UC Berkeley Offers Class in Erasing Jews From Israel, Destroying Jewish State | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

Related Post Roulette

99 Responses

  1. Kolohe says:

    It would be nice if their links to primary sources would have actually worked.Report

  2. Road Scholar says:

    Conservative Nationalism is the explanation for Fermi’s Paradox.Report

  3. DensityDuck says:

    It’s okay, I’m sure that I’ll be assured that he’s in no way representative of anything at all, unlike that Republican candidate for the Wyoming state senate who said something about abortion one time.Report

  4. LeeEsq says:

    I posted this a while ago but it is still relevant. The Social Justice movement like past incarnations of Left have always had a weird relationship with the Jews. They appeal to us to help their cause because of our past but they also want the Jews to be white enough not to have our own form of justice. Its acceptable for Jews to fight for other groups but not our own. The Right has similar issues regarding the Jews but expresses it differently. They want to use us against the more activist minority communities, if the Jews can achieve without government help why can’t you, but still keep us at a distance.Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    This is just a weird thing that happened at Berkley. It shouldn’t be held up as an example of anything else going on in the country.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

      What might it be held up as an example of?Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to Kazzy says:

        Part of a growing and dangerous trend. See also my above leak, evidence of the long troubled history that the Far Left has with Jews.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

        A crazy college person doing a crazy college thing at a crazy college.Report

        • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

          Well, it really is a perfect storm for conservatives reasonable people.

          You have someone we can just safely assume is a liberal because of his affiliation with a liberal university promoting a legitimately repugnant and possibly dangerous idea. So, they can play the “Universities are breeding grounds for liberal insanity card!” Of course, if the college prevented this course from going forward, we’d hear about how liberals hate free speech and academic freedom. I bet dollars to donuts that conservative sites attacking this guy and Berkeley will contain a sizable number of conservative comments making anti-Semetic comments with absolutely no sense of irony or outrage generated. And folks will pretend that college professors and politicians are exactly the same thing.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

            I bet dollars to donuts that conservative sites attacking this guy and Berkeley will contain a sizable number of conservative comments making anti-Semetic comments with absolutely no sense of irony or outrage generated.

            Kazzy, when I say “It shouldn’t be held up as an example of anything else going on in the country”, I also mean that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about conservatives based on this guy either.Report

          • dragonfrog in reply to Kazzy says:

            The bakery up the street just bumped the price of their quite good donuts from 70c to 80c, and Tim Hortons charges 99c for the awful donuts that Canadians inexplicably keep buying.

            Pretty soon we’ll have to start betting donuts to dollars.Report

            • Will H. in reply to dragonfrog says:

              The exchange rate remains quite higher for dollars.
              Granted, donuts tend to have less issues with yield inversion on long-term notes.
              QE also works out a bit differently.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

      I will give this a C for trolling.Report

      • Kimmi in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        BDS is Grade A trolling. I mean, where do you find someone deemed a traitor for a peaceful protest to a country he’s not even allowed to vote in? By A Supreme Court Justice no less?Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

      @jaybird

      The article Will posted is from September 8, 2016. I did some googling and found this article from the Guardian a week later:

      https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/15/uc-berkeley-israel-palestine-class-suspended-decalReport

      • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        And this from September 19th.

        Facing a backlash over academic freedom, UC Berkeley has reinstated a student-taught course on Palestinian history that it suspended last week after receiving complaints from dozens of Jewish organizations concerned that it was designed to push an anti-Israel agenda.

        But a new review of “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis” by senior faculty in the Department of Ethnic Studies concluded otherwise.

        “Nothing in the syllabus indicates that a single viewpoint is taught uncritically,” the department chairwoman, Shari Huhndorf, wrote in a Sept. 18 letter to the dean of social sciences, who had suspended the class. “On the contrary,” it said, “the syllabus indicates that multiple viewpoints are welcomed and debated in the class.”

        The class will resume this week under a slightly different name: “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Inquiry.”

