So is Israel just going to completely overtake Palestine?

Fat Tony@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 250 points –

I saw an article about them attacking Lebanon now. So, where will it stop? Have the Israeli government ever spoken about this?

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Well, yeah. That's the idea. Why would they go this far and not go all the way? They know damn good and well that as long as they keep things just barely on the end where genocide isn't stated as a goal, and they maintain a position of alliance with most of the west, nobody is going to actually stop them.

Hell, without starting a world war, I'm not even sure they can be stopped.

On the world stage? There aren't enough nations with power that actually care about Palestine. Yeah, leaders will make noise and pretend to care, but Palestine offers nothing to the major powers worth intervening for.

Sounds sociopathic, right? That's the leaders of most of the world. People drawn to power rarely have the ethical rigor to wield said power. Those that do, still have to deal with oligopoly, hidden fascists, and the reality that no nation can really take action without upsetting the whole damn thing.

Actually that's not true, the muslim Arab countries went to great lengths to intervene and support the Palestinians. From starting coalition wars that sought to destroy Israel to organized boycotts and sanctions by the muslim world to placing diplomatic pressure on the West to put out peace proposals to giving them billions in aid annually. They tried everything, but every time, the Palestinian leadership has insulted them, backstabbed them, lied to them, or squandered their efforts away. For example:

Jordan - Took part in coalition wars, took them in as refugees... but Palestinians used this as an opportunity to try to overthrow the Kingdom by assassinating officials and committing terrorist attacks. It was so bad that these events became known as black September.

Egypt - Took part in the coalition wars, tried to diplomatically support Palestine, and took them in as refugees... but the Palestinians also took this as an opportunity to try and overthrow the Egyptian government multiple times. It got so bad that Egypt had to join Israel in their blockade.

Kuwait - provided military, economic, and political support as well as took them in as refugees... but the Palestinians openly celebrated and supported Iraq's invasion in the 90s under Saddam Hussein. It got so bad that Kuwait kicked out all 350,000 Palestinian nationals from it's territory.

Syria - Took part in the coalition wars, provided diplomatic support, and took them as refugees... but the Palestinians ended up trying to overthrow the government during the Syrian civil war. It got so bad that Bashar Al Assad pretty much severed relations with them.

Saudi Arabia - I don't even need to say anything here, they literally released a 3 part documentary (that I highly recommend) that goes through everything they did to support the Palestinians and what they did in return. Here's part 1:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=edKZbu5OM1c

I could keep going, but I think you get the idea. There's a reason why all these countries are starting to recognize Israel now. They tried everything in their power to act on the behalf and in the best interest of Palestine, but in the end their efforts just blew back in their faces

Palestine: declares war, explicitly calls for genocide, asks muslims to murder Jews everywhere, calls other countries to invade Israel, invades Israeli towns, commits terrorist attacks against civilians, massacres entire families, rapes women, launches tens of thousands of missiles, broke ceasefire agreements they asked for (twice), takes hundreds of hostages, openly celebrate the attacks on the streets, parade around the corpses of the naked victims, shows zero remorse, refuses every peace deal, vows to do it all again.

Israel: fights back

Idiots: tHaT's LiTerAlLy GeNoCiDe

Actually brain dead

This may not be a popular response but when did the nazi regime stop? When did China stop with it's cleansing? America and manifest destiny? I could go on... Humanity needs to realize that we are pretty shitty in general and can't be trusted when it comes to hatred, entitlement, and tribalism.

The solution is a neutral third party with sufficient power to stop any country's bullshit through economic and military (actual) peacekeeping... which doesn't exist nor will it ever.

So the short answer is they will stop when the cleansing is complete.

After the deed is done we as 'civilized' nations will lament the tragedy and promise change... until the media cycle washes all those sins down the drain and it will be forgotten until next time.

I am in no way saying what's going on is right...anytime massive amounts of life is taken it's horrible. With that being said you realize that there isn't a single country in the entire world that wasn't built on the blood of others? Every civilization that's here now destroyed some other one. People act like they live in some place that asked nicely to have the land they have.

Oh, I'm fully aware. Tribalism is the lizard brain going deeeep in the paint. The problem is this: peaceful culture doesn't fight back - aggressive culture exploits this: which one thrives? We have systematically bred for and codified our warlike nature. This is the result. Is it fixable? Many have tried. Our history books are littered with both failed attempts and their distorted remains. All I can say for certain is that the way the majority of countries are structured... isn't it. This is fundamentally why achieving a fix is nearly impossible at scale: tribalism. Even if we are wrong it's our wrong and we don't want to lose it. This is rooted in fear of change which from a survival aspect makes sense... but becomes detrimental at scale.

I agree with what you're saying and it's too bad most people are too stupid to move forward with that mindset because I for one would rather we could all get along but for invisible reasons many people can't..which is in itself quite unintelligent

party with sufficient power to stop any country's bullshit

No. That would not be a solution for anything! That would just be an even bigger threat to humanity.

I disagree. It's about execution - creating an environment that is resistant to corrosion. A standing force can absolutely be viewed in that manner - which is why it cannot be a single static standing force.

The UN is the right idea but it needs teeth. And it needs the teeth to be double sided. If boots are on the ground peacekeeping they should be without bias and secondary interest. An attack on a peacekeeper has no guarantee of the creed nor country of origin of that keeper.

Peacekeeping should be like a draft. Every country that participates must provide and maintain a set number of rolling participants. These people will serve and train initially in humanitarian deployments with others.. half way through their 'term' they should be moved to peacekeeping duties. This is idealized but would be good for both building trust amongst peacekeepers and goodwill towards them. This solves the military portion (roughly) - I have a lot of thoughts on this and believe it to be solvable... it just won't be. No country gets to benefit therefore it has no merit.

That covered the military side... when talking about the economic side: the peacekeepers (let's say un for simplicity) carry the ability to (by vote) censure a country and cut it off from direct trade / support. At that time any trade is then routed through the UN and it becomes the middleman. This allows economic pressures to be precisely controlled on an area. Once that country falls in line, by majority vote, operations are restored. Once again this is idealized and has no obviously advantaged party ... so it has no merit and will never occur.

Basically everyone is equally held accountable and equally invested. Of course this means everyone gets a seat at the table and everyone gets one vote. I'm certain we can already see why this has 0 chance of ever happening. Those in power seek to keep it - very few will willingly give some away.

A nice dream, but only a dream.

Unfortunately man is not perfect enough for it to work. Therefore the outcome can be nothing else than a huge threat for mankind.

I said as much multiple times.

The point of that statement was to highlight that it is possible to construct something that does not allow for consolidation and corruption of power... which it did. Your view simply was looking at present day examples which, as you correctly identified, do not work. That doesn't mean nothing can work however ... which is why I disagreed.

It's a fun mental exercise to what if and try to construct something that could work. Can't tear something down without considering what rebuilding it would look like.

This is the most reasonable approach, but as seen with the UN, wich as the sum of its parts failed to keep dictatorships out wich now basically control everything but the security Council and the ICJ, its a Utopist approach sadly. There cant be a peace unless Israel takes over Palestine and treats the people that live there now as equal (wich they do already btw, the myth about apartheid is BS there are many Arab Palestinians living in Israel and many went to work in Israel from gaza) but the problem with the surrounding terrorists is another problem.

The claim of Israeli apartheid does not pertain to the status of Israeli Arabs fyi. It pertains to de facto Israeli control of Gaza and the West Bank, where any time they want the IDF can exercise as much control as they want, by virtue of superior firepower.

Hamas, for instance, only persisted because the Israelis allowed it. Israel controlled the majority of access to the regions, and could and did unilaterally police them with military force at will.

Yeah shure because Hamas isnt constantly firing rockets into Israel... If there is a defakto control how exactly would the 7th October have happened...

This is just idiotic.

De facto control does not mean 100% control over every event that happens. People are still humans, and capable of making errors. It is not mind reading/mind control powers, those are still impossible.

Yeah shure...

Israel has defakto 0 control over Gaza except for the borders normally. Everything inside is controlled by Hamas. And if you think otherwise you have never been there and you don't know anything about it.

Except they would routinely send in military forces to capture terrorist suspects in a process they referred to as "mowing the grass". It's even more pronounced in the West Bank, where the Israeli settlements are thoroughly intermingled with the Palestinian ones, and the Palestinians had relatively few powers over their own security.

It's not a simple thing, unfortunately. Middle Eastern politics seldom are, just in general.

The civilians in Palestinia in general are victims, thats clear, but the reason they are is hamas and the narrative they propagate about the victim hood that got somehow transferred through generations just as their state as refugees would have according to them.

But yes the settlement thing is a shitshow, but nither side recognized the existence of the other and both claim the possession of the entire area, however, Israel clearly has more rights to it due to the fact that the people in Gaza and the other parts aren't the people that lived there before Israel, they are mostly the descendants of the Arabs that attacked Israel shortly after it was declared a state, with the intention of a genocide. The original Palestinians live in Israel (many of them btw killed on the 7th October pogrom/genocide attempt) and have the same rights as the Christians, jews and everyone else, Israel is a super diverse country with lots of immigrants from all over the world. The claims about apartheid by Hamas (supported by un) are absolutely outlandish and just not true.

Oh and... When you have terrorists as you neighborhood you gotta make shure they don't plot teroristic shit and remove the ones that do. That doesn't mean anything about control thats just trying to keep a never ending Forrest fire within certain boundaries.

The claim of Israeli apartheid is not a hamas claim, it's acknowledged by various Israelis as well. Neither Gaza nor, especially the West Bank, has had full independence in many years.

Note, I am not talking about any Israeli citizens. I am talking about Israeli non-citizens who live under Israeli restrictions and off-and-on military control. This is the nature of apartheid. A people that is separate, but not fully independent. An in-between state of conquest, where you're sort-of conquered but not really and have some, but not full, freedoms.

Uhhh autonomous regions that don't see themselves as part of a country and behave like that are obviously not treated like citizens... Thats not apartheid thats common sense. And Israel blockade of Gaza is 100% justified because hamas uses basically everything as weapon transport.

Except it is not under full Palestinian control either. Some things are controlled by Palestinians, other things are indeed controlled by Israelis. When a country is exercising partial control over citizens that are not its own, something odd is happening.

You can justify it if you like, but it is not the normal way of things where free people are concerned.

No its not normal and people living in a country governed by terrorists are never free, be gay in the autonomous region and you get to choose between being thrown of a building or hung or something worse...

There is no such thing as freedom as long as there are terrorists and as long as most support them.

Oh and both Israel and the autonomous region do claim ownership of each others territory and by that the people, so. Yes. Its complicated.

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Israel recognised Palestinian civilian and security control of the West bank in the Oslo accords from the 90's. They are blatantly shitting on their own promises whenever a genocidic occupier or their enabling security forces set foot on the West Bank without express permission from the Palestinian West Bank government.

Yeah the promise to ignore all genocidal attempts, rocket barrages and what not. You are not just a clown, you are the entire fucking clown academy.

"rocket barrages" lol that's rich.

Then Israel responds by murdering 100x civilians including women and children.

Complete disproportionate response after Iron Dome basically prevents any Israelis from dying from those so-called "rocket barrages."

Each time it's one or two Israeli soldiers killed by the one rocket out of 40 that made it in, and by a week later 1,200 Palestinian civilians are murdered. Cool.

Over and over for 5+ decades. It's just objective fact, the numbers are publicly available. I don't forget, so the people in Gaza and the West Bank sure as shit don't (between fighting off "settlers" with AR-15s from New Jersey storming their villages in the middle of the night). Israel created every Palestinian terrorist after decades of oppression, displacement, apartheid, and dire hopelessness. Almost like it's what they wanted.

And now literal genocide. Their end goal. A final solution if you will.

Textbook Hamas propaganda. Absolut mental diarrhea and just misinformation.

Wow. Go away nazi.

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I mean if you born in Gaza your birth needs to be registered with Israel. Otherwise you will lack the necessary documents to get through the checkpoints.

Obviously, Gaza or Palestinia in general doesn't give out recognized papers. Its a autonomous region for a reason.

They wouldn't be allowed to enter any other country without said documents either.

There is no actual reason why it should ne otherwise.

"Autonomous region" is a technical label, but it does not negate the fact they don't control their borders or who ultimately says their children are actual people.

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UN, which... failed to keep dictatorships out

The UN while created with noble intentions certainly fell for the paradox of tolerance. They tolerate the dictatorships and human rights abusers because if they didn't they'd be much less empowered to take action against them, or worse they'd form their own competing UN made up of nations motivated to join them and you'd just end up with another NATO and Warsaw Pact for example. It's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Ultimately the challenge comes down to how do you ultimately tame the leaders of the world who have absolute power. The founding fathers of the United States of America thought they had the solution with democracy and the many checks and balances they implemented into this new form of government they setup, but even that has its challenges and failures that they never could have forseen. The UN was the next experiment, trying to take the similar principles onto the world stage, and it's been less successful (but at least has had some successes)

The UN while created with noble intentions certainly fell for the paradox of tolerance. They tolerate the dictatorships and human rights abusers because if they didn't they'd be much less empowered to take action against them, or worse they'd form their own competing UN made up of nations motivated to join them and you'd just end up with another NATO and Warsaw Pact for example. It's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Yes absolutely but the dictatorships and shitshow countries (china for example) keep growing in numbers, if this trend isn't reversed fast, UN fails as a whole and there is no saving.

It would be better in my opinion to have two options, democratic union and whatever the dictatorships do with each other, because the only thing that united them is being against democracy and Israel. UN, in my personal opinion, already failed as a whole and is beyond saving.

Ultimately the challenge comes down to how do you ultimately tame the leaders of the world who have absolute power. The founding fathers of the United States of America thought they had the solution with democracy and the many checks and balances they implemented into this new form of government they setup, but even that has its challenges and failures that they never could have forseen.

The big part of a government is, that it has power to enforce whatever it decides, UN gladly does not have any meaningful power, Israel would be gone by now otherwise.

The UN was the next experiment, trying to take the similar principles onto the world stage, and it's been less successful (but at least has had some successes)

Well those successes slowly but steadily crumble away, the most institutions have failed, WHO is doing its job only half assed (especially the making shure hospital aren't used as military bases) the human rights Council is majorly filled with people that think human rights are shit and only need to apply it when it fits against the west or Israel specifically, the General Assembly is almost the same. (fun fact, the day of the Russian attack on Ukraine the general assembly voted about condemning Israel for something... Again. Most resolutions are against Israel.) Oh and the entire UNHWR wich is definitely more than partially responsible for hamas doing what they do.

UN isn't even a diplomatic forum anymore.

The Apartheid is very much real, and, while to a much lesser extent than the Palestinian Occupied Territories, also applies to the Palestinian Citizens of Israel

Socio-economic gaps between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli citizens are the result of discriminatory policies pursued over decades. Historically, Israel prevented its Palestinian citizens from accessing livelihoods under its 18-year-long military rule, and used them, at different times, as a source of cheap labour in order to preserve the interests of the Jewish majority. In addition to cruel land seizures, other discriminatory policies have led to Palestinians’ social and economic deprivation: the exclusion of Palestinian localities from high priority areas for development, the discriminatory allocation of land and water for agriculture as well as discriminatory planning and zoning, and the failure to implement major infrastructure development projects in Palestinian communities.

The blockade and Israel’s repeated military offensives have had a heavy toll on Gaza’s essential infrastructure and further debilitated its health system and economy, leaving the area in a state of perpetual humanitarian crisis. Indeed, Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population, the majority of whom are children, has created conditions inimical to human life due to shortages of housing, potable water and electricity, and lack of access to essential medicines and medical care, food, educational equipment and building materials.

Other reports about how Israel is an Apartheid State:

Human Rights Watch Report

B'TSelem Report with quick Explainer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watch

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amnesty_International

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27Tselem

I think you might need to read this i won't read your comment or open those links, your sources are very openly and clearly biased and known to be very antisemitic and to hate Israel. There is nothing to gain from them.

Criticism of the Human Rights Abuses of the Israeli State and Anti-zionism are not antisemitism. You are choosing to be willfully ignorant. Israel does NOT represent all Jewish people, nor does their actions. There have been prominent Jewish people extremely critical of Zionism since it's inception, are you seriously saying they are antisemitic too?

Israel is the one that intentionally conflates the two in order to deflect from criticizm. When Israel commits war crimes, or human rights abuses, or land grabbing, they are the ones that claim they do so for all Jewish people. When Zionist actions are criticized, they call it antisemitic. The conflation of the two is genuinely antisemitic, as the actions of Israel in no way represent all Jewish people.

If you don't want to be naive, I suggest you read the reports by human rights organizations. They are not antisemitic, unless you think advocates for a Secular Bi-National State with equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians is also antisemitic, which is insane.

