Sorry, but thats capitalism. Its far better than communism and Islamic terrorism.
Plus, the Rothschilds weren’t bootleggers or slaveholders. They were financiers, and good ones, ie winners.
:rolleyes:
Yeah, they’re really good. They leveraged 5% ownership into an excuse to take the whole goddam thing.
Arabs owned something like 15 times as much land as the jews and yet they managed a partition agreement that gave them half the land. The Rothchilds were very very good at capitalism indeed.
Again, you are mixing up practicality and morality.
The Palestinians have a weak hand, it is true. But they are playing it badly. It isn’t as if they have no cards whatsoever - they do have some bargaining power. The notion that they have none is simply a fantasy on your part, and makes it very difficult to explain actual Israeli actions, such as the disengagement from Gaza, or the Oslo Peace Process.
The Israelis have a strong hand, and in my opinion, they are also playing it badly. The difference of course is that someone with a string hand can play it badly and still come out okay. Not so someone with a weak hand.
Again, you have no actual answer.
That doesn’t follow at all.
Again, a total fantasy that makes nonsense of the actual history. Why did Israel remove its settlements from Gaza? Why did it engage in the Oslo process?
Because the Palestinians do, in fact, have some bargaining power. They have international pressure. They have the constant wearing of low-level attacks. They have their “intifadas”. All of which puts some pressure on the Israeli government.
In your black and white thinking, you can’t see two sides here.
So, you reject being reasonable.
The alternative, of course, is to continue to be unreasonable.
A weaker party locked in a controversy with a stronger party and convinced that being unreasonable is better than being reasonable is doomed to repeat failure.
That is not a moral judgment, that is simply reality.
I’ve not been following this thread but noting that Last Page had only four posts I clicked to peek.
I find myself agreeing with DerekMichael and applauding Malthus’ excellent post. I wonder about this:
I’m no expert on detailed land transactions in Palestine circa 1947 — is that the topic of the sub-debate? Certainly the aftermath of the Biggest War Ever had caused upheavals in several countries. Is this what the debate is about, in Palestinian eyes? Quarrels about the almost-seventy year old state of Israel itself? (Thank whatever Lords there be that Poles aren’t suicide bombing to get Poland back from Russia.) ***And even remembering to caricaturize the Jewish bankers?? *** Can we assume your was more a flight of whimsy, Mr. Damuri, rather than serious debate? (I think land returns should be on the table, along with an International City of Jerusalem, but Palestine fosters terrorism, never offering a quid for a quo.)
Derek Michaels is the one who brought up capitalism and how the rothchilds were good financiers and winners.
no I brought up the Yishuvs peaceful means by which they acquired land to build a society and country, and you attributed that to the Rothschild, ie another Jewish conspiracy theory bc you can’t accept that the Jews had and have merit (something Palestinians don’t)
You were a progressive 8 years ago, and now you’re ranking ethnic groups by “merit”?
What the heck happened to you?
I think there’s a more basic question here, which is this: How does a group of people come to own an area of land to the point where no other group has any moral or legal claim to live there?
So for example, Jews lived in the City of Hebron for hundreds of years until they were ethnically cleansed in the 1920s and 1930s. The city was inhabited pretty much exclusively by Arabs from that point until the 1970s, when Jews started to move back.
It’s hard to see any principled basis for saying that Hebron is “Arab Land” or “Palestinian Land.”
Similarly, in the late 19th Century the entire area was under control of the Ottoman Empire and many people, both Jewish and Arab moved there from other parts of the world. The descendants of the Arabs who moved there are (as well as Arabs who were already there) are now referred to as “Palestinians” but why should they have a superior moral or legal claim to the Jews who moved there (or who were already living there)?
Seems to me that if you want to accuse Israel of “stealing land” from a group of people, you need to provide your definition of how one determines ownership. Otherwise your claim has no meaning.
Are you saying that the Rothchilds are not involved with the PICA?
Facts, apparently have an anti-Semitic bias.
Facts are apparently a Jewish conspiracy theory?
And why were you referencing the Rothchilds as “financiers, and good ones, ie winners.” if all you were referring to the Yishuvs (which you didn’t actually mention)
And in what way have I indicated that Jews don’t have merit? Are you saying that Palestinians are a meritless people?
I once had a partner. He was one of the brightest men I knew. He was rational, logical and liberal. Except when it came to Israel. We could never talk about Israel because he it was a topic where his emotions got the better of him. If you criticized Israel too much, that made you a bad person and he would want nothing to do with you.
I think they were talking about settlement activity. That stuff gets really hard to defend and most people don’t bother trying but please go ahead.
