Since when is anti-Semitism a liberal idea?

The BBQ Pit
61

Right. Two sides. And yet, you seem to associate peace desire only with the Palestinians and war only with Israel.

Well, Israel has tried on several occasions to make peace. When we met with willing partners, peace was signed. When the other party is not willing to engage in an actual give-and-take (E.g., the “three noes” and Arafat’s refusal at Camp David), we really can’t force them toward peace.

Sure. How much higher? How far do you think we have to go?
Do you, for example, think Israel should accept the “Right to Return” which will beyond doubt eradicate it as a Jewish state?
And why “supposed” to be democratic? Israel is a democracy.

This seems borderline support of terrorism, so I’m not going to address it.

True. But how about killing the guilty terrorist themselves?

  1. Israel did not bomb “the shit out of Lebanon”. Had Israel done that, Lebanon would be in ruins now. Completely. With tens of thousands or more casualties.
  2. The war did not start just because of the kidnapping. Please look at recent threads on the war – you’ll find wealth of info there.

I was going to ask for a cite, and then notices you don’t have one…
Well, I have heard different things. How shall we judge?
You see, the requirement for cites has its merits.

No, not all Palestinians are evil etc… But if you’ll bother to read, for example, the PLO charter, you’ll see the destruction of Israel is the Palestinian official goal.

Israel tried being the “bigger man”. Sharon evacuated the settlers, using the IDF, even at the risk of civil war.
And where did that got Israel? The Palestinians immediately started using the evacuated areas for shelling Israel. Then they voted Hamas government.
And you blame Israel?
Now, that’s amazing to me.

No argument there. Including the people in Israel. And, I truly hope, the Palestinian people.

Cite fo Israel playing victim?

Well, from where I stand I see myself surrounded with people wishing to kill me and wipe Israel from the face of the earth. A matter of perspective, I guess.
Even on this board you find views that “Israel was the biggest mistake of the 20’th century” (mind you – that century saw some pretty major mistakes).

Huh? I have no idea what you mean by that.

Cite?

Oh, I’m sorry. Does the mention of the Holocaust bother you much? I promise I won’t mention it again.

No, it does not make you anti-Semitic. I do believe it make you less informed that desired.

Guess what – I am even more sick of it. I’m living it, not hearing it on the news. But, like I said, Israel came to the table. The Palestinians left. What is the point of staying near an empty discussion table?

Right. And still, you keep addressing it to Israel alone.

Err… cite?

If you’re talking about the Arab states, you are correct.

We live with terrorism. Doesn’t mean we have to reward it with concessions.

Like what? We tried war. We tried negotiations. We tried unilateral moves. What do you suggest?

Right… because before that the were SOOOOO friendly.

Not claiming to be one of those brains, I’m sure Israel leaders know that. That’s why Israel must stay strong enough to ensure those Arab nations who don’t accept us will be less eager to attack.

You’d think that, now, won’t you?

Thanks. And don’t want to see you die any more than I want to see a Scandinavian die. So?

Sure. Thare has to be. It’s Israel’s job to find it, no matter what the Palestinians do. And until such solution is found, Israel will always be in the blame, right?

Oh, wel…

62

I’d like to second the request for a cite showing official Israeli representative playing the victim card. Not non-Israelis speaking on behalf of Israel, not people expressing their opinions in defense of Israel - actual Israelis.

Because let me tell you something about the Holocaust… and not what you think. Every other country in the world that notes a Holocaust memorial does it on the anniversary of the Allied liberation of Aushcwitz. Israel doesn’t. In Israel, the Memorial Day falls on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - on the anniversary of the first day in nearly two millenia that Jews decided to fight back. We’re embarassed by the Holocaust, by the fact that millions of Jews got on the trains quietly, like lambs to the slaughter. We remember it to remind ourselves what happens if we let ourselves get weak.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as victims.

63

Checking… Nope. Never was a Palestinian state, Palestine or otherwise there. Never. Ever.

64

Humor me, though. Do name three Palestinian peace initiatives.

