libertylover

bear, do you align yourself with the neoconservative movement?

Im, I did it again and the offensive stuff came up again. Wonder if this just
pops up in the United States.

Somebody else try this, please????

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“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”.

The Bear

I don't really align myself with ANY political movement.

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I am an old man. I have eaten much salt.

Aardvark

The 'terrorists' can't move away from their families and they don't 'surround' themselves with them - they have nowhere else to go. Gaza is a tiny sliver of land surrounded by enemy forces - Israel even keeps an eye on the Egyptian border. Nobody can 'move'. There are 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza; before the 'Jewish' settlers moved 5000 of them occupied one fifth of the land - every square inch was stolen at gun point. The Palestinians, without a state, have no right to passports. They have great difficulty moving safely between villages in the West Bank. The idea that you can just get up and move house in Gaza assumes certain things - that there is a housing market, that people have money (unlikely as all the industry has been destroyed by the Israelis and unemployment in some families is 100%), that there is anywhere to move to where people opposed to Israel don't live, that you have notice that your home is going to be destroyed (15 minutes is the usual warning given, although when bombs are dropped on homes there is no warning). People who have not been to the region do not understand that simple solutions do not exist.

One solution to the Palestinian problem is for the settlers to stop stealing land at gun point.

Bear, do you really think there was a good reason for the Israeli soldiers to smash up schools and hospitals (funded with EU cash)? What reason is there for defecating on teenagers homework?

The Palestinians used to have a very large Christian community, which is now in decline, and the West Bank was home to a substantial Armenian community, there are Bedouin and Druze and even a few Samaritans left in the Holy Land. The Israelis, if you'll pardon the expression, see them as wo\gs.

I lived on the Green Line in Jerusalem and saw a lot. I read the viciously racist Jerusalem Post - a week reading that and you begin to think long and hard about Jews and Zionism. It is a vile newspaper from the same stable as the Daily Telegraph. The letters page would shame the BNP. I have never, in any country, read such vile filth. People write from Manhattan about how if they visit their relatives in the settlements they will spit on Palestinian border guards rather than show their passes (Topol was going to do that). The hatred is beyond my comprehension.

The Balfour Declaration, which I have read several times, is ambiguous. Balfour was sympathetic to the Zionist cause and suggested a homeland in Palestine, without detriment to the Palestinians. People keep falling back on the declaration to say it presaged the state of Israel, but that wasn't what was expected.

In my view perhaps the only solution is the destruction of the illegitimate state of Israel. It is not a 'Jewish' state any more. There are more new Russian Orthodox churches being built than synagogues in some regions. There are 1 million Russian speakers (of 'Jewish' origin). The kibbutz system, that at least had some morality, has collapsed. Apartheid exists across the country and the million or so Arab citizens of Israel do not have the same rights as the 'Jewish' citizens. A Jew can marry an American gentile and he/she might move to Israel to live, an Israeli Arab cannot marry within his own clan, if the family was split in 1948, and bring his/her partner to Israel, even though the partner's parents or grandparents came from his/her village.

Israel is an apartheid state ran by religious nutters and racists. Israel expects to be treated as an equal, but ignores the UN declaration of Human Rights. Israel ignores the Geneva Convention and illegally occupies and steals land. Israel routinely tortures Arab prisoners and holds 9000 without charge or trial, many for years on end. Israeli settlers routinely snipe at Arabs going about their business and have killed a number of people for the crime of farming their own fields. Israeli border guards f@ck arabs around for no good reason - I waited for an hour for an American Arab in front of me to be processed at the Allenby crossing, no reason was given and the thick Polish Jewish tart actually took a 30 minute lunch break whilst processing one person. The thick Polish Jewish tart, despite my partience and good humour, then looked at my passport and said she'd never heard of the UK and asked where it was (this must have been malicious spite as we were at the Allenby Bridge and perhaps somebody had told her about the Balfour Declaration).

Push the b@st@rds into the sea is what I thought at that stage. I have seen too much petty bullying to ever think nice things about Israel and the Israelis ever again. I've met a few 'left wing' Israelis since and they're not too bad, but the religious and political bigots deserve to be treated as the international pariahs they surely are.

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When in Woking do as the Wokes do.

"I do not wish to form my opinions by thoughtlessly quoting others; I wish others to support their opinions by sensibly quoting me." Paul Wesson (Aardvark) 13th April 2008

Imperium

The very existence of the illegal terrorist state of israel is or should be an afront to all decent minded people throughout the world.
It is the nazi state par excellence and bases its citizenship laws purely on race. I find little difference between its behaviour and that of the Third Reich.

Imperium

You can assume whatever you wish but it would be helpful and indeed more appropriate to confine your comments to replying to my posts rather than guessing my politics.

The Bear

Now I would contend that Israel is a tiny country surrounded by enemy nations and that if the terrorists in Gaza can’t separate where they operate from where their families live they should stop operating.

The “Settlement” program was not one of the Israeli’s better ideas! Nevertheless the settlement prtogram is not the bottom line. The bottom line is the refusal to accept Israle as a ligitmate nation state and cease hostilities agaionst it.

No idea, but if I had seen my family or the families of my friends massacred by a deliberate attack on a civilian bus I suspect that the least that I would do would be to "dump" on some enemy kids homework.

The so called Palestinians are and always have been predominatly Muslim

IMaybe you lived on the wrong side of the Green Line?

Israel is not an illegitimate state.

Sorry, Aardvark, the moment you wrote that we disconnected on this subject.

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I am an old man. I have eaten much salt.

Aardvark

Sorry, Bear, but I come at it from the point of view of someone who used to be pro-Israel and was influenced by personal and bitter experience. The tit-for-tat killings have been going on for the best part of a century and will never stop. Israel has never made any real concessions since the religious power brokers ensure that that will never happen (Camp David gave a lot less than is billed and didn't surrender a square inch of the Jordan Valley in real terms as Israel retained a 100 year lease for security purposes). Hamas has supplanted the more pragmatic Fatah movement as total despair has set in.

The Muslims were in a majority, but not as large as people think. The Versailles division of the region split up what almost became a greater Arab state containing Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, but the French wanted their bit and created Lebanon as a Christian majority country cut from ancient Syria. Palestine west of the Jordan was about 40% Christian with a mixture of other groups - Bethlehem, Galilee, Jericho and a number of other areas were majority Christian.

I have become very passionate, not through ignorance of the region, but because I've now read considerably more of the history than I previously had and I've even met, through my work, some of the 'players', including Saeb Erekat. I also have hands on experience working in very difficult circumstances and can tell some very sad stories from both sides. There is also a black humour amongst the people who have lived in the region for some time. Sadly there is little hope. For every Israeli dead or wounded in the last 60 years there are 10 times as many Arabs. In my experience the Israelis feign a victimhood that has carried down from when the raggle taggle survivors of Nazism arrived to make their home in a country that was already occupied by another people. The moral high ground that those people occupied has long been lost by the current generation of American settlers who arrive with hatred and bigotry in their hearts. If ever you hear a settler, armed with an Uzi and Raybanns, talking about Arabs you will despair of humanity - all settlers are evil. The settlers have even been known to kill Sephardic Jews going about their business because they thought they were Arab terrorists. The Sephardim - Jews from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and the Maghreb etc - are discriminated against in all walks of life. The Sephardim describe the Ashkenazim as Poles and don't like them one bit. The Ashkenazim also despise the Falasha, who are probably more Jewish than they are, but black.

In order to 'whiten' Israel there has been an influx of 1 million Russians and other former Soviet citizens. Anyone who is one quarter Jewish can gain Israeli citizenship and the checks are few - most of east Europe's birth and marriage certificates were destroyed during the war so few people have documentary evidence of their grandparents. I say this, again, from experience of being invited by civic authorities to look round the registry office in the former Polish city of Baranovichy, now in Belarus. The population was 60% Jewish before the war, now they are less than half of one per cent. There are no records pre-1946. The city was typical of those damaged in the holocaust.

These new Israelis do not like anyone with a brown skin (note how many of our own recent east European migrants don't like our coloured population). A few of them have even, in an act of lunacy IMHO, set up anti-Semitic organisations and attacked synagogues and Jewish cemeteries as they're not real Jews at all, but chancers after a better life. These Russians have more rights in Israel than the Israeli Arab citizens who are actively discriminated against - the Balad Party MKs are forever being expelled from the debating chamber for arguing with the representatives of those who want to expand Israel as far as Amman or who want to expel all Arabs from west of the Jordan (it could well happen in our lifetime).

Oddly a lot of older Jews who created the state of Israel are packing up, with their families, and going back to the diaspora, mainly in the USA. There is no point being in a waterless overcrowded bit of desert when the real war breaks out.

The deliberate insertion of 1 million Russians into Israel is set to backfire in a monumental way. Talking to the odd Russian, many of them have claimed Jewish/Israeli citizenship in order to abandon their former Soviet ID. Once they have done that they get priority for immigration into the USA and can bypass the Green Card scheme in a way they could not as unskilled Russian citizens.

Demography is the great game of the West Bank and Gaza. In Lebanon the number of children born to a mother in a refugee camp is down to about 2.4 (IIRC, it's a while since I read the newspaper item in Ha'aretz), in Gaza it is over 8!!! In Israel middle class secular Jewish families (and they all think they're middle class) are down to 1.9 and are no longer replacing themselves. In the settlements the women are having 6 or 7 children as they get more subsidies from Jewish Orthodox charities in the USA (ultra-Orthodox men by and large don't work, but, funded by USA charities, spend their days in the Yeshiva discussing books that have been discussed a million times before). The reality is that Hamas and the ulta-Orthodox are in a breeding race that is squeezing the former secular majority on both sides. The Russians will go as soon as the balloon goes up. The secular and Christian Arabs are already developing large communities as bolt holes in Michigan and Wisconsin. The settlers will not give an inch of land if they can help it, Hamas don't want to give up any more land. There are over 10 million people where there were barely 500,000 60 years ago. There is not enough fresh water to go round (tankers bring water from Turkey). There is not enough land to go round. The Israeli economy receives more overseas aid than all of Africa combined and would disappear if the plug was pulled ($6 billion dollars in non-military aid pa to 6 million Israelis - the highest per capita overseas aid in the world). The Israelis are on their third or fourth currency at present - pound, shekel, new shekel and something else I think, although I could be wrong.

The whole situation is a mess. Less countries recognise Israel than any other state in the world. Without the USA there would be no Israel and the Muslims now outnumber Jewish voters in the USA. The world is moving, but it Israel is not moving with it.

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When in Woking do as the Wokes do.

"I do not wish to form my opinions by thoughtlessly quoting others; I wish others to support their opinions by sensibly quoting me." Paul Wesson (Aardvark) 13th April 2008

The Bear

The influx of Russian Jews certainly has caused huge problems and personally I think they’ve blown the whole thing way off course.

Although I do have tremendous sympathy for Israel it is sympathy based on what I learned as a child about a nation and what was taking place, well, it was about 55 years ago that I took an interest in such things.

So much has changed.

I very much doubt if today Israel would have been established much less underwritten by the UN and I also very much doubt if the Jewish people who fought for the establishment of Israel would have been quite so ready to fight for what has emerged.

Is what emerged a result of what was made to emerge by the actions of the Palestinians? Who can say with any certainty, but whatever the reason, emerge it has.

To be perfectly honest , much as I regret it, I can’t see any solution to the situation in the region that leaves Israel intact.

It’s a conflict that the Israelis simply can’t win.

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I am an old man. I have eaten much salt.