UPDATE: Commenters, as usual, have gotten bogged down in a general Israelis versus Palestinians debate. What I meant to point out is that the terrorist groups try to exploit any vulnerability on the Israeli side, regardless of what that means for the quality of life of the Palestinians they claim to represent. The elderly, children, and women, used to get more or less a free pass at Israeli checkpoints, because the terrorists used only young men. But once the terrorists figured out that young men would be checked thoroughly, they started using children, women, and now even elderly women. Which means that Israel will have no choice, security-wise, but to now check these groups thoroughly, too, making their lives more unpleasant (and opening them up to the abuse that unfortunately occurs whenever you give 19 year olds with guns discretionary authority). Similarly, whenever Israel tries to open up the Gaza border crossing, and he Erez industrial zone that used to provide thousands of jobs for Palestinians, the terrorists attack there almost immediately. The saddest thing is that "the terrorists" are not some fringe group, but the Palestinian government, as well as the opposition factions. And of course, they then turn this, actions they intentionally provoked, into a propaganda victory: "look at Israel 'harass' old women at checkpoints! look at Israel refusing employment to Palestinians!"
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Why does Israel have to build on land that does not belong to them?
"They [Israelis] destroyed her house, they killed her grandson - my son. Another grandson is in a wheelchair with an amputated leg."
"They [Israelis] destroyed her house, they killed her grandson - my son. Another grandson is in a wheelchair with an amputated leg."
And grandma's suicide proves what? That she's as stupid and hell bent as her grandkids? The Palestinians are too far gone for rational thinking.
How about I come to your country, kick you out, make you live in a refugee camp for forty years, and then offer to give you back a a bit less than half. Still sound generous?
Some commentators here seem to think that the only workable solution is to kill all the evil, irrational Palestinians. There's only a couple million, after all. How many of you support divestment from Darfur?
If they are Muslims, absolutely!
[quote]How about I come to your country, kick you out, make you live in a refugee camp for forty years, and then offer to give you back a a bit less than half. Still sound generous?[/quote]
Bad knowledge of history. The ARAB governments told the palistinians to get out of the way of their "victorious" armys and promised they could take back all the land when the Jews were dead. Not suprisingly, Arab military prowess proved as false as the readiness reports of their officers. Truth is in very short supply in the Arab world.
Gee, that old canard...even the Israeli historians don't say that any more. Bet you watch Fox News, too...
The Israelis did not "come" to the Palestinians' country. Nor did they "kick [them] out" of anywhere. Nor did the Israelis make the Palestinians live in refugee camps for any length of time, let alone forty years.
Let's be clear about our history:
1) Begining in the late 19th century, Jews began moving to that portion of the Ottoman Empire that would become Israel. They came as lawful immigrants, buying land in lawful transactions. At this time, there was no such country as Palestine. The land the proto-Israelis moved to was part of the vilayet (province) of Damascus-Syria.
2) After World War I, the Ottoman Empire was divided by the victorious parties. What would one day be Israel became part of the Mandate of Palestine, administered by Great Britain. This mandate included modern-day Israel and modern-day Jordan. It's worth noting that the most Jordanians are ethnically the same as Palestinians. Not long after, the British gave semi-autonomous control of the eastern half of the mandate -- that portion east of the River Jordan -- to the Hashemite family. This was known at the time as Transjordan and is the modern country of Jordan. It's worth noting that the Hashemites are not ethnically identical to the Palestinians -- the Hashemites were rivals to the House of Saud, and when the House of Saud wound up controlling Saudi Arabia, the British set the Hashemites up in Iraq and Jordan.
In any event, the area east of the River Jordan remained a British Mandate.
3) In 1948, the United Nations partitioned the eastern part of the mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The surrounding Arab nations promptly declared war, urging all Palestinians within the territory to leave lest they be swept upin the violence. The Arab states promised the Palestinians a swift victory, at which point the Palestinians would return to a newly-created Palestinian state comprising both halves of the U.N. partition. Arabs who chose to stay in Israel were offered full citizenship, which they (and their decendants) have to this day.
