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

Geopolitical Consequences of the Lebanon War
Patrick Seale Al-Hayat - 18/08/06//

Who won and who lost? It would appear that the Tehran-Damascus-Hizballah axis has emerged more confident from the Lebanon War, while the United States and Israel look politically weaker, morally tarnished, and acutely vulnerable to guerrilla warfare.

Israel's war on Lebanon was not a 'just war.' The capture of two Israeli soldiers on 12 July -- which Hizballah hoped to exchange for Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails for nearly 30 years - cannot serve to justify the destruction of Lebanon.

Brutal, wanton and hugely disproportionate, the war was pre-planned with Washington. It was waged to destroy Hizballah and install in Beirut a government submissive to Israel and the United States. But it was also waged to weaken Hizballah's sponsors, Iran and Syria, and perhaps expose them to attack in turn. It has achieved the exact opposite.

An immediate consequence of the war has been to increase the stature of Hizballah and its charismatic leader, Hasan Nasrallah. Although its fighters must soon withdraw from the border areas -- as Israel moves out and the Lebanese army and a beefed up UNIFIL gradually move in -- it is highly unlikely that Hizballah, as an armed political movement, will be dismantled, or even disarmed - at least not in the near future. Israel has failed to do the job, and neither the Lebanese government nor any one else is willing or able to attempt it.

Hizballah's domestic opponents will seek to blame it for having provoked the massive damage to Lebanon's infrastructure and the killing of over one thousand civilians. A million refugees are now streaming home in deplorable conditions to their shattered towns and villages.

As the main representative of a community of some 1.4 million people, Hizballah is bound to play a major role in rebuilding southern Lebanon, the Biqaa valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut, devastated by Israeli bombardment.

Far from reining in Hizballah - as Israel and the United States demand -- the Shi'a community may now demand a greater say in the country's affairs. Lebanon's institutions may have to be adjusted to take account of the new realities of power.

Another consequence of the war is that it has sharply reduced the likelihood of an attack on Iran or Syria. Washington's neocons, like Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard and other such fanatics, continue to call stridently for the violent overthrow of the regimes in Damascus and Tehran, but neither Israel nor the United States would seem to have the stomach for it.

Before the Lebanon war, Iran may have hesitated about the wisdom of building a nuclear weapon. Today, it must surely be racing to acquire the deterrent capability which nuclear weapons can provide. In the aftermath of the Lebanon war, it is hard to see how, or by whom, Iran's nuclear programme could be interrupted, let alone ended.

The American press continues to speculate about an American strike to destroy Iran's facilities, but most experts rule out any such dangerous adventure. President George W Bush may be ignorant and stubborn, but he is not insane.

Yet another result of the war has been to bring Syria in from the cold. Politicians and commentators in the United States and Europe -- and even Israel's Defence Minister Amir Peretz - have remarked on the need to involve Syria in any permanent settlement of the region's conflicts.
The war has brought to international attention the two preconditions for a lasting peace in Lebanon. They are the return of the Golan to Syria and the recognition that Syria has a legitimate interest in preventing a hostile foreign power establishing its influence over Lebanon, as this would constitute an intolerable threat to Syria's national security.

President Bush and President Jacques Chirac of France have, for their different reasons, attempted to exclude Syria altogether from Lebanese affairs. Israel's foreign minister, Tsipi Livni, has followed suit, saying this week that 'Syria must understand that Lebanon is taking off…in a different direction without them.' These are vain hopes, contradicted by the situation on the ground. It is Israel that must keep out of Lebanese affairs, and stay out.

In Israel, the political class is absorbed by the search for a scapegoat for a war which has severely dented its reputation for military invincibility, as well as its deterrent capability. Israel has had a taste of what the U.S. is experiencing in Iraq.

There are other far reaching consequences, which may not yet be fully grasped by the Israeli public. What is the point of Israel's hugely expensive Separation Wall, which has been pronounced illegal by the International Court of Justice and is making Palestinians' lives a misery, if missiles can fly over it?

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's 'unilateralism' - inherited from Ariel Sharon but which he hoped to extend - is another victim of the conflict. The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, while maintaining Israel's cruel siege, has led to missile attacks on Israeli towns in the Negev. The attempt to destroy the democratically-elected Hamas government has led to something like war. Although some 200 Palestinians have been killed in the last six weeks, there is no sign that Hamas is ready to surrender. Meanwhile Olmert's so-called 'convergence plan' - a land grab on the West Bank without reference to, or negotiations with, the Palestinians - seems moribund.

