Don't throw stones at bigger people than you they might be "Israeli"


How simple: you win land in war, it's yours. End of story. But in truth it's nowhere near as simple as that. This is not solely a question of land, it's about the rights of a people. There are 2.4 million people living in those lands in the West Bank who while being effectively controlled by and subject to the state of Israel have no citizenship or voting rights within that state. That has been the position since the 1967 war. There are 1.5 million people living in Gaza which is also subject to air, sea and land border control by Israel. It is effectively a prison, not a state. Israel can choke it of supplies at any time. They too are citizens of nowhere, the leftovers that Israel could never incorporate into itself without changing the fundamental nature of the state itself. As long as this unjust situation persists there will be resentment, bitterness and ultimately conflict.

The solution of course would be either the creation of a Palestinian state or the extension of full citizenship of Israel to all Palestinians in the territories captured in 67. The present arrangement is neither one thing nor the other and has been allowed to fester and degenerate into the most brutal and intractable of conflicts. Remember around 20% of Israel's population (inside its pre-1967 frontiers) is Palestinian Arab. They have full citizenship and the right to vote in elections. While relations between Arabs and Jews are not perfect, nothing remotely resembling the Intifada has occurred within this community nor growing Islamisation and radicalisation by the likes of Hamas. Hamas is a product of years of Israeli occupation without any resolution to the status of the Palestinians living there. Indeed, in the early years the Israeli authorities turned a blind eye to the growth of the movement if not encouraged its development as they saw it as a way to divide Palestinian society and weaken the then dominant PLO. However, it grew beyond their control and turned into the monster it is today, making its terrible power to influence events all too clear with a wave of suicide bombings beginning in the mid-90s after the signing of the Oslo accords.

Israel chopped off the head of one dragon (Arafat and the PLO) only for another more vicious and uncontrollable to appear in the shape of Hamas. Same can be said of Hezbollah. They did not exist in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon to dislodge the PLO. Hezbollah was born as a reaction to the Israeli presence in Shia areas (and also to the export of the ideas of the Iranian revolution of 1979). It goes on and on, the mishandling of one conflict mutates into something else and peace is further away then ever
 
The West Bank should never have been part of Jordan; it took it by force from the British/UN Mandated territory. Israel took it only after Jordan had invaded Israel and held it because of its important geographical qualities (high ground that can be used to fire shells into half of Israel and the fact that the Jordan River created a barrier to Jordanian invasion again).
It should also be remembered that Jordan has consistently refused to allow Palestinians from the West Bank to immigrate to Jordan (indeed during conflicts the Arab league has acted as one to keep their borders closed).

Gaza was held for the same geographical reasons.

The problem was created by the Arabs and the Arab league indeed when the Palestinian National Council was established in 1948 the Jordanian and Iraqi forces refused to allow delegates from areas they controlled to attend because it was seen by them as an anti-Hashemite and an Egyptian and Saudi puppet whereas they dominated the Higher Arab Institute. The Higher Arab Institute was set up by the Arab League with no Palestinian representatives even though they had their own Higher Arab Committee which was set up in 1936 but outlawed by the British soon after (sorry, I can’t remember when).

I offer the above detail simply to show that the Palestinian people have been sold out and deliberately undermined (to say the least) by the Arab world in an attempt to throw mud at Israel by keeping an open sore on their doorstep. Every time Israel engages and tries to sort things out at least one Arab country acts to undermine its efforts. It used to be Jordan and Egypt, now its Syria and Iran (with plenty of Saudi money in the mix at every turn).

The bottom line is that a resolution is in the interests of Israel but is opposed by the leadership of most of the Arab world.
 

I accept your central point that the Palestinian people have been sold out and undermined by the Arab world in the past (the most obvious being the rejection of the 1947 UN Partition plan which was a fair compromise for everybody). However I believe your analysis is not a true reflection of the position as it exists today.

