Angry Israel/Palestine Ranting Thread.

A lot of it depends on what hamas and other groups do, if they continue with attacks Israel can deflect a lot of the deserved condemnations it should get for its policies.

Here's a fun fact for you to mull over. The ANC was classified as a terrorist organisation for a long, long time by most western countries. Nelson Mandela, a name you should recognise, was actually denied entry to the US about five years ago when his name popped up on a terrorist watch list. Mandela still manages to be one of the most respected and revered politicians in the world for leading the peaceful transition of South Africa from apartheid to democracy.

So, no, if Israel goes full racist no amount of deflection is going to win them back the moral high ground, nor is it going to save them from international condemnation. Not that Israel isn't going to try, or isn't already trying, but the narrative of oppressive racists=bad, suppressed freedom fighters=good is hard to counter even back when Israel wasn't going full racist.

The ANC was nothing compared to what Hamas and others are doing, as long as Hamas and others want to launch rockets and such at civilians they give Israel cover that it doesn't deserve.

They're so evil that Israel will always be completely blameless!!

Have you actually read what the ANC got up to?

Yes thats exactly what I said, get a clue for once in your life.

Ill try again so even someone as slow as you can get it. Israel deserves a ton of blame for the actions it takes in this conflict, but as long as Hamas and others continue to attack Israel they give Israel cover for its actions with some groups.

Sure. But those groups are getting smaller and smaller. As long as Hamas remains the underdog in this particular conflict the dynamic won't change and neither will the narrative. It's going to be racist oppressors vs plucky freedom fighters, even if said freedom fighters happen to be theocratic thugs with visions of driving the jews into the sea, because people recognise the fundamental injustice of Israel oppressing an entire race of people. The further Israel goes down the path of racism-as-policy the easier it will get to make excuses for Hamas, not the other way around.

About the only thing that can change the narrative at this point is an Iranian nuke, and then I figure all bets are off.

Both sides are silly with theocratic ideology, just two shades of the same veil -- even though we full well know the ideology isn't much to either but rallying political rhetoric. It's hard for Israel to claim much secularity when their existence as a state is usually explained in biblical terms and they offer carte blanche citizenship to folks of Jewish lineage.

I think the narrative can change faster than you think. Blind US support is what's fueled Israel's political hubris and the Arab world's belligerent rage, and much of that support is supplied out of fear of what appears to be a dwindling Christian Right in America. I wouldn't have called it that way five years ago, but the winds may be shifting a bit.

History repeats itself. The first as tragedy, then as farce.

I don't know, Gnu. There's still a significant population on both the right and left wing who call any weakening of support for Israel, any condemnation of Israeli politics antisemitism. Anything but absolute, lock-step, full-throated support gets that treatment, and with races as close as they are these days, neither side is exactly looking to throw away votes.

That might be what it's like there, but I assure you that in the US, Brett is correct. The focus here is generally on Hamas attacks. Hamas is not "the underdog" in US circles.

Please do not lawyer me about how they are smaller and therefore the underdog. "Underdog" has different connotations and you know it.

I'm not sure why you felt the need to pre-empt any lawyering but whatever. The US is the outlier but even the US is going to change it's stance towards Israel eventually if Yisrael Beitenu disenfranchises the Palestinians after they win the elections, it's in their party platform after all. I have that much faith in the US public and in US sensitivities to racial segregation.

Back to the subject of Hamas attacks, here's a question. Do you think the Palestinians would have a better change of succeeding in achieving independance if Hamas unilaterally laid down arms tomorrow and the Palestinians stopped all armed struggle?

I'm not convinced they would be better off, necessarily, because I suspect the result would be that the Israeli government would take that as de facto acceptance of their settlement policies while the lack of violence would make the conflict drop off the international radar, further removing pressure on Israel. The US focus on Hamas attacks wouldn't shift to a focus on Israeli settlers because the US focus doesn't give a crap about the Palestinians and that wouldn't change if they stopped fighting. Armed struggle serves both to impose a cost on Israel's settlement policies as well as raise international attention. Without the struggle, what's to stop Israel from unilaterally taking everything they want?

Am I wrong about this? Possibly. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. I'm not trying to make excuses for Hamas here. If you define "better off" as free from bombings or border sanctions then Hamas laying down arms would be an enormous benefit to the population of Gaza, for instance. But I don't think it would gain them independence.

No idea. Israel's policy aims are awful and they don't seem to realize it, so I'm inclined to agree with you. There is so much bad blood now that I have little faith in Israel's government to do the right thing.

Which is why I used to be scared to death to mention anything publicly that vaguely resembles post-Zionism, and folks like our buddy Ahmadinejad who wield anti-Zionist doctrine as thinly-veiled (if you can call it that) anti-Semitism don't help. But the Knesset's been the one staging the racially victimized passion play for decades, and even the old South Florida Jews (who have been traditionally stuck between social liberalism and the right's championing of Israel) are starting to either die off or bore of the fiery rhetoric.

The average American knows jack shit about internal Israeli policies and wouldn't recognize an Israeli politician if they tripped over Golda Meir's grave. All they know is Israel = good and Palestinians = evil terrorists who blow up buses (remember 9/11!).

And even if they did have their history in order, the average American suffers from a farcical lack of political nuance anyway, making black and white from a very Technicolor political backdrop. Insight isn't our best quality. But I have a bit of dark hope I lacked not long ago that the Knesset's position is eventually going to become so untenable that it's impossible to ignore anymore. And I'm the biggest sociopolitical misanthrope there is.

The American far right has been nudged that way by the Christian Right who for freaking serious bases their support of Israel on the biblical assertion that Israel's resurgence will bring about the end-times, so there's that. (They may not be far off the mark if Israel ever decided to get fancy with the nukes that they totally do not have.)

Can we just come out and say that the Anti-Defamation League does not fucking help matters and needs to just go away? Their existence as per their original civil rights advocacy is still necessary to be sure; antisemitism certainly never went away overnight. But they've drifted so far away from that and just become a mouthpiece for Israel and aggressive Zionism that any time anyone is slightly critical of them, the ADF yells and screams and stirs up the public and because holocaust. I'm tempted to believe they've done more damage to the American public's perception of the Middle East conflict than any Republican politician ever has.

Republicans and Democrats alike dance to Israel's flute.

Entirely true. Neither side wants to give up the votes of those who care deeply about Israel, within the US. Look at how much bile and rage was directed at Obama over Israel for the last few years - few politicians have the same personal clout to withstand that.

It's kind of odd, but your angry skull avatar (Now with 100% more Santa hat!) gives this post way more gravitas than it deserves. In my head I heard Morgan Freeman's voice as I read it.

The skull is not angry. The skull simply is.

The Dems have mostly been scared to death (as they tend to be of most things, like clowns and haunted houses) of folks like the ADF stirring the pot with the whole anti-Israel=antisemitism trope. Most of them at least have the sense to look like they're wringing their hands over it, and I kinda get the fear in our climate of sensitivities about Israeli and Jewish history, but it still doesn't make it right and it still just keeps the wheels turning.

It's hard to defend this position to well-intentioned people who have the usual knee-jerk reactions to Israel, and I usually keep it to myself outside of the pseudo-anonymity of teh interwebs. For people who can't even absorb the sociopolitical history of the thing, it's disingenuous to then jump to the defense of "I lived with a Jewish partner for six years" or "I totally make a kick-ass matzo ball soup", because the "but I have a lot of black friends" shtick ruined everything for white guilt. "Racist people talk about how they have a lot of black friends, and I actually do have a lot of black friends ... holy shit, I'm a horrible racist!"

Wait a minute, Morgan Freeman is just a talking skull?! This changes Shawshank Redemption for me completely.

If anyone is destined to become the Omnissiah then it could very well be Morgan Freeman.

Do you even know what the ADL does? (not the ADF as you keep calling it). Most of what they do focuses on the continuing hatred of Jews in Europe, Arab countries and the US. They address Israel as well, most recently with the UN Vote, but it's a smaller part of their overall activities.

I would suggest you spend some time on their website before making broad and ignorant comments on things you know nothing about. I know it's fun to bash Israel and teh Jews on this thread with only Brett defending them, but at least be able to back up your claims that the ADL is a mouthpiece for aggressive Zionism as opposed to reporting and responding to hate across the world.

I googled the ADL today to see what venomous Zionist hatred it was spewing just today and found this horrible article about their insidious activities clearly aimed at undermining our children.

I'm usually neutral on the ADL. I was .. sorely disappointed in them when they came out against the Park 51 stuff. In general though, AIPAC are the issue with regards to American Politics. The ADL are usually a pretty solid bunch, if understandably overzealous at times.

I don't disagree with this. But he clearly and specifically addresses the ADL, which is activist and zealous in its own way. I disagreed with dismantling the ADL as an aggressive Zionist mouthpiece.

The ADL is openly zionist, though.

There's a lot of bullshit in there.

More from the ADL:

And check out this myth-busting page. It won't make you furious, I swear!

Of all the things to criticize Abraham Foxman for, "espousing Zionism" is a pretty weird one. The two-state solution is effectively an endorsement of a two nation-states model. It'd be historically unrealistic to think the ADL would be studiously neutral or far more quixotically, anti-Zionist, a perspective that hasn't been mainstream since before the first Arab-Israeli war.

I find the ADL's support and parroting of Israeli government policy troublesome but on the whole it does not take away from the fact that jews are still being persecuted and they do good work in fighting that persecution.

I support a two-state solution, but I think Zionism is a flawed ideology, at best. It should have died with other radical nationalist ideologies, but it's on life-support thanks to the US. But you can't separate the ADL from Zionism, and in turn from rabid support of Israel. I don't just say that because I think Zionism is wrong, but also because of stuff like this:

I have no issue with people who dislike nationalism in principle, and I feel a certain affinity for countries that, like my own Canada, or in a certain sense the Federal Republic of Germany, have sort of enshrined a sort of post-nationalism into their heh, national identity.

But post-nationalism tends to be a "luxury ideology" of peoples whose "national rights," as traditionally defined, are not in question. Waiting for people to stop caring about linguistic-cultural-ethnic-historical-sociological nations as focuses of identity and belonging is like waiting for people to give up religion. It's not going to happen, least of all in places where "nationality" is a source of conflict.

Sure. Just like wishing Israel had never come into being does nothing to ease its flaws or continuing oppression of the Palestinians. Nor does acknowledging the privilege behind my opinions make me feel less confident in them.

That last bit actually shouldn't follow. Acknowledging the privilege behind your opinions should lead you to reevaluate whether the positions you hold are truly valid. You might still hold those positions after the reevaluation, but if you do, you should be more confident in them; and if you haven't reevaluated them after realizing they're born of a privileged view that hadn't been accounted for previously in analyzing it, you should be less confident in them.

Then we're agreed!

You'll have to pardon my quizzical sidelong internet-look in your general direction, but have you really never become less confident in a position you hold after an attempt to privilege-check, as it were?

Give him a second to privilege-check that opinion.