Occupation and settlement/annexation are two different things. The military campaign into Germany wasn't an act of aggression, because they withdrew and no Russian ever claimed east Germany was Russian.

The imposition of rule through client states was complex. Quite a few countries joined the block willingly. Whatever crime there was, wasn't a crime of aggression.

I'd actually like the leaders of Hamas dead, but out of office would be a victory as well. Ideally, Hamas as both an organization and a belief system would be no more - leaders dead, we can can spare the lesser members. If you are consciously and deliberately leading this movement I consider you an enemy of humanity. — BitconnectCarlos

That would be stupid considering Hamas currently has a much more pragmatic leadership than before, willing to discuss 1967 borders - and possibly less if a Palestinian referendum would support it.

1. Sure and Israel has offered to give them a state in the past, but with Hamas in power Israel is absolutely under no obligation to go in that direction these days. Hamas is a terrorist group, not a legitimate government. Giving them independent statehood is a serious security concern for Israel. — BitconnectCarlos

That Israel has offered the Palestinians a State in the past is disingenuous. If you look at those proposals, it requires Palestinians to cede land that Israel has illegally occupied and settled. That's not an offer, that's an insult.

The second part of your argument is also an argument to deny Israel a right to a State. The Israeli State is a serious security concern for Palestinians - in fact, more so considering the military capabilities of Israel. It doesn't make for a good argument in my view.

I'd also point out that Hamas is not just a terrorist group and terrorist groups have evolved into peace partners as well. This is why one of the few countries with a sensible classification is the UK; where the military wing is considered a terrorist organisation but the political (and social activist) wing of Hamas is recognised as representing the interest of Palestinians.

Also, when it comes to cease fire violations, the IDF takes the cake. In that respect Hamas has proved more trustworthy than the Israeli government. You put too much weight in what people say as opposed to what they actually do. The "we'll destroy you" language is coming from both sides' extremists but the situation on the ground proves only one is actually doing what they're saying - and it isn't Hamas.

"revert to its inhabitants" is just rhetoric. they just wanted to maintain the status quo with arabs in charge. It's always been fine if there's a state where Arabs are in charge with a Jewish minority. — BitconnectCarlos

How is it just rhetoric if you form the ethnic majority in a region but get less of a say and get less territory? How is it not a valid argument to expect representation?

Israelis did not aggress in '67. But you can uproot the forces that were trying to destroy you. russia was still defending when it pressed into germany. were the allies "aggressing" by pressing into germany? sure you can say that they were going on the offensive, but to describe them as the "aggressors" in the conflict seems strange to me.

Uhuh. You can't annex land and not call it aggression. There's an important difference between occupation and annexation. The latter is not what the Allied forces did. Those forces occupied German territory but they didn't claim that land as part of their country. The occupation lasted so long due to the tensions between the USSR and the Western countries but at no point did any of those countries laid claim that parts of Germany were in fact French, Russian, American or English. Nor did they settle the land with a view to permanently keep it.

So your comparison is simply wrong and what the Israeli did, while initially legal and rightful in 1967, turned into a crime because they decided to annex the land.

In 1948 the arabs declared war on Israel and sought to wipe it out. there was talk of a second holocaust at the time. Land taken and held in '48 was a necessary security measure and I'm not going to apologize for it. Israel was extremely vulnerable w/ 1947 boundaries.

I'm not looking for an apology, I'm looking for recognition that what Israel has done and is doing is immoral. I also don't think the 1947 borders were indefensible. Israel was simply vulnerable as a fledgling state and that had rather little to do with the geographical disposition of the state borders of the partition plan.

I also think that saying the Arabs declared war on Israel denies the intricacies of the time. There was a civil war fought between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews that resulted in the displacement of Arabs. And while both sides committed crimes against civilians, during the civil war, it was mostly committed by the Jews (with 24 to 33 mass killings, depending on which historian you consult) as opposed to 3 by the Arabs. During the war in 1948 both sides were mostly adhering to the rules except, again, for IDF war crimes. According to Jewish historian Ilan Pappé the goal was ethnic cleansing and it "carr[ied] with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchering of thousands of Palestinians were killed ruthlessly and savagely by Israeli troops of all backgrounds, ranks and ages." and he continues "If it is possible Israel's conduct in 1948 would be brought onto the stage of international tribunals; this may deliver a message even to the peace camp in Israel that reconciliation entails recognition of war crimes and collective atrocities. This cannot be done from within, as any reference in the Israeli press to expulsion, massacre or destruction in 1948 is usually denied and attributed to self hate and service to the enemy in times of war. This reaction encompasses academia, the media and educational system, as well as political circles."

Bluntly put, Israel has a history of war crimes since its inception and it supresses dissent through laws (Nakba Law) and social pressure.

8. Could you just expound a little further on this?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/22/israelandthepalestinians.usa

Hamas has publicly announced that in 2017 as well through a declaration of general principles. Literally:

Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be
compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances
and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas
rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine,
from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of
the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas
considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent
Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of
June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their
homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national
consensus. — Hamas

i'll agree with you that the israeli government is more recalcitrant that it was in the past and this is due to several factors, but then again so is hamas. neither side right now has a serious interest in peace.

You're making these demands of Israel but it's never going to be your family who bears the repercussions. It's easy to tell Israel to loosen their security or to let Hamas import anything completely unrestricted or to give back half their land when you're halfway around the world.

I'm making these demands because it is quite clear the Palestinians have been open to peace at least since the 90s (Oslo Accords, Camp David Accords) and clearly again since 2008. It's Israel who is not open to peace and has not been because it wants to maintain the settlements in illegally occupied land. If Israel would announce today that they are prepared to move back to the 1967 borders, it would have lasting peace.

I'm making these demands because Israel has been worse than the other side every step of the way.

I'm making these demands because it's the right thing to do.

If there was a homeless problem in your community would you be willing to let some live in your home? How would you feel about fundamentalists muslims as your neighbors? They need a place to live too, why not next to you? They can invite their friends over too.

You make a pretty good post and then you end with what is really a totally idiotic analogy. Why are Palestinians "homeless"? It's not a problem that just appeared out of nowhere. If there was a homeless problem I caused because I took their house then I wouldn't have any moral claim to be living in that house in the first place.

And you keep pointing to muslim fundamentalism with a big stick in your eye failing to see the extremism in Israel itself. It's not "reticence" it's a fucking Apartheid state in 2021 for God's sake where a majority of Israelis are now condoning it. That is, over 50% of Jewish Israelis think Arab Israelis ought to be second class citizens and so we see discrimination enacted through law in every strata of society there. Did you read HRW or Amnesty reports on this?

Without international law, the Israelis wouldn't have a right to self-determination or any need to respect their borders. So let's go with that in which case Israel has no right to exist. Idiot.

At least he's honest. I'd rather have a Jewish Israeli like that than the two-faced bullshit where they pretend to want peace (I'm looking at Likud for starters).

Keep talking. Foaming at the mouth yet?

@BitconnectCarlos I'm wondering, what part of the facts we're not in agreement about, aside from the conclusions we derive from them. So here's a list of things I consider facts:

1. Palestinians have a right to self-determination as well;
2. The Arabs were opposed to any type of partition in 1948 because they believed the rule "of Palestine should revert to its inhabitants", that included Jews and Arabs at the time;
3. In accordance with Bretton-Woods, acquisition of land through warfare is illegal because aggression is illegal;
4. You cannot acquire land through defensive war, because you cannot logically defend what wasn't yours to begin with;
5. Therefore the acquisition of land beyond the 1948 partition plan is predicated on the war crime from which all war crimes stem: the act of aggression;
6. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are therefore illegal;
7. All settlements not in accordance with the 1948 lines are therefore iilegal and should be removed;
8. The Palestinians have been more than generous several times over to agree to solutions close to the 1967 borders;
9. The reason why the Israeli haven't agreed is because the right-wing political zionism, which has been in power most of the time, especially for the last 24 years, is intent on establishing an Israel from the Jordan river to the sea;

Let me know which ones you disagree with or think need to be qualified in some sense.

My conclusions from the above:

1. The fact there is no peace, can be laid fully at the feet of the Israeli government as its even greedier than the land it already stole in 1967;
2. Israel has been in breach of international law since 1948, the same legal regime it bases its own rights on (you can't have your cake and eat it);
3. As long as right-wing political zionism is effectively in control of policy, it's a policy of de facto ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people as their presence is slowly eroded through evictions in East Jerusalem and through settler colonisation (and let's not get started on the Apartheid rule in Israel proper itself, which is another atrocity);
4. Israel therefore deserves no help or respect from the international community until such time as it enters into good faith negotiations with the people its oppressing;
5. Considering Israel's obvious bad faith approach to any form of peace, I conclude that every Israeli tragedy is of its own making and every tragedy befalling the Palestinians is wreaked upon them by the Israelis.

My God the number of fallacies is just staggering for one post. One, you're equivocating Palestinians in Gaza with Hamas and confusing them with Palestinians in The Knesset. It's a total red herring to bring either up. Or the aid, that needs to go into construction every time the fucking IDF destroys the place.

The fact of the matter is that if Israel wasn't occupying and strangling the Palestinian territorities they wouldn't need billions in aid or build rockets to get the oppressor and occupier to move off of their lands.

https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Israelis-restrictions-cost-the-Palestinian-economy-34-billion-annually-328129

https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-chokes-palestinian-trade-says-un-study/10352

https://unctad.org/topic/palestinian-people

EDIT; Just read your post history here. Since you're an uncritical and unambashed Israeli war crime apologist, this is exactly the first and last time I'm replying to you.

Here are some facts: Israel has had no troops or settlements in Gaza since 2005. It's entirely self-governed except for the borders, with virtually all internal affairs dictated by Hamas. — BitconnectCarlos

This is a silly thing to say or you don't realise what this factually means. Palestinians do not control access to clean water, electricity or gas, can't get medicine, don't get enough stuff to build (wood, concrete and steel), import of foodstuffs are regulated causing inflated prices and keeping Palestinians poor, they can't travel to and from Gaza, even through the corridor to the West Bank without going through a checkpoint, they can be administratively detained for 6 months which can be indefinitely extended without being charged with anything. And I don't recall with certainty whether this concerned Gaza, but Israel created a landfill in the most arable region destroying good land and poisoning the aquifer underneath it, increasing Palestinian dependence on Israeli water. And that's just the stuff I remember at 6 in the morning. This isn't self governance, it's an atrocity.

There's many things in the world I don't want to happen and they still happen. It quite obviously doesn't follow from the fact that Arabs didn't want a Jewish state that it would therefore not have come to pass. And since the politicians and warmongers didn't try Buber's way, we can't know what would've happened if Jewish Zionism had followed his Hasidic approach from the 20s onwards.

Why,’ you say, ‘shouldn’t they have chosen violence as a means of attracting attention to their existence and their dreams of obtaining a national identity?’” [Wiesel in The New York Times, June 23, 1988].

Wiesel, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”

While Wiesel never condemned Israel, that was as consequence of his love for the country that was unconditional and that he thought he could not judge as a Diaspora Jew. On the other hand, in his later personal memoirs he has indicated he never did enough for the Palestinian plight.

Nahum Goldmann: “[t]o use the Holocaust as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon, as Menachem Begin does, is a kind of ‘Hillul Hashem’ [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah [Holocaust], which must not be misused to justify politically doubtful and morally indefensible policies.”

Buber highly valued consensus with the Arabs, but there would be no state of Israel if we took that seriously as the Arabs categorically refused any Jewish state in 1947-48. — BitconnectCarlos

I see you're more of a mystic than Buber with that crystal ball.

Maybe you should read some more Martin Buber.

things we can do : fund J Street.

I think that's the shortest way to policy change in the US. With a bit of luck, Republicans will split in two parties for the next election, handing victory to the Democrats. That should give enough time to cement some changes in US foreign policy with respect to Israel.

So admittedly the bombings are of no strategic value but only meant to punish people living in Gaza, as if the brutal oppression wasn't punishment enough.

Hmmm... Curious. Any way to find it somewhere else based on title in the link?

Edit: I was in the middle of the video.

where did your link go?

tu quoque fallacy mate. And you do this every time. As if it's a good look for Israel to be compared to autocratic Middle Eastern regimes just to look good. I don't think you want to go there to begin with.

The upshot is of course that if people recognise Israel for the racist Apartheid State it is, they might finally come to their senses about continuing to support it.

The "right" is just a bunch of snowflakes after all.

This is not true! There's a huge difference in how Israeli citizens with the Jewish nationality are treated and those without the Jewish nationality. I'm disappointed you repeat this, as I pointed this out a year ago in the Israel and Zionism thread.

No, I'm just accusing you of committing fallacies. That last one is just another one. If all you can do is offer red herrings or poison the well, just get lost OK?

do you want to start charity dick measuring? Or maybe, how much people can we influence? What's the point of your comment except for being a twat? I mean in the grand scheme of things blowing up a couple of Palestinians has no bearing on anything either so let's not talk about it, ok?

How much bearing does that have on the veracity of positions and arguments? But nice poisoning of the well!

When you engage in a discussion with someone you have never met , have no background context on , and especially when the topic is something as complex and personal as politics , you might want to examine what it is that makes you inclined to use worlds like ‘moron’ , ‘stupid’ , ‘deliberate obfuscation’. I understand my sarcasm irritated you, but it was intended
as a gentle prodding for you to explore more than just what initially seems to you to be the obvious and correct interpretation of my comments. Especially since the reality is I could care less about Israeli politics , I just jotted off my comments in an offhand way, and I am not wedded to any of the assertions I made. Apparently my sarcasm had the opposite effect, making you feel threaded and causing you to double down on your initial
construal of my post.

