I didn’t used to understand foreign involvement in wars, like the whole America-Vietnam shenanigans. But I can see why after watching this Israeli Palestine Conflict since birth.
But now it’s like watching two children fighting over who’s sandcastles can be built in the sandbox. And what do we do if children can’t learn to share? You take away everything and no one is happy.
So is that what this is going to come to? Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?
About 70 years ago European leaders decided the best thing to do with the Jewish people was give them their own country…
So they picked the holy land of three main religions, kicked out everyone that had been living there for centuries and made it a religious ethnostate.
Surprisingly the people who lived there weren’t happy to be victims of an ethnic cleansing.
Picking virtually any other place on the globe and it probably would have worked itself out by now.
Cynics think that was intentionally. It’s the perfect lightning rod for attacks against “the west” and the hostility leads to plenty of proxy wars while avoiding actual war in Europe again after WW2
It started even earlier, after the ottoman empire fell/dissolved, British and French diplomats basically drew lines on a map Scramble for Africa style and created new countries out of nothing.
That created tons of tension already.
Yeah, they broke up Africe with no regard to how many distinct cultures there was.
They looked at that giant ancient landmass and legitimately went “they’re all Black, it doesn’t matter”.
The area has been a hotbed for 5000 years. The west didn’t help, at any point, but conflict in the middle east is as old as history itself.
There’s also a belief among some Christians in the US (including many political leaders) that a Jewish state was necessary for the second coming of Jesus to occur. Why they’re in a hurry, I don’t know.
As one who was raised Evangelical Christian for the majority of my childhood by a devout and Republican parent, I’m pretty sure it’s just a death cult.
They live their whole lives only preparing to die.
They forsake and forego a lot of random stuff in favor of rewards after death.
And if they think it’ll get them any bonus, they don’t care if they take everyone else with them, hence the Republican Evangelical politicians generally trying to supply the ingredients for the battle of Armageddon to happen.
Tldr; I think it’s greed typical of those who would fully knowledgeably choose to be a Republican combined with the beliefs of an Evangelical trying to cash in on rewards asap, in the way a Republican typically does.
Good analysis. I guess it’s deep in the conservative ‘F everyone else’ mindset.
There has been conflict there for centuries. It was predominantly Jewish people 1500 years earlier when they were forced out. One of the main reasons it was selected was because it was not heavily populated and that at one time it was a Jewish region before they were invaded. The history goes back millenniums.
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It actually started with WW1 when Britain promised both Jews and Palestinians their own state if they overthrew the Ottomans.
Before that, Ottoman rule was oppressive to both groups relatively equally for a few hundred years.
WW2 and the whole holocaust thing just turned it from a small problem into a big problem, as millions of European Jews sought a safe haven outside of Europe, leading to the creation of a religious ethnostate in 1948.
So yeah, Europeans definitely are to blame, but Arabs and Palestinians aren’t innocent either. They rejected a perfectly adequate solution by the UN in 1947.
They rejected a perfectly adequate solution by the UN in 1947.
I mean… adequate to who?
At what point did the responsibility switch?
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Whose?
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Their fault for living there?
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This is a really patronising take.
Imagine if your country was ‘donated’ to a whole other group of people, they took over, murdered people, took your home, tortured your grandparents, you’re going to be mad. It’s not ‘childish’, it’s reality.
The whole Levant area has seen so many blood-soaked conquests that any claim of ‘proper’ or ‘original’ owners is wilfully and maliciously ignorant. This is also the case for pretty much every bit of solid ground. Your desire to return things to “how they were” is just you picking your fave point on a timeline of history.
Not what I said in the slightest. Current residents were and still are being displaced.
Take my own house as an example, who lived here originally? Probably some celts. Who lived here before me? Fuck knows, but they left and it tranferred to me.
If someone decided to donate my house to someone else would I be mad? Fuck yes.
So Hamas is killing Israelis who live there right now and trying to steal their houses. They should be mad as fuck and retaliate. No?
Or are you suggesting they have not lived there long enough?
