Arab-Israeli Conflict, v2: What the UN Jerusalem vote mean for Israel, the U.S, and Palestine

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I'm asking how the US president can on his own decision be the decider on what the official state of Israel is.

What Gives him the power to make that decision?

I guess I'm not following you. The capital of Israel is Jerusalem, as per the country of Israel themselves. The Trump administration is simply officially recognizing that fact and moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I don't see why any outside country or organization would have a say on either of those.
 
The choice was already made. We just never acknowledged it till now.

The choice was already made many years ago. All world leaders have been doing since then is walking around that fact. If they truly believed there was no validity to Israel's claim on at least a portion of Jerusalem as their national capital real actions would have occurred to force Israel to back off that claim and remained in place till they did so.

The apparatuses of Israeli government reside in Jerusalem and the UN has done nothing of any real consequence to change that fact.

What has occurred so far regarding Israel has been nothing more than propaganda, especially given our long standing ties with the nation.

I can't help but feel that the US could have gotten something from BiBi in return for this to give the Palestinians. If we are still working towards a 2 state solution.

I'm asking how the US president can on his own decision be the decider on what the official state of Israel is.

What Gives him the power to make that decision?

The US President decides what the US recognizes. There was a point in time where we didn't recognize China before Nixon.
 
Hamas got elected by popular election. They were the most popular option. That’s just he worst option they had. Which group was not a terrorist backed org

I didn't ask how Hamas got elected or if they were the most popular option, or what sort of options the Palestinian people had, so what are you talking about?
 
I can't help but feel that the US could have gotten something from BiBi in return for this to give the Palestinians. If we are still working towards a 2 state solution.



The US President decides what the US recognizes. There was a point in time where we didn't recognize China before Nixon.
I guess I'm not following you. The capital of Israel is Jerusalem, as per the country of Israel themselves. The Trump administration is simply officially recognizing that fact and moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I don't see why any outside country or organization would have a say on either of those.

I get it now.

News are making it out like Trump made the decision for all involed. What actually happened is Trump agreed to Isreals claim?
 
Yes, because waiting on Hamas to be all cosy and peace loving until kingdom come will be so much better...


I know right? Stupid Hamas being butthurt when Israel keeps stealing their land/building illegal settlements and keeping them penned in the world's largest concentration camps.
 
I can't help but feel that the US could have gotten something from BiBi in return for this to give the Palestinians. If we are still working towards a 2 state solution.



The US President decides what the US recognizes. There was a point in time where we didn't recognize China before Nixon.


thats assuming the US gives a fuck, which they do not. Been pretending for decades.
 
I know right? Stupid Hamas being butthurt when Israel keeps stealing their land/building illegal settlements and keeping them penned in the world's largest concentration camps.
Well... Hamas IS an internationally recognized terrorist group no? So um... fuck 'em?
 
Well... Hamas IS an internationally recognized terrorist group no? So um... fuck 'em?


So that must be why Israel has them penned up in camps. Sure. Whatever makes you feel better.
 
So that must be why Israel has them penned up in camps. Sure. Whatever makes you feel better.
Look, I don't blame Israel for not wanting to work with a group that insists on a zero sum game essentially and uses regular people to hide behind while they shoot/blow shit up.

There's a reason King Hussein of Jordan kicked the PLO and Hamas out of his country (best he could) after Arafat and company took up residence and then started launching attacks our of Jordan.
 
No worries he's got this!

photos-jared-kushner-goes-to-iraq.jpg
 
Look, anyone can see that the far right in Israel have been a HUGE problem since before it was even a state. Even Herzl had deep problems with the ways Zionism was tending by the time he took ill and died.

But to pretend as if Israel and it's Muslim neighbors are anywhere near the same moral equivalence, I see this as absurdity.

I think most thinking people, however, can agree that an explicitly religious state is absurd, and makes whatever region it lies in demonstrably less safe.

You're right, there's no moral equivalence because Israel continues to illegally occupy land and expand, expand, expand. International law is very clear as to who's in the wrong here.

Sure, there are some Muslims (lots) who want to see Israel wiped off the map, no questions asked. Those type of people shouldn't be in the conversation. But the ones that argue that the settlements should stop and that the apartheid-like treatment of Palestinians should stop SHOULD be in the conversation. But Israel treats both as the same.
 
Look, I don't blame Israel for not wanting to work with a group that insists on a zero sum game essentially and uses regular people to hide behind while they shoot/blow shit up.

There's a reason King Hussein of Jordan kicked the PLO and Hamas out of his country (best he could) after Arafat and company took up residence and then started launching attacks our of Jordan.


Whats that quote from the former Israel PS? Something like cooperate with allies but negotiate with enemies, sorry but I forgot it.

At some point its not even working with them as much as stop actively fucking them over. How and why would anyone take Israel seriously while they continue to build etc?
 
Whats that quote from the former Israel PS? Something like cooperate with allies but negotiate with enemies, sorry but I forgot it.

At some point its not even working with them as much as stop actively fucking them over. How and why would anyone take Israel seriously while they continue to build etc?
There's something my dad said after working in the Gulf on merchant ships running around Saudi Arabia, going through the Suez and such. He was there prior to the war Israel had with Egypt (can't remember which year) and he told me how when they went through the Suez then there was a beautiful seaside town. Went back after the war (like a year later) and nothing taller than a donkey was left. He asked a local what happened and their response was (and this man was Egyptian):
"Israelis did this. They understand this situation, they lose once and they're gone forever so they play to win."

It's why they fucking leveled Beirut in the like 80s. Everything they do they have to prove that they could wipe off the map if they really wanted because if they lose just once that entire country is gone and they get evicted from their homeland... again.


As to why they actively fuck over Hamas? Well, IDK, Hamas are considered terrorists so why would you give them much of everything when their demands are fucking ridiculous and then when you're not at the table it's the usual "death to Jews and America!"
 
I can't help but feel that the US could have gotten something from BiBi in return for this to give the Palestinians. If we are still working towards a 2 state solution.
Agreed. It was certainly a missed opportunity.
 
I get it now.

News are making it out like Trump made the decision for all involed. What actually happened is Trump agreed to Isreals claim?

What actually happened is that he has the audacity to finally carried out something Congress long mandated that the last three Presidents skirted around.





Quoting the latest update for the new-comers who somehow missed out on our discussion these past 4 days:

Trump Is Right: Jerusalem Is Israel’s Capital — But It Is A Divided One.
Aaron Bondar | December 6, 2017

gettyimages-887054544-1512595805.jpg

Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel.

Israelis know this; Palestinians know it. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and the Arab world know it.

And yet an illusion is maintained, for the sake of diplomatic correctness, that Jerusalem is not yet the capital of the Jewish state, though it is obvious that it is.

It is generally acknowledged among the analytic class that to affirm what is obvious would bring great danger to a region which is already in great danger, or would put a stop to a peace process which is not yet in progress. Whatever the reason, the illusion is maintained.

This is not the only illusion—or delusion, depending on your level of commitment to reality— which shrouds the city of Jerusalem in a mirage. There is also a delusion which exists in the minds of some who support Israel that Jerusalem is not only the capital of Israel—which it surely is— but that it is the “undivided” capital, which it surely is not.

Every year, on Yom Yerushalayim, the holiday marking the conquest of the Eastern part of the city by Israeli forces in 1967, marchers descend upon the streets of the capital city and celebrate the occasion. Some purposefully march through Arab neighborhoods in ritualistic fashion, as if to convince themselves. Surely, if they say the city is unified, it must be so.

Thus the illusion is maintained. An Israeli teacher of mine once said that observers of the march mistake the participants’ assertiveness for pride, when it is more like a product of insecurity. After all, in which other unified capital city is it necessary to repeat to oneself, year after year, that it is unified—and under armed guard, no less?

Jerusalem is not the only object of these convenient illusions and delusions. They are to be found all over the state of Israel and all over the territories. It is not absurd to say that for peace to be possible, these illusions must be dispelled and delusions shattered.

President Trump has come under much criticism for his recognition of the obvious—that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. If he had said it was the undivided capital, he would certainly deserve the opprobrium for subscribing to the same delusion to which others have fallen prey even while shattering another.

But he made explicitly clear in his statement that his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel should not be received as the United States “taking a position [on] any final status issues—including the specific boundary of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem,” insinuating that there may in fact be a boundary which divides Jerusalem from the rest of the territories, and perhaps that boundary runs down the city.

Most analysts of the region — in rising alarm and panic — have suggested that moving the embassy or recognizing the capital of Israel was a chip to play, an inducement—and Trump just gave it away for free. But they have it wrong. In the context of negotiations, US recognition of Israel’s capital, in any form, is meaningless—either Israel and the Palestinians sign a deal, in which case Jerusalem becomes Israel’s divided capital in a realistic final settlement, or they don’t, and the U.S. recognition changes nothing. No—the real leverage comes with recognition outside the context of negotiations.

Think; President Trump has just become the first American president since the birth of the state of Israel to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state—a gesture that has become imbued with meaning not because the American president gets to decide where Israel’s capital is but because, as is characteristic of this conflict, many people have invested much in the illusion that he can. For better or worse, Trump’s predecessors’ refusals to do so has made Trump’s recognition meaningful. Can Netanyahu claim, now, that the first American president to recognize Israel’s capital is acting in bad faith? That no longer plays. It cannot.

As President Trump said in his statement, the record of peace is not good. President Obama, for all his hope, for all his support from journalists and common-sense analysts, left the Palestinians in the worst bargaining position they’ve ever had; not because of his policies regarding negotiations, but because of his general strategy in Middle East.

After the Iran Deal and the Syrian civil war, the hardening of the Sunni states against Iranian hegemony has left the Palestinians with few allies and a hostile and restless region with bigger fish to fry; a region coming off a civil war which has created a refugee problem that deflection to Israel can’t solve. But it has also created a moment where is of the essence—where the pressure is rising; enough pressure, maybe, to do impossible, wondrous things. Palestinians have earned few victories, and the window of opportunity is quickly becoming a narrow aperture.

Do I trust President Trump, with the Arab states, to give Palestinians a fair chance at a deal they can live with? Perhaps not—but if we have begun dispensing with our illusions, maybe we can move toward dispelling others; including the illusion that the status quo in the West Bank can continue indefinitely, a delusion which has captured the imaginations of too many.

I will admit that I do not have confidence in this administration to succeed where others have failed. But the truth is that others have failed. The moment is here, for better or worse, and it is such that there is reason—perhaps irresponsibly— to hope.

https://forward.com/scribe/389377/t...m-is-israels-capital-but-it-is-a-divided-one/

I fully expect that the first issue that the Israelis and Palestinians are anxious to address in the next (and possibly final) peace summit to be Jerusalem's boundaries, and East Jerusalem will eventually be declared the capital of the State of Palestine if they agree to play ball more than Yasser Arafat.

After all, we have come to the junction where the religious importance of Jerusalem is now paramount over all other disagreements between the Arabs and the Jews.
 
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Sure, there are some Muslims (lots) who want to see Israel wiped off the map, no questions asked. Those type of people shouldn't be in the conversation. But the ones that argue that the settlements should stop and that the apartheid-like treatment of Palestinians should stop SHOULD be in the conversation. But Israel treats both as the same.
Isn't a huge problem though the ones that want Israel dead and buried are the ONLY ones allowed at the table? At least as an outsider with only a passing interest in this the ones that want Israel dead and gone silence/kick the moderates into the gutter to keep playing their zero sum game while also acting the victim constantly.

The ones at the table will be given an inch and then try to take a mile and feign victimhood when Israel levels another town where attacks came form.
 
I can't help but feel that the US could have gotten something from BiBi in return for this to give the Palestinians. If we are still working towards a 2 state solution.



The US President decides what the US recognizes. There was a point in time where we didn't recognize China before Nixon.
The US has never really taken this seriously. Israel was always our boy.
 
Retweeted Stephen Colbert

I'm surprised Trump didn't declare Jerusalem as America's capital. Then he'd be able to say we have a wall.
 
Retweeted Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister):

#Trump is doing a truly *excellent* job at destroying what remains of U.S. credibility in the #MiddleEast.

It’s difficult to see *any* possible advantages of this #Jerusalem announcement - beyond pleasing #Trump's increasingly small, ignorant electoral base.
 
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