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Israel, becoming increasingly isolated because of the revolutions in the region, its own actions garnering little sympathy, and the weakening of the US global hegemony, has become vulnerable to the prospects of war and international condemnation. The situation is not absolutely hopeless, but the Palestinians are seeking a nation and the Arab Spring has greatly upset the status quo of the past several decades. Israelis should be concerned the actions of the government forced both Egypt and Turkey to reconsider their treaties with the state of Israel.

What do you think?

I believe it's all coming down like it was stated in the bible for Israel.

Israel cornered and alone means one thing. Nukes galore.

Israel's been through three separate wars for their existence...with the aid of the US (which wont be retracted any time soon...) I'm sure they can hold their own against other countries around them that have bigger things to worry about.

The whole thing makes me sick.

Just share the god-damn holy land.

You think bombing the gak out of it makes any God happy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option

I don't think the Israelis care. To a hardcore Jew any religion other that Judaism or Christianity is evil blasphemy. Religious zealots have little tolerance for other religions.

I wouldn't mess with Israel. They do not feth around. I don't know if their current leadership is willing to go "lol nuclear apocalypse" or not, but there is a chance that they are. Don't take that chance.

Personally, I hope the trend continues and the Israelis come to realize how childish and foolish they are. I also hope that this weakens the pro Israeli stance in the US, its ridiculous that such a marginal nation can wield such great influence over American policy and policymakers. Sometimes I wonder if our elected officials are elected to serve the American people or the Israeli people...

Since the early days of recorded history, people in that region have been clobbering each other for various and diverse reasons.
I think there is a large vein of lead near the area's water table which has leeched it's way into the water supply, causing judgemental issues amongst the population.
Even if Isreal were to pack up and move, somebody would be shelling somebody else there.

No other country in the region has the political stability, economy, and military power to seriously threaten Israel. That isn't going to change any time soon. The absolute worst you're going to get is Turkey taking Israel to court over their blockade of Gaza, which will be interesting to watch.


Meanwhile, Israel is directly oppressing the people living in Palestine, keeping them in absolute poverty and denying them basic goods they need to build their homes. Yet people worrying if Israel might one day be picked on by someone else. It's very odd.

snurl wrote:Since the early days of recorded history, people in that region have been clobbering each other for various and diverse reasons.
I think there is a large vein of lead near the area's water table which has leeched it's way into the water supply, causing judgemental issues amongst the population.
Even if Isreal were to pack up and move, somebody would be shelling somebody else there.

That's what makes me sad.

I wish religion didn't have to inspire murder.

The irony is that a lot of aggression shown to Israel by their neighbor has a little less hate a lot more political posturing. After all, what would Syria do is Saudi Arabia found out they actually didn't care Israel existed? And how what Jordan say to its underclass that feel threatened by all the Palestinian refugees.

Geo-politics suck.

sebster wrote:Meanwhile, Israel is directly oppressing the people living in Palestine, keeping them in absolute poverty and denying them basic goods they need to build their homes. Yet people worrying if Israel might one day be picked on by someone else. It's very odd.

In the context of a society that values life in different degrees thanks in large part to media portrayal and media visibility, it is in reality not very odd. Israel has the sympathy of the Western world (for the most part) whereas the Palestinians are often lumped with other regional nations that hate Israel and thus often seen as the agitators rather than the victims.

Intellectual discourse does help shed light on a discriminated and neglected people, but tell that to the Western news media.

As terrorism increases Israel becomes more like apartheid South Africa to the point now where they have outdone the old apartheid South African government in oppression. The problem the Palestinians have is they have Hamas and other organizations like Hamas instead of a Nelson Mandela, which just aggravates the cycle. Israel becomes more oppressive because of the non stop terrorism increases, and the non stop terrorism increases because Israel is becoming more oppressive. It's a death cycle that both sides can't escape from, and if a Mandela were to emerge from the Israeli or Palestinian leadership his own people would liquidate him.

I only see 2 ways for this to end, and both involve the Iranian nuclear weapons program: Israel and Iran nuke each other into oblivion, or Israel kills 60 million or so Iranians in a nuclear holocaust to stop them from getting the bomb. The only question is will 6 million dead Jews in WW2 give Israel 1 get out of jail free card when it comes to genocidal war crimes? There are other ways it could potentially end, but if you combine a healthy dose of cynacism and logic all other possibilities are possible but not that probable.