65

You’re serious, aren’t you?

66

Wow, what a load of BS. You must have worked real hard to come up that, didn’t you?
Israel is attacked, then defended by a third party, and then, under this cover, strikes back?
I’d like to ask for a cite, but the degree of BS here to way to high to even engage is serious debate.

The Lebanon war was discussed to death in other threads.

Well, some people may cry these allegations. But I think you’ll find that fair, honest criticism will meet fair, honest discussion, without Godwining.

Yeah, real sad there are actual people there, so you can’t save and restore like on your computer game right? That sucks.

I’m sure I can find videos of people from your homeland doing crazy stuff. What does it prove?

67

Dead serious. The land was under Ottoman occupation, and then under British mandate.

Have a different vesion of history?

68

Any version that does not require so cramped a definition of “homeland” in order to sustain a belief that the people other than yourselves have no right to be there but you do - i.e. *all * other versions of history. Palestine existed in at least as much reality as Israel did even in your own version, you surely must realize.

Just what do you think was partitioned in 1947? Who lived there, and for how long? What rights did they have then and now, and how do you distinguish your claim from theirs as somehow superior? Can you really not see the problem there?

69

All I said was that there never was a Palestinian state. Do you disagree with that?
I wouldl ike to quote Fibb from here

The piece of land was known as Palestine, but was never a Palestinian land.

70

If that’s all you meant, it’s irrelevant. The concept of “homeland” is what it’s about, and what you’re pointedly not addressing.

What you did say, FTR, was

What *did * you mean by “otherwise”, then? :dubious:

71

I disagree WRT relevance.

Isn’t it abvious? There was never a Palestinian state. Palestine was not a Palestinian state. Nor was any other state by any other name.

72

Perhaps you could *finally * take the opportunity to explain what you do mean, then. You claim, or seem to, that the Jews have a far-superior, even inarguable, claim to all of the land between the Med and the Jordan, based on the land “always” having been “Israel”, and “never” having been “Palestine”. You’ve been asked politely, and are now being asked bluntly, where you got that notion from, what “version of history” you’re using.

If you can, that is.

73

I realize I’m not a member here yet and probably don’t have a right to complain, but how lazy do you have to be to post a google search for a cite?

You inferring that there are anti-Israel sentiments on Pacifica Radio. Post examples.

What does this mean?

The subject of the OP’s rant seems to me to be that the left and ‘liberals’ are somehow anti-Israel and I haven’t seen any proof of that. They may be sympathetic to Palestinian people but that doesn’t translate to anti-Israel.

74

Wow, that opens up a lot of moral latitude. If we cannot make peace with them, we might as well kill them. Furthermore if it is not a moral responsibility to make peace, we condemn ourselves to endless war.

Wow. Got a kid in uniform?

The Arabs have accepted Israel’s right to exist for what? Ten? fifteen years now? Of course if it is not our responsibility to make peace we can ignore that.

You take my breath away.

75

Ah, that’s what they want you to think.
:smiley:

76

Most American “righties” are Christian. Most American moderates are Christian. It’s the most Christian country in the industralized world.

77

We do need to act more like it, though.

78

The 1967 Six-Day War changed everything. The left discovered the Palestinians, and the romance with the PLO began. Israel was stereotyped as a powerful oppressor state and a tool of western imperialism involved in suppressing the national rights of the Palestinians.

Leftist anti-Zionism soon spread beyond the radical left to mainstream social democratic parties. In Australia, leftist anti-Zionism was reflected in then ALP prime minister Gough Whitlam’s so-called “even-handed” policy during the Yom Kippur War, the associated campaign by Bill Hartley and other leading ALP leftists to delegitimise Israel and the 1974-75 Australian Union of Students motions calling for the liquidation of Israel.

Leftist anti-Zionism seemed to go on the backburner during the period of the Oslo Accords. However, the outbreak of the intifada provoked a renewed outburst of anti-Zionist hysteria.

