Re: 52 Dead in Israel/Palestine Clashes
Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 1:05 am
I see I urgently need to re-remove the politics thread from the main page to get this fucking drivel out of sight.
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Kingdroid wrote: ↑Tue May 15, 2018 12:52 amI know you don't care about my opinion but I'm actually quite impressed with you for this response oct. i honestly expected to hear the same ridiculous zionist arguments I usually hear from right wingers from you as well.Octavious wrote: ↑Mon May 14, 2018 10:49 pmIt seems clear to me that Israel is not making the lives of the Palestinians a priority. I have no doubt whatsoever that they could have defended their borders with far fewer casualties if the will had been there.
Equally, it is clear that this is not a peaceful protest, and was never designed to be a peaceful protest. Nor were the Palestinians who were killed somehow under the impression that the Israelis would behave any differently. The Israelis have been accused of many things, but unpredictably isn't one of them.
It is very hard to be sympathetic to either side when neither sets of leaders are remotely interested in peace or compromise. The status quo suits the powers that be on both sides just fine.
Unfortunately, I cannot fully agree. While I recognize that the Palestinian side has not always been super peaceful (to put it lightly), I can't find myself to blame the people who have were summarily displaced from the land they've lived on for at least a thousand years, and then were continuously oppressed/attacked by a coalition of foreign governments and military force. The Palestinians, for a long time at the start of the Israel/palestinian conflict were attempting to come to agreements with Israel that were fair to both parties, while the Israelis continuously broke these agreements and pushed more and more Palestinians off what little land they have left. This sort of action continues to this day. The Israeli government has not acted in good faith literally ever.
In addition, this is just one incident in a long series of events where the Israeli military shoots unarmed (relatively) Palestinians and then israeli and Western Media attempts to whitewash the Israeli as anything less than the completely violent fascist ethnostate it is, that is slowly but surely attempting to commit a genocide.
For Exmaple, the New York Times first reported these murders with headlines such as "52 people *have died* during protests on the gaza strips" (emphasis mine), a completely blatantattempt to avoid casting blame on the group actively committing murder.
1. even you know that's nonsense. it never ceases to amaze me the bullshit people will say on the internet.Kingdroid wrote: ↑Tue May 15, 2018 7:26 amI get it Yanik, you support genocide of brown people. *yawn* the whole fascist pearl clutching over burning tires is getting quite old.
also, since I can't be bothered to read your incoherent ramblings, I'm going to respond to a key point, which is you claiming that Israel has only had distant support from the US.
Since its inception Israel has had vast Military and humanitarian support from the USA as well as Great Britain. The USA is consistently selling the Israelis weapons tech. Read a book, for fucks sake.
Speaking from my personal experience, after 200 years such events are remembered but not really any differently to any other detail of history. It wasn't an issue for my grandfather either. I think that once the people who were evicted have died, as well as their descendants that knew them, it's essentially a dead issue.Bob Genghiskhan wrote: ↑Mon May 14, 2018 11:33 pmHow many generations of Chinese occupation of Oklahoma would it take before you gave up on it?
Tell that to the protestants in Northern Ireland that still celebrate the Battle Of The Boyne victory from 1690:Octavious wrote: ↑Thu May 17, 2018 6:40 pmSpeaking from my personal experience, after 200 years such events are remembered but not really any differently to any other detail of history. It wasn't an issue for my grandfather either. I think that once the people who were evicted have died, as well as their descendants that knew them, it's essentially a dead issue.Bob Genghiskhan wrote: ↑Mon May 14, 2018 11:33 pmHow many generations of Chinese occupation of Oklahoma would it take before you gave up on it?
Telamor wrote: ↑Thu May 17, 2018 12:05 amI lived in Jerusalem for a time. People love sticking the word Hamas on Palestinian protests to delegitimise them and that's complete bs. The Palestinian people have no methods of self-assertion that aren't directed against Israel. All Palestinian borders are controlled by Israel. Israel dictates what can and cannot be imported/exported. Israel dictates who can and cannot immigrate/emigrate. They dictate what can be built where and with what materials. Israel can and will enter houses forcibly and regularly for any reason they fancy. I knew a 7 year old girl who developed anorexia and had frequent anxiety attacks because the IDF occupied her house about 6 times a month at gun point.
The thing to bear in mind is when Palestinians go and protest they know they aren't going to achieve anything but they're often so angry at the injustices of it all that they have to vent somehow. Also someone mentioned that the area the protests occurred at were uncontested I would remind them that Jerusalem was annexed into Israel by invasion.
There's a section in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov where one character describes a little girl that was abused by her parents and then locked in the outhouse in the middle of the Russian winter for complaining about it. Then her parents go to bed ignoring her weeping and howls. Castigating the Palestinians for protesting is like telling that girl off for crying. She has no other recourse so what else do you expect her to do.
--------------------Telamor wrote: ↑Thu May 17, 2018 5:02 pm@JamesYanik
I don't have enough time to correct all your misconceptions about Israel/Palestine history but I can cover some.
Your history starts very late so I'll take you back a bit earlier to the mid 1800s. Nationalism is sweeping Europe and Europe's Jewish community, out of this develops Zionism the belief in a Jewish nation for the Jewish people. By the late 1800s wealth Jewish families in Europe have begun buying sizable tracts of land from Ottoman landlords/aristocrats. Most of these landlords live in Istanbul, Constantinople at the time, and have little interest in Palestine. The land is bought and thousand of Palestinian farmers are evicted. The land is then gifted to European and American Jews interested in living in Palestine. This, understandably leads to resentment amongst the Palestinian population and the two communities become fairly hostile to one another.
An interesting aside here the Palestinian Jewish community is firmly entrenched on the Palestinian side of the divide. There is very little interest in joining the Zionists from the Palestinian Jews and the Zionists view the Palestinian Jews as Palestinians, not Jews. At the time the Zionist narrative is one of expulsion and return, pre-existing Jewish communities in Palestine contradict this narrative and so are generally ignored or dismissed as non-Jewish Jews. This kind of thinking has never entirely disappeared.
The next notable phase in Israel/Palestine history is the Balfor declaration and the British mandate:
So a quick summary of Britain's involvement in the M/E during WWI. Britain and the Ottomans fight an extended war across the M/E with Britain essentially pushing from Iraq up to, if memory serves, Syria. The M/E is not the front Britain is primarily interested in, that'd be the Western front, and so Britain resorts to its trademark imperial tactic of Do It On The Cheap (patent pending). How do you fight a war on the cheap and still hope to win? You get someone else to fight it for you. In this case the Arabs. How do you get the Arabs to fight for you, essentially for free? Promise them a country from Saudi to the Northern Levant ruled by Arabs for Arabs.
But Britain also wants money and International backing. Funnily enough a lot of the European Jewish families that have been buying up land have money and international sway. How do you get their support? You promise them a country run by Jews for Jews. And you promise that country will be in what is currently the Ottoman province of Palestine.
But there is one final deal that has to be struck, this one with Britain's buddy France because heavens forbid they fail to acquire any land in the M/E. So Britain promises to split the land with France. France gets the Northern Levant and Britain gets the rest.
Now you may have noted that Britain has made three conflicting deals, so has Britain to an extent. So they decide to renege on the Arab part of the deal. No Arab state emerges from WWI and the Sharif of Mecca is humiliated when he attempts to attend the Versaille peace conference. By way of apology Britain installs his sons as puppet kings in Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. I'm fairly sure there were four sons but I can't remember where the fourth was sent. Side note, only the Jordanian son avoided death at the hands of a nationalist uprising. Britain maintains its promise to the Zionists by opening up immigration into Palestine but tensions between the Palestinians and the Jews leads to the imposition of immigration restrictions. The Jews are viewed by many of the Palestinians as Britain's colonizers and for a time the Mandate did basically serve the needs of the Zionists but there were increasing sympathies among the Mandate officials towards the Palestinian plight and eventually the Mandate settles into more of a neutral arbiter role with slight Palestinian leanings.
Britain spends a lot of the interwar years putting down Arab rebellions as the concept of Arab nationalism sweeps the M/E. It's difficult to attribute problems in Palestine to individual causes and there are bouts of violence between Palestinians and Zionists as well as between both groups and the British. It's in the early 30s that the Haganah militia (a Zionist defence force) splits over the policy of restraint and the Irgun emerges as a more proactive Zionist militia. By the late 30s the Irgun has ceased exclusively defensive actions and has begun launching attacks and raids on Palestinian villages. It is also worth noting this is a period of mass illegal immigration as Zionist groups set up networks to bring into Palestine. During this period Zionist groups managed to smuggle well in excess of 250,000 people into Palestine. This was also a period of brutal sectarian violence with tit-for-tat exchanges between Zionist and Palestinian groups.
1939 saw a government white paper emerge from Britain that suggested further reducing the number of Jewish immigrants allowed into the Mandate and put a halt to land purchases. Part of the justification for the halt on land purchase was that the land ownership records were in an absolute state and trying to figure out who actually owned what was proving a nightmare for mandate officials, this confusion had been pretty ruthlessly exploited for the past two decades and so purchases were halted until the record could be sorted. This was interpreted as a hostile action by a variety of Zionist groups particularly the Irgun and was followed by a spate of Terrorist attacks including the killing Mandate policemen with IEDs. However the paper was overshadowed by the eruption of WWII. Many Palestinians and Zionists volunteered to join the British in their fight against Nazism and a variety of underground organisations that had thus far been working in opposition to the British began gathering intelligence across central and eastern Europe. There was a small group of Zionists who believed Hitler intended to exile Germany's Jewish population and viewed the war as the perfect opportunity to overthrow the British and take advantage of this mass expulsion. They were a small and tragically mistaken minority.
We all know about the tragedy of the holocaust. Or at least I hope we all do and if you don't go read a history book or Wikipedia it or something. In 1945 the British vote to dispose of Churchill's conservative party bringing Labour to power in one of the great surprises of British politics. Labour had run on a variety of brilliant policies that led to the establishment of many of Britain's greatest institutions but one often forgotten promise was the repeal of the 1939 immigration limits in Palestine. Upon taking power as Foreign minister Ernest Bevin decided not to follow through with this promise.
It's hard to create an easy narrative for this period of Israel/Palestine history. Lots of histories take the 1945 refusal to overturn the white paper as the start of a new era of Zionist-british hostility but It's worth bearing in mind the Irgun had attempted to kidnap the head of the Mandate in 1943 and were only prevented from doing so because members of the Haganah leaked the plans to the British. It's also a.time of continued fragmentation and groups within groups within groups and had ended the ceasefire formally by 44 and resumed terrorist operations including bombings and assassinations. For ease we'll just say hostilities resumed towards the end of the war and Labour's decision not to overturn the white paper led to an escalation in violence.
Labour annonced an end to the policy of a two state solution instead proposing an Arab majority state of Palestine in which Jews would compose 1/3rd of the population. This outraged many zionists groups and in 1945 the King David hotel was bombed by the newly formed Jewish resistance movement killing 91 people and injuring a further 40 odd. A new terror campaign began with roadside bombs and attacks against off duty military personnel and their families increasing dramatically. The attacks weren't limited to the Mandate with Irgun members attacking a British Officers club in Vienna and a Sergeants club in Germany. In an effort to hinder British efforts to reduce immigration the British embassy in Rome was also bombed.
The Irgun stepped up attacks on British personnel internationally through out the years of 45-48. I'll give a short run of some highlights: The bombing of the officers club in Jerusalem killing 13 (only 2 were military personelle), the attempted jailbreak at acre leading to the escape of some 200 odd prisoners, mostly not Irgun members, several suicide bombings, and the sergeants affair. The sergeants affair involved the kidnapping of two off-duty British sergeants who were the Irgun tried to use to negotiate the release of several Irgun members caught during the Acre prison break and sentenced to death. Upon British refusal the sergeants were hung and their bodies rigged with explosives. By mid 1948 a war weary Britain decided to withdraw its troop .from the Mandate essentially washing its hands of the whole thing.
Britain had essentially ended WWII only to have to fight a bloody insurgency against the many of the people they'd helped liberate. Several of my Grandpa's friends served in WWII only to be transferred to Palestine and they were some of the most pro-Arab people I knew growing up. They were also sick of Palestine by the time they left from they told me you were never able to relax and let your guard down and everyone was a potential threat. The Irgun used to steal the uniforms off dead soldiers and use them to get close to checkpoints and bases before opening up. Sounded brutal to be honest. As for the rest of your history there Yanik I'd go and read up on the Lebanon civil.war and the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon because you've got a pretty wonky grasp of events then too and I don't have the energy to.produce another of these.
I do empathize with the Palestinians, which is why I want Israel to let them control their own borders, and for them to have a state. I've said this many times. I've decried Israel's illegal and terrifying overseas ventures, allowing the poisonous water in Gaza to go unchecked, using unnecessary violence, and not caring in the slightest about civil casualties (though people seem equally incapable of blaming Hamas for using children as shields, because seeing anything outside an absolutist lens is apparently looked down on in this conflict), this is why I want a Palestinian state:Kingdroid wrote: ↑Thu May 17, 2018 1:22 amThank you telamor for being the voice of rationality and empathy. It truly speaks to the privilege and ignorance of Western citizens when they see the Palestinian protests and deaths and blame the victims for it. People like yanik have never and probably will never live in a world even remotely hell ish, unjust or as cruel as the Palestinian people have had to endure for the past 60 plus years.
The difference is that the celebration of the Battle Of The Boyne is quite divisive...while Guy Fawkes night is not.Octavious wrote: ↑Thu May 17, 2018 7:54 pmIt's a battle worth celebrating. A glorious win for the Pope over the French, fought by Kings of England in the middle of Ireland. But as much as it was a pivotal moment in history, the people who mark it have the same sort of emotional connection as your average Brit celebrating bonfire night. It doesn't really matter.