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.
The purpose of West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible.
Palestinians can remain in the West Bank if they agree to be second class citizens without political rights.
Israel’s rightful land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile.
I don’t care about Palestinian children, only my own children.
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
I am by no means an expert, but I think this relates to the idea of Greater Israel. There even was an attempt to do that by Ariel Sharon in 1980ies at least according to Darryl Cooper of Martyrmade fame. The plan was to ethnically clense Palestinians from Gaza, West Bank as well as from Lebanon. Make Lebanon a Christian ally state and drive all the refugee Palestinian population to Jordan, where they can have their revolution creating a new Palestinian state by overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy, which was imported by Brits in 1920ies anyway.
It is not without precedent - something similar happened to Germans after WW2. Not many people know about it, but Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers "to the left" and anexed/incorporated some lands into Russia//Ukraine at the expense of ethnically cleansed Germans from historically German cities like Breslau/Wrocław or Königsberg/Kaliningrad etc. The same happened in Czechoslovakia where millions of Germans were ethnically cleansed and relocated to Germany, Germans who lived there for literally centuries. Poland and Czech Republic became ethnically homogenous countries.
The analogy would be treating Gaza/West Bank as something akin to East Prussia or Sudetenland while Jordan - or any other Arab state for that matter - plays the role of post-war East or West Germany or Austria. So you will have two state solution in the end. And ideally nobody will bat an eye, the ethnic cleansing of Germans is nothingburger today. Nobody gives a shit, there is no whining on some supposed wound on the soul of Czech or Polish or Russian nation or anything like that. Most people don't even know this and life goes on, there is enough to do in the respective countries and the mutual relationships are cordial enough, event outright friendly.
The Germans whined about it for years but couldn’t do anything while they were literally under military occupation and their former lands were themselves part of the Soviet empire. But official policy in the CDU, which dominated postwar German politics, was that those lands should be returned as late as the 1980s. What settled it was that the occupying powers agreed to reunification only if the claims were dropped.
As an aside, the Lebanon stuff is always interesting. As early as the 1950s the Israelis offered to carve out a Christian state, but the Lebanese refused, believing they could maintain control of the whole thing, which obviously didn’t work out (and obviously there were internecine disputes between various Christian groups). It’s pretty sad actually.
How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
A two-state solution was moderately popular just a few decades ago, but it's largely considered a lost cause at this point among Israelis at this point, and polls among Palestinians show it unacceptable or undesirable for them as well (for whatever extent you trust polls on this). But that does not mandate genocide or a lack of political rights (or ethnic cleansing), nevermind presuming such a position would be popular: indeed, even early in 2023 a two-state solution polls higher than a single-state one with privileged status for Jews.
The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
A lot of it's less political power, and more the Israeli equivalent of the deep state. A lot of the positions and perspectives favoring Israeli expansionism into the West Bank has been a philosophical goal of the Israeli government for long enough that changing who's in office doesn't necessarily change what happens, it just changes who reports on it. And there were military and tactical reasons in the 70s, even if using those reasons as justification for military confiscation to later hand over to individual civilians is utterly abominable. Beyond that...
The settlers in the areas illegal under Isreali law, and their more activist branches in specific, are often assholes (price taggers regularly deface Israeli or even IDF property!). But there's another large class who played by at least Israeli rules, and are not so readily opposed. And the former groups exist in no small part by exploiting the ambiguities, there, and they're regularly assisted by international groups that take anything less than the Green Line borders as Israeli perfidy.
While I think the religious role is overplayed in American or international contexts, among Israelis and Palestinians there's a very serious concern that each side will dynamite the other's religious sites the second anyone's back is turned, and they matter a good deal more for internal reasons.
Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
Combatant doesn't mean 'bad person' (an Israeli defending their Kibbutz on 10/7 is a combatant!), and non-combatant does not mean 'good person'. We have the "you're not allowed to shoot someone unless they're trying to kill you, or at least part of a military trying to kill you" for the very good reason that if you start allowing military strikes on anyone who has actively wrong political positions, there's nothing without a target.
A more difficult question is whether she'd count as a valid military target, and that's complicated. Ideally, trespassing and unlawful occupation are not themselves the sort of thing that would justify military or personal self-defense, but COGAT's enforcement and implementation of the law is a joke, so I have more sympathy for some of that. That said, mere advocacy or past actions are not themselves military justification -- there's a difference between fighting someone who's actively invading your house from breaking in to beat up someone who did a year ago.
For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
I'm not the person you'd need to persuade, but it's been considered at times.
A lot depends on what, exactly, you mean by "West Bank" or "settlers": there's a risk of certain if-by-whiskeyism, here. Area A is already effectively off-limits for Jewish (and Israeli-friendly non-Jewish) people, rather famously. But that's a bunch of small cities and towns without a land bridge, which doesn't even include all West Bank Palestinians. On the other hand, turning over Area C and going back to the 1967 Green Line would involving moving almost a 400k Israelis and give the West Bank a fully-uncontrolled border with Jordan; that was a difficult ask in 2000 and there's no way it'd be acceptable now. Whatever extent 'land for peace' might have seemed a reasonable trade in the 1990s, it's clearly danegeld now, if the rumors that Arafat was planning the Second Intifada during the 2000 talks weren't enough, the recent problems made it obvious. And a lot of Palestinians, the Arab states, and the academic left consider all Israelis to be settlers, which beyond all the other problems, given the number of Israeli Jews that were ejected from Muslim countries nearby, is the sort of thing you bring to end negotiations, rather than to start them.
On the gripping hand, I think Israel should dismantle the settlements that are a violation of Israeli law anyway, so 'conceding' to remove them is conceding nothing at all.
I dunno. Before October, some large scale-down of Area C, in exchange for significant concessions elsewhere, might have been the best option. And maybe the PA pulls some sort of hat trick here that makes puts that back on the table again, if only to cut out Hamas and its affiliates as competition. But the last 'significant' (and it wasn't much, or even that honest!) pull-back resulted in a swath of suicide bombings, and I'm not sure that Abbas could commit to non-hostilities if the IDF gift-wrapped the entire Green Line borders for him, and any attempt to remove Israeli settlements requires them to believe they're getting peace out of it.
I think her particular view is pretty extreme, even among religiously motivated settlers I doubt very many would see the east bank of the Nile as part of the promised land. That would imply that Moses was already in the promised land when he parted the Red Sea.
