Palestine-Israel Conflict
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[Moderator – Moved from the Russia Topic]
True Scotsman
“I suggest True Scotsman be given the last word on the Israeli-Palestine conflict on this thread.
If any poster wishes to continue the exchange, a new topic should started.”
The reason for bringing up the Israel/Palestine conflict is that if one supports the Palestinians’ right to violence in self defence, why not Donbass’ and Russia’s?
Similarly, if one supports the unilateral annexations of Crimea and Donbass, Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and Golan Heights can be equally as permissible. In reality, the West Bank is already effectively annexed.
If a pre-emptive strike by Russia was acceptable then the 1967 war by Israel was also in self-defence.
All sides in wars seek legal and moral justifications to bolster domestic approval. Seldom do they stand up to scrutiny.
The most important issue right now for the Palestinians is, as you say, to bring the Israeli government seriously to the negotiating table.
The question is whether increasing attacks on Israelis accomplish that. I happen to think it will not.
Another Intifada may have a degree of success especially if joined in a general strike by Arab-Israelis.
Some say the crucial element is the USA propping up Israel. If support was withdrawn, perhaps there might be progress.
Violence begets violence and Israel has the ability and has shown its willingness to inflict far more force than whatever the Palestinians can ever aspire to use.
I have said that I don’t hold out any hope of any resolution to end the conflict. Both sides have grown more entrenched in their respective nationalisms and deepened their prejudices.
Sometimes there is a slight glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, but I catch only a fleeting glimpse of it before other events extinguish it.
Between Russian Tensions and here: it seems my post is in moderation.
I will say this: ethnic, national and all kinds of tensions generate conflict.
Regarding Hope:
Catch that glimmer friend: it is shared by so many you would not believe!
I am as you may know an Irish man living on the south of the world, who is a person of faith, who expresses socialist ideations… and so much more subject positions.
Sides of a sword kill: their sharp ends.
The flat sides do not: long live the flat sides.
Not sure why I needed to say that.
As a kid I learned about Dier Yassin: the ovens. Another atrocity.
As an adult: I learned we can overcome national tensions… that seem superior to ‘governmental tensions’
Casting an apex aside (casting class interests aside) we will see one another for our humanity and common goals.
No matter what.Apartheid Israel only understands violence. Palestinians know this.
Lions’ Den is Not a Fleeting Phenomenon: On Palestine’s Looming Armed Revolt
Will such counter-violence get the Israelis to negotiate?
I don’t believe so. And we have decades of previous armed struggles to base that view on. The Lions Den is the latest and an expression of the frustration the Palestinians feel at the lack of any political progress.
Negotiations mean compromise and concessions on both sides.
What have the Palestinians got to bring to the table that Jewish-Israelis are interested in?
Urban guerrilla warfare?
For many Zionists this is exactly what they hope for, to acquire Israeli popular support to permit pogroms against the relatively defenceless Palestinian population.
What has Israel to gain from talks? Absolutely nothing.
They have no need for talks as they hold overwhelming dominance. They have a docile Palestinian-Israeli population inside Israel, a subdued West Bank run by the collaborationist and corrupt PA, and in Gaza a Hamas administration dependant upon the patronage of Qatar to function.
The US the only country with a degree of influence will not pressure Israel to reach any agreement with the Palestinians.
As I said previously, all this is basically cost-free to Israel. The ordinary Jewish-Israeli is as unaffected by the situation as the ordinary Russian citizen is by the Ukraine war.
There can be no victory for the Palestinians when the existing status quo works so well for Israel.
Armed struggle isn’t going to work. BDS is toothless unless nations enforce real sanctions, which they won’t. Migrant labour means the Israel economy isn’t as reliant on Palestinian labour as it once was.
Will things change? First there needs to be a shift in consciousness and that isn’t happening. Opinion polls show the attitudes of both sides growing increasingly polarised.
