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

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
version said:
benjamin-netanyahu-%D7%91%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9F%D7%A0%D7%AA%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%94%D7%95.gif
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If he wasn't such an awful cunt I'd be tempted to call him 'Netanyoo-hoo!' here.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
germaphobian said:
in much of eastern europe, where i'm from, the pereception is that this particular conflit between israel and palestine is just an aspect of the larger conflict between the west on one side and all the bitter rougues, lead mostly by russia, on the other (with china still sort of on the sidelines). deffo there's a fair amount of cold war geopolitical thinking still involved, because during the soviet era palestine really used to be a russian proxy - mahmoud abbas even studied in patrice lumumba's peoples' friendship university of russia which was sort of breeding ground for all those third world proxy warriors - so there's this long historical connection. but leaving history aside, it would still be false to attribute this view just to eastern european paranaoid thinking regarding all thinks russia-connected. the fact is that hamas leaders have been visting russia quiet frequently (october of this year being the latest visit) and then you have the iranain connectiona and all that. so that's that.
and then, of course, you come to the staunchest palestine defenders themselves - worst of the worst, ungodly atrocity excibition - all those chomskies, finkelsteines and suchlike. norman finkelstein, which is the biggest boi of dem all, recently said that ukraine is russian land so they had the right to invade (can post link if needed) and then you have all the chompskies and phlomskies saying the same until you go "ya' knaw wha? fak palstine!" get it?
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It's a fun and, due to the complexity, kind of maddening exercise to try to draw out the regional geopolitics at work. You have Iran, which emerged as an important power following the Iraq war and is a key player in the Western-opposed geopolitical block which China leads. You have Saudi Arabia caught trying to move in two different directions at once: both towards the China-Russia-Iran axis via Chinese-sponsored rapprochement with Iran and the Opec Plus oil cartel with Russia, and towards the Western axis via US-sponsored rapprochement with Israel, in return for stronger military guarantees following Iranian / Houthi attacks on its oil fields. You have Qatar, which is, outside of Iran, the most important producer of natural gas in the region, as well as being the host of Hamas' leadership. You have a Chinese "belt and road" corridor passing through Iran and Turkey. You have a proposed alternative--now probably dead in the water--corridor connecting India to Greece via the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel. You have the UAE, which has become an important financial centre for Russian capital, and recently withdrew from the "Combined Maritime Forces", a US-led international task-force which protects global shipping routes. You have Israel's natural gas discoveries in the med, along with a proposed pipeline to Cyprus in order to ship its gas to Europe. You have the Turkish-Russian proxy war between Armenia and Azerbaijan--an important source of oil for Israel, and an importer of its weapons. You have Lebanon, which hosts Hezbollah and is the site of a possible second front in the war. You have Egypt, which is already the recipient of Israeli natural gas, shares a border with Gaza and is the birth-place of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is both the parent-organisation of Hamas and the source of the government whom the current Egyptian government overthrew in a military coup.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
vimothy said:
This is good - interview with Israeli historian Guy Laron on Netanyahu and current Israeli politics: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/october-war/
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yes that was quite good, thanks. if you missed it, I've posted several times in this thread about Netanyahu in Israeli politics and his alliance of RW populism to settlers and Haredim, the outsize influence of hardline religious settlers in the govt, his policy of strengthening Hamas and weakening Fatah for the express purpose of derailing negotiations for a Palestinian state, etc. the one major point he didn't mention was the racial dynamics of Israeli Jewish society, specifically Mizrahi/Ashkenazi.

