Israel is Coming Apart at the Seams, It Seems

Pretty damn badly, because the United States government freed the slaves and then mollified the rebellious South to keep the peace. The freed slaves were given nothing, and peacefully fought (and their descendants fought and continue to fight) for truly equal rights.

But it's not the same set of circumstances, and you know it. But let's take the analogy to its conclusion: if the freed Blacks had been given the ability to take over the South, for example, and had gone on to install an undemocratic, Christian theocratic Black supremacist government and proceeded to oppress the Southern whites, would that have been any more okay than the Jim Crow hell that actually occurred? Obviously not. The freed slaves should have been given freedom, reparations, and equal rights. The South, as defeated states in rebellion, should have been obligated to accept this new status quo. A new, freer society, not one evil replacing another. Radical Reconstruction. But...again, the two situations aren't the same.

Anyway, Palestine absolutely should be free. Free for all who live there, not just for the people being currently oppressed. The answer to oppression is not more oppression. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be saying that the Palestinians should have the right to make any kind of government they can agree to or have imposed on them by a vocal minority, even if it means that government will be undemocratic and unsupportive of human rights. How can anyone supporting freedom support that? But I'm not trying to play gotcha with you; if you think otherwise, please say so. What should a free Palestine specifically be? And what of the Israelis?

No, what I'm saying is that the Palestinians and the Israelis should be able to hammer something out of what they need, something that brings peace for everyone in the region. A tall order, but the US and other nations have been meddling so long that the only way these people are going to work something out is if we stop interfering to our own ends. That means the US stops funding Israel's bombs, and forces Israel to stand on its own feet while making negotiations.

I'm sure you've noticed the US has been both sidesing this situation, telling Israel not to use the white phosphorous bombs while selling them said white phosphorous bombs.

The Palestinians and the Israelis need to negotiate on equal terms. That means no choking the Palestinians, and no funding the Israelis in the process.

I'm fine with that.

I liked your post. I assumed you were talking to me on that one.

I'm not, since Amaris doesn't believe Israel should exist, and a considerable number of Palestinians don't believe Israelis deserve to exist. "I'm guessing The Palestinians and the Israelis need to negotiate on equal terms" is a polite way of saying "The US needs to stop helping Israel so it's enemies can have a better shot at winning the next war."

Israel-Palestine: Israeli forces block ambulances from reaching besieged hospitals in Jenin
Sick and wounded Palestinians unable to access medical care leading to deaths as Israeli soldiers surround hospitals during ongoing raid

Source: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-jenin-besieged-hospitals-ambulances-blocked

This is happening in Jenin, the West Bank, far away from any Hamas sightings or fighting.

Israeli troops kill 12 Palestinians, desecrate West Bank mosque

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/middl...forces-raid-jenin-health-ministry-2023-12-14/

Once again, in Jenin, the West Bank, away from Hamas and any fighting. One of the Palestinians they shot was an unarmed 17 year old.

"Israel shouldn't exist" is like saying the US or Russia shouldn't exist. It does. They do. Might not last long, won't last forever, but for the foreseeable future, these countries exist. And any realistic peace process must accept the fait accompli of Israel's existence or fail. If the Palestinians can't accept it, they're doomed to a future as refugees and unwanted wards of the Israeli state.

Conversely, Palestinians exist and if Israel must accept that many don't want to go anywhere, and that they should be given equal rights in the land in which they live, or there will be no peace.

Both sides have elements which won't accept peace under those conditions (or any). They're the long-term problem. The short-term problems are Hamas' continued refusal to surrender and Israel's hamfisted waging of this war, to name but a couple.

Hamas' biggest mistake right now is holding onto the hostages, and for two reasons:

1. It takes away Israel's strongest chess piece if they let them go.
2. It will play out, at least as far as I can tell, that Netanyahu never cared about the hostages and would continue bombardment.

Hamas holding on to the hostages gives Israel a very convenient excuse to keep the war going (or at the very least, not agree to a ceasefire). At this point, Hamas should release the hostages and hope Israel agrees to a humanitarian ceasefire long enough to negotiate some kind of peace in which it can survive more or less intact. But obviously, neither side wants peace right now. A pox on both their houses.

Meanwhile, the innocent civilians continue to die.

FINALLY, CNN is able to gain access to Gaza since October. Clarissa Ward is on site:

1- Since Amaris hates countries being all colonial and displacing people, I expect her to be moving out the U.S. to wherever her family's ancestral place of origin is any day now. Poverty is no excuse.

2-Anyone else notice how 6,000 dead babies has gone up to 10,000 dead babies in just the few days I've been here? With that efficiency rate, I expect Hamas to be defeated any day now. [/sarc]

When people make this point online, I've often seen it dismissed as 'meme-ing' or something like that. I'm not sure it can be so easily dismissed, though. If we're willing to compare the plight of the Palestinians to American Black slaves, comparing them to the Native American situation on US soil isn't much of a stretch. The Native Americans just don't fight it much anymore. But if they did, I can't imagine many Americans would be all that supportive, particularly if the Natives shot rockets from tribal reservations onto American territory. I could be wrong, though.

