>> Initially, I felt that it wasn't genocide because the goal was to wipe out Hamas, not the Palestinian people. I knew that Hamas hid their people, weapons, and hostages among the the civilian population, which made civilian casualties inevitable.<<
Israel has long been working to crowd out Palestinians, whether by death or displacement. The current round is not new, just more open now that Israel has tested the waters and found they can literally get away with murder.
Hamas does behave badly. But what reward is there for being a "good" victim? Your enemies will kill you anyway, or crowd you out of your home. How much abuse are people expected to swallow before fighting back? At some point, they are going to decide that it doesn't matter if they all die, they can at least take some of the bastards with them.
>> I was wrong. It may not have begun as genocide, but there is no excuse or other name for what Israel is doing.<<
No excuse, but reasons, and the root reasons show why this is everyone's problem, not just Palestine's problem. Israel is never going to feel safe. Jews never feel safe. Israel was founded entirely by trauma survivors, and generational trauma is a fundamental part of the Jewish tradition. They're not even wrong; anti-semitism is still a serious problem. But they're not just attacking Hamas, or Palestine; they're attacking other nearby countries too. Do you think they'll stop if they kill all the Palestinians and take all the Palestinian land? I don't. They're surrounded by people who aren't Jews and don't like them, so they'll just wind up in a fight with somebody else. Israel does not seem to have either the skills or the desire to interact gracefully with other nations. (This is true of many countries in the Middle East, and for that matter, central Europe has been a bucket of crabs for centuries too.)
>> And yet...Hamas' stated goal is Jewish genocide. Asked how they could claim they did not kill non-combatants when the murder of infants was documented, they said something along the lines of "since they are illegitimate, there are no civilians in Israel." <<
Yeah. That's exactly the position that invaded nations usually take. Like say, Ukraine trying to fend off Russian encroachment. Russia uses the settler invasion method too. It's a big part of how they've been pecking away at that border for a while. The same thing happened in America. And that's why I can't sympathize with Israeli victims, except in an abstract that it's sad when people die, especially children. If you choose to go into contested territory, you are choosing to enter that fight. The children are just born into it, but children always wind up paying for the mistakes of adults.
Obviously attacking Israel was a poor strategy. Israel is more powerful and they're showing it by pounding Palestine to gravel. But they were always intending to destroy Palestine one way or another. This is faster and messier. Sometimes, when you've been oppressed long enough, you just sort of stop feeling the suffering as much, and thus don't really care if gets you killed so long as you can strike back at your enemies. Sometimes you think, maybe if you hurt them enough, they'll leave you alone. And when both sides are in that headspace, you get a war that doesn't end until one side is dead or gone.
>> How do you respond to that kind of intransigence? <<
Well, when you have two groups that would both like to kill the other group and take all their stuff, it has a predictable set of possible paths:
* One group successfully wipes out the other in a completed genocide. For all the squawking about Hitler, he never did manage to kill off all of any of his targets. But look at Australia and America, both of whom completely obliterated multiple tribes. Considering that Israel has nuclear weapons and Palestine does not, this is a likely outcome.
* One group successfully drives the other out of reach in a completed exile. This is also quite plausible. Used to be there was enough room in the world for them to find somewhere else as a group, more often than not, but now there's nowhere for a group to go. The Jews are one of the very few exiled cultures that managed to maintain an identity over the long term. I doubt Palestine would manage, but it might.
* What starts out as a small conflict between two groups flares into a massive, world-shaking war. This is most likely if both groups have allies to pull in -- or if not allies, at least 2+ clusters of people who don't like each other. While perhaps a lower probability, this is still plausible because Israel has powerful allies afar but is surrounded by Islamic states who may decide they hate Israel more than they hate each other.
* Surrounding cultures pressure the ones in conflict to cool down their combat. This can work for a while in terms of keeping war off the hot burner, but it is not peace nor is it stable. I don't think other countries give sufficient fucks to achieve this, and hell, it's the Middle East, it's been a seething mess of violence for most of the last 6,000 years or so. Just that we know of.
