Ibrahim wrote:TurkishJew wrote:Ibrahim wrote:TurkishJew wrote:Ibrahim wrote:TurkishJew wrote:Of course, even Assad's dictatorship in Syria was helpful for Israel since the Syrian government was secular.
1. Assad was helping arm Hezbollah. How many weapons shipped through Syria killed IDF soldiers in the last Israeli invasion of Lebanon? With friends like that.
2. Assumes than any insufficiently secular regime is bad for Israel, and vice versa. Saddam Hussein's regime was good for Israel?
There was certainly opportunism and manipulation during the immigration of Mizrahi Jews, but the way the Arab world united in 1949 against the UN Partition Plan was rather very strong. And after the creation of Israel, you cannot say that most of the wave of antisemitism was just Zionist manipulation. Many Mizrahi Jews went to France and England, as well as other countries, not just Israel. After the creation of Israel life became very difficult for the Jews who live in Arab countries.
You keep saying this over and over and nobody is even arguing against it. What of it? Israel was created and the Jews had a "Jewish state" where not only could they be free and safe, but lord over other groups who lived there. If all you are trying to say is that Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian Arabs were both wronged, then sure that's accurate. Except that those displaced Jews can now live in Tel Aviv, and those displaced Palestinians can live in Gaza. But of a difference, don't you think?
Ironically, both Assad (father and son) as well as Saddam Hussein are preferable to Israel instead of a more religious extremist takeover of Iraq and Syria. Under Assad family's rule, even the Syrian help for Hezbollah was always in moderation. Even a nuclear-armed Saddam and/or Assad would have been perceived as less dangerous by Israel compared to a fanatical system similar to Al Qaeda coming to power in those countries.
This statement makes no sense. "Al Qaeda" is a blanket term for terrorist organizations, not a system of government that has operated anywhere, ever. To say that contemporary Iraq poses more of a thread to Israel than Iraq under Saddam is nonsensical. To say that Assad, who as a matter of known fact supplied Hezbollah with weapons that killed Israelis, is better for Israel than any hypothetical regime that his overthrow might produce, is nonsensical.
After all, during the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States always knew how to negotiate and both sides feared escalating the tension beyond a certain limit.
The only country in the Middle East with a nuclear arsenal, and which is currently threatening another state, is Israel (directed towards Iran).
As for the suffering of the Palestinians, it was not, and should not be the aim of Israel to rule the lives of the Palestinians in West Bank, Gaza, etc, but the main point is to encircle both Gaza and West Bank to prevent the Palestinians from arming themselves.
Surprising admission that Gaza and the West Bank are de-facto concentration camps which the Israelis seek to keep powerless and isolated on principle. Doubling down on this failed policy is unlikely to produce better results over the long term.
To be exact, the reason there are 1.5 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens is because the Israelis were actually not as aggressive as many other nations, they could have deported those Palestinians who did not promise that they support Israel and the Jews
"We're not the worst! We're not the worst!"
Instead of using the meaningless word "Al Qaeda", I should have said "religious extremism", as being more dangerous for Israel than secular dictators who are logical in planning their own survival.
(1) The only extremist regime in the region is Iran, and they seem quite shrewd about planning for their own survival. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that such regimes are any worse for Israel than dictators, indeed Iran and Assad have supported Hezbollah in equal measure.
Moreover, your computation disregards the condition of the population in these countries. This is not exactly surprising, but nor is it inspiring.
Gaza being a "de facto concentration camp" is your terminology, but Palestinians are not the only people under siege, Israel, is ideologically under siege
(2) This is a laughable claim when Gaza is blockaded by Israel, and such dangerous terror weapons as wheat and medicine are not allowed in. To claim that Israel is under siege when it is Israeli soldiers controlling all the checkpoints, Israeli ships blockading the ports, and Israeli soldiers killing far more Palestinians than Palestinians do Israelis, is frankly dishonest.
We're back to Shamir's "put[ting] the fear of death into the Arabs," except it isn't working.
Indeed, we the Israelis are less bad, and this is a virtue in the Middle East.
Which other country in the region maintains massive concentration camps for the displaced populations it stole lands and homes from?
In any case, the possibility of a two-state solution still exists because there is enough room for both populations to reside there.
(3) You'd better hope so, and agitate for it among your Israeli friends. The obvious solution is a two-state solution, but if the Settlers and Kahanists and Likudniks get their way and make it impossible then I don't think there is much of a future for Israel in the long run.
