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  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible “Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!” analysis.

    Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it’s allowed to be the exception is because it’s a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world’s oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it’s also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you’re not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).

    Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there’s a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it’s extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase “… has a right to exist”, it’s always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this “right” in the West’s eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn’t. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.

    There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it’s one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas’ victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.

    I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of “X hates Y and so they’re fighting” obfuscates a lot of what’s actually going on geopolitically. It’s extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn’t mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.

    This isn’t to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn’t just some inherently religious war.

      • pascal@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        What you say it’s not wrong, but you completely ignored the unilateral expansion thing. There’s no free territory, for Israel to expand, someone else has to leave.

        If the United States starts expanding into Canada, there would be international outrage.

      • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Israeli settlers need to give back the land they stole.

        Imagine what a court in your country would decide in this case:

        A man breaks into a house, kills some of the residents, and locks the rest in the basement. He then lives there and raises a family in this house. Decades later, his children still live there, and there are still prisoners in the basement, and they are routinely abused. The children obviously know all this.

        • Would the court expel the children from the house and give it back to the original owners or their descendants?
        • Would the court find the children guilty of crimes?
          • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Yes. You can make an argument that some of the land was legally purchased, but even at the time, this was part of a plan of colonization and ethnic cleansing, so it’s essentially property owned by a criminal enterprise or its members. Palestinians also deserve restitution for decades of oppression. So IMHO all property owned by Israel, any Zionist institution, or any Israeli found guilty of taking part in the oppression may be seized.

            • library_napper@monyet.cc
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              1 year ago

              The vote to create Israel included many countries, but they didn’t let the Palestinians vote. Curuoislu both Inida and Pakistan (who had recently gotten independence from Britain and had a similar psrtiton happen to them) both voted against it.

              I dont think an argument that it was legal could be made if they didn’t bother letting the people who were living there vote on it.