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My Imaginary GF posted:Just look at the current antisemitic knifing epidemic in Israel and the response of Israelis when a knifing occurs: that is the response necessary of Palestinians whenever a terrorist attack occurs in order to halt those attacks. Until such a time as Palestinians are able to stop terrorist attacks without Israeli intervention, Palestine will never develop. The very fact that you can still describe the epidemic of knife attacks as "current" after all these months is a pretty solid indictment of the effectiveness of the Israeli response. It's hard to call the last decade or so of Israeli policy "successful" - retaliatory bombings, collective punishment, and mass arrests appear to have failed to stop the tide of terrorism even after being practiced for so long, and the only remotely effective pieces are Iron Dome (a big pile of "let's throw money and technology at a band-aid without actually solving the problem") and what little remains from Oslo's tattered corpse. Now that the security cooperation is seemingly in the verge of breaking down and anti-knife missile defense systems have yet to be installed in East Jerusalem, the time seems ripe for a serious reevaluation of Israeli policy. The Insect Court posted:On a related note, this seems as good a place as any to introduce Robert Wistrich's theory that one of the hallmarks of ideological 'new antisemitism' is the rhetorical equation of Zionism with Nazism. What argument? He doesn't have one. All those words boil down to "being anti-Israel in any way means being anti-semitic, just like Osama Bin Laden and the socialists, and all that bad stuff you hear about Israel is just conspiracy theories from Islamic socialist terrorist Jew-haters". I read the whole drat thing just in case he made any points worth refuting, and I was shocked at just how devoid of substance it is. Total waste of my time. -Troika- posted:And what does right of return mean in this context? The original refugees? The original refugees and all their descendants? The original refugees, all their descendants, and any random person who just so happens to be hanging out in their general area? Original refugees and their descendants, per the internationally recognized definition of "refugee", obviously. It's never had any other meaning.
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Dec 20, 2015 16:46
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captainblastum posted:Is there a definition of a Palestinian Right of Return that would lead to Israel no longer existing? Because that seems to be the point in contention - whether or not BDS seeks to end the Israeli state. Depends on what you mean by "lead to", "Israel", and "no longer existing". Some people take "Israel" to mean "Israel as an independent sovereign entity", some people take it to mean "the current Israeli government", some people take it to mean "Israel as a Jewish-dominated state", and so on. Some of the people who gravitate toward that last definition feel that "Israel as a Jewish state" is wholly dependent on a significant majority of the population being Jewish so that they have the voting numbers needed to keep the minorities from having real significance in government, and therefore any significant source of non-Jewish immigration or citizenship (such as a one-state solution or a Palestinian right of return) is an existential threat to what they believe to be the most essential aspect of "Israel".
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Dec 20, 2015 23:40
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Dead Reckoning posted:In addition to what Xander noted, nothing in that implies that those granted derivative refugee status can extend that status to their dependents as well. That "derivative" refugee status is a full and indefinite refugee status that includes all rights and entitlements of refugees - including the ability to extend that refugee status down to their spouse, children, and other dependents. Refugees extend their refugee status to their children, who retain that full refugee status even after they reach the age of majority and strike out on their own, and thus they are able to extend that full and unrestricted refugee status to their own children, who will retain it when they grow up and strike out on their own and pass it on to their own children, etc etc. Both UNRWA and UNHCR operate under this principle, allowing refugee status to be extended to descendants over an unlimited number of generations until such time as the refugee situation is resolved, and both are clear that this is an intentional policy that applies to all refugee populations. The fact that few large examples of this exist is simply an unavoidable result of the relative youth of refugee law and the relative rarity of massive, prolonged, generations-long refugee situations - most other major refugee crises are a couple of decades old, tops. The biggest group of UNHCR refugees, for instance, are refugees from Afghanistan, about half of whom have already been returned to and repatriated in Afghanistan. Instead of trying to figure out how various passages are intepreted by UN refugee organizations, why not just ask those organizations how those passages are interpreted? http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/features/exploding-myths-unrwa-unhcr-and-palestine-refugees quote:Questions raised about the passing of refugee status through generations stem from a lack of understanding of the international protection regime. These questions serve only to distract from the need to address the real reasons for the protracted Palestinian refugee situation, namely the absence of negotiated solution to the underlying political issues.
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Dec 21, 2015 15:56
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The case of the Duma arson in the West Bank, the one which the government angrily claimed it would get to the bottom of, has yet to be solved...despite the fact that the Shin Bet has been holding several "suspects" (including at least one minor) for a month without charging them with a crime or even allowing them to speak with their lawyers. It's quite likely that the Shin Bet has no real evidence (the settler movements are notorious for refusing to cooperate with investigations) and is simply trying to break some people connected to extremist groups in hopes that they'll snitch on someone. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4741601,00.html quote:The Shin Bet and the State Attorney will file a prosecutor's statement later this week against the suspects arrested in connection with the arson attack in Duma, while the suspects' supporters claim the Shin Bet tortured them during harsh interrogations.
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Dec 21, 2015 20:38
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LeoMarr posted:Why don't we just give Gazans and west bankers Sinai and leave judeland to judes. Because Israel does not want a truly autonomous Palestinian territory to exist, and because the out-of-control Israeli right considers even "ruling in favor of Palestinians in a minor land dispute" to be morally equivalent to a second Holocaust.
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Dec 22, 2015 02:00
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Maoist Pussy posted:I don't think it is reasonable to assume a nation-state must be entirely multicultural and divorced from any historical, cultural, religious or ethnic focus. Most states are not. Requiring Israel to be so seems highly impractical. Nobody's saying that. However, having a historical, cultural, religious, or ethnic focus does not make it acceptable to engage in state-sponsored discrimination, population transfers, deliberate policies of disenfranchising particular groups, and so on in order to preserve that ethnic focus for a group losing its grip on the political domination that allowed them to set that focus in the first place. It's also generally accepted to be unacceptable to create this culturally-focused state by forcibly expelling members of other cultures. The state's focus should reflect the population, rather than forcibly manipulating the population to privilege those who match its focus. For example, it's acceptable for Germany to be a German state, whose official language is German and which maintains state-sponsored museums of Germany history and teaches German history in school. It's not okay for Germany to ban the speaking of non-German languages or to ban private museums to other cultures. It's also not okay for Germany to restrict government benefits to non-Germans, arbitrarily confiscate their land, deprive them of political power or voting rights, or outright expel them. Multiculturalism is a simple acknowledgement of the fact that you do have minorities and its not okay to treat them like poo poo for the sake of cultural or ethnic supremacy.
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Dec 22, 2015 14:42
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It's all just a distraction anyway. When the government makes a big public fuss over Palestinians, they're just trying to keep the headlines distracted from their own work at destroying Israel. After all, there is one sector of the population that's growing even faster than Israeli Arabs: the ultra-Orthodox "Haredim", who pride themselves on being the Jewishest of Jews. They're so devout, in fact, that they don't believe in employment, military service, learning science, or women's rights - they believe the only things a truly devoted Jewish man should do with their life are studying the Torah and having as many children as possible, they oppose the very idea of a state as a secular entity, and because they often play a critical role in government coalitions, they've been able to wrangle a number of special privileges and treatments from the government. Generous welfare payments are available to haredi so they don't have to work, they're exempted from required military service, they have their own separate (state-funded) school system that replace subjects like "math" and "science" with "Torah study" and "more Torah study", and since they tend to congregate together in tight-knit communities (and utterly reject dissenters) local businesses openly cater to them even when it means breaking laws against things like segregations. They hate the very secular state apparatus that supports and funds their lifestyles, and attempt to contribute as little as possible to it while pursuing what they consider to be the ultimate Jewishness. And most importantly, they make up ten percent of the population and are the fastest-growing demographic in Israel, thanks to their extremely large families combined with a system of indoctrination and a useless school system that deliberately avoids teaching haredi children useful real-world skills so that they have little choice but to remain haredi. Haredi Jews' poverty rate is on par with that of Israeli Arabs, with over half of both demographics living below the poverty line. This is a load that Israel can't tolerate forever, considering that Israeli has one of the worst poverty rates in the West, second only to Mexico, with one in five Israelis living in poverty. But who needs a functioning economy? The Bibi-sitter campaigned on protecting children from the bloodthirsty masses, unlike those limp-wristed leftists who'd invite Arabs over for tea while discussing pansy-rear end shot like "economic reforms", and his coalition depends on the Haredi parties since he'd rather let them be the kingmakers than the left-leaning or Arab parties. The biggest threat to Israel isn't external, but its own internal radicals - the hilltop youth, the expansionist settlers, and the radical haredi. The Israeli radical right is a band of borderline-anarchists and borderline-fascists who literally don't believe in a government that doesn't follow their ideology exactly. While the Shin Bet is going around terrorizing Bedouins, the IDF is roughing up Palestinians, and Mossad is loving with Iran, the Israeli security establishment has essentially turned a blind eye to Jews like Meir Ettinger who believe that the current Israeli state isn't actually "Jewish" at all and needs to be destroyed by terrorism and civil war in order to make way for a true Jewish state to arise. They're giving out generous handouts to groups that threaten armed rebellion against the military every time government policy doesn't go their way, who appear to be about as loyal to the government as British colonists in 1774. Government members themselves even go so far as to delegitimize their own government and implicitly encourage Jews to take the law into their own hands in the name of Jewishness. The end of Israel as a Jewish state, if it comes, will be at the hands of devout Jews who declare that it was never Jewish enough in the first place. But there's no political will for dealing with those groups; it's just so much easier to blame the ongoing undermining of the Israeli state on people who aren't allowed to vote!
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Dec 22, 2015 16:17
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My Imaginary GF posted:Like the kind BDS whitewashes of middle eastern Jews from all nations but Israel? All Middle-Eastern nations? To be clear, which definition of "Middle East" are you using here? I've also never heard of BDS "whitewashing" the exodus of Middle Eastern Jews to Israel - the only entities whose participation in that is regularly whitewashed are the Jewish Agency and the state of Israel, which spent decades convincing countries in the surrounding area to send them their Jewish populations.
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Dec 22, 2015 17:30
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Ethnic or religious groups shouldn't be oppressed, disenfranchised, or discriminated against, regardless of the ethnic or religious makeup of the state. Just as I oppose Israeli oppression of Palestinians under both formal and de facto Israeli control, I would oppose any similar oppression of Jews by hypothetical future Israeli Palestinians. I would dearly hope that this is not a controversial statement, and that everyone in this thread could agree on at least that much. (and if anyone disagrees, please kindly get the gently caress out) However, it is absolutely unacceptable to oppress and discriminate against an ethnic group for fear that, if they were not oppressed and disenfranchised, they might gain enough power in the government to reverse those policies back against their former oppressors. It's just a thin excuse to justify racism as "necessary", no different from Confederate slavemasters who claimed that slavery (and later Jim Crow) was necessary to protect whites from the retribution of ex-slaves. The proper answer is to have a strong state with effective checks and balances which prevent the state from discriminating against any minority group, regardless of which one it is. And, in all honesty, a one-state solution would be pretty close to that already! Most abuses against Palestinians are either extralegal, illegal, or governed by an alternate legal framework (mostly military law or immigration law). A one-state solution would neatly end the applicability of the military laws responsible for most of the abuse in the Palestinian territories and the residency laws used to threaten East Jerusalem Palestinians, without giving any opportunity for those same laws to be applied against Jews. The extralegal abuse wouldn't be stopped by a one-state solution, but its institutional nature heavily insulates it from population shifts so there's no need to worry about turnabout from Palestinians there either.
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Dec 23, 2015 18:16
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Maoist Pussy posted:They shouldn't. It would be nice if they wouldn't. But, they will be if they declare themselves enemies of that state and repeatedly collaborate with foreign invaders. Oh, I didn't know you were Jordanian.
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Dec 23, 2015 19:47
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My Imaginary GF posted:What about the previous oppression of Jews by Palestinian arabs? Do the Jews of the arab world get to return to their homes and have their property returned to them before or after you require them to compensate the families of those who stole their property and livelihoods? I didn't say anything about compensation. However, I'm completely in support of Arab Jews who were forcibly expelled from their home countries being offered a right of return, and have never claimed otherwise. I'm not sure what part of "Ethnic or religious groups shouldn't be oppressed, disenfranchised, or discriminated against, regardless of the ethnic or religious makeup of the state" is hard for you to understand? Yes, I realize you're trying to bait people into saying something you can construe as biased or unfair against Jews so you can accuse the whole thread of being anti-semitic, but it's really tiresome and I wish you'd stop!
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Dec 24, 2015 00:35
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Dead Reckoning posted:Given the almost universally poor treatment and disenfranchisement suffered by minorities in the middle east, (including, yes, in Israel) it is quite reasonable for Jewish Israelis to believe that their rights would not be respected should such a situation come to pass, especially in light of the irredentist and anti-Semitic themes in Palestinian rhetoric. So you're saying that it is good and justified for Israel to oppress and disenfranchise Palestinians, because if they don't, there's a possibility that it might maybe someday lead to Palestinians oppressing and disenfranchising Jews, which would be horrible and unjustifiable? The only moral outcome is for nobody to be oppressed, regardless of who is in power. The way to obtain that is with reconciliation and with a strong constitutional framework that prevents the majority (regardless of which group it ends up being) from abusing minorities. Oppression as a tool to prevent oppression is just a convenient lie used by oppressors to justify continuing to oppress even after oppression becomes recognized by the society as a bad thing; its inherent hypocrisy, obvious moral bankruptcy, and built-in implicit racist assumptions render it utterly incapable of sincerity. Besides, the Palestinian side isn't the only one with groups spewing hateful rhetoric. Just look at this photo!  Just looking at it, what would you think of it? A Hamas militant getting ready to strike? An Arab protester in the midst of a riot? After all, that's clearly a Molotov cocktail in one hand, and if you look real closely, you can see the knife in the other. What other context could that possibly be in? Well, as it turns out, the person in that photo was Jewish, and it was taken at a loving wedding. http://www.timesofisrael.com/clip-shows-far-right-wedding-goers-celebrating-dawabsha-killings/ quote:Footage released on Wednesday showed dozens of young Israeli right-wing extremists, said to be linked to the suspected perpetrators of the Dawabsha family murder, celebrating the killing at a wedding last week. The images in the clip immediately sparked wide condemnation.
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Dec 24, 2015 14:51
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Lady Morgaga posted:Most harmless stabbing in last 3 months. Boo loving hoo. "Oh, they only stabbed a baby in effigy, no big deal"
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Dec 24, 2015 21:57
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The Insect Court posted:Just gonna go ahead and point out that anyone who thinks stabbing a picture is worse than stabbing actual people to death is probably a morally loathsome human being. Well, it would be pretty hard for Jewish extremists to stab that particular baby to death, since it's already been burned to death at the hands of Jewish extremists. It's almost as if incitement, extremist groups, violent rhetoric, and actual violence are not unique attributes of a single ethnic group, but are in fact present on all sides!
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Dec 25, 2015 00:24
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The Insect Court posted:Are you really going to go this route when the major story in I/P conflict over the past several months have been the stabbings of Israelis? Are we going to pretend that out of the twenty-ish fatalities(and many more casualties) including several very recent ones the fact that the stabbing the usual suspects find time to condemn(and can't fit in any mention of any other) is the stabbing of a picture? That's not a thing that I, or anyone else, has said. I was responding to claims that violent rhetoric and celebration of terrorism from Palestinian extremists necessitate discrimination against Palestinians by illustrating that violent rhetoric and celebration of terrorism are present among Israeli extremists too. CommieGIR posted:"They are hosed up, but the Palestinians are more hosed up. I have no idea why the Palestinians are so hosed up" To be absolutely fair, I'd say that the government is legit trying as hard as they can to find the people responsible for the arson (unlike most other Jewish terrorist attacks). The problem is that, because Jewish terrorism has been ignored so long that law enforcement never built or cultivated the intelligence resources they would need to make headway on a case like this. There are entire communities that just flat-out refuse to cooperate with investigations like this, there are no informants or community outreach to give law enforcement inroads into those communities, and the only thing the government has been apparently able to come up with is "arresting a bunch of random people known to be associated with extremist groups, locking them up indefinitely, and interrogating, intimidating, and abusing them in hopes that they'll crack and give some kind of useful evidence eventually". They're paying the price for refusing to build any ability to combat Jewish terrorism now that the government is demanding a particularly publicly prominent case be solved, as well as getting concerned about the general anti-government leanings of many of these groups.
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Dec 25, 2015 15:01
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My Imaginary GF posted:Speaking of which, why is it that Jews do not have the right to worship on the temple mount? Because it's prohibited by Jewish law, and mainstream Jewish authorities consider it risky and highly inadvisable to even set foot on the Temple Mount at all.
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Dec 27, 2015 05:29
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Maoist Pussy posted:Israel is not going to stop doing that because having tiny enclaves occupied by foreign hostiles is dumb and untenable. "It's inconvenient for us if they live there" is not a valid reason for stealing, and collective punishment of entire civilian populations for the acts of terrorist individuals or organizations is generally considered a violation of human rights.
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Dec 27, 2015 17:16
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The Insect Court posted:lol. It's like listening to to Actually, I think American police violence has more in common with the common IDF killings of unarmed Palestinian children - no one openly condones the killings, but the same narratives of "self-defense" and "accidents" and "unfortunate collateral damage" are used to justify making no effort to prevent such killings or punish the perpetrator. Even goes for non-Palestinians, like the African Jew shot by an overzealous security guard and lynched as a "terrorist" several months ago: the incident was loudly condemned, but nobody was actually punished for his death and the shooting was quietly ruled a "valid shoot". What was that you were saying about racism?