Will the Olmert government fall? Will the debacle benefit the Right or the Left? Will the chief of staff, Air Force General Dan Halutz, be forced to go, as several Israeli commentators are demanding? In 34 days of war, his forces failed to stop Hizballah's rockets, while his vaunted air force was guilty of war crimes.

There is as yet no sign that Israel is ready to confront the real questions raised by the Lebanon war. Will it press on with its West Bank expansion and refuse to withdraw from the Golan, or will it be persuaded to negotiate with the Palestinians and Syria on the basis of the land-for-peace formula of Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967?

Will it seek to restore its absolute military superiority over the entire Arab region or will it accept some form of a balance of power -- or at least a balance of deterrence?

The answer to these questions will determine whether Israel can live in peace and security in the region or whether it will have to face a more or less permanent insurrection by its hapless neighbours.

The Western powers have made a dismal showing in the crisis. The United States is more hated and despised than ever before. By delaying a ceasefire for more than a month to allow Israel to 'finish the job', the U.S. has dealt a lethal blow to the UN Security Council, to the considerable anguish of Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Rarely has a world leader attracted such widespread ridicule as President George W Bush for asserting that the many crises from Afghanistan to Iraq and from Lebanon to Gaza are a contest between 'terror and freedom.' His notion of 'freedom' has brought nothing but death. Bush's repeated use of the term 'Islamo-fascism' - borrowed from Washington's Likudniks - has aroused outrage across the Muslim world. In Egypt, 50 independent parliamentarians are demanding an apology!

This, unfortunately, is not a leader able to conceive or to implement the bold and wide-ranging peace plan the region so desperately needs.
As for Britain, by tagging along behind the United States and Israel, Prime Minister Tony Blair has covered himself and his country with shame. At home, his policies appear to have put the country at risk from an enraged section of the Muslim population.

France has done a good deal better. Although it started by aligning itself on the United States, it soon corrected its aim to take account of Lebanese and Arab objections. This allowed it to negotiate the final compromise with the United States, which resulted in Resolution 1701.
How long will the present truce last? A lot will depend on whether opinion in Washington and Israel is ready to accept and digest the geopolitical lessons of the war. End

Lebanon prime minister condemns Israel



I am still not seeing if Israel met its stated objective of stoping the arms shipment. It looks to me that it only succeeded in getting into a skirmish with casualties on both sides.

I sometimes think that the best way to treat terrorism is with terrorism. Perhaps a few "unofficial" Israelis could start planting car bombs and other assorted targetted demolitions. Only difference would be the cars belonged to Hamas and Hezbollah leadership. Make the bombs traceable back to Iran or Al Qaeda. Israel could deny all responsibility of course.

Keep it up for a year or so and see what happens.

But Israel did teach Lebanon a lesson, which is that Lebanon will suffer severely for wanton attacks on Israel.

Israel has essentially pulled back to its borders for peace, and cannot retreat further. Thus, it has no choice but to hit back hard in Lebanon and Gaza for any attacks.

Sure it has a choice. It can choose to capitulate and do what they want which is to die and be eradicated or just abdicate and leave. Or it can choose to stand and defend itself.

Some, however, think that last choice is the immoral one.

Well they certainly have experience, going right back to the Irgun and the Stern gangs.

Cutting through Israel's
propaganda war in the US

Four short clips of things
Americans never see on TV

Help the Israeli Jews permanently disarm Hizbella, or else.

It's obvious that some of you want the Jews in Israel to duplicate the behavior of the European Jews in the fourties. Then when they were confronted by the Nazi-Pogrom, the great majority--about 6 million of them--passively walked/rode to their mass murders by Nazi firing squads and Nazi poison gas showers. Yes, many did risk their lives trying to defend themselves. But many of these died in the effort before it became fashionable to vilify victims who tried to defend themselves and sympathize with their victimizers.

Today, the Jews of Israel are not going to passively walk/ride to their deaths in this current Islamo-Pogrom against them, while some of you sympathize with their victimizers. Rather they will defend themselves to their death if they need to. Today they will attack Hizbellah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, et al scum whereever they can find them, whether or not that leads to their killing non-combatants in the same neighborhoods as these scum. Israeli Jews have zero respect for those of you who villify them while sypathizing with their murderers. Rightfully so!

