naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
1yr ago
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n. - Lucifer, Paradise Lost.
Some people here have said that it is just and right for the Palestinian people to continue to fight to the death against their Israeli "Oppressors", even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab. Certainly the Israeli Arabs are doing decently, with their being no large scale oppression against them, even though Israel has far more control over them than it does with the Palestinians (which is not what you'd expect from a state that hated them, you'd expect a positive correlation between how much power a state has over a person and how much it oppresses them).
The mindless lashing out by Hamas two weeks ago initially made me think they were extremely stupid, given that compared to them Israel was basically a sleeping beast, which they provoked into waking up and retaliating by kicking it. However I refuse to believe that Hamas leadership can altogether
be this idiotic (with a population of 2 million people, even if your average IQ is 90 you can easily fill out your top ranks with IQ 130+ people), surely they knew that what they were doing had zero hope of bringing down the Zionists and all it would do is kill the Palestinian cause for decades since their only hope is to win the "sentiment of the rest of the world" war until Israel is pressured into making concessions. Murdering/pillaging civilians, then posting videos online celebrating what you did is absolutely not the way to go about it.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic. Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind. Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better and everyone is happy. They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man, there are no "political party manifestos" of what Hamas would do to improve lives if suddenly they got everything they say they want. They are just interested in fighting the stronger power in the area and deposing them so they can be the strong power instead. At the very least they could come up with a serious and convincing plan of how the Levant would be better off and what they would do to make people's lives better if/when they win their struggle. They have no positive vision, end of story.
Just as Milton's Lucifer preferred to rule over ashes rather than live a subservient life under God, these terrorists prefer to force the Palestinians to live out a life in terrible conditions with them at the head rather than accept the comparative Heaven on Earth experienced by Israeli Arabs. Such actions are literally Satanic, as was understood by humans hundreds of years ago, and yet, even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness. The mind boggles.
the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens of Israel suddenly disappeared
They want the dignity of not living under the heel of an entity they view as an evil oppressor. So what if that oppressor can give them more porn and plastic doo-dads to play with?
I think you’re completely missing the point here, and also of the Milton quotation. If Lucifer doesn’t strike you as intensely relatable in that quotation I don’t think you’re going to understand.
Diluting the term “Satanic” to mean “shooting oneself in the foot” is ridiculous.
I might as well say that you, my friend, are Satanic. The Devil is well known for playingprosecutor when humans sin. By accusing these child-murderers, you are usurping a role reserved for God:
But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”
The first is Pan-Arabism. After the Ottoman Empire fell there was a desire to unite all of the Arab lands in a "Greater Syria". A Jewish state smack dab in the middle was contrary to this dream. The Muslim Brotherhood was and is a big proponent of Pan-Arabism. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So there will always be a lot of money available to fund anti-Iraeli activities.
Next is polygamy. There are naturally more reproductive age men than women. You'll often hear that there are more women, but that's due to women living longer. Post menopausal women don't play a part in these numbers.
In most societies the difference small and manageable, but once you allow polygamy you have a massive surplus of young men. There are only two ways to deal with that... encourage young men to leave or encourage them to die in some conflict. Either wars or sectarian violence.
Small communities in non-polygamous countries can just drive out the young men, FLDS towns are notorious for this.
But once you get large populations that's not an option. So there's some mix of encouraging emigration and supporting sectarian conflicts.
So Hamas is basically a way to use a structural societal problem to achieve some political goals.
I don't find calling things Satanic convincing, since Satanism was a confabulated Boogeyman, and by now I associate the term with generic American protestantism.
Satanic as a term well predates anything associated with LaVey or Crowley. If your memeplex well is so thoroughly poisoned just read it as diabolic instead.
You're using Satanic and Diabolic as words that just mean "Badness." It sounds dumb and histrionic, tuned to rile up boomers and Jesus-freaks. If you want to use Satanic the same way other people use Racism, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, be my guest, just know that it doesn't play well with every crowd.
Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better
I think this may be demonstrating a major disconnect in mindset. Simply put: material prosperity is not a terminal value for most groups of people, and for some may barely be a value at all.
It's like mentioning how the Amish could be more prosperous if only they used modern technology. Of course they could! The explicitly think that's a bad thing, in a way that many valueless post-modernists seem to fail to understand. Have you considered that maybe Palestinians just genuinely feel that being free, impoverished, and Islamic is actually better than less free, wealthy, and progressive? Having actual values beyond "have money" doesn't make them Satanic.
