I think he just meant that all major sects support Israel’s right to exist, i.e., Reform, Conservative, and the OU. As far as I know, they all have such wording in their statements and charters.
edit: In light of what Ali just said, maybe he just thinks that Jews are Israel-loving antipatriots.
Supporting a country’s right to exist is a far cry from faith-based unqualified support for anything they might do.
Certainly, the majority of American Jews have a natural affinity for a country composed of their ethnic and religious counterparts in Israel, and this is reflected in their organizations (with the exception of those ultra-orthodox who have faith-based reasons to oppose Zionism). That is not the same as “unqualified” support.
Agreed. I was attempted to translate for the…er…him. :smack:
One Jewish, American congressman or senator who deflects from unqualified support?
You’re now shifting the goal posts and completely backing off your earlier claims.
Off the top of my head, Barney Frank criticized Israel’s handling of the Gaza Flotilla raid.
Furthermore, after Obama’s speech, Abraham Foxman’s ADL released a statement supporting Obama’s speech while it was being criticized by Netanyahu.
If American Jews really took their marching orders from Tel Aviv, as you imply, then this wouldn’t have occurred.
Sorry dude, but your beliefs are not reality-based.
You should try to learn more about Jews. If you did you wouldn’t subscribe to anti-Semitic claptrap like dual-loyalty myth.
Whichever is Woody Allen’s, I should think.
Can someone clarify what Obama means when he talks about the changing demographics of the Palestinians? This is something most people cite as a reason for Israel to negotiate for peace.
Is the problem that there will soon be too many Palestinians for Israel to handle?
The average Palestinian family has 7 children; when you take modern medicine into consideration, that means that they probably have the highest growth rate of any human population, ever, in the history of the world.
Happens the world over. When people are really, really poor . . . well, the best things in life are free. 
Yes, it means the Palestinian population is growing at a much faster rate than Israel’s.
It would be one thing for Israel to annex a territory with a small Palestinian population. It’s another to annex a territory where the hostile population outnumbers Israel. In the first the original population just becomes a disaffected minority. In the second, it becomes a disaffected majority.
When the United States annexed Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California, those territories were very sparsely populated, and many of those people didn’t consider themselves Mexicans–they were Indios, or Anglo settlers. So we could just declare any Mexicans that happened to find themselves on the wrong side of the border to now be citizens of the United States, with very little demographic or ethnic change.
If we tried to annex the areas around Mexico City, we’d be looking at a new population of millions of Spanish speaking catholic mixed race people. And what would we do with them? Let them become citizens? What if they voted for Mexican Independence? They’d have to become subject people and not allowed to vote. Of course we already had a large population of subject people, and look how well that turned out. Now imagine doubling or tripling the problem.
The demographic argument never made much sense to me - more people doesn’t necessarily mean more power, particularly as very high growth rates in the modern world tend to be associated with poverty. A third world nation with a super high growth rate isn’t posing a greater threat to a first-world nation.
The Israelis, even the most right-wing of them, have no intentions of annexing the West Bank or Gaza, complete with its massively-growing Palestinian population. It’s not going to happen, so it isn’t a potential problem.
What the Israeli right wants, is to nibble off bits of the WB by populating those bits with Israelis.
This is why I don’t understand the argument.
The only potential threat I can see from a rising Palestinian population is that it would make occupation more difficult for Israel. A potential uprising would also be more difficult to suppress.
Still, if the last Israel military effort in Gaza is any indication, it’s going to be a while before Palestine grows to a size that can threaten Israel.
I agree - the demographic argument makes no sense. It presumes that more population equals more power. This is only of concern if that population is within Israel itself - in which case, it is of course more a question of politics.
