Who are the good guys in the Israel/Palestine conflict?
Who are the good guys in the Israel/Palestine conflict?
I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?
And dumb it down for me, because apparently I'm an idiot.
Up until 1967, the bad guys were Britain.
Britain seized Palestine from the Ottomans during WWI with the help of the local Palestinians, promising the Palestinians sovereignty in exchange for their help overthrowing the Ottomans.
At the same time, Britain promised to create a homeland for Jews in Palestine (in the Balfour Declaration), and Jewish refugees from Europe began settling in Palestine. Britain did this because they thought they might gain the support of Jewish financiers for their war efforts.
The Balfour Declaration was deliberately vague about whether Britain was giving all of the land to the Jews or just some of the land. It was vague because Britain wanted to appeal to Jewish Zionists (who wanted all of Palestine) while not alienating the Palestinians.
Britain never did divide the land, resulting in two different populations who felt they legally owned the land, one who had always been there, and one who mostly arrived as refugees.
When Britain left following WWII, a civil war broke out for control of the land. A border was eventually drawn at the line of control (which ran through the middle of Jerusalem), and Israelis declared the new State of Israel, while Palestinian refugees fled to their side of the border or neighbouring states. That was in 1948.
So, up until then, it's a messy situation created by Britain, but one which eventually resulted in the land being split (albeit violently), with both Israelis and Palestinians having a state, and each having part of Jerusalem. The world accepted this as the new status quo and hoped it would be sustained peacefully.
That changed in 1967 when Israel annexed the Palestinian lands (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) in the Six Days War. Since then, Palestinians have been living under a harsh Israeli occcupation as a stateless people (meaning no citizenship), with their rights and freedoms strictly curtailed. Palestinians have been resisting through a number of resistance movements, usually designated as terrorist groups in the Western media.
There was a political movement towards peace and repartitioning of the land that peaked in the 1990s, but since then it has been held up by a series of right-wing governments in Israel. Meanwhile, Israel has been aggressively building Jewish neighbourhoods (called settlements) in the formerly Palestinian lands of the West Bank.
So since 1967, Israel has pretty clearly been the bad guy.
The terrorist attack that killed 1200 young Israelis was horrific, and we should all hope nothing like that ever happens again. But the root cause of the attack was Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The way to prevent future terror attacks is to end the oppression of the Palestinian people.
There are no "good guys" in a conflict between religious people.
Read the excellent Decolonize Palestine website to learn about the vital context that makes Israel's claim of self defense deeply disingenuous, and to learn about some of the falsehoods about Israel and Palestine that are present in mainstream discourse.
Okay:
In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn't want to deal with.
Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.
Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).
Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.
Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land 'settled' at will by Israelis.
It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it's also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there's virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.
In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It's a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel's ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.
Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.
In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city's infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It's also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.
The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the 'regrettable' loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.
Fuck Israel.
I just want to briefly make one point because I think most of the important points have been very well covered by others already.
What's terrorism and what's freedom fighters is determined by history. By the same standards that Hamas are being called terrorists, you could easily make an argument that 1910s Irish republicans, black South Africans under apartheid, and British suffragettes (not to be confused with suffragists) could easily be considered terrorists. Innocent civilians were killed by all these groups, but looking back on it today we almost universally say they were in the right, because they were fighting for their groups to receive rights denied to them by the ruling class. Their methods weren't always as perfectly clean as we might ideally want, but the primary target was always someone oppressing them in some way. And right now and for the last half century+, Israel have been oppressing the Palestinian people.
It's important to separate out the government from the people, especially as it pertains to governments that don't listen to their population and don't have overwhelming support. Neither government is good. Most of the civilians from both sides are perfectly decent, though a number of them are misguided.
It's really impossible to simplify it, but I'll give it a shot with a quick timeline:
- ~1200 BCE: Several unrelated tribes of people group together to become what we now call Jews or Hebrews or ancient Israelites. How this happened and exactly when is disputed, and is significantly muddied by their own mythology.
- ~600 BCE: The first major expulsion of Jews from areas variously known through time as Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and many others.
- ~538 BCE: Jews are allowed to return (until next time).
