Changing attitudes towards Israel isn’t going to bring about lasting peace. You have to change the attitudes of Hizbollah and Hamas and Iran and ISIS, and the UN can’t do that, and ending settlements isn’t going to do it either.
People are sick of the situation in the Middle East. The terrorists don’t care and aren’t going to change, and therefore the UN has no influence with them. So everybody concentrates on making Israel change, even though it won’t help. But at least they are doing something.
After a quick skim through Wikipedia: previous UN Security Council resolutions regarding Israeli settlements that the US didn’t veto: 446, 452, and 465. The US voted for 452 and abstained for 446 and 465.
Lots more criticism of Israel in that list; e.g., the US abstained on resolution 1435 against Israel’s operations in Ramallah.
A more comprehensive but still partial list here. It’s true that both the UNSC and UNGA seem to pay an undue amount of attention to Israel-Palestinian affairs, but it’s hardly consistently one-sided, and neither is the US position consistently one-sided. The US has abstained many times and sometimes voted with the UN against Israel, and other times voted with the UN supporting Israel. Both sides in this conflict are frequently nuts and deserving of being called out on it. The OP, as already said several times here, is completely without merit.
Good point; I didn’t mean to indicate that the list was entirely critical of Israel, just that it was chock full of Israel criticism and none of it vetoed by the US.
…and somehow I missed your earlier post. Sorry about that.
Yes, he won a plurality. That’s the point. If Israelis wanted to end the settlements, and work for peace in a two-state structure, they could vote that way. But they haven’t. I don’t understand why that’s an issue for you.
What Bibi (and it’s charming that you use an affectionate nickname for him) wants is hardly the root of the problem. He only reflects what a “plurality” of Israelis want, and wanted when they elected Sharon, too.
No, subjugation is sufficient, like the Boers and kaffirs.
Know what? So do many Palestinians. It isn’t really available to them though, is it?
You don’t start a negotiation by declaring anything significant to be non-negotiable. That is not good faith.
You also do not demonstrate good faith, a necessary precursor to genuine peace negotiation, by declaring asymmetric rights. If Jews have a right to settle in Palestine, based on claims from a book a couple of thousand years old at that, then why don’t Palestinians have a right to settle in Israel, based on actions taken within living memory?
Still looking for a justification for the settlements that has a basis in any kind of morality, not just special pleading and fuck-everyone-else-ism.
But in the past, they did vote that way. For Rabin. For Barak. What ended up happening? Terrorist attacks and the 2000 Intifada. So they turned to Sharon and Netanyahu instead.
As for my “issue”, you said “most Israelis voted for Netanyahu.” That’s not true, most did not, although due to their system, he ended up as PM.
You said that Netanyahu, and by extension, most Israelis, want policies that lead to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank. You asked if there’s any alternate conclusion for what said policies were hoped to lead to. My alternate conclusion is what remains of my post.
The “kaffirs” were fellow citizens whose rights were being abridged. The Palestinians are foreigners who came under Israeli control from a hostile entity.
Why not? Is the Israeli government not capable of controlling the Israeli army? Has the Israeli government not prosecuted lone-wolf Israeli citizens who attack Palestinians?
Who declared them non-negotiable? You asked what conclusion can be reached about what most Israelis/Netanyahu want based on the policies they’ve pursued. That’s what I see as what they want and what their policies are hoped to lead to.
When you lose a war, you lose land. The winners are the ones with the stronger bargaining position. That asymmetry is built in to war by definition. The current generation of Palestinians may have gotten screwed by their ancestors whose armies attacked the nascent Israeli state in 1948 and then later again in 1967, but that can be said of the descendants of the losers of any war. Why should the Palestinians be special?
And BTW, none of the above was meant to justify settlements. They are specific points in response to specific posts. Period.
[QUOTE=wolfpup;19876548 ]
A vote either way would have made it much more difficult for the US to have any future role as a fair-minded arbitrator in two-state negotiations.
[/QUOTE]
…um actually, nobody (outside the USA) thinks that the US has any present role as a fair-minded arbitrator. The US is on the Israeli side. And I only put (outside the USA) because of your post: until you posted that, I didn’t realise that anyone /inside/ the USA thought that the US had any role as a fair-minded arbitrator.
