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The future of Israel

...on serious topics that don't fit anywhere else at present.
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thundril
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The future of Israel

#1 Post by thundril » June 26th, 2015, 2:45 pm

Interesting article form Mark leVine.http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2 ... -left.html
A single, secular country with equal rights for all citizens, seems to me like the only hopeful path.

thundril
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Re: The future of Israel

#2 Post by thundril » June 30th, 2015, 6:57 pm

A tired old trick, beloved of simplistic demagogues everywhere.
"If you criticise our favoured political grouping, (in this case, the Israeli state machine,) you are attacking all members of the social grouping they claim to represent. (in this case, all Jews.)"
Complete rubbish, of course, but it still seems to get traction amongst the shallower thinkers of our world. (In this case, Californian legislators!)

thundril
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Re: The future of Israel

#3 Post by thundril » August 4th, 2015, 2:09 pm


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Altfish
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Re: The future of Israel

#4 Post by Altfish » August 4th, 2015, 5:46 pm

thundril wrote:A tired old trick, beloved of simplistic demagogues everywhere.
"If you criticise our favoured political grouping, (in this case, the Israeli state machine,) you are attacking all members of the social grouping they claim to represent. (in this case, all Jews.)"
Complete rubbish, of course, but it still seems to get traction amongst the shallower thinkers of our world. (In this case, Californian legislators!)
Only just spotted this thread. What a crazy resolution!
So what do you have to do? Go round saying everything in Israel smells of roses.

thundril
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Re: The future of Israel

#5 Post by thundril » August 6th, 2015, 8:21 pm

The most hopeful sign, AFAICS, is the increasing visibility of Jewish, and especially Israeli, human rights movements opposing Israeli policy in the occupied territories.
B'tselem, Jewish Voices for Peace, and many others, are winning increasing support amongst the Jewish Diaspora, and this is giving them new confidence. For too long, Jews who dared to speak out in defence of the Palestinians were in a similar position to that of openly gay people in Western culture a few decades ago. But speaking out for justice, (especially in defence of non-Jews) is a very proud element of secular Jewish tradition, as well as a mitzvah (a moral injunction) for religiously-observant Jews. Israel has become a disgrace to these traditions, and more and more Jews are daring to say so.
Hope, as always, arises from the courage of ordinary people to speak out when those who claim to 'represenrt' them commit atrocities in their name.
Those of us who are neither Jewish nor Arab, but want peace and justice in the Middle East, must welcome and support these movements.

thundril
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Re: The future of Israel

#6 Post by thundril » October 22nd, 2015, 1:40 am

Bump.
Just wrote a piece in reponse to someone who declared that 'There are no Palestinians'. He had seemed a decent, thoughtful fellow, with whom I was having a spirited but intelligent debate. Then he made that statement. I criticised. He justified.
So I wrote a longish response.
I don't want it to go to waste, so I thought I'd plonk it down here, in the hope of some (constructive) cxriticism.

Luke wrote:
My ancestry is partly Jewish, and I do consider myself a liberal Zionist. But in the way that believing in the continuation of the United Kingdom means you should not be uncritical in your support, I apply the same to my belief in a Jewish state.

I wrote:
Sorry, Luke. I see the point you are making, but I want our discussion to be based on complete clarity. I am not a supporter of the British State, the Jewish state, or FTM any other state. Nation statehood may have been, in the 19th Century, a progressive concept. For the Jews particularly, with their long centuries of exile, pogroms, and being driven from place to place at the whim of petty princes and manipulative politicians, the idea that they should have a state of their own, with all the legal and diplomatic protections that statehood confers on its citizens, was a progressive idea indeed. It was intelligent. It was humane.
In fact, in the early years of my developing political awareness, I was fully and unreservedly in support of the State that was born in the same year that I was born.
Tragically, the State of Israel was promised to the Zionists by the same people who had promised the Palestinian Arabs their own State, on the same piece of land. It is merely another piece of British imperial arrogance, no different from all the other examples. Someone drew a line on a map, with no real concern about, or interest in, the ethnic, religious or cultural make-up of the peoples living in the area. So the concept of the nation state, having promised so much to the peoples who suffered under the yoke of the great Empires, failed to live up to that promise. The artificial entities that were created as those Empires ripped each other apart in the early 20th Century, became the “failed states”of the early 21st.
Today, with travel, communications, manufacturing and commerce all operating in a shrinking global village, the nation state is losing any meaning it ever had.
Israel is a lost cause; the absurd idea that ‘God’ promised a particular bit of scrubland to a particular tribe of pastoralists is not a valid reason for continuing the agony, the torture, the mass slaughter that is happening in Palestine. Nor do hazy histories of iron-age conquest offer any justification for such suffering.
One state is needed; a single, modern democracy, with equal rights for all citizens, irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, or choice of folk-tale. This will be difficult to achieve. But every other solution is impossible.
The ‘two-state’ solution is not going to happen. Decade after decade, the Zionists’ relentless creation of ‘facts on the ground’ has made clear what has very rarely been voiced openly; namely that the two-state solution never was any part of the Zionist strategy. On the contrary, the Zionist strategy has been, from the start, to drive the Palestinians out of their geography, out of their history, out of the collective memory of the world. We are watching a slow but systematic act of genocide. You and I, and every other individual currently alive and capable of political engagement, is faced with a stark three way choice: actively to oppose this genocide, actively to support it, or inactively to acquiesce, pretending innocence.
This is why cannot let pass without challenge your sinister declaration that ‘There are no Palestinians.’ Such is the (horribly familiar) language of Genocide.

