Israel announced today that it is carrying out strikes against Iran in response to an Iranian attack last month in response to Israel's murder of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah in response to Hezbollah border attacks in response to Israel's war in Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks on October 7 in response to Israel's increasingly brutal occupation of the West Bank in response to rising terrorism from Palestinians in response to Israel's wall in response to the Second Intifada in response to the failure of the Camp David talks in response to Yasser Arafat's rejection of a deal in response to Israel's refusal to cede control of East Jerusalem in response to fears of Palestinian revival during the First Intifada in response to Israel's "Iron Fist" policy of oppression in response to raids from southern Lebanon in response to the Lebanon War in response to an attempt to assassinate Israel's ambassador to Britain in response to the Yom Kippur War in response to Israel's occupation of the West Bank in response to the Six-Day War in response to Egypt's closure of the Strait of Tiran in response to Israel's attack on as-Samu in response to PLO terrorism in response to Israeli existence in response to the 1948 War in response to the UN creation of Israel in response to de facto Israeli settlement in Palestine in response to the Balfour Declaration in response to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Zionist movement.
More or less, anyway.
Finally Kevin gets it and admits the obvious: the Zionist colonization of Palestine under the guns of the British Mandate was the start of this conflict.
Israel is the aggressor, always and forever until this conflict ends.
Iran has some interesting history also. Pre USSR war with Russia. The Brits looking for oil. The USSR/Us/Brit occupation in WW2. The overthrow of Mosaddeq.
My father in law's company had contracts with the shah and went BK when the shah fell. I met a man who was in the shah's office when the shah put a man in house arrest for arguing against a project.
One thing to emphasize is that the WWII occupation resulted in a famine in which 2 million Iranians died because the British had commandeered the entire railroad network to deliver Lend Lease. Without defending the current regime, the Iranian people have some very justified reasons to consider the US and UK to be enemies.
To a point. I'd argue it's the failings of the last 20 years that are more relevant than what happened in WW2. After all, we're pretty friendly with the Italians and the Japanese these days. And France and Germany certainly aren't at each others' throats.
I think it's important to think about countries in terms of cultural memory. In the US, our government tends to be rather elderly, and so WW2 and the 1950s looms pretty large in our collective consciousness (and our pop culture has for decades been heavily weighted towards WW2--just look at all the "dad" programming on the History chanel as a small example).
But the population of Iran's median age is the early 30s, which means that most people in Iran have no direct memory of the Shah or the US embassy hostage crisis etc., to say nothing of what happened in the 1970s, '60s, '50s, and '40s. There's a certain amount of ingrained Death To America, but I'd imagine most popular Iranian sentiment concerning the West has to do with the idiotic and bloody Iraq war and US support for Israel.
Another Iran story.
A co-worker and good friend convinced NASA to fund a trip to Europe to visit wind tunnels there. His real reason was to met his girlfriend, the product of a German American war bride union to marry him. He was having lunch with some Swiss engineers when a pilot for Iranian airlines came over and told him Irainians like Americans.
I have heard that Americans and the West are fairly popular among the urban/middle class/secular Iranians who rather dislike the Theocracy ("if the mullahs think the Americans are bad, well, they probably aren't..."). However, the Theocracy retains considerable support among the urban working classes and rural and small town folks. So, like so many situations, there is not a universal single answer.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did well in rural areas, if I recall correctly.
Correction:
More specifically, while the Balfour Declaration was clearly a declaration of war, it really had little impact on the ground relative to WWI as a whole. When Palestinian rights began to be violated at large scale was during the post-war conferences where the League of Nations (basically Britain and France in practice) carved up the Middle East. There, despite credible plans put forth by the leaders of the region, the land was carved up by the Europeans for their own ends, one of the ends being for the British being to keep their promises to Zionists. Leadership in London was all-in on Zionism, but the boots-on-the-ground folks, a couple Jesus-Returns-If-Jews-Hold-Jerusalem evangelicals aside, quickly recognized it for the cluster%#^ it was.
Though, the authors of both the Balfour Declaration and the Palestinian Mandate used the phrase "Jewish national home." They considered using "Jewish state," and explicitly rejected it. When you read the text of the Mandate, especially Articles 7 and 28, it's clear that it envisions Palestine becoming a single, multiethnic state.
The British behaved in a way that makes it obvious that they didn't feel themselves bound by the legal requirements of the Mandate, but that is what they put into writing.
We have no idea how well the Palestinians would have responded to a lot of Jewish immigrants who were committed to that single state, rather than being committed to creating a state that excluded the Palestinians from full citizenship. But it couldn't have been worse than what actually happened.
Mandate-era Zionist immigration levels were, relative to population size, around ten times the immigration levels in the US today.
Imagine how bad our "border crisis" and politics would be if not only the migration was 10x bigger but also was almost entirely a group of people who had no intention of assimilating and every intention of seceding!
