On the first thread here about the Israeli attacks on Gaza, I was struck by this comment in an article linked by Rob:
Even when development and enlightenment stare them in the face, their instinct is to destroy them pretending to safeguard their honor, the mechanics of which supersede all else including a happy life of fulfillment and accomplishments.
Ostensibly, the writer, Farid Ghatry, is accusing Hamas and Hizbollah of being ruled by “instinct”, but it doesn’t take him long to elide those organisations with “Arabs” collectively:
Their poisonous rhetoric of violence feeding a frenzied mass of ignorant Arabs leaning on their extreme religion to honor their incapacity to compete with the West is destroying future generations of hopeful saviors of our culture and traditions.
I don’t want to discuss the specifics of this conflict in this post – this thread is still open for those wishing to do so. I do want to observe that peace appears to have few champions at the moment. Endless dissections of history and propaganda claims and counter-claims seem to leave debate stuck in the same morass – of friends and enemies, and the only logic of that cycle – on both sides – is a drive to extermination. It seems to me that since the Cold War ended, the peace movement has more or less disappeared from view – at least in this country – and there are very few voices prepared to prioritise humanitarianism and conflict resolution over picking sides.
There’s a huge irony here – in an age where humanitarian war and “the responsibility to protect” are both lodestones of political discourse – both options, of course, involving the application of violence. It would appear that the easiest thing to do for many is to demonise those who are seen as “unlike us” – and one of the many cards the cheerleaders for the Israeli state play is to invoke the claim that Israel is “the only advanced democracy in the region”. In fact, Israel is not a secular state (not that it’s a religious state either… but that’s part of the problem). And it’s rarely mentioned that it’s the only nuclear power in the region. But clearly one of the rhetorical effects such a claim has is to increase the identification we are supposed to have with one side of the conflict – or more properly, with the government, political class and military/intelligence apparatus of one side of the conflict, because there is certainly still a peace movement within Israel itself.
One of the difficulties humanitarian impulses have is the gap between abstraction and concrete situations. It’s actually inherent in the whole notion of humanitarian universalism because there’s always going to be a tension between a particular and a universal, and this is where philosophy itself stops being a parlour game or a learned discipline, and shows us something about the very messy world of political violence and making distinctions and judgements. One can rightly be sceptical about violence in the name of humanitarianism, and in fact we ought to be, because it can never be divorced from all the other calculations, strategies and investments which accompany any exercise of political power – and the use of force is the ultimate political decision.
But we can resist the dehumanisation of civilians caught up in conflict zones, or in zones which are subjected to cruel and inhumane blockadesm, or civilians targeted by rockets. They might not all be “like us”, but we need to recognise that humanity itself has ethical claims to make – on all of us. What we need to do is to give up the habit of accepting far too blithely the dehumanisation and thus alienation of others, and begin to look above the parapets of a tragic history and the particulars of political advantage being sought on both sides and refocus our efforts – and our imagination – on the one goal that should be truly paramount – peace itself.
Mark said
I discuss an excellent example of such voices, the Australian Intercultural Society, here, and give you a taste of the AIS:
Hi Mark
A couple of comments.
First reading through the comments on the various threads you have initiated, as well as the various op-eds in different newspapers, reminds me a little of being in Young Labor during the mid-1990s. After Rabin was assassinated and the prospects for peace deteriorated one again, there was a stream of resolutions condemning either the Palestinian leadership, or the Isrealis, with the left universally condeming Israel, and the right universally condemning the Palestinians. While the participants in those debates no doubt strongly believed in the positions they were taking, there was also a reflexiveness, and a combativeness, that meant that there was little common ground and certainly no discussion of what compromise steps were necessary to prepare the ground for long-term peace. Think of it is as politics as a football match – people choose a side and then filter incoming information in a way that confirms the already held view. It is obviously pretty common in political life on a range of issues and a reason why many bright thoughtful people stay out of politics altogether.
Your point about conflict resolution also got me thinking in the context of the books I have been reading about the American Civil War. As you probably know, northern Democrats were more conditional in their support for the war, especially once the scale of the conflict and the loss of life became apparent, and Lincoln announced emancipation. The Democrats were called “Peace Democrats” for a reason. Yet most of us think of the civil war as a just war in the sense that despite the loss of life, military and civilian, and the broader devastation it wrought, especially in the South, it brought about the end of an inhuman practice that otherwise would have peristed for decades longer.
So that brings me to the following question. Is it always the case that the humanitarian cause is associated with the pacifist case? That compromise is more just than belligerence? Abolitionists certainly didn’t think so.
That brings me back to the Palestinian question. While I wouldn’t equate the ACW with what is happening now, one of the complicating factors in achieving peace is that many of the actors, as well as commentators and onlookers, do regard the issues at stake as just as important. Personally, I don’t look at either the Isreali government actions, nor Hamas’s actions as reprsenting a just cause, and think justice and long-term peace can only be achieved by both sides giving up some of their demands. But I recognise that others see things differently, and hence hold out little hope for a sustainable settlements in my lifetime.
This statement from Shimon Perez overnight in response to the attack on the UN sponsored school that was sheltering civilians, mostly children.
“Do you know why so many Palestinian children are killed and no Israeli children are killed? We take care of our children.”
While interesting and thought-provoking, regrettably your point might not be relevant, being so western-culture-centric as to be inapplicable. It certainly applies in part to Israel with its shared western liberal democratic traditions. There is a ‘peace movement’ there. Philosophically, at the root of the ‘peace movement’ concept is the notion of the penultimate value of the individual human life.
What happens when the Western concept of ‘peace movement’ based on that notion meets an ‘honour culture’ where the concept of ‘religious honour’ is placed ABOVE the value of individual human life?
I do not know the answer, but I suspect there is no place in it for the Western notion of ‘peace movement’. Surely it would be an alien concept?
I have been unable to locate any evidence of ‘peace movements’ in the sense you apply anywhere in the Arab world. Different culture means different patterns of thought and perception.
If the extract below is true, and Hosni Mubarak has said this to the EU, then I cannot see how any Arab peace movement (assuming they even exist) can have any effect.
QUOTE: The European foreign ministers, headed by Karel Schwarzenberg of the Czech Republic, whose country currently holds the European Union’s rotating presidency, came to Jerusalem after visiting Cairo, and briefed Livni on their meeting with Mubarak. Inter alia, they reportedly told her that Mubarak had said Hamas “must not be allowed to emerge from the fighting with the upper hand.” UNQUOTE
Source: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1052974.html
Imperial Tirade
(thanx Katz for the improved moniker. Sounds much better!)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/07/2460411.htm
The IDF command should be arraigned as mass murderers. This is the moral equivalent of the Port Arthur massacre – and makes about as much sense.
“Three artillery shells we understand landed outside the south-east corner of the Jabalya preparatory girls school resulting in at least 30 fatalities and 55 injuries of which 15 are in critical condition.
“Hundreds of people were taking refuge in the school from the fighting. We have given all our GPS coordinates to the Israeli army – we have told them exactly where all our facilities are in the Gaza Strip and all of our facilities are clearly marked. So it should have been quite obvious where the UN facilities are.”
The Israeli ruling class knows that it is only a matter of time before the
“teeming arab masses” within the borders of Israel out breed the arriviste Jewish population. There is no other solution but to exterminate the fecund Arabs. That’s what this “war” is about; pure and simple extermination. There will be no peace in Israel until the ethnic cleansing program is complete.
Huggy.
Glenn Greenwald’s Orwell, blinding tribalism, selective terrorism and Israel/Gaza echoes Mark’s points and worth reading.
This item from Victoria Buch might assist in understanding the Zionist program for Israel. http://www.counterpunch.org/buch01062009.html
Bleating about “peace” is a waste of time, the only hope of avoiding a genocide in Israel is to peruade the puppet masters in the US to lean on Israel really hard.
Huggy
Mark,
I’ve yet to see the Israeli leadership characterise the Palestinians or the Arabs in terms comparable to this:
That’s from Nizar Rayyan, the Hamas leader admired as much for is Islamic scholarship as his military prowess, who was killed a few days ago.
That is a great quote Rob, sometimes i think that the punk message got a little lost on the way to the Middle East. It was; here are three chords, go and form a band and lob some gob, not here is an imaginary friend, go and form a political party and lob some high explosives.
Farid Ghandry smells to me like the Syrian Chalabi-wannabe. His article is horrible. I don’t know why Rob thought it would be worthwile passing it along. Beyond the empty rhetoric, it just gets facts wrong.
And by who? The IDF may cripple Hamas and behead, but it’s beyond their power to destroy it. Only the Palestinians can destroy it by repudiating the party, and that’s damn well not going to happen any time soon. And Hezbollah is untouchable – by the IDF, the Americans and rival Lebanese groups. Even a cut in Iranian funding wouldn’t slow them down – they’re that well entrenched.
Wank, wank, wank. Personally, I trust the War Nerd on Hezbollah; he may be a fictional paper-shuffler from California, but at least he researches:
One thing I don’t understand is why the UN is not putting more pressure on Egypt to open its borders to allow humanitarian aid in and civilians out. With sufficient international support they should be handle to handle the influx of refugees and stop arms going back in through the same border.
Nizar Rayyan’s locutions are simply the other side of the rhetorical coin of Jews calling themselves “the chosen people”.
The Old Testament is full of stories of God punishing whole groups of people for the alleged sins of a few.
Rayyan’s God was at least discriminating enough to turn only the “disobedient” into apes and pigs.
It is true that Israeli political classes are astute enough not to indulge in this kind of rhetoric when they are abroad. But similar language and practices in regard to the Palestinian people and non-jews in general are commonplace in Israeli politics.
The rise of messianic religious zionism as a political force in Israel forces secular Israelis to make a choice between confronting messianic zionism or compromising with it. Most have chosen the latter.
This compromise enables the continued trespass of Jews into the West Bank.
It would be ironic if Israel funded PLO/Fatah. Hamas got start-up money as a counterweight to the other Palestinian groups, and look what happened to them. The affair makes me worry for Israel – it is one state that cannot afford short-term thinking in its military and intelligence service.
Unfortunately for the innocent occupants sheltering amongst Hamas militants, it’s also quite obvious where motar firing positions are:
Rob @9
“There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.” Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
“The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more”…. Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time – August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000
” [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts”. New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
“The Palestinians” would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.” ” Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
“How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.” Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
“There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed.” Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969
“The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war.” Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha’aretz, 19 March 1972.
David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti – Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : “We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return.” Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. “The old will die and the young will forget.”
“We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.” Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel… Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces – Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.
16. “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” Israel Koenig, “The Koenig Memorandum”
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’” Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
Rabin’s description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. “We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters” Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From “The Arabs in Israel” by Sabri Jiryas.
“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.” Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.
“Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.
“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” — Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]
“…a choice between confronting messianic zionism or compromising with it. Most have chosen the latter.”
uite so Katz – but I do think its worth notin than a clear majority of settlers are there because they cant afford to live elsewhere, and the Israeili state gives them massives subsidies to do so. Thye would live anywhere inside 67 borders if they could.
Zionist crazies in the West bank are a minority of the settlers. This key point never appears to surface in our media. The settlemetns are – above all else- deliberate policy projects of the Israeili state.
I’ll just repeat what I said in the post:
You can quote selectively from the Qur’an to attempt to show that Palestinians or Muslims regard Jews as animals but you can also quote selectively from the Old Testament demonstrating that the Jews believe that God destroyed an entire generation of Egyptian children as punishment.
Those are some pretty intense quotes at #16.
y*ti, the only quote you cite that really works for you is Begin’s. To that extent, I concede your point.
There are quite a few movements for peace in both Israel and in the Palestinian territories. Not surprisingly (issues of societal cohesion, extreme poverty etc. rather impede Palestinian efforts) there are more known Israeli organisations than Palestinian ones.
Imperial Tirade though didn’t look very hard if s/he couldn’t find any Arab peace movements or organisations. A google search yields not only articles and links on them, but also articles talking about the social dynamics and conditions in several Middle Eastern countries, and the relative disintegration of the Palestinian peace movement that grew rapidly with the first Intafada, but has been considerably battered through the various failed negotiations and peace attempts, and escalating violence, since then. It is fairly obvious I think, that as the Israeli leadership has radicalised to the right, so the Palestinians, particularly after the death of Arafat have responded in kind, not least because of Hamas’s far more effective social / anti-poverty domestic programs compared to Fatah.
