I’d like to answer these, partly because I think Chumpsky and I largely agree.
yes
I think the question ought to be turned around: Would terrorism significantly decrease if Israel withdrew from the occupied territories? Yes, I think it would, do you? Besides Israel could put all that recovered energy into guarding the green line and otherwise keeping West Bank and other Palestinians out of the country, thus reducing terrorism. If they so choose.
Withdraw from the occupied territories, including East Jerusalum.
Chumpsky, the strongest party making peace is not usually the way war works. In fact, the losing side generally sues for peace when they know the war is unwinnable. The losing side has to accept peace and stop fighting, that is kind of the purpose of war. I seem to remember the Japanese coming to the USS Missouri, the Iraqis coming to the US for peace, and so on.
Indeed, in the Middle East, this has borne true as well – the weaker parties came to Israel and Israel made peace with them. This is what happened with Jordan and Egypt. You still haven’t told me how Sadat was somehow a force to be reckoned with – it seems to me that his greatest strength was that he was able to lose a war less spectacularly than Nasser. And he knew when to call it quits.
I believe that Israel would benefit in the long run by unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. I think they should build a big honkin’ wall and retreat behind it. But, there is no guarantee that the predominant view of the Palestinians would change for this. There is no guarantee that the more militant aspects of Palestinian society would rise up and with the view that Israel retreated because of weakness and that continued struggle against Israel proper could lead to the downfall of Israel. And that is the stated goal of Hamas, IJ, PFLP, and if you believe their charter, even Fatah and the PA. Change needs to come from within – Israel will retreat once it can win the gamble for Palestinian popular opinion. Once there is the possibility of peaceful coexistence – militants in Palestine (and state media, school textbooks, etc.) are not calling for the end to the Zionist entity.
So supporting Palestinian militants won’t possibly make the situation better. It will just force harsher reprisals. Every Palestinian attack takes a chunk out of Oslo, which is all that the Palestinians have left. Each attack moves the parties a step away. You should throw yourself behind movements which bring the parties closer together.
I guess it’s just a “semantic discrepancy” when virulent Anti-Israel posters say hateful things about the Jewish people in Israel? Criticizing Palestinians is racist, but criticizing Israelis is somehow NOT? Interesting double standard, there.
Simple question, really. Why is someone who posts anit-Palestinian threads automatically called racist, while someone else who posts anti-Israeli threads gets a pass?
okay, Chumpsky, thank you for your informative answers.
I assume you agree that the “leaders” of Israel and Palestine leave something to be desired.
What if they elected different leaders; maybe they could work out something?
Also, what would IYHO, happen if the U.N. got behind the palestinians. Would the U.s alwasy support Israel, no matter what?
I’m still confused as to what you’re talking about. Poster A said that the majority of Palestinians are ‘despicable scumbags.’ I said that assertion was racist. He said it wasn’t, because Palestinians aren’t a race per se. I called him out for his nitpick in semantics, and stood by my assertion he was being irrationally hateful.
Who is this person ‘getting a pass’? If someone said most Jews are ‘despicable scumbags,’ I’d consider it equally racist. I really have no idea what you’re talking about with this “gets a pass” stuff.
You know, I have never heard a single person defend Arafat, or claim he is some kind of great leader, apart from his cronies in the PA. The reason he stays in power is because he is the only person who can fulfill his role, for the Palestinians, and more importantly for the Israelis. There is simply no other Palestinian of prominence still around who has been with the movement for as long as Arafat has.
But, really, I think all talk about what the Palestinians should do is disengenuous. They are a defeated people living in the most miserable cicumstances. The occupied territories are the least free regions on Earth, outside of prisons. The Gaza strip is the most densely populated region on Earth, yet the Israelis continue to build yet more settlements in Gaza, pushing the already overcrowded population onto less and less land. To talk about what the Palestinians should do in these circumstances leads nowhere.
This is not a hypothetical question. In fact, it has been the situation for decades. For all practical purposes, the entire world is unanimous in what the short term solution should be, namely the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with security guarantees for all states in the region. This has been the international consensus for at least two decades. U.N. 242, for example, passed in 1967, called for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from land captured in the 1967 war. And Israel has been violating it for 35 years, along with a whole host of other U.N. general assembly and security council resolutions.
