The fundamental reasons why Palestinians and other Arabs attack Israel is that they hate Isrealis and they hate Jews. They have been trained to hate by the Palestinian Authority and by some Arab governments.
That’s the thesis of this Washington Post article by Charles Krauthammer. (quotes below) I believe he’s right about the hatred, because it was so obvious to me on a brief trip to Jerusalem ten years ago. I cannot independently verify his description of how Arabs have been trained to hate, but it seems plausible.
Since hatred is the problem, land isn’t the answer. Removing some settlements or providing different access to some part of Jerusalem won’t change the hatred and won’t change the promotion of hatred. Eliminating Israel altogether wouldn’t even end the hatred, although there’d be no moere Jews around for Arabs to murder.
What should be done and by whom to end the hatred? Should the US or the UN take any particular action?
If we can’t end the hatred, how can Israel and the West deal with it?
The only answer I can come up with is brute force. Take such strong military action that the Palestinians will stop attacking despited their hatred. Or, even, kill all those who irrationally hate you. (This seems to be current US policy toward al Qaeda.)
I don’t like those answers, but what else is there?
Well, brute force worked before, but that was when they were fighting definite armed forces outside their borders. The main problem the Israelis have is that they occupied the land they won but kept their enemies within those borders – and did not do the type of “cleansing” that had been done in other earlier wars across the globe.
So, could they use “brute force” and actually do the type of “ethnic cleansing” that some have already accused them of? Sure. Would the world stand for it? Not a chance. Would they end up worse off than they are now? Yup.
It’s hard to frighten somebody into a cease-fire when the people who are doing most of the attacking are suicides…
december’s hook-line-and-sinker swallowing of Krauthammer’s vitriol is not exactly a good basis for a reasonable debate on this issue. Nor is your willingness to ignore all evidence of Israeli murder (just because Israeli killers wear uniforms doesn’t necessarily justify the killing), and to blithely skip over the issue of land as if Krauthammer’s ridiculous thesis about Israeli “conciliation” and “concessions of territory” were the unvarnished truth.
You start a debate that takes as its primary assumption that Palestinians have no motive other than simple hatred, and that then seeks to determine whether Israel should just use “brute force” (as if they haven’t been doing that already) to overpower the Palestinians. I’m not saying that there is no hatred among Palestinians; nor am i even arguing that the hatred is always rational or justified (although in many cases it is, in my opinion). I am simply saying that to reduce every action taken by Palestinians to simple “hatred for Jews” is a simple-minded and/or disingenuous way to frame a discussion.
What if someone started a debate that said “OK, we all know that the Israeli army exists for no other reason than to gratuitously kill Palestinians, so all we need to discuss is whether the Palestinians should step up their terrorist attacks.” People would say, quite rightly, that the murderousness of the Israeli army has not been unanimously established, and that we cannot simply assume that it has in order to then debate the reasonableness of Palestinian bombings.
What i am criticizing here is the way you frame the debate. Your primary assumption is far from a settled issue, and any debate that assumes that it is will never even approach a solution to the problem, but will serve as little more than a forum for bashing the Palestinians.
mhendo and efrem, you’re certainly entitled to advance the position that Krauthammer (and I) are wrong about he level of hate and its one-sidedness. Please present your evidence.
There’s brute force and brute force. Israel has the military might to kill every single Palestinian. They haven’t done anything like that. OTOH they ceded to Arafat and the PA responsibility for much of the security in the West Bank.
Actually, people would say that theory has been proved false. If the Israeli Army had that level of hate, they would have already killed as many Palestinans as possible. They have not done so. OTOH suicide bombers DO kill as many Israelis as they can.
Again, I invite you to dispute my assumptions. Krauthammer’s article provided considerable support for extreme Palestinian hatred and its source. By all means, bring forward facts on the other side.
However, I’d also invite you to contemplate the possibility that Krautahmmer may be right, and to think about what actions by Israel, the US, the UN, etc. are likely to lead to a secure peace. It’s a heck of a challenge to suggest any reasonable strategies.
mhendo, at the risk of stating the (tragically) obvious, the facts speak for themselves.
