Can the US bring peace in the Middle East?

I was looking at the situation as it is now.
Understand that some characterize Sharon as a terrorist.

I characterize those committing terrorist bombings as the terrorists, and I see Israel as retaliating. Realize opinions vary widely.

Isreal's wrongs often have nothing to do with "protecting their own people".

Their wrongs are in stealing land that is not theirs and acting in a way that deliberately postpones a settlement.

The pretext for the sequentialism is to protect their people. The pretext for stealing land is that God gave it to them or that they are too small and need more land to "protect" themselves.

Again, your view of Isreal is inordinately rosy. Do you see any wrongs on their part?

One needs to understand that Sharon is also considered a "terrorist." c.i.

Craven--
You may be on to something.
I was filling my lungs for a high-pitched scream, reading your plan, until I came to-- "and don't let anyone in until negotiations are completed."

The territories are a foregone conclusion in the Roadmap. It would put the onus on the Pal leadership to claim it for their people.....unless I am right, and the violence would not stop even after the withdrawal.

But, this gesture--leaving the Palestinian territory--should be enough to show the world who wants peace.

Sharon has been carrot and stickin' it--and getting nowhere. Of course, such a huge gesture would spell the end of him--possibly completely, certainly politically.

Wish he would do something this big.

I give up posts mysteriously disappear and reappear and than disappear again.

Can you summarize? I have no problem reading a long post from you but am no fan of copy and paste debate.

I would guess that the Bush peace plan, being under development as it is, is moving towards the goal of killing everyone. No people, no problems.

You know, Sofia, to the Brits in 1948, people like Begin and Sharon were terrorists--blowing up the King David hotel didn't exactly polish their reputations. Please consider that it is possible to paint everyone in this ugly embroglio in a pretty harsh light . . .

Call me hardheaded-- but I think there is something inherently WRONG with negotiating with terrorists.

I agree. It seems to reward them and such.

But l also think that it is inherently wrong to not pursue the plan that gives the greatest chance for peace.

And my take is that in the mid east the situation has degenerated so much that it is inevitable that you'd have to draw the line somewhere and eventually negotiate with terrorists and those who support it.

Think about this. In America what level of complicity with such militants makes you define the individual as having supported terror.

Then think about how many of the Palestinian population would fall under that criteria.

Isreal routinely targets people who are symbolic of the attacks while often not participating in the attacks themselves.

Ultimately someone will realize you can't kill or jail them all and the ones willing to stop fighting might be worth pursuading to do so. Even if you plan to later crack down on them.

Another factor that leads me to my conclusion is to watch as every single time prograss has been made that an attack on the Palestinian side sets the peace process back. And then I see Isreal retaliate, every now and then they mess up and kill innocent people, and this sets thing back even further.

Regardless of what Isreal's motives may be the sad fact is that in the escalating conflict Isreal has killed many innocent people and to the Palestinians this somehow validates their killing of innocent Isrealis (I recognize the distinction between targeting civilians and killing them accidentally by using undue force while a combatant is targeted but most Palestinians do not).

Isreal exacerbates this by this very method of assasinations / "targeted killings" that I bemoan. I have nothing positive to say about the people Isreal targets. They are often very bad people. Yet I still have a qualm with Isreal's choice of targets. First of all, the immediate retaliation to make a point has strong arguments in it's favor but little in the mid east conflict to show it has worked.

Killing what Isreal likes to call "masterminds" (this sometimes is used flexibly to include spokespeople) I think starts to become tricky. Some of them are not obviously terrorists to the Palestinian mind. The methods used are also often not the wisest.

In this latest attack Isreal attacked a car in a busy area. The target of the attack fled the car before teh car was even hit. The helicopter proceeded to lauch multiple shots at the car (over 5 if I remember correctly).

Here is an account of the attack:



We are always asked to think about what our response in America would be to terrorist attacks of the variety that the Isrealis suffer but would we also not question the tactics of sending hellicopters in to make an arrest? I do not fault Isreal for the genuine mistakes they make in these assasination so much as I do the decision to use this method at all.

I recognize that arresting Palestinian militants is not the same as arresting a New york City drug dealer but the reaction to killing 50 year old women and inncocent bystanders by using helicopters and missles to pursue an outlaw in dense streets is probably not going to be positive in either nation.



