Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Barrister]

I would say it's hypocritical to oppose the existence of one settler-colonist country and while being okay with living in one.

One can't really do much about historical dead vs what one can do with ongoing conflicts.

So the implication is that everything is business as usual ("nothing we can do about it now") IF the settlers definitively displace the locals and a generation passes.   That's a view of the world that incentives ethnic cleansing.

I'm not on board with all of Raz's commentary, but he has a point about the way in which academic theories of settler colonialism are being deployed politically. If you take that approach seriously, then it necessarily has massive implications for anyone that lives on land that was once occupied by people who were displaced.  Which means just about everyone currently living on the planet. Including the Palestinians.

I mean I think you and I are on the same page.  This shit is complicated.

I mean there are Islamists who are upset about the Spanish reconquista - but that happened 500+ years ago.  Or you can definitely argue that all of Asia Minor should be owned by the greeks.  But that's despite the fact that there are basically no muslims, or greeks, in either Spain or Turkey in the modern day.

But then doesn't that mean "might makes right"?

Let's take a modern example that isn't Israel/Palestine - Crimea.  I've argued in the past that Crimea, historically - belonged to neither the Ukrainians, nor the Russians - it belonged to the Crimean Tatars.  Problem is that Stalin deported all of them 70 years ago.  A few moved back, but then after 2014 Russia has heavily "Russified" the region.  If you were to hold a referendum in Crimea today it would almost certainly vote in favour of being part of Russia - but then again almost everyone voting would have moved there from Russia in the last 10 years.

Going back to Israel though things get even crazier.  Jews didn't pick that piece of land randomly - there's a certain historical basis for why Jews think they are entitled to live in the historical land of Israel.

But then how different is that than Putin who argues about the "historical unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people" based on what Prince Volodymyr did back in the late 10th century?  A prince, who, by the way, was scandinavian by heritage, not slavic?

[The Minsky Moment]

This shit is complicated.

I think the best answer to the question is the one you gave at the top.

It may turn out that there is simply no avoiding looking carefully at all the relevant facts, circumstances, and competing claims in context in every particular situation.  Perhaps there is no magical theoretical heuristic that can cut through all the complexity with a single right-wrong definitive answer to every disputed set of claims.

[Razgovory]

The Palestine issue really bothers me for a several reasons, but one of the biggest is that it really marks a moment when the optimistic world of the 1990's started falling apart.  I grew up in the 1990's and things looked like they were getting better.  Wars were ending, the Cold War was over and it looked like liberal Democracy was the way to go.  Hell, even the remaining communists were reforming. I believed that if everyone had a full belly, cable TV, a decent job and civil rights we could have world peace or at least something close to it. 

It even looked like we could have peace in the Middle East, God knows Clinton tried to force it on them.  But no, after years of negotiations Arafat launched the second intifada. And it was horrible, and nobody got anything from it, and bizarrely people are demanding another remake of that shitty movie. People who chant "intifada revolution!" are mystifying to me.  Why the fuck would you want that to happen again? 

Then came 9-11, and the War on Terror and the war in Iraq and all the stupid shit that entailed.  But I learned one thing from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Some people, perhaps most people don't want a fully belly, cable TV, a decent job and civil rights.  Some people just want to live like it's the fucking 12th century, or they want to exterminate their neighbors over some 1300 year old religious argument, or just have a totalitarian theocracy.  That has been very disconcerting.

When Oct 7th occurred it was not too surprising that Hamas had done it, they are murderous religious fuckwits after all (something that many people seemed to have hard time grasping in the years prior to Oct 7th), but that there were Westerners, Western leftists who celebrated it.  That shook me.  After 9/11 there were a handful extremists in the US who celebrated it, Ward Churchill was the one who came to mind, but basically everyone denounced him for it.  After Oct 7th universities were putting up messages in lights saying "glory to our martyrs".  Democratic Socialists in New York had a fucking march.  I'd expect that from Nazis and the like, but from my fellow leftists?  I'd just seen the Taliban take over Afghanistan and ISIS selling slaves for sex in Syria.  I was fucking done with Islamic extremists.  I know, I was Mr. Religious tolerance here for years, but these assholes are really making that hard.  Now when these assholes massacre 1200 people they are some sort of revolutionary chic?  Really, what the fuck?  These guys stand for basically everything most leftists oppose.  What, we fight the right here in the America and West in the culture war for the rights of women, LGBTQ, and minorities but when the right has slightly darker skin on the other side of the globe it's opposite day? I left several left-wing groups on Facebook because they shifted from posting memes lampooning the right to praising the Houthis and the Iranians.

I find this all very distressing, and it has come at the worst possible time.  While the left disappoints and confuses me, the right is openly talking about setting up a dictator. Last year I had a procedure to help my mental health that involved zapping my skull with magnets.  It was like being attacked for by a woodpecker for 45 minutes each day.  It is possible that all of what I'm saying makes no sense because I am delusional as a result from that procedure, and if that is so, please excuse my madness.

[Tamas]

Nobody is ever on board with all of Raz's commentary.   And of course Raz is being silly.

It's just that I wouldn't adopt your furious levels of conviction and certainty on the subject, since it is complex.

[PJL]

Raz - certain sections of the left have always been anti-West. It's why Western communists denounced WW2 as an imperialistic war and demanded a ceasefire. They were rooting for Hitler for his anti-Westereness / capitalist tendencies, not because they were Nazis. Of course that all changed when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. But they   then reverted to type once the Cold War set in.

[Valmy]

It is a conundrum.  I admit, I had been reading a bunch of this Settler-Colonialism stuff because it came up so often regards Israel.

