I'M GLAD I WAS WRONG

au, I support a 2 state solution with plenty clean water all around. I also support regime change in Israel and war crimes charges against Olmert. Israel has shown that it's they who do not support a 2 state solution. In late July Hamas and the Palestinians threatened to embrace new peaceful initiatives aimed at a 2 state solution based on 1967 borders. Shin Bet and Israel destroyed that initiative real quick. "SHIN BET VETOED SECRET ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE AGREEMENT"
Israeli and Palestinian Sources Concur: Israel Made War Inevitable

The Omega Institute (OI), which works closely with the Institute for Policy Research for Development (IPRD), has learned from Israeli and Palestinian sources that just prior to the current crisis, senior Hamas leaders were in active dialogue with Israeli religious leaders in a round of bilateral peace negotiations. Israeli negotiators included Rabbi Menachem Froman, former deputy leader and co-founder of the Israeli Settler movement Gush Khatif; Rabbi David Bigman, head of the liberal religious Kibbutz movement Yeshiva at Ma'ale Gilboa; and Yitzhak Frankenthal, founder of the Arik Institute. Ongoing negotiations had resulted in a breakthrough peace "understanding", which was to be announced at a press conference in Jerusalem to mark the launching of an extraordinary peace initiative. Israeli Prime Minister Olmert had been briefed extensively about the initiative by Frankenthal. Also due to attend the conference were Khaled Abu Arafa, the Palestinian Cabinet Minister for Jerusalem, Sheikh Muhamed Abu Tir, senior Hamas Member of the Palestinian Parliament, and other senior Palestinian delegates.

The meeting was to announce a joint Israeli-Palestinian call for the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit who had been abducted by Hamas in Gaza, along with proposals for the beginning of the release of all Palestinian prisoners. These measures were to precipitate unprecedented new peace negotiations on a framework peace agreement, drawn on the 1967 borders. The presence of Palestinian Cabinet Officers and senior Israeli religious leaders in contact with the Prime Minster was to underline the seriousness of this peace proposal on both sides.

Just hours before the meeting was due to start, the Israeli Shin Bet internal Security Service arrested Abu Tir and Abu Arafa and warned them not to attend the meeting, under threats of detention. The meeting, which offered a major opportunity to obtain Shalit's release and launch a new framework for peace, was thrown into disarray. The next day, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) invaded Gaza, and the day after both Abu Tir and Abu Arafa were abducted by Israeli forces, along with a third of the Palestinian Cabinet, provoking a predictable escalation of violence.

Israel simultaneously began conducting covert incursions on to Lebanese territory, provoking Hizbollah's capture of two IDF soldiers. Credible sources confirm that the soldiers were not abducted on Israeli territory, but inside Lebanon. Like the scuppered peace negotiations, Western officials have ignored this, and misinformed the media. However, some reports corroborate the sources. Israeli officials, for instance, informed Forbes (12.7.06) that "Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction from Israel."

"The revelations show that Palestinian and Lebanese actors were not principally responsible for the escalation of the current conflict", said OI Director Graham Ennis. "Contrary to the misinformation disseminated by the Whitehouse and Whitehall, Israel vetoed unprecedented peace proposals that would have initiated a promising new framework for serious negotiations, and went on to provoke Palestinian and Lebanese groups into retaliations, that now threaten to escalate into a dangerous regional conflict." http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2006/07/shin-bet-vetoed-secret-israeli.html

Cyc wrote


I reject that statement in it's entirety. The palestinians had the opportunity to establish a state alongside of Israel on several occasions strarting in 1948 and always found a reason to reject it. There answer has been rto attack Israel or to send their legions of terrorists into Israel to kill as many civilians as possible.

CYC wrote


That is such a ridiculous statement it does not warrant a response.

What struck me having been in Israel several times was how the Iraelis turned a virtual desert into a flower garden.I remenber standing on the Israeli side of the dead sea and looking at the stands of trees on the hillside and seeing development all around. And than looking at the Arab side and seeing nothing but barren land. And asking myself why?

