Angry Israel/Palestine Ranting Thread.

I think where you are coming unstuck is in the idea that there are two in any way comparable 'sides' to this conflict, the power balance is wildly tilted in multiple axis. On the one hand you have Israel which is a first world country with a stable democratic leadership, a fairly strong economy and a humongous, in terms of their population, conventional military - with tanks, a navy, jets and nuclear missiles. On the other 'side' you have a collection of people divided into two groups already. Half of them live in a giant slum that is often 50% composed of perpetual rubble, they are allowed no police force to keep order and their leaders that do rise up from the rubble are regularly assassinated, their military strength consists of largely hand held rockets smuggled in through a firmly enforced blockade. A child growing up in Gaza, I suspect more often than not with a dead father, has a very small set of life outcomes available to them, in US terms it is like the stereotypical ghetto child x100. Contrast that with a child growing up in Israel who has the entire universe of possibilities that coming from a first world country allows. There aren't really two sides in this conflict there is a side that has power and choices and a people that have neither. You can see one example of this supremely unbalanced power dynamic in the widely differing casualty rates, despite Israel apparently turning the other cheek they regularly kill around 500x to 1000x more Palestinians than are killed in return. I didn't even get into the concrete and sizeable backing Israel has enjoyed and continues to enjoy from the worlds most powerful economy & military in the US.

In answer to your second point, Israel is very good at the whole pretending to turn the other cheek to the world because what often goes unreported is the daily aggression of 'settlement' construction and expansion on Palestinian land. While it might seem like Israel occasionally isn't killing Palestinians or stoutly ignoring rocket fire more often than not they are arbitrarily stealing more and more Palestinian land in the manner of colonial era Europeans. This activity not only directly takes land from Palestinian's who were using it for other purposes it also undermines the future viability of a two states solution. Settlement is perpetuated entirely by aggressive zealots who are just as genocidal in their rhetoric as Hamas, but they don't need to fire rockets because they have tanks, bulldozers and are allowed concrete (plus they have an entire professional army defending them).

Just so we're clear it's not anti-semitism to point out the depth to which Israel has now sunk either. Israel is not the Jewish people as a whole and the state of Israel is functioning modern state so it has its own internal dissent that will often sound a lot like the things you read in this thread. There are people in Israel very much aware that their safe haven has transformed slowly into a modern day version of apartheid era South Africa and that the current leadership is perhaps the most dangerously unhinged that the country has seen. If anything it is pro-Israel to try and fight for a two state solution because the problem with Israel's current powerful dominance in the mid east is that it is fighting hard against long term trends in economics, technological advancement and demographics. At some point not too long from now the US won't be the world's largest super power, eventually the Palestinians will outnumber the Israelis and also, despite the efforts of the US, Israel's neighbours will one day likely have the same nuclear misery button that Israel has. Getting a peaceful outcome sorted out now while Israel has the upper hand in negotiations is the pro-Israel solution.

I forget, how did that end?

My problem with this argument:

is that that didn't happen in a vacuum, but everyone wants to pretend it did. Heavy Israeli sanctions are a response to Palestinian terrorism.

I agree that, just like "Ignore rockets forever," this is a poor long-term strategy because it has no plausible happy ending, nor really an endpoint of any kind. It doesn't solve problems in a way that will reduce militant sentiment or terrorist action, and will likely exacerbate it. But I am again uncomfortable with this blasé attitude toward Palestinian misconduct. They should not be let off the hook for bad behavior just because Israel also does bad things. They have agency and should be held accountable for what they choose to do with it.

I'm expressly not trying to indemnify Israel against claims of wrongdoing. But I think the discussion is hypocritical in the extreme.

I addressed this already; I agree that continued Israeli settlement of contested areas is a huge problem and needs to stop.

I agree that criticism of Israel is not the same as antisemitism; I hope I didn't give that impression. Criticism of Israel is perfectly reasonable. I do it routinely. Israel does some Bad Shit that it ought not to do. I do think it is sometimes hard to be sure that criticism is not rooted in antisemitism; it's a problem inherent to the identification of Israel as a Jewish state. It's hard to tell what's legitimate and what's not because you can't know the motivation of the speaker.