Here is the article:

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/162/nation/Israeli_strike_targets_key_Hamas_figure+.shtml

And the situation has degenerated. There have now been retaliatory missle attacks on Isreal to which Isreal responded with retaliatory killings and a horrible bombing.

I think the US administration was right in saying that the Israeli attack did not help their security goals.

Behind statements like "We will make no concessions to terror" (Sharon, yesterday) and the Palestinian refusal to "sell their homeland" the peace process is stalled. Every time EITHER side attacks we see the peace process posponed.

Some advocate sequentialism. We wait for the violence to end before anything is settled. The Palestinians see this as "stop crying before I stop spanking" and others see it as a way that would draw out the conflict.

We ahve seen Isreals steadfast refusal to "not negotiate with terror" and to punish it harshly but what we have yet to see is that peace is acheived this way.

I favor parallelism. Isreal should not need the Palestinians to stop attacking to remove the settlements that are attempting to take Palestinian land. Removal of settlements is where Isreal is complying with what they are already wrong in. It is also not impossible given that the majority (by a slim margin0 of the israelis now support removing the settlements.

The Palestinians need to stop their terror attacks but little indicates that anyone, not the palestinians, not Isreal or anyone can stop all the attacks.

While we are working on this difficult task of stopping the attacks I think it would be wise to take other steps that are possible. Many of those steps are on Isreal's part. And I do not care about who is more to blame so much as simply taking every step possible to deescalate.

Sealing the border would have a very negative effect on Palestinian lives but it shoudl be done while the negotiations continue. IMO it will be easier to crack down on terror once a portion of the Palestinians ahve already made peace with Isreal than it is to do so without the initial base of Palestinians who gave up the intifada.

It's a nice notion to revange every attack but this has show itself to be a vicious cycle and every attack prolongs the conflict.

People say that this side or that side has tried peace so many times and on and on.

Well have they? Have they ever reached the "final settlement" only to see it break down?

Not yet, before an agreement is postponed I think they should try reaching it first and then see what happens.

[satire]I don't think you need a Holocaust to fear rounding up. After all Arabs have not had a Holocaust yet they still do not like the idea of Israeli military announcing that all men need to step out of their houses then blindfolding them and taking them away. I bet Arabs too, still without a Holocaust, wish that Isreal would call in these helicopter attacks. The occasional old lady or baby that it kills would have had a chance to be warned away and such[/satire]

The "satire" was factual. Except in that occasionally Isreal still calls it in (especially in the cases in which they do not have a person to target in retaliation so they target a building, it might be a police station or something so they call it in, the Police will flee and the building will be bombed).

Questionable tactics abound in the mid east.

What do you mean?

