Yeah, the Zionist immigration brought a lot of capital into the region.
First, that immigration in the last 50 years has a higher cultural/political impact as last few centuries migrations. There’s nobody alive who saw the last centuries of Ottoman Empire, but there still are quite a few people who were there in '48.
But more that the Palestinian man_in_the_street idea that the Israeli invaded their lands, while not valid in the grander scheme of things, is based on a kernel of facts, not thin air, and could certainly convince someone inclined to believe the Israeli aggressive/nefarious based on the checkpoints and so on.
Understand, this is not my viewpoint, I’m just trying to figure out what *they *see, believe and understand, understand their vision of history, their historical narrative, the data available to them and so on - and trying to play their Devil’s advocate in the process
That is precisely my point. See above.
Well, aren’t the Russians as subtle and proportionate in putting down the insurrection as…something that’s as far as subtle and proportionate as can possibly be conceived ? I must admit, I have the barest of knowledge of that situation.
The sad thing is, it’s true. Maybe the US should have invaded both of them to give them a unifying common ennemy. Dammit, where’s Bush when you need him ? 
The Germans really and truly believed that the Jews were the cause of all of their problems, that they were the primary reason that Germany lost WWI and that they were secretly working with the communists to destroy Germany (this isn’t an exhaustive list of everything they believed btw). The Europeans believed that the Jews were evil and that they occasionally used Christian children in their foul rights, drinking the blood of said children during the heights of their celebrations. American’s during colonial times felt that blacks were sub-human and that it was a white persons Christian duty to enslave them…for their own good.
What I’m getting at here is that just because some people believe something doesn’t make it true. The history of that region is fairly well documented. Many of the people there (and here on this message board) simply refuse to actually LOOK at that history, instead choosing to believe a mostly fabricated version that highlights certain things and takes others out of context.
All of which is moot because it really doesn’t have any bearing on the actual question of the OP.
-XT
Kobol: there are numerous problems with your gloss. To begin with, your claim that immigration is an act of aggression is one that holds up neither in precedent nor in international law nor in common sense. When the Irish had the Potato Famine and fled in great droves to the United States, we’d have been out of our minds if we treated that as an act of aggression and reacted as sovereign states tend to do when faced with aggression.
Second, as pointed out, you can’t have “Muslim lands” ,and the people you point to conquered the land just as surely as the Crusaders did, anyway. Further, the analogy between the Arab citizens of the region of Palestine under, say, the Ottomans and the Native Americans is exceedingly poor. It wasn’t a question of them living on land for ever and ever and simply not having deeds to it. It was a situation where it was fully possible to privately own land, and there was a centuries long legal and societal framework set up for private property ownership, but some people simply didn’t own land.
Your analogy with Tibetans is also flawed. It would have to entail Tibetans moving to Texas, and then the sovereign state of the United States dissolving, with no new sovereign to ultimately replace it.
Oh and:
Speaking of which, Hamas’ pablum about respecting all religions also doesn’t apply to Judaism. Which of course Sevastopol cannot admit as that would make his defense of Jew-hating that much harder to pull. And defending Hamas’ goals is important to him.
The fact is that Hamas can not only differentiate between Judaism, Jews, an Israel, they make quite clear that they consider all three to be enemies of Islam.
Which makes their intentions quite clear considered that Sevastopol forgot to cut out the operative sentence that:
So they’re saying it’s theoretically possible for Jews to live under Hamas rule if they weren’t hostile to Islam. But then they specifically say Jews and Judaism as well are hostile to Islam.
It is extraordinary enough that Sev believes that the claim that some group might have genocidal ambitions against a different group, let alone the Jews, is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. Yeah, it just flies in the face of all history. :rolleyes:
As to the line in the sand regarding what is and isn’t a war crime … The Economist puts it thusly:
FWIW.
First, a nitpick : that’s 3 threads you keep spelling my nick with two "o"s. Is there a point to the misspelling, or ?
Did the Irish wish to create an independant state and enforce it ? Did they, outside of the NYPD ? 
Hell, come to that, didn’t the Irish face violence and resentment when they got off the boats (Gangs of New York is my cite :))
Besides, I realize that at heart, it’s equivalent to “durn forunurs stealing our jobs”… but since that sentiment certainly exists in our countries, it would be unfair to blame it in others.
You keep on arguing that - who owned it then ?
In any case, I wasn’t shooting for an exact analogy - I was just asking the question : if that hypothetical happened, don’t you think the US would go up in arms, even though you’re big on the right of all people to self-determination ?
But it doesn’t even have to be the US - if any ethnic group organized massive immigration into any country, with the explicit aim of eventually taking power and denying power to any other ethnic group (cause that’s, at heart, what Israel is, isn’t it ? They’ll never allow any group but Jews to ever be in position to take power - that’d go against the whole mission statement), don’t you think the people of that country, or those sharing their culture, are never going to take issue with that ?