Barak never made any actual concrete offer. here’s what a Clinton administration official who was there had to say :
*Even so, it is hard to state with confidence how far Barak was actually prepared to go. His strategy was predicated on the belief that Israel ought not to reveal its final positions—not even to the United States—unless and until the endgame was in sight. Had any member of the US peace team been asked to describe Barak’s true positions before or even during Camp David—indeed, were any asked that question today—they would be hard-pressed to answer. Barak’s worst fear was that he would put forward Israeli concessions and pay the price domestically, only to see the Palestinians using the concessions as a new point of departure. And his trust in the Americans went only so far, fearing that they might reveal to the Palestinians what he was determined to conceal…
The final and largely unnoticed consequence of Barak’s approach is that, strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer. Determined to preserve Israel’s position in the event of failure, and resolved not to let the Palestinians take advantage of one-sided compromises, the Israelis always stopped one, if not several, steps short of a proposal. The ideas put forward at Camp David were never stated in writing, but orally conveyed. They generally were presented as US concepts, not Israeli ones; indeed, despite having demanded the opportunity to negotiate face to face with Arafat, Barak refused to hold any substantive meeting with him at Camp David out of fear that the Palestinian leader would seek to put Israeli concessions on the record. Nor were the proposals detailed.*
Barak was fighting an election campaign during the negotiations and couldn’t even afford details of any concessions to be made public because that would lose him the election. That underscores the reality of the Israeli position which is that any israeli leader is leader of a coalition featuring extremist parties who will not accept any concessions and would collapse any government who offered them. That’s why Israel have never made a serious offer. Oslo is a similar story, don’t have time to go into it right now.
I haven’t got time to go into Oslo but it’s no different.
To a small extent, that population will always be “within Israel” because there is no intention of letting the WB and Gaza fully govern itself. Everything I’ve seen that indicates details of an offer includes complete military control over the Palestinian territories.
In the worst case this means a Palestinian state will become like the Gaza strip; in the best case this means that the Palestinians will not control their borders and there will always be some type of limitation on their economic and security activities.
I think the right-wing of Israel is envisioning something similar to Native American Indian reservations, or somewhere closer to these reservations on the spectrum of independence.
The key difference is that none of these Palestinians will have a vote in the entirety of their governance.
Israel blockades the Gaza strip, with the co-operation of the Egyptians (or at least, it did - not sure what the Egyptians are up to these days). It most certainly does not police the Gaza strip, like (say) the US or Canadians exercise ultimate police control over a Native American Reservation.
Naturally, the Israelis wish to limit access through the Palestinian borders of Gaza - they are at times engaged in a low-level conflict with Hamas, and want to limit the availability of munitions and otherwise put pressure on the Hamas gov’t.
Such control won’t really be possible without the cooperation of the neighbours, though - the blocade of Gaza was made possible, for example, by Egyptian cooperation. I doubt it will be practicable without such cooperation, and I doubt such cooperation will be forthcomming from all parties in the future.
Which is a bit beside the point - whether or not Israel is able to successfully blockade a new Palestinian entity, or otherwise control its borders, the demographics of Palestine will make little difference to the Israelis. Poor and numerous does not translate well into powerful.
What he’s saying is so misleading as to be false. The negotiations didn’t go further than they did because of Arafat’s intransigence. From Dennis Ross’s interview with Brit Hume, April 21, 2002:
The article is an explaination of why Arafat turned obstuctionist. Although it sets out to attempt a more “nuanced picture” than that of all (objective) observers - that this was a case of Arafat, once again, missing an opportunity for peace - if read, it actually paints the opposite view: that to Arafat, nothing the Israelis could offer was a “concession” because the Palestinians were already making the greatest “concession” - to Israel’s existence.
Again, to an unbiased observer, knowing the relative powers of the two entities involved, this simply isn’t a realistic position.
The Israeli offer wasn’t concrete because they were fishing for some willingness, any willingness, on the part of Arafat to deal, in order to hash out the details - but they waited in vain.
Arafat was the problem then.
Most of what you said is no different than what I said. I said military control and made no mention of police.
To give a clear prediction regarding the likely arrangement, an ever-increasing population of Palestinians will always view periodic retribution on the part of the Israeli military (retribution for whatever dominant terrorist group does to piss off Israel) as arbitrary and out of proportion. If they decide to rebel against these conditions they will not blame the various terrorist groups in their midst, they will blame Israel. I think if the frustration levels are high enough, and they are focused enough, then there really will not be much Israel, by itself, can do about it.
So I guess I do think poor and numerous is more than enough against military force.