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I don't think so. My prediction is big casualties in Gaza and maybe West Bank, skirmishes on the northen border. Israelis will eventually say all the hostages were either killed or returned, and that they've killed Hamas leadership.
Hezbollah is battle hardened from the Syria war. So I expect their soldiers to be superior to those of Israel. It is not something that Israel can repair easily. However, Israel has an air force and Hezbollah doesn't even have a decent air defense.
Wrong. Russia is supplying Hezbollah with SAM300 systems. Syria as well. If Israel tries to bomb its way to victory, it will fail. Besides, even with two US carriers involved, this would not give Israelis enough carrying capacity to stop 100,000 Hezbollah fighters from overrunning northern Israel. The only thing that can deter a large army is another large army. At some point, Israel is fucked.
Israel bombs Syria about weekly and there is nothing it can do against it. I don't expect Hezbollah to do better. Modern air defense means not only shooting planes but also the missiles that they may fire.
It is hard to say what would happen when 100,000 Hezbollah fighters would overrun Northern Israel. But as I said: what would be the end goal? Would it be the kind of flash action that Hamas just did? Would they occupy the northern part of Israel? Or would they try to conquer all of Israel?
Israel has more modern weapons and also an endless source of more (the US). Hezbollah on the other hand would find it hard to buy more weapons and munition once the conflict starts. Their initial attack can be quite successful. But in the long term I expect Israel to prevail.
Wrong on all counts. We have no surge capacity to replace spent arsenals. Israel is watching the sands run out. How did that Ukraine war turn out? This one in the Mideast will end badly.
We are at a point where the decision is either to permit the Zionist entity to ethnically cleanse the remaining Palestinians or intervene and cause WWIII. I will not be surprised if Hezbollah strikes along with the rest of the resistance axis.
Israeli officials have been pretty clear about pushing all Palestinians out of Gaza. So it would be the Gazans being "ethnically cleansed." Pretty simple concept.
This guy has obviously never heard about the Nakba. Entire villages of civilians where massacred. The rest where forced to flee. Today 70% of Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees. No stretch to think that Israel want to finish the job. Hamas has given them the excuse they wanted. Before the establishment Jews lived in harmony with the Muslims and Christians.
Netanyahu: “Those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas”
You fail into the trap of thinking this is a religious war. It's two groups of people fighting over the same land. Interesting Christians are always left out of it, as if they don't exist in Israel/Palestine.
Mama, Christians in Israel are definitely involved in the mix. The week before HAMAS attacked there were articles in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, about Israelis openly spitting on Christian clergy and nuns in Jerusalem.
You fall into the trap of thinking this is white colonizers oppressing brown Nobel savages. The only reason either side cares about the land is because of religion, and the only reason Palestinians are still living in refugee camps instead of being absorbed into neighboring Arab (Muslim) countries is because it’s politically useful to Imams and politicians.
Palestinians and Muslims care about the Al-Aqsa Mosque for religious reasons but not the rest of the land in Israel and Palestine. The Arab claims are secular. They don't base their claims on the Koran, except for Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Jewish claims are a mixture of secular and religious (God promised the chosen land to his chosen people). It's like the Turks and Armenians, Serbians and Albanians - land disputes between different groups that happen to have different religions. Kurds and Iraqis also fought about land but since they share the same religion, it doesn't get billed as a "religious war."
What do you mean by ethnic cleansing? How would you differentiate it from the population transfers that were routinely used in early and mid 20th century Europe and Asia or, for that matter, from the forced relocations carried out by the Ottomans (they called it 'sürgün') or those undertaken more recently by the Kuwaitis after Gulf War 1 (when they expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians)?
The forced relocation of the Germans from Poland and the former Czechoslovakia secured ethnic and inter-state peace for several generations. The forced relocation of the native Americans enabled modern America to take shape.
Not by me. Am a big fan of the Burmese military (find the name Myanmar awkward). The very last thing the wider region needs is a Gaza Strip on the Bay of Bengal. It appears that the Rohingya leadership (or at least a part of it) is based in the Gulf. Accurate information about what went on (or is still going on) is very hard to come by and I am not inclined to trust the Western media on this one. Burma has been harassed by the West for generations and many of the parties on the ground have been extremely sinister.
I am an Australian. I want regional stability. It is easy to take the perspective you do but I do not want waves after waves of refugees showing up into my own British contraption. We are doing a great job of wrecking it by ourselves and need no assistance.
It's up to Bangladesh to do the right thing and treat them as equal citizens. But these are poor people living in a poor country, so they'll be left to fend for themselves. They'll be mistreated and discriminated against. An opportunity for outside forces to radicalize them. Perhaps in a generation jihad will come to that small corner of hell. Buddhist nationalists can thank themselves for stripping the Rohingya of citizenship, rendering them stateless.
Australia really is the lucky country. A continent onto itself. Boats can be sunk if it comes to that. And it will come to that, because we are human and job #1 is to save our own skin, and the skin of our children, because... genes. From prison colony to keeping refugees out - bloody good show, as the Brits might say.
Phillip, I don't see a distinction between what happened to native-Americans and what has been happening to the Palestinians. Geronimo, Sitting Bull and several others were leaders of terrorists per white Americans at the time. Native-Americans committed brutal acts the equal of anything HAMAS has done. No beheadings that I know of, but scalping, disemboweling, incineration and the leveling of settler homes with white children and women sometimes taken. Now we call these people, who dared to resist overwhelming power, heroic.
It's interesting that the US was the ethnic cleanser then and is now on the side of the ethnic cleanser. It could be said back then that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" and now it would not be hard to find Israelis who feel the same way about Palestinians.
Any American who claims to be sorry about what happened in the Old West and is now cheering on Israel is a hypocrite.
What is happening is only the latest episode of Israel's removal of the natives. Not a few Israelis believe that the job done in 1948 did not go far enough and now needs to be finished. The slow terror of after-midnight home invasions by the IDF, routine arrests of Palestinians to be tried and convicted by Israeli military courts (98% conviction rate), settlers burning Palestinian olive groves and beating the Palestinians with pipes and baseball bats, spraying of Palestinian villages with "skunk water" has been going on for years. A particular horror has been the practice of condemning Palestinian buildings and then forcing the Palestinian owners to destroy what they have built as the IDF stands by to make sure they do.
The only difference now is it is open hunting season with no restraint as Netanyahu directs US foreign policy. Knesset member Ben Gvir is openly distributing AR-15 type weapons to settlers to be used against any Palestinians they can find. Palestinians in the West Bank, of course, have never been allowed to have any weapons. It will be a turkey shoot. Settlers who have openly taken the land without hesitation (many of them Americans with dual citizenship) will not hesitate to pull the trigger on those they consider nothing but pests.
If Netanyahu directs US foreign policy why did the Biden Administration change tack on the Golan Heights, the Sheba'a Farms dispute etc? And why did the US not back the Israelis on the hydrocarbon treaty with Lebanon? And why has Biden and Blinken demanded that the Israelis desist from searching aid shipments to Gaza? Sounds like the Israelis are inept at handling those they 'control'.
The dust-up in Gaza is a dispute between American clients. The US supported the creation of the Palestinian refugee industry (UNRWA) in the 40s in order to constrain Israel and deny the Israelis the security readily accorded Europeans by the resolution of WW2 via the population transfers at the time. The US has been the biggest single financial supporter of the refugees ever since. Today Hamas is a military proxy for the Qataris...US allies.
BTW if I were you, I'd worry about the ethnic cleansing of whites from major cities and the imminent 'decolonisation' of your own neck of the woods.
Re the native American analog, the American frontier was contested by rival groups.
The Native Americans and the whites had no common culture and the former did not have effective political institutions. They may as well have come from different planets.
The Arabs and Jews have a very long shared history, which includes the legal/political subjection of the latter under the shariah (which assigns second class status to non-believers and the payment of special taxes). Zionism was not, nor is it now, just about resolving the crisis of European Jewry in the 20th c. It was, and remains, a response to the difficulty/failure of Ottoman society and its successors to accept substantial legal, social and political equality between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Ben Gvir, whom you mention, is an Iraqi. Have a look at the history of the Jews of Iraq, above all at the way Iraqi nationalists turned on their Jews in the 30s and 40s in order to demonstrate their support for Berlin and Rome. The Zionist argument with secular Arab nationalism is even more bitter than the Zionist argument with jihadist ideologies.
Western Asia is contested by any number of competing peoples, each with long, very complex, histories of their own. Outsiders should be cautious about projecting their own assumptions. Serious people on all sides deserve better than the cartoonish platitudes of Wilsonian rhetoric or, even worse, the assumptions of Rawlsian political theory.
And the Palestinians do not lack weapons. The US Army provides them (and the training to use them) to the Palestinian Authority. They have done so for several years.
Agree on both counts. War suits any number of parties, albeit for wildly different reasons. Plenty of regional states already benefit from seeing Hamas crushed, but there are others who might benefit from a decisive outcome to the question of the eroding/emerging regional pecking order. In addition there are any number of extra-regional players (not all states) with an interest in shaking things up. Throw in the aerospace, hydrocarbon and construction industries and there is serious money to be made from war and for post-war reconstruction.
My analogy is the pressure cooker with the relief valve jammed shut. It is a certainty it will eventually explode no matter how strong the material from which it is made.
Israel has been systematically applying heat and with the full backing of the US has made sure there is no relief possible. Weapons and money pour in from the US while the US uses its veto in the UN Security Council to make sure no diplomatic interference can relieve the pressure.
Surely there has never been a better example of power corrupting. Whether it is an individual, a group of people or an entire country, if there is no restraint a monster will eventually emerge. We've watched as Israel has moved steadily right and with a guarantee from the US, why not?
At the moment, the armed might of the US is entirely pledged as a defense force for Israel no matter what offense Israel commits, so far holding the world at bay while Israel slaughters as it pleases under the unbelievably foolish yet predictable pledge of Biden to "stand with Israel". The only superpower is completely blind to what it is doing and I shudder at how history will view this complete repudiation of liberty and justice for all for the sake of the last European colony.
There can be pushback against Israel without causing WW3. Israel as a country won't be allowed to cease to exist due their nuclear arrsenal, but they can be corralled and taught a lesson. What's happening, and that it is allowed to happen, can be blamed on the West as much as Israel.
Too bad they're toi useful as an attack dog to the world cop, and that European politicans are bunch of weak, self serving cowards (spoken as an European).
Nov 2, 2023·edited Nov 2, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
What is in it for him? What are costs, risks, benefits? To him? To his organization? Does Iran want him to do it? Can they compel him to even if he doesn't want to? What does he know, or think he knows, about Israeli capabilities? What does he know, or think he knows, about how well or poorly Israel is performing in Gaza? What is the actual state of his own capabilities? What is his perception of his capabilities? What is risk if does NOT act, as he perceives it? How much autonomy does he have? Who else inside or outside of his organization has an influence on his decision making? How coordinated are Hamas and Hezbollah and other potential enemies of Israel? Is there actual coordination or just spasmodic attacks along the same axis? What can he realistically expect to accomplish by open warfare? What does he think he can do?
And that is just the known unknowns.
And the unknown unknowns may be even bigger.
No way to make predictions here unless you have genuine domain expertise in the region, and an awareness of the players and their motives.
Nonetheless, I will venture a pure guess that Hezbollah will remain in a mainly harassing mode rather taking on the risk of a full scale war, at least for the next few days.
One angle I have not heard discussed is direct Israeli retaliation against Iran. That is the source of the problem. Gaza is poor as dirt. It cannot afford any military capabilities at all. Iran pays for everything. At some point Israel may decide to punish Iran.
Hopefully Israel crushes Hamas so thoroughly and without their usual hesitancy and half-assedness that others will think twice before entering the fray.
I also obtained some super duper top secret military intel from the future that covers some of the financial, psychological, and other aspects of the conflict, for anyone interested.
I’d like to recommend The Martyrmade Podcast by Daryl Cooper. It is about ~20 hours long and I am ~5 hours in.
It covers the start of Zionism in the early 1900s and ends with the establishment of Israel in 1948. It looks at the perspectives of both the Jews and the Arabs fairly evenly; the Jews get more time as they were more active, while the Arabs were more reactive.
This all started much differently than I imagined. Daryl asks thought provoking questions and asks you to consider perspectives you might not have otherwise.
I don’t think anyone can think in black and white terms after learning the history of this conflict. You can still take sides, sure, but there is darkness to be found within each side. It is a story of two peoples, each fighting for their existence, and willing to do absolutely anything to achieve their goals.
Andrew, your claim that there is some kind of balance in the history and current situation of Israel is simply not true. Please visit the website of B'Tselem, the Israeli NGO for human rights in the occupied territories. The have produced a flood of fully documented publications over the decades that will open your eyes.
I place a heavy burden of blame on the US for refusing to admit the survivors of the holocaust residing in the displaced persons camps after WW2. The European countries did not open their doors either and it isn't hard to understand why survivors did not want to return to where they had lived before the holocaust. The survivors overwhelmingly wanted to go to the US and Zionists did all they could in the camps to get survivors to Palestine including outright physical coercion. If you were a survivor you were offered a survey where you could indicate where you wanted to go, but Zionists let you know you had better indicate Palestine. Read "In the Shadow of the Holocaust" by Grodzinsky for the story in detail.
The holocaust was the opening Zionism needed, limping along without enough Jews immigrating to Palestine. The holocaust confirmed the thinking of Theodore Herzl that Jews needed a safe place for themselves and the guilt of the holocaust provided the psychological push that had the major powers lining up to approve of all out Jewish immigration to the native land of a powerless group - the Arabs as a whole and the Palestinians in particular. Win - win for everyone except the powerless, an old story which we see still being told right now.
The holocaust is continually emphasized by Israel because it is such a horror that nothing else, even the leveling of Gaza can even approach it, so they believe. Golda Meir said that "after the holocaust, Jews can do anything" and Israel has run with that. Netanyahu always sees Israel as the eternal victim, talks about a "second holocaust" continually and has now identified Israel as being the side of light against darkness. Criticism is immediately met with charges of antisemitism. Jews who object are "self-hating". Even the word Jew is so loaded by its use under National Socialism that few dare to use the word. To say "David is a Jew" doesn't sound good, so it is preferable to say "David is Jewish"
Under this shield of the holocaust and the toolkit derived from it that Israel has not been hesitant to use, Israel has cowed the world and done as it pleased, even stooping to claim that "there never was a Palestine" and "There are no Palestinians" as it systematically evicts them, pushing them into ever smaller parts of what was all once their land. Even Israeli hero Moshe Dayan admitted as much and so did Ze'ev Jabotinsky who took a hard line against the Palestinians from the start, but fully admitted and understood their reaction. Read his essay "The Iron Wall"
Zionism from the start has wanted the Palestinians gone, denying any responsibility for making the refugees in 1948, refusing to donate a shekel to supporting the refugee camps, instead dumping them on the UN, still fulfilling that role in over 50 such camps that it undertook before the middle of the last century as the UNRWA (UN Relief Works Agency)
Two wrongs do not make a right. The holocaust did not and does not justify the taking of a land from a people who had nothing to do with it. The Palestinians were innocent victims as surely as were the Jews of Europe. The big difference is that the holocaust ended with the end of Hitler's camps. The Nakba, the catastrophe visited on the Palestinians, has been ongoing since the creation of Israel and has been practiced ever since before the eyes of the world, a violation of international law that was created in response to what Hitler did when he moved Germans onto the land ("lebensraum") overrun by the Wehrmacht. Yet, Zionists have done exactly the same thing continuing as I write with the US covering for all that it does.
No, Andrew, there is no balance just as there is no justice for Palestinians. There is a safe home for Jews, the US, where they are welcome and share full citizenship with all other Americans. There are countless stories of penniless Jews coming to the US and finding wealth and security due to their efforts. My dentist is a Jew as are the mayor of my town and my US representative, my state representative, the governor of my state.
The outrage of outrages is that American Jews with every right and freedom any American has, can be granted dual citizenship by Israel and then proceed to go and take land from people who have no rights. A significant percentage of settlers in the West Bank are Americans with dual citizenship.
Nov 2, 2023·edited Nov 2, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
I don't know if the war will expand beyond Gaza. But I was struck today by the truth of the title of Steve Marriott's piece in The Times today: 'You Don't Need to Share Your Views on Gaza'.
The bald fact is that Israel has been fighting for its existence for 70+ years. And the Arabs have never at any time accepted its existence. Weeks - in fact decades - of commentary about negotiated 'solutions' etc etc is (and has always been) just politico and media blah blah. Yes, the Israelis have handled some things better than other things but whatever they did (or did not) do - nor whoever was in government or not - would have altered that fundamental (and intractable) impasse.
The awful truth is that, for Western publics and commentariats who don't have to actually fight them, wars have long since become another grim part of the media entertainment industry....like gripping horror movies and with the same insatiable audience appetite.
"Arabs have never at any time accepted its existence"
That is the propaganda that Israel has been spreading for the past 70 years. In fact the PLO recognized Israel in the Oslo agreements and Hamas adopted a more moderate program in 2017. Not to mention the Arab states that recognize Israel.
In contrast Israel has never recognized the right of the Palestinians to have their own state - despite the UN resolution granting them that right.
Israel is an apartheid state. A rare remainder of the colonial era. It treats its Palestinians the way the US treated its Indians and South Africa its Blacks.
After seeing what happened to South Africa after apartheid ended, and knowing what the end of colonialism entailed, this is an argument FOR Israel, not against it.
What you saw is how destructive colonialism is. It gives influence to the wrong kinds of people. That makes it hard to build a functional society after it ends.
That's a good argument against creating new colonies. Israel already exists. By your own argument destroying it will mean Palestine, or whatever entity comes after, will almost certainly be a failed state.
Maybe not always a failed state, but just a standard turd world state. It certainly won't have anywhere near the standard of living in Israel. It would be dominated by Arab muslims, with their unique pathologies, and have the same issues as all of it's neighbors.
If your like me and think Israel is broadly part of the West, then losing it is not a good thing.
The Israelis founded a new country on their ancient homeland.
They have the same rights to it the Arabs have - both took by force.
The only American interest is not stabbing yet another ally in need, mind you all they need from us is don't interfere or force nonsense deals on them.
That's it.
In many ways W.R it's like Indonesia in 1965, we just looked the other way and didn't sanction Indonesia and they solved their own internal problems.
The US played a major role in the 1965 mass murder in Indonesia. It harmed the country and turned it into a corrupt cronycracy. Exactly what you also saw happening in Latin America thanks to American interventionism.
Who are you to decide what another country should do. If they'd rather collapse in freedom, than prosper in peace, that is entirely their choice, and not one of some faceless western politicos.
Why do you expect Palestinians to give up a claim to land they lived on and their ancestors lived on? Jews spent 2,000 fighting for a return to their ancestral land, yet you think the Palestinian refusal to give up after 70+ years is crazy. Jewish converts can claim Israeli land (Ivanka Trump, Antonio Garcia Marquez) yet Palestinians whose families have lived there for centuries just need to accept their loss.
I wonder what percentage of Israelis or Jews generally actually have Hebrew ancestry. It's interesting how Hebrews and Jews have become synonymous when they are different groups.
We now know from genetic data that number is extremely high. In fact apart from a few questionable groups, every major Jewish group has a genetic link back to the ancient levant.
Hahaha. The Palestinians are mostly the descendents of the tribes of Israel, later converted to Islam. The Eastern European Jews connection to Israel remains extremely dubious.
Palestinian Christians and Samaritans certainly are. Palestinian muslims much less so. Many/most have deeper genetic and ancestral connections to places like Syria and Egypt than they do ancient Israel. Of those muslims that do have a deeper link to the area they have a high percent of admixture from other areas, often subsaharan and occasionally slavic via the slave trade.
I know of no serious paper on genetics that contests the link between Ashkenazi and the ancient levant. Rather the debate is on the who/what/where of European genetic admixture into the group. Make of that what you will.
Grudges keep going. How many centuries did the Germans and French fight over Alsace-Lorraine? How long did the English and French fight for Calais? How about the Balkans - still fighting over land. This is the human condition. The fights are not going anywhere ever.
If you’re going to fight someone you don’t talk about it you just do it. This will be akin to the outside of the pub at closing time where the guy knows his mates will hold him back and he is safe and secure in screaming all manner of dire threats that come to nothing.
Someone wrote somewhere that Israel would pay Egypt’s debt if they take the people from the strip. It’s an entertaining thought that objectively would make decent sense for everyone but the franchise managers in Europe. I’m sure Egypt would promptly ship the newcomers over to our neck of woods.
I guess the main thrust of the speech will be that he considers the latest beatles release “acceptable” but hezbollah will declare war if they should attempt to unearth further demos which are not of sufficient quality.
Nov 3, 2023·edited Nov 3, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
My baseline was that there’s no place for the Palestinians in Gaza to go so eventually Israel would declare victory over Hamas and put the lid back on the Gaza pressure cooker, hopefully under considerably less pressure. I now expect Israel will persuade Egypt to accept the Palestinians from Gaza. An Israel from the river to the sea...
If Egypt accepts the Palestinians, it'll be suicide for Egypt. The Copts have it terrible as it is. Taking in more radical Muslims will be even worse for them and non-radical Muslims. Just pushing the problem onto someone else.
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The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah . . .
If he's anything like Lindsey Graham, with his personal safety not on the line, that's an easy call to make.
Okay, so he's keeping all options on the table. This is unlike Lindsey, who only supports one option.
I don't think so. My prediction is big casualties in Gaza and maybe West Bank, skirmishes on the northen border. Israelis will eventually say all the hostages were either killed or returned, and that they've killed Hamas leadership.
This is more likely. He has to know one wrong move means American intervention so he will be more cautious.
Rinse and repeat.
I have no clue about how things will go, but will add that back in 07-08 the War Nerd said Hezbollah was more military capable than Israel.
Hezbollah is battle hardened from the Syria war. So I expect their soldiers to be superior to those of Israel. It is not something that Israel can repair easily. However, Israel has an air force and Hezbollah doesn't even have a decent air defense.
Wrong. Russia is supplying Hezbollah with SAM300 systems. Syria as well. If Israel tries to bomb its way to victory, it will fail. Besides, even with two US carriers involved, this would not give Israelis enough carrying capacity to stop 100,000 Hezbollah fighters from overrunning northern Israel. The only thing that can deter a large army is another large army. At some point, Israel is fucked.
Israel bombs Syria about weekly and there is nothing it can do against it. I don't expect Hezbollah to do better. Modern air defense means not only shooting planes but also the missiles that they may fire.
It is hard to say what would happen when 100,000 Hezbollah fighters would overrun Northern Israel. But as I said: what would be the end goal? Would it be the kind of flash action that Hamas just did? Would they occupy the northern part of Israel? Or would they try to conquer all of Israel?
Israel has more modern weapons and also an endless source of more (the US). Hezbollah on the other hand would find it hard to buy more weapons and munition once the conflict starts. Their initial attack can be quite successful. But in the long term I expect Israel to prevail.
Wrong on all counts. We have no surge capacity to replace spent arsenals. Israel is watching the sands run out. How did that Ukraine war turn out? This one in the Mideast will end badly.
We are at a point where the decision is either to permit the Zionist entity to ethnically cleanse the remaining Palestinians or intervene and cause WWIII. I will not be surprised if Hezbollah strikes along with the rest of the resistance axis.
There are 15.3 million Jews and 1.9 billion Muslims in the entire world. Please explain who is being "ethnically cleansed"?
Israeli officials have been pretty clear about pushing all Palestinians out of Gaza. So it would be the Gazans being "ethnically cleansed." Pretty simple concept.
This guy has obviously never heard about the Nakba. Entire villages of civilians where massacred. The rest where forced to flee. Today 70% of Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees. No stretch to think that Israel want to finish the job. Hamas has given them the excuse they wanted. Before the establishment Jews lived in harmony with the Muslims and Christians.
Netanyahu: “Those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/11/can-netanyahu-survive-hamass-attack-on-israel
confirmed by Israeli news: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
You fail into the trap of thinking this is a religious war. It's two groups of people fighting over the same land. Interesting Christians are always left out of it, as if they don't exist in Israel/Palestine.
Mama, Christians in Israel are definitely involved in the mix. The week before HAMAS attacked there were articles in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, about Israelis openly spitting on Christian clergy and nuns in Jerusalem.
You fall into the trap of thinking this is white colonizers oppressing brown Nobel savages. The only reason either side cares about the land is because of religion, and the only reason Palestinians are still living in refugee camps instead of being absorbed into neighboring Arab (Muslim) countries is because it’s politically useful to Imams and politicians.
Palestinians and Muslims care about the Al-Aqsa Mosque for religious reasons but not the rest of the land in Israel and Palestine. The Arab claims are secular. They don't base their claims on the Koran, except for Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Jewish claims are a mixture of secular and religious (God promised the chosen land to his chosen people). It's like the Turks and Armenians, Serbians and Albanians - land disputes between different groups that happen to have different religions. Kurds and Iraqis also fought about land but since they share the same religion, it doesn't get billed as a "religious war."
What do you mean by ethnic cleansing? How would you differentiate it from the population transfers that were routinely used in early and mid 20th century Europe and Asia or, for that matter, from the forced relocations carried out by the Ottomans (they called it 'sürgün') or those undertaken more recently by the Kuwaitis after Gulf War 1 (when they expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians)?
The forced relocation of the Germans from Poland and the former Czechoslovakia secured ethnic and inter-state peace for several generations. The forced relocation of the native Americans enabled modern America to take shape.
Kill some so the rest flee for their lives. What Myanmar did in 2017, although it is termed a genocide.
Not by me. Am a big fan of the Burmese military (find the name Myanmar awkward). The very last thing the wider region needs is a Gaza Strip on the Bay of Bengal. It appears that the Rohingya leadership (or at least a part of it) is based in the Gulf. Accurate information about what went on (or is still going on) is very hard to come by and I am not inclined to trust the Western media on this one. Burma has been harassed by the West for generations and many of the parties on the ground have been extremely sinister.
I have no respect for generals trying to hold together a British contraption. The breakup of Burma would be preferable to centralized looting.
I am an Australian. I want regional stability. It is easy to take the perspective you do but I do not want waves after waves of refugees showing up into my own British contraption. We are doing a great job of wrecking it by ourselves and need no assistance.
It's up to Bangladesh to do the right thing and treat them as equal citizens. But these are poor people living in a poor country, so they'll be left to fend for themselves. They'll be mistreated and discriminated against. An opportunity for outside forces to radicalize them. Perhaps in a generation jihad will come to that small corner of hell. Buddhist nationalists can thank themselves for stripping the Rohingya of citizenship, rendering them stateless.
Australia really is the lucky country. A continent onto itself. Boats can be sunk if it comes to that. And it will come to that, because we are human and job #1 is to save our own skin, and the skin of our children, because... genes. From prison colony to keeping refugees out - bloody good show, as the Brits might say.
Phillip, I don't see a distinction between what happened to native-Americans and what has been happening to the Palestinians. Geronimo, Sitting Bull and several others were leaders of terrorists per white Americans at the time. Native-Americans committed brutal acts the equal of anything HAMAS has done. No beheadings that I know of, but scalping, disemboweling, incineration and the leveling of settler homes with white children and women sometimes taken. Now we call these people, who dared to resist overwhelming power, heroic.
It's interesting that the US was the ethnic cleanser then and is now on the side of the ethnic cleanser. It could be said back then that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" and now it would not be hard to find Israelis who feel the same way about Palestinians.
Any American who claims to be sorry about what happened in the Old West and is now cheering on Israel is a hypocrite.
What is happening is only the latest episode of Israel's removal of the natives. Not a few Israelis believe that the job done in 1948 did not go far enough and now needs to be finished. The slow terror of after-midnight home invasions by the IDF, routine arrests of Palestinians to be tried and convicted by Israeli military courts (98% conviction rate), settlers burning Palestinian olive groves and beating the Palestinians with pipes and baseball bats, spraying of Palestinian villages with "skunk water" has been going on for years. A particular horror has been the practice of condemning Palestinian buildings and then forcing the Palestinian owners to destroy what they have built as the IDF stands by to make sure they do.
The only difference now is it is open hunting season with no restraint as Netanyahu directs US foreign policy. Knesset member Ben Gvir is openly distributing AR-15 type weapons to settlers to be used against any Palestinians they can find. Palestinians in the West Bank, of course, have never been allowed to have any weapons. It will be a turkey shoot. Settlers who have openly taken the land without hesitation (many of them Americans with dual citizenship) will not hesitate to pull the trigger on those they consider nothing but pests.
If Netanyahu directs US foreign policy why did the Biden Administration change tack on the Golan Heights, the Sheba'a Farms dispute etc? And why did the US not back the Israelis on the hydrocarbon treaty with Lebanon? And why has Biden and Blinken demanded that the Israelis desist from searching aid shipments to Gaza? Sounds like the Israelis are inept at handling those they 'control'.
The dust-up in Gaza is a dispute between American clients. The US supported the creation of the Palestinian refugee industry (UNRWA) in the 40s in order to constrain Israel and deny the Israelis the security readily accorded Europeans by the resolution of WW2 via the population transfers at the time. The US has been the biggest single financial supporter of the refugees ever since. Today Hamas is a military proxy for the Qataris...US allies.
BTW if I were you, I'd worry about the ethnic cleansing of whites from major cities and the imminent 'decolonisation' of your own neck of the woods.
Re the native American analog, the American frontier was contested by rival groups.
The Native Americans and the whites had no common culture and the former did not have effective political institutions. They may as well have come from different planets.
The Arabs and Jews have a very long shared history, which includes the legal/political subjection of the latter under the shariah (which assigns second class status to non-believers and the payment of special taxes). Zionism was not, nor is it now, just about resolving the crisis of European Jewry in the 20th c. It was, and remains, a response to the difficulty/failure of Ottoman society and its successors to accept substantial legal, social and political equality between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Ben Gvir, whom you mention, is an Iraqi. Have a look at the history of the Jews of Iraq, above all at the way Iraqi nationalists turned on their Jews in the 30s and 40s in order to demonstrate their support for Berlin and Rome. The Zionist argument with secular Arab nationalism is even more bitter than the Zionist argument with jihadist ideologies.
Western Asia is contested by any number of competing peoples, each with long, very complex, histories of their own. Outsiders should be cautious about projecting their own assumptions. Serious people on all sides deserve better than the cartoonish platitudes of Wilsonian rhetoric or, even worse, the assumptions of Rawlsian political theory.
And the Palestinians do not lack weapons. The US Army provides them (and the training to use them) to the Palestinian Authority. They have done so for several years.
I'd say the odds of a regional war are greater than ethnic cleansing or annexation of Gaza. Pretexts for war never have to actually happen.
Agree on both counts. War suits any number of parties, albeit for wildly different reasons. Plenty of regional states already benefit from seeing Hamas crushed, but there are others who might benefit from a decisive outcome to the question of the eroding/emerging regional pecking order. In addition there are any number of extra-regional players (not all states) with an interest in shaking things up. Throw in the aerospace, hydrocarbon and construction industries and there is serious money to be made from war and for post-war reconstruction.
Regarding "shaking things up"...
My analogy is the pressure cooker with the relief valve jammed shut. It is a certainty it will eventually explode no matter how strong the material from which it is made.
Israel has been systematically applying heat and with the full backing of the US has made sure there is no relief possible. Weapons and money pour in from the US while the US uses its veto in the UN Security Council to make sure no diplomatic interference can relieve the pressure.
Surely there has never been a better example of power corrupting. Whether it is an individual, a group of people or an entire country, if there is no restraint a monster will eventually emerge. We've watched as Israel has moved steadily right and with a guarantee from the US, why not?
At the moment, the armed might of the US is entirely pledged as a defense force for Israel no matter what offense Israel commits, so far holding the world at bay while Israel slaughters as it pleases under the unbelievably foolish yet predictable pledge of Biden to "stand with Israel". The only superpower is completely blind to what it is doing and I shudder at how history will view this complete repudiation of liberty and justice for all for the sake of the last European colony.
There can be pushback against Israel without causing WW3. Israel as a country won't be allowed to cease to exist due their nuclear arrsenal, but they can be corralled and taught a lesson. What's happening, and that it is allowed to happen, can be blamed on the West as much as Israel.
Too bad they're toi useful as an attack dog to the world cop, and that European politicans are bunch of weak, self serving cowards (spoken as an European).
What is in it for him? What are costs, risks, benefits? To him? To his organization? Does Iran want him to do it? Can they compel him to even if he doesn't want to? What does he know, or think he knows, about Israeli capabilities? What does he know, or think he knows, about how well or poorly Israel is performing in Gaza? What is the actual state of his own capabilities? What is his perception of his capabilities? What is risk if does NOT act, as he perceives it? How much autonomy does he have? Who else inside or outside of his organization has an influence on his decision making? How coordinated are Hamas and Hezbollah and other potential enemies of Israel? Is there actual coordination or just spasmodic attacks along the same axis? What can he realistically expect to accomplish by open warfare? What does he think he can do?
And that is just the known unknowns.
And the unknown unknowns may be even bigger.
No way to make predictions here unless you have genuine domain expertise in the region, and an awareness of the players and their motives.
Nonetheless, I will venture a pure guess that Hezbollah will remain in a mainly harassing mode rather taking on the risk of a full scale war, at least for the next few days.
One angle I have not heard discussed is direct Israeli retaliation against Iran. That is the source of the problem. Gaza is poor as dirt. It cannot afford any military capabilities at all. Iran pays for everything. At some point Israel may decide to punish Iran.
Hopefully Israel crushes Hamas so thoroughly and without their usual hesitancy and half-assedness that others will think twice before entering the fray.
I also obtained some super duper top secret military intel from the future that covers some of the financial, psychological, and other aspects of the conflict, for anyone interested.
https://open.substack.com/pub/socraticpsychiatrist/p/a-briefing-from-hamas-headquarters?r=44y4c&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I’d like to recommend The Martyrmade Podcast by Daryl Cooper. It is about ~20 hours long and I am ~5 hours in.
It covers the start of Zionism in the early 1900s and ends with the establishment of Israel in 1948. It looks at the perspectives of both the Jews and the Arabs fairly evenly; the Jews get more time as they were more active, while the Arabs were more reactive.
This all started much differently than I imagined. Daryl asks thought provoking questions and asks you to consider perspectives you might not have otherwise.
I don’t think anyone can think in black and white terms after learning the history of this conflict. You can still take sides, sure, but there is darkness to be found within each side. It is a story of two peoples, each fighting for their existence, and willing to do absolutely anything to achieve their goals.
Thanks for sharing bro.
Andrew, your claim that there is some kind of balance in the history and current situation of Israel is simply not true. Please visit the website of B'Tselem, the Israeli NGO for human rights in the occupied territories. The have produced a flood of fully documented publications over the decades that will open your eyes.
I place a heavy burden of blame on the US for refusing to admit the survivors of the holocaust residing in the displaced persons camps after WW2. The European countries did not open their doors either and it isn't hard to understand why survivors did not want to return to where they had lived before the holocaust. The survivors overwhelmingly wanted to go to the US and Zionists did all they could in the camps to get survivors to Palestine including outright physical coercion. If you were a survivor you were offered a survey where you could indicate where you wanted to go, but Zionists let you know you had better indicate Palestine. Read "In the Shadow of the Holocaust" by Grodzinsky for the story in detail.
The holocaust was the opening Zionism needed, limping along without enough Jews immigrating to Palestine. The holocaust confirmed the thinking of Theodore Herzl that Jews needed a safe place for themselves and the guilt of the holocaust provided the psychological push that had the major powers lining up to approve of all out Jewish immigration to the native land of a powerless group - the Arabs as a whole and the Palestinians in particular. Win - win for everyone except the powerless, an old story which we see still being told right now.
The holocaust is continually emphasized by Israel because it is such a horror that nothing else, even the leveling of Gaza can even approach it, so they believe. Golda Meir said that "after the holocaust, Jews can do anything" and Israel has run with that. Netanyahu always sees Israel as the eternal victim, talks about a "second holocaust" continually and has now identified Israel as being the side of light against darkness. Criticism is immediately met with charges of antisemitism. Jews who object are "self-hating". Even the word Jew is so loaded by its use under National Socialism that few dare to use the word. To say "David is a Jew" doesn't sound good, so it is preferable to say "David is Jewish"
Under this shield of the holocaust and the toolkit derived from it that Israel has not been hesitant to use, Israel has cowed the world and done as it pleased, even stooping to claim that "there never was a Palestine" and "There are no Palestinians" as it systematically evicts them, pushing them into ever smaller parts of what was all once their land. Even Israeli hero Moshe Dayan admitted as much and so did Ze'ev Jabotinsky who took a hard line against the Palestinians from the start, but fully admitted and understood their reaction. Read his essay "The Iron Wall"
Zionism from the start has wanted the Palestinians gone, denying any responsibility for making the refugees in 1948, refusing to donate a shekel to supporting the refugee camps, instead dumping them on the UN, still fulfilling that role in over 50 such camps that it undertook before the middle of the last century as the UNRWA (UN Relief Works Agency)
Two wrongs do not make a right. The holocaust did not and does not justify the taking of a land from a people who had nothing to do with it. The Palestinians were innocent victims as surely as were the Jews of Europe. The big difference is that the holocaust ended with the end of Hitler's camps. The Nakba, the catastrophe visited on the Palestinians, has been ongoing since the creation of Israel and has been practiced ever since before the eyes of the world, a violation of international law that was created in response to what Hitler did when he moved Germans onto the land ("lebensraum") overrun by the Wehrmacht. Yet, Zionists have done exactly the same thing continuing as I write with the US covering for all that it does.
No, Andrew, there is no balance just as there is no justice for Palestinians. There is a safe home for Jews, the US, where they are welcome and share full citizenship with all other Americans. There are countless stories of penniless Jews coming to the US and finding wealth and security due to their efforts. My dentist is a Jew as are the mayor of my town and my US representative, my state representative, the governor of my state.
The outrage of outrages is that American Jews with every right and freedom any American has, can be granted dual citizenship by Israel and then proceed to go and take land from people who have no rights. A significant percentage of settlers in the West Bank are Americans with dual citizenship.
Palestinians were just Arabs until the 70s. Arabs’ existence is not in danger.
I don't know if the war will expand beyond Gaza. But I was struck today by the truth of the title of Steve Marriott's piece in The Times today: 'You Don't Need to Share Your Views on Gaza'.
The bald fact is that Israel has been fighting for its existence for 70+ years. And the Arabs have never at any time accepted its existence. Weeks - in fact decades - of commentary about negotiated 'solutions' etc etc is (and has always been) just politico and media blah blah. Yes, the Israelis have handled some things better than other things but whatever they did (or did not) do - nor whoever was in government or not - would have altered that fundamental (and intractable) impasse.
The awful truth is that, for Western publics and commentariats who don't have to actually fight them, wars have long since become another grim part of the media entertainment industry....like gripping horror movies and with the same insatiable audience appetite.
So very true! People are shite!!!!
"Arabs have never at any time accepted its existence"
That is the propaganda that Israel has been spreading for the past 70 years. In fact the PLO recognized Israel in the Oslo agreements and Hamas adopted a more moderate program in 2017. Not to mention the Arab states that recognize Israel.
In contrast Israel has never recognized the right of the Palestinians to have their own state - despite the UN resolution granting them that right.
Israel is an apartheid state. A rare remainder of the colonial era. It treats its Palestinians the way the US treated its Indians and South Africa its Blacks.
