Settler colonialism in action

[Ares Land]

I don’t really know much about French Algeria; could you elaborate on why you think it’s a more suitable analogy? (Insofar as any analogy is suitable here.)

With the big caveat that I don't think the colonial analogy is entirely satisfying, sure.

Algeria was a settler colony, with a large-ish population of European settlers and a large Arab / Berber population. So demographically there is a parallel. I think the relative size of the population were sort of similar, in proportion.
There was a similar fear of democratic growth of the Muslim community. In the case of Algeria, it was justified -- and I think that factor alone led to the abandonment of the colony.
Parallels to Israel were actually drawn by the French government at the time. There were very advanced plans for a two-state solution of sorts in the early 60s, where France would have kept Algiers (and the oil fields. and the nuclear testing grounds.) and the rest of the country granted independance. The resulting map looked strikingly like one of Israel -- and as De Gaulle put it at the time (please forgive the rough translation):

"If we follow through with your solution, we will cause the whole Earth to rise up against us. The Third-World will side with the Arabs. We will have created a new Israel. All hearts in the Arab world, in Asia, in Latin America, will beat along the Algerians'. The Jews have a good reason: on this land they had their roots, long before the Arabs, and they have no other national home. In Algeria, the Arabs were there before us, everything we did bears the stain of the colonial regime, which we cannot clean off. The home of the Algerian French is France."

Myself, I entirely agree with the sentence in bold and that part is exactly where, in my opinion, the colonial analogy stops. (And in case my position feels unclear, I also think Netanyahu belongs in the Hague in front of the ICC.)

(Also, as you can read above, De Gaulle was a huge drama queen, but he had some common sense. What do you call it when you feel moldy old reactionaries aren't what they used to be?)

[Raphael]

I do believe the leadership of rich Western countries -- the US, of course, but also others -- sometimes/often thinks of Israel as a 'middleman country', a useful foothold in a resource-rich troubled region.

Both many of Israel's supporters and many of Israel's opponents like to talk about how important Israel is for Western and specifically US interests, but frankly, I'm not seeing it. Israel directly or indirectly controls a, geographically speaking, tiny part of the Middle East, and outside the area it directly or indirectly controls, it has very little influence in the rest of the Middle East. And the area that it does control isn't even used to station troops from other Western countries as part of missions elsewhere in the Middle East (unless you count embassy guards or liaison officers). So, if Israel projects Western power in the Middle East, it does so only in a fairly tiny part of it.

[Ares Land]

Both many of Israel's supporters and many of Israel's opponents like to talk about how important Israel is for Western and specifically US interests, but frankly, I'm not seeing it. Israel directly or indirectly controls a, geographically speaking, tiny part of the Middle East, and outside the area it directly or indirectly controls, it has very little influence in the rest of the Middle East. And the area that it does control isn't even used to station troops from other Western countries as part of missions elsewhere in the Middle East (unless you count embassy guards or liaison officers). So, if Israel projects Western power in the Middle East, it does so only in a fairly tiny part of it.

I think the importance might be overstated, but it's there.
It's more a matter of location than size -- it's central relative to Africa, Asia, the Arabian peninsula, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. It has always been a key strategic place.
Having an ally there is certainly an asset, even if you don't actually maintain truth, if only for intelligence reasons. Israeli military and intelligence can be trusted to cooperate with US operations in the area. Israel is probably easier to work with than Turkey or the Saudis, too.

[Travis B.]

About the one-state solution versus the two-state solution versus the current "one-state reality", the thing is that variations on the one-state solution and the two-state solution are our only options for peace. Continuing the current "one-state reality" will only mean continual insecurity, and the longer this remains the harder peace will be.

As for the one-state solution, while the secular version I have mentioned here may be overly idealistic, there are other versions that are possible, e.g. ones that bake communal rights into the constitution (e.g. everyone has a right to use their native language (e.g. Hebrew or Arabic) publicly, everyone has a right to have their religion (e.g. Judaism, Islam, or Christianity) and its practice be respected) and also ones that are federal or confederal rather than unitary (i.e. rather than one state without subdivision, have the Republic of the Holy Land (or whatever it is to be named) have autonomous units that are guaranteed to be Jewish or Palestinian, and in which Jews cannot take land from Palestinians or vice versa).

