I beg to differ with Jesse's statement that there's nothing inherently wrong with "anti-Zionism." Really? What other worldwide movement has ever existed that was dedicated to denying a particular group of people the right to nationhood? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? No, there's not, because anti-Zionism is simply a more socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism.
I beg to differ with Jesse's statement that there's nothing inherently wrong with "anti-Zionism." Really? What other worldwide movement has ever existed that was dedicated to denying a particular group of people the right to nationhood? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? No, there's not, because anti-Zionism is simply a more socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism.
There is no such thing as a "right to nationhood."
Seriously, I could name a hundred groups that theoretically could be "nations" but are "denied" that by the realities of international relations. Kurds, Aromanians, Cree, Volga Bulgars, Xhosa, Crimean Tatars, Shan, etc etc ad infinitum.
Anti-Zionism consists of one and only one proposition, to wit: Jews have no more right to override the human rights of others in pursuit of soi-disant "nationhood" than anyone else does.
Yes, but they have achieved nationhood just like countless other nations and just like countless other nations we can point to injustices, violence and people being displaced in its creation.
The reality is the surrounding nations spent decades not accepting that reality and trying to address the injustices, but trying to destroy the state in its entirety. It is still clearly the policy of many groups to do just that.
Modern тАШanti ZionistsтАЩ want to embrace thinking and rhetoric that undermines IsraelтАЩs right to exist but then argue they donтАЩt really embrace the ramifications of that rhetoric.
We donтАЩt see movements to deny the nationhood of basically every country in the new world & everywhere in Anglosphere that isnтАЩt the UK.
"Yes, but they have achieved nationhood just like countless other nations and just like countless other nations we can point to injustices, violence and people being displaced in its creation."
Are you 10 years old? "All the other countries are killing people and stealing their land! Why can't I?"
Reality: It was wrong when they did it and it's wrong when Israel does it.
Dude, itтАЩs you thatтАЩs the 10 year. Probably every national on earth has that in its history. No where did I say it was тАШrightтАЩ but I donтАЩt see movements to claim all these other nations shouldnтАЩt exist.
Anyway, what is the just solution youтАЩre seeking here? If Israel exists on тАШstolen landтАЩ the state of Israel should be destroyed and Jews driven out. ThatтАЩs HamasMs position.
If youтАЩre in favour of a two state solution, then all the тАШanti ZionistтАЩ rhetoric is an irrelevance as it requires accepting the State of Israel, with secure borders like any other state.
If you believe in a one state solution, can you point to anywhere in Palestine or indeed anywhere in the Arab world with democratic governance, where citizens have rights equivalent to those of Israeli that would make them think this once state wouldnтАЩt simply be an autocracy hostile to Jews?
"Dude, itтАЩs you thatтАЩs the 10 year. Probably every national on earth has that in its history. "
You are correct here. However the issue is that A - it's only been 70 years and there are many people still alive who experienced it and its immediate aftermath firsthand. B - it's still happening as Israel is illegally settling Palestinian land.
First the UN would need to put Peacekeepers on the ground to stop this. Israel cannot be allowed to continue to keep Palestinians in a concentration camp with dirty water and no electricity. They cannot be allowed to repeatedly "mow the lawn" and kill thousands of Palestinians using indiscriminate bombing. Israel needs to be stopped from murdering journalists who are reporting on the atrocities committed in Gaza.
That alone would never be allowed by the USA/Israel because they will never grant the Palestinians freedom.
"If you believe in a one state solution, can you point to anywhere in Palestine or indeed anywhere in the Arab world with democratic governance, where citizens have rights equivalent to those of Israeli that would make them think this once state wouldnтАЩt simply be an autocracy hostile to Jews?"
Are Arabs incapable of democracy? Also...are you suggesting Israel and the USA are "Democracies" or are they actually Plutocracies?
тАЬItтАЩs only been 70 yearsтАЭ -- new countries are formed all the time. There are a few dozen countries younger than Israel, including Montenegro, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Armenia, Latvia, Namibia, Eritrea, and Yemen.
So the "Palestinians" definitely don't have a "right" to a nation, since their "nation" was a concept invented in 1964. There was a place that had been named Palestine by the Romans as punishment for the Jewish revolt when they pushed the Jews out, but there was never any Palestinian nation before or after, until Arab nations--realizing they needed to create an entity smaller than Israel so they wouldn't look like the bullies--invented the concept.
Israel was a nation 1,600 years before Islam burst from the Arabian peninsula in the most thorough act of colonialization the world has ever witnessed. There were no Arabs living in "Palestine" until that, but there have been Jews there for three millennia. In fact, Israel has had the same name, the same language, the same religion, etc., for three thousand years. Egypt doesn't come close, inasmuch as it was one of the nations that succumbed fully to the Arab/Islamic colonial takeover.
No, no one has a "right" to a nation as though there were some central authority handing out rights (the above poster relies on twisting the words of others to support an anti-anti-Hamas agenda), but people do have a right to fight for their lives. That's a right that people like this want to deny them.
1. The term "Palestine" as a referent to the area south of Syria and northwest of Egypt is a Greek term that was in use for centuries before the Romans repurposed it (at an unknown time and for unknown reasons).
2. "Israel" seems likely to have been the name of a small and short-lived state in some of what is now northern Israel, which lasted about a hundred years before being conquered by Assyria. In no sense could it be called a "nation" in the modern usage of the term, any more than, say, one of the plethora of tiny kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England could be (imagine if someone today identified themselves as "Mercian"). it has significantly less historical pedigree than such current non-states as Bactria, Kush, or Media.
3. Calling the Arab conquests "the most thorough act of colonization the world has ever witnessed" is an absurd exaggeration. They engaged in no large-scale massacres, population transfers, or population replacement; rather, they built an empire which was not fundamentally different from the Roman, Sassanid, or Achaemenid empires which had preceded it. The Mongol Ilkhanate engaged in more thorough efforts at wiping out the local populations of the Middle East than the Arabs ever did, though they were unsuccessful at doing so and ultimately were not able to hold on to Palestine. (It should be noted that the Franks of the First Crusade also engaged in mass slaughter of the local populations of Palestine, both Jewish and Arab, as a part of colonizing the region, though again there was a continual Arab and to a lesser extent Jewish presence even after the Frankish conquest.)
4. Arabs have lived continuously in Palestine since the beginning of recorded history. Antiochus III recruited huge numbers of local Arab troops as part of his attempted conquest of Palestine during the Fourth Syrian/Ptolemaic War, which culminated in the battle of Raphia, one of the larger and better-attested battles of the Hellenistic era. They continued to form a major part of the local Seleucid armies right down to the end of that kingdom at the hands of Pompey, including during the Maccabean Revolt, and have continued to live there ever since. In the post-Constantine era, several of the Palestinian Arab tribes were Christianized; this is all very well documented.
