Israel - Palestine Conflict Discussion Thread 2.0

[craig 680]

I don't see how Martin Luther king is related to that ?? Maybe you mean Martin Luther? 

Either way Gandhi wasn't the best either. He was highly racist and s-xist. 

Martin Luther King was a black Christian clergyman, who partly inspired by Gandhi's tactics used non-violent civil disobedience to advance black civil rights in the 50's and 60's. With different leadership, African Americans could have used more violent tactics, making racial hate in the US worse.

Yes Gandhi was s-xist, but how many people born in 19th century India weren't? I have no idea who he was supposedly racist against. He wanted different religions in work together peacefully. 

[Woolfsmck 2,763]

Ghandi tried to unit India regardless of Hindu or Muslim origin....He did manage to get Enlish rule to leave tho.

[Luiz 4,253]

Ministers approve mandatory Arabic studies from first grade 

"When the Jewish population will understand Arabic, the way the Arab public understands Hebrew, we will see better days," says Likud MK Oren Hazan.

 

 

A bill approved on Sunday by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation would make it mandatory for schools to teach Arabic from the first grade.

The measure was introduced by MK Oren Hazan (Likud), who said that in supporting the legislation in the middle of a wave of terrorism, the government was signaling that it seeks coexistence and calm.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett was also among the bill’s supporters.

Hazan encouraged lawmakers from the coalition and opposition to put politics aside and vote in favor of the measure when it is put to a preliminary Knesset vote on Wednesday. He saw Arabic studies from an early age as providing a bridge between different parts of Israel’s population.

“In these days, when terror is on the rise and coexistence is undermined, it’s important to lower the flames among the nation’s citizens, and there is no better way to do that than by understanding each other’s language, to understand the culture and mentality of 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel and hundreds of millions of Arabic- speakers in the Middle East,” Hazan said.

“I have no doubt that when the Jewish population will understand Arabic, the way the Arab public understands Hebrew, we will see better days,” Hazan also said.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Ministers-approve-mandatory-Arabic-studies-from-first-grade-430017

[TiphEret 1,320]

Very interesting article, from an Israeli "traitor" basically now there is only one opinion that can be heard in Israel and if it doesn't follow the government decisions you should face consequences...

I was an Israel Defense Forces soldier in Gaza 27 years ago, during the first intifada. We patrolled the city and the villages and the refugee camps and encountered angry teenagers throwing stones at us. We responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Now those seem like the good old days.

Since then, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen stones replaced with guns and suicide bombs, then rockets and highly trained militias, and now, in the past month, kitchen knives, screwdrivers and other improvised weapons. Some of these low-tech efforts have been horrifically successful, with victims as young as 13. There is plenty to discuss about the nature and timing of the recent wave of Palestinian attacks — a desperate and humiliated answer to the election of a hostile Israeli government that emboldens extremist settlers to attack Palestinians. But as an Israeli, I am more concerned with the actions of my own society, which are getting scarier and uglier by the moment.

The internal discussion in Israel is more militant, threatening and intolerant than it has ever been. Talk has trended toward fundamentalism ever since the Israeli operation in Gaza in late 2008, but it has recently gone from bad to worse. There seems to be only one acceptable voice, orchestrated by the government and its spokespeople, and beamed to all corners of the country by a clan of loyal media outlets drowning out all the others. Those few dissenters who attempt to contradict it — to ask questions, to protest, to represent a different color from this artificial consensus — are ridiculed and patronized at best, threatened, vilified and physically attacked at worst. Israelis not “supporting our troops” are seen as traitors, and newspapers asking questions about the government’s policies and actions are seen as demoralizing.

Since the start of last year’s Gaza war, there have been several incidents of anti-leftist violence to go along with the attacks aimed at Palestinians: Left-wing protesters were assaulted at antiwar demonstrations in Tel Aviv andHaifa last summer, during the war; left-wing journalist Gideon Levy of Haaretz was accused of treason by a Knesset member, a crime that during wartime is punishable by death. He’s since hired bodyguards. The comedian Orna Banai lost an advertising job after an interview in which she expressed horror over Israeli actions against Palestinians. This month, people in Afulaattacked an Arab correspondent for an Israeli TV network and his Jewish crew while they reported on a stabbing attack. A new bill in the Knesset encourages the thought police by turning away visitors to Israel who have supported the movement to boycott companies profiting from the occupation. On Friday, a masked Jewish settler attacked the president of leftist group Rabbis for Human Rights in a Palestinian olive grove in the West Bank.

On social media, the gloves are taken off, social courtesies abandoned, hatred rears its ugly head. Facebook pages calling for violence against left-wingers and Arabs appear frequently, and even when they’re taken down, they pop up again in one guise or another. Any sentiment not aligned with the supposed consensus is met with a barrage of racist vitriol. One Facebook group calling itself the Shadow Lions discussed how to disrupt a wedding between an Arab and a Jew, posting the groom’s phone number and urging people to call and harass him. On Twitter and Instagram, hashtags like #leftiesout and #traitorlefties abound. Film director Shira Geffen, who asked her movie audiences for a moment of silence to respect Palestinian children killed in an Israeli offensive, was flayed across Israeli social networks. “Shame,” a new and brilliant play by actress Einat Weitzman, brings to the stage a selection of the hateful comments she received after wearing a T-shirt bearing the Palestinian flag. One example from the play: “If the baby that was murdered was yours I wonder which flag you would put on yourself. Now step on it and get your ugly head back to your tiny apartment and bury yourself from the shame until you die there alone and maybe in your funeral we will ask the Jihad to read verses from the Koran.”

Israel on high alert: What could be causing the violent surge
Play Video1:48

In this latest round of fighting, the volume has been turned up still another notch. While the knife attacks are going on, my family and I are in Omaha, where I’m teaching for the semester, and what I hear and read from Israel leaves me appalled. Again led by politicians from the right (with the perplexing support of members of the supposed opposition, such as Yair Lapid), then circulated by the sensationalist mainstream media, there has been a unified demonization of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. One recent pollby the newspaper Maariv found that only 19 percent of Israeli Jews think most Arabs oppose the attacks. This past week, the trend reached its absurd peak, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ridiculous claim that Hitler decided to annihilate the Jews only after being advised to do so by Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of Palestinian Arabs at the time. (Israeli Twitter was full of jokes and memes about the speech, which one image in circulation dubbed “Hitlerious.” Even for Netanyahu’s supporters, apparently, this was too much.)

There have been calls to kill attackers in every situation, in defiance of the law or any accepted rules of engagement for the military. Lapid, for example, said in an interview, “Don’t hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct. If someone is brandishing a knife, shoot him.” Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan also gave his blessing to that notion. And the head of the Jerusalem police department, Moshe Edri, announced, “Anyone who stabs Jews or hurts innocent people is due to be killed.” Knesset member Yinon Magal tweeted that authorities should “make an effort” to kill terrorists who carry out attacks.

Such sentiment has led to incidents like the death in East Jerusalem of Fadi Alloun, suspected of a knife attack but shot by police as they had him surrounded. Sometimes, it backfires: This month, a Jewish vigilante near Haifa stabbed a fellow Israeli Jew who he thought was an Arab. Late Wednesday, soldiers killed an Israeli Jew whom they mistook for a Palestinian attacker.

The low point (so far) was last Sunday night’s lynching of 29-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker Haftom Zarhum, mistakenly identified as a perpetrator of a terrorist attack in Beersheba. Zarhum was shot by a security guard then beaten to death by a mob of passers-by in a predictable response to the incitement from our own politicians to kill as revenge. And the increasingly intolerant, boiling, racist tone of the Israeli conversation is — there is no other way to put this — a result of 48 years of occupying another people: of Israelis receiving a message (or at least understanding it as such) that we are superior to others, that we control the fate of those lesser others, that we are allowed to disregard laws and any basic notions of human morality with regard to Palestinians.

The cumulative effect of this recent mindless violence is hugely disturbing. We seem to be in a fast and alarming downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society. There is only one way to respond to what’s happening in Israel today: We must stop the occupation. Not for peace with the Palestinians or for their sake (though they have surely suffered at our hands for too long). Not for some vision of an idyllic Middle East — those arguments will never end, because neither side will ever budge, or ever be proved wrong by anything. No, we must stop the occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes. So that we can legitimately ask for, and receive, support from the world. So that we can return to being human.

Whatever the consequences are, they can’t be worse than what we are now grappling with. No matter how many soldiers we put in the West Bank, or how many houses of terrorists we blow up, or how many stone-throwers we arrest, we don’t have any sense of security; meanwhile, we have become diplomatically isolated, perceived around the world (sometimes correctly) as executioners, liars, racists. As long as the occupation lasts, we are the more powerful side, so we call the shots, and we cannot go on blaming others. For our own sake, for our sanity — we must stop now.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/23/confessions-of-an-israeli-traitor/?postshare=6231445781219986

[Luiz 4,253]

JERUSALEM (AP) — An American educator who marched for civil rights in the 1960s and advocated coexistence between Muslims and Jews when he moved to Israel died Tuesday after succumbing to wounds sustained in a Palestinian attack on a bus in Jerusalem two weeks ago.

