How interesting. You demand that Israel " offer the hand of peace, have it slapped aside, and offer it again." (somehow missing that Israel has done that numerous times and yet your argument remains the same) and you demand that Israel soak up an evidently infinite number of attacks in the service of “peace”… but endorsing a two state solution with demilitarization as a prerequisite is something you can’t stomach.
At least one of these are all real stretches.
Dershowitz is only repeating what most of us acknowledged days ago. Israel did not break the law when it used force to enforce its blockade, even in international waters.
He may be characterizing the situation in Gaza in the light most favorable to Israel but in doing so, he is contradicting the informed opinions of the red cross, amnesty international and the UN. I don’t know who else you could ask to make a call on stuff like that. They are probably more qualified to make that determination than the IDF or Netenyahu.
Just as the blockade is lawful and the enforcement of that blockade in international waters is lawful, so are attempt to break the blockade.
“There can be little doubt that the moment any person on the boat picked up a weapon and began to attack Israeli soldiers, they lost their status as innocent
civilians.”
Unless they themselves were acting in self defense. I’d still like to see a complete and unedited video, I’m pretty sure it exists.
The fact that Israel didn’t commit war crimes when it enforced its blockade with lethal force doesn’t mean that Israel can’t be criticized for it does it? The Brits didn’t break any international laws when it violently enforced its monopoly on salt in India or used lethal force to break up unauthorized demonstrations when one of the demonstrators threw a rock at the British troops.
Without doubt the acts of these Indians did more for Indian independence than any act of violence by Indians:
“The Khudai Khidmatgar members willingly faced bullets, responding without violence. Instead, many members repeated ‘God is Great’ and clutched the Qur’an as they went to their death.”
“One British Indian Army regiment, troops of the renowned Royal Garhwal Rifles, refused to fire at the crowds…The entire platoon was arrested and many received heavy penalties, including life imprisonment.”
What a horrible sacrifice we ask of the Palestinian for their nation:
" Gene Sharp, who has written a study of nonviolent resistance, describes the scene on that day:
When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with their chests bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic. . . . The Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore, which represents the official view, itself wrote to the effect that the people came forward one after another to face the firing and when they fell wounded they were dragged back and others came forward to be shot at. This state of things continued from 11 till 5 o’clock in the evening. When the number of corpses became too many, the ambulance cars of the government took them away."
“Ghaffar Khan later wrote that this was because the British thought a non-violent Pashtun was more dangerous than a violent one. Because of this, the British did everything they could to provoke them into violence, with little effect”
And the Palestinians on the other hand seem to fall for it every single time… except I haven’t heard of anything like that this time.
How ironic.
Yes, the arab states had even offered a peace plan. I wonder how the arab league feels about that peace plan now.
I thought you said that you would support a Palestinian state with a military or did you just mean a Palestinian state that could enforce police powers on lightly armed criminals?
If they can have a police like the Japanese I guess its not a big deal but it sounds like you are of the “we have to be able to kick their ass” school of thought. Would a Palestinian state be large enough to create a demilitarized “zone”
A blistering critique of the question, to be sure. As close as you’re going to get to an answer? You have demonstrated a vast wealth of certainty on these subjects, who else might we ask to clarify the meaning of “demilitarized”.
Some of us more suspicious minds would take that to mean that Palestinians should put themselves entirely at the mercy of people who have hated their guts for sixty years. I could see how that might give one pause. So, perhaps I’ve misunderstood, and you can set that right. Was there a *quid pro quo *in the offing? Israel would follow the same course of “demilitarization”? Well, that certainly seems fair, perhaps I have misjudged…
Advise.
I pointed out that you used a rather poor joke to divert attention away from the very strange facts that don’t match up with your position where, curiously enough, your great professed admiration for Israel leads to demands that they allow Hams et al to kill as many Israelis as they feel like… and yet a very simple request for a two state solution with a demilitarized Palestine is totally unacceptable to you. It’s just interesting that demands for war against Israeli civilians and your particular brand of “peace” look exactly the same. Just one of those coincidences, I guess.
I’m not going to engage with or “critique” your jokes let alone debate them.
You’re mighty idealistic, Luci, for someone whose enture nation was built on the basis of wars of conquest and genocide. I guess you don’t have to be a hard-headed realist after your ancestors already crushed all your enemies.
Whatever we do, we’ll still be better than you.
Israelis, by and large, don’t hate the Palestinians’ guts. We don’t like them all that much, and we certainly don’t trust them, but we’d be happy to let bygones be bygones and adapt a live and let live approach - so long as both the “live” and “let live” parts of the agreement are complied with.
Spent forty years now, protesting, arguing, witnessing against my country’s military and political transgressions. Longer than you’ve been alive, by any chance? I love my country, I expect to love it more as it gets better.
Well, thats certainly reasonable. But my question to Finn was about the meaning of the word “demilitarize” in the context he was offering, as proof of Israel’s sincere efforts to reach peace by compromise.
