Senior ministers concerned about effects of Occupied Territories Bill.

I don't think you can say that "it stands to reason" that X or Y would happen under any particular law if you haven't looked at what the law says. Does the US anti-boycott law apply whenever any state takes any measure affecting trade with Israel? Or is it more narrowly — and, dare I say, more intelligently — targetted?

And a second, and equally important question: what happens, exactly, if the anti-boycott law is triggered? What measures are taken, and how would those measures affect Ireland?

Tl;dr: What does the anti-boycott law actually do?

So what? Your criticism of Palestine for its prisoner payment program wasn't moderated by any consideration that not all Palestinians support this (or any other) measure that the Palestinian authority may implement. I don't think you can defend Israel from criticism for its payments to terrorist by saying that not all Israelis supported those payments, or supported the leaders who implemented them.

The difference is that, as a report presented to US Congress in March 2023 by the NGOs United Nations Watch and IMPACT-se stated, there was antisemitic content in textbooks used by teachers who worked in UNRWA schools in which Palestinian children are educated and in social media posts by those teachers.

What can you tell me about these NGOs? Who runs them? Who funds them? Do they have a good reputation for impartiality and academic rigour, so that I can accept their findings as conclusive, or should I look more deeply into them?

There's no evidence that Israel's education system has indoctrinated Jewish children with hatred towards Arabs.

Did the report you cite examine the Israeli curriculum materials and find them to be unbiassed, or did it simply not examine the Israeli materials?

Therefore, there's no evidence that most Israeli Jews have anything against Arabs.

Spot the logic flaw! Biassed school materials is hardly the only reason why a population might hold biassed attitudes. If you want to know whether a population holds biassed attitudes, just survey the population's attitudes rather than surveying curriculum materials and trying to infer population-level bias from them.

Therefore, the paying of pensions to people who fought for Israeli independence (and the paying of those pensions wasn't necessarily condoning everything that every one of those pensioners did in the fight for Israeli independence) is not the same as what the Palestinian Authority does. 

Spot the even more glaring logic flaw! Payments to terrorists are payments to terrorists, PA. And if the payment of benefits to Israeli terrorists "wasn't necessarily condoning" everything done, then the same goes for the payment of benefits to Palestinian terrorists.

In any case, most of the people who were members of Irgun or Lehi (and Yitzhak Shamir was in neither of those - he was in Haganah's Palmach unit!) have since died and any who might still be alive would be very frail and thus not pose a threat to the lives of Palestinians.

"The reason Israel doesn't make payments to terrorists and their dependants is that they can no longer find any to pay" is not exactly a ringing defence, PA. In any case, it's not a defence at all if Israel continues to make welfare payments to the dependants of Israelis imprisoned today for crimes of violence against Palestinians. And, guess what! They do. Bitach Leumi, the Israeli goverment agency that administers social welfare programs, runs a number of programs under which prisoner's dependents can receive benefits. There is no exclusion for the dependents of prisoners convicted of terrorist offences.

No offence to you, Blanch, but I'd like to think that public policy is formed by reference to something a bit more credible than your arbitrary expectation which, by an astonishing coincidence, tends to support the policy that you would wish to see adopted anyway.

Trump is unpredictable and will act capriciously and illegally. But precisely that consideration tells us that (a) your expectations of what Trump will do are worthless — that's what "unpredictable" means — and (b) trying to shape policy in teh hope of eliciting a particular reaction from Trump is a mug's game.

We started down this particular road in the thread because Political Analyst quoted Dan O'Brien as saying that the OTB Bill trigger the US's anti-boycott legislation; you're now suggesting that the US will ignore it's anti-boycott legisaltion and respond to the OTB in an entirely different, and thoroughly illegal, way. This division in the ranks is not helpful; if the opponents of the Bill who predict dire consequences are actually predicting entirely different dire consequences, it doesn't make their predictions look terribly reliable. If you're right then PA is wrong; if PA is right then you are wrong; since each of you could be wrong it's entirely possible that both of you are wrong. This doesn't make for a strong case against the Bill.

Most of the Israeli independence war veterans who received pensions were members of Haganah, which was a Jewish self-defence militia and the embryonic form of the IDF, not a terrorist organisation.

Most of the people who receive payments under the Palestinian Authority programme are people, or the dependants of people, who are in prison for non-terrorist offences.

