Military action against land-based targets in Yemen moves a step closer
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Israel maintains a blockade of Palestine. What do you think they do if a ship tries to sail to Palestine?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_flotilla_raid
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230531-13-years-since-is...
"The Gaza flotilla raid was a military operation by Israel against six civilian ships of the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" on 31 May 2010 in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. Nine activists were killed during the raid and dozens wounded, including one who later died of his wounds, while ten Israeli soldiers were wounded, one seriously. Three of the six flotilla ships, organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (İHH), were carrying humanitarian aid and construction materials, intending to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip."
we're not here to "democratize" the country, we're here to protect global trade routes, and to strip their ability to launch anti-ship missiles.
Ah yes, because stupid ship insurance rates are more important than human lives in Yemen, nothing new to be honest, we know how the "human rights" world values human lives in Iraq with Abu gharib and the proxy war in Syria to the active genocide in Palestine.
As long as its not Europeans or Americans getting attacked it's "complex" and "blackmail".
Note: this isn't about oil in Iraq or exterminating terrorism in Afghanistan. The civilian lives on those ships are exactly as civilian as civilians in Yemen. This isn't about some US war in a foreign country. This is about either not stopping attacks on civilian merchant ships, or stopping attacks on merchant ships.
As much as this sucks, Yemen is another Middle East shit show. And it's not a shit show we should expend anything further on other than protecting our shipping lanes.
I wish it could have been better but the damage is done. I'd rather everyone just stopped being nut jobs and blowing each other up respectively. And I don't think we should get involved in Middle Eastern politics, just distance ourselves from it.
The occupation wouldn't exist, the zombie state in Iraq wouldn't exist, and much more. Please just leave it alone!
If you meant the Israeli occupation, you're wrong. Israel isn't "The West" and isn't able "to leave" in the same way that e.g. the US could leave Afghanistan. This is true both in terms of Israelis having mostly nowhere else to go, and also in that the majority of Israelis aren't Westerners in the first place.
It won't leave it will just be defeated.
> the majority of Israelis aren't Westerners in the first place.
Not true, especially when taking into account that it's the "country" with the highest dual citizenship percentage in the world.
Of those, a little over 2.0MM are Israeli Arabs. Arabs are the largest ethnic minority in Israel.
Among Israeli Jewish people, over half are Mizrahi. They're the former Jewish residents of Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and other MENA countries.
It is not possible that the majority of Israelis are westerners; you can't possibly make those numbers work. It would be like trying to claim the majority of Americans are Irish.
As for dual citizenship, it might be large, but it's still estimated at only 10% if the population. And that includes lots of people with citizenship in countries that they have no connection to at all.
They have nukes. They aren't going away. Ever.
And in some absurd world where their existence actually is threatened, they'd take out the countries trying to destroy them along with them.
The US Navy ship has every right to be there under international law, and its reason for being there is to repel attacks on civilian shipping that also has every right to be there.
Every right to go to another countries waters and kill it's solders who are imposing a blockade ordered by their government? - A blockade that has killed 0 people I would add.
I mean the US can't possibly give in to these terrorists demands right - to stop bombardment of civilians and let in humanitarian aid....
For clarification, do you believe preventing aid from entering gaza under the threat of violence is self defense, but preventing ships from going through the red sea trade route is terrorism? - I mean these ships are informed that they are breaking a blockade and chose to continue anyway, and still no civilians have been hurt.
Yes.
First, the Houthis aren't the recognized government of Yemen by any country except Iran; they don't (legally) control Yemen's territorial waters.
Second, even if they did, the vessels are permitted under international law (including treaties Yemen is subject to) to transit the strait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_passage
> A blockade that has killed 0 people I would add.
If you run around shooting a gun at people and only hit their cars in the process, expect to still be shot by police if you don't stop.
> For clarification, do you believe preventing aid from entering gaza under the threat of violence is self defense...
No, I similarly believe Israel is violating international law in various ways. I'm opposed to their blockade of Gaza.
That's not how it works.
> risk a lot of collateral damage in land attacks in Yemen than give the impression that a ceasefire happened through blackmail.
