Oddbean

AS TO FACT DETERMINATION: Where Hamas and Israel agree as to what happened, and where I am not certain as to what happened, I would be keen to know. I would need sources. Best to just PM me if you wanted to go down that route. I don't have any expectations that you do, and that you are making a general point which I take and accept. AS TO THE STRENGTH OF HAMAS: The belief that survival is at stake, that this is extential, presupposes that Hamas has the ability to execute it's intentions. You suggested in a prior post that Hamas is strong when I called them the "little guy". But I see Hamas as very weak compared to Israel, even with external funding, even with many people in the world wishing them well, even as they have focused the entire economy of Gaza on war, sacrificing even their own people's drinking water distribution for this effort, being starved of imports... in this state they can barely make functional rockets, these rockets have zero targetting ability, very small explosion radii, they have nothing resembling an iron dome to protect them, they have no tanks, they have no airplanes, their airport was destroyed, they have no port on the sea. They live in squalor, having to spend much of their effort just to survive with food and water and a bit of shelter, and having not much left to dedicate to military purposes. Occasionally a small amount of weapons get through. Israel has mostly effectively blockaded them for a long time, but as we have now seen this has not been totally effective. So they are weak, and Israel is not under any real existential threat from them via military force. It is under a threat of terrorism though. AS TO EXISTENTIAL THREATS: Israel is far more an existential threat to Palestine than Palestine is to Israel. Palestine is not even a recognized state at this point, although there are currently a stateless people in exile on land claimed by Israel. The territories of the refugees have shrunk multiple times, each time as the result of actions by the state of Israel. I find the argument that Israel should defend itself against an existential threat completely ridiculous in the face of the actual history. If that were a good course of action, then Palestinians should also defend themselves against an existential threat, one that has been 90% successful already. But that way just leads to the endless war we currently have. It is in everybody's best interest to seek an alternative. AS TO ISRAEL WOULD HAVE LET THEM LIVE IN PEACE: The evidence is strong that Israel would never let them live in peace. Claims like they could have been an economic powerhouse alongside Israel are complete fabrications of what Israel made or didn't make possible. Look at the Oslo accords. They make legal the Israeli settlement of the West Bank (something the PA should not concede), Israel only withdraws from some of the territory that nobody lives in (nature reserves and such), it put Israel in charge of Area C which carves up areas A and B to make them discontinuous, it didn't recognize statehood for Palestine instead containing only utterly non-binding aspirations, It left Palestinians in charge of only 18% of the West Bank. While it was being negotiated, Netanyahu continued expanding settlements into areas they were negotiating a withdrawal from... tipping off that they weren't really going to do it (else why waste money building things you can't keep?). It was a terrible deal. Fatah and the PA have tried going down this path of being peaceful. It has not worked. Israel carved that up like swiss cheese, continues to slowly steal more and more land, injects more and more settlers, and kills more and more Palestinians there. I believe they do it in slow motion in order to avoid an international response, but I would be keen to hear if people have a better explanation. If Israel were just peaceful people respecting property rights and the right to life of Palestinians, maybe Gazan's wouldn't feel the need to defend their brothers in the West Bank. AS TO WWIII AND HAMAS STRATEGY: I don't think they want WW3, but I do think they want other Arab nations to come help them. AS TO THE RIVER AND SEA THING: I don't take a position as to whether Israel should or should not exist, so this section is about what Hamas is looking to achieve, not what I think is reasonable or just. Yes, Hamas wants Israel to no longer exist. All the people, current Israelis and current Gazans and current West Bankers... would all be living in a single secular nation together called Palestine. Nothing about that desire requires killing anybody, or destroying any economic property, buldings, businesses, or otherwise. Nothing about it requires Israelis to leave. It is a restructuring of government. It is a one state solution. Talking about it as if it is an existential threat to humans misrepresents it. I refer you to several points from the current 2017 Hamas charter: 16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity. 17. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine. 19. There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, judaisation or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse. 28. Hamas believes in, and adheres to, managing its Palestinian relations on the basis of pluralism, democracy, national partnership, acceptance of the other and the adoption of dialogue. The aim is to bolster the unity of ranks and joint action for the purpose of accomplishing national goals and fulfilling the aspirations of the Palestinian people. I don't accept claims that Hamas (and most Palestinians) just want to kill all the Jews if they got a chance (even as Nazis on nostr assure me that they do... Nazis have their own reasons for believing what they believe). Right now, most of them are very angry and probably do dream of killing Israelis because of it. But it is only because they are fucking pissed off, and given a continual stream of new reasons to be pissed off (check the news of what happened on October 6 someone else posted, every day it is like that for them). It is to Israel's advantage to sell the story that these people are all Jew-hating terrorists, because if you buy that story you are more likely to accept the Zionist apartheid, bombings, etc. The beliefs of Palestinian muslims are far less extreme than ISIS or Al-Qaeda or even Iran or Saudi Arabia. The vast majority are Sunni and in particular Da'wa salafiyya which practices a largely non-violent and mainstream Islamist tradition that is common around the world. They are not Salafi Jihadists. But far be it from me to tell anybody who they are, as I am not one of them and could be wrong.

