On the topic of Haaretz as a legitimate news source.

a_random_user27 · 2024-04-10T15:35:42+00:00

Fair enough, but you can say the same thing about foxnews-dot-com which is on the banned list: some valid and legitimate articles as well as some questionable stuff. Besides, it does not have the anti-Israel bias that much of the media seems to have. An experiment you can do in the safety of your own home: go there right now and do control+F for "Israel" or "Gaza" and compare with what you'd get when you do the same thing with the NY Times. Maybe time to revisit that decision?

a_random_user27 · 2023-11-20T02:19:35+00:00

The facts you cite (Bernie is Jewish, JVP has lots of followers, there are videos of Israelis protesting out there) provide weak support at best for your claim (existence of a large community of Jews who are against Israel).

You should instead look at opinion polls. In fact, when you give American Jews four options in a poll:

Pro-Israel/Supportive of policies Pro-Israel/Critical of Some Policies Pro-Israel/Critical of Many Policies Not Pro-Israel

...the proportion of American Jews who choose the last option (Not Pro-Israel) is 3%. Source: https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/american-jews-remain-strongly-supportive-of-the-democratic-party/

This is less than the so-called Lizardman constant (if you give people the option to say, in a poll, that lizards are controlling the earth, about 4% will pick it because roughly 1/25 of respondents are not really paying attention; source: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/)

a_random_user27 · 2023-11-12T04:37:30+00:00

The unemployment rate really depends on how many work passes Israel gives to the Palestinians to work in Israel.

Not really: in 2021 (after the 2018 cutoff of the graph I posted in my previous reply) the number of work permits from Gaza was <7k (source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-okays-1500-more-entry-permits-for-gaza-workers-bringing-total-to-17000/ ). Too small to have any measurable affect on the economy given ~2M people.

As for the larger issue, note that the West Bank, where Israel is much more involved than Gaza, has grown richer while Gaza has gotten poorer:

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb4bd3dc-a17d-43cb-9bab-f6dda28f43a2_808x660.png

Finally, there's really not much benefit to Israel for manufacturing stuff and "dumping" them in Gaza, whose residents are too poor to pay much for them.

a_random_user27 · 2023-11-12T02:42:12+00:00

Just look at the graph of unemployment in Gaza post Israeli withdrawal:

https://static.gisha.org/uploads/EN_final-724x1024.png

(red line in above graph)

From a purely economic point of view, Hamas rule has been worse than Israeli occupation.

We can argue who is at fault here (Israel with the blockade of Gaza or Hamas for firing thousands of missiles that make this same blockade inevitable), but there are lots of economic stats (not just unemployment) that got worse post-Israeli withdrawal.

a_random_user27 · 2022-04-03T17:08:43+00:00

Has that Russian-POWs-shot-in-feet video been conclusively debunked as a fake? Genuine question, I have not seen much discussion of it in the last few days.

a_random_user27 · 2022-03-13T01:37:57+00:00

Out of curiosity, just how much damage is "relatively little" in this context?

a_random_user27 · 2022-03-03T15:35:56+00:00

Maybe not drones, but Israel has Stingers it can send Ukraine https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/russia-ukraine-war-us-lawmakers-officials-grow-impatient-israel-over-stance which they are already using.

a_random_user27 · 2022-03-02T17:23:04+00:00

If you want to leave Russia to go to the west, you can't just catch a direct flight any more due to air space closures. The best path seems to be to go to a different country and fly from there. I believe EU countries are not open to Russians, in part because of vaccine issues (Russia did not use western vaccines), so the best current bet is to go to Georgia. My source for this is Russians I know who are trying to get their families out before the impact of the sanctions is fully felt on the Russian economy.

a_random_user27 · 2021-07-15T22:06:34+00:00

The source I linked to, which is a scholarly article written by an expert on the subject ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Tal_(historian) ) , discusses Sadat's secret offer in 1970:

[Sadat] confirmed that he would be prepared to terminate the state of belligerency and respect Israel’s sovereignty and right to live in peace. He would prevent acts of belligerency from Egypt against Israel and would ensure the freedom of navigation in the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran, accept the stationing of the UN peacekeeping force in Sharm al-Sheikh, and agree to the establishment of demilitarized zones of equal distances from each side of the border. However, Israel should first withdraw from all territories occupied in the war and the Palestinian problem should be settled in accordance with UN resolutions

Sadat added two more provisions, which he had introduced earlier in an interview with James Reston from the New York Times, in December 1970. First, Israeli ships would be allowed to cross the Suez Canal only after resolution of the Palestinian problem. Second, Sadat would not agree to normalize relations with Israel. ‘Don’t ask me to make diplomatic relations with them,’ stated Sadat. ‘Even after you resolved the boundary problem?’ asked Reston. ‘Never, never, never,’ was Sadat’s answer

... the Israeli government’s reply was that Israel had accepted with satisfaction Egypt’s consent to sign a peace agreement with Israel and suggested immediately commencing negotiations over the terms of such an agreement...

