Meet the "Trump peace plan" for the Israel-Palestinian conflict

[Prodromos]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Can we talk about how hideous these borders are. This is a crime against cartography

Jewish groups in US blast Trump's Mideast peace plan

You don't even need to click to know it's J-Street.

[sumskilz]

I was talking about life under occupation.

Alright, I wasn't talking about Gaza. Gaza is an active war zone, ruled by an authoritarian Islamist regime, and under blockade. Most of the things you mentioned exist to some degree in the West Bank, but the typical West Bank resident lives in Area A and has no contact with settlers or the IDF in his or her daily life. There are indirect effects, but as far as direct effects, it's not surprising that if you ask some randomly, many can't come up with an answer for how they suffer other than that they have to go through checkpoints sometimes. Their cities don't look much different than Arab cities in Israel. So what I was objecting to, is the notion that their lives are so terrible that they don't have anything to lose by sacrificing themselves fighting the Israelis.

The bulk of the sure to be rejected plan (which is obviously the Kushner plan in reality) is about improving quality of life for the Palestinians in various ways. If they got closer to what they want as far as borders, I can't really see that as better for them if the West Bank just turns into a highland version of Gaza. Their rejection will probably result in them getting all the things the don't like about the plan regardless, but without any of the compensating positives.

[Papay]

Is massacring civilians a legitimate form of ‘resistance’?

Israelis have committed more massacres

[PointOfViewGun]

I'll answer this with a quote from the article Sumskilz linked on page 2:

Except the actual issue at hand has no relation to a metaphor like driving to your mother. Weizmann was likely trying to sound fancy while avoiding giving an honest answer.

[sumskilz]

Israelis have committed more massacres

Whataboutism + nonsense

Except the actual issue at hand has no relation to a metaphor like driving to your mother. Weizmann was likely trying to sound fancy while avoiding giving an honest answer.

It was an honest answer.

Anyway, this is what happened to the Jewish "autonomous" oblast:

From April 1928 onward, Russian Jews, many from the Pale of Settlement, started resettling in their brand-new Mesopotamia, an underdeveloped area flanked by two rivers, the Bira and the Bidzhan. Idealistic Jewish socialists from abroad (from as far away as the US and Argentina), too, came in droves...

Their new home turned out to be less than ideal real estate. Hardly a land of milk and honey, their Stalinist Promised Land was hilly, rocky and swampy; it was also infested with a variety of bloodsucking insects…

Just as their brethren in Palestine, the Jewish pioneers in Birobidzhan persisted – or at least those of them who did not soon flee back whence they had come. They set up collective farms with names like Valdheim (“forest home” in Yiddish) and Yiddish became the new oblast’s official language, proudly displayed on street signs, used in government offices and taught in schools. The burgeoning city of Birobidzhan soon had a Yiddish newspaper, a Yiddish theater named after Stalin’s Jewish henchman Lazar Kaganovich, and a library named after the writer Sholem Aleichem. In 1935 alone, 8,000 new Jewish settlers arrived, doubling the local Jewish population.

Then tragedy struck. Not even this heady experiment in Jewish autonomy and cultural revival in Soviet Russia could escape the cold hard realities of Stalinism. The nationwide Great Terror of 1936-38 didn’t spare the Jews of Birobidzhan: many of them were declared “class enemies” and either sent to the gulags or liquidated. The Yiddish writer David Bergelson, who hailed from a Ukrainian shtetl and had by then become Birobidzhan’s most vocal advocate, escaped by alternatively penning sycophantic paeans about certain communist notables or else fiercely denouncing them, depending on how the political winds blew.

In the end, though, Bergelson, too, came a cropper. In 1952, during yet another one of Stalin’s purges, he was executed, along with 12 other Jews, in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka Prison on what came to be known as “the Night of the Murdered Poets” on August 12. They had been branded “rootless cosmopolitans,” a trumped-up charge which henceforth marked all Russian Jews as suspect and served as an enduring pillar of Soviet anti-Semitism.

Following the creation of Israel in 1948, to which Stalin at first lent fleeting support in the hopes of undermining US interests in the Middle East, terror resumed at home once again. Several of the more prominent Jewish intellectuals in Birobidzhan found themselves rebranded as “bourgeois nationalists.” Ironically, primary among the charges levelled at them was their promotion of Yiddish at the expense of “the great Russian language of Lenin and Stalin” (in the words of a prosecutor), even though the adoption of Yiddish in Birobidzhan had hitherto been encouraged by Moscow. The accused were either killed or sentenced to hard labor. So it went in the Alice in Wonderland world of Soviet communism: hailed as a pioneer one day, executed as a traitor the next.

