I just see a lot of similarities in how the US has historically treated Natives and how Israel treats the Palestinians.
Edit: and yes I was aware of your heritage, which is why I should have phrased that in a better way.
I promise I'm not mad at you or anything, don't worry
But folks often try to draw comparisons between the Israel/Palestine situation and the America/Indigenous situation, and it's never great
There are superficial similarities, but (and this might be off in potentially big ways; like I've said, I don't have an Official Israel Opinion), the "people with religious connection to Jerusalem" matter is not particularly cut-and-dry. Here, there's only one side with a spiritual tie to land*. Over yonder, the side in power seems to have some fluctuation. Here, that is not the case.
The comparisons get particularly touchy for me (and this is not at all your fault), because people I know will get into fights about Israel/Palestine, and try to drag me in to support their position because of how I can "relate" to their side. This has happened with the pro-Palestine crowd, and with the pro-Israel crowd. Both sides see this similarity to American Indian history.
And I hate being dragged into it. I hate that the shit my family survived gets turned into a way to put points on the board in a fight I don't have a stake in.
So again - I can't stress enough that I'm not pissed at you or anything. But please, please try to avoid drawing connections between these two things.
*Edit: And that "one side" is like 500+ discrete nations with spiritual ties to land, which is only further indication that it ain't the cleanest comparison
Basically I don't think there is a solution in which an Israeli and a Palestinian state can coexist without either Palestine compromising its sovereignty or Israel compromising its security.
US aid to Israel makes Israel somewhat more comfortable with strategic concessions (giving up the Sinai, for example), which in turn makes possible US-brokered peace treaties between Israel and various Arab powers. These further reduce the security threat to Israel, which gives Tel Aviv a wider margin of strategic compromise and as such represent the most significant material step towards a mutually agreeable Palestinian settlement (i.e., in which Israel judges that its overall strategic position is good enough that Palestinian sovereignty does not fatally compromise Israeli security) Despite the Second Intifada and the Lebanon War, it's important not to forget how much less stable the situation was before the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties.
If you can somehow create a regional dynamic where Israel can't credibly claim an existential threat from its neighbors, a 2-state solution might become viable. Unfortunately we have limited carrots to offer the Arabs and limited sticks to beat the Israelis in order to make this happen (cutting off aid would only reinforce their strategic rationale for holding the West Bank as a buffer), and progress is more easily reversed than made.
The disproportionate influence of Israeli lobbying on the American public and legislature certainly doesn't help our freedom of action on the issue though.
I mean we could have just stopped arming Israel decades ago and stood by while the Arab powers drove them into the sea, but would Arab-occupied Israeli territory be any less of a clusterfuck than Israeli-occupied Arab territory?
I suppose Israel might not be driven into the sea tomorrow if we cut them off today, but they would certainly take action to forestall the deterioration of their position. Historically the IDF mitigated its strategic disadvantages by attacking preemptively against Egyptian and Syrian forward positions in the Sinai and the Golan. A return to this doctrine would destabilize the region further.
Maybe there's a version where a militarily weak Israel responds by making concessions, and the Arab powers in return tolerate Israel's existence, but that requires some very optimistic assumptions about the decisionmaking process of all the actors involved.
Wait is this not saterical? Are they actually bringing up that Democrats in the Civil War era were pro slavery even though the parties are absolutely different now? Is he really saying that spending time in jail talking to those in jail taught him about political crime?
Wait is this not saterical? Are they actually bringing up that Democrats in the Civil War era were pro slavery even though the parties are absolutely different now? Is he really saying that spending time in jail talking to those in jail taught him about political crime?
I am so confused by this thing
I get the feeling it's like God's Not Dead, pandering to a feeling of persecution some people have/preaching to the choir
Wait is this not saterical? Are they actually bringing up that Democrats in the Civil War era were pro slavery even though the parties are absolutely different now? Is he really saying that spending time in jail talking to those in jail taught him about political crime?
I am so confused by this thing
D'Souza's made himself a very rich man by pandering as hard as possible to right-wing paranoia
I get the Democratic party is far far from perfect. But when your opponent actively goes out of its way to suppress women, all minorities, the poor, the middle class, the sick, non christians, and anyone who has the audacity to speak out....well man I know who I'm voting for.
I get the Democratic party is far far from perfect. But when your opponent actively goes out of its way to suppress women, all minorities, the poor, the middle class, the sick, non christians, and anyone who has the audacity to speak out....well man I know who I'm voting for.
please do remember that the democrat party does its own form of suppression by using minority causes and bodies as fuel for its own goals
it's easy as hell to call out the republicans for this shit, and I typically rather that folk err on the side of democrats over republicans
but, man, this election has made me even more aggressively opposed to this two-party nightmare
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Oh wait, oh god. He made Obama's America didn't he. Oh fuck. Fuuuccckkk that guy. I was working at the movie theater when that released and we had it for just the fucking worst month.