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Dec 31, 2015 15:24
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talk about how they don't want cops to gun down black kids in principle, it's just that they don't seem to think it's acceptable to criticize them in any way when they do and every single concrete incident ultimately ends up being the victim's fault and a condemnation of black "culture". But don't you dare imply that racists, that's just playing the race card, and anyway they didn't affirmatively and explicitly state they want innocent black children to be murdered by the police.
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Zas posted:someone pleaase defend this, hahahaha Maybe not so far as "defending" it, but Israeli government is so fragmented and chaotic right now that it's hard to extend the actions of a particular group to the whole because one minister or another might just go do whatever the hell they want without regard for the government's official stance. For example, it was recently discovered that even after the government cancelled a particularly controversial and sensitive round of settlement expansion (it would have practically split the West Bank in two), the Housing Ministry secretly kept working on the planning for it anyway, supposedly at the behest of the Housing Minister at the time. http://www.timesofisrael.com/pms-office-settlement-expansion-plan-came-from-minister-not-government/ quote:The Prime Minister’s Office on Tuesday distanced itself from reported plans to build thousands of new homes in a politically incendiary area of the West Bank, calling the initiative the brainchild of former housing and construction minister Uri Ariel, a member of the right-wing, pro-settlement Jewish Home party.
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Dec 31, 2015 17:24
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team overhead smash posted:What is the inherent worth of rockets which seem to offer no concrete advantages, enshrine Hamas attacks as war crimes in fact rather than just propaganda and which kill civilians rather than soldiers? They don't require the attacker to be in territory under direct Israeli military rule, they don't require attackers to be smuggled through a tightly controlled border or recruited from ethnic enclaves within Israel that are dominated and heavily surveilled by opposing political groups and will face collective punishment as a result, and they're far less likely to result in the death of the attacker? They're also visible from Gaza, which has significant domestic political effects. They're also cheap and can be built in Gaza out of piss and wreckage, circumventing the problems of tight border controls and Hamas' incredibly limited funding. Do you think Hamas is behind the East Jerusalem terror wave or something? Or do you just think that Hamas has a wide array or more effective techniques that are superior to rockets in every way that they're just not using? Edit: A common problem I see is that people ignore the Palestinian perspective, including such considerations as local domestic politics, and base their analysis of Palestinian activities based entirely on how Israel would portray them. "Why are they doing that thing? It lends more validity to the propaganda Israel was going to use anyway, while providing critical political points that help maintain their domestic popularity even in the face of more militant rivals! It's nothing but downsides!" Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Dec 31, 2015 |
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Dec 31, 2015 20:57
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team overhead smash posted:Also your explanations seem to hold only within a very narrow viewpoint. When firing a rocket the risk to the Palestinians doing the firing is relatively low at that specific point in time, but with Israel willing to launch missiles into areas where rockets have been fired from even when it's likely the perpetrators have gone (killing civilians in the area) and the willingness of Israel to launch massive attacks which kill hundreds or thousands in retaliation for missiles the risk is worse with rockets. Take Operation Cast Lead which was spurred on by rocket attacks. Over 1000 Palestinians died and their entire economy was wrecked for the benefit of killing a bare handful of Israels. We're talking worse than a 100:1 ratio of Palestinian Deaths:Israeli Deaths and thats if we include those not killed by rockets simply because they died in a conflict spurred on by rockets being fired. If you don't include them it's even worse!. So what's the strategic upside of Israel bombing civilians even when they know they won't hit Hamas operatives? You're applying a nasty double standard here, where it's a propaganda success for Israel if Hamas commits war crimes against them, but a propaganda failure for Hamas (and also their fault) if Israel commits war crimes against Gaza. If any activity that could possibly injure civilians is a victory for the other side on the international stage, then I'm pretty sure every Gaza hospital bombing makes up for quite a number of rockets. And if you say that only Israel gets propaganda victories, then it doesn't matter what Hamas does because the deck is so badly stacked against them that there's little point in them trying to delay their defeat in that arena. You're asking the wrong question - it should be "who does it provide a net benefit to". Obviously the rockets are perceived by somebody as having a net benefit to themselves, otherwise they wouldn't be getting launched in the first place! What the hell do you think - that Hamas and other Gazan groups have this long list of things they can do that bring them benefit, but instead they're doing something that they don't perceive of as providing them any benefit at all? Hamas isn't doing so well that they can afford to throw away resources in order to do something they think just damages their strategic position. "It might have happened anyway" is actually a very important factor, because if a strong power is just looking for an excuse to bully or invade a weaker power, then it will happen sooner or later no matter how hard the weaker power tries to avoid giving that excuse. It's simply inescapable (and, if necessary, can eventually be provoked or faked by the strong power in order to manufacture the excuse), and pretending that the excuse was the cause or even a cause is little more than international victim-blaming. First of all, Hamas doesn't have many other military options, and those that it does have are extremely limited and can only be done rarely, expensively, and at the cost of significant and often-unrenewable resources. Second, being able to see the strikes against the enemy from your own front lawn has a significant morale component - for example, the Israelis who dragged out lawn chairs to party while they watched Gaza explosions from a hilltop. Third, Hamas needs to keep their militant activities public in order to maintain political dominance over the more militant group. If Hamas activities team overhead smash posted:Israel doesn't act in a vacuum and has to answer to international pressure and its own citizens. It can't simply kill Palestinians on a massive scale for absolutely no reason, it needs some kind of rationale even if it's not a good one. Stopping rocket attacks and destroying stockpiles of weapons buys them some leeway. If Palestinians to were adopt a more opportunist method of attacking with ordinary domestic weapons like knives and cars, they could hardly bomb massive amounts of Palestinian homes on the basis that there were hidden stockpiles of knives and cars that they were bombing. On the other hand, recorded history. The excuse for Protective Edge, as I recall, was the kidnapping and murder of just three people in the West Bank. An ordinary domestic attack, nothing to do with rockets, but it was still enough to kill a thousand Gazans. Like I said, if the strong power wants to attack and is just waiting for an excuse, then they will find one. The question is not "if" but "when", and "when" is measured in "months" rather than "years". I'm not just talking Israel - the history of imperialism is just rife with cases like this, and it always ends up as an ultimately inescapable predicament. There's been tons of cases of that kind of unspoken ultimatum, and it almost always ends badly for the little guy. My personal favorites are when the little guy actually repels the initial invasion, treats the invaders humanely and lets them leave in peace in order to try and preserve diplomatic relations, and then gets obliterated by a far larger second wave because their foe simply could not tolerate the embarrassment of their glorious Empire losing to the natives.
