ANIME AKBAR posted:

Oh come on, you have to wait more than two years before you can tell such a huge lie and expect to not get called on it. On june 30th, Hamas fired its first rocket since 2012, in response to Israeli airstrikes which killed a Hamas member. No honest, clear-headed observer could come to the conclusion that Hamas instigated protective edge. Or brother's keeper, for that matter.

emanresu tnuocca posted:

Slight comic relief, one of Israel's most prominent fascists one Yoav "The Shadow" Eliassi posted the following on his facebook page:

Hong XiuQuan posted:

Except all the data point to the opposite, unless you are claiming mizrahim are about 65% of the population?

Hong XiuQuan posted:

Remember your original claim about it being less about Israeli shift to the right and more about Mizrahim being right-wing?

When 65% of Israelis think that a soldier who executed a wounded man 'did nothing wrong' it would suggest to me that there has been a massive shift to the right in Israel. Whether with Mizrahim or Ashkenazim. The fact that Mizrahim may be a little more to the right of an already far-right spectrum is meaningless. When heads of 'leftist' parties are espousing ideas that would have been considered practically Kahanist in the 1990s then you can't just point to Mizrahim and say 'well, Muslims' fault for kicking them out I guess'.

Watermelon City posted:

So what will it take for Israel to grudgingly regard Palestinians as allies?

Volkerball posted:

The US and Iran came to a deal based around security. That doesn't make them allies, or even on friendly terms.

Volkerball posted:

So now they are Israeli puppets? Ignoring the fact that this completely undermines your point about Israel being "allied" with any Palestinian body, you're way off base. Pretty sure Israel wasn't very happy about releasing prisoners as concessions to the PA during negotiations, or the PA applying to UN charters and the ICC very publicly to stick their thumb in Israel's eye. Israel is not politically aligned with anyone who wishes to unlock the ball and chain on Palestines ankle, because at the end of the day, they are not open to giving up concessions on basic human rights that would allow Palestine to thrive as a normal nation. That's why the situation has been stagnant for so long.

Ytlaya posted:

This is the part I can't wrap my head around. Most of the people who defend Israel in conversations like this tend to genuinely believe that government-sanctioned violence committed by an organized military is somehow less bad than private individuals committing acts of terror. Usually I can at least understand the warped logic that leads to dumb right-wing opinions, but I honestly don't know where they're coming from here.

The only thing I can think of is that they consider military violence more justifiable solely because the military (in this case the IDF) attempts to make excuses for its violence, whereas terrorists just flat out say "yeah we wanted to kill civilians." Like, it's somehow better for the IDF to kill orders of magnitude more civilians as long as they claim it wasn't their primary goal.

objects in mirror posted:

The conflation of Israel with Jews and Judaism as a tactic to prevent any criticism of Israel needs to be called out more.

quote:

The labour party in the UK, which has many members who are on the anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine train, has been getting hilariously trolled these past few months by Israel lobby people and their cronies in the media with accusations of anti-Semitism and the Labour party is responding as if they got caught with their pants down (I don't follow UK politics too closely and all this information is coming to me via outlets that cover the I/P issue.)

quote:

Vox.com is a site I like for the most part, even though I'm a moderate on most issues, but one of their glaring flaws is that they do act as a bulwark against criticism of Israel becoming mainstream among the left.

Ultramega posted:

You want to talk about cherry-picking, you never answered these:


But who knows, maybe these are all non sequiturs and not worthy of a meaningful response.

Ytlaya posted:

But none of this changes the fact that Israel actually is guilty of the crimes that it is frequently accused of.

quote:

The problem with your argument is that you assume that all criticism of Israel is somewhere on the anti-semitic spectrum

quote:

As I said, there's a lot to criticize about their work but to smear it as anti-semitism is beyond the pale and has a chilling effect on the discussion.

quote:

I said nothing of the sort.

Panzeh posted:

A desire to engage in ethnic cleansing at some point is probably the most accurate term I could use for Israeli intentions in the Palestinian territory. When I presented the dictionary definition of ethnic cleansing to people who suggested that the inhabitants of Gaza and the West bank move, they just kinda shrugged. I don't recall which one it was, MIGF or hakimashou.

The very notion that you can occupy territory, then tell the inhabitants that they can neither be citizens of an independent country nor be citizens of Israel is rather troubling, and most people who support Israel support this position. The easiest way to tease out the racism from this very notion is to ask them to justify why Palestinians can't be unilaterally made citizens of Israel.

FreshlyShaven posted:

No, that's precisely what you're arguing. Simply saying "nuh-uh" doesn't change the fact that your argument, that there is no line between criticism of a nation state/its policies/its ideology and bigotry towards a people but only a question of degrees, implies precisely that.

team overhead smash posted:

Actually there has been majority support for the peace process for a good long while amongst Palestinians. It's only in the last year or two that it's dipped below 50%, with the thousands killed in protective Edge following years of oppression with no progress seeing it decline to the high 40's due to the lack of belief that Israel is actually willing to engage in peace.

team overhead smash posted:

Okay, I have their book, The Israel lobby and US Foreign policy, right here in front of me. If you're "not remotely" just throwing out blind accusations of anti-semitism to hide behind, what are the passages that you're critical of?

Main Paineframe posted:

even the director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism is being accused of "dismissing" anti-Semitism and having ties with "leftist" groups that are "critical of British Jewish institutions", I think it's fair to say the whole thing's escalated into nothing less than a witch-hunt.

team overhead smash posted:

This is a nice way of shifting the blame. What you actually mean here is that no Israeli government and a majority of the Jewish people do not support the peace process based on the internationally agreed consensus on the final status.

quote:

And I've got the book right here in front of me, so where does it say anything to back up your claims? Have you even read it?

The book I've got points out that the Israel lobby is a powerful influence, but not the exclusive one. It explains that even though the Israel was active in the various events it covers, other people with no connection to the lobby were pushing for the same thing. Moreover at no point does it say "and because the lobby has this influence, the USA politicians therefore have no culpability in their own decisions".

It honestly seems like you've never actually read the book and are basing your entire argument off of reviews or on-line criticisms you've googled, which is loving retarded.

objects in mirror posted:

I see, Walt and Mearsheimer were merely trying to apologize for American failures. In that same spirit of criticism, perhaps it's fair to say that you might be similarly prejudiced in trying to discredit claims about Zionist lobbying efforts and corruption of U.S foreign policy perhaps because of your ethnic and religious ties to Israel (sorry to say but only Israelis and Jewish supporters of Israel take your tone, but forgive my presumption if you are someone without emotional and ethnic connections to Israel who just happens to be sharing impartial views on foreign affairs that just happen to be favorable towards Israel.)

objects in mirror posted:

You dismissed a widely read and influential book that was critical of the US-Israel relationship as well as of the Israel lobby by claiming that its authors were merely trying to cover up for American mistakes. Let's entertain this idea. Walt and Mearsheimer book was not a reasoned argument but merely a ruse to cover up for America because, presumably, Walt and Mearsheimer are American nationalists who love America and were being protective of its image. But curious, isn't it, how you froth at the mouth when this same type of criticism is leveled at you -- that is, you are someone who primarily perceives the I/P conflict from an ethnocentric and tribal perspective and your arguments are the ones that are really trying to cover for a country's bad actions. When you claim others' words and advocacy as being disingenuous due to being motivated by nationalism (as you said, the intent to cover up for America's mistakes), it's fine and dandy. When others accuse you of the same thing, it's "stormfront-level trash." Funny how that works. Perhaps this is making you understandably uncomfortable, as Israel is known for having a troll brigade of nationalists who work to disrupt criticism of Israel online, but that's neither here nor there, so how about withdrawing that baseless charge against Walt and Mearsheimer? If you don't then I'll be just as free to call you an ethnocentric tribal nationalist engaging in hasbara for emotional and biased reasons to benefit a Nation-state to which he's connected. Toodles.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

You know, I try to avoid posting or adjudicating in this thread due to my closeness to the material, but you've been spending pages upon pages alternating between throwing accusations at Mearsheimer and Walt and non sequiturs attacking those asking you to back them up. If you can't support your claim with evidence, admit defeat and move on. Keep this up and there will be consequences.

Crowsbeak posted:

YOu are kidding right? Actually according to your logic the USA should have invaded Israel and forced it to endure a ten year occupation.

Main Paineframe posted:

Officially, yes. In the Temple, there was a area which basically no one was permitted to enter except for the High Priest under very specific circumstances, and entry to the Temple in general was subject to certain conditions as well. It's believed that even though the Temple is long gone, these restrictions still exist on the land on which it stood, and since it is no longer possible to determine the exact location of the area where humans were forbidden to step, mainstream Judaism holds that Jews should stay off the Temple Mount altogether until the time of the Third Temple, in order to avoid accidentally violating that ban and profaning the holiest site in Judaism.

However, there are plenty of extremist rabbis who go against mainstream Orthodox doctrine. One particularly active set is the so-called "religious nationalist" movement, which basically argues that bringing all of biblical Israel under Jewish control is not just a divine right but also a divine mandate. Naturally, Temple Mount activists tend to be followers of religious-nationalist rabbis, who proclaim that the time of the Third Temple is ours to decide and bring about through action. Typically, these rabbis claim that the prohibition on ascending the Temple Mount is misguided in some way, either arguing that the location of the prohibited site is known well enough that there's no need to bar entry (typically they claim it's inside the Dome of the Rock or other Muslim sites, which of course would have to be demolished so that the Third Temple could be built there) or pointing to various historical Jewish scholars who they claim ascended the Temple Mount.

The Temple movement goes against Jewish theology in a lot of ways, but people don't flock to religious nationalism for accurate Jewish analysis - they flock to it because it's a religious justification for their political desires, and its distinctly messianic flavor is attractive to many.

quote:

A new political party with former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, Kulanu leader Moshe Kahlon and former Likud minister Gideon Sa’ar would get the largest number of seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament — 25 — if elections were held today, according to a poll published on Friday.

The survey by Israel Radio indicated that a new center-right party would beat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud by four seats, with Israel’s ruling party dropping from its current 30 seats to 21.

With the new Ya’alon-Kahlon-Sa’ar party in the running, the Zionist Union would fall dramatically — from 24 seats to 11 — and the center-left Yesh Atid, right-wing Jewish Home and right-wing Yisrael Beytenu would all snatch up two more seats than they currently have (Yesh Atid would rise from 11 to 13, Jewish Home from 8 to 10, and Yisrael Beytenu from 6 to 8).

The Joint (Arab) List would remain steady with 13 seats, as would the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism with eight. Ultra-Orthodox party Shas and left-wing Meretz would each lose one seat, according to the survey.

Ya’alon resigned last Friday, after Netanyahu offered the Defense Ministry to Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman as part of coalition talks. In his parting address, the veteran Likud politician vowed a political comeback.

Sa’ar, also a former Likud minister, is rumored to be considering a return to political life and is thought to be a contender to Netanyahu for the premiership. Ya’alon, Sa’ar and Kahlon have not suggested they will run on a joint ticket in the future, and the survey is entirely speculative.

Without the formation of such a new center-right party, the Likud would shrink by two seats (28) but remain, by far, the largest party in the Knesset, according to the Israel Radio poll.

The second-largest party would be Yesh Atid with 19 seats, identical to the number it had after the 2013 elections. Kahlon’s Kulanu would drop from 10 to 6, and the Zionist Union would decline from its 24 seats to 15. The Jewish Home and Yisrael Beytenu parties would get an additional two seats, respectively, and Shas and Meretz one more than they now hold (7 and 6).

The poll did not note the number of respondents or margin of error.

The coalition deal between Netanyahu and Liberman was signed on Wednesday, bringing the latter’s five-seat party into the narrow coalition. It would have been six seats but Yisrael Beytenu MK Orly Levy-Abekasis resigned from her party last week, although not from the Knesset, in protest of the talks.

On Friday, Environmental Protection Minister Avi Gabbay, a non-MK Kulanu candidate filling the position, stepped down, saying he “could not swallow” Liberman’s appointment and Ya’alon’s resignation.

quote:

Israeli foreign minister Moshe Sharett vociferously condemned Iraq’s extortion and state-sponsored theft. Estimates of the value of Iraqi Jewry’s blocked assets ranged from 6 million to 12 million dinars or, at its highest valuation, some $300 million in 21st century money.

Sharett swore that Israel “considers this act of robbery by force of law to be the continuation of the evil oppression which Iraq has always practiced against defenseless minorities … We have a reckoning to conduct with the Arab world as to the compensation due to Arabs who left Israeli territory and abandoned their property there because of the war of the Arab world against our state. The act perpetrated by the Iraqi kingdom against the property of Jews that have not transgressed against Iraqi law, and have not undermined her status or plotted against her, forces us to combine the two accounts. Hence,” Sharett declared, “the government has decided to inform the appropriate UN institution and I proclaim this publicly, that the value of the Jewish property frozen in Iraq will be taken into account by us in calculating the sum of the compensation we have agreed to pay to Arabs who abandoned property in Israel.”

Main Paineframe posted:

Anyhow, what about the main thrust of your argument - the assertion that Mizrahi have a grudge against Arab countries and demand reparations? Well, although Jews were definitely outright expelled from a few Arab countries, many prominent Mizrahi have called the "all Mizrahi were expelled from Arab countries" narrative utter horseshit, pointing out that large-scale departure of Jews from many Arab countries was entirely voluntary or done at Israel's behest (and, indeed, one of the deeper traumas shared by many Mizrahi populations is Israel's utter mismanagement of those migrations and the second-class status they faced when they arrived). It's a narrative that deprives Arab Jews of their own agency by turning them from "fervent Zionists who willingly threw away their old lives for Israel" into "helpless refugees rescued and enlightened by the mighty Ashkenazi", all for the sake of concocting an excuse to refuse the claims of the Palestinian refugees that Israel forced upon those very same countries. Let's see how the descendants of Iraqi Jews feel about Iraq.

Kajeesus posted:

I'm assuming you would be cheerleading exactly as much if Palestinians were in a position to ethnically cleanse Jews, because they too have a direct grudge and animus, yes?

team overhead smash posted:

Also it is perfectly possible that in a final agreement the reparations to Jewish refugees will be set against the much larger reparations to Palestinians. That's unlikely to happen any time soon though because it would invovle Israel being comitted to the peace process.

quote:

In fact if we flipped this around and have "people are hostile towards Jews because of something Israel did 60 years ago", wouldn't that be a classic case of anti-semitism? Projecting the actions of a nation onto an entire race/religion is wrong and racist whether the country is Iraq or Israel. So why are you advocating this directly analogous example as something that should not just be taken into account but actually emphasised?

FreshlyShaven posted:

That and the whole racism thing, you know how Israel was supposed to be a "Jewish" state(ie, a state which guaranteed one racial group's political dominance and relegated all others to second-class status if that) and such a state could not come about without ethnic cleansing.

quote:

Of course, that's just another tactic for buying time and changing the "facts on the ground". What you're saying is that Israel shouldn't be asked to end the occupation and accept Palestinian human rights until literally every Arab(and maybe Central Asian/Persian/Turkish) state agrees to apologize to the Mizrahim and compensate them. In the real world, that means never; you'll never get all these countries to agree, at least as long as Israel continues its occupation and makes a mockery of the very concept of human rights and as long as the occupation/the refugee situation continues to fuel mass anti-Israel sentiment. Saying "we won't do anything until Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Iran, KSA, etc, etc. all simultaneous agree to our terms" is saying "we won't do anything," period. Now, if Israel were actually interested in securing rights for the Mizrahim forced out of Middle-Eastern lands, Israel would end the occupation and grant Palestinians their rights. Doing so would make such agreements politically possible; the Arab League has agreed to normalize relations with Israel once the occupation is over and some just solution to the Palestinian refugees is found and normalization of relations is an important step towards reconciliation and compensation. With an end to the occupation and the bi-annual Gaza massacre and the subsequent piles of dead children, with an end to the misery-filled Palestinian refugee camps, popular opinion towards Israel will soften in the Middle East, making it politically feasible for governments to deal with Israel and the Mizrahim justly. Of course, Israel is more interested in using the plight of the Mizrahim as a pretext to continue oppressing and violating the rights of Palestinians than it is in actually trying to solve it.

quote:

That and the fact that the Ashkenazi elite who formed the core of the Labour party and the center-left political establishment viewed Mizrahim as little better than Arabs, ie. vermin. Cf. the whole abducting Moroccan children thing or the dousing of new Mizrahi arrivals in pesticides upon arrival in Israel.

FreshlyShaven posted:

Leaving that aside, despite the disclaimer, this comes dangerously close to victim-blaming. Maybe instead of trying to elide Israeli responsibility by blaming Palestinian leaders, you could simply acknowledge the most salient fact and let it sink in: Israel ethnically cleansed the Palestinians and has refused to make amends for it or acknowledge the basic human rights of its victims. Yes, the ethnic cleansing occurred in a time of racial tension and political violence, but that's true of almost every incidence of ethnic cleansing; ethnic cleansing rarely happens during periods of stability and prosperity.

quote:

In the real world, Israel is not interested in making a just peace. It prefers to maintain the occupation to satisfy its right-wing zealots, avoid dealing with its housing crisis and to profit the Israeli economy at the expense of Palestinian suffering. The closest thing to a serious peace plan offered by Israel was the Oslo Accords and a) that didn't even create a Palestinian state, and b) no sooner did Israel sign the Accords than it went about sabotaging them.

quote:

Netanyahu has promised there will be no Palestinian state, 3/4 of Israeli Jews oppose a 2 state solution which creates a viable Palestinian-administered territory, and Labour's record is just as bad as Likud's(and likely to get worse as Herzog decides that the route to electoral victory is through hating Arabs more than Likud). So don't pretend that some reasonable peace could come about if those Palestinians were just willing to eat more poo poo and pretend to like it. The only way to peace is through international sanctions and pressure.

quote:

No, I'm saying an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal should focus on Israel/Palestine instead of dealing with tangential issues because given Israel's behavior, it should be obvious that Israel would use a single country's intransigence to scuttle the entire talks. The issue of Iraqi Mizrahim and compensation for their suffering should be dealt with between the government of Iraq and Israel; the Palestinians should not be held hostage over something they had nothing to do with.

That seems like Israel's MO right there. Nevertheless, that's not what I'm doing. I'm saying separate issues should be addressed separately and that one group's suffering is no excuse for another group's suffering. You know, basic morality.

quote:

For another, the Arab peace proposal is, in its outline, simple: end the occupation and find a just solution to the refugees. This is the international consensus and the bare minimum for any kind of a just peace. Israel has no excuse for not accepting it; its refusal to even entertain the idea is proof of just how little interest Israel has in ending apartheid and making peace.

quote:

The Palestinians have been suffering for over 60 years under a brutal apartheid regime. Israelis have not. The Palestinians have already made hard concessions through their blood, their tears, their stolen lands, the daily apartheid checkpoints, the stolen billions from the Palestinian economy, etc. They've done 98 percent of the suffering; it's Israel's turn to give up its apartheid policies and make some concessions for once.