This is just a very, very bad take, you're basically saying "it's better for Yemeni kids and women to get killed [my reading of collateral damage] than for the West to lose face [my reading of the blackmail thing]". Hasn't the West learned anything from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, like, literally, anything?
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that these things (israel, vs merchant shipping) basically cannot be allowed to be linked, because they aren't. It's simply blackmail. If the merchant shipping is seen as isolated, then it's clear it can't be tolerated. We can't tolerate the attacks, and we can't tolerate disruptions such as caused by massive detours.
> Hasn't the West learned anything from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, like, literally, anything?
Iraq and Afghanistan were invasions with the attempted (and nearly impossible) goal of regime change. That's not at all what I'm suggesting should happen. This is about removing the ability to engage in piracy/attacks on merchant ships.
> it's better for Yemeni kids and women to get killed [my reading of collateral damage] than for the West to lose face
No, it's even more crass than that! we are discussing accepting the loss of civilian life just to maintain shipping insurance prices! And what I'm saying is "yes that's terrible, but less bad than the alternative".
The merchant ships are also civilian! The current attacks are deliberate attacks on civilians. We are talking about attacks on military (or paramilitary) targets, in order to stop attacks on civilians! Yet you are arguing that those would be the attacks that put civilian lives at risk?
Agreed. And there's no fundamental reason that "Israel doing what it's doing" justifies "attacking commercial shipping."
It's a convenient moral and diplomatic fig leaf over an unrelated action.
I must have missed the part where those civilians couldn't take the Cape route. Also, saying that the West does this in the interest of a couple of dozens under-paid Filipino or Eastern European sailors and not because it's freaking out about a few percentage points added to the transport costs of the Chinese dildos and EVs being brought in by ship from China is beyond parody.
They can. But are you saying it's acceptable that they should have to in order to not be attacked? What else is acceptable? Would it make a difference if they were also attacked by the same attackers on that route so there were zero routes available? Why would that make a difference? This whole line of reasoning makes no sense to me...
> Also, saying that the West does this in the interest of a couple of dozens under-paid Filipino or Eastern European sailors and not because it's freaking out about a few percentage points added to the transport costs of the Chinese dildos and EVs being brought in by ship from China is beyond parody.
It's not. It's because in particular it's important for world shipping that merchant ships can travel freely where needed. In general though it's of course unacceptable to have piracy or attacks on civilian vessels.
My comment about those sailors being civilian was merely made to point out that right now we already HAVE regular and deliberate attacks on civilians in this situations. And that the action called for is deliberate attacks on military targets where any civilian targets would merely be collateral damage.
Israel annihilating Hamas looks like a winning strategy to decisively eliminate foreign interference from the likes of Iran.
> This is just a very, very bad take (...)
I don't agree. As Iran's control over the likes of Hamas proves, terrorist nations are actively killing the same innocent civilians they are using as human shields with the expectation that the humanitarian crisis inflicted upon their pawns hinders or even prevents any retaliation. The only effective strategy to prevent civilians from being thrown in arms way is to eliminate any perverse incentive leveraged by the likes of Iran to harm innocent civilians as a proxy war strategy.
This is a pipe dream. For every killed Hamas member there are two sons or brothers who are ready to pick up arms. This looks like a fools errand if you ask me. Isreael appear to think that if they just get rid of the last training camp, the last tunnel or the last rocket ramp, then all will be quiet. I honestly don't think they really believe that. I think the campaign is a populism fueled killing spree for a domestic audience. The collateral and civilian damage isn't a side effect but a feature. And they know Hamas isn't weakened long term by it but the opposite. But they do it anyway because of domestic politics.
But you have to realize a few things - this is wrecking the Israeli economy, Israel is losing soldiers in this current war daily, and everyone in Israel personally knows someone on the front lines of the fighting. This isn't some vague "other people are fighting a war and might get killed", this is people you know personally fighting that war.
No one sane would support a "killing spree" with no end in sight, if not for morality's sake, just for the fact that it's hurting Israel a lot. In fact, it would be far "easier" on Israel, in that sense, to just bomb a lot more, kill far more civilians, but end this war much sooner. Of course it would be a moral travesty, but if Israel was going by pure populist anger, that'd probably be the course it would take.
