concordtom said:

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How long until Trump appears and says:
"Only I can fix it!

??????????

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He said it as reported by NYPost this morning

BearGoggles said:

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kal kommie said:

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BearGoggles said:

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sycasey said:

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Question: is a two-state solution even feasible? I'm not confident such a thing would actually hold in the long run; the problem is that the Jews and the Muslims both want the same land.

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If you read historical accounts, the problem is not occupancy of the same land. The division of land was largely resolved (return to 1967 borders, with trades for security and settlements) and some sort of joint authority (dual capitals) in Jerusalem.

I understand the central problem are;

1. To this point, the Palestinians have insisted upon a literal right of return which is interpreted by Israelis as a means to destroy the Jewish character of Israel. There were several attempts to bridge the gap by offering compensation or a limited symbolic right of return. Those were rejected by Abbas.

2. Fundamentally, at this point the Israelis have no basis for expecting their security concerns will be addressed by any formulation

My personal opinion is that Abbas was incapable of making peace because his entire existence was based on being the rebel fighter. His rhetoric - which largely continues to be employed by others to this day - does not prepare the Palestinian people for compromise. "From the river to the sea" is not a call for peace - it is a call for a the destruction of Israel.

Israel has made many mistakes and has contributed to/reinforced many of cycles of violence. But Israel has a large center left/left contingent that advocate for peace. Who are the people in Palestinian society that advocate for a true two state solution? There is a reason most of the Arab world is no longer willing to advocate for Palestinians.

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In the early 2000s a basis for the resolution of the land questions (including settlements), security, and Jerusalem seemed within reach, at least between the negotiating teams. However 20 years of "facts on the ground" have annihilated that basis. Continued settlement expansion has already redrawn the map of the West Bank and would seriously complicate any land swap. More importantly, Israel no longer appears willing to consider a divided Jerusalem. Netanyahu has repeatedly declared Jerusalem to be the "eternal, undivided capital of Israel" and Israeli public opinion steadily turned from ambivalent on the issue to being strongly against dividing Jerusalem.

I think the understanding of the "central problem" that Bear Goggles presents is generally valid though I would not characterize Abbas or any leader as the main stumbling block so much as the deeply held opinions of the Palestinian people (insofar as I would be willing to characterize Palestinian attitudes as the stumbling block at all as opposed to Israeli attitudes).

1. Right of return

Palestinian negotiating teams in the early 2000s showed willingness to compromise on the right of return through limitations on the number of refugees who would be allowed into Israel and compensation for the remainder, but Palestinian public opinion has always emphatically rejected these compromises, leaving it unclear as to whether any mutually acceptable agreement could ever have been fulfilled.

2. Security concerns

Again, Palestinian negotiating teams in the early 2000s were willing to compromise by accepting in large measures the Israeli demands for that state to be demilitarized and for Israel to retain at least some security installations in Palestinian territory, but again Palestinian public opinion was strongly against these concessions as they would infringe upon the sovereignty of the future Palestinian state. However, this issue seems to me more tractable than the right of return.

Here's a link to a 3rd party observer summary of what some feel is the most viable negotiation ever between Israeli and Palestinian representatives at Taba in 2001. That opinion was expressed by members of both negotiating teams, with the chief Palestinian negotiator having said they needed only six more weeks to conclude the agreement, but Israel pulled out of the Taba Summit before it could be completed, citing its upcoming elections. Since Labor was kicked out of power in that election, it's likely that even if the negotiators had reached a deal, it would have been stillborn.

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-200101/

Bear Goggles is plainly mistaken about there being a large "center left/left" contingent" in Israeli politics. Likud has controlled the government for 17 of the last 21 years, during which time the left has been decimated. It took a center + center/left (Labor) + left (small parties) coalition to remove Likud from power between 2006-2009. Labor, once the largest Israeli party, has not received more than 6% of the vote since 2013. In the 2022 elections, the seven largest vote shares comprising 80% of the vote went to center right, right, or far right parties while Labor had been reduced to 3.7%. The electoral rise of the right wing, which originates in the late 1970s, has been accompanied by decades of neoliberal "reforms" as throughout the western world, leading as always to rising inequality and immiseration of the working class, a particularly revolutionary outcome in a state that was once politically defined by its commitment to economic social democracy.

Bear Goggles is also mistaken as to the relative levels of support for "peace" in Palestine and Israel. Support for the two state solution between Palestinians and Israeli Jews has been closely mirrored through this century. Up to 2017, polling had consistently indicated that between 45-55% of both demographics supported the two state solution but support on both sides has severely declined since then to around 30% with Palestinian opinion slightly lower than Israeli. Most tellingly, support for the two state solution by Israeli Arabs has crashed from its historical levels exceeding 80% to under 50%. Support for some form of a one state solution has grown in all groups but optimism regarding the prospects for any negotiated solution are virtually at all time lows.

Those are the facts, now for my opinion. I do not believe the people who really hold power in Israel have ever been interested in either a two state solution or a one state solution. This is also the opinion of two of the foremost experts on Israel/Palestine from the left, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein (both Jewish Americans). A federative single state involves unacceptable power sharing with Palestinians. An integrated single state is incompatible with Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. Any viable Palestinian state created through a two state solution would be an eternal security threat to Israel even if Palestinians agreed at the start to Israel's security concessions.

Moreover, the status quo serves the designs of Israeli maximalists almost perfectly. Remember that just as there are Palestinians who feel their people are entitled to possession of the whole country, there are Israelis who believe the Palestinians are entitled to absolutely nothing, that Eretz Israel belongs entirely to the Jewish people and refuse to consider any concessions except as part of a design to eventually acquire the whole country. This was in fact David Ben Gurion's position with respect to proposals to partition the country, a position he explicitly details in a letter to his son in 1937.

