Former President Barack Obama said a way forward for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only possible if people acknowledge the “complexity” of the situation.
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And … that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” Obama said in an interview on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
The former president’s comments come as the Israeli military focuses its offensive against Hamas in Gaza City and northern parts of the enclave.
Sadly, there is no way forward. The leaders of both sides want the complete elimination of the other.
So remove the leaders of both sides.
Unfortunately Hamas hasn’t held a single election since they were elected in 2006, and Netanyahu is looking similarly autocratic. The recent escalation is only going to make both sides more antagonistic.
In other words, this shit ain’t going away any time soon.
Why should hamas keep down their arms when they see what is happening in disarmed Westbank?
Do you think an armed Westbank would fair any better?
Exactly. I’ve been recently thinking that maybe Israel and Palestine become a new country run by the world. It becomes a neutral globally enforced and patrolled market or exchange. Almost like a U.N. country, but somehow better because the U.N seems like a fucking joke. I’m not sure exactly what I mean here, but essentially, the world removes the two and force them to be one.
Even though it is complex, there are obvious crimes, let alone war crimes happening there. Looking at you IDF with your repeated bombing of civilians and the wounded.
I think you’ve just created a tinderbox of like…well…biblical proportions.
Umm… it’s already burning.
Just saying.
The UN is a pull organization. It has to request forces & money for operations. No nation or nation collective in their right mind would want to shell out the billions required to basically occupy the region, even with Jerusalem.
Make it a global trade hub. All nations will have an interest. With global trade comes investment, and the next thing you know, this small patch of the earth is the most valuable piece on it.
So make a place a global trade hub in theory can be as simple as saying it is so and watching every country trade there, only in one’s imagination.
So now the region is going to be made into a great Singapore for the Mediterranean using billions of dollars of tax money from nations including Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, etc?
That’s not a global trade hub. That’s a globally subsidized tax haven. Whose long-term stability Congress from the whim of nations like the USA, China, Russia, the EU, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc…
With that, it would be infinitely easier and more attractive for any nearby nation to create a special economic area to handle regional trade & take the jobs, and the best part? This would be funded by the respective nation itself.
This is the answer and is being downvoted with no better suggestions. If you don’t have solutions and only criticism, you’re part of the problem.
Criticism, constructively made, helps avoid bad ideas, and makes good ones better. But you don’t always know the better way when you see a bad one— I don’t need to know how to build a boat to know a screen door won’t float.
Part of the problem is one side having a desire for autonomy, and limited, at best sense of self-determination. Robbing them and the state they have grievance with of both their autonomies and capacities for self-determination doesn’t seem like a good answer to the problems they both have.
I agree. But downvotes to a legitimate solution without criticism or suggestions is pointless and contributes nothing to the discussion. I don’t care if you even suggest nuking the entire area. Just own it and defend your opinion.
Eh… I think I might care about somebody suggesting nuking the entire area. Not all ideas are created equal, and not all ideas are worth expressing.
I agree that not all ideas are equal, but disagree about their expression. Discourse and communication is the only way we learn and become better people. If I’m wrong, which happens too often, I want someone to be able to explain why. I’d rather the racists hurl slurs, so they can exposed and taught, then to stay silent and never be confronted.
Another thought that I had was having international governing bodies get together and force Israel to pay for the relocation, education, housing, and UBI for every single Palestinian citizen for the remainder of their lives if they would agree to peaceful relocation to another host country. This is a much less preferable idea to the previously mentioned one, but it seemed like a potentially feasible one.
I’d just take Israel paying for their relocation.
If you think you can reduce the solution to this problem (or even a proper description of the problem itself) into a quick reply on a web forum, you’re part of the problem.
Honestly, everyone I’ve seen weigh in on this has fucked it up, on all sides, at all times, going all the way back.
Maybe a bunch of armchair geniuses should stay out of it, unless they’re willing to drop what they’re doing and go over there to help. Meddling from external parties is part of how this got so fucked up (over and over and over).