There are some people in Israel advocating for exactly this - increase the amount of bombing in order to lower the risk to Israeli soldiers.
It's the neo Nazis in Ukraine that tried to ban the Russian language and prevented Zhelensky from negotiating peace in the Donbass when first elected.
Yes, and there's even a Wikipedia article devoted to them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazism_in_Russia
Quote from that article:
> With the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Russian neo-Nazis have achieved international attention for their militant support of Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Certain groups, such as the Russian Imperial Movement, have been accused of training white supremacists and neo-Nazis from other countries in Europe. The links between these groups and the Russian government, comprising a policy known as managed nationalism, have become particularly noteworthy since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine after Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed to be pursuing the "denazification" of Ukraine.
The linked article on "managed nationalism" has more:
> Managed nationalism or controlled nationalism is a term used by some academics to refer to an informal policy of pragmatic collaboration with Russian nationalist and neo-Nazis (or in broader cases, the Russian far-right as a whole) pursued by the government of Russia under Vladimir Putin. ...
> The Russian response to Euromaidan marked a significant revitalisation of managed nationalism. Neo-Nazis, monarchists, Stalinists, and Christian nationalists, as well as Cossack groups, formed the anti-Maidan coalition, and later became militants supporting the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics as part of the Russian people's militias in Ukraine, bringing together members of the Russian neo-Nazi community and others from throughout Europe. ...
Terrorists aren't just a fixed group of people, and studies and common sense is that widespread and arbritrary attacks on innocent people increase resentment. It's like an employment program for war mongers and war profiteers. The civilian populations of Israel and the US also don't benefit from this, in addition to the innocents in Palestine Israel as occupying force is obliged to protect under international law.
> The only effective strategy to prevent civilians from being thrown in arms way
... is to not do it actively. Obviously. Otherwise, preventing the harm to innocents can be ruled out as a motivation and justification.
Iran's strategy has been to use their proxy groups to force innocent civilians to be their human shields. Hamas has been thoroughly documented as using basic infrastructure such as hospitals as their command bases, prevent innocent civilians from fleeing war zones under the penalty of death, steal humanitarian aid to cause humanitarian crisis, and even infiltrating supposedly humanitarian organizations to abuse them to further their military and political goals.
Let's face the facts: the likes of Iran actively places civilians in arms way expecting it to be a win-win scenario, as in either it prevents any retaliation or leads people like you to misguide your indignation hoping to weaponize it.
There is a wealth of information on how Iran, through Hamas, is murdering palestinian civilians by playing them as expendable pawns. If you care about the problem then you'd be directing your indignation towards the root of the problem, and do your best to not create an upside to using civilians as sacrificial pawns.
> leads people like you
Can you refrain from personal attacks, as totally lacking of substance as they may be?
> This is what Israel has begun to do - we cut the supply of energy, water and diesel to the Strip … But it’s not enough. In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza … The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave. If Egypt and other countries prefer that these people will perish in Gaza, this is their choice.
-- Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council
Just ONE of the many many many dozens of such things is enough to refute these tropes about "human shields" and "$evil group and their likes". "(...)" describes the full depth of your counter-argument.
> If you care about the problem then you'd be directing your indignation towards the root of the problem
I am just as outspoken against those who glorify Hamas as I am here. You are, right now, just repeating what I essentially replied to, while ignoring the inconvenient facts I introduced, and making it about me, and "the others". That's all that happened here, what I wrote stands, your attempt to dismiss it stands.
Geopolitics is a cruel game, and unfortunately sometimes we wil be deciding whose lives are worth more / more aligned with our interests. If one dosen't like that, then one can try to enact their own peace on the world, but I doubt the world wants that.
(I'm not American BTW)
You can see the same leverage at play in East Asia, where the US is forcing good relations between South Korea and Japan. The military bases there cost a lot of money, but serve a deterrence purpose against China which is necessary for the US' policy of containment, and confer a level of soft influence that wouldn't otherwise be possible. The pacification of Japan and forced alignment with the US, resulting in 80 years of Japan-US trade, was certainly in the US' own net interests, even though it originally cost a lot of money to do it.
Most things aren't zero sum (they are either very negative sum or very positive sum), and indirect benefits can be equally valuable to direct contributions.