4) The Israelis were victorious in fighting off the Arabs, and signed a peace treaty with their foes. This treaty established the borders of Israel that existed until the Six-Day War in 1967 -- the "Green Line." Jordan took the West Bank for itself during thee peace talks; Egypt took the Gaza Strip. Palestinians living in the West Bank were given Jordanian citizenship, but many chose to live in refugee camps in the expectation that Israel would soon be conquered and they would return home. Palestinians living in Gaza weren't even given the choice; Egypt ket them in refugee camps.
5) There were several more wars in which the Arab states attacked Israel, culminating in the Six-Day War. Following that war, Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza.
Have the Palestinians been given a raw deal over the years? Yes. Do they have legitimate greivances against the Israelis? Yes. But they also have legitimate greivances -- some would say more so -- against the Jordanians and the Egyptians, to say nothing of the British.
The bottom line is this -- the people who would become Israelis moved to what would become Israel under legitimat circumstances. As tim passed, the land became filled with Arabs and Jews, each of whom wanted their own autonomous state. So the U.N. partitioned the land as best it could (just as it partitioned the Indian sub-continent among Hindus and Moslems). It was an imperfect solution, but the best available under the circumstances. Since that time, the Israelis have, for the most part, tried to live in peace with their Arab neighbors. Have they always taken the high road? No. But the larger sweep of the last 60 years of history shows Jews trying to get along with Palestinians and other Arabs.
Virtually all nations out there won their land in a war. Israel was given land so their people could escape a world that wants jews persecuted. Yeah, bad location. But why are Israelis held to a different standard than, say, Egypt?
Actually Israel has only annexed East Jerusalem; the so-called West Bank Territories have never been annexed. They still have an indeterminate status.
What races are you talking about? Both Arabs and Jews are Caucasoid. Pretty much all Jewish men have the same set of variations on their Y chromosomes. These variations are common throughout the Middle East and include Jews, Arabs, Armenians, and Turks reflecting their common geographic origin. Now if you want a racist state I give you Saudi Arabia who had slavery until 1964. Compare and contrast how Christians and Jews living in Arab countries are treated versus how Arab Muslims living in Israel are treated.
Yes, that's the solution- put Israel up on YouTube.
The bigger problem is the Bush Administration (primarily the President's) woefully inadequate estimation of what they set in motion by going into Iraq, trying to sell the story to the world that Sadaam was linked to al Qaeda, and and rekindling and unleashing conflict between the Shia and Sunnis that predated the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Did the President really think we could just go into Iraq and impose American Democracy there as easy as pie? Now we find ourselves in the throes of a leap in violence in Iraq, to the point that this Shia immolation of 6 Sunnis walking out of their Mosque will likely result in an escalation of Shias and Sunnis seeing how many each can set on fire of the other -- unthinkable barbarity that is brings a very genuine, real threat this conflict will spread throughout numerous countries in the Middle East.
Iran must have been rolling on the floor in laughter when the President fomented the war in Iraq and took out Sadaam, installing Maliki, a Shia government in Iraq to create Democracy. That virtually alligns the "Democratic" Shia government in Iraq with Iran -- and Hezbollah. This is probably the reason we had to remain silent while Isreal routed Hezbollah. How would the Shia Maliki government in Iraq have received our support for Isreal against the Shia Hezbollah, angering Maliki's Shia constituents?
Worse, the current escalating violence in Iraq can only align the Shia Iraqi government with Iran (Shia), for its survival. Isn't that great foreign policy to cause the Shia Iraqi government to wed itself to Iran? While they have two different languages, the Shia unity is strong enough to overcome the languag barriers (which are probably reduced somewhat by local dialects).
Now Saudi Arabia, primarily Sunni Wahabi, who view the Shia as heretical, are getting extremely nervous about the spreading Shia unity of Iran-Iraq-Hezbollah, and the violence of the Shia against the Sunnis, threatening to spill across borders of numerous Middle Eastern countries. (From their perspective, it wasn't too long in the past that they were nomadic travelers, and there were no real country-boundaries -- only one bog caliphate.