Broadening "her cause" somewhat, there's a number of religious and very right-wing parties that Netanyahu relies on as coalition partners, and incorporating "Judea and Samaria" into Israel has support in those sectors because of the area's historical and religious significance. E.g. King David ruled from Hebron, Abraham was buried there, Jericho was the site of Joshua's first conquest in Canaan, etc.
She's not a combatant, but I also take issue with the implication that it's obviously fine to attack soldiers. Attacking civilians is an act of terrorism but attacking soldiers is still an act of war, and war is often even worse than terrorism.
Sure. "Land for peace" is a good trade if it works.
In the end it doesn’t really matter what the extremists think. If the Arabs had accepted the 1947 or 1967 borders and an independent Palestine was a separate, legitimate state (likely with the permanent or temporary presence of various Arab armies), clearly delineated borders, it’s own military and so on, there would be no ‘Jewish settlers’ on its territory.
Would religious Zionists still dream of an Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates? Sure. But Jews dreamed of a return to Israel for millennia without doing anything about it. And of course since the return of the Sinai to the Egyptians, there aren’t any Jewish settlers there either, because they don’t want to die. There aren’t any in Gaza since 2006 either, because they don’t want to die. So again, the dreams of Jewish irredentists in a timeline where the Palestinians didn’t deliberately sabotage their own future are about as irrelevant as the dreams of Germans who wish they could reconquer all of Prussia, or Austrians who would like Hungary back, or even the Spaniards who would seek the return of Gibraltar which, for all the endless whining, isn’t going to happen any time soon either.
They are restricted by reality. The reason the settlers are in the West Bank is because the Palestinians fucked up so badly that, after being curbstomped thrice, they’re now under a combination of partial occupation and collaborationist government. Any number of things could have avoided this for them, settlers want to breed, they wouldn’t cut down the fence to an independent Palestinian state only to get shot by border guards because that defeats the purpose of their ideology. They settle because they can, and they can because the Palestinians, when it came down to it, were unwilling to deal.
But one of the reasons the Arabs fought Israel is because they predicted they would turn into an expansionist state and claim its ancestral borders. This is a damned if you, damned if you don’t. Israel is literally creating new colonies each year within the West Bank and (more egregiously) the Golan Heights, and its history is illustrative —
In 1976, former Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan said Israel provoked more than 80% of the clashes with Syria in the run up to the 1967 war, although historians debate whether he was "giving an accurate account of the situation in 1967 or whether his version of what happened was colored by his disgrace after the 1973 Middle East war, when he was forced to resign as Defense Minister over the failure to anticipate the Arab attack."[89] The provocation was sending a tractor to plow in the demilitarized areas. The Syrians responded by firing at the tractors and shelling Israeli settlements.[90][91] Jan Mühren, a former UN observer in the area at the time, told a Dutch current affairs programme that Israel "provoked most border incidents as part of its strategy to annex more land".[92] UN officials blamed both Israel and Syria for destabilizing the borders
The argument sounds almost like, “why didn’t you let me take your land peacefully? Now that you defended it, you’ve forced me to take your lane!”
I also doubt anyone would make this argument if it were the Arabs destroying Israel militarily. Israelis would be in uproar about Arabs violating international law and taking rightful Jewish clay.
If the Arabs destroyed Israel militarily there would be a lot of kvetching for a few years, then nothing. The refugees/survivors would presumably be accepted by various Western countries, and in a decade Palestine would be just another MENA shithole riven by internal conflict between Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which would adopt a lot of secular Palestinian nationalist elements, and Saudi-backed Sunni militias, who would adopt the rest. It would be a poor dump and nobody would care about it ever again.
Of course, one other thing is that the Jews would never again retake the land (at least in the foreseeable future). America would decide that ‘what’s done is done’, neither Turkey nor Cyprus nor Egypt nor anyone else would give Jews staging ground for an operation to retake their country, the ‘West’ would decide that annoying the Arabs further was unwise and besides, the Jews would be back in the diaspora and settled.
But that underlines the point, really. 98% of the region is Arab, always has been and always will be. Sympathy is therefore difficult. Say the price to secure a white supermajority in Western Europe and North America forever was to hand a tiny sliver of land - say the state of New Jersey, or half of Flanders - to everyone else as an ethnostate. Practically every single wignat I’ve ever encountered would take that deal instantly, no matter the fact that a few locals would be mad. US secessionists talk openly of handing half their country to the ‘enemy’ in a ‘national divorce’.
But the Arabs, even after being trounced several times, throw a fit at the idea of losing - and this is true even in the case of an unrealistically expansionist Zionism - a tiny percentage of their land. And that’s a ‘worst case’ scenario; the Jews have no interest in Arabia itself, nor in Persia or almost all of North Africa or Anatolia (despite having an extensive history in those places).
In truth, there is more than enough land in the region to settle all Palestinians without great hardship, without approaching an unliveable population density and without removing almost all of the region from Muslim control. The Palestinians have been offered a vastly better future than practically any other defeated people in history (in many ways including the Germans and Japanese, who suffered more, lost more, and sacrificed cultural autonomy to American global homogenization, whereas Palestinians have preserved their Islam, their radicalism, their irredentism and most cultural traditions), including the Jews (whom they expelled from their own lands after the founding of Israel, of course).
To me this is as if someone complains that communists have taken over their country and expropriated them. Tragic, I obviously sympathize. Then they say ‘well actually they haven’t, they’re actually just social democrats and they taxed me a little on my billion dollar fortune’. My sympathy is lowered. The expropriation of Arabs in former mandatory Palestine is sad, but it does not seem to me sadder than the expropriation of the region’s Jews (something that of course happened not once but repeatedly for centuries before the founding of Israel), which few seem concerned with.
My continued position is that the Israelis have treated the Palestinians substantially better than Arabs have treated Jews, than Shiites have treated Sunnis (and vice versa) and than warring Sunni tribes have treated each other in most of the conflicts in the region’s history. When they force their way out of their containment zone (implemented due to their attacks on civilians), they have a chimp out and rape, torture and kill women and children like a bronze age warband with RPGs. What mercy do they deserve?
Doesn’t it bother you that you immediately changed your argument from “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because they failed to make an agreement”, to “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because Jews are special and there’s not many of them and Arabs suck?” It betrays the fact that your original argument wasn’t exactly sincere. Or was not at least your main argument.
