Zev - Fair enough, though I think it’s a bit of a slippery slope.
London - No problem, and great post! Hope you’re planning on sticking around here.
Fair enough, London. Let’s consider this matter resolved. Thanks.
Just one thing before I go (I never stick around Israel Threads after the second page - too repetitious): I may indeed not be objective concerning the situation in my country. However, I don’t think that you, for example, are capaqble of being objective in the matter of Northern Ireland, just as a Russian cannot be objective about Chechnya, or a Frenchman about Algeria. The fact of the matter is, no-one can be objective when their own own interests are at stake… and very few people who are not personally involved have enough information on a subject to pass judgement.
This is not neccessarily a bad things - enlighteneed self interest is one of the strongest driving forces of human civilization. We must face the fact, however, that informed objectivity belongs to God and few others.
I think you might be surprised at the pragmatic, level-headed attitude many Britons have with respect to Ulster. Indeed, I would suggest that the sole reason that there is peace there, uneasy and imperfect though it may be, is because of a general acceptance that if the terrorists have some halfway legitimate grievance which will not simply die out in time, then negotiation with them is ultimately necessary for peace.
As the Northern Ireland Peace Process showed, inviting terrorists to negotiate even just so that they can arrive, declare “no surrender” and leave is a useful first step. Blowing up old quadriplegics in wheelchairs is mere martyr-manufacture.
Been there, done that… at least twice (Oslo Accords - Rabin, and Camp David - Barak). Got spat in the face for our efforts both times.
Arafat seems to fear any conclusion to the hostilities - after all, his cronies and he may actually have to start answering tough questions about money should there ever be peace… :rolleyes: not to mention they don’t particularly want to go from Patriotic Heroes to “Those Responsible for Making the Busses Run on Time”
Dani
Of course, Dani - the peace train in Northern Ireland suffered similar derailings over the decades.
But it got there in the end. And now the former bomber Martin McGuinness is responsible for ensuring Ulster kids get a good education.
There is hope.
(Erratum to above: The devolved parliament in Northern Ireland is currently suspended, but McG’s post is still in education.)
Not at the moment he’s not, as the Unionists scuppered the Assembly, and then got a sound beating in the subsequent elections by the DUP, who are now actively refusing to cooperate and are pushing for a “renegotiation” of the Good Friday agreement.
But being pragmatic and level-headed is not the same as being objective. Objectivity is saying: “Your happiness is as important to me as my happiness”; pragmatism is saying: “Things will be good for us if everybody’s happy”. The end result is the same, but the approach is quite different.
A local auto-insurance firm used to run a commercial slogan that went (my tarnslation): “Don’t be right - be smart”. Those are truly words to live by. Until every side in this conflict decides to forget about their grievences, their prestege and what they believe they’re owed - until they stop talking about their “rights” - they won’t be able to do the smart thing, and make peace.
That might be the way to go if history had been different, Alessan. If the Zionists hadn’t forcibly expelled Palestinians from their land, and if a peace accord signed today or tomorrow left Israel and Palestine on concretely equal footing, then there might be a point to not talking about “rights”.
That, unfortunately, is not the case. For the Palestinians to abandon claims to rights, like the right of return among others, is to acquiesce and legitimize what is nothing more than a vicious and bloody occupation. It is also to acquiesce to conditions that are far more disadvantageous to them - the lands they do control fragmented like a broken dish, their infrastructure nonexistent, with a neighbor whose lands break theirs apart and who enjoy billions of dollars of aid annually from a larger and richer country.
Frankly, I’m not surprised the Palestinians have refused to give up the fight.
My take on this thing is that assassination is a bad policy, especially from the Israel-Palestine conflict. It will not solve any problems.
And I won’t be surprised if the Palestinians never have their own country.
Besides, most Israelis aren’t occupiers. Take me, for example - I was born here. That makes me a native, just like any Palestinian. A native can’t be an occupier, can he?
Time once again to differentiate between the actions of an individual and the actions of a state. No, Alessan, you are not an occupier unless you’re in one of those “frontier” settlements that keep popping up on Palestinian territory. Whether you’re a native-born Israeli or immigrant, in this case, is irrelevant.
That doesn’t mean Israel isn’t an occupier. The country was founded on the expulsion of Palestinians from the lands they once owned and it continues the active suppression thereof. Moreover, the country does so with the active military and financial help of the United States. Those billions in annual aid don’t all go towards the war effort against Palestine; from what I understand portions of that money can end up directly in the pockets of Israeli citizens. Which means that, while they may individually not be occupiers, they benefit directly from the occupation of Palestine. Which I find just as unpalatable.
First of all, every country was founded on the expulsion of someone else. The U.S. was founded on the expulsion of Loyalists and Native Americans, but you don’t se them giving anything back. Secnd of all, circa 1948, it seemed to most people here - correctly - that it was a situation of “expulse or be expulsed”. I shudder to think what would have happened if we’d lost. We fought a war for land, on fair terms; we were hardly the side with more soldiers, more guns or more will to fight. We won, and we got the land. They lost, and thy didn’t.
BTW, the U.S. aid is not to fight the Palestinians - it’s to maintain a balance of power with Egypt, who recieve similar sums as part of the 1979 Camp David Accord. The vast majority of it has to go towards buying U.S. military hardware, so you can see it as sort of a subsidy for the American military industry. You can cancell it, but that would just lread to another Israeli-Egyptian war, which will not be good for the Palestinians.
No but until they were close to exterminated they fought like fuck including some nasty attacks against civilains for their lands and rights.
Good Point. The US was never going to co-exist with an Indian nation next door. Unfortunatly the only solution was a forceful one. I think (unfortunatly) that a political solution to the Israel/ Palestinian problem will never happen. The Palestinians want Israel to vanish & the Israeli’s will never grant a completely independent Palestine on it’s doorstep. Maybe someday couragous leaders will emerge but I do not see it. With Clinton as Pres & Barak as PM maybe the deal wasn’t perfect or even close but Arafat chose what’s behind door #1 instead. Unfortunalty Sharon was behind door #1.
OK, who got expelled when Italy and Germany were unified in the 1870s? Who was expelled from France? Britain? Russia?
Not in the 20th and 21st centuries, no. Go back from the 1600s to the 1800s and you’ve got events ranging from King Phillip’s War to the raid on Deerfield, MA to Custer’s Last Stand at Little Big Horn. And I certainly think the Native American nations got a completely raw deal.
Nitpick, and only a minor one - the verb is “expel”.
Why was a war seen as necessary in the first place? It’s not like the Zionists came peacefully and only picked up arms in 1947. They were no strangers to terror against the Palestinians and the British in the preceding decades.
Israel was well ahead of Egypt in the balance of power game before 1979. This article by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs shows that out of the $49.8 billion in aid Egypt received since 1953, $45.6 billion was given after 1979. That means that from 1953 to 1978, Egypt got an average of $173 million a year from the US. According to the “Congressional Research Report” by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs here, Israel received $17.4 billion over the same period (chart on page 13 of the PDF) - in fact, it received $4.8 billion in 1979 alone, which outstripped the total of US aid to Egypt in 1953-1979 by $600 million. That averages out to $669 million a year. “Preserving the balance of power with Egypt” is a flat-out lie. Israel has had the upper hand since its founding, and the drastic increase in aid to Egypt is just a bone thrown to the country for its choosing not to fight any longer.
Olentzero:
The Zionists did come peacefully…in the early decades of the century. They built Tel Aviv on uninhabited swampland rather than displace natives. They didn’t take to violence until the Arabs began to make pogroms, e.g., Hebron in 1929 and Jerusalem in 1936, and the British sat on their hands rather than offend the Arabs by prosecuting the killings of Jews.
No, it didn’t magically turn that way in 1947. But the Zionists did have the intention to settle peacefully.
On second reading, I see I have completely misread this line.
The act of land seizure in and of itself is morally neutral. It depends on what goal you are trying to achieve by the action. In the 1770s, Loyalist land was seized and the Loyalists expelled because they were opposed to the revolutionary government of the United States. Had they remained in the US unmolested, they could potentially have formed a network, or series of networks, focused on undermining the new government (which for the times was radically progressive, in the political aspect at least) and restoring power to the British throne. So, in this case, land seizure and expulsion was a progressive measure intended to defend the achievements of the American Revolution. (And, on a more personal note, it wasn’t always completely permanent - I have Dutch Loyalist ancestors who fled New York in the 1770s, only to have their grandchildren return in the 1830s to become by all accounts successful farmers in western Massachusetts.)
The seizure of Native American land, their expulsion and subsequent herding onto reservations and their continued impoverished existence, was for quite a different reason entirely. That was pure expansionism. There wasn’t an overtly racist element to the expulsion of the Loyalists, but there certainly was one here. There were few, if any, attempts at compromise or agreement, and those that were were often complete snowjobs. The United States wanted to expand, and it based its right to do so simply on having the power to do so, and at the expense of indigenous and native populations. (Indigenous being Native American, native being the descendants of European settlers.) In short, the United States treated the people it expelled from their lands just as harshly as Israel treats the Palestinians.
Would giving the land back to the Native Americans be a solution? I don’t know. The horrors are long past; it is far too late now to undo what has been done to the nations that were here first in the name of expansion. That, however, is not the case with Israel and Palestine. There is still a large chance of achieving a peaceful solution and stopping the oppression of Palestinians, but as long as Israel maintains its “us or them” mentality and the US continues to finance Israel’s policy of actively oppressing the Palestinians there will always be a fight.
Before Tel Aviv was even built, the World Zionist Organization had established a fund for land purchases that stipulated the land was to be inalienably Jewish and that only Jewish labor could be employed thereupon. Additionally, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem had issued a report detailing Zionist evasion of Ottoman law regarding immigration and land transfer. So not only did the Zionists go in with an exclusionary program, they were breaking the law to accomplish it.
And the massacres and Hebron and Jerusalem didn’t come out of nowhere, nor were they either ethnically or religiously motivated. The year leading up to the riot in Hebron (and other cities) was punctuated by Zionist attempts to establish exclusive property claims to the Wailing Wall, which Muslims also regarded as a holy site. And in 1935, a shipment of smuggled Belgian arms had been discovered in Jaffa. Add to this the ongoing, decades-long tensions between Palestinian and Zionist farmers, and you have a volatile mix that was bound to explode.
I don’t have much information about the Jerusalem incident in 1936, but I do wish to note that roughly equal numbers of Palestinians and Jews were killed or injured in Hebron 1929. This was not a one-sided slaughter.
In short, I simply don’t believe the Zionists came in peace. When you start out with a program based on expulsion and exclusion (how else would you portray the efforts to prevent the re-sale of Jewish land to Palestinians, and forbidding employment of same?) that grew to armed force even before the country was founded, it’s pretty clear you’re not taking the peaceful road.
Well, yeah. I mean, of course Egypt didn’t get much money from the U.S. before '79 - it used to get it’s money from the Soviets. I mean, where the hell did they get all those T-64’s, MiGs and Saggers from, the tooth fairy? Russian support for the Arab nations prior to 1979 was huge. The U.S. just equalled the amount to force a peace.
I’ll answer the rest later.