I don't see any top-level comments actually discussing the arguments the author is putting forward, so I'll add my thoughts. I agree with the notion that there is more to the conflict than just...
Exemplary
I don't see any top-level comments actually discussing the arguments the author is putting forward, so I'll add my thoughts. I agree with the notion that there is more to the conflict than just two sides, and that the term "Israel-Palestine conflict" doesn't do justice to the diversity of opinion represented by all the involved parties. However, he recycles the oft-cited discourse that Israel's enemies represent unacceptable threats to national security and that Israel's military occupation of Palestine is primarily intended to serve as a bulwark against these threats. If we take this logic to its extremes, we can justify atrocities in the name of prevention, e.g. the Iraq war (in that case, the supposed "threat" turned out to be nonexistent, and we now understand the Iraq war as the illegitimate power and resource grab that it was, an act of aggression which blatantly violated international law). The possibility of a sovereign Palestinian territory that cooperates with Israel in good faith to ensure joint security is hand-waved away, because "it will wind up creating not a state but a power vacuum destined to be filled by intra-Muslim chaos, or Iranian proxies, or some combination of both." This presumes the inability of Palestinians to govern themselves, which is a poor justification for having Israelis rule over them instead. Yet the conflict is not solely about protecting Israel from external threats like Iran. I doubt these Israeli settlers pushing Palestinians off their farmland, for example, are doing so because they want to make sure they're safe from Iran. Dynamics other than national security are at play, and the way the author presents those concerns as overdetermining the nature of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is meant to justify the status quo.
I don’t think the problem is that other people are naive, it’s that we are naive, we know we are naive, and there are very good reasons to distrust every analysis by default because there is a lot...
I don’t think the problem is that other people are naive, it’s that we are naive, we know we are naive, and there are very good reasons to distrust every analysis by default because there is a lot of propaganda and lying. The more passionate the argument is, the more we should distrust it. Certainly all online opinions by strangers should be distrusted, people caught up in the war should be distrusted since they’re not free to say what they think, and I’m not too sure about the journalists. I’m not sure about NGO’s like Human Rights Watch either. The situation might be described as epistemic learned helplessness.
I’ve read a few serious history books about this conflict but think I think they were seriously biased. I don’t care enough to become an expert and there is no trusted authority to outsource our thinking to either.
Sure, I trust the newspapers enough to report some of the basic facts that aren’t easily faked, but that’s about it.
Thanks for clarifying, I agree. On-the-ground reporting and testimonies from citizens of Israel and Palestine is probably the best us on the outside will get.
Thanks for clarifying, I agree. On-the-ground reporting and testimonies from citizens of Israel and Palestine is probably the best us on the outside will get.
I'm sympathetic to your point that we can't possibly understand what people on the ground are going through right now. It can feel weird to talk about a struggle that isn't one's own. I don't know...
I'm sympathetic to your point that we can't possibly understand what people on the ground are going through right now. It can feel weird to talk about a struggle that isn't one's own. I don't know about you, but I'm from the United States. The U.S. is a huge part of this conflict, because it supports Israel militarily and diplomatically. Therefore, I believe I have a responsibility to do my research, have an opinion, and advocate for a peaceful resolution to the conflict and the liberation of Palestinians from oppression. Although I am not on the ground, my country is part of perpetuating this violence and represents me in some way. Palestinians can't afford for me and others to stay silent on the issue because "we don't know what it's like."
As Americans, we can reasonably discuss the matter in the same way we "reasonably" engineer and pay for all the guided munitions that are killing children. It's not just Israel that pays the price...
As Americans, we can reasonably discuss the matter in the same way we "reasonably" engineer and pay for all the guided munitions that are killing children. It's not just Israel that pays the price for that barbarism: America's name is on every one if those missiles and aircraft and so is our reputation and moral authority in the world.
When Israel pays for and develops their own weapons they can get indignant about Americans asking why they are subjecting these people to disproportionate levels of violence.
Israel has every right to exist and defend itself. What's happening now with levelling clinics and media buildings is retroactive to those goals and puts America in danger to boot.
I think that taking sides (as many have done in the past few weeks) in this conflict is a bad idea. I think it's natural that many people do, as the Palestians are in this case, the underdog. They...
