BadenMarch 31, 2018 at 14:4415350 views154 comments
This discussion was created with comments split from The Shoutbox
Comments (154)
unenlightenedMarch 31, 2018 at 14:10#1682880 likes
I decided it might be unwise to start a thread, but in light of various accusations of anti-semitism against the labour party in the UK, I leave this video here. And if anyone can bear to watch it through, I would ask whether it is just possible that some Jewish people are racist; that the state of Israel is institutionally racist; that the victims have tragically become the oppressors? Am I even allowed to ask?
Reply to unenlightened My thought is that the problem with your post in the Shoutbox is likely what you intended to avoid by placing it in the Shoutbox. I get that you feared starting a thread would spark controversial remarks that could be designated anti-Semitic, but I also think by placing a single video here as sort of the definitive description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without offering a full forum for complete discussion sort of limits the responses.
I can't say I watched the whole video, but I did watch the opening lines, which had a woman declaring that Israel's right to exist was rooted in God's decree alone, which was intended to delegitimize Israel's right to exist and it then said Palestinian children were being rounded up in an effort to control the population, placing Israel as monsters who enjoy injuring children.
Questions like what gives our Australian announcer the right to live on Aboriginal lands are not discussed, nor is the question of what has instigated the martial law tactics of the Israelis addressed (although maybe later in the film they offer a balanced explanation of both sides, but it seems not).
Anyway, the right to possess land is complicated in all instances, but the right to protect it generally not. So I'd think a thread would be more appropriate for complete discussion, but I also think special care should be made to avoid suggestions that the Jews are monsters or that the Palestinians are dogs, which are sometimes the unspoken thoughts of the advocates for either side.
ArguingWAristotleTiffMarch 31, 2018 at 15:01#1683000 likes
I am afraid to watch it. I have this unappreciated power of seeing something once and never being able to get it out of my mind, even years later. I walked out of Bambi in the forest fire scene and I couldn't finish the Lion King after he chased his brother off a cliff to be eaten alive.
Please advise me: is this a video that has hard to watch images?
I noticed that the film had comments turned off on vimeo, which is one reason I was hesitant about the thread. But I think people should look at it (no children though). There are some amazing Jewish Israeli people trying to change things for the better on the film, so though it is indeed one sided, and though there are big issues about Australia and Britain and anywhere, this is this and it needs to be known about too. Hopefully we can avoid the 'your atrocities are worse than mine' arguments, along with the 'you're racist for calling me racist' ones. But probably not. :sad:
Anyway, the right to possess land is complicated in all instances, but the right to protect it generally not. So I'd think a thread would be more appropriate for complete discussion, but I also think special care should be made to avoid suggestions that the Jews are monsters or that the Palestinians are dogs, which are sometimes the unspoken thoughts of the advocates for either side.
I generally avoid discussions of Israel and the Palestinians and I won't make an exception here except to make one point about moral perspective. Bad things happen to people all over the world. There is violence. People lose their homes. There is oppression and terrorism. As a US citizen, I don't necessarily need to weigh in on who's right, who's wrong, and what's up. Except when I share responsibility for what's happening, which is certainly true in the Middle East. My country has had a big role in screwing that part of the world up. I don't feel any need to fix things. That may not be possible. Often I feel that our continued involvement just makes things worse.
I can't say I watched the whole video, but I did watch the opening lines, which had a woman declaring that Israel's right to exist was rooted in God's decree alone, which was intended to delegitimize Israel's right to exist and it then said Palestinian children were being rounded up in an effort to control the population, placing Israel as monsters who enjoy injuring children.
Questions like what gives our Australian announcer the right to live on Aboriginal lands are not discussed, nor is the question of what has instigated the martial law tactics of the Israelis addressed (although maybe later in the film they offer a balanced explanation of both sides, but it seems not).
There is a difference between systematic, institutionalized discrimination and sanctioning of rights violations in a double standard manner and individual acts of discrimination. Any form of institutionalized sanctioning of rights violation should be criticized and stigmatized. I see no reason why not, and I see an especial need to pipe it down on a group who's very existence was threatened by the same elitist, God-endowed form of discrimination being enacting now. This documentary should be taken as a case study of discrimination and oppression in a modern state, not a wholesale condemnation of a people group.
And just because colonial communities of the past committed terrible acts does not legitimize nor should it relax condemnation of it in the present.
Questions like what gives our Australian announcer the right to live on Aboriginal lands are not discussed, nor is the question of what has instigated the martial law tactics of the Israelis addressed (although maybe later in the film they offer a balanced explanation of both sides, but it seems not).
While I do agree that the ultra-orthodox community - though they have the loudest voice (let's not forget Yitzak Rabin) - is actually a small minority in Israel and we could say the same for many countries in the world that violate children' rights, i.e. child soldiers, slave labour and sexual crimes; Australia indeed has a deplorable past with the genocide they have committed against Indigenous peoples and even today continue to violate international human rights conventions with their horrendous treatment of asylum seekers, but it is not about the right of self-determination neither is it pointing fingers here and saying that one is worse than the other. The rights of children are universal and it is our responsibility to protect this right. The question here is not about the possession of land but whether there is any justification to violate Convention of the Rights of a Child for the sake of security.
No.
In Israel, martial law prohibits freedom of expression and association that enables the military to exercise powers that can detain and intimidate children who are subject to martial law and Israeli police continue - in places like East Jerusalem - to violate adopted laws such as Law 5731-1971 (âYouth Lawâ) - that attempts to improve the treatment of minors. Order Number 1745 explains the lawful process of interrogation against minors suspected of committing security offences and yet within it - 136d(b)6 - it hypocritically states, âThis article does not apply to minors suspected of committing security offenses,â So, :chin: ? I suspect the intention of the Knesset amending the Penal Code to increase the sentence of stone throwing with a minimum imprisonment of three years is to use intimidation to protect residents living in illegally built settlements in the occupied territories of Palestine and/or to try and change the mindset by using fear tactics to enforce submission. It is dubious to say the least whether these hostilities will in fact prevent the makings of future terrorists. These children experience mental health and post-traumatic symptoms from being detained from their families, stripped naked, interrogated, before going back to living in proximity to a wall protected by armed soldiers that continue to use aggressive tactics.
I don't care what country you are from or what religion you follow. The rights of children are universal and to use the pointing fingers card is really not on.
Reply to TimeLine My reference to Australia was not to suggest that since the Australians violate civil rights, it's hypocritical for the Australian presenter to condemn Israel for doing the same thing. It also was not meant to suggest Australians are particularly egregious violators of civil rights. I suppose an argument could be made that hints at anti-Semitic motives if it is indeed Jews being specifically targeted by the international community for its violations, but I don't think that's the case candidly. I do believe the interest in Middle East politics is all about the seas of oil in the region and the need for a strong US ally there. Displacement that occurs in various lesser known regions in Africa, for example, get no attention because there is no economic interest there.
My reference to Australia was over the question of what constitutes legitimate land occupation, and the question can be turned to any nation anywhere. It's no more legitimate to say my quarter acre lot is mine because I bought it through legitimate means under US law as it to say it is mine because my ancestors put a stake in it 1000 years ago. Land is acquired by war, government force, treaty, and purchase, and the question isn't clear when it's morally rightfully one's own, which places Israel's rightful presence as morally ambiguous as Australia's and the US's. The Palestinian right to the lands is just as morally right as the Manhattan Indians right to NYC, only in the latter case no one takes such a claim at all seriously.
And that takes me to the next point, is that if we accept Israel's right to occupy all the lands it does (for example, accepting the Levy Commission's report of its right to the disputed territories), then it is understandable that there be a certain ferocity in protecting those lands. You'd certainly not expect much less from a sovereign nation in allowing the takeover its land. To be sure, if the Mexicans decided they wanted to reclaim Texas, it would end very badly for them, with little public outcry.
And this takes us to the children. I absolutely wish to protect innocent children and even to afford guilty children lesser punishments than adults, but there is no nation on earth that doesn't detain children. Israel, if you take the generous view toward the Israelis (which I understand you do not), is a nation under constant attack and fears for its safety and its continued prosperity. Amid the growing violence, it did in fact increase mandatory sentences for rock throwing, although the Israeli Supreme Court did not allow anywhere close to three year sentences for it, and the sentences in facts were measured in terms of weeks and not years. I would assume again that should some teenagers take it upon themselves to throw rocks at police in the US, I could certainly see sentences being handed down in that range. Say what you wish, but throwing stones into crowds and at officers is a real threat to public order, and doubtfully something you would accept in your community, unless, of course, you shared in the outrage of the rock throwers. But, of course, in this hypothetical, we are assuming the rightful occupation of the Israelis, which you do not.
So, yes, innocent children should not be detained, but dangerous children should, still keeping in mind they are children and should not be treated as punitively as adults.
The British Labour Party is anti-Semitic. The current issue of The Economist magazine even has an article on the topic. The Economist also featured articles on the anti-Semitism of the British Labour Party being so prevalent that top Jewish leaders of the party had to resign, because of all the threats they were receiving from party members.
Land is acquired by war, government force, treaty, and purchase, and the question isn't clear when it's morally rightfully one's own, which places Israel's rightful presence as morally ambiguous as Australia's and the US's. The Palestinian right to the lands is just as morally right as the Manhattan Indians right to NYC, only in the latter case no one takes such a claim at all seriously.
I accept the legitimacy of sovereign states as defined by international law whereby such states as members of an international community are subject to the equality principle based on particular characteristics as per the declarative theory test. This would make Israel, as a sovereign state, subject to international human rights law (see Montevideo Convention) however the erosion of human rights is when legitimacy of statehood is accepted on the basis of national law where sovereign powers begin to exercise categorical breaches of human rights obligations based often on potentially ideological underpinnings and violating the League of Nations Mandate (hence the "certain ferocity in protecting those lands" and the Levy Commission Report).
In 1992, Australia' high court case Mabo vs. Queensland overturned the Terra Nullius concept used by the colonialists as justification for the possession of Australian land, despite the indigenous population living here for thousands of years and this declaration was likely inhabited by the vicious concept that the indigenous people were not 'civilised' and why the disgusting White Australia Policy only recognised as loathsome in the 1970s. It took even longer for the government to apologise for the genocide and even the latter is a word not used to describe what they did to indigenous children.
Referring to your statement, indeed, Palestinian statehood has regularly failed the State Recognition tests for a number of reasons, but not what you suggest (vis-a-vis land acquisition) but rather the ambiguity of permanent characteristics where the government is unable to consolidate adequate control over the territories. You speak of war, force, treaty and purchase, but there is also constitutive recognition by the international community - hence why UN resolutions recognising Palestinian statehood cannot be undermined, as well as other characteristics such as defined territory, a solid and unified system of governance, international relations and diplomatic capacity, and finally a permanent population all of which have been undermined both as a result of bad Palestinian leadership but - the latter in particular as per the settlement buildings - by Israel because the intention is clear that they are infringes the Palestinian right to self-determination.
The security and continuous threats of violence plays a pivotal role in this and it is clearly understandable given the constant threats against Israel and particularly the disbelief against the existence of Israel. If cases against Israel were taken to international courts, Hamas would likely be guilty since Israel was merely defending against attacks aimed at Israeli civilians. But if we really want to discuss land occupation and international law, we can remove the potentially emotive elements relating to the Palestinians by focusing on the Golan Heights.
So, yes, innocent children should not be detained, but dangerous children should, still keeping in mind they are children and should not be treated as punitively as adults.
Ahed Tamimi is one such girl detained by the Israeli police for kicking a soldier and while I congratulate the soldiers in that instance for not responding to her frustrated resistance, is she "dangerous" enough to merit 10 years imprisonment?
I don't understand how you would assume that I am not taking a "generous view" toward the Israelis when I am well aware of the continuous security threats and have said it as such - hence the relationship between security threats and children's rights - but children are not dangerous. You need good people in dangerous cities to respect and trust the police, just as much as these children belong in schools, to be protected by a safe home, and to be given opportunities so that they can see Israel for what it really is, a beautiful place. Do you not understand that?
Ahed Tamimi is one such girl detained by the Israeli police for kicking a soldier and while I congratulate the soldiers in that instance for not responding to her frustrated resistance, is she "dangerous" enough to merit 10 years imprisonment?
From the article :
"But with Israelâs military court system boasting a 99.7 per cent conviction rate for Palestinians, the odds donât look good."
Why the bloody hell is a minor judged in front of a military court for a misdemeanor?
Why would anyone want to hold a "generous view" of those who commit such abuse?
Reply to Hanover The beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes back to the beginning of Zionism (late 19th century and forward) and the flight of Jews from Germany before WWII. It was acknowledged at the beginning that bringing non-Arabs into Palestine would be problematic for the resident Arabs. The land was already fully occupied -- of course; it wasn't just sitting there empty, waiting for settlers.
There was resistance from the Arab residents from the beginning, and became more intense once the State of Israel was declared.
It has been evident for quite some time that the Jewish infiltration into the west bank, with settlements and roads, would prevent the Palestinians from organizing a contiguous territory. Further, there was, if I remember correctly, an intention (in the British Balfour Declaration) to include the West Bank as part of Israel. That didn't happen de jure; it's been de facto.
Israel now has the problem of pacifying the Arab population in its midst, never a nice process. It is traumatic for the resident Palestinians to endure, and it is degrading to Israeli culture to do it. I don't see an acceptable way out for either side.
The point I want to reinforce, is that this isn't a new problem: it was created when the first Jews left Europe for Palestine. This is, for better or worse, the way the world works. Columbus's expedition, then later the British, was the beginning of the end for native western hemisphere cultures. When Australia was discovered and claimed by the British, that too was the beginning of the end for the aboriginal culture.
Nobody lands on the shore, discovers people already present, and says, "Oh, look, Jack. See, there are people already living here. That means we must leave so as not to disturb them. They were here first, and they deserve to remain the only residents here."
No. Never happens that way. Instead, calculations are made about what it will take to win a beachhead, then move in settlers. If the calculating is sound, the discoverers will lead to settlers and that will be either the end of the existing residents, or a very long war and then the end of the earlier residents.
Colonial expansion by one people normally occurs at the expense of the natives -- in this case, Arabs. It may not be nice; just; fair; reasonable; and so on, but that is the way the world works.
Questions like what gives our Australian announcer the right to live on Aboriginal lands are not discussed
Criticism of those in Australia that seek to deny or downplay the genocides of Australian indigenous people are right and just, as are those of people who do likewise in the US, Canada or many other developed countries where people live affluent lives on land that was stolen from the inhabitants a few centuries ago, and where the few survivors of those indigenous inhabitants have mostly been oppressed and discriminated against in the intervening years.
What differentiates this from the Israel-Palestine case is that I can vehemently criticise the Australian government when it seeks to downplay the country's past genocide (as it shamefully does far too often), without being accused of racism against the current majority inhabitants of Australia. Yet when one criticises the Israeli government one is branded as anti-semitic. Or, if one is one of the many Jews that levy similar criticism against the Israeli government's actions, one is branded a self-hating Jew. I'm not saying that people on this forum, who are mostly a pretty thoughtful bunch, would spray those accusations of anti-semitism or self-hatred around. But there are regrettably very many in the wider world that do exactly that.
Nobody lands on the shore, discovers people already present, and says, "Oh, look, Jack. See, there are people already living here. That means we must leave so as not to disturb them. They were here first, and they deserve to remain the only residents here."
I think that what happens is that they land on shore and see a lot of unoccupied land. Land is not an asset as such, it has to be worked to become productive, so there would be no notion that the new arrivals were depriving anyone of anything.
There was something of that notion in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, They were taking on unproductive land, so bringing it into production would benefit everyone.
Of course, this idea dates from a period when it was assumed that Jewish immigration to Israel would only ever involve a tiny number of idealists.
The establishment of Israel was an act of utter imperialist arrogance which has dropped the world into a pit of violence that will last a thousand years.
Despite no final agreement by the League of Nations of the UN with the neighbouring polities Jewish terrorists seized control of Palestine and there has been bloodshed ever since.
Israel was conceived during a time when eugenics was respectable and at a time when race was thought to be a viable proposition. Hitler accepted the position of the Zionists as it was his view that founding a state on racist lines was a good idea.
Ahed Tamimi is one such girl detained by the Israeli police for kicking a soldier and while I congratulate the soldiers in that instance for not responding to her frustrated resistance, is she "dangerous" enough to merit 10 years imprisonment?
Consider what is being said about Israel as the result of a 16 (now 17) year old child for striking an officer. She was no stranger to intentional provocations against military officers in what basically amounts to a war zone. She is not a little child, but someone who was specifically protesting and physically resisting for the purpose of impacting public opinion about Israel in her effort to gain political advantage where she could not gain it militarily. She was not part of a round up effort of children and she wasn't whisked away after a late night knock on the door. Might a 16 year old be sentenced to 8 months in detention in the US after repeated resistance against police officers, especially if it occurred in areas where officer's safety was threatened? Maybe, it wouldn't be that extraordinary, but does that rise the level of declaring Israel a nation rife with human rights abuses? Quoting TimeLine
I don't understand how you would assume that I am not taking a "generous view" toward the Israelis when I am well aware of the continuous security threats and have said it as such - hence the relationship between security threats and children's rights - but children are not dangerous.
Fair enough, it's likely I'm more defensive than you are ungenerous when it comes to Israel, but you're views on children are overly defensive and entirely unrealistic in your declaration that they are not dangerous. Evil doesn't suddenly emerge at 18 years old.
What differentiates this from the Israel-Palestine case is that I can vehemently criticise the Australian government when it seeks to downplay the country's past genocide (as it shamefully does far too often), without being accused of racism against the current majority inhabitants of Australia. Yet when one criticises the Israeli government one is branded as anti-semitic. Or, if one is one of the many Jews that levy similar criticism against the Israeli government's actions, one is branded a self-hating Jew. I'm not saying that people on this forum, who are mostly a pretty thoughtful bunch, would spray those accusations of anti-semitism or self-hatred around. But there are regrettably very many in the wider world that do exactly that.
I'm no fan of calling people racist to end discussion, but that occurs in all sorts of settings. It's a worn out battle cry here in the US, recited often after a Republican speaks. The race card can only be played when race is at play, so one group of white Australians can hardly call another group of white Australians who are decrying the past abuses against the aborigines anti-white for their views. It just wouldn't make sense. I suppose I might be limited in defending Australia's past treatment of aboriginal peoples for fear of claims of racism aimed at me, but I don't know, I'm not Australian and don't know the social limitations placed on such conversations. But when you're criticizing Israel, it can be seen a criticism of Jews specifically, a historically abused minority, and therefore the cries of racism. My guess is that sometimes it is prejudice against Jews, sometimes not, but we all understand an ad hom doesn't respond to a legitimate argument.
Israel was conceived during a time when eugenics was respectable and at a time when race was thought to be a viable proposition. Hitler accepted the position of the Zionists as it was his view that founding a state on racist lines was a good idea.
And so it's your position that the founding of Israel was motivated by a desire to foist Jewish dominance on the world as opposed to saving an ancient people from the verge of extinction?
unenlightenedApril 01, 2018 at 13:50#1685750 likes
Yet when one criticises the Israeli government one is branded as anti-semitic. Or, if one is one of the many Jews that levy similar criticism against the Israeli government's actions, one is branded a self-hating Jew. I'm not saying that people on this forum, who are mostly a pretty thoughtful bunch, would spray those accusations of anti-semitism or self-hatred around. But there are regrettably very many in the wider world that do exactly that.
I'm not sure that there are that many, but they manage to dominate the media, and have undue influence.
Hitler accepted the position of the Zionists as it was his view that founding a state on racist lines was a good idea.
Ken Livingston, ex mayor of London, was kicked out of the labour party for saying exactly that. His defence that it is a matter of historical record was dismissed as - irrelevant?
But by contrast, this guy is not going to get kicked out of the conservative party anytime soon.
unenlightenedApril 01, 2018 at 16:32#1685960 likes
Consider what is being said about Israel as the result of a 16 (now 17) year old child for striking an officer. She was no stranger to intentional provocations against military officers in what basically amounts to a war zone. She is not a little child, but someone who was specifically protesting and physically resisting for the purpose of impacting public opinion about Israel in her effort to gain political advantage where she could not gain it militarily. She was not part of a round up effort of children and she wasn't whisked away after a late night knock on the door. Might a 16 year old be sentenced to 8 months in detention in the US after repeated resistance against police officers, especially if it occurred in areas where officer's safety was threatened? Maybe, it wouldn't be that extraordinary
Repeat after me : "A minor has no fucking place being judged in front of a military court for a misdemeanor. The country who does this is a gakhole with no respect for common decency and international laws.".
Its not hard. If you can't do that, sorry, but you are a human rights violation apologist. It's that simple.
It's a worn out battle cry here in the US, recited often after a Republican speaks.
Yes it is counterproductive, and sometimes unfair, in that context as well. I find most accusations of racism regrettable, no matter who utters them. In most cases they lead either to an escalating exchange of insults or to a pointless semantic argument over what the word 'racism' means.
