Dirt...it’s just dirty dirt

Anyone surprised over Biden’s support for Israel? Was anyone surprised over tRump support for Israel?

The USA has supported it for monetary and weapon (yes) trade…

https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-israel/

Oh…and the base! Need to know you’re on the “right side” …

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/14/half-of-evangelicals-support-israel-because-they-believe-it-is-important-for-fulfilling-end-times-prophecy/

IMO the disgusting treatment of people by the Israeli government is criminal and shameful - and don’t tell me there hasn’t been “room” to have settled this shit long ago.

Yes, the people in Israel deserve security in a place they are hated. BUT the Palestinians deserve the same security, oh - and humane treatment and access…

Hate. It’s too bad. And there are so many “reasons” to hate in the Middle East.

I don’t have a solution :woman_shrugging:t2:- not as though the political leaders are really wanting one…

The conflicts in that area are incredibly complex, although some people tend to oversimplify it and just blame just one or the other side. There are mostly good people on both sides of the conflict – good, friendly and peaceful israelis, and good, friendly and peaceful palestinians, and they just want to live in peace. But there are also crooks, warmongers, fundamentalists, corrupt and power hungry people on both sides. And profiteering people on both sides that make dirty money from keeping the conflict alive. So blaming only one or the other side is missing the point.

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Isn’t there always in extremist conflicts? I don’t care about the politics, it always boils down to control/power/money/corruption … it’s the heavy handedness against “people” and a lack of humane responses that always disturb me.

Usually people who have nothing to do with but are the victims of “action”. From damaged property to deprivation to death.

More martyrs are made, more reasons to escalate.

And yes it’s complicated - but it also is not that complicated when the sight/goal is set on humans. Beliefs, superstitions, money interests- those get complicated.

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Both sides have their extremists - Israel have their ultra-orthodox settlers, and the palestinians have Hamas. Israel seems unable and/or unwilling to put a stop to the stealing of land that the ultraorthodox jews are doing, and the Hamas cling to power while the palestinian people cannot seem to get rid of them, or have sane alternatives. So then religious fundamentalism and extremism, combined with reluctance to give up power and/or to work for the better of the people is a recipe for disaster. And then you have the iranians who back up the Hamas, and they certainly are not conceding or giving anyting to the israelis, on pure hell-bent principles.

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So much for Jared Kushner’s “Peace Plan”.

To put things in a perspective you almost never hear:

Until recently; the median age of someone living in the occupied territories was below 18. Now it is around 21. It is almost double that in the USA (around 39).

Remember this when you are told that the condition of the people in the occupied territories is their own fault. They are basically faulting children for stuff they did (right or wrong) 60 years ago. That is how you can be sure that smoke is being blown up your ass.

Palestinian, at least in my life time seems to mean: a non-Jewish Israeli child who has lived in a concentration camp their entire life; as punishment for something their grandparents might have done.

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Yair.

I do not support the Israeli government and their policies on Palestinians. Seems a tad ironic historically.

The US supports Israel because it is in its perceived best interest to do so, not for any moral or humanitarian reason.

Supporting Israel has meant the US has had a military/strategic presence in the Middle east since the 1960’s.

Be interesting to see what happens when the oil in the Middle East runs out and/ or the US produces most of its own fuel from renewable sources.

Trivia: Right now, 25% of all Australian households have solar power installed. Imo, this is largely due to generous government subsidies. .

Its another cockatoo rant…
The Israeli-Palestinian wars have their beginnings in the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of Cannan around 700 BC. Written around that time Deuteronomy has YHWH promising the return of all Jews exiled to Israel wherever they end up and on top of that, Israel’s eventual rise as the greatest nation in the world. Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezra, and others all promoted the idea which became an entrenched part of Jewish lore. There is a prayer devoted to the rise of the state of Israel, a particularly attractive idea that was eventually politicised by the Zionist Movement which formally began in the late 1800s.
Along the way, the Christians interpreted the restoration of Israel as an absolute imperative for the return of Jesus and the Judgement Day. Such sentiments drew medieval Europe into the costly wars of the Crusades. It was for this prophetic vision that Cromwell lifted the ban on Jews in England set by Edward I some three hundred years before in 1290, to ensure the Jews did get to “the four corners of the world”, as biblically prophesied before being encouraged to go back to Israel, to be converted to Christianity in time for when Jesus would then put an end to the material world and everyone could get their final celestial rewards.
Nothing, as it transpired, happened.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was the first legal government policy regarding the establishment of the state of Israel. It had support of the Zionist movement and Christians generally but the unspoken agenda was that it was formulated as an enticement for the Russian Jews of the Bolsheviks to bring Russia back into the First World War. It didn’t work; someone overestimated the piousness of the secular communist Jews, but England was now committed to the state of a Jewish Israel.

The resettlement of European Jews didn’t really take off until after WW2 and the horror of the Holocaust, which cast them as the victims and deserving inheritors of Canaan. There were lots of negotiations and endless talks but some sort of uneasy treaty was hammered into place under the power of the existing British Mandate allowing the refugees land grants and with the assistance of wealthy supporters, limited purchases of land from the resident and mostly impoverished Palestinians. The following decades witnessed an escalating bloody struggle over land and power in which the Palestinians suffered increasing losses in living space and of fundamental rights that has equivalents in other uneven territorial struggles, such as the North American Indians against the white man.

The continuing sad and tawdry events has indeed seen Israel emerge as a nation above all others, confident in its influence over the US in supporting its fight in a bitter and savage war of survival against its Arab religious, cultural and poltical enemies.The once pitied survivors of concentration camps and gas chambers have emerged as intolerable as any of the regimes who had ever persecuted them.

In comparison very little consideration of the Palestinians usually hyped as terrorists or murderous zealots in western media, who had been possessors of the land for nearly two thousand years after the Romans forcibly dispersed the Jews. I have often heard Israel has the right to survive as a nation, but what of the Palestinians? Do they deserve their own cruel Diaspora? There is no mention in the Bible of their place in the future of the promised land but this does not justify the treatment metered out to them by the now empowered Jews with openly unfair discriminations and exclusive distributions of favourable districts.

I don’t support one side over the other in this endless conflict. It’s a profound and sorry mess, deplorable for its savagery and hypocrisy. It remains the epitome of the political inhumane insanity that only the three supposed Religions of Peace could produce.

It really is just dirty dirt. Its the purchased burial grounds of Abraham’s Sarah; Genesis 23 is the symbolic title deed. Paid for in full, despite offers of it as a gift.
But it’s also the ancestral territory of generations of Palestinian who lived there for centuries and whose children and old folk have been destroyed along with those of the Jews within that stupid ancient and seemingly endless conflict. It might only be the figurative Promised Land but it is most certainly the arse End of the World.

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Great post Grin, thanx.

Once worked with a Seventh Day Adventist. At the time she was 20 odd and saving to go to Israel as a missionary. Really. I asked her why and she explained the reasoning or her sect. I wished her luck.

Tow different things I think. Yes, it’s thoroughly documented that the Jews (and other minorities) were horribly persecuted during the Shoah.

This may not be popular view: Imo, Israel has taken advantage of the guilt of the world about the Shoah. This an observation, nota judgement; exactly what I would do in their place.

That Israel is now persecuting the Palestinians shouldn’t be a surprise. These are simply ordinary human beings behaving in normal ways for a range of reasons, ranging from survival to personal power . Pretty sure there aren’t many survivors of the Shoah actively engaged in Israeli politics.

I do not support the claim that any nation has the right to exist. Having an ancestral home and about $3.50 will buy a reasonable cup of coffee in most of Oz.

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Context: In 2000 I went backpacking around S Ireland and Scotland. Stayed in Youth Hostels whenever I could. In Dublin Youth Hostel I met an American born Israeli woman. She lived in Tel Aviv and had two young children. She told me her children never took the bus to school; taxis only.

There are many things for which I am grateful. Among them is that I was born a white Australian instead of an aborigine, another is that I was not born a Jew in what was then Palestine.

Times change, yet we seem to learn so little from history.