As for the two-state solution, as I have mentioned before it is the only option if Israeli Jews want their Jewish state, and with every settler that moves to the West Bank and every hectare of land taken from the Palestinians it only becames that much harder to implement. And as I have mentioned, if Jews want both peace and a Jewish state, they must evict every one of those settlers and return each of those hectares of land to the Palestinians.

While both of these may be distasteful to many Israeli Jews, who both want a Jewish state and do not want to give any land back to the Palestinians, there are really no other solutions, and the status quo will simply make things worse the longer it continues. Sooner or later, if not already, the two-state solution will be completely infeasible, resulting in the only viable solutions being variations on the one-state solution, as much as many Israeli Jews may dislike these options.

[Torco]

I'm skeptical of a two state solution, tbh: look at it from, say, Jordan's perpective -or Syria or whatever: as long as you have a nuclear ethnostate right around the corner, and one that supports illegal settlements on your land to boot, peace is simply not a smart choice for you. the one state solution, one where israel ceases to be an ethnostate, though, is inimical to the very idea of israel itself. of course, if the israelis stopped voting in likud, things could change, but the other parties have ruled in the past and there hasn't been a lot of -that i know of, i'd love to be informed otherwise- progress.

[Travis B.]

I'm skeptical of a two state solution, tbh: look at it from, say, Jordan's perpective -or Syria or whatever: as long as you have a nuclear ethnostate right around the corner, and one that supports illegal settlements on your land to boot, peace is simply not a smart choice for you. the one state solution, one where israel ceases to be an ethnostate, though, is inimical to the very idea of israel itself. of course, if the israelis stopped voting in likud, things could change, but the other parties have ruled in the past and there hasn't been a lot of -that i know of, i'd love to be informed otherwise- progress.

The key thing for a true two-state solution is that it requires true sovereignty and territorial integrity of Palestine, with all of Palestine being reserved for Palestinians, and everything the Israeli gov't has been doing for decades has been militating against these things (for instance, attempting to legitimize settlements that are illegal even by present-day Israeli law). Yes, the two-state solution involves a Jewish ethnostate, but it still would be much preferable over the status quo, where Palestinians are second-class at best and settlers can take land from them essentially as they please (and this goes very much against any prospects for peace, so if Jews sincerely want to have a Jewish state for the sake of safety for Jews, they had better do their damnedest to push for the two-state solution).

[Torco]

I don't know man, remember bantustans?

[rotting bones]

Both many of Israel's supporters and many of Israel's opponents like to talk about how important Israel is for Western and specifically US interests, but frankly, I'm not seeing it. Israel directly or indirectly controls a, geographically speaking, tiny part of the Middle East, and outside the area it directly or indirectly controls, it has very little influence in the rest of the Middle East. And the area that it does control isn't even used to station troops from other Western countries as part of missions elsewhere in the Middle East (unless you count embassy guards or liaison officers). So, if Israel projects Western power in the Middle East, it does so only in a fairly tiny part of it.

The US used Japan and South Korea as forward bases to exert influence on the Far East too: https://youtu.be/12ddOpt7Hio

[rotting bones]

As for Le Pen and Meloni... I do believe there's a certain continuity. Most noticeably in seeing Arabs and Muslims as some sort of barbarian enemy.
Though of course, there is also a strong anti-semitic element in the far-right too. It's all a mess of contradiction, but contradiction is in the nature of fascism.

I'm not sure it's contradictory. Nazis support Zionism because they want Jews to move out of Western countries. This is why Zizek said he wants Jews to live in the West. They make valuable contributions there.

The analogy to colonialism is really not helping; the colonial wars ended up with the colonial power being kicked out.
Israel is not going away. Nor should it!

It's not an analogy. There really is an indigenous population that was removed to settle people from elsewhere.

Colonialism doesn't always collapse. All the colonial countries where disease decimated the local population are still here.

Palestinians are more numerous than Israelis

I'm positive the Native Americans were much more numerous than the colonial settlers at first. Then the Nature Americans were hit with diseases and nonstop genocidal wars to wipe them out.

Arab Muslim culture is alive and well.

I think this comes from genocidal rhetoric against those born in Palestine. What does culture have to do with flesh and blood human beings? Was it okay for Pakistan to commit genocide against Bengalis because we are a large ethnic group?

A 'Republic of the Holy Land' would quickly turn into a puppet state.

People seem to think Israel is a puppet state already.

[rotting bones]

I will defend Israel’s right to exist and right to defend itself, but beyond that I have a lot of issues with its current conduct.

I oppose the right to exist of all countries.

This, on the other hand, I don’t agree with (even leaving aside the argument that a single state would not be ‘Israel’ as is commonly understood). In theory… yes, it would be all nice and lovely if everyone could get along together without borders. In practice, it would turn into a bloodbath. The sad fact is that there’s just too much accumulated hate on both sides for people to get along easily — both Palestinian hatred of Jews, and Jewish hatred of Palestinians. Extremists exist, and are politically powerful on both sides.

As for ‘Jewish character’, it doesn’t even need a ‘demographic bomb’. The simple fact is that, in a single-state solution, there would be more Arabs than Jews (or at the very least, an equal number of each). As mentioned by Torco earlier, one of the biggest reasons Israel is important to me is that it provides an environment where Jews are guaranteed to be safe… could a one-state solution give us that same guarantee? I doubt it.

I've heard supporters of the one state solution say the one state would be a federal union of Israeli and Palestinian states with states' rights. Personally, I have doubts such an union would survive.

I've had at least two countries created for me, and I still don't feel safe. How could I with the human rights record of Pakistan and Bangladesh? India has two states where Bengali is the official language, but the human rights record of India is almost as bad. One of the two Bengali states, Tripura, is already controlled by the BJP.

There could be an international army that explicitly violates the sovereignty to protect minorities across the world.

Keep in mind ‘the Israeli government’ which has funded it has been pretty much only Likud. This policy, like quite a lot of the other failures, can be traced back directly to Netanyahu. From his perspective, there’s nothing ‘suspicious’ about it: he wanted Hamas to be in power so that he could seem to be a strongman.

Right, the clip of an Israeli politician saying so was aired by John Oliver.

[rotting bones]

(For instance, some people call the Bengal famine "genocide", as in a prior discussion here, and that was far less deliberate than what the Israeli gov't is doing here.)

I don't understand how the Bengal famine wasn't deliberate. They knew it would happen and they didn't take adequate measures to stop it. There were these "inadvertent" famines throughout British rule in India.

Also, just in case: The Bangladesh independence genocide, which I mentioned in this thread, was different from the Bengal Famine.

Probably the solution to this sort of problem is to write communal rights, e.g. protection of language and religious rights, into the Republic of the Holy Land's constitution, and make it so they simply cannot be voted away (e.g. make it so that these parts of the constitution require a more-than-supermajority, e.g. three fourths', vote to change them, or even make it illegal to attempt to change them at all).

My understanding is that this created a stalemate in Lebanon. Because some communities have more rights than their demographic strength, the government is in an eternal stalemate. Maybe there are ways to avoid this.

[rotting bones]

Ignoring the rights of communities means that majorities can simply win an election, then oppress minorities.

Why do we have to give up on fixing injustice within communities? Do we still need rights of communities if we can have that?

[rotting bones]

...

I agree that you said these things. I can't for the life of me figure out why you'd think saying them is a good idea.

This is what I mean when I say I have never seen a human find a truth convincing.

[zompist]

Ignoring the rights of communities means that majorities can simply win an election, then oppress minorities.

Why do we have to give up on fixing injustice within communities? Do we still need rights of communities if we can have that?

I dunno, ask the person who has the weird opinion you are criticizing.

[Travis B.]

(For instance, some people call the Bengal famine "genocide", as in a prior discussion here, and that was far less deliberate than what the Israeli gov't is doing here.)

I don't understand how the Bengal famine wasn't deliberate. They knew it would happen and they didn't take adequate measures to stop it. There were these "inadvertent" famines throughout British rule in India.

Also, just in case: The Bangladesh independence genocide, which I mentioned in this thread, was different from the Bengal Famine.

This goes back to the whole "murder" versus "manslaughter" thing -- what the Pakistani gov't did in Bangladesh (with Operation Searchlight and all) and what the Israeli gov't is currently doing in Gaza (with bombing just about everything even though no one has any real ability to escape and deliberately cutting off shipping in food) is different from what the British gov't did in Bengal (horrible mismanagement just like their horrible mismanagement in years past led to other famines in British India; while from what I have read there were issues with shipping food in due to the Japanese occupation of Burma resulting in the Bay of Bengal effectively becoming Japanese-controlled airspace, I have also read that they actually had enough food in Bengal and the Bengal famine was really due to economic mismanagement).

[zompist]

what the British gov't did in Bengal (horrible mismanagement just like their horrible mismanagement in years past led to other famines in British India; while from what I have read there were issues with shipping food in due to the Japanese occupation of Burma resulting in the Bay of Bengal effectively becoming Japanese-controlled airspace, I have also read that they actually had enough food in Bengal and the Bengal famine was really due to economic mismanagement).

You're letting the Brits off too easy... Amartya Sen showed long ago that famines were endemic in British India, including major famines at the beginning and end of their rule, and dwindled to almost nothing after independence. Having regular massive famines for 150 years is more than mismanagement.

[Travis B.]

what the British gov't did in Bengal (horrible mismanagement just like their horrible mismanagement in years past led to other famines in British India; while from what I have read there were issues with shipping food in due to the Japanese occupation of Burma resulting in the Bay of Bengal effectively becoming Japanese-controlled airspace, I have also read that they actually had enough food in Bengal and the Bengal famine was really due to economic mismanagement).

You're letting the Brits off too easy... Amartya Sen showed long ago that famines were endemic in British India, including major famines at the beginning and end of their rule, and dwindled to almost nothing after independence. Having regular massive famines for 150 years is more than mismanagement.

Oh that I am well aware of; the key thing I was commenting on was the difference w.r.t. genocidal mens rea. British rule of India was a real clusterfuck and was full of negligence and callousness towards the Indian population, but I have not read anything which indicates that the British deliberately intended on killing off the Indian population (Winston Churchill's comments on whether Gandhi was dead yet aside), while the Pakistani gov't certainly aimed at killing anyone who even sounded like they could possibly oppose their rule in Bangladesh and the Israeli gov't is so indiscriminate and disproportionate in their conduct of war combined with deliberately cutting off food that it is hard to see their actions here as anything but genocidal.

[keenir]

...

I agree that you said these things. I can't for the life of me figure out why you'd think saying them is a good idea.

which things? I can't recall having said "..." lately. I probably felt I had a good reason, just like you felt you had a good reason to say what you did.

This is what I mean when I say I have never seen a human find a truth convincing.

well, you're human, and you believe in the truth of that statement, right?

[rotting bones]

This is what I mean when I say I have never seen a human find a truth convincing.

well, you're human, and you believe in the truth of that statement, right?

Nope, I oppose all my opinions. "Humans" is a generalization of observations about myself.

[rotting bones]

Oh that I am well aware of; the key thing I was commenting on was the difference w.r.t. genocidal mens rea. British rule of India was a real clusterfuck and was full of negligence and callousness towards the Indian population, but I have not read anything which indicates that the British deliberately intended on killing off the Indian population (Winston Churchill's comments on whether Gandhi was dead yet aside), while the Pakistani gov't certainly aimed at killing anyone who even sounded like they could possibly oppose their rule in Bangladesh and the Israeli gov't is so indiscriminate and disproportionate in their conduct of war combined with deliberately cutting off food that it is hard to see their actions here as anything but genocidal.

The British knew that famines were more prevalent under their rule. They did nothing about it. Knowing and doing nothing is deliberate carelessness, a sinister oopsie, a "shame if something were to happen to it" mindset.

They were hoping India would be depopulated and the English settlers would occupy it like America. At the time, they didn't know why Native Americans were more susceptible to disease.