"The Cult of the Occupation" or The International Media Coverage of Israel

[Roen]

Disclaimer(s):
A. Long read ahead. It is, but at the very least I can assure you it is a very well written read.
B. According to the spirit of annonymity here in the E community, I've kept my personal information private for the last five years I've been a part of this community. I respect everyone's right to selective ignorance regarding my life. However, I'd feel negligent posting this without noting that I am indeed from Israel, of the left wing persuasion. I feel that no information or opinion should be taken without careful consideration of its source (or, at least, its courier).
C. I have my own reservations regarding the article below, but I agree with enough of it to feel like it should be said, or at least considered.

I happened upon this piece on FB, been shared by some of my more politically savvy friends. I found it really enlightening on some aspects, and wanted to share it with you lovely bunch.

The Ideological Roots of Media Bias Against Israel / Matti Fridman
[Winter- 2015]

Matti Friedman speaking at the BICOM annual dinner, 26 January 2015.
On 26 January 2015 the former AP reporter Matti Friedman delivered the keynote speech at BICOM’s annual dinner in London. Expanding on a widely-noted argument first set out in Tablet and The Atlantic, Friedman spoke about how the media dissect and magnify Israel’s flaws while purposely erasing those of its enemies. He spoke about a fashionable and extravagant disgust for Israel among many in the West, and the rise of a ‘cult of the Occupation’ which positions Jewish arrogance and perfidy at the heart of all the problems of the Middle East.

One night several years ago, I came out of Bethlehem after a reporting assignment and crossed through the Israeli military checkpoint between that city and its neighbour, Jerusalem, where I live. With me were perhaps a dozen Palestinian men, mostly in their 30s – my age. No soldiers were visible at the entrance to the checkpoint, a precaution against suicide bombers. We saw only steel and concrete. I followed the other men through a metal detector into a stark corridor and followed instructions barked from a loudspeaker – ‘Remove your belt!’ ‘Lift up your shirt!’ The voice belonged to a soldier watching us on a closed-circuit camera. Exiting the checkpoint, adjusting my belt and clothing with the others, I felt like a being less than entirely human and understood, not for the first time, how a feeling like that would provoke someone to violence.

Consumers of news will recognise this scene as belonging to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which keeps the 2.5 million Palestinians in that territory under military rule, and has since 1967. The facts of this situation aren’t much in question. This should be an issue of concern to Israelis, whose democracy, military, and society are corroded by the inequality in the West Bank. This, too, isn’t much in question.

The question we must ask, as observers of the world, is why this conflict has come over time to draw more attention than any other, and why it is presented as it is. How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 per cent of the world’s surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other? We must ask how Israelis and Palestinians have become the stylised symbol of conflict, of strong and weak, the parallel bars upon which the intellectual Olympians of the West perform their tricks – not Turks and Kurds, not Han Chinese and Tibetans, not British soldiers and Iraqi Muslims, not Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Christians, not Saudi sheikhs and Saudi women, not Indians and Kashmiris, not drug cartel thugs and Mexican villagers. Questioning why this is the case is in no way an attempt to evade or obscure reality, which is why I opened with the checkpoint leading from Bethlehem. On the contrary – anyone seeking a full understanding of reality can’t avoid this question. My experiences as a journalist provide part of the answer, and also raise pressing questions that go beyond the practice of journalism.

I have been writing from and about Israel for most of the past 20 years, since I moved there from Toronto at age 17. During the five and a half years I spent as part of the international press corps as a reporter for the American news agency The Associated Press (AP), between 2006 and 2011, I gradually began to be aware of certain malfunctions in the coverage of the Israel story – recurring omissions, recurring inflations, decisions made according to considerations that were not journalistic but political, all in the context of a story staffed and reported more than any other international story on earth. When I worked in the AP’s Jerusalem bureau, the Israel story was covered by more AP news staff than China, or India, or all of the 50-odd countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. This is representative of the industry as a whole.

*

In early 2009, to give one fairly routine example of an editorial decision of the kind I mean, I was instructed by my superiors to report a second-hand story taken from an Israeli newspaper about offensive t-shirts supposedly worn by Israeli soldiers. We had no confirmation of our own of the story’s veracity, and one doesn’t see much coverage of things US Marines or British infantrymen have tattooed on their chests or arms. And yet t-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers were newsworthy in the eyes of one of the world’s most powerful news organisations. This was because we sought to hint or say outright that Israeli soldiers were war criminals, and every detail supporting that portrayal was to be seized upon. Much of the international press corps covered the t-shirt story. At around the same time, several Israeli soldiers were quoted anonymously in a school newsletter speaking of abuses they had supposedly witnessed while fighting in Gaza; we wrote no fewer than three separate stories about this, although the use of sources whose identity isn’t known to reporters is banned for good reason by the AP’s own in-house rules. This story, too, was very much one that we wanted to tell. By the time the soldiers came forward to say they hadn’t actually witnessed the events they supposedly described, and were trying to make a point to young students about the horrors and moral challenges of warfare, it was, of course, too late.

Also in those same months, in early 2009, two reporters in our bureau obtained details of a peace offer made by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, to the Palestinians several months before, and deemed by the Palestinians to be insufficient. The offer proposed a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in a shared Jerusalem. This should have been one of the year’s biggest stories. But an Israeli peace offer and its rejection by the Palestinians didn’t suit our story. The bureau chief ordered both reporters to ignore the Olmert offer, and they did, despite a furious protest from one of them, who later termed this decision ‘the biggest fiasco I’ve seen in 50 years of journalism.’ But it was very much in keeping not only with the practice at the AP, but in the press corps in general. Soldiers’s vile t-shirts were worth a story. Anonymous and unverifiable testimonies of abuses were worth three. A peace proposal from the Israeli prime minister to the Palestinian president was not to be reported at all.

Vandalism of Palestinian property is a story. Neo-Nazi rallies at Palestinian universities or in Palestinian cities are not – I saw images of such rallies suppressed on more than one occasion. Jewish hatred of Arabs is a story. Arab hatred of Jews is not. Our policy, for example, was not to mention the assertion in the Hamas founding charter that Jews were responsible for engineering both world wars and the Russian and French revolutions, despite the obvious insight this provides into the thinking of one of the most influential actors in the conflict.

100 houses in a West Bank settlement are a story. 100 rockets smuggled into Gaza are not. The Hamas military build-up amid and under the civilian population of Gaza is not a story. But Israeli military action responding to that threat – that is a story, as we all saw this summer. Israel’s responsibility for the deaths of civilians as a result – that’s a story. Hamas’s responsibility for those deaths is not. Any reporter from the international press corps in Israel, whether he or she works for the AP, Reuters, CNN, the BBC, or elsewhere, will recognise the examples I’ve cited here of what is newsworthy and what is not as standard operating procedure.

In my time in the press corps I saw, from the inside, how Israel’s flaws were dissected and magnified, while the flaws of its enemies were purposely erased. I saw how the threats facing Israel were disregarded or even mocked as figments of the Israeli imagination, even as these threats repeatedly materialised. I saw how a fictional image of Israel and of its enemies was manufactured, polished, and propagated to devastating effect by inflating certain details, ignoring others, and presenting the result as an accurate picture of reality. Lest we think this is something that has never happened before, we might remember Orwell’s observation about journalism from the Spanish Civil War: ‘Early in life,’ he wrote, ‘I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. (…) I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”’ That was in 1942.

Over time, I came to understand that the malfunctions I was witnessing, and in which I was playing a part, were not limited to the AP. I saw that they were rather part of a broader problem in the way the press functioned, and in how it saw its job. The international press in Israel had become less an observer of the conflict than a player in it. It had moved away from careful explanation and toward a kind of political character assassination on behalf of the side it identified as being right. It valued a kind of ideological uniformity from which you were not allowed to stray. So having begun with limited criticism of certain editorial decisions, I now found myself with a broad critique of the press.

Eventually, however, I realised that even the press wasn’t the whole story. The press was playing a key role in an intellectual phenomenon taking root in the West, but it wasn’t the cause, or not the only cause – it was both blown on a certain course by the prevailing ideological winds, and causing those winds to blow with greater force. Many journalists would like you to believe that the news is created by a kind of algorithm – that it’s a mechanical, even scientific process in which events are inserted, processed, and presented. But of course the news is an imperfect and entirely human affair, the result of interactions between sources, reporters, and editors, all of whom bear the baggage of their background and who reflect, as we all do to some extent, the prejudices of their peers.

In the aftermath of last summer’s Gaza war, and in light of events in Europe in recent months, it should be clear that something deep and toxic is going on. Understanding what that is, it seems to me, will help us understand something important not only about journalism but about the Western mind and the way it sees the world.

What presents itself as political criticism, as analysis, or as journalism, is coming to sound more and more like a new version of a much older complaint – that Jews are troublemakers, a negative force in world events, and that if these people, as a collective, could somehow be made to vanish, we would all be better off. This is, or should be, a cause for alarm, and not only among people sympathetic to Israel or concerned with Jewish affairs. What is in play right now has less to do with the world of politics than with the worlds of psychology and religion, and less to do with Israel than with those condemning Israel.

The occupation of the West Bank, with which I opened, would seem to be at the heart of the story, the root cause, as it were, of the conflict portrayed as the most important on earth. A few words, then, about this occupation.

The occupation was created in the 1967 Mideast War. The occupation is not the conflict, which of course predates the occupation. It is a symptom of the conflict, a conflict that would remain even if the symptom were somehow solved. If we look at the West Bank, the only Palestinian area currently occupied by Israel, and if we include Jerusalem, we see that the conflict in these areas claimed 60 lives last year – Palestinian and Israeli.

An end to this occupation would free Palestinians from Israeli rule, and free Israelis from ruling people who do not wish to be ruled. Observers of the Middle East in 2015 understand, too, that an end to the occupation will create a power vacuum that will be filled, as all power vacuums in the region have been, not by the forces of democracy and modernity, which in our region range from weak to negligible, but by the powerful and ruthless, by the extremists. This is what we’ve learned from the unravelling of the Middle East in recent years. This is what happened in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, and before that in Gaza and southern Lebanon. My home in Jerusalem is within an easy day’s drive of both Aleppo and Baghdad. Creating a new playground for these forces will bring the black-masked soldiers of radical Islam within yards of Israeli homes with mortars, rockets, and tunnelling implements. Many thousands will die.

Beyond the obvious threat to Palestinian Christians, women, gays, and liberals, who will be the first to suffer, this threatens to render much or all of Israel unliveable, ending the only safe progressive space in the Middle East, the only secure minority refuge in the Middle East, and the only Jewish country on earth. No international investment or guarantees, no Western-backed government or Western-trained military will be able to keep that from happening, as we have just seen in Iraq. The world will greet this outcome with sincere expressions of sympathy. Only several years ago I, like many on the left, might have dismissed this as an apocalyptic scenario. It isn’t. It is the most likely scenario.

People observing this conflict from afar have been led to believe that Israel faces a simple choice between occupation and peace. That choice is fiction. The Palestinian choice, it is said, is between Israeli occupation and an independent democracy. That choice, too, is fiction. Neither side faces a clear choice, or clear outcomes. Here we have a conflict in a region of conflict, with no clear villain, no clear victim, and no clear solution, one of many hundreds or thousands of ethnic, national, and religious disputes on earth.

*

The only group of people subject to a systematic boycott at present in the Western world are Jews, appearing now under the convenient euphemism ‘Israelis.’ The only country that has its own ‘apartheid week’ on campuses is the Jewish country. Protesters have interfered with the unloading of Israeli shipping on the West Coast of the United States, and there are regular calls for a boycott of anything produced in the Jewish state. No similar tactics are currently employed against any other ethnic group or nationality, no matter how egregious the human rights violations attributed to that group’s country of origin.

Anyone who questions why this is so will be greeted with shouts of ‘the occupation!’, as if this were explanation enough. It is not. Many who would like to question these phenomena don’t dare, for fear that they will somehow be expressing support for this occupation, which has been inflated from a geopolitical dilemma of modest scope by global standards into the world’s premier violation of human rights.

The human costs of the Middle Eastern adventures of America and Britain in this century have been far higher, and far harder to explain, than anything Israel has ever done. They have involved occupations, and the violence they unleashed continues as I speak here this evening. No one boycotts American or British professors. Turkey is a democracy, and a NATO member, and yet its occupation of northern Cyprus and long conflict with the stateless Kurds – many of whom see themselves as occupied – are viewed with a yawn; there is no ‘Turkish Apartheid Week.’ The world is full of injustice. Billions of people are oppressed. In Congo, five million people are dead. The time has come for everyone to admit that the fashionable disgust for Israel among many in the West is not liberal but is selective, disproportionate, and discriminatory.

There are simply too many voices coming from too many places, expressing themselves in too poisonous a way, for us to conclude that this is a narrow criticism of the occupation. It’s time for the people making these charges to look closely at themselves, and for us to look closely at them.

Naming and understanding this sentiment is important, as it is becoming one of the key intellectual trends of our time. We might think of it as the ‘Cult of the Occupation.’ This belief system, for that it what it is, uses the occupation as a way of talking about other things.

As usual with Western religions, the centre of this one is in the Holy Land. The dogma posits that the occupation is not a conflict like any other, but that it is the very symbol of conflict: that the minute state inhabited by a persecuted minority in the Middle East is in fact a symbol of the ills of the West – colonialism, nationalism, militarism, and racism. In the recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, a sign hoisted by marchers linked the unrest between African Americans and the police to Israeli rule over Palestinians.

The cult’s priesthood can be found among the activists, NGO experts, and ideological journalists who have turned coverage of this conflict into a catalogue of Jewish moral failings, as if Israeli society were different from any other group of people on earth, as if Jews deserve to be mocked for having suffered and failed to be perfect as a result.

Most of my former colleagues in the press corps aren’t full-fledged members of this group. They aren’t true believers. But boycotts of Israel, and only of Israel, which are one of the cult’s most important practices, have significant support in the press, including among editors who were my superiors. Sympathy for Israel’s predicament is highly unpopular in the relevant social circles, and is something to be avoided by anyone wishing to be invited to the right dinner parties, or to be promoted. The cult and its belief system are in control of the narrative, just as the popular kids in a school are those who decide what clothes or music are acceptable. In the social milieu of the reporters, NGO workers, and activists, which is the same social world, these are the correct opinions. This guides the coverage. This explains why the events in Gaza this summer were portrayed not as a complicated war like many others fought in this century, but as a massacre of innocents. And it explains much else.

So prevalent has this kind of thinking become that participating in liberal intellectual life in the West increasingly requires you to subscribe at least outwardly to this dogma, particularly if you’re a Jew and thus suspected of the wrong sympathies. If you’re a Jew from Israel, your participation is increasingly conditional on an abject and public display of self-flagellation. Your participation, indeed, is increasingly unwelcome.

What, exactly, is going on?

Observers of Western history understand that at times of confusion and unhappiness, and of great ideological ferment, negative sentiment tends to coagulate around Jews. Discussions of the great topics of the time often end up as discussions about Jews.

In the late 1800s, for example, French society was riven by the clash between the old France of the church and army, and the new France of liberalism and the rule of law. The French were preoccupied with the question of who is French, and who is not. They were smarting from their military humiliation by the Prussians. All of this sentiment erupted around the figure of a Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, accused of betraying France as a spy for Germany. His accusers knew he was innocent, but that didn’t matter; he was a symbol of everything they wanted to condemn.

To give another example: Germans in the 1920s and 1930s were preoccupied with their humiliation in the Great War. This became a discussion of Jewish traitors who had stabbed Germany in the back. Germans were preoccupied as well with the woes of their economy – this became a discussion of Jewish wealth, and Jewish bankers.

In the years of the rise of communism and the Cold War, communists concerned with their ideological opponents talked about Jewish capitalists and cosmopolitans, or Jewish doctors plotting against the state. At the very same time, in capitalist societies threatened by communism, people condemned Jewish Bolsheviks.

This is the face of this recurring obsession. As the journalist Charles Maurras wrote, approvingly, in 1911: ‘Everything seems impossible, or frighteningly difficult, without the providential arrival of anti-Semitism, through which all things fall into place and are simplified.’

The West today is preoccupied with a feeling of guilt about the use of power. That’s why the Jews, in their state, are now held up in the press and elsewhere as the prime example of the abuse of power. That’s why for so many the global villain, as portrayed in newspapers and on TV, is none other than the Jewish soldier, or the Jewish settler. This is not because the Jewish settler or soldier is responsible for more harm than anyone else on earth – no sane person would make that claim. It is rather because these are the heirs to the Jewish banker or Jewish commissar of the past. It is because when moral failure raises its head in the Western imagination, the head tends to wear a skullcap.

One would expect the growing scale and complexity of the conflict in the Middle East over the past decade to have eclipsed the fixation on Israel in the eyes of the press and other observers. Israel is, after all, a sideshow: The death toll in Syria in less than four years far exceeds the toll in the Israel-Arab conflict in a century. The annual death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is a morning in Iraq.

And yet it is precisely in these years that the obsession has grown worse.

This makes little sense, unless we understand that people aren’t fixated on Israel despite everything else going on – but rather because of everything else going on. As Maurras wrote, when you use the Jew as the symbol of what is wrong, ‘all things fall into place and are simplified.’

The last few decades have brought the West into conflict with the Islamic world. Terrorists have attacked New York, Washington, London, Madrid, and now Paris. America and Britain caused the unravelling of Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead there. Afghanistan was occupied and thousands of Western soldiers killed, along with countless civilians – but the Taliban are alive and well, undeterred. Gaddafi was removed, and Libya is no better off. All of this is confusing and discouraging. It causes people to search for answers and explanations, and these are hard to come by. It is in this context that the ‘Cult of the Occupation’ has caught on. The idea is that the problems in the Middle East have something to do with Jewish arrogance and perfidy, that the sins of one’s own country can be projected upon the Western world’s old blank screen. This is the idea increasingly reflected on campuses, in labour unions, and in the media fixation on Israel. It’s a projection, one whose chief instrument is the press.