I spoke to someone in IRC -- I'll let them ID themselves in case they don't want to be identified -- who said that one possible better strategy is for Israel to start trying to win hearts and minds by rebuilding infrastructure in the areas they're currently crushing the life out of. I like this idea. I do have some concerns about it:

• Will Israeli aid workers be attacked? It's hard to see individuals wanting to do this work, even if they are convinced it's the right thing to do.
  
• Will Palestinian militants just use this aid to mount more effective armed attacks?
  
• Even if you could guarantee everything would go smoothly, this is a really hard sell to the current Israeli electorate, which seems more interested in the "kill everything that moves" alternative.

There's no trust to speak of on other side.

How do you hold Palestinians accountable for anything in the absence of a functioning Palestinian state? That makes no sense to me. The average Palestinian has no control over Hamas or any other militia group, so how do you blame Palestinians per se for their actions? It would be like arguing that Afghanis must be held accountable for the actions of the Taliban.

E: maybe you mean that Hamas should be held accountable for its own actions, which I agree with. That accountability should still be subject to proportionality though. Killing many civilians to kill a few Hamas militiamen does not seem proportionate to me. Stopping rocket attacks is important, but not if you are killing ten times more civilians than you are saving.

Lum, I agree.

I'm not sure how else to phrase this. I see a tendency to treat Palestinian terrorists as an inevitable force of nature, not subject to blame or responsibility, as if there aren't real people choosing to pick up RPGs and fire them into Israeli civilian territory. And I see a tendency to caricature Israel as Ken Bates Boris Badenov a comic book villain who does bad things because MWAHAHAHA as opposed to a rational actor responding to legitimate concerns (independent of whether their response is appropriate, proportional, or wise).

That just seems like a weird point of view to me. I see hamas militants as basically criminals. I don't see the point of getting mad at criminals for being criminals. By all means, arrest or kill them if there's an immediate threat of violence. But scolding them seems besides the point, like scolding a Mexican gang would be. By contrast, the IDF is a branch of a democratic government and should be held to a higher standard of conduct. I expect criminals to behave like criminals; I don't expect governments to kill dozens of bystander in attempting to stop those criminals.

Hamas is the elected government in the area, and they encourage and support the terrorists to do what they do.

Shush brettmcd, the adults are talking.

So the IDF should ask Palestinians how they voted before dropping missiles on their homes, no?

I mean, seriously. Are you somehow labouring under the impression that Hamas beat The Palestinian Pro-Jew People's Party of Peace and Taking it up the Arse From Israel to the post?

The question with proportional response is a fuzzy one. The problem is that while we generally accept 15-20 casualties to kill a militant in Gaza, can you imagine the shitstorm if US police killed 15-20 civilians while trying to kill a terrorist or drug kingpin in the US? Or really anywhere, a 20-1 collateral damage ratio is a shit ratio. It's a shit situation because you also can't just ignore it.

Hamas are huge dicks, but unless we think Iraq was a hugely successful democracy spreading adventure to change a government then we need a different approach than a purely military one to reduce their influence.

I'm still sort of interested in why the 2008 cease fire cannot be restarted by any parties. It was really REALLY successful. And as many dumb things as Romney said about the region, he was almost right on one part: Gaza will be solved mostly by Gaza becoming an awesome place to live with a thriving economy. Happy people don't lob missiles at neighbors. He was wrong that the solution is to make them love the free market, but correct that economics has a lot to do with why Gaza is Gaza and the West Bank isn't.

Obviously the first step is to roll out Google Fiber in Gaza. Problem solved.

That seems like a reasonable position and I don't think I object to it.

