[reliabilityguy]

> And you think that's legitimate? Keeping millions of people under permanent rule of a state with no rights whatsoever?

They do have rights. Why are you lying? They have PA, and they have all their rights there as determined by the PA.

> I'm not going to get into your historical claims, except to note that the reason why the situation for Middle Eastern Jews changed so drastically after 1948 was because a bunch of people claiming to represent all Jews conquered a strip of land in the Middle East and expelled the native population.

I see. So if some Jews in Israel do something, then the Arabs everywhere else are allowed to ethnically cleanse the Jews in other places. Thank you for clarifying this. Well, now we know where you stand on collective punishment :)

> Israel left Gaza in 2005 so that it could concentrate on the settlement of the West Bank. It was a strategic move to conserve their forces.

How does it change the choice that Palestinians made in Gaza?

> The only "land for peace" deal that Israel has made is with Egypt. Israel did that because it did not want to risk another war like 1973 with a serious military opponent.

So? It was a smart move, and proved itself.

Like man, you just showed with this reply alone that you don’t care about human rights, you just don’t like Jews.

[dragonwriter]

> They have PA,

Kind of.

> and they have all their rights there as determined by the PA.

The PA doesn't administer Gaza (because of the civil war Israel actively facilitated, and because even though the parties came to an agreement on all-Palestine elections to resolve it, Israel has blocked them), and much of the West Bank (not just the Israeli settlements, but places where Palestinians live) is administered by Israel, not the PA.

And even the parts administered by the PA are subject to regular (and accelerated in the last couple years, with almost no international attention thanks to the focus on the part of the Israel-Palestine war taking place in Gaza) arbitrary violence by Israel, rendering "rights" determined by the PA moot in practice.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> They do have rights. Why are you lying?

I'd actually turn that around and ask you the very same question. You know that Palestinians in the West Bank have no rights whatsoever, and I don't understand what you're playing at with your obvious gambit here.

> They have PA, and they have all their rights there as determined by the PA.

The PA is totally powerless, as I'm sure you know. It gets to take out the trash and run the schools. The Israelis hold all the real power in the West Bank, and they do whatever they want, wherever they want. The IDF wants to invade a Palestinian city nominally under PA jurisdiction? No problem. The IDF wants to cut off the tax revenue of the PA? No problem. The IDF wants to nab someone in the middle of a Palestinian city? No problem. The PA is just as powerless as the Warsaw Judenrat was.

> So if some Jews in Israel do something, then the Arabs everywhere else are allowed to ethnically cleanse the Jews in other places.

I never said anything of the sort. The Jews of the Arab world were treated horribly after the founding of Israel. They suffered because of what people they had no control over (European and American Zionists) did.

> How does it change the choice that Palestinians made in Gaza?

It directly contradicts your claim that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza was an attempt to trade land for peace with the Palestinians. You're just changing the subject now.

> So? It was a smart move, and proved itself.

The "So what?" is that this undermines your claim that Israel is willing to trade land for peace with the Palestinians. They only traded land for peace with Egypt because Egypt was a credible military threat (which the Palestinians are not).

> Like man, you just showed with this reply alone that you don’t care about human rights, you just don’t like Jews.

I'm Jewish.

But this is how every conversation with a Zionist ends, in my experience. After they pull out all the talking points they learned at summer camp, they fall back to their last line of defense: "You just hate Jews." Or its cousin: "You're just a self-hating Jew." As if loving oneself requires one to support a little ultranationalist state on the other side of the world that's currently carrying out a genocide.

[msgodel]

I think if you're jewish it is healthy and acceptable to concern yourself with the well being of Israel the same way it's healthy for anglo Americans to concern themselves with the state of the UK.

The problem is when people drag the rest of the country into it. And that's mostly a problem because the US is this weird international country now so we have to make all these compromises.

[reliabilityguy]

> I'd actually turn that around and ask you the very same question. You know that Palestinians in the West Bank have no rights whatsoever, and I don't understand what you're playing at with your obvious gambit here.

They absolutely have rights. For example, they can marry, they can buy things, go to work, sell things, they have a lot of rights. So, stop lying.

> The PA is just as powerless as the Warsaw Judenrat was.

I’m sure the Jews in Warsaw ghetto got their tax revenue and used it to fund martyrs fund to kill innocent polish civilians. Quite a novel discovery about the history of Warsaw Ghetto!

> I never said anything of the sort. The Jews of the Arab world were treated horribly after the founding of Israel. They suffered because of what people they had no control over (European and American Zionists) did.

