Yup, but as E-Sabbath noted, before '45, both groups got along relatively well - I’m sure there were some tensions, there always are between neighbours, esp. when they have cultural differences. But clearly, neither group was gung-ho about wiping the other off the map either.
Aren’t you conflating two issues ? It’s true that the Jewish population already living in the region wouldn’t have left, nor am I arguing that they should have, nor do the Palestinians themselves insist on that AFAIK.
And it’s also true that a good part of the Zionist immigration (though not all of it) were fleeing persecutions elsewhere (and not just in Europe) - but it’s not like that geographical region was inherently safer for them, or there was no other place to flee *to *where Jews weren’t discriminated against. AFAIK the US was perfectly safe, for example.
Quite sure Nazi Germany was a dictatorship ;). But yes, joke aside, of course I see your point and acknowledge it.
I’m definitely struggling with that myself, and not just WRT the Israel situation - I find deciding whether one should stick to “pure” ideals no matter the cost, or accept the necessity of compromising them in pursuit of the greater good to be very difficult (if only because it’s quite hard to know what the greater good is on a longterm basis). Obviously, this neurotic ambivalence between idealism and cynicsm colors my judgment of that situation.
Well, like I said, that’s veering into the field of philosophy, but yes, in a general sense I’m of the opinion that *everyone *lives in an illusion or self delusion-based reality.
Everyone observing one fact, or one image, or reading one sentence filters it through his own lens, makes sense of it through his own network of nature/nurture bias, previous experience, tries to equate it to some other personal understanding or experience, tries to fit them in his own narrative, pattern recognition framework and so on. If there was such a thing as an unequivocal and readily available Objective Truth, the judicial process would be quite simpler :)… hell, we wouldn’t need to debate anything.
So is the NIST’s 9/11 report.
If you, Kimstu, are going to argue the claim rather than playing the Point of View game, please quote which article(s) of international law you claim are violated.
Neither. And the word “Islamaphobia”, is strangely misused in this context. Chritisians can no more vote to remove the Law of Return than Muslims. Or Buddhists, Taoists, atheists, Moloch worshipers… (Cthulu worshipers get a pass on that, as Israel hopes to be eaten last).
Israel’s Basic Law for the Knesset is rather simple.
Every Israeli national above the age of majority, unless prohibited by the court, can vote. Every Israeli national over the age of 21, unless prohibited by the court, can run for a post in the Knesset (there are a few specific exemptions for army positions and such).
Likewise, there are three factors which can disqualify the candidates of a party list.
Note, the first, despite misrepresentations, is not a racist idea. There are debates, both within Israel and among its supporters abroad (check out ARZA) as to just what degree of power the ultra-orthodox should wield. And it is precisely due to the coalition government system which allows them to swing their votes as a block. But ultra-orthodox voting patterns aren’t what makes Israel a Jewish state. The Law of Return make Israel a Jewish state; that Israel will always be a refuge for Jews from any corner is what maintains Israel as a home for Jews.
So as long as you don’t incite racism, advocate the overthrow of the democratic state of Israel, or support removing Israel as a haven for Jews, you’re golden. You can have all the policy disagreement you want. You can advocate and vote for complete religious pluralism or secular humanism (see, for instance, IRAC). What you cannot do is vote to strip Israel of its nature as a home for Jewish people.
And as Tom points out, that isn’t particularly novel or correctly described as racist.
The only thing Israel’s Arab populace is prohibited from doing is trying to eliminate Israel as a refuge for Jews.
They really didn’t get along all that well. There was huge resentment, for example, of Jews moving into the area even though they dramatically improved the quality of life of virtually everybody there. You’re also ignoring the Arab riots and anti-Jewish pogroms of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Including massacres that Husseini helped organize and which led to the formation of the Haganah. These are more than the normal tensions we’d talk about with different cultures living next to each other.
Not perfectly, no. Especially since the rights of Jews to flee to America was never absolute. See, for example, the Saint Louis. That helped demonstrate a large flaw in any plans of relying on America as a refuge.
