Palestine

[82_28]

That was a photo of Yitzhak Rabin that I "hot linked" from wikipedia that takes up all that space. Even clear on the other side of the planet hearing of his assassination while listening to the radio while delivering pizza devastated me. He was a clear path to peace and could thus exist no longer.

[Nordic]

One of the key reasons that I no longer participate in such debates, is that it is now beyond doubt in my own mind that the vast majority of Israel/Israelis are as much victims of the whole current Global insanity as the rest of every other fucker here reading this.

Get our heads around this fact and we might possibly proceed.

Do you mean .... That the current policies of the State of Israel only cause hatred of Israel to arise around the world? Because that seems to be the situation. I used to not have an opinion on the situation until a few years ago when I figured I'd finally research the situation .....

It seems there's nowhere for Israel to go but down.

[AlicetheKurious]

[AlicetheKurious]

Sorry I don't know how to embed the video. It's of a Zionist occupation soldier planting a knife on a Palestinian child whom he's just murdered. There have been accusations for the past few days that Jewish settlers are advising each other on social media to run up to any Palestinian and shout that they're being stabbed, thereby getting an Israeli soldier to shoot the Palestinian ("for free.")

This is clearly what happened in this video. The soldier runs up to the child he's just shot, and sees that he's unarmed. Another soldier comes up from behind, and hands the first soldier a knife. The soldier bends down and throws the knife on the dead child's body.

https://www.facebook.com/unbreakable.he ... 203969959/

[zangtang]

There have been accusations for the past few days that Jewish settlers are advising each other on social media to run up to any Palestinian and shout that they're being stabbed, thereby getting an Israeli soldier to shoot the Palestinian ("for free.")



https://www.facebook.com/unbreakable.he ... 203969959/

captures of such tweets or txts or whatever could be valuable.....in an art project sense

[backtoiam]

http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2014/07/ ... ing-sides/

[backtoiam]

This is a very sad situation. Obviously the children of Palestine that have grown up in 60 years of this situation are terrified of the Israelis.

At the same time the Israeli children have grown up for 60 years being trained to be scared of the Palestine children, and they are.

I cannot imagine what the end of this unfortunate deadlock will be, or how it could ever end. Children become adults.

Children on both sides, which of course is the future, both growing up scared of each other.

This is very unfortunate, and it doesn't have to be this way. This fear mongering is also being promoted in the U.S. between peoples. I hope the following are not shades of the future.

[BrandonD]

I think it's worth remembering that most of the people out there involved in this debate are ultimately just ordinary people who've been conditioned by the propaganda of their authorities.

I see many parallels between Israel and America. For example, most of us on this forum are Americans who don't buy into the nationalist propaganda, but I suspect we are in the minority. Most Americans appear to buy into it, and yet I wouldn't consider them despicable monsters, just people who were not gifted with much intelligence or discernment. Or perhaps just raised under circumstances that hindered their ability to wake up to the reality of the situation.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

Likewise, there are certainly Israeli people who don't buy into their nation's propaganda. As in the US they are probably in the minority, but even Israelis who buy into the lies are not despicable monsters, but simply ordinary people not gifted with much intelligence or discernment, or raised under hindering circumstances.

I think that thorough and continuous conditioning can, little by little, transform a decent person into someone who thinks of another group of people as sub-human. I hope that if people can be brought there, then this means they can also be brought back.

[Iamwhomiam]

tapitsbo wrote
This is a country that needs to be understood as not simply an exception, but also a part of a spectrum of authoritarian states including the US, UK, Russia, etc.

I strongly disagree. This country must be seen as exceptional because it is the only country created by the then and still existing authoritarian states. That it too, has powers of the authoritarian states is only natural - it's their baby. And our nightmare. It is also exceptional in that it is a so-called religious state.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with the spoiled children of the wealthy who are doted on endlessly by parental proxies and have all their heart's desire, the kid is rotten to the core.

Israel is the last vestige of Western Colonialism and continues being defended by its creators.

BrandonD wrote
I think that thorough and continuous conditioning can, little by little, transform a decent person into someone who thinks of another group of people as sub-human. I hope that if people can be brought there, then this means they can also be brought back.

Perhaps. But barring physical and mental torture, (and I recognize one being exposed to near endless war as torturous and mind-altering) I think one must give up their intellect and will in order to be so coerced to submit to peer pressure and the abandonment of your own individual values.

Just like Trump supporters have.

[General Patton]

I see many parallels between Israel and America. For example, most of us on this forum are Americans who don't buy into the nationalist propaganda, but I suspect we are in the minority. Most Americans appear to buy into it, and yet I wouldn't consider them despicable monsters, just people who were not gifted with much intelligence or discernment. Or perhaps just raised under circumstances that hindered their ability to wake up to the reality of the situation.

Do you think people would be nationalist without propaganda? Are there nationalists with intelligence or discernment? What does that make them?

[kool maudit]

I am deeply embarrassed but feel compelled to admit that in the early days of this board I engaged Alice in an argument that employed a variant of the neocon "only democracy in the region/Islamic fundamentalist/I like to have fun in Tel Aviv" argument regarding Israel's overall... status.

I bring this up because for me, it illustrates how remnants of loyalty to the organized structures that ostensibly define one's realm of familiarity (for me, "the West") can occlude even the most visibly egregious of abuses.

It is years later now, and I have visited both Israel and its neighbours. I walked through the wall in Jerusalem (it's full of turnstiles and metal detectors and chicken wire checkpoints) and talked to people off all sorts about how the many programmes and raids and attacks that I once callowly imagined to somehow represent me, or my region, or the expectations I grew up with, were nothing of the sort. I still, by the way, had fun in Tel Aviv. I did elsewhere as well. But my easy certainties have long been exposed, were exposed decades before I voiced and repeated them, as monstrous diversions and brutal lies.

I bring this up only to note both my own error and the fact that minds do change when exposed to evidence, both here at RI and in the world.

[AlicetheKurious]

I feel compelled to jump in and tell you, kool maudit, that I really respect what you wrote. If we're not learning and growing and assimilating new information into a world-view that makes intellectual and moral sense, then what the hell are we doing here ("here" as in RI, or in this life)? Surely nothing good.

[seemslikeadream]

Why Americans Are Mostly Ignorant of the Nonviolent Palestinian Resistance Movement
The message the West sends by ignoring the Palestinian nonviolent movement is that if Palestinians want attention paid to their plight, they have to commit violent acts.
By Zaid Jilani / AlterNet October 16, 2015

A wave of violence has hit Israel and the Palestinian territories, and there are rumors that it is the spark of a third intifada, an uprising against the occupation. Many are questioningwhy young Palestinians are choosing to use such violent tactics as knife attacks against Israelis. Some wonder why Palestinians have not followed a path of nonviolent resistance in the spirit of Gandhi and King instead.

In fact, for many years, there has been a nonviolent Palestinian movement. A film about it, Five Broken Cameras, was nominated for an Oscar two years ago. The film documents protests in the West Bank city of Bil'in, which has been the site of major settlement grabs by the Israelis.

Watch it below:



For years, settlers have moved into the surrounding territories and grabbed Palestinian land to build apartments. The Israeli military protects the settlers and has helped construct a wall to carve out lands for them to colonize. The Palestinians in Bil'in have chosen not to respond with rockets or rifles; instead they model their resistance on Gandhian nonviolence.

As Five Broken Camerasdocuments, the Israeli military response to the protests has been violent, with tear gas and rubber bullets and sometimes live ammunition. During the course of the film, Palestinians are injured and even killed by the Israeli military, while Israeli settlers burn their olive trees and harass their town. Many Palestinian families have their homes raided in the middle of the night, so that the military can arrest individuals it identifies as leading the demonstrations.

Despite all of this, Bil'lin continues to be one of the centers of Palestinian nonviolent resistance. Several times a month, I get emails from activists there documenting weekly protests. On September 25, shortly before the wave of violence broke out, activists in Bil'in were struck with rubber bullets, sound grenades and tear gas. Here are some photos of their action and the resulting injuries:



The nonviolent movement in Bil'in, as well as the violent military crackdowns, rarely make international news. The Oscar nomination for Five Broken Cameras was a rare moment when the Palestinian nonviolent movement received any recognition. From 2002 to 2005, the Palestinian nonviolent movement that was going on alongside the violent resistance of the Second Intifada received only three feature news articles in the New York Times.

Mubarak Awad, one of the pioneers of the Palestinian nonviolent movement during the First Intifada, was arrested and deporteddespite the fact he never committed an act of violence. Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has disavowed violence against Israel, is met with massive settlement constructionand deprivations of Palestinians in the West Bank. Even when American citizens are shot and killedduring demonstrations, the State Department does not respond harshly to the Israeli state.


Although Palestinians are injured, killed or displaced by the Israeli state and/or the settlement movement frequently, the issue only really reaches Western media when there are violent uprisings that injure or kill Israelis. Google Trends data of news headlines shows that the three significant spikes of Western news coverage of the Palestinians was during the past three Israel-Gaza wars.

The message the West sends by ignoring the Palestinian nonviolent movement is that if Palestinians want attention paid to their plight, they have to commit violent acts.

American politicians condemningPalestinians for violent uprisings could help to prevent the violence if they started paying attention to, and legitimizing, the nonviolent movement, including the boycott movement. As President Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

[tapitsbo]

I have trouble understanding the "last bastion of Western colonialism" thing. Living in a Western country where Harper's government attempted to pass laws banning criticism of Israel, it feels as though the colonialism is the other way around (Western countries being subordinated to Israel, at least in the 21st Century). But that's a controversial argument - seems a lot simpler to just characterise Israel as an ethno-nationalist state ("fascist" if the term hadn't been worn out to meaninglessness).

Especially with the constitutional changes defining Israel as a "Jewish State", it provides justification to people seeking segregated ethno-nationalist states everywhere.

Meanwhile Western colonialism seems to have morphed into transnational capitalism.

I acknowledged that Israel is an exception, but I'm saying that it isn't *just* an exception. Treating the country like an absolute nadir and scapegoat only will justify the last-ditch, desperate escalation it seems headed towards. Meanwhile much of the rest of the world is guilty of similar policies and repression. Criticism that is consistent is harder to write off as hypocritical.

A question for the knowledgeable people here: what is the likelihood that Russia, which supposedly has a great relationship with Israel, won't assist in furthering the Yinon Plan just as the USA was enlisted into doing earlier in the century? I'd love to know more about what is likely to happen here.

[backtoiam]

A question for the knowledgeable people here: what is the likelihood that Russia, which supposedly has a great relationship with Israel, won't assist in furthering the Yinon Plan just as the USA was enlisted into doing earlier in the century? I'd love to know more about what is likely to happen here.

In my opinion the likelihood is incredibly slim. I realize this opinion killz the buzz from smoking Hopium (hope) but at the moment this is the opinion I hold. I wish I will be proven incorrect. If I am incorrect we will see disaster of bewildering proportion, and it will be blisteringly obvious that I am incorrect.

So should I wish to be incorrect? I don't know. Its bad either way.