Agreed. Neither side is stranger to inexcusable behavior in this fight, that’s for sure.
Ah yes, collective punishment: wrong for Israel, but right for the Intefada.
Collective punishment is wrong, we can define that as fact. The challenge now is to determine if what the Israelis did was collective punishment. We can leave this as I say no and you will say yes.
A few years ago Israel came up with a new policy: the homes of suicide bombers (or martyrs) would be destroyed. This was called collective punishment, the Israelis were punishing the “innocent” family of suicide bombers. The family did not commit the act, so the family should not be punished. Here comes the big however: The family plays a HUGE role in the development of a suicide bomber, AND up until a little over a year ago Saddam was paying upwards of $20,000 to the family. What were they rewarded for if they were not involved?
Now, for some reason you kept focusing on the sniper situation, so again I’ll point out that there area variety of reasons for destorying a Palestinian home. And when one is destroyed three parties share responsibility: 1.) The IDF for making the decision and tearing it down. 2.) The militants for CHOOSING to use that building. 3.) The civilians who allowed it to be used.
If you allowed somone to set up a meth lab in your basement, the police will cease your house, no matter how justified you feel the meth lab is or how little involvement you had. Collective punishment?
OK, as I said in a previous post in this thread, one’s ethnic origin or religion should not be a determinant as to who stays and who leaves. I am not calling for your family’s expulsion from anywhere. Or the dispossession of all Israelis. But in those cases where Palestinians were clearly dispossessed, every effort should be expended to grant them unconditional right of return.
There is no reason whatsoever that Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab cannot live side by side over the whole of what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. But it’s clear that those at the top of both Israeli and Palestinian society don’t want that.
OK, let’s take just one example and work with that. There is a village in the Acre sub-district called al-Ghabisiyya. According to this map, al-Ghabisiyya was located deep in the heart of the sub-district, quite far away from the partition border as set by the UN in 1947. Yet the Israelis occupied it on 20 May 1948, and all that remains now of the old Palestinian village is the shell of the mosque.
Now, will you be so kind as to provide information as to what perceived tactical or strategical reasons lay behind the total destruction of a village that wasn’t even close to the territorial border?
True. But if the damage is not reversed (and what evidence is there to believe Israel will reverse it?), then what good is it to claim “We could undo that but the Palestinians can’t undo what they’ve done?”
emacknight, please point to where I’ve stated that I support the use of collective punishment by the Palestinians and not by the Israelis.
Could you expand a little more on the huge role an individual’s family plays in the development of a suicide bomber, and provide cites for the claims of Saddam Hussein providing big money for such things?
How else is the intefada expressed? No, really. It’s called “uprising” for a reason, Arafat’s encouragement of the individual terrorists are equivalent to state terrorism, if Arafat can be said to be the leader of the “state”.
Did you, like, skip a few pages back there? About where rights come from and all that?
Yeah, it seems like you skipped a few pages.
If you won’t accept that Israel got the right to administer the land from the UN mandate, then there is really nothing more to say.
Hey, does that Red Indian on that reserve have the right to suddenly decide that he’d like to have a Red Indian Chief instead of Prez Bush? Damn, he’s just exercising his right to self determination, you know. His daddy lived on the land since the Mayflower came in. Aw hell, he just firebombed City Hall. Oh well, he’s justfied in that, because he’s just exercising his oppressed right to self determination.
Hey, the Mormons in Utah just decided to elect High priest Jethro as their ruler (proxy to God, y’know), and that’s some right of self determination there!
Can I use a rolleye smiley? Please? Pretty please?
(re: dismantling of Israel and/or a one-state solution)
But I don’t want to live in a bi-national, bi-cultural state. I like living in the Israel I grew up in. tell you what - take a poll of a few (non-Mexican-heritage) Texans. If your results are that most of them are willing to stay where they are, living under Mexican rule (Hey, it WAS Mexico until about 150 years ago!) I’ll re-examine my position on changing the way my country is run and ruled.
(Re: demolitions)
I admit that I didn’t even click the link (yet. I will later. I’m not ignoring history). You’re talking about 1948? I’ll grant you right here and now that we did some lousy things in 1948. How is that relevant to the Intifadah? Surely you can come up with some more recent examples.
Dani
How very tolerant of you.