98% of the region is Arab, always has been and always will be. Sympathy is therefore difficult
That’s a lot like saying “99% of the region is Slavic, therefore sympathy is difficult if Turks decided to conquer Odessa“. It doesn’t make sense as an argument because it ignores the diversity within the term “Arab” and the fact that you don’t suddenly get the right to land because the inhabitants are under the same broad ethnic umbrella. And it ignores that the holy land is particularly important for the whole Arab world.
the Jews have no interest in Arabia itself, nor in Persia or almost all of North Africa or Anatolia
The Jews have no interest in Iran? Have you turned on the news in the past decade? One of their overriding geopolitical interests of Israel is to destabilize Iran, just like they aimed and succeeded to influence American foreign policy toward destabilizing Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It turns out that placing Jews in the heartland of the Muslim world means that they are perpetually neurotic about powerful neighboring states. Which is a recipe for massive regional unrest. Jews have been kvetching about Iran for some time now, with the same WMD lie that they used to sell Iraq to America. Israel has no interest in Iran like America has no interest in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Doesn’t it bother you that you immediately changed your argument from “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because they failed to make an agreement”, to “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because Jews are special and there’s not many of them and Arabs suck?” It betrays the fact that your original argument wasn’t exactly sincere. Or was not at least your main argument.
There are two arguments for two different questions, neither of which is 'does Israel deserve to exist?'.
The first is something like 'are problems with Israeli religious zionist settlers [which is what the original comment was about] in the West Bank an inevitable outcome of the existence of Israel and its settlement by zionists?'. My answer to this is 'no', because (as I said) had the Palestinians accepted the '47 or '67 borders, there would be no settlers on that land because it would have a clear border, be guarded by one or multiple Arab armies and would be recognized by the international community (including the US and Israel, which were prepared and ready to recognize such a Palestinian state at the times in question). There would be no settlers in such a Palestinian state for the same reason there are none in present-day Syria, in present-day Jordan and in present-day Egypt. The sole reason settlers exist in the West Bank is because they can be guarded by the IDF, because the IDF controls the land, because of successive defeats for Arab armies on that land by the IDF, because of wars that the Arabs started.
The second question, which you seemed to be discussing in your next comment, is some variant of 'how much should we sympathize with the Palestinians' plight?'. This is a separate moral consideration since one can certainly sympathize with a defeated party even if they brought ruin upon themselves. In this case, I argue that the grander civilization of which most Palestinians were part continues to control almost all of the region and that resettlement away from historic Palestine - while a partially avoidable (as I said above) tragedy - to nearby Arab lands that are not overpopulated, that have natural resources and that share a cultural, ethnic and religious identity with (predominantly Sunni) Palestinians is a less sympathetic plight than that of Jews who have no 'homeland' peopled by those of their ethnoreligious identity if Israel is destroyed.
This is actually why I'm more sympathetic to, say, the plight of European nationalists than I am to the plight of, say, the Rohingya. The Rohingya are ethnically Bengali Muslims who live next door to the homeland of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh, where their demographic majority is not threatened. If, say, native French become a minority in France, they have no homeland left to return to.
The Jews have no interest in Iran? Have you turned on the news in the past decade?
How much interest did the Jews have in Iran when the central mission of the Iranian state was not the eradication of Israel? I think the answer is comparatively little, and as I recall they were allies. It was only when an explicitly Islamist movement took over the country, almost all the local Jews fled after many were arrested and/or expropriated and/or even executed, and the Iranian government declared that it sought (and would fund, and arm, and incite) the eradication of Israel that Israel pursued its anti-Iran policy.
The counterfactual is valid - Iran could, without altering its demography, territory, flag, national religion or even political system end any Israeli opposition by renouncing (and ceasing to pursue) its hostility toward Israel. There is nothing, by contrast, that the 'Zionist entity' could do to end the opposition of the Iranian revolutionary government other than dissolve itself entirely.
I liked the interview for giving a hint of just how strongly Israelis believe in the demographic dimension of history. Mainstream or not, her side will become more mainstream through their efforts at expanding their Lebensraum and effortfully breeding; and their vigor will win over tired moderates even over this purely biological growth. I'm fairly sure we will see her maximalist ambitions of a massive Israeli empire normalized in some decades. What is impossible often becomes possible when enough people believe in it.
I also think this whole war episode has strengthened my thesis that Israel doesn't depend on the US much, doesn't care for what the US thinks, and frankly isn't any sort of an «outpist of Western liberalism in the sea of barbarism» but just a powerful, autonomous civilization state on its own already.
My least favorite part is her shrill denialism here:
In a lot of these places where settlements have been developed, from 1967 to the present day, there have been Palestinian communities and Palestinian families. What is your feeling about where these people should go?
It’s the opposite. None of the communities in Judea and Samaria are founded on an Arab place or property, and whoever says this is a liar. I wonder why you said it. Why did you say that, since you have no idea about the real facts of history? That’s not true. The opposite is true. Who got this idea into your mind?
Palestinian communities have been removed from their land, kicked off their land by—
No, you never read things like that. No. There are no pictures. [According to a report by Btselem, an Israeli human-rights group, parts of Kedumim, where Weiss lives, were built on private Palestinian land; in 2006, Peace Now found that privately owned Palestinian land comprised nearly forty per cent of the territory of West Bank settlements and outposts.]
O.K. I’m a little surprised you are denying this. I thought you were going to say, “It’s O.K. to kick Palestinians off land because it belongs to the Jewish people.”
You did no homework before you interviewed me. Everything that you say is the opposite of my personality and my philosophy. You are interviewing a person, and you don’t know anything about them. It’s very strange. I’ve never encountered a situation like this.
I was trying to understand where Palestinians who live in the West Bank should go.
Why should they go? Why should they go?
etc.
This kind of DARVO-like shrieking has always rustled my jimmies, but it seems to be normal in the Eastern discourse, and will be normalized further in the future. People on the right will be begging to get the genteel progressive assimilated Jews back.
This kind of DARVO-like shrieking has always rustled my jimmies, but it seems to be normal in the Eastern discourse, and will be normalized further in the future. People on the right will be begging to get the genteel progressive assimilated Jews back.
You would then like Baruch Kogan,most popular representative of Israeli settlers on dead bird site. Typical settler (born in Taganrog, served in US army, moved to reclaim holy land due to mid life crisis) who tells openly what he thinks about his Arab neighbors and Gentiles in general and is not shy about his plans for them. He would be happy to debate you (in English, Russian, Hebrew or Arabic) on every level, from insults and prison slang to most intellectual HBDIQ and NRX arguments.
Mainstream as in widely shared, or mainstream as in accurate? The premise that the purpose of the West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible is more than a bit of a stretch, somewhere between over-reach, over-simplification, and ignoring other competing dynamics.
The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
Because it overlaps and taps into multiple cultural/religious/ideological/strategic considerations, which creates the conditions suitable for political coalitions to work with as a tool for compromise for internal political cohesion.
East Bank settlements have always had a strategic-security implications for the ultimate resolution of Israel's eastern border. Ever since the initial 'land will be traded for peace,' the second implication of that has been 'but facts on the ground will shape what is traded for what.' Some settlements can be tolerated/advanced for the purpose of being traded- a concession in and of themselves. But others are expected to shape the new borders, as has already been reflected in previous iterations of negotiations, where territorial tradeoffs were set to accept israeli settlements in some areas. These enduring settlements, in turn, have post-deal implications for things like who controls how much of East Jerusalem, the practical viability of a East Bank state to marshal and consolidate military power across the North-South Mountains, the strategic depth / chokepoints of any future hostile army approaching from the East, and so on.
Whether you view the Settlements as an ideological mission to secure command of the holy land, a bargaining chip that can be traded away, a tool that can be leveraged against coalition partners for domestic policy concessions, or a factor in long-term strategic planning, there are a variety of reasons why settlement activists will have access to political power. The settlements are politically potent.
Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant?
Not unless she takes part in combat.
On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian.
As long as those colors are accurate, she garners the protections to civilians under international law, including not being deliberately targetted (as opposed to being accepted as collateral when targetting military targets).
On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
Since the Israelis didn't declare rules like that, the premise of fairness is rather misaimed. It's certainly inconvenient international law, but it's not international law crafted by the Israelis for the purpose claimed, and it's not international law with a caveat for settlers.
For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
Given that the broader peace deals that were closest to being credible and coming to fruition didn't kick all settlers out of the West Bank, but rather did mutual trades with a goal of respecting many exsting population distributions, it would seem like a poison pill demand to sink a peace deal, and thus not a moderate position to take.
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Dean 1yr ago
The premise that the purpose of the West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible is more than a bit of a stretch, somewhere between over-reach, over-simplification, and ignoring other competing dynamics.
More than a bit of a stretch? What else are they? Unless the idea is to have them as Jewish citizens of the new Palestinian state, the counterpart of Israeli Arabs in Israel, they new Palestinian state will either have to remove them or have an impossibly fractal border.
Unless the idea is to have them as Jewish citizens of the new Palestinian state,
And why should this be so farfetched? Perhaps because implicit in the idea of both Israel and the Palestinian national project has been ethnic homogeneity, or at least hegemony, for the dominant ethny. Two states has always meant division of the Cis-Jordanian territory into two ethno-states, which simply isn't practical for any number of reasons (water distribution, population distribution, transport networks and ocean access, etc.) even before we get to the basic fundamental fact that significant factions in both sides see themselves as entitled to all of the land, and anything less as a bitter half-loaf to be mourned until revenge can be taken.
Precisely what I said? A number of settlements are fully expected to be traded away- those that would make things 'impossible'- while others are meant to shape the borders- the land swaps that have been a core component of 2-state talks to date.
To say the that the purpose of West Bank settlements is to make the two-state solution impossible is to ignore the history that 2-state negotiations were already built and being conducted on the acknowledgement that the 2-state borders weren't going to align with the occupied territory dividers, and that various settlements had different prospects and roles in said negotiations to different relevant actors.
How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
I'm pro-Israeli and think Israel over all is one of the more moral countries in the world and has just been put in a very difficult situation. But I think the settlements do not have good justification at all, and because of that complete lack of justification are a blight on Israel's record.
The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
I'm given to understand in modern politics, a very dedicated interest group can wield a ton of power even if they aren't very large.
Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
I don't know what the international law is, but personally I think if someone illegal crosses into another states territory during a period of heightened tensions like the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, that state is allowed to kill them.
For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
I'd prefer it over a deal where they were allowed to stay even if Israel got nothing else for it. The settlements aren't a deal breaker for my support for Israel, but that's just because I think Palestine is even worse. The settlements are still a bad thing.
I don’t think there can be a two state solution. There can only be a one state solution at this point in time with some devolved control. But that doesn’t mean the settlements are just or right to maintain.
I think Israel would be better off maintaining the current state of affairs than going for a one state solution. I don't think the Palestinians would let go of their hate for Israel even if they were granted voting rights and freedom of movement, and giving voting rights and freedom of movement to a population that violently hates you would not go well.
I think one state solution with a population in Gaza that isn’t permitted to vote for the Knesset. But they could have a local parliament for civil governance.
Saudi Arabia laughs at you in fuck-you money. Most of the Gulf States rely on second class citizens/migrant workers while their primary citizens lounge about on welfare if they wish to.
There's a big difference between treating your imported brown labour class poorly (western nations that cry about racism do this all the time, I've run into indian physicists working in supermarket delis) and having an explicit category of second class citizens who cannot vote.
Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
I think that would make her a more legitimate target than the average civilian minding their own business in Israel, but a legitimate target? No strong opinion on that. It's not like the legitimacy of targets is a major sticking point for people who shoot up peace raves.
For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
I'd call myself strongly pro-Israel, to the extent that there's little or nothing they could do to the Palestinians that would make me withdraw my support (within the Overton Window of Israeli politics).
And the answer is yes, but only if the peace deal has any hope of being adhered to. I have a high opinion of Israel as a whole, not the fundamentalsist wackos who are the primarily inhabitants of the settlements. They could die in a house fire and I wouldn't be particularly fazed.
I'd call myself strongly pro-Israel, to the extent that there's little or nothing they could do to the Palestinians that would make me withdraw my support (within the Overton Window of Israeli politics).
I have noticed that a lot of Indians support Israel online, would you be able to shed some light on that phenomenon?
I have noticed that a lot of Indians support Israel online, would you be able to shed some light on that phenomenon?
Pure "enemy of my enemy" principle. Otherwise, devout Jews have no sympathy for Hinduism and devout Hindus think even less about any Abrahamic religion.
I would ascribe the majority of the sentiment to them pattern matching to Muslims Bad, as is common because of the animosity with Pakistan. There really isn't much more to it to be honest, especially since Indians are usually strictly neutral to Jews, both because we lack any meaningful number of them, and because our education in history and civics doesn't really dwell on the Holocaust in more than passing (my textbook didn't even mention it, but it ended at the 40s and even then only dealt with the Indian independence struggle).
That's not the reason I support Israel, which is more of a general appreciation for intelligence and competence, especially as an oasis in a region seemingly deficient in both.
I don't like the average Muslim much, but I also happen to dislike Hindu fundamentalists and Christians and.. I'm secularly irreligious though I can maybe hold back my disdain for the inoffensive types, or the ones who are a thin veneer over secular humanism like Unitarian Universalists or some Western strains of Buddhism.
I will note, given that I've already devoted more space to an answer beyond "The average (Hindu) Indian isn't particularly fond of Muslims", is that there is a mild under-current of support for Palestine from upper middle class Westernized Indians like myself. American politics and ideology dominates their worldview, including adoption of leftwing talking points and propaganda. I have yet to see anyone in my social circle post pro Israeli statements on social media, but I have seen a handful supporting the Palestinians, including falling for absolutely ridiculous propaganda, and I mean beyond the ability of anyone with a passing knowledge of Israel and Palestine to believe, not just a slant on facts.
So you're seeing the millions of nationalist Hindus on Twitter engaging in foreign politics for once, and of course you're going to be exposed to the most polarized takes within that. It's still true that the average Indian supports Israel, be it because they hate Muslims, or for the more moderate because they see them as a potential ally against Middle Eastern nations that have historically aided Pakistan (and even then I'm pretty sure the US has done much more to prop up that sorry excuse for a country than their Islamic brethren have).
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An interview in the New Yorker with settler/activist Daniella Weiss, The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers, is making the rounds on Twitter.
Tl;dr:
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
I am by no means an expert, but I think this relates to the idea of Greater Israel. There even was an attempt to do that by Ariel Sharon in 1980ies at least according to Darryl Cooper of Martyrmade fame. The plan was to ethnically clense Palestinians from Gaza, West Bank as well as from Lebanon. Make Lebanon a Christian ally state and drive all the refugee Palestinian population to Jordan, where they can have their revolution creating a new Palestinian state by overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy, which was imported by Brits in 1920ies anyway.
It is not without precedent - something similar happened to Germans after WW2. Not many people know about it, but Stalin literally moved Poland couple of hundreds kilometers "to the left" and anexed/incorporated some lands into Russia//Ukraine at the expense of ethnically cleansed Germans from historically German cities like Breslau/Wrocław or Königsberg/Kaliningrad etc. The same happened in Czechoslovakia where millions of Germans were ethnically cleansed and relocated to Germany, Germans who lived there for literally centuries. Poland and Czech Republic became ethnically homogenous countries.
The analogy would be treating Gaza/West Bank as something akin to East Prussia or Sudetenland while Jordan - or any other Arab state for that matter - plays the role of post-war East or West Germany or Austria. So you will have two state solution in the end. And ideally nobody will bat an eye, the ethnic cleansing of Germans is nothingburger today. Nobody gives a shit, there is no whining on some supposed wound on the soul of Czech or Polish or Russian nation or anything like that. Most people don't even know this and life goes on, there is enough to do in the respective countries and the mutual relationships are cordial enough, event outright friendly.
The Germans whined about it for years but couldn’t do anything while they were literally under military occupation and their former lands were themselves part of the Soviet empire. But official policy in the CDU, which dominated postwar German politics, was that those lands should be returned as late as the 1980s. What settled it was that the occupying powers agreed to reunification only if the claims were dropped.
As an aside, the Lebanon stuff is always interesting. As early as the 1950s the Israelis offered to carve out a Christian state, but the Lebanese refused, believing they could maintain control of the whole thing, which obviously didn’t work out (and obviously there were internecine disputes between various Christian groups). It’s pretty sad actually.
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A two-state solution was moderately popular just a few decades ago, but it's largely considered a lost cause at this point among Israelis at this point, and polls among Palestinians show it unacceptable or undesirable for them as well (for whatever extent you trust polls on this). But that does not mandate genocide or a lack of political rights (or ethnic cleansing), nevermind presuming such a position would be popular: indeed, even early in 2023 a two-state solution polls higher than a single-state one with privileged status for Jews.
A lot of it's less political power, and more the Israeli equivalent of the deep state. A lot of the positions and perspectives favoring Israeli expansionism into the West Bank has been a philosophical goal of the Israeli government for long enough that changing who's in office doesn't necessarily change what happens, it just changes who reports on it. And there were military and tactical reasons in the 70s, even if using those reasons as justification for military confiscation to later hand over to individual civilians is utterly abominable. Beyond that...
The settlers in the areas illegal under Isreali law, and their more activist branches in specific, are often assholes (price taggers regularly deface Israeli or even IDF property!). But there's another large class who played by at least Israeli rules, and are not so readily opposed. And the former groups exist in no small part by exploiting the ambiguities, there, and they're regularly assisted by international groups that take anything less than the Green Line borders as Israeli perfidy.
While I think the religious role is overplayed in American or international contexts, among Israelis and Palestinians there's a very serious concern that each side will dynamite the other's religious sites the second anyone's back is turned, and they matter a good deal more for internal reasons.
Combatant doesn't mean 'bad person' (an Israeli defending their Kibbutz on 10/7 is a combatant!), and non-combatant does not mean 'good person'. We have the "you're not allowed to shoot someone unless they're trying to kill you, or at least part of a military trying to kill you" for the very good reason that if you start allowing military strikes on anyone who has actively wrong political positions, there's nothing without a target.
A more difficult question is whether she'd count as a valid military target, and that's complicated. Ideally, trespassing and unlawful occupation are not themselves the sort of thing that would justify military or personal self-defense, but COGAT's enforcement and implementation of the law is a joke, so I have more sympathy for some of that. That said, mere advocacy or past actions are not themselves military justification -- there's a difference between fighting someone who's actively invading your house from breaking in to beat up someone who did a year ago.
I'm not the person you'd need to persuade, but it's been considered at times.
A lot depends on what, exactly, you mean by "West Bank" or "settlers": there's a risk of certain if-by-whiskeyism, here. Area A is already effectively off-limits for Jewish (and Israeli-friendly non-Jewish) people, rather famously. But that's a bunch of small cities and towns without a land bridge, which doesn't even include all West Bank Palestinians. On the other hand, turning over Area C and going back to the 1967 Green Line would involving moving almost a 400k Israelis and give the West Bank a fully-uncontrolled border with Jordan; that was a difficult ask in 2000 and there's no way it'd be acceptable now. Whatever extent 'land for peace' might have seemed a reasonable trade in the 1990s, it's clearly danegeld now, if the rumors that Arafat was planning the Second Intifada during the 2000 talks weren't enough, the recent problems made it obvious. And a lot of Palestinians, the Arab states, and the academic left consider all Israelis to be settlers, which beyond all the other problems, given the number of Israeli Jews that were ejected from Muslim countries nearby, is the sort of thing you bring to end negotiations, rather than to start them.
