I’m not playing the game of “name the ethnicity so that we may all ascertain that you’re racist” or whatever seems to be passing for fun and games in this thread. I’m a WASP–an American WASP. What do you want to be today? You can self identify if you like, or just play along at home.
The Palestinians have lived in that area for centuries, as have some of Jewish extraction (and even some Jewish Palestinians–OMG!). I am against them (Ps) being treated like rabble; I am against the current Israeli policy of crying victim all the while their policies are increasing the chances of more violence and terror. I can’t stand that the US gives Israel a free pass for all manner of hostilities and provocations, but if the US says as much as one positive thing about the Palestinians, suddenly we (our Gment) are anti-Semitic. The same goes for individuals. I don’t think of Jewish people one way or another. By that I mean I don’t give them a thought as an entity–they’re just people, some nice, some not so nice etc in my daily world. But if I complain about something someone Jewish did, that doesn’t make me anti-Semitic, unless I use his religion to base my dislike or complaint on. Israeli is not the same as Jewish.
If Israel had the most secular government in the world, but still held to the policies, laws and actions it does now–I’d still be critical of it and “anti” it. If the settlements would stop and were pared back, if laws were passed that allowed more equity for the Ps, if racial profiling didn’t occur etc in Israel, I would wish it (the country) well. I’m not anti-Islamic, either, and yet I find the Gment of Saudi Arabia to be horrible as well. Go figure. It’s as if there are some of us who disapprove of the government while not being bigoted against the people of those countries. Shocking.
What I don’t understand is why one is conflated with the other. It happens time and time again, here and in RL. It’s retarded.
If you want peace, work for justice. It really is that simple.
I highly doubt the Israeli Gment wants peace with the Palestinians. Nothing in their negotiations or behavior in the past 15 years or so has reflected that, IMO. Obviously, this is an opinion and YMMV.
Helen Thomas has a point (except for some problematic facts, which I’ll get to). This isn’t anti-Semitism.
Judaism is a religion, not a nationality, & it has too many adherents for them all to live in Israel’s territory. The best answer Israel has given us for the displaced inhabitants of Palestine is giant refugee cities–wait, aren’t those ghettoes? Why, yes, Hinde, they are. If in fact the entire Israeli Jewish population were from Central Europe, I’d be agreeing with her.
The problem is in how many Jews from other parts of the world really have little other place to go.
The pity is that Israel is geopolitically doomed. One day the USA will tire of sending support to them as we did tire of S. Vietnam, & they will be swept into the sea.
Maybe Israel would be better off taking her advice.
By the way, I think Israeli Jews (barring recent immigrants) are a specific ethnicity too. I agree with Malthus on that. I just don’t think that Helen Thomas’ remarks were made because of their ethnicity, but because of old resentments over the formation of Israel in the first place.
No games, a simple question. No hidden “racist” card here.
I’m not sure that many people though of themselves as Palestinian" in the 17th century, for instance. The (non-racially-Jew) inhabitants of Israel/Palestine come from a great variety of ethnic groups. Many a national identity appears with independence movements.
Native Peruvians had no sense of unity until after the spanish conquest, hell, the conquest was only possible with the very willing help of Native Peruvians. Even the concept of “Native Peruvian” is more of a European idea.
ow the hell is a population from Europe “coming home” to a place their families had not been from in hundreds or a thousand years?
It would be like ME deciding that I want my ancestral home in the British Isles and going and turfing out the people who had been living there in the 300 or so years since my family moved to the Mass Bay colony [or my Dutch ancestor left to go to New Amsterdam]
So for shits and grins pretend that WW3 just occurred, and it was decided that Haitians needed a new country, and through some miracle it was decided that Israel would now be marginalized, and the remaining Haitian population was moved in exactly the same way that the palistinians were turfed out and your parents and grandparents moved in.
So … what would you do.
And don’t give me any bullshit about it cant happen. I am quite certain that there were a shitload of palistinians living happily in their home country that thought the same thing.
And if Palestine is not completely destroyed it is the goal of Likud to do just that. I do disconnect from your reality, I just don’t see it the way that you do. To you how people slip into war is not important “in every practical sense of moving forward”, yet that is the opposite of why most people study history, in order to avoid repeating its mistakes. You want to hide the truth and “move forward” to where? Well, you say where, for the Palestinians, those hundreds of thousands of oppressed people to accept what they have, which is oppression. You have disconnected yourself from those people, ignored the wrongs against them and want them to accept it. We are on the opposite side of this, you accept the oppression and embrace it. That is your reality.
My view of reality is that Israel and the United States is responsible for taking the land of the Palestinians away from them, killing them, cutting them off and denigrating what is happening to them. You can accept all of that. It is not an injustice to be righted as far as you are concerned. In your mind it is something these people have brought on themselves by being of the losing ethnicity.
Both sides here have historic and religious ties to this piece of real estate. Both have blood on their hands for the death of their neighbours. Neither can be trusted, or relied upon. We have no reasonable way of knowing who is telling the truth in any given instance. They are both equally guilty of two faced-ness and duplicity. They have both played the bully. The world is weary of listening to either side scream ‘they started it’ like school yard children.
If they want to sacrifice yet another generation to hatred and loathing, let them. There is, quite evidently, little anyone can do about it.
If they want peace, let them create peace, it doesn’t just rain down from the sky, and nothing we can do is going to make it rain.
I don’t disagree with any of that. There is an evolving Iraqi national identity ongoing now. I am not an anthropologist or a sociologist, so I don’t attempt to make any kind of designation, but there is this: we are all people; racial and ethnic identities are arbitrary social constructs, and rather than concentrate our ire on thoughtless and perceived racist remarks by an old woman, perhaps our time would be better spent treating all parties in the ME clusterfuck as people, with essential human rights (such as the right to clean water, humane treatment, trial by jury and the rule of law etc). To want parity and justice for the Palestinians does not make one an anti-Semite.
In a sense (and this is an inflammatory remark), the Israeli policy seems to be “do as we were done by”, which is hardly a mature, rational approach to peace. This is not to say that the Palestinians are “right” and the Israelis are “wrong” (by them I mean their policies). But I think it’s safe to say that there will be no ME peace until Israeli stops with its paranoia and constant provocation. I’m no fan of Hamas, but is the government Israel and the world has to deal with. How much better would it be to engage them, debate with them, build trust and try to sway them via friendship instead of sanctions and refusing cement and wheelchairs and forcing an entire supply system via tunnel? Per Israel, they won’t deal with terror. But they are being disingenuous in this because they deal with terror every day, due to their current policies.
Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Therefore, IMO, the policies of Israel is insane.
ETA: you got it, elbows.
It’s been pointed out to you several times that this story isn’t accurate. It’s fictional. It’s bullshit. It’s a fantasy.
Nobody was “moved in”. Britain was, in point of fact, arresting and imprisoning Jews who attempted to move to the area. There was no plan to make anybody “move out” either, Plan D was only implemented after the Arab states initiated a war of genocide.
I’ve pointed this out to you several times, but for some reason you prefer the story you have created.
The Brits didn’t want the Jews to move there because they had strategic interests in keeping (edit to: their Arab allies happy during WW2). However, (after the war) the US told them to knock it off, and basically made the Brits cough up Palestine to the UN.
The UN then, without question, allowed the Israelis to move in.
No. Not only were the Jews not “moved in” to the area, Britain actively tried to keep them out not only after the UN partition vote, but for about a year after the establishment of the state of Israel itself. And even when Jews were allowed in, they weren’t “moved” in. And even when they were allowed in, they were allowed to buy land from its owners and live on it, not to take land from Arabs and just decide it was theirs. Major conflicts over land that wasn’t bought began as a result of the war, not immigration and not the UN partition vote. Especially since UNGAR 181 wasn’t binding, wasn’t agreed to by both parties, wasn’t implemented, was never going to be enforced and didn’t inform the final geography of any of the relevant states in the area.
And so on. The UN did nothing. A UN General Assembly tomorrow that declared the miraculous, cancer-fighting powers of jarlsberg cheese would have no less of an effect on reality than UNGAR 181.
Britain abstained on UNGAR 181, and they continued to imprison Jews trying to enter the area. They held, in point of fact, 10,000+ Jews as prisoners until roughly a year after Israel was already a recognized, sovereign state.
You’ve also shifted the goalposts from “moved them in” to “allowed them to move in”. There’s a marked difference, and even then you’re still wrong on the facts in any case, as the British didn’t start letting Jews in after 181 anyways.And even if they had, that doesn’t address the false-to-facts claim that somehow a bunch of Jews were “moved in” and that "palistinians were turfed out ".
You are aware of the fact that there were nearly a million Jews in the Mandate *prior to the outbreak of WW2? * Tel Aviv, the region’s largest city at the time, had been founded by Jews in 1909, when the Ottoman Empire still ruled the land.
Jews had been moving to the area, legally, independently, at their own expense, for half a century before the establishment of the UN. The UN did nothing except make a lame attempt to divide the country between the two groups of people already living there.
Which of course explains away the treatment of the Palestinians and excuses any and all barbarisms the Israelis commit against them. We don’t have to learn to get along with these people or share resources or governance! We bought (some) of the land from them, free and clear! And besides we’ve been here for a long time as well and also there’s this holy book that says we get to live here. So shove off and shut up!
:rolleyes:
