4781

Neither side’s leadership wants peace. Everybody is fine with being an eternal victim.

For all I care, give the Palestinians the entirety of Jerusalem, and let them have my sister-in-law. Though that is kind of perpetuating the hostility.

4782

Perhaps this is true, but considering the treatment of the Palestinian people, and the movement of the Settlers, I would still argue that Israeli’s failings are far greater, being the dominant player in the events going on.

By which I mean treating the Israeli Palestinians as second-class citizens, and slowly pushing the Palestinians out of their homes in order to allow Settlers to move into that region.

4783

Netanyahu’s in particular. Not sure if the new regime is actually abiding by Settlement Agreements since Netanyahu got booted or not, but under Netanyahu, they were not even worth the paper they were printed on, and even not worth avoiding insulting Israel’s Most Powerful ally (see Biden as VP arriving in Israel to work on Settlement Negotiations and Netanyahu breaking ground on new settlements at that very moment).

Side note - given all of this over the past couple of decades, I’m not certain the 2-state solution 9regardless of how it would be the most equitable solution) will ever work, but I haven’t seen any good analysis of what alternatives could be. As is, it gets the voice assent, along with negotiating agreements which are never really upheld.

4784

I think this is not true. There is a massive power imbalance, and one side benefits much more from the status quo, and the other side would like to change the status quo. That’s the natural state of affairs.

4785

Israel continues to double down on ‘Apartheid state’ instead of democracy.

4786

They just arrested a Palestinian writer for an op-ed where he detailed the abuses in his previous unjustified arrests.

4787

In all the stuff going on in the world lately, no one is paying much attention to the ongoing situation in Israel/Palestine, of course. I am despairing at this point of Israel as a political entity ever doing the right thing.

4788

Israel is a great case in the collision with the lack of political imagination and political concepts and ideologies formulated in the 18th and 19th centuries slamming headfirst into 20th and 21st century multinationalism and demographic shifts.

But basically Israel (and the world) are going to have to figure out how to have an exclusionary democracy, for an Israel that is not premised on being exclusionary doesn’t have a reason to exist. Yet there’s basically no framework in which to do this in a sensible or respectable way. In a weird way you might extrapolate that out to many other nation-states in crisis - the nation-state is founded on ethnocentric lines, but the nation has these tinges of 18th C Prussian citizenship, where citizenship is supposed to be divorced from ethnicity.

In practice many countries do this de facto rather than de jure - most East Asian countries are probably impossible to immigrate to without a marriage as they’re just not interested in non-ethnocentric immigration. But that sort of relies on social convention and is all under the table and guilty about it.

4789

Are we sure this is accurate? I’m pretty sure this guy was arrested for security offenses, not just writing stuff. Looks like his first arrest was for plotting to assassinate a politician?

Also…

The 36-year-old dual national spent eight years in an Israeli prison between 2006 and 2012.

4790

Normally I would concur but I’m pretty sure the past two years has taken at least 4 years so it’s possible.

4791

In fairness, being a Palestinian and being arrested by Israel by no means indicates you are actually any sort of terrorist or threat. Being Palestinian is often enough.

The only way out of this trap is a one-state solution where everyone, Jew and Muslim, is treated equally, all people have protected rights, and there are provisions for accepting immigration from Jews anywhere and people with blood ties to Palestine perhaps. A two state solution is dead at this point.

4792

I’m not familiar with most of the publications I saw that covered this (beside Jacobin, which I spared you from) but it’s not at all unusual for Western press to not touch news from Palestine. And at this point you can’t trust Israel’s stated reasons for any action they’re taking against a Palestinian.

4793

It’s hard to look at the story of Hamouri’s life and conclude that he is anything other than a Palestinian rights activist who has been repeatedly harassed and held in prison by Israel using their special security laws; sometimes even illegally according to those very laws and Israeli judges.

The one-state solution essentially means that the idea of Israel as both a Jewish state and a democracy is dead. As you say, they can’t really be both, and demographics force them to make the choice. They’ve chosen oppression and Apartheid rather than democracy pretty consistently.

4794

The other option though, yes, it to give up the formality of being a Jewish state, in favor of a state that respects Jews and others, even if the cultural slant prioritizes a Jewish culture. I’m a very secular Jew, and I’ve always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with many of the conceptions of Israel that have existed over time. To me, “Israel” exists as a metaphor, the thing we mean when we say “next year in Jerusalem,” and as a physical nation state. The latter to me should operate on principles that reflect Jewish ethics, not Jewish theology as interpreted by hyper-conservative racists. But I admit I am probably in a minority.

4795

Yes, terrorists mostly use NATO weapons because the US is sending lots of guns and ammo to Hamas, their best friends. They totally don’t all use AK-47s and RPG-7s, that’s just Hollywood.

4796

The need the Israelis seem to have to avoid any and all responsibility for anything has slowly eroded my long-standing support and affection for them. Well, their government at least.

4797

We still use the M16 with its various variants in Israel, not just the Tavor.

4798

Israel assassinates a journalist and then attacks the funeral procession. I don’t know how anybody can see the Israeli state as anything but villains.

4799

Someone in this thread might know offhand, but in economics I studied a paper that correlated major world news events and actions by the Israeli military and found a strong link between the two, albeit with a slight time lag. The obvious implication was that contentious military actions were carefully timed for when the global eye would be turned elsewhere.

I’ve tried searching for it but all the terms are too generic to get a hit. Has anyone else come across it?

4800

I can’t help you with that but if you end up finding it please share here, sounds interesting!