>> Perhaps the obsession with sacred #martyrdom precludes "what if we end up worse off" reflection.
Yes, exactly! As the author of the original essay wrote:
"A people on the cusp of #liberation instead suffered war deaths and the moral rot caused by the veneration of suicide and murder."
#EcstasyAndAmnesia #VenerationOfSuicide #InTheirName #Palestine #Israel.
@ArenaCops @AxiosNews @axios-AxiosNews
This is as good a time as any to re-up the #EcstasyAndAmnesia in #Gaza thread 
https://mastodon.social/@rameshgupta/112441485737099304
#Palestinians need to learn their true history, not just what #Hamas-simps at UNRWA schools teach them, and as you pointed out, they need serious self-reflection on top of that
It’s remarkable that since US media kicked up a shitstorm over #Biden’s age (and only Biden’s age), the calls for Biden to step aside BECAUSE of alleged #genocide in #Gaza have virtually disappeared, even though war rages all the same in the #MiddleEast and #Palestinians are once again being displaced.
"Jews would not have continued to come" implies #Jews came to #Palestine
That does not negate the fact that Jews also had a continuous presence on the land since pre-Biblical times
That also does not negate the fact that many were forcibly driven away at multiple times from wherever they settled https://mastodon.social/@rameshgupta/111494007586354401
That also needs to be squared with #HamasCharter asserting rights of displaced #Palestinians to return but denying displaced Jews the same
On #amnesia, #antisemitism, #bigotry, #victimBlaming, and the #Russian-seeded narrative of #IsraeliApartheid…
Yes, #Russia, where virulent antisemitism has been documented forever, is where the contrived notion of "Israeli Apartheid" originated.
A #FourthCatastrophe?
In the last three years, there has been every sign that another catastrophe was coming.
Read the whole essay at the paywall-free link to the archive.
It also tells you where the notion of #IsraeliApartheid came from and why #TimingIsNoCoincidence.
The conclusion is a clincher, regardless of which side of the #Israeli-#Palestinian conflict you are on.
Thanks to @toooobeeee for sharing such a deeply researched and though-provoking essay!
The #Arab-#Israeli conflict isn’t a normal conflict, and the cause of Arab #Palestine still isn’t a normal cause of national liberation.
The fundamental fact of this conflict, that one side believes the other’s #existence is a metaphysical crime for which a just resolution can only be #elimination, means that standard diplomatic practice is much harder to apply at best, and gets scrambled, inverted, and abused at worst 
A global diplomatic edifice that keeps the #Palestinians in a permanent holding pattern of misery stemming from defeated #Arab war efforts, where the Palestinians themselves weren’t even always the central actors in the descent to war or the principal combatants who lost them, is unlike anything the international community has attempted in other conflicts.
#permanentStateOfWar #inTheirName
The common and deeper meaning to all was that #Israel’s enemies needed to be protected from the consequences of THEIR defeat in the wars THEY initiated and LOST.
It’s notable that this doesn’t seem to have happened in #Arab-#Israeli wars where #eliminationism didn’t feature in the rhetoric or the stated motivations—#Suez in 1956, #YomKippur in 1973, the #FirstIntifada wars in #Lebanon.
But it certainly happened in the wars that began in 1947, 1967, & 2000
It also, for that matter, further disincentivizes the stronger side from seriously engaging in any kind of mediation to begin with, because mere entry into negotiations could lead to a diminishment in what it gets out of a deal.
[And herein lies the explanation for those accusing #Israel of #politicalTheater and in never being serious about negotiations and settlement]
If one side of a conflict rejects a compromise, initiates a violent confrontation, and is defeated , no mediator of sound mind offers that side better terms next time around.
The reasons are obvious. It creates a new incentive for the losing side to keep rejecting compromise while removing the biggest disincentive from the table, namely that the move from mediation to arbitration or open confrontation carries the strong risk that the rejecting side will lose
If there is a bedrock principle of #conflictMediation it is that mediation seeks to arrive at a solution that is better for BOTH sides than what either side could hope to get from open confrontation.
This is true for warring states, for a divorcing couple, for labor and management, and for any other situation with competing claims and a possibility of forceful arbitration
The themes of this coordinated #Soviet effort—#Israel as an #apartheid state and an outpost of Western #imperialism, powerful #Jewish lobbies manipulating #American #foreignPolicy, and #Zionism as a form of #racism—outlived the #SovietUnion and may even be regarded as its largest intellectual contribution
Memories tend to exaggerate what actually happened:
#Israel was not yet a major recipient of #American aid or weaponry, and one of the #Arab belligerents, #Jordan, was decidedly not in the #Soviet camp.
But the war was experienced as a clash between a Western-aligned society and pro-Soviet anti-imperialist sphere.
The regime most responsible for the build-up to and outbreak of the war, #Nasser’s #Egypt, was also the one most closely associated with Moscow.
Decades after 1948, #Soviet propaganda would cast #Israel’s birth as a venture in #imperialism. But as the historian Jeffrey Herf’s 2022 book Israel’s Moment shows, it was #imperialists in Western governments who were most hostile to #Zionism, and anti-imperialists both in the Western left and #Communists and #socialists in both East and West who were most sympathetic.
In each of the 3 wars, the #Palestinian cause was taken up in a larger global struggle 
: first, #WorldWarII, then the #ColdWar, then the #jihadist war against free societies.
#Palestine has served as an excellent rallying cry for OTHERS [who only fight #inTheirName].
For #Palestinians, the result has never been good.
3 generations. 3 different wars. 3 different modes of combat. All 3 times, the wars were preceded by grandiloquent pronouncements and popular excitement as well as broad intellectual support. And all 3 times, as soon as or even before defeat appeared, the excitement and frenzy were excised from collective memory, so that the event came to be remembered as a case of pure cruelty by the hand of the Israeli other. That’s the #PalestinianPredicament in a nutshell
What was foregone at #CampDavid was all that plus what stood to be gained afterward: #statehood, #Jerusalem, a massive evacuation of #settlements.
What happened instead was a wave of Palestinian violence… with the goals of eliminating Israel over freedom—that has been the preference of generations of #Palestinian leaders.
A people on the cusp of liberation instead suffered war deaths and the moral rot caused by the veneration of suicide and murder.
Consider what exactly was at stake in 2000 and the years immediately following.
Over the 7 years of the #OsloProcess, from 1993 to 2000, the #PalestinianAuthority was established in #WestBank and #Gaza Strip.
#Palestinians had, for the first time, an elected government, a representative assembly, passports, stamps, an international airport, an armed police force, and other trappings of what was in every sense a state in the making
As happened 30 and 50 years before, in the months after #CampDavid and well into the #SecondIntifada, the rhetoric was as militant as ever, and triumphalist too.
Moderates held that a #controlledOutbreak of #violence could improve the #Palestinian position in any future negotiation 
Less-moderate voices hoped that violence could replicate #Hezbollah’s success in forcing a full #Israeli withdrawal from #Lebanon without Israel receiving anything in return