One only needs to consult maps from 1967 and today to see how Israeli maximalists have fulfilled Ben Gurion's vision. The multi-generational process of illegal annexation of the territories conquered in 1967 has slowly but surely disintegrated the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, in addition to netting the Golan Heights and Jerusalem entirely for Israel. On each iteration of the so-called "peace process", Israel is able to confront Palestine with a new set of "facts on the ground". Israel refuses to remove the vast majority of its illegal settlements and those few settlements they are willing to remove become currency in land swaps.

In every negotiation that has ever taken place, the Palestinians are the only ones who are required to make concessions on their rights under international law and the principles of self-determination. They must give some of their unquestionable right to return to their homes lost in the wars and illegal annexations. They must give up some of the sovereignty of their prospective state to the security concerns of their conquerors or endure continued stateless existence. They must legitimize not only the illegal annexations since 1967 but the original negation of their right to political self-determination throughout the country in the creation of the Jewish ethnostate of Israel. Whenever the Palestinians balk at the degree to which they are required to unilaterally surrender rights, Israeli partisans brand them as rejectionist as though they were the ones who have been in continuous violation of international law for 56 years and haughtily refuse to rectify their illegalities.

This is the realist appraisal of the situation, the one taken with the understanding that people are fundamentally self-interested, alone or in groups, and that international relations are based on nothing more than power dynamics. If anyone still does not understand how this applies to the Israeli plan for the the Palestinians, they should consult the candid words of the forthright Israeli warmaster Moshe Dayan after Israel won the 1967 war: "Let's say 'we don't have a solution, and you will continue living like dogs, and whoever wants will go, and we'll see how this procedure will work out." Generations later this is obviously still the plan.

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You're pretty selective in your conclusions and doing lots of cherry picking - very Chomsky of you. You're quick to point out the things that Netanyahu has said - what have Abbas and Hamas said about sharing Jerusalem or for that matter Israel's right to exist?

Labor is not the only center/center left/left party in Israel. If the right's control of government is so strong, why have there been 5 elections in 4 years? Why were there massive protest by the left recently? The Israeli left has a strong and consistent peace advocacy program that is politically active. Where is the counterpart in the Palestinian community? When was the last time Palestinians ANYWHERE demonstrated against their government, for recognizing Israel, and/or in favor of Peace?

Your extrapolation of the Taba Summit is equally silly. If only they had six more weeks? Really? All parties, including Palestinians, knew that Barak and Clinton were leaving office. It was the last chance after the failed 2000 camp david summit. Arafat missed an opportunity (again).

Settlement policy is unhelpful. But not nearly as unhelpful as continued violence from Gaza and the West Bank. Israel has removed settlements and would do so as part of any peace settlement (or those people would become citizens of the Palestinian state). When have the Palestinians (including Hamas) renounced violence?

And while we're on the subject of elections, what is going on in the West Bank and Gaza?

Your suggestion that Israel is simply pursuing "Ben Gurion's vision" ignores the fact that the Israel has traded land for peace and in fact (by your own admission) offered the Palestinians 97% of the West Bank and all of Gaza - that is per the Moratinos non-paper you cited.

And to go "there" your claim that only the Palestinians must give up the right to their homes is laughable. Did history start in 1948? In 1948, were their jews in the West Bank and other Arab countries? How were those people treated? Remind me, what is under the Dome of the Rock? I'm pretty sure there's a Jewish temple there. I find the argument least relevant at this point, but if any claim will be decided on "who was there first", the Jews win. So just stop.

What is most striking about the above is that you completely deny the Palestinians agency (or responsibility). To you, they are just victims. You claim to be a realist, but far from it.

A realist position would acknowledge that the Palestinians have no option but to make compromises to achieve their larger goals. Something their leaders never acknowledged, instead suggesting the impossible - that Israel will be destroyed and Palestinians would control from the river to the sea.

A realist position would acknowledge that the Israelis can never make peace with a country governed by terrorists (or that permits terrorism against Israel). NO COUNTRY would be expected to make the compromises you're asking of Israel given the current situation. You're not a realist; your an apologist.

The Palestinians need to remake their society to be a partner for peace. If you really cared about their suffering (which is very real), you'd be advocating for those types of changes. Instead, you present them as victims and Israel as the sole bad actor. You are perpetuating the problem.

And to be clear, Israel and all other countries/people of good will need to do their part to assist the Palestinians. The first part of that is removing Hamas which is a permanent obstacle to peace.

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"Cherry picking" here means pointing out obvious critical flaws in your statements, of which I am certainly guilty. We're about to pick another basket full of cherries, a harvest that would have been larger had you not exercised the better part of valor and ignored several salient points, but I'll repeat those points in the hope that you will be more courageous next time around.

First we'll dispatch the counter-points you did offer.

1. The supposedly large Israeli center/left + left

Your evidence that there is a large Israeli center/left + left is:

A. There have been 5 elections in 4 years

It is true that there have been 5 elections in 4 years but this has nothing to do with a supposedly large center/left + left. It follows entirely from disunity between the center (not the center/left) and the right-wing parties.

Edifying note for Americans: in US politics, "liberal" is ridiculously connoted as "left" thanks in part to how far warped to the right US politics are and in other part to particular historical circumstances in 20th century US party politics. In most of the western world "liberal" when describing a party means center/right (such as the UK's Liberal Democrats or Australia's Liberal Party or Japan's LDP) which is why I included them in the combination of center/right + right + far right from my previous post but Wikipedia identifies the Israeli "liberal" parties as center so I will adopt that identification here. The point is they are not part of the left. The two Israeli "liberal" parties in this four year span, Blue & White and Yesh Atid, both support the two state solution but also support settlement expansion and reject dividing Jerusalem.

The rapidity of elections over the past four years has been produced by fluctuations in the on-again/off-again coalition between the major center party (first Benny Gantz's Blue & White Party, then Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid) and the right-wing bloc led by Netanyahu's Likud. Likud and the center party have been the two largest vote getters in every one of these five elections. In none of these elections did any center/left or left party get more than 13% of the vote, and even that showing required the temporary consolidation of several left parties that before got small single digits.

