Do you mean what non-viable positions? First and foremost the unrestricted right to return as this has the potential to end the state of Israel as a Jewish state if Palestinians become the majority population.
As a humanist, I consider the right of return to be undeniable. Given your logic, this would make the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state the unviable option. I've been of that opinion for some time now. Nothing to do with antisemitism as some might try to suggest - just the logical conclusion of a humanist position.
I'm heartened to see that more people are coming to this same conclusion. Talk of a 'two state solution' has always been a convenient excuse for more of the same as far as I am concerned.
In response to the dead response... (not sure why it is dead)
> Israel will not agree to a right to return
This government will not.
My view is that the Israeli state is failing through its own actions and at some point will experience regime change (i.e. a drastic change in government - possibly, or possibly not as a result of a democratic election). I expect that a new regime may not be Zionist (at least not in the exclusionary sense we are familiar with) and could well introduce something similar to South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission.
That type of government could very possibly recognise the right of return - possibly in some compromised form such as a willingness to pay compensation as has happened following other colonialist endeavours.
It is not just the government. The overwhelming majority of Israelis are opposed to what you're suggesting and there's no way to force them to accept it (they have nuclear weapons).
A global coordinated sanctions regime might work, like it did on South Africa, but that is pretty unlikely to ever happen because outside of Arab states, almost no country is opposed to Israel’s existence within its recognized borders. If Israel stopped actively oppressing/colonizing Gaza and the West Bank, opposition against them would evaporate, even if they remain an explicitly Jewish state and never grant right of return for the descendants of Nakba refugees.
Israel gave Arabs land larger than its entire current size in the quest for peaceful coexistence (Gaza, Sinai and you could count in West Bank in terms of PLO governance).
If I move into your house without your permission, and let you sleep on the floor in the crawlspace, would that be called 'giving you a place to live'? What if that were coupled with regular beatings, and/or starving you?
1) Jews were always a part of historical Palestine. Sometimes more and sometimes less but were always present. Around 1900, 50 years before the formation of Israel, there were about 50k Jews (about 10% of the population). You can see it especially in cities like Safed, Tiberias and Jerusalem which were Jewish centers.
2) Jews that came later largely bought their way in, rather than forced Arabs out. There were violent clashes but usually it was friction between the populations, and not outright conquest.
3) The forceful expulsion of population came as the result of the 1948 war which was opened by Arabs and not by Israel.
So to correct your analogy, the Arabs here are like a violent HOA which doesn't like the new group of residents who bought their way in. They fight and they lose. Tough luck, right?
There's a difference between people moving into an area and a nation state moving into an area.
If you think think 1948 was started by the Arabs, you're obviously missing some vital context. Vital context, like 'A nation state started colonizing them without their permission'.
The colonization continued, with more land grabs at gunpoint for the next 80 years.
Let's talk about colonization. The land of Israel, backwards through time:
21. Modern state of Israel
20. British mandate
19. Ottoman empire
18. Islamic Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt
17. Ayyubid dynasty
16. Christian kingdom of Jerusalem <-- this is around 1099
15. Fatimid caliphate
14. Abbasid caliphate
13. Umayyad caliphate
12. Rashidun Caliphate <-- right after Muhammad dies
11. Byzantine empire
10. Roman empire <-- founding of Christianity
9. Hasmonean dynasty <-- BC flips to AD
8. Seleucid empire
7. Empire of Alexander the 3rd of Macedon
6. Persian empire
5. Babylonian empire
4. Kingdoms of Israel and Judea
3. Kingdom of Israel
2. Theocracy of the 12 tribes of Israel <-- first Jews
1. Individual state of Canaan <-- earliest archeological evidence of people in what is today called Israel
> Around 1900, 50 years before the formation of Israel, there were about 50k Jews (about 10% of the population).
That's a funny starting point to pick, since 1900 was about ten years after the beginning of mass Zionist migration to Palestine. How many were there in 1880?
Israel will not agree to a right to return that might result in the destruction of its status quo. So even if you think that this would be the morally desirable outcome, it is not going to happen. How many of the people displaced during the Nakba are even still alive? We are not talking about letting people displaced a couple of years ago return, we are talking about people and their descendants that have been displaced generations ago, most of them have never lived in the place you want to let them return to. Make them a good enough offer to forfeit their right to return.
Israel is a Jewish state, but it's also a safe harbor for minorities. It is the only place in the Middle East where you can be openly gay or trans and not be killed for it (or Druze, as it turns out).
Even for Israelis that are against the current government and want to see equal rights for all peoples in the Middle East, there is an abundance of evidence to show that you don't get that without Israel.
