New War In Israel / Gaza

[zazen]

Unreasonable 

 

[Raze]

15 minutes ago, Raze said:

interesting: this documentary from 2012 interviews former heads of Israel’s domestic security agency on what sets Israel’s security policy 

 

You can watch it free here

https://www.documentaryarea.com/video/The Gatekeepers/

@Leo Gura

Watch this, it explains a lot of Israel’s perspective but also their hidden motives 

Edited December 15, 2023 by Raze

[Karmadhi]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Bahahahahaha....

If it does not then why is democracy considered a more evolved and better system than autocracy? What benefits does it have if not everyone is treated equal? 

[Raze]

 

 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Raze

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Karmadhi said:

If it does not then why is democracy considered a more evolved and better system than autocracy? What benefits does it have if not everyone is treated equal? 

1) There are MANY degrees of democracy, like a scale from 0 to 1000. And no country is anywhere close to 1000. Being closer towards 1000 is better than being closer to 0.

2) Democracy as it is practiced today is too weak to assure equality. But it at least prevents tyranny and insane injustice. The closer you get to 1000 the more equal and just things get.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Karmadhi]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

There are MANY degrees of democracy, like a scale from 0 to 1000. And no country is anywhere close to 1000. Being closer towards 1000 is better than being closer to 0.

Where would you put Israel?

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Democracy as it is practiced today is too weak to assure equality. But it at least prevents tyranny and insane injustice. The closer you get to 1000 the more equal and just things get.

The way Palestinians are treated by Israelis is insanely injust. Putting hundreds of kids into cages seems just to you? Or shooting unarmed kids for throwing rocks at you? How is this any better than the way Putin's Russia treats Russians? I would argue they are treated more humanely than Palestinians under Israeli. I would invite you to do some research and see how they have been treated through the decades. There is NOTHING democratic about it. Pure tyranny. 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Karmadhi

[Leo Gura]

9 minutes ago, Karmadhi said:

The way Palestinians are treated by Israelis is insanely injust. Putting hundreds of kids into cages seems just to you?

Palestine is not part of the Israel government, so why would it fall under its democracy? Israel treats Palestine as a foreign terrorist state. Democracy does not apply outside one's boarder. At least not in today's world. Maybe in 500 years.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Leo Gura]

14 minutes ago, Karmadhi said:

Where would you put Israel?

It's hard to quantify it. I don't know all the ins and outs of the Israeli government. You'd need to create some kind of objective metrics to quantify it.

Here's a starting point:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

Edited December 16, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Nivsch]

@Karmadhi There are also women being sometimes murdered by their husbands in Tel Aviv and in Toronto.

This doesn't make Israel or Canada a murderous tyrrani. I can also play the game of extreme edge cases. 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Nivsch

[zazen]

3 hours ago, Nivsch said:

@Karmadhi There are also women being sometimes murdered by their husbands in Tel Aviv and in Toronto.

This doesn't make Israel or Canada a murderous tyrrani. I can also play the game of extreme edge cases. 

At what point do the extreme edge cases become the normalised viewpoint reflecting the politics and society of a country? 

From John Mearsheimers latest substack article:

''Israeli leaders talk about Palestinians and what they would like to do in Gaza in shocking terms, especially when you consider that some of these leaders also talk incessantly about the horrors of the Holocaust. Indeed, their rhetoric has led Omar Bartov, a prominent Israeli-born scholar of the Holocaust, to conclude that Israel has “genocidal intent.” Other scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies have offered a similar warning.

To be more specific, it is commonplace for Israeli leaders to refer to Palestinians as “human animals, ”human beasts,” and “horrible inhuman animals.” And as Israeli President Isaac Herzog makes clear, those leaders are referring to all Palestinians, not just Hamas: In his words, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Unsurprisingly, as the New York Times reports, it is part of normal Israeli discourse to call for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased,” or “destroyed.” One retired IDF general, who proclaimed that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” also makes the case that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.” Going even further, a minister in the Israeli government suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza. These statements are not being made by isolated extremists, but by senior members of Israel’s government.

