Daniel Finkelstein says what needs to be said. Brilliant article.
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bullshit
I hate it when people try to use the holocaust to “explain” Israel.
Take my word as an israeli , the holocaust is not that important in our political psyche
The zionist movement pre-dates the holocaust by more than 50 years – 4000 years if you go all traditionalist and count from the patriarchs .
The state itself was NOT created by survivors of the holocaust but by jews who came before the war.
and about half the jews now living in Israel are of sepharadi origins which means that their families were never touched by the nazis.
.
There’s little point discussing this as most people have made up their minds one way or another – see Fun Online Poll results(Link) – and all they do is rehash their prejudices/deeper understanding of the issues*
* Delete as appropriate.
ontobelli, yeah, your reaction is really going convince the undecided. Don’t be shy: explain how Israel is supposed to deal non-violently with rocket attacks.
I’d figure the Jews that the Nazis did touch would pretty much be missing the boat – seeing how they are all mostly dead in Europe.
Pass. For greater or worse, WWII is not a very prominent part of American political culture either – the Invasion of Sicily being a weak vote getter compared to health care and taxes, for instance – but it IS there.
The situation in Gaza would obviously be solved immediately by a land value tax. (Click link below for a complete explanation).
Oh Ian! You scamp!
Jeez, yeah, its almost like the Jews had a rough time of it even before they were industrially exterminated.
How is it that a Gentile whose father’s father’s forefathers certainly would gave tormented you for any excuse – certainly so, as great grandpa was a Kossack – seems more ardently pro-semetic than the semites?
I don’t know exactly how much of a driver the Holocaust is in Israeli politics or general thought. But… My suspicion is that it remains a factor because it never fully ended.
A rational response in 1945 would have been for the world collectively to think “never again” and really mean it. Of course even more rational would have been not to have started in the first place… Anyway that never happened in ’45 and anti-semitism never went away. You can see it now in so many of the protests contra-Israel. And in the reports of a sharp rise in attacks on Jews across the World following the Gaza incursion/invasion/whatever.
I very rarely link to myself but I said it better here.
Basically. I guess the Israelis can’t allow the memory of the Holocaust to fade whilst the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah want to repeat it and get it right this time.
You really should get out more. However, I do agree that the current situation in Gaza, or for that matter the entire conflict, should have nothing to do with the Holocaust. Everyone has the right to live wherever they like and to defend themselves against violence.
Nick, the beautiful phraze “never again” has been concocted by a small group of wise people. Unfortunately, it has never reached neither the ignorant masses nor the cynical barbarians of the world. That’s why we are having IT over and over again. Even more; everything is pointing on the possibility that we shall have much, much more of IT in the near future…
I hate Fink, but in fairness to him, all this article seeks to explain is why when the world lectures Israel, Israel doesn’t care as much as, say, some soya drinking twat in Soho.
However, this article certainly doesn’t say all that need to be said. What needs to be said is this: none of what is happening now would have been possible were it not for the pullout from Gaza. This pullout was immoral because it rewarded violence and because it handed control over people and resources to mafia organisations. Now Gazans, and to a lesser extent, Israelis are reaping the shitstorm.
Now Israelis need to kick out Kadimah, elect Likud with a large majority and resolve never to do anything so fucking stupid ever again. They need to admit that they have no one but themselves to blame for the rockets that are falling on them. They need to apologise to the brave and decent settlers they demonised and whose homes they destroyed. They need to expand settlements in Judea and Samaria. The “World Community” that agressively pushed the pullout has a much easier job. It just needs to GTFO and focus on something important, like the new energy war.
The “peace process” has been one disaster after another, worsening the lives of both Israelis and Levantine Arabs. It needs to end immediately and for good.
Fink would never say that, which would mean admitting that everything he believes is crap, so he should just shut up.
Blimey, I actually find myself in complete agreement with Gabriel.
help!
JP, Gabriel,
I think it’s fair to say the “peace process” or “roadmap” or whatever is dead as Dillinger. I mean de-facto anyway. Of course some nutters (such as the UN) will keep on performing CPR on the rotting corpse but for fuck’s sake there is a full-blown shooting war and talking is utterly bizarre in the circs!
Gabriel, though, I will take issue with you on one thing… Israel may be to blame through bad decisions but the true malice here are Hamas et al and all their backers and pals such as that shower of cunts in Tehran and Damascus. If you leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition and someone steals it then yeah, you’ve been silly but it doesn’t take away from the guilt of the thief.
It’s more like giving your car to someone with 4 hit & run convictions and a shirt saying “I will run over your kids” then getting all surprised when he runs over your kids. You are right, though, I was going over the top for rhetorical effect. The point is the desire of certain groups to harm Israel is a constant, it is the hands of Israel whether they are allowed to do it.
However, I will take issue with you on one thing, the peace process is not over. Obama is committed to mobilising the full resources of the American Empire in pursuit of leftist dreams. Almost all members of the Israeli media and its cultural and political elites are committed to it as an extension of their very being; the situation is even worse in the educational hierarchy. The UN and the EU are, well we know what they are. Benjamin Netanyahu really is the only thing standing in the way of a pullout from the West Bank and the endless war and Zimbabweization that will result. That is in fact the whole reason why Kadima launched this farcical war: to buy them enough security credibility to destroy Israel.
As a side note,* until the late 1980s when it declared war on Israel, Hamas was a legal organisation in both Israel and the Occupied Territories. It even received a certain amount of government asssistance. Hamas is, of course, the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its arm in Britain is called the MAB. Obvious steps need to be taken, the first of which is a complete ban on all Islamic immigration starting today.
*To stop JP agreeing with me.
One problem I have with his view is his simplification of the 2000 Camp David meetings to make the Israel look generous and the PLO look malignant. Arafat did not just dismiss the offer of the West Bank out of hand, there were other concerns that complicated the matter (arguments over control for parts of Jerusalem including holy sites, plus the closing of roads that connected Palestinian populations, plus Barak only offered 73% of the West Bank, among other concerns). I suspect one of the main problems with finding a solution over the years has been there is always at least one hard-headed person representing either side.
I’m not sure how relevant this is, but Jews were not just persecuted by Nazis, so that is a red herring, they had an awful time in Poland and Russia as well. Whether or not Russian Jews have any ‘ancestral right’ to live in Israel is an easy question to answer – if existing Israelis allow them in, then they do.
Well. . . I suspect that’s only half right. Arafat certainly had his problems, but “rewarding violence”? Seems to me both sides use violence. If you die from a Hamas rocket or an Israeli shell, what difference does it make? Wars are won by whichever side uses the most violence– fire-bombs and A-bombs over Japan, carpet-bombing of Germany. Sure, in both cases it was a reaction to violence initiated by the other side, but in the end it was the most violent side that won.
I have always wondered how things would have played out differently if the PLO began a series of hunger strikes and non-violent protests like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, instead of resorting to violence. Would the world care? Would the Israelis care? I would hope so but I usually don’t put much faith in humanity.
Anne Frank is old news. Knock it off.
It may not be important in the political psyche, but that’s the first thing you hear about when Israelis justify something. The last too, and lots in the middle.
That is a stupid, emotional, dishonest, special pleading article. “World opinion didn’t save the Jews.” He’s right.
First, millions of people from all over the earth gave their futures to stop Hitler, and the English and French were well engaged in doing it before the general killing of Jews began. Even before the war began, the rest of the world absorbed quite a few Jewish fugitives, who were receiving from Germany the kind of treatment that Negroes were then receiving routinely in Alabama and Leopoldville.
What exactly was “world opinion” supposed to do when the extermination campaign got fired up in 1942?
Declare double extra war?
Mr. Finklestein insults the dead, the maimed, the veterans, and on the families of those who fought Nazism.
Second, “world opinion” never saved anybody, that’s not what opinion does. The “world” has no more duty to the Jews than it does to the French or to the left handed.
Every nation state on earth “only exists because its citizens do not feel safe as the wards of world opinion.” Italy, and Zimbabwe, and San Marino are all “founded on a determination that, at the end of the day, somehow their people will defend themselves and their fellows from destruction. ”
The Jews of Germany didn’t resist the aggressive wars of the Hohenzollerns, nor did they rush to protect the slaves on the middle passage. It wasn’t their business to, any more than it was Israel’s duty to protect the Tutsis from the Hutu, or the Falkland Islanders from the Argentines.