team overhead smash posted:

Just to confirm then, do you accept that Mizrahim who hold the views you set out are racist scumbags whose opinions are worthless regardless of whether it might be useful to understand why they hold these racist scumbag opinions?

quote:

Arafat in the 2000 Camp David Summit was already willing to make concessions and accept a very limited return to Israel. The only bit Israel could possibly object to is handwavey waffle specifically designed as a fig leaf for the arabs so that the refugees can be mentioned while committing Israel to nothing.

quote:

Also it's not really elevating one group's suffering arbitrarily over another's, but being capable of basic critical analysis and reasoning that the ethnic cleansing of Jews 70 years ago who were refugees for a short time, in some case days, but now live in relative comfort in a modern industrialised nation is not as important than a group of arabs being ethnically cleansed 70 years ago and then them and their descendent continuing to be refugees living in poverty who are oppressed, kill, jailed, tortured, etc for those 70 years up until the present day.

team overhead smash posted:

Counter-productive to what? Israel's slow ethnic cleansing of them? There is a massive international consensus that Israel needs to return to the the pre-1967 borders (with mutal land swaps, blahblahblahblah) and this constrains Israelis actions to a large degree. It would be foolish to get rid of that by going "actually, I guess we don't need human rights or anything, feel free to take all our land".

That of course doesn't mention that this is a massive misinterpretation. In negotiations, Palestinians haven't been arguing for a return to the status quo. The return of refugees has been planned to be small, with most of them planned to go to a newly formed Palestinian state so that Israel can maintain it's ethnic and religious purity, while in terms of the land although it's based along the 1967 borders land swaps have been agreed in principle so that Israel gets all its big settlements in return for giving the Palestinians undeveloped land. They're specifically not negotiating for a return to the "status quo anti bellum".

Main Paineframe posted:

You're wrong, though. There's a massive difference between the expulsion of a minority population by military force, and voluntary emigration to a national home which promises a better social and economic standing, subsidies, and also pays their way. Some Mizrahi migrations were the result of ethnic cleansing, but many more weren't. (Why, it's almost as if lumping together the experiences of the Jewish populations in over 20 different countries over the course of more than four decades is dumb)

SedanChair posted:

That's nice, now the Palestinians are "irredentist." Not wanting your land to be slowly absorbed, and your people dispersed and their identity not even acknowledged, is irredentist.

Ultramega posted:

A cursory google revealed this
https://bdsmovement.net/2013/al-haq-substantial-grounds-holding-italian-firm-pizzarotti-responsible-war-crimes-11197

Al-Haq is about as mainstream as they come when it comes to palestinian NGOs and their record of defending terrorism and organizing direct violent action against Israeli settlers is so well documented.

Ultramega posted:

Why do you have such a stick up your rear end about all of this? What's more illustrative of current trends? The fact that hardons like you literally, cannot take a joke about The Jewish State™ and your and KJI's axiomatic position of "anti-israeli sentiment is de facto anti-semitism" comes off in ways you might not intend.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

You have all spent a whole page talking about BDS, so maybe it's worthwhile to mention this:

I wonder if this will hold up in court? Seems like both executive overreach (this failed to pass in the State legislature) and State overreach (seems to be impinging upon the Commerce Clause). Here's some criticism published in the generally centrist Jewish-American Daily Forward:

Ultramega posted:

Crowsbeak posted:

Why did Herzog think it was a good idea to enter into a coalition again? Also might he get kicked from his party?

Irony Be My Shield posted:

It's insane to me that people regard boycotts as an extremist view. It's such a minor measure that only involves us choosing what to buy.

Platonicsolid posted:

Remember, KJI is one of those people who believes that objecting to ethnic cleansing of Group B by Group A is ethnic cleansing of Group A.