Avram Burg’s point is that there’s no debating Israel with Jews. They play the holocaust card like squid deploy ink. There is something to this, but I don’t entirely agree. It serves a real purpose to display how readily evidence brings down key planks of the Israeli propaganda, such as the ‘Hamas Charter cite’.
There is no denying the proper result is an explicit recant by the propagandists. That is hardly a realistic expectation. As expected they will instead vomit a murky cloud with no substance, like this one from E-Sabbath:
If evidence based reasoning means the boards and struts of Zionism are knowing lies then that’s what it means. You can see in that quote the trouble faced when loyalty is more to the speaker than proper reasoning.
Cooler than talking statutes. Talking documents are a dime a dozen these days, but with a talking block of carved marble, a man can make a dollar or three.
Of course it is - well, not necessarily racist in the sense that it discriminates *against *another ethny, but it’s in essence a deliberate claim that “You can do anything you want, except deny that it’s our country, y’all just live in it”. That’s not exactly a minor point. Neither is the law of return, what it pre-supposes, and what it implies - it essentially denies the right of the sovereign state, wherever it may swing, to control or impose limitations on one special kind of immigration. If that’s not preferential treatment or privilege, I don’t know what is.
And even if it was a minor point, the mere existence of an inalienable, unbreakable taboo flies in the face of the whole idea of democracy and self-determination. If it’s “freedom of opinion, except that one opinion we don’t like”, then it’s not freedom of opinion, exactly the same way “freedom of speech except if we don’t like what you’re saying” isn’t freedom of speech.
Fair point, but there always is a movement against any immigration (or any societal change, for that matter), and another (although they often have big overlap) movement against “them” as opposed to “us”. And those movements usually are violent, because when people aren’t enlightened enough to be tolerant of others, they’re precisely the kind of dumb fucks who believe violence is a good problem solver.
I know I’ve been living in it since I was born - “Real French” scumfuckers going out on saturday night “melon hunts” to beat on Algerians immigrants & their descendants. They even have their own little fascist party, even though many of them find it “too soft” and “compromising” :rolleyes:.
OK, you score a point there, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What’s the Saint Louis ?
I’m focusing on civilians like the baker.
I agree that he wants peace. However his political options are pretty much the PLO and Hamas, both of whom have been described as terrorists.
And what does he do when armed men want to hide in his bakery?
Just think how little influence the baker has on Hamas or the Israeli Government.
And how likely it is that he and his family will be be unable to buy raw materials to make money, get caught in a crossfire, or even bombed.
He hasn’t got the money or the right to move elsewhere either. :smack::smack::smack:
Glee, the PLO (Fatah) has come around to seeing that their best interests are found by working towards a long term negotiated settlement. Hamas has not. At the time of the last election the baker may have hoped that Hamas represented less corruption than Fatah but by now it is apparent that Hamas is a thugocracy. But how does the baker in Gaza get rid of Hamas now? Those who support Fatah do so at significant risk there now. Many were kicked out of the area at the time of the Hamas coup of Gaza. Can there be free and fair elections now? Would Hamas respect results if they lost? Sev I am really trying to understand what your latest point is and what it has to do with my post but I cannot. My post was very straightforward. “Extraordinary” evidence of Hamas’s long term ambitions and goals has been provided but I fail to see why you find the concept of one group having genocidal ambitions upon another is so “extraordinary”. Look around the world. Genocidal ambitions are not an extraordinary item. To suggest to a people who have been the target of a fairly recent and large scale genocidal attempt that it is an extraordinary claim that any group would have such ambitions is to me quite extraordinary. It is to some degree moot to this discussion but the claim just struck me as so bizzare that comment was called for.
Much of the argument in this thread depends on an unstated assumption that I feel is false. The assumption is that if Hamas or the Palestinians in Gaza are bad, that means Israeli attacks on them are good, or at least not morally wrong.
My view of morality is different. It doesn’t depend on international law or rights that people or countries have. An action is moral if it improves the overall condition of humanity. It is immoral if it hurts humanity. By that standard the actions of Hamas firing rockets into Israel are certainly immoral. I haven’t seen anybody in this thread disagree with that position. Whether the people of Gaza are immoral because they support Hamas is less clear and the the subject of debate.
