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Israel is acting pretty foul again
deadonthestreet
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So, if you didn't know, for the past week or so, Israel has been blockading Gaza.
That means they haven't been letting anyone or anything in or out. This, of course, includes things like food and and fuel. This means that their one power plant was not functional last night. Now that may not seem too bad at first, until you realize that you need electricity or fuel to do thinks like cook food, unless you are lucky enough to be set up with a wood burning stove and wood to burn in it. Most people are not.
Israel has, due to international pressure, eased the blockade a bit. However, they are still making life tougher than need be for many citizens of Gaza.
Israel's blockade is in response to a series of rocket attacks coming out of Gaza. The problem with using a blockade as a retaliatory tactic, however, is that they are starving many people who had nothing to do with the attacks. In fact, the only thing that the blockade has resulted in is pissing off the people of Gaza even more, and escalating the violence.
So, in this thread, we discuss why Israel continues to poke the Palestinians with a stick, prompting the Palestinians to throw rocks back at Israel, prompting Israel to kick Palestine's teeth in. As you can tell, my suggestion is for Israel to take the high road, and stop willfully pissing off the Palestinians, which may over time allow a peaceful resolution to the situation.
*Note: Egypt is not blameless in this situation, but that is not the focus of this thread.
That means they haven't been letting anyone or anything in or out. This, of course, includes things like food and and fuel. This means that their one power plant was not functional last night. Now that may not seem too bad at first, until you realize that you need electricity or fuel to do thinks like cook food, unless you are lucky enough to be set up with a wood burning stove and wood to burn in it. Most people are not.
Israel has, due to international pressure, eased the blockade a bit. However, they are still making life tougher than need be for many citizens of Gaza.
Israel's blockade is in response to a series of rocket attacks coming out of Gaza. The problem with using a blockade as a retaliatory tactic, however, is that they are starving many people who had nothing to do with the attacks. In fact, the only thing that the blockade has resulted in is pissing off the people of Gaza even more, and escalating the violence.
So, in this thread, we discuss why Israel continues to poke the Palestinians with a stick, prompting the Palestinians to throw rocks back at Israel, prompting Israel to kick Palestine's teeth in. As you can tell, my suggestion is for Israel to take the high road, and stop willfully pissing off the Palestinians, which may over time allow a peaceful resolution to the situation.
*Note: Egypt is not blameless in this situation, but that is not the focus of this thread.
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Collective Punishment is a pretty horrible long term idea. You're taking a large group of people who generally dislike you or are indifferent to you, punishing them, and not even thinking what happens six months later when someone offers them a way to get back at you.
As for the OP: Israel attacked by militant group, overreacts and takes out anger against civilians. I think we've seen this news story constantly.
Yes, because Israel is completely blameless in this - they've never done anything to harm the Palestinians.
http://www.wrmea.com/html/us_aid_to_israel.htm
Conspiracy theories are fun but can't it just be pride that's causing this new blockade?
I didn't say that- but in this particular case, Israel is responding to rocket attacks from Gaza, and every time they respond, people say "oh they should just turn the other cheek."
There are two sides to every story, and "Blame Israel First" is just as ridiculous as "all Palestinians are terrorists."
Which is still better than the treatment they receive in any other country in the region.
It's "Stop shooting/harming *(&(*ing civilians instead of the militants, you dicks"
It's pretty safe to say that if a rocket attack is fired, and you shell the location 12 hours later, the militants Probably Left By Now. At that point, anyone you hit will almost certainly not have been involved in the attack, since the people who were involved knew to get the fuck out.
So.. why shell a public beach, again? Why blockade basic humanitarian supplies to an entire country? Why keep taking this out collectively on innocent people?
That is the high road people expect Israel to take. You can't cry foul about people attacking your civilians if your response is to attack theirs.
I really don't see how starving civillians is going to make anything better.
Y'know, maybe if the militants would- I dunno, shot in the dark here- STOP FIRING ROCKETS AT ISRAEL, then there'd probably be no reason for them to retaliate. I mean, come on. Things were looking up, weren't they? Sure, Israel's tactics here are hamfisted, but it wouldn't be happening if someone weren't pissing in their Cheerios and ruining it for the whole fucking log.
Again, it's not like Israel's been treating the Palestinians like dirt, letting the settlers steal their land, using checkpoints to restrict their movement, etc.
Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, but you have to remember that those guys shooting rockets at Israel aren't just doing it for kicks. There is history here that originates a couple thousand years ago, or more. Also, a lot of those guys shooting rockets at Israel have sworn to "drive the Jews into the sea", oh and actually get something out of the retaliation - support and recruits.
The militants would probably find themselves running out of civilian support if Israel would take steps to secure the health and wellness of Palestinian people. It doesn't matter how much you hate a people, if no one around you will support you, you're not likely to achieve much.
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Monday April 29, 2002
The Guardian
In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.
What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.
On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?
I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews."
My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?
Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.
The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.
Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or - I hope - to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.
We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?
My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."
But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?
People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.
Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.
We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.
Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. This address was given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month. A longer version appears in the current edition of Church Times.
My thoughts on the situation are summed up by the most compassionate man of the last half century.
