Israel's Shame

In your analogy you're conflating nations with peoples. The people have rights to their houses that nations must honor.

As I had said you and others are living in fantasy land if you think that the current land arrangements of the nation of Israel is going to be change by force anymore then the Mexico Army is going to take back the US south west by force.

In fact the unbalance of power between the US and Mexico is not as great as the unbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians.

No one inhabits that fantasyland, Bill. Thinking people, compassionate people, people with a sense of morality simply question how people like you can so wholly support genocide.

But it is odd how so many USians get their panties in a twist over this but USA genocidal actions seem not to phase them at all.

Wrong as nations sometime honor and sometime does not honor such claims as the US did not in fact honor all land claims after we took over the southwest and that is par for the course.

With special note of the percent of the population that fled and did not stay in place.

You're still an idiot; you don't know the history of Israel.

An you are an anti-semite that can cheerfully support the launching of hundreds going onto thousands of missiles with 600 hundred pound warheads with ball bearings around the warheads and are trying to picture the actions of pure self defense as a moral sin.

Does Bill know the history of Israel as poorly as y'all know the history if the USA, CI?

BillRM has a very primitive mind as is evidenced by his garbled attempt at language. If you'd read many of his posts you'd know that compassion doesn't come into it, (unless you're a sex offender.) He cannot comprehend anyone feeling for fellow human beings suffering a brutal occupation. So his monochromatic mind switches to something he does understand, hate. He just assumes everyone critical of Israel hates Jews like he hates African Americans. Not only does he not want to know the truth of what's going on, he is incapable of understanding what's going on. He just sees the world in black and white.

Izzy, stop parading your ignorance.

This attempt to excuse or dismiss anything than disturbs or questions a position held with fanatic devotion by some is pretty common in this forum. We see it frequently in threads containing discussions of subjects that evoke passionate opinions like President Obama, abortion, or gun control. In this thread, and in the wider world, it’s the position that Israelis are the Very Bad Guys and Palestinians are the Very Good Guys, and so IDF efforts to provide advance warning to Palestinians residing in target building are dismissed entirely, the failure of Hamas to accept the Egyptian cease-fire proposal is blamed on a scheme cooked up by Sisi and Netanyahu, and hundreds of rockets being fired into populated areas is regarded as insignificant because the weapons are crude, home-made and not able to get past the Iron Dome with regularity. The heck with the intent of Hamas, the focus has to be on reporting the vastly disproportionate number of Palestinian casualties.

The Israelis have killed and injured more Palestinians than the reverse. which is not surprising considering the military superiority of Israel, but as usual the base numbers don't tell the whole tale.

First of all, casualty numbers in any conflict can range widely depending upon the source and while I wouldn't make the case that Israel doesn't have an incentive to manipulate the numbers, there is a high likelihood that statistics from Israeli sources are more accurate than those from Palestinian sources for two reasons:

1) Israel has a fully formed and well-functioning government with all the attendant bureaucracy necessary to collect accurate data. Obviously neither the PA as a whole, nor Hamas has the same degree of administrative capability.

2) Unlike the Palestinians, there is a robust segment of the Israeli establishment (press, academia etc.) that it is in opposition to their government's actions in this conflict, and they have the means, as well as the will to report casualty figures that they feel are more accurate than the government's.

Arguably, Hamas actually seeks civilian casualties among their own people (as demonstrated by their call/order for civilians to not respond to IDF warnings of impending air-strikes, by vacating targeted buildings), and it is clear that they view the reporting of these casualties in the world press as a major weapon in the very important propaganda battle. It would be truly naive to believe that they do not make a conscious effort to exaggerate these figures.

In any case, when we examine the statistics that are available we immediately find that there isn't as huge a discrepancy as the critics of Israel and the global press would have us believe. Various sources put the total number of casualties (Israeli and Palestinians) somewhere around 15,000 and 20,000 over a period of decades (with one source calculating the total death count over almost 100 years of conflict at 25,000). In itself this doesn't tell us anything about the division of casualties between Israelis and Palestinians, but it does provide us with the scope of a conflict many would have us believe is one of the most violent and bloody in the history of the region, if not the world. Surely one might be led to believe this by the passion and furor it evokes, and the amount of media, academic, and governmental attention it receives. In relative terms though, it is not, at all, large in scope.

Obviously it is a terrible thing for any number of people to die in a violent struggle, let alone thousands, but in comparison, over only several years the number of casualties in the Syrian civil conflict is reported to be between 112,000 and 175,000, and in a matter of several months, the death count in Rwanda in 1994 was estimated to be between 100,000 and 300,000. There are far bloodier, far more brutal conflicts going on in the world that receive far less attention, and generate far less passion than this one.

B’tselem (an Israeli NGO) and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs report that during the period of 1987 -2011, 9, 481 Palestinian and Israeli civilians have been killed due to the conflict. The report breaks this number down to 7,978 Palestinians and 1503 Israelis, however the Palestinian number includes 1,593 deaths attributed to intra- Palestinian violence. Remove the relatively sizeable number of Palestinians killed by other Palestinians , and the breakdown is 6,385 vs 1,503. This is a 4:1 ratio which certainly appears high on the face of it, but again context is important. During the Soviet/Afghan war, the ratio was 17:1 Afghan to Soviet (civilian and military casualties) and in the Iraq war it was 10:1 Iraqi military or insurgent to Us military (add in civilian casualties and it is much higher)

Accurate war casualty statistics are difficult to obtain and what are available don’t lend themselves to easy comparison. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is, of course much different than these other two wars as the conflict is being fought in the homelands of both opponents, and unlike in Afghanistan or Iraq, the civilians of the party with the stronger military have been at risk and have died.

