What a shit take. You’re information hygiene has to be completely cooked to defend tabloids like this. This is an objectively poor source that’s basically just the Daily Mail 2.0 that pumps out clickbait.

This article is reporting on the same thing, but it is so much better:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8pz5nm6r8o

Supporting shitty tabloids doesn’t become okay just because they pump out headlines you agree with, the point is the quality.

I’ve seen this site a lot now on here, and it just looks like another low tier British tabloid that pumps out misleading ragebait content for clicks. From what I saw it’s like the left wing version of the Daily Mail. Why is the information hygiene on Lemmy so poor? Why can’t the community have higher standards on better sources?

You’re missing the point. Your proposal makes zero sense for any of the parties involved. Your reasoning is not sound, your claimed benefits aren’t real, and the compromise is incoherent.

It makes zero sense for Egypt to give the Sinai. That’s very strategic land that keeps the Suez Canal firmly in Egyptian control while also acting as a buffer between Israel/Palestine and the Egyptian heartland.

It makes zero sense for Israel to over the Sinai as it’s just a massive patch of desert. They already controlled it once before and they gave it up in exchange for recognition. That’s how worthless it was to Israel. The West Bank, unlike the Sinai is actually habitable, fertile land that solves one Israel’s biggest geopolitical problems, which is that the current core of the Israeli heartland is too thin and exposed.

It makes zero sense for the Palestinians in the West Bank to be ruled by Egypt which is not similar to them culturally nor is it connected to them physically. They’ll just end up being a neglected after thought by the government in Cairo.

Your proposal does not answer the question of what will happen to the 700k+ settlers in the West Bank, or how any of the parties would feel about them leaving/staying. It doesn’t answer how the relocation of the 2 million Gazans is going to go. It doesn’t answer how the West Bank is going to absorb the 2 million Gazans, when the West Bank only has a population of 2.5 million itself, meaning that the population would literally double.

Like it’s just a flawed proposal all around. I’m not sure why you’re doubling down on it when you could easily come up with a better proposal.

Oh the long winded “Palestine desnt even really exist” zionist guy wants to spew comments. OK.

If that’s what you got from my comment then you really are an idiot.

Give this a read.

The article doesn’t contradict any of the points that I made.

And you call out the Ottomans empires slavery. They abolished slavery in 1840. England in 1834. The US not till 1865 I think. You going to go after England and the US too then or is it only an issue in selective cases where its convenient for you?

The Ottomans practiced slavery for 500 years and had one of the largest slave trades in history. Playing whataboutism doesn’t disprove my point, it just shows that you’re dimwit who’s engaging in bad faith.

. I explained my lense which is examining policy and where it is heading. I also took a stab at yours which you have confirmed. It amounts to a societal pendulum, which is of course is my very reductionist view of it.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with looking policy or the direction it’s heading. It’s an okay standard to hold. However, the standard doesn’t actually contradict my point which is that societies aren’t static. I disagree with the notion that it’s pendulum. Societies do shift back and forth from have more progressive governments to having more conservative governments. However, the iterations of each of those can be vastly different from their predecessors.

For example, FDR styled US politics in the mid 20th century and radical Republican styled US politics in the mid 19th century are both technically left wing, but they’re incredibly different from each other and they have very different views and platforms. However, I think that’s besides the point which is that change is inevitable. I think you can agree that this something that’s difficult to argue against.

It is a common but misleading trope on many levels but does have some validity depending on how you look at it. While on the surface this may may often seem true the devil is in always in the details.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with this statement in of itself, I do think it applies to you in this comment quite a bit. All of the examples that you provided are missing a lot of important context.

There are more slaves today than at any time in history.

This is true, but only because there’s that many more people today. In the 1800s, the world only had 1 billion people, today there’s 8 billion. At the peak of the Trans Atlantic trade in the early 19th century alone somewhere around 12 million to 15 million Africans were enslaved. Keep in mind, at the time there were other major slave trades that were just as big like the Indian ocean slave trade and the Arab slave trade. Today, most estimates put the number of slaves at 50 million people. So by absolute numbers, yes there’s more slaves, but by the share of the population slavery is actually much lower than what it was back then.

they still have managed to poison every human with forever chemicals and micro plastics.

