> Must be nice if politics is just good and bad guys for you.
Some politics are more complicated. Other politics are treated as more complicated because people get uncomfortable when you point out that they're casually endorsing-via-silence the mass murder of one group of people by another.
There's nothing complicated there. If you as a nation state or standing army are obliterating an opponent that can't fight back in a meaningful way, with lethal force, along an ethnic or racial line, that's a genocide. That's just what that is. The past year of desperate attempts by the West to re-frame it as something else have not been successful for exactly that reason.
And before you say it, no Palestine is not innocent. But unless I missed some pretty radical court proceedings in the UN, the punishment for their crimes as a state was not ruled to be "Israel gets to ethnically cleanse you" which is what is now happening.
> It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Kids aren't inherently stupid either. Kids have a lot of good questions to ask about our modern world and the fact that you don't have answers beyond "that's the way it always has been" both a) does not make that complete horseshit far more often than not, and b) does not make the question somehow lesser compared to you, irrespective of how many journey's around the sun they've taken.
I answered you in the other comment, but my "resolution" would've been not carving out a chunk of a number of middle eastern former colonies and turning it into a Jewish ethnostate. But that's done now, and now Israelis have lived there for so long that simply "packing it up" and moving them elsewhere is now also, if not equally IMO, problematic as an action.
Israel is itself a project of the latter end of colonialism, and like many projects and side-effects and consequences of colonialism, we will be feeling it for hundreds if not thousands of years into the future. I don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes with that.
> I answered you in the other comment, but my "resolution" would've been not carving out a chunk of a number of middle eastern former colonies and turning it into a Jewish ethnostate. But that's done now, and now Israelis have lived there for so long that simply "packing it up" and moving them elsewhere is now also, if not equally IMO, problematic as an action.
That's a lot of words to say you have no resolution.
> I don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes with that.
Israel is not the product of "the latter end of colonialism". It was the product of the Holocaust, which occurred just three years before its founding.
Should Europe have used Palestine for this purpose, that is debatable. But to lump it into the same colonial endeavors such as England's occupation of India or Belgium's occupation of the Congo just doesn't add up.
Yes, there was a lot of factors, going back years before WWII, but I still believe that the aftermath of the Holocaust was major contributing factor to the creation of the State of Israel.
I don't take issue with the creation of Israel as a means to put all the displaced Jews somewhere. I take issue with that the land provided for this project was taken without the consent of any of the nations from which it was taken, which is colonialism and why it's impossible to separate Israel from the colonialist roots that helped create it. Just as it's impossible to not see it as an act of Western dominance towards the middle east to whom it was done. Like, there's no reason at all (apart from latent, extremely quiet antisemitism on the part of the Allied powers post WWII that they didn't want to discuss) that all those refugees couldn't have been subsumed into any of these countries, especially America, who at the time was boasting not only the only economy not obliterated by WWII, but also shit tons of open land. We could've absolutely made room for all the Jews that would be sent to colonize Israel (yes I chose that word on purpose).
However localizing it in an area none of them had any stake in was better politically, and yeah it meant pissing off basically every neighboring country to Israel, but that was also in line with the other priorities the West was holding: a strategic, permanent emplacement in the middle eastern region that would not ever oppose Western interests in any way, because it owed it's existence to the West.
It's a brilliant strategy overall as long as you ignore how it treated entire swaths of humanity as beneath consideration for what their own futures looked like, as long as those swaths of humanity were darker in complexion than yourself.
The same thing happened to Jewish people in those "pissed off" surrounding countries, to the extent that a plurality of the Jewish population of Israel is of MENA origin (the "Mizrahim"). There is no simple history of the area, and nothing that will fit into an HN comment.
"I take issue with that the land provided for this project was taken without the consent of any of the nations from which it was taken, which is colonialism and why it's impossible to separate Israel from the colonialist roots that helped create it"
Who was the land taken from? It was owned by the British from WWI to '48. Before that, it was owned by the Ottoman empire, before that it was an Egyptian kingdom and going further back it was the Roman empire. And at some point before that, it was Judea which was the land of the Jews. The Romans renamed Judea to "Palestine" to remove the connection of Jews to that land.
