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what i want, powerclown, is this barbarism to end.
what i want to believe is that it will end before the real slaughter starts--which is "phase 3"--which is being debated now. if you'd like a sense of the stuff that generates a sense of outrage about this that i do not write about here, read this. i put the key section in bold. Quote:
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Well, I'd like the barbarism to stop, too, but I think you have the wrong barbarians, roachboy. I could write for pages about this, but let's focus on the one incident you quoted the Guardian about. That precise incident has actually been reported differently in different sources. It's one of the reasons I never get my news from only one source. (You know the Guardian's well-documented views on the whole Israel-Palestine mess, I'm sure).
Let's start with the Associated Press, and I'll boldface the appropriate sections: Quote:
The Israeli military has a YouTube channel with films of its operations in the current fight. One of the things you might notice if you have a look there is the preponderance of secondary explosions - meaning that there was ordnance being bombed, which then exploded. If you bomb a mosque, and then there are a series of additonal explosions from within the mosque, what does that tell you? What it tells me is that the imam of that mosque wasn't too particular about the uses to which the mosque was put. But don't take my word for it, go have a look yourself. You can get more detail if you want to see what the Israeli military is telling the Israeli press. Take it with a grain of salt, of course - the motivation of the speaker is evident - but this should alert you to the prospect that more is going on than the house organs of the British left are willing to report. So you might find this article in the Jerusalem Post interesting: Quote:
-----Added 7/1/2009 at 02 : 27 : 06----- Oh, one other thing. Israel apparently learned a lesson from the 2006 Lebanon War, and that is that no matter what precautions they take there will always be people who parrot the Hizbullah/Hamas propaganda use of civilian casualites and use it as a bludgeon. So Israel no longer pays attention. It does what is militarily necessary, and damn the critics. If you go back to the sources, you'll see that something on the order of 80% of the dead people in Gaza were Hamas fighters, which for urban warfare is extraordinarily precise. (I don't know what the ratio is now; I suspect it's somewhat lower but not drastically so). Those who focus on the 20% as a reason to discredit the entire operation are saying, in effect, that Israel has no right to protect its citizens, and that all Hamas needs to do to make sure it can attack Israel with impunity is to use the local population as human shields. I really wish this sort of fight wasn't necessary, but those who proudly advertise their genocidal intentions have made it necessary. And frankly, I take this personally. I don't have the link now - I can dig it out - but Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas who is out of danger in Syria right now, has told the press that every Jew on the planet is now a legitimate target because of Israel's war on Hamas. (So much for any distinction between Anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred/anti-semitism). That's me and my family that are now "legitimate targets," roachboy. My family has withstood one genocide in the last century and I really don't feel like having to deal with another. |
loquitor--nice to see you again...
first, you shouldn't confuse the perspectives that i have been developing in the thread with support of hamas. second, i had gathered more information about this than is in the guardian article--the idf's version, which is what you post above via ap, was floated not long after the story first broke and seems to me an exercise in damage control. while it's obviously impossible for any of us to *know* what happened, i don't think that this attack and the institution of the 3 hour cease fire for humanitarian assistance to reach the civilian population is a coincidence. i'm in the middle of a dealine-driven thing at the moment, so will for the moment refer you back to the thread above for my view of this overall situation. the narrative is think central does not preclude yours exactly, but it does undercut it in some important ways. i'll check back tonight and see if there is stuff up for discussion... but for the moment, i gotta go. |
I'll stipulate that neither of us really knows what happened. Neither can any reporter, by the way. The "fog of war" is well known.
What I want is a clean result. Until now, outsiders kept mixing in to prevent Israel from having a clean victory. That allowed the Hizbullahs of the world to survive to rearm and fight another day. This time it looks like Israel isn't biting, and they really shouldn't. The "human shields" strategy works only because Westerners let it: Quote:
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I've had to stay quiet on this subject because it shook me a bit. I'm not interested in jumping in, guns blazing.
The bottom line: We need a two-state solution immediately, before this conflict escalates beyond anyone's control. Oslo was a good start, but that's history now and it's clear that without outside interference Palestine will continue to become more radical and Israel will continue to escalate their level of force. Either Israel will finally wipe out Palestine or there will be a war between Israel and other Arab countries, again. Obviously neither of these can be allowed. We need to stop arguing about unimportant points like who started the recent attacks or what kind of illegal weapons one side is using or what the other side is chanting, and we need to start talking about peacekeepers. We need to start talking about the end of Israel ignoring the UN. We need to start talking about Palestinians being satisfied with Israel remaining in the Middle East. Most of all, we need to start talking reasonable solutions for the Jerusalem conundrum. It's time to use our soon-to-be Secretary of State. Send Sec. State Hillary Clinton to Israel and Palestine to explain that the US is going to stop protecting Israel in the UN and is going to stop the flow of arms into Palestine, and that the introduction of foreign troops on both lands are inevitable without a change. After she lays the groundwork, Obama and Hillary can "invite" (demand) Israeli and Palestinian leadership to talks. We need to get a solid cease-fire in place and get them talking asap. I'm no longer interested in the "if you show an ounce of objectivity towards Israel, you hate Jews" type of response. We're so far beyond that it's not even funny. I'm more than willing to drag anti-Palestinian/Israel-is-perfect simpletons kicking and screaming into reality, and I hope everyone that reads this feels the same way, but it can't end there. We have to be solution-oriented whenever the issue can be brought up. We have to demand that our government not only stop being Israel's lap-dog, but to also be solution-oriented. Can you imagine a world without Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad or Fatah? Can you imagine the devastating blow to "radical Islam" from both the US leaving Iraq and a real shot at peace between Israel and Palestine? It's too good not to do everything we can. |
If I thought a two-state solution could work I'd be in favor of it. I don't think it can because I don't think the Palis want it to. Israel has already traded away or just walked away from lots of land and you see what it got for its efforts. The only solution that can work is for Egypt to take Gaza and Jordan to take the West Bank. Unfortunately, neither of them wants either misbegotten piece of land, and I can't say I blame them.
-----Added 7/1/2009 at 03 : 46 : 48----- Will, you're a nice person who grew up in a basically nice country. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that other people's thought processes are much like yours and that we all want basically the same things. It just ain't so. What you're saying would make sense if your premise was correct but it's not. Have enough respect for the Palestinians to take them at their word. They elected Hamas as their govt knowing full well what they were getting. They consistently approve of attacks on Israeli civilians (yes, I know, the polls vary depending on how questions are worded, but ask yourself whether you would ever answer yes to a question like that, irrespective of wording). When I say that I wish the two state solution would work but I don't think it can, that's what I mean. There won't be peace when one side wants peace and the other wants victory. |
gee. loquitor, what gives you an inside track into what all palestinians are thinking?
among the patterns of thinking that seem to be reaching the end of their road---i hope---is this essentialist take on the israel-palestine matter. you know, there are two sides defined as identical to themselves internally--there are the israelis who all think one way---which is entirely, completely false---and then there are the palestinians who all think in exactly the opposite way---again entirely, completely false. what this does is to enable you to dodge thinking about this as political, dodge thinking about concrete policy choices and their implications. there is an obvious, concrete, empirical historical and political trajectory that opened the space for hamas to win the elections in gaza, and another that led the israelis and bush people to refuse to recognize that election result---all of it is to blame for the resulting siege--that siege has failed to weaken hamas. what that siege has done is brutalize the civilian population in gaza. you may substitute a Hamas Bogeyman for this reality if you want, but i don't nor do i see the point of it. hamas chose to play a dangerous game with israel at the end of the last cease fire and in that they fucked up--but the reasons for that, too, are political. you know, actual choices made by discrete agents that have consequences in the world. the israelis made their choice based on a political calculation that was only secondarily about the famnous rockets you hear so much about so so much about. kadima faces elections, finds itself weakened politically and sees the end of the bush period of unconditional support for the brutal and self-defeating policies of the right rushing up against them. hamas knew it too, no doubt. there are no heros here. there is nothing but idiocy amongst the political agents involved--the bush people, the israeli right, hamas. but nothing---and i mean nothing---justifies what the israelis are not doing to the civilians in gaza, just as nothing---absolutely nothing---justifies the disastrous POLITICAL choice to refuse recognition of the jan 06 elections. i think this has to be internationalized and quickly. even the israeli right must see that everything about thier brutalize the palestinian people as a way to keep the political order weak has not worked. i think everybody sees the endgame of this entire way of thinking except perhaps for the american supporters of the israeli right, who sit far away playing tedious little image subsitution games---o look at this anecdote about how horrible hamas is. but that's a noin-sequitor. here, no-one is supporting hamas. but israel's approach of brutalizing the palestinians is no different and no better--except that there is an enormous assymetry of means---so to my mind, if anything it is worse. a military superpower pulverizing people who make rockets and throw fucking rocks. it is obvious that the logic in place leads to nothing but carnage. internationalize the situation and move quickly toward a two-state solution. force israel to dismantle the existing settlements in the west bank. do it now. stop building new ones. create an international status for jerusalem. it's time to end this lunacy. |
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We both know that radical elements thrive when conditions are bad. It stands to reason that with improved conditions and "hope" radical elements would lose at least some of their clout. Will that make them more desperate? Sure. We saw that in Lebanon in 2006 with Hezbollah. But that doesn't have to mean that they will succeed in their crusade. Quote:
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And let's not pretend for even a fraction of a second that Palestine wants victory and Israel wants peace. That's below a man of your intellect. If Israel wanted peace, they wouldn't use such asymmetric military responses every chance they get (compare t he death tolls, compare the death tolls of civilians). They wouldn't ignore the UN all the time (35 resolutions violated at last count). Please, please do not pretend that Israel is the innocent superpower and the Palestine is the evil terrorist aggressor. The longer people cling to that myth, the longer it will take to solve this. |
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Do you guys REALLY believe Israel targeted a school just to kill civilians? Or do you think maybe they ate a few rounds and when they returned fire they hit a nearby school?
