The Israel / Palestine mire (again)

well, that was quick, seems he is back to his previous views.


Netanyahu flip flops on Palestinian state comment

CNN)?Two days after his victory at the polls, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already walked back his disavowal of a two-state solution.

"I don't want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution," Netanyahu said Thursday in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "I haven't changed my policy."

U.S. officials have said that they have been waiting to see if Netanyahu would stand behind his campaign comments nixing a Palestinian state as he moves toward forming a governing coalition, and indicated that they would be reassessing aspects of the U.S.-Israel relationship if he maintained his firm opposition to a Palestinian state.

More at link
 
Thankfully his peaceful solution of immigrating Jews from around the world and settling them on land the Palestinians have lived on for three-thousand and more years is a complete success.
 
Funny. Isn't that what Hitler wanted? All the Jews out.
 
Funny. Isn't that what Hitler wanted? All the Jews out.
It's not just what Hitler wanted. Most of Europe was (and much of it still is) ripe with anti-semitism, but the Nazis were more "successful" catalysts than all that had come before.

What's funny is that it's exactly what the Palestinians want too.
the following seems appropriate:

Clearly he's full of it
 
Thankfully his peaceful solution of immigrating Jews from around the world and settling them on land the Palestinians have lived on for three-thousand and more years is a complete success.

And this is anti-Semitism in a nutshell. Denying the legitimacy of the Jews to peacefully return to the land they were forcefully driven from three thousand years ago in favor of the right of those who fled their homes during their process of waging war upon the Jews.

Me, I'm glad people are willing to simply come out as hating the Jews rather than trying to cloak it some kind of rubbish justification.

Steve
 
And this is anti-Semitism in a nutshell. Denying the legitimacy of the Jews to peacefully return to the land they were forcefully driven from three thousand years ago in favor of the right of those who fled their homes during their process of waging war upon the Jews.

Me, I'm glad people are willing to simply come out as hating the Jews rather than trying to cloak it some kind of rubbish justification.

Steve

This is the same kind of demagogic argument as Russia used with Crimea. With the same kind of extreme revisionist logic, every square meter of land, in Europe especially, could be claimed by 10 different nations, ethnicities or religious groups. And their more or less legitimate successors.
 
This is the same kind of demagogic argument as Russia used with Crimea. With the same kind of extreme revisionist logic, every square meter of land, in Europe especially, could be claimed by 10 different nations, ethnicities or religious groups. And their more or less legitimate successors.
Yup. If people think and act like an already settled landmass is rightfully theirs, what they start sooner or later is a war. In the case of my own country, "Volk ohne Raum" (People without Space) was one of the slogans used with great success by the Nazis.
 
The British had the "right" (whatever that means) to that land after WWII.

The British offered their land to both the Jews and the Arabs to create two separate states and live side-by-side.

The Jews accepted. The Arabs did not.

The British saw that the Arabs were being stubborn and throwing a tantrum and just gave the Jews their portion of the land and peaced the f out.

As soon as the Brits left, the Arabs attacked the Jews. The Jews had to defend their brand new state.

The moral of the story is that maybe if the Arabs weren't so stuck-up and stubborn back then, there would have been a Palestinian state for 70 years now. But hey, let's just all sit around blaming the Jews for everything; that's been the cool thing to do for thousands of years so why stop now?
 
Even the most misanthropic person who likes nothing better than seeing humanity slowly self-destruct, gets tired of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The same shit, year after year. Get a new script, guys.
 
The moral of the story is that maybe if the Christians hadn't been so hateful and murderous for centuries, there would have been no need for a Jewish state. But hey, let's just all sit around blaming the Palestinian Arabs for not wanting to lose their homeland; that's been the cool thing to do for decades, so why stop now?
FTFY
 
The real news here over the past few days has been the implications for the slim margin for majority that Netanyahu has managed to pull off in the wake of the elections. Akiva Eldar does a good job of showing that voting trends have brought the knesset ever closer to expansive support for negotiations that would quickly change the status quo. While the news over the past year has been pretty grave in regard to prospects, I think that what is included in this article is reason to be hopeful once this government implodes in a fog of broken promises and wheeling and dealing.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ori...nt-two-state-solution-knesset-opposition.html
 
It's quite amazing (sad really) the number of differing opinions in the Israeli Knesset on the issue and near unanimous opinion in the United States congress.
 
Well there's probably a hint of nuance that comes with living under circumstances dictated by the conflict. I don't think anyone should be surprised that those who live across an ocean are likely to have a more general understanding and aspiration for any plan.

The number of opinions about this in the Knesset are really also due to the diversity of the Jewish population in terms of their political goals and preferences, and certain attitudes about the conflict speak to layers of the population differently. For instance, some of who we might call right-wingers are really only such in that they value protection of their kind of Judaism, but that kind of policy is matched with populist robust welfare politics as well, which sometimes can include subsidy for settlement in the west bank.

But these politicians, like Deri and Gafni and their ilk, are also interested in reducing the need for conscription in their communities to such a degree that they view a solution as beneficial. Add to that the possibility of expanding the welfare state with all the cash freed up by lowering defense expenditure and you've got a very complicated political picture. What's important here is that this is only one extremely nuanced political view in regard to a solution that brings a group not necessarily seen as sympathetic to the Palestinian cause to the table. Think about the fact that there is also a large community in Israel that view a solution as unavoidable and long overdue for purely humanitarian and philosophical reasons, and multiple parties represent them too.

What makes this all so much more intense is that the election threshold in the knesset is low enough to allow for a great number of parties. Because parties can reasonably assume they can get elected and be an effective part of a coalition, they can afford to hold particular views. American politicians cannot afford to have more complex opinions on Israel because they need to align with a party line in order to get elected, and that means simplying the position to vague endorsement of a two-state solution.

So in the end, the reason that so many opinions can be aired in the knesset is that there are more particular parties because of the electoral threshold, a diverse population with many nuanced understandings of the conflict, and that these opinions are discussed very openly. I don't think that this is sad, because it allows more voices to be heard, especially pro-peace ones. Instead, I think that the equivocation of American politicians is more dangerous because you cannot see the extremism of many right wing politicians on Israel (like Cruz for example) because it is enveloped in a layer of party fluff.
 
https://www.amnesty.org/en/countrie.../israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/
Amnesty said:
Amnesty International Report 2014/15

Israeli forces committed war crimes and human rights violations during a 50-day military offensive in the Gaza Strip that killed over 1,500 civilians, including 539 children, wounded thousands more civilians, and caused massive civilian displacement and destruction of property and vital services. Israel maintained its air, sea and land blockade of Gaza, imposing collective punishment on its approximately 1.8 million inhabitants and stoking the humanitarian crisis. In the West Bank, Israeli forces carried out unlawful killings of Palestinian protesters, including children, and maintained an array of oppressive restrictions on Palestinians? freedom of movement while continuing to promote illegal settlements and allow Israeli settlers to attack Palestinians and destroy their property with near total impunity. Israeli forces detained thousands of Palestinians, some of whom reported being tortured, and held around 500 administrative detainees without trial. Within Israel, the authorities continued to demolish homes of Palestinian Bedouin in ?unrecognized villages? in the Negev/Naqab region and commit forcible evictions. They also detained and summarily expelled thousands of foreign migrants, including asylum-seekers, and imprisoned Israeli conscientious objectors.
 
Fair and balanced?
 
I don't think the point is to counter one piece of a report with another.
:nod:

Delll's post reminds me of something else I often come across. A lot of the time if I criticize Obama, the response is "yeah, well Bush sucked!!!" despite me never mentioning one word about Bush, in the negative or in the positive.

 
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