After seeing what happened to South Africa after apartheid ended, and knowing what the end of colonialism entailed, this is an argument FOR Israel, not against it.
What you saw is how destructive colonialism is. It gives influence to the wrong kinds of people. That makes it hard to build a functional society after it ends.
That's a good argument against creating new colonies. Israel already exists. By your own argument destroying it will mean Palestine, or whatever entity comes after, will almost certainly be a failed state.
I didn't say that it would be a failed state. The big majority of the ex-colonies never became a failed state.
Maybe not always a failed state, but just a standard turd world state. It certainly won't have anywhere near the standard of living in Israel. It would be dominated by Arab muslims, with their unique pathologies, and have the same issues as all of it's neighbors.
If your like me and think Israel is broadly part of the West, then losing it is not a good thing.
false, considering how crappy most of subsaharan africa is.
Most were better off under euro rule
Oh, Indonesia is doing fine Wim Roffel.
Ahem.
The Israelis founded a new country on their ancient homeland.
They have the same rights to it the Arabs have - both took by force.
The only American interest is not stabbing yet another ally in need, mind you all they need from us is don't interfere or force nonsense deals on them.
That's it.
In many ways W.R it's like Indonesia in 1965, we just looked the other way and didn't sanction Indonesia and they solved their own internal problems.
The US played a role, believe me. Just ask the Soetoros.
The US played a major role in the 1965 mass murder in Indonesia. It harmed the country and turned it into a corrupt cronycracy. Exactly what you also saw happening in Latin America thanks to American interventionism.
Who are you to decide what another country should do. If they'd rather collapse in freedom, than prosper in peace, that is entirely their choice, and not one of some faceless western politicos.
Why do you expect Palestinians to give up a claim to land they lived on and their ancestors lived on? Jews spent 2,000 fighting for a return to their ancestral land, yet you think the Palestinian refusal to give up after 70+ years is crazy. Jewish converts can claim Israeli land (Ivanka Trump, Antonio Garcia Marquez) yet Palestinians whose families have lived there for centuries just need to accept their loss.
I wonder what percentage of Israelis or Jews generally actually have Hebrew ancestry. It's interesting how Hebrews and Jews have become synonymous when they are different groups.
We now know from genetic data that number is extremely high. In fact apart from a few questionable groups, every major Jewish group has a genetic link back to the ancient levant.
DAS RITE!
Hahaha. The Palestinians are mostly the descendents of the tribes of Israel, later converted to Islam. The Eastern European Jews connection to Israel remains extremely dubious.
Palestinian Christians and Samaritans certainly are. Palestinian muslims much less so. Many/most have deeper genetic and ancestral connections to places like Syria and Egypt than they do ancient Israel. Of those muslims that do have a deeper link to the area they have a high percent of admixture from other areas, often subsaharan and occasionally slavic via the slave trade.
I know of no serious paper on genetics that contests the link between Ashkenazi and the ancient levant. Rather the debate is on the who/what/where of European genetic admixture into the group. Make of that what you will.
just like germans gave up land where they have lived for centuries in 1945?
Lose a war, move forward or keep the grudge going ?
Grudges keep going. How many centuries did the Germans and French fight over Alsace-Lorraine? How long did the English and French fight for Calais? How about the Balkans - still fighting over land. This is the human condition. The fights are not going anywhere ever.
It has been fighting for it's existence the same way that European enclaves in Africa in the 19th and 20th century were.
Why should they accept its existence? It is a settler colonial state that was built on top of their heads for no fault of their own.
The hatred is massive and mutual. Hatred is baked into the cake; children are taught to hate the other side. Children!
Apartheid is the answer.
To end the killing one side must win and the other side physically withdraw. Is that what the two state solution means?
The whole world is Israel now.
If you’re going to fight someone you don’t talk about it you just do it. This will be akin to the outside of the pub at closing time where the guy knows his mates will hold him back and he is safe and secure in screaming all manner of dire threats that come to nothing.
Someone wrote somewhere that Israel would pay Egypt’s debt if they take the people from the strip. It’s an entertaining thought that objectively would make decent sense for everyone but the franchise managers in Europe. I’m sure Egypt would promptly ship the newcomers over to our neck of woods.
Franchise managers?
Niccolo calls the European “leaders” franchise managers for the USA inc.
That’s right I remember that now
War will expand.
Israel is evil, murdering Palestinians for nearly 100 years, it is pariah.
Entering the conflict is moral, to save innocents.
However, going in will involve the greatest purveyor of war crimes, the US,
Likely coordinate with Iran.
Iran likely better prepared in 10 years.
Limited with false flagged by USA who see sooner better than later when iUSA is weaker vis a vis the resistance.
What have Muslims been doing for 1400 years?
1919 matters, mandates and sphere of influence replaced Ottoman with imperialists.
Since 1948 Palestine has been a mix of apartheid, and US’ reservation system.
7 Oct Hamas broke from the reservation or concentration camp…
I guess the main thrust of the speech will be that he considers the latest beatles release “acceptable” but hezbollah will declare war if they should attempt to unearth further demos which are not of sufficient quality.
Made me LOL
Ditto
😝
>nothing ever happens
>this one doesn't count
My baseline was that there’s no place for the Palestinians in Gaza to go so eventually Israel would declare victory over Hamas and put the lid back on the Gaza pressure cooker, hopefully under considerably less pressure. I now expect Israel will persuade Egypt to accept the Palestinians from Gaza. An Israel from the river to the sea...
If Egypt accepts the Palestinians, it'll be suicide for Egypt. The Copts have it terrible as it is. Taking in more radical Muslims will be even worse for them and non-radical Muslims. Just pushing the problem onto someone else.
Agreed. Egypt will accept only token numbers at most. Al-Sissi fears the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and will not welcome Palestinians en masse.