Who the fuck is Lolman?

He just downpropped every post that indicates Israel isn't so great.

Holy shit I raged

So it's not okay to say butchering other people isn't cool, and that maybe both sides are sort of (by sort of I mean WICKED) retarded?

How retarded is it to resist occupation by an aggressive and racist foreign power?

You can definitely argue the merit of Hamas and Hezbollah's tactics, but there's little doubt that their cause is in the right and Israel is the sole actor which is capable of accomplishing peace should it so desire.

Well, you know, I would argue both sides of an argument who say the best solution is the whole sale destruction of the other party are pretty idiotic.

But Israel should be destroyed as a Jewish state.

Additional Spam:
In any case, Hamas has been willing for a while now to negotiate a two-state solution. Maybe if Israel didn't create its own existential threats it'd have nothing to worry about.

It's those yamulkes, I swear, if the Israelis didn't dress that way then they wouldn't have so much trouble in the first place.

You know full well there are plenty of people on the other side saying the only solution is the utter destruction of Israel. However, the constant US support of Israeli terrorism is idiotic, as well.

Well, we need some way to assure the second coming of Jesus, man.

(and we'll be damned if we have to support towelheads over kikes to get our oil)

And you know full well that the Israelis have engaged in a program of settlement, disenfranchisement, and genocide.

Additional Spam:
The moral precedent for Hamas is as such: were the European resistances justified in seeking the utter destruction of Nazi Germany?

Given that they were at war, yes they were. At the same time, given that they were at war, Nazi Germany was justified in seeking the utter destruction of the European resistance movements.

Brady, thus my belief that I would be hard pressed to be sad for anything beyond the human cost if both sides of this conflict were to take each other out. I think they're both acting like children.

Sure if you want to look at things amorally. No foreign occupier is justified in seeking the destruction of resistance movements.

Shouting "a pox on both houses!" and likening their behavior to children overlooks the fact that it is a very adult thing they are doing, and well-reasoned. The ultimate goal of Israeli Zionism is to expel the Arabs from Palestine for the purposes of Jewish settlement. To reclaim the Holy Land from 'squatters' who have lived there for millenia.

There's nothing childish about Israeli paranoia and the view that there are existential threats to Israel everywhere. It's part of a concerted effort on the part of Israeli "academia," media, and political leadership to brow-beat the Israeli people into a forever war against their neighbors.

There's nothing childish about taking up arms when your dignity and land has been stripped away by decades of oppression and ethnic cleansing. I'd like to see how your worldview would be shaped if Jews shot your family members and beat you in prison.

If you're looking for morality, you would be better served to look for it in something besides war. War tends to be a pretty amoral business.

One of the objectives of war is the neutralization of a threat. As long as there is a resistance actively continuing to fight, the occupying force is justified in continuing to fight the resistance until its threat is neutralized; if neutralizing the threat requires its destruction, then it does.

In Defense of the Nazis: War is all Fucked Up!
a post by Lord Styphon

Your idea that the Four Powers should have just let any armed resistance movement that might have arisen in occupied Germany kill them at will instead of seeking its destruction is charming, but silly.

Now should we continue this discussion while pretending to be civilized people, or are you going to continue to Godwin the thread when the people discussing it with you don't fall in behind your particular viewpoint immediately and completely?

Honestly Brady, just stop digging.

Unfortunately, Styphon is completely correct. Just because Nazi Germany did horrendous acts during the war does not mean they'd simply roll over and die when a resistance formed. Likewise, just because Israel is doing horrendous things to the Palestinians does not mean they'll simply stop when they fight back.

Well first of all it's not my idea, you're putting words into my mouth.

I should have used the aggressor qualifier in my statement, although if the Allied occupation of Germany was nearly as brutal as the Nazis then it too would lose legitimacy.

You don't understand what I'm saying. Nowhere have I said that the Nazis or the Israelis would or will give up their occupation, only that they should morally speaking.

What Styphon is talking about is reasoned justification, what I am talking about is moral justification.

I agree, morally they should stop. However wars tend to not be fought with morality in mind, and this is what Styphon is trying to tell you. Should they? Yes. Realistically though, that can and will not happen in this, and most, instances. Israel will need be forced to stop what they are doing in Palestine, and at this stage I simply don't see that scenario occurring without a full blown war in the region.

Ignoring the fact that occupying a foreign country is by its nature an aggressive act, using the words you did use, it would apply to all foreign occupiers, which the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II certainly was.

As for legitimacy and brutality, the legitimacy of the occupation was established by the victorious Allies at Yalta and Potsdam, with no higher power to appeal to. So far as the brutality goes, the plans included the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe of Germans by means of mass expulsions, as well as deindustrialization that would have required the deaths of close to 25 million more Germans to accomplish, according to Herbert Hoover.

Objectively, that sounds to be pretty brutal. The Soviet Union, which had just suffered an occupation at least as brutal as the Palestinians are suffering from the Israelis now, would have been perfectly happy implementing it fully. And to take it even further if they suffered armed resistance.

So far as this applies to the Israelis, there is an important question to consider here; just what counts as being Israeli occupation? Everything they captured in the 1967 war? Everything outside of the 1947 UN partition plan? Or the entire country?

Except the Allies weren't the aggressors in World War 2.

Yes, but those are all still Bad Things that didn't happen, barring the gang rape and expulsions.

Possession of territory within Palestine's internationally recognized borders.

The Soviet Union invaded Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic States before Barbarossa.

The United States began attacking German submarines in the absence of provocation from Germany.

France and the United Kingdom were preparing to occupy Norway to cut Germany off from Swedish iron ore and on the morality front were lucky the Germans preempted them.

And Poland, meanwhile, whose getting invaded started the War in Europe, took advantage of the Munich agreement to grab a piece of Czechoslovakia for itself.

And the Soviet Army putting down an uprising in East Germany in 1953. But even ignoring that, wouldn't the expulsions alone be equivalent to the ones Foreign Minister Lieberman wants Israel to do?

Which are? There is the region called Palestine, which derives from the League of Nations mandate, and there's the State of Palestine, declared in 1988 and recognized by around 100 countries to various degrees. The former has defined borders, while the latter, as of 2010, does not, and will not until Hell freezes over and Israel and the Palestinian Authority agree on them.

If your define Palestine's borders as Mandatory Palestine, you say that Israel is a foreign occupier even within it's internationally recognized borders. Given that, and that you aren't alone in your thinking, you've managed to justify Israel's paranoia about existential threats.

I'm not saying that the Allies were saints, merely that they weren't the aggressors. By Allies here I also do not mean the Soviets and I feel it's an important distinction to make. I'm also not going to defend the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and all of the legitimate revolutions they quelled until they gave up the ghost in the 80's.

I guess if you really want to pin me down and get a clear answer, the territories under occupation since 1967 are illegally possessed by Israel. Of course this ignores all of the Arab land in Mandatory Palestine which was taken when the Jews expelled them in the Nakba.

And because I know you like to bring up irrelevant stuff: yes I know those territories were occupied by Egypt and Jordan, and no I don't see those occupations as any more or less legitimate.

The distinction between the Western Allies and the Soviets is important, and lots of people make it, even to the point of breaking the European war in two seperate wars. While it's there, and important, there are limits to how far it can be taken. For all their differences, the Western Allies and the Soviets cooperated to defeat Germany together, and later cooperated to occupy Germany. In the separate joint occupation of Berlin, they continued to cooperate until the Cold War ended. The Western Allies also agreed to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

So yeah, it's important to differentiate between the Western Allies and the Soviets, separating them completely is impossible in regards to Germany.

I did, and now that I have, there are plenty of people in Israel who agree with you, and even among those who will disagree about the legality of the occupation (like Ariel Sharon before his stroke, apparently) think it's time to just accept that a Palestinian state is inevitable, and the problem is specifics, with whatever adjustments are needed before the final agreement on borders.

Of course, this is a big problem, since Israel wants to take as much of the West Bank as it can, even if it means hacking Palestinian territory into three separate parts, which isn't viable for an independent Palestinian state. Israeli settlers are a separate but related problem. The Palestinians, meanwhile insist on the right of return and East Jerusalem. And since Israel holds all the high cards here, they feel they can hold on until the Palestinians give up. They may or may not be right.

Since we're pinning positions down, my solution would be that the Palestinians give up East Jerusalem and the right of return and accept everything in Israel as lost to them. Israel, meanwhile, gives the Palestinians everything else: the West Bank minus Jerusalem, Gaza and all those really nice settlements the Israelis have built and continue to build. The settlers can either return to Israel proper or take their chances as Palestinian citizens.

Sadly, nobody there is as reasonable as I am.