just had to write some stuff about Israel-Palestine down to organize my thoughts, not even specifically relevant to the current phase of conflict, mostly just subtweeting all the annoying people I see on twitter
A few truths about Israel-Palestine that are in my view basically indisputable
For the leftists:
1. There is absolutely no conceivable scenario where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolves with Israel not existing as a state and not retaining at least the 1967 borders (besides the remote but technically possible chance of a binational state). The idea that Israel proper will be “decolonized” is an absolute fantasy. I understand there might be tactical value in disputing this, as like a “high opening bid” in negotiations so that when the inevitable compromise comes you can concede the fantasies and agree to something like 1967 borders. But you must understand that that is all it is.
2. Islamists being in charge of Palestine as a polity makes the prospect of a sovereign Palestinian state in the world even more unthinkable than it already was. A more secular-leaning party like Fatah (or some other party that doesn’t exist yet or is currently only marginal) coming to power is basically a precondition for any independent Palestine.
3. Violence will inevitably be part of the negotiation for a resolution to the conflict. Violence is not an alternative to “peace talks”, violence is part of the peace talks. But as a corollary to this, people should recognize that Palestine is never going to “win” militarily. There is no conceivable scenario where Israel is defeated decisively on the battlefield. These attacks are part of a negotiation, a credible signal that says “see what we’re capable of?” But crucially, they’re not capable of fending off the Israeli counterattack. Israel will retaliate and kill 10 times as many people and there’s nothing the Palestinian forces can do to prevent that. That’s what I mean. Israel won’t be defeated, merely harassed.
4. The Palestinian liberation movement--both in the earlier days when led by secular-leaning and leftist groups like the PLO and PFLP, and in its current form led by Hamas--commits atrocities against civilians much more routinely and comfortably than almost any other national liberation movement in the last half-century. All terrorist groups get their share of blame and condemnation, but it's simply false to say that all of them behave the same and therefore the condemnation means nothing. Groups like the IRA, PKK, ANC, FRELIMO, and West Papua National Liberation Army have not historically committed the same kinds of atrocities at anything like the frequency and routineness that Palestinian liberation groups do. All have committed some atrocities, and you can try to make an argument that those are just the eggs that have to be broken in order to make the omelette. But since they all have committed substantially fewer atrocities, that suggests clearly many of Hamas and co.'s are excessive.
5. A significant portion (perhaps the majority?) of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews who have emigrated to Israel since its founding were forced to flee the various Arab countries they used to live in due to pogroms and expulsions in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. This history offers yet another reason people doubt the possibility of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in a single state.
For the liberals and/or Zionists:
1. There's a reason there is a world consensus in favor of a two-state solution along the 1967 borders and it's not that the whole world is controlled by Hitlerites. Israel's position is indefensible. There is no version of international law or the concept of national self-determination that allows Israel to indefinitely occupy the Palestinian territories or to annex any part of them. Israel is an international outlier. No other country in the world occupies a densely-populated stateless territory full of 5 million stateless citizens. That's not a thing that's allowed to exist in international law. The only legitimate stateless territory is Antarctica, where no people live.
The Palestinian territories--Gaza and the West Bank, as defined in 1967--are either (1) the sovereign territory of a sovereign state, in which case Israel is at war with that country, occupying that country, and the settlements are therefore completely illegal and outrageous; or (2) they are the sovereign territory of a single state that encompasses all of the former Mandate of Palestine, in which case Israel has built an enormous system of apartheid that denies citizenship, freedom of movement, and civil rights to approximately 1/3 of its population, who are segregated in strictly-controlled unrecognized bantustans. It can't be both, you have to pick one or the other. Israel cannot settle the West Bank if the West Bank is some foreign country that Israel is at war with and legitimately occupying. And if it's not a foreign country, if there is no foreign country, then by default it is Israeli territory that must enshrine the equal rights of all its inhabitants. You don't get to pick and choose the elements of each of the two scenarios that benefit you more.
2. For the last five decades, Israel has killed ten times as many people as Palestinian forces have. Their only fig leaf of defense is that they kill the majority with bombing, rather than shooting, which is impersonal and allows an infinitesimal degree of deniability that the civilians they're killing are being intentionally killed. You'll have to forgive the world for not granting this fig leaf much credit. Furthermore, no one cares about the lengths the "most moral army in the world" is supposedly going to in order to minimize civilian harm when the result is the same as always: a 10-to-1 ratio of retaliatory killing that colonial armies throughout modern history have enacted whenever there is violence by the natives. If you'll return to the list of national liberation struggles above, you'll note that not all of them were suppressed by their enemies with such an enormous ratio. The British in Northern Ireland often resorted to brutality in their war to suppress the IRA, but they did not kill ten times as many as the IRA did. Even if Israel's war were completely legitimate, they are clearly being excessive.
3. Attacks by Palestinian forces against Israel cannot possibly be defined as "unprovoked". The status quo in the West Bank is the slow-motion annihilation of any possibility of a Palestinian state as the settlements continue to expand and become entrenched to the point that any possibility of their eventual evacuation becomes increasingly remote. To think that the attempted interruption of this status quo by counter-offensives from Palestinian militants is some kind of aggression on their part is preposterous. They're under occupation and they're fighting it, as is their right. Particular acts in the fighting most assuredly constitute war crimes, but the idea that the fighting itself is criminal is categorically false.
Unless, of course, you were to admit that there is no foreign country under occupation, it's all just sovereign Israeli territory, in which case these are domestic terrorists, not occupied foreigners. Then they would be criminals again, though only criminals against an illegitimate apartheid regime.
4. The founding of the state of Israel was a messy process and reversing that process is impossible anyway. But it was not straightforwardly legitimate and the world is not obligated to respect Israel's founding ideology. None of the basic tenets of Zionism are legitimate universal principles. Not every identifiable ethnic group in the world is entitled to their own state. They can't all have them, it would never work, everyone already knows this and accepts it regarding hundreds of different ethnic groups. The complaint that the Jewish people are somehow being "singled out" for discrimination if they were denied their own nation-state is completely ludicrous. Also ludicrous is the idea that Jews whose ancestors have not lived in the region for over 1,000 years have any special right to migrate to the region that any other human being shouldn't have. Aliyah is an illegitimate and racist policy, and the idea that Ashkenazi Jews from the US or Russia have a greater "right of return" allowing them to live in Tel Aviv than Palestinian refugees in Jordan is completely laughable.
Tossing this one back out there. Nothing has changed in two and a half years.