So many people leaving that theater saying awful racist and ignorant things.
I feel like there's a really weird tendency to treat the US as the only actor on the international stage that has any agency.
changes in American policy have an outsize effect in any region of the globe
nobody else could prop up Israel the way we do, for example, and Israel could not substitute anyone else for American support. Every state and some non-state actors have international agency, but the balance of power shifts dramatically depending where we throw our weight. When US policy changes in a region, every regional actor's calculations change.
One day of course our relative preponderance of military and economic resources will diminish to the point that it no longer supports such hegemony. When policy eventually catches up to that new reality, it will suddenly matter a great deal less what America thinks about Palestine, and the world will become that much scarier a place.
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Please allow me to word vomit a bit about Israel. I am going to put it in spoilers so that anybody who doesn't want to read it, doesn't have to skip over a giant wall of text that this is inevitably going to become due to this being a difficult subject and these boards being about the only real adult interaction that I get on a normal basis. If you do choose to read the spoiler, please be advised that it may not be coherent in any way and will likely jump from topic to topic likea 3 month old changes moods. Frequently and often with tears.
You've been warned as best I can.
This is likely to get me flamed at, but for me Israel is much like Joe Paterno and Bill Cosby. Icons of good, right, wholesomeness that were held up as worthy and heroic through my childhood and young adulthood. And much like the aforementioned human heroes, Israel has also fallen from the pedestal. Not just fallen but absolutely shattered and cracked and been destroyed by reality. I'm not certain if Israel was always like this and i"m just realizing it now, or if it has been a slow and excruciating burn to this point. But please, allow me to try and give some background from the perspective of a 30-something American Jew.
Israel has always existed for me. Israel has always existed for my father as well. The state was formed in 1948, my father born in 1955. He has never known life without the relative safety and security that is Israel. As a Jew it was a place that was there for us to escape to, to go home to, should things be too difficult elsewhere. My father's upbringing came from grandparents whose parents had fled Russia and the rule of the Tsars and the pogroms that tore apart the country. They came to the US and had children. Children who lived and survived through the turn of the century and then had their own children. My father's parents lived their young childhood through the Depression and of hearing tales of the Old World. They spoke Yiddish at home with their relatives and spoke of going back to visit the family in the Fatherland. The Maternal side of my father's family were Russian Jews, the paternal side were German Jews. And everybody still had famiy back in Europe during the Holocaust. Had being the operative word there. There was nobody left after the war. The only family that survived was the family that had fled to the States.
My father was born into this world ten years later. Israel was surviving, even thriving, having won it's right to exist and defended itself after the people had been through so much. My father had the same Jewish education that I ended up having. We are a people that have been beaten, chased, blamed, executed, hunted, and hated throughout history. We were thrown from our homeland by the Babylonians, enslaved by the Romans, and hated by the Christians of every land for our entire history. Israel was our land and we had finally gotten it back. It was our place, the place for us to finally go home to after centuries of wandering and being the victims of every body else's hatred (except the Muslims, oddly enough. When Jerusalem was part of the caliphate before/during the crusades and the Moors ruled in Spain the Jews were treated quite well. More like 2nd class citizens than 3rd class but that's a small detail that most people like to glaze over oddly enough).
Israel had a right to exist and it was our job as Jews to defend that right. No matter what. The Arabs of the Middle East were ony the next in the long line of peoples who were trying to extinguish us, remove us, keep us from our homeland and our rightful safety that we had earned after so many years of the diaspora. My father used to tell me a story that during the Yom Kippur war, 1973, my father actually went to the airport to try and buy a ticket to Israel so that he could go and fight. But it was not a thing that happened.
The Arabs are the enemy. They are murderers, terrorists, and infiltrators in our Holy land.
These are the lessons that I was taught as a child, the stories of the land of Israel and it's wonders, beauty, history and traditions and how it was ours and we had to defend it. It's tough to break from that, indoctrination would be the best word for it I suppose. I think, for me, the point that I started to question everything was when Itzakh Rabin was assassinated. I assumed, my father assumed, we all assumed as soon as we heard the news that it was an Arab terrorist. A member of Hamas or Hezbollah. But it was actually a Jew. A fellow Jew who disliked the attempts towards peace that were being made. But I soon fell back into my selfish teenaged life and forgot.
I had a chance to go to Israel in 1999, just after graduating High School. and I really do wish I had gone. There was a soft peace then and I would have loved to have seen Ramala and the West Bank. Visited the tomb of the matriarchs and prayed at the Western Wall. Why? Because I"m Jewish. Whatever my political feelings now, I'm still Jewish and I still had those feelings then. I still have them now. I want to go to Israel. I want to pray at the Western Wall, see the fortress at Masada, stand on the Golan Heights and eat an orange in Haifa.