Flouting international law, Netanyahu’s new Israeli regime plans to legalise dozens of illegally built outposts and annex the occupied territory. It includes a commitment to expand and vastly increase government funding for the Israeli settlements in the divided West Bank city of Hebron. Bezalel Smotrich, a settler leader who leads the Religious Zionism party, is given a newly created ministerial post overseeing West Bank settlement policy.
Also included is discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on religious grounds, as well as generous stipends for ultra-Orthodox men who prefer to study instead of work.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s announced that his country will open an embassy in the West Bank.
“We are going to raise our official representation in Palestine from having a charge d’affaires,” Boric said.
Chile boasts the largest Palestinian community outside of the Middle East with 300,000 members living peacefully alongside Chile’s 30,000 Jews.
“Will such counter-violence get the Israelis to negotiate?
I don’t believe so. And we have decades of previous armed struggles to base that view on.”
The Palestinians have a access to technology their forebears did not. Technologies which can somewhat even the battlefield. i.e. drones and guided missiles.
“The Lions Den is the latest and an expression of the frustration the Palestinians feel at the lack of any political progress.”
Indeed.
“Negotiations mean compromise and concessions on both sides.”
They do. But the Zionazis aren’t willing to make any so they’ll have to be forced.
“What have the Palestinians got to bring to the table that Jewish-Israelis are interested in?”
An end to the violence.
“Urban guerrilla warfare?”
Yes.
“For many Zionists this is exactly what they hope for,”
Yes, and now they shall have it.
“to acquire Israeli popular support to permit pogroms against the relatively defenceless Palestinian population.”
That is the present policy. You speak as though it was a mere consideration.
“What has Israel to gain from talks? Absolutely nothing.”
An end to the violence.
“They have no need for talks as they hold overwhelming dominance.”
Clearly, they don’t as the existence of the Lion’s Den attests.
“They have a docile Palestinian-Israeli population inside Israel”
That started to change a while ago.
“a subdued West Bank run by the collaborationist and corrupt PA”
No disagreement from me there. Though the PA has lost all legitimacy among the population.
“and in Gaza a Hamas administration dependant upon the patronage of Qatar to function.”
But still embrace armed struggle.
“The US the only country with a degree of influence will not pressure Israel to reach any agreement with the Palestinians.”
For the time being but the American hegemon is being forced from its perch.
“As I said previously, all this is basically cost-free to Israel.”
Which is why violence is the only remaining option.
“The ordinary Jewish-Israeli is as unaffected by the situation as the ordinary Russian citizen is by the Ukraine war.”
Drones and missiles can change that.
“There can be no victory for the Palestinians when the existing status quo works so well for Israel.”
Which is why violence.
“Armed struggle isn’t going to work.”
Except when it does.
“BDS is toothless unless nations enforce real sanctions”
True.
“which they won’t. Migrant labour means the Israel economy isn’t as reliant on Palestinian labour as it once was.”
If you say so.
“Will things change? First there needs to be a shift in consciousness and that isn’t happening.”
That’s what violence is for.
“Opinion polls show the attitudes of both sides growing increasingly polarised.”
One side is genociding the other, so yeah.
I don’t think the possibility of far greater atrocities that can be inflicted upon a more or less unarmed Palestinian population is fully appreciated by many people. There is a great potential for bloody pogroms and the Palestinians are very much defenceless.
Jewish-Israeli extremists seek the ethnic cleansing of ALL Palestinians, both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. They want a theocracy.
I don’t think that they presently have the consent of the majority of Jewish-Israelis to conduct such. But it is close. It is presently half-half.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/plurality-of-jewish-israelis-want-to-expel-arabs-study-shows/
A policy of escalating violence would only exacerbate the situation and reinforce their siege mentality increasing support for another Nakba and expulsion of the Palestinians.
Violence in the past, and there has been much of it, has not succeeded in shifting the mind-set of Jewish-Israelis.
With American Jews and the Jewish diaspora elsewhere slowly becoming less supportive in their pro-Zionist sympathies and more critical of Israel’s government policies, such violence would be counter-productive and end such progress, discouraging any US endeavour to pressure Israel into offering concessions.