I'm not even pro-Palestine (far, far from it actually,) but this read of them is just so far from any traditional Islamist I've ever met that I had to say something. If you're one of those people with no values beyond "win," don't forget that other people actually have other values, and say hi to Moloch for me.
Value-rational behavior is produced by a conscious “ethical, aesthetic, religious or other” belief, “independently of its prospects of success.”6 Behavior, when driven by such values, can consciously embrace great personal sacrifices. Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be. The means to achieving these objectives might change, but the objectives themselves would not.
The term value-rational does not, of course, mean that the values expressed by such behavior are necessarily laudable. Indeed, the values in question may range from pure pride or prejudice (vis-à-vis some groups or belief systems) to goals such as dignity, self-respect, and commitment to a group or a set of ideals. Likewise, value-rational acts can range from long-run sacrifices for distant goals to violent expressions of prejudice or status.
It's actually a pretty good comparison, because while Satan's defiant declaration that he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven is the most famous of his lines from Paradise Lost, he spends much of the rest of the story reflecting on how he is the architect of his own suffering, and how his pride and arrogance will never allow him to repent, but will only ever condemn him to even greater suffering.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic.
I can't tell if you're just being cheeky, or if you're actually passing moral judgment here.
Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind.
This reminds me of the (fallacious, imo) argument that people make against the alt right:
"An ethnically homogeneous society isn't a utopia, it'll still have problems, so why even bother?"
This sort of deeply rooted concern with Fixing Everything At Once is something that I associate mainly with Marxists. It is foreign to other types of minds and other styles of thinking.
Rightly or wrongly, Hamas perceives Israel as a problem. They don't have to provide a solution to every possible problem that anyone could think up. They're only focused on fixing this one particular problem that's in front of them right now.
They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man
Again, this is (historically speaking) a highly idiosyncratic conception of the aim of politics, loaded with implicit assumptions, largely able to flourish only in the soil of modern Western liberalism. Not everyone thinks in these terms (including many "common men" themselves!).
Satan infamously tempted the Son of God with all of the world’s riches in exchange for obedience (Matthew 4:8). The Son of God declined and instead chose poverty, trial, oppression, and a torturous death in order to save his people. Rejecting riches in exchange for a promised land is deeply Abrahamic. It’s also very evolutionary, if we want to talk as strict atheists: they are making a bet that, if they succeed in winning against Israel, they will have a greater genetic proliferation than if they are evicted and sent to a random Arab nation.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do? Not exactly making me feel the love, honestly.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
It's very theatrical I will give you that. God is clearly a drama queen if nothing else.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do?
Not following, here.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
Yes, that's what I just said. He wanted to be with us that badly. If He hadn't, He'd presumably have just not bothered with us or gone through that.
Still not sure what else you're implying. If God wants to marry us, which is rather what this whole thing is about, He wants a bride capable of choosing Him. That also means that we're capable of choosing to reject Him, hence everything else that happens.
Maybe you're suggesting that God could simply have created us capable of choosing Him and also incapable? If so I think your notion of 'omnipotence' is broken.
The original point was about God sacrificing his son to poverty, torture and death remember, thus illustrating His love for us. But since God is omnipotent, it was was entirely unnecessary. He could have snapped His fingers instead. It's theatrics.
Is Justice not a good enough answer? In the sense that when wrong is done, restitution must be made? If you accept it as a coherent argument that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to make people love him of their own free will, it seems like you might also accept that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to nullify the basic concept of justice either.
Absolutley it is. If there are universal laws that even God is bound by then that squares away a good chunk of inconsistencies. Finite God (in that God is merely hugely powerful but not truly omnipotent) is one of the more popular solutions to the problem of Theodicy.
Unfortunately, at least the Christians I was raised with (and I think most others?) insist that isn't true and He is entirely omnipotent.
This is smuggie-tier material. You're not using 'omnipotence' to mean anything like what we do when we use the word, and I suspect you have very little idea of the context regarding the matter.
So what we're left is,
"Oh, your story makes sense internally? Well let me just motivatedly redefine terms until it doesn't. Wow, you look so dumb now."
Do what you want, I guess, but if you'd like to know what we actually think and why your criticism doesn't seem even remotely applicable, I'll be happy to tell you.
