I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

IllinoisLady

Cheryl, I will be anxious to look into your authors.  I have been a bit of a student for the past 20 years or so and never tire of attempting to learn more.  Many times I do find that I get conformation of thoughts and feelings I have not as yet found a great way to express.  In fact, I have a great deal of trouble with fully expressing many of my ideas on a variety of subjects.  People who know me well don't get flustered by it as they know why and as for those who don't know me that well, I have to let it be their problem.

Blue....I love the tree advice.  Reminds me of a picture I have of my Dad standing by a giant Sequoia.  My Dad who lived a difficult life seldom showed what he was thinking in his face, but in this picture, turned away from this huge old tree......there is such awe and amazement.  I never tire of looking at that picture. 

Jackie

QuinnCat

Not posting about his article, but I have little patience for Alan Dershowitz.  To him, Israel is never never never ever wrong.  Both sides are wrong at times and both sides have their cause that America seems to have chosen up sides unilaterally.  The news we get is so one-sided though and I think it is time to stop with the knee jerk support of Israel 100% of the time.  Lots of atrocities have been committed on both sides, but there is another side to this story that we often don't hear because it isn't politically correct, or maybe religiously correct.  Ok, off of my soapbox.

Anonymous

Kam, a bit that's missing from the diagrams, is the part of the West Bank that was changed as a result of war in the 1970's, as in so many cases, victorious countries take more land.  The current borders of USA is a good example of this kind of expansion.  Unlike the situation in Isreal, the USA did not have bordering countries trying to eliminate its existence. Difficult, difficult situation - role of the British Empire during World War II comes into it, of course, note the date 1948 isn't in the diagram.

Jon Dommic Crossin  LOVE his writing.  Went to several "seminars" he spoke to years ago.  Really a fascinating man, and so, so wise.  Haven't hear Borg, but have read some of his work.  I respect them both.

Alyson, I am FASCINATED by your field of study - what book would you suggest as "a toe in the water" for someone without much background in that subject.  ALSO, from your study - WHY were those other Gospels put aside?

Happy today to all - more rain, this is gonna be an interesting Spring, summer, we have a HUGE number of "Pick Your Own" berry farms in this area - strawberries are in trouble...blueberries have yet to bloom, and at least they're on little trees.  But seriously - how do we send this H20 to the midwest where it's needed?  Or was needed, b4 the floods, oh no, nothing to do with Global Climate Change - right, and pics of Germany, Hungary, Austria - really sad.

QuinnCat

Sunny -  "Unlike the situation in Isreal, the USA did not have bordering countries trying to eliminate its existence."  I think the Palestinians could say the same thing.  Taking more land is justified then?  1967 is not the long ago.  Even I had a memory from then!

bluedahlia

crazy4carrots

A 1per center's take on why the middle class is so important to economic growth (from Think Progress):

On Thursday, entrepreneur and self-described one percenter Nick Hanauer warned Congress thatrich people like him aren’t the engines of the economy. In a testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, he explained why, in fact, middle-class workers are the economy’s real job creators:

 

In the same way that it’s a fact that the sun, not earth is the center of the solar system, it’s also a fact that the middle class, not rich business people like me are the center of America’s economy.[…]

As an entrepreneur and investor, I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all would have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.

He described what he calls a “virtuous cycle” in which middle class consumers have money to buy goods, which increases demand and therefore hiring. The rich, on the other hand, don’t fuel the economy with their consumption in the same way. “I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff,” he noted.

But the country’s policies pretend otherwise. He included facts that display how skewed America’s policy priorities really are:

• Corporate profits and unemployment are simultaneously at 50-year highs.
• The share of income for the richest 1 percent has tripled since 1980 while their taxes have only risen by 50 percent.
• The rich enjoy a 15-20 percent tax rate on capital gains, dividends, and carried interest while the top marginal rate on middle class Americans is 39 percent.

He concludes, “Tax the wealthy and corporations – as we once did in this country – and invest that money in the middle class-as we once did in this country.”

Facts back up his proposal that taxing the rest and investing the revenues can spur economic growth. The years following the Bush tax cuts were the worst for job creation since record keeping began. Meanwhile, job growth in the post-war period has been stronger when the top income tax rate is higher.

Yet wages just fell to an all-time low. Corporate profits, on the other hand, haveoutpaced wages by 20 percent since 2008.

Wabbit

Exactly!  A thriving middle class was the goose that laid the golden egg.  We have allowed the greed and lack of long term vision by those who care about nothing more than their own interests and the next quarter's profit margin to destroy the goose.  And too many of the geese that are being slaughtered are buying into the fiction and enabling the destruction.

crazy4carrots

Richard Wolff was interviewed by Bill Moyers the other night on PBS.  One thing (among many) that he said really stood out for me:  When FDR was President during the Great Depression, he presented a tax reform to Congress which would have meant that those whose incomes were +$25,000 (today's equivalent $350K) would be taxed at 100%!  Congress debated this, of course, and the end result was a tax rate of 94%.  Those were the days when Americans (yes, even those in Congress in both parties) actually cared about those who couldn't find jobs and were basically destitute.   Couldn't afford food or shelter or health care.  And there were so, so many who fell into that category.

