"Oh, fuck, I might get entertained for 38 whole minutes. Can't we just cut this down to 60 seconds, so that I can watch it on TikTok?"
I’m willing to bet for my own (admittedly useless) part that the peoples of Palestine and israel would settle at this point for the two state solution if it meant a lasting peace
You mean the Oslo Accords? Remind me again who fucked that one up?
See this is the kind of thing you only ever hear from the “stronger” party in the situation, when their “solution” is some kind of rampant injustice.
Unfortunately, in matters of war, the one with the stronger army wins.
you would never accept that that’s justified because they’re “solving the problem.”
Because that sort of "justice" is only half of the problem. The other half, the harder half, is nation-building, solving for the power vacuums they just created, and making sure the peace is maintained. This is the part that the US keeps screwing up, because elections are a thing and people don't have the patience for problems that take a decade+ to solve.
Honestly, in my mind, it has to start with the US stopping providing cover for Israel at the UN. I don’t think anyone would say that Hamas should be able to kill innocent people and anyone should let it slide – so when Israel kills innocent people or breaks international law in some other way, it shouldn’t just be let to slide either. Let the UN enact actual solutions, then – sanctions, military action, legal action against leaders who commit war crimes. Both sides are killing innocents, though not in equal numbers. One, that has to stop,
I think the problem is that they've been doing this sort of thing for so long that it has fatigued the world in general. The fact that Israel declared war on Gaza is new, which is why there's a lot of protests and attention, but all of the conflict before that has been same repetitive violence for decades. Palestine even had a chance with the Oslo Accords, but Hamas fucked that up soon after.
The UN is not exactly the bastion of justice, either, especially when the usual powers hold veto power (the US included/especially).
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
Which is precisely the kind of ancient hatred I'm against here. Israel is a county, and Palestinians need to accept that. The sooner they do that, the sooner the rest of the world would accept Palestine as a country. (One country, not this ridiculous two sets of landmasses. I'll even accept two countries there.) Yeah, I know, they used to be bigger before the formation of Israel, but that identity doesn't need to serve as their identity as a people. Hamas has does more harm for the public image of Palestine than anything else, even as a minority of the population. This is why even small elements of terrorism needs to be squashed, by the host country or by other countries as necessary, as soon as they form.
I mean, if we really want to point at the root cause here, it's Jerusalem. Arabs had it, then they didn't, then they did, crusade after crusade after crusade to take over Jerusalem from the Jews, then the Muslims, then the Jews again. Hell, I don't even care if Israel or Palestine or the old-pre-1947 version of Palestine is owned by the Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians, Jedis, Pastafarians, Satanists, or whoever. I just care that Israel is the latest to hold it, they've held it for decades, and they have a fairly stable government and culture.
If the religious over there are going to continue to believe that this holy place needs to be held by whatever culture doesn't currently hold it, then there is absolutely no hope for them. Religion has a bad habit of clinging to ancient hatred for millennia, as long as it's still written down, and as long as people still recite it. They will never heal because "our God is not theirs".
My point was that there are large numbers of Palestinians who have much more recent grievances than 70 years – like dead relatives of all ages, or lost homes, within their lifetime.
Which all stem from that original conflict from 1947. A wave of hatred against the Jews who took their country, which spawned more violence, not all of it balanced, which spawns more terrorism, which spawns more violence, until we get to today.
You are pleased to use the devastation and fragmentation and discoordination of a region which used to be connected and prosperous as some sort of gotcha against Palestine’s legitimacy- In all ignorance of the fact israel inflicted that devastation and fragmentation, ensured that the only coordination could be underground, with the necessary help of US dollars.
Which is, again, ancient history. Israel was established as a nation after the Six Day War. It doesn't matter how wrong that war was, or why it was done, or how it was done. It was done, and it was done over 70 years ago. Borders are established most of the time through bloody conflict, so this is not something that is suddenly unique to Israel.
for Palestinian independence
Which is what? Which borders do you agree are Palestine? Is it:
That support only continues because of the strategic and material advantage of having a hold on Suez shipping
Are you actually serious? You think the entirety of the Israeli independence was because of a shipping lane? Not the fact that Jerusalem is in the center, or that a bunch of displaced Jews wanted to form their own state, or the fact that there have been several crusades to take back Jerusalem for centuries? In fact, I will accept almost any religious-based argument you give me. But, not because of a fucking shipping lane.
And as far as continued support, let's not forget that there's still a bunch of nukes pointed at Russia from Israel. Why do you think the Cuba Missile Crisis happened?
is that remnant of the ottoman empire
I... ummm, I'm going to have to stop right there. The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922. You are, again, using ancient grudges to justify terrorism.
What of their right to exist? Open war and guerilla war and terrorism- flying planes into skyscrapers: This is what they will take when they are denied the right to exist.
Yeah, I shouldn't have read any more. Now you're calling 9/11 a justified act. This conversation is over.
I would say that we happen to be posting in an Internet forum, where we all have access to the Internet, and I could just look that up. But, it's a more nuanced question that isn't as easy to look up. According to Wikipedia, more than half are stateless and 21 percent of Israelis identify as Palestinians.
But, I'm sure you're leading this question into an answer that you already have a page up for, so let's hear it.
Because the world is filled with nuance and shitty solutions.