My point is that even today, every American benefits from settler colonialism at the expense of the Native Americans--even if they are first generation immigrants. If that's acceptable and Israel's control of Palestine is not, that's slightly problematic and the point should be addressed.

Also, does the US and Canada treat Native Americans as badly as Israel treats Palestinians? No. Would we, if they engaged in the kind of violence in which Hamas engages? Probably.

I took your obvious anti-trans bigotry over to a different thread little miss K'bonz. The K stands for Karen.

Anyway, I am Tererune, nice to meet you, but I know you know who I am already. Your haughty taughty attitude is practiced, but you are not on your turf anymore, and I have a memory. I also figure as a moderator at Trekbbs you probably have a nose for salient characters, and there is no fucking way you have not noticed me. I have done rthis shit for longer than your little board has existed. Fuck, I have done this for longer than HTTP has been a thing. As for the who am I, I am one of the people who helped invent internet trolling. I was here before fucking AOL was. I was adminning dial in BBS systems, and playing on trek MUCKs.

As for the who the fuck am I, someone you should be glad you don't know. I used to have a bigger page on ED than WF and trekbbs.

Yeah, that is why you came over here whining at amaris for pissing you off. I can respect the admins over here for being able to take some fucking redass. I even respect @Amaris for putting up with some god awful shit. You give a fuck. You cannot even hide it.

We aren't on trekbbs. You came over here to have a fit because you care enough to. It is amusing like most moderator hissy fits. This isn't my first rodeo honey. I am not chasing you down, you responded to me because you had to tell me how much you didn't care because you were bleeding care like a pressurized anime character.

There are no consequences because this is just some fun words. What consequences are going to happen? We aren't going to be chummy? That doesn't seem much like a consequence, and it is more like how we would like it. CVould you imagine me chumming around with one of the most easily butthurt admins on trekbbs? The empire of meow would come back from the dead and send ponty the werepontiac to laugh at me. BTW these are jokes that only I get.

Bullying people like peach? I take a hell of a lot of offense to that. Peach has yet to go running to the cops about how I am the evil in their life and start running across random message boards with me fucking with them. I used to spend time hanging out in the fucking bronx. when I bully, you know it.

Now that you have come down here to insult the tranny community because Amaris had a free palestine slogan in her sig and that triggered you, what else do you got?

Jesus fucking Christ, not even Tamar for as terminally online as she was would go to another whole board specifically to dead name them and drag out drama like this.

Fucking cringe.

In the future, historians will endlessly debate the cause of the great Trek BBS/Wordforge war of 2023, but one thing will be certain: the survivors will truly envy the dead.

I will put it this way. I think either side's surrender is not going to end this. If Hammas surrendered there would just be another terrorist group that formed under a different name. Isreal and the IDF are not going to stop the slow genocide of palestinians, so there will always be a resistance force that is formed by the hurt of the actions of Isreal that violate international peace agreements because they are so horrible anyone who uses them faces the angry backlash of the survivors. Yes, this does also include Isrealis as what hamas has done is in vioolation of those things for the same reason.

Surrender does not work bvecause neither side can be trusted to take the surrender and stop abusing the side that surrendered.

Any peace has to be enforced by an outside force willing to step[ in and protect both Isreal and Palestine from those that survive on the other side.

Let us also remember the republicans think armed teachers would not be going on shooting rampages. I hope the police are watching this crazy. I hope their state has some red flag laws.

I condemn them too, and think their actions are horrific.

We have been doing that over and over.

Since the only thing you will believe is your own eyes I will gladly pay for you to be flown to gaza to see it. I am up for it and have the money.

you forgot to log into you @T'Bonz account again.

Please do burn the e-book. You will; show that dirty @Amaris by burning your i-pad.

That is a deliberately obtuse view of the word free. Palestine is under Isreali control. By free it we mean allow it to become under it's own control to stop the abuses of the palestinian people.

from there we can work on the people. The state is not the people. Don't be intellectually dishonest. Don't be a federal farmer.

This is actually a very good point, and why you could not rely on the US to treat native americans properly. Their lands as some sort of "other country" are not really free to be used exactly in that way.

This is an important point within the US. We have to rely on our military not to act on threats from native lands in the US, and considering the Trump years, and what has occurred at other times with pipelines do the native americans have a true nation that can be seen as theirs? I would say not really, and they are even worse off than the palestinians because there is no real reigning in the US when it wants to take those areas.

That is a different discussion, but the difference ends up being Isreal couldn't do what it does without the US, or some foreign support. So as people of the US we could cut Isreal off and that would influence their need to make peace. It is an area where we could influence something, and we could vote people in who were willing to put more established laws to protect native lands on the books.

