Israel/Palestine thread

I don't know how to make sense of what you're trying to say. It seems like we've dropped "religious motivations" and moved to "Palestinian side"'s religious motivations being the problem. But they're not the problem, it's the non-material demands and the fact that they're irrational.

This also simplifies a complex situation so much that what you're saying is just wrong. There are significant political, social, and territorial dimensions to the conflict.

We've lost the thread a bit. It's not whether or not you can classify the organization as "religious", it's whether or not they are fighting for religious motives. There is not a single group fighting purely for religious motives, even if they claim to be.

You could say the same about Russia, I still work within that framework when trying to figure out how to get a favorable peace deal for Ukraine. It's very far off, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

The "liberal world" has not ignored this, or put all attention on Israel for 80 years.

So what I'm gathering from this is that part of Palestinian motivation being religious changes absolutely nothing about the current conflict, or how it should be approached. It is purely a (false) attempt at placing all blame on Palestine for the conflict.

Israel motivations are blatantly non religious.

they want security and safety and some of them, control on more land. very pragmatic needs.

they don't want a genocide of all Arabs in the region or the removal of all Arabs 500km from Jerusalem or any other such nonsense. they have 20% of Arab citizens!!!

they just want to guarantee nothing like 10 7 can ever happen again at any cost.

the situation isn't complex.

non western countries should always do our bidding every time with their head down and being thankful we let them exist in the first place.

if you aren't our explicit ally you only live and exist because of our infinite mercy.

and we should be very clear we mean it. Israel is our ally, it gets what he wants, anything that gets in the middle gets annihilated by our immense power. only full obedience to our orders will be tolerated.

we get to decide what happens and what we decide is moral definitionally.

not complicated at all.

And I would view what the liberal world has been doing the last 80 years as a false attempt (no parenthesis needed) at placing all the blame on Israel, and attribution zero agency or responsibility to the Palestinians. And I am saying as long as this is how things are approached, there is no hope for any peace or resolution.

Both sides are just going to continue to radicalize, and Israel is going to be less and less discerning with its bombs.

Why did Israel choose this location to search for those pragmatic needs?

What is going to radicalize someone more: religion or having a bomb kill their family?

outside of movies, religion obviously.

in real life, if you miraculously survive a bombing that kills your family you ****ing leave the place lol

This is an actual situation that is happening now. We're not seeing everyone leave, a lot of them want revenge which I think is pretty natural and predictable.

a lot of them left, a lot of them would leave right now or will soon when/if allowed.

we should encourage that. no more aid if you stay, a lot of aid if you move.

we can do it, we pay, we decide. not doing it is a choice, a choice to prolong the suffering of Israeli.

anybody showing signs he wants to actually revenge violently gets killed.

I think a significant amount of the "we" which will be paying will be classified as "religious organizations", if staying consistent with the terminology of the last few pages. I guess we will have to give them the choice of either avenge their murdered family or leave as well.

Is this a safe way to sum up the argument: because this war is religiously motivated, one side should kill or disperse the other side.

I was actually thinking about western contributions to UNRWA.

the argument is given the war is religiously motivated on the Hamas side (Iran, the main financing entity of Hamas, is a self defined theocracy!) , Israel shouldn't be pushed to try to find a compromise and it is ab utmost moral imperative to help Israel to complete annihilate the irrational enemy.

which means Hamas, all other minor terrorist groups in Gaza and the WB, and Hezbollah, and any possible other groups that will ever get financed by Iran on the borders of Israel

accepting Iranian money should become a guaranteed death sentence basically

Thanks for the key clarification in bold.

Actually, I dont think you need to go that far at all. A simple, "No more Jihad or no more aid" would suffice. And the incentive structure would completely change, and everyone would be better off for it.

You said it is natural to want revenge. And this may be true in the short term. But it is extremely unnatural for a war to drag on so long with the losing side refusing to budge from unreasonable demands; and this is entirely because the liberal world is creating a very unnatural incentive structure.

There is no multi generational violent resistance of Armenians against the Turks

There is no multi generational violent resistance of Cypriots against the Turks

There was no multi generational violent resistance of Ukrainians against Russians when they took Crimea. And eventually a peace will be made and likely Russia will end up with some part of Ukraine and there will be no multigenerational resistance to recapture the rest of Ukraine.

There is no multi generational violent resistance of Jews against the all the Arab countries that threw them out

--I can go on forever. There is absolutely nothing natural about what has happened the last 80 years with Palestinian refugees. It is a very pathological situation artificially constructed by the world, and it could be completely changed if the world stopped providing such perverse incentive structures.

I think the religious zealot component makes it so the Palestinian population would be more obstinate than most populations and willingly embrace more pain and suffering before relenting and getting to a place of reason; but I think they would eventually get there, and EVERYONE would be better off for it.

No disagreements here. The major disagreement is that I believe we passed the point where this would suffice some time ago and since Israel has proven incapable of continuing without extremely high civilian casualties they should stop.

This is a drastic shift in how "natural" was being used. It's also extremely unnatural for widespread persecution to warrant the creation of a new state based on the return to an ancestral homeland (largely based on religion) and despite significant opposition from nations in the region and the local populations. I would say that the "unnatural incentive structure" begins here if anything, and not afterwards. (I want to point out that I believe in Israel's right to have a nation where Israel currently is.)

I don't know what you're trying to prove with these examples. Some of these are multigenerational issues. To me these point to the fact that genocide isn't needed to find a peaceful solution, yet it seems like these are being brought up to point to genocide as a solution. (If you don't think what is being alluded to here counts as genocide then replace it with whatever word accurately describes it.)

At least three of these examples involved a genocide which didn't actually solve the issue (the founding of Israel began due to a genocide), and the sides are still working on a peaceful solution. To me this points to the fact that "killing the other side until they don't want to kill me" is probably not the solution, especially since these peaceful solutions are still happening despite people wanting to kill each other. I believe if you went back in time to the founding of Israel and told the founders that you're from the future and the best option for Israel is to kill all surrounding "religious organizations" then the founders would probably refuse your advice.

(This is a total aside but the characterization of Crimea is incorrect. There has been violent resistance from Ukraine since Crimea was taken, although not necessarily in Crimea due to the geography. More importantly Russia kept attacking Ukraine, and is likely to continue attacking Ukraine. Ukraine being willing to trade peace for land is not a good basis for how diplomacy should work, but more a reflection of the power imbalance between the two nations. The future peace here is also pure speculation.)

The reason I rail against these monocausal reasons is because they're all bullshit. They seek to boil an insanely complex issue down to "my side is right, therefore they are moral" which is just completely wrong. Both sides have valid claims. Both side have religious extremism which is hurting a peaceful resolution (yes one side is worse). Both sides are radicalized due to the long term violence. Both sides have a disregard for the humanity of the other side. Both sides are engaging in extremely amoral actions.

You can appeal to the morality of antiquity all you want, but the fact is that's not the world we live in today. Genocide is not a good option; it is amoral and not realistic anyways. A better solution needs to be found.

I still think if the West said, "No more Jihad if you want aid," Palestine would become much more reasonable very fast; and I think it would probably result in less net human suffering than the current status quo.

If this actually happened I suspect the rest of the Arab world, which doesn't want to absorb any more Palestinian refugees, would put tremendous pressure on Palestine to be more reasonable.

The point is with misplaced empathy and initiating horrible incentive structures the Western world has fumbled this situation at least as bad as Israel or the Palestinians IMO. With no self awareness or interest in self correction.

The problem I have here is that it's really not the West which needs to say "no more jihad". If the west says it it's mostly meaningless. If countries with similar cultures to Gaza say it it is far more meaningful. If countries which are directly involved in restoring Gaza say it then it's more meaningful still. If the political wing of Hamas says "no more jihad" then it's extremely powerful.

I think that the necessary steps to make all of these happen are in place already. Not everyone agrees on it though.

