The suggestion that if Israel simply lifted the blockade and stopped all security operations in the West Ban there would be complete peace is ridiculously idealistic and naive.
You are not going to convince a nation that just saw hundreds of citizens brutally murdered and kidnapped that the only thing they have to do is fully open the borders and smile, and then the people who just murdered them will come out and be their friends.
The inverse is also true. Israel has kept these people bottled up in what amounts to open air concentration camps for the last 70 years, and constantly killing Palestinians for that entire time.
Israel has never cared about collateral damage in their war on the people who lived there before.
So imagine a people, treated like criminals for their entire lives, all because they lived on the land that Zionists wanted.
All that resentment for the unceasing oppression let the worst elements gain power.
The path to change is not to expect the oppressed to stop lashing out. Only in ending the oppression can there be change.
But the Israeli government isn’t interested in stopping the oppression. They could have done that at any time in the last 70 years. No, they seem to want a full genocide.
The reason that Israel doesn’t go full speed on genocide is the same reason why they never actually pursue peace. That is, the ruling authority there benefits from having a persistent threat. They get to maintain and build power and wealth while genociding in a slow enough fashion to not raise a critical mass of objections from their benefactors in the United States.
That’s not congruent with the facts. If Israel wanted only to guarantee its own security, it could have accepted the Arab Peace Initiative, but deemed withdrawing to the pre-1967 borders unacceptable. It wants to guarantee its own security, to be sure, but it also really, really wants more land.
Israel could genocide the Palestinians in a few hours, but then the international community would bomb their asses back to the stone age.
But, if they were to say, fund a religious extremist or two (which they totally did in the beginning), and then look the other way as that extremist starts up a terrorist organization or two, then the Israeli leaders can constantly be in a state of “protecting themselves” and easily maintain their own power in government.
Plus the constant low level terrorist attacks justify more oppression and theft of land, and any time there’s international pushback about the oppression or theft of land, you see a larger terrorist attack.
If I were conspiracy minded, I’d say that there are mossad plants in Hamas who gently nudge when Israeli leaders need a distraction.
This isn’t that profound an observation, because the same sentiment works in reverse from the point of view of Palestine. There’s no way that they can appease Israeli revanchism. That’s why the situation is so intractable.
I cannot imagine success as killing someone. Also, you are speculating on what might happen with people’s lives.
IMHO civilians dying in any circumstances is dumb af. This includes them directly dying as a result of war and indirectly dying as a result of economic and political maneuvers, blocades, shitty things.
My point is that there is a difference between attacking a building that is shooting rockets at your civilians and slaughtering 200 civilians at a festival, taking 130 hostages, raping women and parading their naked bodies through the streets, and decapitating people.
Israel is not in any sense perfect, but it least attempts to minimize civilian casualties. The IDF is not roaming through the West Bank murdering every Palestinian it sees, whereas that’s exactly what Hamas was doing two days ago.
We are mostly saying the same thing. There is a reason why what happened happened and as far as I am concerned both sides are terrorists. Is raping women any worse than imposing a blocade that literally equals people fucking starving to death? Yes, it’s shocking. Genocide is genocide no mater how you slice it.
Nobody is saying that 100% of the Palestinians would then make peace by doing that. But doing so would rob Hamas of all its popularity. Palestinians turned to it because they had no other choice; Abbas was doing nothing to stop the slaughter of Palestinians and asking the world for help got nowhere. Conversely, if all attacks by Palestinians stopped for good then most of the Israeli rightwing would be abandoned by the Israeli public. These two groups are not as different as you think.
The suggestion that if Israel simply lifted the blockade and stopped all security operations in the West Ban there would be complete peace is ridiculously idealistic and naive.
You are not going to convince a nation that just saw hundreds of citizens brutally murdered and kidnapped that the only thing they have to do is fully open the borders and smile, and then the people who just murdered them will come out and be their friends.
The inverse is also true. Israel has kept these people bottled up in what amounts to open air concentration camps for the last 70 years, and constantly killing Palestinians for that entire time.
Israel has never cared about collateral damage in their war on the people who lived there before.
So imagine a people, treated like criminals for their entire lives, all because they lived on the land that Zionists wanted.
All that resentment for the unceasing oppression let the worst elements gain power.
The path to change is not to expect the oppressed to stop lashing out. Only in ending the oppression can there be change.
But the Israeli government isn’t interested in stopping the oppression. They could have done that at any time in the last 70 years. No, they seem to want a full genocide.
The reason that Israel doesn’t go full speed on genocide is the same reason why they never actually pursue peace. That is, the ruling authority there benefits from having a persistent threat. They get to maintain and build power and wealth while genociding in a slow enough fashion to not raise a critical mass of objections from their benefactors in the United States.
Not only the resentment but Israel actually helped their worst elements gain power in order to cause an inner conflict within the Palestinians. They supported Hamas’s growth to cause a fissure between them and the PLO.
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That’s not congruent with the facts. If Israel wanted only to guarantee its own security, it could have accepted the Arab Peace Initiative, but deemed withdrawing to the pre-1967 borders unacceptable. It wants to guarantee its own security, to be sure, but it also really, really wants more land.
Israel could genocide the Palestinians in a few hours, but then the international community would bomb their asses back to the stone age.
But, if they were to say, fund a religious extremist or two (which they totally did in the beginning), and then look the other way as that extremist starts up a terrorist organization or two, then the Israeli leaders can constantly be in a state of “protecting themselves” and easily maintain their own power in government.
Plus the constant low level terrorist attacks justify more oppression and theft of land, and any time there’s international pushback about the oppression or theft of land, you see a larger terrorist attack.
If I were conspiracy minded, I’d say that there are mossad plants in Hamas who gently nudge when Israeli leaders need a distraction.
This isn’t that profound an observation, because the same sentiment works in reverse from the point of view of Palestine. There’s no way that they can appease Israeli revanchism. That’s why the situation is so intractable.
This is a ridiculous straw man.
Look up how many civilians were killed on both sides since the beginning of this clusterfuck.
You know as well as I do that if Hamas was successful every time it tried to murder an Israeli, those death tolls would be much much closer.
Are you saying that if Israel let more of its civilians die, it would be less morally culpable?
I cannot imagine success as killing someone. Also, you are speculating on what might happen with people’s lives.
IMHO civilians dying in any circumstances is dumb af. This includes them directly dying as a result of war and indirectly dying as a result of economic and political maneuvers, blocades, shitty things.
My point is that there is a difference between attacking a building that is shooting rockets at your civilians and slaughtering 200 civilians at a festival, taking 130 hostages, raping women and parading their naked bodies through the streets, and decapitating people.
Israel is not in any sense perfect, but it least attempts to minimize civilian casualties. The IDF is not roaming through the West Bank murdering every Palestinian it sees, whereas that’s exactly what Hamas was doing two days ago.
We are mostly saying the same thing. There is a reason why what happened happened and as far as I am concerned both sides are terrorists. Is raping women any worse than imposing a blocade that literally equals people fucking starving to death? Yes, it’s shocking. Genocide is genocide no mater how you slice it.
Nobody is saying that 100% of the Palestinians would then make peace by doing that. But doing so would rob Hamas of all its popularity. Palestinians turned to it because they had no other choice; Abbas was doing nothing to stop the slaughter of Palestinians and asking the world for help got nowhere. Conversely, if all attacks by Palestinians stopped for good then most of the Israeli rightwing would be abandoned by the Israeli public. These two groups are not as different as you think.