Didn't "white people" migrate into Texas, back then? I'd be happy for Texas to secede and become a state in Mexico.
Yes. 10X immigration was possible because the ruling British assented and the Jewish settlers were educated, wealthy relative to the locals, and as emigrants from powerful nations they had deep ties to the countries they were leaving.
Under these conditions the locals could not be consultated, had they been they would have said no.
Trying to fill out your counterfactual I'm not sure it wouldn't have been worse. Britain could have tried to establish a state that gives rights to all. I imagine it would have been deal worth taking for the Jewish settlers, a definite minority at the time.
Generously imagine a good start: The British hand the keys to a newly elected leader in a putative putative democracy, a leader who who made inclusive promises in his campaign.
Of necessity that leader would be Muslim to win the election. The promises salve British consciences as they leave, but would they have real roots in the two peoples? It seems clearly a government headed for failure, and as it fails you get a war, and that war could play out similarly to the actual war, or better, two states, or worse, full-up genocide as one or the other people is exterminated and expelled.
For all the terrible things that have happened, around 8M Jews and 8M Muslims are alive today on that sliver of land, and I can still imagine outcomes this side of full-up ethnic cleansing or genocide.
There is a contradiction in that: Britain could not establish a state “with rights for all” and simultaneously have massive Jewish migration that the vast majority of the existing population strongly opposed. Fostering this migration was precisely why the mandate area was not given self-rule shortly after the war, as it should have been.
From Wikipedia: “Lebanon's unwritten National Pact of 1943 required that its president be Maronite Christian, its speaker of the parliament to be a Shia Muslim, its prime minister be Sunni Muslim, and the Deputy Speaker of Parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister be Greek Orthodox.”
Amazingly, this arrangement held for a quarter-century, during which Lebanon enjoyed progress, prosperity, and generally good international standing, until it was brought down by, what else, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now, I don’t know that something similar could have worked for Palestine, but it was never tried.
That's not the way I read it. Actually, it goes back further than that, into the mists of history, at least as far back as the first Babylonian invasion of the Levant. It's "aggressors" all the way down.
How about the Hittites and the Egyptians?
Several North American Indian tribes would agree
The US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have all adopted reasonable one-state solutions to that issue.
There are no innocent people in the entire Middle East. It’s a shame the Muslims are such pussies. They even hate each other!
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/world/asia/pakistan-kurram-sunni-shiite.html#:~:text=A%2045%2Dday%20gun%20battle,and%20several%20villages%20were%20burned.
Thanks. I was just thinking along these lines, but mine would've taken multiple sentences.
Nicely done!
And here I thought you were going to take it back to Moses. So disappointed. /S
There was no meaningful conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews before the modern Zionist movement, and none at all between Palestinians and worldwide Jewry.
A small number of Jews lived in Palestine in the late 1800s/ early 1900s, and were treated about as well as any minority group anywhere…and certainly much better than Ottoman Christians. Both the Central Powers and the Entente were aggressively courting Jewish support before and during WWI, which was one of several bad reasons Britain promised a slice of the Middle East in the first place.
IDK how you would take something closed with /S seriously, but wasn't this about A history of Israel in one sentence? After Exodus, where did they settle? Canaan. Where is Canaan?
You know Moses was thick of tongue and when he asked the lord for a place for the jews he could not pronounce California and the lord mistook it for Canaan.
😂😂😂
Really, think how happy the world would be if the laid back CA dreaming lifestyle was a reality for much of the world?
The farmworker communities of California would have a thing to say about laid back California life style.
🤣
It's in New Hampshire.
Connecticut has Canaan, North Canaan, and New Canaan (all township names, the latter nowhere near the other two). Though Canaan is commonly known as Falls Village, and North Canaan’s town center is known as Canaan.
I miss Connecticut.
Both the Central Powers and the Entente were aggressively courting Jewish support before and during WWI, which was one of several bad reasons Britain promised a slice of the Middle East in the first place.
You keep bringing banging on this particular drum, but it's not a very strong case. Please name a single country on earth whose birth didn't include elements of conquest, and a raw deal for the original inhabitants.
Israel is a country with a legal right to exist just like any other, and it isn't going away, not since its acquisition of a nuclear arsenal.
Far better to concentrate on what's fixable: Israel's post-1967 illegal conquest and colonization of Palestinian lands.
What Israel has been doing for many years now is against its long term interest, for a variety of reasons, chief of which is it removes itself from among the ranks of democracies. Hence the US should stop sending that country billions in annual military aid.
We probably can't stop them from doing stupid, illegal and immoral things. But we can stop them from doing stupid, illegal and immoral things with our money.
And maybe one day enough Israeli voters will tire of endless war, and they'll end the illegal occupation in favor of a free and sovereign state of Palestine.