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Jan 1, 2016 15:06
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Ultramega posted:I'm not calling bullshit on you or anything but I am down to read about a few instances in recorded history where indigenous people actually prevailed over imperialist powers. There were very few instances where they won in the end, but there were some major battles won and some instances where the natives managed to hold out for quite a while. The one I was referring to specifically was the Anglo-Zulu War, made up of two major British invasions of Zululand. The first, an unauthorized attack carried out by local colonial functionaries with the ambition of conquering their own colony, was a disaster and utterly repulsed. However, the defeat of a British army in the field by African natives was simply not to be tolerated in Victoria's day, so the home country sent heavy reinforcements and orders for a second invasion which was taken far more seriously. team overhead smash posted:Why haven't Israel launched a massive bombing campaign killing thousands in response to the stabbings? Because bombing East Jerusalem is something Israel won't do under any circumstances, and investigations have failed to discover even the most tenuous link to organized groups or occupied areas that can be targeted for collective punishment. Hamas does not. Stabbings and ramming soldiers with cars is viable for residents of East Jerusalem, but not for Gazans. You're making the mistake of attributing all Palestinian tactics to Hamas, ignoring significant differences in resources, opportunity, and treatment. Mortars are more accurate than rockets, but much more difficult to get, especially considering Hamas' limited resources. So let me pose you a question here. You've asked why Hamas conducts rocket attacks as if you have no idea why, dismissed every reason offered as false or irrelevant, and seem to act as if Hamas has no possible reason for doing it. So, then, why do you think that Hamas does it? Why do they engage in the rocket attacks that you are so completely convinced there is absolutely no good reason for? team overhead smash posted:Seeing as the point being made is about large-scale attacks which result in thousands of casualties, exactly what the gently caress is a small scale attack that left several people dead supposed to matter in the context of the discussion being had? Rockets are small scale attacks that lead to, at most, a few casualties. So it seems that small scale attacks matter a whole lot!
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Jan 2, 2016 04:47
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team overhead smash posted:Thank you, that's it exactly. There isn't some kneejerk reaction like people have been claiming where Israel automatically goes "MUST BOMB 1000 PALESTINIANS" to any provocation, it's based on the context of the attack and what is deemed as appropriate based on a host of different factors including internal and external pressure and the efficacy of any such measures. I don't know how you got that from "they didn't bomb anyone because there wasn't anyone to bomb", but whatever. Sounds like if they dropped rockets from their arsenal they would only be able to make one-third as many attacks, with no apparent improvement in the success rate of attacking soldiers. The thing that stands against the arguments you're making is that if rockets weren't beneficial to anyone, why would anyone bother with them? Originally, you asked why Hamas launches rockets when you asserted that there was no benefit whatsoever to doing so. And I've answered you very simply - obviously Hamas wouldn't launch rockets if they thought there was no benefit to doing so or if they thought the downsides totally overwhelmed the benefits, so it naturally follows that at the very least they (and other Palestinian militant groups) believe that the benefits of rocket launches are worth the risks. Maybe you disagree, but that doesn't mean you're right and everyone else (ranging from internet commenters to the people actually involved on the ground) is wrong. The only thing that meets the criteria of being a "large attack" is Israel's invasions. Rocket attacks are also small attacks.
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Jan 2, 2016 17:39
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Ddraig posted:FWIW it's only really worth looking at subtle nuances when there's even a token attempt to hide blind racism and bigotry. It's always worth looking at subtle nuances, even when people are openly being bigoted. There are always details, and they are always significant in some way. For example, considering that it's impossible for two people of different religions to marry within the borders of Israel, it's perhaps less surprising than you'd think that a government official saw nothing wrong with openly making an anti-miscegenation statement. Likewise, Netanyahu's statements are right in line with assimilationists throughout the modern world who deny immigrants' right to retain their own cultural identity. Dead Cosmonaut posted:I hate to bring this up, but Typically a "sovereign" country is one with complete control over its own territory, in which case Palestine is absolutely not sovereign. Dead Reckoning posted:I think TOS is arguing that rocket fire is useless from a military and strategic perspective, and only serves to harden those factions opposed to a durable peace. Probably, but that's not a particularly useful observation, given that there are plenty of other important perspectives. For example, Hamas' feud with other, more violent factions fighting for control of Gaza is just as significant a factor - if Hamas renounces rocket attacks, then radicalized militant youth will be less likely to join Hamas (where they can be harnessed and controlled) and more likely to join other rocket-launching groups like Islamic Jihad (which strengthens those groups and fuels their bid for power in Gaza).