I was raised as a Christian, studied the Bible in Sunday School, etc. etc. I am using omnipotence as those teaching me said. When I asked could God do anything they said yes of course.
It isn't internally consistent, that is my point. That Theodicy is a problem can be seen by the many, many attempts in different ways to reconcile that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent as described. That Jesus had to be sacrificed and suffer is just a subset of that larger problem. The Finite God answer (that God is not omnipotent) is a reasonable answer. But it isn't one that most Christians in my direct experience subscribe to.
The usual answer given is that God moves in mysterious ways. Which is notable in not actually being an answer.
Except Palestinian authorities are highly corrupt and enrich themselves where they can. They're like most Third World leaders in that way.
You could frame it as the old autocratic/oligarchic dilemma of "a big piece of the pie for me under this stable but awful equilibrium" vs "let's try something new for the possible betterment of everyone and the likely immiseration of me and my class (and maybe it won't even fucking work)". It looks very different from that angle.
All that said, I reject the starting assumption of OP that the deal is even on the table. Putting aside all of the awful shit that's happened, even pretending that Palestinians would all happily join the Tel Aviv Pride Parade or meet whatever arbitrary standard of assimilation we set, if Israelis want an ethnostate - which many Israelis self-evidently do - it simply cannot be. For such people there are diminishing returns to having some of the Good Ones.
It's the opposite of Satanic. They think the God of Abraham is on their side. They are Islamic extremists. They would literally rather die than live under Israeli occupation. People in the West on both the Right and Left don't seem to understand that they have sincerely held religious beliefs that make them do things that we would consider irrational. ISIS and Bin Laden and many others have written out their beliefs on this and Westerners just don't seem to believe them. This is why I still believe that radical Islam is literally the biggest threat to mankind because it is a mind virus that makes people believe insane things. I really don't think any other religion or ideology is like this. Think about it this way. ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God. This is why they do what they do. It's really that simple.
ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God.
Even if you are fighting a global war for God, doesn't that seem like a poor-quality military tactic? It seems like it would just piss off powerful enemies while not achieving any military objectives.
I agree. Them doing that made it even more important for the West kill ISIS immediately. But they were so dedicated that they had to go kill infidels regardless,
Yep, only correct answer. Just ask them. “We love death.” That explains a lot. Political program, any sort of plan if you fail at dying? “Islam is the solution”. Okay then.
Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind.
The Palestinians would, if Israel disappeared and they took over all its land, have the water, food, ports, etc. that they could develop. There are undoubtedly millions or billions of dollars that could flow from Islam-dominant countries to help them as well.
even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness
Yawn. Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say. It's not writing for everyone to argue that one side of an issue is Satanic...except in cases where actual Satanists are involved, I suppose.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
drmanhattan16 1yr ago
Palestinians had plenty of water and food before the present crisis. They also had a port that wasn't blockaded until they elected a regime with the explicit goal of genociding Israelis.
Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say.
Tribal societies in the Middle East don't go by Western ideas of tolerance and compassion. The supporters of Hamas would directly laud actions that are considered evil in the West for precisely the same aspects of them that make them considered evil in the West. They slaughter innocents and post about it to social media, because they're the kind of people who get joy from slaughtering innocents and posting it to social media.
If you mean that they wouldn't literally invoke Satan, sure, but that misses the point.
Right, I should clarify. I meant specifically Western supporters of Hamas. I do not believe those people would ever frame things in light of Satan, and that's a very important distinction.
even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab.
But Israel isn't offering them that option! Israel isn't offering them the option of "living like your median Israeli Arab", since it isn't offering them the option to be Israeli Arabs, ie. become citizens of Israel, even implicitly second-class ones like the Israeli Arabs! All that Israel has been offering them, currently, until this operation, has been the continuation of the same as now, ie. continuous humiliation of checkpoints and raids and continous expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the state of siege and isolation in Gaza; there has been no indication of this changing under whatever possible Israeli administration, and no particular reason to suspect that even if Palestinians dropped militancy entirely that this would change.
The first part is true - they’re not being offered Israeli citizenship and probably never will be. But they did have a chance at complete autonomy in 2005. They just preferred to choose Hamas and Jihad over their own good. It’s a valid choice, but it does have consequences- especially when that Jihad is being waged against your much-more-powerful neighbor who can bomb you to hell on a coin flip.
