Rising tensions in East Jerusalem

[wiggin]

But I have a couple of questions first about this asymmetrical warfare: If all Israeli citizens have a mandatory military service period, doesn't that make them all "fair game" as military combatants? ie How could Palestinians begin to know who's a civilian vs a soldier anyway?

Generally soldiers are fair targets when carrying out military activities, not when they are (for example) off duty or reservists or the like. Things get a little murky with combatants who aren't soldiers per se (no uniform, no official duties, no clear delineation between their civilian life and their military duties) as is the case of the military arm of Hamas. But for a conventional military, that is the rule.

Uniformed on-duty soldiers are also generally off limits if they are, for example, assisting in the delivery of humanitarian aid to the civilians of the enemy (as was the case of a soldier who was wounded by a rocket/mortar attack while supervising delivery of aid to Gaza at a border crossing).

And if the US (and UK) are the major funders of Israel's defense systems and weaponry, why should we ignore their offense tactics when they're in breach of previous agreements?

The US funds both defensive and offensive armaments for Israel, and they sell additional weapons to Israel above and beyond the military aid. The UK does not provide substantial funding (or any?) for the Israeli military but UK companies do sell weapons to Israel (and vice versa). I think it's perfectly reasonable for the US and other countries to want to know how their weapons are being used, and indeed there have been some US restrictions in the past - most notably some associated with Israeli plans to sell weapons to other countries.

That the US has chosen a relatively hands off approach in the Middle East in policing how their weapons are used (by e.g. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, etc.) can be attributed to any number of potential motives: realpolitik, corporate greed, moral decay, or even a genuine belief that on the balance the weapons are improving regional security and stability.

[GGT]

Pretty rich to talk about "humanitarian aid" when there's basically an apartheid situation for Palestinians. (The largest open-air prison in the world?) Or even the "Rules" of combat, when it's asymmetrical warfare. Of the things you listed, I'll go with moral decay. Or maybe moral sclerosis related to politicking and greed. It's all related and interconnected, I suppose.

It's still really fucked up. With no resolution in sight. Just more of the same, doing the same things over and over and over again, expecting different results, ie insanity.

[Lewkowski]

Pretty rich to talk about "humanitarian aid" when there's basically an apartheid situation for Palestinians. (The largest open-air prison in the world?) Or even the "Rules" of combat, when it's asymmetrical warfare. Of the things you listed, I'll go with moral decay. Or maybe moral sclerosis related to politicking and greed. It's all related and interconnected, I suppose.

It's still really fucked up. With no resolution in sight. Just more of the same, doing the same things over and over and over again, expecting different results, ie insanity.

The idea that it is an apartheid regime is stupid.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/05...artheid-state/

"Israel is a democracy that affords its Arab citizens full rights. They vote in elections and Arab parties sit in parliament. These parties obviously have a profoundly different worldview than the Zionist parties, which has been a barrier preventing cooperation between them. But this year, in a first, Arab parties were part of the negotiations over forming a new government before they broke down.

Arab Israelis are full participants in Israeli society. There are Arab justices on the Supreme Court. About 20% of doctors in Israel and about half of pharmacists are Arab."

[GGT]

The idea that it is an apartheid regime is stupid.

What's *stupid* is assuming that whatever Israel does is democratic or "right".

[RandBlade]

It isn't an assumption. They are the only proper democracy in the region and they are literally defending themselves from those who seek the extermination of all Jews and think #HitlerWasRight

[GGT]

It isn't an assumption. They are the only proper democracy in the region and they are literally defending themselves from those who seek the extermination of all Jews and think #HitlerWasRight

Israel isn't acting like the "proper democracy" you make them out to be. They've expanded territorial building, ignoring previous agreements, and become an "occupying force". They've stacked the courts so no Palestinian can actually dispute land claims and get justice. If this is what "proper democracy" looks like, it's no wonder there are riots. Why are you defending Israel when their actions are questionable or indefensible?

Are you in the camp that Israel can do no wrong, and that even questioning their military policy is somehow anti-semitic?

[RandBlade]

Israel can do wrong, but when their enemies like Hamas and its sponsor Iran are literally and publicly seeking the extermination of Jews in the region and the destruction of their state then I think they're entitled to defend themselves.

If Israel were seeking to eradicate Arabs from the Middle East and ensure there were no Arab states in the Middle East then I would say the Arabs have a right to defend themselves from that, but its not the case.

[Aimless]

Didn't see this coming:

Twitter Link

Foreign actors' intelligence ops targeting Ireland are likely to intensify.

[Aimless]

Perspectives from inside Facebook:

Twitter Link

[BluntHorse]

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[Aimless]

Bro, don't engage. There are more productive uses for your energy.

[RandBlade]

That's a lovely bit of racism there. So as long as Israel isn't trying to eradicate Arabs from the Middle East, Palestinian Arabs don't have the right to defend themselves from eradication. I mean, it's not like it's *all* the Arabs. Just the Palestinian ones. Goes very well in hand with your whataboutery.

You've reminded us that Israel has a right to defend itself (even if it uses live ammunition where rubber coated steel bullets would suffice, or uses rubber coated steel bullets where tear gas would suffice ect.).

So remind us, what rights do Palestinians have and what mechanisms have they got to uphold their rights?

Israel didn't eradicate Palestine. They took land off Egypt and Jordan, not Palestine. Maybe answer why Egypt and Jordan had the land in the first place.

And Israel has withdrawn from Gaza. They did so a long time ago. So Hamas or anyone else could have tried to actually manage well their territories and better their people. But no. Hamas number one goal isn't a Palestinian state in the land Israel has already withdrawn from and does not occupy. It is to have a second Holocaust.

That is indefensible.

[BluntHorse]

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[RandBlade]

SMH.

I’m fully aware of the types of the games you are trying to play here. “But no Palestinian state existed!”. Sure, it didn’t, but neither did the modern nation states known as Egypt, Syria, Transjordan ect - all had their roots in the hand of Sykes-Picot.

So in 1967 when Israel took Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan you think no state of Egypt or Jordan existed? Who did Israel take the land from if not Egypt and Jordan? You think they took it from Palestine?

The rest of your racist ranting spins on from this bollocks so lets get this settled first. Who did Israel take the land from if Egypt and Jordan did not exist in 1967? Who were the 1948 and 1967 wars against if Egypt and Jordan did not exist?

We can deal with the rest of your racist ranting later.

[Aimless]

“Israel has withdrawn from Gaza completely,” is the hasbara slogan that Labor Party chairwoman Merav Michaeli chose to sell to the world in one of the many interviews she gave to the international media during the days of fighting. This blitz she described in a press release as “patriotism,” as part of the never-ending need of the Israeli left to prove to the right their burning loyalty to the country.

Israel may have evacuated its military facilities and settlements from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, but in no way is it possible to say that it “withdrew from Gaza completely.” It continues to control the access to and from the Gaza Strip ever since, in the air, by sea and on land, as well as aspects of the population registry that affect the Rafah crossing too. This is alongside the economic authority, control of construction and development, and much more.

Israel is present in almost all aspects of life as far as the residents of Gaza are concerned, including permission to wear camouflage-patterned clothing, or hiking boots (defined as “dual-use goods,” which can be used for military purposes). Even foreign journalists (and Israelis of course) are not allowed to cover what is going on there as they wish. This is because of the chutzpah that claims it is for their own safety. As if war correspondents for the leading media outlets in the world are not mature enough to make such decisions themselves.

So the claim that Israel has withdrawn from Gaza is at the very least deceptive; in practice it is closer to a lie.

This is exactly the problem: During the days when no missiles are being fired from Gaza, and specifically on Tel Aviv, the vast majority of Israelis, including the Zionist left such as Michaeli, is convinced that everything is wonderful. The Gazans may be very poor and frustrated, but that is only because of Hamas. After all, we left there during the disengagement, even Michaeli agrees, so what do they want?

Israel is supplying a living example of this these very days. Most Israelis are convinced that the cease-fire returned the situation to its previous status: We are here and they are there, and it’s over. But in practice, ever since the cease-fire, the crossings to and from Gaza have been closed to goods and people. A defense official who briefed Walla journalist Amir Buhbut on Sunday gave this amazing statement: “Every request for the passage of food, the bodies of Palestinians who died in hospitals in Israel, and civilians who want to return to Gaza – is rejected out of hand.”

Why is a request to transfer food, a humanitarian commodity by any measure, rejected out of hand after the cease-fire? The reason was not provided initially, even to the dozens of foreign journalists who waited on Sunday to enter Gaza, but was provided in the end by Defense Minister Benny Gantz when he announced that the Gaza Strip will remain “at a basic humanitarian level,” and any additional aid would be conditioned on a solution to the issue of the Israeli captives and missing.

What exactly is the basic humanitarian level? Did anyone provide details? Is food or the possibility of transferring the sick not included in this category? In spite of statements by the defense establishment Monday morning, made after international pressure, that Israel would allow the movement of UN medical equipment and entry of aid workers and journalists, organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights were still forbidden to bring medical equipment into Gaza.

I haven't been able to find a good source for the claim re. blocking food and bodies, do you have any handy? Asking b/c I think I saw NGOs announcing they were distributing food in Gaza now.