        Report

  6. Saul Degraw says:

    Will,

    See above. The article you posted was an extreme op-ed essay made irrelevant a week after the initial publication date. The initial publication was more than a half week ago. I would call that swift action on the part of the Berkeley administration.

    I did some googling and most of the stuff I found on the professor was from right wing agitators. I had to scroll down a bit to find The Guardian article. I get that this section is supposed to be stuff of interest but maybe it could at least be accurate. I know you describe yourself as a squishy centerist who really dislikes Trump but there is a lot of anti-left bias in these links sometime.

    And I wrote blog posts here defending Israel and Zionism.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      The article you posted was an extreme op-ed essay made irrelevant a week after the initial publication date

      So would you say that it’s just an example of a weird thing that happened at a pretty leftist college and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions because of it?Report

      • greginak in reply to Jaybird says:

        An actual sitting Represtive said people is chronic health problems didn’t live good lives, which why they are sick, so they shoudl pay more for health care.

        “My understanding is that it will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, you know, they are doing the things to keep their bodies healthy,” he said. “And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”

        http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mo-brooks-meadows-macarthur-amendment-cost-sicker-good-lives

        To be fair he added that some of those people are sick through no fault of their own. Patterns? Conclusions about republicans?Report

        • Jaybird in reply to greginak says:

          Um, Greg? We’re talking about someone on the left who said something and Kazzy is using that to reach conclusions about people on the right.

          If that particular sitting representative was a Republican, why would you reach conclusions about Republicans based on what he said if we’re using Kazzy’s statement as a template?

          You should be reaching conclusions about Democrats.Report

          • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

            I speculating on the likely conservative response to this feller.

            I’ve drawn many conclusions about this feller.

            I’m not drawing conclusions about Democrats or liberals because nothing I’ve seen coming from this feller that suggests he actually holds values or ideals that are commonplace among either Democrats or liberals or would even draw the least bit of sympathy from the vast majority of either group.

            Which I suppose is indeed a conclusion of sorts about Democrats and liberals: they’d reject this guy for being a monster. As would many conservatives.

            Save for those in the comment sections on conservative sites who’d say he didn’t go quite far enough.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

              And there were tons of blogs overflowing with Schadenfreude at the thought of Trump voters losing health care coverage. The most famous of which was Kos, but there were others.

              If I were to use the Congressman’s statements as an opportunity to talk about Democrats… well, I’d hope you’d see that as transparent.

              Even if I added something about how there were probably a lot of Democrats who disagree with Kos. Like Maryscott O’Connor! Oh, my goodness. After her being purged from Kos, you wouldn’t believe the stuff that got printed on her site (and, to bring us back on topic, by left wingers who left during one of the many Kos purges to post about, among other things, Israel).

              Heck, when Trump tweets something tomorrow, I look forward to seeing what conclusions we can reach about, oh… let’s say “Democratic Underground“.

              Though, I should point out, there are people on the left who disagree with Kos and DU.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

                Yes, Jay, there are shitty people on both sides of the aisle. Pointing that out gets us exactly nowhere. What tends to help is determining the type and frequency of the shittiness and how core or inherent it is to a give group.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to Kazzy says:

                Kazzy,
                BDS is a movement that trolls a ton of different people. You could almost define that as shitty, if you want to call shitty as Asshole Sadist On A Mission.

                On the other hand, it is a helpful thing, for the entitled prats and the losers both.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Kazzy says:

                “Yes, Jay, there are shitty people on both sides of the aisle. ”

                And it’s much more fun to point to the shitty people across the aisle than it is to ask whether the shitty people on your own side are really helping anyone.Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Yes, but also no. Purging one’s own camp of heretics, dissenters, and the ideologically impure is something that a certain species of partisan appears to pursue with outright lust.

                And again, this is a demonstrably bipartisan phenomenon.Report

              • Nevermoor in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Of course, who gets purged varies completely between parties.Report

              • Troublesome Frog in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Usually the people being purged as heretics are the ones who are pointing out shitty behavior on their own side of the aisle, though.

