Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Barrister]

I will note few, in fact none I can easily think of, wars in modern times have seen a B side refuse to admit when it has lost and things turn out well for the B side.

The Taliban.

The Taliban never actually lost though.

That's remarkably circular reasoning - because the Taliban eventually won that means they never lost.

I would have said that by 2002 everyone agreed the Taliban had lost decisively - they previously ruled Afghanistan, now they didn't.  They certainly had lost to the same extent that the Palestinians had lost in 1948 or 1967 (or either Intafada).

[crazy canuck]

I don't think anyone here is actually supporting the settler position.

You may have missed the posts by Hamilcar, where he said that Palestinians should be eradicated and their culture destroyed.

You may have also missed Otto's post where he  once again said that all Muslims are evil.

[viper37]

I believe both groups should have their own state, and I believe the Israeli state has been acting in bad faith because it's been winning and it's goal is to annex the territories and deport the population.

I mean what can I say?  Israel has repeatedly agreed to a two-state solution.  Whether that was in 1947, 1979, 1993 or whenever.  It's always been the Palestinians who have refused to complete a deal.

Come on.
Look at the maps of what was offered, and look at the finer points.  No one would have realistically agreed to that.  

Israel declared its independence in 1948 because they thought they would gain more territory than by simply accepting the UN peace plan with the proposed borders.  First thing they do is to expel the Arabs from their territory wherever they can.  Not saying the Arab invaders were angels, but it's not a GI Joe vs Cobra situation here.

[viper37]

I believe both groups should have their own state, and I believe the Israeli state has been acting in bad faith because it's been winning and it's goal is to annex the territories and deport the population.

And I think the Palestinians have been acting in bad faith for 75 years--in continually losing wars and expecting to never have to concede territorial losses.

I am unfamiliar with any other scenario in which two sides have fought for specific territory for 75 years, one side that loses every battle, refuses to ever agree to real concessions--and the side that wins every battle agrees to territorial concessions but is held out as the warmonger.

Burn Gaza now, nothing less.

What territorial concession has Israel ever agreed to?  They propose territorial concession but keep pushing for new settlements and they split a proposed Palestinian state into three parts.  No sane leader would agree to that and the other conditions Israel asked of the Palestinians.  That amounted to not having a state at all, only an Israeli colony subject to further settlement, basically statu quo with limited guarantees.

The only real acceptable deal came in 2008 under Olmert.  Abbas rejected it because he did not have time to study it or to present it to anyone else.  He later regretted it.

But it is doubtful Israel would have gone ahead with the plan, given the political climate.  Olmert was on his way out due to bribery scandal.
A little more time for negotiations, and it might have worked.

[OttoVonBismarck]

That's remarkably circular reasoning - because the Taliban eventually won that means they never lost.

I would have said that by 2002 everyone agreed the Taliban had lost decisively - they previously ruled Afghanistan, now they didn't.  They certainly had lost to the same extent that the Palestinians had lost in 1948 or 1967 (or either Intafada).

To me it isn't though--like the Taliban was in a state of Civil War when the U.S. invaded, and after the U.S. invaded it lost a lot of territory, but importantly--it never lost all of its territory, and never did it lose all of its military either. Diminished / struggling? Yep. Lost? No.

The Continental Army was diminished and struggling after the British drove Washington's ass out of New York, but he wasn't beat.

A dig difference IMO is Palestine literally didn't even have a military force after the 1949 Armistice Agreement, it was overseen by Egypt and Jordan (technically the West Bank was actually part of Jordan.) After Israel occupied the land in 1967, Palestine ceased having any actual military force at all. Remember Palestinian militancy in the 70s / 80s looked nothing like a war, it was killing Olympic athletes and bombings and shit targeting prominent people--because the Palestinian resistance was doing shit like that, but they didn't field an actual army.

You are fully occupied and have no military left, seems like "lost" to me. Your daddy countries Egypt / Jordan signing a cease fire that left you under Israeli control sounds like "lost" to me.

You may have also missed Otto's post where he  once again said that all Muslims are evil.

Let's calm it down.

