THE WAR IN GAZA

@georgeob1,

George-

President Truman recognised the State of Israel 15 minutes after it declared itself to exist. And against the advice of both Marshall and Forrestal and at the risk of antagonising Arab oil producing countries.

Do you think that came out of the blue? The Americans were in close contact with the British throughout. The latter merely carried the can. When the buck stopped it was in London.

It was the American Jews in the Democratic party who didn't want European Jews flooding into America, to avoid a possible re-occurence of their troubles in Europe, which influenced, along with Clark Clifford, who supported the Jewish State, Mr Truman's decision. And American policy ever since has been to support it.

I don't think history will accept your "typically duplicitous British fashion" phrase. That is another example of your growing anti-Euro stance which looks to have you by the throat.

Your New Year best wishes to us notwithstanding.

1 Reply

@Foofie,

You argument is idiotic: people have a right to choose where they live. The alternative is segregation, genocide and Nazism> Why can't all the israelis move to America: in the long run if would be cheaper.

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@Fountofwisdom,

Your statements about how much aid Israel receives are ridiculous. I challenge you to support those statements. Israel's airforce is hardly murderous. It spares civilians as much as possible. Unfortunately, and this is not in dispute, Hamas's weapons and operations are in the midst of the Gazans.

Infra is a strange guy. In almost everything except Israel, he is basically fair and balanced. However, he has this blind hatred of Israel that causes him to ignore the facts and assert nonsensical accusations against Israel. BTW, the Arabs in Israel are better off in every sense than those in the other ME countries. Further, large numbers of Jews (those surviving) were run out of the various countries in the ME, with most taking residence in Israel. This is one reason that Israel stands a homeland for Jews.

Israel has existed for 60 years and is an important and loyal ally of the USA. It is entitled to run it's country as it pleases, and not according to what the haters, like Infra, would prefer.

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@Advocate,

So Britain doesn't carry the can. It takes a bow. And Mr Truman also but after a 15 minute delay.

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@Advocate,

Quote:

Your statements about how much aid Israel receives are ridiculous. I challenge you to support those statements.

Quote:

"The U.S. aid relationship with Israel is unlike any other in the world," said Stephen Zunes during a January 26 CPAP presentation. "In sheer volume, the amount is the most generous foreign aid program ever between any two countries," added Zunes, associate professor of Politics and chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.

He explored the strategic reasoning behind the aid, asserting that it parallels the "needs of American arms exporters" and the role "Israel could play in advancing U.S. strategic interests in the region."

Although Israel is an "advanced, industrialized, technologically sophisticated country," it "receives more U.S. aid per capita annually than the total annual [Gross Domestic Product] per capita of several Arab states." Approximately a third of the entire U.S. foreign aid budget goes to Israel, "even though Israel comprises just…one-thousandth of the world's total population, and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes."

http://www.wrmea.com/html/us_aid_to_israel.htm

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@InfraBlue,

InfraBlue wrote:

The Palestinian militants have attacked Israel precisely because Israel runs its country as it wishes: as an ethnocentric state that to exist necessarily discriminates and oppresses the Palestinian people.

Israel is just more overt in its ethnocentrism. The U.S. is quite ethnocentric when on sees the positions in corporate America that expatriate Brits get when coming across the pond. Are French speaking Canadians given nicer jobs in France than the French immigrants from Algeria?

My point is that I believe there is a lot of ethnocentrism in this world. Israel just was willing to make it "official," to give the founding of the state a reason for existence. And, since Nazi Germany was sort of ethnocentric to the point of killing Jews, it made a lot of sense at the time (not to mention the other European countries wanted no Jews to return to their country of origin if they survived the Holocaust). As the saying goes, "what goes around, comes around."

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@mysteryman,

I couldn't agree more with you

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Aid to Israel
Does the U.S. get its money’s worth?

Israel and Egypt are the two largest recipients of U.S. aid. For its“participation” in the Gulf War, Egypt was forgiven its indebtedness of $9 billion. Israel pays its bills. It receives $2.8 billion every year. Of that amount, $2.0 billion is for military aid and $0.8 billion for economic aid. It’s fair to ask whether this is a good deal for the American taxpayer.

What are the Facts?

The only democratic country in the Middle East. Israel is the only genuinely democratic state in the Middle East. It is committed to freedom and equality, and the rule of law. It embodies the fundamental values that are in tune with those of America and that America has traditionally supported. Israel’s military and political importance in the Middle East and its strategic position stabilize the entire area, including the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. During the Cold War, it was America’s indispensable rampart against the inroads and expansionist ambitions of the Soviet Union. It is now a western bulwark against the aggressive intents of Iran and other bellicose nations that threaten the interests of the United States. It is a most reliable partner in the promotion of Western strategic interests and in the stabilization of the Middle East. Over 20% of its budget goes for defense, compared to 7% in the U.S. and less than 1% in Japan. Israel has one of the best armies in the world. Its navy and air force are the major deterrent forces in the eastern Mediterranean.

Israel effectively secures NATO’s southeastern flank, without having a single American soldier stationed in its territory. Still, the superb military installations, the air and sea lift capabilities, the equipment and food storage capacity, and the trained manpower to maintain and repair sophisticated U.S. equipment are instantly at hand in Israel. It is the only country in the area that makes itself available to the United States, in any contingency.

Only fraction of aid stays in Israel. There is no other country in the Middle East except Israel that can be considered to have a stable government or populace friendly to the United States. There is much danger that any military aid to Arab countries, and military equipment given or sold to them, will suffer the same fate as the untold billions of dollars and priceless military secrets that were lost to our enemies in the debacle of Iran. Is Saudi Arabia more stable? Egypt? Jordan? Kuwait? Judge for yourself!

Only a fraction of the aid given stays in Israel. By far the largest share remains with American defense contractors. Peter McPherson, former administrator of the Agency for International Development, estimated that every billion dollars of aid to Israel creates 60,000 to 70,000 jobs in the United States.

Compared to the $2.0 billion yearly military aid to Israel, the U.S. contributes more than $130 billion(!) every year to the defense of Europe and more than $30 billion to the defense of Japan, Korea, and the Far East. Over 300,000 U.S. troops are stationed with NATO and over 30,000 U.S. troops in the Far East. In contrast, not one single U.S. soldier needs to be stationed and put at risk in Israel. U.S. military analysts estimate that the U.S. would have to spend the equivalent of $150 billion a year in the Middle East to maintain a force equivalent to Israel’s.

There are many other benefits that the U.S. military derives from Israel. Israel is the only country that has gained battlefield experience with U.S. weapons. This experience is immediately conveyed to the U.S. Enormous quantities of captured Soviet weapons and defense systems were turned over to the U.S. military for analysis. Israel, in the light of its experience, continually modifies U.S. weapons systems. For instance, Israeli scientists have made over 200 improvements in the F-15 alone and similar improvements, mostly in avionics, in later-generation planes. It would be more in line with reality if military aid to Israel were classified as part of the defense budget, rather than as “aid”. Israel is truly America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East. Former President Reagan put it well: “The fall of Iran has increased Israel’s value as perhaps the only remaining strategic asset in the region on which the United States can fully rely.” American aid to Israel is a two-way street. Aid to Israel is America’s greatest defense bargain

--factsandlogic.org

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@spendius,

spendius wrote:

George-

President Truman recognised the State of Israel 15 minutes after it declared itself to exist. And against the advice of both Marshall and Forrestal and at the risk of antagonising Arab oil producing countries.

Do you think that came out of the blue? The Americans were in close contact with the British throughout. The latter merely carried the can. When the buck stopped it was in London.

It was the American Jews in the Democratic party who didn't want European Jews flooding into America, to avoid a possible re-occurence of their troubles in Europe, which influenced, along with Clark Clifford, who supported the Jewish State, Mr Truman's decision. And American policy ever since has been to support it.

I don't think history will accept your "typically duplicitous British fashion" phrase. That is another example of your growing anti-Euro stance which looks to have you by the throat.

Your New Year best wishes to us notwithstanding.

Truman very likely won a very close election as a result of his recognition of Israel. American Jews have long been (understandably) supportive of Israel. However neither you nor I know exactly what were their particular motives . Certainly your theory that they didn't want then coming to America seems odd in the light of the already successful assimilation of millions of Jews who came here from Russia, Poland and Germany just a generation earlier.

Beyond that, you miss the essential point. The organized Zionist movement was a European phenomenon, initiated after the British brought down the Ottoman Empire in WWI and duplicitously promised Palestine to both European Zionists and the Hashemites (then) of Mecca and Medina. The organized migration of European Jews to Palestine began soon after WWI. It was European Jews, who had survived and were displaced by the holocaust and finding themselves no longer welcomee in Western Europe, who flooded Palestine from Mediterranean ports and often via Cyprus, precipitating the present situation.

