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This latest violent outburst by Israel just stinks of ethnic cleansing.

And I actually don't give a damn if that offends anyone.
 
Champ said:
This latest violent outburst by Israel just stinks of ethnic cleansing.

And I actually don't give a damn if that offends anyone.
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It's nothing new, they've been doing this shit since 1948. And the world looks on...
 
FireballXL5 said:
It's nothing new, they've been doing this shit since 1948. And the world looks on...
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Indeed.
It's insane and just shows you how Geopolitics can be manipulated so you are always perceived to be the good guy.
 
I've seen a lot of claims by pro Israel people that it's a democratic society so supposedly whatever they do it's fair game cause they're better than backward Palestinians and of course whatever the other countries say or do its antisemitic.
 
Champ said:
This latest violent outburst by Israel just stinks of ethnic cleansing.

And I actually don't give a damn if that offends anyone.
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The only people that will be offended by this are fascists. It's clear as day, always has been for most of us but now the fog is clearing for other fence sitters too.

Free Palestine! Should be the call everywhere. Specially sports ground.
 
I expect the Israeli ministry of propaganda to awaken Fearless from his slumber and send him here in 3...2...1
 
RedTiger said:
She confronted Naftali about Israel targeting children and it seems she's been inundated with messages from pro zionists. The board of deputies have made a formal complaint to the BBC about the line of questioning.
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Who is Naftali Bennett?
 
Don’t really see much wrong in her questioning. Led the interview off with the most controversial question, but what journalist wouldn’t?

 
RedTiger said:
BBC news presenter Anjana has deleted her twitter after yesterday's interview of Naftali Bennett.
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I’ve seen some of the stuff on Twitter about this. Generally, religion confuses the hell out of me at the best of times, my brain just can’t process why people believe it. Not the social, good parts of it, but the nasty stuff that doesn’t fit in with progressive societies.

Anyway, I find it really distasteful that seemly smart Jewish people seem to be unable to separate Israel and a religion.
 
The newest images came in last week during the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Reporters and ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent, which struggled to reach the injured, were impeded by military obstacles.

At a Fourth of July event in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli Army had attacked “the most legitimate target on the planet — people who would annihilate our country.” He was referring to months of armed resistance against Israeli settlers by young men in the Jenin refugee camp.

More than 20 years ago, another right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led an extensive military campaign against the same refugee camp. It was two years into the second Palestinian uprising. Palestinian suicide bombers, some of whom hailed from Jenin, had rocked Israeli streets. In response, the Israeli Army invaded the West Bank and ravaged the Jenin refugee camp, then, as now, a center of Palestinian resistance.

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A 7-year-old Palestinian amid the rubble of the Jenin refugee camp following the Israeli incursion in June 2002.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

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A Palestinian boy inside a destroyed home in the occupied West Bank Jenin refugee camp on Thursday, following a large-scale, two-day Israeli military operation.Credit...Zain Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The two invasions unfolded in vastly different contexts. Between 2002 and 2023, the illusion of partitioning the land into two states disintegrated. It exists now only in diplomatic talking points, hollowed out of all meaning, and replaced by a consensus among international and Israeli human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, vindicating what Palestinians have long believed.

For most Jewish Israelis, this shift is barely perceptible, as they continue to be effectively sheltered from the cost of their government’s policies toward Palestinians. The Palestinians, meanwhile, are experiencing growing despair and fatigue, ground down by the daily structural violence. With the absence of any hope for statehood, and with no viable political leadership to lead the struggle, some take matters into their own hands through armed and unarmed forms of resistance, others are apathetic or preoccupied with the crippling effort to support their families, and many live in fear.

In 2002, though round after round of American-mediated negotiations had faltered, there was still the hope — and the expectation — that a peace process would resume. The two-state solution was touted as the only option for peace. The framework of territorial partition — that Israel would withdraw from the territories it had occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors — was the dominant policymaking approach.

But as the Second Intifada came to an end, Israel intensified practical measures to expand its occupation and undermine the two-state solution while maintaining the diplomatic pretense of engaging with peace efforts. With the financing of Western and Arab donors, Israel pacified the West Bank with neoliberal incentives even as it hollowed out the core of its economy and carved up the Palestinian territory with expanding settlements. It implemented security coordination measures with the Palestinian Authority, turning the Palestinian government into a key partner for managing local resistance. The Palestinian Authority, for its part, initiated an expansive state-building agenda as it sought to project an image of an authority with control, one that was setting the foundations of a future Palestinian state.

Under Mr. Sharon, Israel also unilaterally reconfigured its occupation of the Gaza Strip, dismantling its settlements and initiating a territorial disengagement that proponents of the two-state solution celebrated — perhaps genuinely, but naïvely — as a step toward peace, one that demonstrated the possibility of Israeli territorial withdrawal paving the way for eventual Palestinian rule.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/opinion/jenin-israel-west-bank.html
 
Dan_F said:
I’ve seen some of the stuff on Twitter about this. Generally, religion confuses the hell out of me at the best of times, my brain just can’t process why people believe it. Not the social, good parts of it, but the nasty stuff that doesn’t fit in with progressive societies.

Anyway, I find it really distasteful that seemly smart Jewish people seem to be unable to separate Israel and a religion.
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A lot of them can, I’m sure. The one and only Israeli I’ve ever met/talked to was proud of his religion but deeply angry and ashamed about his government’s actions in Palestine.
 
Prominent New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an op-ed on 12 July warning that the Biden administration is reassessing its ties with Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist Israeli government, in response to the judicial overhaul legislation pushed by the prime minister’s Jewish supremacist coalition.

In his op-ed, the prominent New York Times columnist noted that Biden had called Netanyahu’s coalition “one of the most extreme” he’s ever seen and that US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides had remarked that the US is trying to prevent Israel from “going off the rails.”

“There is a sense of shock today among US diplomats who’ve been dealing with Netanyahu … They just find it hard to believe that Bibi [Netanyahu] would allow himself to be led around by the nose by people like Ben Gvir, would be ready to risk Israel’s relations with America and with global investors and WOULD BE READY TO RISK A CIVIL WAR IN ISRAEL just to stay in power with a group of ciphers and ultranationalists.”

According to Friedman, US President Joe Biden believes the push by Netanyahu and prominent cabinet ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to overhaul Israel’s judicial system is a smokescreen to engage “in unprecedented radical behavior… that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values and the vitally important shared fiction about the status of the West Bank that has kept peace hopes there just barely alive.”

Friedman explained further that Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich’s efforts to construct additional Jewish settlements at an unprecedented pace in the occupied West Bank, which they openly state they wish to annex, was undermining “the shared fiction that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was only temporary and one day there could be a two-state solution.”

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, which were ostensibly meant to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state after an interim period. This included an eventual end to Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank, a requirement for establishing a viable Palestinian state on contiguous territory.

The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority (PA) to give Palestinians limited autonomy and self-rule in some areas of the occupied West Bank, with other areas remaining under direct Israeli military control.

However, while subsequent Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, paid lip service to the goal of establishing a Palestinian state in public, they in private made clear their intention to undermine the Oslo Accords, and use the interim period to buy time to build additional West Bank settlements for Israeli Jews which could later be annexed by Israel, in a process known as “establishing facts on the ground.”

In his New York Times column on Tuesday, Friedman argued further that “This Israeli government is now doing its best to destroy that time-buying fiction,” suggesting that the ongoing Israeli settlement project was in the US’ interest, but only if done sustainably.

Friedman went on to charge that “Netanyahu’s steady destruction of this shared fiction is now posing a real problem for other US and Israeli shared interests,” such as the stability of neighboring Jordan and the effort to ink a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
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https://new.thecradle.co/articles/biden-administration-reassessing-ties-with-israel-nyt

Israel marching, as predicted here, some years ago, to North Korean levels of isolation. Hezbollah, Lebanese, massed on the border 17 years after the 2006 war (wherein the siege of Gaza and Israeli retreat from Gaza all stems in its present day form). Difference this time, if an intifada does break out, is substantial. The Israelis have gone so far to the right that they've alienated many Israelis and Jewish exiles/dual nationalists in the United States itself. Public opinion is overwhelmingly against them, globally, not just in Arab nations but increasingly within the centres of the American state that actually count. I read the article on the NYT by Friedman, long a defender of Israeli policies over the years, and he was entirely accurate. The present Israeli government, and it's been years coming, has basically stabbed itself in the foot so many times and become a complete embarasment to the Americans who would, in other conditions, tend to support them (including UN security council vetoes wherein America is the only reason Israel has had a free pass for decades).

Now look at the fertile crescent. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Oman, Syria, et al. 350 million people with all but Yemen, Syria, and Iran having decent ties with the United States. Syria has re-entered the Arab League, and the anti-Assad movement is finished, whether it takes a year or two or however long to completey disappear. The Saudis, only yesterday, made it known to the Americans that they would be investing in Syria for a variety of reasons under the pretext of anti-drug legislation but that is literally a pretext. They've (Syria) been welcomed back into the fold and Iranian/Saudi ties, never warm, are at the least "cool" they've been in a long, long, time. Iraqi and Iranian ties, too, are growing and, in general, the picture is of a Fertile Crescent Bloc which in population terms, and in capital terms, not to mention geopolitical strategic (contiguity/geographical) terms, is as powerful as the EU if the trend of loose solidarity (not killing each other) continues. The pariah here is no longer Syria, or, by some trick of fortune, even Iran or Saudi Arabia, but Israel. The far-right in Israel has, via West Bank incursion and breaking settlement promises, made to Clinton, as Friedman notes, plus so many instances that are too numerous to name, (general disavowal of democratic values, giving into the absolute worst in Israeli society to the disgust of Israeli moderates, at which you see the protests), now, brought it all to an inflection point and the trend is such that if Israel thinks its special status with America is written in stone, they had better think a few more times about it. America has arms deals, and placements, not to mention economic deals, with Egpyt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia which, not qualitatively, but future-projections, and general importance, outweight anything "this" Israel (or any, in truth, barring two-state solution) has to offer.
 
VorZakone said:
So what happened here?

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Israeli parliament is trying to do away with the Supreme Court, which has the power to cancel any decisions made by the Israeli government.

It definitely is a step to dictatorship and it's particularly hilarious how silent the US is on the matter considering they love parroting the whole 'the only democracy in the Middle East' line.
 
The Corinthian said:
Israeli parliament is trying to do away with the Supreme Court, which has the power to cancel any decisions made by the Israeli government.

It definitely is a step to dictatorship and it's particularly hilarious how silent the US is on the matter considering they love parroting the whole 'the only democracy in the Middle East' line.
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Ah Israel have been able to do what they like for decades now.
 
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