5. Said Maccabean Revolt forms a significantly better claim to historicity than do any of the pre-Babylonian Hebrew splinter kingdoms, since it resulted in the foundation of a well documented and unambiguously Jewish state. That state had an independent existence of about a hundred years followed by another hundred or so as a Roman vassal state before being annexed following the Jewish Revolt in the late 60s CE. It's odd that you don't mention it at all. But perhaps that's because it obviously, like Egypt, "succumbed fully to the [Roman] colonial takeover."
6. Modern Hebrew is an invented language formed by reconstructing old Hebrew from old texts and coining new words to describe concepts unknown to the ancient speakers. Hebrew had no native speakers as of roughly 1850 CE; at that time it was a liturgical language comparable to modern Latin, Coptic (which is just liturgical Egyptian-- oops, guess it didn't "succumb fully" after all) or Old Church Slavonic. Even in the Hasmonaean era it was not universally spoken even among Jews; Aramaic was the lingua franca of the region until it was displaced by Greek.
7. The extent to which modern Judaism could be described as the "same religion" as the animal-sacrificing Yahweh cult of the 8th century BCE is debatable, to say the least. It has been subject to the same erosive and avulsive pressures as any other religion, to the point where you've got a real Ship of Theseus problem.
So, now that we've exploded the quasi-mystical bullshit that this poster is attempting to weave into a "nationhood" narrative, we are left with the observation at the end that "people do have a right to fight for their lives." I suppose so, but that provides no moral high ground for Israel vis a vis Palestine, as both groups can lodge the same claim. And if your only method of differentiating one claim to nationhood from another is "Group A is better at killing and driving out its adversaries than Group B," then you can hardly be surprised when people react badly to mass expulsions and murders.
I'm aware of virtually all the historical details you bring up, except the part about modern Hebrew, which I'll take on faith. You marshal a great number of historical facts and are obviously quite adept at arguing a position, but facts are slippery things, as a sophist such as yourself knows, and there are many arguments to be made against your lengthy series of points. But that's a waste of time. What's interesting to me is this intensity of passion on your part, and on that of others, against a group of people who experienced what the Israelis did on October 7. From what you've said here and elsewhere, it's reasonable to guess that you'd say they had it coming, which is a sentiment I find difficult to comprehend. I certainly don't feel anything of the kind toward the Palestinians, and I've never met an Israel supporter who does.
Translation: "I cannot defend my propaganda points when they are exposed as lies, so I will launch an ad hominem attack on the person exposing them in the hopes that character defamation will cause people not to look into the matter carefully."
Of course, in this case you can't even defame me with actual quotes; you have to make up a straw viewpoint and attribute it to me as something that it's "reasonable to guess that I'd say," when of course I would not say (and don't believe) anything of the sort. This is unbelievably asinine behavior, but given that this subthread started with a series of brazen lies about the history of the middle east, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
At any rate, add another to the list of worthless hacks that this comment section is infested with.
Just to set the record straight before moving on, I know a good deal more than you think I know about these subjects, and could challenge your points effectively on almost every score, but that's not what I'm here to do. I've spent maybe ten hours of my entire life on boards like this, and probably nine of them have been on this one in the past six weeks, letting off steam about this situation and reading the words of others who feel the same. I'm not an online activist looking for fights, and I don't want to continue this pissing match, but you really do need to learn some history from a different perspective. Your reading of ancient Israel and the spread of Islam is extremely tendentious, as are your arguments regarding claims of nationhood, and while you might say mine are as well, I'm not presenting myself as the Smartest Guy in the Room, Here to Set Everybody Straight. (And btw, modern Hebrew is a *reconstructed* language, not an "invented" one. You made it sound like Esperanto.)
You're the one who cared enough to make a multi-paragraph argument with numerous claims of fact in it, so your sudden observation that actually you're too disinterested to bother defending those claims with the (totally real and very persuasive) evidence you're not telling anyone about is roughly as believable as saying you have a girlfriend in Canada.
I'm sure I'm not the only one put off by your extremely hateful tone, full of accusations and name-calling. That's why I chose not to engage with you. If you had approached this topic in the way of someone who's actually interested in the truth rather than simply scoring points, I would have taken time to respond to your long series of assertions. I'm still not going to spend a lot of time on you b/c you've made it clear that you're just an activist looking for people to take down online, but here are a few responses.
*The renaming of Judea did not occur "at an unknown time for unknown reasons." It was 135 CE, immediately after the Romans suppressed the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
*Another reason why I didn't take your laundry list seriously is that a lot of it seems to be fueled by anti-Semitic propaganda. Hence you diminish the existence of Israel in ancient times, referring to "a small and short-lived state." I'm not sure how its being small disqualifies it, and if you count the period from the establishment of the united kingdom of Israel to the end of the Kingdom of Judah, that's nearly half a millennium.
*Saying that Israel "has significantly less historical pedigree than such current non-states as Bactria, Kush, or Media" is further proof that you simply see Israel as an illegitimate state with no right to maintain its existence. Guess what? If those various non-states had been forcibly removed from a land where they had constructed buildings and created literature, and if they had a continuous history of shared identity, and if they sought to maintain a liberal democracy while being beset on all sides by authoritarian enemies, then yes, I would support them and say they had a right to be taken seriously.
*It's funny how you're so ready to dismiss the history of ancient Israel while according the region's Arab inhabitants the widest possible benefit of the doubt. The reign of Antiochus III was LONG after "the beginning of recorded history," and by that time the Jews had been living in the Levant for centuries. (FYI, some Jews remained during the Captivity, and many more returned in the years following.) So the fact that Arab troops fought for the Greeks is not a very impressive argument for the Palestinians' historic claims on the land they occupy.
*I call the Arab/Muslim conquests the most successful colonial effort in history b/c, in contrast to European colonization, the lands they conquered remain conquered. They also "intermarried" (that's a nice way of putting it) with the populace much more than the Europeans, and thus transformed the literal DNA of the countries they invaded. Morocco, for instance, was not Arab to begin with, but it is now and will be for the foreseeable future. It also wholeheartedly follows the religion brought to it by the Arabs. Where in the world is there a wide swath of former European colonies composed primarily of European descendants who *ardently* follow Christianity to the point of being willing to wage war against the enemies of their religion?
