Arguments could b made America is only more polite when it comes to marginalized groups, but I don’t know how hollow comparing african american and other minority problems in america to outright war/terrorist bombings on a simi-regular basis would feel and would rather not insult people.
It’s a sore subject.
Wow, so all or nothing. I assume that means Palestinians will “have to accept” the existence of the squatter state of Israel on land that was once theirs (and granted, many do – relatively few do call for the dismantlement of Israel).
But does your line of thinking also imply that they “have to accept” continued, ever-encroaching displacement and dispossession, as in for example the ongoing, internationally condemned theft of land for the expansion of Apartheid-like, Israeli-only “settlements”?
The surest way for Palestinians to dismantle Israel is to demonstrate that Israel as we presently know it is no longer a necessity.
The way to do that is to accept that no, they do not get to drive a new mass displacement.
And this is where the mostly-secular vs. mostly-religious split between Jews comes into play. I don’t see how the religious faction can possibly accept a bi-ethnic, bi-religious Eretz Yisrael. Nor do I see how the devout on either side of the Israel/Palestine split will stop fighting over the Temple Mount, with claims on both sides of desecration and destruction of historical record, and efforts by both governing bodies to actually maintain the status quo without actually yielding any claims.
But maybe I’ve got it all wrong. After all, I’ve never felt a need to drag my American-Jewish tail over to Israel, even for a short time, so I try not to actually get wrapped up in the politics of it all.
So hard to remember all the different ways Turtledove has the South win the Civil War and the many series that they spawned. I had to look it up. I think he only had aliens alter WW2. So many alternate realities to consider!
My policy here is simple if unrealistic: The religious folk can all go to Hell, Jahannam, or Gehennom… as they prefer. The reality is that the statehood issues can be resolved separately anyway. Any peace agreement, no matter final resolution, would probably preserve status quo anyway with promises to resolve later. I tend to view that barrier as less insurmountable than the multitude of other issues that are more pressing.
Why do you keep talking about some mythical desire and ability among all (or even most) Palestinians to subject Israeli Jews to a mass displacement? I’ve been addressing the opposite, the apparent Israeli Jewish aqcuiescence to continued Palestinian displacement. And I notice that you keep ignoring this bittterly ironic injustice.
Right, Palestinians do not get to drive a new mass displacement. But there’s also no good argument I can think of for them to just lie down and accept the ongoing mass displacement being imposed on them.
Mythical, you say? It’s the overt intent of the non-PA militias. And the PA 's officials continue to pay lip service to it to maintain their credibility. And this in a region where that kind of displacement continues to occur, on a large scale, with the blithe acceptance of all involved.
Where I part ways with you is that you’re still talking about moving from the status quo towards a hypothetical. And nobody on either sides going to risk what he has for the sake of a hypothetical. Israel as presently constituted is not a hypothetical. The PA as presently constituted is not a hypothetical. Hamas, unfortunately, is not a hypothetical either, but let’s set that aside for the moment.
Israel and the PA can make incremental improvements in how they commit to and defend the rights and dignity of both peoples. And every improvement is worth it regardless of whether it tends towards two-states or one.
Ah, so continuance of the ongoing displacement and predations of the massively more powerful, entrenched and stable Israeli state currently being inflicted upon the comparatively defenseless and state-less Palestinian open-air-prison population are justified, because of some supposed but entirely unenforceable desire of some of them to somehow dismantle the region’s only nuclear hegemon.
Thanks, I think I see now the twisted place you’re coming from.
Oh, I never said it was viable today. I’m just of the mind that a two-state solution may be viable never. I’m generally in agreement however that I don’t care so much about how many states there are in the end as long as the issue is resolved to respect the lives and dignity of all involved.
I liked the Worldwar (Aliens invade in 1942) alt-history. As he got further and further out from 1942, it got a little silly – but they were a romping good beach read.
Yeah, keep the hyperbole going. Really adding to your critique’s credibility here.
I grew up among Mizrahi Jews (i.e. Jews displaced from Arab countries INTO israel.) Want to talk about being defenseless? Being state-less? Being in an open air prison? They can tell you all about it.
So you’re saying that justifies putting others into one? Again, I’m not getting the logic here…
I’m not sure whether Uganda was ever considered, but Madagascar was, even by the Nazis themselves before going with the Holocaust as we know it. Christopher Priest’s alt-history “The Separation” has this actually happen, but isn’t the main plot of the novel. He does bring up that there were conflicts between the resettled Jews and the native Malagasy, and didn’t sound like an ideal situation.
Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat. Arguably the source material for this novel.
I personally as a historian, find myself a bit wary of trying to understand history via stories/novels/films, and especially alternative histories - at times such things can illuminate actual history, but more often than not it only serves to obscure what happened. There are some who include alternative histories in their classes and some historians have written alternate histories. But since it sits in the realm of fiction, I think it should only serve to highlight where differences in the meaning of the past emerge.
@ActionAbe is right to point out that history and narrative aren’t quite the same, but are connected - history is more often than not told through what we recognize as a narrative, which can either serve to flatten the complexity of history (which just from reading the description this book seems to do some what - really? Non-aligned countries were under Moscow’s thumb? What we actually KNOW about the NAM doesn’t actually bear that out) or to illustrate just how complicated history actually is and show how there are no easy answers.
I find myself attracted to histories that actually focus on the fact that there is no real narrative (even if that’s told in a narrative fashion), only competing narratives which drive people to make decisions which have various consequences, which we can’t always account for. Foucault was right that those who control the narrative, control how we understand history. We should also acknowledge that the nature of nationalism as described by Benedict Anderson is erase other ways of understanding the past and feed it through the narrative of national history, as if other kinds of history are either illegitimate or simply don’t exist as ways of understanding the world of the past.
Plus, history has become deeply politicized, especially in this case - I can’t think of another case where how we understand the past is so deeply divided along particular lines. I’ve actually not read The Iron Cage, but it seems like an interesting read which argues that the construction of a Palestinian national identity begins with the Mandate period? And the going narrative is that a Palestinian national identity was only founded in the postwar period, in direct response to the founding of Israel (or the Nakba).
As for the debate about the founding of Israel and if it could have happened elsewhere, it is pretty undeniably that a group of people, already traumatized by what had just happened to them, came home and found nothing but violence aimed at them, as @Israel_B correctly points out. Europe still wanted to solve “the Jewish question”, because despite being European, Jews were still considered outsiders and interlopers in European history. I find Atina Grossman’s book Jews, Germans, and Allies an incredibly useful text for understanding how the Zionist movement really got it’s feet under it and managed to convince the US to back their plan (which the British had backed off of support for a Jewish state in the Mandate):
Those few years were actually critical to the founding of Israel as a political reality, more so than the Holocaust itself. [quote=“ActionAbe, post:40, topic:80170”]
Which is a part of the growing realization that the Two-State Solution may be unviable.
[/quote]
Yet that continues to be the only way we talk about it (not us, but the parties involved - Israelis, Palestinians, the rest of the ME, the US, Europe, etc). So what are the alternatives? Making the whole area Israel, which would mean one of two things - either a complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the WB (which should be unacceptable to everyone) or the far more palatable incorporating Palestinians into the country as is? But in the second case, does that mean Israel is no longer a Jewish majority state, though, if Muslim and Christian Palestinians are afforded full civil rights (which as @bersl2 points out is unacceptable to some Jewish religious groups, especially conservative ones who are deeply invested in the current government)? Both of these have obvious problems then.
So, how about overlapping states on a single territory? You have two states sharing the same land, with the two sets of citizens adhering to different political structures, even if they live next door. Can this be a viable solution? To me, it might be the most workable, even if you’d still have various tensions.
The last is making Gaza part of Egypt and the West Bank (what hasn’t already been appropriated) part of Jordan. It doesn’t seem like Egypt or Jordan want that, nor do many Palestinians.
Are there other options on the table or which could be on the table? Thoughts?
How does this happen, though? Whenever there has been a rejection of violence, the only thing that seems to happen is an expansion of settlements? Mass displacement is happening right now, as we arm chair quarterbacks debate this, in the section of Palestine that has sworn off violence aimed as Israelis. There is a clear split between the Hamas led organization and the PA and no love lost there. But many people from the West Bank, who supported the PA, see no way forward via political means, given that the only thing that has happened since Abu Mazen took over has been an expansion of settlements on what they (and the international community) deem their state. Meanwhile, in Gaza, despite being an open air prison - no settlements. As far as I can see, the parts of the Palestinian leadership that are deemed legitimate have been completely neutralized and have no real say over what happens between them and the Israeli government. It’s little wonder that some Palestinians see Hamas as a hopefully beacon of resistance (and are willing to ignore their background as an Islamist group, with ties to other places).
But history and how history is framed by everyone involved, is still a deeply political question, involving a people have a history of experiencing centuries of violence, and people seeing a current history of violence in the past few decades. And no one can agree on that history, either.
So… I have no easy answers here. But I don’t think even people who study this topic for a living do either.
That military aid is in the forms of sales of US arms to Israel. The net effect has been a fiscal positive for US defense industries and a deleterious effect on Israel’s homegrown weapons manufacturing.
Uganda, Madagascar, Argentina, Birobidjan all have the same thing in common: all of them were a proposal for Jews to serve as the clipboard wielding functionaries of someone else’s territorial ambitions. What’s worse is that by that point Jews had already served that role, for so many ambitious empire builders, and it never, ever panned out well. We get to hold the pen and paper, our boss’s other men get to hold the swords, and we get stabbed from both directions when the SHTF. Thanks, but no thanks. What distinguished Zionism was Jews not serving another imperial power, just their own desire to establish and protect their rights.
Yes. There really was no good place to resettle millions of people without disrupting other people.
