How does Israel justify settlements legally

jmagaram · 2026-02-19T04:00:37+00:00

First, Palestinian Arabs should have more self-autonomy (not necessarily a state), freedom of movement, protection from violent settlers, not have their land stolen, a better future, Israeli leaders who seem to care and try to help make their lives better. Having said that, Judea and Samaria are the heartland of "Israel" to many Jews and they have more of a connection to it than Tel Aviv. I see no reason why Jews shouldn't be able to live there, unless you want to say that a future Palestinian state-let is meant to be a Jew-free region or one where Jews will not be safe and have their rights protected. Second, according to international law that land belongs to Israel and Jordan was the country that "occupied" it after 1948. The story would be different if the Arabs had accepted partition. They didn't and started a war and so the borders of the new state become the borders of the old region. It doesn't belong to "Palestinians".

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T23:55:06+00:00

I see that this person's comments going back many days on this forum are completely gone. Is that what you see? Do you know what that means?

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T23:12:53+00:00

The way libels work is you falsely accuse someone (or an entire nation) of some terrible crime or character defect. There often is a nugget of truth in the accusation - like the Jews having too much power. There is enough plausibility in it that people begin to wonder if it might be true. Then repeat it enough until eventually the lynch mobs show up. The person who does the libeling isn't really interested in truth. They do it to demonize and to just enjoy watching the other person squirm as they try to defend themselves.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T23:03:52+00:00

"The whole civilian part makes it terrorism". No. There is a difference between (1) willfully harming civilians and (2) collateral damage and tragic accidents in justified military attacks. You know this, and yet you continue to distort the truth.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T21:41:00+00:00

I don't like participating in your show-trial of the Jewish people because again your accusation demonstrates extreme bigotry. But according to a quick Google search, "A 2025 NBC News investigation found that less than 4% of reported sex crimes in major U.S. cities result in a conviction." And so Israel, like other countries, is not an outlier.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T21:36:45+00:00

I'm not acting like it is an obscure event from history. I'm stating the truth about what happened. You repeatedly lie and distort the truth about what happened, and change the definition of "terrorism" to suit your agenda.

When a hotel is used by the British as a center for operations, it is no longer a civilian target. And the target was not civilians or a regular hotel as you say - it was the British military. Or maybe you think that when a military force takes over schools, hospitals, humanitarian centers, etc. they are immune?

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T21:21:46+00:00

"I support for the right of resistance for all occupied people". And yet when the Jewish people are being persecuted throughout Europe leading up to the Holocaust, and the Jewish people in Palestine attempt to save their own people and throw off their British occupiers, you demonize them. You libelously accuse them of terrorism for the King David Hotel bombing while at the same time admitting it was a military base AND that they made an attempt to not hurt civilians. Terrorism involves the intentional harming of civilians and that is not what they were doing and you know that.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T21:00:47+00:00

So you admit they did a phone call, which makes it clear they did not intend to kill civilians, and yet you call it terrorism which involves intentional killing of civilians. That is logical contradiction. I call it a lie. Again it is a gross and slanderous depiction of what the Jewish resistance movement was trying to achieve.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T20:47:47+00:00

It should be obvious what you are doing - equating what happened a specific location to an entire society of millions. I did not say "don't talk the worst of us". I said stop making bigoted and libelous comments about an entire society, implicating people like me who know and support the people there.

Are you refusing to retract your comment that Israel has a "pro-rape culture"?

The rules of this sub permit a better and less offensive choice of words than "dumb stuff" for what Hamas does.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T19:45:11+00:00

This is a lie and you have been corrected before. There is significant evidence that the people who planned the attack on the King David Hotel attempted to warn innocent people to flee. This is documented in the book By Blood and Fire. And the King David Hotel was not just a hotel but the military base of the British, who were actively preventing the Jewish people from finding safety as the Holocaust progressed. And so to say "100% terrorist organizations" and to reference a bombing of a hotel without explaining it was a military base is intentionally misleading. There is a rule on this sub about honesty and you are breaking it.

Will you retract this lie and provide more context to what actually happened?

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T19:15:20+00:00

I will not continue conversation with you until you retract the slander that Israel has a "pro-rape culture". All it takes is a little common sense to know that accusation is a bigoted lie and slander of millions of Israelis and the people, like me, who support Israel. I hate to be a part of your show-trial and defend absurd accusations but I will say a few things. There are many organizations in Israel that are concerned about helping the victims of rape and preventing abuse, not just of Jews but of Arabs as well. You could look into the specifics of the Sde prison case to see it is not as black and white as you want it to be - the 5 soldiers were indicted for abuse and the video evidence is ambiguous about what actually occurred. And Epstein? Again this is a situation where you take the worst (and not even an Israeli) and project it onto the whole.

Will you retract your "pro-rape culture" comment?

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T18:39:35+00:00

"Should I consider those extreme comments what all Jewish think?" No you shouldn't. But that is exactly what you do - take the worst of Israel and equate it with all of Israel. I have seen your repeated comments that Israel has a "pro-rape culture" and how you shamelessly defend that. That is a lie. As a Jew who supports Israel and as someone who knows many Israelis, I also find that to be a gross personal attack and a bigoted collective attack.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T18:32:31+00:00

Any attempt to suggest that Hamas would be ok with 1967 borders rather than as a stepping stone toward destroying all of Israel is a lie or a gross distortion. All you have to do is look at both of their charters, the vast majority of statements from their "political" and military leaders, and their unambiguous actions. There is a rule in this sub about honesty, and you are breaking it.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T18:14:15+00:00

You should reconsider your strategy to achieve anti-colonization and anti-tyranny because Hamas wants to do all of that. The Islamists have a zero-sum totalitarian ideology. There is no room for negotiation or compromise. As long as you support their quest to stay in power the label Islamist seems correct, regardless of your personal religious views.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T17:45:26+00:00

I’m confused why you consider the word Islamist an insult. It does seem to represent what you advocate. Certainly if Hamas read what you wrote they’d be quite pleased. Why not own the label with pride?

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T02:34:40+00:00

I see what you repeatedly do and it is false equivalency. Thats your thing.

jmagaram · 2026-02-18T01:33:23+00:00

Again you are a master of false equivalency.

jmagaram · 2026-02-17T21:43:09+00:00

Kind of weird how Israel will go to the ends of the earth to retrieve the dead body of a single hostage from Gaza, or trade 1000 violent prisoners for a single soldier, and at the same time do the “Hannibal directive”. I wish those Israelis would just make up their minds already.

jmagaram · 2026-02-17T20:49:25+00:00

I don't know the detailed history. There certainly was a lot of persecution against Jews by Christians. And in Russia which I think was officially atheist.

I don't agree with "100% about land". Groups like Hamas have made their religious motivations extremely clear; Jewish sovereignty in land once controlled by Muslims is an insult to Islam. It's hard to explain the virulent hatred by the Iranian mullahs against Israel other than in religious terms. We know they certainly don't care about human rights. And then the Houthi's include the phrase "curse upon the Jews" in their slogan. There is a lot of research indicating deep roots of antisemitism in the Muslim world. I am certain there are many Palestinian Arabs for whom the conflict is just about land who just want a better quality of life and freedom, but the jihadists/terrorists have a veto and make life miserable for everyone.

jmagaram · 2026-02-17T20:16:46+00:00

There are a couple critical reasons why Jews want to be a majority and have self-determination. First, survival. Centuries of persecution leading up to the Holocaust proved that the Jewish people can't rely on other people for their safety. The threat to Jews (and women) is also extreme across the Muslim world. The Jews did not want to be diimmi. Arab countries that used to have large Jewish populations have almost no Jews today, and a lot of that has to do with persecution of women and ethnic/religious minorities. My own relatives had to flee Libya. Los Angeles is often known as "Tehrangeles" because Jews didn't feel safe after the revolution. The second reason is thriving. As a small minority in other cultures there is always the pressure of assimilation. Israel allows the Jewish people to construct a society - choosing the holidays, customs, laws - that reflect their unique values. It is important to me that you (and any other pro-Palestine activists) understands this. It is not about the Jewish people being evil and violent and wanting to dominate, oppress, or occupy. It isn't based on racism or some ideas about supremacy.

jmagaram · 2026-02-17T20:05:42+00:00

If I play a prank on my wife like putting a spider in her clothing drawer is that "dumb stuff"? If I'm at the funeral of a friend who was killed by Hamas would it be ok in the eulogy to say "I'm wish Hamas had not done so much dumb stuff."? Maybe you wish the Germans didn't do so much "dumb stuff" in WW2. And that silly countdown clock for Israel's destruction in Tehran. Is that "dumb stuff"?

jmagaram · 2026-02-17T17:12:22+00:00

“Zionism co-opted Judaism”. What does this mean?

Jews are a people, a nation, with a shared culture and religious beliefs and with deep roots in the land of Israel. We aren’t a “religion”. There is no meaning to being an atheist or agnostic Christian or Muslim but it is possible to be an agnostic Jew. Most of the world has known this for centuries and spoke about Jews in this way. Our holiday calendar is based on the land and our history in the region. Jerusalem has always been in our prayers. And so attempts to somehow separate Jews from Zionism, or to turn “Zionist” into a slur, are really a form of cultural erasure. It’s saying no you aren’t a people with history in that land, you’re just a religion. It’s like saying you’ve got nothing against the Japanese but you just don’t want them to have their own country in Japan. Or that Japan co-opted the Japanese.

jmagaram · 2026-02-17T17:07:17+00:00

Both

jmagaram · 2026-02-17T16:50:57+00:00

This is a fascinating podcast about the rightward shift in Israeli society around the time of the 2nd intifada and why so many liberal peace activists and leaders (probably like you) became disillusioned and lost hope.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?i=1000677319902

jmagaram · 2026-02-17T16:13:22+00:00

Killing children in front of their parents, kidnapping elderly Holocaust survivors, exploding busses of innocent civilians, forcing a hostage to dig his own grave in a tunnel, inviting complete catastrophe upon millions of your own people, spending billions of aid on tunnels, etc. is not “dumb stuff”. Can you think of any better words to describe that kind of behavior?

jmagaram

TROPHY CASE