johker216

And yet, when I look for my sample ballot:

But regardless, ballots were not finalized until this ridiculous ruling, and the county boards of elections will start making 'legal' sample ballots available shortly.

We don't have sample ballots yet, but this matches our local reporting:

Now LaRose is abusing his position on the Ohio Ballot Board to paint Issue 1 in a comically negative light. The Ohio Constitution bars ballot language that would “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” Yet the board’s description of the amendment states that it would create “a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts” to produce “partisan outcomes” (emphasis added). It also declares that the amendment would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors participating in the statewide elections of 2015 and 2018,” a gratuitous reference to the failed reforms of the previous decade.

This is grossly misleading of what we approved in the past.

I understand that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and frankly it doesn't matter how far back either's claim goes - there are significant numbers of Palestinians and Israelis who have only known the current boundaries and any changes fundamentally alter their identities. Sure, we can go into the genocides committed against the Jews in the region over the past 2000 years that expelled them from the area and gives cause to antisemites that call Jews "white", or violence perpetrated by Europeans when breaking up the Ottoman Empire and stoking ethnic violence over the past 100. But those claims only matter to the extremists as wedge issues used to divide.

Extremists shouldn't get to determine the future of millions who clearly want to live peacefully together. No one can bring back the murdered, but Israel, regional powers, the US, and European countries owe it to humanity to rebuild the destroyed cities in the same fashion that we intend to rebuild Ukraine.

You need to understand that most people's understanding of the conflicts in the Middle East started on October 7, 2023.

Biden did not "strike it down", he halted all EOs not in effect so their administration can review them (see: the first paragraph of the linked article). Instead of re-issuing an EO, something that can be withdrawn on a whim (see: your post), Biden did the actual hard work of working with Congress to help pass the Inflation Reduction Act. The $35 cap is now backed by law rather than by diktat. Trump took the lazy path and issued the EO in the last days of his Presidency - a Presidency he spent quite a long time using to try and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Try understanding the issue instead of spamming MAGA talking points.

I guess the point wasn't clear enough: Israelis and Palestinians both claim the land due to ancestry. Reasonable people understand the issue is complicated; displacement was a friendly replacement for massacred, forcibly removed, and slavery. You can clearly see that the intent of the creation of Israel was to redress a wrong perpetuated over millennia, regardless of the reality that it caused another migration of peoples.

Like you said, Zionism is just the belief in a divine ancestral claim (core, even, for Judaism) to the region. You can be flippant about it being based in religion and dismiss it from your position of privilege behind a keyboard, but there are radical religious people that believe the land is their birthright just as strongly as some Palestinians and are fighting over that. The religious extremists on both sides of the conflict frankly don't care about your opinions. A two state solution offers the best course for peace in the area, but the extremists from both sides need to be isolated and dealt with. Most Israelis and Palestinians are good people such in the middle of a shitty situation.

Israelites

Jewish diaspora

The presence of Jews in that area of the Middle East goes back over 3000 years until the expulsions. People don't dispute that modern-day Palestinians lived there prior to the 1940s - but people conveniently set arbitrary time limits of settlement to allow for one genocide and decry the other.

Politics in the middle east is not a simple case of "Israel bad." Both groups of people deserve a home and both are going to lose part of their national identity regardless of the outcome. A two state solution is the most prudent solution and arguing otherwise ignores reality.