If you can get the people angry at ethnic/religious/foreign enemies, you can distract them from the fact you’re screwing them. It’s the oldest trick in the book.
[/QUOTE]
You cannot get people angry at enemies of whatever stripe, unless they already had the propensity to so be. I doubt Bolivians will ever get very angry at Malaysians for instance.
[QUOTE=Corry El]
That is self evidently what rulers in the Arab (and some other parts of the Muslim) world have tried to do, with some success. It’s obviously not a permanent and foolproof way to distract popular attention from their failings, but it’s a well established post 1948 part of the mix along with secret police, etc.
[/QUOTE]
Self evidently? Sorry what? Sadat’s biggest threat came not from the hardliners, but from the huge increase in the price of bread. Assad has shown nothing but hostility to Israel, yet it was the never ending drought that caught on and started the events which led to civil war. Saddam used to prefer (American propaganda notwithstanding) to buy out his critics and enemies through infrastructure developments, as did Gaddaffi.
[QUOTE=Corry El]
It’s hard to believe anyone is seriously arguing that international criticism of Israel isn’t disproportionate to its wrongdoing, which it is obviously is.
[/QUOTE]
Oh really. Illegally occupying and annexing land and all they get is a polite “don’t do that” and thats “disproportionate” to their wrongdoing. Unless you meant, very very mild, thatis ridiculous. They has been literally no UN mandated enforcement mechanism, no Iraq style sanctions and blockade, no major power operation ala Balkans, zip, nada, just a “please stop” and that apparently makes Israel the most persecuted country on the planet.
North Americans seem to take leave of their senses when discussing Israel. Its a bit like they used to happen with Apartheid South Africa. Like Pierre Trudeau, insisting that lets talk Uganda/ not South Africa at a Commonwealth summit.
We live on a small planet. And in our increasingly digital world, almost everything we do has no concern for borders. So we need international cooperation in many ways. If the UN is broke, let’s fix it.
Just as we should try to make things better within the US, or within Israel.
The particular grievance of the OP, of “Why do we keep picking on Israel”? Doesn’t work for me. We keep raising the issue because they keep building settlements. And saying there are more important issues is a handwave in leiu of a argument.
It isn’t that US membership in the League of Nation would have stopped Hitler, it’s that US isolationism led by the likes of Charles Lindbergh gave Hitler some assurance that he could do as he pleased in Europe with no American involvement. At the time the US military wasn’t as large as it turned out to be, but surely Hitler knew that a nation of that size, once mobilized, would be formidable.
Back to the topic at large: an American withdrawal from the UN would be crippling, perhaps inviting North Korea to cancel its cease fire and go back on the offensive. In this day and age when the Pakistani Foreign Minister threatens nuclear war with Israel in response to a bit of fake news, why on earth would we want to undermine an international organization dedicated to peace? So they pass resolutions against Israel, some are deserved and some are not. It’s time for the American right wing to realize that Israel is not automatically right on every issue.
South Africa was thrown out of the Commonwealth in 1961, so why would Pierre Trudeau, who wasn’t Prime Minister until 1968, want to discuss South Africa at a Commonwealth summit?
Israel has offered peace and statehood to Palestine. On multiple occasions they’ve agreed to plans that would create a Palestinian state with inviolable borders. They were always rebuffed. South Africa, not so much.
What about the paragraph prior to the one you quoted given your belief Israel has made reasonable offers of peace and statehood? They have been given a slap on the hand at most while they continue to acquire the territory they want.
Just out of curiosity, do you happen to know what specific problems the Palestinians had with these offers? If you do know, are you able to sympathize with them? If unable to sympathize with their views is it because you are a strong supporter of the Israeli government’s negotiating position or really it’s just that you don’t give a shit about the Palestinians?
It’s the Middle East - it’s not hard to get people angry.
As mentioned, the Palestinians have had several offers wherein the settlements were ended and they got their own land. They turned them down. As (I believe) Yassir Arafat said, 'the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity".
If the Palestinians reject a deal that includes stopping the settlements, why is Israel being condemned for not abiding by the deal the Palestinians said they didn’t want?
None of the offers have been completely ideal for either side; that is inescapably true. Some thing the Palestinians want - notably an unfettered right of return - are simply not going to happen; that is also, inescapably, true.
Look, let’s be perfectly honest; Palestinians are a put upon people in a shitty situation that is to a large extent not of their doing. The thing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that so much of the blame, if you want to fix blame, can be assigned to parties other than Israel and the Palestinians. It’s not Ahmed the Palestinian’s fault that Syria uses him and his family as proxy martyrs, or that Jordan didn’t give a hoot about Palestinian statehood when they occupied the West Bank, or that the UK (insert a laundry list of colonialism sins.)
What the solution is, to my mind, is quite obvious; it’s something basically approximating the Oslo accords. Is that solution politically viable? Perhaps not. Palestinian leaders who make peace overtures to Israel are taking their lives into their hands. Well, and Israelis too; you could ask Yitzhak Rabin if he hadn’t been shot to death. But if the best solution is one no one will accept, then that’s reality. If Palestinian leadership will not agree to a deal because they cannot (for whatever reason) accept a deal where they don’t get to keep both Palestine and Israel, there will be no deal. If Israeli leadership cannot agree to a deal whereby more control over the West Bank is not conceded, there will be no deal.
There’s no such thing as a neutral political organization. Some political organizations have a positive effect, on net, and some have a negative effect.
You have pointed out that the UN has flaws and biases, which no one is really disputing. But you haven’t really provided any evidence that, in totality, the influence of the UN is negative.
You’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The UN is a generally good and useful organization, despite the fact that it gives a disproportionate voice to the enemies of Israel.
Debatable. There were at least three wars between Great Powers in that period, and none in the last 70 years; not to mention that you’ve convienently left out the period 1914-1945.
How was the Soviet Union given “three votes to join?”
That ignores what I said. No, trying to divert attention to Israel hasn’t been a foolproof way for Arab/Muslim politicians/dictators to stay in power, as I said. But it’s absolutely been one of their methods to try.
As opposed to people from Muslim backgrounds who are typically so level headed about Israel.
In order to get the USSR to join, it was agreed that Byelorussia (now Belarus) and Ukraine would be given votes in the General Assembly even though they were not independent nations.
The blame for the settlement project, though, rests squarely and solely with the Israelis.
Israel could have kept the Palestinian territories under military occupation, if they felt they had to do that for security reasons, without transferring huge amounts of their own population into the territories. What the settlements are about is an expansionist attempt at de facto annexation, with zero concern for the rights and territorial claims of the Palestinians.
And now Israel is in a cleft stick, because the rest of the world still condemns the settlements but there is no longer any way Israel can retreat from the settlements without launching a bloody civil war with the settlers who are determined to keep occupying and expanding them.
That part—the settlements issues—is a domestic and foreign-policy disaster in the making that is entirely Israel’s own fault.
Has anyone ever floated this idea? Okay, Israeli Jews and others can move in and settle in the Palestinian Territories. But they need to follow the local laws. In other words: no longer being the current version of extraterritoriality “enjoyed” by the current crop of settlers.
That would work, if Israel and the Palestinians could agree on who administers the territories and thus sets and enforces the local laws. But that’s what they can’t agree on.
IOW Israel and the Palestinians can’t agree on a compromise where the Palestinians get 95+% of the land they want, and in return Israel gets an end to the rocket attacks and terrorism. The Palestinians said No, we want 100% plus the right of return, plus part of Jerusalem. To which Israel, or at least the settlers, said “fine, if you say all or nothing, it’s nothing”.
