Don’t forget to mention that Palestinians are ONLY allowed to fish within the six-mile coastline of the Gaza Strip. What a murderous, oppressive and racist shithole of a country Israel is.
I happen to be reading Richard Evans' history on the Third Reich, book 2 covers life under the Nazis, after they took over in '33. All the terrible shit that was done to the Jews, all of it legal and above board once the Nazis changed the laws, is strikingly similar to what the Israelis are doing now.
Has anyone listened to martyrmade's series on the Israeli/Palestine conflict? It's a deep dive and will require hours of your time - very similar to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - but well worth it. Darrell is an autodidact who grew up in a super chaotic environment, shuffled from one house/family to another, and on paper should have grown up to be a criminal or a drug addict. Instead, he joined the military and focused all of his time on reading and learning. As a result, his viewpoint is fairly unique and, where possible, unbiased. For anyone who wants a primer on How We Got Here: http://www.martyrmade.com/fear-loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem/
The photos of the rockets and Iron Dome (or whatever, that shit sounds like a Wu-Tang album about flawless blowjobs) are incredible.
Quite a while, probably. Israel has a military far more powerful than every other country in the Middle East combined.
The US has been doing the "kill an Afghani fighter using a missile that cost more than his entire lifetime's earnings" for two decades now. I'm guessing they can keep it up for a while.
Serious question, and one that hopefully doesn't devolve us into a banning shitstorm. If you were in charge, how would you fix this? You can't go back and alter time or history, you cannot waive a wand and apply a magical solution. Let's assume, for this thought experiment, that you could at least bring all sides to the table to talk and that you had some authority to implement your idea. What would you do? I have to admit, I don't have an idea. The ideal solution is to go back in time 70-odd years and not allow what would become Israel to occupy the space initially. We can't go back in time and fix that. Currently, Palestine is a fractured state run by multiple parties that each have their own agenda. Hamas openly calls for the destruction of all Jewish people. Palestine is backed by Iran, and Israel is backed by the US and in this little patch of land their proxy war plays itself out. I can't find a solution. If you say, "let them fight to the death," Israel will win. Much stronger military and they are unified as a government and a people. And to "win," they would have to genocide the Palestinians. If you say, "Abolish Israel," where do you put the hundreds of thousands of people you've now evicted and made stateless (not that they would ever agree, but this is a thought experiment)? If you try to broker a peace deal, how do you get the Palestinians to agree on terms, especially when one of those terms won't be "we're killing all the Jews"? I see it from both sides. I can understand the Palestinians saying, "get the fuck off our land," and HATING the usurpers who have their boot on their neck. A religion they don't agree with, a land war on what they consider theirs and a much stronger, well-funded army that will not back down. I can also understand that the Israelis of this generation consider it their home, and live every day with the knowledge that the ENTIRE region surrounding them would like to see them in a gas chamber and eradicated from the Earth. If they back down or show weakness or relent in any way, their lives would likely be forfeit. You won't convince either side to get along, and you cannot give the same piece of land to two different people.
can we say “I would install a secular government and take religion off the table?” Or are we calling that part and parcel with everything. In my opinion, as long as religion is involved, this conflict will never end. And there is no way to make it end. Money will keep being spent on war, and people will continue to die as the violence escalates. And since there’s no reasonable way to remove religion from the equation, I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to solve this. that being said, I am not super well versed in what’s going on to the extent I feel confident understanding or debating the nuances
Who the fuck knows what the solution is. How do you quickly undo millennia of animosity? No idea. But whatever the solution, Turkey probably has to be at the center of it. It’s the Middle East’s most economically powerful and economically diverse nation. However, relations between the US and Turkey have shit the bed via both the Obama and Trump admins. The sanctions on Iran have crushed it so severely that it can barely export pistachios at this point. Saudi Arabia’s military exists solely to subjugate its own people, not execute regional military operations. Their military foreign policy basically consists of funneling money into terror groups to do their dirty work for them, which is why the US keeps its odd relationship with them going. It keeps the cork in the bottle of gasoline. So the only real regional power is Turkey, which is becoming more and more of a Russian puppet state. The real solution may be for the West to just pull out entirely and do business with whomever is left after 10 years or so. But as far as solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the other Arab nations don’t actually give a shit, no matter what sabre-rattling they do.
It’s more than just land, but ancient artifacts and “museums”. Jews have to pray to a wall because their holiest site (actually the holiest place on earth), The Foundation Stone, lies in the Dome of the Rock on Al Asqa which is a Muslim building that won’t let Jews inside (they say that everyone is allowed inside....but they’re not). ....Something as petty as this on its own has made these two groups hate each other tooth-and-nail for centuries. That’s just one of the dozens of things that will ever prevent peace or even ceasefires in the region. As I said before, this isn’t fixable and we’ll be dead 1000 years before it is. The best thing for people who live there to do is escape it entirely if they still can. The lunatics run the asylum and they have swallowed the key.
ROTN beat me to it. Abolish religion, offer everyone free citizenship elsewhere (Australia? Brazil? Canada? US? Who the fuck cares?), and suddenly no one gives a shit about dust and rocks. Seriously, with the decline of religion in the US, I wonder what the appetite for this bullshit will be over the next few decades, and what will happen to the civilizations that cling to it obstinately. Whenever we start to have more atheists in politics (and given how batshit crazy the Evangelicals we have are, that pendulum swing is going to be HARD), I can imagine they'll look at situations like this much more dispassionately, and hopefully be able to appeal to a younger generation who emphasizes their quality of life, than the qualities of their after-life. I'd also wager some demographic issues (those COVID-19 deaths will sure take a swipe at social stability, won't they?), climate change issues, and the effects of being past "peak oil" may make things far worse. People tend to fight far harder when they are desperate, and I'm not sure anyone wants to learn what "fighting harder" looks like for that region. That part of the world getting hotter and dryer may render all this conflict a moot point, especially without oil money buying elaborate infrastructure and covering the topsy-turvy economics of literally not producing anything other than oil, conflict and religious tourism. Darkly, I wonder if they back into WMD's from a vector no one else really expects. They might not get nukes, but biological wouldn't be beyond the pale for this part of the world, and an attack on a water supply in some of these places is tantamount to genocide. I can't be the only person who has wondered about it, and if no one survives, the victors write their own history, with the West and the larger international community offering little more than indignant outrage and/or shrugs.