Israel and Palestine- The permanent mess

[straits]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

This situation is complicated and difficult it is impossible until we get leadership in the two combatant sides willing to speak reasonablely and rationally to each other.

Agreed, but this and most of your comment is applicable to the Yugoslav wars. It is disturbing to see a logic, laid out meticulously to identify and condemn genocidal crimes in the 90s, be thrown out entirely when a geopolitical ally is on the examination table. It sends the message that justice and accountability is applied to and demanded from countries not allied to the western sphere of influence.

edit: it would only be honest to add that this is well-known. It is only being reaffirmed.

Edited January 15 by straits

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

42 minutes ago, straits said:

Agreed, but this and most of your comment is applicable to the Yugoslav wars. It is disturbing to see a logic, laid out meticulously to identify and condemn genocidal crimes in the 90s, be thrown out entirely when a geopolitical ally is on the examination table. It sends the message that justice and accountability is applied to and demanded from countries not allied to the western sphere of influence.

edit: it would only be honest to add that this is well-known. It is only being reaffirmed.

Should the West attack both Hamas and Israel?  

This makes me wonder what would happen if the UN was given genuine sovereign power and a military arm that could intervene to seperate waring factions?

Edited January 15 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[straits]

21 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Should the West attack both Hamas and Israel?  

This makes me wonder what would happen if the UN was given genuine sovereign power and a military arm that could intervene to seperate waring factions?

It would be sensible for the international community to decide. The US did not wait for such a decision before they began bombing Serbia in 1999, due to the unfolding crisis in Kosovo.

Watching over 22 thousand Palestinians die, over a million souls risking starvation in winter, and over 70% of the population ethnically cleansed - forced out of their homes with less regard than people give to cattle - I don't even see sanctions on Israel discussed as an option. In fact, American tax money is financing their suffering.

[kissdbyfire]

2 hours ago, straits said:

Agreed, but this and most of your comment is applicable to the Yugoslav wars. It is disturbing to see a logic, laid out meticulously to identify and condemn genocidal crimes in the 90s, be thrown out entirely when a geopolitical ally is on the examination table. It sends the message that justice and accountability is applied to and demanded from countries not allied to the western sphere of influence.

edit: it would only be honest to add that this is well-known. It is only being reaffirmed.

https://youtube.com/shorts/ILWX2C76cMc?si=vw4flpjEYh4bYuXQ

Edited January 15 by kissdbyfire

[straits]

4 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

https://youtube.com/shorts/ILWX2C76cMc?si=vw4flpjEYh4bYuXQ

This is basically it. The only thing mildly surprising to me is that she did not expect it.

[kissdbyfire]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Should the West attack both Hamas and Israel?  

Of course not. But perhaps apply for real the democratic prínciples everyone says they want to see being upheld and stop vetoing everything that could reign in some of what Israel is inflicting on Palestinians? Since it's, I don't know, 150 countries in favour of sanctioning Israel and basically just the US,,Marshall Islands and Micronesia against it. Not very democratic, if you ask me.

[Ran]

Those 150 countries could start just sanctioning on their own, if they wanted. Go for it, folks, there's no time like the present.

 

[straits]

I almost agree! But ending up on the US sh*tlist is an experience which ranges from unpleasant to fatal.

[Ran]

3 minutes ago, straits said:

I almost agree! But ending up on the US sh*tlist is an experience which ranges from unpleasant to fatal.

So much for righteous democratic principles, I guess. 

[kissdbyfire]

4 minutes ago, straits said:

I almost agree! But ending up on the US sh*tlist is an experience which ranges from unpleasant to fatal.

Heh, that could change rather quickly if Mango wins in November. 

[fionwe1987]

25 minutes ago, Ran said:

Those 150 countries could start just sanctioning on their own, if they wanted. Go for it, folks, there's no time like the present.

 

Hardly the point, is it? Israel gets the majority of its weapons from the US, and would make for any trade sanctions with the US, as well. 

Now you could call for the US to be sanctioned too, of course. And honestly, it should be, both for its past behavior and its current actions, but that's honestly not a viable option till the dollar is shitcanned as the global currency. Which, if I understand my finance friends, is genuinely possible this decade, so we'll have to wait and see. 

