magdalene – I do think it’s worth making a distinction between the historical wars for control (in general terms) of Jerusalem itself (on religious grounds) and the modern conflict which has far more to do with ‘homeland’ and all it’s appendages.
Hasn’t every place in the world been a battleground between someone and someone else, thoughout history?
Of course it’s important to distinguish. But the emotional/religious claim to Jerusalem is a very sticky point in the proposed peace accords - it is an extremely holy place to both Jews and Muslims, and both sides wish to control it. While issues of homeland, economic survival, political power, and justice loom large, I don’t think we should underestimate the religious and emotional significance of Jerusalem to Israelis, Palestinians, and the allies on both sides worldwide.
No, and especially not to this extent.
I raised the emotional/religious importance of Jerusalem as one reason many people in the world care about the conflict, not as the only reason, and certainly not as the most important reason that pkbites should care.
What I would like to know is: “Why does the U.S. media think I should deeply concerned about what happens between Israel and the Palestinians?” In my opinion, the amount of time spent by the U.S. media covering this particular situation is way out of porportion when compared with events, injustices and tragedies happening in other parts of the world.
After 50 years, the news coverage has become a parody of itself, like one of The Onions headlines (“Peace was not achieved yet again in the mideast today.”) Yeah, I “get it” already. :rolleyes:
I have also wondered why Palestinian issues get more airtime than, say, Sierre Leone. While part of it is due to the fact that Israel contains sites holy to three major religions, I suspect it boils down to Western bias. Israel is an affluent country on the fringes of Europe: Sierre Leone is not.
Kudos to Collounsbury for this:
Well here is the long and short of it from my point of view.
From a purely selfish point of view, why you should care is this. Israel and Palestine are a potential powder keg to start World War III.
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Israel is one of the US’s mostly tightly bound allies.
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China is no threat compared with a United Arab Coalition, of which Israel is the strongest glue to hold one of those together that exists today.
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The situation makes it difficult for secular governments in countries like Egypt to function vs their very powerful religious organizations. We are allied with Egypt and should the secular government fall that would affect us dramatically.
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The US is one of the few countries that supports Israel almost unilaterally in the UN. Most of the other nations oppose Israel and that includes many powerful European nations, which are also our major allies alongside Israel. This would leave us in the loathsome position of dropping a major ally or opposing the UN in the event of UN intervention.
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As was said, there are a lot of powerful jews in this country.
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There are even more moderately less powerful muslims in this country.
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Israel is a nuclear power, Palestine is not as most other arab nations are not. Under overwhelming threat, nuclear weapons falling on Baghdad and Beirut are not in your best interests.
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I am assuming you are of draft age.
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Most of the region loathes the US. Foreign loathing of the US is not limited to the French ignoring us in Paris.
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Little kids are dying daily because their parents send them against soldiers with M-16s.
Hope that helps,
Erek
Sorry for not mentioning the posters, but here are a few of my replies:
The Sbarro restaraunt and the Dolphinarim disco are not in a militarized zone. They are in downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And that is exactly the problem. There is no real difference between those attacks and the attacks on the World Trade Center and in Oklahoma City. They are all terror attacks. And if I can go on a limb here, they are all terribly cowardly attacks. If the Palestinians feel they really want to go to war, then the way to do it is to attack military positions. We won’t like it, and we’ll hit back hard, but that’s what war is all about. It has nothing to do with blowing up teenagers at a restaraunt. Nothing at all. Damn cowards. And don’t start comparing the Palestinian dead teenagers. Those deaths are tragic, but they are the result of incitement and honestly, bad parenting, by adults who are willing to let their kids go in to the street and through rocks at armed soldiers. Those rocks can and do kill. If you were a soldier, and someone was throwing a rock, or more likely, a molotov cocktail would you fire back? Damn straight you would. Or you wouldn’t be able to reply to this post.
And, honestly, would you let your children go out and do that? Where are the parents?
Actually, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians live under Palestinian rule. But I agree about the civil rights – the Palestinian Authority is no democracy, and torture is widespread.
I take it you haven’t seen me in shorts yet…
Do you have any idea how much Barak offered them? And do you remember who turned them down? In the past few months, almost everyone from Clinton down in his old administration has blamed Arafat for rejecting the Israeli offer. The Palestinians didn’t want an agreement – they wanted war.
IMO, these sides do not want peace, only victory.
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Bottom line, as an Israeli, I would write the subject of the thread this way:
US Policy in the Middle East. Why should I care?
And don’t start about the money. I have no problem listening to the US, but if the average citizen in the States doesn’t care at all about what happens here, I think we can make our own decisions.
In all fairness to the Palestinians. (I throw my support toward the Israelis for the most part) They do attack military targets…with Molotov Cocktails and Rocks. What is a piece of granite against apache attack helicopters and F-16s? The “terrorism is cowardly” stance is complete and total bullshit with no basis in reality. Terrorists use terror because they have no way to realistically compete with rich capitalists nations with high tech arms. So if you want to call it cowardly, go ahead but you would tell me that I was pretty stupid for challenging the entire WWF to a street fight, it’s more or less along the same lines.
The Palestinian refugees are mostly used as a political tool by the other arab nations who are doing the same or worse to them than the israelis. During peace Israel opens it’s borders to Palestinians. The Lebanese Palestinian refugees do not get the same privileges in Lebanon.
In Jordan, where refugees have been more assimilated than elsewhere, the Palestinians tried an unsuccessful coup d’etat.
Palestinians are not innocent victims nor are they baseless criminals.
Arafat DID NOT reject peace offers more or less he was forced to, lest he lose the support of his people. Arafat’s control is in question these days. The Hezbollah and Hamas which are more or less controlled by forces outside of Palestine.
Palestine is a willing pawn in the power struggle within the Middle-East, more or less. They have little power, little desire to actually negotiate a peace and no access to education that will lead to the betterment of their society as a whole. Israel has offered them more than anyone else in the entire world, and it comes down to the fact that Israel was formed because the Israeli’s had nowhere else to go and that was a decision of the UN and the British Empire which controlled that area with much the same kind of weasily ineptitude that they left in many of their colonies of the time that were not as economically/strategically significant. British Imperialism can be spotted at the genesis of many similar conflicts throughout the world.
Two societies that were successively marginalized were thrown into a pit together and that’s more or less how it goes.
Erek
As I tried to explain before, I think there is a difference between attacks on military targets and attacks on civilian targets. If the Palestinians want to attack soldiers, be it with rocks, molotov cocktails, or as more often now roadside bombs and Kalashnikovs, then we will hit them back very hard and prevent it from happening, but it is morally legitimate if the Palestinians are waging war.
But attacks on civilian targets have no moral justifications. Not bombs in restaraunts, not drive-by shootings of civilians in cars (my 20 year old next door neighbor was killed this way in May), not killing infants by throwing rocks at them. To do so is cowardly.
But then you say:
And this is an important point. The PLO, Hezbollah, Hamas, Jihad and others are funded by some of the wealthiest countries in the world. In their wicked, evil ways they feel the need to destroy Israel. But instead of sending their own soldiers, they use these proxies to kill children. They know they would lose to Israel in a straight fight.
I don’t think the difference between terror supporters and those that oppose terror is a question of wealth or status. It is a question of morality.
Arafat lead one of the most notorious terror organizations since the 1960s. He was responsible for killing dozens of Israelis in Israel and outside of it. He also supported terror against Western targets, including personally ordering the murder of US diplomats in Sudan. In a sane world, he would have been brought to justice years ago.
But Israel, and other countries, were concerned about the rising threat of Islamic terror, in the form of the Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Arafat was brought back into the area in order to stop the terror. As Rabin would say “Arafat doesn’t have a Supreme Court” (the Israeli Supreme court often prevents strong measures against terror). Instead of preventing terror, Arafat encouraged it, sometimes actively supporting it, since 1993. The incitement never stopped, the terrorists were never arrested, etc.
If Arafat had worked to promote coexistence, the Hamas never would have become as popular as it is now. And then he wouldn’t be able to complain of the view on the street after Camp David. But then again, he didn’t want a peaceful solution from day one. He’s in a war now, which is exactly what he wants.
If Arafat and the PA can not control the Hamas and Jihad because they are “afraid”, then they should step aside, and let the Israelis take care of them.
I wish. Did you forget WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, Bosnia, Somalia, Panama, Haiti, Gulf War, Grenada, etc. See the full list at http://www.vfw.org/member/elig2.shtml.
The dichotomy between US involvement in foreign affairs and US ignorance of foreign affairs is the subject of Kissinger’s new book.
So the question is now restated as, “Why does the U.S. media pay disproportionately more time to the Israel/Palestinian conflict than to other hotspots in the world?”
In which case, I suggest that you also consider the amount of U.S. media coverage of Ireland. It is because a large number of Americans trace their ancestry back to Ireland, and are connected intimately with that country.
And why not the same attention to conflicts in Africa? Because the conflicts are in a country, not continental, and (lamentably) most black Americans cannot trace their ancestry to this country or that country. Hence, there is not a large population section called “Rawandan-Americans” as there is called “Irish-Americans” or “Jewish Americans” or “Arab-Americans.”
The U.S. media knows its audience.
If this were a thread about bashing Americans rather than why one should care about the middle east, I’d have to admit the superiority of the British in foreign affairs. Just the other day I was having a pint with a bunch of football yobs discussing which countries’ plate glass windows best yield to the application of a hob-nailed boot. We then went on to question why the US has never had a leader with the insight of Neville Chamberlain.
