Strange goings on about the pro-Palestinian march on Saturday. The right wing blogs are frothing at the mouth, as its in the Remembrance w/e. The obvious solution is to ban it. But, err. Pause for thought.
Strange goings on about the pro-Palestinian march on Saturday. The right wing blogs are frothing at the mouth, as its in the Remembrance w/e. The obvious solution is to ban it. But, err. Pause for thought.
It's strange, the argument against it seems to be that it's "disrespectful". Isn't that another way of saying it will hurt some people's feelings, and isn't that what we're constantly told shouldn't be enough to ban something?
Israel Palestine has only been an intractable conflict since 1947. That's only a few years before my father was born. He's not a young man anymore, but it wasn't "ages and ages ago."
These aren't "eternal, unending" conflicts. Jewish folks and Muslim folks have mostly gotten along in the middle east over the centuries, far better than Jewish folks and Christian folks in western Europe.
If that was a response to my post, I wasn't claiming that it was an "eternal, unending" conflict, merely that because of the way the "sides" are drawn they can serve as signifiers for other things.
Israel Palestine has only been an intractable conflict since 1947. That's only a few years before my father was born. He's not a young man anymore, but it wasn't "ages and ages ago."
These aren't "eternal, unending" conflicts. Jewish folks and Muslim folks have mostly gotten along in the middle east over the centuries, far better than Jewish folks and Christian folks in western Europe.
If that was a response to my post, I wasn't claiming that it was an "eternal, unending" conflict, merely that because of the way the "sides" are drawn they can serve as signifiers for other things.
It wasn't you, it was a line from another post about intractable conflict.
Reading again today, I think I overreacted.
I had a class in undergrad on middle east politics and we got kind of grilled on understanding the modern, secular causes of the struggle, how the way that people map over other concerns actually obscures what's going on. I think it's important to keep track of all the motives and cultural lenses people apply, but I think sometimes it also gets in the way. And I think sometimes these lenses get weaponized, which is common in politics.
There's something especially repugnant about having your death be considered profane, as if you're just an acceptable loss in someone else's grand scheme, doubly so if it's not one you signed up for.
Isn't there an element of revenge? How you compute that in terms of deaths, no idea. But the idea of destroying Hamas is bizarre, they are giving it life.
Given this, I think Netanyahu wants Gaza to be re occupied by Israel. Also, given the evacuation orders and them saying they have split Gaza into northern and southern halves, I suspect they will want to keep the northern half as a non residential military buffer zone occupied by Israeli troops. But that is speculation.
There's something especially repugnant about having your death be considered profane, as if you're just an acceptable loss in someone else's grand scheme, doubly so if it's not one you signed up for.
Hence the quote that's being doing the rounds from MASH -
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Um, sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell, but war is chock full of them – little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
Israel Palestine has only been an intractable conflict since 1947. That's only a few years before my father was born. He's not a young man anymore, but it wasn't "ages and ages ago."
These aren't "eternal, unending" conflicts. Jewish folks and Muslim folks have mostly gotten along in the middle east over the centuries, far better than Jewish folks and Christian folks in western Europe.
It does strike me as rather unfair that Europeans basically shoved their own guilt into the middle east and now we insist that this is some kind of mystical "clash of civilizations" instead of a simple turf war where one group took a whole bunch of land from another. You can't displace that many people and expect peace.
It frustrates me that because organized religions are ancient, we assume that any conflict that happens to fall along religious lines must similarly be ancient. Honestly, I think it's less about Judaism per se and more about the fact that Israel has become America's fortress in the middle east. Imperialism is what everyone resents, not piety. Though hiding imperialism under a facade of piety is, of course, a Christian tradition that's as old as the nation state (which itself isn't 1000 years old, I think.)
You don't need to study 1000 years of history to understand the modern middle east. A mere hundred years will do.
[yeah...50 is understating it, I forget my own age here]
To understand the modern Israel/Palestine conflict I think requires going back at least as far as the Aliyah of 1882, which I believe is considered the birth of modern Zionism.
I don't think he particularly wants to kill lots of people. I think he just doesn't care much if he does.
Keep in mind also that voices have been talking about unseating Netanyahu "when the war is over." He has every good reason to keep the "war" going indefinitely.
On the thing about the history of the conflict: this isn't accurate.
There was the 1929 Hebron massacre, before that the pogrom following the Peasants Revolt in 1834, before that the 1517 pogrom, before that the crusades. And that's glossing over a lot.
It might be true that not all of these were crudely "Arabs verses Jews"* but it isn't true to claim that the violence between communities around Jerusalem only go back 100 years.
That scrap of stony ground has been a site of conflict for *over 1000 years*. The only way one could say that this dates back to 1947 is because of the hardening sense of the "nation state" in the early 20th century. Before that Jerusalem was a part of empires, before that a keenly fought over prize for various communities and their bloody leaders (pun intended) - usually with the beleaguered Jews at the wrong end of it.
Jews *did not* only return to Jerusalem in the twentieth century after the horrors of the Holocaust. Jews were expelled by law from England in 1290 (after being regularly massacred such as in 1190), were pushed around and murdered in much of Europe for hundreds of years and wandered around trying to find safety including by going to Jerusalem.
