You’re correct that I don’t equate Hamas with the general Palestinian populace. However, since the majority of the Palestinian people (52% I believe, in the latest poll) still hold that Israel has no right to exist (which is Hamas’ view), then there is no real basis for making peace with a people who don’t want it. If my figures are wrong, not only will I be happy that peace is achieveable, but I will even be happy that I was dead wrong on this fact.
As for a more moderate Israeli approach, what do you suggest?
You want to ask me a question, ask me. But don’t put forth a position I don’t hold in response to something else I said, then roll your goddamned eyes at it. You want to do that, take it to the Pit.
First, phil, I have no idea what life issues you’re dealing with behind the keyboard, but this continuous curmudgeonly crankiness you’re exuding is becoming rather tiresome. I can appreciate that we’re coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and it’s only in taking on the arguments from the other side that we can clarify our own arguments. But this snotty jowl-snapping has got to go, sweetheart.
So, let’s turn to the question of how much money the US is giving to each side of this conflict.
I’m not sure where you got your numbers for US contributions to the UNRWA, although I suspect it was from this page on the UN site, which lists the total income from the US as $89.5M for 2000.
However, according to this article from the Washington Report on Middle East affairs, the amount of foreign aid to Israel from the US totals $3 billion annually. In other words, for every $1 the US gave the UNRWA, it gave Israel $33.50. And even though the amount of economic aid to Israel is supposed to be reduced by $120M a year for the next ten years, the amount of military aid will increase by $60 million over the next ten years… so by 2009 the amount of aid given annually to Israel will be a mere $2.4 billion.
So yes, phil, you are correct. The Palestinians, or at least one organization that claims to represent them, does have the ear of the United States. But if you look at the big picture, it clearly shows which side the US favors, and has been favoring, since 1948. Having the US’ ear doesn’t mean squat if your opponent has his hands in the US’ wallet.
Oh, Alessan - yes, I do believe Israel does not have a right to exist. But that does not mean I believe Jews don’t have a right to live anywhere they wish to. The former belief is anti-Zionist; the latter is anti-Semitic, and there is a serious difference between the two.
The problem is that both sides are led by a bunch of poopy-heads, and a sizable chunk of the people they represent are also poopy-heads. Sharon’s got a personal vendetta against Arafat, Arafat is more interested in looking “defiant” to Israel than in building a true peace, and there are people in both camps who would gladly see the other side completely driven out of the area all together.
And these nuts are all goading each other, which simply makes things worse – and gives them all more “examples” to point at to justify their own actions.
Personally, I’d give the Palestinians their own state, throw in some international money to help them rebuild, and make Israel and Palestine sign a pact of mutual protection (think NATO), just so they’d both have an incentive to work together for a change. But I know the odds of anything like that being approved by both sides and actually being carried out is lower than monkeys spontaneously flying out of G. W. Bush’s butt.
This gets me. Really. The East Timorese have their own country, and had democratic elections a few months ago. They won the battle against oppression. The UN came to their aid and helped them out. All without having to blow up grandmothers and granddaughters at bus stops.
Similarly are countless other nationalist and social struggles that did not resort to violence, notably the fight for civil rights in the American South in the 60s, which was following an example of the Indian nationalist movement of Gandhi.
You are right, someone willing to kill themselves in order to protest is a powerful symbol. Look at the self-immolation of Buddhist monks. This is most decidedly not that.
Hamas and IJ are against any Jewish presence in the Middle East. They spew hateful messages dismissing Jews as infidel pigs. They are against negotiated settlement with the unholy Jews, and will only settle for total military victory. Even the PA still has this in their charter. Hamas and IJ blow up people on buses not to protest occupation, they do it because they want the Jews to all go back to Europe or Ethiopia or Yemen or whever they come from. The ones that don’t will be killed.
