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The [MENA] Thread
JusticeforPluto
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hello everyone,
This is the thread where we discuss this region:
(I'd include Turkey, but it really goes to show the borders of what the "Middle East" are not exactly nailed down)
Current goings on include the Israeli bombing of Gaza in retaliation for the October 7th terror attack.
The War in Yemen continues, as does the civil war in Sudan.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to deteriorate.
Turkey continues the "fun" slide into autocracy.
If you feel some needs to be included in the OP please message me.
This is the thread where we discuss this region:
(I'd include Turkey, but it really goes to show the borders of what the "Middle East" are not exactly nailed down)
Current goings on include the Israeli bombing of Gaza in retaliation for the October 7th terror attack.
The War in Yemen continues, as does the civil war in Sudan.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to deteriorate.
Turkey continues the "fun" slide into autocracy.
If you feel some needs to be included in the OP please message me.
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Posts
Considering the amount of people and the current conditions of Afghanistan this is impressive on it's sheer brutality.
Honestly with the level of aid that Gaza needs, especially if they don't allow fuel in for the wells/power it's plausible to see the humanitarian pause becoming a limited ceasefire. Even more so if you're talking about medical staff going in, assessing and then safely moving those in most desperate need for critical care.
An incredibly optimistic off-ramp to the current emergency if you can also apply pressure on Qatar to get a slow drip of hostages released.
That would also again, needlessly hopefully, mean that you can start to see a change in leadership amongst the Israelis in the wake of all this and a demonstration that diplomacy and not a ground invasion house by house is what gets people home.
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Bleh, no hope of stopping that either, but at least I assume the US isn't actively enabling it.
Transcript of Imseis’ argument, which by my read is effectively that the Right of Self Defense is something invoked between warring nations. Which Gaza is not; it’s an occupied territory administered by Israel, which means while a level of use of force, including repelling active attacks, is considered normal, it must be proportional. Which this absolutely has not been:
I believe this is the ICJ advisory opinion he speaks of:
https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/131/131-20040709-ADV-01-00-EN.pdf
I take it in this instance that a Right to Self Defense is deployed to defend the kind of full on military operation that Israel is engaged in, rather than any kind of policing action.
Imagine if the Proud Boys decided to become a fully militant terror organization that massacred a bunch of people and the US’s response was to, say, deploy the military, complete with bombs, missiles and artillery strikes instead of, you know, the fucking cops and FBI, and then argued an Article 51 right to self defense as [insert US metro area here where they’d concentrated] was reduced to an archipelago of smoking craters and blood
You mean the Hamas HQ beneath the Gazan hospital where the only evidence is a shitty CGI model pumped out by the IDF on social media?
The Gazan Hospital with a Hamas HQ under it where staff had to take time away from their duties to film a fucking trek through the facilities’ basement to demonstrate they didn’t have secret Hamas doorways into secret Hamas headquarters, and that the IDF was lying to justify attacking a hospital like they have so many other goddamned civilian infrastructure sites?
The hospital that got a convoy of ambulances bombed this past week despite being assured they’d have a safe corridor to evacuate critically injured patients to the border to get treatment out of reach of Israel’s bombing campaigns?
That Gazan Hospital with a Hamas HQ beneath it?
At some point you really, really need to stop trusting the propaganda of the army and state that is mercilessly killing civilians.
You want us to fucking believe the IDF that fucking Al-Shifa houses a fucking Hamas headquarters, with no evidence presented other than the IDF, who has routinely lied and fabricated shit before
I don't think anyone here has said it can be completely without innocent people getting caught up, but surely you can't call indiscriminately levelling buildings and bombing ambulances to be the same thing?
The other problem is that the statement ignores how Israel treats Palestine to begin with, and to what degree the Palestinians and various organizations should ALSO have a right to fight for their rights. People are quick to state that Israel has that right, but will entirely avoid the question when the same thing is asked about Palestinians. 10/7 is not within what I think should be "self-defense" or "fighting for right to self-determination" by Palestine, but it also can't mean they just have to sit there and accept what Israel wants to do to them.
I guess in the end, there aren't going to be too many pithy, quick and easy statements that don't ignore a LOT of the actual problems that exist. Even "Free Palestine" which seems pretty straightforward has a couple different connotations, and some of them are more sinister/problematic than others.
clearly Hamas Fishing Boats filled with Hamas Fighters to take the war against Israel out to sea. While also occasionally catching Hamas Fish.
That would be an argument that the response was excessive. Nobody would doubt that if the Proud Boys shot up a bunch of americans the US would have the right to attack their organization.
