Why would we expect any desirable outcome in this hypothetical though? So the US flips, Israel is pressured into withdrawing, Hamas regains control of the strip and resumes rocket attacks, Israel is forced to respond eventually. It doesn't seem like a path toward a real solution.
As long as Israel controls the lives of millions of Palestinians who have no rights and who are treated like trash, there will be conflict.
In order to be effective, US pressure would have to be aimed at forcing Israel to do one of two things:
1. Withdraw its military from the Palestinian territories (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza), dismantle all of its illegal settlements there, and recognize a fully sovereign Palestinian state. This is basically asking Israel to give up its dreams of taking over the Palestinian territories and to withdraw to its own borders - a simple ask.
2. Alternatively, Israel gets to keep the Palestinian territories, but it has to grant full, equal citizenship to the Palestinians who live there. That would mean that 50% of the Israeli electorate would be Palestinian, effectively ending the Jewish nature of the state of Israel. The next prime minister could be a Palestinian - who knows?
Israel has held onto the Palestinian territories for nearly 60 years without granting the people who live there (except for Israeli settlers) any rights. It has to either leave the occupied territories or grant everyone who lives under its control equal rights. It's actually quite a simple and reasonable demand.
Right now, because of unconditional US support, Israel has no incentive to do either of the above. Israel's leaders correctly believe that they can have it all: they can keep the land without granting the Palestinians who live there any rights. They operate with complete impunity. The US could end that impunity and impose real costs on Israel for its actions.
The Palestinians pursued a 2-state solution (option 1 above) for over two decades. It failed largely because of dead-set opposition from the Israeli right (thanks Netanyahu) and because even the Israeli center-left was unwilling to fully withdraw to Israel's internationally recognized borders and recognize a fully sovereign Palestinian state. There were always demands to keep large chunks of territory (most critically in East Jerusalem) and maintain effective control over any future Palestinian semi-state.
Both options laid out above (the 2-state and 1-state solution) are vastly better for the Palestinians than living under permanent Israeli military occupation with no rights, and subjected to continuous violence from the Israelis. It would not be the Palestinians who would block these types of solutions, were they actually on offer.
The Israelis have a near monopoly on force in this conflict. They are the overwhelmingly dominant party, the only one with tanks, aircraft, destroyers and nuclear weapons. They have the power to dictate solutions, and that's what they've been doing for decades, using brute force. Pretending these are two equal sides that just can't agree is a fantasy.
Arafat was offered something very close to a two state solution. He walked away without responding. He couldn't accept (he would have been assassinated if he agreed), he couldn't make a counter-offer because there was a risk of it being accepted, leading to the same end.
Look carefully at all the "peace" proposals from the Palestinians. All are non-viable due to details buried in them. Typically this is hidden references to the "right of return".
The Palestinians were the ones who originally pushed for the two-state solution. It took them years to convince the Israelis to even come to the negotiating table, which finally happened in 1993.
The offer made to Arafat was awful for many reasons that are well known, and that I won't go over here (but to give you an exanple, the proposal said that the Palestinians would have no military, and that the Israeli military would have the right to enter Palestine whenever it wanted, meaning that Palestine would not have real sovereignty).
> He walked away without responding.
Actually, he told the Israelis that the offer was a very bitter pill to swallow, and that he would have to show it to the Palestinian national council before he could accept it. Then, the PLO came back a few months later to negotiate further in Taba. The Israelis eventually broke off negotiations, because the ruling party was about to lose the election to a party that opposed the two-state solution.
> Typically this is hidden references to the "right of return".
It always amazes me how Israelis say the Palestinian right of return is so awful, absurd, outlandish, unacceptable, etc., when the entire founding ideology of the state of Israel is that the Jews have a right of return from 2000 years ago.
What's happening in Gaza right now is unequivocally genocide, and it's shameful. But...
> The Israelis have a near monopoly on force in this conflict. They are the overwhelmingly dominant party, the only one with tanks, aircraft, destroyers and nuclear weapons. They have the power to dictate solutions, and that's what they've been doing for decades, using brute force. Pretending these are two equal sides that just can't agree is a fantasy.
Why should the losers of a conflict get to decide the terms? Has that ever happened, in all of recorded history? Say the Israelis don't want to give up East Jerusalem under any circumstances, what then? Would the Palestinian side be justified in "blocking" the resolution of the conflict?
The way I see it, the fairest and best outcome was a two-state solution with Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem -- this would have represented a compromise on both sides.
Today, I don't know. I don't think that there is a fair or best solution. They're probably going to just keep fighting until the Palestinian side is hollowed-out and the Israeli side is a Burma-tier pariah state.
> Why should the losers of a conflict get to decide the terms?
Because might doesn't make right. Because there's such a thing as international law. Because it's wrong to steal land and force people out of their homes.
> The way I see it, the fairest and best outcome was a two-state solution with Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem -- this would have represented a compromise on both sides.
The Palestinians have already given up 78% of Palestine. They only want the rump: East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Most big Israeli cities used to be Palestinian cities, until the Israelis conquered and ethnically cleansed them in 1948.
The standard 2-state solution is already a massive concession by the Palestinians. It's not the starting point for more concessions. You're asking them to now concede the most cherished piece of Palestine that they haven't yet given up: East Jerusalem. That would be such a humiliation that the Palestinians would never accept it.
The way out of this is massive international pressure on Israel. Israel is strong as long as it's beating up on almost completely defenseless Palestinians. But Israel is a small country that could be pressured by the US and EU fairly easily. Instead, they back it to the tune of billions of dollars a year and give it diplomatic support.
