Israel/Palestine

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Israel/Palestine

(Thread IKs: Main Paineframe, Irony Be My Shield, punishedkissinger)

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Nolgthorn posted:

Israel isn't committing a genocide of any kind. If they wanted to they could have done so at any time a long time ago, and probably saved themselves a lot of problems in having done it. Instead they spend extraordinary amounts of money trying to minimise casualties.

The Iron dome didn't come about through staging a genocide it is a state of the art defensive system. Staging a genocide would involve manufacturing a PR campaign against your enemy first and foremost, it would probably involve scaling up casualties on your own side. You wouldn't build an Iron dome. You would put people in the way of targets, such as what "Palestine" and their majority elected government absolutely provably has. That's a war crime.

It has been said before that if Palestine 'put down their guns' the conflict would be over. If Israel 'put down their guns' there would be no more Israel, and that's the truth.

Palestine is and has always been a region, not a country. Nobody declared themselves a state until 1988, more than 20 years after Israel was there. Didn't apply for international recognition until 2011.

There are many muslims and arabs living in Israel. There are no israelis or jews living in Gaza. There are mosques in Israel. After the 6 day war, yet another war started by its neighbours, Israel granted permanent Israeli residency to all people living in East Jerusalem. There is today a large muslim population because of that.

Before the campaign in Gaza Israel evacuated a huge area closest to the Israeli border, and the best places to launch rockets from. What did Hamas do, they moved back with everyone else. Into schools, into hospitals, and launched their rockets from there. Israel isn't new in the area, they underwent an incredible amount of restraint before ever doing anything other than diplomatic about the terrorism problem. Now it seems like whenever this country does anything everyone is willing to jump down their throats. They are surrounded on all sides by internationally recognised terrorist organisations, which ideologically and theologically demand the extinction of jews. Not Israel, but rather literally the extinction of jews, the ethnoreligious demographic.

Israel has a comprehensive set of rules that they follow in their dealings with terrorist threats. One of those rules involves the demolition of terrorist homes. That incentivises others who live in the home to turn terrorists in, to save the home. Israel has successfully reduced the threat to its citizens dramatically.

Yet they still are attacked just about daily by what else, knives now, and stones. Still they haven't gone all Donald Trump about the situation, this should be a story of virtue.

israel is an ethnic supremacist apartheid state founded on ethnic cleansing, and if the best defense of them you can come up with is "but their neighbors are worse!!!!!!!" that's pretty pathetic, both for israel and for you

# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 18:54

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:55

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

My Imaginary GF posted:

Their neighbors are much worse, and yet you don't see Palestinians criticizing them for their crimes. Gee, maybe the terrorist actions of Hamas and Palestinians are rooted in antisemitism? Certainly this whole wave of knifings in Israel is.

settle down rahm

*holds MIGF back by his forehead, which is at arm-height, as he wildly flails his arms without reaching me*

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 18:59

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide is pretty convenient for the state doing it, yeah

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 09:12

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

The entire idea behind liberalism as a political ideology is that individual people have rights, not abstract collections or classifications of people. Ethnic groups do not have the right to an exclusive state, and the idea that they do is about as anti-liberal as it gets

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 11:01

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

Actually many if not the majority of liberal democracies has such a policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis . Rights based in part on ethnicity is a pretty common policy world-wide.

I don't think anyone is arguing for an exclusive ethic state, there are many Jewish ethnicities.

Jus sanguinis is not the same as rights based on ethnicity. And no, outside of affirmative action schemes rights based on ethnicity are not particularly common in developed countries, because it's an illiberal far-right policy

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 22:05

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

OzyMandrill posted:

c) Why are you insisting we discriminate?

Because he's unable to process the idea of equality before the law and universal human rights, or of racial and ethnic groups not being in a hierarchy of superiority to each other

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ¿ Dec 22, 2015 22:31

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Maoist Pussy posted:

Luckily, hardly anyone here gives a crap about liberalism.

Well, it would save everyone a lot of trouble if the pro-Israel people just came out and said they're in favor of fascism, apartheid, and racial/ethnic supremacism, but they won't do that, so here we are

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Dec 23, 2015

# ¿ Dec 23, 2015 11:03

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

i normally like roger cohen, but just :fuckoff:

dude

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/opinion/an-anti-semitism-of-the-left.html

quote:

LONDON � Last month, a co-chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, quit in protest at what he described as rampant anti-Semitism among members. A �large proportion� of the club �and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews,� he said in a statement.