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Notes -
Some people here have said that it is just and right for the Palestinian people to continue to fight to the death against their Israeli "Oppressors", even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab. Certainly the Israeli Arabs are doing decently, with their being no large scale oppression against them, even though Israel has far more control over them than it does with the Palestinians (which is not what you'd expect from a state that hated them, you'd expect a positive correlation between how much power a state has over a person and how much it oppresses them).
The mindless lashing out by Hamas two weeks ago initially made me think they were extremely stupid, given that compared to them Israel was basically a sleeping beast, which they provoked into waking up and retaliating by kicking it. However I refuse to believe that Hamas leadership can altogether be this idiotic (with a population of 2 million people, even if your average IQ is 90 you can easily fill out your top ranks with IQ 130+ people), surely they knew that what they were doing had zero hope of bringing down the Zionists and all it would do is kill the Palestinian cause for decades since their only hope is to win the "sentiment of the rest of the world" war until Israel is pressured into making concessions. Murdering/pillaging civilians, then posting videos online celebrating what you did is absolutely not the way to go about it.
The more I reflect on why they would ever do what they did, the more convinced I am that the actions of Hamas and those who prefer to fight to the death rather than accept life under the Israelis are, in a word, simply Satanic. Note that the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens if Israel sudden disappeared in the blink of an eye beyond going in an feeding off the surplus left behind. Their plan for prosperity is: 1. Get rid of Israel. 2. Things magically get better and everyone is happy. They don't even bother to try and demonstrate that they are serious about improving life for the common man, there are no "political party manifestos" of what Hamas would do to improve lives if suddenly they got everything they say they want. They are just interested in fighting the stronger power in the area and deposing them so they can be the strong power instead. At the very least they could come up with a serious and convincing plan of how the Levant would be better off and what they would do to make people's lives better if/when they win their struggle. They have no positive vision, end of story.
Just as Milton's Lucifer preferred to rule over ashes rather than live a subservient life under God, these terrorists prefer to force the Palestinians to live out a life in terrible conditions with them at the head rather than accept the comparative Heaven on Earth experienced by Israeli Arabs. Such actions are literally Satanic, as was understood by humans hundreds of years ago, and yet, even today there is a very large contingent of the world that supports those who get their political inspiration from the Prince of Darkness. The mind boggles.
They want the dignity of not living under the heel of an entity they view as an evil oppressor. So what if that oppressor can give them more porn and plastic doo-dads to play with?
I think you’re completely missing the point here, and also of the Milton quotation. If Lucifer doesn’t strike you as intensely relatable in that quotation I don’t think you’re going to understand.
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Diluting the term “Satanic” to mean “shooting oneself in the foot” is ridiculous.
I might as well say that you, my friend, are Satanic. The Devil is well known for playing prosecutor when humans sin. By accusing these child-murderers, you are usurping a role reserved for God:
Jude 1:9.
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There are two big issues underlying Hamas.
The first is Pan-Arabism. After the Ottoman Empire fell there was a desire to unite all of the Arab lands in a "Greater Syria". A Jewish state smack dab in the middle was contrary to this dream. The Muslim Brotherhood was and is a big proponent of Pan-Arabism. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So there will always be a lot of money available to fund anti-Iraeli activities.
Next is polygamy. There are naturally more reproductive age men than women. You'll often hear that there are more women, but that's due to women living longer. Post menopausal women don't play a part in these numbers.
In most societies the difference small and manageable, but once you allow polygamy you have a massive surplus of young men. There are only two ways to deal with that... encourage young men to leave or encourage them to die in some conflict. Either wars or sectarian violence.
Small communities in non-polygamous countries can just drive out the young men, FLDS towns are notorious for this.
But once you get large populations that's not an option. So there's some mix of encouraging emigration and supporting sectarian conflicts.
So Hamas is basically a way to use a structural societal problem to achieve some political goals.
Polygamy isn’t particularly common in Gaza.
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I don't find calling things Satanic convincing, since Satanism was a confabulated Boogeyman, and by now I associate the term with generic American protestantism.
Satanic as a term well predates anything associated with LaVey or Crowley. If your memeplex well is so thoroughly poisoned just read it as diabolic instead.
You're using Satanic and Diabolic as words that just mean "Badness." It sounds dumb and histrionic, tuned to rile up boomers and Jesus-freaks. If you want to use Satanic the same way other people use Racism, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, be my guest, just know that it doesn't play well with every crowd.