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Jan 3, 2016 23:53
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Kim Jong Il posted:These actions predate the settlements though, Fedayeen attacks were going on in the 50s. PLO predates 1967 too. Yeah, it's not like Israel ever stole Palestinian land prior to 1967. -Troika- posted:You can turn that around the other way though. Why should Hamas and other Palestinian militants get a free pass on exclusively targeting civilians? They shouldn't. But Israel shouldn't get a free pass on targeting civilians either, especially when they kill about a hundred times as many. Since both sides are terrible, arguments about relative morality are basically just distractions - especially when the PA acts as living proof that nonviolence, cooperation, and peaceful negotiation still just boil down to laying down and letting all your poo poo get stolen. Rather than arguing about which civilian-slaughterers are worse, it would be better to look at paths toward a future in which no one slaughters civilians - and that future must necessarily include concessions on both sides, from the very beginning. Hamas will not stop engaging in violent action against Israel unless Israel offers significant concessions of their own, and as long as Israel refuses to recognize Hamas' right to exist, they will have little reason to openly recognize any such right for the current Israeli government. I legit do not understand why so many people (on both sides of the debate) seem to have a fundamental problem with saying "the deaths of Israeli civilians are bad, the deaths of Palestinian civilians are also bad, and both sides are bad and should stop killing civilians, together, at the same time". I'm sick of arguments about who is ultimately at fault for a back-and-forth escalation of violence that has been going in for over half a century. Who the gently caress cares whose fault it is? They're both at fault, and they should both stop - and because of the feedback loop and shared fault between them, they both have to stop at the same time. Why can't anyone say "killing civilians is bad" without then stopping to assign blame and explain why it was really okay for their side to kill civilians? In other news, how about a look at Arab and Jewish education in Israel? http://maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=766493 quote:Paper lanterns crafted for Ramadan are hanging over the heads of children as they run between a snack table and a cartoon playing on the television.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:19
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The Israeli government is suddenly holding talks about how to respond to a potential collapse of the PA. I haven't seen anything new that particularly justifies the sudden wave of concerns and rumors, other than the slowly intensifying crackdowns and downsides within the West Bank over the past few months. However, evidence is growing that the fall of the PA is a "when" question rather than an "if" question, so it seems like the center-left is trying to make it a political issue now in order to blame Netanyahu for failing to either prepare for it or act to prevent it. The PA is loudly denying all reports that their regime is in any danger, but no one with any sense is buying it. The Knesset, in an effort to combat Israel's ongoing economic woes, high poverty rate, and mounting inequality, has cut the corporate tax rate. Yeah, good luck with that. The current UN Human Rights Council special investigator into Palestinian human rights has resigned because, despite having held the post for a year and a half, Israel hasn't allowed him to visit the West Bank even once. His successor is unlikely to be any more successful, as Israel takes issue with the very existence of the post - the only UN HRC special investigator post indefinitely assigned to a single country. Israel has denied other human rights investigators on less reasonable grounds, however - the UN HRC investigator for women's rights was prevented from visiting the West Bank last year because her request and itinerary did not reflect the Foreign Ministry's view that there was "no such country" as Palestine and the West Bank was part of Israel. The IDF has backed down from a plan to put special numbered stickers on the ID cards of Palestinians who live near the Jewish area of Hebron after it was compared repeatedly and loudly to a certain regime's treatment of certain minorities. The intent appears to have been to speed up the identification of residents - in an attempt to reduce the opportunities for violence, those neighborhoods are currently defined as "closed military areas" that no Palestinians are allowed to enter except for the ones who already live there, but actually checking the residency of every Palestinian that enters turned out to be too slow and time-consuming and therefore the IDF is looking for a way to streamline this entry check. A Palestinian taxi driver has been sent to the hospital after being stopped and beaten by armed settlers. Two Israeli Arabs were forced to disembark from an Aegean Airlines flight to Israel after a number of Israeli Jewish passengers refused to allow the plane to take off, demanding repeated security checks and generally being obstructive pains in the rear end. Even after the Arabs were removed from the plane, the passengers continued to prevent the takeoff and demand further security checks until the captain threatened to kick them all off the plane. http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.695633 quote:Israeli passengers on a recent Aegean Airlines flight from Greece to Israel forced the cabin crew to remove two Israeli Arabs from the flight before allowing it to take off, according to a report by Israel Radio.
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Jan 5, 2016 17:41
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The Knesset Education committee has met to discuss the banning of the book "Borderline" from school curriculums. The strongest support came from the Shas MK that headed the committee, who said that "We in Israel are fighting against assimilation, and the country is investing large amounts of resources on the project" and referred to the book as a "strategic" and "existential" "threat". An IDF soldier in the intelligence division has been sentenced to 45 months in jail for accessing the Nationalistic Crimes Unit's classified databases, looking up information on suspected Jewish extremists and planned operations and actions against those extremists, and then leaking all that information to Jewish extremist groups on an ongoing basis, warning them in advance of arrests and raids.
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Jan 6, 2016 21:10
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Ddraig posted:I agree that a stabbing is a terrible thing that is completely unconscionable. It's also fairly common.We have about 130,000 stabbings per year in the UK, yet none of them are met with the full force of our military might by driving tanks through the ghetto, much as certain sections of society would love to see that. Same reason the British Empire was meeting civil unrest with military force a hundred years ago - fear. They're not confident in their ability to suppress a serious uprising among the natives, so any hint of mass unrest without a clear leader is met with overwhelming force in hopes of crushing it before it can escalate. The stabbings in East Jerusalem are particularly alarming because they're not tied to any organization, so there's no leader that Israel can bomb or bully into submission - they're spontaneous solo attacks not tied to any larger group that can be monitored or infiltrated, making them genuinely unpredictable and nigh-unstoppable. An open revolt in East Jerusalem would be an incredible tragedy leading to a lot of dead civilians on both sides and devastating reprisals from all major organizations.
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Jan 11, 2016 05:33
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The Insect Court posted:That said, splitting down the middle on the 'is it ok to murder innocent people' question does not speak highly of the ability of the anti-Zionist posters to empathize with with both Palestinians and Israelis. The response to that question should not be another question asking what tribe the victims/perpetrators belong to. I absolutely agree. Killing unarmed civilians ("innocent people" isn't the right term to use since it just leads to people on both sides saying that X is somehow the fault of unarmed noncombatant civilians and therefore they're not really innocent) is bad regardless of who does it, how they do it, or why they do it. I understand why Palestinian militants sometimes target civilians, just as I understand why Israeli militants and security forces both sometimes target civilians, but from a moral point of view, both are absolutely unacceptable. So is discrimination and oppression. Killing civilians is morally unacceptable, and I'll happily and unconditionally condemn one side for doing it...when the other side stops doing it. As long as both sides are doing it, I see little value in arguing about which side's civilian-murders are more morally abhorrent, as if it matters when virtually every group involved is horrible, and in fact they all pretty much fuel each other's atrocities in a nightmarish feedback loop of slaughter and brutality. It's only going to get worse, too, if things are allowed to continue - Israel is slowly but surely downsliding into fascism, the weakened Hamas is struggling to maintain dominance against rivals like Islamic Jihad and now ISIS, and the long-dominant peaceful wing of the PA is losing against both internal and external militancy as the stench of Oslo's rotting corpse becomes more and more difficult to ignore.
