I often point out that no one is offering to put the screws on Turkey re: the kurds.
Probably because if we use the "we wuz'ere furst"-arguement (aka Blud und Boden as it was originally known, no two guesses as to the Woke won't use that phrase) the kurds would have the "right" to almost all of eastern Turkey and surrounding areas. They predate both persians and greeks, for starters.
What's that to do with Israel and Palestine? W-e-l-l... that whole bit about who's on first? It just got complicated - why should it only apply to jews and arabs? Any genetic descendents of the picts around to challenge scottish colonialist oppression, hm? What about alla them thar gaylick peoples then?
Oh we can have fun with this - howsabout demanding Doggerland be restored? The Danelaw?
But the ding-ding-ding-winner-winner-chicken-dinner moment comes when the Wokeist realises, not a single arab, jew, african of any tribe, asian, or "native american" have a slivver of a right to ever set foot much less dwell in Europe, so all them thar "refugees" they cherish?
This Matthew Goodwin post today https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-people-think-about-the-war has some truly chilling polling statistics showing (amongst other things) that more young people sympathise with genocidal barbarism than with Israelis trying to keep existing (at least amongst those who answer polling questions). The comprehensive ignorance of these people about history can of course be guessed at and this despite, no doubt, large helpings of 'higher education' (or should that "despite" read "resulting from"?).
A few of us have been warning for decades now about the deluge that must inevitably follow from allowing an up-itself intelligentsia to entirey 'colonise' our Western academy (and at tax-payers expense to add to the foolishness of it).
I do believe the dam has broken, And.... as you have sown Western Liberalism so shall you reap.
I struggled some with weight gain through my life, until I started having my last meal of the day between 4pm and 6pm, and going to bed at 8:30. I started sleeping much better. Wish I had discovered it before I was 55! I also believe in the idea that if you want cake or cookies or muffins, make them yourself. Today I am making oatmeal cookies, and I am truly excited to do so. Good luck.
I have a brother that ate himself into full disability and is now in a nursing home. He weighed in at 400 lbs. Before he was declared disabled he fell constantly and emergency services had to be called to pick him up. Please take care of yourself.
Sykes and Picot and the UN have a lot to answer for. In 1948, I think, Hannah Arendt argued strongly against the creation of the State of Israel, and I think with good reason. Creating a Jewish homeland (look at the first map - how was this ever going to work?) was not a good way of compensating for our collective guilt in not accepting Jewish refugees pre-1939
And I don’t understand why you put “indigenous” in quotes - whatever we call them, there were definitely non-Jewish people living in the Holy Land until 1948.
The indigenous quote marks are because I don't think of the Arabs as "indigenous" to the region - and also a swipe at the whole notion of indigenous.
The first proposals for a two-state solution, internationally agreed upon by The League of Nations, predate the second world war. Maybe the guilt factor amplified the urgency after WWII, but there was an international awareness that the Jews needed a homeland well before the horrific Nazi culmination of centuries of Jewish persecution.
I understand the need (and sort of agree with you about “indigenous” - I was once asked by a bunch of N American therapists to say where I lived and what tribe owned it - but stumped really, cos I was on Naxos at the time, so I said Greeks, but for some reason they weren’t happy with that). The problem is it seems to me that the solution they came up with was inherently wrong, and we’ve been dealing with the consequences ever since.
"but few in the “west” suffer from anything like real oppression"
Arguably most of us do, the jab being pushed onto the majority of the populations of the "West". In addition the % of people on the poverty line is not a small one in any Western nation. Add to that the cost of housing in the same which reduces ability to prosper and have families then the oppression is quite significant.
And maybe your stack needs a bit of real politik in regards to Israel & Palestine. Gaza is more or less a city state of 3 m & the third most densely populated place in the world. Cities traditionally need a hinterland to sustain them a place to draw resources from. Where is Gaza's? Right it doesn't have one which means that economically it relies on the State next door, Israel. Israel undoubtedly sees that as a noose around its neck. But Israel's hinterland is not exactly large itself there being maybe 10m living in a place that 120 years ago, for reasons, only had 500 thousand living there. Back in the 14th C the Kingdom of Jerusalem which was markedly similar to the current State of Israel failed largely due to the unwillingness of Europe to continue to support it.
