Is there a thread for discussing the Israel/Palestinian conflict?

1) The Israelis are behaving appallingly
2) Ah, but the Palestinians are terrorists!
3) B-but they're not, and the policy of the Israeli govt is dishusting and the failure to secure Palestinian justice through political means feeds the extremist response!
4) Palestinians are terrorists and Israel must do whatever it must to secure itself
5) That's not true though is it? There are somethings you shouldn't do for moral reasons, hell, even strategic good sense reasons!
6) Israel cannot afford to give an inch on security. To suggest they should shows you have a desire to see Israel pushed into the sea.
7) That's not true
8) Yes it is
9) No, it's not
10)Anti-semite

Repeat on every thread, on every messageboard, in the whole wide interweb for ever and ever.

OTM though.

there's something about this particular war in a world overstuffed with them (was there ever a thread on the chadian civil war? no?) that brings out the weird in people.

So we don't discuss it because it could lead to arguments?

There are no discussions, just arguments.

ISRLY????

That said, while I tend to spend more words going against the knee-jerk anti-Israel stuff on this board, the latest Gaza incursion seems pretty indefensible.

I don't suppose it'll amount to much but I feel kinda stoopid.

Although, having said that I think that 'This is one of the worst thread title fuckups ever' is probably a tad strong.

And another of my gems:

"Do the Beach Boys get a bum wrap?"

At least ILM was amused.

I don't think anyone has ever called an ILX poster an anti-semite for criticising Israel. Go ILX!

1. A lot of the Palestinian extremists want to see Israel
totally wiped out, and all Israelis killed, exiled or
enslaved. This really is a part of what's at stake, folks.
These extremists are anti-semites. There's some Israelis
(and Americans) who consider the Arabs to be the devil's
disciples, worthy of ignominy and death. These extremists
are also anti-semites (Jews and Arabs are both semites,
dipshit).

2. The political rulers in Beirut deliberately exacerbate
the conflict, to guarantee compliance and solidify
their rule.

5. The Arab political/religious rulers also exacerbate. Sometimes
they exacerbate together. They also manually manipulate the UN with total cynicism. Exasterbation, manipulation, stimulation. It's a sick
part of the world, folks.

3. The Palestinian jihadists DO have a genuine right to fight for
their self-interests. They also have the right to not pay government workers. They also have the right to fire their weapons in the air and have chaotic gangwars in the streets of Gaza (if this is what they do sober, I'd hate to see them drunk). Then they blame this strife on the Israeli army LEAVING! So the Israeli comes BACK and look how they react. The ingratitude!

4. Unfortunately, the Palestinian liberation movement has a bad record of mistakenly killing innocent Israeli soldiers during their attacks on women and children. The Israelis have the reverse of this problem.

3. When are the Euros gonna get it? To the most powerful Americans
(I'm talking about not just politicians, but HUGE voting
constituencies) Israel is the Kingdom of God. The Israelis are a
chosen people who must be supported in all things. Christ is
returning soon, and since he'll be landing in Jerusalem, it's
important to keep the Holy City out of heathen hands. When are
the Brits and the Euros gonna realize that these beliefs aren't
held by just a few fringe kooks. These are mainstream beliefs in
the US, and they lie at the heart of all our foreign policies.

..........

In case you didn't get that, Arabs and Israelis are both
Semitic. Your welcome, dipshit.

I don't get the relevance of this.

this belief is held by a few fringe kooks.

You'd be shocked. Tens of millions of Americans bought "Left Behind" and the following books, and buy into that shit big time. Naturally, most of these people vote.

the central ongoing tragedy is that it seems pretty clear that majorities of both israelis and palestinians want more or less the same things -- stability, security, economic opportunity -- and are willing to make more or less the same deals to get them. but internal politics on both sides have made those deals all but impossible. (i'm not making some tired "equivalency" argument, so much as just saying that it doesn't really matter at this point who has the moral high ground, because the "moral high ground" is degraded that it's hardly worth fighting for.)

anyway, the inabililty to resolve this relatively conflict on a small piece of land involving a small number of people is extremely disheartening. is what i think.

(which isn't intended to downplay the complexities of the situation, just that the solutions -- or at least the beginnings of the solutions -- seem both identifiable and attainable.)

