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

[Werthead]

29 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

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. 

I think the answer to that question is simple. The Palestinians and their ancestors have been living in those lands for thousands of years, so why should they leave and go somewhere else? The same argument, of course, applied to the Jewish population of the region in the period leading up to 1948.

It's also easy to simplify and see Arabs as a monolithic bloc, but they are not (and neither are Israelis, for that matter), and Palestinians have a distinct culture and identity which is not the same as Jordanian, Saudi Arabs, Syrians etc. Palestinians have faced discrimination from other Arab communities and see no reason to move from their ancestral homeland to other locations.

I agree that other countries in the Middle East see Israel as having this absolutely massive headache to deal with as beneficial to them, but it's also a headache of Israel's own making, and if it had held back from building the settlements, then the West Bank could now exist as a viable Palestinian state under a moderate government and Israel could focus on the gains it has made through diplomacy elsewhere (and yes, the Palestinians also have to take responsibility for Arafat rejecting the 1990s peace process when it was on the table for them and after he'd just negotiated the thing, despite the high probability that hardliners in Israel would never have agreed to it as, well, they didn't).

[DanteGabriel]

I think one thing that's important to remember is that a lot of the states around Israel don't give a fuck about the Palestinians. But it's useful for those regimes to have Israel as a perpetual enemy to rally against, so they are content for the Palestinians to remain perpetually fucked over.

I wish Netanyahu wasn't so willing to play along, or so willing to create provocation and get a bunch of people killed just because it helps him cling to power.

[Liffguard]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

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.

One side is vastly more powerful and has vastly more blood on its hands than the other. I agree that the situation is not simple, but let's not pretend the two sides are equivalent.

[S John]

Where’s Jared Kushner when you need him?

[Arakan]

6 hours 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. Can that exist if Jews become a minority in said state with the new majority’s long history of persecuting Jews?

Simple, right?

I see you support Apartheid and racism against Arabs and Muslims just to scour a fantasy scenario. I do not wonder. 

[Arakan]

3 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

I think one thing that's important to remember is that a lot of the states around Israel don't give a fuck about the Palestinians. But it's useful for those regimes to have Israel as a perpetual enemy to rally against, so they are content for the Palestinians to remain perpetually fucked over.

I wish Netanyahu wasn't so willing to play along, or so willing to create provocation and get a bunch of people killed just because it helps him cling to power.

Nothing of this addresses what @Werthead excellently put together. The Palestinians are occupied, treated like garbage by the Israeli Military. All life-necessary Ressources be it water or arable land are being stolen from them. The Palestinians are facing racism every day, have to live in abhorrent poverty and are being colonized. All of this happens with the US‘ blessing. @Spockydogsaid it well. 

The only country to force a different course would be the US but they don’t want. Israel is too valuable as an ally. And the Israel lobby in the US is strong. 

[Bael's Bastard]

3 hours ago, Liffguard said:

One side is vastly more powerful and has vastly more blood on its hands than the other. I agree that the situation is not simple, but let's not pretend the two sides are equivalent.

Only by reframing a historically one-sided conflict between much more numerous and powerful Arabs/Arabized peoples and the ancient MENA Jewish communities they colonized into a much narrower national conflict between one of dozens of modern-crafted Arab nationalities and Jews. But the reality is, even then, that all the newly created Arab states worked to destroy Israel from the start and for decades. Only when all efforts failed did Jordan relinquish its claim to the West Bank in 1988, after Palestinians had originally proclaimed the West Bank/Palestine one with Jordan and Abdullah the king of Palestine in 1948. If you wonder why Palestinians don't have a military, it's because Jordan was their military until they abandoned them and tried to take back citizenship from Palestinians since 88.

[Spockydog]

11 minutes ago, Arakan said:

And the Israel lobby in the US is strong. 

LOOK AT THE ANTI-SEMITE! HOW DARE HE THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS ANTISEMITISM!!!!!!! BURN THE ANTI-SEMITE! BLAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH!

[Fez]

I'll always acknowledge the heinous shit that some Israelis have gotten up to throughout the conflict. But I have absolutely no time for people who won't also acknowledge the heinous shit that some Palestinians have gotten up to throughout the conflict.

The only reason the death toll in recent years is so lopsided is because Israel built those separation barriers, which physically prevented most non-rocket attacks from occurring. But before that, when there was conflict there was just as much blood on the Palestinian side. During the first few years of the second Intifadia over 1,000 Israelis were killed. Exact records from earlier flare-ups aren't as well kept, but Israeli civilian deaths were a regular occurrence for a long time.

[Zorral]

I don't recall who it was today who posted about a video he saw of the ultra right orthodox marching in Jerusalem with bludgeons in their hands, shouting, "Death to Arabs." With the video the poster wrote, "This sure as hell looks like the videos I saw from the nationalist marchers in Charlottesville who were shouting/chanting, "Jews will not replace us!"

[DanteGabriel]

16 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Nothing of this addresses what @Werthead excellently put together. The Palestinians are occupied, treated like garbage by the Israeli Military. All life-necessary Ressources be it water or arable land are being stolen from them. The Palestinians are facing racism every day, have to live in abhorrent poverty and are being colonized. All of this happens with the US‘ blessing. @Spockydogsaid it well. 