Some links:
Wiki’s list of Arab – Israeli peace organisations
“The Facebook of Middle Eastern Peace”
myriad, I think what upsets the Israeli left in particular is that there seems to be no street level movement for peace on the Arab side. As one of them – Lisa Goldman, I think – remarked rather bitterly: we demonstrate for peace, we sing songs for peace, we assemble in the streets against our government’s policy, for peace. Why don’t they?
Maybe they do, and we just don’t hear about it. But then again…
Apologies for being OT.
Rob, you’re actually on T. I asked specifically that this thread be devoted to discussing blockages to peace and to regarding civilians on both sides as fellow humans not targets or collateral damage. I’d request anyone who wants to discuss the specifics of the current conflict to do so on the previous thread, as I asked in the post.
That thread is here:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/05/eyeless-in-gaza-ii/
One positive take on the current situastion, is that Israel has launched this military action in the face of uncertainty as to what the new US administration will have to say from Jan 20. Obmaa is no promising that he will “have plenty to say” on the Gaza situation from the 20th. It’s not so much the quantity, as the quality that will count.
I don’t mind waiting till then, but I’m not sure how people in Gaza without water or electricity will fare. My pessimism says that if Obama had something important to say, he would be sending some subtle, or not so subtle, signals already.
Which is probably not so subtle a signal. This statement may be entirely consistent with Israel’s military action to date. We’ll see on the 20th.
Rob @ 22 – perhaps because they don’t have the freedom to protest? I’d imagine it would be a lot more dangerous to protest against the government living in Gaza than Israel. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t those who want peace just as badly though.
Chris, I think that’s undoubtedly so. That’s why I’m a bit suspicious of the polls that show 80 per cent of whatever of Gazans support suicide bombings. If I was a Gazan and was approached by an official-looking person with a clipboard, I think I’d say yes as well, knowing what Hamas policy is and the way it treats collaborators.
There was a fascinating adress at Boston University a few months ago by Khaled Abu Toameh, who is an Israeli Arab who write for the JPost. He’s regarded by some Arabs as an Uncle Tom, but it’s generally conceded he has the best connections to Gaza of any journalist. He was saying – and it sounds quite incredible – that the Gazans long for the days, not just before the withdrawal, but before Oslo (which handed Gaza over to the administrative control of the PA). Before Oslo, the only people in the street who had guns were the IDF, and they played fair and everyone knew the rules. Since Oslo the militia, criminal and clan gangs have armed, everyone has an AK-47, etc.
There was also a Palestinian journo who was quoted on MEMRI as saying if an honest poll were held in Gaza a large majority would back the return of the occupation.
Make of that what you will.
Rob asked:
“I’ve yet to see the Israeli leadership characterise the Palestinians or the Arabs in terms comparable to this: …..”
So I offer this in support of #16
“”All of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants, and even their beasts.” This was the religious opinion issued one week ago by Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, director of the Tsomet Institute, a long-established religious institute attended by students and soldiers in the Israeli settlements of the West Bank. In an article published by numerous religious Israeli newspapers two weeks ago and run by the liberal Haaretz on 26 March, Rosen asserted that there is evidence in the Torah to justify this stand. Rosen, an authority able to issue religious opinions for Jews, wrote that Palestinians are like the nation of Amalekites that attacked the Israelite tribes on their way to Jerusalem after they had fled from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. He wrote that the Lord sent down in the Torah a ruling that allowed the Jews to kill the Amalekites, and that this ruling is known in Jewish jurisprudence.”
Source
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/892/re72.htm
Interesting development.
Looks like the growing pile of dead children is forcing a belated response.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/07/2460593.htm
It may be more subtle than it looks to folks who are wont to equate “everything” with military violence.
But CMc is correct. We won’t know until after 20 January.
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/04/04/math-madness-leading-rabbi-says-every-jewish-life-is-worth-1000-arab-lives/
This site has links in the text of the post to hate comments from both sides.
This is one more as an response to Rob
“Former Sephardi chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu used the one month anniversary of the massacre at Mercaz Harav rabbinical seminary by offering his own unique take on the value of a human life: insisting that the life of a single Jew should be re-paid by 1000 Arab lives. He clearly explained that this was not just him talking, it was the “revenge” ordained by God.”
Its probably easy, it didn’t take long to find these, to get hate stuff from extremists on the edges of both sides, so blaming just one group for extremism is not fruitful.
hd @ 28 – that appears to be a rabinnical exegesis on: “Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not; and but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (I Samuel 15:3).” He appears to be arguing that Israel has that right in respect of its enemies, on the basis that Amalek of today is Hamas in Gaza. Other rabbis vociferously disagree. In any event, no Israeli leader or government would attempt its practical application.
No-one has argued, least of all Israelis, that Israel doesn’t have its share of religious crazies.
“I do want to observe that peace appears to have few champions at the moment.”
“They might not all be “like us”, but we need to recognise that humanity itself has ethical claims to make – on all of us.”
Myriad (21), the two sentences above I interpret much as Rob mentions in (22) “we demonstrate for peace, we sing songs for peace, we assemble in the streets against our government’s policy, for peace. Why don’t they?”
My doubts centre on Mark’s second sentence above. If the culture places the value of religious and clan/family honour above the value of individual life, does that explain Lisa Goldman’s comment? Is Mark’s unstated assumption that “ of course there should be an Arab equivalent of Western ‘peace groups’” even valid? In that cultural context, I cannot see how it can be.
This is especially so if it is the Islamic religious definition of peace (only possible between Muslims, a physical impossibility with Infidels) is being used. If that’s the case, there is not even agreement and connection on the most basic of terminology.
The differences seem to be fundamental cultural and belief-system ones at the philosophical level. So how can a western-style peace movement based on a philosophy of penultimate value of the individual human life operate in a culture that may not believe that to be true?
Imperial Tirade
I think that you are understating Rob.
Israel has far more than anyone’s share of religious crazies.
Political parties representing the beliefs and hopes of religious crazies control the balance of power in the Knesset.
Only Iran (and recently the Palestinian Authority) have a larger share of religious crazies in elective office.
And as I suggested above, secular Israeli leaders have become their enablers in pursuit of their own short-term interests.
“….no Israeli leader or government would attempt its practical application.”
No, just 500 to 1.
I guess that makes the Israeli leadership ‘moderates’ ?
You are confusing me Rob, poerhaps its my problem.
But I took your claim ““I’ve yet to see the Israeli leadership characterise the Palestinians or the Arabs in terms comparable to this: ..” to be exactly this [slight paraphrase] from you ” …. Israel doesn’t have its share of religious crazies.” That is it appeared to me that you were claiming that only the palestinians/Arabs/Islamic made hate statements such as the one you quote in comment #9.
Since then you have been provided with numerous examples of Israelis/Jews giving the same sort of statements.
The fact that the 2 such I cited are based on biblical exegesis does not negate the fact that they equate the ‘enemy’ in hate terms.
And whether no Israeli leader would attempt to kill a 1000 Arabs for every Jew seems to be patently denied by the massive practice of ‘disproportionate response’ currently and in the recent past.
Begin’s statement was pretty revolting, but Begin is long gone. Most of the others refer to the dispossession of the Arabs, which is not the same thing. I’d also like to see the context for those quotes, and the status of the people who made them (some I know, of course), since I was referring to the national leadership level, not individual fanatics.
Katz – yes, the one of the foundational errors of the Israeli state was to opt for proportional representation as its electoral system. As is usually the case, this gives small fanatical or single-issue parties the avenue to the balance of power.It happens everywhere (think Greens).
Of course, we’d only need to talk to the fascist Israeli Settlers (who just last month carried out what Olmert(!!) described as a pogrom in the West Bank) to be immediately provided with thousands of quotations that might satisfy Rob.
But if it’s de-humanizing quotes you want, it’s hard to go past Golda Meier, who didn’t just say that the Palestinians were beasts, she said they didn’t even exist!! I suppose you don’t need to feel any guilt when the people you rob, murder and starve don’t exist.
A little clean up in the Gaza, then it’s on to Tehran.
There is a quite sustainable argument that the Palestinian people never existed (I don’t share it, incidentally). Under the Ottoman Empire, the eastern Med seaboard was divided into administrative districts, hubbing around the major cities. City-states did not exist, let alone nation-states. What is now called the area later known as Palestine was made up of the Vilayet of Beirut and the Mutarsarriflick of Jerusalem. In 1918 the British liberated from Turkish rule the land they described as Philistia.
Modern ‘Palestine’ can only have been said to have come into existence after 1920, when the British accepted the Mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations. That Mandate included an explicit provision for the establishment of the Jewish National Homeland in the lands east of the Jordan. Thus the Zionist settlers, ironically, were probably as ‘Palestinian’ as the Arab inhabitants of the region.
As I say, I don’t agree – it’s a very semantic point. But I think it’s perfectly arguable.
I think the continued ability to justify the violence is the greatest obstacle to peace and this is connected to our interpretation of our cultural values.
The smiting God of the Old testament is a good standby, He can be dragged out whenever needed to equate current events with the “justice” of the old days.
Yahweh, the implacable, irreconcilable, single-minded sometime (he seems to have some competition from El, an older entity) God of the Old Testament can be relied upon to sanction any excess in the name of protecting the “chosen” from their enemies.
I suppose this would be relevant if revelation ceased in the time of Moses, but it didn’t.
In this respect, I would agree with Rob’s comment @ 190 in thread 1,
“…but history cannot be turned back on itself.”
But we can’t just rely on past favours and glories, so new concepts must be appropriated to the cause.
The “responsibility to protect” meme is the latest cultural value to be press-ganged into the fight against peace.
What started out as a good idea has been twisted into yet another justification for the current mayhem.
The way I see it, the responsibility is not limited to arbitrary national borders but extends to the limits of the power that the particular state may choose to project.
Call me a hopeless romantic if you like, but I think such attempts to distort reality do serious damage to our cultural integrity.
There is only one thing worse than doing the wrong thing, and that is kidding yourself you are doing the right thing when you doing the wrong thing.
Justifying the unjustifiable will get us nowhere.
PEACEMAN AND HOPEMAN
http://gaza-sderot.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00%3A00%3A00%2B02%3A00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00%2B02%3A00&max-results=1
“This blog is written by 2 friends. One lives in Sajaia refugee camp in Gaza and the other lives in Sderot, a small town near Gaza on the Israeli side. There is ongoing violence between Israel and Gaza which has intensified greatly since October 2000. Many have been killed and many have been injured. The media coverage on both sides has been extremely biased. Our Blog is written by 2 real people living and communicating on both sides of the border”.
[Your comments are welcome]
Ooops – west of the Jordan….! Sorry about that.
SG – that’s a good site, I’ve been following it for a while.
Israeli shelling kills dozens at UN school in Gaza
Reports of more than 40 killed in and around UN shelter
Make that more than 40 arguably non-existent people (it’s a semantic point, but I think perfectly arguable).
yeti, as was pointed out above:
No surprises – Hamas had publicly bragged that it had booby-trapped its sites to become death traps. The IDF fire set off the booby-trapped explosives.
Here’s some background to that blog above. Caught an interview on ABC newsradio with one of them around 11.20 ish. I think their blog names hooked me.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99053041
Rob,
Chris and yourself nailed it, in response to Lisa Goldman’s complaint. I’ll go hunt for the link in a bit, but I found an excellent BBC article documenting the disintegration of the ‘grass roots’ Palestinian peace movement, not least because if they assembled in any great number they got shot by the IDF, extremist groups in the Palestinian territories, or both. But I’d also argue that Goldman is living in a different reality if she doesn’t understand why particularly in the last 5 years, Palestinians haven’t had the practical wherewithal to sing songs and such, given that they have faced an incresingly destabilised and dehumanising existence with nearly 50% unemployment in Gaza, most of the population 15 or under and malnourished, and constant IDF incursions, incursions from the settler extremists, etc etc etc. I rather suspect that survival has leapt to the top of the list for most Palestinians.
Imperial Tirade, your comments are horribly broad-bursh and inaccurate about ‘Arab culture’ which for starters isn’t remotely monlithic.
My doubts centre on Mark’s second sentence above. If the culture places the value of religious and clan/family honour above the value of individual life, does that explain Lisa Goldman’s comment? Is Mark’s unstated assumption that “ of course there should be an Arab equivalent of Western ‘peace groups’” even valid? In that cultural context, I cannot see how it can be.
