GrimTuesday

7 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Which, on its face, would be perfectly understandable in 1952, 1980, or maybe just about any other year. 

Lord knows I'm not in favor of what's happening in Gaza. It needs a solution yesterday.  But I also know that there is zero solutions forthcoming with Rwpublicans in control of the White House, let alone Trump in control. Europe and the Middle East become two different theatres of the Wild West if Trump (or any Republican) is in power, as they'll turn their backs on Bibi and Putin and Iran and it'll be game on for those bastards.

Again, you bare not voting for Joe Biden in 2024. You're voting for the right to vote again in 2026, 2028, and beyond. You're voting for the right to be able to be able to have a chance to tell Joe Biden and the other leaders who have policies you disagree with.  

I understand the need, the right, to make those protests, but right now, one also has to weigh the entirety of the stakes at hand to see the chance for any hope for the Gazans, the Ukranians, and yes, the American people too. 

 

Man, Biden has done next to nothing to curb Israel and is actively arming them. This isn't a matter of the US sitting idly by, the US is an active participant in running interference and defending Israel from other groups who are trying to stop what courts have found to be a potential genocide.

The fact that they are doing this while staring down the barrel of a gun in Trump, it should tell you that the Democratic party has massively fucked up. And if there is no course correction, They have no one to blame but themselves. This is not voters failing the Democratic party, this is the Democratic party failing the voters by refusing to do the will of their voters.

If the uncommitted vote stays above 10%, it's a bad sign for Biden. Those are voters who are motivated enough to go out in an uncontested primary just to tell Joe Biden that they are unwilling to commit to the incumbent president.

The inhumanity on display here is disgusting. Sneering imperialists mocking and discrediting the actions of one who was willing to sacrifice himself in the name of those who are the victims of an ongoing genocide despite the fact he is not directly affected by said genocide. The inhumanity on display here is disgusting. Of course, it is the same folks who have been cheering the exact crimes against humanity that he is protesting are downplaying the legitimacy of his actions.

We are not disconnected by this either. Our tax dollars are directly going towards the murder of Palestinians.

Also if you think we are disconnected from the horrors that we are seeing, you're lying to yourself. The only reason we are able to live the lives we live is due to the exploitation and brutalization of the global south. You can blind yourself to this reality, comfort yourself with your hollow luxuries but that is just craven rationalization that allows you to not feel guilty for your excess and extravagance while other suffer to provide it to you.

18 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Well there seems to be enough information and evidence provided for a host of countries to cut ties and pause funding with the UNRWA, so it's unlikely it's just nothing.
 

And yet babies were murdered by Hamas, it really doesn't matter if they were beheaded or not. Anyone bringing this up as some sort of moral point is just a terrible person.

Except even that is wrong. There was only one "baby" that was murdered on October 7th according to the official Israeli numbers, with the total of children (those aged 0-19 according to Israeli records) amounting to 50 victims total. The point here is not to quibble about whether or not innocents lost their lives, that is objectively true and is horrific, but rather to illustrate that the information that Israel puts out is suspect. It also illustrates that just because other nations say they have been presented with credible evidence does not actually mean that is the case. You may recall Joe Biden going out and publicly repeating what we now know were just straight up lies, and when journalists followed up on the evidence the white house had been given, administration spokespeople confirmed that no such information had actually been presented.

We'll have to wait and see what the UNRWA's internal investigation uncovers.

1 minute ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

And asking them to kindly leave isn't either. Like it or not a military solution is the best path. Now that doesn't justify everything Israel has done, a lot of it is really fucked up, but I don't see any other route to getting rid of them.

No, it isn't. All the military solution is going to do is make things more desperate, and when people are desperate, bad shit happens. Improving people's material conditions is the best way to actually bring peace, and Israel is perpetually doing the opposite. They're the definition of We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.

1 minute ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

They did negotiate, after they got their asses kicked. That's the real world. And then Hamas refused to give more hostages that Israel wanted, so the fighting restarted. 

Well close to 25% of Hamas fighters are now dead. Obviously the war will create future problems, but doing nothing wasn't something any government could do. Hamas has to go. If you don't believe that, say it. 

You could before. And you can make short term deals, but after what happened there's no going back. Hamas has to go. 

