Is Economic Superiority Due to Cultural Superiority?

Post Reply New Topic

Rubbish, rubbish and more rubbish.

I take it the land rights claims are being settled by giving back to the natives 100% of North America?
I hope you are planning on demolishing the last few centuries worth of city building and leaving the land as pristine as when you found it?
All people of European descent are going to leave?

No?

That is what I thought.

The Bedouin roam the Negev desert which has been part of Israel since it was founded. The Israeli government has had a campaign of social engineering certainly, they built towns with access to modern services like clean water and education for the Bedouin in to live in but many still roam around. The Israeli government has already negotiated and allocated land for the bedouin to grow crops on but many keep ignoring it and just grow where ever they want.

The chemical in use was roundup, the same stuff you can buy in the shops for killing weeds in your garden. The court rulings only objection was that the chemical was being sprayed from the air and there was no guidance from Monsanto as to the safety of this method of application because the officially approved method is spraying from a ground vehicle. The court specifically said the ruling could not be used to assert any claim of ownership over the land.

Shooting people in the back of the head is ethnic cleansing, paying to build towns with infrastructure for people to live in is not ethnic cleansing and the Geneva convention only applies at times of war, not to a country internally enforcing it's laws.

A huge amount of mistruth from you in that post do you actually believe the lies you wrote, or were you just making stuff up to make the argument look good?

Strawman strawman strawman.

Did someone call my name?

Last edited by JakobVirgil on 03 Aug 2012, 1:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is not a rebuttal. It's just ... "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" with your fingers in your ears.



Obviously that is not practical because there has been so much settlement (which would never be permitted today, at least not by civilized nations abiding by the rule of law), so they are giving cash settlements instead. Why? Because it was recognized as having been ....

ILLEGAL

Where it is practical to do so, however, land claims settlements have resulted in title to land and mineral rights being restored, so this has indeed happened. Many times.



The Bedouin ruled it independantly for about 1000 years prior to the Ottomans and British, who never really adminstered it in any sense, and left the Bedoiun to manage it as they had done for centuries, without interference. The Bedouin never surrendered, never signed a peace treaty, never ceded their land, and it wasn't unoccupied.



Yes, they need food. Israel forces them to live in one spot, then allocates a few crumbs of land which are not sufficient to sustain the population (deliberately, so as to drive them out, as per the ethnic cleansing policy evidenced by practices - although Israel is hardly alone in doing so, Egypt practices the same against the Bedouin).

Need I remind that Israel's entire legitimacy is founded on a "claim of ancestry"? If claims of ancestry aren't valid, then Israel isn't valid.

Moreover, the other reason Israel exists, is because the nations which were home to Jews passed laws to strip them of property and even life, and they realized they needed a state to protect themselves against nations making these sorts of laws designed to conduct genocide and ethnic cleansing against them. (But I guess you're ok with the Holocaust, since it was all quite legal by the laws of Germany at the time, and your argument seems to be that all law is valid no matter what).

They aren't the only ones who need protection from the type of vicious, morally degenerate nationalists who think it is ok to do anything to anyone as long as you write yourself a note.



I'll let wikipedia explain this one.

Ethnic cleansing is not to be confused with genocide. These terms are not synonymous, yet the academic discourse considers both as existing in a spectrum of assaults on nations or religio-ethnic groups. Ethnic cleansing is similar to forced deportation or population transfer whereas genocide is the intentional murder of part or all of a particular ethnic, religious, or national group.[4] The idea in ethnic cleansing is "to get people to move, and the means used to this end range from the legal to the semi-legal

So ... under the correct definition, you would seem to be an enthusiastic supporter of ethnic cleansing.

So have we established yet that the Negev desert is in fact inside the state of Israel?
Have we also established that the legitimate nation state of Israel did in fact build towns with modern facilities for the Bedouin?

Have we also established that the legitimate nation state of Israel did in fact allocate land for the Bedouin to grow crops on as well?
The allocation was hardly 'a few crumbs' of land, it was 10% of the Negev, a huge area of land and easily large enough to feed many times number of people that are recognised Bedouin if they decided to adopt farming methods.