Is there an actual, politically serious movement among the citizens of Texas and New Mexico to even secede from the United States? No. Just because there isn’t such a movement in the Southwest doesn’t mean the movement in Palestine is any less legitimate.
I’m sure I can, too. But the intifadeh has, as one of its demands, the right of return to the villages from which Palestinian Arabs were expelled, and that goes all the way back to 1948. You claim that the destruction of houses and villages occurred as a result of some perceived tactical or strategic advantage, and I chose one example of such destruction perpetrated by Israel back when the fighting started. If you can’t justify everything Israel did even as far back as its founding, what does that say about the legitimacy of the goal of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East?
Tabby_Cat, unless and until you can refute positively my claim that I do not support or condone terrorism as a useful and/or correct tactic in the fight to exercise the right to self-determination, I will have to ignore any examples of such a fight that you provide which expressly refer to the use of such tactics. I will not defend myself against someone who deliberately misinterprets what I am saying.
And it seems we disagree on rights, as well, but I’m going to give this one more shot. Rights can exist either in theory or in practice (although to exist in practice they must exist in theory first). In theory, the Palestinians, like any other oppressed people or nation on Earth, have the right to self-determination, but they do not have it in practice because Israel is actively preventing them from doing so. For Palestinians to have that right both in theory and in practice they have to fight like hell against Israeli oppression.
Where I think you and I differ is that you say if they don’t have the right in practice, they don’t have it at all, whereas any well thought-out philosophy would certainly recognize the difference between having it in theory and having it in practice. The lack of the latter does not necessarily imply the lack of the former, unless you disagree with the right of self-determination in the first place.
The thing is, Olentzero, if we follow your solution, within a very short times us Jews would become a minority group. Can you assure us - with 100% certainty - that we would not become a persecuted minority group? A yes or no answer would be appreciated.
How very nice of you to tell me that I must suffer unwanted changes to my life-style because of injustice you feel was done to some others in the past (hint - I’ve never physically harmed a person in my life, except maybe for a few fist-fights as a school boy. Certainly I’ve never personally done any harm - to body or to property - to any Palestinian). How would you like everyone else here telling you how you may or may not live in your own country because of the behavior of your government?
This is my homeland, my society, my country, dammit. It was given to me by the f***ing United Nations. Plus I can take you on a guided tour here and show you about a zillion places explicitly mentioned in my cultural heritage. Now LAY OFF!
Huh? I was talking about your magninimous offer to me that I may stay here as long as you get to choose my form of government for me, and comparing it to an admittedly hypothetical situation closer to home for you. But since you’ve brought up the point about secessions - You wouldn’t happen to want to go a little further back, to the Confederacy, would you? You think the CSA was right and the USA was wrong, and there should now be two separate nations between Canada and Mexico, right?
And if you can’t justify everything the USA did during WWII (Internment camps for Japanese-American citizens, anyone?), what does that say about the legitimacy of the goal of fighting the Axis in Europe and in the Pacific :rolleyes: Oh, other countries might occasionaly slip and pull an attrocity but it need not reflect on the overall goal? Then why a double standard in the case of Israel?
Dani
The way any parent plays a role in the development of their child. If your parents helped you with your homework the played a role in your educational development. If your parents housed and fed you while you were training to become a martyr, again they played a role. Imagine if the Columbine parents knew of their children’s plans, what would you expect the police to do with them?
Olentzero, I honestly cannot believe you just asked this. I’m sorry to say but it really reflects on your ignorance of the entire process. So as you requested here are a few cites to show how much money Saddam provided to Palestinians.
First, from the BBC
Incase you feel the BBC is some how biased, here’s a link to FrontPageMagazine.
A third article from Global Security
And lastely, from The Palestine Chronicle
If that’s not enough, or quite what you were looking for consider looking at Results 1 - 10 of about 173,000 for saddam palestinian family from Google.
Me? What makes you think I could assure you that? I’m not Arafat, I’m not the leader of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or even the mayor of Nablus. I have no hand in the matter.
Do I think, on the other hand, that anti-Semitism is so deeply ingrained in the Arab mind because of some ethnic, genetic, or socioeconomic factor, that the minute they perceive they have the upper hand they’ll unleash the Second Holocaust? No.
