whoa, there, everyone, just calm down a minute. leo - firstly, criticising the state of israel is not the same thing as hating jewish people. if you think an action, a policy or a law is wrong, you must be free to say so. there is a difference between doing that and having a go at all jews in general. where there is often confusion (and i can see it here in one particular case) is when criticism of israel is expressed in terms which draw on classical anti-semitism, such as when israelis are accused of conspiracies, poisoning or inherent untrustworthiness in such a way as would be unusual were it aimed at any other group. for example, take darfur. what those militias are up to down there, blimey - yet i don't see anybody calling darfur a "racist apartheid state". singling israel out in order to "demonise" it is a very different animal, as we shall see below.
LeoSalinas22 said:
below is a link to a website about the 6 Day War and the miracles that occured there. it is very fascinating and actually got me choked up just reading about it because i know God intervened for the nation of Israel in that war. no other war that is taught in history at our schools teaches about this and no other war that i know about ( if there is, let me know!), for the exception of the wars in the Tanach, did people of a nation look to God for their salvation.
leo, you should really know that despite the opinions of chabad (who, incidentally, are not a zionist organisation and do not believe in a non-religious jewish state) and despite the wishful thinking of many credulous and foolish religious people G!D does not intervene directly in human history any more. in jewish terms this is called the
hester ha-panim ("hiding of the Divine Face") and the religious consensus on miracles is that *every single one*, *
even the biblical ones*, could also have occurred *naturally* (however unlikely this might be), APART from the Revelation at sinai. all other miracles have an element of doubt. this is why a "strong east wind blew all night" the night before the splitting of the reed sea.
doubt is an important thing, because it allows for individuals to hold to their own private opinions. when someone like you, or chabad for that matter, attempts to discern the cause and effect of the Divine Will *within recorded history*, the effect is invariably corrosive. in the case of the 6-day war, a lot of people got delusions of grandeur and, forty years later, we're living with the consequences. so-called "christian zionists" who get all excited about G!D helping the modern state of israel are invariably doing so for their own purposes in my experience. frankly, mate, if your perception of what we're up to in the middle east is preparing to all be killed or converted when jesus shows up again then you are no friend of ours and neither are any of your fundamentalist friends. it is bad enough that our own fundamentalists think that the aversion of a *serious existential threat* - which was what the 6-day war was - gives them an excuse to ride roughshod over the humanity of others, without a bunch of rich americans encouraging them to be even more extreme. so much for one side. now for the rest:
post-abrahamic said:
No one can honestly claim God is on the side of racist Israelis who even former President Jimmy Carter soundly condemned for their racist apartheid policies keeping Palestinians living in hellish conditions.
well, you sound pretty open to debate, don't you? i must say i'm noticing evidence of a pattern here. you're not a UK academic, are you? you do know, by the way, that jews are not permitted to buy land in the palestinian authority? the penalty for that is death. is that not a form of "apartheid"? jews are also not allowed to become citizens of the new iraq (even if that is where they were born) - is that not "racist"? i just hope that you do actually distribute your invective in an impartial fashion - but i'm not holding my breath.
firstly, since when is jimmy carter the fount of all wisdom on the middle east? even he has found it hard to defend his recent book and interventions as blatantly one-sided as his recent ones have been do just as much harm as those of fat, bigoted televangelists.
You site a war that has a totally different perspective to the victims of the Zionist land stealers and killers of local resistance to this theft of land.
with all due respect, i think you're failing to take the proper view of the historical context of the 6-day war. i don't think you're prepared to actually concede it might be a bit more complicated than your sloganeering would suggest. you might read some of nasser's speeches, perhaps. remember, israel beat three - count 'em - three vastly larger, richer and better resourced countries who were preparing to annihilate it. not "steal their land" - they were going to "throw the jews into the sea". everyone would have been slaughtered. the israelis were not about to take that lying down.
Without considering the immorality of Europeans and Americans ganging up to deprive Palestinians of their own country in order to assuage the conscience of Europeans for the European caused Holocaust
the arabs (we can't really speak of palestinians properly before 1967) had a chance in a UN VOTE in 1948 to partition the land. the jews voted yes. the arabs voted no and they started another war of annihilation in which they lost. the only countries that gave israel any material or logistical support were france and czechoslovakia. forget "europeans and americans ganging up". the americans weren't even interested at this point. as for the "conscience of europeans" - more than half of israel's population comes from arab countries like morocco, iraq, syria, yemen, lebanon, egypt and tunisia. they were simply kicked out (or murdered) after 1948 - they were rich communities that had been in these countries in some cases since before there were arabs there - but i don't see you calling *that* a theft of land. and that, certainly, has nothing to do with the
Shoah.
no Christian has a right to side with the foreign invaders. No one who knows God would ever stoop to stealing another people's land.
whilst i am not about to whitewash immoral acts that were committed by israeli forces and governments at any time, i think calling the them "foreign invaders" is simply flying in the face of cultural fact. jews are from this place. its very names, its hills, its valleys, its stones are in our hearts. we have prayed for the return to zion and jerusalem for the last 2000 years, more than three times a day. under my wedding canopy, at the moment of my greatest personal happiness, i recited "if i forget thee, o jerusalem, may my right hand wither". i don't expect you to understand this, but the land of israel is our land historically, culturally, religiously and now, factually. what we must do is seek to be worthy of it morally and, unfortunately, we're not doing a great job of it so far, particularly at the moment. however, without a realistic, open-minded assessment of the facts and realities we are not about to find any understanding, let alone a solution. this, i am afraid, includes a full understanding of the mistakes of the early C19th zionist movement which had such tragically ignorant and misguided slogans as "a land without a people, for a people without a land". can anyone spot the bloody problem with that nowadays? sheesh, what a bunch of idiots they were. however, as someone said, we have to start from where we are, not where we wish we were, which means that slinging abuse and accusations, or hegemonising and romanticising are both equally unhelpful - and this thread so far has been an example of precisely why it is nearly impossible to have a discussion about the middle east without it being hijacked by people with extreme and unreasonable viewpoints.
thomas -
i've not come across the uss liberty event before, but there seems to be a very comprehensive wikipedia article on it:
USS Liberty incident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
obviously, i would be appalled to think that the israelis did this to american bystanders on purpose, knowing they were americans, but having read the article, i am bound to pull out the following quote:
No adequate benefit has been put forward that the Israelis would derive from the attack on an American ship, especially considering the high cost of the predictable complications that must inevitably follow such an attack on a powerful ally, and the fact that Israel immediately notified the American embassy after the attack.
given that the US was *not* an ally of israel at the time of the 6-day war (or it wouldn't have happened) but only became so afterwards, i find it very hard to believe that the israelis' explanation of this tragedy did not satisfy the american government, if not some of its most senior politicians and soldiers. i also understand that the israelis paid some $13m in reparations to the wounded and the families of the dead, so presumably they accepted some measure of responsibility. i presume you brought this up because it happened in the war and it wasn't (presumably) evidence of Divine intervention, not to illustrate the general perfidiousness of israel.
Snoopy said:
"Forty years on, Israel has settled around 450,000 people on land occupied in 1967, in defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own. The fate of the Palestinians informs foreign policy and relations between the Arab world and the west to this day."
snoopy,
have you come across what is going on in a place called nahr al-bared in lebanon at the moment? nahr al-bared is a palestinian *refugee camp*. in lebanon. there are corresponding camps elsewhere in lebanon, syria, jordan and egypt. in them, palestinian refugees are kept in limbo and have been since 1967 and in some cases 1948 - by other arabs. their so-called "brethren" have kept them in poverty and filth for 40-60 YEARS, whilst trumpeting how important the palestinian cause was to them and using it as an excuse to avoid dealing with their own problems. the palestinians have been treated scandalously by the other arabs, who pat them on the head with one hand, handing them grenades and AK47s and paying them to murder themselves and others, whilst refusing them jobs, citizenship, public services or entry into their own societies. some brotherhood. the palestinians *i* know are sick and tired of being taken for fools and used to fight other peoples' battles. this includes their leaders, in many cases. might i point you to this article which appeared recently in the international arabic paper asharq al-awsat:
Asharq al-Awsat: 40 Years On - The Real Stigma
jews don't treat other jews like that. however, as you should have seen in gaza last year, the israelis pulled out thousands of settlers *unilaterally*, because it was the right thing to do and they thought it might get them some peace. instead, they got rockets in sderot. so forgive me if i am a little cynical about "international law" in this and other contexts. people are very keen to go on about it without actually realising what it is - namely, what you can get away with justifying to other countries. it has always been enforced selectively and will continue to be so until countries are either abolished, or are prepared to accept an international policeman, or are prepared to relinquish absolute and total sovereignty over what they can call "internal affairs".
b'shalom
bananabrain