Fair point about the ethnic cleansing vs genocide, however it is still utterly absurd to describe Israel's actions in this case as 'ethnic cleansing', it is urbanisation. If moving people from rural poverty to towns with modern wonders like a sewage system and running water is ethnic cleansing then every nation on earth is guilty of ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale over the last sixty years. Many billions of people have been ethnically cleansed the poor dears.

Yes, all in the same manner that apartheid was practiced through the system of Bantustans. Of course that was all perfectly legal, according to the laws of the legitimate nation-state of South Africa at the time, so I'm sure you applaud them for apartheid, too.



Negev is a desert. Nothing grows on most of the land, at all. The amount of arable land in the Negev is practically nil, except where irrigation is provided or rivers exist. It is only possible to grow crops in specific areas, and the Israelis have taken the best land, and naturally enough, left the Bedouin with the worst 10% of land, in a desert. and told them they can farm there instead. In their own homeland.



Forcing people into Bantustan reserves that cannot provide enough food or housing for the inhabitants is not "urbanization", it's an attempt to get them to leave (or slowly die out), ie ethnic cleansing.

It's one thing to argue about security policies vis a vis the Palestinians - there is at least the argument that the Palestinians haven't shown they can govern themselves and politically volatile and unstable. But the Bedoiun are a different matter altogether. They ran their homelands for centuries, and continued to do so before Israel under the Ottomans and British. They do not conduct any widespread terror campaigns against the people who have invaded their land and forced them on to reservations - they just keep trying to live, keep trying to grow food and find places to build (illegal) housing because there isn't enough in the designated Bantustans.

Are you intending to do this in every post?

Decide to compare the current actions of the Israeli government in clearing illegal crop plantings to every morally questionable action in history?

Where are we going next, conquistadors or holocaust?



Try looking at two things you seem to be missing from your myopic view of Israel's history.

Number one Kibbutz.
Number two the Jewish National Fund.

Jews were in Palestine a long time before the founding of Israel, they purchased their land, including in the Negev and through lots of hard work improved the land, created lots of oases and planted lots of forests.

If Jews can irrigate the desert in a couple of decades, why can't the Bedouin do the same in centuries?



How very ironic that you try to paint the Bedouin as some great pacifists when the only reason that the Israeli government was spraying crops from the air was because they were repeatedly attacked by the Bedouin when they were trying to do it by tractor.

If you look at the history of Jewish settlements before Israel existed you will find that many of them had stockade walls to protect the Jews who had legally purchased land from violence and theft carried out by the Bedouin. Oddly enough the traditional way of life for the Bedouin over the centuries is pretty heavy on the violence and theft, raiding of towns and isolated settlements being a normal thing to do.

I'm not some great ardent supporter of Israel and I do consider the events surrounding it's founding to involve rather a lot of ethnic cleansing and genocide but this is a complete non issue, you would be treated far more harshly in Britain if you decided to start carrying out illegal development.

Nope ... just calling it what it is.

South Africa and Israel had a special relationship during the apartheid era actually ... Israel was helping SA to develop nuclear weapons and vice-versa. Birds of a feather, I guess.


Correct. They recognized the Bedouin system of land title before Israel, enough to buy land. So did the British and Ottomans. But when Israel was created, they confiscated it and decided that their title was illegitimate.



Why should they? It's their land ... they can do what they want with it, live how they want on it.



Yeah? I'll come take your food out of your kid's mouth, we'll see how much of a pacifist you are then.



Britain would never arbitrarily sweep aside land titles that it had recognized as legally legitimate enough to buy. It is a country that abides by the rule of law.

The Israeli claim is illegal - or, conversely, the land they purchased from the Bedouin before Israel is illegal too. You can't have it both ways. Either you recognize the system or you don't.

It's called the "Just World Fallacy", a time honored right-wing bias, and a very repugnant one at that.

