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

In the days before Israel's overwhelming retaliation, Hamas -- the anti-Israel terrorist sect and democratically elected majority party in Gaza -- harassed the towns bordering Gaza with missile attacks that made ordinary life impossible. It was a matter of chance that not one Israeli was killed by the missiles. Six days ago Israel launched its response: the first stage of a collective punishment which was six months in the making. Round-the-clock attacks by American-built F-16s and Apache helicopters targeted Hamas militants, and also hit the civic institutions of Gaza: a police school, an interior ministry, a president's guest house, a university. AFG Global Edition reported on December 30 that the first three days of the Israeli attacks saw 373 Palestinians killed (including 39 children) and 1720 wounded. Hamas fired into Israel more than 250 rockets and mortar shells. Four persons in Israel were killed and about two dozen wounded.

As American politicians have been careful to say, Hamas provoked the attack. But go back to the blockade of Gaza by air, land, and sea -- trace all the oppressions of the siege that after January 2006 turned this arid strip of land into a prison where fuel and electricity are non-existent and most ambulances do not run -- and cause and consequence become more complex. "Disproportion" hardly suggests the dimensions of the slaughter apparent in the unevenness of the two sets of figures above.

There is a word for the straightforward killing of enemies by a superior force where the victims are sparsely equipped and the odds one-sided. Much of the world is calling Israel's actions in Gaza a massacre. By contrast the American press has been cleansed and euphemized. "3rd Day of Bombings," said the New York Times headline on December 30, "Takes Out Interior Ministry." Takes out. The Times paid an involuntary homage to George W. Bush: "I think it's a good thing for the world that we took out Saddam Hussein." Under that phrase are half a million Iraqis killed and a country destroyed. And for Israel in Gaza?

The U.S. and Israel share many things. A form of government, it is sometimes said; a set of ideals. But much more in the past ten years the U.S. and Israel have shared a fantasy. The fantasy says that the Arabs understand only force. It says we can end terrorism by killing all the terrorists. The neighbors of the terrorists will be overawed. No new terrorists will be created. Finally, when every face on the president's fifty-two card deck is crossed out and the known composition of Hamas is dead, we can "address the social conditions" that foster terrorism. But perhaps there are no such conditions. Do the terrorists not hate for hate's sake?

You can see the shape of the fantasy most distinctly in the writings of those journalistic enablers who move into position as soon as either country starts a war that needs interpreting. "It was Israel at its best," writes Yossi Klein Halevy, a typical war broker, in a New Republic column posted on December 29. "In response to random attacks aimed at civilians, Israel launched precise attacks aimed at terrorists." Halevy does not add that the precise attacks killed almost 400 persons and that one death in every four was civilian.

Another war broker on Gaza has been David Brooks. In a column of January 29, 2006 entitled "The Long Transition," Brooks pointed out that democracy often leads to "bad choices." The people of Gaza, said Brooks, in electing the Hamas government had made a bad choice. This error he attributed to the "traumatic phase" in the gradual maturing of "a romantic, revolutionary people." It was the duty of America and Europe to teach the Palestinians to choose again until they choose right. The task was "to isolate Hamas" and devote our energies to "finding and fostering" an opposition to Hamas. The siege of Gaza, the rejection by Europe and America of the Palestine Unity Government, and the attempted insurrection in Gaza by Fatah thugs bankrolled by the same powers, might all be said to be pardoned in advance by such a salutary intent.

But a fantasy is no wilder than the methods it answers for; and Israel and the U.S. now hold as common property a whole school of counterinsurgency tactics. The citizen of Baghdad who said of the wall General Petraeus built to separate the good from the bad, "This reminds me of another wall," was only saying what many Arabs must have thought when they reflected on the "surge" in Iraq and its precursor in the West Bank. Israel has most often, these past few years, been the teacher and the United States the pupil. An article by Dexter Filkins in the New York Times on December 7, 2003 reported that the rules of engagement used by the U.S. in Iraq were modeled on the Israeli rules for Gaza and the West Bank. On the other hand, what is happening now in Gaza is plainly modeled on the American "shock and awe" in Iraq; it derives indirect permission from the fact that Americans never regretted that first stage of what we did to Iraq. Also, somewhere in back of the Israeli methods are usually American equipment and an American brand name. Apache helicopters and F-16s for the missiles and the bombs, and a Caterpillar bulldozer to reduce the house to rubble.

