linus wrote:


I don't think you need to invoke the Israel lobby beyond the fact that the Tories have got very very good at micro-targeting voting blocs and ridings. The Tories are quite capable of basing their foreign policy on whether it would get them 3-4 extra ridings.

The jewish population is actually slightly over 1%, and they are highly concentrated in a couple of ridings which were targeted by the Tories. I think it's an absolute certainty that the Jewish vote in York North and Eglinton North is the reason Ken Dryden and Joe Volpe are no longer MPs (the latter had some other issues, obviously, but the swing of the Jewish vote was certainly part of the story). I suspect it was a factor in the Tories winning Thornhill, too.

The more fundamental question is why is Canada's jewish community so much more hawkish on Israel than others (including the US). I don't know anyone that has a good answer for that.

As I see it the Palestinians now have the chance to proove that they can form a viable government and end the rocket fire. While the Palestinians are as split as they are now I can't see this happening and therefore I can't see the UN vote changing much. Maybe Gaza joining Egypt could be a start.

Also new Israeli settlements certainly won't help, but that goes without saying.

I wonder why Israel are never asked to prove they can form a viable government and end the occupation?

(the other blackly comic bit of all that bluster about the Palestinian govt having the wherewithal to stop crime of any sort - including rockets - is the fact that Israel persists in bombing its police stations and other instruments of this state/entity/whatever it is.)

AB2 wrote:


Sadly no players from the eight sides that qualified so no boycott of the tournament.

Platini was promoting the tournament with Peres this week. Scum.

To be fair, how many countries in the world could meet the criterion of not being rewarded for "actions that are contrary to sporting values?" Can the EPL, which generated much of these players' incomes, be said to not be dominated by "actions that are contrary to sporting values." Obviously that doesn't mean that the EPL is as bad as Israel but it's always dangerous to campaign on some basis of moral purity.

The sporting boycott of the apartheid regime in South Africa had an impact and so could one on Israel. This is not some pissing contest here. Of course every country has moments in their history and present policies they are not proud of but the current apartheid regime of Israel is at another level.

Well the sporting boycott on SA began in the early 70's and took 20 years to bear fruit. I think really it was that combined with the cultural, and increasingly during the 80's the economic boycotts which made a difference. The other key difference is that the South African government considered themselves to be part of the 'white, civilised world', and when that white civilised world started telling them they were barbaric, naturally this had an effect.

The Israeli government on the other hand, has shown time and again that it doesn't give a shit what the rest of the world thinks. Any criticism is brushed off as being 'anti-semetic', and as a result there's no reflection or questioning of their behaviour (at least not by anybody in power). So whilst I agree that a sporting boycott may be worth doing from a purely moral point of view, I don't think people should be under any illusion of it's prospects of success.

World Cup Qualifying- possible revised UEFA Group F

Team MP W D L GF GA Pts
Russia 3 3 0 0 4 0 9
Portugal 4 2 1 1 6 3 7
Northern Ireland 4 0 3 1 3 5 3
Azerbaijan 3 0 1 2 1 5 1
Luxembourg 2 0 1 1 2 3 1

Israel to Babylonish Captivity

So the UN voted to recognise Palestine as a state, 138 in favour of the plan,including from the EU Spain, France Cyprus, Portugal, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Malta, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and Greece with only nine against (basically the USA and the Czech Republic and Micronesia) and 41 abstentions.

In response Israel announces 3000 new settlements in the occupied territories and seizes Palestinian tax receipts

Haaretz tonight reports Britain and France may withdraw ambassadors

Clinton and Hague are enabling Israel; their "outrage" is meaningless if it isn't accompanied by some concrete action.

Hague is currently slapping a wrist...

ooh aah wrote:


The anti-apartheid boycotts were as crucial in mobilising external opposition as it was in changing white minds.

I think you are wrong that Israel doesn't give a shit about bad PR. On the contrary, I think Israel cares a lot. It's just that Israel doesn't need to adapt a thing until those who really matter change their opinions. Back they care; else they'd not have a massive propaganda machine in motion.

It's a myopic policy which will come back to bite them.

Well it was working for them, they've been ethnic cleansing and grabbing land in the West Bank for decades, only now did countries do something about it. France and the UK withdrawing their ambassadors is a pretty significative gesture, I wonder how far you have to go back for a precedent in France, maybe the de Gaule administration?

That's my point. Perhaps the bite is starting now, though I'm not terribly confident that the diplomatic measuresm, significant though they are, are a sign that the West is changing its course.

But the UN vote is a game-changer in one crucial respect: it has injected hope in people who previously had none. Any international pressure will add to that hope. Returning to the anti-apartheid struggle, it was fuelled by the idea that apardheid would eventually fall, by hope. International solidarity continually nourished that hope.

They care. They haven't given in. They aren't the same thing.

The BDS movement is really upsetting them hugely. Blimey, even Stevie Wonder cancelling an IDF fundraiser upsets them hugely.

This video is worth sharing with anyone you run into who doesn't really know what's going on. It's produced by the very excellent (US-based) Jewish Voices for Peace
972mag.com/watch-a-six-minute-primer-to-the-occupation/61289/

Adam Shatz in the LRB. I'm not as optimistic as Shatz, I have to say, but it's still a readable piece
www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n23/adam-shatz/why-israel-didnt-win

Google mapping apartheid: blog.thejerusalemfund.org/2012/12/google-mapping-apartheid.html

Interesting thread

A few pages back there were suggestions from a couple posters that moving 6 million people to a better place on earth, or allowing those of the 6 million people who wanted to move, to invite them somewhere better, would be anywhere near humane, is one of the most ... I don't find words for how much that is simplifying a gigantic tragedy. It's like telling a mother who has lost her teenager daughter to comfort herself with a MARS bar, times a few million.

Yes, one option is to move to a safer place, if you can, but does that make you feel better? My father fled communist Yugoslavia in the 1960's. Not a day has gone by when he didn't long back to his native part of the world. He has been in deep depression because even though he helped a lot of the family to make it to "a better part of the world", there was always family left which was still living back there, in misery.
Yes, you can help a family, a mother, a father, son and daughter to move to "a better part of the world", but that father has a brother left behind, that mother has a father left behind, those children have cousins, aunts and a whole tree of relatives left behind.
So we help them to move as well?
Well, they also have relatives who will be left behind.
So we move all 6 million?
They don't want to move! That's sort of, kind of, like, the reason why they fire rockets. They've been there for more generations over time than USA as a country has existed.
They want to stay there, but without being fucked with. You can ask a Somali, a Palestinian, an Afghan, an Albanian or a Tutsi whether he wants to live in the "promised" lands of USA, UK or Sweden and I bet you, I bet that 9 out of 10 will answer that they'd rather live in their native country if only it was a safe place to live in. They would rather grow herbs and sell them at the local market, cattle stock and milk them, in their native country, than work at the Volvo factory i a far-away country and earn enough excess money to be able to buy a second plasma screen to be installed in the bedroom.

If one of the primary solutions to come up with is to allow people to move to a safer place it is only a great testament to the greatest failure of humankind, of this era.
People don't want to move to a safer place. They want where generations of their family has lived to be a safe place. People don't want to emigrate, they want the soil where their great grandmothers and great grandfathers, to be where they can have their children to grow up. They want their children, not only to inherit the house they've inherited from their own parent, but for it to be passed on to their children in turn.

The Palestine-Israel conflict is the most written about and most widely known about in the world. At least in the western world. But let's say we move 6 million Palestinians, what about all the other around the world living unsafe? I mean, it's not like Israel-Palestine is the only one in the world. It's only that we don't hear about the rest because media isn't very interested in those topics.
Shall we start to move the muslim population of southern Thailand?
Natives who ar being treated like shite in North and South America?
So many minority groups in African nations I don't know where to begin?
Former Soviet territories now nations with loads of minority groups?
Roma (or gypsies as you know them by the derogatory), shall we take a part of Australia and make it their country?

There's fucking billions of us on this earth, most of us normal, and the core issue is that we can bloody get all excited and make Facebook work, the founder to become a billionair, but we can't solve a conflict between people who don't really want one. Jews don't want to war against Palestinians, it's Israel who is at war against a people who want to stay at home, in their home. There's a huge difference.
If the founder of Facebook declared that Muslims and gay people are not welcome the thing would die a slow death, well deserved if so. But we can't kill the killing of innocent people around the world? That's where the insanity of it all lies. There's a core problem. It's not strictly related to Hamas or ISrael.

And ad hoc, thank you for your posts on here. Always great reads on this topic.