Israel's 'measured' response to Hamas... - Page 4

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNe...50544520090106

Hey, I'm not arguing that it's a logical position to have. In fact mine couldn't be farther from this. I know this conflict is unwinable for either side under the current mindset of one side being 'right' and the other one being 'wrong'. But I have this feeling that for many people, dead civilians on the other side are worth less than dead civilians on their own.

A couple of days ago the Israeli air force bombed the house of a high ranking Hamas officer killing him and nine members of his family. Would everyones reaction be the same if Hamas blew up Yehud Barak's house killing nine other people in the process? I'm afraid not.

Don't you think that, by using that example, you're demonstrating the same type of bias that you're accusing the rest of us of having? You think that people are not being sympathetic enough to the Palestinian side.

Look, there's no way that perfect equity will be achieved in our emotional responses to these events; it's human to feel more empathy towards those to whom we perceive greater similarities or simply to those that simply elicit certain emotional responses (e.g., if you have an affinity toward underdogs regardless of context, you'll probably feel more sympathy toward the Palestinians; if you've done a lot of reading on the Holocaust, you'll probably feel pretty sympathetic toward a country run by people made highly defensive by the events of a half-century ago).

I think most of us can get past these biases intellectually, but I find it curious that most of the posts in this thread are pretty critical of Israel, yet you demonstrated bias by highlighting Israeli sympathy. If the posts here simply aren't critical enough for you, I think that might speak to a smidge of pro-Palestinian bias.

Let me try and explain where I'm coming from. Any emotional bias I may have is pro Israel both because of their history and because after all I as a person have way much more in common with the average Israeli than the average Palestinian. But for any kind of lasting peace to be achieved you must be willing for your side to make concessions. Meaningful and sometimes grating concessions.

Allow me to share my personal experience. As you may know I live in Greece. To say that our history with Turkey has been troubled is a huge understatement. Excluding a couple of decades here and there we have been killing each other for over a thousand years. The list of atrocities commited by each side is insane. The last period of 35 years since our last shooting war is one of the longest in all our history together. And still there have been at least three instances of Cuban Missile Crisis level of potential conflict. During the last crisis in '96 the standing army had been mobilized and a primary draft had been issued but not executed. That night I actually went to bed sure that by the next day I would be going to war. Going further back both my paternal and maternal grandparents came to Greece as refugees during one of our numerous wars with Turkey. And there is still a Casus Beli on Turkey's part if we ever decide to extend our national waters to the full extend international law allows. Still we decided to just ignore the fanatics on both sides and find some logical people to talk to. So now our relationship is the best it's ever been.

The situations may not seem completely analogous but there comes a time when you realize you have to let the other side's provokations go unanswered if you want to end the problem. It sounds wimpy, I know I had trouble with this approach myself, but I'm sure it will be worth it in the long run.

I think most of us agree with that, actually. But I think it's easy for most of us on this board to agree, since, despite any biases, we're not really living in the middle of it.

An example I like to consider is South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, post Apartheid.

While nobody is fully satisfied it united whites and blacks/non-whites and that retributive justice was paid by non-cooperative parties, on the whole South Africa is probably better off with that positive attempt rather than taking hard measures against the Apartheid regime's members.

I'm right there with you.

But let's say you're running a country. The country next door is run by a government whose #1 priority is the destruction of your country. That government is being supplied with rockets by another country that also makes your destruction part of its foreign policy stance.

Now, the neighboring country, the one that's run by people whose organizing principle is your destruction, is consistently bombarding you with rockets. How long are supposed to stand there and sing Kum By Yah?

Israel has shown that it can and does do business with Fatah, which does not put Israeli destruction at the top of its "to do" list. This isn't an operation to crush the Palestinians; it's an operation to crush Hamas.

This is a massive and fateful foreign policy blunder of the United States. Hamas was democratically elected and yet the US and its aligned states did nothing to help empower the moderate voices like Fatah - no aid, no talks, no understanding, zero. These people were cut off from the world, so as radical as Hamas is, they were the ones helping the civilian population, providing food, schools, care. The way to crush Hamas isn't to bomb civilians who will only grow more radical as a result -- it's to provide another alternative and help the civilian population crawl out of poverty and desperation so that they can form a strong democracy and feel connected to the world at large. This campaign - regardless of the spark - is bad for Israel, bad for Gaza, bad for the US, bad for the world. It's stupid and yet another impending disaster George Bush is sleeping through.

The thing is: ultimately, both sides are wrong. Yet, I understand why they act like they do.

With Israel's strangulation of Gaza and aggressive behavior, like the settlers colonies right in the middle of Palestinian territory, I understand why Palestinians call those rocket attack "self-defense".

But having the Hamas calling for the death of Israel as a prime governing policy, endorsing the killing of civilians, I also understand the Israeli policies on this, and all the attacks on their citizens.

Both sides calls the others out for all their problems, and no one listens to the other. Like someone above said, one will have to start acting up straight in order to end this, and it's typically the stronger one that does it, but there's no proof that the Hamas will even want to negotiate after that.

Someone really needs to bioengineer a massive alien beast and teleport it right smack on the Israel/Palestinian Territories border. Or something.

The Veidt Method really works for everything.

I always thought that we had 2 options;

1. Forcibly remove everybody from the disputed areas and turn the whole thing into big religious theme park. Nobody is allowed to live in it, but you are welcomed to visit.

2. Warn everybody in the area that we're about to nuke it and then turn it into a radio active wasteland. That solves the problem of people fighting over this land.

I think the Veidt method fails, because I don't even see Palestinians and Israelies dropping their differences to unite against a common alien invasion.

Would the theme park have games where you shoot the plastic suicide bombers and get a stuffed animal?

I think there's a big difference though, in that Hamas doesn't speak for the Palestinians at large, and also they're in a position of extreme weakness, cut off from and largely ignored by the world. Throwing rockets and inflaming tension with crazy hateful rhetoric is horrible, but bombing children and beating on a people so brutally and aggressively is way way worse.

I think Israel and the United States are in the wrong, and alternately icing out and slaughtering Palestinians as a way to try to get them to "come around" has never worked and will never work. This whole "Israel is defending itself" meme doesn't play any more than the school bully claiming he's defending himself by pounding on the class weakling.

With all respect, that's a poor analogy, unless the class weakling is also throwing darts in the general direction of the bully, hoping to take out an eye but content for the shoulder or thigh. And in that case the bully is kinda justified in pounding the crap out of the weakling.

This doesn't examine whether the bully started it or the weakling threw darts first, and after a point it doesn't matter. To make progress either the weakling will have to choose to not retaliate against the beatings, or the bully will have to accept the possibility of losing an eye without exacting revenge.

But see, the bully has stolen the lunch food from the weakling every day now, and the weakling's only shot at eating his food is if the bully goes with the school nurse to heal his eye or whatever..... and I feel really stupid typing this.

It doesn't matter how powerful Israel is, attacks on civilians are just that. They are justified to defend themselves. The problem is the complete absurdity of the retaliative power they use, killing more civilians than anything else.

I somewhat agree that it should be Israel that stops it first and start a realistic peace process, but at the price of negotiating with the Fatah, not the Hamas. But it's something that I don't see happening in a long long while. With the rest of the Arab nations not giving a fuck, and Israel too, it's up to the Palestinians to choose the right governing body, but at this point, who will really want to talk?

I'd go with the Veidt method.

Let us hope that those rockets coming from Lebanon territory don't muddle things up even more. No one claimed responsibility for those yet, meaning people could point fingers to whoever they find more appropriate.

Allow me to guess the obvious culprit for you: Hezbollah. Mind you, it could be some random guys doing it, but I doubt it.

Come on. The cease-fire with them has the same effect for them as it did for the Hamas. They just rearm themselves for the following attacks.ate el

It is interesting that people tend to take Gaza's side due to them being smaller and having the notion of them being picked on. I know that were candlelight vigils all around England yesterday for the dead in Gaza. The situation over there is completely fucked and fifty years ago my sympathy would have definitely been with the displaced Palestinians, but Israel has its own population of people born on that land now and it makes it harder to pick a side. Whichever side wins you're looking at a diaspora

They denied having anything to do with it. Obviously that doesn't mean much in this situation, specially coming from them. Hopefully Israel leaders won't take this as a license to blow up Lebanon's border cities and its citizens with it.

I think that comes from an expectation most have that the stronger side should use its power with responsibiity. When people compare non-military death tolls in both sides and see this kind of imbalance, moral support usually goes for the underdog.

No, we tend to to take Gaza's side because Israel is leaving wounded civilians to die, shelling schools and killing UN relief workers.

And that.

Pfft! Everyone knows the Red Cross and the UN make up these lies to cover for their Islamofascist allies. Everyone but the US wants Israel destroyed and all the Jews dead, anyway.

Edit: No matter how may times I see Islamofascists written down, I can't help but laugh.

Give the West Bank back to Jordan & the Gaza Strip back to Egypt.

Let the Jordanian & Egyptian governments negotiate the final borders with Israel.

Apparently Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Starbucks are partly to blame for the whole conflict according to these confused Jordanians at a recent protest ...

Bet that girl's drinking a McDonalds coke too.

I'm confused, is he saying that Schwarzenegger is Jesus? *


Whoa ...


Is this a nightmare or IsReal?


Not even St. Thomas Aquinas could unravel the theological meaning of that one.

* Another IsReal. Exstinct? I'm surprised he got dinosaurs correct.

Is that first pic Joe the Plumber?

Pro-Israeli rallies full of idiots too;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FABqq_jjRRo

Not to make light of the situation, but I find swastikas laying squarley on one of their arms aesthetically irritating.

Not to mention that he also got the swastika wrong.

Here is where I find the entire fucking argument breaks down.

"Does Israel have a right to exist?" The affirmative is defended and proposed by the United States government, to the point that Ehud Olmert can call Bush, while the President is in the middle of making a speech, demand to speak to him immediately, and dictate that the United States abstain from voting in favor of the cease-fire organized and secured by Condi Fucking Rice. So yes, of course.

The negative is easily analog to Anti-Semitism, the desire for a second Jewish holocaust, and the insane jabberings of Mahmoud Ahmajediniad.

The problem, as I see it (and of course I can only speak for myself) is that the underlying question is a load of horeshit. No state has a right to exist. That right, insofar as it is secured, in only a function of the social contract binding the client citizenry of the state. The United States of America does not have a right to exist. The United States of America exists as a function of the social contract, enshrined in the Constitution (to which all politicians and citizens are bound to uphold, please God remind help remind us of that particular item), amongst its client population. It does not, in and of itself, hold any particular claim to a right of existence. It exists only because the client citizen population agrees it should exist.

In the case of Israel, however, the notion of a right to exist becomes immediately and irrevocably entangled with theology, religion, and the idea that Israel is promised that land through its special covenant with its G-D (which originates as the covenant between a God of War and His client tribal affiliation, but I digress).

Of course, determining legalistic legitimacy based on one particular sects' interpretation of an admittedly theological framework is absolutely batshit insane. [pun intended, motherfuckers] No other nation on Earth claims to exert a right to exist on the basis of a theological text.

It can be argued that the Eelam Tigers of Sri Lanka make a very similar case, but of course, their political party is about to be wiped off the face of the Earth.

If Israel has a right to exist, it is only as a function of its client population. Unfortunately, that client population (the Palestinian portion of it anyway) has been historically marginalized to the point that every notionally Palestinian or Arab political party has been banned from the upcoming state elections. The client population of Israel is irrevocably religious in nature, ethnic in nature, and the argument can be made, racist in nature. The demographic shift currently underway in the country, with an exploding Palestinian population overtaking and overwhelming the Jewish population, only furthers this fucking conundrum.

In order for Israel to continue to exist an integrated democratic Nation-State, it will becoming increasingly necessary for the Jewish political leadership to exclude and bar any legitimate Palestinian or Arab political opposition. Given the explicit backing of the United States, doing just that isn't a problem, as we are seeing before our very fucking eyes. This introduces a very interesting end-time Armageddon dynamic, which I would love to discuss with anyone who wants to PM me, but thats neither here nor there (well, it is quite acutely RIGHT THERE but its very impolite to say so).

Alternatively, the exploding indigenous population will just vote the Israeli establishment out of power and take the whole fucking state back. Which about does it for any right to exist.

Which, of course, brings us back to the fundamental conundrum. If Israel has a right to exist, then by definition, Palestine has a right to exist (unless we subscribe to the Millenarian Dispentionalist Quackery popular in America right or legitimate old-school Jewish theology, neither of which deserves to be mentioned in exclusion to the client populations' [read: currently and increasingly Palestinian] claim to self-determinancy). Of course, if Palestine has a right to exist, and Israel has a right to exist, and Israel can claim the right of return based on a 2,000 year old historical beef . . . well, I mean, shit, don't the Palestinians have a much more recent claim to a right of return?

My name is Christopher Cyrek, and if you want to debate me on these points, feel free. But please, leave the semantics and the popular lines and the other assorted cake-assed quicksand bullshit at the door.

addenum: this is a movie website, which is the only movie website I frequent, because I find the underlying product to be of the highest quality, so I will suggest two films in support of my statements. Those being: John Adams, the HBO miniseries, and Wedding in Galilee, by Michel Khleifi. There is another movie I would add to this list, also about a wedding in Palestine/The Occupied Territories (either one means the same thing), but I cannot find the name at the moment. I can dig it up if anyone requests, though.

EDITED for grammar.

FURTHER EDIT: if anyone wants to make the baby-bitch claim that I am a terrorist sympathizer or that I don't understand the nature and threat that terrorism poses to liberal Western governments, take it up with me personally, and I will be more than happy to forward an academic paper authored by yours truly thoroughly debunking that line of thought.

Blow a hole in the UN building holding 700 refugees while your at it. The world looks on in shame, no where more than here in the United States, where some moral action could take hold. Collusion leads to war crimes. Disgusting.

Zhukov, kudos for that long post. And here I thought I was alone with my opinion of the notion of the very basis for this mess being utterly idiotic. A state quite actually ceases to exist the day it can no longer defend itself, either against military adversaries, or as in Israels case, a change in the demographic essentially causing it to change into something else.
Right now, a growing-to-be-a-minority part of jewish population of Israel is trying to use every trick in their admittedly pretty big book to retain power in a situation where every other nation on this world would long ago have had to make concessions.
Its just sad the USA are pretty much forced to back it.

The Syrian Bride?

I agree that every nation has the right to exist only insofar it can make the claim stick.

Israel can make the claim stick, at least for now. Once the Palestinian minority becomes a majority, and then an overwhelming majority, that could change. Or said majority could collectively realize that their lives as a Israeli citizens are better than the lives of Arabs living in authoritarian states, and the state we call "Israel" could continue to exist.

Of course, from a historic perspective no state has a 'right' to exist. The tides of history have destroyed many empires, nations and peoples far more prevalent and powerful than Israel.

One could argue though that the state of Israel is a somewhat special case insofar as its existence is seen as an ultimate guarantee of the Jewish people's rights as declared by the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But it is not a position that I agree with 100% and it raises the question as to the legitimacy of possible similar claims by other maligned peoples such as the gypsies or more to the point the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, much of that majority has been cordoned off behind security checks and a security wall. Hence Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. Hasn't worked out too well for those people.

As far as the other authoritarian regimes in the region go: Egypt receives more U.S. aid than anyone save Israel and Iraq, Saudi Arabia continues to exist as an authoritarian regime with the explicit backing of the U.S., Syria is a close partner in the war on terror (whose security services, so vital to intelligence interests in combating terrorists in the regime, are extremely repressive in regards to their own population), and Jordan is actually pretty well handled, as far as monarchies go. Iranians enjoy a quality of life far exceeding anyone else in the region (for the time being), save for Israelis (the ones on the right side of the Wall, that is). That the Arabic population still living in Israel proper enjoy certain freedoms not found elsewhere is evident, but those freedoms are fundamentally limited by the boundaries placed up their political activities and parties. What good is a vote if you can't vote for who you want to?

I don't know my history too well and as a German I know I have to be very careful when participating in such a discussion, but I always wondered where the idea of Israel really came from?
Was it Theodor Herzl in 1896?
And is the main legitimacy for the founding of Israel taken from ancient scripture, namely the Bible and the Torah?
As an atheist that wouldn't count for anything in my book, so how accurate are the Bible's historic depictions of Israelis being enslaved by Babylon and having to flee their holy land, given to them by "God" etc..?
Whose land was this originally and what percentage of Israelis living there are descendants of people from that region?

I thought this was pretty good;
Gerald Kaufmann, Jewish British Labour MP, condemns Israel actions.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=pwhrHoPv5Ok