this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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This seems to be an “ESH” (everyone sucks here) situation. Yes, Hamas sucks more. But Israel isn’t far behind.
If you're keeping score isreal has for sure put more points on the board.
But Hamas does suck as much as the Israeli government, yes.
The biggest victims here? The Palestinians.
We can agree on that, at least.
Shame they don’t have the ability to eradicate Hamas from their midst. But then there comes the issue of Israeli aggression and violent land appropriation.
As I pointed out, ESH.
The reason I know I'd fail as a politician is because the instant I get asked anything about Israel / Palestine, I'd either run away screaming or I'd throw my hands up and say "I'm not touching this with a ten foot pole, they both suck and everyone except the civilians caught in the crossfire deserve whatever they get."
This whole conflict isn't black and white morality, or even black and gray morality. It barely qualifies as black and slightly-less-black-if-you-squint morality. It's like Luke trying to blow up the Death Star, if the Death Star was populated mostly with families, children, and puppies, and Luke ate a baby while he was rescuing the princess.
To me it seems like the obvious answer, from the perspective of a country that provides significant financial and military support to Israel, is to withdraw that support conditional on Israel giving a defined minimum amount of concern to not committing war crimes and human rights abuses. Things genuinely necessary for defense, fine, the rest, we should not be complicit in.
That seems like an obvious answer, but we use Israel to further our foreign policy goals in the middle east and Israel uses our money. The nation's continued existence, not a given if foreign aid gets yanked, gives us a location from which to stage operations. That gives them significant bargaining power.
Just because the United States is always super Machiavellian about its foreign policy doesn't make it ok to bargain with the lives of innocent people. If we acknowledge that what Israel is doing is wrong, and that we are enabling it, the right thing to do would simply be to stop enabling it. Otherwise, we are partly responsible for it.
Most of that money also goes right back to US weapons manufacturers too so it is just one form of indirect aid for the US industry.
I think this whole "who is worse" paradigm is a dead-end trap. The binary right/wrong paradigm is also useless.
The reality is that you have two incompatible populations stuck on the same chunk of land, and they are not sufficiently motivated to compromise on the key issues. That's why this conflict has been an unresolvable stalemate for decades now. Sad to say, but all-out war is probably the only thing that can break the stalemate at this point.
Imagine having on the same place 2 presidents. 1 is Trump and the other is, let's say, the one from Iran. Do you really think they would put the well being off the people before their own agenda? Israel has a bloody extremist leader and Hamas is another bloody extremist group. Israel's civilian and Palestine's civilian are just "collateral damage".
I don't disagree. Politicians are often selfish narcissists, especially conservative politicians. And some people just want to see the world burn. Regular people always get the shaft. Nothing new there. At the same time, we can look at both of these radical governments as alternately fueling, and being fueled by, 75 years of unresolved conflict over the same land. Peace terms have been proposed and rejected. Add in external players that ensure they both have weapons and ideological support, and war is inevitable until one side is exhausted and gives in on the key issues in dispute.
I thought Jared Kushner solved this during Trump's presidency. Are you saying that they lied?
Jokes aside I agree. Both sides claim they want a 2 state solution, but that's only because it's politically convenient to say. Perhaps the Palastinians would settle for it now, since Israel has more power, but Israel really has no incentive not to just keep encroaching even more into Palestine until it's all Israel.