The vast majority of plastics and forever chemicals are produced in Asia. Asia is also the biggest polluter of both by a big margin.

Not to mention other future catastrophic calamities like the oceans dying off or global warming set to displace billions of people.

Trying to blame this on the US is just silly. Global warming is the result of industrialization which most of the world has gone through. US emissions have actually be steadily going down for decades now. Once again, Asia is the biggest polluter of greenhouse gasses, and the rates are actually increasing there. There’s a reason why global warming has to be a global effort.

Policies are not always enforced and can be also be used for nefarious purposes.

Which is why you need to verify policy with actual data. Policy is still useful as it can tell you the political leanings of a society and the desires of the public. However, data shows how serious that society is about something or what the results were.

Of course, we later came to realize that it really was an attack on minorities which amounts to a slow burn genocide by the white nationalists.

While there’s no denying that there a lot of racist motivations behind the war on drugs, I think the use of genocide here is inappropriate. Genocide is a very specific term that describes a very specific event. This term cannot and should not be used to describe any act of injustice or violence. That just devalues the weight behind it.

History teaches nothing about the computer or what things like the military industrial complex has achieved through rampant fascism around the world. While it can serve as a predictor of some human behavior it can’t explain how to handle AI. I think this is where history can’t help us even if it is fascinating to study.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what history is as a subject. We don’t study to predict the future, we study history to understand the past. By learning about what the people before us did, what they went through, and what they achieved we can better understand ourselves by learning from their mistakes, their knowledge, and their success. We can recognize patterns from history that we can extrapolate on to the present to make educated guesses as to why things are happening as they are or what will happen because of what we’re doing now.

Obviously history says nothing about computers or AI. However, history is filled similar situations that we can draw patterns and lessons from. Take for example, the light bulb. Before them, cities you used to rely on oil lamps for light. Each city had a team of lamplighters that would go from one streetlamp to the next lightening them on fire and making sure they have fuel. This was an entire industry and a lot of people made their livelihoods from this. But when the light bulb came around, it was simply a superior option that was brighter, more reliable, cheaper, and much easier to maintain. When cities decided to electrify their street lights, there was an insane opposition to it by lamplighters and their industry. They feared that their jobs would be automated away and they did everything in their power to oppose it. There was a lot of lobbying to ban light bulbs, a lot strikes and protests, there were even instances of lamplighters breaking electrified streetlights to send a message that they were not welcome. Obviously with time, they lost that the battle and electrified streetlights are now the standard. However, even today there are some towns and cities in Europe that still have lamplighters as remnants of the opposition at the time.

The point we have examples in history of groundbreaking technologies that revolutionized the world. We’ve seen how these intentions disrupted established industries and how much they hated and resisted it, how it gave rise to new industries, and how these inventions automated away the jobs of a lot of people. We can look to history to see what lessons we can take to best handle our present day groundbreaking inventions and how they’re going to disrupt people’s lives. I think it would be foolish to disregard history because there aren’t exact examples. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.

Egypt already has peace with Israel and they’re already blocking any potential wave of Palestinian migrants and have been for decades now. Egypt doesn’t benefit from such a deal

I believe you are making an ideological assessment, I am not. My assessment is historical. If you look at any society in history, you’ll see that nothing is ever truly static. Societies evolve to their circumstances. There’s always cycles of growth and cycles of contraction. There’s cycles where a society is open, progressive, and tolerant relative to its past and cycles of isolation, conservatism, and exclusion. There’s no reason to think that we live in a time where this is any different.