From: mikedilger at 11/06 17:49 > AS TO FACT DETERMINATION: Where Hamas and Israel agree as to what happened, and where I am not certain as to what happened, I would be keen to know. I would need sources. Best to just PM me if you wanted to go down that route. I don't have any expectations that you do, and that you are making a general point which I take and accept. In this hypercharged environment I think individual citings are irrelevant. Note how many have been added to this thread by the onlookers. I do not read them because there is far too much FUD to take any particular citing seriously. The determination of FACT must be accomplished by throwing a very wide net and trying (hoping against hope) to weed out reality from the noise. > AS TO THE STRENGTH OF HAMAS: The belief that survival is at stake, that this is extential, presupposes that Hamas has the ability to execute it's intentions. You suggested in a prior post that Hamas is strong when I called them the "little guy". But I see Hamas as very weak compared to Israel, even with external funding, even with many people in the world wishing them well, even as they have focused the entire economy of Gaza on war, sacrificing even their own people's drinking water distribution for this effort, being starved of imports... in this state they can barely make functional rockets, these rockets have zero targetting ability, very small explosion radii, they have nothing resembling an iron dome to protect them, they have no tanks, they have no airplanes, their airport was destroyed, they have no port on the sea. They live in squalor, having to spend much of their effort just to survive with food and water and a bit of shelter, and having not much left to dedicate to military purposes. Occasionally a small amount of weapons get through. Israel has mostly effectively blockaded them for a long time, but as we have now seen this has not been totally effective. So they are weak, and Israel is not under any real existential threat from them via military force. It is under a threat of terrorism though. All true. Hamas is weak and Isreal is strong. My only quibble with the above is that I never said that Hamas was militarily strong. The fact that Hamas is weak does not mean that they are not an existential threat. Terrorism is an asymmetric approach. A few terrorists can exact a huge price on a strong nation. Allowed to continue they could utterly disrupt the society they are attacking. A few dozen terrorists brought down the World Trade Center killing thousands, and spurring twenty years of a war of annihilation in which two coutries were blown into the stone age. The stronger side has no choice other than to remove the terrorist threat by applying their greater strength and overwhelming the assymetry. The punches of "the little guy" cannot be absorbed forever. At some point "the little guy" has to be forced to stop. > AS TO EXISTENTIAL THREATS: Israel is far more an existential threat to Palestine than Palestine is to Israel. Given that 20% of the citizens of Isreal are Palestinian arabs, I think you might want to reconsider that assertion. >Palestine is not even a recognized state at this point, True, which is another reason to reconsider your assertion. You cannot be an existential threat to something that does not exist. There is no state of Palestine. There never has been a state of Palestine. And at this point I think it unlikely that there ever will be a state of Palestine. >although there are currently a stateless people in exile on land claimed by Israel. Who is in exile? Again, 20% of the citizens of Isreal are Palestinian arabs. Exactly 0% of the residents of Gaza are Jews. And, indeed, the Jews that used to live in Gaza were exiled from Gaza in 2005 by Israel. Claimed? No, developed and defended. Israel lives there. This isn't a claim that can be adjudicated by some higher authority. >The territories of the refugees have shrunk multiple times, each time as the result of actions by the state of Israel. Not completely true. In fact, mostly untrue. The territories occupied by Palestinians dedicated to the destruction of Israel have shrunk several times in wars that were started by the surrounding Arab nations. >I find the argument that