Moving along this line of reasoning, Israel recently killed the leader of Hamas' military wing: http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stor...ches-aerial-assaults-gaza-hamas-leader-killed This guy is explicitly a dude who heads up Palestinian terrorism. He is not a political leader. I was told yesterday but do not know for sure that no civilians were killed in the attack that killed him. Israel is nonetheless taking a lot of flak for it, and not just from Hamas or even Palestinians.


In a related but I think unverified twist, however, someone is now reporting that shortly before his assassination, Jabari was in receipt of a draft of a permanent truce agreement. (The implication is that he was receptive.) If that's true and an agreement was possible, then, uh... whoops. Another claim being advanced, however, is that senior Israeli leadership was aware of that and ordered his assassination anyway. If that's true, then we aren't in whoops territory anymore -- that would put us in "Israel has decided it doesn't want peace" territory, and that is a Really Big Deal. I repeat that I do not yet have anything that I regard as trustworthy confirmation for these claims.

That makes me feel a bit better. Deliberately scuttling a viable peace agreement would be disastrous and would rightly bring condemnation from all quarters.

A series of Hudnas is an acceptable bridge to provide cover for better peace talks. But I slightly doubt there was a peace deal in the works that was just waiting on that one dude, and seriously doubt the IDF would have knowingly started shit if there was a deal going through.

The main thing with the Hudna last time was that after the first one broke down (the IDF did a cross border raid, up to the reader to decide if their intel was worth breaking the cease fire over or not), Gaza demanded a lot more concessions with regards to the import bans to start a new one. But from a preventing violence standpoint it really was a good time for the region.

edit: basically, everyone would love some more Hudnas like 2008's. I cannot see the entire Israeli chain of command going "you know what? We like this whole rockets thing, temporary peace is for losers"

In a sense Palestinian terrorists are an inevitable force of nature. When you keep large groups of people in the kind of conditions Palestinians are subjected to, some of them are going to resort to violence. It's not necessarily moral or justified, but it is a fact of (human) nature. The only way to stop it is either go full genocidal or relent with the oppression, but an apartheid state (or whatever you want to call what Israel has become) is inherently unstable.

That's not to say Palestinians don't share a significant part of the historical responsibility for the current mess. But at this point it's largely irrelevant: given the environment they grew up into, some of them are bound to be fanatics beyond (practical attempts at) rehabilitation, and without a functioning police force, without infrastructures, resources, education, homes or pretty much anything, it's unreasonable to expect the others to effectively stop them. The only way Palestinians could cease all hostilities is if each and every one of them rose up to superhuman levels of rational restraint, and that's not going to happen.

Israel on the other hand is a functioning first-world society, with all the additional responsibilities (and perks) that that entails. Sure, rocket attacks are evil and psychologically devastating, but they kill what, 90 Israeli per year on a population of 6 millions? They are not a threat on a societal level, or a lesser one than traffic accidents or cigarette smoke. As I expect my own country to react to vile organized crime/terrorism without freaking out and turning into an apartheid theocracy, I don't think it's antisemitic to expect the same of Israel. Being an educated, rich and secure population, they have the means to do so.
Note, I don't expect the victims and their families to react rationally to rocket attacks 'cause that's almost impossible, but as a society Israel should be able to look past the immediate need for revenge and think about the long-term results of its policies.

Not even because it's the moral thing to do, btw, because it's in their enlightened self-interest. If they don't achieve peace, what is the endgame? An eternal war they can't win, or turning into Nazi Germany 2.0.
Both alternatives are way worse than reaching a compromise and then tolerating some degree of violence from the Palestinian lunatic fringes during the next couple of decades, until they die out and/or the rest of the Palestinians has time to build a functioning state, capable of stopping the terrorists and, having something to lose, interested in doing that.

It's entirely rational for Israel to respond with force to the rocket attacks. The complaint is mostly that their response to the situation is entirely use of force, and that path has no end goal or successful outcome. You MUST respond to violence against your civilian population in order maintain law and order. But part of solving the overall problem is identifying the root causes of the violence and addressing them. We can put all the police we want in a ghetto and not actually solve the crime problems, just temporarily suppress them.

