These are very, very different situations. You are comparing nations and cultures that have be living side by side for thousands of years to a 77 year old state (Israel) occupying territory that has been Palestinean for thousands of years.
Israel and Ozzy Osbourne were born on the same year. People that were born after Ozzy, can no longer return to their birthplace, because it is now Israel and they are besieged in Gaza.
Not really Palestinian to be fair. Jewish, Greek, Roman, Islamic, Ottoman, and finally British, in that order. Palestinians then started a war of aggression to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, and then lost that war. You can not lose what you never had. If you want to talk about occupying, why is the al-aqsa mosque built where it was, if not for trying to erase native ties to the land?
Native ties? Who the do you think the Palestinians are? Did they just appear one day and occupied Palestine?
The Palestinians are the natives of Palestine. They literally have direct ancetrial ties all the way back to the original Hebrew occupants.
Like many people, they've been occupied, mixed, and they've adopted the religions and customs of their occupiers. That doesn't mean they've not been inhabiting the land for centuries.
Are they less deserving of their ancetrial homes simply because European colonists decided they wanted a religious ethnostate?
My family has ancetrial ties to Britain, do I get to go there and kick out someone from their home because of my ancetrial ties?
Heck I likely have Roman ties, do I get to go to Italy to reclaim my birthright?
Some Palestinians have direct ties to ancient Israelites as well. But the Hebrew occupants were expelled by force, hence the spread out Jewish population. The story is not one of the Jewish people remaining in the region and converting to Islam. At least not for the most part.
The Palestinians are not less worthy because the Jewish people, refugees, returned to their historic homeland. They are less worthy because they chose to wage war against them and lost.
- The site of Tell Mulabbis is usually identified with the Casale Bulbus, which the Count
of Jaffa handed over to the Hospitaller Order in 1133 CE together with the 'des moulins
des trois ponts' (the mills of the three-bridges
- villagers from hills of Samaria repopulated Mulabbis during the 18th century (Yaʿari 1947, 244). Mulabbis figures on Pierre Jacotin's map, which was surveyed in 1799 (Karmon 1960, 168-170) Avraham Yaʿari claims that malaria and disputes with neighbouring nomadic tribes led
to the abandonment of the village (Yaʿari 1947, 243-244)
- Both Jewish and Arab sources ascertain that Mulabbis was settled again by the Abu Hamed al-Masri clan, of Egyptian origins at some point before the middle of the 19th century.
- "Following Ibrahim Pasha’s campaign, Egyptian immigrants, headed by Abu Hamed
al-Masri, settled in Mulabbis. It was a part of a larger wave of Egyptian migration to
Palestine’s coastal plain.21 Ottoman cadestral (tapu) registers mention common Egyptian
names, like ‘Abed b. ‘Abd al-‘Al and Musa b. Muhammad Bardawil, indicating that the
village was mainly, if not solely, inhabited by Egyptian immigrants"
- In 1878, Mulabbis became the first village in Palestine to be acquired by Jews with the intention of establishing an agricultural colony in 1878, establishing the moshava (colony) of Petah Tikva on its lands
So you are telling me that the Jewish people that legally immigrated to the region, bought land from people of Egyptian descent that lived there, almost 200 years ago, don't have rights?
The Jews in Israel didn't kick anyone out of their homes before the 1948 war on them started.
Where do you live? What's your right to the land? If you are persecuted everywhere and in your tradition there is a strong and proven connection to Rome then yes, you can go back to Rome. Do you pray to go back to Rome? Was your family evicted by force from Rome? If I go digging in Rome am I going to find historical artifacts linking you to Rome? If you immigrated to Rome and bought property should we consider you to be a colonialist?
EDIT:
I don't look at my neighbor and say that because he's an immigrant he has no rights. I don't say Palestinians that lived in the region have no rights either. I do stand by the Jewish people being the indigenous people of the region. The only reason they were not there is that they were expelled by force and prevented from returning. They never left, in spirit, and they never gave up on wanting to return.