What happened to the Jews in the Third Reich was terrible, but the rest of the world did put a stop to it.
Israel remains a military and economic protectorate of the United States and to a lesser extent Europe today.
So where is the brilliance? What “needed to be said”?
Why do you assume I was talking about violence against Israelis? Fatah is an organised criminal syndicate, that acheived its supremacy in Judea, Samrai and Gaza through robbery, extortion and the like. It was wrong to give them control over people and resources.
The sooner people realise that the chances of remotely civilized government in any prospective Levantine Arab state are precisely nil and that the best option for everyone is continued Israeli occupation, the better. the One State Solution has a lot more to be said for it than the Two State one.
Jenny,
I fail to see your point. Obviously victory goes to the side most capable of astonishing with their violence. That’s war, baby!
Hamas et. al. have taken the Ghandi route to it’s (dementedly) logical conclusion. They aren’t just hiding amongst the “civilians” they particularly want dead Palistinian kids on the BBC and CNN. It’s a total inversion of civilised warfare. They are attempting to maximise the number of “their” dead kids. It’s their plan. And that’s why they are scum and should be treated as worse than vermin.
“What needed to be said” may only have been said by implication, so let me help you out, staghounds, and be a little more explicit:
Hamas has zero interest in peace; its only goal is killing Jews and (as a result) eliminating Israel. No amount of appeasement will change that. Israel has a legitimate right to defend itself, and no one has any moral basis to claim that it should accept without retaliation the incessant bombing of its citizens. Hamas views the Palestinians living in Gaza not as its citizens but as tools to be used, destroyed, and discarded at will. For their part, those Palestinians are not “innocent” bystanders: they are the willing enablers of Hamas, electing them to political office, permitting the use of schools, hospitals, mosques, etc., for military purposes, accepting the location of combatants within civilian areas, and offering up their own children for martyrdom to this obscene cause. The Israelis have done a magnificent job of minimizing civilian casualties under these circumstances (Hamas actively wants civilian casualties among its people for propaganda purposes), but none of this effort is rewarded or even acknowledged by the rest of the world.
Gabriel is correct (I feel a little like JP saying that!) in that it was a serious tactical error for Israel to cede Gaza to the Palestinians. This is an error they should recitify: they should reclaim that territory by force, declare that it is henceforth a part of sovereign Isael (not merely an occupied territory), execute all Hamas members, expel its known supporters, and permit the remaining Palestinians to stay only as long as they are peaceable. If Palestinians want their own country they should go find it elsewhere; there’s plenty of unused land around there (Syria would be a good place to start).
Exactly right Nick.
The big cheese Hamas strategist killed in the last few days was rung up by the IDF to tell him they were attacking his building, and to fuck off out of it. Or at least get his women and children out.
He chose to do the opposite.
Death is much more glorious than life to these fuckwits so where does a Peace Process ever begin???
It’s fair enough to say Israel has a right to defend itself. I don’t have a clue why anybody would choose to live in the Middle East though. The place is infested with crackpots and religious imbecilities and there never will be peace. Britain sure has its problems, but at least it doesn’t have the curse of being a Holy Land.
The Red Army sustained between eighty to one hunderd thousand dead and a quarter of a million wounded in the two week long battle for Berlin.
Germany casualties are hard to estimate but are most likely on the order of five to ten times that.
This is just political theater.
This article completely ignores the fact that Egypt and Israel have cut Gaza from the rest of the world. Let’s imagine you’re a Palestinian: You have no job, your children are malnourished, your family farm was stolen by lunatics from Brooklyn with Israel’s help. Your mother-in-law needs medicine but the hospital has none. Your neighbors’ two kids were killed by Israeli bombs at a market. It’s filthy, hot, crowded, impoverished, and boring.
Is there anything you wouldn’t do to Israel? Hell, you guys spent the first half of the decade telling us we had to attack, conquer, and occupy a country which was thousands of miles away and had never done either of us (US or UK) any harm. What kind of reaction would you have if you had to live as a Gazan?
OT: Johnathan, why don’t you start Discussion Point XXIX:
“How can we bring down the UN?”
bullshit.
I’ll second that.
I mean – it’s a nice sentimental article, well written, but not much to it.
Israel doesn’t act “because the world won’t defend it”. The is no such thing as “the world”, let the world go to hell.
Israel struggles for it’s survival. It doesn’t expect “the world” to lift a finger, the world never has, and never will. (In WW2, the allies haven’t fought to save the Jews, they fought to save their own hides, as they should).
The Arabs fight to redress a grievance, a real one, but Israel fights for survival. That’s all.
Daniel Finkelstein’s nice words are irrelevant, except as some artifact to help with world opinion.
Rather unlikely as, the fictitious blockade notwithstanding, there has been no lack of food or medical supplies in Gaza over the past year. There are indigent in Gaza, but there are also indigent in Britain.
There are no Jews, mad or American or anything else, in the Gaza strip. All the farms they did once own are now smashed up by the people of Gaza.
The population of Gaza is 1,400,000. In the last 30 years Israel has killed, tops, about 2-3,000 people there. If we assume that the average person in Gaza has about 30 neighbours (per block of flats). The chance one of their neighbours kids was blown up by Israel is about 0.06%.
Gaza is less crowded than Tel Aviv, less filthy than Tanglewood and less boring than where I live.
One of the reasons I take such a hardline position on this issue (and I used to sort of support Oslo) is that Palestinian sympathisers never, ever know what they are talking about. There has been a deliberate campaign of disinformation to make the relative plight of the Levantine Arabs seems much greater in global terms than it is.
Life expectancy and child mortality are better in Gaza than Syria. Did you know that? Of course you didn’t.
Of course the idea that Gaza has been the “largest prison in the world” or whatever for the past year is utterly belied by the claims that the situation has massively worsened in the last week.
On gem I came across
(Now rubble.)
Fail.
It’s almost like you completely ignore what the Palestinians do when they do have full open access to the world.
Anyways, what Gabriel said. Arguing with Palestinian supporters is even less intellectual than arguing with gangsta rappers over Bloods and Crips, and less stimulating.
More here(Link)…
Palestinians attack Israel because they want to kill Jews.
Amir Taheri also has a must-read article in the Times.
So it’s of no concern to you libertarians that a state is implementing collective punishment?
war = collective punishment, got it. So we’re clear for the next time around, would you suggest assasination or arrest for the entire Hamas government?
For my libertarian fides, anyone that wants to stamp a barbaric, theofascist, genocidal, racist, religiously-bigoted, terrorist substate’s hanging fruit into the dirt is A-okay in my book. If Israel full-out colonized Gaza, even then the sum total of happiness and freedom in the world would increase; Hamas is just that bad.
BTW, is there a specific IQ cutoff for Hamas supporters – like say a subretarded 70 – or could you, James, find us some smarter supporters to make this interesting?
How many Israelis have killed the Hamas rockets? 0
How many Israelis have died in last week in Gaza? 7 at least.
It’s pretty obvious that the operation was a failure before it was started. A very stupid movement that puts a lot of pressure in Israel and has gained a lot of sympathy to the Palestinians.
Do not start a military operation unless is in your own favor. So… This was to stupid to be the real goal. It looks like the intention to cause a reaction of Iranians and force US and Obama to start a war against them as the heritage of the Bush government.
Oil and gas are the ultimate goal, everybody knows that. Don’t you?
Emotional reasons of the Times article are bullshit.
Why would Libertarians be concerned, qua Libertarians, about something that is not true? Why, would anyone?
The intention for war is very obvious, to win the election for Kadimah. No party can win an election of it looks like it can’t protect its citizens or won’t even try. That, by the way, is the reason the U.S. is allowing the war to happen, because they want Kadima to win so they can proceed with their “save Bush’s failed Middle East Policy by getting the Arabs to like us by forcing Israel into suicidial concessions that will destroy her” strategy.
It’s a stupid strategy and thankfully it’s going to be neutered. Kadima are so transparently corrupt and incompetent that even with the world, the media and the Israeli elite behind them they will lose the election. Anything short of an unconditional surrender by Hamas in the next few days cannot save them.
You think the Bush government is getting Israel to start a war, in order to spark a regional conflict so as to secure oil supplies, but won’t drill in Alaska because it might hurt the Polar Bears?
What a silly man, this conflict is about land and religion and hatred and dreams and grubby politics and all sorts of other rubbish, but it ain’t about oil and gas.
I’ll tell you what is about oild and gas: the thing going on in the world that is actually important, namely Russia’s machinations.
James,
Do you really think Hamas counts as a ‘state’?
Ontobelli,
No matter what they do (short of national suicide), Israel are always under such pressure, and only people who are already sympathetic to the Palestinians would find anything to sympathise with here. So far, they seem to be doing fine.
Governments can’t always be open about their support for Israel, because they need to maintain diplomatic relations with the terrorist-supporting states. (And with the terrorist-supporting elements in their own electorates.) But I’ve seen a lot of talk about quiet support, even from Muslim Arab states concerned at the possible effects of the Iranian’s proxy war on regional stability. Fatah, in particular, are almost open in their support – the Israeli strategy seems aimed at returning them to power in Gaza – and there are rumours that Fatah have provided much of the intelligence on Hamas facilities.
There is no oil or gas in Gaza. The ultimate goal of Jihad is for the whole world to submit to Islamic law, and to stay that way. Israel are simply first on the list. Everyone knows that. Don’t you?
Gaza has oil! let’s get drilling, guys, we’re gonna be rich!
Seriously, what has the conflict got to do with oil? Iraq, yes, Iran, definitely. But Israel and Gaza? is the fight about Jaffa oranges?
Staghounds:
I agree. But then it logically follows that neither should it have more duty to the Palestinians – and yet it always seems to have lots of extra double duty to them. How come?
Gabriel: I agree with what you say on a whole, but you are not well informed on at least one point: the media and the elite are not behind Kadima. If they are behind anyone, it’s the good old Labor (of which Barak, the man behind the current war, is a proud member), just like they always were. But that is beside the point of course, as Kadima, as you rightly point out, is finished (good riddance too).
Oh, and what Jacob said.
My first reaction to Ontobelli was the same as JP’s. And my sister in law is a geolgist! Oh and the war of Jaffa oranges concept amused me. Which is quite a feat in the context.
Pa is right. If you look over at various Islamic discussion forums you will see a heck of a lot of anger from the Ummah directed at the Egyptian and the Saudi governments in particular. Hamas are a loose cannon and an Iranian one to boot. The entire ME is a political quagmire. Which is odd when you consider that the actual, primitive, causi belli are rooted in the word of Allah/God/Yahwah. You can criticise Jihads and Crusades and whatnot for many things but generally a lack of moral focus isn’t one of their failings.
Ultimately I suspect a lot of the Arab governments’ enmity towards Hamas (and Hezbollah) is due to their popularity on the street for actually doing something while the OIC & Arab League issues strongly worded condemnations etc.
Alisa. God knows why the Palestinians get so much attention. God knows why the EU bank-rolls them to the extent it does. I guess the Palestinians just have good PR. Better PR than the starving and flood wracked Bangladeshis, or the raped, murdered and displaced Darfurese or the abysmally treated “guest workers” in Arabia and the Gulf. I dunno. It’s a puzzler and as the examples I cited seem to confirm it ain’t because they’re Muslim.
Or maybe it is. It probably suits too many folks in the Islamic world to have a cause to bellyache about ad nauseum and the Palestinians are that cause. Perhaps they have seized upon that cause because it is utterly interminable and perhaps by doing so they have made it so. I dunno. But it is a fixation in modern Islamic thought bordering on monomania. Imagine if the entire Catholic world had fixated on Northern Ireland. That would have been beyond weird.
Nick M wrote:
I think it’s because of the presence of the 68ers (the generation of student revolutionaries stuck in a time warp) in dominant positions in the media and academia. I remember, about 18 months ago, watching a documentary on the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War and being surprised at just how much Western public opinion seemed to be on the side of the Israelis. That, and the fact that Egypt was blockading the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, a fact I hadn’t known beforehand.
