On this first anniversary of October 7, I have a bit of an unusual observation. I don't even know if it's correct, but here goes.
On the Israeli side of things, there's no shortage of people who will publicly say exactly what they think Israel should be doing. Their point of view is pretty simple: Hamas and Hezbollah are murderous terrorist groups that will never cease their attacks on Israel. They need to be destroyed, full stop, and Iran's sponsorship of terrorism needs to be hit hard enough to make them give it up. If a brutal war is the only way to accomplish this, then so be it. Enough is enough.
This may or may not have any chance of working, and you may or may not agree. But it's all pretty clear.
Now consider the pro-Palestinian side—here in the US anyway. During the campus turmoil earlier this year it was striking that the protesters were reluctant to talk to the press. It was specifically discouraged, in fact. More generally, the pro-Palestinian side never really says what they think Israel should do.
Don't get me wrong. In the short term they think Israel should stand down. They support a permanent ceasefire. That much is self-evident. But over the longer term, what is it they think Israel should do? The obvious answer is that Israel should stop fighting; should stop oppressing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; and should allow Palestinians a free and clear homeland with no restrictions.
But the TV talking heads and newspaper pundits rarely actually say this—or so it seems to me. Am I just watching the wrong TV? Or are they, in fact, reluctant to say this publicly?
If reluctance there is, the reason is probably not hard to figure out: it's because they know nobody would buy it. If Israel literally retreated to its borders, took down its walls, and foreswore any further military action, they would instantly be the target of endless, sustained terrorism. Eventually they would be destroyed. It would not be a "genocide" in the sense of killing 2% of Gaza, it would be a genocide in the sense of killing every Jew in Israel.
Help me out. Where am I wrong? Who should I be listening to on the Palestinian side that has sensible things to propose that don't presume the extinction of Israel?
Here is the pro-Palestinian argument in its essence:
This conflict was started by Britain, on behalf of the Zionists it hoped to win over to its side in WWI. Thus it is Palestinians, not Israelis, who are engaging in self-defense.
There is no way to justify what happened during the British Mandate. It was simply wrong, and until Israel admits this and accepts the enormous debt it owes to Palestinians, there will be no peace
So it can all be solved by mere words? What do you mean by "accepts the enormous debt?"
Thirteen figure reparations, the price dependent on one-state, two-state, or evacuation of Israel, and related details.
Well said, except that “enormous debt” means all the Jews will leave or die. They don't say that part because they know nobody accepts it.
Who would stop them from immigrating to the USA? Not the left.
You could also argue that the Balfour Declaration was largely about getting British Jews out of Britain, a sort of ethnic cleansing.
For context, this is exactly what the U.S. did with Liberia. i.e. "If freed black people don't want to be slaves in the U.S. then they should get the hell out and go to Liberia." Never mind that this stretch of the African coast was already fully populated by people who didn't speak English. Inevitably, there was conflict between the settled residents and the newcomers shoehorned in by the U.S. government, which is precisely what has been happening in Palestine.
Re: Iran'
Do some Wiki searching for the histories of Iran and for that matter also Palestine.
I am tired of 9 to 10 million people controlling our foreign policy in the region.
Israel should honestly seek a fair, just and legal peace agreement.
This is something that Israel refuses to do.
The former chief of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, has said that Israel does not want peace and that, if it had, it would have made peace with the Palestinian Authority (PA) long ago."
The Israeli government for the last two years has rejected the idea of an independent Palestine, saying that all of their land should be part of Israel:
The “basic principles of Israel’s 37th government: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria.”
And, of course, it is Israel that attacks, and breaks ceasefires: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reigniting-violence-how-d_b_155611
Zionism is strong with that one.
Israel should formally expand its borders to encompass all the territory it de facto controls, including the whole Gaza Strip and West Bank, and grant full citizenship to all the inhabitants of those territories. Israel has been occupying those territories for nearly sixty years and clearly has no intention of unoccupying them any time in the foreseeable future. If they're not going to unoccupy the territory, then they should formally annex it.
Logical, but the consequences would be a population too high in Palestinians to secure Israel as "home of the Jewish people" or even as a Democracy.
Being an atheist, I have no sympathy for any country trying to be the home of a religion. I see no reason why Palestinians should be any less democratic than Jews.
Have KD's periodic I/P posts devolved to trolling for lots of comments?
Some of his I/P posts are decent, but this one? It fails to meet any reasonable quality standard.
So asking others for their opinion is below some quality standard that you consider to be trolling?
pot meet kettle
Because Kevin doesn't care about the answer.
He's posted lots about Israel and Palestine. And those posts have generated plenty of thoughtful comments showing him the Palestinian side/viewpoint. Yet he continues to post the same uninformed crap over and over and over again. Showing he hasn't read the comments.
I can’t believe Kevin can’t educate himself about what is happening and has been happening for decades. He can start with this BBC documentary about what extremist settlers have been doing to Palestiansvsince the Oct 7 attack. It is a more extreme for of what was happening before.
Too many settlers believe they have a right to the land because the Bible says it’s theirs and a lot of rightwing evangelicals agree. International law says Israel has no right to keep taking that land.
https://youtu.be/fxLDYkX7l9A?si=MFml1-nmocY0b2rQ
Well, for one thing, you've drunk a Bibirita, and it's gone to your head. While, yes, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran are implacable foes of Israel, there are several hundred million Arabs who are not, and I expect that a large majority of Palestinians would be ecstatic to be given the opportunity to join them.
Now maybe a sizable portion of Palestinians wouldn't have a year ago; maybe they were genuinely elated that Hamas pulled off its bloody surprise attack. But they are now. Israel has been a very good teacher of the ugly old truth of real warfare: it is bloody, brutish and Hell on Earth.
Kevin asked 2 specific questions:
1. How is he wrong - everyone happily is jumping in with their own BS on this one.
2. Which pro-Palestinian voices should he be listening to? Other than “Mehdi Hassan, it’s just crickets on this. I would legitimately like to hear more suggestions on this as well.
He actually asked 'what is the pro-palestinian argument' and this seemed to be his only question through the piece.
Many people respinded very directly to this main question.
Maybe you missed the main thrust of Kevins post and nearly all of the responses? Or perhaps this is in bad faith......
Most of what I've read so far aren't so much pro-Palestinian arguments as anti-Israel ones. Let's grant most of those have some validity: what's the Palestinian plan for how they get from here to a stable, peaceful coexistence with Israel (which isn't going away)?
Well Abbas, the head of the PA and the leader of the West Bank, the largest Palestinian area (well those parts that have not been taken by Israel) offered to make peace along the lines that Israel would get 78% the territory both share for its minority of the population, the refugees from that 78% would give up their right to return to their homeland and would move to the crowded 22%, and at least temporarily Israel would get to control all borders into Palestine as a measure to feel secure. And Israel said no, it needed to additionally control territory within that 22%.
Is the question what the Palestinian approach is given that Israel has all of the strength and no interest in peace? Because how one gets to peace if Israel wants it really is not a mystery. That is what makes Drum's question so disingenuous.
Ehud Olmert has said that peace could be achieved by returning to the peace talks that existed between his administration and Abbas (before Olmert had to resign because of corruption issues). Of course then Olmert said that Israel couldn't agree to Abbas' terms because it would mean having to remove settlements that were built to prevent peace. And since then many more settlements have been built and filled with the kind of settlers who already assassinated an Israeli prime minister. So it wouldn't be easy. But the hard part would be getting Israel back into line with international law. The rest is fairly easy.
Hamas and Hezbollah draw their strength from the fact that Israel has made it clear that it respects only violence. If Israel wants to weaken Hamas the best thing it could do would be to show that peace negotiations improve things for the Palestinians in the West Bank. Instead Israel has shown that security cooperation with Israel allows Israel to behave even worse in the West Bank.
My God Kevin Drum is obtuse.
The Palestinians have FOR DECADES been trying to get their grievances heard in courts of international law. Israel -- often with American assistance -- has blocked every effort.
"The Palestinian Side" wants Israel to abide by the law, to begin with. "The law," by the way, is still really racist and biased against non-Europeans; it is the means by which 56% of Palestine was given to an ethno-state of a people who had mostly immigrated under force of arms in the prior thirty years, and probably the means by which half of the remaining territory was also seized by that ethno-state and is now recognized as belonging to it.
And even that isn't enough for Israel: it is seizing most of the rest of the remaining 22%, even though "the law" says they have no right to do so.
You have to be willfully ignorant not to know this.
Kevin Drum is dishonest and stupid.
In reading the comments I was reminded that Drum asks one question which seems in bad faith, namely who gives the Palestinian side. This is a general colonialist trick because while the occupiers have strong structural leadership, that is what makes them occupiers, the occupied will generally have scattered leadership and it will be concerned with fighting the occupation, not what Drum is looking for. And Israel has taken the threat of peaceful protest especially seriously. It dealt with peaceful protests in Gaza with sharpshooters murdering and maiming protesters across a fence in Gaza.
But if Drum is serious one thing he could do is go to Ta-Nihisi Coates website where he lists the sources he looked at to try to understand the Palestinian perspective before going to see things for himself. I know this is ironic since Drum wrote two columns attacking Coates for his lack of curiosity, if Drum had the slightest curiosity as to whether his columns attacking Coates were fair he would have found the answer to that particular question that he writes here in seeming bad faith.
The pro-Palestinian argument relates to the idea on the far left that first world nations are wrong and second world nations are all peace loving. The far left sees Israel as a colonial empire and therefore has to right to exist. The far left believes that if allowed Palestinians would be magnamous and forgiving and allow the Jews to live in peace, but under a Palestinian government.
The reason the far left doesn't articulate this things is the Palestinians won't agree to say the even halfway reasonable things that would be required to be believed.
You do not understand is at all, and everything you said is a strawman.
Also the reason the far left doesn't articulate this view is that the far left you describe exists only in your mind.
You don’t say even quarterway truthful things and yet you are allowed to live.
Maybe we should rethink that.
Israel's supporters are the "Karens" of political discussions.
It's all about everyone's god given right to kill Jews.
The Palestinians have been killing Jews for centuries. The Ottomans had no problem with this when they ran the area. The British were less happy with it, but that didn't stop the pogroms in the 1930s. The British tried to keep out Jewish refugees from elsewhere and were pretty successful at it until the late 1940s. When the British left and Israel founded, its neighbors tried for genocide but were repulsed. There were a few more attempts, and we all remember the latest.
There's a world wide consensus that Jews should just die. Gandhi suggested they all commit suicide in the face of Nazi genocide. Modern critics have similar suggestions. Gandhi, at least, was open about it. Most just mumble something along the lines of: well, they should stop trying to defend themselves if it hurts anyone. Maybe they'll put in a memorial for the Nazis killed wiping out those nasty Jews holed up in the Warsaw ghetto.
Your understanding of the history of the region is so wrong I don’t know where to begin. For starters, there was little Muslim-Jewish violence in the late Ottoman, despite substantial Jewish migration in the two decades prior to WWI. During the war, Ottoman Jews were not mistreated, unlike Armenian and Greek Christians in Ottoman territory. Even when a Zionist spy ring working with the British was discovered, there were no reprisals against the local Jewish population.
Victim victim victim victim victim!
Oh, woe is me!
Gee, Kevin what are the arguments for not beating your wife?
Let's see about the Palestinians. Since the founding of Israel, Israel has pulverizing their lives and properties, stealing their land, building luxury homes on it, renting them on AirBnB, destroying their agronomy, conquering and annexing more territory, illegal under international law, by force majeure, doing bombing with 1 ton American bombs of targets occupied by innocents. Precision strikes for sure, but sending in infantry to dig out Hamas would cause casualties, so mass murder from above is preferable to Israel The Palestinians are a demoralized, pulverized people who haven't had an election in 18 years, and what government they have had has been purposefully and successfully corrupted and fragmented by Israel. They have tried non-viollence, but that became the especial target of Mossad and the IDF, because it makes Israel look bad and destroys the image of them as all terrorists. Oh, and for years and years, or at least the last 20 by Israeli statistics, Israel has killed 10 to 20 Palestinians for every one Israeli death.
https://www.btselem.org/statistics
As they have in Gaza: some 1400 Israeli victims of Hamas atrocities (no, the rapes reported in NYTimes did NOT happen) and the Palestinian toll is approaching 40 thousand.
Yes, yes. I'm sure the Palestinians have an elaborate peace plan....though any one of them foolish enough to stand up for peace would be instantly targeted by both Hamas and Israel.
Alternately tell me about Israel's peace plans? There was Rabin, of course, long ago and assassinated by a fanatic Israeli.
Israeli are so good at war and devastation, mass murder, slow-motion genocide...why should they bother with peace?
iirc for the last few thousand years jews have been on the Palestinian end of the stick. They finally have their own land and a superpower behind them. Perhaps they see how being nice worked out their European ancestors, native Americans and Tibetans . . . . to mention a few.
Maybe Palestinians should hire the Taliban or the Mongols.
Germany has just conquered France. What is the Maquis' plan for peace?
Kevin, I don't know if you read all these, but if you do, know that you are still the Voice of Sanity and you should ignore the trolls no matter how painful their comments might be.
lol. War on people of the Middle East is unique in its ability to turn sane people into total lunatics.
THEVOICEOFSANITY!
Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine......something in common that allows people to see theft and slaughter as the reasonable, moderate, patriotic option....the only SANE CHOICE!
The main point of the "trolls" is that building settlements in occupied territory does not actually make a country safer. That is not actually a trollish sounding point. But as somebody who can recognize a voice of sanity, no doubt you can explain why increasing the areas that have to be secured by your military makes one safer. Certainly that voice of sanity doesn't explain it, he just asserts that pulling settlements out of occupied territory will lead to Israel's destruction.
Do you have arguments, or just a realization that as long as Israel is powerful enough to slaughter everybody around it, then supporting Israel doesn't require having arguments.
Someone definitely has a dog in this fight, and is dishonest.