Calling people who support Palestinian Rights names such as "Israel Haters" or "Anti-semitic" misses the point.
Israel has been on a death spiral since its beginning, but it has been propped up by the United States. This to both their detriments.
Now, Israel is showing its weakness. It has been surviving on victimhood, despite its dislike for those who died in the holocaust.
Three points here about the Israel Lobby:
Just remember that most Zionists are Christians who want Jews to move to this part of the world to start a massive war.
Isn't that the best reason to stop supporting Israel without question?
Amusing, this is a lot of conservative thinkers who are shut out of the political debate. Most likely because big money, in this case AIPAC and the Zionist lobby, shut them out.
I pretty much agree with what he says, unless we get to the two state solution since Netanyahu has basically killed that option. And tough shit if some people want an ethnically pure state. Been there, done that.
And "Never Again" needs to mean never again for anyone--especially a group that suffered under another country's attempts to create an ethnically pure state.
See also:
Ehud Barak (Hebrew: אֵהוּד בָּרָק [eˈhud baˈʁak]; born Ehud Brog; 12 February 1942) is an Israeli former general and politician who served as the tenth prime minister from 1999 to 2001. He was leader of the Labor Party from 1997 until 2001 and again from 2007 until 2011. He previously held the posts of defense minister and deputy prime minister under Ehud Olmert and then in Benjamin Netanyahu's second government from 2007 to 2013. He attempted a political comeback, running in the September 2019 Israeli legislative election as the leader of a new party that he formed. His party merged with other parties to form an alliance called the Democratic Union, but the alliance did not win enough seats for him to become a member of the Knesset.
A lieutenant general in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Barak shares with two others the honor of being the most highly decorated soldier in Israel's history, having taken part in many battles and combat missions. He was appointed Chief of General Staff in 1991, serving until 1995. He is a graduate in physics, mathematics, and economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stanford University.
Of course, the Israelis have evidence of an underground annex under Al-Shifa Hospital--they built the place. I've posted backup for that claim. Of course, Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth. They may be Kosher, but they love their porkies!
Unless you really believe the USS Liberty incident was an accident...
In that case, I can offer you some NFTs in the Brooklyn Bridge.
The reason for doing this is that IDF is committing war crimes and they need to justify them. But that is very hard.
The good part if that when one gets away from Western Media, particularly the US media, one sees Hamas soundly thrashing the IDF. I trust Hamas more in regard to the stats--especially since they provide video backup for their claims.
This is the drawback to not being aware of history, which has led to IDF overconfidence. That despite having at least on unit wiped out on 7 October.
IDF and the Israeli security service had a great reputation prior to this, but they are coming off like clowns now that the internet can shed light on them. Iron Dome was put out of commission by "fireworks" and the Merkava tank is proving to be useless. Unfortunately, Hamas's material is in Arabic, but they paint a very different picture of the situation.And it doesn't look good for Israel. It's Stalingrad with Chu Chi tunnels and fighters who want to die for the liberation of their country.
According to International law, an occupied nation can fight its occupier. And as the saying goes: One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
I would also add that this is yet another example of how taking the Second Amendment out of the context of a "well regulated militia" is a bad idea.
As they say, you can give someone a gun, but there's no guarantee where they will point it.
UN Resolution/45/130:
"Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle; "
UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 (December 3, 1982) specifically mentions the Palestinians, "Considering that the denial of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, sovereignty, independence and return to Palestine and the repeated acts of aggression by Israel against the people of the region constitute a serious threat to international peace and security." That resolution goes on to say: "Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for their independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle. "
Despite the UN having allowed for the Zionist state to be created at the detriment of the Palestinian people, the change in makeup of the United Nations has led to a change in attitude toward this issue. Although, UN resolution 194 from 1948 did grant the Palestinians the right of return to the lands they were ethnically cleansed from.
So, while people might want me to condemn Hamas for its activities, which they may seem extreme: Hamas is engaging in a legitimate action to recover the land stolen from the Palestinian people. And 75 years of ethnic cleansing have only made the situation worse.
Yes, the solution is simple: Palestinians are allowed to return to their land. The truth about the ethnically pure state of Israel need to be made more widely available outside of Israel.
