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There has not been much discussion here of events in the middle east. There is not much hope of discussion as positions are deeply entrenched. I have been thinking what a monumental irony it is that a religious group who was so oppressed so brutally in recent history, inflicts the same treatment in kind on another. Schools, hospitals, universities, and homes reduced to rubble, while food, water, and medical supplies are withheld from 1.5 million displaced refugees, crowded into the last corner of their walled prison. Truly an irony beyond belief.

But further, these Palestinians are actually descendants of biblical Jews. Mohamed lived around 500 AD, and Suleiman converted the biblical Jews to Islam around 1500 AD. There are no people who have a more legitimate right to live in historic Palestine than the Palestinians.

I don't understand the grotesque expedience that leads my government to support and spend my tax dollars in the extermination of a native population. It is so clearly a colonial apartheid and genocide. South Africa and Ireland recognize it clearly, having lived through it, and speak out loudly to the world community.

Where are we, the safeguards of freedom and justice, in all this?

But further, these Palestinians are actually descendants of biblical Jews. Mohamed lived around 500 AD, and Suleiman converted the biblical Jews to Islam around 1500 AD.

Heh. By more or less forcing them to.

I agree that the Palestinians have a legitimate claim on Palestine. As you say, they were (at some point) Jews. The Jews that weren't converted also have a claim on the land. They're basically the same people. It's religion that is mostly getting in the way. Small groups of Muslims want to drive all the Jews into the sea. Meanwhile, Jews create illegal "settlements" on land that is not recognized as theirs, often evicting Palestinians in the process.

Both sides are wrong, and it's mostly about religion and intolerance.

OPG

If you listen to statements made in the Knesset, it is the Zionists who are intent on driving Palestinians into Sinai, not only metaphorically but in fact. I believe they are motivated by the Ben-Gurion Canal and the Gaza Gas fields off the coast of Gaza, valued at 1/2 trillion dollars.

I believe they are motivated by the Ben-Gurion Canal and the Gaza Gas fields off the coast of Gaza, valued at 1/2 trillion dollars.

Why haven't the Palestinians done anything with that? That kind of wealth would have transformed their society.

I'll answer for you: Because they don't want to transform their society.

I believe they are motivated by the Ben-Gurion Canal and the Gaza Gas fields off the coast of Gaza, valued at 1/2 trillion dollars.

Why haven't the Palestinians done anything with that? That kind of wealth would have transformed their society.

Gaza gas currently belongs to Israel as Gaza is an autonomous region. Gas gas is in Israeli economic waters Currently. It's no uncommon in disputed areas for development to be marginal or nil. Israel did sign off on small development last year, but now Gaza is hot/

"I don't understand the grotesque expedience that leads my government to support and spend my tax dollars in the extermination of a native population."

I don't understand the repeated attempts by Christians, Muslims, Russians, Germans, and assorted Muslim nations, to persecute Jews.

I don't understand the repeated attempts by Christians, Muslims, Russians, Germans, and assorted Muslim nations, to persecute Jews.

Hitchens hypothesized that the Jews had the original monotheism, and that they have rejected every "add-on" to that religion. They're still waiting for the 'christ', and they don't accept Islam at all. So they p-o both groups, except for the radical splinter Xian group that thinks the Jews need to take over all those lands so that the Second Coming can be triggered. But Xians and Muslims account for probably half the world's population (give or take).

Probably not quite that simple, but I think he is at least close to the truth.

Sano

Jews, historically, have been persecuted ruthlessly, as have many peoples throughout history for the crime of being different. Currently, it is the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank that are being brutally oppressed and massacred. At least 25,000 dead and twice as many wounded, most women and children. imagine the burned, maimed, and disfigured without recourse to medical aid, amputations and C-sections without anesthesia. This cruelty is intentional, as all the hospitals are destroyed, houses leveled, schools and universities now rubble.
The goal of eliminating Hamas is a crude and transparent canard. Israel is not interested in only eliminating Hamas, but also in the elimination of every Palestinian.

My point is that brutal cruelty is a potential human behavior and anyone can devolve into that brutality. It is ironic that a group who have suffered so much of the same have resorted to inflicting such inhumane torture on another group who are descendants of biblical Jews. Water has been cut off now to Gaza for 100+ days! Who does that? What kind of people withhold food and water as a weapon? Why are the press targeted? More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in all of WWII. Doctors are targeted. Even Germany in WWI did not target hospitals.

And the residents of the West Bank are not spared. Children are killed by snipers for the crime of picking up a rock. And Israel holds 5000 hostages, some as young as 15 yo, without charges, without review, some of them tortured.

Somehow it is expedient for our government and the governments of the EU to support this new holocaust, while people around the world; while Jews around the world and even Israelis protest non-stop. I have no adequate words for the depth of this tragic depravity.

I don't understand the repeated attempts by Christians, Muslims, Russians, Germans, and assorted Muslim nations, to persecute Jews.

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Part of the challenge with understanding this history lies in FORGETTING this history, stepping backwards a bit and contemplating the underlying human psychology. What does that mean?

The current history we all think we know, including all of the labels we use for the various "peoples" involved is itself so encrusted with faulty history and pointless debates about who did what to who first that any discussion of the underlying mechanisms is swamped by debates over factors that don't explain the underlying social behaviors.

I've thought for a long time that if it were possible to rewind the human world as we know it back to some random but DIFFERENT starting point one hundred thousand years ago, gave the dice a new roll then watched it evolve back to the "present" and compared states, we would find a nearly identical world, only with different names for everything. As an example (and on-topic for this board...), we'd still have multiple organized religions. They would have different names, different "origin stories" and maybe slight differences in their dos and don'ts but the overall dynamic of overlapping / competing / conflicting religions would exist exactly as we now it today.

Why?

Organized religions might be a social mechanism for trying to ensure some minimum set of pro-social norms amid collections of highly socialized animals but the concepts of "sin" and "guilt" involved with virtually every theology prove to be HIGHLY effective in coercing other behaviors that have nothing to do with helping the collective and instead benefit those skilled in using those manipulative techniques. How much human history elapsed before one particularly observant local shaman noticed a consistent pattern of solar activity each year that only that shaman could predict because of his special tie with "the gods"? How long did it take that shaman to realize that his "predictive power" led the people in his collective to shower him with food, gifts, etc. because of his special tie with "the gods?" How long did it take that shaman to realize that setting up a list of do's and don'ts then claiming to damn people for eternity for violating them generated enormous psychological control? How long did it take these crude religions to land upon the ultimate psychological jackpot of tying innate human sexual behaviors to guilt, then to shame, then to silence and coercion against the powerless in the community, especially women but also children?

This distortion of "religiosity" didn't just occur in the late 1980s when stories of sexual abuse began emerging from evangelical ministries and the Catholic Church. Hindsight is now showing that sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church dates back as far as modern records can be reverse engineered and re-interpreted back to the late 1800s. We know multiple Popes had illegitimate children and relationships with women and men so it is one hundred percent certain that priests have ignored their vows for centuries and likely sexually abused women and children from inception. It seems obvious in hindsight that this abuse flourished because the priests understood how to leverage the appearance of their power over their victims' eternal fate to silence them.

At its root, what we call "anti-Semitism" today has nothing to do with the Jewish faith or the Jewish race if you think in those terms. Back to my original point, if you could roll time back one hundred thousand years, re-roll the dice and watch the world through a different one hundred thousand year period of evolution, you would wind up in a nearly identical state only with different names for everything and everyone. But the names don't define the behavior. They're just numbers on the back of the jerseys of the players on the field. The GAME is what's important. And the rules of the game are driven by human psychology and the fight-or-flight mechanism which is driven by FEAR. While humans are highly social, our brains are wired with a hyper-sensitive trip wire based on perceived "differences" so we can rapidly deduce who can be trusted and who cannot. That trip-wire fear of "others" is EXTREMELY difficult to disable and requires repeated "conditional training" to turn off. If humans don't understand that mechanism and how misleading it can be, the "other-ism" overwhelms any "us" instinct and drives the behaviors experienced through history.

Making this point is not merely a means of cynically waving one's hands, saying "what's the point?" and ignoring current issues as unsolvable. The point is that any attempts to address these problems that fixate on current labels and current understandings of past events trying to unwind the clock to determine who was wrong first will utterly fail to solve the problems. These problems can only be solved by explicitly re-conditioning the people stuck in the current cycle to at least scale down the fight-or-flight fear that has completely overwhelmed their judgment.