Year before Oct 7 - Jewish Voice for Peace

2023 is 'deadliest year' for Palestinian children say human rights groups (Oct 6th)

HRW Events of 2022 and HRW Events of 2023

Jewish voice for peace is a super left wing anti Israel organization.

New Arab is a shitshow. Also yeah shure the 10k rockets hamas fired from gaza after 7th had a 20% failure rate... They are usually fired from residential areas or sometimes from school/hospitals. So yeah shure many gaza children died. "OH SAVE THE CHILDREN!" they screamed as they murdered children from another religion/ethnicity...

HRW again, im not reading that, i cant even, ive blocked their domains in my DNS due to given reason provided.

Oh and yes i absolutely see a two state solution as absolutely impossible and borderline Antisemitic currently (after 7th October)

You are aware that what Israel is doing in Gaza is comparable to the nazi treatment of e.g. the Warsaw ghettos.... right?

Take a step back, and look at the Israeli soldiers mocking Palestinian dead, mistreating the wounded and captured, and shooting at clearly unarmed civilians for fun. All this while they brag about it on video. Look at that and tell me that it doesn't give you a sick feeling to your stomach of the type you haven't had since you saw photos of concentration camps.

There are dozens of children that have literally STARVED TO DEATH in Gaza because of Israel's actions. They're dying the same deaths that Jews were put through in concentration camps. Don't you see the horrifying irony in this?

Israel is at a point where humanitarian workers from recognised international organisations have been targeted and killed, and they brush it off as a "mistake".

I cannot think about anything in the past 70 years that compares to what Israel is doing, and I hope beyond hope that some force will smite their government and armed forces such that the slaughter will stop. Because it is a slaughter. It's not a war when Israel is counting its dead on its fingers, while there are enough missing Palestinians in the rubble to fill a football stadium. It's just Israel wilfully bombing, burning and slaughtering, with nobody stopping them.

All this, and you have the fucking audacity to talk about antisemitism? Take a look at the world, and ask yourself how calling for an end to this can have anything to do with the religious beliefs of the perpetrators.

You are aware that you talk absolut mental diarrhea and make not a single coherent sentence in the above comment...

Oh and "THE CHILDREN!!!!!"

Im blocking you now, arguing with you is like trying to teach a wall to do a backflip.

What a class A moron. You can't even respond to a single thing they say, so it's just "mental diarrhea". Every one of your comments is evading their points so hard, your mental gymnastics would qualify you for the Special Olympics if they didn't have a minimum IQ requirement.

As a person with jewish ancestry, what you are spewing makes me feel ill. Antizionism is not antisemitism. If it were, so many jews will be antisemitic? Please, grow up.

As a person with German ancestry i kindly don't care if you personally are against it. Israel is a state and being for the abolishment of Israel is antisemitism, even from Jewish people.

Maybe learn about the history of a place outside of the Islamnazi propaganda.

Oh, I learned plenty, and not from Islamic centered resources. But you wouldn't be able to discern it because you are speaking from hate, not from facts. Besides, there are many jewish academics who support Palestine and are against the genocide of Palestinians. And neither they nor I claim that supporting them is antisemitic or that it requires the genocide of the Israeli people. Only someone with a warped and dellusional understanding of history could make the claims you make.

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Yeah - it’s about regional control, and defensive positions.

This comment is sort of a continuation of this one, but not exactly. (Sorry about the link to my instance, I’m new and don’t know how to do the thing.)

The U.S. has long needed a bully in the area to prevent the Middle East from being too unified, so the west can get relatively inexpensive access to its oil.

The state of play right now is that the U.S. actually produces enough petroleum for its own needs, but our western allies do not, and supplying them with enough oil will raise the cost to an unacceptable level/a level where they’ll have to channel money to the Middle East (which hates the U.S. for its meddling, or to Russia, which also hates the U.S.)

In about 10-15 years, technology and renewables will advance to a point where oil demand is going to have decreased to the point where the U.S. can supply all of its needs and those of its western allies without jacking the price up.

That means the U.S. won’t need a bully. But it will mean that the U.S. will cut funding to Israel, and more or less stop coming to their defense. Israel’s plan is to push out every non-Jew, using Zionism as an excuse for awful statecraft, and they’re going to push their borders to easily defensible geographic areas.
Once they do that, they’re going to basically become North Korea of the Middle East - armed to the teeth and hard to get into. Because if they don’t, everyone they’ve been bullying for the past hundred years (yes, this started before the declaration of statehood), is going to wipe them from the map - potentially leading to them launching the nukes they keep pretending they don’t have, so they don’t have to undergo international monitoring.

Assuming, of course, the plot by other countries to destabilize the U.S. fails and U.S. is still major player by the time Israel’s plan is accomplished. If the destabilization effort succeeds, we may see a full scale war against Israel before their aims are achieved.

That’s my take on it, anyway. They won’t stop because they don’t think they can stop, due to how horrible they’ve been. (At the behest of the U.S., who will begin dropping them once their usefulness has ended.)

Reminds of the accounts of people who owned enslaved people being afraid to let them go because of how they thought once freed they would turn around and slaughter their former "masters" because how could they not.

Except that didn't happen.

A bunch of folks without many rights, property, education, or jobs in a country where they are basically hostages is quite different than Iran.

It is, you're right. It's kind of a poor comparaison now that I see it spelled out

and supplying them with enough oil will raise the cost to an unacceptable level

That would actually be good, so EV and plastic alternatives get better chances.

I don’t deny that. I really can’t wait for the transition away from petroleum.

But … power, and the economy is power. Sigh. The U.S. gets billions for its oil.

Your take makes a lot of sense but I do wonder how advantageous israel really is anymore. In the past it was an easy base, but we control Saudi, UAE etc now.

It feels like people downplay how much our policitians are in israels pocket. AIPAC is flaunting publicly that they practically own all American politicians.

Even when being utterly worthless israel might be able to keep American taxpayer dollars flowing to them by bribing politicians.

It feels like people downplay how much our policitians are in israels pocket. AIPAC is flaunting publicly that they practically own all American politicians.

I find it wild that people say this so openly now, when before Oct 7 saying something like this would get you branded as a neo-Nazi. AIPAC being a massively powerful lobby is nothing new, it's just socially acceptable to oppose them now.

That’s also highly valid, and not something I factor heavily into my thoughts about the future of U.S. support.

Shit. Huh. I gotta rethink that.

I'm just gonna comment here because most of my comments from my main aren’t getting federated in this thread. Not sure if I'm being censored or just janky federation, but its frustrating to be silenced in this situation. I'll delete this if my actual comments ever show up.

::: spoiler history lesson Why don't you try answering his questions? He just demonstrated how the assertions you made in your original post don't make any sense. And your response is a list of random historical generalities without any attempt to dispute the factual and logical inconsistencies of your argument. Oy vey

You're advancing a thesis that the US has been intentionally destabilizing the Middle East for the past 70 years, when the truth is the complete opposite. Destabilizing the region is what causes the price of oil to rise, the best interest of the US is for the region to be more stable so they can sell us more oil for cheaper prices.

You're so massively, incalculably confused and yet you believe yourself to be not only knowledgeable, but capable of explaining the situation to others. Remarkable.

[Comment 2]

… I just realized you think my comments about Israel being a bully mean you think I mean the U.S. is destabilizing the Middle East.

And while that is true in limited contexts, I’m talking about Israel being a projection of U.S. power in the area, to prevent unity against the west. Obviously, the U.S. destabilizes countries that are opposed to the west, and fosters ones that aren’t.

This sequence of words is utterly meaningless. "You think I meant the US is destabilizing the Middle East, but actually I meant that the US uses Israel in limited contexts in order to destabilize the Middle East".

Huh? You're saying the US destabilizes countries opposed to the west in the Middle East, using Israel as a projection of power. So, you're saying that the US is destabilizing the Middle East. My reading comprehension is just fine, but you just have absolutely no clue what point you're even trying to make. Your position is completely incoherent and paradoxical.

The U.S. has long needed a bully in the area to prevent the Middle East from being too unified, so the west can get relatively inexpensive access to its oil.

No, it hasn't. The Middle East has never been even remotely unified, why would the US be concerned about that?

If anything, the existence of Israel is the most unifying force for many Middle Eastern countries who can barely agree on anything except hating Israel.

pay attention to what it says about the

FOH with this bullshit, quote the relevant passage that you claim contradicts me. You constantly dodge and run away from any points made against you and try to move the goalposts to distract from your glaring ignorance and wrongness.

[Comment 3 (this one went through on at least one server)]

And of course all the plans of the US that specifically talked about destroying nations like Iraq and Syria and the invasion of Iraq to do exactly that... All coincidences! Who would be so mean to assume this to be part of larger strategies?

You need to cite sources. This means nothing without a specific source. The US previously had war plans to invade Canada in the event of war with the British Empire. Does that indicate the US is currently trying to destabilize Canada? Such is the nature of geopolitics.

Ahh yes. The Middle Easts own history. Clearly has nothing to do with French, British or US being the colonizing entities... And after all why would the US be interested in dividing a region that is connecting 3 continents and has the mos accessible of the main strategic ressources of the past two centuries.

First of all, the French, British and US never colonized the middle east. They did engage in imperialism in order to control the geopolitical situation from distance after the demise of a previous colonial empire (the Ottomans), but there wasn't any concerted effort to permanently settle or develop colonies in the region. The Middle East has historically been a colonizing region, not a colonized region.

Seriously try to answer your own question. Why would the US be interested in destabilizing the region? So they can deal with more terrorist attacks until the end of time? The success of Middle Eastern countries is not a threat to US hegemony. They are on the payroll just like everyone else, they take US money for their oil and then they turn around and spend that money on manufactured goods and advanced services provided by US corporations. The US always wins as long as there is peace and economic activity is maximized. The US loses when economic activity is reduced, which is why you have the constant interventions in response to political and religious violence and extremism.

The US military is a generally a peacekeeping force, because the US economy is a much more powerful tool for dominating other countries. A military victory only lasts as long as you have troops on the ground, but an economic victory can effectively assimilate an entire society, leaving no trace. The more money that Middle Eastern countries make, the more dependent they become on American goods and services. That's the larger trajectory of the American geopolitical aim, not some childish strategy of "destabilizing" foreign regimes just to get embroiled in hugely expensive wars. :::

::: spoiler comment was too long [Comment 4]

You are completely and utterly confused and mistaken about everything that you just said. I wish I could help you, but the best I can offer is to stop offering opinions on topics that you know nothing about.

How is it so impossible for you to respond to the words I have already written down?

You have repeatedly stated that the US has been intentionally destabilizing the Middle East.

Now you state that:

The U.S. has a vested interest in keeping Middle East oil flowing and cheap until it’s no longer needed

a stable oil market means a healthy economy and unchanged projection of geopolitical power for the U.S., yes?

I know, I literally just explained that fact to you. How is Middle East oil going to keep flowing cheaply if the US destabilizes the region and causes wars and conflict? Please explain how that makes sense to you. You think that oil becomes cheaper when the country is at war? Wtf are you smoking?

Please, for the love of God, respond to my argument instead of going on some tangent about how the Hebrews were enslaved in the Old Testament or some shit. Confront your own ignorance.

Oh! The Wikipedia article says that the U.S. provided significant help to Israel. They said Israel won those on their own. Nah. They did alright in ‘67, fully stocked with U.S. weapons, because they knew it was coming. And in 73, the U.S. had to execute operation Nickel Grass to bail Israel out.

Lmfao this would be funny if it weren't so worrying for the future of humanity. The US had to bail Israel out? My man, the USSR had to threaten nuclear war in order to bail out Syria and Egypt (from a war they started) and get the US to force Israel to agree to a ceasefire before they overran Cairo and Damascus.

The Yom Kippur war began when Egypt and Syria, supported by auxiliary forces from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Algeria, Libya, Kuwait, Tunisia, Morocco, Cuba, and North Korea, launched a surprise attack on Israel on the Holy day of Yom Kippur, October 6th, 1973. The Arabic forces were supplied with weapons by their Soviet allies, and Israel was supplied by their American allies. Just in case you can't count, that's 12 Arabic and communist states versus Israel alone, with the advantage of surprise. Israel proceeded to absolutely rout the opposing forces in a matter of weeks.

After three days of heavy fighting, Israel halted the Egyptian offensive, resulting in a military stalemate on that front, and pushed the Syrians back to the pre-war ceasefire lines. The Israeli military then launched a four-day-long counter-offensive deep into Syria, and within a week Israeli artillery began to shell the outskirts of the Syrian capital of Damascus. Egyptian forces meanwhile pushed for two strategic mountain passes deeper within the Sinai Peninsula but were repulsed, and Israeli forces counter-attacked by crossing the Suez Canal into Egypt and advancing towards Suez City. On 22 October, an initial ceasefire brokered by the United Nations unravelled, with each side blaming the other for the breach.

By 24 October, the Israelis had improved their positions considerably and completed their encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army and Suez City, bringing them within 100 kilometres (62 mi) of the Egyptian capital of Cairo.

Your argument is that the US provided significant help to Israel and they wouldn't have been able to win without the US. It was a fucking surprise attack and they were able to turn the tide within three days. That not even enough time for supplies to get shipped into Israel from the States. Guess what else? The Soviet Union provided more help to Syria and Egypt than the US did to Israel, as it stated in the Wikipedia article which you linked, but apparently didn't take the time to read.

In the end, the military airlift shipped 22,325 tons of materiel to Israel. Additionally, the U.S. conducted its own seaborne re-supply operation, delivering 33,210 tons to Israel by 30 October.[17] During the same general time, the Soviets airlifted 12,500–15,000 tons of supplies, more than half of which went to Syria; they also supplied another 63,000 tons mainly to Syria by means of a sealift.

66,00 tons of material from the Soviets versus 55,000 tons from the USA. Please stop spreading propaganda; you're just a happy idiot, but bad actors move people like you around like pawns on a chessboard. Hamas is playing you like a fiddle and you don't even realize.

They did alright in ‘67, fully stocked with U.S. weapons, because they knew it was coming.

I don't know how to explain this to you, but the fact that they didn't know it was coming in 73, or many times since then, is exactly why they have some moral ground to stand on. Invading another nation without declaring war in advance is barbaric and cowardly. Regardless of any other opinions that you hold, surely we can agree that any military action should be announced in advance and directed towards military targets? I don't believe that any civilized person can fail to understand that principle. If armed conflict is inevitable, at least give forewarning and let the defenseless women, children, and elderly get to safety.

Israel does that. Hamas does the exact opposite. They go out of their way to attack defenseless Israeli civilians and they actively put their own civilians in harms way so that they can use their preventable deaths for political maneuvering. Absolutely disgusting, indefensible behavior. :::

The U.S. has long needed a bully in the area to prevent the Middle East from being too unified, so the west can get relatively inexpensive access to its oil.

Is there any evidence to directly prove this claim? This sounds like a made up justification to validate your own opinions. The Middle East isn't divided by the US, it's divided by its own history of imperialism, colonization, oppression and violence based on religious and ethnic lines accross the centuries. There's really no incentive for the US keep the Middle East divided, not to mention that oil producing countries are already united through OPEC.

Besides, why would the US need a bully when it's directly allied with Gulf states? Not only that but those states are also allied with Israel. Who exactly is bullying who? The only agreed upon bully in the region is Iran, it's actually the uniting factor between the Gulf states and the Israelis. Not to mention that the US doesn't need a bully because it's more than capable of doing what it wants.

The state of play right now is that the U.S. actually produces enough petroleum for its own needs, but our western allies do not, and supplying them with enough oil will raise the cost to an unacceptable level/a level where they’ll have to channel money to the Middle East (which hates the U.S. for its meddling, or to Russia, which also hates the U.S.)

You understand that it's not only American allies that rely on Middle Eastern oil, right? China, India, Southeast Asia, and so on all rely on Middle Eastern oil and they all have a vested interest in keeping it flowing. If anything, the US is incentivized to sell its own oil since it's a net exporter.

In about 10-15 years, technology and renewables will advance to a point where oil demand is going to have decreased to the point where the U.S. can supply all of its needs and those of its western allies without jacking the price up.

Again, is there any source that backs up this prediction?

But it will mean that the U.S. will cut funding to Israel, and more or less stop coming to their defense.

This idea that Israel only exists due to US funding is a myth. Israel won all its major wars by itself and it has one of the world's largest and most resilient economies. US aid, which is almost entirely in the form of loans or weapons contracts, account for less than 1% of Israel's GDP.

Israel’s plan is to push out every non-Jew, using Zionism as an excuse for awful statecraft, and they’re going to push their borders to easily defensible geographic areas.

20% of Israel's citizens aren't Jewish. Also do you even know what Zionism is?

Because if they don’t, everyone they’ve been bullying for the past hundred years (yes, this started before the declaration of statehood), is going to wipe them from the map - potentially leading to them launching the nukes they keep pretending they don’t have, so they don’t have to undergo international monitoring.