Here is the breakdown of vote share by alignment in each of the five elections. Note that "Left" includes center/left (Labor) and "Right" includes center/right. One party, Shas, particularly defies clean classification as it combines center/left economic policy with strong right-wing social policy; Shas used to be moderate where Palestine was concerned but in the last decade has taken a sharp right-wing turn. It is included here as a right party given our discussion's orientation toward Palestinian policy. Similarly Ra'am defies easy classification since they are a conservative Islamist party that has joined centrist coalitions against Netanyahu. They are listed here as a center party.

April 2019
Left (Hadash-Ta'al, Labor, URWP, Meretz, Ra'am-Balad) 19.6%
Center (Blue & White, Kulanu) 29.7%
Right (Likud, UTJ, Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas) 42.2%

Sept 2019
Left (Joint List, Labor, Democratic Union) 19.7%
Center (Blue & White) 26.0%
Right (Likud, Shas, UTJ, Yisrael Beiteinu, Yamina) 51.5%

March 2020
Left (Joint List, Emet) 18.5%
Center (Blue & White) 26.6%
Right (Likud, Shas, UTJ, Yisrael Beiteinu, Yamina) 54.1%

March 2021
Left (Labor, Joint List, Meretz) 15.5%
Center (Yesh Atid, Blue & White, Ra'am) 24.3%
Right (Likud, Shas, Yamina, UTJ, Yisrael Beiteinu, Religious Zionist, New Hope) 58.7%

Nov 2022
Left (Labor, Hadash-Ta'al) 7.4%
Center (Yesh Atid, National Unity, Ra'am) 30.9%
Right (Likud, Religious Zionist, Shas, Yamina, UTJ, Yisrael Beiteinu) 52.9%

The total marginalization of the Israeli left should be self-evident from a review of electoral results in the five year span you identified. And again, this in a country that used to be defined by its social democracy. Every PM until 1977 was from Labor. No left party has held the govt since 2001.

B. Netanyahu's authoritarian judicial bill drew massive protests

The wide-spread protests to Netanyahu's profoundly authoritarian judicial "reform" in which the Israeli left naturally participates along with the center are not a left wing movement. They're protests against a sharp slide toward authoritarianism that includes both the center and the left. Even Alan Dershowitz vociferously opposes these "reforms" and he is strongly anti-Palestinian. Palestinian issues are a channel through which supporters of the Netanyahu government have sought to fracture the protests as the body of protesters is widely divided on those issues.

Imagine a Trump II administration announced a policy by which the judiciary would be prevented from ruling on the constitutionality of new laws or ruling against actions taken by members of the executive branch. Do you think the ensuing protests would be limited to American leftists? No, in fact I bet there are posters on this board who voted for Trump in 2016 who would be out on the streets with me.

C. The existence of an Israeli peace advocacy program

Here you identify advocacy for peace between Israel and Palestine as leftism, which is ironic because no left party has won a national election in this century but you still claim Israel has sincerely pursued peace. In reality the desire for peace is not confined to the left, as some right leaning members of this board will attest. And even if we did grant the entire Israeli peace movement to be entirely left-wing, it does not take a gigantic number of people to run peace advocacy programs. We have them here in the US and the organized left barely has a political pulse.

2. Taba

"Six weeks" is not MY "extrapolation" of the Taba Summit. As I said before, that was the assessment of the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, who said "My heart aches because I know we were so close. We need six more weeks to conclude the drafting of the agreement." Erekat was echoed by Israel's negotiator Shlomo Ben-Ami who said "We made progress, substantial progress. We are closer than ever to the possibility of striking a final deal."

On the contrary, I said that regardless of whether the negotiators had been able to reach an agreement, the upcoming Israeli elections would likely have rendered that agreement stillborn. How did you miss these things? Is your reading comprehension this bad or is this due to your own awareness that your arguments are so weak that you feel the need to purposefully misrepresent me in attempts to score fraudulent points?

Nor did the progress made at Taba (and Camp David) die there. The progress was incorporated into the secret negotiations at Geneva over the next two years. The respective reactions by the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to the terms arranged at Geneva once they were made public is telling: Arafat, Abbas and Qurei gave it qualified support despite significant domestic opposition while Sharon, Peres (Labor) and Barak (Labor) rejected it outright. The outcome signaled the futility of negotiation to the moderate segment of the Palestinian public, though future Palestinian governments nonetheless continued the effort.

And Arafat did not "miss an opportunity" at Camp David. There was no viable proposition there for Arafat to accept but the negotiations over the Clinton Parameters did help pave the way for Taba and Geneva. We could talk more about why the Camp David proposals were not viable from the Palestinian side or you can remain ignorant about it, your choice.

3. "Settlement policy is unhelpful"

Understatement of the century. Like so much else Israel has done and continues to do, the settlements are a blatant violation of international law. Until the Trump administration, even the US government officially asserted that fact. That Palestinians cannot secure even a halt to the EXPANSION of the illegal settlements, much less their removal, says everything about Israel's aims here. If you sincerely wanted peace you would be careful not to take actions that even further violate the rights of your counter-party. It's my understanding that in legal practice, a disputed asset is supposed to be frozen until the dispute is resolved. The settlements themselves are the cause of tremendous violence and are a part of the on-going expropriation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israel.

4. The West Bank vs Gaza

Since you asked, what's going is that Hamas won the only free and fair (as attested by international monitors) legislative elections ever held for the united Palestinian government despite attempts by Israel to obstruct their participation through repression. The US and Israel immediately rejected the results and issued sanctions on the Palestinian government. The collaborationist outgoing Fatah government (which sent $50 million in Palestinian reserve funds to the US govt rather than have it available for their own people's elected govt) joined the US and Israel in planning a coup which Hamas pre-empted by seizing total control of Gaza and initiating a split in governance with the West Bank that continues today and which is greatly to Israel's benefit (divide and conquer).

5. "Ben Gurion's vision"

Your belief that a willingness to negotiate over land division means that Israel is not pursing Ben Gurion's visions completely ignores the fact that Ben Gurion was willing to negotiate away 83% of Eretz Israel in 1937 and 45% of the country in 1947 in order to advance his explicit (though privately stated) goal of obtaining the entire country. The people who hold and exercise power in Israel are not stupid or inept. Of course they're willing to TALK about giving up land in negotiations that are carefully managed to restrict terms to those they know are unacceptable to the Palestinians or they would lose the cover this talk provides to people who either through stupidity or dishonesty deny that this is exactly what Israel is doing. Meanwhile the illegal annexation continues year after year, making it more and more difficult for negotiated solution to succeed. Given how successful this program has been, why would they do anything else?

6. History before 1948

How are the Palestinians in any way responsible for what other Arab countries did to their Jewish populations? How are they in any way responsible for the decision by Muslim rulers to build a mosque on the Temple Mount 14 centuries ago?

Why should the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine 2000 years ago give all Jewish people throughout eternity overriding political rights to self determination over the native population in a country that at the time of the liberation of Palestine from the Ottomans was over 90% non-Jewish? Did the Palestinians or even their ancestors have anything to do with the destruction of that Jewish state? Do you really believe the Jewish colonists who came from Europe and North America between 1918 and 1948 had the right to establish an ethnostate over the objections of nearly all of the country's native population?

Do you support returning 55% of the United States to the sovereignty of Native American tribes? Because that's what was demanded of the Palestinians in 1947 under threat of war if they refused. And that's not even the same because nearly all of the descendants of indigenous people of the US still live in this country instead of being colonists from thousands of miles away.

I don't even have to wait for your answer. We both know you damn well wouldn't.

7. Denial of Palestinian agency

Exactly how did I deny the Palestinians agency?

YOU are the one who denies them agency. You claim their leadership is the obstacle to peace as though their will to resist their oppressors through armed struggle was some aberrant quantity that is sourced from the top down. If you knew anything about Palestine, if you regarded Palestinians as human beings rather than as dupes who would cry uncle if Hamas was gone, if you took even the slightest effort to learn what the Palestinians actually want instead of yet again asserting your stupid prejudices, you would know that the mandate for armed struggle against Israeli oppression comes from the people. That's why they elected Hamas to begin with.

Far from relying on the image of being a "rebel fighter" as you ignorantly claimed, Abbas is known as a "pragmatist" who has opposed armed resistance since before he was elected president in 2005. Because of your careless ignorance you don't realize that Abbas is despised by the overwhelming majority of Palestinians who now regard him as a corrupt Quisling. In your ignorance you don't realize that if new presidential elections were held, Abbas would be trounced by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyyeh (despite Hamas' relative unpopularity especially in the West Bank) who would in turn be trounced by Marwan Barghouti, a leader of both the First and Second Intifada, if the latter was released from the Israeli prisons he has spent the last 21 years in.

You didn't even know that Palestinian support for a two state solution has always tracked closely with that of Israeli Jews because you don't actually care at all about what Palestinians think or want. And you talk about agency? What a fool you are.

8. Realism

You say the Palestinians have no option but "compromise" which means unilaterally surrendering rights to Israelis who surrender nothing in return except some land swaps and even there they insist the Palestinians make one-sided sacrifices by accepting the swaps at less than 1:1, at less than equal quality of land, at locations of Israel's choosing, and by allowing Israel to retain control over large portions of the land they surrender in the swap (portions which slice the West Bank into pieces). But you are characteristically wrong, as the Palestinian people constantly prove. They can choose to reject these abusive deals that require them to sacrifice their unquestioned right to return to their homes, to surrender sovereign security rights to the people who have oppressed them, to legitimate all that Israel has done to them from 1947 to the present and instead suffer to maintain their equality of rights as human beings. It may not be the realistic thing to do, it may not be what I would do in their shoes (how could I know?), but it is incredibly courageous and demands respect rather than obloquy.

You say the Israelis can never make peace with a country governed by terrorists (as though Israel wasn't itself a country governed by terrorists with far more blood on their hands than Hamas, or that terrorism wasn't a standard policy among states in general, particularly ours), the exact same rhetoric that used to be applied by rejectionists like you to Northern Ireland and the IRA. "You can't negotiate with terrorists, that only emboldens them. You can't trust deals made with terrorists, they will not keep faith. The terrorists must lay down their arms before negotiation can take place." Turns out the rejectionists were wrong on all counts. "We won't negotiate with terrorists" is the standard rhetorical ploy of rejectionists everywhere who understand that sympathetic or fearful audiences won't challenge either the premise or the conclusion, won't realize that in most armed conflicts each side regards the other as terrorists and yet human history is filled with peace being made between them nonetheless.

Most importantly, you are wrong about which one of us misapprehends the reality of Israel/Palestine. I recognize the demands of both peoples and understand the degree to which they are incompatible. Palestinians want their full right to return; Israelis want to maintain their ethnostate. Palestinians want full sovereignty over their prospective state; Israelis want control over Palestinian security for their own sake. Palestinians want at the very least all of the land beyond the Green Line; Israelis want at the very least to keep nearly everything they have seized from Palestinians after 1967. The difference between us is that I understand that Israeli realists have used the incompatibility of these requirements as diplomatic cover to stonewall any negotiated solution indefinitely while they slowly but steadily achieve their maximum aims.

You pretend it is the Palestinians -- and them only -- who must mend their ways to become partners for peace. Who deprived the other of self-determination to begin with? Who conquered what remained of the other in 1967 and almost immediately began annexing their land in violation of international law? Who has run the world's longest military occupation again in defiance of international law? Which side has killed the other at a rate of 20:1 over the last 15 years before this latest exchange of deaths? Which side has subjected the other to the collective punishment of internment in the world's largest open air prison? Which side arbitrarily imprisons the other's people for crimes like waving a flag or shouting a slogan or having a cousin who organizes activism?

