Ed General Israel/Palestine discussion thread - Part 3

[Mycroft]

That won't do, I'm afraid. Here is our conversation on the topic.

If you're talking about the Golan Heights, is it okay to point out that Israel captured it in a defensive war, and has been willing to trade it back for almost 50 years in exchange for a comprehensive peace with Syria like they have with Jordan and Egypt, and that it's Syria that's been refusing? Or are we only allowed to consider cherry-picked information that makes Israel look bad?

Egyptian citizenship was revoked in the 1880s? Parts of Syria were annexed and cleared in 1948? Aye, right.

See? That's why it's important to clarify your terms.

I did not say Egyptians lost their citizenship in the 1880s, and will ask you not to be purposefully obtuse.

Neither did I claim that parts of Syria were annexed in 1948, but interestingly Syria did capture and annex territory in that war. In fact, ethnic cleansing was the norm in that war, Jews were expelled from all Arab controlled territory. I think it's worth asking why that's not considered important information?


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[Giz]

I guess when Jews struggle for survival, they're supposed to not consider their own survival as a factor?

I think the take away is that some folks don't like it when minorities, er, I mean Jews, er, I mean 'Zionists' get uppity. And that "never again" is a nice phrase about the holocaust... but heaven forfend if you actually take any concrete actions to make sure it never happens again. Why not try leaving the defence of Israel to the UN, or human rights lawyers?

 

[kmortis]

This is Part 3 of the General Israel/Palestine discussion thread. Part 2 is here.

Posted By: kmortis

 

[Craig B]

If you're talking about the Golan Heights, is it okay to point out that Israel captured it in a defensive war, and has been willing to trade it back for almost 50 years in exchange for a comprehensive peace with Syria like they have with Jordan and Egypt, and that it's Syria that's been refusing? Or are we only allowed to consider cherry-picked information that makes Israel look bad?

No. These circumstances might justify a military occupation of Golan, but not its annexation and settlement. That is not my view, but that of the U.S. Government too, which has abstained from recognising the annexation. There is currently afoot a plan to increase the number of settlers there by 100,000, now that there is no effective government in Syria capable of resisting it; which I have related in a previous post. The publicly expressed purpose of this is to render Syrian recovery of the area impossible in practice. I have related this fact in posts too.

I'm not cherry picking anything. It is this clearance and resettlement which is the activity of Zionism that inspires my aversion to that ideology. In that respect it resembles the land tenure system of the S African apartheid regime, which I was very active in opposing prior to its collapse.

See? That's why it's important to clarify your terms.

I will ask you not to be purposefully obtuse.

I can't be intimidated by this tactic, so you may as well cease to employ it.

 

[Ziggurat]

No. These circumstances might justify a military occupation of Golan, but not its annexation and settlement. That is not my view, but that of the U.S. Government too, which has abstained from recognising the annexation. There is currently afoot a plan to increase the number of settlers there by 100,000, now that there is no effective government in Syria capable of resisting it; which I have related in a previous post. The publicly expressed purpose of this is to render Syrian recovery of the area impossible in practice. I have related this fact in posts too.

Syria could have had that land back decades ago. I will not blame Israel for putting land to use that Syria continually refuses.

 

[Craig B]

Syria could have had that land back decades ago. I will not blame Israel for putting land to use that Syria continually refuses.

That is of little moment. International law is clear. Wiki.

Construction of Israeli settlements began in the remainder of the territory held by Israel, which was under military administration until Israel passed the Golan Heights Law extending Israeli law and administration throughout the territory in 1981. This move was condemned by the United Nations Security Council in UN Resolution 497, which said that "the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect." Israel states it has a right to retain the Golan, citing the text of UN Resolution 242, which calls for "safe and recognised boundaries free from threats or acts of force". However, the international community reject Israeli claims to title to the territory and regards it as sovereign Syrian territory.​

 

[theprestige]

I guess the issue will have to be adjudicated in the International Court of Molon Labe, then.

 

[NWO Sentryman]

International Law has been a joke well before 1945 and everybody knows it.

 

[theprestige]

I gotta say, the Security Council resolution 497 gives me pause for thought. The UNSC is the only UN body that I take seriously (because of its membership, more than its affiliation with the UN).

 

[Ziggurat]

That is of little moment. International law is clear.

And do you think Syria has been following international law? Or do only violations by Israel matter?

 

[CapelDodger]

Syria could have had that land back decades ago. I will not blame Israel for putting land to use that Syria continually refuses.

Syria could never have had that land back because Israel did not conquer it to give it away. Israel conquered it to fill out the territory of Israel as set out after the Balfour Declaration. Having been emptied of its original inhabitants it is to be filled with settlers, as was always the intention. It's just taken a lot longer than expected.

You keep seeing the progress of this project as caused by a series of Arab actions which coincidentally steered it along the original plan. At every step you'll have your "The Arabs did this" or "The Arabs didn't do that" argument as laid out for your convenience on some well-meaning web-site, and at every step the Zionists defend there way out of Europe into some more of somebody else's property.

It beggars belief that Assad the Elder would have turned down the Golan Heights, the recovery of which would have brought him a hero status he gravely lacked. But you believe that he did. As I may have mentioned before, Zionism rots the mind.

 

[CapelDodger]

And do you think Syria has been following international law? Or do only violations by Israel matter?

Do you excuse them by tu quoque? Why do you always want to talk about other places?

 

[caveman1917]

Do you excuse them by tu quoque? Why do you always want to talk about other places?

Because clearly the thread title is "General Syria discussion thread" and it is antisemitic to discuss Israel.

 

[NWO Sentryman]

Here's the thing about Israel: Its founders remembered what it was like to be an "accepted minority" in Europe. It ended in Crematoria and gas chambers, and after millennia of persecution, they decided that they could never trust a majority ever again, and they had to form their own nation.

