well that escalated quickly! Business as usual or the tip of the iceberg?

"The United Nations approved a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state in 1947, but the Arabs rejected it." But wait there's more! This article is pretty informative and sticks to the facts, before things get too far off track.

Israel - Facts, History & Conflicts - HISTORY

For those who deny that Israeli policies are ultimately aimed at screwing over Palestinians I'd love to know how you reach that conclusion, because as I see it right now there are a number of future options.

1. One state solution. Non-starter as it would immediately make the Jewish population of Israel a minority.

2. Two state solution. Would require a massive Israeli pullback from settlements that currently separate Palestinian territories and their control over movement between them.

3. Status quo holds indefinitely.

4. Palestinian territories are further separated.

Is there a fifth option here I'm not seeing? If so I would love to know it. If not, the only option that seems to end in lasting peace is either of the first two.

Option 5:

Hamas is everywhere, like yeast in bread! Please no "unleavened bread" jokes folks. You know what I meant.

Yeah, the Palestinians rejected it because they were already living there. How would you feel if someone came into your home and the city told you that the person who just moved in once lived there 20 years ago, and that they now owned half of your house? Oh, you don't agree? Well, too bad, because now they've taken the upstairs, and the kitchen. Better start working things out with them before they come downstairs with a shotgun and annex your basement.

Oh, you shouldn't have shot at them in order to force them to leave your bedroom. They've set you on fire, shot your dog, and the media's asking why you're such an asshole for simply not compromising with them.

Just make peace with them and get on your bed, because it's all you have left. Don't make them take defensive action against you.

OMG Tafkats! How DARE you address a comment from Amaris unless DIRECTLY spoken to.

Don't you know we have royalty on this board?

You really are shit at reading. The comment was directed at you, and @tafkats clearly thought it was directed at all moderates in general.

Seriously, either get better at reading, or hold your tongue until the concept clarifies in your head before you respond. You're like the Oldfella of liberals.

At this point, yes, absolutely.

But that ignores the fact that's been the Palestinians objectives since day one, and when that appears to be on capable of change it often breaks out into violence between Arabs because someone is willing to look at peace. See Black September, and the Hamas-Fatah civil war.

Both sides feel justified, and there are numerous bad actors on both sides.

Does Israel have a right to exist? Yes or no?

Amaris you really are shit at thinking. Just my humble opinion of course.

Or maybe dumbass there's a long history on this board of people being able to respond to whoever the hell they like.

Personally, I thought it was one of the stupidest things I've seen on this board, so I didn't bother.

They damn well have the ability to exist, as they stand ready to demonstrate 24/7.

@tafkats was free to respond, I just corrected the idea that I was referring to all moderates, and not you. You're still catching up to that, aren't you? Because you still think I told him he couldn't respond to me with his own take. Your mouth is doing mileage your brain hasn't yet logged.

Imagine if following a crippling major war the UN declared it was going to transport a few million Russians into Texas and partition the land there between Americans and Soviets without asking or caring what the US thought.

How would that go down?

Would you see armed resistance to the new sovereign state?

The Arabs rejected the plan because foreign powers were partitioning their own homeland between themselves and war refugees they already had ongoing conflicts with. We, the Brits, quite simply took that land from them having promised to vacate following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and gave it to their enemies. No amount of sanction from the League of Nations or later the UN is ever going to make that any more acceptable to the Palestinians who still see Israel as being an occupation of their land.

Sure, that's clearly the Palestinian point of view.

But, of course, it's a bad example, because the real response would be to drop a million Native Americans into Texas, right? A bit of a different take - though I agree that Texans would likely still be up in arms if done against their will.

And, if that is your point of view, it's pretty explicit that to you Israel doesn't have the right to exist. After all, they have no legitimacy in that particular narrative.

So what do we do with 8 million Israelis?

As I said above, there's no good answer. Both sides have valid claims. The only thing you can do is get them to agree to co-exist.

But here's yet another Palestinian polity that refuses to acknowledge Israel's right to existence, and never, ever has.

If you don't get that, you never get a peaceful resolution.

And it appears that Israel is no longer willing to accept co-existence with a state that doesn't believe it has a right to exist.