As one BBC reporter informed a Jewish interviewee on camera several weeks ago, after a Muslim terrorist murdered four Jewish shoppers at a Paris supermarket, ‘Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffered hugely at Jewish hands as well.’ Everything, that is, can be linked to the occupation, and Jews can be blamed even for the attacks against them. This isn’t the voice of the perpetrators, but of the enablers. The voice of the enablers is less honest than that of the perpetrators, and more dangerous for being disguised in respectable English. This voice is confident and growing in volume. This is why the year 2015 finds many Jews in Western Europe eyeing their suitcases again.

The Jews of the Middle East are outnumbered by the Arabs of the Middle East 60 to one, and by the world’s Muslims 200 to one. Half of the Jews in Israel are there because their families were forced from their homes in the 20th century not by Christians in Europe, but by Muslims in the Middle East. Israel currently has Hezbollah on its northern border, Al-Qaeda on its north-eastern and southern borders, and Hamas in Gaza. None of these groups seek an end to the occupation, but rather openly wish to destroy Israel. But it is naïve to point out these facts. The facts don’t matter: We are in the world of symbols. In this world, Israel has become a symbol of what is wrong – not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Great Britain, not America, not Russia.

I believe it’s important to recognise the pathologies at play in order to make sense of things. In this context it’s worth pointing out that I’m hardly the first to identify a problem – Jewish communities like this one, and particularly organisations like BICOM, identified a problem long ago, and have been expending immense efforts to correct it. I wish this wasn’t necessary, and it shouldn’t be necessary, but it undoubtedly is necessary, and becoming more so, and I have great respect for these efforts. Many people, particularly young people, are having trouble maintaining their balance amid this ideological onslaught, which is successfully disguised as journalism or analysis, and is phrased in the language of progressive politics. I would like to help them keep their bearings.

I don’t believe, however, that anyone should make a feeling of persecution the centre of their identity, of their Judaism, or of their relationship with Israel. The obsession is a fact, but it isn’t a new fact, and it shouldn’t immobilise us in anger, or force us into a defensive crouch. It shouldn’t make us less willing to seek to improve our situation, to behave with compassion to our neighbours, or to continue building the model society that Israel’s founders had in mind.

I was in Tel Aviv not long ago, on Rothschild Boulevard. The city was humming with life. Signs of prosperity were everywhere, in the renovated Bauhaus buildings, in the clothes, the stores. I watched the people go by: kids with old bikes and tattoos, businesspeople, men with women, women with women, men with men, all speaking the language of the Bible and Jewish prayer. The summer’s Hamas rockets were already a memory, just a few months old but subsumed in the frantic, irrepressible life of the country. There were cranes everywhere, raising new buildings. There were schoolchildren with oversized knapsacks, and parents with strollers. I heard Arabic, Russian, and French, and the country went about its business with a potent cheer and determination that you miss if all you see are threats and hatred. There have always been threats and hatred, and it has never stopped us. We have enemies, and we have friends. The dogs bark, as the saying goes, and the convoy rolls by.

One of the questions presented to us by the wars of the modern age is what now constitutes victory. In the 21st century, when a battlefield is no longer conquered or lost, when land isn’t changing hands and no one ever surrenders, what does it mean to win?

The answer is that victory is no longer determined on the battlefield. It’s determined in the centre, in the society itself. Who has built a better society? Who has provided better lives for people? Where is there the most optimism? Where can the most happy people be found? One report on world happiness ranked Israel as the 11th happiest country on earth. The UK was 22nd.

Israel’s intellectual opponents can rant about the moral failings of the Jews, obscuring their obsession in whatever sophisticated way they choose. The gunmen of Hamas and their allies can stand on heaps of rubble and declare victory. They can fire rockets, and shoot up supermarkets. But if you look at Tel Aviv, or at any thriving neighbourhood in Jerusalem, Netanya, Rishon LeZion, or Haifa, you understand that this is victory. This is where we’ve won, and where we win every day.

[elone]

To begin with, BICOM is nothing but a group of hasbarists who are bent on putting Israel and Zionism in the most favorable light as possible.

Perhaps a look at some of the writings of people like Ilan Pappé or Noam Chomsky would shed some light on what is going on here. There is so much misinformation and political pandering in Fridman's speech that one would think he was employed by Netanyahu or AIPAC.

This is nothing but a repeat of Israeli's saying "Yes, we are bad but look at who is worse." The trouble is, Israel claims to be a democracy and a nation built on laws with a high moral compass. The "most moral army in the world"; an army who murders women and children in Gaza with complete impunity. Israel is a  nation whose soldiers murder Palestinians and are rarely held accountable. A country who has put settlers on occupied land in defiance of international law and US law as well.

The list can go on and on, starting even before the 1948 war in which over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their lands and never allowed to return. Palestinians were murdered, villages razed, and  land colonized by foreign invaders. This is still going on today.

So the question is not the media bias against Israel, it is more the media bias for Israel. Israel commits acts everyday that would make headlines elsewhere, but in the US in particular, they are given a pass. Every day, in actions reminiscent of the East German STASI, Israeli soldiers break into Palestinian homes in the middle of the night, terrorize the occupants, photograph them, destroy their belongings and not a word is in the news. They spray skunk water everywhere indiscriminately. The IDF shoots protestors, Kent State anyone? Let a Palestinian stab and israeli and "terrorist" is all we hear. Let an Israeli policeman or soldier shoot a Palestinian in cold blood and nothing is in the news. It is only because of videos do we get a glimpse of the horrors of being a Palestinian in the occupied territories.

If Matti Fridman thinks all is unfair, then maybe he should be speaking of how Israel needs to go back to their borders. Oh, right, Israel in the only country in the world with no declared borders. Maybe they should let Palestinian refugees come home. Oh, right, only Jews can come to Israel. Palestinians who lived there for generations are exiled forever. Maybe he should complain about the over 50 discriminatory laws on the books in Israel. Maybe he should complain about the house demolitions, the lack of building permits for Palestinians, the theft of land and water resources, the checkpoints, the open air prison that is Gaza, the thousands of prisoners held without charge, the burning of olive trees, the separate laws for Israeli's and Palestinians in the West Bank, the Jewish only settlements built on Palestinian lands, roads built for Israeli licensed vehicles only; the list goes on and on.

The problem is not media bias, the problem is that people are not seeing the truth of the barbarity of the occupation. The problem is governments like the US who look the other way.

Israeli leaders have shown they have no intention for a just peace, the status quo is just fine for them. History is written by the victors, but now some people are writing about the victims, the people of Palestine.

BDS. Stop all aid to Israel until they observe basic human rights for all people, and in particular, give all Palestinians equal rights.

[Roen]

What are your sources for these accusations? And can you actually trust them?

Speaking as someone that has lived here for almost three decades, some of these accusations are plain wrong, others are simply not accurate. Your misinformation seems to be the product of selective journalism, just as stated in the article above.

[Roen]

To begin with, BICOM is nothing but a group of hasbarists who are bent on putting Israel and Zionism in the most favorable light as possible.
Perhaps a look at some of the writings of people like Ilan Pappé or Noam Chomsky would shed some light on what is going on here. There is so much misinformation and political pandering in Fridman's speech that one would think he was employed by Netanyahu or AIPAC.

Can say the same thing about BDS, man, you have no proof, at all, that the organization you're favoring is the one telling the truth as opposed to, say, being run by people driven by irrational hatred. Misinformation in the anti-Israeli press is a fact, they have been caught on doctoring videos, using outdated war photos from war zones and simply lying on numerous times. Been proven time and time again, so let's not talk about organizations. 

This is nothing but a repeat of Israeli's saying "Yes, we are bad but look at who is worse." The trouble is, Israel claims to be a democracy and a nation built on laws with a high moral compass. The "most moral army in the world"; an army who murders women and children in Gaza with complete impunity. Israel is a  nation whose soldiers murder Palestinians and are rarely held accountable. A country who has put settlers on occupied land in defiance of international law and US law as well.

What law is that? When was it legislated and how does it apply?

The list can go on and on, starting even before the 1948 war in which over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their lands and never allowed to return. Palestinians were murdered, villages razed, and  land colonized by foreign invaders. This is still going on today.

Again, sources on the murders, please.
There are no 700,000 Palestinian refugees, it's practically laughable because Palestinians are the only people in the world that their so called 'refugee' status seems to be hereditary. Also, what about all of the dozen other Arab countries in the area? Did you know that over 900,000 jews have been forcibly evicted from all of these countries, with no other place to go other than Israel? Or were they supposed to just scatter around the world and continue to live like a nomadic people?

Also, Israel is hardly the only country that employs such immigration laws. Germany has such laws, for instance, how is that a crime to give sanctuary to those of a religion that have been systematically persecuted, murdered and discriminated in literally EVERY land they have tried to settle in?   

So the question is not the media bias against Israel, it is more the media bias for Israel. Israel commits acts everyday that would make headlines elsewhere, but in the US in particular, they are given a pass. Every day, in actions reminiscent of the East German STASI, Israeli soldiers break into Palestinian homes in the middle of the night, terrorize the occupants, photograph them, destroy their belongings and not a word is in the news. They spray skunk water everywhere indiscriminately. The IDF shoots protestors, Kent State anyone? Let a Palestinian stab and israeli and "terrorist" is all we hear. Let an Israeli policeman or soldier shoot a Palestinian in cold blood and nothing is in the news. It is only because of videos do we get a glimpse of the horrors of being a Palestinian in the occupied territories.

The videos? You mean videos that have been documented to be staged again and again? Videos of Palestinian mothers holding their phones in their hands while egging their children to go and throw rocks at Israeli soldiers? That kind of videos? If you want actual proofs, I'll gladly supply them.
I'm not saying there isn't violence, of course there is, but what I find outrageous is how you seem to be ignoring the fact that the Israeli soldiers don't just go around at night because they enjoy harassing law abiding citizens, they are looking for terrorists, they have FOUND terrorists during those raids. The way you describe it, you simply ignore the fact that the Hamas employed terrorists are there, hiding among the civilians, using women and children and human shields, hiding their ammo in hospitals, using ambulances to ship explosive belts, hiding rockets under schools and digging their tunnels under civilian homes.
They do that, they have been documented and proven to do that, but you choose to ignore that and just condemn the necessary counter-measures that has been proven effective in preventing such attacks. That's reckless editing of the truth. 

If Matti Fridman thinks all is unfair, then maybe he should be speaking of how Israel needs to go back to their borders. Oh, right, Israel in the only country in the world with no declared borders. Maybe they should let Palestinian refugees come home. Oh, right, only Jews can come to Israel. Palestinians who lived there for generations are exiled forever. Maybe he should complain about the over 50 discriminatory laws on the books in Israel. Maybe he should complain about the house demolitions, the lack of building permits for Palestinians, the theft of land and water resources, the checkpoints, the open air prison that is Gaza, the thousands of prisoners held without charge, the burning of olive trees, the separate laws for Israeli's and Palestinians in the West Bank, the Jewish only settlements built on Palestinian lands, roads built for Israeli licensed vehicles only; the list goes on and on.

Checkpoints are crucial to prevent terrorists from entering Israeli territory, there are numerous accounts of weapons and explosives caught on these checkpoints, so we probably keep them. If you can think of a more effective way to make sure none of these things get through, please do. Oh, and don't use the "if you don't oppress them, they won't terrorize you", because we've tried that already. You try living as a child when riding a bus can get you blown to pieces, then tell me how these checkpoints are unnecessary.
Israel is also hardly the only country in the world with vague borders, and it was hardly the soul fault of the Israeli government, borders take peace agreements, and it takes two for that tango.
The roads build for the Israeli licensed vehicles were an actual thing, until they were ruled out by the ISRAELI supreme court of justice, thank you very much.

The problem is not media bias, the problem is that people are not seeing the truth of the barbarity of the occupation. The problem is governments like the US who look the other way.
Israeli leaders have shown they have no intention for a just peace, the status quo is just fine for them. History is written by the victors, but now some people are writing about the victims, the people of Palestine.
BDS. Stop all aid to Israel until they observe basic human rights for all people, and in particular, give all Palestinians equal rights.

Yes, war is rough, especially when you're fighting terrorist organizations that keep on enlisting civilians from its population, the same population that have "democratically" elected. Yes, they have, they voted to get a terrorist organization as their "government", the same one that is now taking responsibility for one terror attack after another, bombing Israeli cities day and night, actively digging tunnels under Israeli cities so their terrorist could sneak in and murder civilians, but I guess that's not barbaric or against human rights as a whole, is it?

You seem to be requiring equal civil rights for Palestinians, and that's kinda ridiculous to me, because they don't live in Israel. Are you suggesting that we conquer Gaza and the west bank to make it, and them, a part of Israel? Also, bear in mind that out of the 700,000 so called Palestinian refugees, no Arab country in the world has ever agreed to take them in, not because they didn't have the resources or the lands, simply to spite Israel and further develop the conflict. They have been actively massacring Palestinians that tried to immigrate into their borders.
Israel is proven to have more Palestinian and Muslim citizens (and the Arab-Israeli citizens DO enjoy equal rights), doctors, parliament members and ministers than jews in ANY arab country in the world, but we're still considered to be the barbaric ones.

You know what? It's a tough situation, there have been made some mistakes, I'm not claiming to innocence and I'm certainly not satisfied with the current political atmosphere in Israel at the moment. I think Netanyahu needs to go home (or to prison, to be honest) and I agree that the current measures being taken aren't leading us towards any sort of resolution. But to put all the blame on the Israeli government and to put all of the defensive moves it is doing in the light of murder and genocide is just hypocrisy. The relative security you see Israel enjoying now is the product of some of these doctrines that you so hastily condemn, and that deems them necessary, but I guess it's easier to judge from afar, especially from a place that never had to deal with the same complex, bloody, grief stricken and harsh reality.

You should come to Israel, you really should, instead of reading about it online and watching videos, just come here and talk to the people, see how we live, talk to our Muslim citizens, our jewish ones, our christian ones, see what's happening here with your own eyes. Go to Tel Aviv, go to Jaffa, go to Jerusalem, Haifa, Gaza even, visit the checkpoints, see the good and the bad. This isn't North Korea, nobody will hide anything from you if you look hard enough. See it for yourself and THEN pass judgement, I'd happily take it.

[Kythia]

And why would Israel give a toss whether it's actions are in defiance of US law? Little confused why you made that point.

[consortium11]

The trouble is, Israel claims to be a democracy and a nation built on laws with a high moral compass.

I've never quite got this point.

So if one day Israel went "you know what, screw it. We're no longer a democracy, we're a dictatorship with all elections suspended, we're going to change our rules of engagement to 'shoot anyone you like with no consequences at all', we're going to remove all rights from non-Jewish citizens and you know what, screw it, let's just cluster bomb the Gaza Strip and West Bank without warning because we can" it would lessen the amount of criticism they get or make it more morally acceptable? That actually the issue with Israel isn't the stuff that it does but the fact it does it while having elections and taking at least some precautionary measure to try to reduce civilian casualties?

[elone]

What are your sources for these accusations? And can you actually trust them?

Speaking as someone that has lived here for almost three decades, some of these accusations are plain wrong, others are simply not accurate. Your misinformation seems to be the product of selective journalism, just as stated in the article above.

I really do not have time to list the many sources out there. I do not usually post here but could not help it in this case.  Please note that the speech you posted here contains exactly zero sources and is simply a matter of opinion as are your own replies.

Try these:

https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org
http://www.yesh-din.org/en/
http://peacenow.org
http://www.maannews.com
http://www.btselem.org
http://mondoweiss.net
http://www.ifamericansknew.org   (this one is a bit biased but has statistics)
http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il

Please note: the vast majority of these sites are Jewish, I throw that in for those who will raise the issue of anti semitism. I am sure it will be raised anyway.

[elone]

And why would Israel give a toss whether it's actions are in defiance of US law? Little confused why you made that point.

Good point, Israel does not care who's laws they break. I am not speaking of US law, although the US breaks it's own laws when giving aid to Israel. There is the Leahy law. (not sure of its exact name) There is currently a lawsuit about US giving aid to countries that do not sign the Nuclear non-proliferation agreement. We will see where that goes.

I am talking about international laws. The Geneva convention, the United Nations, and the decree in 1948 that allowed the creation of the Stat of Israel.

Israel denies officially that any of these pertain to them, so be it.

[Kythia]

Well, no. I mean, you are speaking of US law. You went out of your way to point out that the actions of Israel are illegal under US law. Which, obviously, doesn't apply to Israel. I just couldn't work out why.

[elone]

I've never quite got this point.

So if one day Israel went "you know what, screw it. We're no longer a democracy, we're a dictatorship with all elections suspended, we're going to change our rules of engagement to 'shoot anyone you like with no consequences at all', we're going to remove all rights from non-Jewish citizens and you know what, screw it, let's just cluster bomb the Gaza Strip and West Bank without warning because we can" it would lessen the amount of criticism they get or make it more morally acceptable? That actually the issue with Israel isn't the stuff that it does but the fact it does it while having elections and taking at least some precautionary measure to try to reduce civilian casualties?

No, the issue is exactly the stuff that Israel does.

The US invaded Iraq because of the stuff the they did, or were thought to be doing. They were a dictatorship. If Israel were the same, we would be bombing Tel Aviv. (slight exaggeration). But that is the point.

Operations Protective Edge 2014.

2104 killed, 1462 civilians, 495 children, 253 women (UN sttistics)

Of the 247 airstrikes that hit residential compounds, out of the some 5,000 Israeli bombing raids, determined that of the 844 killed, 60% or 508 were presumed civilian children (280, of whom 19 were babies and 108 preschoolers between the ages of 1 and 5), women and older men. 98 or 11% were confirmed or suspected Hamas militants.

According to the army’s figures, 39,000 tank shells, 34,000 artillery shells, and 4.8 million bullets were supplied during the fighting. This doesn't count the missiles and bombs and morters.



Hardly precautionary measures. Wholesale destruction and death.

[elone]

Well, no. I mean, you are speaking of US law. You went out of your way to point out that the actions of Israel are illegal under US law. Which, obviously, doesn't apply to Israel. I just couldn't work out why.

I should have said that official US policy is that settlements are illegal under international law. My mistake.

[Roen]

I really do not have time to list the many sources out there. I do not usually post here but could not help it in this case.  Please note that the speech you posted here contains exactly zero sources and is simply a matter of opinion as are your own replies.