In the US, for example, political cycles last about 50 or so years before they go through a major transformation. The current cycle started with Ronald Reagan back in the 80s. If you think what politics was like 50 years before then, it was the politics of FDR that started in the 1930s. Before that it was the corrupt Gilded age presidents like Cleveland that started in the 1880s (which is very similar to the politics of today in a lot of ways). Before that it was the Republicans that wanted to end slavery. I think you get the idea. The point is we’re at a time where existing one political cycle and entering another. These are always turbulent times. However, history indicates that the new cycle runs counter to previous one. We’re leaving a political cycle that was centered on gutting regulations, cutting taxes for corporations, free trade, anti unions, pro immigration, and so on. If we follow the pattern, the next cycle should be similar to the one started with FDR in the 1930s. There’s going to be a real push for a lot social programs, raising the minimum wage, massive housing build outs, taxing corporations, and going after things like monopolies.

We’re already starting to see this now with people like Bernie gaining national traction and Mamdani getting elected mayor. There’s still pushback, so the new cycle is not yet calibrated, there some positions that the public doesn’t agree with that need to change. But for the most part? That seems to be the next phase of American politics. MAGA appears to be the final chapter of the Reagan era cycle of politics because nobody wants its continuation, people are eager for the next thing that will come after it.

I think there’s a flaw in your bet. Societies have to be viewed in their relative context, you can’t apply some arbitrary standard that’s based on your subjective whims. Each society has a different overton window and different issues. However, they all have an internal left and right wing.

For example, if the Democrats win in 2028 and they manage to reverse 70% of the major Trump fuckups in policy and pass a few of major policies like universal healthcare, abortion rights, or raising the minimum wage. That’s a pretty substantial policy shift, but that’s still not a communist revolution that’s overthrowing capitalism. Would you call this shift in policy left wing or slightly less right wing? If it’s the former, then I would take you up on your bet because societies do go in cycles of going from one end of their mainstream political spectrum to the other. If it’s the latter, then I can’t take you up on your bet because nothing will ever satisfy your condition. Nothing will be leftist enough.

The Ottoman Turks? Are you an idiot?

The Ottoman Empire was one of the most violent and brutal empires in human history. They practiced slavery and had one of the largest slave trades in the world. They would go invade their weaker neighbors unprovoked to expand their empire. When they force the people they attacked into submission they’ll take “spoils of war” and distribute them among muslim soldiers and officials as instructed by islam. Therefore, they would steal the land, loot possession, and enslave people and hand them out as rewards for winning the war.

They would specifically kidnap and enslave young women and children either as servants or as sex slaves in harems. Everybody else gets a choice of either converting to islam or becoming a second class citizen under islamic law where you’re forced to have less rights, less freedoms, face more discrimination, and harsher punishments than muslims. Oh, and you have to pay an extra tax that muslims don’t have to pay (jizya) for the privileged of being oppressed.

They also colonize the lands that they conquer. They’ll kidnap and relocate the children elsewhere, they’ll give special benefits for muslims to settle the newly annexed lands, and they’ll forcefully exile or relocate the nonmuslims if they’re in the way of muslims colonizing the land. Oh, and the conquered people have zero representation at any institutional power if they’re not muslims, and they can’t hold a high ranking position if they’re not also Turkish. Therefore these nations were often ruled by muslim rulers who ruled had no interest or obligation for the natives, they were just there to serve and enrich themselves. Because of this, a lot of the conquered nations were subject some pretty horrid treatment.

Turkish rule is so brutal that Ottoman history was filled with conquered nations breaking out in revolts, some lasted centuries because they would rather fight to the death and than be ruled by the Turks. The thing is that the Turkish reaction to revolts is so extreme that it’s infamous in history. Instead of fighting to put down the revolt, the Turks would seek to genocide that society. They want to mass murder them, take their land, erase their culture, and pretend that it was always Turkish land. They did that with the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Jews, and Arab Christians.

The Ottoman genocides are some of the worst in history. The very concept of genocide was literally made to describe what the Turks did to the Armenians. This idea that the Ottoman empire was peaceful golden age is quite literally bullshit propaganda that’s funded by the Turkish government. There’s a reason why that empire collapsed, and there’s a reason why every single ethnic group in southeastern Europe, the Caucuses, and the Middle East despises it with a burning passion.

