Israel: When the Drums of War Have Reached a Fever Pitch

[IFR]

I know very little about the situation in Israel and Palestine. I've read a couple of books that touch on it, and I've been to both places, but I still consider myself highly ignorant.

I hope this thread will generate a (courteous) discussion by people who do know a lot about the current situation.

Also, although this isn't a lit thread, if you folks know of any nonfiction books or other references that tackle this subject, please do feel free to mention them in the discussion. 

[DaveSumm]

Interested in the responses here. I’ve heard intelligent and rational people on both sides declaring that the perception is heavily skewed one way or the other, it’s a really tricky subject to get a handle on. 

[dog-days]

Very. I was sad to see a professor I follow on Twitter come down very strongly on Israel's side with a tone that was - well, it had that kind of ominous note you hear when things have got hopelessly polarised, and even the thoughtful and kind start to sound like demagogues. Frightening. (I would also not have rejoiced to hear such language from the other side.) 

 

[Spockydog]

It's really quite simple. Britain and America created the state of Israel after World War II to give the Jewish people somewhere they could call home.

Unfortunately, since then, Britain and America have completely ignored Israel's genocidal treatment of the Palestinians, whilst convincing the rest of the world that to criticise Israel's genocidal treatment of the Palestinians makes you the biggest anti-semite since Jeremy Corbyn.

Meanwhile, the people of Palestine have been so successfully 'othered' that Israel feels it can massacre hundreds - women, children, and babies - in a single day, confident in the knowledge that Britain and America will do absolutely nothing to stop them.

There, I think that just about covers it.

 

 

 

[Maltaran]

3 hours ago, IFR said:

 

I hope this thread will generate a (courteous) discussion by people who do know a lot about the current situation.

 

All I can say is that this seems over-optimistic

[Fez]

I suspect this means the broad-based anti-Netanyahu coalition that was about to get formed will in fact not get formed. It was probably going to be extremely unstable, having a far-right party and an Arab Israeli party (plus center-right, center, and what-passes-for-the-left-now parties). But it could've at least passed that law that people under indictment for corruption can't be the Prime Minister, which would bar Netanyahu and maybe make the inevitable next election more clarifying.

But unless fighting magically ends right now, I don't see how Ra'am could possibly join an Israeli government (which was already going to be a potential sea change in Israeli politics) without new demands that Bennett will never, ever agree to. But I freely admit I don't know much about Israeli politics.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, Spockydog said:

It's really quite simple. Britain and America created the state of Israel after World War II to give the Jewish people somewhere they could call home.

Unfortunately, since then, Britain and America have completely ignored Israel's genocidal treatment of the Palestinians, whilst convincing the rest of the world that to criticise Israel's genocidal treatment of the Palestinians makes you the biggest anti-semite since Jeremy Corbyn.

Meanwhile, the people of Palestine have been 'othered' so successfully that Israel feels it can massacre hundreds of them - women, children, and babies - in a single day, confident in the knowledge that Britain and America will do absolutely nothing to stop them.

There, I think that just about covers it.

 

 

 

Calling the situation simple is incredibly ignorant. Let’s start with one of the main issues, the need for a safe Jewish state. Can that exist if Jews become a minority in said state with the new majority’s long history of persecuting Jews?

Simple, right?

[lacuna]

3 hours ago, Spockydog said:

There, I think that just about covers it.

You forgot about Israel's (unconfirmed, but suspected) nukes and other WMDs.

 

I know basically nothing about this particular shitshow, other than that it is one of those corners of the world that makes me embarassed, even genuinely sad, to be human.

[Spockydog]

19 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Calling the situation simple is incredibly ignorant. Let’s start with one of the main issues, the need for a safe Jewish state.

What about the Palestinians? What about their needs?

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

Of course, the source of the conflict spans millennia, but the seeds of a Jewish state were planted much earlier than the end of WWII (support from the British government in the middle of WWI).

I lack the expertise to truly expound on the conflict. I'd like to ask a somewhat naive question about whether relocation efforts for many Palestinians were ever seriously considered, or was there no interest among neighboring Arab states and/or little appetite among the Palestinian people themselves?

