The western countries governments are the most evil people on the planet. They have looted and destroyed countries, left them in extreme poverty, time and time again massacre millions of people, murder poor children and they still continue to support the killings of innocent people living in poverty. I don’t believe in afterlife but if there is, I just wish to see those evil barbaric people suffering for eternity. Each and everyone of them.
Israel - Palestine Discussion | Post Respectfully | Discuss more, tweet less
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I remember discussing this with some friends and family at the time, one a history major who was focused on the Middle East and another in US military intelligence, and the consensus was that there would not be a better deal available for Palestinians for decades, or potentially ever, because of how the tides were shifting; the right-wing was already rising on both sides. It's easy in hindsight to say Arafat should have accepted as it was the best they were going to get, but even at the time, it felt like the rejection was a foolish move that would have generational consequences, which it has.
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Keep doing mental gymnastics until your spine and brain can't take it anymore.
It was a shite deal with zero guarantees for Arafat, the PA and the Palestinians at the time. I should remind you that Arafat and the PA recognized Israel as a state without any counter-part in the Oslo Accord. 78% of the original Palestine was already in the hands of Israel and the PA agreed to it. His credibility was on the line and there was no way he or the PA would accept such terms.
That's why he believed in a series of meetings beforehand to iron out a decent outcome for both parties before anything final could be signed, and tried to stall the negociations without signing anything. But Barak at the time needed it to be done before the Israeli elections, for his own political interests. That's why it was rushed and ultimately brought nothing. You're right about the rise of the Israeli right-wingers though. 58% of the Israeli population thought Barak compromised too much, which in itself is absolutely hilarious. The election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister, a notorious war criminal, can only reinforce that.
Camp David in 2000 was an ambush and nothing else. The game was and is still rigged. It only seems great in retrospect because the bully, backed by even bigger bullies, was able to do whatever the feck it wanted to without anyone else opening their fecking mouth. And now do a Pontius Pilate.
The whole situation there is simply tragic, I despair for both Israelis and Palestinians. I hoped that at some point the lessons of the past would be learned. I still do. I'm passionately interested in history, how civilizations come and go. How some would agree that others simply don't have the right to exist either as a people or as a country. In this thread, I'm slowly starting to understand how and why it begins, then finally happens. People just stop to care, take the path of the least resistance, leaving the field clear for the extremists to carry it out and then find any kind of justification to put their own mind at ease. Then decades, or centuries later, whine about it and swear it will never happen again.
If the West thinks that they're coming out of this unscathed, they're in for a rude awakening. It's not 1945 nor 1991 anymore and I don't believe that many of the western leaders really took the full measure of it. The world has changed and if they want to keep the last bit of credibility they still have in the Global South, they might seek another way than "Ah well, that's unfortunate but..." when it comes to countries or people they don't particularly like or align with their interests.
History has a nasty habit of coming back to bite you in the ass. We might even live to see it.
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Well it's a damn bit better than anything anyone could hope for now. How many Gazans wish it had been signed today?
This thread is a case study in the problem: its extremely easy to be appalled, enraged, engaged at the atrocities currently being done by Israel. There's an entire ecosystem built around it now.
What there is not is a viable solution. As I posted weeks ago and was roundly mocked for: what do you propose that isn't a pithy phrase about not killing babies.
In relative terms, Oct 7th was 9/11 times about 15 for the Israelis. The subsequent reaction is another order of magnitude worse for Gazan Palestinians. There will be no Gazans left who did not lose family members from this. There are very few Israelis who did not know someone personally impacted by the 7th attacks. This escalation has made peace impossible for the foreseeable future.
Hamas knew this, knew precisely how Israel would react. This is the result Hamas leadership wanted.
Some posters seem to think that Israel is just some puppet of the US - I'd strongly encourage you to study up on Israel's tech, manufacturing and defence industries. Israel is a relative powerhouse all on its own in the region these days. It also ignores the correct issue: the American voters don't want the US to not back Israel.
In 2006 Israel left Gaza, but installed draconian measures to try to ensure that Gazans couldn't build a force able to attack Israel from 'inside'. This created the apartheid state which Israel justified to the world as necessary to prevent amass killing of its citizens. After Oct 7th, it has all the evidence it will ever need to do even worse in the future.