> Because it's wrong to steal land and force people out of their homes.
When has this stopped any army? And hasn't this very thing happened to Jews in Middle Eastern countries, who were sent packing without any hope of compensation?
> You're asking them to now concede the most cherished piece of Palestine that they haven't yet given up: East Jerusalem. That would be such a humiliation that the Palestinians would never accept it.
The same goes for the Israelis, who swear a religious oath by Jerusalem every year, and time has shown (repeatedly, at that,) that no Israeli leader will be induced to give it up.
At some point, you've got to admit defeat, or else the conflict will simply continue forever, very much to the detriment of all involved, and their children, who are innocent.
The passions obviously run high, but obviously both sides should compromise from the position of the status quo, and it's wishful thinking to suppose that the side that has prevailed in combat will knuckle-under and let the loser decide the terms of the peace. This is quite literally something that has never happened before.
Granted, the Israelis are fighting their war in a way that is deranged and quite dangerous for their own long-term survival. If they were somewhat more chivalrous, their own goals would be far better served; there appears to be a very nasty edge to Israeli democracy.
> The Palestinians have already given up 78% of Palestine.
You seem to be conflating the region of Palestine, which has always included a mix of religions including Jews, with the modern Palestinian national identity.
Jews were only a few percent of the population before Europeans started moving in at the end of the 19th Century. The people we now call Palestinians were the native inhabitants of the whole region of Palestine. They've given up 78% of it.
Yes, there was a certain period when Jews were a small minority; so what?
If we're using "Palestinian" to mean someone from Palestine, why wouldn't we count a family from the First Aliyah as Palestinian? The Second Aliyah? Holocaust refugees?
Some who now identify as Palestinian also immigrated during the economically prosperous Mandatory Palestine period. Would you say they're not real Palestinians, because they joined too recently? How about Arafat, who doesn't have a "pure" unbroken Levantine lineage (being born in Cairo)?
Should American families who have only been here for one century have fewer rights, perhaps less voting power, than families who have been here for multiple centuries?
That "certain period" was over a thousand years. For at least hundreds of years until the about 1900, the region of Palestine was inhabited by the people we now call the Palestinians, not by the ancestors of the Israelis.
> Some who now identify as Palestinian also immigrated during the economically prosperous Mandatory Palestine period.
Relatively few. Not enough to have much of an impact on the overall Arab population of Palestine. This is radically different than the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which was a mass influx of people with the explicit intention of taking over control of the territory.
> Should American families who have only been here for one century have fewer rights
I think you would accept that the following two situations would be very different:
1. People immigrate to the US, settle down, send their kids to school, and eventually become American citizens.
2. A large group of people enter the US with the explicitly stated goal of founding their own country - a country in which they want there to be as few Americans as possible. They have their own militias and operate completely outside the control of any government that the people of the United States control. Just to make this scenario more realistic, we can say that the US is currently under the rule of a foreign empire, so that Americans have no say in their own government. The foreign settlers start taking over large parts of the country. Finally, the UN says that the US should be split in two, giving half of it to the foreign settlers. The foreign settlers agree, but Americans think it's unfair and don't agree. War erupts. The foreign settlers, based on superior political organization and funding from abroad, quickly establish massive military dominance over the Americans, and go on to conquer 78% of the United States, expelling 80% of the American population from the territory they control.
> Relatively few. Not enough to have much of an impact on the overall Arab population of Palestine.
The numbers are largely unknown for border crossings. But the point is that it's a gross oversimplification to say that Palestinians are native to Palestine (even those born outside?) while Jews are not. The intentional naming collision encourages this oversimplification.
And if we move past the rather old-fashioned idea that more recent immigrants don't count, the more relevant figure is that there was a (slight) Jewish majority within the partition plan borders.
> mass influx of people with the explicit intention of taking over control of the territory
Many of them simply had no choice, having been driven out of other MENA states.
> with the explicitly stated goal of founding their own country
I don't think that it's wrong to legally immigrate, regardless of any statehood aspirations, or that such immigrants are less deserving of any rights than other residents.
> The numbers are largely unknown for border crossings.
Actually, we do have a very good idea. The demographics of Palestine were studied at the time (e.g., by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry), and are well understood. Arab population growth in Palestine was almost entirely due to simple births minus deaths, and was similar to population growth in other Arab countries of the time.
> But the point is that it's a gross oversimplification to say that Palestinians are native to Palestine (even those born outside?) while Jews are not.
Which Jews? There were Jews who were native to Palestine. They made up a few percent of the population of the region. But the overwhelming majority of the people who founded Israel were recent immigrants. The first Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was from Płońsk, Poland. The first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann was from Belarus. Golda Meir was from Odessa and grew up in Milwaukee. You can go down the list. They're almost all like that. Heck, the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was from Budapest, and barely ever set foot in Palestine (only once, I think).
> The intentional naming collision encourages this oversimplification.
The reason for the naming collision is simple: the Palestinians are the people who lived in Palestine before the Zionists came in, took over most of it and established Israel.
> Many of them simply had no choice, having been driven out of other MENA states.
No, that happened in the years after the founding of Israel, as a consequence of it. It turns out that kicking out hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes and loudly proclaiming that you're doing so in the name of the Jewish people is a really effective way of stoking antisemitism in Arab countries.
> I don't think that it's wrong to legally immigrate, regardless of any statehood aspirations, or that such immigrants are less deserving of any rights than other residents.
