Israeli–Palestinian conflict

[pietillidie]

^M2M, you have to pay heed to reputable specialists and recognised models and methods. Sticking with a small set of default ideas is fine, as I say, for shooting the breeze, but not for doing something consequential.

Understanding is a path and process, not a destination you arrive at quickly and need to defend from change. Marxian thought is just a moment in time. Your highlighting of the egregious contradictions in this are often right, but engaging with the society that produced them can't be an outside-in process because it's your society, too. Your moral force is derived from the things that society gets right, and there's no alternative but to hold one's nose and work with what is.

I would encourage you to go back to each discipline in its own right. I once spent a split-shift break working through an introduction to micro- and macro-economics textbook (I once had a horrible shift whereby you work half your day early and half your day late to catch clients before and after work, and had a 4-hour break or such in the middle which was too short to bother commuting all the way home and back again).

I just wasn't satisfied in critiquing something I didn't understand from afar. It felt as flawed as engaging the big bad world without leaving the confines of Melbourne.

This book by a very moderate and personable economist looks at the strengths and weaknesses of conventional economics:

[stui magpie]

Detail on the temporary "port" the US plans to build off Gaza to get food and aid in.

https://www.theage.com.au/world/middle-east/how-the-us-built-floating-dock-will-be-installed-on-gaza-s-coastline-20240310-p5fb8w.html

And yes, the article notes the disconnect between the US providing humanitarian aid to the same people that are being assailed by the weapons they provide to Israel.

[LaurieHolden]

[pietillidie]

Its just horrific. Nutteryahoo knows he's got everyone trapped with the US election campaign underway, and won't be losing a second of sleep over this. Israelis themselves are best positioned to pull the deranged ba$tard into line, but the Hamas attacks and hostages seem to have put paid to that politically.Meanwhile, Biden can't get anything done without Republican support, and they're in thrall to that other lunatic malignant narcissist.

You just never let scum like that near power, because they're always waiting for this kind of opportunity, and won't be easily stopped once events turn. They also know that international action can't be mobilised quickly through diplomatic processes to stop them.

What a snake.

[David]

A real problem is that the next Israeli elections aren't until 2026. There are calls for Netanyahu to bring that forward to the end of this year, but obviously he has little motivation to do so given that half the country seems to be waiting for him with brickbats. So there's every chance that October 7 and the destruction of Gaza will already be fading into memory by the time he gets some of what's coming to him at the ballot box.

[Magpietothemax]

[pietillidie]

As predicted, which is why Schumer was used to do the dirty work. Obviously, basic decency shouldn’t be partisan, but they're dealing with an amoral scumbag who will seize any opportunity, flipping on a dime if it suits:

[stui magpie]

https://www.theage.com.au/world/middle-east/the-problem-is-netanyahu-why-biden-is-accused-of-trying-to-tear-down-the-israeli-prime-minister-20240317-p5fd0m.html

Another interesting article. The inference is that the moment Benny Nutter has a momentary lapse of rationalism and starts to negotiate peace, the hard right will drop him like a bad habit. His only hope of staying in power until the next election is to continue the war.

[David]

The shift of the Democratic Party establishment on this has been quite interesting. It's obviously a long way short of a repudiation of the massacre, but seeing generally staunch Zionist figures like Biden and Schumer so openly dump on Netanyahu seems unprecedented.

Of course, as awful as Netanyahu is, the problem is that he makes an easy scapegoat for a much bigger problem in Israeli politics, which is that most of the political establishment more or less back his approach to Gaza as well as the West Bank settlements (if not being even worse). There's certainly nothing to be optimistic about in, say, a Benny Gantz prime ministership. So, much with US liberals and Trump, there is a danger that an individualised politics will, if successful in getting rid of the moustache-twirling villain, only further ward off the bigger structural change that so desperately needs to happen.

[pietillidie]

^And as I say, I reckon the menace of Trump and a looming election is holding them back. Whether this translates into serious action is another thing, of course, but it's a shift nonetheless. To me, the right PR strategy has always been to isolate the fruitcakes, separate them as outliers, and go after them, not 'Israel'. It's a no-brainer when the facts and PR advantage align like that.

I think the Dems are also getting to the point of doing that with the utter lunatics on the other side of the aisle. There's got to be mileage leading with this kind of nutter as MAGA-average:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NemT9KJnIEY

[Magpietothemax]

[pietillidie]

As anticipated:

[Magpietothemax]

[Magpietothemax]

For anyone who still doubts that the Israeli regime is carrying out genocide, here is an excerpt from the report of Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories:
“[There are] reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of … acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met. The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group.”

“The savagery of Israel’s latest assault is best illustrated by the torment inflicted upon children of all ages, killed, or rescued from under the rubble, maimed, orphaned, many without surviving family. Considering the significance of children to the future development of society, inflicting serious bodily harm to them [by bullets or through starvation] can be reasonably interpreted ‘as a means to destroy the group in whole or in part’.”

And, a spokeswoman from Oxfam:
“Northern Gaza is days away from famine, and the rest of Gaza faces a similar fate. Children are already dying of malnutrition and starvation under the gaze of the international community. Since December, the number of people in Gaza who have plunged into catastrophic levels of hunger has nearly doubled. Oxfam’s report today shows how Israel is causing these horrifying figures, by deliberately blocking food and aid from going into Gaza. It has been using starvation as a weapon of war for over five months now. … Israel’s deliberate manufacturing of suffering is systematic and of such a scale and intensity that it creates a real risk of a genocide in Gaza.”

And, from the UN High Comminssioner of Human Rights, Volker Turk:

""The situation of hunger, starvation and famine is a result of Israel’s extensive restrictions on the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid and commercial goods, displacement of most of the population, as well as the destruction of crucial civilian infrastructure. … The extent of Israel’s continued restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza, together with the manner in which it continues to conduct hostilities, may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime."

[slangman]

Six months and 43 pages in and hardly any mention of the hostages taken on October 7th and demands for their release in the VPT.

Until all of the hostages are released there will be no ceasefire and the bombing of Gaza will continue. I’m not sure which part of that many of you don’t understand.

Hamas, the elected party of Gaza has used the financial aid provided by the rest of the world to wage a war against Israel instead of using that money to build the infrastructure to enhance the wellbeing of its population.
As one commenter put it, “they built down instead of up”.

This is all on Hamas and the path that they chose to take.