Hamas does have to go, but bombing Gaza is not the way to do it. All Israel is doing is creating an even more desperate situation for Palestinians which will only swell their ranks.

As for the number of fighters killed, we really have no clue. There is a frankly disgusting assumption that just because 2/3rds of Gazans killed were women and children, the remaining 1/3rd is all Hamas terrorists because they are "military aged males". The men of Palestine are human too, most of them are not probably not Hamas and the ill will they have towards Israelis stems from the brutality of the occupation.

There seems to be no will by most Israelis, or at least those in power to understand the Palestinian people's grievances, and that is why the cycle of violence will continue. The wound can never heal until you completely remove the knife and Israel doesn't even acknowledge the knife exists.

3 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

No, it absolutely is not. You can't negotiate with people who just killed more people in one day than any since the Holocaust, took nearly 250 hostages and said their goal is to kill all of you. 

I think you will find that you can negotiate with them. Violent retaliation through indiscriminate bombing is not some kind of inevitable force of nature, you can absolutely choose how you react to something. This idea that you can't negotiate with terrorist is just a way to perpetuate the cycle of violence. Terrorism generally evolves out of unaddressed grievances that were done against them with the exception of groups like salafist jihadists who are zealots who seek to enforce their warped brand of Islam on others. Some of these are legitimate, some are not, some exist in shades of grey.

The fact of the matter is the only way to actually stop the vast majority of terrorist groups is to find a way to address their grievances. This of course does not mean allowing Hamas to commit a genocide of their own, but Israel creates the material conditions that leads to radicalization and drives more Palestinians into the arms of Hamas and other terrorist groups. 

2 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

This is idiotic. More than a third of the hostages have been released. 

 

And how was that achieved? Was it through IDF soldiers on the ground kicking down doors and freeing them from their captors, or was it through negotiations that could have happened whether or not there was an ongoing military operation? The answer is, of course the latter, there is no evidence that Israel's military actions influenced anything, in fact as you and other love to say, Hamas doesn't care about Palestinians so from that perspective it's pretty silly to think the flattening of Gaza would enter into their calculus.

Israel has killed more hostages than they have gotten back through their military actions. Hamas (who is bad and should never have taken hostages or carried out the October attack in the first place) was willing to trade hostages on October 8th, so if the main goal for Israel was to get them, they could have gotten them back then.

24 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The large and vociferous protests against Netanyahu and his policies in Israel by Israelis suggests Likud’s BS is a long way from universally supported by Israelis.

Where are you going with this line of thought?  Are you implying that the destruction of Israel and explusion of Jewish Israeli’s that Hamas advocates is somehow justified because of your criticism of Zionism?

First of all, the protests weren't in regards to Likud's policies as relates to the Palestinians, it was in regards to judicial reforms that would have hurt Israelis. There is not wide spread concern for the rights of Palestinians amongst the Israeli public, sure there are those who are peace activists or do volunteer work to help get Gazans to hospitals and such, but that is not necessarily a popular sentiment. This also does not mean that they are all genocidal monsters like certain members of the current Israeli government, but do not fool yourself into thinking that there is some broad coalition of Israelis who support Palestinians either.

Secondly, what an bizarre take away from what I said. Nowhere in my post did I even intimate that the fact that you can draw a direct line between Israeli leaders of the past to what Netanyahu is doing today is grounds for the expulsion of Jewish Israelis. Just like Trump was not an aberration but rather the logical next step in the Republican evolution, Netanyahu and his policies we are seeing play out before our eyes are just the continuation of the Israeli national project.

I have, in every incarnation of these threads, always argued that a single state where in Israelis and Palestinians would be allowed to live on equal terms with a robust truth and reconciliation commission like in South Africa is the best course forward. At no time have I ever argued for even the displacement of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank. I believe that the only way forward to together rather than a two state solution that will still leave a significant amount of resentment on both sides that will be used to foment further conflict.

This idea that Netanyahu is some kind of aberration and not the continuation of a violent, racist settler colonial project that has been going on for over a century is just plain wrong. Even the socialists amongst the early Zionists wrote about civilizing the backwards, provincial Arabized Jews of Palestine and cleansing the lands of the Palestinians. Israel as a state is and has always been built on and maintained through violence and pretending that the government of today doesn't have a direct ideological through line in terms of the Palestinians to the founders of the country is ahistorical and intellectually bankrupt.