So you didn't realize Missouri used to be populated by Native Americans until Europeans and American colonists showed up until this thread? Missouri public schools strike again.

[Razgovory]

It is a conundrum.  I admit, I had been reading a bunch of this Settler-Colonialism stuff because it came up so often regards Israel.

So you didn't realize Missouri used to be populated by Native Americans until Europeans and American colonists showed up until this thread? Missouri public schools strike again.

I'm not sure you understand what the Settler-Colonialism theories are.  It's not simply that one population replaced another, it's the societies that are founded by settler's replacing another population are intrinsically racist, oppressive, and otherwise compromised.  The settler is basically a genocidal maniac devoted to exploitation and murder.  His presence is so hateful that he land itself rejects him.  He can never have the relationship to the land that an indigenous native can have.

[Razgovory]

Raz - certain sections of the left have always been anti-West. It's why Western communists denounced WW2 as an imperialistic war and demanded a ceasefire. They were rooting for Hitler for his anti-Westereness / capitalist tendencies, not because they were Nazis. Of course that all changed when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. But they  then reverted to type once the Cold War set in.

We discussed this in the thread (Josq denied it).  They weren't quite rooting for Hitler, but they were rooting for a ceasefire.  They didn't want a scenario where Britain and France were at war with the Soviet Union.  One of the more surprising things was that the Communists didn't resist the Germans in France and Yugoslavia until the Soviet Union was invaded.  They stayed loyal to Stalin after he betrayed them.  That's actually kind of sad.  I think that far left-wing antizionism can be traced to 1949 with rootless cosmopolitans campaign and the later doctor's plot.  I read that Foucault joined the Communist party in France in the early 1950's but left due to the disgusting antisemitism.

Butt he communists could at least argue they were motivated by a love of humanity, by the hope of Communism.  You can't realistically make that claim when you support Hamas.  Do they really want a future dominated by religious obscurantism and oppression?

[The Brain]

Butt he communists could at least argue they were motivated by a love of humanity, by the hope of Communism.

The hope of a boot stamping on a human face forever? You can't be a Communist and love humanity. It is a very hateful ideology.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Butt he communists could at least argue they were motivated by a love of humanity, by the hope of Communism.

The hope of a boot stamping on a human face forever? You can't be a Communist and love humanity. It is a very hateful ideology.

Every communist fanboy: that wasn't real communism! 

[viper37]

I would say it's hypocritical to oppose the existence of one settler-colonist country and while being okay with living in one.

One can't really do much about historical dead vs what one can do with ongoing conflicts.

So the implication is that everything is business as usual ("nothing we can do about it now") IF the settlers definitively displace the locals and a generation passes.  That's a view of the world that incentivizes ethnic cleansing.

I'm not on board with all of Raz's commentary, but he has a point about the way in which academic theories of settler colonialism are being deployed politically. If you take that approach seriously, then it necessarily has massive implications for anyone that lives on land that was once occupied by people who were displaced.  Which means just about everyone currently living on the planet. Including the Palestinians.

1) There's more than one generation from my pov (see Oex's comment)

2) Reparations were paid, and are still ongoing

3) Quebec is not actively waging war against its native population today to displace them to the US claiming they don't have any right to live here, that it isn't their country.

4) Quebec isn't actively seeking to terrorize its native population so that they would leave by themselves by a combination of military actions and laws that actively discourage any kind of retaliation by exercising collective retribution.

5) What is happening today in the West Bank and in Gaza is more comparable to what was happening in Canada and the US in the 19th century.  It was seem as the norm back then, because the White Man was presumed to be superior in intellect to the inferior Red Skin who was, at best, good only for assimilation, and at worst, only good if he was dead.

6) Unless you are willing to deny that Israel is constantly annexing territories in the West Bank and all its actions so far has been conducted as a way to deligitimize the creation of a Palestinian State?  The same positions as Otto, that all of this is a fiction?


See what happened recently in Lebanon as another exhibit:
unhinged IDF troops fired at Canadian peacekeepers:
Link

Too many witnesses, got to make them leave.  It's becoming a habit of firing at humanitarian workers and other neutrals, by "accident".  One accident, two accidents, 3 accidents, 4 accidents, 5, 6, 7, 8...

As a lawyer, when does a series of accidents become gross negligence as one refuses to correct the procedures leading to such accidents?

[Razgovory]

In settler colonialist theory you are still a settler colonialist. Settler-colonist is inherited identity.  Invasion isn't an event, it is a structure.  You are still eliminating the natives, you eliminate them by trying to take away their nativeness.  Demanding they speak French is eliminative and oppressive.  In fact, as a settler-colonialist you can't help but be oppressive and eliminationist.  

[Valmy]

In settler colonialist theory you are still a settler colonialist. Settler-colonist is inherited identity.  Invasion isn't an event, it is a structure.  You are still eliminating the natives, you eliminate them by trying to take away their nativeness.  Demanding they speak French is eliminative and oppressive.  In fact, as a settler-colonialist you can't help but be oppressive and eliminationist. 

Ok. So if Viper leaves Quebec and moves to Switzerland or something can he then be upset about civilian deaths? Just checking.

[Solmyr]

Butt he communists could at least argue they were motivated by a love of humanity, by the hope of Communism.

The hope of a boot stamping on a human face forever? You can't be a Communist and love humanity. It is a very hateful ideology.

Capitalism also has a boot stamping on a human face forever, but some people seem to love it.

[Richard Hakluyt]

The capitalist boot is more stylish and trendy though.