~shrugs~
I’ve read it as “Kobol”, like, the Twelve Tribes of. Ah well. Brainfart.
You’re also backpedaling on your claim of immigration as aggression. The Irish didn’t intend to create their own state, but then again, that wasn’t part of your original formation. Nor, It should be noted, did the Jews who immigrated under the Ottomans think they’d overthrow the Ottomans and even during the Mandate, the British had already explicitly authorized Jewish immigration for the purpose of creating a Jewish home. And yes, the Irish faced discrimination but the US as a sovereign state didn’t respond as if their very presence here was an act of aggression.
I’ve also discussed property rights at length. The Ottoman empire, as the sovereign state, owned Miri and waste land. It’s really not all that much different than ‘government property’ in the United States, except there was a fuck lot more of of it under the Ottomans.
And no, Israel isn’t at heart about taking power and denying power to other people. The only thing that non-Jews are denied the power to do is vote away Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
… Okaaaaay so people don’t live for multiple centuries often. But… yeaaah, before 1948, who was there? Muslimland? Or the Ottoman Empire? And… what does that have to do with anything?
Just because people believe things doesn’t make it true.
So, you’re saying that the US is a Christian Nation? Or that the belief by some christians that it is, counts as reality? What?
… noooooooooo.
Meh. Deal with things as they are now, understand the past as context to the future, but don’t depend on it as a crutch. Like your argument is using. Who cares who owned the land before the British? The Brits took it, right of conquest, gave it to the Jews, suck it down.
If you go back before the Brits, neither the local arab tribes nor the local jewish people owned it. And you can’t make an argument that they did. Not one that isn’t full of lies and half-truths.
Since the U.S. controls it’s territory it has the right to exclude immigrants if it wants to. So the situation is unlike one where the owner of the region allows large group of people to immigrate there.
Don’t forget that the Palestinians now essentially want the same thing. They want to immigrate into Israel, take over power, and deny power to the other ethnic group (maybe even to kill the ethnic group.) If it was not ok for the Jews to do this, why is ok for the Palestinians to want this now?
Even if the Jews were wrong before, it still makes no sense for them to give up their land to people who want to kill all of them. The Jews did not move in with the intention of killing all the Muslims in the region.
Also, the Palestinians now have the same shitty land that they had before 1945. It’s not like the Jews took over more profitable territory from them.
When I say ‘the jews’, I mean as a whole. Many individual arabs and jews owned property. And most of the jews were working together. But, you know, huge goverment owned tracts of land. Like the middle ages, the baron owned the land, people just lived on it.
This smacks of racism, or at the very least, Islamophobia. This was precisely the justification whites used to prevent blacks and other minorities from voting. You can’t, on one hand, claim Israel is a democracy and on the other necessitate laws that would suppress the votes of the minority. It is my opinion that Israel is not a democracy, but, instead, is a Jewish democracy; which, of course, makes it no different than China.
To be frank, as a black man, I cannot help but watch the events unfold in the Middle East with tepid shock and mild curiousity. It seems to me that white people will, and have, come up with beautifully-written rhetoric on why its proper and right to strip those who are darker or different than themselves of the right to participate and coexist in government.
What makes Israeli policies disappointing is that the Jewish diaspora in America played an instrumental role in the Underground Railroad and in the Civil Rights Movement. The Jews in America seem to have realized a basic truism: Love one another. Israel, on the other hand, is about 300 years behind the bar. If Israel doesn’t stop it, they’ll have the equilavent of the March on Washington on their heels and a frantic, future generation that has to come up with ridiculous excuses why their ancestors behaved so barbarically.
I should send Mr. Olmert a copy of Disney’s Pocahontas. I doubt it’ll convey much about the value of human life, regardless of creed or color, but at least the Prime Minister can learn to drop the blood-stained palette and begin painting with the colors of the wind.
<hums>
- Honesty
The situation is not analogous to race relations in the US. Israel is not protecting itself from a race, but from an ideology. It believes that if the Jews become a minority that they will be mistreated, and at worst slaughtered.
The analogy is not whether white and black people can get along, but whether black people can get along with the KKK. The answer will always unequivocally be no, because to be a member of the KKK means you hate black people.
Now you are asking Israel to open it’s doors to be taken over by radical Islam. To territories governed by authorities that have repeatedly expressed their desire to destroy Israel. This is just not a viable option.
Whites said the same thing about blacks when they were slaves, I know, but they were wrong. Do you really believe that hostility toward the Jews will end if the Palestinians take over the government of Israel?
I am guessingh that you are claiming that Jews are “wte” andArabs are “drker.” You should spend a lot more time looking at actual pictuires of the participants of this tragedy: it is pretty hard to distinguish between Arab or Jew or Israeli or Palestinian based only on sking shade–which tends to run through a lot of different shades with each side equally represented on the palette. Your argument is odd, although I suppoose it might be made of straw.