If Israel were simply trying to gun down civilians the death toll would be a couple orders of magnitude higher by now. With regard to the school fiasco, it sounds like they were using a radar counter-battery and lobbed a few rounds at the calculated point of origin of some incoming mortars/rockets. That sort of thing isn't pinpoint accurate, and if someone was lobbing mortars from 'near' a school, they likely returned fire without the artillery crew realizing how close to a school it was. |
actually, slims, maybe i should have made this point more forcefully--through the fog of disinformation---i do not think it was intentional, no. when i posted the guardian article this morning, i prefaced it by saying that i thought the israelis had made a mistake--but it's the kind of mistake that's inevitable in this situation. it's just a question of time. the problem is the situation itself.
so no, i don't imagine anyone on the idf do be willing to or intentionally able to shell a school full of refugees. mistakes happen. but the fact is that the civilian population of gaza is trapped there. and THAT is a choice that israel made 18 months ago. and THAT is the level at which direct responsibility rebounds back to them. the individuals of the idf are just as trapped by the idiotic logic of the politics around gaza as anyone else is. i don't see anywhere in this thread such simplistic views of this situation that'd lead you to think anyone imagines the idf to be composed of sociopaths. they're charged with carrying out the directives of the political leadership of israel. they are responsible--along with hamas---along with the united states--directly--for this. the policies are to blame. period. |
roachboy, I don't claim to know what every Palestinian is thinking. All I can go by is the evidence of what the conduct of their polity has been. I also read the public opinion polls, which of course are flawed, but it's what we have.
Which leads me to ask Will how he knows the Palis elected Hamas out of desperation. It's not like radical Islamism is exactly unknown in the muslim world the past decade. It's not a fringe phenomenon. Probably not a majority or plurality one, but not fringe by any means. You are assigning motives by projection or inference, which I do understand, but that comes back to assuming that others think the way you do. They don't. Different cultures, different background, different assumptions. In the end you have to evaluate people based on their own words and actions. I have been having some real difficulty here understanding how nice, educated, enlightened people can possibly think it's ok for the self-proclaimed genocidal murderers of Hamas to lob rockets at civilians and hide behind their own children as human shields -- but be outraged when Israel takes steps to stop it. Or if you don't think it's ok, you are silent about it when the rockets are being lobbed but vocal when Israel finally says "enough." As I said before, my family has managed to survive one genocide in the last century, and I don't want it to have to survive another one in this century, which is what is going to happen if Hamas isn't stopped. And the Palis will be better off when Hamas is overthrown too. Or did you just gloss over the murders and leg-breaking that Hamas has been doing over the last couple of weeks to intimidate its own population? I guess that doesn't count, it's just Arabs killing and maiming other Arabs. The best thing that can happen to the Palestinians is to have the back of the Hamas monster broken for good. If, as I hope, the people here on this site are right, and the Palestinians really do want nothing more than peace, that will be their chance. Jeffrey Goldberg had it exactly right: Quote:
“We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” |
My comments were not meant to indict the Israeli military with targeting civilians, either, but there is no doubt that there are measures being taken by the Israeli government that show an indifference to the security of Palestinian civilians. I find this to be inhumane and as a logical extension, according to my brand of logic, murderous. But I understand that such is the way of warfare, regardless of the colors that are waging it and I don't mean to sound overly critical of the Israeli government in a particular way.
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loquitor---if you look at the history of the occupation, hamas is a direct result of earlier israeli efforts to fragment the plo/fatah so they could then not negociate about settlements etc. by claiming that there is no-one to negociate with. the assumption was the same as informed the siege---if you prevent a political organization from governing, the people will turn against it. except that everyone knows they main reason these organizations can't govern is the colonial occupation. hamas represents a rejection of conventional politics because the occupation has been such that conventional politics don't function. what's stupid--and i put this up before---is that such a organizations are typically not prepared to actually win something like an election and would have found itself moderating in all probability had israel and the united states recognized the results of the jan 06 elections. remember hamas is also located in syria and the syrian hamas is FAR more moderate than is it's--o what do you call it exactly--not a branch--it's namesake in gaza. to my mind, that refusal is the policy blunder that set up all of this. you can post all the anecdotal stuff you want to demonstrate that you personally prefer to bracket all this and focus on what nasty fellows hamas is comprised of in gaza--but the fact remains that while i do not doubt that some of it is true even, the problem was that the israelis--again--used the discourse of terrorism to refer to hamas and that boxed in the idiots in the bush administration, who in turn supported unconditionally, as a function of their wholesale abdication of any pretense to being even interested in brokering peace in the region, the genuinely awful idea of refusing to acknowledge the elections and imposing the siege instead.
this siege has *strengthened* hamas' position and has imposed no significant challenge to it organizationally. the pattern of oppositional groups finding themselves in a quandry if they actually win in conventional political elections (or some other process) is well known and has repeated over and over and over. just as the pattern of failure of the israeli "idea" that you can brutalize the palestinians with the result that they'll turn against their own organizations has been repeated over and over and over. i don't understand what your motivation is in avoiding the political reality of the situation and instead imposing this simplistic overlay on it. i really don't. it doesn't enable you to do anything except rationalize away what's happening now to the civilian population of gaza. i can't seem to find it within myself to pretend it's not happening. i find doing so to be an analytic and ethical problem. |
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RB: I'm well aware of the history. It's also irrelevant for current purposes. Why thugs act like thugs is not pertinent when the issue is whether someone has the right to stop the thugs from acting like thugs. The reasons for the thuggery might be relevant to what sorts of treatment the thug should get once he is immobilized, but the justice of the immobilization doesn't turn on that. I submit, respectfully, that it's your position that has the ethical issues, if the purpose is to justify thuggery. I understand explaining bad behavior. I understand attempts to understand bad behavior. Those are good things to do; they are responsible things to do. What I don't get is attempts to justify bad behavior, and complain about the efforts to stop it.
Will: I think Israel acts incredibly stupidly at times. Its governmental system is a travesty and many of its politicians are repellent. That has precisely zero to do with whether Israel has the right to shut down self-proclaimed genocidal murderers who hide behind children and seek to exterminate Israel's population. It does. When you ask whether I'm ignoring the half of the equation about whether the bombs Israel is using are too big for the objectives, what's your point? I'm not a military expert and neither are you - neither of us has even a tiny clue what is or is not a weapon big enough to effectively achieve a military goal. You're just assuming that if there is collateral damage that means the bomb was too big, which is self-evidently false. What I do know is that there have been instances in the past where Israel used smaller bombs for the precise purpose of avoiding civilian casualties, and the result was that the bad guys (the leadership of Hamas, as it happens) got away. I can try to dig up a link for that if you want; it's pretty well documented. |
This is one of the situations that brings the following to mind:
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you're not missing anything. If Israel "wins" it gets a respite at best. It's not willing to exterminate the population of Gaza.
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That particular case was just a recent example, though. The best example in recent years was the invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Hezbollah kidnaps two Israeli soldiers with the intent of trading them for Hezbollah prisoners. A symmetrical response might be to hit a Hezbollah training camp, which Israel has been known to do. Israel launched a rescue attempt which failed. What did they do next? They essentially declared war on Lebanon. There were massive air strikes on civilian targets, intentionally crippling the infrastructure of the country, a ground invasion, and a naval blockade. Over two soldiers. In response, Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel. Fatalities? Over a thousand Lebanese civilians. 44 Israeli civilians that were only fired upon after Israels air strikes and invasion. Hezbollah was wrong to kidnap the soldiers, Israel was wrong to murder over a thousand civilians and send an entire country back into the stone age. The worst part is that Israel galvanized Hezbollah support, which was dwindling before the 2006 war. Now? Hezbollah is gaining positions in government again and Lebanon is becoming more radical, which is opposite to the path they were on 3 years ago. The insane thing is that Israel were to give up Shebaa Farms, Hezbollah would no longer have a cause. Do you have any opinions about the settlements in the West Bank? Bulldozing Palestinian homes? How are these acts of self-defense? How are these not essentially goading Palestinians to respond? |
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Well maybe they should just do nothing then since they cannot win. Perhaps then Hamas will stop.
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Very long running, low intensity war in highly-concentrated population areas. Terrorists/freedom fighters vs State. Terrorists bomb and terrorise continuously for 30+ years.
Should the state intervene to slaughter 600+ and injure thousands in a few fleeting days? Should you stand behind the obvious need of the state to defend its citizens? I'm truly glad you were 100% behind the UK in its actions in Northern Ireland. Bloody Sunday anyone? 27 deaths, a stain on the UK in perpetuity and caused one thing only: Escalation. Terrorism IS a state-scale nuisance, you deal with it in law enforcement and political/diplomatic arenas. Always. If you want something comparable, look at road deaths... they're so much higher per year, every year, it's not funny. To respond to state-scale nuisance with state-scale slaughter is disgusting. To do it 6 weeks before an election in a state were the ruling parties are trailing... that's criminal. |
Dealing with law enforcement is fine, and what I would argue for myself, when the terrorists are operating from your own territory. But whatever its reasons may have been, Israel withdrew from Gaza; it's Hamas' territory, not Israel's. So when Hamas is unable or unwilling to stop the attacks on Israel, or complicit in the attacks, law enforcement isn't really an option for Israel. The UKs problem was one in its own territory, Northern Ireland.
(And yes Roachboy, nation states are becoming obsolete. But I don't think they're obsolete yet, or will ever become entirely such as long as people tend to think through that lens. So it's not a mistake to analyze a solution in terms of nation-states; the perception of the participants that they are part of such objects makes them real.) |
Sorry, Israel bares responsibility for the governance of the territories.
Even when the _ground based_ military moved out, Israel still held sway in the air and the sea... Keeping functions like the population registry for itself. It is the dominant power, it bares responsibility in very much the same way as the UK. Israel, to all intents and purposes, 'owns' the territories - whether they should or not is another matter - and systematically escalates 'The Troubles' rather than dealing with them in a semi-rational manner. -----Added 8/1/2009 at 07 : 32 : 50----- B'Tselem - Israel's responsibility toward residents of the Gaza Strip |
Hmmm...this is interesting
"Gaza War Role Is Political Lift for Ex-Premier"... NYT on Election Implications click to show |
asaris---agreed on the nation-state matter--i haven't brought that question into this thread, though, because it is shaped by other dynamics. this is a nationalist conflict. this is a demonstration of why nationalism is a pathology.
where it impacts on this situation in gaza is at a remove--i disagree entirely with loquitor's statement above that the past does not matter. this present is entirely a function of the past, it is a result of thinking in terms shaped by it and represents the extreme difficulty of breaking with the past. i don't see the logic of winning and losing as relevant here--but the logic of the past is built around that. i don't see anyone winning anything here. what i do see from the folk who support the israeli action is a whole lot of denial: denial of the post 67 reality, which you can see in the analogies to individuals (if someone attacked my sister...)----which erases both the fact of occupation, it's trajectories, it's implications AND the radical asymtery of the conflict itself--a regional military superpower uses its military capabilities against a non-state paramilitary the edges of which blur into a civilian population that is trapped in place by a siege---in a broader context shaped by 40 years of colonial occupation in the context of which the primary strategy has been to keep the palestinian population fragmented politically and subject more generally. none of the logics internal to occupation ave produced the stated objectives---pulverizing the plo did not produce more peace--it produced hamas---claims to want peace have been undermined by the settlement program, which continues in the west bank to be expanded, despite, well, everything. the logic of this history is such that even gestures that could and should have opened onto something else like the pullout from gaza have produced nothing like the stated objectives. the problem is the entire logic of occupation. within that, you have the ideological limitations that follow from viewing this history through the viewpoint of the israeli right--and in this thread every last one of the posts which support israel's action in gaza reproduce that logic---without even qualifying it, without situating it--as if the right and israel as a whole are identical--which is nonsense---as if the right represents therefore the only perspective---so you are either for israel so defined or you are for hamas---the ideology itself prevents more complicated thinking, prevents consideration of any alternative but the existing alternative. us/them, win/lose---40 years of this have produced nothing but death, suffering, instability--and more death, more suffering, more instability is being produced now---the effect of conflating the viewpoint of the israeli right with israel as a whole is, even in this thread is to generate the illusion that nothing else is possible. what's startling is that this logic is not understood as replicating the problem that has resulted in decisions like the 06 refusal to recognize the gaza election results. it is that logic itself which has created this situation, which is shaping it, which will do nothing but create more such situations. the americans have long hung their hat on this same logic, for the same reasons---i think the calculation was that israel could "win" following on the rightwing way of viewing the situation--and policy has been framed by this same conflation--that the logic espoused by likud, particularly when in coalition with the extreme right, that represents israel as a whole. this cold war relic has made it difficult for the americans to actually change course: it has compromised their relation to any peace process. the americans threw the dice in this respect and will find themselves losing face if the situation between israel and palestine is internationalized---which i think it must be at this point. so an internationalization of this conflict will be a first, obvious indication of the decline of american hegemony, such as it has been---and so i would not be surprised to find the next administration opposed to this direction---but i see no way out. there are alternative logics within israel--thousands upon thousands of folk have worked to build other types of community, to link palestinians and israelis through local programs--the political viewpoint of the israeli left offers another way of thinking about the conflict, one relatively devoid of racism, one relatively devoid of this asinine idea that this is a conflict between religions or that concessions in the context of colonialism represent a threat to israel as a state. the existence of israel is not at stake. israel is a fact. that is why thinking about gaza in the longer-term context of post 67 history is far more useful than is thinking about it in terms of a history that runs back to 1947--it is the paranoid and useless claim that israel's existence is threatened that drops out, and it is that paranoid and useless claim that underpins the marketing of rightwing israeli political views in the united states as if they represented the whole of israel, the only option, the only way. if you assume that rightwing politics are the only option, and buy the line that the existence of israel is at stake, to abandon or question rightwing policies is then to place the existence of israel at peril. this circular thinking benefits only the right. no-one else, anywhere. even in the states, there are alternatives--it is entirely possible to gather information about what has been happening on the ground in the west bank and gaza. it is entirely possible to read descriptions from israelis and palestinians of the facts about occupation, the facts about settlements, the facts about responsibility. it has been entirely possible to find out quite alot about what 18 months of siege has meant for gaza. the fundamental choice that separates folk who support this action and those who do not is that the folk who support it seem unable or unwilling to look at this reality on the ground. the reason i keep pointing to the democracy now transcript i posted earlier is that this distinction--knowing what's been happening as over against operating with a reductive counter-narrative that references the same place names without knowing anything about them, that substitutes rightwing mythology for the grain of information--that relation repeats in it. there should be an immediate cease fire in gaza monitored by an international peacekeeping force. while the quartet is far from perfect, it's initiatives should be placed at the center of a new peace process--which presupposes that the americans get out of the fucking way and start acting in good faith--which they have not done. by that i mean the obama administration is in a position to see the non-policies toward the israli right enacted (if that's the word) by the bush people as yet another dimension of conservative failure and to abandon them--and those policies are the logical extension of american policy toward israel since 1967, so in abandoning them, it would break with this horrific logic that has lead to nothing but violence and death on all sides. =========================== today's gaza casualty count: edit: 707 killed, over 3100 injured. there are conflicting reports about the adequacy of medial supplies, the consistency of electricity etc,. the situation remains most dire for the population of gaza. |
The UN is now pulling out it's humanitarian aid since the IDF fired on a UN convey twice killing 2 UN workers. The UN gave their co-ordinates but were fired on anyway. I guess the big UN letters on their conveys translates into human shield or Palestinian sympathizer in Hebrew.