But the Israel that is now is not the Israel that I remember. It's not the Israel that I was brought up with. The Israel that I was raised with could do no wrong. We were the ones under attack always, we were the ones living in fear of our coffee shops, pizza places, and school buses blowing up. I never knew the other side, I was never taught the other side. I read "Exodus" by Leon Uris and felt that for sure that was true. I watched "The Raid on Entebbe" (the hero of which was actually Bibi Netanyahu's older brother) and knew that Israel's soldiers and Air Force were second to none. These were facts for me. There was no need to question them.
Except, much like my venerated hero of all things good and wholesome, Joe Paterno, that's just not the truth. No matter what I was taught as a child, it's not the truth. No matter how much the truth hurts, it's still true. Israel, as it is now, is not the Holy land that I was taught, it's not the safe place for those who are abused, lost, abandoned. And knowing all of that does not make it any easier to know how to feel about it.
The human rights violations, the blatant racism and near genocide. How can I square that with the ideals that I was taught as a child? How can I look at Israel as it is now, knowing what I know about my family history, my people's history, and feel anything but shame and revulsion? How can I call myself a liberal, a progressive and still want there to be Israel? And yet.
And yet, I still want to visit. I still want to see the Western Wall, pray beneath it's presence, eat at a market stall in Jerusalem. I still want Israel to be Israel. But I don't know if it ever will be again. Or if it ever truly was.
Please allow me to word vomit a bit about Israel. I am going to put it in spoilers so that anybody who doesn't want to read it, doesn't have to skip over a giant wall of text that this is inevitably going to become due to this being a difficult subject and these boards being about the only real adult interaction that I get on a normal basis. If you do choose to read the spoiler, please be advised that it may not be coherent in any way and will likely jump from topic to topic likea 3 month old changes moods. Frequently and often with tears.
You've been warned as best I can.
This is likely to get me flamed at, but for me Israel is much like Joe Paterno and Bill Cosby. Icons of good, right, wholesomeness that were held up as worthy and heroic through my childhood and young adulthood. And much like the aforementioned human heroes, Israel has also fallen from the pedestal. Not just fallen but absolutely shattered and cracked and been destroyed by reality. I'm not certain if Israel was always like this and i"m just realizing it now, or if it has been a slow and excruciating burn to this point. But please, allow me to try and give some background from the perspective of a 30-something American Jew.
Israel has always existed for me. Israel has always existed for my father as well. The state was formed in 1948, my father born in 1955. He has never known life without the relative safety and security that is Israel. As a Jew it was a place that was there for us to escape to, to go home to, should things be too difficult elsewhere. My father's upbringing came from grandparents whose parents had fled Russia and the rule of the Tsars and the pogroms that tore apart the country. They came to the US and had children. Children who lived and survived through the turn of the century and then had their own children. My father's parents lived their young childhood through the Depression and of hearing tales of the Old World. They spoke Yiddish at home with their relatives and spoke of going back to visit the family in the Fatherland. The Maternal side of my father's family were Russian Jews, the paternal side were German Jews. And everybody still had famiy back in Europe during the Holocaust. Had being the operative word there. There was nobody left after the war. The only family that survived was the family that had fled to the States.
My father was born into this world ten years later. Israel was surviving, even thriving, having won it's right to exist and defended itself after the people had been through so much. My father had the same Jewish education that I ended up having. We are a people that have been beaten, chased, blamed, executed, hunted, and hated throughout history. We were thrown from our homeland by the Babylonians, enslaved by the Romans, and hated by the Christians of every land for our entire history. Israel was our land and we had finally gotten it back. It was our place, the place for us to finally go home to after centuries of wandering and being the victims of every body else's hatred (except the Muslims, oddly enough. When Jerusalem was part of the caliphate before/during the crusades and the Moors ruled in Spain the Jews were treated quite well. More like 2nd class citizens than 3rd class but that's a small detail that most people like to glaze over oddly enough).
Israel had a right to exist and it was our job as Jews to defend that right. No matter what. The Arabs of the Middle East were ony the next in the long line of peoples who were trying to extinguish us, remove us, keep us from our homeland and our rightful safety that we had earned after so many years of the diaspora. My father used to tell me a story that during the Yom Kippur war, 1973, my father actually went to the airport to try and buy a ticket to Israel so that he could go and fight. But it was not a thing that happened.
The Arabs are the enemy. They are murderers, terrorists, and infiltrators in our Holy land.
These are the lessons that I was taught as a child, the stories of the land of Israel and it's wonders, beauty, history and traditions and how it was ours and we had to defend it. It's tough to break from that, indoctrination would be the best word for it I suppose. I think, for me, the point that I started to question everything was when Itzakh Rabin was assassinated. I assumed, my father assumed, we all assumed as soon as we heard the news that it was an Arab terrorist. A member of Hamas or Hezbollah. But it was actually a Jew. A fellow Jew who disliked the attempts towards peace that were being made. But I soon fell back into my selfish teenaged life and forgot.
I had a chance to go to Israel in 1999, just after graduating High School. and I really do wish I had gone. There was a soft peace then and I would have loved to have seen Ramala and the West Bank. Visited the tomb of the matriarchs and prayed at the Western Wall. Why? Because I"m Jewish. Whatever my political feelings now, I'm still Jewish and I still had those feelings then. I still have them now. I want to go to Israel. I want to pray at the Western Wall, see the fortress at Masada, stand on the Golan Heights and eat an orange in Haifa.
But the Israel that is now is not the Israel that I remember. It's not the Israel that I was brought up with. The Israel that I was raised with could do no wrong. We were the ones under attack always, we were the ones living in fear of our coffee shops, pizza places, and school buses blowing up. I never knew the other side, I was never taught the other side. I read "Exodus" by Leon Uris and felt that for sure that was true. I watched "The Raid on Entebbe" (the hero of which was actually Bibi Netanyahu's older brother) and knew that Israel's soldiers and Air Force were second to none. These were facts for me. There was no need to question them.
Except, much like my venerated hero of all things good and wholesome, Joe Paterno, that's just not the truth. No matter what I was taught as a child, it's not the truth. No matter how much the truth hurts, it's still true. Israel, as it is now, is not the Holy land that I was taught, it's not the safe place for those who are abused, lost, abandoned. And knowing all of that does not make it any easier to know how to feel about it.
The human rights violations, the blatant racism and near genocide. How can I square that with the ideals that I was taught as a child? How can I look at Israel as it is now, knowing what I know about my family history, my people's history, and feel anything but shame and revulsion? How can I call myself a liberal, a progressive and still want there to be Israel? And yet.
And yet, I still want to visit. I still want to see the Western Wall, pray beneath it's presence, eat at a market stall in Jerusalem. I still want Israel to be Israel. But I don't know if it ever will be again. Or if it ever truly was.
This was good to read and it's nice to have your perspective on Israel. Thanks for writing it.
On the topic of Israel (dear lord I'm walking a fine line here)
In the UK, people are very careful in what they say to criticize Israel in case they're labeled as anti semitic.
Which i find sad, because no country should ever be beyond criticism.
In the US it's more that the campaign funding (for or against) is massive. I can only assume that stranglehold is much tighter thanks to Citizen's United. /spits on the Roberts Court.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone called an anti-semite (excepting Seinfeld).
I mentioned this in the Civil War thread, but this trailer played before the movie when I saw it opening night and it was the most bafflingly out-of-place thing I've seen in a long time. Laughed my ass off, though.
On the topic of Israel (dear lord I'm walking a fine line here)
In the UK, people are very careful in what they say to criticize Israel in case they're labeled as anti semitic.
Which i find sad, because no country should ever be beyond criticism.
In the US it's more that the campaign funding (for or against) is massive. I can only assume that stranglehold is much tighter thanks to Citizen's United. /spits on the Roberts Court.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone called an anti-semite (excepting Seinfeld).
Yeah I remember the 2008 debates when both candidates talked about how much they love Israel.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
On the topic of Israel (dear lord I'm walking a fine line here)
In the UK, people are very careful in what they say to criticize Israel in case they're labeled as anti semitic.
Which i find sad, because no country should ever be beyond criticism.
In the US it's more that the campaign funding (for or against) is massive. I can only assume that stranglehold is much tighter thanks to Citizen's United. /spits on the Roberts Court.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone called an anti-semite (excepting Seinfeld).
I imagine this is partly because the majority of American Jews have voted Democrat since well before Israel's inception, and continue to do so even though the Republicans are the most staunchly pro-Israel party. It's hard to call criticism of Israel and/or Zionism anti-semitic when much of it comes from within the Jewish community.
A lot of the ultra-Orthodox New York Jewish community are actually stridently anti-Israel because they believe the Jewish people are still bound by divine covenant never to return to the Holy Land.
I get the Democratic party is far far from perfect. But when your opponent actively goes out of its way to suppress women, all minorities, the poor, the middle class, the sick, non christians, and anyone who has the audacity to speak out....well man I know who I'm voting for.
please do remember that the democrat party does its own form of suppression by using minority causes and bodies as fuel for its own goals
it's easy as hell to call out the republicans for this shit, and I typically rather that folk err on the side of democrats over republicans
but, man, this election has made me even more aggressively opposed to this two-party nightmare
On the topic of Israel (dear lord I'm walking a fine line here)
In the UK, people are very careful in what they say to criticize Israel in case they're labeled as anti semitic.
Which i find sad, because no country should ever be beyond criticism.
this is a fair point
criticism of Israel is emphatically not anti-semitism
but it's also true that many people attempt to justify anti-semitic opinions by calling it anti-Israel
e.g. the Oberlin professor who claimed that her rants declaring that ISIS was an Israeli invention and that the Rothchilds secretly control the world were examples of anti-Israel speech, and not anti-semitism
I'm not sure the UK is a good example here, given that Labour is currently in the middle of a huge anti-semitism scandal
they don't seem to have much of a problem saying blatantly anti-semetic things, and they alternately argue that their speech is anti-Zionist, rather than anti-Semitic, and that the whole controversy was fabricated to discredit them (and while they don't always state who's doing the fabrication, the implication is obvious)
It's definitely true that anti-Israel speech is not anti-Semetic speech, and that some people falsely claim that it is
but I think it's a huge overgeneralization to say that people are afraid to criticize Israel for fear of being called anti-Semitic. Some certainly are, but many others feel comfortable expressing anti-Semitic hate speech under a veneer of criticizing Israel
On the topic of Israel (dear lord I'm walking a fine line here)
In the UK, people are very careful in what they say to criticize Israel in case they're labeled as anti semitic.
Which i find sad, because no country should ever be beyond criticism.
In the US it's more that the campaign funding (for or against) is massive. I can only assume that stranglehold is much tighter thanks to Citizen's United. /spits on the Roberts Court.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone called an anti-semite (excepting Seinfeld).
I imagine this is partly because the majority of American Jews have voted Democrat since well before Israel's inception, and continue to do so even though the Republicans are the most staunchly pro-Israel party. It's hard to call criticism of Israel and/or Zionism anti-semitic when much of it comes from within the Jewish community.
A lot of the ultra-Orthodox New York Jewish community are actually stridently anti-Israel because they believe the Jewish people are still bound by divine covenant never to return to the Holy Land.
Also, judging by the opinions expressed by a number of my Jewish friends (mostly secular and reform, as far as I know), they're kind of creeped out by how much Republican support of Israel seems to be derived from Christian Apocalyptic beliefs.
Republicans: "Of course you need your own nation! A strong nation with a shitload of weapons and soldiers, and the freedom to pick fights with anyone and everyone with impunity! Surrounded by mortal foes in a never-ending cycle of escalating hostility! Because Israel being the epicenter of the Final World War is a vital precursor to our God coming back and fucking everybody's shit all the way up hell yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaah!! Thinking about the world ending makes my scrotum tingle unnnnnhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Jewish friends: "Uh. No. Thanks."
Desert Leviathan on
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
Yeah, I tried explaining to my arab friends that most of the support for Israel in the US comes from radical Christians, but they didn't seem to believe me.
Leading up to the California primary Bernie did an interview with Univision and, in my opinion, it put on display a couple of the things I consider to be a significant failing on the part of his campaign. His narrow focus on one or two key issues, and the staff that surrounds him.
Even after the particularly bad interview he did with the NYDN, he is once again put on the spot and asked about topics he should at least have some grasp on, and not only does he have no idea, he still can't stop himself from pivoting back to his stump speech.
He must have known for a while that he was going to do this interview, and he had to know that he would be asked about Latin America, and it appears that no one on his team spent any time with him to prepare at least a little.
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MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
Wait is this not saterical? Are they actually bringing up that Democrats in the Civil War era were pro slavery even though the parties are absolutely different now? Is he really saying that spending time in jail talking to those in jail taught him about political crime?
I am so confused by this thing
My favorite part is that he never went to jail; they sent him to a halfway house and gave him probation. Judging from the content of the short it sounds like he spent his time there in his head making up more nonsense rather than talking to any of the other occupants; he was a lot more likely to learn about how hard it is to detox in lockup than pro crime tricks from the hardened criminals he consorted with.
man as much as America fucks up a lot Israel is a super destabilizing problem in the middle east and I don't think anyone has any good idea how to solve the conflict between the Israelis and Arabs
Israel gets more credit than it's due for destabilizing the region. A middle east without Israel would probably be roughly as violent as one without it, except there just wouldn't be as many Jewish people.
Would the iran/iraq war not have happened? Would it cure the divide between Sunni and Shia? Would ISIS give up the goal of establishing a Islamic State and destroying modernism that is literally in their name of their organization? Would other regional powers give up their unrealized ambitions? Would it have delayed or accelerated the Arab spring? Would western interests in the region cease?
I don't really think so.
There's a significant difference between Israel versus The United States, Britain, and Russia-- Israel stopped invading middle eastern nations in the twenty first century.
A magician gives you a ring that, when worn, will let you see the world as it truly is.
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
It's even more complicated when you can't be bothered to do any sort of preparation.
huh?
i think? this is a sneak dig at trump who is quoted as regarding himself as his own foreign policy expert
A magician gives you a ring that, when worn, will let you see the world as it truly is.
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Well, there is also the problem that the Cold War was one of the dumbest foreign policoy paradigms humanity had ever seen, and then there was that bit later where we were actively terrible at it.
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ZoelI suppose... I'd put it onRegistered Userregular
Well, there is also the problem that the Cold War was one of the dumbest foreign policoy paradigms humanity had ever seen, and then there was that bit later where we were actively terrible at it.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the cold war was way better than the balance of powers prior to world war I.
A magician gives you a ring that, when worn, will let you see the world as it truly is.
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
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My dude my man
Don't do the thing you are trying to do
I just see a lot of similarities in how the US has historically treated Natives and how Israel treats the Palestinians.
Edit: and yes I was aware of your heritage, which is why I should have phrased that in a better way.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Pooro's a little more familiar with that sordid history than most.
I promise I'm not mad at you or anything, don't worry
But folks often try to draw comparisons between the Israel/Palestine situation and the America/Indigenous situation, and it's never great
There are superficial similarities, but (and this might be off in potentially big ways; like I've said, I don't have an Official Israel Opinion), the "people with religious connection to Jerusalem" matter is not particularly cut-and-dry. Here, there's only one side with a spiritual tie to land*. Over yonder, the side in power seems to have some fluctuation. Here, that is not the case.
The comparisons get particularly touchy for me (and this is not at all your fault), because people I know will get into fights about Israel/Palestine, and try to drag me in to support their position because of how I can "relate" to their side. This has happened with the pro-Palestine crowd, and with the pro-Israel crowd. Both sides see this similarity to American Indian history.
And I hate being dragged into it. I hate that the shit my family survived gets turned into a way to put points on the board in a fight I don't have a stake in.
So again - I can't stress enough that I'm not pissed at you or anything. But please, please try to avoid drawing connections between these two things.
*Edit: And that "one side" is like 500+ discrete nations with spiritual ties to land, which is only further indication that it ain't the cleanest comparison
US aid to Israel makes Israel somewhat more comfortable with strategic concessions (giving up the Sinai, for example), which in turn makes possible US-brokered peace treaties between Israel and various Arab powers. These further reduce the security threat to Israel, which gives Tel Aviv a wider margin of strategic compromise and as such represent the most significant material step towards a mutually agreeable Palestinian settlement (i.e., in which Israel judges that its overall strategic position is good enough that Palestinian sovereignty does not fatally compromise Israeli security) Despite the Second Intifada and the Lebanon War, it's important not to forget how much less stable the situation was before the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties.
If you can somehow create a regional dynamic where Israel can't credibly claim an existential threat from its neighbors, a 2-state solution might become viable. Unfortunately we have limited carrots to offer the Arabs and limited sticks to beat the Israelis in order to make this happen (cutting off aid would only reinforce their strategic rationale for holding the West Bank as a buffer), and progress is more easily reversed than made.
The disproportionate influence of Israeli lobbying on the American public and legislature certainly doesn't help our freedom of action on the issue though.
I suppose Israel might not be driven into the sea tomorrow if we cut them off today, but they would certainly take action to forestall the deterioration of their position. Historically the IDF mitigated its strategic disadvantages by attacking preemptively against Egyptian and Syrian forward positions in the Sinai and the Golan. A return to this doctrine would destabilize the region further.
Maybe there's a version where a militarily weak Israel responds by making concessions, and the Arab powers in return tolerate Israel's existence, but that requires some very optimistic assumptions about the decisionmaking process of all the actors involved.
Wait is this not saterical? Are they actually bringing up that Democrats in the Civil War era were pro slavery even though the parties are absolutely different now? Is he really saying that spending time in jail talking to those in jail taught him about political crime?
I am so confused by this thing
I get the feeling it's like God's Not Dead, pandering to a feeling of persecution some people have/preaching to the choir
D'Souza's made himself a very rich man by pandering as hard as possible to right-wing paranoia
please do remember that the democrat party does its own form of suppression by using minority causes and bodies as fuel for its own goals
it's easy as hell to call out the republicans for this shit, and I typically rather that folk err on the side of democrats over republicans
but, man, this election has made me even more aggressively opposed to this two-party nightmare
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
So many people leaving that theater saying awful racist and ignorant things.
changes in American policy have an outsize effect in any region of the globe
nobody else could prop up Israel the way we do, for example, and Israel could not substitute anyone else for American support. Every state and some non-state actors have international agency, but the balance of power shifts dramatically depending where we throw our weight. When US policy changes in a region, every regional actor's calculations change.
