Israel-Gaza War (and Iranian Distractions)

[Syne]

Again, completely ignoring the BBC providing cover for Hezbollah and Hamas by repeatedly deflecting back on Israel... or anything else possible. I see you don't care about that. Figures.

[Syne]

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[Syne]

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[C C]

David Remnick in The New Yorker described Haaretz as "easily the most liberal newspaper in Israel", its ideology as left-wing and its temper as "insistently oppositional".[30] According to Ira Sharkansky, Haaretz's op-ed pages are open to a variety of opinions.[44] J. J. Goldberg, the editor of the American The Jewish Daily Forward, describes Haaretz as "Israel's most vehemently anti-settlement daily paper".[45] Stephen Glain of The Nation described Haaretz as "Israel's liberal beacon", citing its editorials voicing opposition to the occupation, the discriminatory treatment of Arab citizens, and the mindset that led to the Second Lebanon War.[46] A 2003 study in The International Journal of Press/Politics concluded that Haaretz's reporting of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was more favorable to Israelis than to Palestinians but less so than that of The New York Times.[47] In 2016, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, wrote: "I like a lot of the people at Haaretz, and many of its positions, but the cartoonish anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism can be grating."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haaretz#Ed...viewpoints

Less favorable to Israelis than the NYT, and even the Atlantic thinks Haaretz is "anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism."

Ironically, a (socialist) Labor Zionism newspaper in its earliest days, but over the decades since, almost all socialist organizations became anti-Israel (like the DSA in NYC), due to the postcolonial and decolonization movements that arose in Marxist theory in the ensuing decades of the 20th-century. The universal ambitions of the ideology are more important to Jewish members than their ethnic roots or allegiance. Haaretz itself, of course, shifted more to a mainstream left-wing or progressive stance during that period. But accordingly, New Antisemitism can still be fashionable with it, as also with the NYT to a limited extent, etc.

[Syne]

I recently watched an interview with a historian who said that Jews had been so persecuted that some had sought refuge by trying to integrate with such secular ideologies, as a survival strategy. As such, the adopted secular ideology became more important to them than their own ethnicity or heritage.

[confused2]

I recently watched an interview with a historian who said that Jews had been so persecuted that some had sought refuge by trying to integrate with such secular ideologies, as a survival strategy. As such, the adopted secular ideology became more important to them than their own ethnicity or heritage.

On reflection I see this is a variation on the "No true Scotsman" argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
I prefer Yazata's more honest approach.
I'll leave my original response but see no reason to follow it down the rabbit hole.

Japaneses immigrants to the US faced this problem during WW2 (the US being at war with Japan).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment..._Americans
[quote]
Internees were prohibited from taking more than they could carry into the camps, and many were forced to sell some or all of their property, including their homes and businesses. At the camps, which were surrounded by barbed wire fences and patrolled by armed guards, internees often lived in overcrowded barracks with minimal furnishing.
[@__@]
Japanese Americans were initially barred from U.S. military service, but by 1943, they were allowed to join, with 20,000 serving during the war.

[Syne]

“Free Palestine.”

I grew up on those words.

In Lebanon, most people around me wanted a free Palestine for a very practical reason — to send the Palestinian refugees back. The civil war that tore my country apart was ignited in no small part by the Palestinian armed factions who turned Lebanon into their launching pad. “Free Palestine” meant: free us from them.

In Damascus, where my father’s family lived, the sentiment was different but equally self-serving. Palestine must be returned to the Arabs, its righteous owners. No one asked follow-up questions. No one was expected to.

Palestine was central to Islam, most Arabs are Muslim, therefore supporting the Palestinian cause was reflexive. A non-brainer in the most literal sense — no brain engaged at all.

Nobody stopped to point out that Palestine is not an Arabic word. Nobody found it strange that Jerusalem, the supposedly third holiest city in Islam, is not mentioned once in the Quran. Not once. Nor is Palestine. The entire theological and political architecture of this cause rests on a foundation that their own scripture doesn’t bother to acknowledge.

What was actually happening was indoctrination. A systematic, generational rejection of Jewish sovereignty — and frankly, of any minority sovereignty. Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis — the Arab world has been remarkably consistent in how it treats people who are different. We just don’t talk about that.

Instead, in the West, we talk about Palestine.

In the West, a civilization that has elevated human rights to its highest moral currency, the Palestinian cause has become the one exception to every rule. In the queue of human suffering, Palestinians cut the line every time. Homosexuals executed in Gaza and hanged from cranes in Iran? Palestine first. Women imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for campaigning for the right to drive — a right they were denied until 2018 — girls sold into marriage in Afghanistan, women erased from public life entirely under the Taliban? After Palestine. Political dissidents ground into dust in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, journalists disappeared in Libya, children starving in Yemen while their rulers wage proxy wars, entire populations hollowed out by hunger in Sudan? All of it waits. Christians ethnically cleansed from Iraq and Syria, the Arab world methodically emptied of every Jewish community it once held — a demographic erasure carried out across a century with surgical patience and near-total Western silence?

Palestine is still first.

So let’s end where we started. Free Palestine. Which Palestine, exactly? The Roman invention? The British administrative line? The British Mandate covered the entire territory of what is today Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. In 1921, 78% of that mandate was handed to the Hashemite family — a dynasty imported from Hijaz in present-day Saudi Arabia — and became the Kingdom of Jordan, which it remains to this day. A foreign royal family, on the majority of historic Palestine, ruling it as a monarchy. Nobody protests that. No flags, no chants, no encampments. The remaining 22% was designated for the Jews, became Israel, and is the only part that any pro-Palestinian activist has ever had a problem with.

So when you say Free Palestine, you mean that 22%. You mean the Jews.

And free it from whom? From a people with a three-thousand-year-old documented presence in that land, to restore the glory of a name coined by Roman colonizers, a name lifted from the Torah, a name that has no roots in Arabic, no mention in the Quran, and no history as a sovereign state?

You are not chanting for liberation. You are chanting for colonialism — the Roman kind, repackaged for social media.

Free Palestine is not a cause. It is a colonial term, coined by invaders, recycled by the indoctrinated. The least you can do is have the intelligence to understand it and the decency to reflect on your position.
- https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=270...7906066106

[Syne]

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Hamas says it has agreed to disarm after Trump announces Board of Peace plan

US President Donald Trump says the Board of Peace has reached an agreement for the "complete disarmament" of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza.

A senior Hamas official has told the BBC they have agreed to the Board of Peace's plan to completely disarm in Gaza and that an official statement will be released soon. Israel has yet to comment.

Trump said Israel would withdraw from Gaza "as disarmament is completed" and called the agreement "a critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government".

The second phase of a US-brokered Gaza ceasefire plan includes the disarmament of Hamas.

The second phase also includes the reconstruction of Gaza.
...
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj03m512r4go

Was Israel consulted at all? If I were them, I certainly wouldn't withdraw before complete disarmament, as Hamas has repeatedly proven themselves as faithless as Iran.