Chalmers referred to members of the executive committee �throwing around the term �Zio�� an insult used by the Ku Klux Klan; high-level expressions of �solidarity with Hamas� and explicit defense of �their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians�; and the dismissal of any concern about anti-Semitism as �just the Zionists crying wolf.�

The zeitgeist on campuses these days, on both sides of the Atlantic, is one of identity and liberation politics. Jews, of course, are a minority, but through a fashionable cultural prism they are seen as the minority that isn�t � that is to say white, privileged and identified with an �imperialist-colonialist� state, Israel. They are the anti-victims in a prevalent culture of victimhood; Jews, it seems, are the sole historical victim whose claim is dubious.

A recent Oberlin alumna, Isabel Storch Sherrell, wrote in a Facebook post of the students she�d heard dismissing the Holocaust as mere �white on white crime.� As reported by David Bernstein in The Washington Post, she wrote of Jewish students, �Our struggle does not intersect with other forms of racism.�

Noa Lessof-Gendler, a student at Cambridge University, complained last month in Varsity, a campus newspaper, that anti-Semitism was felt �in the word �Zio�� flung around in left-wing groups.� She wrote, �I�m Jewish, but that doesn�t mean I have Palestinian blood on my hands,� or should feel nervous �about conversations in Hall when an Israeli speaker visits.�

The rise of the leftist Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of Britain�s opposition Labour Party appears to have empowered a far left for whom support of the Palestinians is uncritical and for whom, in the words of Alan Johnson, a British political theorist, �that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is.�

Corbyn is no anti-Semite. But he has called Hamas and Hezbollah agents of �long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region,� and once invited to Parliament a Palestinian Islamist, Raed Salah, who has suggested Jews were absent from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Corbyn called him an �honored citizen.� The �Corbynistas� on British campuses extol their fight against the �racist colonization of Palestine,� as one Oxford student, James Elliott, put it. Elliott was narrowly defeated last month in a bid to become youth representative on Labour�s national executive committee.

What is striking about the anti-Zionism derangement syndrome that spills over into anti-Semitism is its ahistorical nature. It denies the long Jewish presence in, and bond with, the Holy Land. It disregards the fundamental link between murderous European anti-Semitism and the decision of surviving Jews to embrace Zionism in the conviction that only a Jewish homeland could keep them safe. It dismisses the legal basis for the modern Jewish state in United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947. This was not �colonialism� but the post-Holocaust will of the world: Arab armies went to war against it and lost.

As Simon Schama, the historian, put it last month in The Financial Times, the Israel of 1948 came into being as a result of the �centuries-long dehumanization of the Jews.�

The Jewish state was needed. History had demonstrated that. That is why I am a Zionist � now a dirty word in Europe.

Today, it is Palestinians in the West Bank who are dehumanized through Israeli dominion, settlement expansion and violence. The West Bank is the tomb of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Palestinians, in turn, incite against Jews and resort to violence, including random stabbings.

The oppression of Palestinians should trouble every Jewish conscience. But nothing can justify the odious �anti-Semitic anti-Zionism� (Johnson�s term) that caused Chalmers to quit and is seeping into British and American campuses.

I talked to Aaron Simons, an Oxford student who was president of the university�s Jewish society. �There�s an odd mental noise,� he said. �In tone and attitude the way you are talked to as a Jew in these left political circles reeks of hostility. These people have an astonishingly high bar for what constitutes anti-Semitism.�

Johnson, writing in Fathom Journal, outlined three components to left-wing anti-Semitic anti-Zionism. First, �the abolition of the Jewish homeland; not Palestine alongside Israel, but Palestine instead of Israel.� Second, �a demonizing intellectual discourse� that holds that �Zionism is racism� and pursues the �systematic Nazification of Israel.� Third, a global social movement to �exclude one state � and only one state � from the economic, cultural and educational life of humanity.�

Criticism of Israel is one thing; it�s needed in vigorous form. Demonization of Israel is another, a familiar scourge refashioned by the very politics � of identity and liberation � that should comprehend the millennial Jewish struggle against persecution.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 16:28

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/18/pro...usly_decimated/

i'm sure this guy is going to get his tenure stripped straightaway

# ¿ Mar 9, 2016 19:43

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Kim Jong Il posted:

It's de facto, functional anti-Semitism using the logic of progressivism. If a policy has a disparate impact towards Jews, it's functionally anti-Semitic even if that's not the hypothetical intent - per that reasoning.

Of all the human rights offenders, they're only targeting the Jewish one, the same people who have been systematically targeted by (in those cases clearly and explicitly) anti-Semitic boycotts throughout history. It's literally thousands of people spending 100% of their energy on Israeli and not uttering a peep about worst offenders, or in cases like Syria, in some cases actively apologizing for them.

So do you think the South Africa boycott movement was racist against Afrikaners?

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 05:55

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

NLJP posted:

I wish sometimes that arguments solely based on criticism of or actions against the Israeli state being automatically anti-Semitic would be bannable or at least probateable ITT but I guess that would shut down too many of the posters. It's so goddamn tiresome though and I started to feel we were past that in the public discourse too but it's back in full force recently.

It's the prevailing opinion of 90% of the Western political establishment, so banning it here would be sort of useless

I do feel like the public discourse is progressing though, albeit slowly. The reason the pro-apartheid lashing out has been so intense lately is because of BDS clawing its way onto the political scene. Even if very slow and relatively low-key, it's progress, and the pro-Israel people know it

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Mar 24, 2016

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 15:45

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

The Insect Court posted:

The point is that if you don't want to be accused of holding anti-semitic positions(or see Zionists ready to leap out and accuse you of it lurking in every shadow) then you probably shouldn't write things like that.

So it's anti-Semitic to suggest that Jews do not, in fact, have the right to commit atrocities and crimes against humanity, no matter how hard you pull on capital-H History as justification? Sorry, the Holocaust doesn't make it OK for Jews to set up a fascist apartheid state and commit slow genocide. The anti-Semite thing is honestly in my opinion some of the most blatant projectionism you can find in all of politics, because the argument for Israel depends on a racist, ethnic supremacist notion that Jews have more rights than other ethnic groups. Remember the idea that corporate groups have rights is an extremely suspect idea to begin with; individuals have rights, ethnic groups do not have rights, states do not have rights. Zionism is the only case in which that illiberal idea is tolerated. And Israel defends are open about this, it's not a secret people are trying to hide. And yet, calling those racist, supremacist assumptions into question gets the full weight of even the liberal establishment crashing down on you as ANTI-SEMITE!!!!!

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Mar 25, 2016

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 02:41

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

The Insect Court posted:

Is there something literally wrong with you? Here, once again, is the coyo7e post I was responding to:

Maybe I'm falling afoul of Poe's Law here, but you are the poster who insisted in the Middle East thread that everything wrong with the modern Middle East was the fault of Israel so I'm assuming your response wasn't meant to be taken as sarcasm.

Do you think that the past experience of the Jewish people affords them more rights and more leeway in conduct as a group?

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 02:55

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Kim Jong Il posted:

I haven't argued that it was or BDS is, just that the logic of identity politics is really what's at fault. Afrikaners also don't have a long history of being scapegoated, and South African apartheid is very different than what's being alleged against Israel, which is land occupation and war crimes.

Arguably Israel is actually worse than SA apartheid, Israel has apartheid and war crimes and active ethnic cleansing. SA never engineered mass-scale ethnic cleansing nor was it founded on it like Israel

quote:

1. The voting rights laws in Arizona only affect certain Hispanics, not all Hispanics everywhere. Perfectly ok then? They affect a gigantic plurality of world Jewry, so the impact test is passed.
2. African Americans are in a position of power in certain towns in North Carolina. Does that make it okay that the NC state legislature restricts their ability to vote? Would you dare argue that if Ferguson has a black mayor, everything's peachy even though the county and state government are very different? In fact, nothing would magically be changed even if the entire levels of power were minorities.
3. You're conflating opinion with whether or not the analogy is valid. I think the goal of BDS is ethnic cleansing and would have horrific implications if it was remotely possible, realistic, or internally consistent.

If Hispanics or African-Americans were running brutal apartheid regimes in certain areas in which white people were a legally disenfranchised underclass and murdered by the regime daily, I would support sanctions on them as well. And :laffo:

at the bolded crocodile tears

quote:

Were sanctions against Iraq unfair to Iraqis? If we sanction North Korea, I think it's realistic to think that the people baring the brunt of that will be ordinary citizens. It'd be monstrous therefore on a humanitarian level, besides the fact that it would not be very likely to change the regime's behavior. I think the same of sanctions towards Israel, Iran, Cuba, pretty much everyone. They're humanitarianly and morally indefensible, and in addition don't loving work.

So why do you think South Africa ended apartheid then?

edit:

Kim Jong Il posted:

Of course I've never said this and you're deliberately lying and making stuff up. Everyone who disagrees with your fringe view is a racist, got it.

See my comments about projection two posts ago

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 03:17

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Crowsbeak posted:

Really it isn't the Israeli lobby that has power its the Theocrat and Neocon lobby.

No, American Third Way/Clintonian/DLC liberalism is generally extremely supportive of Israel and Zionism. Look at publications like the Atlantic, the New Republic, the NYT editorial board. Just like two weeks ago Roger Cohen wrote a hilarious op-ed in the NYT about how he stands with Zionism and screaming about the evil BDS anti-Semites. Substantive anti-Zionism is still very much a fringe left-wing position. Obama is probably close to as far left as you get among the American liberal establishment, and that's just because he has to personally deal with Nutty Yahoo on a daily basis

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Apr 4, 2016

# ¿ Apr 4, 2016 02:12

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Xandu posted:

Holy poo poo, Israel. Didn't expect much from Oren, but this is pretty hosed up.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-...1#ixzz45ABovi88

At least they didn't call him a race traitor, I guess?

# ¿ Apr 7, 2016 21:01

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

NikkolasKing posted:

So, another question. Sorry, I really am new to this and while history is simple enough to get as far as these things go, understanding the modern or present situation is kind of hard for me. Is there like, a primer or something somewhere?

A guy elsewhere told me that the Saudis are no one's friends. Not ours, not Israel's. They play nice but that's all and so it seems like Israel's potential ME allies base is even shakier. Also another guy said the US is the real broker between Egypt's and Israel's freedom by bribing them.

But all I am wondering, as I read up on the history of Israel, is there any chance of a repeat of the old Arab alliance against Israel? Everyone talks about how all the ME countries hate Israel. Even Iran, who I'm learning isn't even popular with its fellow Islamic states, hates Israel. But is this all talk, all bark and no bite? Or could the future see an alliance against Israel again and a real war?

There's never going to be another real war against Israel. Well, unless Iran lets the nukes fly, but in that case we're all dying in nuclear war anyways and Iran knows this, so it's extremely unlikely. The Saudis were never part of the anti-Israel coalition, they were always American stoogies. See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Cold_War

The Egypt/Syria/Iraq alliance versus Israel is dead and is not going to be revived

# ¿ May 16, 2016 09:10

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Dead Reckoning posted:

The idea that violence committed by organized, identified, accountable agents of the state is better than violence committed by random private individuals is hardly strange nor novel. Like, there's a reason no one bats an eye if the sheriff's deputies take someone to jail on a theft charge, but for some reason you'll get in trouble if you, Jim, and Bob decide to chain a guy up in Bob's basement for stealing from you.

You're talking about accountable, morally justified states, not ethnic supremacist, colonial apartheid states

# ¿ Jul 3, 2016 01:45

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Dead Reckoning posted:

You don't understand what accountable means in this case. Just because the UN or whomever can't put Israel over a barrel and make them comply with whatever norms you have in mind doesn't mean their soldiers aren't accountable to competent authority.

SS commandos were accountable to their superior officers and to the German general staff. Therefore, Nazis did nothing wrong

# ¿ Jul 3, 2016 08:24

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

You say to yourself, Jews are an oppressed people, and have a historical connection to the land of Palestine, plus you wouldn't want to give refuge to the dreaded left-wing antisemitism. You keep walking

# ¿ Jul 3, 2016 20:03

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Israel doesn't have the right to exist. States don't have rights, individuals do

# ¿ Jul 3, 2016 21:23

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

computer parts posted:

The actual long term solution is a One State plan but Israel would rather give away half its land than do that.

israel is fully aware that one state is the only possible outcome, it's just that they want to get rid of all the pesky Palestinians in that future single state

# ¿ Jul 5, 2016 02:49

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Berkley shuts down a student-taught class on Palestine for being too anti-Zionist

https://academeblog.org/2016/09/15/berkeley-bans-a-palestine-class/

quote:

Suspending a course in the middle of a semester is one of the most serious actions a university can take. On Sept. 13, Dean Carla Hesse of the University of California at Berkeley did exactly that to a student-taught DeCal class about Palestine.

DeCal stands for Democratic Education at Cal, an old-fashioned tradition where undergraduate students teach 1 or 2 unit courses, pass/fail, to their peers. The instructors, called facilitators, plan their own courses, which must be approved by a faculty committee and the chair of a department.

...

The administration seems anxious to claim that their decision was made in reaction to the concerns of students, faculty, and staff on campus. But the truth is that Berkeley faced a global onslaught of organizations attacking them for allowing this course. In a letter to Chancellor Dirks on Sept. 13, 43 Jewish, civil rights and education advocacy organizations declared that the class was �intended to indoctrinate students to hate the Jewish state and take action to eliminate it:�

Comments from Jon Chait, shockingly, are nowhere to be found

# ¿ Sep 19, 2016 03:35

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Macunaima posted:

And this is why there won't be peace in the Middle East.

If in the sense that there are still many Zionists trolling around the Earth both inside and outside Israel who outlive that dude, then yeah, I agree

# ¿ Sep 29, 2016 14:13

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Macunaima posted:

Zionism and Palestinian nationalism are two sides to the same coin of primitive nationalism. One side really only acknowledges the other when it launches lopsided attacks. The other side is weaker, but wants to exterminate the other.

If by 'weaker' you mean 'essentially nonexistent as a coherent ideology any longer [replaced by islamism] outside of leftist dissenters in the first world, and not sponsored by an actual sovereign state for decades, versus a state and ideology with the full-throated support of the most powerful country on earth, its ruling elite and all its allies', then no, even then you're still an idiot

# ¿ Sep 29, 2016 18:13

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Secular Humanist posted:

Just out of curiosity; are there any actions\attitudes of the Palestinian people and\or Hamas that people itt condemn? I read this thread a lot and I often get the impression that people think Israel just kills and oppresses and makes people generally miserable for the fun of it like North Korea or something. And no doubt some Israelis do, I'd never suggest there aren't lots of legitimately bigoted Muslim-hating Jews in Israel. But I mean... the whole Hamas genocidal charter thing, does it not matter because they can never possibly achieve it, or because they're just kidding about it, or what? Both sides do lots of hosed up things, but Palestine's share of the condemnation always seems conspicuously absent from these conversations.

Assigning collective guilt to a mass of people on ethnic or national grounds for actions comitted by individuals is actually one of the key steps on the genocidal racism road. As for Hamas, they're bad sure, but they have basically no influence compared to the Israeli state and its allies, and much of what influence they do have is a result of Israel systematically undermining any competing authority or institution in Palestine. The civilian death toll of Hamas vs the IDF and settler militias aren't anywhere near comparable. You can quibble over them not being criticized enough I guess, but to equate the two is simply a lie

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Sep 30, 2016

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 12:11

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Xander77 posted:

Great point, you disingenious jackass. I am absolutely defeated, as we all know that the Charter is bsolete, and the principles stated in it are not
http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/3257.htm

whoopsie daisy.

So because there are people in Tunisia who are racist against Jews, the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine is OK, or at least something that you can't really criticize consistently?

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 16:49

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

team overhead smash posted:

I think that the Hamas charter isn't totally irrelevant as it's continuing existence is an indication that although Hamas has become more accommodating to Israel over the years, it still contains enough hard-line elements that it can't get rid of it.

That said, a hypothetical future war crime that Hamas is no position to actually carry out is far less relevant than the actual war crimes taking place right now.

Clearly you can see we need to take the moral high ground and not unfairly attack Israel, as both sides are at fault :smug:

*accepts editorial post at major liberal news publication*

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 20:09

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Xander77 posted:

To me, knowing where Hamas actually stands is a good thing to... err... know, when it comes to efforts for peace in the area. Which... I wouldn't think would be all that controversial.

Apparently there are some to whom efforts to understand are just nefarious Jew-ey preparations for a genocide.

Look at my cherry-picked facts; they prove that Muslims need to be genocided in order to secure a future for Jewish children.

:downsbravo:

ISLAMAPHOBE

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 22:41

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

I feel like arguing the specifics of Israel's crimes is a worthless strategy not even for the obvious reason of arguing on the internet doing nothing, but b/c the real issue are Zionist liberals who are animated by a genteel, self-righteous affection for a vision of Israel that does not exist, has never existed, and will never exist, and would prefer if Palestinians simply disappeared so they would't have to think about their darling state/political movement carrying out large scale ethnic cleansing and genocide. They're more of a problem than Nutty Yahoo and the Israeli right, or their supporters in the US, because they are the ones with actual power

Unfortunately, we've seen lately how absolutely overwhelming the crackdown and screaming of antisemitism is when the anti-Zionist left tries to break with Zionist liberalism. I don't think liberals will tolerate an explicitly anti-Zionist left ever gaining power or influence, and in that case don't expect anything to happen as Israel descends into explicit fascism except performative hand-wringing to let them hold onto their liberal Zionist ideal and still feel good about themselves

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Oct 1, 2016

# ¿ Oct 1, 2016 01:13

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Dead Reckoning posted:

I'm curious what exactly you think would happen if somehow the ANC became the sovereign authority over the entire territory of South Africa over night. Looking at the modern history of Africa, I'm having a really hard time coming up with an example of a previously repressed minority getting a hold of the levers of power that ends with, "and then everything was totally cool, no reprisals or purges of government bureaucrats, and things just kept trucking along like they had before."

# ¿ Oct 1, 2016 02:06

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

so it's gonna be cool watching President Hillary embark on her grand makeup tour to Israel, Saudi and Sultan God-Emperor Erdogan first thing after she's inaugurated

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 12:34

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Liberal Zionists play quite a big role in preventing non-conservative opinion from turning too hostile to Israel. I suspect stuff like BDS would be a lot more popular/mainstream on the left if not for the Jewish component of the left-liberal coalition

# ¿ Dec 16, 2016 20:11

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Kim Jong Il posted:

A two state solution isn't dead any more than Kerry's belief about a peace deal magically solving the entire Middle East's woes was true. It becomes a lot harder, but all you need is an Ariel Sharon to withdraw. I think politically the status quo is sustainable for a very long time, and Israel ultimately won't create literal bantustans. They'll withdraw to something like the current parameters that were being negotiated between Olmert and Abbas, unilaterally annex those areas with US support, and it'll become de facto official like Russia's various annexations. There's absolutely no chance of a one state solution ever happening.

There's a wide anti-Zionist movement that is indeed advocating against Israel period instead of the current government. BDS, for instance, has a central tenet of relitigating 1948.

the west bank and gaza are already bantustans though? i'm not sure you quite understand how this analogy works

and two states is never going to happen, and was never going to happen

# ¿ Dec 31, 2016 03:44

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

*faaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrtttttttt*

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/how-a-saudi-israeli-alliance-could-benefit-the-palestinians/546248

quote:

How a Saudi-Israeli Alliance Could Benefit the Palestinians

There is far more opportunity than danger in the two countries� flirtation.

...

Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C., a weekly columnist with The National, and a frequent commentator on Middle Eastern affairs in the American and Arab media.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2017 11:27

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Lord_Adonis posted:

The creation of an East Prussian Ashkenazi Jewish state presupposes the Holocaust. The Soviets controlled the territory and expelled the German population, which could have been handed to Jewish refugees, instead of being split between the Soviet Union and Poland.

quote:

In 1941 Lord Moyne suggested to David Ben-Gurion that Jewish refugees could be resettled in East Prussia after Germany was defeated and the area's German inhabitants were expelled. Ben-Gurion responded that "the only way to get Jews to go [to East Prussia] would be with machine guns."[23]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_a_Jewish_state

# ¿ Nov 20, 2017 04:56

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

GreyjoyBastard posted:

Chiang Kai-Shek, may his name never die.

Also Tito.

if you attempt to disabuse me of either of these I will appreciate the information but totally ignore its impact on my proposition

Tito was good but Chiang was kindof an incompetent baby

# ¿ Aug 5, 2018 02:46

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Grape posted:

I've said before that the policy side of the GOP used to understand the local circumstances better than their base, that they just didn't care and still went all in on the Israelis.
While understanding still that it was a nasty ethnic land conflict with an extremely lopsided power differential.

The Trump admin is as dumb and ignorant as the base and does in fact think it's a bunch of hapless Jews in a desert surrounded by pointy teethed bomb covered bedouin raiders going "MWAHAHAHAHAHA".

That�s what liberal supporters of Israel believe too

# ¿ Aug 26, 2018 18:30

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

How much support does a one state solution have on the ground in Palestine? How would a one state solution begin to build support on the ground considering as I understand it the existing Palestinian institutions are all bought into a dead Oslo/two-state framework?

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 00:27

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:55

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

How integrated if at all are non-Israeli-citizen Palestinian residents with Israeli society? Is it like South Africa where many/most of the Bantustan residents worked in the white areas (at least that's how I understand it, it's probably more complicated) or are they completely separated in an open-air prison, as the saying goes? Is there any labor immigration from Palestine to Israel, illegal or otherwise? Is the industry and economic activity that does exist in Gaza and the West Bank owned by Israeli companies mostly or is it natively owned/controlled?

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Feb 26, 2019

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 02:07

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Israel/Palestine

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