Also as far as woke goes, how can they support a country (two countries?) that rely on food imports so much. Those imports have heavy CO2 emissions encased in them (I'm merely pointing out woke views here).
Also reports of significant gas fields off the Gazan & Israeli coasts. Is either side going to share these resources?
And getting back to your claim that nobody in the West should claim that they're hard done by well poverty in Israel is also highest in OECD at about 18% and most of those people have a more individual type of food insecurity. I'd call that oppression.
Yes - my footnote was a (partial) recognition of the possibility of viewing the various covid responses as oppressive in nature.
I'm not going to deny that the Palestinians in Gaza have it bad. My issue is with the framing of all of this as being the "fault" of Israel in its entirety. This is not really fair. I don't think the Palestinians in other areas of Israel have it anything like as bad - and therefore we have to understand this as being more than just an Israel vs Palestine issue. There are other factors at play here. In particular, perhaps we need to widen our scope of what is meant by a "Palestinian" - and to appreciate that Hamas and Gaza might be a special case (which does not wholly exonerate Israel from their tough and probably excessive counter-measures, either).
The population density of Gaza is very similar to that of Greater London. I know that wiki describes Gaza as the 3rd most densely populated region on Earth, but I tend to take issue with that - one can always manipulate definitions of areas and regions to get the answer that suits one's politics better.
It's an unholy mess. And it's not entirely Israel's fault. They're surrounded by enemies who, for many years, just wanted to wind the clock back and wipe Israel off the face of the map - and Jews off the face of the planet. They also have a significant number of people *within* their borders who desire this. What are they to do? We can argue that their responses to the various aggressions they've suffered over the years have been excessive - and that's a view I'd sympathise with, particularly with their treatment of Gaza over the last couple of decades - but how does one actually deal and reason with people who want nothing more than your destruction? I don't know the answer to that. I honestly can't pick out the "right" and "wrong" here. Israel is in an almost permanent state of having to make a "Hobson's Choice". It seems to me that almost all of Israel's choices are "bad" - and figuring out which one is least bad can't be easy.
I think poverty, or *relative* poverty, is on the increase in the west - and the increasing cost of housing is a major concern - and this is worrying. I tend to push back a bit on western notions of "poverty" because if you visit some places in the world, you kind of realise that "poverty" means very different things depending where you are. I've spent time with various families who live in what I can only describe as breath-taking poverty in relation to even "poor" people in the west, for example. Until I had travelled and lived (for a short time) with such people I had no idea what true, grinding, poverty actually was.
"perhaps we need to widen our scope of what is meant by a "Palestinian""
I get a bit tired of this one "Palestinian" as if it's an invented nationality. The ME devolved from Ottoman control 100 years ago and the result was a bunch of nation states often given borders by Britain. Add in 1948 and you have Palestine without the need for quote marks. And in reality all nationalities are inventions Israel no different than any other.
I also know what true grinding poverty is like, I had a recent experience of it and I grew up under it. There is nothing relative about poverty, it is just poverty. Those in the West who have not experienced poverty seem all too keen to push their experiences on to the rest of us. Universities are full of such (I am happy to pass on details).
The Jews were the only people to have claimed that area as a separate country. This does not, of course, mean that the right of the Arabs living there to have their own state should be dismissed. It wasn't dismissed - and the first internationally accepted "solution" by the League of Nations around 1920 would have seen the Jews living there being given 20% of the land and the Arabs 80%. This plan, which did not intend to displace or dispossess anybody, was accepted by the Jews living in the region, but not by the Arabs living in the region.
Under this plan nobody was going to be "kicked out" - it was about which 'group' of people living there got to decide the rules and sovereignty of a particular region. The Jews had mostly settled (and bought land) around the west coast and the Arabs were concentrated more in the east. The initial 20/80 plan was intended to recognize this.
Palestinian is an invented nationality. There was no sense of a separate country called Palestine, in the sense that the UK or the US, for example can be described as a country. There was no country called Jordan, either - for example.