The reality is the leash on Isreal is a lot stronger and perhaps easier to pull on for the US. even though the US people should focus more on cleaning up their own act as the world has less pull over the US to act properly towards their indigenous people, it is just the reality we are faced with, and reality is always unfair.

That is just the answer. sometimes you chose the battle you can win.

Hamas is the one that is the government of the Palestinians. They are the one that are supposed to care about the well being of their people. But they don't, they even abrogate their duty to protect them by intentionally putting civilians in harms way, and they have stated openly that it is the UN that's supposed to take care of Palestinian material needs - that they are there to destroy Israel.

These two things are not the same. This stance is madness. They'd rather all the Palestinians die than make peace with Israel, and they've stated that openly as well. They have literally said they aren't willing to live with Israel and that if they must all be martyrs, so be it.

So no, peace is not in the best interest of Israel, at all, because you are just moving this process down the road again, after Hamas has a chance to rearm and strike again.

Which they have pledged they will do.

This is just an entire culture choosing suicide by cop.

And no one is going to stop either party.

The good news is Israel isn't going to commit the destruction of the entire Palestinian people. They know what that means. For all the talk of genocide by hypocrites on the far left the number of fatalities as a percentage of the people of Palestine is about half a percent.

They will however not be put off of destroying Hamas. And if that means dead civilians then it means dead civilians. To Israel this is an existential war.

And they are fighting it like we fought WWII. Hell, we bombed French towns when the Germans were encamped there.

The big problem there, particularly in Gaza, is that when they had those equal rights, too many Gazans used them to kill Israelis and to attempt to wipe Israel off the map. That's why Gaza isn't administered by Egypt anymore, that's why it's so hard to import certain things into Gaza, that's why so many Gazans aren't allowed to go for a stroll in Israel wearing their favourite baggy vest. (It's like a registered sex offender complaining about not having equal rights because they're not allowed to use the internet anymore. They know exactly why they're not allowed to use the internet, because of the horrible things they did with that freedom last time. )

If they want that freedom back they need to spend a long time convincing everyone else they're not going to abuse it again, and the people of Gaza have done an absolutely shit job of convincing anyone they wouldn't abuse those freedoms to kill more Israelis.

Stating 'I'm definitely going to do it again' is not a good way to convince people that you aren't going to do it again.

Attacking everyone and then blaming it on the only people who respect your life and do not openly think you are human trash because you believe in a different religion is not a good way to make peace with your bordering neighbors as a country. That is very anti-productive if your goal is anything but all out war.

On the longer-term solution, I don't agree with @Amaris that everyone else should just leave Israelis and Palestinians alone to sort it out themselves. It's much too late for that. Both societies are extraordinarily radicalised and there is too much history of atrocity and counter-atrocity for that not to lead to more of the same. One can only imagine what would happen were a nuclear-armed Israel to be confronted by a potential defeat in conventional warfare. Besides, the hand-in-glove approach of the United States to Israel has only really been a thing since after the 1967 war - and obviously the problems pre-date that.

I made a critique of the nation state system earlier in the thread and I'll reiterate that. It's an extraordinarily artificial system that has only really been fully established for 100 years. The violence it caused along the way was tremendous and there are parts of the world where its application remains very problematic - primary among these is the one at hand.

But reviewing the possible solutions...

The "two state solution" has been (and is) the formal international consensus. A version of this was agreed by both sides in the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. The agreement was unsatisfactory of course, but a potential starting point. Unfortunately it was never implemented (another complicated story) and may now be impossible. Present Israeli government policy explicitly rejects it. The continued encroachment of settlement activity in the West Bank has made impracticable the idea of any kind of contiguous Palestinian territory. And Palestinian politics are bifurcated to the point where it's difficult to say even who could or would speak for them.

A "one state solution" whereby all of the territory is absorbed into a larger polity, be that called "Israel", "Palestine" or something else runs into the so-called demographic problem. Israeli Jews would be in a minority and would therefore lose control. So they're against that, with very good reason given the strength of Islamism amongst Palestinians. Unless of course, the people living in the occupied territories can be removed first, which is what the current Israeli government would like.

Then there's the existing situation, with a Jewish supremacist state controlling all of the territory but with Palestinians trapped in an apartheid. Clearly untenable.

So, it's not the most intractable problem in world affairs for no reason and some creativity is required. Federalism, joint-authority and such things should be considered. There must be international oversight and enforcement to ensure that neither side oppresses the other. And things will not be plain sailing. Only over time will wounds heal.

But of course, this is academic. Right now, the killing spree in the Gaza Strip must be stopped.

Back to Gaza, there seems to be a new narrative developing where the US are demanding an end to "high intensity operations" within 3 weeks. It somewhat squares the circle of allowing Israel to continue, but not in the same way that they are now.

Unclear if this is just legal ass-covering from American officials or if they really mean it, since little or their talk has translated into action yet.

But I imagine the step-change might also come with some more aid, limiting the numbers (now mounting) who are dying from disease or starvation.