The US tries to be a fair-minded guarantor, a fair minded ally.
The long-standing US policy of abstaining on votes where Israel is making a dick of themselves is not, of course, anything new with Obama, so he’s not the only president to have been condemned for it.
Obama’s actions of late are unsurprising. He’s been wanting to stick it to Israel for a long time. I think the realization that he wasn’t the Great Peacemaker during his Presidency and that the Middle East is a complicated place really upset him. Simplistically he blamed Netanyahu when of course the truth is that both sides are equally at fault.
Fortunately his petty actions can’t do too much damage, everyone knows he’s a lame-duck President.
As usual, any problem is the other guys’ fault, never your own. That does get awfully tiring.
All right, fine - more Israelis voted for Netanyahu and his policies than for any other. Happy now?
I thank you for your concession.
The topic here is settlements. Is Palestine a foreign land when you want it to be, part of Yeretz Israel when you want that? It does seem that way.
Is the Israeli government interested in following normal standards of international law, or is it sponsoring colonization of occupied foreign land?
Cherry-picking along with special pleading now.
You did, in the post I was responding to. I trust you don’t need a quote.
You do know you are justifying anything the Palestinians do to win the next one, don’t you?
Why should the Israelis be special?
IOW, just more special pleading and fuck-everyone-else-ism, as already described. Is it really hard to understand how the rest of the world is out of patience?
Well, at least one person inside the US must believe the US can have a valuable role as a fair-minded arbitrator, namely Jimmy Carter, the architect of the two framework agreements collectively known as the Camp David Accords signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. And outside the US at least the Nobel Committee must believe it, too, because Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, and for that and other achievements in international diplomacy, Carter himself received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
No one is denying that the US is an ally of Israel, but if the US was unconditionally and consistently “on the Israeli side”, there wouldn’t be all those abstentions, let alone the dozen or so times that the US actually voted to condemn Israel’s actions.
That old simpleton Obama. Always blaming Netanyahu for Netanyahu trying to interfere in U.S. politics when Netanyahu didn’t get his way. The Palestinians really do share equal blame for these incidents.
As one of the five permanent members, a vote against by the US is a veto.
So he allowed a meaningless resolution to pass. Boy, he sure showed them. Meanwhile, Netanyahu has actively and openly undermined him at every turn and campaigned for his opponents. I can’t imagine why Obama might have thought it was pointless to engage with him.
Kerry had a great line in his speech yesterday. “**If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both **. . ."
By that he means incorporating the West Bank into the state of Israel would require either giving Palestinian residents Israeli citizenship or setting up an apartheid system in order to have a Jewish state.
At the point where the current unofficial apartheid system becomes the state policy of Israel, the USA can no longer claim to be supporting “the only democracy in the Middle East”.
Trump meddling in this is far outside the tradition of American transitions. Clinton, Bush and Obama all refused to meddle in foreign affairs as president elects. Trump, asshole that he is, couldn’t resist.
Vote Republican and prove that government is stupid, ineffective, corrupt and wasteful.
Which I have seen partially quoted by outraged right-wing Jews: “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both.”
I the vast majority are just forwarding on this propaganda they see in some other source. But really, what kind of person originates this kind of shit? Is it partisanship? Malice? Something else?
I think you’re quite wrong there. Trump has a lot of respect for Israel and cares very much about its future. I firmly expect him to be the only President to keep to his word and recognize Jerusalem as the ancient and present capital of the Israeli people.
This sounds garbled, as though you were trying to say that all other Presidents have promised to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital but not followed through. In fact, US administrations have generally been against making Jerusalem the Israeli capital.
I can well believe that Trump will be unprecedentedly biased and foolish enough to finally throw a match in that powder keg, though. Although “caring about Israel’s future” is not exactly how I would describe such reckless hawkery.
This sounds garbled, as though you were trying to say that all other Presidents have promised to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital but not followed through. In fact, US administrations have generally been against making Jerusalem the Israeli capital.