Gaza

[sleigh]

I have to say that I'm not a supporter of either Israel or Palestine. I am disappointed with the belligerent attitudes of both of them, and I despair of ever finding a solution there. Yes, Israel needs to defend itself, but the county's traditional response of bombing the crap out of neighboring countries in retaliation for terrorist activities such as suicide bombing or missile strikes seems perfectly designed to escalate tension and make reconciliation nearly impossible. 'Defense" doesn't necessarily need to be in the form of a military strike.

And the Palestinian factions are just as intractable and aggressive in return. As long as both sides remain stubbornly and intractably polar in their stances, this horrible situation is doomed to continue.

Israel/Palestine will be yet another turd sitting on Obama's plate when he takes office, joining the economic meltdown, the twin wars in iraq and Afghanistan, nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea, the looming presence of China, and the India/Pakistan conflict, which also has been bubbling uncomfortably. I don't envy the man his task.

And for the tattered King George who is abdicating his throne on January 20 and who had hoped to have a Middle East peace past as a consolation legacy for his disastrous eight years in office, well, it appears that now there not only won't be a peace agreement, but an open, festering wound. Yet Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice are insisting that history will judge that the Bush presidency was a resounding success. "I think generations pretty soon are going to start to thank this president for what he's done," Rice said in an interview the other day.

Uh, yeah. Sure. That's gonna happen.

Meanwhile, bombs continue to fall in Gaza, and tanks gather at the border. I hope this latest conflagration ends soon, but I have little hope that it will be the last one, or the worst one.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Historical note: There is no "Palestine". If there were, it would be "Israel". The refugees in the West Bank/Gaza had many opportunities to create some sort of state, but turned down every opportunity since 1947 through refusing to continue the ceasefire two weeks ago, preferring war to peaceful coexistence.

Criticizing Israel is one thing -- it's one of the reasons I'm not a liberal -- but at least get the facts straight.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Actually, I feel there's reason to use "Palestine" in this context. The term has been used for centuries to refer to that region, including the current state of Israel, and portions of surrounding countries. Articles on the region often refer to the West Bank/Gaza refugees and those who want to create a new State of Palestine as "Palestinians."

[barondave.livejournal.com]

If so, than "Palestinians" refer to the Jewish population of the region, not the refugees who wanted to go home but weren't allowed back to Egypt/Jordan/etc.

And no, I don't trust the conservative news media to get their terminology right, especially on sound-bite driven stories like this one.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

Just wondering. If hundreds of missiles were launched into the United States each day from Canada or Mexico, what should the United States' response be?

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

They're not, and there's no sense in speculating on that. If you ask me what I think should be happening in the Middle East, I can answer. As I said above, Israel has a right to defend itself, but too often (to my mind) it seems that their response is too strong, too aggressive, and too 'shotgun,' which only exacerbates the situation.

The closest political analog to the Middle East that I can think of is Northern Ireland. There, violence always beget more violence. What worked was dialog, bargaining, and concessions and making conditions better for the people there, so that the violence of the rebels began to be opposed by their own people. I suspect that's what needs to happen in the Middle East, also -- conditions need to be made good enough for those in the area so that the people no longer support the actions of the radicals among them. Both sides need to feel safe.

How to get there? That, I don't know... but I feel that's the direction both parties need to be nudged toward. Bombs won't settle this, in my opinion.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

If the IRA had launched missiles into England, do you think England would have refrained from bombing the launching sites?

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Again, that never happened, so speculating about is rather useless. But I suspect that wouldn't have done things much differently. If the bombing sites were static, yes, they'd try to destroy them. But if they were mobile, I suspect they'd have done little different from what they did.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think they'd have surrounded them and sent troops in to them, rather than bombed them. Northern Ireland was essentially occupied territory.

And actually the peace process there was much more complicated and longer than this makes it sound.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I agree. And yes, the process was much longer and had several up and downs, but ultimately things were resolved not by violence but by dialog, negotiation, and compromise.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

I agree that this endless "eye for an eye" will never solve their problems, only exacerbate them. I don't understand why the U.S. has always unconditionally supported Israel when they continually act the aggressor. Any other country that does this tends to be invaded by us in the name of peacekeeping (Iraq, Kosovo, Afganistan, etc.).

[penmage.livejournal.com]

The only thing I can say to this is, it looks different when you're there. When I moved to Israel in 2000, things were quiet. If you had asked me then, my opinions and ideas about Israel and Palestinians and peace would have been very different from what they are now.

And then the Intifada started. It started in September 2000, and it only got worse during the two years I lived there. And it changed everything.

Yes, there are innocent Palestinians living in terrible poor conditions. Yes, it's hard when they have to cross a checkpoint and a prohibitive border to get work and food and supplies. Yes, I feel their pain.

But you know what I feel worse? I feel the pain of the Israelis who were having dinner in a restuarant and were murdered. I feel the pain of my cousin's cousin, who took his daughter out to dinner on the night before her wedding, and they were both murdered in a terrorist attack. I feel the pain of a country who is being attacked from the inside and is nearly powerless to stop it--because how do you fight people who aren't afraid to die?

In those two years, my philosphy towards all this changed radically. I'm sorry the Palestinians are suffering--but maybe if they didn't train their children to love death, and didn't preach the destruction of Israel from their newspapers and loudly proclaim that they wanted to drive Israel into the sea--maybe then I'd have a little more sympathy.

