The Little Dickie Silverstein Marching Song

I am a little kapo,
It makes my mommy mad,
Cause when I am a kapo,
Those Zionists get sad!

I celebrate the jihad,
and terror all the while,
I fill my blog and web page,
With loud salutes of Sieg Heil!

I want to see them Zraelis,
All dumped out in the sea,
My swastika a waving,
Cause everything’s bout me.

So if the non-Jewish locals were still Baal worshipers you’d feel differently?

If you’re a fundamentalist bible-believer, sure. Otherwise you have to face the fact that the creation of Israel was a colonization by foreigners.

Meaning Palestinians in 1948 had no rights?

Have fun applying this logic to the former Yugoslavia and see if you don’t end up agreeing that Radovan Karadzic had a point. After, all Serbs predated Muslims in Europe too – fun fact!

Alternatively, people have rights regardless of the age of their culture.

We give money to plenty of Arab countries too, either through aid or by buying their oil.

We’re not talking about “Arab countries”, we’re talking about one of them, the Palestinians (hint – they don’t all look the same). And we’re not buying their oil.

Of course, other Arabs do indeed love the way we give money and weapons to the regimes that oppress them, so it all evens out really.

And we have given a lot of money to Iraq, so they can have the pleasure of being kicked in the face by our boots.

More Jews were kicked out of the surrounding arab states during the late 60’s than Arabs fled Israel during the same period.

In terms of violence, these two events were not actually the same. And Palestinians are not mere “Arabs” who can be simply be moved to one interchangable “Arab” country anymore than you can shove the Spanish in France and say “Enjoy your new home, guys, and stop bitching already – assimilate you bastards, you’re all the same!”

Arabs fled Israel – nice use of the passive voice. Were forcibly expelled by the Haganah is another, and more accurate, way of putting it.

For every argument there is a counter argument. Hence, both sides are stupid. Thinking otherwise is being biased, for either direction.

Sometimes, but not always. Even after every shitty thing the Palestinians have ever done has been added up and noted, the body count and physical suffering of this conflict is very, very heavily weighted in one direction. The stuff that happened before does actually matter – because the consequences are being felt in the present by real people, real men, women and children.

The Palestinians have the World’s Worst National Liberation Movement TM (borrowed from Daniel Davies). But the denial of Palestinian self-determination is the beginning and end of this conflict and walking away from that leaves us back in the same bloody place.

Sure, but one side took the other side’s stuff and keeps taking, and we all support the takers with tax money for some stupid reason.

Bull fucking shit. I’m not making the argument about who was here first or whatever, but if you want, then you lose, seeing as how the Jews predate the Muslims by a few thousand years. We give money to plenty of Arab countries too, either through aid or by buying their oil.

More Jews were kicked out of the surrounding arab states during the late 60′s than Arabs fled Israel during the same period. Rather thanputting them in camps and bitching about it for 30 years, Israel happily assimilated them. Dozens of Arab countries could do the same for the displaced Palestians but don’t.

Again, I’m not arguing one side is right and the other is wrong. For every argument there is a counter argument. Hence, both sides are stupid. Thinking otherwise is being biased, for either direction.

I think it’s important that this comment be injected into this thread also: http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/15773.html#comment-762059.

Look. “I’ll stop hitting you when you stop trying to make me stop hitting you” is the most disingenuous negotiating stance, and such a basic hard-wired human structure that in many cases we don’t even notice the structural unreasonableness built into the construct. “You can have your freedom when you stop fighting for your freedom” is just reducto stupido.

“We’ll negotiate your right to develop nuclear energy only when you agree you have no right to develop nuclear energy”. “We’ll stop assassinating your leaders when you start elevating leaders we approve of”. “We’ll withdraw our occupation forces only once you accept them on your soil”. It’s past time for people to recognize and identify this as nothing more than the taunts of a bully. You can only stake out a ludicrous position like this when you have the power to ignore demands for honesty and fair play.

And it is precisely under those circumstances of imbalance that a great power acts with the most compassion and restraint. Alas, in this foul year of our lord 2009, there are few, if any, great powers…

mikey

Schooled.

The West Bank has a border to the east. How come Jordan and Egypt don’t step in and do something to help.

The Palestinians are a propaganda tool for governments in the region who get to say “Hey! Look over there!” when another big pile of money goes missing.