You want to talk about Hamas denying Israel's right to exist? Israel denies Palestine even exists as a state! Why should the Palestinians make concessions like legitimizing Israel's existence or surrendering their right to armed resistance before they even get to the negotiating table. Why are the Israelis not required to renounce the use of violence to suppress the Palestinians before negotiating; to hold their private citizens responsible for murdering Palestinians; to recognize the existence of the state of Palestine; to freeze settlement expansion until peace is made; to lift the collectively punishing blockade of Gaza; to release the thousands of Palestinians, including children, who languish in Israeli prisons, some of whom for no greater crime than exercising freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Your ignorance, arrogance, and unreal one-sidedness is staggering. Next time you're going to spout off on an important topic, please educate yourself first that way neither I or anyone else will have to waste time and effort correcting your factual errors before correcting your logical and ethical ones.

BearGoggles said:

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kal kommie said:

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BearGoggles said:

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dimitrig said:

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sycasey said:

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Question: is a two-state solution even feasible? I'm not confident such a thing would actually hold in the long run; the problem is that the Jews and the Muslims both want the same land.

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Why don't they share it like they did for hundreds of years before England got involved?

I will tell you why. A sizable faction of Jews don't want to share the land.

The correct solution isn't a two state solution. It is a one state solution, but the current leaders of Israel will never permit that as Jews would be the minority population.

I am no fan of Hamas but keeping Palestinians holed up in a small section of what was also their land too shows what role Israel thinks they should have in deterring the fate of the country.

Long-term that is unsustainable. They have to figure out a way to integrate them into Israeli society instead of second class citizens.

On the other side, the Palestinians can't engage in terrorism to make their point. Iran and others goad them into these actions instead of diplomatic solutions. It is ill-advised and wholly unnecessary when they have demographics on their side.

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Fact check time - what is the sizable portion of the Jews who don't want to share the land? What is your number? How does this compare to the percentage of Palestinians that don't want to share the land?

You need to be very specific here because a statement like that treads very close to antisemitism. Is it only Jews that don't want to share?

Which group refused to accept the 1948 partition - which group was unwilling to "share" then? Which group gave up land for peace (Sinai) and has offered to do so again? Which group has people chanting from the river to the sea?

Israel was founded as a safe haven for Jews. Do you have a problem with Jews wanting to have a Jewish state and preserve its Jewish nature? Do you have the same problem with the Vatican and or the 27 countries that have adopted Islam as the state religion? Why do you think its unreasonable for Jews to want to have their own country when so many other countries are explicitly religious?

It is truly awful that the Palestinians live in terrible circumstances that are about to get worse. But the old saying remains true:

If the Palestinians lay down their arms, there will be no more war (and they would have a country). If the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will be no more Israel. Until that changes, the Palestinians are destined to suffer.

The first step to improving conditions for Palestinians is getting rid of Hamas and their corrupt PA. Until that happens, nothing will change.

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Earlier you insinuated without evidence that support for the two state solution was substantially stronger in Israel than in Palestine. What were your numbers? Did you consult polling or just assert your prejudices? Why didn't you feel the need to be very specific there? Can one only be racist when making unsubstantiated assertions about the attitudes of Jewish populations and not Palestinian ones?

BTW if anyone is interested in learning what Palestinians actually think about these issues, this is an excellent polling resource:

https://www.pcpsr.org/en

The Palestinians of course were the ones who rejected the partition of their country. Why wouldn't they? Let's say the US was conquered by a foreign power which allowed tens of millions of people who claim to be descendants of Native Americans (genetic or spiritual) from all over the world to immigrate to the US so they could carve out a new ethnostate. At the behest of the conquering power, the UN puts together a partition plan which gives the new ethnostate half the country. How willing to "share" would you be?

The UN partition plan allocated 62% of Palestine to the Jewish population that comprised only 32% of the country, the majority of whom had immigrated after 1918. Is it just to condemn the Palestinians for rejecting such an outrageously unfair division of their country?

Do you know the history of Israel's occupation of the Sinai? They conquered during their surprise attack against Egypt in 1967. They never had any legitimate claim to the land. What credit should a conqueror be given for doing what international law demands? Well since Israel has refused to comply with international law as regards its conquered Palestinian territories, maybe credit would have been due to Israel with regard to the Sinai if they had returned it for peace but they didn't, at least not voluntarily.

Egypt did not accept Israel's theft of their territory. After recovering some strength following their defeat in 1967, Egypt offered Israel a full peace treaty in exchange for the return of the Sinai, along with an ultimatum that refusal of the offer would lead to war. Israel, having defeated Egypt in two consecutive wars (both times as the aggressor), refused to return their stolen possession to secure peace. They felt the threat was empty and that even if Egypt did attack, Israel would easily thrash them again. But they were wrong on both counts.

In 1973 Egypt (along with Syria and contingents from other Arab countries) followed through on its threat and Israel was caught off guard. In the early stage of the war, defeat looked like a real possibility but Israel, aided by an emergency supply of US arms, turned the tide and launched a counter-invasion of Egypt. At this point the USSR threatened to intervene and fear of escalation prompted the US to step in. A UN backed ceasefire was arranged and eventually negotiations led to a peace treaty in which the Sinai was returned.

So Israel "gave up land for peace", land which it never had legitimate claim to, after fighting a bloody war rather than return that land. Are you sure this episode is a credit to Israel rather than yet another shameful episode of militaristic self-aggrandizement for which they deserve condemnation?

Should we have a problem with Jews wanting their own ethnostate? Does the existence of other ethnostates excuse "the Middle East's only democracy" from being one itself? How can Israel be as Netanyahu declared "The nation-state of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people alone" and still be a liberal democracy? Aren't liberal democracies supposed to be the state of all of their people without regard to their race, ethnicity or religion?

If Jews did deserve their own ethnostate, did the Palestinians deserve to suffer the loss of their own right to self-determination in their own country so Jews could not only have their ethnostate but have it in the geographic location of their choosing?