                We’re in a weird era when a lynch mob will break off its pursuit to go after a member who slows down and says, “Hey, maybe this lynch mob thing isn’t a good idea.”Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                Well, if you’re Right about things, then obviously whatever you do is the right thing to do, and anyone who says you’re not doing a right thing is Wrong. And we know what to do about people who are wrong, don’t we?Report

              • Pinky in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                Sure. It feels like betrayal. We’ve already discounted the other side’s opinion of us, but when a criticism comes from inside our camp it surprises us. And it’s even worse when the criticism is “we’re taking this too far”. Especially when we’re taking it too far. I guess that’s really the quandary: the more you take things too far, the harder you have to hit back at people who accuse you of it.Report

              • gregiank in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

                hums…..when you can’t be with the one you want to lynch, honey
                lynch the one you are with.

                hat tip Stephen StillsReport

              • notme in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Come on, while the left may have shitty people on their side, we all know that deep down inside they really mean well so it’s alright. The shirty folks on the right are just shitty, right?Report

              • Pinky in reply to Kazzy says:

                You realize that this sub-conversation was started by greginak launching a “both sides do it” digression about health care?Report

              • gregiank in reply to Pinky says:

                I wasn’t doing the BSDI thing. I was asking what we could determine about what groups believe based on the statement of federal level representative as compared to some raging guy no one had heard of and who was, at most, going to teach a college course. Jay wanted to use the raging anti semite guy as some sort of serious indicator of kids these days on campuses. If that is fair then we should be able to glean some info about what R’s in congress believe about health care.Report

              • Pinky in reply to gregiank says:

                So, if one side does it, we should look at what the other side does. I see the distinction you’re making. (I hope you don’t take this comment seriously, because I can’t take yours seriously.)Report

              • Pinky in reply to Pinky says:

                Unless you were trying to say that we shouldn’t talk about any position that anyone takes on anything that’s less important (to you) than what this particular Congressman said about health care.Report

        • LeeEsq in reply to greginak says:

          I had to listen to this on CNN because I was a captive audience in a government waiting room.Report

          • Kazzy in reply to LeeEsq says:

            “…a captive audience in a government waiting room…”

            What’d ya get pinched for, @leeesq ?Report

            • Kimmi in reply to Kazzy says:

              It’s conscription if it’s the army, it’s only kidnapping if it’s the navy.Report

            • Burt Likko in reply to Kazzy says:

              Our man @leeesq is an immigration attorney, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the agency in question were CIS or ICE or something else of the like. The man’s gotta make a living somehow.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to Burt Likko says:

                Exactly. The different levels at 26 Federal Plaza have waiting rooms with televisions. The office staff puts on Fox, CNN, New York 1, or a network based on their mood. New York 1 is the least offensive choice because its just local news.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to Burt Likko says:

                It might say something about one’s life choices when murders call immigration lawyers “coldass motherfuckers.”Report

              • Nevermoor in reply to Kimmi says:

                I suspect that’s in reference to ICE (i.e. government) lawyers, which is not Lee.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to Nevermoor says:

                No, this was in reference to the people repping for the immigrants.
                “They take the illegals money, when they know that nearly always the immigrant is getting deported.”

                ICE agents are bastards and bullies, but everyone knows that.Report

              • LeeEsq in reply to Kimmi says:

                Kimmi, fish you. Immigration lawyers actually do good work and fight so people fleeing persecution can get status in the United States and fight to keep families together. Just because we are doing this for money does not believe that we don’t believe in the cause. Private bar lawyers have more money and resources to help immigrants than the not for profit advocacy groups, who are geared to aiding immigrants from Latin America above those from other places in the world.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to LeeEsq says:

                Lee,
                Was it not apparent that I was quoting someone who I was describing as a murderer? If not, then I’m sorry for being unclear.

                Yeah, you can go right ahead and tell me to fuck off, that’s fine.

                It’s quite alright if you think your job is justice incarnate. I’m not even saying it’s not. I’m quoting someone.

                (How much do you know about the notforprofit advocacy groups? Most of the hunted illegals I’ve seen have been from China — and aided and abetted by (presumably legal) American Chinese folk.)Report

              • Burt Likko in reply to Kimmi says:

                I can see how @leeesq would have got the impression that the referenced quotation was an endorsement of what was being said.

                It feels like a rather testy day around these parts for some reason. I can’t quite see why that should be the case. Let’s everybody take a moment to remember why this site is different from all the rest: our commenters and our writers all aspire to adhere to principles of charity, courtesy, and comprehension in their dialogue.Report

          • Will H. in reply to LeeEsq says:

            I had to listen to this on CNN because I was a captive audience in a government waiting room.

            One power ballad from the 80’s and you would have a colorable claim for inhuman treatment.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      I watched the video which purported to be of him calling for an American intifada, and indeed he was calling for an Amerian intifada, something about how angry people are, the need to change the political dynamics in the country, and vote Trump. Well the last part was implied.Report

    • One should not confuse “to the right of Saul” with being “to the right”! As a practical matter, though, I am a guy and I collect these links and these links are going to carry some of my biases because they’re based on what I read and what I find interesting and worth sharing. (As with the media collectively). That said, I’m suspect over the last year I have shared more from Jacobin and Salon than I have the National Review and Weekly Standard. The one you complained about the other day had a pretty left-wing economics link*. My goal is not so much balance as it is variety.

      * – It was a wrong-link deal, but the link with the correct blurb was slated to appear tomorrowReport

  7. Kolohe says:

    It’s a pretty good racket to collect 35-60 thousand dollars a year from everyone and then turn around and offer classes taught by students (and not even grad students). That there was a May Day angle I didn’t pick up on yesterday.Report

    • trizzlor in reply to Kolohe says:

      Universities definitely play fast and loose with grad students and adjuncts teaching courses they are not qualified for, but this is part of a specific program for student-run classes. Berkeley is totally open about the structure and makes it clear that it’s primarily about students getting teaching/learning experience from other students (and the 1 unit reflects that). IMHO it’s really hard for undergrads to experience what academia is like and this is a pretty neat way of doing it. At the same time I don’t think you could get students to take it seriously if it was for 0 credits. More to the point, the OP is really scraping the bottom of the barrel if they have to troll through student-run classes for controversial content.Report

  8. Damon says:

    Switch Jew with Muslim…

    Would this be tolerated?Report

    • notme in reply to Damon says:

      Are you kidding? Those people would be tossed out of the school in a heartbeat.Report

      • Jesse in reply to notme says:

        You might get elected President or something by saying mean things about Muslims.Report

      • trizzlor in reply to notme says:

        Is there even a single example of someone getting tossed out of school for teaching a class that promotes Israeli settlement, or whatever you think the analog is here?Report

    • Kimmi in reply to Damon says:

      Jews have been mooching off the Holocaust for too long now.
      It’s hard to change, yes, but good PR comes to those who work for it.
      Like the Quakers. You never see a self-righteous Quaker saying, “WHY do people hate us so?”
      Because they do positive PR. They get to work, and they fix things.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Kimmi says:

        Can you manage to go a day without saying something horrifically ignorant, offensive, and/or absolutely incoherent? Can you manage to do this for a minute?Report

        • Kimmi in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          Of course I can manage to do it for a minute.

          When you stop being so offensively entitled, people will hate you less.
          (In case this wasn’t clear, this was a more general you).

          People don’t like entitled people in the first place, and you’re not that rich anyhow.Report

          • Pinky in reply to Kimmi says:

            Don’t fool yourself. If you want to make disgusting comments, you can do so, but don’t think they’re not disgusting.Report

            • Kimmi in reply to Pinky says:

              Pinky,
              Really, are you so easily disgusted?
              Ah, but what disgusts you is not what disgusts me, I’m certain.
              It is not a matter of taste, but of perspective.

