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Zohran Mamdani is threatening to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the UN in September
18 USC 878 makes it a federal crime to threaten to imprison any foreign head of state, which suggests that the DOJ has grounds to take action against Mamdani here. This would, of course, cause absolutely nuclear levels of insanity to erupt, especially since I have very little faith in the media not to frame it as "Fascist Trump arrests political rival". But also, it's also extremely unlikely that there will be an actual attempt to arrest Netanyahu, since that would require the NYPD to tangle with the United States Secret Service. All of this seems obvious to me, which means it must be obvious to Mamdani, which raises the question, what is his play here? Even the suggestion that the city that hosts the UN would seriously consider arresting guests of the UN should be insanely problematic.
The hysteria over this flies both ways.
The DOJ has no grounds to take any action against Mamdani as he has only said that he was in active conversation with the legal team over whether or not he could arrest Netanyahu. That can't be illegal, can it? Following that the law apparently says he can't arrest Netanyahu so this is just PR for the lefty base.
That being said, Israel is an apartheid state engaged in terrorism against civilians in large areas that it wants to ethnically cleanse and settle with the genetically correct people. The UN is by their own standards denigrating itself via inaction against such a regime. As is the rest of the world who holds on to the pretense that this is bad under any other circumstance.
To that extent the UN can not act as if their own inadequacies and failures are excusable when they fly in the face of the moral decency felt by free and democratic societies that are fast seeing their electorate turning into single issue voters due to the corruption and crimes committed by zionists and Israel.
Maybe the people of NYC don't want to host the UN if this is what the organization stands for.
Is Israel more or less of an apartheid state compared to its neighbors?
I don't know. Is there apartheid lore I'm missing from the middle East?
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Israel is not apartheid state. There doesn't seems to be segregation inside Israel. People in the west bank and gaza are not israeli citizens so how can Israel apply apartheid to them?
For the ethical cleansing - Israel seems to be pretty bad at it. We have more Palestinians than ever.
The South Africans also claimed "Zulus in the Bantustans aren't South Africans so how can we apply apartheid to them" and yet that little trick didn't fool anyone. The essential element is that the West Bank and Gaza are under effectively under Israeli sovereignty yet their people have no citizenship, the textbook example of apartheid.
Yes, they are bad at it. The essential difference between them and the Germans is competence: the Israelis are more cowardly, less capable and less self reliant. First as a tragedy, now as a farce and all that. There have been plenty of incompetent genocidaires throughout history; the Rwandan genocide ended with the genocidaires actually losing the war to their would-be victims, for example.
Also we have no idea how many Palestinians there are since they refuse to allow any kind of unbiased outside monitors in to actually figure out how many Palestinians there are. Famously the 1948 World Almanac claimed that the Jewish population had actually increased during the war but that was because the Almanac was using old data.
So, your argument is that they totally definitely for sure WANT to kill all the Palestinians. (I suppose that before Oct. 7 2023 they just had other things on their mind, like controlling global finance.) With that as a given, the fact that they HAVEN'T is only explained by being so darn incompetent. The Israeli tanks and missiles are being stopped from razing every city to the ground by ___ (please fill in the blank here, presumably with something other than "being a civilized Western nation").
They're obviously incompetent since they claimed their goal was to destroy the tiny militia located in a territory entirely encircled by their forces and in the end they wound up having to release thousands of ostensible deadly terrorists while leaving said militia still in control.
The only real dispute is whether they're incompetent cowardly losers who were too militarily inept to defeat Hamas or whether they're incompetent cowardly losers who were too politically inept to engineer circumstances sufficient to kill or displace the entire population of Gaza.
It's strange how we have to pretend that the fact that these clowns who haven't won a war since 1982 have failed at their objectives is an indication of anything other than their incompetence.
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The Israeli government was seriously discussing shutting off all the water to Gaza. The only reason they didn’t do that was because if the massive international outcry.
I suppose I'll have to take your word for it that they were totally definitely for sure seriously discussing stopping giving a utility to the Palestinians, and then didn't stop giving the utility to the Palestinians. Those jerks. You did lead me to a fun Wikipedia page talking about water in the Palestinian territories. After the mandatory Israel-blaming, there's this buried gem:
So, the Palestinians have spent 18 years not handling basic services because of their dysfunctional government. But if the Israelis stop covering the slack, it's "genocide" I guess.
If I lock a hooker in my basement and then stop giving her water bottles, that’s murder. I can’t argue that the stupid bitch should have been responsible for her own utilities payments.
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They are not under Israeli sovereignty. Israel doesn't claim to own them or rule them. Both are orphaned ex Egypt and Jordanian territories. And if tomorrow Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan or the Alpha centauries offer to conquer the west bank and gaza, Israel will welcome them and unroll the red carpet.
I think we can guestimate by how many hospitals Gaza ministry of health has claimed to have been destroyed.
If the West Bank isn't under Israeli sovereignty then why are Israeli settlements full of Israeli citizens guarded by the Israeli military located in the West Bank then?
They don't claim to own or rule them, yet they do. Israeli forces freely enter both, kidnap or murder who they please without the slightest accountability. The Israelis effectively exercise sovereignty without all the inconvenient parts that come along with it, like providing basic services or allowing the people there to vote on their leadership.
Would they? At various times they've also pretended to welcome a Palestinian state, but it's pretty obvious that this is just a pretense so they can absorb the land at their own pace without absorbing the people too.
Well if we're doing "guesstimates" then my "guesstimate" is somewhere in the mid 6 figures. Around a tenth of the population at the low end, closer to a quarter on the high end. Comparable to the losses of one of the Soviet Republics during WW2, certainly genocidal by any standard.
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I think it's worth pointing out that under your definition, Lebanon is an apartheid state; Syria is an apartheid state; Egypt is an apartheid state; heck, even Norway is an apartheid state.
Well no, because none of those countries are exercising sovereignty over conquered territory whose people are kept in a state of permanent statelessness for purely demographic reasons. Try again
It seems to me you are shifting the goalposts here. For example, your previous post said nothing about "conquered territory."
At this point, I would ask you to lay your specific definition of "apartheid state" so that the goalposts are firmly in place. I think that it's going to be hard for you to define "apartheid state" in such a way that (1) it's broad enough to apply to Israel; (2) it's not broad enough to apply to states such as Lebanon (which has long denied citizenship to Palestinian Arabs who have lived their for generations); and (3) it's not an obvious gerrymander definition created in order to apply only to Israel.
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I'm not VIM but what exactly do you mean by that? Because Norway etc has non-citizens in its territory?
Palestinian Arabs living in Lebanon (even for generations) don't get citizenship. They are considered "refugees," they are not allowed to vote, own land, or work in various professions.
The situation is similar in Syria and Egypt.
Norway exercises sovereignty over the Russian town of Barentsburg. As far as I know, Russians living there don't get Norwegian citizenship even if they are born there.
I'm sure we can all appreciate the real world difference between the Russian owned coal mining outpost of Barentsburg, hosting a population of ~300 that operates on Norwegian land, and Palestine.
Or appreciate that refugees from the Israeli Palestine conflict are not the same as Palestinians living on their own land.
Pretending that no one understands what apartheid means is just annoying wordplay. Israel occupies land and legally distinguishes between the populations within using various criteria and discriminates accordingly to maintain control for the designated ethnicity, just like SA did. They employ de facto separate voting rolls, just like SA. They even deploy the same alleged tokenism SA did. It's as close as you can get to the original to the point of parody. But regardless of that, the practical effect is the same.
The Israelis as they exist today never intend to relinquish any relevant representative control over the explicitly racially defined jewish state of Israel to anyone other than jews. They define themselves ethnically. They define their state ethnically. It is not possible for Israel to exist without jews. It's not possible for the state to be jewish without jewish sovereignty.