I would also remind you that the palestinians and the rest of the nations in the area refuse to recognize Israel and continue to espouse it's destruction.

You have the madman in Iran calling for it's destruction on a daily basis.

As for Camp David here's what Gush Shalom has to say, "Barak's offer gives Israel control over all the border crossings of the Palestinian State.
No country in the world would accept that.
The words "territorial continuity" are deceptive -
No Israeli would agree to travel 50 miles from one town to another,
if the real distance between them is only 5 miles.

This impossible offer, Barak's imperious attitude,
the ongoing massive construction in the settlements,
Years of Israel's Delaying tactics and Sharon's provocation -
all these contributed to the inevitable explosion.
In December, no maps of the Gaza Strip were shown,
so we cannot illustrate Barak's intentions there.
At Taba, January 2001, Barak presented a much-improved map.
The Palestinians consider it a basis for negotiation." link When Rabin offered a more reasonable settlement he was shot in the back. Many Rabbis had called for his assassination and used their interpretations of scripture to justify it. Many Rabbis rejoiced when Rabin was killed. Arafat sure didn't nor the Palestinians who lost a partner for peace. Imagine being in their shoes then knowing that the assassins would be running the show.

blueflame1
Consider the source. By the way Hizballah did not fire missels into Israel. It was all a figment of the dastardly Israeli's imagination.

And yet, for many Palestinians, it is the reality of their everyday lives. They are the cheap labor, and Israel has shot plenty of Palestinian kids for no good reason. Even if they didn't do a damn thing wrong other than be born into an area which doesn't officially exist, they still have to live with the consequences. How do you think they feel? I mean, even if you don't want to have sympathy or pity for their situation, imagine how that changes the way a young mind develops?

The thoughts are reinforced by the elders who coincidentally were cheap labor and saw their people get shot up and pushed around their whole lives too - so they really believe it, which makes it very convincing to the youngsters.

Over time, what do you get... why, exactly the situation that we see now.



WHy? Because Israel has all the water and all the goddamned money, that's why. Because someone's been giving them billions of dollars every year for quite some time now and getting their back militarily. Someone gave them (or allowed them to have) lots of nukes, just in case push really comes to shove.

That Palestinian youth - the one who has never seen anything good for his people for pretty much his whole life, and can see for himself that there is a clear and present enemy (no matter whose fault it really is, or any terrorism, or anything - a guy with a rifle walking through your neighborhood, who may or may not shoot you, is your enemy when you are a child) who is giving his people at least part of the problems they have - how do you think he feels when he looks at the flower gardens, and trees, and development in Israel?

When you understand the answer to that, you will understand the nature of Israel's problem. It is a fundamental problem in that it has now been bred into an entire people. Unless Israel can do something affirmative to bring about massive, positive changes in the lives of the Palestian people, the problems will not end. And that's both a fact and a tragedy of epic proportions.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn
Been through these arguments time and time again and always ended up as an exercise in futility. We will just have to agree to disagree and continue to look at the situation through a differnt pair of glasses. .

I don't have a problem with that, but I'm not about assigning blame near as much as looking for a working solution.

I mean, isn't that the goal - to end the violence?

Cycloptichorn

au, hahaha. "blueflame1
Consider the source." That I do. I've been a supporter of Gush Shalom for years. My kind of people. Highest respect. Your arguments consist of a "consider the source" kind of nothing to sayness. Also you're the source that said my opinion is Israel has no right to exist when in reality I support a two state solution. You spin and facts be damned and who could respect that?

The solution if it is to be. Will be achieved when both sides want it badly enough. And are willing to live side by side in peace.

BBB
When Rabin was murdered, I gave up on any hope of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. I'm not Jewish nor religious, but I went to the temple near my home where I mourned his death with my many Jewish friends. I've not observed a similar leader with Rabin's quality emerge in Israel. Sad, because Arafat and Sharon are gone, removing a barrier for peace.

