I mean, if it were me, we would not just have cut off all financial support of Israel, but they’d be under economic sanctions and labeled an apartheid state. Of course, this is untenable for anyone with actual power in America.
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What would be the demands? We’ll drop the sanctions if Israel does __________?
I legitimately don’t know the answer to this: could Israel survive without US support? I know at one point the answer was “absolutely not”, not sure if that’s still true.
It just seems to me that every single question eventually boils down to whether Israel should exist. And I don’t even really know the answer to that, honestly. But, it does.
EDIT: When I say I don’t know the answer to whether Israel should exist, I’m talking logistically, not morally if that makes any sense. Like, looking back at the history of the region and the establishment of Israel as a state, the current state of affairs just seems completely inevitable. I don’t know how anyone thought this was going to work.
Yeah one of the big reasons I’m trying hard not to follow this mess too closely is that watching right wing Israeli’s take a victory lap makes me actually upset. It’s worse than GOP politicians and school shootings. They at least are trying to deflect and not talk about it.
“See these people we’ve been brutally oppressing for decades decided to attack us we told you they were bad people we should be able to genocide!”
That these people are mostly Jews doesn’t make me, a half Jewish person whose family tree got a lot smaller between 1930-1945 for some reason, feel any better. It would be funny if it wasn’t so nauseating.
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This is a valid point as well which is insanely frustrating. It would take some attempt to deescalate from the Palestinians and Israel’s neighbors would have to help. But instead literally everyone in the region is using the weaponized suffering of the Palestinian people as a piece in the great game.
The best thing the US could do for the situation (outside of questions of right and wrong which in this scenario are at best dark grey) is allow mass migration of Palestinians to the US. And as I pointed out up thread that’s going to get described with some accuracy as aiding the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Still the right thing to do IMO. Anything that reduces pressure from the situation is going to be a big positive.
This is why I think this will never, ever, resolve. And obviously it’s not just those in the region.
I get that there’s lots of fearmongering about how if Gaza is allowed to trade for goods, they’d just get a bunch of guns and invade Israel, but, like, Israel is surrounded by states that deny its right to exist, and it hasn’t been invaded in quite some time. It’s ~29th in GDP, behind only Saudi Arabia in the region (15th), and ~15th in the world in military power, again behind only Saudi Arabia in the region (5th), and maybe a shade behind Iran in current military spending, depending on the source. And they have nukes. Seems like they should be able to handle a destitute population of 750k on top of everything?
Letting the people of Gaza move and trade seems like a pretty good starting point, and if they want to fortify and militarize the shit out of the border there, fine? Like, we’ve got a term for a place where people are confined without charge or trial indefinitely, and it’d make a lot of people uncomfortable, but it’s relatively apt for a place where Palestinians are confined against their will and without charge or trial for their entire lives.
The cynical take is that it was designed to not work so that imperial powers could rule over the chaos.
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I’d bet every dollar I have ever made and ever will make that the us military has a civilian body count multiple orders of magnitude higher than hamas
desperate people do desperate things
Not sure why that relevant to this or even interesting that a military from a massive multiple century old country with over 100x the population has resulted in more civilian deaths than the military of a single city essentially.
Makes me think civilian deaths per capita of citizen “represented” would be an interesting stat in general
Yeah it’s really important to note that the Israeli’s have gotten a lot more aggressive in recent years about the ethnic cleansing. Yes in a vacuum this massacre is every bad adjective you can think of. Unfortunately that includes predictable.
It’s not that I think the US deserved 9/11, it’s that 9/11 was a not unpredictable event that we had been making steadily more likely for decades. When it happened it was so clearly the end result of our choices in Saudi Arabia that we started one mostly unjustified and one totally unjustified war to cover it up.
I think we’re watching the end stages of the Palestinian tragedy most likely. I had been avoiding following the situation because it’s so depressing the last couple of years and yeah… What I caught up on since this started is bad bad.
I probably need to check out again this is mega depressing.
what are you counting here as 750k? gaza population is 2+ million. west bank population is 3+ million. the numbers alone mean that a military occupation of all of palestinian territories is not possible for any extended period of time (if it were possible i bet the fascist right wing would have done it in the last two decades).
gaza border with israel is closed due to security threats, but gaza border with egypt is closed also due to massive migration that would occur into egypt. which is bonkers, because this is the 21st century and immigrants are a huge asset to a nation, not the other way around. and yet, creating an immigration escape hatch would implicitly validate israel’s strategy to lock palestinians into gaza, also a tool of oppression and apartheid.
the depravity is that whoever else is “supporting” hamas in this war (iran, putin, and ordinary westerners who just wish apartheid would stop), is absolutely realizing the fighters are going to get crushed by idf, with even greater civilian casualties. the breach of the border was spearheaded by hamas military, but attacks on civilians in israel were also followed by combatants who are not strictly military. that’s a huge problem. in very direct sense they were radicalized and used by hamas, and killing most of hamas will bring about another faction named something different or similar.
hamas is sacrificing itself and everyone within gaza for a largely symbolic viewpoint that western support is hypocritical (well duh). but it is too high a price for too fine a point.
“we intend to be war criminals and nobody is going to stop us”
https://twitter.com/TheCradleMedia/status/1711318053282009116
I guess that may be the population of the city, not the whole strip
Bloomberg is already running article about Schumer confronting Xi about their stance on Palestine.
So China and Russia as expected I guess. Proxy wars forever yay!
Even relatively reasonable people descend into whataboutism instantly on this topic. Unsolvable.
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This thing is the most legitimate place to use whataboutism I have ever seen in my goddamn life. The biggest everyone sucks here situation on planet earth. Which is why I want the US to fucking leave. We’ve been involved since the start and haven’t solved a single goddamn thing ever. Time to call it quits.
I find it depressing and frustrating to think much about it. I’m far from an expert, and obviously a few 42 minute long episodes that tug at heartstrings and drama aren’t the best way to learn, but I thought the West Wing summed up the key problem very well. The Israelis and Palestinians are two groups that much of the rest of the world has more or less shunned, one way or another, for many many years. They both also have very valid claims to the same land being their “home” and very valid reasons for feeling like they need their own homeland to be safe. Despite those similarities, they are bitter enemies - and often led by political groups that derive their power from the conflict - and thus round and round we go.
Oversimplified, but that gets at it.
Another way to think of it is that this is what happens when human society advances to a point where genocide is no longer allowed. Throughout human history, conflicts that would have gone on forever between two bitter enemies have ended in a genocide. This is not a genocide is good take, obviously it’s horrific and should never happen. This is a, “We’ve advanced in some ways as humans, but we haven’t found an acceptable replacement for genocide to end never-ending violent conflicts over land,” take.
Obviously living together in harmony or some form of democracy sounds great, but that’s a utopian idea for a conflict like this. It’s about as realistic as settling it over a game of soccer or chess. Never ending conflict is less bad than genocide, but it sure would be nice if we could figure out a way to end this also really awful thing.
I think if I were POTUS and felt like I had to mettle, I’d go for some sort of UN peacekeeping force running ports of entry into and out of Gaza, in exchange for opening up trade to Gaza with shared responsibility for security. I’d offer increased immigration opportunities for Palestinians if they wanted to come to the US, and try to get the rest of the world on board (of course thus ensuring I was a one-term POTUS which is why that’ll never happen), and I’d try to set up some sort of right of passage to shared holy sites. Then let Israel completely shut down the border with Gaza on its side, and hope that ended any additional conflict. (The passage could be done through a UN-run checkpoint, then through an Israel run checkpoint, so shared responsibility for security.)
Then you’d have to get into the details over a lot of stuff like settlements. But I think the general idea of opening up trade and guaranteeing security is fundamental. You cannot have Palestinians living in the prison that the Gaza Strip has become and accept that as the end state, and you cannot accept constant terrorism, violence, and skirmishes.
Of course getting any of that done is close to impossible, so round and round it’ll go.
Currently are there any countries accepting Palestinian refugees in any significant number?
The fact is that none of the other ME countries give two shits about the Palestinians nor have any interest in allowing them to resettle in one of their countries–AKA the Arabic version of NIMBY. The Palestinians are simply a propaganda talking point for the other Arab countries.
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That seems like an under discussed moral failing in this whole thing. Like obviously Nato/Europe are encouraging Ukraine to fight Russia but have taken in 6 million refugees or whatever. But if NATO was just pumping weapons to Ukraines rulers but locking down the boarder that would be super shitty.