Try these:

https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org
http://www.yesh-din.org/en/
http://peacenow.org
http://www.maannews.com
http://www.btselem.org
http://mondoweiss.net
http://www.ifamericansknew.org   (this one is a bit biased but has statistics)
http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il

Please note: the vast majority of these sites are Jewish, I throw that in for those who will raise the issue of anti semitism. I am sure it will be raised anyway.

Are you claiming that it is impossible for jewish people to be antisemite? Because self hatred and self denomination for global validation is not a thing? I'd rather discuss the merits of the man, not his religion. Today we know of gay people that can be the worst of the homophobes and gay bashers, we know of muslims that can be the greatest criticizers of Islam.
A jewish person that does not live in Israel and that has never visited in Israel or at least tried to educate themselves about the Israeli condition while getting support and funding from proven Anti-Israeli organizations such as BDS is no less capable of Antisemism than your common Neo-Nazism enthusiast. On the contrary, those of the Jewish faith that try to get into that club will protest against Israel the loudest.

So please, religion is NOT alibi. I myself am an Atheist, though I'm still technically considered Jewish because of my herritage, so it's not a great feat or a great consequence to be considered jewish. Probably none of these people chose the Judaism, they were born into it, and it is very possible to hate a religion and a people that was "forced" upon you by birthright.

Let's stick to actual facts instead of cheap theatricals, please.

[Roen]

Edit: Irrelevant sarcasm is irrelevant.

[Roen]

Ok, so you asked for some candies (sources).
Well, my first and foremost source is the fact that I actually live in Israel and lived through most of the more volatile parts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but that doesn't help our readers much, so here are a couple of links.

First, a quick crash course into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this seems passably balanced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wo2TLlMhiw

Edit: Here is the long version, for those that don't need crush courses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2jnvsdF38k&list=PLPvkBEWSL5pKelZ5rXDwFTerxuq9rlUKk

Here are a couple of examples regarding news reports doctored, staged and misinformed by anti-israeli media:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umhy9LnorKQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNZniRFSeug
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQNbZyoJXBo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc9v5gLXP4w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkfKAz8l37U


Here are a couple articles about the biased, and yes, these might leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, obviously they were written with some bias, but how can you avoid emotional responses when witnessing such cynical and sometimes malevolent hypocrisy?

Let's start with this one, common DBS policy of spreading lies to further promote hate:
http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/10/msnbc-middle-east-expert-martin-fletcher-uses-anti-israel-propaganda-map/

Here are a couple more:

http://honestreporting.com/cnn-and-the-dubious-journalism-of-assertion/
http://honestreporting.com/no-palestinian-elections-so-delegitimize-israeli-democracy/
http://honestreporting.com/the-economist-lumps-terror-victims-and-terrorists-together/
http://honestreporting.com/bbcs-donnison-tweets-another-falsehood/

Now, since I feel like I've been monopolizing this debate, I'll retire from it for a while and allow others to participate.

[Kythia]

Before you disappear, out of curiosity: What do YOU think should happen. If you could click your fingers and resolve the situation, what would that resolution look like?

[Roen]

Before you disappear, out of curiosity: What do YOU think should happen. If you could click your fingers and resolve the situation, what would that resolution look like?

To be perfectly honest, I don't know.
I'd love the idea of one land for two countries, but not if one of them is under the reign of a terrorist organization such as Hamas. Just like Fridman said, we've seen what happens around this region with vacant political spaces, they get filled with radical Islam, like it is now. I feel like even if the Palestinian people do eventually frees itself of Hamas (as they should) a worse organization will take its place and basically make Israel unlivable.

I would love it if it could be one country for all religions, I'd personally LOVE it if Israel would stop being "a jewish state" and just return to being a "state for the jewish people" while still finding a way to accommodate people of all faiths as equal right citizens in a way that would ensure the safety of its Jewish citizens. Do I think it's possible? Unfortunately, I don't, the hatred is too deeply seeded, and there are too many of those that would like to see it continue, on both sides.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been the source of a lot of stress, anxieties and despair for the common Israeli person, I find it hard describing the magnitude of the emotional distress it instills in us. Feeling like there are those that have been wronged and now would like nothing more than to see you and everyone you know die or left homeless, without a land or a country of your own, and knowing that it'll never stop, that it will probably never be resolved, is petrifying.

Dealing with a people that gets so easily taken over by corrupted and radical leaderships isn't easy. What's easy is to sit on the sideline and judge the actions a nation takes to insure its safety, without stopping for a moment to ask yourself what you wouldn't do.

So I'll ask you in return:
What you wouldn't do to make sure that your own women, men and children wouldn't get butchered and bombed in a home that is the only home that you can confidently call your own?

Edit: Apologies, I didn't mean to insinuate that you pass such judgements or assume anything about your life or nationality. It's a more broader referral to those that do unrightfully pass that judgement. I'd like to take back my question, actually, the only reason I haven't deleted it is that in a political debate, it feels like cheating :P

[Oniya]

Ok, so you asked for some candies (sources).

Just a note - unlike other politics boards around the internet, requests for sources are commonplace here.  In particularly controversial and volatile topics, it is useful to be able to judge the bias and reliability of the individual source.  It also provides a launch-point for personal research.  There have been incidents where a particularly inflammatory article has been traced back to someplace like 'The Daily Mail' (a source noted for its lack of reliability.)

Rather than 'candies', sources are instead the 'meat/protein' of discussions here.

[Roen]

Just a note - unlike other politics boards around the internet, requests for sources are commonplace here.  In particularly controversial and volatile topics, it is useful to be able to judge the bias and reliability of the individual source.  It also provides a launch-point for personal research.  There have been incidents where a particularly inflammatory article has been traced back to someplace like 'The Daily Mail' (a source noted for its lack of reliability.)

Rather than 'candies', sources are instead the 'meat/protein' of discussions here.

Absolutely, didn't mean to insinuate otherwise, just a juvenile coin of phrase for me. Thank you for clarifying that.

[consortium11]

No, the issue is exactly the stuff that Israel does.

Then why the talk about Israel saying it's a democracy and a nation being built on laws?

Would things be any better if Israel did exactly what it does now but wasn't a democracy and wasn't built on laws? Would they be more morally justifiable if they were a dictatorship? Would it be an improvement if they made no pretence or attempt towards reducing civilian casualties? Would things be more positive if they came out and went "we're the bad guys and we'll do what we want"? The whole "Israel is meant to be a democracy" argument seems to me simply to be a way to focus criticism of Israel while not doing so for other states (or state actors)... and at best that's the bigotry of low expectations.

Hardly precautionary measures. Wholesale destruction and death.

I'm not going to particularly defend Operation Protective Edge or Israel's offensive security operations in general. But I will point out the hyperbole here.

Operation Protective Edge wasn't wholesale destruction and death if we want the terms to mean anything and if the intention was for it to be so then the Israeli armed forces are pretty much literally the most incompetent in the world. As well as the figures you cite with regards to ground based munitions it's estimated that over the first month of Protective Edge Israel dropped between 18,000 and 20,000 tons of explosives on Gaza. The results tragically were the loss of, depending on your source, between 2,100 and 2,300 lives in Gaza. When the allies bombed Dresden towards the end of WW2 they dropped around 4,000-4,500 tons of explosives but had no ground attack. That resulted in between 23,000 and 25,000 dead. In terms of property damage Protective Edge destroyed around 7,000 homes with roughly 90,000 damaged. During the bombing of Dresden about 80,000 homes were completely destroyed and around and another roughly 90,000 damaged, a third of which were uninhabitable.

So Israel dropped around four times as many bombs on Gaza than the Allies did on Dresden but while doing so caused less than 10% of the casualties and did around half the property damage... despite also having ground forces engaging as opposed to the purely aerial Dresden bombings.

Dresden was wholescale destruction. What happened in Gaza, tragic though it was, doesn't compare. And we're left with the conclusion that either the Israeli military are hopeless incompetent considering the amount of munitions they used during the conflict compared to the damage they inflicted or that measures were taken to reduce civilian casualties; the fact that the property damage was around half of Dresden while the killed were about 10% suggests that while still clearly awful and not entirely effective Palestinians were given warning to get our of their homes before the bombing began and it worked to a certain extent.

[elone]

Oh, honest mistake, really, because for a moment it sounded like you were saying that the whole founding of Israel is illegal by US law,
which is, you know, not the same statement? Perhaps you'd like to amend that in your original post, so to not misinform any casual reader.

I really think you need to stop reading your interpretation into my posts. Here is what I wrote:

"A country who has put settlers on occupied land in defiance of international law and US law as well."

I corrected as per Kythia referencing US policy, not law.

How could one possibly interpret my statement as to mean the founding of Israel is illegal by US law???

[Roen]

I really think you need to stop reading your interpretation into my posts. Here is what I wrote:

"A country who has put settlers on occupied land in defiance of international law and US law as well."

I corrected as per Kythia referencing US policy, not law.

How could one possibly interpret my statement as to mean the founding of Israel is illegal by US law???

Mhm, I misread your post, I do apologize.
Post duely edited.

[Kythia]

So I'll ask you in return:
What you wouldn't do to make sure that your own women, men and children wouldn't get butchered and bombed in a home that is the only home that you can confidently call your own?

To me, the problem is that you can't count attacks that don't happen.  Sure, there are x attacks per year.  There are y attacks that are definitely foiled - the weapons are found at a checkpoint, say, or military intelligence has phones bugged and catches it being organised.  But there are also z attacks per year that don't happen BECAUSE of the security.  A group want to plan an attack but they can't work how to make it work - how to be one of the x not one of the y - so it never progresses beyond an idea.  That number, z, is somewhere between 0 and a googol inclusive.

Israel is, presumably, claiming that the things it does are justified because of z being high.  Criticism of Israel often takes the form of accusing them of overreaction and implicitly claiming z is low.  *Shrug*. 

I realise that's not an answer, but its the closest I have to one.  What I wouldn't do is proportionate to the actual danger which is proportionate to z.

[elone]

Then why the talk about Israel saying it's a democracy and a nation being built on laws?

Would things be any better if Israel did exactly what it does now but wasn't a democracy and wasn't built on laws? Would they be more morally justifiable if they were a dictatorship? Would it be an improvement if they made no pretence or attempt towards reducing civilian casualties? Would things be more positive if they came out and went "we're the bad guys and we'll do what we want"? The whole "Israel is meant to be a democracy" argument seems to me simply to be a way to focus criticism of Israel while not doing so for other states (or state actors)... and at best that's the bigotry of low expectations.

I'm not going to particularly defend Operation Protective Edge or Israel's offensive security operations in general. But I will point out the hyperbole here.

Operation Protective Edge wasn't wholesale destruction and death if we want the terms to mean anything and if the intention was for it to be so then the Israeli armed forces are pretty much literally the most incompetent in the world. As well as the figures you cite with regards to ground based munitions it's estimated that over the first month of Protective Edge Israel dropped between 18,000 and 20,000 tons of explosives on Gaza. The results tragically were the loss of, depending on your source, between 2,100 and 2,300 lives in Gaza. When the allies bombed Dresden towards the end of WW2 they dropped around 4,000-4,500 tons of explosives but had no ground attack. That resulted in between 23,000 and 25,000 dead. In terms of property damage Protective Edge destroyed around 7,000 homes with roughly 90,000 damaged. During the bombing of Dresden about 80,000 homes were completely destroyed and around and another roughly 90,000 damaged, a third of which were uninhabitable.

So Israel dropped around four times as many bombs on Gaza than the Allies did on Dresden but while doing so caused less than 10% of the casualties and did around half the property damage... despite also having ground forces engaging as opposed to the purely aerial Dresden bombings.

Dresden was wholescale destruction. What happened in Gaza, tragic though it was, doesn't compare. And we're left with the conclusion that either the Israeli military are hopeless incompetent considering the amount of munitions they used during the conflict compared to the damage they inflicted or that measures were taken to reduce civilian casualties; the fact that the property damage was around half of Dresden while the killed were about 10% suggests that while still clearly awful and not entirely effective Palestinians were given warning to get our of their homes before the bombing began and it worked to a certain extent.

Very hard to compare Dresden and Gaza. One thing about Dresden was the use of incendiaries that burned the center of the city. The other thing noted was that it took place in February, 1945. The war ended in May, so it's destruction was probably unnecessary. That is another discussion.

[Kythia]

Very hard to compare Dresden and Gaza. One thing about Dresden was the use of incendiaries that burned the center of the city. The other thing noted was that it took place in February, 1945. The war ended in May, so it's destruction was probably unnecessary. That is another discussion.

Not sure either of those affect consortium's point though - that if the Israeli army were indeed trying for a massacre they did a terrible job of it (the fact they didn't use weapons that, as you say, were available in 1945 in fact just strengthens consortium's point)

ETA:  Also claiming that there are differences between the two and one of those differences was the Dresden's destruction was unnecessary kinda carries implications that I'm sure you didn't mean!

[elone]

My final thought.

What we have in Palestine/Israel are two forces (not necessarily the people) who each believe the other is out to destroy them. The Israeli's defend their tactics by saying it is necessary for their security and the Palestinians are intent on killing them and driving them into the sea. This includes all methods of policing, land theft, etc, etc.

The Palestinians see the Israeli's as colonial occupiers who are gradually taking all their resources and leaving them with nothing in hopes they will disappear or be exiled to other Arab nations, leaving Israel to the Jewish people. The right to resist occupation by any means is lawful and necessary.

The Israeli's have the power, the Palestinians have nothing. Therefore, Israel has no incentive to give up anything, the status quo is fine.

edit:

To the point of Israel being a democracy. It is Israel who constantly points to their being the "only democracy in the Middle East" as if that absolves them of any consequence for the damage they do. By claiming to be the good guys they avoid the repercussions that would occur to a dictator or other bad actors who did the same. It is just the way the world seems to work. Maybe I am wrong, but that is the way I see it.

Sure they could have destroyed Gaza, but what would that have bought them. They still, for the third time bombed the hell out of Gaza. Currently, there is supposed to be a cease fire of sorts, but Israel still fires on fishing boats, still fires across the border at demonstrators, still drives bulldozers and equipment to destroy farmland and crops, still imposes their will on the people of Gaza through what is basically a quarantine of goods and shipping. They put the Gazan's on a diet so they will not thrive, but will not starve to death either. Instead of a bullet to the head, it is a slow strangulation.

As each side becomes more entrenched and right wing leaning it all becomes more difficult.

Only when the US and the world put enough pressure on Israel to work for peace will there be a solution. That can be either a two state solution or a one state solution where all have equal rights and citizenry. A boycott is the first step.

Personally, I do not believe a negotiated peace is possible. I think it must be imposed by the rest of the world through sanctions and boycotts. Force both sides to end the struggles.

We will see what elections in Palestine bring. The last time, Hamas won the democratically monitored elections. Of course, the US and Israel immediately did not recognize that fact. Getting rid of Netanyahu would be a good start as well.

[Zakharra]

My final thought.

What we have in Palestine/Israel are two forces (not necessarily the people) who each believe the other is out to destroy them. The Israeli's defend their tactics by saying it is necessary for their security and the Palestinians are intent on killing them and driving them into the sea. This includes all methods of policing, land theft, etc, etc.

The Palestinians see the Israeli's as colonial occupiers who are gradually taking all their resources and leaving them with nothing in hopes they will disappear or be exiled to other Arab nations, leaving Israel to the Jewish people. The right to resist occupation by any means is lawful and necessary.

The Israeli's have the power, the Palestinians have nothing. Therefore, Israel has no incentive to give up anything, the status quo is fine.

edit:

To the point of Israel being a democracy. It is Israel who constantly points to their being the "only democracy in the Middle East" as if that absolves them of any consequence for the damage they do. By claiming to be the good guys they avoid the repercussions that would occur to a dictator or other bad actors who did the same. It is just the way the world seems to work. Maybe I am wrong, but that is the way I see it.

Sure they could have destroyed Gaza, but what would that have bought them. They still, for the third time bombed the hell out of Gaza. Currently, there is supposed to be a cease fire of sorts, but Israel still fires on fishing boats, still fires across the border at demonstrators, still drives bulldozers and equipment to destroy farmland and crops, still imposes their will on the people of Gaza through what is basically a quarantine of goods and shipping. They put the Gazan's on a diet so they will not thrive, but will not starve to death either. Instead of a bullet to the head, it is a slow strangulation.

As each side becomes more entrenched and right wing leaning it all becomes more difficult.

Only when the US and the world put enough pressure on Israel to work for peace will there be a solution. That can be either a two state solution or a one state solution where all have equal rights and citizenry. A boycott is the first step.

Personally, I do not believe a negotiated peace is possible. I think it must be imposed by the rest of the world through sanctions and boycotts. Force both sides to end the struggles.

We will see what elections in Palestine bring. The last time, Hamas won the democratically monitored elections. Of course, the US and Israel immediately did not recognize that fact. Getting rid of Netanyahu would be a good start as well.

As I see it, in the last 20-30 years, most of the Palestinians problems have been self made. They are the cause of most of their problems because they will not leave Israel alone. Any aid they get, is used to build tunnels and/or buy more weapons/supplies to launch attacks on Israel. They are absurdly paranoid about any religious sites (the Dome of the Rock being a popular one to get outraged about) and seem to go off in shooting/knifing sprees at the drop of a hat.

Until the Palestinians give up their pointless 'resistance' there will never be a peace either. A true peace requires both sides to want it. At this time (and for the last 60-70 odd years now), the Palestinians haven't wanted any peace that leaves Israel intact. Certainly Hamas and Hezbollah don't want Israel to survive. Until that issue is dropped by the Palestinians and Hamas, Hezbollah, any peace  initiative and agreement is going to go nowhere.

It bears pointing out that in the middle to late 90s, the Palestinians got about 90% of what they wanted. 90%...  Israel was willing to give them that much of their demands. And Yassar Arafat, the head of the PLO walked away from negotiation table to start another mini war against Israel.  Until this insane stupidity of eternal resistance and 'No negotiations until we get 100% of our demands!' by the Palestinians is dealt with one way or another, there is only one way peace will ever come between Israel and the Palestinians; when one side has been killed down to almost the last man, woman and child.

If the Palestinians were on the border of any other First world nations, they would have been stomped into the ground long ago. Israel, despite any criticisms they get, have been very restrained in their responses to Palestinian provocation. Especially as a democracy.

