Our latest Israeli-Palestinian war has me more depressed than I would have expected.
Longtime readers with good memories will recall that I long ago lost all sympathy for Israel. I won't bother spelling out the entire list of their appalling behavior, but it's long and damning.
But if it's possible to have negative sympathy for someone, that's what I have for the Palestinians and their Arab enablers. It's more than that, though; it's the unending inanity of their behavior. Israel's enemies have launched war after war over the past 50 years and they've been crushed Every. Single. Time. The result has been uniformly disastrous: settlements, walls, blockades, checkpoints, and massive oppression of Israeli Arabs. You don't have to approve of any of this to recognize that it's the easily foreseeable response of a nation under siege.
The same thing will happen this time. Thousands of Palestinians will die and Israeli retaliation will make the rest worse off than before. But I doubt that matters to the lunatics who run Hamas.
Is this simplistic? Sure. But sometimes it's best to just clear the fog. The only remotely reasonable course for the Palestinians—though it may be too late even for this—is to stop fighting and surrender on Israeli terms. There is literally no other option open to them aside from endless war and brutal poverty.
Israel's killing of Palestinians, with US support, is why the retaliation action was launched. Like after the Warsaw Ghetto uprisings, the mass murder of Palestinians by their oppressors will continue and with the negative sympathy of Democratic liberals.
"...and their Arab enablers..."
I'd broaden that a bit.
"The only remotely reasonable course for the Palestinians—though it may be too late even for this—is to stop fighting and surrender on Israeli terms."
I believe these terms would be expulsion from all of the land between the ocean and the Jordan, aka ethnic cleansing, so no, I don't think they're ready to accept those terms quite yet.
Yep, those are exactly the terms Israel insists on. They just don't want to say that out loud; instead, in the aftermath, they'll insist that those terms happened 'by accident'. Anybody want to lay any bets 😉
Well, hold on. How much of this is "no we don't want to be expelled from our land" and how much of it is "expel to where? There's no country on Earth that would let us in?"
The way I understand it, after losing the 1948 war the nearby Arab nations decided that the Arabs of Palestine were a distinct people and couldn't resettle elsewhere in the Arab world, and have held that line to this day.
It'd be like Florida sinking below the waves due to rising seas, and the rest of America suddenly throwing up a border wall along the panhandle. "What we have here is a Floridian refugee crisis. You can't come in, but we'll let aid workers supply your camps along the border. And we'll offer you moral support in your struggle against the rising seas. Go get 'em."
I mean, setting aside for the moment the question of whether Israel's government would like to do it, is expulsion even possible?
To all the critics I ask you a simple question:
If you had been elected (by way of party control) PM of Israel, how would you have responded?
Don't give me your bullshit counterfactual history that would have prevented this event.
Since the mid-90s I've supported the two-state solution and thought that Israel should give up much of its occupied territories as a bargaining chip to find a lasting peace. Furthermore, I detest Netanyahu and he should have been in prison years ago.
We didn't get there.
What we have right now is what we have to deal with. So, how would you deal with what just happened (and is still happening)?
If I were the PM of Israel, I'd accept the jurisdiction and the rulings of bodies of international law and beg our benefactors around the world to help pay reparations to the Palestinians for the many crimes committed against them, this in place of all the military aid now provided.
And then Israelis might be able to live in peace, and maybe even retain a lot of the territory they currently control with the blessings of the richly compensated Palestinians that it was taken from.
As you can see, there is no danger that I would ever become PM of Israel, not even if I were Jewish, and not even if I were both Jewish and Israeli, and not even if I were Jewish, Israeli, and born into a prominent Israeli family.
And what guarantees do you have that Israelis would live in peace?
Because that is in fact your primary responsibility - that after doing all the things you suggest, you have a much higher confidence of peace.
Can you explain specifically how you get that confidence?
Are Israelis living in peace now?
Really, what I see is much worse things to come for Israel on the present course.
And in my admittedly limited experience, people are much more peaceful when you acknowledge their humanity and respect their dignity.
