"It Wasn't Muslims"

[OP ED]

Well, I wrote a long post, but then deleted it. I doubt it would have convinced anyone of anything.

Let us suppose that Jews moved to Palestine, bought up property, managed to form Israel, but never bothered to get more aggressively militaristic. What would the outcome have been? Peaceful coexistence with their neighbours?

probably not, but it couldn't have hurt them to try.

A related question: could Israel have been founded without shedding a drop of blood?

yes. but why?

Prior to the formation of Israel as a nation state, the various settlements would constantly raid each other in tit-for-tat massacres. The earliest documented raid was allegedly done by Palestinians against Jews, but this hardly justifies all of the counter-blood-baths that followed on either side.

citation needed.

Was there ever a founding of a nation that didn't require a mass blood sacrifice as a prerequisite?

probably not.

If Israel had not been aggressively militaristic, there is a strong chance that it would be locked in perpetual warfare with Palestine, and under this scenario it would eventually fall because Palestine would draw in surrounding Arab countries, which could then lead Israel to call in Europe and the U.S. as allies. Would this alternate universe look any better than the present one?

maybe not, but it couldn't easily look much worse.
of course if Israel had decided to integrate with Palestine rather than conquering it and making their own government they wouldn't have had to deal with that problem.

In a perfect world, neither side, or any side for that matter, would waste an iota of time and/or energy fighting each other. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world where people are either killing each other, or plotting to kill each other. And within our own society, people either compete with each other for the best of everything, or plot to compete, which is really a disguised form of sublimated warfare. Israel is aggressive because it would rather be aggressive than defensive, peaceful, and potentially eliminated, because it reasonably believes the world to be a dangerous place.

blah.

Years of victimization through massacres, pogroms, holocausts, and various wealth-seizing schemes, forged Israel out of people who decided it would be better to oppressors than oppressees.

yeah, cause that's real stable.

To say that Latinos and African Americans are colonial subjects is gigantic euphemism. I don't recall King George pumping crack cocaine into the 13 colonies so that he could fill up his dungeons with slaves; then again, that would have been bad policy. The U.S. has a policy of trying to turn its African American citizens into fodder for its prisons, and thus its slaves; the latinos, it exploits for awhile, and then deports.

I volunteered down in the lower 9th ward of New Orleans for four months 1 year after Katrina and it looked very similar to footage of the Gaza strip. You had the National Guard cruising around in Hummers shooting people, beating up people; you had the gangs and the police doing the same thing; you had no hospitals or any social support services except those provided by a handful of volunteers; you had massive federal, state, and private sector fraud where basically ALL of the aid money was stolen, you had people being put into FEMA trailers with formaldehyde, and this is only the stuff that actually made the news. When I was down there, I heard stories about things that happened that may never come out because the military and the intelligence agencies have got the whole thing so tightly sewed up that . . . well, they always do say that we only hear about their failures, never their successes. I guess it all depends on how you define success.

Well meaning U.S. citizens wag a finger at Israel, but when you mention any of the above to them, they've either never heard of it, or they don't know what to do about it.

you should stay awhile before saying things like that in your last paragraph. it is also irrelevant to what is going on in Israel for the most part. If America jumped off a bridge would Israel do it too?

If we can't stop it in our own country, who are we to try to stop it in another country?

i'm not interested in interfering in their affairs, really. i think we should just stop paying for their attrocities financially.

Was the invasion of Iraq justified because Saddam was a monstrous dictator?

no.

Is Iraq a better place now that he is gone?

yes. also no.

Would Israel be a better place if we invaded, overthrew the Israeli regime and tried to make democracy their?

at least we'd be obligated to stop buying bombs for them then, but no we'd probably make it worse as we did in Iraq.

Palestinian militias backed by their neighbour would promptly exterminate the remaining Israelis.

possibly.

I'm not saying that I'm right, and you guys are wrong, or that I'm righteous, and that you are antisemites. I'm saying that this whole thing is a giant gray area, that tends towards darkness. I'm saying people should recognize their own culpability before pointing fingers and measuring out nooses.

i agree more or less. though you can tell people they're wrong when they are. They'll appreciate it later when they aren't anymore.