*As for the Mongol example, the reason why they didn't leave any lasting impact was that they didn't have any ideology they were pushing. The spread of Islam took place in an incredibly short period of time, engulfing a huge portion of the known world, and it was driven by the need to spread their religion in accordance with the edicts of the Quran. People could either convert willingly, or they could die. It's true that in some areas (Spain in particular), they still allowed non-believers to maintain a separate existence, but in accordance with Islamic law, those people were second-class citizens. I'm not suggesting the Franks were any good either, and I'm quite aware of the intellectual achievements of medieval Islam. But it was a religion founded by a warrior, and they followed him in a blaze of conquests far more rapid than anything seen since Alexander's shortlived empire.
*About the differences between ancient Judaism and the modern version, are you saying they're not the same religion? Yes, there have been a lot of adjustments and liberalization since the days of Moses, and somehow that's a bad thing?
*The business about modern Hebrew being "invented" took me aback at first and I didn't even know how to respond b/c that sounded so absurd. In fact that characterization is at best victim-blaming, and at worst something much more sinister. Hebrew has far more historical basis as a language than Palestine does as a polity of any kind.
From your past behavior, I'm guessing you'll whip through those points and race back at me with a whole bunch of accusations that I'm a liar or just plain stupid, to which I say, "Please give it a rest." Please try to be a nicer person and not such a combative blowhard. From what I can tell, most BARPod listeners are very open-minded people who don't take kindly to being screamed at, so maybe you'd be happier in one of the many places on the Net that caters to people like you.
I do indeed hate pathological liars and propagandists, of which you are both, so... guilty as charged I guess? Though I have to say, smearing your opponents by accusing them of "anti-semitic propaganda" (a ludicrous assertion; almost none of what I've posted here is even discussed in current-day debates over Israel/Palestine, and I'd love to see you try to prove otherwise) seems pretty hateful to me.
1. As a casual perusal of Wikipedia will make clear, there's a source conflict on the issue of the Roman renaming of Palestine. What there is no conflict at all over is that the term long predates the Roman usage of it.
2. There is very poor evidence that there was ever a "united kingdom of Israel" or, if it existed at all, when it was formed. The actual kingdom of Israel that can be proven to exist from Assyrian records was an almost completely insignificant splinter state whose relevance to modern life is nonexistent.
3. All three of Bactria, Kush and Media were forcibly removed from lands where they had constructed buildings and created literature. That's called "history." Almost all of the states that have ever existed no longer exist.
4. Israel is not a liberal democracy; it's a Jewish supremacist state by its own legislation, and not a democracy at all since a huge percentage of the population it forcibly controls is disenfranchised and stripped of rights.
5. I am well aware that Antiochus III ruled long after the beginning of recorded history. I offered the presence of masses of local Arab levies in his army as merely an especially convenient and well-attested refutation of your absurd lie that Arabs didn't live in Palestine until the Islamic conquests.
6. Again, the idea that Arab colonization of the Middle East was somehow more comprehensive than European settlement of America or Australia is self-refutingly dumb.
7. Arabs absolutely did not require conquered "people of the book" to convert-- anywhere. There have been continual Christian patriarchs in Alexandria and Jerusalem since the Byzantines controlled them (and there's still a patriarchate of Antioch as well, although it has been moved to Damascus due to Antioch itself being abandoned).
8. The Mongols absolutely left a "lasting impact" in the form of the piles of hundreds of thousands of corpses outside Samarkand, Baghdad, Damascus, etc etc etc. Those "intellectual achievements of medieval Islam" were crippled in the process. Then a few generations later Timur (a Muslim!) swept through and did the same thing a second time. Not exactly great for the old intellectual ferment to have all of your scholars slaughtered every hundred years or so. The damage those invasions did to the Mideast was incalculable; one can argue it has still never recovered.
So look at this from my perspective. We have someone who has come onto a thread that he claims to be disinterested in, yet immediately proceeds to spout off lie after lie in the apparent belief that no one will have the historical knowledge to refute them. When called on it by someone who actually does have that knowledge, he immediately retreats into assertions that he really doesn't care, do u? After considerable prodding, he returns with... yet another broadsheet of very easily disprovable lies. What precisely, pray tell, is the appropriate response to this? Politely asking him to please stop? No, thanks. What I want is to make your presence here extremely unpleasant so that you go away. That's how to deal with liars, and it's how I aim to deal with you going forward.
I'll give it a shot: I took Jesse to mean that there's nothing inherently wrong in having criticisms of various Israeli policies.
But we've turned it into a zero sum game. One is antisemitic if one has any harsh criticisms of Israeli policy.
I have harsh criticisms of my own government's policies here and there. Doesn't make me inherently anti American.
That being said, the term Zionist has turned into somewhat of an epithet so I don't necessarily blame Jews who interpret "anti-zionist" inherently negatively.
Yeah, I don't think someone who criticizes the Israeli government is necessarily an "anti-Zionist." There's plenty to criticize in even the most humane government. Unfortunately, actual anti-Zionism is typically predicated on the idea that it's wrong for Israelis to have a state of their own. Nor do those people who most vociferously criticize the Israeli government have anything much to say about Arab regimes that have far less regard for human life. But your point is well-made about the zero-sum game, an unfortunate by-product of the hatred and anger that this topic seems to always elicit.
"the idea that it's wrong for Israelis to have a state of their own."
I don't know that it's that simple though. If the house you claim as your own is the house me and my family have been living in for centuries, I'd probably have some feelings about that. Some strong ones even. They might even come across like I don't care if you have your own house or not.
It's...complicated.
For the record, I feel for both Jews and palestinians and mostly blame the brits.
How many years or generations does it take for a land to be тАЬyoursтАЭ?
There are Jews in Israel who are living in the farms their grandfathers tilled. So we would take someone out of their third generation home and move in people who have never lived there but their people did three generations ago? And if we decide itтАЩs ok to do that, at what point to we freeze time to the perfect moment where people were only settling in their ancient ancestral homeland? Was that ever something that existed? The Christians has much of those lands before the Muslims took it by force. The Christians took it from the Jews. So clearly itтАЩs ok to go back 100 years, but not 600.
I'm not saying it's "theirs." I said it's complicated, meaning I agree with you that it gets confusing.
I don't know what the solution is, other than for both sides to stay at the table until they figure out how to live together. Not that I think that's going to happen any time soon.
You're right it was more the Brits but the USA was INSTRUMENTAL as the USA was the first (and most powerful nation) to officially recognize Israel in a diplomatic capacity. They Brits legislated Israel into existence while the USA (as global hegemon at the time) legitimized it on the world stage. The USA then provided Israel with all the money and weapons they would need to gain a immovable foothold in the region.