There is no palatable solution since October 7th. World leaders know that. Scholars of the last century know that. I'm pretty sure Hamas leaders know that. And yet, here we are.
I've met people involved in the 'negotiations' with Arafat who said there was never an iota of a chance he would agree anything, that he played it like a game and was gleeful in rejecting everything. They were shocked because they really believed they'd cracked what was, at the time, the longest running issue in geopolitics.
Let's not shine a positive light on Obama. Obama drone bombing weddings and funerals is literally a meme.
A poll out of Florida would be interesting though. Cubans, Venezuelans, and Jews, all who voted trump and were foreign affairs are important. State could be too far gone now, but still interesting.
"Here, some pieces of old bread, we care about you, we dont want you to die from hunger" .
Do you ever think to yourself that from human dignity point of view they would rather die for their cause than to be subjugated. Not everyone is with zero self respect.
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No. I think Iran would rather they die for their cause. But the average family just wants to live in peace and not have their world ripped apart by bombing and terror. Besides, living in a huge prison run by Hamas is hardly having human dignity.
What is “their cause”?
A long post of victim blaming. Then dont be surprised if the Palestinians will push back even harder than that. Not only Hamas will grow, but even more extreme factions. This is human nature and you can not expect them to stay silent until the end of time. Your suggestions and others here of subtle and sometimes clear signals of ethinc cleansing and apartheid measures is not a solution for the indigenous people of the land.
I keep forgetting this all started on October 7. Thank God for some of the posters that keep reminding me.
It's insulting and exactly what the evil Israeli regime and paid Western Media wants.
As if life was really nice and dandy in Gaza before 7th October.
Clear as day..
Just read what you wrote. Your language has really been appalling, you are literally talking in colonialist tone "you either accept to be subjugated and we let you live as a subhuman, or resist and you will die".
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Surely this will not pass though. Simply absurd.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité..unless it upsets an Israeli.
No doubt there will be pockets who will vote vis à vis foreign policy, etc., but not enough to sway any national or statewide election.
Yeah, ain't gonna happen.
France isn't what it was in this particular matter to say the least, but there's no way this comes to pass.
November 2015 truly fecked them up though.
See the reaction to the US in Cambodia or Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, no one really cares.
Being supreme Jewking sounds like a great job. Thing is though, in all seriousness, this kind of mass movement to a random strip of land of one of the peoples made far more sense for the Jews back in the early 20th century because they were already geographically spread out massively, many European Jews had had it with Europe and Europeans were still the masters of the world and drawing borders and fecking things up worldwide. Probably easier to tell a German Jew or Polish Jew that you're going to Zanzibar or Canada, when their family have not stepped foot in the Middle East for many many generations, than it is to force either set of people out, one who have been there for hundreds of years and see the land as their own, the other who've now built a state there and believe that God/history gave them that land.
I do think that Israel would have thrived in Europe. Would have been great to punish the Germans for what they'd done too by giving them a juicy chunk of German land. Alas, they decided to punish the Palestinians instead and the rest, as we say, is history.
When I say its unprecedented, I mean the entire context. There are situations where the Palestinians themselves have been forced out entirely (Kuwait), situations where countries force out entire groups of refugees who already have a state (as Pakistan look set to do soon with Afghan refugees, Turkey with Syrians, Denmark too I think), situations where there is ethnic cleansing of a people, who then return to their 'historical/ancestral homelands (Armenians of NK, Germans being ethnically cleansed around Europe post WW2 to ensure a German state couldn't use them as an excuse for future war), mass population transfers to a new state (Muslims out of India to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs out of Pakistan to India) and ethnic groups who are stateless but who inhabit their 'historic' homelands and can potentially have some autonomy (the Kurds) but I cannot think of an example in recent history where a people are left stateless, with no 'home' state to return to, are ethnically cleansed with nowhere to go. An ethnic group with no homeland and who will eventually likely end up dispersed worldwide.
Maybe the Rohingya are the closest example I can think of? I don't know enough about the history to know whether they're 'ethnically' Bengali etc. Another really tragic story, with I guess a closer example of a country that the international community genuinely has no control or leverage over.
