Israel and Palestine

Sure, nobody is arguing that they're doing it for legitimate reasons, they're killing people because they want to kill people, however that doesn't change who the placement fo said people massively impacts the legal situations.

Let's grant that the West Bank Israelis are civilians, those civilians are by definition being used a human shields by the Israeli military, that means that attacks on them are on par with Israeli attacks aimed deliberalty at civilians by military targets in Gaza (note that they're not the same as Israeli attacks that catch civilians in the crossfire while being aimed at military targets in Gaza).

The delusional idea held by Palestinians and some Arabs that all fo Israel is illegitimate doesn't have an impact on the reality, the same way that the delusional idea that West Banks settlements are legitimate does not impact the legality of the situation.

Like is very common in this conflict both sides are wrong and so blinded by hate that they're willing to do awful things that would in a just world get them jailed.

As for Israeli settlements providing jobs, no shit they do, they control everything that would allow them to provide jobs, if Arab towns controlled the same resources, administrative functions and territory they'd be able to provide jobs.

edited 24th Jul '17 9:31:36 AM by Silasw

Oh really when?

Ah, yes. It is illegal for Jews to live in any area where they were successfully ethnically cleansed out of by Jordan in 1948, despite they're having lived there for thousands for years before, their holy sites being located there, the land having the name 'Judea,' the League of Nations Mandate -the last truly binding piece of international law on the subject - mandating that the land be prepared for Jewish settlement, despite the fact that the land was captured in a defensive war when Jordan attacked after the Israeli government begged it to stay out. Despite all that, international law mandates that the land of Judea be completely Judenrein for all time after 1948, and any Jew who dares to live in his ancestral homeland or to pray at his holy sites is just asking to be murdered and is different from all other civilians. It doesn't matter if he's living in the house his father was born in or the town his grandfather was expelled from. He's a criminal just for being where Jews are not wanted.

Giving a minority of natives in occupied territories jobs is not an excuse for occupying those territories in the first place. You're stealing their livelihoods and selling them back to them, while asking them to thank you for making the price so reasonable. Ignoring the material elements of the Palestinian occupation is also severely shortsighted - if you believe that stories like the Mekorot water cutoff had no bearing on Palestinians' attitude towards Israel, or, more generally, that living for fifty years under a brutal, heavy-handed occupation that has riddled the area like Swiss cheese might have been somewhat irritating, then you're reduced to assuming that it's part of some native, irrational lust for Jewish blood held by the Arab race, and the solutions to that tend to be rather... final.

As for the settlers, they're the ones using those stolen resources, and endangering Palestinians by doing so. Going 'murder is murder is murder' simply means that you consider starving people to death preferable to stabbing them - it's an aesthetic quibble, not a moral one.

edited 24th Jul '17 10:05:27 AM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

@uncannybeetle: Please don't be deliberately obtuse. Jews living in the West Bank is only objectionable in the context of an ongoing ethnic cleansing operation by an invading nation-state. If Jews want to live there, then they can either live there as lawful immigrants to/citizens of the state of Palestine or work to create a single, unified state that affords both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews equal rights and an equal say in its government.

edited 24th Jul '17 10:12:17 AM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

@laculus: For all this talk of Israel 'ethnically cleansing' the Palestinians from their homes, not a single Arab is being expelled from the West Bank, the vast majority of settlements are built on empty land and, and the Palestinian population in the West Bank has never stopped growing. If Israel if ethnically cleansing anyone, it is by far the least effective instance of ethnic cleansing in human history. The vast majority of Palestinians live in cities and towns Israel exercises no jurisdiction over.

And as for their being able to 'immigrate legally.' Palestinian Authority law mandates the death penalty for any Arab who sells property to Jews. The PA, including Abbas, has made repeated declarations that there will be no Jews or Israelis in the 'state of Palestine.' He also has has publicly denounced Jews being at their holiest site and accused them of 'desecrating' it 'with their filthy feet.' Jews are banned by Israeli law from entering Arab areas in Areas A and B for their own safety. None of this is going to go away if the Palestinians get a state on all the land they want tomorrow and by some miracle it doesn't collapse. They need to learn to accept Jews as equal human beings if there is ever going to be peace, and every excuse for Palestinian acts of murder and the many, many examples of official and popular blatant anti-Semitism, such as the the protests against Jews even being at their holiest site, pushes peace farther away.

edited 24th Jul '17 10:35:55 AM by uncannybeetle

Still trying to justify murder, I see.

Human shields of what, exactly? What military asset are they protecting? All you're doing is pushing a nonsensical moral equivalence.

edited 24th Jul '17 10:44:41 AM by Cag

No evictions? Oh come the hell on, pull the other one. Squeezing the Palestinian population into smaller and smaller parts of the West Bank via settlement building and house demolitions is also ethnic cleansing, just on a national rather than international level.

