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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.

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I see the motivations for a Jewish homeland in the Levant to be sound and understandable.

Why? Why do Jews have a right to invade someone else’s land and ethnically cleanse the native populace? Why aren’t jews obligated to live in humanitarian multiculturalism like ever other western nation on the planet, and instead get violent ethnonationalism that inherently can not cohabitate with the non-Jewish natives of the land they are (violently) immigrating to? Why do the Palestinian people not have a right to resist this?

The area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration.

“Arab” is not a real racial category. It’s a cultural one for speakers of Arabic. I see this a lot with people that are Israel apologists. Basically an attempt to delegitimize and dehumanize the Palestinians as a faceless and vaguely threatening barbaric mass. And an attempt to bring back the terra nullius justification argument for colonialism. Are you sure you were neutral and not… faking? Because you don’t sound it. You sound like a typical agenda’d and hardened culture warrior with all the same boilerplate.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Palestinians are not all Muslim, and it’s very interesting that pro-Israels keep talking about them like they are. There have been Christian Palestinians since about as long as there’s been Christianity. You haven’t outright said it, but this also seems to come with a completely ignorant but political motivated historical belief that the Palestinians are all foreign “Muslim” barbarians that come in at the 600s and took over the joint or something. That’s not how these things work. Egypt turning Muslim (also not all Muslim) did not replace the Egyptians.

There’s no reason to believe the canaanites and yes, Jews, of the area didn’t just convert - like everywhere else.

The Arabs too have a historical claim to the area and also benefited from being last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds.

Historical claim is putting it mildly and quite curiously. Yes, the Poles have a historical claim to their land in a conflict with Germans invading too. The Palestinians are natives of the land. The Zionists are not. Again, they are probably in no small part descendants of the Hasmonean kingdom that converted to Christianity and then Islam. Just as the English are descendants of ancient Celts that converted to Christianity and latin/germanized. There’s no reason to believe otherwise.

Next door to Israel, the ongoing Syrian Civil War has a death toll (500k-600k dead) nearing that of the Nakba's displacement figure, alongside a global refugee crisis.

The thing is though in the end Syria will still be Syria no matter what shitty dictator or not reigns in the future. Just as Russia weathered an Ivan the Terrible or 2. A war to straight steal land and displace the natives is a whole other kettle of fish. That preeminently changes the geography of the planet and destroys a people in an area forever. The Taino will never come back to the world after the Spanish colonial conquest of the Caribbean. Some things can’t be reversed or 2 things at once.

Being OK with this means accepting on the world scale permanent malevolent wars of conquest as a valid tactic (see Russia right now for why that’s a problem) without any real defensive casus belli. The nature of Zionism means the invaders fundamentally won’t and can’t cohabitate with the natives whose lands they are “moving” to. Their gain comes from the flesh of the other. On the ground, this makes it totally zero sum. That’s not that usual for war actually.

There's no guidance system to speak of, and the most precise aim Hamas could hope for is [waves vaguely over the distance]. … I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn't cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that "resistance" is justified through "any means necessary".

There’s value to what you say. But let’s consider the opposite. What value is there in passivity? Look to the West Bank and see what a more passive stance has achieved. Nothing but further expansion of Jewish colonies and a tightening noose around the Palestinians’ neck. That’s pretty damning. I think it’s objective at this point that “just be more peaceful” is an utter failure and an invitation to personal destruction.

Let’s go there and consider a case of a Jew in Auschwitz. He somehow finds himself in a position to kill a guard’s, who is an avid assistant in mass killing, wife and child. Is it moral and right to do so? If I were in that situation I don’t know what I would do. Per your own arguments, there’s a very, very strong case to be made that innocent should not be hurt. But oh how it stings. At the same time, what good does such moralism do? If the Jew passively lays down and lets the Auschwitz system do its thing without any karmic vengeance, however unfairly undirected, what good does it do? It only assists and convenience an evil act without any consequences.

A key here is that Zionists jews and the proverbial guard put themselves and the “innocent” into a position of aggression and violence. They woke up and chose to wrong another every day. And they could stop at any point if they really cared. They are betting on power saving them from any blowback for their actions. Weakness, only reifies this into being and, from a certain point of view, enables evil into the world. It’s not the same thing as walking up to a random baby and stabbing it for some vague incoherent goals. They could always choose peace.

This is why I suspect the myth of Israel ever giving a damn about the “peace process” (puke) is so popular with Israel apologists. People desperately need to believe Zionists are something other than what they are to apologize for them in normie morality. Like they just tripped, fell, and accidentally violently invaded another people’s land and constantly expanded - to this day. They could always choose not to do this. They could always go back to the 1967 lines and respect the Palestinians. They won’t. Ever.

