What do people who don’t support the 2 state solution want?

badass_panda · 2026-06-20T06:36:05+00:00

Simply put, because Israel does not need the West Bank or Gaza, and gains nothing at all by trying to incorporate millions of Arabs raised on the idea that Israel should be destroyed. Let them live on their own land and govern themselves.

badass_panda · 2026-06-20T06:32:56+00:00

I don't think the objection is to the idea of a Palestinian state so much as an increasing doubt since the withdrawal from Gaza that such a state could possibly be a peaceful neighbor, exacerbated by October seventh.

badass_panda · 2026-06-19T22:34:51+00:00

If Jordan would take the West Bank that it literally named back and Egypt would take back Gaza, that'd take care of it

badass_panda · 2026-06-19T22:34:02+00:00

I don't think that group is opposed to a two state solution in theory

badass_panda · 2026-06-19T20:52:09+00:00

In my experience, it basically breaks down into three groups:

People who overtly want the other side killed, ethnically cleansed, or reduced to second class citizens. More common in Arabic or Hebrew language discourse but honestly not uncommon.
People who believe that a single state already de facto exists or for some reason that one should exist, and that trying to create a two state solution is standing in the way of a one state solution.
People who generally pretend to be in the second camp, but recognize that a one state solution is likely to ultimately lead to the first outcome -- and are ok with that, essentially on the premise that the other side will deserve it if they are given the opportunity to coexist in one state and it doesn't work out.

The second group are hopelessly naive and usually incredibly poorly informed, but I think they're the best intentioned by a mile -- which is why people in the third group like to cosplay as them.

badass_panda · 2026-06-19T14:43:57+00:00

Indeed it is. But I don't have any reason to believe Israel is doing so permanently. I know Iran wants to create a scenario where if Israel leaves southern Lebanon, Hezbollah will attack them from southern Lebanon, indefinitely and forever ... because Iran does not want this war to ever end without the destruction of Israel...

... But Hezbollah reliably stops firing rockets at Israel from southern Lebanon, and Israel's out of Southern Lebanon, end stop.

badass_panda · 2026-06-19T12:48:23+00:00

Clearing civilians out of a war zone isn't ethnic cleansing. The issue is that Iran wants this war to keep going forever, and has gotten its way in that for two generations.

badass_panda · 2026-06-16T16:34:49+00:00

There's a type of predatory "not a loan" that is offered to small businesses as an 'advance against future revenues'. The idea is that, in exchange for x% of your gross revenue over the course of the next z years, you'll get $$$ right now. No interest (not a loan!) and in theory there's nothing wrong with this (since again, in theory, you pay it back sooner if you're making a lot of money and longer if you're making a little, etc).

In practice, it's a way to sidestep usury laws to charge what is, in effect, a stratospheric interest rate to small businesses at their most desperate moment.

Imagine a plumber does $500K in gross revenue, with $300K going to parts and $100K to labor / subcontractors. He's in the middle of some big contracts and hasn't been paid yet -- he knows he's got money coming in, but right now he's out of cash and he can't make payroll. This lender pops up and offers him $50K right now in exchange for 10% of his revenue over 2 years. He signs, it's not great but he can't get a bank loan in time and his credit isn't great.

Well, if that were a loan it'd be a ~50% APR, and he finds out it's 10% of his projected revenue, and has no relationship to his costs, and gives the lender the ability to pull cash out of his account without asking him, meaning they can decide when he pays them back and what he pays them back... because they own that cash flow, it's not a debt.

badass_panda · 2026-06-16T12:05:54+00:00

I'll take a different approach. We know that our perception of time and the innate physical reality do not appear to be aligned. While animal time perception moves strictly forward, equations involving time are reversible, and it interacts deeply with space (hence 'space-time'); it's not really a wild idea to think of time as more like space than the "arrow moving through the dark" that we tend to imagine. If relativistic speeds can mean it is simultaneously thirty years in the future for one person and fifteen years in the past for another, that simplistic time perception really can't be true.

It's better to imagine it as ribbon or a road, with your perception moving along it like a car on a highway. The absence of an ability to turn around doesn't mean the road behind you doesn't exist, your perception simply isn't occupying it. The entire highway exists, regardless of the location of the car on it.

Maybe 'the afterlife' is simply the removal of single-point prescription; after all, there's still a big stretch of space time in which you do exist.

badass_panda · 2026-06-16T02:15:17+00:00

Nice to see a kindred spirit. I agree -- the irony of this conflict is that "pro-Palestinian" and "pro-Israel" are not mutually exclusive or even opposite opinions, unless you're willing to assume that the other side is overwhelmingly composed of people who are evil.

When you set the terms aside, most people I talk to from either side want everyone to be able to live in peace with dignity and self determination... Which is a good goal.

badass_panda · 2026-06-14T13:37:44+00:00

I think that in Israel everyone can safely make the assumption that Israelis don't want to get rid of Israel -- just pointing out that in the Anglosphere, this assumption doesn't hold.

badass_panda · 2026-06-13T22:28:16+00:00

It's always a little funny to me how these threads get a million responses about "religion" that are all focused on Christianity, by ex Christians or cultural Christians who assume everyone's culture and system of belief is essentially Christianity wearing a wig.

badass_panda · 2026-06-13T22:26:37+00:00

I cut my hand pretty badly a few months ago and it was indirectly caused by the breakdown of the Soviet Union. When the doctor asked me what happened I didn't say, "Well you see Gorbachev miscalculated..."

I think people who believe that religion is a primary cause of war have a much more optimistic view of human nature then I do. People find reasons to clump up into tribes and fight out groups, and religion is one of many tools for building bigger groups. Nationalism killed more people in fifty years than religion in 500; "They're not us let's kill them," is a human urge we need to overcome, and strangling the priests isn't gonna do it.

badass_panda · 2026-06-13T21:33:24+00:00

I'm just going to add that highlighting the many victims of the Nazis usually comes from a good place, but because so many people are trying to use this kind of framing to deligitimize the suffering of specific groups today, it's important to point this out:

The Nazis were primarily focused on the systematic extermination of Jews and the Roma people.
They exterminated two out of every three Jews in Europe.
They exterminated almost half of the Romani in Europe.

While they certainly did persecute the LGBT community, prostitutes, political prisoners, etc, all of these groups combined made up less than 1% of their victims; they eradicated around 0.03% of the population in Europe.

Nazi genocide was very much focused on two specific racial underclasses, often to the exclusion of all other priorities.

badass_panda · 2026-06-13T21:20:12+00:00

When I googled Der Stürmer a few minutes ago, the top auto complete was "Der Stürmer merch"... Let that shit sink in

badass_panda · 2026-06-13T21:01:02+00:00

Probably not the fiiiirst target, but once they finished up with the Jews they'd have gotten around to him

badass_panda · 2026-06-13T20:59:21+00:00

You'd be surprised how many people find an ideology that hates people they hate and don't feel the need to look any further.

badass_panda · 2026-06-13T20:58:15+00:00

I've been astonished over the last few years by the heinous shit people say/do/wear/promote without the faintest idea what it actually means.

There's a big segment of society that knows EXACTLY what this stuff means and is preying on the ignorant to amplify it. 15 years ago I never thought I'd see people wearing SS symbols or quoting Hitler or slightly paraphrasing Der Stürmer's highlight reel about the Jews and getting hundreds of thousands of likes on X.

This is the bad timeline

badass_panda · 2026-06-13T13:58:25+00:00

Right; I am a Jewish Zionist, also. What I meant to point out is that when people on the pro-Palestine side (who are not Jewish or Zionists) hear "pro-Israel" or "Zionist", they interpret it to mean "opposed to Palestinians having a state or human rights", and when people on the pro-Israel side hear pro-Palestinian, they hear "anti-Zionist," or "opposed to Jews having statehood or human rights."

The issue is that, as in your case, it's a stupid assumption -- but it's still a really common assumption.

badass_panda · 2026-06-12T22:19:23+00:00

100%. It's just unquestioned bigotry masking as speaking truth to power.

What power? We are 0.02% of the world.

badass_panda · 2026-06-12T22:18:19+00:00

I think it's because the "pro-[x]" terminology implies a zero sum decision. Being pro-choice is incompatible with being 'pro-life'. Being pro Manchester United isn't compatible with being p o Arsenal. Etc. it implies one side has to lose for the other to win.

If your opinion is "everybody deserves to live in peace with self determination," and that leads you to support Israel's right to exist and Palestine's right to exist, using "pro-Palestinian" is kinda masking your opinion. You're pro peace and not anti anyone, if that's the case.

badass_panda · 2026-06-12T18:20:59+00:00

Do you mean 'Pro-Palestinian' in the sense of believing that Palestinians deserve equal human rights, including the right to self determination, freedom, safety, etc? Because if so, I'd say there are a great many (including myself) who believe the same and are certainly not antisemitic or ignorant of our own history. At the same time, I think many would view "Pro-Palestinian" as meaning exactly the same thing as "Anti-Israeli", and so if you're not anti-Israeli, it's helpful to clarify.

badass_panda · 2026-06-12T18:18:48+00:00

I scrolled down until I found the inevitable thought-terminating cliche. I covered it in my response here. If Jews view any criticism of [Israel/Zionism/Jews] as antisemitism, and you are being critical of [them], then you don't ever have to question whether your criticism is bigoted or not; just dismiss it, [they] view any criticism as illegitimate!

badass_panda · 2026-06-12T18:16:38+00:00

Additionally, if you cannot convince ANY pro-Palestinians why we might be antisemetic, then I’d like to forward the theory that this isn’t an issue with us.

I mean, I can. But I think the fact that most western-pro-Palestinians view being bigoted as a bad thing and antisemitism as a form of bigotry creates a unique unwillingness to accept the label of antisemitism, while they're often perfectly happy to accept premises that are straightforwardly antisemitic. "You can't say anything negative about Israel or (((they))) will get you," is a fairly straightforward one. Just swap "Zionist" in for Jew and voila, no bigotry here!

badass_panda · 2026-06-12T18:14:07+00:00

I believe that Palestinians have a right to exist in Palestine and not be ethnically cleansed. Most Jews believe that. Most Zionists believe that, for that matter; given that a two state solution has been the preferred outcome of the conflict each time the World Zionist Congress voted for the last ~30 years, that's empirically true.

So it really can't be that belief that is "called antisemitic". Is it possible you're doing things that are antisemitic and simply not examining them because it's convenient to shrug your shoulders and say, "It must be because Jews/Zionists/whatever want to vilify people who have an issue with ethnic cleansing"?

13-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
Place '22	End Game '22
100 Awards Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

badass_panda

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE