Ed General Israel/Palestine discussion thread - Part 3

[caveman1917]

Because that is what your sentence implies.

Prove it.

 

[CapelDodger]

And I'll agree. Whoever bulldozes the olive and citrus groves in the West Bank in order to intimidate the occupants into leaving is a ****, whether it's Jew or Arab. If it's done to ease and promote Israeli settlement on non-Israeli land then that's Zionism in action, not "Jewishness".

Exactly.

The ancient olive groves of Palestine are disappearing because they "might be sheltering terrorists", and because they appear foreign to the settlers. Who prefer lawns, like they're used to back home.

A friend of mine who did the summer-on-a-kibbutz thing gets very exercised about this. The ever-present olives, like peanuts to a Yank, is one of his fond memories, but now olives have become associated with Palestinians and "the other", the "foreigner in the Land" .

Destruction like this can, perhaps, be reversed. But the ending of Jewish history in the wider Middle East, since the Babylonian Exile cannot be fixed. That's down to Zionism as well. Zionists will point to the Mizrahim exodus after the 1948-49 War as examples of Jewish victimhood but they don't like to address why they were there beforehand, and had been for countless generations. When Zionists identified themselves with all Jews (as they do), identified themselves with the West (initially through the British Empire when it carved the place up with the French) and used Mizrahim communities as shelter for Mossad, the Jewish position eventually became impossible.

All of which is criticism of Zionism, not even criticism of Israel (which is merely the vehicle of Zionism), and certainly not criticism of Jews. Which, of course, may be taken as evidence that it's concealing open anti-semitism - after all, no actual anti-semitism is evident. That's the first requirement for concealment, duly satisfied. We shall see.

 

[tyr_13]

The post has no moral valuation in it.

Why doesn't it? How is it such a terrible thing to say those cheering violence on any side are doing something immoral (if understandably human)?

And as a direct response to what others had said leading up to it, this means you're admitting it didn't actually address what was under discussion. Furthermore, it makes your justification of opposing Israel nonsense.

You do realize we're not actually doing a comparison or anything here right?

Wait, what? That's exactly what you were doing. It was a direct comparison. Here, look what you wrote,

It must be sad when all you have to cheer for is some people hijacking a plane and flying it into a building, rather than such a nice spectacle Israel regularly provides its citizens.

which is of course a direct comparison. This direct comparison was in response to your justification for 'siding against Israel', as I showed in my last post's series of quotes.

If you want to change what is being discussed at any given time, you should make that clear. If you respond to an accusation that you're taking sides against Israel with 'they cheer violence', that means you're justifying taking sides against Israel. If you didn't want to say that, use more words to acknowledge you're denying doing that then talking about something else. At the very least don't quote the accusation right before making the statement that is justifying your position.

That's leaving aside that if it was a justification, then it's a silly double standard.

This is something I see time and again with people who don't want to state something they know to be very justifiably unpopular; they use vague language to avoid having to admit to what they hint at. It's dog whistles all the way. Then all you have to do is ask for evidence you hold the view you are accused of holding, without actually denying you hold the view, and refuse to do something as simple as condemn the actions 'your side' is doing that you've already made hell about in the 'other side'.

If you would just admit that you find the actions of the Palestinians acceptable, even if they're actions you condemn the Israelis for, that would be morally wrong, but at least intellectually honest.

 

[caveman1917]

Why doesn't it? How is it such a terrible thing to say those cheering violence on any side are doing something immoral (if understandably human)?

And as a direct response to what others had said leading up to it, this means you're admitting it didn't actually address what was under discussion. Furthermore, it makes your justification of opposing Israel nonsense.



Wait, what? That's exactly what you were doing. It was a direct comparison. Here, look what you wrote,



which is of course a direct comparison. This direct comparison was in response to your justification for 'siding against Israel', as I showed in my last post's series of quotes.

If you want to change what is being discussed at any given time, you should make that clear. If you respond to an accusation that you're taking sides against Israel with 'they cheer violence', that means you're justifying taking sides against Israel. If you didn't want to say that, use more words to acknowledge you're denying doing that then talking about something else. At the very least don't quote the accusation right before making the statement that is justifying your position.