The height of hypocrisy is that European colonizers of the new world, with zero connection to it, who massacred the local populations wherever they arrived, cause them suffering to date, and who stole the land and resources they live on, are calling the Jewish people who have one of the clearest and strongest connections to their land, supported by rich historical and archeological accounts, who once they could, as refugees themselves with almost nowhere to go, immigrated legally to their land and bought it back, colonizers. That the Arabs who attacked the Jews and ethnically cleansed them from the region even before Zionism was a thing (In Tsfat, in Hebron, in Jerusalem), who attacked Israel on the day it was established even though it offered its Arab/Palestinian residents to become equal citizens ( https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp ), who like the Hussein's in Jordan are often themselves colonizers, are somehow the ones wronged in this story and who deserve the sort of self determination as countries they never had before WW-I and WW-II.
> Some Palestinians have direct ties to ancient Israelites as well. But the Hebrew occupants were expelled by force, hence the spread out Jewish population.
But dude, this is the only paragraph that matters. Israel is persecuting and stealing land from the descendants of the Hebrews all because they aren't the right race and religion.
The 47 partition and 48 war didn't happen because the Israeli settlers were behaving like doves.
And no, just having the same religion as ancient inhabitants does not magically grant you land. That's insanity as I pointed out.
Exactly the same as if a native American came to my home and demanded that I leave because this was their ancetrial land.
What happened in the 1800s was horrific, just like what's currently happening in Israel. It's not hypocrisy to see past genocides as wrong and identify a current genocide. You don't "get one" just because my ancestors did one. Nor do you "get one" just because your parents/grandparents/or great grandparents were subject to one.
You are always the villain when you murder people to steal their land.
At some point I'll give up on this thread but you're wrong.
The only reason I'm arguing the historical context is to counter the ridiculous argument of colonialism or the equally ridiculous revisionism about the connection of the Jewish people (ethnically and religiously) to the land.
Go back and check the history prior to 47-48. The migrants, and the native Jewish population, were under constant attack by Arabs. Not because the Jews "stole" anything. Simply because they are Jews. The "Yeshuv" back then, and now, acted in self defense. The security organizations that were formed were formed as a result of attacks on Jewish people. Attacks (read as massacres and ethnic cleansing) on Jews (native Jews who lives there forever, and migrants) predate Zionism. Jewish people either have been there forever, or were migrants that bought property, often developing areas nobody wanted to live in (due to swamps, Malaria etc.). The area was not as desirable as it is now, it was a disease ridden sh*thole which the Jewish people turned into an amazing modern country (compare to the surrounding countries).
The story of the peaceful native Arabs that somehow got forcibly displaced through some "occupation" is bogus. Never happened. The Arabs that got displaced got displaced during a war they started after they rejected the partition plan (that gave them like 98% of the land in the middle east and like 75% of the original "British Mandate" land that included Jordan). Because Jews and Arabs apparently can't live together (not because of the Jews) then the reasonable solution at the time was to create different political entities for those groups. The partition plan left a tiny sliver of the Levant to be a primarily Jewish state (that guaranteed the rights of minorities, and still does, unlike any Arab country) and a vast middle east to the Arabs. The Arabs wouldn't have that and decided they were going to just kill the Jews and take all the land. This is how we got here. Now the people that ended up as refugees in that war (and their descendant) still want to kill the Jews and take the land.
So sure, some Palestinian, who maybe has ancient Israelite blood in his veins, needs to live somewhere else because of this. If his people actually wanted to make this a win/win and cared about things like human rights and freedom maybe this wouldn't be the outcome. But he's not "rejected" from Israel because of his faith or ethnicity.
Re: Genocide. The word has become meaningless. According to the anti-Israeli killing a single Palestinian can constitute a "genocide" as per their interpretation of the legal definition. The simple truth is that Israel is not killing all Palestinians because of them being Palestinians. Or all Gazans for any reason. I.e. there is no genocide. There might be war crimes in Gaza but those are not comparable to what most people would consider genocide and particularly not comparable to the Nazis systemic murder of six million Jews in Europe. There was no war in Europe between the Jews and the Germans. There were no military targets. There were no Jews that were not a target because they lived somewhere else. If you seriously can not see the difference then you need to read more about the Holocaust. Assuming 60,000 Gazans have been killed (which we don't know but that's the number Hamas publishes more or less) that number is perfectly in line with what you would expect in this kind of war, about half or 30% being combatants is also expected. If we didn't have a war, there wouldn't be civilian casualties. If we didn't have a war we wouldn't see the scale of destruction we see in Gaza. A war has two parties and Israeli soldiers are dying and getting wounded every day and Israel proper is still occasionally getting attacked by mortars and rockets.
Take a look at what Russia did to Checnya, or to Mariupol, or with Assad to Aleppo and other Syrian cities. Take a look at what western countries did in places like Mosul. In terms of brutality and impact to population Gaza is far from the worse war we've seen even in recent decades. It's certainly the war with the most media focus though. Never has a terrorist organization gotten so much positive media in the west. Uninvolved civilians shouldn't need to suffer like this, but it's a reality of war, a war that the Palestinians decided to start on Oct 7th and are still insisting on continuing to fight. There is a fine line- If Israel does change course towards murdering the entire population of Gaza then that's a different story. So far this has not been the story - far from it. Israel is mostly applying the same standard of care as any other western nation, and way above that of non-western nations. Russia leveled Grozny to the ground and 80k people were killed in that war ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War#Siege_of_Gr... ) and nobody said the g word.
EDIT: Also worth adding the word genocide was being thrown around from about Oct 8th without much relationship to Israel's actions. The dilution of this word is doing a disservice to humanity. It is weaponized as part the war as a tool for Palestinians against Israel. I have to admit this is working very well. The various forces here that are pushing narratives seem to have been very well prepared for the Oct 7th attack. I'm not sure if the word genocide has been used previously in the conflict - that's also possible. Using the word is a lot more effective than trying to have a more nuanced debate ratios between civilians and combatants and what is legal use of force in war and what isn't and comparing to other conflicts. Hamas must have known Israel would respond with a heavy hand and that would result in large scale destruction and civilian casualties. They obviously understood the consequences of using civilian infrastructure and tunneling under civilians.
> If you want to talk about occupying, why is the al-aqsa mosque built where it was, if not for trying to erase native ties to the land?
The second temple was destroyed in 70 CE and the first Al Aqsa mosque was likely built in 600s. What is your argument here? Both religions share a common lineage so it's not unusual that Islam would revere the same location as an older religion with the same origin story.
You are forgetting the Natufians, residing in the Levant from 15,000 to 11,000 BC. Should we revive the Natufian identity and claim the land ? They are the OG Levantians after all.
Can you see how this makes no sense ? Why create so much pain and suffering ?
They just had a working state with working institutions that carried on, prussian, protestant bureaucracy carrying on even after the die hard nazis had died out.
Islamic culture is unable to produce these institutions .
I mean I was trying to show that the Germans don't suicide bomb busses in Kaliningrad even after their own much worse version of the Nakba. In general, most losers of wars, especially of wars of aggression that they themselves started, don't spend then next century suicide bombing and turning down deals that they deem beneath them. They take what they can get and get on with their lives, being productive and improving the future for their children.
south africa is not a good analogue since it's fate is different from that of palestine, and you are making this obtuse analogue to stir up feelings of decolonisation as a sort of nationalism
Think you are missing the point. This wasn’t an analogy about the actors , but rather the framing.
During apartheid , and towards the end plenty were making arguments for gradual control ; gradual processes which just would have further perpetuated oppression. I was highlighting the similarities to that. We also had people saying the ‘blacks’ just want to ‘kill the whites’ and it would result in violence.
Your mapping of roles is completely incorrect, Indians cannot be the Zionist since they were an oppressed minority and did not have power. Equating Afrikaners to ottomans / British is incoherent.
You, and the original comment completely ignores the power imbalance as was the case in apartheid South Africa. This framing further perpetuates oppression and is a way to prop up the apartheid state.
I won’t post all of the evidence here confirming that Israel functions as an apartheid state. Numerous reports exist that describe and draw the comparison.
> During apartheid , and towards the end plenty were making arguments for gradual control ; gradual processes which just would have further perpetuated oppression. I was highlighting the similarities to that. We also had people saying the ‘blacks’ just want to ‘kill the whites’ and it would result in violence.
If you are then making comparison to modern times instead of colonialism, then still not really applicable to gaza since gaza was not occupied Oct 7th. Therefore, Israel (colonization conspiracies aside) had no interest in gaza except for security.
I do believe the apartheid example / comparison makes sense when thinking of the west bank, and I do believe myself the west bank is experiencing settler colonization and apartheid conditions along that settler boundary.
If you do not believe that zionists in palestine were an oppressed minority until the mass immigration in the 1930s and the failed arab revolts, I suggest you restudy the history. Palestine would have easily ended up like Uganda if the Palestinians hadn't made strategic errors / failed their invasion of the newly declared state of Israel.
The Orwell link is a great read, and part of it suggests that both decolonization and underdog-centered pacifism are forms of nationalism. Here is a quote that I love, heavily relates to the troubles in ireland and some reactions to the current gazan war:
"But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough."
Almost like starting a war is risky, and that by doing so you should weigh the consequences of you losing that war. Why would Hamas leaders expect to survive this war? Are they so cowardly that they would genocide their people to escape justice? If the people of gaza are going to be sacrificed by the IDF, or sacrificed by Hamas, at what point do they turn on Hamas as the weaker of the two?
one could argue, that with hamas de facto defeated and now rival gangs rising up to take power, israel could unilaterally ceasefire and hold elections for a new government to run the strip. hamas, if they pop up again, are disposed of with both domestic and IDF forces.
the main problem is that doing so would probably result in the death of the hostages. hamas wants to stay in power, even if gaza is reduced to sand, they will hold onto the hostages until their power, even over nothing but skeletons, is assured.
the IDF could continue to engage on hamas's terms, or it could make the heartbreaking decision to give up on the hostages and focus on saving the innocent gazan civilians.
Israels government doesn't care about the hostages. They could have saved all remaining hostages by just not unilaterally breaking the ceasefire earlier this year.
Ultimately it's Iran's call who takes power in Gaza, as they've been funding various groups based on the willingness to engage Israel - for this reason the PLO originally fell out in favor of Hamas when it softened its stance.
After all these atrocities, even with Hamas completely gone the hatred for Israel will remain. This war will not stop, only pause.
Imagine all the kids that are growing up in Gaza now, witnessing so much pain, misery and death. How on earth could they forgive Israel, especially as it continues to invade and occupy their territories ?
These are very, very different situations. You are comparing nations and cultures that have be living side by side for thousands of years to a 77 year old state (Israel) occupying territory that has been Palestinean for thousands of years.
Israel and Ozzy Osbourne were born on the same year. People that were born after Ozzy, can no longer return to their birthplace, because it is now Israel and they are besieged in Gaza.
> You are comparing nations and cultures that have be living side by side for thousands of years to a 77 year old state (Israel) occupying territory that has been Palestinean for thousands of years.
What difference does that make for 'all the kids that are growing up in Gaza now'? If they're less than 77 years old (which I assume they are, being kids and all), Israel has been their (and many of their parents') neighbour for all of their lives.
International relationships and balances are created through centuries of cultural ties and exchanges. Don't you think it makes a difference if you know that you cannot visit the birthplace of your parents because it has been occupied ?
hamas could surrender tomorrow and end any pretense or cover for the "genocidal ambitions". you are being incredibly racist towards palestinians by infantilizing them and suggesting that hamas doesn't have any agency or responsibility for this war or it's effect on innocent civilians.
I think you are putting too much weight on the organization rather than the idea and collective it represents. From a very westernized idealized perspective.
Hamas is not this all encompassing high communication stable organization able to surrender tomorrow.
Hamas, or rather the idea, is instead made up of everyone who had a family member, relative or friend killed by Israel wanting to live a good life without the threat or pain of past actions.
One group of a loosely connected collective surrendering won’t materially change the situation on the ground.
you bring up an interesting point, in that after two years of war, almost none of the pre-war hamas leadership is left alive. why is hamas refusing to surrender even though all of it's higher leadership is dead? it should be clear that the "axis of resistance" wasn't coming to help on oct 8th itself, and two years later iran and it's proxies are toast. yet hamas opts to continue fighting, at this point it looks like a suicide cult that wants to drag civilians down with it for the purpose of martyrdom
>why is hamas refusing to surrender even though all of it's higher leadership is dead?
How's an organization supposed to surrender when all of its leaders have been assassinated? Who's going to walk up to an IDF emplacement while claiming to lead Hamas? How would such a death-defying individual prove that they had any actual significance to Hamas?
the recent talks in qatar suggested that even though disorganized, enough of a hierarchy still exists within hamas to negotiate. the main complaints from the american side was that hamas seemed to be inconsistent / fractured in their demands, outside of forcing the israelis to return to pre-war status-quo via a ceasefire that protects hamas rule
It's entirely possible there's no longer any single person in charge in practice, but rather a bunch of more or less individually operating cells - each with their own leader.
Imagine you are a 19 year old in charge of some Hamas survivors. Let’s say you want to surrender.
1. Would it even mean anything? It’s not like you or anyone else has the control to stop everyone else. And Israel will use any attack as a sign of bad faith and ignore the surrender.
2. Would it improve anything for your people? If Israelis are intentionally starving babies, there is no reason to think they will stop the genocide just because the militarized part has given up. Have you even heard any news of Hamas even fighting back recently or has it all just been killing civilians?
All a surrender would do is get you tortured for information and executed for no gain.
ironically only indian and pakistani news really report on the IDF casualties / hamas attacks, make of that what you will (IDF journalism blackout backfiring, news bias, maybe south asians love telegram war footage, etc)
try some empathy. if you were conscripted to fight, i don't think your mom would approve of your "19th century warfare" plan. she would want the air force to drop the bombs if there was any improvement to your odds of coming home. she would smack you on the head and say there is nothing "cowardly" about avoiding unnecessary danger
I see what you're saying, IDF soldiers were trigger happy to kill surrendering Semites that were the hostages they were looking for, because their mom said its not cowardly to avoid unnecessary danger.
Thanks for redefining that term, its the substantive comment we needed. I apologize for my chauvinistic idea that avoiding masculine altruism during an actual war to accomplish the actual stated goal might be internationally seen as cowardly.
It’s near impossible to explain to some that 50k dead is equivalent to nuking a place. See, everyone is like “well it’s not like we’re nuking the place” … well actually, that’s … actually what it is.
Hiroshima was 80k dead? How do you achieve a Hiroshima without the blowback of using a Nuke? Heh. You can get the same causality count minus the Nuke fan-fare, IDF lunch special (a bomb sandwich).
how are refugees from russia and germany colonizers? are venezuelan refugees colonizing america by your logic? if the zionists aren't the colonizers, but allied with colonizers, then who is the backer? the ottomans? the british? the french? the russians? what prevented the palestinians from allying with outside powers if the israelis were doing the same?
when you claim colonizers, you're just making an excuse for the repeated strategic errors that the palestinians made, and will continue to make, that led them into this humiliating situation.
You're touching on a very true point by saying that the high-level ideas, like ancient homelands or Marxist theory, create a lot of argument that in the end seems to distract people from the obvious reality, which is the mass slaughter of civilians, many of them children.
In reality, the challenge remains, what is a better solution from the Israeli perspective? If the proposed alternative is they all pack up and leave or dissolve their government, there is 0% chance that will happen.
It may be in the interests of someone to kill a witness to a murder, but it's up to law and society to stop them. Likewise I am sure plenty of genocides have been in the interests of the victors, but it is up to law and civlization to stop them. What I am not sure about is that it is truly in Israel's interest to be known forevermore as one of the racial exterminators in mankind's long and fraught history.
It seems like you are dodging the question by claiming it doesnt matter what Israel wants or will accept (like a murderer). Do you actually think that is true in reality, or do you simply wish that it did not matter?
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/tuned-ppd/
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