War in Israel

[taxi1]

@sevenhelmet said it already, and he's exactly right. Concluding that birth rate = optimism would mean devout Catholics, Muslims, Mormans, etc., plus the poorest people in society, must just have more kids because they're more optimistic about the future. That's silly.

To be exact, and to quote myself, they must believe something for their kids. Or maybe they just don't think about kids.

 

[Mirage]

To be exact, and to quote myself, they must believe something for their kids. Or maybe they just don't think about kids.

But they do not need to "believe in something for their kids" in order to have kids. Perhaps they are regular horny humans and don't believe in or even have access to birth control or abortions. Perhaps their Quran tells them to reproduce, and so they do because they believe it wrong not to.

 

[taxi1]

But they do not need to "believe in something for their kids" in order to have kids. Perhaps they are regular horny humans and don't believe in or even have access to birth control or abortions. Perhaps their Quran tells them to reproduce, and so they do because they believe it wrong not to.

Free time on their hands is a valid reason, I guess.

Edit: whenever I wonder what another culture's value function is, I think about Brown's Human Universals research.

Human Universals

condor.depaul.edu

 

[IRfly]

I would be very careful going by Wikipedia. The article shows its bias right from the start, referring to Israel and "its ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories." I would argue that Israel doesn't really "occupy" anything. The so-called "occupied territories" are lands that were taken from Israel during the 1948 war, which Israel only took back in the 1967 war when multiple Arab states (again) tried to destroy them. So I do not agree that they are really in violation of international law.

Whoa…lands taken from Israel in the 1948 war? Not even close. You really should try reading at least *something* before pontificating

 

[IRfly]

This is the proposed UN partition plan for post-mandate Palestine. Blue for the Jews, yellow-ish for the Arabs, and Jerusalem was to be an international city administered by the UN.

This was never implemented. But it gives a good idea of who lived where during the mandate. Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University wrote the more or less authoritative history of this war, including the ethnic cleansing of the “Jerusalem Corridor,” in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949.

 

[Brett327]

But comments like the link below make it a little clearer (possible bluster, but certainly Israel can't take it as such). No doubt there is a nuanced history, but I don't understand how we expect Israel to react to Gaza and Hamas (who's charter calls for the destruction of Israel, the murder of Jews, and have recently done so), without overwhelming force. How that is done remains to be seen.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1714252709132411193

Of course Israel has to react to being attacked. Hamas should be annihilated. Loss of innocent life in that process, while regrettable, must be accepted to achieve Israel’s security goals.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are all malign actors. But there are 2 million Palestinians, most of whom have no say in any of this, and whose lives are all now even more monumentally fucked than they were two weeks ago. We should all be concerned about what happens to them as human beings, and acknowledge that perpetuating the cycle of violence means that some of them will feel desperate enough to join Hamas in the future. Someone has to figure out a way to break that cycle.

 

[Brett327]

But how is it the Israelis don't give the Palestinians any options when they've repeatedly made offers for a Palestinian state? And the world has repeatedly sent money and supplies to the Palestinians only for the leadership to use it to enrich themselves and build a war infrastructure and tunnels into Israel for conducting war.

I’m not trying to be a dick, but how is it possible that you are so ill informed on the Arab-Israeli conflict? It’s quite astonishing.

 

[zippy]

I’m not trying to be a dick, but how is it possible that you are so ill informed on the Arab-Israeli conflict? It’s quite astonishing.

Arab-Israeli conflict has been pretty much a side show since 9/11, especially after the invasion of Iraq. Other than the Intifada almost 20 years ago, the conflict has been a series of smaller length skirmishes that didn’t really stand out against the back drop of the war in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Bin Laden, ISIS etc. Unless someone’s had a keen interest in it, it’s probably pretty easy to overlook/let fall into the background. Since this has been the largest loss of Israeli life since 1982 and the Lebanon War, and no competing loss of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan etc, on the nightly news, people are probably starting to pay more attention again.

 

[Brett327]

Arab-Israeli conflict has been pretty much a side show since 9/11, especially after the invasion of Iraq. Other than the Intifada almost 20 years ago, the conflict has been a series of smaller length skirmishes that didn’t really stand out against the back drop of the war in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Bin Laden, ISIS etc. Unless someone’s had a keen interest in it, it’s probably pretty easy to overlook/let fall into the background. Since this has been the largest loss of Israeli life since 1982 and the Lebanon War, and no competing loss of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan etc, on the nightly news, people are probably starting to pay more attention again.

It’s not that I’m expecting PhD level fluency with the subject matter. It’s that his statements and assumptions about the subject are, for the most part, completely wrong, as is true with many subjects he decides to pontificate about.

 

[IRfly]

It’s not that I’m expecting PhD level fluency with the subject matter. It’s that his statements and assumptions about the subject are, for the most part, completely wrong, as is true with many subjects he decides to pontificate about.

Or at least to not be exactly 100% wrong while discussing Wikipedia's potential inaccuracy?

 

[Random8145]

Mainly because Israel continues to take more and more Palestinian land beyond its internationally recognized borders no matter what the Palestinians do.