THEY’RE BOTH STUPID.

Sure, but one side took the other side’s stuff and keeps taking, and we all support the takers with tax money for some stupid reason.

I find it really frustrating of how so many on the left seem to talk as if the problem lies solely with the Israelis. Yeah, they’ve done terrible shit, but there is way too much blame to go around to only decry them. You’re decrying tribalism, then blaming everything on Israel and that seems a bit hypocritical. Gaza has a border to the south that’s just as closed. The West Bank has a border to the east. How come Jordan and Egypt don’t step in and do something to help.

EVERYONE is screwing the Palestinians.

Maybe it’s not how you intend it, but it really doesn’t seem that you don’t recognize that the problem isn’t just twofold. Yes, Israel is basically fucking over the fucked. I hate them for their bulldozers and their walls and their bombs. That doesn’t change the fact that from day one, long before Gaza and the West Bank were taken over, there was a shitload of antisemitism in the region. If you’ll recall, the refugee crisis started when over a dozen countries declared war on Israel. The Arabs in the camps right now fled Israel at the call of the invading countries, who wanted them out of the way so they could more easily “push the Jews to the sea.”

I think the only real reason to put the onus of peace keeping on the Israelis is because they’re the ones with the economic and political stability to actually try and improve things. Still, the only way that I can see that this problem is ever going to be solved is if Israel puts a shitload of money and energy into developing a functioning economy in Palestine. If they weren’t in abject poverty,maybe the Palestinian’s would stop hating them. Sounds like a good idea; but how do you get a country that’s been getting randomly shot at with rockets to start throwing a shitload of money at the people who voted the rocket launchers into power?!?!?!

Too many people just seem to want to call everyone a racist. Tell me, why is Israeli racism so much worse than Arab racism? How come no long as screeds about the fact that Arabs fucking HATE Jews and have done so since long before they were “the oppressed.” You yourself note that they used to get attacked by armies but now only by terrorists. Isn’t that because they didn’t used to be the powerful ones and yet somehow they still had problems?

I mean, why is it that Arab violence is just in response to Israeli violence and so doesn’t get you riled up, but Israeli violence in response to Arab violence is OMG HOW STUPID CAN THE ISRAELIS BE?!?!?!

THEY’RE BOTH STUPID.

There’s so much wrong with Israel’s actions here, on so many levels. Others in this thread have mentioned the moral or demographic problems with Israel’s kill-’em-all policy. Here is criticism from another angle, from the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld (hardly a peacenik), who believes that the war is unwinnable. From 2002, but just as applicable today IMHO.

Bonus excellence from van Ceveld, why Iraq will end as Vietnam did.

Robert: No, I haven’t, but I’ll look for the book, and if I pick it up, will read it.

As for what I’ve read about Israel-Palestine… well, I approach it as I approach another conflict about which I have some stake through my own identity (the American Civil War): I try to avoid reading about it. But wingnuts (and those supertribalist, reflexively pro-Israel, American “liberal” Jews who should know better: e.g., the absolutely horrible Alan Dershowitz) won’t let me. So, somewhat paradoxically, I read more of the conflict through that prism than through any other source. I have read, however, some leftist stuff online, mostly Cockburn, Richard Silverstein, Finkelstein, Weiss. As for books, eh… I’ve had Chomsky’s book on the conflict for many years, the one in which he conclusively and forever destroyed Joan Peters (that much I’ve read in excerpts and reviews), but I haven’t had the heart to read it whole.

Hitchens, back when he was a human being and writing in Izzy’s old space in the Nation, used to occasionally post some small but dense and excellent work on the conflict — the quote of the 80′s Israeli spokesman on nukes come from my memory of one of those pieces.

As for my point on tribalism, it’s something I’ve always instinctively known independently, at least since I was a freshman in the early nineties and was (of course) horrified by the college republicans, but also by the silly tribalism of the many idiots in the PC “left.” OTOH, Hitchens did crystalize the maxim “tribalism only inspires more tribalism” in his overview of the Vidal-Podhoretz feud, which was not only spot on in the specific (about which I know a great deal) but in general. Many flamewars with a certain Podhoretz clone in my early net days only reinforced the truth of the matter. There’s more, but I’ve already gone on too long, and I bet you’re sorry you asked by now hah.