Hence the “ then argued an Article 51 right to self defense as [insert US metro area here where they’d concentrated] was reduced to an archipelago of smoking craters and blood”
The problem is you’re talking about a hypothetical implementation of “right to self defense” that is justifiable in your mind, while Israel and hte US are utilizing Article 51 as legal justification for these atrocities.
Stop worrying about the hypothetical where Israel apparently is rendered with no legal right of self defense in any capacity,because the rest of us are engaging with the actual, material thing happening and don’t have time or energy to play with thought toys in the middle of this nightmare.
No, we should deal with what people are actually saying. When people are like "Israel has a right to self-defence" they are arguing that Israel has a right to respond to Hamas' attack. The response to this is not "Israel doesn't actually have a right to self-defence because UN blah blah blah", it's "Israel's response is excessive and counter-productive and seems mostly concerned with collective punishment and ethnic cleansing". Because the legalistic argument is missing the point and frankly, rhetorically useless at best.
Or are you next going to next tell me the ongoing pogroms in the West Bank are also self defense?
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Which people are you talking about?
Becuase Article 51 is what Israel and the US, as governments implementing and abetting this nightmare, are talking about.
I don’t particularly give a fuck what CharlieFartFuck79 says about his colloquial definition of what “Right to Self Defense” means.
Article 51 of the UN Charter refers to the use of military action in state-vs-state conflict, wherein an aggressor state strikes against another state; in this paradigm, under Article 51, the aggrieved state has a Right to Self Defense, meaning military response to repel and halt the attacks against it by the aggressor state.
Gaza is not a separate state from Israel, and Hamas is not a state actor.
But, because it is politically convenient to swap back and forth as necessary, Israel will often treat the two as such, while decrying the potential of a two state solution. It’s like Schrodinger’s State, it exists in a superposition of both until such time one is politically expedient over the other, and chosen to fit the need of Israel’s politics at the time.
The point about the right of defense is that this should be considered in terms of a police action.
I mean, if we're being honest, you don't really give a fuck about what the UN says except insomuch as it bolsters your argument here. If the UN said that blowing up Hamas was totes legal and very cool, you'd be saying that their definition is bullshit.
Because when we're talking about a "right to self defense" in this thread, what I think we're mostly talking about is a moral right to self defense. If someone attacks you, do you have a moral right to attack them back, within certain limits?
And I'd say the legal definition here is largely irrelevant, inasmuch as it's not going to have any impact on what Israel does.
Well, this does recognize that the PA by itself can't do it so they are going to need help, and that all the expansionism on the West Bank has to cease in order to make it viable. So guess that will see what happens.
Even if we go with the more commonly used defending itself against a terrorist group, it means it's a civil war or collective punishment in a police action to a group of people stuck in an apartheid state.
NONE of these are good looks.
I will note who rebuilds, who pays for it, and who is nowhere to be seen. My guess is Isreal rebuilds and the USA pays for it.
“When you were still swinging from trees, we had a Jewish State here.” - Naftali Bennett
This fucker said this to a Palestinian Israeli Knesset member in twenty fucking goddamn twelve.
Like this is the kind of fucking talk you’d hear from white supremacists.
The International Court of Justice disagrees with you; again the citation from earlier this page of paragraph 139 of its advisory opinion regarding the wall construction in 2004:
Relevant section highlighted.
We are talking about the UN Charter, a charter for an organization meant to manage disputes between states. It seems fairly clear the intent of Article 51 is meant to be about state-state conflict.
"A country has a basic right to self defense, and to respond to attacks" and "Israel is and has been engaging in a plan of intentional genocide and ethnic cleansing, and their recent actions are more of the same" are not mutually exclusive. I think the prevailing consensus among people who are arguing Israel as a nation has a right to respond to this violent terrorist attack, is that what they are doing is not in any way a reasonable interpretation of self defense, and is just more genocide with self defense as a paper thin pretext. Generally people also agree that the current government of Israel has intentionally fed into a pattern of reciprocal grievances, of which this is only the latest and perhaps most violent example. That Israel has a right to self-defense, and that the government of Israel has essentially invited violent action against its own citizens through intentional policy decisions, in order to justify further violence done to Palestinians can both be true.
Indeed. How could the UN charter enshrine the right of states to defend themselves from themselves? The idea is nonsensical and would allow any policy on such a basis. “A murder was committed in NYC, therefore the US has a right to defend itself against South Carolina”.
Similarly inherent in defensive rights is proportionality. If one person dies in a border skirmish the right to self defense does not give the defending nation the right to invade. Or drop a nuke. The right of defense is always proportional and limited. That is a fundamental aspect of defense.
Maçães quote tweeting Channel 13 Presenter Raviv Drucker: