this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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That's a compelling idealistic position. But what we're really looking at right now is a simple "Might Makes Right" arrangement. Israel controls its territory firstly because it successfully perpetrated the Nakba back in '48 and purged its current territory of Palestinians. And secondly because it defeated its neighbors back in the '67 Seven-Day War.
In that sense, the land IS owned. It is owned by the victors in these incredibly violent conflicts.
They're whats left of the government that has been smashed up time and time again by a rival military. If they look and act like a crime family, it might be interesting to interrogate what kind of conflicts other crime families emerged from. Check out Operation Gladio and its influence over Italian-American mafias. Or look into how the collapse of the USSR gave birth to enormous European criminal cartels. Ask what happened in the wake of the American Civil War and how organized crime along the Gulf Coast emerged as a result. Or the Spanish and Chinese Civil Wars, for that matter.
At some point, trying to point at an organization and say "These people are uncompromisingly evil" misses the historical events that gave birth to them. The Israel Government is a consequence of European anti-Semitism and of the Cold War politics of the Middle East. Hamas is a consequence of Israeli police and paramilitary transforming Gaza into an enormous black market by necessity.
What comes next will be a consequence of what came before it. And moralizing the actors does nothing to illuminate what to anticipate next.