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Away End - General Chat
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Ok I want to wade into the dangerous ground of this Israel-Palestinian conflict discussion. Why I say dangerous because it would be easy to misconstrue what I am going to say as “whataboutism” etc. But I gonna try.

First statement - its wrong to kill people and the people who suffer, especially the civilians on both sides do not deserve to be the collateral damage in this conflict. Whatever the reasons, 2 wrongs do not make one right.

Getting that in is important because I do think there is a pretty unbalanced focus on what Israel is doing and not the reasons why they have been doing it because I do not believe that Israel is out to kill as a first instinct. And I find it naive to think that if Israel stop doing what they are doing (which I hope eventually, they will and should not find any need to do it anymore), then peace will resume. It is also naive to think that the Israel - Palestinian conflict is only about these 2 parties and not the wider Middle East community who has never seen eye to eye with Israel and a couple of them has always openly stated they would eradicate Israel if they could. It is also naive to think that this conflict is only about when the Jews were given the land in the 1940s, it goes even further back.

I have no solution to this. Obviously, the best resolution is for peace. Everyone stop killing people but I think people are just harping on that Israel should stop killing Palestinians, of course they should! But do we really think that would stop the conflict? Who else is also looking at the other factors of the conflict and ensuring that while Israel is being reined in, that in the process not allow other evils to rise? Its almost as if just because Israel were able to stop the rockets, that they are being blamed for firing back because “you did not suffer any deaths or damage”. So now they are being penalized just because they have better technology? Should they allow some rockets to land on them, so they then have reasons to fight back?

Again to summarize, modern wars and conflicts only bring pain and tears and death to innocent civilians but I think Israel is not the only protagonist here which unfortunately they seem to be painted as.

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Not even news anymore :slightly_frowning_face:

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The fact that it has been normalised makes it worse.

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Absolutely. And the fact that no one can/is willing to stop them. Biden is culpable.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkQ4HZAepYc

Great summary

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Found Trevor Noah’s take on this interesting as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZ4yXyzUG0

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Unbalanced? Indeed. On one side ten dead people (ten too much I should add). On the other, more than 200, God knows how many injured people and destroyed buildings and surroundings.

But let’s take a look at what started these attacks on both sides: Israel started to destroy buildings in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem in order to build housings for Jewish colonists. People got angry, what a shock.

If your government came and teared your house apart in order to implant other people, and simply told you that you haven’t the right to leave there anymore, wouldn’t you be angry? Wouldn’t you possibly be part of an uprising against such blatant injustice? That’s what happened here. Israeli citizens of the Muslim quarter got angry and rose to their oppressors, their own government. Of course, the police retaliated with force as they always do, and the whole thing escalated.

Then, those idiots of Hamas, who are currently losing popularity among the people in Gaza, launched their rockets, well knowing that they would have minimal effect, but would entice Israel into massive retaliation. And so it happened. Now they can play the heroes again, those who protect the poor people of Gaza against the oppressors. And for Netanyahu too, it’s the perfect opportunity to show strength before a new election, just when he’s rapidly losing any kind of popularity, due to his blatant corruption. In these events, there will be two winners: Netanyahu and Hamas. All others will lose out.

But to come back on the unbalanced situation: this isn’t a symmetrical war. Israel hold all the cards, and that’s why their government deserves all the blame for the many dead people on the Palestinian side. They have no intent at all to find a peaceful solution for everyone. Their goal is still to continue colonizing the remnants of Palestinian lands, and they won’t stop until they have achieved their vision of a Muslim-free ‘Great Israel’. Meanwhile, the Palestinians can go to hell.

In my book, Netanyahu and his cronies are fascists, murderers and war criminals. History will judge them in time, as well as the US who allow them to accomplish their horrible deeds.

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Well said @Hope.in.your.heart . I try to stay away from discussing any conflicts in general and Palestine (and Rohingya) conflict in particular because it’s so painful even to fathom the plights. But may I add, all the recent (by that I mean last one decade) flare-ups resulted when Israel evicts Palestinians, and not rocket lunching Palestinians, helpless Palestinians.

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If we go back to the Second World War would it have made more sense to have had the Holy Lands administered by the League of Nations (and subsequently the United Nations)? No permanent residences in certain prescribed areas etc.

I really ought to know more about this. In order to create Israel and a home for Jews, from whose control was that land removed?

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At the end of WW2, wasn’t Palestine still a British colony, or more precisely a British mandate in the name of the League of Nations/the UN?

From what I recall, the British came under intense pressure after the war because of strong Jewish activism in Palestine, and because the US refused to support the British mandate further. As a result, the British relinquished their mandate, and the UN then pronounced the infamous partition between a Jewish country on one side, and Palestinian lands on the other, in 1948.

Since then, there have been nothing but problems there.

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Yes, it was certainly under British control come the end of the second World War but from whom did we gain that control? Was it the Ottomans? That whole region just seems to have been unsettled (literally) for at least a thousand years that it’s hard to determine if any particular demographic, nationhood, ethnicity, race etc has what greater claim to where?

I’m more and more convinced that any “state” solution simply won’t work.

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This was perhaps the first major instance mass eviction/ethnic cleansing.

Again, these were just innocent, helpless people.

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Yes. After WWI and subsequent fall of Ottoman Empire, the present day Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine (it was known as Palestine till 1948) was divided up between French and British protectorates. Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine was under British administration while Syria and Lebanon was under French administration.

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The British are not innocent in all this

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Definitely not but it should reassure you to know that the Brits that contributed to the current clusterfuck are all dead. Apart from Blair…

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It was the Ottomans. A big de-centralised empire… Not sure that it was a particularly unstable region before the Europeans came in after WW1, at least not more than other areas in the Middle East under their watch.

The most unsettling idea by far is the one of a Jewish religious state taking the lands of the people who were inhabiting the land in the first place. Whomever gave credit to this crazy idea is responsible for decades of suffering, probably with much more to come yet.

I’m with you that a ‘state’ solution at the time should never have been the answer, and the idea of a partition between Jewish and Palestinian territories was even worse.

But for now, with the current forces in place, the whole area should be transformed into a democratic, secular, non-religious state, with Muslims, Christians and Jews attempting to live together in peace. I can’t believe that the US, who are the only ones able to stop that mess, don’t at least try to go into that direction in the long term. Instead of that, they support religious fanaticism.

These religious fanatics everywhere… crazy idiots the whole lot of them. :angry:

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How far back do you guys want to go? 80 years, 200, 1000 when it was fought over during the Crusades, 2000 to when the Roman’s enslaved and killed an entire nation? 100 years seems like it’s acceptable but what makes that time period relevant? The fact of the matter is that Jewish people were the owners of the land having themselves kicked out the tribes there before and then got slaughtered themselves a few times before the Roman’s pretty much ended it and over the subsequent history since various peoples have laid claim and held sway and wars innumerable have been fought over it.

What do I think? A Jewish nation has a claim on the land and it is their ancestral home as much as many people think that claim is invalid. The nation of Israel existed long before most of the nations of modern Europe as we know it today as well as most of the world including the Arab nations in their current guise and were it not for an ethnic cleansing and genocide courtesy of the Romans, which in all of their conquest and empire building was staggering even by the standard of the day, it would likely have existed to this day and after the decline of the Ottomans after WW1 and the horrors of the Holocaust in WWII, I believe personally that establishing the nation of Israel was the right thing to do.

That said, it was completely cocked up just as the partition of India into India, East Pakistan and West Pakistan (as it was back then) was cocked up and across the Eastern British colonies Jew was pitted against Muslim, Hindu against Muslim and so on and so on. There should have been a place for Palestine then, as there should be a place now. Palestinians should not have been strangers in what also became their home over the centuries and should not have been forgotten when modern Israel was born and should not now still be made strangers and exiles in what is still their home. Israel has forgotten the horrors that were perpetrated against it over time and the long exiles that they have had and has also become an oppressor.

As always, governments in power decide legislation and what the nation does and the military enforcers and masses follow, sheep as always. There is a place for both sides in that part of the world. Israel has lost itself.

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About your claim that Ashkenazi Jews have a historic right to found a nation: a few years ago, I came across an interesting story, based on recent historic researches.

Do you know who the Palestinians actually are? According to these researches, most of them are the descendants of the people who lived there as Jews during the times of ancient Israel. These studies have shown that there has never been such a thing as a Jewish mass exodus during the Roman occupation, nor later on. The people kept living where they belonged throughout diverse occupations and at some point, were converted to Islam.

The biggest source of Jews outside of Palestine seems to have been the ancient, large Khaganate of Khazar, where millions of people were converted to Judaism alongside their king (around the VIIIth century). Later on, the exodus of many jews from that country after it had converted to Islam in a similar way (around the Xth century), led to the Ashkenazi culture based on the story of Exodus.

The point is: genetically, Ashkenazis have nothing in common with Palestine. That leads of course to doubts about their right to found a nation at the expense of the people already living there. Especially a religious one, based on exclusive judaism, at the expense of other religions.

This newer, more scientific way of looking at historic events is being discussed vividly in Israel among academic circles, and for obvious reasons, is being totally disregarded by the government. There is no formal proof yet, only an educated guessing based on incomplete historic documents, but thinking about it, it must hold at least a part of truth. It’s impossible to dislodge an entire population from a country. And more importantly, despite of intensive researches being done in recent decades, no historic evidence has been found that the Romans ever intended to do such a thing in the first place.

Anyway, what’s done is done now. Israel exists, and the Palestinians exist too. None will go away from this point. The only solution for a peaceful future is to put religious fundamentalism aside, build a common laic state with the same civil and religious rights for everyone, and move on. Anything else will only lead to more conflict and suffering.

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