WarOne wrote:In the context of a society that values life in different degrees thanks in large part to media portrayal and media visibility, it is in reality not very odd. Israel has the sympathy of the Western world (for the most part) whereas the Palestinians are often lumped with other regional nations that hate Israel and thus often seen as the agitators rather than the victims.

This is pretty much what I find very odd. We're so indifferent to the suffering of one group in the region, but so hyper-concerned with the welfare of the other group, to the extent that we worry about what future hypotheticals might possibly threaten them.

I mean, I get the people are much more concerned for friends and family than for random strangers. I also get that we're more concerned for people who are like us than people who aren't (the media here was all over 9/11, but strangely silent on the human tragedies affecting people who aren't white and about as rich as us). But if that's what is driving this, is Israel really that much more like us than most Arab states?

Or is it that we all know the story of Israel, holocaust to a nation of their own, beset on all sides, and that narrative overrides any concern about what's actually happening?


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schadenfreude wrote:As terrorism increases Israel becomes more like apartheid South Africa to the point now where they have outdone the old apartheid South African government in oppression. The problem the Palestinians have is they have Hamas and other organizations like Hamas instead of a Nelson Mandela, which just aggravates the cycle. Israel becomes more oppressive because of the non stop terrorism increases, and the non stop terrorism increases because Israel is becoming more oppressive. It's a death cycle that both sides can't escape from, and if a Mandela were to emerge from the Israeli or Palestinian leadership his own people would liquidate him.

Mandela led the armed faction of the ANC, and it was long debated whether his violent resistance to apartheid could be justified by the horrible nature of apartheid. When he was caught and imprisoned, his imprisonment came from information provided by the CIA, and the CIA did this because the guy was a known terrorist. He was offered release by SA authorities if he renounced violent opposition to apartheid but he declined. On release from prison, he still justified violent resistance.

We all just chose to ignore that stuff, and overwhelmingly support him and his cause. We kind of invent our own Mandelas, when we want to.

I do find it really strange that people can't all get along. I don't expect everyone to be best of buds, but come on - you are all fighting over some old buildings and bits of dirt that were the setting for some supposed "holy" events hundreds of years ago that are important to several major religions. Didn't their mothers ever teach them to share?

Especially confusing when a large part of each religion is supposedly teaching people to be nice to each other.

But I have to say that I agree with much of what sebster is saying; we are so fixated on the bad things one side is doing yet are ignoring what is happening on the other side.

I mean what would have happened if the UK had acted more like Israel in Northern Ireland?

I've always been fascinated by Israel as a nation in the grand scheme of international politics, and I wrote many papers totaling many pages throughout my undergrad on the subject of Israel. I'm not really going to contribute much here, cause once I get started, I won't be able to stop myself.

I will, however, be watching this thread intently to see how everyone views the conflict. I'm a curious person.

The whole Israel thing is funny, because it's kind of like a little microcosm of 40k. There is never-ending war, no one is the good guys, and the end is always nigh, forever, and it's always on the cusp of either getting better or getting worse without ever actually doing so. Grimdarkest.

On the whole, I think it's a nonstop cycle of suck that my nation would do best to avoid. I feel that AIPAC exerts an undue influence over our foreign policy.


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sebster wrote:Mandela led the armed faction of the ANC, and it was long debated whether his violent resistance to apartheid could be justified by the horrible nature of apartheid. When he was caught and imprisoned, his imprisonment came from information provided by the CIA, and the CIA did this because the guy was a known terrorist. He was offered release by SA authorities if he renounced violent opposition to apartheid but he declined. On release from prison, he still justified violent resistance.

Not to OT, but was he wrong? At what point, in your opinion, does violent resistance become an acceptable response?

I have little to no sympathy for Israel. They do whatever they hell they want and get away with it due to US backing.

Murdering someone in cold blood using UK and Irish passports (pro tip Ireland is a NEUTRAL country).. bad form.

Personally sometimes I do wish that it would just be nuked from orbit in a sort of 'if you can't play nicely then no one is getting the holy-land *smash*'

Ouze wrote:Not to OT, but was he wrong? At what point, in your opinion, does violent resistance become an acceptable response?

I have no idea if it's morally justifiable, but I don't think it works very often, and generally works against you, allowing people to dismiss your cause and write you off as violent extremists. It's just that in South Africa and Mandela are a weird one, because it seems to me that in the end the rest of the world seemed happy to look past the terrorism.

To be fair, the ANC didn't go about deliberately killing civilians like various Palestinian groups have, and that is a big difference.

Isreal and Palastine are just as bad as each other. Israel gets the most criticism becasuse it's citizens live in relative luxury and they have the 'Big Boys' on their side to start with. That said, most Israelis i've met are anti-palestine to the point of racist obsession.... This does not do them any favours.

There is a world of difference between an armed resistance/insurgency and terrorism. Sometimes the lines seem a bit blurry as civilians can easily become collateral damage when an armed resistance/insurgency destroys key infrastructures such as oil pipelines, railroads, refineries, power plants, or munitions depots. Sometimes the lines become crystal clear when a bomb is set off in a crowded market with the single purpose of killing civilians.

Israel needs stop thinking it can roll back time and claim back lands that they lost, hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Too much time has gone past and too many people have set up home in that area. If we can't sort out Northern Ireland, and that's only a few hundred years old, what hope do you have in that region?

Well being human I descended from africans so I want to own africa...

it defies sense!

chaos0xomega wrote:Personally, I hope the trend continues and the Israelis come to realize how childish and foolish they are. I also hope that this weakens the pro Israeli stance in the US, its ridiculous that such a marginal nation can wield such great influence over American policy and policymakers. Sometimes I wonder if our elected officials are elected to serve the American people or the Israeli people...

Then what?


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SilverMK2 wrote:I do find it really strange that people can't all get along.

When have people ever gotten along, anywhere?

Some interesting comments here, I would just like to add my own experiences to them.

Last year I went to Israel (Tel Aviv) on holiday to meet a good mate of mine (an Israeli). Picture this - basically a Mediterranean or South European town, with lots of cute little coffee shops, shopping malls, great beaches with nice looking women walking about. But, the country is tiny, is sat in a valley, and is surrounded by countries who have gone on record to say they want Israel destroyed. So its kind of like if you picked up Barcelona and whacked it in between Jordan, Iran and Lebanon. It could almost pass for such if you didn't have groups of 18 year old girls walking around with machine guns (doing their military service but accessorising at the same time) and searches for bombs before walking into the air-conditioned shopping malls. It's fething bizarre. Everyone I spoke to, younger people or those my age, are absolutely convinced about the countries right to defend itself, which is fair enough if you look at it from their situation.

But, and this is the clincher I think, there is a MASSIVE divide in Israeli culture. You have 'sin city' (Tel Aviv) on the one hand, which is full of generally westernised people, fairly liberal (considering their circumstances) and generally not wanting the kind of stuff that we have just read about. I would liken the culture to Spain or maybe Italy. But then, you have the orthadox Jews, and this is where once again religion rears its ugly head. Basically all this 'claim the hilltops for our land to spread' is coming from the orthadox groups of the population (I should say men, because you NEVER see the women) and the heavy weight they carry in parliament. All the people setting up houses in the occupied territories, living in Gaza (I think you have to be slightly nuts to choose to live somewhere where a mortar could land on your house, when you have the option of living in a beautiful seaside apartment in Tel Aviv) and expanding into the 'Palestinian lands' are almost without exception orthodox Jews. The rest of the population (the majority, you see more orthadox Jews if you go to London than you do in Tel Aviv or most parts of Israel) frown on it, but the pendulum of power seems to swing backwards and forwards between the two groups - so you get years of relative peace, followed by the government being hard-headed like it is now.

So, don't get me wrong, I think the militants attacking Israel are in the wrong. But, it becomes impossible to forget that they have Israel next to them when there constant expansions into what they think is their own territory. It's ridiculous looking at the different areas in Israel, you have modern and western looking towns for the israelis, then look next to it and theres a gakky looking group of hovels owned by arabs, with dirty kids with rag clothing hanging around it. So no doubt some of the aggression focused on Israel comes from resentment at the wealth of the country. I completely sympathise with with the people living in Israel, but they really need to get some kind of balanced government rather than having gun heads in charge like they have now - any aggression which happens now is making extra barriers to the other countries that ultimately they have to be neighbours with, and I worry it will ultimately end in tears for Israel as they are really such a small country despite their military power.

sebster wrote:

WarOne wrote:In the context of a society that values life in different degrees thanks in large part to media portrayal and media visibility, it is in reality not very odd. Israel has the sympathy of the Western world (for the most part) whereas the Palestinians are often lumped with other regional nations that hate Israel and thus often seen as the agitators rather than the victims.

This is pretty much what I find very odd. We're so indifferent to the suffering of one group in the region, but so hyper-concerned with the welfare of the other group, to the extent that we worry about what future hypotheticals might possibly threaten them.

America has very real emotional and strategic investments with nations in NATO, with China, Japan, and Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and pretty much anyone worth America's time and investment (you can get many stories about the suffering of the North Korean people under a dictatorship, the same story in China as we love to impose our ideals on different cultures, the quake and nuclear victims of Japan to which America has a parallel investment in like we do in Israel, the violence in Mexico that pretains to vulnerability at the US border, Iraq, and Afghanistan though from the latter two examples it is mostly soldiers and the failed investment of riches and manpower used).

Palestinians are such a marginalized people that we simply don't have enough attention allocated to their plight, almost like the zero attention America gives to first world poor (Colbert Report was using in context a segment of their show to lampoon a Heritage Foundation report that said the American poor had access to microwaves, TVs, and refrigerators -suggesting contempt for the people or governemnt that claims them poor), suffering people in Africa, in SE Asia, in India, in the Caribbean, and in South America jus to name a few areas.

sebster wrote:Or is it that we all know the story of Israel, holocaust to a nation of their own, beset on all sides, and that narrative overrides any concern about what's actually happening?

This is most acutely the problem.

In media, we have a list of stories and media a mile wide about the Holocaust that begins with Anne Frank and ends with Zog Nit Keynmol. The accusal of Jewish controlled media while biased and unfair, does highlight that in America, people of the Jewish faith have been instrumental to the development and control of what Americans watch. People of Palestinian origin have made far less noteworthy contributions to their own plight as well as in media circles. It is an unfair advantage, but the Holocaust has had many more decades to ingrain itself in our society. It is probably also unfair that American politicians have chosen to ally with Israel than the Palestinians, so the political rammifications mean that any act against the Palestinians (by Israel or other nations) is often muted at best.

A great deal of the American people have grown up reading American textbooks and listening to teachers that the Holocaust was the single greatest tragedy of the modern world. It is no small wonder that Americans are not only attentive to the plight of Israel, but also fascinated as well as supportive of the people they most often see in news media and print.

A link for further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict

WarOne wrote:(Colbert Report was using in context a segment of their show to lampoon a Heritage Foundation report that said the American poor had access to microwaves, TVs, and refrigerators -suggesting contempt for the people or governemnt that claims them poor)

Obviously not in context if this was the suggestion that he presented with the segment.

I think that the Israel-Palestine conflict has a lot of problems, and to lay them all at the feet of the Israelis is inappropriate and harmful to the issue. The terrorists running Palestine aren't doing the people living there any favors.

biccat wrote:
Obviously not in context if this was the suggestion that he presented with the segment.

To clarify, it was the report that denigrated the poor who had modern conveniences, not Stephen Colbert.

WarOne wrote:

biccat wrote:
Obviously not in context if this was the suggestion that he presented with the segment.

To clarify, it was the report that denigrated the poor who had modern conveniences, not Stephen Colbert.

I've read the report, it's making the point that what we consider "poor" really means a pretty darn high standard of living, from a global perspective. It also makes the point that the government has a vested interest in upwardly-defining poverty.

In fact, the report is not what you perceived it to be from watching Colbert's program.

Although this is getting dangerously off topic.

The palestinians aren't really all that popular in the region either, it must be said. From what I've read.