Israeli was recognized by the United Nations in 1948. The US had very little to do with the founding of the State of Israel, and the Soviets officially recognized it before the United States, nor was the US its largest or only benefactor. There was debate within the State Department about the process-George Marshall opposed it. The 1917 Balfour Declaration clearly outlined that His MajestyтАЩs government looked favorably upon the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine, but the growth of the Jewish population in the region began in the 19th century, with emigration of Jews from Europe to the region, which added to a long-extant Jewish (and Christian and Muslim) population in the region. The British administered it as a League of Nations mandate, gaining the territory and much of former Ottoman territory in the region after the war. The Ottomans won the territory from the Byzantines, and before that it was Roman. After the First World War, the British hoped to dominate the Middle East, for oil, communication, and to protect access to and control British Raj.
The Russian Empire, from where many of these immigrants came, had the largest Jewish population in the world, and was not exactly the nicest place for Jews. Many of the most enduring Anti-Semitic myths were developed in Russia, most notable the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a forgery of the Ohkrana, the Tsarist Secret Police. The British allowed and facilitated immigration, but it was never a major British policy or focus. Interestingly, during the Second World War, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem developed a relation with the 3rd Reich, which introduced a lot of European antisemitic thought (the Protocols).
The recognition of the country was recognizing a fait accompli, with the State of Israeli being a reality on the ground in 1948. Israeli did receive a ton of aids and arms - there were quite large stockpiles of weapons from demobilized German troops at hand. Israeli was then promptly attacked by a coalition of Arab states, and one.
Lastly, the United States could not be called a hegemon in 1948. A hegemon implies there are no equals in the international system. What existed in 1948 was a bipolar world of roughly equal blocs- thatтАЩs what makes a Cold War. It was not until the collapse of the USSR that one could accurately use that term.
There is no right to nationhood anywhere in the world and there certainly isn't a right to invade a country and ethnically cleanse it of the people who currently live there.
If Israel is trying to тАЬethnically cleanseтАЭ the Levant of Palestinians, theyтАЩre doing a terrible job of it, considering that the Palestinian population has continuously shot up since the Nakba.
I guess the Holocaust never happened then according to your logic bc there's more Jews today than in 1945. Here you should educate yourself about what Genocide is:
Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:
A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and (ISRAEL GUILTY)
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
Killing members of the group (ISRAEL GUILTY)
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (ISRAEL GUILTY)
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (ISRAEL GUILTY)
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (ISRAEL GUILTY)
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group ( (ISRAEL NOT GUILTY)
As you can see Israel has already committed all the necessary acts required to be found guilty of Genocide under the Geneva Convention.
Do you deny that? Yes or no?
You'll never answer because we both know they are guilty. The difference is that you agree with the Genocide and I don't.
The funny (not funny) thing about anti-anti-Hamas bots like this jackass is that they're only concerned about human rights when they can claim Israel is violating them. Zero criticism of Hamas or any other terrorist groups, or of any of the many Arab nations who are killing their own people, or indeed of any other situation in the world. Only Israel. Funny how this one group of people attracts all the criticism.
Funny how you excuse such acts when it's Israel but regularly condemn concentration camp inmates for behaving like animals. I'm sure you would just lay down and die like a good concentration camp inmates but many Palestinians refuse to disappear and die so Israelis can take that land in uncontested
I don't condemn victims of genocide for resisting their own genocide.
Concentration camps don't have beaches or restaurants. Concentration camp inmates aren't allowed out of their camp for any reason, including to go work at a kibbutz. Concentratiop camps don't have huge stockpiles of armaments to fire on their enemies. Concentration camps don't get billions and billions of dollars to use for building tunnels are weapon systems.
The disgusting level of gaslighting you are engaging in right now is incredible. Honestly I assume you're a paid troll based on your wild propaganda statements and your refusal to engage in any factual discussion.
"Concentration camps don't have beaches or restaurants."
Can you please show me a link to the definition of Concentration Camp where it says "Anywhere that has restaurants or sandy areas near water cannot be considered a Concentration camp."
A beach is literally just a sandy area alighting a body of water. Of course Gaza has beaches...it has 25 miles of water coastline. The beach is guarded 24/7 by the Israeli Navy and it serves as a natural fence for the Concentration Camp. It's cheaper than building enormous fences like they did around the other 3 sides of gaza with heavily armed guards all over and 24/7 video surveillance.
"Concentration camp inmates aren't allowed out of their camp for any reason, including to go work at a kibbutz."
The Nazis started using forced labour shortly after their rise to power. They established specific Arbeitslager (labour camps) which housed Ostarbeiter (eastern workers), Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers) and other forced labourers who were forcibly rounded up and brought in from the east. These were separate from the SS-run concentration camps, where prisoners were also forced to perform labour.
"Concentration camps don't have huge stockpiles of armaments to fire on their enemies."
The uprising began around 4:00 in the afternoon of October 14, 1943. In Camp One, prisoners invited the deputy commandant, Johann Niemann, into the tailor shop to be fitted for a suit. They then killed him with an axe. In Camp Two, prisoners lured SS NCO Josef Wulf to try on a coat in the warehouse of victims' belongings, and also killed him with an axe. In the course of the next hour or so, nine more SS personnel were killed in a similar manner.
Honestly there is no reason to engage with a person like you who is clearly some kind of ignorant troll or teenager. The Sobibor camp had a Tailor Shop. Does that negate it as a Concentration Camp? Or is it just restaurants and beaches?
These assertions all prove the points made above. The example of the Sobibor uprising would be appropriate if the Germans had been bending over backward to help the inmates, including by letting them *leave the camp* and work *for pay* on farms, sometimes even staying overnight in people's homes, instead of doing forced labor at a Siemens factory in the camp. Also, the inmates at Sobibor hadn't been building up weapons and planning the attack with the help of wealthy, powerful outside forces, and when the attack occurred, the world didn't mobilize to march in the streets and condemn the Germans.
"Concentration camp," like virtually all nouns, is defined in terms of what it IS, not in terms of what it IS NOT, but any reasonable person could assume that it doesn't include the many amenities that exist or at least have existed in Gaza. They even had a water park, something that certainly would have looked out of place at Treblinka. So why did the Crazy Water Park in Gaza City close down a few months after opening in 2010? Was it those awful Israelis? Nope, Hamas closed it down b/c they didn't like men and women swimming together.
And of course Hamas could do that, because they have *controlled Gaza since 2005*. So if Gaza is a concentration camp, it's not the fault of the Israeli forces patrolling off-shore to make sure the terrorists don't launch an attack from the beach. It's the fault of the people who voted in this "government"--a regime that says its only responsibility is to its own fighters and not to the civilians of Gaza.
I beg to differ with Jesse's statement that there's nothing inherently wrong with "anti-Zionism." Really? What other worldwide movement has ever existed that was dedicated to denying a particular group of people the right to nationhood? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? No, there's not, because anti-Zionism is simply a more socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism.
