The girls, aged 14 to 16, have come for settler training to learn how to occupy Palestinian land — breaking international law. “God promised us this land and told us if you don’t take it, bad people will try and take it and you will have a war,” says Emuna Billa, 19, one of the camp supervisors. “Why do we have a war in Gaza? Because we don’t take Gaza.”
Their guru is Daniella Weiss, a 79-year-old grandmother in a long skirt and patterned headscarf. Founder of the Nachala or Homeland movement, she has been setting up illegal settlements for 49 years and was recently put under international sanctions. “You will be the new emissaries,” she tells the 50 or so girls at the camp. “I call it redeeming, not settling and this is our duty.”
She unfurls a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories dotted with vivid pink house symbols to represent existing and proposed Jewish settlements. Not only are these all across the West Bank, but also in Gaza. Already 674 people have signed up for beachside plots there, she tells me, and “many more want to join”. When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.
It’s not clear to me that the fundamental ideals of a liberal democracy are compatible with a state where one race or religion is held above all others; or with a state where some races or religions are considered less equal.
Arguably the US is still working on recognizing this idealism and didn’t fully reckon with it until the 1960s.
Basically everyone is sticking their head in the sand re: Israel being an Ethnostate. Basically “sure, but they deserve it”. That had some credibility behind it 70 years ago. Today? Not so much.
I’ve come to find out that in-spite of having many Israeli friends and some family members, I had no idea about what Israeli culture and society were really like. It is mind-boggling to me that the only Jewish people I see speaking against genocide seem to be a part of the diaspora. Every time I hear or see a Jewish person from/ in Israel speaking on this issue, its like “Well its necessary” is basically the argument. Like, I’m sure there must be voices in Israel to the contrary, but I can’t seem to find them.
Its as if Zionism has supplanted Judaism in Israel entirely and there is no distinction in current Israeli culture or media.
There’s definitely people protesting in Israel and have been since the start. But it is indeed unclear on whether they’re protesting regarding their government’s actions in Gaza or just protesting against Netanyahu more generally (which they had also been doing prior to all this anyways).
There are voices inside Israel opposing this, but it sounds like (i don’t have personal knowledge) all the moderates got co-opted. The opposition voices don’t get any media play, not in the US at least. Some Israeli press covers them, or used to at least.
Haaretz is the only real source of coverage of such opposing voices. And the Israeli government has already been trying to make moves to have them be shut down for daring to not support the will of the government.
I honestly feel like if the national powers at the time had been actually serious about the Jewish people deserving a homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust, then Israel should have been created out of a portion of western Germany.
That’s my position, 100%. That they didn’t is telling, imo.
Make space in Europe for the JEWS?! When there’s plenty of land that has only brown people in it?!
The reasoning was that, I think.
Yep
The Jewish people have a right to self determination and had many good reasons to leave Europe for their ancestral homeland. Offering Jews a different homeland failed with the Jewish Oblast in the Soviet Union.
Herding European Jews into a new Ghetto while displacing Germans would not have gone well.
Now do Palestinians. Did they not have a right to their own land they were already on?
Sure Palestinians have a claim to the land as well. That’s what this whole conflict is about: competing claims over the same land.
They can’t both have a right to the same land without sharing it. This is the problem with ethnostates.
Israel is less of an ethnostate than many other European and Asian countries.
Sharing the land in some kind of two state solution, federation, Emirates/Kanton system, is possible.
Herding? Dude you just give them Germany. Done.
No one is herded.
Maybe the Jews want to live elsewhere. Also what do you do with all the Germans who live on the land?
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!
Zionists would not have wanted that. Establishment of a Jewish state around Jerusalem is a core idea of Zionism and Jerusalem is not in West Germany.
The plan to realize this ideology is much older than the Holocaust.
It is not about having a safe place to stay, it’s about religion.
It is pretty funny that they discussed a bunch of other places, too, including Uganda, and shot down a bunch of them because they were inhabited and weren’t sure how the locals would react or there were already white settlers in the area. The irony 🙄
If there was credibility for a Jewish ethnostate 70 years ago due to the Holocaust and global antisemitism, how do we get to say things are better now and take the country back. Especially with all the other ethnostates in the world.
Obviously there is a problem because the region had changed hands over the past 1-2000 years and had other ethnic groups when the country was established by the Allies. The idea of having taken the land from Germany instead of the area around l Jerusalem sounds like poetic justice, but ignores that they have a historic homeland. Anyone would want their historic homeland with their historic religious sites back over somewhere else.
It seems like Jews are treated as second class when it comes to that. Talk of giving Mt Rushmore back is because it was that tribes sacred religious site, and no one would be happy giving them another mountain in another state.
And this isn’t even the first time we’ve realized this either. Look at Ireland, and how they only achieved peace when they enforced equality with their power sharing agreement. Heck, look at the entire EU. Instead of Germany and France invading each other every 30 years, they just said “fuck it”, and let their citizens live on both sides of the border. Trying to create ethnostates and encourage division never works.
At this point the only serious solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict is the “one state solution”.
Two states with some kind of federation or union is a more realistic idea.
A one state would only result in civil war and we end up right back where we are. The failure of one state in the Mandate for Palestine is of historic record.
The failure of that one state is because one side kept spreading. That will happen with two states as well as long as Israel believes they deserve all the land and are supported by the West and Palestine isn’t. Hell, you can see it now with Israel constantly starting fights with Lebanon and their other next door neighbors. The place needs to be dismantled and rebuilt as a one state in the whole area with a secular government and Constitutional rights for everyone, a la what happened in South Africa with the help of the international community, or they’re going to be constantly doing Nazi things.
Israel would leave Lebanon alone if Hezbollah didn’t regularly attack. The Lebanon war in the 1980s only came about because of constant attacks against Israel from Lebanese soil.
Palestinians get more support than any similar group. Billions have been spent by the USA and Europe to build a state, economy, and peace. However Palestinians prefer to spend the money on pensions for terrorists instead of economic development and cooperation with their richest neighbor. The amount of support Palestinians get from the west is without equal.
Of course you go straight to an antisemitic Nazi comparison.
OK that is some hilarious straight up lies. I get it now.
For years we kept being told that Israel had “Western Values” as part of the pro-Zionist propaganda in the West.
And indeed they do: 19th Century Western Values.