Topical news that as far as I can tell is first being reported today:

http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.615667

Uncovered: U.K. intel encouraged Arab armies to invade Israel in 1948

Intelligence obtained by the French secret services in the Middle East sheds new light on Britain’s role in the Arab-Israeli War of Independence.

Ray

These are incredibly ill formed arguments. They show a basic ignorance about the whole situation in 1947

.

The Irgun started their campaign of terror well before 1947.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks

As did the Hagannah.In 1940 the Haganah sabotaged the Patria, an ocean liner being used by the British to deport 1,800 Jews to Mauritius, with a bomb intended to cripple the ship. However the ship sank, killing 260.
Violence really started about 1920 with Arab riots Although the Hagannah had organized as early as 1909 in response to isolated incidents.
But there's no "they were worse.... " arguement to be won. The reality is that innocents at the hands of terrorists on both sides.

ray

Did Ukrainian and German immigrants do this in Canada? Did Japanese-Americans do this? WTF are you even talking about?

I'm talking about nations collectively punishing a people out of fear.
Are all 700,000 Palestinians who lost their homes to be held responsible for the acts of terror by some of them?

After the Holocaust, those few Jews who survived in hiding or in concentration camps came home to find Germans, or Poles living in their previous homes. Sometimes their homes for many generations. The authorities did not return their homes to them. Should they have? Should they even unto today? I find the treatment of those victims immoral. DO you?
http://www.krakowpost.com/article/5958

I don't see a great deal of difference between the way returning survivors in Poland were treated to the way Palestinians are treated who want to return to their homes...
Israel refuses to recognize any need to allow Arabs to return or to compensate them. And Arab nations refuse the same about Jewish refugees...
Somehow this issue needs to be solved. it isn't going away. And Israelis intransigence on this issue is immoral.

The refugee problem is not disappearing, as many in Israel and the West
fancifully hope, but is actually worsening with the passage of time. As refugees grow
poorer, more desperate and more hopeless with regards to their future, extremism
proliferates and thrives.1 Time and again, refugee camps have exploded in violent
anger: for example, in September 1970 (Black September), when Jordanian troops
quashed Palestinian militants; in May 2007, when Lebanese forces stormed and
demolished the Nahar al-Bared refugee camp, clashing with the armed members
of Fatah al-Islam; and most recently in the recurrent violence emanating from the
Gaza Strip, where refugees comprise a majority of the population.
In 1950, some 750,000 refugees were registered with UNRWA; today, that
number has climbed to nearly 5 million, and 1.4 million Palestinians still live,
impoverished, in 58 recognized refugee camps across the Middle East.2 As the
number of refugees rises, their international funding is running out. The amount
of money received by each refugee has been cut nearly in half since 1975: from
about $200 annually in 1975 to around $110 today.3 This situation is unsustainable
even in the medium term. With the division of the Palestinian Territories into two
distinct political entities since the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007,
and considering the standstill of the peace negotiations which ensued, Palestinian
refugees can scarcely afford to tie their future to the prospect of a negotiated
settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority

Ricky you are immoral. You are dishonest. The whole world can see it.

Ray Jay wrote:Ricky you are immoral. You are dishonest. The whole world can see it.

I would not say immoral. I would say Amoral. The rest I agree with.

Well, I think that characterization of Ricky might be a bit harsh. But Ricky any analogies to the Holocaust should be made with care...and probably not made at all. Nothing is more outrageous to a Jew (I think; I'm not Jewish) than is the suggestion that the treatment of Palestinians is somehow in any way comparable to the Holocaust. And of course they're right because the situations are not remotely comparable. But the pro-Palestinians crowd wants to make that comparison, saying in essence how can you treat Palestinians this way given how you were treated by the Germans? Well, again the situations are not remotely comparable to each other and making that comparison is going to get you significant blow-back--as you can see. The Palestinians are not victims--they started the war in 1947 and essentially have never stopped trying to attack Israel and so there are limits to the justice of their complaints. And I find the complaints about the massive amounts of money that the Palestinians are paid as refugees to be almost farcical.

Maybe Brad and RJ are right but what I see is someone who has a position who then just finds stuff and cites it without much analysis or filtering. Of course we all just find stuff on the internet, but I would assume that we also look around to see what other sources are saying, looking at whether the source is biased, whether the arguments made by the source are well-supported, compare what the source says to our previous knowledge of the issue, etc. Of course if a person does not have that much knowledge of an issue then it is difficult to be able to filter what are plausibly reasonable sources or interpretations.
Ricky's writing style indicates he might have some difficulty with filtering (I guess what I mean by that is material from the internet going into a person's brain, being analyzed and then interpreted here). But I don't know that it is a character issue.

I think you are misunderstanding me. I think Ricky is immoral because he dishonestly quoted my reply. I indicated that the 1947-1948 treatment of Palestinians by Israel is not remotely similar to the treatment of Ukrainians and Germans by Canada or the treatment of the Japanese by the U.S. during WWII because the Palestinians were engaged in a civil war against the Jewish state. I was not referencing his other arguments.

However, Ricky quoted me and then pretended that I was referencing his arguments about returning survivors after the war or terrorism by various factions. My quote wasn't about that at all. My quote was about Israel's rights as it relates to the Palestinians in 1947 after then engaged in hostilities.

I wasn't talking about the substance of Ricky's quotes (which is an entirely new topic worthy of discussion). I was talking about the style of pretending that someone was quoting one thing when he quoted another. That's immoral and dishonest.

Ricky:

After the Holocaust, those few Jews who survived in hiding or in concentration camps came home to find Germans, or Poles living in their previous homes. Sometimes their homes for many generations. The authorities did not return their homes to them. Should they have?

This is off the wall and incredibly insensitive about other people.. After you lose 6,000,000 of your brethren and 90% of the Jewish children of Europe are murdered, you don't really care about some home you used to live in. Why would someone make such an analogy anyway?

Ricky:

As did the Hagannah.In 1940 the Haganah sabotaged the Patria, an ocean liner being used by the British to deport 1,800 Jews to Mauritius, with a bomb intended to cripple the ship. However the ship sank, killing 260.

Do you realize that Britain was preventing the immigration of Jews to Palestine from 1939 onwards? Whereas 66,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in 1936, the Brits restricted immigration to Palestine from 1939 to 1948. The quota after 1939 was 7,500 per year.. This resulted in a lot more than 260 dead people (who were killed by accident) since very few countries were willing to absorb the Jewish refugees.

I re-read the posts. Ricky compared the treatment of Germans and Ukrainians in Canada and Japanese in the US to the treatment of Palestinians by Israel. You rejected the comparison, quoting a source outlying the violence by Arabs that led up to the war in 1948. You then asked did the Ukrainians, Germans and Japanese behave like that. Ricky then quoted that sentence, said he was talking about collective punishment based on fear and then started to compare Right of Return to Jews not being allowed back into their homes in Europe after WW II (admittedly an outrageous comparison). Guess I just thought Ricky just went off a bit of a tangent but not that he was trying to misquote you to support his argument. But I admit I may be missing something. In any case , the comparison was so awful you had a right to be angry.

On morality...

Forty-three Israeli military intelligence reservists who signed a letter refusing to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories have been denounced as "criminal" by defence minister Moshe Ya'alon, as the country's political and military leadership turned its fire on the refuseniks.

...

The reservists' letter had alleged the unit undertook "all encompassing" surveillance of the Palestinians – whether involved in terrorism or not – and used information, including of sexual orientation, to blackmail individuals into becoming informants.

...

Leading the charge against the refusniks on Sunday was the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. Speaking at a cyber-security conference in Tel Aviv, he accused the soldiers of "baseless slander" adding: "This is an act that should be condemned … and that constitutes political exploitation of the Israel Defence Forces [IDF].

"The IDF is the most moral army in the world and it carries out the missions that we give it to safeguard our security. From my long years of acquaintance with the members of Unit 8200, the baseless slander levelled against them will not harm the vitally important work they do for the nation's security. And I say to them – continue."

...

By Monday, Ya'alon, speaking at the same cyber-security conference as Netanyahu, was also hinting that the reserve soldiers could face criminal prosecution. "Their refusal is politically, not morally, motivated. Soldiers should go to their commanders when they have a problem. Our officers and soldiers are doing sacred work which saves many lives and they deserve our gratitude. I will not allow a political abuse of this and those who signed this [refusal document] will be treated as criminals," he said.

My emphasis. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/s ... e-minister

rayjay maybe you need to read my punctuation better. My response to your question only referenced the topic of collective punishment.
I started a new paragraph for the next set of provoicative comparisons..

ray

Did Ukrainian and German immigrants do this in Canada? Did Japanese-Americans do this? WTF are you even talking about

?

I'm talking about nations collectively punishing a people out of fear.
Are all 700,000 Palestinians who lost their homes to be held responsible for the acts of terror by some of them?

Did you answer the question? is collective punishment acceptable?

freeman3

But Ricky any analogies to the Holocaust should be made with care...and probably not made at all. Nothing is more outrageous to a Jew (I think; I'm not Jewish) than is the suggestion that the treatment of Palestinians is somehow in any way comparable to the Holocaust.

There are those who seem to think that the crimes committed against Jews provide them with a special armor. That somehow they should be judged seprately and given a pass for behaviours or activities that bear similarities to the crimes that were committed against the Jews. (Not in the same scale, but certainly some of the activities are similar.)

Screaming that we are moral, how dare you judge us, as an answer to the questioning of "Is this activity moral" isn't an arguement . But its the standard reply...
The questions remains. If it is immoral that jews should have their `right of return` denied by the Poles (and i believe it was). If it was immoral that there should have never been an admission that the jews were wronged, and they have never been compensated ....
Then why is it so different to codemn the treatment of returning Palestinians the same way... (And the parallel, for Arabs states not compensating jews who were expelled.)
How are the two so very different other than in the enormity of the crime versus jews. Its the same crime just with fewer affected.

ray

Do you realize that Britain was preventing the immigration of Jews to Palestine from 1939 onwards?

Since i referened the Patria sabotage, I`d think it was a given that I was aware...

ray

After you lose 6,000,000 of your brethren and 90% of the Jewish children of Europe are murdered, you don't really care about some home you used to live in. Why would someone make such an analogy anyway?

People want to go home Ray. There is a book called `The Jews are coming Back`about the attempts by most jews to try and regain their homes after WWII (author: Banker I think) . Most didn`t decide to leave for Israel till they were turned away from their previous homes...

I don`t think its insensitive to look at the similarities between the ways these poor people were trearted, and the treatment of the evacuees and expelled Palestinians and jews of 1949....
I think that those who decry the comparison are sensitive to the obvious similarities .... and scream loud to avoid having to deal with the comparison.Its incredibly uncomfortable. Just as was Tutu`s codemnation of the security zones as Apartheid. And just as the recent stand by Israelis soldiers was decried in such extreme terms. The louder the response, the more likely the questions and comparisons will be deflected..

..

The first reaction is of course how dare the Israeli Establishment react this way to criticism. But I don't know of any military in the world that would not react sharply to overtly political acts by members of the military. It is one thing to refuse to serve because of moral qualms; it is quite another to go public justifying why you are refusing with allegations of military abuses. This is not to say what the reservists did was wrong, but I am not sure that Israel is acting in an unusual manner to a political act by soldiers in a quasi-war setting. ( of course, we all want transparency in government and people in government usually want less scrutiny and when it comes to national security the justification is that by revealing secrets national security will be harmed, so there has to be a balance struck) As for the emphasis on sacred I certainly believe that people can go wrong when they start thinking what they are doing is sacred work, but I am an atheist and I see that as a problem with all religion. However, Jews and Arabs have strong religious feelings attached to the Land , to Jerusalem, etc. and I think we should expect such language though it jars the atheist ear . The danger when you feel the whole world is against you is that you become extremely sensitive to internal criticism, as being almost traitorous.
Anyway, I am curious to see how Israel handles the situation. So far the language has been not well-chosen but the substantive reaction is more important.

People want to go home, Ricky? They left home 66 years ago. For all but a very small fraction of Palestinians, they never had a home in land presently occupied by Israel. With every passing year the Right of a Return has left validity.

I thought these cases from Israel were interesting.


http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/P ... orture.pdf (Permissive Means of Interrogation)
https://www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/ce ... ngCase.pdf. (Targeted Killing Case)

A law review article discussing the targeted killing case.
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/comment/o ... d-killings

The discussion on proportionality in the targeted killing case with regard to civilian casualties seems particularly relevant.