The Mandate colonization of Palestine came after the closing bell of that era, after Wilson’s 14 Points and as decolonization was happening elsewhere. Perhaps if Zionists had ridden in on Napoleon’s wings a century earlier, things would be different, but what they did came way too late to work in a modern context, particularly because how Israel’s creation inevitably surrounding it by implacable enemies.
You do seem to admit that what happened during the Mandate was wrong, but you are loathe to hold anyone accountable for it and want to use 1948 as a baseline. That’s where we disagree. 1917 should be the baseline, and Israel should compensate Palestinians for all that has happened since with some combination of land and mountains of gold.
Why the need for a baseline? Baselines are used to establish a moral beachhead in negotiations. Better to emphasize justice today, embodied in values like self-determination, political and human rights, and dignity.
This does not erase historical claims, demote them to one of many considerations.
We would do a lot better than we have just insisting the law, domestic and international, be followed.
Justice today would require either one-state or two, and massive reparations.
You do seem to admit that what happened during the Mandate was wrong, but you are loathe to hold anyone accountable for it and want to use 1948 as a baseline. That’s where we disagree.
Wrong? Morally, maybe in part, but what's relevant is international law. Perhaps as part of an eventual, two-state solution deal, Israel will agree to pay reparations. That would be fine!
And sure, I get you don't like the circumstances whereby the state of Israel came into being. I don't like the circumstances of the birth of my own country (all that genocide vis-a-vis the indigenous people was very bad). Come to think of it, the Saxons pushing out the Britons sucked, as did the Yayoi's ethnic cleansing of the Ainu. There are almost always winners and losers when new countries come into being.
But your ramblings about things that happened a century ago don't provide practical solutions. Israel is a sovereign state under International law, and isn't going away, and isn't going to be forced into national suicide.
But it is not inconceivable that Israel might be prevailed upon one day to give up its illegal post '67 conquests. This is the path forward for peace and stability. In the interim, the US ought to sever its special relationship with this outlaw state.
Well put. I agree it is not inconceivable Israel is pressured and pushed into accepting pre-1967 borders.
Conditional aid is a start. No peace process, continuing settlements, no aid.
It would take years, maybe decades, but S. Africa boycotts and isolation remains the best model.
I don't see the conflict. Foundation stories are powerful, it is good for them to be accurate because for the reasons you give reality gets in the way of propaganda.
A misleading Israeli foundation myth is a big reason the US continues to send unconditional aid.
part of the history is British horse-trading in WW1. That does not remove Israel's right to exist, but it does add complexity to Israeli claims of moral superiority.
"moral superiority"
Didn't the Nazi Party of the 30s claim that?
Now "Israel" is claiming such, ostentatiously claiming such while not even following their own Ten Commandments. Still worshipping at their golden calf, I see.
Here is a map of the West Bank. Go to the UN map of West Band Access and Closures and draw the boundaries of the Palestinian State.
Or just watch this lovely animation set to the classic "This Land is Mine" that captures the problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tIdCsMufIY
Ugh. The human race has a long way to go.
Notice how nowhere in this list is there any entry along the lines of “in response to the assassination of Israel’s prime minister Yitzak Rabin” but “an attempt to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Britain” counts as a predicate triggering event.
The response to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was to arrest, try and convict his assassin, who was an Israeli Jew.
That said, Yigal Amir got everything he wanted from the assassination. He may be in prison, but his world view is shared by just about every Jewish party in Israel. All of them, except possibly Labor (it's hard to tell, because all of the Labor MKs just happen not to be in the building anytime a vote is held concerning the occupation), from Yesh Atid all the way to Otzma Yehudit, are now adamantly opposed to giving up any of the West Bank as a part of a peace deal. Amir wanted to destroy the peace process, ad he was wildly successful.
The assassin won.
And yet the IDF didn’t bulldoze his home or detain his family.
One. Jewish settler terrorist martyred while the rest were given license to run wild in the West Bank, and worse, often protected by the military when in the act.
Obviously that is war, from which the victims have every right on earth to resist with violence.
Hence Palestinians, for throwing a rock at an IDF "soldier", not hitting them, is given 17 years in prison.
The husband of the rock tosser asked me what they could do.
A friend lost his father when his dad's ambulance was held for over ten hours, just so Zionistas could travel essentially Jewish only "freeways" in the West Bank.
I guess the Good Samaritan was not Jewish.
"Obviously that is war, from which the victims have every right on earth to resist with violence."
Like the participants of the Trail of Tears?
Jeez, man. Too short. You haven't even gotten to Masada yet.
And that is why there can't be peace in Northern Ireland. Oh wait one could tell the same story about Northern Ireland with the same kind of back and forth, but Northern Ireland reached a peace. The reason for this, of course, is that the UK granted citizenship to Catholics in Northern Ireland while Israel moved large numbers of citizens into the West Bank whose Palestinians Israel has no intention of allowing to be citizens of Israel and whose settlers makes it impossible for those Palestinians to be citizens of an independent state.
If you want to ignore this reality than you do what Drum does here and give this tired "they are all bad lets throw our hands up and keep arming the more powerful side while it massacres the less powerful side" that Drum is doing here.
This.
The other point is that the IRA has Sinn Fein. and Sinn Fein could deliver peace. It’s not perfectly apples to apples but the Palestinians seem to always have an active terrorist wing - and by active I mean since the 1930s. This gives Israel, or at least the hardliners, the excuses needed through Kevin’s sentence. In NI the reunification of NI might take 100 years of no IRA violence at all, humans are awful grudgholders.
I am not sure why you present this as a difference. The Palestinians have been led by Abbas who has provided security cooperation for the almost 20 years that he has been led the West Bank. Israel has used that security cooperation to more quickly gobble up the West Bank and kill the possibility of peace. At times Hamas has acknowledge that it is Abbas who is in a position to negotiate with the Israelis.
If Israel wants peace it has had the partners in peace that are the equal of Sinn Fein. Abbas offered Olmert everything Israel could reasonably want in a peace plan. Israel just hasn't wanted peace. If the British wanted a continuation of the conflict they could have pointed to Sinn Fein's ties to the IRA as an excuse to not pursue peace. But the UK wanted peace.
In fact Hamas' use of terrorism since the second intifada has been so contained that Israel convinced itself that it was such a spent force that it could ship its military to the West Bank to protect the settlers from getting any blowback from their pograms against Palestinian villages.
The real difference between Hamas and the IRA is that the world would never have accepted the slaughter of 1000s of Irish civilians in response to IRA attacks.
Israel had Irgun and the Stern Gang, and now has marauding settler gangs. Also, the IRA always had extremist wings or offshoots — the Provos, the Real IRA. When there is a will to make peace, peace can be made, and the extremists dealt with by the legal system.
But Drum doesn't say there can't be peace, so your response is pure straw.
Ah you didn't understand the point of his post. It happens.
LOS ANGELES – After the Yankees intentionally walked Mookie Betts to face Freddie Freeman with two outs and up by a run in the 10th inning, Freeman made them pay, crushing a grand slam to carry the Dodgers to a 6-3 win in Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night at Dodger Stadium.
Freddie is… awesome. 👏
Yes he is. Still sad that Atlanta let him go.
Somehow I wonder whether the UN would have taken that course had the Holocaust not happened.
I was thinking that myself. The surviving victims of Nazi concentration camps lost their entire family, most of their wealth and property. No one in Europe seemed that concerned with the survivors rights or bothered with ensuring they were justly compensated for their losses. I don't think the idea of Zionism or immigration to palestine or the creation of the state of Israel would have been as appealing as it was without the existence of the Holocaust. Also without the existence of World War 2 the U.N. might not have been created to begin with and we we would still have the ineffective League of Nations.
As opposed to the "effective" UN?
It's a low bar perhaps, but there hasn't been a world war in the eight decades since the UN was founded. Whereas in the three decades preceding founding the UN, we had two of 'em.
Correlation is not causation etc., but still.
There had not even been a war between European nations until Russia began instigating uprisings in neighboring countries, as a pretext for de facto sending in troops.
While the Jewish religion is named, please don't forget about the 14 million non-Jews (as compared with the 6 million Jews)
who were killed during the "Holocaust". How would you track all those people and compensate them and their families?
Fourteen million is an extremely high figure. A part of the problem is that there isn't any consensus as to exactly what to include as a part of the Holocaust. Should it include the around three million Soviet POWs that died in captivity? Should it include the, perhaps, four million Soviet civilians that died of starvation because the railways couldn't both supply German troops and get food to population centers? Or should it only include those that the Nazis deliberately murdered, and the other deaths fall into a different category?
The highest number of those who died in the Holocaust that I'm familiar with is seventeen million, including six million Jews. That figure is based upon a very broad definition of the Holocaust. Narrower definitions produce a figure of ten to eleven million total victims.
I thought it was set up in the first place as a strategic proxy military and intelligence base in the middle east for the US after WWII. Lot of good its done us, much less Israel, but we persistently spent an awful lot of money on it year after year without much discussion, like most things intelligence and military-related.
Kevin! You forgot to remember Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent bricking up The Golden Gate on the Eastern approaches to the Walls of Jerusalem.
Actually, they are twin gates, (see attached picture link) The Gate Mercy and the Gate of Repentance, to prevent Christ, or the Jewish Messiah, from being able to enter the City everagain...
Such superstitious fools we are...(everyone knows that Christ will return from the Sea of Galilee and so must return through the Damascus Gate).
Be that as it may, is is certainly an odd feeling to stand before the sealed gates and consider the folly of men. Best Wishes, Traveller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_(Jerusalem)
I thought that it was pretty clear that Kevin was pointing out that both side have endless grievance against the other and the situation there is in an endless cycle of retaliation that lasts well longer than most of us have been alive.