Israel is the creation of persecuted European Jews who colonized Palestine with the usually ambiguous help of the British. The relatively large population of American Jews have consistently supported Israel and have been a major factor in the political support the United States provided after its creation. However, the existence of Israel itself is the exclusive product of long-term European mistreatment of Jews who had lived there for centuries. There has been no mass migration of Jews from America to Israel (unlike their European brethren). One can speculate on the reasons, but European history provides ample and ready possibilities.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

First off George I might ask you to consider the likely outcome of dealing with the Hashemites in a non duplicitous fashion.

And the mistreatment of Jews goes back a very long way and our policy was an attempt to right that wrong. I think your use of "duplicitous" is a result of idealism and not of real politik and unworthy of a gallant officer of the greatest navy the world has ever seen. Steering a carrier onto a sandbank off East Africa notwithstanding.

And you need to define the word Jew. It is not entirely a racial concept.

And it was no theory of mine that American Jews wished to limit the number of Jews coming to America. The fact that many did come to America says nothing about that.

How on earth could I come up with such an idea George?

I can't even understand why the Arab brotherhood are not offering any support to the suffering Gaza residents. I could speculate mind you.

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@spendius,

One might even argue that the existence of Israel is something Hitler brought them. Without him I'm not sure the motive for the risks would have been there.

But what about Suez George?

1 Reply

@spendius,

spendius wrote:

One might even argue that the existence of Israel is something Hitler brought them. Without him I'm not sure the motive for the risks would have been there.

But what about Suez George?

One could argue that point above; however, it is specious, because Hitler's goal was to eradicate all Jews from the world. The fact that Hitler lost the war is only because the Russians have a very cold winter, and were willing to take enormous losses of life. In other words, Hitler's not being able to finish his Final Solution was just a chance occurrence. Do not think there are no people in the world that give Hitler great credit for the Final Solution.

But, you touched on something that many pro-Palestinean people do not want to address today. Yes, it was Hitler's Final Solution that put the survivors in Israel, and made the Arabs upset about the new addition to the neighborhood. So, when Europeans protest the Israeli air strikes in Gaza, notice how they are not blaming the prior generation of Europeans that were quite content to see the Jews disappear.

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foofie wrote:

Israel is just more overt in its ethnocentrism. The U.S. is quite ethnocentric when on sees the positions in corporate America that expatriate Brits get when coming across the pond.

Ok, Foofie, let's play. Your attempt to rationalize Israel's discrimination against and oppression of the Palestinian people is laughably disingenuous. I refuse to believe that you are as retarded as you let on. You have mental issues, surely, but retardation is not one of them.

Quote:

My point is that I believe there is a lot of ethnocentrism in this world. Israel just was willing to make it "official," to give the founding of the state a reason for existence. And, since Nazi Germany was sort of ethnocentric to the point of killing Jews, it made a lot of sense at the time (not to mention the other European countries wanted no Jews to return to their country of origin if they survived the Holocaust). As the saying goes, "what goes around, comes around."

Well, that's the basis of the problem with the Zionist state. Instead of sublimating their devastating experiences at the hands of the hateful ethnocentrists of Europe and establishing a tolerant and egalitarian state, they went and established a hateful ethnocentrist state for themselves, pre-populated with a convenient scapegoat upon whom to project their malevolent motto "what goes around, comes around." What the Zionists really needed was a comprehensive series of collective post-traumatic counseling sessions, and not a spiteful, revanchist state. Great Britain and the US have done the Zionists a great disservice by merely enabling the latter's collective sociopathy.

1 Reply

@spendius,

spendius wrote:

First off George I might ask you to consider the likely outcome of dealing with the Hashemites in a non duplicitous fashion.
And the mistreatment of Jews goes back a very long way and our policy was an attempt to right that wrong. I think your use of "duplicitous" is a result of idealism and not of real politik and unworthy of a gallant officer of the greatest navy the world has ever seen. Steering a carrier onto a sandbank off East Africa notwithstanding.

Yes and your "attempt to right a wrong" involved giving away a land you did not posess and could not control. From Palestine to Iran and Pakistan, the world is still dealing with the aftereffects of British Imperialism and in particular the greedy and idiotic destruction of the Ottoman Empire which was one of the primary war aims of Britain & France in 1914.

spendius wrote:

And it was no theory of mine that American Jews wished to limit the number of Jews coming to America. The fact that many did come to America says nothing about that.

How on earth could I come up with such an idea George?

I have no idea how you came up with it or where you read it. The Zionist ideal had appeal to Jews everywhere, and the Holocaust, coupled with European indifference after WWII, turned a minority movement among Jews into a national cause. That makes far more sense intuitively than your rather tortured theory.

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It breaks my heart to see Israel's stupidity

Quote:

It has a right to respond to attacks, but will not achieve its ultimate aim - peace - until it stops thinking in military terms

Michael Lerner

Israel's attempt to wipe out Hamas is understandable, but stupid. No country in the world is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from neighbouring territory day after day. If Mexico had a group of anti-imperialists bombing Texas, imagine how long it would take for America to mobilise a counterattack. Israel has every right to respond.

But the kind of response matters. Killing 500 Palestinians and wounding 2,000 others (at the time of writing) is disproportionate. Hamas can harass, but it cannot pose any threat to the existence of Israel. And just as Hamas's indiscriminate bombing of population centres is a crime against humanity, so is Israel's killing of civilians (at least 130 so far in Gaza, not to mention the thousands in the years of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza).

Hamas had respected the previously negotiated ceasefire except when Israel used it as cover to make assassination raids. Hamas argued that these raids were hardly a manifestation of a ceasefire, and so as symbolic protest it would allow the release of rocket fire (usually hitting no targets). But when the issue of continuing the ceasefire came up, Hamas wanted a guarantee that these assassination raids would stop. And it asked for more. With hundreds of thousands of Palestinians facing acute malnutrition, Hamas insists that the borders be opened so that food can arrive unimpeded. And in return for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, it asks for the release of 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.

Hamas has made it clear that it would accept the terms of the Saudi Arabian peace agreement, though it would never formally recognise Israel. It would live peacefully in a two-state arrangement, but it would never acknowledge Israel's “right to exist”. This position is unnecessarily provocative, and is deeply self-destructive for Palestinians who believe it is the only symbolic weapon they have left.

How do we get out of this destructive spiral? The first step is for the world to demand an immediate ceasefire. That ceasefire should be imposed by the United Nations and backed unequivocally by America. Its terms must include the following:

" Hamas stops all firing of missiles, bombs or any other violent action originating from the West Bank or Gaza, and co-operates in actively jailing anyone from any faction that breaks this ceasefire.

" Israel stops all bombing, targeted assassinations or any other violent actions aimed at activists, militants, or suspected terrorists in the West Bank or Gaza, and uses the full force of its army to prevent any further attacks on Palestinians.

" Israel opens the border with Gaza and allows free access to and from Israel, subject only to full search and seizure of any weapons. Israel allows free travel of food, gas, electricity, water and consumer goods and materials including from land, air, and sea, subject only to full search and seizure of any weapons or materials typically used for weapons.

" Israel releases all Palestinians in detention and returns them to the West Bank or Gaza according to the choice of the detainees or prisoners. Hamas releases Gilad Schalit and anyone else being held by Palestinian forces.

" Both sides invite an international force to implement these agreements

" Both sides agree to end teaching and/or advocacy of violence against the other side in and outside mosques, educational institutions, and the media.

" This ceasefire would last for 20 years. Nato, the UN, and the US all agree to enforce this agreement and impose severe sanctions in the event of any violations.

These steps would make a huge difference, isolate the most radical members of each side from the mainstream, and make it possible to then begin negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a broader and deeper set of issues.

The basic condition for creating peace is to help each side feel “safe”. A first and critical step is to speak in a language that is empathic toward the suffering of each people in a climate of discourse in which both sides' stories are heard and understood.

Yet Israel, as the militarily superior power, ought to take the first steps: implementing a massive Marshall Plan in Gaza and in the West Bank to end poverty and unemployment, rebuild infrastructure and encourage investment; dismantle the settlements or make settlers become citizens of a Palestinian state; accept 30,000 Palestinian refugees annually back into Israel for the next 30 years, apologise for its role in the 1948 expulsions and offer to co-ordinate a worldwide compensation effort for all that Palestinians lost during the Occupation; and recognise a Palestinian state within borders already defined by the Geneva Accord of 2003.

This is the only way Israel will ever achieve security. It is the only way to permanently defeat Hamas and all extremists who wish to see endless war against Israel.

The most significant contribution the new Obama administration could make to Middle East peace would be to embrace a strategy that homeland security is best achieved not by military or economic domination but by generosity and caring for others. If this new way of thinking could become a serious part of US policy, it would have an immense impact on undermining the fearful consciousness of Israelis who still see the world more through the frame of the Holocaust and previous persecutions than through the frame of their actual present power in the world.