That's leaving aside that if it was a justification, then it's a silly double standard.

This is something I see time and again with people who don't want to state something they know to be very justifiably unpopular; they use vague language to avoid having to admit to what they hint at. It's dog whistles all the way. Then all you have to do is ask for evidence you hold the view you are accused of holding, without actually denying you hold the view, and refuse to do something as simple as condemn the actions 'your side' is doing that you've already made hell about in the 'other side'.

If you would just admit that you find the actions of the Palestinians acceptable, even if they're actions you condemn the Israelis for, that would be morally wrong, but at least intellectually honest.

Blah blah blah

Seriously, does anyone ever fall for this sort of nonsense?

 

[tyr_13]

Blah blah blah

Seriously, does anyone ever fall for this sort of nonsense?

You refuse to address anything I've said? Even where you claim it wasn't a comparison when you were explicitly making a direct comparison?

I was expecting intellectual dishonesty and you delivered in spades.

 

[caveman1917]

You refuse to address anything I've said? Even where you claim it wasn't a comparison when you were explicitly making a direct comparison?

I was expecting intellectual dishonesty and you delivered in spades.

I was expecting fascist drivel and y'all are delivering in spades - we've still yet to see the first response agreeing with taking a side against Israel for the activities mentioned in the article, but we're seeing the whole "list of fallacies" being used in defense of it. You wouldn't be able to detect intellectual dishonesty - your reasoning skills are too lacking.

Btw, it was a comparison of the quality of the respective spectator sports, not a comparison of their morality. Obvious enough from that which was actually being stated.

 

[CapelDodger]

Oh REALLY ?

Yes, really. Non-Zionist Russian Jews had been settling in Palestine for at least a century, without any nationalist or exclusionist motivation. For them it was a spiritual and hopeful movement, linked to Judaic traditions of redemption through righteousness. Not through money and force of arms, which is the Zionist way.

How about the Zion Mule Corps ? (I'm not kidding), or the Jewish Legion ? (see Wikipedia article) They included a LOT of Russian Jews in their ranks.

Not from Palestine.

the Jewish Legion fought against the Turks at Gallipoli, and also served in Jordan.

In WW2 the Jewish Battalion was involved in the recapture of Italy.

"contribute nothing to the British cause.. " ? Well, they contributed WAY more than the beloved "Palestinians", who's leader was trying to create a Waffen SS Battalion, for Pete's sake.

The Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917. This thing is 120 years old, remember. It didn't start with WW2, or even with the rise of Nazism.

Here, of course, Zionists went to war on behalf of the British Empire in the name of the Jews. Not in the name of Zionism, which was their particular distinguishing characterstic, as in the Zionist Legion but in the name of all Jews. This they did against a Muslim state and ally of Germany and Austria. Weizmann even offered - and made sure the offer got in the newspapers - to provide the Jews of Palestine as a Fifth Column for the British, then advancing from Egypt. None of this with the slightest regard for any danger it might put Middle Eastern Jews in. After all, if the Mizrahim could understand the wonder of what was at stake they would surely shoulder the risk. A desire to return to the Holy Land being, of course, a Jewish racial characteristic. And reckless arrogance being the natural behaviour of Zionists.

Anyhoo, the Zionist contribution to the British Empire was miniscule: compare and contrast with the Australian effort. The British intended to govern Palestine after the Great War, and had no interest in creating a conflict where there was none - the Zionist presence in Palestine being a few tens of thousands at most, and going nowhere. The British did it, though, and predictably created a rod for their own backs.

This does call for an explanation. Even more so when one considers that it destabilised a strategically important region, close to the Suez Canal life-line of the British Empire, and close to the newly discovered oil-fields of Iraq, which were to play such an important role in WW2. A place you want very much to be peaceful and prosperous

A mule train or two doesn't cut it, frankly.

We know why Woodrow Wilson agreed to it - Justice Brandeis, a keen Zionist, told him it would deliver the mythical Jewish Vote. We know that because Justice Brandeis made no secret of the fact, being rather proud of himself. At first Wilson wanted to reject it as some British Imperialist deviousness,as you would. That was the last hope of the cabinet antis : they'd made US clearance a condition for agreeing to it.

