I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?
And dumb it down for me, because apparently I’m an idiot.
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You can’t argue that in good faith when one military has so much more resources than the other.
It’s like if a child hits you, then you beat the shit out of him and use the “he started it” excuse.
It’s not just “hitting” when it’s done with explosives and bullets, and the ones doing the killing aren’t children. They’re all bad and all need to be stopped from abusing and slaughtering noncombatants. If you think that’s a hot take, hey congrats, you’ve discovered the thinking that perpetuates the violence.
Where are you getting news, and how often?
It’s important to separate out the government from the people, especially as it pertains to governments that don’t listen to their population and don’t have overwhelming support. Neither government is good. Most of the civilians from both sides are perfectly decent, though a number of them are misguided.
It’s really impossible to simplify it, but I’ll give it a shot with a quick timeline:
- ~1200 BCE: Several unrelated tribes of people group together to become what we now call Jews or Hebrews or ancient Israelites. How this happened and exactly when is disputed, and is significantly muddied by their own mythology.
- ~600 BCE: The first major expulsion of Jews from areas variously known through time as Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and many others.
- ~538 BCE: Jews are allowed to return (until next time).
- ~538 BCE through 1896 CE: For the sake of brevity, let’s just say Jewish people rarely had real control over this land and were consistently persecuted and/or expelled from wherever they were.
- 1896 CE: Theodor Herzl writes “The Jewish State” and births the modern Zionist movement, claiming Jews have a right to Israel primarily on religious basis. He approaches world leaders saying as such and finds little traction.
- 1920: Britain takes control of the area now called Mandatory Palestine.
- 1941-1945: The Holocaust. I assume no additional information needed.
- 1945-1948: The Holocaust gives significant weight to Zionists’ arguments that Jewish people need their own country. As many Jews have already been emigrating there (known as “Aliyah” or Jewish emigration to the promised land) since Zionism took hold, the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.
- 1948: Israel is officially recognized by the United States, its primary backer today. As part of this recognition, Israel and its allies committed what is commonly known as “The Nakba.” A huge number of Palestinians were killed, injured, jailed, or forcibly removed from the area.
- 1948: Arab-Israeli War. The Arab countries unite to fight the new state of Israel. This, as with most wars, is primarily because of power. The don’t want the West to be controlling the region. The Arabs lose, but nobody loses more than Palestine.
- 1948: Palestinian attacks on Israel start. I don’t have anywhere else to put this, but know that the end of the Arab-Israeli War didn’t end Palestinians fighting for their land and independence. They will continue to do so by any means available to them.
- 1956: Suez Crisis. Israel and its backers invade and militarily occupy part of Egypt and take control of the Suez canal because Egypt decided to nationalize it. This war is transparent in its goal for power.
- 1967: Six Day War. Israel invades a variety of areas that it borders, including land owned by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Palestine would be listed as well if it were recognized as a state. They’re successful in only six days. Notable areas you may have heard of that were militarily acquired by Israel at this time are the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights. Israel still retains control over these conquered areas.
- 1973: Yom Kippur War. Arab states attack to try to get back the land lost in the Six Day War. Israeli victory.
- 1978: Camp David Accords. Israel agrees to give some land back in return for being recognized by Egypt as a state. Sedat, the Egyptian leader, would be assassinated in part because of this action.
- 1987–1993: First Intifada. More organized and wide-scale Palestinian insurgency than we’ve seen before. Palestinians are fighting for their independence and their land. The insurgency is suppressed.
- 2000–2005: Second Intifada. Same reasons and result as the first.
- 2006-current: Much like the intifadas, there’s a lot to say here, but for the sake of brevity (lol too late) the Palestinian attacks that started in 1948 continue to this day. Israel intermittently declares various wars with the claim that they’re rooting out terrorists, Hamas, Hezbollah, and more.
This leaves out a lot. It’s just not possible to condense it. But (mostly) off the top of my head, that’s what I’d consider most of the most important bits.
The way I see it, whether or not you think Israel is “the good guys” largely hinges on whether or not you think Jews have a right to the land of Israel, and whether or not you think that claim was executed in a humane way.
I would compare it to the Native Americans - were the Americans of that time period the “good guys”? In my opinion, absolutely not. Were the Native Americans wrong for defending their land? Again, absolutely not. Were they wrong for attacking innocent civilians in retribution (for their land being taken, their own innocent civilians being killed, a genocide in progress)? Maybe, but it’s also understandable that when you’re working from a position of basically zero power against a behemoth, you can’t fight the way the behemoth fights, or you’re going to lose.
The way I see it, the Palestinian people just want a place to live and develop, and nobody’s giving them a way out, so they’re trying anything and everything they can.
lmao 1200 BC
Buddy, Zionism is a European settler colonial project from the 1800s that emerged as a response to European antisemitism but is of course, itself, deeply ethnocentric and racist.
