Quote from: tins on May 09, 2015, 12:57:41 AM

Quote from: u9y42 on May 09, 2015, 12:31:10 AM

the Palestinian position is that they are open to the idea of land swaps

Well of course they are, now...they should have accepted the land offered to them in '47...

Maybe; but how does that justify Israel blocking a peace deal now - 70 years later? What's the endgame here?

Quote from: jaysabi on May 11, 2015, 02:09:40 PM

Quote from: J. J. Phillips on April 26, 2015, 05:53:53 PM

Quote from: jaysabi on April 25, 2015, 06:21:43 PM

So what it is the "legitimate" claim for Israel as a state then? It seems to me the same situation: Israel declared itself a state in 1948 at the end of the British Mandate, and then it was accepted as a state by the international community. It seems just as arbitrary as Palestine, which has declared itself a state and is recognized by a majority of the world, both in terms of number of governments, and a vast majority of the population represented by those governments. I'm just trying to drill down as to what the specific difference is here, on a technical "what is a state" level.

Hmm. Good point. What do you think is a representative document in which Palestine declares itself a state? I'll take a look and see if leads me to accept their statehood.

This is where I take the information about Palestinian declaration of state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Declaration_of_Independence One of the problems with the Palestinian declaration is that it is predicated on the 1947 partition borders. As we have already agreed, this is probably no longer applicable/possible, as too much has changed in the last 65 years for those borders to be workable. But from the Palestinian point of view, this is what they consider to be their state, and Israeli "occupation" of that area is a provocation. It seems to me to have any progress on this, the world needs to work towards helping the Palestinians accept that the original borders are no longer on the table, due to Arab aggression towards Israel following the 1947 plan. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The point here is that Palestine should be a state, and now both sides just need to be reasonable about what the borders should be. And one thing I find absolute is that Israeli settlement expansion is not reasonable, and this is entirely Israel's fault since the government encourages it.

I don't think the Palestinian position includes a return to the 1947 borders, but rather, to the 1967 borders (which is already, pretty much, the international consensus) - the negotiations I described above, for example (in point 2 of the large reply, just a few posts back, especially the Clinton Parameters and the negotiations at Taba), were based on this division, with a few minor adjustments to account for settlements and such (both sides agreed to this, though there were still a few other issues left to be resolved at those negotiations).

Quote from: jaysabi on May 11, 2015, 02:09:40 PM

Quote from: J. J. Phillips on April 26, 2015, 05:53:53 PM

Quote from: jaysabi on April 25, 2015, 06:21:43 PM

I agree with you for the most part, the violence and the rockets need to stop. The only thing I would add here is the question, do you believe the Israel does nothing to perpetuate hostilities? I guess specifically I mean the expansion of Jewish settlements into what both sides have at times previously recognized as land designated as part of a future Palestinian state.

I don't think Israel has any good choices. The terrorism won't stop no matter what they do. The barrier/fence/wall cut down on suicide bombings, but just led to more rocket attacks. I don't think Israel would get attacked less if they didn't respond (both militarily and by building settlements).

We've both argued our sides here. I respectfully disagree that building settlements isn't a provocation. I think militarily, Israel is provocative too, but this is a chicken-and-the-egg type of argument. Israel really doesn't have a choice but to respond militarily when they are attacked (for political reasons, moral is another question). Just as Israel could not respond militarily, Palestinians could just as easily stop firing rockets.

Palestinian rocket fire into civilian centers is wrong, and is almost certainly a war crime - but it isn't only a response to the illegal Israeli settlements. In the last point of my answer above, I described at some length what some of the realities of the occupation mean to the Palestinian population: soldiers firing on civilians, sometimes killing them; Israeli courts failing to punish those actions; house demolitions of crime suspects (collective punishment of the families living there); torture of criminals, suspects and apparently even innocent people; very heavy handed response to any protest or demonstration (use of live ammo, for example); land annexation, not only with settlements, of important resource rich areas (mostly containing water sources and farmland), but also with the wall Israel is building, military bases and outposts that displace Palestinians, Israeli controlled checkpoints inside the occupied territories, etc.; settler violence and state cover up of that violence; mass arrests; administrative detention; extra-judicial assassinations; the sanctions and blockade of Gaza, leaving the population there in a desperate situation; the attacks on Gaza, that destroy a good deal of the infrastructure and kill thousands, worsening the effects of the sanctions and blockade regime; and so on. Rocket fire might receive more attention, but it pales in comparison to Israeli actions.

And again, for you to have the right to use violence, you need to show you really have no peaceful option open to you; Israel has consistently failed here - my last two (large) posts go into considerable detail on why and how. But, even if you want to throw morality out the window, Israel should at least not use the indiscriminate Dahiya doctrine, and certainly shouldn't be telling its soldiers to fire on anything that isn't an IDF soldier, when in their periodical excursions to Gaza (which, going by the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, they pretty much did): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1051663.

Quote from: jaysabi on May 11, 2015, 02:09:40 PM

Quote from: J. J. Phillips on April 26, 2015, 05:53:53 PM

Quote from: jaysabi on April 25, 2015, 06:21:43 PM

I think your analysis of the situation and the motivation of Israel is reasonable. I don't disagree with it, but I do also feel that this approach makes victims of people who aren't deserving in many cases. By lumping all Palestinians together, Israel looks to punish "them" by taking "their" land when the radicals commit violence against Israel. But the blanket use of force against "Palestinians" and not the specific individuals who commited the violence makes victims out of people who had nothing to do with the violence. I think this is where much anger comes from. And then the radicals use this as proof of how 'evil' Israel is and radicalize more people for the intifadas and the rocket campaigns. I'm not justifying the violence, but I'm saying that I don't believe the Israeli approach to it doesn't solve the problem, and actually makes it worse. It hasn't solved it for decades, and I guess at this point it only looks like it will when there are no Palestinian lands left, and then it still won't, because there will continue to be terrorist attacks.