[elone]

As I see it, in the last 20-30 years, most of the Palestinians problems have been self made. They are the cause of most of their problems because they will not leave Israel alone. Any aid they get, is used to build tunnels and/or buy more weapons/supplies to launch attacks on Israel. They are absurdly paranoid about any religious sites (the Dome of the Rock being a popular one to get outraged about) and seem to go off in shooting/knifing sprees at the drop of a hat.

Until the Palestinians give up their pointless 'resistance' there will never be a peace either. A true peace requires both sides to want it. At this time (and for the last 60-70 odd years now), the Palestinians haven't wanted any peace that leaves Israel intact. Certainly Hamas and Hezbollah don't want Israel to survive. Until that issue is dropped by the Palestinians and Hamas, Hezbollah, any peace  initiative and agreement is going to go nowhere.

It bears pointing out that in the middle to late 90s, the Palestinians got about 90% of what they wanted. 90%...  Israel was willing to give them that much of their demands. And Yassar Arafat, the head of the PLO walked away from negotiation table to start another mini war against Israel.  Until this insane stupidity of eternal resistance and 'No negotiations until we get 100% of our demands!' by the Palestinians is dealt with one way or another, there is only one way peace will ever come between Israel and the Palestinians; when one side has been killed down to almost the last man, woman and child.

If the Palestinians were on the border of any other First world nations, they would have been stomped into the ground long ago. Israel, despite any criticisms they get, have been very restrained in their responses to Palestinian provocation. Especially as a democracy.

The Palestinians did not drive over 700,000 people from their homes in 1948, Israel did. The Palestinians did not start the 1967 war, Israel did. The Palestinians did not settle hundreds of thousands of people in occupied land in defiance of the United Nations and Geneva conventions, Israel did. The Palestinians have not refused people the right to come home to their lands, the Israeli's did. The Palestinians did not attack the USS Liberty, Israel did. The Palestinians did not invade Lebanon killing tens of thousands, Israel did. The Palestinians did not plant bombs and then blame it on Egyptians, Israel did. The Palestinians do not shoot demonstrators, demolish homes, invade mosques, assassinate civilians, steal land and water, blast homes with skunk water, support settler's who break laws and murder, and destroy entire neighborhoods, Israel does. Yes, the Palestinians have brought this all on themselves. Please tell me how?? Through legal resistance?

The Palestinians only want the West Bank, Gaza, parts of East Jerusalem, and the right for some refugees to be able to return to their homes. It is basically what they had before 1967. Israel refuses to give the land back. They actually should demand a return to 1948, the legal borders of the state of Israel as set by the UN. The  Arab League has offered peace with Israel if Israel will just walk back to the 1967 lines. Israel, ever intent on expansion will have none of it. Does a nation who wants peace settle its people all over another country in religious discriminatory settlements?

Offering 90% was not all of the plan. That is a simplistic view. Israel also wanted to control much of East Jerusalem, roadways, air space, borders, water, parts of Al-Aqsa and more. Also, no return of refugees. There was much left unsaid in the negotiations and Arafat could not trust Israel to abide by their word, seeing as how they have never done so, not even the UN plan that gave them statehood.

Hamas and Hezbollah do not represent the Palestinians, but even Hamas has shown willingness to make some concessions. Palestinians do not want to destroy Israel, they just want them to take their foot off their necks. How is it that Jews and Palestinians lived in relative harmony for a thousand years before the creations of the State of Israel?

Resistance is the right of all Palestinians since Israel has occupied their territory. Did the French have the right to resist Nazi's in WWII? Of course they did. Do the Palestinians have the right to resist the Israeli occupation of their lands. Of course they do.

Palestinians would be much better off if they were on the border of a first world nation. After WWII Germany was rebuilt, Japan was rebuilt, colonial enterprises  have for the most part been long gone.  Israel still holds on to land that they took through conquest in recent times. A first world country would have made peace with Palestinians long ago. It is Israeli intransigence that has kept the pot boiling all these years.

[Roen]

Elone, please stick to the facts, Israel did NOT start the war of '67, you can't just change history to suit your ideology.

[Roen]

The Palestinians did not drive over 700,000 people from their homes in 1948, Israel did. The Palestinians did not start the 1967 war, Israel did.

Now that's not your first lie in this thread, but it is the boldest one. Israel did not instigate the Six Days War, it stared when Egypt mobilized its units in utter defiance of the cease fire that took place at the time, which any other country would consider an act of war. Israel started a preemptive attack, sure, because all three countries- Egypt, Syria and Jordan were readying their air forces, which outnumbered the Israeli airforce and would have lead to a devastating blow if they were allowed to attack first. So you'd say that Israel should have just waited for an entire army of planes to destroy it? Suddenly being strategically savvy is a war crime? 

The Palestinians did not settle hundreds of thousands of people in occupied land in defiance of the United Nations and Geneva conventions, Israel did.

You seem to be turning a particularly selective blind eye to the strategical locations of said settlements, almost all of them were settled in ventages where they served as Israel's first line of defense against a population that proved to have every intent to murder civilians with every weapon and chance they get. It's in their Charter:

"Article 10:

Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness, and the mobilization of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution. It also requires the achieving of unity for the national (watani) struggle among the different groupings of the Palestinian people, and between the Palestinian people and the Arab masses, so as to secure the continuation of the revolution, its escalation, and victory."

Commando actions, only the commando warriors are civilians, not soldiers, if I'm not mistaken, there's a word for that, it's terror. Although you might call it "Legal Resistance"

The Palestinians have not refused people the right to come home to their lands, the Israeli's did.

That's weird, after 48 almost a million Jews were banished or chased out of the various Arab countries, yet not one of them ever considered themselves refugees or even tried to pass that title to their children, like the Palestinians stubbornly do, and are encouraged to do in the same PLO charter:

"Article 4:
The Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership in the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them.
Article 5:
The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father - whether inside Palestine or outside it - is also a Palestinian."

So you mean to say that every child a Palestinian has, every grandson, every cousin and every next generation family member is automatically a Palestinian with the birthright to inherit the land? That's pretty convenient, not to mention exclusive, as NO OTHER NATIONALITY IN THE WORLD makes such claims.

The Palestinians do not shoot demonstrators,

Israel has never done that, that's a blatant lie.

demolish homes,

Terror needs to have consequences, since the Hamas is recruiting civilians and refuses to recognize them as soldiers, it's forcing Israel to act against the terrorists themselves. How else would you deter other civilians from joining the organization and going out there to murder innocent men, women and children?

invade mosques,

They do invade mosques, but not only that, they invade synagogues, schools and kibbutzes.

assassinate civilians

Of course they don't assassinate, they slaughter, they jump on women and children in the streets and butcher them with knives, while the innocent bystanders, the palestinian shop keepers and street goers, stand at the sidelines and laugh, it has been documented, it has been proved, happened a year ago.

Support settler's who break laws and murder, and destroy entire neighborhoods, Israel does.

Settlers that have been prosecuted and punished, while rocks, Molotov and firework throwers on the other side were treated as heroes. But please, don't let the facts stand in your way.

Yes, the Palestinians have brought this all on themselves. Please tell me how?? Through legal resistance?

I'll tell you how, by encouraging terror, by voting for a terrorist organization, by treating dead terrorists as Shahids (saints), by glorifying armed (legal? seriously?) resistance.

Let's look back to the PLO charter for reference:

"Article 9:
Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it . They also assert their right to normal life in Palestine and to exercise their right to self-determination and sovereignty over it."

The Palestinians only want the West Bank, Gaza, parts of East Jerusalem, and the right for some refugees to be able to return to their homes. It is basically what they had before 1967. Israel refuses to give the land back. They actually should demand a return to 1948, the legal borders of the state of Israel as set by the UN.

You seem to be, yet again, harshly misinformed, or just selectively forgetful.

Here is what they actually demand, yet again, from the PLO charter:

"Article 2:
Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.
Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
Article 21:
The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian problem, or its internationalization."

Not only do they demand to return to the pre-48 borders, they completely deny any sort of a co-existence with a jewish country and refuse to acknowledge not only the right of the jewish people to have a land in Israel, but also completely dismiss the Jewish people's right to consider themselves a nationality, rather as a religion of drifters that are to be scattered around the globe and assimilate into other countries as their citizens.

Hamas and Hezbollah do not represent the Palestinians,

They voted for Hamas, in that so-called "democratic" elections, so suddenly they don't represent them? Why do you deny the Palestinians from their right to be represented by their own elected leadership?

How is it that Jews and Palestinians lived in relative harmony for a thousand years before the creations of the State of Israel?

Sure, relative harmony, unless you consider dozens of bloody massacres during the British mandate, for lands that were not conquered by the Jews, but legally and peacefully bought from their Arabian landlords. The British Mandate was before the creation of the state of Israel, unless I'm mistaken. (Sources at the bottom about the Palestinian aggressions)

Resistance is the right of all Palestinians since Israel has occupied their territory. Did the French have the right to resist Nazi's in WWII? Of course they did. Do the Palestinians have the right to resist the Israeli occupation of their lands. Of course they do.

Here we go, finally comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, I was wondering when that was going to happen. I'm not even going to grace that with a response, just wanted to make a note.
Well, anyway, to answer your question: yes, everyone is entitled to resistance, but NO, not when it comes to murdering innocent civilians- that is men, women and children by blowing up buses, cafe's, night clubs, invading kibbutzes and settlements and slitting people's throats in the middle of the night, throwing rocks at cars and shooting at them with automatic weapons. If that's your idea of legal resistance, I don't know what to tell you. Again, all of those acts of violence are encouraged by the PLO charter.

Palestinians would be much better off if they were on the border of a first world nation. After WWII Germany was rebuilt, Japan was rebuilt, colonial enterprises  have for the most part been long gone.  Israel still holds on to land that they took through conquest in recent times. A first world country would have made peace with Palestinians long ago. It is Israeli intransigence that has kept the pot boiling all these years.

I don't know any country that would tolerate such constant and unrelenting attacks against its citizens and cities- rockets, terror attacks, the brainwashing on young children to go out there and stab civilians on the street. Not USA, not the UK and definitely not Germany would EVER put up with that, and if you think otherwise, please consider what happened every single time ANY US citizen or even soldier were taken by any foreign organization or nation. Compared to methods employed there (like raising a whole battalion of assault helicopters), Israel has been restrained with its reactions.

In conclusion, I feel like you've been deeply and severely misinformed, either by reading the wrong website or just nitpicking your sources, you seem to pick the most biased ones and then present them in a semi-balanced tone, which is a misleading technique in an almost criminal degree.

Not only that, I feel like you seem to deny the Palestinian people of their clearly stated goals and antics, sometimes in direct contrast to what they have been publicly announcing for decades. You say you have a balanced view point of the whole conflict, but then you completely deny any merits that the Israeli people have to their side while denying ALL responsibility that the Palestinian people has for their mistakes and, yes, crimes. Terror is a crime, Elone, no matter how neatly you'd like to dress it as "legitimate resistance".
It seems to me that you'd like to treat the Palestinian as kids, as if they're not responsible for electing a terrorist organization, they're not responsible for raising their children to idolize terrorists, as if they're not responsible for actions that are firmly encouraged by their national charter, the sort of "Forgive them, father, they know not what they are doing."

You are treating them like they aren't entitled to their own political views (just because these don't suit your views), their own mentality (just because that doesn't fit the whole victimization theory) and the responsibility for their mistakes and faults, from which you'd like to absolve them by acting like they are children that are completely susceptible to outside influence, without the basic capability for critical thinking and moral compass.

We have a term for that sort of mentality, it's called racism.

To me it seems like you've made up your mind a long time ago, and ever since you've only accepted facts, rumors and lies that support your predetermined opinions. That's too bad, I'd like to extand you the same offer again; come to Israel, or Palestine, or whatever you want to call it. See the land, talk to the people, all of the people, put some faces on the figures and statistics and judge for yourself.

Videos and news reports can be so easily manipulated, man, you need to come here and see how it is with your own eyes. I'll gladly show you around (The Israeli side, as it would be really dangerous for me to go on the Palestinian side. Literally a death sentence).


Sources:
The PLO Charter (Yale Legal)
Examples for Pre-Israel Arab-Jewish conflicts:1929,1936-1939

[elone]

Elone, please stick to the facts, Israel did NOT start the war of '67, you can't just change history to suit your ideology.

I don't know what they teach you in Israel.  Here is the truth.

"It is often claimed that Israel’s attack on Egypt that began the June 1967 “Six Day War” was a “preemptive” one. Implicit in that description is the notion that Israel was under imminent threat of an attack from Egypt. Yet this historical interpretation of the war is not sustained by the documentary record.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin acknowledged in a speech in 1982 that its war on Egypt in 1956 was a war of “choice” and that, “In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

The current Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael B. Oren, acknowledged in his book “Six Days of War“, widely regarded as the definitive account of the war, that “By all reports Israel received from the Americans, and according to its own intelligence, Nasser had no interest in bloodshed”.

The President of Egypt, then known as the United Arab Republic (UAR), Gamal Abdel Nasser, later conveyed to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson that his troop buildup in the Sinai Peninsula prior to the war had been to defend against a feared Israeli attack."

Source: http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/07/04/israels-attack-on-egypt-in-june-67-was-not-preemptive/

[elone]

Now that's not your first lie in this thread, but it is the boldest one. Israel did not instigate the Six Days War, it stared when Egypt mobilized its units in utter defiance of the cease fire that took place at the time, which any other country would consider an act of war. Israel started a preemptive attack, sure, because all three countries- Egypt, Syria and Jordan were readying their air forces, which outnumbered the Israeli airforce and would have lead to a devastating blow if they were allowed to attack first. So you'd say that Israel should have just waited for an entire army of planes to destroy it? Suddenly being strategically savvy is a war crime? 
You seem to be turning a particularly selective blind eye to the strategical locations of said settlements, almost all of them were settled in ventages where they served as Israel's first line of defense against a population that proved to have every intent to murder civilians with every weapon and chance they get. It's in their Charter:

"Article 10:

Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness, and the mobilization of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution. It also requires the achieving of unity for the national (watani) struggle among the different groupings of the Palestinian people, and between the Palestinian people and the Arab masses, so as to secure the continuation of the revolution, its escalation, and victory."

Commando actions, only the commando warriors are civilians, not soldiers, if I'm not mistaken, there's a word for that, it's terror. Although you might call it "Legal Resistance"


That's weird, after 48 almost a million Jews were banished or chased out of the various Arab countries, yet not one of them ever considered themselves refugees or even tried to pass that title to their children, like the Palestinians stubbornly do, and are encouraged to do in the same PLO charter:

"Article 4:
The Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership in the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them.
Article 5:
The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father - whether inside Palestine or outside it - is also a Palestinian."

So you mean to say that every child a Palestinian has, every grandson, every cousin and every next generation family member is automatically a Palestinian with the birthright to inherit the land? That's pretty convenient, not to mention exclusive, as NO OTHER NATIONALITY IN THE WORLD makes such claims.
Israel has never done that, that's a blatant lie.
Terror needs to have consequences, since the Hamas is recruiting civilians and refuses to recognize them as soldiers, it's forcing Israel to act against the terrorists themselves. How else would you deter other civilians from joining the organization and going out there to murder innocent men, women and children?
They do invade mosques, but not only that, they invade synagogues, schools and kibbutzes.
Of course they don't assassinate, they slaughter, they jump on women and children in the streets and butcher them with knives, while the innocent bystanders, the palestinian shop keepers and street goers, stand at the sidelines and laugh, it has been documented, it has been proved, happened a year ago.
Settlers that have been prosecuted and punished, while rocks, Molotov and firework throwers on the other side were treated as heroes. But please, don't let the facts stand in your way.
I'll tell you how, by encouraging terror, by voting for a terrorist organization, by treating dead terrorists as Shahids (saints), by glorifying armed (legal? seriously?) resistance.

Let's look back to the PLO charter for reference:

"Article 9:
Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it . They also assert their right to normal life in Palestine and to exercise their right to self-determination and sovereignty over it."


You seem to be, yet again, harshly misinformed, or just selectively forgetful.

Here is what they actually demand, yet again, from the PLO charter:

"Article 2:
Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.
Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
Article 21:
The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian problem, or its internationalization."

Not only do they demand to return to the pre-48 borders, they completely deny any sort of a co-existence with a jewish country and refuse to acknowledge not only the right of the jewish people to have a land in Israel, but also completely dismiss the Jewish people's right to consider themselves a nationality, rather as a religion of drifters that are to be scattered around the globe and assimilate into other countries as their citizens.
They voted for Hamas, in that so-called "democratic" elections, so suddenly they don't represent them? Why do you deny the Palestinians from their right to be represented by their own elected leadership?
Sure, relative harmony, unless you consider dozens of bloody massacres during the British mandate, for lands that were not conquered by the Jews, but legally and peacefully bought from their Arabian landlords. The British Mandate was before the creation of the state of Israel, unless I'm mistaken. (Sources at the bottom about the Palestinian aggressions)
Here we go, finally comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, I was wondering when that was going to happen. I'm not even going to grace that with a response, just wanted to make a note.
Well, anyway, to answer your question: yes, everyone is entitled to resistance, but NO, not when it comes to murdering innocent civilians- that is men, women and children by blowing up buses, cafe's, night clubs, invading kibbutzes and settlements and slitting people's throats in the middle of the night, throwing rocks at cars and shooting at them with automatic weapons. If that's your idea of legal resistance, I don't know what to tell you. Again, all of those acts of violence are encouraged by the PLO charter.
I don't know any country that would tolerate such constant and unrelenting attacks against its citizens and cities- rockets, terror attacks, the brainwashing on young children to go out there and stab civilians on the street. Not USA, not the UK and definitely not Germany would EVER put up with that, and if you think otherwise, please consider what happened every single time ANY US citizen or even soldier were taken by any foreign organization or nation. Compared to methods employed there (like raising a whole battalion of assault helicopters), Israel has been restrained with its reactions.

In conclusion, I feel like you've been deeply and severely misinformed, either by reading the wrong website or just nitpicking your sources, you seem to pick the most biased ones and then present them in a semi-balanced tone, which is a misleading technique in an almost criminal degree.

Not only that, I feel like you seem to deny the Palestinian people of their clearly stated goals and antics, sometimes in direct contrast to what they have been publicly announcing for decades. You say you have a balanced view point of the whole conflict, but then you completely deny any merits that the Israeli people have to their side while denying ALL responsibility that the Palestinian people has for their mistakes and, yes, crimes. Terror is a crime, Elone, no matter how neatly you'd like to dress it as "legitimate resistance".
It seems to me that you'd like to treat the Palestinian as kids, as if they're not responsible for electing a terrorist organization, they're not responsible for raising their children to idolize terrorists, as if they're not responsible for actions that are firmly encouraged by their national charter, the sort of "Forgive them, father, they know not what they are doing."

You are treating them like they aren't entitled to their own political views (just because these don't suit your views), their own mentality (just because that doesn't fit the whole victimization theory) and the responsibility for their mistakes and faults, from which you'd like to absolve them by acting like they are children that are completely susceptible to outside influence, without the basic capability for critical thinking and moral compass.

We have a term for that sort of mentality, it's called racism.

To me it seems like you've made up your mind a long time ago, and ever since you've only accepted facts, rumors and lies that support your predetermined opinions. That's too bad, I'd like to extand you the same offer again; come to Israel, or Palestine, or whatever you want to call it. See the land, talk to the people, all of the people, put some faces on the figures and statistics and judge for yourself.

Videos and news reports can be so easily manipulated, man, you need to come here and see how it is with your own eyes. I'll gladly show you around (The Israeli side, as it would be really dangerous for me to go on the Palestinian side. Literally a death sentence).


Sources:
The PLO Charter (Yale Legal)
Examples for Pre-Israel Arab-Jewish conflicts:1929,1936-1939

I keep losing my posts for some reason. Perhaps I am too tired.

I really do not like being called a liar and a racist. Those types of attacks are usually used by those that have nothing to say. It is a good way to get this thread shut down by moderators.

There are so many untruths and misconception here that I hardly know where to start. It is late, another day.

One thing, you claim Israel never shoots protestors. I suggest you do a google search on that one. Start with Bilin and go onto the two young men killed in the Ofer prison protest just for starters. Watch some videos, they are not manipulated as you claim.

"Two Palestinians were shot dead by Border Police at a Nakba protest outside the Ofer Military Prison near Ramallah." In cold blood.

Shooting protestors, Israel calls them rioters, is official policy, shoot the legs.

Videos and news reports can be so easily manipulated, man, you need to come here and see how it is with your own eyes. I'll gladly show you around (The Israeli side, as it would be really dangerous for me to go on the Palestinian side. Literally a death sentence).

By the way, if I were to try to go to Israel, I would be interrogated and sent home from Ben-Gurion Airport for my pro Palestinian stand. No Thanks. They do that you know, or maybe you didn't. Why could you not go to the Palestinian side, all the settlers are there. Israeli's go there with no problem, many join the protests.  Are you a wanted criminal there or something? It is only the gov't of Israel who puts up warning signs to keep people form interacting.

[Roen]

By the way, if I were to try to go to Israel, I would be interrogated and sent home from Ben-Gurion Airport for my pro Palestinian stand. No Thanks. They do that you know, or maybe you didn't. Why could you not go to the Palestinian side, all the settlers are there. Israeli's go there with no problem, many join the protests.  Are you a wanted criminal there or something? It is only the gov't of Israel who puts up warning signs to keep people form interacting.

I'll deal with the rest of what you said when I get some time on my hands, but for now I'll deal with this one. No one checks your political stance when you enter Israel, there are many people that come and go here every day, from all persuasions and organizations, left and right. So unless you are wanted for any crimes at all, not just Israel, or unless you're standing on a boat loaded with weapons and ammunition headed to Gaza, no one is going to stop or interrogate you.

Also, I don't need my government to warn me about traveling to the Palestinian side, all I need to do is take a look of what was done to Israelis and Jews that ended up there and got lynched on the streets. Thanks, but no thanks.

[Blythe]

A general reminder: Let's remember to keep things civil and step back from the keyboard when frustrated on debate topics like this. Topics like this are often hard to talk about and can bring out tempers quickly. It's good to keep that in mind when posting.

Time for a small break. This thread will be locked for about 24 hours.

[Blythe]

All righty, going to unlock this. Discussion can resume, but please keep the above post about civility and temper in mind. Thank you.

[Oniya]

Civility includes remembering that other members are people.  If you can't make your point without attacking another member - don't post.

[Roen]

Thank you for keeping this discussion clean, Oniya. Tempers should be kept at a check, I say that realizing that mine might have slipped here and there. It's only natural, of course, when one feels like their country's very right to defend itself is being delegitimized and falsely framed as murder and war crimes, it can cause an outrage.

I, and the rest of the participents in this debate, will do our best to keep our tones more appropriate from here on out, to make sure none of our posts force you to using that delete button. I'm sure you didn't enjoy using it and I apologize that you had to be put in that position.

[dror]

Elone - did you read the article you brought before you posted it? It proves Roen's point.
It starts by saying that Nasser said AFTER THE FACT that it was not his intention to attack Israel. He just broke a ceasefire and got his ass handed to him, of course he'll never say it was his intention.
Let me ask this - if there is a war, and the sides agree on terms of a ceasefire, then one side breaks those terms, what are the consequences? Last I checked, if a ceasefire is broken, the war resumes. Hence, Nasser started the war by breaking the ceasefire. He later complained that he lost, as most losers do.
Take a look at what Nasser said just before war broke out, literally inviting Israel to a war, and I'm quoting: "If general Rabin wants war, Ahalan Wasahalan" (Ahalan Wasahalan in Arabic is basically translated as "by all means").

So that article says that Nasser broke the ceasefire and started a war, then goes on to complain that Israel didn't wait around for that to happen.

Let's just assume for the sake of argument that we accept your premise (I don't, but for the sake of argument): in 1973 Israel did EXACTLY what you say it should have done. It got warning signs, it saw force movements, but it assumed there would be no war. And then it was attacked, unprepared, in the most holy day for the Jewish people... That alone completely obliterates your opinion about what Israel "should" have done (or shouldn't have done, I guess). We have two wars within 6 years of one another, one with Israel doing what it did, one with Israel doing what you claim it should have done. Tell me, from Israel's perspective, which one was the better call?

And to another subject - I have to agree with Roen. The Palestinians' own elected officials (both in Hamas AND the PLO) clearly state that they want a FULL right of return, they want a Palestinian state ALL over Israel and they do not accept the UN's partition plan. Roen brought quotes from their OWN CHARTERS. So we should accept your word when you say "No, they don't REALLY want the whole place, they just want the West Bank and Gaze."
Have you ever heard Abbas say he is willing for a "two states for two people" solution? No, he will never say "two people," only "two states" and has repeatedly claimed he will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state (he doesn't have a problem with nation states in general, as he recognizes others and wants one for himself, he just doesn't want one for Jews in Israel). He even went so far as to state that Palestine will be "free of Jews" (talking about the future Palestinian state). So, it's ok for Palestinians to live in Israel, but Jews can't live in Palestine. I'm not even going to start with Hamas, which doesn't even say "two states."
So I would honestly like to know what you base your claim that the Palestinians just want Gaza and the West Bank on? Not only is it factually wrong, but it basically takes away the Palestinians' rights! Palestinians can't be trusted to mean what they say, they are like children. They have no responsibility over their actions and their fate, everything is done TO them.
That is HIGHLY discriminatory towards Palestinians.

I often hear these "Israel is too successful" arguments. "The rockets don't cause any damage, so you shouldn't bomb terrorists over them." The basic argument is Israel is doing too well, so it should stop. It won too many wars, defeated too many Arab armies, stops too many of its civilians from being killed. Israel fights terrorism better than any other country IN THE WORLD, and with much less civilian casualties. Israel is too successful countering Hamas rockets shot over Israel, and too accurate hitting militants. That bothers Israeli opposers, and they want Israel to stop, so they criticize its methods.


As for demonstrations - yeah, unfortunately Israel is wrong on this one. But the shortest research will show that they don't use live bullets, even when they shoot for the legs, only rubber coated bullets. While still dangerous, it's hardly live ammo, and will take some direct shots and a lot of misfortune to cause any lasting damage. Not that there haven't been casualties, but those bullets are DESIGNED to cause the minimum amount of damage. If Israel REALLY wanted to stop protests, it could have easily shot live rounds into the crowds.

I assume you've seen this map before:

I'd like to know your thoughts on it please.

Also, I'm far from being a fan of Dennis Prager, but I found this video to be on the spot:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZjK9U-ZVvGo

[Kythia]

Have you ever heard Abbas say he is willing for a "two states for two people" solution? No, he will never say "two people," only "two states" and has repeatedly claimed he will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state (he doesn't have a problem with nation states in general, as he recognizes others and wants one for himself, he just doesn't want one for Jews in Israel). He even went so far as to state that Palestine will be "free of Jews" (talking about the future Palestinian state). So, it's ok for Palestinians to live in Israel, but Jews can't live in Palestine. I'm not even going to start with Hamas, which doesn't even say "two states."

Without overly sticking up for Abbas - because, yanno, fuck that guy - I do think the PLO's and Hamas' position is a little more nuanced than you're giving it credit for.  Their argument (or, minimally, the argument they publicly espouse) is that "Jew" isn't a national identity in the same way "Palestinian"  (Or "American" or whatever) is and so the idea of a Jewish national state is fundamentally inconsistent.  I'm not certain to what extent I agree with him and I'm hampered by thinking that tying nationality to land is a fundamentally flawed idea, but there is a certain logic to his refusal to recognise the/a Jewish state but willingness to accept a Palestinian one.  You seem to be suggesting there's a hypocrisy there (my apologies if I'm misreading) but if we take the various writings at face value - and I fully agree with your statement about believing what Palestinians themselves say - then I really don't think there is. 

For example:

The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine , and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

[dror]

That's nice, but irrelevant for two reasons:
1. Jews, like everyone else, have a right for self determination. That right has been recognized by the international community, including the UN.
Therefor, it is still hypocritical to call on international law for a Palestinian state but refuse it for recognition.
2. If anything, the Palestinians themselves will have a problem establishing a nationality, as their national identity depends on opposing Israel. Without that, they are no more than a mob of mixed Arab originated people (half their leaders are named for places they were born in, like AlMazry (The Mitzri, Mitzraim = Egypt)).
Under Jordanian and Egyptian rule until 1967, they had no national aspirations, and the Arab states around Israel planned to take the lands and there wouldn't have been any Palestinians under their rule.

[elone]

Elone - did you read the article you brought before you posted it? It proves Roen's point.
It starts by saying that Nasser said AFTER THE FACT that it was not his intention to attack Israel. He just broke a ceasefire and got his ass handed to him, of course he'll never say it was his intention.

So that article says that Nasser broke the ceasefire and started a war, then goes on to complain that Israel didn't wait around for that to happen.

I have read the article several times and cannot find where it says Nasser broke a ceasefire. Nevertheless, my point was a response to the idea that Egypt started the six-day war. Clearly, it was Israel who started the conflict. Good for Israel, bad for Egypt. The article states Israel attacked. I quoted Begin and Oren as to that effect.

That alone completely obliterates your opinion about what Israel "should" have done (or shouldn't have done, I guess).

I have not found where I expressed an opinion as to what Israel should have done, maybe I missed that. 

And to another subject - I have to agree with Roen. The Palestinians' own elected officials (both in Hamas AND the PLO) clearly state that they want a FULL right of return, they want a Palestinian state ALL over Israel and they do not accept the UN's partition plan. Roen brought quotes from their OWN CHARTERS. So we should accept your word when you say "No, they don't REALLY want the whole place, they just want the West Bank and Gaze."
Have you ever heard Abbas say he is willing for a "two states for two people" solution? No, he will never say "two people," only "two states" and has repeatedly claimed he will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state (he doesn't have a problem with nation states in general, as he recognizes others and wants one for himself, he just doesn't want one for Jews in Israel). He even went so far as to state that Palestine will be "free of Jews" (talking about the future Palestinian state). So, it's ok for Palestinians to live in Israel, but Jews can't live in Palestine. I'm not even going to start with Hamas, which doesn't even say "two states."
So I would honestly like to know what you base your claim that the Palestinians just want Gaza and the West Bank on? Not only is it factually wrong, but it basically takes away the Palestinians' rights! Palestinians can't be trusted to mean what they say, they are like children. They have no responsibility over their actions and their fate, everything is done TO them.
That is HIGHLY discriminatory towards Palestinians.

2 states for 2 people seems to imply separate states for Arabs and Jews. Why would Abbas say that, no one wants that. Since there are already over half a million Jews in West Bank and Jerusalem, that solution is not too likely. The idea of recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is fairly recent and just one more case of Netanyahu moving the goalposts. Would Israel accept Palestine as an Islamic state? Hardly. I am the first to say that Abbas is a crap leader who is more interested in his personal wealth than solutions. Maybe he and Bibi will go away and there will be a chance for a peaceful solution.

I often hear these "Israel is too successful" arguments. "The rockets don't cause any damage, so you shouldn't bomb terrorists over them." The basic argument is Israel is doing too well, so it should stop. It won too many wars, defeated too many Arab armies, stops too many of its civilians from being killed. Israel fights terrorism better than any other country IN THE WORLD, and with much less civilian casualties. Israel is too successful countering Hamas rockets shot over Israel, and too accurate hitting militants. That bothers Israeli opposers, and they want Israel to stop, so they criticize its methods.

I am not sure about the success argument. The argument I hear are that they ore disproportionate in their response. Also that the repress and are pretty brutal in their conquests.  A lot of evil is successful as oppressors. Saddam was successful, Kim of North Korea is successful, that does not make their means to that success morally right.

As for demonstrations - yeah, unfortunately Israel is wrong on this one. But the shortest research will show that they don't use live bullets, even when they shoot for the legs, only rubber coated bullets. While still dangerous, it's hardly live ammo, and will take some direct shots and a lot of misfortune to cause any lasting damage. Not that there haven't been casualties, but those bullets are DESIGNED to cause the minimum amount of damage. If Israel REALLY wanted to stop protests, it could have easily shot live rounds into the crowds.

They indeed use live rounds on demonstrators, rock throwers, and others when they are in no real danger. There are many, many more examples. Hundreds of Palestinians have been shot and killed by the IDF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaibEqx2m_k

this
http://www.dci-palestine.org/israeli_forces_target_children_with_live_ammunition_to_quash_protests

I assume you've seen this map before:

I'd like to know your thoughts on it please.

Looks like a map. I cannot comment on the first and last panels, but the two middle ones look accurate. The seem to depict the loss of land by the Palestinians over time. So?

Have you seen this map. Where is Palestine??

[Roen]

I have read the article several times and cannot find where it says Nasser broke a ceasefire. Nevertheless, my point was a response to the idea that Egypt started the six-day war. Clearly, it was Israel who started the conflict. Good for Israel, bad for Egypt. The article states Israel attacked. I quoted Begin and Oren as to that effect.

When you mobilize armed forces against the terms of a ceasefire you break the ceasefire, and when you break the ceasefire, you basically declare war, that is a fact. Also, you seem content in defining a preemptive attack as an attack that's necessary to counter an attack that's already in motion or that somehow there should be a confirmation of the intent to invade/attack from the other side. That's not the only meaning on preemptive attack.
Preemptive attack is largely attacking to neutralize a potential threat, to prevent the possibility of an attack, which- considering the tension between Israel and Egypt during those years, and considering the fact that Egypt openly provoked and threatened Israel, both in words and in action, that attack was the exact response they were aiming for. They simply didn't plan on Israel's attack being successful.

Neither Oren's nor Nasser's after-the-fact testimonies negate the fact that it was, in fact, a preemptive attack, and that means that it was Egypt that started the war by breaking the ceasefire agreement. That's simply not something you or our dear criminal friend, Hammond, could debunk with irrelevant quotes or misleading framing of the word "preemptive", semantics cannot change history.

I have not found where I expressed an opinion as to what Israel should have done, maybe I missed that.

To me that seems a little confusing, you condemn Israel for starting the war, saying that they had no merits to attack, but then you state that you wouldn't say they should have waited? What would be the right action they should have made then, in your opinion? 

2 states for 2 people seems to imply separate states for Arabs and Jews. Why would Abbas say that, no one wants that. Since there are already over half a million Jews in West Bank and Jerusalem, that solution is not too likely. The idea of recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is fairly recent and just one more case of Netanyahu moving the goalposts.

Fairly recent? I don't know about that, the idea that Israel would be a state for the Jewish people has been around since before 48, it's in the declaration of independence. Now, I am against the idea of a Jewish state, I know I wouldn't want to live in a country that was defined as a Jewish one. I do, however, fully expect to get a recognition from the Palestinians, in any sort of peace arrangement that would ever come to term, that Israel is the rightful homeland of the Jewish people (be it as a mixed-cultural country for all religions or one that resides next to a Palestinian state). 

Would Israel accept Palestine as an Islamic state?

We have plenty of those around us. As long as it's peaceful Islam and not radical Islam, what's one more?

I am the first to say that Abbas is a crap leader who is more interested in his personal wealth than solutions. Maybe he and Bibi will go away and there will be a chance for a peaceful solution.

There are days when I like Abbas more than I do Netanyahu. To be honest, all of us on the left (and some of us on the right) hate that man and would like nothing more than to see him rot in a jail cell for what he has done to our country. If you think Abbas is greedy, you have no idea what greed is, Netanyahu just hides it better, behind his provocative stances and the wall of right-wing supporters. Talk about living in a political prison.

I am not sure about the success argument. The argument I hear are that they ore disproportionate in their response. Also that the repress and are pretty brutal in their conquests.  A lot of evil is successful as oppressors. Saddam was successful, Kim of North Korea is successful, that does not make their means to that success morally right.

Disproportionate? Perhaps, depends on the type of enemy you're dealing with. With radical Islam, deterrence is a huge part of the equation.
Evil? Not at all. As much as you'd like to deny it, this is a war going on here, a war against Islamic terror, and it has been going on for decades now. What you see nowadays all across Europe, we've been dealing with that for decades. You call that Evil, we call it protecting our citizens, you say it's unnecessary, we say that when we didn't deem it necessary- we had buses blowing up on a daily basis, night clubs being exploded, shootouts at restaurant and cafes. You seem to think that the fact that these attacks have lessened by now symbolizes the triviality of the danger. It doesn't. It symbolizes the success of our method, our long-haul methods learned and perfected over years of bloodshed and losses.
The moment we stop, the moment we let loose even a little, it will start all over again.