This is historically illiterate point of view. First of all, Israel isn't the bully in this conflict, especially before statehood. If you look at the actual history, you'll how muslims in the region collaborated with the Nazis to help eradicate the Jews during WWII or how the Arab world rejected the 1947 UN peace plan and invaded Israel with the intention to destroy it or again in 1967 during the six day war or again in 1973 Yom Kippur war or the 1920 Nebi Musa riots against Jews in Jerusalem or the 1921 Jaffa riots or the Jaffa deportations by the Ottomans in 1917 or the 1929 riots and massacres (including the Hebron Massacre which destroyed the ancient community there) or the insane number of Palestinian terrorist groups and their attacks on civilians. The number is comically large that there are entire databases dedicated just recording all of them:

https://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/terrisraelsum.html

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/comprehensive-listing-of-terrorism-victims-in-israel

Hell, even Wikipedia can't fit all of them in a single article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist\_incidents\_in\_Israel\_by\_year

Ffs, the Palestinian leadership at the time, which is arguably the foundation of the modern Palestinian national identity, literally cooperated with the Nazis to a comical degree. The leader at the time, Amin al-Husseini, and his administration literally flew out to Germany and personally met with Hitler. There they both expressed praise and support for each other, and declared desire for cooperation to reach their mutual goals of defeating the British and genociding the Jews. Amin al-Husseini directly told Hitler that Jews shouldn't get a national home, that they were natural allies in their fight against the Jews, and that Fascism is a righteous ideology. Hitler was so impressed that he called him the most important leader in the Middle East and an Aryan because he was white, blone, and had blue eyes. The thing is that muslims at home celebrated the new ties with the axis powers and cooperation between went through the roof. The Palestinian identity was quite literally founded on antisemitism.

Do I need to keep going? I hope not. Keep in mind, this is all history. You can look all of this up yourself to verify.

we may see a full scale war against Israel before their aims are achieved.

We have already seen this play out at least three times. All of these wars were coalition wars provoked by the muslim Arabs seeking the full destruction of Israel, and every time Israel won.

That’s my take on it, anyway. They won’t stop because they don’t think they can stop, due to how horrible they’ve been.

What a bad take. The reason they're still fighting is because they're still being attacked.

Oooh. I attracted a 1-day old account that conveniently doesn’t know about U.S. statecraft toward the Middle East for the last 70 years, doesn’t know about the long history of arms transfers to Israel, doesn’t know about the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish terrorism against Britain and Palestine until Britain left the area, or the genocides that happened as soon as Britain stopped offering protection to the Palestinians. You conveniently seem to fail to understand geopolitics in any meaningful contexts.
And then you “Source?” my (very well informed) opinions.

lol. No. Don’t waste my time.

Lol imagine feeling so attacked by someone calling out and criticizing your blatantly made up and ignorant claims that you actually resort to a toddler level insult where you call me stupid, call yourself "well informed" (lmao), and then put yourself on the back for it as if you actually did anything more than clown yourself. I was right on the money, you don't actually have any idea what you're talking about. You just regurgitate the propaganda you consume on echo chambers like Lemmy, and then make up stuff to fill the gaps. But I agree, I won't waste your time because that would mean I would be wasting my time on somebody who doesn't actually bring anything of value. Now scurry back to your echo chamber before the big scary knowledge comes and destroys your ignorant worldviews. Shoo, go on then

Support your claims.

Edit: With like, actual sources.

And I didn’t call you stupid. I insinuated that your motives were suspect and that you are dishonest. But I am beginning to think you lack the ability to actually make supportable claims or debate people - which would probably mean … eh. *shrug*

8 hour old account with 42 comments...

I really hope it's a hasbara account working hard and not someone with such an unbelievable capacity for missing the point.

The Middle East isn’t divided by the US, it’s divided by its own history of imperialism, colonization, oppression and violence based on religious and ethnic lines accross the centuries. There’s really no incentive for the US keep the Middle East divided, not to mention that oil producing countries are already united through OPEC.

Ahh yes. The Middle Easts own history. Clearly has nothing to do with French, British or US being the colonizing entities... And after all why would the US be interested in dividing a region that is connecting 3 continents and has the mos accessible of the main strategic ressources of the past two centuries.

And of course all the plans of the US that specifically talked about destroying nations like Iraq and Syria and the invasion of Iraq to do exactly that... All coincidences! Who would be so mean to assume this to be part of larger strategies?

This is such a brainless and oversimplified ideological point of view. If you actually bothered to look into the region, you would clearly see that there's a lot more going on. For example:

  1. The Ottoman Empire genocided the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and a bunch of other minorities leaving them all to resent the Turks... especially since Turkey still officially denies that any of them even happened
  2. Turkey actively oppresses and squashes any attempt for Kurds to maintain their identity, let alone gain independence which leads them to hate the Turks. Just FYI, the Kurdish language, clothing, and culture was banned in Turkey until the 1980s.
  3. Turkey illegally occupies half of Cyprus under the pretext of "protecting the Turkish minorities", and both Greece and Cyprus hate them for it because they've broken their treaties and are illegally occupying half of the country
  4. Syrians hate Turkey too because it invaded the north and still occupies parts of it
  5. The Turks hate Arabs and vice versa because Arabs view the Turks as colonizers turned heathens since they're now secular and allow a bunch of things not allowed in islam, and the Turks view the Arabs as backwards religious fundamentalists who leech of them since there are millions Arab of refugees in Turkey
  6. Kuwait hates Iraq because it invaded in the 90s
  7. Iran and Iraq don't like each other because of the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s
  8. The Iraqi Kurds hate the Arabs because Saddam Hussein genocided them
  9. The Sunni and Shia in Iraq hate each other because they're different sects of the same religion, and oh they fought wars over it too
  10. Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon DESPISE Iran because it actively funds and arms terrorist militias that constantly terrorize them, steal their wealth, and keep their countries into unstable failed states
  11. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries hate Iran because they're Shia and because they keep threatening their oil exports in the
  12. Saudi Arabia hates the Shia in Yemen (the Houthis)
  13. The Yemeni people hate Saudi Arabia because of the war they led against them
  14. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, and Bahrain all severed ties with Qatar in 2017 because it funds terrorist groups inside their borders and because it uses Al Jazeera to pump out propaganda against them. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the mutual hatred got so bad that the royal family actually proposed digging a moat around Qatar to turn it into an island
  15. All of the islamic countries in the Middle East hate Israel because it's Jewish
  16. Egypt and Turkey don't like each other because Turkey is trying to claim the EEZ of the eastern Mediterranean, some of which is Egypt's
  17. Armenia and Azerbaijan hate each other because Azerbaijan denies the Armenian genocide, because on is Christian and the other is muslim, and because of a territorial dispute created by Stalin that they've been fighting over for the past 30 years.
  18. Georgia hates Armenia, despite both of them being Christian nations, because they supported Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008
  19. Kuwait hates Palestine because they supported Saddam Hussein's invasion in the 90s, which led Kuwait to expel all 350,000 Palestinians from its territory
  20. Jordan hates Palestine because they tried to overthrow the government when they took them in as refugees. This series of events was so bad it became known as black September
  21. Syria doesn't like Palestine because they tried to overthrow the government during the Syrian civil war
  22. Egypt doesn't like Palestine because they used the Sinai to commit terrorist attacks and they tried to overthrow the government. It got so bad that they joined Israel in their blockade against Gaza
  23. Saudi Arabia and the UAE also don't like Palestine because despite all the numerous military, economic, and political aid... their efforts blew up in their faces. The UAE ended up recognizing Israel and Saudi Arabia released a 3 part documentary featuring one of their top diplomats that went through the history of Saudi Arabia's support for Palestine and how the Palestinian leaders were liers, cheaters, and backstabbers
  24. Georgia doesn't like Turkey because of its Ottoman past
  25. All the caucuses countries hate Russia because of their genocides and imperialism
  26. Syria hates Israel because they occupy Golan Heights
  27. Lebanon hates Israel because they invaded to stomp out Hezbollah
  28. Israel doesn't like any of it's neighbors because they're Arabs and they all supported Palestine
  29. Israel also doesn't like Lebanon specifically because of Hezbollah
  30. Iran and Israel hate each other because of religious fundamentalism
  31. Iranian people, especially the minorities, HATE their government because it's theocratic and their government hates them back because the people are secular
  32. Israel doesn't like Jordan, Syria, Egypt, or Lebanon because they invaded it before
  33. Christians hate muslims because they've been persecuting them
  34. Kurds in Syria don't like the Arabs because they also tried to suppress them
  35. Turkey and Israel have a love hate relationship based on Netanyahu's and Erdogan's mood swings.

The list goes on and on. No matter how recent or how far back you go, this region has ALWAYS been unstable, violent, and tyrannical. This because it's in the crossroads of 3 continents like you said, but also because of geography and culture that reinforces the same cycles. Western powers did play a role, but trying to blame all the division, violence, and hatred in that region on the West is just ignorant.

1...

And Israel and the EU help Azerbaijan to continue ethnic cleansing of Armenians, in particular Israel by sending drones in exchange for Azerbaijani oil

2..

The Kurdish identity was deliberately squashed by the Western imperialists France and UK when they drew the borders after the fall of the Ottoman empire

3...

Turkey went into Cyprus when a western aided fascist Greek military junta government tried to take over Cyprus and make it part of Greece with ethnic cleansing against the Turks in Cyprus. Calling it an illegal occupation is again a western imperialist narrative ignoring the complicity in attempted ethnic cleansing or worse genocide by the Greek fascist military junta government of the time. In fact Turkey stepping in was pivotal to the fascist military junta falling apart and Greece returning to Democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus

So already in your first three points you are showing either a lack of understanding, or deliberately downplaying the effects of western imperialist rule and its continuation into today. Armenians are allies of Palestine as they understand that they are victim of the same forces. In particular the Israel-Azerbaijan axis shows that it is not about religion, but about classic imperialist motives of ressources, power and money.

And Israel and the EU help Azerbaijan to continue ethnic cleansing of Armenians, in particular Israel by sending drones in exchange for Azerbaijani oil

This is blatantly false. France and Greece, for example, explicitly supported Armenia and the rest of the EU and NATO was largely neutral except for Turkey because they were dealing with Covid lockdowns.

The Kurdish identity was deliberately squashed by the Western imperialists France and UK when they drew the borders after the fall of the Ottoman empire

This is true but the squashing of the Kurds didn't start with the West nor did end there, they merely continued something that already existed. The Ottoman Empire and the Arab empires before it were all explicitly suppressed the Kurds.

Turkey went into Cyprus when a western aided fascist Greek military junta government tried to take over Cyprus and make it part of Greece with ethnic cleansing against the Turks in Cyprus. Calling it an illegal occupation is again a western imperialist narrative ignoring the complicity in attempted ethnic cleansing or worse genocide by the Greek fascist military junta government of the time. In fact Turkey stepping in was pivotal to the fascist military junta falling apart and Greece returning to Democracy.

Such embarrassing ignorance. This is from the very wiki article that you linked:

In 1983 the Turkish Cypriot assembly declared independence of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Immediately upon this declaration Britain convened a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to condemn the declaration as "legally invalid". United Nations Security Council Resolution 541 (1983) considered the "attempt to create the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is invalid, and will contribute to a worsening of the situation in Cyprus". It went on to state that it "considers the declaration referred to above as legally invalid and calls for its withdrawal".

The international community condemns Turkey's illegal occupation of Cyprus. There is a reason why no country on earth except for the occupier, Turkey, recognizes this fake puppet state as a country. Even Turkey's other puppet, Azerbaijan, which is the most loyal of Turkey's allies doesn't recognize it.

Not only is the international community unanimously against Turkey, but they also violated the Treaty of Guaranteed of 1960. This was a joint agreement between Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, and the UK regarding the protection and territorial integrity of Cyprus. Turkey was one four principal signatories and one of the three supposed protectorates of Cyprus, and they only signed the treaty a few years before their occupation.

This is taken directly from the Treaty of Guarantee of 1960:

**Article II. **

Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom, taking note of the undertakings of the Republic of Cyprus set out in Article I of the present Treaty, recognise and guarantee the independence, territorial integrity and security of the Republic of Cyprus, and also the state of affairs established by the Basic Articles of its Constitution. Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom likewise undertake to prohibit, so far as con cerns them, any activity aimed at promoting, directly or indirectly, either union of Cyprus with any other State or partition of the Island. Article IV. In the event of a breach of the provisions of the present Treaty, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom undertake to consult together with respect to the representations or measures necessary to ensure observance of those provisions.

In so far as common or concerted action may not prove possible, each of the three guaranteeing Powers reserves the right to take action with the sole aim of • re-establishing the state of affairs created by the present Treaty.

You can read the full treaty right here: https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/CY%20GR%20TR_600816_Treaty%20of%20Guarantee.pdf

As you can see Turkey is in clear violation of this treaty. It is refusing to cooperate with the other protectorates of this treaty and it is directly violating Cyprus' sovereignty and territorial integrity.

But actually gets even worse because the Turkish speaking Cypriots want to reunite with their Greek neighbors and unify the island, and there are have been ongoing demonstrations by the native people there for DECADES against Turkish occupation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Turkish_Cypriot_protests (50,000 to 80,000 people turned out, that's about 1/3 of the 170,000 native Turkish speaking Cypriots) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/09/rising-anger-with-turkey-drives-calls-for-reunification-in-crisis-hit-northern-cyprus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/15/erdogan-met-by-protests-from-turkish-cypriots-during-visit-northern-cyprus https://cyprus-mail.com/2024/04/26/hundreds-of-turkish-cypriots-protest-against-govt/ https://apnews.com/article/europe-middle-east-government-and-politics-united-nations-suburbs-235658ac64b564902747dc2225933899 https://apnews.com/ea58f13ac33a49479048df04357d78c7/Turkish-Cypriots-protest-Turkey's-'unwanted'-meddling

What does Turkey do in response to this very clear opposition from the native Turkish speaking Cypriots who want them to leave, respect the treaties they've signed, and want to unite with the rest of the island? That's right Turkey sends in over 100,000 non native Turkish residents to occupy the island: https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/X2H-Xref-ViewHTML.asp?FileID=10153&lang=EN#:~:text=According%20to%20reliable%20estimates%2C%20their,way%20from%20those%20in%20Cyprus. http://www.mfa.gov.cy/mfa/Embassies/Embassy_Vienna/vienna.nsf/page74_en/page74_en?OpenDocument

Which by the way is a clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention's Article 49 which includes:

Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.33_GC-IV-EN.pdf

Calling Turkey's illegal occupation of Northern Cyprus anything but that shows that you're either a historically ignorant, a bootlicker, or an authoritarian extremist like a Marxist or Fascist. Though in your case, it's probably all 3.

So already in your first three points you are showing either a lack of understanding, or deliberately downplaying the effects of western imperialist rule and its continuation into today.

I wonder how it feels to be confidentially incorrect. I can't really tell if this a projection or just a lack of self awareness.

Armenians are allies of Palestine as they understand that they are victim of the same forces. In particular the Israel-Azerbaijan axis shows that it is not about religion, but about classic imperialist motives of ressources, power and money.

Actually this isn't true. Israel and Armenia are pretty neutral towards each other. Armenia was the only country in West Asia, other than Israel, to not recognize Palestine as a country. Actually they only did so yesterday, and everybody sees this as a tit for tat for Israel signing that arms contract with Azerbaijan back in 2012 where they gave them drones and other military equipment (which the Azeri dictator Aliyev used against them in 2020) over the next few years in exchange for their oil (which makes up 40-60% of their oil imports) and having Azerbaijan and Turkey remain allies against Iran... but despite this there's calls in Israel to recognize the Armenian genocide and talks in Armenia to buy Israeli weapons: https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-armenia-mulls-procuring-iai-missiles-report-1001482068 https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/why-israel-must-now-recognise-the-armenian-genocide-jvxgn8k7

Armenia used to be a strong Russian ally in hopes of having Russia protect it from Azerbaijan, and it's big ally Turkey, a NATO member. However, when Azerbaijan attacked and Armenia invoked it's defense clause, Russia refused to help. Not only that but it's puppet Belarus, publicly came out in support Azerbaijan. Because of this Armenia has publicly announced it's intent to withdraw from the CSTO and draw closer to the West, especially after France, Greece, and even the US (remember that Nancy Pelosi trip?) all showed support to Armenia over Azerbaijan. Which leaves Armenia in a very weird and complicated geopolitical situation. Trying to oversimplify their geopolitical situation is just stupid.

I've been reading your posts. You make excellent points very often, clearly drawing from a deep knowledge of the region.

However continually calling people names and insulting their intelligence will tend to stop them from really hearing your message and just inflame the situation. You could just not type that stuff and then everything else you type would have more impact. It'd be a pity to waste all that effort.

