I fail to see how Bennett is far right in any sense of the word. Conservative yes, but the far right is inhabited by nut jobs like Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Whether you define support for an active military as militaristic versus actually taking aggressive military action is also another issue - they cannot be militaristic if you accept the second definition.
Isn't Bennett's big issue, for most of his political career, seizing the West Bank? He and his political party have been routinely described as far right.
We could define 'far' relatively, and say there are people further right, but I think the word stops being meaningful at that point.
There are few countries on Earth that have (a) directly officially threatened military action against another state, or (b) routinely bomb another state they are not officially at war with, the way Israel has. How are they not "taking aggressive military action"?
> (b) routinely bomb another state they are not officially at war with
In what sense are we not officially at war with Palestine? Nobody ever signed an armistice, ceasefire, or peace deal to end the War of 1948. Nobody even wants to. The official policies of both the PLO and Hamas remain "struggle until victory". There are internal political reasons for this that any knowledgeable person can describe, but as far as anyone who lacks inside influence is concerned, that's their policy and they're sticking to it.
> In what sense are we not officially at war with Palestine?
In the literal sense. The territories that form Palestine and the West Bank today were part of Egypt and Jordan before the six-day war. Israel occupied these territories during the war, then signed peace treaties with the countries it defeated. The three Arab countries (including Syria) attempted to recapture their territories again in 1973, but failed, and peace treaties were again signed between all four countries involved.
In the meantime, people living in the territories occupied by the Israeli military forces continued their fight for freedom, as all occupied people do. They made some strides in this direction with the Oslo accords, where they gained official recognition as a separate country under their own authority.
While open hostility existed on both sides since the beginning, there has never been an official war declaration between the PLO and Israel. Both have been routinely attacking and killing civilians and destroying infrastructure in each other's country forma long time - though Israel now has a vast upper hand and the killing and destruction has become more and more one sided against the people of Palestine.
That's like saying after d-day, the killing and destruction has become more one sided against the Axis Powers. Nobody takes that as a serious argument that the Allies shouldn't have done it (and please, no Nazi comparisons).
I mostly just don't like the rather extreme metaphysical claims involved in simply denying that there exists a state of war. If there is no war, what were the Oslo Accords for? To formalize terms of a post-war occupation? But then when was the war? Who surrendered?
To talk of a "peace process", or even of an entrenchment of the Occupation, you need to acknowledge the existence of a second party to the conflict, who in any practical point of view are in a military struggle, that being a war, with the other party. Maybe you agree with their military-political demands, maybe you disagree. But certainly they exist, and are in fact fighting.
If I were to treat it as reasoning rather than polemic, I would say it's projecting an expected - and feared - possible future backwards into the present. The idea seems to be, "we don't want the Palestinian Arabs to end up as a conquered, dispersed, exiled, or killed former nation, so we treat them as already dead, then cheer for them, being already dead, to rise up and prevent their own deaths ahead of time." That's getting a bit speculative and psychoanalytic, but it does sort of explain the grim, dark "rage against the dying of the light" attitude people display when trying to argue simultaneously that there's no war and that the Palestinian side of the war needs more support.
My objection to the whole complex is: there is no dying of the light. Millions of people are right there, year after year, dealing with various endemic problems because, by and large, the peculiar factionalization of their political system forbids them to do anything else. There's no dramatic moment to wait for. They're just gonna suffer more as long as everyone keeps cheering for them to put victory over coexistence.
> If there is no war, what were the Oslo Accords for? To formalize terms of a post-war occupation? But then when was the war? Who surrendered?
I explained my perspective on this: after the six-day war, Israel conquered the lands currently forming today's Palestinian territories and occupied them. As with any occupying force anywhere in the world, the occupied people started resisting this occupation.
The Oslo accords happened between the occupying force, Israel; and (representatives of) the resistance movement - represented by the PLO at the time, mostly. The accords marked the beginning of the modern Palestinian state (the "official" beginning was Yasser Arafat's 1988 declaration of independence, but that couldn't even happen in Palestine). They were maybe closer to the Good Friday deal in Ireland than to any kind of inter-state peace treaty.
So again, any regular war ended a loooong time ago (basically after the six-day war, but that was re-attempted in the 1973 Yom Kippur war); it ended with Israel de facto ruling all of the territory of modern Israel + all of the Palestinian territories. However, there are two aspects that prevented the fighting stopping there: (1) Israel wants to be a Jewish state, so they did not want to officially incorporate the Palestinian territories, since especially in 1967 they would have meant that the vast majority of Israel's population would have been Arabic; and (2) the people in the occupied territories started a bloody resistance movement against the occupation - fueled by historic religious hatred and concerns, but also by item (1) - the knowledge that they would not be allowed to be full citizens of Israel, even if they wanted to.
3) The Palestinians, both officially and according to opinion polls, want the land inside the Green Line, and refuse to end their "irregular militancy" (aka: war but you want to pretend their hands are clean) until they get it. This issue becomes more urgent after Israel withdrew all its forces and civilians unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, with a plan to do the same in the West Bank, and gets in return a militarized statelet that maintains a state of war with Israel. Worse, Hamas, the PLO, and their Western supporters start moving the goalpost of what constitutes "occupation", so that it stops meaning the presence of active military force and starts referring to the simple state of war between neighbors. Then you can keep telling Israel to "end the occupation of Gaza" so that "ending the occupation" becomes solely defined as meeting the demands of Gaza's ruling government.
Now, I'll bite my political bullets and say that I still think the Gaza Withdrawal was the right thing to do, but I also find it totally obvious and sensible that Israeli voters don't want to repeat the experience with the West Bank, which has high ground from which a rocketeer or a sniper can take easy pot-shots at Israeli civilians down below. I can especially see why most voters don't want to repeat the experience, given that even our supposed Western "friends" and "allies" are willing to redefine words so that we somehow become the perpetrators of a crime whose commission is entirely in someone else's control.
To wit, if someone is accused of assault, it is in fact an alibi to have been a hundred miles away when the supposed assault took place. If Israel is accused of "occupation", an alibi becomes a contradiction-in-terms: "occupation" is now when you have no troops on the "occupied" soil but your neighbor keeps up a state of war with you for their own political reasons.
Israel maintains control of all Palestinian airspace and the Gaza coast. Israel maintains the right to march its military or police inside the West Bank or Gaza or to bomb them without considering this an act of war. They have regularly arrested Palestinian elected officials. They control all resources entering Gaza and the West Bank, particularly water, food and construction materials, and punish people by reducing rations if they feel they are not complying with some decision.
The withdrawal from Gaza was also not some gesture of autonomy towards Palestine as you make it out to be. It was a demographic calculation, again going back to the problem of the Jewish state - the balance of Jewish people and Arabs in Israel was getting too low, so the leadership at the time decided it was more important to stop the colonization effort and bring the Jewish population back into Israel. This was widely reported and the official public reason given at the time.
This policy has also been illegally reversed recently, so new illegal Israeli colonies are again popping up, though I believe mostly in the West Bank.
So, by all possible measures, even if they do not have permanently stationed troops there anymore, Israel is occupying Gaza.
Imagine if China were flying fighter jets over Taiwan, refusing entry to any ships they didn't inspect, refusing to allow concrete or food to be delivered, and had a tight grip on water resources. Further imagine if Chinese troops were freely entering Taiwan and arresting people the regime deemed "terrorists" or simply "problematic", and they were regularly bombing Taiwanese buildings in retaliation for terrorist acts, or just in response to democratic choices they didn't like. Would you not say that China was occupying Taiwan, or at least doing something very very close to it?
It's also important to note that Israel itself does not recognize Palestine as a state, so it is very hard to see by what measure Israel could claim that it is at war with Palestine.
>Israel maintains the right to march its military or police inside the West Bank or Gaza or to bomb them without considering this an act of war.
No we don't. These are acts of war. We're at war with Palestine.
>The withdrawal from Gaza was also not some gesture of autonomy towards Palestine as you make it out to be.
I didn't say anything about motives. I said we took our soldiers and settlers out of Gaza. That is a material fact.
>Would you not say that China was occupying Taiwan, or at least doing something very very close to it?
I would say that China was blockading or besieging Taiwan, with which it was at war, and would apply the same terms for Israel's war against Gaza.
>It's also important to note that Israel itself does not recognize Palestine as a state, so it is very hard to see by what measure Israel could claim that it is at war with Palestine.
> No we don't. These are acts of war. We're at war with Palestine.
You keep insisting on this historical revisionism. When did this war start? Between which two states is it happening? When did the declaration of war happen? At most, you can call this is a civil war, since it is taking place entirely on Israel's territory (according to Israel's own definition!).
The more historically correct way to look at it is that there is a resistance movement fighting against Israel's occupation. This is the simple, undeniable historical truth.
Israel is, undeniably, the original aggressor against the people of Gaza and the West Bank, though over the years there have been many heinous acts committed by all parties.
If the Allies had started bombing German civilian targets more as they were gaining an upper hand, or even had they not subsided in their bombing of civilian targets, then yes, it would be the same, and it would not be excusable.
When fighting against a dirty enemy, it is mostly acceptable to be dirty in turn. But as your enemy is close to defeat and is losing any power to harm you, you're supposed to stop the dirty tactics that were necessary and (somewhat) justified earlier.
>But as your enemy is close to defeat and is losing any power to harm you, you're supposed to stop the dirty tactics that were necessary and (somewhat) justified earlier.
That is:
1) Not how international law actually works,
2) Not how anyone actually behaved in World War II,
3) Not remotely applicable before an official surrender is issued.
The law says that you have to call off military action and start releasing POWs into civilian life once their government surrenders. There is absolutely no legal or moral requirement to "let up" or "go easy" on a government that is strategically losing but refuses to surrender. This is especially so when the enemy has repeatedly invoked conditions of total war by violating the typical soldier/civilian distinction (eg: storing weapons in civilian dwellings, sending soldiers to attack without uniform or serial numbers, and various other tactics commonly labeled "terrorism" for lack of a unified legal category).
That's ok then, as the government of Gaza was created by Israel's own accord - so at least in 2005, we can both agree that there could have been no state of war between occupied Gaza and Israel. Then, in 2006 the Israeli backed government held free elections, in which the people of Gaza voted for Hamas. The immediate result, before Hamas had even formed a government (but after someone kidnapped 1 Israeli soldier), was intense hostility from Israel, bombing civilian infrastructure (a war crime, if indeed there is a war), arresting elected Hamas officials, denying Hamas members transit between Gaza and the West Bank, and other acts.
So, if you really want to claim there is an actual war, then this war can only be the one started in 2006 by Israel in a surprise attack in retaliation for the democratic vote of the people of Gaza. The war started then with a surprise attack and immediately resorting to war crimes by Israel (Gaza would follow suit with their own attack on Israeli civilians).
> In what sense are we not officially at war with Palestine?
Israel is a part of Palestine. Palestine has never been a state. How can "we" (Israel, I presume) have ever been officially at war with a territory they are occupying? How can you sign an armistice to end a war that was never declared?