Palestinian suicide bombers routinely target innocents. In fact, they seek out those targets calculated to cause the greatest outrage: children and teenagers (the disco bombing), worshippers and noncombatants (the synagogue bombing), families (the pizzeria bombing), and the elderly (the Passover Seder bombing). The sole purpose of these attacks is terror.
And note that the victims are called “Jews” by the perpetrators. Indeed, the orthodox Jews (and their children) who were murdered as they left synagogue a few weeks ago, were not, and would never be, soldiers in the Israeli army. The ultraorthodox do not serve in the armed forces. Their “crime” was their Jewishness (just like Daniel Pearl).
I will not dispute that the Israelis have also killed innocents. But, there is no systematic or state-sponsored mission to do so. There is no underlying hate*, no jihad, enjoing the Israelis to massacre the Palestinians. When the Israelis kill an bystander, it is an accident.
*Presumably, this is part of the purpose of the suicide bombers - to engender hate in the Israelis and thereby either provoke the Israelis to respond in kind, or to make the Israelis so blinded by hate that they too will not seek peace, or both.
December, does bring up a good point here. Wile Israel was arming itself with missiles, tanks and various military ordinance, the PLO was busy training its own version of the smart bomb. Intelligent, effective, affordable and very difficult to disarm. There is definitely a greater risk of these Palestinian “smart bombs” to operate out of personal hate rather than military order. Monty has said that education is the key factor. I agree. Some degree of stability must be reached. If it means hunting down and killing the militants, then do so. It will also mean fostering some kind, any kind, of civil relationship.
Well, not only do you have an interesting definition of what constitutes “the obvious,” you’re also a mind-reader. How else to explain the fact that you use the death of “innocents” at the hands of Palestinians to explain the Palestinian hatred, and then concede that Israelis also kill “innocents” but that there is no hate involved. Have you spoken to Israeli soldiers (or Palestinian suicide bombers, for that matter) about what they feel at the moment of killing? Or are you just making assumptions based on your predispositions? And your reference to Israeli “accidents” is surely ironic.
Apart from a few Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israeli settlers, most Palestinian deaths in this conflict have been caused by the Israeli army, yet you contend that there has been no “systematic or state-sponsored mission” to kill innocents. Well, i can think of very few institutions that fit the description of “systematic and state-sponsored” better than a country’s armed forces. If innocents die at the hands of this force, as you admit does occur, who are we then to blame? The very use of the term “innocents” means we cannot blame the victims, and the fact that these people die at the hands of Israeli soldiers means that we must look at those soldiers. Do we then argue that it is the individual soldiers’ fault, or is it the Israeli governments’ fault? And if we blame the soldiers rather than their leaders, then can we not argue that blame for Palestinian suicide bombers should lie at the feet of the individual bombers, and not all Palestinians or even their leaders?
And, further to your contention about the killing of “innocents,” you bring up the fact that Palestinians routinely target children and teenagers. This is certainly true in some cases. Yet you conveniently ignore the fact that an alarming number of the Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers have also been children and unarmed civilians. Do you not accord these people the same human status as Israelis?
You also contend that the sole purpose of Palestinian attacks is terror, something you surely have no direct knowledge of. Perhaps the purpose is to get Israel to change some of its draconian policies regarding Palestinians. Of course, one could argue that this is “terrorism,” but we then get into the old chestnut that was debated a thousand times after September 11, in which one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter or homeland defender.
And surely the purpose of Israeli air strikes and bombardments of Palestinian settlements, in total disregard for the fact that many of the people who end up dead may have nothing to do with Palestinian attacks on Israel, is just as much about terrorising the Palestinian population as it is about catching and punishing individuals responsible for particular acts. Imagine the equivalent system of justice operating in the US, whereby the police knew that a particular criminal was hiding out in a particular area, but instead of going in to find the person, they just bombed the whole neighbourhood instead. (Actually, maybe that’s what it feels like to live in some black neighbourhoods when police conduct crime sweeps through them.)
Finally, your pondering about the motives of the Palestinians, and their intention of causing Israel to “respond” makes the erroneous assumption that every act of violence committed by Israeli troops or citizens has been in direct response to a particular act of violence by Palestinians. Maybe you ought to have a bit of a read of a history of the area, which will show you that this is far from being a universal condition of Israeli violence towards Palestinians. What about the Al-Aqsa mosque massacre, or the 1994 Ebrahimi Mosque killings? Or the checkpoint killings by Israeli soldiers who “thought” the people they shot “may” have been a threat (and who have often been in error, and ended up killing “innocents”)? Or the over-the-top “retaliations” in which a single killing by a Palestinian is used to justify massive counterattacks using advanced weaponry?