Answering the question is beneath his dignity. Either that, or a truthful answer would do violence to his argument. How about you?
You can’t deny that your nations current security and prosperity is a result, to a large degree, of its past atrocities.
How well has clinging to past events served y’all thus far? Apart from putting you into the mindset of “everyone is out to get us”, that is?
Oops! I thought at the time I typed it that I had the wrong guy. Chamberlain it is.
Interestingly enough, Turkey’s fragile peace with the Kurds is breaking down, even as Turkey heats up the rhetoric on the flotilla.
Cite: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/turkey-locks-horns-with-kurds-again/article1595640/
One wonders if there is a connection. World interest is firmly fixed on Gaza, mostly as a result of a flotilla organized with heavy Turkish involvement. Meanwhile, practically no-one is following, or cares about, the far more serious issue of the plight of the Kurdish minority in Turkey itself.
Well here in teh US, interest has come back to the BP oil spill. People have a very cursory understanding of what happened with the flotilla and while it has turned a few minds (the whole killing peace activists thing turned some people off regardless of whether or not Israel was breaking international law or not), most people believe a version of the story that reinforces their current beliefs.
It was my impression that outside the US, most people were focused on the World Cup 
How has clinging to the past helped the Palestinians?
Boy, sure struck a nerve with that one, didn’t I? But its a pretty important question, don’t you think? ** Allessan** would rather talk about something else, anything else. **Finn **responds with an assault on the character of the questioner.
But its pretty important, I think. Because if Israel knew that the “demilitarization” clause rendered the proposal unacceptable (and I can certainly understand how it might), then the alleged Israeli commitment to peace would be revealed as a sham and a lie, wouldn’t it? Or, at the very least, far short of an equitable compromise.
Must be me. Yes, that must be it, my perfidy makes answering such a simple question impossible. Perhaps someone else will pose the question, someone who meets Finn’s standards of acceptability and is not burdened with being a citizen of a country with a regrettable history? No doubt, you would answer the question in a heartbeat if it did not originate from such a reprehensible source. Yes. Indeed.
But really, gentlemen: proposing terms that the other guy cannot possibly accept without throwing himself entirely upon your tender mercies? This is your idea of a “peace offering”?
I’m not wrong on the facts. Acccording to a Clinton official who was there Israel never made an offer. Israel was having a general election soon after and any actual concrete peace move by Barak, the centre-left leader, would have seen him destroyed by Sharon/Netanyahu/Likud etc. as being weak, selling out Israel etc. Even his own coalition wouldn’t have accepted it so he never made an offer. Here, from somebody who was there :
Even so, it is hard to state with confidence how far Barak was actually prepared to go. His strategy was predicated on the belief that Israel ought not to reveal its final positions—not even to the United States—unless and until the endgame was in sight. Had any member of the US peace team been asked to describe Barak’s true positions before or even during Camp David—indeed, were any asked that question today—they would be hard-pressed to answer. Barak’s worst fear was that he would put forward Israeli concessions and pay the price domestically, only to see the Palestinians using the concessions as a new point of departure. And his trust in the Americans went only so far, fearing that they might reveal to the Palestinians what he was determined to conceal…
The final and largely unnoticed consequence of Barak’s approach is that, strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer. Determined to preserve Israel’s position in the event of failure, and resolved not to let the Palestinians take advantage of one-sided compromises, the Israelis always stopped one, if not several, steps short of a proposal. The ideas put forward at Camp David were never stated in writing, but orally conveyed. They generally were presented as US concepts, not Israeli ones; indeed, despite having demanded the opportunity to negotiate face to face with Arafat, Barak refused to hold any substantive meeting with him at Camp David out of fear that the Palestinian leader would seek to put Israeli concessions on the record. Nor were the proposals detailed. If written down, the American ideas at Camp David would have covered no more than a few pages. Barak and the Americans insisted that Arafat accept them as general “bases for negotiations” before launching into more rigorous negotiations…
The Palestinians saw acceptance of the US ideas, even as “bases for further negotiations,” as presenting dangers of its own. The Camp David proposals were viewed as inadequate: they were silent on the question of refugees, the land exchange was unbalanced, and both the Haram and much of Arab East Jerusalem were to remain under Israeli sovereignty. To accept these proposals in the hope that Barak would then move further risked diluting the Palestinian position in a fundamental way: by shifting the terms of debate from the international legitimacy of United Nations resolutions on Israeli withdrawal and on refugee return to the imprecise ideas suggested by the US. Without the guarantee of a deal, this was tantamount to gambling with what the Palestinians considered their most valuable currency, international legality…
Had there been, in hindsight, a generous Israeli offer? Ask a member of the American team, and an honest answer might be that there was a moving target of ideas, fluctuating impressions of the deal the US could sell to the two sides, a work in progress that reacted (and therefore was vulnerable) to the pressures and persuasion of both. Ask Barak, and he might volunteer that there was no Israeli offer and, besides, Arafat rejected it. Ask Arafat, and the response you might hear is that there was no offer; besides, it was unacceptable; that said, it had better remain on the table.
And if you still want to continue arguing that wWeinglass didn’t say what he said when he was talking about withdrawing from Gaza ending the peace process then that’s fine by me, I’m happy for the people reading to make their own minds up on that one.
And you’re simply parroting Israeli propaganda over whether they’re serious about trying to make peace. You’re just repeating what they’ve said when confronted with the facts. The facts were they wouldn’t deal with Fatah because they said they wanted to deal with elected parliamentarians even though the parliamentarians told then a. negotiate with Fatah and b. you’re just using us as an excuse not to negotiate with Fatah. Once Hamas got elected and Fatah had no mandate Fatah suddenly became just fine to negotiate with. This kind of nonsense has gone on for decades as anybody who’s followed this over the years will testify.
And Netanyahu has never made a serious offer of a Palestinian state and still won’t :
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will refuse on his trip to Washington to back the formation of a Palestinian state, an MP close to the premier said on Saturday, according to national radio. Netanyahu “will not make a commitment to Washington on the creation of a Palestinian state which would undoubtedly become a ‘Hamastan’,” Ophir Akunis from Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party was quoted as saying, referring to the Islamic movement Hamas which controls the Gaza Strip and favours armed struggle against Israel.
The hawkish prime minister is scheduled to arrive in Washington on Sunday ahead of his maiden meeting with US President Barack Obama since the two men took office this year.
The key meeting takes place against a backdrop of disagreements over the Middle East conflict and how to deal with Iran’s nuclear programme.
While Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to endorse the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state, Obama is insisting on a “two-state solution” to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis."
Making an offer of some bantustans and keeping all of Jerusalem isn’t a serious offer. If Netanyahu did make any kind of serious offer his coalition government would last exactly five minutes.
Dennis Ross. Bill Clinton. Prince Bandar. All there. All said an offer was made. You quibble because offers were shifting (it’s like… *negotiation *was going on or something!) and Final Status issues weren’t addressed before Final Status talks. Go figure.
Rather obviously I’ve never said any such thing. I have pointed out and proven that you’re ignoring all the facts that aren’t useful to your position and that he was only talking about Arafat and only a temporary freeze until the PNA was reformed and was a worthy negotiating partner.
Rather unsurprisingly when you’re shown to be wrong on the facts, we see “we’ll I’ll just describe the facts differently and people can make up their own minds.”
I notice that you have no actual counter to the facts, so you have to call them “Israeli propaganda”. Their position was that they would negotiate with someone who was negotiating in good faith. This was proven not to be Arafat and they began negotiations with the new Fatah once he was gone.
Likewise, as the facts don’t help your narrative, you claim that Israeli wasn’t negotiating with Fatah after Arafat but before Hamas was elected. I’ve already pointed out that your claims are false, but you’ve repeated them.
And again you have discarded the facts that are inconvenient to your narrative. He’d back a Palestinian state that’s demilitarized. Pointing out that he won’t give Hamas open borders and the ability to import weaponry is hardly inconsistent with that. To say nothing of the fact that the West Bank and Gaza are not the same place.
Need some new memes. There was never an offer of “bantustans”, and it’s now interesting to see how your rhetoric has twisted the process of negotiations. If the Palestinians aren’t granted some of Jersualem (as per their demands) then, why, any offer can’t be serious. You’ve now defined away any and all offers that you don’t like as “not serious”.
Curiouser and curiouser,
Well, now that you mention it, what exactly does that mean?
I hope you are not serious. I hope in the next post you make, you say “I wasn’t serious about this pondering at all.”
In case you are, here are the responses to this easily refutable theory:
- Erdogan’s focus on Gaza pre-dated any perceived breakdown in peace with the PKK. The other way to look at it is that there is been an extended cancellation of a cease fire that ended roughly in 2004, when our invasion of Iraq freed up the PKK to come and screw with Turkey - so there has been trouble with the PKK both before, during, and probably after world attention is focused on Gaza.
- The AKP’s focus has been to increase the representation and democratic privileges of the Kurdish minority to get in line with EU requirements. This focus can be attested to in your article and in the most recent issue of Smithsonian.
- World focus has always been more on the Palestinians than Kurds. At least since I can remember.
and finally,
this can’t be serious at all. Kurds have freedom of movement throughout their country, they can actually vote for a government that is affecting their day-to-day lives, they aren’t fucking occupied, they can engage in trade, have access to education and pretty much any service available to any other Turk, they don’t live in an open air prison, they aren’t subject to sanctions when they democratically elect a government, and the party running the government favors their equalization like none other since the Turkish Republic was founded. So no, it’s not more serious in any way you look at it.