That 94% tax rate continued even into the 50's during the Eisenhower years.  Co-incidentally, those were the years that the economy grew and grew and the vast majority of Americans enjoyed the best economic prosperity ever.

Hmmmmmm.....sometimes (actually ALL of the time) it pays to read history to see what works and what doesn't.

bluedahlia

Reading Linda?  What a concept!

bluedahlia

bluedahlia

alexandria58

Kam:

I don't approve of everything Israel does.  I am in favor of a Palestinian state, and I believe that Israel needs to stop building settlements on the West Bank.  I believe Israel sometimes acts with unnecessary harshness.

That being said: Let us start with the main reason the UN voted to create a Jewish state.  There was a certain level of World guilt following the Holocaust when 6 million Jews were murdered, especially given that those Jews who tried to flee Hitler were refused entry into other countries, and returned to Europe, where Jewish men, women, and children, were gassed, shot, and burned.

So, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews from Europe wanted a Jewish homeland where any Jew anywhere could find refuge. 

In 1947, the Israelis accepted the UN plan to partition Palestine, but on May 14, 1947, when Israel declared its independence, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria invaded.  They promised to push the Jews into the sea, a promise that Jews took seriously after the Holocaust, thus sparking the first Arab-Israeli war.  And the borders did change, being set as of the time of the 1949 armistice agreement.

In the 1967 war, also known as the Six Day War, there had been escalating tensions between Egypt and Israel, with Egypt moving forces into the Sinai and along the Israeli border, the joining of Egyptian forces with those of Iraq, Syria and Jordan.  With war with Egypt appearing inevitable, Israel struck against Egypt, destroying its air force and taking over Gaza and Sinai.  Israel did not go into the West Bank or Old Jerusalem until Jordon and Syria began shelling Israel. 

I copied a summary of the political situation below from teacher's scholastic site.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/upfront/features/index.asp?article=f041607_Six_Day_War

Israel wants the Palestinians to renounce terrorism and genuinely accept its existence, while the Palestinians seek statehood, a capital in Jerusalem, and the right of Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 war to return to Israel.

"Each people believes that justice is totally on its own side," David Shaham, executive director of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, wrote in The Times some years ago. "Each nurtures its own sufferings and grievances and remains almost completely oblivious to that of the other."

In 2000 at Camp David, President Bill Clinton brought the two sides to the brink of an agreement: Israel would return to its pre-1967 borders, with adjustments, and the Palestinians would get an independent state with a capital in East Jerusalem, in return for the Palestinians' destroying all terrorist groups. But Arafat, to the consternation of Clinton and even Arafat's Arab allies, walked away from the negotiations.

According to Leslie Gelb, a former State Department official, Camp David's failure demonstrates the difficulties of bringing the two sides together.

Is Israel always right?  No.  Do Palestinians have legitimate grievances.  Yes.  But the Palestinians are also at fault. The Palestinians are not pure victims.  There are many Israeli Jews who advocate for a two state solution.  There are Palestinians who deny that the Holocaust occurred and claim that the Jews burn Palestinians in ovens.  There are Palestinians who deny that the second temple existed in Jerusalem.  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/24/temple-denial.html 

I don't know the solution.    I do know that this whole mess cannot be blamed solely on the Israelis.

Wabbit

A high tax rate encourages more investment in business, hiring more employees, and also paying them better  ... for the tax breaks.  The absence of a need for those tax deductions has resulted in just the opposite.

IllinoisLady

Carrots, I was reading what you printed out a couple of days ago.  At the time I was thinking along the lines of...yes, the middle class gets to take care of those who are poorer and needier and the rich because we get don't get the tax breaks etc.  Always getting squeezed both ways.  I don' t mind helping those less fortunate then me, but having to sit still for the other direction irritates me no end.

Jackie

Headline from Add Info:  Republicans watch another fake Scandal Die.  I.R.S. Manager reveals he is a conservative Republican.   The I.R.S. clarified it wasn't liberals targeting conservatives nor was the White House involved.  Wonder if Fox will report it that way......any bets.

Jackie

IllinoisLady

Anonymous

Thanks Alexandria - learned a lot from your post.  Always wondered why Camp David didn't work. Didn't realize how it ended.  Such a lost oportunity for peace.  Can't imagine it ever being as possible as it was then.  Sad.

Wabbit

The road to hell is paved with good intentions seems to apply.  Out of guilt, Europeans, Americans, Russians and whoever else was involved, decided to establish a Jewish homeland.  But what they did was give away land that was already occupied by other people who were not parties to the agreement.  I know that is way too simplistic a recap, but still the difficulties should not have been a surprise to anybody.  I just hope that someday all parties will be able to come to an agreement and be able to live side by side without the distrust, fear and anger. 

alexandria58

Actually, Palestine had been governed by the British since World War I until partition in 1947.  Before that, World War I, the area was governed by the Ottomans - or the Turks.  There was never an independent Arab "Palestine." The Americans and Russians did not "give" the land to the Jews - the Jews were already there, and they paid for the land.  The U.N. simply recognized that fact by splitting the land there to create two independent countries to satisfy both the Arabs and the Jews, a deal that the Jews were willing to accept.  The UN's recognition came out of guilt over the Holocaust, but they didn't "give" the land.

Jews have lived in what was Palestine since the Roman times, even though they were a small minority.  They began moving there in numbers in the 19th century as nationalism rose in Europe.  They purchased land from Arabs, much of which was desert, for what was then above market prices.  Jews used modern farming methods and irrigation to make the dessert bloom.  Jewish immigration did increase markedly after WWII, but Jews already owned much of the territory that was recognized by partition.

From Wikipedia

Nevertheless, during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, many successful land purchases were made through organizations such as the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA), Palestine Land Development Company and the Jewish National Fund.

When purchasing land, Jewish migrants were concerned with the displacement of fellahin, agricultural laborers who cultivated the land. "In 1920, Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion expressed his concern about the Arab fellahin, whom he viewed as 'the most important asset of the native population'. Ben-Gurion said 'under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to the fellahs or worked by them'".^[7] Because of the desire to displace as little number of people as possible, large tracts of land were purchased in the coastal plain the valley areas since most of the area was uncultivated and swampy. There were two main reasons why these areas were sparsely populated. The first reason being when the Ottoman power in the rural areas began to diminish in the seventeenth century, many people moved to more centralized areas to secure protection against the lawless Bedouin tribes. This resulted in huge migration to the cities leaving the rural area drastically under populated. The second reason for the sparsely populated areas of the valleys and coastal plains was the soil type. The soil, covered in a layer of sand, made it impossible to grow the staple crop of Palestine, corn. As a result this area remained uncultivated and under populated.^[3] "The sparse Arab population in the areas where the Jews usually bought their land enabled the Jews to carry out their purchase without engendering a massive displacement and eviction of Arab tenants".^[8]

"By 1947, Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres. Approximately 45,000 of these acres were acquired from the Mandatory Government; 30,000 were bought from various churches and 387,500 were purchased from Arabs. Analyses of land purchases from 1880 to 1948 show that 73 percent of Jewish plots were purchased from large landowners, not poor fellahin. Those who sold land included the mayors of Gaza, Jerusalem and Jaffa. As'ad el-Shuqeiri, a Muslim religious scholar and father of PLO chairman Ahmed Shuqeiri, took Jewish money for his land. Even King Abdullah leased land to the Jews. In fact, many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including members of the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews".^[7]

bluedahlia

bluedahlia

QuinnCat

My stance is that both are at fault; I think I said that, though it may be an insurmountable problem that can never be overcome. What bothers me is that it is seemingly prohibited in this country to ever say the Israelis are wrong or try to see it from the Palestinian's side. Enter Alan Dershowitz. It's tantamount to treason, for some reason, to speak ill of Israel. In reality, it's probably the strength of AIPAC and our method of campaign financing. There is a strong Jewish Lobby in the US.



I know there are far more Israeli's, percentage wise, who have a softer view of a 2 state solution and or are ashamed of their own government's handling of the conflict, than Americans. I think we, as Americans, are just programmed to think Israel is always right. They're not.

alexandria58

Well, Kam, I agree with you there.  Israel is not always right, and there is a liberal Jewish party in the state of Israel that wants Israel out of the territories and deplores some of Israel's strong arm tactics. 

I do think that the American problem is twofold.  First , Jewish congregations here tend to blindly support the Israeli government in everything.  You do have to understand, though, that much of this is out of fear.  You might notice how much I know about the Holocaust.  It is drilled into us - that Jews were assimilated in Germany, thought they were members of the society, and then Hitler came to power, promising to destroy the Jews and nobody toook him seriously, and nobody did anything as the noose tighened.  More liberal Jews like me do question Israel's tactics, but many many Jews still fear a rise of anti-Semitism and see Israel as a bullwark against it. 

Then there's what I call the unholy alliance - the born again, far right Christians who support anything Israel does, both out of animosity towards Muslems and out of religious belief that the Jews have to be in Israel for the second coming to occur. 

But honestly, I do despair of a solution.  Both sides will have to compromise, and I don't see that happening soon.  We need fewer fanatics and more people on both sides able and willing to recognize the humanity and the positions of the other side for there to be real progress.  Maybe someday.

IllinoisLady

Just a change of pace here:

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

Anonymous

Alexandria - thank you. WONDERFUL history lesson - I didn't know a lot of that history.

alexandria58

The history of what actually happened in the region does get forgotten at times.  Glad that know that Hebrew school did do something for me.

IllinoisLady

bluedahlia

Thank you for the refresher Alex, I used to be a history buff, but now I'm not even a buff.  Isn't it enlightening to have a conversation where everyone is adult and civilized!  The world has a lot to answer for in regards to what they let happen in Nazi Germany to the Jews.