I am not making the argument that Palestinian acts of violence are justified. Quite the contrary - i condemn each and every suicide mission carried out in Israel, and i personally believe that all conflicts should be resolved by non-violent means if at all possible. And, such moral issues aside, i don’t believe the Palestinians help their cause by these continued acts of violence, although i do understand that many of them might see no alternative.
All i am arguing against here is, as i said in my first post, the reductionist (and quite racist, IMHO) assumption that nothing but hate for Jews motivates every single Palestinian who carries out any act against Israel.
december wrote:
So what? Are we meant to applaud Israel just because it hasn’t laid waste to the whole West Bank and Gaza Strip? Nice, nuanced and thoughtful argument, that one.:rolleyes:
But in many cases the Israelis do seem to have killed as many as they thought they could get away with in the court of world opinion and US pressure (such as it is) to adopt less bloody tactics. Again, your argument ignores, as you so often seem to do, the variety of forces and pressures impinging on any particular situation in an attempt to reduce it to a single, over-simplistic explanatory model.
I’ve already disputed your assumptions. I assume you meant refute. I’ll say it again, in case people missed it the first two times: i’m not excusing Palestinian violence, nor denying that there is an element of hate involved. I’m only saying that reducing the whole conflict to this one causative factor is totally unproductive. I don’t see any way to prove, by resort to “facts,” what percentage hate plays in each incident, or in the conflict as a whole.
Krauthammer’s article provided little except unsubstantiated assertions. He, and you, accept as a premise for this whole debate that Israel did everything it could to make life easier for the Palestinians and that those ungrateful people didn’t know a good deal when they saw one. It is appropriate that the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 play such a big part in his article, as it is those very accords that many Palestinians saw as evidence not only of Israel’s intention to keep subjugating Palestine and the world’s intention to do little about it. The “peace” that the accords brought was one considerably more favourable to Israel than to the Palestinians.
Maybe you need to actually step back and take a look at the way much of the US media treats this issue. Read this article and tell me if you think the way the media deploys certain words and phrases to describe Israelis and Palestinians in totally different ways is an accident.
The interesting thing is that the debate over the whole Palestinian question is much more open to a variety of viewpoints in the Israeli press than it is here in the US. Positions that would be decried as anti-Israel if they appeared in the major newspapers over here frequently appear in papers such as Ha’aretz in Israel. The problem with your argument is that it not only makes the ridiculous assumption that all Palestinians think alike, it also implies that all Israelis do too, when in reality there are many in Israel who, while condemning Palestinian violence, are also horrified at the way in which Israel is dealing with the situation.
Sweet Willy wrote:
:sigh: Again, we see the assumption that violence by a state-run army that operates to maintain its own dominance and control is automatically more excusable than violence by individuals motivated by “personal hate.” The presence of “military order” is far from being a guarantee of rational and reasonable outcomes in conflicts, as the merest glance at any history book will tell you.
Isn’t it true that all Israleis over 18 and under 55, with the exception of the Orthodox priests, are considered part of the military, whether or not they wear a uniform?
mhendo , my point is not that either of the motivations is more excusable. My point is that Israel can more easily expect their military to respond to a cease fire or truce. It takes some serious “brain work” to convince someone to strap on a fanny pack full of explosives and detonate themselves in a crowded bar. I am not sure you turn this type of behavior on and off like the switch on a tank.
As for the discussion over who is killing “innocents” – one point seems to have been lost. The Palestinians generally TARGET innocents. The Israeli army targets those who are taking military action. Do the Israelis also kill innocents? Yes, but part of it depends on how you define an innocent. Yes, some people who have nothing to do with the situations get caught in the crossfire. But in other cases where we hear of the tragic deaths of children, those children were SENT to the areas where the shooting was occurring to be made into martyrs and so the media would turn against the Israelis. It worked for a while, until this little tidbit of news made it out into that same media.
Again, the main point is that the Palestinians specifically target innocents – civilians.