As for the Palestinians stopping it themselves, I hardly know how they could. There are no resources in Palestine for police or courts or just general society. To the extent Palestinians have jobs, they travel to Israel for work, when they are allowed to cross the border. There are just no resources for a functioning society, and it is very easy to say "that's the price of being terrorists, because then Israel has to wall them off from everyone else" but this is also an overslimpification of what is happening (IMO). It creates victims of people who are innocent, and this creates anger and resentment, and then a radical group wants to use them as a proxy for their war against Israel, and it's easy to marshal that anger at that point.

It is preferable to me when Israel targets specific people. Propaganda-wise it doesn't seem to make a difference. When Israel targets specific leaders they're accused of going on an assassination campaign against Palestinian leaders. (Of course, they are, but this is supposed to be a good thing.) When Israel responds with a large bombing campaign or with import controls, they're accused of collective punishment.

Regarding Palestinian resources,the Palestinians get a huge amount of foreign aid (billions of dollars a year). I haven't studied how they spend it. Here's my impression which people can try to prove wrong if they like: Palestinians spend some of the aid on schools that indoctrinate children to become Jihadis, some of the money on weapons to use against Israel, and most of the rest of the aid to secret bank accounts for Palestinian Authority officials. I'm basing the last part on memories of Arafat's wife, who I assume is somewhere in Europe being very rich. I would be very surprised if any of the money went to stop or punish Jihadis. That might be a condition of the aid, but it's a condition with a wink because no one can realistically expect it to happen. The only time in my memory that the Palestinians have done anything to combat terrorism is in 2006 when they had a civil war and fought each other.

To really understand my point of view, it's important to recognize that I think the primary goal of the Palestinians is not to have a state, but to eliminate the Jews from their region. Under that assumption, their actions make more sense, and it's difficult to imagine a good strategy to counter it. If Israel doesn't respond at all, it will be destroyed. When Israel does respond, there are more people in the world who want Israel destroyed. The frustration I often show is due to my suspicion that I'll live to see the day that it'll happen, and that people around the world will celebrate it.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least that an unfortunate amount of aid winds up in the personal accounts of the political leadership of Palestine. This is repeated everywhere in the world to poor nations the developed world supports. The solution to me is to stop providing aid (my view as a selfish tax payer), because our intervention entrenches tyrants who have the resources to impose their will. ⁽¹⁾

I understand your point of view, I just disagree with it (largely, not entirely). I think there is definitely an element that wants to destroy Israel and there are people who use this anger for their own political advantage, but I also think this is a minority compared to the people who just want their own state and to live in peace. As I stated above, I think the (unreasonable) expectation to have the 1947 borders leads to a mentality of purposeful and willful "occupation" that is not necessarily justified.⁽²⁾ The violence over this isn't aimed at "destroying Israel," it's aimed at driving out the "occupation." (I'm using "occupation" because I don't believe everything the Palestinians view to be occupied territory to be a legitimate claim.) But I think the distinction between the motivation of destroying Israel and ending the occupation to be important, as the former motivation is murderous, but the latter is defensive. Any population on Earth would, and has, violently resisted what they viewed to be an armed and hostile occupation. I think the majority of the Palestinian violence is of the latter motivation now, but I am not blind to the fact that there are still factions bent on the destruction of Israel. But their numbers will continue to dwindle, as they have since the aggressive wars against Israel began in 1947.

(1) -There is certainly a great deal of corruption, and indeed, the Palestinians themselves are the first to complain about this, as I noted above (in the polls part of the large post). But stopping aid in a "NGO economy", when they have little or no conditions to live by themselves, largely thanks to Israeli balkanization of the occupied territories, in addition to the sanctions and blockade of Gaza and continued illegal land grabs in the West Bank, could have dire consequences to the population living there - for example, at the worst of the blockade of Gaza "more than 80% of Palestinians in Gaza rely on humanitarian assistance, with UN food aid going to about 1.1 million people - three quarters of the population."

In my view, a better approach, for you as a "selfish tax payer", would be to move the US to put pressure on Israel to prevent it stalling negotiations and avoiding a peace agreement that would allow a viable Palestinian state to emerge - the rest are temporary measures at best, or harmful at worst.

(2) - "I think the (unreasonable) expectation to have the 1947 borders leads to a mentality of purposeful and willful 'occupation' that is not necessarily justified"? As far as I can tell, no one has that expectation. And, regardless of what expectations Palestinians might have, the "mentality [of living under occupation]" is justified by the facts of how the occupation actually works in practice. Further, the "expectations" they expressed in their negotiations so far seem, at least to me, to be quite reasonable and closely in line with the international consensus (see the negotiations at Taba, for example - and in fact, I should say "generous" instead of "reasonable", since in some points they are going beyond what international law actually requires of them).

By the way, jaysabi, thanks for mentioning the book "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" in a previous post - I actually didn't imagine firing rates were that low initially, and the length the soldiers would go to avoid killing others. I'll have to take a better look at that.