But when you live on the same land as a population group that is not jewish then you either make your bed as an apartheid state to maintain your ethnosupremacy over the land or you let everyone vote. There's no argument for why West Bank jews can vote in Israeli elections but West Bank Palestinians can not that is not de facto apartheid driven.
And I assume you're similarly outraged by the existence of Japan, South Korea, Liberia etc., all of which are ethnostates in fact if not expressly in law? Or for that matter, essentially any Arab nation, most of which purged themselves of their Jewish, Christian, Druze etc. minorities at some point in the last eight decades or so.
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France and Hungary, and most other European countries, let their citizens living outside the country vote. I used to have a friend who was born in the United States to a French mother and (at the time I knew him) had never lived in France his whole life - but he was still regularly voting in French elections.
Would you say that French voting law is based on apartheid, because they let him vote but not me?
Now, of course, there is a difference: France does not have military bases on American soil and does not have any oversight over the American government. But France didn't let Germans vote in 1946, either, even as they were maintaining a literal military occupation over part of Germany. Of course, that was more obviously justified than the Israeli powers over the Palestinian government - but even if you argue the Israeli example isn't justified, it remains at least "an argument... that is not de facto apartheid driven."
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OMW was making a (pretty interesting) objection to a definition. If someone offers up a definition that can't stand up to annoying wordplay, it should probably be modified. (There's no shame in tweaking a definition; changing your argument in response to correct objections can only strengthen it, unless it is fundamentally weak).
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Yes, but this is that thing you do when you strip things of all context and then leap in saying, 'har har! Under your definition, Britain is an apartheid state!'. Resulting in an incredibly long definition which to be perfectly honest I believe you would either nitpick to death or say, 'well, clearly this definition was created to allow Israel to be an apartheid state without Norway or Britain'.
In practice words have fuzzy definitions and 'partitioning your state to exclude a specific citizenry that you hate and fear but nevertheless can't actually kill' is pretty close to apartheid.
Which is question-begging. Asking that question doesn't resolve the antecedent question of what is part of the State.
Not begging anything. To my eyes Israel exerts de-facto authority over Gaza. Because it feels it has to, because it doesn't trust the Gazans (understandably) enough to let them alone, but it also doesn't trust them enough to let them be part of the state. This is the circumstance I think of as apartheid.
Does it? I don't think the Israeli police can wander directly through the center of Gaza City and arrest whoever they like.
But even moreso, many military forces have held a foreign territory without automatically annexing it to their state. The US occupation of Japan went on, and the solution was a Japanese government, not Japanese representation in the US system.
It's even more outlandish given that such annexation would be against the manifest will of both populations. It runs directly contrary to any norm of self determination to tell both the Gazans and the Israelis that we've just gone and decided that it's now a part of the Israeli state.
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I think the context-stripping door was opened by those who want to use a specific, principled-sounding words such as "apartheid" or "terrorism" to tar Israel.
Once you accuse Israel of these things, it's completely reasonable to ask for definitions of those words. And to see if the word is applied universally or if there is a special definition for Israel.
I'm the last person to deny that nasty words have their definitions stretched for political goals, and I don't even like the Palestinians, but Israel really does look like a pretty damn clear example of an apartheid state to me.
If you want to make that claim, fine, but it's reasonable to ask how you are defining "apartheid." Because if you have a special, broader, definition which applies only to Israel, it undermines your point. To use your words, it suggests that you are stretching the definition of a nasty word for political goals.
ETA: As an alternative, you could simply argue that it's improper for Israel to rule over the Palestinian Arabs living in Judea & Samaria without giving them a voice in Israeli government. In response, I could point out that doing so is the best among various bad alternatives; and so on. But as soon as you start throwing the word "apartheid" around, you've opened a door. To use your words, you've stripped context.
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Precisely. Mamdani is a politician first and foremost, not some socialist demi-god who will use his position as ruler of the richest, most powerful and important American city to bring about paradise on Earth now that finally Real Communism can be practiced.
