Further to our late lamented friend's plug for "The Lobby" documentary about Israeli state interference in British politics, I'm hearing reports that its sequel, the one that covers the US side of the story, was completed two years ago but has yet to be broadcast while unspecified "editorial and legal issues" are dealt with. The rumour is that it has been buried on the insistence of the Qatari government for fear of an Israel sponsored backlash from Trump's White House.
Unverified reports of Russian interference with the US election have been whipping through the British media like a hurricane. Fully authenticated reports of Israeli subversion of British Democracy can be heard like the faintest breeze in a distant forest. Labour Party calls for a Government investigation have been ignored. Scandalously the Labour Party is not calling for an internal investigation into the deep penetration of its own structures.
Re: The generic "Look at what Israel's doing now" thread
I saw a Facebook friend make a reference to Israel's "right to exist" (she also said she doesn't like Israel's policies and supports "Palestine's right to exist safely and freely") and it got me to thinking about the phrase again.
1. I think she only made reference to Palestinians' "right to exist" because of the parallelism with Israel. But it didn't really resolve the issues with that term, which doesn't really have much to do with what was obviously the cause of her post (Ilhan Omar's comments about AIPAC). Omar is not contesting Israel's right to exist if that means the right of Israeli Jews not to be murdered or forced out of the Levant, or Israel's right to exist as an independent country (from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, etc.), so what is the relevance of bringing it up? Omar didn't even say anything against a two-state solution...
People don't generally reference countries' or nations' "right to exist" other than Israel. People do not generally speak of Tibet's right to exist, or Flanders', or Wallonia's, or Kosovo's, or North/South Korea's, or Taiwan's, or Catalonia's, etc. You can find instances of some of those terms, but generally not more than a couple hundred on Google (as opposed to 340k hits for "Israel's right to exist").
Those are situations where a state exists but its independence is contested (Kosovo, Taiwan) or another country would like to unify with it/annex it (the Koreas towards each other), or they are independence movements, some where the people like Tibetans have severe grievances justifying the desire for independence. It would seem it makes just as much, if not more sense, to talk about Kosovo or Taiwan's "right to exist" as Israel's.
But still that terminology is not commonly used.
2. It is frequently invoked in response to criticisms of treatment of Palestinians.
Which made me notice, it is an invocation of a country's rights in response to criticisms of violations of people's rights.
And another term for a country is a state... so it's states' rights. States' rights are frequently invoked to justify taking away people's rights in the US, so I dunno, seemed like a revealing parallel.
Netanyahu shot back on his own Instagram account: “Dear Rotem, an important correction: Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and not anyone else.
It's a good thing Trump said he would be "neutral" between Israel and Palestine, which one would assume would extend to Israel's relations with neighbors like Syria, of course! Nobody got burned on that one.
Re: The generic "Look at what Israel's doing now" thread
We don't have a "What the Military/Industrial Complex is doing now" thread, but this one comes close, and closer still. This is the splendid Jonathan Cook reviewing "Wonder Woman", and Hollywood in general, in 2017;
Re: The generic "Look at what Israel's doing now" thread
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