No, you're right. That's total justification for shooting at unarmed civilians with rockets.
It's fucking cowardly, and they're screwing any chance that things might change for the better.
Just fucking sick.
Which is why Israel completely abandoned Gaza to the Palestinians and why they've been kicking settlers out of their homes in the West Bank.
Did I say it was understandable? Not really.
Is it going to solve anything? No.
Am I suprised? No.
Nobody in this situation is lily-white. Nobody's right. And you know what? There's no viable solution.
Until Israel stops their left hand/right hand dickishness, and until the Palestinians start behaving in a non-militant manner, this shit is going to go on and on and on.
While we all pay lip service to how horrible it is. Fuck it.
Anyone who has ever seen two three year olds fighting over a toy knows how this is going to end.
What I do understand, however, is a need for vengeance on a simple, human level. Shit, look at some of the rhetoric espoused after 9/11. I'm unsure as to the rest of you, but a consensus amongst my peers was that we should "glass all the towelheads." For most people, revenge is a simple concept to understand and one that most people are very much in favor of. It is a concept like vengeance which drives things like the death penalty, and for peoples such as the Isrealis and the Palestinians it is a very familiar concept. One could make the point that part of the reason the Israeli government continues to exercise its might in such a way is because if they didn't, those in power would swiftly lose it. Similarly, these continued attacks on the Isreali citizenship bring power to those disenfranchised among the Palestinians and so this great struggle will continue until one side or ther other attempts to, as a group, take the high road out of the situation. Not only attempts, but continues with the attempt even if the other side continues violence. If the cycle is not forcibly broken in such a manner then it will not end.
Yes, there is. It's just that every American president will pretend this is some minor, insignificant conflict while morons parrot his position, until his last year in office in which it suddenly becomes very important while he becomes completely insignificant. And then everybody points and says "see, it could never be resolved!"
Call me when they abandon Ariel.
"I think it's time to stop thinking about this as a mideast crisis and start thinking about it as a mideast culture."
I think it would be interesting if the Israelis treated the Palestinians like Muslim states treated the dhimmis. I mean, ideally someone would take the high road, but since that's probably not going to happen it would be nice if they at least took a consistent low road that everyone can agree on.
Has there ever been a leader worth blockading that gave in to the demands, or do people still expect 'the people' to rise up and fulfill the demands through some wildly improbable revolution or vigilantism? Do you really expect a country full of people who are told again and again that the west is pure evil by their leaders, and feel the hardship of the blockades and embargoes everyday to have some outbreak of insanity and vote for a new leader who will give in to that?
Fuck Israel and Hamas, how about the UNITED STATES stop funding Israel and the rest of the world step up and put a stop to this shit. Both sides are wrong, no question, but seriously, Israel needs to take the first step because they're the only ones who can afford to.
As an American, I feel particularly ill-suited to the role of criticizing Israel, since my government is doing a lot of the same things in response to our own little bout with terrorism. I don't support it, but I understand the fear that causes it.
You can certainly criticize them (and America) for anti-terrorist policies that are demonstrably inneffective and appear to make the problem worse.
That's crap. You could say the same thing of the Palestinians, with more justification, seeing as they've suffered worse losses.
But fine. I'll rephrase the question. If you're the Israeli government (so that precludes such nonsense as picking up stakes and leaving the Middle East entirely, doing nothing to try and stop attacks against your citizens, etc.) what would you do to fix this?
I can and do criticize my own government for anti-terrorist policies that are ineffective and make the problem worse. But I would kind of feel like an idiot condemning Israel for doing stuff my own country does. I ought to first at least fix the problem in my own backyard, shouldn't I?
Not violating the Geneva convention? Not commiting war crimes? Acting like a 1st world country instead of a 3rd world shithole?
I'd try to negotiate a permanent peace deal that wasn't a fucking joke done as photo OP or legacy saving for a failing presidency. I wouldn't trust either Israel or the Palestinians to do what they need to do without serious pushing.
I'd begin with ending the systematic oppression and illegal occupation.
That doesn't solve the problem, does it? It'd be nice, but it's incidental and a meaningless talking point at most.
What needs to happen is Israel needs to work with the international community on policing this. Because the Palestinian government isn't going to stop this and at the very least Syria wants this to continue. If the US responded to a terrorist attack in the US with troops IN the US, it probably wouldn't go over well, so there needs to be a non-military group policing Palestine that is international.
For any solution ever, though, Israel needs allies in the general populace of Palestine. So they need to make overt and clear moves towards helping the people form a stable nation where the basics are covered. If people don't feel desperate they are much less likely to do desperate things. Like I said, the militants wouldn't last long if the civilian population wouldn't support them.
Personally, I would answer "Finding some way to make sure Shas never has power in the government."
No, it's not. You solve your problems WITHOUT VIOLATING THE GENEVA CONVENTION. That's the fucking point of the thing.
Maybe, just maybe, Collective Punishment is only making the problem worse. Start solving the problems without this sort of shit, or get it over with and start rounding them up into camps and throwing them into ovens. Anything else is just stretching the problem over a longer period of time.
see what effect Muslims killing other Muslims has on popular support. See how ready people are to give up their lives when they have something to live for.