I am nauseated by the American pretense that Israel is anything other than an expansionist ethno-state.
It makes sense, because the US is also an expansionist ethno-state. Like knows like.
Nobody, and I mean nobody ought to be able to profess real surprise at Netanyahu’s play of his final hole card, threatening to annex most of the west bank. Basically, he was so desperate to stay in power that he was willing to gamble the long-term game in order to gain influence in the short term. There has been remarkably little commentary in the US media about it, especially when you compare it to coverage of Russia annexing Crimea.
Let me re-introduce to you one of my terms: “emergent conspiracy”; that’s when there’s an uncoordinated move in a certain direction that appears as though it may be coordinated; it’s not a plot but rather an expression of people’s desires for action filling in an opportunity where it happens to present itself. If you have enough people who want things to work out in a certain way, and each of them gives a little nudge – it will happen. Whether or not there is a majority or a formal political process is irrelevant; this is part of the reason why I reject the idea that democracy is a good political system: what you are really measuring is not the will of a majority, so much as the will of people who are willing to act. When you move that down the dial to people who are willing to stop at nothing then they are going to have a massively disproportionate say in events as they occur. Keep that idea in mind when you watch what is happening in the US right now, and what has happened and will happen in Israel. Both of those countries harbor toxic minorities that will stop at nothing, which consequently out-power people who would otherwise act slowly and deliberately. This is why, I believe, all human politics ultimately fail. For one thing, if those energetic people who are willing to stop at nothing go on the offense, everyone else is immediately on the defense and cedes the initiative to the energetic and aggressive.
This appears to me to be how it has always been: militarists will arm up, stomp you, and declare themselves your king while you are still scheduling the meeting to discuss how to deal with militarism and understand what they are so upset about.
I have always been deeply suspicious of the trope we often hear which is that any criticism of Israel is unjustified because the country is under existential threat: they are fighting for their lives and therefore opposition to any aspect of that fight reduces their chance of survival and therefore you support the slaughter of jews. It’s an offensively stupid argument that any bank robber could also make – and it’s no excuse for being unwilling to negotiate in good faith. At this point, someone comes along and says that Israel does negotiate in good faith, it’s the arabs that are unwilling to accept a deal that amounts to “accept a fraction of what used to be yours” and it’s easy to tell who has been negotiating in good faith when you look at the map above. It doesn’t matter if the arabs are or not, because the Israelis rather obviously are not and never have been.
Then, someone often comes along and says that Israel is the middle east’s sole democracy and we must support democracy, whether it’s Israel or the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of North Korea, which also claimed to be a democracy. That’s also a risible argument since – as the republican party in the US has been showing us – you’re not a “democracy” if only a privileged minority can vote. I’d go a step further and say that you’re not a democracy if there is any gerrymandering or voter exclusion at all because how then can you claim to reflect anything but the will of a manipulated majority of some of the people. Netanyahu’s plan for annexation is as disgusting as a North Carolina election; he proposes to take the land where palestinians aren’t – thereby not gaining any new palestinian voters. It would be as though the american southern states, after reconstruction, moved all the black people to Atlanta and then made it a special elections district that can’t vote. That’s not a very funny example because I just described Washington, DC.
If you combine Israel, Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, jews would not be a majority in the new country. So: Israel can only maintain its control on ‘democracy’ as an ethno-state if it only annexes the areas which have already been declared off-limits to palestinians.
Do you think, for one single moment, that that happened by accident? It’s as “accidental” as a North Carolina gerrymander.
There’s more precise analysis of what’s been going on in an article in the New Yorker [ny]
Typically, those maps made Jewish settlements and outposts look tiny compared to the areas where the Palestinians lived. The new map in the briefing book was different. It showed large swaths of territory that were off limits to Palestinian development and filled in space between the settlements and the outposts. At that moment, Lowenstein told me, he saw “the forest for the trees” – not only were Palestinian population centers cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained. Lowenstein’s team did the math. When the settlement zones, the illegal outposts, and the other areas off limits to Palestinian development were consolidated, they covered almost sixty per cent of the West Bank.