"Like, there's no reason at all (apart from latent, extremely quiet antisemitism on the part of the Allied powers post WWII that they didn't want to discuss) that all those refugees couldn't have been subsumed into any of these countries, especially America, who at the time was boasting not only the only economy not obliterated by WWII, but also shit tons of open land."
Israel was pretty empty too in 1948. There was enough room for the European refugees and the Palestinians. The 1948 partition was not the best for everyone, but it did give both Jews and Palestinians a new homeland, something neither had post Judea or anytime for the Palestinians.
A big reason for wanting their own land, was to provide a safe haven. Jews were doing very well in pre-Nazi Germany, and that changed quickly. The same could happen in the US too. There's historically been very few safe havens for Jews in Europe (And America is pretty much an extension of Europe).
I don't agree with your premise about colonialism or that Israel was created to be a bridgehead for western powers. But I do appreciate your writing and dialog on the matter.
Israel unilaterally declared independence following what was in essence a civil war in Mandatory Palestine. The UN had partitioned the territory but Israel took much more than had been allotted to them. Israel also illegally expelled many Palestinians and refuses them the right of return to this day, which they do counter to international law. In 1967 Israel expanded even further and took the remaining Palestinian territories which they occupy to this day in the world’s longest occupation. To this day, Israel keeps taking more land from Palestinians e.g. by setting up illegal “security corridors” or opening new illegal settlements.
So to answer the question. The land was taken from the Palestinians. And it keeps being taken from the Palestinians, in defiance of a number of UN resolutions, to whom the British had given the mandate to.
In an alternative universe where Israel wouldn’t be colonial, there would not have been a civil war, Israel would not have unilaterally declared independence, but done so in agreement with Palestinians, the UK and the UN. They wouldn’t have expelled any Palestinians, and they wouldn’t have maintained a policy of maintaining an ethnic majority. Jews would live now as a minority in Palestine, hopefully with some minority protections mandated by the UN (and probably demanded by the UK as part of the independence agreement).
In a slightly less alternative universe where the Zionist national project still happens and Israel unilaterally declares independence, at any time after 1948, in an effort to right previous colonial wrongs, Israel would offer the expelled Palestinians the right to return and reparations for their years or decades in exile. They would dismantle their ethnodemographic policies, and either integrate the occupied territories into a single democratic (non-apartheid) Israel-Palestine or recognize an Independent Palestine at the 1967 borders with some freedom of movement between the two states (similar to Ireland and Northern Ireland). For as long as non of this happens. Israel’s current policies are an unbroken link to their colonial past.
You are omitting that each of those events happened after the neighboring Arab states declared war on Israel. Israel won those wars. If they didn't, Israel would not exist.
Israel should get out of the West Bank, just like the way Israel exited Gaza. And I would like to see Palestinians flourish in both those areas. I'd even be happy to see Israel go back to pre-67 boundaries. But this will only happen when both sides desire to have peace and acknowledge their rights to exist. Sadly neither do.
Why the hell should the Palestinians even come to the table anymore? They have been mercilessly brutalized for decades. You're effectively saying that a home invader who has taken your living room, kitchen, dining room, and left you isolated to your bedroom and bathroom upstairs has just as much right to your home as you do, and you need to now come and negotiate to maintain access to your upper floor.
It's patently ridiculous. Do both sides aggress? Yes. But one side enjoys the strategic and financial backing of the West for their aggression, and one does not, and ergo, the conflict will never, EVER be on a level playing field. To go back to my own metaphor, the invader in your first floor has the backing of the police department. What are you going to do in this situation?
I‘m not omitting anything. The neighboring Arab states invaded after Israel declared independence, and after many Palestinians had already been expelled from their homeland. The colonial act came first, and the invasion and wars were a reaction to that colonialism.
Also what Israel ought to do, is not what Israel is doing, and what Israel is doing, is pure colonialism, taken straight from the 19th century, genocides and everything.
That is not at all the definition of genocide. Israel is not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate killing. Hard to take anyone seriously making such good/evil distinctions, especially when the they are not reckoning with the evil of Hamas & co. beyond “well gee shucks Palestine ain’t perfect either yall!”
Only one side has the state md objective of “ethnic cleansing” and it’s not the Israelis
There's no shortage of material in print calling for the destruction of Gaza, the non personhood of Palestinians, etc. from Israel ministers and commentators from before the October attacks by Hamas.
You can, for example, look to the Journal of Genocide Research at articles that draw parallels between Holocaust scholar Eugene's Finkel's declaration of Ukraine as a genocidal event and his point by point justification and similar parallels with Israel and Gaza.
> Israel is not pursuing a strategy of indiscriminate killing.
No they're pursuing a strategy of using intelligence and AI to strategically target "Hamas hideouts" which both conveniently for the state of Israel and in fact are often civilian structures, which result in tremendous "accidental" civilian casualties, which Israel is clearly incredibly broken up about as they continue causing them week after week.
In reply to both this and the other person who's asking for my solution: I don't know, because fighting insurgent forces in any area of the globe at virtually any time in human history has only rarely succeeded for the non-insurgent side, and universally that success came at the cost of numerous atrocities perpetrated against the insurgent forces and the civilians they hide amongst. The most powerful military on the planet tried this exact same thing in Iraq, and 2 decades and trillions of dollars later, we left the Taliban and ISIS billions of dollars in U.S. war materiel, and the state of Iraq such as it was was quickly overrun by those same forces which enjoyed at least some level of support among the civilians they were hiding with, probably because it's extremely easy, even if they don't think you give a shit about them, to explain to people that the other side shelling their cities to rubble every day are bad people that are trying to kill them. Shock of shocks, even civilians largely against the ideological positions of organizations like Hamas, end up more or less on their side, because again, the other side is Israel, who is actively killing them, accidentally or not making precious little difference to the people at the wrong end of their missile strikes.
I would say, with a grain of salt as I am not even remotely in this line of work, but I would say: when your enemy combatants are sheltered by a civilian population, do not possess a standing traditional army that would otherwise meet you on a field of battle, and are prepared to carry this out as long as your state is: then there is no solution, apart from killing everyone. The problem is the more civilians you kill in your quest to kill the combatants simply makes your combatants job of recruiting people to their cause even easier, because you killed their family in the previous bombing run. Ergo, the logical endpoint of this cycle is either returning to the stalemate that has persisted for decades now, where Hamas takes pot shots at Israel from neighborhoods, or the Israeli's just finishing the job and turning Palestine and what remains of her people into dust and corpses. Simply openly declaring that one state, Israel, and her people, have a greater right to exist than Palestine and her people do, and let that play out.
However, that is an ethnic cleansing, and IMO, still a heinous crime against humanity unless we're just going to plunk down some UN courts and say, once and for all, that a resistance movement fighting inside a besieged state is such an impossible strategic puzzle to solve, that it's okay to just obliterate the entire fucking thing. Which is an option, though I think it's a pretty horrific one.
Some politics are more complicated. Other politics are treated as more complicated because people get uncomfortable when you point out that they're casually endorsing-via-silence the mass murder of one group of people by another.
There's nothing complicated there. If you as a nation state or standing army are obliterating an opponent that can't fight back in a meaningful way, with lethal force, along an ethnic or racial line, that's a genocide. That's just what that is. The past year of desperate attempts by the West to re-frame it as something else have not been successful for exactly that reason.
And before you say it, no Palestine is not innocent. But unless I missed some pretty radical court proceedings in the UN, the punishment for their crimes as a state was not ruled to be "Israel gets to ethnically cleanse you" which is what is now happening.
> It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Kids aren't inherently stupid either. Kids have a lot of good questions to ask about our modern world and the fact that you don't have answers beyond "that's the way it always has been" both a) does not make that complete horseshit far more often than not, and b) does not make the question somehow lesser compared to you, irrespective of how many journey's around the sun they've taken.