According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs from Sept 2000 until the end of July 2007 69% of all Israeli casualties were civilian while 59% of Palestinian casualties were civilian. Based on these numbers if, the Israelis are targeting civilians, the Palestinians have been as well and more to a greater degree

While 20% of Palestinian civilian casualties were children under 18, 12% of Israeli “children” have died. A notable statistic in this regard is that of the Palestinian “children” who died, 87% were male. Hamas and the PLO have not imposed age limits on those who may join the fight and video of skirmishes between Palestinians and the IDF during the intifadas often showed Palestinian teenagers in the fray. The distinction between civilian and combatant and adult and “children” is not quite as clear on the Palestinian side as it is on Israel’s.

This is not to minimize the violence or the casualties in this conflict and none of these numbers show that the Israeli’s have suffered greater losses than the Palestinians; however they do not support the narrative of a massively disproportionate rate of casualties either in total or as regards civilians.

The Palestinians have been trying their damnedest to kill Israelis and the current rocket attacks as well as numerous prior suicide bombing and settlement raids indicate that they very definitely are targeting Israeli civilians. I suppose one can argue that given their lack of leverage against a powerful State this is the most effective strategy they could adopt, but too many of Israel’s critics would have us believe the Palestinians are a peaceful people being slaughtered by their oppressors. Once again, the position: Palestinians Very Good/Israelis Very Bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict#Criticism_of_casualty_statistics
http://israelipalestinian.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000639
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/casualtiestotal.html

You wrote,

You are so 'full of it,' it's amazing you can lie when there are statistics being kept by the jewishvirtuallibrary.org, an American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. You should be ashamed of spreading lies and rumors.

Jews/Israelis killed = 24,845
Arabs/Palestinians killed = 90,845

And the majority of those killed are from 1948 to 2006.



http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/casualtiestotal.html

The death tolls balance is beside the point as if you have a gang of ten people all trying to placed bombs into your home and you are able to killed all ten of them with not one of your family members being harm so what and good for you.

The deaths are the direct results of the ongoing attempts to kills Israels and the Israels defensing themselves from those attempts.

The power to bring this conflict to an end along with the deaths are only in the hands of the Palestinians leadership as in no rockets being launch there would be no counter bombing of the launching sites.

Somehow I do not think we [the US] would settle for just the stopping of massive rockets attacks from Mexico but would send in the forces needed to find those who was responsible for the attacks and either killed them or capture them for trials in our courts.

No, real statistics tells all we need to know. A country with the latest in war machines against the people who are being treated like shyt and using whatever is available to them is the real story behind the violence.

If my property was stolen like the Palestinians are being treated by the Zionists in Israel, and this so-called 'superior Zionist' race limits my freedoms, takes my water, and many of 'my' people are dying because of road blocks, I may use antique warfare to fight those who think they are god's gift to man too! Call me brazen.

Sorry my friend if someone was trying to killed me with a knife I am going to use at least my 357 to end the attack or perhaps even my 12 gauge shotgun. Fairness in the ability to kill between myself with a gun and my attacker with a knife is not the issue at all when it come to self defense.

Israel have every right in the world to used whatever forces is needed to keep their citizens safe from would be murderers launching 600 hundred pound warheads into their country.

If the Palestinian leadership wish to end the deaths of their citizens living on top of military targets such a missile launchers they can just stop their attacks.

We're not talking about self-defense, you idiot. We're talking about a situation where somebody takes your property, your water supply, your medicine, your job, your freedoms, and possibly a family or friend's life. You should understand this example, because Jews were exterminated by the millions during before and during WWII; all their rights were taken away.

You should visit Auswitz-Birkenau; you might remember some history where the Jews were the victims, and now the Palestinians are the victims of the Jews.

Almost every restriction on the Palestinian people was place there due to past actions of terrorism not for the joy of harming them.

Next the resources going into weapons and attempts to kill Jews or lining the pockets of their leadership to the tune of millions at least and perhaps billions could be better employ in my opinion in aiding the Palestinians people.

Given that their own leadership care so little for the welfare or even lives of the Palestinians their first step to selecting a better future is to change leadership and stop the attacks that gain them zero to date and is highly unlikely to do better for them in the future.

The Palestinian Authority has tried peaceful negotiations and that hasn't changed the current land arrangement of the nation of Israel either.

Sure, one thing is what nations must do, another thing is what they actually do. It doesn't change the fact that people have rights that nations must honor.

The population that fled has rights granted by various international resolutions to return that the state of Israel has violated since its inception.

Unfortunately the Palestinian version of peaceful negotiations involves trying to kill the children of the opposing negotiators.

Sorry but their own actions of random terrorist murders over decades had foreclose their rights to be trusted enough to be a citizens of a state that they to this day had pledge to destroy.

Maybe you would be willing to live under the same roof as someone who had killed some of your women and your children by way of suicide bombs and afterward had have neighborhood block parties to celebrates those killings but most sane people would not.

I am sure however those nations that had sign such international resolutions would take them in<not>.

The one nation that did in fact not only welcome them but who did take a large number of them in needed to paid one hell of a price in blood and treasure for being that stupid.