The problem with these kind of conflicts is the double standard that arises.
The Israelis are in the position where the ir actions are being evaluated by Arab states, and the world at large according to a fairly high set of moral standards. In order to maintain this high ground, their actions are limited.
The Palestinians are under no such moral compunctions.
For Israel, this is a bad bad place to be. The Palestinians are practicing “total war” as best they can.
The best time to extend the olive branch is when you have a big gun in your other hand.
Israel was at it’s most effective in the 60’s and 70’s when it had more of “an eye for an eye” policy, and would retaliate against an attack.
Personally, I think they know this, and are purposefully being their most dovish and conciliatory in the face of the most brutal attacks for a reason.
At some point in the near future, they’re publically going to announce “enough is enough” and retaliate massively, and point to this period as their justification.
The problem, these days, is whose eye they would go after? If they knew where the Hamas/Hezbollah/whatever leaders were, those folks would probably already be dead. So when a suicide bomber blows up a hotel, what should Israel do? Find a bunch of Palestinian civilians and blow 'em up? No, of course not. (As you noted, in this there is a double standard.)
Sorry about the cut-off in my previous post - my browser stopped for some reason. Here’s the post in its entirety.
Sweet Willy wrote:
I’m sure you’re right about the relative difficulties in controlling these different types of fighters. But your term “brain work” implies some sort of brainwashing that makes these Palestinians act against their will, or at least continues to assume that the only possible explanation for their acts is something called “hatred.” Why, for example, has no-one mentioned “desperation” or “despair” as possible motives behind these actions? Again, such explanations would not excuse the actions, but the OP was seeking to explain them, and i think that putting it all down to simple hatred simply ignores too much.
And even if hatred plays a big part in these Palestinians’ reasons for their suicide bombings, you still assume (like Krauthammer and december) that this hatred is based solely on Arafat’s evil propaganda, ignoring the fact that it might well be a direct product of Israeli actions in many cases.
David B wrote:
Again, we see the self-serving demonizing of the Palestinians. Wow, these people are so evil they send their own children to where guns are being fired! Not only is this a half-truth at the absolute best, but it is also inconsistently applied to the two sides in the conflict. And does absolutely nothing to address the issue that is most important: no matter where the children are, or how they get there, killing them is not justified. Here is a passage from the article that i linked to in my previous post:
The last sentence here is particularly instructive. Many people make the argument that the Palestinians kids killed by Israeli soldiers were demonstrating (which mostly, for these kids, involves chanting and yelling, and throwing rocks), so they desrve what they get. But crowd control does not have to involve firing live ammunition intro the crowd. That should be a last resort, and when it is not, it is plausible to conclude, contrary to your assertions, that Israelis do TARGET innocents. And evidence, from websites like this show that some children killed were nowhere near conflict areas:
But in another way, you are right. Israelis don’t target innocents because in many cases they barely seem to “target” at all. As i said in my last post, instead of seeking out wrongdoers or going after particular groups, it is not unusual for the Israeli army to simply attack a whole area, with bombs landing rather randomly all over the place. Or they drive their bulldozers into a Palestinian settlement and start pushing houses over with no concern for whether the individuals inside actually have anything to do with violence against Israel.
For those unwilling to accept the evidence of American media bias in the article i linked to in my previous post, you can also check out Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting’s statements (1, 2) on NPR’s coverage of the conflict. Remember, this is not a report about the right-wing lunatics of the FOX Network, it’s about NPR, often accused of being excessively liberal and sympathetic to the Palestinians in this debate. For those without the time to look at the articles, a couple of their findings include:
and
Something is only “news” in the US when it involves a bombing, or multiple killings at once. The day-to-day, one-by-one murders carried out by the Israelis actually add up to more deaths than those carried out by Palestinians, yet we never hear of most of them. And the overall numbers of killings by each side in the period under consideration in link number 1 aren’t even close:
And David B. responded to scylla’s post by saying:
Yet in your previous post you ignore the fact that this is exactly what they do in many instances. Your attempt to demonstrate your sense of justice is belied by your willingness to ignore Israeli tactics as carried out on numerous occasions.
And scylla’s post said:
The ‘lack of moral compunction’ argument is ridiculous, given the light treatment Israel receives from the most important player in the court of world opinion - the US, which has consistently shown itself to be largely unresponsive to criticisms of Israel put forward by Arab and European nations. It also assumes that Palestinians have no morals of their own, and that they kill for the hell of it, and ignores the constant US pressure on Arafat and on the Palestinians in general to curb the violence. And if we’re going to talk double standards, why is it that a Palestinian youth with a rock is termed a terrorist in the US media, but the same designation is never applied to an Israeli soldier who shoots a kid walking home from school.
Again, you also ignore the fact that, in the course if this conflict, the ration of Israeli to Palestinian deaths is about 1:3. Do dead Israelis hold more value for you than dead Palestinians, as a matter or policy? Or are you just choosing to ignore the day-to-day violence inflicted on the Palestinians in order to concentrate on the more spectacular and obvious cases of bombings. Or do you simply assume that because the Israeli killers generally wear uniforms that their actions are automatically justified? In my book, twenty people killed in a suicide bombing is no more nor less tragic than twenty people shot at roadblocks or on the way home from school or in unarmed demonstrations.
And your reference to Israel as “dovish and conciliatory” made me resort to a line from the Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy: “You must be the creator of Hi and Lois, because you are making me laugh.” (courtesy of The Big Cheese, at this thread).
There is NO question that Palestinians incite their own children to violence and encourage them to take part in dangerous demonstrations. Often, Palestinian children are let out of school in order to take place in violent demonstrations.
Palestinians have also used children as either human shields or political pawns, depending on your point of view. This is the scenario that often plays out - a demonstration arises, drawing out Israeli soldiers. On the front lines are young children and teenagers, throwing rocks and shouting. Suddenly, from somewhere in the crowd a gunman or a group of them opens fire. The Israelis at that point have the choice of returning fire, or withdrawing. Either option puts the Israelis in a bad spot - if they open fire, they may kill innocents. If they withdraw, their military becomes completely ineffective because they will then be met with identical tactics everywhere they go.
Israel in the past has responded both ways. And by the way, the Geneva convention allows for the shooting into civilian crowds if the response is proportional to the threat. In these situations, I put almost all of the blame on the Palestinians for putting their own children in those positions for political purposes.
Some claim that Palestinians go even further, actually teaching the joys of Martyrdom in their schools, and teaching that the state of Israel is illegitimate. Palestinian geography texts show ‘Palestine’ where the state of Israel is. Palestinian equivalents of the Boy Scouts teach children how to be suicide bombers. I saw footage on CNN a month or so ago about a school where the kids were playing a supervised game of ‘suicide bomber’ which fake explosives strapped to them.
Most troubling of all, there is now an investigation into the death of a Palestinian boy who was caught with his father in a crossfire. It was captured on camera, and the boy was shot and killed. Israel took a huge PR hit over it, despite their claim that they never shot the boy. The Israelis went to the trouble of building a replica of the scene, and determined that the boy was not even visible from Israeli positions, and concluded that he was shot by a Palestinian terrorist because the cameras were rolling and they recognized a good PR opportunity.
I don’t know how much of all of this is distorted by the media or outright propaganda. But it’s clear that the Palestinians certainly teach their children the kind of hatred against Israel that leads them to get involved in the conflict.
Oh, and I haven’t heard of any Palestinian families telling Saddam’s bankers to go to hell when they’ve offered blood money for suicide.
Can anyone point me to a non-biased source for information on the shooting of Sara Abdul Azeem, the infant who was apparently shot by Jewish Settlers? The only references to this incident I have found so far are in Palestinian news sources. Has there been an official investigation? Were there any witnesses who saw this take place, other than the people in the car? Has the Israeli government launched an investigation? So far, all I can see is an accusation by Palestinian that Israeli settlers killed his child. I haven’t found any corroborating evidence.
“Dovish and conciliatory”? Surely you jest. You can argue that they’re still showing some restraint, in that they haven’t just leveled the West Bank and Gaza, but sending tanks in to occupy major cities and engaging in gun battles at Arafat’s compound don’t, by any stretch of the imagination, qualify as “dovish and conciliatory” responses.
Oddly enough, I’ve heard the same argument being used regarding Israelis and their children. I know if I were an American Israeli right about now, I’d be putting Junior and Junioretta on a plane back to New Jersey.