Another novel historical take: Jews lived peacefully in Muslim lands for generations! It’s all fault of some other Jews thousands of miles away that Jews of Iraq were attacked by Arabs. It was not the decision of the Arabs in Iraq to attack their fellow countrymen, it was… hm…

So, you would be totally fine to attack ethnic group X in america if the same ethnic group somewhere else does something you may disagree with? Gotcha!

> It directly contradicts your claim that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza was an attempt to trade land for peace with the Palestinians. You're just changing the subject now.

No it doesn’t. The same time Israel disengaged with Gaza it also cleaned up and removed numerous settlements in the West Bank. For example, a couple of them were near Nablus. Which kinda makes it illogical — how can one focus on settling West Bank if the actions are quite the opposite?

However, it’s going to be a third novel historical tale by you, so everything tracks.

> The "So what?" is that this undermines your claim that Israel is willing to trade land for peace with the Palestinians. They only traded land for peace with Egypt because Egypt was a credible military threat (which the Palestinians are not).

See above. Perhaps you should read more on the subject, but not Wikipedia.

> I'm Jewish.

Of course you are.

> But this is how every conversation with a Zionist ends, in my experience. After they pull out all the talking points they learned at summer camp, they fall back to their last line of defense: "You just hate Jews." Or its cousin: "You're just a self-hating Jew." As if loving oneself requires one to support a little ultranationalist state on the other side of the world that's currently carrying out a genocide.

Talking points? Man, you make up history as we speak. Make factually incorrect claims. And I’m the one with talking points?

Your values are not universal, they are conditioned on who is the subject, you apply different standards to Israelis and Palestinians, and you telling me about “zionists” and talking points? Hilarious.

Every claim you make is not rooted in reality, and shows just surface level understanding of what is going on.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> They absolutely have rights. For example, they can marry, they can buy things, go to work, sell things, they have a lot of rights. So, stop lying.

And they can be killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers, imprisoned and tortured by Israel with no trial or charges, or have their homes demolished by Israel. They can't travel more than a few kilometers without having to go through Israeli military checkpoints, where they can be humiliated, stopped for no reason at all, or taken captive. They are subjected to pogroms by Israeli settlers, while the IDF stands by and watches (or even sides with the settlers). But they can marry one another, so I guess everything is fine, right? Do you hear yourself? As a Jewish person, you should be ashamed to be justifying extreme oppression of an ethnic minority like this. It's a complete betrayal of Jewish history and values.

> I’m sure the Jews in Warsaw ghetto got their tax revenue and used it to fund martyrs fund to kill innocent polish civilians. Quite a novel discovery about the history of Warsaw Ghetto!

First, this is completely irrelevant to my point, which is that the PA is as powerless as the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto was. You want to go on a tangent about the existence of Palestinian terrorism (which is a response to Israeli state violence). If we start talking about the widespread use of terrorism by the Zionists / Israelis during the establishment of their state in the 1930s-40s, you will, of course, suddenly have nothing to say.

> No it doesn’t. The same time Israel disengaged with Gaza it also cleaned up and removed numerous settlements in the West Bank.

Settlement activity in the West Bank continued apace. If you look at a graph of the number of Israeli settlers over time, the Gaza disengagement does not even create a blip. The numbers kept increasing, year after year. There are now 70% more Israeli settlers than there were just before the Gaza disengagement.

> Another novel historical take: Jews lived peacefully in Muslim lands for generations! It’s all fault of some other Jews thousands of miles away that Jews of Iraq were attacked by Arabs. It was not the decision of the Arabs in Iraq to attack their fellow countrymen, it was… hm…

Of all the countries you could have chosen to talk about, Iraq is the absolute worst for your argument. In Iraq specifically, there have consistently been strong suspicions by historians that the Israeli intelligence services carried out attacks on the Jewish community in order to spur emigration to Israel, and more evidence of that has come out in recent years. The Israelis played extremely dirty, driven by an ideology that says the ends justify the means.

My historical take here is not novel at all. It's just a historical fact that antisemitism was historically much worse in Europe than in the Middle East, and that the founding of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians by the self-proclaimed "Jewish state" dramatically increased antisemitism in the entire region.

> Talking points? Man, you make up history as we speak. Make factually incorrect claims. And I’m the one with talking points?

I haven't made anything up. You weren't even aware of Operation Nickel Grass, the massive US resupply effort to Israel in 1973, and you claimed it was made up. Before accusing others of making things up, you should learn the basic history.

> Your values are not universal, they are conditioned on who is the subject, you apply different standards to Israelis and Palestinians, and you telling me about “zionists” and talking points? Hilarious.

It's precisely because I have universal values that, unlike you, I don't form my opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on my Jewish ethnicity.