Fully agree with all you said, except that religion can't be a beautiful thing. The art, conservation of history and community produced by religion is one of our greatest assets as a species. Yes, it is also rife with conservatism, but that's no different from politics. Which is where religion goes wrong, used for political gains.

Teaching people religion is stupid won't stop conflicts like this. It has nothing to do with religion, religion is simply a tool to keep the conflict going and justify all the crap that's happening. Without religion people will use something else. People tend to want to belong to a group with the genetically build in superiority complex to all other groups. Zionism and Jihad are not born from religion, they're born from those using religion to justify their superiority complex. Unfortunately people don't need religion for ethnic cleansing, apartheid, slavery, war on terror etc.

Btw the best religion is in Bhutan :)
https://theculturetrip.com/asia/bhutan/articles/how-and-why-bhutan-came-to-worship-the-phallus/

I'm not religious myself but find all things produced by religion quite fascinating. Sure, it comes from archaic beliefs in (a) 'higher' power(s) to explain the unknown. Yet most people don't follow the 'teachings' by the letter and know full well they're just stories to describe history and values.


The problem with the state of Palestine is, they keep giving 'the world' reasons not to help. Giving Israel the chance to play the victim and justify all the crap they're doing. A tear down the wall moment is needed, not shoot rockets over the wall.

i dont get how the party that got decimated in 40-45 became the shitters

The Israelis targeted media outlets in Gaza to eradicated them, destroying a whole building where at least 3 major media outlets operated as well as a blood bank, taking with it, it's enormous value in hardware, recorded material and a place to work, all to try and silence the information coming out :/    

Israel is for sure trying to wipe the Palestenian identity. Israelis don't acknowledge the existence of Palestine or Palestenians as a valid identity. They call them Arabs. They also take more and more land from Palestenians in an effort to squeeze them out of the area. If the possibility of a Palestenian state ceases to exist, is that not the death of an identity, of an ethnicity? It is genocide, it is apartheid, it is ethnic cleansing and it is one of the worst hi,an rights atrocities in the world right up there with Yemenis, Uyugurs, Kashmiris, etc and in the top echelon of human rights atrocities.

Palestenians in Gaza can;t have electricity because Israel doesn't allow it. People can't fish because israel doesn't allow it. No proper healthcare, no proper food supply system. You can't enter or leave Gaza without Israel's permission. Israeli soldiers rip down solar panels, if people try that. Gaza has no autonomy. West bank is shrinking constantly as Israeli settlements expand more and more. In the end, there will be several Gaza like situations where the people of West Bank will be covered up by Israel from all sides and have very little space for themselves and then they'll be in the same situation as Gazans. And even in West bank, the PA can barely do anything without Israel's approval. Israel wants to remove the Palestenian identity from the face of the Earth. What would you call that?

I'm not sure what you mean by they don't acknowledge the existence of Palestine or Palestinians. Here's a transcript of a speech by Netanyahu. He uses the term Palestinian no less than 20 times, and also use the term Arab separately and distinctly. I'm not endorsing anything in the speech, but I'm not sure where you've gotten the idea that Palestinian is not acknowledged as an identity.  https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-netanyahus-speech-today-recalls-historic-day-of-israels-founding/ The Palestinian National Authority issues Palestinian ID cards which are approved by Israel. Again, not endorsing the practice, but that is another example of them recognizing Palestinian identity. 

If the possibility of a Palestian state ceases to exist then that's also not genocide or the death of an ethnicity. Because... uhhh... they're you know, still alive. Ethnicity and nationality are a different thing, and there are often multiple ethnicities within a country. Palestine has to my knowledge never been a sovereign state, yet the identity exists, so clearly that's not required. Texas was once a country, then it became not a country. That was not genocide. Likewise, there was no Prussian genocide. There was no genocide of Constantinoplians (or whatever you'd call people who lived in Constantinople). When the Roman empire fell, that was also not genocide. 

For argument's sake, I'll accept all of the allegations you make in your last paragraph. What would I call that? I dunno. Not everything has a specific term. But, I wouldn't call it genocide. Or ethnic cleansing. Because both of those things require populations of a group within an area going way down. However, populations of Palestinians are going up in Gaza, the West Bank, and within Israel. If the numbers of a group are going up while a genocide is happening, that is akin to it being raining in an area and the ground getting drier.

I know you would really like to use the word genocide but words have meanings. For reference, in Rwanda, 800,000 people were killed in 100 days. That is genocide; an attempt to kill all members of a particular group. Not some kind of metaphorical death of an identity. This is like saying a man grabbing a woman's ass without consent is rape. It may not be okay, but it is not rape, and that kind of usage cheapens the term for actual victims. 