A year later came the radicals, and a lot of old notions were thrown by the wayside. To this day the thinking of that generation infects a lot of political discourse. Everything is seen (certainly here in the US) through a prism of events that happened between the assassination of John Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon. Look at how both wars against Saddam Hussein were compared beforehand against Vietnam. Or, more irritatingly, look at how the GDF -gate suffix is added to any scandal.
Ted,
Interesting. I was born in ’73 so for obvious reasons what happened between ’67 and ’68 is a bit of a black-hole pour moi…
I must admit though that my original (as a kid) tendency to side with Israel was sheer admiration of the utter brilliance of the Six-Day War… I’m into fighter planes big-time. Just a damn shame no one has really done a Mirages vs MiGs sim ’cause those were the last of the gunfights… Oh, and all the Operation Thunderbolt stuff too… Real “Boy’s Own” antics…
Anyway. You give me hope. Those ’68 radicals should be joining St Harold in the choir eternal soon…
What happened in the late 60s was the general adoption of the Gramscian analysis as part of the New Left philosophy. Jews are considered hegemonic, the Arabs in gramscian terms are the oppressed class. Ergo, the Jews must be opposed and the Arabs supported, in the standard counter-hegemonic war of position. It’s not about who is right or wrong (though arguments regarding right and wrong are deployed as justiication). It’s about post marxist power struggle.
On the other hand, in my experience, many leftists like to irresponsibly smear their opponents with accusations of anti-semitism whenever possible.
I’d be interested in hearing what people here think are viable solutions to the Israel/Palestine problem. What do you think will work, how, and why? Vague notions and detailed plans.
I sometimes like to think there are a couple of ways to get to peace, but other times I think there will never be peace there (or at least not for hundreds of years).
My own joking sarcastic solution? An invasion by a third, unrelated power who is allied with neither side (which I guess at this point would mean “space aliens”) who would either institute it’s own laws that treated both sides as the same vanquished people, or at least caused the two sides to band together to push the invaders out.
What happens when a fly falls into a coffee cup?
The Italian – throws the cup and walks away in disgust.
The Frenchman – takes out the fly, and drinks the coffee.
The Chinese – eats the fly and throws away the coffee
The Russian – drinks the coffee with the fly, since it was an extra with no charge.
The Israeli – sells the coffee to the Frenchman, the fly to the Chinese, buys himself a new cup of coffee and uses the extra money to invent a device that prevents flies from falling into coffee.
The Palestinian – blames the Israeli for the fly falling in his coffee, protests the act of aggression to the UN, takes a loan from the European Union to buy a new cup of coffee, uses the money to purchase explosives and then blows up the coffee house where the Italian, the Frenchman, the Chinese, and the Russian are all trying to explain to the Israeli that he should give away his cup of coffee to the Palestinian
TedH,
The collapse of Islamic literalism as a belief system.
Those ’68 radicals should be joining St Harold in the choir eternal soon…
No I bloody wont!
Not with my genes
My lot tend to get to 94.
Look I’m really sorry about
My Ger, ger, Generation….
But some of us grew up. 😉
Maybe like Great Britain?
It’s almost like you completely ignore what the Palestinians do when they do have full open access to the world.
Some Palestinians are murderers, hence 1.5m of them should be caged. That’s terrific thinking, almost a final solution to the problem.
Well, Joshua, what would you do?
Joshua,
They’re not caged, any more than any other nation. A lot of the claims of ‘caging’ are propaganda fakery, and the rest is implemented by Hamas, in whose interest it is to have a humanitarian disaster for the cameras. (I recall one of our lefty MPs going to Gaza reporting on how the shops were bare of goods – with a photograph of said MP meeting a local shopkeeper in a shop that was visibly fully stocked. The inconsistency didn’t seem to register.)
Hamas have stolen free humanitarian aid and sold it to raise money for weapons, they’ve stolen fuel intended for hospitals and used it for their own military vehicles, they’ve turned down aid when it came with conditions that stopped them smuggling weapons, and they routinely steal a large slice of the funding that the idiot Europeans give as aid. For its size, Palestine has received a huge amount of aid. They could be rich and prosperous beyond the dreams of most in the Middle East. But they spend all those resources on insanely pursuing a futile religious war.