Of course, there is also much talk of ethnically cleansing Gaza (and the West Bank), in effect, producing another Nakba. To quote Israel’s Agriculture Minister, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” Perhaps the most shocking evidence of the depths to which Israeli society has sunk is a video of very young children singing a blood-curdling song celebrating Israel’s destruction of Gaza: “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.”

Edited December 16, 2023 by zazen

[Nivsch]

1 hour ago, zazen said:

At what point do the extreme edge cases become the normalised viewpoint reflecting the politics and society of a country? 

At this thread, unfortunatly.

I responded to a claim by its same logic to show the ridiculousness of taking an edge case and projecting it so loosely as it is "Israel".

About the rest of your message, when you take a society who has just got traumatized as was never before and Gazans are celebrating and dancing in the streets to that, what else do you expect to hear?

I really don't understand.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Nivsch

[lina]

18 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It is democratic. Democracies do plenty of war crimes.

 An exclusive ethno-state democracy built on top of ethnic cleansing and massacres is not worthy of respect and will always be targeted as long as they don't deal with the devastation they caused. That's like a murderous thief who starts a democratic family in a stolen house. Him being democratic with his family members doesn't change the fact that he is a murderous thief. That's why this thief will spend the rest of his life trying so hard to protect his house, knowingly it wasn't legitimate to begin with. That serial killer waiting outside his house to target him & his family didn't exist out vacuum, he is result of his long standing wrongdoings. Getting rid of one serial killer might ensure brief moments of peace but definitely not a lasting one. His house will always be a target, even if not militarily but surely of resentment and hate. 

1 hour ago, Nivsch said:

when you take a society who has just got traumatized as was never before and Gazans  (Israelis) are celebrating and dancing in the streets to that, what else do you expect to hear?

Put that same logic to Palestinians, who have been suffering for all those years + the audacious Zionist expansionist ambitions by the likes of Ben Gurion the first Israeli prime minister,  like what do you expect to hear? I really don't understand.  

19 hours ago, zazen said:

Zionists frame it as Palestinians not being developed enough or behaving well enough to have rights granted to them when really its that they are impeded from developing and are preoccupied with first securing their fundamental rights. It's the dignity in them that resists that is then gaslighted as them not behaving well. I expect nothing less than for people to resist despite what spiral stage we colour code and paintball them with. This isn't a stage red or green thing but a human thing.

If even a ant or animals resist to survive unwanted death then what of humans who have the conscience to be aware of their undignified treatment, oppression, being taken advantage of through unviable peace proposals and impending conditions of death imposed on them? There's nothing confusing about resistance, in fact it would be confusing for anyone not to. It would be a case study for such a alien reaction or lack of if no resistance occurred. 

Yes, nothing strange or complicated here, this is the expected dynamic between any oppressor and oppressed. His survival depends on confining the oppressed. 

Edited December 16, 2023 by lina

[lina]

 

[Nivsch]

@lina As much as I want the settlements expnasion to cease, still, the suffering from seeing new villages being built few km near your home is not comparable to the suffering of being killed, raped and kidnapped with a life threat on your head in any given moment for 70 days.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Nivsch

[Nivsch]

@Nabd They have got countless offers from Israel to have a state on roughly 67' lines (with areas exchanges) which is obviously mean no new settlements within the new state's area.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Nivsch

[zazen]

33 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

@Nabd They have got countless offers from Israel to have a state on roughly 67' lines (with areas exchanges) which is obviously mean no new settlements within the new state's area.

The majority of people who hear about the 'countless offers' have no clue what the parameters of the offer are. All they hear is that the Palestinians have rejected yet another “peace” initiative by Israel which gets spun as them being unpeaceful greedy savages. This is why the discourse always focuses on the number of offers - because it distracts from their content and unviability/unfairness.

Lets look at why they refused the proposals by looking at the most commonly claimed 'generous offer' in 2000 being the Camp David one from Ehud Barack. 

1. Barak offered the Palestinians 96% of Israel’s definition of the West Bank, meaning they did not include any of the areas already under Israeli control, such as settlements, the Dead Sea, and large parts of the Jordan Valley. This meant that Barak effectively annexed 10% of the West Bank to Israel, with an additional 8-12% remaining under “temporary” Israeli control for a period of time.

