Israel and Palestine

Example of the Horseshoe effect in a succinct paragraph right there.

Israel would probably be able to shake off some of the Nazi comparisons once they elect someone besides the guy who keeps cozying up to Neo-Nazis, whose son is an alt-right supporter, and who keeps echoing Nazi rhetoric when talking about Palestinians. Assuming of course that the new person isn't even worse.

By the way, this is Godwin's Law:

Even if "Godwin's Law is still on", does it matter? First of all, the whole thing was meant as a joke and secondly, it was never about applicability. It's about probability, i.e. how likely somebody is to bring up Nazis or Hitler in an online discussion.

When somebody does or says things that eerily remind people of the Nazis, it's fair to point that out - Godwin's Law doesn't even factor into that apart from "somebody mentioned Nazis".

Heck, the person who coined it even pointed out that it's fine to call out people as Nazis when they do shit that the Nazis did.

Incidentally, Zina Bash just did the gesture again today, a lot more clearly and unambiguously.

I think there are several reasons why criticism of Israel feels more common and visible than that of other Middle Eastern countries, and the biggest is probably the contrast with the image that has been presented of it by its defenders as the plucky, enlightened defenders of Western civilisation in the Middle East. The ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. The ‘world’s most moral army’. I think we all know the clichés by now. There is far less effort to present, say, Saudi Arabia or our current favourite dictator as the hero of their story, and what effort there is gains little traction. They’re presented as a necessary evil who may become unnecessary at any moment, and so criticism of them is so common that it fades into the background.

Like, who’s really going to get mad if you describe Mohammed bin Salman as a genocidal autocrat? Who’s going to get grumpy when you describe Hassan Rouhani as the product of a partial, compromised democracy? But if you point out that Israel the Jewish state is, by definition, a racist endeavour, an oppressive ethnostate founded as a reaction to the attempted establishment of an oppressive ethnostate, that’s unusual. That gets a rise out of people. The story is that it was the Jewish people’s appropriate reward for suffering the Holocaust was to get them a state of their own, with no question of whether attempting to establish an ethnostate of any kind might be a bad idea in the first place (because if the site is habitable, there are probably going to be other people living there who you’ve just decided to turn into second-class citizens).

I should be clear that Western attitudes towards a Western creation have a lot to do with this - the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was a way for countries with their own histories of anti-Semitism (and of looking the other way when others engaged in anti-Semitism) to absolve themselves and give an unhappy story a happy ending. Israel had to be the good guys because we had to be the good guys. Incidentally, this was also the reason why apartheid South Africa was held up as a bastion of freedom and democracy for so long - Britain in particular was keenly aware of who invented concentration camps and who they used them on, and so they had a considerable vested interest in being nice to an Afrikaans state.

On a related note, I think the philosopher Slavoj Zizek made a fascinating point in his book Violence - that Israel’s greatest sin was arriving too late. It was an expression of old-school colonial logic as the rest of the world was falling out of love with imperialism, thanks to the economic collapse of most of the world’s greatest empires in a pair of giant dick-waving contests and thanks to a particularly savage and extreme manifestation of imperialist ideology right outside those empires’ front door (there’s a persistent historical argument that one of the biggest reasons for Germany’s vilificstion in both world wars was that it was using established imperial tactics on the citizens of rival empires rather than on its own, comfortably distant colonies - consider, by contrast, Leopold II of Belgium, who remains controversial rather than near-universally despised, or Winston Churchill, the beloved British bulldog, who managed his own seven-figure body-count in the Bengal famine). What had once been standard policy now had few people defending it, particularly outside one of the world’s last two remaining empires.

I always wondered why this narrative was so popular. Britain support for the idea of Israel started during the first world war, long before the Holocaust was an issue, and they started to back out of it in the late 30's, just as the Holocaust was picking up. So obviously it wasn't really a factor in the British decision-making process.

As for the UN, people tend to forget that it didn't decide on the creation of Israel; it decided on the partition plan which called for the creation of both Israel and Palestine. The main reason they decide on that was that they knew that Israelis and Palestinians hated each other guts and wouldn't be able to live in the same country without it deteriorating into a bloody civil war.

It wasn't a good solution, but if was the only peaceful solution the UN could think of to a very volatile situation it didn't create, but still wanted to solve. Even if the Holocaust wouldn't have happened, it would still be the only possible peaceful solution so they probably would have offered it anyway.

Unfortunately, the UN lacked any enforcement power, so the bloody civil war happened anyway, and Israel won. It could have just as easily lost, and Palestine would have been created instead.

I think this is why the Holocaust-guilt narrative is so popular in the Arab world: the Israelis were outnumbered, alone they were supposed to lose, if they didn't have international support then it means that somebody in the Arab world screwed up. It's a lot less embarrassing to believe that Israel's victory was some kind of western imperialist conspiracy.