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I'm about as opposed to the Israelis' actions in Palestine as it gets, but I believe that hosting the UN ought to entail some sort of responsibility that surpasses object-level moral concerns. Really, the UN is somewhat like the Motte in that its purpose is to provide a neutral ground for parties to talk to each other who would never do so otherwise, except with the UN there are rather more things at stake.
If the people of NYC can't keep their moral principles in their pants for this higher purpose, maybe they should in fact not be allowed to host the UN, and the headquarters should move to a place with a higher decoupling waterline. It's their loss, or that of the US as a whole if they are incapable of finding any other site to guarantee safe passage for the de facto representatives of every significant piece of clay. (I'm sure China would be happy to set up a special economic zone with hookers and blow somewhere if nobody else is willing to step up.)
One could argue that in practice it doesn't matter since the Supremacy Clause strips NYC of any power to do anything. Heck, it's difficult for NYC to enforce its parking laws against UN diplomats.
But yeah, as a general principle the Mayor of NYC should refrain from this kind of talk.
What's funny is this was a big win of Mamdami's campaign in the "what are your top priorities as mayor and why is #1 visiting Israel?" debate. That's basically what he said and he looked fantastic. Basically stole Trump's excellent "no new wars" rally vibes
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I'm not seeing a failure mode for Mamdani voters here. As far as they are concerned their moral principles are the reason the UN exists in the first place. If the UN is not serving those principles then what's the point of venerating it? Create a migrant hotel for Palestinians out of the headquarters instead. Host an annual anti-zionism conference. Do something that lines up with the morals of the demos.
To steelman the lefty base, Israel has been waging its ethnocentric terror campaign against the Palestinians for decades. The time to invoke the sanctity of our international institutions passed us by a long time ago. The moment Israel stopped pulling their punches after Oct.7 and the UN did nothing, any surface argument for maintaining the pretense that these institutions matter went out the window.
The UN is not and can not serve as the world police enforcing what the US wants and thinks is moral on everyone else, because a UN that does it is a UN no more. The only reason it can exist is precisely because it doesn't get involved if any of the major players in the world don't want it to. If it ever did, those major players leave and it becomes yet another generic partnership between allies, which we have plenty of and keep creating more, rather than an international conference between opposing nations which we have a scant few.
The UN's best point is not in forcing our own desires onto Russia or China or India or whatever else, but coordinating with them to achieve the few goals that all of us can agree on regardless of our difference in values.
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Wouldn’t the same logic apply to North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and many more members of the UN? If the UN’s purpose is to “do something” when states violate moral principles, then there won’t be many member states left.
If we care about doling out equal punishment to all at the same time based on nothing but moral intuition then the same logic applies. Doubly so if we pretend we are not human beings with agency and capacity for strategy and understanding of context but instead mindless automatons that have to follow every possible strand of 'logic' to its conclusion or our heads blow up. But that's obviously not the case so no.
The current issue being focused on is Israel. The current strategy is aimed at disrupting and ultimately stopping the regime. If the power of anyone relevant can be leveraged to that end in any relevant way then that should obviously be done so long as it's beneficial to the cause. To that extent everything that's going on with this political theater is 'logical'. Mamdani has to demonstrate ill intent towards zionists at the behest of his electorate. And if you asked the NYC electorate if risking the sanctity of the UN was worth disrupting the Israeli government that is terrorizing Palestinians then the answer would be yes.
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The UN rather uniquely tried to do something about North Korea, but this was the one time in the cold war that the communists forgot to veto action and it was not a mistake they repeated.
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It's not moral principles, it's showing off, like the sanctuary city stuff and then all those immigrants turning up was a problem so they needed to be bussed off somewhere else.
I think that's what 4bpp is saying. Saying something like "keeping their moral principles in their pants" is a good way to put it. It's like having a big dick. Instead of a dick though, it's big morals. A lot of people who have it want to show it off as much as they can.
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