Israel declared its independence in 1948 because they thought they would gain more territory than by simply accepting the UN peace plan with the proposed borders.  First thing they do is to expel the Arabs from their territory wherever they can.  Not saying the Arab invaders were angels, but it's not a GI Joe vs Cobra situation here.

And the Arabs rejected the UN Partition Line and invaded because they assumed they could get more territory, they were wrong (in their case, that meant the entirety of Israel.)

1947 was a bad plan, and the UN should be sternly reprimanded for it.

However, given the state of Palestine, its extreme weakness, its lack of prospect of ever having an actual Arab state fight a war for it again, by the 1990s when Oslo was negotiated, that was actually a good deal for Palestine relative to its "power" in the situation. Statehood, territorial exchanges etc.

[Threviel]

And on the last point there is lots of hypocritical arguing that the Israelis expelled 750.000 Palestinians whilst conveniently forgetting the 900.000 jews expelled from Arab/Muslim states.

Very little noise from pro-palestinians that the Arab/Muslim states give land back to the Jews the same as the Palestinians. Hypocrisy at its finest.

A simple tit for tat with the Palestinians being given what was stolen from Jews in '47 would have solved most problems.

[Valmy]

Vietnam

Huh? We eventually admitted defeat.

[viper37]

And on the last point there is lots of hypocritical arguing that the Israelis expelled 750.000 Palestinians whilst conveniently forgetting the 900.000 jews expelled from Arab/Muslim states.

Very little noise from pro-palestinians that the Arab/Muslim states give land back to the Jews the same as the Palestinians. Hypocrisy at its finest.

A simple tit for tat with the Palestinians being given what was stolen from Jews in '47 would have solved most problems.

That point was raised before.  They were expelled after Israel had expelled the Arab population of Palestine.

Nonetheless, it's again in a situation where one evil justifies another evil.

Does WWII justified the crimes of Stalin?

Should the crimes of Russia in Ukraine justify the extermination of the Russian people?

[OttoVonBismarck]

Which again—the Jews throughout the Middle East had nothing to do with Arab expulsions in a place they didn't live. I like that you show your cards there with that "all Jews everywhere share guilt" logic. (Ignoring your largely deficient understanding of the Arab expulsions to begin with.)

[Admiral Yi]

the Israelis expelled 750.000 Palestinians

I dispute the word expelled.

My understanding is there were a number of factors at work that made Arabs leave their homes.  The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem told them to do so over the radio, and to return home once the Jews had been defeated.  Another was the murder of Palestinian civilians by the Stern gang at Deir Yassin. 

[OttoVonBismarck]

Yeah, I mean the Nakba being uncritically reported as a mass Jewish expulsion of Arabs is part of the "3 part lie" that has been orchestrated since 1948 to delegitimize the Israeli state. For various reasons, the political left has always enabled and promoted these lies.

The three steps are:

1. Portray the founding of Israel to be simple and one sided--Jews who had no right to be there came in and forced Arabs, who had every right to be there, for their home. Making way for additional Jewish immigrants. This means Israel is now a state "founded with original sin", and can be rhetorically attacked as much--similar to how America is frequently held to be in a state of "original sin" for its treatment of Native Americans and slavery.

2. Portray subsequent Israeli military occupations as colonialism, directly linking them to the anti-colonial movement of the mid-20th century and specifically painting Israeli occupation of territory after 1967 as no different from e.g. British, French or other "evil" colonialism of the past.

3. The final lie is labeling Israel an apartheid state, and proclaiming that the West only allows this due to "guilt over the Holocaust." This will involve elaborate narratives trying to stretch the history of South African apartheid to be identical to the situation in Israel/Palestine.

Of course--the real narrative, it should be no surprise, is far more complex and far less anti-Israel.

The real narrative is there were evil Jews active in the 1940s, including the Irgun and other extremists. The truth is Israeli/Jewish military forces did destroy Arab villages and physical homes and force some displacements.

However, the real narrative is also that by all evidence the vast majority of Arabs who fled were fleeing war, not fleeing at the point of an Israeli gun. They left of their own volition. There is also documented evidence Arab leaders in the region even sent out communications encouraging this flight--with the promise that "when we shortly destroy Israel, we'll have either your original homes, or even better land we take from the dead Jews to give you."