I am amused but not surprised how so much of the commentariat used this as an excuse to make their usual comments, roughly that Israel is to blame for all of this basically because they exist. But an Israeli nation exists and like all nations (including the Palestinians, who apparently only formed a national conscious in reaction to the existence of Israel), according to the precepts of our times, deserves self-determination.
Any narrative embeds claims that Imply moral superiority. Kevin's sentence ain't bad making your point.
Few commenters here claim Israel is to blame simply because they exist, I don't.
I think the commenters you are referring to would lay the heaviest blame on ongoing settlement outside the 1947 borders and the occupation. Those are the big reasons peace is impossible.
Returning Israel to 1947 borders would be a start.
You might want to clarify. A start for what?
A start to the liquidation of Israel.
Those borders are not viable militarily, economically, or demographically.
Don't be a slave to impractical and narrow legalism. The 1967 borders are somewhat viable for both sides. And are at least vaguely realistic to implement.
And you who are you, exactly? Besides a well-known troll who never listens to anybody, I mean.
Drum's childish way of describing the history as a series of alternating responses to previous events set up the responses you object to in which there was an attempt to find out the first such event, which given the Palestinian presence during centuries in which there was only a token Jewish presence clearly calls into question Israel's historical right to exist.
You are right that a better argument would focus on what the situation is there today, but Drum rather pointedly made an argument designed to minimize looking at the situation now and focusing instead on the history of grievances. That is a good way to distract from the very real current grievances of the Palestinians, kept stateless for decades with Israeli plans to keep them stateless in perpetuity, and Israel's much less real grievance that it occasionally pays a small price for keeping millions of Palestinians stateless.
Currently Israel controls a (slight) majority Palestinian population, with millions of other Palestinians stuck in refugee camps because Israel refuses to let them return home, by keeping the great majority of the Palestinians stateless. You say that Israel has a right to self-determination, but you seem to mean that the Jews in Israel have a right to self-determination at the expense of the Palestinians. After all, if everybody in Israel had a right to self-determination Israel would not be a Jewish state.
Ours times do not say that the minority population in an apartheid state has the right to self-determination. Now if Israel existed in its 1967 lines it would have a healthy Jewish majority (at least if one ignores the refugees) and one could make the case that that state has a right to self-determination. It is a shame that some evil group killed that possibility. Oh right it was Israel which wants the 22% of their shared homeland with a Palestinian majority as well.
The UN did not create Israel.
There was a Plan for Partition passed by the General Assembly. crucially, it is not binding unless passed by the Security Council.
Israel consistently points out that General Assembly resolutions are not binding, there was a big kerfuffle when Obama abstained in the security council allowing one of jillions of resolutions to become binding, etc. I go into this because this is not an obscure technicality, it is basic to the way the UN works.
Israel, to give their establishment of Israel in the 1948 War legitimacy, presented it as enforcing a UN ruling, a great but misleading narrative masterstroke the persists and warps many histories,not just Kevin's.
Another problem with the narrative: the UN Charter requires the approval of the local population to divide land. Any actual creation of Israel by the UN would have required local approval by plebecite. This is a just requirement, Israel was established against the will of the majority. This central fact deserves a place in Kevin's sentence.
Israel was founded by a group of people who settled in a country whose people were poorer, less educated, and less connected to great world powers. Some settlers intended to rule from the start, others had more benign intent, but in 1948 rule they did.
This is nothing new under the sun, our own history in America has countless parallels. In Israeli, as here, what's done is done, far the greater injustice now would be to remove the Jews from the area of the Mandate. Taking that position is monstrous, as is Israel's insistence on control from the river to the sea.
The only decent path is a sovereign Palestinian state so the land can be shared with some semblance of justice, giving all the dignity of political rights and self-determination.Any opposed party, whether it be Hamas, Iran, or Israel, should be pressured consistently and vigorously by the world community.
Bravissimo!
A leftie Jewish friend: Drum
forgot the Nakba, Deir Yassin and numerous other expulsions/massacres. Also military rule of Palestinians in "green line" 1948-1966. I know it's a summary, but those are important.
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. From the Book of Exodus, predated by the Code of Hammurabi, which predates the Hebrew Bible, seems appropriate.
So what does it mean when modern day Israel consistently demands 20 or more "eyes" for every " eye"? They've slaughtered 46,000 or so in response to a little over 1,000 (by their count) killed by that Hamas raid over a year ago, and have repeatedly stated that they're just getting started.
How many eyes will Israel demand to finally be satisfied? All of them.
Wouldn't that be forty eyes then?
This is silly/dishonest in the sense that it omits the most important question/element.
So let's ask that question: why is IRAN involved? Iran is 2000 km away. Iran was not a party to, or interested in, any of the earlier wars.