While you armchair genius. No insight. No congregation of minds to develop even a strategy of a path forward. Just criticism for those who want to make the world better. Pathetic. I assume you’re commenting from Gaza because you went over there to help.
Edit: That was reactionary and uncharacteristic. Some of us want to learn from each other and try to understand the situation to build a consensus for what a solution might look like.
Exactly, change the leader or change the leader
Take away their toys and put them in time oot.
Ah. Yes. That’s the easy way to do it.
Lol not true. Palestine disarmed in the Westbank and got nothing except brutal apartheid and evictions as a result.
And we can stop giving them money unless they start playing nice.
It’s not the government who is settling the West Bank. Yes, it is their policy, but it’s regular Israeli citizens who are killing Palestinians, burning their homes down or taking their homes from them and driving them away.
I mean, the government is incentivizing it and enabling it.
Settlers wouldn’t settle the West Bank if the Israeli military wasn’t protecting them. The government is absolutely the problem.
Go try and take someone’s home by force. It won’t go well. But it will go a lot better when it’s sanctioned by an overwhelming military force.
And in turn, Western governments are enabling the Israeli government. If the West sanctioned Israel as hard as they sanctioned Iran or Russia, they’d probably think twice about annexing the West Bank. But instead of sanctions they get weapons.
enact a european style democratic state with no official religious affiliation. problem solved. jews and muslims don’t actually hate each other. they live side by side all the time.
High school never ends [for now]. Remember that, people. And when you distill complex conduct into easy bites about said high schoolers, the other high schoolers of the world will take high schooler level actions.
Perhaps we need a more educated world to move forward…
We certainly are catering to the least intelligent among us in almost every respect. Oddly enough I was thinking about this earlier tonight.
I went to use the bathroom at a restaurant and they had some framed newspapers hanging up in there that were run by the local newspaper in 1918. The whole front page was news about WWI but it looked very different from war coverage in newspapers today. Each article was very detailed and covered distinct parts of the conflict during that week. There were sections on American, Canadian, and English troops detailing whether they had advanced or retreated, how much fighting they had to do, and references to commanding officers, obscure geographic landmarks, and lines from speeches made by foreign leaders. It was clear from the way they were written that the author expected his audience to be familiar with all of this to the point that he could mention them in passing without offering any explanation as to how they were related or what significance they held.
This is in stark contrast to current reporting on the Palestinian conflict and to a lesser degree the war in Ukraine. Journalists rarely mention details in such a way and when they do they offer much more context, assuming the reader is unfamiliar with much of what is being discussed. Of course, they’re not wrong in that assessment but I do wonder how much of that has to do with the public being slowly conditioned to expect simplicity in reporting. These articles often read more like a political interpretation than a description of events. Nuance and the expectation of sustained interest in the subject seems almost entirely absent.
During my relatively long life I’ve witnessed journalism morph from giving information to forming opinion. Sometimes they do it openly, sometimes they try to pass it as the context you mention.
I believe context is necessary now because of how fragmented people’s attention is. We used to have 5 tv channels and two main newspapers and that was it. It was easier to keep the focus and remember the context back then.
Or, rather, we were all inside the same information bubble. Now everyone is in their own bubble, and there’s no more common understanding of reality.
This conflict makes it super clear, because of its complexity and long history, that people don’t have the time or bandwidth to understand the whole thing and end up repeating what they hear inside their bubble.
For example: your opinion is largely influenced by your location and your own history, much more than by the facts of the conflict. I come from Argentina, where most people support Israel, and I live in Ireland, where most people support the Palestinians. There’s understandable reasons for that. Argentina suffered two Islamic terrorist attacks against local Jewish institutions, while Irish people identify with Palestinians because of the British oppression.
I personally live in my own bubble of course, we all do. I know my opinion is heavily influenced by my own history.
As a consequence I end up getting involved in online discussions where I argue for nuance and against simplification, but that just puts me on the “wrong side” of both “sides”. So for my own mental health I’ve been trying to stop participating. I only wanted to chime in here because your comment seemed to capture some of what I think.
I know exactly what you mean about being on the wrong side of both sides. In the US our two political parties are so ingrained in culture that people feel like they can’t disagree on any subject without being cast out. I’ve always thought the idea that you would fall perfectly into one of two categories was asinine. That’s led to me taking positions on many subjects that aren’t extreme enough for the purists on either side. It’s incredibly annoying because you can tell that for many of them the things they’re saying aren’t deeply held beliefs and yet they’re defended as if they are. Really though, they’re simply the dominant narrative in that person’s bubble.
Education isn’t the problem. It’s self control. People think they prioritize rational decisions but if that were true, cigarettes would be long gone and global warming would be solved. We prioritize feelings which is why GOP loves to fear monger and push religion. Nothing scarier than a eternal suffering, especially since eternity lasts a long time.
In this case, we have two countries that have held a religious divide for decades based on who believes they’re actually worshipping the correct people so they don’t get sent to eternal suffering. Except, they’re willing to kill for their religious text because they feel so deeply that theirs is superior.
How can we as outsiders possibly take the right actions when the irrational people are willing to commit genocide over their feelings brains?
I would argue education is important, because this isn’t actually really a religious conflict, and perpetuating that belief causes harm - namely that this is some intractable millennia old conflict rooted in fundamental beliefs and not one only a hundred years old largely just about lines on a map.
2,000 years ago the region was largely inhabited by Jews, under the Roman Empire, and known as Judaea. With the split of the Roman Empire by around 300AD, the region became known as Palaestine under the Byzantine Empire, and obviously started seeing a lot of Christian activity. By the 800s, the region was conquered by Islamic caliphates, and by the 1500s was part of the Ottoman Empire. For nearly 400 years Jews, Muslims, and Christians all got along perfectly fine in Palestine under the Ottomans.
But with WW1, Britain was fighting the Ottomans. Britain promised the region to the people who by that point came to see themselves as “Palestinians” (largely Muslim but with a sizable Christian minority), as well as to Jewish diaspora if they’d help fight the Ottomans. They did, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and Britain created the state of Mandatory Palestine, but decided to just keep it and rule it themselves. This was an unpopular move, but to make sure they didn’t have to fight everyone, manufactured Jewish vs Palestinian antagonism so they’d just fight each other instead of British colonial rule. This unfortunately worked.
After WW2, Britain decided it didn’t want all its colonies anymore, especially the mess it created in Palestine, so just left and told the brand new UN to fix it. The UN drew some borders, which the newly created modern nation of Israel was fine with. The people who would inhabit the newly created modern nation of Palestine were not fine with it, nor were the other neighboring nations, so there was a war in '48 and it’s basically gone down hill from there.
I’m not a historian and that’s a very, very, very superficial explanation of one of the longest inhabited regions in the planet, but it’s just worth noting this conflict is not really religious in nature. It’s two peoples, of various religions (or no religion at all, since there are secular Jews), who are fighting over land and recognition as a sovereign state due to a manufactured nationalism and border dispute barely more than 100 years old.
A more educated world, or a less educated one. If there is nobody around to teach the tradition of violence in the region, nobody would have any interest in perpetuating it.
He also said:
If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean
which is something I totally agree on. There is no “good or bad” team in the Middle East…all parties are involved in this conflict and it’s cause!
Hey, don’t forget those of us who made this mess and walked away, and every country on Earth that continues to keep the whole Middle East area relevant through our continued oil addiction.
Hey, don’t forget those of us who made this mess and walked away,
The early 20th century British Empire?
through our continued oil addiction.
Israel, let alone Gaza, don’t exactly produce a lot of oil, and I certainly don’t know that they sell it.
This whole conflict in Israel is more about land, and the West supports Israel bEcAuSe DeMoCrAcY in an otherwise unfriendly region. The region as a whole might be messy “because oil,” but that’s rather tangential to this conflict.
Israel is adjacent to an incredibly strategic shipping location - the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal links the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean without having to go around Africa or around Siberia.
Israel isn’t strategically important because it has big oil reserves. It’s strategically important because it’s near a lot of important things. Oil and shipping play a bigger role than you’d think.
Of course. Those kids in refugee camps, hospitals and ambulances have their hands soaked in blood.
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look around
If the entire holy land was nuked and radioactive, people would still try to occupy the wasteland so they could get back in first. Don’t think there is a solution
Honestly, this is nonsense.
They aren’t fighting over Jerusalem or Bethlehem or Jericho. This is a war over grazing lands and a beach town.
If you look away from Gaza for a moment to the other Palestinian territory – the occupied West Bank – you’ll see gangs of a hooligans in pickup trucks with ski masks smashing water wells and killing cattle in small desert towns like it’s high noon at the O.K. Corral.
The whole religious component is largely a distraction. There are people living on real estate that other people who have much bigger guns want. The solution is the same as it’s always been: give folks a fair deal.
It’s not a coincidence that this latest conflict is in Gaza. Gaza isn’t religiously significant. It’s just the densest, most brutal concentration camp in Israel. This is not over religion.
But it’s in the name of religion, so it draws in the Christo-fascist zionists alongside the Israeli ones. They don’t need educated support, just support. Religious nuance helps increase that.
That’s totally true. I only mean to say that the fundamental drivers are typical to those outside of the holy lands. But you’re right that the religious component is definitely leveraged. I’ll also credit @[email protected] for pointing out that the American Evangelical Christian nationalist movement is a huge contributor to the conflict. They’re far more numerous than American Jews, and seem to be have greater influence on American policy in Israel than American Jews do.
That’s really what I was insinuating as well. The National Prayer Breakfast needs to be ignored wholly by our politicians, but members from both “sides” attend because it’s politically advantageous.
A documentary called The Family does a great job at explaining this.
There is oil just off Gaza’s coast. But Israhell already controls that.
Tiktok says this is all about the Ben Gurion Canal Project. I haven’t had the time to validate the potential veracity, but it seemed like an interesting rabbit hole.
There are people living on real estate that other people who have much bigger guns want.
What is the big distinction between the “people” and the “other people” that makes them different groups of people? Hint: the word starts with an “r” and ends with “eligion”.
Flood it. God.did; worked apparently.
*Albeit briefly. So, I reckon we can shift the gulf some.
Mythology won’t help here. That’s partly the problem already.
I think the proposal to nuke it may also leave it flooded - depends on the yield and qty.
disregarding that fucked-ass comment,
God.did
is this a DJ Khaled reference?
Genesis
so it’s racism then
The radioactive halflife of a nuke explosion is quite short, if we want a long term solution we need…Chernobyl 2.
nuclear boogaloo
how about an agnostic democracy that israelis and palestinians can both live in? like a european country or something…
Yeah, but the whole point of Israel, is that it’s a home for Jewish people. That this apparently means an ethno apartheid state, is revolting. I have yet to hear a zionist to provide a good solution.
On that front Obama is correct: how are you going to create a Jewish state surrounded by Muslim states that oppose your existence fundamentally?
But at this point you can argue that living as a Palestinian in Israel and the occupied territories is worse than living in many (but clearly not all) Muslim countries as a non-Muslim.
So religious states, democracies or not, do exist and kinda can make it work in some cases, even if I would prefer a secular democracy for myself any day.
why the fuck do we need a jewish state? do we have a christian state? a buddhist state? not really. religious states are an outdated way to do government.
Breaking my own rule here, but whatever.
There’s no need for a Jewish state per se. There’s a need for a state for Jews, so they can live without fear of being persecuted, like they have been for hundreds of years.
Same reason there’s a need for a Palestinian state.
so a european style democracy with a constitution that has “congress shall make no law” types of sentences in it
And yet, Muslim states exist.
they shouldn’t. it’s an ultra conservative old way of doing government.
As someone living in muslim state: no, religious state shouldn’t exists.
The complexity is that Israel (specifically Netanyahu has gone rouge, saying nothing will stop what they are doing) and that is starting to have consequences for Democrats, and the US world image. This, along with Blinkens recent statements, are a subtle way of telling them to stop, without Biden going back on his full support of Israel.
It is the foundations of deniability, so that if the critiques of war crime and genocide come fully to light in the public eye, the US has ground to shift to. Those drones capturing footage over Gaza can quickly be used to support whatever narrative shift the US deems most advantageous. Can the Dems lose support of Arab Americans and their allies? Can/will they lose Jewish support at home if crimes are unmasked and is that number more or less than being on the “right side” of things?
These are likely the questions that are swirling around the White House and State Department as we speak. Time is of the essence, as 2.5 million people are on the verge of succumbing to dehydration and starvation. If those distributions are equal, a heart breaking cataclysm, in the form of a mass casualty event, could occur at any time. 10,000. 100,000. Who knows how many won’t be able to be saved even once aid comes through. Medical capacity is needed to reverse these things and none exists any longer. The UN is warning of this.
If it happens, blame will need to be swift to maintain appearances and Israel is running the risk of becoming the “Voldemort” of the Middle East overnight.
He wouldn’t be the first powerful guy supported or even brought up by the US going rogue.
We don’t talk about what happened with Sadam…
Nuance? What’s that? Just say horrific fuckin things to the people who disagree with you! Much more fun that way!
A plea for nuance from the enablers and backers of the apartheid regime is not something I’m going to take on board.
I’m aware of the historical context and Israel has a right to exist and Jews to be safe. But I stand firmly with the Palestinians as the victims of generations of aggression.
The calls to nuance and complexity is insulting, like people can’t see what’s right infront of them and form an opinion of their own. What complexity is there in bombing hospitals, ambulances, schools and refugee camps, while denying food, water, and medical supplies to millions
Ignoring nuance is claiming only one side is right. It’s easy and borderline brainless to simply claim Israel is the only side wrong for bombing hospitals.
But this ignores that Hamas is committing war crimes by using civilian facilities as staging grounds to launch attacks on Israel. This ignores that Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and the only thing stopping them is lack of weapons. This ignores that Hamas, the democratically elected ruling party of Gaza, has continued to use resources to attack Israel instead of building infrastructure to actually function independently.
Ignoring nuance is to ignore history. Ignoring that the West created this whole situation, by both promising one region to two peoples then creating division where there was none to make colonial rule easier, and by also so brutally attempting to wipe out an entire people it created a hardline cultural belief that swift and severe military action is necessary to insure “never again,” (and two wars in '48 and '67 didn’t help either).
None of this is to say Israel is innocent of wrongdoing - they sure as shit aren’t and certainly seem happy to bomb 100 Palestinian civilians if it means they get 1 Hamas fighter. But rejecting nuance pushes a belief one side is right and one side is wrong, and that the only sides here are national ones. Both suck, both are morally wrong. The only “right side” is Palestinian and Israeli civilians being killed because the only “wrong side” - extremist Israeli and Palestinian leaders - are happy to kill as many civilians as possible for some acres of land.
But please, do tell me how my opinion is wrong and there’s no complexity here.
I think the nuance is understanding the evils of the Israeli state without blaming Jews or endorsing violence against Israeli civilians. You aren’t doing that here, but lots of people are doing this right now (the people “forming an opinion on their own” aren’t always forming great opinions). Anyone suggesting that nuance is unnecessary is begging you to only see their side of things. There are zero issues in the world that don’t require some degree of nuance; why you would think such a complex and long-standing conflict like this one is better without critical thinking is the real insult here.
‘we didn’t realise they were going to use the weapons like that’
We thought they were going to build schools and hospitals with those bombs!
Could we have this guy back, please?
Christopher Hitchens made an argument regarding the religious undertones of the conflict and why peace cannot easily be found. https://piped.video/watch?v=rc90pcx6kNU
Of course, by this point there’s also hate passed on from one generation to the next.