Non-Jews were 92% of Palestine when it was liberated from the Ottoman Empire in 1918. According to the principles of democratic self-determination, Palestine should have been assisted in immediately organizing elections for a constitutional convention. Instead the rights of the population to self-determination were abrogated by the western dominated League of Nations so that the country could become the "national home for the Jewish people". Britain had already declared its intention to fulfill that end two years before it even received the mandate. The will of the indigenous population was nugatory.

What right did Britain, the (western controlled) League of Nations, or the (western controlled) United Nations have to gift part of Palestine to European Jewish colonists? Why should the Palestinian Arabs be condemned for rejecting a colonial enterprise that was forced upon them, a rejection that should be expected of any indigenous people anywhere?

Israel was born in injustice. Not only was the indigenous population deprived of its right to political self-determination, they were also robbed, murdered and ethnically cleansed before their permanent subjugation. Now you hypothesize about what might happen if they consigned all of the injustices that Israel has inflicted upon them to oblivion and trusted their conqueror enough to utterly submit? Because that's what you would do in their place, get on your knees and beg for some Bantustan your people could shelter in under Israeli domination? Do you know why Hamas was elected in the first place? Because Palestinians are human beings and as a species we tend not to submit to our conquerors unless we have no other choice but annihilation.

I condemn the intentional killing of civilians in war, whether by Hamas, by the US, by Israel, or anyone else. But Palestinians are entitled to the right of armed resistance to their oppressor. Every civilian who is killed in a war of liberation is beyond all else the responsibility of the subjugator. I don't enjoy reading about the civilians who were killed in slave rebellions in the American south and Caribbean, but I refuse to condemn the liberation movements which produced the murders. When a rebelling slave kills the wife and child of their slave master, the master is as responsible as though he was holding the blade hand-in-hand with the rebel slave. If you really want to end the killing, it is Israel who should receive your pressure, not the Palestinians. Israel holds all of the cards here except one: the will to resist injustice in the face of impossible odds.

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Putting aside your one sided recitation of the history (your characterization of the 1967 war being most notable), I can't help but wonder. Did history start in 1918? Your entire argument is based on the idea that the Palestinians were there first and were displaced. Jews were there 5,000 years ago indisputably before the people now known as Palestinians. Jews were displaced before the Palestinians were. By your logic, the Palestinians are the occupiers.

At this point, this has devolved into a weird extrapolation of colonialist liberation theory. You really are living up to your board name and that's fine. But the crap in the last paragraph exposes you for what you are. Violence is justified if you like the end. What you fail to see is that the exact same logic supports the (misguided) notion that every Palestinian in Gaza deserves to be killed as the result of the actions of Hamas.

Ultimately, people like you espousing these BS ideologies - that deny all reality - get a lot of Palestinians killed. Sadly you are part of the problem but don't see that (or more likely don't care because it serves your ideology).

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Even as a layman, I am familiar with the legal doctrine qui tacet consentire videtur. So I will assume that everything you did not address in your pathetic response, you agree with. Perhaps I should be glad you did not have more to say, because this way there is less of your garbage for me to clean up. And don't pretend you're above wasting the time on this board to make a detailed reply, I've seen plenty of your posts to know that's not true.

If you think my argument is based on who got there "first" then you're even more stupid than I had previously believed. The Zionist colonization of Palestine is not one speck more legitimate because other people professing the same faith lived there thousands of years ago (and check your math on 5,000 years or better yet stop making demonstrably false assertions, you ignorant fool. One or two in an argument is understandable but your comedy of errors is just lazy).

Did history start in 1918? No, that was when the country was liberated and its history as a free state should have began. Instead the rights of its people were deliberately held in abeyance by Britain and the League of Nations while they worked toward the specific goal of turning an over 90% non-Jewish country into the national home for the Jewish colonists. That is, for hundreds of thousands of people who had no ancestor from Palestine for centuries or even millennia. Claims to land don't survive that long; everyone should know that by common sense. Even if I could prove with 100% certainty that your home is built on land that was unjustly taken from my distant ancestors, I would have no right at all to either evict you or force you to share it with me.

By your logic, half or more of the US should be turned over to the sovereignty of Native American tribes because this land used to be theirs and it was unjustly taken from them. The restitution would be far more just than what the Zionists did because unlike the Palestinians, the US is the same sovereign state that participated in the original theft; and unlike the Zionists, the Native Americans are still here and always have been.

I am proud to reaffirm the entire final paragraph of the post you have quoted. I condemned violence against civilians while holding that when such violence is committed by people in a liberation struggle, their oppressor is at least equally responsible for the violence and that the unjust violence does not obviate the justice of the liberation struggle.

I am also unsurprised to see you on the other side, the side that opposed the liberation movements in South Africa, Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Philippines, India, Haiti and countless other places where at least some of the rebels committed violence against civilians in their struggle. Perhaps you would sympathize with a liberation movement that employed terrorism if the rebels were white or if you had some reason to sympathize with them politically; I'm not yet sure exactly how large a bigot you are but I know you're a big enough hypocrite for it.

Arabs are colonialists too. Guess that doesn't fit your silly narrative either. And what percent of the Ottoman Empire is now controlled by majority Muslim nations? It must be close to 100%. Zionism is no different than any Arab settlement but because it involves Jews you view it through a different standard as Jew haters do.

CaliforniaEternal said:

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Arabs are colonialists too. Guess that doesn't fit your silly narrative either. And what percent of the Ottoman Empire is now controlled by majority Muslim nations? It must be close to 100%. Zionism is no different than any Arab settlement but because it involves Jews you view it through a different standard as Jew haters do.

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Yeah, Arabs colonized Palestine...1400 years ago. The Palestinians aren't responsible for that, nor does the number of other Muslim nations deprive them of their rights, but good try imbecile.

And I was wondering how long it would take for some assh*le to call me an antisemite. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long. It's almost a reflex for defenders of Israel.

This Daily Show bit from 9 years ago is sadly still relevant.

