chava
Well-known member
Ok, I read you wrong, ease up now.
Since it's been a while since we had an Israel/Palestine thread...
- Thread starter Mr. Tea
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Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Yeah I agree with this position, as I understand, IE a history of occupation/annexation explains this harsh conflict, but by no means justifies what we’re seeing (EG the civilians at that psytrance/freedom festival being raped and slaughtered).
I don’t know much about the current situation, or about Hamas in particular, but I do remember a bit from the Israel/Palestine conflict course I took in college, mostly about the geopolitical project of Zionism.
I could be oversimplifying this, so please someone correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems the central difficulty in the wests perception of all this is as follows: the west would tend to view occupying forces as oppressors (EG Russia today), but because the Jewish diaspora suffered so much in the mid 20th century, Israel implicitly gets a pass to occupy Palestine? Complicated more, perhaps, by western Christian dogmas/prophecies about the role of Israel, which I gather largely define the US’s foreign policies regarding Israel, but I don’t know details and I could be wrong.
Again I know there is a lot more nuance to it, but I’m wondering if anyone else here thinks this is part of the reason the west (or at least the US) seems to have such difficulty in parsing out this conflict in terms of who deserves to be living there and recognized as a state.
droid
Well-known member
It complicates things - but no, thats not really it. The US supported Israel diplomatically in 1948, but military support only really kicked in after 1967 and that was primarily for geopolitical reasons as a bulwark against left wing Soviet backed Arab nationalist regimes that sought to wrest control of 'the glittering prize' of middle east energy supplies from Western powers. This was part of a wider strategy that included the Iranian coup, Suez, the entire Eisenhower doctrine, and then onto the Iran/Iraq war, Lebanese intervention, first gulf war etc.
Its all complicated by internal US politics, the rise of the religious right and Christian fundamentalist support for Israel as the harbinger of the rapture, and ofc now, general anti-Muslim sentiment, especially after 911, the far right ethno-nationalism of swathes of the GOP which sees Israel as the ideal model for an ethno-state, plus of course the long term integration of Israel into a US oriented global techno-military complex.
There are of course, thousands of threads you can pull here, but this isn't really about morality or guilt - at least not as far as the people who make decisions are concerned. The reality is far more prosaic. Israel is strategically, economically and militarily useful to the West.
Its all complicated by internal US politics, the rise of the religious right and Christian fundamentalist support for Israel as the harbinger of the rapture, and ofc now, general anti-Muslim sentiment, especially after 911, the far right ethno-nationalism of swathes of the GOP which sees Israel as the ideal model for an ethno-state, plus of course the long term integration of Israel into a US oriented global techno-military complex.
There are of course, thousands of threads you can pull here, but this isn't really about morality or guilt - at least not as far as the people who make decisions are concerned. The reality is far more prosaic. Israel is strategically, economically and militarily useful to the West.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
How is having a massive PR strategy devoted to obscuring your atrocities somehow better, or worse, than proclaiming them openly? Israeli govt has been doing this literally since its inception. Go look up hasbara.
and that's an absolutely absurd statement. while you're at it, go look up the massacres and expulsions of the 1948 War, the reprisal operations of the 50s and 60s, the futher displacements after 1967, Sabra and Shatila, the literal apartheid of the West Bank, etc. it's impossible to even begin talking about this without talking about the land. Palestinian violence is and always has been a direct byproduct of expulsion from the land - two more things to look up, Nabka and Naksa. it is impossible to even begin talking about this without talking about the land.
there is nothing Hamas fears more than a solution that allows Palestinians to live in dignity and peace. it wouldn't stop the violence - nothing can do that after 75 years of bad blood - but it would cripple Hamas and other militants. people who can raise their children with hope for the future are a hell of a lot less likely to support this bullshit. people who have nothing, have nothing to lose. the best way to increase Israeli safety would be to improve the living conditions of Palestinians.
none of it - the bombings, kidnappings, Munich, Coastal Road, whatever incident you want to name - is ever "justified", but if you grind people into dust for decades, beat and imprison them, kill their children, deny them economic opportunity, take away any hope for a better life, violence is the inevitable outcome. Israeli leadership knows this. They've always known it. David Ben-Gurion was talking about it more than a century ago. droid posted the Moshe Dayan quote about 67. They know it now. Their strategy has always been to keep the territories at a manageable level of violence - hence the disengagement from Gaza, but not the West Bank, bc protecting settlements in the former was strategically untenable.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
That's what this attack is really about for Hamas I think, making Gaza unmanageable for Netanyahu and showing that to the world, but specifically the Sunni govts. the 2nd biggest fear of Hamas is those Sunni govts making normalization deals with Israel as UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan have done and Saudi Arabia is working toward. The calculation for those govts is basically: Israel is unbeatable militarily, normalization will bring economic and diplomatic gains with Israel and more importantly the U.S., so if you can survive the domestic backlash, maybe normalization is worth it. obviously Hamas can't defeat Israel in a direct military confrontation, but maybe it can make the occupation so difficult and costly as to be untenable. they're trying to change that calculation by saying "if you continue supporting us, we can achieve a victory on our terms".
important sidenote: Hamas leadership probably thinks they can fight the IDF to at least a draw in Gaza itself? Hizballah showed it can be done. terrain favors the defender. current state of military technology - missiles, drones, etc - favors the defender, as we've seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, especially in such a dense urbanized environment. this attack also looks a lot like bait a la 9/11.
important sidenote: Hamas leadership probably thinks they can fight the IDF to at least a draw in Gaza itself? Hizballah showed it can be done. terrain favors the defender. current state of military technology - missiles, drones, etc - favors the defender, as we've seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, especially in such a dense urbanized environment. this attack also looks a lot like bait a la 9/11.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I think that's a common position on the pro-Israel side - and not just the Holocaust and other historical instances of antisemitism, but anti-Jew prejudice that's ongoing today (witness chava's repeated attempts to derail the discussion here by talking about the obviously unacceptable abuse of visibly Jewish people in Europe - as if anyone here were saying "European Jews will just have to take it on the chin and that's fine.")
OTOH, on the pro-Palestine side, I've seen people make the exact opposite argument, that since Jews have been the victim of genocide within living memory, they should therefore "know better", and that what Israel does is therefore worse, not less bad, on that account. Which seems a bit like, I dunno, considering a teenager with antisocial behaviour problems who's come from a neglectful, abusive family to be more responsible for their actions than one that's come from a secure, loving home but who just loves causing a bit of trouble.
I don't think this is a thing in Europe, but I understand Christian eschatology, especially among Evangelicals, is a big part of public pro-Israel support among US Christians. It's weird, because many of these people are actually pretty antisemitic themselves, but I think it can be summed up as a belief that "Jews in the wrong place" are a bad thing - i.e. in the USA, owning/manipulating banks, media orgs, Hollywood, etc. - but are OK in their correct place, i.e. their designated ethnostate, coinciding largely with the Biblical Israel/Judea, keeping the previously mentioned savage hordes at bay and preparing the way for the Second Coming.
Frankly the idea that people with ideas like this form a substantial and powerful constituency in the world's sole remaining military superpower is pretty terrifying.
droid
Well-known member
Yep, the parallels are there - an inconceivable, ruthlessly symbolic attack against a powerful foe that destroys their arrogant assumption of invincibility and draws them into a succession of unwinnable conflicts.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
I think it is/has been about morality or guilt for plenty of individuals, including famously Harry Truman
was also much easier to view the Israelis as underdogs in 1948
if you're only talking about state policy post-67 then absolutely morality has a lot less to do with it than realpolitik consideration
and if you're talking European policy then post-56 if not earlier. Suez War had zero to do with morality or guilt.
chava
Well-known member
Not to mention the only functioning democracy in the region
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Israel should be in Germany tbf
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
not only in the sense of unwinnable conflicts, but of restructuring a society the way that 9/11 restructured American society and psyche
the implications are so enormous they cannot be overstated
when I first heard the news I thought of Kfar Etzion in 48 but as the scale became clear I realized it had to be 9/11
the other thing I thought of was the initial Zapatista uprising in 94, parallel in its stunning suddenness and symbolism, but different in basically every single other way
chava
Well-known member
No, it's a wrong assessment. Violence does not necessarily rise from oppression. The Jewish diaspora would have been much more violent if so
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Please show me a single place in the world where diaspora Jews are living under conditions even remotely comparable to Gaza/WB.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
Lebanon is a democracy that shares a land border with Israel
not a perfect one certainly but literally a functioning democracy
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
you really are ignorant
you know who was historically famous for being violent under oppressive military occupation?
the Jews, under Roman occupation
and Jews of the diaspora almost never lived in conditions comparable to Palestinians, and when they did, some of them fought back
the Warsaw Uprising, the Bielskis, the United Partisan Organization, etc
"Only functioning democracy" sounds a lot like only white people can handle democracy unlike those stinky Arabs. As Padraig said, you're pretty ignorant. Whole lot of different Arab peoples have crying out for democracy for years and years, that's essentially what the Arab Spring was about.
yyaldrin
in je ogen waait de wind
i'm also surprised by this, plus, how were they able to plan and prepare this without being noticed by us/israeli intelligence?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Arabs, and Iranians, and Kurds, etc.
And let's not forget that many of these countries have authoritarian governments - several of them absolute or near-absolute monarchies of the sort not seen in Europe since Napoleon's day - that Western governments routinely criticise but are happy to buy oil from and sell weapons to. Or, in Iran's case, that seized power in a revolution against a US/UK-installed puppet government.