Has your life indicated something different?
That's the problem, right? Hamas exists solely to eliminate the Jewish State. Your solution is not achievable if you can't get all sides to the table.
I find that starting any discussion by recognizing that the other parties are human beings fully equal to and entitled to the same rights and dignities as you are is a good way to get all to the table.
Israel, the proto-Israelis, and the British mandate authority never, ever did that with the Palestinians.
And the Israelis won't do it now.
But the question was, "If you had been elected (by way of party control) PM of Israel, how would you have responded?"
So my answer stands.
I guess the corollary question is, "If you were the popular and official leader of the Palestinians, what would you do about the dispossession of your people from all of their land over the years?"
So your answer is "I would treat the Palestinians with respect, and expect that they would be peaceful".
Is that accurate?
I will answer your question.
I would tell the Palestinians that the only way to get what we need is non-violence.
Ghandi, MLK, and Mandela were successful, at least partly.
Arafat was not.
I would tell every Palestinian to hand over every weapon and rocket, and stop honoring suicide bombers, and stop teaching that Jews are the cause of all evil.
Because in 60 years, the weapons and attacks have not helped even a little, and anyone with any honesty will acknowledge it never will.
I would apologize for every civilian killed, and ask Israel to do the same.
Then I would encourage every pro-peace Israeli, Arab Christian and Jew, to march to Jerusalem and demand that negotiations start immediately on a two-state solution.
And any time a rocket was fired from a Palestinian area, I would do everything in my power to capture and prosecute the people responsible.
If absolutely nothing improves in a year, it will take a boat full of weapons from Iran to get back to where we are today.
But I think a major change in actions in attitude will change the situation.
Now you might say - why not have Israelis make the major change?
The answer is they should. But their lack of change is not an excuse for the Palestinians to keep fighting a war unwinnable by violence.
Steve C, Steve C, Steve C.
First, the Palestinians have tried peaceful methods. Do a little research on all of the legal challenges they have brought against Israel's actions.
But Israel rejects any implementation of the law that questions its right to do whatever it feels is necessary for the state.
More ugly, though, you prescribe the methods of Gandhi, MLK, and Mandela for the Palestinians ... but when I propose those methods for Israel, you won't even consider them.
And while Arafat was not successful with his methods, do you know who was?
Ben-Gurion.
So I think you're seriously inconsistent, and possibly inconsistent in a way that depends upon race.
I'm sure you can connect the dots.
Yes.
The path of righteousness is straight but steep.
Either way (fight or surrender) there will be brutal poverty.
Pingback: The injustice of the apartheid state Israel enforces on Gaza / Palestine… | Zingy Skyway Lunch
As usual on this subject, low-info rumdumbs have made the comments here a real shitshow. "The bride is beautiful, but she is spoken for." I doubt they even know who said that, when they said it and what it means, and why it matters.
There is always propaganda flowing from anything happening in the Middle East, particularly anything happening in Israel.
Here's a quick guide to things I've noticed:
Pro-Israel sources will make Hamas out to be existentially evil. This is pretty standard, but it will be amplified.
Pro-Trumpublican sources will insist there's Iranian participation. This feeds into their, "Biden gave Iran $6 billion that was used to fund Hamas" conspiracy theory.
Pro-Israel sources with a progressive audience will claim that there was Russian assistance to Hamas. They'd like their audience to think of Israel as aligned with Ukraine.
I think any pro-Hamas sources are pretty easily identifiable as seriously evil or seriously crazy.
I think -- and I don't have any better information source than anyone else -- it's most likely that Hamas acted almost completely alone. They may have gotten supplies from Hezbollah or Iran or even Russia, but the fact that they were able to plan and execute without any leaks says that it was a very confined group that did the planning. And there doesn't seem to have been any sophisticated weapons that they used; early reports described the attack as a "coordinated attack by land, air, and sea," but I think it was really an overwhelming land attack and one guy had a paraglider and a few others had motor boats.
It is surprising that Israel apparently had almost no perimeter defense around an area filled with angry people, many of them armed. Netanyahu seems truly to be incompetent.
The remarkable thing about the attack, aside from it having been planned without leaks, is that they were able to get so many parts of it all executed simultaneously, and without (educated guess here) using radio or telecom, which the Israelis would have intercepted.
America very helpfully laid out how all of this could be done in publicly available information about our Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, in which Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper -- commanding "Team Red," the bad guys -- was able to sink 16 "Team Blue" warships -- including a carrier and several cruisers -- by using unconventional tactics and communication.
Naturally our military, which wanted to use the exercise to demonstrate how great their new command and control systems were, rewrote the rules to give "Team Blue" yet another victory.
https://www.sandboxx.us/news/that-time-a-marine-general-led-a-fictional-iran-against-the-us-military-and-won/
Van Riper probably deserves to be remembered as a modern day Gen. Billy Mitchell.
At least this time the visionary general wasn't courts martialed for making the military establishment look bad.
When Hamas says its goal is to eliminate the State of Israel, do you take them at face value or not?
I take them at face value.
But they believe -- and I agree with them -- that the founding of the State of Israel was almost completely illegitimate.
If you accept that, then shouldn't any negotiations begin without accepting the existence of the State of Israel, to essentially eliminate it in the starting of negotiations?
I mean, if someone stole your car, wouldn't you want to begin negotiations on the basis that your car will be returned to you without preconditions? Would you accept negotiations with the starting basis that the person who stole your car should get to use it to commute every weekday and should have access to it every other weekend, but everything beyond that was negotiable?
On what basis would you insist that the Palestinians accept less?
Are you a Native American?
If not, when will you be moving back to wherever your parents, grandparents or great-great whatever came from?
Because we stole Native America's car. So you need to move, if they want you to. On what basis should they accept anything less?
And England belongs to the Picts. And all Hispanics must leave Central and South America. Did I miss any?
The reality is Jews lived in Israel for 3000 years, ten times longer than Europeans lived in the New World. The Jews who moved in between 1840 and 1948 bought much of the land from Muslim owners. The rest was owned by the Ottoman Empire, which got taken over by the British Empire, which gave 70% to the Arabs as Jordan, then left it up to the UN, which divided it up in 1948, at which point the Arabs declared war rather than give up the 15% of the original Mandate to the Jews.
Unless you want to have racial covenants so that it is illegal to sell land to certain ethnicities, deal with it.
Oh wait - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/31/palestinian-sentenced-to-life-for-selling-land-to-israelis
You are joining ranks with Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and Syria. Congratulations.
When you declare a sovereign state, formed by a UN resolution, and recognized by the vast majority of countries, to be illegitimate, I stop listening to you.
You're obviously very passionate about this. Is it because you're Jewish?
That doesn't retract, in my eyes, from the legitimacy of your position. I just want to be aware of you sensitivities.
As for Indigenous Americans' rights, I think our history is very ugly; it's difficult, I'm sure you know, to avoid that conclusion.
But the ugliness is based on hypocrisy.
Our system generally recognizes land ownership, territorial sovereignty, etc.
But we didn't recognize these things to the extent that they benefited Indigenous Americans.
(Or, many years later, when they benefited Palestinian Arabs, by the way.)
Now, we put lipstick on that pig, and pretend that because the Indigenous Americans didn't have their own system of recognizing property rights and territorial sovereignty, we could freely steamroll them.
(Or, many years later, we could rationalize steamrolling the Palestinian Arabs because they didn't have an internationally recognized sovereign state ... which seems to be your rationalization.)
In the interest of consistency, I propose that we each state our positions on both the dispossession of Indigenous Americans from their territories and the similar denial of any form of territorial sovereignty to the Palestinian Arabs. We can get into remedies later, but I hope you agree that before we discuss remedies, we must first identify the disease.
I declare that both dispossessions were wrong.
You?
On the basis that they lost the war, and every rematch since. That counts for a lot.
