I find that Carrie Nation-like moral certitude, no matter what “camp” it’s issuing from, is a hindrance to understanding and progress in this matter.
Dude, if my comments offend, you shouldn’t be setting me up with such classic material.
By the way, not to be obnoxious or anything but while rulers (and witnesses) can be deposed, I don’t think people can be. Come to think of it, people can’t be occupied either. You can occupy land but not the people on it, even in unusually close relationships.
My post here was in reference to Newcomer’s screed, which you appeared to agree with.
As said in the first half of my post - there is no necessity to read only “pro-Israeli” sources, but rather to be well-read generally on the topic, and to know the basics. Generally, a proud proclamation that historical knowledge of the facts is the tool of the enemy to confuse the obvious rightness of some cause or other isn’t a very good advertisement for that cause …
He post wasn’t addressed to you. He was responding to Newcomer.
Furthermore, no one has said that until one visits Israel and reads “half a dozen books” on the subject, you can’t form a valid opinion.
What I’ve merely pointed out is that by your own admission you know very little of the situation, which you do nothing to help by claiming that in reality, its not very complex.
Furthermore, when you foolishly claim that there is far more media criticism of Israel now than in the 1980s and I then point to how much more negative coverage of Israel CNN did during the First Intifada and how negatively Israel was criticized during the invasion of Lebanon, and yet you still insist that the media coverage of today is worse, you come across as being aggressively in denial of reality and impervious to logic and reason.
I think it has something to do with teh constitution of this board. Lotsa Jews, not a lot of Palestinians.
I don’t think you appreciate my position. I’m not saying that ignorance>knowledge. I am saying I have enough knowledge to form an opinion and your insistence that I read a clutch of books before I engage in this debate is stupid. I know enough from reading wikipedia and your claims that this is insufficient doesn’t go very far when you can’t identify what information i am missing that wikipedia does not provide.
I am very wary of folks trying to leverage the mere fact of their greater knowledge of the specifics into some argument for the virtue of their position. A while back a poster used a similar arguemtnt that he is more likely correct because he knew more facts. He tried to pretend that Palestinians didn’t actually own a lot of land in Palestine because the only REAL form of land ownership was something called mulk and most of the land in palestine was actually owned by the government and the ownership of THAT land changed hands when israel became the government. It soon be came clear that while that statement was techincally correct, there were other forms of interests in land that were being conveniently ignored. I claimed that the poster was using facts like a scalpel (finely dissecting and making distinctions in facts to achieve the desired result) and the poster took it as a compliment. It was like he reveled in having used superior knowledge to be able to create a false impression without actually mistating the facts. It soon became clear to me that miri and communal land ownership were property rights that were being ignored in the effort to reduce to almost nothing the pre-1948 Palestinian ownership in land.
For example Miri (as i understand it was government land that I had the exclusive right to use. I could pass on this exclusive right to my heirs as long as I continued to farm it but I could not sell it to third parties, if I failed to farm it for three straight years then it reverted to the state (in this case, israel prevented the usufruct holders to return to cultivate their land). Anothe example is communal ownership where no single person has right to the land but a village had the ususfruct.
So I am wary of vague assertions of superior knowledge as a buttress to your position considering how this superior knowledge has been used by Israel apologists. If you have superior knowledge, then share it with me and convince me that your position is reasonable (I already think that the positions of most Israeli apologists are in fact reasonable but they present it as the almost inevitable conclusion of anyone who is equipped with all the facts. Well what are these facts that lead to these inevitable conclusions? What are the facts taht prove me wrong?)
I’m trying to stay out of yet another heated debate about Israel, but this is unreal:
I’m sorry, but this is one of the most offensive off hand things I’ve ever seen tossed into GD. For one thing, it assumes (incorrectly) that this board is some sort of pro-Israeli board which is total horseshit. For another, it assumes that to be ‘pro-Israeli’ you have to be Jewish.
Damuri has taken to referring to me obliquely and mischaracterizing what’s actually been said. For instance, I pointed out at the time that due to his utter lack of knowledge of how land ownership worked, he wasn’t qualified to talk about who owned what land.
