Israeli Apartheid and the UK's Complicity

[Jason]

The IHRA anti-Semitism definition won't protect Israeli apartheid

History will judge Israel's apologists the way Theresa May is now judged on apartheid South Africa.

The UK Labour Party's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) anti-Semitism code in full, including its list of 11 examples, means it now considers calling Israel "racist" a potentially racist act.

But the reality is that since the foundation of Israel - beginning with David Ben-Gurion's "Drive them out!" order to the Palmach in the 1948 Nakba - racial oppression of Palestinians has been the norm.

As Palestinian freedom fighter Ahed Tamimi has observed, Israel is afraid of this truth being known. And by adopting the full IHRA definition, Labour is helping to stifle it.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opini ... 26078.html

[Brian Peacock]

By the definition, would those expressed views be anti-Semitic?

Herein lies the problem: that Jewish people should have a right to a homeland, which is to say that Israel has a right to exist, is generally not disputed, but it's a separate issue from how that was achieved and how it's been maintained. Criticism of the latter is too often considered a negation of the former.

[Svartalf]

Jews have a right to live, Israeli had no right to steal the lands of Palestine from the occupants who settled them while the Jews were away.

[Jason]

I'm not saying Israel should not exist, but why is it that people feel that a particular ethnic group requires it's own ethnocentric homeland? There are many ethnicities around the world who do not have such a homeland and no one is calling for their right to have one. What makes the Jewish ethnic group special in that regard?

[Svartalf]

It's called the question of Nationalities... a fairly old XIXth c. matter that got its logical conclusion with jews invading and taking Palestine by force and the internecine wars in former Yugoslavia, because the people felt more Serb, Croat, or Bosniak than 'yugoslav', or for that matter, the splitting of Czechoslovakia...

[Rum]

So calling Israel 'racist' could 'potentially' be a racist act.

So what? It makes the word almost meaningless. The dispute within the Labour party about the definition of the tern 'anti-Semitic' has been akin to arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Corbyn is clearly a man who believes in equality - but he is opposed to nearly all of Israel's territorial policies and their approach to the Palestinians and despite trying to talk sense to the baying mob, he has, as so many seem forced to do today, bow to the will of the hyseriati and the twitter roar.

And as to complicity in an 'apartheid' system. The UK may be, but if that is the case that applies to any number of sympathetic countries.

[Jason]

It's called the question of Nationalities... a fairly old XIXth c. matter that got its logical conclusion with jews invading and taking Palestine by force and the internecine wars in former Yugoslavia, because the people felt more Serb, Croat, or Bosniak than 'yugoslav', or for that matter, the splitting of Czechoslovakia...

I'm afraid I don't follow. Could you expand please?

[Svartalf]

Basically, it's a 'my tribe is best' and 'my tribe needs territory' question

and when your tribe doesn't have a properly defined territory, you go to war with the neighboring tribes, unless you're lucky enough to manage to split the land peacefully with the other tribe.

[Jason]

OK, so there's no actual moral justification for it then.

[Strontium Dog]

Jews have a right to live, Israeli had no right to steal the lands of Palestine from the occupants who settled them while the Jews were away.

"While the Jews were away" is a heck of a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homeland!

Ignoring the anti-Semitic claim that land was stolen from anyone: after the re-establishment of Israel, Jews were forced out of Arab lands, leaving behind land covering an area four times the size of Israel. Shouldn't that land be returned to the Jews, since it actually was stolen from them? Or does that not count, because Jews?

[Animavore]

The UK created Isreal without permission of those who lived there. Of course they are complicit. They never had any right to create the state.
They did the same with my country. Took our land and proportioned it out to whomever they pleased while removing in the way natives.

[Jason]

"While the Jews were away" is a heck of a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homeland!

OK SD, so tell me why is the Jewish ethnicity treated with such special consideration for what is a dead fact of history when other ethnicities have been similarly displaced from their homelands and receive no such treatment?

[Animavore]

Jews have a right to live, Israeli had no right to steal the lands of Palestine from the occupants who settled them while the Jews were away.

While the Jews were away? They never went anywhere. Palestinians are decendants of the people who always lived there. They just changed religion and culture over time. They are a Semitic group.


Isreali Jews aren't only diaspora anyway. They are largely genetically European.

[Animavore]

Jews have a right to live, Israeli had no right to steal the lands of Palestine from the occupants who settled them while the Jews were away.

"While the Jews were away" is a heck of a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homeland!

Ignoring the anti-Semitic claim that land was stolen from anyone: after the re-establishment of Israel, Jews were forced out of Arab lands, leaving behind land covering an area four times the size of Israel. Shouldn't that land be returned to the Jews, since it actually was stolen from them? Or does that not count, because Jews?

Thanks for giving us permission to start slowly reclaiming Northern Ireland and pushing the Prods into ghettos.

[Strontium Dog]

I'm not saying Israel should not exist, but why is it that people feel that a particular ethnic group requires it's own ethnocentric homeland? There are many ethnicities around the world who do not have such a homeland and no one is calling for their right to have one. What makes the Jewish ethnic group special in that regard?

Is this a serious question? Did you not see what happened to the Jews over the two millennia since they were largely purged from their homeland?

And how many ethnicities exist for whom nobody is calling for their right to have a homeland? I can only think of one - the Roma - and that only because their itinerant lifestyle is an integral part of their culture. Every other ethnicity I can think of either has their own homeland, or has a serious nationhood movement.