@Nathan: I’m hostile to Israel in the same way I was hostile to South Africa when they had apartheid. When apartheid was dismantled in South Africa I stopped being hostile.
@DeBakr: “I don’t believe most arab nations give a shit about Palestinian Arabs any more then they care about anybody else. ”
I don’t believe most Americans give a shit about the “Jewish State”, it’s all about being manipulated by Holocaust guilt, the shared colonial mindset of the U.S. and Israel, and the interests of the military industrial complex (to use Eisenhower’s words).
But I DO believe that American citizens are waking up to the apartheid nature of the situation.
@DeBakr: The stuff you mentioned is straw man stuff, no one claims the Syrian civil war was caused by the IP-conflict.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-us-general-we-pay-a-price-for-backing-israel/
“I [James Mattis] paid a military security price every day as the commander of CentCom because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel, and that moderates all the moderate Arabs who want to be with us, because they can’t come out publicly in support of people who don’t show respect for the Arab Palestinians,”…He called the current situation in Israel “unsustainable” and blamed the settlements for harming prospects for peace. …Petraeus reportedly dispatched a team of senior officers under his command to brief Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The 45-minute powerpoint presentation shown to Mullen argued that Israeli intransigence was harming US interests in the region and harming American credibility among Arab leaders…In a prepared statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2010, Petraeus said that the “conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [area of responsibility] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.
“The Israelis have managed to use technology, territory, power politics, and the success of Israel’s economy to minimize the pain to themselves of occupation. The one thing that the Palestinians can do that would make a difference is something they emphatically will not do: shut down the Palestinian Authority and make the Israelis pay an actual price for their occupation and annexation. Under these circumstances, the Israeli attitude seems to be, “Let Jared Kushner try to sell his plan—we have better things to do.” ”
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that the U.S. and Israeli military-industrial complexes have, shall we say, been in the process of merging for some time, and that drives a lot of stuff –
“Max Ajl, a PhD candidate in development sociology at Cornell University, writes: “U.S. ‘military assistance,’ more accurately understood as a circular flow through which U.S. weapons firms profit off the colonization of Palestinian land and Israeli destabilization of the surrounding states, is a long-term structuring element of the U.S.-Israel ‘special relationship.’” ….By the 2000s, the Israeli military-industrial complex had produced an industry capable of competing in small-arms and high-end security technology on a worldwide scale. Israel started to export arms that have been refined through high-technology colonial policing of the Palestinian population, especially in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In recent years, Israel has risen to one of the top 10 arms exporters in the world….Frida Berrigan, author of Made in the U.S.A.: American Military Aid to Israel, writes that a major barrier to any shift in American policy towards Palestine-Israel is “financial pressures from a U.S military industrial complex accustomed to billions of dollars in sales to Israel and other Middle Eastern nations locked in a seemingly perpetual arms race with each other by all buying American and using Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to pay the bills.”
https://thedefensepost.com/2019/04/09/us-israel-arms-sales-opinion/
@DeBakr: “Exodus” has nothing whatsoever to do with history, it’s advertising, it serves the same function as the ads you see on TV hawking the latest Lexus or wrinkle cream. The overwhelming majority of people don’t read history, they respond to advertising on a gut level. That’s the function of “Exodus’ the movie and the book, and so far it’s been pretty successful.
Only relatively recently are people coming to their senses.
“Deborah Lipstadt says all Muslim countries are intolerant of minorities”
Hey Ms. Lipstadt, I have an African-American friend and once I met him for dinner in an ethnic white neighborhood; when we came out of the restaurant the tires of his car were slashed, I saw it with my own eyes. Maybe you could talk to some minorities in non-Muslim countries to see how they’re faring?
I think it’s important to understand the mentality in Skokie – not only does Skokie have a large Jewish population, it has a lot of Holocaust survivors –
https://www.momentmag.com/the-life-and-times-of-skokie/
“If Skokie was an escape from urban decay for a kid from Chicago, it was something close to paradise for my parents and an estimated 8,000 Holocaust survivors like them who poured into the Chicago suburb in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. “
I think Philip K Dick’s “Minority Report” might serve as a better tale than Orwell’s “1984” for understanding the situation. Palestinian? We predict you are going to commit a crime so we’ll lock you up in Gaza….
@Nathan: “Israel’s entire claim to its right to an independent racially-defined nation state is rooted in the mythical claim to an ancestral home and the equally mythical claim to descent from a single Semitic tribe that once inhabited it.”
That seems correct to me. The land of Israel is much more the ancestral homeland of the Palestinians than it is the ancestral homeland of some Jew born in New Jersey or France or Russia.