One would say- "That's an easy excuse. You don't know unless you try. Peace takes faith and patience."
I ask, even if it was true (it isn't, but let's say it is), even if it was true- what's the price you'd be willing to pay until that peace kicks in? How many dead men? How many dead women? How many children would you be willing to sacrifice to test that theory?

They indeed use live rounds on demonstrators, rock throwers, and others when they are in no real danger. There are many, many more examples. Hundreds of Palestinians have been shot and killed by the IDF.

I know you don't like being called a liar, but seriously, that's just untrue. The army has policies and code of conduct.
They do not use live rounds unless there is life threatening danger. Also- have you ever been hit by a rock thrown at you? I'm not talking about a pebble, I'm talking about actual construction bricks thrown at you in full speed. You might want to try that out (don't), before claiming that there is no real danger in that.

I don't need to watch these videos, because these videos are more often than not being edited to show a glimpse of the full picture. Our army has many faults, our soldiers are humans, and like any humans can be susceptible to emotions and errors, but I know that our army is very strict about combat code of conduct, and that means that if live rounds were shot into a demonstration, it was because there was someone armed on the other side, hiding between the rock throwers, using children and teens as live shields. It has happened and have been documented many times before.
You only need to look at what's going on right now in Israel surrounding the case of Alior Azaria, the soldier that had shot a captured terrorist when the man was already on the ground, he is currently being prosecuted to the full extant of the law. Sure, his story is getting extra coverage because of the public attention, but any violation like that is always being carefully examined and prosecuted, either in court marshal or in state court. Unlawful killers don't get a pass on the Israeli army, while on the other side they are considered as saints.

[elone]

Roen, as long as you refuse to watch videos or read anything that goes against your preconceived beliefs, then there is no point in continuing the conversation. To claim that the IDF has some great moral code of conduct is just a dream. A code of conduct that may be written, but is not always followed. Go read the stories of IDF soldiers (Breaking the Silence) interviewed and listen to them tell the tales of abuse. I am not making it up. Unless all the news you get comes from Arutz Sheva. Try reading Haaretz for a change. Go search the internet and google a few things. All videos are not faked, all testimonies are not lies.

Read about peoples experiences at Ben Gurion airport. Read about the abuses that go on daily in the occupied territories.

I am not suggesting that all soldiers are evil. I am only saying that often the evil  goes unpunished. Had there not been videos of the man shot in the head, do you seriously think there would have been any repercussions. The first Israeli response is to deny, then when faced with video proof, to make excuses. Have an open mind and take a look around you.

[dror]

I have read the article several times and cannot find where it says Nasser broke a ceasefire.

No, but it sais Nasser brought forces into the Sinai desert, which was a violation of the ceasefire. That fact was never in question and was never denied even by Egypt. Even the strongest Israeli opposers can't deny historical fact. That ceasefire breach was very, very clear, and your article doesn't deny it. It skips over it to Nasser saying that he didn't mean to attack (=using the forces in Sinai).

I have not found where I expressed an opinion as to what Israel should have done, maybe I missed that.

Am I to understand that you agree Israel did the right thing in preemptively attacking?

2 states for 2 people seems to imply separate states for Arabs and Jews. Why would Abbas say that, no one wants that. Since there are already over half a million Jews in West Bank and Jerusalem, that solution is not too likely.

Why not? There are 1.5 million Palestinians living in Israel (that is Israel proper, NOT the West Bank or Gaza). They are Israeli citizens, they have equal rights, they vote, they have members of the Israeli parliament, etc. That doesn't stop Israel from being a Jewish state.
I see no reason Palestine can't be a Palestinian state with Jewish citizens.

Would Israel accept Palestine as an Islamic state? Hardly.

Why on earth not? I absolutely think Israel would accept Palestine as an Islamic state, if the Palestinians want Islam to be their country's religion.
As for Bibi - I share in your dreams that he will evacuate his post. He is the worst PM Israel ever had.

I am not sure about the success argument. The argument I hear are that they ore disproportionate in their response.

Yeah, that's just another part of the "too successful" arguments.
Yesterday, Israel fired 50 missiles into Gaza, targeting terrorists, after a single rocket from Gaza was shot at an Israeli city (Hamas targets civilians by choice, all the time, that is its goal). How many Palestinian civilians were killed? 0. 50 missiels on terror targets, 0 civilian casualties. Now THAT's what I call successful. What was the world's reaction? "Disproportionate force." 0 casualties.

A lot of evil is successful as oppressors. Saddam was successful, Kim of North Korea is successful, that does not make their means to that success morally right.

I agree. Hamas is also successful, and is Evil. The PLO possibly. Yet somehow, as the video I brought suggests, Israel will be the first liberal Democracy to be evil and want war. It is highly unlikely.

They indeed use live rounds on demonstrators, rock throwers, and others when they are in no real danger. There are many, many more examples. Hundreds of Palestinians have been shot and killed by the IDF.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaibEqx2m_k

I'm sorry, but that looks like Pallywood to me. Where is the blood? Fires are shot and people just stand there or run to the wounded, not trying to escape? How convenient that you don't see the person shooting, and that there just happened to be a camera there.
Look up "Pallywood."
Here's an example (the location looks familiar?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBAqzLNpgBk

Why on earth should I believe videos the Palestinians post, when they are so clearly doctoring these videos? It makes it VERY hard to believe them when something actually happens.

Looks like a map. I cannot comment on the first and last panels, but the two middle ones look accurate. The seem to depict the loss of land by the Palestinians over time. So?

That map is used by BDS all across the globe, and like the Pallywood videos above, it is clearly FAKE. It's not only that they are fake, but they do so in a way that is meant to rewrite history.
The first panel marks all the Jewish towns and cities before 1948. Then it takes all the rest, and paints it green, as if it was Palestinian. That is of course false. Palestinians never owned those lands. It belonged to the Othoman Empire, then to the British mandate, then to Israel, Egypt and Jordan after 1949.

Have you seen this map. Where is Palestine??

It's a tourism map... What's your point?
I personally would have shown Israel's border, but this goes both ways.
Here is how the Palestinian Authority sees Israel:
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=826&doc_id=14527

A code of conduct that may be written, but is not always followed.

That is true. It is not always followed. There are always rule breakers. Israel right now is in the middle of a trial for a soldier who killed a terrorist, because he shot him in the head after the terrorist was already neutralized.
When was the last time the PA tried someone for killing an Israeli? They celebrate the murderers.

Try reading Haaretz for a change. Go search the internet and google a few things. All videos are not faked, all testimonies are not lies.

I'm subscribed to Haaretz. Best paper in Israel :D
Also not all videos are lies and not all testimonies fake, but too many of them are.

Read about peoples experiences at Ben Gurion airport. Read about the abuses that go on daily in the occupied territories.

Read about the terror attacks Israel suffered before those security measures were enacted. You suggest Israel is doing those things "just because."

I am not suggesting that all soldiers are evil. I am only saying that often the evil  goes unpunished.

That's true. A lot of terrorists go unpunished, unfortunately, and if they are then their families get rewarded for it.

Had there not been videos of the man shot in the head, do you seriously think there would have been any repercussions.

There usually are, and they cause great debate in Israel - punishing soldiers for shooting terrorists isn't as obvious as one would think.
This trial is very public because of the video, usually the trials are done within the military.

The first Israeli response is to deny, then when faced with video proof, to make excuses. Have an open mind and take a look around you.

Actually, Israeli officials immediately denounced that act, and said the soldier will be tried for his actions, a trial which could well end up in favor of the soldier. The killed Palestinian was a terrorist who just finished stabbing people. If the soldier can prove he was fearful for his life (which is not, like, out of the question, since terrorists have, in the past, strapped bomb vests to themselves and blew themselves up when people came to treat them after they were shot), he will probably get a very reduced punishment.

Also, no matter what, this is fair play. The guy was a terrorist. As usual, the losers complain when they lose. If he doesn't want to get shot, he shouldn't stab people.

[elone]

From Wikipedia.

The Beitunia killings refers to the consecutive killings of two Palestinian teenagers, which took place on the occasion of the annual Nakba day protests on May 15, 2014, near the Israeli Ofer Prison outside Beitunia in the occupied West Bank. Israel described the protest as a riot in which a crowd refused to disperse,[1] and initially denied responsibility, saying the cause of the deaths was unknown, the deaths were faked, that video clips of the killings either failed to capture the violence of the scene shortly before, or might have been manipulated, that soldiers had been provoked and that only rubber bullets had been fired.[1][2] Third party evidence and investigations, based on multiple sources, refuted the IDF position, while an autopsy showed that one of the teenagers had been shot with live ammunition.[3]

Ben Deri (21) of Rishon LeZion, an Israeli border police officer was arrested six months later and charged with shooting one of the two killed Palestinians, Nadim Nawarah (17)[4][5] after forensic evidence proved one of the lethal bullets came from his gun.[6]

Not faked.

[Roen]

From Wikipedia.

The Beitunia killings refers to the consecutive killings of two Palestinian teenagers, which took place on the occasion of the annual Nakba day protests on May 15, 2014, near the Israeli Ofer Prison outside Beitunia in the occupied West Bank. Israel described the protest as a riot in which a crowd refused to disperse,[1] and initially denied responsibility, saying the cause of the deaths was unknown, the deaths were faked, that video clips of the killings either failed to capture the violence of the scene shortly before, or might have been manipulated, that soldiers had been provoked and that only rubber bullets had been fired.[1][2] Third party evidence and investigations, based on multiple sources, refuted the IDF position, while an autopsy showed that one of the teenagers had been shot with live ammunition.[3]

Ben Deri (21) of Rishon LeZion, an Israeli border police officer was arrested six months later and charged with shooting one of the two killed Palestinians, Nadim Nawarah (17)[4][5] after forensic evidence proved one of the lethal bullets came from his gun.[6]

Not faked.

Wikipedia is edited by users, not the most reliable or transparent source, but even then your own extract says they have been prosecuted. So much for Israeli mandated murders...

If I may, it seems to me that you pick and choose the arguments you answer to, while ignoring those that debunk or at least challenge your previous claims. That is not how a debate is conducted, it is quite discouraging when people take the time and effort to respond to your arguments and then simply get ignored and spun by a work of nitpicking and reframing of the argument.

Please try and respect the rest of the participants of this debate as they do you.

[elone]

I will always choose what I want to respond to because much of what is here is just your opinion with no backup whatsoever. You continue to deny the truth and bend everything to what you believe. That is not how debates are conducted!

For example, the maps of Palestine, you claim are fakes because it calls the land Palestine. Apparently Palestine never existed. You say the maps are fake, they rewrite history, they are BDS. The land was Ottoman etc. The land was called Palestine whether you want to believe it or not. Go take a look at old maps. Again, I made no real comment on the maps other than they portrayed the UN demarcation in 1948 and the lines in 1967. If you want to deny the existence of Palestinians, fine, we have nothing to talk about. It would seem to me that people who live in a land referred to as Palestine have the right to call themselves Palestinians. You rant over those maps, but pass over the map produced by Israelis showing no Palestine. There is just no response to that.

You ask me if I agree Israel did the right thing in preemptively attacking in 1967. Again, I could care less. Why would I bother answering that? It was the right thing for Israel obviously, but that was not the point of discussion.

You say Nasser violated the ceasefire. Where did you get that information? What ceasefire? Are you talking about the 1949 Armistice agreement? There were multiple violations of that on both sides. Who knows, as far as I am concerned just another one of your opinions.

You still refer to the video as a fake. Your opinion again, everyone else seems to think that the security camera footage is real. By the way, the soldier who shot them down in cold blood has not been charged with murder, only manslaughter, and as far as I can find he has not been convicted of anything. Justice? Again, nothing I wrote said there have been prosecutions as yet. I could have posted hundreds of videos showing how inhumane the IDF is, but you would just write them off as fakes, so why bother. Did you see the one with the little girl riding a bicycle on a Jewish only road in Hebron last week? The IDF stopped her, puthis foot on her bike and she ran off crying. They threw her bike in the bushes. Nice guys. Oh yeah, probably faked.

Again, 2 states for 2 peoples. Read my post. I said it implied separatism, not integration. Really though, how many settlers do you think would agree to live under Palestinian rule? Honestly. Israel will probably annex it all so it will not matter.

Also, the Palestinians don't try people who kill Israelis because the IDF and police kill them, hence no trials. Like the Israeli's who celebrate Kahane and Goldstein and dance in the streets shouting Death to Arabs, there are always going to be extremists.

Ben Gurion airport, first you deny that anyone is harassed or denied entry, then you say, of course they do it to prevent terrorist attacks. Okay, at least you agree there are people denied entry. Again, read the stories about the terror people go through there. Being forced to give passwords to email accounts so authorities can check up on them, denying entry if they do not comply. Necessary to prevent attacks, who knows, pretty extreme.

I don't have stats that I can find, but most military trials result in light or no punishment at all. Palestinians who complain about abuses rarely see justice.

Again, so the guy shot in the head was a terrorist so it is ok by you, he might have had explosives. What about Israeli terrorists. They get arrested, maybe, but not shot down. Again, the videos of soldiers shooting women who the soldiers say had a knife. Half a dozen armed soldiers in combat gear and one woman wielding a knife. They could not disarm her? No they gun her down. Has happened more than once. Brave lads those IDF boys.

Speaking of terrorists, what do you think of Irgun, Stern gang, Lehi, Palmach, and Haganah? Everything we hear is terror tunnels, terror this, terror that. Why is it that no one acknowledges that Israel was born by terrorism. Terrorism against the British and Arabs. Assassinating UN people. Ancient history? Shamir and Begin were both terrorists and ended up as prime ministers. Who did you say exalted their terrorists?

I am just about done with this discussion. I fully understand that you must defend your country, I would do the same. I also will admit when my country is in the wrong. You and Israel never seem to admit to their wrongs unless forced by overwhelming evidence. Take the attack on the USS Liberty for instance, still no official acknowledgement. Of course it was an accident. A ship flying an American flag on a clear sunny day was mistaken for an Egyptian freighter in international waters. Right.

Nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, of course it is ok for Israel to have them, but no one else. Israel can not even come clean on that one. Didn't we attack Iraq for the same offense? They of course, had none of them. You talk about double standards.

I think I am done here.

[Roen]

I will always choose what I want to respond to because much of what is here is just your opinion with no backup whatsoever. You continue to deny the truth and bend everything to what you believe. That is not how debates are conducted!

I'm sorry that your arguments repeatedly get challenged, it's easy to see that you are getting upset when confronted with the reality as it is here. That is why I advised you to take the time and actually look and consider facts that contradict your previously determined opinions. Only looking at reports, theories and rumors that affirm your opinions is hardly researching. However, as much as I understand your frustration, it's no excuse to be that rude. We've backed up our arguments, with websites that are mostly balanced (unlike the ones you've provided), please try and keep this debate civil.
If you wish to retire from it, you are free to do so, but I honestly wish you didn't.

[elone]

I just pointed out all of the things you said in your last post that had no reference to any sources for what you implied. You can always write your opinions, and that is what you have done. "We've backed up our arguments", is that the royal "We" or do you have help from the hasbara propagandists that haunt the web.

In your last post you had zero sources for anything other than a ridiculous video and a map in the background on a wall.

It is obvious that there is no point in discussions. Neither of us will change our views. Maybe one day your country will lift their foot off the neck of the Palestinians. If not, hopefully the world will eventually force it to.

BDS

[Roen]

I just pointed out all of the things you said in your last post that had no reference to any sources for what you implied. You can always write your opinions, and that is what you have done. "We've backed up our arguments", is that the royal "We" or do you have help from the hasbara propagandists that haunt the web.

In your last post you had zero sources for anything other than a ridiculous video and a map in the background on a wall.

It is obvious that there is no point in discussions. Neither of us will change our views. Maybe one day your country will lift their foot off the neck of the Palestinians. If not, hopefully the world will eventually force it to.

BDS

A. You might not have noticed, but you have been debating with more than one person and your very recent post, the rude and petulant one, was to Dror's post, not mine.

B. If you cannot continue this discussion with a respectful and accepting spirit, and without these dismissive remarks, then perhaps it is best that you leave and maybe return once you have settled down.

I'm not telling you to go, but if you want to, I now believe that you should. I did not create this discussion so people would be berated in such a rude and condescending tone.

[Kythia]

I'll level, from the outside this seems to be getting acrimonious on both sides.  Maybe time to step away from the computer for a moment, guys?

[Roen]

I'll level, from the outside this seems to be getting acrimonious on both sides.  Maybe time to step away from the computer for a moment, guys?

I love the reference, I really do :P
I assure you, I'm perfectly calm. I just don't appreciate it when a thread of mine serves as a stage for that kind of bickering and disrespect, I'd say as much (and have) to any other participent that chose to behave like that. I'm no admin or moderator, I don't have any authority here, but as the creator of this thread I do feel like I have some responsibility for how the debate is conducted and people are treated. That's the only sentiment I have in this.

But all of that is irrelevant to the debate at hand. Let's move on from this business and return to more appropriate discussions :)

[elone]

A. You might not have noticed, but you have been debating with more than one person and your very recent post, the rude and petulant one, was to Dror's post, not mine.

B. If you cannot continue this discussion with a respectful and accepting spirit, and without these dismissive remarks, then perhaps it is best that you leave and maybe return once you have settled down.

I'm not telling you to go, but if you want to, I now believe that you should. I did not create this discussion so people would be berated in such a rude and condescending tone.

I apologize, I did apparently get confused about who was posting what. I do not really consider my remarks rude or petulant, however. I do find it difficult to not stand up for the truth.

[dror]

For example, the maps of Palestine, you claim are fakes because it calls the land Palestine.

That's not why I claimed they were faked. I claimed they were fake because of how they split the territories of the British Palestinian Mandate between Jewish cities, and claimed everything else belonged to the Palestinians.

Apparently Palestine never existed.

I suppose that depends on what you call Palestine.
Palestine was a piece of land which got its name from the Romans before Islam ever existed, and before the Arabs came out of the Saudi desert. Interestingly enough, the Romans changed the name of Judea and Sameria to Syria Palaestina in order to try and break the Jewish connection to their ancient homeland. It was named so after the biblical people of Paleshet (Philistia, a sea faring people who invaded Israel according to the bible and archaeological evidence).

