Since it's been a while since we had an Israel/Palestine thread...

[droid]

One of Israel's strongest EU allies calls for ceasefire

 

[droid]

Expansion of domestic fascism

 

[droid]

“They are turning the city and its people to ashes. Everything you’ve seen on TV is true.”

 

[droid]

There's no coming back from this. Not for Israel and not for those who celebrated and defended these atrocities. Genocide leaves a permanent stain.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yes. I was at the march today and passed a bar with a load of EDL brothers chanting Israel at small group of protestors, it’s the same thing. Reminded me of passing loyalist bars in Belfast, it’s actually just a bit of craic for these men first and foremost, they get a buzz from provoking

And you just know that, a generation ago, these same guys would have considered knocking the hats off elderly Orthodox men and carving swastikas into park benches a Saturday well spent. Their 'support' for Israel begins and ends with it being a way to antagonise Muslims and lefties.

 

[vimothy]

and each level relies on the level above--for example, israeli energy politics depends on regional geopolitics, and regional energy geopolitics depends on the global situation. the importance of Israel's natural gas discoveries for its domestic political concerns, for example, cant be understood without understanding both the regional alliances it motivates and the global context in which europe needs to replace russian supplies with a politically more palatable alternative.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

true, but it's also a question of lenses or analytical dimensions. you can look at the conflict in terms of domestic Israeli-Palestinian politics, you can look at the conflict in terms of its effect on regional geopolitics in the middle east, and you can look at it in terms of the global-historical context. no perspective is complete on it's own exactly, but equally no perspective is redundant.

sure like I said everything exists within some greater context. what I think is incorrect is the flattening of any situation but particularly Isr-Pal to fit into into a narrow geopolitical context.

there was for example much discussion of Oct 7 as a response to the Abraham Accords and other Israeli-Sunni normalization deals. that's almost certainly true in some part, but the fundamental condition is the occupations and the denial of a Palestinian state, occupations which don't make any geopolitical sense. besides poisoning Israeli society and its institutions, the occupations - and the cancer of the settler movement - have totally wrecked Israel's foreign image and turned it into an international pariah. with a Palestinian state in place of the occupations, it's hard to see a Hamas in power - its raison d'etre is, and its credibility rests on, resistance, just like the Provos took the republican mantle from the traditional IRA in the early 70s.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

There's no coming back from this. Not for Israel and not for those who celebrated and defended these atrocities. Genocide leaves a permanent stain.

where droid and I probably differ is how thoroughly sick a society we think Israel has become

there is still the Israel of B'Tselem, Haaretz, +972, Breaking the Silence, Yesh Din, etc, an Israel with the ability to be self-critical and the courage to pursue peaceful coexistence. there are still some kind of brakes on the madness. Amichai Eliyahu was fired (he's the guy who was fired for talking about nuking Gaza) and Distal-Atbaryan - who is an absolute lunatic btw - was forced to resign.

my hope I guess is that Oct 7 wakes Israelis up not only how ruinous Netanyahu was personally, but his policies as well. maybe I have to believe that for personal reasons, idk, but there is a precedent - after their resounding victory in 67 the Israelis developed a belief, the conceptzia, that they were basically invincible and could treat the Arab govts with contempt. that was shattered in 73, leading to the downfall of Labor and eventually, peace with Egypt. Oct 7 shattered the illusion of indefinite occupation with minimal cost. I can only hope something better emerges the wake of the disillusionment.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

btw in re Israeli critiques of occupation, possibly the first and probably still the best is by Yeshayahu Leibowitz

written in 1968, eerie in its prescience. if you read anything on what the occupations have meant for Israel, make it this.

an excerpt:

Without an agreement imposed from the outside, our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without the prospect of ultimate resolution.

“Security” is a reality only where there is true peace between neighbors, as in the case of Holland/Belgium, Sweden/Norway, the United States/Canada. In the absence of peace there is no security, and no geographic-strategic settlement on the land can change this. There is no direct link between security and the territories.

Our security has been diminished rather than enhanced as a result of the conquests in this war.

Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions. After a few years there would be no Jewish workers or Jewish farmers. The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs.

As for the “religious” arguments for the annexation of the territories—these are only an expression, subconsciously or perhaps even overtly hypocritical, of the transformation of the Jewish religion into a camouflage for Israeli nationalism. Counterfeit religion identifies national interests with the service of God and imputes to the state—which is only an instrument serving human needs—supreme value from a religious standpoint.

 

[droid]

where droid and I probably differ is how thoroughly sick a society we think Israel has become

there is still the Israel of B'Tselem, Haaretz, +972, Breaking the Silence, Yesh Din, etc, an Israel with the ability to be self-critical and the courage to pursue peaceful coexistence. there are still some kind of brakes on the madness. Amichai Eliyahu was fired (he's the guy who was fired for talking about nuking Gaza) and Distal-Atbaryan - who is an absolute lunatic btw - was forced to resign.

my hope I guess is that Oct 7 wakes Israelis up not only how ruinous Netanyahu was personally, but his policies as well. maybe I have to believe that for personal reasons, idk, but there is a precedent - after their resounding victory in 67 the Israelis developed a belief, the conceptzia, that they were basically invincible and could treat the Arab govts with contempt. that was shattered in 73, leading to the downfall of Labor and eventually, peace with Egypt. Oct 7 shattered the illusion of indefinite occupation with minimal cost. I can only hope something better emerges the wake of the disillusionment.

Oh, I was thinking internationally. Im not making any predictions, but the longer this continues the more likely there will be some significant economic and diplomatic impacts. There's the Arab states, normalisation is completely dead there now. Israel does a shit ton of trade with the EU, its researchers get Horizon funding, they're in European sports leagues, the EBU... Business is business, but its gonna get very difficult to justify doing business with a country that is openly slaughtering thousands of innocent people whilst gloating about it on social media. The contrast with Ukraine is being felt quite viscerally I think.

As for internally. I saw there were some protests in Tel Aviv tonight, that took a lot of guts.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The ethnic cleansing hits just keep on coming



one of the many crazy things about the last few weeks is how the official position seems to have gone from "there were no expulsions, they left voluntarily" to "the expulsions were justified, let's do more". denial of intentional expulsions having been a cornerstone of Israeli PR for 75 years.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

@Mr. Tea and @shiels do you believe all of @droid's twitter claims to be true?

 

[droid]

I'm confused by this, if the nazis weren't as bad as Hamas because their genocide was ideological and they didnt really enjoy it, then surely the amazingly coincidental discovery of a pristine Arabic copy of Mein Kampf on the body of a dead militant implies some kind of moral improvement on the part of Hamas?

 

[version]

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Isaac Chotiner did an interview with a hardline settler activist, and it is nuts

If you have any interest in the religious settler mindset, read it

The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers

A leader of the settlement movement on expanding into Gaza, and her vision for the Jewish state.

www.newyorker.com

Only caveat I'd make is that religious settlers like her are minority tho a large one (~30-40%, something like that), and that a lot of them are actually there for things like cheaper and partially subsidized cost of living, a kind of securitized suburbia

But she represents the hard edge of settlers who are constantly setting up illegal hilltop outposts, attacking Palestinians and forcing them out, etc. And her part of the settler movement is in the one that's been in power with Netanyahu for the last 15 years, i.e. her neighbor Bezelal Smotrich, and will make any future two-state solution hugely more difficult.

 

[droid]

It's an unusual interview, in that its been published by a major US media outlet. A lot of what she says dovetails with official policy though, long before Netanyahu.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Yeah I saw that

Who does Israeli govt really expect to believe such ludicrous horseshit? Not to mention how it cheapens the Holocaust

 

[droid]

Americans and Brits and conservatives.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

A lot of what she says dovetails with official policy though, long before Netanyahu.

Some of it does, i.e. Sharon was Gush Emunim's most important patron.

Stuff like "from the Euphrates to the Nile" absolutely doesn't tho

Neither does the open endorsement of apartheid "accept our sovereignty without having civil rights or leave". Even the racist Basic Law didn't go there. It's like the whole reason they've avoided direct rule in the WB, so they can have "disputed territory" gray area fiction.

It's the difference between yr basic Revisionist Likud take and religiously driven fanaticism. The two have gone hand in hand for a long time but they're not the same thing.

Oh also, the difference between Netanyahu and his predecessors is the degree to which he's dependent on settler support to stay in power, rather than just supporting them for ideological reasons

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Nasrallah just gave a speech saying there won't be a full war

More and more if it does kick off in the north I think the escalation will be Israeli

I just don't put anything past this govt