I think that the arguments that are made against certain policies using an allegation that they are racist can be made better by appealing to human values of compassion and fairness.
Human rights, whatever they may be, are dependant upon circumstances. You have the right to live unless you are trying to kill me. You have the right to due process, unless we are on the field of combat. No particular right, I'd submit, dictates that another commit suicide and allow you to kill them.
So, is there an instance when an enemy combatant might be afforded lesser due process rights than a citizen in a milatarized zone even if 16 years old? Of course. It just depends on the circumstances on the ground, the danger posed by the conduct, and precisely the due process limitations in the military court versus the civil court.
The vitriol and indignation are generally unhelpful.
Whataboutism is certainly more unhelpful. Indignation is justifiable when one is facing indignities. You are doing the apology of Human Rights violations. That is what your pretense of mild-maneurism is obfuscating.
Opinions are dependant upon circumstances. In a circumstance where you claim that there are justifications for a 16 years old girl facing a military court for a misdemeanor, it is clearly justifiable to hold the opinion that you are, in this instance, batshit crazy wrong.
... but I also think special care should be made to avoid suggestions that the Jews are monsters or that the Palestinians are dogs, which are sometimes the unspoken thoughts of the advocates for either side.
Circumstances can make us all monsters and dogs, and I have the luxury of sitting in my judgemental armchair at a safe distance, and the sad truth is I care more about the overspill into my local politics than any of the people over there. The conflict is older than me, and I am old.
Nevertheless, I have a principle that I hope is agreeable to most, that those with power over others are responsible for them. I don't think there is a question on which side the balance of power lies. And I don't think the film is mere propaganda; one can argue and question individual incidents, but there is too much, too well supported from Israelis as well as Palestinians, testimony from the Australian journalists, credible video evidence. This is not peace-keeping, this is not a measured response to threat, this is a terror campaign intended to totally subjugate demoralise and eventually evict or eliminate opposition. There is little sign of a will to reach an accommodation.
And that comes from a dreadful history - it is understandable. It is, in a sense, a continuation of WW2, itself the culmination of 2000 years of oppression. Psychologically, we are afraid to stand alone, and so we identify with the tribe, and the tribe demands loyalty unto death, that is the security it offers.
So between the dogs and the monsters, my loyalty is always with the dogs, and when the dogs become monsters and the monsters become dogs, I change sides. I am disloyal, I become a traitor.
I know plenty of people who are appalled by the actions of Israel. I don't know any anti-Semitic people. I don't think that's as much of a thing as it used to be.
unenlightenedApril 02, 2018 at 13:03#1688170 likes
Reply to unenlightened They should export him to Minnesota. I think there's a militia that wants him.
unenlightenedApril 02, 2018 at 13:50#1688230 likes
[quote=a vile racist] Weâre saying, âYouâve got three years, then go home. Go to your natural homelandsâŠWe give you time to go.â Then weâll swing into action.
I think thatâs the only way forward, if we want to save our cultures and our nations. Because these people are having children like rabbits.[/quote]
'Natural homelands' 'we want to save our cultures', ' these people are having children like rabbits'. Listen out for these sentiments and epithets - this is how 'they' speak. Don't do likewise, learn to spot them in the threads and on the news. My homeland is the whole earth and none of it; my culture is their culture and I reject it; every child is someone's baby rabbit.
It's amazing how many crazy Jew-hating comments are on here. Hitler supported Israel? That's absolutely false. Israel is a racist state? False. Israel gives its Arab-Muslim citizens free education, free medical care and greater rights than they would have if living in any Islamic nation, or even any European nation. Yet, the world obsesses over Israel 24/7. There are Muslim people in other locations, including Iran, who are fighting for state hood, and no one even knows who they are. In fact, there are presently 350 active groups of people trying for independent statehood, and yet, other than the so-called Palestinian Arabs, how many such groups can people name? Not to mention that when Egypt bombs Gaza, no one says a word. When Lebanon mistreats Palestinians, no one says a word. When the King of Jordan violated international law and claimed the land for Jordan, through military action, no one said a word. Not even the so-called Palestinian Arabs said anything.
If one makes a list of countries with human rights records, from the best to the worst, Israel would be near the top. Yet, Israel gets more than half of the UN sanctions? And that's not anti-Semitism? So, Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc., etc., combined have fewer sanctions than Israel? Israel is a nation where an Arab headed the country during an interim period. It's a nation where Arab Muslim judges sentence Jewish Israelis to prison. It is a country where it's fairly well integrated among various "races," and religious groups, and extends greater rights for women, gays, atheists, and other minorities than any country in the Middle East, while its neighbors routinely commit crimes against humanity, deny freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and cleanse all non-Muslims from their states.
The denial of the basic facts regarding Israel, as well as the world's fixation on Israel and the use of double standards against Israel can only be explained by anti-Semitism. While it is certainly wrong to call someone an anti-Semite for voicing a just criticism of Israel, it is equally wrong to deny the anti-Semitism that underlies the vast majority of the so-called discussion regarding Israel.
Serious question: why is critisizing the actions of Israel anti-semitic? Is this the case that only being Jewish or an Israeli, you can be critical of the actions of the Israeli government?
Besides, not all people are in favour of one side and against the other (as typically Americans think everything has to be). You can be critical of both sides. You don't have to be a supporter of the Palestinians and a hater of Israel or a worshipper of the Judeo-Christian heritage and hater of the arabs (or muslims).
If one makes a list of countries with human rights records, from the best to the worst, Israel would be near the top.
At war at least it hasn't been so. When Israel invaded Lebanon in the early 1980's you could see Lebanese coming to the roads and clapping their hands in support of the action. Why? Well, of course they didn't like the PLO running things. Yet that changed quite quickly when the local populace came to interaction with the IDF.
Just to give an example observed by the UN peacekeepers in Lebanon: when an Israeli armoured column advancing on a road drove through an area of thick vegetation, they would simply open fire with their machine guns to pin down any possible ambushes lurking in the bushes. When a small girl playing in her family orchard got shot and killed this way, the IDF would simply inform that they have killed a terrorist. Now, to fire wildly and blindly at a spot where there might be an ambush has it's points, but also shows that total lack of concern of the civilian population.
SSU: There you go completely trying to twist my words. I specifically stated that not every criticism against Israel is anti-Semitic. However, a great deal of criticism against Israel is anti-Semitic, and not saying so, is equally repugnant.
Your claims against Israel are pure bullshit. How about you tell us when you have ever condemned the barbarity and crimes against humanity by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority? The Palestinian Authority as its official government policy demands the mass murder of Jews. It officially calls those who stab to death little Jewish children in their own homes "heroes and legends" and encourages others to also stab Jewish children to death. How about when the Palestinian Authority has an official bounty on the heads of Jews, and it pays the family of those who murder Jews, life-long pensions, which can be as much as $15,000 per month? Ever protest that criminal action? Even the Nazis did not offer bounties for the mass murder of Jews.
How about when Hamas cites in its official charter that Israel should be destroyed, that Jews are responsible for all the wars, I assume even those wars between Japan and China, and it also endorses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as being real. Ever protest that?
Did you protest the more than 30 terrorist tunnels that were dug into Israel, and were used to kill Jewish children, which started the last war in Gaza? Did you protest against the UN for allowing one of the tunnels to originate from a UN building, which means UN officials had to have known about the tunnel?
Have you protested the actual occupation of Cyprus by Turkey? How about Egypt's abuse of Christians? How about China's abuse of its Muslim population, which it oppresses in a way Israel never would?
Those are just some of the double standards I'm speaking of. And how come a crowd in Sweden burned down a synagogue and screamed that Jews should be shot after Trump agreed to move the US embassy in Israel? How come they did not attack Americans? It's because today's Jew-haters lie about Israel and do so in order to justify the abuse of Jews throughout the globe. That's why we see such vulgar behavior in Sweden, France, Germany, and a rise in anti-Semitism. The fact is that if Jews weren't involved, the world would have recognized that Jordan and Egypt were the main culprits regarding the Palestinians and they both have an affirmative duty to take their own citizens back after losing a war of aggression against Israel. It's only because Jews are involved that the world believes the Jews in Israel have some duty to take these millions of people in as full citizens. No country would do that. Name any nation that would take in millions of people who previously declared war on their nation, and who demand their nation's destruction, and who would enter in such numbers that the citizens would no longer be a majority in their own country? Name one? Japan? No. Germany? No. The USA, Canada, Australia? No. No one would even think any other nation should have to do such a thing. It's only when it comes to tiny little Israel that the world engages in such double standards.
Just on behalf of all the Palestinian victims of the Israeli state:
The way the Palestinians have been treated by Israel for the last 50 years is one of the most ironic situations in all of human history. It's been incredibly shameful. What do I think of Jews? They're people. What more is there to say?
Nevertheless, I have a principle that I hope is agreeable to most, that those with power over others are responsible for them. I don't think there is a question on which side the balance of power lies. And I don't think the film is mere propaganda; one can argue and question individual incidents, but there is too much, too well supported from Israelis as well as Palestinians, testimony from the Australian journalists, credible video evidence. This is not peace-keeping, this is not a measured response to threat, this is a terror campaign intended to totally subjugate demoralise and eventually evict or eliminate opposition. There is little sign of a will to reach an accommodation.
I disagree with this assessment. The Israeli response is motivated by the real threat posed by the Palestinians to their existence and peaceful functioning. They are not terrorists who awake each morning asking themselves how they can disrupt a peaceful people due to religious and ideological differences. Should the Palestinians stop any aggressive act toward Israel, there will be no aggression by Israel.
This is a dispute over land. That's what this is. If we accept Israel's right to the land it occupies, it stands morally right. If we don't, it doesn't, although I would not allow that the terroristic acts by the Palestinians are acceptable in any circumstance. They lob bombs into Israel for the sole purpose of disruption and civilian casualty, without regard for any military target.
The Palestinians have no way to win a military war against the Israelis, so the war has turned to securing public condemnation against Israel in order to gain an advantage diplomatically. They have largely been successful in that approach except in the U.S. So, is the video you presented propaganda, no more or less than if Israel were to start producing videos showing the atrocities exacted by the Palestinians. What's the purpose of such videos if not to garner support for a political position?
unenlightenedApril 02, 2018 at 19:56#1688980 likes
If we accept Israel's right to the land it occupies, it stands morally right.
And I disagree with this. One can accept Israel's right to the land, and condemn its actions against people who helplessly and fruitlessly resist with stones against automatic weapons and tanks. One can in these circumstances well afford to respect the rights of one's enemies, and so hope to reduce the enmity.
Reply to unenlightened They don't just throw rocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel
The rock throwing is symbolic (David against Goliath), but it can be significantly harmful as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_stone-throwing
You have enough evidence to make a comprehensive case for either side. The structure of the articles also encourages partisanship - the data on deaths, injuries etc aren't compared symmetrically within articles: you'll find Israel focussed and Palestine focussed articles but few attempts to synthesise them. So there are few comparative accounts of damages incurred by both sides. The best overview I've found is this one, but it omits estimation of indirect and economic effects of the war.
There's also a sustained ideological battleground on appropriate methodology for generating any of the statistics. So much effort is placed on methodology contestation there're good academic arguments for any partisan take, really. Also excellent arguments against any take. Informed discourse about it might as well be a discrete space, in which every person is infinitely far from reconciliation with any other viewpoint except one equivalent to their own - which is accepted as obvious without reflection.
The interpretation of Israel-Palestine might well be the best model of polarised discourse, so much so that it would be controversial to put it as an example of polarisation in the dictionary. :P
unenlightenedApril 02, 2018 at 20:43#1689240 likes
Reply to Hanover Yes the horrible results of stone throwing were shown on the propaganda, and it needs dealing with, but by police and civil courts, because kids throwing stones is not an act of war, or even of terrorism. But children are not responsible for rocket attacks. It's still an insufficient excuse for the obviously disproportionate responses.
Yeah, it's nothing to do with a Jewish homeland, it's to do with the America and Britain wanting to maintain post colonialist influence over the Middle East.
I think Zionism was about keeping Jews from being assimilated. That was the homeland part.
What makes her evil? What has she done to deserve what she received? Is it worse than knocking down the homes of Palestines. Bombing the Gaza Strip as Israel does. Or the multiple assassination commited by Mossad on Foreigners. She just kicked a soldier. Poor him. That must have been a life threatening situation. I wonder if he will go to jail if he ever kills a Palestinian.
The truth is that the Israelis are the aggressors. They came in illegally before 1948 and they suddenly ended up with the majority of previously Palestinian owned land.
Now I condemn the violence from both sides, but tell me where is the justice in this. How does Israel have a moral high ground?
It was in self-defense.
Andrew4HandelApril 02, 2018 at 22:17#1689530 likes
Personally I don't think anyone has a right to land.
Land ownership is just a stance not a metaphysical reality. I think we can only survive through cooperation and not making excessive claims on land. We can enforce landownership but through armies, police and war not justification.
I don't think that claiming rights over a bit of land means you can overpopulate it and excessively exploit it's resources.
I was disturbed in the late 90's when watching an Open university documentary on Demography and someone on the Gaza strip said he had 8 children because he was trying to outnumber the Jews but he was apparently living in a one bedroom apartment. Well that is child abuse in my opinion. Creating children into a conflict zone is dubious but doing it as a conflict tactic is just futile and harmful.
I think having children does just add to the state of exploitation and conflict which is life. Responsible reproducing would surely eliminate various problems.
Anti Israel sentiment does smell of antisemitism because it is disproportionate considering millions of people have died in the Republic of Congo wars and received little attention or academic studies or appearances in The Lancet. People are clearly very selective about which cause to get behind.
Reply to unenlightened It seems unnecessary to watch the video to respond to the questions you raise. It is certainly possible that there are some Jewish people are who racists, and if by institutional racism you mean that it is part of Israel's policy to oppress Palestinians, that's certainly possible as well.
Andrew4HandelApril 02, 2018 at 22:58#1689650 likes
Of course Anti Israel sentiment and Antisemitism are going to be closely linked. I don't think I can debate with you if you keep up this low level of discourse.
I think what happens is that I see someone like Hanover and think: "He knows all the things I know and he's just waving it away like it's irrelevant." And that's just monstrous. It really would be if that's what he's doing.
But maybe he's actually not doing that. Maybe he's focusing on something else. Who knows?
But it would probably help if someone like Netanyahu would acknowledge the mistakes the state of Israel has made. Or maybe he has done that and I missed it.
Reply to frank I actually like this post of yours. A huge part of working through these political debates for me as well is in figuring out how reasonable people can hold such seemingly unreasonable views.
Andrew4HandelApril 03, 2018 at 00:36#1690040 likes
What if you owned a house and it was stolen from you?
We need to differentiate between land and housing. I think everyone deserves a roof over their head.
Life involves exploitation of each other and resources we benefit from cheap produce made from minerals mined by slaves in places such as the Congo that I mentioned earlier and labour in undemocratic China and poverty hot spots like India. I can't justify my lifestyle because societies are based around exploitation. I am just thankful not to be homeless.
If I lost my housing I would hope someone else could find mey a property to live in.
We are not discussing this type of scenario anyhow we are talking about strong claims about ethnic or national groups owning a whole territory. Well ...Palestine has been owned that way by different groups and for the longest period it was owned by the Ottoman Empire and never self determining.
Anyway if I became homeless I would not have 8 children because that would be cruel and irresponsible. I have no desire to live in the Middle East which has no redeeming features for my and breed hordes if offspring to become fresh victims for an ideological dispute.
I think the bible may have got it right when it talks about stewardship.
We should be looking after the land not exploiting it and fighting over it.
Andrew4HandelApril 03, 2018 at 00:40#1690050 likes
The folly is not to be discussing the whole contentious issue of the validity of nationhood, countries, borders and over population, parental responsibility etc.
but instead they're discussing tit for tat grievances, quasi religious or religious ethnic identities and land statuses and raking over historical minutiae.
I don't understand how a species that flew to the moon could be so dysfunctional.
Andrew4HandelApril 03, 2018 at 00:46#1690070 likes
Are they? I think most people opposed to Israel are not anti-Semites.
How would you know that? To me it is the only explanation for the disproportionate and biased coverage of the conflict.
People don't think the Jews should have a state and Israel should never had existed meanwhile there are hundreds of millions of Arabs with large countries in the middle East and a small area of land for the Jews. Why shouldn't the Jews have a nation and why should they be forced to live in exile? They have historical roots in the region. The surrounding Arab countries mistreat their Palestinians force them to keep refugee status and live in camps even though a lot of them were born in these countries.
Israel clearly faces an existential threat to its survival and the Jews as a whole already faced that threat so they have my support for the foreseeable future."Pro" Palestinians are also clearly worsening the conditions for the Palestinians (B.D.S. and so on).
I do have faith in what the UN Peacekeepers have observed in Lebanon. They gave an objective view... that usually wasn't heard in the media.
How about you tell us when you have ever condemned the barbarity and crimes against humanity by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority? The Palestinian Authority as its official government policy demands the mass murder of Jews.
Yep, the typical viewpoint I was talking: critique of something makes you the ardent supporter of the other side. The typical ignorant bashing so common in the net.
Israel has been able to make peace with Egypt and Jordan and these countries have had the ability to also reinforce and stick their side of the agreement. Lebanon is far too weak to do this and so are the Palestinians. Withdrawal from Lebanon didn't make Israel's situation better as it was the Hezbollah, not the Lebanese Government, which then retook southern Lebanon.
Hamas has it's line to destroy Israel and the low-level conflict goes on. That shouldn't come as a surprise.
The most strange thing is how peaceful the Golan Heights have been where the Muslim extremists and Israel have been next to each other.
It's amazing how many crazy Jew-hating comments are on here.
I stopped reading right here. If this is what you took away from the preceding discussion, then you are not in a position to participate in the discussion (for whatever reason; I am not going to speculate about the possible psychological reasons of such striking incomprehension).
This is a dispute over land. That's what this is. If we accept Israel's right to the land it occupies, it stands morally right. If we don't, it doesn't, although I would not allow that the terroristic acts by the Palestinians are acceptable in any circumstance.
Interesting asymmetry. Atrocities are conditionally excused on one side and unconditionally condemned on the other.
Count Radetzky von RadetzApril 03, 2018 at 07:17#1690990 likes
Interesting asymmetry. Atrocities are conditionally excused on one side and unconditionally condemned on the other.
Yep.
I guess it is the American vitriolic style of juxtapositioning things to good and evil that makes the discourse so inherently dumb. My wife has a friend who is married to an Israeli and when talking with him about Mid-East politics he has allways been totally rational, realistic and had what I would call a natural critique towards his government which anyone living in a democracy typically has towards some policy actions of one's government. In fact, when you read the English versions of Israeli newspapers, you get the same feeling.
You don't get the same feeling when Americans or the American media talks about Israel. Never mind Christian fundamentalists who see modern day Israel not as just a nation state, but something very biblical and a benevolent sign of the end times finally coming. Even the ordinary commentary is totally different from any other country. To be fair, the other side, those who denounce Israel support the plight of the Palestinian people are similarly annoying in their zealous support of their cause.
And both sides just use the "useful idiots" that they have on their side.
What is different about Israel are the occupied/controlled territories. If they were annexed then the people living in them should have equal rights to Israelis. If they are not annexed then Israel should not build settlements there. But they are kept in limbo; a situation where Israel can exploit the land and people without giving them rights and this seems a throwback to the worst forms of colonialism. Like colonialism it seems underpinned by the notion that Israelis and Palestinians are not equal as humans. The very idea of Israel, a state being 'for' one particular religion or race is out of step with most modern thinking. In other words, Israel is an unapologetic assertion of social/political attitudes we would reject.
I think that is why Israel arouses such passions. Other states may do worse things, including persecute minorities, but as long as our own nations support Israel people feel they have lost the moral high ground.
(I am trying answer a specific question here that is often asked; Why Israel gets so much attention, especially from the liberal/left, when objectively other nations do worse things?)
unenlightenedApril 03, 2018 at 09:39#1691150 likes
Anti Israel sentiment does smell of antisemitism because it is disproportionate considering millions of people have died in the Republic of Congo wars and received little attention or academic studies or appearances in The Lancet. People are clearly very selective about which cause to get behind.
Yes, I am very selective. I am interested in conflicts that impinge on me. Whatever I posted about the Congo on one side or another, I doubt i would be accused of spreading propaganda or of racism. But the Congolese secret service is not very active in the UK, the policies of the Congo is not an issue in Uk politics. But here, it is a major issue which faction of Jews one spends passover with.
The smell of antisemitism, as I have shown in previous links, is not associated with people who give talks at meetings of avowedly antisemitic and white supremecist organisations, but rather with supporters of Palestinian rights. Now that is what I call propaganda.
His administration supported and co-drafted the Haavara agreement and supported a variety of emigration ''solutions'' to the ''jewish question''. I think if repatriation was an option during early nazi period they would have been supportive of it.
