Nick Kristof believes Israel is justified in going after Hamas remorselessly:
Israel has the right to defend itself and strike military targets in Gaza, and there should be strong international pressure on Hamas to release its hostages. My reporting in Gaza over the years convinces me that Gazans themselves would be much better off if Hamas could be removed: Some American liberals don’t appreciate how repressive, misogynistic, homophobic and economically incompetent Hamas is in Gaza, to say nothing of its long history of terror attacks on Israel. All this explains why many Gazans are fed up with Hamas.
The problem is that he doesn't think a ground invasion of Gaza will work:
When I hear backers of an invasion speak of removing Hamas I have the same sinking feeling as when I heard hawks in 2002 and 2003 cheerily promising to liberate Iraq. Just because it would be good to eliminate a brutal regime doesn’t mean it is readily achievable; the Taliban can confirm that.
That resonates with liberal critics of the Iraq War. Boy does it resonate. But the truth is that the lessons of the American war on terror are equivocal. Things did not run smoothly, to understate the case, but in the end we destroyed al-Qaeda and then destroyed ISIS. The only reason we failed to do the same against the Taliban is that we didn't vigorously prosecute the initial fight against them, preferring instead to keep troops available for the planned war against Iraq.
In other words, we successfully dismantled two terrorist groups and only failed against a third because we weren't violent enough. It can be done.
On the other hand, it took us 20 years; 15,000 American dead; and a (literally) uncountable number of non-American dead—ranging from 200,000 to several million depending on how the counting is performed. It can be done, yes, but only at enormous cost.
I'm trying to talk myself into something here, but I'm not sure what. On both moral and realistic levels, you can't do what Hamas did and not expect a ruthless response. But the toll in innocent life is unimaginable.
So: How do you justify doing nothing? How do you justify doing something? They're both offensive to any person with a working conscience. But what's in-between? What does common decency require of Israel in its implacable mission of destruction against Hamas?
"On both moral and realistic levels, you can't do what Hamas did and not expect a ruthless response."
I believe Hamas not only expects a ruthless response, they're actively trying to provoke one. I would wager that Hamas leadership believes spilling the blood of Palestinians will secure their own power.
My thoughts exactly. This is a trap and not many have seen it. Whether the result will be what Hamas or the Israelis want, history will remember the trap.
Apparently this Hamas leader agrees with you:
"The blood of the women, children, and elderly...we are the ones who need this blood so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit...So it pushes us to move forward."
Ismail Haniyeh
Agreed. That is why they need to exterminate Hamas.
Hamas is only interested in "securing its own power"? Seriously? They couldn't be wanting to start a new Intifada, try to get the Israelis' boot off of Palestinian land (Gaza, at the very least?) Hamas is totally selfish and unconcerned with their own people?
What kind of bizarre projection is this?
Do you think that a killing 1400 civilians of your much more powerful enemy is the best way to get the Israelis' boot off of Gaza?
Do you think Netanyahu would start a war to secure his own power?
It was absolutely intended to provoke a maximal response from Israel and inflict as much pain and damage on Gaza as possible. Heightening the contradictions, as they say...
People write as if there is a clean line separating "Hamas" and "the rest of the Palestinians in Gaza". It's like declaring that if only we could get rid of the MAGA Republicans, we could work constructively with the rest of the American right. In truth there is surely a long seamless spectrum between "fanatical active member of Hamas" and "lukewarm supporter of Hamas albeit not personally involved". I suspect most Palestinians in Gaza fall somewhere along that spectrum, and it would therefore be impossible to stipulate the circumstances where Hamas had been "removed". The Bush administration claimed the Taliban had been destroyed, and we know how that turned out.
Israel could occupy Gaza indefinitely, with all the costs that would involve. Or it could wreak such material damage in the territory that it would be many years before the inhabitants had the ability to inflict any serious damage on Israel. Either course practically guarantees hostility towards Israel will deepen not only in the Arab world but globally, but Israel's leaders seem incapable of searching for any alternative ways forward.
Hamas sort of shut the door on alternative ways forward
Imagine if Bush didn’t do anything after 9/11? Israelis want vengeance and hard not to imagine myself feeling differently. I still get mad about 9/11 when I think about it now, and those guys were half the world away, not in my backyard
If Mexico parasailed their way into Dallas and gunned down a bunch of innocent people I think we’d be a whole helluva lot meaner than whatever Israel has planned
Not that whatever the IDF does won’t blow up in their face. But they basically have to do it
Do you really think a systematic bombing of Mexico City would follow something like that?
I think that if the Mexican government ordered an attack like that, kidnapped a bunch of Americans, and were lobbing missiles into San Diego that our response would be pretty ruthless. Even more so if Trump were President.
Nah. Bridges, electrical substations, power plants, pipelines, intersections the enemy uses, ports, runways, enemy bases and formations. You're thinking of Russian tactics.
Trump is already talking about bombing Mexico. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration at all. And Putin is Trump’s model.
Yeah, Trump would do silly things. Say silly things. I won't say how far he'd really get before he found a general or three to carry out his plans and I won't deny that this nation would contort itself to carry out those plans and further I won't say there won't be civilian causalities but I will say that our troops will not do a Russia. We did a Russia in WWII. Less so in Korea and Viet Nam but Russia Lite. First Gulf was non-alcoholic Russia and second Gulf was too. Israel imo is doing a Russia no matter how righteous and no matter the stamping of feet that they are being forced to do it. I just wish our government would own up to it or condemn it, this middle of the road is for the birds.
Full disclosure: I'm for stopping the general bombardment and doing it the old fashioned way. Block by block. Like Fallujah.
Trump wanted to nuke hurricanes. He had people to talk him out of his insanities last time but if he “wins” this time I think all of the people around him will be sycophants. We are in some deep shit if the Republicans find a way to make him President again.
I don’t know what’s going on with the bombing but if is actually as bad as it looks I agree with you.
1) Just a note, it is NOT a general bombardment. The Israelis are not just rando lobbing stuff into Gaza like Hama does with its rockets. It is aiming at specific targets. The civilian casualties are largely the result of Hamas deliberately putting such targets among civilians and keeping the civilians from leaving.
And I would like you to explain your preference for room to room urban combat to the families of Israeli troops. And such fighting is likely to kill even more civilians.
While I respect that you want les death and destruction, I don't think your opinions are taking everything into account here.
+1
See Battle of Jenin (2002)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jenin_(2002)
Palestinians declared thousands of civilians killed. Actual number:53, mostly military.
Israeli soldiers killed: 23
Israel could have killed that many Palestinians with a single bomb and no Israeli casualties. But they went house-to-house to get specific people.
Probably yeah. Not much left standing at least, whether that qualifies as systematic or not
I would certainly hope so if the Mexican government was behind it.
Imagine if Bush didn’t do anything after 9/11?
If Bush is an example of anything, he's a lesson in exactly what not to do. Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, not the Taliban and not Iraq, yet we went to war against the latter two and gave up the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader as if he didn't matter. Bush f*ed up the Middle East so badly that America, which once had some credibility in the region, now has none. And after Trump broke our commitment to the Iran deal, we have less than none. Biden's job would be difficult anyway, but it's now virtually insurmountable because of the actions of our past two Republican presidents.
Doing "anything" and doing "something that helps" are two different things.
Israelis want vengeance ...
The lust for vengeance is an understandable human emotion but it's a terrible basis for policy. Fwiw, the teachings of both Judaism and Islam prohibit acting on the desire for vengeance.