 

It was one of many attacks in a month of violence triggered in part over Palestinian allegations of Israel changing long standing agreements at Jerusalem's most sensitive holy site, charges Israel has strongly denied and said amount to incitement to violence.

http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-dies-wounds-oct-13-jerusalem-attack-093956719.html

[Melech 9,900]

JERUSALEM (AP) — An American educator who marched for civil rights in the 1960s and advocated coexistence between Muslims and Jews when he moved to Israel died Tuesday after succumbing to wounds sustained in a Palestinian attack on a bus in Jerusalem two weeks ago.

 

It was one of many attacks in a month of violence triggered in part over Palestinian allegations of Israel changing long standing agreements at Jerusalem's most sensitive holy site, charges Israel has strongly denied and said amount to incitement to violence.

http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-dies-wounds-oct-13-jerusalem-attack-093956719.html

 

[Woolfsmck 2,763]

JERUSALEM (AP) — An American educator who marched for civil rights in the 1960s and advocated coexistence between Muslims and Jews when he moved to Israel died Tuesday after succumbing to wounds sustained in a Palestinian attack on a bus in Jerusalem two weeks ago.

 

It was one of many attacks in a month of violence triggered in part over Palestinian allegations of Israel changing long standing agreements at Jerusalem's most sensitive holy site, charges Israel has strongly denied and said amount to incitement to violence.

http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-dies-wounds-oct-13-jerusalem-attack-093956719.html

Some of the Muslim leaders need to get fired ... 8-/

[lego 44,165]

 

 

 

 

[lego 44,165]

Israel demolishes Bedouin village of Al Araqib — for the 90th time

Things have been quiet in the Negev lately. So the authorities decided to take advantage of this period of relative calm and, while everybody’s attention was elsewhere, sent the bulldozers to destroy the unrecognized Bedouin village of Al Araqib — for the 90th time.

[Police arrive in Al Araqib to destroy it for the 90th time, October 28, 2015. (Aziz Alturi)]

 

Bulldozers returned to the Israeli Bedouin village of Al Araqib on Wednesday, along with police officers and someone from the Israel Land Authority. For the 90th (!) time, bulldozers destroyed the shacks and lean-tos the villagers have been living in since the authorities destroyed their original brick homes just over five years ago.  They didn’t need too many police officers, nor many bulldozers. Just two were enough. Along with one person from the Israel Land Authority, and some drivers. It’s routine now. Everyone knows their role. Including the villagers.

The residents stood helplessly as their few remaining resources — lumber, canvas and tarpaulin sheets — were confiscated or broken. They rescued a few possessions —  kitchen utensils, mattresses, children’s toys and some chairs. Then they stood back and watched the bulldozers do their work. Afterward, as on all the previous occasions, they stood there and took photos. What else can they do. Where do they find the strength to stay there, not to be broken, to rebuild from the ruins once again.

http://972mag.com/israel-demolishes-bedouin-village-of-al-araqib-for-the-90th-time/113328/

 

[lego 44,165]

The incitement Netanyahu doesn't want to talk about

The Israeli prime minister casts blame on Arab MKs and long-dead clerics but won’t talk about the messianic incitement coming from his own government. And forget about a discussion on the occupation’s role in inciting violence.

 

Member of Knesset Basel Ghattas entered the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount on Monday in direct contradiction of instructions from Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister barred all MKs from entering the compound earlier this month in hopes of preventing provocations that are fanning the flames of violence that swept through Israel and Palestine over the past month.

The provocations Netanyahu was hoping to prevent, however, were not those made by Palestinian members of Knesset. With all due respect to Mr. Ghattas, he is far from a household name among either Israelis or Palestinians, and he does not hold enough sway to influence or provoke anything significant enough that might demand the prime minister’s attention.

The provocations Israel’s prime minister was hoping to prevent when he barred lawmakers from ascending the holy esplanade are those being made by ministers and officials in his own government. In one such provocation just this week, which Netanyahu wasn’t able to prevent, was when his own acting foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, said in a television interview that she dreams of seeing the Israeli flag fly over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, calling the site the “center of Israeli sovereignty.”

 

Hotovely’s statement followed weeks upon weeks in which Netanyahu reassured the world that his government has no desire or plans to alter the fragile status quo at Al-Aqsa Mosque. In response, the prime minister was forced to release a late-night statement reassuring that the government’s policy has not changed, and that he “expects all members of the Government to act accordingly.” He did not mention Hotovely by name. He did not suggest she might be reprimanded, let alone dismissed from her position overseeing Israel’s foreign relations.

In comparison, Netanyahu reprimanded MK Ghattas by name and accusing him of seeking solely to “inflame the situation” by visiting Al-Aqsa. This will probably piss off a few people: Basel Ghattas probably did, as Netanyahu accused him, set out to create a provocation or at least score a few headlines Wednesday morning.

According to the “status quo,” the arrangements and power-sharing agreements that have been in place on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount for nearly 50 years, there shouldn’t be any problem with Ghattas doing what he did Wednesday. His provocation was directed at Netanyahu, whose successive governments haverepeatedly limited Muslims’ access to the Aqsa Mosque in recent years. It was directed at Netanyahu’s ministers and members of his party who publicly support shattering that “status quo” in ways as eclectic as demanding Jewish prayer in the compound to drawing up plans for building a “Third Temple” on top of it.

 

If the prime minister’s priority was truly to extinguish or prevent the ignition of Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem in general, one might question his choices over the past few years. For instance, he might have thought twice about appointing Tzipi Hotovely to the top post in the Foreign Ministry after watching this video of her from last year, in which she stands on the Temple Mount, in front of the Dome of the Rock, and declares: “We must change the status quo. The Temple Mount must go back to being a place for Jewish prayer.”

Or maybe he would have reconsidered allowing Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, who discusses building a “Third Temple” on top of Al-Aqsa, into his government. Two years ago Ariel, who was construction minister at the time,told an archeological conferenceheld in an illegal settlement: “We’ve built many little, little temples. But we need to build a real Temple on the Temple Mount.”

If assuaging Muslim fears over Israeli plans to change the “status quo” on the Temple Mount was really Netanyahu’s top priority, he might have said something critical about Culture Minister Miri Regev,who last year attended a conferenceentitled “Israel Returns to the Temple Mount,” outside which “Temple Mount Faithful” founder Yehuda Glick (himself a Knesset candidate on the Likud slate) was shot and nearly killed. Also in attendance at the conference were then-Likud MK Moshe Feiglin andYehuda Etzion, who was convicted of plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock.

[Right-wing activist Yehuda Glick holding a book depicting the Jewish Temple while standing in front of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, May 21, 2009. (Photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)]

 

Benjamin Netanyahu knows very well how problematic the cast of characters that comprise his government are. He also knows he has no other choice but to keep them at his side. They are not only his political partners: they represent his political base. So because he can’t get rid of them, the only thing left to do is deflect attention with accusations of incitement — incitement by Arab members of Knesset, Palestinian leaders who have little and waning influence over the current violence, religious leaders who have been dead for over 40 years, and even neo-Ottoman autocrats.

Nothing about the members of Netanyahu’s own government who dream — out loud — of flying an Israeli flag over one of Islam’s holiest sites or building messianic temples on its ruins. Nothing about the occupation, which Netanyahu just admitted — again — isn’t going to end anytime soon. (He also said ithere, here and here.) Nothing aboutwhy most of the violence in recent weeks is taking place in Jerusalem and Hebron, the only two cities that have Jewish settlers insidePalestinian neighborhoods. Nothing.

There is no justification for violence against civilians — ever. Not when it is perpetrated by democratically elected governments with remote controlled airplanes and not when it is perpetrated by teenagers who believe they are defending their nation or even their god. There is also good reason to try and understand both ends of that spectrum of unacceptable violence. Doing so, hopefully, can help us prevent more innocent lives being stolen by altering the conditions that nurture violence. Deflecting attention from that vital context, by blaming the violence solely on Palestinian incitement, ensures that we will live to see bloodier days yet.

 

http://972mag.com/the-incitement-netanyahu-doesnt-want-to-talk-about/113321/

 

[Andy McQueen 4,484]

What do you think, what are your thoughts? Discuss. 

[The Child 18,997]

Why can't the one Jewish state be allowed to exist?

Because of Jerusalem sadly, just because they think it's a holy city or whatever the ****. 

I'm not on the side of Palestine nor Israel tbh, this conflict is as stupid as 2 kids fighting for a toy. 

[The Child 18,997]

And let me add the fact that for spiritual people they care a lot about material thing, the state that should own that ground should be a non religious state.

You have the right to disagree with me though, everyone has his/her own opinion obviously.

[lego 44,165]

Dude, not now.

There is already topic about it and it's been discussed to death.

And only based on description that video is biased.

[Andy McQueen 4,484]

2 hours ago, lego said:

Dude, not now.

There is already topic about it and it's been discussed to death.

And only based on description that video is biased.

Okay; I'm so sorry, I didn't knew that,@lego