Senate Israel/Palestistine - now disc. Obama's trip

Same here. I don't really care about it anymore. Although, according to Ender's definition of caring, I never did, so it's no loss.

lol.

^
(I'm not actually laughing out loud, but there is no acronym for "looking at the screen with an apathetic goofy smile".)

Let's not forget Islamic Jihad and the rest of the militant groups which make Hamas look like Boy Scouts.

Let's also ponder the question as to why these groups are firing rockets into Israel in the first place? It's all good and well to declare Hamas as being responsible for bringing Israel's might down upon Gaza but do you think they are doing it for fun or perhaps the rocket attacks are themselves a response to Israeli aggression and an intolerable situation? Both sides have legitimate security concerns but let's not pretend the rocket attacks take place in a vacuum. When Israel drops a bomb on a building which kills nearly everyone in it, the fathers and brothers of those dead children tend to get pissed off and will join the militants. If my kids were killed by an Israeli bomb do you think I would sit around and do nothing? Would you?

Ender, I'm using the Palestinians for my own selfishness? What? I don't really care about the suffering? Really?

You can't accuse me of being in an Ivory tower. I know what it's like to have a restaurant explode in front of me. I know what it is like to have family in danger. You can sit here and accuse me of taking a trendy cause all day long, but it will never stick. Because unlike you, I've been in similar situations and I know what it is like.

emotional appeals incoming. objective supermen might want to scroll on past, lest their eminently logical brains short-circuit from the oversimplicity of it all:







ender i would ask you to consider that it might be difficult to perceive the complexities of the situation when one's brethren are being held in what amounts to the world's largest concentration camp by a hostile settler-state that has stolen their land. speaking of which:

at least he's honest?

I care, but it just feels so hopeless that I'm no longer outraged about it, just depressed. I feel like I've seen this happen before, and will see it happen again.

lol Israel's government is psychotic. I mean, civilized.

No, rogue, if anyone isn't purely detached like a Senate Floor Sociopath, they are only pretending to care for show.

So what do you all suggest as a solution?

Vivec - and I don't? You haven' the foggiest idea about experiences. The fact I don't share things you don't need to know doesn't mean anything. Except of course that you're admitting to a bias rather than rising above it.

What you and Cliche Guevara fail to pick up on is that the central theme of my commentary has been "both sides are bad". Because you are ostensibly only able to function with political dichotomies, you feel the need to reconstruct my argument as pro-Israeli. Therefore, after recalibrating my stance in your mind, you feel you can argue against points I didn't make.

To simplify it for you; both sides are very bad. I like none of them.

Similarly, if your peaceful cafe scene is disrupted by a bomb, are you going to give two ****s about the wellbeing of the Palestinians.

You're right, IJ is a huge influence and I've already touched on the Pasdaran. I'd be keen to hear your thoughts on Iran's role in all of this.

Thank you for confirming your 'care' is purely about marketing the Vivec brand as a compassionate individual with deep feelings about hot topics. Did you also get sucked in by Kony2012?

Keep bringing up Kony2012. It will stick at some point.

I never branded you as pro israeli. I took issue with you stating that no one should bring up that more palestinians died. Upon which you proceeded to accuse me of feigning care and 'using the palestinians for my own selfish ends.'

And after i told you that i identify with the people because i know what it is like to be in those types of places, you ignore it and continue to accuse me of being a sham.

What a horrible thing to do to someone.

I care deeply about this conflict, but I'm completely exasperated with arguing over whether the latest tit-for-tat maneuver from either side was justified. I will say I find it highly disturbing how many people fall for the "Israel is an imperialist state that stole the land at gunpoint without any justification!" narrative. By no means do I think the conflict reduces to some cartoon binary "Heroic Israelis vs. Evil Palestinians!" contest, but a lot of people display a nauseating, seemingly willful lack of curiosity about how direct the Nazi connection is to the genesis of the violent Palestinian resistance movement, and how much currency a lot of that ideological rhetoric still has in the region. In fact, a rigorous, public deconstruction of this would be hugely helpful for two reasons. Not only would it help to decouple the concepts of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, it would also help decouple the concepts of Islamism and Islam, as Nazi collaborators or sympathizers al-Husseini and Hassan Al-Banna were two of the chief theoreticians of modern Islamism.

Going back to this conflict: If this all reduces to legitimate geopolitical grievances, why didn't you see such spectacularly virulent opposition to the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank for nearly twenty years? And I pretty much loathe the Netanyahu regime, but the very ascendancy of the far right in Israel over the last decade can be traced directly back to Arafat's indefensible rebuke of the 2000 offer and subsequent intifada.

You should read through this thread as much of this ground has been covered. Jordanian control of the West Bank was negotiated as part of the Armistice Agreement. The decades which followed 1948 saw a rise in Palestinian nationalism which is why Jordan gave up any claims to the West Bank. I'm not sure why you are comparing the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank to the Israeli occupation after the Six Day War. There is no equivalence.

I'm posting from my phone at the moment so will have to respond to the rest later.