I think Israel's problem is rooted in the fact that it is based on the notion that a nation state is something that the Jews must have if they are to survive as a people.

i think the problem is the notion that it has to be a jewish nation state. i doubt many would've objected to them becoming Palestinians.

I think this notion comes from the observation that nation states are efficient tools that enable distinct peoples to survive across many generations due to the fact that they render certain advantages to their controllers.

which is funny, because Nietzsche said that NOT needing to be doing that was what made Jews so cool to begin with.

The Jews elected not to have a nation state for centuries and faced certain problems because of this choice. Now that they've made another choice, they face different problems.

the problem was thinking they could go to someone else's country and make that choice.

[lightningBugout]

When one goes through the "alternative" press, one finds a very detailed chronicling of Israeli crimes. One does not find the same thing for say, North Korea, or Somalia, or England, or the U.S., or China.

Doing my best to be emotionless here - in my experience you are very wrong. I'm not sure what meaning "alternative press" has anymore. At one point I would've attributed that title to a small handful of lefty newspring mags, perhaps a couple of the bigger academic journals, but most of all to the series of newsprint local alternative weeklies that existed in medium-sized cities all the way up to the megalopolises of LA and NYC. Well, no more for them. Consolidated away. There is absolutely no publication in this country that has come close to chronicling Israeli crimes, much less detailing them or, say, showing pictured of the atrocities. If you are aware of one, please let me know right away.

Additionally, I find that people who criticize Israel, often have no clue about what their own countries have done, or are currently engaged in, or are planning for the future.

This feels, to me, very much like you feel a bit personally slighted that Israel gets such a bad rap and so you've confused that feeling with this imagined scenario. Just my gut read. But again, in my experience this line is almost backwards. Those who most voraciously criticize Israel pretty much see America as Amerika the police state run by a bunch of fascists. I cannot think of a single instance in which someone I spoke with tried to smear Israel as being more vile than the states. The closest I can think of is some kind of white nationalist hick who argued that all the bad shit our country has done is acting under the influence of the jooz.

How can a Chinese, a U.S., or a U.K. citizen have moral standing to say what should or shouldn't be done about Israel when they can't even keep from subsidizing their own government's crimes, let alone even keep track of them?

You don't have to earn the right to protest genocide, human rights violations, breaches of treaty, etc. You are born with a conscience and you have an inalienable right to protest injustice.

[orz]

Is Iraq a better place now that he is gone?

Yes, if you like dead babies that is.

[8bitagent]

"When one goes through the "alternative" press, one finds a very detailed chronicling of Israeli crimes. One does not find the same thing for say, North Korea, or Somalia, or England, or the U.S., or China."

What?

The alternative/conspiracy/activist media I read has long gone out of its way to detail the war crimes of the US, China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, North Korea, etc next to Israel. To me these are all new world order controlled and crooked countries. Love the people, hate the government. And same with Russia, I dont know why so many people defend Putin and his war criminal leadership.

[AlicetheKurious]

From a factual POV, the Khazar hypothesis has been proven to be false.

No, it hasn't.

Not only are the North African Jews for the most part descendants of pagans who converted to Judaism, but so are the Jews of Yemen (remnants of the Himyar Kingdom in the Arab Peninsula, who converted to Judaism in the fourth century) and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe (refugees from the Kingdom of the Khazars, who converted in the eighth century).

- Shattering a 'National Mythology', Ha'aretz


jlaw172364 said:

Now, I actually studied International law and I can tell you several things about it:

First, you try to cloak your bullshit in ersatz authority by stating that you're "a card-carrying Jew", and now you claim that you "studied international law". But then you go on to expose your total ignorance of said international law, by equating, from a legal point of view, between crimes committed before 1945 and those committed after WWII, when our current system of international law, specifically designed to outlaw such abominations, became effective.

According to your logic, someone who traffics in human slaves today should be left alone, because after all, slavery used to be practised throughout the world. Or, in your terms, by everybody. You display the fuzzy, self-serving and cynically selective apologia that is typical of zionists, picking and choosing what you like from history, mythology, legal jurisprudence and facts, and blithely discarding what does not serve your ugly purposes.

Under its standards, not only is Israel a "rogue, criminal, etc." state, but guess what, so is the United States, the UK, France, China, the Middle Eastern States; in fact, every state that has a military and/or an intelligence agency, because, guess what, they all do the exact same things; it's just that sometimes, there is less publicity in some cases than in other cases.