If you read the scenario I sketched out above and think it's the same as everyday immigration and is okay, I don't know what to tell you. It's like calling the European settlers who drove out Native Americans "immigrants."
> Arab population growth in Palestine was almost entirely due to simple births minus deaths
Do you have a source for this? I don't think that matches the British census data, unless we postulate that the birth rate somehow skyrocketed.
> There were Jews who were native to Palestine. They made up a few percent of the population of the region
What do you mean by "native"? What's special about the particular time period you're referencing? The Palestinian identity didn't exist then.
> the Palestinians are the people who lived in Palestine before the Zionists came in
There were always Jews in Palestine. Even if we're zooming in on a period where their numbers were small (and I'm not sure why), we shouldn't be saying things that erase these Jews from history.
> as a consequence of it
I think most of us would agree that there's no justification for ethnic cleansing. (I don't condone the cases of that done by Jewish militias in some towns either.)
> and think it's the same as everyday immigration
Not what I said at all. The point is that, in both this analogy and the actual topic of immigration to the Levant, it shouldn't matter how many centuries a family has lived in a region.
> Do you have a source for this? I don't think that matches the British census data, unless we postulate that the birth rate somehow skyrocketed.
It's in the official report of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry, which did actually use demographic data gathered by the British. It's not that births skyrocketed. It's mainly that infant mortality went down. This exact same phenomenon has played out throughout most of the world at some point in the last 200 years, and it typically leads to a population boom (until families adjust and start having fewer children).
> What do you mean by "native"? What's special about the particular time period you're referencing? The Palestinian identity didn't exist then.
We don't have to get into a big theoretical discussion of what "native" means. When the Zionist movement began, there were already people living in Palestine. Most of them had deep roots there, going back many hundreds of years (or more). The Zionist movement was a European movement that aimed to colonize Palestine - to settle it and establish a state for European Jews. This is basically very similar to what happened in North America with European colonists and Native Americans. There are particularities to each case, but the basic dynamic between the existing ("native") population and the group that's coming in to displace them is the same.
The fact that Palestinians didn't have a firm national identity in 1900 isn't a justification for taking their land and expelling them.
> There were always Jews in Palestine.
This is a red herring. The fact that there was a tiny group of Jews living in Palestine does not have much of anything to do with our discussion. We're talking about Zionism, a movement among European Jews to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
> I don't condone the cases of that done by Jewish militias in some towns either.
Without the ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist militias (and the IDF, after it was officially founded), there would be no Israel. The entire basis for Israel's existence is the creation of a large Jewish majority in a substantial portion of Palestine. That happened through the mass ethnic cleansing campaign in 1947-48.
> Not what I said at all. The point is that, in both this analogy and the actual topic of immigration to the Levant ...
We're not discussing "immigration to the Levant." We're talking about an organized effort to take over a foreign territory, against the will of the people who live there.
> This is basically very similar to what happened in North America with European colonists and Native Americans
This is a complicated analogy. There was no sovereign, so noone to decide on an immigration policy and no arbiter of legality.
Some settler groups purchased land and had good relations with natives. We don't tend to deem those problematic merely because people relocated and didn't look like the other people living there at the time. Many settlements were of course problematic for other reasons.
A closer analogy would be black families legally relocating to safer white neighborhoods, "against the will of the people who live there". If a neighborhood flipped from majority-white to majority-black, and black politicians gained power, would you say the white community gave up something that was rightfully theirs?
> Without the ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist militias (and the IDF, after it was officially founded), there would be no Israel. The entire basis for Israel's existence is the creation of a large Jewish majority in a substantial portion of Palestine. That happened through the mass ethnic cleansing campaign in 1947-48.
This isn't accurate at all. There was already a Jewish majority in the proposed Jewish state by the time of the partition plan. Hundreds of thousands of additional Holocaust survivors were expected. Ethnic cleansing of Jews from surrounding Arab states also greatly contributed to what became a much stronger Jewish majority.
> against the will of the people who live there
I don't believe a demographic majority has some inherent right to deny access to minorities who wish to legally immigrate.
The fact that you think Zionist colonization of Palestine was analogous to black families moving into white neighborhoods is just crazy. I don't think anyone who has ever read about this history could sincerely think that those two scenarios are even remotely comparable.
You're making a big deal of the existence of a "sovereign" - in this case, an imperial overlord that ruled without any democratic accountability, and which implemented policies that were almost universally hated by the local population they ruled over. But because the British Empire supported Jewish settlement of Palestine, you view that as just fine - regardless of what the people who actually lived there thought.
> I don't believe a demographic majority has some inherent right to deny access to minorities who wish to legally immigrate.
That "legality" was established by an undemocratic regime that ruled directly against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population. You're setting up a morality here in which the European imperial powers had a moral right to dictate to their captive colonial populations who would be allowed to live where, and to force them to accept the political / demographic takeover of their lands by a foreign people. And what's more, you think it would be immoral for the colonial population to resist what would effectively be an invasion by a foreign people. Why? Because the imperial overlord said the invasion was legal.
But if you're being morally consistent, you'll have to now say that the Israelis have no moral right to prevent the millions of Palestinians who live scattered across the world from immigrating to Israel. I'm sure you'll quibble that Israeli law doesn't allow that immigration, but that's not a moral objection. If the Palestinians had been allowed to run their own affairs in the 1920s-40s, instead of being ruled over by a foreign power, they would have passed laws preventing Jewish immigration, just as Israel now prevents Palestinian immigration. If you're morally consistent, you'll accept that Israel should allow itself to become a majority-Palestinian country.
