Philosophy Now Forum

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 9:58 pm

bahman wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 9:52 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 9:25 pm Their lives.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k_0L_nhEwtg

So if you love peace, then don't just nag...make it possible for them to say "yes." If you don't, then you are just perpetuating genocide.

But how do they know that accepting a ceasefire leads to losing their lives? As I said many times in this thread, violence just brings violence. There would be more people who hate Jews, there would be more terrorists then ... unless Israel kills all Jew haters that is not possible. Israel's government just is not wise enough.

The Israelis and their supporters need that narrative ... that all Jews will be killed in a genocide if they don't continue the attack.

With that narrative, they are fighting for their survival. Without that narrative, their actions are unconscionable.

I can certainly see Hamas managing to kill Israelis, but how would they manage to carry out genocide? Against a vastly superior military that cannot be caught off guard again for the foreseeable future.

bahman wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 9:52 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 9:25 pm

bahman wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 6:17 pm What Israelis lose if they accept the ceasefire for the second time?

Their lives.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k_0L_nhEwtg

So if you love peace, then don't just nag...make it possible for them to say "yes." If you don't, then you are just perpetuating genocide.

But how do they know that accepting a ceasefire leads to losing their lives?

There are 7 million Palestinians here and 7 million Israelis here and no one is going anywhere ...."

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 9:58 pm The Israelis and their supporters need that narrative ... that all Jews will be killed in a genocide if they don't continue the attack.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 10:41 pm There are some who refuse to enlist even when jailed.

There are 7 million Palestinians here and 7 million Israelis here and no one is going anywhere ...."

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 10:42 pm It's the "narrative" that Hamas has given them, and continues to perpetuate. "From the river to the sea," remember?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 10:49 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 10:42 pm It's the "narrative" that Hamas has given them, and continues to perpetuate. "From the river to the sea," remember?

If Hamas declared that they were willing to divide the country, or live within a democratic state shared by all, and yet were still militant in expelling the occupiers from Gaza (their stated original objective) and also from the West Bank (an objective not achieved yet), in that case the *narrative* would be acceptable and you would see Hamas differently?

The Palestinians would have accepted the 1947 proposal, and would now still own most of the territory, and all of Jerusalem; and Israel would be a tiny dot of land in the middle of that.

Myth: Had Palestinians accepted the 1947 partition plan, they would have had a state by now


One of the talking points most often employed against the Palestinians -especially during Nakba day- is that their rejection of the UN partition plan is the root cause for all the misery and conflict that followed. To paraphrase, the argument goes:

“Had the Palestinians only accepted the UN partition plan in 1947, they too could have been celebrating their independence alongside Israel.”

This, we argue, is a classic case of victim blaming, and yet another ahistorical myth in need of correcting.

Sustaining this argument requires some glaring lies of omission and manipulation of facts. I believe it is important to scrutinize this claim, and this can only be done by conveying a historically accurate depiction of the debates and context surrounding partition.

Before we can talk about partition, however, we need to talk about those demanding partition. Based on the Israeli narrative, this would be “the Jewish people”. This is a dishonest assertion and is often uncritically accepted by many.

This line of thought conflates the Jewish people with Zionism, an ideology finding its origins in Europe in the late 1800s. At the time, the Jewish people were largely uninterested in Zionism. As a matter of fact many groups were fiercely anti-Zionist. The attempt to conflate the two is an attempt to give legitimacy to self-professed settlers from Europe, and portray any criticism of the Zionist project as inherently antisemitic.

Yet in the early days, the Zionist movement was astonishingly honest about its existence as a form of colonialism. The founding fathers of Zionism, such as Herzl, Nordau, Ussishkin and Jabotinsky –among others- employed the same colonial tropes and tactics used by Europeans to legitimize their imperialism. Not only was Zionism colonialism in practice, but Zionists openly referred to it as such; for example, Herzl sought counsel from Cecil Rhodes on how best to proceed with the process of colonization, describing Zionism as ‘something colonial’. To drive this point even further, the first Zionist bank established was named the ‘Jewish Colonial Trust’ and the whole endeavor was supported by the ‘Palestine Jewish Colonization Association’ and the ‘Jewish Agency Colonization Department’.

At the end of the day it was a group of European settlers claiming an already inhabited land for an exclusivist ethnic state, while planning to ‘spirit the penniless population across the border’ through various means. Modern attempts to retroactively whitewash Zionism, and portray it merely as a movement for self-determination, cannot escape these facts [You can read more about this here].

When partition is brought up in the historical sense, it is not surprising that most tend to think of the 1947 UNGA resolution. However, this was not the first partition scheme to be presented. In 1919, for example, the World Zionist Organization put forward a ‘partition’ plan, which included all of historical Palestine, parts of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. At the time, the Jewish population of this proposed state would not have even reached 2-3% of the total population.

Naturally, such a proposal did not see the light of day, but it is an indication of the entitlement of the Zionist movement in wanting to establish an ethnic state in an area where they were so utterly outnumbered. To put this into context, even after waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, and a much smaller area allocated to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition plan, the proposed Jewish state would not have had a Jewish majority without additional immigration and settlement. As even on the eve of the Nakba, the Jewish population in mandatory Palestine was less than a third.

If we consider that most of this population arrived during the 4th and 5th Aliyot (Between 1924-1939), then the majority of those demanding partition of the land had barely been living there for 20 years at the most. To make matters worse, the UN partition plan allotted approximately 56% of the land of mandatory Palestine to the Jewish state.

Why, then, were Palestinians expected to agree to give away most of their land to a minority of recently arrived settlers? Why is the rejection of such a ridiculously unjust proposal framed as irrational or hateful?

Jabotinsky understood clearly what establishing Israel meant for the natives; he did not mince words, in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall he wrote that:

‘Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised’.

What was being asked of Palestinians was nothing short of rubber-stamping their own colonization with approval. Nobody should be expected to agree to that.

Yet for some, this is not seen as convincing reasoning for the rejection of partition. They acknowledge the obscene injustice of what was being asked of Palestinians, yet they argue that due to the historical persecution of the Jewish people, and fresh off the heels of the Holocaust, creating a Jewish state at the expense of Palestinians was a historic necessity.

While such justifications serve mainly to assuage guilt, I argue that there is also a practical reason for why accepting or rejecting partition was irrelevant to the grand scheme of Zionist colonization of Palestine.

It is often brought up how the Yishuv agreed to the 1947 partition plan, showing good will and a readiness to coexist and live with their Palestinian neighbors. While this may seem true on the surface, a cursory glance at internal Yishuv meetings paints an entirely different picture. Partition as a concept was entirely rejected, and any acceptance in public was tactical in order for the newly created Jewish state to gather its strength before expanding [You can read more about this here].

While addressing the Zionist Executive, Ben Gurion reemphasized that any acceptance of partition would be tactical and temporary:

“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”

This was not a one-time occurrence, and neither was it only espoused by Ben Gurion. Internal debates and letters illustrate this time and time again. Even in letters to his family, Ben Gurion wrote that “A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning” detailing that settling the rest of Palestine depended on creating an “elite army”. As a matter of fact, he was quite explicit:

“I don’t regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim.”

Chaim Weizmann expected that:

“partition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years”.

So even ignoring the moral question of requiring the natives to formally green-light their own colonization, had the Palestinians agreed to partition they most likely still would not have had an independent state today. Despite what was announced in public, internal Zionist discussions make it abundantly clear that this would have never been allowed.

Partition today remains as immoral as it was when first presented, a band-aid solution and a cure for a symptom which overlooks the root cause. Any settlement that is achieved without justice or accountability merely buries the issues in exchange for short-lived quiet; but no matter how long it takes, silenced and ignored grievances will resurface. This becomes exceedingly clear when observing the situation of our comrades in South Africa today.

The demise of the Oslo accords can serve as a catalyst to challenge the fixation on the pre-1967 war borders. Reducing the question of Palestine to partition and occupation overlooks crucial components of the struggle. Many may prefer to ignore said components; however, if true justice is our goal, then they must be discussed and confronted. We must start from the beginning and reject any urges to whitewash history.

phyllo wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 11:22 pm

The Palestinians would have accepted the 1947 proposal, and would now still own most of the territory, and all of Jerusalem; and Israel would be a tiny dot of land in the middle of that.

Ah, this.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 10:10 pm I can certainly see Hamas managing to kill Israelis, but how would they manage to carry out genocide?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 7:51 am Ask yourself this: what did they think they were going to achieve on October 7th? What was the point of it all, if Hamas did not think they could possibly take Israel?

Now, I'm not saying they were being realistic.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:07 am

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 7:51 am Ask yourself this: what did they think they were going to achieve on October 7th? What was the point of it all, if Hamas did not think they could possibly take Israel?

I could speculate on that, and I will below. But this was not what I was responding to. You presented it as if genocide of the Jews was on the table. Do you think that is on the table? Now instead of acknowledging that it is not or backing up the claim you made, you want to talk about the intent of Hamas.

OK, My guess as to their intent. I think it is a mix unthinking idiotic short term goals - do damage, get revenge, kill Jews (in the main civilians) in horrible ways: iow short term 'success'. Then longer term: they had to know that the response was going to be enormous and that Palestinian civilians were going to suffer. So, my guess is that they included this intentionally in their plans. The longer term goals are to win sympathy for the gaza civilians so that other players might enter the field (Iran, perhaps, in the longer term, perhaps other Arab nations, China and Russia, who knows). Also any competitions for power often get set to the side in wartime. The US does this, many nations do. In wartime citizens collect around the president or ruling party, etc. There may have been plans to consolidate long term power and support around themselves (Hamas) through the war. That much of Hamas might want to remove Israel and/or kill the Jews in the region, sure that wouldn't surprise me and some have stated this outright.

That's my speculation.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:24 am So your thought is that they never actually intended genocide at all? For you write, "...you presented it as if genocide is on the table. It's not." It was never "on the table," right?

Now, I'm not saying they were being realistic.

So if you love peace, then don't just nag...make it possible for them to say "yes." If you don't, then you are just perpetuating genocide.