Then, we are trying to get OBL, who is Sunni, and makes a call to restore the caliphate. Sadaam, Sunni, too, is soon to be hanged, which will only increase the chaos.
Boy, has the President ever made a MESS out of the Middle East and the security of our oil supply by going into Iraw in th first place. We should have stuck with pursuing OBL in Afghanistan or routing him out of Pakistan.
Clearly, the Bush Administration is also woefully short on people to help out who know Arabic and have studied Middle Eastern religions (the conflicting sects of Islam). Further compunding the problem is the Bush Administration's penchant to screen people out with 1930s era standardized testing, a way to exclude the real critical thinkers, leaving employees who are simply taught Arabic and something about the history of the Middle East -- not enough to bring an understanding and solution to this pandora's box. This approach is more likely what caused the myopic thinking in the first place that got us into this mess.
When I was an undergrad, all of my International Business classes for 4 years were filled 90% with students from a variety of Arabic countries (and Iran, which is not Arabic but Persian). To understand the Arabic culture, I soon learned that one has to be immersed in it and the way Middle Eastern people think, not just learn Arabic from Americans or take American standardized tests on Middle Eastern history.
From my own experience, I cannot fathom the choices being kicked around by the Iraq Study Group. What a bad hand of cards to work with.
The Arabic people I knew were very set in their ways and unbending toward their goals, Americans might cal it rather stubborn, resistant. I never saw a sight before like my arrival on campus just before 6 am many mornings, when we could all hear booming across the campus from the basement of the Catholic Church, the prayer chanting coming from the Mosque established in the Church basement. It also made quite an impression, when traveling out by Ocean Beach in San Francisco many early mornings at sunrise or evenings at sunset, seeing many of these same Arabic students bent in prayer facing toward Mecca on the beach, there so long the waves and sand had begun to wash over them.
It is a kind of fanaticism that is very hard for an American to understand -- until you become immersed in this culture for about 4 years or more.
Although about 90% of all Muslims are Sunni, a large block of them (Iraqi government-Iran-Hezbollah) are igniting a LOT of violence.
I, for one, did not agree with the President's idea of going into Iraq. But he did. And now here we are caught in the middle of enormous problems that could cause loss of the oil in Iraq -- as well as topple the Saudi ruling family. And, China is in Nigeria, and Venezuela is not on overly friendly terms with us. In sum, a major portion of America's oil supply is at stake.
If we pull out of Iraq now, it will likely solidify the Iraq Shia-Iran-Hezbollah block -- not good for either Israel or Saudi Arabia. And, Iran wants nukes!! Lets not forget that Iran controls the Straight of Hormuz, too.
So what to do? It is a real disadvantage that we do not have a much much larger military. That would take a draft. But leaving Iraq is not a very good option, and could set off a chain of events causing sudden and catastrophic loss of the majority of the supply of our oil. The unthinkable.
If I were the President, I know it would be a bit provocative to the Arabic countries, but I would declare that we need a base in Iraq because of this conflict and escalating violence, we want their oil, pay them for the oil like China does in Angola and other places, and find a way to greatly increase the military troops there on the stated premise of protecting the base and oil, needed of course to protect Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Israel. And I would concentrate the increased troops around the base and oil infrustructure (a smaller area), not try to police the entire Iraqi conflict or expend an inordinate amount of money shoring up the Iraqi government.
How to increase troops (people joining the military)? 100% student loan foregiveness for those who commit to serve. Gas supply for people who drive SUVs and other gas hogs or have an excess of vehicles if they commit to serve; otherwise if they are not willing to serve, then their gas supply will be limited to a fuel efficient car's needs (allowing for exceptions for vehicles people demontrate they need for their livelihood or business). A guarantee of housing ownership for those who are renters or homeless who commit to serve (should be easy with all the speculator vacancies now being generated by the crashing real estate market). I could probably think of other incentives.
So, though I could go on, Visitor Again, it is not Israel that "will be the death of us all." It is how we decide to handle the mess we created in Iraq in light of the stability of the entire Middle East. It is just too bad those critical thinkers equipped with useful skills to be of help in analyzing this situation are disregarded for their inability to pass a standardized test.
I regret this is so, for I long hoped for Israel's continued existence and some kind of permanent truce. It will not happen, regrettably.
Pretty scary stuff. Dang them ancient prophets.
And as another aside, a type of argument I've never seen taken up with people like jvarisco and Visitor Again (though I admit I must only guess about some of Visitor Again's attitudes) is the idea of eminent domain.
There were some ten actual arabic landowning families in the partitioned territories. Incoming Jews were purchasing land in ordinary legal manners. The vast majority of other arabs who lived on the land were renters and tenants of those ten families. Those families were actually compensated for the land in the transition and those land boundaries and areas are known.
Under standard theories of eminent domain, the government, in this case Britain as guided by the UN's partition plan, can buy your land from you at the current market value at any time for a public use. (You can challenge it in court but good luck.) And here the public use was the partition plan and the creation of two new states.
I'll have to try bringing this one up some more every time I hear the 'kicked out of their homes' deal. Sorry, eminent domain, that's the breaks. There's some people in Connecticut who'll be real sympathetic to you right now, but they aren't likely to keep their homes either.
You still don’t tell us which races you are talking about, and of course you can’t because you know it doesn’t make sense in this case. Both Israelis and Arabs are of the same race.
Don't you ever get tired, Prof. Bernstein, of finding ways to reinforce your own contempt toward Palestinians? Don't you have even the slightest inking that you aren't even slightly objective on these issues? (Your pattern of closing comments on some of your more hateful posts suggests that you do.)
I could only wish that the other conspirators would find your screeds as tiresome as I do, and ask you to take them elsewhere. There's not one thing you could say about Israel-Palestine, or about the Palestinians, that anybody who is even slightly familiar with your writings doesn't can't anticipate with 99.999999999% accuracy.
Well, the alternative is coming with Baker, the guy who betrayed the Iraqi Shia and accepted the 1989 Taif Accord that ended the Syrian-sponsored Lebanese civil war by sacrificing Lebanese sovereignty to Syrian fascist occupation in the name of regional stability. That's already working out well...
No wonder you don't like it when people hold up the mirror to your anti-Palestinian posts - you see a Hamas propagandist leering back at you.
I am.
But you are welcome to list all their admirable qualities.
We can then balance these against their unadmirable qualities. Among these: blood feud, violent religious intolerance, oppression of women, martyr schools, and -- oh yeah -- cold-blooded random murder of people and a political ideology of genocide.
So it really isn't very useful to just make emotional smears about Israel being racist or terrorist being racist/anti-semitic. Similarly it is totally useless to argue about who did what to whom 50 years ago. No matter how badly someone treated your grandmother or what their ancestors stole from your ancestors it doesn't become right to go kill them or start a war. As someone pointed out above the terrible way we treated the Indians wouldn't make it okay for them to use terrorism to demand ownership of major cities on what used to be Indian land. Likewise Israel wouldn't be justified in attacking Germany for the holocaust, nor would it be reasonable for europe and the middle east to resume a war over who did what to whom in the middle ages.
All that matters is what policies produce the best results now. The only valid justification for causing harm or taking life is preventing future harm. Thus the Israeli policy of searching old women and giving them a hard time is justified if and only if it prevents more pain/harm than it causes, regardless of who owned what land when. If, as Mr. Bernstein claims (and I believe), not doing this to old ladies results in old ladies being used as suicide weapons then it is probably justified (means less Israelis and old women die). Similarly policies like supporting settlments in the west bank that avert no suffering and cause much more are totally unjustified.