The only country to force a different course would be the US but they don’t want. Israel is too valuable as an ally. And the Israel lobby in the US is strong. 

Was I contradicting anything they said or are you just stuck in the habit of policing what I can post about?

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Liffguard said:

One side is vastly more powerful and has vastly more blood on its hands than the other. I agree that the situation is not simple, but let's not pretend the two sides are equivalent.

Whilst it's true Israel has inflicted vastly more damage and death than the opposition, still around 25,000 Israeli citizens and soldiers have died due to military action, terrorism and assassinations since its founding (still well within a single human lifetime), or over a quarter and almost a third the number of deaths of opposition Arab forces (including Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian losses in warfare where they were the belligerents attacking a superior foe, in which disproportionate casualties are to be expected).

The number of Israeli deaths is certainly not negligible, although in recent conflicts the disparity is considerably more lopsided.

9 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

Only by reframing a historically one-sided conflict between much more numerous and powerful Arabs/Arabized peoples and the ancient MENA Jewish communities they colonized into a much narrower national conflict between one of dozens of modern-crafted Arab nationalities and Jews. But the reality is, even then, that all the newly created Arab states worked to destroy Israel from the start and for decades. Only when all efforts failed did Jordan relinquish its claim to the West Bank in 1988, after Palestinians had originally proclaimed the West Bank/Palestine one with Jordan and Abdullah the king of Palestine in 1948. If you wonder why Palestinians don't have a military, it's because Jordan was their military until they abandoned them and tried to take back citizenship from Palestinians since 88.

Though interesting, this historical record is not entirely germane to the current moment. It is also somewhat disingenuous; the real reason the Palestinians do not have a military is because Israel has flattened every attempt for them to form one, and various Israeli governments have told them that a Palestinian army would not be tolerated and have even said that if they were to ever recognise an independent Palestinian state, it would be a condition that state would not be armed (!).

The fact is that for the first twenty-five years of Israel's existence, it was under an initial existential threat from the surrounding Arab states, although the most immediate moment of crisis was at its founding and receded fairly linearly after that. The last time Israel encountered a military challenge it had difficulty with was in 1973, and that was only briefly. In the forty-eight years since then, Israel has not faced such a challenge (excepting maybe the Iraqi quest for a nuclear bomb in 1982 might have ultimately presented such a threat, but it was dealt with long before it became an issue). With thawing relations with surrounding states who see Iran as vastly more of a problem than Israel, there is no short-to-medium term, realistic threat to Israel's existence (and the only long-term one is Iran if it were to pursue a nuclear weapon).

This also ignores the fact that in the highly improbable event of Israel facing a military defeat, the United States would step in and destroy the attacking force in short order, although as recent history shows, countries relying on the USA always being there to help out should consider that this might not always be the case.

So, whilst you take Israel's overall history to show reasonable justification for Israel having a massive military relative to its small population, many of those factors are no longer in play in 2021, and certainly not when the military disparity between Israel and its immediate opposition in the Occupied Territories is focused on.

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The only reason the death toll in recent years is so lopsided is because Israel built those separation barriers, which physically prevented most non-rocket attacks from occurring. But before that, when there was conflict there was just as much blood on the Palestinian side

Yes, and even the small number of deaths in rocket attacks has been reduced further by the deployment of the Iron Dome system.

"Just as much" is not really accurate though; there were three times as many Palestinian casualties as Israeli ones during the Second Intifada (and even that is almost a generation in the past), which roughly tracks with the overall disparity in casualties throughout the entire conflict since 1948. The First Intifada was even more lopsided (277 Israeli deaths to just under 2,000 Palestinian).

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

29 minutes ago, Arakan said:

I see you support Apartheid and racism against Arabs and Muslims just to scour a fantasy scenario. I do not wonder. 

Lol, you've spent pages complaining in another thread about people putting words in your mouth and then you write this.

If you knew what you were talking about, you'd recognize a Jewish person calling Israel an Apartheid state is the ultimate denunciation of what their government is doing.

3 hours ago, Liffguard said:

One side is vastly more powerful and has vastly more blood on its hands than the other. I agree that the situation is not simple, but let's not pretend the two sides are equivalent.

Israel is vastly more powerful if we're just talking about in comparison to Palestine, but it gets a bit murkier once you expand it to a regional discussion. As for who has more blood on their hands, you can look at today's and make your decisions, but the people involved in the conflict see things very differently and they have much longer memories than you or I could understand. It makes the phrase "this goes back to the old country" sound like you were talking about something that happened the other day.

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

I think the answer to that question is simple. The Palestinians and their ancestors have been living in those lands for thousands of years, so why should they leave and go somewhere else? The same argument, of course, applied to the Jewish population of the region in the period leading up to 1948.

If you're opening bid is to say it's simple, there will never again be a Jewish state, good luck negotiating that one. 

