Merged threads discussing Israel

[SpontaneousOrder]

They simply want what you have. They have the capability and the desire and the system of government to have what you have. What they do not have is neighbours who will let them have what you have.

I thought you were talking about the privileged middle class high earners. I might have missed what you were getting at.

[lilelvis2000]

And is your point that Israeli land belongs to the Arabs? If your argument is about sovereign rights then maybe you would like to argue them. The truth of course is that the priviliged middle classes with their high earnings can make themselves seen to be caring byr condemning Israel and pretending to support the underdog. They think it makes them seem morally virtuous and as such entitled to their own high standards of living (because they care )

Here we go with the whole high earnings thing again... apparently materialists who care are seen as traitors to they own. While those who could give f**k are seen as righteous. How society has f**ked itself up is still a mystery to me. I don't even own a car or house - I suppose that makes me an outcast.

[DodgyAgent]

Here we go with the whole high earnings thing again... apparently materialists who care are seen as traitors to they own. While those who could give f**k are seen as righteous. How society has f**ked itself up is still a mystery to me. I don't even own a car or house - I suppose that makes me an outcast.

It makes you a hypocrite.

This sums people like you up rather nicely : Brendan O

The double standards in relation to Israel are now so enormous that you will often hear British and American leftists calling on their governments to condemn Israel over its militarism in Gaza and elsewhere. So, our governments, which destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan, whose wars overseas make Gaza look like a tea party in comparison, are invested by leftists with the moral authority to lecture Israel. This totally surreal situation springs from the fact that Israel is seen as different to every other state, as a lower form of life effectively, as criminal, and therefore it falls to the apparently more civilised Western nations to put it in its place. There is an ironically imperialistic streak to this left-wing agitation for the superior West to condemn stupid, backward, uncivilised Israel.

The double standards can also be seen in the campaigns to boycott Israeli academics and Israeli produce. Decent middle-class people will quite happily listen to a professor from authoritarian Belarus, or use an iPhone that was made in undemocratic China, but if you introduce them to an Israeli professor or give them an Israeli apple they will go mad and pretty much break out in hives. They have a weird allergy to all things Israeli - Israeli writing, Israeli music, Israeli food. They scream and jeer when an Israeli violinist starts to play at the Proms. Such irrational behaviour doesn’t only speak to the left’s double standards on Israel - it also has very ugly echoes indeed of earlier boycotts of Jewish shops and Jewish organisations by racists and fascists.

So why has there been this massive shift in the left’s attitude to Israel, this shift from uncritically loving it to unthinkingly loathing it? It can’t be explained by Israel’s behaviour: Israel’s militarism is of a smaller order today than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are some peripheral explanations for the left’s change in outlook. For example, the leftists of the 1950s and 60s will have had memories of the Holocaust and therefore will have felt greater empathy for the Jewish people. Also, socialistic Zionism was at the forefront in Israel back then, unlike today. Back then Israel was seen as a kind of socialistic experiment and not a right-wing nation, and therefore it was viewed favourably by Western leftists.

But those are only peripheral reasons. There is a bigger, key reason, I think, for the left’s change - which is that the left has stopped believing in modernity and progress, and it sees Israel as the embodiment of those things. Its vitriolic hatred for Israel is really an expression of disdain and disgust for what we might call the Western project, the Western way of life, the old ideals of nationhood, sovereignty, economic growth, human expansion, social experimentation. Israel is seen as being at the sharp edge of all those once-positive but now hated values, and thus it is intensively loathed. The left, having lost faith in modernity, has turned Israel into a kind of punchbag against which it can express its own anti-modern, anti-progress, shallowly anti-Western feelings.

In essence, Israel is very much a zeitgeist issue, where your attitudes towards it tend to reveal more about you and your worldview than they do anything about the reality of Israel. And the contemporary left’s attitudes to Israel reveal a lot about where it stands on the modern world itself. Israel is treated as a symbol of all the things that Western leftists and others once held dear, from self-possession to progressive intent, but which we now hold in trendy, postmodern disdain. This is where I think we can see that there is a very thin line, I’m afraid to say, between today’s fashionable anti-Zionism and old-style anti-Semitism.