Basically Israeli actions that are reasonably likely to reduce terrorism and cause less suffering than the terrorism they prevent (including the indirect effects of terrorism to spark retaliation and block peace) are justified otherwise they are not. Some Israeli actions are some are not. Virtually all terrorist attacks by the Palestinians fail this test, there is no way that a suicide bomber on a bus is somehow going to deter future violence rather than fueling it. What makes all the Palestinian terrorist actions against Israel so particularly immoral is that they, like Israeli settlements, are so obviously ineffective at making the other side back off.
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I just don't understand this whole argument between supporters of Israel and Palestine. Showing the other guy is doing bad things doesn't mean you get to do them as well. We should be looking to history to figure out what is effective in reducing violence not who is 'justified' in doing bad things to the other one.
I mean the whole premise the arguments I keep seeing in the comments are based on is absurd. Who did what to your parents or what land they own simply doesn't have any direct bearing on what is right or wrong for you to do. Sure we ought to punish wrongdoers and deny them their ill-gotten fruits but only to discourage such behavior in the future. It wouldn't make one jot of difference if Israel had really been created by space aliens who planted false memories in everyone's heads. The right and wrong actions now would still be the same
“It is a kind of fanaticism that is very hard for an American to understand -- until you become immersed in this culture for about 4 years or more.”
You have given us some good examples that help dispel the myth of multiculturalism that so grips the elites in America and Europe, especially in the media and academia. The adherents to multiculturalism deny racial, religious, ethnic and national differences to a point where they think all groups are necessarily compatible when given enough education and enlightenment. What they fail to understand is that many groups either have to be physically separated, or ruled with an iron fist. For example Saddam and Tito both ruled with an iron fist. If you relax the fist, the tribal, national, religious or racial forces will tear your conflicted country apart until you either physically separate the groups or allow one side to exterminate the other.
Extermination is nothing new in human history. About 95% of pre state societies practiced continuous warfare, and extermination was common. Bands, tribes and chiefdoms knew that mere victory in battle would leave your an opponent with a grudge itching for revenge, so you had better exterminate them to avoid a future war you might lose and get exterminated yourself. Even the settled communities and national states of the ancient world practiced extermination. For example after the third Punic war, the Roman general Scipio Numantinus utterly destroyed Carthage. Both the harbor and the city were burned. Anything that did not burn was plowed under. All those not slaughtered outright were enslaved. The 20th Century too is no stranger to extermination. It started with the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, an event the Turks still deny.
One viable alternative to extermination is separation. Cyprus provides a good example. After many years of conflict between the Greek and Turkish communities, Turkey invaded in 1974 in response to a coup by Greek Army officers seeking to unite Cyprus with Greece. The coup was reversed restoring president Makarios to power, yet the Turkish Army has remained in North Cyprus till this day in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Turkey established an unrecognized national state in the North of the island and expelled 200,000 ethnic Greeks to the south. Ethnic Turks then migrated north. In violation of the Geneva Convention, Turkey also moved over 120,000 people from the mainland into North Cyprus. So today Cyprus remains a divided island with a “green line” separating the ethnic Greeks from the ethnic Turks. Not a good solution, but a better solution than continued conflict, civil war and invasions by the parent powers of the warring ethnic groups.
It’s time to come to grips with the failure of multiculturalism in all its manifestations both foreign and domestic. You can pretend that somehow everybody is the same and will get along and enjoy the fruits of a pluralistic society, but reality has a way of creeping in to contradict your illusions.
Is this a threat on my life for speaking my point of view?
First of all, I am not at all naive. I am not all for the United States dictating world affairs. However, I don't want to see the gas pumps run dry, and affect my ability and the ability of everyone else I depend on, to earn a living necessary to survival and our way of life. I also don't want to freeze in the winter and sufer extreme hat stroke in the summer when electricity runs out. That is a business necessity, not a political view, as you way miss the mark in understanding how many Americans look at the necessity to protect America's oil supply.
You appear to be indoctrinated by Arabic, Anti-American sentiments.