But the quote marks here weren't meant to address this question of nationality and which people got sovereignty over which region - they were really to emphasize that the word Palestinian refers to a heterogenous bloc of people - and the point I was making was that Palestinians outside of Gaza are not treated with anything like the same degree of oppression by Israel. This means that whatever is happening in Gaza it's not purely about Israel crapping on the Palestinians - there are other factors at play.
I don't really agree with your point on poverty - what I saw on my (limited) travels was truly mind-blowing. It's poverty on a different scale than anything I knew about in the UK, for example. The only thing that is comparable is homelessness - but the biggest factors in that (at least in the UK) are mental health and addiction. When the newspapers talk about 10% (or whatever) of kids in the UK living below the poverty line, they're not meaning the kind of poverty that exists elsewhere in the world are they? It's a poverty relative to the average UK living standard.
But I agree with your general point that it's not a good thing - relative or otherwise and we definitely need to sort it out better than we are doing - whether it's poverty in UK terms or poverty in more global terms.
We're all invented nationalities that was my point. If you want to go back to Jewish history then what you'll find is interesting but it's not the story that we're told now. The same applies everywhere for example in England.
30 years ago there was such a thing as a Yugoslav. Maybe a 1,000 years ago there was no such thing as an Englishman or a Scot. Things change. Throwing quote marks around their identity is saying that they're less important, not deserving of nationhood. Imagine someone calling you an "Englishman" or a "Jew" - you know what they're getting at right?
Re poverty, does mental health come first or is it a result of poverty. Chicken and egg no doubt. You need shelter and food as a human. Whether your floor is a mud floor or a concrete one or a wooden one, I don't think that it really matters. In the big cities of the world right now there's a class, often third world, of people servicing the highly mobile upper middle and above classes. This class have no ability to even pay their bills in polite society. So they operate below that in a cash and exchange economy. They're just as poor as any poor person in the third world.
I often point out that no one is offering to put the screws on Turkey re: the kurds.
Probably because if we use the "we wuz'ere furst"-arguement (aka Blud und Boden as it was originally known, no two guesses as to the Woke won't use that phrase) the kurds would have the "right" to almost all of eastern Turkey and surrounding areas. They predate both persians and greeks, for starters.
What's that to do with Israel and Palestine? W-e-l-l... that whole bit about who's on first? It just got complicated - why should it only apply to jews and arabs? Any genetic descendents of the picts around to challenge scottish colonialist oppression, hm? What about alla them thar gaylick peoples then?
Oh we can have fun with this - howsabout demanding Doggerland be restored? The Danelaw?
But the ding-ding-ding-winner-winner-chicken-dinner moment comes when the Wokeist realises, not a single arab, jew, african of any tribe, asian, or "native american" have a slivver of a right to ever set foot much less dwell in Europe, so all them thar "refugees" they cherish?
Go home, effing coloniser!
Oopsie-poopsie.
This Matthew Goodwin post today https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-people-think-about-the-war has some truly chilling polling statistics showing (amongst other things) that more young people sympathise with genocidal barbarism than with Israelis trying to keep existing (at least amongst those who answer polling questions). The comprehensive ignorance of these people about history can of course be guessed at and this despite, no doubt, large helpings of 'higher education' (or should that "despite" read "resulting from"?).
A few of us have been warning for decades now about the deluge that must inevitably follow from allowing an up-itself intelligentsia to entirey 'colonise' our Western academy (and at tax-payers expense to add to the foolishness of it).
I do believe the dam has broken, And.... as you have sown Western Liberalism so shall you reap.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
I struggled some with weight gain through my life, until I started having my last meal of the day between 4pm and 6pm, and going to bed at 8:30. I started sleeping much better. Wish I had discovered it before I was 55! I also believe in the idea that if you want cake or cookies or muffins, make them yourself. Today I am making oatmeal cookies, and I am truly excited to do so. Good luck.
I have a brother that ate himself into full disability and is now in a nursing home. He weighed in at 400 lbs. Before he was declared disabled he fell constantly and emergency services had to be called to pick him up. Please take care of yourself.