WTH

Currently, it is the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank that are being brutally oppressed and massacred.

It's a war, Flightdoc. War is horrible. No sane person thinks otherwise.

Hamas started this latest war (caveat -wrt the post WW2 history of the creation of the Israeli state and return of the diaspora; Jews are entitled to a safe place on earth). For a war to end, Hamas must surrender, disarm, and accept conditions that prevent another slaughter of Jews.

Most of the participants of this board are well educated on:
- the history of the Middle East, the Islamic and Jewish diasporas in Asia/Europe/Africa.
- the significant atrocities perpetrated by and for biblical causes.

Yes, it's horrific. Hamas should surrender immediately to stop the carnage.

Nice post, WTF.

Can mankind resolve the Islamic schisms such that 'others' aren't stuck for centuries in the crossfire?

Can mankind resolve the -again- resurgence of white christian nationalist power structures in Europe and the US?

Psychology aside, the game has just changed.

There's no more option for fighters to retreat to their respective corners in safety. Globally Positioned Nuclear Weaponry (GPNW) means everybody has a gun pointed at everybody else.

On that cheery note, I think I'll go dip my toes in the silty surf.

On that cheery note, I think I'll go dip my toes in the silty surf.

Much better than my task of finishing fixing my toilet. :)

It is so clearly a colonial apartheid and genocide.

It is clearly neither.

Since Jews are just as indigenous to the region as anyone else, they cannot be placed into a colonial framework. And while Hamas' decision to wage war while embedded within a civilian population means that any responsive military action will have terrible consequences for civilians, that does not make such responsive military action a genocide. The civilian casualties are impossible to avoid because of Hamas' war crimes, but for something to be genocide the intent and goal of the action has to be the extermination/expulsion of the group.

To their everlasting shame, Egypt and Jordan derailed the partition of the area between two indigenous populations. That partition would have been traumatic for all involved anyway, just as the Partition of India was - and many, many people would have never been returned the status quo (just as millions of now-Pakistanis and Indians never got to return home during that Partition). And the two resulting nations might have had a very uneasy co-existence (again, as India and Pakistan did). But that potential pathway was derailed by the wars in 1948.

But trying to shoehorn the history of the region into a colonial framework ignores the complex history of the Jews in that part of the world, their own experience of conquest and diaspora, and their status as an indigenous people. And labeling it a genocide, rather than recognizing Hamas' strategic decisions to embed their forces entirely within civilian-populated areas (itself a war crime) is also a major mistake.

And don't forget the religious implications. If the Temple Mount did not exist, I think there would be a lot less tensions. But the Jews bob down at the base, and the Muslims built a mosque on the top (which occasionally a crazy Jew tries to blow up), and both regard it as especially "holy". Both sides claim dominion over it.**

Ultimately, both are an indigenous people, and both think that a deity deeded them that plot of land. (That deity must have hated both of them as that bit of land is about the only place in the middle east that doesn't have oil under it.) This further complicates the situation.

Like most people (hopefully!), I am aghast at the civilian casualties. Those are people who just want to work in their shops, feed their families, and not worry about getting shot. But extremists (on both sides) want to push the other group out. In this case, HAMAS didn't like that the situation was cooling in the middle east, so they attacked Israel expecting this response, and hoping that other "Arab" nations would pull back from normalizing Israeli relations. At the same time, I ponder how I would react in that situation. In Afghanistan I was "try to minimize civilian casualties, but get those SOBs". I think Israel (like us in Afghanistan) is pursuing a lost cause: you can't get them all. It's whack-a-mole. We crippled the Taliban, but when we finally left they had had a resurgence, and promptly took over the country again. That same likely will be true with HAMAS.




**Of course, the Xians have their own zaniness, with fights breaking out over who gets to clean a church...but that's not part of the Temple Mount.

I think Israel (like us in Afghanistan) is pursuing a lost cause: you can't get them all. It's whack-a-mole.

What is "the cause"; pacifying anti-jew extremists?

Their officially stated goal is the elimination of HAMAS. I don't think they can do it. Probably not even if they nuked Gaza.

The goal of eliminating Hamas is a crude and transparent canard. Israel is not interested in only eliminating Hamas, but also in the elimination of every Palestinian.