Quote

It's also easy to simplify and see Arabs as a monolithic bloc, but they are not (and neither are Israelis, for that matter), and Palestinians have a distinct culture and identity which is not the same as Jordanian, Saudi Arabs, Syrians etc. Palestinians have faced discrimination from other Arab communities and see no reason to move from their ancestral homeland to other locations.

Do we need this disclaimer every damn time? Of course there are obvious cultural differences just like there are in every group we bloc like that. 

Quote

I agree that other countries in the Middle East see Israel as having this absolutely massive headache to deal with as beneficial to them, but it's also a headache of Israel's own making, and if it had held back from building the settlements, then the West Bank could now exist as a viable Palestinian state under a moderate government and Israel could focus on the gains it has made through diplomacy elsewhere (and yes, the Palestinians also have to take responsibility for Arafat rejecting the 1990s peace process when it was on the table for them and after he'd just negotiated the thing, despite the high probability that hardliners in Israel would never have agreed to it as, well, they didn't).

Just goes to show how each side can claim they're in the right while mostly just being in the wrong, and I don't think progress can be made unless both sides come to get and recognize what they've done to one another, but like you said in your other post, the voices that could maybe do that are be shouted over by the hardliners on both sides and these recent events will only make things far worse.

[IFR]

I really appreciate everyone who is contributing to this thread. It's getting a little heated in parts, but I think everyone is doing well in discussing a highly emotional issue and trying to maintain an informative, neutral stance (as much as one can on an issue such as this).

I hope this will continue to be an educational experience for people like me, who do not know much about the issues discussed.

[Padraig]

25 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Israel is vastly more powerful if we're just talking about in comparison to Palestine, but it gets a bit murkier once you expand it to a regional discussion.

Have Israel's neighbours ever been weaker over the last 50 years than now?  But also, once you start expanding the issue, you may as well make it a global discussion, given the significance of allies.

33 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Do we need this disclaimer every damn time? Of course there are obvious cultural differences just like there are in every group we bloc like that. 

I would think we do need the disclaimer?  Given somebody did suggest (innocently) that the Palestinian's could simply move and live with their fellow Arabs.  As if they were one big monolith.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

6 minutes ago, Padraig said:

Have Israel's neighbours ever been weaker over the last 50 years than now?  But also, once you start expanding the issue, you may as well make it a global discussion, given the significance of allies.

If we're talking about state based actors then yes, there isn't much of a military threat outside of Iran depending on how one wants to view their relative strength going forward. But what complicates things is the abundance of fear of non-state actors, and it's hard to argue that it's an illegitimate fear from their perspective. 

On a global scale, if the U.S. abandoned them they'd be in a seriously weak position.

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I would think we do need the disclaimer?  Given somebody did suggest (innocently) that the Palestinian's could simply move and live with their fellow Arabs.  As if they were one big monolith.

It was asking if it's been thought about rather than suggested, and if you knew the poster in question I was responding to you'd know he's well aware of how we group people into monolithic blocs. And frankly it's reasonable to ask about relocation simply because I'm skeptical there could be a non-contiguous Palestinian state. I'm for a two (or three) state solution, but I think for that to work people in general will need to be relocated (and that includes the illegal Israeli settlements). 

[Fez]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

"Just as much" is not really accurate though; there were three times as many Palestinian casualties as Israeli ones during the Second Intifada (and even that is almost a generation in the past), which roughly tracks with the overall disparity in casualties throughout the entire conflict since 1948. The First Intifada was even more lopsided (277 Israeli deaths to just under 2,000 Palestinian).

The Second Intifadia went from 2000 to 2005. However, Israeli causalities began declining dramatically in 2003 when the first segments of the barrier were completed, whereas Palestinian causalities remained high throughout the conflict. 

I don't have the precise numbers, but I think if you just looked at those first 2-3 years, the rate would be close enough to bear saying "just as much."

[Zorral]

OK, Imma just going to say this: it's heartening to see at least those of us on the board who are USians talking about something other than US/us.  Which again shows OUR GREAT PRIVILEGE, when all we/our sorts think about at all has been US/us, due to the horror show of who was in the White House, and then the pandemic.

Again, the emphasis is indeed on OUR USian privilege, because this matter of Israel and Palestinians wouldn't even have been discussed here, I think, a year ago. But a year ago, these matters were going on and accelerating.

Not quite sure what the point is I'm trying to make here -- other than what a privilege to even be thinking of others not right inside our own, local, pandemic dome.  How many on this globe can say that? 

Is this, meaning what I'm groping to say, coming through at all?  If it isn't, it's my fault.  I'm not expressing myself well at all.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

36 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Again, the emphasis is indeed on OUR USian privilege, because this matter of Israel and Palestinians wouldn't even have been discussed here, I think, a year ago. But a year ago, these matters were going on and accelerating.

Please, we've been talking about it for years. It just didn't always have its own thread which was in part why I started the first international news thread here so people could discuss these kinds of things when they were unsure if there was a germane thread for various topics like this.

[A True Kaniggit]

Would anything in negotiations ever convince Israel to abandon/withdraw the settlements in the West Bank?

If not, then I guess increased conflict is inevitable.