Israel is a racist state? False.
This report was published last year. There have been numerous attempts to discredit it, mostly by -of course- Israeli and US govt. To my knowledge, there are no real counterarguments to arguments made in the report itself, just accusation of anti Israel bias and antisemitism. The first and second authors; you can read about them and their educational background.
Israel gives its Arab-Muslim citizens free education, free medical care and greater rights than they would have if living in any Islamic nation, or even any European nation. Yet, the world obsesses over Israel 24/7.
I believe most of the discrimination is with respect to property rights and building permits. I believe there is also segregation of educational facilities/schooling and discrimination in education funding practices (and possibly other sectors, but I'm not sure).
Also there is plenty of condemnation against and accusation of rights violations by the typical critics - UN, amnesty international. So I've never quite understood this point about Israel being disproportionately targeted.
There are Muslim people in other locations, including Iran, who are fighting for state hood, and no one even knows who they are. In fact, there are presently 350 active groups of people trying for independent statehood, and yet, other than the so-called Palestinian Arabs, how many such groups can people name? [B]Not to mention that when Egypt bombs Gaza, no one says a word. When Lebanon mistreats Palestinians, no one says a word. When the King of Jordan violated international law and claimed the land for Jordan, through military action, no one said a word. Not even the so-called Palestinian Arabs said anything.[/b]
None of those groups are recognized as having states or being subjugated or oppressed within their own, internationally recognized boundaries.
Also, I don't see why the bold can't be recognized as in need of international attention while simultaneously recognizing israeli to palestinian rights violations as well.
If one makes a list of countries with human rights records, from the best to the worst, Israel would be near the top. Yet, Israel gets more than half of the UN sanctions? And that's not anti-Semitism? So, Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc., etc., combined have fewer sanctions than Israel? Israel is a nation where an Arab headed the country during an interim period. It's a nation where Arab Muslim judges sentence Jewish Israelis to prison. It is a country where it's fairly well integrated among various "races," and religious groups, and extends greater rights for women, gays, atheists, and other minorities than any country in the Middle East, while its neighbors routinely commit crimes against humanity, deny freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and cleanse all non-Muslims from their states.
Israel has had no economic sanction placed on it, only condemnation. US and its pro-israeli interest has too much influence for anything more than that. Anti semitism is discrimination or prejudice against the Jewish people. Jewish people are distinct from the Jewish state. Anti zionism is distinct from anti semitism and is also distinct from anti human rights violations. I don't think the international community would have any real issue with Israel if it stopped acting on, what are effectively, paranoid-schizophrenic delusions. Just working to economically discourage settlement construction and reduce building demolition in west bank would be a huge plus for their public image.
Uhuh. Except that it makes a distinction between Israeli citizens based on being Jewish or not and gives more rights to Jewish Israeli citizens than non-Jewish Israeli citizens. Israel discriminates based on religion as the High Court concluded you could lose those benefits if you converted to another religion.
The provenance of the modern Jew is debatable.
Extinction? There are as many Jews in the USA as in Israel.
Self identify yourself as Jews, white, black reifies racism.
It's amazing how many crazy Jew-hating comments are on here. Hitler supported Israel?
No it's TRUE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
That's absolutely false. Israel is a racist state? False.
Immigration policy to so-called "Israel" has denied non-Jews. That is racism.
Non Jews, especially Arabs are denied basic rights of land ownership, and their lands have ben systematically stolen. That is racism.
Israel is an apartheid state, expansionist and founded by terrorism.
Whilst the British government were brokering a deal for the foundation of the state, Jews bombed British soldiers stationed in Palestine.
But by contrast, this guy is not going to get kicked out of the conservative party anytime soon.
There is so much more antisemitism and casual racism in the Tory party but for some reason the media seldom seem to feature it in their articles.
By contrast the media seem very keen in denigrate FB pages that support Jeremy Corbyn. In Labour there is really no one in any position of power that would ever get away with expressing antisemitic views and party rules make the mere mention of Zionism, or apartheid next to impossible.
The new rules have been termed thought crime;"
âNo member of the party shall engage in conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial, or in any act which in the opinion of the NEC is grossly detrimental to the party. The NEC shall take account of any codes of conduct currently in force and shall regard any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on age; disability; gender reassignment or identity; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; or sexual orientation as prejudicial to the party; these shall include but not be limited to incidents involving racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia or otherwise racist language, sentiments, stereotypes or actions, sexual harassment, bullying or any form of intimidation towards another person on the basis of a protected characteristic as determined by the NEC, wherever it occurs, as conduct prejudicial to the party.â
Jews are not an economically disadvantaged groups, and I feel are moving towards a privileged status where any criticism of any Jew for any reason tend to attract accusations of antisemitism.
I cannot see what it is that being a Jew makes it okay to have established sub-groups inside the Labour party.
What would the reaction be if there was a group called Whites Labour Movement, or White Voice for Labour?
CuddlyHedgehogApril 03, 2018 at 14:19#1691510 likes
I think that what happens is that they land on shore and see a lot of unoccupied land. Land is not an asset as such, it has to be worked to become productive, so there would be no notion that the new arrivals were depriving anyone of anything.
There was something of that notion in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, They were taking on unproductive land, so bringing it into production would benefit everyone.
So if Somalis landed on English shores, that happen to be unoccupied at the time, they can start working on them to make them more productive for everyone's benefit, right? With such mentality, no wonder the old english imperialists felt entitled to help themselves to anything that crossed their path.
unenlightenedApril 03, 2018 at 15:11#1691660 likes
With such mentality, no wonder the old english imperialists felt entitled to help themselves to anything that crossed their path.
The mentality of British Imperialism was an abomination. And the legacy in India, Myanmar, Africa, Ireland, and elsewhere is a series of lasting fuck-ups of Biblical proportions. Partition has been a source of conflict everywhere it has been tried. Except possibly Cyprus, for the moment, as far as I know. And the attitudes linger on, unfortunately. And there is no denying that Israel has 'made the desert bloom'.
But there is also a resonance of the imperialist attitude in that of Israel along the lines of, 'the Palestinians have done nothing with the land, they don't deserve it.'
CuddlyHedgehogApril 03, 2018 at 15:25#1691710 likes
So if Somalis landed on English shores, that happen to be unoccupied at the time, they can start working on them to make them more productive for everyone's benefit, right? With such mentality, no wonder the old english imperialists felt entitled to help themselves to anything that crossed their path.
The example of colonisation that everyone had in mind was America. An endless frontier of land that could be brought under cultivation. To bring in some philosophy, this is a feature of Locke, it is the explanation of why you should obey the rules of your existing state - because if you don't like them everyone has the option of moving to the new world. Similarly it underlies the notion of property. One has a right to ownership of land because it is only your input of labour that gives land a value.
I'm saying that there was a reflection of this idea in the early Jewish settlements. That they would be creating something new, rather than taking away what somebody else owned. But obviously very few people were expected to want to take this up, any more than most people today would want to leave their homes and jobs to join a pioneering hippy commune in the desert. That is why everyone was relaxed about the idea of a few Jewish settlements in Palestine. They did not know the Holocaust was coming.
Yes, people saw things differently in the past. It is enjoyable to re-tell history as a simple story of goodies and baddies but that is not how it seemed to the people involved then, and nor is helpful when trying to understand the situation today.
CuddlyHedgehogApril 03, 2018 at 15:43#1691750 likes
Yes, people saw things differently in the past. It is enjoyable to re-tell history as a simple story of goodies and baddies but that is not how it seemed to the people involved then, and nor is helpful when trying to understand the situation today.
Attempts to morally justify or excuse what was clearly wrong then and now, wonât wash either.
Charleton: No, it's not true, and I don't even need to waste my time looking at some conspiracy video on social media to know the truth. Go ahead and cite to us a single work by a leading university, like Oxford, that supports your Jew-hating claim that Hitler supported Zionism? The truth is that Hitler always wanted Jews dead, and the policy of kicking Jews out of Germany initially was used to create more anti-Semitism in those nations that had to absorb poor Jewish refugees, as Hitler confiscated all their belongings. Keep in mind, most of the killings of Jews took place in the later years of the Third Reich, after WWII broke out. Although, Hitler and the Nazis did murder Jews in the streets of Germany even before Hitler took over in Germany.
Your comments about the political structure of Israel is also as far-fetched as your conspiracy theories regarding Hitler.
SSU: You think the UN has an "objective" view regarding Israel? That's laughable. How about when the UN claimed that Zionism was racism? Rather odd since Zionism simply means support for a Jewish homeland where Jews have lived longer than any other group of people. It's also true that anyone can become a Jew, so it would be impossible for Zionism to be racism. How many years did it take for the UN to give up on this BS claim?
How about the fact that a terrorist tunnel from Gaza originated from a UN building? You seriously claiming that the UN would not have known about the tunnel? That would have been impossible.
How about when the UN handed over rockets in their own buildings, to Hamas, knowing that Hamas would fire them at Jewish children in Israel? You call that being "objective"?
How about when the UN claimed that because of the number dead Israel must have targeted civilians, in its Goldstone report, written by an anti-Semitic Jew, when years later the Palestinians admitted that they lied about the death toll? How come the UN then did not change its findings? How come it originally used a death toll that even included people dying of natural causes?
How come Israel has been sanctioned more than Syria, when Syria is actively butchering people on its streets?
The UN's own leadership has admitted to bigotry against Israel. It's not surprising. How many Islamic nations are in the UN, as well as allied socialist ones? How many Jewish states in contrast? Is it really surprising that the UN would single out the lone Jewish state for discriminatory treatment given the UN's composition?
Attempts to morally justify or excuse what was clearly wrong then and now, wonât wash either.
No, it was not 'clearly wrong' then. Do you imagine that in the past people did what they did because they woke up one morning and thought 'Let's be evil'?
I would like to hope I could have been magically born with modern sensibilities, but I have to face the fact that if I had been born in another place and at another time I would probably have seen nothing wrong with slavery, or the subordination of women. And I doubt if you would have either. If you cannot get your head around the fact that people see things differently to you then you will never understand either the past or the present, let alone have any hope of making things better.
As to my 'attempting to morally justify or excuse', if you look about six posts down on the previous page you will see what my own opinion is of Israel. But I do not believe I should try to support my opinion by falsifying history. People wrote about the moral justification for taking land in Palestine and I gave my opinion about how that was seen at the time, bearing in mind that nobody then imagined it would involve any more than a handful of people.
CuddlyHedgehogApril 03, 2018 at 16:45#1691870 likes
No, it was not 'clearly wrong' then. Do you imagine that in the past people did what they did because they woke up one morning and thought 'Let's be evil'?
I disagree. They very well knew it was wrong to kill and oppress but invented all sorts of excuses to justify their evil deeds. Not much has changed in that regard today.
Go ahead and cite to us a single work by a leading university, like Oxford, that supports your Jew-hating claim that Hitler supported Zionism?
My answer is that Hitler was a populist politician. When he saw a tactical political advantage he would support emigration to Palestine, or other places. But did he 'support Zionism' in the sense that he wanted to help Jews? Of course not. It was a money-extraction scheme combined with what we now call 'spin'. So yes, you can find papers (Haavara Agreement) that can be interpreted as supporting Zionism, but there is no reason to assume they were sincere. As later became evident, Hitler never felt bound to honour his written undertakings.
unenlightenedApril 03, 2018 at 16:58#1691910 likes
Well that completes the set of failed Imperial partitions then. One could almost make an aphorism of it. "You can't unmake an omelette even if one of the eggs is fresh."
The partition of Cyprus was not 'Imperial', unless you consider all partitions are by definition Imperial.
unenlightenedApril 03, 2018 at 17:29#1691970 likes
Reply to Londoner You're quite right. But it was a colony, and it was within a generation that the shit hit the fan, so it still looks like a botched withdrawal to me. But then there are those who would take the opposite view, that it shows the beneficence of the Empire that all these places fall into conflict without our supervision.
unenlightenedApril 03, 2018 at 18:43#1692140 likes
Well I'm still educating myself about British collaboration, and the holocaust seems to have given urgency to a Zionist movement that was already in progress.
But the Zionists did avert their eyes.
Their eyes were filled with the holocaust, and still are, and it is hard to reproach them for that. Perhaps it is time now, when there is less of a credible threat, to indulge in a little self criticism. But it is worth noting that all this dates back to a time when racial thinking was considered perfectly normal and legitimate. Cultures do not change very fast.
Let me ask this: If Israel stopped the settlements of the disputed lands entirely and offered the Palestinians full autonomy within the lands generally recognized to be theirs, that is they offered a two state solution, would the sentiment on this Board be entirely in favor of Israel? That is, is it really the settlement of those lands that has caused the negative reaction to Israel?
I really question that based upon the comments in this thread, with many arguing that the right to Israel to exist at all is in question. We also have to remember as well that Israel has offered a two state solution and it was rejected by the Palestinians. http://arabisraeliconflict.info/arab-israel-facts/fact-3-two-state-solution
And hypothetically, if Israel did provide Palestine it's own land, and should the Palestinians then launch rockets into Israel, would you agree at that point Israel would have the right to respond in full out war against an act of war by a now sovereign nation?
SSU: You think the UN has an "objective" view regarding Israel? That's laughable.
You're quite laughable.
I was talking about what UN Peacekeepers on the field reported. Not what something as large and schizophrenic as the "UN" officially views is something else.
Those reports done by individual blueberet soldiers and officers are quite objective because they don't have any own agenda or reasons to distort what was observed. I know many that have served in Lebanon as peacekeepers. A lot of Finnish reservists and active officers served in Lebanon and they didn't have any other agenda than just to report what they saw. Finnish troops have been there in Lebanon from 1982-2001 and 2006-2007 and from 2011 onwards to the present.
And the truth is that what they report isn't what typically is reported in the media.
The difference between these reports and the ordinary media reporting is simply that they are done by military trained people observing a military conflict, not the ordinary journalist take on reporting of the plight of the civilians in the hands of evil warlords/terrorists/Israelis Army/whatever. The judgemental aspect of the conflict is left out.
Let me ask this: If Israel stopped the settlements of the disputed lands entirely and offered the Palestinians full autonomy within the lands generally recognized to be theirs, that is they offered a two state solution, would the sentiment on this Board be entirely in favor of Israel? That is, is it really the settlement of those lands that has caused the negative reaction to Israel?
As I said before, the real problem would be for the Palestinian side to stick to the peace agreement. Because once you have the agreement, then that's that. Somewhere Palestine ends and Israel begins. Israel has been capable of removing the zionist religious fanatics quite easily from Sinai, let's remember that. So if there would be a reason for Israel to withdraw, they could do it and it can very well control it's borders. Jordan and Egypt have been able to do this and enforce the peace agreement, even if especially in Egypt populists have a opportunity for their populism in being agaist the Camp David accord. Lebanon is the case example when the government is too weak: Hezbollah has taken over South Lebanon and actually fought very well during the last war.
The truth is that in the Middle East, it takes a lot more courage and political bravery to be for a peace settlement than to be a hawk. It's far more easy to be a hawk and settle to the conclusion that limited wars are just a part of life. Just look at the Arab and Israeli leaders that have been killed by their country's own zealots because they did make a peace agreement.
But of course, there's no need for Israel to do any peace deal. A peace deal is done only when the continuation of the war is intolerable. For Israeli the occasional terrorist attack or rocket attack is a minor nuisance, not something that cannot be lived with.
SSU: There is nothing objective about any UN organization when it comes to Israel. That's one of the issues that the US has with the UN presently. The UN has engaged in criminal behavior against Israel. Literally. From allowing a terrorist tunnel to be dug into Israel from one of its buildings, to providing rockets to Hamas, to promoting signs calling for Muslims to run over Jews in the streets of Israel. The UN is about as anti-Semitic as the Nation of Islam and David Duke combined.
SSU: Tell us all what so-called peace deal the so-called Palestinian Arabs have on the table? Israel has offered the so-called Palestinians a state of their own, on numerous occasions. The state would include all of Gaza, 97% of the west bank, border concessions for the other 3% and east Jerusalem as their capital. The response? The Palestinians turned it down, and demanded the destruction of Israel and all the Jews in Israel. In fact, that is still the official position of both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to this day. So, how is Israel at fault for their being no peace when the Palestinians turn down such a great offer, and don't even counter, except to demand all Jews in Israel be killed?
There is a reason why Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan all supported Israel during its last war in Gaza. It's because even those countries are getting tired of the Palestinians' crap. It's only the anti-Semitic left in the USA and Europe that supported the Palestinians digging terrorist tunnels into Israel, murdering Jewish teenagers, and violating every cease-fire agreement. Even the Saudis know better than to support such crap.
There is a reason why Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan all supported Israel during its last war in Gaza. It's because even those countries are getting tired of the Palestinians' crap. It's only the anti-Semitic left in the USA and Europe that supported the Palestinians digging terrorist tunnels into Israel, murdering Jewish teenagers, and violating every cease-fire agreement. Even the Saudis know better than to support such crap.
This answer shows both your utter ignorance and bias about the Middle East perfectly.
The only reason Saudi Arabia tolerates Israel (and btw just now the crown Prince has said that Israel has a right to exist) is because of the Shia-Sunni conflict. Palestinians are Sunnis, but Hamas has close ties with Iran, which angers naturally Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is top of the pack because a) Iraq is down and out and b) Egypt has it's own problems and general al-Sisi is no Nasser.
To think that Saudis and other Arabs would be "tired of Palestinians' crap" is very odd idea.
Israel's Declaration of Independence draws attention to Eretz-Israel, and speaks of the "natural and historic right" of the Jewish Community and the Zionist Movement in connection with the establishment of a Jewish State to be known as the State of Israel.
For my part, I think Israel exists, and is a nation. I think it futile to maintain otherwise. However, I wonder to what extent it can reasonably be maintained that Palestine as a geographic area can be said to be the location in which a Jewish State should exist, or that a "natural and historic right" to the establishment of a state in that area exists. There are problems with taking such a position, and in basing a claim of entitlement to land on such vagaries as natural or historic rights, particularly when they're used in connection with establishing a nation. Bear with me as I indulge in a simple review of history, or pass on--I won't mind.
As I'm not inclined to think of God as a conveyor of real estate, or think that there is a natural right to certain property at a certain location, I think that if any such right can even be conceived it would have to be defended by reference to history. History, though, indicates that Palestine hasn't served as a home to "the Jewish people" or certainly to a Jewish State in an even nominal sense, since at the latest Hadrian was Roman Emperor and the Bar Kochba Revolt was crushed in 135 C.E. Before that, the Second Temple and most of Jerusalem was destroyed by the legions under Titus in 70 C.E. (you can still see the legions carrying the spoils of the Temple in a relief on the Arch of Titus on the Via Sacra in the Roman Forum).
Exiles from Palestine were associated with both those events. Earlier, the Jews were exiled in the 8th century B.C.E. by the Assyrians, and during the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century B.C.E. Most Jews stayed in Babylon for centuries, though some returned from exile, to be subjected to the rule of Cyrus and other Persians and then one or another of Alexander's successors, for most of the time, until becoming a protectorate of Rome in the 1st century B.C.E.
History seems to indicate that most of the Jewish people lived outside of Palestine, and that no Jewish State existed in Palestine, for the last 2800 years or so.
However, I wonder to what extent it can reasonably be maintained that Palestine as a geographic area can be said to be the location in which a Jewish State should exist,
The region was governed by the Egyptians and Hittites before there was any such thing as a Hebrew. Per Netanyahu's own expressed logic, the area should be split between Egypt and Turkey and the Jews should evacuate entirely.
There was something of that notion in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, They were taking on unproductive land, so bringing it into production would benefit everyone.
This is laughable.
It's the same false argument used by white genocidal maniacs all over the world from South Africa to all the Americas.
The region was governed by the Egyptians and Hittites before there was any such thing as a Hebrew. Per Netanyahu's own expressed logic, the area should be split between Egypt and Turkey and the Jews should evacuate entirely.
Indeed, and the Australians should give Australia back the the indigenous peoples; the nations of the Americas should return the lands to the "Indians", but more in a timeline - since there has not been a Jewish state before 1948 since the time of Hadrian, the English should give back Britain to the Welsh and Cornish folk and return to Germany and Scandinavia.
Well, it wasn't that romantic. Palestine was not empty and even those who at first managed to miss this fact, soon enough found out:
I did not say it was empty, however it was considered under-developed and thus underpopulated, which indeed it was.
What you do not seem to be able to take on board is that Jewish settlements in Palestine were proposed long before the Holocaust. Nobody expected more than a handful of romantic religious idealists would ever want to leave their comfortable lives in places like Germany to go and live in the semi-desert. As your (unattributed) quote says; This is an infinitely graver difficulty than the stock anti-Zionist taunt that nobody would go to Palestine if we got it; which was indeed the mainstream attitude at the time. Nobody was offering Jerusalem and Palestine to the Jews; there were Jews already in those places, just as there were Christians, just as there had been for centuries, so why would a few more matter?
That was the attitude at the time. After Hitler it is hard for us to imagine a time when it was seriously argued that the spiritual home of Judaism was Germany, or where it was not uncommon for Jews to convert on the grounds that all the worlds religions were merging into one anyway, as reason replaces superstitious elements, but that was the case.
But I get the impression nobody is interested in history, except as ammunition for one side or the other. And where something doesn't fit our preconceptions we close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears.
There was something of that notion in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, They were taking on unproductive land, so bringing it into production would benefit everyone.
charleton:This is laughable.
It's the same false argument used by white genocidal maniacs all over the world from South Africa to all the Americas.
No, it is the argument made by anyone who knows anything about farming. Land, particularly semi-desert is not valuable, at best in can be used for seasonal grazing. You have to invest in it before it becomes productive.
OK, the people who used to do the seasonal grazing may not see it that way, but it is a very poor living and you don't have to be a white genocidal maniac to argue that life is generally better for everyone in an economically developed country like the USA than the mountains of Afghanistan.
Yes, there is more to it than that, but my point is that you would not have to be a villain to have seen early Zionist immigration as being a potentially good thing.
But because of the nature of this thread it is impossible to accept ideas like that. You have to keep it simple. One side or the other has to be irredeemably evil. If we were discussing any other topic but Israel /Palestine we would see how irrational this is.
No, it is the argument made by anyone who knows anything about farming. Land, particularly semi-desert is not valuable, at best in can be used for seasonal grazing. You have to invest in it before it becomes productive.
In other words kick off the dirty Arabs and their goats, and build a weapon's factory.
Indeed, and the Australians should give Australia back the the indigenous peoples; the nations of the Americas should return the lands to the "Indians", but more in a timeline - since there has not been a Jewish state before 1948 since the time of Hadrian, the English should give back Britain to the Welsh and Cornish folk and return to Germany and Scandinavia.
By Netanyahu's reckoning, yes. As Hanover said, a group comes into possession of a stretch of land by various means, some violent. Israel should repudiate zionism and admit that some of its historic efforts to make Palestinians either move to Jordan or just shrivel up and die were wrong. The Israeli government should embrace all Palestinians as part of Israel and offer reparations.
The east coast of the mediterranean has been under all sorts of management in the last 4,000 years. Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and... (apologies to those not on the list). At this time the strip of land in question is under the management of German and Russian Jews. Who is not biased about the ownership of this small property? Whether you are in favor of Israel or Arabs, you are biased. So what?
Is there anyone out there (shading my eyes as I look around the 100,000 seat stadium full of philosophers) who has a perfectly neutral position on Israel or Palestine? Come on, raise your hands -- higher, please...
Who has a solution that will not be a fresh injustice to someone?
Per Ciceronianus, God didn't convey any land to the Jews. That role (at least in the 20th century) was filled by the British. They were collecting rent on that particular piece of real estate back then, and they widened and narrowed the gap through which refugee Jews (Zionists, sure, but also non-Zionist Jews hoping to get the hell out of Germany before it was too late).
Were the Brits in this discussion occupying high office in the '20s and '30s, would you have let the Jews into Palestine or not, knowing how much the Nazis hated them? How would you have felt after the Holocaust, saying "Hell, no. I'm not supporting this racist, imperialistic deprivation of Arab rights."
People have been moving around the planet for a long time, displacing the resident group, only to be displaced themselves. Reply to charleton, were the Welsh and the Cornish the VERY FIRST people to occupy your lovely island? It seems to me pretty likely there was somebody else living there when you all arrived.
Colonialism, or population movement, or population displacement or replacement, is just people doing their thing. Everybody has done it, does it, or will do it sooner or later (going back to the stone age) and totally without respect for UN resolutions for or against it.
I'm biased in favor of Israeli displacement of Arabs; the British, Spanish, and Portuguese displacement of Amerindians, The British displacement of the Aboriginal inhabitants in Australia and New Zealand, the Frisian, Angle, Saxon and Scandinavian displacement of Celts, and the Celtic displacement of whoever was there immediately before. And all other displacements.
One might as well be since it's not going to be reversed.
I don't understand how a species that flew to the moon could be so dysfunctional.
The people who didn't live on the moon can be grateful they weren't there when we arrived -- else they would find themselves an earthy possession, at this point, and would be at the UN complaining that their lunar rights were being violated--to no avail.
Flying to the moon is proof of being functional, true enough, and so is operating am empire on which the sun never sets. So is carrying out Manifest Destiny or turning the desert green one kibbutz at a time.
Your mistake is assuming that People In their right minds are sensitive, caring, law-abiding, justice-seeking creatures who wish the best for everyone, and are quick to place others' needs before their own. Homo sapiens in their natural element (planet earth) are an invasive species, and if need be will get rid of the native opposition if they do too much bitching and carping about the new regime. They should be grateful, the bastards. This is not unusual behavior among species, certainly not this one.
It is only with the greatest of difficulty and the most severe cognitive dissonance that we manage to tolerate everyone on this over-populated celestial ball. We can actually like some of the people some of the time, but liking all of the people all of the time is just not within our genetic or learned behavioral repertoire. Consequently, we need a pressure-relieving war every now and then.
So, you'd be able to define what under-developed/underpopulated means, to provide the corresponding sources which show that it was underdeveloped/underpopulated and also give an argument why it matters. Since it was Ottoman land, you couldn't just move there.
You can tell it was underpopulated by the fact that it is now able to support a lot more people that it did at the time. Yes; it was Ottoman land which is why the early Zionists requested the Sultan's permission to settle there. There was nothing remarkable about that, there were already Jews living throughout the Empire as there had been for centuries.
Eastern Europe and the Islamic world was nowhere homogeneous; It is only that way now because we have had a long period of 'ethic cleansing'. So, for example a Greek city like Salonika could have a majority Jewish population, there were Greek cities in Turkey, Christian communities in Iraq...nobody yet has the idea that one geographical area has to have one ethnicity.
Your quotes refer to Eretz Israel and a far more ambitious plan to create a new nation with a Jewish majority. That was not yet a serious option; the idea that any Jew would want to go there was considered doubtful, let alone masses. You pick on these quotes with the benefit of hindsight, because we now know that is indeed what would happen, but that is not how it seemed at the time.
"Do you imagine that in the past people did what they did because they woke up one morning and thought 'Let's be evil'?". It seems like you imagine this exact thing in the case of Germans; one day they offer Jews a comfortable life, the next they slaughter them without anyone seeing it coming.
If you had wanted to pick a nation where Jews were most emancipated, where they played a prominent part in cultural life, you would have picked Germany. During WW1 Germany could credibly appeal to American Jews that Germany was the side they should be supporting. The archetypal anti-Semitic nation was Russia (an ally of France and Britain).
And yes, in a few short years this changed absolutely. There are heart-rending stories of German Jews who waited too long to escape because they simply did not believe what was happening. Once again, because we know Hitler is coming we look into the past and pick out signals of that coming, but that is not how it seemed at the time.
Germany changed. Not because they decided to be evil but because when people get into difficulties they will follow the politician that gives them a simplistic explanation for their problems. People are like that, all people. The liberal reforms were just as real as Hitler, but they turned out to be fragile. And fortunately, so was the Nazi regime; Germany today is again a liberal country.
You expect a clear narrative from history, where the actors have fixed characters and you can prove and disprove things and detect clear lines of cause and effect. I don't. I see it as chaotic.
I view that the existence of nation states or countries simply cannot reasoned from a moral perspective. They surely can be reasoned, but morality isn't a defining factor. This is because basically every nation that has gained independence has gotten that after some kind of war or conflict. Hence anybody declaring one state to be more "legitimate" than other is absurdly confused. In fact, I tend to think that those people talking about the legitimate rights are usually the ones who start wars.
Existence of a state as a sovereign is an issue of practicality. Westphalian sovereignty can be reasoned by it's practicality and usefulness.
Neither can the borders of a country be justified to be legitimate on some higher moral ground. It doesn't have to do with morality, but of convenience and realpolitik. Who won and who lost in the last conflict.
That's not an answer though. So was the rest of the planet. So is the rest of the planet. I don't see populations emigrating to Mongolia, Australia or Sahara.
They do if investment can open opportunities for work. I would have thought Australia was a prime example.
Nah, that "there" is false. The Ottoman decree allowed Jews from Europe to settle anywhere in the empire, except... Palestine. And later prohibited even Ottoman Jews from buying land in Palestine.
What is false; my saying that they wanted to be allowed to settle in Palestine or that there were already Jews in Palestine? That the Ottomans may not have been willing to take Zionist settlers does not contradict either of these. Other suggestions for Jewish settlements were Kenya and Argentina; once again the notion at the time was that it would be beneficial to these places.
Except that these quotes didn't have the benefit of hindsight, they were well known views based on the analysis of the situation. It seems like some people still avert their eyes.
The hindsight is in your selection of those quotes, rather than quotes from the much larger mass of people who saw no point in a Jewish homeland - and some danger. Because we know what is going to happen it doesn't follow that people at the time knew it too. Now somebody like Herzl is considered an important figure because of the way things turned out. But in his own time his vision for a Jewish homeland was not something like modern Israel but what was satirised as 'an imbecile prospectus for a Jewish Switzerland on the instalment plan'. And for those that did give it consideration, is was often as somewhere to put Russian and Romanian Jewish refugees, to relieve their condition, rather than somewhere a middle-class German Jew would ever want to go. Real history is all mixed up; what we now see as a clear process was a collection of different people, all with their own assessments and plans, often talking a cross-purposes. Just like in normal life.
Or maybe it is you who expect a clear narrative and just ignore everything else. It seems quite obvious that were you living back then, you wouldn't have paid any attention to those who were actually right in their assessment.
That's right! If I was living back in those times I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to those who were actually right in their assessment....because at that time I wouldn't have known that they were right. Just as if I had attended a meeting of a tiny right-wing fringe party in 1918 I would have probably failed to realise than one day one of the speakers would become dictator of Germany or that there would be a world war.
And today when I read the various stock market tips I am unable to tell who is actually right from the rest, which makes investment a chancy business. Yes, some of them will be right, but I do not know which. I will only know that in retrospect. If that isn't the case with you, you must be enormously rich, and I would have thought you would have had better places to spend your time than arguing on an internet discussion board..
I haven't seen any stateless ethnic or religious group, with anything similar to the zionist agenda, emigrating to any of these places.
Now you are just twisting your argument to score points. The issue was whether investment in unproductive areas could create a net benefit or whether development is always a zero sum game. That an area can only have a fixed economic output, so that any immigration must always deprive whoever is already there. Now it may be that the immigrants colonise the area and suppress the original population, but it need not necessarily be the case. And that was not how the Zionist project was originally imagined; it was meant to create a new kind of non-nationalistic state, hence the reference to a 'Switzerland' in my previous post. Right up until the end of the mandate there were attempts to build joint Jewish-Arab institutions, because the expectation was there would be a mixed state. Sadly, that wasn't what happened, but once again we only know that with hindsight.
Nah, I'm actually poor. Yet, for some reason, I know that the current resurgence of reactionary ideologies will end up in something bad if folk won't stop normilising them. Really, I'm no magician!
I would say that what characterises reactionary ideologies is their simplistic portrayal of history; "All Jews have always been wicked. They are the source of all our problems." Or alternatively "All Arabs are evil and only want to kill Jews and anyone who sympathises with them must be an anti-Semite". I suggest a more nuanced picture, which is why I annoy both sides.
How does making a judgement on an issue make someone bias? Assuming common agreement on a set of shared human rights, there is a correct assessment of the situation which holds regardless of sentiment. Condemnations are not disproportionately dolled out. Europeans committed atrocities to local populations throughout the colonial period and [to my knowledge] no western state denies this was a dark period. Since this thread is about Israel, that is what we are focusing on.
Israel is suppressing the development of an acknowledged nation state - Palestine - through neglect of its internationally determined duty to condemn and sanction fanatic Jews who think they have a title to west bank land. It committed atrocities during the campaign for its own establishment and still denies legitimate property rights to natives. It displaced, what could have been, a people that developed into an otherwise multicultural, multi-religious diverse state that would've had no pretext for maintaining the dominance of a given component ethnic or religious group unlike Israel which was established under the pretext of maintaining Jewish cultural and ethnic dominance within the state itself. Considering most of this colonization has happened post UN establishment, after the our attempt at holding high enlightenment ideals, it is like almost a slap in the face.
Rene: How about you actually stop using double standards in judging Israel? Name a single time when you have ever evaluated a position by only looking at the costs, and not the gains? Saying the US gives aid to Israel and none to the Palis is also 100% false. In fact, for years, the USA was funding the bounties the Palestinian Authority placed on Jews, so families of murderers of Jews could get life-long pensions, as high as $15,000.00 a month. It was only recently that the Congress cut off such funding. The US gives a huge amount of aid to the Palis, as well as the Egyptians, and many other nations. In fact, the USA gives far more to Germany than to Israel, just calculate the costs of those military bases in Germany to the US taxpayer. But, noticeably absent from your calculation is any inclusion of the benefits Israel has for the USA. How much does Israel benefit the USA in terms of military information, military technology, as well as being an R & D pipeline for numerous US companies? Are you aware that basically every week technology flows from Israel to the USA, which even includes medical advances used in US hospitals? Of course not.
Now, when you buy a car, do you say, "well, this car costs $10,000.00, so I'm not buying it?" Or, do you say, "well, this car costs $10,000, but it will also provide me with $10,000 worth of benefits, so I'll buy it?" You always include a cost-benefit tradeoff, except when you discuss Israel, when you employ an irrational double-standard of only looking at costs, but no benefits.
By the way, most Zionists in Israel have wanted nothing from the USA, PROVIDED the USA stops financing Israel's enemies. That has never happened. The USA actually gives far more to Israel's enemies than it does to Israel.
Reply to Bitter Crank All I've done is suggested, modestly as always, that the claim made in the Declaration of the Jewish State in Eretz-Israel to be known as the State of Israel, that it is established based on "natural and historic right," is questionable. Does that establish a bias? I suppose it might to some at least. But a claim of bias on that basis poses a danger to those making the claim.
I question whether there are any rights which are not rights recognized in law, and maintain that any claim that there are rights which are not, in fact, legal rights is simply a claim that there are certain things which are not legal rights which nevertheless should be treated as if they were legal rights. So when I question the existence of a right which isn't a legal right, I show no particular bias against those claiming such a right exists.
The claim that any group of people have a "natural and historic right" to a nation in a certain location, separate and distinct from a legal right, is necessarily biased, however, as it favors a particular group of people over other groups. In other words, it's a claim that a particular group of people, and no other group of people, are entitled to a nation at a certain place. So, I think reference to rights in these cases is best avoided. Israel simply exists.
Basically, on this forum, as on almost every social media platform, there is an enormous amount of anti-Semitism. It is basic for the left to be anti-Semitic, and it's not just in the USA, but throughout the western world, just look at the anti-Semitism in Britain's Labour Party. The modern-day anti-Semitism was noted by such anti--racists as Martin Luther King, Jr., who stated that anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism. Basically what happens is people tell lies about Israel, in an effort to dehumanize all Jews globally and to "justify" attacks against them. This is why in Sweden, after Trump announced he was moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, a crowd gathered around a synagogue, lit it on fire, and started chanting that Jews should be shot. Similar occurrences happen throughout western Europe, especially France. Why didn't the protestors protest at the American embassy? Because Israel is the modern focal point for anti-Semites. It's not that people hate Jews because of Israel. Israel is no worse than any western nation, and it's history is far more justified than many western nations. Instead, Israel is hated because that is where the Jews are. It's just easier for anti-Semites to hide behind an anti-Zionist claim. Yet, anti-Zionism literally means the destruction of Israel which can only occur if millions of Jews are slaughtered and their property confiscated. These same anti-Zionists never protest against Egypt that kicked out its Jewish citizens and stole their homes from them. This has occurred throughout the Arab-Muslim world, yet, this cleansing of Jews has raised no complaints by those in the anti-Zionist camp who falsely claim that they are interested in social justice.
Bullshit. They don't even care about the Palis. When Egypt bombs Gaza, no one bitches. When Syria bombs Palis, no one bitches. When Lebanon abuses Palis and treats them like shit, no one bitches. People don't bitch in those cases because the Jews can't be blamed for those abuses. This selective concern for the so-called Palis, a group made-up in the 1970s, gives away the plot. The so-called concern for Palis is only expressed when it can be used to harm Israel and Jews. Otherwise, no one gives a shit about them.
Reply to LD Saunders This is my take, and I would have thought that my view would have been extreme on this Board in its support of Israel, but then I read your posts and wasn't so sure.
There is tremendous bias against Israel by the Arabs against the Jews in Israel because the Jews are not Muslim and Israel is seen as a satellite state for the US, which represents an entirely different culture and value system. If an Arab nation, with all its perceived backwardness by the Western world, was felt to have encroached on US soil, there would be less than a warm welcome. The U.S.'s interest in Israel is based upon the strong political involvement of Jews in the US as well as it being in an oil rich region.
So, we have an incendiary mix of hatred and this has resulted in violent reactions by the Palestinians, with the rest of the Arab world sympathizing with them, or at least superficially so. The rest of the Western world sees the Arab world destabilized by Israel's presence and they no doubt largely blame the US for that, considering the Israeli political and military power flows directly from Washington.
Does this mean that there is no link at all between the Jewishness of Israel and world reaction? No, but I don't think that if Israel secularized entirely and were populated by a majority Lutheran population you'd see a much different result in either the Arab reaction or the rest of the world.
I also think that the world reaction will rise and fall on pragmatics more than ideology, meaning that regardless of where this problem came from and regardless of who the land rightfully belongs to, the world mostly just wants to see the violence, regardless of who's at fault, end. The real truth is that no one cares for the Jews or the Palestinians as much as they do themselves, meaning they just want the problem resolved. It's a problem that needs to be fixed, but instead it's just something argued about.
I have a case in my office right now where water is running from my client's land onto his neighbor's. Both have all sorts of creative explanations for why the other is at fault, and I'll spend the better part of a year or two litigating and pointing fingers. I'm not sure who is right, but one day a jury will tell me who it is. What they need is to buy a shovel and fix the problem, but they'd rather be right than fix the problem.
This may or may not be true -- I don't know everything about the Left. But to whatever extent it is true, why do you think is it so? I would think all these neo-Marxists would at least be aware that Marx himself was a Jew. Doesn't that count for something with them?
This may or may not be true -- I don't know everything about the Left. But to whatever extent it is true, why do you think is it so? I would think all these neo-Marxists would at least be aware that Marx himself was a Jew. Doesn't that count for something with them?
Well, you have to first start with the assumption that anti-Israel equates to anti-Semitism. The left in the US has been strongly opposed to American Middle East policy since at least GW's days and the neo-con movement. They were so relieved when Obama came into office that they gave him a Peace Prize only to see him largely adopt GW's strategies, although toward the end he seemed to just let things go. The strongest allies of Israel tend toward the fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews, neither friends of the left, so there's that too.
In terms of thinking Jews always embracing Jews, yeah, not my experience.
Basically, on this forum, as on almost every social media platform, there is an enormous amount of anti-Semitism. It is basic for the left to be anti-Semitic, and it's not just in the USA, but throughout the western world
This is an incredibly far reaching claim. The first author of the UN report was himself Jewish; Noam Chomsky is Jewish; there are numerous other, less prominent Jewish critics of Israel. Are you claiming they are self-hating? How can it be basic for the left to be anti-semitic? That contradicts foundational principles which ground and influence leftist thinking. Zionism, Jewish nationalism, is a completely separate issue from Jewishness. And the present day issues are a matter completely separate from both. Basically I think if you got rid of the extreme right wing leadership and its UN pooping policies, many people would have less issue with the place.
The claim that any group of people have a "natural and historic right" to a nation in a certain location, separate and distinct from a legal right, is necessarily biased, however, as it favors a particular group of people over other groups. In other words, it's a claim that a particular group of people, and no other group of people, are entitled to a nation at a certain place. So, I think reference to rights in these cases is best avoided. Israel simply exists.
I think you are confusing divine law here as indigenous populations had legal systems that we today do not recognise as 'law' and natural rights emerged to coexist so as to recognise the historic meaning of content that is valuable to populations as beneficial users of the land, a mechanism for recognition that is ultimately aimed at resolving disputes but also to ameliorate the content behind the legality. International customary law is binding as it demonstrates the meaning from this identification and therefore qualifies the content of the rights and interests of members of that society and their relationship to the land, which international law and human rights in particular, being universal and inalienable, helps build that bridge. It is heterogeneous and variable but nevertheless this is what Native Title rights are in Australia.
Exclusive use and possession of lands envelops a number of factors and in the case of Israel, notwithstanding the dissolution of imperial control in the region, failures that need to be recognised by poor leadership of the Palestinian people (Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini sided with the German Nazi's against the United Kingdom and the Allies who, at the time, controlled the region). There are legally binding recognition 'tests' to determine a 'state' including the required permanent characteristics and the ability to consolidate adequate control over the territories, a solid system of governance, diplomatic capacity, and a permanent population among others. This could actually be achieved for Palestine as part of the two-state solution, and while consistently undermined by Israel, poor Palestinian leadership that continues to disregard international law by failing to recognise the state of Israel will only perpetuate the problem. Let us not forget the misappropriation of millions of dollars by leaders like Arafat and Abbas while the Palestinian people continue to suffer.
I actually believe that Israel really is trying - as seen with their diplomatic relations with Jordan and Egypt, in particular the former and some amazing contracts they have signed vis-a-vis gas and electricity - but where they fail is the Netanyahu revisionism and the vocal reverberations of the ultra-orthodox community that scream nonsense of which 70% of Israeli people roll their eyes to. Their brutality is used as an effective method to deter violence - particularly following the intifada - but I think it is backfiring when they have a chance now to build effective and positive methods of acceptance.
Basically, on this forum, as on almost every social media platform, there is an enormous amount of anti-Semitism. It is basic for the left to be anti-Semitic...,
They are anti what might be called pro-Semitism, that is the idea that any people should be grouped according to their race or religion. Rather crudely, if somebody is opposed to the KKK it doesn't follow that they must be anti-white. And if one is opposed to the crazier manifestations of Zionism it doesn't follow that they are anti-Jewish.
If we were discussing racism and somebody claimed a distinct identity for the 'white race', or that God had given a piece of the earth to white South Africans, say, or the Aryans, we would (most of us) treat this as lunacy. But because Judaism is part of Christianity many are reluctant to say the same about the set of beliefs by which the Jews see themselves as distinct.
Perhaps the left tends to contain more atheists, or those who take a ecumenical view of religion. So when they see Jewish people celebrating their Jewishness (let alone making political claims based on their Jewishness) they are not sympathetic. They regard it all as self-serving superstition. They are anti-Semitic in the sense of regarding anyone who identifies themselves as 'Jewish' as just as deluded as somebody who regards themselves as a member of the Aryan Master Race, or whatever.
Maybe, it wouldn't be that extraordinary, but does that rise the level of declaring Israel a nation rife with human rights abuses?
No one is saying that it is rife with human rights abuses, but that there are abuses, excessive use of force, detaining children in poor and sometimes extreme conditions, interrogating and violating not only international law but even Israeli domestic laws. If Israel is even conscious of the fact that disproportionate use of force against minors continue to occur and made efforts to raise the standards of applying measures that ensure procedures are correctly adhered and yet time and time again clear evidence shows continuous breaches that result in the deaths of many children, how could you possibly suggest the following:
That's not what I said. I was simply saying they carry out assassinations. I disagree with all assassinations including those commited by France, Russia and the US. All I was trying to say is that assassinating people doesn't help build relationships.
Assassinations are bad. The deep state is a scary world. I am talking about what they are doing and, yes, there are mistakes as much as there is progress as it is a young state in an extremely hostile environment. I was in Israel when they signed a multi-billion dollar deal with Jordan. I met Israelis that continuously stage protests against the government in support of Palestine and the Palestinians themselves have vocalised to me that they are happy for the strong support coming from Israeli citizens for them. I was with these women.
It is full of Israeli people who are genuinely desirous of peace and who simply want a place to call home. Is everything about America simply Trump? Do we believe that the loud noise made by rednecks or evangelicals to be an epitome of that country? There are many left-wing and right-wing suggestions being made against them and indeed there are wrongs - I am from Australia and we have committed genocide to our indigenous peoples and continue to breach human rights against refugees and asylum seekers - but communicating the faults and follies of a country is an important aspect to democracy.
...but you're views on children are overly defensive and entirely unrealistic in your declaration that they are not dangerous. â Hanover
Are you serious?
I don't understand how you would assume that I am not taking a "generous view" toward the Israelis when I am well aware of the continuous security threats and have said it as such - hence the relationship between security threats and children's rights - but children are not dangerous
This statement really isn't limited to Israel, but takes an unrealistic view and overly protective view of children. Some children simply are in fact dangerous. That's a fact. It's not like someone is innocently confused regarding the danger of his behavior until age 18 and then suddenly he's malicious.
This statement really isn't limited to Israel, but takes an unrealistic view and overly protective view of children. Some children simply are in fact dangerous. That's a fact. It's not like someone is innocently confused regarding the danger of his behavior until age 18 and then suddenly he's malicious.
I think you are misconstruing the intent behind what 'danger' entails and while, indeed, there are dangers to stone-throwing, the real impetus behind the excessive use of force and the nature of criminalising behaviours as represented by children like Amir is the overall danger, the symbolic danger that may form the impetus to mobilise further attacks, which is why she was arrested several days after the incident when it became viral. Palestinian children are regularly detained and even shot and killed for throwing stones and the continuity of undermining the laws by security personnel is intended to deter the threat and promote submission to their authority. What is questionable here is whether such martial rigidity ultimately creates the very enemy they are seeking to deter.
When I was in Denmark, I was in a fellowship of international students undertaking research on Islamic communities and one of the students was formerly in the military and he asked me, "you are at war; if you see a child on the mountain ahead of you, would you shoot the child?" I immediately responded with no, before he stated, "you have no choice but to kill the child. The child could be used by the enemy to obtain information to be given back to them." It was distressing, to say the least, but understandable. This parallels the problematic security situation in Israel, only they are not in a state of war that would merit such drastic behaviour and yet they are clearly not out of danger either. So, the real problem here is not the 'unrealistic and over protective view of children' but whether such trauma inflicted on children will in fact produce tomorrows enemy adults who then become the real danger.
I immediately responded with no, before he stated, "you have no choice but to kill the child. The child could be used by the enemy to obtain information to be given back to them." It was distressing, to say the least, but understandable
That was sort of the plot of the movie Lone Survivor.
Anyway, It'd be hard to kill anyone, but I still hold pretty firm on my view that there's nothing magic that happens between being 17 and 18.
Of course I'm opposed to human rights abuses and don't think a 17 year old or 19 year old prisoner should be slapped around and beaten. I also realize that war is war and maintaining all these standards to the satisfaction of an outside evaluating agency is not realistic and not going to be of primary concern to any military leader, except to the extent political blowback affects his ability to accomplish his task. I'm reminded of waterboarding by the US, and my view regarding its elimination was based more on the arguments that it was ineffective in obtaining intelligence than that it was abusive.
There's just no such thing as a cleanly fought war. Again, I'm not saying that we need to ignore abuses that might occur during the war, but that's just one thing I'd be looking at, with a greater focus on the success of the operation, assuming it was just in the first place. An ugly win can be better than a clean loss between gentlemen.
The USA actually gives far more to Israel's enemies than it does to Israel.
Those that have signed a peace deal with Isreal really aren't Israel's enemies anymore. And still, the US has given the most to Israel when it totally dominates it's neighbours in every way, starting with it's nuclear deterrent.
There's just no such thing as a cleanly fought war.
Ummm... the Falklands war is basically a war where both sides stick to the International conventions in war and didn't engage in what are called war crimes. Civilians weren't targeted.
What you laughingly call Israel's "enemies" get aid on the CONDITION that they are not Israel's enemies. `This aid to other countries constitutes aiding Israel!
Ummm... the Falklands war is basically a war where both sides stick to the International conventions in war and didn't engage in what are called war crimes. Civilians weren't targeted.
By the way, most Zionists in Israel have wanted nothing from the USA, PROVIDED the USA stops financing Israel's enemies. That has never happened. The USA actually gives far more to Israel's enemies than it does to Israel.
That is a complete travesty of the facts.
1) The USA funded Israel from the start, dumping thousands of Persing tanks that the WW2 factories pumped out of the US.
Israel currently receives about $3 billion annually, and it's neighbours continues to receive large amounts on the CONDITION that they keep the peace with Isreal. In particular Egypt signed agreements (quoted above) to suspend all hostilities and was paid to do so.
You seem top want to believe what you chose to believe.
Are you Jewish by any chance?
It is usually polite to declare an interest during discussions.
Being Jewish or not being Jewish is not going to make his arguments any better or worse. Nor does it necessarily make him biased. There are Jewish people on both sides of this debate. And that goes as a general principle for all religious or non-religious here (or of whatever culture). Stick to the arguments. Personal stuff will be deleted.
Every fact is both provable and disprovable by a well phrased Google search. See, https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/169761
Well,
Individual instances do happen and especially on the battlefield, that's for sure. Yet in that war you didn't have warcrimes basically ordered from higher above. Or perhaps the case just shows that a war fought lawfully and/or according to international laws is an oxymoron.
In the university I made a small study of the Crimean War in Finland, which showed just how honorable soldiers were during the Victorian era -especially to other Europeans. Today you wouldn't take "A word of honour" not to escape from an enemy officer and let him freely travel in your country, but captured Finnish officers (serving the Russian military) were granted just that in the UK.
Yes, US's opening of its diplomatic embassy in Jerusalem, which I think puts to an end the two state solution, leaving only the one nation or bi-national solution.
Is Bernie Sanders the only prominent democrat to come to the defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar? Correct me if there are others that showed some backbone and logic in this matter. Critique of the policies of Israel is absolutely NOT anti-Semitism in itself. The Democrats look like fraidy-cats on this one. But then politics and logic go together like grease and water. Guess which is the grease? :wink:
About the topic... I am far from an expert and it isn't a black and white clear case. However, the basic unfairness is becoming clearer. A Palestinian state won't make Israel smaller. It will make Israel greater.
On the one hand, the rebuke could be seen as a purely political decision devoid of any real ethical basis. On the other, anti-semitism is very real, very dangerous, and alive and kicking in the US (see Charlottesville), and politicians need to be super careful and qualified in how they approach things so as not to encourage it.
You can be sure though the Dems won't rebuke Netanyahu for saying this:
Reply to 0 thru 9 I know Kamala Harris and Warren have also come out in support for her. But the Democrats looked absolutely awful as they through Ilhan Omar under the bus because bad faith actors decided to pound the table and accuse Omar of baseless anti-semitism.
Meanwhile as Baden pointed out, Netanyahu said the quiet part out-loud, i.e. he views Israel as an monolithic ethnic-state. There is a very real conversation that needs to occur in American regarding out relationship to Israel, and the more Zionists (which mostly refers to Evangelist Christians, rather than American Jews, by the way) attempt to silence this debate and accuse detractors of anti-semitism (even if those detractors are Jewish!) the worse it will be for them in the future.
Reply to Maw Israel has learned basically that peace with Palestinians isn't a priority as:
a) Similar wars with it's neighbours, like the Yom Kippur war, cannot happen anymore and Israel is totally dominant in every field of conventional warfare.
b) Even if Assad does manage to end the civil war, the country poses no threat to Israel (especially after it's nuclear weapons program was destroyed by Israel).
c) The time-to-time fighting with the Palestinians (and Hezbollah) can be contained and limited that it doesn't represent any kind of problem to the government or Israel in general
d) The current state doesn't represent an economic problem to Israel: the economy is doing just fine. There are no international sanctions that would force Israel to think otherwise.
e) Israel has already approach states like Saudi-Arabia as everything isn't viewed through the prism of the Palestinian question anymore.
Above all, the US has become an extremely untrustworthy ally which just fumbles up in the Middle East. It has lost it's influence severely in the Middle East and it's Middle East policy, if you can think there is one, is simply a train wreck. Just look at Iraq and the poor Kurdish allies of the US in Syria. Hence if one would assume that a 'Bernie/Warren'-administration or similar would change US policy towards Israel and cut for example aid to this wealthy country, it wouldn't be a huge crisis for Israel. Israel has good relations with Russia and Turkey and basically the change would create a bigger storm in the US political scene than in Israel.
@Baden@Maw
+1
Thank you both for your thoughtful responses. In this world wired together tighter than a drum, when the Middle East sneezes, the rest of us catch cold. Anti-Semitism is, like other forms of racism and intolerance, a blight upon humanity. We must strive to reduce it, if not completely eliminate it. But like the fable of the boy who cried wolf, false accusations of such for narrow political purposes undermine the real problem and cloud the issue.
The Jewish people have had an undeniably difficult history. May those in Israel live peacefully and happily. Any criticism (from myself and others of like mind) of the current government is with the intent to help ensure and increase that peace and happiness. For all, without exception.
Comments (154)
I decided it might be unwise to start a thread, but in light of various accusations of anti-semitism against the labour party in the UK, I leave this video here. And if anyone can bear to watch it through, I would ask whether it is just possible that some Jewish people are racist; that the state of Israel is institutionally racist; that the victims have tragically become the oppressors? Am I even allowed to ask?
I can't say I watched the whole video, but I did watch the opening lines, which had a woman declaring that Israel's right to exist was rooted in God's decree alone, which was intended to delegitimize Israel's right to exist and it then said Palestinian children were being rounded up in an effort to control the population, placing Israel as monsters who enjoy injuring children.
Questions like what gives our Australian announcer the right to live on Aboriginal lands are not discussed, nor is the question of what has instigated the martial law tactics of the Israelis addressed (although maybe later in the film they offer a balanced explanation of both sides, but it seems not).
Anyway, the right to possess land is complicated in all instances, but the right to protect it generally not. So I'd think a thread would be more appropriate for complete discussion, but I also think special care should be made to avoid suggestions that the Jews are monsters or that the Palestinians are dogs, which are sometimes the unspoken thoughts of the advocates for either side.
Please advise me: is this a video that has hard to watch images?
No, it's just like Bambi, but without the scary scenes.
Ahem...3 seconds in and there is an advisor. :gasp: I'll follow along without the pictures.
I noticed that the film had comments turned off on vimeo, which is one reason I was hesitant about the thread. But I think people should look at it (no children though). There are some amazing Jewish Israeli people trying to change things for the better on the film, so though it is indeed one sided, and though there are big issues about Australia and Britain and anywhere, this is this and it needs to be known about too. Hopefully we can avoid the 'your atrocities are worse than mine' arguments, along with the 'you're racist for calling me racist' ones. But probably not. :sad:
I generally avoid discussions of Israel and the Palestinians and I won't make an exception here except to make one point about moral perspective. Bad things happen to people all over the world. There is violence. People lose their homes. There is oppression and terrorism. As a US citizen, I don't necessarily need to weigh in on who's right, who's wrong, and what's up. Except when I share responsibility for what's happening, which is certainly true in the Middle East. My country has had a big role in screwing that part of the world up. I don't feel any need to fix things. That may not be possible. Often I feel that our continued involvement just makes things worse.
There is a difference between systematic, institutionalized discrimination and sanctioning of rights violations in a double standard manner and individual acts of discrimination. Any form of institutionalized sanctioning of rights violation should be criticized and stigmatized. I see no reason why not, and I see an especial need to pipe it down on a group who's very existence was threatened by the same elitist, God-endowed form of discrimination being enacting now. This documentary should be taken as a case study of discrimination and oppression in a modern state, not a wholesale condemnation of a people group.
And just because colonial communities of the past committed terrible acts does not legitimize nor should it relax condemnation of it in the present.
While I do agree that the ultra-orthodox community - though they have the loudest voice (let's not forget Yitzak Rabin) - is actually a small minority in Israel and we could say the same for many countries in the world that violate children' rights, i.e. child soldiers, slave labour and sexual crimes; Australia indeed has a deplorable past with the genocide they have committed against Indigenous peoples and even today continue to violate international human rights conventions with their horrendous treatment of asylum seekers, but it is not about the right of self-determination neither is it pointing fingers here and saying that one is worse than the other. The rights of children are universal and it is our responsibility to protect this right. The question here is not about the possession of land but whether there is any justification to violate Convention of the Rights of a Child for the sake of security.
No.
In Israel, martial law prohibits freedom of expression and association that enables the military to exercise powers that can detain and intimidate children who are subject to martial law and Israeli police continue - in places like East Jerusalem - to violate adopted laws such as Law 5731-1971 (âYouth Lawâ) - that attempts to improve the treatment of minors. Order Number 1745 explains the lawful process of interrogation against minors suspected of committing security offences and yet within it - 136d(b)6 - it hypocritically states, âThis article does not apply to minors suspected of committing security offenses,â So, :chin: ? I suspect the intention of the Knesset amending the Penal Code to increase the sentence of stone throwing with a minimum imprisonment of three years is to use intimidation to protect residents living in illegally built settlements in the occupied territories of Palestine and/or to try and change the mindset by using fear tactics to enforce submission. It is dubious to say the least whether these hostilities will in fact prevent the makings of future terrorists. These children experience mental health and post-traumatic symptoms from being detained from their families, stripped naked, interrogated, before going back to living in proximity to a wall protected by armed soldiers that continue to use aggressive tactics.
I don't care what country you are from or what religion you follow. The rights of children are universal and to use the pointing fingers card is really not on.
My reference to Australia was over the question of what constitutes legitimate land occupation, and the question can be turned to any nation anywhere. It's no more legitimate to say my quarter acre lot is mine because I bought it through legitimate means under US law as it to say it is mine because my ancestors put a stake in it 1000 years ago. Land is acquired by war, government force, treaty, and purchase, and the question isn't clear when it's morally rightfully one's own, which places Israel's rightful presence as morally ambiguous as Australia's and the US's. The Palestinian right to the lands is just as morally right as the Manhattan Indians right to NYC, only in the latter case no one takes such a claim at all seriously.
And that takes me to the next point, is that if we accept Israel's right to occupy all the lands it does (for example, accepting the Levy Commission's report of its right to the disputed territories), then it is understandable that there be a certain ferocity in protecting those lands. You'd certainly not expect much less from a sovereign nation in allowing the takeover its land. To be sure, if the Mexicans decided they wanted to reclaim Texas, it would end very badly for them, with little public outcry.
And this takes us to the children. I absolutely wish to protect innocent children and even to afford guilty children lesser punishments than adults, but there is no nation on earth that doesn't detain children. Israel, if you take the generous view toward the Israelis (which I understand you do not), is a nation under constant attack and fears for its safety and its continued prosperity. Amid the growing violence, it did in fact increase mandatory sentences for rock throwing, although the Israeli Supreme Court did not allow anywhere close to three year sentences for it, and the sentences in facts were measured in terms of weeks and not years. I would assume again that should some teenagers take it upon themselves to throw rocks at police in the US, I could certainly see sentences being handed down in that range. Say what you wish, but throwing stones into crowds and at officers is a real threat to public order, and doubtfully something you would accept in your community, unless, of course, you shared in the outrage of the rock throwers. But, of course, in this hypothetical, we are assuming the rightful occupation of the Israelis, which you do not.
So, yes, innocent children should not be detained, but dangerous children should, still keeping in mind they are children and should not be treated as punitively as adults.
I accept the legitimacy of sovereign states as defined by international law whereby such states as members of an international community are subject to the equality principle based on particular characteristics as per the declarative theory test. This would make Israel, as a sovereign state, subject to international human rights law (see Montevideo Convention) however the erosion of human rights is when legitimacy of statehood is accepted on the basis of national law where sovereign powers begin to exercise categorical breaches of human rights obligations based often on potentially ideological underpinnings and violating the League of Nations Mandate (hence the "certain ferocity in protecting those lands" and the Levy Commission Report).
In 1992, Australia' high court case Mabo vs. Queensland overturned the Terra Nullius concept used by the colonialists as justification for the possession of Australian land, despite the indigenous population living here for thousands of years and this declaration was likely inhabited by the vicious concept that the indigenous people were not 'civilised' and why the disgusting White Australia Policy only recognised as loathsome in the 1970s. It took even longer for the government to apologise for the genocide and even the latter is a word not used to describe what they did to indigenous children.
Referring to your statement, indeed, Palestinian statehood has regularly failed the State Recognition tests for a number of reasons, but not what you suggest (vis-a-vis land acquisition) but rather the ambiguity of permanent characteristics where the government is unable to consolidate adequate control over the territories. You speak of war, force, treaty and purchase, but there is also constitutive recognition by the international community - hence why UN resolutions recognising Palestinian statehood cannot be undermined, as well as other characteristics such as defined territory, a solid and unified system of governance, international relations and diplomatic capacity, and finally a permanent population all of which have been undermined both as a result of bad Palestinian leadership but - the latter in particular as per the settlement buildings - by Israel because the intention is clear that they are infringes the Palestinian right to self-determination.
The security and continuous threats of violence plays a pivotal role in this and it is clearly understandable given the constant threats against Israel and particularly the disbelief against the existence of Israel. If cases against Israel were taken to international courts, Hamas would likely be guilty since Israel was merely defending against attacks aimed at Israeli civilians. But if we really want to discuss land occupation and international law, we can remove the potentially emotive elements relating to the Palestinians by focusing on the Golan Heights.
Quoting Hanover
Ahed Tamimi is one such girl detained by the Israeli police for kicking a soldier and while I congratulate the soldiers in that instance for not responding to her frustrated resistance, is she "dangerous" enough to merit 10 years imprisonment?
I don't understand how you would assume that I am not taking a "generous view" toward the Israelis when I am well aware of the continuous security threats and have said it as such - hence the relationship between security threats and children's rights - but children are not dangerous. You need good people in dangerous cities to respect and trust the police, just as much as these children belong in schools, to be protected by a safe home, and to be given opportunities so that they can see Israel for what it really is, a beautiful place. Do you not understand that?
From the article :
"But with Israelâs military court system boasting a 99.7 per cent conviction rate for Palestinians, the odds donât look good."
Why the bloody hell is a minor judged in front of a military court for a misdemeanor?
Why would anyone want to hold a "generous view" of those who commit such abuse?
There was resistance from the Arab residents from the beginning, and became more intense once the State of Israel was declared.
It has been evident for quite some time that the Jewish infiltration into the west bank, with settlements and roads, would prevent the Palestinians from organizing a contiguous territory. Further, there was, if I remember correctly, an intention (in the British Balfour Declaration) to include the West Bank as part of Israel. That didn't happen de jure; it's been de facto.
Israel now has the problem of pacifying the Arab population in its midst, never a nice process. It is traumatic for the resident Palestinians to endure, and it is degrading to Israeli culture to do it. I don't see an acceptable way out for either side.
The point I want to reinforce, is that this isn't a new problem: it was created when the first Jews left Europe for Palestine. This is, for better or worse, the way the world works. Columbus's expedition, then later the British, was the beginning of the end for native western hemisphere cultures. When Australia was discovered and claimed by the British, that too was the beginning of the end for the aboriginal culture.
Nobody lands on the shore, discovers people already present, and says, "Oh, look, Jack. See, there are people already living here. That means we must leave so as not to disturb them. They were here first, and they deserve to remain the only residents here."
No. Never happens that way. Instead, calculations are made about what it will take to win a beachhead, then move in settlers. If the calculating is sound, the discoverers will lead to settlers and that will be either the end of the existing residents, or a very long war and then the end of the earlier residents.
Colonial expansion by one people normally occurs at the expense of the natives -- in this case, Arabs. It may not be nice; just; fair; reasonable; and so on, but that is the way the world works.
Criticism of those in Australia that seek to deny or downplay the genocides of Australian indigenous people are right and just, as are those of people who do likewise in the US, Canada or many other developed countries where people live affluent lives on land that was stolen from the inhabitants a few centuries ago, and where the few survivors of those indigenous inhabitants have mostly been oppressed and discriminated against in the intervening years.
What differentiates this from the Israel-Palestine case is that I can vehemently criticise the Australian government when it seeks to downplay the country's past genocide (as it shamefully does far too often), without being accused of racism against the current majority inhabitants of Australia. Yet when one criticises the Israeli government one is branded as anti-semitic. Or, if one is one of the many Jews that levy similar criticism against the Israeli government's actions, one is branded a self-hating Jew. I'm not saying that people on this forum, who are mostly a pretty thoughtful bunch, would spray those accusations of anti-semitism or self-hatred around. But there are regrettably very many in the wider world that do exactly that.
I think that what happens is that they land on shore and see a lot of unoccupied land. Land is not an asset as such, it has to be worked to become productive, so there would be no notion that the new arrivals were depriving anyone of anything.
There was something of that notion in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, They were taking on unproductive land, so bringing it into production would benefit everyone.
Of course, this idea dates from a period when it was assumed that Jewish immigration to Israel would only ever involve a tiny number of idealists.
Despite no final agreement by the League of Nations of the UN with the neighbouring polities Jewish terrorists seized control of Palestine and there has been bloodshed ever since.
Israel was conceived during a time when eugenics was respectable and at a time when race was thought to be a viable proposition. Hitler accepted the position of the Zionists as it was his view that founding a state on racist lines was a good idea.
And with that he left the stage.
Consider what is being said about Israel as the result of a 16 (now 17) year old child for striking an officer. She was no stranger to intentional provocations against military officers in what basically amounts to a war zone. She is not a little child, but someone who was specifically protesting and physically resisting for the purpose of impacting public opinion about Israel in her effort to gain political advantage where she could not gain it militarily. She was not part of a round up effort of children and she wasn't whisked away after a late night knock on the door. Might a 16 year old be sentenced to 8 months in detention in the US after repeated resistance against police officers, especially if it occurred in areas where officer's safety was threatened? Maybe, it wouldn't be that extraordinary, but does that rise the level of declaring Israel a nation rife with human rights abuses? Quoting TimeLine
Fair enough, it's likely I'm more defensive than you are ungenerous when it comes to Israel, but you're views on children are overly defensive and entirely unrealistic in your declaration that they are not dangerous. Evil doesn't suddenly emerge at 18 years old.
I'm no fan of calling people racist to end discussion, but that occurs in all sorts of settings. It's a worn out battle cry here in the US, recited often after a Republican speaks. The race card can only be played when race is at play, so one group of white Australians can hardly call another group of white Australians who are decrying the past abuses against the aborigines anti-white for their views. It just wouldn't make sense. I suppose I might be limited in defending Australia's past treatment of aboriginal peoples for fear of claims of racism aimed at me, but I don't know, I'm not Australian and don't know the social limitations placed on such conversations. But when you're criticizing Israel, it can be seen a criticism of Jews specifically, a historically abused minority, and therefore the cries of racism. My guess is that sometimes it is prejudice against Jews, sometimes not, but we all understand an ad hom doesn't respond to a legitimate argument.
So you don't think there is a legitimate way to distinguish Anti-Zionism from Antisemitism?
And so it's your position that the founding of Israel was motivated by a desire to foist Jewish dominance on the world as opposed to saving an ancient people from the verge of extinction?
I'm not sure that there are that many, but they manage to dominate the media, and have undue influence.
Quoting charleton
Ken Livingston, ex mayor of London, was kicked out of the labour party for saying exactly that. His defence that it is a matter of historical record was dismissed as - irrelevant?
But by contrast, this guy is not going to get kicked out of the conservative party anytime soon.
Repeat after me : "A minor has no fucking place being judged in front of a military court for a misdemeanor. The country who does this is a gakhole with no respect for common decency and international laws.".
Its not hard. If you can't do that, sorry, but you are a human rights violation apologist. It's that simple.
Yes it is counterproductive, and sometimes unfair, in that context as well. I find most accusations of racism regrettable, no matter who utters them. In most cases they lead either to an escalating exchange of insults or to a pointless semantic argument over what the word 'racism' means.
I think that the arguments that are made against certain policies using an allegation that they are racist can be made better by appealing to human values of compassion and fairness.
Human rights, whatever they may be, are dependant upon circumstances. You have the right to live unless you are trying to kill me. You have the right to due process, unless we are on the field of combat. No particular right, I'd submit, dictates that another commit suicide and allow you to kill them.
So, is there an instance when an enemy combatant might be afforded lesser due process rights than a citizen in a milatarized zone even if 16 years old? Of course. It just depends on the circumstances on the ground, the danger posed by the conduct, and precisely the due process limitations in the military court versus the civil court.
Whataboutism is certainly more unhelpful. Indignation is justifiable when one is facing indignities. You are doing the apology of Human Rights violations. That is what your pretense of mild-maneurism is obfuscating.
Opinions are dependant upon circumstances. In a circumstance where you claim that there are justifications for a 16 years old girl facing a military court for a misdemeanor, it is clearly justifiable to hold the opinion that you are, in this instance, batshit crazy wrong.
Quoting Hanover
Circumstances can make us all monsters and dogs, and I have the luxury of sitting in my judgemental armchair at a safe distance, and the sad truth is I care more about the overspill into my local politics than any of the people over there. The conflict is older than me, and I am old.
Nevertheless, I have a principle that I hope is agreeable to most, that those with power over others are responsible for them. I don't think there is a question on which side the balance of power lies. And I don't think the film is mere propaganda; one can argue and question individual incidents, but there is too much, too well supported from Israelis as well as Palestinians, testimony from the Australian journalists, credible video evidence. This is not peace-keeping, this is not a measured response to threat, this is a terror campaign intended to totally subjugate demoralise and eventually evict or eliminate opposition. There is little sign of a will to reach an accommodation.
And that comes from a dreadful history - it is understandable. It is, in a sense, a continuation of WW2, itself the culmination of 2000 years of oppression. Psychologically, we are afraid to stand alone, and so we identify with the tribe, and the tribe demands loyalty unto death, that is the security it offers.
So between the dogs and the monsters, my loyalty is always with the dogs, and when the dogs become monsters and the monsters become dogs, I change sides. I am disloyal, I become a traitor.
It is still a thing.
I think thatâs the only way forward, if we want to save our cultures and our nations. Because these people are having children like rabbits.[/quote]
'Natural homelands' 'we want to save our cultures', ' these people are having children like rabbits'. Listen out for these sentiments and epithets - this is how 'they' speak. Don't do likewise, learn to spot them in the threads and on the news. My homeland is the whole earth and none of it; my culture is their culture and I reject it; every child is someone's baby rabbit.
If one makes a list of countries with human rights records, from the best to the worst, Israel would be near the top. Yet, Israel gets more than half of the UN sanctions? And that's not anti-Semitism? So, Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc., etc., combined have fewer sanctions than Israel? Israel is a nation where an Arab headed the country during an interim period. It's a nation where Arab Muslim judges sentence Jewish Israelis to prison. It is a country where it's fairly well integrated among various "races," and religious groups, and extends greater rights for women, gays, atheists, and other minorities than any country in the Middle East, while its neighbors routinely commit crimes against humanity, deny freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and cleanse all non-Muslims from their states.
The denial of the basic facts regarding Israel, as well as the world's fixation on Israel and the use of double standards against Israel can only be explained by anti-Semitism. While it is certainly wrong to call someone an anti-Semite for voicing a just criticism of Israel, it is equally wrong to deny the anti-Semitism that underlies the vast majority of the so-called discussion regarding Israel.
Besides, not all people are in favour of one side and against the other (as typically Americans think everything has to be). You can be critical of both sides. You don't have to be a supporter of the Palestinians and a hater of Israel or a worshipper of the Judeo-Christian heritage and hater of the arabs (or muslims).
Quoting LD Saunders
At war at least it hasn't been so. When Israel invaded Lebanon in the early 1980's you could see Lebanese coming to the roads and clapping their hands in support of the action. Why? Well, of course they didn't like the PLO running things. Yet that changed quite quickly when the local populace came to interaction with the IDF.
Just to give an example observed by the UN peacekeepers in Lebanon: when an Israeli armoured column advancing on a road drove through an area of thick vegetation, they would simply open fire with their machine guns to pin down any possible ambushes lurking in the bushes. When a small girl playing in her family orchard got shot and killed this way, the IDF would simply inform that they have killed a terrorist. Now, to fire wildly and blindly at a spot where there might be an ambush has it's points, but also shows that total lack of concern of the civilian population.
Your claims against Israel are pure bullshit. How about you tell us when you have ever condemned the barbarity and crimes against humanity by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority? The Palestinian Authority as its official government policy demands the mass murder of Jews. It officially calls those who stab to death little Jewish children in their own homes "heroes and legends" and encourages others to also stab Jewish children to death. How about when the Palestinian Authority has an official bounty on the heads of Jews, and it pays the family of those who murder Jews, life-long pensions, which can be as much as $15,000 per month? Ever protest that criminal action? Even the Nazis did not offer bounties for the mass murder of Jews.
How about when Hamas cites in its official charter that Israel should be destroyed, that Jews are responsible for all the wars, I assume even those wars between Japan and China, and it also endorses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as being real. Ever protest that?
Did you protest the more than 30 terrorist tunnels that were dug into Israel, and were used to kill Jewish children, which started the last war in Gaza? Did you protest against the UN for allowing one of the tunnels to originate from a UN building, which means UN officials had to have known about the tunnel?
Have you protested the actual occupation of Cyprus by Turkey? How about Egypt's abuse of Christians? How about China's abuse of its Muslim population, which it oppresses in a way Israel never would?
Those are just some of the double standards I'm speaking of. And how come a crowd in Sweden burned down a synagogue and screamed that Jews should be shot after Trump agreed to move the US embassy in Israel? How come they did not attack Americans? It's because today's Jew-haters lie about Israel and do so in order to justify the abuse of Jews throughout the globe. That's why we see such vulgar behavior in Sweden, France, Germany, and a rise in anti-Semitism. The fact is that if Jews weren't involved, the world would have recognized that Jordan and Egypt were the main culprits regarding the Palestinians and they both have an affirmative duty to take their own citizens back after losing a war of aggression against Israel. It's only because Jews are involved that the world believes the Jews in Israel have some duty to take these millions of people in as full citizens. No country would do that. Name any nation that would take in millions of people who previously declared war on their nation, and who demand their nation's destruction, and who would enter in such numbers that the citizens would no longer be a majority in their own country? Name one? Japan? No. Germany? No. The USA, Canada, Australia? No. No one would even think any other nation should have to do such a thing. It's only when it comes to tiny little Israel that the world engages in such double standards.
The way the Palestinians have been treated by Israel for the last 50 years is one of the most ironic situations in all of human history. It's been incredibly shameful. What do I think of Jews? They're people. What more is there to say?
I disagree with this assessment. The Israeli response is motivated by the real threat posed by the Palestinians to their existence and peaceful functioning. They are not terrorists who awake each morning asking themselves how they can disrupt a peaceful people due to religious and ideological differences. Should the Palestinians stop any aggressive act toward Israel, there will be no aggression by Israel.
This is a dispute over land. That's what this is. If we accept Israel's right to the land it occupies, it stands morally right. If we don't, it doesn't, although I would not allow that the terroristic acts by the Palestinians are acceptable in any circumstance. They lob bombs into Israel for the sole purpose of disruption and civilian casualty, without regard for any military target.
The Palestinians have no way to win a military war against the Israelis, so the war has turned to securing public condemnation against Israel in order to gain an advantage diplomatically. They have largely been successful in that approach except in the U.S. So, is the video you presented propaganda, no more or less than if Israel were to start producing videos showing the atrocities exacted by the Palestinians. What's the purpose of such videos if not to garner support for a political position?
And I disagree with this. One can accept Israel's right to the land, and condemn its actions against people who helplessly and fruitlessly resist with stones against automatic weapons and tanks. One can in these circumstances well afford to respect the rights of one's enemies, and so hope to reduce the enmity.
The rock throwing is symbolic (David against Goliath), but it can be significantly harmful as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_stone-throwing
American support for the state of Israel was mostly Cold War strategy. Now we're stuck with the fallout.
Wiki's a real battleground on this.
You have enough evidence to make a comprehensive case for either side. The structure of the articles also encourages partisanship - the data on deaths, injuries etc aren't compared symmetrically within articles: you'll find Israel focussed and Palestine focussed articles but few attempts to synthesise them. So there are few comparative accounts of damages incurred by both sides. The best overview I've found is this one, but it omits estimation of indirect and economic effects of the war.
There's also a sustained ideological battleground on appropriate methodology for generating any of the statistics. So much effort is placed on methodology contestation there're good academic arguments for any partisan take, really. Also excellent arguments against any take. Informed discourse about it might as well be a discrete space, in which every person is infinitely far from reconciliation with any other viewpoint except one equivalent to their own - which is accepted as obvious without reflection.
The interpretation of Israel-Palestine might well be the best model of polarised discourse, so much so that it would be controversial to put it as an example of polarisation in the dictionary. :P
I think Zionism was about keeping Jews from being assimilated. That was the homeland part.
I didn't call her evil. I said children are not all innocent.Quoting René Descartes
You can read the history of the State of Israel for the specifics on this, but as I've noted before, the right to land is always morally ambiguous. Why did the British get Australia and not the Roma? There are thousands of reasons.
Quoting René Descartes
These quips make your post not worth responding to. As noted very clearly, I wasn't suggesting anything in particular about the Australians, but only what constituted legitimate land possession by any nation.Quoting René DescartesThis has already been responded to as it relates to the dispute over whether the settlements are illegal.Quoting René DescartesI'm suggesting that the reports are a form of advocacy for one side or the other. I don't think that an inability to present a neutral side amounts to it being fake, but more so being so ideological that lack of bias is impossible.Quoting René DescartesThat's not the truth.Quoting René DescartesIt was in self-defense.
Land ownership is just a stance not a metaphysical reality. I think we can only survive through cooperation and not making excessive claims on land. We can enforce landownership but through armies, police and war not justification.
I don't think that claiming rights over a bit of land means you can overpopulate it and excessively exploit it's resources.
I was disturbed in the late 90's when watching an Open university documentary on Demography and someone on the Gaza strip said he had 8 children because he was trying to outnumber the Jews but he was apparently living in a one bedroom apartment. Well that is child abuse in my opinion. Creating children into a conflict zone is dubious but doing it as a conflict tactic is just futile and harmful.
I think having children does just add to the state of exploitation and conflict which is life. Responsible reproducing would surely eliminate various problems.
Anti Israel sentiment does smell of antisemitism because it is disproportionate considering millions of people have died in the Republic of Congo wars and received little attention or academic studies or appearances in The Lancet. People are clearly very selective about which cause to get behind.
I rent my house
Quoting René Descartes
Have you ever heard of an animal other than human owning land?
Quoting René Descartes
Have you bothered even reading one history book? What a fatuous comment
They are not discussing is the point I am making.
Of course Anti Israel sentiment and Antisemitism are going to be closely linked. I don't think I can debate with you if you keep up this low level of discourse.
But maybe he's actually not doing that. Maybe he's focusing on something else. Who knows?
But it would probably help if someone like Netanyahu would acknowledge the mistakes the state of Israel has made. Or maybe he has done that and I missed it.
We need to differentiate between land and housing. I think everyone deserves a roof over their head.
Life involves exploitation of each other and resources we benefit from cheap produce made from minerals mined by slaves in places such as the Congo that I mentioned earlier and labour in undemocratic China and poverty hot spots like India. I can't justify my lifestyle because societies are based around exploitation. I am just thankful not to be homeless.
If I lost my housing I would hope someone else could find mey a property to live in.
We are not discussing this type of scenario anyhow we are talking about strong claims about ethnic or national groups owning a whole territory. Well ...Palestine has been owned that way by different groups and for the longest period it was owned by the Ottoman Empire and never self determining.
Anyway if I became homeless I would not have 8 children because that would be cruel and irresponsible. I have no desire to live in the Middle East which has no redeeming features for my and breed hordes if offspring to become fresh victims for an ideological dispute.
I think the bible may have got it right when it talks about stewardship.
We should be looking after the land not exploiting it and fighting over it.
but instead they're discussing tit for tat grievances, quasi religious or religious ethnic identities and land statuses and raking over historical minutiae.
I don't understand how a species that flew to the moon could be so dysfunctional.
How would you know that? To me it is the only explanation for the disproportionate and biased coverage of the conflict.
People don't think the Jews should have a state and Israel should never had existed meanwhile there are hundreds of millions of Arabs with large countries in the middle East and a small area of land for the Jews. Why shouldn't the Jews have a nation and why should they be forced to live in exile? They have historical roots in the region. The surrounding Arab countries mistreat their Palestinians force them to keep refugee status and live in camps even though a lot of them were born in these countries.
Israel clearly faces an existential threat to its survival and the Jews as a whole already faced that threat so they have my support for the foreseeable future."Pro" Palestinians are also clearly worsening the conditions for the Palestinians (B.D.S. and so on).
Oh I wasn't specifically talking to you. But seems like you thought so. Which is telling.
Quoting LD SaundersI do have faith in what the UN Peacekeepers have observed in Lebanon. They gave an objective view... that usually wasn't heard in the media.
Yep, the typical viewpoint I was talking: critique of something makes you the ardent supporter of the other side. The typical ignorant bashing so common in the net.
Israel has been able to make peace with Egypt and Jordan and these countries have had the ability to also reinforce and stick their side of the agreement. Lebanon is far too weak to do this and so are the Palestinians. Withdrawal from Lebanon didn't make Israel's situation better as it was the Hezbollah, not the Lebanese Government, which then retook southern Lebanon.
Hamas has it's line to destroy Israel and the low-level conflict goes on. That shouldn't come as a surprise.
The most strange thing is how peaceful the Golan Heights have been where the Muslim extremists and Israel have been next to each other.
I stopped reading right here. If this is what you took away from the preceding discussion, then you are not in a position to participate in the discussion (for whatever reason; I am not going to speculate about the possible psychological reasons of such striking incomprehension).
Interesting asymmetry. Atrocities are conditionally excused on one side and unconditionally condemned on the other.
âPalestine is only a geographic expressionâ - A well known 19th century diplomat
Yep.
I guess it is the American vitriolic style of juxtapositioning things to good and evil that makes the discourse so inherently dumb. My wife has a friend who is married to an Israeli and when talking with him about Mid-East politics he has allways been totally rational, realistic and had what I would call a natural critique towards his government which anyone living in a democracy typically has towards some policy actions of one's government. In fact, when you read the English versions of Israeli newspapers, you get the same feeling.
You don't get the same feeling when Americans or the American media talks about Israel. Never mind Christian fundamentalists who see modern day Israel not as just a nation state, but something very biblical and a benevolent sign of the end times finally coming. Even the ordinary commentary is totally different from any other country. To be fair, the other side, those who denounce Israel support the plight of the Palestinian people are similarly annoying in their zealous support of their cause.
And both sides just use the "useful idiots" that they have on their side.
I think that is why Israel arouses such passions. Other states may do worse things, including persecute minorities, but as long as our own nations support Israel people feel they have lost the moral high ground.
(I am trying answer a specific question here that is often asked; Why Israel gets so much attention, especially from the liberal/left, when objectively other nations do worse things?)
Yes, I am very selective. I am interested in conflicts that impinge on me. Whatever I posted about the Congo on one side or another, I doubt i would be accused of spreading propaganda or of racism. But the Congolese secret service is not very active in the UK, the policies of the Congo is not an issue in Uk politics. But here, it is a major issue which faction of Jews one spends passover with.
The smell of antisemitism, as I have shown in previous links, is not associated with people who give talks at meetings of avowedly antisemitic and white supremecist organisations, but rather with supporters of Palestinian rights. Now that is what I call propaganda.
His administration supported and co-drafted the Haavara agreement and supported a variety of emigration ''solutions'' to the ''jewish question''. I think if repatriation was an option during early nazi period they would have been supportive of it.
This report was published last year. There have been numerous attempts to discredit it, mostly by -of course- Israeli and US govt. To my knowledge, there are no real counterarguments to arguments made in the report itself, just accusation of anti Israel bias and antisemitism. The first and second authors; you can read about them and their educational background.
I believe most of the discrimination is with respect to property rights and building permits. I believe there is also segregation of educational facilities/schooling and discrimination in education funding practices (and possibly other sectors, but I'm not sure).
Also there is plenty of condemnation against and accusation of rights violations by the typical critics - UN, amnesty international. So I've never quite understood this point about Israel being disproportionately targeted.
None of those groups are recognized as having states or being subjugated or oppressed within their own, internationally recognized boundaries.
Also, I don't see why the bold can't be recognized as in need of international attention while simultaneously recognizing israeli to palestinian rights violations as well.
Israel has had no economic sanction placed on it, only condemnation. US and its pro-israeli interest has too much influence for anything more than that. Anti semitism is discrimination or prejudice against the Jewish people. Jewish people are distinct from the Jewish state. Anti zionism is distinct from anti semitism and is also distinct from anti human rights violations. I don't think the international community would have any real issue with Israel if it stopped acting on, what are effectively, paranoid-schizophrenic delusions. Just working to economically discourage settlement construction and reduce building demolition in west bank would be a huge plus for their public image.
Uhuh. Except that it makes a distinction between Israeli citizens based on being Jewish or not and gives more rights to Jewish Israeli citizens than non-Jewish Israeli citizens. Israel discriminates based on religion as the High Court concluded you could lose those benefits if you converted to another religion.
The provenance of the modern Jew is debatable.
Extinction? There are as many Jews in the USA as in Israel.
Self identify yourself as Jews, white, black reifies racism.
No it's TRUE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
Immigration policy to so-called "Israel" has denied non-Jews. That is racism.
Non Jews, especially Arabs are denied basic rights of land ownership, and their lands have ben systematically stolen. That is racism.
Israel is an apartheid state, expansionist and founded by terrorism.
Whilst the British government were brokering a deal for the foundation of the state, Jews bombed British soldiers stationed in Palestine.
There is so much more antisemitism and casual racism in the Tory party but for some reason the media seldom seem to feature it in their articles.
By contrast the media seem very keen in denigrate FB pages that support Jeremy Corbyn. In Labour there is really no one in any position of power that would ever get away with expressing antisemitic views and party rules make the mere mention of Zionism, or apartheid next to impossible.
The new rules have been termed thought crime;"
âNo member of the party shall engage in conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial, or in any act which in the opinion of the NEC is grossly detrimental to the party. The NEC shall take account of any codes of conduct currently in force and shall regard any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on age; disability; gender reassignment or identity; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; or sexual orientation as prejudicial to the party; these shall include but not be limited to incidents involving racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia or otherwise racist language, sentiments, stereotypes or actions, sexual harassment, bullying or any form of intimidation towards another person on the basis of a protected characteristic as determined by the NEC, wherever it occurs, as conduct prejudicial to the party.â
Jews are not an economically disadvantaged groups, and I feel are moving towards a privileged status where any criticism of any Jew for any reason tend to attract accusations of antisemitism.
I cannot see what it is that being a Jew makes it okay to have established sub-groups inside the Labour party.
What would the reaction be if there was a group called Whites Labour Movement, or White Voice for Labour?
So if Somalis landed on English shores, that happen to be unoccupied at the time, they can start working on them to make them more productive for everyone's benefit, right? With such mentality, no wonder the old english imperialists felt entitled to help themselves to anything that crossed their path.
The mentality of British Imperialism was an abomination. And the legacy in India, Myanmar, Africa, Ireland, and elsewhere is a series of lasting fuck-ups of Biblical proportions. Partition has been a source of conflict everywhere it has been tried. Except possibly Cyprus, for the moment, as far as I know. And the attitudes linger on, unfortunately. And there is no denying that Israel has 'made the desert bloom'.
But there is also a resonance of the imperialist attitude in that of Israel along the lines of, 'the Palestinians have done nothing with the land, they don't deserve it.'
Really?? Check this out:
The example of colonisation that everyone had in mind was America. An endless frontier of land that could be brought under cultivation. To bring in some philosophy, this is a feature of Locke, it is the explanation of why you should obey the rules of your existing state - because if you don't like them everyone has the option of moving to the new world. Similarly it underlies the notion of property. One has a right to ownership of land because it is only your input of labour that gives land a value.
I'm saying that there was a reflection of this idea in the early Jewish settlements. That they would be creating something new, rather than taking away what somebody else owned. But obviously very few people were expected to want to take this up, any more than most people today would want to leave their homes and jobs to join a pioneering hippy commune in the desert. That is why everyone was relaxed about the idea of a few Jewish settlements in Palestine. They did not know the Holocaust was coming.
Yes, people saw things differently in the past. It is enjoyable to re-tell history as a simple story of goodies and baddies but that is not how it seemed to the people involved then, and nor is helpful when trying to understand the situation today.
Attempts to morally justify or excuse what was clearly wrong then and now, wonât wash either.
Your comments about the political structure of Israel is also as far-fetched as your conspiracy theories regarding Hitler.
How about the fact that a terrorist tunnel from Gaza originated from a UN building? You seriously claiming that the UN would not have known about the tunnel? That would have been impossible.
How about when the UN handed over rockets in their own buildings, to Hamas, knowing that Hamas would fire them at Jewish children in Israel? You call that being "objective"?
How about when the UN claimed that because of the number dead Israel must have targeted civilians, in its Goldstone report, written by an anti-Semitic Jew, when years later the Palestinians admitted that they lied about the death toll? How come the UN then did not change its findings? How come it originally used a death toll that even included people dying of natural causes?
How come Israel has been sanctioned more than Syria, when Syria is actively butchering people on its streets?
The UN's own leadership has admitted to bigotry against Israel. It's not surprising. How many Islamic nations are in the UN, as well as allied socialist ones? How many Jewish states in contrast? Is it really surprising that the UN would single out the lone Jewish state for discriminatory treatment given the UN's composition?
No, it was not 'clearly wrong' then. Do you imagine that in the past people did what they did because they woke up one morning and thought 'Let's be evil'?
I would like to hope I could have been magically born with modern sensibilities, but I have to face the fact that if I had been born in another place and at another time I would probably have seen nothing wrong with slavery, or the subordination of women. And I doubt if you would have either. If you cannot get your head around the fact that people see things differently to you then you will never understand either the past or the present, let alone have any hope of making things better.
As to my 'attempting to morally justify or excuse', if you look about six posts down on the previous page you will see what my own opinion is of Israel. But I do not believe I should try to support my opinion by falsifying history. People wrote about the moral justification for taking land in Palestine and I gave my opinion about how that was seen at the time, bearing in mind that nobody then imagined it would involve any more than a handful of people.
I disagree. They very well knew it was wrong to kill and oppress but invented all sorts of excuses to justify their evil deeds. Not much has changed in that regard today.
My answer is that Hitler was a populist politician. When he saw a tactical political advantage he would support emigration to Palestine, or other places. But did he 'support Zionism' in the sense that he wanted to help Jews? Of course not. It was a money-extraction scheme combined with what we now call 'spin'. So yes, you can find papers (Haavara Agreement) that can be interpreted as supporting Zionism, but there is no reason to assume they were sincere. As later became evident, Hitler never felt bound to honour his written undertakings.
Well that completes the set of failed Imperial partitions then. One could almost make an aphorism of it. "You can't unmake an omelette even if one of the eggs is fresh."
The partition of Cyprus was not 'Imperial', unless you consider all partitions are by definition Imperial.
Their eyes were filled with the holocaust, and still are, and it is hard to reproach them for that. Perhaps it is time now, when there is less of a credible threat, to indulge in a little self criticism. But it is worth noting that all this dates back to a time when racial thinking was considered perfectly normal and legitimate. Cultures do not change very fast.
I really question that based upon the comments in this thread, with many arguing that the right to Israel to exist at all is in question. We also have to remember as well that Israel has offered a two state solution and it was rejected by the Palestinians. http://arabisraeliconflict.info/arab-israel-facts/fact-3-two-state-solution
And hypothetically, if Israel did provide Palestine it's own land, and should the Palestinians then launch rockets into Israel, would you agree at that point Israel would have the right to respond in full out war against an act of war by a now sovereign nation?
You're quite laughable.
I was talking about what UN Peacekeepers on the field reported. Not what something as large and schizophrenic as the "UN" officially views is something else.
Those reports done by individual blueberet soldiers and officers are quite objective because they don't have any own agenda or reasons to distort what was observed. I know many that have served in Lebanon as peacekeepers. A lot of Finnish reservists and active officers served in Lebanon and they didn't have any other agenda than just to report what they saw. Finnish troops have been there in Lebanon from 1982-2001 and 2006-2007 and from 2011 onwards to the present.
And the truth is that what they report isn't what typically is reported in the media.
The difference between these reports and the ordinary media reporting is simply that they are done by military trained people observing a military conflict, not the ordinary journalist take on reporting of the plight of the civilians in the hands of evil warlords/terrorists/Israelis Army/whatever. The judgemental aspect of the conflict is left out.
As I said before, the real problem would be for the Palestinian side to stick to the peace agreement. Because once you have the agreement, then that's that. Somewhere Palestine ends and Israel begins. Israel has been capable of removing the zionist religious fanatics quite easily from Sinai, let's remember that. So if there would be a reason for Israel to withdraw, they could do it and it can very well control it's borders. Jordan and Egypt have been able to do this and enforce the peace agreement, even if especially in Egypt populists have a opportunity for their populism in being agaist the Camp David accord. Lebanon is the case example when the government is too weak: Hezbollah has taken over South Lebanon and actually fought very well during the last war.
The truth is that in the Middle East, it takes a lot more courage and political bravery to be for a peace settlement than to be a hawk. It's far more easy to be a hawk and settle to the conclusion that limited wars are just a part of life. Just look at the Arab and Israeli leaders that have been killed by their country's own zealots because they did make a peace agreement.
But of course, there's no need for Israel to do any peace deal. A peace deal is done only when the continuation of the war is intolerable. For Israeli the occasional terrorist attack or rocket attack is a minor nuisance, not something that cannot be lived with.
There is a reason why Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan all supported Israel during its last war in Gaza. It's because even those countries are getting tired of the Palestinians' crap. It's only the anti-Semitic left in the USA and Europe that supported the Palestinians digging terrorist tunnels into Israel, murdering Jewish teenagers, and violating every cease-fire agreement. Even the Saudis know better than to support such crap.
This answer shows both your utter ignorance and bias about the Middle East perfectly.
The only reason Saudi Arabia tolerates Israel (and btw just now the crown Prince has said that Israel has a right to exist) is because of the Shia-Sunni conflict. Palestinians are Sunnis, but Hamas has close ties with Iran, which angers naturally Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is top of the pack because a) Iraq is down and out and b) Egypt has it's own problems and general al-Sisi is no Nasser.
To think that Saudis and other Arabs would be "tired of Palestinians' crap" is very odd idea.
For my part, I think Israel exists, and is a nation. I think it futile to maintain otherwise. However, I wonder to what extent it can reasonably be maintained that Palestine as a geographic area can be said to be the location in which a Jewish State should exist, or that a "natural and historic right" to the establishment of a state in that area exists. There are problems with taking such a position, and in basing a claim of entitlement to land on such vagaries as natural or historic rights, particularly when they're used in connection with establishing a nation. Bear with me as I indulge in a simple review of history, or pass on--I won't mind.
As I'm not inclined to think of God as a conveyor of real estate, or think that there is a natural right to certain property at a certain location, I think that if any such right can even be conceived it would have to be defended by reference to history. History, though, indicates that Palestine hasn't served as a home to "the Jewish people" or certainly to a Jewish State in an even nominal sense, since at the latest Hadrian was Roman Emperor and the Bar Kochba Revolt was crushed in 135 C.E. Before that, the Second Temple and most of Jerusalem was destroyed by the legions under Titus in 70 C.E. (you can still see the legions carrying the spoils of the Temple in a relief on the Arch of Titus on the Via Sacra in the Roman Forum).
Exiles from Palestine were associated with both those events. Earlier, the Jews were exiled in the 8th century B.C.E. by the Assyrians, and during the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century B.C.E. Most Jews stayed in Babylon for centuries, though some returned from exile, to be subjected to the rule of Cyrus and other Persians and then one or another of Alexander's successors, for most of the time, until becoming a protectorate of Rome in the 1st century B.C.E.
History seems to indicate that most of the Jewish people lived outside of Palestine, and that no Jewish State existed in Palestine, for the last 2800 years or so.
The region was governed by the Egyptians and Hittites before there was any such thing as a Hebrew. Per Netanyahu's own expressed logic, the area should be split between Egypt and Turkey and the Jews should evacuate entirely.
This is laughable.
It's the same false argument used by white genocidal maniacs all over the world from South Africa to all the Americas.
Indeed, and the Australians should give Australia back the the indigenous peoples; the nations of the Americas should return the lands to the "Indians", but more in a timeline - since there has not been a Jewish state before 1948 since the time of Hadrian, the English should give back Britain to the Welsh and Cornish folk and return to Germany and Scandinavia.
I'm not the only one that cited evidence. If you do not want to read it then that's your problem.
Quoting ?????????????
I did not say it was empty, however it was considered under-developed and thus underpopulated, which indeed it was.
What you do not seem to be able to take on board is that Jewish settlements in Palestine were proposed long before the Holocaust. Nobody expected more than a handful of romantic religious idealists would ever want to leave their comfortable lives in places like Germany to go and live in the semi-desert. As your (unattributed) quote says; This is an infinitely graver difficulty than the stock anti-Zionist taunt that nobody would go to Palestine if we got it; which was indeed the mainstream attitude at the time. Nobody was offering Jerusalem and Palestine to the Jews; there were Jews already in those places, just as there were Christians, just as there had been for centuries, so why would a few more matter?
That was the attitude at the time. After Hitler it is hard for us to imagine a time when it was seriously argued that the spiritual home of Judaism was Germany, or where it was not uncommon for Jews to convert on the grounds that all the worlds religions were merging into one anyway, as reason replaces superstitious elements, but that was the case.
But I get the impression nobody is interested in history, except as ammunition for one side or the other. And where something doesn't fit our preconceptions we close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears.
No, it is the argument made by anyone who knows anything about farming. Land, particularly semi-desert is not valuable, at best in can be used for seasonal grazing. You have to invest in it before it becomes productive.
OK, the people who used to do the seasonal grazing may not see it that way, but it is a very poor living and you don't have to be a white genocidal maniac to argue that life is generally better for everyone in an economically developed country like the USA than the mountains of Afghanistan.
Yes, there is more to it than that, but my point is that you would not have to be a villain to have seen early Zionist immigration as being a potentially good thing.
But because of the nature of this thread it is impossible to accept ideas like that. You have to keep it simple. One side or the other has to be irredeemably evil. If we were discussing any other topic but Israel /Palestine we would see how irrational this is.
In other words kick off the dirty Arabs and their goats, and build a weapon's factory.
By Netanyahu's reckoning, yes. As Hanover said, a group comes into possession of a stretch of land by various means, some violent. Israel should repudiate zionism and admit that some of its historic efforts to make Palestinians either move to Jordan or just shrivel up and die were wrong. The Israeli government should embrace all Palestinians as part of Israel and offer reparations.
Is there anyone out there (shading my eyes as I look around the 100,000 seat stadium full of philosophers) who has a perfectly neutral position on Israel or Palestine? Come on, raise your hands -- higher, please...
How could anyone be neutral? Unbiased? Not racist? To take a position places one in somebody's negative category box. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Who has a solution that will not be a fresh injustice to someone?
Per Ciceronianus, God didn't convey any land to the Jews. That role (at least in the 20th century) was filled by the British. They were collecting rent on that particular piece of real estate back then, and they widened and narrowed the gap through which refugee Jews (Zionists, sure, but also non-Zionist Jews hoping to get the hell out of Germany before it was too late).
Were the Brits in this discussion occupying high office in the '20s and '30s, would you have let the Jews into Palestine or not, knowing how much the Nazis hated them? How would you have felt after the Holocaust, saying "Hell, no. I'm not supporting this racist, imperialistic deprivation of Arab rights."
People have been moving around the planet for a long time, displacing the resident group, only to be displaced themselves. , were the Welsh and the Cornish the VERY FIRST people to occupy your lovely island? It seems to me pretty likely there was somebody else living there when you all arrived.
Colonialism, or population movement, or population displacement or replacement, is just people doing their thing. Everybody has done it, does it, or will do it sooner or later (going back to the stone age) and totally without respect for UN resolutions for or against it.
I'm biased in favor of Israeli displacement of Arabs; the British, Spanish, and Portuguese displacement of Amerindians, The British displacement of the Aboriginal inhabitants in Australia and New Zealand, the Frisian, Angle, Saxon and Scandinavian displacement of Celts, and the Celtic displacement of whoever was there immediately before. And all other displacements.
One might as well be since it's not going to be reversed.
The people who didn't live on the moon can be grateful they weren't there when we arrived -- else they would find themselves an earthy possession, at this point, and would be at the UN complaining that their lunar rights were being violated--to no avail.
Flying to the moon is proof of being functional, true enough, and so is operating am empire on which the sun never sets. So is carrying out Manifest Destiny or turning the desert green one kibbutz at a time.
Your mistake is assuming that People In their right minds are sensitive, caring, law-abiding, justice-seeking creatures who wish the best for everyone, and are quick to place others' needs before their own. Homo sapiens in their natural element (planet earth) are an invasive species, and if need be will get rid of the native opposition if they do too much bitching and carping about the new regime. They should be grateful, the bastards. This is not unusual behavior among species, certainly not this one.
It is only with the greatest of difficulty and the most severe cognitive dissonance that we manage to tolerate everyone on this over-populated celestial ball. We can actually like some of the people some of the time, but liking all of the people all of the time is just not within our genetic or learned behavioral repertoire. Consequently, we need a pressure-relieving war every now and then.
You can tell it was underpopulated by the fact that it is now able to support a lot more people that it did at the time. Yes; it was Ottoman land which is why the early Zionists requested the Sultan's permission to settle there. There was nothing remarkable about that, there were already Jews living throughout the Empire as there had been for centuries.
Eastern Europe and the Islamic world was nowhere homogeneous; It is only that way now because we have had a long period of 'ethic cleansing'. So, for example a Greek city like Salonika could have a majority Jewish population, there were Greek cities in Turkey, Christian communities in Iraq...nobody yet has the idea that one geographical area has to have one ethnicity.
Your quotes refer to Eretz Israel and a far more ambitious plan to create a new nation with a Jewish majority. That was not yet a serious option; the idea that any Jew would want to go there was considered doubtful, let alone masses. You pick on these quotes with the benefit of hindsight, because we now know that is indeed what would happen, but that is not how it seemed at the time.
Quoting ?????????????
If you had wanted to pick a nation where Jews were most emancipated, where they played a prominent part in cultural life, you would have picked Germany. During WW1 Germany could credibly appeal to American Jews that Germany was the side they should be supporting. The archetypal anti-Semitic nation was Russia (an ally of France and Britain).
And yes, in a few short years this changed absolutely. There are heart-rending stories of German Jews who waited too long to escape because they simply did not believe what was happening. Once again, because we know Hitler is coming we look into the past and pick out signals of that coming, but that is not how it seemed at the time.
Germany changed. Not because they decided to be evil but because when people get into difficulties they will follow the politician that gives them a simplistic explanation for their problems. People are like that, all people. The liberal reforms were just as real as Hitler, but they turned out to be fragile. And fortunately, so was the Nazi regime; Germany today is again a liberal country.
You expect a clear narrative from history, where the actors have fixed characters and you can prove and disprove things and detect clear lines of cause and effect. I don't. I see it as chaotic.
I view that the existence of nation states or countries simply cannot reasoned from a moral perspective. They surely can be reasoned, but morality isn't a defining factor. This is because basically every nation that has gained independence has gotten that after some kind of war or conflict. Hence anybody declaring one state to be more "legitimate" than other is absurdly confused. In fact, I tend to think that those people talking about the legitimate rights are usually the ones who start wars.
Existence of a state as a sovereign is an issue of practicality. Westphalian sovereignty can be reasoned by it's practicality and usefulness.
Neither can the borders of a country be justified to be legitimate on some higher moral ground. It doesn't have to do with morality, but of convenience and realpolitik. Who won and who lost in the last conflict.
They do if investment can open opportunities for work. I would have thought Australia was a prime example.
Quoting ?????????????
What is false; my saying that they wanted to be allowed to settle in Palestine or that there were already Jews in Palestine? That the Ottomans may not have been willing to take Zionist settlers does not contradict either of these. Other suggestions for Jewish settlements were Kenya and Argentina; once again the notion at the time was that it would be beneficial to these places.
Quoting ?????????????
The hindsight is in your selection of those quotes, rather than quotes from the much larger mass of people who saw no point in a Jewish homeland - and some danger. Because we know what is going to happen it doesn't follow that people at the time knew it too. Now somebody like Herzl is considered an important figure because of the way things turned out. But in his own time his vision for a Jewish homeland was not something like modern Israel but what was satirised as 'an imbecile prospectus for a Jewish Switzerland on the instalment plan'. And for those that did give it consideration, is was often as somewhere to put Russian and Romanian Jewish refugees, to relieve their condition, rather than somewhere a middle-class German Jew would ever want to go. Real history is all mixed up; what we now see as a clear process was a collection of different people, all with their own assessments and plans, often talking a cross-purposes. Just like in normal life.
Quoting ?????????????
That's right! If I was living back in those times I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to those who were actually right in their assessment....because at that time I wouldn't have known that they were right. Just as if I had attended a meeting of a tiny right-wing fringe party in 1918 I would have probably failed to realise than one day one of the speakers would become dictator of Germany or that there would be a world war.
And today when I read the various stock market tips I am unable to tell who is actually right from the rest, which makes investment a chancy business. Yes, some of them will be right, but I do not know which. I will only know that in retrospect. If that isn't the case with you, you must be enormously rich, and I would have thought you would have had better places to spend your time than arguing on an internet discussion board..
Now you are just twisting your argument to score points. The issue was whether investment in unproductive areas could create a net benefit or whether development is always a zero sum game. That an area can only have a fixed economic output, so that any immigration must always deprive whoever is already there. Now it may be that the immigrants colonise the area and suppress the original population, but it need not necessarily be the case. And that was not how the Zionist project was originally imagined; it was meant to create a new kind of non-nationalistic state, hence the reference to a 'Switzerland' in my previous post. Right up until the end of the mandate there were attempts to build joint Jewish-Arab institutions, because the expectation was there would be a mixed state. Sadly, that wasn't what happened, but once again we only know that with hindsight.
Quoting ?????????????
I would say that what characterises reactionary ideologies is their simplistic portrayal of history; "All Jews have always been wicked. They are the source of all our problems." Or alternatively "All Arabs are evil and only want to kill Jews and anyone who sympathises with them must be an anti-Semite". I suggest a more nuanced picture, which is why I annoy both sides.
How does making a judgement on an issue make someone bias? Assuming common agreement on a set of shared human rights, there is a correct assessment of the situation which holds regardless of sentiment. Condemnations are not disproportionately dolled out. Europeans committed atrocities to local populations throughout the colonial period and [to my knowledge] no western state denies this was a dark period. Since this thread is about Israel, that is what we are focusing on.
Israel is suppressing the development of an acknowledged nation state - Palestine - through neglect of its internationally determined duty to condemn and sanction fanatic Jews who think they have a title to west bank land. It committed atrocities during the campaign for its own establishment and still denies legitimate property rights to natives. It displaced, what could have been, a people that developed into an otherwise multicultural, multi-religious diverse state that would've had no pretext for maintaining the dominance of a given component ethnic or religious group unlike Israel which was established under the pretext of maintaining Jewish cultural and ethnic dominance within the state itself. Considering most of this colonization has happened post UN establishment, after the our attempt at holding high enlightenment ideals, it is like almost a slap in the face.
Now, when you buy a car, do you say, "well, this car costs $10,000.00, so I'm not buying it?" Or, do you say, "well, this car costs $10,000, but it will also provide me with $10,000 worth of benefits, so I'll buy it?" You always include a cost-benefit tradeoff, except when you discuss Israel, when you employ an irrational double-standard of only looking at costs, but no benefits.
By the way, most Zionists in Israel have wanted nothing from the USA, PROVIDED the USA stops financing Israel's enemies. That has never happened. The USA actually gives far more to Israel's enemies than it does to Israel.
I question whether there are any rights which are not rights recognized in law, and maintain that any claim that there are rights which are not, in fact, legal rights is simply a claim that there are certain things which are not legal rights which nevertheless should be treated as if they were legal rights. So when I question the existence of a right which isn't a legal right, I show no particular bias against those claiming such a right exists.
The claim that any group of people have a "natural and historic right" to a nation in a certain location, separate and distinct from a legal right, is necessarily biased, however, as it favors a particular group of people over other groups. In other words, it's a claim that a particular group of people, and no other group of people, are entitled to a nation at a certain place. So, I think reference to rights in these cases is best avoided. Israel simply exists.
Bullshit. They don't even care about the Palis. When Egypt bombs Gaza, no one bitches. When Syria bombs Palis, no one bitches. When Lebanon abuses Palis and treats them like shit, no one bitches. People don't bitch in those cases because the Jews can't be blamed for those abuses. This selective concern for the so-called Palis, a group made-up in the 1970s, gives away the plot. The so-called concern for Palis is only expressed when it can be used to harm Israel and Jews. Otherwise, no one gives a shit about them.
There is tremendous bias against Israel by the Arabs against the Jews in Israel because the Jews are not Muslim and Israel is seen as a satellite state for the US, which represents an entirely different culture and value system. If an Arab nation, with all its perceived backwardness by the Western world, was felt to have encroached on US soil, there would be less than a warm welcome. The U.S.'s interest in Israel is based upon the strong political involvement of Jews in the US as well as it being in an oil rich region.
So, we have an incendiary mix of hatred and this has resulted in violent reactions by the Palestinians, with the rest of the Arab world sympathizing with them, or at least superficially so. The rest of the Western world sees the Arab world destabilized by Israel's presence and they no doubt largely blame the US for that, considering the Israeli political and military power flows directly from Washington.
Does this mean that there is no link at all between the Jewishness of Israel and world reaction? No, but I don't think that if Israel secularized entirely and were populated by a majority Lutheran population you'd see a much different result in either the Arab reaction or the rest of the world.
I also think that the world reaction will rise and fall on pragmatics more than ideology, meaning that regardless of where this problem came from and regardless of who the land rightfully belongs to, the world mostly just wants to see the violence, regardless of who's at fault, end. The real truth is that no one cares for the Jews or the Palestinians as much as they do themselves, meaning they just want the problem resolved. It's a problem that needs to be fixed, but instead it's just something argued about.
I have a case in my office right now where water is running from my client's land onto his neighbor's. Both have all sorts of creative explanations for why the other is at fault, and I'll spend the better part of a year or two litigating and pointing fingers. I'm not sure who is right, but one day a jury will tell me who it is. What they need is to buy a shovel and fix the problem, but they'd rather be right than fix the problem.
This may or may not be true -- I don't know everything about the Left. But to whatever extent it is true, why do you think is it so? I would think all these neo-Marxists would at least be aware that Marx himself was a Jew. Doesn't that count for something with them?
Well, you have to first start with the assumption that anti-Israel equates to anti-Semitism. The left in the US has been strongly opposed to American Middle East policy since at least GW's days and the neo-con movement. They were so relieved when Obama came into office that they gave him a Peace Prize only to see him largely adopt GW's strategies, although toward the end he seemed to just let things go. The strongest allies of Israel tend toward the fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews, neither friends of the left, so there's that too.
In terms of thinking Jews always embracing Jews, yeah, not my experience.
This is an incredibly far reaching claim. The first author of the UN report was himself Jewish; Noam Chomsky is Jewish; there are numerous other, less prominent Jewish critics of Israel. Are you claiming they are self-hating? How can it be basic for the left to be anti-semitic? That contradicts foundational principles which ground and influence leftist thinking. Zionism, Jewish nationalism, is a completely separate issue from Jewishness. And the present day issues are a matter completely separate from both. Basically I think if you got rid of the extreme right wing leadership and its UN pooping policies, many people would have less issue with the place.
I think you are confusing divine law here as indigenous populations had legal systems that we today do not recognise as 'law' and natural rights emerged to coexist so as to recognise the historic meaning of content that is valuable to populations as beneficial users of the land, a mechanism for recognition that is ultimately aimed at resolving disputes but also to ameliorate the content behind the legality. International customary law is binding as it demonstrates the meaning from this identification and therefore qualifies the content of the rights and interests of members of that society and their relationship to the land, which international law and human rights in particular, being universal and inalienable, helps build that bridge. It is heterogeneous and variable but nevertheless this is what Native Title rights are in Australia.
Exclusive use and possession of lands envelops a number of factors and in the case of Israel, notwithstanding the dissolution of imperial control in the region, failures that need to be recognised by poor leadership of the Palestinian people (Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini sided with the German Nazi's against the United Kingdom and the Allies who, at the time, controlled the region). There are legally binding recognition 'tests' to determine a 'state' including the required permanent characteristics and the ability to consolidate adequate control over the territories, a solid system of governance, diplomatic capacity, and a permanent population among others. This could actually be achieved for Palestine as part of the two-state solution, and while consistently undermined by Israel, poor Palestinian leadership that continues to disregard international law by failing to recognise the state of Israel will only perpetuate the problem. Let us not forget the misappropriation of millions of dollars by leaders like Arafat and Abbas while the Palestinian people continue to suffer.
I actually believe that Israel really is trying - as seen with their diplomatic relations with Jordan and Egypt, in particular the former and some amazing contracts they have signed vis-a-vis gas and electricity - but where they fail is the Netanyahu revisionism and the vocal reverberations of the ultra-orthodox community that scream nonsense of which 70% of Israeli people roll their eyes to. Their brutality is used as an effective method to deter violence - particularly following the intifada - but I think it is backfiring when they have a chance now to build effective and positive methods of acceptance.
They are anti what might be called pro-Semitism, that is the idea that any people should be grouped according to their race or religion. Rather crudely, if somebody is opposed to the KKK it doesn't follow that they must be anti-white. And if one is opposed to the crazier manifestations of Zionism it doesn't follow that they are anti-Jewish.
If we were discussing racism and somebody claimed a distinct identity for the 'white race', or that God had given a piece of the earth to white South Africans, say, or the Aryans, we would (most of us) treat this as lunacy. But because Judaism is part of Christianity many are reluctant to say the same about the set of beliefs by which the Jews see themselves as distinct.
Perhaps the left tends to contain more atheists, or those who take a ecumenical view of religion. So when they see Jewish people celebrating their Jewishness (let alone making political claims based on their Jewishness) they are not sympathetic. They regard it all as self-serving superstition. They are anti-Semitic in the sense of regarding anyone who identifies themselves as 'Jewish' as just as deluded as somebody who regards themselves as a member of the Aryan Master Race, or whatever.
No one is saying that it is rife with human rights abuses, but that there are abuses, excessive use of force, detaining children in poor and sometimes extreme conditions, interrogating and violating not only international law but even Israeli domestic laws. If Israel is even conscious of the fact that disproportionate use of force against minors continue to occur and made efforts to raise the standards of applying measures that ensure procedures are correctly adhered and yet time and time again clear evidence shows continuous breaches that result in the deaths of many children, how could you possibly suggest the following:
Quoting Hanover
Are you serious?
You don't see many things. So, should we say that France, Russia, the United States should not exist?
Assassinations are bad. The deep state is a scary world. I am talking about what they are doing and, yes, there are mistakes as much as there is progress as it is a young state in an extremely hostile environment. I was in Israel when they signed a multi-billion dollar deal with Jordan. I met Israelis that continuously stage protests against the government in support of Palestine and the Palestinians themselves have vocalised to me that they are happy for the strong support coming from Israeli citizens for them. I was with these women.
It is full of Israeli people who are genuinely desirous of peace and who simply want a place to call home. Is everything about America simply Trump? Do we believe that the loud noise made by rednecks or evangelicals to be an epitome of that country? There are many left-wing and right-wing suggestions being made against them and indeed there are wrongs - I am from Australia and we have committed genocide to our indigenous peoples and continue to breach human rights against refugees and asylum seekers - but communicating the faults and follies of a country is an important aspect to democracy.
So here's what you said and what I responded to:
Quoting TimeLine
This statement really isn't limited to Israel, but takes an unrealistic view and overly protective view of children. Some children simply are in fact dangerous. That's a fact. It's not like someone is innocently confused regarding the danger of his behavior until age 18 and then suddenly he's malicious.
I think you are misconstruing the intent behind what 'danger' entails and while, indeed, there are dangers to stone-throwing, the real impetus behind the excessive use of force and the nature of criminalising behaviours as represented by children like Amir is the overall danger, the symbolic danger that may form the impetus to mobilise further attacks, which is why she was arrested several days after the incident when it became viral. Palestinian children are regularly detained and even shot and killed for throwing stones and the continuity of undermining the laws by security personnel is intended to deter the threat and promote submission to their authority. What is questionable here is whether such martial rigidity ultimately creates the very enemy they are seeking to deter.
When I was in Denmark, I was in a fellowship of international students undertaking research on Islamic communities and one of the students was formerly in the military and he asked me, "you are at war; if you see a child on the mountain ahead of you, would you shoot the child?" I immediately responded with no, before he stated, "you have no choice but to kill the child. The child could be used by the enemy to obtain information to be given back to them." It was distressing, to say the least, but understandable. This parallels the problematic security situation in Israel, only they are not in a state of war that would merit such drastic behaviour and yet they are clearly not out of danger either. So, the real problem here is not the 'unrealistic and over protective view of children' but whether such trauma inflicted on children will in fact produce tomorrows enemy adults who then become the real danger.
That was sort of the plot of the movie Lone Survivor.
Anyway, It'd be hard to kill anyone, but I still hold pretty firm on my view that there's nothing magic that happens between being 17 and 18.
Of course I'm opposed to human rights abuses and don't think a 17 year old or 19 year old prisoner should be slapped around and beaten. I also realize that war is war and maintaining all these standards to the satisfaction of an outside evaluating agency is not realistic and not going to be of primary concern to any military leader, except to the extent political blowback affects his ability to accomplish his task. I'm reminded of waterboarding by the US, and my view regarding its elimination was based more on the arguments that it was ineffective in obtaining intelligence than that it was abusive.
There's just no such thing as a cleanly fought war. Again, I'm not saying that we need to ignore abuses that might occur during the war, but that's just one thing I'd be looking at, with a greater focus on the success of the operation, assuming it was just in the first place. An ugly win can be better than a clean loss between gentlemen.
Those that have signed a peace deal with Isreal really aren't Israel's enemies anymore. And still, the US has given the most to Israel when it totally dominates it's neighbours in every way, starting with it's nuclear deterrent.
Ummm... the Falklands war is basically a war where both sides stick to the International conventions in war and didn't engage in what are called war crimes. Civilians weren't targeted.
So that's one for the history books.
Care to offer some evidence???
Beat this!
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-1949-present
What you laughingly call Israel's "enemies" get aid on the CONDITION that they are not Israel's enemies. `This aid to other countries constitutes aiding Israel!
Or not.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2109429/A-dirty-war-British-soldiers-shot-dead-enemy-troops-waving-white-flag-Argentinian-prisoners-bayoneted-cold-blood-An-ex-Para-tells-horrors-Falklands.html
Every fact is both provable and disprovable by a well phrased Google search. See, https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/169761
Okay. NP
That is a complete travesty of the facts.
1) The USA funded Israel from the start, dumping thousands of Persing tanks that the WW2 factories pumped out of the US.
Israel currently receives about $3 billion annually, and it's neighbours continues to receive large amounts on the CONDITION that they keep the peace with Isreal. In particular Egypt signed agreements (quoted above) to suspend all hostilities and was paid to do so.
You seem top want to believe what you chose to believe.
Are you Jewish by any chance?
It is usually polite to declare an interest during discussions.
I didn't want to get involved in this discussion. But this is irrelevant. Play the ball not the man (even if your opponent won't).
THis question is TOTALLY relevant. Since when did asking a person if they were Jewish become an insult?
Quoting René Descartes
I'm not interested in his religion, but his "culture:. Being brought up a Jew might account for his bias.
Being Jewish or not being Jewish is not going to make his arguments any better or worse. Nor does it necessarily make him biased. There are Jewish people on both sides of this debate. And that goes as a general principle for all religious or non-religious here (or of whatever culture). Stick to the arguments. Personal stuff will be deleted.
Well,
Individual instances do happen and especially on the battlefield, that's for sure. Yet in that war you didn't have warcrimes basically ordered from higher above. Or perhaps the case just shows that a war fought lawfully and/or according to international laws is an oxymoron.
In the university I made a small study of the Crimean War in Finland, which showed just how honorable soldiers were during the Victorian era -especially to other Europeans. Today you wouldn't take "A word of honour" not to escape from an enemy officer and let him freely travel in your country, but captured Finnish officers (serving the Russian military) were granted just that in the UK.
Yes, US's opening of its diplomatic embassy in Jerusalem, which I think puts to an end the two state solution, leaving only the one nation or bi-national solution.
About the topic... I am far from an expert and it isn't a black and white clear case. However, the basic unfairness is becoming clearer. A Palestinian state won't make Israel smaller. It will make Israel greater.
On the one hand, the rebuke could be seen as a purely political decision devoid of any real ethical basis. On the other, anti-semitism is very real, very dangerous, and alive and kicking in the US (see Charlottesville), and politicians need to be super careful and qualified in how they approach things so as not to encourage it.
You can be sure though the Dems won't rebuke Netanyahu for saying this:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/10/benjamin-netanyahu-says-israel-is-not-a-state-of-all-its-citizens
State-institutionalised racism is apparently OK if it's your friends who do it.
Meanwhile as Baden pointed out, Netanyahu said the quiet part out-loud, i.e. he views Israel as an monolithic ethnic-state. There is a very real conversation that needs to occur in American regarding out relationship to Israel, and the more Zionists (which mostly refers to Evangelist Christians, rather than American Jews, by the way) attempt to silence this debate and accuse detractors of anti-semitism (even if those detractors are Jewish!) the worse it will be for them in the future.
a) Similar wars with it's neighbours, like the Yom Kippur war, cannot happen anymore and Israel is totally dominant in every field of conventional warfare.
b) Even if Assad does manage to end the civil war, the country poses no threat to Israel (especially after it's nuclear weapons program was destroyed by Israel).
c) The time-to-time fighting with the Palestinians (and Hezbollah) can be contained and limited that it doesn't represent any kind of problem to the government or Israel in general
d) The current state doesn't represent an economic problem to Israel: the economy is doing just fine. There are no international sanctions that would force Israel to think otherwise.
e) Israel has already approach states like Saudi-Arabia as everything isn't viewed through the prism of the Palestinian question anymore.
Above all, the US has become an extremely untrustworthy ally which just fumbles up in the Middle East. It has lost it's influence severely in the Middle East and it's Middle East policy, if you can think there is one, is simply a train wreck. Just look at Iraq and the poor Kurdish allies of the US in Syria. Hence if one would assume that a 'Bernie/Warren'-administration or similar would change US policy towards Israel and cut for example aid to this wealthy country, it wouldn't be a huge crisis for Israel. Israel has good relations with Russia and Turkey and basically the change would create a bigger storm in the US political scene than in Israel.
+1
Thank you both for your thoughtful responses. In this world wired together tighter than a drum, when the Middle East sneezes, the rest of us catch cold. Anti-Semitism is, like other forms of racism and intolerance, a blight upon humanity. We must strive to reduce it, if not completely eliminate it. But like the fable of the boy who cried wolf, false accusations of such for narrow political purposes undermine the real problem and cloud the issue.
The Jewish people have had an undeniably difficult history. May those in Israel live peacefully and happily. Any criticism (from myself and others of like mind) of the current government is with the intent to help ensure and increase that peace and happiness. For all, without exception.