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I think this may be demonstrating a major disconnect in mindset. Simply put: material prosperity is not a terminal value for most groups of people, and for some may barely be a value at all.
It's like mentioning how the Amish could be more prosperous if only they used modern technology. Of course they could! The explicitly think that's a bad thing, in a way that many valueless post-modernists seem to fail to understand. Have you considered that maybe Palestinians just genuinely feel that being free, impoverished, and Islamic is actually better than less free, wealthy, and progressive? Having actual values beyond "have money" doesn't make them Satanic.
I'm not even pro-Palestine (far, far from it actually,) but this read of them is just so far from any traditional Islamist I've ever met that I had to say something. If you're one of those people with no values beyond "win," don't forget that other people actually have other values, and say hi to Moloch for me.
+1
Here is where again I reference value rationality:
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It's actually a pretty good comparison, because while Satan's defiant declaration that he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven is the most famous of his lines from Paradise Lost, he spends much of the rest of the story reflecting on how he is the architect of his own suffering, and how his pride and arrogance will never allow him to repent, but will only ever condemn him to even greater suffering.
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I can't tell if you're just being cheeky, or if you're actually passing moral judgment here.
This reminds me of the (fallacious, imo) argument that people make against the alt right:
This sort of deeply rooted concern with Fixing Everything At Once is something that I associate mainly with Marxists. It is foreign to other types of minds and other styles of thinking.
Rightly or wrongly, Hamas perceives Israel as a problem. They don't have to provide a solution to every possible problem that anyone could think up. They're only focused on fixing this one particular problem that's in front of them right now.
Again, this is (historically speaking) a highly idiosyncratic conception of the aim of politics, loaded with implicit assumptions, largely able to flourish only in the soil of modern Western liberalism. Not everyone thinks in these terms (including many "common men" themselves!).
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Satan infamously tempted the Son of God with all of the world’s riches in exchange for obedience (Matthew 4:8). The Son of God declined and instead chose poverty, trial, oppression, and a torturous death in order to save his people. Rejecting riches in exchange for a promised land is deeply Abrahamic. It’s also very evolutionary, if we want to talk as strict atheists: they are making a bet that, if they succeed in winning against Israel, they will have a greater genetic proliferation than if they are evicted and sent to a random Arab nation.
A self-inflicted problem from head to Ghostly toe if I've ever heard of one.
Well…yeah. That is indeed the crux of the matter.
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Yes: That's what's necessary for God to be with us, and He loves us enough to do it.
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do? Not exactly making me feel the love, honestly.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
It's very theatrical I will give you that. God is clearly a drama queen if nothing else.
Not following, here.
Yes, that's what I just said. He wanted to be with us that badly. If He hadn't, He'd presumably have just not bothered with us or gone through that.
Still not sure what else you're implying. If God wants to marry us, which is rather what this whole thing is about, He wants a bride capable of choosing Him. That also means that we're capable of choosing to reject Him, hence everything else that happens.
Maybe you're suggesting that God could simply have created us capable of choosing Him and also incapable? If so I think your notion of 'omnipotence' is broken.
The original point was about God sacrificing his son to poverty, torture and death remember, thus illustrating His love for us. But since God is omnipotent, it was was entirely unnecessary. He could have snapped His fingers instead. It's theatrics.
Is Justice not a good enough answer? In the sense that when wrong is done, restitution must be made? If you accept it as a coherent argument that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to make people love him of their own free will, it seems like you might also accept that God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to nullify the basic concept of justice either.
Absolutley it is. If there are universal laws that even God is bound by then that squares away a good chunk of inconsistencies. Finite God (in that God is merely hugely powerful but not truly omnipotent) is one of the more popular solutions to the problem of Theodicy.
Unfortunately, at least the Christians I was raised with (and I think most others?) insist that isn't true and He is entirely omnipotent.
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This is smuggie-tier material. You're not using 'omnipotence' to mean anything like what we do when we use the word, and I suspect you have very little idea of the context regarding the matter.
So what we're left is,
"Oh, your story makes sense internally? Well let me just motivatedly redefine terms until it doesn't. Wow, you look so dumb now."
Do what you want, I guess, but if you'd like to know what we actually think and why your criticism doesn't seem even remotely applicable, I'll be happy to tell you.
I was raised as a Christian, studied the Bible in Sunday School, etc. etc. I am using omnipotence as those teaching me said. When I asked could God do anything they said yes of course.
