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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 oů les personnes n'ont męme 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. |
rb:
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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