Firstly, I would not include Iran as part of the Arab world for obvious reasons but also because it is a Shia state as well. Iran is distrusted and indeed despised by most of the Sunni Arab world (with the notable exception of Syria). The Arab states feel Iran has "hijacked their issue" if you like, that they are messing in the affairs of the Sunni Arab world to further their own influence and power in the region. Secondly, I would not accept that the Arab world today is bent on the destruction of Israel. Yes, they don't like its presence in the region, if it disappeared tomorrow they would not shed a tear but they are realistic about it. Israel is not going away and most accept they must normalise relations with it.

Look at recent history. Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, Jordan in 1994 (in which they abandoned any claim to the West Bank). Syria holds out because it has not been offered the same land deal as Egypt (the return of all the Golan Heights just as Egypt received all the Sinai). There are complicating factors in the case of the Golan mainly centring on access to fresh water at Lake Tiberias (Sea of Galilee) and I understand it is not a simple issue to resolve but while it remains unresolved Syria will continue to adopt a hostile stance. As such it will see Hezbollah and Hamas as leverage it can use against Israel to get what it wants. In 2002 Saudi Arabia and the Arab League proposed a peace plan that would offer Israel fully normalised relations with the Arab world if it withdrew to its pre-1967 borders. This is a major step forward and shows that if agreement on a Palestinian state can be found plus a resolution of the Golan Heights issue then wider peace and long-term stability should be possible.

The greatest problem in dealing with all of this is the regime in Iran. It is most unfortunate that just when the Arab world was waking up to the fact it had to accept Israel's existence the Islamic revolution occurred in Iran and it then decided to get involved in the dispute. Nevertheless it should not in itself stop progress on a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Lastly, I would say if people are critical of Israel and its actions over the years, they have good reason to be. For me the key issue is the relentless expansion of settlements across the West Bank since 1967. This has turned a difficult problem into a near impossible one. The whole idea has been to colonise and control the territory without any thought for how that affects the existing Palestinian population or how it impacts future possibilities for a negotiated agreement. I suggest anyone interested in this issue to check out to learn more about how this affects Palestinian life. The case of in particular is a good illustration of how the presence of settlements can inflict misery on the Palestinian population.
 
I accept most of what you say but the pre-67 border was indefensible. Israel needs a de-militarised zone on the West bank of the Jordan and control of the Golan Heights.
Syria needs Israeli support to regain control in Lebanon. Israel may well support them in this as it will undermine Hammas.
I suspect that most of the Palestinian population in Gaza would leave if the Egyptians let them in but they don't want tens of thousands of radicalised youth’s destabilising their country. The same goes for the Jordanians and anyone who wants to leave the West bank.

I do not support the settlers in the West Bank but whatever happens it will never be an economically viable state so it will rely on the largess of Israel, Jordan or Syria. If I was them I'd go for the Jews.

I don't think anyone doesn't accept that the plight of the Palestinian people is grave but they chose a terrorist group to lead them and they choose to allow their leaders to fire rockets into the only country that has ever done anything for them.

The bottom line is that as long as the Suez Canal is secure America won't budge, Egypt is part of the Western sphere of influence, Jordan has no stomach or inclination to step in, Syria is far too weak, Iran has its own internal problems and the Wahhabi’s in Saudi rely on the US to stay in power. The only country that has any real interest in sorting things out is Israel.
 


I fully agree with the line "The only country that has any real interest in sorting things out is Israel.".

Israel needs a reliable and stable Palestine state so that they are having secure borders and can continue using the labour resources that are outside their borders. The israeli economy heavily relies on workers coming in from the plestinian controlled areas. So if the borders are closed noboy is coming to work.

Egypt could open it's borders with Gaza and let civilians out but they don't do that because they fear terrorists come with them and continue to attack Israel from Egypt soil. So instead they once again try to negociate a period of "peace".

I actualy feel sorry for the terrorist supporters down at the GOP standing there in the freezing cold today demonstrating the "agressor" while their bedfellows are continue to send rockets into kinder gardens.

Let's face it the only solution is to get ride of Hamas, retract out of the west bank, accept a palestinian state and have some sort of normal relations. But as long as terrorists are firing rockets into Israel and as the cowards they are hide behind civilians there is very little hope of that.
 
Purple said:
I accept most of what you say but the pre-67 border was indefensible. Israel needs a de-militarised zone on the West bank of the Jordan and control of the Golan Heights.
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Well for an indefensible border, the IDF did a pretty good job of defending it at the time

Seriously though, I understand what you're saying but I think the solution is a declaration that Israel is not opposed to transferring full control of the Jordan valley to a future Palestinian state but only when it no longer feels threatened by its neighbours. This would obviously require a comprehensive peace deal that would finally deal with outstanding issues with Syria and Lebanon as well as full normalisation of relations with all other Arab states in the region. No settlement without agreement with a Palestinian state should occur in that zone in the interim. I don't know how long that period could last, it could be 10, 20 years or more but full sovereignty would depend on a total transformation in the nature of relations in the region which I believe would be possible in the years following a comprehensive peace deal. The key thing is that Israel would do nothing to prejudice the final borders of a Palestinian state while it maintained a presence in that zone for security purposes only.

Israel has in the past been prepared to hand back the Golan Heights (under Ehud Barak's government in 2000). The stumbling block was not so much the heights themselves but control over Lake Tiberias. Israel wished to retain a strip of land along the east bank of the lake. Syria was not prepared to accept this.


I must say I don't like the casual acceptance that migration of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank to Jordan is a desirable outcome. You are talking about people who have lived for generations there, who consider themselves Palestinian and do not feel they can just fit in as part of any other Arab nation. I don't see why they should have to leave just because those in the settler movement want to set up new towns on their land. I also know that there was some migration of Arabs to the West Bank between 1948 and 1967 but the majority of the population lived there long before that.

I would ask only one thing of Israel: to stop the continuing settlement activity in the West Bank and to desist from Ariel Sharon's idea of "creating facts on the ground". The settlements causing the most friction and trouble such as Hebron should be dismantled. It makes no sense to plant the most extreme hardline elements of Israeli society in the middle of Palestinian populations with the huge security presence and disruption to Palestinian life it necessarily entails. It is a guaranteed recipe to breed resentment and bitterness. And in that environment extremist groups thrive.
 

I agree with all of that. My point about Jordan closing its border was simply that they didn't want the problem to go away and now they don't want the extremists.

On the topic of the current air strikes I think it is remarkable that they have killed so few civilians. Pro-Israeli sources say a few dozen, the UN people on the ground in Palestine (who can be taken to be pro Palestinian) says around 50. The pin-point accuracy of the attacks, considering the volume of ordinance fires (up to 100 tonnes on the first night), is beyond anything even the US could achieve and is decades ahead of what Russia managed recently in Georgia.
 
Predictably this thread has become a debate on the whole ME situation. The OP suggests a less ambitious discussion point. What did Hamas expect and was the Israeli reaction disproportionate?

On the latter question we do have a body count score of 400 to 4 which looks a bit one sided but OTOH we have 25% innocent casualties v 100% civilians killed by Hamas. We also can assume that Hamas would have been delighted with a better hit rate and maybe thousands of Israelis dead.

If you are a "neutral" what is the proportional retalation?
 
For those that want to incredibly want to doubt the purpose of the Israeli matter of self defence and search to protect their own people, it might be prudent to have a look at www.bicom.org.uk.

Then your opinion might be changed and in case anyone at the Gov.Dept knows anyone, they might pass the link to the Minister who might have a thoughtful and respectful remark on the matter, prior to him making comments on something he knows little about.
 
Slash said:
Criticising Israel for attacking Gaza is not anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.
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We wouldn't want fact or accuracy to get in the way of a good "argument"
 

I seem to recall a poster by the name of harchibald who was giving a poster by the name of Television a hard time due to spelling errors.

retaliation is the proper spelling.

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I'm a simple man, the politics of the middle east are hard for anybody to understand.

What I know is the Palestinian people had the land the worked on for generations bought out from under them.

The people who sold that land to the Israeli people were Arabs.

The Palestinian people have been betrayed by everybody.