It isn't internally consistent, that is my point. That Theodicy is a problem can be seen by the many, many attempts in different ways to reconcile that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent as described. That Jesus had to be sacrificed and suffer is just a subset of that larger problem. The Finite God answer (that God is not omnipotent) is a reasonable answer. But it isn't one that most Christians in my direct experience subscribe to.
The usual answer given is that God moves in mysterious ways. Which is notable in not actually being an answer.
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Except Palestinian authorities are highly corrupt and enrich themselves where they can. They're like most Third World leaders in that way.
You could frame it as the old autocratic/oligarchic dilemma of "a big piece of the pie for me under this stable but awful equilibrium" vs "let's try something new for the possible betterment of everyone and the likely immiseration of me and my class (and maybe it won't even fucking work)". It looks very different from that angle.
All that said, I reject the starting assumption of OP that the deal is even on the table. Putting aside all of the awful shit that's happened, even pretending that Palestinians would all happily join the Tel Aviv Pride Parade or meet whatever arbitrary standard of assimilation we set, if Israelis want an ethnostate - which many Israelis self-evidently do - it simply cannot be. For such people there are diminishing returns to having some of the Good Ones.
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It's the opposite of Satanic. They think the God of Abraham is on their side. They are Islamic extremists. They would literally rather die than live under Israeli occupation. People in the West on both the Right and Left don't seem to understand that they have sincerely held religious beliefs that make them do things that we would consider irrational. ISIS and Bin Laden and many others have written out their beliefs on this and Westerners just don't seem to believe them. This is why I still believe that radical Islam is literally the biggest threat to mankind because it is a mind virus that makes people believe insane things. I really don't think any other religion or ideology is like this. Think about it this way. ISIS, while in the middle of a war of survival in the ME, sent terrorists to Europe to kill civilians. That is completely irrational unless you think you are fighting a global war for God. This is why they do what they do. It's really that simple.
Even if you are fighting a global war for God, doesn't that seem like a poor-quality military tactic? It seems like it would just piss off powerful enemies while not achieving any military objectives.
I agree. Them doing that made it even more important for the West kill ISIS immediately. But they were so dedicated that they had to go kill infidels regardless,
This doesn't even seem that good even if you are just trying to maximize the number of dead infidels!
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Yep, only correct answer. Just ask them. “We love death.” That explains a lot. Political program, any sort of plan if you fail at dying? “Islam is the solution”. Okay then.
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The Palestinians would, if Israel disappeared and they took over all its land, have the water, food, ports, etc. that they could develop. There are undoubtedly millions or billions of dollars that could flow from Islam-dominant countries to help them as well.
Yawn. Every time someone comes up with such an explanation, they should probably do due diligence and consider what those supporters would actually say. It's not writing for everyone to argue that one side of an issue is Satanic...except in cases where actual Satanists are involved, I suppose.
Palestinians had plenty of water and food before the present crisis. They also had a port that wasn't blockaded until they elected a regime with the explicit goal of genociding Israelis.
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Tribal societies in the Middle East don't go by Western ideas of tolerance and compassion. The supporters of Hamas would directly laud actions that are considered evil in the West for precisely the same aspects of them that make them considered evil in the West. They slaughter innocents and post about it to social media, because they're the kind of people who get joy from slaughtering innocents and posting it to social media.
If you mean that they wouldn't literally invoke Satan, sure, but that misses the point.
Right, I should clarify. I meant specifically Western supporters of Hamas. I do not believe those people would ever frame things in light of Satan, and that's a very important distinction.
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But Israel isn't offering them that option! Israel isn't offering them the option of "living like your median Israeli Arab", since it isn't offering them the option to be Israeli Arabs, ie. become citizens of Israel, even implicitly second-class ones like the Israeli Arabs! All that Israel has been offering them, currently, until this operation, has been the continuation of the same as now, ie. continuous humiliation of checkpoints and raids and continous expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the state of siege and isolation in Gaza; there has been no indication of this changing under whatever possible Israeli administration, and no particular reason to suspect that even if Palestinians dropped militancy entirely that this would change.
The first part is true - they’re not being offered Israeli citizenship and probably never will be. But they did have a chance at complete autonomy in 2005. They just preferred to choose Hamas and Jihad over their own good. It’s a valid choice, but it does have consequences- especially when that Jihad is being waged against your much-more-powerful neighbor who can bomb you to hell on a coin flip.
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