Israel and Palestine

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Fishnut
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Israel and Palestine

Post by Fishnut » Wed May 12, 2021 6:48 pm

Israel's Defence Minister has stated that they will not stop military action against Gaza until “complete quiet” has been achieved. He said,
“Israel is not preparing for a ceasefire. There is currently no end date for the operation. Only when we achieve complete quiet can we talk about calm.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated,
“We will inflict blows on them that they couldn’t even dream of”
and that the military will use “increasing force” in their actions.

I don't claim to understand the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict but I find these comments terrifying.

Al-Jazeera has a good explainer of the background to the recent escalation.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Trinucleus » Wed May 12, 2021 7:55 pm

Cout case? What court case?

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Fishnut » Wed May 12, 2021 8:31 pm

Trinucleus wrote:
Wed May 12, 2021 7:55 pm
Cout case? What court case?
Are you referring to this court case? Or rather court cases.
The court rulings are a culmination of a decades-long struggle for these Palestinians to stay in their homes. In 1972, several Jewish settler organisations filed a lawsuit against the Palestinian families living in Sheikh Jarrah, alleging the land originally belonged to Jews.

These groups, mostly funded by donors from the United States, have waged a relentless battle that resulted in the displacement of 43 Palestinians in 2002, as well as the Hanoun and Ghawi families in 2008 and the Shamasneh family in 2017.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 12, 2021 8:37 pm

Trinucleus wrote:
Wed May 12, 2021 7:55 pm
Cout case? What court case?
Israel is using its court system to give an air of legitimacy to its ethnic cleansing, making yet more Palestinians homeless and moving in Israeli settlers.

There's also an upcoming International Criminal Court case against Israel for war crimes, but they don't recognise the court and aren't cooperating with it.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Fishnut » Wed May 12, 2021 8:48 pm

This is a good short thread of links to articles about the situation.

The first article is about the leading Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, who issued a position paper in January of this year claiming that Israel is an apartheid regime.
B’Tselem appears to be the first Jewish-Israeli human-rights organization to use the term “apartheid” to refer to the Israeli regime in its entirety, though Palestinian activists have been using it for years. The paper also marks the first time the organization has taken a position on the Israeli regime as a whole rather than focussing on the occupied territories.
I had no idea about much of this:
only a minority of Palestinians—about 1.6 million, out of seven million—who live on land controlled by Israel are citizens of Israel, and even then their rights are limited compared with their nearly seven million Jewish counterparts...Although Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel can travel freely in and out of the country and through the Israeli-controlled territories, with the exception of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian non-citizens face extreme restrictions on movement. (There is also a formal ban on Israeli citizens’ entry to land governed by the Palestinian Authority, but this ban is not enforced.) Many Palestinians cannot enter Israel proper, and travel between towns and villages in the occupied West Bank is onerous, extremely time-consuming, and often impossible. Finally, the five million disenfranchised Palestinians cannot vote in Israeli elections. (Most of them can potentially vote in P.A. elections, but the P.A.’s influence over their lives is relatively minor—they are governed by Israelis.) Palestinians in the occupied territories are also forbidden to protest without a permit.
The second link is to the AP reporting on the position paper, which includes this quote:
“One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area ruled by one government,” said B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea.”
At the end of April of this year Human Rights Watch was the first major international rights body to call the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians apartheid.
Human Rights Watch compared policies and practices towards nearly 7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories and within Israel with those concerning roughly the same number of Jewish Israelis living in the same areas.

It concluded there was a “present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government … methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.”
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 12, 2021 8:49 pm

There won't be peace till Israel stops expanding settlements, stops blocking Palestinian statehood, stops treating Palestinians as subhuman, and ends the inhumane oppression of people in Gaza.

Until the considerably more powerful party stops ramping up its aggression against civilians, it's hard to view Palestinian militancy as completely unjustified (though attacking civilian targets is). It's a similar situation to the ANC in apartheid South Africa, except that the whites weren't insisting on controlling a white-majority ethnostate in the region.

Obviously it's massively complicated by anti-Semitism in neighbouring states, but I can't help but think that acting like evil c.nts is fanning those flames. Strict Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia are happy to form alliances with Israel for strategic reasons, and I don't see that going away if Israel started acting more like an acceptable modern democracy.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 12, 2021 8:56 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Wed May 12, 2021 8:48 pm
I had no idea about much of this:
only a minority of Palestinians—about 1.6 million, out of seven million—who live on land controlled by Israel are citizens of Israel, and even then their rights are limited compared with their nearly seven million Jewish counterparts...Although Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel can travel freely in and out of the country and through the Israeli-controlled territories, with the exception of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian non-citizens face extreme restrictions on movement. (There is also a formal ban on Israeli citizens’ entry to land governed by the Palestinian Authority, but this ban is not enforced.) Many Palestinians cannot enter Israel proper, and travel between towns and villages in the occupied West Bank is onerous, extremely time-consuming, and often impossible. Finally, the five million disenfranchised Palestinians cannot vote in Israeli elections. (Most of them can potentially vote in P.A. elections, but the P.A.’s influence over their lives is relatively minor—they are governed by Israelis.) Palestinians in the occupied territories are also forbidden to protest without a permit.
This is because the goal of the Zionist movement is to establish a Jewish nationalist state in Israel. Because they haven't been able to persuade enough Jewish people to move there / have millions of kids (only about half of Israeli Jewish people are of European descent), they can only achieve the Jewish majority they want by denying the existence of Palestinians - thrown from their homes, denied statehood and right to return, while anybody Jewish can immigrate there and get citizenship in three months (unless they have a criminal record, infectious disease or the wrong kind of politics).
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by lpm » Wed May 12, 2021 9:17 pm

Does either side want to buy some armaments? I know a country that's ready to sell.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Trinucleus » Wed May 12, 2021 9:50 pm

Trinucleus wrote:
Wed May 12, 2021 7:55 pm
Court case? What court case?
I was thinking of Betenyahu's corruption trial. Not much talk of that now

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 12, 2021 10:17 pm

Still going on, apparently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_o ... _Netanyahu

I'm not sure how much of a difference a guilty verdict would make, though.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Fishnut » Wed May 12, 2021 10:31 pm

This is an informative piece from Haaretz (you have to register your email for access, or at least I did),
Netanyahu built a multidimensional bubble for Jewish Israelis constructed out of a subservient police force, national media, an embrace of neoliberalism and the attempted co-option of select politicians from among the Palestinian citizens of Israel...

The police force’s most recent turn towards gratuitously violent suppression is fully backed by Netanyahu’s staunchest stooge, Amir Ohana, Minister of Public Security, who represents more than anyone the Netanyahu’s increasingly authoritarian state.

But he is not alone: over the years, Netanyahu has created a state ruled not by politicians, but by a close-knit political mafia, kept in sync by his enforcer, MK Miki Zohar. Together, the two, along with the other obedient party lackeys, enforce strict allegiance to Netanyahu, the sole leader.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Woodchopper » Thu May 13, 2021 3:30 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed May 12, 2021 8:49 pm
There won't be peace till Israel stops expanding settlements, stops blocking Palestinian statehood, stops treating Palestinians as subhuman, and ends the inhumane oppression of people in Gaza.

Until the considerably more powerful party stops ramping up its aggression against civilians, it's hard to view Palestinian militancy as completely unjustified (though attacking civilian targets is). It's a similar situation to the ANC in apartheid South Africa, except that the whites weren't insisting on controlling a white-majority ethnostate in the region.

Obviously it's massively complicated by anti-Semitism in neighbouring states, but I can't help but think that acting like evil c.nts is fanning those flames. Strict Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia are happy to form alliances with Israel for strategic reasons, and I don't see that going away if Israel started acting more like an acceptable modern democracy.
I agree. And on your last point, one trend since 2017 is the ‘normalisation’ of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab states which were once foes and supported the Palestinians (at least formally) - which includes the UAE, Jordan, Sudan, Oman, Bahrain and Morocco. Much of which is due to those states having a common cause with Israel against Iran.

Palestinians are far more isolated than in the past.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu May 13, 2021 8:14 am

Sick and depressing:
(JTA) — A video of a crowd of Jewish Israelis beating someone presumed to be an Arab in a Tel Aviv suburb on Wednesday night was broadcast live on Israeli TV as the country erupted in violence between Arabs and Jews.

The incident in the coastal city of Bat Yam, caught by a camera operator for Israeli Channel 11, comes amid the deadly rocket fire between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza.

The footage shows the Jewish Israelis surrounding the man and beating him. Later he is seen lying on the ground wearing a motorcycle helmet being kicked and hit before the camera pans away.

