Israel/Palestine thread

It's just the opposite, I'm telling you history shows it.

You guys have this simplified bordering on infantilized view that a bunch of Jews arrived in 1947, stole Israel, and that marked the very point trouble started.

I'm telling you that you don't know a lick of regional history if you tell yourself that story. It's not even close to reality.

But as long as you believe that version of historical events, we'll do this dance.

I'm sure you're not listening to me. It seems you're only talking to Bill and maybe PW.

Bill has a point there, but it really doesn't have much to do with 1948 either. Plenty of the problem is not resolving the war of 1967, which is already more than 50 years ago.

told you guys rafiki is a warmonger

What does anything of this have to do with that?

I'm trying to explain to these guys that you can go through the 1800's and very early 1900's and see Jewish communities just wrecked in the region. These racial issues the Brits called "irreconcilable" are old (much further back than even a few hundred years). And when you study the region's history you really see it go brick by brick over decades. The way Nazi ideas were imported, who they were imported from. And we're talking about way high up in political spheres. Iraq in some spots went idea for idea on how to handle their "Jew problem". This is the slaughter of Jews based on Nazi ideas in 1941, in Iraq: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-ea...

So when you talk to people who say "it's just a Gaza problem", you get frustrated. You guys are like a bunch of white people telling black people "there's no slavery bro". That's what you're doing to me here in a conflict where you have no skin in the game. The old school Arab nations, one by one (starting with Egypt), began to accept that a country self determined by Jews would be "allowed" to exist (even to their benefit). But this is taking a long long time. And the holdouts are obvious. And believe me, it's not because of "Gaza". It's because Israel is the only state self determined by Jews in a vastness of countries self determined by Muslims.

You debate in a highly evasive manner.

it is important to recognize the anti Jewish sentiment in the area imo

alot of the arabic countries were axis aligned and hated jews

In the 70s Jews weren't allowed in Saudi Arabia. ****, in the 50s there were neighborhoods in Denver Colorado where my parents grew up that didn't allow Jews. Your hundreds of years spans all kids of situations in all kinds of places with all kinds of people. You are listing things that happened in some places almost 200 years ago and saying nothing different is possible. It's like saying you can't live among Christians because...well, you know, long list.

Baltimore Maryland 1960s - guess there can be no peace in the USA

No not at all. I can see you reading it as such, but that's not at all what I'm saying.

What I'm saying to the others, is this problem is old. The Brits bailed because they knew this old problem was "intractable". We hear this word used by experts on both sides. The Brits wanted no part in mediating it. And actually all signs point to them being pretty darn right.

A problem has roots. If you do not understand the roots, you cannot begin to address it. There are people in this thread convinced the roots are just "Nakba, Israel, Problem". This is just the furthest thing from the truth, and I submit the 200 years and 20+ countries we can discuss to prove it. This is a problem steeped in Islam's inflexibility when it comes to other religions in the region (and what power they are afforded). We can mince words or we can just point to almost every single Muslim country regionally and the methods with which they purge(d) those they don't agree with.

It's 2024, in a colonizer/colonized white guilt world, that's not popular to say. But it's the truth.

So this notion of just "fixing Gaza to solve all that ails us", it's a fantasy. Micro I'm trying to tell you that the problem we're trying to "fix" is older (and btw that doesn't mean not fixing Gaza). It's the problem of why Victor is the way Victor is. THAT problem. ducy?

intractable 😀

yes, correction noted. Thank you.

Rafiki,

The problem is new. It's practically brand new. Sunni and Shia have problems going back more than a thousand years, but that doesn't determine what happens everywhere. Right now Sunni and Shia mix in Baghdad in a way that was impossible just 10 years ago. And it wasn't consistently a thing where they couldn't mix before 2003 either. In the former Yugoslavia, there are all kinds of conflicts that went back centuries. But they are not at war now. When people stop killing each other and stop blockading each other and stop restricting each other into tiny cantons, these conflicts can fade the way other conflicts have.

Okay, I'll go back in time with you.

As good a place to start as any was roughly 1900 when the Zionist movement decided to resurrect Hebrew instead of learn Arabic. This left them unable to interact sufficiently with their neighbors.

Now add on the practice of avoda ivrit -- kibbutzes not hiring Arab labor because the point was to build a Jewish-only colonial community.

Herzl in 1895:

So the Jewish National Fund etc. bought land from the big estates; new owners then fired the tenant labor that had worked the land for generations. This produced thousands of landless peasants and the first riots.

Your turn to mark the date of the original sin.

I respect your right to an opinion, I just strongly disagree (here). Your contention is that Hezbollah and Iran for example just stops being a thing when the Gazans get a half-decent deal? There are almost no regional experts who would agree with you here. Remove me from the equation. The best and brightest geopolitical minds totally disregard your assertion. So I don't know how to consolidate that with my world view.

Circling back to the SA whatabout example, it's very easy to imagine the Bantustans winding up in a similar situation to GazaWB without Mandela being the kind of leader he was.

Iran has historically been the least antisemitic Muslim country in the ME. Most Jews stayed there through '48 and through '67 and many even stayed after '79. The big conflict in the ME is over oil and that's what the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia is fundamentally about. Israel is part of this picture. So, yeah, Iran will have conflict with Israel as long as it functions as a military base for US and Western oil interests.

Still a lot different than any other Muslim country in the ME. There were still tens of thousands of Jews in Iran in 2000. And, what about before 1979? You talk about history going back hundreds of years like conflict is universal and unavoidable, but Jews were doing very well in Iran in 1978. Some people call Beverly Hills Tehrangeles because of all the Persian Jews there. How does your description of people always hating Jews in this region allow the possibility of a thriving community of Jews in Iran in 1978?

I have an explanation of what actually happened. The US and UK and British Petroleum orchestrated a coup against a democratically elected government in Iran and installed a dictator. There was a popular revolt against the dictator and the siphoning off of the wealth from natural resources. The revolt was a mix of communists and Islamists at first, but the Islamists prevailed. The governments that followed have been anti-Western and outside the control of Western oil interests. This has naturally put them at odds with Saudi Arabia and with Israel, which is largely supported by the West to protect oil interests (like, this explains why the USA didn't give a lot of military aid to Israel before the 70s).

blah blah blah, their leaders say the holocaust is a hoax. next

That used to be Saudi Arabia and now it's Iran and they flipped. Oh well, no use trying to figure out why things happen. Bombs away!

Which leader says that?

the president

the president of Iran is a holocaust denier (supposedly) and so you think Israel should murder Gazan children? weird logic but ok, noted.

reminder that only one side is doing rape