I think that taking sides (as many have done in the past few weeks) in this conflict is a bad idea. I think it's natural that many people do, as the Palestians are in this case, the underdog. They have no meaningful power and Israel does, and on top of that its largest ally is the US, which has invested a great deal of money and manpower to keep Israel on top, up to some states passing laws that make it more difficult to boycott Israeli products as civilians. Georgia literally has a law that requires individuals to certify that they are not boycotting Israel to be eligible to work with the state. So much for the 1st amendment lol.
That being said, it's not like Palestine is making it easier for themselves. In general I consider Israel's base reason for settling pretty shit. But the Palestinians could've welcomed the jews and tried to live alongside them, but prejudice wouldn't allow that. The surrounding states have been perpetually hostile to Israel since its founding. Now that Israel is more powerful than ever and Palestine isn't even a really recognized country anywhere and Israel has firmly placed itself in the role of the oppressor. This needless expansion for a religious cause strains every relationship, the treatment of the muslims is terrible. But it's not like the other side is willing to compromise either.
In the end, I don't think there are any good sides here. And I also don't know how you would create lasting peace between the factions, since they do not accept or tolerate each other and both claim territorry that they want to control 100%. Generations on both sides have been scarred into distrustring each other.
The only potential I can think of would be turning Jerusalem into an independent city-state as a "you guys cannot handle it so now no one gets it" deal, but that's just not how geopolitics work. People live in that city, and they have an opinion too.
I don't think you can just summarize early Palestinian hostility to zionists as simple prejudice. Arabs had a long history of coexisting with Jewish populations, but Zionist immigration started in...
I don't think you can just summarize early Palestinian hostility to zionists as simple prejudice. Arabs had a long history of coexisting with Jewish populations, but Zionist immigration started in a context of competing nationalist independence movements in the region and an ongoing history of colonialism that played a much bigger role in early conflict, I think, and Israel was formed out of the power dynamics of those things.
I am not summarizing it as such, as I said, Israel is waging war against a group of people that cannot meaningfully defend themselves. The plight of the Palestinians right now is valid. But at the...
I am not summarizing it as such, as I said, Israel is waging war against a group of people that cannot meaningfully defend themselves. The plight of the Palestinians right now is valid. But at the same time, it doesn't seem to me that they are trying to defend themselves, but wage a war back to drive the Israelis out.
I think this is a little reductionist - it's totally true that many people coexisted, but many didn't. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini was a key Palestinian nationalist, who went...
I think this is a little reductionist - it's totally true that many people coexisted, but many didn't. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini was a key Palestinian nationalist, who went to Nazi Germany in order to petition for an Independant Arabia and voiced his support for the Holocaust.
I'm sure the multitude of war crimes committed by the Israeli state has already been brought up here.
The bottom line is that both ethnic Jews and ethnic Arabs and Palestinians (at varying times political activists in Palestine would consider themselves one or both) have lived in the region for many years, and have both been moved by colonial powers, and the conflict runs very deep. In some ways it's not a simple prejudice, due to the long history, but in other ways I think that the longstanding hatred and distrust in a way becomes a sort of simple prejudice when both sides look at the long tally sheet of atrocities and simply decide each other are no longer to be trusted.
Al-Husseini was a nationalist whose opposition to Zionist colonialism dovetailed into Nazi political ideology, but that was all just of its time, not some consequence of deep-seated ethnic prejudice.
Al-Husseini was a nationalist whose opposition to Zionist colonialism dovetailed into Nazi political ideology, but that was all just of its time, not some consequence of deep-seated ethnic prejudice.
Hm, I'm not sure I agree. That's seems like the definition of deep seated ethnic prejudice. He did recruit for the Bosnian SS, so it seems he more than dovetailed into naziism.
Hm, I'm not sure I agree. That's seems like the definition of deep seated ethnic prejudice.
He did recruit for the Bosnian SS, so it seems he more than dovetailed into naziism.
I agree with what you're saying here, and I want to chime in. I think the kind of take you're responding to can operate in a disingenuous way. First, it presents the conflict as being between...
Exemplary
I agree with what you're saying here, and I want to chime in. I think the kind of take you're responding to can operate in a disingenuous way. First, it presents the conflict as being between "sides," of which there are usually just "Palestinians" and "Israelis" (sometimes a bit more nuanced than that), then it says neither side wants to reconcile, neither side wants peace, both sides just want to kill or exterminate the other, etc. This framing creates a situation where you're either totally for one side and against the other, vice versa, or "this problem is unsolvable and therefore there's nothing we can do about it."
Of course, the problem is absolutely solvable and there are things we can do about it. We can start by recognizing that "Palestinians" are comprised of various factions including but not limited to Hamas in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Palestinians of all political persuasions, some of whom are the type who would say the only solution is driving the other side out completely, but there are also plenty who don't believe that, who believe some kind of middle ground is possible so long as Israel stops forcibly displacing them from their homes and bombing their children, who are accepting of Israelis but not of the actions of Israeli state security forces. Israelis are also comprised of many groups: the Israeli state, the Israeli military, Israeli human rights NGOs, settlers being paid by the government, Israelis who think all Palestinians have to go, and also Israelis who think a solution is possible if their government would just stop forcibly displacing Palestinians and seizing their land, Israelis who accept Palestinians and don't want to see them killed. Once we see that there is more here than just "Palestinians" and "Israelis" (which we now understand is an incredibly essentialist binary) we realize that there are indeed some parties to the conflict that we can reasonably get behind, who are advocating for something other than continued violence and retaliation. For example, this Israeli NGO recognizes the actions of Hamas as war crimes, but also recognizes that Israel has implemented an apartheid state where Palestinians are subjected to suffering and humiliation on the basis of their ethnicity. There are factions of Palestinians who recognize this too (though unfortunately I'm not knowledgeable enough to know any off the top of my head). It's these people we can look to and support to actually move the conflict forward towards some kind of resolution that doesn't end with Israeli encroachment on Palestinian land and the associated violence. This idea that there are only two sides and that neither of them can, in good conscience, be approved of or supported, and that therefore we should just throw our hands up and let it happen totally misses all of this nuance, misses the fact that there are factions who are being reasonable that we can support.
I agree with you. As I said, it's just not how geopolitics work. Any agreements concerning Jerulasem have pretty much been nullified by all the war that came after it. There is a lot of violence,...
I agree with you. As I said, it's just not how geopolitics work. Any agreements concerning Jerulasem have pretty much been nullified by all the war that came after it. There is a lot of violence, crime but also valid accusations on both sides here.
I was a very late adopter of Instagram and joined in late 2019 because a few people I wanted to stay in touch with had deleted their Facebook accounts. The first thing that really stood out to me...
I was a very late adopter of Instagram and joined in late 2019 because a few people I wanted to stay in touch with had deleted their Facebook accounts. The first thing that really stood out to me was the prevalence of those infographics and slide guides. It's particularly frustrating because I see all of these progressive people sharing infographics and slide guides on their IG stories and calling it a day, while on Facebook there is an infinite spread of conservative memes, disinformation, and conspiratorial ramblings that get 20x the engagement and go completely unchecked. Those infographics serve a fine purpose of making oblivious people acutely aware of an issue, but they aren't a meaningful substitute for real political discussion which, like it or not, occurs a lot more on Facebook.
I saw that infographic making its rounds on my Instagram story feed. I remember when the IG story feed used to be filled with people sharing nice little snapshots of their daily lives: a bread...
I saw that infographic making its rounds on my Instagram story feed. I remember when the IG story feed used to be filled with people sharing nice little snapshots of their daily lives: a bread well-baked, a sunset, a laugh, a little achievement...
Now it's just filled with memes, infographics, opinions, news — the FB newsfeed reborn. Except it's not a public conversation: it's them beaming their message to me unidirectionally.
I see friends and acquaintances endlessly resharing the same infographics. It frustrates me to no end because no one seems to form and write their own opinions about things, inflected by their own philosophical frameworks: they just reshare a prepackaged opinion made by someone else.
This is pretty much exclusively why I left Instagram behind after a few years. Seeing my friends and aquaintances mindlessly posting these just made me sad.
This is pretty much exclusively why I left Instagram behind after a few years. Seeing my friends and aquaintances mindlessly posting these just made me sad.