Regarding numbers of dead you can put it down to numbers or statistics but what I see is not a single tragedy but 404 tragedies, and that's just the ones killed.

There are also ones injured or maimed.

My view on the whole score issue is every person killed by either side is someones father, mother, sister, brother son, daughter or friend.

I hate war and all that goes with it I just don't see that Israel has a choice but to do what it has to do.
 
Slash said:
Criticising Israel for attacking Gaza is not anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.
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Have you studied the make up and composition of Israel ?
 
S.L.F said:
I seem to recall a poster by the name of harchibald who was giving a poster by the name of Television a hard time due to spelling errors.

retaliation is the proper spelling.
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That looks to me like a typo. There's a difference between the odd typo and multiple spelling mistakes across several posts.

S.L.F said:
I hate war and all that goes with it I just don't see that Israel has a choice but to do what it has to do.
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At this immediate juncture, Israel may very well have little choice but to respond in some fashion to counter rocket attacks but if they have no choice it is because of bad decisions in the past that have left them with no choice. Israel has been in control of the West Bank and Gaza for over 40 years yet felt they could somehow leave the status of the Palestinians unresolved while continuing settlement activity where they liked. It was only after the first Palestinian Intifada beginning in 1987 that they were forced to seriously confront the issue. If Palestinians remained compliant, did just what they were told, accepted being citizens of nowhere with no democratic voice in the state that governed them then it seems Israel would have been quite happy to continue with the status quo and never do anything about it.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and dismantled the settlements there it was part of Ariel Sharon's plan for a unilateral "resolution" to the Palestinian issue. This was a ridiculous concept and many predicted it would not work. Pulling out of Gaza was pointless unless you also resolved the final status of East Jerusalem and the West Bank at the same time. But the idea was that you could seal off Gaza and forget about it. The rocket attacks and attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers are in a sense Hamas saying: "We're still here, you can't just seal us off and think this fight is over". These attacks are indiscriminate and clearly intolerable from an Israeli perspective but they are perhaps not unexpected.

Finally, as horrible as Hamas is, as despicable as their acts, they are not just some tiny band of Islamic extremists with limited support. They are a broad political movement, a movement that gained a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council in free and fair elections held in 2006. This outcome had a lot to do with past incompetence and corruption among Fatah leaders plus a long history of Hamas providing welfare and social services to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. You can't just bomb an organisation like that out of existence. At some stage there has to be talks, as distasteful as that idea is.

Hamas does not recognise the right of the state of Israel to exist. That appears to be an insurmountable problem. However it is prepared to countenance a "long term truce" if Israel withdraws to its pre-1967 borders. Now clearly this would be an idiotic final agreement for Israel to sign up to. Why would anyone hand over territory and make concessions to an enemy whose stated aim was to attack again in the future greatly emboldened and strengthened from such a deal? However it does show some willingness to be flexible and pragmatic on the part of Hamas, however small. I feel here Hamas is a prisoner to its own ideology and history and that it can't initiate negotiations on better initial terms than this without alienating many in the movement. It is certainly not going to change its attitude to Israel's right to exist in advance of talks because others demand it to, be that Israel itself, the US or European states. This would be interpreted as bowing down before the "enemy" when the centrepiece of its ideology is "resistance". It might perhaps be compared to demanding the IRA in 1994 immediately say the war is over and that it recognised the legitimacy of the 6 county state. Hard to imagine things getting anywhere from that starting point given the Republican movement's mindset.

Again, I've dragged the discussion off topic somewhat and gone on too long, but I feel you can't discuss the present violence in isolation from the wider context and recent history of the conflict. There are underlying reasons why the present events are taking place and one cannot simply ignore a discussion of them.
 
Israel took over in '67 so they weren't going to do much for the first few years. They engaged publicly in '87... So it was a 10-15 year period where they did nothing publicly, not 40 years. BTW, through the 70's and early 80's the other players in the area weren't going to do much to help.

I agree that Israel could have done more but it is unfair to single them out. Jordan created the West Bank and if Egypt hadn't started a war Gaza wouldn't exist.
The here and now of the last 15-20 years is that Israel has (most of the time) tried to sort out the Palestinian issue but the Palestinian leadership has done all it could to undermine their own people. Maybe in the past this was because they were making so much money out of their suffering and now it is because they are fundamentalist nut-jobs.

BTW your point on corruption before Hammas is well made and is in common with the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood and their brand of fundamentalism through East Africa (Somalia in the 80's and 90's, Kenya in the 90's and today etc, etc). This followed on from the corruption and economic desolation that very flawed democracy brought to much of sub-Saharan Africa up to the mid 80's. It is interesting that socialist/Marxist rebels were fighting for secular democracies in Africa up to the mid 80's but now most rebel groups in the area have a distinctly religious identity.
Sorry for dragging the thread even more off-topic but it shows that there is a precedent for groups like Hammas to fill the vacuum left by corrupt secular leadership.
 

I don't believe my comments about Israel are unfair. Israel could have done a lot more. When they took control of the territories it became their primary responsibility how they were governed and how the people there were treated.

They had a number of choices. They could decide they wanted to incorporate the newly conquered territory into the state of Israel and annex it outright bringing their borders officially to the river Jordan. They would not do this because they would have to address the status of the Palestinians living there and extend to them the same rights of citizenship those Palestinians living inside Israel itself enjoy. This would fundamentally alter the demographic character of the state, possibly leaving Jews in a minority after a number of years. So short of forcibly expelling the Palestinian population from the territories, this option was out.

The sensible thing to do was recognise that there was a serious issue here as to what was to happen the Palestinian population in the longer term. Some forward thinking here might have indicated that the development of a Palestinian state would be in the longer term interests of Israel itself as well as the Palestinians. Israel could have shaped this state's development fostering moderate political leadership in the process, setting up a nascent Palestinian parliament and democratic structures and giving the local population a voice in what decisions were made in their lands while maintaining military control of the frontiers and key strategic points so as to bolster Israel's security from outside attack. Settlement and development of the land should have been with the consent of the local population. If settlements were linked to improvements in the local economy and the provision of jobs, facilities etc. they might find that they would not face insurmountable opposition.

Instead of that they decided to allow massive settlement to take place in the territories without the Palestinian population being asked as much as their views on it. Take a look at to see what I'm talking about. The question of settlements is not some minor side issue, it's absolutely central to the whole conflict and hardening of ordinary Palestinian opinion against Israel over the years. Many of these settlements are full of the most extreme religious fanatics you're ever likely to find anywhere and require a massive military presence to protect the local Palestinian population from attack as much as to protect the settlers themselves. Anyone with eyes in their head could see this approach was a recipe for trouble down the line. The intractable mess we see today is a direct consequence of these actions.
 

While I agree on the settler issue I don't think that Israel would have been allowed to construct a Palestinian state on the West Bank as too many Arab countries have an interest in keeping the wound open. Jordan is no longer a protagonist but Syria and Iran are, not to mention the vast sums of private Arab money than seem to be available to train and equip terrorists but seem to disappear when schools and hospitals are needed.

Israel is no angel, not by a long shot, but its actions in the West Bank (in particular) and Gaza cannot be seen in isolation.
The settler issue is a different matter; that is just plain wrong.
 
diarmuidc said:
By that logic anyone criticising Hamas must be Islamophobic as the composition of Hamas is mostly Muslim.
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Please do not insinuate that any of my comments are discriminatory. My posts are based on the well published facts.
 
mercman said:
Please do not insinuate that any of my comments are discriminatory. My posts are based on the well published facts.
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You called our Minister of Foreign Affairs a Anti-Semetic muppet because he criticised Israel. People are simply pointing out that criticising a Country's policies whatever it's demographic makeup is not Anti-Semetic. By the way I would remove your comment about Micheal Martin on the first page if I was you. I have seen solicitors letters sent out for less.
 
Sunny, thank you for the comments which are noted. I am unable to remove my comments so therefore, I express my apologies. Nothing personal intended.
The site bicom.org.uk is an independent site that details the matters.
 
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