BBB

au1929


I think peace will not be possible until the United States gives Israel a mandate to achieve a peace agreement within six month or the U.S. will cut off all funds and arms going to Israel. Money is the key to motivation. Sadly, checkbook diplomacy seems to be the most successful way to resolve disputes around the world.

BBB

What would lead you to believe that the United States would want Israel to surrender to the terrorists in the Middle East?

How about if Israel, Egypt and Syria stop funding terrorist organizations in Palestine and Lebanon? That would probably bring peace mucg faster as they would have no weapons to attack Israel anymore and that would lead to fewer retallitory strikes from Israel.

Re: au1929


I agree. It is easy to keep coasting along without finding a solution until someone forces you to do so.

Given that Israel is so militarily superior to its' neighbors, why are my hard-earned tax dollars being sent to them every year in such large amounts, just to have them f*ck up things in the middle east, which comes back to bite me in the ass?

Cycloptichorn

Re: Why did Bush delay his Rumsfeld announcement?

---------------------------------------------------------------

Bush and Rove Blew the Election on Purpose?
By Greg Mitchell, E & P
November 12, 2006

Bush and Rove Blew the Election on Purpose?

Asks Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News, while admitting it's a "tin-foil hat" conspiracy theory. But after a few drinks, you may start to wonder about it. How else to explain, for example, not firing Rumsfeld sooner?

He might have been kidding, but the more you read and think about it, the more it provides a plausible explanation for the wholesale White House bungling in the closing weeks of this year's campaign: Bush and Rove blew the midterms on purpose. How else to accept that the normally hapless Democrats not only won, but as the president put it, "thumped"?

Okay, even reporter/blogger Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News, who concocted the idea -- likening it to "The Producers" plot to engineer a flop -- revealed that he had to put on his tin-foil hat first. I admit, I still don't believe it one bit.

But the alternative view is just as chilling: that many, if not most, of our Washington-based pundits are even more out of it than we'd guessed. How else to explain their embrace of Karl Rove-as-tactical-genius for all these years? Either they were embarrassingly wrong or ... as Bunch hints ... maybe all too correct?

Why blow the election? Go to Bunch's blog for the full explanation, but it largely boils down to Iraq -- and the opportunity to make this a bipartisan problem as the catastrophe worsens in the months ahead.

That desire, at least, is not farfetched, even if the conspiracy theory itself is a joke. I'm reminded of a Mike Peters editorial cartoon this week that offered a new twist on Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn" principle: It showed a broken pot, labeled Iraq, with Bush pointing to a Democratic donkey and saying, "I broke it ... you own it."

Anyway, throw down a couple of tequila shots, and then, for fun and a little head-spinning, consider Bunch's evidence for his provocative conspiracy scenario. He even asks: Why were the exit polls correct this time? Surely that proves ... something.

-- Why didn't Bush fire Rumsfeld sooner (as members of his own party are now howling)? And, just as bad, endorse him on the eve of the election, a move certain to cost his party many seats in the House?

-- Why did he allow Cheney, again on the eve of the election, to say that not only was it still stay-the-course in Iraq, it was, in fact, "full speed ahead?"

-- Why was there no true October or November surprise? Was the conspiracy to lose the election the true "surprise?"

-- Given Bush's unpopularity, why was he sent to campaign in places where he did more harm than good and, as Bunch asks, "why did the White House suddenly make the president more visible by having more press conferences -- and thus taking more hostile questions on Iraq and other unpleasant subjects -- than at any other time in his six-year presidency?"

-- Why, surprisingly, did incumbents Conrad Burns and George Allen fail to ask for recounts when they lost narrow races -- throwing the Senate to the Democrats without a whimper?

-- Why did Rove toss resources into hopeless Senate races in such blue states as New Jersey and Pennsylvania while allowing Montana and Virginia to slip away?