Non-violent civil disobedience, crucially within Israel itself, the full acceptance of the existence of Israel by supporting the One-State federation option, in effect, satisfying the Zionist demand for “Eretz Israel” which solves to some extent the West Bank settler question but, most importantly, demanding a secular state with full equality to all citizens, turning a national liberation struggle into a movement for civil rights.
I have said I am somewhat of a pessimist about any solution and don’t suggest that such a proposal will bring any speedy support from either side and that political opposition between the communities would still continue. But I recall the Israel author Amos Oz saying, I don’t need to love my neighbours, but I do need to live alongside them.
There are too many sticking points such as the Israeli Law of Return versus the right of return for Palestinian refugees that require to still be overcome. But they are not totally irreconcilable problems. Basically, it is about numbers and time-scale.
As an aside, it is refreshing that on this topic we can have a somewhat friendlier exchange where we can comradely disagree because we both have the interests of our Palestinian fellow workers at heart. But I think I go one step further and recognise Jewish-Israelis need security reassurances as well to reach peace.
Hamas has unjustifiably got the popular image of being intransigent in its relations with the Israeli state.
Yet, Hamas has effectively recognised the existence of Israel by accepting the 1967 borders as the basis for a new Palestinian state.
Hamas also offered a form of truce or armistice under Islamic tradition, a 10-year hudna. A Hudna implies a recognition of the other party’s existence.
Co-existence is better than confrontation.
It was a new Israeli government which walked away from a possible settlement back in 2001 at the Taba Talks, not the Palestinians
“We made progress, substantial progress. We are closer than ever to the possibility of striking a final deal,” said Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s negotiator.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, said, “My heart aches because I know we were so close. We need six more weeks to conclude the drafting of the agreement.”
Unintended Consequences
Few realise just as the US sponsored the Afghanis who became the Taliban and Al Qaida that Israel initially encouraged the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas to oppose the more secular “Marxist”-orientated resistance groups, in a divide and conquer strategy.
Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal. Cohen explained “instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas”.
Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party.
Yasser Arafat referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”
“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”
New Israeli government minister provokes Palestinians
Israel likes to describe itself as the only democracy in the region. But new laws are being proposed to undermine that already dubious claim.
Justice minister, Yariv Levin, has proposed a series of changes aimed at curbing the powers of the judiciary, including allowing lawmakers to pass laws that the high court has struck down and in effect deemed unconstitutional that would empower the country’s 120-seat Knesset to override supreme court decisions with a simple majority of 61 votes and allow politicians play a greater role in the appointment of supreme court judges and that ministers appoint their own legal advisers instead of using independent professionals.
Ultra-Orthodox and ultranationalist allies have said they hope to scrap supreme court rulings outlawing Israeli outposts on private Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. They would also seek to allow for the protracted detention of African asylum seekers and make official the exclusion of ultra-Orthodox people from mandatory military service.
“It will be a hollow democracy,” said Amir Fuchs, a senior researcher at Jerusalem’s Israel Democracy Institute, a thinktank. “When the government has ultimate power, it will use this power not only for issues of LGBTQ rights and asylum seekers but elections and free speech and anything it wants.”
Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and head of the opposition, described it as “a unilateral coup in Israel”
Sign of things to come?
Two men wearing Jewish religious clothing smash a stone cross in a historic Jerusalem cemetery has prompted claims that Israeli extremists are responsible for the desecration of more than 30 Christian graves.
In 2021, Christian leaders in the Holy Land wrote in a joint letter that Arab Christian communities were under threat of being driven from the region by extremist Israeli radical groups. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a former lawyer who defended Israelis accused of religiously motivated attacks now oversees the Israeli police as national security minister.
Watch: Jewish extremists vandalize #Christian cemetery in Mount Zion in the occupied city of #Jerusalem. pic.twitter.com/QZFE8L53uM
— Wafa News Agency – English (@WAFANewsEnglish) January 4, 2023
Those for One State
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