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Israel / Palestine, Whats going on exactly?
MeepZero
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm kinda looking for a springboard here. We all hear about Israel and Palestine fighting back and fourth all the time, but what is going on here anyway? From the limited amount of reading I have done it sounds like the Israelis like to beat up on the Palestinians over land, water, recourses, religion, all the stuff that makes people hate people. I feel though that this is such a narrow minded view on the situation that it cant be some guys picking on (sometimes horrifically) some other guys.
Can someone break down what the deal is and what is going on exactly?
I remember something on the Daily Show awhile back where John Stewart had some folks on that represented a peace hopeful group of Israeli and Palestinians. During the interview someone in the audience yelled out "LIE!" in a very rude interruption. Where does all this hate stem from exactly?
Can someone break down what the deal is and what is going on exactly?
I remember something on the Daily Show awhile back where John Stewart had some folks on that represented a peace hopeful group of Israeli and Palestinians. During the interview someone in the audience yelled out "LIE!" in a very rude interruption. Where does all this hate stem from exactly?
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Luckily, nihilism is a great anesthetic.
As for the hate, the region is basically screen onto which any political schemata can be projected on. Both sides feel capable of accusing the other side of relativism of some kind. The place is a logistical, heuristic, historical, diplomatic, religious, political, social and emotional torture device for the human mind.
During WWII, the Jewish terrorists basically assassinated and attacked the Brits. More immigration sanctions were imposed despite the Holocaust. The Jewish terrorists blew up the headquarters of the British administration (the King David Hotel). Britain now didn't want to keep trying to govern this country of increasingly aggressive immigrants; a partition plan was proposed and drawn up in accordance with the UN.
It looked like this:
Just before the end of the British Mandate, roughly two-thirds of the populace was Arabian and a third Jewish, until the Palestinian exodus. Irgun and Lehi (two of the main three Israeli paramilitary groups that had formed up, and had been terrorising the Arabs for the past decade) basically attacked villages of Arabs or warned them they would attack, causing many villagers to flee. They bombed buses and markets of unarmed Arabs. Haganah meanwhile was sliding between shelling villages with mortar fire, distributing warning leaflets, and adhering to a 'stricter' Yishuv policy of not attacking Arabs. They also started broadcasting in Arabic warning of impending mortar attacks on Arabian areas. The result was the devastation of over 300 villages and the fleeing or death of over 650,000 Arabs. This event is known as the Nakba to the Palestinians. The Israelis claim that the Arabs left of their own volition because of fear of dying rather than actual death, or something. They say the Palestinians left because they panicked, rather than because two paramilitary organisations were shelling and bombing the shit out of villages.
A month before the British Mandate was due to end, the Israelis declared the country the state of Israel; this was recognised by world powers. It was then immediately invaded by surrounding nations, kicking off the war. Haganah, Irgun and Lehi - the three paramilitary organisations that committed a variety of atrocities beforehand - became the IDF. The Arab countries surrounding Israel immediately invaded, which was condemned by the UN.
After an Armistice was eventually secured, Israel allowed about 100,000 of the expelled Arabs to return, but in most cases not to their homes but rather to the new Palestinian settlements. Over the next forty years, Israel, with the help and assistance of the international community, has continued to withhold support for the Palestinians who have turned to the same terrorist tactics employed by the Israeli paramilitary, and have elected one such group - Hamas - to lead them.
Basically, the Israelis want a sovereign Jewish state without Palestinians and have been reducing the Arabic partition and withholding aid and building walls, and the Palestinians have a strong social memory of being evicted from their land by a bunch of violent terrorists working for immigrants let in by the British. The British being part of the international community that supports Israel.
Here's the present day Israel which you can compare to the partition plan above:
While Arabs and Jews were in the area prior to the formation of the Mandate of Palestine in 1917 (which encompassed Palestine and Transjordan), the Zionists had been pushing for the reestablishment of an Israeli state formally since 1890s, when the First Zionist Congress basically said they had a manifest destiny to claim the Land of Israel and reverse the diaspora. When asked "what about the Arabs there" they rebutted that "the people there are Arabs and they have no ties to the land, we do, therefore we impose the Right of Return". A lot of this was just talk until the Ottoman Empire was broken up at the end of WWI by the League of Nations. The League of Nations interjecting themselves in the area gave the Zionists an opportunity, and they formally engaged the League of Nations and Britain.