[mormont]

10 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Heh, that could change rather quickly if Mango wins in November. 

There is a strain of thought among some on the left, disappointingly, that Trump as an isolationist would be less willing to foot the bill for Israeli bombing of Gaza. I think that's naive myself: if Trump thinks it's giving Democrats a problem, he'll go right on paying.

Paying the bill or not, though, he'll be enthusiastically encouraging and praising Netanyahu and certainly not allowing the UN or anyone else to intervene. 

[Ran]

4 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

Hardly the point, is it? Israel gets the majority of its weapons from the US, and would make for any trade sanctions with the US, as well. 

Ah, so the alleged reason the US should agree to UN sanctions is to force it to sanction Israel when it's not actually something the US is interested in? What a surprise the US isn't on board!

4 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

Now you could call for the US to be sanctioned too, of course.

Again, folks, go for it! Every nation can decide on its own terms who it wants to trade with and who it wants to work with. Those 150 nations could independently sanction the US, if they'd like.

 

4 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

And honestly, it should be, both for its past behavior and its current actions, but that's honestly not a viable option till the dollar is shitcanned as the global currency.

Oh, because it would hurt too much to sanction the US? Self-interest wins again. 

4 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

Which, if I understand my finance friends, is genuinely possible this decade, so we'll have to wait and see. 

Every decade or two, the predictions come. They have been wrong so far, and I rather suspect they'll be wrong again for more than a couple of decades. China's yuan has the best chance, and their economic woes are deep, structural, and not going to be resolved in a handful of years, which makes the yuan unlikely to gain more than a toehold in the global reserve currency market.

[Zorral]

Letter from Israel
The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
By David Remnick January 14, 2024

Ben-Gurion’s acceptance of the U.N. partition plan, in 1947, dividing the land between the Jews and the Arabs, was intolerable. ....

“This is part of what breaks my heart,” Ziv told me. “When I see Israelis and Palestinians, I see twins, people who are alike in so many ways, mirroring each other, yet they go on inflicting more and more trauma on each other to the point where we refuse to see each other.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/22/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-gaza-hamas-war-hostages

Quote

 

.... Any departure from territorial maximalism was anathema to Benzion. His three sons—Yonatan, Bibi, and Iddo—could have been left in no doubt about where he stood. Ben-Gurion’s acceptance of the U.N. partition plan, in 1947, dividing the land between the Jews and the Arabs, was intolerable. Benzion condemned his fellow-Revisionist Menachem Begin when, at Camp David, in 1978, Begin negotiated the return of the Sinai to Egypt, in what became an enduring peace agreement. The Oslo Accords, signed in the nineties by Yitzhak Rabin, were also an act of pathetic credulity. It was easy to imagine Benzion’s response to Ehud Barak’s negotiations with Palestinians over sovereignty, in 2000; Ariel Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza, in 2005; and Ehud Olmert’s proposal, in 2008, to create a demilitarized Palestinian state. Apparently, Benzion was even critical of his son’s decision to share sovereignty with the Palestinians over the West Bank city of Hebron. No one was vigilant enough to escape his contempt. Benzion once remarked that his son might make a fine foreign minister. Netanyahu was the country’s Prime Minister at the time. ....

.... What is not especially visible on Israeli television is the unrelenting horror of Palestinian suffering in Gaza, where more than twenty-three thousand people have been killed in three months, and an estimated 1.9 million have been displaced. Only rarely do Israelis see what the rest of the world sees: the corpses of Palestinian children wrapped in sheets by a mass grave; widespread hunger and disease; schools and houses, apartment blocks and mosques, reduced to rubble; people fleeing from one place to the next, on foot, on donkey carts, three to a bicycle, all the time knowing that there is no real refuge from mortal danger. Gaza is a presence on Israeli television mainly through the dispatches of reporters embedded with the I.D.F. And they tend to emphasize the experience of Israeli soldiers—their missions, their clashes with Hamas fighters, the search for hostages, the crisp pronouncements of generals and officials helicoptering in from Jerusalem.

A disregard for the suffering in Gaza is hardly limited to reactionary ministers or far-right commentators. Ben Caspit, the author of a biography critical of Netanyahu, recently posted that he felt no compunction about concentrating on the home front. “Why should we turn our attention [to Gaza]?” he wrote. “They’ve earned that hell fairly, and I don’t have a milligram of empathy.” When I asked Caspit about this, he replied that he was “pro-humanitarian aid” and a lifelong “peacenik,” but insisted that there had been, until October 7th, a “ceasefire” with Hamas. And then, he said, they “crossed the border, came to our villages to loot, to rape, to kill, and to kidnap. So, as an Israeli, it’s difficult for me to feel sorry now during this war while we are going on burying five and seven soldiers a day.” He did not care about Gaza in “exactly the same way that the British did not care about the Germans in World War Two and the Americans about the Japanese,” he went on. “We were forced into this situation. We did not initiate it. On the contrary, we initiated peace.” His is a common sentiment among Israelis. ....

.... Hadas Ziv, the director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, has worked for years defending Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza. She advocates for the rights of migrants, asylum seekers, and prison detainees. Lately, she has been involved in gathering publicly available testimony and forensic evidence about the sexual assaults committed by Hamas, and says that the evidence points to rape, in this instance, being “a weapon of war.” (Hamas spokesmen have denied the accusation.) She has been condemned by Palestinians online who find her latest work to be excessively “pro-Israeli.”

“This is part of what breaks my heart,” Ziv told me. “When I see Israelis and Palestinians, I see twins, people who are alike in so many ways, mirroring each other, yet they go on inflicting more and more trauma on each other to the point where we refuse to see each other.” ....

 

 

[Jace, Extat]

Ran, I'm seeing a realpolitik side of you I didn't know existed... 

Meanwhile, 

58 minutes ago, mormont said:

There is a strain of thought among some on the left, disappointingly, that Trump as an isolationist would be less willing to foot the bill for Israeli bombing of Gaza. I think that's naive myself: if Trump thinks it's giving Democrats a problem, he'll go right on paying.

Paying the bill or not, though, he'll be enthusiastically encouraging and praising Netanyahu and certainly not allowing the UN or anyone else to intervene. 

I agree with this completely. Here's what's gonna happen:

Eventually Trump is gonna realize he can call the left antisemitic, his base will love having a new cudgel, and Biden will be punished for standing with an ally by his own base. 

Trump'll additionally start calling Ukraine a lost cause and a black hole of aid money. 

So it should surprise no one that current trends hold the rest of the year. No new aid to Ukraine, support for Israel.

[Zorral]

Versions of Denial
Conor Gearty on denial masquerading as reason

 ‘How do we square all these efforts at denial with the celebration by many in Israel at the death and destruction being visited on the population of Gaza, the pressure for the same kind of action to be taken in the West Bank, and the proud circulation by Israeli troops of selfies and videos from the scene to show to their families and friends? Describing the Palestinians as vermin to be removed or killed is hardly the language of denial, but many Israelis combine celebration with a denial that what’s happening is their fault. Denial in Israel is a means of keeping supporters abroad on message. We in the Global North need lies so that we can continue to see our support for Israeli action as morally possible.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n02/conor-gearty/short-cuts

Quote

 

.... When I joined the London School of Economics in 2002, one of its towering figures was Stan Cohen, a professor of sociology and one of the founders of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, which I had been hired to run. Born in South Africa, Stan was Jewish and had in his youth been a Zionist. In 1980 he moved to Israel to work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. That finished him with Zionism. When I first met him, he had just published States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (2000), which shows that denial can masquerade as reason and reasonableness, making the unconscionable appear civilised, measured, even humane. He died in 2013, but his book makes clear what he would have made of Israel’s current operation in Gaza.

In States of Denial, Cohen was highly critical of the way liberal culture had accommodated Israel’s actions. He discussed three versions of denial: literal denial (it never happened); interpretative denial (it’s not what you think it is) and implicatory denial (we have to do it/it’s terrible, but it’s not our fault). It’s much harder for the Israeli authorities to pull off literal denial than it was before the existence of social media, though it lingers on in their dismissal of the dangers facing the population of Gaza (we are creating safe spaces for the innocent; they should go to the south) and of the severity of conditions there (there is enough food and water; there would be a plentiful supply of fuel if Hamas stopped hoarding it). But the essential facts can hardly be denied: more than 23,000 deaths, around 1 per cent of the population; the destruction of a third of the buildings in the territory; attacks on schools, universities, hospitals and cultural centres; and the forced movement of 1.9 million people.

Instead, and in a move not anticipated by Cohen but which the sociologist in him might have admired, Israel and its supporters have flipped the need for denial to the other side: instead of Israel attempting to show that the atrocities it is committing in Gaza are not in fact taking place, the Palestinians and their supporters find themselves having to prove to the world that things that did not happen actually did not happen − or not in the way Israel says they did. Disproving fabrications is an exhausting business, usefully so from Israel’s point of view. Refutation takes time and often comes too late to undermine what have become entrenched truths.

Ten children aged under twelve were murdered during the Hamas attacks of 7 October, but there is no basis for the claim, widely made at the time, that forty babies were beheaded. The number seems to have come from a report on the Israeli news channel i24 on 10 October by Nicole Zedek, who said she had been told by IDF soldiers that ‘forty children had been killed’ and interviewed a soldier who said that Hamas fighters had ‘cut heads off children, cut heads off women’. These statements quickly morphed on social media into the claim that forty babies had been beheaded. When Joe Biden was asked about this on 11 October he said: ‘I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.’ The White House said he had not in fact seen such pictures but had based his comments on media reports from Israel and on a statement by a spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden repeated the claim on 12 December, but it is no longer being made by the Israelis. It had served its purpose. (The use of the supposed mutilation of babies as a propaganda tool isn’t new: it was used most famously early in the First World War when British newspapers published stories about the Germans bayoneting Belgian babies.) ....

 

 
 
 

[kissdbyfire]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

There is a strain of thought among some on the left, disappointingly, that Trump as an isolationist would be less willing to foot the bill for Israeli bombing of Gaza. I think that's naive myself: if Trump thinks it's giving Democrats a problem, he'll go right on paying.

Paying the bill or not, though, he'll be enthusiastically encouraging and praising Netanyahu and certainly not allowing the UN or anyone else to intervene. 

I was typing on a moving car w/o my glasses, so I went for brevity and clarity paid the price! Yes, I am aware of this faction, and I most definitely don’t count myself as one of them. With so much happening in the world and so many conflicts and tensions that could easily escalate quickly, having Mango in the WH would be the worst possible scenario for the whole world.  
I agree that he would absolutely do whatever Netanyahu wants, despite his thinly-veiled antisemitism. Then there’s his blatant and proud Islamophobia, which would mean Palestinians would suffer exponentially more than they already are. 
And all of that before we even get to Ukraine, his desire to go to war with Iran, and who knows what else. The icing on this evil cake from hell would be no Kelly, no Mattis, no normal and rational republicans in the administration; it would be Flynn, Kash Patel, Stephen fucking Miller, and worse. 
So, yeah, a 2nd Trump term would mean a lot of pain for an awful lot of people worldwide, and I definitely don’t want that. The point I tried to make and failed is that there are many political scientists and other experts out there, both on the left and the right, who believe that if he wins it would hurt the US in many more ways than just the obvious ones. The extreme nationalism bordering on christofascism, the isolationist policies, and on and on.  

[kissdbyfire]

Ah I see now. There is no hunger in Gaza at all! It's just that Palestinians, like all Arabs,  hoard all the food. Gotcha. 

 

 

 

Edited January 15 by kissdbyfire

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

9 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Ah I see now. There is no hunger in Gaza at all! It's just that Palestinians, like all Arabs,  hoard all the food. Gotcha. 

 

 

 

I’m not overly fond of the nasty comments following that horrific statement either… “the Shylocks”?  

[kissdbyfire]

23 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I’m not overly fond of the nasty comments following that horrific statement either… “the Shylocks”?  

Didn't read the thread, but yeah, fucking disgusting. Twitter is just that now, horrible & vile comments and all manner of bigotry everywhere you look. The disgusting brainless bigots are nobodies and there is hateful bigotry of all flavours; nasty morons are sadly a part of every group/race/ethnicity and can't be helped. But an important government official should not sound like the brainless bigots on Twitter, right?