To start off with, you're one of the best members here so if the rest of my post sounds aggressive, it's just because I am a plain speaker and it's not personal. With that said, I agree you still can brainwash people without the need for religion, and humans will always find ways to surprise us with their stupidity. However, acknowledging that "bad things would still happen anyway" shouldn't be the gateway through which we justify the existence of religion and the monstrosities done in its names. To say that Jihad isn't born from religion is wrong, it's like saying sexism and homophobia and transphobia has nothing to do with Islam when it clearly if the literature encourages such phobias, and you can't have a rationale discussion about these issues with moderate Muslims let alone the more deeply devoted. If you run national surveys in the UK about homosexuality, and before that, we had similar issues with the Christian communities who couldn't be talked to logically about these issues. It's not a coincidence the younger generations are more accepting and rational and less connected to religion at the same time. 

And to bring this back to the topic at hand, listen to the settlers justifying settlements violating international law because god promised them a piece of land. 

Religion is used for political gains because religion is deeply political, it wants to be involved with internal and foreign policies just as much as politicians want it to be involved. Teaching kids that x religion is the truth at the age of 5 can only result in brains that can't be reasoned with on important issues when they grow older. You argue humans' are gonna be evil anyway, and I say, well, if it's bad as it is, you don't catalyse it further with fairytales sold as truths. And don't worry, you'd still get your gorey, sexist, -phobic stories in the form of novels, TV shows and video games. They're all mankind's creation after all, just like religions. 

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” 

As for Palestinian giving the world reasons not to help them, well, it's less about what they do and more about lobbying. Once they have something as big as AIPAC in the USA, maybe Obama would've had the balls to do more than issuing blanket statements about how settlements are problematic 

I think this is where the discussion fails, it's when you start making it about the outcome of these rockets from both sides, which is something cable news love to do because the framing becomes "but doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself?" to which the obvious answer is yes, as Joe Biden would happily answer that question for you (no fucking shit, Joe). Obviously, he wouldn't step a foot into a discussion about settlements despite being the main drive for this particular conflict nor those journalists will dare to challenge on what he's gonna do about it; after all, he was only the vice president for 8 years and did nothing but signing a photograph for Netanyahu "I don't agree with you, but I love you", disgusting. 

The discussion should always be circled back to settlement expansions and the diminishing west bank rather than x number of Palestinians died and z building was burnt to the ground, as harsh as that sounds, you're just not gonna win here because "Israel has the right to defend itself" is all you're gonna get, and there is truth to that.

... But what about settlements breaking international law? is that retaliation as well? a reaction? a reaction against what? 

Good on Rashida for linking black issues resulting from racial inequality with what's happening here, Americans can't continue to ignore that their biggest ally is emboldened by their politicians support to steal, support that's paid for with their tax money, take your wokeness further and hold your politicians accountable, you don't have to wait for the greenlight from CNN and the Jimmy Kimmels to be outraged by settlements expansion. 

The mainstream media are not all oblivious, it's getting a little surprising now how frank some are on the issue of the Israelis trying their hardest to displace and remove the Palestinians from their lands and homes, there is growing awareness and anger at this slow creep eradication   

Israel has implemented ethnic cleansing in Palestina for decades. Only now is getting expossed to the general public. It has done so both by killing and, more frecuently, by expelling palestinians from their homes and clearing palestinian lands in order to create jewish settlements. The violence we witness today started precisely when Israel forces tried to expel palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalen and use that land to create jewish settlements (As it has been doing for years now... Only that this time palestinians fought back fiercely). Zionists invaded and occupied Palestine in 1948, used terrorism to expel the colonial power there (the british), killed and displaced millions of palestinians, took their properties and homes and stablished the State of Israel. They did so backed by the resources of multimillionaires like the Rotchild and the Rockefeller families. And by the US, which needed a powerful ally in the area in order to secure its geopolitical and material interests. The palestinians have since suffered the stealth of their land and their country and the humilliation of being pointed as the "bad guy" while being the victims. Israel asphixiates the palestinian economy both by blocking Gaza and Cisjordania and by directly destroying the means of life of the palestinians (I.E., allowing israely settlers to cut thousands of olive trees wich provide palestinian families their only way of income). It's clearly an ethnic cleasing geared towards phisical elimination of palestinians from their land (and by phisical I mean no necesarily killing them, but making them dissapear from the land by terror, displazement, harassment, etc., in order to allow Israel to dominate the whole land that was once known as Palestine).

We really need an historian for this, it's just too much reading. The land of Israel has apparently existed for ~3000 years intill they lost it. I also read somewhere that jews has been hunted down and killed for over 5000 years (someone should fact-check this), so jews might view themself as victims. Politicians almost always respond to their voters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Israel