lissen, man... get back in yer plastic suit, and return to the phantom zone (i.e; try n'keep this forum, and the deep thoughts forum clean. hulk up the rest all y'want).
Thease people have been doing there beat to kill each other for many years. They will still be trying to kill each other many years from now.I thank God that I don't live that way.
I used to be very sympathetic to the Palestinians.
Then the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord that both Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) signed, allowed for gradual return of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians. If Palestinian terrorism had not continued, then Israel would have already returned the entire occupied territory to the Palestinians by September 2000. Arafat's complicity in the continued terrorism toward Israel all along has taken the land away from the Palestinians, not Israeli aggression. The PLO's malevolence toward Israel resulted in election of the most right-wing extremist government that could possibly be elected in Israel, because the Israeli people have become increasingly scared by the PLO's ratcheting up of the violence. An article I read in the April 8th 2002 Time issue, page 30 says that Israelis have been monitoring every telephone call and fax from Arafat's Rammallah office. And they have clear evidence that, far from attempting in any way to contain Palestinian terrorism, he is complicit in orchestrating the terrorism.
If the PLO had simply followed the agreement they signed, they would, as of early 2000, have had a free and independent Palestine. It was land for peace, but they didn't give Israel peace. So Israel pulled the plug.
Israel can be faulted for continuing to start new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. And in that sense, Israel violated the Oslo agreement as well. I also don't like how Jews have been purchasing all the Arab land in Arab East Jerusalem, to try and drive the Arabs out by purchasing all the Arab real estate.
But I still think the Jewish settlements part of it, and other issues, could have been resolved through negotiation. After all, Israel went on with the Oslo plan even after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1994 (by, ironically, an angry Jewish settler, not an Arab). Even after a shock like that, Israel still wanted peace.
But the PLO clearly doesn't. The PLO's founding charter says every last inch of "the former British Palestine" [in other words, all of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, AND all of Israel] "must be under Palestinian rule". It's not the West Bank and Gaza that the PLO wants, it's the total annihilation of Israel.
I've spoken to many Palestinians, and I think many Palestinian PEOPLE would be content to have the West Bank and Gaza. But clearly the Palestinian LEADERSHIP wants more than that, and continues to push for Israel's destruction, even as they give lip service to wanting peace and an end to Palestinian deprivation and suffering.
I really think it's only the United States who understands this. But even President Bush's support of Israel's right to defend itself is half-hearted at best, as Bush struggles to appease Muslim countries somewhat friendly toward the U.S., to prevent a total meltdown of the Middle East, and gain support for a future invasion of Iraq.
The U.S. stands pretty much alone in its support of Israel, as this article below makes clear:
U.N. PANEL BASHES ISRAEL By Elizabeth Olson The New York Times Posted April 16 2002
GENEVA ยท The United Nations' top human rights body voted overwhelmingly on Monday to criticize Israel for what it called "mass killings" during military operations in the West Bank and called for Israel to withdraw its forces.
The resolution in the Commission on Human Rights was introduced by Pakistan and co-sponsored by 11 other members among the 53 nations on the commission, including China and Cuba, and it gained European support as well.
It "strongly condemns" Israel for "the war launched by the Israeli army against Palestinian towns and camps, which has resulted so far in the death of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including women and children."
It also said the incursion included "acts of mass killings perpetrated by the Israeli occupying authorities against the Palestinian people."
The resolution passed by a vote of 40-5, with seven abstentions.
One nation, Peru, neither voted nor abstained.
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Yaakov Levy, said the resolution wrongly ignored human rights violations by Palestinians, was "one-sided and inflammatory" and was replete with "wild, inaccurate exaggerations."
The commission annually holds a separate debate about Israel, unlike other countries, but Levy said the resolution this year was particularly unfair because it "does not condemn suicide bombings and gives them a license to continue this policy of terrorism."
The United States, which normally votes with Israel, is absent from the commission this year after losing its seat in a surprise vote. It has regained the seat for next year's commission.
The five countries that voted against the resolution were Britain, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany and Guatemala. Among European countries, Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Sweden voted for the resolution.
Two nations, Italy and Poland abstained.
Walter Lewalter, Germany's delegate, said his country voted against the resolution because it contained "formulations that might be interpreted as an endorsement of violence."
He added, "There is no condemnation whatsoever of terrorism."
There's a noteable absence of compassion here for Israelis killed by PLO-orchestrated suicide bombers and other terrorist violence, that the current Israeli "acts of violence" have set out to neutralize.
[ 04-21-2002: Message edited by: Dave the Wonder Boy ]
And here's an interesting article from Time magazine:
HOW THE U.S. CAN RESTORE MIDEAST PEACE: Separating a cease-fire from political negotiations has failed. It's time to force both sides to face the future
Thursday, Apr. 04, 2002
Sending Colin Powell in to replace Anthony Zinni as the Bush administration's Mideast envoy isn't enough. The secretary of state has to come armed with a new approach. The reason General Zinni's mission failed wasn't the fact that he's not a high-level cabinet officer; it was that he wasn't given the tools with which to do the job. Washington reportedly had insisted that Zinni push for a cease-fire without any link to negotiations over the political future of the West Bank and Gaza. That was never going to work — even Israel's security and intelligence chiefs had warned as much — and it left the administration standing ineffectually on the sidelines as violence spun dangerously out of control.
So Powell needs to make sure Palestinian independence is plainly stated as the final goal of any truce. Yasser Arafat has long made it clear that he won't respond to Bush's demand to crack down on terrorism until talks about the future of a Palestinian state resume. Senator George Mitchell summed up the deadlock in his report last year: The Israelis (and, apparently, the Bush administration) are concerned that linking an end to violence with political negotiations would reward terrorism, but the Palestinians believe that a cease-fire without restoring political negotiations is to acquiesce to continued occupation. The stark choice for the White House: Be consistent with its rhetoric on not rewarding terrorism, or be an effective peace broker.
A two-state solution
And President Bush gave Powell a solid sendoff Thursday with a message that both insisted that an end to terrorism is the key to progress, but also that such progress requires an end to Israeli settlement activity and, ultimately, an end to its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Clearly spelling out the ultimate destination is the most effective way of securing a cease-fire, and President Bush spoke of two states coexisting peacefully along the lines envisaged in the Oslo peace process and the recent Arab League proposal. While considerable disagreement may remain over borders and the terms of their separation, the two-state solution remains an essential point of consensus among not only Western and Arab governments, but also among at least half of Israel's electorate and at least the same proportion of Palestinians. The Bush administration needs to forcefully assert that vision — and make it more specific on issues such as sharing Jerusalem, and addressing the plight of Arab refugees in a manner that maintains Israel's Jewish majority.
The primary question is how to get back on track to a two-state solution. A cease-fire is an indispensable step, but one that won't be taken in the absence of a commitment by all parties to go the distance. In the absence of that commitment, even a cease-fire may be wishful thinking.
Oslo's basic premise was that the Palestinians would renounce violence and guarantee Israel's security in exchange for Israel agreeing in principle to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. That Oslo's breakdown has led to a resumption of violence is no surprise; before the agreement, the two sides had been locked in a six-year intifada.
