Topic: Why has the left wing abandoned Israel? - page 4. (Read 5730 times)

As usual if anyone dares to disagree with "the truth will set you free"

stories are sometimes invented to make the Palestinians look bad, and countless Israeli crimes are swept under the rug or flatly denied if they happen to get out.

You could well be right sana but it seems to me the press is very quick to advertise Israeli attacks and slow to report Palestinian attacks. Its like those Israel haters on the boards who put up endless hostile reports on Israelis behavior and never mention the Pals at all.

But that's just it, zolace - more than half of the settlers of Israel weren't returning home, but were gathering there from elsewhere. I just figured that giving them a place to live that was fertile and more importantly, comparatively safe, would have been a better idea.And I totally disagree with you that only the atrocities committed by Israel were publicized. We hear about terrorist bombs and mortar attacks all the time; no one's holding back that news.
 

I agree there have been terrible atrocities but usually we seem to hear only about the ones that Israel have committed. We hear very little about the Palestinians crimes. Expecting hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews to go settle in Sicily doesn't make much sense to me. People want to go home and not some strange island most of them have never visited. The two peoples both have history in the same area and will have to find a way to live together.

 I don't personally support either side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Neither side has historically comported themselves very well. It's actually our fault, you know - not just America, but all those who partook in the decision to set the borders in the middle east. The funny thing is, it didn't even really start after WWII - it goes back farther than that, when we created countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria after WWI. But when we decided (and I do think it was a good thing) to create a homeland for the Jews after the Holocaust, we should not have allowed its creation there. I know, that's the place they see as the "promised land" from their scriptures. But anyone should have been able to see that this was going to result in perpetual conflict. We fought WWII against the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. My feeling is that the Jews should have been given their homeland carved from one of them. I usually suggest Sicily, because it's an island, with natural borders. Plunking them down in the middle of their historic enemies really doesn't seem to me to have been prudent, and the result should have been very predictable. As far as the conflict today, like I said, neither side has comported themselves well. Both are guilty of atrocities and of intransigence. We've attempted how many times to broker a deal? And neither side seems willing to truly accept the need to compromise. The real problem now is that we can't even walk away and just let them settle it, as we should, because Israel is a nuclear power. So if they lost, those weapons would fall into the hands of people who likely would do us harm. You ask "why has the left abandoned the Jewish state?" Well, the answer is simple - because the Jewish state has made themselves indefensible too many times by their own actions - like bombing whole neighborhoods to get one terrorist who MAY be taking refuge somewhere in there. The Palestinian authorities don't do enough to combat terrorism, and the Israelis react too harshly to it. And I see no end in sight.

It's worth note (and rarely mentioned in the Western media) that Crimea was effectively Russian until 1954 when Kruschev was on some vodka binge and sort of gave it over to Ukraine.  Of course it was a fairly meaningless handjob since Ukraine was part of the USSR.  But this kind of explains why a popular vote went easily to Russian Federation.  That's the direction where the native population's affiliations tend to lay.

The contrast between the post WW-II experiences of Crimea and of Palestine (and the people within) could not be more stark.

The US also funds Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the Middle East. Big deal.

US has been good at one thing. To put nations in a situation that they can be manipulated to do their dirty work.

Some nations even thank US for their kind "assistance".

Israel has a government which is very independent of control from the U.S.  It is more than fair to question how independent our government is of the desires and aspirations of the government in Israel which has been led by right-wing and strongly Zionist factions for some time now.  There is very little that Israel wishes that we do not provide as far as I can tell, and we are very often their sole source of support and backing in the U.N. when they are called to task for one transgression or another.  Using our military power to crush some of their few remaining enemies is about the only thing we've not yet done for them, and the blowback from doing Iran (and public sentiment against doing Syria) are such that it would be nearly impossible for us to dance to their tunes here.

Israel obtains unfiltered intelligence feeds with data about U.S. citizens as we've learned from Snowden.  They even have explicit authorization to keep data on U.S. citizens for a period of time (minus U.S. lawmakers via a non-binding agreement) but what they do with the data is anyone's guess.

Israel can also execute U.S. citizens on humanitarian vessels in international waters and all of the leaderships of our government, and with almost no exceptions all of our mainstream media will studiously look the other way.  I'm talking about the 2010 'freedom flotilla' incident, not the 1967 USS Liberty incident.

"Foreign aid is taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries." - Ron Paul, perhaps the one few quotations from him I can agree with.

That being said 'foreign aid' is a bribe and bribes are common place in empires.  The British Empire had every African and Indian Chieftain / Prince on its' payroll.  Best way to stop insurrections is to simply give their leaders a few shiny toys and privileges, and they'll keep their minions under control.    


  American foreign aid is no different the than old tactics associated with empires.

The money is not being handed out freely. In case you do not know, the country is a US off-shore military platform and it is being used to watch over middle eastern countries.

Which is about 3.1 billion dollars too much.
Its insane a country with 17 trillion in debt, hands out foreign aid like candy.

+1

This idea that "the Left" has abandoned Israel is about as out of touch with reality as one could get.

Firstly, I would say that back in the 80's' and 90's left-wing negative feelings toward Israel and that countries actions were much stronger than they are now.  NPR (National Public Radio) is a huge source of influence on the more affluent on the left.  They did an abrupt about face on all things Israel in the early part of this century and it has had a very noticeable impact on many of my friends.  Or something has.

My personal beef is with Zionism both as a ideology and as a practice.  This is not the same thing as dislike of either Israel or Jews, but I can understand how it could be read that way.

There are ethnic Jews who share my feelings about Zionism.  Like the holocaust survivor who was part of the Free Gaza Movement flotilla and her family in pre-WWII times.  There are also a lot of Zionists who are not ethnic Jews.

No winners in this conflict.

We didn't start the fire,
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire,
But when we are gone
It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on.

The Palestinians commit many war crimes as well,they are no angels.

When did Democrats abandon Israel? That's pretty much the only bipartisan issue in congress

Israel still receives 3.1 billion dollars in foreign aid yearly. So where exactly is the abandonment? Seems more like extreme sympathizer and supporter

Muslim is not a religion of peace.

Don't forget all the neighboring countries of Israel tried to destroy it in the 50's. Should they succeed in invading it, most of Israeli citizens there would most likely be slaughtered in a horrible way.

Now that the aggressors failed the invasion and got weaken in the process, people are feeling sorry for Israel neighboring countries? Some people need to re-examine their head.