Angry Israel/Palestine Ranting Thread.

Of course. But not this one. As you said, I became more confident in my opinions. I used to feel really guilty about Israel and how oppressive they are, once I really became aware of the issues and stopped being an ardent zionist.

Ah, okay. I had been misled by your use of the unqualified plural in the term "opinions", and now am no longer confused. Thank you for clarifying instead of (this being the Sanctum) simply assuming I was trolling and flaming me. :)

Sorry, I had to bring this back from the dead since I somehow missed the rest of this thread.

I do. Do you? I'm sure you know their mission, which is only a slice of what they actually do. They're not just about protecting the civil rights of Jews worldwide, which is a noble and necessary endeavor, as I said earlier. They also fancy themselves an American mouthpiece for the State of Israel and have a tendency to cry "antisemitism" every time they're criticized for even the most atrocious things, causing a lot of idiots like you to equate a dislike for the practices of Israel and its allies with antisemitism. Do you assume that any time you criticize the government of a state, you're also criticizing its people and their race(s)?

Also, I believe I mistyped "ADF" once, even after spelling out their correct full name earlier in the thread. But since you apparently only have to read half of everything to know twice as much, it can be forgiven.

Yeah, that's exactly what I do, bash Jews. Ask my ex how horrible I am to her people. Hell, I'll give her your number so she can call you an idiot, too. (She indeed wholeheartedly agrees with most of my positions on Israel, as do many, many Jews. In fact, a lot of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews think the whole idea of forced Zionism is pretty damned heretical.)

If I were thin-skinned I wouldn't hang out in this forum, and I don't even like bothering discussing Israel with folks of dissenting view because it's just so damned polarizing, much less take any of it personally. But I'll be damned if I'm gonna let anyone -- obliquely or not -- try to call me an antisemite out of sheer sociopolitical ignorance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel

Speaking of outwardly racist organizations distributing gifts from foreign governments for purposes of affecting the outcome of elections in the United States. Your genetics do not entitle you to anything from anyone besides your mother and father. To imply that your genetic heritage is special and entitles you to money and land and special stories and food is despicable. It is demeaning to humanity at large and it trivializes you as a human being who was born now and is alive now and can do something new and good for somebody else somewhere now.
I understand that people want to be around people who resemble them, but having fun and hamburgers with people who are different is strength. It is also the opposite of Apartheid.

In the set of things to complain about, expending resources so that teenagers can go to Israel and drink at as many bars as possible is pretty low on the list, I should think.

The purpose of those trips is to convince American citizens selected on the basis of their race to support the Israeli government. I do not appreciate that.

I'd say that the purpose of those trips is to convince American (and other countries, but primarily American) citizens on the basis of their race to move to live in another country. Aliyah, the act of becoming a citizen of Israel, is the goal of Birthright. I guess it's a little bit noxious, but in the long list of things, it scores far below "screaming that anyone who doesn't support Israel unconditionally is an anti-semitic neo-nazi".

I disagree that racial/ethnic identity is not a thing to celebrate. And yes, I like being around people of color, not just because it's fun, but also because there seems to be less of a chance of one of them acting or saying something racist. Also, we understand, in some cases, things about each other's culture that white people usually don't.

Extrapolate that to any non-normative group.

Other countries with diasporas have "homecoming" citizenship provisions. Other countries are nation states. There is no moral standard requiring countries to aspire to postnationalism, however obvious its philosophical appeal.

The funny thing, given my ire towards the State and its questionable history, is that I kinda superficially get behind the idea of birthright, albeit in that perfect world of Israel not acting like an ass.

And I have friends for whom it's a big deal to visit, and I think it's a cool thing. I completely get the spiritual connection and it's something I can readily detach from the bad politics, even when a lot of those people buy into those politics. My ex and I had a conservative Jewish neighbor for two years who was a Jewish studies major and we happily talked about her trips down there while being perfectly able to steer clear of the quagmire. (Plus she made me latkes. I can't not be happy around latkes.)

You're wrong. The purpose is to get settlers, and also to get Americans who live in America to agitate for Israel on college campuses, and later donate money and advocate for Israel's policies. Also, don't call it Aliyah. That's stupid. The act of becoming a citizen of Israel is no more special than the act of becoming a citizen of any other foreign government. It isn't better so it does not get its own word. Because the people allowed to become citizens of Israel are generally selected on the basis of race, and the people not allowed to become citizens of Israel are absolutely denied on the basis of their race, maybe it should get it's own word. It should not be a pretty word, such that would evoke memories of a youthful R&B star cut down in her prime just before a terrible vampire movie would have otherwise ruined her career. It should be a word with a lot of harsh sounds and a bit of a hacking noise, to represent how moving to Israel because you think your race entitles you to land mentioned in a three thousand year old book makes you a fucking asshole.

It is part and parcel tied to Apartheid. Each and every tiny policy on its own tends not to seem that objectionable compared to the vile whole; show your papers, certain jobs are not open to you, you vote in different elections, you can't own one of those, your grandfather left so he can't come back, the list goes on. The point to consider is that some parts of Apartheid are the end and some are the means. Taglit Israel is part of Israel's attempt to prevent foreign governments from opposing their policies by presenting gifts awarded on the basis of race to their citizens.

And by the way, there is a difference between a homecoming provision, where the children of immigrants can return, and what Israel does, which is specifically prohibiting people from returning on the basis of their race while at the same time scouring the globe for people of your race and attempting to recruit those people to build farms on land you stole.

I'm German and Norwegian. My heritage is war, rape, sausages and rape.

Yeah, that's kinda the fatal flaw in the whole "White Pride" thing.

Although being Irish, my heritage is mostly just alcohol, potatoes, and indentured servitude.

That's the funny thing about white supremacy. The people who practice it are proof to the contrary. Their knowledge of history usually amounts to, "The Jews killed Jesus in 1932, prompting Hitler to Action and also, the South was led by Lee, Longstreet and Jackson at Second Manassas."

You said rape twice.

It's part of his tradition. His people traditionally love them some rape. They also love them some pillaging, which he failed to mention.

Also, longboats. His people really dig longboats.

I am grasping for an appropriate MRA joke. Please pretend I succeeded.

You expect a German-Norwegian to stop after the first rape?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis

I await the argle-bargle-there-needs-to-be-an-ugly-word-for-Italian-citizenship tirade. The list is padded by countries with strict/short-descent provisions, but Israel's scarcely alone in having diaspora-oriented citizenship rules, and given the fact that it was a country created via settling a diaspora it seems historically weird to me to insist that they repudiate that on the grounds of - again - a high standard of post-nationalism, because apparently that's now a requirement of whomever.

If the actual point is "everything about Israel can be proved to suck because Israel's government, settlement and occupation policies are fucking appalling," well, that's a hard rhetorical club to dodge in the era of Likud-Beiteinu. That much more so when we're talking about national identity being coupled to ethnicity, something we as liberals are uncomfortable about in theory if not, in most of the world, in practice.

For my part I think something like "Holy shit these settlement expansions are foreclosing any two-state solution short of an Israeli civil war" is a much more apposite point of departure for criticizing Israeli policy than trying to prove that "Zionism = racism." In my experience the latter is an exercise for people more interested in their own mid-east enthusiasms than the complexity of the history or problems. Not that "complexity" precludes strong moral opinions. But formulae like "zionism = racism" just remind me of the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian tables that used to set up in the same hallway on my college campus, shouting at passersby and each other. Hooray for our side.

To be fair, longboats really are quite awesome.

"Kinky."

Absolutely. There most certainly are folks out there who have racist motivations for Zionism. There are also just as many -- if not more -- who have racist motivations for anti-Zionism. Both needlessly threaten the validity of the arguments of well-meaning people on either side. I've been accused of antisemitism due to my issues with Israel way too many times to tread that slippery slope.

Holy shit, double-likes for Harvey Korman-ing up this thread.

I've definitely experienced that, and been flabbergasted at how the fuck I'm supposed to defend myself against someone calling me a racist without making it sound like I'm making excuses for racism. But that's never been the case on BF so I'd humbly suggest that you try to lower your defenses a bit while posting here. No one is going to bite your head off or call you an antisemite here because you think that walled settlement communities on occupied land is bullshit.

Undoubtedly. What I meant more than racism, in either direction, though, was that a slogan of that sort to me goes along with being someone who "roots for a side" and has quivering righteous moral certainty about their team's cause. And even that's just a learned association for me, even if I think "zionism = racism" is a dumb-to-the-point-of-erroneousness reading of history.

I also didn't mean to equate that formula with "antizionism," although I have seperate issues with that. It may be a product of my semantic overprecision but for me the natural way to frame "not agreeing with Zionism" would be to say that one disagrees with Zionism, or more consistently, that one disagrees with nation states as a solution to state-and-nation relations in general and in the Mideast in particular. "Antizionism" sort leaves me wondering "in which sense? You wish Zionism the historical movement hadn't happened, you want it undone, you want a one-state solution or the abandonment of a national state in a two-state context, or what?" I tend to disagree with everything covered under the rubric, but in different ways.

I usually don't jump to those conclusions until I get accused of "bashing Jews" as I did earlier. I know that's not remotely representative of BF.

Israel's policies need to change for the benefit of Israeli Jews as much as the Palestinians. Being the hated enemy of everyone around you, where brutal dictators like Mubarak are the lesser evil because they take American coin in exchange for peace, is not a recipe for long term prosperity. I support Israel, therefore I oppose their boneheaded government along with their American (and Canadian) enablers. Their plans are a recipe for disaster for everyone involved.

Yeah, we've kinda been put in a position where we've implicitly supported some pretty shady governments in exchange for not rocking the boat with Israel (and for oil, but that's another matter entirely). The fact that we can't even openly criticize questionable human rights in Saudi Arabia makes me a bit uncomfortable while we expend so much energy on reform in places like Cuba and China.

That whole "I support Israel" qualifier is just weird though, and another mark of how the shadow of antisemitism hangs over the debate. I mean, you wouldn't say "I support Argentina, but" or "I support the UK, but" when talking about the Falkland Islands, to pick a country and international issue at random.

I'd like Israel to stop treating their minority citizens like shit, and also to stop settling occupied land and enforcing apartheid. If Israel can stop making racism into public policy I'll happily give Israel the same consideration I give most countries, which is to not think of them at all when they're not making newspaper headlines.

A lot of that is down to people's perceptions of "state" versus "country". Some people find it easier to separate the two than others (and some governments don't make it easy for us, especially those with a fiercely nationalist bent like Israel).

What about the German poets? (Not the anti-semetic ones....) Or the food (that's all non-kosher)? Or beer? What about the powerhouse economy Germany has? And shit, have you seen Norwegian prisons? Or crime rates? Wunderbar!

There are German pride festivals all over the US every year. Nobody screams "WHITE SUPREMACY" at those. A white pride festival, on the other hand....

My other point about cultural/ethnic pride stuff: in a lot of cases, these are identities that have been considered inferior to other identities. To counteract this, people have taken up nationalist/cultural/ethnic pride. I'm sure you can understand the need for a queer pride celebration vs one for heterosexual pride. Same with black pride, Latino pride, etc.

I am not going to debate the need for a day when tens of thousands of people dance in the streets and you can have sex with in public while wearing only a fanpack and a hot pink cowboy hat. You may as well have asked me to take a stand against puppies, or friendship.

Well, I imagine Mad Hatter's choice of words reflects the Canadian centre-right (or formerly centre right in his case) approach to the issue, but there is a sort of - and in using the word I'm not trying to evoke some Netanyahuesque Iran's-gonna-nuke-us connotations - existential doubt surrounding the future of Israel and it's nature. A great deal more now than formerly, given the way the current government and the even crazier one expected to replace it are racing away from an Israeli future as a democratic nation-state within a two-state solution. The day's soon coming (or has come and gone depending on who you ask) when the only way to get from here to there will be via some South Africa-like purgatory, for who knows how many years, and/or some intra-Israeli revolution or civil war.

That makes people who look kindly on what Israel's been at the best of times, and what it could have been, want to say something. "I support Israel and Palestine having democratic states alongside one another and as just a peace as can be pulled off" sounds rather anodyne. "Shit fuck this is hopeless and soul-crushing" is more to the point but sort of pointless in a thread like this. Most of the time I'm sensible enough to stick to the latter.

At this point I find it easy to categorically say I don't support Israel. They're roughly in the same boat as South Africa (was), Saudi Arabia, Iran, and even North Korea -- for somewhat different repressive reasons, but generally not great company to keep. Or the US for that matter, if you go back far enough (with just how far being a matter of debate).

Go back far enough and most places and most places behave similarly -- which is how I see Israel really, a throwback to the not so distant age when such repression was commonplace and broadly accepted.

That is supposed to be this in France but for Palestinians, I guess. Why France?

Probably because "fuck Europe" - and "if they like Palestinians so much why don't they move them in next door! Ha ha!"

(Serious. Not just like-farming here)

I think that depends on where you stand. The Idle No More movement might consider me as a Canadian to represent an oppressive state which stole native land, threw them into the equivalent of gulags, tried to brainwash their children, etc. They certainly don't consider the age of repression to be past. That's why I don't like singling out Israel as if their actions are uniquely bad even when compared to western nations.

Jason T - Harper's done a good job of making "centre-right" feel wrong these days. I think my position on Israel reflects the general Canadian position from the Chretien years - supportive but not unconditionally (at a time when Israeli policy was not so much on the crazy side). We should be like the friend who refuses to hand over the car keys to their drunk buddy. Harper and the Americans give them a new sports car with the keys inside, and cheer as they slide around the highway heading for the minivan full of kids.

Potatoes are actually South American.