But in the game of buzzword bingo, Dio has nearly won the game by default there. Well, if we give him the free square in the middle, anyway…
-XT
You don’t really have any rebuttals, though do you? Israel apologists never do. Israel good, Palestinians bad.
And strawmen still full of straw. News at 11…
-XT
I rest my case. All you’ve basically done is try to argue that might makes right. How deep.
And all you’ve basically done is create men of straw (to spell it out for you, I never said anything remotely like ‘Israel good, Palestinians bad’…that’s YOUR strawman of my position), attempt to affix labels (such as ‘Israel apologist’), and silly little unsupported assertions out of your ass such as ‘practice apartheid, ethnic cleansing and aggressive expansion with the full blessing and economic assistance of the west’. What is there to debate in any of this horseshit? Your baseless assertions and labels? What’s would be the point? I could point out that there are plenty of ethnic Palestinian and Arabic (as well as other ethnic groups) citizens of Israel, and that their rights are essentially the same as every other citizen of Israel (with the exception that they can’t serve in the military), and that the fact that there ARE ethnic Palestinian and Arabic citizens of Israel pretty much shoots down your silly assertion of ‘ethnic cleansing’, and that you are simply using buzzwords for effect (though I grant that YOU probably believe this bullshit), but what would be the point? Anyone with any actual knowledge of the issues and history already knows this…and those who don’t and want to believe this crap are going to, regardless of the evidence or the number of times they are beating over the head with reality.
-XT
I know they don’t have to do their military service, but is it true that they can’t? But this said, while they legally have similar rights as Jewish Israeli citizens, I understand that there is a certain amount of discrimination against Israeli Arabs. I suppose it’s not much worse than the discrimination other minority groups face in other Western countries, but if someone knows more about Israeli Arabs than I do, I’d be willing to hear about them.
But this said, Palestinians in the occupied territories are not Israeli citizens, probably won’t ever be, and Israel must deal with them fairly. How it treats its Arab citizens is irrelevant to the question.
Who granted those rights?
Look man, this is getting ridiculous.
Ethnic Cleansing?
Ethnic cleansing has been practised through out the middle east. Yes, they cleaned out the Jews just about every where in the middle east. Take Hebron 1928 for example.
Oh wait.
Except Israel. They accept Jews there.
Not in the territory though. That is still pure Arab except for those nasty Jews in the settlements.
This is hilarious. First of all it sidesteps that fact that it DENIES citizenship to millions of people based on nothing but race, then you eadmit that even the few Israeli Arabs it DOES deign to grant citizenship too aren’t REALLY treated equally…
You can’t possibly deny that Israel routinely relocates people based on race. That is ethnic cleansing by definition. It segregates people, ghettoizes them and denies them equal rights based on race. That is apartheid by definition. It uses military force to expand outside its borders. That is aggressive expansion. No other country in the world gets away with the garbage that Israel gets away with. No other country in the world receives full throated support for institutionalized racism, racial entitlement and racial discrimination the way Israel does.
The US, basically. We’re the bully that protects them. They wouldn’t have lasted a week without us.
Israel is the only country that receives praise and my money for it.
It is not their Jewishness that is nasty. Trying to insinuate antisemitism is cheap and desperate.
What? They quite often force out Palestinians and move into the homes they’ve stolen. They don’t need to carry it off because they are staying, but it’s still looting.
Not at all. Ethics are those things that we can all agree that we’d prefer not to happen to us and the things we’d all like to benefit from. And no, we can’t just “agree to disagree” about ethics because unethical people are the enemy of everyone else.
And since people keep bringing up variants on “might makes right”, that isn’t an ethical standard, it’s an excuse. It fails as an ethical standard if for no other reason than the people who claim to support that principle appear to universally be either lying or self deluded; their so called ethical standard vanishes the moment their side loses. It’s not even a real standard, much less ethical. People supporting the nasty behavior of one side or the other in a conflict won’t admit that of course, but their support for the validity of ruthlessness only lasts as long as their side is the one dishing it out.
I doubt the people excusing the behavior of Israel with that sort of argument are willing to do the same for the Palestinians; if “people throughout history have done it” or “the more powerful always run roughshod over the weaker” are valid ethical excuses for the Israelis grabbing Palestinian land and homes, then a successful extermination of the Jewish population would also be ethical, because of course genocide is also common throughout history.
Yep. On board with Dio here.
Oh, as far as who made the settlements illegal? the U.N., you know, the same folks who resolved it was kosher for us to invade Iraq in 1992.
Israel never gets any military action directed against it because the US is a permanent member of the security council. So it really can violate international law with impunity. The general assembly doesn’t have the power to send troops to stop Israel from violating all the UN resolutions it violates.
Oh, and as I’ve noted on this board before-what happens is this: the IDF comes and bulldozes a Palestinian’s property-or a lot of Palestinians’s property, claiming the Palestinians in question are either a security threat or built unpermitted houses(Palestinians are NEVER issued permits to build a house, so this is always true). They then keep the Palestinians off that property for three years by force. After three years, according to Persian law-still in force in Israel, the land is “unoccupied.” So the settlers take over “unoccupied” land.
It is my fondest wish to see a free, prosperous Palestine, and a secure Israel…with a heavily miltarized strip between, permanently occupied by international forces.
But if we made a permanent, fortified neutral zone, with violators of said neutral zone being responded to with lethal force impartially, why then the settlers couldn’t take any more territory. Oops.
I leave here a link to this article for you consideration: http://www.mediamonitors.net/michaelsladah&suleimaniajlouni1.html
(bolding mine)
Why? They’re a hostile foreign nation under military occupation. Sure, Israel shouldn’t commit genocide or anything like that, but why does it have an obligation to treat Palestinians as well as it treats his own people. If you’re making claims, as has been made by some people in this thread, that Israel is a racist state, then the way it treats its Arab citizens becomes enormously relevant, because then you’re looking at the way it treats Israeli citizens of one group to the way it treats Israeli citizens of another group, vs, the way it treats Israeli citizens as compared to foreigners.
You should always deal with people fairly, unless you are actively trying to do them harm. And if Israel is actively trying to do the Palestinians harm (and it is) that is a mark against any claims on its part towards being civilized. The Palestinians are after all a population, not an army.
Not to mention that constant abuse from the Israeli side will make peace impossible for as long as it continues. Do you think the Israelis should be actively trying to maintain Palestinian hostility permanently?
I think that the Israelis and Palestinians should negotiate a treaty that sets up an independent Palestinian state (or maybe two, one in Gaza and one in the West Bank) with clearly defined borders, and that once that happens, the Israelis should stay on their side of the border and the Palestinians stay on their side, and there you go.
But until that happens, though, the place is under occupation, and the population is hostile. This raises security issues, and since Israel’s first obligation is to the safety and well being of its citizens, it should act in a way that protects Israeli safety first. If some of these methods, like curfews, roadblocks, limiting Palestinian entrance into Israel, limit Palestinian freedoms and are “unfair” to Palestinians, that’s unfortunate, but it would be more unfortunate if Israel abrogated its responsibilities to its own citizens.
You are presuming that such treatment isn’t making the hostility and thus the danger much worse. When you manufacture a large population of people with nothing to lose and reasons to blame it on you, you’ll tend to see quite a lot of hatred and violence aimed at you. They have no reason not to be violent, after all.
Well, actually, the Palestinians could gain quite a bit if they stopped electing Hamas. Sure, life would continue to suck for a while, but at least there’d be the promise of some feasible improvement down the road (as opposed to the elimination of the Zionist entity, or some other pie-in-the-sky notion).
Why would they? Israel has established that force is the only language it understands.
On reflection, is there anything resembling an independent news agency operating in the territories?
Before there ever was a modern Israel with a "manufactured population " There was this Arab riot against Jews in the West Bank called the Hebron massacre.
Subsequent Palistinian rioting in the State of Israel have had far less horrible consequences.
Are you saying that Israel should treat Palestinians unfairly? Note that I didn’t define what “fairly” means. They shouldn’t treat them like Israeli citizens, because they aren’t Israeli citizens. But they are a civilian population under occupation, not criminals or a hostile army. I understand that the purpose of road blocks etc. is to ensure Israel’s security (which is a worthy goal), but it is Israel’s responsibility to make sure that it doesn’t prevent Palestinians from living their lives. And even if they can do something, doesn’t mean they should, if they eventually want to have peace.
And I’m not claiming that Israel is a “racist state”. There certainly is racism in Israel, just like there is racism everywhere, but it’s not something that’s actively encouraged by the government.