To feel it is high time that Israel/Palestinian issue got resolved?

[SippyDippy]

conflict us starting up again. I cannot bear another round of children being killed indiscriminately. The super powers would have you believe that it is all oh so very complicated. its not though is it. It is so bloody unfair how those children will keep dying if the status quo is maintained. Something needs to change.

Numbers 33:55 But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your side. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live."

Deuteronomy 1:7 Break camp and advance into the hill country of the Amorites; gotoall the neighboring peoples in the Arabah, in the mountains, in the western foothills, in the Negev and along the seacoast to the land of the Canaanites and to Lebanon, as far as the great river, the Euphrates. See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore he would give to your fathers"

deuteronomy 6:10 ..to give you a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of hings you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant"

Deuteronomy 7 When the Lord your G-d brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations - the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you - and when the Lord your G-d has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.

It certainly is high time that the issue got resolved, but with the US effectively handing Israel a blank cheque and refusing to condemn anything they do except in the faintest and most apologetic of terms, it's unlikely to happen any time soon.

Israel has not started any of the conflicts and only defends itself.

Hilarious.

How would I feel if I were Israeli? I'd move back to NYC.

Actually, Carol, Jordan has given citizenship to plenty of Palestinians - even the Queen is from a Palestinian family!

The reason no Arab states will take any more Palestinians is because they see that as bowing to the Israeli wish to take all of Palestine for itself. So where are they supposed to go once settlers come and kick them out of their homes or deny them a living by making it impossible to harvest their olives? Perhaps, Carol, you think they should just shuffle off into a hole and die?

Israel has far exceeded what it was offered originally. There is no excuse for that. And the silly trick of labelling any criticism of Israel as "anti-semitism" is getting very old. There are plenty of Jewish people who will criticise the way Israel has behaved towards the Palestinians. Are they anti-semitic as well?

Anyone seen what is going on in Israel this week? Anyone seen the person with a knife in the back of their head, anyone heard about the stabbings in Israel? Anyone heard about the couple murdered in their beds last week? Thought not. What's going on in Gaza is terrible but to think that nothing is happening in Israel is not correct but nobody wants to hear about Israeli suffering or Jewish deaths.

www.imemc.org/article/73371

YouTube removed the bideo

carol has seriously lost the plot and lives in a deluded lala land like most of the Israeli population i guess. 'Only defends itself'. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahhahahahahahahahhahahha

It is heartening to see so much more support for the Palestinians. Not long ago, they were all painted as terrorists, many people still would like the world to believe this today. There are parallels between apartheid south Africa and palestine today. What's shocking is that so many would like to see that status quo maintained. We need to be able to break this status quo. We can start small. Boycott israeli/settlement produce until they give human rights to Palestinians. We can write to MPs. Small steps but it could gather momentum and have an impact no matter how small.

This thread gives me hope in some ways. After the typical responses expected there are people who can see past the white wash our media gives on the issue (it took me years to see past it myself which is why it makes me so angry). Yet still people make assumptions about you from your opinion on one topic - I am neither anti-semitic nor pro-muslim. I am anti-apartheid and anti-oppression. I have friends who are Israeli. I don't know any Palestinians because they are blockaded in Gaza being showered with bullets....

There was a thread some months ago about Natalie Portman suggesting that the Jewish community needs to move on from the Holocaust. It was very interesting.

A lot of people said that the Holocaust had no real comparison in terms of the horror and scale (which is vast, for certain) and that this was why we have a rotation of Diary of Ann Frank on television, various holocaust memorials & museums, holocaust memorial days, and so on. This is particularly true in the USA.

When the extermination of the Native Americans and Africans/slave trade was raised as a parallel that in fact far exceeds the holocaust in its scale, then various people said that really it's not about the numbers after all, it's crude to compare death tolls, human suffering can't be counted, etc.

Which brings me to my point - that Israel can't exist in its current state unless they and their supporters constantly remind us about the Holocaust and accuse anyone who would criticise the regime of anti-semitism. It's a very good thing for us to always remain mindful of the horrors of our ancestors - sadly, the Holocaust is only the tip of the iceberg.

Aren't the Israelis illegally occupying (under international law) land that should belong to the Palestinians? They should withdraw from that land and give it back to the Palestinians (I know that's never going to happen).
I too can never see this issue being resolved. It makes the problems in Northern Ireland look trivial in comparison.

Any Israeli can just go and take a persons home away. They can literally throw a Palestinian family out and claim the land. This has been happening for decades

And people wonder why the Palestinians are so angry. Yes there have been stabbings. Yes it's horrible but when you are treated as less than human (just as the Jewish people themselves were..sigh) as nothing but flesh sacks needing to be annihilated why wouldn't you behave that way and go and stab some people in anger?

Oh god I said I wouldn't post anymore and keep
Getting sucked back in

Higginbottom: And the extent of the collaboration too - eg IG Farben, ratlines etc. It was all about establishing slave labour states - the perpetrators did not care what religion the victims were and they themselves were from a variety of religions. And they're still at it.

The solution is simple. We (the YOO-SA) need to stop arming these guys unless they abide by our rules. If US soldiers did half the shit they did would (and have!) been thrown in jail for it.

I'm sure once the ammo runs out, they'll have to resort to this crazy thing called negotiation and set up trade agreements to keep peace. But apparently we need them because drilling for oil in Alaska is bad or something.

Soldiers are cheap, oil is expensive. Sending them over keeps up the profits. We'll keep killing off our children to save a few cents on petrol, while spoon feeding them these stories about how they're defending "freedom".

I have just read the most enlightening book - The Other Side of Israel by Susan Nathan. Susan is a British Jew who decided to go live in Israel after a relationship breakdown. She was a committed Zionist who fully supported the Jewish right to return. The book tells how she became increasingly uncomfortable with the way Palestinians were treated, and gives a fascinating insight into how Israelis are shielded from what is really happening.

A particularly upsetting part is when she describes the Israeli army conscripts. These are just kids, 17/18 years old, who are put in the invidious position of "defending" Israel. Good, well brought up kids taught to hate.

I felt I gained a greater understanding of why both sides are so entrenched. Made me very pessimistic that a solution is at all close. so very, very sad - and we support this by misspelling the story and arming the military.

Mistelling not misspelling!

The truth is that we will happily justify apartheid if there is economic and/or political gain in it. Even our current generation of parlimentarians includes people who defended apartheid in South Africa. This is no different, except that for geopolitical reasons the Israeli state has more powerful allies than the South Africans did.

This is another foreign policy issue on which Corbyn is right btw - though much good it will do him, as even his party has its shade of apartheid deniers.

Olly that sounds like a really interesting book, thanks for the recommendation.

I have indeed got the impression that, within Israeli society, people are hugely subjected to propaganda. I grew up partially in apartheid South Africa and it was much the same, right down to the two-year military conscription which took teenagers, exposed them to dreadful violence and absolutely brain-washed them.
Add to that a narrative where a group of people are being told that they are in terrible danger and what is being done, is being done to ensure their very existence, and one can understand how very ordinary people live in a society that is behaving monstrously, and condone the state's actions.

The other issue as I see it, and someone did allude to it earlier in the thread, is the huge collective trauma of the Holocaust. Again there are parallels with South Africa and what was done to the Afrikaner nation during the Boer War.

I have absolutely no belief in a two-state solution being viable at this point. I don't think there's enough Palestinian land left for one thing. For over fifteen years I've thought that a one-state solution is the only answer in the region, and I'm saddened that attitudes in Israel have progressively hardened in that time period making it seem even more of an impossibility than it did then.

Slaggy I absolutely agree with everything you say.

History is a very distorting lens. When I started my professional career, in the early 1990s in a business with South African links, many people in the UK were still against "negotiating with terrorists" ie the ANC as represented by Nelson Mandela.

Mandela has since been raised to sainthood, even though the movement he represented included its fair share of terrorists and killers - the African nationalist movement was never just Mandela and Tutu. But that didn't make negotiating with them a bad thing, and it doesn't make negotiating with the representatives of Palestinian groups a bad thing either - though you will be crucified for saying so, as Corbyn has been.