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I mostly just don't like the rather extreme metaphysical claims involved in simply denying that there exists a state of war. If there is no war, what were the

I mostly just don't like the rather extreme metaphysical claims involved in simply denying that there exists a state of war. If there is no war, what were the Oslo Accords for? To formalize terms of a post-war occupation? But then when was the war? Who surrendered? To talk of a "peace process", or even of an entrenchment of the Occupation, you need to acknowledge the existence of a second party to the conflict, who in any practical point of view are in a military struggle, that being a war, with the other party. Maybe you agree with their military-political demands, maybe you disagree. But certainly they exist, and are in fact fighting. If I were to treat it as reasoning rather than polemic, I would say it's projecting an expected - and feared - possible future backwards into the present. The idea seems to be, "we don't want the Palestinian Arabs to end up as a conquered, dispersed, exiled, or killed former nation, so we treat them as already dead, then cheer for them, being already dead, to rise up and prevent their own deaths ahead of time." That's getting a bit speculative and psychoanalytic, but it does sort of explain the grim, dark "rage against the dying of the light" attitude people display when trying to argue simultaneously that there's no war and that the Palestinian side of the war needs more support. My objection to the whole complex is: there is no dying of the light. Millions of people are right there, year after year, dealing with various endemic problems because, by and large, the peculiar factionalization of their political system forbids them to do anything else. There's no dramatic moment to wait for. They're just gonna suffer more as long as everyone keeps cheering for them to put victory over coexistence.

tsimionescu 5y ago
> If there is no war, what were the Oslo Accords for? To formalize terms of a post-war occupation? But then when was the war? Who surrendered? I explained my perspective on this: after the six-day war, Israel conquered the lands currently forming today's Palestinian territories and occupied them. As with any occupying force anywhere in the world, the occupied people started resisting this occupation. The Oslo accords happened between the occupying force, Israel; and (representatives of) the resistance movement - represented by the PLO at the time, mostly. The accords marked the beginning of the modern Palestinian state (the "official" beginning was Yasser Arafat's 1988 declaration of independence, but that couldn't even happen in Palestine). They were maybe closer to the Good Friday deal in Ireland than to any kind of inter-state peace treaty. So again, any regular war ended a loooong time ago (basically after the six-day war, but that was re-attempted in the 1973 Yom Kippur war); it ended with Israel de facto ruling all of the territory of modern Israel + all of the Palestinian territories. However, there are two aspects that prevented the fighting stopping there: (1) Israel wants to be a Jewish state, so they did not want to officially incorporate the Palestinian territories, since especially in 1967 they would have meant that the vast majority of Israel's population would have been Arabic; and (2) the people in the occupied territories started a bloody resistance movement against the occupation - fueled by historic religious hatred and concerns, but also by item (1) - the knowledge that they would not be allowed to be full citizens of Israel, even if they wanted to.
- eli_gottlieb 5y ago
  You're missing a factor: 3) The Palestinians, both officially and according to opinion polls, want the land inside the Green Line, and refuse to end their "irregular militancy" (aka: war but you want to pretend their hands are clean) until they get it. This issue becomes more urgent after Israel withdrew all its forces and civilians unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, with a plan to do the same in the West Bank, and gets in return a militarized statelet that maintains a state of war with Israel. Worse, Hamas, the PLO, and their Western supporters start moving the goalpost of what constitutes "occupation", so that it stops meaning the presence of active military force and starts referring to the simple state of war between neighbors. Then you can keep telling Israel to "end the occupation of Gaza" so that "ending the occupation" becomes solely defined as meeting the demands of Gaza's ruling government. Now, I'll bite my political bullets and say that I still think the Gaza Withdrawal was the right thing to do, but I also find it totally obvious and sensible that Israeli voters don't want to repeat the experience with the West Bank, which has high ground from which a rocketeer or a sniper can take easy pot-shots at Israeli civilians down below. I can especially see why most voters don't want to repeat the experience, given that even our supposed Western "friends" and "allies" are willing to redefine words so that we somehow become the perpetrators of a crime whose commission is entirely in someone else's control. To wit, if someone is accused of assault, it is in fact an alibi to have been a hundred miles away when the supposed assault took place. If Israel is accused of "occupation", an alibi becomes a contradiction-in-terms: "occupation" is now when you have no troops on the "occupied" soil but your neighbor keeps up a state of war with you for their own political reasons.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Israel maintains control of all Palestinian airspace and the Gaza coast. Israel maintains the right to march its military or police inside the West Bank or Gaza or to bomb them without considering this an act of war. They have regularly arrested Palestinian elected officials. They control all resources entering Gaza and the West Bank, particularly water, food and construction materials, and punish people by reducing rations if they feel they are not complying with some decision. The withdrawal from Gaza was also not some gesture of autonomy towards Palestine as you make it out to be. It was a demographic calculation, again going back to the problem of the Jewish state - the balance of Jewish people and Arabs in Israel was getting too low, so the leadership at the time decided it was more important to stop the colonization effort and bring the Jewish population back into Israel. This was widely reported and the official public reason given at the time. This policy has also been illegally reversed recently, so new illegal Israeli colonies are again popping up, though I believe mostly in the West Bank. So, by all possible measures, even if they do not have permanently stationed troops there anymore, Israel is occupying Gaza. Imagine if China were flying fighter jets over Taiwan, refusing entry to any ships they didn't inspect, refusing to allow concrete or food to be delivered, and had a tight grip on water resources. Further imagine if Chinese troops were freely entering Taiwan and arresting people the regime deemed "terrorists" or simply "problematic", and they were regularly bombing Taiwanese buildings in retaliation for terrorist acts, or just in response to democratic choices they didn't like. Would you not say that China was occupying Taiwan, or at least doing something very very close to it? It's also important to note that Israel itself does not recognize Palestine as a state, so it is very hard to see by what measure Israel could claim that it is at war with Palestine.

tsimionescu 5y ago

> If there is no war, what were the Oslo Accords for? To formalize terms of a post-war occupation? But then when was the war? Who surrendered? I explained my perspective on this: after the six-day war, Israel conquered the lands currently forming today's Palestinian territories and occupied them. As with any occupying force anywhere in the world, the occupied people started resisting this occupation. The Oslo accords happened between the occupying force, Israel; and (representatives of) the resistance movement - represented by the PLO at the time, mostly. The accords marked the beginning of the modern Palestinian state (the "official" beginning was Yasser Arafat's 1988 declaration of independence, but that couldn't even happen in Palestine). They were maybe closer to the Good Friday deal in Ireland than to any kind of inter-state peace treaty. So again, any regular war ended a loooong time ago (basically after the six-day war, but that was re-attempted in the 1973 Yom Kippur war); it ended with Israel de facto ruling all of the territory of modern Israel + all of the Palestinian territories. However, there are two aspects that prevented the fighting stopping there: (1) Israel wants to be a Jewish state, so they did not want to officially incorporate the Palestinian territories, since especially in 1967 they would have meant that the vast majority of Israel's population would have been Arabic; and (2) the people in the occupied territories started a bloody resistance movement against the occupation - fueled by historic religious hatred and concerns, but also by item (1) - the knowledge that they would not be allowed to be full citizens of Israel, even if they wanted to.

eli_gottlieb 5y ago
You're missing a factor: 3) The Palestinians, both officially and according to opinion polls, want the land inside the Green Line, and refuse to end their "irregular militancy" (aka: war but you want to pretend their hands are clean) until they get it. This issue becomes more urgent after Israel withdrew all its forces and civilians unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, with a plan to do the same in the West Bank, and gets in return a militarized statelet that maintains a state of war with Israel. Worse, Hamas, the PLO, and their Western supporters start moving the goalpost of what constitutes "occupation", so that it stops meaning the presence of active military force and starts referring to the simple state of war between neighbors. Then you can keep telling Israel to "end the occupation of Gaza" so that "ending the occupation" becomes solely defined as meeting the demands of Gaza's ruling government. Now, I'll bite my political bullets and say that I still think the Gaza Withdrawal was the right thing to do, but I also find it totally obvious and sensible that Israeli voters don't want to repeat the experience with the West Bank, which has high ground from which a rocketeer or a sniper can take easy pot-shots at Israeli civilians down below. I can especially see why most voters don't want to repeat the experience, given that even our supposed Western "friends" and "allies" are willing to redefine words so that we somehow become the perpetrators of a crime whose commission is entirely in someone else's control. To wit, if someone is accused of assault, it is in fact an alibi to have been a hundred miles away when the supposed assault took place. If Israel is accused of "occupation", an alibi becomes a contradiction-in-terms: "occupation" is now when you have no troops on the "occupied" soil but your neighbor keeps up a state of war with you for their own political reasons.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Israel maintains control of all Palestinian airspace and the Gaza coast. Israel maintains the right to march its military or police inside the West Bank or Gaza or to bomb them without considering this an act of war. They have regularly arrested Palestinian elected officials. They control all resources entering Gaza and the West Bank, particularly water, food and construction materials, and punish people by reducing rations if they feel they are not complying with some decision. The withdrawal from Gaza was also not some gesture of autonomy towards Palestine as you make it out to be. It was a demographic calculation, again going back to the problem of the Jewish state - the balance of Jewish people and Arabs in Israel was getting too low, so the leadership at the time decided it was more important to stop the colonization effort and bring the Jewish population back into Israel. This was widely reported and the official public reason given at the time. This policy has also been illegally reversed recently, so new illegal Israeli colonies are again popping up, though I believe mostly in the West Bank. So, by all possible measures, even if they do not have permanently stationed troops there anymore, Israel is occupying Gaza. Imagine if China were flying fighter jets over Taiwan, refusing entry to any ships they didn't inspect, refusing to allow concrete or food to be delivered, and had a tight grip on water resources. Further imagine if Chinese troops were freely entering Taiwan and arresting people the regime deemed "terrorists" or simply "problematic", and they were regularly bombing Taiwanese buildings in retaliation for terrorist acts, or just in response to democratic choices they didn't like. Would you not say that China was occupying Taiwan, or at least doing something very very close to it? It's also important to note that Israel itself does not recognize Palestine as a state, so it is very hard to see by what measure Israel could claim that it is at war with Palestine.