Discussion for article #224685
Spot on. Israel is the proverbial albatross around our necks. Better to let them to their own devices and keep our foreign aid. Let Sheldon Adelson and the like fund this rouge state.
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There is a generation gap amongst US Jews. The older generation brought up on the belief that Israel can do no wrong is dying out.
Looking back, the murder of Rabin ended the last chance for the two state solution. The country could have responded by dealing harshly with the settlers and pulling back. Instead they elected Sharon. And by the time Sharon realized that the settlements meant the end of the Jewish state it was too late.
The single fact that nobody in the US seems to want to accept is that there can only be peace if the people living in the area are prepared to live together peacefully. And that canât happen when Israel enforces a whole raft of Jim Crow laws to preserve the âJewish stateâ as such.
Jewish settlements on Palestinian land get government approval while Palestinians are prohibited from building on land they own.
Eventually the US will lose patience and the money supply will be cut off. But it will take a dozen more years before it reaches that point. But when it is reached the transition will be very sudden.
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As someone who was raised on both sides of that generation gap, I have to say that your assertion is not quite correct. My Grandmother was Sephardi, and an ardent Zionist. But she never believed for an instant that âIsrael could do no wrong.â
She saw too many Nation-States go too wrong before 1948 to believe that, Including France and Germany.
The moment you assign âinfallibilityâ to any Nation, no matter what the reasons or the sentiments, you consign that Nation to a degree of destruction, because no Modern State can maintain the cloak of jingoistic thinking in which it wraps itself, along with a flag.
I am a Jew. I consider myself an Israeli. But the moment anyone begins to push on me that Israel, or any other Nation is somehow beyond fault, Iâll make it my business to go out of my way to disprove this dangerous idea.
Itâs dangerous because it backs Nations and peoples into a corner. One that they cannot grow out of. Iâm sorry, but the only other way a Nation can truly grow and mature is to admit when it has been wrong. Strip this away, no matter your good intentions, and there is no growth as a Nation, or for its people.
As a matter of thinking, I know that Israel is never always right, and the other side of that coin is that the people who donât like Israel are not always wrong.
As you can imagine, this make my life somewhat interesting at times. But my goal isnât just the continued existence of Israel. My goal includes her growth and security. This means a maturation process, just as it does for the other Nations in the Middle East. The only way everyone is secure is if there is not only peace on paper, but peace between people. This means, as it meant in South Africa, a form of Truth and Reconciliation. That cannot come to be unless we are all honest enough to know and acknowledge that no one has a monopoly on being absolutely right all the time.
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It needs to become widely known that the source of the majority of the violence in the occupied West Bank is perpetrated by American fundamentalist extremists, followers of the Jewish Nazi, Meir Kahane.
Fundamentalism is its own religion. Labeling it âchristian,â âjewishâ or âmuslimâ is just naming the particular sect. They all have more in common with each other than they do with the actual religions they claim to be âpurifying.â
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Israel prevented 60 previous kidnapping attempts of Israelis by Palestinians; they just didnât prevent the latest one. They also know who the kidnappers are, and they are militant Palestinians.
The death of the Palestinian teen is still being investigated. Iâve read elsewhere that his family is already known to the police and that they earlier claimed that a car full of men tried to kidnap their younger son. The mother claimed it was a car full of Jews but the father claimed it was a car full of Arabs. And there were insinuations that the older son was killed for other reasons including that he might have been gay.
Whatever the investigation will conclude wonât matter because the Palestinians will always blame the Jewsâsort of like the author of the article who only sees Israeli violence. By the way, one of those unguided homemade missiles hit a kindergarten.
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Do you have a similarly convenient explanation for the other 1,525 Palestinian children killed by the Israelis since 2000?
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Netanyahu has to go along with the right wing Likud Party. for to long Israel has played on the sympathies of itâs allies while stealing land from and denying the Palestinian people the same thing they want, defined homeland.
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Netanyahu is the worst thing to happen to Israel. I have been a life long supporter of Israel but have found myself doubting their actions and motivations. The same problem is destroying Israel as is destroying Islam, Christianity and right wing political parties. Greed and hatred. That being said, this article is extremely bias and childishly so. Palestinians are not blameless, are not innocent bystanders and are just as violent and hate filled, if not more so, than Israelis.
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ââŚmisguided militants launching unguided, homemade-like projectilesâŚâ
Stopped right here.
So says âsharonsjâ â without actually saying where she read it. I am sure that was an oversight on her part which she can now correct by citing the specific source.
Well, Sharon? Weâre waitingâŚ
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I have to agree with most of the commenters here. Iâve been a lifelong supporter of Israel, but the actions and philosophies of Likud and its even more right-wing coalition partners are putting a lie to many of the attributes so many Americans admire. The crude tactic of labeling any dissent with their actions antisemitism doesnât help. No, the Palestinians and their supporters arenât blameless, but a lot of thinking Americans are losing patience with being told holding Israel anything but blameless is unacceptable.
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Sharonj
Netanyahu claims to know who the kidnappers are. But he has no credibility. He has a habit of lying. Twenty years ago he claimed that Iran would have a nuclear weapon within months. The truth is that we donât know the identity of the individuals responsible for either action.
The double standard you apply is racist: collective punishment and murder of palestinians in revenge for the murder of three Jews, âwait for the factsâ when it is a Palestinian that is lynched.
Israel is a Jim Crow state and you are giving the same excuses that were given for Jim Crow.
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So true. But unfortunately its also true that the majorities in each of those three religions generally turn a blind eye to their own extremists.
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Ironically, the so-called Likud extremists and settler movement represent the founding spirit of Israel. This is a religious based state founded in a region in which they were a small minority (the UN boundaries barely had over 50% Jews, and was much smaller than the pre-1967 boundaries), and to create the Israel that existed after the end of the 1948 war, they had to expel around half a million Arabs from their homes and lands. The 1967 war and the ongoing annexation of more land perpetuates the same problem â Israel cannot maintain a majority Jewish population within expanded borders without expelling more Arabs.
Israel has to rethink its basic character if the problems are ever going to be solved. Current leadership suggests that it will not rid itself of its own violent past. Yes, palestinians have reacted to ethnic cleansing with extreme violence, and the wider arab world took a long to time to even accept Israel. But they are the flip side of Israeli violence.
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The author is a Palestinian who lives in the occupied territories. English is most likely not his first language. I also wonder about the quality of education in Gaza and the occupied territories. So yes, the article could have been better written by someone writing in her/his own language and who had the benefit of a good education. That being said, the author gets his point across. As for being biased, when was the last time you read an article on this issue that wasnât biased?
It took two generations, but their decades of viscous and anti-democratic actions toward their fellow Semites have worn away nearly all of the good will the civilized world held for post-holocaust Jews.
Israel has become its own worst enemy.
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I am reminded of Edward Said, who spoke forcefully and convincingly of the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the subsequent military occupation of their lands.
Despite his scholarship and personal experience, Said couldnât get an inch of space on the Times op-ed page nor would his 1998 BBC documentary, âIn Search of Palestineâ be shown on American television.
Before the web, anyone who wanted to read anything even mildly critical of Israel in America had to work hard to find the material.
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I have observed before, but it has never been more true:
There will be no peace until both sides want peace. For the past 46 years, neither side has wanted peace. Before you argue that I am incorrect, examine the facts. To want peace means, at the least, that you stop doing the very things that prevent peace.
For the Palestinians, that means stop lobbing rockets into Israel, and acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist.
For Israel, that means stop stealing land in the occupied territory and building illegal settlements. Start treating the Palestinians like human beings and recognize that they arenât going to suddenly âbecome peacefulâ simply because you tighten the screws yet again.
We learned in Vietnam that you never win hearts and minds using bombs and bulletsâŚand white phosphorus and terror. History also shows that building a wall has never, in the long run, prevented the decline and fall of any civilization. Israelis should know thatâŚJericho had walls. Masada had walls. The temple was built of walls, but only one remainsâŚin ruins.
Pretending you want peace doesnât cut it any more, because your actions speak far louder. Itâs time for the US to either cut ties with these terrorists, or deal harshly with them. Israel needs to understand the consequences of their intransigence.
unless we are willing to do the old England way of invading countries, I say let Israel and the whole middle east fight it out. my kid is not going to fight for Israel or Saudi Arabia, so let them fight until they get tired of killing each other over stupid differences
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