I knew about the gas discoveries but I didn't know the details of the "transit state" and how they fit into his plans to turn Israel into a personal dictatorship thru bypassing the need for tax revenue. it's the missing piece in my conception of current Israeli politics and the opposition of the Netanyahu coalition (Mizrahi, Russian, settlers, Haredim) to the secular Ashkenazi middle-class, which is overrepresented in exactly the sectors of the society - tech, the arts, the reservist officer corps - most antithetical to his attempted subversion of Israeli democracy. not to get too far into the history, but Netanyahu can also be seen as the perhaps ultimate victor in the longrunning (primarily) Ashkenazi civil war between Jabotinksy/Begin/Shamir Revisionist (i.e. RW) and Ben-Gurion/Meir/Rabin Labor Zionism.

his point about strong U.S. military response being as much about the craziness and unreliability of the Israeli govt as a warning to Iran and its proxies is also interesting. and I agree the most likely military outcome is an Israeli tactical victory and strategic failure. even if it was possible to totally eradicate Hamas - which it probably isn't - security will continue to be an issue as long as there is no just and lasting peace solution. if it's not Hamas it will be someone else. the American govt solution of bringing in the Palestinian Authority, which already has little credibility with Palestinians, in the literal wake of Israeli tanks will only make the PA seem like even more of a puppet regime than it already does.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
shiels said:
It does feel like this is all just banter and abstract arguments, concepts, culture war …to you lads and that’s depressing as fuck
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yeah it sucks that every serious topic on dissensus is like this now

it's not even discussion, topic itself is irrelevant, biscuits et al just turn up to whatever thread is extant to recite the same bullshit

reminds me of the inevitable handful of Trotskyists who turn up any large anti-war or whatever demonstration or conference. the cause is irrelevant, they're just there to recite the party line at anyone naive enough to listen. it's like that crossed with the kind of engagement farming you see on Twitter all the time, trying to get people to engage so you can lead them down an endless line of sealioning nonsense.

eventually you just have to skim past it as most of us do. it's like debating a flat earther, there's no point.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
back on topic, the censure of Rashida Tlaib

you expect petty hyperpartisan nonsense from MJT etc but 22 Democrats voting for it is an embarrassment

just further proof that there's no acceptable way to publicly espouse the Palestinian cause in the American political class and media

she's consistently made every single qualifier - condemning Oct 7, antisemitism, etc - that they demand and it wasn't enough

can't remember when I've seen a party so wildly out of touch with its base
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
vimothy said:
It's a fun and, due to the complexity, kind of maddening exercise to try to draw out the regional geopolitics at work.
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there's a long-running tendency for observers to overstate the geopolitics tho. obv Israeli and Palestinian actors operate in that context, but I think they should be viewed primarily in terms of their own motivations unless there's some compelling reason to do otherwise. i.e. the initial rush to make it an Iranian operation despite both Hamas and the Iranians saying it was not the case. or viewing Israel as an American outpost and ignoring its domestic politics and societal issues. Oct 7 was carried to further Hamas's aims as Hamas understands them. getting too deep into the geopolitics is how you wind up like that person a few pages back making the ludicrous claim that this war should primarily be viewed as an extension of Russia v the West in a [checks notes] clash of civilizations, which wasn't remotely true even during the Cold War, let alone now.

if anything the intensity of the American military response shows that, as the guy says in the interview, the Israeli govt can't be trusted on its own to act in a way that conforms to regional geopolitics without touching off a larger war. which is absolutely correct btw, a sane Israeli govt would be not doing things like letting Itamar Ben-Gvir arm settlers en masse or appointing Zvi Sukkot to oversee the West Bank.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
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.
 
shiels

shiels

_
padraig (u.s.) said:
yeah it sucks that every serious topic on dissensus is like this now

it's not even discussion, topic itself is irrelevant, biscuits et al just turn up to whatever thread is extant to recite the same bullshit

reminds me of the inevitable handful of Trotskyists who turn up any large anti-war or whatever demonstration or conference. the cause is irrelevant, they're just there to recite the party line at anyone naive enough to listen. it's like that crossed with the kind of engagement farming you see on Twitter all the time, trying to get people to engage so you can lead them down an endless line of sealioning nonsense.

eventually you just have to skim past it as most of us do. it's like debating a flat earther, there's no point.
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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
 
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