[Middle East] US embassy in Israel to be moved from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem

The fundamental barrier to resolution of this conflict is the inability for people to recognize that there is aggression on both sides that needs to stop.

 

Israel is a party to treaties that at least commit it to easing hostilities and allowing one to be created -- it was a condition for example in the Camp David Accords. It just ignores having to adhere to these promises because of "security issues" -- "issues" that are unlikely to ever change. This is why the more outspokenly hardline for full annexation are in some ways more humane, in that they at least would end the status quo and permit the right to vote to all those Palestinians currently in legal limbo (at least the Moshe Arens wing). It's preferable to forcing Palestinians to live under military occupation in perpetuity. It's also not said often enough that neither Egypt or Jordan ever want the ungovernable Gaza / West Bank back.

 

To be fair to Palestinians, it's rooted in pretty ordinary nationalist aspirations, that were later co-opted by Islamists, largely because the Marxist-Lenninist anti-Colonial flavor of resistance wasn't terribly effective, and also because Israeli and American intelligence services helped Islamist groups to weaken what were the main opposition at the time. In the PLO, the leadership was traditionally irreligious and Christians were once an important part of the coalition. They would have never been BFFs with the Soviet Union and groups like the Red Army Faction back in the 70s if this were not so.

It was the 80s when everything changed. If you follow the genesis of suicide in Islam, it was the post-revolution Iranians that first declared that "volunteers" who walked across Iraqi minefields to open up entries for the army wouldn't burn in hell, and were in fact martyrs. Their fellow travellers in shiite revolution in Hizbollah started suicide bombing their Israeli and Christian military enemies in Lebanon, and it was Hamas (who filled the gap when Israel weakened the PLO in Gaza) that started declaring that suicide bombing civilians wasn't haram for the same reason. Now everyone is doing it.

This is a phenomenon that began within our lifetimes, and were all a reaction to being on the losing end of several unrelated conflicts. IMHO, had Palestinians been able to get their state when Egypt got Sinnai back, suicide bombings and Hamas would have never been a thing, but Israel was neither prepared to offer a reasonable concession and the PLO was not prepared to accept one, as the majority of constituents of either would not have accepted it.

I don't know what your experience is in Berlin, but most Palestinians I knew in the US or Israel/West Bank were generally secular enough to drink beer.

All politics is local.

 

The anger and fear on both sides results in the political capital getting owned by those who benefit from it continuing. They would lose support if they suggested compromise, just like political parties in the US or UK or anywhere else. There's a reason why leaders that advocate publicly for peace and reconciliation tend to get shot by their own people. We are all a bunch of warlike apes that are subject to groupthink and cognitive dissonance. It's a fallacy to presume that Israelis or Palestinians are somehow fundamentally different from any of the rest of us.

 

My point was that "international law" has no authority whatsoever and as such it cannot determine who has the "right" to do anything. You might as well be citing "man laws"

 

So according to you, a country can rightly take control of a disputed territory by force in contravention of prior international agreements over that territory, and further their right to do this is “not debatable”.

This is not a serious position, sorry. It is, at the very least, debatable.

 

That's not what I said, we're not talking about a disputed territory because no country other than Israel is claiming that territory. If another country, like Jordan for example, was disputing Israel's claim to that land by suggesting that it should still be theirs....well then you could debate it.

As it is today, there's only one country claiming sovereignty over that land so it's not disputed.

 

The agreement was and has been that this territory would be split between an eventual Jewish state and an eventual Palestinian state. Just because Israel reached statehood first (via unilateral declaration), that doesn’t give it the right to just take all of the territory for itself, particularly when a precondition for Palestinian statehood, demanded by Israel and the US, has long been a negotiated agreement over the status of said territories.

To now argue “well they aren’t a state so we can just take it” completely violates the original agreement. This has been established over and over by the UN Security Council. Now, if you want to somehow disagree with that because of your fringe political philosophy, fine. But don’t act like it isn’t even debatable. It just makes you look silly.

 

That was the plan back in 1948.....and then things changed in 1967, when you attack your neighbors, sometimes you end up losing things you once had and you render any agreements you once had invalid. If Jordan wanted to keep east Jerusalem, they shouldn't have attacked Israel and lost.....and then renounced their territorial claim over the land later.

So like I said, there's no country claiming that territory other than Israel, so it's not disputed territory.

