Main Paineframe posted:

Theoretically, it's under Jordanian control, and Jordanian authorities and guards run the place and make the rules. In practice, the IDF and Israeli guards have free run of the place if they choose to exercise it, and even the slightest change in rules or even unspoken customs leads to hysterical condemnations from extremists on both sides. In reality, I'd say it's an uneasy joint administration where neither side can exercise any real power without causing political controversy. In general, Waqf guards have authority on the Mount itself and are able to eject individuals, and the rules and customs on the Mount favor them somewhat, but they have little recourse if Israeli authorities - who control the entrances to the site and often escort extremists during their visits to the Mount - violate those rules and customs. Typically, both Israeli and Jordanian guards enforce things like the "no prayer" rule, but Israeli authorities occasionally push the limits pretty hard, typically in response to government pressure.

The thing about the Temple Mount is that it is incredibly controversial. Every little thing that goes on there - right down to archaeological excavations or even basic maintenance work - is seen by some as a plot to destroy Muslim/Jewish artifacts at the site and Judaicize/Islamicize the site so that it can be claimed as the sole property of that side. Every non-routine action taken by either Waqf or Israeli authorities is seen by some as just the next step in a diabolical plan to oppress the opposing side and eventually claim the Mount for themselves. The rhetoric of extremists on each side, who openly advocate for those actions, only fuel the fears of the opposing side. There's no good guys on the Temple Mount: just two collections of very scared and very angry people who all believe that the other side wishes to take away everything they have and completely annihilate their very identity as a people.

Kim Jong Il posted:

He accused me of being a racist so no I'm not going to drop it, he's also incapable of basic reading comprehension.

Kim Jong Il posted:

That theory is easily proven false though. Israel came really, really close to withdrawing from settlements in 1996, 2000, and 2007. Rejecting the peace process after those near misses is like voting for Donald Trump because you think it's the only way to implement glorious communism. When in actuality it means a mountain of skulls and Shadow Run.

Kim Jong Il posted:

quote:

1) The plan was, and has been for a couple of decades for, for almost all the settlements to stay and for Israel to annex Palestinian land in a land swap. Your claim that Israel was going to withdraw its settlements therefore ignores one of the most basic concepts of the peace process.

This is pedantic nonsense and seemingly a willful misunderstanding of the entire Oslo process.

Kim Jong Il posted:

They were in direct negotiations at the time with Labor, and can point to the first intifada, which dramatically improved their negotiating position. There's a distinction between Loose Change and high level Fatah members.

quote:

This is a loving lie, and you know it.

quote:

I've never said the latter. I support getting rid of most settlements. BDS opposes getting rid of settlements functionally as the oppose the only process that has a chance of getting rid of settlements.

quote:

Except there's actual documentation of it, and you are still a lying piece of poo poo for claiming I'm racist when I have never brought up race once. Produce any single racist quote or admit you are lying. Ironic given the whining about supposed false claims of anti-Semitism here.


BDS are not equated to Palestinians. BDS is a fringe, largely armchair movement that is widely rejected. BDS wants Palestinians to suffer endlessly by opposing the peace process. You of all people are loving full of poo poo for equating the fringes of hardcore ethno-nationalism with an ethnicity as a whole. I've never said anything along the lines of what you claimed. Produce any single racist quote or admit you are lying. Produce any single instance of me refusing to condemn racism.

quote:

I haven't engaged your posts because you're lying and attacking strawmen as opposed to what I actually said.

quote:

Except that I did, and Google has plenty of similar quotes beyond the one I chose.

quote:

It's so common among histories of the peace process, lamenting near misses, that I took it for a given. http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/09/22/bill-clinton-netanyahu-killed-the-peace-process/

He goes on to fairly blame Netanyahu and Likud for their idiocy.

You have to twist yourself into knots to argue this does not support my reading, which was that a deal was very close according to the Americans. I said that, and I said that Taba (wherein the sides had largely agreed on the fates of most settlements but had outliers like Ariel, and hadn't fully mapped out the Jerusalem arrangement) should immediately be implemented, and you're calling me a racist who wants to butcher Palestinians. Right. Because there's a difference of opinion among analysts of the peace process some arguing they were close, some not, and you're somehow taking this legitimate argument over matters of fact, and acting like a critical literary professor making up any interpretation you want because truth is just relative, man.

Raldikuk posted:

Perhaps addressing the points raised could help with that. For instance maybe you could explain what was "pedantic nonsense" when explaining how Israel has never ever come close to withdrawing from all settlements as you claimed they were close to doing in 1996, 2000, and 2007.

This in fact does not seem like pedantic nonsense but fundamentally dismantling your claim that Israel was really close to withdrawing from the settlements.

team overhead smash posted:

So no evidence to back up your conspiracy theory, just vague claims about what could be potential motivations based on your own haphazard knowledge of middle-east politics?

quote:

"They're not calling for ending settlements, because in their policy of dismissing "collaborationists" they reject the only possible path for ending settlements. They're calling for policies that will lead to wide scale ethnic cleansing and likely genocide."

"They call for a demand [Ending Settlements] that you yourself acknowledge is unlikely to be part of any peace deal - a demand that I think necessarily leads to ethnic cleansing. "

quote:

God drat, I've already loving explained in detail why you are racist multiple times in this thread so please stop being a disingenuous poo poo and acting like this is some out of the blue claim that has never been supported.

For instance after you argued that Palestinian violence isn't motivated by a desire for freedom but because they're just simply genocidal

quote:

And as mentioned, you have stated that racist settlers who have a hatred for all Arabs/Muslims (which is pretty much a dictionary loving definition of racism) should be viewed with sympathy, ignored repeated questions as to whether you viewed their ideas as racist and got all defensive over the idea that such blatant racism qualifies as being racist.

quote:

Your claim that you had quoted Bill Clinton to the letter was in this post. In neither that post nor any other post preceding it had you posted any quote or any link to a quote from Bill Clinton. You were just making poo poo up and coming up with false excuses and reasons to act aggrieved. The first quotes you provided from him were a day later after being called out on the imaginary quote.

quote:

As per European Narrative of What Happened at Taba in January 2001 in the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations on Permanent Status Issues by Christian Jouret as taken from p 351 onwards of [i]Shattered Dreams The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995 - 2002[i] by Charles Enderlin, the nearest the two sides ever got on the West Bank was Israel wanting 8% (6% permanant annexation, 2% on a vaguely defined long term that seems to equate to annexation). The Palestinians were willing to go up to 3.1%. The Israelis wanted nearly three times as much land as the Palestinians. That is not "really really close" to an agreement.

Also it wasn't that Jerusalem wasn't fully mapped out, rather but that there were fundamental disagreements. Israel wanted Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem that were constructed after 1967 and settlements outside the municipal borders of Jerusalem (like Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev). Palestine was willing to make some kind of compromise on the former (but ruled out Jebel Abu Ghneim and Ras al-Amud) and wouldn't accept the latter at all. The only bit that was agreed in principle with the details not fully mapped out was the Old City (a geographically tiny part of Jerusalem), and even then that's only principles about the neighbourhoods and they still specifically did not reach agreement on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount which is a massively important and divisive issues. That's of course not mentioning the other aspects like refugees or security where issues were not agreed either. They were not by any manner of description "really really close" to a deal.

Kim Jong Il posted:

"Withdrawing from settlements" as I said it is synonymous with Taba and similar proposed agreements, wherein Israel would withdraw from the majority of area C, but keep certain blocs. The majority of these are agreed upon, but there are indeed sticking points with Ariel and certain parts of Jerusalem. I acknowledged that those were issues, but saw them as fundamentally surmountable by parties serious about negotiating, as is the international diplomatic consensus on the issue. They were solvable, and rejecting a compromise is stupid when the alternative is continued occupation and expansion of settlements in area C.

TOS acknowledges this at other points, but then foolishly conflates this meaning with me supposedly claiming that Israel was going to withdraw to the Green Line, which I have never claimed. There's clearly a distinction here on what each side means by the term, but my meaning should have been obvious given the context of that post and others. He misread it and then went nuts. The point about pedantic nonsense and willful misreading is because of the cynical bad faith that he applies to Oslo, which is what the BDSers cite when trying to justify the fact that their desired tactics will accomplish nothing but increase Palestinian human misery.

Kim Jong Il posted:

It's not a conspiracy theory in that senior Fatah members have verbally confirmed it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's correct, although it's a point of evidence in its favor, and I think it makes sense given their strategic calculations at the time.

quote:

I was referring to the right of return, which is plainly loving obvious if you had actually read the post as opposed to vomiting up your world salad

quote:

The overwhelming majority of Palestinians are non-violent and don't resort to nationalist violence. I was referring to a handful of people - you're the one conflating the statement to all Palestinians. This is really pathetic grasping at straws.

quote:

Your ignorance shines through. I was explaining strong Mizrahi support for Likud and war mongering, not building settlements. And this was in the context of other arguments that claim Israel proper is a colonial project, when I think the Mizrahi experience makes that question significantly more complicated. And in a descriptive way that was making it crystal clear I disapproved of behavior. Under your analogy, someone who says suicide bombings are bad but Palestinians have legitimate grievances is an anti-Semite.

quote:

All of the four parties I named have on numerous occasions lamented how close a peace deal was. It's a given, it's not an argument to ask for citing of basic facts like the sky is blue. That's trying to derail the debate from even occurring. This doesn't support your argument at all, it would have been a lot easier to just blame them as biased Zionist stooges, or blame Likud for derailing the peace process.

quote:

This overall does not contradict my point at all but it is a difference of opinion on how much you weigh certain matters. Labor and the Americans publicly disagree with you. Their entire narrative is based on publicly disagreeing with you on this.

Kim Jong Il posted:

They were in direct negotiations at the time with Labor, and can point to the first intifada, which dramatically improved their negotiating position.

NLJP posted:

Appropriate time to bring this back up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immovable_Ladder

Not Temple Mount but there's situations like this everywhere.

Ytlaya posted:

What exactly is the ideal endgame for the Haredim? Like, if every single person in Israel was a Haredim, how would society even function? It seems like their way of life is dependent upon other non-Haredim keeping society running.

fool_of_sound posted:

So are most Israelis cool with having something like 10% of the population willfully having no skills or employment and living primarily on welfare? I'm surprised there isn't widespread anger about that.

Ytlaya posted:

What exactly is the ideal endgame for the Haredim? Like, if every single person in Israel was a Haredim, how would society even function? It seems like their way of life is dependent upon other non-Haredim keeping society running.

fool_of_sound posted:

So are most Israelis cool with having something like 10% of the population willfully having no skills or employment and living primarily on welfare? I'm surprised there isn't widespread anger about that.

Ytlaya posted:

What exactly is the ideal endgame for the Haredim? Like, if every single person in Israel was a Haredim, how would society even function? It seems like their way of life is dependent upon other non-Haredim keeping society running.

Cat Mattress posted:

Ubers are not taxis.

Ultramega posted:

Gonna get all thomas friedmann on y'all for a minute.

My uber driver monday was listening to NPR and we ended up discussing incitement on social media. I think it's a dumb poo poo argument made by babies to selectively shut people up viz. that brain damaged israeli guy blaming mark zuckerberg for allowing his site to be used for incitement to murder and how he literally has blood on his hands. These recent attacks in europe; the bataclan attack, nice, the orlando club shooting, brussels I totally understand it now.

It was facebook all this time. Mark Zuckerberg, aka The Terror Inciter, should expect a mossad agent to squirt a vial of poison into his ear a la' khaled meshal any day now.

Anyway my point is the #1 best place to get REAL PEOPLE perspectives is definitely the back of a taxi because that seems to be the go-to place for investigative journalists to collect their facts and cool anecdotal evidence.

team overhead smash posted:

Would you care to back up this interpretation with any quotes and links to posts?

I think you're trying very hard to hide your lack of knowledge because this is nonsense in the context of the discussion.

You have been making the argument about it being "really really close to a withdrawal from settlements in 1996, 2000 and 2007" based on your interpretation of the opinion of Bill Clinton and parts of the USA negotiations team. This obviously has no bearing on the 2001 Taba peace summit that was conducted by the EU with no USA negotiations team involvement after Bill Clinton had stood down as president. He was involved in the preliminaries to the summit while he was still in office, but those were just an outline of the limits of discussion, not an actual peace proposal that could be implemented - making your call to do so irrelevant and nonsensical as well as your claim that they were really really close to an agreement when literally nothing was agreed on aside from a few limits to hwo far apart their positions could be (which neither side really agreed to anyway).

In fact despite this discussion running nearly two weeks, a quick ctrl+F of your posts shows that the first time you actually mention Taba in any of your posts was two days ago, a week after I'd explained how a link that you were using to prove Clinton's statements about the 2000 peace process was actually about Taba in 2001 and how it would have been nonsense to try and use it in such a manner anyway. This is some amazing revisionist history to cover all the gently caress ups you've made in describing the peace process.

Long story short, you are hideously ignorant of the peace process and are trying to twist and misinterpret things that you only know about because I've had to explain to you because you didn't know about them in the first place.

quote:

As you bring up "misreading", I note that your posts here don't have any response to the fact that when you made up posting a Clinton quote and then called me "a lazy sack of poo poo arguing in bad faith" and "a loving piece of poo poo" for being among those to point this out to you. Then again, you not responding to large portions of my post which go into detail and have evidence about how you are wrong about things is kind of a given at this point.


It is literally a conspiracy theory. You have a theory about a secret conspiracy. I mean there isn't really any getting around it that you're a conspiracy theorist and of course like all conspiracy theorists you object to the term because yours are the secret conspiracies which are actually true, not like those other crazy people!

Also they've verbally confirmed what? Your claim is that they thought the first Intifadah "dramatically improved their negotiating position". Even if you offered proof of your claims (which you haven't) that in no way indicates that they secretly planned the second intifada. It is based on your personal interpretation of motives and agendas and lacks any actual evidence.

quote:

Nope, you lying gently caress.

Here's what you were responding to:

"And of course it's worth remembering that the original point this all sprung from is your claim that Omar Baghouti and BDS not calling for the end of settlements is a signal of their secret conspiracy to try and genocide the Israelis. You said 'They're (Omar Baghouti and BDS) not calling for ending settlements, because in their policy of dismissing "collaborationists" they reject the only possible path for ending settlements. They're calling for policies that will lead to wide scale ethnic cleansing and likely genocide.'

You know, despite the fact that calling for an end to settlements is literally number 1 on the list of things for them to get Israel to do in the Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS that basically serves as their founding document and rationale for their existence: "1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall"."

It is a discussion about settlements. There is absolutely no discussion of refugees.

quote:

The Palestinians being referred to are all Palestinians who resort to violence. Now it's very obvious that in the rest of the world there are acceptable times to resort to violence according to basic morality (self defence) and that even if someone does resort to violence it can be caused by emotions other than genocide (Say, "freedom from oppression" as a not completely random example). To claim that all members of a national/ethnic group who are motivated to violence against their oppressors is due to some genocidal desire is by definition racist due to the reasons explained in my previous post.

You are willing to condemn people not based on who they are individually but due to their race/nationality. You are a racist.

quote:

Yes you were explaining strong Mizrahi support for Likud and war mongering and you explained that the reason was racism and then tried to defend it and refused to accept it was racism.

"This is why Mizrahim vote for rightist parties and are the biggest cheerleaders of increased militarism in Israel. They in many cases have a direct grudge and animus against Arabs and/or Muslims."

You explicitly said the reason they voted for Likud and war mongering was they have a grudge against Arabs or Muslims. Holding negative views of an entire race/religion due to the actions of a small minority (Those who expelled them or their relatives) is a classic example of racism. It is wrong and racist to have a grudge against random Muslims or Arabs that have never done anything to you.

quote:

Already addressed how your claims are wrong and pointless in great detail to which you have never responded. In fact I just made this very point in my last post and again rather than engaging with my arguments you just mindlessly puppet your opinion that you have never provided evidence for again.

Quite galling because as you say "it would have been a lot easier to just blame them as biased Zionist stooges" but instead I went and put together an actual detailed argument which you proceeded to ignore.


Yes, it contradicts your point completely. For instance even though you seem to think the Clinton parameters prior to Taba were an actual peace deal instead of, well, parameters, you'll note that the differing positions held by the sides fall outside of the parameters Clinton gave. Even going by your own new idiotic metric (which for reasons that I explained in the link in the point above has no real bearing on how close a peace deal was) it still wasn't close.

Then there's the problem with the idea that since anyone can have an opinion, the opinion that Israel asking for nearly three times the amount of land as Palestine was willing to give is "really really close" is somehow just as valid as "of course it's loving not really really close, it's nearly three times as loving much".

Lastly your argument relies on you arguing in bad faith and bringing up arguments I've already respond in depth (see previous point) and which you refuse to engage with the evidence. You aren't debating in good faith if you literally ignore what the other person has written and just repeat your own unevidenced opinion over and over again. It's a long-winded version of a child going "Nuh-uh, my dad could beat your dad up" and isn't an actual debate.

Main Paineframe posted:

The Western method of convincing their voters that they are dealing with terrorism (without actually addressing the root causes, as that would be unpopular with said voters) is to use a targeted strike to kill or capture a couple of members of the organization from which the terror is accused to have originated, publicly declare that some top terror official has been found and dealt with, and sit back and bask of the image of being strong rulers keeping their country safe...at least, until the next attack. These days, every Hamas rocket is met by an airstrike - it doesn't even really accomplish anything most of the time, what's important is that the IDF can publish a press release saying they struck back against the uberterrorist masterminds.

However, over the last year or so, there's been no organization to blame or take revenge against. Pretty much all the terrorism has been lone-wolf or copycat stuff - often just troubled youths getting into a fight with their family and wandering off to commit suicide-by-IDF. There hasn't been anything to blame and strike out against in response, and there's no terror organization the politicians can vow to destroy. That's not acceptable -for various political reasons, the right needs a scapegoat that it can blame for terrorism. Social media was the chosen scapegoat, in part because it can be used as an excuse to escalate the media war, limit free speech, and silence pro-Palestine voices worldwide.

Main Paineframe posted:

They're not, but the haredi tend to have disproportionate political influence for various reasons. In national politics, the non-haredi right-wing parties can't quite command a majority on their own, so in order to maintain control they need someone else in their coalition, and they'd rather deal with the haredi than left-wingers or Arabs. Since they're reliant on the haredi to maintain control over the government, the haredi are able to demand support for their policies (even though they make up a minority of the Knesset) in return for agreeing to back Likud on most other things.

Cat Mattress posted:

Ubers are not taxis.

Kim Jong Il posted:

By your logic,

Xander77 posted:

Were there a lot of left-wing governments / coalitions that did not rely on the Haredim to maintain control?

Main Paineframe posted:

Kim Jong Il posted:

If you actually do a forums search you will see that I have approvingly cited Taba here for years, specifically mentioning it instead of Camp David because I know the Camp David offer was insufficient. Otherwise, you're still ignoring my core point for an irrelevant straw man. It doesn't necessarily matter that the map was not good enough yet in 2000. Considering how far was left to solve, and how difficult it proved to solve in practice, they were close. There are parties like Malley who disagree on this, but I explicitly picked four people seen as pro-Israel as they've made the point, and you haven't produced a quote from them to contradict the point about their opinions, even though I have provided multiple and there's plenty of documentation of their views on the web.

quote:

Your refusal to use basic internet searches is not proof. The most popular quote is from the PA communications minister at the time.

quote:

You're accusing me of making not only an incoherent point, but directly contradicting a point that I've made frequently in this thread - that ending occupation is contradicted by the revanchist goals of BDS. Ending occupation can realistically happen, revanchism radicalizes Israeli voters and harms international support for the Palestinian cause. I've made the latter point numerous times and never the first, why on earth would I possibly make it? What context or sense does it make at all with respect to everything else I said in that post or this entire thread? You misread it just like you misread a lot of what I said - which is the charitable reading, as more likely you're just arguing with a strawman again.

quote:

That is not remotely what I said. I've merely condemned ultranationalist violence. You're the one claiming that ultranationalists are representative of all Palestinians when I've clearly disagreed. BDS is all about collective guilt, collective punishment, and collective stereotyping on both sides. It is truly the mirror image of Likudism.

quote:

This is not a defense in any way, beyond saying that people who do horrible things don't forfeit their all of their rights, or the rights of their innocent neighbors. It's an explicitly descriptive reference. By your logic, describing the motivations for suicide bombing is support for suicide bombing. Go back to the Donald Trump logic school. Mizrahim who support rightists for this reason are wrong, racist, and should be condemned, as I have repeatedly. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't acknowledge their post-1948 suffering as we do the Palestinians'.

Beyond that, you're conflating nationalism with race, and elevating a fringe movement that large numbers of Palestinians reject. I am pro-Palestinian, I want them to get a state, I want the Israeli army to leave, and I want their own governments to stop exploiting and harming them. My only issue is with racist ultra-nationalist movements, no matter what part of the world they're part of. I've only asked for consistency in condemning ultra-nationalists, instead of praising certain groups that satisfy ideological priors in the name of faux, self-defeating "resistance" that does nothing but spread human misery.

quote:

I've repeatedly explained, in painful detail, how you're completely misreading my argument and this is not relevant at all to anything I said. After the umpteenth time, it's arguing with a wall when you're refusing to read or engage with anything and spouting 100% fiction. You're a Trump talking head on CNN. You're the one who ground the debate to a halt with your strawmen, refusal to back up your points, collective stereotyping, and fake smears of racism.

Ultramega posted:

You're too late, sorry. Peace and harmony now reign in the land of Israel and Palestine and nothing bad ever happened again between any devotees of the abrahamic faiths.