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Do you consider Israel a good country

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Do you consider Israel a good country

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Harabec said:
OMG pics of a NORMAL LIFE!!! I'm about to FAINT OMGOMGOMG...
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Run into a Palenstinian homeless boy begging for cake? They must be very hard on the eyes and mind! Go get some of your precious clean and fresh water piped into your arid country and exclusive to your area!
 
Harabec said:
OMG pics of a NORMAL LIFE!!!
I'm about to FAINT OMGOMGOMG...
Click to expand...
Yeah, never mind the drivel.

Or are we doing serious history here?
If you cannot reply to post 90, that's fine. If it involves just too much reading, just put your hands up.
I promise not to shoot you like a defenceless Palestinian kid.

If you can, have a word with uncle Shlomo, or your pals in Mark Regev's office, and and try to cobble something together.
Not for me, for Israel...
I'll be waiting...
 
There's no serious history here, just another way to delegitimize the idea of Israel and everything it does. I could go on and on about how our reality (on both sides of the conflict) is not as shallow and one-sided as people want it to be for the purpose of debate, and then someone will quote some random convo from decades ago like it is our current policy and what everyone here believes in.
Not going to play your game, perhaps others will.
 
Israel is an abomination. There was no good justification for the creation of that state. And ever since its creation it has taken a constant infusion of billions in US tax dollars to keep it alive. As long as Israel as a state exists, and acts the way it does, it will feed anti-semitism until the hate breaks out into another holocaust. With all the tax dollars feeding into this, it could be even worse than the last one. If a world war breaks out, with Israel at the epicenter, then people all around the world are going to hate jews, for generations.
 
sm625 said:
Israel is an abomination. There was no good justification for the creation of that state. And ever since its creation it has taken a constant infusion of billions in US tax dollars to keep it alive. As long as Israel as a state exists, and acts the way it does, it will feed anti-semitism until the hate breaks out into another holocaust. With all the tax dollars feeding into this, it could be even worse than the last one. If a world war breaks out, with Israel at the epicenter, then people all around the world are going to hate jews, for generations.
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The US did not start support of Israel until after the '67 war.
And had the Soviets not been supporting the Arab side, support at that point may not have happened from the US government itself.
 
The original supporters of the Israelites were the Europeans like the French and the British. They stopped supporting the Israelites about the same time we started to pick up the slack in supporting the country.
 
sm625 said:
Israel is an abomination. There was no good justification for the creation of that state. And ever since its creation it has taken a constant infusion of billions in US tax dollars to keep it alive. As long as Israel as a state exists, and acts the way it does, it will feed anti-semitism until the hate breaks out into another holocaust. With all the tax dollars feeding into this, it could be even worse than the last one. If a world war breaks out, with Israel at the epicenter, then people all around the world are going to hate jews, for generations.
Click to expand...

my understanding is that Israel was created because the Jews returning home to Germany and Poland after WW2 were facing extreme violence/threats when trying to reclaim their old property/businesses... the European solution was to dump all the Jews on a patch of desert no one else seemed to want, fulfilling a promise actually made after WW1.
 
loki8481 said:
my understanding is that Israel was created because the Jews returning home to Germany and Poland after WW2 were facing extreme violence/threats when trying to reclaim their old property/businesses... the European solution was to dump all the Jews on a patch of desert no one else seemed to want, fulfilling a promise actually made after WW1.
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That had nothing to do with why Israel was created as some country. The Jews were already immigrating to the near east in the early 20th century and attempting to reclaim it as well as attacking both the Arabs and the British. Facts I am sure are lost on the American understanding of history. The fact is Israel was already on the path towards statehood regardless of the Nazis and the Holocaust. World War 2 just cemented further the creation of the Israeli country.
 
Harabec said:
There's no serious history here.
Click to expand...

Certainly not from your side. You seem strong on opinions but very low on supporting evidence. You are clearly not a ranting Zionist bigot like Joda but if you cannot discuss your own nation's history on a discussion board topic where such history is central to the topic in hand, then what is your purpose here?

My post 90, was intended to elicit a rational exchange of views. You reject that invitation, fine, your choice.

But the inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that you cannot offer a rebuttal of the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"(2006), despite your claim that he is not to be trusted.