Land (and the attendant resources) obtained through military conquest. You know, the usual goal of an invasion.

What's precedent ever done for us?

Nonsense. That is not what the term human shield means.

While house demolitions are iffy for a variety of reasons (such as smelling like punishment despite not going through the right courts for that), "evicting Palestinians in order to grab their land" is not one of those problems.

The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground

There are demolitions of the homes of terrorist murderers, and there are demolitions of structures put up without any coordination with the authorities in charge of construction in Area C - which are often ramshackle and not built to any sort of code and dangerous for the inhabitants. On very rare occasions there may be an instance of eminent domain. None of this is anything close to ethnic cleansing, and not a single Palestinian has been expelled from his home just for being Palestinian.

It is legitimate to be against Israel's settlement policy. At best it's dumb. But their are good arguments as to why it is legal, and settlements have never been the reason for or the heart of the conflict.

What has been going on here is that because some have decided that Israel is in the wrong, they warp matters that are at most grey, like the settlements, and make them into black and white evil, while warping things that are truly black and white, such as the deliberate murder of innocents, into matters which are grey and understandable.

@Silasw: The only thing I don't agree with in your post is describing "Israel has no right to exist due to being founded through ethnic cleansing of the Muslim and Christian inhabitants!" as "delusional", as that's an arguable descriptor. What said belief indeed is, however, is "highly unfeasible/impractical to follow through with under the current geopolitical circumstances, and easily abusable to justify acts of discrimination/ethnic cleansing against any and all Jews regardless of whether they support or oppose the Israeli government's actions or the existence of Israel itself".

Mr. Pot, Mr. Kettle called. He says you're black.

edited 24th Jul '17 11:31:53 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Show me a state that wasn't founded on kicking someone else off the land, please.

The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground

That's a hell of job, it's why nobody sane is questioning Israel's right to exist.

What Israel doesn't have a right to do is actively continue building settlements and colonizing land that legally belongs to another sovereign nation.

How would people like if Egypt just started up and demolishing Israeli homes and building little towns on their land?

Oh really when?

You seem to be calling MarqFJA insane then, because it's implicit in his post that that very fact makes Israel illegitimate. And, well, I don't support the settlements, but unlike you I don't think they're the be-all end-all of the Conflict, or that they're even the worse fucking problem we have here.

The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground

Mass demolitions frequently have a demographic subtext - the archetypal example was the Gaza 'security buffer' in the Jordan valley, which became the base for a massive settlement expansion until Israel pulled out in 2007. 'Violating building codes' is also often little more than an excuse to be rid of undesirables, since it's almost impossible for new Palestinian builds to pass those codes.

What's precedent ever done for us?

To which sovereign state does the West Bank belong? Jordan, which occupied it before Israel and which gave up its claims in the 1980s? Britain, which was tasked by the League of Nations with preparing the land to be a Jewish homeland and also gave up all claims decades ago? The Ottomans, who no longer exist? Those are the only sovereign nations to have had any control over the West Bank besides for Israel in the last 500 years. On what basis does the land belong to a sovereign nation that has never been sovereign?

Not denying the existence of a Palestinian people, but 'being there' has never been enough to confer ownership of land to a new political entity. Otherwise we'd have a state of Kurdistan, everyone would recognize Tibet, ect.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:05:57 PM by uncannybeetle

I don't think Garçon or I could call Marq insnae, that would violate the forum rules, but I'm more than happy to state that I consider what you see as his view as about as logical and the claim by Israeli settlers that they get to roll the map forward.

That's the thing that really pisses me off about the Israeli settlements, for reasons of practicality and morality (not punishing people for the sins of their fathers) one has to be willing to accept that the map can't be rolled back totally and all colonisation and ethnic cleansing undone (though I'd like a source on the facts of Israel ethnically cleansing the area designated to Israel under the UN partition plan before I belive it). That means that if the Israeli government is allowed to get away with settlements for a generation or two then they will have to be accepted, the same way we've accepted the illegal and immoral transportation of English and Scots to Northern Ireland, Europeans to what is now the United States, Franks into former Celtic lands and Anglo-Saxons into the lands of the Britons.

Oh and just to note for anyone actually debating in good faith, yes obviously any Jews expelled from what is now the West Bank should be allowed to live there, as Palestinian citizens with proper guarantees to ensure that they are no mistreated by the Palestinian government (which should it mistreat them because they are Jewish can be removed by force by a UN sanctioned force if need be).