If this isn't a history of centuries of "eternal unending" conflict, I don't know what is. The only difference today is that the Jews in Israel have an upper hand.
--
Which isn't to say that the Palestinians have no history and no valid point, of course. But in my view refusing to see how antisemitism across the centuries got to 1947 is myopic.
* Which makes no sense anyway, of course, for genetic reasons if nothing else
There have been periods of conflict in the past, but there have also been long periods of peaceful coexistence. The primary impediment to the latter is Israeli insistence that the only permissible state in Eretz Israel is a Jewish-majority, ethno-sectarian Zionist one. And that (both the numbers to make it happen and the drive to insist on maintaining it) have their roots firmly in the Shoah.
There have been periods of conflict in the past, but there have also been long periods of peaceful coexistence. The primary impediment to the latter is Israeli insistence that the only permissible state in Eretz Israel is a Jewish-majority, ethno-sectarian Zionist one. And that (both the numbers to make it happen and the drive to insist on maintaining it) have their roots firmly in the Shoah.
Zionist migration began in earnest around 1900. In the next decades tens of thousands had fled persecution in Russia to Jerusalem. There were nearly 180,000 Jews already there in 1930 and 500,000 in 1940.
I don't know where you are getting the "long periods of coexistence" in the region around Jerusalem. In fact it was quite the reverse, with regular pogroms going back centuries and enforced discrimination under the Ottoman rule.
At best the Jews have been *tolerated* around Jerusalem. Between the massacres.
Israel Palestine has only been an intractable conflict since 1947. That's only a few years before my father was born. He's not a young man anymore, but it wasn't "ages and ages ago."
These aren't "eternal, unending" conflicts. Jewish folks and Muslim folks have mostly gotten along in the middle east over the centuries, far better than Jewish folks and Christian folks in western Europe.
It does strike me as rather unfair that Europeans basically shoved their own guilt into the middle east and now we insist that this is some kind of mystical "clash of civilizations" instead of a simple turf war where one group took a whole bunch of land from another. You can't displace that many people and expect peace.
It frustrates me that because organized religions are ancient, we assume that any conflict that happens to fall along religious lines must similarly be ancient. Honestly, I think it's less about Judaism per se and more about the fact that Israel has become America's fortress in the middle east. Imperialism is what everyone resents, not piety. Though hiding imperialism under a facade of piety is, of course, a Christian tradition that's as old as the nation state (which itself isn't 1000 years old, I think.)
You don't need to study 1000 years of history to understand the modern middle east. A mere hundred years will do.
[yeah...50 is understating it, I forget my own age here]
To understand the modern Israel/Palestine conflict I think requires going back at least as far as the Aliyah of 1882, which I believe is considered the birth of modern Zionism.
Since I don't know as much about that directly, that's a really interesting point. If Zionism is understood as the ideological driver of the conflict...yeah. I can see that.
Though that also assumes the frame that ideologies drive conflict, rather than material realities. This is a war over Zionism, in that frame.
And that's neat in a horrifying way because I think that's the take that scares people. Zionism, placed as the ultimate in this conflict, makes it all about Israel's existence as a nation state, and that is - I think - what makes the stakes for some people literally existential. It's Zionists who see Palestinians as a tragic side effect of their own need for safety versus Palestinians who don't understand why these lunatics keep engaging in real estate theft and acting like it's their entitlement.
It's weird to me, I have very little sympathy with Zionism, between an (admittedly minority) number of Jewish friends who feel alienated by their co-religionists, and my polisci sensibility that saying "Israel is just another bloody nation state" sometimes gets conflated with antisemitism. This of course assuming that all nation states are bloody. It goes with being a nation state. Nothing against Jewish folks beyond a head-scratching "why the fuck do you want to get into this game?"
But I know a lot of Jewish people who feel very earnestly that having a nation state makes them safer. And I have also watched people carelessly meander in the space between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
And that gives me just enough pause to think that maybe I should be careful about how vituperative I get about Israel's role in this mess.
So much of politics depends on how you frame it.
And it's worse when frame-selection seems intentional, as if "I shall decide to favor this ideology because I profit by it," which is one working definition for corruption.
There have been periods of conflict in the past, but there have also been long periods of peaceful coexistence. The primary impediment to the latter is Israeli insistence that the only permissible state in Eretz Israel is a Jewish-majority, ethno-sectarian Zionist one. And that (both the numbers to make it happen and the drive to insist on maintaining it) have their roots firmly in the Shoah.
Zionist migration began in earnest around 1900. In the next decades tens of thousands had fled persecution in Russia to Jerusalem. There were nearly 180,000 Jews already there in 1930 and 500,000 in 1940.
I don't know where you are getting the "long periods of coexistence" in the region around Jerusalem. In fact it was quite the reverse, with regular pogroms going back centuries and enforced discrimination under the Ottoman rule.
At best the Jews have been *tolerated* around Jerusalem. Between the massacres.
That's a point, granted. I did gloss over some details in thinking that Muslims and Jews have - historically - gotten along better than Jews and Christians. Though, for fear of feeling like I'm digging my fingers like Thomas into someone else's bloody wound to assuage my skepticism, I'll probe at this a bit. Just had a first aid lesson the other day where it was discussed the pain involved in packing a wound to stop bleeding, and the metaphor feels a little too apt.
