Kushner lays down the law
He speaks!
But not well. Not well at all. What he says is rather breathtaking.
He does say that, and before he says that, he says, starting at 2:29:
…when we talk about random individuals who don’t have a lot of say or maybe knowledge or who have tried and failed –
Yes, really, Jared Kushner, real estate hustler, called other people random individuals who don’t have a lot of say or maybe knowledge. Amanpour interrupted him where the dash is to say
Jared, he was a negotiator and a former Israeli cabinet minister.
Not a real estate hustler who works for his wife’s father.
He also says, starting at 3:55:
…who do you know that runs a state that when they don’t get what they want they call for a day of rage, that’s not how people who are capable of running a state work…
I know this one. Donald Trump, that’s who. He calls for a day of rage every day, and every night too. Not, to be fair, a general day of rage, a day of rage for him. But he does that more often than he tells the truth, or thanks someone, or eats two scoops of ice cream.
Kushner’s calm confident arrogance is stunning to watch.
On this topic, the person who isn’t speaking well is actually you, Ophelia.
It’s time for people with functional brains to finally stop pretending that the Arabs want a “two-state solution.”
They have been offered same a dozen times since the end of the Ottoman Empire. They reject it each and every time. They’re predictably rejecting this one, and it’s not because it’s “unfair” to the crybabies.
At some point, it might not be unreasonable to consider the fact that privileged Western leftists who continue to refuse to accept the “no”s from the Arabs, might actually be a bit bigoted, themselves. Why won’t you take take their word for it?
No, what they they want, and what they will settle for no less than, is the entirety of Israel. They will settle for nothing less than that, because they are ethnoreligious imperialist colonizers.
The Jewish people are the indigenous people in the land of Israel. Specifically, to Judea and Samaria. Nobody else qualifies for that status. Jews are indigenous to Judea. Arabs are indigenous to the Hejaz. Arabs have zero claim to the Land of Israel.
Your calm confident ignorance is stunning to watch.
@Jay,.
Who are “the Arabs”? Do you think that they are a monolithic cluster of people who all think and act the same?
Can you, for a moment, put yourself in the shoes of a Palestinian? I can’t, but I try to understand. I can see some Palestinians thinking “Here we go again. The colonists are telling us what they will “give to us” and we are expected to be grateful. Why weren’t we involved in formulating the plan? Why do we have to wait for others to tell us what is good for us? All we want is our land back, the land that was stolen from us by the Israelis.
I can’t put myself in the shoes of a Jew after the Shoa, either. But I try to consider how they may have felt. Frightened. Threatened. Tormented. But the answer should never have involved stealing Palestinian land. A new Israel should have been carved out of Germany. The Germans should have paid a high price for their crimes.
As it is, by attempting to make things right for one group of people another group have been harmed. Israel has expanded well beyond its borders at the time of creation, and every expansion has come with further suffering for Palestinians. Adults with no hope. Children growing up without a future. Always waiting for the next bunch of Israeli “Settlers” to come and steal what little land they have left.
I have tried to live a peaceful life, I have opposed wars and interventions. But I can understand the frustration of people kept in an ever-shrinking open-air prison.
The rest of your comments are laughable, the obvious posting of a Hasbara troll.
Roj:
Right on. My view is that the appropriate thing to have done was to give the Jews Bavaria, where Nazism really got going. No deserts there, either.
But I do not think that it was ever proposed as a solution to the problem of creating a safe Jewish homeland and refuge. In the Cold War environment just starting up, it would have turned most Germans against the US, and would have aided the cause of Stalin no end. He was against Israel from the start, and was running his own pogroms to boot.
The Palestinians are descended from the Philistines of the Bible: original owners of the “land flowing with milk and honey” and promised to Moses by God; according to whoever wrote the Pentateuch. They call the territory ‘Felastin’. Sound familiar?
The conflict will still be going in 400 years time; 2,000 maybe.
#1 Jay
No, they’ve had no such offers. Rather, they’ve had leaders of foreign nations carve their land up as spoils to be handed out, against their protest. They’ve had towns bulldozed and families displaced, or simply murdered. Gaza in particular stands out as an atrocity. They’ve had an unwanted nation placed atop them.
Peace talk after peace talk has been initiated… and scuttled, often by Netanyahu himself.
I was all set to tear into this sentence. I was going to declare it the most risible sentence I’ve read all week. But then a problem arose: I read the next paragraph, which contains the assertion that Palestinians are the “ethnoreligious imperialist colonisers”. Really, Jay? The people getting bulldozed out of their homes are the colonisers? Fucking really?
___
I was at first going to mention something about PEP (Progressive except Palestine), but after a reread, I’m not particularly convinced that you are progressive at all. You refer to people on the left as ‘leftists’, which in my experience has been a strong tell for conservative politics. You avoid all mention of the specific population group in question (Palestinians), and you use the location names which Israel wishes to popularise – Judea and Samaria – rather than Palestine. This careful avoidance of all mention of Palestine/the Palestinian people is common among pro-Israel conservatives, who seek to delegitimise all non-Israeli claim to the region.
Oof, and then the erroneous claim that Jews are the only ones that can claim to be indigenous to the region, and the unspoken assumption that even if they were the first culture in the region (they weren’t), that entitles them to knock down and displace any modern resident as they please. Yeah how about no.
The Palestinians had the misfortune to have their land over-run innumerable times by someone and his army going from somewhere to Egypt and back again. Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Jews, the Arabs (who had them speaking Arabic pretty quick smart) the Crusaders, the Ottoman Turks… have I left anyone out?
I encounter the phenomenon fairly regularly in the Australian bush, in the form of ants who build their low-profile mounds right in the middle of dirt roads. Every passing truck, car, motorbike or whatever stirs them up and kills a few in passing. And the poor buggers never seem to learn a thing from it.
Now I know how Pompeo found an unmarked map so quickly, they have them around so they can draw their own lines in the Middle East.
Jay, given the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist in 1923 and modern Israel was created through a combination of British racism and incompetence and Zionist terrorism in 1948, I think you have too shaky a sense of history to be trolling us.
The Jewish people are not indigenous in Palestine. Even the book they use as a historical document to demonstrate their right to the land (the Bible) says they are not. It says God gave it to them, and removed the original tenants for them. In other words, they stole it the first time, too.
I am not anti-Jewish. I believe they need to have the same safety and security as everyone else, and this has been precarious for them at the best of times (which we are not in). I just don’t think they can do this at the expense of another group of people, and I also don’t think safety and security is what they are getting by insisting on control of this particular patch of ground.
I also think the Palestinians deserve better than they have gotten, and their desire to have an end to this is understandable. Their desire to find that end themselves, and not have it forced on them by the western world is also understandable. Think of it this way: if you had a neighbor who claimed a large portion of your house as his own, and then magnanimously offered you the back hallway to call your own, how would you respond?
Roj,
No, I don;t think the Arabs are “a monolithic cluster of people who all think and act the same.” At the same time, they are not indigenous to Israel, and I’d challenge you to provide any evidence that they are.
The fact is that the Palestinian-Arabs have had many opportunities to accept a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. They have constantly refused the opportunity for same, every single time.
Let’s flip this around around, and ask you why the Arabs absolutely refuse to accept a state for themselves in peace next to Israel every time they’re offered one?
Go learn some history, dude.
Holms –
Give up the bullshit. They’ve had the opportunity to accept a state of their own in peace next to and alongside Israel for 72 years now. They’ve rejected same at every single given opportunity. It’s upon you to explain why they have.
Omar –
You defend imperialist Arab invaders. You’re an imperialist colonizer. We defeated you in 1948, 1953, 1967 and 1973. Fuck off, weak loser.
Rob –
Go look up history.
iknklast –
Your understanding of indigeniety is lacking. The Jewish people are the only people who can claim indigenous status in the land of Israel. Israel is where our come from. It is our cultural genesis. Nobody other than the Jews come Israel.
The Palestinian-Arabs have rights of long-standing citizenship in Israel, which we have granted them, but they do not have rights of citizenship
Jews are from Judea and Samaria. Arabs are from the Hejaz.
And I despise Trump, for the record.