- ~538 BCE through 1896 CE: For the sake of brevity, let's just say Jewish people rarely had real control over this land and were consistently persecuted and/or expelled from wherever they were.
- 1896 CE: Theodor Herzl writes "The Jewish State" and births the modern Zionist movement, claiming Jews have a right to Israel primarily on religious basis. He approaches world leaders saying as such and finds little traction.
- 1920: Britain takes control of the area now called Mandatory Palestine.
- 1941-1945: The Holocaust. I assume no additional information needed.
- 1945-1948: The Holocaust gives significant weight to Zionists' arguments that Jewish people need their own country. As many Jews have already been emigrating there (known as "Aliyah" or Jewish emigration to the promised land) since Zionism took hold, the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.
- 1948: Israel is officially recognized by the United States, its primary backer today. As part of this recognition, Israel and its allies committed what is commonly known as "The Nakba." A huge number of Palestinians were killed, injured, jailed, or forcibly removed from the area.
- 1948: Arab-Israeli War. The Arab countries unite to fight the new state of Israel. This, as with most wars, is primarily because of power. The don't want the West to be controlling the region. The Arabs lose, but nobody loses more than Palestine.
- 1948: Palestinian attacks on Israel start. I don't have anywhere else to put this, but know that the end of the Arab-Israeli War didn't end Palestinians fighting for their land and independence. They will continue to do so by any means available to them.
- 1956: Suez Crisis. Israel and its backers invade and militarily occupy part of Egypt and take control of the Suez canal because Egypt decided to nationalize it. This war is transparent in its goal for power.
- 1967: Six Day War. Israel invades a variety of areas that it borders, including land owned by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Palestine would be listed as well if it were recognized as a state. They're successful in only six days. Notable areas you may have heard of that were militarily acquired by Israel at this time are the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights. Israel still retains control over these conquered areas.
- 1973: Yom Kippur War. Arab states attack to try to get back the land lost in the Six Day War. Israeli victory.
- 1978: Camp David Accords. Israel agrees to give some land back in return for being recognized by Egypt as a state. Sedat, the Egyptian leader, would be assassinated in part because of this action.
- 1987–1993: First Intifada. More organized and wide-scale Palestinian insurgency than we've seen before. Palestinians are fighting for their independence and their land. The insurgency is suppressed.
- 2000–2005: Second Intifada. Same reasons and result as the first.
- 2006-current: Much like the intifadas, there's a lot to say here, but for the sake of brevity (lol too late) the Palestinian attacks that started in 1948 continue to this day. Israel intermittently declares various wars with the claim that they're rooting out terrorists, Hamas, Hezbollah, and more.
This leaves out a lot. It's just not possible to condense it. But (mostly) off the top of my head, that's what I'd consider most of the most important bits.
The way I see it, whether or not you think Israel is "the good guys" largely hinges on whether or not you think Jews have a right to the land of Israel, and whether or not you think that claim was executed in a humane way.
I would compare it to the Native Americans - were the Americans of that time period the "good guys"? In my opinion, absolutely not. Were the Native Americans wrong for defending their land? Again, absolutely not. Were they wrong for attacking innocent civilians in retribution (for their land being taken, their own innocent civilians being killed, a genocide in progress)? Maybe, but it's also understandable that when you're working from a position of basically zero power against a behemoth, you can't fight the way the behemoth fights, or you're going to lose.
The way I see it, the Palestinian people just want a place to live and develop, and nobody's giving them a way out, so they're trying anything and everything they can.
You should look into the history of WHY Hamas formed in the first place. Palestinians have been forcibly relocated and had their land taken since the 40's. I will say, is there any justification for the destruction and genocide Israel is committing? They've destroyed practically ALL infrastructure in Gaza including hospitals, they've got snipers shooting kids, targeting UN aid workers. Hamas and hostages are convenient excuses for them to keep doing what they started in the 40's - killing an entire native population and taking their land.
The resistance including Hamas, Ansar Allah, Iraqi resistance, Hezbollah, etc.
but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
lol what. You do realize gaza is a concentration camp right? That's like saying the Jews who fought back during the warsaw ghetto uprising were bad guys. Also they aren't trying to get their hostages back at all. On oct 7 the IDF was responsible for the MAJORITY of deaths.
The bad guys are Zionists. Simply put they think they are superior to anyone that's not Jewish. Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews.
Israel does genocide. That’s it.
This is what Israel defending itself actually means
Forget everything you know (or think you know) about the conflict for a second. Now look at what human rights groups, including the UN, have to say about what's happening in Gaza and Lebanon. It's called a genocide because it is; it's really that simple and there are mountains of evidence published by the likes of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and, again the UN. Also to dispell that particular piece of propaganda: they're not trying to get the hostages back. If they were they'd turn the first ceasefire agreement into a "permanent" ceasefire (there are no permanent ceasefires in this conflict) and end the whole thing. They want to genocide and settle Gaza, so they're doing that while sabotaging ceasefire negotiations.
By the way if you're going to side with the side that has hostages, then you should read up on Palestinian detainees first. Long story short: Israel arrests Palestinians from the West Bank or (until 2005) Gaza for dubious or no charges—which they can do because these places are governed under Israeli military law rather than civil law—and sometimes torture them while stealing years of their life. Part of Palestinian resistance organizations' raison d'etre is to return those people to their homes, which requires constant action because Israel arrests more Palestinians every day. There were already thousands of those detainees before October 7th and thousands more have been arrested after. Note: We're not talking about Palestinians who are arrested for legitimate crimes doing their time here; these people were kidnapped as a punishment against Palestinians for existing. If this doesn't sound like hostages to you, you should do some soul searching and ask yourself if you're trying to learn or justify your beliefs.
This probably sounds biased to you, but I took care to only state verifiable, indisputably objective facts here Sometimes things are just that simple. That doesn't make Hamas good guys; they're more gray with some legitimate resistance actions and some straight up terrorism, and it's not always clear which is which.
Finally, if you want to learn more about the conflict in general and about the conditions that drove Hamas to launch the October 7th attack to begin with, you should see what Amnesty International and other human rights groups have to say on the topic. The long story short is that Israel subjects Palestinians to Apartheid conditions along with a slow-burn genocide to serve their long-term goal of colonizing the whole Palestine and (to their more extremist factions) expand beyond it.
In Western fiction, you are taught to support the scrappy underdogs facing oppression from a racist occupying force. You root for them and cheer when they blow up military facilities and you feel for them when they lose their compatriots to oppressor violence. You know very well who the good guys and bad guys are.
But then, in Western media, with a mere change of labeling and some paper-thin propaganda, they will have you believing the opposite. All they need to do is call the freedom fighter resistance "terrorists", say that the occupiers "have a right to defend themselves", and pretend the "conflict" is "complicated" and really about religion. And they will so this even when the occupier ramps up genocide to unignorable levels.
The good guys remain those fighting occupation. This is consistent with a basic understanding of liberation, with nearly everyone's stated beliefs about self-determination, and international law. The bad guys are the ethnic supremacist apartheid settler colonist occupiers doing a genocide as well as their supporters.
Depends really. What do you value in your life? What ethical framework do you use? Do you value freedom and self determination, do you value people different from you as much as people of your nationality/race? Or perhaps do you value the Western stability, growth, dominance and wellbeing at the expense of the economic South more? There's no objective answer, it depends on you and your viewpoint.
If we do away with the propaganda and misinformation we are left with this question. Because the US and Europe would never support anyone for the sake of them being the only democracy in the middle east or fighting terrorists or whatever. If that were the case the US wouldn't have been complicit with the dictatorships of the gulf countries or any other of the innumerable dictatorships they have established throughout the years in the world. And they would also not be funding the ISIS or other terrorist groups in Columbia, Cuba, Nicaragua and so many other countries.
No dominant organisation in the world like the US state would give a significant amount of money(like it does for Israel) for something that doesn't serve their material interests, namely the perpetuation and/or increase of their power and influence.
So what do you value? Freedom and dignity for all, or more power for the Western states and corporations (- and whatever religious crap you want to excuse colonising and ethnically cleansing a nation)?