What's going on here is, in fact, rather DIFFERENT from the story Kevin gives. The real story is that, step by step after 1948, Israel made peace with its neighbors. Jordan, then Egypt got on board. Lebanon got on board. Saudi Arabia never fought and is now close to getting on board "officially", actual peace treaty saying Israel has a right to exist, blah blah.
What is new is that Iran wants to be regional hegemon, and Iran wants to be top do relative to the Arabs. Which means Iran wants the Arab regions in a constant state of boiling turmoil, and Israel is a good way to ensure that. The immediate cause of the current unpleasantness is that Saudi Arabia was close to signing something with Israel, which led Iran to fire up its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) to go start some trouble.
This is not about eternal hatreds, whether you date them to 800BCE to the British Mandate, or 1948, and it's not about the Muslim world or even about the Arab world. It's about a specific government in Iran with specific goals.
I don't think anyone around here defends Iran, but your story makes a key omission. Israel has sought peace with neighboring states, but not the people in the lands they have occupied for 75 years.
Prevent the formation of a Palestinian state and there is no neighboring state with whom to seek peace!
Iran opportunistically exploits a situation Israel ceated. Israel within 1947 borders and a soverign Palestinian state would give Iran little to work with.
I have trouble believing you yourself believe your narrative. Iran got involved decades after the conflict started, how could it be "about" Iran? Iran was not a belligerant in the 1948 War, the Six-Day War, or the Yom Kiuppur War!
Oh, he doesn't believe it, of course. Oh there's the alternative, that he's mentally challenged in some dimension(s), of course. But it's amazing how many people, when push comes to shove, prefer others to think of them as evil rather than stupid when given the choice between the two.
"So let's ask that question: why is IRAN involved? Iran is 2000 km away."
So let's ask another question: why is THE US involved? The US is 10,000 km away.
tomtom502 does a good job of pointing out the problems with your comment, but it is worth pointing out how depressingly racist it is to simply erase the Palestinians from the story of why there is a conflict. Israel is not trying to make peace with the Arabs, since the Palestinians are Arabs, and Israel is trying to keep millions of Palestinians stateless (well unless they decide to self-deport and become refugees). To describe the conflict while leaving out the Palestinians is as racist as telling the story while leaving out the Jews.
Iran has no possibility of obtaining hegemony in the middle east, which is mostly Arab and Sunni. It lacks the military might that Israel uses to ignore the sovereignty of its neighbors. Iran does wish to enhance its regional influence, which makes it no different than Turkey or the Saudis or Israel for that matter. And the fact that Israel abuses the Palestinians while neighboring Arab countries ignore this to make economic deals with Israel gives Iran an opportunity to enhance its regional influence by standing up for the Palestinians. This is not at all hard to explain, and would go away if Israel made peace with the Palestinians, those people you left out of the story.
“So let's ask that question: why is IRAN involved? Iran is 2000 km away. Iran was not a party to, or interested in, any of the earlier wars.”
How far is the USA from Israel, exactly?
And nowhere in that history is there an indication that the United States can “solve” this.
On another note, does anyone else ever think that this semi-arid, resource poor scrap of land seems an unlikely place to inspire so much contention?
Displacing people by authority of an ancient text will piss off the locals, no matter how poor.
Post-WW2 natural resources have almost an inverse correlation to economic growth. Especially with peoples who are well-educated, relatively wealthy, and have deep ties to rich nations. (In this case the nations the Jewish settlers left.)
What was the US responding to when it armed Israel to kill all these people and steal land?
Guilt over turning away Jews fleeing Germany.
Domestic political pressure. Many Americans feel a connection to Israel, fewer to Palestinians.
A David vs. Goliath mythos (Leon Uris' Exodus, etc.).
More recently, evangelical Christian belief that Jews holding Palestine is a pre-condition for the second coming of the Messiah.
Harry Truman thought we were making a big mistake.
The second coming nonsense isn’t new. It was a common belief among British elite during WWI, including Prime Minister Lloyd George, and was a significant motivating factor behind the Balfour Declaration.
Securing a fortress in West Asia is why the US arms Israel.
It's easy to forget how much blame Joe Biden must shoulder for his actions going back to the Balfour Declaration.
Nice sentence, but no mention of the creation of the State of Israel being in part a response to the rise of Nazi antisemitism and the subsequent Holocaust? Mass Jewish migration to Palestine made Israel possible and sustainable.
Jews living in Israel/Palestine:
1922 --- 83,794
1939 --- 449,000
1948 --- 716,700
1950 --- 1,203,000
Yes.
Jewish migration to Palestine spiked after 1933 because Jews fleeing Germany were turned away elsewhere. Without the Holocaust it is hard to imagine the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (non-binding) passing the General Assembly. It was a close-run vote as it as.
Much shorter sentence. Arabs and Muslims don't want a Jewish state on land considered belonging to Islam so they continue to attack Israel dispite losing every battle. Note: they only need to win one.
