Would MLK’s civil disobedience tactics have worked if his goal was an independent state for African-Americans, carved out of U.S. territory? Hardly. Did Gandhi successfully get the British out of India that way? Yes, but it was as much to do with the inability of Britain to maintain control of India after the effects of the war as anything else. Comparison of the Palestinian struggle for independence agaisnt the struggle of black Americans for justice represents a tenuous grasp of the issues involved.
Returning to the original thrust of the OP: “Is the killing of Hamas leaders a good plan?”, I am going to post a section of the 1991 Torture Victim Prevention Act, passed by the Congress in 1992.
“Sec. 2. Establishment of civil action
(a) Liability–an individual who, under actual or apparent authority, or color of law, of any foreign nation–
(1)…
(2) subjects an individual to extrajudicial killing shall, in a civil action, be liable for damages to the individual’s legal representative, or to any person who many be a claimant in an action for wrongful death…”
IOW, Sharon or whoever ordered the strike on Yassin would be liable for damages under US law should one of his family members or followers file suit.
Of course, Sharon would presumably claim indemnity under the Act of State Doctrine (simply put, officers of States may not be held liable for actions performed in the name of that State… sometimes) so how this would play out would be rather interesting.
To forestall the people who are going to say, “But a US court doesn’t have jurisdiction! etc.”, the Act grants federal district courts that very jurisdiction. Obviously, Sharon or Israeli officer adjudged liable in this hypothetical suit would refuse to pay damages; the usual method of recompense in this sort of case is the seizure of assets of the offending State in the US and distribution to the plaintiffs in the amount of the judgment.
There never was, since the creation of the world, such a country as “Palistine”. The Palistinians, like the Zionists, had zero votes at the UN, because neither entity was a country - until the UN created one, that is (or in this case, two). Notice the date of Israeli representation: "1949 59 Israel ". Israel only got recognition after it became a country. The Israelis had just as much “right”, according to you, to automatically reject the partition plan - because they were in exactly the same position.
“The Palistinians” could not lose land, because they never had any - as a group entity. Sure, plenty of Palistinians owned land personally. So did plenty of Jews, who (until the war that resulted from the failure of the Palistinians, along with the rest of the Arab world, to accept partition) had never “displaced” anyone - they bought land from its private owners, perfectly legitimately.
The whole point of partition, and why it was such a bizzare shape, was to attempt to enclose areas of Palistinian ownership with Palistine, and Israeli ownership with Israel. The process wasn’t perfect, because some Israelis and some Palistinians were on the wrong side of the line. So quit the pissing and moaning about “losing land” and “colonialism”, unless you somehow believe in ancestral ethnic rights (which BTW some ultra-Zionists do, and they think it gives them the “right” to the whole place!) .
Now, one could legitimately ask - what became of UN-created Palistine? Why is there no “1949 60 Palistine” entry? The answer: Jordan absorbed its remains after the war. To total indifference of everyone except Palistinians (remember “Black September”?). Apparently, people only care about “Palistine” when it is useful to bash away at Israel, not otherwise.
Hardly. I’d still appreciate a substantive response, though: how can you compare two struggles for entirely different objectives?
I’m not suggesting that suicide bombings or any deliberate targeting of civilians is justified; I’m merely pointing out the comparison with MLK and Gandhi is unfair.
While I realize that statement was made tongue firmly in cheek, I’m still going to point out that the US is immune to suits in its own courts under the above legislation; it only applies to foreign governments.
Any such suit by whichever Husseins are left would be filed in whatever judiciary the Iraqis create after the handover, most likely. The bin Ladens, if they were to file any kind of suit at all (Osama has been extremely bad for business) would probably do it in a Saudi court.
Yes, funny how that worked out. Note here a partial map of the British Mandate in the Middle East, which was established shortly after the end of the First World War. You’ll see that this mandate covered Iraq, Jordan, and the region called Palestine (no, it wasn’t a country, but neither were Iraq or Jordan at that point). But by 1945, Britain had granted enough independence to Syria and Jordan to qualify them as ‘countries’ and thus earn them representation in the UN. Why did Britain hold out on granting Palestine the same independence? Perhaps it had something to do with not wanting to let the Palestinians have a say in deciding whether the region should be a Jewish National Home?
That’s very possible - but by 1945 Jewish land ownership stood at only 6% of the total area of Palestine. How did they get from that small amount to the area of land they claimed (map) just two years later? A boom in the buyer’s market for real estate?
I presume you’re talking about the original partition of 1947. That doesn’t look like 6% of the land to me. And how do you explain the differences between Israeli-held land in 1947 and Israeli-held land in 1950? More “legitimate” purchases?
If you can satisfactorily explain the massive increase in Jewish-owned (later Israeli) territory from 1945 to 1950 as legitimate land purchases from the native Palestinian population, then I will reconsider my argument.
The area described as ‘annexed by Jordan’ in the French map looks suspiciously like the same area covered in the Oslo and Wye agreements. If that’s Jordanian territory, what is Israel doing proposing divisions thereof?
Well, obviously, it’s not Jordanian territory now. It was between 1949 and 1967, though, when Jordan lost a war to Israel and Israel occupied it pending a permanent peace treaty. Obviously, things happened since then, and Jordan ended up surrendering their claims to the land to the Palestinians.
OK, so if it’s all Palestinian territory, what is Israel doing claiming the right to exercise military and civil authority, either in whole or jointly, over 90% of it?
Before Oslo, as the occupying power, Israel exercised both civil and military control over all of the West Bank. The Oslo agreements set up a framework for phased withdrawal of Israeli authority in the West Bank and the turn over of both civil and military authority to the PNA. Unfortunately, only the first phase of Oslo was completed, when Rabin was killed. Netenyahu’s election as Prime Minister and an outbreak of violence in Jerusalem led to Oslo being stalled, as both sides claimed (correctly, I think, although that’s a matter of interpretation), that the other wasn’t living up to the agreements made. This led to a further round of negotitiation, resulting in the Wye River Memorandum (in 1998), linking Israeli withdrawal to the fufillment of Palestinian security pledges (which was Israel’s main concern), and setting the US up to oversee Israeli withdrawals (which was the PNA’s main concern).
However, neither side lived up to the agreement made during Wye River. The PNA failed to suppress violence and live up to the security guarantees, as the agreement stipulated, and the Israelis refused to carry out withdrawals until the PNA did so. Further, part of Wye River required Israeli freeing of Palestinian prisoners, but they refused to free certain prisoners belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
So, this brings us to 2000. Netenyahu has, by this point, been defeated by Barak, and Barak and Arafat met at Camp David for further negotiations, whereby a plan was offered whereby Israel would annex Jerusalem and some land along the Israeli-Palestinian border, and an independent Palestinian state would be established in the rest (the Palestinians would get 73% of the territory originally, and, after 10 years, a total of 90% [94% if you don’t count Jerusalem and the surrounding areas]). Arafat rejected this because it left Jerusalem in Israeli hands and didn’t allow for Palestinian refugees to settle in Israel proper.
The announcement that Arafat was rejecting the plan led to anti-Israeli violence in the West Bank. At the same time, Sharon, who was campaigning for election against Barak, visited the Temple Mount. This led to further violence, which led to Sharon’s election, put an end to the negotiations.
Before I respond to your specific points, I’ve got to note that your comment:
Speaks volumes for your knowledge of modern Middle East history.
Now, to your arguments:
To say that the second intifadeh was triggered by his visit conveniently ignores a rise in Palestinian terror incidents in the months immediately prior to that. In addition, it should be noted that Sharon never even attempted to enter any mosque - he only went up on the mountain. Even if this visit could be legitimately viewed as the cause of the second intifadeh - is that a rational response to something so small? A visit to the mountain -> a full-scale terror campaign?
News flash - Israel already has the Temple Mount all to itself, and has since 1967. Since winning it from Jordan, the territory was theirs to dispose of as they wished. The very fact that since then it showed utmost deference to Muslim sensibilities in allowing Muslim religious authorities to administer it and virtually bar all Jews from ascending speaks volumes about just how ruthless Israel’s so-called land grab was intended to be.