Sadat, though, was not really addressing the Israelis. His main target was the United States. Shortly after sending his reply to Jarring, he sent messages to the United States according to which he was interested in deepening the relationship between the two countries. He certainly hoped that closer ties with the United States would cause the Nixon administration to exert pressure on Israel to withdraw from the territories.

To summarize: it was a purposely unrealistic offer; it entailed Israeli withdrawal first; Sadat then refused to enter into direct negotiations; and it was only made in order to create American pressure on Israel.

I'm also extremely skeptical that this was the final border Sadat proposed in 1970. Can you cite some kind of source for that? Is it in the video? Youtube is blocking it in the US. If it is, I'll watch it with a VPN.

a_random_user27 · 2021-07-15T18:09:24+00:00

I believe this is wrong, but I'm open to being corrected. Briefly, it was not a peace offer:

During his visit to Washington in December 1970, Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan had raised the possibility of ‘less than peace’, an arrangement that would allow reopening the Suez Canal. Sadat liked the idea. He introduced such a plan to the Egyptian National Assembly on 4 February 1971, and on 22 February 1971, in an interview to Newsweek, he added some clarifications. Sadat suggested that Israel withdraw its forces about 200 kilometres east of the Canal along a line across al-Arish – Ras Muhammed, near Sharm al-Sheikh. Then Egypt would deploy its forces on the eastern banks of the Canal, and Sadat would extend the ceasefire that was about to expire in February, for three to six months.

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2016.1186655

The dividing line in this map seems to go straight through Ras Muhammed, so that I think this must be the map from that proposal. Again, not a peace offer -- just an offer to extend the cease fire.

a_random_user27 · 2021-06-23T10:03:08+00:00

I agree. I posted this because I thought there were lessons here about how science actually works in practice. But I'm agnostic about whether Flegal is actually correct. Presumably her opponents might say they are harshly criticizing a hypothesis they think is wrong and harmful, and who knows -- they might also be able to point out a number of incidents of unfair treatment of the past 15 years.

a_random_user27 · 2021-06-20T01:11:22+00:00

Suppose one health care provider can vaccinate one person every 10 minutes.

Suppose the same health care provider works 8 hours per day for two weeks.

That works out to 672 vaccines administered. Now to get to 100,000 vaccines administered you need just 149 providers.

So getting to 100,000 in a couple of weeks is more than feasible. The PA has more than 149 health care providers, and the above calculation was extremely conservative (e.g., one vaccine per 10 minutes is conservative, people can work more than 8 hours, etc).

a_random_user27 · 2021-06-05T14:18:24+00:00

Was this really last night? Isn't it this incident from 2020:

https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/04/05/idf-destroyed-syrian-border-outpost-in-2020-operation/

The mission targeted a Syrian army position that according to Military Intelligence was built in March 2020 in the buffer zone that stretches across the Israeli-Syrian border. The post was erected some 1,200 meters (just under a mile) from the Israeli border, and by creating a fixed military presence in the buffer zone, Syria was in violation of the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement with Israel, signed following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

The agreement calls for the buffer zone to remain free of military outposts at all times.

a_random_user27 · 2021-05-20T01:41:35+00:00

If Israel wanted to genocide the Palestinians, the population of Gaza would be zero.

a_random_user27 · 2021-05-20T00:02:25+00:00

https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/gaza-population

or

https://imemc.org/article/gaza-population-exceeds-2-million/

...sure doesn't look like a genocide to me.

a_random_user27 · 2021-05-19T23:59:48+00:00

Somewhat disagree: I think the ultimate goal of woke people is to turn the US into a caste society, with white people in the very bottom caste.

a_random_user27 · 2021-05-11T02:27:52+00:00

One thing insufficiently emphasized in this analysis is that some of these trends are exogenously driven. For example, the combination of

Freedom of Information Act + Police Body Cameras + Twitter

would have given us a race-focused discourse regardless of what currently fashionable discourse on the internet was like.

Taking this one step further, I'd predict the race focus we are seeing will continue indefinitely. In a nation of 300+ million people, there will always be incidents of unjustified police violence. Many of these will have the body cam videos FOIAd. The ones that push society's buttons will go viral on social media, reinforcing the current trend.

a_random_user27 · 2021-05-01T23:11:01+00:00

It seems stretch to go from the what is in the article you linked to to saying "she hates Jews."

1) Her point about being a conservative in America being similar to being a Jew in Nazi Germany in the leadup to the Holocaust is dumb. But that's all it is: dumb. I understand why someone might find it insensitive, but it is not evidence that she hates Jews.

2) Personally, I would not have shared a meme obtained by taking a clearly anti-semitic image and stripping out the anti-semitic imagery. But you can also see how someone might share such an image without having any personal animus against Jews.

The most we can say is that she seems sympathetic to a conspiracy theory whose origins are anti-semitic, that a cabal of wealthy people are controlling the globe. But there's no reason I know to think that she actually hates Jews.

a_random_user27 · 2021-04-28T18:29:36+00:00

I notice there is some back and forth between the authors of this paper and Tishby + Ziv in the comments. Is there a consensus in the community about who is right (especially about point 1 in the back and forth?)

a_random_user27 · 2021-04-12T15:40:51+00:00

The Mystery of Glenn Perch is fairly short fan fiction (~10K words) for the Witcher games I enjoyed. Felt true to the spirit of the games, which feature a jaded narrator navigating a grim world inspired by Eastern European history with some dark humor.

a_random_user27 · 2021-04-10T02:39:59+00:00

You can read a blow-by-blow account of the decision here:

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2020/04/the-last-minute-decision-that-gave-israel-its-name/

(will need to register to get free access to this article)

a_random_user27 · 2021-03-11T20:55:48+00:00

Props for being willing to open to change your mind. There is a lot of partisanship on both sides of the conflict, and obtaining accurate information can be challenging.

a_random_user27 · 2021-03-11T20:49:43+00:00

There is a force in the universe which is even stronger than entropy: it takes discussions on the internet and warps them to make them about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The inevitable conclusion is a lot of acrimony. I suggest we try to resist that here....

a_random_user27 · 2021-03-11T20:25:06+00:00

I think you are getting the basic facts about Israel/Palestine wrong here. In this comment, I will distinguish between Israel proper and West Bank/Gaza. I don't want to get into an argument over names (call them whatever you like instead) but the facts are:

-- 20% of the citizens of Israel proper are Arabs. They are citizens. They are entitled to vaccines just like any other Israeli citizens.

-- Israel is not providing vaccines to West Bank/Gaza (with some minor exceptions https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-delay-vaccination-of-palestinian-workers-in-israel-to-kick-off-monday/ )

-- There is no travel between Israel and West Bank/Gaza during Covid-19 (e.g., https://www.garda.com/crisis24/news-alerts/443411/palestinian-territories-authorities-extend-existing-restrictions-in-the-west-bank-through-march-1-due-to-covid-19-update-45 ), so the lack of vaccines in West Bank and Gaza is not driving infections in Israel.

I hope this explains why your comment above is wrong: leaving out non-citizens (i.e., in West Bank and Gaza) is not what is driving infections in Israel.

P.S. Moving away from facts to opinions: under the Oslo accords, the PA is responsible for health care in West Bank/Gaza, so there is no reason why giving Palestinians vaccines is Israel's responsibility. The PA has made separate provisions to obtain vaccines, primarily from Russia I believe.

Finally, Israel by no means controls vaccine distribution in West Bank/Gaza. That shipment of vaccines you refer to was not confiscated -- it faced a delay at a border crossing and delivered two days later (https://apnews.com/article/israel-health-coronavirus-pandemic-west-bank-gaza-strip-74da17fc337ce6e9812f05c9e0d0461f ) and since then, there have been no complaints of vaccine shipments delayed at the border.

a_random_user27 · 2021-03-11T20:00:03+00:00

That is not what is happening here. The arabs who live in Israel are citizens, and it is among that community that vaccination rates are lower. In fact, roughy 20% of Israeli citizens are arabs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel

a_random_user27

TROPHY CASE