You try living like this:
The neighborhood of Kufr Aqab has evolved into a kind of no man’s land — it’s technically part of Jerusalem, but it lies on the Palestinian side of the West Bank barrier the Israelis have built to try to keep out suicide bombers.
Kufr Aqab’s residents have to pay taxes to the Israeli authorities, but they get virtually nothing in return. Still, the East Jerusalem district’s population is booming as Palestinian couples like Bayan Barghouti and his wife, Roula, move there.
The two don’t look like star-crossed lovers, but like the majority of Palestinians in the neighborhood, they surmounted a great deal of opposition to be together.
I have no other place to live with my husband. He’s a West Banker and I cannot live in an area in the West Bank, nor he can live in an area in Jerusalem, so it’s the middle.
The problem? Roula is from Jerusalem; Bayan is from the West Bank.
Palestinians from Jerusalem can travel freely between the West Bank and Israel, but to maintain their residency permits they have to live within the Jerusalem municipal boundaries. Most Palestinians from the West Bank don’t have permission to cross the wall Israel has built in and around the occupied territory.
And this “only democracy in the Middle East” comes complete with taxation without representation:
To prove residency, Palestinians in Kufr Aqab have to pay arnona, the Jerusalem municipal tax. But their streets are mostly unpaved, services are minimal, there are few schools and only one recently opened clinic.
Roula and Bayan say this place is symbolic of how Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are slowly being disenfranchised. Israeli restrictions are forcing Jerusalem residents to either marry other Palestinians from Jerusalem or risk losing their residency in the city.
“If you are married to a West Banker you are punished — you have to pay more; you have to live in an area that’s not organized at all,” Roula says.
Maybe Bart Stupak will offer an amendment so my tax dollars don’t go to support this kind of mess. That would be nice.
Punchy
It’s clear from the questioning tone of this that Cole is an anti-Semite.
cleek
heard that on the radio this AM. was hoping there’d be a text version.
we should send a copy of this to all of our brave Israel-worshiping Democratic Senators.
Dork
Lots of single people working at U.S. Bank, Commerce Bank, and 3/5 Bank to choose from instead….
Cerberus
Hey now, you’re stuck in your anti-semitic narrow-minded thinking.
If we corrected these gross inequalities, how else could we relive real life Romeo and Juliet scenarios?
I mean, think on that, Cole!
Seriously, it’s disgusting and it really drives home how insane this whole mess is. They need to either do a Checkoslovakia and split already or there needs to be a massive shift in rights for the country-less Palestinians.
Right now, Israel looks to be engaging in Berlin Wall 2: Electric Boogaloo on the wrong side.
Svensker
Well, it wouldn’t be happening if These People hadn’t done bad things in the past. So they deserve it.
There’s also the prospect of being classified as an “infiltrator” — which is a snazzy new way to ethnically cleanse These People out of the Only Democracy.
inkadu
Off topic: Steve Benen (Washington Montly) wrote a wonderful slam this morning:
If you were to make a Venn Diagram of the issues Tea Party members care about, and the issues Tea Party members are confused about, you’d only see one circle.
de stijl
I read a quote that I can’t locate on Google so no cite – sorry:
Israel has a choice between being Jewish and being a democracy.
Gator90
Try living with the constant threat of suicide bombers.
T.R. Donoghue
Just don’t call it apartheid.
de stijl
An apartheid that dare not speak its name.
Joey Maloney
But this kind of thing is neither.
James K. Polk, Esq.
@Gator90:
Whipped up by the right wing media?
Yeah, um, CHECK.
Turbulence
@de stijl:
Israel has a choice between being Jewish and being a democracy.
That might be true, but so what? I mean, China isn’t a democracy and it seems to be doing pretty well. I’m not disagreeing with you by the way…it just seems that people trot out that saying with a strong implication of “and therefore the Israelis are going to fix this problem and permit a real Palestinian state” and I just don’t see that happening.
To put it another way: Israeli supporters get real upset when anyone mentions Apartheid. But South Africa may not be a very good model anyway because Israel has a lot of advantages that SA didn’t. My fear is that when you mention SA, it lulls people into thinking that a peaceful coexistence is inevitable and we just have to wait a while.
Cerberus
@Gator90:
Well, if you remove the word “suicide” from your statement, then I can trump the Israeli worry with that faced by reproductive rights doctors and assistants who have been under constant threat of bombing, assassination, and all manner of direct threats to them, their family members, and their friends. And this extends from the doctor down to the volunteers.
Not going to dismiss anything the Israelis have faced, but the crimes in Israel are hardly a one-sided affair and unlike women in America, Israel has responded to this asymmetric criminal action with the complete removal of anything approaching rights for a vast ethnic group.
It would be like if in response to the clinic bombings, fertile women locked every white male christian in Oklahoma, drained all funding and services while taxing them, never let them leave, hold jobs, or hope for any form of representation in government, stole large sections of their land while fencing them in and every so often bombed the crap out of the area.
We’d never let something like that happen to proper white people, but when it’s brown people somewhere else, oh yes, everything in the name of fighting terrorism.
jibeaux
I also caught this on the radio, but missed something that they were starting with — apparently there was a situation with a man and a gun in a school, and the school tried to get the Israeli authorities to come, to no avail because it’s on the wrong side of the wall, then the Palestinian authorities to come, to no avail because it’s in Israeli jurisdiction. Fortunately no one was hurt, but geez louise.
Fergus Wooster
@Cerberus:
You said it better than I could, and in fact better than I’ve seen it said in some time.
I’m going to use that when it comes up in my circle (taking full credit, of course).
numbskull
@Turbulence:
I get your point, but I don’t know many people who think that the people of SA are enjoying a peaceful coexistence, nor do I know many who think it’s inevitable.
Hypnos
@Gator90: try living with the idea that some lunatic firing off a highly dysfunctional firework somewhere could lead to your city being carpet bombed and invaded by a foreign army which considers local residency equivalent to armed insurgent status.
More people die on an average 4th of July celebration than have ever been killed by Qassam rockets. Imagine if some rocket smashed a window in Tijuana and the Mexicans firebombed San Diego with white phosphorus as “retribution”.
Seriously. There was a time where Israel had some moral standing, but it was decades ago. Now there’s hardly any difference between what they’re doing in Palestine and what the Serbs did in Kosovo.
Cerberus
@Turbulence:
I wonder if it isn’t our possibly ill-advised attempt to keep ourselves unified that makes it so it seems unpalatable to consider splitting countries.
Israel and Palestine are pretty much Balkanized states with no hope for unification. We could have them set up a Czechoslovakian sort of deal where they say fine/fine and split and Israel has to deal with the consequences of declaring war on a sovereign state or we can wait for Israel to finish up their slow genocide because America and Britain were too anti-semitic to let Holocaust-surviving Jews come to their countries and so instead dumped them on a sovereign nation that got duped by their middle east cousins into losing even that last sliver of rights.
I think more countries when they get into this sort of dramatic pull away from each other should split into smaller nations and yes, I’ve often thought this about America as well.
El Cid
Apparently some people still think that Palestinians are actual humans who merit the same sort of rights and privileges that real people get to have, like Israelis or U.S. Americans, unless they prove themselves after several hundred years more of good behavior.
Turbulence
@Cerberus:
I think you’re right, but I’m not sure it matters because I don’t think American advice to keep the country unified is the driving force here. The driving force is that Israelis are people, and people want as much land as they can get. Including land on which other people currently live. Israelis think they’re entitled to it. So I don’t think we could have them split up like Czechoslovakia because (1) we’re not calling the shots, and (2) they don’t want to.
To put it another way: any real split means that some settlers get screwed since “their” land or even “their” water would become Palestinian property and they’d have to pay for it. But the settler block is very unified so screwing over a few settlers has the same political costs as screwing over all the settlers and collectively, they dictate policy in Israel.
Persia
@jibeaux: That’s exactly what happened. None of the cops would come because it wasn’t their problem. Kids in a school, and some asshole with a gun. There also aren’t many schools and only one health clinic.
I don’t understand how anyone can defend this bullshit system.
anonymous
Ethnic cleansing!
Will
Demographics aren’t on the Israeli side.