Don’t say things like “Fuck off, weak loser.” I’m not going to repeat that a whole lot of times.
Jay
Fact, the Ottoman Empire fell in 1923.
Fact, Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel on 14th May 1948.
Fact, in the intervening period the British invaded Palestine, with the assistance of zionists. The Jewish population of the area grew, largely as a result of European states persecuting their local Jewish populations and the British seeing Palestine as a good place to encourage them to migrate to, because Britain didn’t especially want them.
This is all established history. You can argue about interpretation, but not the facts. It’s also a nonsense to suggest that someone who has been invaded and who is being squeezed out of their ancestral lands should just shrug their shoulders and accept it.
The reality is that while Jewish people may feel a deep sense of attachment, even entitlement, to those lands, it is nearly 1900 years since the last state even pretending to be an autonomous Jewish nation in the region existed. Worth noting that that was a vassal state of the Roman Empire.
While the region may well be the cultural genesis of the Jewish people, there were other peoples living in the region both prior to and contemporaneous with the Jewish tribes. The descendants of those peoples and others from the region since still live there today and have equally valid claims. In modern terms, zionists are in fact conquering colonisers, not simply those who left for a weeks holiday and are now evicting squatters.
I have enormous sympathy for the suffering of Jews. Israel and its people deserve safety and security. I think they way their leaders have tried to achieve this is wrong-headed and is perpetuating many of the wrongs done to Jews over centuries onto others. No side is ‘innocent’ in this situation and no side will come out of this well or unscathed.
Jay, you are simply a Hasbara troll with no redeeming features. Your post is full of Zionist lies.
Once, we had to take the Nazis out with the trash to avoid any further death and destruction. One day soon, we will have to do the same to Israel, for the same reasons.
Israel was born in terror, and it is sustained by terror.
The Jewish people are the only people who can claim indigenous status in the land of Israel.
Before or after they smote the Canaanites? The Jews came out of Egypt, then spent 40 years wandering around an area smaller than Texas before they found a people they could exterminate in order to steal their land.
Jews are from Judea and Samaria.
IF, and I stress IF, we accept that premise, then the State of Israel should be confined to the West Bank and the remaining Illegally occupied land called “Israel” can be retunred to The Palestinians.
That’s a fair point, Ophelia. I was very mean and disrespectful to you. I hate my attitude to you earlier. I’m sorry for that. I have no excuse for that. It was inexcusable, You’re one of my favorite writers and I should have shown you the respect you deserve.
Rob – we Jews have always been in the Land of Israel. Since before there was an Islam or a Christianity. It’s not about religion. It’s about peoplehood. We are indigenous to Israel just like the Native Americans are indigenous to this continent. Colonizers who came after us do not get to claim landed status in our indigenous homeland. The Arabs have rights of long-standing tenancy, but they are not indigenous to our homeland, and they have zero claims for being so. They are imperialist colonizers. This is a fact.
Roj – you use ugly racist, antisemitic language, so you aren’t worth a reply.
Nina Paley’s wonderful animation of “This Land Is Mine” seems appropriate to interject here.
https://youtu.be/4pKMV6e5kEo
iknklast – your comment is by far the single dumbest thing I have ever seen an otherwise intelligent person write.
There has never in history been a sovereign state of “Palestine.” That place was literally created by the Romans to deny our indigineity from our homeland after they engaged in imperial conquer.
I frankly don’t care what you think about us. But your history is wrong, mistaken and bigoted.
Jay, I am well aware that there has never been a sovereign state of Palestine, and I do not see where I claimed there was. There is an area that has been called Palestine in the vernacular, and I was using it that way. I apologize if that is confusing, but it is the way I learned it in school, and in church, and saying it that way just comes naturally to me. So please do not put words in my mouth or ideas in my head that are not there.
Jay, it took you a while, but there we are, you bereft of counterpoint resort to calling someone who disagrees with your position “antisemitic”.
I will give $5000.00 to a charity of your choice if you can point to a single antisemitic comment by me above. And please note: Criticism of the current genocidal Israeli government is not antisemitic. The people of Israel have it in their power to elect a different, less genocidal, more conciliatory government. Should they choose to do that, they would find the world may regard them more kindly. But, for some odd reason, Israelis seem to love a fascist-style government.
As for your accusation of racism, look no further than your own words above; The Palestinian-Arabs have rights of long-standing citizenship in Israel, which we have granted them, but they do not have rights of citizenship What is that, if not a racist attitude?
All I can say is you have been well-schooled in Zionist propaganda. I wonder where you live? Israel? Russia? Shitsville, USA?
Roj, your entire post once again is antisemitism. I don’t expect an ugly antisemitie like yourself to recognize that, but if you want to make a donation I suggest ZOA.
You and David Duke and David Irving would get along famously. I hope youze can meet one day.
Jay, There is a distinct difference between controlling and governing a territory such that you can claim ownership, and being one of a plurality of peoples in the territory (and a minority at that for most of the last 2000 years). The other residents of the territory have equal claim to people-hood and control of the land. Frankly, until displaced by zionist colonisers since the end of WW1, they had a more compelling and proximate claim.
The fact that the Jews were displaced from their ancestral lands and horribly persecuted through much of the time since is a terrible thing. Holocaust aside however, the Jews are one of many peoples who have suffered (and continue to suffer) similarly through recorded history. Even the Holocaust stands out more for its planned and systematic nature and sheer scale, than being the only example of attempted genocide based on either race, ethnicity or religion. I can comprehend the deep cultural scars and desire for safety, security and a place to stand. The way this is being done will ultimately cause more harm than good.
Also, stop speaking as though all Jews speak with a unified voice on such matters. They don’t.
Rob: The Palestinian-Arabs have been offered very generous opportunities for self-government on part of of our inidigenous homeland multiple times since 1927. They’ve been offered one multiple times since the Clinton years. They have said “NO!” every single time.
They don’t want a state of their own in peace next to ours. They want a state in place of ours. They’re not going to get it.
And westerners should stop making them believe that they can.
iknklast – again, there is no such place as “Palestine.” And there never was. I did not mean to put words in your mouth. I was only claiming historical facts. This is a very important point that needs to be made when arguing with those who claim that there was such a fantasyland.
Jay, as I said, you cannot point to any antisemitism, because there isn’t any. The only thing I have in common with David Duke and David Irving is that our arseholes all point to the ground.
I have criticised the government of Israel and I will continue to do so as long as they pursue genocidal policies against Palestinians. That is not antisemitism, it is humanism.
It may have escaped the narrow, bigoted education you seem to have received, but during the Shoa many Arabs put themselves in danger to protect Jews from the Nazis and their factotums.
When you want to talk about history, for centuries Arabs and Jews lived cheek by jowl, they got along, they traded, some even intermarried. Then Israel was imposed on the Arabs and all hell broke loose. But you will deny there is a connection, and blame the Palestinians for the crimes of your forefathers, or maybe even yourself.
Your pathetic there is no such place as “Palestine.” is no different to the doctrine of Terra nullius that the British used when colonising what later became Australia.
On what possible basis can you defend the murder of Palestinian children defending their homes from the IDF? Almost every day, a Palestinian is murdered by the IDF for defending their home, tending their stock, attempting to sell their harvest. How much longer can you look away from the men, women, and children locked up in Gaza for the “crime” of being Palestinian and thinking they had a right to a home?
If you think that pointing this out makes me an antisemite, then you need to have a good lock at whatever moral code you live by. You can choose to keep expressing your hatred for “the other”, or you can decide to “love your neighbour”. It’s up to you.
Jay:
And a merry Christmas to you, too.
Former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk made a telling observation IMHO. The first five books of the Old Testament are regarded by Zionists as a land title. To anyone else, they are not.
Of course, the ancient Philistines in their land “flowing with milk and honey” worshipped the wrong gods, had wrong attitudes to this and that, and clearly deserved to be booted out and replaced by a chosen People who worshipped the correct god: the one who spoke directly to Moses, who gave Moses those eleven commandments (one of which got dropped and smashed as it was being carried down the mountain, according to one source as reliable as the OT).
