naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
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.
What's going on in the West Bank right now? I haven't seen much coverage of it.
Settlers going on rampage - destroying crops, burning houses, evicting whole Palestinian villages at gunpoint (yes, unlike Israelis in Israel proper, these hilltop guys are heavily armed and unlike Gaza, Palestinians in West Bank are thoroughly disarmed).
Lots of coverage, but you have to dig up into Arabic sources to find it.
Damn. Brutal if true, and it feels plausible, given the incentives. Still, I’d like to see something more conclusive than a tweet about “dear friends” who are totally getting rounded up by the gestapo.
At least some settler and IDF bad action is moderately well-supported by the evidence (and shouldn't be very surprising; Price Taggers tend to be assholes). I think Susiya and Masafer Yatta (note: both these pieces are pre-Oct 7th) are more about the broader Area C clusterfuck, but there's a lot of Well-Respected Reporters giving pretty strong claims of Area C places doing variants of a commanded evacuation followed by invasive search, and I could absolutely believe the IDF and/or COGAT is doing it to fuck with them.
Some of this fuckery has escalated to death (contrast, with the caveat that I expect neither of these is giving a good factual analysis, though the jpost one seems like it's damning enough with faint praise that you don't need to by the AJZ version).
It's just an escalation of existing problems, rather than a change in type.
Are their guns legal? Are they formed into officially sanctioned militias or does the government just tacitly encourage it while looking the other way?
The latter. "It's not technically Israeli land, it's some no-man's land, so we won't police what our citizens do there, but we will protect them from harm".
If true, that really sucks for the people in the West Bank.
It sounds like true anarcho-tyranny. "People can harm you with impunity, but if you fight back, the government will punish you".
The limited examples of anarcho-tyranny which happen in progressive U.S. cities make my blood boil. I can't imagine how bad it would be in Palestine, where the Palestinians have no leafy suburbs to retreat to.
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Notes -
Settlers going on rampage - destroying crops, burning houses, evicting whole Palestinian villages at gunpoint (yes, unlike Israelis in Israel proper, these hilltop guys are heavily armed and unlike Gaza, Palestinians in West Bank are thoroughly disarmed).
Lots of coverage, but you have to dig up into Arabic sources to find it.
Damn. Brutal if true, and it feels plausible, given the incentives. Still, I’d like to see something more conclusive than a tweet about “dear friends” who are totally getting rounded up by the gestapo.
Compare @gattsuru’s estimate.
At least some settler and IDF bad action is moderately well-supported by the evidence (and shouldn't be very surprising; Price Taggers tend to be assholes). I think Susiya and Masafer Yatta (note: both these pieces are pre-Oct 7th) are more about the broader Area C clusterfuck, but there's a lot of Well-Respected Reporters giving pretty strong claims of Area C places doing variants of a commanded evacuation followed by invasive search, and I could absolutely believe the IDF and/or COGAT is doing it to fuck with them.
Some of this fuckery has escalated to death (contrast, with the caveat that I expect neither of these is giving a good factual analysis, though the jpost one seems like it's damning enough with faint praise that you don't need to by the AJZ version).
It's just an escalation of existing problems, rather than a change in type.
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Are their guns legal? Are they formed into officially sanctioned militias or does the government just tacitly encourage it while looking the other way?
The latter. "It's not technically Israeli land, it's some no-man's land, so we won't police what our citizens do there, but we will protect them from harm".
If true, that really sucks for the people in the West Bank.
It sounds like true anarcho-tyranny. "People can harm you with impunity, but if you fight back, the government will punish you".
The limited examples of anarcho-tyranny which happen in progressive U.S. cities make my blood boil. I can't imagine how bad it would be in Palestine, where the Palestinians have no leafy suburbs to retreat to.
Again, if true.
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