Every goddamn border on every G-ddamn map that's ever been drawn has been drawn in blood. Worth remembering when arguing over which state has a right to exist.

No one can right the mistakes made by a previous generation but we can't overlook that we are seeing the consequence of some very poor decision making by what was still seeing itself as the British Empire at the time.

We partitioned India, we partitioned Ireland, we partitioned Palestine.

In each case not only did we rather arbitrarily and high handedly define the geopolitical landscape for a people whose culture we had little or no real understanding of but in each case we placed rival religious groups in positions of direct conflict with each other then spent decades trying to wash our hands of any responsibility for the bloodshed.

I'm not sure you can really make a determination on whether a particular nation state has a "right" to exist. How are those rights codified? Who has the moral authority to arbitrate?

What we do know is that the current situation has it's roots in forcible external interference which was blind to the implications of assuming that moral authority.

Someone had to make a decision how best to settle the refugee Jewish populations but reneging on a deal made with an ally who had voluntarily shed blood on our behalf in order to settle their own land with their arch rivals without their consent was only ever going to lead to violence.

I agree completely, though ultimately that's irrelevant to the question of right and wrong by the polities that exist there now.

Wasn't that the purpose of the UN in the first place? Doesn't every nation have the right to self-determination, sovereignty, and self-defense per the UN charter?

If that has no meaning, then the precept of international law certainly doesn't. Granted, the UN isn't a world government and doesn't have ultimate authority, but it is supposed to have some level of moral authority.

Again, agreed, but again, ultimately irrelevant when it comes to resolving the issue.

The only way to a peaceful resolution is for both sides to agree the other has the right to exist, no?

If that doesn't happen, then it's simple survival of the fittest, and there's bound to be ever-increasing atrocities along the way.

Unfortunately, I tend to think that's the eventual answer.

Both sides are right. But without being willing to agree to a long term two state solution, which Palestine hasn't and Israel is not honoring, both sides are also wrong.

It is worth remembering that the majority of people in the region, regardless of if they are Palestinian or Israeli, are just hapless fucks who have to suffer while extremists on both sides engage in violence.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/countrie...-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/

war/violence does suck, no doubt about it.

Context matters. Israel helped fund an offshot of the Muslim Brotherhood, who at the time were explicitly non-violent. This started in 1973, 14 years before Hamas, 18 years before the founding of its militant wing the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. This was channeled through the quadriplegic cleric Ahemd Yassin, who was believed at the time to be a moderate dedicated to co-existence. The PLO were outraged and called Yassin a collaborator with the Israelis. In time those two positions would reverse.

"Israel's military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the [2008-9 Operation Cast Lead]."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/

So they helped fund charitable relief for Palestinians and did so explicitly by giving to a Muslim religious organization. And of course, the 'now regards as a hotbed of militancy' was 35 years later in 2008.

So in the actual context of Israeli history, the lament 'we helped create Hamas' is not that they helped create violence or a political pawn, but they helped the Palestinian people, and it was weaponized against Israel.

As usual, the Intercept is full of shit. It's the Breitbart of the far left.

Something that I suspected, confirmed by the always accurate *ahem* Wikipedia: there were a lot of proposals for a Jewish homeland before the modern state of Israel was established. One of the interesting points in the article that I knew nothing about is that it seems there was a proposal from Arab leaders in the early 20th century to establish autonomous Jewish territories by the Hashemite kings of Transjordan, but it got scuppered when the League of Nations started carving up the area into "Mandates." The article is well worth a read.

It's worth noting, however, that fucking around in the internal politics of countries can wind up biting one in the ass. The US helped fund various groups fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then basically abandoned them after the Soviet Union left, which laid the groundwork for Bin Ladin to do his fuckery, regardless of if the CIA ever directly gave him money and weapons.

You want to get a little more recent? Look at the Arab Spring. Western nations supported the toppling of various regimes in the Middle East, and with the exception of Tunisa, I've not seen any reports of dramatic improvements in those nations. In the case of Libya, it apparently now has open slave markets, which as bad as Qaddafyi might have been, isn't something that I heard about happening while he was in power.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021...-rise-buildings-as-gaza-marks-deadly-eid-live

Do you actually read peoples posts in the thread?