For those who doubt it, I challenge you to find a cite of a representative of Hamas or IJ saying unambiguously (without code words such as Zionist presence in Palestine which means all of Israel) that they would settle for an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza in peaceful coexistence with Israel.
Really. Not to be off-topic, but what did they win? The right to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands for decades before the UN helped them?
They didn’t engage in suicide bombing. They were killed by the truckload and yet they were largely invisible, for example, in the mainstream US press until the late 1990s.
Again, I don’t think suicide bombing is a smart, effective or morally correct strategy. But I was just pointing out that the Palestinian cause is much more in our consciousness despite the people having suffered much less than the East Timorese (arguably, I suppose: genocidal murder versus 50 years of exile isn’t a fun conundrum). Does this justify tactics? I don’t think so. But you have to see how they might appear to be successful to the Palestinians and how they might justify it to themselves.
If you expect to have people act cool and rational after 50 years of abuse, you’re in for trouble. If the suicide bombings stopped tomorrow, Israel would not for one second restore Palestinian rights, stop settlements, or leave the Territories.
And I hate to break it to you, but the vast, vast majority of “social struggles” undertaken by the powerless against the powerful in our modern times have resulted in miserable failure, no matter what the tactics. Are Black folks in America empowered now? Is there social justice in India? Did non-violence really work in those situations?
Olentzero, if you have an opinion on my personal life, you may discuss it with me, well, personally. In e-mail, if you wish; my address is right there for everyone to see. Do not assume that my nausea over the repeated implications of moral equivalence between the IDF and suicide bombers is anything more than it appears to be. I’m also not going to preemptively answer questions that were not asked or respond to statements that are not made.
Next, you affirm that the U.S. does, in fact, contribute a great deal of money to the Palestinians via UNRWA–nearly a third of its entire budget. Thank you. Although I think the fact that the Arab world combined contributes only a pittance is significant, you may feel differently.
Third, if and when there are Arab countries in the region that have strategic significance as allies – as Israel does – and which operate as democracies – as Israel does – I’m sure the U.S. will give them lots of money, too. You’ll notice that Egypt gets foreign aid in from the U.S. to the tune of billions as well, since they signed a peace treaty with Israel.
Perhaps when Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa also learn to play nice, they can ride the big gravy train too. Right now, all they’re doing is fucking things up for the rest of the Palestinians. They know that every time one of their people bravely attacks a shopping mall, Sharon will send tanks rolling into some portion of the West Bank or Gaza, and they can say, “See? See?” and recruit more of the Palestinian population to share their goal, which is not a Palestinian state, but the destruction of the Jews.
Finally, you do realize that the day that Israel does not exist, there won’t be a Jew left within ten thousand miles of Jerusalem, right? It’s only because of the existence of Israel that there is any Jewish population of significance in the Middle East at all. Absent Israel, there is no way that other countries would absorb any percentage of the Jewish population of the region. I know you’ve claimed otherwise, but the evidence simply does not bear it out.
Squish, if you have anything else to say to me, say it in the Pit.
I don’t really see your point. Sure, I can reason why the Palestinians are sending suicide bombers. But again, I will stress that IMHO most suicide bombers are not beating their fists in hopelessness against a cruel Israeli occupation. Most are religiously motivated to go out and kill as many Jews as possible, to get the Jews not only out of Hebron and Jerusalem, but out of Tel Aviv and Haifa as well.
The occupation is a nifty excuse, but if their only goal was ending the occupation, they could have long since had an independent Palestinian state. Every time a hope for peace surfaces, up go the terrorist attacks. Even before this current intifada started, that was the case.
If there was peace tomorrow, there is absolutely no reason for the Israelis not to give the Palestinians a homeland. Polls reveal most Israelis want out of the territories, most still even support a Palestinian homeland. A small minority of Greater Israel believers is marginalized. Compare this to the PA, which until this week has wavered between policies of total eradication of the Jews and peaceful coexistence with Israel only if it accepts back enough refugees to make it an Arab state. Compare the illegal, marginalized Israeli extremist parties like Kach with the mainstream, wildly popular Hamas, IJ, and al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade (Fatah).