That would be an actionable disability slur. I do the best I can with the state f my current speech recognition assistive device. The last time I heard such an aversion to disabilities from someone who does not apprear to be a medical doctor, was from United States District Court Judge James D. Whittemore (also from the euthanizing Terri Schiavo disability fame). Why don't you quit attacking people with points of view you personaly find unpopular, and while you're at it, how about identifying yourself as required by Federal criminal law instead of posting under an anonymous blog ID?
It is obvious you have no ability to engage in an intelligent debate on the merits.
Yeah. The Russians already sent their anti-spy critic pollonium 210 isotopes into the UK. I also took the Russian language. And Putin is extremely handsome. But I still speak my critical point of view when I think my perspective can be helpful to America.
Thank you, logicnazi. Well said.
And, A Zarkov, thank you, too, for the intelligent discussion my initial post was meant to provoke. I did not make my initial post to engage in Bush-bashing; rather, we have to recognize the reality that going into Iraq created havoc, a spreading mess threatening to destablize the Middle East and abruptly sever our supply of oil. Oil we depend on to run our economy and survive. If the reality cannot be acknowledge, we cannot move on to find a solution that will best benefit our country, the United States. I did propose some solutions. I am sure I could think of more ideas. Every American should be thinking of solutions to this pandora's box, because even the welathy VIP tax cutters will go down if the ship sinks. And I, for one, don't want to be on a sinking ship.
I know may be a pun for those who have read my postings for some time, but perhaps I should have said "I for one already live on a leaky boat."
You are correct in saying that the invasion has created a crescendo of instability. At present NO good solutions exist that can be imposed by the US acting alone. Many doubt whether any workable soution can be created without the full cooperation of Iran. And that is not happening without security guarantees.
You ask what of the increasingly worried Sunni states such as Saudi Arabi. Yes, at least some powerful representative Sunni states must be included. And they are not models of democratic freedom either.
What the US has done and what Israel has amplified with its Lebanon offensive is tight the security of the entire region in a rather tight knot. The tightness is nicely reflected in the back-and-forth anti-hominem attacks that typify comments to David Bernstein's middle east posts.
At this point the only leverage the US has with countries in the region is the threat to immediately remove troops; some do belive the US presence slows the escaltion. Time the US starts to figure out how to play the only trump it has left in its hand.
But it didn't do that, so I won't.
logic, whether I agree with the rigor of your assessment or not is beside the point. At least one side in the dispute does not play by your rules. Starting from the same set of 'facts,' they derive a much different 'result.'
Like you think I can solve the Isreali-Palestinian problem so they can live in brotherhood. You ask for so much.
I tell you what, maybe the Isrealis should stop their raids against the Palestinians, the Palestinians should not raid the Isrealis, both the Isrealis and the Palestinians should build big walls around their territories to keep out Hezbollah, and then the Isrealis and Palestinians should sit down together annually for their own Thanksgiving. It worked for the Pilgrims and the Indians.
I BLAME BOOSH! is not helpful discourse.
That would be the Israelians, no?
If I was a Cherokee I'd think that was the sweetest deal I'd heard offered in over a century. But you don't see them killing random white kids at pizza parlors, do you?
The Palestinians have a right to fight a war against Israel if they want to, but the fact that they're losing doesn't give them the right to engage in wide-scale war crimes. Fighters out of uniform, deliberate targeting of civilians ... I wonder what fraction of the Gaza population would get the death penalty under Nuremberg rules?
I BLAME BOOSH! is not helpful discourse."
What a bore *yawn*
Like the last six years repeating the same mistakes over and over until civil war in Iraq threatening to engulf the entire Middle East, and threatening our oil supply.
Of one thing I am certain -- you are a true Bush trooper --"stay the course," even when you walk off cliff.
You sound rather Arabic, yourself. A Sadr Shia, I suspect ...
That would be the Israelians, no?"
And I was off topic???!!!!!
Wait, I forgot, it is almost finals exams time for some ...