The AfD in Germany scheduled their party conference in Weimar, Thuringia to take place exactly 100 years to the day after a famous Nazi rally in... Weimar, Thuringia...
half of Europe is on the verge of shifting to parties with nostalgia for 20th century fascism and the Trump admin declared it a foreign policy goal to help bring them to power.
My observation was that more democracy in the Middle East is not what Israel or the US is interested in, given that the people's choice there would be overwhelmingly against Israeli and US interests.
They replaced the last democratic choice in Egypt with another military dictator, they keep the widely unpopular autocrat in Jordan on his throne with military and intelligence subsidies, have established and propped up a network of autocratic Gulf states that toe the line...
So yeah, I would not be surprised that Israel and the US would be more than happy to but a scion of the previous Iranian autocratic dynasty back on the throne there.
Interesting point on Israel pushing for the monarchy to come back.
Democracy in the middle-east does not result in Israel or US aligned governments, but the monarchies have proven more interested in preserving their autocratic dynasties and quite easy and eager to work with Israel and the US to preserve themselves.
About a third of American Jews now agree that Israel is an apartheid state and committing genocide against Palestinians.
It remains to be seen what impact this will have, but it will certainly impact the ability for everyone to claim that criticism of Israel and sympathy for Palestinians is motivated by antisemitism.
The democrats lost the last election in part because of their stance on Israel.
With a bit of luck this could lead to a shift in policy within a generation.
So we agree that the first move in this conflict was a 20th century European nationalist group setting up a new state by force in the middle of an inhabited nation? With the blessing of the colonial power in charge.
Doesn't defend what happened to Jewish people in Egypt and Lebanon, but certainly puts some context around it.
As for the depopulation of Jews from Yemen and Iraq, that was Israeli policy and they managed it by themselves.
>Ben-Gurion, along with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the second President of Israel), argued in a 1918 booklet (written in Yiddish) that the Arab peasants of Palestine were not descendants of the Arab conquests, but rather the "remnant of the ancient Hebrew agriculturalists".
If you'd rather modern science, then there are genetic studies out of Israeli universities leading weight to this hypothesis (they tend to not get much attention among modern zionists as you can imagine). It's also the general consensus among historians of the region, inside and outside Israel. It's not really a contested position amongst academic historians.
>I love how you turned the elimination of hundreds of religions and ethnic groups into some beautiful cultural influence.
It was not always a clean process, varied a lot by century and location, but on the whole did not involve ethnic cleansing or massacres of ethnicities. The percentages of Arabs you quote above are, again, people who started calling themselves Arabs after cultural shifts, and not, as you seem to believe, a result of mass migration of ethnic Arabs from the Arabian peninsula to replace the local populations.
I don't think we have much else to exchange in good faith on this topic, so I'll leave you here.
Cultural Arabs and Ethnic Arabs are not the same thing.
Ethnic Arabs are from the Arabian peninsula. Islam's expansion started a slow process of Arabization whereby indigenous people in lands that ended up under the control of the Muslim caliphate/empire started speaking Arabic (mixed with their local dialects) and adopting aspects of Arabic culture, not dissimilar to the previous process of Romanization and Hellenization from the Greeks and Romans.
TL;DR People who today call themselves Palestinians are biological descendants of ancient Jews and other peoples local to the region of Palestine who eventually converted to Christianity and/or Islam, some remained Jewish, started speaking Arabic, and never left the land.
That's what genetic studies and history converge on, and what the early zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion also happened to believe in (Ben-Gurion wrote a thesis on this subject), until it became inconvenient for Zionism to continue to do so.
Israel being an ethnic supremacist state for more than the last 20 years [0], on a determined mission to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from their ancestral land [1], this comment unintentionally makes Iran sound like the good guys in this story. (I do not support any form of theocracy).
"Here is 10 petabytes of signals intelligences, you can run queries, give me the hierarchy of my enemy, the house address of anyone within 3 degrees of separation of their leadership or weapons industry, the next house address they're likely to be at if trying to flee my strikes, and the time they're all most likely to be there. Then schedule drone strikes on the houses."
No they don't. Israel is a state with discrimination against non-Jews baked into its laws, with a couple of clever facades that don't stand up to basic scrutiny.
>Christian percentage went from 10% to 1% in Palestine.
And the decades of ethnic cleansing by Israel against Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, has nothing to do with this? How come those communities were there for millennia and started disappearing? What major event in the last 100 years in the region of Palestine led to the flight of Palestinian Christians?
>Christian Palestinians who are citizens of Israel suffer from the same widespread official and unofficial discrimination that other non-Jews do, in everything from land ownership and housing to employment and family reunification rights. [1]
Building those weapons requires foreign imports. An embargo would stop that.
Rich doesn't mean much if you're under international financial sanctions and can't use your assets.
>You'd just get another Iran.
The sanctions have crippled Iran making it a much less powerful and influential version of what it would have been without sanctions. And by the looks of it is now on the verge of collapse. So I guess this kinda reinforces the point that Western sanctions on Israel would be effective?
Yes, like Russia and Iran, the fanatics in charge could continue in their direction for years, but they would be much less potent and the reaction of their population (who largely have dual nationalities and have extensive business and family ties abroad) may end up forcing a change in direction from the state policy of slow genocide and gradual ethnic cleansing of their indigenous population.
Do you want to comment on the point where the IDF presumably realised what happened and decided to (physically) bury the evidence, and then gaslight the world until video evidence emerged?
I think you're being a bit too forgiving to what's become a clear documented pattern of behaviour during this genocide [1]
This is so disingenuous, the poster clearly has no clue what he's talking about.
Local Christian communities have been living amongst Muslims there for centuries and continue to do so under Israeli occupation. About 25% of the population that calls themselves Palestinian are Christians, and are treated the same as Muslims by Israel, that is as second class citizens at best inside the Green Line and targets for ethnic cleansing outside of it.
Scores of foreign Christians and Jews go stay in Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank to provide some amount of protection to the Palestinian Muslims and Christians there. They are encouraged and welcome to come stay among them by Palestinians.
A Cuba style embargo on Israel until they stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population would be the end of the current direction of the Israeli establishment.
Look at the size of the country, the natural resources and where they are positioned.
They are dependent on Western imports for pretty much everything, and only export technology that Europe and the US can easily replace with domestic or other foreign sources.