"We make peace with enemies," Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reassured a concerned citizen shortly after the September 13, 1993 conclusion of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I). "I would like to remind you that the [March 1979] peace treaty with Egypt had many opponents, and this peace has held for 15 years now."[1] True enough. But peace can only be made with enemies who have been either comprehensively routed (e.g., post-World War II Germany and Japan) or disillusioned with the use of violence—not with those who remain wedded to conflict and war. And while Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was a "reformed enemy" eager to extricate his country from its futile conflict with Israel, Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership viewed the Oslo process not as a springboard to peace but as a "Trojan Horse" (in the words of prominent PLO official Faisal Husseini) designed to promote the organization's strategic goal of "Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea"—that is, a Palestine in place of Israel.
Arafat admitted as much five days before signing the accords when he told an Israeli journalist, "In the future, Israel and Palestine will be one united state in which Israelis and Palestinians will live together"[3]—that is, Israel would cease to exist. And even as he shook Rabin's hand on the White House lawn, the PLO chairman was assuring the Palestinians in a pre-recorded, Arabic-language message that the agreement was merely an implementation of the organization's "phased strategy" of June 1974. This stipulated that the Palestinians would seize whatever territory Israel surrendered to them, then use it as a springboard for further territorial gains until achieving the "complete liberation of Palestine."
To be fair, raccoons give (and take) gifts. I think they consider anything shiny or colorful you leave out accessible to them a gift. My wife was attempting to feed neighborhood cats and we did get some, but we also got raccoons. They took a bright red bowl we were feeding them out of. In return, we've received several shiny rocks and a spoon.
Especially infuriating is that I use OneDrive for work and I've got it running all the time but Microsoft decided I need another instance of it running, that I then have to close every time it decides to start up again. What?
The PLO called for the elimination of Israel as well. That changed after the first intifada and it's the closest we've ever been to peace. This is a different and much more fraught situation, though. I don't expect conciliation on the part of Hamas after this.
And where exactly do you think the Christian Zionists got their ideas?
Could it be Maimonides?
The days of the Messiah, however, is the time when rulership will return to Israel and that they will go back to the land of Israel and that this king will be very great, and the seat of his rulership will be in Zion (Jerusalem). His fame will grow and his mention will be among all of the nations, [even] more than King Shlomo. And all of the peoples will make peace with him and all of the lands will serve him, due to his great righteousness and due to the wonders that will come about though him. And anyone that comes against him, God, may He be elevated, will deliver into his hand. And all of the [relevant] verses in Scripture testify to his success and our success with him. And nothing about existence will change from what it is now, except that rulership will return to Israel.
Maimonides advocated that wise men, those who understood the words of the sages, would naturally establish this "rulership" in Israel. Of course he was commenting on the Mishnah which dates back to the second or third century CE. The Christian Zionists' reason for wishing for the Jews to return to Israel is to bring about the end/messianic times. This prophecy first appeared in Judaism.
If you want to get into the specifics of practical & poltical Zionism of the late 19th century, sure it was inspired by European nationalism. But if that's all it takes for something to be white supremacy, then I guess all the various forms of Arab and African nationalism are white supremacy, too. The political, financial, and logistical methods employed by modern Zionists in the establishment of Israel were reflections of the time in which it took place. Had the Holocaust not occurred, the aliyot of the late 19th and early 20th century likely would have fizzled out without significantly effecting the balance of power in the region, like all the aliyot prior.
Are you talking about Palestine? You know… the place that has always had large Jewish communities all throughout the middle-ages right up to 1949?
Yes, lol. Keep up. The Jewish population waxed & waned over the centuries due to waves of expulsion and emigration, and aliyot.
Anyway, modern Zionism doesn't need to be smeared as "white supremacy"; it stands on its own as a terrible idea, that in its full realization requires violence against and the displacement & expulsion of the Palestinian people.
There’s something I need you to explain for me… have you or have you not noticed that all of Israel’s enablers - all the countries that have proven so fond of the idea of Israel including England, where antisemitic Christians invented Zionism - are literally countries with deep histories of white supremacism, colonialism and… drumroll, please… antisemitism?