It is ironic that it's Arabic Muslims who get displaced in England's apology for European Christians' horrifying behavior.
Also, I think that it depends on how broadly you define "the region around Jerusalem." If you're thinking "Iran to Israel/Palestine," which is to me the scope of the middle east, there have been long periods of tolerance. A friend once reminded me that Muslims have an explicit rule in their own religion that Christians and Jews are considered "people of the book" and generally considered not conversion-fodder. I'll admit that Muslims have failed at this, but it's there. It also strikes me, poli-sci wise, to say that it is always a bad idea to yoke a religious or ethnic identity to a nation state. It always gets rotten, regardless of which ethnic or religious group tries it.
On another level, I have friends who are Armenian. Ever heard of that genocide? I have hung out with youth who had to run for their lives out of the Congo because of the bloodiest and most-ignored war of the 1990s. I have, in my own neighborhood, heard from Assyrians who were desperate for a school to preserve their culture, because it was dying out partly thanks to the second Persian Gulf War. I grew up hearing about Rwanda and Bosnia, and studied the latter a little more closely in undergrad because I want to understand why the fuck people are like this.
If you look at history, war is common, and ethnic persecution is common. What has happened to Jewish people has happened to many ethnic groups. Being protestant, I have ancestors who were threatened or burned at the stake because they had the wrong ideas. I don't think I have any right to use that for my own aggrandizement, but it's there.
As a humanist, and as a Christian, I am very uncomfortable saying that "well, our persecution history makes us special and gives us privileges when it comes to abusing other ethnic groups." As if the senseless murder of a Jewish person is somehow more heinous than the murder of a Palestinian person. To me, as a Christian, human is a human. One is too many. One thousand is way too many. Rape and Murder are Wrong no matter who the victim is or the perpetrator are. I also heard arguments along the lines of "well, Jewish lives are worth more." And that ain't right, to me. It's racist to consider people only as if they're sub-sets of an ethnic group rather than...you know, humans. Humanist, go figure.
I'm a little uneasy when I hear "but our ancestors were killed, so it's more acceptable for us to kill other people so we can play the same bloody game that your religion gets shamed for." I may bring this up if a Jewish person ever wants to call me a monster for being a Christian. What my nastier forebears were doing doesn't look that different than what Israel is doing now. "This land is mine, for my safety and not for yours, so git."
Is it ok for victims of oppression to use that oppression to justify their oppression of others?
And all of this is really uncomfortable, and I think it's what makes this sub-board hard. It seems like it's simply impossible to highlight one party's suffering without being accused of diminishing the other's. Honestly, I hate it, even if I feel compelled to keep trying to understand it.
And does any of this make me legitimately antisemitic? I'm just generally disgusted.
I don't think, personally, that there is any other religio-social group who has been so regularly murdered and abused over the centuries. To the extent of having to repeatedly flee for their lives. Generation after generation.
Except perhaps the Romani.
Which isn't to excuse - but to understand.
One horrific fact of the Holocaust was that it *wasn't* unique. It wasn't. It was the culmination of thousands of years of hatred.
I don't think, personally, that there is any other religio-social group who has been so regularly murdered and abused over the centuries. To the extent of having to repeatedly flee for their lives. Generation after generation.
Except perhaps the Romani.
Which isn't to excuse - but to understand.
One horrific fact of the Holocaust was that it *wasn't* unique. It wasn't. It was the culmination of thousands of years of hatred.
I think there are lots of religio-social groups (what a modern expression!) that have spent centuries fleeing from white people, or being corralled into reservations that are basically ghettos. Aboriginal groups around the world have been vanishing for centuries. Just most of them don't have the same ability to...whatever it is that Jewish people do that we don't have the same empathy for the Navajo, or the Ainu, or any number of First Nations people who may consider themselves deserving of compensation, at least.
That said, I definitely agree that the Holocaust wasn't unique, or even unusual. Also, while I feel it logically necessary, it is viscerally revolting to try to compare different incidents of ethnic cleansing as if some are more grievous than others because of the identity of the victims or perpetrators. It's the same nexus of fascinating and disgusting.
I appreciate, deeply, the distinction between "excuse" and "understand." I can understand. Hell, I have had some fairly serious talks with Jewish friends about it. I get it. And I get that it's a weird privilege that my personal ethnic heritage is dissolved into the broth of America. It's privilege that I live in a very secure nation state (as I've tried to explain, with mixed results - to some pro-Palestinian friends.)
But I don't know if understanding goes as far as excuse, let alone justification. And people are dying for this in tens of thousands, most of whom didn't ask for it.
It can be useful to remember that Hitler's regime was not merely eager to persecute Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, church leaders, Boy Scout leaders, and others. The gypsies in particular were hit hard, and no one provided a homeland for them after the war.
It can be useful to remember that Hitler's regime was not merely eager to persecute Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, church leaders, Boy Scout leaders, and others. The gypsies in particular were hit hard, and no one provided a homeland for them after the war.
Are you straying into the territory of "Black lives matter. Nah, all lives matter."
It can be useful to remember that Hitler's regime was not merely eager to persecute Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, church leaders, Boy Scout leaders, and others. The gypsies in particular were hit hard, and no one provided a homeland for them after the war.