See, if I show you a map of the illegal settlements, then there are great big swaths of land that are not occupied by settlements: it looks like Israel’s zone of control is much smaller than it is. If I show you a map that includes regions where palestinians can’t go (large regions around each settlement, in fact) suddenly palestinian regions become a map of tiny little islands. And those tiny little islands are trivially easy to suffocate if you’re a militarily superior power that controls the movement of anything into and out of those zones, including water and food. Netanyahu’s annexation plan just skips to the chase scene; the plan all along (which Netanyahu has been working toward for decades) was slow death by a thousand cuts. Now, it’s time for one big chop.
Like most rationalists, I steer away from talking about Israel because, in my opinion, it is difficult to talk about Israel without being critical of Israeli politics and risking being accused of anti-semitism for daring to criticize it as an ethno-state. You know, I’m sick of that shit and I’m not doing that dance any more: those of us who criticized South Africa back in the 80s were not criticizing the white people in South Africa for being white, we were criticizing them for what they were doing, which happened to be centered around their interpretation of whiteness. I’m not criticizing Israel because I hate jews, I am criticizing Israel because I hate what Israel is doing. Oh, it’s mostly jews doing that? So fucking what. They should stop.
All of this nonsense about a two-state solution has been known to be nonsense since the late 1930s. Enter, emergent conspiracy: I am not saying that there’s a big secret play-book that each successive ultra-conservative Israeli politician gets read into, it’s that that’s the direction Israel has been going all along, and you don’t get to be an israeli politician if you’re not aligned with that ultimate goal. Which means, to the extent that Israel is a democracy at all, the majority has been pushing in that direction all along. All this hand-wringing about “why can’t we have peace?” can be answered by the Indigenous Peoples who used to own the United States: they got pushed back, pushed back, slaughtered when they stood up, and crushed when they knelt. Either way, slaughter or crushing, there was never any intent to have a “two state solution” in the territory the US occupies, either. There was never a secret book passed down from president to president that has a line-item saying that “our strategy is ethnic cleansing” but it wasn’t necessary: you didn’t get that job unless you were aligned with the general thrust of US politics, which was and always has been ethnic cleansing. Israel’s the same deal. And everyone knew that back when the British were in the middle of fucking up the break-apart of the Ottoman Empire. The British felt that palestine was a pain in the neck, and the zionists were getting awfully annoying and it was time for the Brits to step out of the way and let the stronger party win. And the Irgun and the Stern Gang were going to kill a bunch of Brits – as many as it took – to get them to leave so they could displace the arabs and take over the land.
When Bernard Law Montgomery put down the arab revolt [1936-1939] [wik] said:
The jew murders the arab, and the arab murders the jew. This is what is going on in Palestine right now and it will go on for the next 50 years, in all probability.
Also: note the date. Most American students are allowed to confuse themselves about when Israel founded itself, and when zionists began ethnically cleansing Palestine. Because of the (understandable) focus on the crimes of white christian nazis, we connected the Holocaust with the founding of Israel. That’s not correct, at all. Israel, in fact, was being founded as an ethno-state starting well before Germany made its horrible historic blunder. The Holocaust and Israel are connected, of course, because it certainly gave Israelis an understanding of the threat of global anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is another stupid form of racism and should be fought and crushed whenever it’s encountered, but we shouldn’t preference it as the stupid form of racism: an ethno-state that is deliberately and maliciously displacing a population because it’s not the preferred ethnicity is, in fact, exactly what the nazis and the United States and South Africa and Rhodesia and, and, and, and, … did. That is has been going on throughout time doesn’t make it any less stupid and malicious and nobody rational supports ethnic cleansing and ethno-statism because, by definition, building a state on ethnicity is not rational. Ethnicity is imaginary; it has reality only in people’s minds and in their politics.
Unfortunately, we probably need to educate ourselves more about what is going on in Israel, as we had to when we came to understand South Africa and Rhodesia. Once we educate ourselves about this stuff, there is no way to continue to support it. [I like to imagine that any sufficient introspection about nationalism will also cure us of it, in general] We need to learn how to dodge the distracting accusations of anti-semitism and stay focused on the actual facts of what is going on, and why, and force the supporters to defend the facts of the actions that are being taken. For one thing, the US complained bitterly about Russia annexing Crimea, and placed sanctions (and seized the bank assets of…) Russian oligarchs close to Putin. We should be asking why the US is not sanctioning Netanyahu and everyone around him, for threatening to do what the Russians did. Oh, it’s different? How and why is it different? We need to be asking our peers, “Did you support divestment from apartheid South Africa? Then you support BDS, I assume? The world does not need more ethno-states.”
