I don’t think I called you a liar. I think you told a story you heard, uncritically. But when people showed you about three different reasons why the monk’s story couldn’t possibly be true as you recounted it (bases, gender breakdown of IDF, actual IDF training), you doubled down. Then you made the silly claim that Buddhists have nothing against Judaism–silly for reasons I already described.
I don’t even know if the monk was actually lying. The monk may well have been seeing things through an extremely biased lens. Or maybe he told the story as told to him, and the Friend of a Friend element of urban legends continued in your telling without your realizing it.
But it’s not a good story. It’s not a plausible story. And the narrator being a Buddhist monk does not prove it’s not an antisemitic story.
I am currently reading Ian Black’s Enemies and Neighbors.
First blush it seems fairly even handed and well researched
It does not paint a pretty picture of the nation state of Israel, or the various Arab actors prior to October 7th.
Point of Order, Mister Chairman. Might my distinguished colleague cite where the ‘nation state of Israel’ existed as recognised by the UN or The League of Nations formally before 1948?
Should that occur, I recover my time and forward it to Senator Sanders.
Are you thinking about militant militants like the “Irgun”? They were denounced as terrorists by (possibly anti-Zionist?) organizations like the World Zionist Congress and the State of Israel.
Sorry, the same State of Israel that integrated Irgun fighters into the IOF and then later elected erstwhile Irgun leader Begin, head of the Likud party that directly descends from Irgun, to PM ? That State of Israel?
I’m Rhodesian by birth. We had a lengthy guerrilla war which ended with the Republic of Zimbabwe declared independent in 1980.
I’m South African by descent, I am sure @MrDibble is too, though I expect his predecessors did not move north like mine.
Rhodesia had a lot of support from Israel during the bush war; my father had an Uzi next to the gear lever in our car. Israel (probably) did a nuclear test in South African waters in the far Southern Ocean.
While I can respect certain events, for example the Entebbe Raid, current Israeli thinking is apartheid thinking.
The interesting thing is, though this may just be an isolated outlier, you go to Tel Aviv and there are these markers put up by the municipality with historical information like, “This house had a secret Haganah radio station”, but also “This corner is where they had a shootout with the police after robbing a bank and a little girl was killed by a stray bullet”.
It does seem damning that expressing openly pro-apartheid or racist opinions does not see one, at best, get drummed out of politics. That indicates more than zero tolerance.
The debate between pro-Zionism and anti-Zionism is a diversion when there are people suffering. This is no time to debate ideology—it is urgent to stop harming the people of Gaza and bring them relief. Nothing else is important next to that right now.
I find it interesting that when people refer to Israel politics as apartheid, they are usually referring to Gaza and the West Bank. However, no one seems to pay much attention to the de facto apartheid “equal but separate” laws inside the green line, i.e. Israeil before the 1967 change of borders. Israel ID cards print ethnicity, Arab kids and Jewish kids go to separate schools; it’s mandatory for Arab children to learn Hebrew (which makes sense) but for Jewish children Arabic is optional.
And I’ve posted here before on how Jews are not allowed to marry Non-jews.
BTW, Arabs make up about 20 per cent of the population, i.e. they are Israel citizens. A minority, but still a large number of people.
My understanding is that in Israel no one is allowed to marry outside their designated religion. So Muslims can’t marry non-Muslims, Christians can’t marry non-Christians, Druze can’t marry non-Druze, etc. Although if you marry outside of Israel I think Israel will recognize the marriage.
This could get complicated if certain people in the current Israeli administration get their wish and can declare anyone who doesn’t meet their standard of Jewishness (basically, Orthodox or more strict) declared non-Jew, but have a feeling that’s unlikely at this point in time.
However, civil, interfaith, and same-sex marriages entered into abroad are recognized by the state;[5] as a consequence Israeli residents not permitted to marry in Israel sometimes marry overseas, often in nearby Cyprus, or since 2022, remotely via videotelephony with an officiant in Utah, which a lower court and subsequently the Supreme Court de facto recognized in 2023.[6]