Why would they need terrorism once they are in the majority of a single Israeli state? Are you afraid of payback?
There are parts of the Wb where Palestinians enjoy almost unrestricted autonomy. no embargo, no IDF presence, nothing. And yet they do not fire rockets into Israel. Are they just slackers?
Of course. So why not start with the ones that aren’t trying to murder civilians?
What? huh?
Not all Palestinians are religious zealots, but Hamas are. Hamas wants a one state solution, but it wants that one state to be a religious theocracy without Jews.
Hamas has no intention of stopping until they can wring some sort of win out of the Israelis. Not that they seem overly concerned about deaths in Gaza except as a pretext for more attacks on Israel.
I’d hazard a guess that Israel imagines that by ensuring the West Bank economy expands due to a more or less stable, secure and violence free environment it can act as a catalyst to push Hamas out of Gaza or at lest undermine their legitimacy.
Then again, where’s Hamas going to go? Egypt?
I have not criticized the response, go ahead and look back trough the thread. In fact I have said that Israel generally has a fairly good civilian casualty ratio but people make it sound like these crazy bloodthristy palestinians are attacking Israel for no good reason. And I am saying that if anyone did to us what Israel did to the Palestinians, we wouldn’t just welcome them into the neighborhood or just give up after they kicked our asses a few times.
Its not the Palestinians that want these things. Its Hamas.
Do you think the withdrawal from Gaza caused the Palestinian attacks or did one thing just happen to occur after the other?
At some point Israel’s boot may not be enough or others might start to feel it is too much.
Re-enter negotiations. (Which, I believe, they’re open to doing.)
Try to cut back a little on the settlement building. This is what has turned away a lot of American liberals. Jimmy Carter famously spoke out against this. Support for Israel used to be universal in the U.S. Now, it’s become a right-wing issue, with very little left-wing support.
Israel would benefit by getting American liberals back behind it again.
(On the other hand, they also benefit by building settlements, so what do I know? Maybe the trade off is worth it to them, or at least maybe they perceive it that way.)
I believe a two-state solution really is the best way to go…but not quite right just now. I’d try to premise it on a period of non-violence. Every rocket attack resets the clock.
And, yeah, the two-state thing is certainly reversible, just as the withdrawal from Gaza could be. The tanks could roll right in tomorrow. (I’m dreadfully afraid that’s what is going to happen.) If a Palestinian State acts badly…that’s an act of war. And, right now, it isn’t one that a P.S. could conceivably win. And that just puts us right back where we are now: a military occupation.
(I’d let the P.S. know, right up front, if there’s a war, then there will be permanent seizure of land. That’s one of the things wars do: they change borders. You’d think that knowing any attack could cost them a bunch of real estate would discourage attacks. Gaza, right now, is immune from that threat because it’s so damn small, there isn’t any part of it that could be seized!)
They only attacked because the Zionists declared its independence as a Jewish state. It was not an unprovoked attack and it was not a war of conquest and it was not immoral. The Zionists had no more right to the land than the Palestinians and frankly I think they had a lot less right to it.
People keep trying to put israel on some sort of moral high ground that they simply cannot claim. I don’t mean that Hamas or even Abbas can claim the moral high ground but in an effort to try to paint one side as the good guys (and the other side as the bad guys) they whitewash all the shit that Israel did.
Israel didn’t have any right to expect (and didn’t expect) that the arab nations would just go along with a Jewish state in the middle east.
Israel cannot simply point to the treatment of jews by other arab nations to justify the confiscation of arab property from palestinians in israel.
Israel cannot on the one hand point to things like the Balfour declaration and UN resolution 181 to justify their existence while at the same time ignoring the parts of those documents that give full and equal right to all inhabitants (including the Palestinians).
If they are going to go the route of having Palestinian occupied territories in the WB and Gaza, they can’t then proceed to create settlements and chip away at those territories.
And of course hamas should stop trying to kill israeli civilians.
Err… the occupied territories came under Israeli control following the 67 War not the 48 War of Independence.
Had Jordan not invaded Israel when Israel begged them to stay out of the war, they’d never have taken the West Bank and had Nasser not make it clear that he was going to invade the Israelis never would have taken the Gaza Strip.
For that matter the Israelis were happy to negotiate afterwards and openly offered to do so.
Unfortunately the Arab nations and the PLO refused and issued their famous three nos. “No recognition, no negotiation, and no peace.”
Abba Eban quipped “for the first time in history the victors sued for peace while the losers demanded unconditional surrender.”
Errr… His point was that you rather foolishly suggested that Israel do something that they’d already done(arming the PA). His point was also that this was fairly common knowledge for anyone who’d been paying attention to the conflict.
It’s also worth noting you keep demanding some sort of Marshall plan for the PA and have ignored they’ve gotten huge amounts of foreign aid, part of the reason Hamas insists that Abbas, despite being a vocal denier of the Holocaust, is a puppet of the Jews.
Incorrect.
Palestine IS Hamas. That’s how Democracy works, and Hamas was elected.
The withdrawal from Gaza led directly to the Gaza elections, which led directly to Hamas gaining power.
Palestine is not interested in a two state solution. This much ought to be clear by now, considering they have their goddamn state and still won’t stop attacking. The reason it’s a political necessity (as Brainglutton so eloquently put it earlier in the thread) for Hamas to use hyper-amped up “death to Israel” rhetoric is because Palestinians will not tolerate anything less from their leaders. Israel and Palestine cannot exist peacefully together until this mindset changes. Israel has proven it is willing to negotiate a two-state solution. Palestine continues to prove that it is not willing to do the same.
Average Palestinians chose Hamas, because average Palestinians want a single state solution, where Israel does not exist and Palestine does. This is not an extremist view. It is the view of a typical Palestinian. Yet Israel continues to treat Hamas like it’s some illegitimate terrorist group, naively thinking that all they have to do is cut off the snake’s head to defeat it so reasonable Palestinian leaders can emerge. That’s just not realistic. Palestine is Hamas. There is no difference.
I think you’re really overstating this. Even putting aside the difference between Gaza and Palestine, all the fact that they won an election shows is that a majority of the people in Gaza supported Hamas over the alternatives at the time of the election.
What do current polls say about Palestinian support for a two-state solution?
Right. Like the USA IS George W Bush. No wait, like the USA IS Barack Obama.
Fwiw, in 2006 Hamas won 74 of 132 seats. Or 43%. I feel sure you knew that was in the legislative elections not municipal. Yeah.
Everything else in this post comes stright out the back of your head via the US nightly ‘news’. You don’t even make distinctions between different wings of the political party, let alone between the political and military brigades.
Worthless.
Your annecdote about greenhouses is so wrong headed a 16-year old in a debating society would be embarrassed to voice it. And you seemingly don’t get even a hint of that. I guess you’ve watched and read US media for quite some time.
I’m reminded of the claptrap I used to hear from idiot Irish American nationalists about how Sinn Fein shouldn’t be seen as terrorists or blamed for the PIRA and how the British criticism of Gerry Adams showed how stupid the British were.
Invade Gaza with an overwhelming show of force. Pacify the population through harsh retaliation. Declare the Hama’s government null and void, arrest its leaders, and give them a fair trial followed by a speedy execution. Establish an occupation government to remain in effect until either such time as the Fatah government is capable of exercising responsible government over Gaza and policing its own citizens, or a agreement can be made to allow Egypt to annex the Strip.
Do all of this openly, transparently, and with full respect for the laws of war.
Leaving aside the fact that the real world doesn’t work like that and Israel isn’t a Bond villain, Israel does not have the death penalty except for genocide.
I don’t know about Mosier’s post being worthless, but your math on the other hand…
There is no way to make peace in the Middle East within the next few generations. Israel should continue trying to disarm Hamas as nonviolently as possible and with minimal collateral damage. They should also deploy more Iron Dome installations to protect themselves as well as possible from the inevitable rocket attacks. On their own end, they should find the political will to relinquish their border settlements and, if possible, end the religious draft exemption for the most hawkish segment of their society. It will still take generations to find peace but under the status quo the conflict will go on forever.
That’ll go far to discourage radicalism…
This is ignorant bullshit.
When the UN urged the partition of Palestine the land set aside for the creation of a Jewish state was predominantly Jewish. Legitimate criticisms can be made as to how the borders were drawn but whoever told you that was either a fool or they trying to make a fool out of you.
Errr… yes. The borders of Lebanon were drawn up by the French so that it would be majority Christian. This pissed off the Syrians who felt there was always far more of connection between Beirut and Damascus than between Damascus and Syria and as a result every Syrian government has refused to recognize the existence of an independent Lebanese state and to this day maps in Syria over the area which is Lebanon are labeled “Southern Syria”.
They also set up laws whereby the President would always have to be a Christian, the parliament would have to be predominantly Christian and they refused to have any other censuses after the formation of Lebanon to preserve the fiction that Lebanon was a predominantly Christian country.
Huh? Obviously the Shia were furious at the fact that despite being predominantly Shia the British put the Hashemites in charge and ensured that the rulers of Iraq would always be Sunnis not Shia.
I’d think this was something that most people who’d followed the news regarding the Iraq War would be familiar with.
Really? Turkey is, unlike Israel a member of NATO and a European nation(remember it was long called “the sick man of Europe”) yet it invaded Cyprus in the 70s, ethnically cleansed the Greek Cypriots from Northern Cyprus and has occupied it ever since while setting up a puppet government recognized by no other government other than Turkey.
How much criticism has Turkey endured on this board due to that?
How many threads have been devoted to that situation in contrast to the amount of threads on the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Perhaps you can link us to some of your own posts where you’ve raged against it.
If you can’t perhaps you could explain why you’ve ignored it?
Also, Bulgaria is a European nation and ethnically cleansed it’s Turkish population in the 1980s.
How much criticism has it received for doing so, particularly in comparison to the criticism that Israel has received.
Again, perhaps you can link to some of your own posts criticizing this or explaining your refusal to do so.
Thanks in advance.
(bolding mine)
Israel has been placing settlers on occupied land since the 1970s and engages openly in collective punishment so I’d be a little careful in declaring just how obedient they are to international law.
Admittedly most of their neighbors are hardly in a position to point fingers.
Hamas’ leaders are certainly guilty of attempted genocide, aren’t they?