arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
We would love to. Believe me - we would love to.
General Israel/Palestine discussion thread - Part 4
- Thread starter theprestige
- Start date
webfusion
Philosopher
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- Nov 16, 2004
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Who is this "We" you insist is loving the idea of arresting the Prime Minister of Israel?
Ireland? Turkey? Pakistan? Lebanon?
I think Israel is having a good go at arresting their current PM! Perhaps the only thing keeping him out of an Israeli jail is remaining as PM?
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
We in this thread who aren't hell bent on excusing torture and rape.
NatalieSalat
Thinker
Neither is true. No international law because there is no world government. There are treaties and conventions but neither are laws and both can be withdrawn from or have reservations attached to when being ratified.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
And therefore Netanyahu and the IDF get away with war crimes, including torture and rape, without repercussions.
Which to some here is a Good Thing.
Trausti
Master Poster
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Heh, so here wanted Hamas to get away with torture and rape. So there's that.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
Please provide evidence of this disgusting and malicious allegation. Here, in contrast, is the exact post in which @webfusion defended the IDF torturing and raping Palestinians:
Unless you can similarly quote a post in which anybody in this thread defended Hamas torturing and raping Israelis, I suggest you withdraw your comment and apologise.
webfusion
Philosopher
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There was a single instance of a man who refused to remove a cellphone he was smuggling in his rectum.
This individual was perhaps abused, and there are trials being prepared against those who are accused of it.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist Manar Qassem, who was videoed at Sde Teiman facility on March 28, 2024, is the subject of that 'rape' -- everyone kinda thinks the guards achieved their goal, and the cellphone was recovered, by hook or by crook.
A few posts back, planigale noted the hundred or so Arab deaths in Israeli jails -- but those figures invariably include Gazan combat wounded taken captive by the IDF and whose lives could not be saved from their injuries.
The overall treatment of prisoners is not 'horrific' nor 'torture' ---- they're just being warehoused in sparse conditions, their fate to be determined...
This individual was perhaps abused, and there are trials being prepared against those who are accused of it.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist Manar Qassem, who was videoed at Sde Teiman facility on March 28, 2024, is the subject of that 'rape' -- everyone kinda thinks the guards achieved their goal, and the cellphone was recovered, by hook or by crook.
A few posts back, planigale noted the hundred or so Arab deaths in Israeli jails -- but those figures invariably include Gazan combat wounded taken captive by the IDF and whose lives could not be saved from their injuries.
The overall treatment of prisoners is not 'horrific' nor 'torture' ---- they're just being warehoused in sparse conditions, their fate to be determined...
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NatalieSalat
Thinker
It's almost like the western left isn't caring who they are siding with (see: Saddam in both 1990 and 2003, Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan in the 1960s et al)
NatalieSalat
Thinker
And again, a Palestinian state would very much likely be the opposite of everything the left purports to stand for.
The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
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does that mean that no state or individual has to honor any agreement with Israel or any of it citizens - or recognize its existance?
The fact that you think International Law is a one-way street when it comes to Israel is deeply antisemitic.
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jt512
Philosopher
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"Purport" being the operative word.
The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
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US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee calls Setter Violence in the West Bank Terrorism.
Israel is supporting the Settler Movement with money, weapons, military and legal protection.
Israel is sponsoring Terrorism.
Just a fact, now acknowledged even by the US.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
I wouldn't dream of using Instagram as evidence in any argument, but anecdotally I've seen a lot of videos of settler violence in the West Bank pop up on my timeline. Settlers appear to have been destroying olive trees during harvesting season.
Here's the Hamas propaganda outlet NPR:
Here's the Hamas propaganda outlet NPR:
NatalieSalat
Thinker
This book should be compulsory reading for anyone wanting to understand Israel and the conduct of the Jewish people in their century-long battle to establish and defend their presence in their ancestral homeland.
As we have seen over the past two years, Israel possesses one of the most powerful and most effective military machines in the world. The years 2024-25 will be added to 1948, 1967 and 1973 in the list of Israeli victories. Hamas and Hezbollah have been smashed, the Syrian regime has been overthrown, and Iran has been crippled in the 12 Days War.
But it wasn't always so. When the Jewish reclamation of the Land of Israel began in the 1880s, the Jews had no military tradition. Jews had not borne arms since the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in 150 CE. There was a long Jewish tradition of non-violence and non-resistance when under attack. In the face of massacres and pogroms - notably those accompanying the First Crusade (1099) and the Khmelnytsky Cossack uprising (1650s) - Jewish communities had three strategies:
* Run and hide
* Beg for mercy
* Pray to God
None of these were very effective, but Jewish community leaders always argued that resistance would only make things worse, and they were probably right
This began to change with the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev (now Chișinău, Moldova), when 50 Jews were killed by a Russian mob at the urging of a government newspaper and with participation of police and military. This pogrom received wide publicity, and was an important catalyst for the Zionist movement. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, then 23, was among those who became active Zionists as a result.
The Kishinev pogrom also provoked an angry response from some Jewish writers. The poet Hayim Bialik wrote “In the City of Slaughter”, denouncing the “cowardice” of the Kishinev Jews for not resisting their attackers. As a result, Jewish communities in Russia, Ukraine and Poland began establishing defence units, although these had little success. After the failure of the 1905 Russian revolution, many of these defence-minded Jews emigrated to Ottoman Palestine.
After the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine, there were regular clashes between Jews and Arabs. These led to the establishment in 1920 of the Haganah (“Defence”), a Jewish militia intended to defend kibbutzim and other Jewish settlements against Arab attacks. In March 1920 there was a (very minor) clash between the Haganah and Arabs at Tel Hai in northern Palestine, in which Joseph Trumpeldor, a veteran of the Russian Army, was killed. He became a national hero and a model for the “new Jew”, willing to take up arms to defend his people.
Nevertheless, the Haganah did not become a serious military force until the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936, when the British armed and trained Haganah units to help them suppress the revolt. In 1941, when it seemed that the German Army might drive the British out of Egypt and then strike into Palestine, an elite force called the Palmach (Plugot Machatz, “Strike Companies”) was formed. Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan all began their military careers in the Palmach, and it played the leading role in the 1948 war against the five Arab states which attacked the new-born State of Israel.
The development of a Jewish military capacity was not without controversy, and provoked sharp generational conflict (and this is Anita Shapira’s most interesting insight). The older generation of Jewish settlers in Palestine, who arrived before 1914 and provided most of the leadership of the Jewish community down to the 1930s, remained committed to their utopian belief that the Jewish and Arab workers could form an alliance against the reactionary Arab leaders (the so-called “effendis”) and together build a socialist commonwealth in Palestine. They had also brought with them from Europe a dislike of militarism and were ambivalent about the formation of a Jewish military force.
A typical leader of this generation was Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), the founder of Tel Aviv, who led the Brit Shalom peace movement and favoured negotiations with the Arabs to create a binational state.
These leaders sought to persuade the Arab workers that Jewish settlement and investment would improve their living standards (which it certainly did). When the Arabs remained hostile, the Jewish leaders, as good Marxists, attributed this to “false consciousness” and to antisemitism of the type they remembered from Russia and Poland. They resisted the view, espoused from the start by Jabotinsky and his Revisionists, that the Arabs had a national consciousness that was more powerful than any sense of class solidarity, and that the Jews would have to fight the Arabs (and the British) if they wanted to stay in Palestine, let alone create a Jewish state.
But by the late 1930s there was another generation of Jews in Palestine, those born in the country. They had no memory of life in Europe and saw Palestine as their homeland, not just as a Zionist slogan but as their own lived reality. Although most of them still identified as socialists, they did not share their parents’ illusions about the Arab workers or their pacifist aversion to the use of military force. Their sense of urgency was of course heightened by the rise of Hitler and the fate of the Jews of Europe. They were contemptuous of the failure (as they saw it) of the European Jews to resist the Nazis. It was this generation that fought and won the 1948 war, at the cost of 6,300 deaths from a Jewish population of 650,000.
Ariel Sharon (born in Kfar Malal in 1928) was typical of this generation. He fought in every Israeli war from 1948 to 1973 before going to politics, and expressed contempt for the European Jews who "went like lambs to the slaughter."
In the 1970s the socialist dream faded in Israel as it did everywhere. Leadership passed from Ben Gurion’s Labor party to Begin’s Likud, greatly helped by the emerging majority of Sephardic and Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews. Although Israel had won all its wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973) under Labor leadership, from the 1980s Labor became the party of “land for peace”, the Oslo Accords and a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, while Likud became the party of unrelenting military force.
This did not end well for Labor. The last serious attempt at a settlement collapsed when Arafat walked out on Clinton and Barak (the last Labor prime minister) at Camp David in July 2000. Labor never recovered from this failure. The last of the Labor “founding generation”, Shimon Peres, died in 2016.
The 12 Day War against Iran and the Gaza War have once again demonstrated the prowess of the Israel Defence Force (at a cost of over 1,000 military dead), and have reinforced the central place of the military in Israeli life. Whether this will be enough to save Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition from the wrath of the Israeli voters remains to be seen.
The American journalist Tom Friedman famously described Israel as “Yad Vashem with an air force.” (Yad Vashem being the national memorial in Jerusalem to the six million Jewish dead of the Holocaust.) While Israelis resist the suggestion that they deploy the military as a form of revenge for the Holocaust, there is no doubt that the IDF embodies the slogan “never again,” and has done so with even greater potency since the massacre of 7 October 2023. Nor have Israelis forgotten that the Palestinian leaders, like most of the Arab world, cheered on the Nazis during World War II.
Recent polling shows that the great majority of Jewish Israelis are now opposed to any form of Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. It will take a greater force than Greta Thunberg to change their minds. As Israel has again demonstrated this year, the days when the Jewish people were defenceless against their enemies are most definitely over.
As we have seen over the past two years, Israel possesses one of the most powerful and most effective military machines in the world. The years 2024-25 will be added to 1948, 1967 and 1973 in the list of Israeli victories. Hamas and Hezbollah have been smashed, the Syrian regime has been overthrown, and Iran has been crippled in the 12 Days War.
But it wasn't always so. When the Jewish reclamation of the Land of Israel began in the 1880s, the Jews had no military tradition. Jews had not borne arms since the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in 150 CE. There was a long Jewish tradition of non-violence and non-resistance when under attack. In the face of massacres and pogroms - notably those accompanying the First Crusade (1099) and the Khmelnytsky Cossack uprising (1650s) - Jewish communities had three strategies:
* Run and hide
* Beg for mercy
* Pray to God
None of these were very effective, but Jewish community leaders always argued that resistance would only make things worse, and they were probably right
This began to change with the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev (now Chișinău, Moldova), when 50 Jews were killed by a Russian mob at the urging of a government newspaper and with participation of police and military. This pogrom received wide publicity, and was an important catalyst for the Zionist movement. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, then 23, was among those who became active Zionists as a result.
The Kishinev pogrom also provoked an angry response from some Jewish writers. The poet Hayim Bialik wrote “In the City of Slaughter”, denouncing the “cowardice” of the Kishinev Jews for not resisting their attackers. As a result, Jewish communities in Russia, Ukraine and Poland began establishing defence units, although these had little success. After the failure of the 1905 Russian revolution, many of these defence-minded Jews emigrated to Ottoman Palestine.
After the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine, there were regular clashes between Jews and Arabs. These led to the establishment in 1920 of the Haganah (“Defence”), a Jewish militia intended to defend kibbutzim and other Jewish settlements against Arab attacks. In March 1920 there was a (very minor) clash between the Haganah and Arabs at Tel Hai in northern Palestine, in which Joseph Trumpeldor, a veteran of the Russian Army, was killed. He became a national hero and a model for the “new Jew”, willing to take up arms to defend his people.
Nevertheless, the Haganah did not become a serious military force until the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936, when the British armed and trained Haganah units to help them suppress the revolt. In 1941, when it seemed that the German Army might drive the British out of Egypt and then strike into Palestine, an elite force called the Palmach (Plugot Machatz, “Strike Companies”) was formed. Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan all began their military careers in the Palmach, and it played the leading role in the 1948 war against the five Arab states which attacked the new-born State of Israel.
The development of a Jewish military capacity was not without controversy, and provoked sharp generational conflict (and this is Anita Shapira’s most interesting insight). The older generation of Jewish settlers in Palestine, who arrived before 1914 and provided most of the leadership of the Jewish community down to the 1930s, remained committed to their utopian belief that the Jewish and Arab workers could form an alliance against the reactionary Arab leaders (the so-called “effendis”) and together build a socialist commonwealth in Palestine. They had also brought with them from Europe a dislike of militarism and were ambivalent about the formation of a Jewish military force.
A typical leader of this generation was Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), the founder of Tel Aviv, who led the Brit Shalom peace movement and favoured negotiations with the Arabs to create a binational state.
These leaders sought to persuade the Arab workers that Jewish settlement and investment would improve their living standards (which it certainly did). When the Arabs remained hostile, the Jewish leaders, as good Marxists, attributed this to “false consciousness” and to antisemitism of the type they remembered from Russia and Poland. They resisted the view, espoused from the start by Jabotinsky and his Revisionists, that the Arabs had a national consciousness that was more powerful than any sense of class solidarity, and that the Jews would have to fight the Arabs (and the British) if they wanted to stay in Palestine, let alone create a Jewish state.
But by the late 1930s there was another generation of Jews in Palestine, those born in the country. They had no memory of life in Europe and saw Palestine as their homeland, not just as a Zionist slogan but as their own lived reality. Although most of them still identified as socialists, they did not share their parents’ illusions about the Arab workers or their pacifist aversion to the use of military force. Their sense of urgency was of course heightened by the rise of Hitler and the fate of the Jews of Europe. They were contemptuous of the failure (as they saw it) of the European Jews to resist the Nazis. It was this generation that fought and won the 1948 war, at the cost of 6,300 deaths from a Jewish population of 650,000.
Ariel Sharon (born in Kfar Malal in 1928) was typical of this generation. He fought in every Israeli war from 1948 to 1973 before going to politics, and expressed contempt for the European Jews who "went like lambs to the slaughter."
In the 1970s the socialist dream faded in Israel as it did everywhere. Leadership passed from Ben Gurion’s Labor party to Begin’s Likud, greatly helped by the emerging majority of Sephardic and Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews. Although Israel had won all its wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973) under Labor leadership, from the 1980s Labor became the party of “land for peace”, the Oslo Accords and a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, while Likud became the party of unrelenting military force.
This did not end well for Labor. The last serious attempt at a settlement collapsed when Arafat walked out on Clinton and Barak (the last Labor prime minister) at Camp David in July 2000. Labor never recovered from this failure. The last of the Labor “founding generation”, Shimon Peres, died in 2016.
The 12 Day War against Iran and the Gaza War have once again demonstrated the prowess of the Israel Defence Force (at a cost of over 1,000 military dead), and have reinforced the central place of the military in Israeli life. Whether this will be enough to save Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition from the wrath of the Israeli voters remains to be seen.
The American journalist Tom Friedman famously described Israel as “Yad Vashem with an air force.” (Yad Vashem being the national memorial in Jerusalem to the six million Jewish dead of the Holocaust.) While Israelis resist the suggestion that they deploy the military as a form of revenge for the Holocaust, there is no doubt that the IDF embodies the slogan “never again,” and has done so with even greater potency since the massacre of 7 October 2023. Nor have Israelis forgotten that the Palestinian leaders, like most of the Arab world, cheered on the Nazis during World War II.
Recent polling shows that the great majority of Jewish Israelis are now opposed to any form of Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. It will take a greater force than Greta Thunberg to change their minds. As Israel has again demonstrated this year, the days when the Jewish people were defenceless against their enemies are most definitely over.
EHocking
Penultimate Amazing
Thanks for the post. Won’t need to read the book now . . .
NatalieSalat
Thinker
Again, do the friends of Palestine *want* the likely outcome of yet another Arab-Islamic failed state?
The failed states seem to be those invaded /attacked by Israel or the US. Others seem to be doing fine, certainly Trump seems to think so.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
Can you name all of the previous Arab-Islamic failed states?