And people like Ben Shapiro get shown up for being the loudmouth dickheads they are for trying to justify crimes against international law. As Ben points out, there are 400 million arabs. There are also 2 billion Muslims.
Anyway, if you want to say that the Second Amendment is about fighting tyrannical governments, then you should be cheering the Palestinians.
Not the IDF.
One thing which is conspicuous in the stereotype of Palestinians is that they are all Muslim. Not at all. This is the Holy Land: sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Bethlehem is on the West Bank and is part of Palestine. Palestine is the home of early Christianity, as is Gaza.
As of 2015, Palestinian Christians comprise approximately 1–2.5% of the
population of the West Bank, and less than 1% in the Gaza Strip.
According to official British Mandatory estimates, Palestine's Christian
population in 1922 constituted 9.5% of the total Mandatory Palestine
population (10.8% of the Palestinian Arab population), and 7.9% in 1946.
A large number of Arab Christians fled or were expelled from the
Jewish-controlled areas of Mandatory Palestine during the 1948
Arab–Israeli War, and a small number left during the period (1948–1967)
of Jordanian control of the West Bank for economic reasons.[citation
needed] From 1967, during the Israeli military rule, the Palestinian
Christian population has increased while as a percentage of the
population continued to decrease.
There are also many Palestinian
Christians who are descendants of Palestinian refugees from the
post-1948 era who fled to Christian-majority countries and formed large
diaspora Christian communities. Worldwide, there are nearly one million
Palestinian Christians in these territories as well as in the
Palestinian diaspora, comprising around 6–7% of the world's total
Palestinian population. Palestinian Christians live primarily in Arab
states surrounding historic Palestine and in the diaspora, particularly
in Europe and the Americas.
See also:
Of course, the Israelis know there is an underground tunnel, they built the hospital!
There was an article from an Israeli newspaper about this that showed up on my feed, but went grail. Fortunately, it's mentioned in the wikipedia article since I am feeling too lazy to hunt the original article down.
Anyway, the hospital underwent a major Israeli renovation and expansion in the 1980s. Israeli architects Gershon Tzapor and Benjamin Edelson in their Tel-Aviv office handled the project, both were well experienced in the construction of high standard hospitals. The architects also designed and built a large array of underground infrastructure, which was what the IDF later pointed to as part of the underground Hamas command in both the 2014 and the current Israel-Hamas war. In particular, in 1983, the Israelis built "a secure underground operating room and tunnel network" beneath Building 2 of the hospital.
I would also add that the "guardian list" shown by the IDF is a calendar, not a real rota of terrorists. Toss in that the IDF spokeman reads the Arabic from left to right, instead of right to left. You'd think someone who speaks Hebrew would do it right.
Unless Hamas uses weekdays as codenames for its fighters.
Remember the USS Liberty? Israel wants you to believe it was an "accident". And don't forget those "weapons of mass destruction".
Has anyone found them yet?
The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids into Palestinian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who endured years of American heavy bombing did not respond by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft.
The British resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 75 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.
The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.
The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.
We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.
All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in May 1948. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East.
BTW: As of 2015, Palestinian Christians comprise approximately 1–2.5% of the population of the West Bank, and less than 1% in the Gaza Strip. According to official British Mandatory estimates, Palestine's Christian population in 1922 constituted 9.5% of the total Mandatory Palestine population (10.8% of the Palestinian Arab population), and 7.9% in 1946. A large number of Arab Christians fled or were expelled from the Jewish-controlled areas of Mandatory Palestine during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and a small number left during the period (1948–1967) of Jordanian control of the West Bank for economic reasons.[citation needed] From 1967, during the Israeli military rule, the Palestinian Christian population has increased while as a percentage of the population continued to decrease.
There are also many Palestinian Christians who are descendants of Palestinian refugees from the post-1948 era who fled to Christian-majority countries and formed large diaspora Christian communities. Worldwide, there are nearly one million Palestinian Christians in these territories as well as in the Palestinian diaspora, comprising around 6–7% of the world's total Palestinian population. Palestinian Christians live primarily in Arab states surrounding historic Palestine and in the diaspora, particularly in Europe and the Americas.
Palestine is home to some of the oldest Christian Churches in the world. At least on is in the Gaza Strip and was recently bombed by the IDF.