The Israeli attack on Gaza apparently killed about 1300 people. How many lives did it save? I read somewhere that Hamas had killed seven people in the last two years. Let’s say that they lose a year’s worth of rocket attacks due to the incursion and improvements in their rockets mean that would have doubled their kill rate, thus saving seven Israeli lives in the one year. How has the Israeli attack affected humanity? Trading off 1300 Gazan lives for 7 Israelis strikes me as highly immoral from the standpoint of the good of humanity. But it’s worse. As I understand it, more than seven Israeli lives were lost in the attacks. So it is negative even if we count all Gazans as worthless vermin. There is also a monetary cost to the Israeli people of running the operation.
It gets worse. We all agree that Hamas is scum. We would like to see them out of power. Unfortunately they are probably now more popular than ever, since they are the party of hate for Israel and we can be pretty confident that the Palestinians now hate Israel more than ever. Despite losing members, Hamas is strengthened. Israel should not be aiding and abetting Hamas. Worse yet, Arabs outside of Palestine now hate Israelis more than ever and the international community has less respect for Israel than ever.
It is not a matter that Gaza is wrong and Israeli is right. It is a matter that Gaza is wrong and Israel is wrong (but neither Israel nor Gaza “deserve” to have people killed). To judge morality we need to look at the overall effect these actions have on humanity instead of catch phrases like “they had a right to defend themselves” or “they deserved it.”
Tragic story… but I don’t see how it makes the US any unsafer a place to live in ? Yes, I understand it wasn’t easy to get there, and that there were immigration quotas in place, but the same was true of Israel before, during and shortly after the war (so, until the law of return, eh). No place was easy to get to legally, that was the whole problem.
ETA : striked an argument that made no sense, even to me.
Kobal I think it was in response to you statement “… or there was no other place to flee to where Jews weren’t discriminated against. AFAIK the US was perfectly safe, for example.”
BTW America was not perfectly safe. There was some vicious antisemitism here too.
Seriously…where are you getting this idea from? As far as I can tell no one is saying that attacks by Israel are ‘good’ just because Hamas is ‘bad’. To boil it down into a sound byte (;)) what they are saying is that Israeli attacks are ‘necessary’ in response to Hamas attacks when and how and from where they are being launched.
See the difference?
So, we should all define what is right or wrong based on our own concept of ‘morality’ and toss out laws and such when they conflict? Myself, I think that attempting determine when ‘an action is moral if it improves the overall condition of humanity’ would be a bit, um, subjective. What defines an improvement? Who decides…you? Me? Do we take a vote? How do we determine the converse? In what time frame? And for what group? The majority? What if harming the minority improves things for the majority? What if not harming the minority hurts the majority of humanity in some way?
Let me give you a brief example. Is driving a car immoral? Would taking away peoples cars be a moral or immoral act? In what time frame? How about mining coal? Moral or immoral? For those mining? For those benefiting? For the long term health of the planet?
It only strikes you that way because you are attempting to simply play a numbers game. Leaving aside your flawed concept of morality though the real question is…should Israel simply allow themselves to be attacked without response? Should they just suck it up and take those random losses (and the associated terror of the people in those towns not knowing if it would be their number that was up this rocket attack…something you have, interestingly enough left out of your calculations here. i.e. the psychological impact of terror on those who are actually in the random path of those rockets)? If you feel this is the moral way for Israel to go then that’s fine. I completely disagree with you, but you are entitled to your opinion, however divorced it is from reality. If you don’t feel that Israel should do nothing, then we get into the seemingly never answered question…well, what SHOULD Israel do then?
Myself, my own ‘moral’ compass points to Hamas as being the primary culprit in this little drama wrt both the Israeli AND Palestinian deaths. They are the ones who have not only provoked Israel into retaliation but have also done so in such a way as to deliberately put their own people at risk. In fact, they sought out those causalities. I’m really at a loss how anyone’s ‘moral’ compass can point any other way on this issue…though obviously it does for some people, especially some who simply want to look at the raw numbers and then beat their chests.