Here is an interesting resource on this stuff. I’m a bit “iffy” about it because I wonder about the podcaster’s agenda and where they are coming from, because I worry always that I am about to gobble down a bunch of carefully spun propaganda – but his history checks out. The interpretation of that history is, of course, up to us, but I think he’s being factual and fair. It’s fascinating stuff. Darryl Cooper does a podcast called Martyr Made which is sort of similar to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History i.e.: it’s long and detailed and full of fascinating crunchy facts and dates and stories. He has a series called Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem [apc] it’s six episodes each of which is several hours long – do not undertake this stuff lightly – but it gives him time to go through all the characters and actions from the beginning(s) of zionism to today. I guarantee you that you will find the Israel he describes unrecognizable compared to the Israel of today, which constantly asks us for pity and special treatment. There’s a lot of bombings and some throat-cuttings and shootings – but the bombings and shootings are mostly aimed at British soldiers and civilians. As I said, it’s really interesting stuff. The reason I’d encourage you to give those episodes a listen is because there’s a trajectory running through them, and that trajectory is people who will stop at nothing. People who make Netanyahu look like a complete wimp. People who are familiar with, if not comfortable with, both sides of genocide: they’re comfortable pointing a finger of accusation at the nazis and they’re comfortable covering it up and defending it.
If you give Cooper’s podcast a listen, I expect you will see the current situation as I do: Netanyahu’s annexation move is the inevitable end-game of decisions that were put into motion in the 1900s. The Palestinians, from that moment on, were as fucked as the Indigenous Peoples of North America were when Columbus’ gold raiders waded ashore and the locals were not willing to pay the price it would have cost to slaughter them.
These are the grand ebbs and flows of history, and they are why I don’t feel much love for humanity. Paraphrasing Santayana: once you come to understand some of history, you’ll see that it’s just going to be an endless cycle of humans being horrible to eachother until they scour the planet of life or a great big asteroid wipes them out.
If any of you do bite it off and chew up that podcast, I’d really appreciate any comments you may have on it. I don’t think it’s inaccurate and it seems to me to be pretty straightforward history, but I may be misunderstanding it. Help my confirmation bias?
Say the words “1967 borders” in some places, and you will immediately be labelled an “anti-semite who wants to reopen the ovens!” The claim of “state security” is farcical. A stable Palestinian inside the 1967 borders would be welcomed by other countries in the region. You don’t even have to touch on racism, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide to accurately define Israel’s actions. The plan all along has been petty revenge: Make the Palestinians wander the world homeless for 2000 years, just like they did.
If all the Israeli squatters were sent back home and the 1967 borders made permanent, the population density of Palestine would be almost twice that of Israel. There’s plenty of space for everyone to live.
Palestine: 4,550,000 people, 6,220 km², approx. 731/km²
Israel: 9,000,000 people, 22,072 km², approx. 408/km²
Squatters are people living illegally on other people’s land, which accurately describes “Israeli settlers”. Use of the word “settler” is itself propaganda, the false claim that the Nakba didn’t happen and no one was living there. Nakba denial is as repugnant as holocaust denial. Small wonder many hate Norman Finkelstein and try to deny him tenure.
Intransitive@#1:
The plan all along has been petty revenge: Make the Palestinians wander the world homeless for 2000 years, just like they did.
That seems a little elaborate. when straight-up human greed is also an explanation. No revenge required.
Another trope I’ve often heard is: “Well, Israel is a reality now and you can’t just say ‘go back to the way things were’ so what’s your suggestion?” My usual response is: “Suppose a murderer has just shot someone. They can’t argue ‘hey I can’t go back to the way things were…’ and they can’t make their actions my responsibility. Saying ‘what’s your suggestion’ is trying to make me own a part of a problem that entirely belongs to the Israelis.”
[if Emperor Marcus Ranum I was in charge of the world, European antisemites would have been crushed long ago so none of this bullshit would have happened. Alternatively, if the nazis had happened, I’d have carved a province off of the former Germany and given it to the jews for their homeland. A particularly nice part of Germany, too.]
Although not accurate, “illegal immigrants” – or “aliens”, if the term’s still in use – might be an interesting label to use on account of how it should resonate with Republicans / Trump fans in the US. No need to bother with subtlety when pointing out their hypocrisies (they’ll be ignored anyway).
There is also a concerted effort to get countries and organisations to accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which makes almost any support of Palestinians anti-semetic (some irony there), see the struggle in the British Labour Party. It makes me fucking furious because it very much takes the line that any criticism of Israel is ant-semitic which is just dishonest and isn’t even supported by all Jewish organisations or individuals. But again challenge the definition or try to clarify that it doesn’t exclude support of the Palestinians and you are anti-semitic.
Good luck with that. A good start is no longer needing to give a shit about a career or reputation.
Not specifically related to Israel but to the more general failings of “democracy” (I LOVED that third paragraph on emergent conspiracy):
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/08/shawn-rosenberg-democracy-228045#superComments
“Compared with the harsh demands made by democracy, which requires a tolerance for compromise and diversity, right-wing populism is like cotton candy. Whereas democracy requires us to accept the fact that we have to share our country with people who think and look differently than we do, right-wing populism offers a quick sugar high. Forget political correctness. You can feel exactly the way you really want about people who belong to other tribes.”
There’s no business like Shoah business.
As best I can tell, Israel is under existential threat. The Hamas charter specifically states that Hamas wants to get rid of all the Jews, and in the predominantly Arab countries surrounding Israel, blatantly antisemitic “kill the Jews” propaganda is a mainstay of children’s television.
On the other hand, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians looks an awful lot like some part of the Israeli government thought there was nothing wrong with the Final Solution that couldn’t be solved by a global search-and-replace that turned the character string “Jew” into the character string “Palestinian”.
I have no fucking clue what should be done re: Israel. Seems to me that somebody is going to get genocided regardless of what the US does or doesn’t do, and the only thing the US might be able to affect is which group it happens to.
cubist (#9) – What can be done? Nothing, because the US’s economic collapse is inevitable. And as with the USSR suffered political collapse, the US’s client states will be quickly cast because the US can’t afford it anymore. Israel can say goodbye to that US$300million in annual military weaponry.
When, not if, the US collapses, Israel won’t end up like Cuba, which survived the end of the USSR because of its education and farming systems and having enough friendly states to trade with. Israel has as many friends as North Korea does, and will be begging for a place at the negotiation table if the supply of weapons runs out.
Israel is getting what it wants without negotiations and is protected from consequences (re: the US veto on everything), so it has no need to try and negotiate honestly. It has repeatedly violated “peace accords” that it signed, and the world bought the propaganda when Palestine was falsely blamed.
By comparison, England succeeded in ending the IRA because John Major had the spine to tell the Irish, “Publicly, we’ll keep pretending ‘no negotiations without disarmement’. Privately, what do you want?” Major (and later Blair) negotiated with and treated the Irish as equal partners, and accepted that the Irish would never give up their claim to Northern Ireland. Israel has never (nor will it try unless it is forced to) accept the Palestinans’ right to exist. Not just the existence of Palestine, but the existience of Palestinians.
cubist@#9:
As best I can tell, Israel is under existential threat. The Hamas charter specifically states that Hamas wants to get rid of all the Jews, and in the predominantly Arab countries surrounding Israel, blatantly antisemitic “kill the Jews” propaganda is a mainstay of children’s television.
Yes, that is unquestionably a problem. Somewhere in the 1st episode of the podcast, Cooper quotes Wiezmann as saying something like “the presence of jews creates anti-semitism” – which I think is a profound truth. It’s not because of anything special about jews, it’s just “normal” human in-group/out-group behaviors but too many civilizations have persisted in treating jews as out-group. In that context, we’d expect to see hatred against, say, muslim immigrants, even in a powerful and spacious economy like the US’. That’s what I meant when I said that if I were emperor of the world, I’d be focused on eradicating racism and tribalism rather than solving a problem surrounding jews.
One of the other points the podcast makes is that there was basically no anti-semitism in the middle east, and jews and muslims had cooperated happily together for a very long time, historically. In fact, Mohammed turned to alliances with jewish tribes early on and the law in the islamic world was that jews are left to do their thing as long as they pay taxes. I’m not fond of stratified societies reinforcing stratification on religious grounds, naturally, but that’s every empire, ever, in history. The romans did it, too. Anti-semitism in the arab world arises as a result of the influx of jews from europe. Hamas is a relatively new phenomenon, which is why I took Sam Harris to thoroughly to task when he dishonestly tries to tag Hamas as the source of anti-jew violence. It’s not and that’s wrong [stderr] and Harris is a liar.
None of this is to excuse hamas. For one thing, they made a horrible strategic blunder when they turned to anti-semitism as a weapon. They should have kept it about purely military/territorial concerns, but the arab world has a distinct problem of conflating politics and religion – which is a deliberate construct in islam and ought to be understood that way. Mohammed was not about starting a religion: he was about temporal power and he started a religion as a side effect of aggregating temporal power. What hamas should have been saying all along is “we’re friends again when you give back what you forcibly took; you’re criminals and conquerors and that’s what we hate.” That’s a lot harder to argue against. Obviously, it’s too late for them to change that strategy and I’m not sure I want to be giving military or political strategic advice to either side of what is going to be a genocidal war.
I’ll also note that American kids are raised (or used to be) in a blatant propaganda-field that emphasized white people’s dominance over black and indigenous peoples and emphasized that killing them was a good way to deal with them. It was also a mainstay of children’s television. Nobody’s got clean hands in this.
On the other hand, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians looks an awful lot like some part of the Israeli government thought there was nothing wrong with the Final Solution that couldn’t be solved by a global search-and-replace that turned the character string “Jew” into the character string “Palestinian”.
It always used to shock me that the victims of racism and oppression could turn around and be racist and oppressive themselves, so quickly. But, they do. I’m not just referring to jews in that context. Human history is full of it – especially the history of religion(s). I suppose that is a consequence of teaching a few people that they are special. To me, that appears to be the big flaw.
That said, if you really want to see a discussion about Israel go off the rails and turn into a blood-sport, that’s the thing to say. I have made that point elsewhere (back over at Ed Brayton’s blog back in the day) and it’s a very, very, very unpopular point to make. I happen to think it’s correct and it’s a valid point to make, but pro-Israel supporters get very very upset when you do. Methinks they doth protest too much; it’s a difficult charge to refute and the Israelis have certainly played into it by turning the west bank into a walled prison camp.
I have no fucking clue what should be done re: Israel. Seems to me that somebody is going to get genocided regardless of what the US does or doesn’t do, and the only thing the US might be able to affect is which group it happens to.
Agreed. All of my answers to the problem start with a time machine, but even if someone had one of those and went back to the 1900s and told US, British, French and Russian (maybe some Germans too) political leaders, “this anti-semitism is going to bite everyone in the ass, hard!” none of them would have listened. Because they already knew it. Remember: Europe had experienced the 30 years’ war in the not-too-distant past, and Russia was just in the middle of collapsing at the hands of a bunch of jews who (among other things) were trying to re-structure society to not be so anti-semitic. That was part of Trotsky’s agenda! You can observe that a lot of european political response to communism was: blame jewish intellectuals. (Rather than asking “why are we so stupid?” they blamed the jewish intellectuals for being smart)
Often, around now, someone (rightly!) says that it’s hard for the arab world to respond effectively to Israel or to negotiate fairly because they are dis-unified. That neatly ignores the British, German and French (and now American) efforts to make sure that what was left after the collapse of the Ottoman empire was a political mess. Syria was on its way to becoming a fledgling democracy, for example, but the French made damn sure that didn’t happen. And Egypt was shaping up to be a non-fucked power and the British put paid to that. And the US took over and fucked Iran, Iraq, and now Syria and Libya. “The Great Game” is over but the players are still throwing the pieces around the table; all they care about is controlling access to oil.