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i put this up to reflect something of the day's devolution in gaza.
i don't have time to say much at the moment, but will come back to this later. feel free to develop your own interpretation. Quote:
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They obviously had the sites on them, I wonder why they watched them launch 3 rounds and didnt fire on them. It even looks as though they let them go. Hmm. . . |
on tuesday, antonio guterres from the un high commission on refugees pointed out that gaza is the only conflict that is happening anywhere on earth from which the civilian population is not allowed to flee.
the text of the statement is here, in french: UNHCR | Gaza : « Le seul conflit au monde où les personnes n'ont même pas la possibilité de fuir », a déclaré António Guterres he demanded, in the way that one does in such situations, that the borders to gaza be opened on all sides to allow the civilian population to escape from it. strangely, this did not seem to get a whole lot of press. maybe because the fact that not only has this not happened, but also that the unrwa suspended aid work in gaza after drivers of un trucks were killed provides more perspective on what is actually going on here than anything else. what's more the red cross has claimed that their ability to deliver basic first aid is being obstructed by the idf. if the israelis wanted only to crush hamas militarily, they could easily have allowed the civilians to flee--but in the twisted logic that dominates this horrific situation, if they opened the borders, hamas would be understood as having won something. so they keep it closed--and egypt, which also wants to see something bad happen to hamas, also keeps its border closed. if you look at what's happening here, all the justifications turn to ash. to nothing. not even worth the breath to say them. there is no justification. none. |
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And Israel will blame Hamas for everything that happens, of course. And Hamas, Israel. The international community needs to step the fuck up. All PM Harper has done thusfar is blame Hamas. Way to go, brave leader. Here is one NDP MP's response to just that: Quote:
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I think that a large part of the immediate problem is that Hamas has always remained committed to the destruction of Israel. I think that if upon election, Hamas had stopped calling for the annihilation of Israel, Israel would not have monitored the borders in a (perhaps misguided) attempt to keep arms out of Gaza. Perhaps this is politically naive of me, but I prefer to be overly naive than overly cynical. And the fact remains that Hamas has always remained committed to the removal of Israel as a political entity. This makes it hard to see how any diplomatic solution could possibly have worked. |
israel is a regional military superpower.
it's existence is not in question. this is self-evident. i really wish that entire line of thinking would disappear. it is unhinged from the world. maybe it explains something of the rationale behind trapping the civilians in gaza in place during this military operation. that too is unhinged, but in a different sense of the term (this is not directed at you personally in any way asaris---you explain the consequences of this line of thinking---that line of thinking enables what is happening---but...well, i hope it's clear what i am trying to say) bg: look at it this way--at least the harper government is not directly responsible for what's happening. the bush administration is, to a signficant extent. the sidelines suck, but there's a worse place to be. this whole thing makes me sick. |
I don't disagree with you entirely, asaris, but there is nothing to indicate that what the Israelis are doing is expedient in any way other than politically. Meanwhile, 700+ people who were walking around less than two weeks ago are now dead. And there is no reason to think that they died for anything other than a blanket enterprise in revenge upon a million people.
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Yes, it's not like it will stop the rocket attacks. I posted this earlier in this thread: there is no military solution in Gaza.
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Right now, a military solution seems as likely to succeed as a diplomatic solution.
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so the people that are dead and dying are inconsequential?
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To succeed at what, exactly?
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overnight, israel rejected a un security council resolution calling for an immediate cease fire. for that to have passed, the americans would have had to at least abstain. the response from livni was an exact mirror of the bush administration's responses to the un over iraq.
but this is not a "solution" to anything, what is going on. if the objective is to change the political context so that rocket attacks on israel will stop, this will have precisely the opposite effect. i've been trying to figure this out, make it seem coherent somehow--what i think is playing out here is a consequence of the discourse of terrorism---i think it operates in a self-reinforcing cycle with the illusion of national survival---and that dyad seems to legitimate *anything*...to my mind, what israel is doing in gaza goes way beyond the bushwar in iraq and all the attendant problems...it is the same logic that enabled the administration to justify torture. it seems to me that once a state apparatus begins operating through the discourse of terrorism, it becomes what it claims to be opposing, and uses the illusion of survival begin at stake to rationalize its actions and repress what is dissonant with them. the discourse of terrorism operationalized results in a bureaucratic psychosis. if this is accurate, then it seems to me clear that this dynamic runs nation-states to the very limits of their legitimacy and requires a rethinking of the relation of international institutions and law to nation states---it seems to me that this points to the requirement that limits be placed on national sovereignty as a check on the possibility of entry into a space of collective psychosis. this in principle, across the board. further it points to the need for a different type of international community, not the default version that presently exists, but a serious organization, something with the capacity to force nation-states into compliance. this points to an obvious flaw with the entire international system that was set up after world war 2 in order to prevent repetitions of the worst aspects of world war 2. the difference is that the post world war 2 order was set up to provide a system of buffers that would kick in to limit the effects of economic crisis, which was understood as a generator of fascism, which was in turn understood as a playing out of the effects of economic crisis. one of the main limitations to this understanding was that it bracketed the problem of nationalism, of nation-states themselves---the discourse of terror and its consequences---which are not new, which have surfaced repeatedly since the algerian war---demonstrates that a discursive and political space exists where a relatively stable nation-state can come unhinged and move with a sense of justification entirely outside the legal and ethical order that allegedly holds the international community together---because the range of agreements that comprises that community has to do with norms even as its function has to do with resource transfers (which is another register at which the post world war 2 order has been shown to be obsolete). in this kind of context, it is absurd to talk about military solutions. there can be no solution if, for example, the idf finds itself acting as if it were justified in gaza on hamas while the entire civilian population is trapped in place. the idea of a solution in such a context is lunacy. solutions to problems should not involve the murder of civilians. and the murder of civilians is inevitable if they are trapped in place. so the situation is itself psychotic and cannot be otherwise. in this situation, the idf has no rational options---it can pursue what appear to be rational objectives, but because of the siege, that appearance is nothing more than that. any error results in more civilian deaths. and war is chaos. it is mostly error. there is no solution within a logic conditioned by this. the solution is to change the situation itself and treat the disease. to my mind, things have reached that point. internationalize this conflict---force a cease fire--put mechanisms into place that will bring israel to its knees economically if it does not comply---mechanisms that would undercut the rationale for hamas by instituting a process that would lead toward a meaningful two-state situation in the region regardless of what the israeli right thinks, wants or says. controls clamped on hamas itself. none of these mechanisms exist. this is the theater of the impotence and obsolence of the post-1945 world--first at the economic level, now at the level of human rights. |
A call for ceasefire does not stop Hamas. Where is your comments about Hamas ignoring the resolution, oh wait sorry that does not seem to be an issue. Israel has always been blamed and never have there been meetings and screaming over the thousands of rockets being fired in to Israel from Gaza, no international outcry then, they have a right to use their intel and defend themselves as long as rockets are going and the potential of it including the weapon supply tunnels.
It is amazing hearing the propaganda begin spouted here, oh no the school the school until someone posts a video showing the fire coming from the school. A nation can only take so much before they have to fight back. And there is no rule of defense saying if they use a bow and arrow you have to use the same. If you want to hear the terrorists thoughts on their care for Gaza just read this times article. Roachboy already hinted we will never see in views, and I just disliked how he suggested I modify my views just to open up dialogue, so I am avoiding this conversation, but still hard to watch it be one sided without even looking to see the other side (like the school). Quote:
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xazy--what i don't see in your position is any sense that hamas comes out of a dynamic, a history, and that what is happening in gaza now is an extreme expression of that same dynamic. you seem to think that the only way to consider this fiasco in gaza is to separate it from the past, to pretend that there is a symmetry between the actors involved--i don't think that leads to anything at all except a continuation of the same. it is an expression of the lunatic viewpoint that enables a military operation to be launched against hamas with the civilian population of gaza unable to flee.
what i've been trying to do is put the civilians of gaza at the center of this situation--which they are, like it or not. hamas is a bunch of idiots who i think expressed their idiocy in playing chicken with israel after the cease fire ended. but i see them as in a position to do that **because** of the decision to not recognize the 06 elections, which has strengthened their position--and if this were not the case, they would not have felt they were in a position to play chicken. the dynamic itself is fucked up, and that dynamic is expressed in the actual history of the entire context. if the civilians of gaza had been allowed to flee, i think i would have been far more neutral about this action. but the fact is, no matter what you think of it, they weren't. THAT is the problem. i am not concerned with or about viewpoints that treat the situation in gaza as if the civlians were not there. there is NO justification for this. and this position can easily be maintained while NOT approving of hamas itself or of its use of rockets. there is no way around context. there is no way around the fact of siege. there is no way around the consequences of that siege. |
Hitler was democratically elected. You also do not mention that Israel has called buildings telling civilians that the building will be bombed in 30 minutes. Hamas targets civilians buy fires from within civilian areas, and as mentioned above article, they are proud and have no qualms in running in to civilian homes. This is an ugly fight, and I care and worry about the civilians, but after 3,000 rockets in the past years there is no choice but to defend ones country. And yes Hamas was democratically elected, the people do to some point bare a responsibility to that. By the way Hitler was elected also.
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so wait---you're arguing that israel has the "right" to decide which results of an election are and are not legitimate?
after this debacle in gaza, maybe the international community could decide that electing the israeli right to power is simply too irresponsible to be acceptable and that could be vetoed as well. the analogy between hamas and hitler has more to do with the fact that both words start with the same letter than anything else. it is a wildly false analogy---except maybe in the self-confirming context of total justification for any and all actions on grounds particular to the logic of "terrorism" i've argued this repeatedly in this thread, but i'll say it again: THE error, the structuring political error, that opened the way to this disaster in gaza, was the israeli right's decision to refuse to recognize the jan 06 elections and impose a state of siege on gaza instead. i see no way around this--and it is possible to be critical of choices and still be in general terms a supporter of things israeli. it really is. you need not operate in complete, continuous approval mode to be so--in fact one could argue that if you give up the right to be critical, you undermine the basis for your own support because it stops being a rational matter. i don't see what good that does anyone, including israel. particularly when the israel that is being supported is one dominated by the right. i support israel as well, but it is the israel of groups like peace now. so i entirely reject the idea that there is a single way to think about what israel is, what it's interests are etc. i think the consequences of the collapse of the whole of israel onto the viewpoint of the right--which is central to the imaginary israel in the united states---does no-one anywhere any good. i could point to the politics of the settlements in the west bank as demonstration, but that'd take us afield. gaza is enough to deal with for now. |
I don't really know how to proceed in this thread when it seems as though the world has gone mad, as though the slaughter of hundreds of people, mainly civilians, can somehow be coolly justified as any kind of legitimate response to a handful of crude rockets, landing mostly in empty fields, launched from a tiny, besieged strip of land populated largely by desperate refugees, choked off from supplies for over a year, during which, y the way, Israel was the first to break the ceasefire (in November), a ceasefire whose terms Israel never fulfilled because it never lifted the blockade of supplies. I don't know how else to get at this, or what else to say.