Israel should defend itself against an existential threat completely ridiculous in the face of the actual history. Israel does not find this to be ridiculous. Indeed, it's hard to imagine what other options Israel has. >If that were a good course of action, then Palestinians should also defend themselves against an existential threat, one that has been 90% successful already. What one "should" do must somehow be correlated with what is possible. I think Hamas misjudged that rather badly. >But that way just leads to the endless war we currently have. It is in everybody's best interest to seek an alternative. Should we have sought an alternative against the Third Reich? Or was total obliteration of that regime the only real solution. Sometimes the only solution is absolute victory. > AS TO ISRAEL WOULD HAVE LET THEM LIVE IN PEACE: The evidence is strong that Israel would never let them live in peace. Claims like they could have been an economic powerhouse alongside Israel are complete fabrications of what Israel made or didn't make possible. I can understand that factions like Hamas found the existing situation unacceptable. But they they have always found the very existence of Israel unacceptable. So there's not a lot of room for negotiation there. However, the governing power of Gaza did not need to divert their resources to war. They could have used those resources, and all the aid that was given to them, to build and better the lives of their citizens. They chose war instead. > Look at the Oslo accords. They make legal the Israeli settlement of the West Bank (something the PA should not concede), This is too far into the weeds to be relevant in this particular situation. Given what happened in Gaza it is not likely that Isreal will ever tolerate an autonomous Palestine. > Fatah and the PA have tried going down this path of being peaceful. It has not worked....If Israel were just peaceful people respecting property rights and the right to life of Palestinians, maybe Gazan's wouldn't feel the need to defend their brothers in the West Bank. Hamas killed the PA folks in Gaza when they took over. Threw them out of upper floor windows. That's how much brotherhood means to them. In any case I think the first step in "being peaceful" would have been to recognize the state of Israel and removed the demand for its removal from their charter. > AS TO WWIII AND HAMAS STRATEGY: I don't think they want WW3, but I do think they want other Arab nations to come help them. Then they misjudged. And they shouldn't have. Not one of those Arab nations accepted any refugees. The Arab nations have used the Palestinians as political pawns and proxies for decades. > AS TO THE RIVER AND SEA THING: I don't take a position as to whether Israel should or should not exist, so this section is about what Hamas is looking to achieve, not what I think is reasonable or just. Yes, Hamas wants Israel to no longer exist. All the people, current Israelis and current Gazans and current West Bankers... would all be living in a single secular nation together called Palestine. Nothing about that desire requires killing anybody, or destroying any economic property, buldings, businesses, or otherwise. All of Europe could be living in a single country called The Third Reich. Yeah, no, it doesn't work that way. >Nothing about it requires Israelis to leave. Hmmm. How many Jews live in Gaza? Zero. How many Jews live in Jordan? Zero. Egypt? 3. Iran?... I could go on. If I were a Jew I would not find the idea of living in a Palestinian state particularly appealing. But again, we are in the weeds. The argument about Zionism is just more weeds at this point. Whether anybody likes it or not the Zionists have won. They are there, they aren't leaving, and they are not going to surrender their government to anyone, especially entities that have sworn their destruction. > I don't accept claims that Hamas (and most Palestinians) just want to kill all the Jews if they got a chance I agree with respect to "most Palestinians", or at least I'd be willing to entertain the doubt. As to Hamas, I think they have made their intention quite clear. Kill all the Jews? Maybe, or maybe not; but they certainly seem to want them all to be gone. CC: unclebobmartin