Israel is going to consolidate the west bank, which it must do in order to survive. They are already doing it genocidally: every time hamas fires a rocket at Israel, Israel bombs palestinian homes and villages in response. Israel is now establishing a buffer zone (as militarists must) in which they will air-strike deep into Syria whenever they want, claiming that they are hitting Hamas targets. Imagine if Mexico started doing air-strikes into Texas and claiming they were going after drug cartels…
I’m not a historian (I’m not sure what I am!) but I sometimes wonder whether the arab world will eventually throw up another Saladin or an arab equivalent of Ho Chi Minh. Someone smart, charismatic, and a military/political genius. If that happens, Israel’s survival would be down to about a decade. The wheel of history can turn abruptly; ask F.W. De Klerk, who also thought he was inheriting a stable situation that might well last “forever”. That’s political “forever” which means “Until I am dead and safely buried.” I believe that societies produce Saladins and Ho Chi Mihns as an organic response to high pain levels. After enough time their appearance becomes an inevitability and all the oppressor can do is hope that they get a Mandela not a Mao.
Intransitive@#10:
Israel is getting what it wants without negotiations and is protected from consequences (re: the US veto on everything), so it has no need to try and negotiate honestly. It has repeatedly violated “peace accords” that it signed, and the world bought the propaganda when Palestine was falsely blamed.
Yes! Well said.
Israel’s ability to get what they want without negotiating is making them stupid; that is an inevitable consequence of relying on military power instead of building the networks and interdependencies that allow a nation to survive military defeat. The Israelis are too drunk on their short-term success to look at history and realize what happens to powers that rise and throw their weight around too much. Ask the Akkadians: when you get too unpleasant for too long, you piss off too many people and then everyone rips you apart and dances on your grave.
One friend of mine (who is wiser than I am about geopolitics) always says right around now: “the real winner will be: China” (because in a game of patience, China always wins! Not because there is anything special about China, it’s just that China appears to be the only power in human history that has realized that patience is a weapon.)
Everyone currently holding power on either side of the Palestine/Israel conflict wants things to remain exactly as they are. After all, this is the status quo that placed them IN power.
Both sides, and nobody says this as far as I can see, require a modest but not outlandish monthly body count courtesy of the other side, in order to drive support to their political base. It may appear that the leaders are enemies, but they are in fact the best of friends, each supporting the other by — weirdly enough — murdering a small number of their citizens every month.
One problem, I think, is that Zionism developed from the same strain of nationalistic thought that helped make the first half of the 20th century so bloody in Europe – the idea that every ethnic group (however defined) needs to have its own nation, a discreet piece of territory set aside for the benefit of that particular group and that group only. If put into practice, this leads directly to ethno-states, and while ethno-states can be nominally democratic if the ruling group is relatively united and has a clear majority, they cannot be fair or good societies for anyone who belongs to other ethnic groups – other groups will tend to get treated as an underclass.
Andrew Molitor@#13:
Everyone currently holding power on either side of the Palestine/Israel conflict wants things to remain exactly as they are. After all, this is the status quo that placed them IN power.
An important point! The property-lines everyone is fighting over are just some scribbles on a map that was on a desk between two mid-tier functionaries (one French, one British) who carved up the Ottoman Empire’s remains like kids trading baseball cards.
It’s necessary to get the timing of certain events on a time-line: the Sykes-Picot carve-up was 1916 and the Balfour Declaration was 1917. Basically, the Brits said “we should have carved out a homeland for the jews but can’t be arsed to do it.” What’s sad about that was that the Brits betrayed basically everyone and everything they had transactions with in the middle east, and they could have easily expended the political capital to define a zionist homeland. But, they literally did not give a shit – all they were willing to do was the Balfour document, which was odd: it’s purely aspirational. “We think you should have a homeland but lol we aren’t going to lift a finger.” The Irgun and the Stern Gang made the Brits suffer considerable pain, but it was less than they deserved.
I forget who it was in The Commentariat(tm) who suggested Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East [wc]
I recommend it, too; it’s mind-altering how complicated everything was, and how incompetent the imperial powers (all of them) were. My main take-away was that it’s a case study of why imperialism sucks.