You doubt because you have an erroneous belief about (Arab? Islamic? Palestinian?) culture. It seems to be a common misconception that Arab / Muslim / Palestinian culture is somehow stuck in the 700s, fixated on fuedal blood rights etc. I’d urge you to read something other than Quadrant or wherever it is you’re getting this nonsense and take a look at anything and everything ranging from histories of the various sophisticated civilisations that have flourished in the region, through to the many excellent contemporary descriptions of Palestinian culture and society.
But I think the problem is all to obvious when you write:
This is especially so if it is the Islamic religious definition of peace (only possible between Muslims, a physical impossibility with Infidels) is being used. If that’s the case, there is not even agreement and connection on the most basic of terminology.
But the vast majority of the Muslim world does not use that definition of peace at all, and it’s certainly not an ‘Islamic definition’ in any common or broad sense. That would be a bit like saying the Mormon fundamentalist definition of marriage was the Christian one in the broad. In fact the very word ‘Islam’ means peace, and just like the Old Testament and other documents of judeo-christian faith, there are just as many, if not more, exhortations to peace between muslims and non-muslims as there are expressions of the conditions in which it’s ok to slay the infidel. That this is the case only takes a few seconds to verify when one considers the significant number of countries with dominant or equal Muslim populations who seem to get along with their non-Muslim countrymen and women without resorting to slaugher.
It also igores
oh, what a surprise. Rob justifies the mass murder of sheltering children by a quote from the “Defence Officials” who murdered them.
oops, ignore the igores!
Rob,
here’s the BBC article on the Palestinian peace movement, and the link to the companian article on the Israeli peace movement is also worth reading.
Another understatement, I’m afraid.
The various parties representing religious zealotry and overt Jewish chauvinism represent about 28 of the 108 seats in the Knesset. This is much more than any radical force has ever had in Australia.
It cannot be denied that Israelis have the right to vote for whomever they want. Yet it is also the responsibility of moderates to attempt to discipline and to blunt the power of fanatics whose very ideas serve as an existential threat to fundamental laws and principles. The twentieth century gave us several terrifying examples of the consequences of domestic failure of moderates on international politics.
The influence wielded by Israeli fanatics is symptomatic of the short-sightedness and moral cowardice, and perhaps even compliance, of mainstream Israeli leaders.
Leaders who refuse to keep their domestic affairs in order undermine their legitimacy as actors on the world stage. This applies strongly to the Israeli political classes.
“Yet it is also the responsibility of moderates to attempt to discipline and to blunt the power of fanatics whose very ideas serve as an existential threat to fundamental laws and principles.”
No-one knows that better than the Israelis – the vast majority of whom are secular or nominally observant, but to whom the religious parties and settlers rank only slightly ahead of Hamas and Fatah.
yeti @ 50. Explain to me, then, why Hamas gave children shelter in a school they had deliberately stocked with booby-trapped explosives, and then deliberately fired at IDF troops from the forecourt of the school in the full knowledge and awareness that the IDF would return fire and almost certainly set off the secreted explosives. Could it be that Hamas wanted civilian casualties, to serve their propaganda purposes? And did they get them? And did it? Yes, yes and yes.
Rob – The only evidence the IDF have to back up their claim that the school was being used as a launching zone for rockets is a video from two years ago.
The UN officials running the makeshift refugee camp at the school said they had not seen any militants firing rockets.
Even if there were two militants in that school, do you seriously consider the death of 50+ civilians including women and children an acceptable “collateral” price? Because by defending the bombing of that school, and another one near it, by giving that excuse that’s exactly what you’re saying.
But Rob, do you think that the political classes of secular Israel have done enough to blunt the malign influence of Israeli religious zealots and Jewish chauvinists?
Bush plan beat obstacle to Gaza assault
By Gareth Porter
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KA07Ak02.html
Until mid-2007, there was a serious political obstacle to a massive conventional war by Israel against Hamas in Gaza: the fact that Hamas had won free and fair elections for the Palestinian parliament and was still the leading faction in a fully legitimate government….
As far as I’m concerned, there’s yet to be an reliable report that backs that version of events Rob. The IDF spin clearly doesnt count. Its effectively as if we have no such report at all.
Whereas the report documenting the IDF slaughter of defenceless schoolchildren came from the UN – not Hamas.
Get real here, please.
“Modern ‘Palestine’ can only have been said to have come into existence after 1920, when the British accepted the Mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations. That Mandate included an explicit provision for the establishment of the Jewish National Homeland in the lands east of the Jordan. Thus the Zionist settlers, ironically, were probably as ‘Palestinian’ as the Arab inhabitants of the region.”
What arrant nonsense!The establishment of a Jewish “State” was not explicitly mentioned.
What it did mention was Jewish immigration would be permitted, it should not be in the excess of the capacity of the country (Palestine) to absorb new arrivals.
The rights of the Arab culture,language,etc of the Arabs should be maintained.
That anything else has happened subsequent to the document you are spinning was not in the wording of the document, or more importantly,the spirit.
The immigration of Jews into what was then known as Palestine was controlled by the British government,that they (Jews) eventually over ran the place and created the state of Israel was down to the Jewish lobby ,and American intervention to lift the numbers of immigrants.This was always against the wishes of the Arabs already there.Anything else is abject utter bullshit.
The position of the United Nation in all the negotiations to the problem was, no solution could be found, and hence the British left, the mandate was surrendered,and voila the state of Israel was proclaimed, and the rest they say is history.
Anything else is an interpretation, sophistry, and an imagination run wild. Simple.
Explain to me, then, why Hamas gave children shelter in a school they had deliberately stocked with booby-trapped explosives, and then deliberately fired at IDF troops from the forecourt of the school in the full knowledge and awareness that the IDF would return fire and almost certainly set off the secreted explosives. Could it be that Hamas wanted civilian casualties, to serve their propaganda purposes? And did they get them? And did it? Yes, yes and yes.</i?
Sorry, even if we swallow the usual bullshit from the IDF that the place was indeed booby-trapped and used at the time by Hamas soldiers to launch a rocket attack, the most common & basic rules of war demand that the enemy party (ie the IDF) withhold fire until they have a chance to take out the other combatants without causing massive loss of civilian life. You write as if the IDF is some hapless, passive body only capable of responding, puppet-style to the evil machinations and desires of Hamas.
Your response reminds me very much of a notorious video of US soldiers that circulated early in the Iraq war. In it you see a small group of US soldiers come under machine gun fire from a lone attacker, who then ducks into a group of women heading to market. Two US soldiers open fire, mowing down (it’s hard to tell but at least) three women. It’s not even clear if the gunman was hit. One US soldier the shrugs and says “the chicks were in the way”, and walks off.
Classy stuff.
IOW, for the IDF to even remotely approach the high ground, they need to refrain from falling into such Hamas traps, if that’s what they are, and actually obey the Geneva Conventions and other rules of war long recognised and adhered to by honorable parties to avoid slaughtering 30 children hiding in a UN school.
bugger, bad formatting day. Apologies
Hamas didn’t give people shelter in the school, Rob, the UN did. And they gave out their co-ordinates to the IDF informing them that this was one of 23 UN emergency camps set up throughout Gaza.
But of course, the UN are in on the scam and have been Hamas apologists all along.
Someone linked to a debate between a UN official and a member of a pro-Israeli think thank in the US a few days ago. That same official was on ABC News Breakfast this morning talking about the attack. The fury in his voice was something out of this world.
“The UN officials running the makeshift refugee camp at the school said they had not seen any militants firing rockets.”
No doubt. If they had any sense they wouldn’t be anywhere near the firing line.
As to your 2nd last sentence, it’s inevitable, and is intended by Hamas. That’s why they do it. Your question should really be addressed to Hamas, and the answer would be ‘yes’. And yes, I would certainly defend IDF soldiers firing back at terrorists who fired on them with mortars.
The only people who say that this UN school was booby trapped with explosives (which the UN presumably let them do) is the terrorist IDF, so forgive me if I say it’s a steaming pile of bullshit lies, like the rest of what they say. You’ll have to come up with an independent source while you try to justify the murder of sheltering children, Rob.
Why of course. Don’t forget, one million Paay.lestinian lives aren’t worth a Jewish fingernail. And it’s arguable that txist anyway.
* arguable that they don’t exist, anyway (the murdered civilians, I mean).
Anyone else just throw up reading #63?
The massacre of children sheltering in a UN camp is “inevitable”.
Marlon @ 59. Your post is so historicallyh illiterate that I don’t know where to begin with it.
You say: “What arrant nonsense!The establishment of a Jewish “State” was not explicitly mentioned.”
Of course not. As I said, what was envisioned was ‘Jewish National Homeland’. And yes, the terms of the Mandate was that the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants were to be preserved.
“,that they (Jews) eventually over ran the place and created the state of Israel was down to the Jewish lobby ,and American intervention to lift the numbers of immigrants”
This is just incomprehensible. By 1937 nearly 500,000 Jews had immigrated lawfully to Israel under the terms of the Mandate. The Arabs had rejected Jewsish immigration and land purchase from the first days of the Mandate. In 1936 a territory-wide Arab rebellion broke out, protesting these two issues and the failure of the British to give Arabs their own sovereign territory in all Palestine (the British could not do so, of course, under the terms of the League’s Mandate).
The Peel Royal Commission was set up to investigate the causes of the rebellion. It found as I’ve described above. It proposed a settlement: two states in Palestine, one for Arabs, one for Jews. The Jews accepted, the Arabs did not. After the end of WWII, the British handed the Mandate back to the UN with their recommendation for partition. The UN conducted its own investigation and agreed to a partition. THe UNGA agreed to the plan in November 1947. Again, the Jews accepted it, the Arabs did not.
When the Mandate expired and the British withdrew, Israel declared its independence around the land assigned to it. Five Arab armies immediately launched a war of annihilation against it. In the war that Israel subsequently won, it gained more territory than originally allocated to it.
That’s how the state of Israel was created. At no time up to that point did the Arabs ever accept, or attempt to establish, a state for the Palestinians.
“It proposed a settlement: two states in Palestine, one for Arabs, one for Jews. The Jews accepted, the Arabs did not”
What a very generous settlement. Here’s an idea – The people of Sri Lanka are soon going to be in a lot of trouble due to rising sea levels. I propose a forcible resettlement of the local Australia population, shifting them all westwards and the Sri Lankans can relocate to the eastern half.
Oz @ 66. Oz, you can throw up, fine. But do you actually have an argument against the points I made? Or is that your best argument?
Of course most of the world understands that the IDF are terrorists, and most would defend the right of an invaded population to fire back on the terrorist army that is invading their land. Rob has basically just outed himself as someone who thinks an invading army should slaughter kids if they encounter any resistance to their invasion.
Well, there’s no point in arguing with people like that. I don’t want to do a Godwin here, but there’s a certain class of stone-hearted racist that you just can’t reason with, and you shouldn’t bother trying.
But it’s worth considering who exactly counts as a “combatant” and who counts as a “civilian” when we’re looking at the numbers. The United Nations (not the IDF mind you) is currently classifying all adult males in Gaza as combatants. If that’s what the UN says, you can imagine the IDF’s line of thinking. Are you an adult male? Then you are a “terrorist”, unlike females and children, who have the privilege of being “collateral damage” (“inevitable” as Rob suggests).
http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2008/081229_Gaza.doc.htm
False
If you want to believe the inestimable Chomsky, yeti, good luck to you. You’ll never learn anything.
For a daily update on what is (really) happening in the world have a look at http://www.openyoureyesnews.com Site still under construction (with pictures etc yet to be interfaced) but news items now posted daily and a large element of archive from old site (www.openyoureyesnews.blogspot.com )transferred over now.
Feedback & article suggestions always very welcome.
The Historian
Contra myriad @ 60: The Law of Armed Conflict states:
Further to #74, it appears myriad is saying or implying that Hamas is not required to stick to legal and moral standards, but that Israel is. Why is that?
Myriad
Re an erroneous belief about (Arab? Islamic? Palestinian?) culture… that … stuck in the 700s, … urge you to read something other than Quadrant … this nonsense and take a look at anything and everything ranging from etc.
Myriad, you have a point there, and I actually do read widely (and I certainly do not read Quadrant!) on all that. But how much does that matter in the circumstance we have here, and which Mark is discussing? I am focussing here on what we see in Gaza. So what matters in this restricted view is what is happening there and why.
But I think the problem is all to obvious when you write: … Islamic religious definition of peace… not even agreement … on … terminology.
But the vast majority of the Muslim world does not use that definition of peace at all … a bit like saying the Mormon fundamentalist definition of marriage …
Myriad, this comment does not really apply here, because in Gaza the crazies DO have the guns and it matters little what Indonesian Muslims think. They are not in Hamas, in Gaza. And the Hamas crazies DO believe – if their own statements, pronouncements, charter and years of actions are any guide, quite literally in Koran 8.39, 8.67, 9.5, 9.29, and 9.33; etc as well as Bukhara Volume 1, Book 2, Number 25; Volume 1, Book 2, Number 24; etc. Peace in Islam is an implied state which occurs only inside the ummah, because of the rigid proscriptions regarding perpetual war with everyone outside the ummah in the dar el harb. See Koran 9.29, 3.85, 8.39, 4.89, 22.19 to 22.22, 47.4, Alsaylu Jarar (4:518-519) by Al-Shawkani, The Baydawi quote in his The Lights of Revelation, page-252, Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, Revised Edition, chapter. 4, Jihaad in the Cause of God and the Introduction section of the English translation of the Sahih Bukhari by Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, which revolves around 9.29 of course. The Koran and the Hadiths coupled with the actual words and actions of fundamentalist believers is where I obtain my views, Myriad, not from Quadrant!
BTW, if you are implying that in Arabic ‘Islam’ means peace, that is not correct. The correct work is ‘Salam’. The root word of Islam is “al-silm” which means “submission” or “surrender,” this being understood to mean submission to Allah.
You are quite correct in noting that Islam is not monolithic (far from it!) but it has a shared root and much internal agreement. A good example is that the four Sunni Madhhabs (schools of fiqh: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) all agree on the collective obligation on Muslims to make perpetual war on the rest of the world in perpetuity, until brought into the ummah. Which is NOT saying all Muslims believe this or practise it!
Apologies for the ridiculous length of this.
IT
Rob,
a) it was not a military target, it was a school that had been clearly identified by a neutral third part (the UN) as such, and clearly stipulated to be a civilian shelter. The IDF has failed to produce any corroborated evidence that the site was even used by Hamas soldiers.
b) your selective quote from the Laws of Armed Conflict completely removes the context of in particular the entire Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in a Time of War.
But by all means, parse international law to justify shelling a known school and killing 48 children.
And what I am implying Rob, is that whatever Hamas does or does not do in no way justifies what the IDF does, particularly as there is an overwhelming military asymmetry in favour of the IDF. What’s the point of recognising international humanitarian and war laws if the response of the IDF is going to be ‘but they did it first’?
Contrast the IDF actions, for example, with French military in Uganda, who went to extraordinary lengths not to shoot child soldiers in the Lords Resistance Army.
If the Israeli position is that it is only undertaking this aggression as ‘defence’, it is absolutely incumbent on it to show good faith by minimising civilian casualties and sticking to the letter of humanitarian internatinal law. But as it’s been pointed out on other threads, the opposite is the case. It’s in direct contravention by targetting ambulances, mosques and now UN schools. Of course, if it was truly interested in being held to account it would allow the independent investigation of the school bombing incident, as the UN has called for – but of course the IDF / Israel will allow that when hell freezes over, just as they have consistently refused to hold their military to account for years.
Mark: I asked specifically that this thread be devoted to discussing blockages to peace and to regarding civilians on both sides as fellow humans not targets or collateral damage.
My two bob’s worth:
Unfortunately the latter – regarding civilians on both sides as fellow humans not targets or collateral damage – is a hallmark of modern warfare. I might be wrong but I think WW1 was the last war where military caasualties outnumbered civilian. And that’s with the Armenian genocide. I suspect the main reason for the shift is the growing mechanisation of war. But before WW1 the European powers waging their empire building wars in Asia and Africa didn’t seem to worry too much about civilian deaths either. THe Americans killed around 1 million Filipinos supressing their independence struggle 100 yrs ago and I can’t imagine they were all combatants. Likewise the figures I’ve seen for the dead in the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion in 19th century China are astronomical and I can’t beleive they were all combatants either. The Germans deliberately waged a genocidal capaign against the Hereros in Namibia around the time of the Boer War. The Boer War too has the dubious distinction of originating the concentration camp which was used against the Boer civilian population so as to break the military resistance.
So from a military perspective Israelis targetting Palestinian civilans and Palestinian fighters firing rockets at Israeli towns are consistent with modern war ‘best practice’ Additionally, given that the Palestine wars are colonial wars, Israeli behaviour is consistent with the logic of previous colonial wars such as the ones I’ve already cited. Just like the Europeans in Africa, the Americans in Philippines, Europeans and Japanese in China, and of course our own experiecne in Australia, if you’re going to take someone else’s land you have to deal with that someone else. Sadly, murder and terror are the tried and true solution.
As far as Palestine is concerned, I think the Israeli peace movement has a profound role to play and I wish thre was more covereage of the anti-war and, yes, anti-Zionist movements amongst the Israeli Jewish population and more coverage of anti-Zionist Jewish movements and individuals around the world. There can be no equivalent Palestinian peace movement because it would very much smack of Vichy and Quisling to use a military analogy. HOwever the Israeli peace and anti-Zionist movements can provide a means of solidarity and an important corective to attempts to racialise this conflict
Nevertheless the Palestine situation was created by the international Powers and it can only be resolved by them, especially the US. As the Asia Times piece I posted earleir shows the Bush admin is most morally culpable in this current disaster. Even if the Obama admin is no more than less obstructionist than Bush or maybe even commits itself to pushing through a 2 state solution (that’s already been sort of agreed too) that will be some kind of advance. I myself think it might already be too late for a 2 state solution, unless as some have suggested both states (perhaps with JOrdan) are immediately admitted to the EU, (in which case I’d fast track Lebanon and Syria too).
As for the the question of regarding civilians on both sides as fellow humans not targets or collateral damage. The answer is to give up once and for all our military addiction and call war for what it is – carnage and murder. There is nothing heroic, or glorious, or noble or glamorous about war and the military. Every war and military action should be mourned not celebrated. If we must observe Anzac Day (and similar military fests) then it should be with penitential rites not pomp and display.
myriad, more from the LOAC:
If the IDF are correct in saying the school was used for military purposes, then, as the LOAC prescribes, it loses its immunity.
If it can be reliably established that the IDF attacked the school for no specific military purpose, that it was not used by Hamas as a weapons cache, that mortars were not fired from the front of the school at the IDF (all of the above) and that the IDF deliberately targeted the civilians within, I’ll come over to your side of the net. Emphasis on “reliably”.
And I’m still interested to know, asymmetry aside, why the rules of war are not expected to apply to Hamas. Such simple things as, for example, not siting military installations among the civilian infrastructure, not storing munitions in private houses, not using human shields, not stashing caches of weapons and explosives in schools, not firing rockets from hospital grounds, not packing mosques full of explosives, etc.
When it comes to killing Palestinian untermenschen, no evidence is necessary for Rob but the word of their terrorist killers.
Of course, copious amounts of evidence disproving his take on the UN partition of Palestine can be disregarded because they were documented by one certain world-renowned Jewish scholar. What factual errors in Chomsky’s work on Israeli history are you aware of, Rob?
It would take an age to mine that particular lode, yeti. There are whole books that do it. Seek them out. And he was crap at linguistics as well. OT, sorry.
Rob, you didn’t make any “points”.
You expressed your opinion that you believe that the lives of hundreds of children are worth sacrificing if you *possibly* kill two members of Hamas.
It’s an opinion I find abhorrent, but as it is a opinion, I can’t really argue against it.
“If the IDF are correct in saying the school was used for military purposes, ”
The only time the IDF has evidence of it being used for “military purposes” was in February 2007.
“hat’s how the state of Israel was created. At no time up to that point did the Arabs ever accept, or attempt to establish, a state for the Palestinians.”
At no time did I utter such a thing.
The Palestinians (Arabs) who lived in the area, were in the majority at the time, what you choose to call them is irrelevant.Some modern day Turks probably believe it still belongs to them, after all they were there for three hundred years.
Rob you can spin this forever, it aint the truth, just cos you say it is.
What you are trying to do is put a veil and cloud the issue of, as it stands, the murder of over 500 people.The Israel’s have no intention of permitting a viable Palestinian state,it seems you and one other on this blog believes otherwise.There will be no peace in the M.E. until the Palestinians/Arabs get back what is theirs end of story.
What’s more the violence is already starting to spread to other countries, I just hope this whole shit fight doesn’t get out of hand.
Imperial Tirade,
with respect, I don’t think you are commenting on the reality in Gaza. For starters, not even Hamas is monlithic, and your assumption that the most fundamentalist elements within it haven’t a) softened since the 1998 charter was drawn up and much more importantly B) shown through their actions a quite different reality is the problem.
Since coming to power, Hamas has in fact made numerous overtures to Israel, the one condition is has asked for being an end to the almost total blockage Israel immediately imposed. Hamas is legally and freely elected, something Israel needs to get over, but it has refused for how long now? – continuing the blockage. Your original post at least also belies the actual nature of contemporary Gazan society, which is, as Mark has shown through links, to be overwhelmingly in favour of peace, not tribal warfare, blood for blood, or conversion of the Infidel a the point of a sword/Ak 47/whatever.
I think that’s the practical reality IT. It concerns me greatly to see people frame this argument with the Palestinians posed as something so ‘other’ that we can’t even conceive of them understanding on embracing the ‘western’ notion of peace; yet anyone who has ever experienced Arabic / Muslim hospitality will know how profoundly humanity matters to them, just as it matters to us, despite our differing cultural paradigms in other areas. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting both thoughtful and personable Palestinians and moderate Jewish Israelis, and I’ve no doubt that their is no cultural barrier between them in terms of wanting this horror to end.
Also, since coming to power, Hamas softened considerably its stance on Israel, in fact removing it’s explicit statements about wiping out Israel. I apologise for not having a link, but it’s in a blog that my stupid work blocks access to.
The Etymology of Islam is generally accepted to derive from both salaam (peace) and aslama (submission) – see here. Numerous contemporary Imams I have spoken for now seem to think that the common agreement is Islam means peace (through submission to the belief and adherence of the will of Allah) – which is basically the same as what other religions see their adherents getting from joining up.
“There will be no peace in the M.E. until the Palestinians/Arabs get back what is theirs end of story.”
Well, we can probably agree on that if nothing else, in a kind of way. What Hamas wants is Israel. It makes no secret of it. Neither does Hizbollah (though they of course are not Palestinians – but they are Arabs). “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea”, remember? So until Israel is erased, there will be no peace. Thank you for making it so clear.
I didn’t say that the Geneva conventions et al don’t apply to Hamas Rob, I said their adherence to them or otherwise is not relevant to dictating whether the IDF does (adhere).
But way to completely side-step the point. some would argue that the fact that the UN had already specifically identified the area as a non-military, civilian-sheltering place might be a reason to think twice before hitting it with tank shells, even if you did think you spotted a couple of enemy combatants near it. Proportionality and all. I also note your deathly silence on Israel’s other violations, including targeting ambulances – not to mention restricting acces for neutral humanitarian parties such as IRC and MSF.
As to reliably establishing whether that UN designated school was a real military target, I’ll make you a wager. If the Israeli government agrees to an independent inquiry to establish that fact, I’ll donate $50 to a charity of your choice. If they refuse, you do the same for me. Care to take me up on it?
‘…and the only logic of that cycle – on both sides – is a drive to extermination.’ Yet there is no realistic prospect for extermination either way. Mark sees the ‘…debate stuck in the same morass – of friends and enemies’ that is obviously being engaged in pointlessly or at least without direction and yet he is unable to direct people to a more fruitful activity.
So Mark starts bleating for an equally pointless rendition of ‘give peace a chance’ and tries a thread (based on the phoney pacifism of a purported moral high ground liberal happily at war with commander Rudd in Afghanistan) concluding ‘…refocus our efforts – and our imagination – on the one goal that should be truly paramount – peace itself.’ while an Australian soldier dies in Afghanistan on the same day!
That Oz soldier might be there for the purpose of imperial conquest, or he might be on a mission to fight the enemies of all progressives and Mark has taken sides against the notion that he was there for furthering an imperialist agenda. Mark and I agree the soldiers death is regrettable but the war unavoidable and ‘we refocus our efforts’ in that case by theorizing on what is the strategy that’s required to win that war and bring forth a peace not by abandoning the war and bleating for peace.
Mark and other regulars here are not noticing what is actually happening before their very eyes in Gaza just as they didn’t notice what was happening in the Lebanon attacks of 2006 because they were not reflecting on the war that was started back in 1982.
2006 was the final diversion violence before the actual conclusion of the real war that had been started all those years earlier, in defeat. It was this war that was concluded after the last outbreak of destruction and death with a total Israeli back down on all the still outstanding issues, not a 2006 war that was ended. The Israeli government needed to end that failed war started all those decades earlier so badly that prisoners were even exchanged for bodies!
Nixon’s Christmas bombing had the peace movement of that time dispirited and confused and sounding like Mark is now. Revolutionaries analysed the vicious bombing differently and concluded that the US was doing this for reasons other than striving for victory, or continuing a war endlessly or until extermination was achieved. Revolutionaries concluded that the US was on the verge of defeat. One month later the Paris peace accords were signed where the Vietnamese promised to hand back US POWs, and the US promised to go home. Nixon called it peace with honour. Those of us on the other side tended to see this a little clearer. We called it Victory. Our side won the protracted war of liberation. We never bleated give peace a chance but rather ‘One side’s right the other’s wrong victory to the Vietcong’.
Nixon bombed not because he was thinking that this was a way to turn the war around (after all the as early as 1967 under LBJ they knew that they could not win the war) so he was bombing and slaughtering the Vietnamese for another reason, and so is the Israeli government now. The Zionists need to end the failed war for greater Israel ASAP.
To get your ‘eyes’ working ask yourself the first vital question ‘How goes the war for greater Israel?’ The celebrations of the six days of conquest so long ago look rather distant, as do the prospects of Zionism becoming popular around the world again. Not many people are now taken in by brave little Israel and being understanding of the need to establish more viable borders by grabbing other peoples land bulldozing their homes and ethnically cleansing them. Zionism is reviled now as the racist reality of its aggression confronts the world with the current huge prison population of Gaza. With all the greens around LP the term unsustainable ought to flash like the sign on the freeways WRONG WAY GO BACK!
Curiously, this current butchery stems from a failed war for greater Israel launched all that time ago in 1967. We are heading towards its 42nd year! If you want to direct people to a more fruitful discussion ask yourself what are the Zionists now demanding? For forty years they haven’t wanted monitors yet now they do. Why have they changed? Monitors are just that. They are not occupiers prepared to take and inflict casualties. Calling for monitors is to declare that this time when the Zionists leave they will not be reserving for themselves the right to fly across and kill targets at will. They will be declaring victory by abandoning the reserved power of crossing the border and killing and capturing at will.
They can stop the rockets any day they choose just as they stopped them up North. A comprehensive settlement is brewing and that includes a prisoner exchange just as it did up north.
A couple of years ago there was mass destruction and death inflicted on the Lebanese. The outcome was forcing Hezbollah to join the Lebanese government and ending within a year or so with the resolution of all outstanding issues on this front including the required prisoner exchange
What we are seeing in this butchery is the playing out of the end stages of the failed war for greater Israel. After the Israeli elections we will see the predictable moves to conclude the war for greater Israel. There are plenty of signs in the utter demoralization of the apologists for Zionism who often now claim to be at war for the sole purpose of bringing a peaceful Palestinian State into being. How about that! Forty years ago the Palestinian people didn’t even exist and US president’s and Israeli politicians etc just called them Arabs.
Virtually nobody now doubts that the only way forward for the Israelis is to end the occupation of the West Bank and there is no point in not doing the deal over the Golan Heights with Syria at the same time. The entire war is being brought to an end and just as Nixon brought Vietnam to an end Netanyahu or Livni or even the rank outsider Barak will do what has to be done now. The agreements are in effect already made. We are only waiting for the new Israeli government to be established and the process to start with Hamas returning to a unified Palestinian fold with full open borders and an end of the siege.
The tone of the three threads LP has run on this latest dose of Zionist bastardry is hopelessness, and helplessness and that nothing ever changes. At Strange Times there are two posts about this – The ‘End game in the war for Greater Israel’ explains the background in its connection to Draining the Swamps theory, and the second Zombies march on Gaza http://strangetimes.lastsuperpower.net/?p=175 analyses the current situation more specifically.
Both threads point to the emerging Palestinian State as the short term endpoint not some endless cycle of hopeless violence.
The Zionist focus on ending the rockets and installing monitors is the key to understanding this stage. The timing is rather obviously election based.
The information upon which the IDF acts is not determined by what the UN tells it; it comes from the troops deployed operationally, their observations and the intelligence available to them. If the UN says “there are not Hamas fighters there”, and the sergeant commanding the mortar platoon says “Oh but there are, and they’re firing at us right now”, then the IDF’s position in terms of the LOAC is clear. The school is a legitimate target.
I’ll pay your bet if such an enquiry finds that the there were no Hamas fighters, no mortars fired, no weapons caches and no booby-traps.
“I didn’t say that the Geneva conventions et al don’t apply to Hamas Rob, I said their adherence to them or otherwise is not relevant to dictating whether the IDF does (adhere).”
I’m curious as to why the fact that, on the evidence available (subject to independent enquiry, natch), the IDF is scrupulously abiding by the LOAC inspires you to great rage, but the fact that Hamas is palpably breaching its most fundamental proscriptions inspires you to – none at all.
In other words, you got nothing.
Balfour Declaration.
Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on
behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following
declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspiration(?)
which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
“His Majesty’s government view with favour the
establishment in Palestine of a national home(?) for the
Jewish people, and will use their their best endeavours to
to facilitate the achievement of this object. It being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which
may prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the
rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any
other country.”
I should be grateful if you would bring this
declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours
Arthur James Balfour
(?) the handwriting is hard to decipher.
Note that Balfour felt obliged to add this to his message to Rothschild,
“…or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
Sure they are. Everytime they kill a bunch of kids they can just say “there was a terrorist in the building”. That’s enough evidence for people like you.
“So until Israel is erased, there will be no peace. Thank you for making it so clear.”
Rob, don’t put words in my mouth, which of course is the usual M.O. of the apologists for Israeli’s crimes against humanity.
A bit like Bush “If your not with us your against us”
patrickm,great comments.A shame it will be lost on most, how short our memories.
No Rob, the bet offered was on whether the IDF / Israel would agree to an independent inquiry to establish whether the school was a legitimate target or not. Taking it up or not?
So I’m curious, if the Red Cross establishes a field hospital near a battle zone and informs the IDF precisely where it is & it’s purpose, and then an IDF soldier thinks they spot gunfire coming from that area, is it ok to completely disregard all evidence from a credible neutral party and bomb the field hospital?
Equally, I find your attempts to change the topic to what Hamas is or isn’t doing rather flaccid. Pragmatic statistics show that the IDF has inflicted over 600 deaths and a thousand + casualities, and Hamas less than 10, (unless you want to count in the IDF’s ‘own goal’ which would take it to a dozen). It’s the very definition of asymmetrical warfare, to the point that what Hamas does in terms of civilians is virtually irrelevant, because the IDF has clearly shown that it considers any building a military target – so far it’s bombed mosques, universities, schools and ambulances. You’re still deathly silent I see on the last.
Even with the UN playing ‘fair’ and defining all males killed in the conflict as militants, the numbers of civilian – aka women and children – dead & wounded is markedly disproportionate to the ’success’ of the operation. Of course, a significant number of the dead and wounded men are police – civilians under international law as I’m sure you’re aware – engaged in nefarious activities such as their graduation ceremony.
the blunt fact that you can’t escape is that the Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world where the people are literally trapped, and under the age of 25; and the IDF has done very little to avoid , beyond not just resorting to carpet bombing, has done SFA to avoid civilian casualities. But this is to be expected I guess from a military that has had leaders repeatedly go on record to confirm their view that Palestinian lives are worth less than Israelis’.
Yes. Welcome to war. It sucks. You don’t get time to hold an inquiry into every bit of intel. If you wait, you die.
This is why sane governments don’t like to start wars. Or at the very least have the dignity to surrender once its clear they’re losing. It’s Hamas who are more concerned with pride than with their own peoples lives.
The IDF are attacking any hostile action from Hamas, making Hamas’s actions as significant as the results from the IDF attacks. War was never about “fair”.
I’m curious, how does the number of civilians killed by Hamas compare to the number of IDF they’ve killed or the success of their operation?
I’ll bet $50 both of you won’t agree on what constitutes an “independent inquiry”.
In addition to the school bombing that has been discussed above, Israel has also bombed another two schools being used as shelters by the UN and clearly marked as such, killing a family. This time the IDF isn’t even bothering to claim there were militants hiding there.
This will get me into trouble…
This war will end when it hurts one side to much to continue. The whole UN/ Palestinian thing was a huge mistake, following on from the huge mistake of the creation of the jewish homeland in a way which made conflict inevitable.
Wars end when one side is beaten, knows it, and usualy loses territory/ regime change/reparation payments to the victors satisfaction. I consider it a failing of the UN that it usualy prevents this from happening.
Yes thats a nice outcome in the short term, less dead, in the long term it seems to become a festering sore. Its not specificly the fault of the UN, there is always huge pressure to stop bloodshed immediately. But it allows non state players in particular to claim a victory of sorts.
There will be a 2 state solution, but not until one side or the other is forced to accept they have lost, and are forced to accept the terms granted to them. Any “kindness” appears to only leave the situation festering.
At the risk of invoking Godwins, Germany lost a large part of its northeastern regions to Poland/Russia after WW2. Vietnam lost territory to China, as did (I havent checked this one so correct me if Im wrong) India.
None of these conflicts have had the same effect as the whole Palestinian/Israeli problem, because the loser.
a: was beaten militarily
b: Was so soundly beaten they cant see any upside in continuing the conflict
c: Were forced to accept the terms given by the victors, with little domestic say in the outcome.
d: Most importantly, havent had 30+ years of being informed they are hard done by, and paid to be victims.
Palestinians are treated badly by every country in the Middle east, in most cases they have little access to education/health/jobs, instead they are expected to expunge the Arab worlds shame at having Israel in its midst.
Obama – said: At the time, Obama said : “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.
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Yes so you send rockets into their house and kill their daughters and then they send rockets into your house blah blah blah.
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This is a classic case of the problem the UN would have to address to be effective. If some solution, and sorry Kevvie it’s military not diplomatic, could be effected to impose order and eliminate violence without gifting dominance to one side or the other you might be able to stop this kind of thing happening.
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Trouble is nations see no reason to expend blood and treasure fixing other peoples’ problems. So there’s the rounds of talk, truce and conflict that characterized French-English foreign relations throughout the 14th century.
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I’ve been reading Umberto Eco’s Turning Back the Clock which considers the military and media in modern politics. One of his essays on peace produced the following interesting observation: throughout history peace over a large territory has only ever been accomplished by strong centralized and overwhelming military power: Pax Romana, Pax Brittania and the dual Pax Americana/Pax-Sovietica of the Cold War era.
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In areas where such central authority fails to obtain and/or on the perimeters of said zones there is constant warfare. The UN, and the League of Nations before it, attempt to utilize Westphallian technocracy in furtherance of creating global civility. But this conflicts with the age-old realpolitik practices of states acting in their interests. Pressures of various kinds now obtain for international solutions.
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Thus far they don’t prevail.
Mole, I disagree with you. You can’t win this dispute by simply crushing the enemy militarily. That’s already happened. that’s why the Palestinians resort to home made RPG’s and suicide bombs. And when they don’t have those, rocks. You can destroy the military apparatus of Hamas, Fatah and every other militant faction but the people will keep on fighting.
In other news, more reports of Israel using white phosphorous – a war crime in civilian areas.
In the interest of facts.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090106/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians
I am very surprised, as AP (of all agencies!) supports the IDF reporting of events at the UN school at the story above.
QUOTE Two residents of the area who spoke by telephone [to AP] said they saw a small group of militants firing mortar rounds from a street near the school, where 350 people had gathered to get away from the shelling. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.UNQUOTE
…
QUOTE An Israeli military statement said it received intelligence that the dead at the girls school included Hamas operatives, among them members of a rocket launching cell. It identified two of them as Imad Abu Askar and Hassan Abu Askar.
Two residents who spoke to an AP reporter by phone said the two brothers were known to be low-level Hamas militants. They said a group of militants — one of them said four — were firing mortar shells from near the school.
An Israeli shell targeted the men, but missed and they fled, the witnesses said, refusing to allow their names to be published because they feared for their safety. Then another three shells landed nearby, exploding among civilians, they said.
Palestinian militants have frequently fired from residential areas in the past. UNQUOTE
If this a report is true, then the facts are as follows: a war crime did occur in that Hamas acted the way it did, and according to the Laws of Armed Conflict it is Hamas which bears full responsibility for the deaths.
IT
Not I believe them for a second, but even the IDF spin is that Hamas mortar fire came from *one* of the UN school sites.
Yet they bombed three.
These liars cant even come up with a coherent cover story for their brutal and cowardly assaults on civilians – seeking shelter in UN buildings.
Lefty E – No doubt there’s a lot spin obfuscating the facts here. But one of the common soundbytes is that Hamas has fired thousands of rockets into Israel over the last three years. That’s a bit difficult to spin.
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Are you saying that isn’t true? On what basis?
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It’s very tempting to simply root for one side as the good guys. Makes it all nice and simple. But that ain’t the truth. And one of the many facets of the truth is that Hamas simply don’t want peace. If they fire rockets into Israel they must know that Israel will retaliate with interest and that many innocent Palestinians will die. Seems to me if they gave a shit they wouldn’t fire rockets into Israel.
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There are people on both sides who are determined not to allow peace to break out. Hamas is among these; they’re part of the problem.
Well, that’s what happens when you set up ghettos – you get uprisings. You’d think Israelis would know that.
I ask: on what basis does Israel expect no resistance to their illegal occupation of Palestinian land? I cant see how thats realistic.
So what they want when they demand as cease to the ineffectual (but no doubt horrible in Sderot) rocket fire is Pax Romana – not peace. They dont seek peace, and thats why they dont get peace. They seek a victory in dispossession and conquest.
No point blaming Palestinians for being human – with the same aspirations we all hold.
Suffice to say, I dont care too fool myself with facile assertions of equivalence when David faces Goliath.
Israel’s fabricated rocket crisis
Jim Holstun and Joanna Tinker, The Electronic Intifada, 6 January 2009
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10123.shtml
This isn’t an uprising. This is terrorism. Tens of thousands of IDF troops right in front of them in Gaza and they still fire rockets at the cities of Israel. They don’t want peace. They don’t want a fight. They don’t even want to win. They just want to cause misery and death.
Lefty E – The walling up Palestinian zones are preceded by history. The conflict obtains because you have two groups of people who have a strong moral claim. People take sides. I don’t.
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When I’m arguing with the pro-Israel people I tend to emphasize the Palestinian point of view.
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But neither side has an exclusive license on the moral high ground. This latest brouhaha starts off with the second Intifada which was set off by Sharon visiting that, sigh, bloody religious site in Jerusalem. Now Sharon should’ve held back, maybe he didn’t want peace. Still non-Muslims visit mosques all the time. And Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount should’ve been interpreted as a peace gesture by those who wanted to see it as such. But there were those who didn’t.
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So hundreds of people, Jewish, Arab and otherwise have to die because someone goes into a fucking mosque. And the last 8 years that could’ve seen the building of a fucking country in Palestine has instead seen increasing jail-like conditions for an entire people because another people keep getting rockets fired at them. Thing is both sides are responsible. Because both of them indulge those for whom violence is a vocation and a pleasure.
From Wombo’s source:
“The graphs show that the total number of rocket and mortar attacks shrank from 245 in June to 26 total for July through October, a reduction of 97 percent. Even this was not enough for Israel, which violated the truce by imposing a terror-famine in Gaza for most of these months. But despite these violations, Hamas refrained from launching rockets until Israel definitively cancelled the truce on the night of 4-5 November by sending an Israeli commando squad into Gaza, where it killed six Hamas members. Hamas responded with 30 rockets.”
My guess is the IDF banned media entering Gaza because they knew they wouldn’t pass basic muster under international law, and didn’t want witnesses.
Moreover, I think the UN building attacks were a deliberate message to Palestinian civilians: there is nowhere for you to hide. The IDF has quite a lot of form on attacking UN sites.
Moreover, as the UN spokesperson put, this IDF “war” is “unprecedented in its futility”. There’s no military solution to this conflict.
My overriding feeling is that Israel isn’t seeking to stop the rockets at all – their key objective is to render their illegal blockade of Gaza more effective by eradicating the tunnels that undermine it.
“You are quite correct in noting that Islam is not monolithic (far from it!) but it has a shared root and much internal agreement. A good example is that the four Sunni Madhhabs (schools of fiqh: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) all agree on the collective obligation on Muslims to make perpetual war on the rest of the world in perpetuity, until brought into the ummah.”
This is bullsh#t. Show me evidence of juristic consensus. Prove to me that all sub-sectors of the Hanafi school (India – Barelwi and Deobandi; Turkey; Bosnia/Albania) teach this. Where can I find it in classical texts like Ma La Budda Minhu of Qadi Thanaullah or modern texts like Behisht-i-Zewar of Thanawi.
And show me evidence from various Shia schools, including the ja’afari, zaydi and ismaili.
Indeed, show me anything resembling the stuff you’d find in the Old Testament. And anyway, both Islam and Judaism are law-based faiths in which strict rules apply to the derivation of rules and principles of sacred law from texts and in which there is plenty of room for disagreement.
This conflict has litte to do with religion. If both sides really followed their religious texts, we wouldn’t see HAMAS rockets hitting Israeli towns nor would we see Israeli rockets and shells hitting schools and universities and homes. The actions of HAMAS are no more Islamic than the actions of Israel are Jewish.
Hamas rockets are as about as powerful as a threepenny banger,I should know, I blew up enough letterboxes with them when I was a kid.
Apparently these rockets are in their prototype stage’ they intend to target Crawford Texas when they are perfected.They are going to breed little bitty Hamas midgets to sit in front and guide them.
The M.E. is about to possibly go up in flames,and it’s down to the rockets. not forty years of the Israeli’s being bastards, but rockets.
Although Hamas should be condemned for not putting a little copper sulphate or sim in their fireworks, for a nice color effect.
Is this my home, you ask yourself
You bite your tongue and don’t say your opinion…
Bullshit stories
A tune,
A tune for you
Bullshit stories
That’s what it sounds like
Is this correct, you whisper to yourself
Biting the tongue that stammered on your behalf
That’s not the lady that raised you yesterday
That’s not the story that was dictated for you
The door doesn’t close
And the demons flee
Everybody grips the sadness
Everybody in the darkness of night
-Rami Fortis
http://niqnaq.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/yaron-give-us-some-translation-here/#comments
Whew, I haven’t heard that furphy since Falujah. In other news I decided that anything I didn’t like was a war crime. Take that tax return!
Mole’s right. For Hamas peace is the complete destruction of Israel and the Jews. For Israel peace is being left alone by its neighbours to get on with life. Only one has reasonable goals. For Hamas to give up its will probably require the “Black Knight” treatment, but that’s alright by me.
“I ask: on what basis does Israel expect no resistance to their illegal occupation of Palestinian land? I cant see how thats realistic.
So what they want when they demand as cease to the ineffectual (but no doubt horrible in Sderot) rocket fire is Pax Romana – not peace. They dont seek peace, and thats why they dont get peace. They seek a victory in dispossession and conquest. ”
It’s a bit difficult to square that with the fact (or was it spin?) that Israel evacuated all settlers and soldiers from Gaza three years ago. A Zionist plot, no doubt.
One OZ dollar is worth nearly 2.8 Israeli shekel , place your bets now for a near certain profit, come Gaza IV.
Hey Adrien, how about the fact that the “thousands of rockets over years” had dropped to one a month since the ceasefire?
Who terminated the hudna and escalated the rockets attacks to scores per day? Israel, of course!
“Mole’s right. For Hamas peace is the complete destruction of Israel and the Jews. For Israel peace is being left alone by its neighbours to get on with life.”
Let me see, For Israel peace is the complete destruction of Hamas and what’s left of the Palestinians.For Hamas they want their land back and to live with their neighbors in peace.
Ah so much better.It must be a dyslexia thing, mine of course.
Mole; Ask yourself how the Vietnam war ended; then ask how the 1982 Israeli war launched against Lebanon ended (about a year ago); then ask yourself how the war for greater Israel launched in 1967 (by people that wouldn’t even use the term Palestinian and when US president’s for the next four decades wouldn’t even call the West Bank occupied territory but referred to as ‘disputed territory’) is ending.
Think about how the Israeli government would prefer to be seen as this defeat is finalised.
Ask yourself why Rob is essentially talking to himself, and virtually all support for ‘plucky little Israel’ has vanished as the reality of Zionists holding a population under siege gets thrown nightly onto the TV? Isn’t it obvious that Lebanon runs itself to the north, and that the Palestinians will run themselves to the south and east.
Then ask yourself what would be the point of any fight at all over the retreat from the Golan Heights and take any bets on offer that this part will be concluded peacefully.
The 21C is not a time where people are going to sit at the back of the bus as any type of second class country subject to the dictates of its powerful neighbour. Democracy is flowering across the Middle East region and that’s not going to revive Zionist delusions of making war for the conquest of greater Israel.
It’s dead as a theory, and only the looniest Zionists are still carrying on as the undead.
Once the US adopted the policy of ending tyranny in the ME in order to drain the swamp that breeds the terrorists, the war for greater Israel was a dead war still walking.
Why does Rob want monitors now that the Israeli Government calls for monitors forty years after first stating they wanted no monitors. Are the monitors going to fight and die and kill for the sake of establishing greater Israel? No. Well are these monitors going to monitor who breaks any truce? Yes. So, how to account for the change in policy now?
Marlon; thanks. Have a closer read of my earlier comment and take a look at the links. My current analysis is guided by a theory developed in 2002 when many people commenting here thought that the US were going to install a pro US puppet regime in Iraq. None imagined that they would be working happily with a government where the Dawa party (the Iraqi equivalent to Hamas) was the main player!
As Arthur has just said over at Strange Times;
‘Israel is out on a limb with the siege of Gaza, and would much rather end it murderously than be seen to have simply backed down from the absurd position it took of withdrawing from Gaza while keeping it under blockade and siege.’
“It’s a bit difficult to square that with the fact (or was it spin?) that Israel evacuated all settlers and soldiers from Gaza three years ago.”
They evacuated settlers so they could continue with their airstrikes and shelling without having to worry about precious Israeli casualties, just fourth rate Arab lives.
“Who terminated the hudna and escalated the rockets attacks to scores per day?”
Rockets were at a rate of 1 per month before Israel launched a raid into Gaza killing half a dozen.
So one a month is acceptable now? Sweet, I’ll stock up so I can blow me up some kiwis.
Khalid Meshaal has a great take of the rockets:
Our modest, home-made rockets are our cry of protest to the world. Israel and its American and European sponsors want us to be killed in silence. But die in silence we will not.
I’m betting most here will buy it.
One other point is that no-one wants to be the Palestinian “Michael Collins”. No Palestinian leader wants to be seen accepting any deal that isn’t 100% of what Palestinians expect.
Nose, face, spite.
Rob is doing as god job of presenting the IDF position re: the UNRWA school incident.
Past experince should tell anyone that they should take IDF pronouncments on civilian casualties with a massive does of salt. My rule of thumb is – civilians die, the IDF lie.
It’s emerged trhat the video suplied by the IDF to justify the shelling of the school was actualy shot in 2007.
It’s a reminder of the infamous Qassam-stretcher incident,
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/01/camera-never-lies-unless-its-an-idf-camera.html
Katz: “The Old Testament is full of stories of God punishing whole groups of people for the alleged sins of a few.”
Actually the opposite is true Katz. See Genesis 18:16-33 for instance
“So one a month is acceptable now? Sweet, I’ll stock up so I can blow me up some kiwis.”
I don’t recall saying it’s “acceptable”, I was highlighting the flaw in suggesting that the reason there are currently 600+ dead Palestinians is because Hamas launched thousands of rockets over a period of years.
The putting words in peoples mouths is getting tiresome.
On the flipside, shelling beaches, mosques and schools is acceptable? Launching raids raids and incursions is acceptable? All done prior to the recent escalation by Israel.
But yeah, it’s definitely those homemade rockets killing no-one during the last few months that did it.
Not spin, Rob, but PR. A partial withdrawal from one part of Palestine was nullified by the illegal seizure of 10% in the other land with the unilateral security wall – as you well know. Neither is Gaza a state Israel recognizes as independent. It is a blockaded ghetto. Some ‘withdrawal’.
My guess is they simply did the numbers and worked out it was a demographic lost cause in Gaza.
“It’s emerged trhat the video suplied by the IDF to justify the shelling of the school was actualy shot in 2007.”
I’ve been trying to say that to Rob all day but he’s ignored it.
“They evacuated settlers so they could continue with their airstrikes and shelling without having to worry about precious Israeli casualties, just fourth rate Arab lives.”
But how can that be so if their objective is dispossession and occupation, as yo have repeatedly claimed?
But no-one to my knowledge has ever claimed it was not from 2007. The IDF’s YouTube site very clearly dates it 29 Oct 2007.
The IDF spinmeisters haven’t even bothered to invent a rationale for attacking two of the UN sites.
Seems to me they’re treating their dwindling band of international apologists with increasing contempt.
This stuff is so much like musical chairs, in the end there is only one standing, all alone, but the winner.
Probably because he didn’t bring up any video. In fact, you’re the one who brought it up. BTW, anywhere I’ve seen the video it’s been clearly captioned as from 2007 (and rockets, not mortars), so it’s no-one’s trying to pull the wool there.
OTOH, given that rockets obviously were fired from there in 2007, it take a rash person to discount the possibility of mortars in 2009. But then, I see you’ve discounted it entirely.
“But how can that be so if their objective is dispossession and occupation, as yo have repeatedly claimed?”
“Repeatedly claimed”? Point out one time I’ve claimed that? My view is that the Israeli goal is eradication of the Palestinian by violent means.
“But no-one to my knowledge has ever claimed it was not from 2007. The IDF’s YouTube site very clearly dates it 29 Oct 2007.”
Then on what basis do you take the word of the proven liars at the IDF over UN humanitarian workers?
“OTOH, given that rockets obviously were fired from there in 2007, it take a rash person to discount the possibility of mortars in 2009. But then, I see you’ve discounted it entirely.”
Maybe I think there’s a difference between militants using an abandoned and empty playground as a launching area and a UN shelter filled with thousands of refugees two years later.
You’re saying it’s ok to bomb a market, school or mosque in Fallujah now because there were militants fighting there a few years ago.
#132
Yes, I feel sorry for the Israeli apologists having to come up with their own excuses regarding the two other schools as the IDF has left them out in the cold.
On the 20087 incident (you’ll notice UNWRA does not deny the schoold was used by terrorists or that one of their teachers was a rocket manufacturer):
Why would he deny that? Did you forget that the war is between Israel and Hamas, not between Israel and the UN? The UNRWA isn’t in the habit of protecting militants.
Absolutely none of that changes the fatalities, the lack of evidence of any “terrorist” activities, or the point that you and the Israeli’s believe that it’s ok to cause up to 100 causalities to potentially kill two low-level militants.
How do you get “up to 100″ out of a reported “at least 30″?
I heard 48 killed and more than 50 wounded.
But of course, it’s easier to argue about maths (-2) than anything else.
Sorry, Oz, you’re quite right – I mistakenly thought you were referring to deaths.
This one will keep me laughing for hours.
Who terminated the hudna and escalated the rockets attacks to scores per day? Israel, of course!
First fact you’ve got right.
Sorry for the triple post -
The same Christopher Gunnes claiming there were no militants in the school:
http://news.theage.com.au/national/no-militants-in-bombed-gaza-school-un-20090107-7byd.html
So who do you trust, UNRWA who were running the camp or the Israeli’s who seem to have their stories mixed up and a record of attacking civilians and even their allies.
It’s a sad state of affairs when not only are children being slaughtered but apologists are popping up all over the world defending it.
Craig Mc; you are quite wrong. The deals are already effectively done and are done because they are believed to be acceptable at referendum stage. The Palestinian leader in the wings is Marwan Barghouti. He is the most popular prospect for next Palestinian President and will be released or will win the election from jail. That is untenable for the Israeli government so we can expect that he will be released.
The point is that Israel is ending a failed war for greater Israel and the Palestinians are on the verge of victory in this almost 42 year long war. Yet still people are bothering with Rob who now after forty years wants monitors! Why the change of policy? The Palestinians are not changing policy. They have always been happy to have international monitors.
Everyone knows that rockets and incidents are no longer coming from the north. So the comprehensive settlement of the south and the East (that is an end to the occupation) is not far away.
Everyone trying to convince Zionists that their policies are racist and brutally so are wasting your words. Apparently international monitors are wanted by Rob and co. What a good idea. I wonder why no one ever thought of that! OK the worlds progressives support your call; lets move on.
“This one will keep me laughing for hours.”
Your alleging the UN knew there were militants in the school and now lying about it? If not, please explain what’s funny.
patrickm. Where have I ever said I wanted ‘monitors’? I don’t recall that.
of course they dont want monitors. why do you think they expelled the international media?
This is excellent news Patrickm. When can we expect the Palestinian occupation of Haifa and Tel Aviv to take place? Very shortly, no doubt, since the Palestinians are on the verge of victory.
OK Rob only the Israeli government is calling for an end to rockets and international monitors. So we can dismiss you as not even knowing what this rear guard action is being fought for. Any idea why the change of a forty year policy?
Hint think that the war for greater Israel is coming to an end. You can then claim victory and peace with honour just like Nixon. Progressives don’t mind. We are interested in the reality of the spread of Bourgeois democracy. The Israeli elections will be over in just over a month and then the alternate Zionist leaderships won’t have to prove who is the toughest and they can finally start moving the settlers out.
GregM; you are a little foolish; please review what was captured in 1967 and therefore what is going to be withdrawn from.
Oz, UNWRA’s track record as a witness is not too good. Take Jenin in 2002.
Before the facts were known:
After:
“OK Rob only the Israeli government is calling for an end to rockets and international monitors. So we can dismiss you as not even knowing….”
But it is you who have said twice that I was calling for monitors. What does that do for your credibility?
Latest is that Israel now is offering a 3 hr daily ceasefire to allow huminatrian supplies in.
This strikes me as rather bizarre given that in the past few months Israel has completely blocked all supplies for periods of up to 12 days in response to a few rockets. Now, despite ongoing daily rocket fire, Israel is going to allow supplies in every day. So, what was the point of all this?
I beg you pardon Rob I only asumed you were supporting the explicit war aims of the Israeli Government. My cred must be in tatters.
‘…at least 52 Palestinians, of whom up to half may have been civilians, and 23 Israeli soldiers were dead (UNWRA).’ Is a very good reason why they are not going to do that again.
They formerly protected settlers with separate roads and all the rest (bit like the WB now) in Gaza! BUT that’s gone with the wind!
Now the Israeli government is calling for international monitors to go in after it withdraws. How think do you have to be not to notice what the change of policy is all about.
No I’m not, Patrickm. It is you who is being foolish.
It is Hamas’s goal to liberate the whole of the land of Palestine, which includes all of that part of Israel which existed behind its pre-1967 borders.
To them that is victory. I have enough respect for them to accept them at their word as to what their goals are. You should have the same respect for them instead of interpossing what you think their goals should be (just going back to the pre-1967 borders) and saying that that would be, for them, victory.
I’m going to close this thread now. I made it clear in both the post and in some comments that I wanted to discuss the reasons why people so readily accept the dehumanisation of others in situations of violent conflict, under what circumstances they do, and why there appears to be very little momentum behind a peaceful solution as opposed to arguing the toss about who’s on what side and which side is “right”. It appears that the majority of commenters are incapable of discussing these issues.
Update: My comment crossed with MichaelH’s. I’ll reopen this thread later on tonight, but I want it to stick to the discussion I initiated. Any other comments will be deleted.
This thread is still open for those who want to discuss the issues surrounding what is now happening in Gaza:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/01/05/eyeless-in-gaza-ii/
Geting back to Marks topic…..
Another glimmer of hope from Obama (yes, I’m grasping at straws) is that he has at least made some contact with Palestinians. He did a short tour through the West Bank and actually spoke to real live Palestinians. This does put him streets ahead of most of his predecessors in the humanizing stakes, if nothing else. I remember being very surprised when I found out that Jimmy Carter, notable for being one of the earliest US Prsidents to have some interest in a resolution to this, had never actually meet a Palestinian at the time. His first trip to the OTs came many years later.
Ok, comments re-opened.
But please read #157 and stay on topic.
Off topic comments will be deleted.
Seems safe to assume that moves towards a ceasfire thru the UN are in part motivated by concerns from the US that the on-going pounding of Gaza is not very helpful to two of its allies- Egypt and Mahmoud Abbas. Protests have been reported across Egypt and this will play out quite nicely for the MB. There are already quite enough references to Mubarak as a ‘Pharoah’ as it is without any more encouragement in that direction. Israel may alos be finding that, as usual, the PR war isn’t going quite as well as hoped, and we can assume that Tel Aviv has signalled Washington that it is not adverse to being seen to be compelled to stop the Gaza operation in the near future. While this appears to be realpolitik in action, the general outrage over the growing civilian casualties may be helping to speed things along a little.
A ceasefire is only a very temporary resolution and though it’s clearly needed, it’s not at all clear how to re-introduce trust into the Israel-Palestine situation. As others have pointed out, one of the on-going legacies of Ariel Sharon and Hamas is a break-down in the face-to-face contact between the two peoples. Once, not that long ago, there was a constant interaction between Palestinans and Israelis – many Palestinians worked in Israel itself, even if illegally, and peace groups working directly with Palestinians in the OTs were much more common than now. At the moment, there is a generation growing up who know Palestinians as scary people in masks on TV lobbing rockets at them, or as targets through rifle sites, and who only know Israelis as soldiers in uniform barking orders at checkpoints, or as the unseen pilots of military aircraft screaming overhead.
Israel was mentioned today as being prepared to consider negotiations via the French/Egyption process. 5 Israeli soldiers dead and now over 600 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
Claims and counter claims about the targetting of 3 UN schools. It seems the PR backlash on the schools attack in particular is damaging Israel’s reputation and position. In the Age today the Israeli Yuval Rotem talks about his mission to justify Israel’s actions to the Australian public.
The negotiations Israel is about to enter could have happened without the attacks on and invasion of Gaza, and the very high civilian death toll. So it seems their motives were to inflict as much damage as they could on Hamas without any real concern for civilians.
The path to peace is not going to be easy given how much the situation has now been inflamed.
I know this is slightly OT and metabloggy, but does Rob get some kind of award for stoushing continuously on this thread from 8:47am to 9:37pm yesterday?
In fairness, I must admit that if I still retained the single-minded anti-Zionist partisan spirit of my early adulthood, I would doubtless have stoushed at least as assiduously from the opposite corner to Rob.
I have explained here why I have not retained aforesaid partisan spirit.
According to some you cant be Anti Israeli Govt,support a two state solution and not be an Anti Semite,go look at Ackerman and Bolt and Blair and comments on anyone who has the slightest criticism of Israeli Govt over this.
As far as BOB goes maybe the propaganda Dept pay a good hourly rate and time and a half or double time on weekends?
The irony, John, is that some of the most stringent critics of Israeli government policies, actions and leaders are Israeli Jews, and a majority of such critics would consider themselves Zionists. Such people set an excellent example by their ability to feel, and act on, a sense of common humanity with the Palestinians.
Paul @ 163: Thanks for the link. I think I missed that thread at the time (if I was even hanging around here at that point), but your post and follow up comments pretty much outline my own reasons for being wary of left anti-Zionism. I’ll add to that anecdotal evidence that certain self-identifying lefties cannot leave the issue alone in the presence of anybody who is Jewish, no matter what the context.
QUOTE…why people so readily accept the dehumanisation of others in situations of violent conflict, under what circumstances they do, and why there appears to be very little momentum behind a peaceful solution as opposed to arguing the toss about who’s on what side and which side is “right”. UNQUOTE
I have been following this thread with interest, and I believe it illustrates mark’s point well. My own comments have been minor (Tue and Wed are 14 hour work days for me) and I have confined them mostly to presentation of facts. Yes, I’m on the sidelines here, watching the two teams in play.
The general nature of the thread show two methods in use. I’ll arbitrarily call them A and B.
In the A Method, there is a lot of emotion and passion. It is quote obvious that beliefs are strongly held and can be immutable. Examples include the UN school casualties. Very strong and condemnatory language was used to decry IDF actions before the facts were known. Then the main casualty event was shown to be caused by a Hamas violation – a formal war crime as defined by the UN – and the IDF statements in that case were vindicated. A rational and dispassionate observer would then give additional weighting to the IDF’s contention that it was following LOAC in the other two cases, as it has been repeatedly and very clearly demonstrated that Hamas is not following LOAC. Instead, the opposite occurred, and emotions ran higher, in the vein of ‘Oh, OK, THAT one was Hamas but where is the proof about the others?’
In other words, a double standard is obvious, where malign intent is automatically ascribed to Israel, but not to Hamas, or vice-versa. This is proven by other examples on both sides of the divide, such as the continual reference to ‘blockade’, ignoring the publicised fact that the Israelis have been letting supplies through quite regularly, and that Hamas has been stealing these supplies from the UN and selling them to their intended recipients. A ‘blockade’ in its legally defined sense is not and has never occurred here, ‘sanctions’ have been used. This is apparent from a dispassionate examination of the facts and of Israeli actions.
imilarly, a dispassionate examination of Hamas (note that well, Hamas, not Arab!) actions. IIRC one commentator used the term ‘warlord group’ to describe Hamas. This was quite a useful description, but ignores their basic criminality of Hamas’s actions inside Gaza (I am referring to the facts about the way they have run Gaza since election, nothing to do with rockets or Israel). The closest analogue I can find to Hamas is Big Eared Hu’s Green Gang in 1930s Shanghai. The facts show that Hamas act as warlord-criminals. Therefore that is, defacto, what they are.
So the reason Method A actors are part of the problem is that they have fully dehumanised one side of the conflict (in this thread mostly the Israelis, there are some Method A actors who have fully dehumanised Arabs) but not the other.
CAVEAT: this is a generalisation with the acknowledged weaknesses that brings. There are partial exceptions to it.
Obviously, Method A actors on both sides of their footy match will object to this assessment and commence an orgy of nit-picking.
The Method B actors operate in a quite different manner. They look at the facts available and base their views on them. So, to use the examples most discussed above, they observe from available facts that the weighting of factual evidence that the IDF tale re one UN school was much more correct than the Hamas tale. Therefore, it is likely that the IDF tale on the other two incidents is more likely to be true than not. Method B actors do not appear to hold to immutable emotional positions and can be observed to change their minds as the facts dictate. (Viva Keynes! )
CAVEAT: this is a generalisation with the acknowledged weaknesses that brings. There are partial exceptions to it.
Method A actors on BOTH sides are part of the problem. Method B actors have the potential to be part of the solution.
So in partial answer to your question, Mark. People accept dehumanisation where they base their views of the situation on emotion, not on dispassionate assessment of ALL the available facts, and where by their actions they demonstrate that irrespective of the facts, these emotional views are immutable.
I find this disturbing, because it means that emotive ‘progressives’ can conflate support for the Palestinian cause with support for Hamas. This can result in ‘progressives’ opposing liberal democratic traditions within the Israeli polity and supporting a theocratic fascist totalitarian criminal entity: the most reactionary entity it is possible to imagine. Meanwhile, ‘conservatives’ appear to normally find themselves in logical fact-based opposition to this same group of theocratic fascists while supporting the liberal democratic traditions in the Israeli polity.
Bizarre.
IT
klaus, in my case I went from being passionately pro-Israel as a child and early adolescent to being passionately pro-Palestinian in early adulthood before achieving equilibrium as an advocate of mutual recognition and a two-state solution by about 24-25.
One interesting aspect is that my youthful passion for Israel was largely not based on a deep understanding of Middle East politics and history but had a basis in my evangelical Protestant religious socialisation. I don’t wish to suggest that this is true for anyone but myself, but I think that part of what happened in my case is that, as I both lapsed from my faith in adolescence, and became aware of facts which undermined my idealisation of Israel, I found myself with an Israel-shaped hole in my psyche, and the Palestinian cause was as close as I could find to an Israel-shaped prosthesis. Again, without wishing to press the point too far, when I observe the rancour which non-Jewish and non-Palestinian barrackers for one side or the other frequently bring to Israel/Palestine debates, I find it difficult to imagine how such passions could be based solely on rational consideration of evidence and arguments about the conflict, and think that psychoanalysis has a role to play in explaining this phenomenon.
I recall there were passionate arguments against South African apartheid in the 80s by people all over the world (and of course there were some prepared to defend it, although I doubt they’d be admitting to that these days). While opposition to South African aparthied was obviously motivated by moral outrage, I don’t think you could have said that a rational consideration of evidence and arguments about the conflict there should have necessarily lessened that moral outrage. Of course the comparison between Israel’s policy and South Africa’s policy is grossly unfair to South Africa.
That is very interesting, Paul, and I agree about psychoanalysis. I’ve never been strongly pro-Israel, although after spending some time looking at the history when I was younger I moved from a kind of naive sympathy for Zionism in the abstract to a qualified pro-Palestinian position that, for a while, veered towards the extreme, largely I think because so little was at stake for me personally that it was easy to pronounce upon the topic. I’ve since arrived at a position that proceeds not from questions of justice (which are still important) but from the assumption that the importance of historical wounds (and wondedness), however fresh, needs to take a back seat to the safety and well-being of everybody who already lives in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and displaced elsewhere in the Arab world. I guess it’s something like a utilitarian position.
Yeti, I think we can make a meaningful distinction between outrage over (say) Israel’s current policies in Gaza, and outrage over the mere fact that Israel exists.
Apologies Mark for contributing to thread drift.
To at least try and draw a circle back to the original topic of your post, I think that the absence of an agreement over the applicability of international law to all parties is also an issue, and certainly armchair observers in the west, as this thread has demonstrated, love to argue it back and forth.
this article on the school incident I think demonstrates the range of considerations from an international law perspective for both parties.
It also extends in the broad of course to the fact that some, linking to Paul’s point, deny Israel’s right to exist, and refuse to accept that international law has clearly determined otherwise.
wiki has a pretty decent summary of the international law issues around this conflict.
Paul – I find it difficult to imagine how such passions could be based solely on rational consideration of evidence and arguments about the conflict
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I find it difficult to believe that rational consideration of evidence has anything to do with it.
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and think that psychoanalysis has a role to play in explaining this phenomenon.
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Mmmm into psychoanalysis aren’t we? In my opinion it’s an interesting literary tool but I wouldn’t regard it as empirically reliable. That said there’s more understanding human beings in one act of King Lear then in the whole corpus of behavioural science.
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But following Freud, who follows Darwin, perhaps it’s an extension of intra species zero sum death struggles. Two tribes struggling for the same vital resource will regard the other as ‘not human’. We’ve just shifted this up to a global scale. (Stpd fkn mnkys).
The Israeli lobby likes to conflate the existence of Israel with its control of foreign territory. I don’t think there are many people in the West who are outraged over the fact that Israel exists (as opposed to its occupation and colonization project), although if you are a truly committed anti-racist you might find the idea of a State that defines itself in racial terms to be fundamentally immoral.
Of course the are many Palestinians who are outraged over the existence of Israel, but considering what has been done to them within living memory I hardly think that this requires much psychoanalysis. And even they have been prepared to accept the 67 borders.
I’d just reiterate that the people whose rancorous passions were the subject of my conjecture were not Palestinians or Jews, but their non-Palestinian and non-Jewish barrackers respectively who get very angry on their behalf, project narcissistically onto them, often make swingeing claims on their behalf phrased in very inflammatory language which is often insulting to the other party, generally show a great enthusiasm for fighting to the last drop of someone else’s blood, and get very upset when someone nominally on the side they’re barracking for moves in the direction of compromise, moderation and internal criticism. One example I have in mind is a certain vociferous WASP Israel barracker of my generation who for thirty years has been quick to denounce Israeli and Jewish dissenters from official Israeli policy as “self-haters”.
Interesting you should say that about evangelical Protestant socialisation, Paul. Before you click or mouseover this link to the author, consider these two paragraphs, which might have been written by a strongly pro-Palestinian left-winger:
My italics.
I’ve posted the third part of Israel, Palestine and Gaza at BPOV. I’m not blog-whoring – the series has been largely as a result of debates over here.
Are you back on normal time Rob, or is the Ministry paying you a special rate,its Friday tomorrow then Sat, so will it be time and half for the first two hours then double time,or are you paid by the word like most professional hacks working for the Ministry to keep an eye on and attempt to spin things the IDFs and the Israelis way
You have to wonder whether the nature of the blog-o-sphere has had a role in producing even more more sharply defined opinions on the subjects. It’s certainly not to blame, as inflamed passions have existed for a long time, but it’s now a bit easier to exist in an echo chamber of agreement, only strolling out occasionally to do battle with the other side.
On the psych front it’s interesting that a whole phenomenon (the Hostile Media Effect) was identified through research on people’s perception of media coverage of the I/P conflcit.
Shaun; war is of course unpredictable and the Israeli government could think it has a real interest in escalating this into Lebanon. I very much doubt it, but Zionist electoral politics are in play here, and so are Islamist politics in Lebanon. I would think that a proportional response directed only at the launching sites would be the bigger vote winner on this front at the present time, if rockets keep up and I suspect they might.
I don’t follow the Israeli voting intentions polling as it unfolds but the players in contention there do intently. So if for example Netanyahu were to call for a stronger response he might be seen as tougher or more reckless by the swinging voters and I just don’t know, but IMV the current government response will be based on what electoral advantage is perceived so we will have to wait and see. All will be fully revealed in just over one months time.
I note that the shift of spin now is all towards destroying the tunnels out the back of the world’s largest prison into Egypt. Naturally tunnels can be destroyed and the Palestinian government will want them gone, once the border has been normalized.
I also note that the issue of Syria is also creeping into the picture.
Desipis; The Palestinians are war weary people in desperate need of peace. My view is that the best assumption at this stage would be that a revolutionary peace will break out because a people that have had war made on them for over sixty years and that have just won their own state could be expected to seek a ‘peace dividend’ and try to build a life.
When the Palestinian state comes in the not to distant future it will have been won through an incredible level of struggle, that has inevitably militarized almost its entire population of young men. The occupiers have jailed many thousands of them for their resistance activities, so the victory will very likely bring forth a dominant new and democratic political leadership setting off what amounts to a revolutionary transformation. Reform from top to bottom might well be ‘the order of the day’ from the word go with the new president Marwan Barghouti and all of the thousands of other released prisoners playing a very prominent role in reforming their society.
This state when it is established will have enough to do making ‘war’ on the abject poverty that it finds itself in and that it has been deliberately driven to by its Zionist oppressors. But remember this new state will come into existence while world wide capitalism is convulsing in one of its well known massive crisis of overproduction the boom having now ended in the inevitable bust after being prolonged by extending credit. So it strikes me as realistic to speculate that even a form of social revolution as being immediately on the agenda.
What that means in a moderately Islamic society where the masses seeks personal freedoms of the Lebanese form but have little capital and when their giant neighbor Egypt is also very likely to be convulsing it’s way through a revolution as one of the weakest links in the world capitalist systems is anybodies guess.
We are living through interesting times!
My mistake I though I was IN II could a moderator please swap?
Woooo! I just went to Catallaxy on the hoax trail, and stumbled on their Israel thread. Blimey, I’m getting rave reviews over there, I must say. Best laughs Ive had since the halcyon days of Birdy’s “lying fascist” screeds.
Incidentally, Adrien – it would seem I owe you thanks, old chap – for merely being a “dopey wanker” rather than a “genocidal maniac” and/or “anti-Zionist (possibly anti-semite) exterminationist”. Cheers!
I don’t know how you do it though. Its like a meeting of paranoiacs whipping each other into a symptomatic frenzy. The thread reminds me of that Simpsons episode where in the end they’re all agreed that it was “the saucer people — under the supervision of the reverse vampires” what dunnit..
..with you and Soon doing your best Lisa Simpson.
I think I’ll close this thread off permanently. I obviously didn’t achieve my intention of stimulating a debate about peace and war and the broader principles concerned, rather than arguing the toss over the current events.
If anybody has an on topic contribution to make, please email me.