Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967 during the Six Day War.
Each side has complex and embedded stories that justify violence towards each other.
(Vox: "The militant group based in occupied Gaza launched aerial attacks and broke through the heavily secured fence into the State of Israel. Hundreds of Israelis have been killed, a historic scale of violence for the country. The Israeli counterattack will inevitably lead to more death and destruction for Palestinians and a tightened occupation.")
The Jewish people were attempted to be exterminated during Hitler's rise in Germany, and the general scapegoating, othering and anti-semitism in Europe. Jewish people just want to have a place where they are safe, since the winds of anti-semitism can easily blow, like the strains of hate groups in the USA. The peaceful ones who walked into the killing chambers are dead, it's the feisty vengeful fighters who are left. No, it's not that simple, nothing is simple.
The Palestinians are like native Americans. They are there, and are being displaced. It is also apartheid, they are systematically less than and voiceless, like South Africa. The same thing that happened to the Jewish people, the Jewish people of Israel are doing to the Palestinians.
In the first step in overcoming trauma, you identify with the victimizer and become powerful. You become the victimizer, the bully. You make it impossible for others to bully you by strength.
In later stages of overcoming trauma, it becomes impossible to do such things out of profound empathy, and many Israeli are there, but not the people in power. Benjamin Netanyahu just tries to fortify his power, "see, this is why you need a strong protective leader." Murder justifies his murderous response. For every Jewish person who is killed, more Palestinians are killed, there's a sick equation of retribution because now they have the power to strike back, they can out atrocity their foes now. They have found a willing tango partner in this sick dance.
I think if you read other's misbehavior as justification for your own violence, then you're not interested in peace. You don't want to understand, you want violent retaliation.
A parallel place is Northern Ireland. The conflict between Protestant and Catholic is another internecine conflict that kept self refreshing until, poof, they stepped out of the sick dynamics, and stopped it. What stopped it? All the radicals invested in perpetuating the conflict were eventually caught and brought to justice. That and the fact that religion doesn't really even matter any more. Personal spirituality has replaced the tribalism that leads to war. Spirituality honors interconnectivity and insight into othering, demonizing and the ability to harm others. You harm yourself by harming others. There is no such thing as revenge.
People are not so naive to think killing someone actually protects you. Putin far away in Moscow can fight a war far away. Somehow he dupes the populace into not overthrowing him and continues his war of aggression in the Ukraine.
Reading Golda Meir's Wikipedia page, she was a Ukranian from Kiev. She went to Wisconsin for college and to teach. Then when Israel was created, her Zionism led her to emigrate there.
The people that profit from war are far away from the violence and death.
Hamas isn't an evil force uncreated by the apartheid system in Israel. You can bomb them back, or you could address the original grievance. There's a word for it: conflict resolution. It takes time and a kind of maturity that seeks real answers. They both claim serious people are not in negotiation. The people need to empower serious negotiators. I'm sure there's fatigue. I don't live there and I find this exhausting.
Give the Palestinians their reservation. In the history of America, the playbook Israel seems to be following, you just lie and murder, lie and murder until they are essentially so small they are laughingly powerless. And yet somehow Native American culture holds insights into a whole being that includes nature, that the swarming hordes who displace them want to help conquer their perplexed lives of alienation and bewilderment. You have to trace back into history to figure out how we got to this point. The story of America isn't just displacement, it's also what that did, and what we lost by it.
("The attack comes amid an ongoing failure to grapple with the dangerous situation for Palestinians in the West Bank where Israel’s extreme-right government over the past year has escalated the already brutal daily pain of occupation." Op cit)
As victims of pogroms, the Jewish government is carrying out pogroms on the Palestinians. How can they think that is OK?
USA supports Israel because it's the only democracy in the Middle East, but is that really true? The USA is complicit in this conflict. Obviously internal forces can't conquer this conflict, it's external pressure that's going to be needed to foster change. USA wants a two state solution. There are plenty of small nations, why not create a small nation?