China has a history of patience, but it also has a history of revolution. If the regimes can’t keep them happy (re: food insecurity, tainted food, frustration with the “social credit” system), they eventually get overthrown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rebellions_in_China
cubist @9
Only because of their own disgusting actions and policies. The Palestinians are under no obligation to tolerate a terrorist “state” that is committing genocide against them.
cubist @9
Yeah, as much as I am under existential threat from a toddler shouting “I hate you, I wish you would die!”.
Really, Israel won 3 wars against their united neighbours, at least 2 when those neighbours had the full support of the Soviet Union. If their combined neighbours are not a threat, Hamas, which has nothing but a bunch of overgrown firecrackers and people willing to blow themselves up is no threat at all.
Israel is the MMA fighter who puts a neighbourhood teen in hospital because they keyed his car. There is no threat, let alone an existential one, that it hasn’t met with the full force of the IDF and hammered flat.
TL;DR: ‘Poor little plucky Israel’ is a fucking lie.
I believe that the standard conceit is that, with US backing, Israel is nigh-well invulnerable, and that if the US were to withdraw its support, Israel would find itself swiftly obliterated.
I have precisely zero expertise in evaluating these military situations, so I cannot speak to the credibility of this story. I will observe that the first bit is manifestly true, and that there is probably some sort of largish grey area between the full US support and complete US withdrawal of same.
mvdwege@#29:
TL;DR: ‘Poor little plucky Israel’ is a fucking lie.
The point about the podcast I recommend is exactly that. It has been a hardcore movement prepared to do violence all along. Not in retaliation for attacks, although it’s prepared for that, as well.
Irgun and the Stern Gang were more violent and scary than Hamas, and they were killing British soldiers when Hamas were in diapers.
Readers here likely well know, but it is a fact that many of Israel’s PMs have been wanted terrorists. The Brits were very unhappy with those people back in the day. LIFE magazine from just after WWII is a *fascinating* look into the politics surrounding Israel’s early days.
I read an article from about 1946 with all the familiar tropes. A bomb has gone off in Tel Aviv, photos of a column of smoke, police running, sweeping the area, etc etc. It looked just like contemporary coverage, except for two things:
– the photos were black&white
– the policemen were Arabs
I really like the maps in the post, because they show the dishonesty in the discussion about Israel/Palestine:
In the first map, the white blight is just land owned by Jewish groups/persons. The green is labeled ‘Palestine’, which is true, but most of that was no-man’s-land, controlled by the Brits.
In the second map, both white and green signify state territories (but didn’t happen).
In the third map, white is a state territory, but green is occupied territory. Occupied by Egypt and Jordan. There was no ‘Palestine’, sorry.
In the fourth map, white is Israel plus settlements.
Green is Hamastan and Fatahstan.
To make this four maps consistent, one could possibly think that every place that is tainted by Jews is white, whereas all places not controlled by fucking jews are green.
This might give you some insight about the mindset of the creators of these Maps :)
It seems to me too often you can read two descriptions of the same exact event from a Palestinian and an Israeli, both will accuse each other of lying and paint the other side as the worst of the worst and their own as saints. So despite the danger of excessive centrism, the litmus test I try to apply to anyone talking about Israel/Palestine (say when reading an article) is whether or not they talk only about violence perpetrated by one “side” or only debunk myths with one kind of bias. True, there’s an excessive disparity here, and I’ve read cynical articles bemoaning low Israeli casualties as detrimental to the zionist enterprise, so all the violence seems to be benifitting the stronger actor, but that’s, it seems what motivates the “democratic voters” in Israel (that being a dehumanising fear and hatred).
But yes, what Israel is perpetrating is ethnic cleansing, on a century-long scale, and indefensible without the notion of the validity of a Jewish ethnostate (and a biblical one at that). Terrorist attacks and violent protests by those being ousted from their land are wrong, but at a largely incomparable.
Gonna check out the podcast. Also there was an interesting Netflix show about Israeli “spies and terrorists” called Fauda, but 4 episodes in I just couldn’t stomach the ugly brutality of the Israelis portrayed as crime fighters trying to uncover a terrorist mastermind, but at the same time shown as callous butchers. Maybe that was on purpose since it seems the horrors of the conflict are impossible to face in an unbiased way.
Interesting post.
=8)-DX
Do you have any data to support this?