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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| think positive wrote: | Cheers David thanks
I know I should know more than I do, trying to learn now, it’s still confusing but this helps.
You mentioned Anders Breivik, I just watched a dramatised version of the events, gees, I just can’t imagine. Glad he ended up in solitary and not a hospital. All those kids… just, such a waste. Just like the festival.
Thankyou |
No worries! 
In response to your post above, this is the general history off the top of my head:
• The land today known as Israel/Palestine was the historical land of the Jewish people, dating back 2000+ years. Other peoples lived there with them, including the ancestors of the modern Palestinians. Historically, the term "Palestine" has referred to the entire land currently situated within Israel’s borders (which is how I’m using it below when talking about its history), but today refers only to the lands within those borders inhabited and administered by Palestinian Arabs (i.e. the West Bank and Gaza Strip).
• Over the course of the intervening period, in which various empires in the region rose and fell, most Jews left the holy land and migrated to different parts of the Middle East and Europe, encountering persecution nearly everywhere they settled. Palestine became mostly settled by Muslims, though some Jewish and Christian minorities remained living there throughout (here’s the historical population trend: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)). By the beginning of the last century, the land (along with most of what we today call the Middle East) belonged to the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
• In the early twentieth century, the long-dreamed-of movement to create a Jewish state in their ancestral land (rather than living as second-class citizens in foreign lands), or Zionism, ramped up, with many European and Middle Eastern Jews starting to migrate back to the still Muslim-majority Palestine.
• After World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East including Palestine fell into the hands of the British and French, who carved up the land in the early 1920s and gave it many of its modern borders. As part of this, the Palestinian Arabs, who had fought on the side of the British in World War I, were promised their own independent state, but this never transpired.
• British control of Palestine persisted through World War II until 1948. Of course, this period saw a ramping-up of the same violent anti-semitism that European Jews had suffered for nearly 2000 years, culminating in the mass murder of Jews throughout Europe in the Holocaust. As a result of this, there was considerable international sympathy for the idea of a Jewish state where Jews would be able to live and practise their religious beliefs freely.
• Nonetheless, the British were reluctant to let Palestine go, and Jews fought a guerrilla war against the British colonisers until the British finally agreed to leave. During this process, the newly formed United Nations drew up a two-state plan whereby the British would withdraw and Israel and Palestine would exist side by side, based on a similar territorial division to what we’re familiar with today, but the resolution was rejected and a civil war broke out between Israelis and Palestinians.
• At the conclusion of the civil war, in 1948, the Israelis were successful and declared the formation of the state of Israel. Around 80% of the Palestinian population were forced to flee as a result of this civil war, with their villages destroyed and Israelis moving in. Many Palestinians ended up in refugee camps across the border in Jordan. Following this, neighbouring Arab Muslim countries immediately declared war on Israel, with the resulting ceasefire leaving the West Bank and Gaza under the control of neighbouring countries Jordan and Egypt respectively. Israel subsequently won these territories back in the 1967 war but over time have ceded local control to Palestinians while neither recognising them as a separate country nor allowing their inhabitants full Israeli citizenship.
• So modern Palestine (i.e. the territories of West Bank and the Gaza Strip) exists in a grey area: technically part of Israel and sitting within its borders, considered an independent state by some countries but not actually able to run its own affairs or fully control what happens there. While most countries around the world (like the US and Australia) say they support a two-state solution (i.e. Palestine becoming a fully recognised independent country separate from Israel), the Israeli government’s policy over the years – pandering to their country’s extreme right-wing groups, who want to see all Palestinians evicted from the land – has been to frustrate this by any means possible. They’ve done this through allowing Israeli settlers to cross into the West Bank and build their own settlements, often destroying Palestinian agricultural land and blocking off roads and access points.
• Furthermore, while the West Bank is run by the moderate Palestinian Authority, since 2006 the Gaza Strip has been run by the extremist Islamist group Hamas, who refuse to work with the Palestinian Authority and also refuse to recognise Israel’s existence at all; in the long run, they want to see Jews expelled from the entire land of Israel. This has led to the situation we’re seeing now, with Gazans blockaded, denied freedom of movement and often bombarded by Israeli weapons, while Hamas militants send rockets into Israeli territory.
Hope that helps and isn’t too long-winded! Happy to be corrected if I’ve left anything important out.
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I'd call that a pretty balanced summary. Well said.
Fun fact, in the old testament, the Philistines referred to that the Israelites battled, was the original name of the Palestinians used by the Greeks. The name then moved through Roman into Arabic and became Palestinian.
In the story of David and Goliath, Goliath was a Philistine and David became the Jewish King.
So shit has been going on there for thousands of years.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Yeah, that's right enough. It's amazing after that long see-sawing history, the population of the two groups is now pretty much the same.
And in another reflection of ancient history, the great surrounding empires are all still involved, with the new world thrown in for good measure.
No one's going away, so you'd think you might want to call it even and call it a day, but not to be.
You can bet OPEC are loving this, though.
I thought this captured the percentage of religious crazies pretty well:
| Quote: | | In the December poll, 37% of Israeli Jews said they’d like to see a solution involving a single non-democratic state in which Palestinians didn’t have equal rights. Thirty percent of Palestinians said they wanted a single, Palestinian-dominated state. Smaller minorities on both sides supported a binational state with equal rights for everyone. |
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-09/israeli-palestinian-conflict-explained-from-peacemaking-to-war
If it only takes 20% of the population to be mad to wreck a country.... Imagine being a liberal Jew in Israel at the moment; I don't know how they can bear it.
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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Ah, that’s the trek Jews make to their homeland, often mentioned in movies. Thanks David that’s really interesting.
I don’t understand why Jews have been so persecuted, or why the British didn’t want to give them their own state, that’s awful.
So the west bank is run by people with brains, but the Israelis are being crafty, and Gaza is virtually a big criminal cess pit!
Gees religion is so divisive
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
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Depending on what you read, the Brits did agree to the creation of a new Israel and Palestine, but the Arab's kicked up and refused as they didn't want the Jews there. From there it played out as David said in my understanding.
Apart from the timeline above, it's worth mentioning that the Jews were in Jerusalem 1000 years before Islam was created and 500+ years before Jesus so if any religion has a claim to the place, it's them.
At the time of Exodus, when the Jews escaped Egypt and spent their 40 years in the desert etc before setting in what is now Israel, the surrounding Arab tribes had different religions, worshipping multiple gods (similar to Egypt but different) and idols. Islam came much later when Mohammad proclaimed himself a prophet.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Magpietothemax 
magpietothemax
Joined: 28 Apr 2013
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| swoop42 wrote: | Let's not pretend that Israel doesn't have a whole lot of blood on their hands in this ongoing conflict.
The difference is when they kill Palestinian men, women and children that blood is generally hidden under a pile of rubble.
Amazing how different the reaction is when you don't get the easy option of not witnessing the dead.
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Very good comment. When slaves rebel against the master who imposes the lash and chains, no person with any sense of justice or morality blames the slave for the ensuing violence.
Same applies here.
Tragically, innocent people in Israel died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the responsibility for this lies with the Israeli government, armed to the teeth by the US and the EU, carrying out decades of violent repression against the Palestinian people, confining them to an open air prison, regularly bombarding them, and on several occasions carrying out bloody ground invasions where the ratio of deaths, Palestinian to Israeli, were 100 to 1. In 2019, during a peaceful protest of Palestinian people demanding the right to return to their homelands, from which they were expelled in 1948 and 1967, the Israeli military gunned down and killed over 200 people, injuring and maiming thousands more. Conditions in the Gaza Strip, where 2,000,000 people are confined to a strip of land of 365 km squared, under conditions of economic blockade by the Israeli state, are hell on earth.
Now, the US, EU, Australian, British governments are all declaring that Israel's impending response, which will involve the collective punishment of 2 million people through an economic seige, as well as a likely ground invasion killing thousands more, is "justified". I am sure that many people world wide understand who the real terrorists are, and it isn't Hamas.
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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Why don’t they leave the Gaza Strip?
Why would yo7 want to live under constant threat of terrorism
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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And I’d like to once again take the opportunity to say Thankyou for your patience with me and my ignorance with a world stage subject. My priorities and free time quantity have greatly changed so I’m reading more world news. Plus most of my acting heroes are retired so I’m watching real life stuff instead of Fast and furious type movies! . I really do appreciate everyone explaining, and no one being a dick! Cheers xx
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| think positive wrote: | Why don’t they leave the Gaza Strip?
Why would yo7 want to live under constant threat of terrorism |
Where would they go? neither Egypt or israel would take them, they're stuck there being used as pawns by terrorists.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Magpietothemax
magpietothemax
Joined: 28 Apr 2013
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| stui magpie wrote: | | think positive wrote: | Why don’t they leave the Gaza Strip?