It has been Israel, time and time again, who instigated negotiations. The current intifada shattered the Israeli Left and internal politics took a rightward swing, but negotiations have still continued. Now, the Left is resurgent, and somehwat steering the Sharon government. Policies like unilateral separation are touchstones of the more dovish of the cabinet and are actively being pursued.
I don’t understand why you chose to bring up the points about social struggles not ending in everyone holding hands and singing together. It is totally irrelevant. African Americans now have full protection under the law. India is independent of the British. Whether they are living in utopian situations is irrelevant.
It is ludicrous to say that African Americans would be better off now if instead of Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus, she had detonated 30 pounds of Semtex in the front of the bus. Non-violence absolutely worked in the American South and in India. There are no Jim Crow laws, there is no legal segregation, blacks can vote. India is not under the crown. Those were the goals of the movements, and they succeeded. They did not aim to correct the wrongs of hundreds of years of slavery/colonialism in one jump. The struggle was for justice, and the most glaring violations of justice were corrected.
I’ll get back to you on #1, I’m a bit too relaxed right now…
I think your analogy is a bit off. When one country is using weapons of mass destruction on another country, regardless of how accurate the ‘targets’ may be, it is expected, in that act, that civilians will die because of that act. Not so with an ordinary driver, despite the fact that pedestrians are occasionally run over. The act of driving does not necessitate “collateral damage.” Maybe a drunk driver would be a better analogy, although that still feels off.
-I’ll tell you this:
-I would not hold a driver accountable for running over a civilian if he were licensed and in a legal/suitable condition to drive.
-If a drunk driver runs over a civilian, I would hold the drunk driver accountable.
-If a wrecking truck decided it needed to take out a building (and it seemed very humanitarian to take out that building), but it was highly probable that other, innocent buildings would be destroyed in the process, I would hold the wrecking truck accountable for the damage to all the buildings.
Christ, what planet are you on? We have a black Secretary of State, for god’s sake. Forty years ago, lynchings were an acceptable practice that local police departments turned a blind eye to in many parts of the country. Yeah, I’d call that progress and empowerment. Do you think blacks would be better off today if, instead of peaceful protests, they had taken to blowing up buses carrying white students and grandmothers?
And India is no longer a British colony, but an independent nation. In fact, it is the world’s largest democracy. As this was the exact aim of the swaraj movement, I think that counts as a success too.
Nonviolent resistance does not always work; only when your enemy has the illusion of civility. That is, they really think that they are wonderful, decent people doing what is moral and best for everyone involved. Most whites (at least in the North) were unaware of the horrors of segregation in the South, and believed that blacks wanted “separate but equal.” The continued protests and court battles demonstrated both that this was not true, and that many governors and police chiefs were brutal, racist thugs who were not above turning police dogs and fire hoses at little children. People woke up, realized the system was broken, and fixed it. These protests would not have worked in a completely racist society that didn’t give a rat’s ass about blacks.
So where to the Israelis stand in this equation? Given their numerous past efforts to negotiate with the Palestinians, their successful negotiation with Egypt (even to the point of sending troops to forcibly remove settlers), and their pride at being the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, I think it would be possible to shame Israel into acquiescing to Palestinian demands for their own state, if the Palestinians stopped their terrorism. At the very least, the United States could be shamed into withdrawing financial support. At the very least, it’s something for the Palestinians to try, seeing how thirty five years of violence has gotten them squat.
And on another subject, the reason this conflict has gotten attention is not suicide bombings. It’s news because there’s a lot of rich, powerful Jews in America and a lot of oil in the Middle East. Consider the recently resolved situation in Sierra Leone, where rebels routinely hacked off hands. Or the radical Christians in the Ugandan/Sudanese border region, who actually kidnap children, often making them kill their own families, brainwash them and heavily drug them, and turn them into soldiers for their own cause. Both equally as brutal and horrific as suicide bombers in Israel, yet hardly an iota of attention in the American media.
Well, it’s really just a matter of numbers. In any given driving trip, there is a very small possibility of accidentally killing innocent people. But we know that thousands die every year in car accidents. We can extend this and say that in any given military action, it is not guaranteed that civilians will die, but do enough of them, and the probability is very high.
If you want another analogy, how about digging a tunnel? The standard rule is “one life per mile,” that is, for every mile you dig, you can expect one death. This is tragic, but we recognise the necessity of construction projects. Would you condemn a politicial who approved of digging a lengthy tunnel, knowing that the odds of innocent people dying are very high?
Finally, is there a possibility of civilian deaths that you find acceptable, or is any possibility over 0% considered tantamount to intentional terrorism against innocent civilians?
I originally posted the following in another thread:
At the time, you replied that the anti-Jewish violence throughout the Arab world was also a reaction to Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Maybe so. But the fact is, Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel did happen. To undo the establishment of the State of Israel will necessarily involve a very large amount of bloodshed and human suffering. That Jews, as individuals, would wind up peacefully remaining in a Palestinian state encompassing all of Israel and the Occupied Territories is a fantasy. Two states on that territory, Israel and Palestine, may not be a fantasy, although it’s hard to be optimistic these days.
Really, what modern nation wasn’t founded on some sort of injustice or cruelty? How far do we go in this bloody quest for perfect historical justice? Do the Germans of the Sudetenland and East Prussia get their homes back? I suppose we will need to ship some Germans back out of the Federal Republic and back into what are now Poland and the Czech Republic and so on, in order to make room for all the Jews displaced from Israel by the new state of Palestine.
Do the Tamils get an independent state, or do we say they were alien invaders of Sri Lanka and run them all back to India?
In as much as that the percentage you quote state that they wish for a ‘liberation of all historical Palestine’, you are correct. On the other hand 42.8% would be satisfied with a liberation of occupied territories along the UN resolution 288. That’s not the interesting part in regards of what I posited though. In polls only a year ago only 11% of the polled answered that they wanted a ‘liberation of all historical Palestine’. Which follows my suggested pattern of increasing opposition as violence escalates. Further support for Hamas has increased over 60% in the last year. Suicide bombings have followed the same pattern and on like that it goes. It confirms my point that the more you taunt someone all the more will they oppose you. Now this sword cuts both ways. The more attacks on civilians by Palestinians the more opposition by the Israelis to make peace. A cycle of violence has been created.
More moderate approach? I suggested it already. Stop settlement. Desist all occupation. Crack down on Hamas, Al Aksa and their ilk, but leave the parts of the PA that are not directly and operatively involved room for maneuver and build that friggin’ fence. More importantly than all; work with the international community for the creation of a Palestine state independent of whatever atrocities are or have been committed.
I ask the same from the Palestinian except that the list is shorter. Stop the bombing. Help Israel go after the leadership of the extremists.
It’s up to Israel to take the first step though. Not morally or anything, but it’s the only practical solution given that the Israeli government is not completely fragmented and shattered, but still retains the semblance of unity and control. On the other hand with the current Israeli administration in place that is a pretty unlikely scenario. Basically Likud need to tone down the demagogy, and let us be honest and admit that even if Sharon might be relatively moderate (in a Likud kind of way that is) the vast majority of the party with Netanyahu heading the way want nothing less than the complete destruction of all things Palestinian. Just like the Palestinians the Israelis shift their popular support in that direction as violence increases.
Bottom line is that I am not so hopeful that this is going to work itself towards peace without continued very serious suffering on both sides and the involvement of the outside world in a forceful manner, because both sides are way unreasonable in their expectations of unconditional change of attitude and violent behavior from the other.
Sparc
PS here is some poll data from the last couple of years. DS