What I want to see out of Israel is an actual idea of what the hell comes after the retaliation for the attacks. Because so far we've seen a cycle of attack/retaliation/repeat. And that's just never going to work because the underlying cause of the violence isn't some dude in Hamas, as much as that dude DOES need to be taken out of the picture in whatever way for various war crimes committed.

I think I agree with this. I don't think it's likely, though. For another counterexample, see our response to 9/11. Somewhere in the ballpark of 3,000 American civilians were murdered. I would never want to downplay their deaths, but that attack was not exactly an existential threat to the Union. But we invaded two countries in response, one of which had literally nothing to do with the attack. I am not confident that other nations will respond more calmly.

Yes we are, so you should just go away with trolling comments like you just posted.

No u.

Sure, but the relationship between the US and Afghanistan and Iraq is totally different from the relationship between Israel and the Occupied Territories. To think extent that Israel claims the right to administer those territories, it has a duty to administer the territories fairly and reasonably. Palestinians aren't Israeli citizens exactly, but they aren't foreign nationals of a hostile country either.

I saw this earlier too, but again, I would like to point out that these things were a response to other rockets and the like. They didn't happen because the State of Israel shoots people for funsies.

Several of those things were not a response to other rockets.

Yeah, you're right.

My point is that powerful nations tend to react angrily and disproportionately when their citizens are attacked at home.

I understand Israel lashing out in response to specific procovations, I just really don't see how they sustain this bullshit for decades.

They don't though. Most attacks on citizens happen at the hands of other citizens. In those cases, the state does not (and absolutely should not) act out of anger or act disproportionately. As a result, the state does not level cities to kill home invaders, as a general rule.So it's not about "citizens attacked in their homes", it's about Palestinian lives being less important to the Israeli government compared to Israeli lives. And that would be understandable enough, except that Israel exercises authority over the Occupied Territories, and therefore owes (in my opinion) obligations of fairness and justice to the people in those territories. If you wield power over a people, you have to wield that power fairly. Otherwise you are just a tyrant.

Calling those who commit terrorism criminals is not entirely correct. Terrorism is a political act; targeting civilians for political gain. It isn't simply a criminal act. So, the US doesn't bomb a city block to stop a murderer, but it will to stop "terrorism."

The guy whose olive trees were destroyed, whose house was burned, whose mother was killed, didn't fire the rockets.

I think we will have to agree to disagree, but I would like to point out that I'm not necessarily talking about the Israelis reaching out to Hamas. Quite the opposite; there are undoubtedly moderates on the Palestinian side. Israel should reach out to them. ETA - yeah, you knew that's what I meant. I still think that Israel could do a lot to empower the less rabidly anti-Israeli personalities. 'All' it would take are some meaningful concessions on the Israeli side with some pointed language about who on the Palestinian side was responsible.

I will concede that I'm being a naive idealist here though and it's unlikely that Israel will ever want to look as though Hamas et al are 'winning', whatever the long term benefits.

He seems to fully support the people who do. As others have said the blame is shared by both sides.

Somebody burns down my olive trees, destroys my house, kills my wife and destroys the economy of my country, I'm gonna launch rockets at them, and worse, especially if that someone is doing it to my friends and neighbors too.

Pretty sure you would be too, if you aren't a chicken hawk, that is.

Except that the people Hamas is launching rockets at aren't generally the same people as the people who burned down trees, destroyed houses, killed wives, etc. Punishing Israeli citizens at large for those actions is also collective punishment and is also pretty abhorrent.

Bruce Cockburn wrote this song about the US-directed wars in Central America during the 1980s, but it seems applicable.

It's true, at least according to one of the drafters of the agreement:

I don't think Dr. Baskin has any formal status in the Israeli government, but he did negotiate the release of abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, and so his story has at least some credibility.

Apparently there are elements in the Israeli government that are willing to approach Full Mongol Horde status.

I hope they do. Baibars having done what he did where he did being what it was and all.