I sometimes get frustrated with the people I argue with and these stuff slip out. However, what you're saying is a true and your criticism is valid. I'll definitely keep this in mind. I appreciate your comment.

Yes your frustration is totally understandable. It is a very heated topic and a lot of bad faith arguments are thrown around.

Sometimes I remind myself not to hope that the person I'm replying to will understand my reply or acknowledge that I'm right - instead I post my reply for the lurkers to read, who are far more numerous. The lurker has not publicly said anything so their ego is not fixed on defending their position and they are more likely to receive what I contribute with an open mind.

With this wider context, the goal changes. When the target audience shifts to the readers then there is no longer a need to continue a long back and forth discussion (the person replying to me will never change their mind anyway!) once I have made my point clearly. It's ok if the other person has the last word if by having it they discredit themselves by demonstrating a closed mind - the lurkers will see it.

I hope this helps.

1 more...

For decades, Israel and the US (and European countries) have pursued a policy to destabilize middle eastern regimes.

People don't realize this, but there was a wave of Arab nationalism that was killed by sponsoring Islamic extremists. Had that not happened, the middle east would be much more secular today than it is.

Israel attacking and destabilizing Lebanon and Syria and the US maintaining a dictator in Egypt are part of this strategy.

In turn, this leads to hate towards the West and Israel by the Muslims affected.

It won't stop as long as American voters care much more about gas prices than about human rights. American politicians are willing to sponsor genocide to have some control on oil prices in order to win elections.

You are not giving Arabs any credit for the current situation? Thats almost racist 😁

America cares less today about oil as it is self reliant.

Americans still care about the price of oil, which is set in a global market and where Saudi-Arabia and Russia have more influence than the USA.

Obviously, the extremist Arabs that overthrew their own leaders are also to blame. Where did I deny that?

Extremist arabs didn't overthrew their leaders, the population overthrew their dictators and was hiding the fact of torturing and killing political oponents or even normal people critisizing the regimes

To be fair, how many secular leaders can you assassinate before they stop?

It won’t stop as long as American voters care much more about gas prices than about human rights. American politicians are willing to sponsor genocide to have some control on oil prices in order to win elections.

Who should we vote for to stop what's going on? Please, enlighten me.

I don't think you really have a lot of choices to be honest.

You'd first need to get new candidates to win a primary and then a general and the required majorities are lacking almost everywhere.

A more fruitful approach is to actually change public opinion.

It's a long uphill battle, but it's happening.

I don’t think you really have a lot of choices to be honest.

Therein lies the problem. We don't have a lot of choices. Voting for new, progressive candidates feels great and it's nice to pat ourselves on the back and think we're making a difference, but the fact of the matter is that voting for a candidate who has no realistic path to winning is only even a realistic option when the candidate with the 'D' next to their name is all but guaranteed to win. And yeah, I'd really love to be able to make a statement by splitting the leftist vote between the democratic candidate and a progressive one; I'd really love to tell the democrats to get fucked and vote for a progressive third-party for every seat, but right now is far from the time for that, especially in states where those races are actually close. The last thing we need is to pack the House and Senate with republicans who win something like 40/30/30 because we couldn't unify behind someone who actually had a chance of winning.

Not to mention, we only get to vote in 1 state's elections, and often times there aren't even any progressive down-ballot candidates on the ballot to vote for.

I know a lot of people don't like the American First Past the Post system, but to be honest, even in a proportional system like here in the Netherlands, you end up with very similar dynamics.

Truth is, progressives are always a small minority, in every country. Because they are always ahead of the curve on change.

In the US, this means that you only get a handful of progressives in the most progressive districts and never a really progressive national government.

In the Netherlands, this means progressives are always represented, but need to compromise to form a government. And often, they even get skipped and the centrist and conservative parties form a coalition.

Truth be told, Biden is as progressive as you could hope to get in the USA.

And, while I do think it is important to criticize him - and even threaten to not vote for him - to enable him to move more towards the left, it is also important to vote for him.

Progressives always win, not through getting majorities, but because they have the right ideas and eventually the other parties catch up to them.

For recent examples, gay marriage in the USA or marihuana legalization are now law in the USA.

I am 100% confident that American policy on Israel will also shift thanks to progressive voices. And it will not require a progressive majority.

I am 100% confident that American policy on Israel will also shift thanks to progressive voices. And it will not require a progressive majority.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but I don't believe this will happen while Biden is president. Not to say I'm not going to vote for him - I'm not that stupid, but he's made it pretty clear that he will stand with Israel more or less no matter what they do.

I do worry that he's upsetting a lot of people to the point that they won't vote for him, though, and that's scary to me. He comes across as very weak when he capitulates to Israel this hard. He's repeatedly said, "This is the line, don't cross it!", then when they do, he moves the line. If he loses to Trump in November, I'll have a hard time not blaming Israel and his policies in dealing with them for that loss.

Sanders

But more seriously, vote everywhere for the most progressive people possible and vote strategically to get the most progressive person realistically electable when needed.

Down-voted with deep regrets. A vote for Sanders, no matter how good he would be, is a vote to let Netanyahu "finish the job" in 2024.
The path to your goal is to vote progressives down ballot and really support them until they rise to congressional level where they can actually create change. Until then, vote for the candidate who has the best chance of winning and gets you closest to you goals. Beware, the trolls want to create division so their guy can walk right in.

Did you skip the "but more seriously" part and everything that came after right after I said "Sanders"? 🤔 Because I'm saying exactly what you're saying.

Also, you can vote for Sanders so he keeps his position in the Senate so it's actually not false that people need to vote for him.

I refuse to vote for Sanders...

Because I don't live in his state so I'm not allowed to.

He's done great work convincing progressives that the best way to change the Democratic party is from the inside, and I hope it continues.

It's a general "you", I'm not talking about you as a person specifically.

Israel bombs Lebanon because Hezbollah keeps committing terrorist attacks and launching missles from there, the same goes for Syria. Also, in what universe is helping keeping countries stable like Egypt destabilizing? You people are mind numbingly ignorant. The middle east was never secular or stable, it was always religiously extremist, violent, and oppressive. There was a slight blip in secularism during the British and French mandates and slightly afterwards, but as time moved on, the region just went back to the way it used to. What we view as islamic extremism is just normal islam. Secular muslims aren't a thing. They're considered extremely liberal and westernized in islamic countries.

For decades, Israel and the US (and European countries) have pursued a policy to destabilize middle eastern regimes.

You are aware that china and Russia do that even more. Supporting Terrorism, supporting Iran and their nuclear shitshow blaming everything on the west especially Israel... You get the point.

People don't realize this, but there was a wave of Arab nationalism that was killed by sponsoring Islamic extremists. Had that not happened, the middle east would be much more secular today than it is.

Most of the terrorists, especially ISIS have not been supported by outside of middle east, but where fueled from within middle east because governments do government stuff. Hamas and Hezbolla are similar cases, especially because the antisemitism unites most of the Islamic countries against Israel

Israel attacking and destabilizing Lebanon and Syria and the US maintaining a dictator in Egypt are part of this strategy.

Hezbolla (Lebanon and Egypt) is constantly shooting rockets into residential areas and targeting hospitals. So Israel has a very very solid reason to strike them. And the Egyptian dictatorship is a dictatorship but one that at least on surface fights those terrorists, wich would probably gain majority in a democratic election... Like what happened in Gaza...

In turn, this leads to hate towards the West and Israel by the Muslims affected.

No the antisemitism in nowadays Islam was caused by Nazi Germanys propaganda into middle east. The anti west thing by the Soviet union. But yes its not helping to reduce the hate, but at this point there is no way to reduce this unless we would abolish Israel wich is absolutely not an option.

It won't stop as long as American voters care much more about gas prices than about human rights. American politicians are willing to sponsor genocide to have some control on oil prices in order to win elections.

I haven't seen USA sponsoring hamas or hezbolla and it will not stop ever, especially because even if you leave Israel to the terrorist, when they are done there you get to be the next target. There is no other way than to fight such groups.

Yes, they usually do it slowly to avoid suspicion but when the situation is convenient they go ahead and take a big bite out of Palestine.

That's how they have been operating, even before the establishment of Israel:

Before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out, the Carmeli Brigade's 21 Battalion commander had repeatedly damaged the Al-Kabri aqueduct that furnished Acre with water, and when Arab repairs managed to restore water supply, then resorted to pouring flasks of typhoid and dysentery bacteria into the aqueduct, as part of a biological warfare programme. At some time in late April or early May 1948, - Jewish forces had cut the town's electricity supply responsible for pumping water - a typhoid epidemic broke out. Israeli officials later credited the facility with which they conquered the town in part to the effects of the demoralization induced by the epidemic.[54]

Israel's Carmeli forces attacked on May 16 and, after an ultimatum was delivered that, unless the inhabitants surrendered, 'we will destroy you to the last man and utterly,'[55] the town notables signed an instrument of surrender on the night between 17–18 May 1948. 60 bodies were found and about three-quarters of the Arab population of the city (13,510 of 17,395) were displaced.[56]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre,_Israel#1948_Palestine_War

It is evident that that is their modus operandi because now Gaza's water system is destroyed, and I suspect they will take Gaza just like they took Akka.

Israel taking over Palestine has been the plan since the beginning, as the founding fathers of Israel themselves announced:

Zionist leaders, in particular David Ben-Gurion, viewed the acceptance of the [United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine] as a tactical step and a stepping stone to future territorial expansion over all of Palestine.

Then they started.

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.

All the theatrics about Israel's right to defend itself etc. are just cover for the long history of horrible crimes and human rights violations Israel has perpetrated (and continues to perpetrate). There is a reason that people are mad at Israel, and it has nothing to do with being Jewish.

So yea, Israel is going to continue overtaking Palestine, unless they start being held to international law like everyone else. Germany and USA impede on that process, but hopefully the rule of law will triumph because

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

The Israeli government has no idea what it is doing. Literally. The current government was a barely held together coalition prior to October 7. In the direct aftermath, they formed a unity government and war cabinet that collapsed last week.

Their prime minister has been indicated on corruption and bribertmy charges, which are currently on hold for obvious reasons. By most indications his primary motivation in this matter is to stay in power himself, with Israel's national interests being secondary.

Individual members of IDF leadership have called Israel's stated objectives "unachievable".

Israel simultaneously wants to live in peace as a liberal Jewish state without commiting any form of ethnic clensing; and achieve its manifest destiny of establishing a Jewish theocracy across Judea and Samaria.

These are deep questions that get to the core of what Israel is and stands for. Questions that are to be answered by the Israeli constitution in the 50s. That never happened because Israel was never able to agree on a constitution [0].

Right now, Israel is just reacting, without any long term strategic vision. Various factions are trying to use that chaos to advance their own long term vision.

[0] Which led to the big judicial reform constitutional crisis that was a giant political crisis before October.

Israel knows what it is doing. They have been very consistent about it for more than 80 years.

They will kill every Palestinian an Palestine, and they will try to kill eveyone in the vicinity who is not jewish. It a country of religious fanatics who use 3000 year old fairy tales to justify their actions.

"mowing the lawn" as the Israelis call it.

Btw from what I've witnessed, many Israelis dislike Orthodox Jews as much as they dislike Muslims and Christians. Israel is a weird place.

If that were the case then they would have written that into their constitution 70 years ago. And they wouldn't have assasinated their own prime minister 30 years ago.

Heck, the current minister of national security Ben-Gvir was rejecting from mandatory constriction by the IDF, and convicted in an Israeli court of supporting (Jewish) terrorism after being indicted by an Israeli prosecutor.

These are not things that happen in a country that is unified in its goals.

Israel simultaneously wants to live in peace as a liberal Jewish state without committing any form of ethnic cleansing; and achieve its manifest destiny of establishing a Jewish theocracy across Judea and Samaria.

A country at war with itself, much like the US.

Completely occupying Palestinian land has been the plan for over half a century.

With this terrorist attack, Israel is trying to wrap it up.

They could have completed their colonization under the guise of righteous vengeance, but:

That now has very little chance of succeeding because of three important factors 1) it's taking much too long 2)they're indisputably committing witnessed, recorded and shared war crimes and 3) the goodwill they've accumulated for 70 years as a stabilizing ally is wearing off pretty quickly.

There's more support for Palestine now than there has been with these same Israeli attacks occurring for the past 70 years.

Palestine is officially recognized by 145 countries or so at this point.

So, likely scenario is there's going to be a ceasefire eventually and a similar paltry amount of land will be given to a nascent "official" Palestinian authority under the practical authority of Israel, which is not ideal, but it might actually result in the beginning of a two-state solution that's been suggested since Israel became a country.

In practical terms, Palestine getting a "country", not much will change between Israel and Palestine because the establishment of Palestine doesn't affect the fundamental religious conflict between the two.

That's where it looks like it's headed.

I hope I'm wrong and something better happens.

Palestine being a wholly recognized nation with borders would make it so much easier for the world community to use its leverage on both Israel and Palestine for any of their shenanigans. As it stands now, it’s still arguably “an internal conflict.”

That’s a lot different from “attacking a sovereign nation.”

No it wouldn't because the problem isn't with borders, it's with government. The Palestinian government has squandered every opportunity and has done everything it could to stop progress. Its Arab allies have been dedicated for decades to do everything in their power to act on the behalf and in the best interest of Palestine from going to wars to destroy Israel to islamic world organized boycotts and sanctions against Israel to diplomatic pressure on the west to do something to providing their own peace proposals to giving them arms to taking them in as refugees to giving them billions in humanitarian aid annually and the list goes on and on... But every time, their efforts blew up in their faces. There's a reason why these countries are starting to recognize Israel.

Yeah but that will not happen because the "sovereign nations" government is Hamas and they did attack Israel...

Hamas has the majority in Gaza and would get the majority in the other parts of the autonomous region Palestine in a election (wich is why the current government of this region is not doing elections)

You're talking out of your ass. Israel has no plans to take over Gaza. They already had it and even had settlements there going back all the way before Israel gained its independence. But they voluntarily existed in 2005 in hopes of fostering peace with the Gazans... Instead the first thing they did was elect Hamas and commit terrorist attacks.

So if you rewind another 50 years or so, you'll understand the statement I made a little better.

The israeli conquest of Palestinian land started quite a ways before 2005.

I literally don't care, you made a false statement. Israel unilaterally left Gaza. They don't have settlements there anymore and they don't plan to. Making up stuff doesn't make you sound smart.

You might want to care, since your false claims are entirely based on a woefully inaccurate and incomplete historical understanding of the conflict.

Don't bother, that must be one of those tantrum fueled hasbara accounts.

Thanks, it's fine.

I have a lot of free time and it's fun to respond to mindless bad faith with diametric sincerity.

They always get boggled.

Nothing that I have said is false. In fact I can source every single one of my claims. I know a propaganda fueled drone such as yourself can't do the same, which is why you came back with this drivel instead of providing substance

You claimed:

"I literally don't care".

Sure doesn't seem to jive with your histrionics.

Also, the history of Israel and Palestine is incredibly well documented. Going back 75 years.

You could literally search on any engine and find it instantly. You don't even need a particular source to figure out how old this conflict is.

Which is probably where you should start.

If you actually took into account the context, it's very obvious that I said I don't care about your claim that conflict is old and goes back many years. Nobody is disputing that. My point is that you made specific claim, which is that Israel wants to annex the Palestinian territories entirely as their ultimate goal, however, that is blatantly false because Israel literally gave up their settlements in Gaza voluntarily in 2005 and unilaterally existed. If their ultimate goal is complete conquest, why would they have done such a move? This event contradicts your thesis and disproves your claim.

Paraphrased: "After decades of colonization, why would Israel publicly state that they were ending all illegal ongoing colonization?"

  1. Because Israel already took most of the land(see picture) and didn't have to give any back.

  2. Because there was a lot of complaints about them colonizing Palestine, especially as the internet became more popular and people became more aware of the illegal Israeli colonization of Palestinian land.

  3. By publicly stating that Israel would no longer annex Palestinian land, they didn't have to give up any of the land they already colonized over the past half century, civilians could continue to colonize Palestinian land because it wasn't official government or military colonization, and people would be mollified.

And it worked.

You apparently aren't aware that Israelis are still colonizing Palestine because 19 years ago they put out a press release that said "no backsies, but some of us will stop officially colonizing this country after 60 years".

The civilians are still settling Palestinian land(they never stopped) that has been now evacuated because, you know, they're killing all the Palestinians.

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/3/8/israeli-settlement-expansion-in-palestinian-areas-amounts-to-war-crime-un

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2024/3/19/how-israeli-settlers-are-expanding-illegal-outposts-amid-gaza-war

A lot of unnecessary fluff, but you do have a question hidden down there.

What fluff? I wrote 5 sentences lmao

Paraphrased: “After decades of colonization, why would Israel publicly state that they were ending all illegal ongoing colonization?”