All resistance to the occupation, which has repeatedly engaged in ethnic cleansing, is justified under international law. They have now, for a years engaged in a fast genocide, which makes choosing a side very easy so long as you aren’t yourself deeply racist.
the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.
Israel wasn’t created by the UK or the US (or the UN). Israelis declared the state of Israel themselves after seizing territory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The UN did have a plan to create an Israel in 1947, but that didn’t happen, because neither the Jews, the Arabs, nor the UK were on board.
I think this might be a semantic argument - it’s not important to me if we use the words “give” or “create.” Happy to use whatever words you prefer for allies having power and control of an area and ensuring that power and control is transferred to their chosen ally.
British Mandatory Palestine was officially ending May 15, 1948. Israel announced its independence on May 14, 1948. The United States officially recognized Israel as a state 11 minutes after it declared itself a sovereign state. It’s strange to suggest these are coincidences rather than planned action with their allies, but there’s plenty of evidence in addition to this to make it very clear that Israel wouldn’t have stood a chance without the backing of their superpower friends.
One minor, but important detail: The First Aliyah began in the 1880s, a decade before Herzl’s work. Land was purchased for settlements, and a few tens of thousands came, mostly from Eastern Europe. Within a couple decades the kibbutz system was established, small socialist communities where it was decided, unfortunately, to try to rely exclusively on Jewish labor and economy. This led to the first significant frictions between the settlers and the Palestinians, setting the stage for our situation today.
Very true! It’s hard to imagine Israel would be the same today without the particular cultural choices those first immigrants made. Thanks for the addition.
Thank you for the detailed timeline. However, it raises a serious question for me. Am I misreading, or does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years? If so, wouldn’t that make it understandable why they’re so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?
As you now know, the Zionist project is one by Europeans who colonized and ethnically cleansed large regions of Palestine in the last 120 years or so. Ethnic supremacist myths about stolen Palestinian homes being on Israeli homelands are unacceptable.
Here’s the issue: who’s home is it? Is it the home of people who haven’t lived there for hundreds of years or the home of the people who currently do? Neither of these two groups had anything to do with what happened previously.
Jews had lived in the area for a very long time even after most were expelled. This was relatively peaceful (though not perfect). The current issues started when settlers came, who were not from there, and purchased farms. They later decided they would only hire Jewish workers, despite Muslims traditionally tending it (which hurt production because the Jewish settlers had no idea how to do so, but production wasn’t the goal). Muslims then fought back as their livelihood was being taken from them. The settlers used militias to attack back and used it as justification to take more.
Those militias became the IDF when Israel formed. Israel still uses this tactic of provoking an attack and then using that as an excuse to use more force to take more territory. This has happened many times now and the current fight is just the latest, but not a new event.
There are no “good guys” but there are victims. Anyone just trying to live their lives is a victim. The bad guys are the ones trying to take this away from others.
does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years?
That’s one interpretation, though I’d disagree with it. I have Jewish heritage - enough that a significant portion of my ancestry was wiped out in the Holocaust, though obviously a few of them were lucky and escaped to the US with the help of a sponsor. I don’t practice Judaism as a religion and don’t really relate much to any of my heritage. Is Israel my homeland? Not at all. The United States is my homeland. Before that, Germany would be my homeland. Before that… well, I’m not sure, but history would suggest it’s highly unlikely it was Israel. I have zero attachment to that land, much like I expect you have zero attachment to the land of your ancestors from millennia ago. (I also have zero attachment to the land of my non-Jewish ancestry. I have no idea what it is from thousands of years ago, but I wouldn’t care if I did.)
Would I and other Jewish people be justified in kicking out Germans, because they spent hundreds of years there? What about the Russians? Poles? The Jewish diaspora has gone all over the place and made just about everything their home. Why should they have claim to land that their great great great great great ancestors once conquered and stole from somebody else?
If so, wouldn’t that make it understandable why they’re so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?
I would argue Israel wasn’t their home until they moved there over the last hundred or so years. Home isn’t where some of your family lived 3000 years ago. The individuals in question never lived there. Their parents never lived there. Their grandparents never lived there. None of these people had any idea what Israel was even like. Today, there are more Jewish people in the United States than there are in Israel, and they’re happy to call the United States home.
If we’re going to make the argument that people should be allowed to lay claim to land their ancestry owned 3000 years ago, we open up a lot of questions.
First, it’s worth noting that this is also the home of Palestinians. The origins of Palestinians are much less clear than the origins of Jewish people in large part because the Jews have been uniquely good at maintaining their culture, so we have a much better grasp on Jewish people throughout history than we do of Palestinians. But at its core, the fact is Palestinians haven’t ever lived anywhere else. This means they’re also “so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home.”
Second, to be consistent, we’d have to revert a lot of borders to ancient times. Does that mean we should all revert borders to what they were 3000 years ago? Why 3000? Why not 2000? 4000? Regardless, you’re uprooting a lot of people - and you’d have to provide a really good justification for that, and I don’t see it.
Third, even if we agreed the Jews have a right to this land and we should revert to their ancient borders and give them control, that doesn’t mean they have a right to attempt genocide on those living there. The moment they embarked on the Nakba, they should have lost their allies in their mission. Assuming they have a right to the land, they have to humanely displace the people there, ensure they have a new place to live, and give them adequate compensation for the land and the massive inconvenience you’ve caused by uprooting their entire lives. Sort of a “sorry we’re doing this, but we’re trying to make it right.” Instead, they’ve killed millions of people over the decades.
I’m referring to this part of your timeline-
“~600 BCE: The first major expulsion of Jews from areas variously known through time as Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and many others. ~538 BCE: Jews are allowed to return (until next time). ~538 BCE through 1896 CE: For the sake of brevity, let’s just say Jewish people rarely had real control over this land and were consistently persecuted and/or expelled from wherever they were.”
Maybe I’m misreading it, but it seems to imply that they were, as a people, born from that land, and systemically were persecuted through the course of around 2400 years.
I think there’s a lot of fuzzyness around the idea of “born from that land.” It’s not like they sprouted out of the earth. As with just about any people, there was a lot of rape and murder of warring tribes until some combination of them stopped doing as much rape and as much murder and somewhat arbitrarily called themselves “one people.” If you want to call that “born from that land,” sure, but their ancestry goes back further than that. We’re all just apes.
You left out the protocol of the elders of zion and the backlash it caused against Jews. It’s fairly important as a catalyst for some of the 20th century shit.
I’m actually okay with that not being included as a critical point in Israeli history. My understanding is it was one piece in a long line of antisemitism, and while it was known by the Nazi party, it was known by the leadership to be fictional and wasn’t used seriously as propaganda by them. That’s not to say it didn’t have any effect, just that I’m not convinced it made much difference when it comes to the creation of Israel as a state.
I’m open to alternative viewpoints if you want to provide evidence or just offer some book titles that might change my mind.
1967: Six Day War. Israel invades a variety of areas that it borders
You’ve made a pretty good summary, but I have one quibble: Egypt, Syria and Jordan were planning to attack Israel. Israel launched pre-emptive strikes.
I find it very difficult to justify most historical claims of anticipatory self-defense - it usually looks to me that it’s an aggressor using an excuse to justify their aggression. I haven’t seen nearly enough evidence to suggest Israel wasn’t the aggressor in the Six Day War. While the military mobilization of their neighbors certainly contributed toward Israel’s mobilization, that alone isn’t justification for invasion. Nasser thought Israel was preparing to invade Syria, but he didn’t preemptively invade Israel, he lined up his troops on the Israel-Egypt border and waited. We know now that Israel was not mobilizing troops on Syria’s border, but Nasser’s choice to defend his border was reasonable and nonviolent, even with false information.
But aside from that, I think it’s reasonable to suggest Israel would have attacked even had there been no mobilization of troops from the Arab states. We saw Israel attack Egypt during the Suez Crisis where they forcibly re-opened passage through the Straits of Tiran, their only shipping route to the south other than the also-Egyptian Suez Canal. Just prior to the Six Day War, Egypt cut off Israel from the Straits of Tiran again, something Israel publicly called an act of war. It’s not a coincidence Israel went ahead and took Sinai (immediately adjacent to the Straits of Tiran) during this war and didn’t give it back until the Camp David Accords. (It’s worth noting that had Nasser not gotten the original false information, he wouldn’t have done any of this, and it’s entirely possible the entire thing would have been averted. But he did, and that was a huge blunder on his part. Still, I disagree with Israel that refusing them passage through shipping routes is an act of war.)
I would also suggest that Israel’s behavior after the Six Day War doesn’t seem like the actions of a country that was acting in self-defense. They conquered land during that war and continue to occupy most of it to this day. They’ve invaded other countries since, with stated reasons that are as believable as the United States’ reasons for invading Iraq. They’ve continued to occupy additional land. These actions indicate a country interested in expansionism and power growth, not peaceful co-existence.
lmao imagine being this easy to fool
Also, approximately 900,000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia, primarily as a consequence of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the establishment of the State of Israel.
True! That’s a good one to point out. It’s hard to overstate how significantly and suddenly the Arabs turned against the Jews. Plenty were understandably going to emigrate from Europe, but Israel made them very unwelcome in the Arab world, too. It’s also another good example of how Israel couldn’t have been established without their allies, since the US/UK were the primary providers of air travel for Jews seeking refuge from Arab states to Israel.
- 1896 CE: Theodor Herzl writes “The Jewish State”
- 1897 CE: Theodor Herzl writes “Mauschel”
Herzl believed that there were two types of Jews, Jiden (Yids) and Juden (Jews), and considered any Jew who openly opposed his proposals for a Zionist solution to the Jewish question to be a Mauschel. The article has often been taken, since its publication, to be emblematic of an antisemitic strain of thinking in Zionism, and has been described as an antisemitic rant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl
Due to his Zionist work, he is known in Hebrew as Chozeh HaMedinah (חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה), lit. ‘Visionary of the State’. He is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as “the spiritual father of the Jewish State”.
Okay:
In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with.
Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.
Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).
Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.
Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land ‘settled’ at will by Israelis.
It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it’s also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there’s virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.
In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It’s a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel’s ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.
Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.
In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city’s infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It’s also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.
The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the ‘regrettable’ loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.
Fuck Israel.
Mandatory Palestine was long before 1948. Zionist settlers were doing terrorism on the indigenous Palestinians for decades by 1948. And with British support.
That’s a very polite way to explain Israeli savagery.
In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with
That’s not what happened.
Firstly, the Balfour Declaration was in 1917, during World War I. By 1948, the Jews were already living there, and fighting for the land.
Secondly, Britain never partitioned the land, and never announced any intention to partition the land. (Things might have been very different if they had.) I think you’re getting confused with the UN’s partition plan, which was never implemented.
The people who won’t accept a two state solution are the bad guys, so much is clear.
To me that seems the most optimal and level headed solution, but as you can see many people disagree. A lot of people in this thread are calling for the elimination of Israel as a state, and that confuses me, because they’re saying the things that Israel is SAYING that their enemies are saying, further justifying, in Israel’s eyes, their own actions.
With this post, I guess I was looking for more historical facts and context on who is historically the bad guy in this situation. I’ve gotten some of that. I’ll keep studying the situation and I think I’m going to actively try to avoid getting sucked into the idea that one side or the other should be completely eliminated. My gut just has a really negative reaction to that sort of talk.
Yeah, and the problem is that the history of the conflict didn’t even start with the current state of Israel being established. There really is no simple good/bad narrative to be had. It’s just a shitty situation for anyone who happens to live there.
“Why won’t you accept our proposal of Bantustans, you ingrates!? You deserve genocide for this”
Let’s just fight forever then. Endless hate. Only war. Is anyone who started this shit even alive anymore?
The attempt to “both sides” a genocuidal apartheid settler colonial ethnostate currently doing a genocide vs. the indigenous and regional people opposing them is disgusting. If you don’t put in any work yo understand this topic, you do not need to have an opinion, let alone share it. Though it is important to be politically educated, so you should do the reading so that you can be helpful rather than counterproductive.
And re: people alive remembering how it “started”, much of the leadership of the resistance are literal refugees driven from their homes in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. And of course it does not take much work to inform yourself of the origins of Zionism in 1800s Europe and the antisemitism a collaborating Zionist movement that built ethnocentric colonies in Palestine and eventually formed organized terrorist groups to force conflicts with the indigenous population and receive military backing from the British.
Maybe try looking at it from the point of view of the individual people living there (and having been born there for generations) instead of whatever strategic/historical layer you’re on. The state of Israel exists and won’t be going away, that’s a fact. You can hate the injustice if you want but it would still be better if they’d finally make peace and just live in the present instead of murdering each other over the past. But neither leadership is willing to do that.
Okay, now you can continue scolding me. Don’t forget to link this to Russia’s attack on Ukraine!
Like I said, you need to shed this idea that you are entitled to an opinion, and to share it, having done no investigation.
Maybe try looking at it from the point of view of the individual people living there (and having been born there for generations) instead of whatever strategic/historical layer you’re on.
Which people and where? What do they think? Have you ever actually interacted with Israelis, Palestinians? Israelis are extremely racist and support their settler colonial project and the genocide.
The state of Israel exists and won’t be going away, that’s a fact.
Apartheid South Africa went away.
Also what happened to thinking about the individual people? You didn’t talk about them.
You can hate the injustice if you want but it would still be better if they’d finally make peace and just live in the present instead of murdering each other over the past. But neither leadership is willing to do that.
You cannot live in peace under constant occupation, displacement, and genocide. “Just make peace” is a childish idealism that means you don’t know anything about this topic.
But neither leadership is willing to do that.
One is a gemoxidal racist occupier and the other is an occupation resistance group. Don’t give me this both sides bullshit.
Okay, now you can continue scolding me. Don’t forget to link this to Russia’s attack on Ukraine!
You should do the actual self-reflection required here. There is a genocide on. If you are going to share thoughts on this topic that defends the genociders in any way you better have spent at least a few houra educating yourself. Clearly you have not, and still have no humility about it.
You are really good at putting words in my mouth, that’s been clear from your first reply.
So what’s your great plan that isn’t childish idealism?
Take as much time as you need to actually reply to my response.
Forget everything you know (or think you know) about the conflict for a second. Now look at what human rights groups, including the UN, have to say about what’s happening in Gaza and Lebanon. It’s called a genocide because it is; it’s really that simple and there are mountains of evidence published by the likes of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and, again the UN. Also to dispell that particular piece of propaganda: they’re not trying to get the hostages back. If they were they’d turn the first ceasefire agreement into a “permanent” ceasefire (there are no permanent ceasefires in this conflict) and end the whole thing. They want to genocide and settle Gaza, so they’re doing that while sabotaging ceasefire negotiations.
By the way if you’re going to side with the side that has hostages, then you should read up on Palestinian detainees first. Long story short: Israel arrests Palestinians from the West Bank or (until 2005) Gaza for dubious or no charges—which they can do because these places are governed under Israeli military law rather than civil law—and sometimes torture them while stealing years of their life. Part of Palestinian resistance organizations’ raison d’etre is to return those people to their homes, which requires constant action because Israel arrests more Palestinians every day. There were already thousands of those detainees before October 7th and thousands more have been arrested after. Note: We’re not talking about Palestinians who are arrested for legitimate crimes doing their time here; these people were kidnapped as a punishment against Palestinians for existing. If this doesn’t sound like hostages to you, you should do some soul searching and ask yourself if you’re trying to learn or justify your beliefs.
This probably sounds biased to you, but I took care to only state verifiable, indisputably objective facts here Sometimes things are just that simple. That doesn’t make Hamas good guys; they’re more gray with some legitimate resistance actions and some straight up terrorism, and it’s not always clear which is which.
Finally, if you want to learn more about the conflict in general and about the conditions that drove Hamas to launch the October 7th attack to begin with, you should see what Amnesty International and other human rights groups have to say on the topic. The long story short is that Israel subjects Palestinians to Apartheid conditions along with a slow-burn genocide to serve their long-term goal of colonizing the whole Palestine and (to their more extremist factions) expand beyond it.
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oh right, totally forgot about those poor people who lived and partied next to the concentration camp and then got either kidnapped by people who wanted to break out of the concentration camp or were killed by the IDF. let’s all show a bit more empathy! 😥
It’s clear Judaism / Muslim conflicts have caused a lot more suffering to Muslims in Palestine for the last 100+ years. But the solution to this conflict will never be violence. Only diplomacy.
I’m arguing that such comments can generate hate and divide. You don’t have to agree with me on this, but I at least hope you agree that the solution is not hate, but diplomacy.
When violence is acceptable the weak and marginalized are destroyed. I only wish the best for Gaza and Israel. And in my opinion the solution is empathy and diplomacy. It’s obviously terribly hard to negotiate and empathize with your abuser. But in my opinion, if this sentiment doesn’t start the conflict will only stop when the weaker side is destroyed. I hope we can respect each other. Bless you.
Replace US with Israel in this Stokely Carmichael Quote:
“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
Israel, or any bully, will not be swayed by your appeals to their conscience, no matter how hard you try. Ruling classes intentionally spread pacifist propaganda becomes its completely unthreatening to them. Pacifism overall is a losing strategy with zero historical successes, as the article below gets into.
Red Phoenix - Pacifism - How to do the enemy’s job for them. Youtube Audiobook
Dr. King also changed his opinion later on. People act like he was some lifelong pacifist without knowing his full history and what changes were caused by his pacifist actions and by other’s more aggressive actions.
I think it’s important to differentiate pacifism as a strategy – the total renunciation of anything that could be considered violence, often including even mere property damage – with non-violence as one tactic among many.
Many movements have had success using non-violence as a tactic in certain situations, so long as those movements don’t take the possibility of ever using violence completely off the table (pacifism).
I’m extremely confused. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, led by MLK, had massive, sweeping success. Brown v. BOE, Loving v. Virginia, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Fair Housing Act of 1968, etc. The non-violent strategy succeded in striking down segregation, Jim crow laws, and nearly all forms of legal racial discrimination within a couple decades.
Securing legal rights for minority groups to be treated equally under the law and courts is a losing strategy? What exactly is your objective if you see the civil rights movement as a loss?
I understand that you’re probably not American so you may not have an extensive knowledge of American history. But this is pretty important stuff, and acting like MLK failed because of his non-violent strategy is 1,000,000% wrong. Literally could not be further from the truth.
What did the Black Panthers accomplish with their violent strategy? They committed a few terrorist acts and all ended up dead or in jail. They didn’t secure any major, permanent victories for future generations.
Saying that MLK failed because of his non-violent approach is like saying Julius Caesar failed because he was an ineffective military commander. It’s so incredibly incorrect that I don’t understand how you could ever come to think that.
You did not read the linked article.
And also if you read Michelle Alexander’s the new jim crow, you’ll realize that even de-jure de-segregation has mostly been circumvented / nullified by drug laws. 1 in 5 black men will spend some time in prison in the US, and slavery is still legal in the US under the guise of drug-based imprisonment.