Never Wrestle with a Pig. You Both Get Dirty and the Pig Likes It.

Thanks, Aimless. I will engage with racists no further.

Best to just read, share accurate info about events, and support appropriate NGOs.

[BluntHorse]

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[RandBlade]

If you could cease to be racist for a few seconds you'd understand why 1967 matters.

But no, keep advocating for the destruction of the only Jewish state in the planet. You do you.

[Aimless]

Afraid not, but there was a comment by the UNRWA director for Gaza on 25th May that the Kerem Shalom crossing remained open & that there were no shortages of food or medicine (so in effect to dispute the anonymous statement). I believe food is being distributed in Gaza now.

Not sure why our racist friend is talking about 1967. I guess this is the tactic when someone is morally bankrupt and does not have the balls to deal with real issues at hand. Israel has been at dispossessing Palestinians from their land since the 1940's, and it continues to this day.



It just becomes heart breaking to see an an ongoing unjust disaster, and no one de facto giving a shit. Racists pay lip service to a two state solution but stay silent when Israel expands settlements. The same racists make equivalence of the oppressor and the oppressed, so that people just walk on by, so the status quo can be maintained.

We now have a camera in the hand of almost every person, and a means to publish the evidence. (It is shocking to see that the Israeli forces now don't even give a shit that people are recording them when they are committing human rights violations.) We have eyes. This might help explain whyIsrael is loosing support from its young Christian evangelical supporters in the US.

Things are slowly changing. I refer you back to an earlier post:

Twitter Link

It is heartbreaking, but it's not much more heartbreaking today than it was yesterday, and wasting time on some subliterate dipshit on the internet isn't going to change anything for anyone. Need to conserve emotional energy. Not sure what to think about that claim re. dwindling support among Evangelicals in the US; if it's true, it might simply reflect dwindling (fetishistic) religiosity among Evangelicals.

[RandBlade]

The racists are those who ignore all the injustices in the world and back groups like Hamas that deny Israel's right to exist.

If you want a second Holocaust then you do you. Own it. Otherwise call out scum like Hamas that deny Israel's right to even exist.

Then again it seems that racist dipshits here would be happier if Israel didn't exist too.

[LittleFuzzy]

David Ben-Gurion, wrote to his son in 1937, prior to the founding of the state, that Jewish settlers “must expel Arabs and take their place.” Which is exactly what they did. They expelled the Arab residents, whilst others fled the terrorists who were trying to kill them.

You're not doing yourself or your position any favors by doing things like trying to make a point of this while ignoring the historical context where those Arab residents themselves had a long and then still-continuing history of low-key ethnic cleansing against those native or immigrating Jews and their own settlements in the area (which was in turn not one-sided either. There is no point trying to take a side on the basis of "they struck first" in that area, anymore than in the Balkans). Which of course kicked into a high-key overt overdrive, again by ALL SIDES INVOLVED, the instant the Israeli state was officially formed.

[wiggin]

You're not doing yourself or your position any favors by doing things like trying to make a point of this while ignoring the historical context where those Arab residents themselves had a long and then still-continuing history of low-key ethnic cleansing against those native or immigrating Jews and their own settlements in the area (which was in turn not one-sided either. There is no point trying to take a side on the basis of "they struck first" in that area, anymore than in the Balkans). Which of course kicked into a high-key overt overdrive, again by ALL SIDES INVOLVED, the instant the Israeli state was officially formed.

LF, the letter in question is famous for the competing interpretations of these crossed out lines and was explicitly in reaction to the Peel Commission report that had called for relocating hundreds of thousands of Arabs from a partitioned mandate as part of a population exchange.

Citing this line out of historical context is pretty standard for critics of Israel. There's little doubt that Ben Gurion was open to population transfers by the late 30s, but this letter is not an indictment of Zionism as being committed to ethnic cleansing.

[RandBlade]

Critics of Israel losing all perspective and context?

Say it isn't so (!)

[BluntHorse]

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[Lewkowski]

Where did this crazy person come from? Wasn't there a die hard anti-Israel dude back in the Atari Community Chat forum too? Is this him?

[LittleFuzzy]

The real indictment of Zionism as being committed to ethnic cleansing is what is actually did historically. And what it continues to do today that you can see with your own eyes.

What about taking a side on the basis of injustice and continuing ethnical cleansing that is happening today in front of our own eyes?

Let me repeat my position for you. A plague on both their houses. You expect me to get upset about that suffering of the Palestinians? Get fucking real. They've been bringing it down on their own heads for over a century, and have constantly refused to make any real headway into bringing a peaceful resolution that allows both sides to coexist and prosper. And the Israeli's have been just as bad. Don't BEGIN to try and claim you're thinking or talking about justice when you're taking EITHER side in that conflict. You don't care about justice. You care about looking woke and PC in the most asininely ignorant ways possible.

It really does not matter about me or my position. It matters what is happening to ordinary Palestinian people.

They're as fully complicit in earning what is done to them in response to the offenses committed in their name as the Israeli citizenry are for settlements, Netenyahu, and their own extremists. They have abandoned any right to sympathy. I'll tell you this, though. You try and pull that crap about it not being ethnic cleansing if it was supposedly committed against "Zionist" legal immigrants before 1948 and I'm going to find a right-wing Israeli cause to make a donation to. I don't have sympathy for either side but you can certainly change my mind and get me to develop an active animus against your side and favor for the Israelis by continuing with this manipulative mendacity.

[LittleFuzzy]

Where did this crazy person come from? Wasn't there a die hard anti-Israel dude back in the Atari Community Chat forum too? Is this him?

I originally thought you were full of it but I reread that last post and the singularly one-sided deliberate ignorance does have that Sohaib ring to it

[Aimless]

I thought this debate couldn't possibly get any more stupid and gross but here you went and proved me wrong. "They all deserve to suffer" is literally the worst and most wrong position on this issue. You would have a better case for arguing that the Palestinians' representatives are more culpable than the Israelis', than to support the position that they all deserve to suffer.

[RandBlade]

I originally thought you were full of it but I reread that last post and the singularly one-sided deliberate ignorance does have that Sohaib ring to it

It could be him.

But sadly singularly one-sided deliberate anti-Israeli ignorance is quite common.

There are far too many racists who just can't bring themselves to accept that a Jewish state has a right to exist.

[RandBlade]

Great news.

Twitter Link

Difference between Israel and Gaza (and Egypt, Jordan and the rest) is that Israel is a functional democracy. Good riddance to Netanyahu.

[wiggin]

Let me repeat my position for you. A plague on both their houses. You expect me to get upset about that suffering of the Palestinians? Get fucking real. They've been bringing it down on their own heads for over a century, and have constantly refused to make any real headway into bringing a peaceful resolution that allows both sides to coexist and prosper. And the Israeli's have been just as bad. Don't BEGIN to try and claim you're thinking or talking about justice when you're taking EITHER side in that conflict. You don't care about justice. You care about looking woke and PC in the most asininely ignorant ways possible.

They're as fully complicit in earning what is done to them in response to the offenses committed in their name as the Israeli citizenry are for settlements, Netenyahu, and their own extremists. They have abandoned any right to sympathy.

LittleFuzzy, I appreciate your general sentiment - you are certainly right that the Western tradition of infantilizing Palestinians as victims with no agency is both ahistorical and badly misreads the situation (no better than when the West infantilized Palestinians as savages with no agency). I agree with your implication (if I may be so bold) that to frame the current mess through the lens of either racism or colonialism (as pretty much the only two narratives present nowadays) is putting a gloss of Western problems onto an issue that is, frankly, entirely different. This is not just wrong, it is also dangerous, because it means we focus on solutions that will not work because we do not understand the root of the problems.

That being said, I cannot disagree enough with your last quoted sentence. I don't really care whose fault this whole mess is - that's what most of these arguments devolve into, but you're entirely correct that there's lots of blame to go around. I can make a pretty solid argument that places most of the onus directly on the Arab world, with the Palestinian public and leadership enthusiastically helping, but that argument would be silly if it failed to acknowledge that Israel (and predecessors) has contributed their fair share of bad behavior.

However - and I cannot stress this enough - it doesn't matter if the Palestinians are complicit in their misery. What matters is that there are several million people who do not live lives that are reasonably safe, prosperous, and free. We should be exercised about this issue just like any other humanitarian and/or political crisis. While it's true that the severity of the problem in the West Bank and Gaza pales in comparison to many other ongoing crises that get far less attention, it doesn't detract from the very real and persistent suffering of Palestinians living the Israeli administered territories as well as substantial stateless/second class populations in (primarily) Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Now, of course understanding the contributors to the current mess would lead us to the conclusion that a solution cannot come from pressure on Israel alone, but just because the Palestinians and the broader Arab world bear some responsibility for fixing things doesn't mean we shouldn't have sympathy for the people stuck in this mess.

Israeli citizens (Jewish or otherwise) enjoy unprecedented prosperity and political freedoms in the Middle East, and your typical Israeli citizen today does not have much to worry about wrt safety on a day-to-day basis. It is true that this has come at a staggering cost to Israel (one could only imagine what Israel would look like if they hadn't been an armed camp for the last 70-odd years), but things are relatively good there. This is not true of Palestinians living in the Levant. Sympathy is warranted.