I suggest you have a good flick through Shlomo Ben-Ami's excellent book "Scars of war, wounds of peace: the Israeli-Arab tragedy". It's a very balanced look at the conflict from a senior Israeli diplomat who was on the negotiation team for Israel during the Camp David and Taba peace talks. He has stated publically that he wouldn't have agreed to the 2000 peace proposal if he was on the Palestinian side of the table.

If I felt you had read or understood anything I'd said, I would probably be moved by this. As you haven't, I'm not.

Why did I say the issue of more Palestinians dying wasn't relevant, Vivec? What did I suggest it did?

I'm happy for you to consider the points I made an respond to them calmly and sensibly. You'll find the reasoning is sound.

First off, let me say that I almost entirely agree with Ender on this issue. It's essentially the viewpoint I came to as I observed both sides when I studied in the West Bank and Israel 4 years ago (I happened to leave just before the last Gaza war kicked off, though there had already been some rocket attacks that interrupted some of our coursework in the Negev while we were there). It's very complicated, but it can really be boiled down to the assertion that both sides have valid claims but invalid tactics.

Now, on the subject of many more Palestinians being killed than Israelis, that's absolutely true. However, pointing this out is not a valid way of asserting that Israel is somehow more brutal or their response less caring in terms of civilian casualties. Israel hasn't killed more people because they've dropped more bombs. They've killed more people because their equipment is much better. If Hamas had better rockets, they'd have killed just as many people as Israel has. They've been aiming at cities. They've been aiming at innocent people. The only difference is that they miss.

This doesn't lessen how wrong Israel's response has been. It's just that it's either intellectually dishonest or incredibly naive to assert that the disproportionality of the deaths indicates that Israel is more wrong.

Oh, and Ender, Edward Said is brilliant.

Then why no counter-offer instead of moving straight to the Intifada?That is completely and totally indefensible, not to mention manifestly insanely stupid and counter-productive from a tactical standpoint.

Also, sorry to raise this again, but your passionate support for the Palestinian cause juxtaposed with your "blasphemy is a victimless crime" signature is almost comical. I emphatically support a two-state solution and Palestinian self-determination, but even that has to be bracketed by our understanding what sort of polity would likely emerge from such self-determination: an explicitly theocratic regime that institutionalizes religion and criminalizes blasphemy to a degree that would make American Evangelicals look like bona fide progressives in comparison. Look at what is developing in Egypt.

(And as a disclaimer, none of any of this should be construed as support for the present Israeli campaign, which I disapprove of. I'm talking bigger picture, here)

Well, two counterpoints, sj:

A. Your analysis of target selection by Hamas is flawed, in my opinion. It's a pretty well-established principle that in such deeply asymmetrical conflicts, soft targets are selected because of their inability to face off in more conventional engagements. We don't really know what they would target if they had a better armament.

B. Most people haven't focused on the disproportionate number of deaths on the two sides as proof of Israel's wrongness. It has been brought up to highlight bias in media coverage of the conflict. Much more of the criticism of Israel has mentioned their discriminatory domestic policies, the aggressive settlement building, and the tight strictures on traffic through the area that allows them to keep a stranglehold on anything like a Palestinian economy.

Condition2: If you want to talk about peace negotiations, what about the leaked documents from last year? One of the reasons the Palestinian Authority has taken such a huge hit is that in the negotiations led by Erekat, they made huge concessions, unreciprocated, which Israel still wouldn't accept. This is not to say Palestinian behavior has been perfect, or even good on this score. But the idea that they don't want to come to the table is ridiculous. Especially when the Foreign Minister of Israel is the head of an openly racist political party.

Wait, Wocky - you're suggesting if Iran pumped HAMAS, IJ et al with even more destructive weaponry that their targets would not continue to be civilian areas with higher casualties?

UN resolutions argument is getting pretty old. Because, know what ? They are two kinds of UN resolutions.
-With article 7.
-Without article 7

A resolution without article 7 have zero value. All the 200 resolutions that the Muslims countries and their pals pass against Israel means nothing, as they are without article 7.

BTW, why people seems to assume that having less casualties means that you are ''the bad guy''

Do you seriously think that the Hamas ever thought of putting ressources toward something like the Iron Dome ? They don't even have ditches for air raids alarms, the kind of high tech device put foward in World War One.

And on the topic of the Iron Dome, it's pretty hilarious to see how panicked is the Hamas leadership (and their dhimmis) at seeing how brutally effective it is.

Furthermore, seeing foam mouthed Iranians screaming that their missiles will sink the US fleet in minutes is quite hilarious considering that their missiles manage to miss towns.

I said if the had weaponry that allowed for tactical parity with the IDF, they might have more conventional engagements with them, as opposed to continuing to rely on attacks that tally heavy civilian casualties. Are you disputing this? Even Tawhid and Jihad (later AQI), an unabashedly terrorist organization, basically behaved this way.

You seem to forget that when the Palestians were called ''Jordanians'', ''Syrians'' and ''Egyptians'', they had tanks and bombers. They were defeated pretty abjectly there too.