I'm not commenting other than to say he is correct:
The title of this is "They destroyed tanks with direct strikes... Scenes of Al-Qassam fighters clashing with the occupation forces..."
Israel was humiliated on 7 Oct 23 by having Hamas invade under its defences. The pro-Israeli media is hyping stories of attacked festival goers and kidnapped civilians, but that is because Hamas beat a couple of IDF units and showed up Mossad and Shin Bet to boot.
It's hard to say that Israel is a strategic ally in the region since the only thing it does is create more of a mess. Its using its emotions instead of its brain has led it into something which is going to be the Battle of Stalingrad on steroids. Mosul for something more current. Although, Stalingrad is a better example, but Israel's bombing has created something which is going to be super for the defence, and pure hell for the invader. Toss in that Hamas has planned and prepared this for some time.
A more important consideration is that Hamas fighters aren't afraid of death. Israelis are basically cowards.
The best move would be to admit defeat and grant Palestinians their rights, which includes the right of return under UN resolution 194 of 1948.
Or show the spirit of Masada.
The one good point to all this carnage is that it becomes harder to ignore Israel's rogue behaviour. They have bombed Christian Churches in Gaza (Yes, Palestinians are also Christian) along with hospitals and refugee camps, in contravention to the laws of War.
Israel loses its US support and that is probably a bigger blow than allowing Palestinians their rights, which would show up Israel for the racist state that it is.
I knew that this event would end up being mentioned, especially at this time of the year.
The usual line is along the line of Alan Dershowitz's Kristallnacht again: Hamas praise & Jew-hatred
Many of the most egregious petitions and protests against Israel occurred even before Israel responded to the Hamas barbarity of Oct. 7. Student groups, lawyers’ groups, Black Lives Matter groups, labor unions, and other hard left, woke progressives praised Hamas for its rapes, beheadings and murders just hours after they occurred. It would be as if these groups increased their support for Nazism following Kristallnacht in 1938, when 91 Jews were killed in Germany and many synagogues and Jewish stores destroyed.
This comparison actually lacks a lot of historical background, but since he starts it with "before Israel responded", let's go with the Nakba. The Israelis have pushed the Palestinians into Gaza and the West Bank and restricted their mobility, among other things. The Nazi also put European Jews into Ghettos. Some of those Jews revolted:
Vilna, Mir, Lachva (Lachwa), Kremenets, Czestochowa, Nesvizh, Sosnowiec, and Tarnow, among others, resisted with force when the Germans began to deport ghetto populations. In Bialystok, the underground staged an uprising just before the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943. Most of the ghetto fighters, primarily young men and women, died during the fighting.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943 was the largest single revolt by Jews. Hundreds of Jews fought the Germans and their auxiliaries in the streets of the ghetto. Thousands of Jews refused to obey German orders to report to an assembly point for deportation. In the end the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground to force the Jews out. Although they knew defeat was certain, Jews in the ghetto fought desperately and valiantly.
Likewise there was resistance in the concentration camps: Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, among others.
Should we condemn the Jews that resisted German repression the way that the Palestinians have been resisting the Nakba, which is something my learned colleague needs to refresh his memory upon. Of course, as a Brit, I am well aware of Stern Gang/Lehi, Irgun, and Haganah and their activities. Do the names Folke Bernadotte and Walter Guiness mean anything to you, Mr. Dershowitz? Yellin-Mor said this about the assassination of Guiness:
"Really these acts by Lord Moyne were without meaning for us. They were useful only as propaganda, because they allowed us to explain to the people why we had killed him. What was important to us was that he symbolized the British Empire in Cairo. We weren't yet in a position to try to hit Churchill in London, so the logical second best was to hit Lord Moyne in Cairo."
Lehi, Irgun, and Haganah went on to form the IDF.
I can also add that Krystallnacht did not occur in a vacuum. It was an act of terrorism which precipitated that event. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
As you know, the Jews in Germany were being discriminated against. But I can ask you whether this act justifies the retribution against the entire Jewish community, as is Israel's undeniable Genocide committed against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yes, it is Genocide being committed by Israel using the legal black letter definition of that term.
I quoted Sir Gerald Kaufman's speech from "House of Commons Hansard Debates" 16 January 2009 yesterday, and I'll give an excerpt of it today:
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count...Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.
The phrase "Never again" is rendered meaningless if it applies only to one group of people, especially Jews. It needs to mean "Never again" for everyone, including Palestinians. Zionists (people who support a Jewish homeland of ANY faith) have been using this as an excuse for the excesses of the State of Israel for too long. And, as I like to point out, a lot of Zionists are Christians who want the state of Israel to start world war III. They couldn't give a shit about the Jewish people. Conflating Zionism and support for Israel with being "anti-Jewish" is a fallacy, as I've also discussed. In fact, Zionism is far more the enemy of the Jews than calling the state of Israel on its treatment of the Palestinians.
You might want to reflect on that fact.
I've also heard it said that look at what you are doing now since that would have been the way you would have acted during the Holocaust. I won't quote Martin Niemoeller since I hope my learned colleague is aware of that quote.
Wow, I've wanted to say this stuff for a while, but I found this on Youtube. Not sure you can call him anti-Semitic, but he is the type of person that gave me the ideas which began to form my opinion of Israel.
Here's his bio on the subject: an advocate of Palestinian statehood. A strong critic of the state of Israel, he called for economic sanctions against the state and denounced the state for committing atrocities (which he phrased as war crimes) against the Palestinian people and their nation.
The whole speech from "House of Commons Hansard Debates" 16 January 2009
Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab): I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine.
I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me.
I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as was Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for Israel in the 1948 war of independence.
My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.
On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians—the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that
“500 of them were militants.”
That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.
The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.
Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.
The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said:
“You make peace by talking to your enemies.”
However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.
It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.
And the answer is: NO!
Actually, I've heard that the Israeli forces are pretty weak at this point, which can be born out that most of what is coming out of that area is "hasbara" and not anything of real substance. We are hearing that Israeli raids are directly hitting civilians from the Palestinian side.
Which is a war crime.
The IDF is a "risk adverse" force and tends to retreat when it is being beaten. It will take a certain level of casualties and then run.
They ain't the French Foreign Legion which is best exmplified by the Battle of Camarón, which occurred on 30 April 1863:
A small infantry patrol, led by Captain Jean Danjou and Lieutenants Clément Maudet and Jean Vilain, numbering just 65 men was attacked and besieged by a force that may have eventually reached 3,000 Mexican infantry and cavalry, and was forced to make a defensive stand at the nearby Hacienda Camarón, in Camarón de Tejeda, Veracruz, Mexico.
The conduct of the Legion, who overwhelmingly outnumbered, refused to surrender, killing and injuring hundreds of enemy troops before finally succumbing, led to a certain mystique, and the battle of Camarón became synonymous with bravery and a fight-to-the-death attitude.
No, the Israeli Military embodies the spirit of Masada, which is where the Jews killed themselves rather than die in battle.
Going into Gaza is going to be the Battle of Stalingrad on steroids. The IDF are fools for thinking they will get too far into Gaza before the shit hits the fan. And the risk adverse IDF won't commit to what is necessary to actually do this.
Especially the body count on their side.
So, they would rather commit the war crime of targeting civilians, which is another blunder since what made the terrain in Stalingrad so difficult was that it was bombed out. That gave the Russian defenders lots of great positions to defend from.
Let's toss in Hamas's tunnels for good measure, which an IDF soldier described as fighting ghosts. Hamas's tunnels make it easy to move from position to position. The IDF will be ambushed on a regular basis by the highly mobile defenders.
And fighting in built up areas (FIBUA) is difficult under normal conditions. The Palestinian won't be the ones being slaughtered if they go into Gaza: it will be the IDF.
Toss in that the Hamas fighters have nothing to lose. They know they are going to die and are willing to take as many IDF with them as they can. That's a very formidable foe.
The real problem with Israel is that it has set itself up for defeat the moment Herzl conceived the Zionist movement and has been living on borrowed time since then.
Maybe Patagonia or Uganda were the better choices for a Jewish state.
They say Russia almost became Islamic. The story is that Tsar Jaroslav
the Wise during the Kievan Rus wanted to give up paganism. So, he called
together representatives from all the world's religions.
The
Islamic representative told him he could have all the wives he wanted.
Jaroslav said, "Yeah, go on". The Islamic rep said, "But you can't drink
alcohol". And Jaroslav was all like "get outta here..."