I'm sorry, I find this preposterous. Tens of millions? The US population is, what, 300,000,000? If 30,000,000 people bought Left Behind that would be a tenth of the US population. No book is that popular.

What I do find is that tens of millions of copies of these books have been sold. There are 12 books in the series; this Newsweek story from around the time of the 12th book's release cites total sales of 62 million. Averaged out, that's five million people reading the whole series front to back - although I think it's fair to assume that it could be more like six or or seven million read the first book and far fewer kept going in the series. That's still a lot of people.... but the last Harry Potter book had a US first printing of around eleven million, so if we're going to determine what constitutes "mainstream belief in the USA" based on what kind of books people are really excited about, Bush is motivated not by apocalyptic Christianity but by an Unbreakable Vow he made compelling him to root the Death Eaters out of their Gaza lairs.

I guarantee you the mainstream American opinion is something far blander (though no less wrong), in the general shape of "Those dang people have been fighting each other for thousands of years, they're never gonna get it sorted out!" Skewed towards the Israeli side, but not exactly on an obsessive crusade to reclaim the Holy Land in preparation for Jesus's next visit.

During the 1920s, 100,000 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine, and 6,000 non-Jewish immigrants did so as well. Jewish immigration was controlled by the Histadrut, which selected between applicants on the grounds of their political creed. Land purchased by Jewish agencies was leased on the conditions that it be worked only by Jewish labour and that the lease should not be held by non-Jews.

Initially, Jewish immigration to Palestine met little opposition from the Palestinian Arabs. However, as anti-Semitism grew in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish immigration (mostly from Europe) to Palestine began to increase markedly, creating much Arab resentment."
--

Throughout Europe, Jewish resentment grew because they were believed to have acted as traitors to Germany, which was about the only place that welcomed the Jews and treated them decently prior to this. After WWI, suspicion arose that certain powerful Jews had drawn the Americans into the war with the understanding that British they would give them Israel for themselves. The Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I, for its economic problems and for the spread of Communist parties throughout Europe. They believed the Jews brought America into the war as England's ally, who was previously considering peace with Germany on a status quo ante basis in 1916. Suddenly, America came in out of the blue, the Germans were defeated and the Jews got this little slice of land from a document called Balfour Declaration. From Wikipedia: "Balfour Declaration was a letter dated November 2, 1917 from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, to Lord Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation, a private Zionist organization. The letter stated the position, agreed at a British Cabinet meeting on October 31, 1917, that the British government supported Zionist plans for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine, with the condition that nothing should be done which might prejudice the rights of existing communities there." The British had about as much right to give Israel to the Jews as America would have of giving Australia to Islam and so, it is not hard to understand why there would be an antisemitic feeling, particularly in Germany, when this document was drawn up that depended upon the Germans being defeated by England. The Germans felt betrayed and Jews were no longer as welcome as they were at one time. So now, a situation has been created that is hard to fix. It does not seem that antisemitism is going away anytime soon and the Jewish homeland is a warzone.

What really surprised me was this pie chart:
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html
http://www.adherents.com/images/rel_pie.gif

Is this really accurate? .22% of the World's population is of the Jewish faith compared to 21% who practice Islam? Less than 1% vs. 1/5th of the total world population? If we're going by democracy standards, shouldn't this little strip of land go to Islam?

I think the numbers are right, although they're irrelevant to the debate at hand, which has nothing to do with the popularity of religions. (After all, "Islam" isn't objecting to "Judaism" occupying the territories, it's the Palestinian and Israeli governments, and to various extents their respective nations.)

Not really sure where you got the idea to even think about things that way though, and you're mostly wrong about "the whole thing" centering around a religious interpretation.

that sounds kind of fucked.

that's what you seemed to say.

-- Machibuse '80 (jo...), July 18th, 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Arab

If this might seem like nitpicking, I'd argue that they're defacto 1.5 class citizens. They enjoy citizenship, vote, etc. but live a somewhat segregated life and are not treated completely equally. But I agree that any law or de facto practice infringing on their rights is indefensible.

I think the main problem is that there's all this increasing fear over the "demographic problem" (a term that gives me the creeps) - meaning that Israeli Arabs have a significantly higher birthrate than Jews, and could constitute a majority in a few decades if things continue. This is one of the reasons Israel is so bout it bout it when it comes to Jews immigrating (they'd like to be able to maintain a Jewish majority without resorting to other discriminatory policies).

