ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

I wish I knew the answer. But your solution is a nonstarter.

Take a look at the clash between Fatah and Hamas. There were about six negotiated cease fires. Each lasted about a day. How long would an Arab promise to live in peace with an Israel last? Not long!

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Advocate wrote:

I wish I knew the answer. But your solution is a nonstarter.

Take a look at the clash between Fatah and Hamas. There were about six negotiated cease fires. Each lasted about a day. How long would an Arab promise to live in peace with an Israel last? Not long!

Depends on what the non-Israeli palestinian arabs want most. Do they want most the same privileges possessed by the Israeli palestinian arabs? Or, do they want most to terminate Israel so they can more effectively fight among themselves?

I'd bet on the former because I do not buy the notion that the non-Israeli palestinian arabs are politically monolithic with Fatah or Hamas. If I actually thought they were so politically monolithic, then I would advocate their extermination.

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ican711nm wrote:

George, you allege: "we have nothing whatever to gain in the outcome."

I think that depends on the nature of the outcome.

Peace and civility in Israel could lead to peace and civility in the Middle East. If so, we could gain our own peace and civility from that.

Of course we could pretend to already have our own peace and civility if we would only pretend what happens in the rest of the world will not affect our peace and civility.

Interesting point. However we have a confrontation with a backward and maladjusted (to the modern world) Moslem world, with or without Israel. It is a result of a combination of internal backwardness (no Enlightenment); external exploitation (British & French colonialism); and betrayals by the West (The overthrow of the Ottoman Empire, conflicting promises to Zionists and Arabs, and the betrayals of both at Versailles).

The dispute with Israel only makes our problem with Islam worse and more intractable. Our unconditional support for Israel has removed any incentive for them to find a mutually acceptable accomodation - or even the evolution toards one - with their Moslem neighbors and the unfortunate people they have displaced.

Israel demands that her Islamic neighbors, and the population they have displaced, first accept unconditionally the existence of an exclusively Jewish state - one that gives only second class status to any Arabs who might live there - on land that as once theirs, all as a precondition to any movement towards accomodation. In effect they ask for an Arab surrender before the discussion begins. The Arabs are far from exhaustion - indeed they calculate that time is on their side. Thus the struggle continues, and with no end in sight. There is nothing underay that might eventually bring the peace and civility you cite. Indeed the opposite is occurring.

What is worse, for us the stakes, intensity and immediacy of the overall western confrontation with Islam grow considerably.

Thus Israel is less the vehicle through which the Western and Islamic worlds might find accomodation and far more the fuse that may well detonate the whole thing.

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The Pal Israelis are first-class citizens. The only restriction is that they are not trusted to serve in the military. Big deal!

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Advocate wrote:

The Pal Israelis are first-class citizens. The only restriction is that they are not trusted to serve in the military. Big deal!

You don't do irony, eh?

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Advocate wrote:

The Pal Israelis are first-class citizens. The only restriction is that they are not trusted to serve in the military. Big deal!

Unfortunately it is a big deal to us who are the unwitting underwriters of anything Israel chooses to do. Defense of Israeli security was one of the central motivations of the neocons (as they are called by their opponents) who designed our Iraqi strategy. The two matters are intimately entwined in our national policy.

Interestingly this will be of many profound and prominent contradictions that the Democrat party will face in the coming political season.

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Well worth reposting.

georgeob1 wrote:

Thus Israel is less the vehicle through which the Western and Islamic worlds might find accomodation and far more the fuse that may well detonate the whole thing.

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Advocate wrote:

The Pal Israelis are first-class citizens. The only restriction is that they are not trusted to serve in the military. Big deal!

I don't think the issue is one of trust, and I could be wrong, but I don't think the policy is to exclude Arabs from military service. The way I understand it is that the Arab Israeli citizens are not required to submit to military service as a courtesy so that they are not required to fight against their own kin, group, tribe, whatever--it is only neighboring Arab countries who are trying to destroy Israel and many Israeli Arab citizens immigrated from those countries. But if people of Arab descent want to join the military, I believe they can do so.