If you'd like to see how absolutely nothing has changed in the conversation around Israel & Palestine despite decades of violence, here's Jon Stewart doing a bit that could literally air today without a single change. pic.twitter.com/D0yrtaAsac

— Cooper (@Cooperstreaming) October 11, 2023

kal kommie said:

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CaliforniaEternal said:

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Arabs are colonialists too. Guess that doesn't fit your silly narrative either. And what percent of the Ottoman Empire is now controlled by majority Muslim nations? It must be close to 100%. Zionism is no different than any Arab settlement but because it involves Jews you view it through a different standard as Jew haters do.

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Yeah, Arabs colonized Palestine...1400 years ago. The Palestinians aren't responsible for that, nor does the number of other Muslim nations deprive them of their rights, but good try imbecile.

And I was wondering how long it would take for some assh*le to call me an antisemite. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long. It's almost a reflex for defenders of Israel.

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Thanks for the name-calling. I call you an antisemite because in my view you are one based on your opinions on govt control and that Israel should not exist. I will continue to support my family and friends in Israel as they battle to eliminate the murderous Hamas savages.

CaliforniaEternal said:

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kal kommie said:

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CaliforniaEternal said:

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Arabs are colonialists too. Guess that doesn't fit your silly narrative either. And what percent of the Ottoman Empire is now controlled by majority Muslim nations? It must be close to 100%. Zionism is no different than any Arab settlement but because it involves Jews you view it through a different standard as Jew haters do.

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Yeah, Arabs colonized Palestine...1400 years ago. The Palestinians aren't responsible for that, nor does the number of other Muslim nations deprive them of their rights, but good try imbecile.

And I was wondering how long it would take for some assh*le to call me an antisemite. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long. It's almost a reflex for defenders of Israel.

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Thanks for the name-calling. I call you an antisemite because in my view you are one based on your opinions on govt control and that Israel should not exist. I will continue to support my family and friends in Israel as they battle to eliminate the murderous Hamas savages.

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"Jew hater" isn't a put down in your book? Are you sure you're not the one projecting antisemitism?

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, no matter how hard dishonest partisans for Israel try to make it so.

CaliforniaEternal said:

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kal kommie said:

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CaliforniaEternal said:

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Arabs are colonialists too. Guess that doesn't fit your silly narrative either. And what percent of the Ottoman Empire is now controlled by majority Muslim nations? It must be close to 100%. Zionism is no different than any Arab settlement but because it involves Jews you view it through a different standard as Jew haters do.

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Yeah, Arabs colonized Palestine...1400 years ago. The Palestinians aren't responsible for that, nor does the number of other Muslim nations deprive them of their rights, but good try imbecile.

And I was wondering how long it would take for some assh*le to call me an antisemite. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long. It's almost a reflex for defenders of Israel.

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Thanks for the name-calling. I call you an antisemite because in my view you are one based on your opinions on govt control and that Israel should not exist. I will continue to support my family and friends in Israel as they battle to eliminate the murderous Hamas savages.

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This line of thinking also seems a bit problematic.

CaliforniaEternal said:

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kal kommie said:

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CaliforniaEternal said:

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kal kommie said:

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CaliforniaEternal said:

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Arabs are colonialists too. Guess that doesn't fit your silly narrative either. And what percent of the Ottoman Empire is now controlled by majority Muslim nations? It must be close to 100%. Zionism is no different than any Arab settlement but because it involves Jews you view it through a different standard as Jew haters do.

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Yeah, Arabs colonized Palestine...1400 years ago. The Palestinians aren't responsible for that, nor does the number of other Muslim nations deprive them of their rights, but good try imbecile.

And I was wondering how long it would take for some assh*le to call me an antisemite. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long. It's almost a reflex for defenders of Israel.

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Thanks for the name-calling. I call you an antisemite because in my view you are one based on your opinions on govt control and that Israel should not exist. I will continue to support my family and friends in Israel as they battle to eliminate the murderous Hamas savages.

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"Jew hater" isn't a put down in your book? Are you sure you're not the one projecting antisemitism?

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, no matter how hard dishonest partisans for Israel try to make it so.

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Are you opposed to the existence of any other nation on earth besides Israel? Is there any nation to you so immoral, illegitimate, and evil? Most Jews view a denial of Jewish self-determination as no less a form of antisemitism than a hate of the religion itself. If your goal is to have an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel that is a totally valid and reasonable point.

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I'm less concerned with ethnostates in places that don't go around touting their democratic credentials. Those places tend to have a lot of social, economic and political problems to begin with. I'm also less concerned with ethnostates that aren't also settler-colonial states engaged in a 76 year long ethnic cleansing campaign so they can expand while defusing the "demographic problem". I'm also less concerned with states which my government has not given massive amounts of critical aid (of all sorts) as they pursue their immoral agenda.

I don't claim to know enough about all the Earth's nation-states to say which are so immoral. The closest comparison to Israel I would draw is the obvious one: apartheid South Africa. Not coincidentally those states were great friends.

I don't deny Jews self-determination. The Jews in Palestine in 1918 had as much right to participate in the democratic process of making the Palestinian nation-state as the Muslims and Christians. I deny the right of hundreds of thousands of foreign Jews to colonize Palestine with the express purpose (at least on the part of many of them, particularly in the leadership) of making the country into an ethnostate. I also deny the right of Britain, the League of Nations, and the United Nations to purposefully aid the Zionist design.

But I do not call for the destruction of Israel unless someone believes that Israel is destroyed by being made into a secular state of all of its people as a liberal democracy is supposed to be by definition. I don't want to see Israel destroyed by force because it might result in a genocidal massacre. My preference would be a single state where Jews, Muslims and everyone else lives alongside each other in total political equality. Next to that would be two states but not in the pattern outlined in the "peace process" where one of those states is effectively a Bantustan.

bearister said:

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Sorry if this has already been posted, but I'm not scrolling back through the 10,000 word essays searching.