One day of course our relative preponderance of military and economic resources will diminish to the point that it no longer supports such hegemony. When policy eventually catches up to that new reality, it will suddenly matter a great deal less what America thinks about Palestine, and the world will become that much scarier a place.
You've been warned as best I can.
Israel has always existed for me. Israel has always existed for my father as well. The state was formed in 1948, my father born in 1955. He has never known life without the relative safety and security that is Israel. As a Jew it was a place that was there for us to escape to, to go home to, should things be too difficult elsewhere. My father's upbringing came from grandparents whose parents had fled Russia and the rule of the Tsars and the pogroms that tore apart the country. They came to the US and had children. Children who lived and survived through the turn of the century and then had their own children. My father's parents lived their young childhood through the Depression and of hearing tales of the Old World. They spoke Yiddish at home with their relatives and spoke of going back to visit the family in the Fatherland. The Maternal side of my father's family were Russian Jews, the paternal side were German Jews. And everybody still had famiy back in Europe during the Holocaust. Had being the operative word there. There was nobody left after the war. The only family that survived was the family that had fled to the States.
My father was born into this world ten years later. Israel was surviving, even thriving, having won it's right to exist and defended itself after the people had been through so much. My father had the same Jewish education that I ended up having. We are a people that have been beaten, chased, blamed, executed, hunted, and hated throughout history. We were thrown from our homeland by the Babylonians, enslaved by the Romans, and hated by the Christians of every land for our entire history. Israel was our land and we had finally gotten it back. It was our place, the place for us to finally go home to after centuries of wandering and being the victims of every body else's hatred (except the Muslims, oddly enough. When Jerusalem was part of the caliphate before/during the crusades and the Moors ruled in Spain the Jews were treated quite well. More like 2nd class citizens than 3rd class but that's a small detail that most people like to glaze over oddly enough).
Israel had a right to exist and it was our job as Jews to defend that right. No matter what. The Arabs of the Middle East were ony the next in the long line of peoples who were trying to extinguish us, remove us, keep us from our homeland and our rightful safety that we had earned after so many years of the diaspora. My father used to tell me a story that during the Yom Kippur war, 1973, my father actually went to the airport to try and buy a ticket to Israel so that he could go and fight. But it was not a thing that happened.
The Arabs are the enemy. They are murderers, terrorists, and infiltrators in our Holy land.
These are the lessons that I was taught as a child, the stories of the land of Israel and it's wonders, beauty, history and traditions and how it was ours and we had to defend it. It's tough to break from that, indoctrination would be the best word for it I suppose. I think, for me, the point that I started to question everything was when Itzakh Rabin was assassinated. I assumed, my father assumed, we all assumed as soon as we heard the news that it was an Arab terrorist. A member of Hamas or Hezbollah. But it was actually a Jew. A fellow Jew who disliked the attempts towards peace that were being made. But I soon fell back into my selfish teenaged life and forgot.
I had a chance to go to Israel in 1999, just after graduating High School. and I really do wish I had gone. There was a soft peace then and I would have loved to have seen Ramala and the West Bank. Visited the tomb of the matriarchs and prayed at the Western Wall. Why? Because I"m Jewish. Whatever my political feelings now, I'm still Jewish and I still had those feelings then. I still have them now. I want to go to Israel. I want to pray at the Western Wall, see the fortress at Masada, stand on the Golan Heights and eat an orange in Haifa.
But the Israel that is now is not the Israel that I remember. It's not the Israel that I was brought up with. The Israel that I was raised with could do no wrong. We were the ones under attack always, we were the ones living in fear of our coffee shops, pizza places, and school buses blowing up. I never knew the other side, I was never taught the other side. I read "Exodus" by Leon Uris and felt that for sure that was true. I watched "The Raid on Entebbe" (the hero of which was actually Bibi Netanyahu's older brother) and knew that Israel's soldiers and Air Force were second to none. These were facts for me. There was no need to question them.
Except, much like my venerated hero of all things good and wholesome, Joe Paterno, that's just not the truth. No matter what I was taught as a child, it's not the truth. No matter how much the truth hurts, it's still true. Israel, as it is now, is not the Holy land that I was taught, it's not the safe place for those who are abused, lost, abandoned. And knowing all of that does not make it any easier to know how to feel about it.
The human rights violations, the blatant racism and near genocide. How can I square that with the ideals that I was taught as a child? How can I look at Israel as it is now, knowing what I know about my family history, my people's history, and feel anything but shame and revulsion? How can I call myself a liberal, a progressive and still want there to be Israel? And yet.
And yet, I still want to visit. I still want to see the Western Wall, pray beneath it's presence, eat at a market stall in Jerusalem. I still want Israel to be Israel. But I don't know if it ever will be again. Or if it ever truly was.