Gay people were marched straight from the camps to prison in many cases.
Roma are still treated abominably in much of Europe, and anti-ziganism seems to be a perfectly acceptable prejudice in much of the UK.
The biggest omission from your list, I think, is disabled people, who were murdered with impunity long before the gas chambers were built. Autistic people today still live under the shadow of the decisions Asperger made about who was worthy of life and who not, something our own systems are not as far from as they should be, as we saw in 2020 with blanket issuing of DNRs for autistic people without their knowledge or consent.
It can be useful to remember that Hitler's regime was not merely eager to persecute Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, church leaders, Boy Scout leaders, and others. The gypsies in particular were hit hard, and no one provided a homeland for them after the war.
Are you straying into the territory of "Black lives matter. Nah, all lives matter."
I'm not HarryCH, but I rather see him as saying that the Nazis were even more horrible than we are giving them credit for. They were murderously horrible to queer people, the Roma, and many other people.
It can be useful to remember that Hitler's regime was not merely eager to persecute Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, church leaders, Boy Scout leaders, and others. The gypsies in particular were hit hard, and no one provided a homeland for them after the war.
Are you straying into the territory of "Black lives matter. Nah, all lives matter."
I think it'd be interesting to examine why that analogy does or does not make sense. Care to explain?
I don't think, personally, that there is any other religio-social group who has been so regularly murdered and abused over the centuries. To the extent of having to repeatedly flee for their lives. Generation after generation.
Except perhaps the Romani.
Which isn't to excuse - but to understand.
One horrific fact of the Holocaust was that it *wasn't* unique. It wasn't. It was the culmination of thousands of years of hatred.
I think there are lots of religio-social groups (what a modern expression!) that have spent centuries fleeing from white people, or being corralled into reservations that are basically ghettos. Aboriginal groups around the world have been vanishing for centuries. Just most of them don't have the same ability to...whatever it is that Jewish people do that we don't have the same empathy for the Navajo, or the Ainu, or any number of First Nations people who may consider themselves deserving of compensation, at least.
I suppose my reflection is more to do with what happens when you give an ethnic group who have repeatedly been kicked around - for thousands of years - a notion of nation and security. Of course they primarily want security and of course they are constantly on the lookout for people who want to destroy them. The idea of "never again" looms large in the mind when you know that you've come from a long line of people who have been abused and murdered.
It's not really about empathy, at least that's not what I was highlighting.
I don't know what would happen if the ethnic Karen tribe from Mynmar or the Uighur or any of the other abused groups got given a country of their own.
Mostly I suspect those groups with a long history of being abused would behave in very similar ways.
All I'm saying is that this kind of reaction was almost inevitable given the history of antisemitism.
I did not mean to suggest that one life is more or less valuable than another. However, the Holocaust was not single-mindedly directed against Jews. Between a quarter and a half of all European Roma were killed.
I believe I have encountered people who questioned the claim that WWII was not as bad as WWI; they pointed to the Holocaust, which of course was not part of the war. (The US and Britain did not join the war because Hitler persecuted Jews; they were busily turning away Jewish refugees. It may soon be the case that Palestinian refugees will be turned away.)
It can be useful to remember that Hitler's regime was not merely eager to persecute Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, church leaders, Boy Scout leaders, and others. The gypsies in particular were hit hard, and no one provided a homeland for them after the war.
Are you straying into the territory of "Black lives matter. Nah, all lives matter."
I think it'd be interesting to examine why that analogy does or does not make sense. Care to explain?
Nobody is denying that other minorities were also persecuted by the Nazis, however as this is a discussion specifically about the current conflict maybe introducing other victims of Nazi persecution can have the unintended effect of diluting its impact on the Jewish psyche, and of diluting its awfulness. Rather in the way that "All lives matter" is designed to avert attention from the awfulness of the instances police brutality against black people.
It can be useful to remember that Hitler's regime was not merely eager to persecute Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, church leaders, Boy Scout leaders, and others. The gypsies in particular were hit hard, and no one provided a homeland for them after the war.
Are you straying into the territory of "Black lives matter. Nah, all lives matter."
I think it'd be interesting to examine why that analogy does or does not make sense. Care to explain?
Nobody is denying that other minorities were also persecuted by the Nazis, however as this is a discussion specifically about the current conflict maybe introducing other victims of Nazi persecution can have the unintended effect of diluting its impact on the Jewish psyche, and of diluting its awfulness. Rather in the way that "All lives matter" is designed to avert attention from the awfulness of the instances police brutality against black people.
Except that framing it in that fashion ends up erasing the present and very real suffering of the Palestinian people. And I think that erasure is why most contemporary Black Lives Matter activists seem to support Palestine. Source.
How many Palestinians have been killed so far? Are we counting? How much suffering has been caused by Israel's siege? How many people have been killed on the west bank by settlers, and how many of those cases have been resolved? Is it antisemitic for me to ask those questions as if they carry importance?
Also, at present, Israel has the backing of the US military and billions of dollars of military hardware, without question. If African Americans had half that kind of firepower (or resource allocation) behind them, then I think their situation would be more comparable. But that is evidently not the case.
To twist your question around, is the suffering of historical Jews being used to erase the suffering of present Palestinians? Are Palestinian lives and livelihoods being sacrificed to assuage an historical sin that they, being less than a century old, had nothing to do with?
