Israel and Palestine

Which is a perfectly legitimate analysis, in my view.

Yup, just worth noting, since while the facts on the ground do support that Israel and Palestine comprise a single apartheid state, it's quite revolutionary for a group like Human Rights Watch to come out and say it.

The recognition (however limited) of Israel and Palestine as functionally one single apartheid state gives me hope that people might finally start considering a true one-state solution.

Does the report say anything about Israeli discrimination towards its non-Jewish (and especially Arab) citizens?

Israeli riot police have assaulted the al-Aqsa Mosque to remove protesters who were staging sit-ins over forced expulsions from villages in the area. Palestinian casualties are north of 170 and rising.

This is an incredibly extreme provocation even by I/P standards. We may well be in intifada territory here.

Correction: 170 Palestinians were injured, not murdered.

Maybe that's what you meant, but when I read 'casualties,' I think dead people.

Edited by kkhohoho on May 7th 2021 at 9:13:33 AM

That is what the term means, but the confusion is understandable.

On one of the last nights of Ramadan too. Yikes.

This came in the wake of sustained attacks on Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah in Eastern Jerusalem, where an Israeli district court ordered several Palestinian families to leave and make way for Israeli settlers earlier this month.

Welp, Netanyahu has refused to discuss a ceasefire and has said Israeli attacks will only escalate from here.

I hate that guy so much. I’d use stronger language than “guy”, but it would probably get me banned.

Shithead, piece of shit, motherfucker, asshole...

Probably gonna get shit for this, but:

I mean, I hate the guy as much as everyone around here, and he'll probably go overboard again, but please let's not act like this is happenning in a vaccum.

There have been over 300 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip at South Israel in less than 24 hours. 24 hours!

Some kind of counterattack is not only justified, but also necessary here.

You're ignoring the context, the reason they're facing rocket attacks is because of their continual colonization of Palestinian land and their recent attack on non-violent protesters.

When you make peaceful solutions impossible people will naturally choose violence.

Israel has no one to blame but itself that it's facing rocket attacks.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on May 11th 2021 at 1:23:04 AM

To be honest I also have doubts about the volume of rocket fire.

Hamas are authoritarian shitheads and they deserve no praise, but while they're a problem, they're not the problem. The fact that they threw a few tubes of sheet metal over the Gaza fence has literally no bearing on Israel's continual ethnic cleansing project.

I just spent an hour in a shelter and a rocket blew up a bus in a street near where i live, so those attacks are not as harmless as you might think.

As for context, I suspct Netanyahu wanted this conflict to happen, because he was about to be replaced by a rare political coalition of left wing and right wing parties, but now it seems that the parties different reaction to the violence, ended this attempt.

Edited by nnokwoodeye1 on May 11th 2021 at 1:36:31 AM

The escalation is a pretty naked attempt Netyanahu to distract from the fact that he failed to form a government again.

Edited by LeGarcon on May 11th 2021 at 4:37:46 AM

Quite, they're the symptom, not the disease.

The disease is Israeli colonialism.

Isn't it a little like saying that crime is just a symptom of poverty? It an argument that sound sensible, but in practice, it's kind of insulting to poor people because it suggests that they are incapable of being good.

Edited by nnokwoodeye1 on May 11th 2021 at 2:36:36 AM

I think Owen Jones (British journalist) put it well, that treating the Israeli state - a military superpower armed to the teeth by the West, and any Palestinians as equal sides "is as perverse as Mike Tyson punching a toddler, followed by a headline claiming that the child spat at him."

I don't know what moon logic took you from "poverty causes crime" to "that implies poor people are evil" - it is a basic sociological fact that when people are denied legal opportunities to provide for their family or to protect themselves, they will be forced to take illegal opportunities. This is how poverty (usually caused by or highly corrolated with a lack of opportunity in an area) will walk hand in hand with crime.

Edited by GoldenKaos on May 11th 2021 at 10:35:05 AM

I can't fathom how that's supposed to be insulting, that's just a basic fact.

Any poor person will tell you that poverty and lack of opportunity breeds crime, myself included.

And yet their are plenty of honest poor people, and the courts don't just forgive criminals because they are poor.

Like you said, Israel is too powerful for the Palestinian to defeat. The only thing using Violence achieved is to make it easy for the Israeli government to justify using harsh method against them.

There are plenty of non-violent form of resistance the Palestinians could have chose, any of which, would have been far more successful in gaining the sympathy of the israeli public.

Saying that Hamas are incapable of realizing that their methods aren't working, is insulting, because it basically reduce them to children who are throwing a tantrum.

Edited by nnokwoodeye1 on May 11th 2021 at 2:52:59 AM

To bring it back to the topic before we veer too far off and tie a knot on the comparison, it is not a statement of support for Hamas's terrorism to point out that Israel's actions have led directly to this outcome. It is a simple and neutral case of cause and effect. In the same way that poor people without opportunity or protection will go outside the law and take matters into their own hands in order to survive, the Palestinians have been denied all legal paths to stop Israeli violence against them, and have been left no choice but to fight back as terrorists, or be subjected to the ongoing ethnic cleansing perpetrated against them.

No-one has made the argument that all poor people are criminals, and neither do the actions of the court have any bearing on what we are saying.

This just makes me think you don't know how the Israelis systematically harass and discriminate against Palestinians who are doing literally nothing, and how the Palestinian non-violent efforts have borne zero fruit.

And I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding how desperate they are.

Edited by GoldenKaos on May 11th 2021 at 10:59:03 AM

Here’s the problem, HAMAS will justify the rocket attack by saying that it’s a counterattack for the attack on protesters staging a sit-in to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

What’s the break-even point where actions by one side don’t justify a counterattack by the other? You clearly think that the HAMAS retaliation of roughly 2 rockets per injured protester is out of line, so what is the justified level of response? What level of Israeli response to the rockets makes it okay for HAMAS to retaliate again?

My gut instinct is that the justified level of violence to stop ethnic cleansing is “the amount required to stop the ethnic cleansing”, but I take it you disagree?

They just tried a sit-in, Israeli riot police injured 170 people, doesn’t that count? I assume it got them no sympathy, but I’m happy to be corrected.

Hamas use the methods they do precisely because they won’t work. If Netanyahu ever looses power and someone reasonable comes in HAMAS could be out of a job. They’d hate that.

Edited by Silasw on May 11th 2021 at 10:59:16 AM