Generational Dynamics World View News

[Guest]

John

I do think the push should be for a two state solution.

Timing is wrong for a two state solution: After the next war might work

These people always need enemies. It's their mojo. What's more, much higher up people love that they fight and fund wars.

The funniest part about all of this is that there are people here that actually believe that Israel fell asleep at the wheel while the most monitored and occupied part of the country, which they claim to be an enemy, flew across on hang gliders and did what they please.

This forum has reached an all time low.

Some posters do not believe it. Go back and read their comments. I don't believe the Israeli denials either. Most Israelis don't seem to either.

[Bob Butler]

US military advisors are suggesting Israel should hold off on invading Gaza. Voices from Israel are suggesting asserting control over Gaza will stop the Hamas atrocities. I for one think that attacking the terrorists and missiles in the buildings without harming the civilians above requires infantry closeness. I'm thinking the invasion start should be prompt.

[Cool Breeze]

Timing is wrong for a two state solution: After the next war might work

These people always need enemies. It's their mojo. What's more, much higher up people love that they fight and fund wars.

The funniest part about all of this is that there are people here that actually believe that Israel fell asleep at the wheel while the most monitored and occupied part of the country, which they claim to be an enemy, flew across on hang gliders and did what they please.

This forum has reached an all time low.

Some posters do not believe it. Go back and read their comments. I don't believe the Israeli denials either. Most Israelis don't seem to either.

Thinking like that will get you censored around here, because it shows that other parties are in control, and therefore they would have control or influence over someone like Netanyahu, or people in his situation, whether they know it or not.

[John]

** 26-Oct-2023 World View: Some notes on the Israel-Gaza war

The following notes on the war are based
on information that I've gleaned from TV
news channels:

• The war has now been going on
  for 18 days.
• The war has badly split American
  people, especially within the Democrat
  Party and within elite colleges, like
  Harvard and Columbia. The leftists,
  including Rashida Tlaib and "the squad,"
  and many college protest groups, are
  calling for a ceasefire, which would be
  a total victory for Hamas.
• Polla show that a large majority of
  Americans, especially older people and
  Republicans, favor the Israeli
  side.
• Europe is also badly split, even at
  the nation level. Germany, with its
  Nazi history, is leading many nations to
  strongly support Israel, while Spain,
  Portugal and Ireland are leaning more
  toward the Palestinians.
• Fox News tends to be pro-Israel.
  CNN and MS-NBC tend to be schizophrenic
  between Israel and Hamas. For
  al-Jazeera, however, it's not even an
  "Israeli-Gaza" war that began on October
  7. Instead, it's a "Gaza war" that
  began on October 8. Anything about the
  Hamas attack on Israel is rarely
  mentioned, and then only in
  passing.
• Kamala Harris gave a speech today
  saying that the Biden administration is
  firmly committed to the "two-state
  solution." Anyone who thinks that the
  two-state solution is even credible,
  except as the forced settlement of a
  major generational crisis war, is a
  total idiot.
• Two major humanitarian issues are
  discussed constantly. One is that many
  Gazans would like to leave Gaza and go
  anywhere else. The problem is that
  nobody wants to take in the
  Palestinians. Egypt, Jordan and Turkey
  have specifically refused.
• The other major humanitarian issue
  is providing humanitarian aid to the
  Gazans, many of whom are now homeless,
  specifically food, water, medicines, and
  fuel. Israel opposes any mass infusion
  of humanitarian aid, or any fuel at all,
  because Hamas will confiscate it all for
  their fighters. As a result, the
  situation for Gazas civilians is getting
  very desperate.
• Tensions are rising rapidly between
  America and Iran. Iran has been
  attacking American bases in Iraq and
  Syria, has been supplying weapons to
  Hamas and Hezbollah, and has been
  supplying drones to Russia with drones
  for use in Ukraine.
• Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has
  been off the front pages lately, but is
  still going on and is just as
  potentially explosive as the Mideast
  war.

[Guest]

For
al-Jazeera, however, it's not even an
"Israeli-Gaza" war that began on October
7. Instead, it's a "Gaza war" that
began on October 8. Anything about the
Hamas attack on Israel is rarely
mentioned, and then only in
passing.

I have been watching a lot of al-Jazeera and Sky News, some BBC and other networks less so. I don't think it's fair to say al-Jazeera doesn't cover the Hamas massacres. I have seen multiple reports, long ones, live on TV where al-Jazeera goes to the massacre sites and talks about what happened and interviews the Israelis. The Israeli government is trying to kick al-Jazeera out, and saying these things to justify it, bit it's not true. I watched the reports myself from the beginning.

[Guest]

Polla show that a large majority of
Americans, especially older people and
Republicans, favor the Israeli
side.
Europe is also badly split, even at
the nation level. Germany, with its
Nazi history, is leading many nations to
strongly support Israel, while Spain,
Portugal and Ireland are leaning more
toward the Palestinians.

While most western governments do publicly support Israel their populations are split. Most of the world's population seems to support Palestine. I don't have a dog in this fight, but I see the anti-Palestinian position is very clear among western governments and most western media. I also see how the rest of the world is reacting.

The world is becoming a 3rd world slum with mass immigration, and these masses are using their political muscle. The wealthy elites apparently don't realize this. It is not 1982 anymore.

[Guest]

From The Tablet

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/isra ... li-victory

The article is very clear and concise, too clear. I don't want to fight a nuclear war to save Israel. As for American influence in the Middle East, it's gone. There is no US hegemony in the Middle East left to defend. We don't even have carriers in the Persian Gulf at this moment. I wish the American government could be this centered on protecting America, but it is not. I have no interest in visiting Israel, never have.

But make no mistake, our fight is finally not only with Hamas or Hezbollah. It is with Iran. The Persians play chess, and in the regional power game, Hamas is a pawn, Hezbollah is a rook, and Iran is queen. Iran is the regional actor calling the shots, and Iran is the actor who must finish this war having suffered a clear strategic loss to its regional position and assets. Otherwise, Iran and its patrons and allies win, and the U.S. and Israel lose.

Israel wants a war with Hamas in Lebanon and Iran. That's World War III. I'm American, and I didn't vote for this.

In the broader regional context, an Iranian-dominated Middle East means a Russian-and-Chinese-dominated Middle East. Iran has had complex relations with both Russia and China for many years. However, in the past few years, complexity has given way to clarity. Despite Chinese and Russian hesitations over Iran’s Islamist worldview, both countries have strengthened their strategic ties with the Islamic Republic. A win for Tehran in the Middle East is therefore a win for Moscow and Beijing on the global chess board.

Now China and Russia are mentioned. This will mean WW3, nuclear war.

It is therefore a strategic imperative for both Washington and Jerusalem that the Gaza war ends with a blow to Iran’s positions. Hezbollah is the Iranian front line, but the IRGC forces in Syria and Iraq are the most obvious direct targets. An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, so long planned for, should be on the table as soon as Hezbollah has been neutralized. Devastating Hamas and Hezbollah and exacting a major price from Iran for the behavior of its proxies will come at a tremendous cost to Israel, but an even greater cost to its enemies. It is the only sufficient end to this war that can turn around what is currently a strategic disaster that threatens both America and Israel.

An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, so long planned for, should be on the table as soon as Hezbollah has been neutralized

Insanity.

After Gaza has been razed to the ground, Israel is going to attack Iran and Iraq too. This is madness. Israel knows it can't take on the entire Middle East and win, so it wantrs America to fight WW 3.

WW3.

I would rather walk away from this and avoid nuclear war. I don't care if Israel survives or not.

Voters in Gaza voted for Hamas, and voters in Israel voted for the Jewish version of Hamas. Look at the orthodox crazies that make up Israel's government. We have two extremist groups in the Holy Lands bent on destroying each other. This is tribal.

Time to go home.

[guest]

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/17 ... 2391691733

Kim Dotcom
@KimDotcom
Raz Segel is an Israeli who directs the Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University.

He says that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that Israeli leadership openly displays the special intent to commit genocide against International law.

[guest]

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/17 ... 2391691733

Kim Dotcom
@KimDotcom
Raz Segel is an Israeli who directs the Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University.

He says that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that Israeli leadership openly displays the special intent to commit genocide against International law.

This Raz Segal. I'm sure Raz could tell you all about bouquets today, stones tomorrow...

Young Israeli professor brings new energy and insight to Holocaust studies at Stockton

January 18, 2017

By ELLEN WEISMAN STRENGER
Voice shore editor


Raz Segal, an Israeli who recently joined the Holocaust and Genocide Studies faculty at Stockton, embraces the challenge of making Holocaust studies relevant to younger generations.
Raz Segal, an Israeli who recently joined the Holocaust and Genocide Studies faculty at Stockton, embraces the challenge of making Holocaust studies relevant to younger generations.
“Right now, the U.S. is the place to do Holocaust studies,” according to Raz Segal, a young Israeli who is Stockton University’s new assistant professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Segal, who studied under renowned Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer at Tel Aviv University, ultimately received his Ph.D. in Holocaust Studies from Clark University in Worcester, MA. After spending several years teaching at Israeli universities, Segal began teaching at Stockton in September.

The American students he teaches now are very different from their Israeli counterparts, he noted. First of all, Israeli University students are older and more confident, having already completed several years of military service, often followed by several months of traveling the world.

“Also, just because they’re Israelis, they can’t shut up!” said Segal. “The challenge there is to stop discussion; here the challenge is to get the undergraduates talking.” Conversely, he added, American students are more likely to do the assigned reading than Israeli students.

Perhaps the biggest difference, however, when it comes to teaching Holocaust studies, is their frame of reference. “In Israel, everyone has something to say about the Holocaust. It’s part of the political atmosphere, and many people have family stories. That is not the case here,” said Segal, noting that most of his students are South Jersey natives who are largely non-Jewish. “Why would they be interested in learning about the Final Solution?”

Making the material relevant is a paramount challenge—and one that Segal is well trained to take on. Indeed, how academics approach the Holocaust and seek to make it relevant for the younger generation—both Jews as well as non-Jews—is currently a huge and sometimes contentious topic in the world of Holocaust scholarship, Segal indicated.

While the Holocaust was once understood and studied solely through the lens of anti- Semitism, that is no longer true, said Segal. Initially, scholars studied the Holocaust as part of the study of Jewish history. The Holocaust was understood as a unique and unprecedented horror motivated by anti- Semitism—a crime against humanity perpetrated on the Jewish people unlike any other such incident in all of human history. Among the many anti- Semitic events experienced by the Jewish people throughout history, it stood out as unique in its scope and its horror.

The belief that “the Holocaust was unique”—that it was “a massacre like no other”—is widely held by Jews in Israel as well as the United States, said Segal. According to this point of view, “the Holocaust is considered to be an eruption in the 20th century that is unlike anything else in the 20th century,” he noted.

Yet from a scholarly perspective, this view is problematic. “The Holocaust can’t be unique, yet also have lessons to teach us” relevant to students today, explained Segal. That is why Holocaust and genocide studies have been joined into one department at many American universities—including Stockton as well as Clark University, where Segal earned his Ph.D.

“If we don’t put Holocaust studies together with genocide studies, in a decade we won’t have Holocaust studies,” Segal declared. Putting the two together “offers new insights and understandings” and makes the topic more relevant to the younger generation, who have an awareness of the pervasiveness of genocide, having seen them continually unfold during their lifetime in Sarajevo, Darfur, and elsewhere. “As we sit here, there is a genocide unfolding in Burma of Muslims that has many similarities to the Holocaust in Germany,” added Segal.

Yet many people, especially in Israel, are threatened by the prospect of looking at the Shoah in the context of other genocides, rather than as an entirely unique event, he said. “Dealing with the Holocaust in Israel is always very emotional and political,” noted Segal, who finds many people there are threatened by the new generation of scholars that he is part of, who look at the Holocaust and genocide in a broader context. “There is a lot of suspicion in Israeli Universities about what we do, why we do it, and what is the political agenda behind it,” he explained.

Nevertheless, Segal insists these new perspectives on the Holocaust are essential to keeping Holocaust studies alive. “It’s not a threat, it’s the way forward. This new research opens a window to the complexity—and this complexity is more relatable to the younger generation.”

Segal’s own journey through academia illustrates the sometimes conflicting approaches taken to understanding and teaching about the Holocaust. Notably, Segal does not come from a family of Holocaust survivors. “My family is from Bulgaria and Romania. They survived the war without being deported.” Eventually, they immigrated to Israel, where Segal was born.

After serving in the army and traveling through India, Segal decided he wanted to study “something meaningful.” He chose to study the Holocaust, pursuing a master’s degree in Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. It was there that he met the famous Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer, whom Segal described as “the founder of Holocaust scholarship.” Bauer, a longtime professor at Hebrew University who was then semi-retired, happened to offer a special seminar at Tel Aviv University, and Segal signed up. (Bauer was also a two-time visiting scholar at Stockton.)

“I was very awed by him,” Segal recalled. Bauer likewise recognized Segal’s potential. “He encouraged me to do a master’s with him. I was his last student.”

The view that the Holocaust was a unique historical event pervaded Segal’s graduate classes at Tel Aviv University. “I was very much tied to this point of view,” he recalled.

But his point of view changed radically as a Ph.D. student at Clark University, where Segal went to study under another well-known Holocaust scholar, Deborah Dwork, who founded the University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Under Dwork’s leadership, the Strassler Center stressed the importance of viewing the Holocaust from a larger context than he had seen it from as a graduate student.

“I began rethinking my understanding of the Holocaust,” Segal noted. Given that anti-Semitism was around in the 19th century and medieval times, he began to reflect on what it was about the 20th century that made an event with the proportions of the Holocaust possible. While doing research on Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust for his first book, “Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence,” he found he needed to understand mid-20th century Hungary in its own context to fully understand how its treatment of the Jews fit into the picture. “I realized I was really writing about modern European history,” said Segal. This way of looking at things “was a major shift,” he added.

Both Dwork and Bauer served as Segal’s doctoral advisors. “They were like my doctoral father and mother. Who I am today is a result of the influence of those two advisors.”

Yet as Segal began to understand the Holocaust from a new historical context, he found himself more and more at odds with Bauer. “At this point, he and I don’t agree on much but we’re still good friends,” said Segal, adding that Bauer still pushed him to continue his work despite their disagreements. “I owe him a lot. He believed in me.”

Meanwhile, Segal continues to come up with new ways to teach the lessons of the Holocaust so that they are relevant to his students. He is already planning a new workshop for next fall entitled “The Matter of Black Lives and the Question of Genocide.”

[guest]

Yehuda Bauer, "the Father of Holocaust studies" and Raz Segel's mentor:

In 2003, Bauer stated that "What we have here between the Israelis and the Palestinians is an armed conflict - if one side becomes stronger there is a chance of genocide."

When one of the visitors asked, "Am I to understand that you think Israel could commit genocide on the Palestinian people?,"

Bauer answered "Yes," and added, "Just two days ago, extremist settlers passed out flyers to rid Arabs from this land. Ethnic cleansing results in mass killing."

Bauer said that opinion polls show that a high percentage of Palestinians want to get rid of Jews.

Even Israeli Jews, at this moment, are not in agreement. The right-wing push is just that--right-wing. If Yehuda Bauer and Raz Segal were not Jewish, they would be labelled "anti-Semitic.'

Before we rush off into nuclear oblivion, I think we should all pause and consider what is happening and what all of this will lead to.

It's my life on the line here too.