Israel lobby v Corbyn

[Jacksgranda]

7 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

Good argument.

You'd argue with your shadow.

[HeartsOfficialMoaner]

It might be good to go to a party at her house.

You could go back and listen to all the rubbish you spoke about, all the great ideas you all said and forgot because you were fucked

On the other hand, it would be terrible to go to a party at her house...

[ICTJohnboy]

3 hours ago, Granny Danger said:

Hodge should be kicked out of the Labour Party for bringing it into disrepute.

 

 

She should be kicked out.

Her politics right now only has 1 agenda -  to do as much damage to JC as she possibly can.

[Granny Danger]

57 minutes ago, Jacksgranda said:

You'd argue with your shadow.

By shadow would put forward a more coherent argument than you did.

[Jacksgranda]

6 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

By shadow would put forward a more coherent argument than you did.

You really are a carnapcious old c**t, always looking for "arguments".

Maybe I wasn't putting forward an "argument", maybe I was only passing comment on how she could bring into disrepute something that might be already seen as being in disrepute..

[Guest]

14 hours ago, Jacksgranda said:

You really are a carnapcious old c**t, always looking for "arguments".

Maybe I wasn't putting forward an "argument", maybe I was only passing comment on how she could bring into disrepute something that might be already seen as being in disrepute..

This has nothing to do with alleged anti semitism, it's hodge trying to screw over her own party which she despises as she believes they should be Centre right as they were under Blair.

The woman is an absolute disgrace.............

[Guest]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47952275

 

They're really stepping it up again..................

[Granny Danger]

On 15/04/2019 at 10:41, WATTOO said:

This has nothing to do with alleged anti semitism, it's hodge trying to screw over her own party which she despises as she believes they should be Centre right as they were under Blair.

The woman is an absolute disgrace.............

It’s unlikely a centre right leader would be critical of Israel, but if that were the case Hodges would still oppose him.

Pro-Zionism is more important to her than any other political position.

 

[Detournement]

If the BBC was genuine journalism rather than state propaganda they would sit down someone from LFoI and CFoI and ask them how the friendship is holding up when Netenyahu is talking about permanently annexing the whole West Bank in a way that is approaching genocidal.

 

[welshbairn]

15 minutes ago, Detournement said:

If the BBC was genuine journalism rather than state propaganda they would sit down someone from LFoI and CFoI and ask them how the friendship is holding up when Netenyahu is talking about permanently annexing the whole West Bank in a way that is approaching genocidal.

 

He's just being honest about Israeli policy since 67 under all Governments which has been to make the 2 state solution impossible. Up till now they haven't admitted what they're doing, because that would mean giving Palestinians from the West Bank votes in the Knesset which would make Jews a minority. It's lots of things, apartheid, Bantustan creation, racial discrimination, but it's not genocide. It's political and military subjugation. 

[Detournement]

When you have high ranking Likud officials talking about the IDF having enough bullets for everyone in Gaza it is clear what direction the Israeli state is moving in.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-has-enough-bullets-for-everyone-senior-mk-says-of-deadly-gaza-clashes/

There is no way for Israel to remain a Jewish state without mass expulsion or genocide.

 

[welshbairn]

14 minutes ago, Detournement said:

When you have high ranking Likud officials talking about the IDF having enough bullets for everyone in Gaza it is clear what direction the Israeli state is moving in.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-has-enough-bullets-for-everyone-senior-mk-says-of-deadly-gaza-clashes/

There is no way for Israel to remain a Jewish state without mass expulsion or genocide.

 

Shooting unarmed people running at a fence or looking after the injured isn't genocide, it's simple murder. 

[NotThePars]

Remember when the IDF tweeted, then deleted, a post about every bullet being accounted for after they shot dead clearly marked journalists? Then again, maybe they were reading Comment is Free!

[Guest]

I still don't get why Corbyn and now Burgon feel that they need to apologise for their views, especially when they're the same views as most reasonable people in the country hold.