Aside from the fact that Ashwari, the top Palestinian P.R. spinner, is perfectly capable of exaggerating and outright lying, you’re conveniently ignoring that what she describes is because of the renewed intifadeh, which started some three months prior to the publication of that article. So yes, changed circumstances.
Considering how many violations of Oslo the Israelis gritted their teeth and ignored in order to keep returning to the negotiating table, the Palestinians have some gall claiming such provocations as justification for abandoning the peace process and initiaing an armed uprising.
But of course, gall is pretty much all that Palestinian apologists have in their corner. After all, when they trot out lists of Israeli atrocities against them…and I’m not denying there have been some, including the Qibya incident you mentioned (I’m not going to bother quoting your whole Ariel Sharon bio), they always neglect to mention such minor factors as:
For Israel, such occurrences as Qibya, Dier Yassein, or Sabra and Shalita are not only aberrations - as opposed to being the standard M.O. for Arab countries - but are usually only considered to be particularly heinous because they’re so out of character for Israel.
Then boy, did they do a lousy job of founding it. When the War of Israeli independence ended, there was a substantial Arab population in the country, and the Israelis were foolish enough to actually give them full equal rights, including the right to elect members of the Knesset!
Not that Israel didn’t have any lessons regarding how to properly expel an unwanted population (if such was the desired effect). They could have followed the example set by [http://radiobergen.org/history/jewsinarab.html]these guys.
But for some odd reason, they didn’t. Boy, those Israelis love grabbing land, don’t they?
While not exactly shining moments in Israeli human-rights history, Sharon did nothing other than what he was ordered to. As it is, his military career came to an end not over something he actively did, but over something he passively allowed to happen. What other military holds its officers to standards that high?
And as far as his political career goes…hey, that’s the kind of politician you’ll elect when you’re under seige from terrorists.
Ashwari’s version of events is extremely at odds with that offered by the other parties (including the US, not just Israel) at Camp David, which make Arafat out to be incapable of understanding what “compromise” and “negotiation” mean.
As for the report from the United Nations that you linked and quoted: need I point out that it describes how the Palestinian condition deteriorated since the start of the Al-Aqsa intifadeh? That does not address the point that the Israelis were not “targeting” the Palestinians prior to the renewed hostilities.
What, because I didn’t know the answer to one specific question? Seeing as how I seem to be actually using sources for my analysis of recent history in the region, and that many of these are sources I’ve used before and that I know you’ve seen since we’ve been in this argument before, and that you haven’t attempted to discredit them in any serious manner, I would think maybe I do know something about modern Middle East history. Of course, if you can conclusively prove that every last source I’ve linked to is either grossly inaccurate or a complete fabrication, then I’ll be glad to admit I haven’t the foggiest about what’s going on in Israel. What say you?
You’ll note I used the phrase “straw that broke the camel’s back”. You know, like when Popeye says “That’s all I can stands; I can’t stands no more!” Or, to use another phrase, “Enough is enough”. Had it been just the al-Aqsa visit that triggered the second intifadeh, your opinion might have some validity.
One moderately generous event doth not a silver bullet make. I refer you to the maps I linked to earlier detailing the expansion of Israeli territory over a two-year period, and to the earlier expansion between 1945 and 1947.
whereas every last defender of Israel is a paragon of truth and honesty,
Do you have a chronology of those events on hand, or some other form of ironclad proof that Barak did absolutely nothing close to what Ashrawi described in the article before the second intifadeh was touched off?
Israel has some gall claiming it has more of a right to the land it currently occupies than the Palestinians did when they were expelled from it.
Whereas the defenders of the Qibya massacre seem to neglect mentioning that
In this Wikipedia article, quoting from Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall.Or that
same article, quoting the Jerusalem Post of 31 Oct 1965.
Oh, please provide me with cites on any event where Palestinians directly armed an Islamic militia, sent them into an Israeli camp, and watched them slaughter almost 2,000 Jews at one go. For that matter, show me cites that prove Palestinians have bulldozed entire Israeli villages.