I'm not sure I agree. I found 2 main theses: Israel is in constant conflict with it's neighbors, whether active or not. Even if Palestine did not exist today, the conflict would still exist as...
I'm not sure I agree. I found 2 main theses:
Israel is in constant conflict with it's neighbors, whether active or not. Even if Palestine did not exist today, the conflict would still exist as Israel is surrounded by hostile nations
The conflict will continue to exist as long as it's surrounded by countries that want it destroyed. No matter what, whether Gaza is annexed or the borders are returned to 1947, as long as societies in the middle east cannot provide good lives for their inhabitants*, and as long as there are dictators and oppressive regimes, there will be conflict and terrorism.
*As someone critical of US galavanting in the middle east, I can fully place no small amount of blame for this on the US, Europe, and USSR's meddlings in the region
Seems like the author has zoomed out and discovered that the enemy is everywhere (except where Israel just so happens to be bombing and displacing people most actively?) Saying "please disregard...
Seems like the author has zoomed out and discovered that the enemy is everywhere (except where Israel just so happens to be bombing and displacing people most actively?)
Saying "please disregard the actual actions you just don't or couldn't understand. There's a big picture here for why I'm doing something terrible" is a very weak argument.
I don't see any top-level comments actually discussing the arguments the author is putting forward, so I'll add my thoughts. I agree with the notion that there is more to the conflict than just two sides, and that the term "Israel-Palestine conflict" doesn't do justice to the diversity of opinion represented by all the involved parties. However, he recycles the oft-cited discourse that Israel's enemies represent unacceptable threats to national security and that Israel's military occupation of Palestine is primarily intended to serve as a bulwark against these threats. If we take this logic to its extremes, we can justify atrocities in the name of prevention, e.g. the Iraq war (in that case, the supposed "threat" turned out to be nonexistent, and we now understand the Iraq war as the illegitimate power and resource grab that it was, an act of aggression which blatantly violated international law). The possibility of a sovereign Palestinian territory that cooperates with Israel in good faith to ensure joint security is hand-waved away, because "it will wind up creating not a state but a power vacuum destined to be filled by intra-Muslim chaos, or Iranian proxies, or some combination of both." This presumes the inability of Palestinians to govern themselves, which is a poor justification for having Israelis rule over them instead. Yet the conflict is not solely about protecting Israel from external threats like Iran. I doubt these Israeli settlers pushing Palestinians off their farmland, for example, are doing so because they want to make sure they're safe from Iran. Dynamics other than national security are at play, and the way the author presents those concerns as overdetermining the nature of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is meant to justify the status quo.
In the same way we would discuss anything else?
I don’t think the problem is that other people are naive, it’s that we are naive, we know we are naive, and there are very good reasons to distrust every analysis by default because there is a lot of propaganda and lying. The more passionate the argument is, the more we should distrust it. Certainly all online opinions by strangers should be distrusted, people caught up in the war should be distrusted since they’re not free to say what they think, and I’m not too sure about the journalists. I’m not sure about NGO’s like Human Rights Watch either. The situation might be described as epistemic learned helplessness.
I’ve read a few serious history books about this conflict but think I think they were seriously biased. I don’t care enough to become an expert and there is no trusted authority to outsource our thinking to either.
Sure, I trust the newspapers enough to report some of the basic facts that aren’t easily faked, but that’s about it.
Thanks for clarifying, I agree. On-the-ground reporting and testimonies from citizens of Israel and Palestine is probably the best us on the outside will get.
I'm sympathetic to your point that we can't possibly understand what people on the ground are going through right now. It can feel weird to talk about a struggle that isn't one's own. I don't know about you, but I'm from the United States. The U.S. is a huge part of this conflict, because it supports Israel militarily and diplomatically. Therefore, I believe I have a responsibility to do my research, have an opinion, and advocate for a peaceful resolution to the conflict and the liberation of Palestinians from oppression. Although I am not on the ground, my country is part of perpetuating this violence and represents me in some way. Palestinians can't afford for me and others to stay silent on the issue because "we don't know what it's like."
As Americans, we can reasonably discuss the matter in the same way we "reasonably" engineer and pay for all the guided munitions that are killing children. It's not just Israel that pays the price for that barbarism: America's name is on every one if those missiles and aircraft and so is our reputation and moral authority in the world.
When Israel pays for and develops their own weapons they can get indignant about Americans asking why they are subjecting these people to disproportionate levels of violence.
Israel has every right to exist and defend itself. What's happening now with levelling clinics and media buildings is retroactive to those goals and puts America in danger to boot.
I think that taking sides (as many have done in the past few weeks) in this conflict is a bad idea. I think it's natural that many people do, as the Palestians are in this case, the underdog. They have no meaningful power and Israel does, and on top of that its largest ally is the US, which has invested a great deal of money and manpower to keep Israel on top, up to some states passing laws that make it more difficult to boycott Israeli products as civilians. Georgia literally has a law that requires individuals to certify that they are not boycotting Israel to be eligible to work with the state. So much for the 1st amendment lol.
That being said, it's not like Palestine is making it easier for themselves. In general I consider Israel's base reason for settling pretty shit. But the Palestinians could've welcomed the jews and tried to live alongside them, but prejudice wouldn't allow that. The surrounding states have been perpetually hostile to Israel since its founding. Now that Israel is more powerful than ever and Palestine isn't even a really recognized country anywhere and Israel has firmly placed itself in the role of the oppressor. This needless expansion for a religious cause strains every relationship, the treatment of the muslims is terrible. But it's not like the other side is willing to compromise either.
In the end, I don't think there are any good sides here. And I also don't know how you would create lasting peace between the factions, since they do not accept or tolerate each other and both claim territorry that they want to control 100%. Generations on both sides have been scarred into distrustring each other.
The only potential I can think of would be turning Jerusalem into an independent city-state as a "you guys cannot handle it so now no one gets it" deal, but that's just not how geopolitics work. People live in that city, and they have an opinion too.
I don't think you can just summarize early Palestinian hostility to zionists as simple prejudice. Arabs had a long history of coexisting with Jewish populations, but Zionist immigration started in a context of competing nationalist independence movements in the region and an ongoing history of colonialism that played a much bigger role in early conflict, I think, and Israel was formed out of the power dynamics of those things.
I am not summarizing it as such, as I said, Israel is waging war against a group of people that cannot meaningfully defend themselves. The plight of the Palestinians right now is valid. But at the same time, it doesn't seem to me that they are trying to defend themselves, but wage a war back to drive the Israelis out.
I think this is a little reductionist - it's totally true that many people coexisted, but many didn't. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini was a key Palestinian nationalist, who went to Nazi Germany in order to petition for an Independant Arabia and voiced his support for the Holocaust.
I'm sure the multitude of war crimes committed by the Israeli state has already been brought up here.
The bottom line is that both ethnic Jews and ethnic Arabs and Palestinians (at varying times political activists in Palestine would consider themselves one or both) have lived in the region for many years, and have both been moved by colonial powers, and the conflict runs very deep. In some ways it's not a simple prejudice, due to the long history, but in other ways I think that the longstanding hatred and distrust in a way becomes a sort of simple prejudice when both sides look at the long tally sheet of atrocities and simply decide each other are no longer to be trusted.
Al-Husseini was a nationalist whose opposition to Zionist colonialism dovetailed into Nazi political ideology, but that was all just of its time, not some consequence of deep-seated ethnic prejudice.
Hm, I'm not sure I agree. That's seems like the definition of deep seated ethnic prejudice.
He did recruit for the Bosnian SS, so it seems he more than dovetailed into naziism.
If you're referring to Nazism specifically, sure, but I think the link between Arab nationalism and Nazism was much more transient and spontaneous.
I agree with what you're saying here, and I want to chime in. I think the kind of take you're responding to can operate in a disingenuous way. First, it presents the conflict as being between "sides," of which there are usually just "Palestinians" and "Israelis" (sometimes a bit more nuanced than that), then it says neither side wants to reconcile, neither side wants peace, both sides just want to kill or exterminate the other, etc. This framing creates a situation where you're either totally for one side and against the other, vice versa, or "this problem is unsolvable and therefore there's nothing we can do about it."
Of course, the problem is absolutely solvable and there are things we can do about it. We can start by recognizing that "Palestinians" are comprised of various factions including but not limited to Hamas in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Palestinians of all political persuasions, some of whom are the type who would say the only solution is driving the other side out completely, but there are also plenty who don't believe that, who believe some kind of middle ground is possible so long as Israel stops forcibly displacing them from their homes and bombing their children, who are accepting of Israelis but not of the actions of Israeli state security forces. Israelis are also comprised of many groups: the Israeli state, the Israeli military, Israeli human rights NGOs, settlers being paid by the government, Israelis who think all Palestinians have to go, and also Israelis who think a solution is possible if their government would just stop forcibly displacing Palestinians and seizing their land, Israelis who accept Palestinians and don't want to see them killed. Once we see that there is more here than just "Palestinians" and "Israelis" (which we now understand is an incredibly essentialist binary) we realize that there are indeed some parties to the conflict that we can reasonably get behind, who are advocating for something other than continued violence and retaliation. For example, this Israeli NGO recognizes the actions of Hamas as war crimes, but also recognizes that Israel has implemented an apartheid state where Palestinians are subjected to suffering and humiliation on the basis of their ethnicity. There are factions of Palestinians who recognize this too (though unfortunately I'm not knowledgeable enough to know any off the top of my head). It's these people we can look to and support to actually move the conflict forward towards some kind of resolution that doesn't end with Israeli encroachment on Palestinian land and the associated violence. This idea that there are only two sides and that neither of them can, in good conscience, be approved of or supported, and that therefore we should just throw our hands up and let it happen totally misses all of this nuance, misses the fact that there are factions who are being reasonable that we can support.
I agree with you. As I said, it's just not how geopolitics work. Any agreements concerning Jerulasem have pretty much been nullified by all the war that came after it. There is a lot of violence, crime but also valid accusations on both sides here.
Posting this here for the sake of discussion: How Infographic activism took over social media
I was a very late adopter of Instagram and joined in late 2019 because a few people I wanted to stay in touch with had deleted their Facebook accounts. The first thing that really stood out to me was the prevalence of those infographics and slide guides. It's particularly frustrating because I see all of these progressive people sharing infographics and slide guides on their IG stories and calling it a day, while on Facebook there is an infinite spread of conservative memes, disinformation, and conspiratorial ramblings that get 20x the engagement and go completely unchecked. Those infographics serve a fine purpose of making oblivious people acutely aware of an issue, but they aren't a meaningful substitute for real political discussion which, like it or not, occurs a lot more on Facebook.
I saw that infographic making its rounds on my Instagram story feed. I remember when the IG story feed used to be filled with people sharing nice little snapshots of their daily lives: a bread well-baked, a sunset, a laugh, a little achievement...
Now it's just filled with memes, infographics, opinions, news — the FB newsfeed reborn. Except it's not a public conversation: it's them beaming their message to me unidirectionally.
I see friends and acquaintances endlessly resharing the same infographics. It frustrates me to no end because no one seems to form and write their own opinions about things, inflected by their own philosophical frameworks: they just reshare a prepackaged opinion made by someone else.
This is pretty much exclusively why I left Instagram behind after a few years. Seeing my friends and aquaintances mindlessly posting these just made me sad.
I'm not sure I agree. I found 2 main theses:
Israel is in constant conflict with it's neighbors, whether active or not. Even if Palestine did not exist today, the conflict would still exist as Israel is surrounded by hostile nations
The conflict will continue to exist as long as it's surrounded by countries that want it destroyed. No matter what, whether Gaza is annexed or the borders are returned to 1947, as long as societies in the middle east cannot provide good lives for their inhabitants*, and as long as there are dictators and oppressive regimes, there will be conflict and terrorism.
*As someone critical of US galavanting in the middle east, I can fully place no small amount of blame for this on the US, Europe, and USSR's meddlings in the region
It doesn't sound to me like he's providing any kind of solution, just an observation from a different perspective.
Seems like the author has zoomed out and discovered that the enemy is everywhere (except where Israel just so happens to be bombing and displacing people most actively?)
Saying "please disregard the actual actions you just don't or couldn't understand. There's a big picture here for why I'm doing something terrible" is a very weak argument.