* Nobody succeeds in completely killing the other or driving them far enough away, so they just keep fighting over the same territory and/or issues for ... as long as they both last. This is the story in much of the Middle East and several other hotspots in the world.
* People on both sides get sufficiently fed up with the violence and losses that they voluntarily stop it themselves. This may mean moving out of reach from each other, or finding something else to do, or just quiet-quitting the war by ignoring each other. It only works if they both do this at the same time, though. You need two sides to have a war, but only one to have a massacre. This is ... not quite impossible.
There are people on both sides agitating for peace. The problem is, they are a minority and being attacked by their own sides. American Jewish organizations are outright, openly purging themselves of Jews who think that genocide is wrong and Palestinians have a right to exist. Which is a problem because it's gutting them of their youth. Plus they're pressuring everyone else to do the same, like universities, with a prevailing amount of success.
On the bright side, anyone and everyone can pursue this path for any conflict or just because you generally think that peace is a more desirable way than war, and there are better ways to solve problems than by murdering people. Multiple philosophies, religions, and other organizations have plenty of material about peacework skills. And what if everybody did that? The conflict would go away.
Sadly, history indicates that humans are bad at this. We can keep trying anyway.
* Sometimes, major unforeseeable changes make the conflict a moot point. For example, the Middle East is already hot. America just selected the path of 3C+ climate change by electing a climate arsonist. So it's not difficult to predict that in the foreseeable future, environmental foreclosure will simply take that part of the world off the gameboard.
In which case, I strongly recommend that the rest of the global community do its best to separate groups in conflict and not put them together anywhere, the way America crammed hostile tribes onto the same reservation, repeatedly, in hopes they'd kill each other off. I doubt anyone will listen, but separating hostile parties by enough physical distance can break up a conflict over the long term.
The situation is a mess. Lots of people are committing atrocities. This was all obviously going to happen from the time Europe shoehorned Israel into the Middle East, already an unstable area. I have come to suspect that this was not an accident. There are no easy solutions. So this will likely stay a mess. I can't stop it, but at least I can acknowledge it.
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dancing_serpent
Thoughts
Date: 2024-11-17 05:34 am (UTC)Israel has long been working to crowd out Palestinians, whether by death or displacement. The current round is not new, just more open now that Israel has tested the waters and found they can literally get away with murder.
When one group invades the territory of another group, and expands over time to take more territory, conflict is a predictable result.
Hamas does behave badly. But what reward is there for being a "good" victim? Your enemies will kill you anyway, or crowd you out of your home. How much abuse are people expected to swallow before fighting back? At some point, they are going to decide that it doesn't matter if they all die, they can at least take some of the bastards with them.
>> I was wrong. It may not have begun as genocide, but there is no excuse or other name for what Israel is doing.<<
No excuse, but reasons, and the root reasons show why this is everyone's problem, not just Palestine's problem. Israel is never going to feel safe. Jews never feel safe. Israel was founded entirely by trauma survivors, and generational trauma is a fundamental part of the Jewish tradition. They're not even wrong; anti-semitism is still a serious problem. But they're not just attacking Hamas, or Palestine; they're attacking other nearby countries too. Do you think they'll stop if they kill all the Palestinians and take all the Palestinian land? I don't. They're surrounded by people who aren't Jews and don't like them, so they'll just wind up in a fight with somebody else. Israel does not seem to have either the skills or the desire to interact gracefully with other nations. (This is true of many countries in the Middle East, and for that matter, central Europe has been a bucket of crabs for centuries too.)
>> And yet...Hamas' stated goal is Jewish genocide. Asked how they could claim they did not kill non-combatants when the murder of infants was documented, they said something along the lines of "since they are illegitimate, there are no civilians in Israel." <<
Yeah. That's exactly the position that invaded nations usually take. Like say, Ukraine trying to fend off Russian encroachment. Russia uses the settler invasion method too. It's a big part of how they've been pecking away at that border for a while. The same thing happened in America. And that's why I can't sympathize with Israeli victims, except in an abstract that it's sad when people die, especially children. If you choose to go into contested territory, you are choosing to enter that fight. The children are just born into it, but children always wind up paying for the mistakes of adults.