They’re heinous, period - Israel’s supposed character regardless. Any country that allows such things to happen over and over again in the name of national defense doesn’t have much claim to good character in the first place.
I note, with much interest, that all these actions directed against the native Jewish population, detestable as they are, occurred no earlier than 1948. Do you have evidence that such mass expulsions occurred at any time in those countries before that time? Otherwise, I’d have to conclude that this was a reaction to Zionist violence rather than anti-Semitism inherent in Muslim governments.
Yes, they do indeed. Unless that French map I linked to is a complete falsification?
How ironic… the Nuremberg defense. Do you kiss your bubbeleh with that mouth?
You don’t just “passively allow” a foreign private army to be equipped with your country’s armaments. If you actually do, that’s just gross incompetence.
I shudder to think what the world would be like if they did.
That’s the kind of politician who pisses people off. If you don’t want terrorist attacks upped, don’t elect a man whose track record doesn’t instill people with the hopes of peace in their lifetime.
Ashrawi. Ash-ra-wi. Say it with me.
What, the checkpoints were only thrown up in 2000? Israel never closed Palestine off from the rest of the world before 1999? And why consign two million Palestinians to grinding poverty because of the objectionable actions of a few?
Olentzero - you keep harping on the 1945-1947 “land grab” - from 6% of the land to around 50% in the partition agreements. Allow me to remind you that this is 6% of all land in the British Mandate of Palestine privately owned by Jews. Some additional percentage (I don’t have time to look things up right now) was privately owned by arabs.
And a massive majority of the land belonged (and belongs) to the legal government du jour (due to previous Ottaman - yes, land grabs…)
So the British tried to put as much Jewish-owned land as possible in the Jewish State; as much Arab owned as possible in the Arab State; and carved up the rest as it saw fit.
Following the Arab failure to accept the 1947 partition and the 1948 war, of course, all (well most) of the land reverted to Israeli Government ownership - having become the “Legal Government” of these lands - hence the “inexplicable jump” (just as it previously belonged to the British Crown, and hence was theirs to divvy up). This was not a land grab - this is how the Ottman Legal System (which the British kept while operating their mandate) works.
Most of the land here still belongs to the government, and is not privately owned.
Just one small note (I have no intention of once more entering the Israel meta-debate) - in pre-1948 British terminology, the term Palestinian referred to both Arabs and Jews. It’s odd, sometimes, reading old Mandatory documents and bumping into the term “Palestinian Jew”, but the fact of the matter is, “Palestinian=Arab” only became true after 1948. So British maps including a territory called “Palestine” don’t really mean anything.
OK, so let me get this straight. The partition of 1947, for argument’s sake, divided Palestine half and half between the Jews and the Palestinians. This partition reflected the ownership of the land, whether private or government-owned. Since 6% of the pre-partition land was privately owned by Jews, are you telling me that 44% of the land was owned by the Israeli government three years before the creation of the state of Israel?
No. I’m saying the 80-90% of the land belonged to the British Crown (as current governing body), to dispose of as they saw fit.
They decided to divide it roughly evenly between Jews and Arabs.
Private land, of course, remained private - but it was a small part of the whole, and didn’t make that much of a difference.
Consequently, the Palestinian Arabs refused the British two-state proposal, went to war with the fledgling state that the Palestinian Jews did accept, and lost.
The state of Israel ended the war controlling about 80% of the former Palestine Mandate. All non-private land within that area reverted to (Israeli) government ownership - again, as “current government”. The rest - what is now called the “West Bank” and “the Gaza Strip” - should by rights had remained for the Palestinian Arabs, but the West Bank was annexed by Jordan in 1950, and the Gaza Strip was effectively taken over by Egypt around the same time. Why They chose not to create a Palestinian (Arab) state in these territories is another question…
Actually, the United Nations did that, not the British Crown. Here’s the resolution itself. As a further note, the Special Committee on Palestine, according to this article, consisted of members from the following nations:
No voices representing the Arab majority that actually lived in the region. To be fair, no voices representing the Jewish population either. Essentially, then, the matter was decided entirely undemocratically. So my question is this - if the creation of Israel was accomplished in such an undemocratic manner, by national entities that didn’t even have the same rights claimed by the British Crown as mandatory of Palestine, how can the further expansion of Israel by conquest in 1948 and 1967 be considered any more legitimate?
which was answered by the 1967 war, which even the UN admits was an annexation by Israel:
Here, for further reading, is an entire UN site on the Palestinian question. And, for further reference, a really nice map of the original partition plan.