[litechick]

4 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Interested in the responses here. I’ve heard intelligent and rational people on both sides declaring that the perception is heavily skewed one way or the other, it’s a really tricky subject to get a handle on. 

Agreed. I don't think there can be meaningful discussion unless each participant can make points both for and against each side of the conflict.  If your only focus is on the horrible things one side has done to the other, there's no point in wasting the internet ink.

Since I am mostly ignorant, I like to picture a solution in which a small community is established with a mixture of people who want to live in peace and raise their children.  Once that is established, you expand so that anyone who wants to live in peace can find a home.  Eventually, anyone not living in these communities will have no choice but to acknowledge that they engage in war because they want to.

I know: Pie, meet sky.

[Zorral]

Genocide and murder are bad.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

22 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

What about the Palestinians? What about their needs?

 

And that’s why it’s not simple. Both sides have blood on their hands and both sides think the other party is more guilty. Neither can really trust the other and the leaders of both sides have largely acted in bad faith. It’s a constant story of one step forward, two steps back.

[Heartofice]

I spent time over the past few years trying to read up on the situation, and honestly I still can’t really get a hold of it all because it far from simple and for every situation where one side looks to be at fault there is usually a corresponding event that led to it that implicates the other side.

I distrust anyone who has a simplistic view of it or claims to give easy answers as to who is in the right or wrong 

[ljkeane]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It’s a constant story of one step forward, two steps back.

It’s really not. There hasn’t been a step forward since 1995.

[Fez]

19 minutes ago, ljkeane said:

It’s really not. There hasn’t been a step forward since 1995.

Disagree. Overall, the Israel government has been pretty terrible on the peace issue since Rabin was assassinated, but there have been a few positive steps. Or steps that could've been positive but the steps backward happened immediately. For instance the unilateral pullout of Gaza in 2005, including forcibly evicting the Jewish settlers who refused to leave, could've been positive.

[IheartIheartTesla]

Maybe we can all agree on one thing, which is that moving the US embassy to Jerusalem was a foolish move by DJT (at the very least, it made our embassy staff less safe)

[DireWolfSpirit]

Netanyahu is probably involved in a wag the dog exercise to stay relevant.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

I lack the expertise to truly expound on the conflict. I'd like to ask a somewhat naive question about whether relocation efforts for many Palestinians were ever seriously considered, or was there no interest among neighboring Arab states and/or little appetite among the Palestinian people themselves?

So I want to throw out a few qualifiers before I address this. I am Jewish, but I don't live in Israel, am not all that connected to the culture and am not a hard liner on the issues at hand. I also know my opinion will be biased, and that both sides see the situation different and that there's disagreement within the Jewish community, but the majority opinion tends to be something along these lines:

After the creation of Israel there was still wide spread anti-Semitism and persecutions of Jews by Arabs in the Middle East. Israel went out of its way to bring these people to Israel so they could be safe and have rights. They likewise wonder why neighboring Arab states won't do the same thing for Arabs living in Israel, and it's a common belief that there that they don't take these people in because they want to see Israel destroyed and the best way to do that is by having an Arab majority living in Israel while pressing the Israeli government to be more democratic (which is hilarious because those countries aren't democracies). There is a very real fear that if that were to occur Jews would instantly be persecuted and the notion of Israel as a Jewish state would be over and would never return. That's why they're behaving like an Apartheid state. 

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

It’s really not. There hasn’t been a step forward since 1995.

Fez is correct. There have been some incremental achievements along the way, but they're heavily overshadowed by other events.

58 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Maybe we can all agree on one thing, which is that moving the US embassy to Jerusalem was a foolish move by DJT (at the very least, it made our embassy staff less safe)

It was incredibly dumb and intentionally provacative.

40 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Netanyahu is probably involved in a wag the dog exercise to stay relevant.

Safe bet. He has a history of doing this. It's hard to see how there can be peace with him at the table. 

[Werthead]

It's like Northern Ireland in that the situation seems simple to summarise but you rapidly get lost in the weeds of the details and you're suddenly talking about who decided to do what to whose ancestors in the mid-17th Century (or in the case of Israel/Palestine, somewhere around 1700 BC). But about ten times more complex.

Ignoring the several thousand years of history leading up to it, the current situation is that Israel consists of two areas: Israel proper, consisting of the territory that existed when Israel was founded in 1948 and additional territory captured in the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War; and the Occupied Territories, namely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The original plan was that the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be part of an independent Palestinian state, but for various complex reasons that never happened and the West Bank ended up being administered by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured both territories (plus the Sinai Peninsula, although it returned that to Egypt in 1979) and has occupied them ever since (the Golan Heights were also captured from Syria).

So from 1967 to now, Israel has effectively held two massive concentrations of Muslim Palestinians under their control (not to mention a much smaller Muslim population in Israel proper). The international community has generally held that these two territories are under military occupation and that in the future they should be granted self-control as a non-contiguous Palestinian state, with borders to be held as the 1967 ones as a starting point for discussions but adjustable through negotiation, and that principle was agreed to by both the Israelis and Palestinians during the early 1990s peace process (but later rejected by the Palestinians, something Israeli commentators bring up on a near-hourly basis). However, Israel began obfuscating the issue almost immediately by authorising the construction of settlements - heavily-fortified and walled Israeli towns, basically - within the territory of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan Heights even before the 1960s were over. There are now almost 400,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank.

East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights have been formally annexed by Israel, but the West Bank and Gaza Strip have not, and their status is in a sort of grey area which no one seems to want to fully resolve, to the anger and frustration of the 2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza and the almost 3 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank. Israel seems to have accepted in principle that they have no claim to Gaza, have not built any settlements there (the few that were built were demolished) and militarily withdraw from the Strip in 2005. However, since the militant group Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, took power in the Strip, Israel has also refused to recognise the Strip becoming independent and placed it under a blockade. Egypt doesn't seem particularly keen to regain control of the Strip either.

The West Bank is in a much more perilous situation, in terms of threatening a full-scale war. Hardliners in Israel have effectively colonised the West Bank, seeding dozens of settlements in defiance of international law through the territory and creating travel corridors between them, essentially dividing up the areas of Palestinian settlement into smaller and smaller islands. In this way, the West Bank's viability as a future sovereign state is dubious; Israel is creating "facts on the ground," possibly as a prelude to a formal annexation of the West Bank. Any future Palestinian state formed out of the West Bank would have to integrate a population of half a million angry Israeli settlers or would have to try to remove them (which would be difficult).

However, annexing the West Bank is something Israel has hesitated to do because of the aforementioned 2.7 million Palestinians who live there. Israel would have to formally make them Israeli citizens, something they do not want and which Israel would find demographically challenging (it would dramatically increase the Muslim population of Israel and form a powerful voting bloc); expel them into Jordan, which would cause a bloodbath and destroy Israel's good relations with Jordan and many other countries; or declare them second-class citizens, effectively announcing that Israel is an apartheid state, which would also damage Israel's reputation.

You also have the Palestinians being divided on how to respond, with militant groups (such as Hamas) seeing armed resistance as a viable solution but others trying to push forward a peaceful solution, but the Israeli government is not particularly interested (there are moderate Israeli groups looking for a more practical solution, but they do not have a strong voice at the moment). You also have Israel's current Prime Minister being hell-bent on staying in power due to mounting legal issues against him, someone who has historically been happy to use military action as the old standby to raise nationalist fervour and boost his own opinion polls.

The situation is clearly unsustainable, but no good solution seems to exist that anyone will agree on: ultra-hardline Jewish nationalists want the West Bank to be absorbed proper into Israel and the Palestinians to be kicked out; ultra-hardline Palestinian nationalists want Israel to be swept into the sea and its entire territory being turned over to the Palestinians; the moderates in both camps seem pretty powerless; and the rest of the world seems unable to intervene. Even the traditional enmity towards Israel in the Arab world seems to be divided, with Israel having made friends (if not allies) out of Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and even - unthinkably, a few years ago - Saudi Arabia, playing on Saudi Arabia's fear of their mutual enemy, Iran, so even the normal condemnations of Israeli policy from the usual suspects in the region seem muted.