On the gripping hand, I think Israel should dismantle the settlements that are a violation of Israeli law anyway, so 'conceding' to remove them is conceding nothing at all.
I dunno. Before October, some large scale-down of Area C, in exchange for significant concessions elsewhere, might have been the best option. And maybe the PA pulls some sort of hat trick here that makes puts that back on the table again, if only to cut out Hamas and its affiliates as competition. But the last 'significant' (and it wasn't much, or even that honest!) pull-back resulted in a swath of suicide bombings, and I'm not sure that Abbas could commit to non-hostilities if the IDF gift-wrapped the entire Green Line borders for him, and any attempt to remove Israeli settlements requires them to believe they're getting peace out of it.
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I think her particular view is pretty extreme, even among religiously motivated settlers I doubt very many would see the east bank of the Nile as part of the promised land. That would imply that Moses was already in the promised land when he parted the Red Sea.
Broadening "her cause" somewhat, there's a number of religious and very right-wing parties that Netanyahu relies on as coalition partners, and incorporating "Judea and Samaria" into Israel has support in those sectors because of the area's historical and religious significance. E.g. King David ruled from Hebron, Abraham was buried there, Jericho was the site of Joshua's first conquest in Canaan, etc.
She's not a combatant, but I also take issue with the implication that it's obviously fine to attack soldiers. Attacking civilians is an act of terrorism but attacking soldiers is still an act of war, and war is often even worse than terrorism.
Sure. "Land for peace" is a good trade if it works.
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I am not fond of these settlers.
I’m also not fond of the millions pouring over my border. Why am I supposed to care about the West Bank border and not care about my country’s border?
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In the end it doesn’t really matter what the extremists think. If the Arabs had accepted the 1947 or 1967 borders and an independent Palestine was a separate, legitimate state (likely with the permanent or temporary presence of various Arab armies), clearly delineated borders, it’s own military and so on, there would be no ‘Jewish settlers’ on its territory.
Would religious Zionists still dream of an Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates? Sure. But Jews dreamed of a return to Israel for millennia without doing anything about it. And of course since the return of the Sinai to the Egyptians, there aren’t any Jewish settlers there either, because they don’t want to die. There aren’t any in Gaza since 2006 either, because they don’t want to die. So again, the dreams of Jewish irredentists in a timeline where the Palestinians didn’t deliberately sabotage their own future are about as irrelevant as the dreams of Germans who wish they could reconquer all of Prussia, or Austrians who would like Hungary back, or even the Spaniards who would seek the return of Gibraltar which, for all the endless whining, isn’t going to happen any time soon either.
They are restricted by reality. The reason the settlers are in the West Bank is because the Palestinians fucked up so badly that, after being curbstomped thrice, they’re now under a combination of partial occupation and collaborationist government. Any number of things could have avoided this for them, settlers want to breed, they wouldn’t cut down the fence to an independent Palestinian state only to get shot by border guards because that defeats the purpose of their ideology. They settle because they can, and they can because the Palestinians, when it came down to it, were unwilling to deal.
But one of the reasons the Arabs fought Israel is because they predicted they would turn into an expansionist state and claim its ancestral borders. This is a damned if you, damned if you don’t. Israel is literally creating new colonies each year within the West Bank and (more egregiously) the Golan Heights, and its history is illustrative —
The argument sounds almost like, “why didn’t you let me take your land peacefully? Now that you defended it, you’ve forced me to take your lane!”
I also doubt anyone would make this argument if it were the Arabs destroying Israel militarily. Israelis would be in uproar about Arabs violating international law and taking rightful Jewish clay.
If the Arabs destroyed Israel militarily there would be a lot of kvetching for a few years, then nothing. The refugees/survivors would presumably be accepted by various Western countries, and in a decade Palestine would be just another MENA shithole riven by internal conflict between Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which would adopt a lot of secular Palestinian nationalist elements, and Saudi-backed Sunni militias, who would adopt the rest. It would be a poor dump and nobody would care about it ever again.
Of course, one other thing is that the Jews would never again retake the land (at least in the foreseeable future). America would decide that ‘what’s done is done’, neither Turkey nor Cyprus nor Egypt nor anyone else would give Jews staging ground for an operation to retake their country, the ‘West’ would decide that annoying the Arabs further was unwise and besides, the Jews would be back in the diaspora and settled.
But that underlines the point, really. 98% of the region is Arab, always has been and always will be. Sympathy is therefore difficult. Say the price to secure a white supermajority in Western Europe and North America forever was to hand a tiny sliver of land - say the state of New Jersey, or half of Flanders - to everyone else as an ethnostate. Practically every single wignat I’ve ever encountered would take that deal instantly, no matter the fact that a few locals would be mad. US secessionists talk openly of handing half their country to the ‘enemy’ in a ‘national divorce’.
But the Arabs, even after being trounced several times, throw a fit at the idea of losing - and this is true even in the case of an unrealistically expansionist Zionism - a tiny percentage of their land. And that’s a ‘worst case’ scenario; the Jews have no interest in Arabia itself, nor in Persia or almost all of North Africa or Anatolia (despite having an extensive history in those places).
In truth, there is more than enough land in the region to settle all Palestinians without great hardship, without approaching an unliveable population density and without removing almost all of the region from Muslim control. The Palestinians have been offered a vastly better future than practically any other defeated people in history (in many ways including the Germans and Japanese, who suffered more, lost more, and sacrificed cultural autonomy to American global homogenization, whereas Palestinians have preserved their Islam, their radicalism, their irredentism and most cultural traditions), including the Jews (whom they expelled from their own lands after the founding of Israel, of course).
To me this is as if someone complains that communists have taken over their country and expropriated them. Tragic, I obviously sympathize. Then they say ‘well actually they haven’t, they’re actually just social democrats and they taxed me a little on my billion dollar fortune’. My sympathy is lowered. The expropriation of Arabs in former mandatory Palestine is sad, but it does not seem to me sadder than the expropriation of the region’s Jews (something that of course happened not once but repeatedly for centuries before the founding of Israel), which few seem concerned with.
My continued position is that the Israelis have treated the Palestinians substantially better than Arabs have treated Jews, than Shiites have treated Sunnis (and vice versa) and than warring Sunni tribes have treated each other in most of the conflicts in the region’s history. When they force their way out of their containment zone (implemented due to their attacks on civilians), they have a chimp out and rape, torture and kill women and children like a bronze age warband with RPGs. What mercy do they deserve?