Your analogy to a self justifying spousal abuser is apt and good food for thought. But are you not by your own admission a person on Israel’s side? Are you not really just asking for the Palestinian’s to conveniently to “let it happen”? What good does moral passive acceptance do? It only make Israel’s job of destruction of the Palestinian people easier. The Zionists do not want the Palestinian’s to exists in “their” territory, which includes all the homeland of the Palestinian people. They, again, by nature can not cohabitate or play nice. This is an existential war of total destruction.

In the end we are all dead. It’s highly questionable to kill the proverbial guard baby in a vague attempt to hurt the guard. But if you are a moral person and do nothing you die anyways. How much better is that than if you became an evil person that died and gave the forces of evil some karmic consequences for their actions that in the end also amounted to nothing?

I am a proponent of 100% open borders

This is an old post that was questionable to reply to but this is laugh and half. No you aren’t. No apologist for Zionism is. It’s logically impossible.

I have no idea what the alternative solution is supposed to be here.

One state solution? Again, like every western nation is expected. An immediate reversal of “settlements” (colonies) would be a start.

Given the constant sloganeering about "Apartheid" and given that Israel was founded to be an ethnostate intended to prioritize the interests of a Jewish population, I was surprised to learn about the conditions of Arab-Israelis.

You seem to heavily hinting without stating here that Israel doesn’t really want to be a racially pure Jewish ethnostate. That it took in Palestinian “Arabs” out of multicultural acceptance and not grudging forced calculation.

Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day. Other examples would be pre civil rights USA and Nazi Germany. It’s not legally possible for for a Jew to marry a non-Jew such as an “Arab.” If Israel did not want to be a racially pure as possible ethnostate the right of return would be a non-issue and the highly demonstrative contrast of Birthright/Taglit free travel tours and citizenship for vaguely Jewish diaspora would not be a thing.

But to be clear, the apartheid charge is for the occupation and treatment of Palestinians outside of Israel proper. At least to me.

One of the first red pilling experiences I had was a family member visiting the West Bank, for non-polticidal reasons, and learning multiple things (they were the often politically erased Palestinian Christians). First how normal and civilized they were. But second that there were checkpoint guards everywhere even in “Palestinian” territory. Palestinians encounter Jews all the time. Jews that absolutely will give your brother a hard time for being a non-Jewish male, and absolutely deeply racially hate you to the very core for being different from them - the enemy. And against popular news implication, they actually don’t all blow up everyday in spastic violence despite constant encounters and humiliation. It blew my mind that you could be Christian and live couple kilometers from the birth and death places of Jesus and just have to decide it’s not worth it to visit holy sites for Easter or Christmas. The Jewish checkpoint guards that sit between your home in Ramallah and “East” Jerusalem will absolutely give your family a hard time and maybe imprison someone for some imagined offense of just shoot. Who’s going to stop or punish them? I instantly understood where the 14 year old rock throwers came from ,where before I was always confused and thought them such savage retards. The West Bank is the Jim Crow South on steroids, but you’ll never see it presented that way to the dipshit BLM libs that watch CNN.

What’s more, Israel blockades Gaza. This would be an illegal act of war if it was a sovereign nation, which the MSM acts like it is for propaganda convenience currently. But it’s not. Nor is it annexed and given equal human rights like it should be, if it’s not a foreign entity. The ever fake “peace process” (spits) acts as a shield to keep the situation in a convenient limbo. This is the apartheid.

The "colonization" narrative is facile and misleading

It’s objective fact. I always don’t know if people arguing against this are simply historically confused or outright cynically lying. A meandering linked article isn’t going to change anything.

The early Zionists secured land through legal purchases, though the transactions were often made with absentee landlords and came as a surprise to the occupants.

Okay yeah, here we go. +1 point for the not really confused category. There is no such thing as legal valid permanent exclusionary “purchases” of land/people in a society that has no democratic representation. Let’s be clear about something, this was all done with non-voluntary coercive state violence. That’s why it’s a conflict. No one asked the Palestinians until the situation got really, really bad.

Palestine is unique in that it was colonization on behalf of another party. Ethnic replacement colonization is actually pretty rare (e.g. the British left India as India). But normally it would be the colonizers ethnically cleansing the natives. Here the colonized received the action at the barrel of a gun, but for Jews. Probably because the British just didn’t give shit. But that doesn’t change the experience for them.

If the Palestinians had a self-determined state with their own laws and army Zionism NEVER would have happened. That’s pretty clear and absolutely key. No nation concedes to letting foreigners slow invade their land by “purchasing” land with an intent to never again ethnically cohabitate with the native people effectively zero-sum removing it from the former nation. Hell, Americans can’t even purchase own Mexican land at all, let alone create gringo only enclaves with the full intent to create a white only state in Mexico.

If you object to Zionism, specify what kind and why.

I said it before but I’ll say it again. Why did Zionist Jews have a right to violently invade a people against their consent and expel them from their lands. Why are they owed land/flesh at other’s expense? Why is resistance against this a terminal wrong?

Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day.

Is it legally possible for a muslim to marry a non-muslim without the partner/offspring converting to Islam? I don't think so:

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

The thing is though in the end Syria will still be Syria no matter what shitty dictator or not reigns in the future

The Alawite minority in power that ferociously prosecuted the civil war because of fear of being genocide are certainly taking notes I'm sure.

If you think sectarian conflict and genocide don't change a region in a meaningful way, then you're just not zooming in close enough. From an alien's perspective, even the Palestinian conflict are just two different sects of the over-arching Abrahamic religion duking it out, with many members being hard to even visually distinguish from one another, especially since many (most?) Israeli Jews are refugees from the rest of the Middle East.

I welcome all rebuttals, but ideally they address things I actually wrote rather than things you imagine I wrote. I don't know what else I can do except to re-emphasize that I aim to write very transparently, and it's a waste of everyone's time to try and read in between the lines to find out my "true" positions. You are actively encouraged to ask clarifying questions if anything I wrote seems ambiguous. Absent other explanations, I must infer that resorting to this kind of strawmanning stems from a place of frustration — a sign of difficulty in engaging with the points I've clearly laid out.

For example, right out of the gate:

Why? Why do Jews have a right to invade someone else’s land and ethnically cleanse the native populace? Why aren’t jews obligated to live in humanitarian multiculturalism like ever other western nation on the planet, and instead get violent ethnonationalism that inherently can not cohabitate with the non-Jewish natives of the land they are (violently) immigrating to? Why do the Palestinian people not have a right to resist this?

Notice that I said I believe motivations for a Jewish homeland to be sound, and that's distinct from implementations. In the abstract, a Jewish homeland anywhere does not require either invasion or cleansing, but in practice it might be inevitable given the modern geopolitical reality of not having any unclaimed land anywhere. I don't have a good answer for how Zionists could've accomplished their goal completely peacefully, but I also wasn't writing a post about the righteousness of how Israel was founding.

Addressing some of your substantive points:

What value is there in passivity? Look to the West Bank and see what a more passive stance has achieved. Nothing but further expansion of Jewish colonies and a tightening noose around the Palestinians’ neck. That’s pretty damning. I think it’s objective at this point that “just be more peaceful” is an utter failure and an invitation to personal destruction.

This is fair pushback. I responded to a similar argument in this other comment.

No you aren’t [in favor of 100% open borders]. No apologist for Zionism is. It’s logically impossible.

"I generally take the "Voltairean" position of "I disagree with your chosen form of government, but will defend your right to establish it". I have my own palette of preferred government policies, but also don't want to force them on anyone else (basically think of enclaves in Snow Crash)."

One state solution? Again, like every western nation is expected. An immediate reversal of “settlements” (colonies) would be a start.

There's the practical hurdle, in that Israel prides itself on its democracy but likely only as long as Jews remain a voting majority. It's not likely they'll be willing to take the demographic and political shift that would come with full annexation; the tension between ethnostate and democracy will never go away. Even if we assume this was feasible, I'm not at all convinced that a one-state solution would mollify the fanatical wing of the broader Palestinian cause.

Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day.

I was confused by this but understand you meant anti-interfaith marriage laws. No, I didn't know that Israel has no mechanism for legally recognizing interfaith marriages conducted within its borders. It doesn't surprise me given its status as an ethnostate and the heavy influence the extreme Zionist wing has over its politics (e.g. Lehava organization advocates for exactly this). Its aversion to interfaith marriages is not significantly different from how the topic is treated in Islam. From my own limited experience, any time a Moroccan was about to marry a kafir, the immediate question was always whether the spouse was going to convert to Islam.

But second that there were checkpoint guards everywhere even in “Palestinian” territory...This is the apartheid.

This is fair, I wasn't as clear as I should have been when addressing the Apartheid issue. The comparison I aimed to draw was to wonder why full annexation by Israel is seen as anathema, from a material standpoint (I already acknowledged Israel's resistance to accepting Palestinians as voting citizens). I could understand the concern if Arab-Israelis had a horrendous quality of life, but they don't. The Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza do endure abject poverty that is made even worse but the intrusive security apparatus and the passively-tolerated spate of settler violence. I concede I should have addressed those circumstances in greater detail, but it would not have materially changed my main point which is the need to critically evaluate the self-professed motivations behind the Palestinian cause, to see which ones hold up with the facts. The problem is genuine valid grievances like the untenable life under occupation get shoved into the same overflowing laundry hamper to provide cover for objective insanity, like suicidal rage over stolen family land someone's grandparents never set foot on.

Lmk if you think there are other points I should address, but please make sure it's in response to something I actually wrote. I welcome all clarifying questions!