Because that will be the outcome of letting pirates run riot.
I don't think US is the only country with an army. However, from my perspective, US loves to lead these charges for win-win outcomes. "We keep our image as peacekeepers, so a win for us. We get to test what we have, again a win for us. Also weapon manufacturers make some more monies, again another win for us".
Nobody says that they shall let these attacks continue.
Which affected nations are we talking about? That route affects the supply chain of almost all countries btw.
False dichotomy. The spectrum of possibilities is wider than a) international goods gets more expensive, b) US is goaded by Iran to a proxy war.
> So you are happy for all international goods to get more expensive?
I've heard a maybe 3-4% increase in cost of shipping for going around the long way around (around Africa).
There's just not many people & in spite of their scale these cargo ships are remarkably efficient (by weight) means of transport.
The cost of shipping seems a vanishingly marginal issue here.
I'm OK with spending a bit more if that helps to end an apartheid regime somewhere, just like I spend a bit more buying organic produce to diminish my consumption of pesticides.
For the US taxpayer it may even be a net positive, given how much it's being spent per capita to kill random Palestinians, in absence of a ceasefire. A journalist calculated his share already at 150$: https://theintercept.com/2023/12/28/israel-us-taxes-gaza-war...
So, in the spirit of "if you want peace, prepare for war", I believe the best way to life in peace is to remain peaceful yourself, but CONSISTENTLY engage in EARLY and AGGRESSIVE action which you see through to its CONCLUSION. And yes, in order to be successful, you have to have all of these four elements.
Unfortunately, western democracies repeatedly have fallen short on at least some of these aspects which emboldens everyone from giant countries like Russia or China down to tiny groups like the Huthis.
I get it though, with more than 30% of the US defence budget the Navy feels left out of the whole war thing recently (not that much the Navy can help with in the war against Russia), similar to how the Japanese admirals felt left out of China and Manchuria back in the late '30s, so they'll take any opportunity of a war that they think they'll win easily with the most open of arms.
This is simply not true. With the exception of the recent Ukrainian war, violent deaths on Earth have been massively trending downward for decades.
There is much less war affecting many fewer people than ever before. This is no accident, and it is the result of hard work by people who don’t espouse these sorts misguided of “more aggression is better” beliefs. :(
"Decades" is a really short time frame IMO, especially if you're comparing to thousands of years of human history. It could totally just be a lucky "blip".
> This is no accident, and it is the result of hard work by people who don’t espouse these sorts misguided of “more aggression is better” beliefs. :(
Or, it's the result of the latter half of the 20th century being mostly dominated by two incredibly powerful countries, poised for war at any time. It could exactly be the result of the massive increase in potential for aggression that nuclear weapons pose.
I think it's very far from obvious that the reason for the relative peace of the last 70 years is because of work by people advocating peace.
You're clearly out of touch here.
The war in Ukraine was going on sice 2014, and you also missed the Armenian Azerbaijan war in Nagorno-Karabakh, then the Papua conflict, then the dozens of other conflict on the African continent. And don't forget the war on terror which cost thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, 4 US presidents and 20 years just to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
War has never stopped. You just stopped looking for it since it's not happening in your back yard, if the only one you can mention is the one in Ukraine.
We don’t wage wars anywhere near the scale that we used to, and that’s a good thing.
The money is a different matter, of course.
French revolution, Napoleonic wars, American Civil War, wars of independence in Latin America, etc. comprise some 100 years. In the last 80 years we had markedly less deadly wars across the whole world...
Do you not think the hard work of people backed up by carrier strike groups is part of the equation? Ideally forced never has to be used, but sometimes it does.
Right after they spiked to an all time high during WW1/WW2/Stalin/Mao reign.
I know what you mean and I don't want to dismiss it outright - a lot of the small conquests that dominated Europa for millennia have indeed vanished and the motivations for war in a knowledge economy are very different. But I think we've mostly switched lots of small wars between small countries for fewer big wars between bigger countries - with bigger intervals in between.
The trending downwards for decades statement requires to take measurement only in very specific timeframes and regions. If we take the last 100 years as a whole, they certainly have not.
