The proposed two-state solution would leave the state of Palestine completely surrounded by Israel, with tunnels connecting different sections.
Ah the Minneapolis Plan
can i be"cultural attaché"? (please put the finger quotes on the business card)
the twist is i don’t actually spy i just make them each bring a dish and get both sides wastttteesddd.
I’m not kidding at all. You think Israel is a monster, yet it is the Palestinians who have an official policy of terrorist child murder. Last year alone, they spent 512 million shekels paying the salaries of terrorists who killed Israelis, including children.
Curiously, I am the first to mention this here, amid a tsunami of anti-Israel vituperation.
You remember the 2nd Intifada? That was an official program, in broad daylight, of terrorist murder after the PA signed the Oslo Accords. Are you effing kidding me, indeed.
Welcome to all our brand new commenters in this thread. Good to see that a successor to the Megaphone is in working order.
Pro-tip: you’re not talking to a bunch of easily misled morons here. Israeli state propaganda just won’t fly here.
the overwhelming majority of the deaths are Palestinian, and have been for the almost 14 years since B’Tselem began tracking. Overall, the group has recorded 8,166 conflict-related deaths, of which 7,065 are Palestinian and 1,101 Israeli. That means 87 percent of deaths have been Palestinian and only 13 percent Israeli. Put another way, for every 15 people killed in the conflict, 13 are Palestinian and two are Israeli.
There must be some kind of weighting added to those numbers, as it feels like some of them count as more… 
Well then, let me be the first to say that both the Knesset and the PLC are bastards and that all states and borders should be abolished.
Funny how Jared’s take aligns with Bret Stephens in the NYTimes:
you can’t just count corpses
you have to measure the size of the headlines in the newspapers, and the placement on the page
the deaths that get more column-inches are clearly more important and tragic
I went back and re-read the entire thread and counted comments in a few broad (obviously subjective) buckets. I think “tsunami of vituperation” is a pretty big mischaracterization of the discussion. I did end up seeing something worth flagging, and I hope that if you see things that you think are hateful that you flag them as well. But the majority of comments are actually on topic (Kushner and this specific deal), a bunch are dumb jokes, and nearly 10% are you.
You certainly seem to have a minority opinion here, and there is bias working against you. What I don’t think is that the bias in question is people singling out of Israel because they can’t tell the difference between: 1) a democratic nation with leaders whose policies they dislike; and 2) people of Jewish faith and heritage living in all parts of the world. I know an inability to tell those things apart is a real problem that some people have.
The bias against Israel here is probably more along the lines of:
Except I’m sure it’s being done with the very explicit support of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf petrocracies. I would be shocked if their agreement had not been solicited.
Because you made a misstatement about the timeline of events.
And no, I was not referring to the Balfour Declaration, which did not to anything to justify the formation of the state of Israel. It merely marked the halfway point of the discussion among nations. What I am referring to is the international voting and approval for the Mandate for Palestine, which was begun at the Treaty of Paris, signed into intent by the major powers at the San Remo Conference, and officially made International law by unanimous vote of the League of Nations.
All of those things happened decades before WWII, so collective guilt about the Holocaust had little to do with the justification for including Israel in the Mandate, along with with at least half a dozen other new nations.
B’Tselem does a deplorable job of verification - they admit it themselves. Palestinian casualty numbers are a joke.
And even if we take their numbers as sound, what relevance does that have to the discussion? Israel has a right to defend itself from terrorists, and the PA Charter and explicit policy is that of terrorist murder.
Multiple independent observers are eyewitness to the tactics of the IDF, and they have testified that the IDF is the most ethical military force they have ever seen.
You are a very long way from correct.
It’s actually true.
Janes Defense Weekly does an annual review of most ethical armed services and a dance off.
Sooooo ethical.
Human Rights Watch, reporting on Israeli military abuse of Palestinians:
Israeli forces stationed on the Israeli side of the fences separating Gaza and Israel responded to demonstrations for Palestinian rights on the Gaza side with excessive lethal force. Between March 30 and November 19, security forces killed 189 Palestinian demonstrators, including 31 children and 3 medical workers, and wounded more than 5,800 with live fire. Demonstrators threw rocks and “Molotov cocktails,” used slingshots to hurl projectiles, and launched kites bearing incendiary materials, which caused significant property damage to nearby Israeli communities, and, in at least one instance, fired towards soldiers. Officers repeatedly fired on protesters who posed no imminent threat to life, pursuant to expansive open-fire orders from senior officials that contravene international human rights law standards. In May, the United Nations Human Rights Council set-up a commission of inquiry to investigate the events in Gaza, with a view to identifying those responsible, including in the chain of command, and ensuring accountability.
Your use of pedantry for the sake of defending Israel at all costs does you no credit. And I say this as an Israeli citizen.
You are also continuing to conflate the Mandate for Palestine with the formation of the state of Israel. The former was, indeed, the precursor for the latter. It was in no way, shape,or form a guarantee that the latter would come to pass. Simply put, there could not have been a recognition of the state of Israel when there was no such entity to be recognized.
This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