What motivated the pros in the British Government, such as Balfour and Lloyd George, remains a question.

 

[CapelDodger]

Ummm... No ?

Assimilation is the dissipation or abandonment of one culture in favour of another "dominant" culture. It is NOT a meeting of equals. The assimilated culture is destroyed. (or - more accurately - discarded).

People are fully entitled to discard any aspect of their culture if they wish. There's nothing shameful in it, or admirable in toeing the lines of a culture you've been assigned by accident of birth. The desirable parts of a culture will continue because they're desirable. Anachronisms will wither away. I have friends who do family things but don't do Jewish things, the family things happening to derive be from Jewish tradition.

Herzl described assimilaton as the ultimate degradation, but Herzl was an enthusiast for European racial theory which held that racial purity was desirable in itself, whatever the race, and mongrelisation anathema. He, and his fellow Zionists, carried no torch for Jewish culture, which they thought backward and superstitious. Not to say an embarrassment to Jews like them, whom you wouldn't distinguish from any other conservative European gentleman, in dress or habits or modernity. The assimilation Zionists objected to was actually miscegenation. Loss of racial purity, and thus of racial health. Whatever the hell that is: this was 120 years ago, and people had some weird ideas. Only in Israel can you still find them to any great extent.

 

[CapelDodger]

Hardly suprising: they have one thing in common.

Neither group likes being blown up by madmen screaming "Alluah Ahkbar".
(My God Is Greater).

Bear in mind that these people will come back for the Jews once they've dealt with the Muslims. And they'll have had some practice.

 

[Ziggurat]

Blah blah blah

Welcome to the winner's circle, Mycroft!

Blah blah blah

Remember what I said before, Tyr? Well, it applies to both of them.

 

[Belz...]

No. He did NOT excuse it on the basis of it being a one-time-only thing, he excused it on the basis that they're so terribly oppressed, they've been driven to cheering death.

Where in this:

It must be sad when all you have to cheer for is some people hijacking a plane and flying it into a building, rather than such a nice spectacle Israel regularly provides its citizens.

...or anywhere else has he done this? That's why I was hoping for you to quote another post, because that one says or implies no such thing.

And do you seriously think they wouldn't cheer again if we got hit like that again? Do you seriously think he thinks that? Of course they would. And of course he knows they would.

I am not going to try to guess how Capel would think in some hypothetical future. I am addressing the post you quoted.

I understand the impulse to be charitable in your interpretation

It sure as hell beats making stuff up about other people's beliefs.

 

[Belz...]

Blah blah blah

You know, I've noticed that you do that a lot. Maybe you should, you know, clarify your meaning and actually address other posters.

 

[caveman1917]

You know, I've noticed that you do that a lot. Maybe you should, you know, clarify your meaning and actually address other posters.

It does address them, and it means that the signal-to-noise ratio is too low and that the onus is on them to try again and bring up that ratio - preferably by formalizing and/or reducing the number of claims.

 

[caveman1917]

Welcome to the winner's circle, Mycroft!

Remember what I said before, Tyr? Well, it applies to both of them.

You do understand that just because you call something official doesn't actually make it so? Not that I don't get your obsession with officialdom or your need for turning the response "that's a bunch of noise" into conceding defeat against a bunch of noise.

 

[applecorped]

oh dear

 

[CapelDodger]

I'd rather suggest that the "Palestinians" where actually the victim of the Arabs, not the Israelis.

It was the invading Arabs who encouraged (or frightened) the "Palestinians" into leaving their homes in order to make it easier for them to destroy Israel, and kill all of the Jews, as they had promised to do.

And when that didn't work, they retreated, washed their hands of the "Palestinians", shrugged their shoulders, and abandoned them.

They didn't even allow them to enter their own countries, but forced them into refugee camps, where they remain until today.

(Mind you, after what the "Palestinians" did in Jordan and Lebanon, one can hardly blame them).

Beliefs like this are what the rot of Zionism can make a brain capable of.

120 years ago a group of European racists decided to displace the population of Palestine to make room for a Jewish State for Jewish People, and you blame Arabs for the expulsion of so many Palestinians during an effort to achieve that. Even within the partition territory of Israel - which the Zionists had no intention of honouring - there was an Arab majority : what kind of Jewish State with a semblence of democracy can have a non-Jewish majority? The non-Jewish majority will elect a government to declare the place not a Jewish State. Wouldn't you?

Your contention would be that the Zionists would have conceded a non-Jewish majority rather than, say, drive out as much of the native population as possible by bombing and bulldozing their villages with them still in it. Denying later that the villages were ever there in the first place.

There was no order by "the Arabs" for people to leave, since that's what the Egyptians, Iraqis and Syrians were there to prevent in the first place. They didn't succeed because all those countries had been under colonial rule and European occupation until less than two years before, so their armies were not up to much. Unlike the Israeli army, which had been preparing for the conquest for over two decades and had, in passing, established the foundations of Israel's impressive arms industry. And seen action in Iraq in 1941 as British Imperial auxiliaries

The only effective opposition was the Jordanian Army, the so-called Arab Legion, which also saw action with the British in 1941. Many Arabs suspected that the Jordanians had an agreement with the Zonists to take up the Palestinian allocation, and they were right to. Unity and trust were sorely lacking in the Arab camp, as you can imagine.

As it was, the Zionists had every intention of taking the whole cake in one bite: all the planning and preparation was based on that. The Jordanians found themselves facing Zionists advancing all along the line, and attacking Jerusalem, which was meant to be an international city. Their very spirited defence saved Jerusalem and some of the West Bank and rather styimied the whole Zionist project. Because a lot of the expelled Palestinians only got as far as the West Bank, and were still there in 1967 when the next bite was taken. Ejecting them as had happened in 1948 and after was not an option : people were wise to that "refugee" trick by then. So there they remain. A conundrum.

It was during the defence of Jerusalem that civilians were evacuated from a couple of villages along the road that were about to become a war-zone, and that is the source of your fantasy. Which, if you actually think about it, makes no sense. Nor does a sudden desire to "Kill all the Jews" when Palestinians had spent so many centuries doing precisely not that, and nobody else heard it. Not GCHQ in Cyprus nor the US listening station in the Greek mountains (where my Ancient History was seconded as a translator and having a whale of a time; they loved his accent, he loved their bourbon and shoddy card-play. I learnt a lot from that guy.)

Nor did anybody make mention of it at the time, as far as I'm aware. It seems to have emerged in the 50's at the earliest, when the real status of the refugees was becoming all too clear.

Interestingly, the Hagganah, who had experience of the Jordanian Army from their shared experience in Iraq, warned Ben Gurion that they were a serious force but Ben Gurion refused to believe that Arabs could fight without white officers, which he knew they were about to be withdrawn. As it turned out, Jordanian junior officers stepped up very effectively.

 

[CapelDodger]

Now wait a second. That's not what Capel said. He said it was convenient to Zionism. Where do you get the collective guilt? He sounds more like an anti-Zionist than an anti-semite.

Thank you for that.

Of course, I make no secret of my anti-Zionism.

 

[CapelDodger]

He sounds like both to me.

In what way do I sound anti-semitic to you? Is this some of that "concealed anti-semitism" people keep seeing?

I think you'd benefit from being more conscious that Zionism is a sect within the Jewish world; it is not identical the whole it nor does it represent it. I'm sure you'd agree, but it seems to habitually slip your mind.

 

[caveman1917]

In what way do I sound anti-semitic to you? Is this some of that "concealed anti-semitism" people keep seeing?

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Therefor it is impossible to be a Jew outside the state, and hence opposition to the "Idea of the Nation" (Israel in this case) must be opposition to Jews and hence antisemitic.

 

[CapelDodger]

Damn, this is tiring. To save me further eye-strain, has anybody yet come up with details of the comprehensive peace plan purportedly refused by the Syrians? Ive been told with great certainty that such a thing was offered but when I ask for details the well of knowledge runs dry. What were Israel's demands? It's not as if they said "You can have a comprehensive peace plan: you write it, we'll sign it". The idea that Syria would turn down the Golan Heights is bizarre on the face of it, as is the idea that Israel would give up part of the Historic Claim once it's got its hands on it, so I'd love to know when this offer was made and what the Israeli demands were.