1 hour ago, mormont said:

I see this meme going around a lot from people who should know better.

It’s not ‘shipping delays’. The Houthis aren’t slow-walking customs inspections here. It’s piracy. It’s attempting to murder innocent civilian sailors, most of whom are from third world countries who have never done anything to the Houthis, because they work on ships the Houthis have decided are fair targets. The only reason none of them have died yet is because the missiles and drones were intercepted. 

What Israel is doing is appalling but it is not remotely a justification for what the Houthis are doing, nor for minimising what the Houthis are doing. 

Come on, lets be honest, the US doesn't give a shit about those sailors, they care about the economic pressure that it puts on the shipping industry. Obviously the Houthis aren't some sort of altruistic group of do-gooders, and I'm being somewhat facetious about them and their motives, but lets not pretend like America's actions aren't about anything other than the bottom line. There are other routes that shipping companies can take, sure it is more expensive and more time consuming but they don't have to go through the Suez Canal, this about commerce flowing uninterrupted. But hey, at least that way those ships can thank South Africa personally for doing what none of the great and powerful countries were willing to do as they sail on by.

The West has officially done more to prevent shipping delays than stopping a potential genocide by bombing one of the poorest countries in the world. The Houthis aren't good, they're Islamist fundamentalists and have been engadged in a bloody civil war since the Arab Spring, but besides South Africa taking Israel before the ICJ they are basically the only group who is actively taking actions that are ostensibly an attempt to put pressure on Israel's allies to stop their continued massacre of Gaza.

4 minutes ago, Jace, Extat said:

But they are attacked for their identity. Have you heard that phonecall one of the Hamas, ahem, liberators made to his parents. He's cheering and shouting "I killed ten Jews!" He ain't talkin' about colonizers.

Yeah, I have heard it, and it's pretty gross, I'm not going to defend that guy. That said, because Israel is The Jewish nation. When a country proudly proclaims itself to be based on a Jewish identity that is inextricably linked to the state of Israel. it's hardly surprising that someone who has been radicalized to the point that they are willing to go out and kill 10 people would think Jew=Israeli. In fact, this is actually why many anti-zionist Jews make the argument that Israel's actions, coupled with its insistence on making Israel inseparable from Jews, actually breeds more resentment and makes Jews in the diaspora more unsafe.

The average Palestinian may not use the word "colonizer", but when they talk about Israelis and Israel, that is what they mean.

3 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

A historic aversion to the very existence of Israel for one plus the continued radicalisation within the education system of palestinians. 

Palestinians opposed the creation of Israel because it meant they were losing their land as part of colonial project, so of course they were opposed to it (though the Palestinian solution back then was a single state where both Palestinians and Jews would have equal rights and protections). As for the education system, you cannot separate the material conditions that Palestinians live under (which are due to Israel's actions) from how their society sees the world and that does lead to radicalization.

1 minute ago, Ran said:

Hardly the only autonomous territory that depends on much from its neighbors. Andorra imports 96% of its energy from Spain and France, something like 60% of its food, etc. If they shut their borders and cut everything off, Andorra would be in a situation not unlike Gaza.

This doesn't mean Andorra isn't a sovereign state, however. So dependence on neighbors is not itself a barrier to sovereignty, or potential soverignty.

Yawn, you can't compare a sovereign state with Gaza, Israel doesn't need to have soldiers paroling the streets to exercise control over Gaza.

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

Sure, but you would accept that it's not just a simple reaction to Israel's actions which radicalises Palestinians, that there might be other elements that add to the radicalisation. 

And what, prey tell would you cite as other elements?

3 minutes ago, Jace, Extat said:

Israel pulled out of Gaza, held to a ceasefire for over a decade, and for their trouble their people were butchered and carried away. You're citing vagaries half-a-century gone to excuse terror.

Bad actors can reach logical conclusions. Just because Donald Trump might admit that the sky is blue doesn't mean I need to start reinterpreting the color spectrum. 

Saying "but a badguy might say that" is a pretty naieve way to look at anything. Of course there's a difference between Russia saying they have no choice but to attack Ukraine, and Israel defending itself from Hamas. C'mon now!