Your comparison with Tibet and Kurdistan is apt, I'm perfectly in favour of both areas being allowed to decide if they wish to be independent states. Don't use one tragedy to justify another (in this case unrelated) one.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:11:14 PM by Silasw

I don't care what the solution ultimately is, as long as there's peace. If it's one state, the Palestinians are a minority under someone else's rule, which sucks. If it's two states, the Palestinians live under either Fatah or Hamas, neither of which I'd wish on anyone. My reading of the law is that Israel would be within its rights to annex the entire West Bank if it chose to, but that's not what Israel has done. The Israeli leadership decided not to do that after the Six Day War because they figured it would be harder to give the land back if it was annexed, but they still started the settlements. And while I think that was perfectly legal, it was a mistake to have settlements without annexation. And I certainly don't think any civilians in the West Bank deserve to be stabbed in their beds or at their dinner tables because the Israeli government's policy is stupid.

Stupid is something of a vast understatement. The settlements aren't really morally defensible.

Oh really when?

Jews returning to Kfar Etzion after the town's destruction in 1948 isn't morally defensible? Jews returning to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Hebron after the 1929 Hebron massacre ended a community which had existed for thousands of years isn't morally defensible? Jews building a new town where no one has ever lived so they can be near and protect a neglected holy site isn't morally defensible? When the supposed 'sovereign' has the death penalty for selling land to Jews is it any wonder they don't ask the PA's permission for each house? What about Jerusalem, which Israel did annex? If that is 'morally indefensible' then every time a Jew prays at the Western Wall that is 'morally indefensible.' All of these boundaries are based on where Jordan, not Palestine, succeeded in conquering in 1948, and the cease-fire of 1949 was worded specifically so that neither Israel nor the Arab states would give up any claims to any of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

It is a grey situation.

Neither the legality nor the morality of the settlements holds any relevance. Spin it as much as you wish, murder is still murder.

Do I look like a historian or an archaeologist to you? Besides, saying "it's OK for a state to be founded by kicking someone else off the land because practically all modern states were founded this way" is a Logical Fallacy (not sure which one, but it's obviously one).

That's only if you're counting the ones currently living in the area controlled by the State of Palestine (i.e. West Bank and Gaza Strip), who number at 4.7 million (compared to government-confirmed Israeli Jews numbering at ~6.5 million as of 2017). Palestinians as a whole (i.e. including refugees and disapora worldwide) still outnumber Israeli Jews, at ~12.3 million, and many of the refugees (whether the original displaced people or their children/grandchildren) have and will continue to cry murder if anyone dares to question their Right of Return.

edited 24th Jul '17 1:19:06 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Unfortunately too many people don't see it that way. It's natural for people to assume the worst about those they don't like for whatever reason, and to excuse those who find favor in their eyes for whatever reason. We do it with politicians, celebrities, sports teams, ect. Unfortunately here it involves murder. The status of the settlements shouldn't matter and should be left to negotiations, but unfortunately it does to a lot of people and it colors everything about the conflict.

edited 24th Jul '17 1:15:44 PM by uncannybeetle

So you don't want peace, you want victory.

It's still peace if there's one state with Israelis as a minority under Palestinian rule, would that be an acceptable peace to you? (It woudlnt to me), it's still peace if it's one state with all the Palestinians killed or driven out, would that be acceptable to you? (The way you talk makes me think yes). Hell its even still peace if it's one state with all the Israelis killed or driven out, I hope that's that's a peace we can all agree is horrific and undesirable.

Peace, real actual peace means either a unity state where neither Palestinians or Israelis rule over the other, two states independent of each other, or both or one side becoming apart of a greater state or union that does not mistreat the local inhabitants but gives them full equal rights and proper protections for their minority status.

Oh and as it's been bought up again, yes Jews driven out of the West Bank have a Right to Return, as may well their descendants, that's Right to Return by the way remains legitimate regardless of the hypocracy of the Israeli government when it comes to the right of Palestinians to return to what is now Israel. However it does serve as a great highlight for the rank hypocracy that the Isrlai Israli government and others like to manifest. Jews displaced have a right to return but Palestinians don't? Pull the other one.

No it's not. Just because you declare something holy doesn't mean you get to trample on other nation's soveignigy. Yes the West Bank 'government' is abhorrent and has horrific rules that shodul land to under severe sanctions, thing is for it to be sanctioned it has to be a sovereign state, it has to be allowed control over its own territory.

Ethnic cleansing and the theft of other people's land by force remain those things no matter how hard you try and spin it, no matter how much you like to pretend that a murder by a raving bloodthirsty fool justifies trying to wipe out an entire people group it does not.

edited 24th Jul '17 2:00:09 PM by Silasw