There comes a point, when your family is being murdered, where you have to say--enough is enough. We have to respond, and we can't back down and we can't be soft, because that only leads to more deaths on our side.

The thing you have to understand is, in Israel, everyone's family. It's such a small country that everyone knows everyone--or knows someone related to everything. My uncle's business partner is friends with Ehud Olmert. My cousin's friend knows a guy who knows a girl who babysat for an Israeli movie star.

But more importantly, every death feels like it's your own relative, Every pigua--every terrorist attack--happened to my cousin, my friend, my family. If they were attacking my country it would be bad enough, but they're hurting my family, and that doesn't get to continue.

The other thing you have to understand about the Israeli army is that army service is mandatory in Israel. That means that everyone has soldiers in the family. When the Israeli army is out there fighting the good fight (and yes, I do believe it's the good fight--they are protecting my family) it's not just a nameless mass in uniform carrying guns.

It's my cousin Netanel. My cousin Elad. My cousin Eitan, who has a wife and a baby girl. My cousin Yuval, who has two little girls at home. It's my friend Yonina, who loves to read the same books as me. It's people and faces and beloved memories.

These people are more important to me than the Palestinians who line the streets of their village with children and old people who the Israelis come, because they know the Israelis won't run over innocents. Palestinians who, hiding behind a front line of children, prepare bombs to hurt Israelis.

Who do I value? Is it the Israeli soldiers who risked their life in Jenin to throw water bottles to Palestinians even as they searched the city for terrorists? Or the Palestinians who teach their children to murder innocent people in a restuarant?

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree that living there could well make one view things differently. I certainly would never claim to understand the situation as a native (of either side) would. I also understand what you're saying about the 'closeness' -- it was the same for my Irish relatives who lived through the Rising (I've spoken to several of them who lived through those years about it). One side of Denise's family is Syrian, and family is very important to them, also.

But... it's the same on the other side. It's their cousins and their sisters and their uncles and aunts who are dying in the retaliatory raids. TO them, as to you, every death feels like it's their relatives, also. Until there's empathy on both sides for each other, until both sides see each other as human beings who are undergoing the same suffering, it's just going to continue. Until the Palestinians are as important as the Israelis, and the Israelis are as important as the Palestinians, nothing will change.

"We have to respond, and we can't back down and we can't be soft, because that only leads to more deaths on our side." Respond, yes, but (in my opinion) "an eye for an eye" is only going to lead to escalation of the violence, not an end to it, with more deaths on both sides.

I do understand. I know it's easy for me to say that from a distance. I wish I could say "here's a solution that will work." I don't have one. I believe, however, that it's been amply demonstrated that retaliation in kind has not worked and most likely will never work.

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

There comes a point, when your family is being murdered, where you have to say--enough is enough.

Well, yes. That's what both sides are saying.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Uh, yeah. Sure. That's gonna happen.

-->Why not? People think Reagan was a frickin' god, and he was awful, the least-qualified president, ever, until Shrub. It's fair to say that a lot of the problems we have now started with him. (Can you say "deregulation"?)

Even Nixon is starting to look pretty good, and not just by comparison. Watergate was a travesty, but he did open China, and he got us out of Vietnam. Contrast with Carter, who was a generally decent fellow, who made peace between Egypt and Israel, but failed in negotiations with the Iranian revolutionaries.

History is full of peculiarities, and the books get rewritten more often than we like to admit.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can't entirely discount the possibility (and you're correct to point that out), but I really don't expect it.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

<stipulated>
I stumbled on this thread a little late . . .
There is much to be said. Choosing certain things to say should not suggest lack of awareness of many other things to be said.
<stipulated />

One of the most horrific parts of the current clusterfuck is that the Gazans voted for exactly this. After being ripped off and screwed by Fatah for generations, they voted in Hamas, which has been acting the way Hamas has always acted and has always said it would act . . .

It seems to me that one of the fundamentals is that you can't solve half a problem. The half of the problem which ordinarily goes unspoken is that the Palestinians are the toilet of the Arab world — they've gotten nothing but shit on, by every one.
To choose one beginning point: In 1948, the United Nations decreed the creation of two new countries, side by side, Israel and Palestine. In their eagerness to “push the Zionists into the seas”, the united armies of Egypt, the Hashemite Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq swept through the territory which was supposed to have become Palestine . . . and were stopped and pushed back by the desperate Israelis.
They never left.
Jordan annexed the territory, dropping the "Trans" from its name, but no one in the world acknowledged the legitimacy of the takeover. This was re-titled The West Bank after 1967, when Israel took it.
Meanwhile, the refugees were imprisoned in squalid, inadequate camps by their fellow Arabs, since their importance as victims was much more important than their own lives.
1967+21=1988 The "First Intifada" was the generation which had grown up under the relatively benign (by local standards, c.f. Black September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September_in_Jordan)) administration of Israel. Infant mortality was on quarter what it had been under Arab administration . . .

The Palestinians' own “leadership” has either been thieving thugs (Fatah) or bloodthirsty loony thugs (Hamas). No one has ever looked out for their interests.

<disclaimer>
There are many other things to say. This is simply a gesture toward some of the things which usually do not get said.
<disclaimer />