What utter claptrap! "Israel" is a rogue, criminal, terrorist state because:

1) Its very establishment as a Judeo-supremacist state in Palestine was illegal according to existing laws at the time it was set up. UN Resolution 181, that divided Palestine and gave more than half of it to the zionists, though Jews owned less than 6% of the land in Palestine, was a non-binding resolution that was rejected by the non-Jewish majority AND never accepted by the Jews, either.

The cynical use of Resolution 181 by later zionists to provide the semblance of legality to their misbegotten state falls apart even further when we note that the same resolution divided Palestine into TWO states, one Arab and one Jewish, which the zionists promptly violated by invading all of Palestine. So, either they recognize Resolution 181 as the legal basis for their state, in which case it is a criminal state, or they don't recognize Resolution 181 as legally valid (which it isn't), in which case it is a criminal state.

2) Since the elimination of the Apartheid system in South Africa, Israel remains the only state on earth that would disappear were it to cease its criminal practices of genocide, ethnic cleansing, denial of human and legal rights to nearly half the country's population, theft and bloody terrorism. This is not the case with 'the United States, the UK, France, China, the Middle Eastern States' or any other country, all of which would not only continue to exist, but would thrive were they to comply with international law and basic human decency.

Since under international law human beings have INALIENABLE rights, while states have CONDITIONAL rights, Israel's dependence for its very existence on criminal practices against human beings makes it an illegitimate state.

Jerusalem Post: In our previous interview, you made many assertions about what could and should be expected to happen following the disengagement from Gaza. You claim now that everything has played out the way you said it would.

Geostrategist Arnon Soffer, Adviser to Israeli Prime Ministers: Yes. I said, "The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill."

That statement caused a huge stir at the time, and it's amazing to see how many dozens of angry, ignorant responses I continue to receive from leftists in Israel and anti-Semites abroad, who took my words out of context. I didn't recommend that we kill Palestinians. I said we'll have to kill them.

I was right about mounting demographic pressures. I am also entitled to defend myself and my country.

Link


3) One of the primary principles of international law is the inadmissibility of states acquiring territory through force. Israel has acquired 94% of the territory of Palestine through force, including the destruction of hundreds of entire villages, terrorism and mass murder. To illustrate, just one example:

In July 1948, the neighbouring Palestinian towns of Ramla and Lydd, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, were almost entirely emptied of their inhabitants on Ben-Gurion’s orders, despite the fact that they had been designated part of the Arab state under the UN plan. As Lydd was attacked, a large number of men sought refuge in the local Dahamish mosque.

When they eventually surrendered, they were massacred by Jewish forces led by Yigal Allon and his deputy, Yitzhak Rabin, a later prime minister. Some 176 bodies were reportedly recovered from the mosque. Allon then rounded up the 50,000 inhabitants of Lydd (today the Israeli city of Lod), who were forced at gunpoint to march many miles to the Jordanian border; some died en route of exhaustion.

http://www.jkcook.net/DisappearingPalestineXtract-1.pdf


4) Israel is a rogue state because since its inception it has continuously violated more international laws and UN resolutions than any other state on earth. It has a massive nuclear arsenal, yet refuses to sign the NPT or allow inspections; it illegally occupies the territory of its neighbors, violates the Geneva Convention by creating racist colonies there and steals their natural resources. Its continued membership in the UN is an outrage, since it was admitted to the UN explicitly on condition that it would comply with Resolution 194, calling for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes and their compensation. Israel formally agreed to do so, joined the UN and then violated the agreement.


5) Israel was established and continues to exist through massive theft of the property of others. Not only does it steal precious resources such as water and agricultural land from its neighboring countries, but ever since its inception, it has been taking their money, jewellery, houses, businesses and anything else it could strip from the rightful inhabitants of Palestine:


For a considerable time, government officials, private citizens and especially soldiers enjoyed free rein looting Palestinian homes of their valuables. One government minister reported seeing the army take 1,800 truckloads of property from the single, largely deserted city of Lydd, while another admitted that "the army does what it wants".56

