Biden now calling for Israel to pause???

[Dill]

(11-14-2023, 01:24 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: You continue to ignore the most basic, and important, point regarding this conflict.  The Arab world has sought Israel's annihilation form the very beginning.  Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran continue to state there will be no peace until Israel is wiped off the map and, in the process every Jew in the country is dead.  Israel could have done things better, but nothing they could do, would do or will ever do, will satisfy the Islamic extremists who seek their extermination.  You ignore this because to acknowledge it makes your whole house of cards tumble down.  Israel could be at their 1948 borders and the exact same things would be happening because religious extremists demand their extermination.  Hence your continued, and strident efforts to paint Israel as the cause of this conflict, despite this obvious evidence to the contrary, makes you an apologist.  

No. I've addressed what you call this "most basic point" repeatedly. You fail to recognize this because you separate Israel's founding from the dispossession of Palestinians. Arabs have indeed wanted to eliminate Israel as an ethnic settler state--because it dispossesses Palestinians. Israel's 1948 borders were formed by that dispossession.

Focusing on causes to explain an effect is not ignoring that effect. But taking an effect--your so-called "main point"-- for a cause is certainly ignoring the real causes.

Central to your separation is your insistence that religion is the "real" reason why Arab nations don't want to recognize Israel, and why Hamas and Hezbolllah call for its destruction. That means you can set aside the dispossession and military occupation as non issues. ("Arabs would hate Israel anyway!")

This insistence, in turn, requires that you treat "the Arab world" as a political, cultural and religious monolith, like it's always only been one thing with one attitude towards Israel, and then you conflate this monolith with Islamist groups produced by Israeli aggression/war crimes, like Hamas and Hezbollah. 

But this separation, insistence on religion as a cause, and conflation of "the Arab world" with Hezbollah, Hams, and Iran, are not supported by the historical record of this conflict. And that's why recovering HISTORY has to be the "main point" for anyone seeking peaceful resolution.

E.g. in '48 The Kingdom of Jordan, far from wanting to "annihilate" Israel in '47-'48, was happy to recognize it in return for chunks of the UN Partition intended for Palestinians. It made a show of resistance in Jerusalem and held portions of what is now the West Bank, but did nothing to threaten the Yishuv in the rest of the former Mandate. It was the massacres and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians initially in the Jewish Partition, beginning Nov. '47, which pushed very unready Egypt, Iraq, and Syria into the conflict--though only after Britain left--and shamed Jordan into providing more help than initially intended.

A more recent example: you frequently cite Hezbollah rhetoric as proof of a general Arab hatred rooted simply in religious belief. But Hezbollah did not exist in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon the first time. Shia in southern Lebanon hated the PLO's domination of Lebanese politics, and were initially favorable to the 1982 invasion which removed them. But when Israel installed a Christian government and settled into a brutal occupation of southern Lebanon, the tide turned. Existing Shia militias like the secular Amal lost the mass of their followers to a new religious-based group roused by the occupation and bent on driving Israel from Lebanon--Hezbollah.  Israel created Hezbollah by occupying Lebanon, just as its occupation of Gaza created Hamas. Now it has a far more powerful threat than Hamas on its northern border, with over 150,000 rockets and "smart" missiles.

It is only separated from this history that Hezbollah's rhetoric, like Hamas', becomes your voice of "the Arab world" and the "most basic point" you claim I "continue to ignore" by addressing actual causes--a process you call "painting Israel as the cause" (as if it were the Russians who drove 70,000 Palestinians out of their homes in Haifa in 1947 or the Chinese who invaded Lebanon in 1982) and "apologizing for Hamas."

So "the Arab world" has not "sought Israel's annihilation from the very beginning." There is no reason to suppose Arab armies would have attacked Israel in '48 if the Haganah (the then IDF) had not already begun ethnic cleansing in Nov. of '47. Even then, the goal of Jordan was not Israel's "annihilation."  Israel's mistreatment of Shia in 1982 CREATED an armed group now bent on Israel's destruction where before there had been Israeli sympathizers. If religion were really the cause, Hezbollah would have existed from decades BEFORE the occupation.

And it is not true that "the Arab world" wants "every Jew in the country dead."  That's only the right wing extreme--e.g., Hezbollah, directly produced by Israeli aggression, as is Palestinian resistance is produced in all forms. What most Arab nations and most Palestinians want is a single or two-state solution and peace. That's what my next post is about.