Maybe you don't realize but in ancient times, the Jewish Jihadis fought the Roman Empire with a lot more determination than the Muslim Jihadis
(4) They fought Rome for a while and then killed themselves as Masada. Currently, Israelis suckle on the American tit while Muslim fighters
and civilians are killed by the US military, and yet continue to fight them across several countries, while fighting Arab dictators and resisting Israeli occupation at the same time.
[Red colored numbers are added by TurkishJew]
1) For the moment, on the surface, the only current extremist regime appears to be Iran, but I would argue that ( without the racism of AzeriLoveIran about the superiority of Iranian culture over Arab culture), the Iranians are more sophisticated than Egypt in their calculations and I would feel more comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran more than the more volatile irrationality of a nuclear-armed Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. And the Muslim Brotherhood is close to becoming more extremist, the official peace agreement with Israel is just on paper, and if Egypt gets the capability to hurt Israel without getting hurt in the future, it will do so.
(2) Who says that wheat and medicine are not allowed into Gaza? In any case, even if Hamas currently does not have enough hardware to wipe out Israel, the many Grad missiles were more than enough to close down nearly half of Israel's economy until the Israelis used massive force in the Gaza War to stop the missiles. I was in Beersheba during the Gaza War, and this industrial city (to be exact a redneck town, but I like it since it has Ottoman architecture) was a ghost town during the Hamas rocket salvos. Nearly 50 % of the people left, and I was the only one walking in the street when alarms were sounding to warn us that new Hamas rockets were fired. It is true that very few Israelis died but this was because so far the Hamas missiles are not big enough, and everybody was taking cover and all businesses and schools, the university, were closed. Closing down the Israeli economy would bring down Israel. Only the massive Israeli use of force convinced Hamas to accept a temporary truce. The "ideological siege" is the word of Hamas and most Palestinians that they will never recognize Israel in any form, and that any peace treaty is just a temporary cease fire to regroup.
(3) I am not the only supporter of Israel who wants to cut a deal, but YOU are not helping much: none of my efforts will be helpful if you don't convince Hamas and the majority of the Palestinians to accept that Israel has the right to exist in some small boundaries. As long as they insist that they will never recognize Israel, this means that they will just wait for the occasion to attack again with more power whenever they can. Thus peace is a two-way street, and so far Erdogan has not asked Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist, even though Erdogan regularly meets them. Seriously, this can get Erdogan the Nobel Peace Prize.
(4) This is the most tragic misunderstanding. In fact, I can tolerate anything but I have zero tolerance for plagiarism. So you still deny that Islam learned Jihad from the Jews. Let me emphasize that the Masada suicide of the few hundred Jewish zealots was just the leftover people who chose not to be captured alive. There were three large Jewish revolts against Romans, and the grand total of Jewish casualties is between 750,000 and 1,500,000, even though they only managed to kill about 100,000 Roman soldiers. Thus the Jews sacrificed as many as 15 of their own people just to kill 1 Roman soldier. I will prepare a different thread about the 3 Jewish revolts later, because it seems that you are confusing the Spanish Jews of the Ottoman Empire with the ultra-Orthodox super-serious groups
elsewhere. (The Spanish Jews are liked because we are very mellow, in the Ottoman Empire there were even some Synagogues that were simultaneously used as Mosques shared with Muslims in some Anatolian villages, and one of the rabbis in Turkey said to me that all religions are equal. But this is not true elsewhere, and we are an endangered species.)
Here is a cursory discussion of the 3 Jewish revolts against Rome:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish%E2%80%93Roman_wars
EXCERPT:
Great revolt: 250 thousand[3] – 1,1 million (per Josephus) Jews massacred; enslavement of 97,000;
Kitos War: annihilation of Jewish communities in Cyprus, Cyrenaica and Alexandria;
Bar Kokhba revolt: 400,000[3] – 580,000 (per Dio) civilians and militia massacred,
985 Judean villages razed (per Cassius Dio).
Note that especially after the Bar Kochba revolt (third revolt), the Romans resorted to killing 400,000 - 580,000 Jews (mostly civilians).
But it must be noted that Jews were VERY militaristic in their Jihad, as the Roman Empire was shocked to see that they lost 100,000 soldiers, which was a big deal at the time. 2,000 years ago the world population was only 250 million, and the Jewish casualties were absolutely massive demographically. The reason the Romans were so adamant about crushing the Jewish revolt was that there were other Jewish communities outside Palestine that were also revolting, and this is why Romans wanted to make sure that other nations don't become encouraged to revolt also.
Thus it seems that you don't understand how determined the ultra-religious Jews are, they fear death a lot less than the Islamic extremists. Thus it is not a good idea to imagine that Jews will just be spineless without America.