I do not think that UNRWA issue is well understood and it ends up being misrepresented.

It is meaningless if the West says no more Jihad and keeps the aid gravy train rolling. It is very meaningful if it says no more Jihad or no more aid.

The West is still providing the vast majority of the aid that Hamas controls, and is using to fund their war machine. Through UNRWA and a lot of other agencies. If the West refused to do this unless Palestinian society moderated, I dont think there is any chance the Arab gulf states would be willing to pick up the tab. Instead they would respond by putting pressure on the Palestinians to moderate.

I admit this isn't a reasonable solution because the people of the West wouldn't be able to stomach all the (mostly fake) propaganda videos of Palestinian children starving that would invariably come out in response to such a policy; but that doesn't mean it wouldn't work otherwise.

As long as the West is funding Palestinian extremism, Israel is bearing all the violence, everyone running the show has their hand in the cookie jar, and the Palestinians themselves find the situation acceptable there is little incentive for a radicalized Palestinian society to moderate and come to a place of reason.

With the gravy train comment, I wasn't referring to the people. If there was an honest audit of how aid money was actually spent, I think we would actually be shocked how little actually made it to the people and how much was siphoned off by corruption along the way.

But this is part of the problem. Because of western largesse and empathy with no strings attached, the people making decisions on the Palestinian side aren't incentivized to improve the situation. And they have all the leverage, because they dont actually care if the Palestinian people starve (as long as they can blame it on the USA or Israel).

They of course care if they have bombs dropped on them walking down the street. But so far their solution to this problem seems to be to stay underground and not to walk down the streets.

Well, with a pre 10/7 Hamas this would be a non starter; as no one would be willing to volunteer to be the one to cross Hamas and be thrown off a rooftop; but maybe by the time Israel leaves Hamas will be weakened enough (militarily and morally) there can be some oversight to bypass Hamas. But IF that happens it will only be because of Israel's military intervention, paid for dearly with the lives of their own soldiers in addition to all the Palestinian civilian collateral damage.

And maybe not.

We shall see.

Aid money is not provided by the UN (at least in any substantial amount). Almost of Hamas's money comes from Iran, Qatar, taxation, and illicit means. I suppose it could be argued that if the UN didn't provide food, water, or medical supplies then Hamas would be forced to supply them but I don't think that's actually true and I think it probably wouldn't make a dent in their ability to attack Israel. It's important to note that the two major countries providing money to Hamas are not part of the West.

No one is going to volunteer, even now. I think we passed the point where it was ideal to stop quite awhile ago. We have been in the territory of "hopefully someone can be convinced to help despite Israel's military intervention" for quite some time now.

Yeah, I looked it up and found the agreement from 1951, which should have long ago been abandoned.

Oops, that was Saudi Arabia, not Pakistan.

I believe you are correct, but that is so bizarre to me. Why does Saudi Arabia even need tons of US weaponry?
Have they even ever been significantly involved in a war? I can't imagine such a large country could be rolled over easily like Kuwait was. Do they have the weapons in case their own people try to overthrow the monarchy?

They want to project power regionally, Iran is their mortal enemy.

And they currently have a situation in Yemen

Anyone who does anything for religious reasons is acting irrationally, by definition.

Why should the west, or even the UN, be obligated to making sure Palestinians starve to death and why would the public be (uniquely) appalled by their starvation?

Aren't people in countries all over the world still starving to death every day? I used to work for the USDA in programs which supported NGOs which provided food aid to many poor countries, but I had no illusions that there weren't still people starving there.

I don't watch much TV anymore, but there used to be ads all the time showing starving children in places like Ethiopia and Bangladesh. If they tugged at the heartstrings of individuals with money to spare, they made a contribution. But no one demanded that the US and its allies not allow a single person in those countries to starve.

I think it's appalling that the US sends any aid to the Palestinians, who are at least partially responsible for their situation, while people still starve in other countries which have never committed acts of violence against the US or its allies.