Picking on Palestine

lunacyfoundme

Is it just me or does everybody seem to be picking on the Palestinians.

I know that Hamas terrorists commit awfull atrocities and Im not even touching on that. But its just mad. Israel started the whole by invading Lebanon. Theyre the ones who are supposed to be a legitamite government but are shooting children dead in the street.

They want the Palestinians to crack down on terrorists but theyed destroyed most police stations and security infrastructure. Yasser Arafat is stuck in a compound surrounded by Israeli tanks and they expect him to be able to do anything from there.

Am I the only one that watches the news and wishes the Israelis would be taken up on war crimes?

tribble

Because they're Jewish - and we couldn't be having that now.



RTE (despite their near absence of real international news) does tend to lean towards the Palestinian side.

ReefBreak

I find it's the complete opposite. The media tend to "pick on" the Israelies far more than the Palestinians. Case in point: a bomb went off in a University cafeteria in Israel a few months back killing about 20 students (all aged between 18 and 22 I believe) and injuring scores more. That evening tanks rolled into a Palistinian refugee camp to destroy the homes of some suspected terrorists' families. Bad all round you'll agree. But what did RTE lead with and spend about 90% of their time on? That's right, the demolition job by the IDF. Apparently, the wrongful demolition of suspected terrrists' homes is far worse than murdering and blowing limbs off innocent Israeli civilians.

The twisted thinking of Hamas sympathisers in Ireland say that the Palestinians "have a right to defend themselves". I call it senseless, cold-blooded, mass-murder.

dahamsta

Palestine Supporter != Hamas Sympathiser

That's a Northern Ireland political argument if ever I saw one. Palestine-Hamas, the new Sinn Féín-IRA.

ReefBreak

Originally posted by dahamsta
Palestine Supporter != Hamas Sympathiser

I agree, but it appears to me that an awful lot of Pro-Palestinian people do a very bad job of proving this point. Join an SWP-sponsored match to the GPO on a saturday afternoon for example.

Is it just me or does everybody seem to be picking on the Palestinians.

I think it must be just you. As far as i can see Irish people are extremely pro-palestinian. It probably stems somewhat with our own upbringing of being reminded what an occupation is like. Still, I do notice that any move Israel makes is subject to extreme criticism, whereas everyone seems to accept the terrorist attacks made by Palestinian groups.

I know that Hamas terrorists commit awfull atrocities and Im not even touching on that. But its just mad. Israel started the whole by invading Lebanon. Theyre the ones who are supposed to be a legitamite government but are shooting children dead in the street

yup Israel did invade Lebanon. But look back a wee bit, and you'll see they had reason to do so. You seem to be forgetting that Arab leaders for years have been calling for the destruction of Israel. And these cries were going out before israel invaded any nations.

yes Israel is a legitimate government, and yes they need to be called to account for the deaths caused to civilians. but i don't see you calling out against the "palestinian Government" for allowing the attacks on Israel. Sure... Israel is to blame, but so are palestinians. try to be a little more balanced.

They want the Palestinians to crack down on terrorists but theyed destroyed most police stations and security infrastructure. Yasser Arafat is stuck in a compound surrounded by Israeli tanks and they expect him to be able to do anything from there

being surrounded by Israeli security forces never stopped him before, so i doubt they expect him to stop now. They haven't cut him off completely.

In regards to the police forces in Palestine, i daresay the Palestinian government could crack down on terrorism far more efficiently using their usual means. Policing hasn't been effective for the Israeli's, so i really doubt they consider it would be more so, for palestinians that are biased.

Am I the only one that watches the news and wishes the Israelis would be taken up on war crimes?

Nope you're not. Unfortuently, you're not the only one that blind-sights themselves into believing that the Palestinians are fighting some glorious battle to free themselves. They're not.

I want Israel to brought to account for its actions, but War crimes? Only for some leaders. For the most part, i'd prefer normal crinimal procedures. And i'd like the same applied to palestinians, the US, and many other nations....

The twisted thinking of Hamas sympathisers in Ireland say that the Palestinians "have a right to defend themselves". I call it senseless, cold-blooded, mass-murder

Damned Right.

bonkey

Originally posted by lunacyfoundme
Israel started the whole by invading Lebanon. Theyre the ones who are supposed to be a legitamite government but are shooting children dead in the street.