The fire this time
Right now, the Palestinians believe violence is their most effective means of ending the occupation. Sharon is determined to prove them wrong by a massive show of military force. But escalating Israeli military pressure is simply deepening the militancy of Palestinian society, and the Palestinians believe they can outlast the Israelis in a war of attrition. The reason: Israel is a relatively prosperous middle class society plugged into the global economy, and less than one percent of its population actually live in settlements in the West Bank and Gaza; but the three million Palestinians who live there are an occupied people in desperate social and economic straits. Unlike the Israelis, the Palestinians believe they have little to lose.
The Bush administration had hoped to get Arafat to renounce violence without a reciprocal commitment from Sharon to do anything more than ease up on security measures. That approach has failed. But if the endpoint is a two-state solution, then there's no harm in combining cease-fire efforts with moves to reopen negotiations over ending the occupation. The counter-argument has been that this would "reward violence." But that's simply denial of the obvious — the only reason the Israelis started talking to the Palestinians in the first place was because they were in a state of violent rebellion. The Oslo process would never have happened were it not for the first intifada. The purpose of a peace process is to create mechanisms other than force for each side to pursue their objectives. To avoid creating such mechanisms for fear of "rewarding violence" only prolongs the season of violence.
The way out
Breaking the downward cycle requires a restatement of the basic reciprocal commitments — renouncing violence and ending the occupation. Israel believes the past 18 months have proved that Arafat never renounced violence, and they're unlikely ever to trust him again. But the Palestinians believe that Sharon has never had any intention of ending the occupation, which would involve negotiating a withdrawal to something close to Israel's pre-1967 borders — positions he's always fiercely opposed.
A new American peace initiative can't be dependent on Arafat and Sharon. But it requires the Israeli and Palestinian people to consider their final destination. The bloodbath of the past month, and the past 18 months, has made the prospect of mutual trust more remote than ever. Breaking the deadlock, then, may require that they put their trust in a third party willing to enforce the reciprocal commitments for years, or even decades, to come. It may be difficult to separate the combatants, now, without an international monitoring or peacekeeping force in which both sides have sufficient trust. That suggests a dominant role for the U.S., possibly in concert with forces drawn from the European Union, Turkey, Jordan or even Egypt.
An aggressive new peace initiative designed to map out and secure the two-state separation backed by a hands-on peacekeeping commitment may be far deeper involvement than the Bush administration had ever countenanced. But the alternative may be to watch U.S. policy in the Middle East policy be slowly burned to a crisp, much to the delight of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
[ 04-16-2002: Message edited by: Dave the Wonder Boy ]
I'd recommend www.guardian.co.uk for news and analysis. This article "Parallel universes" is from today:
Most of the world sees Palestinians as the victims, but in Israel and the US events are given a different meaning
Jonathan Freedland Wednesday April 17, 2002 The Guardian
Of all the stories and testimonies emerging from the ruins of Jenin, one detail, picked up by the Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg, captures completely the strange tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. It does not convey the horror wrought in that West Bank town, nor the suffering of its victims. But it says everything about why this disaster is happening. Goldenberg describes a line of graffiti, written in "neat blue ink", on a wall in the home of Aisha Salah. She is a Palestinian whose house was seized by Israeli soldiers, for use as a base of operations. Before they left, one of them took up his pen and wrote on the wall: "I don't have another land."
That was no spur of the moment doodle. That is a phrase ingrained in the Israeli, and wider Jewish, consciousness. Ein Lee Eretz Acheret is even the title of a favourite Hebrew folk song, the kind of standard that will be performed at countless Israeli Independence Day celebrations later today.
That simple, almost apologetic phrase, "I have no other land" expresses how Israelis and Jews see themselves in this conflict - as a victim nation, exiled, dispossessed and desperate for their own home - and how far apart that is from the way almost everyone else sees them. It goes to the heart of the strange truth about the current conflict: that the two sides are living in parallel universes, where the same set of facts has two entirely different meanings depending where you stand.
Palestinians are clear on what they see. They are the victims of an aggression so brutal it has shocked even them, a people who have suffered so much. In the Battle of Jenin, as Palestinian national myth will no doubt come to know it, they have seen a town shaken and upended as if by man-made earthquake: homes sliced, whole blocks flattened and reduced to rubble.
The streets are strewn with corpses, and there are more underneath the wreckage. Palestinians say bodies were piled up and taken away in trucks; that men were lined up, thinking they were under arrest, and shot; that homes were hit by helicopter gunships even as civilians cowered inside. Among the dead are the elderly and the very young, left to die, it is said, because no ambulance was allowed to get near. For Palestinians, Jenin 2002 is a tragedy on a par with Beirut 1982, when Christian Phalangists massacred hundreds in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, unhindered by the Israeli army which then ruled the city.
The Palestinians' friends around the world will draw a similar conclusion. Most of world opinion will be outraged by the images at last coming out of Jenin: the front page of every broadsheet newspaper in Britain yesterday adopted the same tone of shock and fury at the havoc Israel had wrought.
Britons and others will see an already beleaguered people taking yet another pounding from a regional superpower which has no business being there in the first place. They will see the home-made pipe bombs and booby-traps, discovered by the Israelis, and see only the meagre tools of resistance - the puny weapons of a powerless people confronting a mighty occupier.
The arrest of the key Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouti, will just confirm the view that Goliath is trying to choke David. The images of the small, uniformed Barghouti led off by Israeli soldiers will evoke memories of every dissident detained throughout history, jailed by the hated regime he was struggling to depose. If he is put on trial, it will be seen as a show trial - an attempt by Israel to crush a political challenge by legal means.
Yet just a few short miles away, in Israel, these same events mean something else completely. Israel is a small nation, just 6 million people, that has faced an onslaught in recent months unimaginable in any other western country: every day bringing carnage to the high street, the wedding celebration, the religious service. Just as Americans were determined to wipe out the "hornets' nest" which had sent the 19 hijackers of September 11 their way, so Israel has finally set to work rooting out the terrorists who have made Israelis' lives a daily hell. In this view, Jenin is Israel's Kandahar, dispatching nearly one in four of the suicide bombers who have deliberately murdered civilians, often targeting the young and defenceless.
There is damage, to be sure. But, say the Israelis, it's not much worse than the way parts of Afghanistan looked after the US military set to work on al-Qaida strongholds there. Some civilians were killed, but that's what happens when terrorists hide among the innocent. To support the US battle against the Taliban only to oppose Israel's own war against terrorism is to be guilty of a double standard. What would the critics have Israel do? Sit there and take it? Israel asked Yasser Arafat to clean out the terrorists and he didn't do the job - just as the Taliban never booted out al-Qaida. So, following a lead set by George Bush and Tony Blair, Ariel Sharon did what he had to do.
Those weapons stashes found in Jenin, like the armed men who shot back, killing 23 Israeli soldiers, only go to show what kind of terror academy the town had become. As for Barghouti, would anyone have raised an outcry if the Americans arrested Mullah Omar? Yet, say the Israelis, there is ample evidence linking Barghouti to the young "martyrs" who kill themselves and others: he gets the credit for wresting the suicide tactic out of the hands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and getting Arafat's own Fatah movement in on the action.
Judged like that, Operation Defensive Shield is messy, yes, but wholly justified. And this is not only the view of Sharon and the hardliners in his cabinet. A poll conducted last week, admittedly before the truth of Jenin came to light, found 86% Israeli support for the military campaign in the West Bank. That would include a large number of people who once identified with the peace camp and the left.
And they do not inhabit this universe alone. On Monday an estimated 100,000 people, mainly American Jews, gathered at the steps of the US Capitol to protest in favour of Israel. They note the rise in anti-semitism worldwide, see an Arab "street" inherently hostile to any Jewish state in their midst, and reflect on the suicide bombers and their choice of targets - the latest, biggest one during a Passover seder - and believe that, not for the first time, Jews are facing an existential threat. And remember, like the song says, they have no other land. So they carry placards comparing Sharon to Winston Churchill, glad that someone is fighting back.
These are the two universes, now living in parallel. In Washington, thousands gather to demand justice for the endangered people of Israel. In London, 36 hours earlier, 50,000 gather demanding justice for the endangered people of Palestine. Both sides believe they are the victim, both sides are fighting for their very lives. And, like parallel lines, they never touch.
I just saw this one too:MP accuses Sharon of 'barbarism'
All sides condemn West Bank incursions
Nicholas Watt, political correspondent Wednesday April 17, 2002 The Guardian
The veteran Labour MP and prominent Jewish parliamentarian, Gerald Kaufman, yesterday launched a ferocious attack on the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, denouncing him as a "war criminal" who was staining the Star of David.
Speaking in a Commons debate on the Middle East crisis, in which MPs from across the house condemned Israel's incursions into the West Bank, Mr Kaufman likened Mr Sharon's tactics to the actions of Zionist terrorists in Palestine in the 1940s.
In an emotional speech, in which he described himself as a lifelong friend of Israel, the former shadow foreign secretary said: "Sharon has ordered his troops to use methods of barbarism against the Palestinians ... It is time to remind Sharon that the Star of David belongs to all Jews and not to his repulsive government. His actions are staining the Star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilised discourse include Einstein and Epstein, are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians in the Sabra-Shatila camp and now involved in killing Palestinians once again."
To nods of approval from MPs, Mr Kaufman condemned Palestinian suicide bombers. But he added that it was important to ask why Palestinians resort to such tactics. "We need to ask how we would feel if we had been occupied for 35 years by a foreign power which denied us the most elementary human rights and decent living conditions."
Mr Kaufman then likened the suicide bombers to the Zionist Irgun and Stern gangs, which launched a series of terrorist attacks in Palestine in the run-up to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
"We need to ask what the Jews did in comparable circumstances," he said. "In 1946 the Irgun controlled by Menacham Begin blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem, slaughtering 91 innocent people. In 1948 the Palestinians denounced what they described as a massacre in the village of Deir Yassin ... The difference between the Deir Yassin massacre and what happened in Jenin is that Deir Yassin was the work of terrorist groups denounced by mainstream Jewish groups. The horrors in Jenin were carried out by the official Israeli army."
A Blair loyalist, Mr Kaufman warned that Mr Sharon's conduct had made it impossible for Britain and the United States to take action against Iraq. "To do so would unite the whole Muslim world against the US, the coalition against terrorism would disintegrate, western economies could suffer a shock comparable to the oil shock of 1973."
Mr Kaufman's attack on the Israeli government were echoed across the chamber. The former Tory cabinet minister, John Gummer, said that a fundamental distinction should be drawn between the actions of the Israelis and that of the Arabs.
"Israel is a state, with the trappings of a state which claims the legitimacy of a state and the more that it rightly claims that legitimacy, the more it has to be judged by the standards of a state and the standards of democracy," he said.
Amid such a serious Middle East crisis it was irresponsible of Washington to take such a tough stance against Iraq, Mr Gummer warned. He criticised the "kind of approach that says that we judge what is in our self-interest and our self-defence and thereby can do anything we like, irrespective either of international law or the UN or indeed frankly of the evidence before us".
Ann Clwyd, the Labour backbencher who has just returned from a visit to the Jenin refugee camp with the UN, said the EU should consider economic sanctions against Israel. Apologising for her croaky voice, caused by dust from Israeli tanks, she said it was not enough for European countries to "simply bleat condemnation".
Ms Clwyd added: "They need to withdraw European ambassadors from Israel. They need to impose an arms embargo as Germany has already done, and they should consider what economic sanctions can be put in place."
Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, condemned both sides. He also rounded on anti-Semitic groups in Britain which have distributed "hateful" leaflets. "They are an affront to decency, they disfigure democratic society and they disgrace our democracy," he said.
I generally find what I've read in The Guardian consistently liberal and Anti-American. But I think both the articles you posted are informative, and the first ("Most of the World Sees Palestinians as Victims...", by Jonathan Freedland ) is remarkably fair to BOTH sides of the issue.
Like I said, the evidence the Israelis have found (in Jenin, and in Arafat's Ramallah administration compound) shows that Arafat and his leadership is INDISPUTABLY involved in funding and orchestrating the suicide bombings against Israel.
I find it absurd to blame Israel for defending itself against terrorism that clearly violates the Oslo peace agreement, and relentlessly endangers Israeli citizens.
I've seen much news media coverage interviewing Palestinian refugees who say the Israelis are indiscriminantly massacreing every Palestinian they could get in their gunsights, regardless of whether they were civilians or fighters. On CBS News, and PBS' The News Hour, I saw interviews of refugee women and children who had gunshot wounds that seem to corroborate their version of events. One Palestinian woman, who was pregnant and in labor, was not allowed to reach a hospital to care for her childbirth, and was shot and injured as she attempted to do so. She reached the hospital and was able to give birth. Noticeably absent from virtually all the news I've seen is any attempt to explain why the Israelis pushed back the media and medical care.
Only on a panel of guests on PBS' The McLaughlin Group did I hear one of the news media panelists attempt to explain this. He said Israeli intelligence had evidence the Red Crescent (Muslim medical aid equivalent of The Red Cross) was infiltrated with terrorists whose ambulaces and medics would have been used to resupply arms and ammunition to the Palestinian side of the battle. And when the Palestinians have been using women and children as suicide bombers, arguably everyone in these areas is a threat, and the Israeli troops are defending themselves.
If the Israelis were attempting wholesale slaughter of Ramallah and Jenin, the Israelis could have just carpet-bombed these areas, at little risk to their troops.
I might also add that there's no evidence of mass slaughter. And if there IS mass slaughter of Palestinians, the investigations that have already begun would surely expose it.
A friend of mine in South Florida, a police officer in the city of Boynton, used to tell me that he went into black inner city areas to do his job, breaking up domestic disputes, arresting thieves and drug dealers on arrest warrants, etc., and since he was white, they would give him lots of crap for doing his job, by filing false reports on him and other officers for police brutality, and accusations that he used the N-word and so forth. He said it was very frustrating. I know him not to be a racist, and on top of that, he's a highly motivated college graduate, with aspirations to keep an exemplary record so he can advance to the FBI. I know for certain he's not some musclehead, aggressive and cocky and high on his police authority, looking to bash some minority heads. But people eager to get back at him any way they can are eager to slander him and other police officers. How much more motivated to lie about the Israelis are these Palestinian refugees ?
I find it weird as hell that the European Union has begun economic sanctions against Israel, and that Germany has cut off shipments of arms and tanks to Israel (that Israel already ordered and purchased), but at the same time Europe voted to give 42 million dollars in aid to the PLO, who have just been shown in the last week to be using every nickel of that aid to fund explosives, suicide bombers, and other terrorist aggression against Israel.
If Europe doesn't want to support "Israeli aggression" (which is arguably self-defense), then logic would dictate they would not want to support PLO aggression either. But that's what the EU is doing.
I'd like to see direct aid in the form of reconstruction of homes for the Palestinians, and development of an economy and jobs in the West Bank and Gaza, that is done directly by the U.S. and other European nations, and NOT through ANY connection to the PLO. Business development in the occupied areas will give the Palestinians better lives, and eliminate the sense of having nothing left to lose, that has generated this terror and suicide-bomber culture in the last 15 years in the occupied areas. This might motivate the Palestinian people to form more moderate leadership, that would marginalize and replace the PLO, and give them and the region a chance of having peace.
The PLO are terrorists, pure and simple. They are not serving the Palestinian people, and they are not giving more than minimal lip service to peace with Israel. The PLO leadership, and its continued aggression, is precisely why Palestine is not already a free and independent state, as was agreed to by Israel in the 1993 Oslo Peace Agreement to have Palestine become a free and independent state in September 2000, if the PLO themselves had not ratcheted up the terror that destroyed the peace process.
The PLO has to be replaced if peace is to move forward. As I said earlier, the Palestinian PEOPLE may want peace, but the Palestinian LEADERSHIP clearly does not.
There is even more documented evidence of the truth in this than there was three weeks ago. Read the April 8, 2002 issue of Time, page 30.
[ 04-21-2002: Message edited by: Dave the Wonder Boy ]
I read an interesting editorial in Time's April 29, 2002 issue last night, page 41. An article titled "Children of the Holocaust: Why do so many Europeans reject America's view of the Middle East?" by Michael Elliott.
It's not posted on their website, and I'm not feeling so energetic that I want to re-type the whole thing here, but thought I'd mention it.
Several possibilities are listed: >>The vastly smaller Jewish population in Europe (as compared to the 7 million in the U.S., more than even the 5 million in Israel, and the maybe 2 million in all of Europe and the middle east), >>shame of many European countries about their complicity with the Nazis in eagerly handing over their Jews to the Nazis, and postwar treatment of Jews when they attempted to return home, that drove them to Israel in droves in the 1940's, >> greater European coverage over the last 20 years for the Palestinian plight, >> the arrogance of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, which is equivalent to whacking a Palestinian hornet's nest with a stick, >>and possibly of pure and simple European anti-semitism.
I think it's a little of all the above.
[ 04-24-2002: Message edited by: Dave the Wonder Boy ]
I'm the opposite of Dave the Wonder Boy: I used to have enormous sympathy and respect for Israel.
Not any longer. Mr Kaufman's speech to Parliament pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter.
The Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, played the lowest card of all when a few days ago he effectively said that European criticism of Israel amounted to anti-Semitism. How ridiculous - how offensive. Europe has stronger anti-semiticism laws than anywhere else on the planet.
quote: Then the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord that both Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) signed, allowed for gradual return of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians. If Palestinian terrorism had not continued, then Israel would have already returned the entire occupied territory to the Palestinians by September 2000. Arafat's complicity in the continued terrorism toward Israel all along has taken the land away from the Palestinians, not Israeli aggression. The PLO's malevolence toward Israel resulted in election of the most right-wing extremist government that could possibly be elected in Israel, because the Israeli people have become increasingly scared by the PLO's ratcheting up of the violence. An article I read in the April 8th 2002 Time issue, page 30 says that Israelis have been monitoring every telephone call and fax from Arafat's Rammallah office. And they have clear evidence that, far from attempting in any way to contain Palestinian terrorism, he is complicit in orchestrating the terrorism.
I would like to see this evidence. Its is widely acknowledged that Arafat has no control over the Hizbollah, and little control over the more extremist factions of his Fatah coalition.
My grave concern is that Americans will pay dearly for this one-eyed support of Israel by the Bush administration. The immediate suspension of military aid to Israel by the US might ameliorate this potential for revenge against the US.
You see, it is one thing to castigate the Palestinians for suicide bombing where a dozen people are killed or injured. It is quite another to send tanks and bulldozers into a city and indiscriminately kill hundreds people.
I am a firm believer in an eventual resolution to this conflict - as historical examples, see Israel and Egypt, Scotland and England, the US and England, France and Germany. Conducting a bloody pogrom is not way forward.
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.
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 ]
quote:Originally posted by Dave the Wonder Boy: [QB]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.
But Israel does not? Of course Israel wants to be perceived as the good guy, and not jeopardise its bankroll from the US.
quote:
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).
The point is that its a "very densely populated refugee camp". Full to the brim of Palestinians who are disenfranchised. If it was full to the brim of Christians or Jews and someone took tanks through it, Americans would be crying for blood.
quote:
Palestinian fighters and snipers hid among the refugees, so it was impossible to fight the Palestinian soldiers without injuring non-combatants.
So instead the Israelis took tanks through a residential area to fight men with machine guns. How is that excusable?
quote:
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.
Reminds me of Nixon saying that he wanted to nuke Hanoi during the Vietnam war, and Kissinger said it was not a good idea because he'd look like a butcher. Much easier and deniable to seal off the area and send in tanks. "House to house" fighting has on the whole involved tank to house fighting. The minimal body count is hundreds of civilians. The Israelis have now marginalised a lot of moderate Palestinians who wanted peace, and created a new generation of young people willing to martyr themselves against Israel and its moral and financial backer, the United States. even Bush recognises that with his half-hearted calls for Israeli withdrawl, in an effort to appear even-handed and no antagonise further terrorist attacks on American soil.
quote:
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.
Source, please. An Israeli government source, perhaps? And do you really think pipe bombs vs tanks is an even match?
quote:
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.
Let me tell you something about the media in all of this. A sharp eyed correspondent to the Economist pointed out that the Atlantic version of Newsweek pulled their story about why the US should stop supporting Israel in their pogrom. That story appeared everywhere except the US. Now why do you supposed that is? the powerful pro-Israel lobby having an influence over the media?
quote:
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.
Or, if you like, the failure of Israeli governments ot meet the demand of the Palestinians which did not involve their country being criss-crossed by Israeli military checkpoints. Funny, but most news providers just said that Arafat wasn't prepared to accept a reasonable offer, not that he was not prepared to comproise on Palestinian sovereignty. So the Palestinians continue, with rocks and guns, to wage a gueriila war against people armed with American gunship helicopters and tanks, who are occupying their territory.
quote: 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) ?
How is that "clear"? Overseas finance for such things is usually for infrastructure, and directly linked to payments for infrastructure. Germany isn't so silly as to provide finance for arms purchases, and the fact you think that makes me think you haven't thought this issue through as clearly as I know you can. Those millions of dollars aren't being used to buy more pipe bombs, y'know. I could buy a few Stinger missiles with 42 mil., but I don't see any of those in Palestinian areas being used against tanks and helicopters.
quote: 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.
But why wouldn't he order arms? His organisation is at war with a vastly superior force. The only regret is that he lied about it.
quote: 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.
Well, that is subjective opinion without factual support, so I won't touch it.
quote: 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.
As it turns out, you are correct. Reports as of 1 May indicate that around 55 people died, and 233 injured. Its a far cry from the hundred originally estimated by the PLO. So, I concede that.
quote:
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.
The Economist has presented even-handed reporting. CNN's website has been very pro-Israeli. I think it just depends what you read.
quote: 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.
Bringing out the anti-Semitism card against Europeans is the lowest blow of all, something also done by Shimon Peres recently, and by Charles Krauthammer of the Wahsington Post. Its is also the lead story in this week's Economist.
Its is just plain wrong. In Europe, calling someone an Anti-Semite is a grievious insult. Europe has the toughest anti-Semitism laws of anywhere (including the US, which, of course, allows freedom of speech including hate speech). You can criticise Israel for completely and incompetantly failing to solve the Palestinians' grievances except through tanks, without being an anti-Semite. You can call their leader a warmonger without being anti-Zionist. Israel has a bad and unfair habit of rubbing Europeans' noses in the Holocaust as a shield to criticism of its policies with the Palestinians.
Pay special attention to articles 2, 9, 19, 20, 21, 22, and relative to the U.S. specifically, article 29.
I decided to go to the Palestinian National Authority's website to look at this, and see what they say:
quote: When the Arab League held its summit in Port Sa'ed in Egypt in 1964, it was decided that a Palestinian political body should be formed to took after the Palestinian interests. Ahmed Shoqaire was nominated as the contact person in charge of implementing that decision. He contacted the Palestinian communities living in the Arab states, and as a result of which the Palestinian National Council held its first meeting between May 5 - June 2, 1964, in Jerusalem. The Palestinian National Council (PNC) decided to establish the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and decided to endorse the Palestinian National charter and PLO's basic law. The Palestinian National Charter consisted of 29 clauses.
After the 1967 defeat and the increase of military fighting activities, the charter was amended by the Palestinian National Council in its fourth session held between August 10- 17, 1968. After the amendment the charter clauses became 23, while some parts were abolished such; as the introduction that preceded the charter.
This document shows how fake the allegations of the Israeli previous government headed by Netanyahu and media about an alleged Palestinian non commitment to implement the Palestinian commitments in the peace process.
So, lets look at them:
quote:#2 - Palestine with its boundaries that existed at the time of the British mandate is an integral regional unit.
Yup, that's their upper limit as to what they want. Start high in negotiations and work your way down. No problem with that.
quote:#9 - Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore a strategy and not a tactic. The Palestinian Arab people affirms its absolute resolution and abiding determination to pursue the armed struggle and to march forward towards the armed popular revolution, to liberate its homeland and restore its right to a natural life, and to exercise its right of self-determination and national sovereignty.
What's the issue with armed struggle against oppression? Americans have this as a lynchpin of their right to bear arms. I have no issue with this.
quote:#19 - The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel is null and void from the very beginning, whatever time has elapsed because it was done contrary to the wish of the people of Palestine and their national right to their homeland and contradicts with the principles embodied in the charter of the UN, the first of which is the right of self- determination.
See my comments for #2. And I fully endorse self-determination.
quote: The Balfour Declaration, the mandate document and what has been based upon them are considered null and void. The claim of a historical or spiritual tie between Jews and Palestine does not tally with the historical realities nor with the constituencies of statehood in their true sense. Judaism in its character as a religion of revelation, is not a nationality with an independent existence. Likewise, the Jews are not one people with an independent personality. They are rather citizens of the states to which they belong.
I disagree with that. Jews are entitled to statehood as much as Palestinians are. Huntington in his book "The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order" denies that Jews are a "civilisation because of the effects of Jewish diaspora. I don't agree.
quote: #21 - The Palestinian Arab people in expressing itself through the armed Palestinian revolution, rejects every solution that is a substitute for a complete liberation of Palestine. and rejects all alternative plans that aim at the settlement of the Palestinian issue or its internationalization
Actions speak louder than words. The Palestinians have been willing to compromise.
quote: #22 - Zionism is a political movement organically related to the world imperialism and is hostile to all movements of liberation and progress in the world. It is a racist and fanatic movement in its formation, aggressive, expansionist, and colonialist in its aims, fascist and nazi in its means. Israel is the tool of the Zionist movement and is a human and geographic base for the world imperialism. It is a concentration and a way for imperialism to the heart of the Arab homeland, to strike at the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity and progress.
While I disagree that Zionism is racist, the effect has to date been to deny Palestinians a sovereign homeland.
quote: #23 - The demands of security peace and the requirement of truth and justice oblige all states that maintain friendly relations with people, and loyalty of citizens to their homeland, to consider Zionism an illegitimate movement and to prohibit its existence and activity.
See above.
quote: #29-The Palestinian Arab people possesses the prior and original right for liberating and restoring its homeland and form its relations with other states according to the later’s stands on the Palestinian issue the extent of their support for the Arab Palestinian people in their revolution to realize their aims.
So you are saying that this impacts upon the US how, exactly? The US has supported in theory a Palestinian homeland. No issue there.
quote: 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.
I had heard that informants were killed. Spies are killed in times of war. Is it the particular Arab, non-Western way of dealing with spies that is offensive?
quote: 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 disagree. A Palestinian state is not a precursor to the decimation of Israel. And what is the alternative? A constant state of war?
quote: 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.
I am firmly of the belief that there are warmongers in both camps who want annihiliation for the other. If peace is to be brought to that part of the world - and clearly it must or there will be more airliners into buildings - there must be a plan which accomdoates both parties. Tanks into refugee camps is not such a plan.
The US presents itself as the peace-broker in the Middle East. The reality is different
Noam Chomsky Saturday May 11, 2002 The Guardian
A year ago, the Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling observed that "what we feared has come true - War appears an unavoidable fate", an "evil colonial" war. His colleague Ze'ev Sternhell noted that the Israeli leadership was now engaged in "colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighbourhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era". Both stress the obvious: there is no symmetry between the "ethno-national groups" in this conflict, which is centred in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for 35 years. The Oslo "peace process", begun in 1993, changed the modalities of the occupation, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that "the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever". He soon became an architect of the US-Israel proposals at Camp David in 2000, which kept to this condition. At the time, West Bank Palestinians were confined to 200 scattered areas. Bill Clinton and Israeli prime minister Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another and from the fourth enclave, a small area of East Jerusalem, the centre of Palestinian communi-cations. The fifth canton was Gaza. It is understandable that maps are not to be found in the US mainstream. Nor is their prototype, the Bantustan "homelands" of apartheid South Africa, ever mentioned.
No one can seriously doubt that the US role will continue to be decisive. It is crucial to understand what that role has been, and how it is internally perceived. The version of the doves is presented by the editors of the New York Times, praising President Bush's "path-breaking speech" and the "emerging vision" he articulated. Its first element is "ending Palestinian terrorism" immediately. Some time later comes "freezing, then rolling back, Jewish settlements and negotiating new borders" to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. If Palestinian terror ends, Israelis will be encouraged to "take the Arab League's historic offer of full peace and recognition in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal more seriously". But first Palestinian leaders must demonstrate that they are "legitimate diplomatic partners".
The real world has little resemblance to this self-serving portrayal - virtually copied from the 1980s, when the US and Israel were desperately seeking to evade PLO offers of negotiation and political settlement. In the real world, the primary barrier to the "emerging vision" has been, and remains, unilateral US rejectionism. There is little new in the current "Arab League's historic offer".
It repeats the basic terms of a security council resolution of January 1976 which called for a political settlement on the internationally recognised borders "with appropriate arrangements ... to guarantee ... the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in the area". This was backed by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states and the PLO but opposed by Israel and vetoed by the US, thereby vetoing it from history. Similar initiatives have since been blocked by the US and mostly suppressed in public commentary.
Not surprisingly, the guiding principle of the occupation has been incessant humiliation. Israeli plans for Palestinians have followed the guidelines formulated by Moshe Dayan, one of the Labour leaders more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Thirty years ago Dayan advised the cabinet that Israel should make it clear to refugees that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave". When challenged, he responded by citing Ben-Gurion, who said that "whoever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect is not a Zionist". He could have also cited Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, who held that the fate of the "several hundred thousand negroes" in the Jewish homeland "is a matter of no consequence".
The Palestinians have long suffered torture, terror, destruction of property, displacement and settlement, and takeover of basic resources, crucially water. These policies have relied on decisive US support and European acquiescence. "The Barak government is leaving Sharon's government a surprising legacy," the Israeli press reported as the transition took place: "the highest number of housing starts in the territories since Ariel Sharon was minister of construction and settlement in 1992 before the Oslo agreements" - funding provided by the American taxpayer.
It is regularly claimed that all peace proposals have been undermined by Arab refusal to accept the existence of Israel (the facts are quite different), and by terrorists like Arafat who have forfeited "our trust". How that trust may be regained is explained by Edward Walker, a Clinton Middle East adviser: Arafat must announce that "we put our future and fate in the hands of the US" - which has led the campaign to undermine Palestinian rights for 30 years.
The basic problem then, as now, traces back to Washington, which has persistently backed Israel's rejection of a political settlement in terms of the broad international consensus. Current modifications of US rejectionism are tactical. With plans for an attack on Iraq endangered, the US permitted a UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the newly-invaded territories "without delay" - meaning "as soon as possible", secretary of state Colin Powell explained at once. Powell's arrival in Israel was delayed to allow the Israeli Defence Force to continue its destructive operations, facts hard to miss and confirmed by US officials.
When the current intifada broke out, Israel used US helicopters to attack civilian targets, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, hardly in self-defence. Clinton responded by arranging what the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz called "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade", along with spare parts for Apache attack helicopters. A few weeks later, Israel began to use US helicopters for assassinations. These extended last August to the first assassination of a political leader: Abu Ali Mustafa. That passed in silence, but the reaction was quite different when Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi was killed in retaliation. Bush is now praised for arranging the release of Arafat from his dungeon in return for US-UK supervision of the accused assassins of Ze'evi. It is inconceivable that there should be any effort to punish those responsible for the Mustafa assassination.
Further contributions to enhancing terror took place last December, when Washington again vetoed a security council resolution calling for dispatch of international monitors. Ten days earlier, the US boycotted an international conference in Geneva that once again concluded that the fourth Geneva convention applies to the occupied territories, so that many US-Israeli actions there are "grave breaches", hence serious war crimes. As a "high contracting party", the US is obligated by solemn treaty to prosecute those responsible for such crimes, including its own leadership. Accordingly, all of this passes in silence.
But the US has not officially withdrawn its recognition that the conventions apply to the occupied territories, or its censure of Israeli violations as the "occupying power". In October 2000 the security council reaffirmed the consensus, "call[ing] on Israel, the occupying power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations..." The vote was 14-0. Clinton abstained.
Until such matters are permitted to enter mainstream discussion in the US, and their implications understood, it is meaningless to call for "US engagement in the peace process", and prospects for constructive action will remain grim.
Seahorse, your above article from The Guardian is one-sided against the United States. It uses a recurrent journalistic tactic: saying what the U.S. government did, without explaining why the U.S. chose this course of action.
Like how the European press covered Bush's withdrawal of the U.S. from the Koito treaty. Bush explained that he was not going to make the U.S. be the only nation to conform to the Kioto environmental standards, while the rest of Europe, and the world, did not do the same. He said this was unfair, and would hurt America's economy, and Bush said he was withdrawing from the treaty until other nations either conformed to the treaty, or re-negotiated a treaty that all the contracted nations would conform to.
BUT IN THE EUROPEAN PRESS, it was portrayed as the U.S. being greedy and not willing to conform to a treaty the entire world had signed. Little if any mention was given to the fact that NO OTHER NATION was conforming to the environmental standards of the Kioto agreement.
The situation with Israel and the Palestinians is much more complicated, but the press treatment is essentially the same. The origins of the situation date back to Pogroms against Jews in the 19th century in Russia, that resulted in migrations that made Jews resented throughout Europe, that culminated in the desire to form their own state instead of being an unprotected minority in a hostile Europe, a gradual move toward Israeli statehood that was first organized by Jews in 1897.
The article, and many articles here from The Guardian and other sources, ignore the obvious: the Palestinians and the neighboring Arab nations want Israel destroyed. They've fought four wars and endless skirmishes against Israel, and as I said above, they have never renounced their desire in the PLO accord to have not only an independent Palestine, but ALL OF ISRAEL under Arab rule. Never renounced.
The Guardian article also ignores that the PLO leadership has fully participated in organization of suicide bombings and other terrorism against Israel, even as they have "negotiated peace" for an independent Palestinian state.
Israeli President Ariel Sharon visited the White House last Monday (May 6th, 2002), and handed President Bush a 100-page document of the evidence gathered from Ramallah, Jenin and other palestinian terrorist strongholds, that conclusively shows Arafat has, far from doing anything to prevent terrorism, has instead endorsed and orchestrated the suicide bombings and other aggression against Israel. Just because some reporter in The Guardian says Palestine has been negotiating peace and wants peace with Israel doesn't make it so.
Israel has presented the evidence that Arafat and the PLO have waged terror (and thus, the PLO themselves destroyed the independent Palestine that Israel would have fully released authority over in 2000, had the PLO made any attemt to contain terrorism and proimote peace, and the PLO's combined inaction and outright aggression necessitated Israel's neutralizing terrorist strongholds in the West Bank). And yet this state of events is blamed on the U.S. ? Please ! The evidence has been presented by Israel, and the burden is on the PLO to prove its innocence. Blaming this situation on the U.S. is absurd.
And why are the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli occupation anyway? Because of a little thing called the 1967 war, where the Arabs attacked Israel, and Israel defended itself. Israel occupied these areas (West Bank and Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai desert) in response to an Arab offensive. This occupation didn't happen in a vaccuum, it was defensive on Israel's part, not Israeli aggression. And Israel set up defensive areas to prevent a similar invasion. And as I said in above posts, Israel has received no more than empty "assurances of peace" (in contrast to the evidence seen in Arab/Palestinian actions, that contradict the lip-service to their desire for peace) for the areas Israel is expected to give up.
I haven't rushed back here to post in response to Typhoid Dave's post (three posts above this one) because it's frankly exhausting responding to all this. I'm the only one defending Israel here.
I think Israel should withdraw its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza (except for maybe the ones directly on the Israeli/Palestinian border, for defensive reasons). And I also, as I said before, think the U.S. should provide direct economic aid to the Palestinian refugees, completely bypassing any participation by the PLO, to build a peace economy and jobs for Palestinians.
But I wonder if even this will make the Palestinians give up their aggression against Israel. These are people whose children are taught to recite the names of cities and addresses, as they existed prior to 1948 in what is now Israel, even though these cities have not existed in over 50 years. I've never seen a group of people so seethingly hell-bent on long-awaited vengeance.
quote: BUT IN THE EUROPEAN PRESS, it was portrayed as the U.S. being greedy and not willing to conform to a treaty the entire world had signed. Little if any mention was given to the fact that NO OTHER NATION was conforming to the environmental standards of the Kioto agreement.
Actually that's not true - Australia is. And it distorts the fact that they are standards to be met over time. They aren't initiated instantly.
I actually suspect that the other countries in the region might have to be assertive in respect of this soon. Frustrated by Bush's lack of control over Sharon, Saudi Arabia has already expressed extreme disquiet with the US lack of impartial mediation. Lebanon is becoming mildy destabilised along its border.
Hamas is reported not to see a difference bewteen Israelis and Americans. Doesn't that bother anyone in the US? It bothers the crap out of me.
Hamas is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, so of course they'd make a statement like that.
If the U.S. convinces Israel to go ahead with an independent Palestinian state, and the Arab nations do nothing to insure stopping (or even discouragement ) of terrorism against Israel, then what would the U.S. have done but hand over Israel's sovereignty.
From what I've observed from the last fifty years regarding Israel (and largely detailed above) you can't believe any of what the arabs are saying, particularly Arafat.
Arafat, after last week making a half-hearted obligatory statement condemning suicide bombings against Israel (his condition for being released from house arrest in Ramallah), Arafat yesterday said, rallying his Palestinian followers: "A million martyrs are on their way to Jerusalem" (as reported on CBS News).
That doesn't sound like he's condemning suicide bombers. Quite the opposite, he's strongly encouraging it.
Regarding Kioto, I didn't know Australia was complying (already, or planning to ?). I do feel that Bush could have expressed more of a willingness to negotiate the Kioto agreement instead of just dumping it flat-out. The environmentalist backlash was very visible in the U.S. when he dumped Kioto. On many environmental-related issues, such as the proposed oil drilling expansion in Alaska, that was blocked by the Democrats, it seems clear that Bush sides with corporate business, especially the oil industry. But in the news reporting I saw of Kioto and Bush's rejection of it (and the press was very much against Bush, the press is very pro-environment), Bush had a valid point that the U.S. should not be obligated to comply when others do not.
quote:Originally posted by Dave the Wonder Boy: Hamas is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, so of course they'd make a statement like that.
If the U.S. convinces Israel to go ahead with an independent Palestinian state, and the Arab nations do nothing to insure stopping (or even discouragement ) of terrorism against Israel, then what would the U.S. have done but hand over Israel's sovereignty.
From what I've observed from the last fifty years regarding Israel (and largely detailed above) you can't believe any of what the arabs are saying, particularly Arafat.
Arafat, after last week making a half-hearted obligatory statement condemning suicide bombings against Israel (his condition for being released from house arrest in Ramallah), Arafat yesterday said, rallying his Palestinian followers: "A million martyrs are on their way to Jerusalem" (as reported on CBS News).
That doesn't sound like he's condemning suicide bombers. Quite the opposite, he's strongly encouraging it.
Arafat has lots a lot of credibility in the past few weeks amongst Arabs for not being more defiant to Israeli pressure.
Hamas is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel. Their people have been sitting in refugee camps for 50 years.
I was talking to a guy who used to live in Israel the other day - his wife worked for the UK embassy in Tel Aviv. This was some time ago, and he described to me in vivid detail his recollection of the impressively poor treatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints and borders.
The difference between the IRA and Hamas is that the IRA have rich friends in Boston and New York.
quote:
Regarding Kioto, I didn't know Australia was complying (already, or planning to ?). I do feel that Bush could have expressed more of a willingness to negotiate the Kioto agreement instead of just dumping it flat-out. The environmentalist backlash was very visible in the U.S. when he dumped Kioto. On many environmental-related issues, such as the proposed oil drilling expansion in Alaska, that was blocked by the Democrats, it seems clear that Bush sides with corporate business, especially the oil industry. But in the news reporting I saw of Kioto and Bush's rejection of it (and the press was very much against Bush, the press is very pro-environment), Bush had a valid point that the U.S. should not be obligated to comply when others do not.
Actually, the Europeans are still negotaiting Kyoto. Apparently Germany is the stop-out. Otherwise they're ready to implement.
Incidentally, Dave, Watsonwil, myself, and a bunch of other guys from the DCMBs discuss serious topics here:
If Dave is still around, he might be interested to know I've changed my mind. Hamas attacks on civilians are designed to spoil peace discussions, not fight for sovereignty and equal co-existence. They should be stopped.
I have to admit, this one confuses the hell out of me.
Trying not to buy into the propoganda that both sides spout continuously, I end up thinking about the reasons that two factions will fight wars.
One popular reason is, of course, resources. It's why gangs do drive-bys and why mobsters rub each other out and why armies sometimes wander over to the next country and do some looting and pillaging. In the case of Israel and Palestine, I think we're talking about water more than anything else. The Israelis are, for the most part, westerners with western lifestyles, and us westerners use up water like there's no tomorrow. And that's okay for most of us ... I have a stream running to my house. But with Israel and Palestine, we're talking about a desert, y'know?
You've got religion, but I think this reason is generally used an excuse for something else. Fact is, people of wildly different religions live together all the time. Not much bombing going on in the United States, at least between its own people. To us, this whole "Under God," thing in the Pledge of Allegiance is kind of a joke. To other countries, it would be a reason to kill or die. I think that the reason for this is that we've got plenty of public water fountains. :)
(Okay, I'm being a little glib, but you know what I'm saying. We've got resources, and they're reasonably well-distributed in spite of my constant calls for improvement.)
It seems to me, and again I have to make allowances for the staggering amount of propoganda involved in this issue, that neither side is really interested in peace. Sure, the average citizen might be ready to not get blown up, but the leadership of both sides is more interested in using the conflict to grab more stuff, whatever the particular "stuff" they're after.
I don't think that separate states are the answer. I think that's simply a guarantee of further conflict. Imagine if the United States had been divided by the Civil War ... the Cold War would've started almost a century earlier.
But in a unified state -- a democratic unified state -- Israel pretty much disappears. There's no way that a religious minority can maintain a theocratic monopoly on a culture in a democratic state. Israel would vanish in all but name. And although I'm opposed to theocracies, Israel seems like a pretty useful thing to have around.
But maybe that's something we just have to suck up and accept. I don't know.
Here's a link to a series of maps, that really help to visualize the history of Israel, from the days of the Ottoman Empire up through each stage of Israeli/Arab conflict up through 2000.
There is a separate map for each significant event, that you can follow chronologically.
I find these maps tremendously helpful in visualizing Israel's sometimes complicated partitions of land, and the nature of invasions from neighboring Arab countries. They are far easier to understand when you can visualize them.
It is interesting, the history of it, because it seems that so many people have competing claims to the land.
From Dave's link:
quote: Egypt sealed off the Israeli port of Eilat, effectively stopping Israel's sea trade with much of Africa and the Far East.(1) In response to this violation of international agreements which amounted to an act of war, Israel launched a military operation on October 29, 1956. At the same time, Britain and France, angered over the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez canal, launched their own campaign in order to reverse Egypt's unilateral action. In March 1957, after receiving international guarantees that Israel's vital waterways would remain open, Israel withdrew her troops from the Sinai and Gaza strip.
Now, most of the information contained on that site is a vast simplification of the truth, but this one stretches things beyond the truth. The attack on the Sinai was not in response to anything - it was a co-ordinated effort at aggression between France and Israel: France wanted to kill Nasser, who was supporting terrorists in the Maghreb, and Israel just wanted to expand her borders to the Suez.
Anyway, Dave especially, enough finger poinitng - what's the solution? Should Israel stop building settlements in Pal. areas, and allow a two area state of Palestine (Gaza and West Bank) to come into existence?
Well, T-Dave, I agree that the text accompanying the maps is a very condensed summary of Israel's history.