This makes me appreciate the U.S., where we have no ostensible interest in maintaining any particular demographic balance and instead rely on the fact that as people come here they will assimilate American values in some sense or other.

SO LIKE NOT AS BAD AS SHANTYTOWNS IN SOUTH AFRICA!!! GREAT YAY!!!!

Arab Israelis have achieved success in certain industries, have access to education and healthcare (I don't know if it is fully on par with other Israelis yet but it's been improving dramatically), have some celebrities and visible spokespeople in the press, and have some representation in government, but it's clear that they don't have full standing in society.

My fiance's father thinks relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs have gotten worse recently (I'm not sure when he means they were better - in the early 90s maybe?) - he said back then he'd go to restaurants in Arab towns and have friendly conversations with people and that you'd be more likely to have some kind of business interaction or other with Arabs (there were many successful Arabs in the construction business for a time, so a Jew might at least know an Arab contractor or something like that). Not that this constitues full societal equality, just that things have in some ways gotten worse.

Hmm. Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by "cry me a fucking river?"

Can I call you on one thing - representation in government? Has there ever been an Israeli Arab/Palestinian Israeli minister in an Israeli government?

That is a real question rather than a rhetorical one.

Olmert is claiming that Iran was behind the kidnappings to distract the G-8 from the ongoing issue of the Iranian nuclear program. Annan and others have called for a peace-keeping force in a buffer zone, but this is looking increasingly unlikely for several reasons: Who will supply the troops and can they at all really hope to be effective? The Israelis don't think so. Israel would really like to bloody Hezbollah's nose to keep them from becoming a rallying point and hero to anti-Israelis all around them. Bush, has implied that pressure needs to applied to Syria and has apparently decided to back the Israelis not only for the sake of the important U.S. pro-Israel lobby, but because to fail to confront a semi-proxy of Syria, the neo-cons' bugbear of several seasons ago, and of Iran, a perennial bête noir of Americans, and to confront Hezbollah itself, one of the most lethal terrorist organizations to Americans (Nasrallah's protests of having no beef with the U.S, notwithstanding) could undermine the Republicans claim to be better and tougher on terrorism and foreign affairs.

What's really sad is that just 4 months after a much touted visit by PM Siniora (incidentally a Sunni) where Bush lauded the possibilities of a democratic Lebanon, the place is going to hell in a handbasket. The depth of sympathy for Hezbollah, meanwhile, is underlined when the Lebanese president, a Maronite, says, ""For us Lebanese, and I can tell you the majority of Lebanese, Hezbollah is a national resistance movement. If it wasn't for them, we couldn't have liberated our land. And because of that, we have big esteem for the Hezbollah movement." By 'liberated our land', of course, he means kicking out the Israelis, not the Syrians.

The Bush administration's long standing do-nothing policy in the region, dating back to before 9/11, and only half-heartedly rethought with the 'road map' as a sop to Blair, has left a vaccuum of sorts, especially in terms of diplomacy in the region that will take some time to fix. Meanwhile, poor Lebanon is in for yet more chaos and bloodshed.

I didn't say it was oppressed. I said that its neighbors are all aligned in its desire to see Israel liquidated and replaced with an Arab state of Palestine. I also said that Hamas and Ahmadinejad basically wish to finish the Nazis' work. Can you honestly dispute any of that?

declaring a regime to be illegitimate isn't the same thing as wanting to annihilate the people under that regime - yet people continue to believe that's what ahmadinejad and hamas want. it's pretty amazing. i'm not defending either of them, but try being intellectually honest.

Imam said Saddam must go and he said he would grow weaker than anyone could imagine. Now you see the man who spoke with such arrogance ten years ago that one would have thought he was immortal, is being tried in his own country in handcuffs and shackles by those who he believed supported him and with whose backing he committed his crimes. Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. ... Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world.

again, not defending, but - there you have it.

starke - YSI?

i do know about the hamas charter and that passage about killing jews is execreble and totally insupportable.

fuckin A, whatever

srsly dudes. you guys have got to be kidding.

(as far as hezbollah and hamas go, they are cynical fucks who play power politics directly from the arafat playbook at the expense of their own constituencies and they should go fuck themselves. their constituencies need the institutions of democracy - not just a "vote", but a vibrant press, a transparent legal system, public welfare and health care, a stable school system, and their own security forces - in order to grow something better, and israel and the US had better come up a better plan than this garbage)

xpost: gbx, i am actually not kidding. i have this weird thing of like, not ascribing genocidal intentions to people until they've actually articulated them.

-- Tracey Hand (tracerhan...), July 18th, 2006.

FWIW, I pretty much agree.

xpost haha OK got me

At the same time, I don't believe that most Israelis really want to hold on to the territories forever. Why would they? What's to gain? What they have often failed to do, and what the Palestinians have often failed to do, however, is to negotiate in good faith, to give serious enough consideration to the other side's concerns, to strive for the most mutually agreeable arrangement possible. Two-state solution is fine in theory but no workable, realistic arrangement (if there even is one) is agreeable to either party.

So here's a weakness in Rumslfeld's weltanshauung with regard to the military. When you go in light to two countries bordering Iran (a country, which like Germany, has a history of having to look in at least two directions, security-wise), how do you expect the Iranians not to have a wee freakout? I am not condoning Ahmadinejad, who's a dangerous lunatic but wily, but the whole nuclear program coupled with the Hezbollah diversion, is quite clever but frightening. However, if we'd stuck to containment w/Sadaam and committed our troops, alliances, diplomacy, and, dare I say it, 'nation building' resources to pacifying and rebuilding Afghanistan, whether we succeeded or not, we would not only have had an easier time of convincing the Muslim world that we're not just vengeful, power-hungry nation of Zionist stooges with an oil addiction but that we meant the other victim of Al-Qaida, Afghanistan, well. Even the mullahs thought the Taliban were barbaric and as uneasy as they might well have been, Iran was not particularly opposed to our presence there. A stronger American and NATO presence in Afghanistan would also serve to restrain the ghouls at ISI, not only with regard to Afghanistan but conceivably also with regard to Kashmir.

Instead, we got Rummy's modern version of 'gunboat diplomacy' style military tactics mismatched with major regional regime-change style foreign policy. The special-ops, James Bond shit that he loves might have been really useful in say, 1980, against the hostage takers, but, in a collary to what the conservatives kept saying during the 90’s, if airpower ain’t enough to win a war, nor is covering the ground with a light sprinkling of badasses. At the same time we’re finally beginning to see the full extent of the ramifications of the combination of pollyannish myopia, historical ignorance, and knee-jerk American exceptionalism that informs our foreign policy and it’s not only large and rotten but foreseeable.

Also, we really need to suss out what our military strategy/approach is. Rumsfeld probably felt, like many conservatives once adverse to nation-building, that we needed a small, highly trained, rapidly deployable military for all sorts of little post-Cold-War contretemps but instead, we're heading back to 19th century European balance of power politics writ large. The U.S. isn't quite the megapower we thought we were fifteen years ago. Russia is still a player, though distracted by plenty of its own problems. China will be a bigger player, not only due to size but proportionally increasing economic weight. India (for similar reasons to China as well), Pakistan and Israel all have to be taken into consideration due to their nuclear capabilities. The U.K. and France have essentially divergent attitudes and Europe seems settled in for continuing inaction, shackled by deep-seated pacifism, hesitant due to post-colonial guilt, and no longer having much of a stomach for the kinds of conflicts that made the 20th century so memorably destructive to them. Whether you approve or despair, the U.N. is no longer getting much done (a singular crime on the part of the Republicans, imho) and serves to distract, almost, from the kinds of ad hoc congresses that they used to have, like Potsdam, or Berlin in the 1880's or Vienna after Napoleon's downfall, etc...

I predict more proxy wars - they were remarkably successful for 20th century communists - more guerilla and small scale conflicts, but also the possibility of a major regional upheaval. Afghanistan could easily backslide, much of central Asia and huge swathes of Africa could go haywire. Population growth, especially in developing areas, means increasing competition for limited resources, especially water, though the transition away from oil is bound to be fraught with lots of drama as well, and I have no idea what the military thinks about all this and whether it's prepared to say it to the government. Apart from avoiding military dictatorship (a notorious weakness for republics) the principle of keeping the military under civilian control is important to make sure that they both don't cross over into the other's area of expertise and this military has taken (often, alas, due to its own cowardice) such a shellacking from this administration that I fear it's going to be sullen and resentful for awhile.