The article gets more into it, but the material wealth divide was completely unaffected by the civil rights “wins”, and poverty is still growing along color lines. I’ll post a few of these below:
- The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
- The US has the highest incarceration rates in the world. Even individual US states outrank all other countries.
- Ramping up since the 1980s, the term prison–industrial complex is used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Such groups include corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, private probation companies, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activist groups such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) have argued that the prison-industrial complex is perpetuating a flawed belief that imprisonment is an effective solution to social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy. 1
- The War On Drugs, a policy of arrest and imprisonment targeting minorities, first initiated by Nixon, has over the years created a monstrous system of mass incarceration, resulting in the imprisonment of 1.5 million people each year, with the US having the most prisoners per capita of any nation. One in five black Americans will spend time behind bars due to drug laws. The war has created a permanent underclass of impoverished people who have few educational or job opportunities as a result of being punished for drug offenses, in a vicious cycle of oppression. 1, 2
- In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed “aliens”, 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren’t considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. 1, 2
- The Obama era was one of the greatest decreases in working class and black wealth, 2 in history: home equity decreased by ~$17k between 2007 and 2016. His housing policies led to millions losing their homes. While Wall street banks recieved $29 Trillion in bailouts, $75 Billion in relief was set aside for housing foreclosures and mortgage assistance. Instead of being paid to families, this was paid to mortgage servicers, and the services found ways to pocket the money and continue foreclosures: by the end of the program, less than 20% of the funds were used, and most had dropped out of the program due to foreclosures. The Obama administration refused to prosecute the fraud, or any of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.
Ok I still think it’s wrong to criticize nonviolent resistance but I appreciate the data and links. It is true that I didn’t read the linked article at first.
It’s clear Judaism / Muslim conflicts have caused a lot more suffering to Muslims in Palestine for the last 100+ years.
This is a Zionism / Palestinian (and any other independence groups, really) “conflict”, which is to say, occupation and rrsistance.
But the solution to this conflict will never be violence. Only diplomacy.
Diplomacy requires leverage and is not an inherent good on its own. Diplomacy can be a tool for delay, propaganda, and for achieving a lopsided deal with false representatives. All of these things have been done via US/Israeli “diplomacy” regarding Paleetine.
You see a people forced into a ghetto fighting back and say, “no that’s not the way” as if you have any understanding and have earned an opinion. An important lesson to learn is when you should have no opinion until you become informed.
I’m arguing that such comments can generate hate and divide. You don’t have to agree with me on this, but I at least hope you agree that the solution is not hate, but diplomacy.
The divide is already there. It is genocidal settler-colonial apartheid vs. freedom fighters. And the camps throwing in for each side of this. Personally, I don’t find it difficult to place myself fully in the freedom fighter camp and against the genociders. Do you? And no, there is no third option because there is no third force with any leverage or will.
When violence is acceptable the weak and marginalized are destroyed.
The violence has already been here. What on earth are you talking about? What fantasy world do you live in where passive Palestinians are left alone? The Israeli project is premised on their oppression and expulsion.
And you are simply wrong in your generalization. Violence has been essential for virtually every liberation fight. This is not because the marginalized love violence, it is because the oppressor leaves no other options.
I only wish the best for Gaza and Israel.
Israel is an apartheid ethnostate doing a genocide. It is racist and horrible to wish the best for it.
And in my opinion the solution is empathy and diplomacy. It’s obviously terribly hard to negotiate and empathize with your abuser. But in my opinion, if this sentiment doesn’t start the conflict will only stop when the weaker side is destroyed. I hope we can respect each other. Bless you.
You don’t deserve an opinion on this topic because you do not know anything about it. You do not get to set the terms of others’ freedom. You should spend your time helping the resistance, not rationalizing a fairy tale about how to oppose settler-colonial genocide with “diplomacy” and no militarized resistance.
While you sound reasonable, your mistake seems to be to believie that Judaism is the same as Zionism. It is not. It is completely not. They are inherently incompatible. Learn about it or don’t. I’m not some kind of theological scholar or history professor. Maybe ask your local Rabbi about it.
Anyway, sorry to sound like some kind of an extremist to you, but violence is (at the moment) 100% the only answer. Not against the Jewish people, but against the fascist, zionist apartheid regime, who is committing genocide, right now, right before your eyes. Every day, bless you too.
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It’s clear Judaism / Muslim conflicts have caused a lot more suffering to Muslims in Palestine for the last 100+ years. But the solution to this conflict will never be violence. Only diplomacy.
The mental model here is “violence and diplomacy are mutually exclusive”. In fact, they’re very closely connected, almost synonymous.
I’m arguing that such comments can generate hate and divide. You don’t have to agree with me on this, but I at least hope you agree that the solution is not hate, but diplomacy.
Agree here. I grew up in violence and lived through the peace process. It starts out violent, and you win concessions by showing strength, and then negotiate peace. That worked in Ireland in 1998 and almost worked in Palestine in 2000. Violence is the first part of the diplomacy.