 

[caveman1917]

Here's the thing about Israel: Its founders remembered what it was like to be an "accepted minority" in Europe. It ended in Crematoria and gas chambers, and after millennia of persecution, they decided that they could never trust a majority ever again, and they had to form their own nation.

No, that's not just it. That's for instance what the UK Labour MP suggested in the other thread, that idea about having a safe nation. Zionism is the idea that this nation must be taken, specifically, from the Palestinians - even at the expense of other desirable properties such as safety.

 

[Craig B]

And do you think Syria has been following international law? Or do only violations by Israel matter?

Stop this ridiculous misdirection. What are you on about? Either you approve the depopulation and settlement of Golan, or you do not. Say which.

That Syria has collapsed and Assad is a tyrant is neither here nor there. Violations of humanity by Syria are numerous. If I denounce them, as I do, am I a racist?

So tell me if you approve the Israeli annexation of Syrian territory and displacement of 130,000 Syrians. Yes or no. If Some Muslim tyrant did that I would denounce him. Who says only Israeli violations matter? Do you deplore such violations or not, as I do those of Assad?

 

[CapelDodger]

I think the take away is that some folks don't like it when minorities, er, I mean Jews, er, I mean 'Zionists' get uppity. And that "never again" is a nice phrase about the holocaust... but heaven forfend if you actually take any concrete actions to make sure it never happens again. Why not try leaving the defence of Israel to the UN, or human rights lawyers?

The Zionists who decided, 120 years ago, to go and steal somebody else's land for their own haven of racial purity and due respect for one's Community Leaders were not oppressed. They were not getting "uppity". They wore suits and ties, they were going to do the white man's thing and finally prove to everybody that they were indeed white.

The problem with this attempted colonisation is not the Jewishness of the people doing it, and it's ridiculous to suggest that it is. It's the doing of it that's the problem. All this whining about inherited victimisation and how hard done by the Israelis are by the intransigence and nastiness of the colonised is just bizarre.

"A century of conflict", people predicted, using the rhetorical century, and so far they've been proved right. And all the fault of the Palestinians for being there. And still being there, even after all the hints they've been given. So unfair.

 

[NWO Sentryman]

No, that's not just it. That's for instance what the UK Labour MP suggested in the other thread, that idea about having a safe nation. Zionism is the idea that this nation must be taken, specifically, from the Palestinians - even at the expense of other desirable properties such as safety.

The problem is, the British Government promised the Jews and Arabs the same land in exchange for loyalty during WW1 and sat on the topic for 30 years, never to form a viable resolution. During that time, Jews fleeing the Nazi Regime were turned around, and the Mandate was perpetually on the brink of civil war. After 1945, the powder keg exploded and you had an SS Recruiting Sergeant rile up the Arab nations to finish the job Hitler started. After three rounds of "Drive the Jew Into The Sea!", Israel developed a kill-or-be-killed mentality, which isn't well understood by most westerners who have known only comfort for 70 years, and never knowing persecution and genocide within living memory. Where were the Jews supposed to go after 1945? There was no guarantee that another Holocaust couldn't happen again, America had the Ku Klux Klan. In other words, it was the least bad option for a lot of Jews. Jews have a LOT of precedents for what happened to them as minorities.

 

[CapelDodger]

If you're talking about the Golan Heights, is it okay to point out that Israel captured it in a defensive war, and has been willing to trade it back for almost 50 years in exchange for a comprehensive peace with Syria like they have with Jordan and Egypt, and that it's Syria that's been refusing? Or are we only allowed to consider cherry-picked information that makes Israel look bad?

What were Israel's demands in the proposed comprehensive peace treaty?

 

[CapelDodger]

The problem is, the British Government promised the Jews and Arabs the same land in exchange for loyalty during WW1 and sat on the topic for 30 years, never to form a viable resolution. During that time, Jews fleeing the Nazi Regime were turned around, and the Mandate was perpetually on the brink of civil war. After 1945, the powder keg exploded and you had an SS Recruiting Sergeant rile up the Arab nations to finish the job Hitler started. Where were the Jews supposed to go after 1945? There was no guarantee that another Holocaust couldn't happen again, America had the Ku Klux Klan. In other words, it was the least bad option for a lot of Jews.

The problem is that Zionists decided to colonise Palestine therefore creating the dispute over who got to have it - the natives or the colonisers. Without the Zionist project there would have been no problem.

That cack about Haj Amin is just cack. Demonisation. The Arabs didn't go to war in 1948 to kill all the Jews, they went into it to prevent the creation of a Jewish State for Jews over their heads. They were right to fear what the consequences would be - dispossession and exile on a mass, if not total, scale.

The early colonists were mostly Russian and got there decades before Hitler arrived on the scene, let alone got his anti-semitic programme under way. One which, by the way, did not turn genocidal at the prompting of Haj Amin. Just thought I'd better point that out, a different opinion having been expressed recently.

I think it's fair to say you don't really know anything about the Zionist story, so I'll get a bit lectural. To set the stage : in 19th Century Europe Jewish life became normalised in Europe, starting with the French Revolution and the emancipation of French Jews and then the opening of the Italian ghettoes and it was general progress from there. Russia lagged, of course, but that's Russia for you, and Russian anti-semitism was regarded as evidence of its semi-barbarism. By the 1890's this process had produced twin evils, in many conservative Ashkenazi minds, of miscegenation and a decline in deference to the proper Community Leaders.

Zionism is meant to be a counter to that. In their own country, not mixing with anybody else, Jews will rarely marry out, and they will rediscover their duty to their proper Community Leaders who bear the grave responsibility of running the country.

It was supposed to be easier than this.