The recent recognitions of a Palestinian state and the October 10 ceasefire have been followed by a flurry of calls to “deradicalize” Palestinian society. The New York Times editorial board went so far as to compare this deradicalization project to the denazification of Germany after the Second World War. These calls have the situation backwards to the point of farce.
It would be very interesting to see how Palestinians would respond to the same questions.
All of the land occupied by Israel is stolen from Palestinians, they would be justified in wanting them out and their homes back. But if you ask them they generally say they don’t necessarily want to evict anyone, most of the average people there just want to live and have sovereignty.
Would you say that a jewish Israeli whose ancestors lived there in 1800 had stolen the land from Palestinians? What if they immigrated there in 1880 and built a hut in the desert? Not to make light of the situation but I hope you understand there’s more nuance than the trope “jews arrived there on a boat in '46 and claimed the land”. The idea that we should merge all the different nations that emerged back into a resurrected Ottoman Empire to make everyone who was wronged whole again is just unworkable.
Same question from you.
See, sometimes there is this thing called “both sides can be wrong” but in this case the power imbalance combined with 5 decades of Israel terrorizing Palestinians makes it that you can just safely say that Israel is the guilty party here, period, end of discussion
This issue isn’t new. 4 decades ago as a child I read about abuses from Israel against Palestinians. 4 decades ago I remember someone making national headlines because she dated to hang a Palestine flag from her house. She was immediately labelled an anti-Semite, whereas all she wanted was some basic support for suffering Palestinians.
Don’t even start about Hamas. Hamas is at least in part funded by Israel to be a terrorist group so that Netanyahu had an excuse to continue to terrorize Palestinians.
You can’t take all that and then say “weeeeellll, but Palestinians have done bad things too, you know!”
I’m sure they did, I’m sure they have. I’m also sure it’s irrelevant as it’s literally pennies to the dollars that Israel is doing and has been doing since it’s founding
I’m at the point where I wonder if the Israeli as a state should continue to exist. It’s toxic, it’s at the source of almost every conflict in the middle east since WWII. It continuously attacks everyone around them. It sends in tanks and military to kill children who dared to throw stones. Then you keep seeing these polls where the majority of Jews in Israel have, shall we say euphemistically, rather dark opinions. I keep seeing videos of entire neighborhoods rallying being extremely racist against anyone who is not Jewish. I keep seeing videos of these
settlersinvaders who just steal Palestinian homes and lands. You see targetted campaigns against anyone world wide who even dares to speak up against this toxic behavior. This shit has been going on like this for decades now.It really really makes me wonder if that state there is such a good idea in the first place.
And I’m sure I’ll be labeled anti semite for expressing these opinions but that word has lost all its meaning. It used to be something really bad because in WWII Jews were massacred. But what are we supposed to do, say, or think when now, today, 80 something years later, it’s Israel doing the massacring?
Questions like yours are so extremely disingenuous…
I dunno. There’s a lot you can say about the jews, but I don’t really think they were trying to create a zionist state inside Germany in the 1930’s…
Ever since the 1920’s both zionists and muslim arab-nationalists have been duking it out over the spoils of the Ottoman Empire to carve out their own country.
There were a lot of states created from the Ottoman Empire. Most of those borders were carved along ethnic and religious lines and spoiler alert: they weren’t decided through peace and friendship.
It’s interesting to see how people would compare Israel’s guilt to that of, say, Turkey. The latter put a genocide on 1,5 million Armenians to carve out their territory. There’s a bit of irony to be found when people argue that Israel shouldn’t exist because there’s conflict. Had they followed the Turks’ example back in '48, the memory of their sins would have started fading into history the very next day.
And if you have paid attention, there are quite few voices there as well to officially recognize it as a genocide. It’s also rather important to add the bit where this happened before the word genocide existed. Lastly, if we go back far enough in history we’ll find dozens of examples that would have been genocides but again, we didn’t really have that concept setup until after WWII. From the Wikipedia article on genocide
Also I made the argument that Israel perhaps shouldn’t exist because it has been an agressor from pretty much day one and it has continued this to the point where there is a clear pattern of aggression. Though the Turks, to continue your example, suppress the Kurds, I haven’t seen turkey attack nearly all of its neighbors, and they have definitely not committed genocide in the past 50 years
Israel, on the other side, has been in countless wars with countless countries. It executed (understandable but still) extrajudicial executions, it has subjugated Palestinians to the worst atrocities seen since WWII for over 5 decades now. Hell, they’ve been funding terrorists (Hamas) just so they could continue murdering innocent Palestinian with a flimsy excuse. They regularly let “settlers” (nice euphemism there) steal Palestinian houses and land, and if Palestinians resisted even the slightest bit, they’d be murdered without repercussions. For decades.
I’d argue that there is a clear structural pattern of aggression and violence from this state, hence the question: should this state continue to exist? Because if it does so in its current form, I guarantee you that the middle east will never find peace.
Then, Palestinians aren’t trying to create a state within Israel. They had their lands, were driven off of it, Hardee’s in small areas which are the places they’d like to have their independent state with Israel being a neighbor.
And yeah, the way that the middle east was carved up was asking for trouble, because of course it was. That, however, doesn’t excuse anything that Israel is doing today nor anything of what it has been doing for decades.
Well that’s my point, innit?
You don’t hold that against Turkey as much, even though they murdered more than ten times as many innocent people because, well, “it’s been a while now”.
If Israel had just murdered all of the muslim Palestinian population in '48, you’d say they were better than Turkey.
Why would Palestinians want Palestinians expelled from Gaza?
Your answer gives me a chuckle because I was wondering if I had to type it ‘toddler-proof’ to prevent people making a funny instead of an answer ;-)
I had to. Was compelled to. The world being what it is, I gotta make levity where I can.
Almost certainly similar in spirit, regardless of what their Western fans like to project.
It’s a pretty symmetrical situation, even if they have different skin colours. If only we could treat it that way (edit: and then the capability gap wouldn’t be there either).
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Why would you say they deserved it? Do you think Israelis would ‘deserve it’?
The Israeli state at least, like the German Nazi state during WW2, does deserve to be destroyed. Palestinians have had a life of continual murder from advanced weaponry at the hands of Israelis, but even they still generally don’t want to kill every Israeli person.
Nazi Germany was only defeated through putting a genocide on the German people, forcing their leadership to give up and surrender. Do you think the Germans who were genocided ‘deserved it’?
Mass killings of civilians were committed against Germany and Japan, and those attacks are widely seen as war crimes, most reasonable people don’t argue that the average German or Japanese worker going about their day deserved getting firebombed. There were mass atrocities but they weren’t defeated by genocide, they were defeated by a military campaign that took out any capacity they had to wage war.
Sure they were. Had the German military chosen to continue the fight through guerilla warfare à la Hamas, the Allies would have continued their genocide of Germany à la Israel. It’s the German military high command that chose to surrender instead of continuing the fight.
There actually was a German resistance movement against the Allied occupation forces. Little known about but they killed about 5.000 occupation troops. The Allies and the US in particular carried out the death penalty for anyone being caught attacking their occupation troops.
Not super relevant though
looks at post title