Facing a soaring death toll from Israel's renewed offensive in southern Gaza, the Biden administration is trying to pressure its ally to minimize civilian deaths while stopping well short of the kind of measures that might force it to listen, such as threatening to restrict military aid.
The land immediately outside Gaza has been recognized as Israel proper since the 40s, and it has never been included as part of any proposal for a Palestinian state.
So, unless your actual aim is the complete eradication of Israel entirely, there’s no real grounds for criticism there. And if your aim is indeed the forced elimination of all Israelis, don’t bother pretending to care about peace.
Palestinians gave up on the land inside Israel’s 1949 borders, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t ethnically cleansed as part of Israel’s colonial project. See: The Nakba. Politically pursuing them is impossible, but that doesn’t mean the people who “settled” them aren’t complicit in Israel’s genocide.
I don’t think any of the people involved in the Nakba are alive anymore, beyond perhaps a few dinosaurs in nursing homes.
I’ll be the first to admit that the founding of Israel was a disastrously messy process that, frankly, probably shouldn’t have happened, and certainly shouldn’t have happened the way it did. But the fact of the matter is that it happened, Israel is here now, and there are generations of Israelis that have known no other home (most of whom are not of European heritage, it should be said).
I’d agree that there were very real historical wrongs that need to be accounted for, but that won’t happen with the Israeli right dreaming of eliminating all Palestinians or Palestinians hoping to eliminate all Jews and destroy Israel. A random Israeli civilian living near Gaza is no more responsible for the Nakba than a random American today is for the ethnic cleaning of the Americas, and there is absolutely no pretense for random violence against them (just as there is zero pretense for West Bank settler violence against Palestinians).
Yet you’re using arbitrary lines drawn after WW2…
And you’re referring to land seizures that happened even earlier, so I’m not really sure what your point is.
So I already know where this is going, so let me save some time and skip ahead:
I’m sorry, but the Bible (old testament, Torah, whatever you want to call it) isn’t an accurate historical record. And even if it was, it explains exactly how the Jews got their land, doesn’t it? How come Canaanites haven’t ever existed since then? Huh. But I guess that’s different somehow?
The Old Testament is chock full of genocide, whether it be through the Israelites (and the magic box they liked to carry) themselves commiting it in god’s name, someone claiming that god spoke to them and commanded them to commit genocide, or even just god zapping entire cities himself. But Sodom and Gomorrah “deserved it” right? But not Lot’s daughters that literally fuck their dad (shortly after their dad offered them up to be raped by the people of Sodom). That shit is A-OK.
Are these also accurate historical records then? If so, then it seems like, even by your own metric, Israel took that land from other people.
But regardless, again, the Bible (old testament, Torah, whatever you want to call it) is not history.
I genuinely have no idea why you’re talking about the Bible, and I’ve been a pretty stringent atheist for most of my life. I agree it’s a pretty poor moral guide and an unreliable source for history, but I’m not sure how that’s at all relevant.
So er, I’m just gonna bow out of whatever this conversation was meant to be, because I don’t know what you’re trying to say. Cheers I guess.
Because these conversations always go back to that. We can go back and forth about who lived where, and when, and it will always lead back to “the Bible says that land is theirs.” Because when you get down to it, that’s the only claim they really have. And even if you did want to go back that far, they still took that land from someone else.
If that’s not where it was going, then there’s no valid argument whatsoever that Israelis were there first. It’s just not true.
I don’t give a shit about the Bible, but I would say that a bunch of Jews legally bought a bunch of land in the late Ottoman period, a lot more legally immigrated during the British mandate after WW1 (which was wrong, I’d say; the land had been promised to the Hashemites before Sykes-Picot to create a unified Arab state in exchange for Arab support against the Ottomans, but the British and French reneged), then ethnic tensions exploded as everyone did a lot of violence to everyone. In 1947, a UN partition plan was proposed to create two states; the Jews accepted, the Arabs didn’t, and war broke out. Once fighting had ended and the first lines were drawn, we have a state of Israel and the mess has properly begun.
None of this involves the Bible.
Yet the effects continue to this day, in the form of an overpopulated Gaza and 6 million Palestinian exiles.
No, because the Nakba continued. People continued to be expelled from their lands after 1949. It’s like someone moving to live on ancestral Native land that was taken three decades ago. I’m not saying all of them are criminals, but anyone who wasn’t born there is the same as West Bank settlers.
Well, 70% of Israelis were born there, and most immigrant Jews go to firmly Jewish lands, so the odds of any random Israeli being a foreigner who came to settle traditionally Arab lands is quite small, though they do exist of course, and are rather shitty.
Regardless, the attacks on October 7th were concentrated on the land immediately surrounding Gaza, which has been firmly Jewish since the 40s. No Palestinian peace plan has ever claimed them. So even if you accept that direct violence is acceptable against people explicitly displacing Arabs, that describes essentially no victims of the attacks.
Are these stats for people in the attack’s range or Israelis in general? I’m talking about the former.
Almost all of Israel is traditionally Arab land.
Also in the first place we’re talking about foreign citizens (except for ones who were born there and inherited citizenship from their parents), who while not necessarily deserved to die are 100% not innocent.
Ah yes, since the 40’s. That makes it legitimate and completely justified. My bad.
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