Yeah, this isn't going to fly by me. This is just the strawman fallacy. That is NOT what I asked. I asked a very simple and straight forward question:

If their ultimate goal is complete conquest, why would they have done such a move?

This is clearly in reference to their unilateral exit in 2005 from Gaza. If you want to have a discussion with me then at least have the decency to be honest. I won't respond to an answer about a question I didn't ask, but I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt to answer the actual question I asked. If you can't help but be disingenuous then I'm afraid this discussion will end with my comment here.

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/3/8/israeli-settlement-expansion-in-palestinian-areas-amounts-to-war-crime-un https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2024/3/19/how-israeli-settlers-are-expanding-illegal-outposts-amid-gaza-war

Al Jazeera is literally a state sponsored propaganda outlet that is owned by the authoritarian theocracy of Qatar. This outlet is a bad source in general, but it's notorious for it's misinformation and outright when it comes to this specific conflict. If this is where you get your information then I'm not surprised why your talking points are nothing than inaccurate propaganda.

This image is a prime example of what propaganda looks like. I know you don't have any, but let's use our critical thinking skills for a bit and analyze why this picture is complete trash:

  1. The key insinuates that Jews are foreign to the area. This is also entirely false. Jews have always had very sizable presence in this region dating back thousands of years. They were there long before islam, long before Arab colonization, long before the Roman even came up with the term Palestine. This is because Jews are indigenous to the area, but the word choices for the key is trying to erase that.
  2. The colors chosen are also propaganda. They chose green for Palestine, which is the national color, but instead of using blue for Israel, they chose white. Why is that? Well that's easy, because this color scheme gives the impression that Palestine is "real" entity and it is being "erased", when that's not the case.
  3. The first map is intentionally there to insinuate that Palestine existed prior to 1947. This is entirely false. Before the creation of the modern states, before that there was the British mandate, and before that it was the Ottoman Empire which had completely different division for this region. Palestine as sovereign entity has quite literally never existed at any point in history. The concept of a Palestinian nation is as artificial and new as the modern state of Israel.
  4. Also the the first map is also dishonest in another way because it colors inhabited areas as green. The Negev desert for example is largely uninhabited but it is colored green to give the impression that Palestine is more than what it actually is. Most muslim Arabs back then lived in the same sliver of land as what it showed for the Jews, but if they just showed an honest map of the Arab and Jewish settlements then it would give a different story and this wouldn't be such a good propaganda map, now would it?
  5. The second map tries insinuate that the UN took away from Palestine in 1947, but that's false because that was the very first time Palestine was even acknowledged as a sovereign entity.
  6. The third map exists to try and give a sense of progression while also masking away massive amounts of context... like the wars of 1948 and 1967 when Palestine rejected any plans for peace and coexistence, and they along with their Arab allies formed coalition armies and invaded Israel from every angle with the explicit intention of destroying... but they ended up losing both wars in a pretty convincing fashion against Israel by itself. As a part of the peace agreements the Arabs agreed to cede land to Israel.
  7. The first 3 maps go from 1947 to 1967, but then on the fourth map, it skips 38 years and stops at 2005... 19 years ago. Why would it skip all of this time? And why stop at this point in 2005? Well it's simple, if they stopped any earlier then their propaganda map would be called out for not recognizing that Israel left Gaza as that's a the biggest sign that Israel is trying to cooperate to find peace, but if they stopped the map more recently then their propaganda map would've been called out for not pointing out any of the atrocities that the Palestinians instigated and committed. This point in 2005 is just perfect for propaganda, it's far back enough in time to feel disconnected from the modern Palestinian terrorist attacks and wars, but recent enough where it could be argued into the present.
  8. Finally, the map has no source. It's a perfect propaganda piece because it can't be traced back to where it originated and therefore isn't a source to verify the accuracy of the information.

Now what did we learn from all of this little exercise? A little of critical thinking can go a long way in recognizing and dispelling propaganda. Try it some time!

Wow, what a miss you took.

I hope that didn't take you a long time.

Then again, it's much funnier if you did.

Your argument against the Israeli colonization of Palestine is that the Palestinian settlements are even smaller than they appear to be on the map.

Yes, that is the a problem. That is the point of the maps, to show how little land Palestinians have left.

Your argument is that people only own the land of the country they're standing directly upon. Amazing.

You should go argue that to literally any country in the world where that is not correct.

Go look up the term "national boundaries"

However,

Your incorrect understanding of borders is exactly what the Israeli government is arguing as the reason it's okay for them to continue to illegally colonize Palestine and execute the civilians there.

It's also not true, but you don't seem very concerned with the truth.

As for pretending to read the article incorrectly so that you can argue against it, that's just you arguing against yourself.

Not super relevant.

Your arguments:

  1. Irrelevant to the amount of land that Israel has illegally annexed from Palestine.

  2. You complain that colors are propaganda! Doubtful, since so many of these maps use different colors, and it is not relevant to the amount of land that Israel has illegally annexed from Palestine for the past 70 years

  3. Nope, the first map details the settlement area of the Palestinian people. Again, you can look at border maps for many countries, but steal yourself! You'll be shocked that people are not standing on every square inch of their country. Your argument here also is not relevant to the amount of land that Israel has illegally annexed from Palestine for the past 70 years.

  4. Colors(you already did this) are not relevant to the amount of land that Israel has illegally annex from Palestine for the past 70 years.

  5. "It's not stealing land because fewer countries recognized Palestine as a country then."

I mean...Taiwan...

Actually I'll explain this because it doesn't seem like you understand much about national politics. Or geography. Or colonization.

145 countries recognize Palestine as a country.

A dozen (12, for you) countries recognize Taiwan as a country

If Taiwan gets annexed by China, it's still going to be a country being annexed(land being stolen) by China, even if not everybody is willing to recognize Taiwan as a country yet.

Also, pretty irrelevant to the amount of land that Israel has illegally annexed from Palestine for the past 70 years.

  1. Is this "argument" also a basic misunderstanding by you of politics and geography? No! It's a tacit statement of approval by you for Israel annexing a bunch of land.

Greeeeat.

All you're doing here is arguing that Russia annexing Crimea and trying to annex Ukraine is cool because... Russia wants land that belongs to others.

  1. Your complaint here is that Palestinians didn't lose as much land in some decades as they did in other decades, so none of the annexation counts!

Not a great argument.

Kind of missing the point of how Violet is to steal land from people after you kill the civilians on it.

And 8. Your most bizarre criticism. There's no source for this map?

Like, how do you get such s basic thing incorrect? Do you even know how search engines work?

Here's a bunch of sources for that map, even with different colors for your weird color fetish.

You'll have to come up with all new reasons why these different colors scare you.

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visual/http-visualizingpalestine-org-visuals-shrinking-palestine-static/

https://www.palestineportal.org/learn-teach/israelpalestine-the-basics/maps/maps-loss-of-land/

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Figure-1-Showing-the-Loss-of-the-Palestinian-Land-and-the-Segregation-of-Palestinians_fig1_378482435

Here's one on your side, they used different colors and swear that the map is wrong;

https://aijac.org.au/fresh-air/disappearing-palestine-the-maps-that-lie/

Unfortunately, their "correct" maps begin and end in the exact same place and still highlight disappearing Palestinian territory, and they don't even include the illegal settlements by Israeli civilians.

My answer completely and credibly answers your question:

Israel made that disingenuous 2005 statement because they knew they didn't have to give any land back to Palestine, because they knew that Israeli civilian settlers would continue to annex Palestine, and because it would make people like you believe that they stopped colonizing Palestine, contrary to all of the evidence of continued Israeli settlement of Palestinian land in the ensuing years.

Including right now.

Where they are colonizing Palestine and putting up residential neighborhoods.

That's in the sources from my previous comment that you seem a bit wary to mention.

Here's the BBC reporting on the continued illegal Israeli settlement of Palestine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68490034

Here's the times of Israel, proudly declaring their intent to illegally settle Palestinian land, sanctioned by the defense ministry.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/government-panel-greenlights-nearly-3500-new-west-bank-homes/

Here's PBS, describing Israel planning to illegally annex and colonize Palestine:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israel-plans-to-build-3300-new-settlement-homes-in-occupied-west-bank-in-response-to-a-fatal-shooting

Here's Reuters describing The ongoing illegal annexation and settlement of Palestine by Israel:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-advances-peak-number-west-bank-settlement-plans-2023-watchdog-2023-07-13/

Go ahead, please try to explain how all of these sources, including Israel and their ministry of defense stating that they are going to annex Palestine, are just kidding about the illegal annexation of Palestine.

Your argument that the colors are wrong has nothing to do with the number of times Israel has invaded, razed, annexed and colonized Palestine, nor with the amount of civilians it's executed or with schools, hospitals it's bombed.

That was a pretty fun victory lap for me.

Keep swinging though, I like dancing on laurels

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That refers to an agreement by the Israeli military to stop officially invading and colonizing Palestine after successfully colonizing over 90% of their territory.

Unofficially, government invasion continued and the usrael government did nothing to stop illegal civilian Israeli invaders and colonizers.

Israel also continued to bomb civilian establishments and execute civilians up until the present day!

How dare you state the truth in our antisemitic arguments about how evil Israel is...

Unironically defending genocide by using “antisemitism” as an excuse, implying by your own admission that all Jews are genocidal

Who do you think you’re fooling, bud? Fucking Nazi.

Unironicaly thinking that there is a genocide even after the ICJ said there is none... Blocked you nazi.

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As longs as inertia prevails in the world stage, sadly, I don’t see a near term future where a light might shine in the end of the tunnel for Palestine’s future.

But if it serves a consolation, simmering tensions are purging therein the Netanyahu’s regime. His close allies aren’t aligned with the PM’s vision of the plausibility of defeat of Hamas (as if the Israel’s anger agains Palestine had anything to do with Hamas; it’s was a fallacious pretext).

Israel can't just overtake it. There is too many people there. They already tried that tactic for the last 30(?) years when gaza was a prison.

I don't think they know what they want and can even achieve in this campaign. I don't think they will invade Lebanon.

They control the borders and they are systematically destroying infrastructure while stealing the land to be ‘settled’ by right wing Israelis. (They done let liberal folk become settlers.)

The right wingers have no issue with being bad neighbors or otherwise murdering Palestinians. And they are backed up by the military. Any resistance is returned 10-fold, with an associated grab for land.

If a cease fire can be forged, the control of the border will mean that the they will continue their existing blockade on imports of building materials such as cement, so new infrastructure cannot be built. They are even using construction equipment to remove or bury rubble, so it cannot be repurposed/recycled.

The plan is to do to Gaza what they have already done to the West Bank. Turn it into fragmented enclaves that lack access to basic resources. It’s clear they even want to block total access to the beach, to prevent fishing for food. It’s why they are literally selling the land that is currently being bombed. They want to make it impossible to live there if you’re Palestinian. They want everyone that isn’t part of their theocracy to die off, or emigrate.


Not related, but totally related.
I’ve watched these interviews with white supremacists in the U.S. who talk/fantasize about the creation of a ‘white’ ethnostate. They always talk about how there will be a nonviolent transition to this, saying that people who don’t match their racial parameters will be relocated to places outside of the state, or those who won’t have children will be allowed to live out their lives, etc. And that’s widely regarded with a ‘sure buddy’ and you know they’re full of crap. People don’t want to move away from their homes. They don’t want to go where they don’t know anyone. They don’t want to lose their jobs, their savings, all their stuff, the land they own and the effort they’ve pored into their home and land or the resources their home/land offers them.

But the situation in Palestine is literally that. People are ‘voluntarily’ relocating (after their homes, jobs, neighborhoods, and often, families) have been blown up by bombs. Or they’re staying and living out the rest of their lives - until they’re shot or a bomb goes off, or they die from malnutrition, thirst, or contaminated water. Hm.
I suppose it’s (relatively) nonviolent to the aggressor.

Wtf are you on? There were already settlements in Gaza that dated back before the Israel independence, and Israel continued to support them up until 2005 when they unilaterally existed. The hope was that exist would foster peace between Gaza and Israel, but the first thing Gazans did was elect Hamas and the rest is history. It doesn't make sense for Israel to go back into Gaza. They already gave it up, which means there's no strategic value there. They have nothing to gain from such a move.

Why are Jews settling Palestinian land in the first place?

Maybe, after forcing them from their major cities, laying claim to the most fertile land in their country, and then refusing their right to assert their own statehood (and using a superpower to back them up in that), then spending 70 years depriving them of ever-increasing amounts of their country, and blockading imports (why blockade spices for traditional foods?!?), that the presence of anything taking more of their land in the open air prison they’ve been forced into to offer a ‘peace settlement’ is not welcome.

What are you on? Is there no ability for inductive reasoning there, or are you hoping that for all your words, there’s no logic, facts, or grounding in reality?

Sure, that's the long term goal. I don't think you can call that a goal of this war campaign.

This one clashes with short term goals of Netanyahu of staying in power.

But after 30 years of lack of movement, this situation offers pretext for war without restraint. I don’t believe they plan to stop.

They don’t have to kill each person to achieve their aims. Sometimes just making sure the water is undrinkable is enough to kill tens of thousands or force many times that number to leave and never return.
2 Days Ago: Israeli strike kills Gaza workers trying to restore drinking water – The National.

I don't think they know what they want

What would YOU want if you were a military leader of Israel there? (NOT a political one, just a soldier)

I think that they want exactly that. A military goal, not a political one.

For example "kill everybody there who takes a weapon and aims it at Israel, and then take this weapon away from his corpse."

Militarily? I don't think anyone can expect they can achieve any kind of real military goal.

Maybe what you said, to kill some combatants and many times the amount of civilians with them. But that's not really a military goal.

I don't think anyone can expect they can achieve

I wasn't talking about achieving, but only about wanting.

They've already invaded Lebanon before and every time it was for the same reason, and that was to prevent the Hezbollah terrorists from committing terrorist attacks against Israel. This time is no different

Everytime it's a bit different.

The point is that even if they invade Lebanon again, it will be similar to the prior military operations they've had before. They're not going to capture Lebanese territories like they did with Golan Heights. Otherwise they would've done it since they've had multiple opportunities to do so.

It's been clear and consistent since day 1 of the war. Israel wants the return of the hostages taken on Oct 7, the removal of Hamas from power, and the inability for Hamas or any other group to repeat a deadly attack within Israel.

That was the goal on Oct 7, that's still the goal. Anything else is just politics and propaganda.

Now, how effectively they have done so, and the methods they've employed are another discussion entirely.

Yes well we would all like impossible things, but that's not really an achievable goal and everybody on all sides are aware of that.

Thats not true Israel knows exactly what they want and are doing and about 2 million (gaza) aren't that many the remaining parts of Palestinia aren't that many people either. A takeover of much larger places has been done in history several times.

I see you disagree with everything I said and I think you are wrong. Let's just leave it at that.

It will stop when they get everything from the nile to the euphrates river, also known as greater israel. The bible defines Israel as from the nile to the euphrates, they will not rest until they have "settled" the entire region

Sounds like the CCP approach to twain with the "but a 'kingdom' in the past had this territory so we are entitled to it.

Even worse, because the Kingdom of Israel stopped existing 3000 years ago. Modern Israelis have zero connection to ancient Israel

The Palestinians also have zero connection to the land. The Palestinian identity was artificially created around the same time as the modern Israeli identity with the intent to prevent the creation of a Jewish state. There was never a sovereign entity called Palestine at any point in history. Before the current states, there was the British mandate and before that the Ottoman Empire ruled the region for a few centuries. The Ottomans and the empires that preceded them had completely different divisions for this region. The modern borders are based on nothing historical.

Yeah but you understand the difference between the state and the people who lived there right? Like Jewish settlers came from Europe, to the place Palestinian people were and had been living in.

They have a connection to the state of Palestinian (inasmuch as it exists given differing degrees of recognition) by way of having moral rights to continue living on the land they live on regardless of what some lines on a map call it.

This idea that Israel came to be a bunch of Europeans sailing to a country and taking it over is outright false. This brain dead myth is mostly supported by American Marxists who want to push the false comparison with how the US came to be. They're nothing alike.

The Jews in Israel were already there. They're indigenous to the land. Their history goes back thousands of years. Same goes from the Christians and other religious minorities there. islam is not endemic to the region, it came through islamic conquest, colonization, and oppression from the Arabian peninsula. The majority of Israeli Jews are not European. They're from the region. On top of the Jews that already lived there, the islamic world exiled nearly 1 million Jews to Israel for no other reason than being Jewish. European Jews only make up around 30% of Jews in Israel, and a good chunk of those are recent immigrants in the same way most people immigrate today (Indians moving to the US for work, Afghanis moving to Europe as refugees, Japanese moving to Thailand for leisure, etc).