You would think that this something in the long past, right? But no. The Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides are barely a century old. Turkey today still officially denies these genocides. They’re still trying to genocide the Kurds to this day. Kurdish clothes, names, music, press, and language were outright banned until the 1990s. Even today, you can’t call Kurdish towns by their Kurdish names, they can’t speak Kurdish at any position in government, they don’t true Kurdish media, and Kurdish children can’t learn Kurdish in school. Not only that, but Turkey is also actively burning down entire Kurdish villages, they’re mass arresting Kurdish activists and journalists, they’re helping Azerbaijan invade Armenia, they’re invading and occupying the Assyrian and Kurdish parts of Syria, they’re literally illegally occupying and colonizing Northern Cyprus, they’re trying to steal Greek islands and maritime territory as their own, they’re constantly bombing Kurds in Iraq to keep them down, and the list goes on and on.

They’re the biggest menace in the middle east, and this is all just legacy that was carried over from the Ottoman Empire, who by the way is heavily supported and celebrated in Turkey. Not in some delusional sense where they have a different view from what it actually was, but not Turkish nationalists are actively proud of all the genocides, oppression, and conquering they inflected upon the world and they want to see Turkey do it again.

Thinking that the Ottoman Turks were peace makers is so fucking mind numbingly stupid that it’s painful to think that there are people this ignorant out there in the world.

That’s precisely the issue though. You’re dismissing important nuance and context for an oversimplified soundbites. That’s just willful ignorance. If you’re not even willing to entertain the idea of being honest then this conversation is not for you.

This doesn’t disprove what I said whatsoever. All this shows is that the term “Palestine” exists, and it does. Palestine has been the colloquial term for the region that roughly covers the Abrahamic religion’s holy land since it was coined by the Romans. However, what this does not show is Palestine being an independent sovereign state at any point in history. This region did not have any sort of sovereignty for thousands of years. It was always controlled by external empires. The two modern states are literally the first ones since ancient times to rule the land independently from within. This idea that there was a Palestinian country historically that has always existed before Israel is simply not true. The ethnic cleansing and fighting is real, but Palestine before the modern state was never a country at any point in the past.

This is a fun fantasy, maybe the US can redeem itself as well… just kidding, they are going to double down just like Israel.

If you think countries have morals and feelings then you’re a lost cause. Countries have always and will always purely act in their best self interest.

The pendulum will swing! Of course it just keeps swinging to the right and not left. How strange.

History shows otherwise. All societies go through cycles where the ruling party, ideology, or system gets replaced by something fundamentally counters it when it no longer holds up the social contract it promised.

It is almost like a powerful group of well insulated people are calling the shots and they are determining societal movements through propaganda.

Welcome to human history

It’s not the same. The US has unrestricted air and ocean access to both Alaska and Hawaii, Egypt won’t have that. Not to mention, Egypt gains nothing from this deal. The Sinai is more strategically important to them

Egypt cannot possibly govern the West Bank, it is too far from the Egyptian heartland and it is also physically separated from the rest of country. Egypt has already tried governing Gaza before and that went horribly wrong.

Jordan and the West Bank are physically connected and they’re the same culturally, therefore it makes sense for them to be together in that sense, but with that being said, Jordan also tried to rule the West Bank before and that went pretty poorly.

The biggest hurdle here is why would Egypt or Jordan participate? What would they get out of it. They would be getting a big headache in exchange for a lot of strategic land (Egypt giving the Sinai also means giving up one side of the Suez Canal and that’s a big no no in geopolitics). Not to mention, that the West Bank already has well over 700,000 settlers. Even if we exclude East Jerusalem, that’s still over 500k settlers. That’s a loooot of people, and they’re also some of most unhinged zealots you’ll find anywhere in the world. That’s even bigger headache than the Palestinians that they’ll have to take on. I just don’t see this as a realistic proposal.

This is idiotic on multiple levels.