Precisely. Also I find my mention of the Nazis quite appropriate and no, I didn't compare Republicans to Nazis, I merely said that they tend to worship the bullies and hate those who are bullied. Thus, I'm sure quite a few of them would root for the Nazis as Auschwitz.

Arbeit macht frei, as they liked to enscribe over the gates to their death camps. They did, of course, see their victims as lazy bums and justified their behaviour with this conceptualization (as can readily be seen if one views some of the propaganda films such as Der ewige Jude.)

The left wing pinko stinko defenders of Stalin's outrages committed the very same fallacy.

ruveyn

The Bedouin have never 'ruled' Palestine, they have always been a nomadic people that never formed a nation state and never had the western concepts of land titles and property rights, much like the North American Indians.



It is not their land, any more than Britain belongs to gypsies who have also been here for centuries and have been wandering the land during that time.

Gypsies wondered the land before the state seized large amounts of private land during the 20th century, they wondered the land before the state enacted the enclosure acts to drive the poor into the cities.

This does not mean that gypsies in Britain have the right to set up camp on any land they choose because 500 years ago it was common land and one of their ancestors took a dump there once.



How many Bedouin are starving to death?

Can you show me reports of any widespread famine deliberately inflicted on the Bedouin by the Israeli government?

No? In that case you are being a tad over-dramatic.



It can and it does.
The enclosure acts did just that.
The seizure of vast tracts of private land for 'the war effort' did just that.
The planning system means that just because you own a piece of land does not mean you can do whatever you want with it. Just like zoning laws in the US.

Oddly enough Canada also does this are you going to give 'all the land that drains into the Hudson Bay' back to the Hudson Bay Company?
Are you going give back tens of thousands of acres of land back to the descendants of the Canada Company?

If you don't I declare your nation state as illegitimate and I have the right to do whatever I damn please in your country.



You seem to be taking the position that the nation state of Israel is illegal in your eyes therefore anything the nation state does is also illegal.

Completely wrong. They ruled it as a sovereign peoples until the Ottomans, for about 1000 years.

Under Ottoman and British rule, they obviously weren't sovereign, but they were autonomous and had self-rule. The British and Ottomans left all management of their territory up to them. Self-rule is, of course, rule - whether or not it's sovereign.



It is their land as much as Britain is the land of the British.

It's a desert. This does not seem to penetrate your thinking. They are not squatters or vagabonds - in the desert, a vast range was necessary to support a group, because no single location afforded enough resources to do so.



So Israel behaves like a medieval warlord or empire from the colonial era, lacking centuries of moral development. These comparisons are quite valid in that context, it is doing just that with land confiscations, illegal settlements on occupied territory, salting the earth, attacking harvests, restricting movement, etc.



You repeatedly fail to comprehend the difference between a sale and a robbery - you seem to think that all property transfers are the same thing, whether willingly sold, or taken by force, does not seem to register as a difference with you. HBC sold that land to the Canadian government. Why would we give it back to HBC? What was illegitimate about buying it, with money, from a willing seller?



No ... I am saying they should manage the area as the British and Ottomans before them did. If they bought title to land from the Bedoiun before Israel, then they recognize the legitimacy of the Bedouin system of land ownership, and cannot legally confiscate it from private individuals or groups (that has nothing to do with whether they claim state sovereignty of the area or not). Or, they don't recognize it ... in which case all the land that was purchased beforehand should be confiscated by the state too. As I said before ... you can't have it both ways. Legal principles must be universally applied, blindly.

The Bedouin never constituted a nation state in the modern sense of the term.

ruveyn

No one did, 1000 years ago.

And groups organized into nation-states cannot be the only ones who deserve rights - or Israel's foundation wasn't legitimate, since they weren't a nation-state before that, and therefore did not have any right to form one (following that logic). Either one recognizes the right of self-determination or one does not ....

I don't the Bedoiun even want to become a nation-state; I expect they'd be perfectly happy with a limited sort of home rule/self-rule, as they enjoyed under the Ottomans and British.

Is that a criterion for anything?