If the goal is the elimination of every Palestinian, they're doing a piss poor job of it.

Their officially stated goal is the elimination of HAMAS. I don't think they can do it. Probably not even if they nuked Gaza.

It's a horrific thing, but as another poster observed, stopping, allowing Hamas to regroup for another slaughter of thousands of Jews is intolerable. .

Imagine the Nazis refusing to surrender, continuing to stage urban attacks on US troops as they rolled north. Do you think we'd retreat, sit in France and allow the Nazis time to regroup? Or would the Allies continue to bomb the crap out of them until they surrendered?

Death toll of German civilians is controversial."Around 600,000 German civilians died during the allies' wartime raids on Germany, including 76,000 German children, Friedrich says. In July 1943, during a single night in Hamburg, 45,000 people perished in a vast firestorm.

Numbers seem irrelevant in a war. War starts when it starts, and ends when someone surrenders. Horrific, huh?

Don't do war!

If the goal is the elimination of every Palestinian, they're doing a piss poor job of it.

Ain't that the truth.

Allied forces killed >45,000 civilians in Hamburg in one night with conventional weapons.

https://www.instagram.com/hiddenpalestine/reel/C1u...

Note that the accusation of genocide was not accepted by the court. Rather, the court's actions were limited to admonishing Israel not to engage in genocide in the future. Which should be a pretty clear indication that the mere act of engaging in military hostilities in an urban area - which inevitably results in a lot of civilian casualties - is not in and of itself genocide or a war crime.

It's not a violation of international law, or genocide, to engage with an enemy belligerent if the belligerent has embedded itself in a civilian population. The enemy belligerent is committing a war crime - you're not allowed to integrate your military infrastructure, personnel, or materiel among civilians. But once they've done that, it doesn't mean that they're allowed to attack with impunity with no response merely because any response will result in large numbers of civilian deaths.

As I said in a prior post, I fully get that. I'm just saying that I very much doubt they will be able to eliminate HAMAS. They might even be doing to unintended recruiting for HAMAS.

It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. Which is exactly what HAMAS had in mind when they started this.

I'm just saying that I very much doubt they will be able to eliminate HAMAS. They might even be doing to unintended recruiting for HAMAS.

Maybe?

The counter-example would be Al Qaeda, or even global Islamist terrorism organizations generally. The Western world - and especially the U.S. - spent an awful lot of resources and blood trying to eliminate Al Qaeda. We ended up killing a lot of civilians, raising (legitimate) fears that we also were doing unintended recruiting for Islamist terror groups. That every innocent civilian killed by a drone strike or offshore missile that missed its mark was spurring the next generation of terrorists in that civilian's loved ones.

Yet in the end, the pushback against Islamist terror organizations....kind of worked? Al Qaeda specifically has been degraded to the point where it no longer has control over its global operations. Islamist terror groups have retreated from the world stage, and are largely engaged in local or at most regional efforts:

"This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the operation, code-named Neptune Spear, that killed Osama bin Laden. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the state of Islamist terrorism and radical Islam more generally. And the initial diagnosis is clear: The movement is in bad shape.

* * *

Most Islamist terrorism today tends to be local — the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa. That’s a major reversal from the glory days of al-Qaeda, when its leaders insisted that the focus must be not on the “near enemy” (the local regimes) but rather the “far enemy” (the United States and the West more broadly). Al-Qaeda has disintegrated into a bunch of militias in disparate places with no central command or ideology. The Islamic State is doing slightly better, with more funds, but it, too, searches for unstable or ungoverned places, such as Mozambique, where it can operate. This focus on local conflicts erodes any global appeal. Muslims around the world do not identify with local causes in Mozambique or Somalia."

https://web.archive.org/web/20211116153800/https:/...

Now then, Israel is locked in a local relationship with Gaza and the West Bank, so they'd have to degrade Hamas further - but I think their hope is that they can degrade Hamas enough that it no longer can function as an organization sufficient to maintain control in Gaza. Ideally (for Israel) that happens if Israel can destroy Hamas. But even if that doesn't happen, if they can weaken Hamas to the point where another faction within Gaza is able to wrest power from them and finish Hamas off, they get still get a partially successful outcome. They don't want Hamas to continue to rule Gaza, and probably regard any alternative - even the PFLP - as a better result than Hamas holding power.

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