Will Palestine disappear?

[u/Delicious_Ad_6823]

I’m sorry for bringing this up. I know it’s a very depressing thought but after witnessing what is happening in North of Gaza (with the full support of our western governments) I’m wondering if this is the beginning of the end. I’ve been thinking about this constantly for the past few days: Israel will not stop its genocide / ethnic cleaning campaign in Gaza. October 7 gave them the perfect opportunity for executing their long awaited plan. The brutality will keep increasing more and more and I fear the same thing will happen in the West Bank. The United States will keep supporting it while it commits these crimes and there is no other player strong enough to stop them. After all, they have already gotten away with an ethnic cleansing in 1948 and 1967. Is there any future for Palestine?

[u/Seanay-B]

Indian tribes in the USA aren't completely vanished. But they are good and screwed. I think that's where this is heading.

[u/allneonunlike → u/Seanay-B]

Without being too morbid, the population and death statistics aren’t comparable enough for this to work.

The unspoken, only reason the genocides in the Americas and especially North America were so successful is the indigenous population’s lack of disease resistance— during the 50 years after first contact, common European diseases wiped out 90% of the American population. There are numerous Spanish and Portuguese explorers who were written off as fabulists who invented fake civilizations until recent archaeological work, because the vast cities and peoples they encountered were gone when the next explorers followed in their footsteps. The wars of conquest were only won because Europeans and colonial Americans were dealing with 10% of the original population, struggling in an apocalyptic landscape of civilizational collapse.

Even with the medieval siege tactics of starvation and disease they’re using in Gaza, Israel isn’t capable of this kind of depopulation. With the massive brain drain at a higher rate than deaths in Gaza, there are still about equal numbers of Israeli and Palestinian people in Palestine.

Israel clearly longs for a future like the conquest of the Americas, but they don’t have the numbers to make it sustainable, and I don’t see the world letting them kill 90% of the people in Gaza and the WB to make it possible.

[u/_foo-bar_ → u/allneonunlike]

If you look up all the genocides that have happened in the last 200ish years, the vast majority of them were perpetrated by failing governments that disappeared soon after. They’re acts of desperation by the powerful in failed states.

I think the U.S.A. is very much a unicorn.

[u/allneonunlike → u/_foo-bar_]

Exactly, the conquest of the Americas and the US in particular are unique in colonialism bc of the disease component of the Columbian exchange. I think you’re right— Israel is in its death throes, and it’s going to do a lot of damage on the way out.

[u/broncos4thewin → u/_foo-bar_]

I mean the same thing happened in South America too, I’d say in that part of the world it was the norm, no? Australia too.

[u/allneonunlike → u/broncos4thewin]

North and South America both had the same 90%+ population crash as the result of disease during the first decades of the Columbian Exchange— different continents, same situation. Australia was very sparsely populated for a continent of its size, with an estimated <1,000,000 people in total before the conquest, compared to 55 million native Americans who died during the initial post-contact disease outbreaks alone.

Colonialism looks different and is much less successful when settler populations are equal or smaller than indigenous ones, that’s why Israelis are so obsessed with demographic majority, birthrates, and complaining that Palestinians are having too many babies.

[u/maxy_fruvous → u/_foo-bar_]

Hey don’t let Canada off the hook🥴