If you mean to say that I seem to suggest there was never a country called Palestine, well, I'm not suggesting it so much as saying it outright. There was NEVER a country, independent or otherwise, called Palestine that existed in the land of Israel, before or after 1948. That is a known historical fact that was never disputed, but the map I brought is an attempt to mislead people just about that.
Unfortunately, there is a host of people today who believe that the state of Israel was created on what was once a Palestinian state, and that is just a lie, plain and simple.
Once cannot deny something that never existed. Palestine was the name of a piece of land. That's like saying that Sahara was a state because there is a piece of land called the Sahara desert, or saying that there is a country called the Alps.
The Palestinians are Arabs who adopted the name Palestinians because they lived in the region called Palestine. Their national identity was formed after all the Arab states around them were formed and they were left without a nationality, and the British mandate was supposed to end with two states, one for the Palestinian Arabs, and one for the Palestinian Jews (did you know that before 1948, Jews in Palestine were also called Palestinians, because they lived in the land of Palestine?)

If you want to deny the existence of Palestinians, fine, we have nothing to talk about.

I do not deny something that clearly exists.

It would seem to me that people who live in a land referred to as Palestine have the right to call themselves Palestinians. You rant over those maps, but pass over the map produced by Israelis showing no Palestine. There is just no response to that.

I did comment on the map, and said exactly what my personal opinion was (that the borders should have been shown) but also showed that this goes both ways.
Unfortunately, for the moment, none of the parties recognizes the other, yet you only seemed bothered by Israel.

You say Nasser violated the ceasefire. Where did you get that information? What ceasefire? Are you talking about the 1949 Armistice agreement? There were multiple violations of that on both sides. Who knows, as far as I am concerned just another one of your opinions.

Well there is a pretty big differences between the small-time skirmishes between Israel and Egypt, and the preparations for war that went on.
Here is a list of things that happened PRIOR to Israel's attack:
1. The massing of Egyptian troops in the Sinai desert.
2. Egypt BANISHED UN PEACE KEEPING FORCE that they agreed to under the 1956 ceasefire agreements.
3. Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran (an act that, by itself, Israel has previously declared to be casus belli (cause for war).
4. Iraqi troops and armor began to deploy in Jordan (Just a reminder, though Israel has no border with them, Iraqi troops were part of the 1948 war of independence).
5. Defense pacts were signed between Syria and Egypt, as well as Egypt and Jordan.

So... Aside from the general preparations for war among Israel's neighbors, we have specific violations of the ceasefire in (A) putting troops in the Sinai desert, (B) closing the Straits of Tiran and (C) banishing the UN's peace keeping force.

Just as a side note - that withdrawal of the UN peacekeepers is one of the reasons Israel, to this day, doesn't trust the UN and basically doesn't give a shit about it. Israel views it as untrustworthy in a crisis and unwilling to do what it needs to to complete its mission.

You still refer to the video as a fake. Your opinion again, everyone else seems to think that the security camera footage is real.

Well I don't know who "everyone" are, nor do I know if its fake or not. I DO know that there are A LOT of fake videos out there (I brought one because it was from the same location, but as I said, just search Pallywood and you'll find plenty), and I said that while clearly not ALL are fake, the fact that there is such a large industry of fake videos out there makes it very difficult to trust them as a reliable source of information.
Even in the video you brought, at the beginning, you see one of the kids with a rogatka (which might seem primitive and "harmless", but Israel already suffered casualties to it).

By the way, the soldier who shot them down in cold blood has not been charged with murder, only manslaughter, and as far as I can find he has not been convicted of anything.

So? A lot of murderers are "only" charged with manslaughter. Murder requires very specific conditions, including intentions and such, and that is very hard to prove in a court of law. Are you saying these soldiers don't deserve a fair trial because of a political situation?
As for convictions - I have no idea. That doesn't always gets published. But just because it wasn't published or you haven't found anything doesn't mean that they weren't convicted, especially since the western media doesn't really care when Israel does something right, only when it does something wrong.
However, your tone suggest that you would like punishment with no trial. If the courts decide that the shooting soldier is innocent, would you accept it? Or would you claim that you know better than the court? Or perhaps the government controls the courts? Because if you read Israeli newspapers, you'd know that the courts and the governments hardly see eye to eye on a lot of things. Yet you automatically assume that the soldiers are killers, and even go on to say that no one was convicted. So you already made a verdict, and now if the courts rule differently, you claim the courts are at fault.
I have to agree with Roen on this one - it seems like you have an opinion, and you just bend everything to fit that narrative. Did you ever think that if (and again, I don't know if they did or didn't) there weren't any convictions, it is because they were simply not guilty? If it did occur  to you, you haven't shown any sign of it so far. You simply declared yourself judge and jury.

Did you see the one with the little girl riding a bicycle on a Jewish only road in Hebron last week? The IDF stopped her, puthis foot on her bike and she ran off crying. They threw her bike in the bushes. Nice guys. Oh yeah, probably faked.

That one wasn't fake, and it was a terrible thing to do.
Did you see the one where the soldier gives a hungry Palestinian child his sandwich in the middle of the night shift?
You seem to think that just because I (and I guess Roen) don't think Israeli soldiers are all monsters, that means we agree with EVERYTHING Israel and any soldier does. That's just not true.
Israel does A LOT of things I don't like or agree with, and would never approve. There are many soldiers who choose to ignore their orders or act like bullies and monsters. But those are not necessarily representative of the IDF.

Again, 2 states for 2 peoples. Read my post. I said it implied separatism, not integration. Really though, how many settlers do you think would agree to live under Palestinian rule? Honestly. Israel will probably annex it all so it will not matter.

Well Israel offered the Palestinians a trade of "mile for mile", as in Israel will keep major settlements and will give the Palestinians other lands elsewhere. The larger settlements are also closer to the border and some are 200,000 people by now, and technically impossible to evacuate, so there really isn't much of a choice.
As for the question - I don't know or care. If the settlers don't want to live under Palestinian rule (for which I can't blame them... even the Israeli Palestinians don't want to live under Palestinian rule and have said time and again they would rather keep their Israeli citizenship), they are free to return to Israel proper. They are still citizens, after all.
But the settlements aren't the barrier to peace. There were no settlements before 1967, but there was no peace. The reason for that is that the Palestinians see ALL of the Jewish cities in Israel as settlements.

Also, the Palestinians don't try people who kill Israelis because the IDF and police kill them, hence no trials. Like the Israeli's who celebrate Kahane and Goldstein and dance in the streets shouting Death to Arabs, there are always going to be extremists.

Yeah, but there seems to be a lot more extremists on one side than the other, doesn't it? The amount of Israelis who take up knives and start butchering Palestinian babies in their beds is 0. The closest thing we've had is two teenagers who burned a Palestinian kid alive, and they were caught, tried as adults and are now in prison so far as I know. That story shook Israel to its core. How many Palestinians were shocked when a Palestinian infiltrated the house of a family and butchered 5 people with a knife, including a baby several months old? He was celebrated as a hero.

Ben Gurion airport, first you deny that anyone is harassed or denied entry, then you say, of course they do it to prevent terrorist attacks.

Not ANYONE is denied entry. That's what the checks are for. Unless you support terror or is associated with a terror group or possibly BDS leader, I doubt anyone would care. But Israel is far from the only country to check people entering it.
Again, this is a classic "Israel is doing too well" argument. Israel has enemies (I'm talking about REAL enemies, not people who disagree with Israeli policies), and it is doing a rather good job at keeping them out. Of course that would cause people to tell Israel to stop. That is the automatic response when Israel is doing something too successfully.

What about Israeli terrorists. They get arrested, maybe, but not shot down.

How many Jewish terrorists do you know of?
Goldstein was killed. Others were caught after the act (days or weeks, not moments) or turned themselves in, hardly when anyone suspected there was immediate danger.
We're talking here about a terrorist who, moments before, was stabbing people.

Again, the videos of soldiers shooting women who the soldiers say had a knife. Half a dozen armed soldiers in combat gear and one woman wielding a knife. They could not disarm her? No they gun her down. Has happened more than once.

Has it?
Can't disagree with you on this specific case, but the vast majority of cases aren't at all like that.
And even if they were - there is a question to be asked about whether or not terrorists SHOULD be disarmed instead of killed. It's very easy to say that from afar, but you don't really seem to know what goes on in Israel.
Arrest and trial isn't a deterrent for Palestinians. Most say they are proud of what they did. If they sit in prison, the PA pays their family a VERY nice salary, far above the average in the West Bank, and they have streets named after them.
A lot of Israelis believe, and I haven't decided yet myself, that any terrorist should know he isn't coming back from an attack, and that maybe that will be a strong enough deterrent. I haven't agreed with it so far because death isn't a deterrent for them either, as it is also considered an honor. So Israel loses either way with that one.
In any event, it's not as clear cut as you seem to present it.

Speaking of terrorists, what do you think of Irgun, Stern gang, Lehi, Palmach, and Haganah? Everything we hear is terror tunnels, terror this, terror that. Why is it that no one acknowledges that Israel was born by terrorism. Terrorism against the British and Arabs. Assassinating UN people. Ancient history? Shamir and Begin were both terrorists and ended up as prime ministers. Who did you say exalted their terrorists?

Well for one thing, you can't put all of those organizations under the same hat. Hagana and Palmach were defense organizations, created to protect Jewish settlements from Arab attacks (of which there were many. If you think Arab terrorism started in 1967, you are in for a surprise). They usually dealt with attacks and retaliation for attacks, but they never for example targeted women and children (not that accidents didn't happen, but they were hardly targeted).
As for other groups - some where more terror-like than others, but there are several major differences: the vast majority of the attacks were against military personnel, especially british army. There were the occasional civilian target like the UN guy, but those were very few.
Even the most famous attack against "king david hotel" is often viewed as being against a civilian target, because people "neglect" to mention that the hotel was, in fact, the British army headquarters. They also fail to mention that a warning was given BEFORE the attack via phone call. Such ruthless terrorists, warning their targets before they are blown up.

I also will admit when my country is in the wrong.

I think I've disagreed with Israel plenty, even in this discussion.

Take the attack on the USS Liberty for instance, still no official acknowledgement. Of course it was an accident. A ship flying an American flag on a clear sunny day was mistaken for an Egyptian freighter in international waters. Right.

Sure, because it's so unlikely that someone would use such a tactic? But more than that - why does that have anything to do with this discussion? There are several political matters regarding that incident, which have nothing to do with Palestinians.

Nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, of course it is ok for Israel to have them, but no one else. Israel can not even come clean on that one. Didn't we attack Iraq for the same offense? They of course, had none of them. You talk about double standards.

Except, no one fears Israel will use those weapons, unlike the countries around us. You forget that Israel RECEIVED its nuclear plant and technology from the French (before 1967 and the French and British  betrayal of Israel, France - and not the US - was Israel's main supplier of arms and technology, and was a close ally).
i.e. not only is it considered ok for Israel to hold the bomb, no one tried to stop it and indeed was helped in getting it. Perhaps people understood that Israel needs a deterrent, since it is repeatedly being attacked from all sides by hostile forces, some of which don't even have a border with Israel...
Also so far as I know, Israel doesn't have chemical or biological weapons. They are highly inefficient, and also we have no need.
You also forget that Israel's silence on the matter isn't just good for Israel, it has served the Arab countries around us pretty well. If Israel doesn't have weapons, officially, there is no reason for the Arab nations around us to develop them, a development they can hardly afford and maintain.

As for the Palestinians and the right for self determination - I am of the opinion that everyone has such a right, that we ourselves as Jews have used it, and we cannot deny it of others.
But I find it hard to argue with people who point out, as Roen did, that the Palestinians themselves consider their own nationality as part of the greater, Arab nationality (or Pan-Arabism, as it is usually called, which is a view that states that all the Arab nations are in fact one nation, and calls for a unification of all the Arab states in the middle east). Pan-Arabism was VERY popular at the time of Israel's greatest wars. Only after it lost some ground did peace happen between Israel and Egypt (which was considered a blow to Pan-Arabism, and a lot of Arab nations were VERY pissed off on Egypt for it). The Palestinians are STILL very angry, because with the decline of Pan-Arabism, they lost a lot of support from the Arab countries around them.
Look at Egypt and Gaza - there is no "Israeli blockade" on Gaza. There is a blockade, by both Israel AND Egypt. No one cares that Egypt enforces a blockade. For some reason it is perfectly clear why Egypt believes a blockade is necessary. It's just the Israel blockade that's a problem.

And, as I said, the Palestinians are often recognized by a country of origin before they arrived in Palestine, like a lot of Jews are.
Of course, nowadays both nations have a lot of local born citizens, etc., so we're stuck with each other until we figure it out.

[dror]

Maybe one day your country will lift their foot off the neck of the Palestinians. If not, hopefully the world will eventually force it to.

BDS

Ah, BDS. The greatest Pallywood of them all.
BDS has nothing to do with peace in Israel. BDS wants to destroy the Jewish state, exile Jews to other countries and have a Palestinian state across all the land.

Don't believe me?
Read what pro BDS people have to say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4j_BwUWUwE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnosnxJv3Dg

[elone]

This is a topic that is and has been virtually ignored by all. It has been a long time left irrelevant by all. But given the new state of affairs, with the indictment of Netanyahu, and the BDS movement growing, do you believe that the Palestinians should have a state. "The two state solution" or should the Israeli's just annex whatever land is between the "sea and the the Jordan River." This would result in either a one state with an apartheid government or a  Palestinian state with all the rights given to an independent entity? Recognize that Israel has no definable borders, constitution, and has rejected all UN resolutions regarding Palestine,  denied weapons of mass destruction, including biological chemical, and nuclear.

Kushner is supposed to give Trumps solution to all of this shortly.

Is there a solution? What is your opinion?

[Tamhansen]

Well Israel offered the Palestinians a trade of "mile for mile", as in Israel will keep major settlements and will give the Palestinians other lands elsewhere. The larger settlements are also closer to the border and some are 200,000 people by now, and technically impossible to evacuate, so there really isn't much of a choice.
As for the question - I don't know or care. If the settlers don't want to live under Palestinian rule (for which I can't blame them... even the Israeli Palestinians don't want to live under Palestinian rule and have said time and again they would rather keep their Israeli citizenship), they are free to return to Israel proper. They are still citizens, after all.
But the settlements aren't the barrier to peace. There were no settlements before 1967, but there was no peace. The reason for that is that the Palestinians see ALL of the Jewish cities in Israel as settlements.

Here we'll keep all the fertile land that was originally assigned to you in 1948, in exchange we'll give you long tracts of useless desert in exchange, fair deal no? No? oh, then we'll just keep all of it.

Yeah, but there seems to be a lot more extremists on one side than the other, doesn't it? The amount of Israelis who take up knives and start butchering Palestinian babies in their beds is 0. The closest thing we've had is two teenagers who burned a Palestinian kid alive, and they were caught, tried as adults and are now in prison so far as I know. That story shook Israel to its core. How many Palestinians were shocked when a Palestinian infiltrated the house of a family and butchered 5 people with a knife, including a baby several months old? He was celebrated as a hero.

Not sure how many extremists are on the Israeli Jewish side. I'm pretty sure it would be a lot more if there was no IDF to use completely asynchronous warfare. Terrorists tend to grow whena group doesn't have an official armed force to defend them. Examples are plenty:

The IRA in Ireland
Spear of the Nation in South Africa
Communist resistance in occupied France
The bolsheviks in tsarist Russia.

[Quote}
Except, no one fears Israel will use those weapons, unlike the countries around us. You forget that Israel RECEIVED its nuclear plant and technology from the French (before 1967 and the French and British  betrayal of Israel, France - and not the US - was Israel's main supplier of arms and technology, and was a close ally).
i.e. not only is it considered ok for Israel to hold the bomb, no one tried to stop it and indeed was helped in getting it. Perhaps people understood that Israel needs a deterrent, since it is repeatedly being attacked from all sides by hostile forces, some of which don't even have a border with Israel...
Also so far as I know, Israel doesn't have chemical or biological weapons. They are highly inefficient, and also we have no need.
You also forget that Israel's silence on the matter isn't just good for Israel, it has served the Arab countries around us pretty well. If Israel doesn't have weapons, officially, there is no reason for the Arab nations around us to develop them, a development they can hardly afford and maintain. [/quote]

Nobody used to fear Israel using nuclear weapons. The coming to power of Cowboy Netanyahoo and especially his coalition with Shas and the Jewish home have many geopoliticians worrying about just that.

As for the Palestinians and the right for self determination - I am of the opinion that everyone has such a right, that we ourselves as Jews have used it, and we cannot deny it of others.
But I find it hard to argue with people who point out, as Roen did, that the Palestinians themselves consider their own nationality as part of the greater, Arab nationality (or Pan-Arabism, as it is usually called, which is a view that states that all the Arab nations are in fact one nation, and calls for a unification of all the Arab states in the middle east). Pan-Arabism was VERY popular at the time of Israel's greatest wars. Only after it lost some ground did peace happen between Israel and Egypt (which was considered a blow to Pan-Arabism, and a lot of Arab nations were VERY pissed off on Egypt for it). The Palestinians are STILL very angry, because with the decline of Pan-Arabism, they lost a lot of support from the Arab countries around them.
Look at Egypt and Gaza - there is no "Israeli blockade" on Gaza. There is a blockade, by both Israel AND Egypt. No one cares that Egypt enforces a blockade. For some reason it is perfectly clear why Egypt believes a blockade is necessary. It's just the Israel blockade that's a problem.

And, as I said, the Palestinians are often recognized by a country of origin before they arrived in Palestine, like a lot of Jews are.
Of course, nowadays both nations have a lot of local born citizens, etc., so we're stuck with each other until we figure it out.

There was a solution once. People were working on getting things sorted, but then someone shot Israel's best hope for peace, Yitzhak Rabin. Not a terrorist of course, because like White Americans, Israeli Jews do not have terrorists, only mentally ill loners.

After this, both sides went off the deep end. Half of the Palestinians went into bed with Iran backed terrorists, while most Jews supported a group of politicians who slowly turned Israel into a Jewish ethnostate, increased settlement of illegally occupied territory, and set Israel on a course of disproportionate warfare, as well as turning the gaza strip into what is effectively the world's biggest concentration camp, with little to no medical supplies, insufficient food and clean water, and utilities.