Jun. 10, 2003
Middle East history for dummies, By Shmuel Katz


There is much talk of illegal occupation in this land. But the only illegal occupation of Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley in modern times was effected by Transjordan. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918 Britain was granted a Mandate by the League of Nations in 1922 as a trustee for the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home. This was the modern charter for the development of sovereignty for the Jewish people in its ancient homeland. When, in 1947, the United Nations (successor to the League of Nations) recommended the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab thereby gifting the Arabs with a part of the Jewish heritage the Jews consented, but the League of Arab States declared that it would not "allow the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine." Consequently, in May 1948, the British having abandoned the Mandate, the Arab states launched their war for the annihilation of the infant Jewish state. They did not achieve the destruction of Israel, but Transjordan succeeded in capturing Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley, while Egypt captured the Gaza Strip. Transjordan went on to "annex" the captured territories and was henceforth renamed "Jordan." Jordan's rule lasted 19 years. Never during these years did the Arabs living in the annexed areas protest against the occupation, let alone rise up, declare themselves a separate nation or demand the territories for themselves. They peacefully accepted Jordanian citizenship. True, after 16 years, the PLO was established in 1964 and carried out a number of terrorist acts not against Jordan and its occupation but against Israel inside the narrow waist of the armistice lines of 1949. THE LEADERS of the Arab League, whose original purpose in 1948 to destroy Israel had been frustrated, decided in 1967 to try again. A charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had come to power in Egypt, and, having decided that the Arabs' strength was now "sufficient" (as he said in a speech), he led the pan-Arab campaign for a new war. In May he took practical preliminary steps. He demanded that the UN Peace Observer team be removed from Sinai which was done; and he closed the Tiran Straits, Israel's only gateway to the south and the east. While concentrating his armed forces in Sinai, Nasser delivered a series of belligerent speeches describing the lethal aim of the impending war. On May 25, Cairo radio announced to the world: "The Arab people is firmly resolved to wipe Israel off the map." And on May 30, Nasser declared: "The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are stationed on the borders of Israel. Behind them stand the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole of the Arab nation." Cheering crowds in the Arab capitals greeted the promise that Israel's end was nigh. The effect of this preparatory campaign was tremendous. Abba Eban, Israel's foreign minister, subsequently described in detail the international armament ready to attack Israel on three fronts: "The greatest force ever assembled in that peninsula in all its history." "Nobody who lived through those days in Israel," said Eban at the UN some days after the war, " will ever forget the air of doom that hovered over our country. "Hemmed in by hostile armies ready to strike, affronted and beset by a flagrant act of war, bombarded day and night by predictions of her approaching extinction, forced into a total mobilization of all her manpower, her main supplies of vital fuel choked by a belligerent act, Israel faced the greatest peril of her existence that she had known since her resistance against aggression 19 years before at the hour of her birth A crushing siege bore down upon us." Fear gripped the Diaspora. The notion of an assault on tiny Israel by the massed forces of the Arab nations was overwhelming. Young men rushed to get places on planes to Israel. In synagogues Jews gathered to pray for Israel's security. In Israel old men, women and children dug trenches in the parks and open spaces of the cities; hospitals were emptied of all but urgent cases in preparation for thousands of casualties. Then, in six days, the Israeli forces won a great victory. In part of that victory Judea and Samaria, the Jordan Valley and the Gaza Strip were liberated from their Jordanian and Egyptian occupation. The stunning victory was followed by an equally stunning offer by Israel to hand back the liberated territories to the Arabs in return for peace. The Arabs refused categorically. From a conference at Khartoum, they announced that there would be no peace, no negotiations and no recognition of Israel. It was then, in the early seventies, that Jews came to live and build their homes in the wide acres of Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip and the Golan. They are the "settlers" who have written a new and heroic chapter in the Zionist imperative of building the land; and their living where they are living is as legal and as natural as President George W. Bush living in Texas and Prime Minister Tony Blair in England. THE MAKERS of the road map tried to impose a deleterious policy on Israel and evidently, to our shame, succeeded without any discussion, precisely because they did not want to discuss the central historical facts facts that expose the grotesque Arab fabrications on which rests the policy underlying the road map. First, that the current "dispute" between Israel and the Arabs began with murderous Arab terror in the 1920s and 1930s; that deliberate Arab military aggression brought on the war of 1948, and Arab terror continued during the decades that followed.
Throughout this whole period there were no "settlers" in Judea and Samaria or Gaza; and when the Six Day War, which the Arabs pretend did not happen, was launched, there were no "settlers." The worldwide tumult about settlers being responsible for the conflict is simply a reflection of the grand hopes of the Arabs to evade responsibility for their lethal designs on Israel. The mapmakers are thus collaborating in trying to make the hoax work.
Secondly, the Arabs have demonstrated, admit even boast and teach their children that they mean to get rid of Israel and that killing Jews is a virtue, a mitzva. Once you ignore these damning facts you can construct any scenario you like. And if the scenario is conceived by a consortium of veteran friends of the Arabs (like Britain, other Europeans and the US State Department) and the UN, which harbors dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semites (see Durban), plus Saudi Arabia, then you are not creating a vision of peace but of the next war; a repetition, as the Arabs see it, of 1948. The alternative may simply be a continuation of terror against Israel from behind the protective wall of the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.
THE ARABS have made it clear that the state they are now demanding represents the penultimate phase so often referred to by Arafat in the struggle for Israel's destruction. It's a state they could have had in 1947, under the UN Partition plan. They could surely have had a state when Israel offered to give back Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip in return for peace after the Six Day War. Their contemptuous rejection of the offer was an open declaration that peace with Israel was not their objective. The propaganda against Israel in the Arab world, indeed within the Muslim world, has since that time become more strident and more specific. In the mosques, on the streets and in the schoolrooms they do not call for a state on the "West Bank," they call for a Palestinian State "from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea." Why do they prefer to fight and kill (and die) in order to gain sovereign possession of this sliver of Jewish territory?The answer seems to be that they cannot tolerate the idea that the Jews who lived in Muslim lands as third-class citizens are now treated as equals in human society. That is why the Arabs, when they have been defeated in war by Israel, insist that it is England or America that fought the war for them. If the present policy of pressure on Israel while the Arabs are cheering is pressed to the end, the Bush vision will prove empty and the road map a lie.
And there will still be no peace