I’ll tell you what I am wedded to, and that’s a way of understanding human behavior and belief systems that rejects the concept of ‘evil’, which I’ve noticed you like to use. To me , ‘evil’ is what we accuse other people of when we fail to make sense of their thinking from their own perspective. The paradox is that it is this well intended accusation of evil or immorality leveled at individuals or groups that is the root of the sorts of violence and conflict that our concepts or morality are supposed to attach themselves to.

For me your response to my comment is a textbook case of a well intentioned attempt to defend a righteous moral view. But what it shows at a deeper level is that righteous moralism , and along with it the use of terms like ‘stupid’ and ‘moron’ , is a failure of insight, an inability to recognize that we all view the world from
within what in many cases are profoundly different perspectives, all of which can righteously justify themselves in equal measure. — Joshs

One, I didn't call you stupid, I said your comment was unless it was made in bad faith. Second, I also never called you a moron but since you identify as a defender of fascists you believe it applies to you. Thank you for clearing that up for all of us. Saves me a lot of time.

I care strongly because I care about fairness, justice and human rights. I'm originally a human rights lawyer after all.

It's not their country. It's the Jewish homeland. — BitconnectCarlos

There's no Jewish Homeland defined except in the Torah which, as a religious text, has no legal standing. There's an area designated for Jews to settle, which area was called Palestine, with the understanding original inhabitants wouldn't be displaced. We all know what happened and who have been driven from their homes. I think it was Begin who said : there's not a Jewish village that isn't build on the rubble of a Palestinian.

Here's some more material for you : https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/100000/mde150332004en.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj1ptPlr8fwAhUREhQKHXWcACYQFjAFegQIDBAC&usg=AOvVaw3SBqsmtye-7u37B9kbhC8f

It's not genocide and for you to use that term is absurd. If you think the Israelis are literally trying to genocide the Palestinians then there's no point in talking to you. It would put me in a position where I'd be defending Nazis. I can't go on in this conversation. Are you at all familiar with any of Hamas's genocidal language towards the Jews within their Constitution? But who cares about that - weak victims are always good, even if they're throwing gays off rooftops which happens frequently. — BitconnectCarlos

It's not genocide because it's not going quickly enough to your liking, or what? How fast should the destruction of Palestinian society go exactly before it is genocide? The Israeli State is fascist and yes you're defending fascists. This was already recognised by Einstein and Arendt in 1948 and unfortunately very few Jews recognise they've learned more from the Nazis than they care to admit. Things haven't improved. I'm intimately familiar with the entire situation, having studied international law for years, by the way. I just don't have the patience anymore to guide people through all the steps why I see things this way

Hamas' language is no different than that of Israeli main political party. Zionism implies racism, discrimination and the slow killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel is denying the right to exist to Palestinians in their own country. That fits the bill.

A couple days ago an elderly Israeli woman and her caregiver were killed when Hamas' rockets struck their homes in a residential area. Is this an example of resisting evil? — BitconnectCarlos

Let's weep for personal tragedy to obfuscate the slow genocide of an entire people. Sorry. Not playing. I can empathise with the personal tragedy but once I step back from the particulars and look at the bigger picture the moral position is clear. That Israeli woman had been sacrificed on a zionist altar.

Evils don't cancel out. The Palestinians are certainly oppressed, and against some kinds of oppression, violence can be justified. But only if there is a plausible connection between said violence and the end of oppression. And that connection simply doesn't exist here. The Hamas has no military solution, and as such it cannot justify its military actions as fighting against oppression. — Echarmion

Violence against oppression isn't evil. I'm not cancelling anything out. Sorry. And the conclusion that if there's no way out and they should just roll over and accept is ridiculously nihilistic. Evil should be resisted especially when success is unlikely.

Anyway, this is quite a unfruitful way to look at a conflict. Every civilian casualty is a tragedy. Every combatant casualty is also a tragedy as we are talking about human beings. Conflicts are either solved by military means or by diplomacy, not by moral righteousness. I think the better way would be to look at what to do here. — ssu

If you only look at the results and don't look at causes, both parties will look equally guilty. That's why people keep repeating "each civilian casualty is a tragedy" as a mantra because that reinforces equivalence. Intuitively it feels good, appears empathetic but really just glosses over the fact that not every tragedy is equally tragic. Just looking at the number of casualties on both sides makes this clear. The tragedy that befalls Israelis is of their own making, the tragedy that befalls Palestinians is wreaked upon them by the Israelis.