I defend that Israel is a country, and don't defend arguments based on ancient grudges from decades past. I'm not even defending what Israel is currently doing, but what solutions do you think they should be doing in response to a terrorist attack? (Which was the last straw in a series of terrorist attacks.)
I… what? March them across the intervening Israeli territory, so they can engage with the IDF once they arrive in the Gaza strip? Something tells me that wouldn’t be the totally logical and good successful step you seem to be suggesting it would be.
You seem to miss my point: A single country cannot be composed of two completely separate regions, because they cannot defend both regions, especially when trying to defend against their aggressor would involve marching across said aggressor's territory. There's only a few solutions to this problem:
Likud has been helping Hamas defeat their less-violent domestic opposition, and elevating the most violent and unreasonable element in Palestinian politics, for years now. Which kinda makes it weird for them to all of a sudden get upset that the Palestinians are acting violent and unreasonable. It’s like picking the worst and most dangerous dog to take home to your family, then torturing it on purpose because it’s a “bad dog,” and then blaming someone else when it mauls one of your children, and saying everyone needs to put you in charge and never question you so you can protect everyone against these dogs and keep torturing the dogs. To me, that shit means you should never be in charge of anything again and should maybe be brought up on charges both for what happened to the dog and what happened to your kid.
Perhaps Palestine shouldn't let foreign powers influence them and clean up their terrorist elements, instead of promoting them.
I'm not saying what Likud is doing is right, but right-wing fuckheads are going to do what right-wing fuckheads do the world over. See also: Nixon and the Korean War peace talks, Reagan and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan and Iran-Contra, the Bushes and all of their wars, Trump and Afghanistan (or about a million other things), the Tories and their numerous sudden resignations, Putin and every other right-wing leader in Europe and beyond, etc., etc., etc.
Any violence Hamas has done to innocent Israelis, the IDF has done to innocent Palestinians ten times over.
Is that before or after war was declared? I would expect peacetime and wartime numbers to be different, and separated.
I think Hamas leadership and Likud are both guilty of perpetuating the conflict and killing the innocent, and a good solution would be to get the lot of them out of government, bring them up on charges
Seems fine to me, but you and I know that's not going to happen.
and find some people whose solution to “they did an atrocity to us” is something other than “Let’s do an atrocity to them*! It is justified and will totally fix things because it’ll show them not to do that again.”
I see this more of "let's completely annex Gaza Strip, so that it's ours and we get to clean up the area and flush out terrorists ourselves". At that point, if some terrorist group in Gaza Strip decides to bomb another target in Israel, it's entirely Israel's problem and they alone get to deal with it. Because Palestine sure as fuck isn't handling it now.
It's a shit solution, because war always is a shit solution. And again, Israel needs to calm the fuck down with their civilian causalities. But, it is a solution. With an ending. It ends. No more 70 years of debate about Middle East peace talks or whether Gaza Strip is a nation or a part of Palestine or is in this lawless, terrorist-filled region of an in-between state.
I mean, let's look at the US and their wars of aggression against terrorism. They've had a pretty fucking terrible track record, but during the time the US occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, they were better countries than what they were before or afterward. Iraq had free elections. Afghanistan was undergoing a feminist movement. But, the Iraqi military ran like cowards when ISIS invaded, and Trump sold out Afghanistan to the Taliban. I think if the US thought of them as a stepping stone towards allies in the Middle East (like Israel), and less like these short-term military projects, we might still have these countries in their more progressive states.
But, hey, I've already acknowledged that it's a shitty solution, and we're a couple of intelligent people, so instead of "finding some people" for this solution, which is what we've been doing for the past 70 years, let's just talk about what the solution should be. What's really the solution here?
Peace talks? How many are we up to now? I've lost count.
Getting rid of Hamas? How do we do that? Why isn't Palestine themselves capable of getting rid of Hamas? After all, they claim to be the owners of the Gaza Strip, so what the fuck are they doing about it? It's been 70 years. How long do we have to wait?
What else? You've been talking about this "realistic path for peace", right? What's that path look like?
As I pointed out in another post, using decades- or centuries-old arguments for sovereignty has been used as justification for terrorism. When bin Laden smashed a couple of planes into the Twin Towers, that's exactly the kind of argument he used as justification.
It's not about moral dissonance. It's about how hate spreads through ancient spites and grudges. The decades of failed peace attempts in the Middle East have been brought about by clinging on to these ancient grudges, and it's exactly why Palestine has had much less of a standing in being officially recognized as a nation than Israel has.
From your initial comment it seems like the main misunderstanding is that nation states unilaterally declared by European powers in Africa and Western Asia from the nineteenth century until around the middle of the 20th century have been utterly disastrous to those places rather than being the only source of order in those places.
Is this the starting volley of an argument that unfair colonization from the 1800s is justification for a nation's lack of sovereignty?
tend not to consider them as legitimate and more of an encroachment.
Yes, there it is.
That's nice of you to counter with a complete lack of information.
Please. Enlighten me. What part of the history of Palestine am I not understanding?
One hour is typically my upper limit on long-form video essays, unless it's a complicated topic I'm interested in, or it's from a reputable source that I really really know is going to keep me entertained. For example, Folding Ideas' NFT video really did need the two hours to explain it in depth, and he does a really good job at long-form essays, anyway.
But, I really don't understand why some of these put out the 3-, 4-, 6-hour essays. To me, they just don't know how to edit down their material, because no topic needs to take that long to explain.