I can only conclude that the Israel government and Benjamin Netanyahu, wish to perpetuate this conflict instead of resolve it, and shrink the reservation down to a postage stamp. Basic problem solving would lead to solutions, but there's a kind of insistence on conflict positions. The victim has become the victimizer. And they like being the victimizer. That energy isn't spent yet. The Jewish people couldn't be exterminated, and the Palestinians won't be exterminated either. All they are doing is emboldening the Muslim nations around them.
We live in times where there's enough information and problem solvers to come to a real resolution and an end to the conflict. Israel and the world haven't developed enough willpower to call peace into being yet. They can't imagine it. In AA when someone goes back out drinking, they say they need to do more research. You sort of know they will be back or die soon.
Why is man so self destructive is a question for the ages. It's also why the aliens haven't come calling to join the universal alliances. We've got a lot of shit to figure out and we're not doing it. Life is a race between maturity and senility. We're too limited as a species, for all the ideas that we are the dominant species at the top of the food chain. Perhaps the aliens will ask the dolphins to join the intergalactic alliances.
I'm reading about quick social media posts that support one side or the other, and then they're taken down. Neither side is blameless and neither side deserves this. Just focus on solutions, leaders, please.
Golda Meir said, “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
I would argue loving your own children would necessitate more will to peace.
Both sides share the blame and are the solution.
Camp David peace plan proposal, 2000
This Jewish author thinks reading a book by a Palestinian will help to humanize them, and interrupt the white supremacist narratives.
10/12/23: In Michelle Goldberg's editorial in the New York Times, she writes, "Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anticolonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own."
There has to be a way to say that Israel has created this strike by their apartheid system. I can't enjoy anyone dying, being murdered, because of mismanagement, but you have to see how Israel provokes this, right? Not saying they deserve death, but this is a situation of their own creation. Plenty of people are losing job offers because they support Palestine. Who can justify that murder? The idea that we have to pick which murders are OK and which are not is offensive to me.
Why can't they see what Israel is doing to create this situation? There is a solution, everyone says it. You don't like it, then you like war and death. Victim turned into victimizer. Rinse and repeat. No insight at all. "It's complicated." Yea, it sure is.
I'm not happy Palestine killed people. I'm not happy Israel will kill more people in response. I'm against the killing and I see the refusal to come to a two state solution as the cause. Israel wants to drive all the Palestinians out, kill them all. You can't expect people not to fight back.
Sick, uninsightful dynamics. In my opinion, either you see the two state solution or you want war. The Holocaust doesn't justify apartheid. Two wrongs don't make a right.
"Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, called a “complete siege” of Gaza’s two million people, about half of whom are under 18. “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,” said Gallant. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Such collective punishment is, like the mass killing of civilians in Israel, a war crime."
"Hunger was already rampant in Gaza before this conflict broke out; today the World Food Program estimates that 63 percent of its population, living in one of the most densely populated places in the world, is “food insecure.” “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza,” António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, said in 2021."
"If Gaza was already hell, we lack the language for what it’s about to become. Over the weekend, Ariel Kallner, a member of the Knesset from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for a new “nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” which Palestinians use to describe being driven from their homes at Israel’s creation in 1948. This time, Kallner said, the catastrophe befalling Palestinians would “overshadow” the last." (op cit)
Later, "It is not just disgusting but self-defeating for vocal segments of the left to disavow those universal ideas about human rights, declaring instead that to those who are oppressed, even the most extreme violence is permitted. Their views are the mirror image of those who claim that, given what Israel has endured, the scale of its retaliation cannot be questioned." (italics mine)
Um, yea. The debate is whether we can comment on Israel's response? Don't think so. Two state solution. You can stand with Israel and push them to a two state solution, or some solution, because what they're doing ain't working. You think killing all but a few of the 2 million people in the Gaza Strip is the solution? That was the American solution to the Native Americans. Was that right? Israel's goal is to exterminate, seems a bit uninsightful given their history.
I even see on Twitter some bozo candidate says Democrats funded the Gaza attack.