When violence is acceptable the weak and marginalized are destroyed.
You’re saying that the weak should go to the negotiating table empty-handed, but that won’t solve anything for them. They need to stop being weak and start being strong, then diplomacy can start to happen.
The solution to weakness is strength. How can the weak become strong without the Armalite?
The Catholics took up arms in 1968 and came to the negotiating table in 1998. We won some concessions because we showed strength for 31 years, not “empathy”. Yasser Arafat understood this: he knew when to use violence and when to negotiate. If you defang yourself as Step One, you make diplomacy impossible.
I only wish the best for Gaza and Israel. And in my opinion the solution is empathy and diplomacy. It’s obviously terribly hard to negotiate and empathize with your abuser. But in my opinion, if this sentiment doesn’t start the conflict will only stop when the weaker side is destroyed. I hope we can respect each other. Bless you.
I admire your values, but you’re incorrectly equating “empathy and diplomacy”. Diplomacy is more a military matter; empathy has no place in realpolitik.
Well obviously it’s the Western powers that gave a bunch of displaced Jews land after WWII, despite no legitimate claim to the area, and then proceeded to keep meddling in Middle Eastern affairs so they could get cheap oil. And the biggest of those Western powers directly gives taxpayer money to war profiteers so there’s a direct financial incentive to keep the genocide going.
Those are the goodest guys.
Depends really. What do you value in your life? What ethical framework do you use? Do you value freedom and self determination, do you value people different from you as much as people of your nationality/race? Or perhaps do you value the Western stability, growth, dominance and wellbeing at the expense of the economic South more? There’s no objective answer, it depends on you and your viewpoint.
If we do away with the propaganda and misinformation we are left with this question. Because the US and Europe would never support anyone for the sake of them being the only democracy in the middle east or fighting terrorists or whatever. If that were the case the US wouldn’t have been complicit with the dictatorships of the gulf countries or any other of the innumerable dictatorships they have established throughout the years in the world. And they would also not be funding the ISIS or other terrorist groups in Columbia, Cuba, Nicaragua and so many other countries.
No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn’t serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.
So what do you value? Freedom and dignity for all, or more power for the Western states and corporations (- and whatever religious crap you want to excuse colonising and ethnically cleansing a nation)?
If you see this, it’d save you a lot of time from arguing about every single event of the conflict. If you see every human in the world as equal and deserving of freedom, then you’d see that Israel and the West is bringing these people at the brink of extinction, torturing, killing, humiliating, starving them, expelling them from their land, destroying their vital civil infrastructure, stealing their land and property for 75 years now. And when you see all this (not from Western mainstream media though), you’d recognise the right for armed struggle against a colonizing entity that Israel is. No civilian casualties are acceptable, but the ones affected in 7/10/23 would have to turn against their government for ethnically cleansing Palestinians, bringing them to that desperate point of retaliation, not Palestinians.
No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn’t serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.
I disagree with the notion that dominant organizations would never give significant of money away in a manner contrary to their material interests. If anything, the opposite is true: if you are dominant, then you have more freedom to get away with acting against your material interests (intentionally or not).
I think that our treatment of Israel is an example of this. All of the money we have been throwing at them does not buy anything at all, since the Israeli government does not even seem to be that grateful for it but just expects it as a matter of course. They seem hell-bent on bringing the entire region into a war that would pull us in and cause a ton of damage to our material interests, and we have barely any ability to stop them from doing this. Worst, this situation is entirely avoidable because we could, at the very least, put strings on our military aid and then enforce them, rather than just giving Israel whatever it wants and ignoring whenever it crosses any of our supposed lines.
Just to be clear, I am not arguing that our material interests are the only reason to care about what is happening or to criticize our government’s actions, I am just saying that it makes no sense to just take as given that a dominant organization will always act in its own best material interests in this way.
US leaders repeatedly tell you why supporting Israel is in the US’s interests: its a giant unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle east to project power on this resource rich region. The US would never support even another colonialist project with the same values, unless it was in its material interests.
Undermining of independent states in the middle east is in the material interest of the US empire. They just disagree internally about how to best go about doing this. A regional war is not directly against US ruling interests unless they think they would lose that fight or if it would shut down the Strait of Hormuz for a long time. The US has not exactly reined in its Israeli attack dog in any meaningful way, which us what they could do and would do if they wanted descalation.
It’s not in the interests of the wider civilian population of the planet, or even just those in the US, but those things barely register for empire.
The problem with this reasoning is that instability, whether as the result of undermining governments or regional wars, has unpredictable outcomes. For example, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran seemed like a great idea to those in power in the U.S. at the time when we disagreed with Iran’s policies, but this decision turned around to bite us when that got overturned. So it is not in our material interests to promote instability, and I think that the current administration knows this, so to the extent it is supporting Israel with effectively no conditions on its actions I think that it is behaving irrationally rather than maliciously.