The Arabs had mixed responsed to this. The Shah of Persia basically said 10 years earlier "you can have it if you can buy it", which is what the Jews in the area had done until that point in time, but this was a hell of an opportunity to get the land without buying it by reiterating their manifest destiny. The "proto-Palestinans" there said they received a Class A Mandate by the League of Nations and they that they should be allowed to develop autonomously. Autonomous development would preclude the Zionists from showing up and establishing their own government, in their eyes. They had no problems with the Jews being there and, per the Shah's position, buying land... but they weren't about to turn rule over to the Zionists.
This basically started the conflict: The Zionists were on one side saying "there is no Palestine" (quote by Golda Maier). The Palestinians were saying "there is no Israel." Both had a vested interest... the Palestinans were already there, and they considered it their land, legally, as promised to them by the League of Nations (which would soon be defunct). The Zionists considered it their land, legally, as promised to them by God.
The first thing to note is that Israel, as a Jewish state, will let in any Orthodox Jew without any hesitation or questions asked. This serves two purposes. The first is the creation of a national identity as a Jewish safe haven, the second is to keep the population up. From the beginning Israel was a relatively wealthy nation and as GDP per capita goes is close to countries like Greece and South Korea, meaning that the birth rate amongst Israelites is close to two. The Palestinian territories, in contrast, are in extreme poverty, meaning birth rates closer to five or six. Israel has to keep importing Jews in order to keep up its numbers. For its first few decades of existence Israel could rely on immigrants from Europe and America as its primary source of immigration, but by 1990 anyone who would have moved to Israel from those places already did. Also in 1990: The fall of the Soviet Empire.
Around 1990 Russian Jews started immigrating to Israel is large numbers as barriers dropped. This has resulted in a major shift in Israeli parties, as the far right parties began campaigning heavily to the Russian immigrants, recognizing that they weren't interested in the Palestinian situation and would support any party that catered to them. Twenty years after major immigration has begun, the far right has increased in strength dramatically, led by the party Yisrael Beiteinu, which is itself led by Avigdor Lieberman. Although it only has 15 seats in the 120 seat Isreali parliament, the history of coalition building in Israeli government (only one government has ever been constructed without a coalition, and that was an emergency wartime government) means that the far right anti-arab parties are now a serious part of Israeli government, with Yisrael Beiteinu being part of the current coalition and Lieberman acting as the current Secretary of Foreign Affairs. This has resulted in a major shift in the Israeli political spectrum.
Israeli politics for the first half century was dominated by two parties, Labor and Likud, who sat on the left and right of Israeli politics. Two events have shattered this arrangement. One is the rise of Yisrael Beiteinu; the other is the creation of Kadima. Originally designed as a political platform for Ariel Sharon, then the current Israeli Prime Minister, the party lost direction after a stroke left Sharon in a permanent coma. It currently occupies a position between Labor and Likud and had a strong showing at the recent elections, although it was unable to form a coalition and hence sits as the opposition. Labor is currently a minor party, while Likud, under Benjamin Netanyahu, is the current Isreali government.
Labor, once the party on the left, is an important party that is waning in strength. Kadima, once the center, would then be the new left, with Yisrael Beiteinu on the right and Likud in the center. This situation will solidify as Labor loses membership and Yisrael Beiteinu gains it, an inevitable result of Labor's older supporters and Yisrael Beiteinu's younger supporters. Likud, in the center, is happy with the current situation and is not truly interested in a Palestinian state; anything said to the contrary is political maneuver. Benjamin Netanyahu is a very, very good politician, and will thus likely succeed in balancing the requests of the Obama administration with the reality of the political situation. But any real change in regards to the settlers who are reducing the actual Palestinian territory of the West Bank is essentially impossible.
Look at that map again; the green area on the right used to cover all of the territory inside of the dashed line. It's going to keep shrinking until its gone. That's the real problem, and there isn't anything we can do about it.
So, yeah, its fucked. Thank the heavens I wasn't born a Palestinian.
I think we ought to stop thinking of this situation as a "Middle East crisis" and start thinking of it as "Middle East culture."
Which is a gross oversimplification of course, but there's a reason that the main continuous bone of contention is location of settlements and who can occupy them.
That, and that israel is one of the last, best examples of the problems that got created when a bunch of european powers decided they had the last, best ideas about where to draw territorial boundaries in parts of the world they knew next to nothing about.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
In their defense, Israel stuck a flag in the ground and declared itself sovereign before they could actually do anything.
Flag.
He was technically correct. Xinjiang's occupation predates Palestine's by two years.
Pretty much, yeah.
Though so are lot of other countries.
Some are examples of "Genocidal maniacs won."
Another example
...wow, that's a terribly effective and awkward comparison.
...
Fuck.