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In the UK, people are very careful in what they say to criticize Israel in case they're labeled as anti semitic.
Which i find sad, because no country should ever be beyond criticism.
This was good to read and it's nice to have your perspective on Israel. Thanks for writing it.
In the US it's more that the campaign funding (for or against) is massive. I can only assume that stranglehold is much tighter thanks to Citizen's United. /spits on the Roberts Court.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone called an anti-semite (excepting Seinfeld).
I mentioned this in the Civil War thread, but this trailer played before the movie when I saw it opening night and it was the most bafflingly out-of-place thing I've seen in a long time. Laughed my ass off, though.
Yeah I remember the 2008 debates when both candidates talked about how much they love Israel.
I imagine this is partly because the majority of American Jews have voted Democrat since well before Israel's inception, and continue to do so even though the Republicans are the most staunchly pro-Israel party. It's hard to call criticism of Israel and/or Zionism anti-semitic when much of it comes from within the Jewish community.
A lot of the ultra-Orthodox New York Jewish community are actually stridently anti-Israel because they believe the Jewish people are still bound by divine covenant never to return to the Holy Land.
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this is a fair point
criticism of Israel is emphatically not anti-semitism
but it's also true that many people attempt to justify anti-semitic opinions by calling it anti-Israel
e.g. the Oberlin professor who claimed that her rants declaring that ISIS was an Israeli invention and that the Rothchilds secretly control the world were examples of anti-Israel speech, and not anti-semitism
I'm not sure the UK is a good example here, given that Labour is currently in the middle of a huge anti-semitism scandal
they don't seem to have much of a problem saying blatantly anti-semetic things, and they alternately argue that their speech is anti-Zionist, rather than anti-Semitic, and that the whole controversy was fabricated to discredit them (and while they don't always state who's doing the fabrication, the implication is obvious)
It's definitely true that anti-Israel speech is not anti-Semetic speech, and that some people falsely claim that it is
but I think it's a huge overgeneralization to say that people are afraid to criticize Israel for fear of being called anti-Semitic. Some certainly are, but many others feel comfortable expressing anti-Semitic hate speech under a veneer of criticizing Israel
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Also, judging by the opinions expressed by a number of my Jewish friends (mostly secular and reform, as far as I know), they're kind of creeped out by how much Republican support of Israel seems to be derived from Christian Apocalyptic beliefs.
Republicans: "Of course you need your own nation! A strong nation with a shitload of weapons and soldiers, and the freedom to pick fights with anyone and everyone with impunity! Surrounded by mortal foes in a never-ending cycle of escalating hostility! Because Israel being the epicenter of the Final World War is a vital precursor to our God coming back and fucking everybody's shit all the way up hell yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaah!! Thinking about the world ending makes my scrotum tingle unnnnnhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Jewish friends: "Uh. No. Thanks."
http://fusion.net/video/307108/bernie-sanders-acknowledges-he-should-know-more-about-latin-america/
Even after the particularly bad interview he did with the NYDN, he is once again put on the spot and asked about topics he should at least have some grasp on, and not only does he have no idea, he still can't stop himself from pivoting back to his stump speech.
He must have known for a while that he was going to do this interview, and he had to know that he would be asked about Latin America, and it appears that no one on his team spent any time with him to prepare at least a little.
My favorite part is that he never went to jail; they sent him to a halfway house and gave him probation. Judging from the content of the short it sounds like he spent his time there in his head making up more nonsense rather than talking to any of the other occupants; he was a lot more likely to learn about how hard it is to detox in lockup than pro crime tricks from the hardened criminals he consorted with.
What a tender nutsack.
Israel gets more credit than it's due for destabilizing the region. A middle east without Israel would probably be roughly as violent as one without it, except there just wouldn't be as many Jewish people.
Would the iran/iraq war not have happened? Would it cure the divide between Sunni and Shia? Would ISIS give up the goal of establishing a Islamic State and destroying modernism that is literally in their name of their organization? Would other regional powers give up their unrealized ambitions? Would it have delayed or accelerated the Arab spring? Would western interests in the region cease?
I don't really think so.
There's a significant difference between Israel versus The United States, Britain, and Russia-- Israel stopped invading middle eastern nations in the twenty first century.
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
Foreign Policy is basically "which bad/awful choice is least likely to bite us later?"
It's even more complicated when you can't be bothered to do any sort of preparation.
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yeah
huh?
i think? this is a sneak dig at trump who is quoted as regarding himself as his own foreign policy expert
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the cold war was way better than the balance of powers prior to world war I.
However, the ring will never leave your finger, and you will be unable to ever describe to another living person what you see.
Not a dig at you, but at dig at Sanders and Trump for not bothering to study up on what is a pretty big part of being the President.
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