Middle East Conflict

[kaz7]

I've been avoiding the news about this, messes with my head, who's winning?

Stupid question

 

[Ducado]

Tommy Robinson isn't in the British government, advocating genocide. Netanyahu obviously does represent a large proportion of Israeli sentiment.

Maybe Hamas represents a lot of Palestinian sentiment, but no-one else seems to apart from flagwavers abroad. But, it can't be said enough, that's down to Netanyahu too.

You know that the current Israeli Government is a hodge podge of right wing cranks and religious fundamentalists? If we had an electoral system like theirs we would see the likes of the aforementioned in parliament

Israel is going through some internal convulsions at the moment it's always be quite a secular country but the demographic appears to be changing, with lots of high birth-rate very religious jewish groups (not all of them are Hasidic) and it's causing a hell of a lot of tensions, secular and the ordinary observant don't like been told what to do and how to live their lives

One of the ironies of the awful attacks on October 7th is, place like the dance festival will have been full of young Israelis who are supporter of the various peace groups or at least will hav ebeen out demonstrating over the judicial reforms, many of the Kibbutzim (although I don't know the particular make up there) would hav ebeen quite left wing and also committed to peaceful coexistence

In anger we can say and do some terrible things, I mean a proportion of this country voted to impose economic sanctions on itself a few years back

 

[bumbleblue]

I've been avoiding the news about this, messes with my head, who's winning?

We are all losing.

 

[Ducado]

I couldn't have said this better myself (From Haaretz)

A list of 35 Jewish and Arab peace and human rights groups in Israel called on their government to work towards a ceasefire in Gaza, the release of the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas, and a political and diplomatic solution declaring that “it is evident that there is no military solution to this conflict, nor can there ever be one. The only way to stop the bloodshed is a political agreement that will guarantee security, justice, and freedom for both nations.”


An open letter signed by the list of the organizations said that Israel should “strive for a stable ceasefire, within which negotiations for a political agreement will be started immediately based on mutual recognition of the right of the two peoples to self-determination” and immediately “promote a broad prisoner deal, stop harming innocent civilians, act to curb the rampant settler violence in the West Bank and stop the persecution and oppression of Palestinian citizens of Israel and of those who express solidarity with the residents of Gaza and oppose the war.”


“The brutal massacre” committed by Hamas on October 7, the letter said, have been compounded by “additional atrocities” in which “thousands of people have been killed and are still being killed by the Israeli bombings in Gaza.”


“Harming innocents on one side does not balance the pain of the killing on the other side, it just adds more pain,” the letter contended.


The groups included high-profile organizations like Machsom Watch, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Parents Circle Family Forum, and Women in Black, Yesh Gvul. Also signed on was the Arava Institute for Environmental studies and the far-left Jewish-Arab political party Hadash.


Those signed on the letter wrote that they were making the call “in memory of the murdered and for the sake of the living, we must work together to end the war.”


“There are no winners in war. Only peace will bring security.”

 

[mancity2012_eamo]

A fallacious argument that you have personally debunked.Well in that case it must be true.Patronising,perhaps?
Equally what you suggest is that because it was not thriving it was fair game to be taken over ?Interesting view.
It was a pin in a map as Argentina, Uganda,even Madagascar had been suggested as options,yet you are happy to quote 1BCE in effect the Bible.Well go back a bit further to Canaan ??. The Bible is very clear that the state of Israel should only exist when the Messiah returns and some Orthodox Jews hold this belief.
The two state(in effect three state) solution was never going to work as the Israelis control all the borders and have suppressed the Arabs/Palestinians/Ottomans, whatever you may call them.
But I ask you this.5-6 million Ukrainians have lost their homes. If the UN voted to allow them to settle in Prestwich, you lost your home, forced to live in a shit hole, you would be happy ?? Come on.Would you not fight back ??
Frankly, you support a club that is run by Arabs.A club that has equally embraced Jewish people in Manchester. A club that signed Bert.
In my heart I respect you but have said it before, do not be so patronising and look at both sides here.

To hell or to Cannacht.

 

[Vic]

You've reminded me of a post you made a while ago that I meant to respond to.

You refer to "colonising Ashkenazi Jews from Europe" rather sneeringly. You're seemingly an intelligent person, so have you ever considered why those "colonising European Jews" were so keen to go to what was then Mandatory Palestine in the 1930's and 1940's?

Here's a clue: it wasn't part of some fiendish plot (that damn Jewish cunning again) to deliberately outnumber the indigenous Arab population.

I'm afraid it was. Maybe not a "fiendish plot" (it might help if you didn't introduce terms like that, or "sneeringly") but of course the aim was to outnumber the Arabs. (And I meant early Zionism, not in the 1930s.)

Take Herzl's "The Jewish State" (1896) - arguing to be given land in Argentina or in Palestine ("our ever-memorable historic home") - and explaining why it had to be by state agreement (Argentina or the Ottomans): "In both countries important experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews. An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration." Later he realised there was no "empty land" in Palestine.

Here's (Revisionist Zionist) Jabotinsky in "The Iron Wall" (1923):

Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.

To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism, in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.

There is no justification for such a belief. It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.

That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."​

 

[trueblue1972]

I couldn't have said this better myself (From Haaretz)

As Desmond Tutu said
If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

Unfortunately there is no chance Israel will talk to hammass ,

 

[mancity2012_eamo]

I find the arguments over millennia of history largely irrelevant when it comes to who has the rights to the land. I find any religious references to the Koran, The Torah, The Bible as symptomatic of the problems the world in general and that area in particular are dealing with.
To my mind, you might as well quote Gandalf or Saruman damning the Orcs to Mordor for all the relevance to this day and age.

I find the 1947-48 settlement as an imperialist solution to local people that they really don’t care for.
It happened quite a lot in the 20th century.

But I find the present mess and lack of empathy for the other side depressingly worrying.

Because even those in here who most vociferously back the Jewish cause, when asked about the simple daily injustices served upon the ordinary Palestinian people of all occupied areas, tend to only go as far as to say that they have no time for Netanyahu and he and his right wing government need to go.

Some qualify this with saying he’s right doing what he’s doing, but he has to go after he’s finished.

I really am bewildered by some of the attitudes towards each other in here. If you break down what most of us are saying, we actually all seem to agree on a lot of the problems but get bogged down in who started it or who’s fault is it.


One question I would have to the Pro-Israeli posters is, if Netanyahu sees this through and at the end of it all as some of us suspect, he either splits the Gaza Strip North and South or takes it all, but effectively cleanses the land of The Palestinian who lived their, will this be justified?
It’s a scenario that hasn’t happened yet, I know, but it’s not too far fetched a question to ask.

We would all want Netanyahu gone as well as Hamas, but there is an overwhelming feeling that this is exactly the opportunity he was looking for.

 

[jim tolmies perm]

Great interview on CNN with Queen Rania of Jordan
Eloquent, articulate and erudite.
Talks far too much sense.
In serious danger of being nominated U.N. Secretary general

 

[Chippy_boy]

As Desmond Tutu said
If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

Unfortunately there is no chance Israel will talk to hammass ,

And until they do, they will FOREVER be on the receiving end of terrorist attacks. Staggering that supposedly intelligent Israelis - if e.g. Netanyahu - if he is supposed to be intelligent? - cannot grasp this.