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Jan 11, 2016 16:37
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emanresu tnuocca posted:Does any one around here know whether the principal of non-refoulement or any variation thereof apply to individuals who personally extradite or provide information to foreign organizations that might lead to the torture or the application of excessive punishment of a person? He's been arrested for suspected "conspiracy to commit a crime", so while it's certainly a dick move, it doesn't look like there was any obvious law that seemed to apply specifically to this. It'll be interesting to see what the prosecutors come up with. It'll also be interesting to see the context of his claims and why he made them, since although execution is a possible punishment for selling land to Israelis, Palestinian courts have generally declined to use that punishment - typically, sale of land to Israelis is punished by a couple years in jail, and I haven't found any indication that any Palestinian has ever been sentenced to death by the PA for selling land. In fact, the death penalty hasn't been used in the West Bank for a decade. So his claim that the people he's reporting get executed by the PA is just plain not true. Why was he saying things that aren't true? That's a good question. Maybe he's just bullshitting, or maybe the camera operator said some things that don't show up in the final video - Israel isn't the first country in the world to have a far-right organization send out hidden-camera operators to try to bait members of left-wing organizations into saying something shady. Ytlaya posted:While you're correct about such actions being 100% morally wrong and unacceptable, I do not think they're equally wrong. They're both wrong, so who cares which one is more wrong? The minute you start talking about which murder of civilians is more "excusable", you're not making a moral argument anymore, you're just making excuses for amoral conduct that you've decided is justified for non-moral reasons.
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Jan 11, 2016 20:59
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emanresu tnuocca posted:Well as I said, he didn't claim they were executed, he claims that they were killed and later on seems to confirm the infiltrator's statement that the land seller would be tortured. I didn't mention that possibility for two reasons. First, extrajudicial killings do sometimes happen, but since they're extrajudicial, they're fundamentally difficult to predict - when Nawi reports people he has no way of knowing whether an interrogator or prison guard is going to decide to lynch them. Second, Israel is hardly in any position to be outraged about the extrajudicial torture and sometimes murder of Palestinian detainees.
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Jan 11, 2016 21:56
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emanresu tnuocca posted:Neither the Israeli hypocrisy on the subject nor the likely possibility that Nawi is not intimately aware of the conditions of those previous land sellers he claims to have turned in to the PA and is merely talking out of his rear end have much to do with whether Nawi's actions were morally reprehensible or not. Oh, absolutely. He's definitely morally reprehensible, I'm not disputing that. But that's not why security forces arrested him, nor is it why politicians and right-wing organizations appear to be so outraged at his actions - and intent on defunding or destroying virtually every major left-wing pro-Palestine organization in response. Honestly, this unusual outpouring of condemnation for violence against Palestinian civilians would be super heartening if even a little of it was genuine, much like the popular outrage against alleged Shin Bet torture of suspected Jewish terrorists. And personally, I find the nuances of the situations - like the obvious double standard in play here, the considerable political fallout making itself known, the fact that it's happening as several major anti-leftist and pro-far-right moves have been bouncing around the Knesset, and the clear similarity to the smothering of ACORN in the US - far more interesting than having to confirm over and over again that "yep, it sure was bad for that civilian to get murdered, regardless of what race or religion they were". I can't really fault you for thinking that's something that needs to be discussed, since there are a lot of people in this thread (on both sides of the debate) who are disturbingly reluctant to agree with simple statements like "killing civilians is bad", but it's not like any of the organizations or entities actually involved in Israel and Palestine are making decisions based on morality at all (let alone some clear universal morality that everyone agrees on), so I find it to be of limited use for understanding the situation. The only real use of a moral debate is for us to make moral judgements about each other, and I wouldn't really mind skipping the next few rounds of the "try to bait the other side onto saying something you can use to portray them as being a racist or amoral monster" that certain posters like to engage in. That ended up being a bit more meta than I'd like, so to make up for it, updates on the case! In addition to suspicion of "consipracy to commit a crime", Nawi is also being held for suspicion of "contact with a foreign agent". The "Palestinian" in the hidden camera sting was an Israeli citizen, so the security services might still come up with something later regarding his actual reporting. He was arrested yesterday, and had a closed-doors hearing today which determined that he will be held without charge for at least a week and prevented from speaking to his lawyer. Also, curiously absent from most media coverage has been the gag order barring the media from publishing any name, photo, or identifying information about this suspect. Honestly, I don't know why the judge even bothered.
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Jan 12, 2016 18:26
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Ytlaya posted:Because in real life you have to prioritize which acts to devote the most attention and energy towards preventing. Otherwise, you'd end up coming to ridiculous conclusions like "well, Native Americans also killed some European civilians so really they're both wrong." Sure, I guess it's technically correct, but it's not a useful conclusion. The reason it's not a useful conclusion is because it's a moral judgement, and those are virtually never "useful". They just give you a scale on which to rate entities' relative badness, a metric which is not typically useful for stopping violence in the real world. Ending violence is not a matter of devoting attention or determining who's the wrongest. Jewish communities were engaged in violence with Arab communities years before the IDF came into existence, and continue to engage in violence against Arabs today even when soldiers are nowhere to be seen. The IDF is not some fundamental societal shift, it just represents the skewed power balance.
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Jan 13, 2016 23:32
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Netanyahu has accused the EU of engaging in unauthorized and illegal construction in the West Bank in an effort to create "political realities", has compared the labeling of products made in the West Bank to Nazi oppression. No aneurysms have yet been reported as a result of this advanced new form of trolling. He's also fired new shots in the ongoing diplomatic friction with Brazil, by refusing to withdraw his appointment of Dani Dayan (a prominent settler leader) as Israeli ambassador to Brazil. For those who haven't been following this, Netanyahu appointed him publicly without first privately consulting Brazil to gain their agreement first as per diplomatic custom. This, by itself, is not a huge deal; however, the reason that it's customary to work it out privately first is so there's no chance of the appointment being rejected publicly by the target country, which is generally considered to be diplomatically undesirable for both sides. And that's why, for months and months, the offer's just been sitting there ignored - Brazil has yet to accept the appointment, as it is widely opposed by Brazilian lawmakers, but actually openly rejecting the candidate looks bad diplomatically. Typically, leaving the appointment hanging like that is supposed to be taken as an unspoken rejection of the offer, which is supposed to be withdrawn and replaced with another. Now Netanyahu is doubling down, saying Dayan is the one he wants and he won't withdraw or change the appointment - so now Brazil is left with a choice between either rejecting the Israeli ambassador or accepting one they don't like. Al Jazeera America is shutting down in a couple of months, citing low ratings and problems getting advertisers.
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Jan 15, 2016 18:03
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team overhead smash posted:13 year old refugee girl shot dead trying to stab an Israeli security guard Some reports claim that, rather than "doing something about it", whatever that means, it's simply "suicide by IDF". After all, why bother working up the nerve to shoot yourself (and run the risk of surviving) when you can let a knife fall out of your pocket in front of a security guard, who will then proceed to make drat sure you die? Normally I wouldn't necessarily take the "Judea and Samaria police" at their word, but it's an interesting take on this. http://www.jewishpress.com/news/suicide-by-idf-knife-wielding-13-year-old-girl-chased-after-security-guard/2016/01/23/ quote:On Saturday it became apparent that Arab teenagers, especially females, escaping a family brawl, try to get arrested or killed by attacking Israeli security forces at a check post. According to Judea and Samaria police, the phenomenon used to be limited to young women trying to get arrested by hiding a knife on their person when crossing the check post; now they’ve begun to try to use the knife, presumably looking to get killed.
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Jan 24, 2016 13:28
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Well in this case, it was a civilian security guard (who was standing guard at the entrance to a settlement), who was apparently chased by this girl and ran away for a while before turning around and shooting. So it doesn't exactly seem to be brutality. It does, however, illustrate a larger shift - while the previous waves of violence happened in East Jerusalem, this and other recent attacks happened in the West Bank.
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Jan 25, 2016 19:46
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His response is all the more interesting when you consider the extremist elements within Israeli society itself. Considering government policy toward them, it's hard to say that modernity is defeating extremist haredi or that militant Zionists are being deprived of hope.
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Jan 26, 2016 18:13
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ANIME AKBAR posted:Israel sprays herbicide on Gaza farmland because seriously do you even have to loving ask. The justification is right there in the article - to enforce a unilateral no-Palestinians-allowed zone within Gaza. Since the IDF has neither the authority nor the ability to actually create and police such a zone, they instead destroy legitimate business such as agriculture within the zone so that there will be no good, innocent reason for people to enter. Don't mean to sound jaded, but this isn't new either - Palestinian farmers regularly accuse Israeli planes of spraying herbicides on their crops.
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Jan 27, 2016 16:28
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Kajeesus posted:I've always been puzzled by that narrative. What reason do anti-Semites have to oppose Zionism, assuming we're talking about white guys who also hate Muslims? Any time they meet a Zionist that isn't living in Israel, there appears the question of why they haven't made aliyah if they're such a devoted Zionist. The answer they usually arrive at is typically some kind of conspiracy-ish nonsense about traitorous Zionist fifth columns exploiting their own "home" countries to Israel's benefit. It's one thing to be a Jewish American, it's another to be a Jewish American citizen who regards themselves first and foremost as an Israeli rather than American, and that's often seen as a part of Zionism. A common anti-semitic excuse throughout history has been to accuse Jews of having dual loyalties that might result in them working against their birth country for the sake of foreign Jews. The rise of Zionism has only exacerbated that - especially considering that Zionist organizations often intentionally act to cast and encourage such suspicions, in order to stoke antisemitism in hopes that it will encourage Jews to immigrate. Enemies of Israel for any reason (whether due to antisemitism or anything else) also oppose Zionism, because it strengthens Israel. In the years following 1948, many of Israel's neighbors actually banned their Jewish minorities from leaving the country because it was feared that they would immigrate to Israel in large numbers, bolstering the still-young country's population and economy.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:04
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The Insect Court posted:The idea that "Zionist organizations" are often intentionally acting to stir up antisemitism is definitely gonna be a citation needed claim. Which Zionist organizations are acting to encourage anti-semitic stereotypes? AIPAC? Hillel? Help us out here. I said Zionist organizations, so why are you suggesting Jewish organizations that have little to do with Zionism? Are you trying to trick people into condemning non-Zionist Jewish organizations so that you can declare that we're all virulent anti-semites using "Zionist" as a dogwhistle? I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but your constant attempts to try and confuse or mislead people into saying something you intend to cast as anti-semitic are really tiresome. When I said Zionist organizations, I meant actual Zionist organizations, like the Jewish Agency, which went to great efforts back in the 60s and 70s to convince other countries that they'd be better off without their Jews and should just expel their Jewish populations since the Jewish Agency would happily take any and all Jews off their hands (and send them to Israel to bolster the country's growth, while spinning a tale of glorious rescue aliyah). Or the Israeli government, which seems intent on waking up the "dual loyalty" elephant in the room by asking a former Italian government member to give up her Italian citizenship and become Israel's ambassador to Italy. Just because the charge of dual loyalties is often a false and prejudicial one made without any proof simply because of race or religion doesn't mean it can never be true (for instance, I wouldn't say it's anti-semitic to claim that Jonathan Pollard had dual loyalties), and I personally share the absolute horror that Italian Jews feel at Netanyahu's appointment there.
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Jan 28, 2016 15:54
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