If you see this, it'd save you a lot of time from arguing about every single event of the conflict. If you see every human in the world as equal and deserving of freedom, then you'd see that Israel and the West is bringing these people at the brink of extinction, torturing, killing, humiliating, starving them, expelling them from their land, destroying their vital civil infrastructure, stealing their land and property for 75 years now. And when you see all this (not from Western mainstream media though), you'd recognise the right for armed struggle against a colonizing entity that Israel is. No civilian casualties are acceptable, but the ones affected in 7/10/23 would have to turn against their government for ethnically cleansing Palestinians, bringing them to that desperate point of retaliation, not Palestinians.
Israel and its settler garrison are carrying out the standard colonialist formula throughout history (epitomized by the US model in its conquest) : eviction and genocide of the indigenous inhabitants, and theft of their lands.
This is defended under many premises, a "religious" calling, a "civilizing" venture (with orientalist undertones), and many others, but the goal is the same as all imperialist ventures: theft of land, labor, and natural resources. People from around the world, no matter how rich or poor, are invited to join in this colonial project, and many do, because of the promise of cheap land.
Predictably, Israel calls anyone who opposes this genocide as "terrorists", even though by all reasonable definition of terrorism, its the settler garrison who are the real terrorists: murdering innocent civilians, stealing their towns, and erasing the old names. In Palestine, the largest of this event was called the Nakba, whereas in the US, the entire 1800s was a westward-expanding colonial war defeating hundreds of native tribes and killing anyone who resisted.
The US is the primary supporter of this project, because Israel is for them, a giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier / military base in the middle east, which can be used to project western military power on the resource-rich middle east. As Joe Biden said: "If Israel didn't exist, it would be necessary for the US to invent one herself."
I suggest watching this video, as its the best short introduction: How Palestine became Colonized.
I don't have any inherent support either side, and there's too much history along with bias, propaganda, and outright misinformation to make a determination of who the "good guys" are, if anyone.
However, in such cases I will support the underdog on the principle that you don't really want one side to have too much power over the other. That's how we end up with things like ethnic cleansing and genocide. If Palestine (and Lebanon) had powerful militaries, you wouldn't be seeing the mass devastation and huge loss of civilian lives. I'd prefer to see the sides more balanced so that they can keep each other in check.
Another angle to consider is that I consider the state of Israel to be actively harmful to Americans on the basis of:
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using our tax dollars to commit mass murder against civilians, including a staggering death toll for children
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infiltrating our government, interfering with our elections, and having an undue level of influence on American policy
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corollary to the preceding point: they support getting Trump back into the White House
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training American law enforcement, who then use their oppressive tactics on Americans
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similarly, technology they develop for surveillance and other means of control being used on Americans
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directly attacking our First Amendment rights
Bottom line is I'd say everyone sucks, but in different ways. But I am anti-Israel on the basis of them being way out of control (and without anyone to keep them in check) and due to the threat they pose to the American public.
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The volunteers that risk going to do stuff in either side. It’s crazy out there
The one who is colonizing the other. When Nate Turner killed children in his revolt it didn't make the slaves the bad guys and the slave owner the good guy. In the Indian Rebellion of 1857, resistance promised safety to British including kids and women but ended up attacking them, it didn't make the British empire the good guy and the Indian the bad guys
Well obviously it's the Western powers that gave a bunch of displaced Jews land after WWII, despite no legitimate claim to the area, and then proceeded to keep meddling in Middle Eastern affairs so they could get cheap oil. And the biggest of those Western powers directly gives taxpayer money to war profiteers so there's a direct financial incentive to keep the genocide going.
Those are the goodest guys.
The Middle East has been cooking for so long, it's impossible to point at a faction that is the "Good Guys". But right now, one faction is hell-bent on exterminating another nation's people, both military and civilian, so it should be pretty fucking obvious who the worst "Bad Guys" are. There are no good guys, only victims.
You should read Ramzi Yousef's statement at his 1998 trial. Terrorist factions like Hezbollah and Hamas exist only because Israel is consistently refusing to make peace through diplomacy.
Palestine / Hamas.
Where are you getting news, and how often?
the ones staying out of it
Have you watched the Mandalorian? Palestinians are Grogu and the Mandalorian, Israel / US and Zionists are the Empire.
The civilians.