Any thoughts?

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Altfish
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Re: The future of Israel

#7 Post by Altfish » October 22nd, 2015, 8:13 am

I agree with most of what you say, Thundril.
I too believe Israel is a basket case that is only getting worse, I'm not sure I have a solution.

The only thing I may criticise slightly is this...
"You and I, and every other individual currently alive and capable of political engagement, is faced with a stark three way choice: actively to oppose this genocide, actively to support it, or inactively to acquiesce, pretending innocence."
...I think there are more than 3 choices. I think the options you give are too 'definite'. I'd like to think that no one supports the genocide and would look to ways of bringing the sides to a solution. I know this is pie in the sky when they keep referring back to their imaginary rights given by an imaginary sky daddy in a book that is 2000 years old. But hey ho.

thundril
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Re: The future of Israel

#8 Post by thundril » October 22nd, 2015, 10:24 am

There are lots of small things one can and must do, to bring some help to the suffering people of that land, both Jew and Arab. There are lots of tactics our political masters might be exhorted to try. (But I don't think our current masters will do anything to annoy the US) The fact is, a genocide is unfolding before us, and it is with regard to that genocide that we have only three choices: to support, to oppose, or to acquiesce.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 02091.html
If Netanyahu were just some fusty old contrarian, like the Holocaust-deniers in the cellars of some European Universities, his remarks could be dismissed or defended in a dry, disinterested way, with technical point-making and a pretence of scientific detachment. But that is not the case, is it? Netanyahu is the leader of one of the wealthiest and most technically-advanced nations on earth. He has command of one of the best-equipped militaries in the world. His intelligence and surveillance capabilities are unsurpassed. He could obtain, if he wanted it, advice from some of the finest minds in the world, amogst the Jewish Diaspora, to advise him on psychology, diplomacy, conflict resolution, and all manner of peace-keeping tactics. He could bring this conflict to a resolution accceptable to all, any time he wanted. (As could any earlier Israeli administration, FTM)
Instead of doing this, he focusses all his machinery of oppression and aggression against a tiny group of people who have been suffering military occupation for decades. He has made a lifetime career out of blocking peaceful settlement with the Palestinian people. He is on record as promising, many times, that there will be no two-state solution as long as he is Prime Minister of Israel. His latest words will have been chosen carefully, and in conference with others in the leadership of Zionism. His agenda is naked now. His agenda is genocide.

thundril
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Joined: July 4th, 2008, 5:02 pm

Re: The future of Israel

#9 Post by thundril » October 26th, 2015, 4:23 am

Things may be changing a little less slowly now.
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/10/washingto ... le-societyOnce the majority of Jewish American Democrats start to speak out, it looks like the beginning of the end for AIPAC's assumption of invulnerability.


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Dave B
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Re: The future of Israel

#11 Post by Dave B » November 11th, 2015, 7:27 pm

It seems that Europe has decided that items made in Iraeli occupied territory cannot be labelled "Made in Israel"

The Iraelis are claiming some sort of victimisation, of course, wondering why they are getting picked on and not others.Personally I can't think of any other, similsr, situation where one nations claims and builds on another's land and e pects everyone else to think of it as part of their country.

Blonde Bombshell Boris, on a mission in thst area, says (essentially) "It's a load of rubbish cooked up by corduroy jacket wearing lefty academics. Nothing wrong with corduroy jackets..." he said by way of appology.
"Look forward; yesterday was a lesson, if you did not learn from it you wasted it."
Me, 2015

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animist
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Re: The future of Israel

#12 Post by animist » November 12th, 2015, 8:59 pm

but all this is peripheral. Israel will continue unless the Arabs were somehow to become far more united than they ever have been. They are in fact more disunited than ever, with Shia versus Sunni the dominant theme of Middle East politics. The Zionists must be just so happy about the way things are going

thundril
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Re: The future of Israel

#13 Post by thundril » November 12th, 2015, 11:45 pm

animist wrote:but all this is peripheral. Israel will continue unless the Arabs were somehow to become far more united than they ever have been. They are in fact more disunited than ever, with Shia versus Sunni the dominant theme of Middle East politics. The Zionists must be just so happy about the way things are going
Sowing discord and destabilisation in neighbouring countries has been Israeli policy for a very long time. Lebanon and Syria, as well as parts of Jordan and Iraq, are included in 'Eretz Israel' wot God gave specifically to the Jews. (This is actually what religious Zionists argue. Seriously!)
I was reading an interesting article in the Jerusalem Post, a few weeks ago. It was gloating at the prospecrt of being able to lay legitimate claim to the Golan Heights, now that Syria is a failed state. Now the suicdide bombers have hit Beirut again. Convenient!

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