The US Empire barely cares about blowback, they subscribe for a maximalist foreign policy pressure ethos. Like in Domino Theory, they abhor independence lest it coherently spread, and act swiftly and decisively against it like playing whack-a-mole. The ethos doesn’t have to deliver perfect results free of blowback, it just needs to be good enough for the interests it serves. Regarsing Iran, this is why it is co stantly threatened and sanctiobed by the US and its cronies. The blowback was too successful so they are still just doing a maximum pressure campaign and constantly threatening war. They take a similar approach against Syria and Yemen. They took a similar approach against Iraq and likely will again.
When speaking of material interest and the US state, using “our” can be ambiguous. I am not of the ruling class of the US, and certainly nowhere near the great financiers and imperialists whose interests are the real ones served by empire. So I would never say this serves “our” interests using this kind of logic. Are you of that class? Often actions are taken against the interests of the non-ruling classes and in favor of the ruling class.
One can make an argument that the citizen US working class is a beneficiary of imperialism, paying far below what they should for imports and having wages propped up by the petrodollar, buy this is challenging to rationalize with the idea that it is simply in their interest to, say, keep Iran subservient to US empire. The public are ignorant to these things and there is no mechanistic connection between their actions and these outcomes except the propaganda appaeatus that manufactures their consent, which is really a top-down monopoly on information that still does not inform them of how this might be in their interest. And even then, it is arguable whether this is more generally in their interest. Undermining the petrodollar might lead to their yolk being removed.
So it is not in our material interests to promote instability
When hasn’t the US used the british strategy of balkanization, especially in the middle east? Divide and conquer a cornerstone of their strategy, in the ME, africa, south america, SE asia… literally everywhere.
Mossadegh’s government was actively overthrown by the CIA, then the US supported the Shah and his son, and had strong relations with imperial Iran until they were overthrown in the Iranian revolution. The Iranian people refused to accept that right-wing US-puppet and his brutal regime any longer, and there was nothing the US could do about it.
The fact that somebody would be asking this question after a year of genocide is phenomenal.
Reminder that at the outbreak of WWII, TONS of people in the US supported the Nazi regime right up until they started invading Western Europe AKA “the countries that matter”
Also worth noting that the US continued to do business with the nazis well into the war, and IBM famously facilitated the holocaust.
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This is what Israel defending itself actually means
Israel are absolutely and undeniably the bad guys. To use an analogy, imagine a school bully who is stronger and gets the support of the teachers and principal of the school, and the bully beats up the smaller kid every day until they hit a breaking point and throws a punch back. A reasonable school would support the bullied kid, but in this case, the principal just gives the bully a gun and looks away.
Israel has been dehumanizing and oppressing the Palestinian people since it’s inception and things have been getting worse. When October 7th happen, it was indeed horrible and many civilians got hurt, but Israel’s response was so completely disproportionately mad that they are actively committing genocide, treating the list of warcrimes like a to-do list.
Israel does genocide. That’s it.
on a scale from 1 to 10 how serious are you in asking this, I ask because I am genuinly unsure if you are confused and unaware of what is happening, or if you are trying to start some shit
I’ve answered this in the post to another commenter, but I am 100% serious.
Well for Decades the Irealies have both been genociding the Palistinians, and have been on a long push to try to conflait zionism, an origionaly anti-symetic idea in eurpope, that was even embraced by the Nazis, and quinticentialy jewish, so they could use anti-semitism to shield themselvs.
The good guys are the palistinians who where there before anyone else got there, and have been being genocided agian for decades on end, and are being genocided now.
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Very few of Israeli Jews are actually Arabs. They are largely of European descent. So it is misinformation to characterize this as Arabs murdering Arabs. What this is is Western settler-colonialism.
Arabs have been murdering Arabs for hundreds of years. To say Israel started it is not only wrong but spreading misinformation.
“Israel” was internationally recognized as established in the 1940s based on a European movement from the 1800s to create a settler-colonial ethnostate. Israel did start it, it is an occupying force that displaced Palestinians from their lands in living memory, implemented violent apartheid conditions, and is currently doing a genocide.
Your “Arabs just kill each other this isn’t different” is frankly just relying on racism to avoid actually addressing the real history.
Who started it is pointless at this point
No, it is very much an important point as it happened in recent history via occupation, terrorism, and forced immigration by European settlers backed by the British empire and then the US empire. You must ignore this in order to share the positions that you have.
but this anti Palestine sentiment from Israelis has been brewing for decades. For some context look up Arab-Israeli war of 1948
Anti-Palestinian sentiment has been a core part of the Zionist project since its inception. 1948 is when the largest expulsions happened, the war was a response to this occupation and aggression.
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10 kids born 2 killed guess what population still grew by 8
I thought the Jewish heritage and population had been there just as long but were purged out from the area. And as part of the WWII agreements, land was set aside for them to reclaim what was theirs many centuries ago.