First of all, it’s NOT up to Palestine. This is not some ideological statement, this is just reality. The geopolitics works by de facto control, not by some idealized notion of righteous ownership. If that was the case the native Americans would be decided US foreign policy, but that’s not how it works now is it? The cold hard reality is that Israel is the true sovereign of the land, and neither Palestine nor any country can do anything substantial without Israeli approval. Therefore, they’re the ones who actually have the deciding power. Whether you agree with it or not doesn’t mean anything, that’s just the way it currently is.

Second of all, Palestine did NOT exist before the 1930s. There has never been sovereign Palestinian state in history. The modern Palestinian national identity was formed in the 1920s as a reaction to Jews getting serious about establishing Israel. Before that point, there was no such thing as a Palestinian identity. The Arabs in the region were indistinguishable from the other Levantese Arabs. The Arabs in what is now Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine have the same exact history, dialect, culture, food, religion, and so on. They’re called both today and historically as Bilad Al Sham which means the Levant nation in Arabic.

What we think of modern Israel and Palestine are both inventions of the British. The borders, for example, like with the other countries in the region are nonsensical and drawn randomly. The Arabs there did not see themselves as Palestinians back then, but as Arabs that were a part of the Arab nation (ummah al arribiyah). If it were up to the Palestinian Arabs back then, there wouldn’t be any borders because these borders were dividing a bigger nation. The British promised both the Jews and the Arabs a state, and this annoyed both which caused them to start segregating and fighting each other trying to make sure that the other one doesn’t get a state. This eventually led to the 1948 war when Israel did end up declaring independence.

Finally, Christians, Jews, and muslims most certainly did NOT live in peace. This delusional idea is only held by ignorant Westerns who have no understanding of the region’s history. No matter how far back in history you go, there’s always a strong presence of revolts, wars, and ethnic cleansing in the region because whichever religious group ruled the region oppressed the others. For example, when the Turks ruled. They applied islamic law which treats non muslim monotheistic believers (polytheism is punishable by death) as second class citizens. Non muslims are forced to pay a tax that muslims don’t have to pay, they’re forced to observe islamic holidays, and they’re saddled with a lot of restrictions that muslims don’t have.

This already makes everyday life very hard, but the exclusively muslim ruling class would made sure to keep minorities down at every turn. For example, whenever the Ottomans had war, they would force entire towns near the frontlines to evacuate, but they only allow muslims to return afterwards. The property and wealth that was left behind would be possessed and distributed among muslim soldiers and officials as spoils of war. The same goes for the places that got conquered, except the non muslim women and children there would also get ensalved. This type of treatment is the reason why the Greeks, Serbs, Armenians, Assyrians, and so many other minorities revolted against the Ottomans and ended up getting genocided as a result. But it’s not just the Ottomans, the Malmuks before them as well as the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Crusaders, and so on all engaged in similar behavior. You would be hard pressed to find any sustained period of time in this region’s history that didn’t have oppression, war, or violence.

Why Egypt and not Jordan? Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and Palestine are exactly the same. They’re the same people with the same culture, that were only divided by colonial borders drawn by the French and British. The idea of a Palestinian ethnicity is a new phenomenon, it didn’t exist before the 1920s. They’re Levantese Arabs. Egyptians are pretty distinct from Levantese Arabs. They have their own cuisine, history, dialect, ideas about religion, and so on. Your proposal doesn’t make sense on that front alone.

People often forget that countries evolve with time. No country will remain in its current state forever and no current projection is going to be constant forever. The circumstances around Israel are shifting, but all this means is that the country is set to move in a new direction sooner or later. As the current status quo shifts internationally, Israeli culture and politics will also shift to reflect it. Like most other countries, I think Israel will have a counter wave to the ultra far right. The new anti far right wave will lead to a more left wing government that will seek to undo the damage done by the far right and go after the ones who caused it.

There’s definitely no good guys. If you read into the history of the region, you’ll quickly realize that there was never a “rightful” or “righteous” ruler. The ancient Persians, the Romans, the Turks, the Assyrians, the Arabs, the British, and the Israeli Jews have all been horrid. Genocide, oppression, slavery, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, deep seated hatred, and the idea of “if I don’t do fuck them over first then they’ll come after me” is the norm in this cursed region.