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

[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.