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talkpoliticsFirst things first, I might note while I dislike the leadership on both sides here I think that the moral situation clearly favors the Palestinians, unfortunately their leadership is both too murderous for its own good and too incompetent as a result of this murderous infighting to actually use this to its own benefit. So long as a movement like Hamas wins elections, regardless of how much this is due to corruption in Fatah ranks or how much due to desires for impossible to achieve destruction of the state of Israel, it's easy for the Israelis to dismiss the Palestinians wholesale via collective punishment.
However to me I was always curious as to *why* Palestinians had the problem they do with actually using certain obvious moral points in their favor (such as the major problem of why Hitler killing Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union means Arabs in Palestine had to be booted out for the rise of a Jewish state and how that logic precisely works). In the reading I've done on Palestinian internal politics I noted one trend that's recurred with a depressing pattern, namely that leaders like the Mufti of Jerusalem and Yasser Arafat, two iconic leaders of that people won their leadership by killing everyone who might remotely challenge them. The er, Stalin route, to power and glory and fame. The problems this leaves are threefold, Palestinian leaders that rise by killing everyone else are by no means good at either politics or warfare (the serial string of defeats for Husseini and Arafat strongly indicate this in fact is what happens). Their poor leadership, however, won't be challenged because most Palestinians, like everyone else, would rather be miserably aware their leaders are crap and alive than righteously defying them and dead.
Second, this leadership pattern leaves no room for the development of civil society or politics in a normal fashion, where by contrast this is one thing the Israelis have always been very good at. Israel has large, peaceful demonstrations against its leaders when they are dicks or murderous assholes, in Palestinian politics the usual result of this is to be shot for purposes of exemplary punishment. As a result of this the Palestinian political leadership has no real limits, but a pattern of successful use of armed force means movements like Hamas and Fatah rely on guns as there's nothing else to rely on. It also means that Palestinian leaders can say all they will about adhering to treaties, but they've no means to enforce them, as the Palestinian leadership knows that a sufficiently skilled murderer could supplant them. Which from Israel's point of view means every agreement signed is broken, sometimes before the ink is dry, and it has no leaders it can trust or who dicker with it in good faith, so why does it bother with a process that never works? Certainly no other state would do this over and over again. To change this, however, would require a complete overhaul of Palestinian political structures by Palestinians themselves. Thus the claim that Palestinian political situations being desperate justifies those rocket salvoes does not quite hold water and is if anything a confession that Palestinian politics is deeply and fatally flawed right in its inherent structure, to a degree that gives Israel carte blanche from the very mixture of ludicrous claims out of proportion to the actual military capability of Palestinian leadership, claims that also further the very linking of the Holocaust with the justification of Israel's own existence.
Thus Palestinian leadership tends to be led by thugs whose only qualification is having shot anyone who might object to their policies and this is never a good indication of being able to lead, and whose politics therefore are pushed into ever-more-radical objections to forestall continuation of this pattern, but this leads them as a rule to having a problem of being too murderous and incapable of adhering to agreements to be trusted in negotiations and too ineffectual in force to be feared but effectual enough to be hated. In this regard the regular salvoes of rockets from the Gaza Strip after Israel's unilateral withdrawal and the continuing civil war between Fatah and Hamas represent trends of Palestinian murderous leadership and political incompetence opposed to superior Israeli political cohesion and vastly superior military strength.
I would hope nobody in this community would defend things like the Mufti of Jerusalem's slaughtering everyone he disagreed with, his statements about what he would have done to the Yishuv had he won, or his repeated willingness to sell out his own people for political ends. Equally I would hope we can all agree that much of Yasser Arafat's career involved him killing other Arabs and his own people as much as or more than the Israelis, and that no matter what Israel does this is not a means to ensure the Israelis would find Arafat or people like him people to agree with. I would also hope we can all agree that lobbing pitifully inaccurate and worthless missiles into Israel for the express purpose of killing enough Israeli civilians to win a Palestinian Islamist state is a method fundamentally flawed and politically unsound as it's too lethal to be tolerated and too weak to actually change anything.