Doesn’t it bother you that you immediately changed your argument from “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because they failed to make an agreement”, to “the Palestinians deserve to lose their territory because Jews are special and there’s not many of them and Arabs suck?” It betrays the fact that your original argument wasn’t exactly sincere. Or was not at least your main argument.
That’s a lot like saying “99% of the region is Slavic, therefore sympathy is difficult if Turks decided to conquer Odessa“. It doesn’t make sense as an argument because it ignores the diversity within the term “Arab” and the fact that you don’t suddenly get the right to land because the inhabitants are under the same broad ethnic umbrella. And it ignores that the holy land is particularly important for the whole Arab world.
The Jews have no interest in Iran? Have you turned on the news in the past decade? One of their overriding geopolitical interests of Israel is to destabilize Iran, just like they aimed and succeeded to influence American foreign policy toward destabilizing Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It turns out that placing Jews in the heartland of the Muslim world means that they are perpetually neurotic about powerful neighboring states. Which is a recipe for massive regional unrest. Jews have been kvetching about Iran for some time now, with the same WMD lie that they used to sell Iraq to America. Israel has no interest in Iran like America has no interest in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
There are two arguments for two different questions, neither of which is 'does Israel deserve to exist?'.
The first is something like 'are problems with Israeli religious zionist settlers [which is what the original comment was about] in the West Bank an inevitable outcome of the existence of Israel and its settlement by zionists?'. My answer to this is 'no', because (as I said) had the Palestinians accepted the '47 or '67 borders, there would be no settlers on that land because it would have a clear border, be guarded by one or multiple Arab armies and would be recognized by the international community (including the US and Israel, which were prepared and ready to recognize such a Palestinian state at the times in question). There would be no settlers in such a Palestinian state for the same reason there are none in present-day Syria, in present-day Jordan and in present-day Egypt. The sole reason settlers exist in the West Bank is because they can be guarded by the IDF, because the IDF controls the land, because of successive defeats for Arab armies on that land by the IDF, because of wars that the Arabs started.
The second question, which you seemed to be discussing in your next comment, is some variant of 'how much should we sympathize with the Palestinians' plight?'. This is a separate moral consideration since one can certainly sympathize with a defeated party even if they brought ruin upon themselves. In this case, I argue that the grander civilization of which most Palestinians were part continues to control almost all of the region and that resettlement away from historic Palestine - while a partially avoidable (as I said above) tragedy - to nearby Arab lands that are not overpopulated, that have natural resources and that share a cultural, ethnic and religious identity with (predominantly Sunni) Palestinians is a less sympathetic plight than that of Jews who have no 'homeland' peopled by those of their ethnoreligious identity if Israel is destroyed.
This is actually why I'm more sympathetic to, say, the plight of European nationalists than I am to the plight of, say, the Rohingya. The Rohingya are ethnically Bengali Muslims who live next door to the homeland of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh, where their demographic majority is not threatened. If, say, native French become a minority in France, they have no homeland left to return to.
How much interest did the Jews have in Iran when the central mission of the Iranian state was not the eradication of Israel? I think the answer is comparatively little, and as I recall they were allies. It was only when an explicitly Islamist movement took over the country, almost all the local Jews fled after many were arrested and/or expropriated and/or even executed, and the Iranian government declared that it sought (and would fund, and arm, and incite) the eradication of Israel that Israel pursued its anti-Iran policy.
The counterfactual is valid - Iran could, without altering its demography, territory, flag, national religion or even political system end any Israeli opposition by renouncing (and ceasing to pursue) its hostility toward Israel. There is nothing, by contrast, that the 'Zionist entity' could do to end the opposition of the Iranian revolutionary government other than dissolve itself entirely.
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I liked the interview for giving a hint of just how strongly Israelis believe in the demographic dimension of history. Mainstream or not, her side will become more mainstream through their efforts at expanding their Lebensraum and effortfully breeding; and their vigor will win over tired moderates even over this purely biological growth. I'm fairly sure we will see her maximalist ambitions of a massive Israeli empire normalized in some decades. What is impossible often becomes possible when enough people believe in it.
I also think this whole war episode has strengthened my thesis that Israel doesn't depend on the US much, doesn't care for what the US thinks, and frankly isn't any sort of an «outpist of Western liberalism in the sea of barbarism» but just a powerful, autonomous civilization state on its own already.
My least favorite part is her shrill denialism here:
No, you never read things like that. No. There are no pictures. [According to a report by Btselem, an Israeli human-rights group, parts of Kedumim, where Weiss lives, were built on private Palestinian land; in 2006, Peace Now found that privately owned Palestinian land comprised nearly forty per cent of the territory of West Bank settlements and outposts.]
etc.
This kind of DARVO-like shrieking has always rustled my jimmies, but it seems to be normal in the Eastern discourse, and will be normalized further in the future. People on the right will be begging to get the genteel progressive assimilated Jews back.
You would then like Baruch Kogan,most popular representative of Israeli settlers on dead bird site. Typical settler (born in Taganrog, served in US army, moved to reclaim holy land due to mid life crisis) who tells openly what he thinks about his Arab neighbors and Gentiles in general and is not shy about his plans for them. He would be happy to debate you (in English, Russian, Hebrew or Arabic) on every level, from insults and prison slang to most intellectual HBDIQ and NRX arguments.
I think there's nothing to be learned and, accordingly, nothing to be debated in matters of faith (if not in matters preceding those axiomatic ones).
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Or, alternatively, extremely boring and usual very-online frogtwitter/DR shitposter with a zionist instead of wignat flavor?
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Mainstream as in widely shared, or mainstream as in accurate? The premise that the purpose of the West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible is more than a bit of a stretch, somewhere between over-reach, over-simplification, and ignoring other competing dynamics.
Because it overlaps and taps into multiple cultural/religious/ideological/strategic considerations, which creates the conditions suitable for political coalitions to work with as a tool for compromise for internal political cohesion.
East Bank settlements have always had a strategic-security implications for the ultimate resolution of Israel's eastern border. Ever since the initial 'land will be traded for peace,' the second implication of that has been 'but facts on the ground will shape what is traded for what.' Some settlements can be tolerated/advanced for the purpose of being traded- a concession in and of themselves. But others are expected to shape the new borders, as has already been reflected in previous iterations of negotiations, where territorial tradeoffs were set to accept israeli settlements in some areas. These enduring settlements, in turn, have post-deal implications for things like who controls how much of East Jerusalem, the practical viability of a East Bank state to marshal and consolidate military power across the North-South Mountains, the strategic depth / chokepoints of any future hostile army approaching from the East, and so on.
