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Jerusalem Embassy Opening Going Well

ConnorEl said:
A Grotesque Spectacle in Jerusalem

Quote (behind paywall)
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On Monday, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and other leading lights of the Trumpist right gathered in Israel to celebrate the relocation of the American Embassy to Jerusalem, a gesture widely seen as a slap in the face to Palestinians who envision East Jerusalem as their future capital.

The event was grotesque. It was a consummation of the cynical alliance between hawkish Jews and Zionist evangelicals who believe that the return of Jews to Israel will usher in the apocalypse and the return of Christ, after which Jews who don’t convert will burn forever.

Religions like “Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism” lead people “to an eternity of separation from God in Hell,” Robert Jeffress, a Dallas megachurch pastor, once said. He was chosen to give the opening prayer at the embassy ceremony. John Hagee, one of America’s most prominent end-times preachers, once said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their ancestral homeland. He gave the closing benediction.

This spectacle, geared toward Donald Trump’s Christian American base, coincided with a massacre about 40 miles away. Since March 30, there have been mass protests at the fence separating Gaza and Israel. Gazans, facing an escalating humanitarian crisis due in large part to an Israeli blockade, are demanding the right to return to homes in Israel that their families were forced from at Israeli’s founding. The demonstrators have been mostly but not entirely peaceful; Gazans have thrown rocks at Israeli soldiers and tried to fly flaming kites into Israel. The Israeli military has responded with live gunfire as well as rubber bullets and tear gas. In clashes on Monday, at least 58 Palestinians were killed and thousands wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The juxtaposition of images of dead and wounded Palestinians and Ivanka Trump smiling in Jerusalem like a Zionist Marie Antoinette tell us a lot about America’s relationship to Israel right now. It has never been closer, but within that closeness there are seeds of potential estrangement.

Defenders of Israel’s actions in Gaza will argue no country would allow a mob to charge its border. They will say that even if Hamas didn’t call the protests, it has thrown its support behind them. “The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas,” a White House spokesman, Raj Shah, said on Monday.

But even if you completely dismiss the Palestinian right of return — which I find harder to do now that Israel’s leadership has all but abandoned the possibility of a Palestinian state — it hardly excuses the Israeli military’s disproportionate violence. “What we’re seeing is that Israel has used, yet again, excessive and lethal force against protesters who do not pose an imminent threat,” Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, told me by phone from Jerusalem.

Much of the world condemned the killings in Gaza. Yet the United States, Israel’s most important patron, has given it a free hand to do with the Palestinians what it will. Indeed, by moving the embassy to Jerusalem in the first place, Trump sent the implicit message that the American government has given up any pretense of neutrality.

Reports of Israel’s gratitude to Trump abound. A square near the embassy is being renamed in his honor. Beitar Jerusalem, a soccer team whose fans are notorious for their racism, is now calling itself Beitar “Trump” Jerusalem. But if Israelis love Trump, many Americans — and certainly most American Jews — do not. The more Trumpism and Israel are intertwined, the more left-leaning Americans will grow alienated from Zionism.

Even before Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped open a partisan divide on Israel in American politics, where previously there had been stultifying unanimity. “Until these past few years, you’d never heard the word ‘occupation’ or ‘settlements’ or talk about Gaza,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, said of American politicians. But Ben-Ami told me that since 2015, when Netanyahu tried to undercut President Barack Obama with a controversial address to Congress opposing the Iran deal, Democrats have felt more emboldened. “That changed the calculus forever,” he told me.

The events of Monday may have changed it further, and things could get worse still. Tuesday is Nakba Day, when Palestinians commemorate their dispossession, and the protests at the fence are expected to be even larger. “People don’t feel like they can stay at home after loved ones and neighbors have been killed for peacefully protesting for their rights,” Abdulrahman Abunahel, a Gaza-based activist with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, told me via email.

Trump has empowered what’s worst in Israel, and as long as he is president, it may be that Israel can kill Palestinians, demolish their homes and appropriate their land with impunity. But some day, Trump will be gone. With hope for a two-state solution nearly dead, current trends suggest that a Jewish minority will come to rule over a largely disenfranchised Muslim majority in all the land under Israel’s control. A rising generation of Americans may see an apartheid state with a Trump Square in its capital and wonder why it’s supposed to be our friend.
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Trump has no soul or brains. Every death in Israel and Palestine is on his stupidity.
 