              Never Again is a futile hope, a dream that turns to dust in the wind.
              And my dream? Is not indeed the deplorable, close-minded dream that Saul has. For there are two ways to listen to those words, and two ways to read them. One is “We will become Strong, and they Won’t Hurt Us Again” — I know where that leads, to my disgust. Saul’s complicity is not in the least tarnished by his ignorance of the outcomes, the current reality is nearing terminal.
              The other is, “We remember. Never again — not to anyone. A light to the nations, a voice in the wind — we will remember, and we will speak out. We will act.” Elie Wiesel knew this, knew the safety that comes not of strength, but of walking the road of truth, of goodness, and damn the consequences.

              Now, I need a drink.Report

          • Pinky in reply to Kimmi says:

            Here’s a tip for acting like a decent human being: if you think you’re making a situation better by generalizing a complaint to “Jews in general”, you’ve made a miscalculation.

            And if people around you aren’t recoiling in horror, it’s because they have zero expectation of decency from you, whether because of their character, or their beliefs about yours.Report

            • Kimmi in reply to Pinky says:

              Pinky,
              We stand up and strike our breasts together on Yom Kippur. We are the murderer and the thief in our midst. Our crimes and our good deeds are those of the community. If I do not rebuke my brother, I am complicit in his crime.

              And when they come for our blood, they will not ask whether I saved a Palestinian life — whether I stood and made a house where the bulldozers destroyed dozens.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Kimmi says:

                I have to assume that you’re waxing poetic to cover your own embarrassment at having crossed the line. It’s good to know that you can recognize it when it’s pointed out.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to Pinky says:

                Pinky,
                I haven’t crossed the line. Perhaps I’d simply like to claim the line as my own, and sprawl over it on both sides. Feh. One can talk about propaganda as it stands, as it’s used, and how one can use guilt to get things.

                Meh. That was tame. It wasn’t like I said that Russia and the United States colluded to create the state of Israel because they felt guilty about the Holocaust.Report

            • El Muneco in reply to Pinky says:

              I think this might generalize: if you think you’re making a situation better, and you weren’t originally part of the situation, you almost certainly aren’t.Report

    • trizzlor in reply to Damon says:

      This wasn’t tolerated. The course was temporarily revoked and the instructor had to review and censor the syllabus.Report

  9. Jaybird says:

    Good news! Hamas has announced that it no longer seeks the destruction of Israel!

    Seriously, this is one of the things that was a sticking point for a while.Report

    • Will H. in reply to Jaybird says:

      It also says its struggle is not against Jews because of their religion but against Israel as an occupier.

      ‘We are not fighting against the Jews because they are Jewish,’ said Meshaal.

      ‘We are waging this struggle against the aggression of Zionists.’

      If they’re just trying to gain sympathy, that’s the way to do it.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Will H. says:

        There are a handful of games they had been playing that did pretty much FREAKING EVERYTHING they possibly could have been doing to alienate everybody to the right of people who don’t see what’s wrong with referring to themselves as “Tankies”.

        The whole murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the Sbarro bombing (along with the museum which had a room dedicated to the Sbarro bombing), the blowing up in school libraries…

        How in the hell could you even expect *ANYBODY* in the West to root for people who shoot people in wheelchairs? People on the left, I mean. People on the right probably cheer for that sort of thing all the time.

        If Hamas and the Palestinians want respectability, they need to cease violence YESTERDAY. They need to play up the whole “Israel is treating us like a colonial power” thing. “We are like Native Americans and Israelis are like the White People who came here and said THIS IS OUR COUNTRY NOW!”

        Just play that up over and over again. Show old ladies crying and young muscular men comforting them and calling them “auntie” or something. Show them drinking tea and talking about how they just want to live their lives and the Israelis are doing all of these weird things. Talk about being forced to keep kosher or keep shops closed in accordance with Israel religious law. “We just want to live like we used to, back when we were free… but Israel is oppressing us. We just want to be left to live freely!”

        “What about those terrorists?”

        Shakes head sadly “they never represented our interests… but they were the only people who ever even pretended to be on our side. We supported them like Americans supported Donald Trump. We just believed that they would Make Palestine Great Again. Instead they served us a supper of ashes. We were never represented by violence. Our story is one of non-violence and being oppressed. By the Israeli occupiers of our rightful land, and also by the people who are a lot like Trump.”

        Heck, they could probably flip a plurality of people in the middle if they played that crap just right.Report

        • LeeEsq in reply to Jaybird says:

          Leftists have been pretty sympathetic to the Palestinians despite/because of the terrorism and have generally accepted the idea that the Palestinians are the Native Americans and the Israeli Jews, white settler colonial capitalist patriarchal pigs.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

            Yeah, but, for the most part, the Leftists in question have been coming across as moral idiots who were using the Palestinians as a purity test. “You must be this obtuse to truly be one of us.”

            It did a great job of turning normies off of the anti-war movement in the early oughts, I’m sure you remember.

            If the Palestinians weren’t so terribly ugly in their blind opposition to Israel, they’d be wielding some serious Moral Authority points (insofar as “the underdog” tends to get automatically receive Moral Authority points).

            If the Palestinians figure out “hey, if we stop shooting people in wheelchairs, we might actually gain sympathy with normies”, the game changes and the game changes *SIGNIFICANTLY*.

            And, to bring us back to the story in question… hey. Hamas has announced that they no longer seek the destruction of Israel.Report

            • LeeEsq in reply to Jaybird says:

              Maybe yes and maybe no. Outright Palestinian opposition to Israel seemed to have shifted all the weight to Israel to make the concessions as the sole reasonable party and got many people in governments in the developed world to see solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a sort of magic bullet to solving every conflict in the Middle East. It certainly made large swathes of Europe outright apathetic towards Israel in particular and Jews in general. Even in the United States, usually much more pro-Israel than Europe, many people moved to being more pro-Palestinian because of the domestic politics of the War on Terror. The more Muslims became an out group on the right, the more they, and by extension the Palestinians, became an in-group on the Left. I’ve definitely noticed a rise in Pro-Palestinian feelings as Social Justice/Intersectionality became a big part of mainstream liberalism.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

                I’ve definitely noticed a rise in Pro-Palestinian feelings as Social Justice/Intersectionality became a big part of mainstream liberalism.

                Now imagine what happens when Palestinians stop blowing up and instead start writing poetry, plays, and making movies about what it’s like to live under the heel of The Last Colonialist Power.Report

              • Kimmi in reply to LeeEsq says:

                Lee,
                The Holocaust is fading as an impulse to let the Jews do whatever they want, because the French and Germans and Russians feel bad about being complicit in the destruction. [Just to remind you: most Americans pre WWII thought that Jews made the worst neighbors.]

                Without that, you have either — a country that believes in Greater Israel, and is fully trying to take over another country (This is Iraq Versus Kuwait, and You Know It) or a country that is actively building colonies on foreign soil (British Hong Kong?)….

                You kinda can’t stand in the middle on settlements.

                (Nobody cared about settlements in the Sinai, because nobody lived there before the Jews moved in)Report

              • Will H. in reply to Kimmi says:

                The Ukranian genocide shortly following is getting more legs.
                Also, the cleansing in Europe of the Germans following WW II, iirc, resulted in over 150% of the Jewish deaths through Nazi rule, though it still remains taboo to suggest that maybe the Germans might have had a bit of tough going.

                Still, the whole Srebrenica and Rwanda things got a bit different response. Well, not really. Just that we knew a lot more about them before & during.

                The world has a bit of genocide burnout, I’m thinking.

                Besides, as long as there are still Palestinians to slaughter, that will keep the most vocal of the Holocaust drum-beaters occupied for a bit, so that gets toned down in the interim; i.e., “Never again!” while sending another missile into a school full of Palestinian children.
                Good thing the Palestinians aren’t a little bit darker-skinned, or we would call that racist. Maybe apartheid, or something.

                All I know is that, for some reason, Israel has U.S. support, even when they nearly sink ships from our Navy and kill scores of our sailors.
                But these are sailors we’re talking about here. Go figure.Report

            • Will H. in reply to Jaybird says:

              “You must be this obtuse to truly be one of us.”

              But, alas!, I wear flannel!
              Further, I am serious about my flannel, because I have a pillowed insulation liner.*

              What’s worse– I am a wearer of denim– which marks me as either a complete pariah and toucher of tools or one so inexorably hip my shadow can’t keep up.
              But, alas!, I am no Levite, but a Carharttian– though there are they of the overalls, kept isolated from all the civilized world by wide-ranging fields and high mountains, who are much lower life forms than myself.Report

        • j r in reply to Jaybird says:

          If Hamas and the Palestinians want respectability, they need to cease violence YESTERDAY. They need to play up the whole “Israel is treating us like a colonial power” thing. “We are like Native Americans and Israelis are like the White People who came here and said THIS IS OUR COUNTRY NOW!”

          I tend to agree with this, but it ought to come with the important caveat that just about every nation presently existing on this earth, and every nation that has ever existed, was, to some degree, founded in violence and had it’s borders set by war. And that includes Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks

          Thing is, when you fight and you win, you get a certain level of legitimacy that allows you to brush all of your own violence under the nearest carpet. Go to the War Remnants Museum in Sai…. I mean Ho Chi Minh City. The victors get to write their version of history.

          And this is the problem with Hamas and the other elements of the Palestinian liberation movement that have yet to eschew violence. They lost, but refuse to recognize it. They want to keep fighting, but also retain the moral legitimacy of being victims. Sorry, can’t have it both ways. At least not until you win.

          PS – The Israeli hardliners have the exact opposite problem. They want to continue to respond to Hamas attacks with a level of reciprocity many times that capable of being deployed by the Palestinians. And they want to continue to pretend that their operations against the Palestinians are purely defensive when they are, in fact, part of a pretty deliberate strategy to keep the Palestinian territories in a perpetual state of underdevelopment and slowly encroach on as much Palestinian land as possible.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to j r says:

            Oh, I’m not arguing that the state of Israel is illegitimate or any nutty position like that. I’m just arguing about the narratives that are likely to work and the narratives that are unlikely to work.

            The narratives involving the Palestinians being poor benighted victims their whole life is cut off at the knees by organizations like Fatah and Hamas and the violence that they’re more than happy enough to engage in.

            “We’re victims!”, he exploded.

            Yeah, that doesn’t work. It only *BARELY* worked outside of circles of moral idiots prior to 9/11 and afterwards? Man. You had to be downright stupid to argue a “well, actually” variant on the Dolphinarium suicide bombing.

            But if Hamas says “hey, you know what? Let’s try *PEACE*” and then removes the “death to Israel!” bullshit from its charter? If they say “We will no longer call for the destruction of Israel” officially?

            Well, shit. Come on, Israel. Hamas is trying. You want to reward them, right? You want peace, right? Come on. Lean into it. Give them another chance. Make some concessions.Report

          • LeeEsq in reply to j r says:

            I think that the Palestinians and Muslims have a hard time recognizing the lost to Israel because of a weird combination of Islamic thought, once Muslim land always Muslim land and they especially aren’t going to lose land to Jews, and because the more secular ones really do see Israel as an entirely illegitimate settler colonial state like French Algeria.Report

    • Kimmi in reply to Jaybird says:

      Inches move miles, and even the sloth can move… eventually.
      BDS pays dividends beyond its own expectations.Report

    • North in reply to Jaybird says:

      Depends on where you sit. I imagine Bibi was pretty unhappy.Report