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

T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
chava said:
Always stylish to quote oneself.
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the worst of all these aesthetics as politics arguments you love is, that whilst a certain species of spectacularly awful idiot has been elevated to the rank of commodity-genius, many who are far less idiotic have been labelled scoundrels and fools much more than they deserve.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
thirdform said:
I don't really want to respond to this massively because I can guess who it is and I'd rather not engage with those types anymore than I am absolutely obliged to but settling and settler colonialism are not identical. This was actually an argument in early labour zionism, particularly from Bir Borochov who died days after the Balfour declaration. As far as he saw it, mass colonisation by charter as such would retard the development of the israeli-palestinian economy. What he called for was cultural assimilation of the Arabs (natives of Palestine) and heavy investment of Jewish capital (which was the wrong prognosis but that's neither here nor there.)

the bombings or hamas' bellicose nature, or even the events of black september are peripheral to this. If you read Hanan Ashrawi on this you can see why she was so furious at the reconcilliation letter which granted PLO recognition of the state of Israel, (very good) but the Israeli government only recognised the PLO as the legitimate authority of the Palestinian people, not palestinian statehood. It would be like England we don't recognise the Scottish state, of course, but we recognise the SNP (and only the SNP) as the legitimate representative of the Scottish people. It is doubly ironic that every tom dick and harry in the anglo world has adopted this self-hating inverted nazi paranoid idea that people in the middle east want to nuke israel off the map when that has been Israeli policy wrt Palestine written concretely.

There is no real state solution to this conflict anymore. The single state solution is what is taking place, the generalisation of apartheid to all of historical Palestine, what one might want to call greater Israel (although I am personally reluctant to use that term.) The two state solution is so unlikely simply because of the overwhelming settler ownership of land. How can you ask people to have sovereignty over lands they don't own, and what they own is 15-20% of their historical territories? This is not a state, it's not even a semi-state, it's just a generalisation of the conditions of gaza.

I know you hate blaming the US and whilst I share your sentiments this is really a global imperialist conflict. So far as Palestinians can coexist peacefully with Israelis (I'm almost tempted to say we but I won't grant the zionists the honour of considering their secular nationalist project to be in any way theological) an entire shift of nato, the arab countries and the middle east is necessary. The fact of the matter is, there is no good solution, and your friend engaging in whataboutism under the guise of criticism is heinous. We have to be sober and reasonable here.
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To add to what I said, it is not merely the Netanyahu government who is to blame here. To take another example, if the question of bourgeois self-determination was available for say, Turkish Kurdistan, my political preference for survival (although I hasten to add I'm a communist and against all nationalisms, including Kurdish) would be an autonomous republic, or an autonomous devolution within the turkish republic. Mostly because unlike say Iranian or Iraqi kurds who tend to speak farsi and Arabic, we speak Turkish, and our culture is inextricably anatolian, and attempting us to unite us with the rest of the Kurdish people in one fell swoop would precipitate war and an extremely brutal form of nationalist social engineering. So, self-determination for us within the Turkish state as autonomy is a situation that we are able to rule over our own affairs whilst being unified with the Turkish state at the central level, and our political choices are binding on them as much as theirs are binding on us. Rather than the situation we have now where we elect mps from the bottom but once that is done, we are entirely subordinate to ankara with no form of exerting any pressure.

No such option is at all possible in Palestine. It is not a case of a certain section of the historical palestinian population attaining statehood, and then oppressing an internal population, like happens within Turkey.

Perhaps if Israel remained at the level of its pre-1967 borders, that might be possible, but that would require a speculative timeline suitable for careerist labour party hacks and there is no need to talk about that, unless you are in the alliance for workers liberty, which I am not.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
thirdform said:
It is doubly ironic that every tom dick and harry in the anglo world has adopted this self-hating inverted nazi paranoid idea that people in the middle east want to nuke israel off the map when that has been Israeli policy wrt Palestine written concretely.
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I don't think most people in the US and UK literally believe everyone in the Middle East literally believes that. But if some people think it, it's not an idea that's come out of nowhere: it's what the Arab states bordering Israel tried to do in 1967, and much more recently it's been a position echoed by the Iranian leadership.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
doing politics through the spectacle media propaganda of middle eastern state leaders, a bad anglo-american habit!

As if arab, Iranian and Turkish leaders don't tailor this shit to get a maximum reaction. Look at what people believe possible, not what they want, which is always ephemeral and unstable.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
thirdform said:
doing politics through the spectacle media propaganda of middle eastern state leaders, a bad anglo-american habit!

As if arab, Iranian and Turkish leaders don't tailor this shit to get a maximum reaction. Look at what people believe possible, not what they want, which is always ephemeral and unstable.
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Mate, I'm not saying it's a justified belief or anything, or that every Muslim leader has the full backing of all or even most of the people he rules over. I'm simply saying that these things happened and will have been noticed by people outside the Middle East.

And at the same time, there is clearly a lot of anti-Israel feeling in many of these countries, no? There must be factories that exist purely to churn out Israeli flags just so people can burn them.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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These two fellows, Palestine and Israel, need to find common cause. Putin should declare war on Palreal or RealPal and then the Palestinian and Israeli brothers will have to fight together in comradeship thereby realising just how much they have in common e.g. where they want to live.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
mixed_biscuits said:
Two wrongs make a right?
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The point is not that killing kids is fine, whoever does it. Obviously. Nobody here is suggesting it's fine when Hamas does it, for a start, so you are, as usual, tilting at windmills here.

The point is that Hamas's animosity towards Israel has obviously not come out of nowhere. Even if you ignore the terrible conditions Gazans endure under 'normal' circumstances, just take a look at the fatality figures for the 15-year-period shown in those charts. More than 20 times as many deaths on the Palestinian side. Including, if it needs pointing out, a huge number of children.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Mr. Tea said:
The point is not that killing kids is fine, whoever does it. Obviously. Nobody here is suggesting it's fine when Hamas does it, for a start, so you are, as usual, tilting at windmills here.

The point is that Hamas's animosity towards Israel has obviously not come out of nowhere. Even if you ignore the terrible conditions Gazans endure under 'normal' circumstances, just take a look at the fatality figures for the 15-year-period shown in those charts. More than 20 times as many deaths on the Palestinian side. Including, if it needs pointing out, a huge number of children.
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I didn't realise one baby's death is more acceptable if fewer of its co-citizens died. Yet more strange calculus.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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As long as Biden is at the helm obv Israel won't budge an inch. Biden brings the gun to the knife fight. Strangely enough Biden gets a bit of a free pass on this on Consensus.com (hat tip Professor Chava). Here is your good buddy Biden in his malfunctioning grammar:

You know, there are moments in this life — and I mean this literally — when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world.

The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend. The bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas — a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.

This was an act of sheer evil.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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WashYourHands said:
wicked but Jesus stated the only way to the divine was through Him

nothing humble there but Dissensus certainly appears your cross

anyway, back to the irresolvable horror
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This is why it's irresolvable (in the way the anti-Zionists would want, at least); Biden again:

Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond — indeed has a duty to respond — to these vicious attacks.

I just got off the phone with — the third call with Prime Minister Netanyahu. And I told him if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.
 
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