Why would yo7 want to live under constant threat of terrorism |
Where would they go? neither Egypt or israel would take them, they're stuck there being used as pawns by terrorists. |
Who do you believe are the terrorists?
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Magpietothemax
magpietothemax
Joined: 28 Apr 2013
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| think positive wrote: | Why don’t they leave the Gaza Strip?
Why would yo7 want to live under constant threat of terrorism |
Good question TP.
A number of reasons come to mind.
As I referenced, there was a demonstration in 2019 where thousands of Palestinian people marched to the wall separating Gaza from Israel, demanding the right to return to their homelands, and their family properties, from which they were brutally dispossessed, in 1948 and 1967. By leaving, they would be abandoning their historical connections, which for some would be deeply painful.
Even more significant is the fact that the economic choke hold that the Israeli government has used to strangle Gaza for many years has created devastating poverty in Gaza. Most would not have the material means to leave.
Fnally, which country would be willing to accept them as refugees? All the capitalist governments: the EU, the US, Australia, support Israel, and portray Israel as the "victim". So, naturally, to maintain this facade, they will not accept any Palestinian people as genuine asylum seekers. The situaation of the Palestinian people, trapped in Gaza, brings to mind the situation of Jewish refugees: the boat St Louis which sailed out from Germany with 900 Jewish people aboard, seeking asylum in the US from the murderous persecution of the Nazi regime. They were rejected by the US government, and sent back to Europe.
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Free Julian Assange!!
Ice in the veins
Last edited by Magpietothemax on Tue Oct 10, 2023 9:09 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Hamas and their sponsors are scum of the earth too, though.
Where have common ground is that deals with the devil infuriate me so much, whether be nutcase settlers or OPEC. It puts lie to everything being said and done.
I mean, normalising relations with Saudi Arabia? I bet the parents of dead Yemeni children will be delighted.
Just this week:
| Quote: | | 'Kill us or send us home': Amazon workers in Saudi Arabia say they were exploited by labor supply and recruiting firms |
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/amazon-workers-saudi-arabia-say-exploited-labor-nepal-rcna118614
Saudi Arabia is a notoriously racist slave country, known to pretty much have the highest rates of enslavement on the planet. As if Amazon didn't know. It's the equivalent of doing business with a sex trafficking cartel and being taken aback when you discover poor working conditions.
Saudi Arabia should be on a sanctions list with Russia so firms like Amazon can't exploit through them. You can't sanction one and fawn over the other. That's the part Chomsky gets right.
Every single Israeli breach of international and humanitarian law should rightly be penalised to bring what is now a rogue state into line. Not only does Israel's far right make Israel less secure, the treatment of average (Mo?) Palestinians is plainly a crime against humanity.
At the same time, so is the professional terrorism directed against Israel funded by Russia, Iran, Qatar et al., paid for with OPEC and fossil fuels revenues.
Everyone's got a bloody excuse, apparently, except no one's got an excuse.
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Magpietothemax
magpietothemax
Joined: 28 Apr 2013
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^Saudi Arabia is a very strong ally of the US, that is wy it is not on any sanctions list.
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Free Julian Assange!!
Ice in the veins |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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I think this is 100% correct, from Gaza-born Al Jazeera journalist Mohammad Alsaafin on the Chapo Trap House podcast (from around 37:00):
https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/771-the-crossing-feat-mohammad-alsaafin-101023
| Mohammad Alsaafin wrote: | I think one thing Westerners in general – not just Americans – will never understand is the horror of living under airstrikes, or dying under airstrikes, which is the modus operandii of the Israeli and American militaries especially. You're dropping tons of explosives on top of people's heads, on their buildings, on their apartment buildings, their schools, their offices, their markets; you're killing dozens and dozens of people.
The pilots who drop them, they get to go home without a speck of dust on them; and for a lot of Westerners, that is clean warfare. They don't look at the impact on the ground. Whereas for a fighter with an AK47 going into a community and shooting people, that feels a lot more visceral and horrific.
I think a lot of Western journalists identify on a human level with Israelis, in a way they never could with Palestinians. Regardless of the fact that Israel is an Apartheid state, regardless of the fact that Israel has committed massacres and ethnic cleansing throughout its history, a lot of Westerns in the media and the political class see Israelis as people they can make a human connection with, or see them as "one of us". That's something they could never extend to Palestinians. |
On the other hand, though, this is a good piece about Western leftists' dehumanisation of Israeli victims:
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/but-not-like-this
| Quote: | Over the weekend, Palestinian resistance groups led by Hamas finally broke through that cage surrounding Gaza. On land, by air, and by sea, hundreds of fighters poured into Israel. The average age in Gaza is only 18, and the strip has been under an illegal Israeli blockade since 2005: this was the first time many of these people had ever tasted anything resembling freedom. For the first time since 1948, swathes of historic Palestine were being captured by Palestinian forces. They overwhelmed the IDF posts that surrounded Gaza. Dozens of soldiers were captured, including senior officers, along with Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles. Gazan TV journalists reported live from within Israel. The forces of the occupation were reeling. The Israeli state had been humiliated. Just for a moment, the playing field had been levelled. And all of this was entirely within the bounds of international law; more importantly, it was in accord with the sacred right of an oppressed people to resist their oppression.
But that's not all they did. Instead, everywhere they went, the resistance fighters committed indiscriminate massacre. They killed people in their homes. They killed drivers on the roads. They mowed down old women waiting at a bus stop. They exterminated entire families, including their children. They set houses on fire to smoke the residents out of their safe rooms, and then they killed them. They took phones from the people they’d killed and texted their neighbours in Hebrew, saying it was safe to come outside, and when people did come outside they killed them. They found a bunch of kids having a psytrance rave in the woods and killed them too: hundreds of them. The naked body of a German national was paraded around Gaza as people beat her with sticks. Wherever they went, they wiped out as many human lives as they could. As I’m writing, the official death toll is over 900, the vast majority of them civilians, but more bodies are still being found.
[...]
This is the most basic, brute-force gesture: for everything monstrous that has been done here, remember that Israel does the same stuff too. Resistance fighters kill children in their homes: well, what do you think an Israeli missile does? Resistance fighters kidnap dozens of civilians: do you know how many ordinary Palestinians are trapped in Israeli jails, convicted by the farcical military courts? And you’re right: for everything that was done over the weekend, Israel really has done worse, and it will probably continue to do worse in the future. There is nothing Hamas could do that would be equivalent to seventy-five years of violent dispossession and occupation and apartheid. But for a few golden days, the famously lopsided ratio between Israeli and Palestinian civilian casualties went the other way. Is that enough for you? Does that satisfy? Is that justice? Is that all you were really after, all this time?
The worst is when they point out that one of the targets was the Israeli town of Ashdod, and in 2014 the New York Times reported on Ashdod residents dragging sofas up hills so they could gawp and cheer at the IDF bombing Gaza. Which is repulsive. To sit in safety and watch people suffer as a form of entertainment is an utter moral atrocity. But that’s you! What have you been doing these past few days? Do you really think it’s somehow better if you’re watching the massacre on your phone?
[...]
Frankly, if all you have to offer is this grubby, scummy cynicism—no clean hands in a dirty world, sometimes innocent people will die, war is violent and in the end there’s nothing wrong with that—then to be honest, I struggle to understand why you even bother to align yourself with Palestine at all. If this is how you talk, how can you possibly adopt any stance of moral outrage when Israel commits its own crimes? Why not drop the act and throw your lot in with the IDF, since they already speak your language?
[...]
I have not, it’s true, lived under siege for eighteen years; maybe my perspective is limited. But I still think it’s possible to drive past some old people waiting at a bus stop and not kill them on sight. I think it’s possible to not execute parents in front of their children. In fact, I know it’s possible, because there were plenty of Hamas fighters who didn’t do it. Some filmed themselves with women or disabled or elderly people in their homes, promising not to harm them. They insisted that the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades do not murder children, which is completely untrue, but it’s hopeful. Afterwards, an Israeli woman told the TV news that the Hamas fighters in her home had told her ‘don’t be afraid, we are Muslims,’ and asked permission before eating one of her bananas. How do you explain these people? They lived in the same city under the same siege; they lived through the same Israeli bombings as the ones who happily took their revenge. Could it be that whatever our condition, and whatever evils are visited on us, we are all answerable for the deeds of our hands? |
These are not contradictory positions. There is only one correct approach to this, which is that all mass killings of civilians, whatever their governments or militias acting in their name have done, are an unspeakable tragedy, and must never be justified or passed by without comment.
Many people have died, and it looks right now like many more people will. That must be stopped at all costs, and it would be great if international governments with power and influence tried to play a peacekeeping and arbitration role, rather than throwing their lot in with one side without question.
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