> The fact that you think Zionist colonization of Palestine was analogous to black families moving into white neighborhoods is just crazy. I don't think anyone who has ever read about this history could sincerely think that those two scenarios are even remotely comparable.
An analogy is not an equivalence; one can make meaningful analogies involving aliens or unicorns. You have not provided any actual argument for why the analogy might be flawed.
> you'll have to now say that the Israelis have no moral right to prevent the millions of Palestinians who live scattered across the world from immigrating to Israel
Open borders are probably morally optimal, at least theorists like Joseph Carens would say so. You seem to be holding Israel to a standard of moral sainthood, or expecting me to. No state decides immigration (or any other) policies based on what is morally optimal.
> That "legality" was established by an undemocratic regime
We can just as well pretend that there was no sovereign power, only anarchy. When there's no legal argument for blocking immigration, we're left with only moral arguments, and I don't think a demographic majority has any inherent moral right to deny the freedom of movement of select minorities.
> You have not provided any actual argument for why the analogy might be flawed.
You really want me to explain to you why black families moving into a white-only neighborhood is a ridiculous analogy for Zionist settlers moving in to Palestine with the goal of transforming it into a Jewish state?
I'm surprised that this has to be explained, but here goes.
In your analogy, blacks are an oppressed minority inside the United States who are merely exercising their freedom to live in whatever neighborhood they want. They are not foreign invaders coming in to take over the country, expel the native population and establish an ethnically exclusive state for themselves.
In Palestine, the goal of the Zionists were essentially invaders. They had the goal of transforming it from an Arab country into a country for European Jews, where Jews would have unquestioned supremacy and control over the state. In Palestine, the Zionists were not some oppressed minority. They were much wealthier than the Arabs. They had enormous financial backing from the outside in order to buy up land from absentee landlords, expel the tenant farmers, and establish Jewish settlements. They were backed by the imperial overlord, the British Empire. The Arabs had no power of self-governance. They were ruled over by a foreign power, the British Empire, which imposed a policy on them that meant that a foreign people - European Jews - would take over the country. When the Arabs rose up, they were brutally suppressed by the British army, with the help of Zionist militias.
This is what you're comparing to a few black families moving into a white neighborhood. It's beyond absurd.
You're assuming it actually is genocide. And you assume it's Israeli actions rather than Hamas actions. Hamas sets people up to be killed, points at Israel, the world blames Israel.
Unfortunately the evidence is overwhelming, without compelling counter arguments, to the point of fact. To the point of the UN investigators concluding it is genocide. Denial is unbelievable. All that is left is justification.
> To the point of the UN investigators concluding it is genocide
This is a really unconvincing appeal to authority when we consider the three particular individuals behind the report, as well as broad anti-Israel bias in the UN.
Feel free to replace 'UN investigators' with any of the other people or organizations who have been forced to recognize that the evidence is overwhelming, even against their best interest. Appealing to no authority except the evidence here. Once that gets placed on the table and forced into consideration, the only defenses are irrationality, conspiracy theories and claiming special knowledge.
Which of them would you claim is neutral? Amnesty International, who opened their report with "On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive", as if nothing else happened on 7 October? And then decided that the usual standard for inferring specific intent was "overly cramped".
> Appealing to no authority except the evidence here
You haven't mentioned evidence here, only authorities.
fyi, netanyahu signed follow up to oslo agreements, he handed over more areas of west bank to PA and he voted for disengagement from Gaza. He also expressed support for 2 state solution. Gaza disengagement was voted for and executed by Likud.
The only one who pursued 2 state solution is Israel.
There is a video from 2001 of Netanyahu explaining in private (he didn't know he was being filmed) exactly how he intentionally sabotaged the Oslo peace process during the 1990s.[0]
> he handed over more areas of west bank to PA
As Netanyahu explains in the video, he only handed over a small piece of territory, in exchange for a letter from the US saying that Israel could define "security zones" in the West Bank that would remain under Israeli control. That allowed Netanyahu to declare everything a security zone, blocking all future withdrawals. Netanyahu boasts in the video that he gave up a tiny piece of land to end the piece process and prevent there from ever being a Palestinian state.
In the years since, Netanyahu has repeatedly boasted that he's the one who prevented the creation of a Palestinian state. The founding charter of his party literally says that everything from the river to the sea should be Israel.
He didn't sabotage oslo peace process he found a loophole that allowed him not to withdrawal from some of the territory in west bank prior to final settlement of borders.
video from 2001. Bibi is not PM for 2 years already, and in 2000 there was camp david which could give palestinians state (they refused it, and started intifada instead). there were more negotiations that palestinians refused.
bibi boasting about something ? sure he does. he wants to appeal to electors. doesn't mean that he sabotaged anything.
and on topic of killing oslo peace process, i'll suggest you this lovely document from just after camp david that describes how palestians worked on implementing it: http://israelvisit.co.il/BehindTheNews/WhitePaper.htm . and in general to review second intifada
> He didn't sabotage oslo peace process he found a loophole that allowed him not to withdrawal from some of the territory in west bank prior to final settlement of borders.
He literally says in the video that that loophole enabled him to sabotage the entire peace process. Netanyahu has always opposed any "final settlement of borders." He does not accept the idea of a Palestinian state in any form, in any borders. Refusing to implement the agreed-upon withdrawals was a way of making sure the Oslo peace process would break down.
> video from 2001. Bibi is not PM for 2 years already
In the video, Netanyahu is describing what he did as Prime Minister.
> bibi boasting about something ? sure he does. he wants to appeal to electors. doesn't mean that he sabotaged anything.
"Don't believe your lying eyes and ears." Netanyahu is on video (which he doesn't know) candidly describing how he intentionally derailed the peace process. He's said throughout his career that he opposes a Palestinian state. He campaigned viciously against Rabin for signing Oslo. His party's charter explicitly rejects the 2-state solution. But you want me to believe that despite all that, Netanyahu actually supports the 2-state solution?
There isn't a real solution. Just an opportunity for a few years of peace where people can do the important things in life. That is no small thing though. The danger is in chasing some quixotic nationalist dream. That is never ever going to work out.
Well the real solution is to have a single state and assimilation of some kind, so that people can coexist. It’s possible. Israel itself demonstrates this since nearly 30% of the population isn’t Jewish. But I think a peaceful two state coexistence is unlikely with people who chant “from the River to sea”, which implies the complete erasure of the state of Israel.
> Israel itself demonstrates this since nearly 30% of the population isn’t Jewish
Israel also has a law that says that the right of self-determination only belongs to its Jewish citizens- it calls itself the Jewish state. I would be entirely for a one-state solution with equal rights for everyone, but that thing cannot be Israel.
Not sure which states you refer to (and obviously you don't know either, you just mean it as a lazy retort) but it's not the point. The point is that Israel is programmatically a state for the Jews, and therefore Israel cannot be a state for everyone. There is btw nothing wrong with it- western nations can afford the luxury of being open to everyone because they are massive and ethnically homogeneous enough to be able to afford it. There's some hypocrisy or wishful thinking at the bottom of this, but doesn't matter. The fault of Israel is not that of wanting a state for the Jews, is thinking of colonising another people's land do obtain it, and then not stopping but keeping taking more and crushing all resistance with violence.
The only reason Arab states are ethnically homogeneous is that they ethnically clean minorities. Ask any Christian Lebanese. Or any Jew that you might happen to find in Lebanon, or Syria, or Iraq, or Yemen, or Tunis. Or the Kurds, or the Yazidi, or the Druze, or even the Alawites.
Not sure why you want so much to talk about Arab states, but anyway, just in the spirit of conversation- personally I've observed that ME countries, with all their troubles, seem to be much more religiously (and probably ethnically) diverse than European countries. I come from an extremely homogeneous country from both aspects, it's funny when a country made exclusively by white Catholics talks about the intolerance of places where three or four different religions and minorities have coexisted for hundreds of years.
The more of the Hamas stuff Israel breaks now the longer they will have peace later.
And you think they should just walk away from the hostages? If Hamas released the hostages the world would soon make Israel quit. But as it stands why in the world should they be expected to give up?
> Why would we expect any desirable outcome in this hypothetical though?
Ending unconditional US support is the only thing that motivates Israel to seek an end other than by genocide, which is a necessary (but not sufficient, on its own) condition for any desirable outcome.
Either withdraw from all the territory that doesn't legally belong to it (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, plus the parts of Syria and Lebanon it occupies), or keep the territory and make all the inhabitants equal citizens.
Syria lost the Golan Heights in a war that Israel initiated (Israel claimed it was preemptive self-defense, but that's highly questionable). And then in the last year, Israel has taken a bunch more territory in Syria, just because it can. Syria didn't do anything to Israel.
The whole thing about ethnic cleansing is really turning history on its head. The reason why Israel is hated by its neighbors is because Israel was founded by European settlers who conquered and ethnically cleansed the land.
In the six-day war, Syria attacked Israel before the opposite, so it's pretty misleading to say "in a war that Israel initiated".
Sure, Israel struck Egypt first, but Syria is not Egypt. And calling it a preemptive strike should be pretty uncontroversial considering Egypt's naval blockade, expulsion of peacekeepers, deployment of ~100k troops near Israel's border, and Nasser being pretty explicit about his intentions.
> 1. Egypt had no intention of attacking Israel (as we now know for certain).
Where are you getting this idea from? A leader with no intention of attacking Israel would not have made statements like
"We will not accept any possibility of co-existence with Israel. [...] The war with Israel is in effect since 1948." (Nasser, May 28, 1967)
and then proceeded to amass ~100k troops near the border, or in Nasser's words: "The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel ..."
As far as preemptive strikes go, it really doesn't get any clearer than this.
Not to mention the naval blockade which was in itself an act of war, making the question of who started the war rather moot.
The internal deliberations of the Egyptian government at the time are all publicly known now. The Egyptian leadership feared that Israel was planning an attack on Syria, which is why they mobilized their own army. They had no intention of attacking Israel.
The Israelis had been planning their own attack on Egypt for years. Ben Gurion had aggressive, expansionist foreign policy views, which the crisis with Egypt allowed him to implement.
The Israeli public was afraid of Egypt, but the leadership was extremely confident that Israel had massive military superiority over the Egyptians and would rapidly win any war. That's also what American intelligence thought, and what they told the Israelis.
As for Egyptian public statements about Israel, remember the political context: Israel had been founded 19 years earlier through the mass theft of Palestinian land and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israel had carried out terrorist bombings in Cairo in the early 1950s in order to try to politically destabilize the country, and had invaded Egypt in 1956, as part of a conspiracy with Britain and France to take over the Suez Canal. The Egyptians had good reasons to view the Israelis as enemies and loudly complain, but we now know they had no intention of attacking.
Your position boils down to an unverifiable claim about Nasser's mental state. Egypt had a plan (Operation Dawn) to invade Israel. Nasser had not approved it yet, but that doesn't mean he wasn't going to.
Even if Nasser planned to wait and induce Israel to fire the first shot, how would Israel know when Egypt's actions, as well as many of their statements, were perfectly consistent with a military preparing to immanently invade?
Taking this to the extreme, if Russia launched a silo of ICBMs targeting DC, and it turned out that they were all convincing decoys with no payload, would you say the US "initiated the war" for responding with real munitions?
Realistically, pre-emptive strikes don't get any clearer than this. If one objects to this pre-emptive, one would pretty much have reject the notion of pre-emptive strikes categorically. There can be a legal argument that pre-emptive strikes never technically fall under then narrow language of Article 51, but that's more of a strict textualist argument and not a pragmatist one.
It's not at all unverifiable. There is a lot known about the Egyptian government's internal deliberations at the time, such as the fact that they feared Israel was planning to imminently attack Syria.
> Taking this to the extreme, if Russia launched a silo of ICBMs targeting DC
Your analogy has already gone off the rails, because Israel held massive military superiority over Egypt. The Americans and the Israelis both knew that Israel would rapidly win any war with Egypt.
The military escalation that preceded the 1967 war was triggered by Israel's own attack on Egypt in November 1966. Israel was pursuing an extremely aggressive foreign policy. It took actions that caused a massive increase in tensions, but then claimed those actions gave it the right to launch a preemptive war (though actually, when the war broke out, the Israeli government just chose to lie and claim that Egypt had attacked Israel first).
> The Americans and the Israelis both knew that Israel would rapidly win any war with Egypt.
I don't think that's accurate, but I'm not sure what it has to do with the discussion anyway. The point was just that the instigator of a war isn't necessarily the side that technically fires the first munition.
> Israel's own attack on Egypt in November 1966
What do you mean? There was no Israeli attack on Egypt at that time.
> then claimed those actions gave it the right to launch a preemptive war
Not sure what you mean. Israel's justification was the naval blockade and Egypt's apparent preparations for an invasion, nothing else.
It is accurate. There are many declassified documents from the time that discuss Israeli vs. Arab military capabilities. They come to the conclusion that the Israelis enjoyed massive superiority. Here's one [0]:
“The judgment of the intelligence community is that Israeli ground forces 'can maintain internal security, defend successfully against simultaneous Arab attacks on all fronts, launch limited attacks simultaneously on all fronts, or hold on any three fronts while mounting successfully a major offensive on the fourth.'”
Here's another [1]:
“They would try to destroy the Egyptian airforce first and thus gain ability for a tank strike to take Sinai and the Straits. Secretary McNamara said the Israelis think they can win in 3–4 days; but he thinks it would be longer—7 to 10 days.”
> What do you mean? There was no Israeli attack on Egypt at that time.
I mistyped. Israel attacked Jordan in November 1966.
> Israel's justification was the naval blockade and Egypt's apparent preparations for an invasion, nothing else.
Israel actually cycled through a number of different justifications. Their initial justification was just a pure lie: they claimed that Egypt had attacked first.
The theory that Israel could make up for its massive numerical disadvantages with some better training, tactics and morale, with some caveats ("If this assumption should prove wrong, Israel might well be in trouble ..."), doesn't really match your claim that "Israel held massive military superiority over Egypt".
You're not reading what they're writing. They all were predicting a rapid Israeli victory, within mere days. They believed that Israel could take on all the Arab states at once and still win.
If you want a more colloquial version of the US assessment, this is what Lyndon Johnson told the Israelis before the war (paraphrased in the official US diplomatic records):
“The US assessment does not agree with that of the Israelis: our best judgment is that no military attack on Israel is imminent, and, moreover, if Israel is attacked, our judgment is that the Israelis would lick them.”
Nah, history doesn't fully back you up there....Israel decided to face off with Egypt after Egypt decided to stop allowing ships in. Syria then decided to try and get in on this action all on their own.
In May–June 1967, in preparation for conflict, the Israeli government planned to confine the confrontation to the Egyptian front, whilst taking into account the possibility of some fighting on the Syrian front.
Syrian front 5–8 June
Syria largely stayed out of the conflict for the first four days.
False Egyptian reports of a crushing victory against the Israeli army and forecasts that Egyptian forces would soon be attacking Tel Aviv influenced Syria's decision to enter the war
In the months prior to the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967, tensions again became dangerously heightened: Israel reiterated its post-1956 position that another Egyptian closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping would be a definite casus belli. In May 1967, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would again be closed to Israeli vessels. He subsequently mobilized the Egyptian military into defensive lines along the border with Israel and ordered the immediate withdrawal of all UNEF personnel.
On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities in what is known as Operation Focus. Egyptian forces were caught by surprise, and nearly all of Egypt's military aerial assets were destroyed, giving Israel air supremacy. Simultaneously, the Israeli military launched a ground offensive into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. After some initial resistance, Nasser ordered an evacuation of the Sinai Peninsula; by the sixth day of the conflict, Israel had occupied the entire Sinai Peninsula. Jordan, which had entered into a defense pact with Egypt just a week before the war began, did not take on an all-out offensive role against Israel, but launched attacks against Israeli forces to slow Israel's advance. On the fifth day, Syria joined the war by shelling Israeli positions in the north.
Israel need US protection and money. If you take that away, the settlers go home. If they don't, then yes, I'm sure the US can defeat Israel in armed conflict.
I think Americans are done hearing about Zionist invented fictional scenarios. The reality is that Palestine has been ethnically cleansed by Zionists. The other reality is that young Americans see Israel as our enemy, so there will be no support in the near future.
Returning Palestinian land to Palestinians isn’t “ethnic cleansing”. It’s righting a brutal crime against humanity. It’s 100% on Zionists for creating this situation.
This is all on the Zionists to resolve. They created this situation and owe it to the world to clean it up. I don’t see anything wrong with Europe taking in the Zionists. It’s literally the birthplace of Zionism.
And what is your proposal for those with no other country of origin - either because they were born in Israel, were ethnically cleansed by their previous country, or their previous country no longer exists?
I’m not Muslim nor in Hamas. I’m speaking as an American who wants a total removal of Zionist influence from my government based on Zionist actions both in Palestine and the US.
Are there not "Jewish only" roads and areas in the occupied West Bank? Do Jewish Israelis not use "From the river to the sea" as well? Is Israel not attacking several different countries in the region? Let me guess, that's different.
> Are there not "Jewish only" roads and areas in the occupied West Bank
Not really, there are security measures connected to citizenship and vehicle registration, not "Jewish only" roads. Jews are not allowed in Area A, though.
> Is Israel not attacking several different countries in the region?
Not really, it responded to several attacks against it. Do you expect Israel to tolerate attacks with no response? States that gave up on trying to destroy Israel, like Egypt and Jordan, have not been attacked by Israel since.
> Do Jewish Israelis not use "From the river to the sea" as well?
"Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty" is not nearly as problematic as "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab".
> there are security measures connected to citizenship and vehicle registration
Which in practice means there are Jewish-only roads.
> Jews are not allowed in Area A, though.
It's the Israeli government that bans Israelis from entering Area A. The Palestinians don't ban Jews from entering. I personally know Jewish people who have visited Area A.
> Not really, it responded to several attacks against it.
Israel has launched unprovoked attacks on Iran, Syria and most recently Qatar. Qatar has no intentions at all of destroying Israel, and Syria barely even has a government.
> "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty" is not nearly as problematic as "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab".
Leaving aside the fact that you distorted the Palestinian chant (which ends, "Palestine will be free"), the Israeli version is much more problematic, because Israel is actually implementing it. The Palestinians have a vague hope that all of historic Palestine will be free one day. The Israelis actually control all of historic Palestine, subject millions of people there to permanent military rule with no rights, have murdered over 60,000 Palestinians in the last two years, and are systematically stealing land in the West Bank. There's no comparison at all.
It was literally Palestinian land. European Zionists invaded and encouraged Arab Jewish mass immigration. The founding texts of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration and Nakba are all very well documented.
Invaded what state? Mandatory Palestine? It sounds like you're just referring to (mostly legal) Jewish immigration. Would you apply the same label to Arab immigrants such as Arafat, or is it only an invasion when Jews immigrate?
- The nakba happened in 1947.
- Arab armies invaded the Jewish state in 1947.
- Jews did not invade any Arab state in 1947.
- The Arab armies invaded the Jewish state in 1947.
You keep deflecting from Israel’s genocide and land theft. The fact is most of the world is anti-Zionist and Israel can’t survive after the boomers are gone. You may not like it, but that’s the reality of the situation.
Disregarding/waiving away what happens to 10 million people because 'they or their grandparents are/were evil' IS far down the path to its own evil.
Some of the worst atrocities have been committed by people who knew they were in the right, or people that were passing judgement on others on a mass scale. That you have zero reflection on it and just jump to 'zionism' is scary af, not gonna lie. I've lost a shit ton of karma hoping you would get any kind of self awareness. But you are all in on 'fuck 10 million people'. But like I said, at least you are honest that you are fine with whatever happens to millions of people, as long as they are people you judge unworthy of caring. Most pro-palestinians don't have the nerve to clearly state their intentions and are just downvoting me.
Agreed. You don’t even need to take the UN’s word for it (but should). The IDF themselves have posted endless videos of war crimes and Israeli politicians make genocidal statements regularly.
Air defense alone isn't really a sustainable military strategy against endless rocket attacks. It would become even less viable if Israel lost US military aid, lifted the blockade, and/or stopped bombing things like rocket factories.
> how did they manage to average less than one dead per bomb dropped in urban/suburban environments?
By targeting first responders, jornalists, paramedics, and any professionals able to properly rescue wounded, dead and count the causalties, making available numbers a gross underestimate on the true death toll. Just a few days ago we all watched a staircase full of working first responders and jornalists being blown by israeli tank fire.
People keep saying that but nobody proposes a meaningful more precise approach. There are plenty of military planners in nations hostile to Israel, if there is a better answer why are they not pointing it out to make Israel look bad?
And look at Israel vs Hezbollah--Hezbollah makes little use of human shield tactics, casualties run in the ballpark of 90% combatant. Same force, same type of opponent, what's the difference in Gaza? Hamas makes very heavy use of human shield tactics and worse. We see 30-50% combatants. That implies that the majority of the deaths are because of Hamas.
"There are plenty of military planners in nations hostile to Israel, if there is a better answer why are they not pointing it out to make Israel look bad?"
Why would the military in countries hostile to Israel provide Israel with advice or plans on defeating their enemies?
Those booby traps also kill Gazan children. Did you see that recent video of the Gazan girl getting blown to bits? They tried to pin it on Israel, but it was a Hamas IED. That's why there was a camera pointed at it.
It matters because those structures have been converted from peoples' homes to weapons of war. And those weapons are dangerous to both Israeli soldiers and to Gazan citizens.
Many of the dead children pinned on Israel are the result of the bobby trapped buildings. This actually makes sense in Muslim media, where culturally those killed by either side are considered martyrs and afforded the gifts of heaven. But it makes no sense in Western media where human life is supposedly valued.
Do you care about the safety and security of people in Israel? What would you do if a fundamentalist group shot thousands of rockets into your town over a decade?
What would you do if you were expelled from your homeland at gunpoint by foreign settlers, and then 19 years later, your refugee camp was conquered by the very same people, who then ruled over you using brute military force for nearly 60 years, with no end in sight?
Based on your argument, why don’t the Gazans leave? Would you not consider Gaza to be a bad neighborhood?
The answer for both sides is that both sides have historical claim to the land, and there is no better neighborhood to live in for either of the sides anyway.
I accept that argument. If I were Gazan I’d leave too, if I could.
But Gazans can’t leave (the borders have been closed for years now), while Israelis can emigrate whenever they like. So on an individual basis, every Israeli has made a choice to accept living in the bad neighborhood, whereas the Gazans have no choice but to make the best of the bad situation.
The many Jews and ex-Israelis here in the NYC suburbs seem to find it pretty safe. My neighbor just sold his Tel Aviv condo he's owned for 40 years -- he seems to believe he's never going back.
What would you do if you were a southern governor responding to a slave revolt? It's the same kind of question. I wouldn't build my society on ethnic supremacy and then seek to maintain that through force.
It can either end in the death of one side, most probably Palestinians, or in peace agreement.
Currently there is war, peace is out of the window. First step is to stop the war, second step is to make both side actually negotiate.
It was attempted by Clinton a while ago but assassinations from mossad and hamas prevented the process to success.
To be honest, politicians have failed us too many times for my sad brain to believe that there will be a good outcome.
Most probably Israel society will keep radicalizing itself, Palestinians will be killed and Gaza bombed/annexed leading to the death of both Palestinian and Israeli civilization. Palestinian will be all dead and Israeli will have become in all manner what they initially sought to destroy, literal nazi.
I’d even bet that death by zyklon is more human that seeing your family and yourself getting slowly hungered to death. And contrary to nazi Germany, no Israeli can pretend to not know what’s going on.
To an extent sure but Israel 's methods of stopping them are the issue. They are using total war which causes suffering disproportionately to innocent people
No, normal people understand very well that they are. They are the children of Palestinians who were murdered or ethnically-cleansed in the Nakba and then locked up in an open-air prison. They are the resistance to zionist-colonialism. You obviously can't describe them as such, since you are a Zionist for whom such primitive smears are useful propaganda designed to deny them the internationally recognized right to armed resistance.
It's the same liberal psychology behind UNSC Resolution 1701 in 2006 where Hezbollah pinkie promised to disarm. And now look at all the dead bodies that this liberal solution caused 18 years later. Of course the same types propose the same solutions again with no sense of shame as to how much death it causes.
The actual durable solution is something like how Sri Lanka defeated the Tamil Tigers, or how Russia defeated the insurgency in Chechnya. Which is roughly the same as what Israel is doing in Gaza now. But Israel is playing on hard mode because the international community has given such a morale boost to Hamas, prolonging the time until surrender.
> morale boost to Hamas, prolonging the time until surrender.
I think this is key. The protest must condemn Hamas while supporting innocent people. Protests that support Hamas as some kind of justified resistance just prolongates everything. Hamas doesn't care for its people. It has an ideological system that glorifies death. Death is just a means to an end for them.
This is the problem of viewing things black and white. The whole conflict is varying shades of Grey.
> 18 year causality stretch without a single critical remark about israels constant desintegration of palestinian civic life.
Good job. The feat of not blaming the obvious aggressor is something very few accomplish.
Israel has control over water, electricty, gas, road, "law enforcement", etc. and used it for decades to push palestinians out of their homes. The last violent events are a result of long oppression and netanjahu establishing a theocracy. Only focusing on extremes and make conclusions on such a basis is something dumb people do, dont you agree?
Israel is clearly to blame, when you know a little more nuanced history and consider its long time dominant position in that conflict.
> international community has given such a morale boost to Hamas
By ignoring israels obvious long running now openly genocidal master plan, you are doing the same.
Well, you seem to be confusing Gaza with South Lebanon, which is what UNSC Resolution 1701, and the 18 years since then, pertains to. There was zero aggression from Israel, they got attacked unprovoked by Hezbollah on October 8th, 2023.
Hezbollah are supported by Iran, who don't get mentioned enough in this conflict. Iran is quite happy to maintain the conflict at the cost of Palestinian and Lebanese lives.
> It doesn't seem like a path toward a real solution.
As long as the Dahiya doctrine persists, it won't be. But that's an Israeli problem - their disproportionate response has been exploited for years. Hamas is fine letting Israel commit as many war crimes as it takes to satisfy their leadership, it very clearly hasn't changed tactics in recent years. The cost to Israeli international credibility seems to be "worth it" in their eyes.
So, if Israel wants peace they first have to stop escalation. But even if Hamas was defeated, we know that wouldn't be the end of things. Next the Druze has to be defended, which would result in a very justified annexation of south Syria and repeat of the same genocidal conditions in Gaza. They would also attempt to unseat power in Yemen, and then embroil America in an unwinnable war against Iran to sustain a true hegemony.