The real narrative has to address the fact that Jews were an ancient people in the Middle East with longstanding rights of abode in the Ottoman Empire, and rights of property ownership--which they exercised by legally buying land in modern day Israel. The real narrative has to address that while there were bad guys on the Jewish side, the Jewish state actually reigned in their worst bad guys very early on. It also has to acknowledge, as I mentioned, that a good % of the Arabs who left of their own free will, did so expecting incoming Arab armies to kill all the Jews so they could later steal their land.

The real narrative also has to address the reality, the Jewish state responded to the Jewish refugee crisis by giving Jews homes. The Arab states responded to the Arab refugee crisis--which some of these very Arab leaders helped cause by telling Arabs to leave Palestine, by making those Arab refugees permanently stateless "unpersons", with no reasonable prospects for the future. (Egypt was always careful for example to issue Gazans, when it ruled Gaza, identity documents that made clear these are not Egyptians, they are non-citizen Gazans.)

The real narrative on the 1967 war is there were ratcheting tensions and very strong Egyptian-lead Pan-Arabism that was focused on a coalition war to destroy Israel. That for the 2nd time in 20 years, against fairly crazy odds, Israel won against a huge Arab coalition--and it seized land from the two most guilty architects of that coalition--Egypt and Jordan.

The real narrative has to acknowledge that other than Egypt signing a peace treaty some time later, the rest of the Arab world largely encouraged Palestinians to continue a low grade conflict against Israel--and continued to largely deny them meaningful opportunity to move as refugees to other Arab countries (excepting the relatively large population in Jordan, although it should be noted Jordan mostly had to take those Arabs in because it was a fait accompli, empowered with any level of choice Jordan has always refused Palestinian refugees.)

The real narrative has to acknowledge the meaningful compromises Israel put on the table in the early 1990s with the Oslo Accords, and the fact virtually all non-Israeli parties to those negotiations and the following peace process blame its failure on Yasser Arafat.

Frankly, if one wants to look at the real narrative, instead of the invented leftist one that viper surely has been inhaling for years, the Palestinians are frankly idiots who fucked around real hard, repeatedly, and found out, repeatedly. They are also primarily victimized by other Arab states moreso than Israel.

All that being said--most reasonable people, myself included, still think the reality is that in the here and now we have 5m Palestinians living where they are, and there does need to be some settlement. Endless occupation isn't the path forward, and Israel will have to make concessions to resolve it. But if people want to keep fighting over the history, it takes a pretty major manipulation of the history to paint Palestinians as innocent victims.

[Admiral Yi]

A dig difference IMO is Palestine literally didn't even have a military force after the 1949 Armistice Agreement, it was overseen by Egypt and Jordan (technically the West Bank was actually part of Jordan.) After Israel occupied the land in 1967, Palestine ceased having any actual military force at all.

I used to own an excellent SPI game on the Israeli wars.  You could play 56, 67 and 73.  In the 67 scenario there were a few shitty 2-1 units representing Palestine in Gaza.

[Admiral Yi]

3. The final lie is labeling Israel an apartheid state, and proclaiming that the West only allows this due to "guilt over the Holocaust." This will involve elaborate narratives trying to stretch the history of South African apartheid to be identical to the situation in Israel/Palestine.

This one IMO is less of a lie and more of a characterization.  It's a characterization of military occupation with no self determination.

[Threviel]

That point was raised before.  They were expelled after Israel had expelled the Arab population of Palestine.

So?

Nonetheless, it's again in a situation where one evil justifies another evil.

Like the Hamas attack where a gigantic evil was justified by small evil?

Does WWII justified the crimes of Stalin?

I would argue that any action that stopped Germany led to a better resolution for the Soviet people, so yes, if his crimes were done in order to stop Germany and they aided in that they were justified. This does not mean that his every crime was justified.

Should the crimes of Russia in Ukraine justify the extermination of the Russian people?

The crimes of Russia giver Ukraine every right to defend itself, exactly like the crimes of Gaza gives Israel every right to defend itself. Your deliriums about some kind of extermination, which I can only assume is some comment regarding imagined Israeli exterminations, is neither here nor there.

[viper37]

Like the Hamas attack where a gigantic evil was justified by small evil?

I don't recall ever saying anything remotely like that.