(THREAD 2) To ask if we can please try to have Palestine and Israel thread where we acknowledge how awful it is for everyone, but try not to throw shit at each other?

[Poudretteite]

Not OP just created another thread as the first one was full

Other perspectives:

https://ecfr.eu/article/cancellation-costs-abbas-and-palestinian-democracy/?amp=

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-04-13/ty-article-opinion/.premium/president-mahmoud-abbas-has-destroyed-the-palestinian-national-movement/00000187-7a26-dc6c-a5ff-7f77277e0000

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/06/palestinian-authority-israel-west-bank-security-cooperation-suspended-mahmoud-abbas/

Absolutely not. Targeting Jewish shops is wrong but this is not Kristallnacht.
My point was that the Israeli government is now doing to the civilians in Gaza what was done to the Jews in Warsaw: no food, no water, no electricity and no medication. Current international humanitarian law (IHL) — the law of armed conflict — makes clear that the deliberate starvation of the civilian population as a tactic of war is prohibited and a prosecutable war crime.
I hope this is clear enough.

@DownNative

Thanks. Also led me onto interesting sites and commentators I hadn't come across.

No problem! 👍

But how would you convince everyone on the Arab side to agree to let the Jews have their own state? Doesn't seem possible to me, the opposition to it clearly has very deep roots.

It's awful.

And London was founded by the Romans - hopefully no modern day Italians will be claiming ownership

Yes, I am sure that Jews being granted a right to their own state in the place they came from after 3000 years of endless discrimination and genocides in almost every place on the planet is very similar to and Italian coming to Bromley with a suitcase.

FGS.

Who was it on the previous thread who claimed soldiers were killing machines?

Tell that to all the men who served in WW2 on the British side, of whom my DF was one.

AUIU, in the Second WW, many British were poor at aiming at the enemy, IYGWIM. No such choice in the First WW, which had ended only 21 years before the Second one began.

My DF once sat in the back of a lorry, in the Western Desert, in his early 20s, holding a pistol, and supervising some German POWs. Everyone in the lorry was shit scared.

Conflict involves many individuals, each of whom is living their own individual and unique life, and praying not to die.

Thanks, that made me laugh so much 😂

Man's inhumanity to man.

Inhabitants of York, England burn all their Jewish population to death, in Clifford Tower, where they had sought refuge.
BBC - Religions - Judaism: York pogrom, 1190

Not too long after, Christianity got the idea that having a Holy War to reclaim Jerusalem for the Christians was a Good Thing. Hence the waste of human life that was the Crusades, only they were waged against Muslims, who fought much more fairly than the Christians did.

Did the Crusaders rape and pillage? You bet they did.

OK, so it's justified that they went to war. (Although they are not 'from another country,' they were originally exiled, and were persecuted and genocided globally in other people's countries, that's the whole point)

They did go to war, and they lost. That's why they ended up with less than the original agreement. That's kind of how it works?

I'd like to ask and would love for someone to help me understand:

• Why does Netanyahu's govt still allow settlement expansion in the west bank?
• What is the general consensus or feeling from Israelis on the settlements in the West Bank?

I'm wondering if the govt stops facilitating the expansion of these settlements, and even, withdraw those settlements from the West Bank, that we are more likely to see progress in this situation?

I wanted to add, that from what I am reading it seems like the settlers; their behaviour towards other Palestinians (note the spitting on Christians) , the protection they require from the military and the access to resources they get over the access to Palestinians in the area, in addition to the expansion of settlements are what is really fuelling the fire in the region.

Happy to be corrected

To answer your first question - because Netanyahu is a racist supremacist. I can't answer your second question because, despite being ethnically Jewish, I don't know people who live in the West Bank and have little to no connection with Israel. However a poster on another thread is demanding people like me should be making more of an effort to publicly denounce Israel.

I'm wondering if the govt stops facilitating the expansion of these settlements, and even, withdraw those settlements from the West Bank, that we are more likely to see progress in this situation?

Agreed.

I really can’t agree with this. “They” didn’t go to war and lose. Civilians don’t go to war, governments do… that’s why international law says you can’t “win” territory in a war. In 1948 Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon went to war and lost, not the Palestinian people who had no say in the matter. Egypt and Jordan then kept the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza under occupation by their militaries for the best part of two decades.

In regards to international law and conquest of territory, Eugene Kontorovich of the Northwestern University School of Law did an interesting study in 2009 entitled "International Responses to Territorial Conquest" on this issue.

Main takeaways:

"While territorial conquest has been relatively infrequent in the post-World War II period, most conquests have not been condemned by the international community. Indeed, acceptance is as common as condemnation."

And:

"International condemnation is found in only a few cases. Other conquests have won overwhelming international acceptance; these interestingly include both conquests of entire nations. The majority of conquests receive no clear international response."

So, the response is not really clear irrespective of what the UN Charter says. In a punitive sense, its insignificant.

Someone was selling a leaf.....from Tenerife..... for a £1,000!!!! I couldn't stop laughing

It can't, which is why the only viable answer is to get rid of Hamas and replace them with an administration willing to negotiate rather than just destroy and kill

And speaking of destruction it's been reported that Gaza's only power plant has now run out of fuel, so now the lights will be going off too

I'm wondering if the govt stops facilitating the expansion of these settlements, and even, withdraw those settlements from the West Bank, that we are more likely to see progress in this situation?

While Hamas exist I believe that's very unlikely

Any real difference may have to wait until they've been destroyed, and given that Israel honoured their commitment to withdraw from Gaza I see no reason to believe that movement on the dreadful settlements wouldn't also be possible ... but it'll have to be a negotiated agreement and Hamas clearly have no interest at all in these

International response is a poor measure of legality or illegality. Realpolitik means that the world accepts all sorts of things that are illegal under international law.

You only have to look at the total lack of international response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to see that.

It is the international community response that tends to inform international law, not the other way round.

But my point is that international law states this specific prohibition yet the punitive aspect is so insignificant that States can easily ignore it. In his paper entitled "The Re-Emergence of Conquest: International Law and the Legitimate Use of Force" published in the 2020 Liverpool Law Review, Michael Mulligan "speculates on the possibility that the re-emergence of conquest is further evidence that international society is reverting to a previous incarnation whereby Great Power politics is assuming its former pre-eminence, at the expense of the rules-based system which emerged after the Second World War."

Territorial Conquest hasn't always been regarded as illegal under International law, so the law itself can change at any point. This is the Realpolitik. It is not set in stone permanently.

The kind of territorial acquisition Israel, USA and UK have done in the last two decades is known as transient conquest in addition to pseudo-conquest. All three have demonstrated they are willing to hold territory temporarily, but willing to exchange it for something else at some point. For the USA and UK plus Allies as well as Israel, it was in exchange for dismantling of terrorist networks and developing a democratic society in those places.

.

Transient conquest is different to settlement and annexation.

In 2019 Mike Pompeo announced that the US no longer considered Israeli settlements to be illegal under international law. The UN reasserted that they are illegal and the UN position on this had not changed.

That’s pretty recent. The principle underlying the UN position is that it is illegal to settle and/or annex territory gained in a war.