To reiterate, Pappe uses official IDF files in his book. These detail how and where Jewish forces drove Palestinians from their homes in 1947/48, in the weeks before the end of the Mandate.
Are you saying that the both Pappe and the IDF's own records are in error?

Or is it all too much effort?
 
loki8481 said:
my understanding is that Israel was created because the Jews returning home to Germany and Poland after WW2 were facing extreme violence/threats when trying to reclaim their old property/businesses... the European solution was to dump all the Jews on a patch of desert no one else seemed to want, fulfilling a promise actually made after WW1.
Click to expand...

That is an oft-repeated simplification that is very popular in the USA. It incorporates errors of history with the old Zionist myth, propagated by Theo Husserl and others, that Palestine was a "land without a people, waiting for a people without a land".
But there is one truth in your brief account, and that is that Jews were told by Lord Balfour in 1917 that Britain would look favourably on a homeland for Jews in Palestine, provided that such a development would not infringe the rights of those already there. Strangely, that proviso is always left out from modern debate.

Any history of modern Israel must begin with Russian anti-Semitism in the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century (1880-1900). A good early source is "The Persecution of the Jews of Russia" Pub. Wertheimer, 1890. London.

If you wish to know more about the history of how Palestine was lost and Israel came into being, try some of the following books:-
Avi Shlaim “Israel and Palestine” (2009)
Ilan Pappe “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” (2006)
Karl Sabbagh “The British in Palestine 1917-1948. (2002)
Victor Kattan “From Coexistence to Conquest:International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949”(2009)

Norseamd has also offered some guidance
.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_people

Genetic analysis suggests that a majority of the Muslims of Palestine, inclusive of Arab citizens of Israel, are descendants of Christians, Jews and other earlier inhabitants of the southern Levant whose core may reach back to prehistoric times. A study of high-resolution haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Israeli Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool.[31] Since the time of the Muslim conquests in the 7th century, religious conversions have resulted in Palestinians being predominantly Sunni Muslim by religious affiliation, though there is a significant Palestinian Christian minority of various Christian denominations, as well as Druze and a small Samaritan community. Though Palestinian Jews made up part of the population of Palestine prior to the creation of the State of Israel, few identify as "Palestinian" today. Acculturation, independent from conversion to Islam, resulted in Palestinians being linguistically and culturally Arab.[16] The vernacular of Palestinians, irrespective of religion, is the Palestinian dialect of Arabic. Many Arab citizens of Israel including Palestinians are bilingual and fluent in Hebrew.
The history of a distinct Palestinian national identity is a disputed issue amongst scholars.[32] Legal historian Assaf Likhovski states that the prevailing view is that Palestinian identity originated in the early decades of the 20th century.[32] "Palestinian" was used to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by the Arabs of Palestine in a limited way until World War I.[20][21] The first demand for national independence of the Levant was issued by the Syrian–Palestinian Congress on 21 September 1921.[33] After the creation of the State of Israel, the exodus of 1948, and more so after the exodus of 1967, the term came to signify not only a place of origin, but also the sense of a shared past and future in the form of a Palestinian state.[20] According to Rashid Khalidi, the modern Palestinian people now understand their identity as encompassing the heritage of all ages from biblical times up to the Ottoman period.[34]
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DNA and genetic studies

In recent years, many genetic studies have demonstrated that, at least paternally, most of the various Jewish ethnic divisions and the Palestinians – and in some cases other Levantines – are genetically closer to each other than the Palestinians or European Jews to non-Jewish Europeans.[111]
One DNA study by Nebel found genetic evidence in support of historical records that "part, or perhaps the majority" of Muslim Palestinians descend from "local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD".[111] They also found substantial genetic overlap between Muslim Palestinians and Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, though with some significant differences that might be explainable by the geographical isolation of the Jews and by immigration of Arab tribes in the first millennium.[111]
In a genetic study of Y-chromosomal STRs in two populations from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area: Christian and Muslim Palestinians showed genetic differences. The majority of Palestinian Christians (31.82%) were a subclade of E1b1b, followed by G2a (11.36%), and J1 (9.09%). The majority of Palestinian Muslims were haplogroup J1 (37.82%) followed by E1b1b (19.33%), and T (5.88%). The study sample consisted of 44 Palestinian Christians and 119 Palestinian Muslims.[112]
In a 2003 genetic study, Bedouins showed the highest rates (62.5%) of the subclade Haplogroup J-M267 among all populations tested, followed by Palestinian Arabs (38.4%), Iraqis (28.2%), Ashkenazi Jews (14.6%) and Sephardic Jews (11.9%), according to Semino et al.[113] Semitic populations, including Jews, usually possess an excess of J1 Y chromosomes compared to other populations harboring Y-haplogroup J.[113][114][115][116][117]
According to a 2011 study by Balanovsky et al., Haplogroup J-M267 is actually most populous in the Northeastern Caucasus region of Dagestan with the highest frequency in Kubachi (99%), followed by Kaitak (85%), and Dargins (69%).[118]
The haplogroup J1, the ancestor of subclade M267, originates south of the Levant and was first disseminated from there into Ethiopia and Europe in Neolithic times. In Jewish populations, J1 has a rate of around 15%, with haplogroup J2 (M172) (of eight sub-Haplogroups) being almost twice as common as J1 among Jews (<29%). J1 is most common in the southern Levant, as well as Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and Arabia, and drops sharply at the border of non-semitic areas like Turkey and Iran. A second diffusion of the J1 marker took place in the 7th century CE when Arabians brought it from Arabia to North Africa.[113]
Haplogroup J1 (Y-DNA) includes the modal haplotype of the Galilee Arabs[111] and of Moroccan Arabs[119] and the sister Modal Haplotype of the Cohanim, the "Cohan Modale Haplotype", representing the descendents of the priestly caste Aaron.[120][121][122] J2 is known to be related to the ancient Greek movements and is found mainly in Europe and the central Mediterranean (Italy, the Balkans, Greece).
According to a 2010 study by Behar et al. titled "The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people", some Palestinians tested clustered genetically close to Bedouins, Jordanians and Saudi Arabians which could indicate a common ancestry or some recent ancestral influx from the Arabian Peninsula.[123]
A study found that the Palestinians, like Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, Turks, and Kurds have what appears to be Female-Mediated gene flow in the form of Maternal DNA Haplogroups from Sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 117 Palestinian individuals tested, 15 carried maternal haplogroups that originated in Sub-Saharan Africa. These results are consistent with female migration from eastern Africa into Near Eastern communities within the last few thousand years. There have been many opportunities for such migrations during this period. However, the most likely explanation for the presence of predominantly female lineages of African origin in these areas is that they may trace back to women brought from Africa as part of the Arab slave trade, assimilated into the areas under Arab rule as a result of miscegenation and manumission.[124]
A 2013 study of Haber and et al. found that "The predominantly Muslim populations of Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians cluster on branches with other Muslim populations as distant as Morocco and Yemen." The authors explained that "religious affiliation had a strong impact on the genomes of the Levantines. In particular, conversion of the region's populations to Islam appears to have introduced major rearrangements in populations' relations through admixture with culturally similar but geographically remote populations leading to genetic similarities between remarkably distant populations." The authors also reconstructed the genetic structure of pre-Islamic Levant and found that "it was more genetically similar to Europeans than to Middle Easterners."[125]

Arabian origins of local Bedouin

The local Bedouins of Palestine originate from the Arabian Peninsula and speak a distinct variety of Arabic.[126] Arabic onomastic elements began to appear in Edomite inscriptions starting in the 6th century BC and the inscriptions of the Nabataeans who arrived in today’s Jordan in the 4th-3rd centuries BC.[127]
A few Bedouin are found as far north as Galilee; however, these seem to be much later arrival, rather than descendants of the Arabs that Sargon II settled in Samaria in 720 BC. The term "Arab", as well as the presence of Arabs in the Syrian Desert and the Fertile Crescent, is first seen in the Assyrian sources from the 9th century BCE (Eph'al 1984).[128]
Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant by the Arab Muslim Rashiduns, the formerly dominant languages of the area, Aramaic and Greek, were replaced by the Arabic language introduced by the new conquering administrative minority.[129] Among the cultural survivals from pre-Islamic times are the significant Palestinian Christian community, and smaller Jewish and Samaritan ones, as well as an Aramaic and possibly Hebrew sub-stratum in the local Palestinian Arabic dialect.[130][page needed]

Samaritan descent in Nablus

Much of the local Palestinian population in Nablus is believed to be descended from Samaritans who converted to Islam.[131] Even today, certain Nabulsi surnames including Muslimani, Yaish, and Shakshir among others, are associated with a Samaritan origin.[131]
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Caravaggio said:
Certainly not from your side. You seem strong on opinions but very low on supporting evidence. You are clearly not a ranting Zionist bigot like Joda but if you cannot discuss your own nation's history on a discussion board topic where such history is central to the topic in hand, then what is your purpose here?

My post 90, was intended to elicit a rational exchange of views. You reject that invitation, fine, your choice.

But the inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that you cannot offer a rebuttal of the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"(2006), despite your claim that he is not to be trusted.

To reiterate, Pappe uses official IDF files in his book. These detail how and where Jewish forces drove Palestinians from their homes in 1947/48, in the weeks before the end of the Mandate.
Are you saying that the both Pappe and the IDF's own records are in error?

Or is it all too much effort?
Click to expand...

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/refugees.html

The Palestinian Refugees:
History & Overview

by Mitchell Bard
(Updated May 2013)

The Exodus of 1947-48


The Palestinians left their homes in 1947-48 for a variety of reasons. Thousands of wealthy Arabs left in anticipation of a war, thousands more responded to Arab leaders' calls to get out of the way of the advancing armies, a handful were expelled, but most simply fled to avoid being caught in the cross fire of a battle. Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 UN resolution, not a single Palestinian would have become a refugee and an independent Arab state would now exist beside Israel.

The beginning of the Arab exodus can be traced to the weeks immediately following the announcement of the UN partition resolution. The first to leave were roughly 30,000 wealthy Arabs who anticipated the upcoming war and fled to neighboring Arab countries to await its end. Less affluent Arabs from the mixed cities of Palestine moved to all-Arab towns to stay with relatives or friends.

All of those who left fully anticipated being able to return to their homes after an early Arab victory, as Palestinian nationalist Aref el-Aref explained in his history of the 1948 war:


The Arabs thought they would win in less than the twinkling of an eye and that it would take no more than a day or two from the time the Arab armies crossed the border until all the colonies were conquered and the enemy would throw down his arms and cast himself on their mercy.

By the end of January1948, the exodus was so alarming the Palestine Arab Higher Committee asked neighboring Arab countries to refuse visas to these refugees and to seal the borders against them.

Meanwhile, Jewish leaders urged the Arabs to remain in Palestine and become citizens of Israel. The Assembly of Palestine Jewry issued this appeal on October 2, 1947:


We will do everything in our power to maintain peace, and establish a cooperation gainful to both [Jews and Arabs]. It is now, here and now, from Jerusalem itself, that a call must go out to the Arab nations to join forces with Jewry and the destined Jewish State and work shoulder to shoulder for our common good, for the peace and progress of sovereign equals.

On November 30, the day after the UN partition vote, the Jewish Agency announced: “The main theme behind the spontaneous celebrations we are witnessing today is our community's desire to seek peace and its determination to achieve fruitful cooperation with the Arabs....“

Israel's Proclamation of Independence, issued May 14, 1948, also invited the Palestinians to remain in their homes and become equal citizens in the new state:


In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions....We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all.

Caught in the Middle


Throughout the period that preceded the May 15 invasion of the Arab regular armies, large-scale military engagements, incessant sniping, robberies and bombings took place. In view of the thousands of casualties that resulted from the pre-invasion violence, it is not surprising that many Arabs would have fled out of fear for their lives.

The second phase of the Arab flight began after the Jewish forces started to register military victories against Arab irregulars. Among the victories were the battles for Tiberias and Haifa, which were accompanied by the evacuation of the Arab inhabitants.

A newly released British document indicates officials were aware of the reason Palestinians were fleeing:


The [Palestine] Arabs have suffered a series of overwhelming defeats….Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands. It is now obvious that the only hope of regaining their position lies in the regular armies of the Arab states (Barry Rubin, “How the Palestinians Trap Themselves and Drag the West Along,” PJ Media, (May 5, 2013).

On January 30, 1948, the Jaffa newspaper, Ash Sha'ab, reported: “The first of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere....At the first signs of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle.”

Another Jaffa paper, As Sarih (March 30, 1948) excoriated Arab villagers near Tel Aviv for “bringing down disgrace on us all by 'abandoning the villages.“

John Bagot Glubb, the commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, said: “Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war” (London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948).

