The Present Israel-Palestine Conflict Thread

[Bull Moose Base]

This whole tragedy is so predictable. Zionists continuing their colonization of Palestine and accelerating it through the building of settlements leading to more desperation on the Palestinian side. Hapless leaders in Palestine not being able to even come into an agreement amongst themselves, let alone being able to negotiate with Israel. Stupid terrorists taking the opportunity to launch rockets they know will not reach their targets due to the Iron Dome. Israel, despite possessing the Iron dome, invades Gaza knowing it will cause massive civilian casualties, despite claiming they care about civilian casualties. And of course self righteous Americans pretending like Israel is in the right even though they would violently destroy anyone who tries to take their land. I really want Native Americans to go back and just randomly take over houses built on top of their ancestral land. I hope it happens to dead0man just to see his reaction. I am sure he will be very understanding.

Who needs hypothetical hypocrisy when you can find some Americans complaining about Israeli colonialism while, you know, living in and loving America? (Or Europeans or Muslims or whatever other group complains about it.) If your point is just that trying to revert back to some past map, or trying to change a map in general, is a nightmare for all, yeah, I think you'll find most people agree. But there are a lot of Palestinians and Israelis who suffer that same delusion. There are many other who don't, they just don't have enough power to stop the others.
 

[Bull Moose Base]

Notice that part at the end?  Even they admit (with the silence) that the violence will continue even if Israel gives into their unreasonable demands.

So, the leader or Hamas agreed to a two-state solution, according to your quote. Why are you deliberately lying and pretending the opposite? Of course there is going to be violence between the two states, the ideal solution would be for Israelis and Palestinians to suddenly become best friends (France-Germany way), but the truth is that their relations will likely be something like the India-Pakistan relations, unless some miracle happen.

India isn't fighting to get Pakistan back.

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http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Hamas-says-it-would-never-accept-two-state-solution-wont-give-up-one-inch-of-land-339682

A piece on the failed peace process.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118751/how-israel-palestine-peace-deal-died

[Bull Moose Base]

It's not a good sign that so many people on your side are so ignorant of the history.  Anyway....
cite the 1st

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2nd link

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Bolded items emphasis mine. Calling the hotel operator is fair warning? The staff probably assumed it was a prank. I wonder if their descendants had the courtesy to call that UN school before proceeding to attack it.

Official statements from two Jewish organizations and David Ben-Gurion = a majority of Zionists?

Anyway, you're missing the point. People blew a bunch of s#@% up and demanded their own state, and they were subsequently given their own state. That kind of sets a precedent. Is it surprising that another group of people is presently blowing s#@% up and demanding their own state?

You keep screaming bloody murder about "firing rockets at civilians" when a whopping three Israeli civilians have actually been killed by rockets in this present conflict. Ten Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli raids just in the West Bank, which isn't even where the conflict is taking place.

So tell me just what it is that you would do if you were a resident of Gaza? You're not allowed to leave. You can't import or export goods or services and as a result you're probably unemployed. Even if you don't like Hamas, they're the only game in town. And Israel has zero intention of ever granting you sovereignty, rocket attacks or not. So what, at that point, would you suggest the people of Gaza do?

Not defending their tactic but the Irgun wasn't demanding Britain be part of Israel.

The people of Gaza are in a horrific situation obviously. They should have an Arab Spring to protest Hamas rule. I get those who are Hamas opponents being too afraid to. Hamas would presumably violently quash protests as their benefactor Iran did. But Gazans should call for Hamas to disarm so as to remove any justification for the blockade, and reduce the risk of having rockets stored in or fired from next to a location with civilians. And they should call for new elections and democratic rule.

[Bull Moose Base]

India only became independent because Britain was broke and the only other path was a war for independence that Britain would have obviously lost anyway. The American civil rights movement only succeeded in overturning Jim Crow by appealing to favorable elements in the favorable government and (arguably) due to the legacy of having faced two racist empires in World War II (and to say that the American civil rights movement was a success in its real goal of racial equality is obviously idiotic)--and neither movement ruled out violence as a last resort (pacifism is an idiotic ideology which inherently sides with the oppressor over the oppressed).

Peaceful resistance from Palestinians has been tried and has led only to more settlements. The only solution is for Israel to be cut off from the rest of the world the way South Africa was, and for demographic trends to go long enough to force Israel to choose between letting Palestine go (most likely becoming a bi-national Palestinian state) and diving into pure genocide. If that fails (as the South African isolation strategy could have) and Israel moves further right, an international coalition to at least decapitate the serpent and send some guys to The Hague would not be off the table.

Yes, there is clear evidence that some civilian sites in Gaza have been used for military purposes by the Gazan government. However, given how little damage the Hamas rockets have done and how many civilian deaths in Gaza there have been that the "human shield" rationalization can't excuse, Israel's bombing of civilians from the air (and completely known shooting of unarmed civilians on the ground, something which some of the filth in the IDF have openly bragged about on the internet) is inexcusable and anyone with either a heart or a brain should want to see them destroyed.

A solid majority of Israelis support a 2-state solution even now. It doesn't take a genius to see that their historic traumas, plus extreme rhetoric from fundamentalists, plus violent attacks targeting civilians give Israelis enough existential fear to allow rightwing elements more power over policy. Without violent attacks against it, Israel's territory would have been even smaller than the 67 borders if it had been able to sustain at all. But if you want to go on condoning violent "resistance" and mocking the renouncing of it, knock yourself out.

Yes, any soldier who targets a civilian with no military purpose should be charged. But that view is consistent with saying Israel still has no obligation to tolerate a barrage of rocket fire even if their hit rate is very low, nor tunnels penetrating their territory to set up attacks, even if those attacks haven't been carried out yet.

[Bull Moose Base]

A solid majority of Israelis support a 2-state solution even now. It doesn't take a genius to see that their historic traumas, plus extreme rhetoric from fundamentalists, plus violent attacks targeting civilians give Israelis enough existential fear to allow rightwing elements more power over policy. Without violent attacks against it, Israel's territory would have been even smaller than the 67 borders if it had been able to sustain at all. But if you want to go on condoning violent "resistance" and mocking the renouncing of it, knock yourself out.

The Holocaust was undeniably the worst single crime in human history, which is precisely why using it as an excuse for Israel's current policy (as opposed to a mediocre rationalization) is offensive to both its victims and the oppressed in Palestine right now. Of the twelve million killed for political/racial reasons by Nazi Germany and its allies, only about half were Jewish. Yet no one tolerated war crimes by Serbian paramilitaries in the 1990's just because of the genocide against them by the Ustase. The persecution of homosexuals which begun with the Night of the Long Knives' purge of most gay NSDAP members and culminated in mass extermination of homosexuals did not change popular attitude towards gays in the postwar era. The Roma, the second-biggest victims of Nazi racial policy after the Jews, received nothing and continue to be treated like subhumans in most of Europe. Why, then, is Israel (which, mind you, is not and should not be considered the representation of all Jews around the world) given the Holocaust as an excuse for current policy in Palestine?

Re-read the most recent posts…

Bushie asked what Dead0man thinks Palestinians should do.

Dead0man answered nonviolent resistance.

You dismissed as foolish the idea of Palestinians refraining from "violent resistance" i.e. terrorism.

I argued in response that terrorism, together with extremist rhetoric averring the goal of erasing Israel and the historic trauma of the Holocaust led to empowering rightwing groups in Israel, with very negative policy repercussions for Palestinians aspiring for independence and end to occupation. (And that "violent resistance" against Israeli jews had historically only down Israel's territory/created more suffering for Palestinians.) That doesn't look to me to be an especially controversial (or even astute) observation. It seems obvious the lower the level of violence directed at Israeli Jews, the stronger the forces for peace are. That phenomenon is not unique to Israel of course.

[Bull Moose Base]

Oh boo hoo. Quit your hand-wringing. Using the Holocaust as a justification for Israeli war crimes or ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is more offensive than anything Snowstalker has said. This constant lookout for opportunities to jump down on people, scream "anti-Semitism!!!" and shut down discussion is pathetic.

Where did this happen? Looks to me like you're protesting others protesting something that isn't there when, ironically, that protest isn't even there.

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It's ridiculous to say Palestinians have tried peaceful protest and it didn't work. For one thing, stray protests in the context of a movement that's been predominantly violent since it began (even before the creation of Israel) is not the same as a nonviolent liberation movement. To say nonviolent protest didn't work because the protesters just got arrested reveals a staggering lack of understanding of nonviolent protest and its history. I can't speak for dead0man, but my point was a Palestinian liberation movement would be much more effective with violence removed from the equation. The historical trauma of the Holocaust is part of the reason why and I don't see why it should be out-of-bounds to say so. The other absurdity of someone dismissing Palestinian nonviolent resistance as having been tried and failing is that, not only is that false, but violent resistance has been tried incessantly and has been a bonafide catastrophe for Palestinians. Without it, Israel, if it existed at all, wouldn't be in control of the West Bank and Gaza. It's not that, in the absence of violence against Israel, there would no longer be fundamentalist Jews or rightwing Israelis who aspire to annex the West Bank, it's that their political power would dissipate considerably. Remember Netanyahu was most recently elected in the wake of another short war with Gaza. And of course, this is the flip side of the Israel rightwing government's continuing to expand settlements weakening the political power of moderate Palestinians in a cycle empowering rejectionists, a cycle you seem to approve of by condoning militants'  terror attacks against Israeli civilians- the consequence of which is to undermine the liberal forces on each side which represent the only hope for progress. All this is without even discussing the morality of attacks targeting civilians.

[Bull Moose Base]

Why would Israel keep the blockade in effect if they were no longer threatened from Gaza? If Israel were interested in keeping Gaza it wouldn't have dismantled settlements there.

We also don't know how popular Hamas is in Gaza. A recent poll showed over 90% of Gazans wanted to continue the ceasefire that Hamas just broke.