You're just flat out lying at this point lol. 21-23% of the entire Israeli Jewish population is first-generation immigrants; 30-35% is second-generation, direct offspring of immigrants; 30-35% is third-generation; 10-15% is fourth-generation; under 5% is fifth-generation or beyond (which would include Jews who lived there since before Aliyah). These are numbers are from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. There's also statistics that rather say 40-45% are third-generation with much less being fourth-generation or beyond, but with around the same amount or slightly less being first and second generation – I find the former estimates far more reasonable though. It's estimated around 90-97% of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants since 1900.

A majority of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants of several Aliyah (immigration to "Zion" from outside of the lands of Palestine/Israel, practically starting from 1882 but mostly ramping up around the start of the British/Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the region in the early and mid 1900s). Even the most conservative estimates say that around 50-70% of Israel's Jewish population growth since 1900 came from immigration, with most of the rest of the population growth coming from recent immigrants having children. And those are really conservative estimates, the actual amount is likely much higher than that.

A significant portion of Israeli Jews came from immigration in the 90s, especially from the Soviet Union after its collapse – 1.4-1.6 million Jews (compared to Israel's total current Jewish population of around 7.4 million) immigrated to Israel following the collapse of the USSR. Over a fifth of the entire Israeli Jewish population in just the span of one generation. Yet second- and third-generation Israeli Jews make up like 3-3.5x as much still.

It's crazy for you to try to state that modern Israelis aren't primarily (nearly exclusively) descended from relatively recent immigrants who displaced (and outright genocided) the native population. You straight up just made that up without consulting any history/statistics, not even Israel's own statistics lol. Palestine faced a colonization and replacement by Jewish immigrants – according to the Jewish Virtual Library, 8% of people in the region were Jewish in 1882; then 11-13% after the end of WW1, after the adoption of a Zionist policy for Palestine and occupation by the UK (see the Balfour Declaration); then 32% in 1947 after several Aliyah; then in 1948 – the year the Israel was formally established and immigrants were shipped in from all over the globe, and the year European immigrants to Israel started all-out total war and genocide against Palestinians – that number jumped to 82%. It is not Jews' "indigenous land", 93%+ of people in the region were Arab Muslims at the time of the first Aliyah, hundreds of thousands compared to the 9,000 Jews and even less Christians. Jews hadn't been the majority in the region since the 4th century, Arabs & Muslims have been the majority since before the Magna Carta, the Crusades, European Feudalism, they were most of the population when France just started to exist.

Considering the actual facts of the situation, your justification basically becomes "colonization and apartheid in the modern day is okay because some other people they identified with lived there 1,500-3,000 years ago", in which case I have some bad news for like, 95% of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Asians, who all exist on lands which were someone elses in that same time period. Ethnonationalism with feeling you have a "right" to certain land you have no actual connection to based on some ancient "predecessor" civilization that had those lands stolen from them before Hindu-Arabic numerals existed is a strong hint that you're in the wrong (see: Nazism). Modern Jews are about as indigenous to Israel as the modern Japanese are to Korea, or modern Turkish are to Mongolia.

Zionism is modern-day ethnonationalism and colonialism by predominantly non-Levantine peoples (more than half of those being primarily European in ancestry). Its purpose is creating and justifying an ethnostate where Jews are superior and have rights that other groups don't have – and such things are cemented in the Israeli constitution and law. To exist, Israel requires relegating non-Jews to second-class personhood and requires (or required at some recent point in time) commiting acts of genocide towards certain non-Jews; abolishing that would be abolishing the concept of Israel and Zionism as a whole. There is no real moral defense of the state of Israel.

Sorry, meant to reply to a Zionist comment justifying the Genocide. My sincere apologies.

To actually answer the question:

The war with Hezbollah is in my opinion likely. It has popular support among the Israelis and Netenyahu has been doing whatever to stave off an election. It'll still be an enormously costly war which will fill people with regret a couple of months after starting it.

There's another angle where he'll say "If you vote for me I'll get rid of Hezbollah once and for all like I did with Hamas" and then delay until he can say "Circumstances have changed" which I think is a better move.

PLEASE ASSUME EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE IS OUT OF CONTEXT AND MEANT AS A RESPONSE TO A GENOCIDAL ZIONIST BECAUSE I'M AN IDIOT


What kind of bubble do you live in? If you take 2 million people, close their airspace, ports and land borders they're not going to be happy.

On top of that Israel does the following:

  • imprison kids for throwing rocks at soldiers wearing armor
  • take people's houses, most recently in Sheikh Jarrah
  • Ban farmers from using water, promise water from other sources and don't deliver.
  • Close West Bank Airport
  • Settle lands in he West Bank.
  • Make Palestinians go to Military court with 99% conviction rate instead of a civil court.
  • Administrative detetention without giving any reason. (Because classified)
  • Withold evidence from courts that's used to convict them. (Because classified)
  • Settlements are both within the 1948 borders and even within the Olso accord Green line.
  • Beat people up and throw tear gas that go play at Al-Aqsa mosque.
  • Don't convict any settlers of violence.
  • Fondle women at check points when they open the trunk of their cars.
  • Limit imports to single item per pallet.
  • Limit work visas.
  • Limit family reunification as a way to immigrate across the border.
  • Random checkpoints that destroy tourism such as in Jericho.
  • Open policy of disproportial response to every reaction the Palestinians have.
  • Raid refugee camps and destroy their roads like in Jenin.
  • Kill journalists that cover the story such as Shireen Abu Akleh
  • Don't even convict the murdered because he was a soldier.
  • Oh and kill/wound 5% of Gaza, half of which are children, for good measure.

When people are suffocating because someone has their foot on their throat they react. Nobody should be surprised that Oct 7 happened. Especially after Israel was warned many times that they would do something if they continue raiding one of the holiest sites in Islam.

Literally the first thing you do on NoStupidQuestions is attack the person asking the question.

And then go on a rant that doesn't actually address the question. I honestly don't even know if you read the same OP that I did here...

Cmon, that's not acceptable behavior here.

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Hmm... For a more realistic answer not necessarily. This isn't the first time they invaded Lebanon. I'm admittedly not aware of why they left the first time, but from what I know at least in the short term they're mostly content with the territory they currently control. Of course "currently control" including Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan heights; ethnically cleansing those was always the plan. Also when Egypt inevitably collapses as a state I could see them trying to go for Sinai.

How can you comment on something you don't understand? Israel already took control of the Sinai when Egypt declared war on them and lost. Israel voluntarily gave it up in exchange for recognition. Egypt has kept their word, so why would Israel break theirs? Egypt and Israel are actually good allies.

Uh... I think you missed the part that said "when Egypt inevitably collapses".

It already has, numerous times. Nothing happened.

Huh? Are we having the same conversation?

I'm pointing that Egypt has already collapsed since Israel captured the Sinai and returned it in exchange for recognition. You claimed that when this Egyptian government collapses, or rather if it does, then Israel will seize the opportunity to do so. But they've had this opportunity presented to them already. For example, in 2011... but they didn't do anything, so why would they now?

Uh... Egypt did not collapse in 2011. That was a regime change. I'm talking about a Libya or Syria-style failure to keep existing as a sovereign state.

Government collapses tend to count as state collapses, but using your definition it's pretty hard for Egypt to end up in that state. Unless an extremely powerful empire like the British or the Ottomans takes over. Egypt's geography makes it very hard for the country to be divided and fall into civil war. Virtually all Egyptians live on the Nile or its delta, and those areas are completely packed with a fairly homogenous population. There's isn't a big demographic rift or a clear ideological divide. There's the Coptic Christians who make up 10% of the population, but they aren't large enough to do anything and there's the islamic fundamentalists, who do cause trouble, but they either swing the whole country in that direction or don't have enough influence to do anything.

You only say that because you don't know how Egypt is looking like right now. Egypt's economy is the worst it's ever been in decades because of mismanagement, and it's not getting better. We're seeing the government build new bridges and cities using our tax pounds while people can't buy food. They're borrowing money at absurd rates to try to keep the whole thing from collapsing and paying back by selling the counter piecemeal to gulf states while refusing to actually fix anything. People keep having to find places to cut back on food and other essentials just so they don't starve. We can't get enough fuel for the country so blackouts have been going on for a while and it's killing newborns in hospitals. Hell, a guy I know had a 9-hour long blackout recently.

Egypt's economy is in free fall right now and there's not much more room for falling before people starve. Some kind of revolution is going to happen within the next few decades (because people don't like to die of starvation) and you know what happens when the people try taking back control from a military dictatorship. Where exactly it'll be on the Frenchrevolution-Syrian civil war (which started because the Syrian government refused to give up its power) spectrum I don't know, but given what I've seen from other examples in the region and the behavior of Egypt's government I am very much not optimistic.

I am well aware that Egypt's economy is in shambles because of Al Sisi's vanity project in building the new capital city with money the country doesn't have. I agree with you that some kind of revolution is bound to happen at this rate, and I actually think it'll happen in the next few years because the situation is pretty grim. I'm not Egyptian, but I've talked to Egyptians who say their families in Egypt are struggling to the point where they find it difficult to buy rice and sugar. I don't think a revolution is a few decades away with conditions like that. With that being said, is there any indication that the upcoming revolution will end in civil war? Egypt can't be compared to the other countries in the region because it's a unique country due to its geography and high population. Based on recent Egyptian history, which I think is the best comparisons we can make, the country has had a few dictators and revolutions but it hasn't had any civil wars, at least not any that I could recall. Is there something on the ground that is not apparent in the media our Egyptian diaspora?

Is there something on the ground that is not apparent in the media our Egyptian diaspora?

Not really; it's just that I doubt the army will give up power peacefully. Hence civil war or violent revolution. And in both cases it wouldn't be strange if Israel decided to expand into Sinai during the chaos.

Not really; it’s just that I doubt the army will give up power peacefully. Hence civil war or violent revolution.

There's also a good possibility that one of the high ranking military officers will use the opportunity that will arise from the chaos to orchestrate a coup and put themselves in power.

And in both cases it wouldn’t be strange if Israel decided to expand into Sinai during the chaos.

But think about it from an objective point of view. Israel has already taken control of the Sinai twice. Once from October 1956 to March 1957 and again from June 1967 to April 1982. The second time, it held the Sinai for 15 years. That's not a small amount of time and Israel even had a few settlements set up. However, it gave all of them up and handed back the Sinai in 1975 as a part of the Egypt Israel peace treaty. This treaty has been active for 50 years, what would Israel gain from destroying it?

Unlike the previous times where Egypt was the aggressor, that excuse can't be used by Israel if it occupied the Sinai again. The occupation would immediately be seen as unprovoked aggression. Why? Because Israel is the one that's very clearly hostile and violating the treaty. Egypt has been keeping it's part of the deal since 1975. It has allowed for Israeli ships to pass through the Suez, it has kept the Sinai largely demilitarized, and it has recognized Israel. If Israel invades, it would be a pariah like Russia when it invaded Ukraine. Unlike it's war with Hamas or Hezbollah, the US won't be backing Israel on this. Egypt is not a terrorist group and it's not an aggressor, and Israel would have blatantly violated a US brokered treaty. Backing Israel would be a massive blow to the credibility of American diplomacy and no US president would risk American soft power for an ally that's not willing to respect them or keep their words. They would have to back Egypt, or at the very least condemn Israel's aggression. If the US abandons Israel, you can be sure the EU will follow.

But it actually gets worse for Israel, because all the other Arab countries that established relations with it will immediately sever relations again. Why wouldn't they? Not only is Egypt a fellow Arab country, but it is the most populated Arab country and a key ally to all the other Arab countries. It's in their interest to back up their fellow Arab country that's in the right. After all, if Egypt, who has kept their part of the deal for 50 years, still ended up getting attacked, what's there to stop the other Arab countries from being next? Clearly Israeli treaties are worthless since they won't even bother to honor them and they're hellbent on violent conquest.

You can also be certain that the moment Egypt declares war back on Israel, the Palestinian terrorist groups and the Iranian backed terrorist groups are going to go wild. They'll attack Israel from every direction. Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if the bordering Arab countries joined the war alongside Egypt. I'm sure Syria would love to get Golan Heights back, Jordan and Lebanon would want Israel eliminated as a threat, and the other Arab countries would want a decisive victory to end this long conflict. In the off chance that Israel does win another war against an Arab coalition by itself, it would have gained the Sinai at the cost of all of it's diplomacy and it would have to start again from scratch.

And what for exactly? A piece of largely inhospitable desert that bares no security threat from a country that's both peaceful and cooperative with Israel. Israel has already given up the Sinai twice because it doesn't hold enough strategic value. The things it gained from making peace with Egypt is far greater than anything the peninsula had to offer.

So let's summarize Israel loses it's valuable alliances with the US and the West, it loses all the recognition and diplomacy it worked for in the Arab world, it risks fighting another coalition war by itself, and it'll become a pariah state all for an empty piece of desert that poses no threat, has little strategic value, and it has given up twice before. So I ask again, what would Israel gain from doing this?

I just don't see it happening.

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Israel doesn't want territorial gains but to get rid of terrorists that shoot their civilians. They invaded Egypt as well and are now on relatively good terms with their government.

And there is no so called ethnic cleansing.

Literally the same exact thing happened to Jewish villages, towns, and populations in cities in Palestine.

That's what the1920 Nebi Musa riots against Jews in Jerusalem or the 1921 Jaffa riots or the Jaffa deportations by the Ottomans in 1917 or the 1929 riots and massacres (including the Hebron Massacre which destroyed the ancient community there). Not to mention the nearly 1 million Jews who were exiled from the islamic world to Israel for no other than being Jewish.

I see your point. It's not wrong when it happens to Arabs but wrong when it happens to Jews. Can you help me fill in the blanks?

R A _ _ S _

::: spoiler Spoiler racist ass motherfucker :::

No, they weren't the same thing. Zionist Land Purchases were unlike anything prior, leading to the forced expulsion of over hundreds thousand Palestinians under the British Mandate. This, along with the Zionist leadership being very open about the Concept of Transfer since the 1880s, stocked Palestinian fears of being violently forced out of their homes by these new arrivals. There is a lot of context that gets ignored during these events, and it's not easy to summarize. I'll include a few paragraphs but if you want more context I suggest you read the whole chapter.

The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948

Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.

The fear over control of the Temple Mount and a failure by leadership on both sides to quell the fears (and instead, incite them) sparked the terrible pogroms of Jewish Settlements.

In 1928, this meant simultaneously calling for the defence of Jerusalem and discouraging direct action on the ground. But the Palestinian masses found this kind of co-opted nationalism impossible. They lived near the holy places and saw Jews praying there in unprecedented numbers, which they saw as part of a larger scheme to ‘de-Islamize’ Palestine. A minor incident concerning prayer arrangements near the Wailing Wall, the western wall of the Haram, sparked violence that soon swept through Palestine as a whole in 1929. In all, 300 Jews and a similar number of Palestinians were killed.

The spillover of anger from Jerusalem into the countryside and other towns was not a co-ordinated plan by the leadership. Rather, it started with uprooted Palestinians who had lost their agricultural base for various reasons, including the capitalization of crops and the Jewish purchase of land. These former peasants lived on the urban margins, from where they participated in what to them was their first ever political, and violent, action. Their dismal conditions were not the fault of Zionism, but it was easy to connect Zionist activity in Jerusalem with the purchase of land or with an aggressive segregationist policy in the labour market.

The British army was slow to respond to the unrest. The 1920s had been quiet, apart from limited outbursts of violence in Jerusalem in 1920 and Jaffa in 1921. These had seemed inevitable in a mixed community, and quite normal in the vast British Empire. But the events of 1929 exceeded the level of containable violence, and the British government decided in 1930 to appoint a commission of inquiry, the Shaw Commission. After touring the country, its members pointed out the deterioration in the peasants’ living conditions and reported the growing frustration among a large number of Palestinians with British pro-Zionist policy.

  • Ilan Pappe - A History of Modern Palestine Pg 138

1929 Riots: Forward and 972Mag

Shaw Commission

Peel Commission Report

The 1936-39 revolt began as a protest against the British Mandate and Zionist Expansion, and escalated in violence as the protests were met with lethal force.

One of the problems was the leadership vacuum in rural Palestine, and the failure of most attempts to fill it. One of these attempts was that of Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian preacher who settled in Haifa in the mid 1920s. Many history books assert that Izz al-Din al-Qassam ignited the 1936 revolt by fusing Islamic dogmas with national ideology. But his recipe for revolution was welcomed only among a particular segment of the population. This was the poor of the cities and the unfortunate inhabitants of harat al-tanc, the shanty neighbourhoods that surrounded towns such as Haifa. In 1933, Izz al-Din al-Qassam initiated a guerrilla war in the north, recruiting fighters from around Haifa and leading them to the surrounding hills, attacking any Jews or British soldiers they encountered on the way. In 1935, al-Din al-Qassam was killed by the British army, but this was enough to make him a martyr and provide an example of a new kind of resistance.