Agree with both
Not making a statement of correctness, just feasibility. Turning the other cheek is not and was never a real option when thousands of innocent civilians lay dead
Agree with both.
The GWBush administration felt they need "an event" by the first summer and basically ignored all warnings about the "up to ten hijackings of airliners" an entire summer. The Bibi administration, apparently, did the same, ignoring red flags and getting more than he anticipated.
Part of the timing seems to include a potential "deal" Israel was cutting with Saudi Arabia.
+100
So if an IDF response is going to blow up in their faces, why would you base the response on the IDF?
My sense is we are seeing a lack of imagination action.
Considering the US response to Al Qaeda. Funding the Sunnis worked wonders.
"Either course practically guarantees hostility towards Israel will deepen not only in the Arab world..."
Since Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and others are calling for the extermination of Jews worldwide how could that hostility get any deeper?
They could start doing more than just calling for it, for example.
They are. Even before the current war, they launch rockets into Israel every single day trying to kill Jews. If not for the Iron Dome this would be a massacre and on the news nightly.
Anyone who thinks Iran is part of the Arab world has a very flawed understanding of the Middle East.
Yes, they are Persians. But they support all the Arab terrorists.
As I've written, there's no good options for Israel when it comes to Gaza. Unfortunately they have to do what they have to do because Hamas is determined to destroy them, so what can you do other than eliminate the threat as destructive as it's going to be.
Israel not only has to destroy Hamas but rebuild Gaza and has to rebuilt the PA to becoming a credible partner in a two-state solution. I think any peace agreement with Saudi Arabia should open up funds to do this along with perhaps Egyptian police to protect the enclave and prevent Hamas' reemergence.
And yes, Israel must stop the settlers in the West Bank otherwise the PA will be no good to them.
100% correct, excellent post @spatrick.
It's too bad that Netanyahu is in charge of Israel because he appears uninterested in such a way forward.
Thank you for the kind words.
I agree Netanyahu has to go. This failure of Israeli intelligence, security7 and overall policy towards Palestinians is on him and he and his government bares that responsibility. If Golda Meier had to resign after the Yom Kippur War, then Netanyahu has to go too. This is far worse.
And yes, Israel must stop the settlers in the West Bank. That is an alternate reality that I would welcome. I give it a 0.001% chance of success. That train left the station long ago.
Imagine, in the American conquest of the West, we decided to remove settlers and give land back to Native Americans. Wasn't going to happen. Did not happen.
No, human history will play out in the bloody way it does 99.999% of the time.
It's not a question of removing them. Future settlement expansion must be stopped and security increased to protect citizens and programs enacted to increase trust. And anyone violating that trust will be arrested and or killed. It's that simple.
And that unobtainable.
Good news - Israel has already removed settlers twice: Gaza and Sinai. It has removed some (but not many) unauthorized settlers in the West Bank.
When given a partner for peace, it gave up all claim to the land (Sinai). Without such a partner, it simply withdrew to the borders, giving up internal control but maintaining enough control to limit terrorist incursions. (Gaza)
And how will you actually destroy Hamas?
Do you really believe the leadership is still in Northern Gaza?
And how will you stop new recruits?
You will however, if you invade Gaza, create wide spread civilian death and destruction which will be clearly visible to the whole world.
An interesting conundrum for Israel, but it would seem that a brute force head on approach is unlikely to achieve Israel’s objectives.
ISIS and Al-Qaeda are/were pan-Islamist organizations, recruiting around the globe. Many or most of their fighters were foreigners in the lands in which they were fighting; they were often opposed by the local people. Hamas is on its own turf, as are the Taliban. That is a tremendous home-field advantage.
Good observation. That's why controlling American politics to get what they want is so vital to the Israeli State. When a gorilla puts its thumb on the scale, home field advantage might be overcome.
Ah, yes. The Jews control America. anti-Semitic much?
Hogwash. This line of logic is ridiculous.
Know why? Because its infinitely extensible. "You can't do what Israel did to Gaza in 2023 and not expect a ruthless response" is its extension one step further, but it can go as far back or as far forward as you like.
Kevin might not have MEANT to write "violence as revenge is morally self-justifying" but that's what he actually wrote.
That is what has bothered me after the initial horror was replaced by the horror of talking heads calling for the immolation of animals. Some level of revenge is apparently acceptable in some circles. And some of those circles will not accept criticism.
Added: it always has been.
Can you provide a source for the talking heads reference? Were they talking about Hamas fighters specifically, as opposed to Palestinians in general?
"Infinitely" is an overstatement but the cycle of revenge definitely can go on for a very long time. Morality is always disputable, and it's particularly disputable when someone is trying to justify atrocities but on the realistic level the indefinitely extended cycle of revenge and counter-revenge definitely exists.
Thank you. The popular argument is, If X is bad, then 30X is the solution! And totally justified!
But every time 30x is the response to X, the cycle repeats, only ramped up to the new level. If Hamas is "destroyed", the conditions that caused its rise still exist, only worse, and the new Hamas 2.0 will be even more brutal ... trying to match the endless, unjustified brutality of Israel.
Please define “more brutal” than what Hamas did already. Higher quantity, perhaps, but I challenge you to come up with something more brutal.
And please explain how killing 1400 completely innocent people with no military value is not “endless, unjustified brutality” but a military response to terrorism is.
Fundamentally there are four paths to a peace in the Holy Lands:
1: Genocide
2: The opposite genocide
3: The Jews leave
4: Israel pays a sufficient amount to settle all claims related to land acquisition, property damage, fatalities and injuries (less counter claims), and most importantly for sovereignty over Israel, which it took by fiat. Unfortunately for them sovereignty over populated land is rarely for sale by owner and the price astronomical. I am not exaggerating when I say a truly fair settlement is around ten trillion dollars.
Obviously we don’t want the first two, three won’t happen (though seven million Jews would be a great addition to the US!), and Israel will never admit that Zionism was rotten from the start and a great wrong inflicted on the Palestinian people. So the fight will go on, with Israel “winning” short battles with it’s US-backed twenty-eye-for-an-eye responses…until a global war breaks out, the US gets tied down, and Israel’s 1.8 billion angry neighbors splat it like a bug.
Bibi will not defeat Hamas with this stupid war. He will feed it.
If all the Jews left Israel tomorrow, do you really think there would be “peace in the Holy lands?”
In my view the true path to peace would be atheism, but we know that’s not happening any time soon.
I’m going to post this link again. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should see it now:
https://youtu.be/8tIdCsMufIY?si=TjjM21R4sEkS8SnF
Syria and Lebanon have had bloody civil wars, and remain disunited; Iraq has significant religious and ethnic divisions. Jordan is nearly entirely Sunni, and has been stable. The odds don’t look good for peace even if the Jews all left for New York City tomorrow.
Exactly. Go atheism. The video is a great summary.
Or polytheism, with tolerance. Monotheism enabled and encouraged all of its practitioners to claim their (one solitary) god was "the only god", the "real" god... and then fight over it.
Way back when everybody was a polytheist, each person's preferred god or goddess out of their local pantheon was a great topic for conversation. No harm, no blame.
Especially since those multiple gods each exemplified one kind of human skill and at the same time, its associated folly. It was a good teaching tool.
"...the true path to peace would be atheism..."
I can understand the sentiment. Look at the trouble that religion has caused, after all. But I don't think atheism holds any great promise for peace. If atheism were to be the dominant practice/belief across the globe, I doubt we'd have less war. Probably more.