There is indeed much less war now than then. It seems that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction is working, for better or worse.
Cold wars, proxy wars, limited in scope and scale wars - these are better than what came before.
But it wasn’t an all time high, if you look at proportions, as we should.
Pinker has talked a lot about this, and going far back in history [0] has estimates that 15% of people died from violent deaths compared to 0.15% during the peak of ww2 Germany.
[0] https://longnow.org/seminars/02012/oct/08/decline-violence/
7.5% of Germany's population died during WW2, that is just military deaths, excluding civilians dead from bombing raids by the Allies, hunger, disease, etc.
The 0.15% number is absolute nonsense, and anyone who is seriously using it, knows nothing about history (which is just about right for a fraud like Pinker)
There are parallels with other conflicts the US has gotten involved in and with strong potential for it to become another forever-war.
Also doesn't help that they have an indirect line to Russian military manufacturing via Iran.
It will be interesting how the USA and the international community respond to increasing incidents.
From the mid-80s to 00s, the Soviet Union was collapsing and China was preoccupied with economic navel-gazing.
Both reasserting themselves internationally is business as usual.
Unfortunately it seems that humans just aren't equipped with the proper intuition for how to handle the behaviour of enormous masses of people grouped in societies. It seems that we apply the same moral intuitions used for individuals, judging "the West" or "Muslims" or "China" as if they were a single person with a single unified mind.
Each society hosts a variety of people with different individual attitudes and values, and each society produces and consumes a different mix of ideas some of which may be beneficial or problematic (both domestically and Internationally). Ideas like exploitative capitalism or jihadism or whatnot; powerful ideas that have real effects.
Yet people are people and have far more things in common between each other than what our instincts prime us to think.
Generally this article is called doubling down, and the only people that get hurt in these scenarios are the inhabitants of these countries, who then become refugees knocking on other countries' doorsteps.
Continuing to poke international commercial shipping will obviously trigger a response. No one powerful, even China, wants non-military ships being attacked.
So they're risking substantial damage to Houthi power for... what?
Tying up naval capacity? Eh. Temporarily. And with minimal effect on Israel/Palestine.*
Boosting the price of oil? Maybe. But doesn't seem to be doing much yet.
At Russia's behest? Maybe. General chaos elsewhere and tying up ISR assets benefits Russia.
* Would become much more relevant if Hezbollah enters the war.
It could also be an internal thing for the Houthis that we (certainly I) don't know about. Being able to say "We're standing up to Israel and the US" could be big for their credibility in Yemen. That is pure speculation however.
(Trump was tougher against Iran but they feel they can survive it. What's important is that the Mullahs read all the press arguing that Trump is a danger to the American republic itself and take it into account. How often does one get a chance to seriously harm such a powerful country like the United States? For people whose call is 'death to America', this is a one time opportunity, which at worst won't work. These people are compulsive gamblers especially with assets they can afford to lose like the Houthis.)
They're stopping ships that they can, and it is in their interest to stop. Iranian ships seem to be passing through no bother, but ships flagged as Liberian, coming from Europe to Asia with a Filipino and Indian crew are stopped. You can consider any ship linked to Israel if you don't care how tenuous the link is.
> and that everyone in the UN bar the US and Israel are calling for a ceasefire.
Notably Hama's isn't calling for a ceasefire, and it takes two to tango, so even if Israel wanted a ceasefire there won't be one.
> wouldn't it be more useful to get a ceasefire, so then the Houthis can stop?
Since when did "Don't give in to terrorists" stop being a thing? Just throw ourselves on the good graces of a violent terrorist group.
One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. In this case, nearly the whole of the UN has voted for a ceasefire, so interests align, which should be a better solution yes?
It takes two to tango, but two people holding a staring contest hoping the other will propose a tango doesn't work all that well.
> Since when did "Don't give in to terrorists" stop being a thing?
It was never a thing. America's very first treaty was with pirates. Countries negotiate with terrorist groups regularly; they use the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" thing when they don't want to.
Having Iran launch a proxy attack against merchant ships seems like the cover Saudi Arabia has wanted to escalate their attacks against this group.
I’m interested in Iran’s goal here, but don’t have a good analysis that doesn’t seem to be driving toward a particular narrative.
The same coalition could push for a peaceful solution in Israel and Palestine, which would also eliminate Iranian influence in the region, but instead they let the far-right in Israel create a mess and we get pulled along for a big conflict with Iran.
But a peaceful solution seems like a pipe dream. It would need a profound change in Israeli politics to push for a two-state solution now, and the West has only limited leverage. It doesn't help that Netanyahu has a personal interest in the war, it's basically his Hail Mary to save his career.
In any case, the West should pull its support from Israel, though.
Whatever one thinks about land and settlements, it's worth noting that the Israelis are fighting against an opponent who targets their civilian population with the standard terror tactics along with systematic rape and torture [1], and who maintains that they will never stop as long as Israel exists (not borders, not land, nothing short of Israel's destruction).
The people advocating for a ceasefire generally aren't proposing a solution to the Israeli and international hostages held by Hamas, and who could be returned to Israel if Hamas truly wanted a ceasefire.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-at...
Even feminist organizations are raising doubts about NYT "investigation". See https://speakupeg.com/2023/12/30/nyts-disgraceful-investigat...
Also the family of Gal Abdush, a named victim, is distancing from the claims in the NYT report: https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1742251230922187212
On the other hand, Israel has a decades-long genocidal plan against the West Bank. The fact that it's done quietly doesn't change its intent.
The intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is: neither side is good, because both see the conflict as a fight for survival, and therefore justifying terrible means.
We need to use the same recipe used in South Africa, isolating the apartheid regime until it is forced to negotiate in good faith.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to support particular parties within sovereign nations. Although the US and others do this very frequently.
I figured it was the same way countries worked with the US during 2017-2021. It didn’t mean they supported a far right position, just that they wanted to work with the US and interacted with the group in charge.
If countries start treating leaders of other countries they don’t like with “open hostility” won’t that just result in fewer interactions and less work among countries?
The US has reportedly made quiet overtures to the other parties, and certainly Obama and Biden haven't exactly been fans of Netanyahu, but he is in charge at the moment.
Hamas, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have repeatedly rejected any two-state solution proposals. Hamas in particular has always resorted to terrorism. The appetite for a "two-state solution" seems much higher in Israel, even in the conservative communities, than it ever has been in the so-called Palestinian population.
Yitzhak Rabin would presumably disagree.
How has Israel treated Yigal Amir? How has Hamas treated the 10/7 terrorists? How many Israelis support what Amir did? How many Gazans support the 10/7 terrorists?
There are whackos on both the Israeli and Palestinian side. The difference is that Gaza has 25-45% unemployment. [1]
At the end of the day as James Carville reduced it: 'it's the economy, stupid.' [2]
People with economic prospects are happy and stable. People without are willing to take insane risks. And at the end of the day, most people just want to live their life (there will always be crazies, but they'll be outnumbered).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yigal_Amir#Campaigns_for_Ami... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/25/un-report-80-p... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_the_economy,_stupid
There were an only couple of negotiations. We don't even know the details, but in general the rough outline was that the Palestinian state wouldn't be sovereign - it would be more like a protectorate, with no self-defense capabilities etc.
But there simply is no alternative. Israel, international community needs to persistently push for a real two-state solution. Not like once in a decade (the last attempt was 2008) some weak offer with basically no real political support (part of the reason they were dismissed by Palestinians, there was no credibility to them).
I mean, what are the other options? Forever apartheid and occupation? War crimes like ethnic cleansing?
I reject just about all of the assertions in this post, but these straw-man questions are the most egregious.
How can anyone reasonably call the Israeli political situation "apartheid?" There are Arab parties in the Knesset, and Arab Israelis have full rights under the law. Apartheid South Africa rather famously did not allow the black population any representation at all in government. Perhaps by "apartheid," you mean that there is some sort of barrier between the Israeli side and the Gaza side. But having a border is not "apartheid," anymore than the US having a border with Mexico, or the UK having a border with the Republic of Ireland. In fact, since 2005, the Israelis have largely been absent from Gaza, only intervening to stop things like rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians. Or maybe you mean that Israel's blockade of Gaza constitutes "apartheid," though this is really torturing the definition beyond recognition.