It breaks my heart to see the terrible suffering in Gaza and in Israel. As a religious Jew I find it all the worse, because it confirms to me how easy it is to pervert the loving message of Judaism into a message of hatred and domination. I remain in mourning for the Jewish people, for Israel and for the world.

This article is pretty balanced and leaves out a lot of rhetoric and just deals with the here and now problem facing Gaza/Palestine and Israel.

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Let' s see, Israel should release all Pal prisoners, including mass murderers, in return for one Israeli soldier kidnapped from Israeli territory. Some bargain!

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The Israeli military is doing an outstanding job of eradicating HAMAS from GAZA.

Bravo Israel!!

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@H2O MAN,

The victory was never in doubt considering the overwhelming weaponry Israel has compared to Hamas. Nevertheless at the end of the day, all Israel will succeed in doing is further breaking the people in Gaza. Hamas will be temporarily set back, but have no doubt; they will simply regroup and live to fight another day. All they have to do is survive and unless Israel drops a nuclear weapon on Gaza and totally wipe out the whole place, they can survive; though they will be set back and broken. This is why military solutions will never work, either for Palestine or Israel.

1 Reply

@InfraBlue,

First, let us broach the thought that Zionism reflecting an ethnocentric state might really be a straw man, since I believe it might be high time for the world to realize the old paradigm, as to who gets to have a state, may be obsolete.

Here is the thought: historically, those that could claim a long ethnic heritage to a piece of land could claim it was their land. Now remembering that this planet has a finite amount of habitable land, with an ever increasing population, that paradigm might be obsolete. To replace it, the world, if it wanted to be truly effective as a civilization, would say only the non-wasteful land dwellers have the moral right to a nation state. So, by those standards, the U.S., western Europe and other "western" and some Asian countries have all the rights to their nationhood. And, there are countries and peoples that do not add to the world's productive civilization, either through agrarian means, commerce or technology to be productive enough to warrant a nation state.

Now let us remember that Palestine, under the Ottoman Empire, was virtually a back-alley in the Arab world. Yes, there were always Jews and Arab Muslims that lived there, but it looked very much like what Jesus and his followers saw two-thousand years ago. Then in the late nineteenth century along came the early Zionists, buying land from the Ottoman Empire, so they could start collective farms as part of that Zionist dream. Suddenly, the land that was bought was irrigated, and sprouted farm products. Any land the Zionists got became productive, as opposed to much of the land that had been left fallow.

O.K., let us fast forward past WWI and WWII and we see that this little corner of the world is a good place to put the survivors of the Holocaust, considering WWI eliminated the old owners of Palestine, and the British, as victorious in WWII could engineer the placing of these non-English speaking "displaced people" into this historical place that for Jews seemed to have a nostalgic value in their religion.

I believe, in reality, even if the neighboring Arab states did not attack Israel in 1948, it was a set-up from the beginning for the Jews to "not really" have a "homeland," since from day one of the fledgling state, the Arab fecundity was greater than the Jews' fecundity. It would only have been a matter of time when the Arab Israelis outnumbered the Jewish Israelis. So, I believe as Israel saw, in the last 60 years, that many in Europe were quite content in their post-Christain mindset, it was only natural to also see that there was a European distaste by many for anything that smacked of prior religiousity. I believe that is when Israel realized a Zionist state was needed, since the world (unfortunately) did not think like the U.S. and a few other countries, and Jews needed a homeland.

What I am saying is Gentile heal thyself, before any claiming that Israel is this or that. If Israel today "is this or that" it is specifically because of the historical and current behavior of the western Gentile, not the Middle Eastern Muslim that makes a Jewish homeland necessary, I believe.

And, just getting back to the paradigm as to who gets to have a nation state, Israel qualifies, based on turning Tel Aviv into a Middle Eastern Los Angeles of sorts, and being quite productive.

What is annoying to me is that some of the people in Gaza can work in Israel, rather than direct their energies to building an economy of their own. What is the matter with the people there, that they are willing to work for Israelis, yet want an independent state?

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@Advocate,

Advocate wrote:

Let' s see, Israel should release all Pal prisoners, including mass murderers, in return for one Israeli soldier kidnapped from Israeli territory. Some bargain!

What has Israeli intransigence gotten them so far? How long would Israel last without the implicit U.S. guarantee of protection? How long will U.S. willingness to live with this millstone around our necks continue? Do Zionists really believe they can build a state guaranteeing lasting peace and security for Jews on the backs of the Palestinians they have displaced and oppressed?

2 Replies

THE WAR IN GAZA

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