The problem is that no American has any credibility: historically fucking over poor and indigenous communities has been an average Tuesday for the US. There is no path out of this that makes anyone happy. Killing people is never okay and trying to justify it based upon “complexity” is insulting. Fuck religious zealots.
There is no path out of this that makes anyone happy.
I really wish everyone would accept this so world leaders could just buckle down and resolve any sort of permanent solution. Israel would have to make concessions but oh boo-fucking-hoo. The Palestinians don’t even have anything they could concede in the first place. Hell, the only thing Hamas would have to concede is “No, you don’t get to destroy Israel,” since anything else they’d get in a permanent agreement is going to be a step up from the current situation. The UN is fucking impotent though and partially responsible in the first place, but even with the power they do have seem unwilling to use it to try and fix anything. The whole time the US is happy to sell as many weapons as possible to Israel just on the off chance Iran looks the wrong way, but as long as a bomb lands on an Arab we’re seemingly not too fussed about it. Wonder how quickly Israel would be willing to make concessions towards a two-state solution if the West told them “no more weapons.”
Reddit probably rotted my brain, but I’m struggling to determine how this is anything but “everyone sucks here.” On this matter, I don’t think anyone has been truly in the right in a century. Can anyone provide a convincing argument otherwise?
I think he’s trying to get around the black and white viewpoints, and bring up the idea that Israel is committing war crimes here, which is outside the Overton window on the subject currently in US politics.
Nah, you can go through the comments here and find people taking the easy, position here too. “Bombing kids is bad, so Israel is bad, so Palestine must be good, therefore I support Palestine.” No nuance, no attempts to look at a more complex situation or consider anything other than the most basic information.
Both sides suck, both sides will happily commit war crimes, and civilians on both sides are getting hurt. One side is getting more hurt than the other, but that’s just a difference in capability, not belief.
former drone striker in chief trying to remind us of his legacy of absolutely failing to acknowledge, let alone tackle, the role of US imperialism in the middle east.
This specific conflict is more related to early 20th Century Britain promising two different people the same land after the Ottoman Empire collapsed and then being dicks about it for another 20 years. So UK imperialism, not US for once.
The US certainly still arms Israel, but the US arms basically anyone they consider an ally. The US would arm Israel if Palestine were its own state, were part of Israel, or if the whole conflict never happened. But Israel wouldn’t have existed at all past '67 without Western equipment.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Former President Barack Obama said a way forward for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only possible if people acknowledge the “complexity” of the situation.
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it.
And … that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” Obama said in an interview on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
The former president’s comments come as the Israeli military focuses its offensive against Hamas in Gaza City and northern parts of the enclave.
Behind the scenes, American officials also believe there is limited time for Israel to try to accomplish its stated objective of taking out Hamas in its current operation before uproar over the humanitarian suffering and civilian casualties reaches a tipping point.
If you genuinely want to change this … you’ve got to figure out how to speak to somebody on the other side and listen to them and understand what they are talking about and not dismiss it,” Obama said.
The original article contains 268 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 32%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The world needs to stsrting usiing proper words: what Israel is trying to achieve in Palestine is an Holocaust.
No no, its only a Holocaust if it comes from the German Region.
This is just sparkling genocide.
Former President Barack Obama said a way forward for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only possible if people acknowledge the “complexity” of the situation.
It’s a hOlOCaUsT !!!111
Because it is. Complexity doesn’t mean hiding reality. Write me when you need more help interpreting texts. You’re welcome.
It is not and what you actually doing by saying stupid things like that is relativizing the holocaust…which would be a crime here in Germany.
Germany has stupid laws, which stay in Germany naturally.
TIL a law to prevent relativism of the holocaust is stupid. lol.
Never too late to learn.
It’s a pretty shitty Holocaust attempt.
Not even nazi germany managed to kill everyone they decided to.
What percentage would satisfy you to make it successful?
It’s not. The only reason to pretend it is to support Israel’s apartheid state.
It is and the only reason to pretend it’s not is to support Hamas’ terrorists and antisemitism.