Every inch of Israeli territory was on the table in 1948 and again in '67 and '73. Had they lost any of those wars, their territorial claims would have been extinguished and there wouldn't today be a single person of the Jewish faith between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea.
So it's only natural that their attackers had land in the pot as well. And they ought to regard it as honestly lost, fair and square. This fight should be generations in the past by now, with everyone carrying on in more or less peace.
We don't have endless generations of Prussian nationalists living in squalor and sneaking into Kaliningrad to butcher revelers at music festivals. Bunch of people who were pretty raw about how that deal went down have grandchildren and great-grandchildren today living happy prosperous lives rather than wasting their lives re-losing the lost battles of their ancestors.
So if I steal your car and am able to prevent you from recovering it by any means, then it's legitimately my car?
Where do you park?
Not a good analogy. Germany lost its eastern lands in a war that it began. It voluntarily renounced its claims to these as part of the agreement on the reunification of the Bundesrepublik and what had been the DDR. With exception of Russia and Serbia, Europeans have agreed that borders should not be changed by force of arms, and Western Europe has enjoyed perhaps its longest peace in centuries.
Neither Israel nor the Palestinians have ever accepted the Green Line as a permanent border, or even as a starting point for negotiation. And no generation there has known peace and security.
An AP article in today’s paper quotes Netanyahu, “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.” And with generations of Israelis, also.
if you steal my car, I'll try to get it back.
if you manage to hold onto it, and beat the rap, then that sucks for me.
and I'll make what I can of the situation and move on. maybe I'll have to find a way to get by without a car for a time.
what I won't do is pursue the grudge far beyond the point of futility and condemn my children and grandchildren to suffer through same loss and humiliation that I endured. I'll get away from you, one way or another, and let them find their own struggles in their own time.
"Okay, kids. See that guy up the street. That's Mr. Schulz. Years before you were born, he stole my car.
And I've decided to make that theft the central fact of your existence. I want you to hate him and his children. Any by all rights you should, because he never gave the car back.
I want that injury to feel as fresh to you today as it did to me on the day that he stole it. I'm going to raise you on stories about that theft. I'm going to walk you past his house and point the car out to you and tell you how it rightly ought to be yours.
You'll carry on the feud with his children. There's no reasonable hope that you'll succeed, but I want you to carry the same burden that I carried so that I don't have to carry it alone.
I'm not going to arrange for a proper education for you. The money that I might spend on that, I'm instead going to spend on organizing harassment of the thief and his descendants.
We'll leaflet. We'll buy ads. We will never let this go. This struggle that I lost will be the defining fact of your life, and I want you to raise your kids the same way. Because I, alone of all the victims of theft throughout history, am the one who just can never move on.
And I'm a good father."
So you're saying the Jewish People should have accepted losing the Land of Israel when the Romans took it from them almost 2000 years ago?
What are you saying?
So just accept that you will live under apartheid for generations, that you will be subject to random expulsions from you home and from your country (and yes, Netanyahu's partners want exactly that). Let me ask you a question.
Would you do that? I wouldn't. I have a little respect for myself.
Brutal poverty is due at least as much to Israel's intransigence, racism, and determination to fully colonize the West Bank as it is to Hamas and Hezbollah and even Iran. And Israel is fully supported in that by the US, and Netanyahu knows it. That's why he feels free to treat Democratic presidents as his subordinates.
A lot of people blame Arafat for walking away from a deal, but few people know that was no deal at all. It was simply a formalization of apartheid. I don't blame him for that, but I do blame the US for presenting the lost deal as everything they ever wanted when it gave them less than nothing, unless you count outsourcing Israeli security to the PLA.
Netanyahu is like Trump in once critical way: he is telling everyone exactly what he wants to do, and no one believes him. He will subordinate the judiciary to the Knesset, and then use that power to finish the West Bank colonization project.
"Well, your adversary is just too strong so you might as well give up and do what you're told." Yeah. That's an argument that' always works.
.