It should also be noted that Damuri is the one “pretending” here, and the actual discussion was that there was limited private land ownership and the majority of the land in question was state land, which was ‘rented’ by its tenants and could be lost for, for example, lack of cultivation. It’s curious that a distorted gloss of what actually happened is being brought up so much later.
What became clear is that, just like now, Damuri was trying to substitute “interest in the land” for “property ownership”, and ignoring Ottoman land reforms that were half a century old that functionally eliminated communal property ownership or…
:cue conspiratorial music:
But again we see what the real problem was. Damuri was ignorant of the facts before he started making claims. Once he made his claims he was educated on the fact that land ownership was nowhere near as simple as he was portraying it, and the rate of private land ownership among Palestinians was comparatively small. But his pre-conceived notions simply have to be true, so someone pointing out that he’s wrong on the facts and wrong in his logic simply must be reveling in lying.
Of course.
:rolleyes:
I think this isn’t really a good metric for pro-Palistinian or pro-Israeli-ness. Plenty of pro-Israelis aren’t Jews, and plenty of pro-Palestinians are not Palestinian.
Well, I would not disagree - certainly one can form an opinion without being an expert.
With the caveat that one ought to modify that opinion in light of facts one may have been unaware of.
An example of the sort of thing which a person with a background in the history of the region would disagree, whatever their ‘side’, is the oft-repeated notion that Israel would not have been formed but for the financial funding provided by the US gov’t - the error here is backdating that support to the formation of Israel, and much overstating its significance even currently.
Wikipedia is great for its coverage, but it is not good for reliance on truly controversial subjects. It is best used as a guide only, to illustrate uncontroversial points, or as a lead-in to further research.
Or taking it as an item of faith that the UN created Israel even though all it ever did was put words on a piece of paper.
Some narratives are impossible to budge, even with a thorough command of the relevant facts.
I thought the argument was that because all my knowledge comes from cocktail party conversations and wikipedia, I didn’t have a sufficient base on knowledge to be critical of Israel and Zionism.
Like I said, I might be mistaken but I linked to the wiki page on criticism of Israel and it seemed to spend a lot of time on more recent events. I looked up the first intifada and there was this note:
“Many American media outlets openly criticized Israel in a way that they had not before.”
from The Iron Wall; Israel and the Arab World (a book I think someone may have recommended in this thread.
But I have not found any cite for the calim that criticism of Israel was worse then than it is now. The wiki entry on the subect Criticism of Israel - Wikipedia doesn’t seem to be as clear on the subject as you seem to be.
So can you provide an objective cite taht criticsm was worse in the 1980s than it is now? Was the criticism sharper, more sustained, more vitriolic, how was it worse back then?
I don’t think you have to be Jewish to be pro-Israel.
I think you missed my assumption. I am assuming that a Jew or Palestinian is more likely to be knowledgable about the subject relative to people like me who have no connection with the region. I read the prior post to ask why everyone thnks that the pro-Israeli side is so much better informed than the anti-zionist side.
If you find my assumption offensive then I apologize.
If you thought I was saying something else, I find it intersting that you would leap to the sorty of conclusion you did. Almost as if you were sifting through my posts looking for hints of anti-semitism from me. I know that that a lot of people conflate the two but anti-zionism is /= anti-semitism.
It hasn’t been my experience that simply being a Jew or Palestinian means you are informed on this subject at all…in fact, quite the contrary. A lot of US or European Jews are not that informed on the subject, and even Israeli Jews don’t always have all the facts straight, being too close to the subject, so to speak. As for Palestinians, I have known quite a few (when I was going to the U of A there were a lot of Palestinians in the engineering college), and I have to say that few if any of them were really well informed on the subject except from a very skewed perspective.
Basically, from my own personal experience, I’ve found that the vast majority of people, regardless of their nationality or religious preference have a very simplistic and highly skewed (one way or the other) perception of the current state of Israel and Palestine, and almost no appreciation of the history or complexity of how things got to where they are today. Most have an the almost comic book outlook demonstrated earlier by Dick Dastardly and newcomer.
Ok…forget about it. No worries on that.
Here is the thing about that cite…it doesn’t really get into levels of media criticism or give any sort of comparison over time. It is merely talking about types of criticism and supposed suppression of criticism, as well as breaking out some of the factors involved in that criticism. So, it really says nothing substantial to either backup your earlier assertion that there is more criticism today or less, nor does it support your assertion of a virtual critical suppression in the news of criticism in the US prior to 2000. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how you would back that up one way or the other, but it’s your assertion to back up or retract…or to do nothing at all with if that’s how you want to play it. Just let me quote one thing from your cite:
I’ve actually been to Israel. I also know several Israelis as well (just FTR, I’m an lapsed Catholic who is now an agnostic, and I probably have as much Jewish blood in me as the average Mongolian does ;)). The attitude above was really prevalent in Israel a decade or so ago. A lot of Israelis felt very isolated, put down and even hunted by the ‘international community’…including the US. Now…you could chalk this down to simple paranoia on their part, but you even paranoia has a root in reality somewhere when it’s displayed by a large non-zero portion of the population.
I was talking about the fact that the pro-Israeli side seems to have peopel who have deeper knowledge of the issues but I guess imbedded in that is the assumption that Jews would tend to be Pro-Israeli. I know that not every Jew is zionist but I suspect that you will find more support for Israel in teh average synagogue than in the general population and I bet that the you have have a higher average level of knowledge about the issues and facts surrounding Israel in the Jewish community than in the Chinese community.
Of course I agree. My position has shifted as a result of things other posters have said, heck even Finn has said things that have shifted my position in spite of the method of delivery.
I know that Israel was on their own in 1948. Noone won their independence for them. But sent a lot of foreign military aid to israel durign the cold war because the soviets were funding all the arab states. Right now we funds about 20% of Israel’s military budget, Israel can probably live without our help at this point but its not clear to me that Israel would have survived the Yom Kippur War without our help.
I invite you to tell me what I’m missing. I think that there is a consensus for a two state solution along 1967 borders with some horsetrading based on the notion that a failure to reach any trades defaults to 1967 borders (i.e. a lot of Jewish settlements end up in Palestine).
Naturally, of course, it’s my fault that Damuri has a reflexive anti-Israel narrative that he shoehorns any new information into and has to fight against.
When I get my decoder ring I graduate from Puppetmaster to Mindtaker.
My complaint was not against you so much as that comment about “pseudo-complexity”; I do not say it is so complicated as to be incomprehensible, just that it is not so simple as some, and indeed most of these come from the “pro-Palestinian” side, seem to think it is, nay “know” it is.
As far as your belief that 1967 lines are a reasonable basic starting point, sure, so long as the caveat includes not exactly along that line and with swaps and adjustments to accomplish the needs (not just wants) of each side.
Now here you are being silly. “Fair” has nothing to do with it. For all I know Bibi in his heart of hearts is a greater Isrealist and thinks that is fair. Each side has various factions each of which is very convinced of very different outcomes as being fair. Negotiations rarely end up with either side thinking they’ve gotten what is “fair”; they end up with each side thinking they’ve been screwed but that they got the best they could out of the deal. What Bibi and company have to realize is that the status quo is no where near as good a deal for Israel as giving up a shitload to have a real peace settlement. And the Palestinians have to realize the same thing. If either side holds out for what they each believe is fair they will never come to terms.
I do accept that. And you have to realize that security must still be delivered against actions perpetrated by the minority that would take up arms - be that 10% or even just 1%. There will be some that will be dedicated to getting what they think is fair, and fair to that minority is what was fair to the Arab world at Israel’s creation and immediately before: no Israel to exist, to drive the Jews into the sea, to exterminante them. These were the mainline Arab thoughts up through and including 1967. If you want I can find the exact quotes and cites. I again refer you to the Khartoum Resolutions.