This conflict is not and has never been about religion. It is two different ethnic groups fighting over land. If all the Palestinians converted to Judaism, do you really think that would change anything?
@Ogemaniac
It's almost as if you're saying Hitler didn't go far enough.
I don’t understand how you could possibly read my comment and come to that conclusion given that it has two cleat statements to the opposite effect.
First, I could have given your comment a more generous reading and responded to it in a more nuanced way. But (despite appearances) I don't think your comment deserves to be taken seriously. You're not looking for "paths to peace." You're more interested in how to get rid of the problem of Jews. All of your "paths" are ridiculous but in 3 of the 4 the Jews must cede everything, even their claim to a homeland and their right to exist.
Why the comparison to Hitler? Bc of shit like this:
https://x.com/afnanullahkh/status/1718129627527323814?s=20
Oh, I know that's not what you're saying EXPLICITLY, it's just the way the logic works.
ETA:
Looks like Twitter finally took down the tweet, from a high-ranking Pakistani politician, with a picture of Hitler and the message "At least now the world know, why he did, what he did."
The rise of anti-semitism in response to a heinous attack on Jews is pissing me off.
Well, minus a million annoying Haredim. Have to settle them somewhere with no loose stones.
Is that a Monty Python reference?
“Don’t say Jehovah!”
Some have been known to throw rocks at women wearing skirts shorter than ankle-length in parts of Jerusalem.
I had an Egyptian girlfriend. She dressed stylishly but modestly, with ankle length skirts and t-shirt length sleeves on her blouses. She told me that when she visited her father in Cairo and walked down the street many men and women shouted “whore” at her.
They were hoping. That's all.
Right wing cranks exist in all peoples in similar proportion. So yes, we’d be stuck with Jewish MAGAs as part of the deal.
What the Jewish people need a another prophet telling them to move to America. The ultra orthodox can stay, but it’s time for secular Jews to leave.
What they need is one person and a solid majority of 535 people to tell them this.
The world (Israel included) is sprinkled with hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of Jews descendants from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, etc. So:
5. The solution to the problem is population redistribution as bad as that sounds. In a controlled and humane manner give people good stable lives somewhere else and preferably in the Arab world (compatibility of culture). So that they can live with dignity and their descendants can live with dignity. Then you stop calling them refugees and you call them immigrants.
It would be great if Israel and the world find a way to do this with the population of the West Bank without moving them, but that seems impossible.
The apologists for Israel claim that Jews can live nowhere in this world with any hope of safety or acceptance. Thus, Israel.
The facts belie this. Jews live pretty much everywhere and are accepted, generally valued, parts of society. Events of antisemitic violence are rare, and strongly condemned. The only pogroms going on lately have been done by ... Israeli Jews.
You may want to read this.
https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%207794.pdf
Jews were largely accepted, generally valued parts of society in Weimar Germany. They were major politicians, won 25% of Nobel Prizes for Germany, and wrote the Constitution.
There was also anti-Semitism. But there is anti-Semitism in the U.S., and in France, the country with the third most Jews.
Some of the links are since October 7, but many are from before.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-antisemitic-incidents-hit-record-high-2022-adl-report-says-2023-03-23/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-antisemitic-incidents-up-about-400-since-israel-hamas-war-began-report-says-2023-10-25/
https://www.thelocal.fr/index.php/20231030/france-records-800-anti-semitic-acts-since-hamas-attack
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-antisemitism-violence-report-1.6430495
There are the facts. Do you have any to support your claim?
The Jews won’t leave because Jerusalem is there. It’s the most important city in the history of the world.
Remember that many observers say Netanyahu propped up and promoted Hamas for his own political reasons.
If true that surely means Netanyahu has to go too, yes?
Good heavens. Do you think you're going to find ANY Bibi fans here? Even among those who are reluctant to condemn Israel for striking back at Hamas?
Wasn't expecting anything regarding Bibi fans, here or anywhere. Was only -- very poorly, I happily admit -- making the point that if the argument is "the Palestinian people need to suffer for what Hamas did, even if they are not Hamas themselves, they tolerated Hamas" -- then surely if Netanyahu actively promoted Hamas over other possible Palestinian representatives, he bears some responsibility here too. And if you think the Palestinian people deserve to "pay a price" it's hard to understand why Netanyahu shouldn't also pay a price.
By the way, my naive response to all of this is borrowed from the movie "Munich" -- one of the few movies which is, I think, pretty smart about politics. Send in the famous Israeli hit squads to knock off actual Hamas leaders, and then hold elections under the auspices of the UN.
See: https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-80-of-israelis-say-netanyahu-must-take-public-responsibility-for-oct-7-failures/
He garners only 29% support to remain as PM, and 80% of Israelis say that he needs to take the blame for the attack.
Just curious, any sources for “many observers say”?
Who else says that?
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/many-people-saying-meme-hashtag/
You could start with a UN resolution recognizing that the Palestinians are incapable of self-governance.
Which sounds like the British Mandate --which is where a lot of people always want to start talking about this topic anyway.
Then you have to get them all together in a contiguous area they can call Palestine, but which is not inside Israel.
Then do your best to keep them from being criminals because now they will have something different to do.
But all that sounds like it's not going to happen. So, if it doesn't, what they're going to be is something analogous to Irish Travelers, but with a huge population organized for terrorism available to whoever will pay them.
An important point is that Palestinians think of themselves as disenfranchised, the idea of their disenfranchisement is embedded as a key element of their nationality holding them together, and forming their own country would enfranchise them eliminating most of what they know about themselves.
It would be hard to do under the best of circumstances.
You could start with a UN resolution recognizing that the Palestinians are incapable of self-governance.
We have no idea whether or not the Palestinians are capable of self-government, because no one has let them try. For more than a century, every other party in the area has simply dictated to them.
They've had plenty of opportunity, every possible international institution exists to help them do exactly that and would be eager to help and yet at every chance they've ended up being a gimmick that one or another form of Murder, Inc hides behind.
I don't know if they are INCAPABLE of self-Government. The Palestinian Authority on the West Bank is not a complete disaster. Especially by the standards of the Arab Middle East where most countries seem to lurch between authoritarian kleptocracy and rampant murderous civil disorder. Sadly.
The result of 1400 years of "conversion by the sword", I'd bet.
Just a reminder that the Allies committed any number of war crimes during and after WWII, not just in the bombardment of cities but also the displacement of populations involved in the adjustment of borders. We tend to accept the means because the end proved to be a durable and acceptable state of affairs.
So perhaps the less than decent answer is simply whatever it takes to achieve a lasting result, short of the Roman approach, to "make a desert and call it peace."
I think about those post-war adjustments a lot these days. Particularly East Prussia.
Specifically: I think about how the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people driven out of what is now Kaliningrad are, on the whole, living stable lives.
They're not, say, confined to a bunch of refugee camps along the border, under the boots of the Russians who displaced them, raising their children to sacrifice themselves to the struggle in acts of suicidal depravity.
It's utter madness to condemn your children and grandchildren to this kind of misery just because you can't get past a defeat.
I ran across something recently discussing Wroclaw/Breslau, a formerly German city now emptied of Germans except for tourists thronging the Christmas Market in one of the few remaining examples of a traditional East German town.
Israelis are condemning their children and grandchildren to endless violence by responding to Hamas' attacks in kind. 'Mowing the grass' and expecting it not to grow back.
You've made this comparison before, and it's still a bad one. Germans had the rest of Germany to which to flee, with the hope of becoming a sovereign nation following the Allied occupation. No foreign nation was continually taking more and more German land, peopling it and effectively annexing it. Eventually, Germany renounced all claims to lands east of the Oder-Neisse line, which is recognized internationally and by the parties as an international border. There is no sovereign Palestine and no border.
They didn't have to do that, though, did they? There was nothing stopping the rest of the Germans from saying "Hey, you guys from East Prussia? You were Germans yesterday, but as of today you are, first and foremost, Prussian. We don't want you in the rest of Germany. You wouldn't fit in, say, in Frisia or Bavaria or Saxony. It's more convenient for us if you're stuck forever in refugee camps. We'll use your misery to keep our people focused on their hatred of Russia, and thereby divert their anger from our misrule.
You see, if we let you Prussians settle elsewhere in Germany, we're really complicit in Russia's ethnic cleansing. We think that's a bad look for us, so your kids and grandkids are gonna have to take one for the team, okay?
Don't worry. You'll be fine. We'll vote your way in the UN a lot. That should help."
The displacements occurred when Germany was occupied by the Allies; the Germans didn’t have the authority to keep Germans from the former eastern lands out, or keep them confined. But there is a widely shared German culture extending not only across Germany, but also Austria and German Switzerland, for that matter. I don’t think the DPs would have been turned away in any case.
That's true. The displaced Prussians weren't exactly Thuringian or Bavarian, but they did mostly speak German, and were broadly familiar with German culture. Probably they were able to adapt pretty well to their new homes. The sting of being displaced marked their lives, surely, but it didn't blight those of their descendants. A generation or two later, it'd be an interesting bit of family lore, but not much more than that.
The Prussians had been ruling much of Germany for nearly a century by that time. You keep slighting Pomeranian and Silesian Germans, who were likely more provincial, but yes, they managed to establish themselves elsewhere. My great-grandparents had emigrated long since, to a neighborhood in Chicago populated largely by Germans from Pomerania (!).
I still question the relevance to Palestinians, who seem to think they are a distinct culture from other Arabs, and don’t have a Greater Palestine to which they could flee. I think it’s arrogance to tell a people they aren’t really a people, whether it’s Russians telling Ukrainians they’re really Russian, or non-Arabs telling Palestinians they are just generic Arabs.
My point is that these displaced Prussians, Pomeranians, and Silesians were the victims of ethnic cleansing. This displacement was a calamity for them.
Then they resettled elsewhere. Many of them, as you point out, in faraway and unfamiliar countries.
Some probably felt that they'd suffered a terrible injustice. Many probably felt bitterness about it for the rest of their lives.
But, and this is key, they didn't let this calamity consume the lives of their descendants. You don't see their descendants today slipping into Kaliningrad to slaughter Russians in their beds.
I know it's hard for Palestinians to flee. Other Arabs aren't as welcoming to them as other Germans were to the displaced people of East Prussia.
I went looking to learn more about this just the other day, and found an article at Washington Post about how difficult it is for Palestinians to leave.
And the very first difficulty cited in the piece was...that most Palestinians don't WANT to leave Gaza. That they're clinging to their dreams of returning to the lands that were lost in the 1948 or 1967 wars.
Simply put: My point is that in refusing to accept that a defeat, however unjust, is final, you can turn a calamity for your generation into a calamity that consumes the lives of all your descendants, that that's a poor choice to make, and that some defeated and displaced people have made better choices.
It is a poor choice, but there are too many parties that find advantage in encouraging the fantasy that the Jews can be forced out — Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Arab countries that avoid having to deal with destitute immigrants….Without that meddling, some might choose to leave, others might choose to accept a two-state situation.
Also, post 1948, about 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries. Israel accepted and integrated them in Israeli society. Not perfectly, as there is still some Sephardi/Ashkenazi friction, but there are no refugee camps.
Even if you set aside all humanitarian concerns, the problem is, Egypt will not accept the Gazans and Jordan will not accept the West Bank Palestinians. So where can you send all the displaced Palestinians? There really is nowhere else for them to go.
That does seem like an urgent problem, and one that's got a pretty obvious solution. Wealthy countries ought to be more welcoming to Palestinians, and alongside demands for cease-fires and other such, the people of these countries ought to be agitating for a much more welcoming policy.
I guess lots of Palestinians don't want to flee. But we ought to be trying to make it such that every last one who does want to get the hell out of there and start a new life that isn't defined by that futile bloody struggle can do so.
I mean, really. Why should we accept that state of affairs--that there's nowhere for the terribly oppressed Palestinians to flee to--as an unchangeable fact on the ground? It's not. That's a decision that many governments have made, and one that they have the power to un-make.
I'm reading that something like 600 Palestinians have been able to resettle in America in the last ten years. That drives me nuts. We have so much room here, and so much opportunity.
If I could wave my magic wand and bring here every last Palestinian who's willing to emigrate to America, I would.
It'd be a little bumpy at times, maybe? It was, a bit, when my mostly-German ancestors arrived--from the Black Forest in the mid 17th century to the landless Frisians who made it here in the early 20th. But they made it work, and their descendants have mostly led happy and prosperous lives, mostly in peace, and have long since forgot whatever their ancestors fled from all those years ago.
+1
Have you seen the thousands of Palestinians marching in NY and in support of Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel? the last thing we should want in our country is more of them. It would be nice to get rid of those we do have. If all the Palestinians that are here immediately announced Hamas, and we thought would be a different story.
While we agree on some things, I strongly disagree with this:
"It would be nice to get rid of those [Palestinians] we do have."
If you want to deport non-citizens because of crimes they commit, that is fine.
If you want to deport them based on their speech, that is wrong.
If you want to deport citizens based on their speech, that is very wrong.
If you want to deport citizens based on their previous nationality, that is reprehensible.
Not sure which you are advocating, but it is not the first one.
I'm sure like me, everyone else is listening to The Telegraph's latest podcast, "Battle Lines". But if not, the last one included The Telegraph's defense editor Danielle Sheridan's account of her experience watching raw footage compiled by Israel, of what Hamas had done.
Reportedly, Israel withheld the worst of the worst violence from being viewed. She described one particular case where a father rushed his two young children to the safe room in the basement, only to die in front of his children by a grenade that also took out the eye of the youngest child.
This level of brutality has always been present with Israel. This is why the far-right is adamant about security and suspicious of the 2-state solution. But the brutality of seeing whole neighborhoods wiped out by gunmen has set off a rage broadly across the entire political spectrum. As I've mentioned before, the number of dead from that single day attack is equal to several 9/11s, measured as a ratio of total population.
As I said from the start, I know what Israel is going to do: They're going to eliminate Hamas, and go after the IRGC. I mean, I can't help note that Iran is claiming it had nothing to do with the attack -- surely they know what's coming their way and want to avoid it. Regardless of whether you support such actions, this is the stark choice that was forced onto Israel by having multiple 9/11s in a single day.
And I'm sad that lots of innocent people will die as a result. But, this is a hallmark St. Thomas Aquinas definition of a just war. What Hamas does -- the suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians, the rape and burning of people alive, the torture and disfigurement of bodies -- is not part of a just war. Hamas is carrying out its credo: Eliminate Israel.
When you see Americans carrying signs saying, "From the river to the sea", that's Hamas' own rhetoric describing the elimination of Israel. The far left has an antisemitism problem as much as the far-right. Hamas is not justified in its actions.
Agreed, but there is a big problem because a lot of folks conflate what the bad things that the Israelis are doing in the West Bank with its settlers and general maltreatment of Palestinians, to the situation in Gaza where Hamas is like some movie level villain and deserves no sympathy or succor whatsoever.
On Gaza I agree that the Israelis need to destroy Hamas because they are evil and irreconcilable enemies (not to mention they are destroying Gaza and making the lives of Gazans miserable). But on the other hand they need to get the hell out of the West Bank and give the Palestinians their own state (even though it will almost certainly be an ill- managed corrupt mess).
A lot of folks on the Left seem to have a hard time reconciling those two ideas.
The fly in the ointment here has always been the fact that these two prospective "states" would be right on top of each other. Distances are very short. Look at a map and see the distance from the West Bank border to Tel Aviv. It's less than 10 miles! Imagine how Israelis would perceive the daily threat of a corrupt, theocratic state with at least half of its population devoted to their extermination, with the potential to launch rockets and artillery easily across their entire populated land area. Until a Palestinian leadership emerges that could inspire confidence that they could govern responsibly and would be willing to suppress the extremists in their midst, Israelis will always see the prospect of an independent Palestinian state just a stone's-throw away as a deadly threat.
That's not to defend the Likud government, which is also corrupt and theocratic. But it's too facile to just say "End the occupation! Give Palestine dignity!" and just think you've offered a solution.
Of course, this has to be balanced with videos showing what the Israelis have been doing in Gaza, lately and for the last 20 years. Also, keep in mind that Israel has a reputation for faking videos and generally lying in their reportage of their actions toward Palestinians.
The reporter ought to be "crying" for both sides here. And generalized slaughter of the innocent by Israelis is not going to help.
Agree entirely.
There are two ways I see this.
Equivalence, or not
It is obviously arguable that in any war, you're going to see deaths of civilians on both sides. And in the broader view, it's tempting to look at the two sides and see casualties as equivalent.
But one came from indiscriminate targeting of people and the mistreatment of said people whereas the other comes from "collateral" damage during war from bombing. One is specifically a war crime whereas the other is not.
I'm sure there's lots of people who think that Israel wants to get rid of all Palestinians, this despite Israel living in an uncomfortable truce for decades. So they naturally assume that Israel is indiscriminately bombing Gaza.
I don't know about their current situation, but in the past, Israel would do what is known as "roof knocking" in order to give residents time to flee their building. That's not a sign of a party that would perform indiscriminate bombing. You'd have to show me evidence of "generalized slaughtering", and not just the word of Hamas.
I know of only one recent instance of Israeli officials lying about targeting, specifically a journalist. I would caution you against using an exception to make sweeping generalizations.
War means deaths
If we have to go to war, how would we prioritize lives? I think we would prioritize: Us over innocent civilians.
If we choose to preclude a single collateral death, it means our side would have extreme levels of casualties and probably lose the war. Our enemy would simply walk up to us with human shields and throw grenades at us.
To the extent that is practicable, we would limit deaths of civilians, but that's a post-WWII concept. Before that, all people of the opposing side was treated as enemies and therefore fair game. If you're facing an existential threat, that distinction can become irrelevant -- it's us versus them. I think it's a dangerously seductive bait that Hamas has thrown to Israel, but it's not clear that Israel has bitten.
From where I sit, I see the shock and awe of US' actions in Iraq in both Gulf Wars, as visually similar to what Israel is doing in Gaza. The difference between the two is, Hamas built their network of tunnels under Gaza connecting residential buildings to each other, whereas in Iraq the government buildings were distinct. On the surface it may seem like Israel is indiscriminately bombing Gaza. Below the surface, they're targeting the end points of those tunnels.
Collateral damage is not automatically OK:
from https://www.justsecurity.org/69088/preventing-and-responding-to-civilian-casualties-an-upcoming-discussion-on-law-policy-and-progress/#:~:text=Civilian%20casualties%20are%20inevitable%20in%20armed%20conflict.%20Nonetheless%2C,life%20in%20relation%20to%20the%20anticipated%20military%20advantage.
I didn't say that collateral damage was automatically OK. In fact, I wrote:
FTR, the full citation of that section of the 1977 Protocol, Article 51:
I don't know how many deaths is too many, but I know one thing for sure: Hamas is lying about the total number of casualties by a lot. According to them, in a couple of days there were over 2000 casualties. According to them, well over 500 people died in an attack on a hospital.
Also, if the weight on one end of the scale is civilian deaths, then the other end of the scale is the prevention of what was multiples of 9/11s (measured as a ratio of population) in a single day.
How many civilian casualties would you accept if you were tasked to prevent a 9/11? What about 4 9/11s?
Well, what you wrote was,
I guess you meant “not necessarily”
As to your point about prevention, I don’t believe that preemption is a principle in the conventions.
“To the extent that is practicable, we would limit deaths of civilians, but that's a post-WWII concept.”
It's much older than that. I believe it has been a precept of Islam since the beginning. According to the Lieber code (a compilation of the rules of war written during the American Civil War), “In modern regular wars of the Europeans, and their descendants in other portions of the globe, protection of the inoffensive citizen of the hostile country is the rule; privation and disturbance of private relations are the exceptions.”
I think it is true that the concept was to a significant degree ignored during WWII, and revived after it.
Sherman must have missed the memo.
You aroused my curiosity. Wikipedia has an article on Gen. Sherman’s Special Orders, which required that personnel “refrain from abusive or threatening language”, much less inflict civilian casualties. The March to the Sea was focused on destruction of infrastructure and war materiél; foragers were forbidden to enter dwellings, and were instructed to leave sufficient provisions for the sustenance of families.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Field_Orders_No._120?wprov=sfti1
In that light I withdraw my incorrect remark.
I was surprised myself; it’s a measure of how successful the Southern narrative about the Civil War has been since. Sherman’s orders also called for discrimination between hostile and neutral civilians, and between rich and poor, in destruction of mills and ‘gins’, and in foraging.
It's funny. Just the other day, for similar reasons, I went looking to see how hard on the civilian population Sherman's march was. And I was astonished at what I found. Somehow I'd absorbed the myth that his army had slaughtered or condemned to starvation tens of thousands of southerners.
The actual casualty figures are so small that they seem out of place in the American Civil war. These are some some early Anglo-Saxon period numbers.
Gaza population doubled in the last 25 years. How does that happen if Israelis are comparable to Hamas?
Please provide sources for Israel faking videos.
Please provide sources for Israel intentionally burning and raping civilians when engaged in activity which has no military goals, just the goal to kill as many civilians as possible.
Yes, I acknowledge some barbarity in 1948 on the part of Israelis. 75 years ago. In the middle of a war for survival, where civilians and combatants were difficult to distinguish.
I don't know how you make peace with a population of millions of people, right on your border, who won't be satisfied with anything short of your annihilation.
I get the urge to call for a cease-fire. But I can't help thinking that that's the kind of thing that seems like a no-brainer only if you're unwilling to look more than a week ahead. And it's an easy thing to call for if you're up in the cheap seats, and aren't actually responsible for protecting people.
I don't know how to solve the problem Israel's got. And so, I'm not 100% certain that the invasion of Gaza isn't part of that solution.
Of anyone demanding a cease-fire, I'd simply ask: That's step one. That's not a plan. Show me the plan that starts with a cease-fire and ends with a peaceful and secure Israel. I'll be right there with you calling for a cease-fire when I see that that's where it leads.
The same question needs to be asked of the current Israeli administration’s plan. What next, after you destroy all the weapons and tunnels you can find, and cause the deaths of large numbers of civilians in the course of trying to ‘eliminate’ Hamas? Who will govern Gaza? Who will prevent the survivors, embittered by the deaths of their parents, children, siblings, relations, from seeking revenge against Israel?
Things are immensely more complicated in Gaza because it is a land dispute that has existential repercussions for both sides. It's one thing to take apart a terrorist group by force on the other side of the planet and then leave, not really caring if the country ends up dysfunctional. It's something else entirely to do so while you live next door and large portions of your government want to take more land away from the areas that grew the terrorist cell.
It is certainly possible that the IDF can fundamentally destroy Hamas, but that doesn't change the underlying reality that drives the long-term conflict. I'm not sure it is a conflict that can be resolved given current international norms and population demographics.
This is a slick burn of the modern Left:
“How do you justify doing nothing? How do you justify doing something? They're both offensive to any person with a working conscience.”
Indeed, and it’s been an astonishing revelation just how many social justice warriors are utterly lacking any sign of a “working conscience.”
After a chapter of BLM tweeted the image of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag (an explicit message of support for Hamas), I simply stopped going into any stores or restaurants that still keep BLM signs up. And, in my area, that’s a lot of businesses. At some of those businesses, in fact, I’ve been a customer for years.
But I like to think that my conscience is still working, and, sorry for my political incorrectness, but BLM has outed itself as a murderous death cult. And I can no longer live with myself if I continue supporting the supporters of a death cult.
I would not seek to curtail anyone’s freedom of speech; nevertheless, I avoid those who use that free speech to support advocates for genocide.
“But what's in-between? What does common decency require of Israel in its implacable mission of destruction against Hamas?”
A great statesmen once distinguished between two parties in a famous war in this way: “one of them would make war, rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.”
Fight for survival, not destruction. But fight. Aim for justice, not genocide. But aim.
You do realize that BLM is a loose coalition of groups all over the country, right? There is no CEO of BLM Enterprises dictating what each group can or cannot do. So it’s entirely possible that some BLM groups are comprised of horrible people and other BLM groups are comprised of decent people. It’s like how some PTAs are full of parents who want to make their school better and some PTAs are full of parents who want to burn books and get the school staff fired. Not all PTAs are “good” and neither are all BLM chapters.
BLM does in fact have national leaders. One of them retired after her misappropriation of BLM funds became so egregious that even Liberal media outlets (like NY Mag) reported it.
And those national leaders of the organization have been officially adopting anti-Israel manifestos for years.
BLM has simply never been a savory organization, and claiming that it’s decentralized is no excuse. I do realize that many donors meant well, but they’ve been duped.
Because once any group under any banner starts unambiguously celebrating the slaughter of innocents, it’s just time to finally acknowledge reality. Stop making excuses. Just stop. Seriously. I can’t take it anymore.
Please list the national leaders of BLM. Or are you just nutpicking?
I must have missed all those BLM groups condemning the paraglider image.
Happy to help.
BLM Global Network Foundation reportedly made clear it is not connected to the Chicago offshoot or Black Lives Matter Grassroots group that is also under fire over posts tied to the Hamas attack.
https://nypost.com/2023/10/11/blm-chicago-admits-it-isnt-proud-of-deleted-post-of-hamas-paraglider/
Not strictly a condemnation, but a distancing.
Thanks. Happy to have that pointed out to me. I'll retract my prior comment, although, as you alluded to, I would have liked to have seen a much more forceful denunciation from the global BLM group.
American commentary on Afghanistan is amusing at some level, as if their intervention has no precedent, there is no prior history...
But one can look at the Soviet Central Asian experience, notably Stalin period, to see what application of power it would take to break the society - the Central Asian "Stans" on other side of the mountains being the comparables. Should the US have desired and been willing to execute Stalinist style transformation (of which death camps, gulags and complete unshyness about genocidal levels of repression) of course you could have defeated the Taleban. But as the Soviets before you in Afghanistan, the level of effort and price to pay in blood as well as time, money and reputation did not balance out.
Sans change of conditions in Gaza there's no particular reason to think that barring genocidal level of action Hamas will be destroyed, or can be destroyed. Set back certainly but destroyed, no, not without opening another plausible door to choose - emphasis on plausible (and plausible to the locals, not comfortable Americans sitting thousans of miles away).
Gazans need only took to the façade of the West Bank (including the current wildings by Settlers going on right now in revenge cycles) to be turned away from moderation, Netanyahu & Co have rather successfully destroyed the credibility of that path - rebuilding it difficult. Probably impossible so long as there is Netanyahu in government.
Lot's of good points. That said though, we MIGHT have been able to break the Taliban except that Pakistan gave the organization support and sanctuary during its most difficult times. Had they not done so, there is a good chance the Taliban might only have survived as some regional warlords in a few provinces rather than won the war. Pakistan does not get enough opprobrium on this point!
Read again: you could have broken the Taleban but the tactics needed would need to be like applied by the Bolshevik regime in Central Asia (notably on the similar geographic range of the mountainous Stans) in the 1920s-1930s.
Should you be willing to engage in near genocide, yes you can break a culture. Otherwise the Taleban were inevitably coming back as having deep roots in Pashtun cultural refernce and ascendency.
Whoops, did the Lout just admit that he's a Russian agent? "of course YOU could have defeated the Taleban."
Or not a US citizen.
War is hell. But people seem to do it anyway. The lack of concern for life is baked into human nature. We cry for those we know and love. Everyone else is hardly worth noticing.
Kristof is kind of silly on this topic. He’s got nothing as a solution to the problem. He’d have opposed US involvement in WWII.
I hate to mention this, but Al Qaeda is alive and well in Idlib Province, Syria, and ISIS is alive and well under the protection of U.S. forces in Al Tanf, Syria. ISIS is also alive and well and competing with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Oh, there's also a branch of Al Qaeda in Yemen, but they're pretty small and ineffective.
"No justice, no peace."
Please, do not "hate" to bring up the truth, as inconvenient as it may be to some.
Ideas are really hard to kill, sometimes harder than it is to kill humans.
This whole topic is depressing. Guessing no one would be fine with the IDF dragging thousands of people out of Gaza and gunning them down in front of the walls. It's really no different than what they're currently doing. The difference being it's hidden behind antiseptic bombs.
Of course Hamas should be eradicated, but Israel has seemed more focused on the overall removal of Palestinians than addressing them. Notice they've been using their military to "protect" settler encroachment on the West Bank where Hamas doesn't exist versus the south.
Never forget that Ben Gvir, Minister of National Security, used to have a picture of Baruch Goldstein, mass murderer of Palestinians, hanging on his office wall. A frickin hero to the head of National Security says it all. Israel has become apartheid SAfrica seeking a pure ethnicity, but in this case most of the world is backing the Afrikaners. Well, everyone knows Muslims are barbaric animals, so cool.
"Guessing no one would be fine with the IDF dragging thousands of people out of Gaza and gunning them down in front of the walls. It's really no different than what they're currently doing."
Definitely different.
Not so different from the point of view of a person torn apart by an Israeli bomb.
I have to turn away from pictures of explosions because it is likely people are being torn apart, innocent or not.
The "settlers", I call them "squatters", are a big part of the problem, taking land, buildings and crops from the Palestinians.
Palestinians, as the Christian Palestinians are hardly spared (although that is essentially West Bank).
" Israel has seemed more focused on the overall removal of Palestinians than addressing them. “
Can you tell me how much the overall removal has reduced the Arab population?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_State_of_Palestine
Hint: it has *grown* by 15% in less than 5 years.
The only reason we failed to do the same against the Taliban is that we didn't vigorously prosecute the initial fight against them, preferring instead to keep troops available for the planned war against Iraq.
This is a big and probably unjustified presumption. The reason we didn't eradicate the Talibal is they are too deeply and broadly ingrained in Afghanistan. Just ask the Soviets how things went with the Mujahideen. And I think the same can be said for the militant resistance in Gaza. Israel may kill the majority of Hamas and eradicate it's leadership, but like the Taliban in Afghanistan, a new resistance group will replace them. That being said, I'm all for Israeli retaliation, Kristoff and Biden and so many others have said, I hope the response is effective in advancing long term stability and not just a horrifying, deadly and disastrous vengeance for both sides.
"So: How do you justify doing nothing? How do you justify doing something? They're both offensive to any person with a working conscience. But what's in-between? What does common decency require of Israel in its implacable mission of destruction against Hamas?"
I don't know what the answer is, exactly, but I will say proportional responses will never get you peace. Both sides will have to want peace more than they want vengeance or there will always be something to derail the people process.
“So: How do you justify doing nothing? How do you justify doing something? They're both offensive to any person with a working conscience.”
This is kinda silly. I’m not going to do anything. Mr. Drum isn’t going to do anything. No one reading this is going to do anything. It’s half a world away. Just like the violence in Sudan, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, and dozens of other places.
My conscience is clear.
"...But what's in-between? ..."
Give the Hamas people safe passage to Iran (or somewhere) in exchange for releasing the hostages.
Would "safe passage" to your backyard be okay?
"Would "safe passage" to your backyard be okay?"
No, it has to be someplace willing to take them. Maybe Afghanistan.
It is an interesting way of putting things to say that "you can't do what Hamas did and not expect a ruthless response." This is true, and Israel's response has already been ruthless, and is expected to only get worse. The problem is that what Hamas did, while evil, is less evil than what Israel has been doing to Gaza for decades. And, of course, if you can't do what Hamas did and not expect a ruthless response, then you can't do worse than Hamas did and not expect a ruthless response.
There are certain events that seem inevitable, but are still surprising when they happen, because that they will eventually happen does not mean that it will happen at any given time. The collapse of the Soviet Union is one such example. It was predicted decades in advance and yet still surprising when it happened.
That the heartless way Israel treats the Palestinians will lead to periodic bouts of violence is similar. What is amazing is that despite the incredible inhumanity with which Israel treats the Palestinians, the lesson that Israel has learned is that any violence in return shows that the Palestinians are people who can never accept peace. The whine amounts to "We have offered them a wide variety of occupation and they have rebelled at all of them, that shows they are incapable of accepting peace". In fact the only leader in the region to offer something that could turn into peace was Abbas in his negotiations with Olmert, but the Israelis found excuses to turn it down and to blame it on the fact that the Palestinians can't accept peace. (I say a proposal that could lead to peace since Abbas was actually accepting Israeli control of borders, at least for a time. He just insisted on borders that could eventually be a two state solution, while Olmert insisted on cutting East Jerusalem off from the West Bank with Jewish settlements.
So Israel is going to slaughter a lot of Palestinians in revenge for this attack. It will do nothing to change the conditions that make violence inevitable. And it won't be the worst thing that Israel does to the Palestinians. It will remain behind the awful treatment the Palestinians receive between times the world is paying attention, because they are decades long punishment rather than just a flare up in violence.
The problem is that once there is peace again for the Israelis, the world will stop caring about what happens, and the Israelis have shown no inclination for wanting peace then.
That's an excellent summary and analysis. Without a major change in American attitudes towards "supporting" Israel ... the Israeli military machine, that is ... things will just continue getting worse for the Palestinians.
But apparently, it's "anti-semitic" to care about them.
I'm glad I scrolled down this far. LonBecker, your post is accurate and courageous. Israeli control of Gaza's borders amounted to Gaza being a very large prison. Gaza wasn't even allowed to have an airport
The problem is that what Hamas did, while evil, is less evil than what Israel has been doing to Gaza for decades.
What exactly did Israel do that equates to rape, burning alive, and murder of completely innocent civilians with no military objective whatsoever?
And again, Gaza population over the last 5 years - up 15%.
Cut to the chase: Israel has been bent on slow-motion genocide from the earliest inception of Zionism. That's what Zionism is all about, and I suspect that at this point, most everybody knows this, whether they cop to it or not. Where do we go from that singular fact? I don't know. But that has to be the starting point.
And for the language challenged: No, 'Israel' does _not_ have the right to defend itself.
If your starting point is Israel, a modern nation for Jews, has no right to exist, then everything seems clear. The creation of the state, the wars of past decades, the settlements in the West Bank, the apartheid-like policies and brutal treatment of Palestinians, and so on, are all illegitimate acts of a people with no legitimate claim to the land that belongs to others. The attacks they have suffered, the wars waged against them, though violent and heinous, will have to continue unfortunately until the injustice of the stolen land is reversed. Let the Jews live under the authority of those who would persecute them, or they can move. They have been moving and migrating since the beginning of time. Surely, they can find some other country that will be happy to have them. Just look at history. Well, maybe not. Maybe the problem is they want to be Jews. Have they thought about converting? Atheism is very trendy these days. I hear on good authority (see comments above) that atheism is the solution. You might even call it the Final Solution. One way or another, until Jews stop being Jews, there will be no peace, no justice.
FTR, I don't see it that way. I understand there are groups with competing claims for that patch of land in the Middle East. The claim of the Jews is as legitimate as any of them. Who lives in that land, and when and whence they came, is a complicated story. It's not all about Zionism, which among other things doesn't explain the migrations of many non-Jews over the decades and centuries.
I think for any meaningful discussion about what peace might look like in the (distant) future, all parties must accept of the right of Israel to exist as a homeland for Jews.
Borders and much else are negotiable. But the right of Jews to have their own state is fundamental.
Likewise, Palestinians.
"Borders and much else are negotiable. But the right of Jews to have their own state is fundamental."
"Likewise, Palestinians."
You have a natural right to rule what you can take and hold. So for the last 75 years that means the Jews have a right to a state and the Palestinians do not. This may change but it hasn't yet.
First, spare me the histrionics. Second, Israel does not have a right to exist because _no_ state has a right to exist. This is an egregious -- and deliberate -- abuse of language. _People_ have rights; _states_ do not.
Finally, I notice you did not deny that the Zionist project was founded from the get-go on genocide. No, a robber doesn't get to claim self-defense when they kill a householder who is defending his property. Tha is established law. And well-establisched law at that.
Atheism would be a solution in the Middle East only if it was practiced by everyone everywhere. I was responding the “peace in the holy lands”. If every Jew left the Middle East tomorrow there would be no peace. The Shia and the Sunni would still hate each other and no doubt Christians there would be persecuted.
Being Jewish doesn’t necessarily mean practicing Judaism. It’s knowing that whether you practice Judaism or not. Whether your parents parents are atheists or converted to Catholicism or some other religion and that is all you have ever known, the time will come when “they” identify you as a “Jew” and it will be determined that some problem is somehow your fault and you will be told you are not welcome in the country that is your home.
To me, that is why Israel exists.
"Cut to the chase: Israel has been bent on slow-motion genocide from the earliest inception of Zionism. That's what Zionism is all about, and I suspect that at this point, most everybody knows this, whether they cop to it or not. Where do we go from that singular fact?"
How do you define genocide? I think it requires a reduction of population, no? No matter how “slow-motion” it is.
So lets start with a fact, one that is sourced and quantitative, instead of your unsupported opinion parading as fact.
Gaza and West Bank population has grown 15% over less than 5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_State_of_Palestine
When you acknowledge that actual fact, and retract your false statement, we can talk.
You have no idea of the hisory of Zionism do you?[1] Don't think I see what you're trying do here you dishonest little shit; the burden of proof is on you and yours, not on anyone else.
[1] "The bride is beautiful, but she is spoken for" is a phrase that goes back quite a ways. Now go educate yourself before piping up in front of your betters.
ScentOfViolets is a lunatic and a troll. It's not worth arguing with her.
I will continue to point out factual errors so that other people can decide for themselves based on facts instead of opinions unsupported by facts.
Well said.
Wow, "Scent". My opinion of you just changed.
+1
Well AQ moved on to franchises outside the ME and the Caliphate has returned in the ME so I don't think we did.
I think Israel can probably destroy Hamas. Then it has a very small window of time to destroy the settlements and the settlers if they resist and dump Neyanyahoo before a new hamas emerges. That might move the needle somewhat.
As I've said before the main problem is that only 45% of Israelis at most want peace and less than 30% of Palestinians want peace.
And Israel I hope realizes that young people and especially non-whites under 40 think Palestine is right. Biden is the last Dem president that will coddle them, so they are almost out of time.
Israel wants all the land and the locals be damned. Is it surprising that only 45% of Israelis 'want peace'?
We may have ultimately defeated ISIS. But, we also must not forget that Bush's wholly unjustified invasion and occupation of Iraq based on huge piles of BS created ISIS.
Hamas Says Russia 'Our Closest Friend',
https://www.newsweek.com/hamas-russia-israel-gaza-strip-hostages-1838886
Because of course they are.
"The only reason we failed to do the same against the Taliban is that we didn't vigorously prosecute the initial fight against them,"
Taliban could just cross the border into Pakistan. We needed Pakistan's help with logistics in fighting the Taliban so were careful about large scale crossings. We have drone attacks and some special ops stuff but that wasn't going to eliminate them. Also, Taliban werent as harsh as ISIS so they had more support from locals.
Steve
I'm old enough to remember the wisdom in the fight against terrorism in the days of the Rote Armee Fraktion, Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigades, Patty Hearst and so on. Which consisted of not taking the bait. Thus those groups didn't provoke the state into oppression against which the masses would rise up, as they intended. They only proved their own cruelty, leading to the loss of their base and their safe homes. That plus targeted police action.
Since 9/11 that excellent strategy has been stood on its head and the result was always bad. Revenge? Revenge against whom? Almost always, the innocent. AS WAS INTENDED.
But Netanyahu takes it a step further. His strategy has always been to erase Palestinians except, and only except, if they use violence, and then say they deserve to be erased because of it. He also saw Hamas as useful idiots, a good way to split Gaza from the West Bank. Yet he knew how dangerous and psychopathic Hamas was. So did we all, when it took control of Gaza through violence, publicly shooting blindfolded Fatah members through the head.
How further? I'd say Israel needs to let Palestinians create an administration of their own choice, one that can actually deliver on struck deals. Think Marwan Barghouti. But they won't and instead act like a fish that bites in the hook to teach the fisher a lesson. And it's not stupid, it's not understandable, it's cynical. Netanyahu won't lose, his people will.
Many worthy points there. The Israelis and Palestinians deserve better leaders than they have. There will be no peace with Netanyahu and Hamas in place. Sadly, there is no easy way to get rid of them until this bloody war is fought and exhausted, and in the aftermath the faint hope of a peaceful coexistence will be even further out of anyone's grasp.
Re: "existentialism"
Israel keeps proclaiming its "right to exist" (the tacit assumption is that Palestine has no such right and never will). Does any other country have such a "right"?
Israel keeps shouting that Hamas (the PLO, Hezbollah, etc) pose "existential" threats to them (the only country with a "right" to exist). As if! As if a ragtag group of people hiding in underground tunnels in an open air prison pose a threat to the very existence ("existential", get it?) of the best armed, most militarily powerful, assured ot total and massive support from the United States, nation in the middle east!
The kicker is, everybody seems to believe them.
"Our right to exist—have you ever heard of such a thing? Would it enter the mind of any Briton or Frenchman, Belgian or Dutchman, Hungarian or Bulgarian, Russian or American, to request for its people recognition of its right to exist? ... Mr. Speaker: From the Knesset of Israel, I say to the world, our very existence per se is our right to exist!"
--Menachim Begin, 1977
Israel proclaims its right to exist because its neighbors refuse to acknowledge it. The French and Dutch and Indian and Brazilian don't need to proclaim their right to exist because no one questions it. There's nothing mysterious about it. Yes, every other country has the right to exist. Palestine too. More than 130 countries have recognized the State of Palestine, and another 50+ (inc US) support a solution that would grant Palestine statehood.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." That's the slogan of the free Palestine groups, which (taking them literally) want to wipe the State of Israel off the face of the Earth. Don't give us this bullshit that it's only a few ragtag groups hiding in tunnels who threaten Israel. It's a worldwide movement that, shockingly, has plenty of support right here at home. You'll find some in this thread.
So you agree that saying states have rights in general and 'the right to exist' in particular is just so much dishonest rhetoric. Took you enough words to get there (and even then, you're too weak to explicitly say that out loud.)
Oh, and thanks for admitting that you think the United States indigenous populations were a bunch of unregenerate thugs and terrorists. With people like you beating the drums it's no wonder we have such bad PR.
The underlying problem to essentially all of Israel's disputes is that Israel claims the protections of the law while refusing to abide by the limitations of the law.
Most of the world -- the exceptions are Israel, America, and to a lesser extent Britain -- see that Israel has been the aggressor against the Palestinians forever, which is just the truth. Israel keeps its aggression at such a low boil that its patrons don't notice it, this helped quite a bit by Americans' disinterest in anything outside of their borders.
The Palestinians, whether as represented by Hamas or otherwise, don't have the resources to conduct a conflict in this way. So they do things like brutally murdering hundreds of civilians.
Israel had almost certainly been blinded by arrogance; their slow boil strategy was working beautifully, and the Palestinians seemed to have accepted that they were just fated to elimination or at least irrelevance.
It probably is true that Hamas was hoping to provoke an extreme response. For America, it mostly looks like Hamas was acting without any provocation; for most of the world -- and particularly the Arab and Muslim parts of it -- the situation is more accurately read.
We might be entering into an era of pervasive antisemitic stochastic terrorism. If just a fraction of the Muslims around the world who received terminal illness diagnoses agreed to carry out suicide attacks, something nearing the scale of the Holocaust could result. And along with it another world war, no doubt.
I don't expect it ever to happen, but the civilized way to address this conflict would be to have formal hearings based on argued facts and generally accepted standards of human rights, to decide what "fair" claims there are to the disputed territory.
And I include all of Israel in the "disputed territory."
And then based on those "fair" claims, either side -- with support from its allies -- could pay off the other to have them surrender their "fair" claims.
I mean, the rent on the land is already measured in numbers of violent deaths, to say nothing of the billions and billions of dollars spent to make even more violence possible.
Surely a trillion dollars to get one side or the other to abandon its claims would be well within reach.