Last edited Sat Nov 4, 2023, 03:45 PM - Edit history (1)
I'll make an exception for this reply. I've long had a policy of not discussing Israel-Palestine issues on American forums because I don't see anything I have to say as being able to persuade those who are likely to leap on anything I write and often argue in bad faith because no verbal conflict on this can go unwon.
I read Twitter (very selectively), newspapers, watch some TV news (mainly the UK's Channel 4) and some other online sites, and the balance of expressed opinion on DU jars a great deal with the balance of sentiments I see elsewhere, and certainly in my own country, Scotland.
The Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, has had inlaws trapped in Gaza since the Hamas atrocity, and they were only able to leave a couple of days ago having said what they feared might be their final goodbyes a number of times. He went public with his and his wife's anguish, and also reached out to the Scottish Jewish community in heartfelt sympathy, and was welcomed. He has been calling for a ceasefire from the start. He has also condemned in absolute terms Hamas's attack. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has done the same, and has also been sure to reach out to the London Jewish community as well as people of his own faith and none.
It seems no one can post on the issues around this conflict on DU without being pounced upon, usually by what appears to be a gang of the same screennames that always crop up and generally rehearse the same hasbara arguments over and over, usually laced with the old debate-stopper, accusations of antisemitism.
Perhaps because I do have a "side" in this conflict, my perception is that this happens more to people who criticize the Israeli government, and especially its conduct since Hamas's atrocities.
My "side" has long been with the broad left in Israel and others who oppose their government's policies, along with Palestinians who have suffered brutal, often fatal, attacks, land theft, unlawful detention, illegal destruction and confiscation of their crops and property, and manipulation of their political life for far too many years while Israel's government has done nothing to protect them, but on the contrary has encouraged the West Bank settlers and also Hamas. Any analysis of the current eruption of conflict that doesn't include that historical conflict or handwaves it away is disgraceful, and it's impossible to believe that intelligent, politically aware people can defend it in good faith.
Netanyahu has boasted repeatedly about how he has thwarted any attempts to resolve the Palestinian issue over the years to serve his own agenda. I could post a video of him literally doing so, but the tendency too often is to dismiss any such evidence on the basis of its source, or embark on baroque justifications that end up in dizzying bouts of goalpost-shifting and selective readings of history that get nobody anywhere.
He is the prime mover behind a horrible situation, though he has plenty of fellow travellers, and Hamas are as much his tools as they are of any other malign entity. Blaming the Palestinian population for not choosing a different, less savage and corrupt government than Hamas ignores the fact that to change the situation, ordinary Palestinians would have to face down not just Hamas, but the covert and sometimes not so covert sabotage of the Israeli government.
I have watched Israeli ambassadors and government spokespeople in mainstream TV interviews, and have to say that their arrogance and the inhumanity of their language has done more to incite anti-Israeli feeling than almost anything, to the extent that the Israeli government has stopped fielding the Israeli Ambassador to the UK (Tzipi Hotovely, a savage and notorious rightwinger even before she took up the post), I suspect because they realized she was turning people against them.
I would warn people who adopt some of the same complacent, self-justificatory and often utterly heartless lines of argument on DU that they are in danger of achieving the same result. There's no point in "winning" an argument if in the course of doing so you reveal attitudes that would not appear on DU (or at least not without being seriously challenged) in relation to conflicts involving other countries.
I'm not going to repeat some of the objectionable arguments I've seen on DU, but any who say they haven't seen anti-Hamas sentiment stray into anti-Palestinian rhetoric and victim-blaming are either being selective in the truth they write or have become selectively blind to it.
As an example of the depths I've seen some sink to, I alerted on one post a few weeks ago that called for Hamas captives to be tortured in "medieval" ways. Just before then, the poster had posted in the same thread in favour of torturing Hamas captives as some sort of deterrent. When challenged on this on the grounds of illegality and the fact that torture has proven ineffective, he doubled down and said that was because it hadn't been savage enough, and his solution was to go "truly medieval". Both replies stood for a couple of days before my nagging conscience led me to alert on the worse reply. It was a sort of test of DU, fair or not. My alert was upheld. As far as I know, the earlier reply that called for plain old torture still stands. If anybody else alerted on it, it must have been allowed to pass by the jury
This is on a site that sprang into life on the back of Bush's stolen election and weathered the years of wrongheaded conflict in Afganistan and Iraq, where I believe widespread horror and anger was expressed at the systematic torture dealt to prisoners in those wars.
There's an old adage: Be careful who you choose as an enemy, or you may grow to resemble them.
I don't know whether this reply is going to attract any attention at all, or even be alerted on and hidden as unacceptable in some way. It would be nice if any responses didn't just confirm my earlier experiences described above and my long-held stance of not arguing about Israel-Palestine on American forums. I give notice that my ignore finger is itchy if it leads to any personal attacks. Life's too short.
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