Now to be fair, the Israeli side was not a unified voice calling for a land for peace either. Moshe Dyan led the Palestinian autonomous region side of the debate in Israel, Menachim Begin is most strongly associated with the other side’s position. Maybe if Dyan had prevailed it could have overcome the Arab sentiment expressed in the Khartoum Resolution, which may have been more for show than heartfelt. But also maybe if the Khartoum Resolution had not been so strong Begin would not have prevailed. But the Begin side did and the result was the Alon Plan - plan on keeping parts of the West Bank for security and allow settlers there to do it. Israel was even less willing to reconsider when most of the world other than the US piled on against it, in a way it felt was most unfair.
It really should not be too much of a surprise that Israel believes that some want it destroyed when it what is still being expressed in many Arab quarters. And it should not be much of shock that some of us get frustrated when people post as if the problems all began with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
A peace accord must protect Israel from those who think that only Israel’s complete destruction is fair. Or else Israel is getting nothing out of it. It must create a viable Palestinian state, or at least a proto-state, that gives both immediate benefits to Palestinians on the ground and invests in future development, or else the Palestinians get nothing out of it.
The argument is that you don’t have enough knowledge to have a fully informed opinion based on that as your sole source of information and that a wise person would be a bit tentative with the absolute certainty of the absolute correctness of their conclusions if that is really where they have gotten all their knowledge from. Whatever the subject. And in reality I think you do have that tentative holding of your knowledge. You do seem open to hearing the rest of the story.
Finn, sorry but I have to say that I think you are being unfair. That Damuri statement you quote is something more to lauded than to be berated: he is acknowledging an extant bias and consciously attempting to correct for it. What better path do any of us have than that?
You may be right, I was making an asumption. It may be incorrect but judging from folks like Alessan (and probably Finn Again) it seems like there is more knowledge at least among SOME of the Jews on this board than among the general population.
I don’t think I’ve met a Palestinian in my life.
I’d be happy to become enlightened on ths issue. I think much of the history of the world Post-WWII can be seen through the conflict in the middle east.
Everything from the cold war to the current war on terror seems to have a connection with that conflict in israel.
Yeah, I agree it doesn’t argue one way or the other but it was the only thing I could find and I haven’t been able to find anything that supports the notion one way or the other. So I said YMMV and I was told that this was not a YMMV situation. Is the burden still on me to prove it one way or the other or is the burden on the person who tells me that this is not a YMMV situation?
OK, I can accept that the international community has been critical of Israel but I don’t know that it is all unfounded criticism. It really doesn’t help when they make a special rule saying that a Palestinan marrying an Israeli doesn’t become a citizen but anyone else does, it doesn’t help when the Israeli born child of that union must leave Israel by their 12th birthday but no other child born in Israel must. It doesn’t help that they build settlements on land that will go to Palestine if the 1967 borders are respected.
If I seem overly anti-Israel then let me just say “fuck hamas” Sure they do some good humanitarian work but all the humanitarian work evaporates in the face of the part they play in this 60 year long tragedy.
Nah, it directly goes to whether or not Damuri’s argument is particularly malleable. Equally important is that someone with such an argument then sees fit to blame others for their own cognitive processes.
Well, we could start by not having such a bias.
Failing that, we can admit it as a personal failing and not blame others. Failing that we can at least remain silent about how open to change we are if our admitted position is one of reflexive anti-[group] bias, and we refuse to take any responsibility for holding that view.
Come now, if, imagine the reaction if someone said “I have a reflexive anti-black narrative that I shoehorn any new facts into, and I have to fight not to put every new fact I learn into an anti-black screed. But, to be fair, Jesse Jackson made me do it, it’s not my fault.”
or “I have a reflexive anti-gay narrative that I shoehorn any new facts into, and I have to fight not put every new fact into an anti-gay screed. But to be fair, Liberace makes me hate gays, it’s not my fault.”
It’s one thing to talk about how open minded you are. It’s another thing to do that while admitting to a habit of systemic bias and refusing to even accept responsibility for it.
If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have created Israel in Palestine, I would have carved out a piece of Germany and Austria, and called it Israel but as Malthus has pointed out, the subscription rate was not likely to be as high to get Jews to move back to Germany than it would have been to get them to come to Palestine.
But I recognize that the only thing worse than 5 million Palestinian refugees is 5 million Palestinian refugees AND 5 million Jewish refugees.