Totally irrelevant deflection. How Israel treats Israelis inside the borders of Israel is really not what anyone's complaining about.
Yes, the fact that many Middle Eastern countries are backwards on gay rights is bad! This doesn't remotely address the question of whether Israel bombing cities to dust and starving their population is also bad.
Not irrelevant at all. There have been two periods of right to return, and they've both been causal in the current Israeli Muslim and Israeli Arab populations in Israel. If right to return includes voting rights, then it's likely that the voting population would ultimately legislate Israel to not be a Jewish state, and fundamentally shift the laws away from democracy and away from equal rights of Israelis. There are 50 Muslim majority countries and countless data points to reach such a conclusion, and this is fundamentally why an unconditional right to return will never happen.
tmnvix was advocating for the collapse of the only democracy in the region--tantamount to advocating for worse outcomes for more people (and likely to an actual genocide of the Jewish people, who evacuated predominately Muslim countries and populated Israel at its re-formation). There are still 50 hostages in Gaza that have been held for 514 days and counting.
In Yemen 39.5% of the population is undernourished and 48.5% of children under five are stunted. Nearby, in East Africa, the South Sudan death toll and starvation numbers also dwarf this conflict. Mysteriously, and predictably, the world is silent. But, an opportunity to put down Israel, it seems is unfortunately very popular.
> Ai'nt no other minority people have the guts to tell them where their ancestral homeland is or isn't.
That's just... not true. The Celts originated in Central Europe. If a bunch of people who identify as Celts (from Scotland, Ireland, etc.) moved to Czechia and tried to take it over from the people currently living there, a lot of people would oppose that.
I do not particularly think the Muslim conquest of half the world was a good thing, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up.
History is not merely an epic struggle between Muslims and Israelis where one of those are the good guys and the other are the bad guys. It is possible that Muslims were in the wrong at some point in history, and that Israel is in the wrong now.
Ancient Hebrews, who Jews traditionally identify as the originators of their culture, lived in what is now Palestine during the Roman Empire, correct. However this is unrelated to the point that was being made.
The head of the BDS supports the expulsion and/or murder of all Jews in Israel.
Quote:
Omar Barghouti, the founder of the BDS movement, made that perspective clear: “Good riddance! The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead. But someone has to issue an official death certificate before the rotting corpse is given a proper burial and we can all move on and explore the more just, moral and therefore enduring alternative for peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Mandate Palestine: the one-state solution.”
Barghouti also opposed a bi-national Arab and Jewish state:
“I am completely and categorically against binationalism … because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and, therefore, we have to accommodate both national rights. I am completely opposed to that.”
He wants a unitary democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs and the right of return for Palestinian refugees abroad and their descendants. Is that too idealistic to ever happen? Yes, probably. But it’s nowhere near what you’re claiming he says.
That's the "sanitized" version of what he wants. He actually wants the Jews gone, it's pretty obvious from the other words he has said, and especially from his outright refusal to condemn attacks.
He does not say this. He says he wants the end of the two-state solution; that is, he wants the entire area to be one state (in which people coexist peacefully).
> he claims the Jews will have zero rights
No he doesn't. He says they will have no national right; that is, they will not have the right to claim the land as the exclusive home of the Jewish Nation. They will still have civil rights as normal citizens like everyone else. In fact, let me paste the full quote, since you left off the clarifying explanation that immediately follows it:
> I am completely and categorically against binationalism because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and therefore, we have to accommodate both national rights. I am completely opposed to that, but it would take me too long to explain why, so I will stick to the model I support, which is a secular, democratic state: one person, one vote — regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and so on and so forth … Full equality under the law with the inclusion of the refugees — this must be based on the right of return for Palestinian refugees. In other words, a secular, democratic state that accommodates our inalienable rights as Palestinians with the acquired rights of Israeli Jews as settlers.
Someone from the Texas state government wanted to buy a $75 licence for my event planning software. Fine. Then they told me I had to sign an agreement that I wouldn't boycot Israel. Ridiculous. It's none of their business. I refused to sign it and didn't get the sale.
Those laws never made any sense to me from a constitutional or even a practical standpoint. What's being banned? Are they supposed to force you to buy things?
It's not supposed to make sense: lobbyists paid your politicians and now, you have to support Israel, or else...
There's nothing more to it. Israel knows that with access to Western weapons, it will reliably win every confrontation with the Palestinians, just like in Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa. The only thing that did both regimes in was sanctions, or boycotts. I believe they literally studied these nations. So, they want to preempt any attempt at boycotting Israel, because it's the only way they'd ever face reckoning for all the unspeakable atrocities they've committed against the palestinians.