Well no. I don't think anyone can deny the suffering of the Palestinians. As I said many posts ago now,
I believe that there will only be a long term solution now when there are no Gazans in Gaza
. I thought they'd be pushed into Egypt but it now looks more likely they'll go to Cyprus then.. who knows where.
I agree that this is not going to be the end of the resentment, nor likely the terrorism.
But I don't think it is about "erasing" that pain, otherwise Israel would be preventing media coverage from Gaza.
I think the Israeli mindset is that they now have no choice. It is a fight between the security of their people and the Palestinians. And given that they have nukes they're going to win (or at least they think they are going to win). They seem to genuinely believe that they can cut out the tumour and that'll be it.
A BBC correspondent embedded in the IDF was talking to one of their - not sure of his rank - chaps this morning on Radio 4. I was making lunches so had half an ear, but what struck me in the talk about civilian casualties was that he ended up saying that "80% of them support Hamas. 99% of them would be willing to do the same. They raise their children to hate us" - I think there's a strand in Israeli thinking that Palestinian civilians aren't innocent and their deaths are acceptable consequences.
So much to live for, so much undiscussed
So much in common, but so little trust
(Russians and Americans, Al Stewart)
I've learnt to hate Russians throughout my whole life
If another war comes, it's them we must fight
To hate and to fear them, to run and to hide
And accept it all bravely, with God on our side
@KoF please ensure you read the guidance for this forum - and be extremely cautious of posting material that can be read as an advocation of genocide or other war crimes. I assume that is not what you meant, but we are legally liable for what we allow to be posted. I will discuss backstage whether we need redact the hidden text from your post.
There's nothing I can see there about Gazans going to Cyprus, only about aid coming from there.
Hence why I specifically said it was my opinion. At present the only possible way for refugees to leave Gaza is via Egypt. The only other *suggestion* is a humanitarian corridor to Cyprus, and as you said that's only discussing aid at present.
Just so I'm clear - are you saying that I cannot post and discuss something written in Hebrew from an Israeli newspaper discussing a policy document which is undeniably from the IDF?
There's nothing I can see there about Gazans going to Cyprus, only about aid coming from there.
Hence why I specifically said it was my opinion. At present the only possible way for refugees to leave Gaza is via Egypt. The only other *suggestion* is a humanitarian corridor to Cyprus, and as you said that's only discussing aid at present.
But that doesn’t seem to be a suggestion anyone is actually making.
A BBC correspondent embedded in the IDF was talking to one of their - not sure of his rank - chaps this morning on Radio 4. I was making lunches so had half an ear, but what struck me in the talk about civilian casualties was that he ended up saying that "80% of them support Hamas. 99% of them would be willing to do the same. They raise their children to hate us" - I think there's a strand in Israeli thinking that Palestinian civilians aren't innocent and their deaths are acceptable consequences.
There's a presentation I watched a while ago by the journalist Gideon Levy where he discusses this; I have linked to the specific part of it here: https://youtu.be/DGO3eBxQX7Q?t=824
I think, as a rule of thumb, when you begin referring to humans using a metaphor for "cancer," then I think you have formally given up your "good guy" badge.
It's a reason I personally avoid that kind of language like the plague, even if I understand the temptation.
I was thinking that if I knew a person who suffered from this described "Israeli" mindset - and I know Jewish sufferers, and I know Jews who don't (and the latter really resent the stereotype) - I wouldn't say "give that person a nation state and an arsenal of weapons." I'd say "that person needs a lifetime's worth of therapy."
I also don't like calling people "delusional," because I don't think that's a fair word to describe people who are generally lucid. Sane people are quite capable of harboring bad ideas. I know a few of those too, might qualify myself. I understand the motivations. I just think that they're tragic bordering on horrific, and I can completely understand why Palestinian might be angry enough to kill over being mistreated this way. Systematic oppression without recourse has a way of doing that to people.
I don't think there are any "good guys" in this conflict, just two groups of people with mutually irreconcilable differences.
This piece may not be entirely own voice, being written from an American newspaper, but it includes a lot of regional perspective explaining the situation from several Arab POV's.
Maybe there are no good guys, but I feel OK about supporting the Palestinians.
I do too. At the same time, I'm appalled at things like someone giving the Nazi salute in response to a pro-Israel rally in Beverly Hills the other day.
Maybe there are no good guys, but I feel OK about supporting the Palestinians.
I do too. At the same time, I'm appalled at things like someone giving the Nazi salute in response to a pro-Israel rally in Beverly Hills the other day.
If only there were some way to say "I am deeply grieved by what Israel is doing to Palestine" without attracting Nazis.
A small thing, but I hear from Our Place's FatherInCharge that he went to the nearby mosque (an Ahmadiyya congregation) this evening to a short service of prayer for peace.
The Imam (he and Father are good friends) had invited people of all faiths to attend, so Father said a prayer, and a Jewish lady also said a prayer (there is a small Jewish congregation in Our Town).
As I say, a small thing, but perhaps something positive amongst all the ghastliness.
Maybe there are no good guys, but I feel OK about supporting the Palestinians.