Shorter and even less honest as a description of the conflict. After all the Palestinians offered Israel peace on 78% of the land that the two sides consider their homeland, while agreeing to at least temporarily accept less than a state on its 22% and Israel turned it down. Meanwhile the Arabs and Muslims in Egypt and Jordan, and more recently Morocco and the UAE have accepted Israel's right to exist despite there being a minority Jewish population in the territory it controls, and the Saudis likely would have made a similar deal had Trump not put forward his apartheid now and forever proposal for Israel.
Your statement, "After all the Palestinians offered Israel peace on 78% of the land that the two sides consider their homeland, while agreeing to at least temporarily accept less than a state on its 22% and Israel turned it down."
Is just not true. Not even sure where you might have gotten that information.
Please, give me any link.
Look up the Abbas-Olmert negotiations. None of this is secret. The idea that Israel should get 78% of the territory and the Palestinians 22% has been part of every negotiation since the Geneva Accords. It corresponds to the division of territory before the Six Day War.
I can see why you don't believe the numbers since they make Israel look evil. But really it is Israel that makes Israel look evil. Under the warped way that things get discussed in the US this is often described as Israel only wanting 7% of the West Bank, (under Barak's offer) or 5% of the West Bank under Olmert's offer. But what this always leaves out is that they are asking for a part of the 22% of the territory that would go to the Palestinians majority under a peace deal. This also leaves out that in both cases (more with Barak than Olmert) the part Israel is demanding is not territory to make Israel safer, but rather territory to most completely disrupt the Palestinian state.
Barak insisted on settlements scattered throughout the West Bank along with Israeli controlled roads with checkpoints so that the settlers had free access to Israel, while Palestinians would be forced to go through Israeli checkpoints to move around the Palestinian "state". (I am a bit unfair here since Barak noted that Palestinians would only have to go through checkpoints to get from the Northern West Bank to the Southern West Bank. To get around within one side they could avoid the checkpoints if they were willing to go hours out of their way to do so.
Olmert's offer gave Israel settlements cutting off the Palestinian capital from the bulk of the West Bank. That is better than Barak's offer but only because Barak set such a low standard. Barak's offer was so bad that the US assumed that it wasn't the real offer and proceeded as if Israel was really offering something else.
What had me confused in your post was the claim that "the Palestinians offered..." No, the Palestinians have not offered. The Olmert peace plan was an proposal from Israel to the Palestinians; Olmert for Israel, and Abbas for the Palestinians.
Abbas did not take the offer or follow-up with a counter proposal.
The details of the Olmert proposal are well known and discussed. I am very familar with them. Or at least as familar as anyone just reading books without actually being a participant can be.
Don't necessarily disagree with the details of your follow-up post, but do not see them as you do, nor would have phased them as you do. But the essential details are there. One of the problems as I see it is the Palestinians have never said what they will accept for peace. Nothing is or has been offered.
It is a shame that Israel has gotten away with misdescribing how negotiations work to create the false impression you present here. Serious negotiation does not involve presenting grand proposals and hoping that a solution appears in the middle. Serious negotiations involve first developing a list of all of the issues in dispute and then setting up working groups to find agreement where possible. And since the Abbas-Olmert negotiations were serious negotiations each side had taken positions on every major issue, and involved reaching an agreement on most of them. So what Abbas was offering was clear. That is how we know that the settlements were the sticking point.
What you are referring to is the end of the negotiations when Olmert, who was not long for office because of corruption problems, presented a take it or leave it offer to Abbas. (And then didn't even leave him a copy of it since he didn't want it to be in writing)
The point is that it is nonsense, and reflects a lack of understanding how negotiations work to think that Olmert's offer was the first offer rather than the final offer. And it is silly to complain that Abbas did not make a counteroffer to Olmert's take it or leave it offer. That isn't how take it or leave it offers work.
Records of the negotiations have been released, ironically by Palestinians hoping to embarrass Abbas, showing clearly what Abbas was offering. Some US representatives who were there have confirmed this.
The sticking point in the negotiations was that Abbas wanted the settlements gone, while Ohmert insisted Israel should get to keep settlements ringing East Jerusalem plus the Ariel block which juts deeply into the Northern West Bank. Abbas was even willing to accept Israeli control over the border between the West Bank and Jordan, at least temporarily, so Palestine would be more like Gaza than an actual state. And that was not enough to get Israel to agree.
The US has been unhelpful first in taking for granted that Barak was offering something he never offered and with the Olmert negotiations ignoring the actual negotiations and pretending that grand offers are what matters. Of course these negotiations were made during the Bush administration and if you see the notes from the negotiations it is hard to tell which of Livni and Rice is the representative of Israel and which represents the US. Rice sometimes seemed to be taking a more pro-Israel line. Of course that takes pro-Israel to mean pushing a line less likely to achieve peace.
I actually think I understand how negotiations work. But you present some information here that I have not read.
I pretty much read all the books that come out regarding Middle East peace.