And what would have to happen the Palestinian Jews become a minority? There are 6.8 million of you, as opposed to 3.1 million Palestinians - at least as of 2000, according to this UN site (click on the PDF to see the numbers). Would the Palestinians be so stupid as to say “55 years of oppression justify us slaughtering three Jews for every two of us” and expect the world to give them a standing ovation? I hardly think so. Is it possible that the entire Jewish population of Israel would flee in a mind-numbing panic simply because the Palestinians have gained the right of self-determination over the whole territory in practice? Maybe. But it would be incumbent upon the Palestinians to make it clear that their intent is not wholesale slaughter, that they acknowledge the right, in practice, of Jews to remain and live where they please unmolested (pending settlement of claims under the right of return), and not to flinch from punishing any Palestinian Arab that goes to the extreme of practicing terror against the Jewish population of the new state. The State of Israel has whipped up a lot of anti-Semitic fear on the part of the Israeli population and both sides are going to have to work very hard to calm that fear. But it is both possible and necessary.
“You Palestinians are going to have to leave your land and make room for us Jews because six million of us (never mind the millions of Communists, Roma, and homosexuals) died in the Holocaust in Europe and we want a homeland where that can’t happen again.”
You were saying?
But not the Palestinian Arabs. The United Nations partition completely violated the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and the State of Israel took hard advantage of that. How else would you explain the seizure of the Acre sub-district, territory expressly partitioned to the Palestinian Arabs*, by the Israelis at the end of October 1948?
No, of course I don’t think the CSA was right. The Confederacy sought to secede because they wanted to continue the institution of slavery unmolested, and masked that with the issue of “states’ rights” and the right to secede. In other words, they seceded to continue oppression, not to eliminate it. Such is not the case with the Palestinian right to self-determination.
Oh, hell, I can do you better than that. Surely you’ve heard of the good ship St. Louis? You know, the one full of Jewish refugees that got turned away by the United States? Or how about the refusal of the Allied powers to bomb the railroad tracks that led to places like Auschwitz? Simply because I point out the atrocities perpetrated by Israel in a thread specifically about Israel and the Palestinian intifadeh doesn’t mean I’m giving other countries’ atrocities a pass.
But not a HUGE role. I’d argue the organizations that trained individual Palestinians in the tactics of individual terror played a much larger role than that. Or are you saying that every Palestinian family serves as a terrorist training cell?
No, it reflects on the fact that I can’t read everything about everything. Much as I’d like to. Thank you for providing those cites - although it looks like he was providing money to families after the fact, rather than providing money to people in order to become terrorists. Detestable as Saddam Hussien was (and let’s not forget to whom he ultimately owed his position of power), even the money he provided for charity relief - over twice the money he shelled out as rewards - pales in comparison to the annual military and financial aid the US pours into Israel. Saddam Hussein is a mote in the Palestinians’ collective eye, but I think the log in Israel’s is ruining their vision.
Think you missed a double negative there.
BTW, you said
Implying that the intifadeh is something other than individual attacks.
and I replied
saying that the calls by Arafat to “rise up against the Jews” (you know, Intifadeh, “uprising”, direct translation) were tantamount to state support of terrorist tactics.
Your ball.
Stop riiiiiiiight there. Did you read what I wrote? Seriously? They DO NOT have that right. Please tell me where in Law, Tradtion, or Nature they got that right from. See my examples of Chief Crazy Buffalo, and High Priest Jethro. Then come back and when come back, bring refutation. Hell, bring logic, it’s good enough.
And you know what? Stating something over and over again doesn’t make an argument. Summary of your arguments that the Palestinians have the “right to self determination” (that I haven’t refuted so far)
“Yeah, sure they do. It’s just that the Israelis are beating them down with barbed maces and boiling them in oil”
Y’know, just 'cause this is GD, I’m gonna give a few quotes you used that as a “refutation” that they didn’t have those rights.
In response to my previous post. Totally no justification, or argument, at all. Uh huh. Real convinced here.
Which was answered, I dunno a dozen posts before that? Yeah, I’ll quote myself.
With some real debate from you, and a complete rebuttal by me here, which you prompty ignored.
Great DEBATES, not “Grandiose Statements”
“You Indians (Native Americans, whatever…) are going to have to leave your land and make room for us Quakers because many of us (never mind the Lutherans, the Jew, etc…) were persecuted in England and we want a homeland where that can’t happen again”.
At least the Jewish Culture has demonstrable ties to the land which we are sharing… (and it will eventually have to come down to some kind of sharing. Very few Jewish Israelis will even be willing to consider a single-state solution). Oh, and remind me - the reason you killed all the Indians was because they kept on detonating bombs in downtown New York and Philadelphia, right?
Er, maybe it has something to do with the fact that we were attacked by the Palestinian Arabs and seven other, sovereign Arab countries for the mere act of accepting the UN resolution? They tried to stop the implementation of the UN resolution of Nov. 29 1947, which established the partition you mentioned. They lost the war. Boo hoo.
Olentzero, Arbiter of Universal Justice :rolleyes: Do you seriously think a culture’s right to self-determination is continent upon their being Good Guys[sup]TM[/sup]? C’Cause I’d say that rules the Palestinians right out… Oh, and do you really think that the Civil War was all just about Slavery?
Well, yes, of course I have, but I was trying to avoid mentioning Jews or the Holocaust in this context… I looked for something “Jew-neutral”, so to speak.
You’re doing more than “point out the atrocities perpetrated by Israel”. You’re taking these attrocities - some unfortunately very real, but some, IMO, very tenuous indeed, but never mind - and extending them to a denial of Israel’s right to exist in the manner of its choice, as approved by the United Nations. That’s quite a wide leap.
I mean, I fully agree that, eventually, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank will become the Palestinian State. I can actually say I hope this happens. I’m no right-winger or a fan of the settlers (or of religious nut-jobs in general). But you’re going a lot further than that.
And - to complete a full circuit back to the OP - the only way that the Palestinians may maximize their gains (i.e., an independent state on very nearly all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) is if they make a real and dedicated commitment to eradicating terrorism. Believe me, when that happens, we will be out of there inside of five years on the power of Public Opinion alone (yeah, it actually makes a difference here. :shock: :horror: ). But as long as the terrorism continues, they will get nothing (and the Likud will continue to win the elections :()
Dani
You know what? Just because I’m so nice, I’ll tell you how Palestinians can get their precious “right of self determination”. It’s called, get the PLA to set up shop in the bit of land that the UN gave them, and then proclaim the “Democratic Republic of Palestine”, and let the Poor Perscuted Palestians vote. WOW! Way to go, right of self determination! (yay)
What? That’s not what you meant? You want to take the land that Israel got from the UN? Well, then, that’s simple, too! The “Democratic Republic of Palestine” can just go to the UN, declare war on Israel, and annex the whole of Israel! Throw the Steeking Joos into the sea, wot wot. Now Palestine has the administration of the land Israel is on, and if you have the “Democratic Republic of Palestine” (snicker) the Poor Persecuted Palestinians get their “right of self determination”! Yay!
There aren’t enough rolleyes in the world.
I’ve parsed that sentence three times and I don’t see it.
Well yeah, there’s protesting, demonstrating, organizing other actions, throwing rocks at tanks, throwing tear gas canisters back at the IDF troops that fired them… there are plenty of other forms of resistance employed by the intifadeh than suicide bombings and sniper attacks.
But the terror isn’t carried out by the state, it’s carried out by individuals. I wouldn’t call Arafat the head of the Palestinian state any more than I’d call Hamid Karzai the president of Afghanistan.
When come back, leave Weebl & Bob references at W&B forums. And tell KnucklzPlugDog I said hello.
Rights, even the concept of a right, are social constructs. They don’t come from nature; the natural world has existed for billions of years and gotten along quite well without the concept of “right” - or any abstract concept, for that matter.
Rights have come about because we, as humans, have actually created society, and the concept of right became necessary in order for society to progress from the simple tribal hunter-gatherer clans to the worldwide conglomeration we have today. Along the way, people developed the concepts of morals, ethics, duties, responsibilities, and rights in order to assemble coherent theories of how society ought to work, or at least to describe how society worked at the time, depending on your political leanings.
