If they want more rights that begins with following International law on any occasions. Rejecting terrorism. Putting your soldiers in uniform. Freeing hostages. Not targeting innocent people every single day with indiscriminate rocket attacks. Do you know anything about the people you're talking about or are you just ignoring it all because you're sad about the consequences of their own actions? Nobody made Hamas build tunnels under every single school and hospital, nobody made Hamas turn their airport and water ports into instrumentalities of international terrorism. That's what the people chose. Hamas is (was?) wildly popular.
If they want more rights that begins with following International law on any occasions. Rejecting terrorism. Putting your soldiers in uniform. Freeing hostages. Not targeting innocent people every single day with indiscriminate rocket attacks.
Apart from the fact that they do have uniforms for soldiers (except for during that little hospital "operation" some months back), you see that Israel is guilty of all of this too, right?
Eg being held in "administrative detention" without charge is being held hostage, harming or threatening innocent civilians so they put pressure on their government is terrorism. Killing AI-identified "targets" while they're at home with their families because it's easier is targeting innocent people every day. And withholding the necessities of life from civilians on purpose is against international law. Nice uniforms though yeah.
Should we take away Israelis' rights by your logic? Or should we not punish innocents for the actions of people who claim to speak for them?
Basic rights are not conditional. Not sure how I can explain that to you if you don't understand that already. Jesus christ.
Prisoners taken in a warzone under suspicion. Administrative detention. Call it however. No diplomatic status. Citizens of no legitimate state. Hamas is a terrorist organization. They don't get to have a state. They are actual war criminals for all intents and purposes, and in all pursuits. War crimes are never punished in Gaza, often rewarded, always revered. Hamas is indefensible and unredeemable for what they've done to millions of people of have lived and died in Gaza without any prospects, having turned every institution into modalities of Iranian-vassal terrorism. Give me a break.
Again, nothing to do with war, NOT prisoners of war. Hostages by another name. How did you not know about this?
They are actual war criminals for all intents and purposes, and in all pursuits. War crimes are never punished in Gaza Israel, often rewarded, always revered.
Also true this way around. Israel has been committing war crimes for 7 months straight now.
“[T]he United States has made clear that it will block Palestinian membership and statehood until direct negotiations with Israel resolve key issues, including security, boundaries and the future of Jerusalem.”
Why does Israel get membership in the UN, if these are preconditions for membership? Israel will never agree to Palestinian membership. A stable Palestinian state will likely never exist until Israel is defeated militarily and has no choice but to accept it.
When statements don't make sense, i find it helpful to cut out any part that offends logic and see if it becomes clearer. In this case i apply it like this:
“[T]he United States has made clear that it will block Palestinian membership and statehood.
There! The other parts were extraenous fluff to soften their perceived position.
(I know you already grok their position, I'm just sayin its a hack i like.)
Until 1995, when Israeli PM Rabin was assassinated by a right winger, they were moving towards a two state solution, to the point of the IDF forcibly removing their own Jewish settlements from the lands of the prospective Palestinian state.
After the assassination, Netanyahu became the next PM, and has served in the position for most of the time since, asides most of a decade in the 2000s where other Likud politicians held it. He reversed the policy of settler removal.
Try not to conflate the entire country with the crazy right winger leadership they have currently. The same leadership of strongmen that catastrophically failed to keep them safe back in October, which is the one single thing such a man says he is supposed to be good at.
All that said, I also support Palestinian entry as a UN member state, and am tired of the US unfairly favoring its treaty ally in this case.
It seems contradictory to me to say it has always been pursing genocide, when one of the elected politicians was moving in the other direction for years. A bit selective.
Perhaps we could look at the voter tallys in 1996, where Netanyahu won 1,501,023 to 1,471,566, and the events that were influencing the Israeli public at the time? It certainly doesn't help when there's 14 suicide bombings happening in Israel between 1993 and 1995 during the peace process. Being bombed generally does drive people towards militarism.
Regardless of the past, though, Israel is there now. With its nuclear arsenal, it will not be destroyed any time soon unless Iran somehow nukes it off the map through its missile defense. So, negotiation seems necessary.
when one of the elected politicians was moving in the other direction for years. A bit selective.
Yeah and what did it result in? Same thing as every other "negotiation" from the last 75 years, More Genocidal Nazis slowly taking over Palestinian land while the Palestinians have to wait for the "peaceful negotiations".
The only difference between past israel and current israel is that current israel got so arrogant that they are forgetting to hide their Nazism. They are now flaunting what they have been doing for the past 75 years thinking themselves so much in the right that nobody will disagree with them.
Pretending that israel has ever had good-will to come to a peaceful conclusion is pure delusion. Israel is an Ethnostate deeply rooted in Apartheid. You cannot create an Ethnostate pecaefully just like the Nazis weren't peacefully expanding their Lebensraum.
I'm not sure about this ethnostate claim, when over 20% of Israel's citizens are of Arabic descent, and are not required to have Jewish heritage or faith. They can vote, own business and have the same legal protections as non-Arab citizens. These are not in Gaza or the West Bank, but living in Israel's internationally recognized borders.
Unlike in pretty much all other countries in the World, Israel separates Nationality from Citizenship and there are more rights on the latter than on the former.
Further, uniquelly in the World Israel has different kinds of Citizenship such as Israeli Jew Citizienship and Israeli Arab Citizenship and the former has more rights than the latter.
As with every other piece of hasbara propaganda, those massive bollocks you're parroting are a meaningless façade for external consumption that hides the reality of a State were Apartheid is so deeply entrenched that by law non-Jews have a second class kind of citizenship with less rights than Jews who have a different class of citizenship.
They're both said to be Israelis (as there is but one nationality) and if one ignores all the rest they're both as you say "Israel's citizens", they're just de jure different kinds of Iraeli citiziens with different rights and, as I said in the beginning, most rights there are linked to Citizenship, not Nationality, so for example Israeli Arab Citizens can be denied the right to live in certain places whilst Israeli Jew Citizens cannot.
And to preempt the usual hasbara response to this disclosure: those Arabs don't live there because it's such a great situation, they still live there even though they are second class citizens because they've always lived there as they were born there on what was their family's land before it was stollen from them.
This idea of a difference between nationality and citizenship is admittedly new to me. Can you provide a citation to a reputable source that explains it in more detail?
Israelis are not alone in using propaganda, so a neutral source, preferably. Or the law itself, I can run it through a translator.
Actually I was a bit wrong (I had been told this by others but only research the details now to provide you with references) so here are the corrections:
First I had it the other way around - it's the nationality that has Jewish and non-Jewish, not citizenship. Specifically Israeli nationality is only for Jews and it's for any Jew independently of were they are born source
Second, it's not all Arabs that are discriminated by law when it it comes to citizenship, it's only some who, although born in the territory of Israel are seldom given Israeli Citizenship when they ask. This applies not only to the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza but, more shockingly, Jerusalem source. This is why once in a while you get news of Arabs being evicted from their houses in Jerusalem: they were never actually given Israeli citizenship even though they were born in Israel and if they apply they are unlikelly to get it as per Israeli law they have no right of birth to it.
And then of course there are plenty of sources refering to Israeli Arabs being treated as second class citizens, such as this Bloomberg article
PS: I also remembered how some of the details I listed above, such as how Israeli Arabs can be refused license to live in certain places, came from a Documentary I saw on TV years ago. If I remember it correctly it's done via a scheme which is a bit like "housing associations" but for for larger areas (towns?) were people have to apply to them to be allowed to go live there and in many places Israeli Arabs are simply never accepted so they can't go live in those places.
a) Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people in which the state of Israel was established.
b) The state of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, in which it actualizes its natural, religious, and historical right for self-determination.
c) The actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
...
The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.
Furthermore, two million Palestinians live within pre-1967 Israel borders with the ability to vote. Three
million Palestinians live under military occupation in the West Bank. Two million Palestinians survive in what was an open air prison and now is one big death camp. All Jews, including those in the West Bank, enjoy full rights.
Arab families are greatly over-represented among Israel’s poor: over half
of Arab families in Israel are classified as poor, compared to an average
poverty rate of one-fifth among all families in Israel. Arab towns and
villages are heavily over-represented in the lowest socio-economic
rankings, and the unrecognized Arab Bedouin villages in the Naqab are
the poorest communities in the state
Direct state policy measures to reduce poverty disproportionately target
Jewish citizens, with the result that poverty rates have fallen far more
sharply among Jewish citizens than among their Arab counterparts, and
inequalities have consequently persisted.
Admissions committees operate in around 700 agricultural and
community towns and filter out Arab applicants, on the basis of their
“social unsuitability”, from future residency in these towns. The operation
of admissions committees contributes to the institutionalization of racially-
segregated towns and villages throughout the state and perpetuates
unequal access to the land.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF)—a body with quasi-state authority that
operates solely for the interests of the Jewish people and controls 13%
of the land in the state—continues to wield decisive influence over land
policy in Israel, having been allocated six of a total of 13 members of the
newly-established Land Authority Council.
Arab towns and villages in Israel suffer from severe overcrowding, with Arab municipalities exercising jurisdiction over only 2.5% of the total area of the
state. Since 1948, the State of Israel has established approximately 600 Jewish
municipalities, whereas no new Arab village, town or city has ever been built.
Israel is currently intensifying its efforts to forcibly evacuate the
unrecognized villages in the Naqab (referred to as “illegal clusters”),
including by demolishing entire villages, as recently witnessed in the
repeated demolition of the village of Al-Araqib. In pursuing this policy,
the state has rejected the option of affording recognition to these villages,
many of which predate the establishment of Israel. Between 75,000 and
90,000 Arab Bedouin live in the unrecognized villages in the Naqab, whom
the state characterizes as “trespassers on state land”.
State funding to Arab schools in Israel falls far behind that provided to
Jewish schools. According to official state data published in 2004, the state
provides three times as much funding to Jewish students as to Arab pupils.
This underfunding is reflected in many areas, including relatively large
class sizes and poor infrastructure and facilities.
A series of Israeli laws institute a range of restrictions on freedom
of movement, freedom of speech, and access to the political system,
including ideological limitations on the platforms of political parties and
severe restrictions on travel by MKs to Arab states classified as “enemy
states”. Such laws are used predominantly to curb the political freedoms
of Palestinian citizens and their elected representatives and are steadily
shrinking the space for political action available to them
No, there are certainly innocents in Gaza. However, there are also innocents in Israel. You may have chosen your side, but I am not fighting in this war. Frankly, it's consistently been too difficult to determine the truth.
edit: Actually, that's not true. I find I do get involved in the information side of the conflict, except I have to consistently fight against both of the sides. It's very troubling.
Last time I checked you were claiming israel is not an Apartheid state so you might want to work on that information thing a bit more before providing insightful comments
If you can find me an unbiased assessment of it, from people that acknowledge Israel's claims to exist by its 1967 borders and for people of Jewish descent to move to within those 1967 borders if they want, I happily will.
To whatever extent Israeli civilians are more moderate, they’ve never truly been able to affect change. Israel’s history only started with a terrorist campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Rabin’s efforts are truly exceptional in Israel’s history, and he was murdered for it. The return to genocide is simply a return to the norm.
Even if Israeli moderates were to win political power, it would only be temporary. Israeli terrorists saw no problem ethnically cleansing the land to invent their own state with only people they approved of, and if popular sentiment turns away, they no doubt would do it again to remove the new “undesirables”.
There decades since Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and Israel has lurched only further to the right. One of the greatest obstacles to peace has been Israel's continual land grabs and illegal settlement building. That has pretty much been cemented as nationalist policy. Ben Gvir is a psychopath and his rise is telling of how far Israel has embraced religious fanaticism.
No one, however, offends liberal and centrist Israelis quite like Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir, who entered parliament in 2021, leads a far-right party called Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power. His role model and ideological wellspring has long been Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn rabbi who moved to Israel in 1971 and, during a single term in the Knesset, tested the moral limits of the country. Israeli politicians strive to reconcile Israel’s identities as a Jewish state and a democracy. Kahane argued that “the idea of a democratic Jewish state is nonsense.” In his view, demographic trends would inevitably turn Israel’s non-Jews into a majority, and so the ideal solution was “the immediate transfer of the Arabs.” To Kahane, Arabs were “dogs” who “must sit quietly or get the hell out.” His rhetoric was so virulent that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle used to walk out of the Knesset when he spoke. His party, Kach (Thus), was finally barred from parliament in 1988. Jewish Power is an ideological offshoot of Kach; Ben-Gvir served as a Kach youth leader and has called Kahane a “saint.”
Ben-Gvir, who is forty-six, has been convicted on at least eight charges, including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism, compiling a criminal record so long that, when he appeared before a judge, “we had to change the ink on the printer,” Dvir Kariv, a former official in the Shin Bet intelligence agency, told me. As recently as last October, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with him, or even to be seen with him in photographs. But a series of disappointing elections persuaded Netanyahu to change his mind.
Palestinian recognition in the UN is entirely a protest against the US, it always has been. Pissed off at the US? Officially recognize Palestine, that'll show them!
But the reality is that Palestine isn't a viable state. Generally when countries "recognize" Palestine they recognize the unelected Fatah government of the West Bank, which is currently under occupation by Israel. Nobody is recognizing the terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza because, well, they're genocidal terrorists.
So some country recognizes the unelected government of an occupied territory while ignoring the elected (albeit nearly two decades ago) terrorist government of the unoccupied (though not as unoccupied as it was six months ago)? Purely performative bullshit which should be vetoed.
Maybe if Palestinians can elect a party that doesn't have a genocidal intent there could be broad support for an officially recognized state. But no one that hasn't been warped by TikTok propaganda is going to recognize a country that has it's occupied territory run by a corrupt government while it's "free" territory is run by genocidal terrorists.
Come on children, look at this like an adult who understands basic foreign policy.
Yup, Hamas "permanently suspended" elections. Typical fascist bullshit, get into power with a plurality of the vote and then never hold an election again. So should the world recognize them as the government of Palestine? Or should the world recognize the corrupt Fatah regime as the government of Palestine despite not winning the last election over a decade and a half ago? Even if that happened would Fatah really have control over Gaza if Hamas continues to exist? What legitimacy does either Hamas or Fatah have?
The main problem with recognizing Palestine as a country is that there is no legitimate government for that country. Blame Israel as much as you want, but Palestine doesn't have a real government. The only real hope for Palestinian statehood is if Israel eliminates Hamas from the equation, but who is really willing to see that to completion knowing the casualties that will occur to achieve that outcome?
So given the current situation, the Palestinian "state" would be bipolar and completely unstable. An inevitable failed state. Which people far away from it are probably fine with to score politcal points domestically, but it's more significant for people that have to live next door to a failed state.
There's no real hope for Palestine as long as Hamas exists. A state consumed by hatred dominated by a movement that preys on those emotions has a bleak future. If Hamas survives this, everything you're seeing today will happen again in a few decades. Just how it goes.
Can't wait to see the list of US/Israel bootlickers that abstained from/voted against this, trying to deny an entire people the right to their own land.
Having voted in a referendum against joining the Federated States of Micronesia in 1978,[11][12] the islands gained full sovereignty in 1994 under a Compact of Free Association with the United States.
Politically, Palau is a presidential republic in free association with the United States, which provides defense, funding, and access to social services.
You say that as if that's all America is. America controls a vast amount of land. It's the third largest country in the world and, unlike the first two largest (Russia and Canada), most of that land is also usable for either farming or resource extraction. But that's not the only reason it's an empire. It's also an empire because it has a large military presence in multiple countries who rely on it to supply defense at least in part. But another reason it's an empire is that it has vassal states. It doesn't matter how small those states are. Especially not when they are in strategic Pacific locations.
I'm not denying the imperialism of the US, I'm just saying that a group of islands with a total population 1/10th the size of my city isn't really the chief problem, and kinda comes off as anti-American for anti-American sake. There are myriad other problems, and a couple of islands that gave us some strategy in the Pacific are hardly the East India Trading Company.
It also has a method of governance were politicians harp on and on (and on, AND ON) about having wonderful human rights whilst having the largest fraction of the population emprisioned in the World, regular murders by police, commonly deploying violence against demonstrators, having a voting system that enforces a power duopoly, regularly disenfranchise minorities and were citizens do not have rights to health, food or a place to live, which is not a popular export.
When we reach for our democratic ideals we are at our best.
Meanwhile back in the middle east, authoritarian religious police stone you to death for saying things like you're saying about their government. Grow up. You obviously have it very good.
Oh, yeah, the deluded nationalists amongst you guys really talk the talk like pros, shame about not walking the walk. "Reach for our democratic ideals" indeed ... sounds lofty and all but strangelly enough it immediatly fails on the hurdle of actually having a genuine selection of political parties to vote for. Beautiful political poetry to make up for quite a different reality - it's called "Compensation" in Psychology.
As for the second paragraph, that "Look at those other guys in the Middle East" whataboutism is quite a low standard to compare one's nation against and thus an implicit acceptance of mediocrity, and even those "other guys in the Middle East" manage to have less people in prison than the US. Maybe it's something in the water.
Next to the rest of the Developed World the US is only an example of Human Rights or of Humanism in any form in the sense of something to avoid not something to emulate. But yeah, you guys sure beat dictatorial shitholes ... well maybe not on the size of the prison population and their use as forced labour and on police shootings...
And yeah, I do have it very good compared to that shit over there, and had it very good in all other countries in Europe I lived in - in Europe you have to go so far to East that you reach Russia to get a colder and more inhumane system than the one to the West of us across the Atlantic.
Try believing less of what you read on the internet. It's pretty good in America for more people than in virtually any place in any time in world history. Thanks for the effort it took to type your post though.
And hope for the future is more justified here than anywhere in the middle east.
I'd say the most hope rests with Israel: they could excise their right wing populism problem in one election. Could happen this year. How much hope do you have for an Arab Spring in Iran? Even the places that had Arab Springs mostly remain unchanged.
And that's precisely why Israel is worth the West's defense against Iranian and Russian fuckery, much less open war (world war III). I hope Biden continues to lead western diplomacy toward incentivising a more just future for Israel. I have zero hope that there is a more just future in Iran without total regime change, or in the laundry list of other dumpy theocracies which pass as "government" in the mid east, Gaza, Houthiville, or whatever glorious caliphate they imagine, etc.
For the future rights of the hundreds of millions of people who will live and die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, for example, there is more hope after western military invention than before.
Of course, the #20 or so in PPP per-capita country in the World with the largest fraction of the population in prison is the Greatest Country In The World ^TM^ and a lesson that others want to follow as you know because other Americans and people from shithole countries told you so (not to mention all those Hollywood films).
(Oh, and a lot of what I wrote I was told to me by actual Americans who moved to Europe)
