JackRiddler wrote:From another thread - I've already lost track which one:
compared2what? wrote:17breezes wrote:smiths wrote:i will excuse your complete ignorance of the point barracuda and put it down to feeling a little on the defensive yourself
to simplify it for you,
israel is a 'jewish' state (a racial designation which is pretty fucking flimsy)
It's actually a religious designation, which is pretty fucking flimsy.
smiths wrote:there are a pre-existing non-jewish population who are living in prison camps
Where?
They live in something very close to prison camps in Lebanon. Which also doesn't allow them citizenship, restricts their movements, and forbids them from working in some jobs, and so forth, although many of them were born and have lived in Lebanon all their lives. Nevertheless. There are checkpoints and, I'm sure, lots of petty harassment and degradation by Lebanese guards on a daily basis, and so on. But the difference between "prison" and "not prison" is pretty significant. As just about anyone who's ever even visited one always says. And as far as I know, while the Palestinians in Lebanon live...[url=http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=341060#p341060][
rest of blather by me here, if anyone cares].
c2w?, every single thing you say here is a) true and b) important. ("Including, notably, Turkey.")
Thank you. I was trying to keep a lid on it, because, you know: Poor smiths, it's not due to his weakness that I can't leave simplicity alone, but to mine. Why should he end up paying for it?
But since you bring it up:
I didn't just mean the Armenian genocide that Turkey denies committing and bribes the United States congress not to acknowledge. Presumably so that it can continue to occupy most of historic Armenia. Just as it's done since, oh, around 1918, when -- according to Turkey -- the Armenians just walked off it. And totally without being massacred of long-marched to death, too, no matter what every non-Turkish historian on the planet says to the contrary. Quite amazing.
Though I was thinking of that, of course.
But besides that, chance being a fine thing, Turkey too has a blockade going against the less powerful peoples they've been fighting with on and off since the end of World War One. Because they and Azerbaijan have had a blockade going on Armenia since
1994.
Which ain't no small thing, since Armenia (like Turkey) has no natural gas or oil resources of its own. And it looks to me like when (or if, but I'm betting on "when") the Armenians do end up having to say "Uncle" and make various humiliating concessions and what-not in order to start getting gas and oil from the Azerbaijanis again, it's probably actually going to find itself going hat in hand to get them from Turkey.
Because Turkey has spent the last 16 years building pipelines and railroads and so on that take a sharp detour south at the point that they'd otherwise be going through Armenia. Which presently lives with all the of nuclear-health risks (and probably health consequences, though I don't actually know) you'd expect in any country that relied entirely on an ancient Armenian nuclear power plant to meet its energy needs.
To say nothing of their treatment of the Kurds. Who -- seriously -- probably have as much right to be where they are as any ethnic class anywhere on the planet earth the map of which was re-drawn to suit the British and French following the War That Not Only Didn't End All Wars But Which Is Still Being Fought In Quite a Few Places To This Very Day. Including Gaza and the West Bank. Though not as purely there as elsewhere.
Anyway. Poor Kurds. They've been preexisting in the same place since late antiquity. Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria should just give it back to them, imo. It's not like they haven't earned it.
Nevertheless, I feel you're leaving out the differences that make Israel the object of such passion, pro and con. Differences that I know you are aware of, some of which you have at times mentioned in your other comments:
- A colonial, expansionist project in the European imperialist mold, which acquired a mini-empire outside its original borders and plays the attack-dog role in a larger US-UK decades-long assault on the most strategically imporant region in the worldwide struggle for power.
YES. EXACTLY.
What happens in the Congo or China is sometimes worse as atrocity (or at any rate, larger-scale as atrocity), but tends not to be as destabilizing on a world scale. It's also the difference between expansion and cross-border aggression, as opposed to possibly even worse crime within a state's established borders.
- Nuclear weapons in the hands of a state that still won't admit to it and just doesn't seem rational in its responses. I'd trust Iran or possibly even North Korea to take deterrence doctrine (mutual assured destruction) more seriously than I do Israel.
Yep. That has a lot to do with why my first response was a fear-the-follow-up OMG-WHAT-IF-THIS-MEANS-WAR-(WITH IRAN). Because it might not. But it could. Anyway. YES. I AGREE..
You may attribute this to their own conscious use of "mad dog" rhetoric (as Nixon coined it). They seem to want it to sound like they're ready to use nuclear weapons in a preventive war - and fuck what the world thinks, you got a problem? It's not so easy to distinguish between "mad dog" strategy and actual mad dog.
- The claims as a democratic state, widely disseminated and emphasized. Is Israel "held to a higher standard"? Yes, as the powerful and "advanced" tend to be.
And should be.
If they claim moral superiority, they tend to be judged by that standard. In the US, Israel is held up as a role model. You and I living where we do have been hearing about it all around us our whole lives, as a very, very good and noble country under siege from very, very barbaric forces. If that hadn't been the case, the reaction wouldn't be as great.
That isn't at all what I heard growing up, actually. Though it's not that far off what I can remember hearing before, maybe, the late '60s.
But....We lived in the Middle East when I was very little. So we had (Arab) friends from all over it visiting pretty regularly thenceforth. As well as (Jewish) friends, of course. One or two of whom, much to the world's disadvantage, contributed quite a bit to what later became the playbook used by Bush-Cheney.
So mostly I heard a lot of heated discussions. To put it mildly. And constantly, too. In fact, if an evil elf had appeared on my 18th birthday to announce that (due to a curse laid upon me in the cradle) I either had to chose a single subject about which I never wanted to hear another single word or die horribly, I would have said "Middle Eastern politics" before he got any further than "or." To be quite candid with you.
- For me, most of all: its special role in the US....
YES.
The military aid, the Security Council vetoes, the semi-sacred status, the difficulty and costs of deviating from the official line in the US media. We don't pay for Chinese crimes out of our taxes (though we have of course for Indonesian crimes, though not as much). No one in the US media has ever lost their job or had to apologize for telling outrageous lies about Venezuela, or Iraqi WMDs. Remember this is a mostly North American/Anglosphere discussion board.
- Hasbara. If you condemn the other states you mention for their crimes, it isn't usually going to attract a persistent counter-attack coupled to accusations that you are some kind of racist. This gets a merry-go-round of overheated rhetoric going.
I know.
Because for one thing, I understand and share that emotional response.
And for another, I understand that most people everywhere of every race, creed, color, nationality, class and temperament all over the world not only don't have any political mode other than emotional response, but also genuinely neither feel the need nor see the point of ever employing any other.
Including me, when you get right down to it. It's just that a very large part of my emotional response to all bad news of any kind, even if it's just a local news forecast including possible thunderstorms, is a haunted sense of personal responsibility...
- The mutual reinforcement (or is it a satanic pact?) between the pro-Israeli lobby and the worst elements of US imperialism. See: PNAC. Also between the pro-Israeli lobby and the worst of the Christian fundamentalists.
None of which detracts from the truth of any given thing you've said above, which is one reason I quote -- not merely to critique, but also to re-emphasize your own points.
...which in this case I'd say couldn't be more fully rationally justified. Assuming that you are, as I am, an American citizen. Because even though Israel rarely does what the United States wants or tells it to do via official public channels (and also breaks the deep-political-covenant rules of its own accord when it feels like it, just as it did when it was Britain's problem infant), it's still very much our baby.
Exactly as it has been in totally plain sight since before I or most of the posters here were even born. And to the best of my knowledge, we've never stopped (literally) supporting it in the lavish style to which it's long since become accustomed.
And not at any point, as far as I'm aware. I mean, we never gave it so much as a time-out after it committed its first, second, third, or thirtieth juvenile offense, back in the days when it was still just the spoiled little sociopathic teen thug that we raised it to be by design.
Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has the state of Israel ever lost a cent of its stipend for shrugging off whatever token gentle-guidance-style rules we've occasionally gotten it to promise to abide by in its long and thuggish sociopathic adulthood. And it probably wouldn't matter all that much even if it had.
Because through us -- "us" in this context being the through-official-channels "us" that tentatively lays down a little whisp of law every now and again -- it's grown to be so very close to all the numerous black-sheep super-rich (mostly) American uncles that occupy positions of permanent power, either in American finance and in (or near) the nastier and less visible corners of the apparatus of state or (as in Richard Perle's case, briefly) both that it could always hit them up for a few nukes and sundries until the next pay-out from its trust came due.
Which is not in any way to say that Israel isn't guilty to the highest degree of guilt possible for its actions. It's an adult, so to speak, it knows perfectly well what it's doing.
But you know what? I'm an adult too. I pay taxes. And the U.S. has been spoiling Israel rotten with taxpayer money since before I was born. And, like Israel, I know perfectly well what I'm doing. Which means that I know perfectly well that every benefit I've ever enjoyed as an American citizen was drenched in Palestinian blood, or Indonesian blood, or Guatemalan blood, or whatever.
Another thing I know perfectly well is that like all white Americans who aren't desperately and chronically poor and abused -- such as perhaps, some of you -- I've lived the whole of my adult life in what's still just barely enough of a democracy that the people of, for and by which it's governed could exercise their right to govern it in some way that took a little more effort than being pissed off does.
You know. Like maybe on those occasions when -- once in a way -- an unconscionable crime in which they could easily have discovered they'd been implicated for the whole of their lives at any point over the last sixty years struck them as important enough to require that kind of thing.
I mean,
obviously, I don't have answers. And equally obviously, I too have regularly pointed my finger at Israel. And still do point my finger at Israel. But given that it's been decades since I kind of couldn't help noticing that my hand was covered in blood when I did that -- and it strikes me as beyond dispute that my responsibilities definitely extend to the cleanliness of my own hands -- it's been decades since I've done it for any other reason than that, pragmatically speaking, identifying a problem is a necessary prerequisite to resolving it.
Usually by going on to work as hard as you can to understand and address it, to the best of your ability to do so. And usually not by becoming so intolerant of complete strangers on the internet that you rally group consensus to declare them vicious and amoral non-people.
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"Best of ability to do so" is a very limited thing in my case. Just as I imagine it is for every other lone individual on earth, though I can only really speak for myself, as a weak-ass and ineffective bitch. But speaking in that capacity, if I may, what I have to say about that dilemma is:
That's a shame, but no reason to stop, Because between shame and tragedy is exactly how it will stay forever and ever and ever (while wars rage on until the planet is nothing but radioactive dust) for as long as most people everywhere remain uninterested in having any political response beyond an emotional one. IMO.
So basically, when I recur to history as much as I've boringly been doing, that's ultimately the point that I'm doing such an incredibly bad job in attempting to make.
Because you only have to look at American wars and/or American-backed wars of the last two decades to see that we're still not only still fighting World War One, we've been escalating it consistently at least since the Balkan peace-keeping non-war, to choose a nice familar and clear-cut example.
Although the Soviet-Afghani war works just as well, if you feel like going back further than that. As does every single war in the modern Middle East, the immediate post-WWI era being when the modern Middle East -- including what eventually became Israel -- got drawn up and parceled out.
And why and how could it be that the War to End All Wars never ended and nobody noticed, you might ask?
Well.
I don't actually know. But I guess that I'd say that it's in part because some people -- for example, people who have been damaged or still are being damaged by war, poverty and oppression -- usually can't get over their emotions. Which is a no-fault-attached fact of life within very wide parameters, afaic. Because, as I said in some other post, that shit lasts for generations in the best of circumstances, such as a free and prosperous society. Which is a luxury that most people in the modern Middle East haven't had for any significant length of time.
Though as I also said, Israel could have and should have started getting over itself in 1967. They had the resources. I mean, they also should have had some pretty forceful encouragement for using them from their more clear-sighted-and-distant friends, of course. But they hang out with a bad crowd -- ie, us -- and they've had plenty of time in which they weren't being too badly traumatized by anything that was objectively happening to realize that and do the right thing about it. Which they haven't even made much of a pretense of trying to do.
But anyway. Obviously, as a general rule, you can't and shouldn't ask people who are killing or being killed or witnessing one or the other or both of those things on a regular basis and their immediate descendants not to have such strong feelings about it. Because whoever and wherever they are, they're people. And that's no way to treat people.
That said, in my view, all American citizens who are saying either "Fuck Israel" or (implicitly) "Hamas is a vile, primitive and savage group that knows no reason, punishment is the only thing they understand" or "I cannot continue to post to a board on which a small minority does not honor and respect the righteousness of my temper tantrum" should grow the fuck up.
Because, as JackR says, you're fucking talking about something that might be a nuclear war. As well as something that's already plenty bad enough without that prospect. In short, something much more serious than you could possibly have tried very hard to understand if any of those responses strike you as righteous. In addition to which, although it's not about you in the way that you seem to feel that it is, it is about you. So get over it.
I say all of that with love and understanding. Believe it or not.
Including the understanding that it doesn't make either what I just said or me any more likable than if I'd said it out of spite. But whatever. I do my level best, even if it's not that good. Same as everybody here, I know.
But fwiw, that's my opinion. And I'm now done with this thread. I think. Unless anyone has raised an issue with me I haven't seen yet that deserves a reply. Which I doubt anyone has.
Because, you know. tl; dr.
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Alice, as you know, I don't and can't agree with your honest conviction that the United States is controlled by its Zionist overlords. I've read your case for it many times, and I encourage you to continue making it. I respect your views. But I don't share them. Out of my own honest convictions, based on the best information available to me to the best of my ability to understand it. So please don't be hurt, shocked or outraged. I want what you want. I just see the situation from a different perspective. Our differences aren't any more substantial than that from my point of view. And, I hope, yours.
Although if not, speak your mind. I wouldn't want you to do anything else.