For those of you who might care, there are a number of good recent pieces by some permanent fixtures on the Middle East stage. Aaron Miller, by the way, was a high-ranking American diplomat during the Oslo/Camp David process (deputy to Ambassador Ross). Aaron Miller: Obama should get tough with Israel. Obama Must Get Tough With Israel to Achieve Peace | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com Robert Fisk: Why do they hate us, we will ask Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent Rashid Khalidi: What you don’t know about Gaza http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/op...khalidi&st=cse Avi Shlaim: How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe Avi Shlaim: How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe | World news | The Guardian |
Thanks for the links, hiredgun.
Here's another recent Fisk article: Robert Fisk: Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent |
Hamas firing missiles at Israeli civilians is unobjectionable. But Israel giving notice before they fire a rocket into civilian areas or bulldoze a house isn't? Wow, how thoughtful of them. Anyone who thinks the IDF isn't the master of collective punishment, just ask the 10 year old boys who, while throwing stones at tanks get shot in the shoulder, the elbow, the knees, the ankles. Not enough to kill them. Just enough to handicap them for life though.
Interesting hypotheses on the living with terror, adopt terror standpoint rb. Don't hear that angle to often. I wouldn't guess it was as easy as clearing out the old stock of ammo before restocking courtesy of the new president. Maybe the USA should stop treating Israel like a welfare state and instead of billions given, all the while Israel wipes her butt with the Geneva Convention as well as the UN, the USA could pass out homemade rockets and bags of stones to the Israeli's, to somewhat illustrate a fair fight. My guess would be that a peace plan wouldn't be to far behind. |
the un reports this morning that there are about 15,000 displaced people inside of gaza.
so 15,000 civilians wandering around a battle zone. this morning, the idf was dropping pamphlets warning people to stay in their homes. a doctor from the shifa hospital in gaza reports via al jazeera that 165 children have been killed and over 1,200 injured. meanwhile, the us house passed a resolution condemning hamas, while the rest of the planet is calling for an immediate cease fire on humanitarian grounds. the united states is fully complicit with the humanitarian crisis that preceded this and with the situation that military action has produced, which amplifies the previous crisis exponentially. this clip is not meant as a direct metaphor, but it expresses better than any other i could think of what's going on in my head as i read about this disaster: |
After ignoring the calls for a ceasefire from the U.N. and others, Israel prepares its next phase: an intensive ground operation. They've been sending communications to "the residents of Gaza," asking them to stay away from terrorists and to evacuate Rafah due to an "imminent operation." Where are there no terrorists, and to where should they evacuate? I'm not sure they were told. You'd think an organization with the budget of the IDF, they'd have a better handle on logistics.
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Did you notice the part where Hamas also rejected the call for a cease fire?
That whole two sides to every story thing is a real bitch. Oh, and the '500 pound bombs' mentioned in the article are mostly full of concrete rather than explosives to reduce collateral damage...if you look at many of the pics from the conflict you will see that houses adjacent to targets still have glass in their windows which wouldn't be the case had 500lbs of explosives been used. If you want an honest discussion then point out when people on your side make absurd inflammatory statements in addition to just hacking away at everything Israel does. |
i'm not sure why this keeps happening, the assumption that if you are critical of the israeli operation you are somehow for hamas. speaking for myself, that's entirely false and i've found myself having to write the same thing over and over in the thread. it's strange, like there's the automatic dimension to how folk think about this that overrides dissonant information.
but i'll put it in again---israel and hamas are both responsible for this debacle--but the onus really is on the israelis and, because of their idiotic policy logic, the bush administration. obama has already indicated a saner approach in that he's willing to talk to hamas. that's as far as he's gone, but even that is a *Vast* improvement over the current situation. again, my disbelief concerning the gaza situation centers on the civilian population being pinned in place. this makes the situation go beyond the routine "a pox on all their houses" in terms of co-dependent insanity of conservative political organizations and their mirror image, almost a requirement it seems at times, in organizations like hamas. that the civilian population is trapped there, particularly under such horrific conditions, short-circuits any possible justification for this action. and i haven't forgotten about those fine fellows in the mubarak government who are keeping one of the 7 main exit points closed while israel keeps the other 6 closed. what's more if you are inclined to support israel, to think well of it, i don't see how you can not be appalled at this. i can't see how this serves any rational interest on the israeli side. |
Slims, are you talking about those laser-guided 100% accurate mythical bombs? What part of "crowded" don't you understand?
And people on my side? What are you talking about? This isn't a football game. And your use of absurd and inflammatory is blatantly inaccurate, as is hacking. I take most issue with this. Do you disagree that many civilians are dying here? |
I'm sorry, but I simply fail to see how the 'policy logic' of the bush administration to support our ally is stupid when the enemies our ally have sworn to kill every Israeli.
The saber rattling on both sides is pathetic, but at least Israel has the ability to back up their rhetoric. If Hamas were willing to simply agree to stop shooting rockets Israel would back off. The onus is not on Israel because every time they have backed off Hamas has capitalized on the situation (albeit in an incompetent sort of way) and lobbed a shit ton of rockets intended to kill Israeli civilians. That Hamas continues to fire rockets, and the fact that those living in Gaza are allowing them to continue to do so speaks volumes. They obviously still have the ability and the will to fight, until at least one of those is removed, Israel should continue to push forward. And Israel is, IMHO entirely in the right by keeping their border closed. Every time they open it suicide bombers start blowing up schools, etc. After a while even the most dense of individuals can see the correlation. Hamas is asking for open borders and at the same time swearing to kill Israelis by any means possible. |
Do you know that only 30% of Gazans support Hamas? (Actually, since the invasion, it's now at around 40%).
If an election were to be held today, Fatah would probably win. Hamas is not Gaza. Palestinian poll says Gaza border breach boosted Hamas' popularity - Haaretz - Israel News |
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In the 1940s and 1950s Arab governments and civilians emulated German policies from 1930s. Rioting Muslims killed enough of their Jewish neighbors that the remainder fled. Arab governments required that the Jews leave any wealth or property behind (between $15-30 billion in 1950 dollars). Approximately 870,000 Jews from Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, and other Arab countries sought asylum in the State of Israel. These folks spoke no English, had no money, lacked a modern education, and had no experience of participating in a democracy. Most Americans would not have wanted them as neighbors. You could say the same for the more than 1 million Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel between 1989 and 2002. Between the founding of Israel in 1948 and 2007, Israel absorbed a total of 3.23 million Jews from other countries (source: The Jewish Agency For Israel Homepage).
In the Web age it isn't necessary to speculate on why the Arabs reject Israel. We can simply read what they've written on the subject. Not all Arab nations call for the destruction of Israel in their constitutions and yet most Arab countries have maintained a continuous declared state of war with Israel since 1948. To understand this 55-year-long war it therefore becomes necessary to engage in a bit of analysis. Israel occupies 20,330 square kilometers of land or roughly 0.23 percent of nearby Arab territory. This percentage would be slightly larger if we excluded Iran, which is technically non-Arab but which has been at the forefront of the fight against Israel by training, financing, and arming Palestinians. This percentage would be much lower if we included the Arab states of North Africa such as Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc. To put this into perspective, 0.23 percent of the Lower 48 United States is roughly equal to the southeastern corner of Florida. In some sense the State of Israel represents a tremendous achievement for the Arab countries. In exchange for a fraction of one percent of their territory they managed to expropriate the property of their Jewish citizens (estimated at between $13 and $30 billion in 1950 dollars) and expel 870,000 Jews from their territories. Without incurring any of the bad publicity that afflicted Hitler, the Arabs managed to accomplish one of Nazi Germany's primary goals: creating a vast empire that was free of Jews. For the first time in 2500 years an Arab could walk down the streets of Baghdad without encountering a Jew. Morocco and Algeria rid themselves of hundreds of thousands of Jews. As impressive an achievement as concentrating the Jews from all the Arab countries into a tiny corner of the Arab world is, it would be yet more impressive to dump the Jews off somewhere in Christian territory, or perhaps to kill them all. This then becomes the challenge facing the modern Arab political leader. If the Arabs of the middle east were to conquer Israel and fail to kill all of its citizens, there is a high probability that the Jewish survivors of that war would wash up on American shores. How happy would the the average American gentile be to live alongside Russian and Middle Eastern Jews who don't share his culture, language, and values? A 2006 Anti-Defamation League study found that 17 percent of Americans agreed with a long list of classical anti-Jewish statements and an additional 35 percent agreed with "Jews have too much power in the business world" or "Jews have too much control and influence on Wall Street". Slightly more than 50 percent of Americans therefore are uncomfortable with the Jews that are already here. Rather than get into a national debate on whether more Jews can be tolerated on our shores, we send money and weapons to the Israelis. Imagine that you had a fat drunk cousin named Earl living in a trailer park in Louisiana. Would you rather send $250 every month to keep him in beer and pork rinds down there or let him come up and move into your guest room? |
gee, powerclown...what you're basically arguing is that to be arab is to be fascist.
