U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the United States and its allies should not support a cease-fire or peace talks to end the war in Ukraine until Kyiv gains strength and can negotiate on its own terms. Blinken said in Finland on Friday that heeding calls from Russia and others for negotiations now would result in a false “Potemkin peace” that wouldn’t secure Ukraine’s sovereignty and or enhance European security. He argued that a cease-fire allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin “to consolidate control over the territory he has seized, and rest, rearm, and re-attack" would not bring "a just and lasting peace.” Kyiv has given confusing signals about whether a counteroffensive is coming or already underway.
“We believe the prerequisite for meaningful diplomacy and real peace is a stronger Ukraine, capable of deterring and defending against any future aggression,” Blinken said in a speech in Finland, which recently became NATO’s newest member and shares a long border with Russia.
Have you ever been there? Do you know what apartheid actually means? Every single Palestinian without citizenship doesn’t have it only because they refused. And furthermore, in 2005 Israel actually forced its own citizens out of the Gaza strip, whole family’s dislocated at gunpoint by their own government. And when the Palestinians moved in, the terrorists among them tore down the infrastructure and somehow convinced their brethren that the Israelis were to blame. Israel is not the one who’s indiscriminately shooting rockets from hospitals and schoolyards. Israel is not the one encouraging citizens to enter houses of worship and go on killing sprees. Israel is not the one who is encouraging and applauding suicide bombers attacking bus stops and pizza shops. Israel is the one who is sending out texts and dropping leaflets warning people to get out of buildings that they suspect are housing military equipment used to attack them before bombing said buildings. It is easily within Israel’s capability set to kill every last Palestinian and I imagine just about any other country put through what Israel’s been put through would be a lot more aggressive. They aren’t always in the right. There are things they have done wrong. But an apartheid state they are not.
Forgot to mention, the terrorists in charge of the Gaza strip also diverted equipment meant to be used for construction and instead chose to use it to dig tunnels to get through to Israel to carry out attacks and kidnappings.
I’m sorry, how do you think YOU would behave if your homeland were colonized? You’d just politely ask the colonizers to leave until they felt bad enough for you to listen? Not everything Palestinians do to fight back is good or justified, but they’re clearly the victims in this scenario.
To be clear, Israel is not a unique evil. The US and China are at least as bad. But Israel is not magically exempt from criticism, nor is it remotely comparable to Ukraine.
Israel are not colonizers though. Israel is one of the indigenous people finally returning to their homeland. You can say they should share and I agree but the immediate attempt at their annihilation right when they were established definitely indicated that many of their neighbors were not keen on sharing nicely. It’s awful that the children in Gaza are suffering but the blame for that lies with the terrorists who use those children as human shields, tore down the infrastructure, and diverted construction materials meant for humanitarian aid to be used to enable further terrorist attacks, not the country that forced it’s own citizens out and left a fully functioning set of infrastructure for the new inhabitants.
Edit- I was hoping to get away from Reddit culture of disagree=downvote and was looking forward to productive respectful discussions here. So far it seems not to be working out but maybe we can still turn it around
If white Americans today went back to Europe and forcibly displaced the people living there, they would be colonizers. It doesn’t matter that they can trace their lineage back to that location. The idea that blood links you to land is nonsense.
Jesus Christ, how much Israeli propaganda have you been drinking? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but even assuming that’s all true, whose fault is it that people there needed humanitarian aid in the first place? Try reading sources on Palestinians that don’t have a pro-Israel agenda sometime.
My instance disables downvotes, so I can neither downvote you nor see your negative score, but good. I’m glad you’re getting downvoted. That’s exactly what uncritically regurgitated propaganda deserves.
How much Palestinian propaganda have you been reading? Americans weren’t forcibly expelled to begin with and even if they were they haven’t been actively demonstrably yearning and attempting to return ever since so the analogy fails on two counts. A third count as well actually because Americans haven’t had bigotry, prosecution, and murder sprees and mobs and pogroms constantly plaguing them everywhere they’ve been since they left europe.
Regarding the downvotes- good to know although ironically you are the person who would uld be least wrong to downvote me. You’re at least articulating what you disagree with than giving a cowardly anonymous thumbs down like those who have been downvoting.
Why does any of that matter? Why does any of that make it okay to displace the people who currently live in a place? It’s their homeland, too. They have at least as much a right to it as Israelis.
Shit, I’m for landback for indigenous Americans, and even I don’t think non-indigenous people should be kicked off the land they currently live on and relocated. And Native Americans have a much more recent claim to American land than Israelis do to Palestine.
Why does the fact that Jews have not been safe in any society on the planet in the past 2000 years matter? Why does it matter that they were forced off the land? Why does it matter that this bothered us and we’ve been demonstrably hoping and trying to return for the past two millenia? Because if any of those weren’t true I might cede that in some capacity we gave lost our claim to it. However the fact remains that we were forcibly dispossessed of our land and have a right to go back. Of course not at the expense of entirely uprooting those who moved in after us but enough that they and we really should share the land nicely.