The only thing standing in the way of this solution is U.S./Israeli rejectionism. Without U.S. support, Israel would not be able to do what it is doing. In the end, it is only the U.S. that stands in the way of a peaceful settlement. It would take only a threatening of withdrawal of support to Israel to force them to withdraw from the occupied territories.
I’ve mainly stayed out of this thread. See the Pit thread devoted to the op’s poster for why. But something just happened here that dseserves comment. Aaphen256, HenryB, and edwino all agree. And I do to. The best of all realistically achievable solutions is unilateral Israeli withdrawl (there would be some debate over how total, but agreement that the withdrawl should be based on the Green Line) and defend that border absolutely. (Which translates into the big honkin’ wall.)
Problem is the solution still stinks. Palestine can’t make an economic go of it without Israeli partnership and Israel would be better off with Palestinian partnership. Palestine without Israeli partnership would likely stay poor and its citizens as bad off as they are now, and thus as dedicated to destroy Israel as ever.
Now that blood-pressure has returned to normal, I must apologize to every person of Arabic/middle-eastern descent, as well as any person of the Islamic faith as well.
My use in anger of the pejorative terms “ragheads” and “towel headed fucks” was uncalled for, regardless of the provocation.
By the way, while I may not agree with your view on this issue 100%, I do sympathize with your frustration on both this subject in general and this thread in particular.
Whether or not someone wants to kill you has no bearing on finding a solution to the current problem of people trying to kill you.
Huh?
So even if the Israelis do what you recommend, it will not bring an end to terrorism, and war on Israel. But someone who expects it to is a “racist”?
I repeat - huh?
You seem to be saying that Israel has the right to exist, but not to be free from attack, and that they should take steps to bring about an end to Palestinian terrorism, but not expect it to work.
This is just bizarre stuff. Are you sure you mean it?
Regards,
Shodan
I have no idea how to address statements like this.
The question isn’t whether some Palestinians would support destruction of Israel even after unilateral withdrawal and creation of a Palestinian state. Of course some would, there are fringe lunatic elements in every society. The question really is: Would the leader of said Palestinian state do anything whatsoever to reign in the fringe elements? There is no evidence, there is no argument that can be made that Arafat has any desire to do this whatsoever. After Oslo, he arrested a few militants and then released them in his infamous “revolving door” jails. He has never taken steps to make Palestinian society less militant or more tolerant of Israel. So therefore, until we see some meaningful change of action from the Palestinian side, there can never be true peace. It could happen through Arafat, it could happen through someone else.
It doesn’t matter how miserable the situation is in Palestine – they can always admit defeat and make peaceful overtures. I think that is all Israel wants to see. Every Israeli leader to date has shown willingness to negotiate – even Sharon and Netanyahu. If there is significant Palestinian support for negotiation, the only thing that will happen is that Israel will turn more left and more peaceniks will be elected. The one thing that has changed in the past two years is that Sharon has put the ball squarely in the Palestinian court, and announced to the world that he is awaiting the first move. That first move has yet to happen.
That is not the same as saying that Israel has no right to exist.
Look, I don’t think the U.S. has a right to exist, if you get down to it. The European conquerers who founded this country took it by force and deceit, building the country on genocide and slavery. The constitution that was adopted was never voted on. Fully one-sixth of the initial population was enslaved at the founding, and among the free population, less than a quarter had the right to vote. Only the least powerful arm of government, the House of Representatives, was actually representative of the people. This was not legitimate, merely a way for the rich landowners and slave holders who founded the country to consolidate their power, while constructing the forms of democracy in order to gain some measure of popular support.
Does that mean I think the U.S. should be destroyed? No.
Likewise, I don’t think that Israel’s founding was legitimate. They had no right to the land–they took it by force. But, as they say in the movies, “that was then, this is now.” We can’t go back in time and undo past injustices. We have to deal with the situation as it stands now.
Whether or not you think the founding of the state of Israel was legitimate or not, you have to look at the situation as it stands now, and try to deal with the situation as it stands. The Palestinians have long ago granted Israel the right to live within the pre-1967 borders in peace and security, relinquishing their claims on land captured in the 1948 war. What they want, and what they are clearly entitled to, is the land captured in the 1967 war.
Let Israel keep the pre-1967 land, be recognized by all states, and allow the Palestinians to form a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. What’s so hard about that?
