Nooooope. As an American taxpayer and voter, I don’t want us anywhere near this. I’m sorry- this is a mess decades in the making and there’s just too little genuine desire on either side to clean it up. It would be like Vietnam and Iraq had a baby, that grew up to be a terrorist.
I’m not a “write your congressman” type, but I’d become one right quick
And I suspect I’m in the overwhelming majority.
I’m keeping my commentary on this thread to a minimum, because it’s so heated. I’m also in Covid quarantine and feeling relatively OK, so going a bit nuts with boredom.
Anyway, this seems significant, but I’m honestly not sure how, and thought I would share. Best I can tell, this would increase Israel’s responsibility for the population when things settle down?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/world/philadelphi-corridor-israel-gaza-netanyahu/index.html
As one of each of those, I — do? Will this be on the ballot?
So you disagree. Fine. But I’m not sure what your point is. I think the “write your congressman” part made it clear how I saw the mechanism working.
ETA: Just in case I wasn’t clear, I meant I want no part of the US being on the ground in this mess. Providing humanitarian aid, brokering talks, etc. is all fine. I realized that I didn’t include the previous sentence from @Banquet_Bear that provides more context
Maybe I’ll write mine —but, AFAICT, he’s already declared pretty decisively for Israel, and I already figured on voting for him again.
I just want to be clear.
You would support US troops being in Gaza, either solo or as part of a multi-national force?
I’m not aware that Israel has requested US troops, either solo or as part of a multi-national force. I likewise see no reason to support such a request.
I was responding to:
So what, exactly, are we arguing about?
You wrote that: “As an American taxpayer and voter, I don’t want us anywhere near this.” As an American taxpayer and voter, I’m in favor of us providing support — though not, uh, troops — to Israel.
Are there people protesting outside the White House now?
They did it because he criticized the military action - you can say they’re not connected, but I would not believe you at all.
Did I? I wasn’t aware that I had.
Yes, the Apartheid government was great at making, and ruling by, laws too…
I did not say he wasn’t fired or harrassed because of his criticism of the military. I am saying, he was fired by his school board, and harassed by the metropolitan police of his city. And then the court system shut both of those things down, because even if righties with their panties in a bunch very much wish it did, that’s not how Israel works.
Which is exactly why Netanyahu and his enablers have had such a target on our judicial system. So they can turn Israel into the thing you keep accusing it of being.
The thing is, no matter how loud they are, they’ve failed.
Let me rephrase this bit. They have failed so far, but they haven’t stopped trying, and they won’t stop. And they are every bit as much of an existential threat to the country as any group of Islamic terrorists is. The phrase above makes it sound like we’ve won, and that’s not the point - we have to keep fighting for the soul of our nation, and I’m under no illusion that this is a quick or easy fight.
And I am saying: those agents of civil society - and hence the overall trend of Israeli civil society - are clearly more on board with the hardline tack the military is taking than you seem to think or are telling us they are.
Keeping him in prison/unemployed wasn’t the point of the exercise, as he himself knows and said.
Showing others that speaking up will get them harassed, was.
I can see a literally shattered country, piles of innocent dead and hundreds of thousands of displaced people that says different.
You keep saying Israel isn’t the thing, while we can watch it literally being the thing, live on TV.
OK, so by your logic I can find the most progressive thing a San Francisco school board has pushed through and claim that this is the policy of the US federal government? And then I can find a school board in Bumfuck Nowhere, Kansas that makes an extremely reactionary and do the same thing, thus conclusively proving that the US federal government has schizophrenia?
Right, and the court’s reponse also sends a message, to the school and the police department and to all the other public employers and police departments in the country. A message that may need a repeating, but also a message that bears the weight of the law.
Funny, I feel exactly the same way when people make accusations of genocide.
No. My logic is that while the government is doing a thing, if civil society’s actions are aligning with that thing, then that is very strong evidence that the mood of civil society is agreeing with, and supportive of, those government’s actions.
That’s what’s missing from your terrible analogy - the agreement in slant between the civil and the government actions.
After the fact. Too little, too late.
Oh, I’m sure it won’t. I mean, Israel is such a country of law and order, after all… I’m sure this will never happen again. Not even to any of the Arab-Israelis it apparently happens to more frequently.
Something specific you want to say, there, rather than coy hints? In another forum, perhaps?
I’ve been quite specific here as to what I think the disconnect is between what you’re saying Israeli society as a whole thinks, versus what its actual actions are showing me it thinks. Feel free to reciprocate that specificity, wherever is appropriate.
The government is at war. The civil society for the most part supports this. None of that is surprising.
The fact that a school board has some right wing school board members who want to fire this guy is mot evidence that the people running the IDF are right wing fanatics, any more than the existence of the San Francisco school board does not mean that the US military is progressive.
I’m genuinely not sure what you mean. The specific thing that I want to say is that I disagree with allegations that Israel is committing genocide. (I think Germany’s response to South Africa’s allegations has been on point). I don’t know what you allude to that would need to be taken to another thread.
Did I ever say that Israeli society isn’t overwhelmingly supportive of this war? Or that there are no anti-Arab sentiments in Israel?
I have said that there is very little support for annexing Gaza or remaining there permenantly, and I stand by that. That’s not out of some deep respect for Gazan culture on the part of the Israeli public, it’s based on the fact that the portion of the population that isn’t blinded by religion doesn’t want to step in an obvious fucking bear trap.
I’ve said that the Israeli public isn’t going to support deporting Gazans en masse, and again, I stand by that.
I don’t see how this story is at all relevant to that.
If I may, I think from where you are standing the resolution is a bit lower. Which is totally fair, you are further away, and my picture of South Africa is like 8bit.
But you seem to be under the impression that I am talking about how the Israeli public feels about Gaza/Palestinians in general, and that this is a black to white continuum where I am trying to present evidence that Israelis are over here on the “positive towards Palestinians” side when your stories keep pushing the dial over to “hate Palestinians”.
But that’s not the point I am trying to make. We could be here all day discussing the complex relationships that different segments of the Israeli population have with different aspects of the Arab world. That’s not what any of my posts have been about, though.
You can hate Arabs and be a raging racist and a devout believer in the idea that God promised Abraham the entire bit of land and yet strongly oppose involvement in Gaza due to practical concerns. Arguably, that was exactly Ariel Sharon’s stance when he withdrew from Gaza.
I respectfully ask that you take a look at what I am posting rather than what you assume I’ve been posting. I have not been making the claims that you are confidently disproving here.
Well, I said:
and in direct response, you said:
So the logical inference here is that you feel when people make accusations of genocide, there’s a thing they say they aren’t, that you are seeing them literally being. I mean, that’s what I read “feel exactly the same way” to mean. But if you want to offer an alternative explanation for how that then relates to what I said, feel free.
No, but you keep saying that the Israeli people overall aren’t actually supportive of hardliner thinking. Suppressing civil dissent strikes me as hardliner thinking.
Not a thing I’ve been discussing, so irrelevant here. I’m discussing arresting people for just not being supportive of the war, or objecting to how Palestinian civilians are being killed.
I’m as far from Israel as you are, from what you’ve said.
No. I’m talking about what you’ve said about lack of general support for hardliners, like the settlers and the ministers making genocidal statements and the like. Petah Tikva isn’t some hardcore settler outpost, Baruchin wasn’t some hardcore activist prior to this.
Ordinary teacher, normal town. This reaction.
I’m not sure I follow that. Actually, I am sure I don’t, I lost you partway 
My point was that when you look at the news and say you see evidence of genocide, I feel pretty gobsmacked, because I am looking at the same news and I see nothing of the kind.
Well, that’s not precisely what happened.
The specific posts he got fired for basically said, specifically regarding the rapes on Oct 7, that any action taken as part of a resistance movement is legitimate, and that anyways there have been cases of IDF troops committing rapes so again, it is justified.
In response, members of the school board told the police that he had been posting stuff that was supporting Hamas’ activities, and that’s what he was arrested and fired for.
Now, you may disagree that his posts go so far as to materially support Hamas. I’d agree. So did the court. And per the Hebrew Haaretz article I linked above, the court is anrgy at the school for making allegations it could not support (because the posts that he did make do not support the allegations the school made).
Israel is full of progressive people making very angry social media posts about the government and about the IDF. You don’t lose your job simply for opposing the war or for objecting to Palestinians being killed.
Now, I am not saying that what he did rises to the level of more than that. The court agrees with that, too. But if the people who came after him had framed it as “we are upset that you are criticizing the IDF” they’d have gotten nowhere. They had to trump up the allegations to get him in trouble, and then the system worked by confirming that he should not be punished. And legal proceedings are ongoing, but the court should also punish the school and police department to rebuke their actions.
Yes, but I speak with people who are there on a daily basis, watch multiple local news sources, etc.
No, but it’s also no Tel Avivian bastion of progressivism.
That’s not quite true either. He was fired in 2020 for posts that encouraged people to refuse to serve in the IDF. Again, the fact that he went beyond simple criticism (in this case by calling for action) is what got him in trouble; and again, the courts disagreed that this rose to an actionable level.
So I’m sure his principal was waiting for any excuse to get rid of him. They probably thought the war and the provocative nature of his posts (mentioning rape) would suffice to excuse the firing; they were wrong.
I mean, you can look at the polls and see what support for the representatives of hardliner settlers who make genocidal statements is.