You know, you can almost always tell someone's allegiances by looking at who they claim "started" it, or how they construe the "start" of it.

jc

dahamsta

Originally posted by ReefBreak
Join an SWP-sponsored match to the GPO on a saturday afternoon for example.

And in the same vein:

Palestine Supporter != Loony Leftie

Pigeonholing is probably a fair contributor to the problems in both the Middle East and the North; and the recent swing to the far right in Europe for that matter. If people stopped thinking of all middle-easterns and republicans as terrorists, and all refugees as spongers, we'd be a lot better off. A bit of balance and thought wouldn't go astray.

adam

what do you mean "start" it? Are you trying to tell me there was no trouble prior to israel invading the Lebanon?


the plantation of Ulster? What does that remind you of?

the plantation of Ulster? What does that remind you of?

A wee bt different than Israel & Lebanon... Ireland hadn't openly asked to be invaded. Lebanon & the other arab nations practically asked for it, with constant building up of troops on the borders. Are you really going to tell me that the invasion was unwarranted? (Israel's invasion that is)

Belfast

Originally posted by lunacyfoundme
Is it just me or does everybody seem to be picking on the Palestinians.

I know that Hamas terrorists commit awfull atrocities and Im not even touching on that. But its just mad. Israel started the whole by invading Lebanon. Theyre the ones who are supposed to be a legitamite government but are shooting children dead in the street.

They want the Palestinians to crack down on terrorists but theyed destroyed most police stations and security infrastructure. Yasser Arafat is stuck in a compound surrounded by Israeli tanks and they expect him to be able to do anything from there.

Am I the only one that watches the news and wishes the Israelis would be taken up on war crimes?

Jews united against zionism
http://www.nkusa.org/

more Jews against zionism
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/

more
http://voteforusa.com/jewsforusa/

Jews against Zionism: The Hidden Protest
Massive Media Cover-up!
http://www.realnews247.com/spec_rpt_jew_against_zionism.htm

Jewish anti-Zionism
http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/

Jews against Zionism
http://www.btinternet.com/~sapere.aude/jaz.html

books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1566390095/102-5254492-0780140?v=glance

Jews Against Zionism: The Hidden Protest
http://alberta.indymedia.org/news/2003/08/7778_comment.php

http://musicweaver.users.btopenworld.com/JAZ_statement.htm

http://www.islamonline.net/livedialogue/english/Browse.asp?hGuestID=elk1v5

http://www.oasistv.com/news/3-17-03-story-1.asp

Hobbes

Originally posted by klaz
I do notice that any move Israel makes is subject to extreme criticism, whereas everyone seems to accept the terrorist attacks made by Palestinian groups.

Hmmm, They don't accept they more then likely agree with you. Although you get shouted down as anti-semite when you point out things like the IDF blowing away the legs of ISM members or the UN explaining in no uncertains words as "Stop killing our peace keepers".

In regards to the police forces in Palestine, i daresay the Palestinian government could crack down on terrorism far more efficiently using their usual means. Policing hasn't been effective for the Israeli's, so i really doubt they consider it would be more so, for palestinians that are biased.

Yes I laughed out loud when Israel said one time that Palistine wasn't doing enough to stop terrorists when only a few days ago Israel security forces bombed a police station trying to kill a Palistine prisoner that was arrested for terrorism (on Israels request).

It is a bit hard to try to maintain peace when your getting your infrastructure destroyed.

I want Israel to brought to account for its actions, but War crimes?

I would like to see war crimes on both sides take place. Preferbly by a UN council and not a kangeroo court that both sides seem to create.

Hmmm, They don't accept they more then likely agree with you. Although you get shouted down as anti-semite when you point out things like the IDF blowing away the legs of ISM members or the UN explaining in no uncertains words as "Stop killing our peace keepers".

Oh i agree to a certain extent. For myself, i've never considered Israel to be excepmt from criticism because they were jewish. My semi-support of their state stemmed from other personal reasons. But at the core element, Palestinian elements seem to be able to perform their actions without condemnation. It seems that if you're a terrorist or "freedom fighter group" you're allowed to perform despicable actions. Governments are not and should not. But that doesn't excuse Palestine.

Yes I laughed out loud when Israel said one time that Palistine wasn't doing enough to stop terrorists when only a few days ago Israel security forces bombed a police station trying to kill a Palistine prisoner that was arrested for terrorism (on Israels request).

