| > The fact of the matter is that Palestinians, especially their billionnaire "leaders" get a LOT of money That is quite simply complete bullshit. What is worse is that you are arguing in bad faith. The facts are as follows: 1) There is an ongoing long-term occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel. 2) Occupation is an act of war. Israel is waging war on Palestine. It is breaking agreements it is a part of. 3) Of course the aim of Israel is to absorb more-or-less all Palestinian territory into Israel proper. I don't really care about your deflections to Hamas or corruption or whatever, not only because those are the usual talking points of Israeli propaganda and I have seen them repeated about million times, but also because if Israel respected the territorial integrity of Palestine, these would be matters of internal Palestinian politics, and any aggression out of Palestine towards Israel would correctly mean Israel is the victim and Palestine is the aggressor. But when Israel is occupying most of the Palestinian territory, with the intent to keep it and settle their population there, and all of this are acts of violence, you can't in good faith argue the Palestinians don't have the right to retaliate with force. Note that I don't support Hamas or any form of violence against civilians in any way (I have to mentions this because otherwise I will be wrongly accused of being a Hamas supporter), but until you face the fact that Israel is mass murdering and displacing civilians and taking their real estate and occupying it, we can't really move on. |
But let's examine your conditions, because they are SO badly chosen that EVEN Palestine satisfies all 3 of your conditions:
> 1) There is an ongoing long-term occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel.
Yep, Gaza is militarily occupied by hamas. They supposedly "won" an election, but then massacred everyone in the state. Even today hamas makes no attempt, other than with guns, to justify their position in Gaza. That's occupation.
> 2) Occupation is an act of war. Israel is waging war on Palestine. It is breaking agreements it is a part of.
Well, I don't think any sane person will argue hamas' purpose is anything other than self-enrichment through war.
> 3) Of course the aim of Israel is to absorb more-or-less all Palestinian territory into Israel proper.
Actually, it still isn't. Or at least, they haven't publicly declared this, and even the most right-wing members of parliament haven't gone there. So I don't even think this is actually true. Again, however, hamas has not only declared they intend to conquer all of Israel, they've publicly declared they will hunt down and kill every last Israeli (they of course used a certain religious word), anywhere on the planet. So they go quite a bit further than merely this.
I would like to remind you that these arguments are supposedly what you use to justify isolating Israeli civilians, even outside of Israel, even non-Israeli Jewish organizations are getting attacked by these demonstrations (e.g. a WW2 memorial in the Netherlands). So let's now see you agree to boycott Palestinians. After all, you're not a racist, and these reasons really are why you're suggesting a boycott, right? Since the very same facts certainly apply to Palestinians boycotting them is justified, right?
In fact they trivially apply to Turkey, Azerbaijan, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and even Morocco (to name one conflict zone: Western Sahara), and let's just be honest: it applies to essentially all muslim countries. All are militarily occupying territory.
So let's just boycott all muslims! After all, reasons 1, 2 AND 3 justify it!
Frankly, if you know any amount of history you must know that the Ottoman empire is not called an empire because of the favorite headdress of the caliph. It was a central group, in a single central city that militarily occupied anything they possibly could, like the Romans did. They even "exported" slaves from all their conquered territories, which was a ridiculous 80%-90% of their economy. That territory is what makes up muslim countries today, so of course everything is still mostly militarily occupied.
This is what I find so baffling about the whole Palestinian conflict. You are complaining "in the name of freedom" that a region in an empire revolted ... and that it won! Because in reality it is of course Israel that freed itself from muslim occupation (islam, the country, "not" the religion, between quotes because every muslim insists there's no difference) , not any kind of conquest. And you are doing this in the name of freedom? Seriously?
This really reminds me of the arguments everyone kept making defending Soviet Union behavior during the cold war. There were supposed rules and moral principles and "rational arguments" and ... proving the Soviet Union was good and an unfair victim ... and then their tanks rolled into Vienna (and 100 other places), DESPITE things like gulags and the holodomor and ... being well known to the people making these arguments.