Dave W.M.Y.B., I have questioned the actions of Israeli troops in the Palestinian city of Jenin too, but so far I believe the Israeli version of events.
As I said, the Palestinians have every motivation to lie about Isreal and try to escalate the conflict, or at least tarnish Israel internationally.

  • The city of Jenin, a densely populated refugee camp, has very narrow streets, so the bulldozers were used to widen some strategic streets to allow tanks to run freely through the city, and adequately patrol the area for snipers and resistance (as opposed to levelling the entire city).
  • Palestinian fighters and snipers hid among the refugees, so it was impossible to fight the Palestinian soldiers without injuring non-combatants.
  • If Israel wanted wholesale slaughter, they would have just carpet-bombed and leveled the city, not put their troops at risk with house-to-house fighting, and a comparatively minimal body count.
  • When Israelis took the city of Jenin, it was littered with pipe bombs on doors and apartments, and very likely a good portion of the Palestinian deaths could have been caused by Palestinian gunfire and bombs, as easily as that of Israelis.
  • Israeli intelligence showed that the Red Crescent (again, the Muslim equivalent of Red Cross medical relief) was infiltrated with Palestinian collaborators, who would have used their ambulances to re-supply Palestinian soldiers they were fighting. The news always says "Israeli soldiers would not allow medical relief personnel on the battlefield," but never explains WHY the Israelis did not.

Israel has literally endured YEARS of terrorism (unrelenting since the Oslo Peace Accord was signed in 1993, but especially increased and ongoing for the last two years ), and only now are the Israelis finally acting to shut the terrorism off at its source. Again, Israel has elected several liberal leaders in the last 8 years, it was the actions of Palestinian terrorist groups and the obvious deceit and complicity of the PLO (or, at best, the deliberate inaction by the PLO) that finally forced Israel's hand to invade the West Bank and wipe out the centers of the terror-bombings.

And again regarding European "neutrality" , in the example of Germany, if they were neutral and wanted peace for both sides, why did Germany cut off shipment of tanks and other military supplies to Israel, while simultaneously approving another 42 million in aid to the Palestinians (which will clearly be used to wage war on Israel) ?
Arafat didn't fund the terrorism, right.
And he didn't have anything to do with that ship full of weapons from Iran two months ago that Israel siezed on the Red Sea, even though the Captain of the vessel said it was bound for the PLO, and it was later proved beyond any doubt that Arafat's PLO security director ordered it. Arafat and all his top officials lied about involvement, up until evidence exposed them as clear liars, and now, unable to lie with any plausible deniability, Arafat now admits he ordered the arms shipment.

What has Arafat, who has consistently lied, and whose PLO Charter and rhetoric toward Israel (despite any public lip-service toward peace or his signing of the Oslo Accord would indicate) presents a message of aggression as clear as Hitler's Final Solution and Lebensraum were, from Mein Kampf forward.

And conversely, what has Israel done that historically or presently indicates they are not to be believed? So far there is no evidence of a "massacre", just heavily hyped emotional rhetoric from the Palestinians.

It seems to me that Palestine (despite the PLO's endless lies and broken promises and half-truths) is favored by the media, and the world.

There have been any number of studies that show anti-semitism is alive and well in Europe. Nazi Germany is blamed for what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust, but every country except Denmark eagerly handed over their Jews to the Nazis during the war.

Hitler (and Nazi Germany) didn't invent anti-semitism, he simply exploited it. Anti-semitism is as old as Christianity, and the lynchings and pogroms (the Russian word for rioting against Jews) is almost as old as Western civilization.
I saw a documentary called The Longest Hatred on PBS a few years ago, that says despite the fact that there are almost no Jews in Poland, anti-semitism is very strong there.

Even assuming the best scenario, that the PLO would honor the Oslo Peace Accord, the PLO has never renounced their charter decaring that ALL of the British Mandate for the state of Palestine be under Palestinian-Arab control before their liberation war will be declared over(the British Mandate existed from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when it became a British colony, from the end of WW I until 1947, after which it was partitioned into Jewish and Palestinian-Arab sections, at which point the Arabs declared war on the Jews in the initial Israeli war for independence).

Even at the height of the 1993-1994 optimism of peace and an independent Palestine, Arafat never ceased in his rhetoric for the destruction of Israel, and chanting "Death to Israel" with crowds of Palestinians.

Again, the deal was land for peace, and Israel was never given peace.

Here is a link to the PLO Charter:

http://www.netaxz.com/~iris/plochart.htm

Pay special attention to articles 2, 9, 19, 20, 21, 22,
and relative to the U.S. specifically, article 29.

In the last few days, the Palestinians have murdered those of their own citizens they believed
gave intelligence to the invading Israelis, and after killing them, dragged their bodies across the streets of Ramallah, and strung their corpses up in the town square. That is burning hate for Israel, captured for the TV cameras and broadcast on CBS News last night.

Burning hatred not easily quenched by promises of an independent West Bank and Gaza, when Palestinian policy, word and action all show it would simply be stage 1, toward the complete annihilation of Israel.

I strongly believe these are people who will not be satisfied with an independent Palestine. The lessons of history and four wars (and countless other minor police actions of Israeli self-defense) have shown that.

[ 04-26-2002: Message edited by: Dave the Wonder Boy ]

[ 04-26-2002: Message edited by: Dave the Wonder Boy ]