There is no such thing as a "right to nationhood."
Seriously, I could name a hundred groups that theoretically could be "nations" but are "denied" that by the realities of international relations. Kurds, Aromanians, Cree, Volga Bulgars, Xhosa, Crimean Tatars, Shan, etc etc ad infinitum.
Anti-Zionism consists of one and only one proposition, to wit: Jews have no more right to override the human rights of others in pursuit of soi-disant "nationhood" than anyone else does.
Yes, but they have achieved nationhood just like countless other nations and just like countless other nations we can point to injustices, violence and people being displaced in its creation.
The reality is the surrounding nations spent decades not accepting that reality and trying to address the injustices, but trying to destroy the state in its entirety. It is still clearly the policy of many groups to do just that.
Modern тАШanti ZionistsтАЩ want to embrace thinking and rhetoric that undermines IsraelтАЩs right to exist but then argue they donтАЩt really embrace the ramifications of that rhetoric.
We donтАЩt see movements to deny the nationhood of basically every country in the new world & everywhere in Anglosphere that isnтАЩt the UK.
"Yes, but they have achieved nationhood just like countless other nations and just like countless other nations we can point to injustices, violence and people being displaced in its creation."
Are you 10 years old? "All the other countries are killing people and stealing their land! Why can't I?"
Reality: It was wrong when they did it and it's wrong when Israel does it.
Dude, itтАЩs you thatтАЩs the 10 year. Probably every national on earth has that in its history. No where did I say it was тАШrightтАЩ but I donтАЩt see movements to claim all these other nations shouldnтАЩt exist.
Anyway, what is the just solution youтАЩre seeking here? If Israel exists on тАШstolen landтАЩ the state of Israel should be destroyed and Jews driven out. ThatтАЩs HamasMs position.
If youтАЩre in favour of a two state solution, then all the тАШanti ZionistтАЩ rhetoric is an irrelevance as it requires accepting the State of Israel, with secure borders like any other state.
If you believe in a one state solution, can you point to anywhere in Palestine or indeed anywhere in the Arab world with democratic governance, where citizens have rights equivalent to those of Israeli that would make them think this once state wouldnтАЩt simply be an autocracy hostile to Jews?
"Dude, itтАЩs you thatтАЩs the 10 year. Probably every national on earth has that in its history. "
You are correct here. However the issue is that A - it's only been 70 years and there are many people still alive who experienced it and its immediate aftermath firsthand. B - it's still happening as Israel is illegally settling Palestinian land.
First the UN would need to put Peacekeepers on the ground to stop this. Israel cannot be allowed to continue to keep Palestinians in a concentration camp with dirty water and no electricity. They cannot be allowed to repeatedly "mow the lawn" and kill thousands of Palestinians using indiscriminate bombing. Israel needs to be stopped from murdering journalists who are reporting on the atrocities committed in Gaza.
That alone would never be allowed by the USA/Israel because they will never grant the Palestinians freedom.
"If you believe in a one state solution, can you point to anywhere in Palestine or indeed anywhere in the Arab world with democratic governance, where citizens have rights equivalent to those of Israeli that would make them think this once state wouldnтАЩt simply be an autocracy hostile to Jews?"
Are Arabs incapable of democracy? Also...are you suggesting Israel and the USA are "Democracies" or are they actually Plutocracies?
тАЬItтАЩs only been 70 yearsтАЭ -- new countries are formed all the time. There are a few dozen countries younger than Israel, including Montenegro, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Armenia, Latvia, Namibia, Eritrea, and Yemen.
ItтАЩs kind of a long list; you can google it.
Yet I suspect youтАЩre only pressed about Israel.
Nothing you said had anything to do with my post. We aren't talking about those other countries.
We are discussing Israel and their crimes against humanity right now which are ongoing and horrific.
So the "Palestinians" definitely don't have a "right" to a nation, since their "nation" was a concept invented in 1964. There was a place that had been named Palestine by the Romans as punishment for the Jewish revolt when they pushed the Jews out, but there was never any Palestinian nation before or after, until Arab nations--realizing they needed to create an entity smaller than Israel so they wouldn't look like the bullies--invented the concept.
Israel was a nation 1,600 years before Islam burst from the Arabian peninsula in the most thorough act of colonialization the world has ever witnessed. There were no Arabs living in "Palestine" until that, but there have been Jews there for three millennia. In fact, Israel has had the same name, the same language, the same religion, etc., for three thousand years. Egypt doesn't come close, inasmuch as it was one of the nations that succumbed fully to the Arab/Islamic colonial takeover.
No, no one has a "right" to a nation as though there were some central authority handing out rights (the above poster relies on twisting the words of others to support an anti-anti-Hamas agenda), but people do have a right to fight for their lives. That's a right that people like this want to deny them.
Okay, so let's tick off the lies one by one here:
1. The term "Palestine" as a referent to the area south of Syria and northwest of Egypt is a Greek term that was in use for centuries before the Romans repurposed it (at an unknown time and for unknown reasons).
2. "Israel" seems likely to have been the name of a small and short-lived state in some of what is now northern Israel, which lasted about a hundred years before being conquered by Assyria. In no sense could it be called a "nation" in the modern usage of the term, any more than, say, one of the plethora of tiny kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England could be (imagine if someone today identified themselves as "Mercian"). it has significantly less historical pedigree than such current non-states as Bactria, Kush, or Media.
3. Calling the Arab conquests "the most thorough act of colonization the world has ever witnessed" is an absurd exaggeration. They engaged in no large-scale massacres, population transfers, or population replacement; rather, they built an empire which was not fundamentally different from the Roman, Sassanid, or Achaemenid empires which had preceded it. The Mongol Ilkhanate engaged in more thorough efforts at wiping out the local populations of the Middle East than the Arabs ever did, though they were unsuccessful at doing so and ultimately were not able to hold on to Palestine. (It should be noted that the Franks of the First Crusade also engaged in mass slaughter of the local populations of Palestine, both Jewish and Arab, as a part of colonizing the region, though again there was a continual Arab and to a lesser extent Jewish presence even after the Frankish conquest.)
4. Arabs have lived continuously in Palestine since the beginning of recorded history. Antiochus III recruited huge numbers of local Arab troops as part of his attempted conquest of Palestine during the Fourth Syrian/Ptolemaic War, which culminated in the battle of Raphia, one of the larger and better-attested battles of the Hellenistic era. They continued to form a major part of the local Seleucid armies right down to the end of that kingdom at the hands of Pompey, including during the Maccabean Revolt, and have continued to live there ever since. In the post-Constantine era, several of the Palestinian Arab tribes were Christianized; this is all very well documented.
