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Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @03:49PM (#39148098)
It's under-remarked on, but for a majority of Israeli Jewish people, the nakba era might have more immediate salience than the Holocaust. That's because they're not, as the popular imagination has it, all colonists from Europe; they're the Jewish people of the Middle East and North Africa, all of whom were forcefully expelled from their own homes after 1948.

There's no question that the Holocaust has enormous salience to Israeli Jewish people. But if you trace your roots to rural Arab Jewish families from Yemen or Iraq, your more immediate concern would be your own family's immediate viability in a world without Israel. A new rise of European fascism wouldn't be your problem; the fact that you'd have literally no place to go would be. You're sure as shit not moving back to Yemen.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by hypeit on Friday January 26, 2024 @04:05PM (#39148349)
Zionists worked to recruit Jewish people from Arab nations to populate Israel. It wasn't until Zionist intervention that hostilities ramped up.

Zionists even false flag attacked Iraqi Jews to help spur immigration to Israel:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-jews-attacks-zionist...

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @04:19PM (#39148563)
This is both false and irrelevant. Anti-Jewish pograms in MENA following the Arab-Israeli war are well documented. Israel had a variety of motivations for ensuring they could comfortably resettle in Israeli territory, but that doesn't change the crisis Arab Jewish people faced in their home countries: they were forcibly expelled.

Further, it doesn't matter. Most stats I've seen suggest that the Mizrahim are at least a plurality of Israelis, and none of those people can return to their "colonialist home countries". By way of example, long before the current Gaza war, the literal first "official" action Ansar Allah took when it established control of territory in Yemen was to expel the very few remaining Jewish families.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by hypeit on Friday January 26, 2024 @04:23PM (#39148625)
> Further, it doesn't matter.

I think it does matter to the Palestinians who have their land taken as "payment" for other people's actions. That never has been and never will be acceptable.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @04:28PM (#39148691)
People can say it matters until they're blue in the face, but the legitimacy of Israeli popular sovereignty within its 1967 borders is so difficult to argue with that we might as well accept it as complete. We're talking about millions of people, well armed, with a series of powerful historical arguments, and, of course, a nuclear arsenal. Their self-conception is immensely material in ways I don't feel like online Palestinian activists understand.

One reasonable way to think about Israel: their moral claim to Tel Aviv is much stronger than our claim to Dallas. And yet, for all the "turtle island" talk, no serious person entertains the idea of rolling back American sovereignty.

None of this legitimizes the ongoing military strategy in Gaza, or, for that matter, the West Bank crisis or the management of the 2-state process, something that the Israeli right has successfully and for decades worked to derail.

I only bring this up because I feel like there's a tendency in message board discussions to center Israel's legitimacy on the Holocaust, as if that's the sum total of what binds Israeli Jewish people to the land. No, it's much more complicated and deep than that.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by hypeit on Friday January 26, 2024 @04:32PM (#39148755)
I don't believe that might makes right and just because Israel is armed and backed by the West does not give them impunity to steal land. 1948 was not hundreds of years ago, there are people who are still alive who were ethnically cleansed from their land and forced into Gaza. Palestinians have a much stronger right of return than anyone who wasn't living in Palestine prior to 1948.
Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @04:48PM (#39148993)
I think you might believe might makes right more than you realize, because, as I've laid out, it's easier to make a moral case for Israeli sovereignty over Tel Aviv than for American control of Texas --- you advocate against Israel because it seems like a plausible cause, and that plausibility is denominated in international military might. You don't advocate for the return of Texas to the people of Mexico because you viscerally understand it's never going to happen.

That being the case (maybe it isn't!), there are two big problems with your strategy:

1. It isn't possible. They're not going anywhere.

2. It's incoherent. There are very few countries in the world with a morally-hygienic claim to their land. Certainly, with the possible exception of Egypt, none of Israel's neighbors can! They're all of them creations of France and the UK.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by hypeit on Friday January 26, 2024 @04:53PM (#39149090)
You're making a lot of assumptions about my position. I most certainly do think we owe both indigenous people and Black people massive amounts of land reparations in the US.

Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was disbanded. It has less support than ever before politically.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @06:58PM (#39150614)
Several additional problems with your argument past what D.C. just said:

1. Israel has in fact immense support, far more than the South African government ever had.

2. Apartheid South Africa was a system of minoritarian rule, which does not exist within the 1967 borders of Israel (further, Arab Israelis have nominally full citizenship rights, and in fact fight for the IDF; they are a minority, unlike the victims of Apartheid, but they're also not living under an apartheid system).

3. For a majority of Israeli Jewish people, there is no other place in the world for them to go. There is no prospect of a negotiated settlement that forecloses on a Jewish state. Their BATNA is war. That wasn't the case with the Boers.

In these kinds of discussions I feel like people conflate the situation in Gaza and the West Bank with that of Israel proper. Continued Israeli occupation of Gaza probably is untenable! That occupation will eventually be disbanded, the way South African Apartheid was. But here we're talking about the entire state of Israel. Like I said, start with Texas, because that'll happen first.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by ignoramous on Friday January 26, 2024 @10:33PM (#39152236)
> Apartheid... which does not exist within the 1967 borders of Israel

It isn't formal, but Arabs are marginalized and discriminated against. In West Bank, E Jerusalem, and Hebron, all that supremacy is dialed upto 11.

> Israel has in fact immense support

Fear and intimidation isn't support. Besides, I don't see this support lasting long outside of the US and Germany if the Oslo-process continues, which it will because for the Israeli right Judea and Samaria are too good to give up.

> talking about the entire state of Israel

I think folks mean the one-state reality but not total exodus of the Jews, though, it might come to pass if they let their guard down, now that there's genuine animosity to fuel a feud for another century.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @10:53PM (#39152356)
I'm assuming you just missed the previous comments where I agreed that the Palestinians have a powerful moral argument about Gaza and the West Bank. If you read the thread, I think you'll see we might not have much to disagree about.
Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by dctoedt on Friday January 26, 2024 @05:42PM (#39149805)
> Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was disbanded.

South Africa wasn't disbanded, not even close. Apartheid ended more-or-less peacefully; non-whites were given the vote; and more-or-less democratic elections have been held ever since.

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Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @07:03PM (#39150653)
I feel like I haven't written anything that would give the impression that I'm unaware of the crimes Israel inflicted on Arabs during the capital-n Nakba.

The problem is: it doesn't matter. The point is that Arab Jewish people are in Israel now, by the millions. The issue isn't that they've won some kind of trauma competition; it's the simple practical fact of their presence and the history that brought them there.

Your second point, about MENA "nations" expelling Jewish people "in a vacuum", is deeply concerning. No matter what Israel did in Palestine, Arab Jewish people had no culpability. Arguments like this are why the distinction between criticism of Israel and outright antisemitism are so slippery. I too think that distinction is weaponized, but it's hard to press the point when you're making facially antisemitic arguments.

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Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @08:18PM (#39151309)
I don't think becoming a truther on this issue is going to help the cause you're advocating for.
Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tobiasdorge on Friday January 26, 2024 @07:09PM (#39150707)
> That the MENA nations who expelled their minority Jewish populations did so in a vacuum

How does something occurring in Palestine justify this? Tying the actions of Jewish militias to your local Jewish population is antisemitic… if they expelled them to protest the creation of Israel, then that isn’t anti-Zionist. That they mostly all ended up going to Israel is ironically supporting the Zionist cause

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Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @07:35PM (#39150950)
This is a frankly antisemitic argument. "Dual loyalties" is practically the kernel of all antisemitism.
Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by hbt on Friday January 26, 2024 @08:16PM (#39151287)
what would you call Canadian citizens who hopped on the first plane to Israel to serve as reservists?

We cannot question their allegiance?

If an Iraqi did the same thing when the U.S invaded Iraq, you wouldn't question their loyalties?

Arab countries are within their right to question the allegiance of their population when their local population is conspiring (or suspected) against their national interests.

Do I need to remind you the Japanese internment camps in the United States?

It's 1956, it was before the mass surveillance era, internment and expelling was a valid solution when you stop a literal terrorist plot.

Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @08:36PM (#39151424)
No, I don't think questioning the allegiance of pogrom victims is a good play.
Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by hbt on Friday January 26, 2024 @08:40PM (#39151466)
No, there were no reports of a pogrom against Jews in Egypt in 1956. However, during the Suez Crisis in the same year, some Jewish individuals faced increased tensions and discrimination. Many Jews eventually left Egypt, but it wasn't a pogrom in the traditional sense.
Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by pvg on Friday January 26, 2024 @10:25PM (#39152181)
In the context of a discussion about potential crimes against humanity, an argument that ethnic cleansing is sometimes ok feels particularly unconvincing.
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Re:ICJ Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide Without Cease-Fire by tptacek on Friday January 26, 2024 @07:49PM (#39151080)
This is again a frankly antisemitic argument. Arab Jewish people in Tunisia bore no responsibility whatsoever for what happened 1800 miles away from them. Racism isn't nuance, it's just racism.