“Right”, ultimately, is nothing more than a philosophical shorthand used to defend a person’s, or group’s, ability to do something. It can be used to defend an ability that is exercised freely (the right to free speech, in most countries) or an ability, the free exercise of which is being actively prevented (the right to self-determination in Palestine). Rights do not come from anywhere, they are only abilities that are recognized and the free exercise of which is demanded. A political philosophy, like socialism, recognizes that oppressed nations have the ability to secede from the oppressing nation and to form their own, politically independent, nations. (This is the simple, bare-bones outline.) Those oppressed nations, because they already have that ability, therefore have the right of self-determination. How actively the oppressor nation works to prevent the free exercise of that ability (or “right”) will dictate the form and the intensity of the demand (or “struggle”) for the free exercise of that right.
And where, exactly, did I say that the dissolution of the State of Israel necessarily entailed kicking every single last Israeli Jew out of the country?
Yeah, and Clinton was talking to… who, exactly? The Janitor?
Again, sez you.
Backed up by our favourite slave trader, Locke (can you tell I don’t like this guy?)
You know, if you’re going to make up definitions, at least have the decency to call it something else not similar to something that could be confused with the real deal. Use, I dunno, “Salmon”.
Because the right[sup]1[/sup], they aint got. By the way still no argument that they have rights, just a re-definition of the term “right”. Which don’t fool nobody.
[sup]1[/sup]6a: Something that is due to a person or governmental body by law, tradition, or nature. - Dictionary.com
Throwing a man into a plastic shredder doesn’t entail his death either, I guess. I mean, I threw him in, I didn’t kill him. Oh yeah, and just casually toss out the right of the UN to decide on land over which it’s sovereign, whydoncha? I mean, pshaw, Chief Crazy Buffalo and High Priest Jethro kin do et, them Palestinian folks ought ta have them same Salmon.[sup]1[/sup]
[sup]1[/sup]Abilities that are recognized and the free exercise of which is demanded. - Olentzero, Arbiter of Universal Justice, Legislation, and Salmon
Sorry, missed this part.
Even taking this to be true (arguable), the “nation” of Palestine does not have the right to secede from Israel, because none of it is in Israel. A bit hard to have 2 nations in one spot, yeah? Sovereignty, by definition, means “one ruler”.
I assume then you mean that they seceded from the UN/British control, and therefore the UN/British did not have the right to dispose of the land. I invite you to secede your back yard from the USA. Hell, get California to claim independance, it’s the 4th richest state in the world anyway. Go ahead and pretend you’re sovereign and don’t need to pay taxes, or something.
Uh huh, so tell me, does Israel have the right to “self determination”, and to secede from Palestine? I mean, unless you’re somehow arguing that Israel ISN’T a nation, and Palestine IS. I mean, since you’re ignoring the whole business of how sovereignty got passed to the UN, how the british annexed the area etc, I get to ignore how the Jews got there. Deal?
That’s gonna be some argument, by jove.
Oh, yeah, and socialism?
From the mouth of Lenin and Marx. You sure you wanna claim socialism? Damn, take over the world… and the Jews thought they had some good stuff going for them, Media Corps and what not.
Away from Pinky, the Brain and world domination, and into the real world:
No shit, says I.
Note that the observer for Palestine didn’t even make the claim for territory in partitioned Israel, or that they even had the right to self-determination. They made the claim for land with Jewish colonies and all that, which Israel has repeatedly said they would give up, as pointed out repeatedly above, and which I care not to repeat again.
I’m sorry, sir, but your pinko communist star is showing. Repeatedly.
No, you are mistaken there. There was never any such nation as “Palestine”, and neither the land nor the people have been destroyed. The territory was under British control until the UN mandate created the modern state of Israel.
And the overwhelming majority of the land currently forming the state of Israel was purchased by Jews. Much of the rest was developed, by draining salt marshes, and was not being used. (Cite: Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel).
“Dispossessed” in the sense of selling their land, yes. But you are correct that the neighboring Arab lands have consistently refused to accept the Palestinians.
I don’t think we are talking about the same things.
There are things published every week in the Arab press that are as viciously anti-Semitic as anything ever found in the Volkische Beobachter. And it matters relatively little if you call it “anti-Semitism” or not - it is very little comfort to know that when people want to drive you from your home and kill you, they don’t mean anything personal by it.
But if a person believes that Israel has no right to exist, supports the infitada, and wants to convince us that he is really not in favor of terrorism, the position is too close to self-contradictory to be much good to discuss.
Regards,
Shodan