Palestinian police forces have never been that effective against the "freedom groups". Oh a few arrests have been made, but never anything major. However whenever theres a minority group that goes too far for the Palestinian leadership, these groups have a tendacy to disappear... Perhaps Israel should appeal to the palestinian administration for help rather than depending on the Palestinian Police.

It is a bit hard to try to maintain peace when your getting your infrastructure destroyed.

I think Israel would agree with you.

I would like to see war crimes on both sides take place. Preferbly by a UN council and not a kangeroo court that both sides seem to create.

here i agree 100% with you. Amazing

Hobbes

Originally posted by klaz
It seems that if you're a terrorist or "freedom fighter group" you're allowed to perform despicable actions. Governments are not and should not. But that doesn't excuse Palestine.

Actually it is more the reverse. No one will disagree that what terrorists do is wrong. However my main complaint is when a government does the exact same crap and expects everyone to agree with what they do is right.

Oh a few arrests have been made, but never anything major.

The arrest in question was a major one. Israel asked Palistine cops to pick up the person which they did. They then missile attacked the police station the guy was being held in jail in. The terrorist got away and many police officers died.

Please tell me how that is supposed to help the matter? Say "well you weren't doing a good job anyway so we felt the need to kill innocent people to exercise justice".

No better then the terrorists.

I think Israel would agree with you.

Whoa there a second.

Israels infrastructure and Palistines are worlds apart. When you have a country effectively building a wall around yours, blows up your airport and then controls who can leave your country while systematically destroying homes, shops, crops, exports... tell me how that even comes close to how Israel lives at the moment?

When was the last time you heard that an Israeli taxi driver was stranded for two days on a road because security forces took his ID card and if he left that stretch of the road the settlers were allowed shoot him by law?

Or prehaps a person having thier house knocked down and a family member killed because the next door neighbour is supposed to be related a suicide bomber?

I'm sorry, but Palistinian attacks pale in comparison to what kind of crap Israel gets away with in the name of self defense.

Vader

Origionally posted by ReefBreak

I agree, but it appears to me that an awful lot of Pro-Palestinian people do a very bad job of proving this point. Join an SWP-sponsored match to the GPO on a saturday afternoon for example.

Its very dangerous to be a vocal Pro-Palestinian these days. Take for example the persecution of Jaoudat Abouazza and Amer Jubran.

Since Zionism began its patently insane program of eradicating the indigenous people of Palestine -- beginning officially with the founding of Israel in 1948 -- some 5 million refugees have been forced from Palestine into the rest of the world. The US is very much involved in the issue of Palestinian refugees because its sponsorship of Israel in large part created them.

But because the US war against Palestine is covert, the US must come up with false pretexts for its persecution of Palestinian refugees who have brought the struggle to liberate Palestine to the source -- the United States itself. Through the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and now with the Department of Homeland Security, the US has used alleged violations of immigration regulations as a pretext for harassing, jailing, and deporting numerous Palestinian activists, particularly since the Bush Administration's two year-old declaration of racism against Arab, Muslim, and South Asian peoples.

This is where Jaoudat Abouazza and Amer Jubran's story begins.

Jaoudat Abouazza's treatment in the hands of the federal authorities was unusual in its brutality. In the spring of 2002, orders from the Bush Administration were coming down full force. All the activists above were subjected to imprisonment and solitary confinement after their phony arrests. Violation of Constitutional rights was standard. But Abouazza, following his arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was actually strapped into a dentist's chair in a county jail and physically tortured by means of forced extraction, without anaesthesia, of several teeth. He was beaten, stripped, repeatedly interrogated, and finally allowed to return to Canada where the FBI and RCMP continued to harass him. His crime? Possession of leaflets for an upcoming protest against an "Israel Independence Day" celebration in Boston.

The case of Amer Jubran is better known. Jubran has told New England audiences who have come to hear him that they have no idea what it is like not to have a country. He has patiently educated thousands about the reality of the theft of Palestine. So close is Israel to the US establishment that for many this education is a process - one lie after another must be peeled back and exposed, like the layers of an onion. Jubran has taken many through the process. He is eloquent, likeable, and politically sophisticated. For these reasons, the US government has taken special trouble to bring charges against him, and to try to deport him. It is doing so by means of the usual accusations of violating immigration rules.

Amer Jubran's immediate family is from a small village near Al-Khalil in Palestine. They now live in exile in Jordan. Were Jubran to be deported, it would only mean sending him from one place of exile to another. The evidence of how fully the US is haunted by what it has done, through Israel, to Palestine, is that with all its power and money it must go to extraordinary lengths to persecute those from Palestine who whisper the truth to people in the US.

In other cases, the establishment is content to rely on its bought media to overwhelm dissent. That is, it will allow dissent, knowing that it has provided a thousand effective distractions to drown it out. But not in the case of Palestine, particularly since the Endless War for oil was declared in September 2001. Palestine, though it lacks oil, sets a bad example in Uncle Sam's eyes for other nearby countries that do have oil. That example is its longstanding resistance to fascism.

The INS, FBI, and the new Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement -appropriately named "ICE" -- are working overtime to silence Palestinians. In the case of Abouazza, their methods are reminiscent of the the Nazis, who were pioneers in medical torture. In Jubran's case, the authorities have been more circumspect. Their strategy has been to keep him continually entangled in the court system on one trumped up charge after another. The circus that began with Jubran's second political arrest has now gone on for a year.

In July, 2003, his trial was intentionally delayed by the prosecutor, Richard Neville, who wasted an entire afternoon in irrelevant questioning of a witness, and then claimed he had to leave early because his wife had the flu. The presiding judge, the Honorable Leonard Shapiro, obviously had no choice -- allowing the trial to continue would amount to a declaration that a woman with the flu had no right to have her husband at home. In September, the prosecutor delayed the new trial date by claiming that he had travel plans.

The clincher was that he had "pre-paid tickets" for these travel plans - a fact of such importance that the shrewd judge once again had no choice. On September 25, the day he claimed he would be travelling, Neville was in his office. Jubran's new trial date is now set for November 6, 2003. On November 6, Prosecutor Neville is expected to announce, "the dog ate my homework," and be fully rewarded by the judge.

Though it has come at some cost to Jubran personally, the two causes of immigrant rights and the liberation of Palestine have been greatly advanced by this Justice Department attack against him. He and others who are dedicated to telling the truth about the United States' sordid involvement in his country could not have asked for a better venue.

If only we had been able to hear such eloquent spokesmen from the native people during the Indian Wars, the Africans during slavery, anti-imperialists during WWI and II, the Koreans during the Korean War, the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, from Nicaragua and El Salvador and Honduras during the covert wars in Central America, from Panamanians during "Operation Just Cause", from Iraqis during the last 13 years of US genocide there, from Afghanis as their country became a US battleground for 20 years, from Somalia, from Yugoslavia, from practically the entire world, as it has been attacked the US.

If only the Justice Department had been lunatic enough then, as it is today, to publicly target those who dared to tell the story, we might have learned much sooner of these continent-sized crimes. Today the Bush Administration has committed the fatal mistake of obviousness. They have made it nearly impossible not to see the enormity of US imperialism.

ReefBreak

You quoted my post...

I agree, but it appears to me that an awful lot of Pro-Palestinian people do a very bad job of proving this point. Join an SWP-sponsored match to the GPO on a saturday afternoon for example.

...and then copied and pasted an article about the ill-treatment of Palestinian activists. Ignoring the sections on the two Palestinans, it's pretty obvious the writer is almost overcome with anti-US hatred. Anyway, what does it have to do with my quote? What does it have to do about the SWP supporting/not-supporting terrorists.

Vader

did the quote not say Pro palestinians are very poor at proving their point, and then I pasted an article about the treatment in the US of those who can.

Dasilva94

This is a somewhat balanced article from The New York Review of Books that looks to a novel solution to the Israel/Palestinian conflict:

part 1

Israel: The Alternative
By Tony Judt
The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate. Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the "road map." The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: "It's all Arafat's fault." Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?

At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Habsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, their leaders seized the opportunity. A flurry of new states emerged; and the first thing they did was set about privileging their national, "ethnic" majority—defined by language, or religion, or antiquity, or all three—at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status: permanently resident strangers in their own home.

But one nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its ambitions. The dream of an appropriately sited Jewish national home in the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait upon the retreat of imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a second world war. And thus it was only in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel's ethno-religious self-definition, and its discrimination against internal "foreigners," has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge.

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

---

In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.

Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.

Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.

Anyone who supposes that this third option is unthinkable above all for a Jewish state has not been watching the steady accretion of settlements and land seizures in the West Bank over the past quarter-century, or listening to generals and politicians on the Israeli right, some of them currently in government. The middle ground of Israeli politics today is occupied by the Likud. Its major component is the late Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Herut is the successor to Vladimir Jabotinsky's interwar Revisionist Zionists, whose uncompromising indifference to legal and territorial niceties once attracted from left-leaning Zionists the epithet "fascist." When one hears Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, proudly insist that his country has not excluded the option of assassinating the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, it is clear that the label fits better than ever. Political murder is what fascists do.

---

The situation of Israel is not desperate, but it may be close to hopeless. Suicide bombers will never bring down the Israeli state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons. There are indeed Arab radicals who will not rest until every Jew is pushed into the Mediterranean, but they represent no strategic threat to Israel, and the Israeli military knows it. What sensible Israelis fear much more than Hamas or the al-Aqsa Brigade is the steady emergence of an Arab majority in "Greater Israel," and above all the erosion of the political culture and civic morale of their society. As the prominent Labor politician Avraham Burg recently wrote, "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality."[1] Unless something changes, Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic.

This is where the US enters the picture. Israel's behavior has been a disaster for American foreign policy. With American support, Jerusalem has consistently and blatantly flouted UN resolutions requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war. Israel is the only Middle Eastern state known to possess genuine and lethal weapons of mass destruction. By turning a blind eye, the US has effectively scuttled its own increasingly frantic efforts to prevent such weapons from falling into the hands of other small and potentially belligerent states. Washington's unconditional support for Israel even in spite of (silent) misgivings is the main reason why most of the rest of the world no longer credits our good faith.

Dasilva94

Part 2

It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that America's reasons for going to war in Iraq were not necessarily those advertised at the time.[2] For many in the current US administration, a major strategic consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel. This story continues. We are now making belligerent noises toward Syria because Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been moved there—a claim for which there is no corroborating evidence from any other source. Syria backs Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad: sworn foes of Israel, to be sure, but hardly a significant international threat. However, Damascus has hitherto been providing the US with critical data on al-Qaeda. Like Iran, another longstanding target of Israeli wrath whom we are actively alienating, Syria is more use to the United States as a friend than an enemy. Which war are we fighting?

On September 16, 2003, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution asking Israel to desist from its threat to deport Yasser Arafat. Even American officials themselves recognize, off the record, that the resolution was reasonable and prudent, and that the increasingly wild pronouncements of Israel's present leadership, by restoring Arafat's standing in the Arab world, are a major impediment to peace. But the US blocked the resolution all the same, further undermining our credibility as an honest broker in the region. America's friends and allies around the world are no longer surprised at such actions, but they are saddened and disappointed all the same.

Israeli politicians have been actively contributing to their own difficulties for many years; why do we continue to aid and abet them in their mistakes? The US has tentatively sought in the past to pressure Israel by threatening to withhold from its annual aid package some of the money that goes to subsidizing West Bank settlers. But the last time this was attempted, during the Clinton administration, Jerusalem got around it by taking the money as "security expenditure." Washington went along with the subterfuge, and of $10 billion of American aid over four years, between 1993 and 1997, less than $775 million was kept back. The settlement program went ahead unimpeded. Now we don't even try to stop it.

This reluctance to speak or act does no one any favors. It has also corroded American domestic debate. Rather than think straight about the Middle East, American politicians and pundits slander our European allies when they dissent, speak glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized, and censoriously rebuke any public figure at home who tries to break from the consensus.

---

But the crisis in the Middle East won't go away. President Bush will probably be conspicuous by his absence from the fray for the coming year, having said just enough about the "road map" in June to placate Tony Blair. But sooner or later an American statesman is going to have to tell the truth to an Israeli prime minister and find a way to make him listen. Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by Western and international agencies. This is still the conventional consensus, and it was once a just and possible solution.

But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the ground, and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts. It may be that over a quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidized Jewish settlers would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it will happen. Many of those settlers will die—and kill— rather than move. The last Israeli politician to shoot Jews in pursuit of state policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin's illegal Irgun militia in 1948 and integrated it into the new Israel Defense Forces. Ariel Sharon is not Ben-Gurion.[3]

The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution— the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map"—is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.

But what if there were no place in the world today for a "Jewish state"? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. "Christian Europe," pace M. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is a dead letter; Western civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and languages, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, and many others—as any visitor to London or Paris or Geneva will know.[4]

Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews —is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.