Your point is taken about collateral damage by Israel.

And, your plan of action for Sharon is bold and smart. I agree it is a great idea--

Please e-mail Sharon.

Why doesn't Israel ever use covert ops, instead of all the helicopters? I know they have spies... They must be capable of cleaner targetting. Hell, they have enough money.

<Craven--Your post of 6:00am--one of the best I've read on the subject. Even-handed, logically persuasive, explanatory, thoughtful. I appreciated what you put into it.>

Thank you.

Incidentally the covert ops is something I wish would be employed more but I also have a qualm with IDF covert ops and their methods.

The assasination I bemoan the most happened on Jan 14 2002 in which the IDF planted explosives in a narrow street and killed Ra'ad Karmi.

There were no innocents killed and he wasn't a great guy or anything but the circumstances made me angry. It was IMO the worst example of IDF timing ever.

Isreal had tried to kill him in September of 2001 by attacking him in his car but killed two other people instead.

The reason I still remember every detail of this assasination was because Sharon had demanded a stipulated period of "calm" before negotiations.

Arafat made statements condemning terror and the Palestinian militant groups agreed to hold off.

There was a huge lull, over a month (this is long considering it was at the height of the intifada. Isreal chose a time in which they were under pressure to negotiate (because their demand for a time of calm, a cessation of terror was being complied with) to assasinate the guy.

They planted a bomb in a cemetery wall and got the guy as he was walking alone. The questions beg to be asked.

A) why in the middle of a lull that could have been capitalized on? The effect of this assasination I will document shortly.

B) why the James Bond assasination? Why not pick him up if you have cased him that well and he is alone?




After this assasination the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades could be noted in a change in their tactics. They shifted from targeting settlers and Israeli Military within their territories to suicide bombings of innocent Israeli civilians inside of Isreal.

While this type of attack was not unheard of beforehand a trend can be noted where it starts after the assasination of Ra'ad Karmi.

I think Isreals tactics have been very foolhardy at times. And the argument to not negotiate with terrorism is one of the most influential. I credit it as having a great deal of responsibility for extending the conflict.

It traps the process into a vicious cycle.

Craven


Exaggeration yes, complete bull I don't think so.

Au,

I have read what you call the "history" of Isreal. I consider it to be a biased editorial and have two questions for you.

Do you agree with the article you posted in that Isreal has never illegally occupied any land?

If your point of view is the same as the writer of the article then there is no point in discussing this with you. Just as I'd not like to waste my time discussing the finer points of the mideast conflict with a Palestinian terrorist I also do not want to waste my time on discussions with biased Zionists who try to paint Isreal as perfect.

The article you posted has many items that I'd easily contest. I will not, however, waste my time if you are indeed as biased as the article you posted.

So, did the Israelis ever illegally occupy land?

Is the US State Department "veteran friends of the Arabs"?

au, I can't say it's invalid without seeing both sides of the issue. c.i.

I have not read every single post in this thread. Forgive if I do not fit in the flow of the conversation. I have long been of the opinion that every time there is measurable movement toward peace, the Arabs and Jews both act to thwart the process. That is why they can all agree to the roadmap and make observers temporarily happy; they know nothing's going to come of it beyond scoring a few points with the public and press.

And now to take a really bad situation and make it worse:
(Reuters) - A leading Republican lawmaker said on Sunday U.S. forces may have to help "root out terrorism" in the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, including taking aim at Hamas. In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Sen. Richard Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said American forces might be part of an international force to help stop attacks by Hamas, the main group behind a campaign of suicide bombings against Israelis, and other groups. Hamas has said it would reject any peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority