@AnonymousCoward, @pyro
Really? You see nothing wrong with this? I’m frankly surprised, and not in a good way :S
I’ll go through the most problematic aspects. And, err, sorry for the occasional sarcasm.
Let’s begin.
because most of them were Polish and German.
Wrong.
Prior to the Holocaust, Poland and the Soviet Union (not Germany!) had over half of the total European Jewish population between them. However, there was also the fact that roughly 40% of Jews at the time lived outside of Europe, most of them in the United States (who admittedly tended to be Ashkenazi themselves).
Then you have to account for the fact that, if I recall correctly, roughly 90% of Polish Jews and a third of Soviet Jews died during the Holocaust.
Carving a part out of Germany or Poland would have been a much better idea, because most of them were Polish and German.
Right. Try to put yourself in the historical time at the end of World War 2.
Yes, let’s give Jews a part of Poland, which wasn’t to blame for the Holocaust in the first place! Or perhaps Germany - kick out the Germans and replace them with Jews, now living on the doorstep of the country that tried to murder all of them, living in former German homes.
It seems like the perfect recipe for causing even more antisemitic resentment among people who a) already had plenty of it, and b) had very recently demonstrated both the will and the ability to annihilate their Jewish neighbors.
Sure seems like a great solution that won’t backfire!
Not that having them settle in Mandate Palestine was not majorly problematic, of course. But that would require a whole essay to get properly into, I think. I’ll focus on other things now, more immediately relevant to this quote.
Oh, it also needs to be said that the trope of Israeli Jews all being ‘fake European Jews’ (with no ‘connection to the land’, of course) needs to die and be buried already.
Roughly an equal proportion of Israeli Jews identify as Mizrahi or Sephardi (Middle Eastern, North African and Mediterranean origins in recent times), as the ones that identify as Ashkenazi (recent origins in central and eastern Europe). There’s also something like 3% of Ethiopean Jews (from east Africa), and several percent who originate from other places.
At least most of the world is opposed to Israel's behavior. Just waiting for the US to stop supporting a terrorist state.
Yes, because all Israel ever does is kicking and shooting little Palestinian babies for fun and territory.
Look, I’m not going to deny that Palestinians are oppressed. There may even be a form of apartheid going on in the West Bank. This is without a doubt terrible, should be condemned properly and something needs to be done about it all.
But forgive me if I’m skeptical of such efforts when most of the people who are vocally advocating for them seem to see all Jewish Israelis (with the possible exception of the hardest of the hard anti-Zionist leftists there) as being, basically, either completely brainwashed nationalists or downright cartoon villains who just want to murder all Palestinians and never act with any sort of decency, proportionality or a valid justification.
I tend not to make claims like the following unless I’m really confident about them, which in this case I am: those sorts of views show an impressive lack of knowledge and informedness about the region and the conflict, and often an equally impressive dedication to not looking for information outside of a particular subset of anti-Zionist sources and the occasional ‘mainstream’ media outlet (which are both problematic and not; their coverage can vary quite a lot in quality, bias and effort involved).
That being said, there are Israelis have been living there all their lives, indoctrinated by the Israeli media.
Heh heh. And there it is - stated as explicitly as it could possibly be.
All Israeli media except Haaretz and the right kind of NGOs are just brainwashing and propaganda.
And Israeli education is just preparation for enlistment into a bloodthirsty colonial army, right? Just dehumanization of Palestinians from start ‘til finish.
People who seriously claim this, I say with confidence, have little idea what they’re talking about.
Yes, there are problematic aspects of Israeli schooling, and there are media outlets which are less than wholesome.
But other times, partly thanks to having an actual Israeli friend, I found that the Israeli secular education system can downright surprise you with… unexpected levels of encouragement of critical thinking skills. Which actually put the European education system I grew up in to shame. Hard to believe, perhaps, but true.
They're not going to leave. They're going to keep slaughtering and destroying because they've been brainwashed to believe they are doing the right thing.
Oh please. Do you even know what a massive system the IDF is? Most of its members never even see combat, hell most of them probably don’t see any sort of action against Palestinians at all.
When it comes to war crimes and oppression connected to the occupation, the Israeli armed forces are such a mixed bag that even after I had spent a year or two studying the area in my free time (just as an interested amateur), I still found that I can’t quite wrap my head around it.
It’s a frustratingly hard-to-define mix of people acting by the book and loose cannons, of decent people and assholes, of due process for committed crimes and of impunity, of people just trying to make the best of a terrible situation and of ideologically motivated people who can enable or commit terrorism.
It’s a system with lofty ideals that perpetuates a screwed-up situation led by some genuinely horrible politicians in power… with a lot of perfectly regular people thrown into the mix.
I fear Palestine will be wiped off the map before Israel is stopped. Inshallah, justice will be served and the aggressors will be punished, before it's too late.
You know, just yesterday I had a conversation with Shy and another friend on our Discord about implications and ‘saying the quiet part out loud’.
About what is implied in certain arguments, without it needing to be spelled out.
And I wonder about the above quote.
Maybe it’s as “innocent” as it seems on the surface.
What does this person consider to be justice? How will the aggressors be punished?
Don’t hand-wave it away − think. It’s perfectly clear that this person considers all Israeli Jews (or close enough) to be ‘aggressors’.
They outright stated they consider Israel to be a terrorist state that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
They said that Israelis intend to stay there… due to their brainwashing.
What do you do with such terrorist entities and with people you consider so hopelessly fanatical and bloodthirsty?
I don’t think it takes too much imagination to guess. Just look at some of the more strident pro-Palestinian advocates.
The saying “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” comes to mind.
In this view, there is no room for compromise with people who are terrorists and want to wipe out the other side. They can only be forcibly removed at best (from all of Israel/Palestine, in this case), thus ‘rectifying’ the mistake made in 1948 and returning all of Palestine (which includes all of modern-day Israel) to its rightful owners… or, if they won’t go and won’t give up their sovereignty, they have to be eliminated one way or the other.
The ‘inshallah’ bit, while not necessarily ominous, doesn’t give me much hope for a positive interpretation here. Though I may be looking too much into things there.
Oh, also, the words “Palestine [being] wiped off the map” are quite vague. It might refer to the ‘Palestinians are being genocided’ allegation which is depressingly common and frankly untrue, or it might refer to all the Palestinian areas being annexed to Israel, which is actually not an entirely unlikely notion.
All in all…
This quote deserves to be here.
It is not a simple expression of justified outrage against a villainous regime.
There’s a lot more to it, and not in a good way.
I say keep it here.
P.S. I consider myself to be a leftie, for what it’s worth. I even frustrate some of my friends with what they see as me overly drinking the leftist progressive kool-aid :D, and not being critical enough of the far left.
But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the one area where I make a major departure from the western progressive consensus. Not in the sense of being some raging Zionist or someone who sees Palestinians as demons incarnate; rather, I see that conflict and that area as incredibly complicated and full of moral grayness, and as full of propaganda and omissions from all sides of the conflict.
Having seen and read a little more of the matter, I believe that simplistic narratives like the above cannot do justice to that conflict, nor can they help end it and secure a decent future for the Palestinians these people claim to care about.
Demonization of either side just throws more fuel to the fire, exactly the sort of fire that keeps this conflict burning in the first place.
I hope we can avoid contributing to it ourselves more in the future.
P.P.S
@DLaurier
The criminal occupation in Palestine is not representative of judaism. It is colonialism.
White invaders stomping on brown natives, and claiming racial superiority as their justification.
Thank you for illustrating the reason why I’ve been wondering whether to recommend you for the banhammer since you showed up here again.
You represent some of the very worst of anti-Zionism.
Kindly go take a hike.