Palestinian misery (such as it is – they’re a lot less miserable than is portrayed) is entirely the result of their own policy decisions. It’s a ploy to open the borders to weapons imports, and as a demonstration that their terrorist agenda gets results. As the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and military from Gaza last year clearly demonstrated, lifting the “siege” would only empower Hamas, validate their policy of lunatic intransigence, escalate the war, further promote the use of human shields, and make the misery of the Gazans ever deeper.
It would be like addressing the horror of the Gulag by asking the US to stop being so nasty to Stalin. I note that a lot of the people who so liked dear old ‘Uncle Joe’ are the same people who are popping up today. Will they never learn?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Joshua, smart guy. Now sanctions = industrial genocide. Unless you have something to offer, I think we’re done here.
TedH, the problem is insoluble; it’s a Gordian knot and the only way to solve it is through the sword.
There’s that old comforting lie ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, but that is not at all true. In a given year, in a given atrocity, tens of thousands of writers, journalists, and literate people suffer on in gulags (say, North Korea), and no amount of spilled ink will free them.
Unless something causes dramatic changes between the principle actors (the PLO, Hamas, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the US, the EU and the UN), there will only be stalemate. Hopefully, this war will break up the blockage a bit by removing Hamas.
Don’t hear much about the 800,000 Armenian’s, 1.7 million Cambodians, 2 million North Vietnamese, 20 million Russians but you sure as hell hear a lot about the Jews whenever Israel is up to no good, why they even have a Holocaust day (with a capital H) in the UK for Christ sake, where did that come from.
Now I would be the first to admit what the Germans did to the Jews was terrible but I do think they sure as hell turn it to their advantage, no other country would get away with what they get up to, they are so ingrained into the fabric of our society when in fact their allegiances lie elsewhere. But and its a big but I have noticed that people have grown a bit tired of making excuses for their bad behaviour, the second world war was over 60 years ago and our sympathies have grown thin.
Israel can’t go on ignoring international laws, proper modes of behaviour and pretend they are fighting some sort of war to protect us, that’s bullshit and they know it.
So what are they supposed to do? Sit there and let Hamas keep hucking rockets over the border?
Fuck that noise. They have every right to use force to make the attacks stop. “Please, sir, stop launching Qassams at our schools” hasn’t worked worth a damn. And every last drop of innocent blood is on the hands of the scum who build rocket launchers in schools and hospitals just for the human shield factor and then launch those rockets at civilian targets on the other side.
The proper behavior for the IDF is to protect Israeli citizens, which is exactly what they’re trying to do. If Hamas stopped launching rockets and sending suicide bombers, this “war” would be over yesterday.
I would love it if Shake could point to some specific proper models of behavior (preferably from the real world), so that we crude Israelis could emulate them. I am now holding my breath.
Shake,
On your first point – yeah, we ought to hear a lot more about all the others too. The Holocaust memorial day does actually memorialise all of them, but the one that happened right in the middle of Europe tends to have the biggest impact on the Western public consciousness. The reason for making a big deal of it is so that people remember, so that it doesn’t vanish down the memory hole like all the others. The Jews understand the importance of that on a very personal level, but the rest of us should too.
As for the rest, what is happening now reminds me of the 1930s and before, when Jew-hate was not just a German phenomenon but common in the rest of Europe, and a lot of people in Britain, say, thought Hitler had a point. It’s so sad to see it happening again today, and in much the same way. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
As a general rule, Israel doesn’t ignore international laws – they abide by them more closely than most, since they’re watched more closely. (Although like anyone else they’re not perfect.) The problem is that when a lot of the noisiest pundits talk about “international law”, it turns out they’re students of the “making-shit-up-as-you-go-along” school of law, and what they’re citing is what they think the law ought to be, rather than what it actually is.
And since they’re mostly Jew-hating far-left radicals, what they think it ought to be is their side gets to do whatever the hell it likes with no restrictions, and their enemies not permitted to fight back, and forced to declare ceasefires and make concessions whenever they’re winning.
It works because our state schools turn out people with no knowledge of history, or training in critical thinking, and then bombard them from all sides with this slanted story. I can certainly understand how people come to believe it, but my fear is that this is probably how it happened before.
People tell me of how they hear about the history of the Holocaust all the time – but do they? The year before last (on July 18th) was the 60th anniversary of the storming of the Exodus 1947 – possibly Britain’s most shameful sea battle. Did any of us remember? Does anyone in Britain remember who ran the DP camps like Bergen-Belsen after the war? Have they ever seen the pictures of our concentration camp in Cyprus? Fifty thousand Jews crammed behind barbed wire without enough water, and not a Nazi in sight.
And if you haven’t heard of that, what else haven’t you heard of? Do you know what the actual purpose of Jihad is in Sharia law? Can you quote any of the rules by which it operates? Do you know any of its history?
No, the Israelis know it isn’t “bullshit” – but if they have to wait for the rest of us to figure it out, it’ll probably be too late.
What a bunch of crap.. Idiot.
Can you imagine if Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Netanyahu?
And I only linked to examples of counter-terrorism wars I broadly support, the list is endless once you move on to actually bad countries. Indeed your own post contradicts your statement, specifically this bit:
You’re so dumb you can’t even get your bizarre assertions to not refute each other.
Threre have been and are good people who don’t like Jews very much, like Kingsley Amis or Churchill. But I’ve yet to come across an anti-zionist who wasn’t a stupid twat.
I have seen no evidence of any “bad behavior” on Israel’s part. They’re engaged in legitimate self-defense, and bending over backwards (excessively so, in my judgment) to minimize “civilian” casualties. (I put the word “civilian” in quotes because in my opinion those who harbor and enable terrorists are no more “civilians” than are the Hamas terrorists themselvs.)
It’s well worth skimming through the Geneva conventions and Protocols to see what they actually do say about civilians.
Once, as an exercise, I ran through all the Geneva Conventions and Protocols (see Protocol I part III article 35 and on in particular – civilian protections are mentioned in article 51) and tried to tot up how many of their articles the Palestinian terrorists were contravening by their normal modus operandi. I don’t remember the number now, but it was a lot.
One question I’m particularly interested in is whether Hamas/Palestine is even covered by the Geneva Conventions. If you don’t either sign them or agree to abide by them, you’re not protected by them. It’s conceivable the Palestinian Authority signed it, (although given their close connection to the Al Aqsa Martyrs and PLO, it seems unlikely), but Hamas have abrogated many of the treaties the PA signed (including the one forming and legitimising the PA and hence the Hamas government). I genuinely don’t know what the situation is there.
Here’s another excellent editorial on the Israel/Hamas conflict.
The Joos use human shields!
BTW, is there a specific IQ cutoff for Hamas supporters – like say a subretarded 70 – or could you, James, find us some smarter supporters to make this interesting?
Well your own is replete with people who argue blockades restricting food and medical supplies with the stated aim of “Putting the Palestinians on a diet” don’t constitute a collective punishment, so I’d quote a certain overrated Nazarean if I weren’t still fending off my residual anti-theism…
Laird, you’re absolutely right on all counts. But the article didn’t say those things, at least not in any clear way. A third of it was weeping about Anne Frank.
TechH, FWIW, I DO advocate arrest and assassination. Those in power like to stay there, and they like to keep drawing breath. So:
1. Identify those who lead, control, or profit from (Hamas, the Baath party, ZANU, Darfurian mess, or other problem). A half dozen or so per problem would do.
2. Publicly name them and warn them to knock that off. Give them a time period.
3. When they don’t, kill or (if weak, squeamish, and willing to create a focus for opposition) kidnap and imprison them. In a regular criminal prison, no privileges, no lawyers, no nothing.
4. Repeat until problem solved. People like power, and Boss of Hamas as it now is seems to be a pretty attractive spot. If it became a death sentence, the incoming Boss would be more likely to try to change Hamas rather than to say, “I don’t want to be the boss, I’ll go to work at the mill instead.”
Faulkner was right- the Presidents and the Kings should be the first targets.
Staghounds, I agree with you about the article: it is a worthless piece of weepery. As to your strategy: it has been practiced to an extent (sheik Yassin for example). One of the problems is that most of Hamas’ “kings” are living a cushy life in Damascus.
Laird:
Heh. I also liked this quote: