Wow, that’s some cheap shit there @playingwithknives. Can anyone play this game?
Here’s a picture of future car buyers, only, you know, they’re dead.
I’m just going to leave this here:
In particular:
“Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
Up until SlyFrog’s post this thread was a good example of how you can be extremely critical of Israel without being at all antisemitic.
Any other things that are verbotten to discuss? Hopefully I can get the state’s new broadsheet of permissible comparisons, so as to not fall out of line again.
I was in agreement with the list until that the second to last one. Not because it’s true, but it conflates the Jewish people with Israel.
Also, one should never take any language off the table when discussing individual government or nations.
Anyway, can we compare the Israeli Government to the South Africa Goverment in the 1980s? Or how China treats almost every other ethnic minority? Tibet comes to mind.
The point is that it’s both absolutely untrue and unfair AND it’s extremely offensive to most jews by comparing the one jewish-majority state to the state that rounded up and murdered one third of the world population of jews. Lots of things are racist only when you consider the context. This is one of them.
You can absolutely compare Israel to apartheid South Africa, or China’s treatment of ethnic minorities. The IHRA have tried to be very specific.
I don’t really care what the IHRA has tried to do. I would suggest that if the IHRA wants to stop comparisons with certain Nazi policies, then people in Israel should stop doing the things that are reminiscent of some of those policies.
You see, you can do certain things that the bad guys did without doing everything that the bad guys did. Just because you’re not doing everything the bad guys did, doesn’t mean you’re not acting badly. Just because you’re not doing everything, does not take the comparisons with what you are doing off the table.
And frankly, it is particularly sad when the response is to simply prohibit discussion or comparisons. No one is calling for the death of the Jews when they compare aggressive land expansion and walling off people with Nazi era policies. Trying to prohibit such obvious comparisons reeks much more of embarrassment at what you are doing than it does of genuine fear of antisemitism.
“But we’re not actively murdering them, so it’s okay” really isn’t much of a defense.
If you don’t want to be seen as anti-semitic, you should have a pretty solid reason why the Nazi comparison is more appropriate than any other example of racial or ethnic discrimination, beyond “Well, Jews!” which is what it seems to always amount to. Why isn’t the comparison made with the British, or the white South Africans, or the Indonesians?
Those work too, thank you. I did not know about the Indonesian walls and territorial expansion, but I’ll look into it.
I generally tend to that comparison myself — indeed, Israel is perhaps best seen as the vestige of a colony of European culture forcibly injected into an existing population and culture and currently bent on expansion and the systematic repression of the indigenous people — but, honestly, if the PM of Israel is going to tweet stuff that probably sounds even worse in the original German, people are going to make that comparison.
That’s an increasing outdated view, since an increasing percentage of Israelis trace their ancestry to people just as “indigenous” as the Palestinians.
Thus ‘vestige’. Other than that, I can’t imagine what you think this means. I know lots of white South Africans who trace their ancestry to ‘indigenous’ people, and say they’re thus just as ‘African’ as anyone else, but that doesn’t really invalidate the history of the place, or their position in it, or how they came to be in possession of the land and their place of privilege, or how those factors work together to create the status quo and the challenges they face today.
Also, too: Netanyahu seems to want crisis, unrest and conflict in the occupied territories.
Are there any statistics on how many Jewish Israeli people were already living in Palestine/British Mandate/Ottoman Levant/Greater Syria/whatever that area was called before the creation of Israel?
I always assumed it was a high percentage, but the implication here is that most of the people an the culture of the Israeli people is a European one. (Which goes against what I ‘know’, I.e I thought most of the Jews in Europe died in the Holocaust or fled to the Soviets states or the USA)
British Mandate reports say there were about 89,000 in 1922, which had increased to 530,000 by 1944, of which at least 200,000 immigrated between 1932 and 1941. Presumably there was a lot of undocumented immigration, too. By 1948 the official Jewish population was 600,000.
30 percent of current Israelis are first-generation immigrants, born elsewhere, two thirds of whom are from Europe or the US. There are 8 million Israelis today, and 50% of the population growth since the state was founded can be attributed to immigration.
In any event, Zionism was a European project, and, generally, most of the leaders who later founded Israel came to Palestine starting in the early years of the 20th century.
(NB: I’m no expert.)
This may be useful:
Extremely well put. The sad thing I see, Israel is in the early stages of doing to the Palestinians, what Nazis did to them. It’s much more nuanced than that of course, but you can’t help but draw some parallels -specifically the partitioning and walling them off, evictions, the forced poverty, the restriction of goods and raids on hospitals and other neutral places. Lately the “Israeli only” areas where they demolish Palestinian homes, hospitals, and mosques to make way for Israeli citizens reeks of Lebensraum. “we need living space”
This isn’t as bad as some of the things that the Israeli Government has been accused of but damn, this makes them seem like a bunch of dick heads. She’s a young person going to school, with a legit visa.
And the US response is what I would expect from a nation lead by Republicans under Trump. I might be wrong, but I would expect a different response under the Obama Administration.
Sadly, for some reason, CNN website won’t let me cut and paste.
So no one has the right to protest what Israel is doing to Palestinians. How nice.
We seem to be living in an era of incredibly shitty and corrupt world leaders.
I’m shocked they actually indicted him.