Can someone explain to me…
December 27th, 2006 | by Craig R. Harmon |So there’s supposed to be this cease-fire arrangement between Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip. Great. What I don’t understand is how it can unlaughingly be called a cease-fire when rockets are more or less continuously being fired into Israel from, well, imagine this, the Gaza Strip. What kind of cease fire is that?
Oh yeh…the usual kind. Why is it we don’t demand that Palestinians cease firing when they enter into a cease-fire agreement with Israel. We actually demand that Israel cease firing. I don’t know…seems a bit like a double standard to me.
What do you think?
15 Responses to “Can someone explain to me…”
By Jersey McJones on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
Well, I guess people expect more from Israel, a modern Western state, than they do from Palestine, a complete and utter disaster.
JMJ
By Craig R. Harmon on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
Yes, that is certainly the case. But what IS is not necessarily what SHOULD be. Isn’t it the case that giving the Palestinians a pass on their murderous perfidy while demanding that Israel suicidally live up to it’s end of bargains that the Palestinians manifestly have never had any intention of living up to simply encouraging Palestinian murderous perfidy?
And what does the Palestinians’ continual perfidy say about the possibility of there being ANY negotiated peace in the Middle East?
By Paul Watson on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
Craig,
Just a suggestion, but when the Real IRA was bombing us and the IRA was on cease fire, we had to accept it because the Real IRA wsn’t the IRA (honest!). The same thing could apply in Palestine (Although I doubt it does apply, I’m just positing an example). That is you can negotiate as many peace settlements as you like but you will never get all the psychotic nutcases on board and a few psychotic nutcases can do a lot of damage. It’s a possibility, however slight.
By Craig R. Harmon on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
So what happened to the “Real” IRA?
By Jersey McJones on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
Paul makes a good point there. It isn’t all Palestinians.
“Isn’t it the case that giving the Palestinians a pass on their murderous perfidy while demanding that Israel suicidally live up to it’s end of bargains that the Palestinians manifestly have never had any intention of living up to simply encouraging Palestinian murderous perfidy?”
I don’t think anyone gives the Palestinian militias a “free pass.”
“And what does the Palestinians’ continual perfidy say about the possibility of there being ANY negotiated peace in the Middle East?”
Well, you got yourself a chicken/egg catch 22 there. Look the Jews came and took Israel from the Palestinians just as the Bristish took Northern Ireland - and look how long it took them to come to an amicable conclusion. The Jews may not have entirely brought this onto themselves, but the Palestinians sure as hell didn’t either. We can blame Western antisemitism for the formation of Israel. So we’d better step up and help.
JMJ
By Craig R. Harmon on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
I’d be more open to that comparison if the Palestinians hadn’t elected a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. It seems much more systemic in Palestine than it was in Ireland but that’s my view from this side of the Atlantic. Your view, being much closer, may be both different and correct.
By Craig R. Harmon on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
My comment 06 was in further response to Paul W. I hadn’t seen Jersey’s comment when I sent it on it’s merry way to publication.
By Paul Watson on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
They sort of disbanded after the Omagh bombing which was so bad that even the other terrorists thought it was too much. There are still a few violent dissidents on both sides in Northern Ireland but the majority has decided that they’ll get more through peace than war.
In Palestine, the dissidents are the ones that want peace. One of the reasons is that several times the Palestinians had ceasefires and Israel refused to talk to them. Why bother having peace if the other side won’t talk anyway? (I know this is unfair to Israel, but that is the attitude of many in Palestine. Israel wouldn’t talk to Arafat because he was a terrorist, neglecting to account for the fact that as far as the Palestinians were concerned Sharon was a war criminal for allowing the massacares in Lebanese refuge camps by the Israeli backed Lebanese Christian army)
It also applies to Israel, of course, in that they see Palestinians launching rockets and say the ceasefire is a failure and they won’t talk. Expecting a complete and total cessation of violence at the outset is, I’m afraid, unrealistic. Fringe elements will always be able to get off several volleys, which so far has proven to be enough to disrupt the peace process, such as it is. The problem comes in defining when it’s ‘fringe elements’ and when it’s not.
So, as usual, both sides are wrong in several fairly major points. I still can’t see a way out as, at the moment, neither side can move because it will encourage the more radical elements on the other side, or will mean that their own supporters will desert them, break away and continue the violence so they’ll have lost support and, because the violence is ongoing, gained nothing.
Isolating Hamas won’t work because there are enough countries who will support them to enable them to survive. Talking to Hamas at the moment won’t work because they’ll see it as a sign of weakness. Voting for Fatah won’t work as they’re an incompetent, corrupt bunch of self-serving crooks and even if they do gain power, they haven’t got the military clut to force Hamas to do anything. Defeating Hamas militarily is unfeasible because you would have to wipe out around half the Palestinian population, and that level of slaughter is likely to provoke the other half to react. So unless you engage in genocide, military force alone won’t work.
By Craig R. Harmon on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
Jersey.
I think that most of the Arab world gives the Palestinians a pass on their shenanigans. I didn’t intend to say that the posters and readers of this blog give them a pass, although your first comment comes close: it implies “What can you expect?” Well, the world can expect that they live up to their agreements and sanction them when they don’t. Instead, the UN seems totally fixated on condemning Israel. The new and improved human rights council has done nothing else. They have yet to condemn the Palestinians for firing rockets into residential, non-military areas.
Agreed that Western anti-semitism and zionism is responsible for Israel’s existence. We should step up and help but how. How do you help bring about peace with a state government dedicated to the destruction of its neighbor? There are several ways. Sanction the Palestinians, which is what was done. Israel, America, France and others withheld millions of dollars a month from the Palestinian government but it doesn’t seem to have softened Hamas’s openly genocidal intent.
They could go the route of war. If the government of one nation has a policy of the destruction of another nation and is actively carrying out military offensives, even during putative “cease-fires”, it seems to me that a state of war has been declared against Israel. In an all out war, it would take about one afternoon to essentially eliminate Palestine. The problem would be that that wouldn’t eliminate the problem. The Arab nations would take that as their cue to come to the aid of the Palestinians by open warfare. It would be world war all over again.
So that leaves negotiation with a government that has never kept a single promise it has ever made in negotiations.
Or some solution that I haven’t thought of.
By Jersey McJones on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
Well, we could put conditions on Israeli aid - like forcing them to establish realistic and contiguous boundaries for a Palestinian state.
JMJ
By Craig R. Harmon on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
Ah…Israel should give up MORE land for blood…land not just as reward to the Palestinians for the Israeli blood spilled by Palestinian terrorists in the past but Israeli blood that will flow when the Palestinians fire rockets from the new lands abandoned by Israel, just as the Palestinians began firing rockets into Israeli residential areas as soon as Israel pulled up stakes in Gaza. Great plan.
We’ve seen how that worked in Gaza. What makes you think it will work any differently in the new abandoned areas?
The problem isn’t occupied lands. The problem is genocidal Palestinians. The Palestinians have proven that giving back lands does not win peace. It wins the shedding of more Israeli blood.
By Jersey McJones on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
Craig, it’s NOT their land. What don’t you get about that? What do you think all the blood is about in the first place? There’s only one possible solution - seperation. But you can’t have seperation without a contiguous Palesitinian border. How can you have seperation splothces of Palesitinian territory here and there and Israel filling the spaces? It makes no sense. Look, really, if I were the Jews, I’d the living fucking hell out of there! I’m tired of hearing them complain. They went there. It’s their mess now. If they don’t like it, get the fuck out.
JMJ
By Craig R. Harmon on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
I don’t believe that it is true that it is not their land. That is to say, I do acknowledge that present day Israel DOES occupy some land that is not theirs, that they have illegally annexed and settled land that is either of disputed ownership or which seems clear to me is legally the property of Palestinians. So then, when you say that the land isn’t theirs, I can only agree if we’re talking about the lands that weren’t purchased and are legally owned by Israel and Israelis, having been properly and legally purchased.
As for the disputed land and the land that there seems to be little doubt that it belongs to Palestinians, I think the best solution is either to vacate those lands or to purchase those lands from Palestine. Purchasing would surely be the simpler since much of this land is built up and there are Jewish settlements on them but Israel pulled out of Gaza so, given enough political will in Israel, the same could be done from these lands IF there were agreement that those lands would not be used, as Gaza has been, as a launching point for further terrorist attacks. These lands were originally occupied to provide a buffer of security from such terrorist attacks and, as I said above, I believe that they would be similarly used if they were vacated by Israel and returned to Palestinians.
I think that a two state solution is the only proper solution given what I’ve said here.
As to the borders, if I’m not mistaken, the UN has recognized the 1967 borders as the legitimate borders of Israel. Ehud Barak, in the 2000-2001 Camp David Accords, had offered Arafat and the PA statehood with Jerusalem as capital, control over the Dome of the Rock, all of Gaza and 95 percent of the West Bank and $30 billion in compensation for the refugees of 1948 [Dershowitz, Alan. The Case for Israel. Hoboken: Wiley, 2003; pp. 8-9; also this article refers to this article to be an offer to return "to the 1967 border with minor modifications"]. I’m not sure what else Arafat wanted but he rejected that offer without making a counter-offer. I don’t know if there is the will to repeat the offer today but it sounds to me like a fair offer.
By Craig R. Harmon on Dec 27, 2006 | Reply
When I wrote above “…this article refers to this article to be an offer to return “to the 1967 border with minor modifications”
I meant, “…this article refers to this offer (that is, the offer made at Camp David) as an offer to return “to the 1967 border with minor modifications”
Sorry for the confusion.
By Jersey McJones on Dec 28, 2006 | Reply
Those boundaries obviously didn’t work either. They could. But it would require a massive infrastructural overhaul that the Palestinians would need a lot of help with (You need a free-flow of trade to the Med for the whole of the state). I don’t see this ever working out amicably. You point out the conundrum above - the big IF word. Israel needs to stop pretending that they have the luxury of that option and just act unilaterally to create a realistic boundary. With a realistic boundary, which would mean some major land concessions that are only fair in the FIRST place (no IFs or BUTs about it), some greater measure of peace my be attained. Less than that and the bombs will never stop.
JMJ