On the other hand - https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/the_dire_warnings_of_yeshaia_leibowitz_613.jpg
Sykes and Picot and the UN have a lot to answer for. In 1948, I think, Hannah Arendt argued strongly against the creation of the State of Israel, and I think with good reason. Creating a Jewish homeland (look at the first map - how was this ever going to work?) was not a good way of compensating for our collective guilt in not accepting Jewish refugees pre-1939
And I don’t understand why you put “indigenous” in quotes - whatever we call them, there were definitely non-Jewish people living in the Holy Land until 1948.
The indigenous quote marks are because I don't think of the Arabs as "indigenous" to the region - and also a swipe at the whole notion of indigenous.
The first proposals for a two-state solution, internationally agreed upon by The League of Nations, predate the second world war. Maybe the guilt factor amplified the urgency after WWII, but there was an international awareness that the Jews needed a homeland well before the horrific Nazi culmination of centuries of Jewish persecution.
I understand the need (and sort of agree with you about “indigenous” - I was once asked by a bunch of N American therapists to say where I lived and what tribe owned it - but stumped really, cos I was on Naxos at the time, so I said Greeks, but for some reason they weren’t happy with that). The problem is it seems to me that the solution they came up with was inherently wrong, and we’ve been dealing with the consequences ever since.
Sorry, second map - UN plan 1947
Thanks Rudolph. Always putting things in perspective. I’ll watch the documentary shortly.
"but few in the “west” suffer from anything like real oppression"
Arguably most of us do, the jab being pushed onto the majority of the populations of the "West". In addition the % of people on the poverty line is not a small one in any Western nation. Add to that the cost of housing in the same which reduces ability to prosper and have families then the oppression is quite significant.
And maybe your stack needs a bit of real politik in regards to Israel & Palestine. Gaza is more or less a city state of 3 m & the third most densely populated place in the world. Cities traditionally need a hinterland to sustain them a place to draw resources from. Where is Gaza's? Right it doesn't have one which means that economically it relies on the State next door, Israel. Israel undoubtedly sees that as a noose around its neck. But Israel's hinterland is not exactly large itself there being maybe 10m living in a place that 120 years ago, for reasons, only had 500 thousand living there. Back in the 14th C the Kingdom of Jerusalem which was markedly similar to the current State of Israel failed largely due to the unwillingness of Europe to continue to support it.
Also as far as woke goes, how can they support a country (two countries?) that rely on food imports so much. Those imports have heavy CO2 emissions encased in them (I'm merely pointing out woke views here).
Also reports of significant gas fields off the Gazan & Israeli coasts. Is either side going to share these resources?
And getting back to your claim that nobody in the West should claim that they're hard done by well poverty in Israel is also highest in OECD at about 18% and most of those people have a more individual type of food insecurity. I'd call that oppression.
Yes - my footnote was a (partial) recognition of the possibility of viewing the various covid responses as oppressive in nature.
I'm not going to deny that the Palestinians in Gaza have it bad. My issue is with the framing of all of this as being the "fault" of Israel in its entirety. This is not really fair. I don't think the Palestinians in other areas of Israel have it anything like as bad - and therefore we have to understand this as being more than just an Israel vs Palestine issue. There are other factors at play here. In particular, perhaps we need to widen our scope of what is meant by a "Palestinian" - and to appreciate that Hamas and Gaza might be a special case (which does not wholly exonerate Israel from their tough and probably excessive counter-measures, either).
The population density of Gaza is very similar to that of Greater London. I know that wiki describes Gaza as the 3rd most densely populated region on Earth, but I tend to take issue with that - one can always manipulate definitions of areas and regions to get the answer that suits one's politics better.
It's an unholy mess. And it's not entirely Israel's fault. They're surrounded by enemies who, for many years, just wanted to wind the clock back and wipe Israel off the face of the map - and Jews off the face of the planet. They also have a significant number of people *within* their borders who desire this. What are they to do? We can argue that their responses to the various aggressions they've suffered over the years have been excessive - and that's a view I'd sympathise with, particularly with their treatment of Gaza over the last couple of decades - but how does one actually deal and reason with people who want nothing more than your destruction? I don't know the answer to that. I honestly can't pick out the "right" and "wrong" here. Israel is in an almost permanent state of having to make a "Hobson's Choice". It seems to me that almost all of Israel's choices are "bad" - and figuring out which one is least bad can't be easy.
I think poverty, or *relative* poverty, is on the increase in the west - and the increasing cost of housing is a major concern - and this is worrying. I tend to push back a bit on western notions of "poverty" because if you visit some places in the world, you kind of realise that "poverty" means very different things depending where you are. I've spent time with various families who live in what I can only describe as breath-taking poverty in relation to even "poor" people in the west, for example. Until I had travelled and lived (for a short time) with such people I had no idea what true, grinding, poverty actually was.
"perhaps we need to widen our scope of what is meant by a "Palestinian""
I get a bit tired of this one "Palestinian" as if it's an invented nationality. The ME devolved from Ottoman control 100 years ago and the result was a bunch of nation states often given borders by Britain. Add in 1948 and you have Palestine without the need for quote marks. And in reality all nationalities are inventions Israel no different than any other.
I also know what true grinding poverty is like, I had a recent experience of it and I grew up under it. There is nothing relative about poverty, it is just poverty. Those in the West who have not experienced poverty seem all too keen to push their experiences on to the rest of us. Universities are full of such (I am happy to pass on details).
The Jews were the only people to have claimed that area as a separate country. This does not, of course, mean that the right of the Arabs living there to have their own state should be dismissed. It wasn't dismissed - and the first internationally accepted "solution" by the League of Nations around 1920 would have seen the Jews living there being given 20% of the land and the Arabs 80%. This plan, which did not intend to displace or dispossess anybody, was accepted by the Jews living in the region, but not by the Arabs living in the region.
Under this plan nobody was going to be "kicked out" - it was about which 'group' of people living there got to decide the rules and sovereignty of a particular region. The Jews had mostly settled (and bought land) around the west coast and the Arabs were concentrated more in the east. The initial 20/80 plan was intended to recognize this.
Palestinian is an invented nationality. There was no sense of a separate country called Palestine, in the sense that the UK or the US, for example can be described as a country. There was no country called Jordan, either - for example.
But the quote marks here weren't meant to address this question of nationality and which people got sovereignty over which region - they were really to emphasize that the word Palestinian refers to a heterogenous bloc of people - and the point I was making was that Palestinians outside of Gaza are not treated with anything like the same degree of oppression by Israel. This means that whatever is happening in Gaza it's not purely about Israel crapping on the Palestinians - there are other factors at play.
I don't really agree with your point on poverty - what I saw on my (limited) travels was truly mind-blowing. It's poverty on a different scale than anything I knew about in the UK, for example. The only thing that is comparable is homelessness - but the biggest factors in that (at least in the UK) are mental health and addiction. When the newspapers talk about 10% (or whatever) of kids in the UK living below the poverty line, they're not meaning the kind of poverty that exists elsewhere in the world are they? It's a poverty relative to the average UK living standard.
But I agree with your general point that it's not a good thing - relative or otherwise and we definitely need to sort it out better than we are doing - whether it's poverty in UK terms or poverty in more global terms.
We're all invented nationalities that was my point. If you want to go back to Jewish history then what you'll find is interesting but it's not the story that we're told now. The same applies everywhere for example in England.
Here's my take on some of that and some of this;
https://plebeianresistance.substack.com/p/the-significance-to-the-early-english
30 years ago there was such a thing as a Yugoslav. Maybe a 1,000 years ago there was no such thing as an Englishman or a Scot. Things change. Throwing quote marks around their identity is saying that they're less important, not deserving of nationhood. Imagine someone calling you an "Englishman" or a "Jew" - you know what they're getting at right?
Re poverty, does mental health come first or is it a result of poverty. Chicken and egg no doubt. You need shelter and food as a human. Whether your floor is a mud floor or a concrete one or a wooden one, I don't think that it really matters. In the big cities of the world right now there's a class, often third world, of people servicing the highly mobile upper middle and above classes. This class have no ability to even pay their bills in polite society. So they operate below that in a cash and exchange economy. They're just as poor as any poor person in the third world.