Liberals really don't like walls apparently.

If you come near the wall, we will shoot you. Pretty fucking straightforward. Great rule considering the threat of suicide bombers.
 
pinochadeac said:
Liberals really don't like walls apparently.

If you come near the wall, we will shoot you. Pretty fucking straightforward. Great rule considering the threat of suicide bombers.
Click to expand...

Won’t someone think of the poor wall!!!!!!
 
Highland Deac said:
But it's America's God-given mission to protect and support Israel at all costs, because Israel has to exist for Jeezus to return in the Rapture and call all fundies up into heaven. And then God will punish all non-fundie unbelievers and destroy the Anti-Christ's armies in a big battle in Israel. Of course, all those Jews will then have to go to hell too, because they're not Evangelical Christians, but the US of A has got to protect them in the meantime so all true believers can experience the joy of the Rapture. Or, at least that's what I was told by lots of Southern Baptists growing up.
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I prefer my all powerful God to not be limited by a dotted line drawn on a map, but that’s just me.
 
Not to mention that the God of Israel decimated his own people many times in the Old Testament for doing things their own way instead of being obedient.
 
I Helped Start the Gaza Protests. I Don’t Regret It.

Quote (behind paywall)
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RAFAH, Gaza — The seed that grew into Gaza’s Great Return March was planted Dec. 9, just a few days after President Trump announced he would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Palestinians long have held onto the dream of Jerusalem as our own capital, or at least as a shared capital in a country that offers equal rights to everyone. The feeling of betrayal and distress in Gaza was palpable. To clear my head, my friend Hasan and I took a walk along the border, which we do every now and again.

“There lies our land,” I said to Hasan, as I looked at the trees on the other side of the barbed-wire fence that confines us. “It’s just a few kilometers away from here.” And yet, because of that fence and the soldiers who guard it, it is so far away. Most people my age have never been permitted to leave Gaza, since Egypt controls the southern land exit and Israel restricts access to the north — as well as forbids use of our sea and airport (or at least what’s left of it after three wars).

That thought led to a wish expressed on Facebook. And it struck such a chord with people in Gaza that it set off a movement that culminated in the historic protests that have taken place over the last month. Tragically, Israel reacted even more brutally than I expected — and I’ve lived through three of its wars. The latest estimate of the number of protesters killed is 104; more than 50 died just on Monday. Thousands more have been injured. But our voices needed to be heard, and they have been.

My hatred of borders is both universal — in the sense that all Palestinians suffer from them — and very personal. My grandparents and their grandparents were born and raised in the town of Ramla, in the center of what is now Israel. On my walks, I imagined my family’s ancestral land.

But I also have experienced the destructive impact of borders more personally. I was born in 1984, two years after Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, dividing my city, Rafah, between Gaza and Egypt. The core of the city was razed by Israel and Egypt to create a buffer zone, separating families, including mine, with barbed wire. My mother’s family lived on the Egyptian side and Rafah’s division ended in the separation of my parents. Although my mother lived a stone’s throw away, it was 19 years before I saw her again.

On that day in December, as I watched the birds fly over the border I could not cross, I found myself thinking how much smarter birds and animals are than people; they harmonize with nature instead of erecting walls. Later that day, I wondered on Facebook what would happen if a man acted like a bird and crossed that fence. “Why would Israeli soldiers shoot at him as if he is committing a crime?” I wrote. My only thought was to reach the trees, sit there and then come back.

I couldn’t let go of that thought. A month later, I wrote another post. “Thank you, Israel, for opening our eyes. If the occupation opened the crossing points, and allowed people to live a normal life and created jobs for young people, we could wait for a few generations,” I wrote. “We are forced to choose between confrontations or between life.” I ended the post with the hashtag GreatReturnMarch.

Young people in Gaza reacted to my post immediately, sharing it and adding their own ideas. Just a week later, it seemed as if hundreds of people were talking about it. We established a youth committee and met with local agencies and institutions. We also met with the national political parties: We wanted to offer all sectors of society in Gaza the opportunity to be involved.

What has happened since we started the Great Return March is both what I hoped and expected — and not. It was not a surprise that Israel responded to our march with deadly violence. But I had not expected this level of cruelty. On the other hand, I was heartened by the commitment to nonviolence among most of my own people.

A couple of years ago, people here would have dismissed the idea that peaceful demonstrations could achieve anything significant. After all, every other form of resistance has produced nothing concrete. What amazes me is the transformation we are seeing in the way we resist. Our struggle previously was between armed Palestinian fighters and Israeli snipers, tanks and F-16s. Now, it is a struggle between the occupation and peaceful protesters — men and women, young and old.

The Great Return March reminds the world about the origin of the conflict — our uprooting from our lands and our lives, beginning in 1948 and sustained since then. We have chosen May 15 as the culmination of our protests because that is the day that Palestinians mark the “nakba,” the Arabic word for catastrophe, which is what we call the expulsions from our homes 70 years ago. Whatever solution we negotiate in the future to allow our two peoples to live together peacefully and equally must start with a recognition of this wrong.

Still, despite the response from Israeli snipers, I continue to be committed to nonviolence, as are all of the other people “coordinating” this march. I use quotation marks because when a movement becomes this large — attracting what we estimate to be as many as 200,000 people on Fridays — it cannot be completely controlled. We discouraged the burning of Israeli flags and the attachment of Molotov cocktails to kites. We want peaceful, equal coexistence to be our message.

We have also tried to discourage protesters from attempting to cross into Israel. However, we can’t stop them. It is the action of an imprisoned people yearning for freedom, one of the strongest motivations in human nature. Likewise, the people won’t go away on May 15. We are intent on continuing our struggle until Israel recognizes our right to return to our homes and land from which we were expelled.

Desperation fuels this new generation. We are not going back to our subhuman existence. We will keep knocking at the doors of international organizations and our Israeli jailers until we see concrete steps to end the blockade of Gaza.
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pinochadeac said:
Liberals really don't like walls apparently.

If you come near the wall, we will shoot you. Pretty fucking straightforward. Great rule considering the threat of suicide bombers.
Click to expand...

Because walls have really, really worked so well throughout history. The Berlin Wall was a massive propaganda defeat for the Communists, and came to symbolize their system's economic failures. The Great Wall of China didn't keep the Mongols out; they just went around the wall. Hadrian's Wall near the current Scottish border in Britain couldn't save the island from massive invasions of Germanic tribes from the South. Historically, walls provide a false sense of security that nearly always backfires in the end. Not to mention the hypocrisy of a nation of immigrants building a wall to keep out...immigrants.
 
Highland Deac said:
Because walls have really, really worked so well throughout history. The Berlin Wall was a massive propaganda defeat for the Communists, and came to symbolize their system's economic failures. The Great Wall of China didn't keep the Mongols out; they just went around the wall. Hadrian's Wall near the current Scottish border in Britain couldn't save the island from massive invasions of Germanic tribes from the South. Historically, walls provide a false sense of security that nearly always backfires in the end. Not to mention the hypocrisy of a nation of immigrants building a wall to keep out...immigrants.
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Hold on now, I saw a movie about the Great Wall and it worked great to keep all the crazed space alien monsters out of ancient china.
The_Great_Wall_%28film%29.png




Spoiler: do not watch this movie, it is terrible.
 
actually walls have worked pretty well with some notable exceptions that were unable to hold back things like "ideas".

i mean, a good stone wall will totally stymie some sheep for days, probably.
 
Who would have ever guessed the Tunnels Left was stocked to the brim with Hamas sympathizers???

Never expected that one...
 
So amazing that the Romans couldn't foresee that a wall across the land of the northern frontier wouldn't prevent invasions from sea. So advanced, yet so dumb.
 
well, it was technically to slow/stop the horse-back raiding by the celtic tribes

but yeah, hadrian was a beta-cuck
 
Hamas?

Seems appropriate to sympathize with oppressed, hurting, dying people.
 
I take it Fox News and the right wing media are contextualizing all these protests as a Hamas insurgency based upon the tweets and posts from our dear conservative friends.
 
WFFaithful said:
Not to mention that the God of Israel decimated his own people many times in the Old Testament for doing things their own way instead of being obedient.
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Unlike Evangelical Christians, millions of Jews don't see the OT as an historical document. They see it an allegorical period piece.
 
Colonel Angus said:
Who would have ever guessed the Tunnels Left was stocked to the brim with Hamas sympathizers???

Never expected that one...
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Not surprising that rabid RWers can't see texture or nuance. Those who aren't rabid RWers don't have be in lock-step with their extremist masters.
 
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