I am pretty sure that Israel has never offered 100% of the West Bank to the Palestinians since they occupied it in '67, the closest that they got to a peace agreement and one of the greatest missed opportunities in modern times is when Arafat declined to agree to the peace agreement that Clinton hammered out in the waning days of his presidency in '00. The Palestinians got 95% of what they wanted, to include a part of Jerusalem as their capital and a reduction but not elimination of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but Arafat didn't say yes or no. Ehud Barak's government was voted out not long after and the moment passed.

Part of the more recent reluctance on the part of the Palestinian's may be Netanyahu's increasingly hard line stance towards the Palestinians, along with the inclusion of some very hard right politicians in his more recent governments with some pretty extreme views towards the Palestinians. If the Israeli government and their agreements can change overnight, how much trust would you put in what a more peace-inclined government would agree to just to be reversed by Netanyahu?

The same can be said of the Israeli dealings with the Palestinians too, so the cycle continues...

Ehud Olmert in 2008 offered 94.2% of the West Bank and land swaps that would bring the total Palestinian land area to 100% of the pre-1967 borders: LINK (might be behind a pay wall).

Also just my opinion, but I don't think the Palestinian refusal to seek peace with Israel is due to concern about Israel doing a sudden about-face on the issue.

 

[Random8145]

You fail to look at things from their perspective. Palestinians were living in that land, then the west decided to take it and give it to the Jews. That is why they are seen as occupiers, and why they argue any solution where that "wrong" is not undone is not acceptable.

Yes, that is the excuse given, but that was generations ago. Nobody alive now experienced that. The equivalent would be a Native American tribe wanting to engage in brutal violence against Americans because their great grandparents had their lands taken. One would think the current Palestinians would have just decided to seek to create a nice state alongside Israel and live in peace. They, or their leadership at least, have been given multiple opportunities to do so. It's not like the land Israel consists of is some natural paradise that was taken from the people there. Israelis joke that God decided to gift them the only (or one of the only) pieces of land in the Middle East without any oil.

Also, if you go back far enough, the entire Middle East belongs to Jews and Christians. It only became Muslim after Islam came into existence and began violent conquest.

Regardless, you have ignored every fact available to you in saying Israel is not in violation of intl law. If you research it and conclude that Israeli law and practice does not discriminate on the basis of race, then I can't help you. They have, for a very long time, created an open air prison in Gaza where the people feel they have no future.

I will just have to agree to disagree based on that (also I don't have the time right now to get into a lengthy detailed debate).

 

[Random8145]

I’m not trying to be a dick, but how is it possible that you are so ill informed on the Arab-Israeli conflict? It’s quite astonishing.

Regarding my post you quoted, what part of it do you disagree with?

 

[Random8145]

Whoa…lands taken from Israel in the 1948 war? Not even close. You really should try reading at least *something* before pontificating

View attachment 39035
This is the proposed UN partition plan for post-mandate Palestine. Blue for the Jews, yellow-ish for the Arabs, and Jerusalem was to be an international city administered by the UN.

This was never implemented. But it gives a good idea of who lived where during the mandate. Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University wrote the more or less authoritative history of this war, including the ethnic cleansing of the “Jerusalem Corridor,” in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949.

Oh, yes I see my error there. I was tired from work and typing too fast, but yes, the lands weren't taken from Israel (other than Eastern Jerusalem). But Israel didn't go and take the Gaza strip and West Bank in response. They took them after being attacked again in 1967.

My personal opinion is the only reason so much of the "International community" obsesses so much over this is because of anti-Semitism on their part. I mean, when Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, no one cared as much. Yes, they brutally murdered the Jews in East Jerusalem, ho-hum. France had no problem with its empire in Indochina, until it got forcibly kicked out, nor did the rest of the world. There wasn't the outrage over the Soviets occupying the various countries of Eastern Europe that they did (to the contrary, many in the West admired the CCCP), or Putin's more recent occupations of Georgia and Crimea, or China's oppressive treatment of its minority populations, or even when North Vietnam went and brutally took over South Vietnam. But there is a maniacal obsession over Israel and its supposed "illegal occupation" of lands it gained after being attacked in an attempted war of annihilation a second time.

Even with this war, the response from the European Union has been (paraphrasing in my words), "Yes, it's terrible what Hamas is doing, but Israel had better adhere to international humanitarian law in their response. I mean, yeah, we would hope they can and do, but the impression the EU gives is if a street gang tortures your family and does things like cut your child out of your wife and burn your children alive and cut your father's eyes out and arms off, and then the neighbors are like, " Yeah, that's terrible, BUT YOU HAD BETTER ADHERE TO THE LAW IN ANY RETALIATION. We see tremendous concern over those innocent Palestinians being harmed right now, yet virtually no such outrage over the Israelis BRUTALLY tortured and murdered by Hamas, or Russian crimes against the Ukrainians or Chinese oppression and so forth.

Regarding Hamas, the response is just a standard, "Yep, very horrible, Hamas needs to be eliminated" and everyone saying Hamas needs to be eliminated is just because what they did was so brutal, it is pretty much impossible to say otherwise. But if Israel was to have gone and done even a fraction of what Hamas just did, there would have been a supernova of global outrage.

 

[Brett327]

Regarding my post you quoted, what part of it do you disagree with?

All of it, in every post you’ve ever written on this site. (Insert Back to School meme here)