I am curious, however, as to how people view this analysis of the Palestinian side of the situation. To do a shorter version, I believe that while the Palestinians have the logically and morally simpler situation in their favor, their leadership has repeatedly been unable and unwilling to ever actually use this and its means of acting have alienated Israel and most-all the neighboring states while proving too ineffectual to move from more than bulldogs gnawing at all ankles and thus loathed by everyone without receiving fear from anyone. This is from how Palestinian politics have worked in practice, and unless there's a political revolution in a positive sense in Palestinian politics Israel will never seriously consider peace with Palestinians because no peace will stick and Palestinians too unable to rein in their own extremists. Thus, until this changes, Israel can quite freely do what it will because the Palestinians have neither the military power to stop it or the political ability to find any kind of workable solution and Israel meanwhile, as a militarized democracy is going to do what it will no matter what Palestinians do. And perpetuating a war that is genocidal in intent but far too weak to do anything more than be a nuisance we should all agree is clearly not working so perpetuating it is also never going to work.
Your thoughts?
However to me I was always curious as to *why* Palestinians had the problem they do with actually using certain obvious moral points in their favor (such as the major problem of why Hitler killing Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union means Arabs in Palestine had to be booted out for the rise of a Jewish state and how that logic precisely works). In the reading I've done on Palestinian internal politics I noted one trend that's recurred with a depressing pattern, namely that leaders like the Mufti of Jerusalem and Yasser Arafat, two iconic leaders of that people won their leadership by killing everyone who might remotely challenge them. The er, Stalin route, to power and glory and fame. The problems this leaves are threefold, Palestinian leaders that rise by killing everyone else are by no means good at either politics or warfare (the serial string of defeats for Husseini and Arafat strongly indicate this in fact is what happens). Their poor leadership, however, won't be challenged because most Palestinians, like everyone else, would rather be miserably aware their leaders are crap and alive than righteously defying them and dead.
Second, this leadership pattern leaves no room for the development of civil society or politics in a normal fashion, where by contrast this is one thing the Israelis have always been very good at. Israel has large, peaceful demonstrations against its leaders when they are dicks or murderous assholes, in Palestinian politics the usual result of this is to be shot for purposes of exemplary punishment. As a result of this the Palestinian political leadership has no real limits, but a pattern of successful use of armed force means movements like Hamas and Fatah rely on guns as there's nothing else to rely on. It also means that Palestinian leaders can say all they will about adhering to treaties, but they've no means to enforce them, as the Palestinian leadership knows that a sufficiently skilled murderer could supplant them. Which from Israel's point of view means every agreement signed is broken, sometimes before the ink is dry, and it has no leaders it can trust or who dicker with it in good faith, so why does it bother with a process that never works? Certainly no other state would do this over and over again. To change this, however, would require a complete overhaul of Palestinian political structures by Palestinians themselves. Thus the claim that Palestinian political situations being desperate justifies those rocket salvoes does not quite hold water and is if anything a confession that Palestinian politics is deeply and fatally flawed right in its inherent structure, to a degree that gives Israel carte blanche from the very mixture of ludicrous claims out of proportion to the actual military capability of Palestinian leadership, claims that also further the very linking of the Holocaust with the justification of Israel's own existence.
Thus Palestinian leadership tends to be led by thugs whose only qualification is having shot anyone who might object to their policies and this is never a good indication of being able to lead, and whose politics therefore are pushed into ever-more-radical objections to forestall continuation of this pattern, but this leads them as a rule to having a problem of being too murderous and incapable of adhering to agreements to be trusted in negotiations and too ineffectual in force to be feared but effectual enough to be hated. In this regard the regular salvoes of rockets from the Gaza Strip after Israel's unilateral withdrawal and the continuing civil war between Fatah and Hamas represent trends of Palestinian murderous leadership and political incompetence opposed to superior Israeli political cohesion and vastly superior military strength.
I would hope nobody in this community would defend things like the Mufti of Jerusalem's slaughtering everyone he disagreed with, his statements about what he would have done to the Yishuv had he won, or his repeated willingness to sell out his own people for political ends. Equally I would hope we can all agree that much of Yasser Arafat's career involved him killing other Arabs and his own people as much as or more than the Israelis, and that no matter what Israel does this is not a means to ensure the Israelis would find Arafat or people like him people to agree with. I would also hope we can all agree that lobbing pitifully inaccurate and worthless missiles into Israel for the express purpose of killing enough Israeli civilians to win a Palestinian Islamist state is a method fundamentally flawed and politically unsound as it's too lethal to be tolerated and too weak to actually change anything.
