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

If having a Jewish homeland requires the consent of people who hate Jews, there isn't going to be a Jewish homeland.

You seem to be approaching this from a standpoint of "there must be absolute moral purity, or the result cannot be good." Colonialism is evil, therefore anything that stems from it is illegitimate.

But because of British and U.N. colonialism, there is a modern liberal democracy in a region that's otherwise full of brutal, dictatorial, violently misogynist theocracies. That does not become a bad thing simply because its origins are impure.

Apartheid states are not liberal democracies.

All right, I'll ask you, then. What should Israel's borders be? And what could it do to satisfy you? Concretely, not just "something else."

Modern democracy does not mean good. I would not call a state that segregates it's people and promotes religious superiority and runs on a good deal of it's voters looking for the killing of a group of their citizens liberal. That is a right wing religious conservative tyranical democracy. Democracy does not imply good when you put humans in the mix.

Can anyone answer these questions?

1) What should Israel's borders be?

2) What would Israel need to do in order for you to not condemn it?

This is a different issue than what you were claiming with them being a liberal democracy.

This is humans. All the countries did this shit. It is still happening in the middle east, and I am going to say it is because the christian powers have always wanted instability in the region since the crusades.

As for what should happen with Isreal, I am of a sort of naturalist view. They should be left alone to solve their problems which will eventually lead to the wiping out of one side. Then there will be no more of the other side and stability will come around. The mistake has been made, there is no real going back, and it will take generations of horrible police opression to ever come to peace.

As much as I hate what Isreal is doing, it is what every other modern nation did in the past. You cannot have a dual state full of terrorists on both sides blowing up the citizenry because of hate. One side has to die or be expelled. then you can establish borders and have the healing (AKA death of the generations who fought the wars) begin. Every time Isreal rips this wound open it gets infected again.

Sorry to those who do not like it, but it seems Isreal has won. I do not think the palestinians would leave willingly, but I would open up a path for them.

I think I answered #1 while you were typing. As for number 2 we should condemn what they are doing for the future of the world and progress of the human race, but There are tons of actions our countries should be condemned for in their establishment and actions over time. Why should isreal be any different? The Isrealis won. Just like the US won over the native americans. Just like all the other bullshit. Islam nor arabic people are not being wiped out by Isreal winning over the palestinians.

Stop stealing land.

That is not something they did 30 or 40 years ago. It's something they continue to do more of almost every day. If they stop it will go a long way to preventing flare ups like this.

Borders etc. need to be worked out, but at this stage they've made the two state solution unworkable. So something creative is called for.

I agree. That it helps Netanyahu is a side-benefit that he will gladly take advantage of, but it's not the cause.

Of course I understand the difference, the problem is the seeming disparity between your assertions as to whether the past is pertinent to the future. To claim the only way forward is a two state solution is to look forward without being informed by the past. No such solution can be a possibility whilst both sides see it as an unjustified compromise of their rights.

It might be workable, but only the involved parties can determine the feasibility of that for themselves.

The thrust of my position is that short of taking sides in an outright war of extermination any intervention we take externally is destined to escalate rather than de escalate the situation. Therefore on that point we do agree. Passively watching them murder each other is horrific but possibly unavoidable for the immediate future.

Wars, no matter how bitter, do eventually reach conclusions and settlements when the combatants realise their interests are better served by compromise. When those decisions are reached by others on their behalf they have no ownership of their own fates and inevitably resent and chafe against the imposition.

Should the UN then broker a deal it must be on those terms, not by a proxy for you or I attempting to tell Israelis and Palestinians what the future should look like.

Do you honestly think that if Israel freezes its settlements exactly where they are now, Hamas will stop trying to kill Israelis?

And will that cause you to no longer consider them an "apatheid state"?

I think that that would be a good start, and would make their claims to be acting in "self-defense" somewhat less ridiculous.
It bears repeating that Hamas was not trying to kill Israelis until last week - when evictions of families and annexation of land in East Jerusalem precipitated this immediate crisis.

Obviously I don't have a full solution at hand to the entire quagmire.

And this is why you check the social media of your freelancers. This guy works for CNN - for the moment.



Then there's this nice senior Palestinian police officer that posted 'We need Hitler'.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/pales...ed-for-incitement-praised-hitler-on-facebook/

And half a dozen posts that Hitler was right to kill the Jews.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/tweeting-hitler-408845

Thats a minute search. This doesn't exonerate Jewish leaders who dehumanize Palestinians, but quoting just one side of this is disingenuous.

Adeel Raja got fired from CNN shortly after he posted that shit from what I understand.

And rightly so.

Everyone who has been criticizing Israel in this thread has also said that both sides are in the wrong. There are extremely shitty, bigotted people on both sides (who I would hope are outnumbered by more reasonable centrists). Both sides are stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and are both to blame for not breaking that cycle (regardless of how you measure who started it).

It's just that one side is backed by it's own military and can inflict mass damage exponentially worse than the other side (as well as backing from the US and it's own set of nukes). Which is exactly what we are seeing.

Both sides suck. Both sides need to fix it. Both sides need to tell extremists on their side to fuck off, and let more reasonable minds sort it out. But one side has the choice whether to respond in kind or to respond in an overwhelmingly disproportionate manner.

Probably what needs to happen (and what should have been done back in 1947) is that some of that area - what is currently Israel, parts of Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria - needs to be "rounded off" into a free nation under international control. So no "Israeli" government, no Hamas or PLO or whatever. Just take a chunk of the area, declare it free and open, and anyone who wants to live there can live there. No more bulldozing settlements, no more land grabs, no more safe havens for launching rockets at people you don't like, and so forth. The actual governance and maintaining order and security would be a sticky wicket, but no worse than other places that have been calmed down. If we could get 1 or 2 generations raised in that environment the problems would largely disappear.

No. What needed to happen back in 1947 was for the US and UK to mind their own business. They did not need to, nor have the authority to disburse a population and unilaterally decide "these" people get to live here and now own this piece of lnand.

I think we all agree with that sentiment, but time travel is not a practical solution to this problem.

So occupy it ourselves?

If by "ourselves" you mean some kind of international force, like a UN one, then yes.

Then the entire world needs some kind of international force, like a UN one.

Wait, I thought playing World Police was bad . . .

When one nation does it, yes.

In that case, I give you this: https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_ba...ad&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

This particular TED talk is from several years ago now but I think the idea is still a good one.

Horrible idea. The security forces would be branded as occupiers and become targets for every fringe group in the desert. And trying to broker peace deals will never work so long as both sides continue to not want it. The best thing for the U.N and everyone else to do is stay out of it and let the two sides handle their own affairs. If they kill each other, so be it.

It's worth noting that someone did a computer simulation to study situations like these, where you have two parties hostile to one another. The idea is to figure out what strategy would solve the problem, and what one would lead to genocide. Basically, all the strategies, except for one (maybe two, I'll get to that in a moment) wound up leading to genocide.

The strategy that worked was one where one of the antagonists basically said, "Fuck it, I'm going to be nice this time." That was enough to break the path that led to genocide. I'm oversimplifying here, but you get the general idea. Simulations aren't necessarily accurate, but they can point to the way in many cases. What either side needs, in the case of Palestine and Israel, is for someone to be a charismatic leader, and promote the ideas of MLK amongst the population. Not an easy sell, I'll be the first to admit.

If you want more details, this episode of RadioLab has many of them. They did an earlier episode on the subject (where part of this one is excerpted from) but I can't find it in a quick search, and it goes into the concept in greater depth, IIRC.