Sunday, October 8, 2023

About the war in Israel: Honorable war vs dishonorable war

Everyone has a different story about how we got to to this bloody mess. By the way, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a radical Zionist monster, I strongly believed that a bloody day of final reckoning was coming sooner or later. Well, now it's apparently here. This time will probably finish the Palestinians for good, but there are probably going to be a hell of a lot of corpses and horrors along the way.

My vision of the history
My version of the history of this ongoing story of misery and death is pretty simple. Yes, almost all of this will be bitterly rejected by most Jews as a pack of lies and slanders. 

Major event 1: In 1947-1948, a gigantic population change occurred in the Jewish & non-Jewish population of Israel/Palestine. It was a whopper. 


According to Zionist mythology, hundreds of thousands of non-Jews apparently all decided accept buyouts from local Jews to permanently get the hell out of what the United Nations would turn into Israel in May of 1948. My understanding of actual history indicates that most of the non-Jews (Palestinians) who left were forced out, not voluntarily buggering out. 

That point of history, like every other point of the miserable, bloody Israel history, is bitterly contested between the two sides. The Israel-Palestine situation from that time and continuing today looks to be to be almost identical to the bitter differences in reality and belief in modern American politics. One example is what has happened to the Jewish-non-Jewish population from 1995 to 2023, Jewish presence is declining. 


That demographic shift scares the hell out of radical Jewish theocrats who are now fighting in Israel to install radical, aggressive fundamentalist Jewish Sharia law under a radical fundamentalist Jewish Taliban. Does that sound familiar? It should. (hint: Christian nationalism in modern America is fighting for aggressive Christian Sharia law administered by an intolerant, self-righteous, wealthy, White, heterosexual male Christian Taliban)


Major event 2 (still ongoing in 2023): Between 1948 and 1995, there were periods of peace talks, Palestinian terrorist attacks and atrocities. At the same time there was an always increasing occupation of land that Palestinians lived on. Palestinians kept get pushed back over and over and over. The peace talks were going nowhere because neither Israel nor the usually corrupt, incompetent and arrogant Palestinian leadership really wanted peace on terms that were possible at various times. The US sponsored peace talks but they always got derailed by one damn stupid thing or another, usually something bloody. During this time, and continuing today, Israel was slowly annexing Palestine into Israel, despite constant United Nations condemnation of each new illegal territory occupation. An Israeli newspaper commented in 2023:
The United Nations General Assembly passed more resolutions critical of Israel than against all other nations combined in 2022, contributing to what observers call an ongoing lopsided focus on the Jewish state at the world body.

Since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 140 resolutions criticizing Israel, mainly over its treatment of the Palestinians, its relationships with neighboring countries and other alleged wrongdoings. Over the same period, it has passed 68 resolutions against all other countries, UN Watch said.
That article points out that various dictator-controlled nations the UN has condemned for human rights and other violations have ignored similar UN resolutions, e.g., Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Qatar, China, etc. Apparently, human dictators don't care about treating people like garbage when they can get away with it.

The US at the ineffective United Nations, 2018

Major event 3: The 1995 assassination of Rabin is the event that struck me as the end of any possibility of a peaceful two-state resolution of the stupid, bloody conflict. That's major event 3. After Rabin died, it was clear that Israeli society would back away from peace, prodded by incessant dark free speech to scare, divide and conquer Israeli society and turn society against the Palestinians and a Palestine. Does that sound familiar? It should. (hint: decades of authoritarian radical right dark free speech in America has turned a significant portion of society against democracy, civil liberties that God hates (including voting rights), the rule of law and the legitimacy of political opposition) 

The expected result of major event 3 is probably going to turn out to be the war the Palestinians launched against Israel in the past few days. What other options are there? Peace talks since the murder of Rabin were mostly a farce with no chance of a settlement. Since the non-Jews were forced out of Israel in 1947-1948, the Palestinians have constantly seen their land stolen and their freedoms strictly curtailed. They have nothing left to live for. No country on Earth wants the Palestinians, so they are left to their fate at the hands of cruel, racist, radical Zionist theocrat thugs. 


Honorable vs dishonorable war
So, is the current bloody war that Hamas launched against Israel and its non-combatant citizens dishonorable? After all, they attacked and brutalized innocent Israeli citizens. Or, since there is (i) no reasonable hope of any reasonable negotiated settlement, and (ii) a very high likelihood that the misery and hopelessness of Palestinian people will continue for at least decades, if not a century or two. A couple of examples of the hopeless rage that Palestinians feel helps to exemplify this asymmetric in some context:

A rock against a tank

Rock throwing

More rock throwing

Yes I know, murders and horrors have been committed by the Palestinians against non-combatant Israelis. Does that make one last ditch effort, driven by rage and hopelessness, dishonorable? The Palestinians are probably going to be slaughtered by the thousands in this war unless something miraculous intervenes. The US military has already committed to defending Israel. Maybe US troops will wind up obliterating some Palestinians.


An example of non-shooting war morphing into a shooting war
Despite outbreaks of shootings, I consider what is happening in American politics to still be predominantly a non-shooting war. But it is a real war. It is democracy and civil liberties vs dictatorship and oppression (i.e., power and wealth concentrated with the elites). 

How can that be a war without many shots being fired? Simple, take control of the levers of power and slowly chip away at democracy and civil liberties. So far, the American authoritarian radial right has taken a big chunk out of abortion rights (God hates abortion), voting rights (dictators and plutocrats hate voting), and anti-corruption laws (kleptocrats love corruption). If this erosion continues, there will be very little or no plausible peaceful political means to stop the rise of tyranny, oppression and bigoted cruelty in America. The American experiment will have failed and ended in corrupt, bigoted-racist tyranny.

If some Americans, seeing the hopelessness of their plight as authoritarianism, kleptocracy and hopeless oppression slowly engulfs them, rise up and start a shooting war and killing non-combatants, would that be dishonorable terrorism, honorable patriotism in defense of democracy and liberty, or something else?

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