this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Within Israel, the vast majority of people don't particularly care about any kind of manifest destiny style reclamation of the West Bank or Gaza, and if that were the only issue, I genuinely don't think there would be a significant problem.
What essentially everyone does care about, however, is repeatedly having rockets lobbed at them. When people feel under threat, reason starts to fall away, people begin dehumanizing the "other", and you get the massive mess we have today. The fact of the matter is that Israel will never accept any situation where its people are under threat. No matter what you think about what acts are or aren't justified or your opinion on how various parts of the history played out, none of that changes this basic reality.
Palestine is not going to be able to militarily eradicate Israel. There is precisely zero chance that Israelis allow themselves to be subjected to a second diaspora and they'll fight to the death to prevent this, and that's to say nothing of external players like the United States. Again, whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing, it is a true thing.
On the flip side, Israel is perfectly capable of essentially eradicating the Palestinians, though this would subject it to massive international condemnation that would also have huge economic impacts. You're already beginning to see whispers of this as the world increasingly sees Israel's response in Gaza as being excessively harsh. The most they could do is a slow and steady degradation of Palestinian society while encouraging them to "voluntarily" leave, which is arguably what the strategy has essentially been under Likud with settlements and the like.
So, what's required for a peaceful co-existence? Firstly, you need a mutual acknowledgement from both leaders (and also, a legitimate Palestinian leadership in the first place) that the other side exists and has a right to do so, ie, Palestinians giving up on the idea of eradicating Israel and Israelis giving up on the idea of fully annexing and ethnically cleaning Palestinian lands. This is not a trivial thing. The Israeli far-right, though they're not dominant, are growing and believe they have a divine right to the West Bank, with the Arabs being seen as little more than animals in the way. The extreme Palestinian side is that all Israelis are essentially foreign invaders and should be forcibly removed or killed. Both of these positions must be completely taken off the table.
Secondly, Israel will not engage unless it is confident that its security will not be threatened, which will in practice mean that Palestinian authorities must be de-militarized beyond what's necessary for basic local law enforcement. Again, this might seem unfair, and hell, it probably is. But the fact of the matter remains that Israel is the side holding the guns here, so you either play by their rules and try to find some positive outcome, or you flip the table and enjoy the complete loss, but with some moral satisfaction. Similarly, there would probably need to be some kind of border controls for imports that Israeli authorities can inspect for covert weapons shipments, since it's a known thing that Iran does regularly try to bring weapons into Gaza. Ideally, this would be some kind of bi-national force with Palestinian cooperation.
If you reach these points, then you still have other very big questions to deal with, like precise borders, land swaps, the question of Jerusalem, how to connect Gaza and the West Bank, any right of return for displaced Palestinians both recently and during the Nakba, and plenty of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting about. But ultimately, if you have a Palestinian and Israeli leadership that are actually interested in peace and accept the existence of the other, and both agree to cooperate on matters of security and prioritizing that peace above and past grievances, no matter how legitimate, that gives you a real foundation you can build from.
I wouldn't get my hopes up though.
I get what you mean, but the current situation has continued since even before the rocket attacks. Gaza was blockaded before rocket attacks even became a thing (setting aside the second Intifada because that's its own thing). What I mean is: Israeli's feeling under threat is probably a factor, but it's not the main issue.
True enough, but let's remember that it's Israel that engineered a situation where they can claim Palestine has no legitimate leadership. You're not wrong about the fact, but I just wanted to make the cause clear.
For sure, I'm not at all trying to portray Israel as blameless here, because they are not.
I think the blockade does have some basic level of merit, at least in principle (it can't really be doubted that Hamas does import weapons and materials with Iranian backing), but it's critical that those kinds of controls only go as far as they're needed and no further. However, the Israeli government has never really cared about not going to far, so Palestinians have no real reason to trust that they're being treated in good faith, violence comes to feel like the only real option, and onwards the mess rolls along.
Along with Palestinians needing to accept that Israel is going to exist in some capacity and that it will not accept any deal that doesn't ensure its security, Israelis need to accept that if they don't take every step towards keeping peaceful paths available and fruitful, then people will turn to violent ones. Israel can of course easily win a conflict of violence, but it doesn't have to be this way
That's essentially the reality of the situation, though. The land was populated by Palestinians before Europe and the rest of the Middle East NIMBY'd their remaining Jewish populations to Israel.
Maybe if it was the 1940s this would be a bit more accurate, but at this point, we're a couple generations removed from the original mass displacements. Most Israelis today were born there.
Like I said, the way towards progress lies with both sides finding a way to get over historical grievances of who started what and who's to blame for this and that and instead accepting the fact that they're both here now and need to find a way to exist with each other.
You literally just described a settler state, complete with using reproduction as an occupying tactic.
Israel, the state, is illegitimate and needs to be dissolved. The Israeli people can integrate and co-createba society with the Palestinians or they can GTFO. Any that stay to explicitly disrupt this and form reactionary movements can get rekt.
However, as you say, this reality won't stop the genocide. So a two-state solution is the most likely interim step.
This is all kinds of wrong.
Zionism was a Jewish movement. Antisemitism was not NIMBYism, that's a pretty horrible thing to say, it was persecution, pogroms, attacks, the holocaust, a constant stream of hate and oppression. Zionism was certainly not a movement of the Europeans and Middle Easterners who persecuted us. It was our movement. Zionism was not just an escape, but also a long held dream of the Jewish people that coalesced as it became plausible in late Ottoman policy. It was finally possible for Jews to buy land in, and immigrate to, Israel, so many of us did.
We are not foreign to Israel. It is our indigenous homeland. As the rest of the world rejected us, we no longer felt safe as strangers in strange lands. We considered the possibility of having our own nation on borrowed land from the Russians, or from the Germans, or in Alaska. We didn't care for those ideas because of how stupid they were. We wanted a homeland in our homeland. If you don't understand Jewish indigeneity in Judea, maybe you're not ready to talk about complex topics.
As for the Palestinian ties to the land—Palestinian nationalism barely existed before Jewish people started returning to Israel. Arabs in the various Ottoman Sanjaks or whatever division there was at the time were mostly traveling merchants or pilgrims; there was, of course, a small permanent population, which included Jews (always, despite various efforts to remove them or ban them), Christians, and Muslims, but that population expanded dramatically starting in the mid-late 1800s on all fronts. The Arabs then either continued to call themselves Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians ("Jordan" and "Palestine" were part of the same colony, I hope you know), or they subscribed to some conception of pan-Arabism. The word "Palestinian," to the extent was used at all before the ~1960s, was used largely to refer to whoever happened to be in Palestine (like "New Yorker," not referring to a race of some kind), or specifically, in Europe, to refer to Jews. Palestinian nationalism largely gained traction in the 1960s as a political movement, and even then, many leaders were committed to pan-Arabism but treated Palestinian identity as a useful political fiction; Zuhair Moshen in particular, as a leader of the PLO, pushed these ideas, and in much of the politics between the West Bank and Jordan through that period. Of course, since the 1940s, Palestinian identity has taken on new meanings, but many of these meanings are young, and the vast majority of these peoples' ties to the land start between the 1800s and 1948—a beat before similarly-shaped spikes in the Jewish return.
Palestinian nationalism is now used in other Arab countries to keep Palestinian Arabs oppressed; Jordan revoked their Jordanian citizenship, Lebanon refuses to grant them basic rights, UNRWA refuses to resettle them across multiple generations.
If Jews are indigenous to Judea does that mean that Jews never intermarried with Jews of other countries? And if they did, how can they then be called indigenous any more?
... what?
"Jews of other countries" are also indigenous to Israel / Judea / Canaan / Palestine / whatever you want to call it. I'm a Persian-American Jew. Before Iran, my community came from Israel. Is it possible that there are some Russian Jews in my family tree? Or Egyptian Jews? Or Bucharian Jews? Or Iraqi Jews? Yes. Are they all still indigenous to Israel? Yes.
Conversion to Judaism is extremely rare, but it does happen. Is it possible that some portion of my family tree converted to Judaism and is not indigenous to Israel? Sure. Does one drop of Iranian blood in m DNA make me somehow not indigenous to the place the rest of my ancestors are from? Hell the fuck no. Especially given that my ancestors in Iran were never welcome for long. It's also worth noting that, since the Arab Conquest reached Iran, conversion from Islam has been, for most of that time, illegal (it's currently punishable by death!), so the idea of converts to Judaism is extremely rare.
This is a strange, disturbing line of reasoning. You wouldn't ask Native Americans with ancestors from two different tribes how they can be called indigenous, would you?
What's going on here?
Actually the opposite, it's a line of reasoning that supposes that no-one is really indigenous to anywhere in particular, thereby avoiding the good ol' extreme claims to sovereignity.
The history of Israel is littered with invasion anyway, so again, the idea of indigenous peoples at this point requires a reworking of the definition of 'indigenous' to people who have lived there for some time.
I'm expecting a bit of the ol' 'It was the Jew's to begin with' so I'll just say in advance there's no point in my continuing if that starts cropping up in replies.
... what? So you don't know what indigeneity is, so you just said, "fuck it, we're going to do away with the concept altogether so nobody has a right to live anywhere at all!"
I'm always baffled as to where you people think the Jews should be living.
Thanks for the detailed and thought out response. I can't help but notice that it's built on a foundation of autocracy and Israeli exceptionalism i.e. Israel holds all the guns so they call the shots and they have the singular privilege of having non-hostile neighbors while every other country in the world except the U.S. should respect negotiations and international law, and many have hostile neighbors but that's ok. I can't blame you, though, because the narrative is thus constructed: Israel alone has the right to security, Israel alone has the right to self-determination, Israel alone has the right to self-defense, etc. Why doesn't Palestine? The narrative says "because they lob mortar shells over the fence" which is a pure double standard (Israeli exceptionalism). History must be erased to maintain the narrative, like the invasion of Akka among many others. When a country has such a consistent history, it's rational to believe that they will continue annexing Palestinian lands, so it's very important that the narrative removes the Palestinian right to self-defense as well as erasing Israel's colonial history. The truth is different, though.
I'm speaking solely to the facts on the ground.
Regardless of anyone's thoughts on the matter, Israel does hold all the guns here. Rights and privileges mean as much as the paper they're printed on. In a perfect world, Israel and Palestine would exist side by side as peaceful partners, each with fully fledged institutions and militaries and all that jazz. But unless Israel is confident that a Palestinian military won't have its destruction as its primary goal, it will not allow that to happen, no matter how much pontificating about rights and narratives and double standards anyone does. I'm not trying to talk about who's "right", whatever that even means. I'm talking about the actual situation and what will actually happen, regardless of anyone's opinions on the matter.
And an Israeli would say that Palestinians have a consistent history of attempting to murder Israeli civilians and so it is rational to never allow them to build up any military power, and thus the circus goes round. My point is that no amount of moral superiority means very much if you don't have actual power to go along with it, and Palestinians simply do not. If the goal is actually to develop a real peace rather than avenge any sins of the past, both sides will have to give up on prior grievances and decide that they care more about the lives of their children than their own pride. It's hard to imagine the situation being much worse than it already is (though I'm sure it'll find a way)