In return for this annexation, Palestinians would be offered 1% of desert land near the Gaza Strip. Thus, Palestinians would need to give up 10% of the most fertile land in the West Bank, in exchange for 1% of desert land. Not to mention that if the past record is any indicator, the additional 8-12% under “temporary” Israeli control would remain so forever.

2. Israel demanded permanent control of Palestinian airspace, three permanent military installations manned by Israeli troops in the West Bank, Israeli presence at Palestinian border crossings, and special “security arrangements” along the borders with Jordan which effectively annexed additional land.

3. Israel would be allowed to invade at any point in cases of “emergency”. As you can imagine, what constituted an emergency was left incredibly vague and up to interpretation. The Palestinian state would be demilitarized, and the Palestinian government would not be able to enter into alliances without Israeli permission. 

4. Regarding Jerusalem,  Israel refused any form of Palestinian sovereignty over the majority of the city, including many Palestinian neighbourhoods.

5. Regarding right of return, it offered a very limited return for a very limited number of refugees over a very long period of time.

This “generous offer” amounted to turning the West Bank into non-unified districts, crisscrossed by a network of settlements, roads and Israeli areas. Even the supposed “capital” of the Palestinian state would mostly be under Israeli control, with stipulations and conditions that stripped any real sovereignty from any area of the supposed Palestinian “state”.

Not even the sky above Palestinian heads would be under their control, nor the water under their feet, as Israel still demanded access to water resources under the West Bank. Palestinian aspirations cannot be allowed to exceed the ceiling of Israel's entitlements. Israel is not really conceding anything through these offers; ending its occupation and stopping its settlement activities is merely following international law. It is not a sacrifice - it should be the default position.

 

@lina @Nabd Good way of putting it.

Edited December 16, 2023 by zazen

[Nivsch]

@zazen There were many more versions with many more mediators than just Israel and Palestine for example in Anapolis Conference. They want the whole cake with all the colorful tiny candies on top too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Conference

Edited December 16, 2023 by Nivsch

[zazen]

The thinking seems to be that Palestinians, in particular Gazans can only be offered a state once they show they are 'developed' enough or 'behave' good enough like Pavlovs dog to be given one.  So what did the Palestinians in the West Bank who 'behaved' better and 'developed' relatively more than their Gazan counterparts get? Were they rewarded even the most fundamental rights or the beginnings of any sovereignty for their good behaviour?

Israel had its chance to show them they mean peace and good faith - but they failed. Instead they got settlement expansion and settler violence increasing to such degrees that any sovereignty becomes almost impossible. So why would Gazan's think they would get something by behaving and developing if on the contrary when they look over to the West Bank they see a clear indication that 'behaving and developing' leads to nothing except the opposite.

In fact, Bibi's view was that the existence of Hamas works in their favour by creating a divide among Palestinians and de-legitimising the Palestinian cause by them being more extreme - and that's exactly how its been used. The conditions Palestinians are put under is extreme which causes them to radicalise, then when they radicalise the excuse is used that they are too radical to be given a state. 

 

[Nivsch]

Their human rights treshhold within their villages and cities even in west bank is limited by their own culture way before it is affected by IDF attendance near those villages.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Nivsch

[zazen]

14 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

Their human rights treshhold within their villages and cities even in west bank is limited by their own culture way before it is affected by IDF attendance near those villages.

Sure it may be. So if one culture is less developed that means another more developed culture has the right to displace, mistreat and govern them? That kind of logic justifies colonialism, apartheid and occupation. 

The problem with being in a echo chamber of Zionist ideology that dehumanizes Palestinians and normalizes oppression is that Zionist supporters can easily say things that make Israel look bad on the world stage, because it becomes the norm to look at things that way. This also goes for fundamental Islam or any ideology for that matter.

October 7 was just a echo of the violence Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades - and it's foolish to get angry at a echo for talking back. Israel needs to look at how it talks, walks and breathes - how it exists in its current form that puts it in a tricky situation and condemned globally.