If I could ask my own question in return I’d ask why recency of claim matters more than any of the factors I mentioned above. And for the record I agree that native Americans should have far more land rights than they do today. But at the very least they can dwell in a portion of their homeland without the leaders of the rest of those who reside who openly calling for their complete removal and/or extermination and that’s more than can be said for today’s Jews in Israel.
And none of that matters even one single iota to a Palestinian child who’s just been shot in the chest. Go ahead, go up to a grieving Palestinian family and tell them, “Well, I’m oppressed too.” So what? So fucking what? Having been displaced and oppressed doesn’t magically make it okay for you to turn around and do the same thing to others.
I don’t have a problem with Jews living in Palestine if they don’t displace the Palestinians. But that’s exactly what they’re doing. Jews, like anyone else, should be free to live absolutely anywhere on Earth without fear. But they have no right to inflict terror on others. No amount of oppression could possibly justify that.
As for why recency of claim matters, I don’t think it’s necessarily that important, but I was making a point. However, you could make the argument in the case of Native Americans that they’re still quite tied to the lands they live(d) on and often care for those lands in a way colonizers don’t, and therefore their presence is important for environmental reasons. You can’t really make the same argument for Jews and Israel.
Hahaha, what? Native Americans don’t have anyone calling for their extermination? They’re literally still subject to a genocide, like many racial minorities in the US. They were involuntarily sterilized up until the 1970s, and they’re still treated brutally by the government (and especially police).
child sexual abuse
I literally heard a speech in person from a Native man who was taken to a residential school and repeatedly sexual assaulted until he was suicidal while his age was still in single digits. There are people alive today who have experienced this stuff.
Nor do any of those points matter to innocents stabbed to death in a synagogue or blown up trying to buy some pizza. The issue is that Israel tried just existing but literally the day it was established it was attacked in an extermination attempts by literally every country surrounding it. Being oppressed doesn’t make it ok to turn around and oppress others but being under a constant state of siege does make it ok to take actions to ensure your safety as well as that of your citizens. Would you say that literal thousands of rocket attacks, hundreds of suicide bombings, bouts of stabbings, bouts of shootings, and more in addition to at least 3 military actions jointly taken by surrounding nations doesn’t count as a state of siege? If not what does?
regarding recency, we absolutely can make the argument of environmental importance to the land. See what twain wrote of it in our absence. Even now there is a literal green line separating land under our control vs under palestinian control. And I can tell you the green is definitely not on the palestinian side.
And I never said nobody is calling for native americans to be exterminated (although I do believe that it is true that there is nobody around today so bold as to outright say their continued existence here is intolerable in the literal sense that they should be rounded up and killed if they don’t leave and the dissolution of reservations is an absolute condition of their policy that they refuse to revise in any way despite the government of the gaza strip saying just that about israel) I said america’s leaders are not calling for their complete removal or extermination which is currently has been so for a while (~20 years) albeit not nearly as long as it should have been(~200 yrs).
Have you ever been there? Do you know what apartheid actually means? Every single Palestinian without citizenship doesn’t have it only because they refused. And furthermore, in 2005 Israel actually forced its own citizens out of the Gaza strip, whole family’s dislocated at gunpoint by their own government. And when the Palestinians moved in, the terrorists among them tore down the infrastructure and somehow convinced their brethren that the Israelis were to blame. Israel is not the one who’s indiscriminately shooting rockets from hospitals and schoolyards. Israel is not the one encouraging citizens to enter houses of worship and go on killing sprees. Israel is not the one who is encouraging and applauding suicide bombers attacking bus stops and pizza shops. Israel is the one who is sending out texts and dropping leaflets warning people to get out of buildings that they suspect are housing military equipment used to attack them before bombing said buildings. It is easily within Israel’s capability set to kill every last Palestinian and I imagine just about any other country put through what Israel’s been put through would be a lot more aggressive. They aren’t always in the right. There are things they have done wrong. But an apartheid state they are not.
Forgot to mention, the terrorists in charge of the Gaza strip also diverted equipment meant to be used for construction and instead chose to use it to dig tunnels to get through to Israel to carry out attacks and kidnappings.
I’m sorry, how do you think YOU would behave if your homeland were colonized? You’d just politely ask the colonizers to leave until they felt bad enough for you to listen? Not everything Palestinians do to fight back is good or justified, but they’re clearly the victims in this scenario.
Half of children in Gaza are suicidal. HALF. 60% self-harm, and 80% are depressed. Are you cool with that? Because that is directly Israel’s doing.
To be clear, Israel is not a unique evil. The US and China are at least as bad. But Israel is not magically exempt from criticism, nor is it remotely comparable to Ukraine.
Israel are not colonizers though. Israel is one of the indigenous people finally returning to their homeland. You can say they should share and I agree but the immediate attempt at their annihilation right when they were established definitely indicated that many of their neighbors were not keen on sharing nicely. It’s awful that the children in Gaza are suffering but the blame for that lies with the terrorists who use those children as human shields, tore down the infrastructure, and diverted construction materials meant for humanitarian aid to be used to enable further terrorist attacks, not the country that forced it’s own citizens out and left a fully functioning set of infrastructure for the new inhabitants.