Those of you who argue that the Israeli Jews must go back where they came from -- back to Europe or whereever -- fail to recognize that there is another solution, perhaps an even better solution, if you remain opposed to helping the Israeli Jews defend theselves. The Arabs should go back where they came from: back to Arabia.

Of course there still remains the most rational solution.

Help the Israeli Jews permanently disarm Hizbella, or else.

What has been said about defending one's self against an Islamo-fascist-pogrom that you believe is lying propaganda?

Do you really believe that attempting to rescue two of one's abducted soldiers is unconscionable?

Do you really believe that shooting rockets at the civilians being protected by the would be rescuers is conscionable?

Do you really believe that shooting back at those shooting rockets at the civilians being protected by the would be rescuers is conscionable?

If your answers are yes to all of the above, I really think such thinking is unconscionable.

Politics, being the art of deception, must certainly recognize Israel as its Da Vinci. Its smug self-portrait as a 'civilized democracy', rendered with brushes dipped deeply in the oil paint of antipathy for Arabs, has won much admiration among impressionable Americans. Galvanizing and amplifying latent Western hatred of Muslim Arabs in order to rally the West under the banner of 'Judeo-Christian civilization', and intimidating doubters by abusing the memory of the Holocaust to claim special 'unique victim' status, Israel intones, 'Stand with us because we are white and bomb towel-heads in F-16s just as you do, and don't dare stand against us because you once persecuted our forefathers and should atone for your sins - by abetting ours.'

The result of this most cynical ploy is that the Palestinians, dark-skinned victims of Israel's perpetual campaign of ethnic cleansing, torture, theft, and humiliation, are always grotesquely caricatured as mindless savages with a fetish for suicide attacks. There is, however, one major credibility problem with this racist rhetoric: Israel itself is in the process of committing suicide.

The trouble hardly stems from any defect in Israel's elaborate propaganda campaign. To the contrary, its message has been widely accepted with fawning awe and reverence by all dominant presses, pundits, and politicians, whose necks and knees strain from displaying the proper respect accorded to the lies of the powerful. The Israeli narrative, preserved, polished, and peddled by the generously-funded pro-Israel lobby and various sycophants, has easily withstood the fleabites of facts and evidence presented by critical Jewish- Israeli scholars, historians, journalists and commentators, which go unnoticed in mainstream discourse.

No, Israel's crisis has not emerged because its packaged lies have been unwrapped for the public by sentimental sectors of corporate capital moved by the plight of the oppressed, but rather because the oppressed themselves, viciously maligned and virtually alone in their struggle for survival, have refused to bow to the logic behind those packaged lies; that is to say, they refuse to be exterminated, disappeared, destroyed, or spirited away, as Zionism has been demanding of them for one hundred years. As one Palestinian recently wrote in response to Ben-Gurion's famous quip on expelling Arabs, ("The old will die and the young will forget,"): "The old are dying, and the young are dying too, but no one is forgetting."

What is therefore falling to pieces is not Israel's 'smug self-portrait', but rather the cheap, crumbling edifice of arrogance on which it and all the other aspirations of Israeli colonialism are mounted. Propping up this arrogance in the past was the basic assumption among Israeli elites that after enough murder, rape, torture, bulldozing, looting, and expropriating, the Palestinians will break. This prognosis has failed miserably. Compounding the original crime of mass expulsion with more violence has not allowed Israel to escape its consequences. Zionism's "original sin", as one Israeli historian calls his nation's original 1948 expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians and massacre of hundreds more, is the basis of both Israel's existence and the continued non-existence of the more than four million caged, dispossessed Palestinian victims who demand justice.

This demand for justice expresses itself in continued endurance and resistance, separate forms of defiance with interdependent consequences - consequences that Israeli society cannot cope with and sees as its greatest threat.

Endurance means, first and foremost, staying in place. Its greed for land and settlements partially hindered by Palestinian presence, Israel has responded by robbing the natives of any legal, political or human rights, and has constructed what Israeli anti-occupation activist Jeff Halper calls a "matrix of control" to stifle their lives, including settlements, military checkpoints, roadblocks, curfews, embargoes, and detention centers. But merely living in this hellish scenario constitutes a victory against the root logic of Israeli colonialism, which is to 'purify' the land by removing its indigenous population.

Resistance, on the other hand, refers to active measures against the occupation. In the first Intifada and in the beginning of the second Intifada this almost always took the form of unarmed protest or stone-throwing, but Israel responded by mowing down hundreds of Palestinians with machine guns and breaking their bones, bringing in bulldozers to demolish homes and tanks to enforce even harsher living conditions. Their restraint further rewarded with an atrocious death ratio of 25:1, Palestinians tired of digging rows of graves for their children and patriots just to be patted on the head by a few polite Western liberals, and turned to armed struggle, the most extreme form of which now manifests itself in suicide bombing.

The remarkable reality of sustained Palestinian endurance and resistance in the face of overwhelming power has precipitated two crises for Israel so entwined that they are best referred to as a dual crisis: that of its political legitimacy and self-proclaimed moral purpose.

Because Palestinian-Arab population growth in historical Palestine (Israel, Gaza, West Bank) greatly exceeds that of the Jewish population, Jewish majority status in the area - assiduously obtained through a century of mass murder and mass expulsion - will be imperiled and surpassed within a mere two decades. That these growing Arab millions stand stripped of elementary rights and suffer the deprivations of a racist military machine undermines Israel's claim to the mantle of democracy. Panicked Israeli protest to the effect that Palestinian growth is some sneaky maneuver to "destroy" Israel only reinforces its status as an apartheid state, since a democracy which fears the democratic enfranchisement of half its population is no democracy at all.

Furthermore, Israel's viciously disproportionate use of force against all forms of Palestinian resistance to the occupation has created a maximum escalation of violence in which any citizen of Israel is now a potential target of weaponized desperation - suicide bombing. Rocking Israeli cafes, discos, and streets at will, this tactic has narrowed the 25:1 death ratio to almost 3:1, and exploded Israel's basic founding ideal - that it is a safe haven for Jews. Indeed, Jews are now safer in almost any place in the world other than Israel.

In responding to this dual crisis, some in Israeli circles of power have expressed quite reasonable ideas. Last September, Israeli politician Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, declared his country was resting "on foundations of oppression and injustice" and advocated full withdrawal from the territories to create a Palestinian state. The same month 27 air force pilots, considered the military's elite, refused to implement assassinations, describing them in a letter as "illegal and immoral attacks." In November, four ex-chiefs of Israel's vaunted internal security service, Shin Bet, jointly declared themselves against Sharon, the apartheid wall, and their country's "disgraceful" and "patently immoral" behavior against Palestinians, prompted by concerns that "Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people." In December, 13 reservists (including three officers) of Israel's top commando unit joined hundreds of other Refuseniks in refusing to serve in the occupied territories, saying that they "have long ago crossed the line between fighters fighting a just cause and oppressing another people."

But flirtation with reasonableness by these small few stands in stark contrast with Israel's long-time marriage to racism, colonialism, and growing "fascist tendencies," to borrow Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling's words. Representing these tendencies are rightists at the helm of Israeli society - the settler movement, military, and right-wing parties, spearheaded by prime minister Ariel Sharon, a war criminal responsible for several bloody massacres that have left hundreds of civilians dead.

Sharon's 'solution' to the country's dual crisis is in the tradition of Revisionist Zionism, founded in the 1920's by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Italian fascism who wrote honestly but with the aspirations of a conquistador-cowboy that Palestinians "look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie." One disciple of this doctrine was Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan, who admitted, "There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population," and advocated the following method to expand this theft: "[Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no - it must - invent dangers."

The assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin epitomizes and exemplifies this strategy for addressing Israel's dual crisis. While the murder of a blind, crippled, wheelchair-bound quadriplegic outside a place of worship appears cowardly, and the inevitable blowback against Israel gives the impression Sharon has lost his mind, the strike is part and parcel of a consciously calculated game plan that is perfectly rational within the framework of Zionist logic. For the assassination of Hamas' main symbolic leader is designed to provoke it into an extreme 'mega-terror' act or a series of terror attacks, severe enough to marshal chauvinist-Israeli support for a final solution to the Palestinian problem - complete ethnic cleansing and removal of all Arabs from historical Palestine.

This is not some imaginary scenario, but a definite escalation of existing Israeli tactics. An attack of September 11th or similar proportions would allow Israelis to heighten their coveted 'special victim' status, bolster their image as fighting for the 'Judeo-Christian' cause of the 'war on terror', and purge the re-demonized Arabs without international interference. In one fell swoop, Israel would be able to complete what it started in the 1948 war and its dual crisis would be solved.

No serious person denies that Hamas will retaliate; the organization has vowed to attack any Israeli from Sharon on down and political analysts even within Israel recognize that it is only a matter of time before it strikes. Nor is Israeli provocation which aims at or leads to getting Israelis killed unprecedented. In fact, it is commonplace. On July 22, 2003, the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronot reported that the heads of Tanzim, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, approved a unilateral cease-fire, and that former Palestinian Security minister Dahlan had met Sheikh Yassin, who agreed to the cease-fire principles. 90 minutes later, the same paper reports, Israel assassinated militant Salah Sheadeh, "in the course of which dozens of civilians were killed and wounded as well." Israeli writer and professor Ran Hacohen noted that in November 2001, "the assassination of the Hamas activist Mahmoud Abu Hanoud was carried out just when the Hamas was respecting for two months its agreement with Arafat not to attack inside Israel," and that "in January 2002, the assassination of Raed Karmi ended a few weeks of relative quiet in the territories." All of this obviously had disastrous consequences for Israeli civilians.

Then there are those infamous media-created 'periods of calm' during which no Israelis die but dozens of Palestinians are murdered and thrown into the trash heap of forgotten history, such as August 1st, to September 1st, 2002 when 39 Palestinians were killed; 18 days later a suicide bomber exploded in Israel - a 'shattering' of the 'lull'. (Haaretz, September 2, 2002). Even more telling is a study conducted by the Israeli weekly, Ha'Ir, of ten Israeli assassinations against targeted Palestinian activists that followed periods of relative calm (a revelation in itself), from July 31, 2001 to September 9, 2003. The results? In retaliations immediately following the deaths of the ten targeted militants, a total of 180 Israeli civilians were killed. (Ha'Ir, September 25, 2003)

This makes the results of recent Israeli polls all the more remarkable, for they show not only that 80% of Israelis believe the Yassin assassination will increase Palestinian terrorist attacks, but that 62% of Israelis support it. (AFP, March 23, 2003). Even a generous interpreter would have to admit that a significant portion of those who predicted dire consequences from the attack nonetheless approved of it. That Israel's political strategy involves the jeopardizing and killing of its own citizens, apparently with loud approval from some of its own population, speaks volumes about its moral bankruptcy.

Along with this bankruptcy comes a high degree of irony, since Israeli propagandists never tire of demonizing Palestinians based on suicide bombings. Their smugness precluding any possibility of sincerity, Israeli pundits ask, 'Why do Palestinians blow themselves up just to kill us?', and always answer themselves (who else is there?) in a somber tone as if they are suddenly concerned with Palestinian well-being, 'They place no value on their own lives.' If given a chance, the Palestinian native would respond, 'If you would be so kind as to donate us those tanks and helicopters you safely slaughter us with from afar, we would be happy to spare you the agony you undoubtedly feel about our deaths.'

But it turns out that Israel is now neither safe nor far from the reach of its victims, and that its main strategy for addressing its problem involves exposing all its citizens to injury and death just to whip up enough self-righteousness and hate to repeat the cycle all over again until the conditions are ripe for mass expulsion. In this sense Israel is akin to a guilt-ridden wife beater; acutely aware of its own immorality, it provokes its victim into some futile kind of resistance to inspire itself with enough hatred to justify continuing the beating, awaiting all-out world war to finish the job without eliciting much protest.

Many IDF officers probably do not even see the demented logic of their own strategy and have convinced themselves that it is beyond reproach. Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon and his crew proudly announced that they plan to 'liquidate' the entire Hamas leadership, removing those who train suicide bombers, and thus rid Israel of Palestinian terrorism once and for all. What these fine gentlemen fail to understand is that they will accomplish absolutely nothing of the sort. In the Israeli daily Haaretz, September 14, 2003, it was pointed out that in the past two years, the IDF had claimed to have killed or captured the Hebron "head" of the military wing of Hamas no less than five times - and each time it was a different person. Moreover, the notion that bombers need to be 'trained' is absurd: how much practice does it require to put on a bomb belt, walk into Israelis, and explode? All the 'training' required is amply provided by the daily supply of Israeli atrocities that make one final death appear preferable to a humiliating life in which one's dignity and hope are killed a thousand times over.

Ya'alon himself must know this; a few months ago he declared that Israeli tactics were only creating hatred. It is worth quoting one of the former Shin Bet heads, Major General Ami Ayalon, on the subject: "Terror is not thwarted with bombs or helicopters. Why does this increase terror? Because it is overt, because it carries an element of vindictiveness." Israeli elites who hope to snuff out the Palestinian demand for land, freedom and justice by crushing the Palestinians themselves should take heed: their history of vengeance is no match for the vengeance of history.

For it is precisely the vengeance of history that haunts Israel today; conceived and inserted into the heart of the Islamic world at a time when Europe looked highly upon colonialism, the memory of the Holocaust fell heavily upon its conscience, and Muslims were politically weak and motionless, Israel's confidence appeared justified. But now, Europe has largely abandoned its colonialist attitudes, Israel's abuse of its vast military power has earned it the label of the world's greatest threat to peace within Europe and inverted its image from underdog to occupier across most of the globe, and the first signs of Islamic awakening and resistance, though often primitive and backward-looking at the moment, are emerging.

Israel's reliance on the waning forces which precipitated its creation in its war against the very people who were dispossessed during that creation has locked it into a self-destructive dynamic. Its set of solutions consist only of increasing: (a) colonial brutality by killing more natives, (b) sympathy for and anger over Jewish suffering by getting more Israelis killed, and (c) prospects for an intensified 'war on terror' in which anything goes and actions (a) and (b) would be justified in the long run.

Plan (c) is certainly the clincher in Sharon's vision of purging the Palestinians, as he always justifies his atrocities as complementary to the American-led 'war on terror' and constantly advocates bringing this war to Iran, Syria, and elsewhere. Thus from the Zionist viewpoint, America replaces Europe and its crusade against terrorism substitutes for colonialism, allowing Israel to thrive again. But Israelis who cling to this new savior fail to see that this is only an escalation of and not an escape from the self-destructive dynamic. Sharon's decision to follow Dayan's directive to "invent dangers" by inciting and exacerbating the Islamic threat along with America means that the whole nation's very existence will be imperiled, not simply that of a few dozen Israelis every few weeks, as is presently the case.

For assuming our 'war on terror' is still raging two decades from now as desired by Sharon and company, what will Israel do when it is surrounded by over 300 million neighboring Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide? Does a sane nation of a mere few million place its hopes for survival on the permanent subjugation of a quarter of humanity that surrounds it? Israel on its current path is like a man who swims off the coast into the ocean and happens on an island, only to complain of being surrounded by water. Its citizens should start asking themselves and their leaders, 'What will we do when the typhoon comes?'

http://www.lefthook.org/Politics/Alam032704.html

Yes, some think the solution is for the Jews to just abandon Israel altogether and return to the country in which they were born or from which their parents, grandparents, etc. were born. But are the Germans, Russians, Italians, Austrians, Polish, etc. etc. etc. going to graciously return the property and assets taken from the Jews in the European pograms? Those now holding that property most likely had nothing to do with the arrests, murders, torture, etc. of the Jews and most likely have never even been unkind to a Jew. Should they have to give up their property because it was once cruelly taken from the Jews?

But then you would be hard put to name any real estate anywhere that wasn't taken from somebody by somebody else at some time or other.

Israel time and again has trusted UN resolutions that were supposed to achieve peace and protection for Israel along with everybody else. And every time the UN has failed to enforce its resolutions or provide any assistance or protection for Israel against its aggressive and hostile neighbors.

Israel should not be asked to stand down now until somebody pulls Hezbollah's teeth and renders it incapable of waging war against Israel. With peacekeepers on order not to shoot except in personal self defense and no orders to disarm Hezbollah, I think Israel would be nuts not to be looking after its own self interests at this point.

I think these are very telling remarks, from that piece:

Last September, Israeli politician Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, declared his country was resting "on foundations of oppression and injustice" and advocated full withdrawal from the territories to create a Palestinian state. The same month 27 air force pilots, considered the military's elite, refused to implement assassinations, describing them in a letter as "illegal and immoral attacks." In November, four ex-chiefs of Israel's vaunted internal security service, Shin Bet, jointly declared themselves against Sharon, the apartheid wall, and their country's "disgraceful" and "patently immoral" behavior against Palestinians, prompted by concerns that "Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people".

source

Further compensation programs available to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution can be found on the website of the Claims Conference, if you're interested in the subject, Foxy.

I wasn't talking about compensation. I was talking about finding a place for the Jews to hang their respective hats if they should be forced to leave Israel in order to survive.

If it turns out your house and/or the land it sits on used to belong to one of these Jewish families that were forcibly removed from it, are you going to hand over the deed and keys without a whimper? And then where will you go?

Discussion about similar issues are a thing of the quite recent past in Germany. After the reunification, many people who had left the GDR tried to reclaim their property. A number of these claims could be settled by returning the property to the former owner (easy if the property had been annected by the state), and a number was settled by financial compensation.

The same discussion is still kind of going on between Poland and Germany, were Germans had been forcefully removed to make room for Polish people, who again had been forcefully removed by the Soviet Army after the decision to "move" Poland westward. Many of the claims are valid, some have been settled, some are used by organizations from the rather radical right fringe arguing for "repossessing" of lost property.

What I would find quite questionable would be if someone maintained he should be given his former property back after he had received financial compensation, but I don't think that's what you're aiming at.

Another thought: I don't know what I would do in case the scenario you described would be found legitimate and I would indeed be forced to hand over my property to someone I have done no unjustice to.

Assuming that this would be found legitimate, I would probably have little chance but pack my stuff (if allowed to do so) and leave. I don't know where I would go to. I would probably hold a grudge against the people who had the guts to take my property from me, and I would hold a grudge against the government that allowed such an act of (perceived) injustice.

Asking you back: What would you do if it was found that your house and/or the land it sits on used to belong to a, say, native American family which had been illegally expropriated, and it would found legitimate that you have to pack your stuff and leave your house and land to them? Would you hand over the deed and keys without a whimper?

Simple solution when you think about it. Jews living in Israel have abandoned at least as much property in muslim countries as they have purchased or otherwise taken up residence in in Israel, and they've never been compensated for any of it. Let any "palestinians" claiming to have been displaced by Israel have those places.

Israel is not the "victim" here as many of its proponents would have us believe. As previously noted here, there have already been substantial payments made by Europeans to copmpensate the descendents of those whose property (and lives) were taken. In addition Israel has been the largest single recipient of U.S. government aid and grants for many years - a total many, many times greater than the largest estimate of the losses on European Jews in the past century. Israel has unlimited access to the U.S. market for its excports of all kinds - no restrictions whatever, they are treated as U.S. manufactured goods. Israel enjoys the benefits of a modern, high tech economy, and on any rational basis is far richer than any of its neighbors.

It would be verty difficult to describe the behavior of the Israeli government since the 1967 war as benevolent in any manner or form. They have held the West Bank and Gaza under military occupation for most of the past thirty-nine years, without granting any political rights whatever to its inhabitants. Throughout they have subjected then to steady and systematic expropriation of property (usually at the hands of Israeli Zealots, but always with the at least tacit approval and overt protection of the Israeli military) and deprived the inhabitants of the opportunity for organized economic development.

The various offers of land and independence of which the Israelis boast so frequently actually consisted of isolated, disconnected pockets of land, never constituting more than 40% of the captured territory of the West Bank (though they deceptively labelled it is more than that), and never offering the Palestinians the possibility of a choerent, contiguous state with political rights over air, water and mineral resources.

To be sure the Palestiniansd for their part have not shown any reasonable or constructive reaction to even the tentative and highly qualified offers the Israelis have made.

I believe the key point here is that there is no moral or ethicaL basis on which to prefer one side or the other in this awful conflict. The net effect of the intervention of external powers has been to prevent a desisive victory by either party - in short to prolong the conflict and the suffering it entails.

F4F, who must be an Arab living in Detroit, talks about the dispossessed Palestinians. However, very few of the 700,000 who left Israel in 1948 are still alive.

He also talks about the Israelis' hatred of Arabs. Interestingly, due to their conduct, the rest of the world is learning to hate the Arabs. The Arabs themselves are all about hatred, which seems to be their food and water. It is very difficult to to have any good feelings toward them.

Have the Islamic immigration and refugees programs of the Western nations been a good idea these past 50-years... ? I don't think so.

And damn right we are thoroughly deserving of everything that our ignorant PC foolishness is now bringing down upon our heads from the direction of our urban ghettoes where the mosques are doing a roaring trade in shaping immigrant young minds to revile and despise the cultural norms and practices of we the infidel.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

All your own work, dear voters.