I am astonished you bring up ethnic cleansing, when all of the evidence points the opposite way: that Jewish people are victims of ethnic cleansing across the Islamic world, whereas the populations within Gaza and the Judea & Samaria area have grown extensively and currently have high growth rates. If you pick any country in the Islamic Middle East & North Africa, the Jewish population is currently near zero, down from tens- to hundreds-of-thousands a few decades ago. (It's almost as bad for Christians.) Asserting that "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of Israel is happening today (or ever!) is preposterous when literally all evidence contradicts it.
I actually think the "other options" are simple, though quite difficult in practice: Hamas & Fatah could put down their weapons, accept that the State of Israel has a right to exist and agree to control the radical elements within their populations. If that happened, you'd have a two-state solution in no time. The difficulty is that there is little political appetite for this in the Judea & Samaria area, and none in Gaza, so we're stuck in a stalemate.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty international have a different assessment:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/alerts-archive/issue...
And that is part of the proclaimed calculus, such as:
> "If we act strategically correctly, there will be immigration and we will live in the Gaza Strip. We will not allow a situation where 2 million people live there. If there are 100-200 thousand Arabs in Gaza, all the talk about the day after will be different. They want to leave, they have been living in the ghetto for 75 years and are in need."
-- Smotrich, https://twitter.com/GLZRadio/status/1741347524693127398
Here is a list with more, that is work in progress apparently:
https://law4palestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Law-for...
> I am astonished you bring up ethnic cleansing, when all of the evidence points the opposite way: that Jewish people are victims of ethnic cleansing across the Islamic world
That is not the opposite of "is Israel calling for / committing ethnic cleansing". The opposite would be "it is not doing that".
And it's not dichotomy, a hot potato that only one party can ever possess. The history of persecution against Jews has exactly zero bearing on the question whether what Israel is doing right now are war crimes, ethnic cleansing or genocide. One crime doesn't prevent or legitimize the other.
> I actually think the "other options" are simple, though quite difficult in practice: Hamas & Fatah could put down their weapons
An alternative to the current actions of Israel isn't "what someone else could do differently", that's an alternative to the actions of those other parties. And things like blowing up the Supreme Court building after posing for selfies in it (= no fighters), attacking refugee camps and disrupting their water supply in the West Bank, and so on, cannot be remotely excused with Hamas.
> The Genocide Convention requires Israel, as a State party, to suppress “direct and public incitement to commit genocide,” regardless of whether genocide has actually transpired.
[..]
> Still, it does appear to us that Israel has failed – so far – to criminally investigate some specific public calls which seem to border on genocidal in their language. While Israel’s political leadership distanced itself from potentially genocidal language, it has also failed to apply meaningful political sanctions against the politicians making these comments (such as firing instead of merely suspending the junior minister responsible for the Atomic Bomb comment or launching any effort to remove the deputy chair of the Knesset after making the “burn Gaza” comment). Although there might be some mitigating circumstances, given the many challenges the country now faces, the slow and feeble response from Israel’s legal and political leadership to such extremely problematic statements, may not be compatible with its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
-- https://www.justsecurity.org/90939/selective-use-of-facts-an...
^ something the Israel Foreign Ministry retweeted, apparently before reading it carefully
> “The explicit calls to commit atrocities against millions of people have become, for the first time that we can recall, a legitimate and ordinary part of the Israeli dialogue,”
-- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/04/stakes-high-as...
Over a period of 30+ years.
>We don't even know the details
We do if we care to look. There's been a lot published over the years.
>it would be more like a protectorate, with no self-defense capabilities etc
Like Costa Rica? The basic condition is for the state to be demilitarized. We saw what happens when it isn't.
>the last attempt was 2008
Wrong. Even if we don't count Trump's plan, there were the Obama-Kerry negotiations in 2015.
>with basically no real political support
Yeah, there's very little political support for the Palestinian Authority which last ran an election in... 2006 was it?
>I mean, what are the other options?
Sometimes the situation just sucks. There are no good options for anyone given the people being what they are.
The coalition is pushing for a peaceful solution in Israel and Palestine. Just like in Ukraine.
And at the same time, they’re going to blow up a bunch of Houthis.