Subjective Effect on 9/10/2024 at 00:45

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Offer a solution. After Oct 7th, what should Israel have done?

demagogue on 9/10/2024 at 05:12

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What does any normal country do with domestic terrorists?
Arrest them, hold a trial, then imprison them for life.
Then you give Palestinians citizenship and a political say in the circumstances of their existence like any normal country, so disputes are handled through the political system and not terrorism.

That is how every normal liberal democratic country has ever dealt with this situation.
As it is now, Israel is making a whole lot more terrorists than they're killing, and they're just perpetuating the cycle for another decade or two.
It never ends until Palestinians have citizenship, equality, civil and political rights, and a decent standard of living.

And in case anybody is confused on this point, the Israeli Knesset has already (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/18/israels-knesset-votes-to-reject-palestinian-statehood) committed itself to a one state solution, and with the settlers, infrastructural integration, and assured occupation of Gaza, there's no going back on that commitment short of Final Solution level ethnic cleansing as the only viable alternative at this point. (Everybody knows what a "Madagascar Plan" [Oklahoma Plan, Armenia Plan, Circassian & Crimean Khanate Plan, Bantustan Plan] etc., etc, really means.)
It's not really rocket science.
It's "how to deal with people that have lived in your territory for 100s of years" 101 stuff.

Edit: At least for Americans, I guess not many really ever learned that a two state solution was also the solution taken for granted for Native Americans for a very long time too, Sequoia, what we now call the state of Oklahoma (along with the return to Liberia solution for the former Black slave population). But of course white nationalists obstructed its creation at every turn, like Zionists have done for a Palestinian state, and in both cases the situation on the ground makes them un-viable. Also the South African Bantustans while we're at it. Just like the US and South Africa, Israel will at some point realize there's only two viable options, genocide or give them citizenship, and the US was Christian enough to give Native Americans citizenship. I think Americans also probably don't appreciate that our longest wars by far were with Native Americans, Comanches, Apaches, Utes, Sioux, many of them lasting up to and longer than 50 to 80 years. I want to say I doubt that Palestinians want to kill all Jews any more than Apaches and Comanches wanted to kill all white settlers, but citizenship was still the right answer for Native Americans. But they have polls on that matter, and 78% of Palestinians desire living side by side in peace with Jews, as long as they have citizenship to a state. Anyway, Palestinians are still one of the largest stateless populations in the world, the state of Israel has total control over the conditions on the ground, and most decolonization happened already in the 1960s... Having citizenship is the first level for any protection or political agency for any population, and you just can't have a population be stateless for more than 80 years any way you cut it. Give them citizenship already and end the mess. There's really no excuse that isn't debunked by clear evidence and basic human rights standards.

Edit 2: If I were on the Palestinian PR team, the first thing I'd recommend is take a note from Mandela's playbook, which is your starting pitch is that the job of the new state is to ensure all persons in the territory get absolute protection by the state, and a no tolerance policy on any threats or violence against Israeli Jews. You have to make it explicit and the first item in the list, part of the actual slogan, to give no rhetorical chance to claim that Jewish lives might be at risk or that they wouldn't be equal citizens. I think that politically the challenge is that any Palestinians seen as collaborationists aren't going to get much political backing, which is a common theme in all colonial case studies, so I recognize the challenge, but you gotta go with what's worked in other cases.

demagogue on 9/10/2024 at 05:52

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I gave the example of Native Americans. Black South Africans. Catholic Northern Irish. Turkish Russians. Kurdish Turks. Karkalpaki Uzbekistanis. Muslim Indians. Hindu Pakistanis. Fur Sudanese. Kachin Myanarmese. Herero Namibians. Vietnamese Cambodians. I mean... 9 out of 10 countries have had an internal population it's been at war with for a long time. Almost all of them now have citizenship except for Palestinians.

demagogue on 9/10/2024 at 06:02

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Every situation is different from every other situation.

Look, there are 8 billion people on planet earth.
There are 5 million stateless people.
That's 0.0625% of the population.
You want to tell me that that 0.0625% is fundamentally different from 99.9375% of the rest of humanity?
No other ethnically-different population has ever been at war with its home state to which it now has citizenship in the history of mankind?
That's really the argument you want to go with?

Edit: Fine, you raise a valid point, trying to arrest Hamas would be operationally a challenge and hard to avoid some conflict, like it was for some of the other cases like Black South African militants under the apartheid regime or Northern Irish Catholic militants during the Troubles, etc. But they still managed to come to a political solution that didn't involve completely leveling 90% of every structure and cutting off the food and water supply. There's self-defense in terms of incapacitating the ability for Hamas to attack Israelis, which was a line crossed long ago. (The Israeli state was negligent in not preventing the attack to begin with.) But anyway they've gone way beyond the goal of self-defense at this point, and if you really want to get rid of Hamas for good, not even speaking of wokeness, just very realpolitik practically speaking, no state in history has ever gotten rid of a terrorist network until they've given civil and political rights to the population and their outlet for dispute is political and not through violence. The terrorist group just keeps coming back until you have that. Believe it or not I'm actually coming at this from the perspective of wanting to end Hamas, Hezbollah, and terrorism and political violence in the region altogether as one of my starting points.

Jason Moyer on 9/10/2024 at 07:19

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1. Hamas goes
2. Hezbollah goes
3. Likud goes
4. ?????
5. Kumbaya