The antisemitic rhetoric used at the United Nations Conference in Durban and the various proposals for academic boycotts of Israel suggest an increasing leftist hostility not only to Israel, but also to Jewish supporters.

At present, there seems to be little common language between the anti-Zionist leftism and Jews. Where Jews see Israeli vulnerability amidst a sea of fanatical hatred, the left sees only Israeli military power and brutality. Where Jews see cowardly terrorists murdering women and children, the left sees brave resistance fighters. And where Jews see a citizen’s army engaged in self-defence, the left sees only the exercise of state terror.

The anti-Zionist left also ignores the differences between the Palestinians and other commensurate resistance movements.

Few on the left are willing to take into account the views of those who are victims of terrorism. The left prefers to ignore the potential genocidal implications of what it advocates.

It is easy to say that we need to engage in dialogue with the left to educate its members.

Sadly, many of them are not interested in promoting compromise, or the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, they are partisans of Palestinian nationalism even when it is driven by fanatical Islam rather than by Marxism.

http://www.bluegreenearth.us/archive/article/2003_2/mendes1.html

79

Many of them killing Israelis.

Except for that Orthodox religious school deal, don’t all Israeli kids go into the IDF?

That’s news to me. I thought it was Egypt upon return of the Sinai.

80

Well, that depends on whether you consider that democracy can coexist with religious/ethnic discrimination. If Israel is defined as a state where one religious/ethnic group, namely Jews, have a specially privileged status—where Jews from anywhere else have an automatic “right of return” but non-Jewish Palestinians, for example, do not—then there’s no denying that the state is built partly on religious discrimination. Israel certainly might be democratic in any or all other respects, but if you consider rigorous governmental secularism and religious neutrality to be conditions of democracy, it is undeniable that Israel as currently constituted fails that test.

Under Sharon, Israeli settlers were evacuated from some parts of the occupied territories, while other parts received a major influx of settlers. It’s pretty one-sided to focus only on the pullout from Gaza settlements while ignoring the buildup of West Bank ones (not to mention Israel’s insistence on continued military and political control of the Gaza region).

While I flatly condemn terrorism against Israelis, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that many Palestinians disbelieve in the Israeli government’s sincerity or its concern for justice toward the Palestinians.

Ancient Israel was not a “state” either, in the modern sense of the term. There weren’t any modern “states” in the region until after WWI. There’s no logic in saying that Jewish Israel has some kind of historical claim to be a state but Muslim Palestine doesn’t.

IMHO, there are two separate arguments in favor of the existence of a Jewish state, and they shouldn’t be conflated:

  1. Jews as the victims of long-term, widespread persecution and a recent genocidal attack need to have a separate state for security purposes.

This seems to me like a reasonable argument, but it doesn’t imply that the Jewish state necessarily has to be located in the geographical region of ancient Israel. It would be just as valid, and for security purposes possibly more viable, to carve out a sliver of Idaho or Saskatchewan, say, and designate that the Jewish state.

  1. Israel as important historical entity and ancient religious homeland deserves to be represented by a modern state in approximately its ancient location.

This also seems reasonable to me, but it is necessarily contingent on the Israeli government’s being able to work out a peaceful and fair accomodation with the more recent owners and occupiers of the territory. The longer Israel insists on encroaching beyond the boundaries that were internationally agreed when establishing it, the harder it is to justify its actions.

I used to think that not only did Israel have a legitimate de facto right to exist (in the same sense that, say, Pakistan does—yes, it was created as a modern political entity rather arbitrarily out of what used to be part of somewhere else, but it’s been there for several decades now, it’s got an army and a postal service and so forth, it exists, get used to it), but that its existence was absolutely a done deal, a settled issue: Israel was here to stay.

I still believe the former, but I’m not so sure about the latter anymore. The more brutality and belligerence Israel is seen as condoning, the more possible it seems to me that if Israel does encounter a serious existential threat at some point, a critical mass of people worldwide will simply not care. Sure, they’d assist Jewish refugees fleeing Israel—they won’t make that mistake twice—but they just won’t consider Israel as a political entity worth helping to defend.