You thought the insanity about vaccination, masks and hate of the Trump years was bad.
"There are, of course, leaders making exactly that argument. “Right now, the international community must focus on reducing humanitarian suffering and protecting innocent people on both sides of this conflict,” read a
statement by Bernie Sanders."
Don't agree with this but it's interesting: "The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality. Che Guevara didn’t become a dorm room icon only for his motorcycle and rakish beret."
Why can't we want both Palestinian and Israel to live? Israel makes the choice not to do a two state solution, they want the American solution--drive everyone else out, shrink natives down to a postage stamp, drive Mexicans down to a reduced Mexico. It's imperialism. That is why people on the left can be so passionate about Palestine. Not just some naive college dorm thinking.
Such a volatile issue. I have moments where I'm furious at Hamas for seeming to create this. Foreign influences meddling to stir up problems because of anti-semitism. Anti-semitism has a long and gruesome history. If a woman above cited can be put on a list of dangerous people, for suggesting to read a Palestinian author, even though she's Jewish, there's a lot of fear around for supporting one side or another. I'm not saying don't see the pain in both sides. But you have to know that missiles will bring twice the casualties on the other side, so you're willing to have that happen by launching missles. The person who set that in motion could be seen as having both Israel and Palestinian blood on their hands. It's tempting to focus all the blame on them, but honestly this isn't happening if Israel accepts the two state solution. I've been reading up on the rejection of the two state solution today. I haven't read anything that isn't more than "Why would Israel do that when they easily win this war?" They have to share some blame in this situation.
The temptation to blame only one side or the other doesn't seem right to me.
David Brooks has an article that purports to suggest that Palestine rejected the two state deal. "...the Palestinians let it slip away." They were also offered a state in 1947. So my narrative that it's the Israel not wanting to form a 2 state solution is perhaps simplified. Every time I try to find some firm ground to stand on, it erodes away. Why would Palestine reject the 2 state solution? The moment seems to have been 2000, but it was somehow missed.
I hate to see everything as soccer, but it's like a Hudson Derby. Both teams foul and then act like they've never fouled. Both teams simulate to draw the ref's attention, and are irate when it doesn't draw a penalty. Everyone is gaslighting the ref, and the coaches and crowd too, that yells and screams for every injustice against the team. The ref makes mistakes and that gets the crowd and team howling even more. I'm willing the people who put their bodies on the line wish peace would happen.
Dennis Ross wrote a book about Clinton's efforts in 2000. Brooks says the upshot was that Arafat could only imagine himself as a resistance leader, not a state leader. That he's wasn't strong enough to provoke the ire of his people for the many necessary compromises. Palestine had trouble moving away from the victim status. They consider it a death cult and have the unrealistic fantasy that Israel would cease to exist. There are people in the USA who celebrate every act of violence, see it as fighting back against Israel. I'm not sure why the NY Times is so preoccupied with college students, except it represents people who support Palestine.
I read every article, and what I'm not getting is condemnation of both. Every article picks a side, and lambasts the choice of one side. This conflict doesn't continue after a peace settlement and both sides fail to get one. If Palestine is locked into the victim role, then Israel is locked into the victimizer role.
That is even one of the postures, "we tried, but they don't want peace." Well, make them. There's an empathy issue here, and a consequences issue. At least in divorce the families can split and go off in their own direction. There's no finding a new apartment here, they live in such proximity. You can't divorce. So work through your grievances.
I bet if aliens transports the two parties away from each other, they would still grumble about each other and try to find ways to still be in conflict. Supposedly when an abusive parents is stopped, they turn in on themselves and punch walls and things like that. That energy has to go somewhere. I don't underestimate how hard it is to change.
Feel like
this guy gets it, even though he's fighting for Israel: "Israelis and Palestinians will have to reckon with the leaders who led them to this moment. We must wake up and not let the extremists rule. Palestinians and Israelis must denounce the extremists who are driven by religious fanaticism."
BBC on Gaza Strip evacuation notice (10/13/23). Imagine telling 1.1 million people to move. That makes me wonder if there's a significant Palestinian population just on the other side of the Egyptian border in Arish Egypt, or Diqla Egypt. Is Gaza that much better? Is there a refugee crisis in Egypt? Supposedly Palestinians create problems as refugees, not sure if that's true or not, if they were instrumental in a coup in Jordan.
Egypt warned Israel of the attacks (
Guardian). Course Netanyahu calls it fake news. I'm sure they get warnings all the time. How can we as a species avoid these powder keg type situations?
Trading atrocities isn't anyway to live.
Day 6 photos. That's no way to raise above. They don't want to raise above. An eye for an eye leaves you blind.
Al Jazeera has constant coverage on YouTube. Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government.
Sky News
Interesting Op Ed piece by
Thomas L. Friedman: "So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness." There are some interesting hints at the corruption and dysfunction in the government.
Lindsey Graham thinks we should bomb Iran.
"CNN: You're saying that you would want the United States and Israel to bomb Iran, even in the absence of direct evidence of their involvement in this attack.
Lindsey Graham: Yeah." (
tweet CNN footage)
Deepest
article I’ve read yet: “more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own.”
This is an article that explains a lot. Some bits from the article. The people in Gaza are not the original people from there. That seems important. USA and others have undermined non-voilent and ethical ways of protest and change. That seems important. Peter Beinart seems to have the deepest analysis I've read so far. I'm going to have to read it again when I'm less distracted.
If you're Israeli, I would push for ethical change, and not push Palestinians towards violent protests.
Netanyahu told 1.1 million Palestinians they had 24 hours to evacuate. What is that if not ethnic cleansing? by Sarah Helm in the
Guardian.
10/27/23
I haven't seen anything that hasn't devolved into it's OK for one side to murder and only look at the atrocities on this side. You can choose where to stop the antecedent chain. Hamas shouldn't have launched the missles. Israel shouldn't have blocked their non-violent means of protest. And on and on, back to Arafat and back to maps from the Medieval times. You say the Jews shouldn't exist. You say the Palestinians shouldn't exist. If you articulate your disgust the wrong way you can have a truck park in front of you house to show a screen of your comment supporting one side, I'm on the other side, how dare you. It's anti-semitism to think enough Palestinians have died. Certain college students in America identify with frustrated Palestinians who maybe over blame Israel or don't blame anything on the Palestinians. This is a dance both side participate in. Some people focus on that instead of the actual war going on. People in American have killed Arab looking people, and Jewish people. It's horrible. Just stop killing people. Ceasefire in Israel, Ukraine and America, where a man with a gun killed 15 people, and people are ideologically motivated to think up any kind of solution except the one the rest of the world uses and it works. You don't have the right to kill people. You don't have the right to kill people with bombs, guns or not wearing masks and getting vaccines. You can't distort reality because it makes you uncomfortable and impinges on your freedom to kill others. I understand if you're Jewish you want to ask for money on the street to send aid. I understand others want to aid the other side. The need to do something positive and concrete is strong.
10 kids in my daughter's class didn't come to school the next day, when it all went down. It's stressful and terrible out there. Some people are over identifying with their side, inviting you, go on start something, I dare you, replaying what's happening over there, over here. We need the stop these proxy wars, where outside meddlers empower and embolden these conflicts. There's a million intelligent solutions, let's work towards implementing them all. Israel needs to start recognizing non-violent protests as effective and move the needle. Palestinians need to hound out Hamas, and many other things. There's plenty of things for both sides to work on, on themselves.
Season 1 episode 13 "Battle Lines" of Deep Space 9 has an episode where two warring tribes live out a forever war where they kill each other, and then they call come back to life. They can't leave the planet. They can't stop. Remind you of anything? It was their punishment for warring too much. But they can't leave the planet. They have to stay there together.
Every country has their sick dynamics, and ability to act against their own best interest from Gun Control in America, to defeating corruption and criminality, to partisand bickering, to short sighted ignoring of the climate change and poverty.
10/29. For a while now, there have been lots of protests about Palestine (
example) in the USA. It's not anti-semitism, it's the desire not to have an opppressed class of people be trampled for something they didn't really do. Hamas is the bad guy, not the Palestinian people. The Palestinians need to also do a better job of not supporting Hamas.
Guardian update. Israel is trying to uproot the problem, where Gaza launched bombs that kill Israeli on October 7th.
11/3 Kind of sick of the information wars, and all the finger pointing, and the spread of the contagion of this conflict.
11/5. I think it's OK to protest the slaughter of Palestinians even though Hamas did what it did. I don't think it's OK to see this as an opportunity to express anti-semitism. The Israel government isn't all Jewish people. It's a government. You don't want Palestinians to be killed. You don't hate all Jewish people for that.
11/9. Intense editorial by Thomas L. Friedman in
NY Times. How do you protect yourself when you're attacked from all sides? Safe rooms are safe from bombs, but humans come and kill you in your safe room. The far right wing government doesn't speak for all Israeli.
11/11 A friend asked to what extent Hamas represents Palestinians? I don't know the answer to that. To what extent does Israel's government represent the Israeli people? They're a far right faction that doesn't really represent all of Israel, and have done some dastardly things in Israel. This is a war between the Israel Government and Hamas, not the Israel people and Palestinians. To the extent that they join in, it is, but not everyone joins in or thinks joining in the right thing to do.
Every time Israel has a war, they are ferocious. It's quite horrible that Hamas is willing to use that as a technique for drawing sympathy, when they're the ones who launched missiles. To the extent that Israel hasn't listen to peaceful protest from Palestinians they have empowered Hamas to speak for the Palestinians through violence.
But why did Arafat walk away from a 2 state solution in 2002? Could you say every death since then is the fruit of that action?
Israel hasn't just been attacked by Hamas, surrounding countries launch missles. That's pretty horrible. And that's probably why America will always support Israel.
Hamas has headquarters in hospitals. That's pretty horrible. There's an information war to gain sympathy, it really just perpetuates the war. They do not care enough about the children to wage peace, so they wage war. Both sides. Both sides feel righteous.
Israel is mowing down Hamas in Gaza. Five times the amount killed by Hamas for the Israeli deaths, and so far it's not over.
War is just killing people, it makes sense for the military, but it doesn't make sense to me because it can't make sense. I don't think any killing is righteous, but each side will point to atrocities. That kind of thinking is inevitable, a manipulation and just perpetuates the war. Maybe the next generation will get tired of war.
I don't think the imported conflicts in the USA are good. To me taking sides, it's going to happen, but I don't have to take sides. I can lament the death of Palestinians and Israeli. You can say not taking sides kills one side or the other, but that's their justification for killing people. I don't want to kill people. Perhaps that's naive, but at some point they will stop killing each other. And there will be different reasons than the ones they're using now.
I remember after 9/11 I was talking to an Arab woman. I suggested we do nothing. They win, they kill 3K people. War would not really get them back. She sounded so relieved to hear an American say that, but it was never going to happen. Whatever war that was perpetrated after that killed a lot of people, a retaliation, an eye for an eye. It's really about keeping the military industrial complex off life support. Perpetual war. Forever wars. I want to imagine another way.
For every protest picking a side, I can imagine a counter protest. Who is protesting to stop the killing? The people who pick Palestine will say they are, but there has to be somehow a distancing from Hamas. You can't just be for Israel not killing, being blind to one side doesn't resolve the conflict, it just perpetuates it.
