probablyaCat

Ha I had this issue once upon a time too! And the one above with the wifi driver b43-fwcutter. Apparently not great laptop choices. The touchpad situation was awful, because the sensitivity was always insane. IIRC I had a way to slow it down, but then it was so so slow that I had to go over it like 30 times to get across the diagonal. Good times.

So are you arguing that both the governments of Israel and Palestine in no way represent the people they govern?

But these groups and people weren’t the same people as the ones that walked across the land bridge. The cultures had long since diverged and were different. Wars had been fought. Whole groups died or merged. And if you go back a little further, they are all closely related. I don’t think the point is that the slaughtering and pillaging was OK. It is that you cannot have a good faith argument on fixing current problems by trying to focus only on arbitrary time periods to claim certain privileges. I am very much in favor of doing more to make the lives of the native americans better, but I also will not make the argument that descendants of Europeans or Africans have no claim to the land there either. Because to do so is not in good faith and just ignores reality. Any time period you pick to decide who has a claim to a place is arbitrary. We cannot change the past. We can only change the future (but we are limited by the confines of the present).

Nah. Don’t let the current situation fool you. You’ve seen that I’m very pro-Israel in my other comments. But there are many of us that are lefties through and through. I mean most Jews in the US lean slightly left of the democrats. I lean further. And David ben Gurion was super leftist. Hardcore socialist commie pinko, that one. If I had been around for the founding of Israel, I’d probably have been kicking back on a kibbutz somewhere.

But the right is definitely not our friend. Most of them support Israel for christo-fascist dreams of the apocalypse. They want to use us. And we should be careful to think that we are the ones using them.

I do not know where you are from, but especially concerning the US and Europe, I do think it’s important to understand where this support comes from – even if they don’t actually know it either. It’s the underdog problem. Israel is much stronger than in the past. We have won many wars against people who wished to murder us all. We became a force to be reckoned with. And the Palestinian territories are the underdog. And the left has normalized seeing the underdog as the marginalized victim. They are not used to seeing an underdog victimizer. From South Africa to Ireland to PoCs and the LGBT+ communities, they are used to things going one way. And things are not one way. There is a whole 3d plane of possibilities in this world. And that’s why I argue more about Israel than anything else on here. To try to help people see that things are not black and white. This isn’t a left or right issue. This isn’t a David vs Goliath issue. This is something that cannot be boiled down to simple concepts or comparisons. And the more you know, the harder it really is to if not agree with what Israel is doing, to at least understand why they might make the choices they do. And it is not for the sole purpose of ethnic cleansing or genocide. At least not for the majority.

This is a lie. Hamas won the vote. The EU, UN, and the Carter Center all called those elections free and fair. If anything, Hamas was an underdog given that Israel, in collaboration with Fatah, kept arresting the politicians in Hamas as they defined Hamas a terrorist organization. Fatah and Israel wanted to delay the elections, but with the encouragement of the US (GWB in particular who felt Hamas would definitely not win), they decided to keep them as they were. Stop making things up to fit your narrative. Hamas still typically wins the popular vote in polling done since then. You have a fucking computer. Just google it. It’s all there in black and white.

I mean they did have conflicts with Fatah. But the biggest fights weren’t until after they won the election.

That article has such a stupid take. It takes tiny pieces of quotes from a couple of ex-Israeli officials and with one of them is clearly omitting context. Did Israel permit Islamist groups to do stuff like build mosques and have charities? Yes. Did he also say, but it is not mentioned in the article, that they were completely peaceful at the time and that Israel didn’t want to be viewed as attacking Islam? Also yes.

See, what you are saying is that Israel created Hamas by not using more oppression to stop these groups at a time when they were not attacking Israel, but the PLO was. And that is just such a simple naive take that it is ridiculous. Yeah if Israel could redo things, they might have decided that was a good idea. But then again, what if it just caused more attacks from the surrounding countries after they were claimed to be “attacking Islam.” Then would we also blame Israel for those attacks due to them repressing the Islamist movements?

It even does the same by using cherry picked foresight about Afghanistan. It entirely ignores the situation in Afghanistan and just implies that the US caused Al Qaeda. Things just aren’t that simple. It’s entirely possible that had the US and other countries not interfered in Afghanistan that the soviet union would’ve lasted longer and Afghanistan might’ve been another Chechnya.

At the time, Israel was having to fight against the PLO. They were not fighting against the religious Islamic groups. And knowing the history of the time period and the politics in the region, the very religious groups were not nearly the force that they are now. So they made choices for reasons that absolutely made sense at the time. And we have no way of knowing how things would be different if they made different choices.

We can say that places that aren’t Israel still have issues with the Muslim brotherhood or are friendly with them all over the middle east. And Israel certainly didn’t create the Muslim Brotherhood. And if Israel didn’t exist and it was all a Palestinian state with a secular government, it isn’t a stretch to say that they would be in that area too, calling for an Islamist government. As they have done in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and more.

So again, the entire state of Israel? The ones elected in free and fair elections? Don’t get me wrong. I am not a fan of Likud and I loathe ben Gvir and Otzma Yehudit. Just all of it. And only Hamas. The group that won what was called a free and fair election by the EU and the Carter Center and continues to be ahead in opinion polling since they have stopped elections. What are you defining as “Israel the State”?

Why do you say Israel and Hamas? Not Likud. Not otzma Yehudit. Just Israel. All of Israel is an enemy? But only Hamas when it comes to Palestine. What about the PLO? Are they fine? Yesh Atid? Or is it really just only Hamas but all of Israel?

I miss my life as it was before

This sucks. I’m a very pro-Israel person. I still don’t want civilians to suffer. On the other hand, that before she mentions is before the government elected by people there perpetrated the third largest terrorist attack in history. It’d be real great if there were something … Like… Soldiers to keep the peace maybe… That would guard things like fuel so it isn’t stolen or hospitals so that hospitals built by say a union of nations or something aren’t used in rocket attacks.

I miss the days when a 2 state solution seemed imminent. Gaza being demobilized was supposed to be a stepping stone to exactly that.

What do you mean when you say “a people”?

I’m not a military mastermind. More of an armchair 5 star general. But I feel like there are probably more effective ways to mine hunt than this. I get it was a mine hunter, but perhaps if they found them without blowing up in the process it would be a more sound strategy. But this does seem to be their consistent philosophy. It seems to be how they find anti tank mines as well. Unarmed soldiers to get rid of bullets. I wonder if they will start using jets to run into drones next. It’s almost like a reverse war of attrition.

Personally, if I were in charge of the military, I’d probably at the very least compare costs of the average mine to the average Russian navy ship.

But I suppose it does offer a good morale boost when they show their mine hunter successfully finding mines. For Ukraine.

Ah there it is. So ethnic cleansing it is then? That’s what you’re supporting. And where do you suppose the almost 10 million people will go?

You absolute antisemitic little fool. How will that make peace? What will happen with the people? What is the history of the region and those people? None of that matters, huh? Just all of Israel should fuck off. It isn’t that you want peace. It is that you’ve decided one group is an outsider and they have no rights to be where they are. And how do you imagine that will play out?

So edgy and clever. What parts of what used to be called Mandatory Palestine, and is currently considered Israel and the territories of Palestine, do you consider colonialism?

But I didn’t comment a non sequitur. Or if I did, where was the gap in the logic?

What do you consider their colonialism?

Jesus fuck. I wasn’t reductive of apartheid. I was pointing out that apartheid was the policy and south Africa was the nation state. You are reductive of apartheid by trying to simplify it enough that Israel fits your definition of it.

And again, it did not start from scratch. There was a lot of things that were done and existed during the change. A constitution is only one part of a nation state. They already had international recognition. No one was disputing the borders of south Africa. Changing internal borders is an entirely different thing to changing international borders. Literally right next door was south West Africa. Which, if you really want to shoehorn this comparison is a clearly better comparison. But they had an entire civil war forming national and international boundaries. Seriously. It is clear you’ve just read a few lefty articles about how some people from SA say that Israel is an apartheid state.

But let me show you. SWA was a territory controlled by Germany until WWI (check), British gain control (check), UN defines it as mandatory swa governed by SA governed by great Britain (check), great Britain makes plan for SA to be independent and swa to be independent, but (now this is where things differ) SA is like nah and takes control, doesn’t give it up, and institutes apartheid there as well. Eventually the whole region falls into a border war and closely intertwined civil war in Angola. And then we got Namibia.

There are a lot of parallels. But that doesn’t mean it is the same. And when you try to make it the same it is reductive for both sides. The apartheid of SA and SWA is orders of magnitude above the restrictions in the west bank and Gaza. It ignores the backgrounds and why some of those things exist. It was made to have essentially an entire slave class in SA and SWA. Palestinians are not slaves. Arab Israelis certainly experience systemic racism in Israel. But not something that can be classified as apartheid.

Like what things specifically do you think qualifies it as apartheid.

Do you often like to toss out obvious statements that no one was debating into conversations?

What do you mean by fuck off?

See. You obviously weren’t actually interested in my answer. You just wanted to spew overly simplified nonsense. You didn’t answer a single question I asked so that I could answer your question appropriately. SA didn’t start over entirely. They didn’t dissolved the state and then just decide on things like the border after apartheid. Apartheid was a policy. An awful one. South Africa is a place. So what the fuck are you even asking as you talk to yourself.

I mean, you can draw parallels with events from any 2 random countries. That doesn’t make it the same. If anything a closer comparison would be the events with South West Africa. But that would have more to do with the territorial aspects than the apartheid aspects.

Because they’d be attacked, kidnapped, and/or killed. Seriously what kind of question is this? How do you propose they go into Gaza, distribute the aid, and not get attacked. Hamas is rolling right up to the aid and stealing it. Are you suggesting Israel completely occupy the region and maintain security in order to distribute aid?