-- Why did Bush's Justice Dept. go after vulnerable Rep. Curt Weldon in the final weeks -- and how is it that a Republican source first leaked the Rep. Mark Foley scandal? The GOP lost both seats, of course.

I would add two more suspicious occurences: Why did so many conservative commentators, such as Joe Scarborough, say near the end that the Republicans "deserved" to lose power? And what happened to the Diebold vote-counting fears? Maybe Rove did "fix" the election -- but in the Democrats' direction, so that's why they have stopped complaining about Diebold. As Ann Coulter put it, "History was made this week! For the first time in four election cycles, Democrats are not attacking the Diebold Corp. the day after the election."

Maybe the smoking gun in this conspiracy will be a memo from Rove to George Allen suggesting that he utter the word "macaca" whenever some dark-skinned ethnic ticks him off. Or a Ken Mehlman note to Tony Snow urging that he refer to the Mark Foley scandal as nothing but a bunch of "naughty e-mails."

Will Bunch concludes his blog post today: "Is Karl Rove not the evil genius we all thought he was, or is he brilliant beyond the reckoning power of us mere mortals? Whatever the strategery, the more we look at it, the more we think that Bush's difficult next two years may work out slightly better for him with a Democratic Congress."

Preposterous, I know. I'm still not buying it. The more likely explanation: Even evil "geniuses" screw up -- if they were "geniuses" to start with. And, as I've been saying for three years, the public hates the war far more than the pundits and newspaper editorialists admit. Americans want out. And no one should need a tin hat to see that.

Asks Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News, while admitting it's a "tin-foil hat" conspiracy theory. But after a few drinks, you may start to wonder about it. How else to explain, for example, not firing Rumsfeld sooner?

He might have been kidding, but the more you read and think about it, the more it provides a plausible explanation for the wholesale White House bungling in the closing weeks of this year's campaign: Bush and Rove blew the midterms on purpose. How else to accept that the normally hapless Democrats not only won, but as the president put it, "thumped"?

Okay, even reporter/blogger Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News, who concocted the idea -- likening it to "The Producers" plot to engineer a flop -- revealed that he had to put on his tin-foil hat first. I admit, I still don't believe it one bit.

But the alternative view is just as chilling: that many, if not most, of our Washington-based pundits are even more out of it than we'd guessed. How else to explain their embrace of Karl Rove-as-tactical-genius for all these years? Either they were embarrassingly wrong or ... as Bunch hints ... maybe all too correct?

Why blow the election? Go to Bunch's blog for the full explanation, but it largely boils down to Iraq -- and the opportunity to make this a bipartisan problem as the catastrophe worsens in the months ahead.

That desire, at least, is not farfetched, even if the conspiracy theory itself is a joke. I'm reminded of a Mike Peters editorial cartoon this week that offered a new twist on Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn" principle: It showed a broken pot, labeled Iraq, with Bush pointing to a Democratic donkey and saying, "I broke it ... you own it."

Anyway, throw down a couple of tequila shots, and then, for fun and a little head-spinning, consider Bunch's evidence for his provocative conspiracy scenario. He even asks: Why were the exit polls correct this time? Surely that proves ... something.

-- Why didn't Bush fire Rumsfeld sooner (as members of his own party are now howling)? And, just as bad, endorse him on the eve of the election, a move certain to cost his party many seats in the House?

-- Why did he allow Cheney, again on the eve of the election, to say that not only was it still stay-the-course in Iraq, it was, in fact, "full speed ahead?"

-- Why was there no true October or November surprise? Was the conspiracy to lose the election the true "surprise?"

-- Given Bush's unpopularity, why was he sent to campaign in places where he did more harm than good and, as Bunch asks, "why did the White House suddenly make the president more visible by having more press conferences -- and thus taking more hostile questions on Iraq and other unpleasant subjects -- than at any other time in his six-year presidency?"