The Arab population is expanding, while the Jewish population is shrinking or emigrating. Added to this is the fact that the millions of Eastern European, Russian and African Jews admitted as citizens in the 80s and 90s are turning out to be neither practicing Jews or have any cultural affinity for their new countrymen – i.e. the growth of Russian neo-Nazi gangs.
This is an unrelated problem to the Occupied Territories and Jerusalem. They could give them all away, and they’d still have the same problem. Short of ethnically cleansing non-Israeli Jews from Israel proper, the future is one where Jews are no longer the majority in the Jewish state.
As a religious democracy, it’s dying. It’s either going to become a secular democracy (i.e. Jewish, Arab and Christians sharing a state), a theocratic dictatorship (Jews on top, everyone else on bottom) or a failed state.
Gator90
Cerberus: “the crimes in Israel are hardly a one-sided affair”
You’re right, they aren’t. My point exactly.
Gator90
@Cerberus: Argument by analogy is seldom persuasive, and even less so in the Mid-East context. But points to you for being the first person (to my knowledge) to analogize the I/P conflict to the US abortion controversy.
I guess an alternate abortion analogy could go like this: It’s as if Virginia outlawed abortion and was subsequently colonized by pro-choicers, who drove out some of the anti-choicers, who then set up camp in West Virginia and elected a quasi-government dedicated to the destruction of Virginia and sent mass murderers into Virginia to blow up innocent people and then pissed and moaned about the inconvenience caused by the fence the Virginian government put up to stop them. Or something.
Svensker
@Gator90:
Um, no.
Cerberus
@Gator90:
That analogy only worked before Israel started slaughtering people by the bucketload in Palestine.
And see, here in the US, we’ve had a long history of groups suffering very organized terrorism campaigns. The anti-abortion terrorism movements, the militia movements, the KKK were all heavily organized, legally protected bodies, often by more privileged groups with better connections to the levers of local and federal power.
And somehow, women, blacks, gays, liberals, have managed to deal with this unending campaign of murder and terrorism without ethnic cleansing.
You really really missed my point because it pains you that Israel the supposedly secular state really screwed the pooch on the moral high ground.
We’re all down with how bad it sucks to have criminal terrorist organizations trying to kill you and the lefties were all on their side until they started spending decades imposing a hideous apartheid system of murder and discrimination on the Palestinian people.
It’s part of the problem with fighting terrorism (a police problem) with military force. You end up fucking it up and losing your soul and moral high ground in the process. Sort of like how America went from “we’re all americans now” post 9/11 to “hide your children, the americans are coming” post Gitmo.
Cerberus
@Gator90:
I just noticed this also missed some big points about how terrorism isn’t just terrorism when involving brown people. The “anti-choicers bombing shit and then whining about it” happens ALL the goddamn time. Every month or so there’s a bomb scare or some bricks through a window or a shooting attempt on a health clinic worker. When they bag a coup, bomb an event or a clinic or say gun down one of the last late-term abortion providers in the country, huge mobilized religious and political groups organized to try and defend the new “hero” and otherwise justify his actions. The media has repeatedly brought on the organizer of that latest successful assassination to talk about all sorts of right-wing topics and how anything liberals do will lead to killing babies.
In the pre-60s Klansmen and White Supremacists routinely held political office while their breathern engaged in terrorism campaigns, often slaughtering whole towns off the map in “race riots”.
Today, the organized police departments of several large cities have engaged in the recreational killing of black men terrorizing the black populations out of trusting any law enforcement and thus depriving themselves of the protections of the justice system.
Yet, when the perpetrators are white and the victims are brown, we suffer and people cheer the white terrorists who are just “tired” or “have deep religious beliefs”. But if the criminal terrorists are brown and they have the slightest connection to a larger political power, then it’s eliminate every brown person in the country without reproach.
Why? Because they suffered terrorism. So very unique.
I sympathize with the Israelis. Terrorism is horrible and I’d like to see it eliminated and Denmark has shown how to counter international terror without committing atrocities. Israel decided to lose a lot of their moral high ground and see if “Jack Bauer justice” would work.
It hasn’t and now it’s a practical war zone of starving refugees who are easily recruited to bomb the people who keep on slaughtering them, starving them, and stealing their land.
Gator90
@Cerberus: You keep saying Israel has lost the “moral high ground.” I don’t think Israel ever had it. There is no “moral high ground” in that horribly tragic, bilaterally vicious, technologically asymmetrical war, and there never has been.
Israel, as far as I can tell, has never had any good choices in responding to terrorism from the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1967 the Palestinians have been led largely by the PLO and Hamas, whose longstanding commitment to Israel’s elimination has made them difficult to appease or negotiate with.
Treating terror attacks as isolated crimes to be solved with traditional law enforcement techniques would require Israel to maintain full-scale occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, as the local authorities in those areas are often complicit in (or at best, indifferent to) the attacks.
So Israel has turned to a combination of disruptive defensive barriers, brutal military reprisals, and unsavory collective punishments. I don’t like these things either (particularly the latter two), but I also don’t like the idea of Palestinians getting a free pass to murder and terrorize Jews.
Maybe you know the solution to all this. I confess that I don’t.
Gator90
@Cerberus: I fully agree with you that skin color and religious affiliation play a very important and pernicious role in how terrorism is perceived. And civil rights, torture, crime, etc. If Jose Padilla were named Joe Patterson, I expect he’d have had a very different experience.
Cerberus
@Gator90:
There is, actually. The Denmark Solution. Denmark is heavily targeted by international muslim terrorists that occasionally receive high level support from high political figures in various Islamic countries (because of the Mohammed cartoons). They also have a very open refugee system that is accepting a lot of hurting people from the Middle East and attempting to integrate them with their culture.
By traditional theory, this is a recipe for being a terrorist hotspot. However, by engaging in police responses and a low-key information network they are able to neutralize potential threats through the legal system before they can do anything without violating the civil liberties of those who may share only superficial features with the offending groups. This system (along with a strong Anarchist movement) is also what tamps down potential domestic terrorists such as neo-nazi movements and the likes threatened by the “browning” of Denmark.
Given that the actions of terrorists in Palestine are well acknowledged world-wide as terrorism, there is no reason why a similar non-genocidal system would work better than indiscriminately killing Palestinians to “discourage them from attacking Israel” thus breeding a bunch of hurting people with very very good reasons to want to blow themselves up in a crowded Israeli mall. Indeed, as the War on Terror has shown us, it is the only solution that works. Military solutions and “Retribution” just breeds more terrorists for the criminal organizations.
The only system where this fails is when the dominant powers are hesitant to call things terrorism, which is often terrorism by “white people” or top-down terrorism by a more privileged group to order the compliance of a less privileged group. Ethnic cleansing by American forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, Israeli forces in Palestine, the actions of militia and anti-choice bombers in America, Apartheid forces in South Africa, etc…
This isn’t the case in Israel and they have decided that the bottom-up terrorism earlier in their history and the top-down terrorism jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis means they have all the free reign in the world to engage in whatever horror they want to on the captive brown people of Palestine.
In an ideal world, I’d love to just make an arbitrary split and let them argue it out like full countries with the rights and responsibilities inherent in that, but right now, we just need to do what’s best for the many many innocent people involved in the cross-fire between bottom-up terrorist campaigns and top-down ethnic cleansing and massive discrimination campaigns.
The Grand Panjandrum
Plain and simple apartheid. Period.
LD50
@Gator90:
You’re so right. And treating the Palestinians like shit will surely solve that problem.
Mnemosyne
@Gator90:
I think that’s the problem, though — Israel is trying to have it both ways. They refuse to let the Palestinians form their own country, but they also refuse to let them be part of Israel. That leaves the people living in the Palestinian areas in a weird limbo where the government that has the most control over them is not their own government, but a foreign one.
Imagine for a minute if, every time you wanted to leave your city, you had to get permission from the Canadian consulate. Not only that, but you knew that they automatically regarded you as a dangerous terrorist because you’re an American, so the chances of them actually granting permission were very low. And even if they did grant you permission, the Mounties would stop you at the border and there was a very good chance that they would refuse to let you leave even if you had the right paperwork, so you would have to go home and start the whole process over again. Just to leave your home city.
asiangrrlMN
@Cerberus: I like your newsletter. May I subscribe? Oh, wait, you weren’t suggest rounding up the pro-birthers, etc., etc., etc.? Never mind.
What bothers me is the almost unified undying support Israel gets from most of our congress. What would they have to do to receive condemnation?
Gator90
@Cerberus: Denmark? Seriously?
How many fatal terrorist attacks have been carried out in Denmark since, say, 1967?
Well, I guess it’s better than the abortion analogy.
Maybe if Swedes angry about the Kalmar War made a habit of infiltrating Denmark and blowing up restaurants with the support and/or tolerance of the Swedish authorities and population….
If all countries could be like Denmark, I’m sure the world would be a much more peaceful place with much better beer (and free ponies for all).
liberal
@Turbulence:
Very well put.
liberal
@Turbulence:
Weird sh*t: I went to my cousin’s son’s bar mitzvah a few years ago, a Conservative congregation in NJ. As part of his little speech, he went on about something about the settlers being forced to leave Gaza.
I was thinking, WTF? His parents are relatively liberal. My guess is that over the last two or three decades, there’s been an concerted, organized effort to pipe this crap into Jewish congregations here in the US. Like these “WE SUPPORT ISRAEL IN ITS QUEST FOR PEACE AND SECURITY” signs I see outside temples around here, that I mentioned in another thread.
Gator90
@Mnemosyne: >>>They refuse to let the Palestinians form their own country, but they also refuse to let them be part of Israel.
Is it really that simple? Which of those two options does Hamas advocate?
Mnemosyne
@Turbulence:
@liberal:
Fun fact: about 40 percent of Israeli settlements are built on land that doesn’t belong to them. It’s privately owned by Palestinians. But if Palestinians complain, they basically get a shrug from the Israeli government and no compensation.
I can’t imagine why the Palestinians are pissed off at Israel. Everyone loves having their property stolen by an occupying force!
liberal
@Gator90:
Why should the Israelis have a free pass to murder and terrorize Arabs?
The death toll of the essentially unprovoked early 1980s invasion of Lebanon was probably in excess of 10,000.
The central fact is, as Turbulence pointed out above, that the Israelis want and feel entitled to the land that the Palestinians live on. The points you bring up are just apologia used by the Israelis to justify their theft of land, and nothing more.
I mean, if you’re upset about the Palestians murdering on the order of 1,000 Israelis, how must you feel, if you have any moral consistency whatsoever, about Americans murdering in excess of 100,000 Iraqis, or on the order of 1,000,000 Vietnamese?
eemom
I think those of us who are not Native Americans should hold back a bit on the self-righteous condemnation of Israel as “land stealer.” Unless y’all are prepared to pack up and deliver your homes to the folks living on reservations.
Mnemosyne
@Gator90:
Hamas advocates killing all Israelis, which is not exactly a practical solution, either.
Both sides — note I said BOTH SIDES — have gotten so involved in who kicked who first that the only solution is to split them into two countries and then have both countries occupied by United Nations peacekeepers until they calm the fuck down, because neither side can be trusted to act rationally at this point. Even if Israel agreed to separate countries, you would still have Israeli extremists killing Palestinians.
And the settlements will probably have to be pulled down, because those seem to be the cesspools where a lot of the anti-Palestinian extremism is forming.
Mnemosyne
@eemom:
So if the United States did something wrong 100 years ago, we’re not allowed to point out to our allies that what we did was a bad thing that they shouldn’t emulate?
liberal
@eemom:
Nonsense. The terrible theft of native American lands occurred much longer ago, and the victims are mostly all dead, i.e., there’s almost no one to reclaim the land. Unlike the Israeli/Palestinian case.
Given your logic, no one could ever condemn ethnic cleaning (which is what Israel is doing) because essentially all of humanity is decended from someone who committed ethnic cleansing.
Furthermore, many of us (at least me) aren’t saying Israel must be consigned to some kind of penitentiary for wayward states for its actions—as is true, there are worse crimes being committed out there. We’re merely saying that we don’t want this done on our dime, which is currently the case.
Bloix
“taxation without representation”
Arab residents of East Jerusalem, whether or not they are Israeli citizens, have the right to vote in Jerusalem municipal elections. Those who chose to become Israeli citizens – about five percent – can vote in Israeli national elections. Those who did not can vote in Palestinian elections.
So it’s untrue that in paying the municipal tax, they are being taxed by an entity that does not permit them to vote.
The current situation is unacceptable and it’s not sustainable in even the medium term, much less the long term, but it’s not “simply apartheid” and it’s not taxation without representation.
eemom
That something occurred “much longer ago” is a pretty lame ass argument. What exactly is the statute of limitations for genocide and colonization?
And you gotta be fucking kidding me that “there’s almost no one to reclaim the land.” Tell that to the Native American Indian tribes who recently, finally, settled a decade of hard-fought litigation over land use royalties that the US Government screwed them out of.
Like it or not, we’re the beneficiaries of a much more shameful history than anyting Israel has ever done. I’m not saying what is wrong shouldn’t be condemned. I just take issue with the self-righteous tone of glass house dwellers.
“Pointing out to our allies that we did was a bad thing that they shouldn’t emulate” hardly describes the tone of the commentary on this thread and on this subject in general.
Mnemosyne
@eemom:
So you think that Israeli settlers are justified in killing random Palestinians? Or do you just not like people pointing out that there’s fault on both sides and the Israelis are not simply innocent victims of murderous terrorists?
ETA: “Commentary in general” is usually ridiculously pro-Israel with no mention of the violence that the settlers are perpetrating. But, hey, US settlers killed Native Americans, so we can’t tell Israeli settlers that they shouldn’t kill Palestinians.
Svensker
@Gator90:
Hamas was not created until the late 80s. Your error-filled post goes downhill from there. You seem to be one of those folks who thinks “they hate us for our freedoms” and sees no possible other motives for Palestinian/Muslim anger.
Gator90
@liberal:
Oh, I see … so how long need Israelis wait before they get to be as insouciant about their stolen land as you are about yours?
Svensker
@Gator90:
Well, since they’re still fucking stealing it as we speak, it’s kind of an immediate problem. And I don’t feel like funding it anymore, k?
Mnemosyne
@Gator90:
It would be nice if they would actually, you know, stop stealing it before they demanded that we not criticize them for stealing it.
If you’re robbing a bank, you don’t get to demand that the cops let you keep stuffing money into your bag because other people robbed the bank previously.
eemom
@Mnemosyne:
If you read what I wrote, you will see that it is nothing remotely like this ridiculous accusation, and I take offense at your making it.
You know, I made a pretty simple point. I didn’t twist anyone’s words to attribute to them a grotesque belief in killing the innocent. That’s teabagger shit, and I kind of thought we were better than that here.
Of course there is fault on both sides. Really, fuck you.
Mnemosyne
@eemom:
And yet what triggered you to write your original comment was people pointing out that the Israelis are not blameless — you know, that there’s fault on both sides. So what exactly are we arguing about?
Gator90
@Svensker:
Yes, I know. I should have said that the Palestinians were led largely by the PLO from the mid-60s until 2000 or so, and that Hamas has been in charge in Gaza the past several years. Please forgive my imprecision.
You seem to be a person who didn’t read my comments in this thread in which I referred to colonization, driving people from their land, brutal military reprisals, and unsavory collective punishments. Or my reference to the I/P conflict as a bilaterally vicious one in which neither side can claim any moral high ground.
Obviously Palestinians have valid reasons to be angry at Israel, and I’ve never once said otherwise. (I think Israel also has reasons to be angry at the Palestinians.)
Gator90
@Svensker:
I don’t blame you. I don’t feel like funding the war in Afghanistan or abstinence education. But the people who want these things funded appear to be more influential than you or me.
Mnemosyne
I do find it interesting that we’re not allowed to criticize the current actions of the Israeli government because of our past history even though we’re currently funding that government’s actions.
Can we at least cut off the money we pay them if we’re not allowed to criticize, or is that also an unallowable form of criticism and we have to keep financially supporting their campaign against the Palestinians because we stole our land from the Native Americans?
Mnemosyne
@Gator90:
And, of course, you never complain about that funding or try to get it changed, right?
Gator90
@Mnemosyne: Often in the left blogosphere, saying there’s fault on both sides makes one a militant pro-Likud settler-loving Zionist fanatic.
Svensker
@Gator90:
You say:
But you act as though that terrorism is some deus ex machina magical thing that just pops out for no reason. And poor little Israel has to cope with it. What to do, what to do!
Israel has a very good choice in responding to terrorism. Stop stealing other people’s land. And either allow a true Palestinian state, or make the Palestinians full citizens. The fact that Israel doesn’t want to do either of those things doesn’t mean that they’re not “good choices”. The choice they have made instead is oppression, land grabbing and ethnic cleansing. Then they’re all shocked shocked at the response.
Enough. If they can’t get it together and we can’t work out a real deal between the parties, let’s get the hell out and stop funding the fuckers. I, for one, am sick of being a party to a slow-motion genocide.
eemom
@Mnemosyne:
No, that is NOT what triggered my original comment. What triggered my comment is the fact that facile accusations about “land stealing” manifest an inexcusable oblivion to our own history.
What bothers me is simply the smug self-righteousness of the tone. If someone actually had said something along the lines of your revisionist “what we did was a bad thing that they shouldn’t emulate,” I never would have said anything. I hate this whole subject.
Gator90
@Mnemosyne:
Sure I do, if by “complain about that funding or try to get it changed” you mean bitching anonymously on the Internet.
Gator90
@Svensker:
No, I don’t act that way at all. And since you obviously don’t read the things I write here, I see no point in responding to you further.
liberal
@eemom:
LOL! Sure. And I’m sure you apply that standard consistently in all your discourse.
liberal
@eemom:
Why don’t you ask the Israelis who are living on land in Israel proper (i.e., within the Green Line) that was occupied by people who are still alive.
If you actually knew any history, you’d know that the fraction of Native Americans alive today, out of the total alive immediately pre-Columbus, is very, very small in the US, if not in Latin America.
liberal
@Gator90:
False equivalence. I didn’t vote for a government which made as its policy the current appropriation of other’s land. People in Israel do, however.
However, given your partiality—you cite “the idea of Palestinians getting a free pass to murder and terrorize Jews” but ignore that the asymmetry in murder is of at least one or two orders of magnitude—I doubt you’ll understand that.
liberal
@eemom:
Red herring. You did imply that we had no right to call out Israeli ethnic cleansing. Either
(a) you implied we were indifferent to the history here in North America, which is a baseless slur, or
(b) your remark logically results in the conclusion that no one can criticize anyone for ethnic cleansing, because we all have ancestors who benefited from ethnic cleansing, which is moronic.
liberal
@Gator90:
That appears to be a not infrequent dodge. “We’re powerless…”
Here’s the question: IF you could have power to affect the outcome, you’d lobby to stop funding the war in Afghanistan. Would you also lobby to stop giving “aid” to Israel? Somehow I doubt it.
liberal
@eemom:
You overlook the fact that Israeli appropriation of others’ land is occurring now.
Cerberus
@Gator90:
Man, you couldn’t have missed the point harder if you were trying to.
Oh wait…
The point because apparently you are so aggressively ignorant that you need it spelled out for you is that Denmark has been targeted by terrorists, a lot. They’ve stopped multiple 9/11 level plots before they were launched, leading to zero attacks occurring on their soil.
The point is that when you actually have police doing their jobs about a criminal problem (which terrorism is), they prevent the criminals from doing the bad thing. Okay? Okay.
So, the fact that OMG, they totally haven’t been bombed is THE GODDAMN POINT. There’s a huge amount of money in the middle east trying to get someone to blow up something big in Denmark to “get revenge for the Mohammed cartoon”. There have been several large scale attempts on the level of the Madrid train bombings or the London subway bombings that have all been thwarted before they began because law enforcement did their job instead of sending in the military to blow up all the muslim looking people in Aarhus.
They have been doing this while having VERY open borders, letting in a large number of refugees from war-torn muslim nations (which we in the west have said we could never do, because OMG terrorism).
I have also pointed out that other groups in America have suffered far worse terrorism campaigns than the Israeli people and have seemed to cope with them without committing genocide and stealing the land of anyone who bears a superficial resemblance to those involved.
Now, maybe we should. The teabagger marches and the aggressive ignorance of white men have been a stain on this proud nation for a very long time and maybe we would all be better if every white straight christian male was locked in a small state and peppered with White Phosphorous every so often while being denied most social services and governmental rights.
Certainly would decrease the amount of time I spend talking to aggressively ignorant morons on the internet.
Gator90
@liberal: @liberal:
No, but I wouldn’t lobby to continue or increase it either, for whatever that may be worth to you.
Mnemosyne
@eemom:
Here’s the thing you may have missed: we’re not talking about the events of the 1940s. We’re not talking about 1967. We’re talking about the fact that right now, as we speak, Israeli settlements are being built on land that is owned by Palestinians with no compensation to the owners.
This is not a distant historical argument about whether the British handled things well or whether Israel should have kept the territory they won in 1967. This not one of those “right to exist” arguments. This is you essentially saying that, because the US stole land from our Native Americans 100 years ago, we have no right to protest the current and ongoing theft of land from its legal owners.
Gator90
@Cerberus:
Ah. And how should Israeli police do their jobs in the West Bank and Gaza in such a way that would prevent West Bankers from blowing things up and Gazans from firing rockets? How would that work exactly? (Query: Do you think Palestinians want Israeli police “doing their jobs” in the West Bank and Gaza? Have you consulted any Palestinians about this?)
So Denmark hasn’t had any terrorist attacks because Denmark’s law enforcement methods — which would work just as well for Israel if it would only follow Denmark’s lead — are so awesome. Sure, and my clapping keeps the tigers away, which is proven by the lack of tigers in my city.
Really, the “Denmark = Israel” thing is pure fantasy.
Cerberus
@Gator90:
International police efforts on plots hatched outside of country and…
Never mind.
You know what you know. Damn darkies deserve to die, right on!
Aggressively ignorant bastard.
Gator90
@Cerberus:
I don’t think genocide means what you think it means.
Gator90
@Cerberus:
Again, how would “international police efforts” work in the West Bank and Gaza? (Hamas would welcome international policemen to arrest terrorists associated with … Hamas?) How would such efforts succeed without the cooperation of the local authorities, who in fact direct, support, encourage, and/or tolerate the “crimes”?
I’m no law enforcement expert; perhaps you are. If you were in charge of the “police effort” to prevent, say, rocket attacks from Gaza, how would you go about it?
eemom
@Mnemosyne:
Nope. Reading comprehension fail again.
I said we don’t get to “protest” it like smug arrogant assholes, i.e., hurling accusations like “land stealer” with no regard to history or context.
Gator90
@Cerberus: @Cerberus:
Anyone who could construe anything I’ve written to mean that there are “darkies” who “deserve to die,” and then call me ignorant, is beyond help. Your insults are as lame as your reading comprehension is poor.
Mnemosyne
@eemom:
What “history or context” is there to the fact that settlements are currently being built on land that is legally owned by Palestinians? Scroll back up and look at the link I provided if you’re still confused about the difference between “historical” and “ongoing” and what I meant when I said I was discussing events in 2010, not 1948 or 1967.
We’re not allowed to say “hey, stop building those illegal settlements on stolen land right now” because we once stole land from the people who were here first? We’re supposed to condone a continuing and ongoing theft because we did it once, too?
Cerberus
@Mnemosyne:
I think the point eemon was trying to make (though I could be wrong here) was that we should avoid being smug about it, because we have done it (and arguably are still doing it) in our pasts, but that it’s morally right to call it out and condemn the practices. But that we should also recognize the dark stains in our own history from it.
To be fair, that’s also sort of a tone argument so I can see why you’re reacting harshly to it.
Personally I don’t really care how we call them out and the fact that we’ve done it ourselves can be a sort of “learn from history sort of thing”. Hey we tried that, responding to “random attacks” from the people we were stealing land from. It was a bad idea, you should also stop now.
Overall, I think the main problem is that Israel is basically trying to have their cake and eat it too regarding Palestinian sovereignty. It’s totally their country, so they couldn’t even possibly begin to do basic international police actions noting likely hotspots so they can intercept bombers and threats entering their territory or to isolate lobbed fire from their orignating neighborhoods. But at the same time, they like to claim it isn’t a real country so that the incremental creep of the settlements, the slow genocide campaigns that leave many Palestinians literally surviving off of grass, and the regular invasions and bombing runs aren’t war crimes against a sovereign nation.
Which is fucked up to say the least.