I don't think I made a direct comparison with Russian casualties (unless I'm mistaken). I said that some people on here are screaming iran/China (and I guess also Russia) when people criticise Israel, as if 2 of those 3 countries aren't being heavily censured at the moment by Western governments, whereas one is being actively clapped on and provided with weapons.
If you, as an eight year old, see your siblings and parents dying under the rubble of your home, do some people think these kids grow up into completely normal people without any issues.
Israel's actions in the region basically make a conveyor belt for Hamas.
Most polls I have seen show the American public is in favour of this war. We want to think people would be against this suffering but we are wrong. People in the USA see this the same way they see America's war on terror.
I do hope Democrats lose because of this but it is a pipe dream.
I don’t have a particularly well-informed opinion on the finer details of what went down, beyond what is publicly known. I don’t see much reason to believe that either Barak or Arafat were disingenuous in their engagement or determined to sabotage the talks, but both were hostages to a certain degree to the rejectionists in their respective societies. And it’s probably true to say that structure of the entire process was wrong-headed.
More broadly speaking my general feeling is that the maximum that any Israeli politician could plausibly have offered would never have met the minimum that Arafat could plausibly have accepted. I think Israeli society could, by the end of the 90s, have been brought along by strong, determined leadership to grudgingly accept something like what a lame-duck Olmert offered in 2008. But Peres and Barak were not those leaders, Netanyahu and Sharon were not interested, and Rabin we’ll never know (his publicly stated vision of a Palestinian “state” was less generous than what Barak offered, although perhaps the tide of history could have carried him further). The second intifada ended that brief window.
In any case I’m not convinced that any Palestinian leader could sign off on what is essentially defeat in the eyes of too many Palestinians. In any hypothetical two-state solution the Palestinians are still conceding considerably more in terms of what their national movement has historically been struggling for than the Israelis. Palestinian rejectionism is a very consistent and, in my opinion, historically dominant characteristic of Palestinian politics and society, but somewhat under-accounted for in discussions like this due to the massive power differential separating the two parties. For all the talk of “of course Israel is going nowhere”, etc., I’m not sure many people understand just how deeply ingrained the idea that Israel is destined to fall is in Palestinian society.
You are literally constantly spouting weird shite like thatDo we really need this kind of bigotry and wish for harm here?
What? He said governments. Calling a government evil is not acceptable now?Do we really need this kind of bigotry and wish for harm here?
Do we really need this kind of bigotry and wish for harm here?
Spare us the fake outrage. Evil people that are complicit in these crimes deserve it and more.
Wishing for harm in an afterlife? Oh how offensiveDo we really need this kind of bigotry and wish for harm here?
Hmmm didn't Ireland call for a ceasefire?
Do we really need this kind of bigotry and wish for harm here?
I'm sorry, but you taking umbrage at people wishing harm on government officials is a little bit funny. You usually include a detailed desciption of how they should be harmed.
Its the Palestinians in the westbank fault, why didn't they accept a life like Gaza?
Oh wait..
Its worse there.
"Right to defend themselves"
Never heard a more pernicious, slimy and hypernormal statement tbh.
Never heard a more pernicious, slimy and hypernormal statement tbh.
I remember the first time I watched the Louis Thereoux doc on the settlers in the West Bank and it was hard not to despise the settlers being interviewed because they were so egregiously horrible and so down right contemptuous. Made my skin crawl watching people treat others so poorly with a smile on their face. Grim.
They are horrible, with a terrorist mindset.
Yes, to my eyes it's a fairer and much more accurate assessment of the situation back then than what I've depicted.
I've had a hard time to cross check my sources because of how astonishingly few written records were made about such an important meeting and I failed to encompass the expectations of the Israeli society which Barak had to deal with. Nor to understand that Barak was not Rabin, in terms of charisma or leadership. Although as you mentioned, we'll never know how the latter would've lead these negotiations, if he ever did.
I was just driven me mad by seeing the common trope (and false imo) served ad nauseam, that Israel offered Arafat and the Palestinians some kind of a deal of the century that they were dumb enough to refuse. I personally find the implications quite unpleasant.
Your last part, in particular the bolded one, brings questions I've never really considered until now. In the same way, would it be fair to say that the idea of a truly independent palestinian state was never in the mind of the Israeli society, or am I just searching for a false equivalence?
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