Do you think that the one state solution is just code for the future genocide of Jews when the Palestinians are in the majority?
I am pretty sure that the entire arab league (minus Lebanon) have agreed to recognize Israel as soon as they revert to 1967 borders. I thought that Hamas and by extension hezbollah had offered a 10 year truce for those borders. In time Palestinians may see the benefits of half a loaf now over a chance at the whole loaf sometime in the future after much bloodshed and violence. I don’t think we can really do anything about Iran besides stand next to Israel and say, “this is our friend, any action against Israel is an action against us” I would hope that Israel’s agreement to 1967 borders might come with a membership to NATO.
I’m pretty open to it, I just think that the average graduate elective course doesn’t require more than about 500 pages of reading and people have suggested an almost graduate level work load, it seems like a bit much.
Noone likes being attacked and it makes you take an adversarial stance, you realize taht the other person only cares about winning and you start to adopt the same attitude and with Finn, winning meant proving that Israel was a bad actor. I don’t think I would have had that bias if he hadn’t spent so much time calling me an anti-semite but I don’t engage Finn anymore and the bias has gone away. I am still sensitive to accusations of anti-semitism but noone else seems to equate anti-zionism with anti-semitism quite as neatly as Finn.
I wish he could share his knowledge and make his arguments without shitting down my throat. Folks like Malthus and Alessan seem to be able to argue with me without vilifying me.
By your own admission you’ve never met any Palestinians, though you rather arrogantly insist you know how they feel and if you think most Americans Jews are all that knowledgeable about the conflict, then you haven’t met many.
I seriously doubt most American Jews could pass a test on Israeli history if their lives depended on it.
For myself, since you seem to be concerned about the ethnic origins of the the posters, I’m Iranian, though I’ve lived in the US since I was two.
I’m sorry, but claiming that “I know enough from reading wikipedia” on ANY subject is not only incredibly stupid, but it’s also incredibly arrogant.
Wikipedia is nearly universally acknowledged by most academics to be a horrible source of information. Each year, increasingly large numbers of college professors forbid there students from using wikipedia in their papers for a good reason.
The director of the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Rutgers University once said, “the next wikipedia article on the Middle East that’s not riddled with errors will be the first”(yes, he was obviously being hyperbolic).
Now, when acknowledged experts on the Middle East say that you shouldn’t trust wikipedia when it comes to the Middle East, well, then you shouldn’t trust wikipedia.
Arguing otherwise is frankly anti-intellectual.
Now, if you want you can do so, but doing so simply reinforces the perception that you’re aggressively in denial of reality and impervious to logic.
I’m sorry, but you’re trying to defend the above statement really hurts your credibility.
You come across to any reasonable, impartial observer as someone with an embarrassingly superficial understanding of the conflict who, by his own admission rejects any facts that don’t fit into his preferred narrative.
Ok, you’re damaging your credibility even more.
When you first linked to this you insisted it validated your claim that there was far more media criticism of Israel now than in the 1980s.
You’re now conceding that it says no such thing.
Essentially, you’re admitting you tried to fit “facts” into the narrative you wanted rather than allowing “facts” to determine the narrative.
I’m genuinely shocked that you have to ask such a question since you feel so passionately about the subject and you grew up in the 70s and the 80s.
You don’t remember how virtually every night during the first several years of the Intifada, CNN showed videos of unarmed Palestinians getting shot or beaten by Israeli soldiers?
You don’t remember TIME magazine getting sued by the Israeli Defense Minister?
I’m sorry, but what you’re doing is the equivalent of asking me to prove that water is wet.
Exactly who believes this “consensus” you’re talking about?
Hamas doesn’t. The Israeli government doesn’t. Countless Palestinian intellectuals don’t.
Frankly, I find the idea the idea that a Palestinian State consisting of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be economically more viable than any of South Africa’s Bantustans asinine and I’ve never met any Palestinians on the West Bank who believe that and such hostility is even more pronounced in the Gaza Strip.
One last thing.
I don’t mean to come across as a jerk, but could you please remember to capitalize properly and use proper spelling? Occasional typos are one thing, but it’s quite distracting and annoying to read.