I am curious, however, as to how people view this analysis of the Palestinian side of the situation. To do a shorter version, I believe that while the Palestinians have the logically and morally simpler situation in their favor, their leadership has repeatedly been unable and unwilling to ever actually use this and its means of acting have alienated Israel and most-all the neighboring states while proving too ineffectual to move from more than bulldogs gnawing at all ankles and thus loathed by everyone without receiving fear from anyone. This is from how Palestinian politics have worked in practice, and unless there's a political revolution in a positive sense in Palestinian politics Israel will never seriously consider peace with Palestinians because no peace will stick and Palestinians too unable to rein in their own extremists. Thus, until this changes, Israel can quite freely do what it will because the Palestinians have neither the military power to stop it or the political ability to find any kind of workable solution and Israel meanwhile, as a militarized democracy is going to do what it will no matter what Palestinians do. And perpetuating a war that is genocidal in intent but far too weak to do anything more than be a nuisance we should all agree is clearly not working so perpetuating it is also never going to work.
Your thoughts?
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 00:16 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:01 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 00:50 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:02 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:11 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:13 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:30 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:35 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:41 (UTC)I will grant that few ethnically-defined states do that, because they generally prefer ethnic homogeneity ... which is one reason why I think ethnically-defined states are ultimately a bad idea. But an ethinically-defined state does not need that homogeneity to cohere.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:46 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:52 (UTC)But my point remains that one can have ethnically-defined nations which are non-homogeneous and support the full citizenship of their ethnic minorities.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:57 (UTC)Truer words were ne'er spoke. Though I'm not sure that I would call that &lduqo;fortunate”, exactly, much as I take your point.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 02:01 (UTC)That's both hypothetical and rather difficult as things stand.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 02:07 (UTC)But yeah, an Israel challenged by a real Palestinian leader would KO a lot of Israeli illusions ... yet is difficult to imagine.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 02:12 (UTC)And unfortunately changing the circumstances that *make* it difficult to imagine is equally difficult to imagine. Between those dictatorships and Israel none of the Palestinians' neighbors would want such a change and altering that political system is easier stated than put into practice. The legacies of that would need decades of consistent hard work to overcome and a lot can change in a few decades.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 02:15 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 13:35 (UTC)I think Sharon could have pulled it off. Netanyahu? Never.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 21:31 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:34 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 01:40 (UTC)Yes, as I said I really dislike both sides' leaderships.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 02:30 (UTC)But overall, Gaza could have been a great self sustaining oasis. One of the best beaches on Mediterranean and fertile enough land.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 02:41 (UTC)When the Palestinian leadership authorized rockets that question became moot as that's an act of war and they wound up either confessing inability to control their militants or complete lack of scruples, and Israel gets what it wanted the whole time, a giant prison supersaturated with Palestinians and superficially doing more than it actually did beneath the surface.
Suffice to say I really don't like the leadership of either side, Israel's leaders are a bunch of dicks that know what they're doing, Palestinian leaders are a bunch of dicks that don't know what they're doing and make ludicrous threats that harm themselves and the people they theoretically claim to represent. And so long as they're murderous and incompetent Israel can keep the killer food supplies from feeding Palestinians and calling that a blockade when it's convenient and not one when that's convenient without feeling too bad about it. They'd do it anyway but it's so much easier when Hamas is the kind of enemy outsiders are unlikely to be sympathetic to if they've an ounce of decency.
(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 18:06 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/12/11 21:28 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 31/12/11 21:18 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 31/12/11 21:50 (UTC)And unfortunately the Christian Palestinians weren't any nicer or more politically astute than Husseini or Arafat.
(no subject)
Date: 1/1/12 01:16 (UTC)The long and the short of it is that the religions, Muslim, Jewish and Christian (and lots others) are just tools for evil people to use to control the masses. Their original meaning has been beaten down and raped for the sake of that control