Jewish forces seized Tiberias on April 19, 1948, and the entire Arab population of 6,000 was evacuated under British military supervision. The Jewish Community Council issued a statement afterward: “We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course....Let no citizen touch their property.”

In early April, an estimated 25,000 Arabs left the Haifa area following an offensive by the irregular forces led by Fawzi al*Qawukji, and rumors that Arab air forces would soon bomb the Jewish areas around Mt. Carmel. On April 23, the Haganah captured Haifa. A British police report from Haifa, dated April 26, explained that “every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe.” In fact, David Ben-Gurion had sent Golda Meir to Haifa to try to persuade the Arabs to stay, but she was unable to convince them because of their fear of being judged traitors to the Arab cause. By the end of the battle, more than 50,000 Palestinians had left.


Tens of thousands of Arab men, women and children fled toward the eastern outskirts of the city in cars, trucks, carts, and afoot in a desperate attempt to reach Arab territory until the Jews captured Rushmiya Bridge toward Samaria and Northern Palestine and cut them off. Thousands rushed every available craft, even rowboats, along the waterfront, to escape by sea toward Acre (New York Times, April 23, 1948).

In Tiberias and Haifa, the Haganah issued orders that none of the Arabs' possessions should be touched, and warned that anyone who violated the orders would be severely punished. Despite these efforts, all but about 5,000 or 6,000 Arabs evacuated Haifa, many leaving with the assistance of British military transports.

Syria's UN delegate, Faris el-Khouri, interrupted the UN debate on Palestine to describe the seizure of Haifa as a “massacre” and said this action was “further evidence that the 'Zionist program' is to annihilate Arabs within the Jewish state if partition is effected.”

The following day, however, the British representative at the UN, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told the delegates that the fighting in Haifa had been provoked by the continuous attacks by Arabs against Jews a few days before and that reports of massacres and deportations were erroneous. The same day (April 23, 1948), Jamal Husseini, the chairman of the Palestine Higher Committee, told the UN Security Council that instead of accepting the Haganah's truce offer, the Arabs “preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings, and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town.”

ther is a lot more --
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/refugees.html
 
Above information will be classified as propaganda due to the source and that it does not fit what some want to believe.
 
Yoda, your post 119 was refreshingly well-written.
Unfortunately, not a single word of it was your own.
No matter.
Like you, I often rely on The Jewish Virtual Library for a well constructed pro-Israeli take on events.
The man who did write the material in your post, Mitchell Bard, is a former editor of the AIPAC journal "Near East Report". AIPAC is not generally regarded as "neutral" in matters concerning Israel.
He is not an academic historian and has fallen into the trap of borrowing extensively from Joan Peter's book "From Time Immemorial" which itself was plagiarised by Alan Dershowitz when he wrote "The Case for Israel". Both books are full of elementary errors.
But there is an academic historian, the Israeli professor Ilan Pappe, who has studied the material Bard alludes to and has added some much needed balance.

The article you cite implies that the mass exodus of Palestinians in late 1947 and early 1948 was the result of a sort of collective hysterical funk.

The truth, although long concealed, is more prosaic. Where Palestinians resisted transfer they were threatened and brutalised. Where they occupied key strategic land, as on the road from Jerusalem to the coast, they were simply massacred, as at Deir Yassin.

See the Wiki article on Deir Yassin, for details. The subsequent Red Cross report makes grim reading.

History has a duty to evaluate the cases put forward by all protagonists in a struggle, not just the victor's view. This is why Thucydides is such a good historian and explains why Bard is less impressive.

But thanks for the link, anyhow.
 
Anytime I see the term Moral in a post, I think maybe it does not apply. I do not see much evidence of morals in the USA or in the rest of the world. It is even worse when it comes to Muslims and Islamic Facists. All I see in the middle east is a theme where all westerners and christians can be killed on a whim. It looks like they teach their own people to hate and murder people. No Morals found.

I also dont think it is moral to fire rockets at people you may not agree with.

I keep wondering why Israel doesnt attack the people supplying the rockets.
 
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Caravaggio said:
The truth, although long concealed, is more prosaic. Where Palestinians resisted transfer they were threatened and brutalised. Where they occupied key strategic land, as on the road from Jerusalem to the coast, they were simply massacred, as at Deir Yassin.
Click to expand...
Its interesting that you would claim that the truth is just now being revealed...50+ years later...hmmmm
 
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