It's not vagaries from half a century ago, it's shit that has been happening since 1948 (technically before that too, but it's a convenient starting point) all the way up through October 6th 2023. Just because Israel isn't directly administering Gaza does not remove the fact that Gaza is significantly reliant on Israel in many ways (water, electricity, etc.) and directly controls what goes in and out of Gaza. It also doesn't mean that the IDF doesn't regularly kill Gazans. But beyond Gaza, there is a shared Palestinian identity between Gazans and the West Bank, and the living standard there is brutal. Between the constant IDF surveillance and oppression, settlements being built, Palestinians being dispossessed  in favor of settlers, and the violence enacted by Settlers who are backed by the Israeli state, Palestinians have legitimate grievances that are used to recruit people into Hamas and IJP. Israel's own actions are what radicalizes Palestinians.

And to be clear, this does not excuse the actions taken on October 7th, I firmly believe civilians should be protected at all costs when it comes to actions taken by Palestinian resistance groups or the IDF.

All Israeli violence is appropriate and justified, but all Palestinian violence is unjustifiable and can only be chalked up to uncivilized barbarism and certainly not in service of any political project or aims outside of baseless antisemitic slaughter.

This is always how the colonizer vs colonized dynamic plays out, especially when the colonized are brown. This of course ignores the violence inherent to colonialism and necessary to its maintenance. The actions of Hamas on October 7th were reprehensible, but to pretend it happened in a vacuum is to perpetuates a fiction, a warped view wherein Israel is attacked for their Jewish identity, rather than because they have given the Palestinian people legitimate reasons to hate them, a reason to associate the Star of David, which is emblazoned on the flag carried by their oppressors, with an oppression that must be resisted. 

This part of the The Rebel, a poem by Irish revolutionary and one of the leaders of the Easter Uprising Pádraig Pearse, sums up perfectly why resistance to occupation will never end,

And I say to my people’s masters: Beware
Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people
Who shall take what ye would not give.
Did ye think to conquer the people, or that law is stronger than life,
And than men’s desire to be free?
We will try it out with you ye that have harried and held,
Ye that have bullied and bribed.
Tyrants… hypocrites… liars!

The point is that this is not a fringe position, it absolutely a widely held, and popular position that reflects the intentions of the governing body of Israel. For all the time spent crying about an imagined future genocide, it appears impossible for some to recognize that one is being carried out before our eyes.

Just now, Tywin et al. said:

It did happen in Israel though. Fuck it's amazing how little so many of you know about this. 

You keep bringing this up, but do you know why it happened, without just saying that it is because they hate Jews and want to see them all dead?

30 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

So were the Jews by force, so end this canard. And keep in mind, when Israel was created, it was the Jewish side that reluctantly accepted a path to two states. The Palestinian side said fuck no.

Man, you really keep leaving out that for the most part, the Israelis came from outside of Palestine and at the outset, it was objectively a colonial project that became increasingly violent when the native population rejected it. The idea that the Palestinians should have accepted the partitioning of their land to be given to European Jews is such an absurd proposition.

Acknowledging the Nakba is not a canard, a canard is something that is unfounded, the dispossession of Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis is a historical fact.

43 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Again, why do you think many felt forced to leave and go to Europe in the first place? Were they asked kindly? Or maybe they were forced out through violence. Just a thought.

And when did they go to Europe? The answer is hundreds of years ago in most cases, and no they didn't leave for kicks and giggles, they were violently driven from their land (and it wasn't Palestinians who did it). This changes nothing about the status of the region and the inhumanity of the conditions Israel keeps Palestinians in.

The problem with this idea that the Israelis have a right to return that supersedes the rights of Palestinians to return is that one side was removed hundreds of years ago, well beyond living memory, and the other side was removed 75 years ago. There are people who are still alive today who were forced to flee their family homes by the Israeli army in 1948, a lot of them still have their house keys for fucks sake.

The dispossession of the Jews over a thousand years ago does not give them the right to return in such a manner that it dispossess those who were living there in the modern day. This should also be the case for a Palestinian right to return, where they wouldn't get to dispossess the Israelis who are living there currently.

Quote

I have family living there right now. Also have family that didn't fair so well during WW2 after they felt like they had no choice but to leave. You're clearly speaking on a subject you don't understand. 

Cool for you, I hope they are safe and well, but you're bringing this up to distract from the fact that you said something incredibly silly that was meant to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle. My entire point is that most Jews going to Israel have no connection to the country outside of the fact that they are Jewish and they have family who immigrated there either directly before, or after the creation of the state of Israel. The fact that you have family who live there now has no bearing on anything I said.

39 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Have I not written like damn near a hundred times a lot of what the IDF is doing is wrong and that it's fucked up to cut off food and water to people? Or to like, ya know, make sure what you're bombing is actually the target you need to hit. 

Or was it me saying Netanyahu is a disgusting piece of shit for years prior to this that confused you? 

Lets be honest here, you and most of the liberal zionists hate Netanyahu because his policies negatively impact Israeli civil life, Palestinians aren't a consideration except insuring that they are kept in their place and don't cause a ruckus. Nothing about the liberal challengers to Netanyahu does anything for the Palestinians, there is basically no one in Israeli political society who wants to do anything more than manage the conflict just as Netanyahu has done, and that's the ones who aren't actively calling for genocide, they've been given outsized amounts of power because Netanyahu needed them to avoid going to jail.

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

They are! But so are Jews and yet only the latter are called colonizers. Or accused of wanting an ethnostate. Or of wanting to commit genocide despite that the former are actually being louder about the last two parts. There's no denying this. 

That's because a bunch of European Jews went to Palestine and did some colonialism. You literally have Zionist leaders talking about how they are going there to expel the Palestinian Muslims and civilize the provincial Arab/Mizrahi Jews with their superior european culture. They were even doing shit like the Yemenite Children Affair where there was a program of removing thousands of Mizrahi Jewish children (mostly from Yemen but also from other regions as well) from their parents and placing them with Ashkenazi Jewish families and it is only been acknowledged by the government that maybe something happened in the last few years after it had been covered up for decades, including three government inquiries. This is the same shit we did in the US to indigenous children.

21 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

How many Palestinians alive today claiming a right to return ever even had a grandparent who lived in Israel before it was created? We can play this game all day.

At the very least, it is a significant majority of them. It's laughable to use this considering my Grandparents are older than the state of Israel. When was the last time your family lived in Israel? Most Jews claiming a right to return haven't had direct ancestors living in the land that we know today as Israel in hundreds of years. With the exception of those who immigrated there directly before or in the aftermath of the creation of the state of Israel.

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

But you then have to add another wrinkle, the third party was previously thrown out of that same area which was their cultural homeland through violence, so why aren't the people who did so also colonizers? 

Palestinians are also native to the region, stop acting like they are some kind of outside invader.

On an unrelated note, for those who act like Israelis have no other choice but to join the military, there absolutely is a choice, but it takes a level of courage and compassion that few have but we should all strive to emulate

This idea that Arabs and Muslims are somehow barbarians who can't live with "civilized people" like Israelis is just bigotry, plain and simple. Antisemitism is rightfully condemned, but Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment is fully accepted and in many cases encouraged.

6 hours ago, Darryk said:

There is never going to be a one-state solution.

Arabs would be the majority and would block Jewish immigration which would defeat the purpose of Israel existing.

Relations between Arabs and Jews in the region weren't as peaceful as people like to make out. For one, Jews were secondary citizens.

You realize that these sorts of things can be guaranteed as part of the creation of single state, right? It's not like some blinding flash of light is going to illuminate the sky and Israel and Palestine will merge into a single state. There is going to be a significant role of outside influence by the US and the other great powers in the establishment of a single state and it would necessarily require certain protections for Jews to ensure that they weren't persecuted.

If you want a Jewish dominated ethnostate, too fucking bad, you don't get to colonize a land and disenfranchise those who have been living there for centuries. You can cry all you want about second class citizens in history, but we're in the present, and we can choose to learn for the mistakes and inequalities of the past, we don't have to repeat them now that the shoe is on the other foot.

6 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Not block, remove and/or kill. Again, the lack of understanding here is shocking. 

In the American south, the line was always we can't give slaves equal rights to their masters, otherwise they will rise up against the whites and there will be a race war. This has been echoed every time there has been an oppressor and oppressed dynamic throughout history. Don't get me wrong, in a few cases, is has come to fruition, but in the vast majority of cases, it has not.