I know one Jewish man, a former officer in the Israeli army, who regards the whole Israel-Palestine situation as insoluble; and ‘terrible’. It was not intended by the original Zionists to finish up the way it has: as a hornets’ nest amid a seething mass of scorpions.
The region has been called Palestine, or a variation thereof, going back thousands of years. Syrian Palaestina under Roman rule, Palaistine in the earlier Greek era, Phillistia earlier still, and so named for the people living there at the time – the Philistines. Sound familiar? They’re a pre-Judaism people originating from the broader Canaanite peoples, which by the way spawned MANY cultural offshoots. The Jewish people are one of many from that region and from that culture group, and it might interest you to learn that Arabs are another.
Say hi to Bibi for me, and give him my most cordial wishes to rot in jail for his corruption. Peace in the middle east will not exist while he remains in power, goading his neighbours and scuttling peace talks left and right.
No, what they they want, and what they will settle for no less than, is the entirety of Israel.
By that, I take it you mean the land they occupied, the land where they had houses, gardens, businesses, schools, hospitals, cinemas, and all the other accoutrements of civilised living. These things all existed prior to the modern state of “Israel” being imposed on the Palestinians.
And Jay, what happened to those Palestinians? They were dispossessed, expelled, in some cases murdered. They were innocent of any crime. They were living in peace with their neighbours. But they were an inconvenience. The Israeli settlers saw them as vermin to be eliminated in order to provide some Jews with Lebensraum. Not content with their initial land grab, the Israelis have continually expanded their Lebensraum by evicting and expropriating more Palestinians.
I would dearly love to meet you so I could look you in the eye and try to understand how someone could be so lacking in humanity, in basic decency, in compassion.
Jay @ 14 – thank you for the apology, but what I was objecting to wasn’t what you said to me but “fuck off, weak loser” to Omar. Omar replied with a polite joke, but I still don’t want people talking to each other that way here.
Here in North America the back hallway is very small, dark, unheated, and is called a “Reservation.”
Ophelia – I won’t talk to people here that way again.
YourNamesNotBruce -Jews are the only people who are indigenous to Judea and Samaria. The Arabs are indigenoius to the Hejaz (i.e. Saudi Arabia). This is an historical fact. Claiming otherwise puts you in the category iof the men who claim that they’re women.
Omar begins his comment with a sly antisemitic greeting, as expected.
Holms refuses to acknowledge facts, and will rightly be ignored.
Roj is angry at Jews, and refuses to acknowledge history. I’m pretty sure he’s not an Arab in J&S, so I’ll let others draw their own conclusion as to why he’s so angry at Jews.
Jay, you are so bound up in your own bigotry that you perceive others must be as bigoted.
Not one of my criticisms, not one, has been directed at Jews, and I am not angry at/with Jews. My anger is directed at the current state of Israel and the genocidal policies it is following. And all my comments have been directed at the state of Israel and its government.
You claim I refuse “refuses to acknowledge history”, and yet you’ re the one who operates under the assumption that there were no inhabitants, no homes, no businesses, no civil infrastructure in Palestine until the establishment of Israel. You are wrong, the state of Israel dispossessed the inhabitants of Palestine and you think that is fine and dandy. I don’t.
I asked you above to provide a single example of antisemitism in anything I wrote, and you couldn’t. But you did suggest I could make a donation to ZOA – an organisation dedicated to preventing the Palestinians ever regaining a land of their own. How’s that working out for the “two-state solution”?
https://zoa.org/2019/12/10430649-action-alert-tell-your-representative-to-reject-house-bill-calling-for-a-two-state-solution/
At least you have now revealed your true colours. I am done with you. It is the hatred for “the other” that you carry in your heart that means peace will never be achieved in ME while the current Israeli policies are enforced.
There is a wealth of historical, ethnographic and growing genetic evidence that says this is not so. Frankly Jay, if anyone is coming across like a bigot in this discussion, it’s you.
Jay @#29: “Omar begins his comment with a sly antisemitic greeting, as expected.”
Was that where I said to Roj: @#3 “Right on. My view is that the appropriate thing to have done was to give the Jews Bavaria, where Nazism really got going. No deserts there, either.” ?
If so, what is ‘antisemitic’ in that?
Otherwise, please explain.