Tlaib refuses to apologize for blaming Israel for Gaza hospital blast, attacks Biden
abcnews.go.com
Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib refused to apologize Wednesday for saying on Tuesday that Israel is to blame for the hospital explosion that day in Gaza, an accusation that sparked political backlash against her from Republicans as Israel denies fault.
Tlaib joined thousands of protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza during a solidarity rally hosted by the left-leaning group Jewish Voice for Peace at the National Mall. She was visibly emotional, at times pausing her speech to openly weep and criticizing lawmakers who have not backed a ceasefire resolution.
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The apartheid accusation is solid, nothing to say here.
But ethnic cleansing?
There are 2 million arab israeli citizens… not very homogenous. That’s almost 1 in 5 citizens.
The degree to which a nation is homogeneous is not the qualifying factor for whether an action is considered ethnic cleansing. It is instead the effect, and the effect of forcing Palestinians out of their homes, out of Gaza, counts as ethnic cleansing.
It's also not just based on race, it's also got to do with religion.
About 18% of Israelis are Muslim, and they have the full rights of any other Israeli citizen. They serve in Knesset and in the IDF, there are Muslim celebrities, there are Muslim academics, they're free to practice their religion as they see fit.
Actually, the only thing you can really call "apartheid" in Israel, if you want to be a dick about it, is the temple mount. Only Muslims are allowed to pray there, Jews are forbidden.
The last instance I know of where Israel was accused of "forcing Palestinians out of their homes" is the Sheikh Jarrah situation, where Palestinian tenants stopped paying rent to their Jewish landlords for over a decade and Israeli courts were really slow about processing their evictions. Like, really slow. For obvious reasons. And then, just before they decided, mounting tensions led to riots. You might complain about the property decisions from decades before that, but the tenants agreed to the rent terms in the early 90s, so framing this as "ethnic cleansing" is pretty nuts.
That's not true.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
Yeah. Those decisions are exactly what people are talking about when people call it apartheid. And those decisions have never stopped, it's been happening ever since the Israeli-Palistinian conflict started.
When somebody comes in, says they own your home, and then try to kick you out because of your race/religion, that is apartheid.
"Agreed" is a strong word to use when the alternative is homelessness.
It is the intentional homogenization of a region, dispelling people from their homes that they've lived in since their birth. That is by definition ethnic cleansing.
Lol, I'm familiar with the HRW report. It's funny how this almost entirely unsourced document it starts off saying it's going to address claims that Israel is an egalitarian state within its borders, and then kind of goes on to say, "well, they can vote and stuff, but they still face discrimination, like, uhh... they can't trespass on land that used to be theirs, and they can be evicted from land if their landlord evicts them according to the law."
Yeah, still nothing that can be described as apartheid in Israel.
No, I'm pretty sure most people aren't pointing to obscure decades-old property rulings as "apartheid." I'm pretty sure almost everybody who says it just heard somebody who sounded smart at the time say it first.
Feel free to correct me. Can you name any of the decisions that you say constitute apartheid? Have you read any of the opinions? What was wrong with the legal reasoning? How does that legal reasoning relate to the South African system known as Apartheid, aside from the HRW crew deciding it's really bad and that people will really hate it if they make it sound super duper racist?
Well, the alternative was moving to a different place and paying rent there, instead. Kind of the alternatives most people have when it comes to housing they don't own.
Again, Israel isn't homogeneous. You want to look at homogeneity, look at the rest of the Middle East, besides Lebanon. They all chased off their Jews, executing them, launching pogroms against them. Even outspoken antizionist Jews got executed for "zionism." Nobody fucking accuses Egypt of ethnic cleansing. Or Saudi Arabia, or Iran. And they're actually doing it. But the world is obsessed with Israel. Shit, if I was a Muslim, and I had to pick a place to live in the middle east, there's still only one country I'd feel safe in, and you gotta know what it is.
People got evicted from their homes according to boring legal procedures (and failure to pay rent), and they took decades to do it because Israel gave them oodles of procedural protections and special classifications to delay the eviction even after they stopped bothering to pay rent.
Man, someone here has been guzzling propaganda and ignoring tons of evidence, much of it on video, to the contrary. But yes, tell us more about how Israel's many broken agreements to not expand colonists into Palestinian territory is "just protecting their border".