What should Israel do then? What course is open to them when the rockets are flying at them? Should they wait to see if the UN decides to do something? Should they give up more territory (recall that they GAVE Gaza to the Palestinians unilaterally) in the hopes that THIS time it will be better and that it will finally appease them so that no more rockets will come Israel’s way?
I disagree with your assertion that Israel has less respect in the ‘international community’ than they previously did. Anyone who is going to lose respect for Israel by simply looking at the numbers of dead are people who were probably not exactly disposed to be fair and balanced in their outlook toward Israel in the first place. Many of the European nations never really liked Israel in the best of times (for various reasons), especially their citizens. Here in the US I don’t think that Israel has ‘lost respect’. The Arabs? I think they respect Israel’s ability to stomp their military’s into scrap…which is why they haven’t joined in the fun themselves. Other than that I don’t think Israel had much respect to lose with many of the Arab’s in the region.
I disagree. It’s a matter that HAMAS is wrong, is pursuing a clearly hostile strategy that is in the long run detrimental to the interests of their own people, and are doing so in such a way as to put those same said people deliberately into harms way. Israel is simply defending itself to the best of it’s non-magical abilities in a real world. Gaza/Palestinian’s are unfortunately caught in between the raving fanatics in their midst and the realities of the world.
Note that with respect to international law, if Hamas puts just a single rocket launcher on top of a hospital and Israel damages the hospital and kills patients and staff while trying to destroy the rocket launcher, there is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Hamas is guilty by placing the rocket launcher so close to the hospital so that the Israeli attack is likely to hit the hospital as well. Israel is not guilty unless they use disproportionate force (i.e. carpet bombing the whole area when a guided strike is technically feasible). Some posters seem to be unaware that international law puts the onus on BOTH sides to minimize civilian casualties. In Gaza, Israel seems to be at least attempting to do this while Hamas seems to be doing all they can to maximize them.
Whenever the issue comes up of whether we should support an Israeli action, almost invariably the debate centers around how bad the Palestinians are. The whole point of this thread, how much blame Gaza deserves, centers on who is morally right and wrong in this situation.
My principle for morality is just a restatement of widely accepted moral principles like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, “Love your neighbor”, and “The greatest good for the greatest number.” Outside of principles people think were handed down by God, I think this is almost universally accepted. Laws should not be thrown out because they fulfill a necessary function for society, but they shouldn’t be mistaken for morality. One can obey the law and still be evil.
Of course this is subjective. So is any other moral principle. Some situations we would have to debate about. Whether dropping the A-bomb on Japan was moral is tricky since we don’t know whether the consequences of other policies would have been better or worse – perhaps an earlier end to the war resulted in fewer deaths, perhaps not. But the issue should be debated on the basis of the overall effect on humanity. In some cases, like Gaza, the tradeoff is obvious.
I would do my best to try to figure out what works best for all concerned. How would you decide these things? By pouring through lawbooks to see what’s legal? If what’s best isn’t clear, we might better spend our time on causes where the good is more obvious.
I want to live in a world where as few people are killed as possible. Numbers are absolutely necessary.
Yes. There are other things they might do, but doing nothing is definitely better than killing 1300.
Do you think Gazans don’t live in terror? There are many ugly effects here. Life and death seems paramount, so for brevity I only counted that. However I did, unlike you, consider both sides.
Look for ways to make Hamas less popular and reduce the hatred Gazans have for Israel. Perhaps they should give free medical care to Gazan children. Build the facility in the area where the rockets are landing. Or give the Gazans TV sets and provide power. Turn off the power or jam the TV signals for one minute every time a rocket is fired. Make sure the TV shows include things the fanatics will feel undermines their morality but that the average citizen want to see. These may be impractical for various reasons but look for things that involve big carrots and small sticks. Try to reduce the hatred.
Don’t expect any strategy to work quickly. There are a lot Palestinians who have friends and family members dead or maimed by Israeli attacks. While you may think they should blame themselves or Hamas, be realistic about human nature. They are going to blame the outsiders who actually fired the weapons, not their own. It will take many years to ease the bitterness.