-- Why, surprisingly, did incumbents Conrad Burns and George Allen fail to ask for recounts when they lost narrow races -- throwing the Senate to the Democrats without a whimper?

-- Why did Rove toss resources into hopeless Senate races in such blue states as New Jersey and Pennsylvania while allowing Montana and Virginia to slip away?

-- Why did Bush's Justice Dept. go after vulnerable Rep. Curt Weldon in the final weeks -- and how is it that a Republican source first leaked the Rep. Mark Foley scandal? The GOP lost both seats, of course.

I would add two more suspicious occurences: Why did so many conservative commentators, such as Joe Scarborough, say near the end that the Republicans "deserved" to lose power? And what happened to the Diebold vote-counting fears? Maybe Rove did "fix" the election -- but in the Democrats' direction, so that's why they have stopped complaining about Diebold. As Ann Coulter put it, "History was made this week! For the first time in four election cycles, Democrats are not attacking the Diebold Corp. the day after the election."

Maybe the smoking gun in this conspiracy will be a memo from Rove to George Allen suggesting that he utter the word "macaca" whenever some dark-skinned ethnic ticks him off. Or a Ken Mehlman note to Tony Snow urging that he refer to the Mark Foley scandal as nothing but a bunch of "naughty e-mails."

Will Bunch concludes his blog post today: "Is Karl Rove not the evil genius we all thought he was, or is he brilliant beyond the reckoning power of us mere mortals? Whatever the strategery, the more we look at it, the more we think that Bush's difficult next two years may work out slightly better for him with a Democratic Congress."

Preposterous, I know. I'm still not buying it. The more likely explanation: Even evil "geniuses" screw up -- if they were "geniuses" to start with. And, as I've been saying for three years, the public hates the war far more than the pundits and newspaper editorialists admit. Americans want out. And no one should need a tin hat to see that.

BumbleBeeBoogie, I'm glad somebody remembers Rabin. "Eerie Ceremony

Two weeks before the assassination, Victor Cygielman, the correspondent of the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, sat down at his computer in Tel Aviv to sum up the developments of the past months. He began by describing the eerie ceremony in which a small group of religious fanatics had stood before Rabin's house on the eve of Yom Kippur and intoned the mystical Pulsa da-Nura, a kabbalistic curse of death. He wrote of the explicit "contract" put out on Rabin's life by rabbis who invoked the talmudic concept din rodef, the sentence pronounced on a Jewish traitor. Cygielman cited the handbill passed out at a mass demonstration in Jerusalem on October 5 showing Rabin in an SS uniform. "The stage was set for the murder of the prime minister," he said. A technical problem caused a week's delay in the publication of Cygielman's piece, and it didn't appear until Thursday, November 2. Two days later Yitzhak Rabin was dead." http://www.againstbombing.com/Rabinmurder.htm

I don't buy that either, BBB.

Here's an issue of Keyboard Kommandos that sums it up pretty well:

http://www.thepoorman.net/2006/11/14/keyboard-kommando-komics-presents-9/

Cycloptichorn

Advocate wrote: CI, your anecdotal stuff is laughable. Wow, some Pals explained everything to you. Israel is ready and willing to give the Pals their state. But they want Israel destroyed.

I never said the Pals explained everything. Where in hell did you read that? At least my "anecdotal" was from first hand experience, while yours is way off the mark and miles away - as others have pointed out.

Advocate wrote: CI, I see that you are another antisemite.

It seems that's the only tag that seems to satisfy some people. If we don't agree, we're antisemites. What a small brain.

Of course Jews who agree with us anti-semites are called "self-hating Jews". In much the same way that those who expose Bushie are "with the terrorists".

Regarding Israel recognizing the Pals, it is hard to negotiate with those who deny you have the right to exist. This has never changed, and the present leader just reaffirmed this. But Israelis are supposed to kiss their enemies.