You want to stop the palestinians from supporting terrorist actions? Start treating them like human beings. I've been to Gaza and the west bank several times. The reason these people support the terrorists insofar as they do, is because the terrorists bring food for the kids, medicine for the sick, and clothes for the cold, while Israel cuts them off from these basic supplies.

[karkas132]

The problem is that the israel-palestine situation is far more nuanced than anyone wants to admit. Yes the Israelis have committed war crimes but so do HAMAS who literally use women and children as human shields while they carry out acts of terrorism. Point blank theres no easy answer and its hard to support either side in this conflict, several times their arabian neighbors have invaded israel (or attempted to) with genocide on their mind only to be repelled and then go figure now Israel has become more aggressive in nature as a result. Its a complex and nuanced issue that almost no one has an answer to, should the Israelis not do some of the things they do in Gaza and Palestine? Absolutely, the problem is that much like the Vietnam war its hard for them to tell who the enemy is, children are radicalized at an early age in Palestine.
Video link

Hamas is not afraid to use women and children as shields and even weapons much like in Vietnam where little kids would run to US soldiers to give them a hug but have a land mine strapped to their chests.

Linked youtube video with a minor in the thumbnail -Staff

[Skynet]

I think a big problem is the confluence of Palestinian Arabs in general with Hamas. You do point out that anti-Semitism is rife within the Palestinian states, but said feelings are only exacerbated when far-right settlers and IDF soldiers engage in collective punishment in killing civilians. Bombing the densely packed Gaza Strip and leaving 1/3rd of the population homeless as part of revenge killing when terrorists killed 3 Jewish boys, or driving Palestinian families out of their houses at gunpoint as part of some religious prophecy is counterproductive to both Israel and Palestine's safety and security.

Right now Israel has a sitting Prime Minister who:

strickened Arabic as an official language and says that the Arab-Israeli population (20%) y are not actual citizens.

Is attempting to legitimize the Kach Party, a far-right hate group who is the Jewish equivalent of the KKK.

Is in favor of a one-state solution. When Mahmoud Abbas and the West Bank petitioned the United Nations to apply for Palestinian statehood, the US government not only vetoed it, they cut off funding for various programs in the region.

The two-state solution, while not a one-way ticket to peace, is regarded by most in the international community, including most Israelis and some Palestinians, as the best (or least worst) of the options.

While the Israel-Palestine conflict goes far beyond the current administration, the popularization of far-right groups in Israel is intentionally seeking out war rather than safety. Netanyahu also had to be talked out of a very stupid decision by Mossad agents which would have severely compromised Israeli's security. That decision? To go to war with Iran.

Keep in mind that not only does Israeli not share a border with Iran, but the last time someone invaded that country it was Iraq who had more soldiers than Israel, was geographically closer, and whose citizenry (both majority Shi'ite Muslims) had more of a common religious tie than with Israeli Jews.



There's also the fact that agents within the Israeli government covertly funded Hamas. Granted, this was more of a means to do "enemy of my enemy" to weaken the dominant at the time the more left-wing and secular PLO and Fatah parties, but it soon blew up in their faces when not only did Hamas seize power, they now provide 90% of reconstruction funding for Gazan civilians. With Israeli and Egypt clamping down on Gaza's borders and restricting foreign aid into it, most Palestinians do not have much of a choice. It's either Hamas or starve to death.

[karkas132]

I think a big problem is the confluence of Palestinian Arabs in general with Hamas. You do point out that anti-Semitism is rife within the Palestinian states, but said feelings are only exacerbated when far-right settlers and IDF soldiers engage in collective punishment in killing civilians. Bombing the densely packed Gaza Strip and leaving 1/3rd of the population homeless as part of revenge killing when terrorists killed 3 Jewish boys, or driving Palestinian families out of their houses at gunpoint as part of some religious prophecy is counterproductive to both Israel and Palestine's safety and security.

Right now Israel has a sitting Prime Minister who:

strickened Arabic as an official language and says that the Arab-Israeli population (20%) y are not actual citizens.


As I said, its a complex and nuanced issue and I am in no way or shape able to say which side is 'in the right' all I know is that normal every day people are suffering as a consequence of these conflicts. The only insight I can give is that Israel has been invaded by their arabian neighbors, what, 3 times minimum since their establishment as a nation? And since a large majority of their more religiously fervent neighbors literally wish to remove them from existence and murder every single one of them (as they've literally stated on several occasions over the years) It has led to a more militant and aggressive Israel. Im not saying I agree, Im saying I understand.

The two-state solution does seem to be the least-terrible of all the available options however, as it is with human history, sometimes war is inevitable and to the victor go the spoils, no matter how much we want to sit here and go back and forth about what is 'humane' or 'right' sometimes the bare bones facts are violence will occur and whoever comes out on top of the violence is the one who dictates. The only reason that groups like the UN, the EU etc etc have the power to dictate what is a war crime or is not a war crime, what is humane or is not humane, is because the primary benefactors of these organizations won the wars that lead to their formation.
Is attempting to legitimize the Kach Party, a far-right hate group who is the Jewish equivalent of the KKK.

Is in favor of a one-state solution. When Mahmoud Abbas and the West Bank petitioned the United Nations to apply for Palestinian statehood, the US government not only vetoed it, they cut off funding for various programs in the region.

The two-state solution, while not a one-way ticket to peace, is regarded by most in the international community, including most Israelis and some Palestinians, as the best (or least worst) of the options.

While the Israel-Palestine conflict goes far beyond the current administration, the popularization of far-right groups in Israel is intentionally seeking out war rather than safety. Netanyahu also had to be talked out of a very stupid decision by Mossad agents which would have severely compromised Israeli's security. That decision? To go to war with Iran.

Keep in mind that not only does Israeli not share a border with Iran, but the last time someone invaded that country it was Iraq who had more soldiers than Israel, was geographically closer, and whose citizenry (both majority Shi'ite Muslims) had more of a common religious tie than with Israeli Jews.



There's also the fact that agents within the Israeli government covertly funded Hamas. Granted, this was more of a means to do "enemy of my enemy" to weaken the dominant at the time the more left-wing and secular PLO and Fatah parties, but it soon blew up in their faces when not only did Hamas seize power, they now provide 90% of reconstruction funding for Gazan civilians. With Israeli and Egypt clamping down on Gaza's borders and restricting foreign aid into it, most Palestinians do not have much of a choice. It's either Hamas or starve to death.

[Skynet]

You accidentally made an empty quote.

One thing I'd like to mention is that due to abuse by some bad apples one is no longer able to edit one's posts in PROC. But you can do so elsewhere on Elliquiy.

If you don't mind double-posting I'd suggest PMing a mod to rework your post, or repost again depending upon your aesthetic preference.

[karkas132]

How did I end up even doing that? Ill pm a mod to try and get that taken down ^^;. Anyways what I attempted to say is basically

TLDR: Its a complex issue, Israels not in the right, Palestine (mostly Hamas) is not in the right, I dont agree with Israel's policies or why they are so aggressive but I get why they are aggressive they've been invaded no less than 3 times in their short history by enemies with every intention of butchering them down to the last man woman and child so its no surprise they became more aggressive in turn, its not right, but I get it.

However at the end of the day war might be unavoidable, for the simple fact that it is simply the natural course of things. Sometimes violence will be used and to the victor go the spoils, that has always been the way of the world, the onyl reason groups like the UN, the EU and the ICC exist and can dictate what is or isnt a war crime, what is or isnt humane, is because the founders and benefactors of these groups came out on top after violent conflicts.

[Skynet]

This may be thread necromancy, but this is a pretty good YouTube video examining a brief history of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, how right-wing warmongers in the US and Middle East exacerbate violence to bolster support, and how one can critique the Israeli government's expansionism while avoiding anti-Semitic tropes.

[elone]

Not a bad video. Simplistic, but one gets the idea.  Too bad the main stream media does not pick up on this. Now after the debacle in Iran for WMD's that Israeli intelligence told us were there, the same stuff is going on towards Iran. Trump and the rest of the them will never learn, or more frighening,  they learn but carry on anyway. BDS.

[elone]

Correction: Iraq, not Iran.

But we are on the same path.

[Skynet]

Not a bad video. Simplistic, but one gets the idea.  Too bad the main stream media does not pick up on this. Now after the debacle in Iran for WMD's that Israeli intelligence told us were there, the same stuff is going on towards Iran. Trump and the rest of the them will never learn, or more frighening,  they learn but carry on anyway. BDS.

The fault of the US Intelligence community in the 2003 Iraq War was not mostly on Israel's shoulders, but the Bush Administration. Our President at the time was coming up with excuses to invade Iraq well before even 9/11, and there were flawed accounts from multiple intelligence agencies, such as the UK's MI6.

Going into the "Israel persuaded the US to invade Iraq" gives them a disproportionate amount of influence in US military policy greater than they have, and inadvertently plays into the "Israel/Zionists/Jews are the ones truly in control of America" and feeds anti-Semitic rhetoric.

[elone]

Going into the "Israel persuaded the US to invade Iraq" gives them a disproportionate amount of influence in US military policy greater than they have, and inadvertently plays into the "Israel/Zionists/Jews are the ones truly in control of America" and feeds anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Not sure what you are quoting.  I think one has to be careful about equating criticism of Israeli government or intelligence agencies with ant-semitism. They are two different things.

[Skynet]

This part:

Not a bad video. Simplistic, but one gets the idea.  Too bad the main stream media does not pick up on this. Now after the debacle in Iraq for WMD's that Israeli intelligence told us were there, the same stuff is going on towards Iran. Trump and the rest of the them will never learn, or more frighening,  they learn but carry on anyway. BDS.

[elone]

There is a big difference in what you are apparently attributing to me, and what I said. First, don't put something in quotes that was not said. Second, saying Israeli intelligence told us WMD's were in Iraq is not the same as saying Israel persuaded us to go to war. It was simply one of the intelligence sources that were wrong, or made up, you choose.

[Skynet]

It was "not said" in the original post because you self-corrected later on, on account that one cannot edit one's own post in PROC:

Correction: Iraq, not Iran.

But we are on the same path.

Saying "Now after the debacle in Iran for WMD's that Israeli intelligence told us were there, the same stuff is going on towards Iran" doesn't make sense given that it mentions Iran twice as though two different countries were being talked about.

[elone]

I corrected the typo error of Iraq and Iran before your post, what is your point? Did you not see the change? I typed Iran instead of Iraq. Did you read the post that you are referring to?  Of course you did, making an argument for no purpose is pretty useless. I corrected the error, so why would you still quote what was obviously a typo? This is why people avoid this place.

More to the point.
From the Washington Post, December 5, 2003:

Israel was a "full partner" in U.S. and British intelligence failures that exaggerated former president Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a report by an Israeli military research center has charged.

"The failures of this war indicate weaknesses and inherent flaws within Israeli intelligence and among Israeli decision-makers," Brig. Gen. Shlomo Brom wrote in an analysis for Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

Israeli intelligence services and political leaders provided "an exaggerated assessment of Iraqi capabilities," raising "the possibility that the intelligence picture was manipulated," wrote Brom, former deputy commander of the Israeli military's planning division.

David Baker, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, declined to comment on the report.

This is my point.

[Skynet]

It's an odd point to bring up in an unrelated topic immediately after I was talking about how to avoid anti-Semitic tropes, given that "Israelis dancing after 9/11 to manipulate Bush into fighting Iraq" is a theme that holds sway in some conspiracy theory circles and is not always said overtly. Signalling out "Israeli intelligence told us was there" without mentioning any of the other involved actors, such as American neoconservative warmongers who drumrolled the public into invasion, gives the implication in your original post that Israeli bore the majority of the blame for the 2003 US-Iraq War.

[elone]

Do you consider the Washington Post article an anti-semitic trope? It does mention other agencies.

Who said anything about "Israeli's dancing after 9/11". How is that possibly relevant and how could such that conspiracy theory possibly be used to influence Bush?

Why don't you throw out how the Israeli's killed JFK while you are putting out nonsense?  I am done here.

[Skynet]

You can say something while being technically correct, but in omitting certain details frame a statement a certain way.

[Skynet]

This will be my last post about the subject, but I feel that I should expand on my reasoning further. This is pertinent in that 2003 is a big enough gap in time that many younger Elliquiyans and those unfamiliar with US politics at the time may likely not know this.

It is common for President Bush to be portrayed as a stupid but well-meaning guy who was manipulated by Dick Cheney and Rumsfield into doing bad things. But the reality of the situation is that the man, and the Administration at large, had both ill actions and intent. The justification of Saddam secretly allying with al-Qaeda to obtain WMDs (subtly implied to be nuclear missiles poised for Western shores) was the primary rationale for the Iraq War's outset. Although debunked later, the justified anger over the 9/11 terrorist attacks was misused to aim American power at anyone who could be construed as linked to al-Qaeda.

However, from the man's own words, he not only said that capturing bin Laden was not a priority,[1] he also claimed that God himself ordered him to launch an invasion.[2] Furthermore, the Bush-Hussein relationship goes further back. During the Gulf War of the 90s Saddam tried to have George Bush Sr. (President at the time) assassinated.[3] George W. Bush rightfully despised the man for this, but he let this color his foreign policy towards Iraq, putting millions of Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of US soldiers at risk for the quagmire of the war. In 2012 the Pentagon released a declassified document outlining reasons for the invasion, grasping at the flimsiest prospects such as a terrorist visiting the country once.[4] Top military intelligences also asserted that seizing the natural gas and oil resources was a key motivation for invasion as well.[5] A combination of vengeance, greedy oppportunism, and motivated reasoning was what propelled the American invasion.

[1]https://thinkprogress.org/flashback-bush-on-bin-laden-i-really-just-dont-spend-that-much-time-on-him-60cc2bd7af67/
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
[3]http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/27/bush.war.talk/
[4]https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/bush-administrations-worst-excuses-invading-iraq/325692/
[5]https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html

Not a bad video. Simplistic, but one gets the idea.  Too bad the main stream media does not pick up on this. Now after the debacle in Iran for WMD's that Israeli intelligence told us were there, the same stuff is going on towards Iran. Trump and the rest of the them will never learn, or more frighening,  they learn but carry on anyway. BDS.

So typo or no, the original post of elone wouldn't make sense given that "Trump and the rest of the them will never learn" clearly asserts the failed Bush policies of Iraq repeating the same mistakes with Iran, further highlighted by his Washington Post partial quote.

Said article in question is locked behind a paywall, so we cannot see the full context, nor did elone quote the part that mentioned other agencies.

It is entitled that "Israel Shares Blame on Iraq Intelligence, Report Says." Which is most certainly true. But you do not see the Italian military being accused of manipulating the US into war mode for the yellowcake uranium report.

"WMD's that Israeli intelligence told us were there" to an untrained eye reads as the USA banking heavily on Mossad for deposing Saddam, and that if they did not exaggerate the threat then war could've been averted. This sets a dangerous precedent, for it shifts the moral responsibility of American devastation to a foreign entity acting of ill intent rather than forcing citizens to confront the fact that they went on and cheer-led an unjust war. And also presupposes that the White House, military, and intelligence echelons were acting with good intentions.

Thus the reference to the "dancing Israelis" meme, for it runs along a similar line of thought. That the Army, CIA, and American public had just and righteous anger over 9/11 and were manipulated by a foreign power into attacking the wrong target from a call outside the house. The truth is that the call primarily from inside the house.

[elone]

Skynet would have one believe that the combined intelligence of the U.S., Britain, Israel, and other of our partners who share these things had nothing to do with Bush attacking Iraq. It was simple revenge.

Why are you fixated on the "Dancing Israelis"?

Italians and yellow cake?  How about the deception by Israel on their own nuclear capabilities and how they stole uranium, and deceived the US inspectors, and the  world. Of course none of that could be true, could it? Ask Mordechai Vanunu. Don't portray the GOI as innocent babes in a hostile world.

Perhaps the US should have gone after the real terrorist, the Saudi's, not Iraq who had nothing to do with 9/11 more than likely.

Bush made the axis of evil, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The new axis of evil should be the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Chew on that.

Goodbye

[Tolvo]

I do think we should be careful that we don't try to put too much blame on Israel in regards to matters that they did not dominate. Israel's occupation of Palestine is something I consider highly immoral and horrifying. It is apartheid. But while they did have a part to play in the Iraq war the US government and Bush are really the ones that pushed it and wanted it and manipulated their own people into getting it to happen. Skynet also mentioned there were many factors for why different parts of the US government wanted it. Which I think was the point, that we should try to avoid lying by omission. Focusing just on Israel's role and putting blame on them for the Iraq war exists within a larger context. It also doesn't really help the discussion to merely ignore points like Italy's role and to try and refocus the blame on Israel for the war. The Italian incident is related to the Iraq War, while if you're talking about the incident of Israel stealing uranium I think you are talking about it's from decades prior to that. I think Israel's government is quite horrible and corrupt, but so are many governments which you do mention Elone in regards to the USA and Saudi Arabia being included. It is hard to find any government with any involvement in the Middle East/West Asia that isn't highly corrupt and trying to expand their empire, or to form a new one that they currently lack. And I specify those with involvement over those actually from the Middle East, since foreign involvement is a huge part of what's destabilizing the region and is what establishes people like Assad.

[Oniya]

I don't think that admitting that there were other players in the game is the same as saying that Israel was 'an innocent babe'.  Most international conflicts have a plethora of causes, and many people who call for war and desire power.

[Oniya]

I'm getting some news coming in that Netanyahu may not have achieved a majority in the current election. 

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium-israel-election-exit-polls-netanyahu-gantz-1.7854652

I'm not knowledgeable enough to put a 'good news/bad news' on this (I'm certain it's more complicated than that), but the reactions I'm seeing is that this is Big News (TM).

[Roen]

I'm getting some news coming in that Netanyahu may not have achieved a majority in the current election. 

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium-israel-election-exit-polls-netanyahu-gantz-1.7854652

I'm not knowledgeable enough to put a 'good news/bad news' on this (I'm certain it's more complicated than that), but the reactions I'm seeing is that this is Big News (TM).

It is certainly the hope of the majority of the Israeli people, but we have been burned so many times before, so we're not optimistic.