Edited by nnokwoodeye1 on Sep 8th 2018 at 9:44:28 AM

Israeli nationalism was certainly a thing long before the Holocaust, but it seems highly suspect to suggest that the Holocaust played no part in its eventual success, particularly given the shape Israel eventually took. British plans for Palestinian partition were mothballed as impracticable before pressure from Truman (specifically drawing on the importance of a Jewish state after the Holocaust) resurrected them, the UN commission incorporated the European Jewish refugee situation into their deliberations and eventual verdict (the Israeli part of Mandatory Palestine would comprise 56% of the land and have exclusive naval access despite Jewish people only being a third of its population in order to accommodate European refugees), and the resolution itself was passed despite only being accepted by Jewish organisations, not Arab ones. The war of 1948 finalised the relative situations of Israel and Palestine, but the Israeli side was certainly in a more advantageous situation going in thanks to the original partition.

Except that it did, because the Israeli-Palestinian divide at that point was the direct result of the British government playing the Zionists and the Palestinian nationalists against each other and the rest of the League of Nations just standing by and letting them do that (mainly because they were all doing the same 'play the local ethnic groups against each other to keep them from uniting and overthrowing our colonial oppression' thing in their own overseas territories).

One thing that people also tend to not think of (or else quietly ignore) is that from a Palestinian perspective, the early days of Israel were very much a European imperialist invasion.

At the start of the 20th century Jews made up about 10% of the population of Palestine. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, a British Imperialist document that protected the rights of Jewish settlers in Palestine while offering few protections to Muslim and Christian natives of the region, this had risen to about 15%. At the start of the Second World War this had become 25% through the Aliyoth, increasing to about 35% after Mandate authorities made Jewish immigration illegal and it continued in secret, and after the war ended the Jewish population doubled again through refugee resettlement and immigration. Basically in the span of fifty years, the Jewish population went from a small minority to a local majority, almost entirely through immigration, almost entirely from Central and Eastern Europe.

At the time when the negotiations regarding the ending of the Mandate were going on about 85% of all the Jews in Mandatory Palestine were born in Europe. Though the British certainly encouraged the international community to view it as such, most of the animosity Arab and Palestinian nationalists felt towards Jews in Mandatory Palestine wasn't based on their ethnicity. It was based on their status as European immigrants whose families had lived in Europe for centuries, but who claimed to have more right to the land than the people whose families had been living there during those same centuries, many of whom were either direct or partial descendants of the people who didn't leave the region during the diaspora. Which fuelled the very real fear among Palestinians (and foreign Arabs) that any post-Mandate borders that put these immigrant Jews and the other Palestinians in the same nation would simply mean replacing one European colonial oppressor in the region with another.

Edited by Robrecht on Sep 8th 2018 at 11:53:10 AM

No, the Israeli-Palestinian divide was a result of the Israelis wanting to create a homeland for themselves in the same area that was also the Palestinian homeland. The British had nothing to do with it.

They didn't convince the Jews that Israel was their land, they got that from the bible, and were actively working on returning to Israel for at least 50 years before the British were even considering conquering the area. Even when they allowed the Jews to settle in the area, the British were basically just continuing the same immigration policies the Ottoman Empire had.

As for the Palestinians, they were the cosmopolitan citizens of an important port province, they didn't need to be told by some scheming colonial master that becoming a minority in their own land was a bad idea, they were smart enough to figure it out themselves, and indeed they had a problem with it even before the British came to the area.

The idea that the entire conflict is the result of a conspiracy of colonial puppet masters is honestly kind of insulting. It suggests that only the British were smart enough to see the full picture and plan long term, while "the local ethnic groups" were gullible idiots who couldn't see beyond their immediate concerns and believed everything the British told them.

Which, as i said, is why the UN thought that it would be a good idea to put the Israelis and Palestinians in separate nations. it wouldn't have been optimal, but as you said, the Jewish population became too large to remove, so it was the only solution that was left other than a civil war.

Edited by nnokwoodeye1 on Sep 8th 2018 at 2:43:47 AM

Washington has ordered Palestinians working in the mission in DC to be closed ASAP.

... How do you order people to close themselves, exactly?

Do you have an article link?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-administration-close-palestine-liberation-organization-office-dc/

That just broke today.

Whoops. Didn't notice that since I was busy typing it out.

Digusting, but not surprising. This is Trump and the slaved-to-far-right-voters GOP that we're talking about.

Apparently, there was a settler riot in Jerusalem. A number of Palestinian people and businesses got attacked.

Israel has reduced Gaza’s permitted fishing area from nine to six nautical miles from the shore in response to the continuing border protests. For contrast, Israel’s exclusive economic zone extends between 70 and 110 nautical miles from its shore (the usual is 200, but the Mediterranean is pretty crowded).

“additional steps if the violent incidents continue"...what are they planning to do next? Spit in their drinking water?

What drinking water?

Charming. Because taking more food sources away will totally calm the people protesting.

At this point, they're just doing it For the Evulz since there are no real reprecussions to their actions... for now.

Interesting developing story here.

This isn't the first time that Israel's government has bitten the hand that feeds them, right?

My law teacher call israel as the Prodigal son who would go and beat is mother for that reason.

Huh. Out of curiosity, is said law teacher Jewish? Because it would be one more case of the very ironic phenomenon that is Israel — which explicitly describes itself as a Jewish nation-state (while arguing with itself over what counts as "Jewish") — being called out on its bullshit by Jews.

Edited by MarqFJA on Oct 14th 2018 at 10:46:28 PM