The government sought to reassert control with new emergency egulations.57 One, passed in late 1948, ended the legal definition of land as 'abandoned' and instead declared the Palestinian owners 'absentees'; their seized property was then reclassified as 'state land'.58 In an attempt to make this land grab appear legal, the same regulation invested authority in an official, the Custodian of Absentee Property, whose job was supposedly to safeguard the property of the Palestinian refugees. According to a statement in 1980 from the Custodian, about 70 per cent of Israel's total territory was 'absentee' land -- that is, rightfully the property of Palestinian refugees.59

Although officially a trustee, the Custodian -- and in turn the State of Israel -- was soon reaping the profits from rental income from buildings, farmland and religious endowment land; from his newfound ownership of large Palestinian businesses; and from the sale of produce from the refugees' olive and citrus groves, their tobacco, fig, apple, grape and almond crops, and their quarries.60 Of items from the large store of confiscated merchandise -- from clothes to furniture -- the army was given first refusal. Remaining goods were put up for sale, with priority going to disabled war veterans, soldiers' families and government employees.61 Palestinian bank accounts were seized too.

When Ben-Gurion was told that refugees' deposits totalling 1.5 billion Palestinian pounds had been discovered in the banks of Haifa, he noted simply in his diary: "The banks are willing to hand this property over."62

The historian Michael R. Fischbach reports that a UN committee set up to evaluate Palestinian losses produced a very conservative estimate in the mid-1960s that Israel had confiscated at least 1.75 million acres of land (or seven million dunams, in the traditional unit of measurement used by the Ottomans)63 -- about a third of Israel's total territory.64 This land was valued at close to $1 billion in the prices of the day and would be worth many hundreds of billions more today.65

If confiscated Palestinian moveable property such as bank accounts, jewellery, artworks, safe deposit boxes, bonds, as well vehicles, furniture, agricultural equipment and herds of animals was included, the total was pushed far higher. To the Palestinians, of course, their homeland was priceless. None of the successive Custodians, however, regarded their role as the protection of the refugees' property. Mordechai Schattner, the incumbent in 1953, observed: "All money accruing from these sales should go the development authorities. This means, in fact, that it would be used for the settlement of new [Jewish] immigrants."66

http://www.jkcook.net/DisappearingPalestineXtract-1.pdf

Documentation of the enormous crimes that have been and continue to be committed against the Palestinian people could easily fill a library; for a good start, I recommend three books: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe; The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, by Nur Masalha; and Righeous Victims, by Benny Morris.

Note that at the very same time that the zionists were demanding and receiving billions of dollars in reparations for the theft of Jewish property in Europe, they were engaging in the exact same crimes against the Palestinian people, and being allowed to get away scot-free with the stolen loot.

I'm saying people should recognize their own culpability before pointing fingers and measuring out nooses. I think Israel's problem is rooted in the fact that it is based on the notion that a nation state is something that the Jews must have if they are to survive as a people.

And yet more than half of all Jews live outside of Israel, more than 90% of those in the United States, where they expect and receive the same full rights as citizens and human beings that zionists deny to the non-Jewish rightful inhabitants of Palestine.

The West has only added to its culpability by collaborating in such a monstrosity in the first place, by continuing to ignore the horrific injustices being inflicted on Israel's victims, and by supplying weapons and money to such a barbaric enterprise.

Anyway, I won't respond to your idiotic arguments one by one, because your last post merely proves my earlier observations about the sick way (the zionist way) you view the world, especially your claim that, in order for Jews to survive, innocent people must be dispossessed and killed. Like I indicated earlier, a Nazi couldn't have said it better.

I volunteered down in the lower 9th ward of New Orleans for four months 1 year after Katrina and it looked very similar to footage of the Gaza strip.

Really?










"President Obama, please say something about Gaza. You have been roundly condemned for your continued silence in the face of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel in Gaza. Silence is complicity. Not one more bomb for Israel."

- Cynthia McKinney

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Yes, if you like dead babies that is.

Now you're just being a tease Orz...fer shame.

[jlaw172364]

@Alice

If the Israelis were really comparable to the Nazis, there would be no Palestinians; they would have all been exterminated circa 1955. The Nazis were expansionist; the Israelis gave back most of the territory took by conquest because they only took it for strategic reasons in the first place. Judaism is non-evangelical; unlike Christianity or Islam, it does not seek to convert or assimilate the entire world.

