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Post by millring on Oct 17, 2023 5:32:58 GMT -5
Actually, didn't the UN create modern Isreal? At the end of WW2. And in large part because of WWII -- because of who was aligned with Hitler and what the world wanted to do to try to right the wrong of the Holocaust.
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Israel
Oct 17, 2023 6:24:38 GMT -5
Post by howard lee on Oct 17, 2023 6:24:38 GMT -5
And in large part because of WWII -- because of who was aligned with Hitler and what the world wanted to do to try to right the wrong of the Holocaust.
Like every other genocide in history, that's a wrong that can never be righted.
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Israel
Oct 17, 2023 8:04:03 GMT -5
Post by Cornflake on Oct 17, 2023 8:04:03 GMT -5
The movement to create a Jewish homeland predated WWII and the Holocaust. "The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a 'national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population." Wikipedia. Almost all details were left unsettled by the declaration, including whether a Jewish state was contemplated and, if so, what its boundaries would be. The Holocaust certainly gave the idea of creating a Jewish homeland more widespread support.
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Post by millring on Oct 18, 2023 5:25:57 GMT -5
And in large part because of WWII -- because of who was aligned with Hitler and what the world wanted to do to try to right the wrong of the Holocaust. Like every other genocide in history, that's a wrong that can never be righted.
Of course not. No wrong is ever made right. But good people still try.
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Israel
Oct 18, 2023 5:27:26 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by millring on Oct 18, 2023 5:27:26 GMT -5
The Holocaust certainly gave the idea of creating a Jewish homeland more widespread support. Exactly. And especially when considering who was supporting Hitler during the war.
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Post by Cornflake on Oct 18, 2023 7:04:13 GMT -5
The explosion at the Gaza hospital hasn't helped matters. So far I give Israel a high grade for self-control. Biden's doing all he can to keep this mess from turning into a bigger mess.
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Israel
Oct 18, 2023 14:18:03 GMT -5
Post by epaul on Oct 18, 2023 14:18:03 GMT -5
I would go into Gaza with all guns blazing. And 90% of me hopes Israel will do the same.
But, there is contrary voice in my head, one I don't want to listen to, that thinks turning the other cheek is Israel's best, and only practical, option. And I think that voice is probably right.
Invading Gaza, punishing Gaza, the longer it goes on, will only cause the "Israel as Bully, Gaza as victim" narrative to become the telling one. Doesn't matter a whit whether that should be the case, it will be the case.
(if you want to argue that such was the stamped in steel case in most of the world regardless of anything Hamas did or will do, I won't argue against).
Israel vs. Gaza? Facts don't matter. Even if they exist, facts aren't agreed on. Facts, smacts. Emotions rule. And while the Hamas attack gave Israel a quick turnaround on the battlefield's Emotion Front, the kind of punishment Israel is justified in pursuing (if they chose to continue it) will quickly flip the brief advantage Israel gained in the World's Emotion Court after the attack to the same dwindling position it held prior to the attack.
Israel is screwed.
The hospital blast will illustrate the losing pickle Israel is in. The Facts may come to prove it was a wayward Hama's missile, but these facts won't matter. Most in the world won't believe them (and will discount the source). The blast will be held to be Israel's fault regardless of anything fact.
What should Israel do?
Israel should do what the U.S. should have done after 9/11 (Two days of intensive bombing in Afghanistan and then saying "we're done, don't do this again" INSTEAD OF the 20 years of blood cost that ended with the same bastards we wanted out still in).
Israel should just blow up a bunch of Hamas safe houses and tunnels, two days of bomb, bomb, bomb, then call a halt to it and get back to improving their defenses. Don't invade, don't try punish all of Gaza, don't drag it out and spend weeks, months, years in quagmire. Every day Gaza's suffering owns the TV screen is a day that costs Israel in the larger battle. Fair or not, right or not, doesn't matter. It does and it will. All cost, no real gain.
There is nothing Israel can achieve in Gaza other than get involved in something that can't work and has no achievable end (short of killing everyone in there, a plan with issues). As hateful as it sounds, if Israel can't wipe Hamas out, and it can't (or Hamas would be long gone), then take high road. Turn the other cheek (after two days of heavy bombing) and get back to defense. And hoping for a miracle.
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Israel
Oct 20, 2023 6:35:22 GMT -5
Post by brucemacneill on Oct 20, 2023 6:35:22 GMT -5
I don't spend much time here because I don't have much in common with most of you anymore but I do find it amazing that no one here has noted that the Hamas supporting anti-semites aren't MAGA Republicans. Who are you calling Nazis now?
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Post by Cornflake on Oct 20, 2023 7:11:52 GMT -5
I hope you're doing all right, Bruce.
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Post by brucemacneill on Oct 20, 2023 7:42:26 GMT -5
I hope you're doing all right, Bruce. Thanks but other than still alive, things aren't going well around here. Most are 1st world problems but the Delmarva is like 3rd world now. We're in a medical desert and no doctors want to move here. I've broken my dentures and there's only one dentist within 100 miles and he doesn't take insurance. My cardiac "Doctor" is a Nurse practitioner and I don't have a primary physician beyond her. My blood pressure is high and the pills she has me on don't seem to do anything. There's only one appliance repair place and getting an appointment takes a couple of months so when my dishwasher broke I had to buy a new one or go without for a couple of months. My well pump died so I had to have that replaced and there was only one place that could do it. We still have a grocery store but the prices are inflated. I'm not a happy camper. I'll be voting for Trump if I'm still alive.
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Post by millring on Oct 31, 2023 6:24:02 GMT -5
It sure is discouraging to see hundreds of thousands demonstrating against Israel and for Hamas.
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Post by howard lee on Oct 31, 2023 6:41:57 GMT -5
It sure is discouraging to see hundreds of thousands demonstrating against Israel and for Hamas. It is my hope that these protesters are aware of the difference between the policies of this right-wing Israeli government and the wants of the everyday Israeli citizen. But I am not holding my breath.
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Israel
Oct 31, 2023 7:50:29 GMT -5
Post by brucemacneill on Oct 31, 2023 7:50:29 GMT -5
It sure is discouraging to see hundreds of thousands demonstrating against Israel and for Hamas. It is my hope that these protesters are aware of the difference between the policies of this right-wing Israeli government and the wants of the everyday Israeli citizen. But I am not holding my breath. Help me out here, please. What about the "right-wing Israeli government" do you consider wrong? To me these demonstrators are the same scum that spit at me in '68. They were raised to support Communism and anti-Americanism and now they're showing their antisemitism which was always there too.
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Israel
Oct 31, 2023 7:54:21 GMT -5
Post by Cornflake on Oct 31, 2023 7:54:21 GMT -5
The whole situation is very saddening.
I wonder what the pro-Palestinian people think Israel should have done in response to the recent killings by Hamas. Shrug them off? Call for mediation?
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Israel
Oct 31, 2023 9:21:28 GMT -5
via mobile
John B likes this
Post by millring on Oct 31, 2023 9:21:28 GMT -5
The enemy of your enemy might not be your friend, but the world is on its head when you start believing you have more in common with terrorists than you do with ANY Israeli government.
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Dub
Administrator
I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
Posts: 19,893
Member is Online
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Post by Dub on Oct 31, 2023 9:34:52 GMT -5
I know this is long but it’s really worth reading regardless of one’s politics. Elija Wald is a writer who normally writes books about music and musicians. He is also an accomplished musician and a Jew.
I don't normally write as a Jew; I normally write as a white American. But in the last few weeks I have been writing specifically as a Jew, because I cannot help reacting as a Jew to what is happening in Israel/Palestine. I have friends and relatives there, and that affects my reaction; I also see and hear people all around me talking about what has happened and could happen to "the Jews," meaning people like me, not only in Israel, but elsewhere.
My mother grew up in Vienna. She was 14 years old when the German army marched in and was greeted with parades. She spent the next weeks running errands for her parents because it was dangerous for them to be out in the streets. They were not only Jewish, but longtime leftists, and they realized immediately that they would have to leave. It was easier in those first months, and they got out and got to the United States. My grandfather helped other relatives to get out. He tried to help his favorite brother and my mother's favorite cousin, but for various reasons they did not want to leave until it was too late. They were shipped east in the cattle cars, and murdered.
My mother lived with that experience until she died in her nineties. She always thought of herself as a refugee. She found safety in the United States, but never felt at home there. She also found that in the United States she was treated as a white person, and other white people talked to her about Black people the way the German Austrians talked about the Jews. Even many Jewish Americans talked about Black people the way German Austrians talked about Jews.
She had experienced the Nazis first-hand, and she saw that many white Americans were acting like Nazis. So she did not raise me and my sister to be afraid of Nazis, or to ask who would hide us from the Nazis -- she raised us not to be Nazis. She taught us to despise militarism and racism, and to stand up for people who were excluded or oppressed, for immigrants, for refugees, for people treated as “different.” To her, those people were the Jews, the people like her, whoever they might be.
No moral compass is perfect. Sometimes it is hard to figure out who the “good guys” are. Sometimes there are no good guys. But there always is the option of choosing not to be the Nazis – of saying that no matter how far one is pushed, how desperate or angry one may feel, or how frighted, there are things one will not do.
Our mother taught us that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unforgivable atrocities, like the Holocaust – that we must do whatever we could to prevent anything like that happening again. When I read “Slaughterhous Five” and asked her about the firebombing of Dresden, she said it was the same—an atrocity, targeting a civilian population. The fact that they were Germans, many of them undoubtedly Nazis, didn’t excuse the choice to wipe them out, men, women, and children. Blindly murdering tens or hundreds of thousands of people because of who or where they were was behaving like the Nazis.
My mother was not particularly unusual. Many refugees and survivors from the Nazi Holocaust had similar reactions. It became almost a cliché of Israeli writing about the formation of the Jewish state and the expulsion of Palestinians: the moment when a Jewish soldier looked around him and realized he was now behaving like the Nazis and the Palestinians were the Jews. Some writers took that meditation to its (to me) logical conclusion, and turned against the Zionist state project—some left; some continued to live in Israel/Palestine, but worked to shape a multiethnic, multireligious future, whether in one or two states. Other writers took a (to me) more dubious lesson, concluding that they were doing something dreadful but had no choice: the frequent analogy was that the Jews jumped out of a burning building and unfortunately landed on someone else’s head; they hurt a bystander and were sorry for that, but the essential fact was that they had to jump.
I continue to hear many people echoing that claim: that the Israelis are doing something terrible, but have no choice. But, more and more, I’m hearing a different claim: that the Palestinians—or more specifically Hamas—are the Nazis. I don’t have to celebrate or excuse Hamas to reject that analogy. If the Nazis had been a bunch of desperate fanatics carrying out occasional horrific attacks on civilians, they would barely be remembered, because there have been hundreds of groups like that, all over the world. What distinguished the Nazis was not that they hated Jews – it is a commonplace of Jewish history that we have always had enemies – but that they harnessed the power of a modern nation-state and modern technology to kill not hundreds or thousands, but millions.
I am not going to jump from one Nazi analogy to another. The fact that many people, in many wars, have had moments when they realized they were behaving like Nazis does not mean what they did was comparable. The Nazis committed a methodical genocide that had never been attempted on that scale and has never been equaled—they were by no means the only nation to commit or attempt genocide, but managed it with a cool efficiency that was unique, and in that sense uniquely horrific.
But, as my mother’s son, I do think about that history and turn to it for guidance. My mother opposed the death penalty, unconditionally: she did not believe the state should ever kill people, calmly and efficiently, no matter what they had done—much less kill their entire families, their children. She had a particular horror of “civilized” states killing with modern efficiency: if a nation was dropping bombs on people who had no airplanes, she always imagined herself under the bombs, not in the airplanes. She could imagine herself in Dresden or Hiroshima; she could have imagined herself in a kibbutz on October 7, hiding in a safe room, but would have found it far easier to imagine herself in Gaza, under the bombs. I find it far easier to imagine myself in Gaza, under the bombs. It is a much more common fate, in our modern world; few of the people who die in modern wars see the people who are killing them, nor do the killers see them.
A few years ago, I went to Poland, to Przemysl, to see where my grandmother came from, and also my father’s father. Some Jewish friends were puzzled that I would feel that desire, or feel any closeness to that place. They said, “the Poles were even worse than the Germans.” That comment seemed bizarre to me, so they sent me stories—pornographically violent stories, about peasants disemboweling Jewish women with scythes, or herding Jews into a synagogue with clubs and setting it on fire. Those stories were horrible, but the implication was worse: that peasants who were used to slaughtering animals with butcher knives and slaughtered Jews the same way were worse than civilized Germans who bought their meat in stores and sent Jews off to be efficiently gassed by the millions. To me, that is what defines being “like the Nazis”— methodical, state-sanctioned killing, using the latest technology and wiping out entire families without even having to see the people you are killing.
That is not about one state or another. It is about having the power to kill with efficiency, with clean hands, and is the way the vast majority of people have been killed in most of the wars in my lifetime. And yes, I think it is even more horrible than the old-fashioned kind of killing, because it is easier to pretend that you are not doing it, or would rather not be doing it—and when you can pretend you are not doing it, you can do much more of it, and turn off the images, or dismiss them as propaganda, or lament the deaths, but as numbers, not as people. I see the pictures of the Israelis killed on October 7, with their names and their biographies. The pictures from Gaza are of entire neighborhoods destroyed, masses of wounded and dead people—I hear numbers rather than names: five thousand killed, ten thousand killed. It is the language of statistics, the language of the slaughterhouse, of how many hamburgers McDonalds has sold. Most of us feel a more visceral horror at the death of one person we know by name and face than the deaths of an abstract thousand or ten thousand people. But I also find it easier to imagine myself under the bombs than in the airplanes. And all I want is for the bombing to stop.
That is not the answer to any longterm problems, or to trauma and enmities that go back decades and generations. But it is the first, vital, immediate answer to what must be done now, today. STOP THE KILLING. Then, do whatever it takes to reduce the hatred, the trauma; do the long, hard work of building, which is always harder and more time-consuming than destroying. But first, STOP. NOW. Stop the bombing. Get food, water, fuel, and medical supplies to the people who are trapped and dying. That is not an answer for the longterm, but it is the only answer that matters right now: STOP THE KILLING.
(Feel free to share; sharing is good. That's the whole point.)
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Post by Cornflake on Oct 31, 2023 9:35:54 GMT -5
"The enemy of your enemy might not be your friend, but the world is on its head when you start believing you have more in common with terrorists than you do with ANY Israeli government."
You're right, but I don't think that's how they see it. I think the pro-Palestinian people think the Palestinians got screwed when Israel was created and that the Israeli government has made that screwing even worse in recent years. That's the context within which they say we should view all this. Within that context, Hamas isn't a terrorist group but a nationalist movement that is justified in striking back in response to all the injustice and mistreatment the Palestinians have had to endure.
It's a view that leads to one side getting even and the other side getting even for that, etc. Peace has no chance. It's a destructive view but it isn't nuts.
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Post by Marshall on Oct 31, 2023 13:27:53 GMT -5
Hamas is a terrorist group. They want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. (Their earth, they say). Yes, Palestinian people have big legitimate grievances against the way they have been treated by Israel. But terrorism is not a justifiable answer.
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Israel
Oct 31, 2023 14:36:17 GMT -5
Dub likes this
Post by Cornflake on Oct 31, 2023 14:36:17 GMT -5
Marshall, just so I'm clear, I was doing my best to articulate how people I disagree with see the issue. I wasn't articulating my own view.
Mark, the Wald peace made me rethink all of this. That left me even more befuddled than before. From now on, please only share comments that reinforce my preexisting views.
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Israel
Oct 31, 2023 18:24:15 GMT -5
Post by epaul on Oct 31, 2023 18:24:15 GMT -5
It's a little lot way the hell too late for the "turning the other cheek" approach (if it was ever not way too late). If Israel packed it in now it would be a victory for Hamas and supporters. They, with world opinion on their side, made Israel give it up. A win/win/win! (and free money from the West will pour in to rebuild everything... after being filtered through Hamas' pockets first)
Having gone this far, Israel has little choice but to keep going and see if they can deal a crippling blow to Hamas and whatever infrastructure they have in place. And they can not let Hamas return to whatever sort of rule they had established in Gaza. With Hamas gone, there may be a chance to work some kind of deal with whoever is left. From the shambles and ruin arises...
Of course, this argument assumes Israel can deal Hamas a crippling blow. It will be a dirty fight. But, Israel has committed itself, Hamas has committed itself. There is no peace to be had, so make it a war. Do what has to be done. Ask for forgiveness afterwards. And plant flowers in the ruins
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