I think this is true, but I wonder why this olive branch of “right to exist” doesn’t also extend to the Palestinian government? Maybe the Palestinians need a stronger military force to establish their right to exist?
In the 90s, There was a majority of Israelis willing to give the Palestinians a state and recognition for peace and recognition.
This was met with packed buses being blown away in major cities by palestinian extrimists during negotiations.
This allowed Israeli extremists to take the reigns, and after three decades of hegemony managed to convince most of the Israeli population that peace is a dangerous pipe dream and any sort of compromise will be met with violence. And to establish facts on the ground which would make a palestinian state practically impossible without rooting out masses of Israelis from their home by force.
The Israeli left kept warning of this scenario, because the end game is either a non democratic jewish state, or a civil war torn single state. This cost the traditional Israeli left (the labor party) to be almost electorally eliminated during these 3 decades.
Now the hegemony opinion is that no peace is possible, and the Palestinians are to be basically ignored.
Yeah, I have no idea what the answer is. But if the Palestinians somehow all of a sudden had a massive (and well-organized) military, they couldn’t be ignored and settlers would see it in their interest to leave voluntarily. Then maybe peace could happen. The asymmetry of the military situation means that one side is desperate and the other side sees no reason to compromise, and therefore you have a low level conflict forever which is not actually good for anyone.
They are ignored as they've proven again and again that their words are not worth the paper that they sign, that they cannot be trusted. That they are as corrupt as an entity could be. That they are unwilling to make hard compromises ... nay ... any compromise whatsoever. Even when compromise enables them to declare "victory" and free their people from a lifetime of violence.
The conflict will continue until one side realizes that it has been utterly defeated. This hasn't happened yet. They have been defeated. They just don't want to admit it.
> I wonder why this olive branch of “right to exist” doesn’t also extend to the Palestinian government?
The right of a homeland for the Palestinians has been recognized since before Israel was even granted statehood by the U.N as part of the two-state solution.
Note Palestinian’s situation isn’t just due to Israel. Neither Egypt nor Jordan really “want” Palestinians either. Palestinians refugees in Jordan often face as bad or worse discrimination as those in Israel. Egypt could welcome the people of Gaza but don’t either. In contrast after Israel declared itself independent most Arab states in the Mediterranean ejected their historical Jewish inhabitants (roughly equal to the number of Palestinians at the time), and the state of Israel accepted them (it had incentives too to do so). But in short it’s a much more complicated issue than just having a stronger military and Palestinians are victims of more than just one state or political expediency.
Palestinians are victims of an imperialist pan-Arab politics that sees the removal of non-Arab sovereignty from the region as fundamentally more important than ensuring democracy, civil rights, or economic development for all Arabs within Arab nations.
No, not really. You're suggesting more capability for violence will secure their freedom. I'm noting the observation of facts at hand suggest the opposite.
Does that mean reducing the Israeli military would also help?
The goal is for both the Israeli and Palestinian states to exist and for there to be peace. An Israeli hegemony over the Palestinian state, with settlers and all, certainly doesn’t help that, and it may be a rational goal of the Palestinian state to become too much of a nuisance to be ignored. If peace means subjugation, I think many Palestinians probably wouldn’t be okay with that. The Palestinians are seeing a lot of “might makes right” arguments right now about why they should just accept subjugation.
Given the two wars of survival the Israelis have fought in the past 50-ish years it seems very likely that it would reducing their military would reduce the freedom and literal existence of the Israelis.
For the Palestinians, perhaps reducing the Israeli would increase freedom in the short term. In the longer term, in the absence of Israel, it seems more likely they would end up dominated by either larger neighbors like Lebanon by Syria or experience low-freedom autocracies like Egypt, Iraq, etc.
Who said anything about eliminating Israel? Why eliminate EITHER side? I think a two state solution makes the most sense, but right now the one state Israeli right wing has the upper hand and a near monopoly on violence (and let’s not ignore there has been plenty of targeting of civilians, including retribution). This doesn’t seem to be a great argument about how freedom-loving the State of Israel is. An autocratic (or ethnocratic), low-freedom Israel snuffing out the Palestinian state doesn’t seem preferable to me whereas a peaceful two state solution seems like it could be super awesome for both sides if they can just get over themselves.
And if one can understand why Israel would fight for its right to exist as a state, then why should it be surprising that the Palestinian state fights for the same reason?
Instead, the argument is that the observable fact is that continued violence has not helped the palestinian cause.
It simply has not worked.
That's not a moral statement. It is simply the descriptive truth that violence for decades has not helped their cause, and therefore it probably won't in the future.
But the violence by the Israeli military DOES seem to have worked! Israel exists and no serious person doubts that Israel will continue to exist for quite a while because of it. So why would violence help one side more than the other? Probably because one side is much more powerful than the other. Hence my asking about whether a stronger (and more organized) Palestinian military would help.
Yeah, ain’t no angels in this conflict. It’d be doing the world a favor to move everyone out and then sow the ground with highly radioactive waste making it entirely uninhabitable for hundreds of years, denying it to everyone. So much blood spilt over a bit of land no bigger than Massachusetts (and much of it desert).
To take this thread further off topic, i feel like there's some remarkably not-hot-headed people in this thread so maybe I can finally get an answer to a question that's been bothering me a long time:
Why do some Israelis build settlements? I mean, in the middle of what used to be Palestinian-controlled land? What's their goal? Also isn't it super risky/scary?
It seems to me to just be a needless provocation but that makes no sense, why would anyone risk their family's safety just to provoke? I'm clearly missing some key insight.
Originally, security
. Israel’s economic and population core is contained within a region as wide the distance from your average small city to a suburb. It’s also geographically a low plain. It’s called Gush Dan and looking at a map is helpful for understanding how extreme this geography really is.
The land on the Palestinian side of that border are hills. Prior to when Israel conquered that land in 1967, Arab militants/terrorists would take pot shots at and occasionally kill drivers of cars and busses driving along roads in this region. It’s really that small, single digit miles wide. Apparently school busses were a favorite since they are large bright targets.
The settlements were originally limited in number and designed to offer the Israelis opportunity for physical security. This is still the case today when the preferred weapon of militants/terrorist is missiles.
After 1973 when the Right came to power the settlements adopted a religious connotation. They were massively expanded as a conscious effort to absorb the entire West Bank. Since then the problem has only deepened.
Over two thousand years ago there were two kingdoms called Judah and Israel. Judah encompassed the southern West Bank and Israel the northern West Bank. These kingdoms were destroyed and became part of the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and the Roman empires. The modern State of Israel claims that it is the spiritual successor to these kingdoms and that it therefore has a right to the same territory that these kingdoms once encompassed. Furthermore, Judaism's holy book, the Torah, describes how God gave his people, the Israelites, this territory. Many Israeli Jews believe that they are somehow related to the ancient Israelites.
While many Israeli Jews (likely a majority) acknowledge that the West Bank is "occupied", technically, according to international law, for the above reasons, they insist that Israel has a legitimate claim to it. The West Bank is in Israel commonly referred to as "Judea and Samaria" because those are the names used in the Torah.
The goal of the settlements is to create "facts on the ground" to make it harder for future governments to relinquish the occupied Palestinian territories. As Israel's former prime minister Ariel Sharon phrased it: "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many [Palestinian] hilltops as they can to enlarge the [Jewish] settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." This is precisely why it is considered a war crime for an occupying power to transfer parts of its civilian population into occupied territory.
Most Israeli settlers live in settlement blocs and it is not dangerous for the setters to live in them. A smaller number of settlers are religious extremists and they establish "outposts" - settlements built without explicit permission by the government. These settlers are often well-armed and coordinate with the Israeli military. Palestinians, on the other hand, are for the most part not allowed to own firearms.
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is said to have been the most successful political assassination in history. It changed the tide for real, in the way that the assassin strived for.
Yup, I agree. Same for the Israelis who want peace shouldn’t be pushing for settlement and subjugation of the Palestinian state. Extremists on both sides don’t want to compromise on their visions.
Yeah, if I wasn't abroad for my PhD I'd be voting for the Labor Party this election. They've got a new party head who's taking a stronger stand against Netanyahu and the pro-settlement Right than the other parties.
I do really wish my people's country could come up in the news without people breaking out in Zionism Derangement Syndrome in the comments, insisting genocide refugees are colonizers and racism is when we don't force minorities to fight in the army if they don't support the state. It brings to mind that academic crank who once said Israeli soldiers are racist for not raping Palestinian women. This kind of ZDS is why Netanyahu keeps winning -- it's all Israelis and Jews hear from people in other countries, and it affects our discourse.
