Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Thylacine 2000

Well-known member
Citizen
I'm not sure how someone that unpopular got elected in the first place, unless their elections are as big of a sham as Russia's...

Until about 3 months ago, and certainly at the time of the last election, Netanyahu was not unpopular.

He'd had the job on and off for like 17 years, he was a known factor. His major selling points had always been that he massively improved Israel's economy and diplomatic standing while avoiding major change, especially avoiding major change with the Palestinians. And he did. He was viewed as a highly polarizing figure because of his personal scandals - illegal campaign gifts, illegally trying to pressure a newspaper publisher into not printing bad stories about him - but many Israelis were able to shrug this off like Americans who saw the Clinton era as a good one even though he banged his secretary and tried to cover it up. There are almost no political differences between 2022 Netanyahu and his chief rivals - Benny Gantz, Avigdor Liberman, Gideon Sa'ar. It is entirely personality-based.

Netanyahu almost compulsively, uncontrollably doublecrosses and lies to people who should be his political allies. He makes a tit-for-tat deal with them, gets his tit, then says "Tat? What tat? I never promised you anything." It's just a douchey game he can play and he loves it, like Lyndon Johnson forcing his staffers to talk to him while he was taking a dump. Because of that, a huge swath of Israeli politicians who should be on his side because they agree with him on most or all issues cannot stand him, personally, and form new parties to offer the people "More of the same, but without Bibi." And for the last 4 or 5 elections in a row, it's been about 50:50.

Because so many of his colleagues loathe him, it is now impossible for Netanyahu to build a governing coalition (61 or more seats in the 120-seat Knesset) out of the right-wing parties who actually know how to govern a country. He was only able to win re-election in late 2022 by elevating a Halloween parade of ultra-ultra-extreme racist, criminal fringe candidates. From a national functioning standpoint, there is a difference between Mike Pence and Mike Lindell, and that's the difference between Netanyahu's prior terms and this one.

Most people who wanted to turn the page on Netanyahu voted for Yair Lapid's party since Lapid is the leader of the opposition and had been the engineer of Netanyahu's last defeat. Unfortunately, TOO MANY people supported Lapid and not enough supported other sane right-wing / moderate / left parties, which mostly shrank, some so much that they fell below Knesset inclusion criteria and got no seats at all, so all the "turn-the-page" votes cast for them were totally wasted. Lapid's vote bloc grew, but he didn't reach 61 seats, and there were no allied parties left big enough to bring him past the threshold. Lapid did not foresee or prevent this because he has far less experience at actually building governing coalitions than Netanyahu.
 
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PrimalxConvoy

NOT a New Member.
Citizen
Israel police clash with worshippers at al-Aqsa mosque.

Israeli police clashed with dozens of worshippers in Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound early on Wednesday, in what Israeli police said was a response to rioting...

...The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, reported that dozens of worshippers, who spent all the night in Ramadan praying, were injured in a raid on the mosque. The Palestinian Red Crescent reported that Israeli forces had prevented its medics from reaching the mosque.

Videos on social media purportedly showed Israeli police officers beating Palestinians with batons and rifle butts at the mosque...

(Full article: - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/israel-al-aqsa-mosque-rocket-sirens-around-gaza )
 

PrimalxConvoy

NOT a New Member.
Citizen
I'm not sure if this has been covered in the American/non-British press.

UK-Israeli mother dies after West Bank shooting.

_129321788_lucymayarinadee3.jpg

Lucy (left), Rina (centre) and Maia Dee were reportedly shot at close range after their car came under fire

A British-Israeli woman has died after a suspected Palestinian gun attack on Friday, in which two of her daughters were also killed...

...Lucy, Rina and Maia were shot at as they were driving in the Jordan Valley in the northern West Bank on their way to a family holiday. Their vehicle crashed and the gunmen went up to the car and opened fire on the women at close range, Israeli media quoted investigators as saying.

Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported that 22 bullet casings were found, apparently from a Kalashnikov assault rifle...

(Full article: - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65227638 )
 

Thylacine 2000

Well-known member
Citizen

This is a dishonest, sleazy article that is really beneath the level of seriousness this topic calls for.

The headline says THEY FOUND MASS GRAVES, the first paragraph says "they found what might be mass graves." Immediately it's trash but whatever, I'll keep reading.

A few paragraphs later it says "they found long thin disturbances 3 meters wide by 30 meters long," then they show pictures that demonstrate no such things at all and look instead like maps of the Grassy Knoll:


It also says the study was run by Adalah, a shamelessly lying NGO which maintains a database of "over 60 racist laws in Israel," which so many "critics" like to cite without actually looking at it. If people actually look at the Adalah "racist laws" database, they'll see "racism" like the Israeli national broadcasting law which mandates both Hebrew and Arabic language, and also a law that allows Arabs in East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to vote, and also that national holidays are based on the Hebrew calendar, the postage stamps have a menorah on them, etc. Pathetic fake complaints, deserving all the credibility of a Focus On The Family list of how Teletubbies was gay brainwashing.

There is no professional methodology at work, no honest hand guiding it, and all parties are showing the very definition of prejudice.

There have been accusations of a Tantura Massacre for decades. There have been denials just as long. There is no physical evidence whatsoever. It COULD have happened, in a street-by-street civil war in a country the size of New Jersey with well-documented massacres on each side, as the Arab armies invaded 3 years after the Holocaust to exterminate the Jews down to the last baby and the Jews fought to not be exterminated. If someone digs up the beach at Tantura and finds bodies, I'll believe it. It would change nothing.
 
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PrimalxConvoy

NOT a New Member.
Citizen
This is a dishonest, sleazy article that is really beneath the level of seriousness this topic calls for.

The headline says THEY FOUND MASS GRAVES, the first paragraph says "they found what might be mass graves." Immediately it's trash but whatever, I'll keep reading.

A few paragraphs later it says "they found long thin disturbances 3 meters wide by 30 meters long," then they show pictures that demonstrate no such things at all and look instead like maps of the Grassy Knoll:


It also says the study was run by Adalah, a shamelessly lying NGO which maintains a database of "over 60 racist laws in Israel," which so many "critics" like to cite without actually looking at it. If people actually look at the Adalah "racist laws" database, they'll see "racism" like the Israeli national broadcasting law which mandates both Hebrew and Arabic language, and also a law that allows Arabs in East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to vote, and also that national holidays are based on the Hebrew calendar, the postage stamps have a menorah on them, etc. Pathetic fake complaints, deserving all the credibility of a Focus On The Family list of how Teletubbies was gay brainwashing.

There is no professional methodology at work, no honest hand guiding it, and all parties are showing the very definition of prejudice.

There have been accusations of a Tantura Massacre for decades. There have been denials just as long. There is no physical evidence whatsoever. It COULD have happened, in a street-by-street civil war in a country the size of New Jersey with well-documented massacres on each side, as the Arab armies invaded 3 years after the Holocaust to exterminate the Jews down to the last baby and the Jews fought to not be exterminated. If someone digs up the beach at Tantura and finds bodies, I'll believe it. It would change nothing.

Wikipedia seems to believe a massacre, or at least war crimes, occurred:

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantura_massacre
 

Thylacine 2000

Well-known member
Citizen
It very well might have.

The Guardian's George W. Bush-level, WMD to WMD-related-program-activity backpedal won't be how the answer is found.
 
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Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
Citizen
Problem with Wikipedia is it isn't all that accurate when it comes to controversial topics due to how it's edited.
 

Thylacine 2000

Well-known member
Citizen
What did the government actually do?

They stripped the court of its ability to overturn government actions that it found "unreasonable."

The court can still overturn actions! It just had to use different grounds. The "unreasonable" issue is the subject of an ongoing fight from the 1990s, and yeah, yeah, it IS a subjective term. But nothing bad was happening with it in place.



Even if the reasonableness standard is abolished – other paths of legal recourse to challenge government decisions exist. The courts, led by the High Court of Justice, will be able to review government and ministerial decisions using other doctrines of administrative law. These include proportionality, discrimination, conflict of interest, bias, lack of factual basis, arbitrariness and extraneous considerations..... If the court [cannot use the "reasonable" standard]
they may be able to prevent it using other principles – most likely the Estoppel principle, which was already cited by some of the judges in January's verdict. Estoppel is an equitable doctrine, a bar that prevents one from asserting a claim or right that contradicts what one has said or done before, or what has been legally established as true.

Everybody clear on that? They settled the score on "reasonable," the court can still overturn actions because they are "biased" or whatever, one subjective term was replaced with another, and they blew up 75 years of social order to make that swap.

I was deeply hoping someone, anyone, would block this, or back down. Even the people who supported the change should have recognized that the diplomatic, economic, and social costs were not worth it. Israel is a land of coping, of muddling through, of dealing with annoying work-arounds because it isn't worth wholesale changing the system. I know the pro-change arguments, and they all could have waited. They all could have coped. This was entirely self-inflicted and unnecessary.

It could be reversed immediately if a more moderate government wins next time. I believe "next time" is fall 2026.
 
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PrimalxConvoy

NOT a New Member.
Citizen
"
The sound of a single gunshot echoes around the street as a man in a white t-shirt runs away from where an Israeli military jeep has been sighted.
In that instant, blood is seen spraying above him and he collapses forwards.

Ameed al-Jaghoub, unarmed and apparently rushing to help a wounded man, had been shot in the back of the head during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank village of Beita.
Nearly a fortnight on, he remains critically ill in intensive care.

Mobile phone footage of the moment the 33-year-old was hit is among the clearest documentation in recent years of the use of lethal force by Israeli troops against an unarmed Palestinian...

- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66682821
 

Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
Citizen
The first part was eye rolling, but not unexpected, given the source. The last bit was a huge WHAT? HOW IN THE WORLD could country A force people in county B to leave their homes and move to country A. Did they go in covertly and kidnap a good chuck of the Jewish population living in Arabic nations and drag them to the newly minted state of Israel and forbid them from leaving?
 

Thylacine 2000

Well-known member
Citizen
The first part was eye rolling, but not unexpected, given the source. The last bit was a huge WHAT? HOW IN THE WORLD could country A force people in county B to leave their homes and move to country A. Did they go in covertly and kidnap a good chuck of the Jewish population living in Arabic nations and drag them to the newly minted state of Israel and forbid them from leaving?
This is an antisemitic conspiracy theory but not one Abbas himself made up; it has been around for years. The claim is that Arabs and Jews had always lived together peacefully, so to get enough people to migrate into Israel and make the country function, Zionists staged false-flag attacks against Jewish communities throughout the Arab world, forcing them to flee to Israel. They particularly cite the case of Iraq:


Basically, after Iraq allied with Nazi Germany in 1933 and banned all Hebrew schools and Hebrew names in 1936 and held the antisemitic Farhud massacre in 1941 and sent troops to exterminate the Jews of Palestine in 1948, there was a synagogue bombing in Baghdad in 1950 and Iraqi secret police rounded up some Jews and tortured them until they "confessed" to bombing themselves. This is good enough for Mahmoud Abbas, who got his PhD from the Soviet Union for proving the Holocaust never happened.
 

Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
Citizen
Ah. Wasn't aware of that particular conspiracy theory. Not sure if I want to thank you guys for letting me know about it or go cry in the corner over the utter stupidity of humans as a group.
 


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