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kleinbl00  ·  270 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Palestine and the power of language

    Idk, I guess I really just don't get you. I am trying to understand.

CHECK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS. Every conversation we've had around this has been some form of "the information you are presuming is undisputed and universally accepted is actually anything but that." Yet even now, every conversation we have starts with you going "here's an unassailable maxim" and me going "well actually." You'd be in much better shape, mentally and philosophically, if you started out with "why hasn't anybody figured this shit out" instead of "this intractable problem has been solved by Zoomers and it's grownups who suck."

    Dropping untargetted bombs on civilian centers is already against the rules of war. They have responsibility there too.

However, they have been arguing since October 8 that they're not doing that. Whether or not they are bombing legitimate targets is controversial and, personal opinion here, pretty laughable but whatever they're hitting, they're hitting on purpose. "Ooopsie, guess we blew up your embassy by mistake" is a lot harder pitch when you're using guided weapons. Cut a despot off cold turkey and things get ugly.

    And I can't see how we can ever get to two states when Israel is winning their war to totally subjugate one of the two.

The Oslo Accords were a two-state solution. They were also what Netanyahu used to get Rabin assassinated. The Obama administration also proposed a two-state solution. The singular force against a two-state solution going back to Partition has been Israeli hard-liners and since 1991, Benjamin Netanyahu. "Israel winning against Palestinians" is nothing new; Israel has historically won against four, seven, or ten nation-states at once. What's new is that Israel is getting sick of the hard-liners.

    Or I guess put another way, surely it is uncontroversial that we have historically sided almost exclusively with Israel against the Palestinians, for proxy war and geopolitical reasons, or because evangelicals like it, or whatever.

why do you think that is? Let's focus on something for a minute - NOBODY WANTS THE PALESTINIANS. Much of the Middle East is united in wanting the destruction of Israel, but also united in turning away Palestinian refugees. Jordan doesn't want them because they started a civil war there. Lebanon doesn't want them because they started a civil war there. Kuwait doesn't want them because they tried to start a civil war there and Egypt doesn't want them because they're afraid they'll start a civil war there.

The Israelis are guilty of extreme fuckery by any metric but one thing they've never done to the US is blown up 300 peacekeepers. A half dozen different flavors of Palestinian political parties have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations for decades and yet the prevailing Zoomer consensus is "israel/palestine same/same."

    Palestine has offered an exchange of all hostages for an indefinite ceasefire. Israel rejected it and said that it will just allow Hamas time to regroup.

Gotta say - I'm with the Israelis on this one.

    They propose a temporary ceasefire (weeks) and then a return to the genocide. They will accept nothing other than total military control of Gaza.

Right - the current Israeli plan is untenable and nobody takes it seriously.

    We're backing that plan at the UN.

This is simply false. What we've done at the UN is veto the Palestinian plan, not support the Israeli plan.

    I cannot understand how you believe that we are doing everything we can to save Gazan lives and to ensure they will be able to keep an independent state.

Because I know more about this situation than you do. And I'd have a lot more patience if you didn't phrase every response in terms of "no matter what you say you're just wrong."