Bernie Sanders accuses Israel of 'serious violation of law'



https://mol.im/a/12625617

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Pssh

3000 words at most

CaliforniaEternal said:

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You're going to introduce an Islamist population to a country and expect them to join in democracy?

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How does America do it?

CaliforniaEternal said:

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It's incredible the mental energy people like you spend on coming up with completely insane ideas that would lead to nothing but destruction. You're going to introduce an Islamist population to a country and expect them to join in democracy? Better to put Gaza back with Egypt. You would never propose something like putting India and Pakistan back together or Bosnia and Croatia in the guise of repatriating displaced people. What's done is done and there is no undoing it.

The pure hatred people like you show toward Israel show how vital it is and always will be.

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I no longer see any reason to support Israel after the genocide they've visited on Gaza this week. Before, they were just an apartheid state. Now they have perpetrated their own Holocaust on Palestinians. It's a hypocritical country that deserves to be ostracized from the rest of the world.

tequila4kapp said:

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In a thread about a war that started when a terrorist organization - one which militarily overthrew a democratically elected Palestinian government and apparently rules Palestine by force - invaded a country and killed civilians, including burning civilians alive and beheading babies, there's an awful lot of attention paid to Israel, it's form of government and the role of Judaism. An objective of the terrorists and the propagandists is to do just this. Maybe we should resist that temptation and focus elsewhere, like on the terrorists and their supporters.

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Biden lied
Palestinians died
Israeli genocide

Biden was told a lie by Netanyahu's officials: that Hamas had beheaded children.

Biden then decided to recycle that lie but add a lie of his own: that he'd actually seen the photos.

Babies being ripped from incubators (Gulf 1991)
Weapons of mass destruction (Iraq 2003)… https://t.co/qGc2fLxyuR

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 12, 2023

Slava Palestini said:

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CaliforniaEternal said:

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It's incredible the mental energy people like you spend on coming up with completely insane ideas that would lead to nothing but destruction. You're going to introduce an Islamist population to a country and expect them to join in democracy? Better to put Gaza back with Egypt. You would never propose something like putting India and Pakistan back together or Bosnia and Croatia in the guise of repatriating displaced people. What's done is done and there is no undoing it.

The pure hatred people like you show toward Israel show how vital it is and always will be.

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I no longer see any reason to support Israel after the genocide they've visited on Gaza this week. Before, they were just an apartheid state. Now they have perpetrated their own Holocaust on Palestinians. It's a hypocritical country that deserves to be ostracized from the rest of the world.

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Great antisemitic trope invoking the Holocaust on a country of the survivors and descendants of survivors with something that is not even remotely related. You're a real thought leader, we've never heard that one before tossed our way.

CaliforniaEternal said:

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Slava Palestini said:

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CaliforniaEternal said:

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It's incredible the mental energy people like you spend on coming up with completely insane ideas that would lead to nothing but destruction. You're going to introduce an Islamist population to a country and expect them to join in democracy? Better to put Gaza back with Egypt. You would never propose something like putting India and Pakistan back together or Bosnia and Croatia in the guise of repatriating displaced people. What's done is done and there is no undoing it.

The pure hatred people like you show toward Israel show how vital it is and always will be.

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I no longer see any reason to support Israel after the genocide they've visited on Gaza this week. Before, they were just an apartheid state. Now they have perpetrated their own Holocaust on Palestinians. It's a hypocritical country that deserves to be ostracized from the rest of the world.

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Great antisemitic trope invoking the Holocaust on a country of the survivors and descendants of survivors with something that is not even remotely related. You're a real thought leader, we've never heard that one before tossed our way.

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I'm sorry that facts are so upsetting to you.

wifeisafurd said:

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Okay, not my first stupid question:

Where do you "evacuate" 1.1 million people to from Northern Gaza in a 24 hour period?

https://cnb.cx/46rf4Nc

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You can't, and the Israeli military knows you can't.

BearGoggles said:

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An instructor at @Stanford has been suspended for telling Jewish students to take their belongings and stand in a corner.

The instructor said, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians”

The instructor then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?”

When a student…

— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) October 13, 2023

I was waiting to post this until it was confirmed by multiple sources I trust (that are @Stanford)

Just read this. Hopefully widely reported on tomorrow

These are 1930s vibes pic.twitter.com/PbPBbLYSZf

— Shaun Maguire (smc.eth) (@shaunmmaguire) October 13, 2023

https://forward.com/news/564587/stanford-university-jewish-students-instructor-hamas/

Those of you aligning with the "anti-colonialism" BS, these are the people and ideologies you're endorsing. For the record, the teacher is a Berkeley BA/MS/PHD and Stanford lecturer. Collin Kap's mentor.

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The teacher's two mistakes were asking people to identify themselves as being Jewish or Israeli and conflating all murders committed by "colonizers" with the murders committed by Israel, which I'm pretty sure are well under 6 million. Although after this week, maybe they've cleared that total.

It doesn't matter what the student's identities are for the purposes of explaining the obvious - that Zionists are colonizers, that they did displace and murder Palestinians to create their homeland, and that they have murdered many more over the years

https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/INTERACTIVE-What-is-the-Nakba-infographic-map.png

https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/INTERACTIVE-Mapping-Palestinian-villages-destroyed-by-Israel-infographic.png

Israel is responsible for the Palestinians they've killed since 1948, but not for all people killed by all colonizers worldwide. Those countries (including the U.S.) that murdered indigenous peoples to steal land have their own blood on their hands, but that's those countries' issues - not Israel's.

Does this justify kidnapping, torturing, taking hostage, and murdering innocents by Hamas? No, but when you negotiate in bad faith as Israel has, when you fund Hamas to sow dissension to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, and when you perpetrate your own Holocaust on Gaza in a ridiculously disproportionate response, you lose all moral authority to claim victimhood.

Israeli terrorism pic.twitter.com/5u2ObKJamL

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) October 13, 2023

Also, if BearGoggles has an issue with the Jewish diaspora, he is welcome to take it up with Babylonia.