Dasilva94

Part 3:

For many years, Israel had a special meaning for the Jewish people. After 1948 it took in hundreds of thousands of helpless survivors who had nowhere else to go; without Israel their condition would have been desperate in the extreme. Israel needed Jews, and Jews needed Israel. The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Israel's identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something that Israel's American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit. To find fault with the Jewish state is to think ill of Jews; even to imagine an alternative configuration in the Middle East is to indulge the moral equivalent of genocide.

In the years after World War II, those many millions of Jews who did not live in Israel were often reassured by its very existence—whether they thought of it as an insurance policy against renascent anti-Semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and would fight back. Before there was a Jewish state, Jewish minorities in Christian societies would peer anxiously over their shoulders and keep a low profile; since 1948, they could walk tall. But in recent years, the situation has tragically reversed.

Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel's current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.

In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today's "clash of cultures" between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.

To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The "fence"—actually an armored zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt roads (for tracking footprints), and a wall up to twenty-eight feet tall in places—occupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will destroy villages, livelihoods, and whatever remains of Arab-Jewish community. It costs approximately $1 million per mile and will bring nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin Wall, it confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect.

A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership. The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force—though a legitimately constituted binational state would find it much easier policing militants of all kinds inside its borders than when they are free to infiltrate them from outside and can appeal to an angry, excluded constituency on both sides of the border.[5] A binational state in the Middle East would require the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class. The very idea is an unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to begin. But the alternatives are far, far worse.

—September 25, 2003

Notes
[1] See Burg's essay, "La révolution sioniste est morte," Le Monde, September 11, 2003. A former head of the Jewish Agency, the writer was speaker of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, between 1999 and 2003 and is currently a Labor Party member of the Knesset. His essay first appeared in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot; it has been widely republished, notably in the Forward (August 29, 2003) and the London Guardian (September 15, 2003).

[2] See the interview with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the July 2003 issue of Vanity Fair.

[3] In 1979, following the peace agreement with Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon did indeed instruct the army to close down Jewish settlements in the territory belonging to Egypt. The angry resistance of some of the settlers was overcome with force, though no one was killed. But then the army was facing three thousand extremists, not a quarter of a million, and the land in question was the Sinai Desert, not "biblical Samaria and Judea."

[4] Albanians in Italy, Arabs and black Africans in France, Asians in England all continue to encounter hostility. A minority of voters in France, or Belgium, or even Denmark and Norway, support political parties whose hostility to "immigration" is sometimes their only platform. But compared with thirty years ago, Europe is a multicolored patchwork of equal citizens, and that, without question, is the shape of its future.

[5] As Burg notes, Israel's current policies are the terrorists' best recruiting tool: "We are indifferent to the fate of Palestinian children, hungry and humiliated; so why are we surprised when they blow us up in our restaurants? Even if we killed 1000 terrorists a day it would change nothing." See Burg, "La révolution sioniste est morte."

Dasilva94, could you perhaps comment when you post an article. Even one as long as this.

overall, a good article, but just a few titbits:

Suicide bombers will never bring down the Israeli state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons

not really true. Check the statistics on the attacks made upon the IDF, and you'll find all manner of modern weapons being used. Grand, no top of the line equipment, but snipers, rocket launchers, mortors, mines etc. They access to these weapons, and are using them. I never saw the IRA take on a suicide campaign, rather they made their own weapons. The Palestinian groups use suicide bombers because it feeds the hatred. Those in power realise that peace will never come, and the only way to keep their people behind them is to create martyrs and turn killing into a religion.

Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by Western and international agencies.

A terrorist free Palestine? This guy has got to be joking. If Israel did leave palestinian areas, the Palestinians would shout Victory, and attack Israel's borders by any means necessary. Sinply put, there is no real answer to the situation. Pro-palestinan Groups will shout for Israel to leave, but they're all afraid to admit what would come after. Genocide & invasion of Israel.

Geromino

Originally posted by klaz
Dasilva94, could you perhaps comment when you post an article. Even one as long as this.

overall, a good article, but just a few titbits:

not really true. Check the statistics on the attacks made upon the IDF, and you'll find all manner of modern weapons being used. Grand, no top of the line equipment, but snipers, rocket launchers, mortors, mines etc. They access to these weapons, and are using them. I never saw the IRA take on a suicide campaign, rather they made their own weapons. The Palestinian groups use suicide bombers because it feeds the hatred. Those in power realise that peace will never come, and the only way to keep their people behind them is to create martyrs and turn killing into a religion.

A terrorist free Palestine? This guy has got to be joking. If Israel did leave palestinian areas, the Palestinians would shout Victory, and attack Israel's borders by any means necessary. Sinply put, there is no real answer to the situation. Pro-palestinan Groups will shout for Israel to leave, but they're all afraid to admit what would come after. Genocide & invasion of Israel.

Two phrases to describe ME politics and the current Palestine/Israel issue:

1) How can I negotiate when I am weak; and
2) Why should I negotiate when I am strong.

Both sides do this and until this cycle is broken, the killing will not stop. Also, you are dealing with over two thousand years of cultural hatred. Palestinians from the decendents of Ismail and Israel/Jews as the decendents of Isaac.

bonkey

Originally posted by Geromino
Two phrases to describe ME politics and the current Palestine/Israel issue:

1) How can I negotiate when I am weak; and
2) Why should I negotiate when I am strong.

Both sides do this and until this cycle is broken, the killing will not stop.

Absolutely.

Also, you are dealing with over two thousand years of cultural hatred. Palestinians from the decendents of Ismail and Israel/Jews as the decendents of Isaac.

I'm unconvinced of that one. I'm pretty sure if it had been Catholics, atheists, or any other religious group (instead of Jews) who seized the land and created a nation in that spot....they'd have received the exact same treatment.

jc

Also, you are dealing with over two thousand years of cultural hatred. Palestinians from the decendents of Ismail and Israel/Jews as the decendents of Isaac.

i'm not sure this has as much bearing on the issues on hand. Sure there are extremists out there that will point back in time to justify actions, but for the most part people will look back at most 100 years. And alot has happened in the last 100 years for both sides to hate each other.

I'm unconvinced of that one. I'm pretty sure if it had been Catholics, atheists, or any other religious group (instead of Jews) who seized the land and created a nation in that spot....they'd have received the exact same treatment

I agree.

El_MUERkO

I agree with most of the more moderate views expressed in this thread but I would like to share one point I've come to believe about the Israel -v- Palestine or Jew -v-Muslim conflict in the middle east.

Time.

Progress is slow in the middle east peace process, but only by modern standards, this conflict has been going on in various forms for over 1000 years, the last 10/15 years of intense media scrutiny of it doesn’t mean the process can wind up nicely in two or three years.

Just because the western world wants everything in a super fast, super sized, super quick, take away container doesn’t mean we can expect two peoples to change their points of view and way of life over the course of a weekend.

There are people from both sides so caught up in their war that it may take a generation or two to quiet them enough to allow other more rational people to create a peace.

For example Iran under the Ayatollah Hommeneh (spellings not even close) burned books and issued fatwa’s against their authors, his death allow more liberal clerics and politicians a better chance to voice their opinions and Iran has mellowed politically.

For Israel & Palestine to resolve differences its going to take a slow '1 small step at a time' diplomatic process that will probably be still going on when we're on our death beds, until people come to realize this I think many westerns are going to get involved in the conflict and cause more problems than they solve.

Belfast

Originally posted by El_MUERkO
I agree with most of the more moderate views expressed in this thread but I would like to share one point I've come to believe about the Israel -v- Palestine or Jew -v-Muslim conflict in the middle east.

Be moderate is not the solution to every problem. I wonder if the Zionist have arrived in Ireland in 1945 instead of Palestine and kick most Irish across the Shannon to live in Connaught and took all the best land for them selves would we all think at conflict resolution and the right of the sate of Israel to exist in the island of Ireland was a reasonable response.

Originally posted by Belfast

Originally posted by El_MUERkO
Be moderate is not the solution to every problem. I wonder if the Zionist have arrived in Ireland in 1945 instead of Palestine and kick most Irish across the Shannon to live in Connaught and took all the best land for them selves would we all think at conflict resolution and the right of the sate of Israel to exist in the island of Ireland was a reasonable response.

crude, but very true! I've been subscribing to this theory for a long time now. A lot of people don't seem to grasp this fact - that the land was stolen.

Be moderate is not the solution to every problem. I wonder if the Zionist have arrived in Ireland in 1945 instead of Palestine and kick most Irish across the Shannon to live in Connaught and took all the best land for them selves would we all think at conflict resolution and the right of the sate of Israel to exist in the island of Ireland was a reasonable response.

when Israelis came to the Middle east it wasn't Palestinian land, it was British . When the british left, it was the UN that recognised both Israel, and Palestine areas. The reason Israel occupies Palestinian land (as was allocated by the UN), came from the War that palestine initiated, along with its other Arab allies. Israel, was not born of land grabbing, the current Crisis has just escilated towards that.

Britain colonised Ireland. they took the land. Irish people fought against it for years, and the only true freedom for Ireland, came about from peaceful negotiation, not by continous nonsence warfare. Sure the gun was used as a tool, but it was politics that brought about the State we live in.

What is your answer to this, since you think moderation is so bad? Since all i can see is that you want the violence to continue. And please don't say for Israel to completely leave Palestine immediately. That won't solve anything, and surely you're not naive enough to believe that....

crude, but very true! I've been subscribing to this theory for a long time now. A lot of people don't seem to grasp this fact - that the land was stolen

Not True. get your facts straight. Sure if you're going to look back 1000 years, you can say that Palestinian ancestors had a right to land, But there were jews in that area also. Along with hundreds of other destroyed civilisations.Ancient palestinians (not that they were palestinians then) have no bearing in this. Prior to the British leaving, it was British land. Just as Wales is british areas, or how areas in europe are controlled by Russia since WW2.

Check your stats, and forget the nonsence that palestinians are complete victims. They're victims of israel's current policies & reactions, but then, Israel is a victim of palestinian groups.

Originally posted by klaz
when Israelis came to the Middle east it wasn't Palestinian land, it was British . When the british left, it was the UN that recognised both Israel, and Palestine areas. The reason Israel occupies Palestinian land (as was allocated by the UN), came from the War that palestine initiated, along with its other Arab allies. Israel, was not born of land grabbing, the current Crisis has just escilated towards that.

Britain colonised Ireland. they took the land. Irish people fought against it for years, and the only true freedom for Ireland, came about from peaceful negotiation, not by continous nonsence warfare. Sure the gun was used as a tool, but it was politics that brought about the State we live in.

What is your answer to this, since you think moderation is so bad? Since all i can see is that you want the violence to continue. And please don't say for Israel to completely leave Palestine immediately. That won't solve anything, and surely you're not naive enough to believe that....

Yes but what brought about these negotiations? Surely you can't believe that if Ireland was totally peaceful for all those years we would be living in a republic now...

Not True. get your facts straight. Sure if you're going to look back 1000 years, you can say that Palestinian ancestors had a right to land, But there were jews in that area also. Along with hundreds of other destroyed civilisations.Ancient palestinians (not that they were palestinians then) have no bearing in this. Prior to the British leaving, it was British land. Just as Wales is british areas, or how areas in europe are controlled by Russia since WW2.

Check your stats, and forget the nonsence that palestinians are complete victims. They're victims of israel's current policies & reactions, but then, Israel is a victim of palestinian groups.

Ireland was british land too, you know. You might say that Iraq is American land right now, does that mean you'd support a mass plantation of Americans in Iraq as a method of cleansing the country of all it's bad elements?

Yes but what brought about these negotiations? Surely you can't believe that if Ireland was totally peaceful for all those years we would be living in a republic now...

read what i said. Violence was used, but as a tool. Politics was what achieved the peace. If violence had continued, the Irish forces would have been wiped off the face of Ireland, due to lack of equipment/ammo. It was diplomacy that achieved peace. Diplomacy/politics is the only way to resolve the Palestinian conflict.

Ireland was british land too, you know. You might say that Iraq is American land right now, does that mean you'd support a mass plantation of Americans in Iraq as a method of cleansing the country of all it's bad elements?

Yes, Ireland was British land, but Britain left. Palestine & Israel came about because of UN intervention. Without the UN, neither would exist today.

As for Iraq, i wouldn't support that, because the US have never said that they're there to stay. Also the Coalition controls Iraq, not just the US.

But Utility, you're ignoring the Fact the land where Israel lies was not stolen. As for Palestine itself, its occupied. The only stolen land is what Israel has been doing with their colonising attempts. Thats wrong, agreed, but don't expand it beyond what it is. A lesser problem of the whole.

The problem is that a resolution is needed, and Its unlikely to happen while both sides are blowing away at each other.

Originally posted by klaz
Also the Coalition controls Iraq, not just the US.

HA! Excuse me while I die of laughter...