11/12. In an information war it's all about what you don't say. The Palestinian report of Israel won't explain why they back Hamas, or why they even want to be in Israel. Why other countries don't want Palestinian refugees. Just negative personal experiences of prejudice without seeing the wider picture. The fact checking counter spin will question everything and invalidate the Palestinian experience. Spin and counter spin, trying to one up the narrative. The terms of the conflict are always being reinitialized by communication about it. The war is in Israel, in the infosphere and imported wherever people without more meaningful lives and grievances exist. A Jewish rabbi was killed in Michigan. Anyone with power and an ax to grind can punish pro-Palestinian sentiment, thereby contributing to the Jews have too much power and influence narrative. The endless conflict is acted out in many realms, and guises, anti-Arab, anti-semitism, back and forth, on and on, forever and ever. You can justify anything if you selectively choose your facts and terms. Right now Israel is justifying their violence because of the Hamas violence on October 7th. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. The narrative gravity is either/or, and it's impossible to say, "I want nobody to die."
There's a Florida politician who said they want all Palestinians to die. Many on the other side will say that they don't want Israel to exist. Both sides are pulled into a "let's wipe them off the earth" narrative, as an expression of hatred for the wounds they have suffered. Instead of the multicultural narrative that is the savior of situation. When everyone's culture is respected and valued, you don't have to eliminate anyone, diversity is appreciated. Unless part of that culture is to eliminate everyone not like them. Is that an essential part of Israel or Palestine? I don't think murderous suicidal ideas are culture, they're mental viruses. The death instinct.
11/13. I do think Israel has a right to strive for safety, but I also think safety will come from listening and being inclusive. There's an article in the
NY Times about Palestinians telling their story. I can't get over, then Arafat shouldn't have walked away in 2002 or Hamas shouldn't have launched the missles October 7th, but even so, when you open up to other's experience, it changes you in good ways. It's an information war if you put someone who suggests to read a Palestinian novel on a list of dangerous people. I think that's exactly what this conflict needs, more empathy for the other side and less finger pointing. If you want empathy, you have to give empathy. We live in a world where there's space for everyone's story. Sympathy for Palestinians isn't about saying Israel is bad or Israeli stories don't matter. Maybe there's a common theme of suffering at being lockhorns. Maybe they need to step back and see what they're really doing. Looking at it from afar, it seems like there is not enough effort to make peace. There's just angry tit for tat and revenge for a hurt, over and over again. It's murderous. The idea that one side or the other deserves the pain and loss--that is weakened by hearing your opponent's tale. If hearing the other side interferes in what you want to do, maybe that should tell you something.
If I had the power to make people do things, like a teacher in a class, I would make an Jewish person report on a Palestinian's experience, and a Palestinian report on a Jewish person's experience, and they would all have to sit there and listen to each other's reports.
I would be a powerful thing to have Israeli politicians go on a listening tour. Would a Hamas leader do such a thing? The fact that I even doubt that is very troubling.
I googled Hamas Leaders, and I got Ismail Haniyeh who lives in the lap of luxury in Qatar according to this article in the
NY Post.
When I google "hamas leader Gaza" I get this article: Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War (
NY Times)
So in a way you can see how Israel comes to this scorched earth war policy, because the Hamas leaders in Gaza are warlords and terrorists in hiding, they're not open politicians. I'm beginning to see why Israel is not listening to calls for a cease fire. The leaders of Hamas want war, and therefore they are in hiding. If I was Palestinian I would hate Hamas.
I find it interesting the way I flip flop. I read an article in the
Guardian and look through a book of pictures from before 1948,
Before Their Diaspora by Walid Khalidi.
If the worst thing you can say is I'm idealistic or unrealistic, I'm OK with that. What is the opposite to wanting peace? Wanting war? Saying it's inevitable, unavoidable?
Intense article that shows how non-Jews of Israel help Israel, and how non-Jews were killed by Hamas in a kaleidoscope that is Israel. It's not even easy to see just Palestinian or Jewish Israeli.
Counterexamples to the binary, a kaleidoscope: "Bedouins saving Israeli Jews from Hamas being saved by a rescued Israeli Jewish woman from being shot by the Israeli Army after they rescued her … kaleidoscopic."
People from far away shouldn't embolden people who see black and white. That's what this is about. People invested in conflict. Warmongers. It's a realistic scenarios that Trump could be president, and he could be president from jail. People are just stupid.
"newspapers and television have succumbed to what he calls the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”" (
NY Times)
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