Of course, it is possible to hate Israel without hating the Jewish people, yes. But historically, a very fine line separated anti-modernism from anti-Semitism, and that line was often breached. Jews, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were seen by some as representing disruptive change, radical modernity, deviant intellectual ideas. In those periods, some people who were thrown or battered by the spread of modernity, by the rapid pace of change in society, often visited their fury upon Jews, who they saw as the source and instigators of that modernity. This is where the idea of the “socialism of fools” comes from, where people who were made uncomfortable by the impact of capitalism and progress blamed such things on the Jews. We are seeing something similar today, where Israel rather than “the Jews” is seen as too modern, too Western, too cocky, and it is hated for that. And this hatred for Israel, because it is quite irrational and is fuelled more by Westerners’ own emotions than by reality on the ground in the Middle East, is unpredictable, changeable, often quite rash, meaning it easily crosses the line into expressions of disdain for “the Jews”. Consider that Lib Dem MP who recently chastised the cruelty of “the Jews” against Palestinians and later corrected himself and said he meant “Israel”. Such slips of the tongue suggest today’s anti-Zionism is motored by similar ugly and unfair sentiments to yesteryear’s anti-Semitism.

For young people, especially young radicals, and even for young Jewish people, it can be very tempting to join the anti-Israel juggernaut. Hating Israel is such a powerful strain in respectable left-wing circles that people feel they must follow suit to be treated seriously politically, to be thought of as left-wing. I say, “Don’t do it”. I say there is nothing positive - nothing - in contemporary hatred for Israel. In fact it is one of the most backward outlooks of our age, fuelled more by a casual, kneejerk rejection of Western values than by anti-imperialism. It should be challenged and ridiculed, ruthlessly picked apart, not indulged.

[SantaClaus]

Thank you Dodgy Agent. Your post is a refreshing change to the usual drivel spouted on here.

[Unix]

Israel approves Egyptian ceasefire in Gaza

Obviously the international condemnation has forced Israel to face up to the fact they are nothing more than murderers. No doubt this terms will be totally unacceptable and it will be rejected, only for Israel to claim they tried, then they can get on with blowing children apart with their shiny state of the art missiles.

[DodgyAgent]

Israel approves Egyptian ceasefire in Gaza

Obviously the international condemnation has forced Israel to face up to the fact they are nothing more than murderers. No doubt this terms will be totally unacceptable and it will be rejected, only for Israel to claim they tried, then they can get on with blowing children apart with their shiny state of the art missiles.

So what are they supposed to do then clever dick? perhaps you should read this: http://brendanoneill.co.uk/post/5568...sive-in-todays

[Unix]

So what are they supposed to do then clever dick? perhaps you should read this: Brendan O

That presumes everyone who is criticising Israel is a leftist, you'll find most of the world is condemning them right and left, except you a recruitment agent scumbag who tries to justify innocent children being blown up.

[DodgyAgent]

That presumes everyone who is criticising Israel is a leftist, you'll find most of the world is condemning them right and left, except you a recruitment agent scumbag who tries to justify innocent children being blown up.

Innocent children were blown up by the allies in the second world war, so presumably that makes us as bad as the Nazi Germans? I think you will find if you read Brendan O'Neils excellent article that it is primarily the left and members of repressive groups who hate Israel.

[Unix]

Innocent children were blown up by the allies in the second world war, so presumably that makes us as bad as the Nazi Germans? I think you will find if you read Brendan O'Neils excellent article that it is primarily the left and members of repressive groups who hate Israel.

So because we did it in a World War it makes it Ok for Israel to do it to a people who are upset because they occupy part of their land?

[lilelvis2000]

Israel approves Egyptian ceasefire in Gaza

Obviously the international condemnation has forced Israel to face up to the fact they are nothing more than murderers. No doubt this terms will be totally unacceptable and it will be rejected, only for Israel to claim they tried, then they can get on with blowing children apart with their shiny state of the art missiles.

Israel has far higher morals than Hamas. Hamas bribes the residents - perhaps even intimidates them into staying. The other day people were fleeing and Hamas pushed them back. Ostensibly to act as human shields. Now that is scum. People with dual citizenship are being allowed out. Probably, serious cases are going to Israeli hospitals. That does not mean I think the IDF are nice people - because they aren't.

My main gripe is the whole limbo thing. As Israel is not willing to give up the land, they should annex it. Frigg many Palestinians actually want to live in Israel. Unfortunately that would make non-Jews the majority. I don't think this is something the Israeli's planned very well.