Israel / Palestine News Thread

[Leo Gura]

2 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

I am not saying it is the right one.

I am just saying I think a nation who lived in a given area for a millenia in the past has the right to return to this area especially after the worst possible lesson they have learn at the end of the era in which they have lived distributed abroad.

Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion man.

[Nivsch]

22 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

According to who? You?

Why should your view be the right one?

Additionally, why that the muslim world will care so much about the Palestinians if they barely care about a slightly different muslim group than them as we can see in their non stop internal wars between soonis and shias for example?

The answer is, this isn't because some oppression, it is only because ISRAEL does this oppression! The core reason is Israel. Not an oppression itself that happening.

Their ego start to care only when Israel does it.

What proves the real core reason is the conflicting worldview and not the existance of an oppression by itself. Because oppressions happens all over the middle east in endless and often far worse forms and terrorists are silence to that.

Edited 13 hours ago by Nivsch

[Raze]

3 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

Additionally, why that the muslim world will care so much about the Palestinians if they barely care about a slightly differemt muslim group tham them as we can see in their non stop internal war between soonis and shias for example?

The answer is, this isn't because some oppression, it is only because ISRAEL does this oppression! The core reason is Israel.

for most of history the Sunnis and Shias lived in peace, same with Jews in Palestine. Western ideas of nationalism and Zionism kicked ethnic conflicts into overdrive especially after they tried to import western state building after the Ottoman Empire fell. 

Edited 13 hours ago by Raze

[Nivsch]

12 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion man.

Yes this is my opinion but it represents an entire nation's authentic feelings, urges and identity that is not less legitimate than the Paleatinian's one. They are both legitimate.

Edited 13 hours ago by Nivsch

[Leo Gura]

10 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

we can see in their non stop internal war between soonis and shias for example?

That's no different than European wars between Catholics and Protestants.

Of course Arabs fight amongst themselves, because it is a huge region with many cultural and tribal differences.

[Leo Gura]

4 minutes ago, Nivsch said:

Yes this is my opinion but it represents an entire nation's authentic feelings, urges and identity that is not less legitimate than the Paleatinian's one.

You should notice that it's a very convenient, self-serving opinion though.

[Hardkill]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

That's no different than European wars between Catholics and Protestants.

Of course Arabs fight amongst themselves, because it is a huge region with many cultural and tribal differences.

None of the other Arab nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, or UAE have been doing nearly enough to help save the Palestinians.

[Nivsch]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You should notice that it's a very convenient, self-serving opinion though.

What do you exactly mean by that?

[Leo Gura]

1 minute ago, Hardkill said:

None of the other Arab nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, or UAE have been doing nearly enough to help save the Palestinians.

That's what Bin Laden said. That's why Bin Laden wanted to overthrow some of those regimes, like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia revoked Bin Laden's citizenship because he critcized them for being too friendly with the West.

[Raze]

7 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

That's no different than European wars between Catholics and Protestants.

This is not true, both religiously and politically the dynamic is very different.

[Nivsch]

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You should notice that it's a very convenient, self-serving opinion though.

I think any nation or individual have to follow their authentic feelings and intuition that give them true meaning.

Jews in a land that would be chosen for them randomally in Europe would feel empty, unauthentic and unconnected and humilliated to a significant extent.

Authentic actions have a significant importance to one's mental health be it a nation or an individual.

Edited 12 hours ago by Nivsch

[Hardkill]

3 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

That's what Bin Laden said. That's why Bin Laden wanted to overthrow some of those regimes, like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia revoked Bin Laden's citizenship because he critcized them for being too friendly with the West.

Damn. I didn't know that.

So, have Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and UAE been against the Palestinians or have they just never really cared about them?

Edited 12 hours ago by Hardkill

[Leo Gura]

2 minutes ago, Raze said:

This is not true, both religiously and politically the dynamic is very different.

Explain how is it different?

[Raze]

An interesting interview excerpt about one of the only anti Zionist Israeli journalists thought process:

Quote

How did Gideon Levy become so different to his countrymen? Why does he offer empathy to the Palestinians while so many others offer only bullets and bombs? At first, he was just like them: his argument with other Israelis is an argument with his younger self. He was born in 1953 in Tel Aviv and as a young man “I was totally nationalistic, like everyone else. I thought – we are the best, and the Arabs just want to kill. I didn’t question.”

He was fourteen during the Six Day War, and soon after his parents took him to see the newly conquered Occupied Territories. “We were so proud going to see Rachel’s Tomb [in Bethlehem] and we just didn’t see the Palestinians. We looked right through them, like they were invisible,” he says. “It had always been like that. We were passing as children so many ruins [of Palestinian villages that had been ethnically cleansed in 1948]. We never asked: ‘Who lived in this house? Where is he now? He must be alive. He must be somewhere.’ It was part of the landscape, like a tree, like a river.” Long into his twenties, “I would see settlers cutting down olive trees and soldiers mistreating Palestinian women at the checkpoints, and I would think, ‘These are exceptions, not part of government policy.’”

Levy says he became different due to “an accident.” He carried out his military service with Israeli Army Radio and then continued working as a journalist, “so I started going to the Occupied Territories a lot, which most Israelis don’t do. And after a while, gradually, I came to see them as they really are.”

But can that be all? Plenty of Israelis go to the territories – not least the occupying troops and settlers – without recoiling. “I think it was also – you see, my parents were refugees. I saw what it had done to them. So I suppose... I saw these people and thought of my parents.” Levy’s father was a German Jewish lawyer from the Sudetenland. At the age of 26 – in 1939, as it was becoming inescapably clear the Nazis were determined to stage a genocide in Europe – he went with his parents to the railway station in Prague, and they waved him goodbye. “He never saw them or heard from them again,” Levy says. “He never found out what happened to them. If he had not left, he would not have lived.” For six months he lived on a boat filled with refugees, being turned away from port after port, until finally they made it to British Mandate Palestine, as it then was.

“My father was traumatised for his whole life,” he says. “He never really settled in Israel. He never really learned to speak anything but broken Hebrew. He came to Israel with his PhD and he had to make his living, so he started to work in a bakery and to sell cakes from door to door on his bicycle. It must have been a terrible humiliation to be a PhD in law and be knocking on doors offering cakes. He refused to learn to be a lawyer again. He became a minor clerk. I think this is what smashed him, y’know? He lived here sixty years, he had his family, had his happiness but he was really a stranger. A foreigner, in his own country… He was always outraged by things, small things. He couldn’t understand how people would dare to phone between two and four in the afternoon. It horrified him. He never understood what is the concept of overdraft in the bank. Every Israeli has an overdraft, but if he heard somebody was one pound overdrawn, he was horrified.”

His father “never” talked about home. “Any time I tried to encourage him to talk about it, he would close down. He never went back. There was nothing [to go back to], the whole village was destroyed. He left a whole life there. He left a fiancé, a career, everything. I am very sorry I didn’t push him harder to talk because I was young, so I didn’t have much interest. That’s the problem. When we are curious about our parents, they are gone.”

Levy’s father never saw any parallels between the fact he was turned into a refugee, and the 800,000 Palestinians who were turned into refugees by the creation of the state of Israel. “Never! People didn’t think like that. We never discussed it, ever.” Yet in the territories, Levy began to see flickers of his father everywhere – in the broken men and women never able to settle, dreaming forever of going home.

Then, slowly, Levy began to realise their tragedy seeped deeper still into his own life – into the ground beneath his feet and the very bricks of the Israeli town where he lives, Sheikh Munis. It is built on the wreckage of “one of the 416 Palestinian villages Israel wiped off the face of the earth in 1948,” he says. “The swimming pool where I swim every morning was the irrigation grove they used to water the village’s groves. My house stands on one of the groves. The land was ‘redeemed’ by force, its 2,230 inhabitants were surrounded and threatened. They fled, never to return. Somewhere, perhaps in a refugee camp in terrible poverty, lives the family of the farmer who plowed the land where my house now stands.” He adds that it is “stupid and wrong” to compare it to the Holocaust, but says that man is a traumatized refugee just as surely as Levy’s father – and even now, if he ended up in the territories, he and his children and grandchildren live under blockade, or violent military occupation.

 

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Damn. I didn't know that.

So, have Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, or UAE been against Palestine or have they just never cared.

They were pro-Palestine from the beginning, but after years of failed wars and efforts and stalemate they have mostly moved on to handle their own internal affairs.

Pan-Arab sentiment has died down over the years as each nation prioritized its own prosperity and survival.

But there is still massive grassroots support across the Arab world for Palestine. Especially after Oct 7th. The support is mostly from the streets vs from the palaces. The people in the palaces are too comfortable to risk a war with Israeal.

Edited 12 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Leo Gura]

I will soon add a bunch of new books to my book list about politics, terrorism, Zionism, Arab history, Middle East politics, and so on. A lot of basic reading is necessary to properly make sense of these issues.

Edited 12 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Hardkill]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

They were pro-Palestine from the beginning, but after years of failed wars and efforts and stalemate they have mostly moved on to handle their own internal affairs.

Pan-Arab sentiment has died down over the years as each nation prioritized its own prosperity and survival.

But there is still massive grassroots support across the Arab world for Palestine. Especially after Oct 7th.

I see. 

So, now the sentiment for the palestinians has lately been resurging across the Arab world.

I wonder if wealthy Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar no longer have to feel tribalistic because of how wealthy and developed those countries have now gotten.

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Hardkill

[Raze]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Explain how is it different?

religiously protestants separated much later because they rejected authority of the clergy and was a reformation to it, Shia separated much earlier because they respected the authority of the prophets family that Sunnis rejected and both developed alongside each other and maintain much more similarities.

Historically the Shia Sunni split had much less violence, it was common for intermarriage and the populations to live peacefully together for most of their history. Relatively recently the tensions ratcheted up for various reasons.

https://www.history.com/news/sunni-shia-divide-islam-muslim

[Leo Gura]

2 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

So, now the sentiment for the palestinians has lately been resurging across the Arab world.

That was the whole purpose of the Oct 7th attack.

The #1 purpose of all terrorism is to raise global awareness to injustice which would otherwise go ignored and unrecognized. Terrorism is basically a marketing strategy.

[Leo Gura]

2 minutes ago, Raze said:

religiously protestants separated much later because they rejected authority of the clergy and was a reformation to it, Shia separated much earlier because they respected the authority of the prophets family that Sunnis rejected and both developed alongside each other and maintain much more similarities.

Historically the Shia Sunni split had much less violence, it was common for intermarriage and the populations to live peacefully together for most of their history. Relatively recently the tensions ratcheted up for various reasons.

https://www.history.com/news/sunni-shia-divide-islam-muslim

I don't see that as so different.