In tandem, every Yiddish-language book in sight was burned. On Stalin’s orders, Yiddish theaters were closed down and Yiddishists were hounded, persecuted and murdered.

Henceforth all Jews in Birobidzhan would need to speak Russian while Jewish children were forced to adopt new Russian identities.

[PointOfViewGun]

It was an honest answer.

Not really. An honest answer would be him saying that they took Jerusalem because they wanted to and they had the opportunity, not because it presented them a safe and prosperous place.

Anyway, this is what happened to the Jewish "autonomous" oblast:

It wasn't less safe or fertile compared to the lands Israel occupies now.

[Lord Thesaurian]

The Palestinian leader’s long, rambling speech was laced with deeply anti-Semitic tropes, including that the Jews of Europe brought persecution and the Holocaust upon themselves because of usury, banking and their “social function.”
Israel, he said, grew out of a European colonial project that had nothing to do with Jewish history or aspirations.
And citing a widely discredited book from the 1970s by Arthur Koestler called “The Thirteenth Tribe,” he posited that Ashkenazi Jews were descended not from the biblical Israelites but from the Khazars, a Turkic people who converted to Judaism in the eighth century.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/w...rael-jews.html

It's a fact that the masterminds behind creation of Israel was European Jews as opposed to Jews who were actually living there. Whats so hard about acknowledging the fact that the almost all the signatories to the declaration of independence of Israel was not born in the lands Israel resided on? There was a straggle for a safe homeland in Europe for Jews and they did brought that struggle to Palestine and set up Israel over that.

There was actually a Soviet project to give the Jews a homeland. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast was set up around Birobidzhan in 1934. It remains to this day though with little Jewish population. If the Jewish struggle was to find a homeland then they would have been settling there.

I’ll ask you again, for the fourth time: If you concede that European Jews/diaspora are just as Jewish as those who happen to live in the Levant, why would a Jewish homeland be in Europe? Why would a Jewish homeland be in East Asia? Why wouldn’t a Jewish homeland be in the Levant? Why would Jews living in Europe confer less legitimacy on a Jewish state than would Jews living in the Levant?

It wasn't less safe or fertile compared to the lands Israel occupies now.

Do you or do you not believe Jews originated as a national and religious group in “the lands Israel occupies now?”

[sumskilz]

Not really. An honest answer would be him saying that they took Jerusalem because they wanted to and they had the opportunity, not because it presented them a safe and prosperous place.

It wasn't less safe or fertile compared to the lands Israel occupies now.

Alright, you obviously don't know what you're talking about. The Soviet Union didn't even exist yet and Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time.

[PointOfViewGun]

I’ll ask you again, for the fourth time: If you concede that European Jews/diaspora are just as Jewish as those who happen to live in the Levant, why would a Jewish homeland be in Europe? Why would a Jewish homeland be in East Asia? Why wouldn’t a Jewish homeland be in the Levant? Why would Jews living in Europe confer less legitimacy on a Jewish state than would Jews living in the Levant?
Do you or do you not believe Jews originated as a national and religious group in “the lands Israel occupies now?”

Jews originating from the Levant doesn't really give them a blank check over it. Turks of Turkey came from central Asia, does it somehow grant them extra legitimacy to go there and claim a new country around Altay mountains? Not really. I don't get why stating the obvious is such a controversial topic when it comes to Israel. It is your own idiotic tangent that people think European Jews are not real Jews or that Jews somehow do not originate from the Levant. So, if I'm not giving you direct answer on them it is not to entertain such intellectually dishonest line of argumentation. Those topics were never a point of discussion. You're merely trying to put words into people's mouths and whining when its pointed at you. Carry on.

Alright, you obviously don't know what you're talking about. The Soviet Union didn't even exist yet and Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time.

Why are you citing statements I never for or against?

[Lord Thesaurian]

Jews originating from the Levant doesn't really give them a blank check over it. Turks of Turkey came from central Asia, does it somehow grant them extra legitimacy to go there and claim a new country around Altay mountains? Not really. I don't get why stating the obvious is such a controversial topic when it comes to Israel. It is your own idiotic tangent that people think European Jews are not real Jews or that Jews somehow do not originate from the Levant. So, if I'm not giving you direct answer on them it is not to entertain such intellectually dishonest line of argumentation. Those topics were never a point of discussion. You're merely trying to put words into people's mouths and whining when its pointed at you. Carry on.

I have quoted you directly. You’ve explicitly refused to answer basic questions directly posed to topics you raised. As I said from the beginning, the most benign assessment of your comments, since you refuse to explain them, is that they are irrelevant to the topic of peace/rapprochement between Palestinians and the state of Israel.

If you concede that Jews originate as a national and religious group on the lands Israel occupies now, then your tangent about “If the Jewish struggle was to find a homeland then they would have been settling elsewhere” is a meaningless assertion. If you concede that European Jews/diaspora are just as Jewish as those who happen to live in the Levant, then your aspersions about European Jews “masterminding” the state of Israel are also pointless, especially given “Palestine” as a state concept was “masterminded” by Europeans/westerners.

[nhytgbvfeco2]

Except the actual issue at hand has no relation to a metaphor like driving to your mother. Weizmann was likely trying to sound fancy while avoiding giving an honest answer.

It was an honest answer, believe it or not. Jews have yearned to return to the holy land, and to Jerusalem, for thousands of years.
Why do you think Jews chose Israel over Birobidzhan, then? Burning hatred for Arabs?

Not really. An honest answer would be him saying that they took Jerusalem because they wanted to and they had the opportunity, not because it presented them a safe and prosperous place.

Chaim Weizmann died before Jerusalem's old city, the only part of Jerusalem important to Jews, had been taken. West Jerusalem didn't exist before Jews began migrating to Israel, so not sure what Jerusalem was taken when he was asked the question.

It wasn't less safe or fertile compared to the lands Israel occupies now.

Perhaps, but at least for the first time in a very long time the Jews were no longer at the mercy of others, able to defend themselves.

Jews originating from the Levant doesn't really give them a blank check over it. Turks of Turkey came from central Asia, does it somehow grant them extra legitimacy to go there and claim a new country around Altay mountains? Not really. I don't get why stating the obvious is such a controversial topic when it comes to Israel.

Turks already have a state.
Because if a Jewish state is to be made, it only makes sense for it to be in the only place in the world where one previously existed. Regardless of where it would have been founded, the locals would have been upset about it, might as well be the only place where it can be justified.

[Papay]

Whataboutism + nonsense

Whatabaoutism=a "great" argument that is used when you actually dont have any argument. Israel is an artificial state that was created by settlers who ethnically cleansed Palestinians. They committed far more atrocities than the Palestinians. And now Israelis use the same arguments white settlers used in South Africa, or white southerners used in United States

[PointOfViewGun]

I have quoted you directly. You’ve explicitly refused to answer basic questions directly posed to topics you raised. As I said from the beginning, the most benign assessment of your comments, since you refuse to explain them, is that they are irrelevant to the topic of peace/rapprochement between Palestinians and the state of Israel.
If you concede that Jews originate as a national and religious group on the lands Israel occupies now, then your tangent about “If the Jewish struggle was to find a homeland then they would have been settling elsewhere” is a meaningless assertion. If you concede that European Jews/diaspora are just as Jewish as those who happen to live in the Levant, then your aspersions about European Jews “masterminding” the state of Israel are also pointless, especially given “Palestine” as a state concept was “masterminded” by Europeans/westerners.

Distorting what people say is one way to appear as if you have a case. Your inability to address what I actually say rather speaks for itself. Have fun.

It was an honest answer, believe it or not. Jews have yearned to return to the holy land, and to Jerusalem, for thousands of years.
Why do you think Jews chose Israel over Birobidzhan, then? Burning hatred for Arabs?
Chaim Weizmann died before Jerusalem's old city, the only part of Jerusalem important to Jews, had been taken. West Jerusalem didn't exist before Jews began migrating to Israel, so not sure what Jerusalem was taken when he was asked the question.
Perhaps, but at least for the first time in a very long time the Jews were no longer at the mercy of others, able to defend themselves.
Turks already have a state.
Because if a Jewish state is to be made, it only makes sense for it to be in the only place in the world where one previously existed. Regardless of where it would have been founded, the locals would have been upset about it, might as well be the only place where it can be justified.

If Turkey didn't exist but Turks lived in various cities in the world the "diaspora" would have a legitimacy to carve out central Asia for themselves? No. That's just stupid. Logic and reason doesn't work that way. The common narrative is that Israel was founded because Jews were looking for a safe place to call home. That's clearly not the case. They founded Israel because they wanted those specific lands for themselves. It wasn't an existential struggle. It was a struggle by European Jews to seize the opportunity and take over what they wanted.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Distorting what people say is one way to appear as if you have a case. Your inability to address what I actually say rather speaks for itself. Have fun.

I quoted you directly, addressed what you said directly, and asked you direct questions about what you said. Your explicit refusal to answer those questions or address my response to your post speaks for itself.

[Aexodus]

It was a struggle by European Jews to seize the opportunity and take over what they wanted.

This is an out of date view at best because most Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi/European.

[Infidel144]

Anyway, this is what happened to the Jewish "autonomous" oblast:

You are quoting that as though you think it would be seen as something other than a bonus...

[sumskilz]

Whatabaoutism=a "great" argument that is used when you actually dont have any argument.

Assuming you believe your unsupported claims, your point then seems to be that you consider slaughtering innocent civilians a reasonable course of action if people of the same ethnicity or nationality have committed atrocities.

[nhytgbvfeco2]

If Turkey didn't exist but Turks lived in various cities in the world the "diaspora" would have a legitimacy to carve out central Asia for themselves? No. That's just stupid. Logic and reason doesn't work that way.

If a Turkish state was to be founded and Turks didn't constitute a majority anywhere in the world then I honestly don't see why not. Certainly better than carving out some random portion of Siberia and sending them there.

The common narrative is that Israel was founded because Jews were looking for a safe place to call home. That's clearly not the case. They founded Israel because they wanted those specific lands for themselves. It wasn't an existential struggle. It was a struggle by European Jews to seize the opportunity and take over what they wanted.

I'll repeat my question. Why do you think that Jews wanted those specific lands?

Also, why the continued emphasis on European? What difference does it make? The only reason you'd have to keep mentioning that they're European again, and again, and again is if you thought that this somehow takes away from the legitimacy of their claim to be either Jewish, or of middle eastern heritage. Yet you're so insistant in your debate with Legio_italica that this isn't the case. So WHY do you continue bringing it up?

[Cope]

Distorting what people say is one way to appear as if you have a case. Your inability to address what I actually say rather speaks for itself. Have fun.

He didn't distort your position. You argued that the contemporary Israeli claim on parts of Canaan was a scheme cooked up by Ashkenazi Jews and European gentiles. Given the context of the discussion and your participation in it, the implication of your statement was that the European Jews had no basis for their Levantine claims. The follow up questions you were asked on this issue (which you have hitherto evaded answering) were valid.

[PointOfViewGun]

This is an out of date view at best because most Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi/European.

How does population make up somehow change who created Israel?

If a Turkish state was to be founded and Turks didn't constitute a majority anywhere in the world then I honestly don't see why not. Certainly better than carving out some random portion of Siberia and sending them there.
I'll repeat my question. Why do you think that Jews wanted those specific lands?
Also, why the continued emphasis on European? What difference does it make? The only reason you'd have to keep mentioning that they're European again, and again, and again is if you thought that this somehow takes away from the legitimacy of their claim to be either Jewish, or of middle eastern heritage. Yet you're so insistant in your debate with Legio_italica that this isn't the case. So WHY do you continue bringing it up?

Not much I can say in the face such a deplorable mentality. Yeah, why do I keep bringing it up when I'm responding to people bringing it up? You guys are trying to stupefy this discussion as much as you can to perhaps create a defensible position. The first time I pointed out Israel was created by European Jews was when Aexodus argued against Cyclops' point that Europe exported its Jewish problem. Aexodus disagreed with Cyclops' claim and he himself claimed that they were actually Jews with roots in Middle Eastern countries that were expelled before. Hence, I pointed out where the people who lead the struggle to create Israel were born. Since then, I kept touching the same points as those points were challenged. Did I go into every thread about Israel and randomly point at those points? No. So, why lie about what I argued?

The real question why is it so hard to accept the fact that people who created Israel were overwhelmingly non-locals?

He didn't distort your position. You argued that the contemporary Israeli claim on parts of Canaan was a scheme cooked up by Ashkenazi Jews and European gentiles. Given the context of the discussion and your participation in it, the implication of your statement was that the European Jews had no basis for their Levantine claims. The follow up questions you were asked on this issue (which you have hitherto evaded answering) were valid.

I never stated that lands occupied by Israel were only claimed by European Jews. I merely pointed out that Israel was created by European Jews. Those two are vastly different statements. His attempt to equate pointing out the simple fact that Israel was created by European Jews with anti-Semitism was a deplorable argument to make as well. I wish you didn't had to further distort what I argued to defend his distortion. My response to his questions contained enough to provide an answer. If you need simple facts to be spoon fed there isn't much I can to help.