Now, I’d like to turn back to the French map for a moment. You’ll note on the 1950 map that there are several green stars scattered about. The key indicated that these are the locations of the chief massacres of Palestinian civilians. Several of them are of great interest - like Deir Yassein, the three near Hebron, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, the ones at Jaffa and Haifa, the one north of Acre, and finally the one at Majd al-Kurum. Every one of these sites were deep inside what was Palestinian territory in 1947, and, with two exceptions (northeast of Jerusalem and northeast of Hebron) are now Israeli territory. Even the ones at Jaffa and Haifa occurred on Palestinian territory, if you compare the sites of those massacres with the UN partition map I linked to. Essentially, Israel defied an admittedly undemocratic mandate, encroached militarily on territory it was told it had no claim to, massacred civilians, and claimed that territory anyway - which, according to the UN, resulted in
If that isn’t a blatant colonialist land grab, I don’t know what is.
Certainly an improvement over Hanan Ashrawi (and see? I’m spelling it right this time!), I’ll say that much.
Well, when the specific question at issue is what the Palestinian Arab response was to the UN Partition Plan, that’s pretty glaring. As you no doubt know, their response was to reject the Plan and immediately attack the newly-created Zionist state, alongside the armies of several already-established Arab nations.
Then what else was Israel doing to them before that?
Who’s talking about a “silver bullet”? What it does make, though, is a blow to anyone who seriously argues that disenfranchising Palestinians for the sake of land acquisition is an Israeli policy for its own sake rather than a reaction to Arab acts of war and/or terrorism.
Hardly. But given the choice between a spokesperson for an autocrat running a territory with no non-state(so to speak)-run press and a spokesperson for a government whose every action can be examined both in open political debate and in a free press, I’ll more likely believe the latter.
Do you see anything in Ashrawi’s article that specifically alleges that what she describes took place earlier than that? The article makes broad, vague accusations without any specific historical context at all. The only thing that places any sort of date on the allegations is the fact that the article itself is dated three months after the Al-Aqsa intifada started.
“Palestinians” as a distinct national entity (to whatever extent they have ever existed as such) did not have the ability to carry out attacks on that sort of scale. (And speaking of the scale, your “2000” number is more than twice as high as the actual highest estimate of dead in that incident…that high estimate coming from the Israelis. It has since become inflated in Palestinian/Arab propaganda only.) Nonetheless, the Palestinians and other Arab nations have armed Islamic militias and sent them into Israel with the intention of killing as many as they’re capable of, sometimes dozens at a time - do you deny that?
And that just relates to the terrorist groups - how many times have Arab armies initiated hostilities against Israel?
Finally, mass Arab-government violence is hardly limited to being against Israel. What about Jordan’s Black September? Or Iraq’s gassing of Kurds? The ongoing repression of what Western countries consider to be basic human rights in most, if not all, of these countries? How many do we not even know about because those countries don’t have a free press?
But in Israeli history, these incidents are discussed, dissected, blame is publicly assigned, and they therefore stand out like red flags for the world community to criticize.
Zionist violence where…in the Arab countries that did those? Can you point me to a cite for such an allegation? That’s not meant as challenge; I have sincerely looked for ANY non-Jewish-slanted web site for such a perspective on the Arab explusion of Jews, and I have yet to find one.
In any case, what I meant by the quote I offered was merely an illustration of what a real land grab/disenfranchisement looks like. Nations are perfectly capable of carrying such complete removals, and Israel would have been equally capable, if such was their aim.
Yes, I’ll admit to trying to inject a note of irony into my response by referencing the Jewish expulsion from Arab lands. I could also cite how Kuwait effectively removed Palestinians following the Gulf War due to their support - merely in word, not material support - of Iraq. This quote is from an “anti-Iraq-War” slanted web site (http://www.sfbg.com/gulfwar/090992.html), posting an article dated 1992 (no doubt pre-dating the web-ization of this organization):
Which plays to a point I had been trying to make earlier: Somehow, this sort of thing is simply shrugged at and ignored/accepted if Israel is not involved. And unlike Israel, the Palestinians never actually took up arms against Kuwait, never stated a goal to “drive Kuwaitis into the sea” nor do Palestinian textbooks “neglect” to include Kuwait on their Middle East maps. And this is a much larger-scale disenfranchisement of Palestinians than Israel ever carried out. But somehow, for their much milder and much more defensive-minded actions, Israel is accused of ruthless land-grabbing.
I was not defending his actions. I was making the point that the incident couldn’t be expected to harm his military career. (this was your quote to which this was a response: “Again, I repeat - if Sharon’s atrocities were aberrations, he should not have gotten as far as he has militarily and politically.”) Whether or not such retaliatory strikes were justifiable military policy is a different issue entirely.
No, but you do “passively allow” them to be massacring civilians when their stated purpose was to root out terrorists who had been responsible for the assasination of Lebanon’s elected president. And for that dropping of the ball, Sharon was dismissed from his Ministry portfolio.
OK, let me get this straight: already under Barak, the Palestinians began a new uprising, and the Israeli public is supposed to re-elect him due to worry that they’ll be more pissed off otherwise?
Aside from the questionable wisdom of electing a leader with the appeasement of one’s enemies in mind, the fact was that there was no indication that a second term for Barak would lessen the Palestinian pissed-offed-ness. The Al-Aqsa intifada started with him at the helm at the time, why would the Israeli electorate expect it to diminish if he stayed?
Not when the threat of violence was low. Certainly the degradation of the standard of living in the Occupied Territories did not take a nosedive until the beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada.
When the decision is between the lives of your own citizens vs. the prosperity - not the lives, but the quality of life - of non-citizens, it’s a pretty easy choice. A sad one, to be sure - not only was it bound to happen that the impoverished Palestinians would get angrier, from a pragmatic point of view, Israelis were quite happy to have Palestinian cheap labor, the Middle-Eastern equivalent of Mexican migrant workers. Nonetheless, when you’re worried that every man crossing a loosely-guarded border might be setting off a bomb in the pizza shop where you plan to eat lunch the next day, you shake your head, sigh sadly, and station the soldiers at the checkpoints.
Here is a map of the distribution of population by ethnic origin broken down by sub-district in Palestine from 1947. Nowhere except in Jaffa was the Jewish population an overwhelming majority; in three other sub-districts (Haifa, Tiberias, and Jerusalem) they were a significant minority.
Here, for comparison, is a map of the breakdown by sub-district of land ownership between Jews, Arabs, and public lands. Nowhere was the land majority Jewish-owned. Now here’s a quite detailed map, showing sub-district borders, of the UN plan of partition from 1947. Examine the ratios of land ownership and population in the districts partitioned to Israel at that time. Particularly note the partition of Beersheba, in which there was less than 1% Jewish land ownership - in fact it was the largest sector of publicly owned land in Palestine - and yet Israel got roughly 80% of it. The robbery couldn’t be clearer.
Now, against this background, it should become almost self-evident that the Palestinians have gotten the short end of the stick from both Israel and the international community since 1948, and that their fightback, tactics notwithstanding, is eminently justified. Furthermore, continued Israeli intransigence cannot be adequately cloaked with “self-defense” - all their actions towards the Palestinian population have been nothing but provocation upon provocation. The Palestinians have a right not to acknowledge or accept the existence of the state of Israel, and their right to fight back against Israeli aggression should not be rejected out of hand simply because the only tactics available to them at this point in time are crude (but no less brutal than Israeli tactics).