If the Israel lobby don't like it, then tough, it's a free country with free speech and supposed free thinking, but this constant apologising and denial does nothing to help themselves at all...........

[LongTimeLurker]

3 hours ago, welshbairn said:

He's just being honest about Israeli policy since 67 under all Governments which has been to make the 2 state solution impossible. Up till now they haven't admitted what they're doing, because that would mean giving Palestinians from the West Bank votes in the Knesset which would make Jews a minority. It's lots of things, apartheid, Bantustan creation, racial discrimination, but it's not genocide. It's political and military subjugation. 

Not sure that's accurate. They clearly have no intention of ever annexing the Gaza Strip and have erected a Trumpesque wall around large parts of the West Bank, so that still makes a 2 state solution possible from their standpoint, just not one most non-Israelis would find either palatable or permissible as the 1967 borders would not be involved.

[Guest]

This is probably a rather simplistic view, however I've always compared the situation in Palestine to that of Northern Ireland, basically Israel appears to take the stance that if Hamas or the now defunct PLO etc committed a terrorist attack or assault on Israel or it's citizens then Palestinian civilians were deemed to be fair game as they weren't "preventing" Hamas etc from carrying out these acts. To my mind that would have been the equivalent of the IRA planting a bomb in England and then the occupying British army ordering Air strikes and gunning down lots of innocents within the Catholic parts of Belfast, Derry etc as retribution.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there were many within Thatchers Government who would have been right behind this policy but it still shocks me that people can stand back and just watch the Israelis murder innocent people and even worse still, support them...............

[Kuro]

If it wasn't Israel us and the USA would have invaded decades ago.  They commit war crimes every day, for fifty plus years.  Their crimes are much worse than countries we have invaded, and they are the most prolific violators of UN resolutions in the world.  We are not the good guys, and situations plethora help people see it.

[LongTimeLurker]

1 hour ago, WATTOO said:

This is probably a rather simplistic view, however I've always compared the situation in Palestine to that of Northern Ireland, basically Israel appears to take the stance that if Hamas or the now defunct PLO etc committed a terrorist attack or assault on Israel or it's citizens then Palestinian civilians were deemed to be fair game as they weren't "preventing" Hamas etc from carrying out these acts....

So if that's true, it isn't in fact anything like Northern Ireland. Glad we've cleared that up given that definitely wasn't the posture of the British State during the Troubles. Have to wonder whether the people who fixate on Israel on here either know or care that a majority of Israeli Jews nowadays are not Zionist European settlers but are descended from refugees from Arab countries that have no right to return and ever ponder why the Jewish population is now almost non-existent in the Arab world, while around 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs without the Intifada in the occupied territories spreading into 1967 borders Israel to any significant extent? Have they forgotten or are they too young to remember that Israel almost lost the 1973 war even with the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai peninsula and Golan heights under their control and therefore might have some legitimate security concerns where a two state solution on 1967 borders is concerned.  At times, there seems to be something deeper going on that drives this one-sided obsession with Israel and only Israel rather than viewing the conflict as being about two shades of grey and that's what the concerns about antisemitism in the Labour party are all about.

[Kuro]

8 minutes ago, LongTimeLurker said:

So if that's true, it isn't in fact anything like Northern Ireland. Glad we've cleared that up given that definitely wasn't the posture of the British State during the Troubles. Have to wonder whether the people who fixate on Israel on here either know or care that a majority of Israeli Jews nowadays are not Zionist European settlers but are descended from refugees from Arab countries that have no right to return and ever ponder why the Jewish population is now almost non-existent in the Arab world, while around 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs without the Intifada in the occupied territories spreading into 1967 borders Israel to any significant extent? Have they forgotten or are they too young to remember that Israel almost lost the 1973 war even with the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai peninsula and Golan heights under their control and therefore might have some legitimate security concerns where a two state solution on 1967 borders is concerned.  At times, there seems to be something deeper going on that drives this one-sided obsession with Israel and only Israel rather than viewing the conflict as being about two shades of grey and that's what the concerns about antisemitism in the Labour party are all about.