So I'm curious what source are you referencing with your descriptions of the Abbas Olmert negotiations?
The main account of the negotiations is usually called the Palestinian papers. But I am not sure what you have read that does not make clear that there were extensive negotiations and that each side had clearly given its positions on all of the major issues before Olmert offered his take it or leave it offer.
Not sure what you call extensive. The last book I read that referened this was (In)Sights, Peacemaking in the Oslo Process 30 years and Counting.
Thanks, I'll look up The Palestinians Papers. But I will again restate my first claim. The reason we know Olmert's offer, whether it was take it or leave it, was Abbas did not make a counter offer, just as Arafat didn't make a counter offer. They can't and couldn't. Any counter offer would be an acceptance that the Palestinians can't have it all. And that would get them killed by the hardliners such as Hamas.
But again, thanks.
Palestinians don't want a Jewish state on land that they inhabited, in which they are denied full citizenship.
Apropos of nothing, can anyone shed light on this "right to exist" formulation, as well as "legal right to exist"? How does one get it? Who adjudicates it? Is there some kind of certificate or claim on file, or something?
Of similar importance, does the United States have it? How about Canada? Does "Great Britain" have it, or was that revoked / downgraded to "United Kingdom" in the last century? How about "England"? Does "Wales" have a "right to exist"?
I only ever hear about Israel's "right to exist", never that of any other country or nation. Why is that?
These are good questions. Supporters of Israel would say that it is because no other country's right to exist is challenged. But that is clearly untrue since Ukraine's right to exist is challenged by Israel, and Israel has stayed neutral in that conflict. And if you look at countries that have ceased to exist, like apartheid South Africa, the USSR and Yugoslavia, it doesn't seem that any rights were violated.
But mostly it is a nicely ambiguous claim so that some people can treat it as saying that Jews deserve a state, although such people don't think that Palestinians or Kurds have such a right. But it can also sound like the more reasonable right not to be invaded by one's neighbor as Kuwait was by Iraq or Lebanon has been on a couple of occasions by Israel (and once by Syria).
So the overall answer is that it sounds nice, and Israel really has no other defense of its behavior.
It'sa bit like Israel's right to self-defense. a right that apparently extends to Israel, but none of the populations that it attacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaHuhQwJBT4
Oh, that's easy: Israel doesn't have a right to exist, legally or otherwise, because no state has the right to exist. Rights are, by and large, the prerogative of individuals.
Mostly, yes, but, as culture and language exist only as they are shared in communities, the rights to maintain cultural traditions and speak ones language are rights of groups.
You left out the Holocaust.
Not to mention the Nakhba.
The Balfour Declaration can only be understood in the context of World War I. This is two: (1) before the war, but when it was known to be inevitable, Winston Churchill (remember him? but this was thirty years before that) converted the British Navy from coal to oil, which gave extra speed and thus a combat advantage. It also led to the Western world's dependence upon Middle East oil ever since; (2) during the war, the Declaration itself was a promise extracted from the British Government by Chaim Weizmann in exchange for technology to manufacture more powerful explosives. The British Government had no intention of honoring that promise, until they were forced by the United States, in the late 1940s after the next war, to shed their most expensive colonial commitments: India and Palestine. Churchill (again), counterfactually re-elected in 1945, would have done neither of these things, although God only knows what he could have done instead.
(Arthur Balfour himself was, rightly, regarded as a figure of fun by his British political colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Not until David Cameron was the House of Commons again disgraced by such an utter lightweight.)
Due to the conservative starting points of this estimate cited below, I would lay big money on the death toll in Gaza thus far being well over 200,000. I'd also say we are less than half way through the most intensive stages of this atrocity. The only hope is a Harris win and a Harris policy that is far from what she currently espouses.
I am referring to a letter authored by domain specialists and published by The Lancet that estimated 186,000 excess deaths thus far.
Why am I confident this is still an underestimate? Because:
1 - the baseline for direct deaths is the official reporting of confirmed fatalities which does not count many thousands buried in rubble, those in isolated locations and those already bulldozed by the war criminals who killed them. So it is already 10-30% undercounted.
2 - the multiplier for direct to indirect deaths that they based the number on is historically between 3 and 15. They chose 4. I don't see any reason to doubt that the circumstances in Gaza should place it at or near the top of that range, not the bottom.
The truth will take years to get. Israel will bulldoze and burn and bury the bodies in mass graves and deny any investigations by UN agencies or mainstream human rights NGOs. They will gaslight the world about why there are so many unaccounted people. I would not put it past the current blood-lusting regime, with heart-breakingly supportive public sentiment, to build mass incinerators.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-north-gaza-hospital-eyewitness-palestine-united-nations
Mr. Drum seems to be having some pretty interesting mood swings between "Here's who I'm mad at and the exact reason why" and "Nothing matters and you're dumb if you think anything does."
how about one short sentence. they hate each other.
Glib.