Edit- I was hoping to get away from Reddit culture of disagree=downvote and was looking forward to productive respectful discussions here. So far it seems not to be working out but maybe we can still turn it around
If white Americans today went back to Europe and forcibly displaced the people living there, they would be colonizers. It doesn’t matter that they can trace their lineage back to that location. The idea that blood links you to land is nonsense.
Jesus Christ, how much Israeli propaganda have you been drinking? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but even assuming that’s all true, whose fault is it that people there needed humanitarian aid in the first place? Try reading sources on Palestinians that don’t have a pro-Israel agenda sometime.
My instance disables downvotes, so I can neither downvote you nor see your negative score, but good. I’m glad you’re getting downvoted. That’s exactly what uncritically regurgitated propaganda deserves.
How much Palestinian propaganda have you been reading? Americans weren’t forcibly expelled to begin with and even if they were they haven’t been actively demonstrably yearning and attempting to return ever since so the analogy fails on two counts. A third count as well actually because Americans haven’t had bigotry, prosecution, and murder sprees and mobs and pogroms constantly plaguing them everywhere they’ve been since they left europe.
Regarding the downvotes- good to know although ironically you are the person who would uld be least wrong to downvote me. You’re at least articulating what you disagree with than giving a cowardly anonymous thumbs down like those who have been downvoting.
Why does any of that matter? Why does any of that make it okay to displace the people who currently live in a place? It’s their homeland, too. They have at least as much a right to it as Israelis.
Shit, I’m for landback for indigenous Americans, and even I don’t think non-indigenous people should be kicked off the land they currently live on and relocated. And Native Americans have a much more recent claim to American land than Israelis do to Palestine.
Why does the fact that Jews have not been safe in any society on the planet in the past 2000 years matter? Why does it matter that they were forced off the land? Why does it matter that this bothered us and we’ve been demonstrably hoping and trying to return for the past two millenia? Because if any of those weren’t true I might cede that in some capacity we gave lost our claim to it. However the fact remains that we were forcibly dispossessed of our land and have a right to go back. Of course not at the expense of entirely uprooting those who moved in after us but enough that they and we really should share the land nicely.
If I could ask my own question in return I’d ask why recency of claim matters more than any of the factors I mentioned above. And for the record I agree that native Americans should have far more land rights than they do today. But at the very least they can dwell in a portion of their homeland without the leaders of the rest of those who reside who openly calling for their complete removal and/or extermination and that’s more than can be said for today’s Jews in Israel.
And none of that matters even one single iota to a Palestinian child who’s just been shot in the chest. Go ahead, go up to a grieving Palestinian family and tell them, “Well, I’m oppressed too.” So what? So fucking what? Having been displaced and oppressed doesn’t magically make it okay for you to turn around and do the same thing to others.
I don’t have a problem with Jews living in Palestine if they don’t displace the Palestinians. But that’s exactly what they’re doing. Jews, like anyone else, should be free to live absolutely anywhere on Earth without fear. But they have no right to inflict terror on others. No amount of oppression could possibly justify that.
As for why recency of claim matters, I don’t think it’s necessarily that important, but I was making a point. However, you could make the argument in the case of Native Americans that they’re still quite tied to the lands they live(d) on and often care for those lands in a way colonizers don’t, and therefore their presence is important for environmental reasons. You can’t really make the same argument for Jews and Israel.
Hahaha, what? Native Americans don’t have anyone calling for their extermination? They’re literally still subject to a genocide, like many racial minorities in the US. They were involuntarily sterilized up until the 1970s, and they’re still treated brutally by the government (and especially police).
child sexual abuse
I literally heard a speech in person from a Native man who was taken to a residential school and repeatedly sexual assaulted until he was suicidal while his age was still in single digits. There are people alive today who have experienced this stuff.
Nor do any of those points matter to innocents stabbed to death in a synagogue or blown up trying to buy some pizza. The issue is that Israel tried just existing but literally the day it was established it was attacked in an extermination attempts by literally every country surrounding it. Being oppressed doesn’t make it ok to turn around and oppress others but being under a constant state of siege does make it ok to take actions to ensure your safety as well as that of your citizens. Would you say that literal thousands of rocket attacks, hundreds of suicide bombings, bouts of stabbings, bouts of shootings, and more in addition to at least 3 military actions jointly taken by surrounding nations doesn’t count as a state of siege? If not what does?
regarding recency, we absolutely can make the argument of environmental importance to the land. See what twain wrote of it in our absence. Even now there is a literal green line separating land under our control vs under palestinian control. And I can tell you the green is definitely not on the palestinian side.
And I never said nobody is calling for native americans to be exterminated (although I do believe that it is true that there is nobody around today so bold as to outright say their continued existence here is intolerable in the literal sense that they should be rounded up and killed if they don’t leave and the dissolution of reservations is an absolute condition of their policy that they refuse to revise in any way despite the government of the gaza strip saying just that about israel) I said america’s leaders are not calling for their complete removal or extermination which is currently has been so for a while (~20 years) albeit not nearly as long as it should have been(~200 yrs).
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Downvoted for being off topic and thread derailing.
Fair enough. I appreciate the critique.