Texas requires contractors to certify that they're not boycotting Israel; Florida maintains a public list of companies that boycott Israel and prohibits state investment in them; in Arkansas, the law has been upheld in federal court after a challenge.
Look for mutually beneficial ways forward - reassignment to relevant projects, retraining where necessary, generous layoff package for those for whom neither hits. Realistically the vast majority of PhD employees are going to be highly motivated and want to work on something useful just as much as you want them to.
Unless you're a sociopath, you let natural attrition run its course. If their skills weren't relevant when you hired them, then it's your fault. If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault. The only just thing to do is find a way to make their work meaningful until they move on.
No, you give them a fat severance and eat the losses. Maybe 6 months + 1 month per year of tenure, something like that. You're break even by the end of the fiscal year, you just gave someone a lifechanging amount of money, and they don't have the crushing morale problems of "the work I do is pointless" and get to collect unemployment in addition to severance.
If you are honest and generous with people, they aren't mad that you made a mistake and let them go. It's companies that try to give 2 weeks + 1 week per year of severance that are making a mistake, not the entire concept of layoffs.
(Without delving into the systemic reasons that layoffs are inevitable of course. If the system was different, they wouldn't have to happen, but we live in this system at the moment.)
Imagine you're a middle tier functionary making $70k a year. Are you telling me $90k in cash after tax plus unemployment for ~6 months isn't lifechanging? That's a downpayment on a house, or your student loans paid off, or $4000 a year in permanent income for the rest of your life.
> If you changed course after you hired them so that they stopped being relevant, then it's your fault.
Nobody can predict market conditions or technological advances.
If you don’t change course (mission, people) the company will likely fail and then everyone is out of a job, shareholders, pensioners, and 401k holding laypeople look money.
I do think that leadership is not held accountable enough for their mistakes and failures.
The situation of Intel is much more the result of bad management than the output of their current workers. For all purposes, they're effectively doing what they're were supposed to do when hired. So the logical conclusion is that Intel workers are the ones who should have the power to fire the entire management and put someone in place to fix the issue, not the other way around.
The output of workers is always a leadership problem, imho.
I disagree that the workers are the ones who should have the power to fire management unless they are shareholders. I think this should (and it does) fall upon the board and the shareholders. If the workers are shareholders, all the better.
Regardless, it's clear the current system needs work.
What a sad waste of talent in that case. A waste that could be mitigated by them finding a more productive way to help society than sticking to a pointless job.
Agree. We lean hard into sunk cost fallacy when it comes to job training.
“If your name is Farmer you’re a farmer.” mentality but self selected euphemism. “I trained as a software engineer and that’s what I am for 50 years! Dag gubmint trynna terk my herb!”
Service economy role play is the root of brain dead job life we’re all suffering through.
Managers are also employees. Nobody's arguing they should be spared and I'm not sure that you can argue top management at Intel hasn't been let go over the years.
Also laying off incompetent managers alone won't solve the problem of having hired the wrong people
Do they have any clear direction for the future of the company? As it seems they don't, the idea that these workers are the wrong people is completely unfounded.
> I heard from a friend who works for Intel that he doesn't know why he was hired in the first place; his PhD was in a completely different domain, the objectives of the project were remote to his skills, and he told me this is what his entire team was made of. Seems like a lot of bloat present in this company, and it makes sense they feel the way forward is layoffs.
But this is just his point of view. Intel was hiring people and training them to do the job they wanted. And if they continued employment this means they were doing what was expected.
Microsoft <3 Linux so much, they ruined Windows so people would switch to Linux. Thank you Microsoft!
Seriously though, I switched to Linux late last year and haven't looked back. It has everything I need for a computer and a lot of the "problems" people say is holding them back from switching full-time are greatly exaggerated. Like if you're not willing to make some small compromises so you can have a computer that respects you as a human and not a metric then I don't know what to tell you.
This has been my take. They even made Windows 11 look like a linux desktop so they can do a switcheroo later on.
Microsoft could kill off Windows as a desktop operating system and it wouldn't dent their financials in a major way. You'll know they're truly serious, though, when they start making contributions to Wine and also makes bash the default command line interpreter in windows.
"Avoid misuse"? This is the United States Military we're talking about here. They're directly involved in the ongoing genocide in Gaza at this very moment. There is no way to be ethically involved. Their entire existence is "misuse".
If BDS didn't work, they wouldn't be trying to ban it.