Something deeper like an aversion to war crimes you mean?

[Kuro]

Israel does not want peace, or a two state solution, and never has...

 

 

Regardless of the outcome of yesterday’s elections in Israel, Palestinians will most certainly lose.

While past elections focus on Iran or the economy, this campaign season the Israeli electorate is being fed a steady diet of anti-Palestinian toxicity. Historically Israelis have a tendency of voting for those with the most vile, intolerant and yet variedly repeated anti-Palestinians tropes.

Racism in the upper echelon of the Israeli government is a norm, however, embedded just as well deep within its institutional policies, the media, immigration rights, housing and legal policies. In fact, it all goes back to the time Israel was founded.

David Ben-Gurion, before becoming Israel’s very first prime minister was a member of Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary group which played a key role in the ethnic cleansing of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in during the 1948 war. Yet, he was elected not once but twice into office.

Menachem Begin, once described by Albert Einstein as a terrorist, was behind the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, killing 91 people including 28 British citizens. Three decades later he was elected prime minister. Another former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was also one of those jailed for the bombing, however Shamir’s two-year imprisonment also did not impede his chances of winning higher office exactly four decades later.

During the first Lebanon war Menachem Begin referred to the Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs,” in a statement he delivered to the Knesset reported by the New Statesman in 1982, illustrating how state-sanctioned racism is evidently a mainstay at the highest level.

More recently in 2016, while visiting the construction site of a border fence between Gaza and Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the barrier was necessary because, “In our neighborhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts,” in reference to both Palestinians living under siege in Gaza and Arabs in neighboring countries.

Like the air, land and sea blockade in Gaza which Israel today vehemently denies exist, Golda Meir during her time as prime minister also pushed the despicable idea that Palestinians don’t exist. In a recorded statement on 8 March 1969, Meir said, “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist”. She later claimed she was misquoted,writing in the New York Times, “My actual words were: ‘There is no Palestinian people. There are Palestinian refugees.’”

Then we have assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who in April 1976, threw a banquet for John Vorster, the prime minister of Apartheid South Africa, expressing that in their “respective parts of the world,” he said speaking of the broader Arab World in comparison to sub-Saharan Africa, both countries face “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”, heaping praise towards apartheid South Africa while chillingly hailing “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa”. Nevertheless Rabin too, found his way to higher office 16 years later.

It is of course, one thing to openly support apartheid states but quite another to transform into one.

Implementing zoning regulations, land seizures or expropriating Palestinian land essentially to achieve the same purpose as apartheid South Africa’s Group Areas Act, Israel has ensured that Israeli settlers and exploited Palestinians populations live in separate and unequal communities.

As an example, Israel’s Law of Return allows all Jews and persons with one Jewish grandparent to immigrate to Israel while Palestinian refugees who have been claiming a Right of Return for over 70 years are not eligible for citizenship.

Worse still, the Israeli government in 2018 passed a controversial nation-state law that egregiously states, “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it,“ further marginalizing Palestinian citizens. It also stipulates, “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment,” allowing the state to deepen support the establishment of Jewish-only communities.

To this end and credited for laying the brickwork for apartheid in Israel, Shimon Peres, the former prime minister and president was responsible for sanctioning of the first illegal settlement in the West Bank, one of the key root causes of why every single peace roadmap whenever proposed is almost perpetually stonewalled.

One may argue all this, however, pales in comparison to what came soon after in the form of a “bulldozer,” as he was widely known in Israeli circles. Former prime minister and military general, Ariel Sharon was not only implicated for failing to prevent the September 1982 massacre by Christian Phalangists of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon but was forced to resign as minister of defense, as a result. Yet the right-wing hawk was ultimately elected Israel’s prime minister two decades later.

Sharon also once said, “Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches” and was told an Israeli radio station in a 1998 interview, “Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don’t grab will go to them,” illustrating how such a core expansionist belief may in fact be a key characteristic of almost every prime minister in Israel.

Therefore it should come to little surprise, Benny Gantz, the former Israeli army chief and the strongest contender against Netanyahu, in a series of election campaign videos featured tilted statistics such as “6,231 targets destroyed,” and “1,364 terrorists killed” during the 2014 Gaza bombings, wearing the death toll as a badge of honor. In fact, 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 civilians, among them 551 children, according to Amnesty International.

Evidently indifferent to a missing moral compass, his political party partner, Lt. General Moshe Ya’alon speaking at a May 2015 conference in Jerusalem was quoted saying, “If we don’t intercept the rocket-launchers in advance, civilians will be hurt, if not killed. If we hit the launchers, it will hurt or kill Lebanese civilians.”

Among others aspiring to win higher office later, Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s Justice Minister in July 2014 re-published a quote she gave to a journalist who is a settler, advocating the Palestinian children of convicted terrorists should be killed because they are “little snakes.” Shaked is no stranger to stoking controversies and recently featured in a video that punned fascism, which caused a swift backlash. A Haaretz columnist, however, explains Shaked best, calling her a “representative of an ideology unembarrassed by its racism”.

These handful of statements above are only but in line with the tone and values of senior Israeli cabinet ministers and military officials, some of whom openly advocate racism, which they leveraged as a pathway to higher office.

Most frighteningly, none of these statements have ever been disowned by the official Israeli government let alone these dyed-in-the-wool hardliners aiming for higher office, as if being an ardent anti-Palestinian were a qualifying part of the job description.

In the end, some of these statements most frighteningly have either never been disowned, are sometimes disputed or whitewashing walk-backs issued. In either case, emboldening some of the most racist and expansionist members within Israel’s dysfunctional political system. A state  that evidently rewards dyed-in-the-wool hardliners aiming for higher office, proving time and again the merit of being an ardent anti-Palestinian is incontrovertibly a qualifying part of the job description.I

 

 

 

A few examples of revolting racism spewed forth by rabbis and other Zionists:

Rabbi Perin, in an eulogy for mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994: ‘One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.’ (New York Times, Feb. 28, 1994)

In April, 2001, during his Passover sermon, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party and former Israeli Chief Rabbi, described the Arabs as ‘serpents’ and in his Passover sermon, he stated that ‘the Lord shall waste their seed, devastate them and vanish them from this world. It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.’

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir declared during an interview with the foreign editor of the London Sunday Times that ‘it was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine…and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.’ (Sunday Times, London, June 15, 1969)

In the view of another prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, the Palestinians are of no more significance than insects when compared to Jews: ‘From this mountain top and from the vantage point of history I say that these people [the Palestinians] are like grasshoppers compared to us.’ (The Independent, April 1988, from Reuter, Tel Aviv; quoted by Michael Rice, False Inheritance, Kegan Paul International, London and New York, 1994, p. 127).

While delivering a televised address to his Likud party in 1989, Shamir further maligned Palestinians by describing them as ‘alien invaders of the Holy Land…. They are brutal, wild alien invaders in the land of Israel that belongs to the people of Israel, and only to them.’ (New York Post, February 6, 1989)

During a speech to the Knesset, Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister, referred to Palestinians as ‘beasts walking on two legs.’ (New Statesman, 25 June 1982)

Regarding Palestinians residing in the occupied West Bank, Raphael Eitan, then Israel’s Chief of Staff, declared: ‘When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle…. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.’ (New York Times, 14 April 1983)

Prime Minister Ehud Barak: ‘The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more…’ (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 30, 2002)

 

 

 

My favorite quote from an Israeli politician is the one from Dov Weisglass –

The significance of the [Gaza] disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process… And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with… a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress… The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

https://imeu.org/article/putting-gaza-in-formaldehyde-israels-disengagement-a-decade-later