Hamas is now the voice of the Palestinian people. They are the resistance. They are the ones getting props. The clowns running the West Bank should try to smuggle themselves and their money out of there while they still can.

At least the US is a functioning democracy for all.

"Any conversation about the region is now dominated by a string of propaganda myths, he [Gideon Levy] says, and perhaps the most basic is the belief that Israel is a democracy. “Today we have three kinds of people living under Israeli rule,” he explains. “We have Jewish Israelis, who have full democracy and have full civil rights. We have the Israeli Arabs, who have Israeli citizenship but are severely discriminated against. And we have the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, who live without any civil rights, and without any human rights. Is that a democracy?”"

link upthread by Bill Haywood.

the whole thing is an opinion (and tragically wrong, since Israel hasn't annexed the entire West Bank, making the democratic issue irrelevant until a peace agreement is signed. the only reason they are at all under israeli control is because there is no peace agreement).

But, of thousands of journalists in Israel who all say otherwise, why did you pick him as the only one who is telling you the truth? Confirmation bias much?

I sometimes wonder if there's a "journalist" like Gidon Levy in the Palestinian territories, and where he's buried.

They had no problem with Jews the region had been a haven for Jews fleeing from European persecution for hundreds of years. They had a problem with a group of people whose aim was to take their country from them (the Zionists). I'm not sure why you don't understand this.

There was no deal in practice. No-one was prepared to enforce it and the Jewish side had already attacked and occupied areas marked out as Arab in the plan. If there had have been law and order and some enforcement then both sides would have negotiated something with the UN.

No they seem to using the South African "bantustan" model as they appear to want the land but not the people and they do not want to kill all the unwanted people.

By making Egypt run by an independent (ie not American puppet) a relevant player on the world stage and a key part of the mechanism when it comes to the eventual Palestinian state they clearly won. Its not even close.

They didnt lose anything of value, people dont think worse of them, they lost some lives but lives are cheap under Israeli occupation and resisting asymmetrically means you will lose more people than the other side.

Yeah, the UK is very progressive. They actually allowed Jews to become citizens as early as the 1850s, even though they'd only been living there about 600 years. That was well before (well by ~10 years anyways) the US allowed blacks the same rights, too!

Yay England!

Another dagger in the idea that Israel started this "escalation", as well as exposing hypocrisy and partisanship of the UN and its councils.

On at least 20 separate occasions this year, the Israeli government appealed to the UN to take action against Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, in letters sent to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the President of the Security Council.

In the letters, Israel informed the United Nations about repeated instances of rockets fired from Gaza against Israeli civilians, and urged the U.N., at a minimum, to speak out and condemn the attacks.

Not a single response from the UN, cited here and by Israel-haters everywhere - and by political science professors (on 2p2) as well - as impartial arbiters of morality and reason.

Not a single ****ing word.

January 6, 2012
January 31, 2012
March 8, 2012
June 25, 2012
October 12, 2012
November 12, 2012

Funny, about half the number of Palestinians have died in 45 years of "occupation" than the last 18 months in Syria. About half as many has have died in 45 years than in 10 years in Afghanistan, and about 1/10th the number in Iraq since 2003.

So: Syria is under Israeli occupation? Afghanistan? Iraq? Or the teenagers executed in Iran today, were they also under Israeli occupation? Meanwhile, Israel has executed one person in 67 years.

In the arab world, lives are cheap. In Israel, they are valued - whether Jewish, Arab, or otherwise.

Israel derangement syndrome at its finest.

WTF are you talking about? Those people have nothing to do with Palestine and its occupation and domination by Israel.

Their position is that they weren't immigrants, but that they were returning to their actual ancestral home stolen from them back in whatever, 122 AD or something. You keep skipping over that part, but it's fairly important.

586

edit maybe not. i cant be bothered to figure out exactly.

What would Xenu do?

I must say as a general principle it's hard not to call the racial motivations into question of anyone who uses the word "Zionist" routinely.

Is it ? I don't give a monkeys about the country my ancestors from two hundred years ago came from let alone two thousand years. I have no rights there. It belongs to the people who have been there since then.

Seems a little odd to say Israel has the right to exist because they hold their territory with force, while also saying they have the right to be there because another group used force to expel them 2,000 years ago.

okay, adding it to the list of accusations.

israel intentionally murders innocent civilians.
and even if they didn't intentionally murder innocent civilians, they drop bombs indiscriminately on civilians.
and even if they don't drop bombs indiscriminately on civilians, they use white phosphorus bombs to cause extra pain to civilians.
and even if they didn't use white phosphorus bombs to cause extra pain to civilians, they use disproportionate force to reply to attacks.
and even if they didn't use disproportionate force to reply to attacks, they intentionally starve civilians.
and even if they didn't intentionally starve civilians, they force other countries to starve civilians.
and even if they didn't force other countries to starve civilians, they stole other countries' lands.
and even if they didn't steal other countries' lands, they occupy another country.
and even if they don't occupy another country, they steal the land of individual people.
and even if they didn't steal the land of individual people, they torture innocent people.
and even if they didn't torture innocent people, they let "settlers" shoot people.
and even if they didn't let "settlers" shoot people, they run an apartheid state.
and even if they didn't run an apartheid state, they are running a racist state.
and even if they didn't run a racist state, their leaders were racist.
and even if their leaders weren't racist, they colonized others' lands.
and even if they didnt colonize others' lands, they were installed as a proxy for Western powers.
and even if they weren't installed as a proxy for Western powers, they should have stayed where they were in the first place.
and even if they hadn't stayed where they were in the first place, they shouldn't have returned to their historic homeland where their entire history and focus has been for 2000 years.
and even if they had returned to their historic homeland where their entire history and focus has been for 2000 years, they should have not had any rights because they waited too long, so now only arabs have rights.
and even if they didn't wait too long and non-arabs should have rights, they should have just shut up and got slaughtered without asking for help from anyone else.

You do realize Jews from Israel call themselves Zionist?

The European colonisation of Africa could have gone so much...better?... had the Europeans just invoked the "return to homeland" defence.

Also Americans should be really wary of such a doctrine given their own history.

It's about country "ownership". Anyone can buy land in any country eg Israelis could buy some Scottish islands but it would not make them "Israel". They'd still be part of the UK.

But you're not a displaced person. You're a Brit with full citizenship, including a passport and a government that will protect you. The Jews of the 40s had no such luxuries. Most of the world didn't want them and the places that did (sort of) couldn't protect them.

At least we acknowledge it. You're still doing it.

Was it legal for Jews to buy land in Arab states in the 40s?

Do you believe that applies to the majority of posters ITT using it?

I'm referring to the way it's commonly used outside Israel, as in it's use by White Nationalists, Sovereign Citizens, Muslim extremists etc.

I mean, I get it. Some posters here want the Jews out of the region. They have racial motivations behind it.

There were many displaced persons after WW2. Most of them were free to go home and most of them (including Jewish displaced persons) did so. Hitler lost the war and most Jews in Europe were no longer in need of special protection. As for my own situation I have lived through times when I couldn't expect much protecton from racists. I am black and the police used to be pretty racist themselves in the old days.