 

No [major] country has officially recognized a Palestinian state for the same reason they don't officially acknowledge J"lm as the capital of Israel -- because those things are considered TBD by future negotiation, and they want to maintain at least some appearance of impartiality and respect for both parties.

I'll give you that Trump didn't destroy the peace process that was ostensibly supposed to determine those things, it was more like he pissed on the corpse, but we can see from the world's reaction why diplomats prefer to stay couched in their carefully scripted positions.

 

A Palestinian state isn't recognized because one doesn't exist. That said, if one did exist, then the acts of hostility from that state would be cause to declare war and seize more territory to act as a buffer between the 2 nations. So in many ways, it would be a bad thing for the Palestinians if they had a country of their own for the first time in history.

As to Jerusalem, it was not up for negotiation, and making that clear is a good thing so that everyone can be on the same page when it comes to peace talks. You won't get anywhere when one party comes to the table with ridiculous delusions.

 

Couldn’t agree more except for the Beer part , my brother in late 90s made a bunch of friends who were regulars at a strip-club near sharpstown/59 ,they were members of hezboallh

Miles Copeland a former CIA agent had written an interesting book over his relation with military coup in ME ,Jamal Nasser in particular and the creation of anti-West movements to push the British away from the region

I don’t see religions as obstacles , I have spent significant time of training at the Jewish Hospital in Montreal, I met those folks who are like me on steroids religiously so they would chose me over any female staff, I have a friend who is Stanford graduate who takes his infants child’s to the Côte des nieges Sat. synagogue even if it’s beyond freezing ,but we occasionally would go with our kids to the nearby park on Sunday ,probably the weirdest thing i wasn’t expecting it ...is when I came home after a trip in a taxi , twice happened , a neighbour Jewish kid asked to help me carry my suitcases to the front door , so on personal levels, I view them positively, but geopolitics is something else

 

The Palestinian Authority does exist, and an agreement was made to to begin the transition to a state after issues like Jerusalem, the settlements, and the Right of Return were negotiated first before a state can be created.

That's the Gene Simmons position...but the whole Oslo process that was agreed upon was to solve all these issues before declaring statehood so a war wouldn't break out

Jerusalem was specifically up for negotiation. It was the main thing up for negotiation. It was one of the conditions of the agreement.

But Oslo and the two-state solution are today largely a political fiction that everyone has pretended to care about since Rabin died, despite neither Palestinians or Israelis honoring it, though to be fair, largely because Hamas and Likud never had any intentions of humoring it's mandates. Likud-led Knessets have acted unilaterally since to make partition of Jerusalem as difficult as possible, building a light rail system (that no one asked for) that specifically stops in areas that would ostensibly be part of a future Palestinian state, allowing seizure of homes in East Jerusalem by Jewish squatters, and revoking the residency rights of Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem.

That Trump did this is not a big deal in the sense that no one needs to pretend any longer that the US is impartial (they never were) or that that Oslo was ever anything but dead and buried. It does however mean that other parties will be doing the negotiating in the future, maybe the one that just stopped a war in Syria and then actually pulled their troops out and went home, and it means the legitimacy of the US funded and backed Palestinian Authority is being called into question, and that's not to mention the backlash, particularly in Muslim majority states.

Trump doesn't care about that stuff, but he knows it makes his base happy, and you are clearly happy about it. By all means, enjoy this brave new world.

 

I don't doubt that story, but Hizbollah doesn't own a brewery, or bars. Ramallah is secular enough to have booked me for shows in bars where plenty of mixed-sex drinking was going on. Palestinians, in my experience, are often as secular as their Israeli counterparts, even if they were less cordial about me talking to their women.

 

and since that agreement you had the second intifada which changed things. Some things that might have been on the table in 1993 are no longer on the table anymore as the Palestinians constantly prove that they can't behave themselves and prove that they have no real interest in peace. I imagine if the Palestinians don't get their act together and they continue to support terrorism and continue to attack Israel the deal will get even worse in the future.

 

Yes, We have every right to act arrogantly and ignore decades of precedence set by previous administrations. Who cares about destabilizing the Mideast or increase national security threat in the US, MAGA.

 

This is going to be a very, very expensive move by our resident budget hawks under the "librul tears" line item.

 

So, what exactly is the point of doing this?

 

Ask Chuck Schumer, who was part of the unanimous senate vote on the topic over the summer. 90-0. Schumer said "“I am proud to sponsor this resolution, which reaffirms the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 that states Jerusalem should remain an undivided city and Israel’s capital – in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are celebrated, valued and protected,” he said.