While the expansion of Zionist settlement gave the nationalist notables a chance to reach a wider audience, there was still no genuine solidarity with the peasants, apart from rare displays of unity and firmness of purpose. Such a moment took place in March 1933 in Jaffa, where leaders of all the political factions joined in a united call for a concrete campaign of sustained pressure on the British government to change its policy. Five hundred representatives of the Palestinian elite, in a rare show of resolve, declared their intention of boycotting British and Zionist commodities, and for the first time ever rejected the legitimacy of the Mandate in the land of Palestine.

In May 1936, the Arab Higher Committee declared a general strike and organized nationwide demonstrations, the principal one held in Jerusalem, where about 2,000 demonstrators gathered inside the walls of the Old City. The demonstrations became more violent three weeks later, when British police opened fire on demonstrators in Jaffa.

At first the magnitude and nature of the protests impressed the British. They appointed a commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, who visited Palestine in 1937 before making his recommendations. His commission recommended the annexation of most of Palestine to Transjordan, and urged the maintenance of a direct British presence in vital strategic positions such as Haifa and the newly built airport in Lydda, as well as in the Negev. A small portion of the land was designated as a future Jewish state. This plan was rejected, not of course by Prince Abdullah in Transjordan; but in a way it was endorsed by Ben-Gurion, who had the foresight to understand that you take what you are given when the balance of power is not yet in your favour. For Ben-Gurion, the proposal was a basis for negotiations, not a final map, hence his willingness to be content with such a small portion of Palestine.

  • Ilan Pappe - A History of Modern Palestine Pg 156-159

1936-1939 Revolt: JVL, Britannica, MEE

The Jewish exodus from the Muslim world was also not the same

Keeponstalin's comments are always top notch, and I just want to add a bit more info about the exerpt that reads:

A minor incident concerning prayer arrangements near the Wailing Wall, the western wall of the Haram, sparked violence that soon swept through Palestine as a whole in 1929.

The "minor incident" went as follows:

On 15 August 1929, Tisha B'Av, the Revisionist youth leader Jeremiah Halpern and three hundred Revisionist youths from the Battalion of the Defenders of the Language and Betar marched to the Western Wall proclaiming "The Wall is ours". The protesters raised the Zionist flag and sang the Hatikvah.[13] The demonstration took place in the Muslim Maghribi district in front of the house of the Mufti.

Two days later, in raised tensions caused by a 2000-strong Muslim counter-demonstration after Friday prayers the day before, a Jewish youth, Avraham Mizrahi, was killed and an Arab youth picked at random was stabbed in retaliation.[14] Subsequently, the violence escalated into the 1929 Palestine riots.

There is a lot of context that gets ignored during these events, and it’s not easy to summarize. I’ll include a few paragraphs but if you want more context I suggest you read the whole chapter.

It's interesting you say this because, ironically, you conveniently leave out a lot of context and ignore many events. I'll include a few paragraphs as well, but there's just so many of these events that I'm afraid Lemmy's character limit won't allow to give you anywhere near a comprehensive list. This very, very brief list will have to do for now:

West Bank:

The Hebron massacre was the killing of sixty-seven or sixty-nine Jews on 24 August 1929 in Hebron, then part of Mandatory Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.[1] The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged and synagogues were ransacked. Some of the 435 Jews in Hebron who survived were hidden by local Arab families,[2] although the extent of this phenomenon is debated.[3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre

Jordan:

According to an Israeli complaint, Jordan undertook systematic destruction of the Jewish Quarter including many synagogues.[34] Under Jordanian rule of East Jerusalem, all Israelis (irrespective of their religion) were forbidden from entering the Old City and other holy sites.[35] Between 40 000 and 50 000 tombstones from ancient Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery were desecrated.[36] In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter was destroyed after the end of fighting. The Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue was destroyed first, which was followed by the destruction of famous Hurva Synagogue built in 1701, first time destroyed by its Arab creditors in 1721 and rebuilt in 1864.[37][38][39]

Abdullah el Tell, a commander of the Arab Legion, remarked: For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamization_of_Jerusalem

Bahrain:

Bahrain's tiny Jewish community, mostly the Jewish descendants of immigrants who entered the country in the early 20th century from Iraq, numbered between 600 and 1500 in 1948. In the wake of 29 November 1947 U.N. Partition vote, demonstrations against the vote in the Arab world were called for 2–5 December. The first two days of demonstrations in Bahrain saw rock-throwing against Jews, but on 5 December, mobs in the capital of Manama looted Jewish homes and shops, destroyed the synagogue, beat any Jews they could find, and murdered one elderly woman.[218]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world#Bahrain

Syria:

After the vote in favour of the partition of Palestine, the government abetted and organised Aleppo's Arab inhabitants to attack the city's Jewish population.[3][4][5] The exact number of those killed remains unknown, but estimates are put at around 75, with several hundred wounded.[1][5][6] Ten synagogues, five schools, an orphanage and a youth club, along with several Jewish shops and 150 houses were set ablaze and destroyed.[7] Damaged property was estimated to be valued at US$2.5m.[8][9] During the pogrom the Aleppo Codex, an important medieval manuscript of the Torah, was lost and feared destroyed. The book reappeared (with 40% of pages missing) in Israel in 1958.[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_anti-Jewish_riots_in_Aleppo

The subsequent Syrian governments placed severe restrictions on the Jewish community, including barring emigration.[196] In 1948, the government banned the sale of Jewish property and in 1953 all Jewish bank accounts were frozen. The Syrian secret police closely monitored the Jewish community. Over the following years, many Jews managed to escape, and the work of supporters, particularly Judy Feld Carr,[197] in smuggling Jews out of Syria, and bringing their plight to the attention of the world, raised awareness of their situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world#Syria

Yemen:

The Aden riots of December 2–4, 1947 targeted the Jewish community in the British Colony of Aden. The riots broke out from a planned three-day Arab general strike in protest of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), which created a partition plan for Palestine.[1] The riots resulted in the deaths of 82 Jews,[1][2] 33 Arabs, 4 Muslim Indians, and one Somali,[1] as well as wide-scale devastation of the local Jewish community of Aden.[2][3] The Aden Protectorate Levies, a military force of local Arab-Muslim recruits dispatched by the British governor Reginald Champion to quell the riots, were responsible for much of the killing.[1][4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_anti-Jewish_riots_in_Aden#Background

Egypt:

Until the late 1930s, the Jews, both indigenous and new immigrants, like other minorities tended to apply for foreign citizenship in order to benefit from a foreign protection.[170] The Egyptian government made it very difficult for non-Muslim foreigners to become naturalized. The poorer Jews, most of them indigenous and Oriental Jews, were left stateless, although they were legally eligible for Egyptian nationality.[171] The drive to Egyptianize public life and the economy harmed the minorities, but the Jews had more strikes against them than the others. In the agitation against the Jews of the late thirties and the forties, the Jew was seen as an enemy[168]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world#Egypt

The 1948 bombings in Cairo, which targeted Jewish areas, took place during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, between June and September, and killed 70 Jews and wounded nearly 200. Riots claimed many more lives.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Cairo_bombings

Five Egyptian Jews and one Muslim policeman were killed in Alexandria, hundreds were injured in both Alexandria and Cairo, and an Ashkenazi synagogue was burned down.[1] The Greek Orthodox patriarchate, Catholic churches and a Coptic school were also damaged in the riot.[1] The police reacted quickly but were unable to prevent much of the violence.[1] However further demonstrations planned for the following day were largely suppressed.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_anti-Jewish_riots_in_Egypt

Libya:

The 1945 Anti-Jewish riots in Tripolitania was the most violent rioting against Jews in North Africa in modern times. From November 5 to November 7, 1945, more than 140 Jews were killed and many more injured in a pogrom in British-military-controlled Tripolitania. 38 Jews were killed in Tripoli from where the riots spread. 40 were killed in Amrus, 34 in Zanzur, 7 in Tajura, 13 in Zawia and 3 in Qusabat.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_anti-Jewish_riots_in_Tripolitania

The 1948 Anti-Jewish riots in Tripolitania were riots between the antisemitic rioters and Jewish communities of Tripoli and its surroundings in June 1948, during the British Military Administration in Libya. The events resulted in 13–14 Jews and 4-30 Arabs dead and destruction of 280 Jewish homes. The events occurred during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_anti-Jewish_riots_in_Tripolitania

Tunisia:

On April 11, 2002, a natural gas truck fitted with explosives drove past security barriers at the ancient El Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba.[1] The truck detonated at the front of the synagogue, killing 14 German tourists, three Tunisians, and two French nationals.[2] More than 30 others were wounded.[3][4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghriba_synagogue_bombing

Iraq:

Under Iraqi nationalists, Nazi propaganda began to infiltrate the country, as Nazi Germany was anxious to expand its influence in the Arab world. Dr. Fritz Grobba, who resided in Iraq since 1932, began to vigorously and systematically disseminate hateful propaganda against Jews. Among other things, Arabic translation of Mein Kampf was published and Radio Berlin had begun broadcasting in Arabic language. Anti-Jewish policies had been implemented since 1934, and the confidence of Jews was further shaken by the growing crisis in Palestine in 1936. Between 1936 and 1939 ten Jews were murdered and on eight occasions bombs were thrown on Jewish locations.[115]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world#Iraq

Farhud (also Farhood; Arabic: الفرهود) was the pogrom or the "violent dispossession" that was carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on 1–2 June 1941, immediately following the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi War. The riots occurred in a power vacuum that followed the collapse of the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali while the city was in a state of instability.[2][3][4] The violence came immediately after the rapid defeat of Rashid Ali by British forces, whose earlier coup had generated a short period of national euphoria, and was fueled by allegations that Iraqi Jews had aided the British.[5] More than 180 Jews were killed[6] and 1,000 injured, although some non-Jewish rioters were also killed in the attempt to quell the violence.[7] Looting of Jewish property took place and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud

Baghdad Radio invited citizens to Liberation Square on January 27 to "come and enjoy the feast",[3] being brought in on buses.[2] 500,000 people reportedly attended the hangings, and danced and celebrated before the corpses of the convicted spies.[1]

Nine of the fourteen hanged were from the Iraqi Jewish community, three from the Muslim community and two from Christian communities.[1] Three other members of the Iraqi Jewish community that were arrested at the same time were executed seven months later, on 26 August 1969.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Baghdad_hangings

The Jewish exodus from the Muslim world was also not the same

You're absolutely right, it wasn't the same. The Jewish exodus from the muslim world was way worse.

Those weren't ignored, they were addressed with the last link. Palestinians are not responsible for the Jewish exodus. Your argument is trying justify the Israeli Apartheid and Genocide by conflating Palestinians with all Arabs/Muslims and conflating all Jewish people with Israel.

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.

Forced expulsion of Palestinians has been central to Zionism since the 1880's

There are a lot of factors of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, but your conflating of the two as justification or minimization of the Nakba doesn't work; unless you somehow think all Arabs or Muslims are the same. But it's pretty clear your racist towards Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims when your argument boils down to 'they are violent primitives and deserve to die,' just going straight to dehumanization and ignoring all material conditions of Apartheid

Iraqi-born Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, speaking of the wave of Iraqi Jewish migration to Israel, concludes that, even though Iraqi Jews were "victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict", Iraqi Jews aren't refugees, saying "nobody expelled us from Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted." He restated that case in a review of Martin Gilbert's book, In Ishmael's House.

Yehuda Shenhav has criticized the analogy between Jewish emigration from Arab countries and the Palestinian exodus. He also says "The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of many Mizrahi Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation." He has stated that "the campaign's proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a 'right of return' on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of 'lost' assets."

Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath has rejected the comparison, arguing that while there is a superficial similarity, the ideological and historical significance of the two population movements are entirely different. Porath points out that the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was the "fulfilment of a national dream". He also argues that the achievement of this Zionist goal was only made possible through the endeavors of the Jewish Agency's agents, teachers, and instructors working in various Arab countries since the 1930s. Porath contrasts this with the Palestinian Arabs' flight of 1948 as completely different. He describes the outcome of the Palestinian's flight as an "unwanted national calamity" that was accompanied by "unending personal tragedies". The result was "the collapse of the Palestinian community, the fragmentation of a people, and the loss of a country that had in the past been mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world

Those weren’t ignored, they were addressed with the last link.

You didn't address anything. You posted 3 unsourced paragraphs from 3 random historians that contain cherrypicked statements that confirm your biases. This isn't the smoking gun evidence you think it is. Their opinions have no bearing on the actual events that happened, assuming that these are their opinions or that their opinions are credible, both of which are big ifs. I actually linked over a dozen examples of actual events and their aftermath in over half a dozen countries, including the Palestinian territories. I actually provided context, you provided confirmation bias.

Palestinians are not responsible for the Jewish exodus. Your argument is trying justify the Israeli Apartheid and Genocide by conflating Palestinians with all Arabs/Muslims and conflating all Jewish people with Israel.

The Palestinians had their own ethnic cleansing of Jews, but that's besides the point. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not contained to just Israel and Palestine. It is much bigger than that, and it has affected way more people. Disingenuous people like you try to box in the conflict to specific parameters to push propaganda fueled narratives, like you brought up about apartheid and genocide. The fact that this is how you're choosing to frame things just shows that you don't actually have an interest in the truth, but rather your interest lies in satisfying the narratives you've subscribed to. You can't oversimplify the conflict. You can't erase the coalition wars the Arabs waged against Israel or the million Jews that were exiled from the islamic world or the havoc that the Palestinian refugees caused in the Arab countries that invited them or so on. If this conflict was localized to just Israel and Palestine then it would be such a big global conflict. It would've been thought of in the same light as the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict or the Morocco-Sahrawi conflict... but it's not... for a reason.

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.

I'm not sure what you were trying to achieve here, but I already know the definition of ethnic cleansing.

Forced expulsion of Palestinians has been central to Zionism since the 1880’s

Literally 21% of Israeli citizens are Arab, and another 6% is neither Jewish or Arab.

There are a lot of factors of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, but your conflating of the two as justification or minimization of the Nakba doesn’t work;

That's not what I'm doing. You're trying very hard to push this idea, but it's not going to work. If you actually scroll up and read my original statement, I simply claimed that the violence and ethnic cleansing went both ways... which is undoubtably true.

unless you somehow think all Arabs or Muslims are the same.

No, but the conflict is broader than what you're trying to make it out to be. Take Jordan for example. This country has taken part in multiple coalition wars against Israel on behalf of Palestine, spent decades supporting Palestine militarily/economically/politically, had governed the West Bank, ethnically cleansed Jews from it's land, ethnically cleansed Jews from East Jerusalem, lost both to Israel, had taken in a lot of Palestinians, kicked out those Palestinians when they tried to overthrow the government (black September), expelled the PLO to Lebanon, took in Palestinians again afterwards, became the second Arab country to recognize Israel, and the list goes on and on. This is a history that runs deep with the conflict. It's not just Jordan, but also Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and so on. You can't pretend that this history doesn't exist. No, not all Arabs or muslims are the same and not all Jews are the same, but this conflict is interwoven with these identities, at least to a degree.

But it’s pretty clear your racist towards Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims

I'm literally Arab, I'm Iraqi. But I'm sure you know more about Arab world than I do.

when your argument boils down to ‘they are violent primitives and deserve to die,’ just going straight to dehumanization and ignoring all material conditions of Apartheid

When did I do that exactly? I have at no point argued anything even remotely close to that. I merely challenged the brain dead and blatantly false narrative that you and your propaganda driven friends here are harping on, which is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one sided and always has been when that's very clearly not true. I then proceeded to give examples that disprove this notion. It's clear you don't actually have a case to present. You try to sound smart, but once you scratch the surface the facade disappears and you reveal yourself to be a pretentious . If you're going to lie and put words in my mouth then I have no interest in talking with you.

I added the link, those quotes show why most historians consider the comparison of the Nakba and Jewish exodus from the Muslim world to be a false equivalence. While there were certainly pogroms, the vast majority of Jewish immigrants were able to sell their possessions and willingly move. This is in contrast to the Nakba, where all 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed by a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign. Whether you recognize it or not, when you bring up the exodus as a reaction to the Nakba with the conclusion that both sides are bad, the point of that argument is a justification for the Nakba.

If you're Iraqi, how do you not see that all the different Arab countries have their own interests? While there was some semblance of pan-Islamism and pan-arabism during the British Mandate, it ultimately was a failed project. Jordan, Egypt, and other countries were not operating on the 'behalf of Palestine,' and their actions are not the fault of Palestinians.

You bring up the 1913 Pogroms and the 1930s Riots in Palestine in reaction to the Nakba too, as if they were fueled by Antisemitism instead of anti-settler-colonialism. Even the commissions done by the British disagree with that.

The Concept of forcible transfer the native Palestinians population was central to Zionism since the 1880s when Palestine was chosen as the location. During the British Mandate, around a 100,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced by land purchases (unlike previous land purchases, where peasants would normally continue working and living on the land). Ben-Gurion used Partition as a tactic to dissuade the British from considering a Bi-National Secular State, and instead create a causi-belli for the beginning of a Jewish ethnostate within Palestine. The Nakba, or Plan Dalet, was deliberately planned for over a year. That ethnic cleansing campaign is directly responsible for the Palestinian Occupied Territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The 1967 war was a deliberate tactic for Israel to take control of those areas and begin the never ending occupation, once those policies were practiced on the Palestinian population that remained in the Green Line after the Nakba.

So what are you trying to agrue? Because none of that is false.

The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948

Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.

1967 war: Haaretz, Forward

Israel Martial Law and Defence (Emergency) Regulations practiced in the occupied territories after 1967

I added the link, those quotes show why most historians consider the comparison of the Nakba and Jewish exodus from the Muslim world to be a false equivalence

No, you can't make up claims like this. Your quotes do NOT show that most historians have this opinion. It only shows that those very specific individuals hold this opinion, that is all. In fact the very Wikipedia article that you linked provides examples of historians who disagree with this narrative. If you want to prove that most historians hold this opinion then you're going to need evidence that actually supports that claim like a survey or a poll.

While there were certainly pogroms, the vast majority of Jewish immigrants were able to sell their possessions and willingly move.

Interesting you say that because the very article you linked disproves your claims:

Various estimates of the value of property abandoned by the Jewish exodus have been published, with wide variety in the quoted figures from a few billion dollars to hundreds of billions.[326]

The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) estimated in 2006, that Jewish property abandoned in Arab countries would be valued at more than $100 billion, later revising their estimate in 2007 to $300 billion. They also estimated Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel).[7][327][328][329]

Clearly the situation is much more complex given how the situation differed from country to country, from culture to culture, and from community to community. The sheer scale of this exodus prevents it from being entirely uniform. However, despite that, it still does disprove the notion that the Jewish exodus went all fine and dandy like you're making it out to be. Even the most conservative estimates range in the billions. That is an insane amount. Even if we become ultra skeptical about this particular estimate and cut the figures by a factor of 10 due to exaggeration from bias, that would still put the amount somewhere between $10 and $30 billion. The amount lost per person on average is somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000. Even if we cut this estimate by a factor of 100, that would still be a high amount. So while some Jews might've been lucky enough to sell their property and voluntarily move, that wasn't the case for many.

This is in contrast to the Nakba, where all 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed by a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign.

Yes, this was bad. I never argued against the Nakba. I'm not having a juvenile competition about which is worse. I'm just proving the point that the violence and ethnic cleansing isn't one sided. It went both ways.

Whether you recognize it or not, when you bring up the exodus as a reaction to the Nakba with the conclusion that both sides are bad, the point of that argument is a justification for the Nakba.

No, that's not a coherent line of thought. The point is to showcase that the one sided narrative that you're pushing for is false. You can't oversimplify this conflict to good vs bad. You're trying to spin these historical events in way that disregards so much context that it renders your renditions of them to be historically inaccurate and misleading. You're doing it now by trying to pretend that the Jewish exodus from the muslim world wasn't bad at all. That's simply not true.

When the UN proposed the partition plan in 1947, the Jews rejoiced while the Arabs protested and rioted. This turned in to the 1947-1948 civil war which lead both sides to lose about 1000 lives each. This escalated when the Arab Liberation Army infiltrated Palestinian population areas and started organizing attacks on Jews. This eventually culminated in the Arab Liberation Army blockading the 100,000 or so Jews in Jerusalem. The Jewish army tried to send supplies in but the Arab militants killed all who tried to get through. This event caused the US to withdraw it's support from the partition plan, which embolden the Arab Liberation Army into thinking that it could end the partition plan all together. In the meantime, there were talks between the Arab countries on militarily intervening on behalf of Palestine. The Jews who were fighting were struggling, but their leadership ordered them to hold ground as much as possible until they could come up with a new strategy that defended the Jews in anticipation of the impending Arab invasion.

That strategy eventually came, and it was called plan Dalet. The plan was to basically secure the Jewish settlements, unify them into a single cohesive unit, remove the Palestinians in between, and declare the independence of a new Jewish state. This was the beginning of what the Palestinians called the Nakba. This plan lasted about a month or two, and on May 14th, 1948, a day before the British Mandate ended, the Jews declared independence. The US and USSR both recognized the new state, but the Arab countries refused and decided to form a coalition army and invade. The Arab world was already hostile to Jews due to the antisemitic hatred that descends from islam, the situation in the British Mandate, and their close relations to Nazi Germany (which were spurred by their mutual hatred of Jews). The Jews in the muslim world faced constant discrimination, violence, and harassment, but after the Arab countries invaded? The rhetoric and propaganda were dialed up to max. This was the beginning of the Jewish exodus from the muslim world.

Back to the invading Arab countries, while their numbers were great, they were pretty incompetent. Armies had poor communication among themselves, there was poor coordination among the different countries, and the leadership made poor decisions. This led the Arab forces to lose ground to the Israeli army. As Israel was making gains, it was basically continuing plan Delat on the new territory that it acquired. Which caused more displacement of Arabs. Meanwhile, the Arab countries increased their propaganda and nationalist rhetoric even more at home to compensate for their losses, which caused even more discrimination, harassment, and violence against Jews which forced more of them to flee. These events kept going until 1949, when Israel pretty much won and signed armistices with the invading countries. The end result? Over 6,000 dead Jews, over 10,000 dead Arabs, over 700,000 displaced Arabs, and around 1 million Jews were displaced. It should be noted that the violence, displacement, and aggression didn't stop from either the Jews or the Arabs, and things kept going, at a slightly slower pace, until things boiled over again in 1967.

That's so much history happening in such a short span of time that affected so many people. There was no moral side and there was no unjust cause. It's a lot complicated than that. But that's my point. You can't brush off all this context. You can't oversimplify this conflict to comic book superhero storylines. You can't disregard historical information because you subscribed to an inaccurate narrative. Pointing out the complexity of the situation is not a justification of anything, it's merely pointing out the complicated reality.

If you’re Iraqi, how do you not see that all the different Arab countries have their own interests? While there was some semblance of pan-Islamism and pan-arabism during the British Mandate, it ultimately was a failed project. Jordan, Egypt, and other countries were not operating on the ‘behalf of Palestine,’ and their actions are not the fault of Palestinians.

Back then, the idea of different Arab nations hasn't really set in yet. There were different Arab states, but the Arab world viewed itself as one big nation and thought that eventual unification was inevitable. That's why they went to such great lengths to try and help establish Palestine. Each state acted in it's own interests, yes, but they were all pursuing the same goals. Not to mention that the Palestinian leadership called on them for help, so they didn't go in uninvited. Of course, you can't blame this on civilians, but these states did act on behalf of the Palestinian state that they wanted to take place. All of these ideas are less true today because so much time and history has passed that the different states were able to form their own national identities. Even though Arabs still view themselves as one people (this is slowly but surely decreasing in popularity), idea of unification is now seen as farfetched and even as undesirable.

Sources: aljazeera a known hamas sympathizing or straight up part of them media outlet, and a website called visualizing Palestinie, without any actual sources.

Btw

The official land given to Israel by UK is the blue part left. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_the_British_Mandate_for_Palestine

1 more...

Lebanon (at least Hezbollah in Lebanon) began attacking Israel on Oct 8 in solidarity with Hamas. Things have gradually been escalating since then.

Facts have no standing in this area of discussion.

Israel wants to take over far more. They have litarally said they wanted to take over Turkey.

This stops like how the Nazis were stopped from expanding their Lebensraum. By asking them very nicely to stop and explaining they are mean.

Have you not read the Bible?

Go read what they originally did to the Canaanites...they're going to do it again.

It definitely cannot defeat Hezbollah. Much less combined with other parties, Hamas, Houthis, whatever is coming from Iraq. As far as I can tell... Israel has already lost. Mainstream media isn't even providing its viewers/readers of the actual number of IDF casualties. It's definitely not in the hundreds.

Also, I have a feeling that Middle East nations will begin uniting, abandoning Western powers - their influences.

Basically the situation in Israel/Palestine is that Hamas has pretty much total iron first control of Gaza, and Israel has a very right wing government. The Israelis have vowed to destroy Hamas entirely, but Hamas is deeply entrenched in every aspect of life in Gaza so what Israel is doing is actually pretty much the only way to rid the region of Hamas, but it comes at an extreme cost and involves a lot of war crimes.

It probably is the only way to get rid of Hamas, but its going to cause so much resentment that peace in Gaza will be completely unattainable within your j or mine. But in short yes, they're going to kill anyone with even loose ties to Hamas and if you're a civilian standing too close, oh well.

Hamas has pretty much total iron first control of Gaza

I was under the impression the IDF had a bit of influence there, what with all the tanks and bombers and soldiers scouring every inch of the war-blasted landscape.

Hamas has pretty much total iron first control of Gaza

Don't you mean Israel has pretty much total iron first control of Gaza? Hamas does not control the borders, the monetary policy, electricity, water (via a racist system of permits being habitually denied), airspace, sea, population registry, international trade, ID cards, or travel to and from Gaza. Israel does. Israel even sells the drilling rights for natural gas off the coast of Gaza.

Gaza has a border with Egypt as well. If Egypt were so inclined, they could open it and allow all sorts of trade and humanitarian relief. They could even set up a refugee camp to protect civilians from harm. They would rather not open the border because they don't want Hamas to get a toe hold in Egypt.

Also as far as mineral rights go, the reason every partition plan has been shot down in the past is that the Palestinian side will not accept anything less than the entirety of Israel/Palestine and this has been the case going back to the first partition plan proposed by the league of nations in 1947. But as a result of not agreeing to any of the partition plans Palestine is not legally regarded as a country. And therefore doesn't have mineral rights. Sucky but true.

Gaza has a border with Egypt as well.

Not anymore. The IDF controls the strip of land between Gaza and Egypt and has secured it against any further aid crossing the border.

That's the problem isn't it? Hamas was actually running a government. For reference about 13 percent of people in the US work for the government. Now think about their friends, contractors, and families. How high do you think that percentage is? How high does it become after you kill half that 13 percent while they're just trying to distribute aid and run hospitals?

They absolutely know what they mean they say they're going to destroy Hamas, but the West pictures Hamas solely as a bunch of fighters, separate from the hospitals, sewage departments, police, and etc.

There’s no reason for them to stop. No one standing against them. If I was them, I would do the same.

I saw an article about them attacking Lebanon now.

Hezbollah, not Lebanon. Please don't legitimize terrorist groups by considering them to be the government of the country they operate in. Lebanon has elections, please support democracy and it's not consider Hezbollah as Lebanon's government, even if those psychopaths have control over a significant portion of the country.

That being said, Nasrallah is probably under significant pressure to do something to help Hamas in some way. Last week he put out some threats against Israel. Israel put out counter threats. In all likelihood that's where things will stay, neither side wants a war with the other.

The media is always saying a war is imminent. Remember when they were claiming China was going to invade Taiwan any minute? There's probably some outlets that're still are saying that sometimes. It gets clicks, views, and ratings.

Who knows they might be right this time (a stopped clock is right twice a day) but it seems doubtful.

So, where will it stop?

In terms of Gaza, Hamas is still holding Israeli hostages. It's not going to stop as long as Hamas is holding Israelis hostage.

Hamas is likely making a lot of money from the suffering of Palestinians. So they don't have much incentive to release the hostage and put an end to the conflict.

So it will continue on as the IDF goes house to house trying to find the people that Hamas took on October 7.

Eventually either the IDF will find all of the hostages or Hamas will release them. Then it will end.

Eventually either the IDF will find all of the hostages or Hamas will release them. Then it will end.

Lol, good one.

Hopefully, there is no way in hell it can continue like it did for the last decades.

And the thing about attacking Lebanon was just some rumors basically. Hezbolla is however constantly shooting rockets into residential areas and targeting hospitals. So i can see Israel continuing a cleanup there after the Hamas problem is solved.

Bombing residential areas and targeting hospitals is very wrong, isn't it?

Why are you downvoted? You're right

Cause lemmy is apparently filled with antisemitic people. At least i don't have to worry about karma BS.

Neo-Leftism is a term i could use for this.

I mean the creators of this platform are full blown Marxists, it's no surprise that a large percentage of their userbase share the same hateful viewpoints

I mean Marx was a jew... The new left is people thinking they fight imperialism by hating on Israel, wich by definition is antisemitism.

Im beginning to regret having left reddit, they at least banned people for obvious antisemitism.

hating on Israel, wich by definition is antisemitism.

It's official, they're trolling. No one is this stupid... Right?

In 1948 when Israel was formed as a nation state, the borders were set at that time. It would not have been a problem but terrorists (think Hamas and other groups like that) kept going across the border into Israel and killing and committing other crimes. Israel fought back.

As Israel fought back more cross border raids happened.

Israel puts up the iron dome ( understandable because of the missiles being launched at them).

Israel pushed their borders to try to get some breathing room. I disagree with their belief the area should be settled. Make it a DMZ ? Fine, that’s a legitimate usage. But to settle it? Now they are (in my opinion) expanding their territory and not creating a buffer zone.

But I’m not sure what the answer is.

Leave Palestine alone and allow hamas to keep doing cross border raids?

Keep responding to the individual cross border raids and attack hamas? That doesn’t solve the problem because hamas will keep coming.

Put other nations militaries on the border? Hamas will just call that an act of aggression by those countries and attack those militaries.

Hamas has a belief that all Jews everywhere should be killed. So where would the Jews even go?

Just expand their nation ( Israel) to the ocean? Ok then where do the Palestinians go?

I’m not sure what the answer is.

The state of Palestine was split to create two countries Palestine and Israel. Because historically that was the Jewish homeland. But how do we solve this current problem. I have no idea

Which neighbouring nations approved of those borders and does Israel respect those borders today?

The borders were technically a theory.. an idea. It wasn't even officially established until Israel gained military might, if I remember correctly.

Israel was formed from a combination of terrorist groups like Lehi and Irgun.

Israel is like the power ranger form of terrorism.

Israel is the terrorist. Israel was established by murdering and displacing the people who lived there.

Genocide and mass murder are the core values of the Israeli state.

Yeah it would have nothing to do with the fact that after world war 2 no one would take in the Jews. So a Jewish state was created. Nah nothing to do with that at all.

Did they have to murder and displace millions of Palestinians?

Colonial league of nations declare Israeli state after later to become Israeli terrorists have terrorized Palestinians and the British troops to force them out. Palestinians are not asked on the matter if they want to give those terrorists a fascist ethnostate on their land.

Fascist ethnostate gets declared, starts ethically cleansing hundreds of thousands of people.

Some neighbouring countries try to prevent that.

75 years of propaganda and brainwashing and people like you spin it like the Israelis are the victims, even while they are currently committing an even worse genocide and ethnic cleansing than they used to do back then and in between.

What kind of bubble do you live in? If you take 2 million people, close their airspace, ports and land borders they're not going to be happy.

On top of that Israel does the following:

  • imprison kids for throwing rocks at soldiers wearing armor
  • take people's houses, most recently in Sheikh Jarrah
  • Ban farmers from using water, promise water from other sources and don't deliver.
  • Close West Bank Airport
  • Settle lands in he West Bank.
  • Make Palestinians go to Military court with 99% conviction rate instead of a civil court.
  • Administrative detetention without giving any reason. (Because classified)
  • Withold evidence from courts that's used to convict them. (Because classified)
  • Settlements are both within the 1948 borders and even within the Olso accord Green line.
  • Beat people up and throw tear gas that go play at Al-Aqsa mosque.
  • Don't convict any settlers of violence.
  • Fondle women at check points when they open the trunk of their cars.
  • Limit imports to single item per pallet.
  • Limit work visas.
  • Limit family reunification as a way to immigrate across the border.
  • Random checkpoints that destroy tourism such as in Jericho.
  • Open policy of disproportial response to every reaction the Palestinians have.
  • Raid refugee camps and destroy their roads like in Jenin.
  • Kill journalists that cover the story such as Shireen Abu Akleh
  • Don't even convict the murdered because he was a soldier.
  • Oh and kill/wound 5% of Gaza, half of which are children, for good measure.

When people are suffocating because someone has their foot on their throat they react. Nobody should be surprised that Oct 7 happened. Especially after Israel was warned many times that they would do something if they continue raiding one of the holiest sites in Islam.

and thus you justified the 14 words.

"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for Jewish children"

we must slaughter Palestinians, because only then can we be safe!

Israel will try to kill every non-Jew in the Middle East. Their religion compels them.

I don't think that's in their religion.

Plus the other side actually is saying that.