5. Said Maccabean Revolt forms a significantly better claim to historicity than do any of the pre-Babylonian Hebrew splinter kingdoms, since it resulted in the foundation of a well documented and unambiguously Jewish state. That state had an independent existence of about a hundred years followed by another hundred or so as a Roman vassal state before being annexed following the Jewish Revolt in the late 60s CE. It's odd that you don't mention it at all. But perhaps that's because it obviously, like Egypt, "succumbed fully to the [Roman] colonial takeover."
6. Modern Hebrew is an invented language formed by reconstructing old Hebrew from old texts and coining new words to describe concepts unknown to the ancient speakers. Hebrew had no native speakers as of roughly 1850 CE; at that time it was a liturgical language comparable to modern Latin, Coptic (which is just liturgical Egyptian-- oops, guess it didn't "succumb fully" after all) or Old Church Slavonic. Even in the Hasmonaean era it was not universally spoken even among Jews; Aramaic was the lingua franca of the region until it was displaced by Greek.
7. The extent to which modern Judaism could be described as the "same religion" as the animal-sacrificing Yahweh cult of the 8th century BCE is debatable, to say the least. It has been subject to the same erosive and avulsive pressures as any other religion, to the point where you've got a real Ship of Theseus problem.
So, now that we've exploded the quasi-mystical bullshit that this poster is attempting to weave into a "nationhood" narrative, we are left with the observation at the end that "people do have a right to fight for their lives." I suppose so, but that provides no moral high ground for Israel vis a vis Palestine, as both groups can lodge the same claim. And if your only method of differentiating one claim to nationhood from another is "Group A is better at killing and driving out its adversaries than Group B," then you can hardly be surprised when people react badly to mass expulsions and murders.
Absolute pack of historical lies. Will refute in more detail later.
I'm aware of virtually all the historical details you bring up, except the part about modern Hebrew, which I'll take on faith. You marshal a great number of historical facts and are obviously quite adept at arguing a position, but facts are slippery things, as a sophist such as yourself knows, and there are many arguments to be made against your lengthy series of points. But that's a waste of time. What's interesting to me is this intensity of passion on your part, and on that of others, against a group of people who experienced what the Israelis did on October 7. From what you've said here and elsewhere, it's reasonable to guess that you'd say they had it coming, which is a sentiment I find difficult to comprehend. I certainly don't feel anything of the kind toward the Palestinians, and I've never met an Israel supporter who does.
Translation: "I cannot defend my propaganda points when they are exposed as lies, so I will launch an ad hominem attack on the person exposing them in the hopes that character defamation will cause people not to look into the matter carefully."
Of course, in this case you can't even defame me with actual quotes; you have to make up a straw viewpoint and attribute it to me as something that it's "reasonable to guess that I'd say," when of course I would not say (and don't believe) anything of the sort. This is unbelievably asinine behavior, but given that this subthread started with a series of brazen lies about the history of the middle east, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
At any rate, add another to the list of worthless hacks that this comment section is infested with.
Just to set the record straight before moving on, I know a good deal more than you think I know about these subjects, and could challenge your points effectively on almost every score, but that's not what I'm here to do. I've spent maybe ten hours of my entire life on boards like this, and probably nine of them have been on this one in the past six weeks, letting off steam about this situation and reading the words of others who feel the same. I'm not an online activist looking for fights, and I don't want to continue this pissing match, but you really do need to learn some history from a different perspective. Your reading of ancient Israel and the spread of Islam is extremely tendentious, as are your arguments regarding claims of nationhood, and while you might say mine are as well, I'm not presenting myself as the Smartest Guy in the Room, Here to Set Everybody Straight. (And btw, modern Hebrew is a *reconstructed* language, not an "invented" one. You made it sound like Esperanto.)
You're the one who cared enough to make a multi-paragraph argument with numerous claims of fact in it, so your sudden observation that actually you're too disinterested to bother defending those claims with the (totally real and very persuasive) evidence you're not telling anyone about is roughly as believable as saying you have a girlfriend in Canada.
I'm sure I'm not the only one put off by your extremely hateful tone, full of accusations and name-calling. That's why I chose not to engage with you. If you had approached this topic in the way of someone who's actually interested in the truth rather than simply scoring points, I would have taken time to respond to your long series of assertions. I'm still not going to spend a lot of time on you b/c you've made it clear that you're just an activist looking for people to take down online, but here are a few responses.
*The renaming of Judea did not occur "at an unknown time for unknown reasons." It was 135 CE, immediately after the Romans suppressed the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
*Another reason why I didn't take your laundry list seriously is that a lot of it seems to be fueled by anti-Semitic propaganda. Hence you diminish the existence of Israel in ancient times, referring to "a small and short-lived state." I'm not sure how its being small disqualifies it, and if you count the period from the establishment of the united kingdom of Israel to the end of the Kingdom of Judah, that's nearly half a millennium.
*Saying that Israel "has significantly less historical pedigree than such current non-states as Bactria, Kush, or Media" is further proof that you simply see Israel as an illegitimate state with no right to maintain its existence. Guess what? If those various non-states had been forcibly removed from a land where they had constructed buildings and created literature, and if they had a continuous history of shared identity, and if they sought to maintain a liberal democracy while being beset on all sides by authoritarian enemies, then yes, I would support them and say they had a right to be taken seriously.
*It's funny how you're so ready to dismiss the history of ancient Israel while according the region's Arab inhabitants the widest possible benefit of the doubt. The reign of Antiochus III was LONG after "the beginning of recorded history," and by that time the Jews had been living in the Levant for centuries. (FYI, some Jews remained during the Captivity, and many more returned in the years following.) So the fact that Arab troops fought for the Greeks is not a very impressive argument for the Palestinians' historic claims on the land they occupy.
*I call the Arab/Muslim conquests the most successful colonial effort in history b/c, in contrast to European colonization, the lands they conquered remain conquered. They also "intermarried" (that's a nice way of putting it) with the populace much more than the Europeans, and thus transformed the literal DNA of the countries they invaded. Morocco, for instance, was not Arab to begin with, but it is now and will be for the foreseeable future. It also wholeheartedly follows the religion brought to it by the Arabs. Where in the world is there a wide swath of former European colonies composed primarily of European descendants who *ardently* follow Christianity to the point of being willing to wage war against the enemies of their religion?
*As for the Mongol example, the reason why they didn't leave any lasting impact was that they didn't have any ideology they were pushing. The spread of Islam took place in an incredibly short period of time, engulfing a huge portion of the known world, and it was driven by the need to spread their religion in accordance with the edicts of the Quran. People could either convert willingly, or they could die. It's true that in some areas (Spain in particular), they still allowed non-believers to maintain a separate existence, but in accordance with Islamic law, those people were second-class citizens. I'm not suggesting the Franks were any good either, and I'm quite aware of the intellectual achievements of medieval Islam. But it was a religion founded by a warrior, and they followed him in a blaze of conquests far more rapid than anything seen since Alexander's shortlived empire.
*About the differences between ancient Judaism and the modern version, are you saying they're not the same religion? Yes, there have been a lot of adjustments and liberalization since the days of Moses, and somehow that's a bad thing?
*The business about modern Hebrew being "invented" took me aback at first and I didn't even know how to respond b/c that sounded so absurd. In fact that characterization is at best victim-blaming, and at worst something much more sinister. Hebrew has far more historical basis as a language than Palestine does as a polity of any kind.
From your past behavior, I'm guessing you'll whip through those points and race back at me with a whole bunch of accusations that I'm a liar or just plain stupid, to which I say, "Please give it a rest." Please try to be a nicer person and not such a combative blowhard. From what I can tell, most BARPod listeners are very open-minded people who don't take kindly to being screamed at, so maybe you'd be happier in one of the many places on the Net that caters to people like you.
I do indeed hate pathological liars and propagandists, of which you are both, so... guilty as charged I guess? Though I have to say, smearing your opponents by accusing them of "anti-semitic propaganda" (a ludicrous assertion; almost none of what I've posted here is even discussed in current-day debates over Israel/Palestine, and I'd love to see you try to prove otherwise) seems pretty hateful to me.
1. As a casual perusal of Wikipedia will make clear, there's a source conflict on the issue of the Roman renaming of Palestine. What there is no conflict at all over is that the term long predates the Roman usage of it.
2. There is very poor evidence that there was ever a "united kingdom of Israel" or, if it existed at all, when it was formed. The actual kingdom of Israel that can be proven to exist from Assyrian records was an almost completely insignificant splinter state whose relevance to modern life is nonexistent.
3. All three of Bactria, Kush and Media were forcibly removed from lands where they had constructed buildings and created literature. That's called "history." Almost all of the states that have ever existed no longer exist.
4. Israel is not a liberal democracy; it's a Jewish supremacist state by its own legislation, and not a democracy at all since a huge percentage of the population it forcibly controls is disenfranchised and stripped of rights.
5. I am well aware that Antiochus III ruled long after the beginning of recorded history. I offered the presence of masses of local Arab levies in his army as merely an especially convenient and well-attested refutation of your absurd lie that Arabs didn't live in Palestine until the Islamic conquests.
6. Again, the idea that Arab colonization of the Middle East was somehow more comprehensive than European settlement of America or Australia is self-refutingly dumb.
7. Arabs absolutely did not require conquered "people of the book" to convert-- anywhere. There have been continual Christian patriarchs in Alexandria and Jerusalem since the Byzantines controlled them (and there's still a patriarchate of Antioch as well, although it has been moved to Damascus due to Antioch itself being abandoned).
8. The Mongols absolutely left a "lasting impact" in the form of the piles of hundreds of thousands of corpses outside Samarkand, Baghdad, Damascus, etc etc etc. Those "intellectual achievements of medieval Islam" were crippled in the process. Then a few generations later Timur (a Muslim!) swept through and did the same thing a second time. Not exactly great for the old intellectual ferment to have all of your scholars slaughtered every hundred years or so. The damage those invasions did to the Mideast was incalculable; one can argue it has still never recovered.
So look at this from my perspective. We have someone who has come onto a thread that he claims to be disinterested in, yet immediately proceeds to spout off lie after lie in the apparent belief that no one will have the historical knowledge to refute them. When called on it by someone who actually does have that knowledge, he immediately retreats into assertions that he really doesn't care, do u? After considerable prodding, he returns with... yet another broadsheet of very easily disprovable lies. What precisely, pray tell, is the appropriate response to this? Politely asking him to please stop? No, thanks. What I want is to make your presence here extremely unpleasant so that you go away. That's how to deal with liars, and it's how I aim to deal with you going forward.
I'll give it a shot: I took Jesse to mean that there's nothing inherently wrong in having criticisms of various Israeli policies.
But we've turned it into a zero sum game. One is antisemitic if one has any harsh criticisms of Israeli policy.
I have harsh criticisms of my own government's policies here and there. Doesn't make me inherently anti American.
That being said, the term Zionist has turned into somewhat of an epithet so I don't necessarily blame Jews who interpret "anti-zionist" inherently negatively.
Yeah, I don't think someone who criticizes the Israeli government is necessarily an "anti-Zionist." There's plenty to criticize in even the most humane government. Unfortunately, actual anti-Zionism is typically predicated on the idea that it's wrong for Israelis to have a state of their own. Nor do those people who most vociferously criticize the Israeli government have anything much to say about Arab regimes that have far less regard for human life. But your point is well-made about the zero-sum game, an unfortunate by-product of the hatred and anger that this topic seems to always elicit.
I largely agree with you. But!
"the idea that it's wrong for Israelis to have a state of their own."
I don't know that it's that simple though. If the house you claim as your own is the house me and my family have been living in for centuries, I'd probably have some feelings about that. Some strong ones even. They might even come across like I don't care if you have your own house or not.
It's...complicated.
For the record, I feel for both Jews and palestinians and mostly blame the brits.
How many years or generations does it take for a land to be тАЬyoursтАЭ?
There are Jews in Israel who are living in the farms their grandfathers tilled. So we would take someone out of their third generation home and move in people who have never lived there but their people did three generations ago? And if we decide itтАЩs ok to do that, at what point to we freeze time to the perfect moment where people were only settling in their ancient ancestral homeland? Was that ever something that existed? The Christians has much of those lands before the Muslims took it by force. The Christians took it from the Jews. So clearly itтАЩs ok to go back 100 years, but not 600.
It all gets really confusing.
I'm not saying it's "theirs." I said it's complicated, meaning I agree with you that it gets confusing.
I don't know what the solution is, other than for both sides to stay at the table until they figure out how to live together. Not that I think that's going to happen any time soon.
"How many years or generations does it take for a land to be тАЬyoursтАЭ?"
Good question. Goes both ways. Israel was destroyed as a country nearly 2000 years before the USA recreated it by fiat in 1948.
тАШThe USA created it by fiatтАЩ Wow, thatтАЩs a new one. ItтАЩs normally the Brits that get blamed.
You're right it was more the Brits but the USA was INSTRUMENTAL as the USA was the first (and most powerful nation) to officially recognize Israel in a diplomatic capacity. They Brits legislated Israel into existence while the USA (as global hegemon at the time) legitimized it on the world stage. The USA then provided Israel with all the money and weapons they would need to gain a immovable foothold in the region.