There is one art of peace that Israel might have learned from the United States: equal rights and citizenship for all the people of the country. But this, Israel has not learned, and in the nature of its constitution it cannot learn without a radical change of self-definition. The difference ought to be a fact of some interest to the first non-white president-elect of the United States; but the response of Barack Obama to the slaughter in Gaza has been a nerveless silence. "If somebody," he said last summer, "was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." He has left it at that, for now, and made no comment on Israel's showing this week of the scale of obliteration that lies in its power.

Obama would not in fact do everything, he would not destroy a city of innocent people. But one may note the resonance of "everything," a word that crept into his usage once before and revealingly, in his AIPAC speech. There, Obama said three times that he would do everything to assist Israel against a threat from a nuclear Iran. When Israel is on the minds and the Israel Lobby script is in the mouths of American politicians, every statement takes on a quality at once categorical and unreal.

... (more at the link)

I think I should introduce a note of sanity into this "discussion". It is clear the 60 year-old Zionist experiment has failed. And it cannot be made to succeed by spilling the blood of more Palestinian children. What we are seeing here is not the demise of Hamas or terrorism or aspirations of a free Palestine, but the death throws of a failed state. Israel is a failure.

Some claim the Palestinian territory was originally stolen from the Arabs. But that same land, was previously stolen by the Jews from non-Arabs more than two-thousand years ago. That same land was subsequently stolen from the Jews in the first century A.D. by the Romans. The Arabs stole that same land in the 7th century, and it was in turn stolen from the Arabs in the 11th century. Since then lots of folks have stolen that same land. However, that territory never again was stolen back by the Arabs or by the Jews.

In the 20th century (i.e., 1947) the British, who were the last to steal Palestinian land, gave it to the UN for the UN to figure out who should be given it next. The UN decided to give some of it back to the Arabs and some of it back to the Jews.

The Arabs tried in 1948 to steal what was previously given to the Jews by the UN, and failed at the price of the Jews stealing some of that land previously given to the Arabs by the UN. Subsequently, the Arabs have tried repeatedly to steal back that land stolen from them by the Jews plus that land given the Jews by the UN. The Arabs have failed each time they tried and had more of the land given them by the UN stolen from them as a result.

Come on you Arabs, stop trying to steal land from the Jews before you don't have any left of your own to be stolen. It's simple! All you Arabs have to do to get my support to be given back what was stolen from what the UN gave you, is grant Israel's right to exist in the land the UN gave Israel, and simultaneously stop trying to steal more than what the UN gave you!

If any nation A were attacked by another nation B, it sure would be prudent for the attacked nation A to counter attack and defeat the attacking nation B before the attacking nation B completes its buildup and conquers the attacked nation A.

If they want the land, fine, then they have to take the people who live on it. But they want one without the other because of an inherent contradiction in their founding principles. And that is the basis of the conflict.

PBS versus the Bible

The Bible says the Hebrews who escaped from Egypt invaded the Caananite's land and conquered some of it. Then many of the Caananites eventually assimilated with the Hebrews, or many of the Hebrews eventually assimilated with the Caananites. Subsequently these people became known as Jews.

Currently there are several thousand Arabs living, working, and voting in Israel.

I think there is too much discussion of ancient history. Israel has been a legitimate, independent, state for 60 years. It is a prosperous and successful multicultural nation that the Arab countries would do well to emulate.

Fund all the countries in the area equally, militarily. Why should the Palestinians have to fight with home made rockets.?

Advocate wrote:

I think there is too much discussion of ancient history. Israel has been a legitimate, independent, state for 60 years. It is a prosperous and successful multicultural nation that the Arab countries would do well to emulate.

Depends on what you mean by 'legitimate.' It certainly did not rise out of the self-determination of the citizens of the region; instead, it was constructed from whole cloth by Europe and the US in order to solve the problem of millions of Jewish refugees. A poor solution which has only led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands since that time.

Cycloptichorn