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

padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
vimothy said:
for the current configuration of Israeli politics then. where do you see this ending up, in terms of outcomes that are immediately achievable? to me it seems that israel has two options, both of which are failure modes: occupy gaza, or abandon it to hamas (or whoever replaces them)
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to take second part first: those are not the only two options. they can turn it over to the PA, possibly with some kind of peacekeeping force. I don't think that's a particularly good option, largely bc Netanyahu has spent the last 15 years destroying the PA's credibility with Palestinians, which will only be reinforced by returning on the coattails of Merkava tanks, but it might be the only palatable option the U.S. will accept. if Trump gets back in, all bets are off bc he'll let them do whatever they want, but I don't see how the Israelis can drag this out for another full year.

in terms of Israeli politics, I'm not sure. the post-Oct 7 rightward spike is probably the same as after 9/11 rather than a lasting thing, but Israel has been gradually drifting rightward for decades and especially in the last ~20 years, for multiple reasons including demographic. I made a long post about that. the settlers and religious Zionists exert an outsize influence. it doesn't seem like there's a strong appetite for peace, but I could be wrong. that gets beyond my kind of topical granular knowledge. I think Netanyahu will drag the fighting out as long as possible bc once it's done he's probably gone. maybe Benny Gantz and whatever coalition he puts together will have more space to restart a peace process? the other problem is it could take a long time just to rebuild a credible Palestinian negotiating partner.

immediately achievable: they destroy more of Gaza, proclaim victory, and begin wrangling some kind of U.S.-mandated handover to the PA. idk what else there is. they don't have many options here.
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
droid said:
It's the combination of intent and action. The level of violence against civilians thats being meted out in Gaza, massacre after massacre, tens of thousands dead - combined with the clearly genocidal commentary from senior figures that qualifies this. I don't think I ever used the term to describe Israel's policies before now, but this seems unambiguous.
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And the other crucial factor is the cutting off of food, water, electricity and fuel, while sealing the exits. because that alone is a genocidal plan for the entire population
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
It's already been accurate to describe gaza as a concentration camp for years, as Giora Eiland (former head of Israeli national security council and IDF operations chief) did in 2004, even before the siege

But now it seems more accurate to describe it as a death camp.
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
To those questioning intent - the most difficult aspect of genocide to prove legally - there have been dozens of genocidal statements of intent. Its not just the Amalek one and "human animals". Along with the clear evidence of mass killing and the no food/water/fuel murder plan, this is why Craig Mokhiber described it as a "textbook case of genocide" when resigning from the UN.

Yaniv Cogan and Jamie Stern-Weiner collected and continue to update a long list of them, with links to sources. It shocked even me because we're not seeing many of these reported in western media. Here are a few:

- Yitzhak Kroizer MK (Otzma Yehudit, governing), 5 November: “the Gaza Strip should be flattened, and there should be one sentence for everyone there—death. We have to wipe the Gaza Strip off the map. There are no innocents there”

-
Deputy Head of the Civil Administration Yogev Bar Sheshet, 4 November:

Reporter: There are no civilians now in Al-Atatra neighbourhood [Beit Lahiya].

[...]

Sheshet: “Whoever harms Jews, whoever harms Israelis, we will destroy his houses. We will kill him wherever he lives. It does not pay off to harm the people of Israel, this is our message. Nothing left. Whoever returns here, if he returns here later, will see here scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future … They [Hamas—because they caused the Israeli military to do it] annihilated this place for many years to come” [from approx. 4 mins in]


- Galit Distel-Atbaryan MK (Likud, governing), 1 November: “Hate the enemy. Hate the monsters. [...] Spend your energy on one thing; wiping Gaza off the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters fly to the southern fence and flee into Egyptian territory. Or have them die. And have them die horribly. Gaza must be wiped out. And fire and billows of smoke must be upon the heads of the Nazis in Judea and Samaria. Jewish wrath that will cause the ground to shake around the world. We require a revengeful and cruel IDF. Anything less than that is immoral. Simply immoral”


- Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, 1 November: “The north of the strip—more beautiful than ever. Blowing up and flattening everything, simply a delight for the eyes. (A soldier in Gaza). We must speak about the day after. In my mind’s eye, we give away real estate to anyone who fought for Gaza over the years, and those who were evacuated from Gush Katif—god willing. (Without Merkhavim Muganim Dirati’im) [without the threat of rockets]”


- Former Deputy Commander IDF Gaza Division Amir Avivi, 29 October: “We are not taking any chances … When our soldiers are manoeuvring we are doing this with massive artillery, with 50 aeroplanes overhead destroying anything that moves”


- Former Likud MK and former Knesset Deputy Speaker Moshe Feiglin, 27 October (?): “Do not leave a stone upon a stone in Gaza. Gaza needs to turn into Dresden … Complete incineration. No more hope … Annihilate Gaza now! Now!”¹¹


- Revital “Tally” Gotlieb MK (Likud, governing), 23 October: “Without hunger and thirst among the Gazan population, we will not succeed in recruiting intelligence, [or] … in bribing people with food, drink, medicine, in order to obtain intelligence”


- Meirav Ben-Ari MK (Yesh Atid, opposition), 16 October: “And the children in Gaza—the children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves!”


- Revital “Tally” Gotliv MK (Likud, governing), 10 October: “Only an explosion that shakes the Middle East will restore this country’s dignity, strength, and security! It’s time to kiss doomsday. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza. Otherwise, we would have done nothing. Not with passwords, with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!”


- Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Arieh King, 17 October: “If the Prime Minister … cared, or his ministers from the State of Israel cared, there would have been 150,000 dead already in the Gaza Strip and not a single building in the Gaza Strip would have been left standing”

-
Advisor to Defence Minister Gallant, former Head of the National Security Council and former IDF operations chief Giora Eiland, 25 October: “We can’t, simply can’t, give in with anything related to the entry of fuel into Gaza. Yes, the Palestinians will present [to the world] babies who died in incubators as a result of a power outage due to the lack of fuel, but still, a necessary condition for creating distress for Hamas is a lack of fuel in the entire Strip. As we have already said—[it’s] an existential war, and we are facing a situation of either us or them”


- Minister for the Advancement of the Status of Women May Golan, 7 October: “All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza”

-----

This is just a small selection
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
padraig (u.s.) said:
but now they've so thoroughly insulated themselves, even in the territories, that they've lost touch, as well as become complacent

the previously unthinkable intelligence failure leading up to Oct 7 begins to make more sense
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Put like that, the parallels between 9/11 and 10/7 become even more apparent. In each case you've got a country that's basking in a false sense of invulnerability after the defeat of an enemy (fall of the USSR in one case, the Fatah-Hamas civil war rendering impossible a unified Palestinian government in the other), becomes complacent, and then suffers a massive terror attack that makes people say "How could such a thing happen?".
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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padraig (u.s.) said:
I again, encourage everyone to just stop engaging with the bad faith of this person

but for any lurkers who read this, it's a teachable moment

the genocide claims do not hinge in any way on hospital attacks. attacking hospitals is certainly inhumane, and the IDF has so far failed spectacularly - like where are the WMDs in 2003 level of failure - to provide evidence justifying its attacks on hospitals, but they are not genocidal of themselves.

the genocide claims hinge on dehumanization, collective punishment, and intent. Israeli politicians have put forth a tidal wave of public dehumanization (children of light vs children of darkness, vermin, etc) of Palestinians. the total siege of Gaza is collective punishment against an entire population. so those two are quite clearly true. intent is not quite as clear. there are genocidal elements in Israeli society, those elements are a part of the current Israeli govt, and there's a push, and not just from Ben-Gvir and Smotrich et al, to turn this war into an ethnic cleansing of Gaza and as much as they can get away with in the WB. I'm not sure to what degree that push will succeed and I suspect it's more of an improvised than a planned development - the Israelis don't really seem to have a plan in the political sense, and Netanyahu specifically is only concerned with his own survival - but it's a direct consquence of letting those racist elements run free in your governing coalition. either way, nothing to do with whether or not hospitals are Hamas "command nodes".
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There is a reason why the hospitals thing is being discussed a hundred times more than those other things you mention, precisely because they might reveal this purported intent, exemplify the dehumanisation, and be an object case in ethnic cleansing. They are of prime importance in the PR war; most of the more agitated comments and tweets here on this very thread are to do with those attacks, their nature and implications as to their significance.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
mixed_biscuits said:
There is a reason why the hospitals thing is being discussed a hundred times more than those other things you mention
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that's not even true in this thread, and not remotely true in the general coverage of the war

anyone who had made even a half-hearted effort to follow that coverage would know it's not remotely true

you just made it up out of thin air

this is why I again encourage everyone to just stop engaging with the bad faith of this person, as I will now go back to doing
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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padraig (u.s.) said:
that's not even true in this thread, and not remotely true in the general coverage of the war

anyone who had made even a half-hearted effort to follow that coverage would know it's not remotely true

you just made it up out of thin air

this is why I again encourage everyone to just stop engaging with the bad faith of this person, as I will now go back to doing
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You need to extricate yourself from those book stacks because the hospital events are quite a big thing.
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
Mixed biscuits isnt interested in evidence. It doesn't matter what you show him. He's decided his position in advance (slavish worship of the Israeli state and steadfast commitment to cheerleading genocide) and will desperately cling to anything he can to support that position no matter how absurd.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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maxi said:
Mixed biscuits isnt interested in evidence. It doesn't matter what you show him. He's decided his position in advance (slavish worship of the Israeli state and steadfast commitment to cheerleading genocide) and will desperately cling to anything he can to support that position no matter how absurd.
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I'm far less invested in Israel's success than anyone Jewish might be; what has annoyed me in this thread is the preponderance of poor quality reporting by proxy and the stockpiling of ammunition for a potential Jewish purge. Having said that, I think the quality has been better in the past few pages (apart from droid posting things in languages he doesn't understand), although the only guy who seems close to tackling Israeli realpolitik is Padraig. I see your big list of quotations and obviously they read badly, but I also see that you are hugely biased for some reason, so just expect that it's not the whole story.
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
Mixed biscuits thinks taking a position against something connotes bias. He thinks that if a jury finds a defendant guilty they are 'biased' against them
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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A further question is: even if people agree on some set of criteria by which it is collectively established that metonymically Israel has perpetrated genocide, what is the optimal extent to which this should be made a deal out of? How should this awareness be instrumentalised without it being weaponised and more bad things happening as a result. As I've said, if one group has suffered (attempted) genocide by another natural justice might dictate repayment in kind. @maxi if you think Israel is attempting a genocide of the Palestinians would the Palestinians be morally entitled to do the same? And would you want that, regardless of any justification?
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
maxi said:
Mixed biscuits thinks taking a position against something connotes bias. He thinks that if a jury finds a defendant guilty they are 'biased' against them
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Your analogy reveals your bias because it's too early to deliver a verdict given that there is such wide disagreement, and you have not been furnished with all the facts. If you insist on holding a monological view of things, even that should be considered provisional.
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
Jesus ok i might have to take back what i said earlier in the thread about thinking no one on dissensus was thick 😂
 
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