Whether you view the Settlements as an ideological mission to secure command of the holy land, a bargaining chip that can be traded away, a tool that can be leveraged against coalition partners for domestic policy concessions, or a factor in long-term strategic planning, there are a variety of reasons why settlement activists will have access to political power. The settlements are politically potent.
Not unless she takes part in combat.
As long as those colors are accurate, she garners the protections to civilians under international law, including not being deliberately targetted (as opposed to being accepted as collateral when targetting military targets).
Since the Israelis didn't declare rules like that, the premise of fairness is rather misaimed. It's certainly inconvenient international law, but it's not international law crafted by the Israelis for the purpose claimed, and it's not international law with a caveat for settlers.
Given that the broader peace deals that were closest to being credible and coming to fruition didn't kick all settlers out of the West Bank, but rather did mutual trades with a goal of respecting many exsting population distributions, it would seem like a poison pill demand to sink a peace deal, and thus not a moderate position to take.
More than a bit of a stretch? What else are they? Unless the idea is to have them as Jewish citizens of the new Palestinian state, the counterpart of Israeli Arabs in Israel, they new Palestinian state will either have to remove them or have an impossibly fractal border.
And why should this be so farfetched? Perhaps because implicit in the idea of both Israel and the Palestinian national project has been ethnic homogeneity, or at least hegemony, for the dominant ethny. Two states has always meant division of the Cis-Jordanian territory into two ethno-states, which simply isn't practical for any number of reasons (water distribution, population distribution, transport networks and ocean access, etc.) even before we get to the basic fundamental fact that significant factions in both sides see themselves as entitled to all of the land, and anything less as a bitter half-loaf to be mourned until revenge can be taken.
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Precisely what I said? A number of settlements are fully expected to be traded away- those that would make things 'impossible'- while others are meant to shape the borders- the land swaps that have been a core component of 2-state talks to date.
To say the that the purpose of West Bank settlements is to make the two-state solution impossible is to ignore the history that 2-state negotiations were already built and being conducted on the acknowledgement that the 2-state borders weren't going to align with the occupied territory dividers, and that various settlements had different prospects and roles in said negotiations to different relevant actors.
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I'm pro-Israeli and think Israel over all is one of the more moral countries in the world and has just been put in a very difficult situation. But I think the settlements do not have good justification at all, and because of that complete lack of justification are a blight on Israel's record.
I'm given to understand in modern politics, a very dedicated interest group can wield a ton of power even if they aren't very large.
I don't know what the international law is, but personally I think if someone illegal crosses into another states territory during a period of heightened tensions like the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, that state is allowed to kill them.
I'd prefer it over a deal where they were allowed to stay even if Israel got nothing else for it. The settlements aren't a deal breaker for my support for Israel, but that's just because I think Palestine is even worse. The settlements are still a bad thing.
I don’t think there can be a two state solution. There can only be a one state solution at this point in time with some devolved control. But that doesn’t mean the settlements are just or right to maintain.
I think Israel would be better off maintaining the current state of affairs than going for a one state solution. I don't think the Palestinians would let go of their hate for Israel even if they were granted voting rights and freedom of movement, and giving voting rights and freedom of movement to a population that violently hates you would not go well.
I think one state solution with a population in Gaza that isn’t permitted to vote for the Knesset. But they could have a local parliament for civil governance.
An explicit apartheid state? Good luck selling that in the modern world.
Saudi Arabia laughs at you in fuck-you money. Most of the Gulf States rely on second class citizens/migrant workers while their primary citizens lounge about on welfare if they wish to.
There's a big difference between treating your imported brown labour class poorly (western nations that cry about racism do this all the time, I've run into indian physicists working in supermarket delis) and having an explicit category of second class citizens who cannot vote.
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I think that would make her a more legitimate target than the average civilian minding their own business in Israel, but a legitimate target? No strong opinion on that. It's not like the legitimacy of targets is a major sticking point for people who shoot up peace raves.
I'd call myself strongly pro-Israel, to the extent that there's little or nothing they could do to the Palestinians that would make me withdraw my support (within the Overton Window of Israeli politics).
And the answer is yes, but only if the peace deal has any hope of being adhered to. I have a high opinion of Israel as a whole, not the fundamentalsist wackos who are the primarily inhabitants of the settlements. They could die in a house fire and I wouldn't be particularly fazed.
I have noticed that a lot of Indians support Israel online, would you be able to shed some light on that phenomenon?
Pure "enemy of my enemy" principle. Otherwise, devout Jews have no sympathy for Hinduism and devout Hindus think even less about any Abrahamic religion.
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I would ascribe the majority of the sentiment to them pattern matching to Muslims Bad, as is common because of the animosity with Pakistan. There really isn't much more to it to be honest, especially since Indians are usually strictly neutral to Jews, both because we lack any meaningful number of them, and because our education in history and civics doesn't really dwell on the Holocaust in more than passing (my textbook didn't even mention it, but it ended at the 40s and even then only dealt with the Indian independence struggle).
That's not the reason I support Israel, which is more of a general appreciation for intelligence and competence, especially as an oasis in a region seemingly deficient in both.
I don't like the average Muslim much, but I also happen to dislike Hindu fundamentalists and Christians and.. I'm secularly irreligious though I can maybe hold back my disdain for the inoffensive types, or the ones who are a thin veneer over secular humanism like Unitarian Universalists or some Western strains of Buddhism.
I will note, given that I've already devoted more space to an answer beyond "The average (Hindu) Indian isn't particularly fond of Muslims", is that there is a mild under-current of support for Palestine from upper middle class Westernized Indians like myself. American politics and ideology dominates their worldview, including adoption of leftwing talking points and propaganda. I have yet to see anyone in my social circle post pro Israeli statements on social media, but I have seen a handful supporting the Palestinians, including falling for absolutely ridiculous propaganda, and I mean beyond the ability of anyone with a passing knowledge of Israel and Palestine to believe, not just a slant on facts.
So you're seeing the millions of nationalist Hindus on Twitter engaging in foreign politics for once, and of course you're going to be exposed to the most polarized takes within that. It's still true that the average Indian supports Israel, be it because they hate Muslims, or for the more moderate because they see them as a potential ally against Middle Eastern nations that have historically aided Pakistan (and even then I'm pretty sure the US has done much more to prop up that sorry excuse for a country than their Islamic brethren have).
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