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Israel: When the Drums of War Have Reached a Fever Pitch


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56 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Stop this. I do not defend Hamas, yes they are bad!
So you admit that the Westbank is under a de facto Arpartheid Regime. Then look up South Africa at the end of the 80s. In such a Situation resistance is the only way something will change. Has it to be armed resistance? That depends on many variables. 

Honestly, I don’t get it with the Americans in this regard. Your whole founding myth is based on armed resistance against a perceived „tyranny“ which in objective history simply meant that a small wealthy elite did not want to pay increased taxes. 

Again, Hamas are bad but Hamas is the reaction, not the cause. Hamas didn’t force Israel to build illegal settlement after illegal settlement in the last 20 years. Which basically made a two-state solution impossible as the most realistic possible Palestinian rump state is not close to be sustainable. 

You may find this difficult to believe, but most of us USians do not support armed uprisings to avoid paying taxes.  Just because that happens to be our history doesn't mean we support it.  And I think you'll find most of the people posting on this board don't romanticize or venerate the mythos surrounding the founding of the US.

There are plenty of valid criticisms of the US re: Israel and Palestine that don't require you to speculate as to how individual people here relate themselves to early US history.

 

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1 hour ago, Arakan said:

Honestly, I don’t get it with the Americans in this regard. Your whole founding myth is based on armed resistance against a perceived „tyranny“ which in objective history simply meant that a small wealthy elite did not want to pay increased taxes. 

Tangential, but more 1619 Project erasure here too. ;)

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2 hours ago, Arakan said:

So you admit that the Westbank is under a de facto Arpartheid Regime. Then look up South Africa at the end of the 80s. In such a Situation resistance is the only way something will change. Has it to be armed resistance? That depends on many variables. 

The comparison begins and ends with recognizing both stats had Apartheid governments. The violence was no where near what it's like in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the African National Congress were good faith actors unlike the Palestinian Authority and they worked really hard to establish trust with The National Party culminating in a unified government. That's not happening right now and it likely won't.

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Honestly, I don’t get it with the Americans in this regard. Your whole founding myth is based on armed resistance against a perceived „tyranny“ which in objective history simply meant that a small wealthy elite did not want to pay increased taxes. 

This isn't germane at all, and also what @larrytheimp said.

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I will say that this guy's ability to keep filming and taking photographs in the face of extraordinary personal danger (and the fact that presumably numerous people were in that building) is quite staggering.

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2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

The comparison begins and ends with recognizing both stats had Apartheid governments. The violence was no where near what it's like in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the African National Congress were good faith actors unlike the Palestinian Authority and they worked really hard to establish trust with The National Party culminating in a unified government. That's not happening right now and it likely won't.

What are you talking about? Like what? You do know absolutely nothing about South Africa, that’s clear. I suggest you start with the Soweto Uprising in 1979 until the 94 election. Those 15 years were extremely bloody, full of mass protest, police killer commandos, extra-judicial arrests and the like. How many people died in this period due to military/police actions and counter-Action of the resistance is unclear but figures start with 20,000 plus. This doesn’t include the Borders Wars in today‘s Namibia and Southern Angola. Conflicts which were all related to each other. Furthermore the ANC wasn’t the only Player back then, many other actors/organizations were involved. 

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/14/violence-israel-gaza-bloodshed-palestinians
Good opinion piece in the Guardian, especially the conclusion is spot on 

The cyclical pattern certainly works for Netanyahu. Look how this week has played out for him. Only days ago, he was on the verge of losing power to an opposition coalition sustained among others by two Arab parties. It would have been a first, a threshold moment in the integration of Palestinian citizens into Israeli life. But once the Hamas rockets started falling on Israeli cities, that prospect looked dead. No one needs to say out loud that they do not regard Arabs as legitimate partners in government; they can simply argue that a national crisis is no time for a change in leadership. Not for the first time, Hamas has done Netanyahu a favour.

But it is not only Israel’s leaders who have grown used to the status quo. Israelis themselves have learned to live with these periodic outbursts of violence, even the terror of rockets falling from the sky, as the price they pay for long spells of quiet when they can put the conflict out of their minds. They’ve got good at it, living in a bu’ah, a Tel Aviv bubble in which they are the hi-tech, startup nation, leading the world in vaccine rollouts one moment, partying on the beach the next.

Inside the bubble, it’s easy to forget the West Bank, with its two legal systems – one for Jews, another for Palestinians. It’s easy to forget Gaza, with its 14 years of suffocation by closure and joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade, or the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where Jews can reclaim property owned before 1948 but Palestinians are denied that same right. It’s easy to forget a 54-year occupation.

The only people who cannot forget are those who live with it every day, those for whom the status quo is unbearable: namely, ordinary Palestinians. If the roles were reversed, Israeli Jews would not be able to bear it either. It’s why Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Barak spoke a profound truth when he said that, had he been born a Palestinian, he did not doubt he would have become a fighter.

I desperately want the current violence to end. I crave word of a ceasefire. But I cannot hope that things go back to normal. Because normal is what got us here – and what keeps bringing us back, again and again.

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4 hours ago, Arakan said:

What are you talking about? Like what? You do know absolutely nothing about South Africa, that’s clear. I suggest you start with the Soweto Uprising in 1979 until the 94 election. Those 15 years were extremely bloody, full of mass protest, police killer commandos, extra-judicial arrests and the like. How many people died in this period due to military/police actions and counter-Action of the resistance is unclear but figures start with 20,000 plus. This doesn’t include the Borders Wars in today‘s Namibia and Southern Angola. Conflicts which were all related to each other. Furthermore the ANC wasn’t the only Player back then, many other actors/organizations were involved. 

In another thread you demanded that other posters should attack the message not the message. It would serve us all very well if you would heed your own words. Leave out the attacking part in any case.

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11 hours ago, Arakan said:

Then look up South Africa at the end of the 80s.

 

6 hours ago, Arakan said:

What are you talking about? Like what? You do know absolutely nothing about South Africa, that’s clear. I suggest you start with the Soweto Uprising in 1979 until the 94 election. 

Talk about moving the goal posts. 

Stop trying to control the window in which people can understand an issue. Especially when you then throw it back to the American Revolution. I seem to remember a much more influential event between then and now that impacts Israel today. Should we goosestep into your grandparents' history, and why that plays a huge role in the need for an independent Jewish state?

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5 hours ago, Arakan said:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/14/violence-israel-gaza-bloodshed-palestinians
Good opinion piece in the Guardian, especially the conclusion is spot on 

 

 

Here it is, let's paint all Israeli as evil, as if they are responsible for their government's actions. Mmm I wonder why pieces like this weren't written about US citizens when the US invaded the Middle East...

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2 hours ago, kiko said:

In another thread you demanded that other posters should attack the message not the message. It would serve us all very well if you would heed your own words. Leave out the attacking part in any case.

 I said he doesn’t know about the time in South Africa 79-94, which is stating a fact, otherwise he wouldn’t have written what he did. Where is the attack?

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'Not as violent as the Israel/Palestine conflict' doesn't mean there wasn't violence, it means that in South Africa there was no serious threat despite what racist politicians will claim to this day that upon stepping down from power all white people were gonna be thrown out of the country or killed. It means that the major resistance against the apartheid state were not a terrorist group fighting rockets at cities.


And yes, I know you're going to choose to read that sentence as me supporting the apartheid situation in Israel. No, I do not.

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21 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

 

Talk about moving the goal posts. 

Stop trying to control the window in which people can understand an issue. Especially when you then throw it back to the American Revolution. I seem to remember a much more influential event between then and now that impacts Israel today. Should we goosestep into your grandparents' history, and why that plays a huge role in the need for an independent Jewish state?

Ok, why do you get defensive and bring in my grandparents when you do know nothing about them, from where they are, what they did? (so much for personal attacks @kiko). 

Your statement: 

6 hours ago, Arakan said:

The comparison begins and ends with recognizing both stats had Apartheid governments. The violence was no where near what it's like in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

which is simply absolutely wrong and thus I corrected it. No moving the goal posts here. So instead of admitting that you don’t know much about South African history, you double down. If the time frame is too small for you, we can go back to the Sharpsville massacre in 1960. 

All I am saying is: the fight against Apartheid was from the very beginning a bloody one. That this was mostly suppressed in Western news media due to SA being protected by the US and UK and only slowly changed in the 1980s after the Soweto Uprisings is another story. 

The major reason Mandela was released from imprisonment by de Klerk was that the SA security forces and death commandos had totally lost control over the Situation, couldn’t sufficiently surpress the resistance anymore and basically stood alone on the world stage at that point (especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall). Mandela, one of the greatest historical personalities of the 20th Century, was their last Hope. 

Israel should study the historic developments in South Africa very carefully and I am sure that the strategic think tanks are doing this. All it needs is one mistake, one symbolic massacre you can’t in no way justify and the international mood is permanently swinging against Israel, like it did wrt South Africa 1979. 

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The Israeli military has now taken out the tower that housed Al Jazeera and The Associated Press. Attacking the media certainly doesn't bode well for the near future.

 

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6 hours ago, farerb said:

Here it is, let's paint all Israeli as evil, as if they are responsible for their government's actions. Mmm I wonder why pieces like this weren't written about US citizens when the US invaded the Middle East...

They were, at extreme length and with impressive virulence (mainly about the Iraq War, not so much Afghanistan, which was seen as a justified reprisal for 9/11).

It also doesn't say that "all Israelis as evil", instead suggesting that the cycle for the last decade or so has been of the problem being out-of-sight, out-of-mind for many Israelis - and many people across the world, including many Arabs as well - until a crisis point emerges that lasts a few days or weeks and then recedes again, and this in itself is a problem because it has removed the impetus for an urgent solution before it becomes yet more complicated and stores up more problems for later on. That doesn't mean that waking people up with rocket attacks on their home is a justified solution, but the problem needs to be focused on and taken seriously until it is resolved and it has been too easy in recent years for too many people (including those in the West) to simply ignore it.

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30 minutes ago, karaddin said:

The Israeli military has now taken out the tower that housed Al Jazeera and The Associated Press. Attacking the media certainly doesn't bode well for the near future.

Saw that the owner was warned in advance and the building was evacuated.

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Just now, DMC said:

Saw that the owner was warned in advance and the building was evacuated.

But only enough time to evacuate the people, not all the equipment needed for their work or their on site archives. I didn't intend to suggest it was full at the time (hence houses) and my view of this as a very bad sign is with that in mind.

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7 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I didn't intend to suggest it was full at the time (hence houses) and my view of this as a very bad sign is with that in mind.

I mean, I take it as a bad sign that they're taking out so many high rise buildings in Gaza that it's been narrowed down to the one with the media.

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6 hours ago, farerb said:

Here it is, let's paint all Israeli as evil, as if they are responsible for their government's actions. 

Yes.  I don't see where that interpretation comes from.

I think I posted 15 years ago that this situation reminds me of the maxim "the beatings will continue until morale improves".  One can justify actions in the singular but in the long view, there is no progress.  Israel has tried to make it as tolerable as possible for itself but the gaping sore continues to exist.

There are red lines that people will agree with (Israel is largely a Jewish state, apartheid isn't a solution, no forced displacement of people).  But the sore will continue to exist.

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