I think the main problem is that some people think there's a moral equivalence between the violence of Palestinians and Israel. That requires you to deny several of the following things :

1. Palestinians are oppressed, discriminated against and economically undermined by border control that basically functions like the worst sanctions we have in the world
2. A gross differential in military might and state power
3. A gross differential in political support from other countries and political representation
4. Israeli "security" trumps Palestinian "security" pace every draft of every deal where on average there's pages upon pages on the former and very little or nothing in the latter
5. Israeli deaths are a fraction of Palestinian deaths
6. The multitude of discriminatory laws in Israeli proper linked to religious affiliation
7. Palestine barely functions, Israel is a modern state claiming to be a democracy

So when a Palestinian cheers an Israeli death, it's not the same thing. If an Israeli is killed in this conflict, it's not the same thing. To interpret the violence between these two groups as morally equivalent is wilfully ignoring context.

Nothing in the past 20 years has given any indication Israel wants peace. If one side doesn't want peace and undermines it every time, what's the moral obligation of the other side? At what point does violence against the oppressor become a moral obligation?

There's no secret handshake mate. You're just being an ass. Begin gets elected after the atrocities were committed. Obviously he was more "moderate" after that, the deed was already done. So your comment was either stupid or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate. It says something about Israeli politics that they are fine to elect a fascist and war criminal and then decades later still have morons defending it. You'd think 70+ years would give some perspective but can't fight tribalism I suppose.

Apologist's crap. A moderate fascist is still a fascist.

Wiki is not a good source for most things political. I advice an actual history book or comments from people living at the time. The writing was on the wall in 1948 that Israel was turning into a fascist shithole: https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948

Social power is often contrasted with state power. It’s wherever the locus of power is in society or the community and not in the government. It might be an outdated term but I couldn't think of a better one. — NOS4A2

You cited writers and philosophers before that I have read a long time ago but I'm not familiar with this. What is this "outdated term" based on?

I don't realize that because the state also denies rights, or otherwise granted themselves selectively: to nobles, the wealthy, members of certain races, members of certain sexes, and so on. The examples are myriad and not worth repeating.

I also grant rights, as can anyone else, and we don't need any legislation to do so. Should someone infringe on your rights I'll be right there defending you. — NOS4A2

But this raises the question; what rights exists without the State? Only moral rights. But moral rights will be ignored by most people if they can get away with it. It's quite obvious from history that rights are best preserved and protected in a civilised society. Human rights, unfortunately, really are a luxury not available to most and a recent invention.

I would therefore argue that rights are only meaningful, if they are legal and therefore protected by the legal order and organisation of a State. Morality still informs us about the content of what those legal rights should be. The "I can grant rights" doesn't exist - it's merely a sentiment. You're not capable of protecting me from Russian or Chinese interference, or indeed Facebook's abuses, or enforce a contract for me against an unwilling counterparty. Your "granted rights" are in that sense worthless and in any case a contradiction in terms if your position is that I have intrinsic rights (who are you to grant me my rights?).

My point is it doesn’t matter if the confiscation is legal or not; it is still theft. If someone confiscates my resources without my permission and for their own use, whether state or man on the street, it’s theft. I don’t excuse someone for theft because he makes the laws or claims a right to my income.

I can’t see why it would matter if the income is fair and equitable. What matters is that someone is confiscating what another has earned. — NOS4A2

It's not confiscation if you don't have a claim to the income.

The reason why it matters whether it's fair or equitable is that if your morality is merely procedural, then obviously the legal procedure creates the moral basis for taxes. If you want to have a moral claim to income, you need to prove your claim to specific income is fair and equitable. But this isn't "priced" into markets, so the income paid is not a reflection of moral worth but happenstance.

LOL. Negotiations.

decline of social power — NOS4A2

What do you mean with social power?

I see taxes as forced labor and theft — NOS4A2

For taxation to be theft, there must be a right to pre-tax income. Legally, this is clearly not the case.

A moral right to pre-tax can only be said to exist if earned income results in a fair and equitable payment for labour rendered. This too is false. Market circumstances are not concerned with the moral worth of labour or who needs the job the most or who is most deserving of fulfilling the assignment. So a moral right to pre-tax income is incoherent.

Since no rights are infringed, there's no theft.

You do realise this is totally a-historical? Rights were and are granted by the state. Human rights are a civilised luxury, nothing fundamental about it.

The presumption is innocence is a legal fiction, it says exactly nothing about actual guilt or innocence.