As for the claims that the zionists stole land at the inception of the state of Israel. I think its important to point out that any claims of legitimacy based on Jewish ownership of land at the time are bound to fail considering how much of Israel was owned by arabs compared to Jews. Arabs owned about 15 times as much land as the jews in Palestine at the time the UN came up with their partition agreement. And yet they ended up with a fairly even split of land. The population of arabs was double that of jews and yet they ended up with a fairly even split of land. If you measured population before the Aliyahs, the arab population was more than ten times that of the jews. What Israel has today could be called the spoils of war and if the notion that their control over the land they gained based on right of conquest should be the basis of their negotiating position for how israel should be divided, then they cannot complain if the other side thinks that they might win a war one day as well and turn the tables on the zionists.
Is there a particular reason you insist on referring to “jews” instead of “Jews”?
Is it related your insistence that Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright couldn’t possibly be supportive, sympathetic towards, or evenhanded regarding Arab causes because they were both “jews”?
Before anyone mentions it, no, Albright isn’t band has never been Jewish but for an absurdly long time Damuri argued that as far as he was as concerned she was a Jew because her father was born into a Jewish family.
Homo sapiens is a new species, so genetically we’re all very similar. An Arab child is born with the same capacity for love, hatred, intelligence as a Jewish child.
But the term “ethnic” encompasses culture as well as genetics. The culture of modern-day Saudi Arabia abuses women compared with modern-day Scandinavia. Human Action, do you think the cultures of Saudi Arabia and Sweden have “equal merit”?
Many Israelis want their children to grow up to be doctors or scientists. Many Palestinians want their children to grow up to be suicidal terrorists. Other Arab countries act to ensure Palestinians continue to wallow in their own misery: this distracts attention from those countries’ own crimes and cultural inequities.
@ Liberals — One can love the Palestinians as fellow humans, without concluding that their culture of revenge and bloodlust has “equal merit” to the cultures of civilized countries.
Alas, that’s me and my brother-in-law. I’m pro-Israel, and he’s anti-. We’ve agreed to let that topic of discussion alone.
(Here on the SDMB, I don’t hold back as much.)
Actually, the Palestinian culture is a pretty good one. It values professional skills and education, and is heartily mercantile in character. Palestinians are very often shopkeepers, vendors, traders, and sellers. They are a surprisingly good-natured people, caught up, alas, under some very bad leadership.
If they ever did get their own country, it would probably become a good one, such as Lebanon was during the 1960s.
Hamas are a mob of bloodthirsty barbarians…but the Palestinians, as a people, really aren’t.
Then how about the tons of hijackings, the Munich attack, the Achille Lauro, the getting in bed with the USSR, (none of which they’ve ever apologized for) etc. before Hamas was formed? Their culture is a culture of jihad terrorism. The Palestinian national movement is nothing but a bunch of terror; the Jewish national movement is a movement of victories, economic, social, scientific, you name it.
[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
As for the claims that the zionists stole land at the inception of the state of Israel. I think its important to point out that any claims of legitimacy based on Jewish ownership of land at the time are bound to fail considering how much of Israel was owned by arabs compared to Jews.
[/QUOTE]
The partition was based on where populations where, not how much land was owned. Most of what Israel got offered in the partition, which they accepted, and the Muslims didn’t, was Negev desert. The Muslims turned down the partition, and sought to expand on the Holocaust. They lost.
These were done by Palestinians, but not by the Palestinian Culture.
Do we blame American culture for Charles Manson or J.W. Gacy? Do we blame American culture for slavery or the conquest of the native Americans? Did the crimes at Abu Ghraib make all Americans bad people?
Don’t make the mistake, very often seen here on the SDMB, of blaming all of Islam for the actions of only a minority, nor of blaming all Palestinians for the crimes committed by only a few.
I support Israel, and generally oppose the current Palestinian leadership, but I will not descend into arrant bigotry against their people. (And I like Abbas quite a bit more than I liked Arafat.)
Aaand… here comes Ibn Warraq to the rescue with accusations of anti-semitism.
We’ve been over this upper case lower case obsession of yours before. What exactly is it that you imagine is the reason I spell Jew with a upper case sometimes and jew with a lower case sometimes?
Or are you just asking questions?
No. It has nothing to do with stuff that you are misremembering and mischaracterizing from 5 years ago. But you go ahead and keep beating that dead horse if that’s the only thing you’ve got to add to the debate.
What is an absurdly long time? Do you have a cite?
Do you have anything to add to the debate or do you just feel the need to bring up stuff that I said over 5 years ago because you have nothing else to add and never really did.
Palestinian society at large celebrated them and still celebrates them, hence why their culture is crap.