I re-read a reasonably full account of the 1956 Suez Canal War and events preceding and following it in The Seige: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, by Conor Cruise O'Brien, who was the newly appointed Irish ambassador to the U.N. at the time the Suez/Sinai war was occurring and being decided on by the U.N. It is a very complicated war, and O'Brien's 30-page or so account still clearly glosses over some events. There were Egyptian sponsored and trained raids and killings (raiders called the fedayeen) of Israeli citizens that were occurring for years prior to 1956, but with increasing organization and frequency. Egypt had blockaded the the Israeli port of Eilat (the Southernmost tip of Israel), and the Strait of Tiran (near the Southern tip of the Sinai peninsula), closing off the Gulf of Eilat to any Israeli shipping and trade. This cut somewhat into Israel's economy, but it was more importantly a challenge to Israel's sovereignty as a state.
So with this Egyptian aggression going on, Israel had the justification already to attack Egypt and eliminate these threats to its citizens and trade. But Israel was considerably more isolated from the U.S. at this time (the U.S. at this point in 1955-56 was more interested in downplaying its relationship with Israel, to establish better relations with oil-rich Arab nations, and actually saw its relationship with Israel as a liability), and feeling very politically isolated from the U.S., Britain and France, Israel was not initially eager to react and risk isolating itself even further from the major powers in this period (1953-1955).
Egyptian President Nasser was the first leader of an Arab nation to break out from under British and French colonial rule (Britain and France had divided up the Ottoman Empire after the Axis-aligned Ottomans lost in WW I in 1918). Nasser was very outspoken against the British, French and Americans over Cairo-based radio. Nasser broadcast throughout North Africa and the Middle East not just to his native Egypt, and was rallying an anti-colonial sentiment that threatened British control of Jordan, Iraq, and other areas, and French colonial rule in Syria and Algeria. Nasser had also pushed out British bases in the Suez Canal, and had limited shipping through the Suez region, again to the fury of Britain and France.
In addition, Britain had further infuriated the Arab world by brokering a defense pact between Turkey and Iraq (called the Baghdad Pact), to further isolate the Middle East from the Soviet Union. Egyptian President Nasser was infuriated by this shift of power, and condemned the British-controlled Iraqi government, that also threatened to generate popular revolt in Jordan and French-controlled Syria. In direct response to this event intended to close off the Middle East to Soviet influence, Egyptian President Nasser signed an alliance pact with the Soviet Union, under which the Soviets would send a huge arsenal of planes and weapons to Egypt: 300 medium and heavy tanks of the latest Soviet design, 200 MIG-15 jet fighters, among others. Israel knew with certainty that these weapons, once deployed, would be used against them, and that Israel would be vastly outgunned at that point. Their intelligence reported that it would take Egypt roughly 6 to 8 months to receive and deploy them. So Israel would have to do something to neutralize that threat within that 6 to 8 months, before it was too late. It was at precisely this point that Britain and France approached Israel about a deal for recognition and backing if they conducted a war with Egypt.
So as you say, T-Dave, France [and Britain] wanted Nasser out. France and Britain both encouraged Israel, in a secret alliance, to invade Egypt under the auspices of Israel's pre-existing grievance with Egypt's Eilat Port blockade, and Egypt's sponsored terrorism against Israel. And once Israel had initiated the war, the plan was that Britain and France could come in and "separate the combatants" (Egypt and Israel). And under the cloak of U.N. police action, Britain and France could look to the Arab world like they were protecting Egypt from Israeli military action, while re-shaping Egypt's government in a way more compatible with their colonial holdings in Africa and the Middle East. Doing so in a way that made Britain and France look like benevolent powers instead of empires clinging to their holdings, which they were.
But to the astonishment of the British and the French, in the U.N. security council meeting, the U.S. rejected Britain and France's proposal, so Britain and France's invasion of Egypt was never able to go on as planned. (In fact, President Eisenhower was really ticked off that Britain and France had attempted such an action without consulting the U.S., especially in October 1956, just weeks before Eisenhower's re-election.
A cease-fire was brokered, and Israel agreed to give back the Sinai Desert to Egypt, in exchange for greater aid and strategic importance to the U.S., which continued to increase after the war.
Despite the U.S.'s preventing the further invasion and overthrow of Egypt, the U.S. was vilified by Nasser and the rest of the Arab world as another Western imperialist power in the years that followed, while Israel's relationship with the U.S. continued to prove a reliable one to the U.S., and as U.S. outreaches to Arab nations continued to wither on the vine.
All of which is still the tip of the iceberg, and is very difficult to sum up in three or four sentences. In summing up the facts limited to Egypt and Israel, and not getting into the deeper politics of the U.S./Soviet Union Cold War, and those of the waning British and French empires in the region, I think the map summary did a pretty good job of summing up the essential facts: Egypt was orchestrating terrorist raids on Israel and closing off the Eilat Port to shipping, Israel invaded and seized the Sinai to stop the raids and re-open the port, and Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt after Egypt agreed to let Israel use the Eilat Port.
The linked maps are an overview of Israel's history and wars, and while related events are important, they would reqire much more space, and run much deeper than the summarized overview the maps are intended to give.
I took the liberty of looking at what Worldbook Encyclopedia had to say on the subject, and it's only slightly more informative about the 1956 war (within a larger piece on the Arab-Israeli Conflict) :
I'm about halfway through a book called France, the United States and the Algerian War (which I have made reference to in the discussion on France on one of the other forums here). France and Israel were certainly left out to dry by the UK, when it shifted its support towards the US in the middle of the crisis. Eisenhower was miffed, but documents show that his governemnt was aware of what was being planned.
Anyway, Dave especially, enough finger poinitng - what's the solution? Should Israel stop building settlements in Pal. areas, and allow a two area state of Palestine (Gaza and West Bank) to come into existence?
To answer your other inquiry, I think the key is accountability and verification. When the Israelis or Palestinians don't follow through, there should be immediate pressure to resolve any problems and follow through.
For openers, I think Israel should agree to remove any settlements since the 1993 Oslo Accord, since this is a violation of the agreement.
I think Arafat should willingly allow himself to be replaced by a new leader who is not so questionably connected to the suicide bombings he is supposedly trying to prevent (which will hopefully happen in the planned Palestinian election).
I also would like to see hate propaganda removed from Palestinian schools. I don't need to explain this, do I? It's pretty well covered in the U.S. media, that Palestinian schools teach Palestinian children to hate Israelis, with a lot of Muslim rhetoric that puts them well on the road to becoming suicide bombers. This teaching began in 1993-1994, when Palestine was first negotiated to become an independent Palestinian state, again, under Arafat's leadership. Which further shatters the credibility of a peaceful Palestinian state, regardless of Israel's best attempt to honor the agreement.
So in a word, the solution to a peacedful settlement is verifiability, with immediate consequences and pressure to comply, if compliance does not occur.
But regardless, I think the world will be promised, and in the end Arab states will still find a reason to break the agreement and attempt to destroy Israel.
It's the way my brain works. My subconscious hits upon something, and then it takes a while for my conscious brain to catch up.
I was watching the news, and they were talking about Israel ... and then, for some reason, I found myself going to the bookshelf and grabbing a book about the history of privateerism. That's the tactic used (during the colonial period of Europe, come to think of it) by Europe and America during various little wars, where they would basically draft pirates and send them out to ... well, pirate. Basically, they could use these privateers to screw with other countries, but since the privateers were criminals, the nation that had sent them wouldn't get into any trouble on certain levels.