Police did not appear to be on the scene. Channel 11 reported that the man was hospitalized.

“We’re watching a lynching in real time,” reporter Daniel Elazar says off-camera. “There are no police here.”

The attack happened amid a night of unrest across Israel as Hamas fired salvos of rockets at Israel and Israel bombed Gaza. It appears to be the worst interethnic violence within Israel since the onset of the second intifada, a violent Palestinian uprising, more than 20 years ago.

Jewish protesters in Bat Yam, as well as the northern cities of Tiberias and Acre, marched through the streets, and footage circulating on social media captured crowds of men in multiple locations chanting “Death to Arabs” and vandalizing Arab-owned businesses.

A Jewish man in Acre was beaten and an Arab man in the central Israeli city of Lod was shot, according to The Times of Israel.

One night earlier, Arab protesters in several cities took to the streets, with some starting fires. In Lod, the protesters burnt synagogues, shops and cars, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a state of emergency.
https://www.jta.org/2021/05/12/israel/w ... -in-unrest

It's way beyond a border dispute between a state and a future-state. These people are all Israelis. This is ethnic violence targetted at civilians.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Beaker » Thu May 13, 2021 12:53 pm

Just been on a work call with colleagues in Israel (all working from home). One by one they dropped off as the sirens came on in their home area.

A nationalist regime probably sees that as a price worth paying for their continued bulldozing of Palestinian homes, and justifies their position to their supporters.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by monkey » Thu May 13, 2021 1:31 pm

Beaker wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 12:53 pm
Just been on a work call with colleagues in Israel (all working from home). One by one they dropped off as the sirens came on in their home area.

A nationalist regime probably sees that as a price worth paying for their continued bulldozing of Palestinian homes, and justifies their position to their supporters.
Yes, but the conflict also keeps the likes of Hamas in power, and it's your ordinary Israeli and Palestinians that suffer. I am no expert on Israel/Palestine but there seems to be very little incentive for those currently in charge on either side to compromise and make peace.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Beaker » Thu May 13, 2021 2:59 pm

Suppose the council were coming to bulldoze your house on Monday. What compromise would you make?

It’s a very asymmetric situation. Hamas firing rockets from Gaza in support of Palestinians in the West Bank probably does keep them in position in the blockaded Gaza, but there is only one man ‘in charge’.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu May 13, 2021 3:56 pm

Hamas has repeatedly offered peace, contingent on Israel ending its settlement program.

Israel doesn't want to end its settlement program, even though the entire international community considers it illegal. Instead they choose to continue the bloodshed, mostly Palestinian blood.
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by monkey » Thu May 13, 2021 4:46 pm

Beaker wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 2:59 pm
Suppose the council were coming to bulldoze your house on Monday. What compromise would you make?

It’s a very asymmetric situation. Hamas firing rockets from Gaza in support of Palestinians in the West Bank probably does keep them in position in the blockaded Gaza, but there is only one man ‘in charge’.
Oh I know it's asymmetric, and when I say "compromise", on the Israeli side that's basically "let the Palestinians have human rights, stop sterling their land and let their refugees return". But the Palestinians are also going to have cede something to Israel for it to work. As far as I can tell, the Palestinians have been better than Israel on this front in the past.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Fishnut » Thu May 13, 2021 4:51 pm

monkey wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 4:46 pm
Beaker wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 2:59 pm
Suppose the council were coming to bulldoze your house on Monday. What compromise would you make?

It’s a very asymmetric situation. Hamas firing rockets from Gaza in support of Palestinians in the West Bank probably does keep them in position in the blockaded Gaza, but there is only one man ‘in charge’.
Oh I know it's asymmetric, and when I say "compromise", on the Israeli side that's basically "let the Palestinians have human rights, stop sterling their land and let their refugees return". But the Palestinians are also going to have cede something to Israel for it to work. As far as I can tell, the Palestinians have been better than Israel on this front in the past.
What do the Palestinians have left to cede?
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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Woodchopper » Thu May 13, 2021 6:23 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 4:51 pm
monkey wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 4:46 pm
Beaker wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 2:59 pm
Suppose the council were coming to bulldoze your house on Monday. What compromise would you make?

It’s a very asymmetric situation. Hamas firing rockets from Gaza in support of Palestinians in the West Bank probably does keep them in position in the blockaded Gaza, but there is only one man ‘in charge’.
Oh I know it's asymmetric, and when I say "compromise", on the Israeli side that's basically "let the Palestinians have human rights, stop sterling their land and let their refugees return". But the Palestinians are also going to have cede something to Israel for it to work. As far as I can tell, the Palestinians have been better than Israel on this front in the past.
What do the Palestinians have left to cede?
In terms of a peace process the the biggest concession would be to recognise the state of Israel. That though would be to give up in practice the prospect of returning to lands encompassed by whatever borders were covered by that recognition.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Woodchopper » Thu May 13, 2021 6:48 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 3:56 pm
Hamas has repeatedly offered peace, contingent on Israel ending its settlement program.

Israel doesn't want to end its settlement program, even though the entire international community considers it illegal. Instead they choose to continue the bloodshed, mostly Palestinian blood.
Bit more complicated than that Bird. You should check out Hamas’ response to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

Hamas’ 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies calls for what would amount to the removal of Jews living in Palestine and their replacement with Palestinians.
https://hamas.ps/en/post/678/A-Document ... d-Policies

See especially Articles 1,2,3,12,13,18,19,20,21,23.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by monkey » Thu May 13, 2021 6:59 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 4:51 pm
monkey wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 4:46 pm
Beaker wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 2:59 pm
Suppose the council were coming to bulldoze your house on Monday. What compromise would you make?

It’s a very asymmetric situation. Hamas firing rockets from Gaza in support of Palestinians in the West Bank probably does keep them in position in the blockaded Gaza, but there is only one man ‘in charge’.
Oh I know it's asymmetric, and when I say "compromise", on the Israeli side that's basically "let the Palestinians have human rights, stop sterling their land and let their refugees return". But the Palestinians are also going to have cede something to Israel for it to work. As far as I can tell, the Palestinians have been better than Israel on this front in the past.
What do the Palestinians have left to cede?
In addition to recognition of Israel:

They could cede claims to settled land in return for proper compensation. I believe land swaps have been proposed and discussed in the past.

There's also the disarmament of the various militias that are part of, or connected to the Palestinian political parties, to be replaced by a more formal security service that can be better monitored and held accountable. Also something that I believe has been discussed in the past.

I don't claim to have all the answers, but if we want Palestinians to be treated as humans and for Israelis not to live in fear of indiscriminate rockets, both sides are going to have to agree to terms, and that is going to involve compromise* because they both have conflicting demands.


*More on one side than the other, as discussed.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by monkey » Thu May 13, 2021 7:01 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 6:48 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 3:56 pm
Hamas has repeatedly offered peace, contingent on Israel ending its settlement program.

Israel doesn't want to end its settlement program, even though the entire international community considers it illegal. Instead they choose to continue the bloodshed, mostly Palestinian blood.
Bit more complicated than that Bird. You should check out Hamas’ response to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

Hamas’ 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies calls for what would amount to the removal of Jews living in Palestine and their replacement with Palestinians.
https://hamas.ps/en/post/678/A-Document ... d-Policies

See especially Articles 1,2,3,12,13,18,19,20,21,23.
Yes, I thought it was Fatah who have been more open to negotiations.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Woodchopper » Thu May 13, 2021 7:15 pm

monkey wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 7:01 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 6:48 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 3:56 pm
Hamas has repeatedly offered peace, contingent on Israel ending its settlement program.

Israel doesn't want to end its settlement program, even though the entire international community considers it illegal. Instead they choose to continue the bloodshed, mostly Palestinian blood.
Bit more complicated than that Bird. You should check out Hamas’ response to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

Hamas’ 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies calls for what would amount to the removal of Jews living in Palestine and their replacement with Palestinians.
https://hamas.ps/en/post/678/A-Document ... d-Policies

See especially Articles 1,2,3,12,13,18,19,20,21,23.
Yes, I thought it was Fatah who have been more open to negotiations.
Yes, Fatah/the PLO recognized Israel in the Oslo Accords. However, Fatah was replaced in Gaza with Hamas which does not.

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Re: Israel and Palestine

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu May 13, 2021 7:21 pm

Fair enough - I thought there had been offers of ceasefires on the table at various points, but I may well be misremembering or just be a dumbo.

(I know a ceasefire isn't necessarily lasting peace, but I don't see the situation going from rockets to talks without a few intermediate steps)
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