You seem confused. No Israeli houses are being stolen. Hamas or representatives of them killed around 200 people at a recent event. In the same period Israel has killed 500 people, including nearly 100 children.
There is a war occurring, and people will be involved in the fighting. However this is an America funded army with bombs and planes against a few groups that are mostly using rocks.
This is a breakdown of the resources available - https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/this-is-the-imbalance-of-power-between-israel-and-palestine-in-real-terms-46651
Israel have decided that they want the gaza strip, and are blanket bombing with the explicit goal of eliminating the population there. It’s brutal.
Civilians will get killed when you use them as shields. And please don’t try and tell me Hamas is not using them as shields.
Also don’t try and tell me Hamas is not indiscriminately sending rockets into Israel. I feel bad for the 50 percent of Palestinians who do not support Hamas but I don’t feel as bad for those that do.
Oh you’re deep into Israeli propaganda. Israel bomb schools and refugee centres and defend themselves by claiming that Hamas were there and ‘using the children as human shields’. The funny thing is, when they go through the dead, they never find these Hamas fighters. It’s almost as if they’re murdering children just to punish Palestinians.
Read the article. Hamas have very few rockets, dozens maybe, and even those have short ranges. Bombing Israeli settlements is rare.
The celts were actually just so good at genocide that they fully displaced the people before them in most places they live now…
Trying to find the “original owners” of anything is stupid as history doesn’t go back that far, so as you say we just need to look at current residents
Issue is, currently Jews are being displaced from their homes to Israel and Palestinians are being displaced by them, so there’s underlying issues that need to be solved first
Nobody is trying to find the ‘original owners’, it’s not relevant at all.
Jews are not being displaced from their homes. People currently moving to Israel are moving by choice, and kicking families out of their homes to do so.
Importantly mostly the people stayed after those conquests though. They were given Greek influence, then Christianized by the Roman empire and held the major Christian center of Antioch, then they were culturally Arabized by Muslim conquests. The main caveats to that rule were the Roman Jewish deportations. Largely, the DNA of the ancient peasants and the current inhabitants is the same.
You are speaking from an incredible place of privilege. You’re nation had one of the most successful expansionist genocides in history. The reason there is still conflict in that region is because Israel’s expansionist genocide is WIP.
That expansionist genocide you are referring to must be the indigenous peoples of North America, correct?
Which is funny since the guy in the video was an Italian-American posing as an American native.
If there’s a people that know about expansionist genocide, it’s the Italians.
Carthago deleda est?
(amongst a very long list of localities)
I gotta be honest, if you ever want to make a point land with anyone, starting with “… privilege” is about one of the worst ways to do it. It’s just an insult: you have such a cushie life that you can’t conceive of whatever.
And then, given the opportunity, you should probably actually answer their question instead of simply condescending.
Are you really tone policing me when OP is calling people children and infants? I’m also very privileged, I’m not trying to own OP, just trying to point out the origins of their beliefs. Their situation isn’t due to a lack of barbarism, it’s due to successful barbarism. It’s not even all in the past, the US commits atrocities every decade, and has its own border crisis.
They are correct in saying I’m privileged, being a middle class white American male is 100% an advantage in life. Doesn’t mean I can’t conceptualize feelings from a different viewpoint.
North America went from undeveloped to world leader in what, 300 years? Israel and Palestine have been habitated by humans more than 6000 years. Both equidistant from European hubs of industry and innovation.
So the fact it hasn’t developed into a world leading pair of nations is on the people.
Israel and Palestine have been habitated by humans more than 6000 years.
So the fact it hasn’t developed into a world leading pair of nations is on the people.
Dumbest shit I’ve ever read. What do you think about Africa, oh enlightened adult? Africa’s been inhabited for over 100,000 years. Is their lack of development “on the people” too?
Please educate yourself, you’re embarrassing yourself and your people.
The US is just as propagandized as Russia and China and it shows.
Because conservative religious people are insane, and that region involves three different and conflicting religions.
If suddenly you snapped your fingers and the entire region/world became irreligious, peace would exist there within a generation or so.
That’s not going to happen, so it’s going to continue to be a clusterfuck for as long as any large groups of people believe a magical being in the sky has destined the state of the region to be a given thing without compromise.
If suddenly you snapped your fingers and the entire region/world became irreligious, peace would exist there within a generation or so.
This is unlikely. The grievances between the various ethnic groups in the region are older than the Abrahamic religions, and older than the historical records that we have (see my other post). Individual people may have short memories, but cultures have very long memories. If you took the religion away, the groups would still mistrust and hate each other - the fighting has been going on since at least the Bronze Age.
Literally every region on earth has cultural histories of atrocities that have been moved beyond in the sake of peace and cohabitation.
You’d need to make a case for why this particular region would be atypical enough to be the exception, and outside of continued belief in opposing religious claims, I don’t see any that would merit such a status.
Do Jews or Russians and Germans currently live in peace with each other in Germany? Are the Japanese in the US secretly planning terrorist attacks on everyone else for the internment camps of WW2? Do American tourists to Vietnam need to worry about being kidnapped and beheaded by the children of people who suffered war crimes?
It’s the religions, not the history.
I think the cycle is something like this Assholes want power over others > they invent religion, which conveniently gives them power > stupid people, content being told what to do accept religious bullshit > said stupid people push religion on their children > new crop of credulous people is raised > assholes want power over said idiots >… Religion… > stupid people, content being told what to do accept religious bullshit…
It’s a bit more complicated than that, as typically religion developed initially as an adaptive social evolution.
For example, early attempts at transitioning to agriculture failed because of a lack of sanitary practices, so disease ran rampant. Much later on when the transition happened again, it was around societies that had developed ideas around the importance of burying the dead, or burning the leftover parts of butchered meats “for the gods.”
What you see more is evidence of alterations to religions in order to protect authoritarianism.
A good example of this is Deuteronomy 21:1-9.
The foundational ritual is one where when there was an unknown murder, the elders of the closest town needed to sacrifice one of its cows. From a sociological standpoint, this created a communal shared cost on unsolved murders occurring.
But notice what happens in 21:5.
Literally in the middle of the elders standing in the water breaking the neck of the cow, the priests - sons of Levi - show up to remind everyone that they are the ones chosen to perform rituals and pronounce judgement. And then in the very next line we’re back to the elders and the cow in the water.
This line was probably a later addition to an earlier elder-driven ritual following a social shift to a priesthood based on ancestry controlling the religion.
There’s a ton of things like this.
So religious practices developed from causes ranging from OCD to social evolution, and then those practices eventually get reworked to support the authorities, and then the continued survival of those religions tend to reinforce authoritarianism even after the original authorities are long dead.
A country with no involvement in world war 2 had its land taken as reparation for world war 2.
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Palestinian soldiers also fought with the British against the Nazis.
But none of this involvement is making it any more fair that Palestinians had to pay for the Holocaust. If anything, the opposite.
Yeah you lose me at stuff like ‘controlled the territory’. It was palestinians living there, not British.
The British empire controlled a lot of regions of the world and they didn’t do it by establishing big population bases everywhere.
You’re conflating ‘country’ and ‘people’ then. The ‘country’ that gave up the land had this flag: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ae/Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom.svg/2560px-Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom.svg.png
I care about the people
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Youre making me hate your side more and more for the complete disregard of uprooting people that were already living there, guilty of nothing. Yes, they were there first, and then were exiled. You wanna get exiled from your own country? No fucking empathy
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Yeah, youre advocating that Palestinians could be uprooted because they were under british control. People not involved in WW2 were uprooted and their homes given to jewish refugees. That happened, thats why palestinians are pissed, and now israel is just perpetuating more of the same. It never should have happened, those refugees shouldve been returned home where they could, taken in by allies, or if they absolutely had to have their own country give them land from germany or any country responsible for exiling their jewish population.
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Are you referring to the British Empire (who was a victor of WW2) or the Ottoman Empire (who no longer existed)?
Stupid take.
Why?
The wikipedia article on that piece of land is crazy. Religious zealots have been fighting over it since basically recorded history started.
It freaks me out that the cradle of civilization is completely desertified and locked in an endless war, as if that’s just the inevitable result of humans being somewhere for a long time.
Cradle of religion?
Not really cradle of civilisation.
Not really. That only really started with the crusades. For most of history it just got traded between various empires that just wanted to control the entire region (Babylon, Persia, Macadon/Selucids, Rome, Ottomans, etc).
Yeah, the crusaders were the first ones that weren’t interested in greater Syria/the greater Levant (If you don’t include the Phoenician city states I guess), stupidly enough for them. It’s a fine bit of territory to control if you can actually take the whole thing because of natural chokepoints, but otherwise you’ll lose eventually. Ottomans just went back to what the Romans did and governed it as Syria.
Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?
I just want to point out that bigger stronger countries stepping in to “soothe the conflict” between two smaller countries has worked basically 0 times throughout all of history in the long run.
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Agreed, the bigger stronger countries aren’t mature enough to handle themselves, let alone getting mixed in other conflicts.
But like who’s the “adult” in this metaphorical dynamic? If there is no mediation, then one of two things will happen
- One kills and annexes the other Or 2. They continue to fight until they run out of populace and the whole area falls to irreparable socio-economic ruin.
I personally vote we let Greenland handle any and all affairs pertaining to this battle. They got a steady reign on things over there.
I don’t disagree, but I doubt either side would agree. Certainly the Israels wouldn’t. They’ve got the most international support, the superior military, and (most importantly) this war let’s them do what they’ve wanted to do for almost a century now, wipe them out and claim all their land for themselves. They’ve got everything to gain and really not all that much to lose except their humanity - and countries rarely optimize their wartime strategies for that.
It depends on what you mean by “work out”. If the goal is to stop conflict by eradicating a culture, that’s worked many times.
The conflict in the Mesopotamian region are the oldest in recorded history. These episodes of the Fall of Civilizations podcast do a pretty good job of describing the various nation states in the area and what we know about what happened to them:
It’s important to understand that these nation states are the oldest known. They are a part of the cultural background of all human civilization. Their conflicts are not only a part of what the Middle East is today, but of what the entire world is today. Their history is our history.
Almost every major conqueror in history, and many minor ones, started conflicts in the Middle East, including Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan.
Between the 7th and 11th centuries, there was a series of wars between the various Arab nations and the Eastern Roman Empire.
Following that, various European nations attempted to conquer parts of the Middle East in the Crusades.
During the 1800s, various European empires took control over various parts of the Middle East, through both military and political action, though the Ottoman Empire controlled most of the region.
WWI saw the end of the Ottoman Empire, after which the European powers carved up their territory.
During Operation Exporter in WWII a British-led force invaded Syria and Lebanon to take control from Vichy France, which had signed the Paris Accords and given territorial control to the German military. Conflict in the area continued after WWII.
This isn’t an exhaustive timeline by any means. No part of our world has been fought over as often, or with as much force, as the Middle East. The feuds there are older than recorded history.
This attitude:
Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?
Demonstrates an ignorance of world history. It’s an arrogant point of view that suggests that the people living in the area are solely responsible for the long history of conflict, which is not the case. And the idea that Western nations could and/or should take actions in this area to “quell the infants” is absolutely delusional. The history of all such actions (such as Desert Storm I and II) has led to more destabilization and conflict in the Middle East, not less.
It is therapeutic to hear the words of reason at times like these were irrational uneducated “opinions” are flung around more than ever.
World history should be mandatory in every country and tested exhaustively. Kids are able to consume the information, as long as they’re not forced to remember the absolutely useless information of it and focus on the actual point of learning history instead.
Of course it’s not to the benefit of individual countries for its citizens to be fully educated, especially when their history consists of taking advantage of the whole world and causing way more misery than the one they’re accusing others of.
More importantly, people should take the initiative to self educate and read books in their spare time. It’s hard and time consuming, but your opinion honestly doesn’t matter much when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about and yet feel fully confident about it.
Non ironically old wars in the Mesopotamian region was my audio TOEFL test 3 years ago
I think the historical record basically shows that organized groups of humans (like the early nation-states) have been picking fights with each other since the first organized groups existed. We have been warring with each other since before there was a word for it. I don’t know how we ever get out of it.
It’s not so much two infants irrationally arguing. Israel has owned some of this land for three generations. So the folks living there have passed it down as long as they’ve been alive. But another group owned it first, and the oldest among them remember the days before the occupiers came.
It’s like if the Cherokee decided to go full on guerrila warfare in the 1940s. Would they maybe have a point? How would it square with folks that had already been there for 80 years? It’s the settlers generational home now, too. Everyone has legitimate greivances. It’s not about settling tantrums, it’s about mediating between people that have legitimate but mutually exclusive claims.
The problem goes back further. You say “another group owned it first”, but Israel say they have had that land for millennia and it was given to them by God.
Palestine did not even exist until the British randomly carved it out on a map except for a brief period under the Romans around 0BC. The Romans called it Palestine in order to remove Israel’s identity.
How far back do we go?
My God said your home belongs to me so…gtfo. Please, leave something in the fridge for dinner. /s
Palestinians themselves, like Jews, descend from the ancient Hebrews. While the Jews left and (somewhat) assimilated in the lands they moved to, Palestinians were assimiliated by the Romans and Arabs. While their language and religion changed they are basically the same people.
And like any good brothers they go full Cain and Abel.
If my brother steals my house from me and leaves me in squalor…
Let’s just say Christmas dinner won’t be a happy one.
Cain disAbeled his brother…
Part of the problem is neither group seem to have any real interest in negotiation. Both groups seem to engage in war crimes attacking civilians and other illegitimate targets.
Every couple of years they get bored and lob missiles at each other, but the “war” has essentially devolved into a stalemate where everyone’s just trying to cause as much misery as possible without any real hope of victory or advancement.
I don’t understand why there are any westerners there. The whole region is red flagged for UK citizens, there’s no way I can get insurance to go there, I don’t understand how some people do.
Israel is coming out of a political crisis from 2021that saw a huge loss in confidence on the government including a dissolution of the parliament. Now that Netanyahu is in power again, he loves that this war broke out. Nothing cements a government in power like a good war.
That’s a simplistic take. There’s a saying that goes something like if you don’t read up, the Jewish are within their rights. If you read a bit, the Muslims are within their rights. If you study the issue you have no idea anymore.
I believe at this point everything in the media is a spin on the truth; for both sides.
How I see it, is that the ones with the money and technology have a better probability to stop the cycle. The ones with their backs against the wall have little options. Violence seldom leads to less violence.
Religion
Basically, hate sells.
I could unpack that phrase over thousands of words about how generation after generation of Palestinians get indoctrinated, or how the leaders of the Arab nations use hating Israel as a way to show their strength and dedication. Or how generation after generation of Israelis have come to see Palestinians as something less than human. But let’s just summarize: hate sells.
The middle east has been fighting for thousands of years. Religion is a helluva thing.
Besides all the very interesting comments and links here about the violent history of the area, here’s an answer from one Israeli guy I once asked a similar question. His take was that it is basically a mafiose environment now … “both sides are corrupt to their core” – the religiosity of the people would be abused by profiteers.
Many countries in the Middle East are essentially Banana Republics. They are countries that have a large amount of wealth that comes almost entirely from exporting a natural resource. The government in these countries is less of a government and more of a group of people who control the export market. They don’t rely on their citizens for support, they rely on other countries buying their exports. As long as their exports keep being purchased, the government has the money and power to do whatever it pleases.
Foreign involvement in these countries is usually to ensure the exports keep coming. The USA specifically spends a lot of money on being world police with their military because its easier to make trade deals with countries when they’re not at war.
It’s not that adults need to stop children from fighting. It’s adults going to the gas station and getting upset the employees are spending too much time fighting and not enough time pumping gas.
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One highly significant area for three different world religions means there will always be religious fundamentalists who want to throw out the other two.