nice. but it kinda makes you wonder how, for example, the moroccan sephardic community managed to survive from around 1492, when they were exiled from pain, until 1947. it must have been an oversight. or maybe your story is so riddled with holes to the point of being more or less meaningless as a history. if one grants that the factoids you base it on are correct, it is still the case that your story explains nothing--at all---about the action in gaza. what it does do is provide a justification for it that has the convenient side effect of enabling you to sidestep everything about the actual empirical reality of the past 2 years. but maybe that's the point. your narrative is a demonstration of why i lost patience with trying to frame israeli actions in gaza in terms of a history that goes back to 1947 and the, with increasing arbitrariness in your particular case, beyond that. by no rational standard is post -67 israel the same as pre-67 israel in terms of military capabilities, in terms of actions, even in terms of the ethico-historical arguments that you run out above. post-67 israel is a military superpower. post-67 israel has indulged the occupation. post-67 israel has undermined it's own connection to it's past as beleagured. the problems with thinking about israeli military and/or colonial actions since 1967 based on your narrative are obvious--you don't and you can't. instead, you erase it. all of it. ======================================= slims---i've said this repeatedly, but again the main fuck-up i attribute to the bush administration is their participation in and support of the decision regarding the jan 06 elections. both are simple matters of record. there's no debate about them. we can discuss the question of whether this was in fact as catastrophically bad a decision as i think it was---and i would argue that the situation that is happening now demonstrates just what a bad idea it was---but if we do, at least we'll be on the same page. supporting an ally does not preclude making horrible choices. rigid, unthinking support is characterized by the inability to recognize horrible choices and allowing yourself, and your ally, to be boxed in by those horrible choices. that is a Problem. that is a Problem visited upon the civilian population because of the bush people. and i think that this Problem is more determing of the fiasco in gaza than are the actions of hamas---and this without in any way saying that hamas plays no role. they do, they have. this is self-evident. ======= baraka--thanks for that information. it's really interesting. |
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Israel is allowed one lost war, while the Arabs and Persians can wage war against Israel forever. The Palestinians are a lucky people, because their enemies are Jews. Any other foe, especially other Arabs, would have wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago. |
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No, I don't think the US should have installed a dictator. But I do think that hosting elections when the only two choices are between Bad and Horrible was a stupid thing to do. It backfired.
We should have either stayed away and let Gaza sort itself out a little more prior to the elections, provided support for Fatah to re-legitimize them prior to elections, or convinced the arab countries involved to prop up a completely different party that was more interested in peace than killing jews. Of course hindsight is 20/20 and now that it is done Israel is dealing with the consequences, for better or worse. |
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leaving that tic aside, and the mostly fictional framework it sets up around the gaza elections, the place where i agree with you slims is an assumption in your post--that once the election process was in motion, there was no rational choice for the israelis but to accept the results. if you want an idea of just how great the damage the israeli right is doing to israel itself in the longer run by way of this lunatic adventure in gaza, read this from naomi klein: Quote:
this link takes you to the original along with the first page of often very testy comments, as you can imagine. i post this because i think that like it or not you're going to see more of this--what i think a result of the gaza action is is that the israeli right's framing of its action and of the historical narrative that makes it appear rational is rapidly losing traction, and that along with this loss of traction you're starting to see a counter-discourse taking shape. in place of the romantic post-47 historical narrative, a more accurate post-67 narrative is being established---instead of the story of a heroic nation of jewish folk who are just trying to make a homeland for themselves after the shocking, horrific experience of world war 2 you have a post-67 narrative of colonialism and apartheid. the narrative of return to a homeland is being replaced with parallels to south africa. the question of racism is becoming central. israel is being recoded as a modern nation-state and is being inserted in a narrative that links it to other modern nation-states, and the standards for evaluating its actions are shifting along with this. i post this because it seems to me that this position expresses something that is far more abroad in the world that american supporters of the israeli right would like to think it is. and because the action in gaza is giving this narrative increasing traction. so from a strategic viewpoint--and the framing of narratives is a central element in strategy because it enables action to be coherent and to be marketed as coherent---i see nothing but self-defeating lunacy in what the idf is doing in gaza. time will tell whether my interpretation of the above is correct or not. 880 killed according to the latest information from medical sources within gaza. no update on the number of wounded, nor is there a new breakdown by category. the new phase of the israeli action is taking the military toward heavily populated areas. unless this is stopped, things are only going to get worse. |
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700 casualties are 700 to many. However, with a population of 3.3 million crammed into a small area, casualties could be much worse if a semblance of caution wasn't being used. |
that post is surreal in its wholesale inaccuracy, in its bad faith. it is nothing more and nothing less than a repeat of the extreme rightwing's justifications for killing palestinians in great number and then congratulating themselves for being such humanitarians. the place you see this nonsense repeated almost verbatim is amongst the fringe rightwing settler parties. you know, the folk who embarrass most israelis.
i post the following because it provides a sense of the marketing bubble inside israel with respect to the horror in gaza and indicates that the source of it is a *particular* politica viewpoint that speaks neither for judiaism nor for israel as a whole. Quote:
sometimes you have more to say but find it so difficult to remain civil in saying it that it's better to hit not do it. this is one of them. |
One thing that I'm not seeing in the news or anywhere is the number of Israelies that have been killed by this constant almost weekly bombing coming from the Hamas. The Palastinians in Gaza knew it was happening but I haven't heard of them doing anything to stop it. Doing nothing doesn't make you innocent, it actually implies guilt.
I feel that if you let something like that continue to happen in you own back yard and you do nothing to stop it, then I don't want to hear you crying about getting penalized for letting it happen. If I had a rabid dog in my back yard, knew about it and did nothing to get rid of it (not even calling to report it) and it constantly attacks passersby. I have a feeling that I might be held liable when he attacks the wrong person. So far I don't feel sorry for those who have drawn the ire of Israel. If you don't want to get hit, get out of the way. Quit allowing yourself to be a shield. |
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there have been very few casualties in the period running up to the israeli ground action. li do not remember the numbers. since then, i have not seen that there have been any casualties from them, but i could be wrong.
[[edit---the stats that will posted are useful, but they count casualties since 2000. i was specifically talking about the casualties that accompanied the breakdown of the cease fire after 15 december. just to be clear.]] but there is something deeply offensive about comparing the palestinian population of gaza to rabid dogs. you might join most people in seeing hamas as a Problem in many ways, but to go from that to saying that palestianians as a whole are dogs is moving straight into kahane-type racist terrain. translated into policy, it's a logic of extermination, not negociation. why negociate with people that you think of as rabid dogs? geez. get a grip. |
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It would be a miracle if you replied to a post without developing a straw man. -----Added 11/1/2009 at 04 : 44 : 14----- Quote:
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Also, I don't think the militants conducting the rocket attacks are open to suggestion. How would you go about doing "more than sit in your house"? |
all i did was to position your viewpoint in the space it belongs--the far right of the israeli political spectrum. and then, because i was inclined to actually take you a bit seriously in the context of this debate, i posted an article that demonstrated what i was saying.
which i do not expect you actually read. notnasty. your position requires no actual information, so it's not surprising, somehow, that there is no particular need to acquire any. one of the most tiresome tasks that has come up over and over in this thread, and in nearly every other debate involving palestine and israel, it pushing back at this tendency on the part mostly of american supporters of israel who seem imagine that because they only know one political line on the topic that there is only one political line. over and over the same thing. it is ultimately not my problem that you appear to know nothing about the political spectrum in israel, that you appear to know nothing about the diversity of views in israel. if you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't be so quick to buy into this one-dimensional narratives that are free of any context and so are free of any danger of actually addressing what's happening. over and over, the reverse side of this one-dimensional view of gaza is another--that somehow if you are critical of the patent lunacy of the israeli action that you support hamas, that if you focus on the civilian population of gaza which is trapped in place BECAUSE of the israeli blockade that you are somehow excusing rocket attacks. sometimes, in particularly delightful examples of one-dimensional thinking on this, you get these quaint little scenarios involving abstract house number one and abstract house number two, in which one house is full of people who just decided one fine day to start lobbing rockets at the other. no context, no information, no nothing. every last bit of these arguments is made up of nothing but strawmen, lined up one after another. things get complicated when you start actually look at and thinking about a world that is not locked into moralizing fables the sole function of which is to justify the occupation in general, the actions within the occupation, the demonization of palestinians and by extension to rationalize away what is by any rational standard a sequence of atrocities interspersed with an all-considered, self-defeating military action. |
Israel bans Arab parties from running in upcoming elections - Haaretz - Israel News
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel disqualifies Arab parties Israel has disqualified two Arab parties from running in upcoming parliamentary elections. |
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Maybe it's time for a Mediterranean tea party? |
It's interesting how the parties that filed for the ban are on the far right, while the parties that were banned are progressive (ostensibly...I'm open to being enlightened otherwise).
Don't disqualify the Arab lists - Haaretz - Israel News |
this is a digression-->if i were to blame the poisoning of the political atomosphere after 67 on one thing--and this includes the modalities of occupation--it would be the settlements in general and the far right politics that has taken hold amongst the settlements in particular. because the israeli parliament was so fractured---WHICH WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WERE THE RIGHT'S THE ONLY VIEWPOINT HELD BY ISRAELIS--likud entered a period of coalitions with the far right: to my mind, things were not great before that, but this is the point at which things started to really turn to shit. it caused an ideological shift within the right. and that was not good. not good at all.<----this is the end of the digression.
yeah, see, this is the kind of thing that raises the memory of apartheid pretty explicitly. |
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If I'm not understanding the position correctly, that's my fault, but it sounds really close to "ignore the rocket attacks" to me. At this point in my view it's pretty clear that a political solution isn't going to work as long as the ability to produce home made rockets exists. There might be a large segment of the Palestinian population that might want to live in peace with Israel. For whatever reasons, that segment of the population is unable to prevent their government from launching rockets and conducting suicide bombings inside of Israel. With around 700 casualties in an area crammed with 3.1 million people, Israel has to be using some semblance of caution while executing this military engagement. Maybe they really are just trying to go after Hamas's ability to make and launch home made rockets, and aren't really embarking on wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people. |
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1) Respond with extreme force or 2) Sit there and twiddle your thumbs There are a lot of options. |
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It is my opinion that those in Palestine that want peace with Israel aren't doing much to ensure that happens. Quote:
Quite the Catch 22, on one hand you could try to change your own government and likely be tortured and killed. On the other, your government continues to launch missles and conduct suicide bombings within Israel and you get to deal with the IAF. The difference, the later gets forum warriors the world around in an uproar. :) To be serious though, I honestly don't know what could be done, but I can't help but think not much is being done by the segment of the population that wants peace with Israel. The whole situation has been circular for a long, long time. Political cease fires aren't going to work, Hamas and other organizations won't follow them, but the only real answer is for them TO follow them. If Israel, tomorrow, would remove all blockades and Israeli nationals out of the Palestinian territories, suicide bombings and rocket fire wouldn't stop, for multiple reasons already brought up in this thread. A cease-fire continues the circular nature of this confrontation that has been on going for longer than most of us have been alive. In essence I think that everything over the past 40-50-60 years has created a situation where these guys just have to fight it out. Not every situation in this world has an ending that is fair, or logical, or just. I really think this is one of them. The question becomes, what happens next? At some point we've got to accept an all out offensive from Israel into Palestine is inevitable, once we create the baseline we can then try to control future moves in the chess game to minimize the global implications of any war. Earlier in this thread, on the first page, Roachboy discussed what has Israel's policy got them so far? My question is what has Palestine's policy got them so far? Surely the people of Palestine knew what Hamas stood for, I know that Hamas built schools and roads and what not for the people of Palestine, but surely they realized that if elected they would be legitimizing Hamas's effort against Israel. The only legitimate ending for this centuries old conflict is for one side to stop throwing stones (or bombs.) One side of the fight believes, justly or not, that if they stay strong that they will be eliminated. If Hamas/Palestine/whoever would, starting tomorrow, leave Israel alone I believe everything would be over. I don't believe that would apply if the roles were reversed. The only ending is for Hamas, and other organizations that terrorize Israel and her people, to stop. Or be forced to stop. Just my opinion, if the 10 or so months I've been reading and not participating on these forums have taught me anything the majority will likely disagree. :) |
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Peace process in the Israeli?Palestinian conflict - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Again, this isn't advocating either side, but with so many peace treaties/agreements/talks/whatever failing, it does beg the question of how long can the circular nature of this conflict continue? We're quickly approaching the point where it is either Respond with force or twiddle your thumbs. For a crude analogy, that isn't painting one side or the other as the victim or the bully. A bully picks on you and you try to solve it by asking him to stop, by talking with your parents, by talking with the teacher, by talking with the principal, and by trying to avoid him. Eventually the only solution is to punch the bully in the nose. I think we're to option (F) in the Israel/Palestinian conflict. Israel's punch is bombs and tanks. Palestine's is crude home made rockets. |
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And I know it's not worked perfectly in the past, but you have to admit that Oslo demonstrated that it's possible. There can be a peaceful solution. |
thenasty---i haven't necessarily been arguing a clear and simple line in this thread in part because there isn't one, not that makes sense anyway. i don't buy your bully analogy for example--the palestinians have been under occupation since 1867, there has been a substantial official/unofficial policy of settlements---israel is a militarily by far the most powerful country in the region--on and on. within this, there has been a political dynamic in which all parties have played their part in the cycle of deterioration--but i see israeli policy choices as in some cases reacting to problems, but in many cases driving them. there's alot of information in the thread, so i'll just refer back to it from here.
i've linked the horror in gaza to a specific set of political choices made by israel and the united states in jan 06. i've linked that in turn the the logic that has been driving that deterioration, which is the same logic that informed the imposition of a seige---that a military substitute for good-faith peace negociations and ultimately an independen viable palestine makes sense, will work---it doesn't, it hasn't, it won't. i see gaza as a kind of psychotic demonstration of the impotence of the logic of force. where does this logic of force come from? what enables it politically and ideologically? the israel right. does this mean i think the palestinian population has been well-served politically by the organizations there? hell no. does that mean i think there is no responsibility for, in this case, hamas? i don't know how many times i have to say that i hold hamas in part accountable for this wreckage--but the cause of the incursion, really, is the policy choices that the israeli right made from january 06 onward. as for the idea that the palestinians are "bullies"--consider today's casualty counts. as of this morning, medical sources in gaza say that 935 palestinians have been killed and 4,300 injured. in the context of a siege, in the context of reduced medical supplies, erratic water and electricity. there have been 13 israeli casualties. 10 of them are soldiers. then there's the following: Quote:
are these charges true? some are entirely consistent with information that's been coming out of gaza. some it's impossible to know about. but the palestinians are the "bullies"? what on earth are you talking about? i maintain a few shreds of optimism about this situation. i would hope that the israeli right would implode as a function of information concerning the needlessness of this entire situation, the brutality of the siege itself, the ill-advised ground incursion, the appalling consequences of launching in it in a situation where the civilian population is trapped in place. but that may be naive. conservatives seem to benefit from panic and to be able to conflate irrational responses to panic with forcefulness. i would hope that this relation between israel and palestine is internationalized, and the sooner the better. this because it seem to me so long as the framework that has been in place remains in place, there will be nothing but carnage---inflicted on both sides---but disproportionate bourne by palestinians. the american position has to change. getting rid of george w bush is a positive step, but i am not yet convinced that obama's administration will be particularly radical in their break with the nitwit policies of the past 8 years. but so far, he has said little. so we wait, like everyone else does, for the end of the bush administration and hope that no more damage comes while their ghosts trail about the house. and to be clear, israel is a fact. it's existence is in no danger. it is given, it isn't going anywhere. it's well past time for israel to be understood as a nation-state like any other, obliged to act like a part of the international community which is bound by the same rules. on the other hand, there are fundamental, seemingly intractable problems--like the settlements in the west bank and ESPECIALLY the disproportionate ideological influence of the extreme right---that could be addressed but not in the context of the nation-state based approach that's been the only game in town so far. internationalize the conflict. remove the settlements. all of them. move toward a two-state solution. my underlying assumption is that the cycle of colonial domination and resistance to it leads to nothing but excuses for continuing the domination which leads to nothing but reasons to try to fight back against it. all sides are trapped in this, and nothing will change until the logic itself is undermined. and on this, i hope i'm right. it seems reasonable as a way of looking at post 67 reality, but no-one knows for sure whether things are in fact as simple as they seem when you project an idea forward in time. but it seems worth a try. this sure as hell hasn't worked. i've made this as clear as i can in this thread. i'd prefer to think folk read the thread before they post. even raeanna, who obviously did not. |
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I mean, they were bombing both N.I. and the mainland - with American dollars! (mostly) |
Most of the nations within the Middle East contain conquered people and conquerors. For an example right next door to the Palestinians, consider that the rulers and bulk of the population in Egypt are Arab conquerors who swept in from the southeast. The conquered indigenous people are the Copts, the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids and temples so familiar to tourists. The Copts converted to Christianity during the Roman Empire and have suffered from religious, political, and economic oppression for 1300 years, ever since the Arab conquest. Copts are periodically murdered by Arab-Muslim mobs and generally the Arabs are not prosecuted for the killings. You could read about this in U.S. Copts Association but you probably won't because the Copts are not violent.
At the Potsdam Conference the Allies granted Eastern European nations the right to expel their ethnic German citizens, i.e., people who had been living in these areas for generations but whose forebears were German and who spoke the German language. Roughly 12 million of these volksdeutsche were in fact expelled, their property confiscated, and as many as two million may have been killed in the process. The surviving volksdeutsche settled in crummy houses in Germany and Austria and integrated themselves with those societies. If there were a Volksdeutsche Liberation Army murdering Czech, Polish, and Hungarian civilians the world might pay some attention to the injustices suffered by this group. The 870,000 Jews expelled from Arabs countries in the 1940s and 1950s similarly settled quietly in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. They aren't out there blowing up Iraqi, Moroccan, and Algerian embassies or airplanes, which is why you probably never think about them. The list of people who were displaced by the events of World War II and decolonialization is endless. The only group that anyone pays attention to is the Palestinians. If the Palestinians were to stop blowing up airplanes and pizza shops people would stop paying attention. Arab leaders don't care about non-violent Palestinians. If you were an Arab leader there is no reason to care about your own subjects, much less members of very distant tribes. The only Arab nation that has ever offered Palestinians citizenship is Jordan; a Palestinian family that has lived in Egypt or Saudi Arabia for several generations will still be aliens with no right to permanent residence. Thus there are more than 4 million people officially classified as Palestinian refugees despite the fact that the final British census before the 1948 war found only about 1 million people of all religions living in Palestine. The primary agency for these stateless souls is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). If you visit their Web site, UNRWA Official Homepage (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), you'll see that the U.S. and European nations provide almost all of the funding. Historically in fact the Western nations provided 100 percent of the funding for UNRWA but in recent years Saudi Arabia has been shamed into chipping in. For 2006 the Saudis contributed $5.8 million, compared to a U.S. contribution of $120 million and Britain's $30 million. Most Arab countries contribute less than the cost of a new Mercedes automobile. Violent Palestinians, by contrast, have no trouble getting support from fellow Arabs. In April 2002 the Saudi state television network ran a telethon that raised more than $100 million to aid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (Associated Press, April 13, 2002). Iraq, which contributes nothing to UNRWA, had been donating roughly $10 million per year to the families of suicide bombers. Iran, another state that contributes nothing to UNRWA, sends weapons and money to anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah and Hmas and the ex-PLO, most notably a 50-ton shipment of rockets and plastic explosives in January 2002 (notable because it was in violation of the agreements that Arafat had signed and because it was discovered and intercepted by the Israeli Navy). The only way that a Palestinian can get his or her hands on a share of Arab oil wealth is by becoming a suicide bomber. "[Izzidene al Masri] lived with his 12 brothers and sisters and his parents in a neat, tile-floored house" (Knight Ridder, April 1, 2002, on the Sbarro pizza shop bomber). If you lived in poverty it might make sense to trade your life for the knowledge that Saudi Arabians would support your parents, grandparents, and 11 siblings in comfort for the rest of their lives. This kind of poverty is likely to endure because Palestinians combine a low level of education and a high level of illiteracy (30 percent) with perhaps the highest birthrate of any world population, estimated for 2007 at 5 percent per annum by passia.org. This means that Palestinians need to generate economic growth of 5 percent per year, and preserve that growth from kleptocratic politicians, merely to maintain their standard of living. For comparison, the most rapidly growing population with which most Americans are familiar is Mexico; its population is growing at an annual rate of 1.47 percent (CIA Factbook 2007). In the 1990s, according to the World Bank, the average country enjoyed a 2.5 percent annual growth rate. Even if they succeeded in liberating all of Palestine, the Palestinians would have a difficult time growing at any rate close to 5 percent per year. They'd have one of the most densely populated countries in the world, one of the poorest in natural resources, especially water, and a complete lack of industry. It may be a mistake to look too deep into Palestinian poverty for the roots of Palestinian violence. For most violent Palestinians we need not conjecture as to the motivation for their violence because they've explained it in their own words. Here is an except from The Palestinian National Charter, July 1-17, 1968: Quote:
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Jeremy Bowen from his journal in the BBC today:
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Powerclown summarized the situation better than I could have ever hoped to.
Very nice job. Every day Joe Palestinian is stuck between a rock and a hard place, any decent person would feel for them. That being said, this problem won't ever be solved if the answer is Political. Hamas/Hezbollah/militant arabs aren't seeking a political answer. |
The IRA clearly stated they would not lay down their arms until the island of Ireland was one nation. What people say and write down to convince other people that they're really, really committed isn't necessarily what they'll agree to in genuine efforts at negotiation.
With the notable exception of the Copts, whose plight I know nothing about, the others were not and are not the subjects of 40 years up to the present day of ongoing oppression, humiliation, torture, siege (which i'm pretty sure counts as collective punishment...), assassinations(some carried out in person by the current defence minister, that lefty labor peacenik man), killings (ditto) and massacres (take your pick of all the Zionist revisionists on the Israeli political scene) at the hands of an organised, modern state funded by the hegemonic superpower of the world. History is bloody, everyone knows it. History is not an excuse for the knowing slaughter of innocents NOW, and it really doesn't matter that they're 'not deliberately targeted' which is as disingenuous a phrase as you'll find (and very much reminds me of Catch 22, with others telling Yossarian to calm down, because they're not really trying to kill him, they're trying to kill everyone!). Hopefully, after another couple of weeks of this mindless barbarity, the Israeli people themselves might cry out for a halt to the insanity... It's a long shot, but stranger things have happened. Eventually people will start finding videos on the net... Maybe there's a possibility of some sort of sane political party emerging in Israel. I think it was Machiavelli who said that you either treat an opponent well, or wipe them out completely. People have the strange habit of seeking revenge for past, non-genocidal crimes against them. |
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And if the answer isn't political, then it's time to stop pussy-footing around and get busy with the extermination camps, forced evacuations and ethnic cleansing in an honest fashion. |
No one is saying to ignore attacks. What I think most are saying, though, is that this asymmetrical military response that Israel adores so much is clearly causing more problems than it's solving. Israel is killing a lot of innocent people along with the few guilty ones, and that's fuel on the fire of hatred towards Israel. And this isn't some kind of secret, a child could figure this out. If Israel wanted peace, they wouldn't be trying to exterminate the Palestinians, which leads us to...
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There aren't just 2 options. Either you set out on a policy of massacre or you ignore the rockets fired at you... Can't you think of any other potential lines of progress from here? The big stick doesn't work... the more Israel uses the iron fist, the more money will flow to the extremists, which they won't be using for flower arranging classes and pilates sessions. |
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Israel doesn't want that, and they've shown they haven't wanted that continually through their actions. |
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powerclown's narrative manages somehow to erase the fact of occupation. so the claims concerning poverty and their correlate in some strange essentialist distinction between the violent and non-violent end up being cast as eternal conditions.
if one integrates empirical and/or historical reality into this circular, self-justifying narrative, the sole function of which is to justify anything and everything the israeli right does--you'd end up in a position quite far from where powerclown himself does. if you're going to tell "historical" narratives, there are rules. including factors that have for over 40 years now fundamentally conditioned the cycle within which the factoids you adduce have happened is a rule. if you don't do it, you're making fables and that's all you're doing. similarly, it is self-evident that what an organization's official line is and what it's unofficial lines might be in negociation can be entirely different, and that it is somewhere between amateruish and disengenuous to pretend the contrary, the sole reason for including the bit about saudi money going to unrwa is to delegitimate information coming from that organization about what israel is doing on the ground. i call bullshit on the move. there's 40 years of debacle to show that the dominant approaches to this situation have produced nothing but suffering on both sides, violence on both sides. the logic itself is the problem---the logic that has shaped these approaches. i see nothing but repetitions of that same logic from the folk who support anything and everything the israeli right puts into motion, who can excuse what's happening in gaza because they prefer to look at some pseudo-historical story that departs from and leads back to "kill em all and let god sort em out" 971 dead. 4,418 injured. every once in a while through the fog of disinformation, these numbers are broken down into plausible fighter vs children, women, and (only sometimes) the elderly. |
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Time. Patience. Tolerance. Quote:
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This goes back to my original statement of, with around 700 casualties so far in this conflict there has to be some semblance of caution being used in this fight. I lean toward Israel is actually trying to remove Hamas' ability to attack them. I understand that when you read that you roll your eyes. Quote:
-----Added 13/1/2009 at 01 : 38 : 13----- Quote:
..... I don't paint situations with words as dramatic as possible to imply one side as bad and the other as victims. |
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