Israeli was recognized by the United Nations in 1948. The US had very little to do with the founding of the State of Israel, and the Soviets officially recognized it before the United States, nor was the US its largest or only benefactor. There was debate within the State Department about the process-George Marshall opposed it. The 1917 Balfour Declaration clearly outlined that His MajestyтАЩs government looked favorably upon the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine, but the growth of the Jewish population in the region began in the 19th century, with emigration of Jews from Europe to the region, which added to a long-extant Jewish (and Christian and Muslim) population in the region. The British administered it as a League of Nations mandate, gaining the territory and much of former Ottoman territory in the region after the war. The Ottomans won the territory from the Byzantines, and before that it was Roman. After the First World War, the British hoped to dominate the Middle East, for oil, communication, and to protect access to and control British Raj.
The Russian Empire, from where many of these immigrants came, had the largest Jewish population in the world, and was not exactly the nicest place for Jews. Many of the most enduring Anti-Semitic myths were developed in Russia, most notable the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a forgery of the Ohkrana, the Tsarist Secret Police. The British allowed and facilitated immigration, but it was never a major British policy or focus. Interestingly, during the Second World War, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem developed a relation with the 3rd Reich, which introduced a lot of European antisemitic thought (the Protocols).
The recognition of the country was recognizing a fait accompli, with the State of Israeli being a reality on the ground in 1948. Israeli did receive a ton of aids and arms - there were quite large stockpiles of weapons from demobilized German troops at hand. Israeli was then promptly attacked by a coalition of Arab states, and one.
Lastly, the United States could not be called a hegemon in 1948. A hegemon implies there are no equals in the international system. What existed in 1948 was a bipolar world of roughly equal blocs- thatтАЩs what makes a Cold War. It was not until the collapse of the USSR that one could accurately use that term.
There is no right to nationhood anywhere in the world and there certainly isn't a right to invade a country and ethnically cleanse it of the people who currently live there.
If Israel is trying to тАЬethnically cleanseтАЭ the Levant of Palestinians, theyтАЩre doing a terrible job of it, considering that the Palestinian population has continuously shot up since the Nakba.
I guess the Holocaust never happened then according to your logic bc there's more Jews today than in 1945. Here you should educate yourself about what Genocide is:
Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:
A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and (ISRAEL GUILTY)
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
Killing members of the group (ISRAEL GUILTY)
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (ISRAEL GUILTY)
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (ISRAEL GUILTY)
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (ISRAEL GUILTY)
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group ( (ISRAEL NOT GUILTY)
As you can see Israel has already committed all the necessary acts required to be found guilty of Genocide under the Geneva Convention.
Do you deny that? Yes or no?
You'll never answer because we both know they are guilty. The difference is that you agree with the Genocide and I don't.
The funny (not funny) thing about anti-anti-Hamas bots like this jackass is that they're only concerned about human rights when they can claim Israel is violating them. Zero criticism of Hamas or any other terrorist groups, or of any of the many Arab nations who are killing their own people, or indeed of any other situation in the world. Only Israel. Funny how this one group of people attracts all the criticism.
Funny how you excuse such acts when it's Israel but regularly condemn concentration camp inmates for behaving like animals. I'm sure you would just lay down and die like a good concentration camp inmates but many Palestinians refuse to disappear and die so Israelis can take that land in uncontested
I don't condemn victims of genocide for resisting their own genocide.
Concentration camps don't have beaches or restaurants. Concentration camp inmates aren't allowed out of their camp for any reason, including to go work at a kibbutz. Concentratiop camps don't have huge stockpiles of armaments to fire on their enemies. Concentration camps don't get billions and billions of dollars to use for building tunnels are weapon systems.
The disgusting level of gaslighting you are engaging in right now is incredible. Honestly I assume you're a paid troll based on your wild propaganda statements and your refusal to engage in any factual discussion.
"Concentration camps don't have beaches or restaurants."
Can you please show me a link to the definition of Concentration Camp where it says "Anywhere that has restaurants or sandy areas near water cannot be considered a Concentration camp."
A beach is literally just a sandy area alighting a body of water. Of course Gaza has beaches...it has 25 miles of water coastline. The beach is guarded 24/7 by the Israeli Navy and it serves as a natural fence for the Concentration Camp. It's cheaper than building enormous fences like they did around the other 3 sides of gaza with heavily armed guards all over and 24/7 video surveillance.
"Concentration camp inmates aren't allowed out of their camp for any reason, including to go work at a kibbutz."
The Nazis started using forced labour shortly after their rise to power. They established specific Arbeitslager (labour camps) which housed Ostarbeiter (eastern workers), Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers) and other forced labourers who were forcibly rounded up and brought in from the east. These were separate from the SS-run concentration camps, where prisoners were also forced to perform labour.
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/types-of-camps/
"Concentration camps don't have huge stockpiles of armaments to fire on their enemies."
The uprising began around 4:00 in the afternoon of October 14, 1943. In Camp One, prisoners invited the deputy commandant, Johann Niemann, into the tailor shop to be fitted for a suit. They then killed him with an axe. In Camp Two, prisoners lured SS NCO Josef Wulf to try on a coat in the warehouse of victims' belongings, and also killed him with an axe. In the course of the next hour or so, nine more SS personnel were killed in a similar manner.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/sobibor-uprising
Honestly there is no reason to engage with a person like you who is clearly some kind of ignorant troll or teenager. The Sobibor camp had a Tailor Shop. Does that negate it as a Concentration Camp? Or is it just restaurants and beaches?
These assertions all prove the points made above. The example of the Sobibor uprising would be appropriate if the Germans had been bending over backward to help the inmates, including by letting them *leave the camp* and work *for pay* on farms, sometimes even staying overnight in people's homes, instead of doing forced labor at a Siemens factory in the camp. Also, the inmates at Sobibor hadn't been building up weapons and planning the attack with the help of wealthy, powerful outside forces, and when the attack occurred, the world didn't mobilize to march in the streets and condemn the Germans.
"Concentration camp," like virtually all nouns, is defined in terms of what it IS, not in terms of what it IS NOT, but any reasonable person could assume that it doesn't include the many amenities that exist or at least have existed in Gaza. They even had a water park, something that certainly would have looked out of place at Treblinka. So why did the Crazy Water Park in Gaza City close down a few months after opening in 2010? Was it those awful Israelis? Nope, Hamas closed it down b/c they didn't like men and women swimming together.
And of course Hamas could do that, because they have *controlled Gaza since 2005*. So if Gaza is a concentration camp, it's not the fault of the Israeli forces patrolling off-shore to make sure the terrorists don't launch an attack from the beach. It's the fault of the people who voted in this "government"--a regime that says its only responsibility is to its own fighters and not to the civilians of Gaza.
But the Neanderthals!