-Throw all jews out of Westbank
-Throw all palestines out of Israel
-Throw all palestines out of gaza strip
-Make gaza strip a harbor used by Egypt and Israel
-Build a big big wall between Isarel and the new staate Palestine (todays Westbank)

theheeee

stop stealing land, stop building illegal settlements

You and Ahmadinejad are on the same page! Sorry, those pesky Jews are going to have a country to call their own, no matter how much it pisses some people off.

Only hardline religious morons do that Magnus................wait the entire Isreali lobby in congress use that crap.........dammit!

Lets use it for other situations

Person: I beleive the British attack in the Falklands are disgusting and criminal
Lobbyist: Pfft you are clearly a anti-tommyist

Person: Pakistan refusing to allow the people of East Pakistan autonomy is wrong
Lobbyist: Your anti-pakistanism clouds you judgement.

Nothing kills useful forward discuss quite like this claptrap.

Sounds like the ideal advice for an Irishperson atm as well.

When did I say you were pro-Palestinian? For all the regions talk, most people aren't really and truly pro-Palestinian. You think Israel is the only country where Palestinians are treated as lower class?

I just find it incredible that you think that the region is so fucked up it needs to be nuked. The Israel/Palestine conflict has caused less fatalities than over 40 other civil wars/in-fighting since WWII, yet people talk about it as if the Palestinians are the most fucked over people there are.

Who talks about the million plus people who were just dislocated from their homes along the Yangtze River? That didn't happen so a small minority could escape continuous prosection; it was so China could have the biggest dam in the world.

at the expense of some other people though right . . .

It did sound a bit like a very sneaky though-terminating cliche.

Right, because neither England or the United States ever wronged other people. Or just about every nation state for that matter!

If you want to talk about this issue, stick to the fucking topic and stop bringing up other countries as a way to dilute the topic. Who here is saying that England or the US have been saintly, or that there are no other problems in the world? You mentioned the forced relocation of people from the Yangtze valley and how people have ignored it (they have not; it's been the subject of documentaries and I've personally had many discussions about it with my friends). I can just as easily cite what the Communist regime is doing by moving millions of ethnically Han Chinese to Tibet and the Muslim provinces as a way to shift demographics to a sufficient degree so as to eventually stifle calls for increased autonomy, and how that has parallels with actions on the part of both Israelis and Palestinians to employ demographics as a means of gaining political power. But that's meaningless bullshit.


Parallels between England, Europe, the US and Israel are precisely part of the reason why so many people in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere have found Israel so problematic. It's the product of 19th century German nationalism applied to Judaism, if it is anything, and the country has responded to the hostility of its neighbours by aligning itself with the West. I understand it's inevitable (they have no one else to turn to), but I'm appalled by the absurdity of it. The West? European hatred of Jews is the main impetus behind the creation of Israel, and the US responded to Jewish suffering during WW2 with utter indifference until its own interests were at stake. I've always been struck by the ridiculous claims made by various people about the power Israel has over the US. It has none; the bond between the two countries could not be more tenuous, as tenuous as that supposed (and frankly non-existent) bond between the other Middle Eastern countries and the Palestinians. If it was in America's best interest for it to throw Israel under the bus, it would do so with ease. Current American-Israeli discourse emphasizes a common value system, which has recently been buoyed by terrorist attempts to undermine those said values (whatever those values are). But the US can just as easily separate itself from Israel by a few rhetorical flourishes.


And who knows what China's and India's ascendancy and their increased roles in the Middle East and worldwide will mean?

I'm familiar with Up the Yangtze, (which grossed just over $1 million worldwide) but can't find any other documentaries. What are they, and are they any good?

Anyways, I agree with plenty of what you're saying. It is rather astonishing that 61 years later, Israel's main allies are the United States, Germany, etc. The country has not been able to escape it's role as the last bastion of colonialism, and that seems to trump it's importance as a home for one of the most often persecuted minorities. To be fair, it's not like the UN has ever been on Israel's side. Just look at the laughable Durban Anti-Racism conferences.

My argument isn't just that since other countries have persecuted people, it's ok for Israel to do so too. Rather, I'd like to remind people that of all the land Muslim majority countries occupy, Israel holds 1/16th of 1%. If Israel has to be a racist state (by nature of being a Jewish state alone it already is) in order for Jews to have at least one small place to go, I can accept that. More importantly, plenty of Israelis will gladly accept that. But they must also acknowledge that the Palestinians are real, living people, not just proxies for their neighbors to stage a media war (although they do that too.)

Israel has a right to exist, and the capacity to unleash hell on whoever challenges that. The Holocaust is still fresh in many people's mindsets, as is the struggle for independence. Maybe when more Middle Eastern countries acknowledge their existence they'll chill out. It could do the region a whole lot of good,

The documentaries I've watched were about the dam itself, but several of them discussed the effect it would have on the people in the region. I have also seen news items addressing the issue on BBC and other channels, and I explicitly remember a news report more than ten years ago in Austria when I was young. More recently, the issue has come up in conjunction with that horrible earthquake in Sichuan province. The issue, for me at least, has always been around. But I would say I pay more attention to such stories than most people.

At any rate, your criticism regarding general ignorance of world events is correct, but it doesn't really get to the heart of the issue. This particular conflict receives a lot of coverage because it is part of a vast number of narratives. That of Judaism, of Christianity, of Islam, of the Jewish People, of the Palestinians, of Britain and British Imperialism, of France and French Imperialism, of Germany and its past, of World War 2, of the Holocaust, of European Jewish history, of the history of relations between the three Abrahamic faiths, of nationalism in general, of the history of ethnic conflicts, of the relations between the East and West, of the Middle East, of Arabs and their relationships to various other groups, of Muslims and their connection to Jews and Christians, of US military history in the Middle East and worldwide, of the relationship between the US and the world and between it and Jews, Muslims, etc., of the Bible and the veracity of its geography, and so on.

The Yangtze River has a profound place in the history and identity of China, but the forced relocation of a large number of people is an internal, Chinese matter occurring in a region to which no one but the Chinese can lay a claim. When you move outwards to the margins of China, and discuss Tibet or Taiwan, you begin to come across topics that have a wider currency in the global media. But even those receive less coverage than Israel and the Palestinians because those places mean less to many people than the supposed Holy Land. Few Americans can find a meaning in Tibet or Taiwan; almost all of them have at least some kind of understanding of the meaning of, for example, Jerusalem.

When other issues arise that affect a broad group of people, they easily get more coverage. At no point in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has it received as much coverage as the US did during the invasion of Iraq, for example, and the same goes for the Global Economic Crisis and other things. The World Cup gets more coverage outside the US, in fact.





Well, there is nothing inherently wrong with having the US or Germany as allies. My claims as to the absurdity of Israel's association with the West is the extent to which it perceives itself as part of the West, as if that is a cause for celebration. I remember reading a column, I think in the Jerusalem Post, a while ago in which the writer approvingly cited the fact that more than 60% of Israelis wanted to join the EU. How absurd. I understand that this is partly due to hostility from the other Middle Eastern countries, but it is disingenuous; Israel is a thoroughly Middle Eastern country, and the more it detaches itself ideologically and culturally from its neighbours, the more it feeds into their claims that it is nothing more than a colony of the West.




It's not OK for Israel to do so too; what that means is that it's NOT OK for the other countries to do it either. I this it's deeply cynical to point to other countries and events and argue for justification in reverse; that's the kind of stuff a kid says to his mom when he tells her that it's OK for him to have eaten a bug because a classmate of his ate a worm. This is not a personal anecdote, btw




That's a meaningless number to the people who were displaced by Israel's creation. It reminds me of people who try to contextualize Israel within an American context by saying that it's the size of New Jersey. But nobody is contesting New Jersey. Alsace is much smaller than Israel, and the size of the West Bank. Do you know how much blood France and Germany spilled over it?




No you can't, and the Israelis don't either. Perhaps in practice, on a day-to-day basis, but not ideologically. That's why they are so incensed whenever parallels to apartheid South Africa are brought up, or when the UN calls them a racist country (the UN!!!). Whether you like it or not (and who does?), the history of the Jews, particularly the episodes immediately preceding the creation of Israel, place a moral obligation on them which is politically devastating. You can't disavow it, since it is so central of Israel's as well as the Jews' identity. I mean the suffering they have endured as a result of often nationalistic and religious hostility.

Basically, I think that the history of the Jews after their exile renders the existence of any Jewish nation-state problematic, because their suffering speaks to the horrors of nationalism at large. I'm generally very cynical about nation-states, and I don't think any one of them has a right to exist. One of the things I like about Canada is that its identity is often diluted; it's defined more by what it is not (America, Britain, France) than by what it is.

What I find so curious is that the global response to the excesses of nationalism that WW2 showcased was a proliferation of nation states. Almost all the former European colonies became nation states, and the US and other participants in the war used it as a means of propping up their nationalist cause. I think the idea of Israel is symptomatic of that kind of reading of the events. I would have preferred a different outcome, where everyone acknowledges the ridiculousness of such things as a homeland or of state boundaries, but I'm aware of how absurd this sounds in light of "real" life.



No, it does not have the capacity to unleash hell on whoever challenges that. That's why it has been fighting for its existence for the entirety of its existence. Israel is one of the most insecure countries in the world. All the weapons it has-and so many from the US and Germany at discount prices-signal that, if nothing else.

And the Holocaust is not really fresh on people's minds, at least not on most people's. I would say that many in the Middle East are perfectly aware of it, even if in an often distorted sense, but I don't think they care. Remember that the vast majority are very young people whose sense of suffering and warfare has been shaped more by Israel and the plight of the Palestinians, as well as by American involvement in the Middle East, than it has been by European warfare and the suffering of Jews.

But even if they immersed themselves in the history of the Holocaust, they would not immediately be more sympathetic to Israel's cause. The NYT had an article a few years ago about the difficulty teachers in France faced when trying to lecture students about the Holocaust, because several students expressed incredulity at the fact that the Jews would cause suffering to the Palestinians after enduring so much suffering themselves. This reading of the Holocaust, whereby the Palestinians and not modern-day Jews form the analogue, is a particularly galling (and incorrect) one, as is understandable, but it shows the dangers of using history as a way of contextualizing the present. The Iranians are very well aware of this, which is why they play around with it so much. I would say that Iran's denial of the Holocaust has terrorized the Israelis far more than anything the Palestinians have done. You can shoot a guy who's throwing rocks at you, but even if you bomb someone who is floating ideas around, you can't erase those ideas.

What a horrible note to end up on, but I gtg, sorry!

Idiot.

More people should be pissed at England for having such a big hand in the whole mess. What's so necessary about a nation-state that you exploit people out of their homes (and lives, see: the bombing of the King David Hotel) for it, again?