I do too. At the same time, I'm appalled at things like someone giving the Nazi salute in response to a pro-Israel rally in Beverly Hills the other day.
At a time when Prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers and Members of the Knesset are making statements endorsing genocide and ethnic cleansing, such things are both serious and require putting into some perspective.
As Bullfrog alludes to above; criticism of Israel will attract Nazis at the margins. Just as criticising Hamas will attract Islamophobes, and in both cases such people should be condemned rather than given a platform to rant in newspapers.
Comments
It's strange, the argument against it seems to be that it's "disrespectful". Isn't that another way of saying it will hurt some people's feelings, and isn't that what we're constantly told shouldn't be enough to ban something?
If that was a response to my post, I wasn't claiming that it was an "eternal, unending" conflict, merely that because of the way the "sides" are drawn they can serve as signifiers for other things.
It wasn't you, it was a line from another post about intractable conflict.
Reading again today, I think I overreacted.
I had a class in undergrad on middle east politics and we got kind of grilled on understanding the modern, secular causes of the struggle, how the way that people map over other concerns actually obscures what's going on. I think it's important to keep track of all the motives and cultural lenses people apply, but I think sometimes it also gets in the way. And I think sometimes these lenses get weaponized, which is common in politics.
I don't think he particularly wants to kill lots of people. I think he just doesn't care much if he does.
Isn't there an element of revenge? How you compute that in terms of deaths, no idea. But the idea of destroying Hamas is bizarre, they are giving it life.
Hence the quote that's being doing the rounds from MASH -
To understand the modern Israel/Palestine conflict I think requires going back at least as far as the Aliyah of 1882, which I believe is considered the birth of modern Zionism.
Keep in mind also that voices have been talking about unseating Netanyahu "when the war is over." He has every good reason to keep the "war" going indefinitely.
There was the 1929 Hebron massacre, before that the pogrom following the Peasants Revolt in 1834, before that the 1517 pogrom, before that the crusades. And that's glossing over a lot.
It might be true that not all of these were crudely "Arabs verses Jews"* but it isn't true to claim that the violence between communities around Jerusalem only go back 100 years.
That scrap of stony ground has been a site of conflict for *over 1000 years*. The only way one could say that this dates back to 1947 is because of the hardening sense of the "nation state" in the early 20th century. Before that Jerusalem was a part of empires, before that a keenly fought over prize for various communities and their bloody leaders (pun intended) - usually with the beleaguered Jews at the wrong end of it.
Jews *did not* only return to Jerusalem in the twentieth century after the horrors of the Holocaust. Jews were expelled by law from England in 1290 (after being regularly massacred such as in 1190), were pushed around and murdered in much of Europe for hundreds of years and wandered around trying to find safety including by going to Jerusalem.
If this isn't a history of centuries of "eternal unending" conflict, I don't know what is. The only difference today is that the Jews in Israel have an upper hand.
--
Which isn't to say that the Palestinians have no history and no valid point, of course. But in my view refusing to see how antisemitism across the centuries got to 1947 is myopic.
* Which makes no sense anyway, of course, for genetic reasons if nothing else
Zionist migration began in earnest around 1900. In the next decades tens of thousands had fled persecution in Russia to Jerusalem. There were nearly 180,000 Jews already there in 1930 and 500,000 in 1940.
I don't know where you are getting the "long periods of coexistence" in the region around Jerusalem. In fact it was quite the reverse, with regular pogroms going back centuries and enforced discrimination under the Ottoman rule.
At best the Jews have been *tolerated* around Jerusalem. Between the massacres.
Since I don't know as much about that directly, that's a really interesting point. If Zionism is understood as the ideological driver of the conflict...yeah. I can see that.
Though that also assumes the frame that ideologies drive conflict, rather than material realities. This is a war over Zionism, in that frame.
And that's neat in a horrifying way because I think that's the take that scares people. Zionism, placed as the ultimate in this conflict, makes it all about Israel's existence as a nation state, and that is - I think - what makes the stakes for some people literally existential. It's Zionists who see Palestinians as a tragic side effect of their own need for safety versus Palestinians who don't understand why these lunatics keep engaging in real estate theft and acting like it's their entitlement.
It's weird to me, I have very little sympathy with Zionism, between an (admittedly minority) number of Jewish friends who feel alienated by their co-religionists, and my polisci sensibility that saying "Israel is just another bloody nation state" sometimes gets conflated with antisemitism. This of course assuming that all nation states are bloody. It goes with being a nation state. Nothing against Jewish folks beyond a head-scratching "why the fuck do you want to get into this game?"
But I know a lot of Jewish people who feel very earnestly that having a nation state makes them safer. And I have also watched people carelessly meander in the space between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
And that gives me just enough pause to think that maybe I should be careful about how vituperative I get about Israel's role in this mess.
So much of politics depends on how you frame it.
And it's worse when frame-selection seems intentional, as if "I shall decide to favor this ideology because I profit by it," which is one working definition for corruption.
That's a point, granted. I did gloss over some details in thinking that Muslims and Jews have - historically - gotten along better than Jews and Christians. Though, for fear of feeling like I'm digging my fingers like Thomas into someone else's bloody wound to assuage my skepticism, I'll probe at this a bit. Just had a first aid lesson the other day where it was discussed the pain involved in packing a wound to stop bleeding, and the metaphor feels a little too apt.