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I believe that you are wrong in this. The IDF is a pervasive organization in Israel. Nearly everyone serves in it and later in the reserves. It is the dominant unifying organization in the country, and service in it is the first step in the professional development of someone with ambitions in the business or professioanl worlds. Moslem Arabs are not admitted.

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Who are trying to kill Jews? Arabs.

Is it all Arabs? Not even close. Is it some Arabs? Yep.

How do you tell a Jew hating Arab from a non-Jew hating Arab?

I have no idea either. Until one can find a way to tell that difference, probably best to keep your enemy out of your own army.

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George ob1 writes

Quote:

Thus Israel is less the vehicle through which the Western and Islamic worlds might find accomodation and far more the fuse that may well detonate the whole thing.

I think Israel would very much like to not be the fuse. But the only way that their neighbors will allow them not to be a fuse is for Israel to stop being Israel. I accept that you think there is no need for a country which Jews can go to be Jews. I think your argument was that the Jews are running out of Jews who need refuge even as we both know that most Jews live in places other than Israel. And yet several thousand Jews recently immigrated to Israel from South America when conditions became intolerable for them there. Fortunes for many peoples of the world are constantly shifting, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

I don't know what the answers are for Israel. I know you see Israel as the enemy in the Middle East or, if I am mischaracterizing you there, you have given that impression by virtue of your harsh criticism of Israel while seeming to direct no such criticism to those who would destroy Israel.

I see Israel as not the same as the United States, but a shining beacon of democratic principles, human rights, prosperity, and opportunity among countries that are almost 100% backward by comparison. And I see a tiny little country that is but a speck in a much larger area and wonder how it can be such a problem and focus of such hatred from the peoples who surround it.

You seem to say that it must afford unrestricted access to the Palestinians in order to survive. I see no way it can survive if it affords unrestricted access to those pledged to destroy it. This is the dichotomy that keeps the two sides talking past each other and unable, if not unwilling, to seek a solution.

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ehBeth wrote:

Well worth reposting.

georgeob1 wrote:
Thus Israel is less the vehicle through which the Western and Islamic worlds might find accomodation and far more the fuse that may well detonate the whole thing.

Agree. And the tragedy is that Jerusalem could be that accommodation between the three great monotheistic faiths. But it never will be whilst militant zionists press on with their project to carve out a specifically Jewish state in the heart of the middle east.

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Israel is the most accommodating of all three great faiths (as well as a few others) of all Middle East nations, but they are the only one criticized for bigotry. Why is that do you think?

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Because they steal land and kill innocent women and children.

Because they believe the land was given to them by God and they mean to take it back one way or another.

Other than that I don't understand either.

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xingu wrote:

Because they steal land and kill innocent women and children.

Because they believe the land was given to them by God and they mean to take it back one way or another.

Other than that I don't understand either.

You must be a bigot.

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Foxfyre wrote:

Israel is the most accommodating of all three great faiths (as well as a few others) of all Middle East nations, but they are the only one criticized for bigotry. Why is that do you think?

I'm not sure if I understand the question. There is no shortage of disgusting racism in the Arab press.

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The only land Israel has taken is Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights all from which they were being attacked without provocation. Most of that land they have relinquished or offered to relinquish in return for concessions from those who would destroy Israel. All their enemies will happily appropriate the land occupied by Israel the first chance they get.

Israel does not target women and children as a matter of policy. Their enemies do.

So tell me again why it is only Israel who is the target for criticism?

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It isnt "only Israel" which is the target for criticism.

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Israel seems to be the only country expected (required) to change with the unspoken but implied result that this will solve all our problems in the Middle East.

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And true, the United States receives as much criticism as Israel. But not those who murder women and children as a matter of policy.

Strange world we live in these days.

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ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

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