Steel-wolf wrote: Great!! So we agree that Israel had a right to defend itself from rocket attacks from Gaza, even if that means they "eat" them.
I’ve never disagreed Israel has the right to self defence. But the majority of Israel’s actions are not in the defence of its population, but the colonial aim of annexing territory with an ultimate aim of expanding the racial religious state. An example of this is the deployment of the IDF under the guise of defending settlers who themselves are supplanted into locations as a means of gaining a foothold and creating facts on the ground to void land exchange negotiations.
I defend Israel’s right to self defence by means of actions that actually are defensive and effective towards that goal. Israel’s previous operations, such as incursion into Gaza and the bombing campaign against Lebanon were not defensive and failed to preview the very attacks the operations were undertaken to stop.
Steel-wolf wrote: Thats true, it WOULD be hypocricy if Iran and Hamas were mentaly stable and not going to hand over a suitcase bomb to the first dunderhead who could sneak it into a foreign country. Maybe I should let my four year old kid play with matches because I know how to use them......
This is an attempt at misdirection to avoid the argument and redirect into meaningless dribble.
Steel-wolf wrote:That worked so well the last time our president tried to have open dialog with Iran. Oh thats right, it led to over a year in hostage negotiations.
During a time when Western powers were ether financing the Shah or in a confrontation with Ayatollah Khomeini – nether side was open to diplomacy at that point in time. But I agree that at that time in particular, Iran was indeed a rogue state – as I assume that you are referring to the 1979 Iranian student storming of the US embassy in Iran.
Skycore wrote: Does anyone really believe Attrition is the reason a rogue nuke hasn't been used? From my pov, it looks like the rhetoric has been astronomically increased to justify paranoia on the brink of suicide.
The populations are too closely mixed, deployment of such weapons would have major consequences for both sides no matter who uses them.
Danholo wrote:Palestine was granted as a Jewish national home.
The Balfour Declaration put forward a view, that a Jewish national home should be established in Palestine, but not all of Palestine. See…
â€His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…Danholo wrote:Whatever plan was carved later, was still accepted by the Zionists. The failure of the plan retracted the Zionists to defend Eretz Israel, as a whole. I remember the maps in school: ALL OF IT WAS REGARDED AS ISRAEL, and Israel was just liberating more land in all wars directed at it.
I’ve studied a number of maps, each labelled the area differently depending upon the organisation that commissioned the cartographers and the politics of the day and age the map was made. All the rest of your text is just conjecture – which I nether accept nor disagree with.
Danholo wrote: The state runs along communal lines, as does the rest of the world.
Discrimination is discrimination Danholo. I always find it curious Jews who complain about being discriminated against as Jews, yet consider discriminate a moral practice as long as its positive towards Jews. A strange Jewish hypocrisy no?
Danholo wrote:It is childish to assume that these two peoples could coexist.
Then the foreign immigrant Jews should not have moved to the region then if there was no intention to coexist with the already existing population.
Danholo wrote:They are different communities, in both character and culture. They have a right to evolve and live separately.
As much as I can agree to this, communities around the globe consist of different communities, intermixed and still maintaining separate identities. Although over the generations these communities often blur and mix into an amorphous union.
I do not agree that the two are so different as to not be able to share the region, maintain their own identities and coexist. It has happened before.
Danolo wrote:We will not create a Utopia of coexistence because you wish it. On the other hand, the Jews did not kick the Arabs out of their homes, until they were actually under and victims of violence.
It is difficult to pin down a particular moment in time in the conflict when people were evicted from their homes, in order to lay blame upon who did such an action first. One could easly claim it was the Arabs who did it first, but these claims can be countered by the actions of Jewish militias, so finger pointing in order to blame some group for doing it first is really unproductive in this debate. All we can really say is, it happened, upon both sides.
Danholo wrote:I do not wish to kick the Arabs out of their homes.
Delineation must be draw between your personal wishes, and those of the movement. I agree you personally my have a high level of scruples and morality against unethical action, this is not to say all of your fellow Zionists feel the same way.
Let us keep the debate impersonal. As I have no interest in debating what you as a person are may be like – akin to War Angel, I think you may be a nice guys, although we have ideological differences.
I also lose interest when debates degenerate into rhetorical mud slinging, as seems to be the norm of most PoFo middle-eastern debates.
Danholo wrote:Or could it be so, that it's an infidel country in the Middle of the "Arab heartland"? You don't get it... You'll never get it. :/ I'll be arrogant here, but this is your reality. Yes, Jews usually live in peace with their neighboring communities when they are minorities in countries. Jews, as families often do, take care of their own first, and considering how dysfunctional this family is, nothing good can come of it. Are you really that naïve to think that the West and Jews are alien to each other? Jews share similarities, as does Israel, with the West and the Middle East. It's like something in the middle, but something totally different. It is not that we don't know each other but you are proposing that we should "be each other". I'm glad Jews have their own quirky place Jews can do things Jewishly. That is what's nice about this place, for me, but all the rest is, well, not that great.
Doing things Jewishly does not appear to be much of a hindrance to international Jews outside of Israel. So why is there is since that one can only do Jewishly things in Israel, as if such is looked upon with distain elsewhere in the world? Certainly I can find instances of animosity towards Jews on racial and religious grounds, elsewhere in the world as well as I can find the same examples within Israel towards Gentiles.
But once again, I’m not arguing against the Jewish state. But the unethical context of a race state.
Danholo wrote:The Zionist movement has indeed twisted Jewish dogma; it has taken world Jewry and used a perverted Western idea of a nation state and tried to make one along those lines for Jews. It has worked for Jews as it does for Arabs; i.e. not at all. Israel's fate was never to have this place and take it for granted.
Israel’s fate was the destruction at the hands of the Romans, had the Zionists immigrated to Palestine and tipped the scales of balance in the same method as the Jews now fear of the Arab demographic – the political and conflict carnage may have panned out in a totally different (and maybe peaceful) plubacide towards the Jewish Homeland through population mass in a cohesive host population consisting of Jews and Arabs of Palestine. Instead we ended up with zealots intention on a race state, and the inevitable race conflict it generated.
Danholo wrote:Of course, but the fact remains that Jews had a right to settle in Palestine and create a national home there.
I have never disputed this. This was inline with the Balfour Declaration, but the error was that ultra-Zionist aims conflicted with an important element of the Balfour declaration:
… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."Danholo wrote:Religious dogma is one of the things that connect us to Israel, yes, and is deeply rooted in our own mythology, which has been passed down generations, and is rooted in reality. All of us "have a connection" but Jews are the only nation to draw any uniqueness in this connection. The land has only been a national home for one people, and we still exist, no matter what sort of social organism you view us to be.
No more or less than the same is rooted in Christian or Islamic dogma. No one faiths dogma is more or less important than that of another faith, but yet Zionists contend that Jewish dogma relating to “ownership†of Palestine is of higher value than the dogma of other religious orders.
As for religious dogma being rooting in reality, certainly the places may be tangible, but the reality of the stories is best left to theological debate.
International Jews have as much a connection to Israel, as I do to Scotland – the land of my ancestors. But as powerful or weak as that connection may be, it does not give me or International Jews the right to encroach upon those who currently call Scotland or Palestine home. Certainly we can immigrate, purchase a home, but we have no more a right to those places of our heritage than those who already live there.
It is at this point, you and I differ on our ideology. Where you propose that as a Jew, you do have a greater right to that land than those who live there and are not Jews. Where I propose you don’t – equality takes precedence.
Danholo wrote:I will feed my children before yours. I will not apologize for that. The Zionist movement only catered to selfish interests, but selfishness is human and moral, at times.
Yet the intelligence of the thinking species we are a part of is evolving beyond such simple conflict drive frames of thought.
Danholo wrote: As far as I can tell, "the Defence" was created in part of a lack of trust towards the inability of Palestine's British rulers to protect Jewish communities from violence.
I can understand this – the British were at first busy with the Second World War and troops were better employed against the Rommel and the Afrika Korps than policing towns. Yet we can not miss the mutual antagonism going on between Zionist leaders, vocal at the Western Wall and other ceremonies, proclaiming the coming rise of the Jewish state and the purge of the Arabs. While Islamic imams preached much the same in their halls. Each leading to riot, counter riot, revenge killings, etc. All while both groups agitated against the British occupation forces.
The defence was as much out of aggression as a need to defend against aggression – upon both sides.
Danholo wrote:The ideology supports a Jewish state, yes, but it does not necessitate it to be homogenic. Any and all non-Jews are welcome here, and happen to actually live here, too.
Certainly, but this comes back to what people say and do in public and the difference between laws and those laws being acted upon. We have already seen Jewish groups protesting against having Arabs in their towns, or giving Arabs jobs, the worry of the Arab demographic, or loyalty to the Jewish ideal. This comes back to the duel nature of Israel and Zionism as I have written before – of the population being torn between two halves, one that believes in equality, in rational thought and ethics – and the other half that puts Jewishness above and beyond all else.
Danholo wrote:I am very reactionary when it comes to sploop's hateful comments about Israelis, and what he's concluded to be true by reading and watching media. Not very convincing.
As I mentioned above, I don’t really want to get into character debates. But I say, at times you come across the same way as what you just wrote of Sploop. Take for example the document you offered up as a rebuttal that the whole of the mandate was put forwards for the Jewish homeland. That whole document was rhetoric, written by a biased hand aiming to claim everything for Zionism – surely you could see that?
But why then use it?
Danholo wrote: And thus you are able to create quite a broad and balanced view of the conflict, and don't throw wild accusations into air. We really don't view the reality on the ground differently, in my opinion, but our perceptions of the societies and what they want are different. You place emphasis and hope on compatibility, while I widely regard that to be a pipe-dream. Also, with my own bias and opinions, have a certain understanding that Jews want to live separately from Arabs, no matter their desire. Arabs could live in a totally bipartisan state with Jews, but Jews could not do so with Arabs.
I do see the pipe-dream within my thoughts of equality when overlaid upon the circumstances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I do see the flaws within my utopian desire to make a better place. Which is why I acknowledge that a peace solution to the conflict will not come from forcing everyone to get along like some jolly dysfunctional familiy from a British sitcom. But rather that separation is a requirement towards both short term peace, and the holy grail of long term peace. Thus why I’d support a two or three state plan. But I’m still going to aim for something better, but rationalised against present needs of the moment.
I understand how the Jews want to live apart, I don’t really blame them, but I can see how those self segregation idea came into being – but also how detrimental to both internal and international relationships such a xenophobia frame of mind can be. And in essence, the Palestinian Arabs now aim for the same. But even so, I’ll never support such xenophobia, as much as I can understand its origins.
Danholo wrote: You don't question, but attack. You, as I, have a theory of what it is, and even without proving it, suppose it to be true.
You see it as an attack as it questions what you believe in. But I don’t use question marks, without expecting an answer to a question.
Danholo wrote:You do know that you have a habit to start preaching. Humbling.
Heh, really?
I do know I have a habit of rambling on a bit.