And that mentality is why this is all going to end up in one state. And when that happens, there are 7 million Palestinians, 2 million in Gaza, 3 million in the West Bank. Israelis comprise about 7 million Jews and 2 million Palestinians. In one country that is effectively half and half. You really think Israel will be able to maintain a…
And that mentality is why this is all going to end up in one state. And when that happens, there are 7 million Palestinians, 2 million in Gaza, 3 million in the West Bank. Israelis comprise about 7 million Jews and 2 million Palestinians. In one country that is effectively half and half. You really think Israel will be able to maintain a military occupation of 5 million Palestinians for an eternity? That is delusional. It hasn't worked for 75 years, what do you think is going to change? Unless the solution is genocide, and ethnic cleansing, there is no way for Israelis to lay claim to the entire land.
The basis of the Israeli claim is based on a 2,000 year old claim to a land based in a religious book of Judaism. Just stop for a minute and absorb how ridiculous such a claim sounds to people outside that religion. It may be the Israeli reality, but that is not the reality of anyone else in the region. It just sounds like a preposterous claim to a land that is in fact not theirs.
Even if I was agree to the stipulation that Israel's claim precedes the Roman Empire, since the Roman empire, the land has been Palestine or a version of Palestine under the Byzantines and the Ottomans. The nations of France, and England, of Germany are much younger than the Roman province of Palestine yet you think the descendants of those Palestinians don't have claim to their homeland.
The first mistake Israel made in 1947 was attempt to expel the local population. Jews fleeing Europe were initially welcome and had they come to live with the locals instead of supplant them we wouldn't be having this conversation. But they tried to supplant them and you do not expect to hand over your country without a fight and so fight they did. It is quiet outlandish to claim that Israelis ever respected Palestinians and wanted to live in the same country when the first actions of the Israeli army was to embark on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their villages when they were not facing any aggression from those Palestinian villages. In fact Israeli military historians have documented a myriad instances of atrocities by Israeli troops on unsuspecting Palestinian civilians. Had not that happened, millions of those villagers would just be Israeli Muslims. I fear you have your history backwards. Israelis fired the first shot of this conflict.
I would love to take you through the planning and execution of the mass expulsion by Israel's founders who believed that the only way to build Israel was to expel Palestinians. If thats respect, I would be interested to find out what the opposite of that is.
From an outsider, the claims of Israelis to the land are actually quiet outlandish because most nations are much younger than the province of Palestine and you couldn't persuade the Spanish for example to give their land back to the Moors because the descendants of Moors lived in Spain a thousand years ago and were there for over 5 centuries.
There is only one way out of this, Israel will have to stop fighting Palestinians, stop trying to eject them from the land, and welcome them back to their homes and find innovative ways to live with them, give them their citizenship and make serious amends.
You think that is ridiculous? Well there only other way is genocide and I promise Israel does not come out of that end. It will be an international pariah. Half of its American and European allies have already jumped ship and others will follow, and without Europe and the United States, Israel's Arab neighbors will isolate it. The pressure from within and without will be too great and the Israeli state will crumble and in its ashes will rise a Palestinian state.
So Israelis either need to change things fast or their country's fate will be decided. And don't think nuclear powers don't fall, they do. You only need to look at the Soviet Union. When a state implodes from inside, even nuclear weapons don't save it.
I find the idea that the Palestinian Arabs would accept, in good faith, and as a truly permanent solution, anything less than ultimate supremacy in a single state, to be fanciful - all the predictable revisionist history and stacked reasoning you recited to me notwithstanding.
There is simply no basis to believe it.
Especially if all their relatives were invited in, as a crowning form of Israeli penance no less, to tip the demographic balance.
And the more emboldened they were by Israeli concessions, the more they would feel entitled to, and demand. At which point Israel would feel compelled to use force on an unprecedented scale just to keep order.
Personally, I long ago concluded that the conflict has no practical solution. Indeed, that the search for such solutions is a dubious compulsion too often rationalized by the merciless tyranny of logic.
Which doesn't mean temporary fixes can't occasionally be patched together, however emotionally unsatisfying they may be. There is, after all - or at least ought to be - space between genocide and capitulation.
Well, I think the rest of the world is running out of patience with these "temporary" fixes especially those that have led to two different legal systems, one of freedom for Israeli Jews and a military occupation for Palestinians.
Good faith? What good faith, Israel never operated in good faith, its a ridiculous demand to place on Palestinians too. The international community made a mess of this with the whole partition idea, so the international community (cough the United States) needs to impose its will on both Israelis and Palestinians and put them in one state. Thats the only way they make peace. Sure none of them think the other is acting in good faith, but under one flag, they will figure it out. One man, one vote, under a Constitution that protects minority rights and ties the government from actually doing anything without a super majority, sort of like the hot mess of governing we got here in the United States. No one gets their way even when they win elections and get in power lol.
Right now, we've settled for Israeli supremacy in one state, no one is pretending anymore Palestinians govern themselves. They live under Israeli military rule. That is fundamentally unacceptable. So, lets just end the charade, remove Israeli supremacy, put both peoples in one state and force them to live together.
The notion that Israel will prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their home is equally preposterous and shall not stand.
I doubt the American public would support a US/NATO occupation of Greater Israel to effect it, because that's what it would take in the foreseeable future.
Or you could just wait (and hope) for Israel to annex the territories, and then root for Nature to take its "logical" (?) course.
Can you force a multinational state into lasting being? I guess there's Belgium, and, for the time being, Spain and the decaying UK. And what's left of Lebanon. Then again, Yugoslavia and the old Soviet Union fell apart.
Yours is ultimately a case for empire. I've actually always felt it was too bad Austria-Hungary disappeared. But maybe that's because my DNA test claimed I shared ancient genes with the Habsburgs' Marie Antoinette. Not too encouraging there either.
The UK is a case of two separate states and an additional province belonging to Ireland that might peacefully go their separate ways peacefully. Not bad. Belgium seems just fine. Spain I am not very familiar with. Lebanon is destabilized by the Israel/Palestinian problem not an internal problem. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union fell apart because they were ruled by corrupt communist dictators whose rule led to the rot of the state. Either way Israel/Palestine resembles far more like the United States where black and white Americans are learning to live in the same nation after Jim Crow and slavery.
Also the American public currently doesn't support lots of things including arming Israel. Its not like the government listens.
The cases you cited have lasted well, and the separations will less blood if not outright peaceful than the current conflict of Israel/Palestine.
Israel HAS annexed those territories, its delusion to think it hasn't, it has. What hasn't happened is Palestinians getting their full rights as citizens and so we need to end this.
We don't need an occupation, I am assuming the Israelis are friendly so we won't be getting attacked from them, and we have U.S. presence in Germany today, as long as we're not there to fight a war with the locals we would be fine.
As for Palestinians, they gain full rights as citizens, vote, participate in government, get the return of their refugees in Lebanon, Jordan etc... and suddenly those who seek to affect the future of the state from a political path suddenly have the tools and they are confident they would be in much better political position than today, so they have something to gain and so would work in the political system and so need the Americans as guarantors of their rights.
The Israeli Jews too would need American guarantors to ensure in the short term their political rights are maintained. In the long term the political dynamics work themselves out the same way they have worked themselves out between Americans of African descent and those of European descent. Sure its not perfection but its not Jim Crow either and whoever said life should be perfect is a perfect moron lol.
Empire by definition is actually not bad, an empire is where multi ethnic, multi religious and multi states can coexist together under one flag, the difference being that today the empires are not ruled by the iron fist of one man / throne. The United States is by definition an empire. Even without counting the non voting territories (we need to fix that).
But back to the present, the solution is one state for all, the rights for Jews and Palestinians to live in the entire country. Palestinians who lost their homes should be recompensed partially by the UN for screwing them over and the state of Israel can make the other compensations but allow them to live anywhere, the rule of law enshrined to not favor Jews or Muslims or the tiny number of Christians there, remove religion from the state (as we have tried here lol).
I have to credit you for optimism. Of course I'm highly skeptical, particularly of some of your premises, but I still find your ultimate outlook refreshing, as you're one of the few people who actually seems to think matters can be worked out.
It can brother, the thing is that we are all human. We are both capable of great and beautiful things and we are also capable of absolutely horrible things that make anyone recoil. The key is to remember that anyone of us can be either one of the two above in the right circumstances. I reject the notion that anyone is permanently bad just like I reject the notion that anyone is permanently good. As an infantry officer in Iraq, I quickly realized that I could do a lot of good, but I could also do a lot of bad.
And I am going to first apologize with how I started this conversation. I misjudged you and for that I am very very sorry.
I will admit to you just like I have admitted to my friends that I am not very rational when it comes to genocide, my father is Hutu, my mother is Tutsi (hence the maternal family being massacred to just one or two cousins left) and my mom, dad and us 5 little children then spent 3 months in deep hiding as they killed everyone around us. I watched my mother get up every day getting ready to be killed. At the same time, the man who ultimately saved my family from the genocide is a man who was responsible for massacres in our area. Like how the f**k do you explain THAT??? So in these conversations I can come in hot and so apologize for that.
The scale matters but for individuals, that lasts generations. Its also important that the trauma doesn't lead to new trauma. Those suffering from trauma can exact trauma on others as a reaction to their own. Got to watch out for that. No one is justified regardless of their own history.
And that mentality is why this is all going to end up in one state. And when that happens, there are 7 million Palestinians, 2 million in Gaza, 3 million in the West Bank. Israelis comprise about 7 million Jews and 2 million Palestinians. In one country that is effectively half and half. You really think Israel will be able to maintain a military occupation of 5 million Palestinians for an eternity? That is delusional. It hasn't worked for 75 years, what do you think is going to change? Unless the solution is genocide, and ethnic cleansing, there is no way for Israelis to lay claim to the entire land.
The basis of the Israeli claim is based on a 2,000 year old claim to a land based in a religious book of Judaism. Just stop for a minute and absorb how ridiculous such a claim sounds to people outside that religion. It may be the Israeli reality, but that is not the reality of anyone else in the region. It just sounds like a preposterous claim to a land that is in fact not theirs.
Even if I was agree to the stipulation that Israel's claim precedes the Roman Empire, since the Roman empire, the land has been Palestine or a version of Palestine under the Byzantines and the Ottomans. The nations of France, and England, of Germany are much younger than the Roman province of Palestine yet you think the descendants of those Palestinians don't have claim to their homeland.
The first mistake Israel made in 1947 was attempt to expel the local population. Jews fleeing Europe were initially welcome and had they come to live with the locals instead of supplant them we wouldn't be having this conversation. But they tried to supplant them and you do not expect to hand over your country without a fight and so fight they did. It is quiet outlandish to claim that Israelis ever respected Palestinians and wanted to live in the same country when the first actions of the Israeli army was to embark on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their villages when they were not facing any aggression from those Palestinian villages. In fact Israeli military historians have documented a myriad instances of atrocities by Israeli troops on unsuspecting Palestinian civilians. Had not that happened, millions of those villagers would just be Israeli Muslims. I fear you have your history backwards. Israelis fired the first shot of this conflict.
I would love to take you through the planning and execution of the mass expulsion by Israel's founders who believed that the only way to build Israel was to expel Palestinians. If thats respect, I would be interested to find out what the opposite of that is.
From an outsider, the claims of Israelis to the land are actually quiet outlandish because most nations are much younger than the province of Palestine and you couldn't persuade the Spanish for example to give their land back to the Moors because the descendants of Moors lived in Spain a thousand years ago and were there for over 5 centuries.
There is only one way out of this, Israel will have to stop fighting Palestinians, stop trying to eject them from the land, and welcome them back to their homes and find innovative ways to live with them, give them their citizenship and make serious amends.
You think that is ridiculous? Well there only other way is genocide and I promise Israel does not come out of that end. It will be an international pariah. Half of its American and European allies have already jumped ship and others will follow, and without Europe and the United States, Israel's Arab neighbors will isolate it. The pressure from within and without will be too great and the Israeli state will crumble and in its ashes will rise a Palestinian state.
So Israelis either need to change things fast or their country's fate will be decided. And don't think nuclear powers don't fall, they do. You only need to look at the Soviet Union. When a state implodes from inside, even nuclear weapons don't save it.
I find the idea that the Palestinian Arabs would accept, in good faith, and as a truly permanent solution, anything less than ultimate supremacy in a single state, to be fanciful - all the predictable revisionist history and stacked reasoning you recited to me notwithstanding.
There is simply no basis to believe it.
Especially if all their relatives were invited in, as a crowning form of Israeli penance no less, to tip the demographic balance.
And the more emboldened they were by Israeli concessions, the more they would feel entitled to, and demand. At which point Israel would feel compelled to use force on an unprecedented scale just to keep order.
Personally, I long ago concluded that the conflict has no practical solution. Indeed, that the search for such solutions is a dubious compulsion too often rationalized by the merciless tyranny of logic.
Which doesn't mean temporary fixes can't occasionally be patched together, however emotionally unsatisfying they may be. There is, after all - or at least ought to be - space between genocide and capitulation.
Well, I think the rest of the world is running out of patience with these "temporary" fixes especially those that have led to two different legal systems, one of freedom for Israeli Jews and a military occupation for Palestinians.
Good faith? What good faith, Israel never operated in good faith, its a ridiculous demand to place on Palestinians too. The international community made a mess of this with the whole partition idea, so the international community (cough the United States) needs to impose its will on both Israelis and Palestinians and put them in one state. Thats the only way they make peace. Sure none of them think the other is acting in good faith, but under one flag, they will figure it out. One man, one vote, under a Constitution that protects minority rights and ties the government from actually doing anything without a super majority, sort of like the hot mess of governing we got here in the United States. No one gets their way even when they win elections and get in power lol.
Right now, we've settled for Israeli supremacy in one state, no one is pretending anymore Palestinians govern themselves. They live under Israeli military rule. That is fundamentally unacceptable. So, lets just end the charade, remove Israeli supremacy, put both peoples in one state and force them to live together.
The notion that Israel will prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their home is equally preposterous and shall not stand.
I doubt the American public would support a US/NATO occupation of Greater Israel to effect it, because that's what it would take in the foreseeable future.
Or you could just wait (and hope) for Israel to annex the territories, and then root for Nature to take its "logical" (?) course.
Can you force a multinational state into lasting being? I guess there's Belgium, and, for the time being, Spain and the decaying UK. And what's left of Lebanon. Then again, Yugoslavia and the old Soviet Union fell apart.
Yours is ultimately a case for empire. I've actually always felt it was too bad Austria-Hungary disappeared. But maybe that's because my DNA test claimed I shared ancient genes with the Habsburgs' Marie Antoinette. Not too encouraging there either.
The UK is a case of two separate states and an additional province belonging to Ireland that might peacefully go their separate ways peacefully. Not bad. Belgium seems just fine. Spain I am not very familiar with. Lebanon is destabilized by the Israel/Palestinian problem not an internal problem. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union fell apart because they were ruled by corrupt communist dictators whose rule led to the rot of the state. Either way Israel/Palestine resembles far more like the United States where black and white Americans are learning to live in the same nation after Jim Crow and slavery.
Also the American public currently doesn't support lots of things including arming Israel. Its not like the government listens.
The cases you cited have lasted well, and the separations will less blood if not outright peaceful than the current conflict of Israel/Palestine.
Israel HAS annexed those territories, its delusion to think it hasn't, it has. What hasn't happened is Palestinians getting their full rights as citizens and so we need to end this.
We don't need an occupation, I am assuming the Israelis are friendly so we won't be getting attacked from them, and we have U.S. presence in Germany today, as long as we're not there to fight a war with the locals we would be fine.
As for Palestinians, they gain full rights as citizens, vote, participate in government, get the return of their refugees in Lebanon, Jordan etc... and suddenly those who seek to affect the future of the state from a political path suddenly have the tools and they are confident they would be in much better political position than today, so they have something to gain and so would work in the political system and so need the Americans as guarantors of their rights.
The Israeli Jews too would need American guarantors to ensure in the short term their political rights are maintained. In the long term the political dynamics work themselves out the same way they have worked themselves out between Americans of African descent and those of European descent. Sure its not perfection but its not Jim Crow either and whoever said life should be perfect is a perfect moron lol.
Empire by definition is actually not bad, an empire is where multi ethnic, multi religious and multi states can coexist together under one flag, the difference being that today the empires are not ruled by the iron fist of one man / throne. The United States is by definition an empire. Even without counting the non voting territories (we need to fix that).
But back to the present, the solution is one state for all, the rights for Jews and Palestinians to live in the entire country. Palestinians who lost their homes should be recompensed partially by the UN for screwing them over and the state of Israel can make the other compensations but allow them to live anywhere, the rule of law enshrined to not favor Jews or Muslims or the tiny number of Christians there, remove religion from the state (as we have tried here lol).
I have to credit you for optimism. Of course I'm highly skeptical, particularly of some of your premises, but I still find your ultimate outlook refreshing, as you're one of the few people who actually seems to think matters can be worked out.
It can brother, the thing is that we are all human. We are both capable of great and beautiful things and we are also capable of absolutely horrible things that make anyone recoil. The key is to remember that anyone of us can be either one of the two above in the right circumstances. I reject the notion that anyone is permanently bad just like I reject the notion that anyone is permanently good. As an infantry officer in Iraq, I quickly realized that I could do a lot of good, but I could also do a lot of bad.
And I am going to first apologize with how I started this conversation. I misjudged you and for that I am very very sorry.
I will admit to you just like I have admitted to my friends that I am not very rational when it comes to genocide, my father is Hutu, my mother is Tutsi (hence the maternal family being massacred to just one or two cousins left) and my mom, dad and us 5 little children then spent 3 months in deep hiding as they killed everyone around us. I watched my mother get up every day getting ready to be killed. At the same time, the man who ultimately saved my family from the genocide is a man who was responsible for massacres in our area. Like how the f**k do you explain THAT??? So in these conversations I can come in hot and so apologize for that.
No need, but thank you. I appreciate it. I am so sorry for what you and yours went through.
That sh*t stays with you man. It really does.
With Holocaust survivors it can last for generations.
The scale matters but for individuals, that lasts generations. Its also important that the trauma doesn't lead to new trauma. Those suffering from trauma can exact trauma on others as a reaction to their own. Got to watch out for that. No one is justified regardless of their own history.