Obviously attacking Israel was a poor strategy. Israel is more powerful and they're showing it by pounding Palestine to gravel. But they were always intending to destroy Palestine one way or another. This is faster and messier. Sometimes, when you've been oppressed long enough, you just sort of stop feeling the suffering as much, and thus don't really care if gets you killed so long as you can strike back at your enemies. Sometimes you think, maybe if you hurt them enough, they'll leave you alone. And when both sides are in that headspace, you get a war that doesn't end until one side is dead or gone.
>> How do you respond to that kind of intransigence? <<
Well, when you have two groups that would both like to kill the other group and take all their stuff, it has a predictable set of possible paths:
* One group successfully wipes out the other in a completed genocide. For all the squawking about Hitler, he never did manage to kill off all of any of his targets. But look at Australia and America, both of whom completely obliterated multiple tribes. Considering that Israel has nuclear weapons and Palestine does not, this is a likely outcome.
* One group successfully drives the other out of reach in a completed exile. This is also quite plausible. Used to be there was enough room in the world for them to find somewhere else as a group, more often than not, but now there's nowhere for a group to go. The Jews are one of the very few exiled cultures that managed to maintain an identity over the long term. I doubt Palestine would manage, but it might.
* What starts out as a small conflict between two groups flares into a massive, world-shaking war. This is most likely if both groups have allies to pull in -- or if not allies, at least 2+ clusters of people who don't like each other. While perhaps a lower probability, this is still plausible because Israel has powerful allies afar but is surrounded by Islamic states who may decide they hate Israel more than they hate each other.
* Surrounding cultures pressure the ones in conflict to cool down their combat. This can work for a while in terms of keeping war off the hot burner, but it is not peace nor is it stable. I don't think other countries give sufficient fucks to achieve this, and hell, it's the Middle East, it's been a seething mess of violence for most of the last 6,000 years or so. Just that we know of.
* Nobody succeeds in completely killing the other or driving them far enough away, so they just keep fighting over the same territory and/or issues for ... as long as they both last. This is the story in much of the Middle East and several other hotspots in the world.
* People on both sides get sufficiently fed up with the violence and losses that they voluntarily stop it themselves. This may mean moving out of reach from each other, or finding something else to do, or just quiet-quitting the war by ignoring each other. It only works if they both do this at the same time, though. You need two sides to have a war, but only one to have a massacre. This is ... not quite impossible.
There are people on both sides agitating for peace. The problem is, they are a minority and being attacked by their own sides. American Jewish organizations are outright, openly purging themselves of Jews who think that genocide is wrong and Palestinians have a right to exist. Which is a problem because it's gutting them of their youth. Plus they're pressuring everyone else to do the same, like universities, with a prevailing amount of success.
On the bright side, anyone and everyone can pursue this path for any conflict or just because you generally think that peace is a more desirable way than war, and there are better ways to solve problems than by murdering people. Multiple philosophies, religions, and other organizations have plenty of material about peacework skills. And what if everybody did that? The conflict would go away.
Sadly, history indicates that humans are bad at this. We can keep trying anyway.
* Sometimes, major unforeseeable changes make the conflict a moot point. For example, the Middle East is already hot. America just selected the path of 3C+ climate change by electing a climate arsonist. So it's not difficult to predict that in the foreseeable future, environmental foreclosure will simply take that part of the world off the gameboard.
In which case, I strongly recommend that the rest of the global community do its best to separate groups in conflict and not put them together anywhere, the way America crammed hostile tribes onto the same reservation, repeatedly, in hopes they'd kill each other off. I doubt anyone will listen, but separating hostile parties by enough physical distance can break up a conflict over the long term.
The situation is a mess. Lots of people are committing atrocities. This was all obviously going to happen from the time Europe shoehorned Israel into the Middle East, already an unstable area. I have come to suspect that this was not an accident. There are no easy solutions. So this will likely stay a mess. I can't stop it, but at least I can acknowledge it.