There's still no evidence that most Israeli Jews hate Arabs - and an opinion poll by Ha'aretz, a far-left newspaper, is not a credible source - just in case you cite it! Go and look at the interview with former hostage Moran Yanai on ITV News's YouTube channel - uploaded on 7 Oct 2024. She said that, when the terrorists took her into the Gaza Strip, she saw "everyone, the entire city, from the smallest child to the oldest one, celebrating evil". Therefore, the endemic hatred is not among the Israelis.

Where to start?

First, I have not claimed that most Israeli Jews hate Arabs, and I am not sure what the claim would have to do with the issues we are discussing.

Ha'aretz is not a far-left newspaper, unless you consider secularism, disagreement with Israeli government policies, and any publication of dissenting opinion to be inherently "far-left". Independent media bias assessment organisations generally rate Ha'aretz as left-of-centre or liberal, not far left. More to the point, they also assign it high ratings for the factuality of its reporting. Just because you don't like a newspaper's editorial stance doesn't make it not a credible source, PA.

I haven't cited Ha'aretz, so I am puzzled at your pre-emptive monstering of it. I can only assume that it refutes your opinion; that you know it does; and that you are trying — not very effectively — to undermine its credibility for that reason. In my earlier post I pointed out that, to argue that Israelis don't harbour hostility to Arabs, you needed evidence about the attitudes held by Israelis, not evidence of what some possibly dodgy NGOs said about the curricular material used in UNRWA schools. I'm getting the impression now that you looked for relevant evidence; you found it; it didn't support the view you wish to hold; so you label Ha'aretz as "far-left" in order to rationalise dismissing it. If you'd found any evidence that actually did support the view you want to hold, I'm sure you'd have said so.

And, no offence to someone who has been a victim of Hamas, but I am sceptical that the conditions she must have endured as a hostage would leave her well-positioned to ascertain the attitudes of "everyone in the city" or to assess them dispassionately. If you want to make the argument — and I strongly advise you not to make this argument — that "most Arabs hate Israeli Jews", then for the love of God assemble some remotely persuasive evidence in support of it before you do.

(And, if you do make the argument, don't make the elementary error of arguing that it follows that "endemic hatred is not amongst the Israelis". Even if you can prove that most members of Group A hate members of Group B, this tells you absolutely nothing about what members of Group B feel towards members of Group A.)

The payments made to dependents of Israeli criminals who are in Israeli prisons are to help those dependents, not reward what the criminals are imprisoned for.

Ah, another characteristic which it shares with the Palestinian programme.

Why would Israelis call the Palestinian Authority's programme 'Pay for Slay' if it's not true?

Why would PA call Ha'aretz "far-left" if it's not true? In both cases, perhaps, because the truth would not serve their purpose.

In many cases in which Palestinian terrorists blew themselves up or were killed by Israeli security personnel, the dead terrorists were praised by their parents.

Not sure what point you're trying to make here. It's common for people who die in conflicts to be praised by their families. This happens on both sides. If you're trying to argue that Palestinians are sympathetic to terrorists in ways that Israelis are not, then to complete your argument you need to find balancing cases showing that Israeli terrorists are in many cases condemned by their parents.

I'd believe the humanitarian agencies before i'd believe anything Israeli. 9 more children blown up today while queueing for food. Any state that can do that should never be believed.

Of course the people Moran Yanai saw were supportive of what Hamas was doing. Hamas are hardly going to parade their opponents before her, are they? And pretty much the last thing that people who dissent from Hamas's actions are going to do is head into town to gawp at Hamas's hostages. Pretty much everyone who got close to her got close, one way or another, because they were supportive of Hamas. You can't point to a group pretty much selected for its support for Hamas and then argue that it's a fair representation of the entire Palestinian nation, in regard to support for Hamas.

And I understand what you meant about the parents of dead Palestinian terrorists. That's sad, but really not suprising; we saw similar things, many times, in Ireland, on both sides, where the familes of people who had done dreadful things would support, defend or justify their actions. My point is that, if you are trying to suggest that this marks a distinction between Palestinians and Israelis, you have to show that Israeli's don't do that; you have to show that the parents of dead Israelis who have perpetrated crimes against Palestinians generally condemn their children's actions.