It is ironic that it's Arabic Muslims who get displaced in England's apology for European Christians' horrifying behavior.
Also, I think that it depends on how broadly you define "the region around Jerusalem." If you're thinking "Iran to Israel/Palestine," which is to me the scope of the middle east, there have been long periods of tolerance. A friend once reminded me that Muslims have an explicit rule in their own religion that Christians and Jews are considered "people of the book" and generally considered not conversion-fodder. I'll admit that Muslims have failed at this, but it's there. It also strikes me, poli-sci wise, to say that it is always a bad idea to yoke a religious or ethnic identity to a nation state. It always gets rotten, regardless of which ethnic or religious group tries it.
On another level, I have friends who are Armenian. Ever heard of that genocide? I have hung out with youth who had to run for their lives out of the Congo because of the bloodiest and most-ignored war of the 1990s. I have, in my own neighborhood, heard from Assyrians who were desperate for a school to preserve their culture, because it was dying out partly thanks to the second Persian Gulf War. I grew up hearing about Rwanda and Bosnia, and studied the latter a little more closely in undergrad because I want to understand why the fuck people are like this.
If you look at history, war is common, and ethnic persecution is common. What has happened to Jewish people has happened to many ethnic groups. Being protestant, I have ancestors who were threatened or burned at the stake because they had the wrong ideas. I don't think I have any right to use that for my own aggrandizement, but it's there.
As a humanist, and as a Christian, I am very uncomfortable saying that "well, our persecution history makes us special and gives us privileges when it comes to abusing other ethnic groups." As if the senseless murder of a Jewish person is somehow more heinous than the murder of a Palestinian person. To me, as a Christian, human is a human. One is too many. One thousand is way too many. Rape and Murder are Wrong no matter who the victim is or the perpetrator are. I also heard arguments along the lines of "well, Jewish lives are worth more." And that ain't right, to me. It's racist to consider people only as if they're sub-sets of an ethnic group rather than...you know, humans. Humanist, go figure.
I'm a little uneasy when I hear "but our ancestors were killed, so it's more acceptable for us to kill other people so we can play the same bloody game that your religion gets shamed for." I may bring this up if a Jewish person ever wants to call me a monster for being a Christian. What my nastier forebears were doing doesn't look that different than what Israel is doing now. "This land is mine, for my safety and not for yours, so git."
Is it ok for victims of oppression to use that oppression to justify their oppression of others?
And all of this is really uncomfortable, and I think it's what makes this sub-board hard. It seems like it's simply impossible to highlight one party's suffering without being accused of diminishing the other's. Honestly, I hate it, even if I feel compelled to keep trying to understand it.
And does any of this make me legitimately antisemitic? I'm just generally disgusted.
[Edited at request of poster - Gwai]
Except perhaps the Romani.
Which isn't to excuse - but to understand.
One horrific fact of the Holocaust was that it *wasn't* unique. It wasn't. It was the culmination of thousands of years of hatred.
I think there are lots of religio-social groups (what a modern expression!) that have spent centuries fleeing from white people, or being corralled into reservations that are basically ghettos. Aboriginal groups around the world have been vanishing for centuries. Just most of them don't have the same ability to...whatever it is that Jewish people do that we don't have the same empathy for the Navajo, or the Ainu, or any number of First Nations people who may consider themselves deserving of compensation, at least.
That said, I definitely agree that the Holocaust wasn't unique, or even unusual. Also, while I feel it logically necessary, it is viscerally revolting to try to compare different incidents of ethnic cleansing as if some are more grievous than others because of the identity of the victims or perpetrators. It's the same nexus of fascinating and disgusting.
I appreciate, deeply, the distinction between "excuse" and "understand." I can understand. Hell, I have had some fairly serious talks with Jewish friends about it. I get it. And I get that it's a weird privilege that my personal ethnic heritage is dissolved into the broth of America. It's privilege that I live in a very secure nation state (as I've tried to explain, with mixed results - to some pro-Palestinian friends.)
But I don't know if understanding goes as far as excuse, let alone justification. And people are dying for this in tens of thousands, most of whom didn't ask for it.
Are you straying into the territory of "Black lives matter. Nah, all lives matter."
Gay people were marched straight from the camps to prison in many cases.
Roma are still treated abominably in much of Europe, and anti-ziganism seems to be a perfectly acceptable prejudice in much of the UK.
The biggest omission from your list, I think, is disabled people, who were murdered with impunity long before the gas chambers were built. Autistic people today still live under the shadow of the decisions Asperger made about who was worthy of life and who not, something our own systems are not as far from as they should be, as we saw in 2020 with blanket issuing of DNRs for autistic people without their knowledge or consent.
I'm not HarryCH, but I rather see him as saying that the Nazis were even more horrible than we are giving them credit for. They were murderously horrible to queer people, the Roma, and many other people.
I think it'd be interesting to examine why that analogy does or does not make sense. Care to explain?
I suppose my reflection is more to do with what happens when you give an ethnic group who have repeatedly been kicked around - for thousands of years - a notion of nation and security. Of course they primarily want security and of course they are constantly on the lookout for people who want to destroy them. The idea of "never again" looms large in the mind when you know that you've come from a long line of people who have been abused and murdered.
It's not really about empathy, at least that's not what I was highlighting.
I don't know what would happen if the ethnic Karen tribe from Mynmar or the Uighur or any of the other abused groups got given a country of their own.
Mostly I suspect those groups with a long history of being abused would behave in very similar ways.
All I'm saying is that this kind of reaction was almost inevitable given the history of antisemitism.
I believe I have encountered people who questioned the claim that WWII was not as bad as WWI; they pointed to the Holocaust, which of course was not part of the war. (The US and Britain did not join the war because Hitler persecuted Jews; they were busily turning away Jewish refugees. It may soon be the case that Palestinian refugees will be turned away.)
Nobody is denying that other minorities were also persecuted by the Nazis, however as this is a discussion specifically about the current conflict maybe introducing other victims of Nazi persecution can have the unintended effect of diluting its impact on the Jewish psyche, and of diluting its awfulness. Rather in the way that "All lives matter" is designed to avert attention from the awfulness of the instances police brutality against black people.
Except that framing it in that fashion ends up erasing the present and very real suffering of the Palestinian people. And I think that erasure is why most contemporary Black Lives Matter activists seem to support Palestine. Source.
How many Palestinians have been killed so far? Are we counting? How much suffering has been caused by Israel's siege? How many people have been killed on the west bank by settlers, and how many of those cases have been resolved? Is it antisemitic for me to ask those questions as if they carry importance?
Also, at present, Israel has the backing of the US military and billions of dollars of military hardware, without question. If African Americans had half that kind of firepower (or resource allocation) behind them, then I think their situation would be more comparable. But that is evidently not the case.
To twist your question around, is the suffering of historical Jews being used to erase the suffering of present Palestinians? Are Palestinian lives and livelihoods being sacrificed to assuage an historical sin that they, being less than a century old, had nothing to do with?
I agree that this is not going to be the end of the resentment, nor likely the terrorism.
But I don't think it is about "erasing" that pain, otherwise Israel would be preventing media coverage from Gaza.
I think the Israeli mindset is that they now have no choice. It is a fight between the security of their people and the Palestinians. And given that they have nukes they're going to win (or at least they think they are going to win). They seem to genuinely believe that they can cut out the tumour and that'll be it.
Which seems delusional to most others.
(ETA add hidden text, DT, Admin)
So much to live for, so much undiscussed
So much in common, but so little trust
(Russians and Americans, Al Stewart)
I've learnt to hate Russians throughout my whole life
If another war comes, it's them we must fight
To hate and to fear them, to run and to hide
And accept it all bravely, with God on our side
(God on our side, Bob Dylan)
https://apnews.com/article/cyprus-gaza-israel-humanitarian-aid-sea-corridor-d88c02a8be9ff7c514e3b64915093017
I guess you have access to Google, though?
There's nothing I can see there about Gazans going to Cyprus, only about aid coming from there.
That could be interpreted as sarcasm.
Doublethink, Admin
Hence why I specifically said it was my opinion. At present the only possible way for refugees to leave Gaza is via Egypt. The only other *suggestion* is a humanitarian corridor to Cyprus, and as you said that's only discussing aid at present.
I'm not looking to get anyone in trouble.
Thank you
BroJames, Purgatory Host (acting Epiphanies)
But that doesn’t seem to be a suggestion anyone is actually making.
There's a presentation I watched a while ago by the journalist Gideon Levy where he discusses this; I have linked to the specific part of it here: https://youtu.be/DGO3eBxQX7Q?t=824
It's a reason I personally avoid that kind of language like the plague, even if I understand the temptation.
I was thinking that if I knew a person who suffered from this described "Israeli" mindset - and I know Jewish sufferers, and I know Jews who don't (and the latter really resent the stereotype) - I wouldn't say "give that person a nation state and an arsenal of weapons." I'd say "that person needs a lifetime's worth of therapy."
I also don't like calling people "delusional," because I don't think that's a fair word to describe people who are generally lucid. Sane people are quite capable of harboring bad ideas. I know a few of those too, might qualify myself. I understand the motivations. I just think that they're tragic bordering on horrific, and I can completely understand why Palestinian might be angry enough to kill over being mistreated this way. Systematic oppression without recourse has a way of doing that to people.
I don't think there are any "good guys" in this conflict, just two groups of people with mutually irreconcilable differences.
Sucks all around.
They've undeniably gotten the short end of the stick in the current situation.
This piece may not be entirely own voice, being written from an American newspaper, but it includes a lot of regional perspective explaining the situation from several Arab POV's.
If only there were some way to say "I am deeply grieved by what Israel is doing to Palestine" without attracting Nazis.
The Imam (he and Father are good friends) had invited people of all faiths to attend, so Father said a prayer, and a Jewish lady also said a prayer (there is a small Jewish congregation in Our Town).
As I say, a small thing, but perhaps something positive amongst all the ghastliness.
At a time when Prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers and Members of the Knesset are making statements endorsing genocide and ethnic cleansing, such things are both serious and require putting into some perspective.
As Bullfrog alludes to above; criticism of Israel will attract Nazis at the margins. Just as criticising Hamas will attract Islamophobes, and in both cases such people should be condemned rather than given a platform to rant in newspapers.