Israel/Palestine thread
Think this merits its own thread...
Discuss my fellow 2+2ers..
AM YISRAEL CHAI.
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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.
That's a good point. I'm down with prioritizing aid for people who are starving and not holding hostages.
Let Sally Struthers help out Hamas.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal...
Article 25:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
This answers why the UN should care. People care for various reasons, I don't think it's unique to care for Gaza.
I would be surprised if there's a well known famine where the UN is not involved in any way. Often famines occur in areas with internal conflict (often with actors who are largely not influenced by the West) and poor logistics, limiting what the UN can do, but they're still usually involved in some sense.
I agree that some humanitarian crises get more media coverage than others, but it seems to me that the answer isn't to then neglect the area getting the media coverage but to increase aid and visibility to the situations which aren't being shown.
I think there's a lot of reasons that Palestine is covered so extensively. Part of it is that there's really no excuse for starvation there in comparison to other places with conflict that the UN cannot safely go to stemming from belligerents where the West has very little direct influence. A large % of people think that the Palestine conflict can and should stop, and Israel is given so much aid in part because they can and should be held to a higher standard which they are not meeting. Due to that aid, the West has far more say over what standards Israel should be held to when compared to entities in Yemen or Sudan for example.
I also think there's a lot of reasons that do not stem from altruism, or just not wanting to see people starve. Gaza is a very important place geopolitically, and is influenced by Iran, USA, and other actors. It is not pragmatic to let millions starve and humanitarian aid is used as a stabilizer in a very unstable region of the world. Destabilizing the Middle East, USA losing credibility, the spread of extremism, and the public opinion of the Israel/USA alliance deteriorating are very much in Iran's interest and not in USA's (or the West's) interest.
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?
Iran and KSA hate each other's guts.
Also shiny new toys for the princes to play with.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal...
Article 25:
This answers why the UN should care. People care for various reasons, I don't think it's unique to care for Gaza.
To care generically for Gaza is certainly not unique, to donate more to palestinians per person than to any other cultural/ethnical/religious/you name it group in UN history by a large margin is though. And btw article 25 is not a mandate not even an indication to pay for foreign welfare. And many countries are poorer (in gdp per capita) than gaza + wb
I didn't quote it as a "mandate [...] for foreign welfare" so no problem there.
The many poorer countries generally fall under the categories I laid out in the post.
To care generically for Gaza is certainly not unique, to donate more to palestinians per person than to any other cultural/ethnical/religious/you name it group in UN history by a large margin is though. And btw article 25 is not a mandate not even an indication to pay for foreign welfare. And many countries are poorer (in gdp per capita) than gaza + wb
As I said, I think we would be surprised how very little money actually makes it to the people. Even much of the western aid is confiscated by people like Hamas and sold to the people at extremely marked up prices.
Richard Hanania (an Arab FWIW) says Westerners dont understand, and dont even really try to understand, Arab norms and society. There is a tremendous amount of tribalism, nepotism and outright corruption. Except for the extremely wealthy gulf monarchies with small populations, all of the Arab world suffers from similar problems for similar reasons. It is not like places like Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Syria are thriving and Palestine is the exception.
There is just too much corruption for anything to work very well. Imagine an entire society that operates like the Trump family, and you get an idea of what you are dealing with.
There is a video circulating online of a Hamas militant executing 3 Palestinians. Not sure what for. Unless Hamas is completely destroyed (which seems impossible at this point) I dont think we can comprehend how brutal and bloody the day after is going to be when Hamas violently reasserts control.
Of course pre social media days there would just be a complete media blackout of this as it isn't conducive to the prevailing narrative. But with social media as it is, a lot more is going to come out than would have in the past. But dont expect Al Jazeera to be acknowledging it.
lol, no one has done more to shut down reporting from Gaza than the IDF. World's most noble military force has killed the highest % of journalists in any conflict in modern history.
As I said, I think we would be surprised how very little money actually makes it to the people. Even much of the western aid is confiscated by people like Hamas and sold to the people at extremely marked up prices.
Richard Hanania (an Arab FWIW) says Westerners dont understand, and dont even really try to understand, Arab norms and society. There is a tremendous amount of tribalism, nepotism and outright corruption. Except for the extrem
well yes ofc the money is then stolen by intermediaries.
Still when you destine it to palestinians, you ought to measure it per person i suppose? UNRWA gets 1.5 bln, UNHCR total budget (for every other UN refugee worldwide EXCEPT palestinians, the only group that has it's own agency) is 10.7 bln
Sudan gets 426M , how is that reasonable, proper, moral? how is that not racism?
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
Life isn’t fair. Saying something isn’t fair isn’t a reason to change distributions.
Distributions are based on need, direness and prob public optics
KSA buys our guns cause we buy their oil.
These pricks won't stop:
Tory candidate accused of dog-whistle tactics against rival with Indian name
Marco Longhi, standing for Dudley North, asked British-Pakistani voters if they could trust Labour’s Sonia Kumar
A Conservative candidate has been criticised for sending letters to British-Pakistani voters allegedly insinuating they should vote for him instead of his Labour rival because of her Indian surname.
Marco Longhi, the Tory candidate fighting for re-election in Dudley North against Sonia Kumar, has been accused of using dog-whistle politics and attempting to “alienate British Hindus”.
In a letter to “voters of the British Pakistani/Kashmiri community in Dudley”, Longhi asked if the Labour candidate would speak for Kashmir in parliament as he had done. Kumar’s name was in bold, capitalised and underlined.
Sadly one day we will probably look back wistfully at the days when it was "only" racist dog-whistling and not deportations and internment camos.
yeah i never looked into it at all, but i did see reports that egyptian intelligence warned israel that something was going on in the gaza strip before oct 7
They were given warnings from their own guards tasked with monitoring the border.
huh, so yeah they literally had the whole thing, but did nothing / let it happen. wild
Fascist governments approve of sacrificing their own citizens in clandestine black operations if it provides the excuse to do the genocide of their dreams.
many such cases
guessing the israelis get warnings like that quite frequently given the large number of groups on their boarders who believe that killing/raping jews is life's highest and best calling
I think you're taking it all bit too personally.
The October assault was from part of an oppressed, subjugated people against their oppressors.
Fascist governments approve of sacrificing their own citizens in clandestine black operations if it provides the excuse to do the genocide of their dreams.
is it your position that the israeli security service purposefully allowed the attack to happen so that they would have a pretext for retaliation
Who can say for sure? I think there's some likelihood of that.
For the non-clickers here:
The brutal Hamas massacre on October 7 was preceded by months of warning signs noted by IDF surveillance soldiers and disregarded as unimportant by intelligence officials, according to eyewitness accounts given in recent days.
At least three months prior to the attack, surveillance soldiers serving on a base in Nahal Oz reported signs that something unusual was underway at the already-tumultuous Gaza border, situated a kilometer from them.
The activity reported by the soldiers included information on Hamas operatives conducting training sessions multiple times a day, digging holes and placing explosives along the border. According to the accounts of the soldiers, no action was taken by those who received the reports.
IDF surveillance soldiers, referred to in Hebrew as tatzpitaniyot, belong to the Combat Intelligence Corps and operate along the country’s borders, as well as throughout the West Bank.
The surveillance soldiers are referred to by many as “the eyes of the army” as they provide real-time intelligence information to soldiers in the field, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The soldiers gather information through a variety of cameras, sensors and maps, and are expected to be acutely aware of every small change that happens in the 15-30 kilometers of land that they are each responsible for monitoring.
Once relevant information has been gathered by the surveillance soldiers, it is passed up the chain of command, including to intelligence officials who then determine what steps need to be taken. However, according to the accounts of two surveillance soldiers stationed on a base in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, the signs of what was to come on October 7 were never taken seriously.
well you seem to understand.
rational people can be convinced by changing their payoff matrix and it happened systematically.
fully irrational zealots have to be carpet bombed to nothingness or slaughtered in other ways. I am not saying this of "Islam". I am saying this of Hamas and related radical groups.
There's no one on Earth that purely rational. Everyone applies a payoff matrix but different people weigh different things.
Faced with mundane choices, people will readily alter their behavior in response to money. You can pay someone to clean your house or defend you in a murder trial. But with issues like gun control or abortion, a fundamentally different calculus seems to be at work. Economic trade-offs — like lifting an embargo in exchange for concessions — suddenly become unacceptable. As Professor Tetlock (now also at the University of Pennsylvania) has observed, even to suggest such a trade-off is to invite moral outrage, along with feelings of contamination and a need for moral cleansing.
Sacred-value conflicts can be lessened, sometimes just by reframing the issue. When Professor Tetlock and a colleague asked people about President Bill Clinton’s practice of rewarding big campaign donors with a night in the Lincoln Bedroom, they got varying reactions depending on how the question was phrased. If they presented it as an economic transaction — pay $250,000 or more and get a night in the White House — even Clinton supporters were indignant. But when the practice was painted as the kind of thing you’d do for a friend, much less outrage ensued.
Not every issue can be so easily finessed — but whatever the circumstance, money seems a subject best avoided. When Scott Atran of the French National Center for Scientific Research and Jeremy Ginges of the New School for Social Research asked people in the Middle East about potential solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they found that the mention of money frequently incited moral outrage. Among Palestinian refugees, those who were open to compromise responded favorably to the idea of giving up their right of return to Israel in exchange for financial support for the new state of Palestine. But when moral absolutists among the refugees were offered this solution, they greeted it with anger, disgust and increased support for violence. Symbolic gestures — like Israel’s giving up of its claim on the West Bank — had the opposite effect. The same pattern held with Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
As the West Bank is to Israelis and Palestinians, nuclear power is becoming to many Iranians. Powerful figures there have linked the issue to the history of foreign exploitation of Iran’s oil resources in an effort to reframe it as a matter of national pride. A recent online survey led by Morteza Dehghani of the University of Southern California suggests that this may be working: 14 percent of Professor Dehghani’s respondents treated nuclear power as a sacred value.
Israel warns of prospect of ‘all-out war’ after Hezbollah publishes video of military, civilian sites
Israel warned Hezbollah on Tuesday of the prospect of “all-out war” after the Lebanese militant group published a 9-minute video, purportedly taken by a drone, showing Israeli military and civilian locations in several Israeli cities.
“We are getting very close to the moment of deciding to change the rules of the game against Hezbollah and Lebanon,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a statement on X. “In an all-out war, Hezbollah will be destroyed, and Lebanon severely beaten,” he added.
Parts of the Hezbollah footage, filmed in the daytime, claimed to show Krayot, a cluster of “highly populated” residential cities north of the Israeli city of Haifa and 28 km (17 miles) south of the Lebanese border, along with malls and high rises.
Other parts claimed to show a military complex near Haifa belonging to Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael – including Iron Dome batteries, missile storage sites and radar sites – and military boats, ships and oil storage depots in the port of Haifa.
So something which I have brought up before which I have never seen addressed adequately by anyone advocating for Palestinian statehood is the geographic military significance of the West Bank.
Israel has been surrounded and constantly attacked from every direction for decades; and has relied mainly on defensive measures to keep their populace safe. This has worked in part because of the geographic distance of the belligerent forces from Israel's main population centers.
The West Bank is on high ground directly above these population centers. Given Palestinians and their supporters have shown zero inclination or ability to control militants from threatening and attacking Israel; why in the world would Israel give up such militarily significant land?
It is one thing if the Palestinians first demonstrated a willingness and an ability to control violence against Israel; but they have shown absolutely no inclination for either over decades.
There is absolutely no indication an independent Palestinian state controlling the West Bank would not be immediately compromised by foreign funded militants promising to destroy Israel; as has happened in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Gaza. I
In fact these groups are already operating in the West Bank, they just cant set up shop and bring in heavy weapons as they have in Gaza due to Israel's occupation.