Arabs were against Israel and also against having Britain & France controlling colonial assets in their countries. The USSR saw them as valuable allies in dismantling colonial empires to make way for expanding Soviet influence. Western alignment with Israel didn't fully materialize except with the context of the Cold War. It really doesn't have a whole lot to do with ideological concerns beyond the surface level. It's realpolitik. The USSR was even pro-Zionist for a hot minute when they thought the kibbutzim were going to take off.
Also, this...
England, where antisemitic Christians invented Zionism
... is fucking stupid. Jews have been returning to Zion for as long as there has been a diaspora.
Israel, the UK and France invaded Egypt in 1956 after Egypt expropriated the Suez Canal from its French & British owners. Then they fought a war in 1967 to keep it open. The conveyance of European trade through the Suez Canal is a major part of Israel's geopolitical importance.
Netanyahu also stoked the anti-Oslo crazies to the point that Rabin was assassinated. He's more responsible for the current state of the conflict than anyone, period.
Covid caused a recession, and by definition (GDP line go down), we have not been in a recession since the post-covid rebound. We have inflation because covid messed up our supply chains and aggregate demand is higher than it was pre-covid. People have money and they're spending it, unemployment is as low as it's ever been. The economy is white hot. The whole point of raising interest rates is to artificially lower demand so that prices can stabilize. If the fed doesn't stop raising interest rates at exactly the right time, demand dips too low, people start losing their jobs, and we end up in a recession.
Some of the mandatory budget and discretionary non-defense budget can be directly or indirectly linked to military purposes, but regardless, the majority of the budget is social programs.
There's no guise. This is the way war has been prosecuted for millennia. The Geneva Convention, UNHRC, etc. are blips. War is genocide and always has been. Only in the late modern to post-modern era has war been something other than the complete annihilation of your enemies and their culture, including all the infanticide and rape that implies. If you're, for instance, the US prosecuting a war for nebulous geopolitical reasons, then you can slap up a veneer of rules and conduct. If it's a war of territorial expansion, on the other hand, you'd better be prepared to do what it takes to stamp out any trace of the people who originally lived there, or at least leave those who remain so broken and disempowered that they'll never pose a threat.
Expect more like Ukraine & Palestine as the US's grip on hegemony slips, and as we continue to slowly forget the lessons of the World Wars.
Bullcrap… I guess you didn’t know that Christian Zionism predates Jewish Zionism, did you?
It doesn't. The religious-academic roots of Zionism in both religions go way back. Jews were resettling from Europe to Ottoman Palestine in proto-Zionist migration as early as the 1500s.
No - it isn’t. Comparing Israel to Apartheid-South Africa is actually softballing it.
Well, then you should try reading the second part of that sentence before you have a heart attack from being so triggered.
I can literally google Ben-Gurion and produce a laundry list of his quotes that demolishes your argument
Yes, Ben Gurion is one of those hard-liners who is responsible for the deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations in the 1920s. I wouldn't go so far as to say his views represented the whole of Zionism prior to or during WWI. The situation was salvageable until Britain gave up.
What exactly do you mean by "you and yours" there buddy? Your view is simply ahistorical. Zionism differs from other forms of European nationalism in that it was not primarily motivated by supremacist rationalizations, but by the desire for safety. Intent is important. Today, I agree; Israeli treatment of Palestinians is clearly apartheid, and many Israeli actions are clearly genocidal under the UN definition. The further back into history you go, the less clear the situation gets, though, and is more accurately seen as a conflict between two nationalist movements in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's collapse wherein hard-line elements on both sides stoked conflict. There was a great amount of mutual respect and acceptance of Zionism among Arab leaders prior to the 1920s. I'd suggest you look up the Faisal-Weizmann agreement. The current conflict is a product of British mismanagement of Mandatory Palestine, and the initial failure of diplomacy in the face of racist, nationalist sentiments of BOTH Arabs and Zionist Jews.
This is an absurd exaggeration of the reality of the situation. This did not become a genocidal/apartheid situation until after 1948. There was an opportunity for peace in the UN partition plan, which would have required no one to "blink out of existence".
Palestinian leaders never accepted the 1967 borders until 1988. And even then it wasn't genuine:
https://www.meforum.org/6264/why-the-oslo-process-doomed-peace