Or, they have a different goal.
Such as “no Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank” and believe that long term, that will give them increased security. I’m skeptical of the latter, and consider the former to be morally reprehensible. I’d like to think that’s not the strategy they are pursuing, but the history of Likud makes me more than a little worried.
Yeah, usually a country would bomb the crap out of the country firing rockets into them, until they surrendered and no longer had the ability to wage war on them, or reached some sort of peace treaty to end the conflict.
That’s what makes this case kind of unique, because basically nothing Israel does will make the palestineans stop attacking them, but the palestineans are seen as not having any responsibility for the terrorist elements that operate within their ranks. I’m not sure there’s a good historical analog we can look to as a blueprint for how to solve this.
Conversely, nothing the Palestinians do will make the Israelis budge on ending the occupation of Arab lands, giving Palestinians full citizenship, and giving the Palestinians right to return (which are incidentally the goals of the BDS movement).
I don’t have a solution, either. The best I think we can hope for is some sort of truth and reconciliation, followed by partition and massive economic development support for the Palestinians. Not sure even something like that works, though, as long as both sides are effectively led by parties who benefit from the status quo.
Apropos of nothing, I was listening to a podcast today which made the (obvious, but important) point that the Palestinians have been using the language of colonization to describe their struggle for the last 50 years. That argument presupposes that if you can make things miserable enough for the colonial power, they will eventually give up and go home. The argument ignores, however, the reality that the Israelis – even if they were colonizers 75 years ago – literally don’t have anywhere to go back to. So the strategy of “make life miserable and they’ll leave” is fundamentally misplaced vis-a-vis the Israelis. It’s also fundamentally misplaced vis-a-vis the Palestinians, who have worn out whatever welcome they might have had from the surrounding nations over the last 70 years by promoting coups (Jordan), fostering civil war (Lebanon), and promoting instability (Egypt). They’re just stuck with each other, and neither government seems to have any sort of solution shy of extermination.
Some of them Yemeni chicks got nice houthis
This is my view.
Imagine mobsters do something horrible and you know about it. They know where you and your family live. You have no weapons. There are no police (or they’re also the police). What do you do when someone asks you about Horrible Thing? You say whatever the mobsters want you to say about it.
Hell, people do this in a world where they can be armed and call the FBI and actually expect a response.
Also this. Statistically very few people saw anything.
This seems an accurate view. Certainly some people knew something was up, but I also don’t expect anyone who loves their family to say shit about it.
Cutting off the supplies of a hospital for long periods is always going to end up with people asking questions, especially when people died.
I see a lot of people, here and online, talk about Hamas and their hostage taking/human shield stuff and usually it’s a matter of “well you can’t do nothing,” which I agree with. But also, you can’t just kill the hostages. Like let’s say a deranged gunman shoots up a bakery, flees and barricades himself in your home. The expectation is that the cops are going to try to arrest or kill him and try to do it in a way that doesn’t also kill you. If they say, run a hose to the house and fill it with Carbon Monoxide, people are going to, rightfully imo, be more than a little upset. Now if they attempt a breach and the gunman shoots you? A lot less upset. If they blow up your house with you inside because “well he’s just gonna kill more people if he gets away anyway,” I’d imagine those cops would be in a cell someplace talking to their lawyers.
My understanding is that hospitals are in a class where you need pretty hard evidence of direct usage of violence. Which maybe that exists, but taking a hostage there probably doesn’t qualify. Kind of like an ambulance. Near as I can tell you can be shooting, get hit, hop in an ambulance for care and be fine as long as you aren’t shooting from it. Which makes sense, because that’s what you want to happen on the battlefield for your own troops even if it seems a little crazy when you say it out loud.
Well, not when their thing is inevitably violence and degradation.
People like Bibi (and by extension the Israeli people since he keeps running the country all the time) have given up on any other solutions. There is no Israeli push to make life in Palestinian areas better or to stop settlers or even the IDF from doing horrible shit to people. They gave up on hearts and minds and a coherent strategy a long time ago. Now it’s just punitive measures and cruelty, which they thought would work fine until they got caught with their pants down.
I think it’s possible to work around Hamas and work with other Palestinian leaders. Of course getting rid of the Hamas or sidelining them is the hard part when they’ve been the de facto leaders of an area for going on two decades. The other problem is that democracies aren’t consistent. Maybe the Israelis elect someone willing to do these things. Will it last for 10 years? 20? 30? I doubt it. One dude with a bomb can probably derail it all and get people like Bibi back into power, much less a few thousand dudes like that.
The handwaving in that piece about it being voluntary and limited to Gaza is absurd. If you frame the problem as “Israel can no longer tolerate the presence of Palestinians in Gaza”, your proposed ‘solution’ can’t be that anyone who wants to stay in Gaza is free to stay. If you add the argument that the Palestinian Authority is no better than Hamas — as the author does — then your ‘solution’ is meant to be applied to the West Bank, too.
There’s lots of reporting this morning that Hamas and Israel are getting closer to a cease fire agreement. It might be safe to hope again for a moment.
Reports of a tentative deal that the Israeli cabinet are currently reviewing.
There’s a funny/depressing news story making the rounds right now, that the Danish justice minister fears that all these large pro-Palestinian demonstrations may lead to radicalization.
Not the murder of 5000 kids and 3500 women in response to a terror attack. Not war crimes, or an illegal occupation. Not the deprivation suffered in Gaza. Not unconditional Danish support for all of these things. It’s the demonstrations that are the real problem, you see.
He’s right in that every single right wing terroristic islamist organization is out in force, but this is a conflict that has been radicalizing people all over the Muslim world - and even in the West to some extent - for at least 40 years. As evidenced in the Bin Laden letter that recently made the rounds, it was front and center in their propaganda, so it just makes look like the justice minister is only now waking up to reality, and still doesn’t quite get what he’s dealing with.
It would be nice to take that bullet out of the gun of any fascist islamist douchebag though. If only our unconditional support for one side didn’t get in the way of that.
Israel bombs hospital killing 3 doctors, kills more journalists in Lebanon.
Regarding some of the anti semitism coming from the left, which seems weird that folks are still unaware of this at this point given that we’ve actually had people arrested for hate crimes at this point, this article compiles a number of different cases.
Here’s a fairly long article from the ISD about anti semitism from the far left, that actually predates this current conflict by a few months.
This piece includes a number of links to other stories highlighting various cases, and showing how antisemitism is now bipartisan.
(The conversation is a site where academic researchers publish things in their areas of expertise. In this case, it’s by a researcher at UMass)
Then there’s this bit by the ADL, who I know you discount out of hand, but for the benefit of others I’ll include it.
Certainly you can find links to stories covering things like the antisemitism seen on college campus recently, but I figured it’d be more useful to give some higher level analysis, which includes links to those specific cases.
Actually, I’ll include this piece by the WaPo as well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/10/31/antisemitism-college-campuses-jewish-hamas-gaza/
I don’t have any idea how much more antisemitism is suddenly coming from the far left, though I don’t doubt there is some. My point was that you don’t have any idea either, because ‘a ton’ doesn’t relay convey much information, and as a metric, it’s just about as useful as anybody else’s anecdotal experiences, which is what you were complaining about.
College students say and do stupid performative shit. They always have.
I actually wasn’t complaining about it at all. I was confirming that what was intended was a relation of anecdotal experience, and not an attempt to suggest that there in fact wasn’t significant antisemitism coming from the left. The reason I asked for clarification here, was that if it was just a relation of personal experience, it didn’t merit a response. But if it was indicating a denial or ignorance of stuff that was happening, then I was going to present some evidence.
The responses to that indicated that in one case it was just a relation of personal experience, and in the other it was in fact a denial of antisemitism coming from the left.
But regarding this:
This is actually one of the things studied by the researchers at UMass.
I read the UMass article, and the one thing about it I found lacking was a comparison of the scale of ‘right-wing’ antisemitism and ‘left-wing’ antisemitism.
For example, it says this:
“In the U.S., our data shows that 95% of antisemitic incidents motivated by Israel’s policies were perpetrated by far-left or unidentified activists. Just 5% were perpetrated by known far-right activists.”
This makes it sound like there are 20 times as many incidents of antisemitism caused by left-wing activists as by right-wing activists. But is that what they mean? I don’t think it is, I think they’re talking about a subset of all incidents, counting only those incidents linked to Israeli policies or actions. But I can’t really tell, because it is the only actual comparison like that offered in the entire article.
(Also, their data only runs up to 2021, so it can’t really tell us much about what’s happening now as a result of this war.)
Given that the ADL sided with Elon, they’ve lost all credibility in my eyes.
They are ONLY talking about the antisemitism that is specifically related to Israel.
That’s what I assumed, but it then means what I said it means: they’re not providing any information at all to compare the amount of antisemitism coming from the right with that coming from the left, even though the premise of the article is that it’s “now” coming from “both sides”.
That doesn’t seem to be a very useful nor informative metric.
The ADL counts support of the BDS movement or opposition to Israel’s policies as antisemitism, which is also not a particularly useful methodology.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the left is responsible for more antisemitism, although that particular research tracks how it’s tossed and falls with flare ups in the Israeli conflict.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you are trying to argue here. I just presented a number of sources that highlight antisemitism coming from the left, because double G appeared to be unaware of them.
For that piece by the ADL, I believe they provide more detailed information about exactly what they are criticizing as antisemitism, so the reader can decide if all of their cases should be discounted as you suggest.
I’m just saying, I read your stuff and I still don’t know how much antisemitism is suddenly coming from the far left. The problem is getting a lot of media attention, and I don’t doubt there is something to it, but I can’t really tell how much. And it isn’t helpful that some people and organizations feel free to call things antisemitism which are not clearly antisemitism, and are fast and loose about who the ‘far left’ is.
I read that piece, and came away from it thinking the ADL believes the BDS movement is definitionally antisemitism. Examples like this:
Antisemitism is global and multifaceted. One area in which ADL has seen a growth of antisemitism is within elements of the political left. This often takes the form of anti-Zionism, a movement that rejects the Jewish right to self-determination and of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, and frequently employs antisemitic tropes to attack Israel and its supporters. It also manifests through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a campaign that promotes diplomatic, financial, professional, academic and cultural isolation of Israel, Israeli individuals, Israeli institutions, and Jews who support Israel’s right to exist.
And this:
In May 2019, a majority ruling was passed by the German government – with support from all party factions – declaring the BDS movement to be antisemitic. As part of this decision, it recommended that no government institutions should provide financial support for BDS events.
Although the government’s decision asserts that the BDS campaign is antisemitic and the BDS movement in Germany has been marginalised, BDS is continuing to gain ground, not least in leftist, anti-racist and post-colonial circles. This is causing debates and alliances to be hijacked by anti-Israel activists. Jewish people are being coerced into speaking out for or against Israel at a time when synagogues have been subjected to arson attacks and angry mobs have congregated outside of them, shouting “fucking Jews” in protest over Israel.
Within these debates, an assault is being made on the clear, unambiguous positioning of BDS as antisemitic as based on the working definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
…seem to make that pretty clear. The BDS movement exists because of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza; because of the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people living there. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel’s Jewish nature, and I don’t think it’s properly antisemitism.