The Nazis wanted to exterminate international Jewry; that's why they kept up the extermination until the bitter end. Other nations assisted them by denying Jewish refugees a safe haven. Do you think the Israelis would hunt the Palestinians to the ends of the earth to exterminate every last one of them? The Israelis just want a chunk of territory to call their own.

Is the international community of nations that in aggregate, denied safe haven to Jewish refugees in any position to tell the remaining population of Jews what they can and cannot do? Having to ask permission is a position of weakness. It's clear that the Jews figured out that if they are to survive, they can't be relying on the good will of non-Jews, but will have to take whatever they can and defend, just like every other tribe has done.

International law as created by wealthy and powerful interests to exploit the weak and the poor. Part of mobilizing support for its missions is to cloak everything in humanitarian terms. Every international intervention pretends to be humanitarian.

As applied, international law does not exist. Law has to be applied equally, and as it stands, international law is applied unequally.

You will never convince most Jews or Israelis that Muslims or Christians have the right to judge them or accuse them of anything. Christian and Muslim regimes treated Jews like second-class citizens, murdered, tortured, and dispossessed them for centuries. Under contemporary Muslim law, non-Muslims don't have equal rights to Muslims.

One of the first maxims in international law is that it international law is international politics, and what is international politics but various interests jockeying for position.

I noticed that you used the theory of private property rights to support your notion that the Israelis "stole" the Palestinians land. Property is pretty much theft, nobody has any inherent right to anything, people band together and take what they can, then use psychological instruments called laws to protect what they appropriated. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have any "legal claim" to the land because law is a fiction. If the U.S. decided to take Israel and turn it into Bible-land, it would concoct some legal theory to support its war plans, and then after it had exterminated or otherwise driven out the inhabitants, it would set up a system of laws to govern the newly incorporated 51st state. However, it would still be as fraudulent as the previous states.

I did volunteer in New Orleans; like I said, the various goon-squads have that place well under wraps. That's why nobody knows exactly how many people perished down there and by what means. The "free" press is using its freedom to not investigate anything. People were dispossessed of their property and basically run out of a place they had lived for generations. Most got no aid, and any aid received was a fraction of the amount needed. The people who remain are given no services, no protection, and are being taxed as if they were. The army kills civilians, the police kill civilians, gangs kill civilians. If you look at aerial footage of the 9th ward, it looks like a war zone. Local activists such as Common Ground actually use terms like "right of return." I was there for 4 months; I saw enough and heard enough to understand that what went on there is just business as usual for the rapacious overlords who run this planet.


Alice, you essentially proved my point because your photos and your comment of "Really" suggest that you believe that the Palestinians are somehow unique as victims of invasive, predatory interests. They are not unique, they're just another example of a weak, disorganized people being taken advantage of by a strong, organized people (and I only use weak and strong in the physical sense). I suppose I could dig up some pictures of destroyed neighborhoods, corpses, FEMA camps, and brutalized children, but you can easily google them up yourself.

Here is what it boils down to, the Israelis are EXACTLY THE SAME as the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, Japan, China, India, the Middle East and any other modern quasi-imperial, industrialized nation state, yet factions within these nations would try to pretend otherwise. This is because, as Machiavelli tells us, hypocrisy is an essential tool in the Prince's arsenal.

Israel is organized, efficient, amoral, predatory, invasive, exploitative, etc. etc. It is NOT unique, it is a modern nation-state.

These nations can never claim that what they do is moral, ethical, etc. when they do it, and neither can Israel. Legality is largely irrelevant because it has little to do with morality. Nazism was legal in Nazi Germany, and if the Nazis had taken over, Nazism would have been the law of the land, and all the charnel houses that were frying up all the non-Aryans would all be given a stamp of approval.

What Israel does to the Palestinians is immoral, unethical, evil, cruel, predatory, exploitative. I never would claim otherwise. Israel is gambling that what it does will help it survive in the long term. It reasonably believes that its plan will work.

[AlicetheKurious]

jlaw172364 said:

...the Israelis gave back most of the territory took by conquest because they only took it for strategic reasons in the first place.

No they didn't. Try to make your lies slightly less egregious -- not that you would have more credibility, but some of us are not quite as ignorant as you would like.

If the Israelis were really comparable to the Nazis, there would be no Palestinians; they would have all been exterminated circa 1955.

Once again, spoken like a Nazi, circa 1939. When the zionists talk about the Palestinian people as "vermin", "cockroaches", "lice", of Palestinian women's wombs as "demographic bombs", when the Israeli Deputy Defense Minister threatens Palestinians with "an even bigger Holocaust", and when Israeli rabbis explain that the extermination of Palestinians is a religious duty, some of us know exactly what that means, even if the likes of you would prefer that we didn't.

If there were any doubts, these would be banished by a quick glance at the facts on the ground. Already the Palestinians have been stripped of all their possessions and their human and legal rights in the Jewish state. Millions have been herded into concentration camps where conditions are not fit for human beings. In Gaza, the zionists are deliberately starving 1.2 million human beings living in the radioactive rubble of their homes, depriving them of medicine and giving them sewage water to drink.

Though the Israelis tried to prevent anybody from knowing what they did last January, the world saw the children burned alive, saw the indiscriminate bombing, saw the crushed ambulances and heard the screams of the helpless victims of the zionist monsters.

Now the zionists are threatening to do it again, and again, daring the world to stop them.

Is the international community of nations that in aggregate, denied safe haven to Jewish refugees in any position to tell the remaining population of Jews what they can and cannot do?

The concept of "collective guilt" is typical of Nazis and other racist oppressors, to justify persecuting those who cannot defend themselves. The West is "guilty", the Muslims are "guilty", everybody is "guilty" -- only the "Jews and Israelis" are immune from any guilt or responsibility for their own actions in your psycho world-view.

Even more disturbing is how you recommend that others expiate their "guilt". How many babies, in your opinion, should the world allow the Israelis to kill, to redeem its conscience? How many Palestinian people should 'the West' allow you to burn alive, tear to pieces, poison, shoot and beat before the zionists consider the West's 'moral debt to the Jews' to be paid?

You will never convince most Jews or Israelis that Muslims or Christians have the right to judge them or accuse them of anything.

I hope you're wrong, and that "most Jews or Israelis" are not beyond human pity or appeals to basic decency, or even reason. In any case, your point is well taken, regarding the futility of expecting either humanity from most "Jews or Israelis", or justice under international law and Geneva conventions.

Hence the burgeoning global movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), and for the Palestinian resistance. It must drive you crazy (even crazier than you already are) that so many Jewish people reject your medieval tribalism and have joined it, and more are joining it every day.

Alice, you essentially proved my point because your photos and your comment of "Really" suggest that you believe that the Palestinians are somehow unique as victims of invasive, predatory interests. They are not unique, they're just another example of a weak, disorganized people being taken advantage of by a strong, organized people (and I only use weak and strong in the physical sense).

Yes, the Palestinian people are weak, facing a predatory, ruthless enemy. That is precisely why it is so crucial that people of conscience demand that their countries stop channeling weapons and money bought with billions of dollars in taxpayer funds into this morally repugnant enterprise. And that they expose and prosecute its treasonous agents within their own governments.

The struggle to save the Palestinian people from their tormentors is indivisible from every other fight for freedom and human rights by any oppressed people. Justice denied to some, is justice denied to all.

What Israel does to the Palestinians is immoral, unethical, evil, cruel, predatory, exploitative. I never would claim otherwise. Israel is gambling that what it does will help it survive in the long term. It reasonably believes that its plan will work

.

Well, we'll just have to redouble our efforts to ensure that it doesn't.

[wintler2]

Thanks Alice.

[jlaw172364]

Oh, I'm lying when I say Israel gave back territory it took by conquest? Now who's being disingenuous? Israel occupied the Sinai peninsula, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank during the seventies, and then it withdrew over a period of time. An Nazi, imperial state would NEVER give back territory, period. Calling the Israelis Nazis is just disingenuous, simple-minded rhetoric. It's lazy thinking, and it's also calculated to agitate because the person who uses such rhetoric very well knows that many Israeli citizens survived Nazi extermination and lost huge junks of their families to it.

And calling me a Nazi is even more dishonest.

A Nazi wouldn't even bother attempting to engage you in a dialogue. They would either ignore you or kill you, period. A Nazi would also try to morally justify the crimes being committed. I NEVER said what Israel was doing was moral or ethical, so STOP suggesting that I do. The only claim I make is that Israel does what it does for strategic reasons pertaining to its survival. Survival is hardly about morality, unless you're speaking of it in the Nietzschean sense, where the only thing that is moral is vigorous, thriving in life even at the expense of others' death. I'm not someone who wants to see Palestinians exterminated.

There is a big difference between factions of a nation threatening extermination and actual extermination; there is a big difference in lowering the standard of living so that people suffer and die and actual liquidation. Extremist factions in the U.S. are constantly calling for the extermination of this group or that group, but that's not the same as actual extermination. You can't just say that because some extremist Israelis made statements about the Palestinians that it automatically follows that all Israelis want to exterminate Palestinians.

If the Israelis were the Nazis, there would be no Palestinians, period, to harp about. All the Palestinians would be dead, or refugees outside of Palestine. Thanks to the Nazis and the Soviets, oh, and every other modern nation state with security apparatus, we now know how easy it is for a modern nation state to exterminate civilians en masse. Israel has clearly possessed the capability to exterminate the Palestinians since its inceptions. It could have easily already been a fait accompli. Nobody would have cared or done anything. Sure, governments would have denounced Israel, but no government would have actually done anything, much in the manner that governments denounced Nazi Germany and Augusto Pinochet without lifting a finger to stop the butchery.


In this alternate universe, you would be calling for the prosecution of the war criminals in Russia for exterminating Chechens, for the regime change in China, for exterminating Tibetans, for the lynching of U.S. war criminals for oppressing African Americans and Latinos, for the heads of all G20 governments proxy extermination of Africans and South Americans through puppet regimes.

Does anyone harp on about how the Russians exterminated Chechens? Not like they harp on about how the Israelis oppress Palestinians.

People demonize Israel because it is easier to demonize an other than it is to demonize someone who is closer to oneself. Jews have been demonized historically. The Nazis demonized the Jews for being weak, diseased, unfit, but somehow at the same time, strong super-villains who oppressed the Aryan race.

Honestly, in my mind, you are as disingenuous as a neoconservative, going on about Saddam Hussein's crimes against humanity, while calling for the invasion of Iraq so that the U.S. can be the agent that commits the crimes against humanity.

When you talk about doing something about Israel, what do you actually think would work, a full scale invasion? Because that is what it would take. Rightly or wrongly, the Jews, especially the Israelis, perceive themselves to backed into a corner, and they will fight to the death like a desperate, cornered animal. That's why they do what they do, because they simply don't care anymore about issues of morality. So, in order to save the Palestinians, you essentially have to exterminate the Israelis, or at least wall the Palestinians off from the Israelis.

The only sane solution is to wall the two parties off from each other. But you're not going to get Israel to give back the vast majority of the territory it now claims.

[American Dream]

[Jeff]

Admin sez: I'll keep this thread open so long as it continues to host a more or less civil discussion, but less is not more.

[OP ED]

The Nazis wanted to exterminate international Jewry; that's why they kept up the extermination until the bitter end. Other nations assisted them by denying Jewish refugees a safe haven. Do you think the Israelis would hunt the Palestinians to the ends of the earth to exterminate every last one of them? The Israelis just want a chunk of territory to call their own.

No, the Israelis just wanted a chunk of territory that someone else was currently living on. That isn't the same thing as protecting your back yard from terrorists, which is the pretense on my television to justify all of this NONSENSE.

An Nazi, imperial state would NEVER give back territory, period.

incorrect. Even the Nazis gave back territory on more than one occassion, although they gave it back to marginalised now non-entities or puppet regimes whose existence depended on their own. This is common imperialist practice when one oversteps the bounds of what one can easily maintain by continued conventional means. See: Rome in Britain or Egypt for example, or Alexander of Macedon in the AfPak region.

[jlaw172364]

As I said before, there is no moral or ethical argument for the driving out and the dispossessing of an indigenous people.

I suppose the Jews could have relocated to some uninhabited frozen wasteland, but that hardly would have worked. Nor could they have declared a swath of the State of New York Israel, since the U.S. would have squashed that like a bug.

They were able to create a Jewish state because they marketed it as a return to the mythical Biblical State.

They went in, bought land, build settlements, bought more land until the Palestinians began to notice that they were being invaded.

Then the massacres started.

This went back and forth for decades; the Jews eventually won because they had superior political and economic support from outside.

Israel has existed as a de facto nation state for about 70 years. It has all the trappings. One can make all kinds of self-serving legalistic arguments, but legalistic arguments mostly seek to reify the existing power structure. I mean, I had a property law professor tell me that the a Supreme Court opinion that basically reverted public land to the private hands because their bequest condition that no blacks be allowed on the public land was breached by Supreme Court rulings that resulted in the outlawing of segregation was valid because, and I quote, "we care that much about private property rights here in the U.S." And did the private family, a wealthy aristocratic Southern family, care about private property rights when they bought and sold Africans like chattel? Where were the private property rights of the Africans? They were banished with pseudo-scientific and pseudo-legalistic arguments that the Africans weren't actually human, and therefore couldn't have rights. These same arguments were the repeated rationale for reneging on every land treaty made with the Indians. The United States is basically a rogue state, founded on theft, murder, and exploitation . . . like all the other states, if you go back far enough. But as any cynical law professor will tell you, so what? Once established, the state exists as an undeniable fact.

By the way, the book I read about the Israeli-Palestinian is Benny Morris's Righteous Victims. Basically, I wanted to read about how it was founded, and as expected, it was founded in blood, although initially, a significant faction of Zionists thought they could found it relatively bloodlessly, but how can you undo massacres that have already occurred beyond your control? It was basically Hatfield / McCoy style massacres before it ever even became an issue of nation-hood. The Palestinians got the urge to create their own nation as a reaction to the Israeli threat; before, they were basically a British protectorate, which hardly lessens their claim, but does somewhat explain their failure to expel the Israelis. Plus, the Zionists exploited the system of private property to co-opt the Palestinian land-owning class; they bought up a lot of property, and the tenant class got screwed like it always does.

I think a big part of the tragedy was that there was no pragmatic, realistic, long-sighted leadership viewpoint that prevailed on the part of the Palestinians. This viewpoint would have seen the Israeli invasion as perhaps unstoppable, but certainly mitigatable. It would have sought to carve out and protect a place for the Palestinians. Instead, unrealistic eliminationist viewpoints prevailed, and were egged on by the neighboring states. You cannot deny that none of the Arab States wanted a Jewish State in their midst, that they worked assiduously to prevent it, and they attacked it twice with military force. You also cannot deny that the Palestinians have been belligerent towards the Israelis from the beginning. Of course, their belligerence is perfectly understandable, they're being invaded by outsiders, and Jews to boot.

I think a big mistake people raised in a tolerant, 20th century multicultural milieu forget is how just how intolerant the denizens of most ethnocentric nation states are. Even states with a tradition of tolerance for immigrants have plenty of room for violent bigotry. From a historical standpoint, tribes are always attacking or conspiring to attack tribes they consider "other" or members of some outgroup.

I don't believe the Israelis ever seriously believed they were going to settle the Sinai Peninsula. They took it as a display of power and to use it as a negotiating instrument to buy concessions from the various Arab states. I know that there are radical factions of right-wing Israelis who talk about a Greater Israel, but I doubt they'll ever see their ideas to fruition. I personally believe that the right wing in the U.S., the Christian right-wing, secretly hates Jews and Israel, and only pretends to be a friend, but in a play out of Sun Tzu, feeds the nutjobs to build up ill will towards Israel.

The Nazis, on the other hand, they were breeding the master race to take over the world. I mean, they took over Europe and invaded the Soviet Union. They were expanding in every direction, they took on everybody at the same time. If they made peace, it was only temporary for strategic purposes. When you say they gave back territory, I don't think one could say that allowing some French Nazis to control part of France to be the same thing is giving up territory. The maps from that period resemble a python trying to swallow a water buffalo; they made a valiant attempt, but they just couldn't do it. It wasn't possible.

I don't think a rational case can be made that Israel wants to subdue the entire globe, although plenty of people argue that International Jewry economically subjugates the globe through the ZOG, but that's getting into nut-land.

I think Israel is just another case of a separatist tribe wanting a homeland, similar to what the Chechens or Kurds would want for themselves. Only, the Israelis have more or less taken it by force.

[orz]

there is a big difference in lowering the standard of living so that people suffer and die and actual liquidation.

Not so big a difference to those doing the suffering and dying.