Israel/Palestine

I’m speaking from experience of being around British Muslims.

And it’s definitely a recent thing.

Jews and Muslims have a historically positive relationship and the Israel / Palestine conflict skews peoples perceptions of that relationship

I guess it’s the religious zealots on each side which perpetuate this animosity, and the rest suffer.

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I have a Jewish friend, and a couple of Muslims friends, and they get on fabulously. Both of them roll their eyes whenever tensions get high in Gaza. The majority of both groups, I feel, aren’t interested in perpetuating the animosity at all, but are at the mercy of these religious demagogues in both Palestine and Israel.

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It’s a never-ending conflict with the UN being the useless organization when Israel was getting attacked by Arab countries and the UN continues to be a useless organization when Israel is the aggressor.

Dissolve that useless organization.

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Love hearing anecdotes like that but I think that’s a pretty self selecting group, you know? Like if you did have hard line views about the conflict you’re not as likely to associate with members of the “out group”.

And fwiw from an outsider it feels like the Muslim world by and large has really turned its back on the Palestinian people and their struggle. They basically treat it like a coat. Pick it up and use it when convenient, put it away in a closet when it isn’t.

I don’t think they turned their back on them. I think it’s more like they think it’s a futile fight, and it wears them down to the point where they just give up.

That’s fair. Although I’m not sure what actually motivates the heads of state for countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Maybe they were more concerned with getting one over on Iran.

I don’t know enough about Middle East politics to answer, but I’m guessing at least for Saudi Arabia it’s more profitable, because of the relationship with the US, to not get involved.

Maybe there is also a Sunni/Shia angle to this as well?

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That was my thought, but then again, maybe MbS doesn’t actually give a shit about that. He’s probably too busy erecting a 50ft statute of Joelinton at the Jeddah airport or something like that.

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He probably doesn’t care, but I bet all the religious leaders in Saudi do, and he has to appease them at every turn.

I thought the fun part of being a dictator was not having to appease anyone but yourself!

That and getting people to applaud your pathetic PRs in the gym.

MBS isn’t a dictator. At least not in the sense that most people would think of someone with that title.

He’s merely one member of a powerful family. But be in no doubt, if the mullahs and the religious orthodoxy turned on him, he’d be gone in a flash.

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The shared interest tends to be Iran. Saudi and Iran have long had tensions and both have a desire to be seem as the power country in the region. That’s been Saudi Arabia for as long as any of us can remember and most of the Gulf States would rather normalise relations with Israel (even without the Palestine solution) to damage Iran.

Either way, the Saudi self interest is the only one that matters to them. They’ve largely kept themselves outside of a conflict they could be key to solving by simply preferring to keep ties with US strong and their not so secret relationship with Israel strong than to be a power broker in the region and try to find a solution.

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Even more violence :frowning:

I am not so sure about this.

He is 36 years old, crown prince and he already has transformed Saudi Arabia in a very short time span.

Opened the country up for proper tourism. Given much more rights to women and minorities than the religious orthodoxy ever would allow for.

Women can drive. Women can decide not to wear the headscarf. Many young Saudis are very content and supportive of MBS.

He has retrieved billions in money in his fight against corruption.

He is building towards a future for Saudi Arabia less dependent on oil revenue. Becoming one of the largest solar energy providers in the world.

It might be too late for the mullah a to put the genie back into the bottle.

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A film on Netflix called ‘Farha’ is gathering quite the storm. Lot of Israeli are condemning the film and calling it “anti-Semitic” because it rightly depicts the Zionist actions of the Nakba in 1948.

I’m glad Netflix stood firm and released a film which finally starts to shed light on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people that started back in the 40s and exists until the present day.

Going to give it a watch this weekend to see if it matches up to its reviews but either way it’s good to see some mainstream artistic attention being drawn to the topic. For too long the narrative on Palestine-Israel has been carefully controlled by the right wing press in the West.

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Looks worth a watch as well

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I don’t think we’ll ever see it in our lifetimes but a two state solution and peace between the two nations would literally be a dream

It’s a race between this and a united Ireland

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If Ireland goes then the dominoes fall and we all go and the death of the union is complete :grin:

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