You also appear to have misinterpreted FinnAgain’s other comment. The U.S. has the same rule that the citizens and states cannot de-establish the country. I am not sure who is being subjected to discrimination by that law, here, but it would not be racist either here or in Israel.
This claim is disputed. For example, Israel argues that the Convention’s standards do not require it to prevent Israeli Jews from settling in the Palestinian territories, while other parties, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, disagree.
I found this Zionist site several months ago regarding who owned what land at the end of the Ottoman Empire, and its all very complicated.
Fair enough. It puzzled me, is all - I wondered whether it was a simple mistake, or a deliberate joke WRT the antiquated code language.
That’s true, I rechecked my original statement and you’re right that it isn’t there - but I assure you that’s what was on my mind when I was talking of “massive, organized immigration”. You can accuse me of moving the goalposts if you will, but that was not my intention - it was a communication problem and failure on my part to properly enunciate my thought process, not dishonesty.
Neither did the Palestinians, since they’re not a sovereign state, nor did Palestinian/Israeli resentment & violence start when Hamas seized power in Gaza.
Which…is denying power to other people. Right now, the population levels are about matched (with a slight Jewish advantage) - which in and of itself means the country isn’t a Jewish state per se. And when there are more people inside the country who don’t want a Jewish state than people who do, which is bound to happen soonish considering the big discrepancy in natality rates, the option still won’t be on the table. If the people of a country don’t have the right to modify or abbrogate the rules under which they are governed, whatever the rules are, that’s not a democratic or free country.
And for that matter, we tend to frown on non-separated church & state in general, why make an exception here ?
Good point. But then, that’s part of the problem, isn’t it ? The idea that a third party (the Brits, in essence more alien to the region that either group) took over at the tip of a sword and forced the immigration down their collective throats against their wishes ?
Not saying it is for *either *group. But we can’t accept it from one side and saying the other is abhorrent for it, can we ?
Nope, but objective truth has never had much of an impact on realpolitik, cultural identity and so on. It’s obviously better if the people’s (or each individual’s) truthiness is as close as possible to The Truth, but when it comes down to it, it’s their individual truthiness that motivates their actions, not The Truth (which may or may not exist in the first place, but that’s a whole other kettle of philosofish).
So we condone and endorse right of conquest now ? Neverminding the obvious Wehrmacht thing (it’s too early for Godwin) : Iraq belongs to the US, they took it, if they wanna keep it, suck it down ? For that matter, Kuweit was rightfully Saddam’s, he took it, suck it down ? Colonialism was just fine and dandy ? Might makes right ?
Pretty sure we’re trying to move past that.
Which is why we don’t give power to either group unilateraly - yet don’t deny the KKK right to vote. And rightfully sanction KKK actions as individual criminal ones rather than branding the whole of the whites criminals based on the actions of the KKK, or allowing the black community to attack the KKK in retaliation.
And FWIW, I don’t think you can equate Islam or Palestinians with the KKK either. The armed core of Hamas ? Sure. But every Palestinian isn’t a Hamas operative or a rabid Muslim fundie. Which (miracle !) stirs us back towards the OP
The thing is that the Jews did not move in with the intention to steal the land. Once violence broke out they had to separate themselves from the Muslims.
Don’t forget that at that time these people were running away from persecution in Europe. It’s not like they could have left Israel and went some place more safe. They had no where else to go. The situation is a little different from what the Palestinians are doing now.
I know we want to believe that democracy will always lead to good things, but history tells us it doesn’t (e.g. the Nazis.)
We don’t deny the KKK the right to vote because we know they can’t hurt us. But what if you lived in a county where the KKK made up the majority of the population and you were in the minority black population. Lets say that up until this point the KKK could not vote. Would you let them vote? My guess is no because you know the results will get you killed.
I’m not equating all of Palestine with the KKK. However, the Palestinians have not been very good at choosing or controlling their leaders. Why should I expect things to be different if the Jews allow them to vote? The sad reality is that radical fundamentalist have a death grip on that region. We can easily predict that the results won’t be good if Israel allows them to vote.
What I have realized is that as a die hard liberal, I have been arguing against quite a few liberal ideals in this thread. Liberty does have it’s limits. Sometimes you just have to accept that certain people won’t act responsibly. Particularly when they announce such intentions for the whole world to hear.
FinnAgain I don’t really have anything to add, but there are very few people with whom I agree so completely on this issue with.
Right of conquest is how things worked up till WWII. Go figure. We’ve moved away from it, but… yeah, end of WWII, Brits owned it.
As far as, “Oh, subjectively, realpolitik”? Bullshit. You’re telling me that you live in a faith-based reality? Like George W. Bush?