Comment by thomassmith65
3 days ago
It's 'not complicated' if one is lazy. The comment is missing a lot of mitigating pieces of information:
- the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent
- the lack of options for Jews facing persecution, pograms and a holocaust given immigration policies of nations around the world
- the many Jews in Israel formerly from middle-eastern nations
- the complication to the birth-right citizenship argument that all Jews have Israeli ancestry (albeit very distant, in many cases)
- the UN Partition Plan for Palestine
The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right. It's not the Palestinians' fault that their land was least bad refuge for Jews, but it probably was.
>The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right.
So true on a theoretical basis, and at the same time both sides are wrong for fighting on that same basis.
Leaving the only sensible participants those who are committed to complete non-violence for a few generations, no-one else could possibly have beneficial actionable input without making things worse.
>the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent
You have my upvote but I consider this a fairly weak argument from all sides.
After WWII there were only three kinds of people remaining on my home planet:
1. Those that won WWII.
2. Those that lost WWII.
3. Those that were saved by the ones that won WWII.
Everyone else was killed.
Sure, it's a fresh start, but pretty gloomy when you think about it.
The winners rightly would be expected to take the lead from that point on, drawing lines of co-operation highly focused on preventing any more worldwide conflict in any predictable way. Definitely for the foreseeable future at the time, and it has proven to work more effectively than any other peace initiative in human history. Relative to the overall threat.
Anyone who was saved by the winners of WWII and was not completely delighted with the outcome has certainly never had legitimate grounds for complaint considering the alternative. How quickly some people can forget.
Then again religious hatred and/or superstition can misguide some otherwise intelligent people from just about anywhere, and this is nothing new since cave men were all there was.
Of course it's been quite a while since prehistoric times, so too late now, nothing that happened before WWII will ever be a reason for further conflict ever. They'd have to be a complete moron.
Looks like the world had settled into its most peaceful time by about 1950.
Realistically the only major war that remained was a cold one after that, and regardless of whether you were unappreciatively saved by the winners of WWII, or happened to be disgruntled losers, the only way to change it was to start WWIII. At one time everybody knew that.
Which "everyone" also knew would take one hell of a suicidal maniac, but if it happened it would probably be dealt with along the lines of how Kamikaze tactics were proven to be overcome when the scale reached world-threatening proportions.
It was already the 20th century with worldwide communication and everything, and the century was only halfway along. Naturally with such a worldwide war brought to conclusion without complete destruction everywhere, previous conflict up until that time had been made as equally prehistoric as in 19,500 BC ever since.
How could people forget so easily? Who would possibly be suicidal enough to let that kind of bloodthirsty hatred rule again?
I think my wording was a bit vague there. By 'two empires', I meant the two who governed Palestine prior to 1948 (ie: the Ottoman, and then the British).
When zionism came about, Palestinian arabs were not in power and could not determine policy.
Zionist jews spend years wrangling (sometimes violently) promises and concessions from the British, and finally from the UN, who, at the time, seemed like the legitimate bodies to grant them.
In retrospect, 'what business did the Ottomans or British have to allow foreign zionists to take over Palestine?' but that's with the benefit of hindsight.
Not that either side is evil... it's a complicated conflict.
Ouch: it's too late to correct, but the word 'turks' should be substituted for 'ottomans'. As a noun, 'ottoman' means only 'foot stool'
>I meant the two who governed Palestine prior to 1948
That's the kind of thing I think people should be able to disregard altogether.
Not just because it's ancient history of the Middle East, but the whole world went through so much.
After all that, it was not supposed to matter any more what happened before.
Almost all the lucky survivors could move forward and there was maximum worldwide consensus that non-violence was the way to go.
Even some of the absolute losers of the war moved forward non-violently to a better outcome than any other way.
The Hatfields & McCoys were never going to stop feuding either, until they declared multi-generational peace, that's the amount of time it takes for co-existence to eventually give way to constructive interaction, rather than destructive interaction.
>'what business did the Ottomans or British have to allow foreign zionists to take over Palestine?'
Exactly what I mean, doesn't matter what anybody anywhere did before the war.
It was only after the war when the British came out on the winning side, that made them an arbiter of these kind of things. If the Germans would have won it surely would have been much worse, with an entire political party focused primarily on spreading hatred and oppression as a growth tactic.
No traditional business or inherent right to govern was responsible for British decisions that were capable of shaping destiny.
The Crown just happened to already be there actually keeping the peace before the war, until the British empire was threatened across the entire world, and peace completely lost on the planet. I like to keep in mind that you could have spent the war years in isolated communities on a number of continents and had no knowledge whatsoever that a war had even taken place. You were still saved by the ones that won WWII, there's no getting around it.
Even though the British had gotten there in the first place because of their own misguided war-like efforts of conquest, that didn't give them legitimate rights to anything.
Their empire was actively reversing all kinds of war-like tendencies like never before, along with every other person no matter what their religion or culture, that a peaceful world was suitable for. And withdrawing from an occupation that was quite painful itself.
You know, reversing like the Hatfields & McCoys. Remember if a hateful violent culture develops, and generations go by without resolution it never really matters any more what they are fighting for. Nope. Never. Really. Matters. And it can get a lot worse when the population grows with each generation because pretty soon there are not enough mountains for everybody.
Things were pretty simple with only 3 kinds of people for a while, but since prehistoric times there's often been some violence-prone contingent that would not be compatible with world peace without major change in attitude & behavior.
The world-wide window of opportunity for complete non-violence that opened after the war will never close until WWIII.
It's what you do with it that matters until then.
For those few that failed to quit shooting you could say that it's like the war never ended for them so they're stuck in a historical impasse. But the day the war ended it pushed any continuing conflicts right into the "prehistoric" category along with all the ancient stuff that would best be non-glorified if not completely forgotten because that's what's proven to work so well.
Once it was proven that almost the entire world could become deathly hateful of their adversaries, then stop shooting and rapidly turn it around for unprecedented co-operation, then anybody can do it, and those who failed to heed the example have only worsened their own outcomes.
Just like my hillbilly ancestors did for so many generations. Nobody who actually had academic schools could have taught the lessons of WWII until it was over anyway. Even those with academic traditions going back millennia, if they didn't stop teaching anything that could lead to violence after that, then they have failed worse than the most illiterate hillbilly. Lots of those mountain dwellers didn't even get schools until the 20th century.
The feuding parties were as hateful and uneducated as people can get. You don't want to be like them any more, you want to learn how not to be like them so you don't get stuck in permanent hate. If that means forgetting the past, maybe that's the only way to learn sometimes. To some extent it could have been easier to declare peace without very much tradition of formal indoctrination.
The most effective teaching could turn out to be teaching how to forget.
The first thing that always needs to be done is to stop shooting, who knew?
>it's a complicated conflict.
It stays complicated, even after the shooting stops.
But even a hillbilly can do it.
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