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*Originally posted by curwin *
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[QUOTE
And this is an important point. The PLO, Hezbollah, Hamas, Jihad and others are funded by some of the wealthiest countries in the world. In their wicked, evil ways they feel the need to destroy Israel. But instead of sending their own soldiers, they use these proxies to kill children. They know they would lose to Israel in a straight fight.
I don’t think the difference between terror supporters and those that oppose terror is a question of wealth or status. It is a question of morality.
**[/QUOTE]
Well I don’t have a lot of time to post but I brought this up with my wife who is Israeli now living in America and what she said was this, she disagreed with you on the cowardly aspect. It takes cojones to blow yourself up for a cause. Her problem is that it is not state sanctioned and therefore a war is being waged without local consent, unlike an army which is formed by the consentual government.
Erek
As Foreign Minister Peres pointed out, if it is so brave to blow yourself up for the “cause”, then why don’t the imams and terrorist leaders themselves do it, instead of sending brainwashed young men, who are promised 70 virgins in the afterlife?
Personally, I think if they think suicide is such a noble option, we should take them out now, and save them the hassle…
A commnet
First on leaders going and blowing themselves up, this is rather silly. Beheading an organization is the surest way to win. The French in Algeria, for example, spent a lot of time trying to identify and kill the heads of the FLN. A good leader, coordinator, motivator is what helps make a movement successful. It is plain absurd and stupid to make this kind of assertion. No, suicide attacks require certain cojones. Else you would see more.
Second in re funding. I think your assertion is highly distortive. The actual funding to movements such as Hizbollah is largely (a) non-official (b) by private individuals © relative to the resources of a middle income state like Israel rather tiny. Not all of their funds go to terror. They spend a lot of their cash on “winning hearts and minds” – to understand movements like this you have to stop thinking of “devils” as emotionally satisfying as that is and recognize many participants have positive if misguided motivations (and bound up with bigotry of course). Plenty of Islamist people, from long term personal contact on my part, have real concerns for the well-being of their people. They just have a (IMO) wrong headed approach.
All these posts are good, but they miss 1 universal fact of life:
There will never, ever, EVER be a lasting peace between Palenstine & Isreal. All the peace accords in the world have never, and will never bring lasting peace. Never, ever! You can blame whomever you want, but there will always be turmoil there. If you think any cease fires, treaties, or accords will ever bring a lasting peace, you are a fool. Palenstien believes Isreal stole their land. Both races of people have hated each other for over 5,000 years. This is an eternal conflict. Eternal! It will never, ever end. The stories we hear on the news about the conditions there sound the same as they did in 1961, 1971, 1982, 1991,…etc. And 10, 20, 30+ years from now, the scene will be the same! It’s never, ever, ever, ever going to stop. No matter what the rest of the world does, or says, it will always be the same. So, why should I care about something that is never, ever, going to change, no matter what?
This post was missing a number of universal facts.
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You began this post from a position of ignorance, self-stated I might add. Now you claim to be an authority.
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Recorded history starts at about 5000 years ago.
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Judaism is the only major monotheistic religion that predates the birth of christ.
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Christ was born 2000 years ago. If you need a more exact date of when he was born look at what year it is on your calendar, add that to 0 and that’s how long ago it was exactly.
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Islam was not a religion until a significant amount of time had passed after the death of christ.
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The jews left Egypt somewhere around 3000 years ago and Jerusalem had yet to be founded.
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Tribal warfare does not necessarily govern alliances in a post-industrial society. IE England and France are no longer at war.
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Israel was formed in 1948. That’s 4947 years after the date you gave for the beginning of the conflict.
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People who were alive at the time of the formation of Israel will soon all be dead and the fight won’t be fought by the actual people who started it all.
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Catholics no longer burn people for disagreeing with them, at least not as public policy.
Erek
Pkbites,
First of all, it’s spelled Palestine and Israel. Sorry, it’s a minor nitpick, but I think it’s important. Secondly, as has been stated before, Palestinians and Israelis don’t belong to “two races who have hated each other for 5000 years.” Arab-Jewish relations throughout history have generally been good. I also disagree with your contention that nothing has changed since 1961. A great deal has changed, including the gaining of the Occupied Territories by Israel. Things have changed in the territories, too. They were occupied by Israel, Israeli settlements formed, infatada was declared, Hamas was founded, the territories were given limited self-government, etc. Israel has also changed. For the first time, native Israelis are coming to power. I don’t know if you realize this, but Benjamin Netenyahu was the first prime minister born in Israel. Israelis are coming to power now who have never known a world without Israel. There are Arabs in the knesset now, and Arabs have been in the government (I don’t think the current government has any Arab ministers). The coming to Israel of the Ethiopian Jews has changed the racial and political composition of Israel. This is a very dynamic situation. It’s not at all stagnant, and conditions are changing every day, and, in all likelyhood, continue to change over the years.
Sorry to nitpick but I do believe it’s spelled intifada. 
Erek