doccitrus
The AANES started with the PYD, the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, a Kurdish nationalist party fighting for some form of national rights (the right to speak their own native languages, the right to celebrate holidays associated with their culture, and in some cases against displacement) with offshoots in every country that includes part of ‘Kurdistan’ (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, IIRC).
The Assad government has been involved in repression of its Kurdish population including everything mentioned parenthetically above as well as efforts to displace Kurdish populations and replace them with Arab ones.
The AANES has other ethnic constituencies but many of them are also minorities in Syria. Minority rights, and in particular cultural rights and self-determination is a big deal in their philosophy and governance structure.
I guess the Assad government neither wants to cede that level of control, of devolution of power to local entities, nor that approach to the various ‘national questions’ for ethnic minorities in Syria.
Thanks for writing out your thinking on this explicitly, and for inviting discussion in that way.
Public support in Israel for Israeli military operations is typically very high (70% or more, often even above 80%). The only sense in which those supporting massively disproportionate violence and indiscriminate killing of civilians are a minority is in terms of rhetorical style— not the substance of supporting the actual operations that kill people.
Moreover, many of the Israelis on TV ‘frothing at the mouth’ are current or former government officials. To characterize them as a ‘tiny minority’ is extremely misleading about their role in effecting this violence.
This kind of functional role of ‘bad settlers’ is well-documented in settler-colonialism, and there are even instances of leaders and government officials in the United States case admitting the necessity of ‘unofficial’ settler violence, from paramilitaries to illegal settlements and more.
Can any comrades with more recent contact with this material than I’ve had help me out with a citation on this, ideally ‘from the horse’s mouth’?
I’d question the nature of that support. I’m sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game in protecting them, however support for the recent bombings and ground assaults is significantly lower.
Well, a large supermajority of Israelis support continuing the current campaign, which is inarguably characterized by indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza, ‘until Hamas is completely eliminated’. This is a clear statement of support not just for the bombing which has so far taken place, but a claim that it must continue (indefinitely— until reaching a goal that is arguably impossible).
I’m sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game
Are you familiar with the concept of strategic depth? Given Israel’s limited size and accessible terrain, its geography profoundly lacks this feature. This means Israel’s defensive capabilities have a virtual ceiling, and the ability to make strategic retreats against an invasion is very limited.
For this reason, Israel has a long history of preferring offensive action over defensive action. And indeed, a large plurality of those polled by IVP, as reported on in the article cited above, have come out and said that Israel’s biggest mistake leading up to October 7 was failing to carry out more offensive operations in Gaza prior to the attack.
Calls for Israel to ‘step up its military game’ are intimately tied to offensive action in Israel, and the pretense that they could conceivably relate only to defensive measures for ‘protection’ or ‘safety’ is unsustainable under any historical scrutiny.
there are many in Israeli leadership roles behaving that way. It’s hard to say whether they genuinely feel that way themselves or if they’re just encouraging it for their own benefit - Netanyahu is probably the latter, in my opinion
Why such interest in the rhetoric when there is a growing pile of civilian corpses behind it? Who cares what is in Netanyahu’s heart when the evident fact is that his finger is pulling the trigger?
Most people in any nation just want peace and prosperity for themselves, rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.
The demand for peace without justice is a demand to normalize violence. Are you familiar with the concept of ‘normalization’ in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or in the BDS movement? If you aren’t, regardless of the outcome of this discussion, I urge you to take the time to review and at least consider this recent lecture on the concept. Peace is indeed vital for all human beings, but how peace is demanded is equally vital.
rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.
And yet Israel, a country in which conscription is mandatory for both sexes, military training typically begins at age 14, a large supermajority of the population serves in the military, and whose military and intelligence agencies are rooted in paramilitaries that antedate the formal state by decades, has been engaged continuously in exactly such a project of forceful expulsion for more than a hundred years, without pause.
If this history is unfamiliar to you, or Palestinian displacement has been presented to you primarily as very recent or unintentional, you may find some deeper engagement with the topic enlightening, if challenging (and you may not agree with all the analysis you read, of course).
There are a large number of books, including books by Jewish Israeli scholars, currently available for free on this topic.
If you’re interested in diving deeper, outside the context of this argument, please let me know. If you have preferences for audiobooks, videos, or other formats, I can help you find something that works for you.
I’m also willing to do a ‘reading exchange’ with you if you’re open to that— I’ll read one related book of your choosing if, after you give me a sense of what texts most interest you, you agree to read one book I recommend, and we can discuss both books together.
I understand that the latter is a big time commitment, so no big deal if you can’t do it.
Bumping this because as someone new to this community, I’m feeling it too. I really appreciate the quality of discussion here. People put a lot of effort into their posts, and it shows. This is a good community for political education and moral support.
Just stumbled upon this. It’s very good, but not easy to watch.
not to mention a genocide denier engaged in a prolonged process* of brutal ethnic cleansing of his own.
Netanyahu and Erdogan make an astonishing pair: two ethnic cleansers, each pointing the finger at the other for ethnic cleansing. And Genocide Joe is holding Bibi’s hand.
*: This is actually a source focused on the Kurdish resistance in Turkey and the early part of the evolution of its national aspirations rather than one focused on Turkey’s perspective or activity per se. I chose it because it quickly came to mind for me and covers the ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure of Turkey’s Kurds but was written long before the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, in which the Kurds of the Ocalanist PYD became ‘good, sympathetic rebels’ for American media consumption. I want to highlight a good source on the PKK as a revolutionary leftist/progressive nationalist party— an older source relatively uncontaminated by American opportunism in the Syrian Civil War, which I knew I wouldn’t quickly find on the first page of Google.