the USA, Israel, and national interest

makes me want to vomit

how is that article fucked up? did you not realize these two populations actually want to kill each other?

I guess more importantly the thing that article makes clear to me is that even if 90 percent of both the hebrew and arab populations in any part of israel/palestine agreed that coexistence was a-okay and fine and something they wanted, the outliers will ruin it for you every time. And I'm sure, every time, that when the outliers start blowing stuff up and killing each other, more and more of the middle get that If You Can't Beat Em Join Em feeling, which most of the quotes in that article seem to illustrate.

One of the biggest failures of Israel has been to allow those "outliers" to gain increasing power and legitimacy over time. In Gaza, the outliers actually threaten you with violence for dissenting. In Israel, on the other hand, I'm never clear whether they're indulged for short-term political gains without any further motives or if there's a larger strategy at work.

uhh Rabin?

outliers support each other. we've seen how effective fear-mongering politics have been over here, just imagine it in that environment.

media writing about nurse znaty shit doesn't really help/reveal anything. you really think finding Palestinians celebrating horrible things would be that hard to find?

outliers support each other. we've seen how effective fear-mongering politics have been over here, just imagine it in that environment.

totally. I don't know if letting wingnuts hijack national policy is so much of a "failure" as it just seems like part of the democratic business cycle, if that makes sense.

and in a kind of lol but mostly sad non-coincidence, the books I've been reading about the rise of wingnuts in the GOP culminating in the last eight years trace a lot of their starting points back to 1973.

uhh Rabin?

Rabin should have provided grounds to target extremists, not to indulge them.

Yeah, of course they want to kill each other, often in ugly ways, but one side has billions in U.S. military support and a relatively large, well-trained army, and the other is a big refugee camp that's being humiliated and starved. Just by the crude measurement of a body count of how the "war" is going, it's up to around 700-3. For me, the power dynamic between the two sides is central to understanding what's happening (well, that, and race and religion and a dozen other things).

What's fucked up and sad about the article is how nonchalant the Israelis depicted are towards real suffering while living in relative comfort and wealth.

(xps)

that's not just israelis. you may find that in fact the entire developed world is nonchalant towards real suffering while living in relative comfort and wealth.

vermonter, are you trying to say that if we evened the odds and gave both sides a few billion each, and let hamas take some genius classes on artillery, that would make it better? I don't think the power dynamic has shit to do with anything EXCEPT in the macro game theory picture where mutually assured destruction creates the opportunity for a real ceasefire agreement that lasts for an entire generation or two.

(and no I don't really like those odds either)

(xp)
That's true.

I guess what's different about Israel for me is that it's younger and we can watch in real time the violence of creating a nation on someone else's land...kind of like being in the U.S. 400 years ago. Also we can't picnic on a hill and clap while our boys drop bombs overhead either, so there's a difference in proximity too.

You don't have to go time traveling, verm. You can look at lotsa places in the world today where relatively wealthy folks are killing relatively poor folks. And vice-versa. Just like in Israel/Gaza.

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053800.html

Seriously, fuck these guys.

DEEP THOUGHTS BY CONTENDO

Shlomi Regional Council head, Gabi Na'aman, told Channel 1 that local residents have been told to open their bomb shelters and that school has been canceled. The Home Front Command said, however, that no orders have yet been given to cancel school.

Which guys Mordy, the Shlomi Regional Council or the Home Front Command? I'm going with seriously fuck the HFC because yo schools out forever motherfuckers

Sorry, don't have much of a sense of humor about it. I have two brothers and a sister-in-law living in Israel right now.

I'm just really pissed. I want to know how Israel is responsible for Hezbollah breaking THAT cease-fire as well.

israel made the decision to exist, therefore they are responsible for shit that is done to them

israel shouldn't have worn that short skirt to the party. she was fucking asking for it.

ha - at least we agree about revolutionary road

It seems like a lot of the people that wsj article is talking about aren't really ideological extremists but just people who happen to live in Sderot.

btw vermonter in re birth of a nation, there's another UK partition project growing up before our eyes a little further east, and again the same thing is happening - attempts at secular democracy being hijacked by religious extremists. we're 230 years in and this happens to us, so I think it's safe to say it'll be a while. OTOH history goes faster every day.

Apparently making the British viceroys feel unwelcome is a one-way ticket to sturm and drang of the bloodiest variety

I know I was being simplistic in that last post, but damn, I really hate the argument that this particular situation calls for a special kind of one-sided moral outrage over the "very clear evil that those people over there are doing over there!" I mean, it is clear that great evil is being done, on both sides, but it's also clear that the situation exists as it does due to a big tangle of achingly complex sub-situations, and that any attempt to mash it down into a simple bad guy vs. good guy scenario is FUCKED - is seriously part of the problem. And that's why I was getting all moony-inna-joony with the deep thoughts back there.

^^ which is more of the same, I suppose...

israel made the decision to exist, therefore they are responsible for shit that is done to them

― TOMBOT, Thursday, January 8, 2009 1:52 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

israel shouldn't have worn that short skirt to the party. she was fucking asking for it.

― Mordy, Thursday, January 8, 2009 1:54 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

Well let's not be completely obtuse. 1) Israel's decision to "exist" did involve displacing a ton of people and they've been a bit slow to confront the consequences of that. 2) Israel has made normal life in Gaza pretty much impossible since the Hamas election in 2006, which is almost since the withdrawal.

haha yeah it is unfortunate that deontological ethics doesn't work at the level of nation-states

xpost to contendo

or, you know, any time you're making decisions that actually affect other people

1) Israel's decision to "exist" did involve displacing a ton of people and they've been a bit slow to confront the consequences of that. 2) Israel has made normal life in Gaza pretty much impossible since the Hamas election in 2006, which is almost since the withdrawal.

Re: the first point, yes, there was displacement. But there was also an enormous displaced Jewish community living in Cyprus internment camps and a sizable Jewish community in Israel from before the war. Obv. displacing one community with a second isn't a good thing, but it's not like a colonialist oppressor threw people off their land to make way for new citizens. (And before the war, there wasn't much displacement - which doesn't mean it's right and okay, but does explain a bit the circumstances.)

Not to mention that the generation growing up in Israel now didn't kick Palestinians out of their homes to clear the road to Jerusalem in '67.

NOT TO MENTION that, as shitty as displacement is, if Arab armies didn't lock down Jerusalem, attack the Jews living there, and didn't blockade settlements so that people couldn't eat, the army wouldn't have felt it necessarily to throw Palestinians out of their homes to clear the blockade.

This wasn't a fucking colonialist army trying to abuse the poor, innocent civilians living there. There was some huge fucking evil shit that the Palestinians were complacent in to get things to this point. And it doesn't excuse the current situation (esp since current Palestinians weren't the ones blockading thousand year old communities), but it does lend a little understanding to the matzif.

(Sorry if I sound snitty or pissed. I'm just upset right now about the situation in general. When family are in a war-zone, you feel this shit intensely.)

Re: the first point, yes, there was displacement. But there was also an enormous displaced Jewish community living in Cyprus internment camps and a sizable Jewish community in Israel from before the war. Obv. displacing one community with a second isn't a good thing, but it's not like a colonialist oppressor threw people off their land to make way for new citizens. (And before the war, there wasn't much displacement - which doesn't mean it's right and okay, but does explain a bit the circumstances.)

Oft-repeated and obfuscating statements. There is a "sizable" Indian immigrant population living in New Jersey -- would that somehow help to justify displacement of non-Indians for the creation of an Indian state there? And what difference does it make to what I said whether they are "colonialist oppressors" or not? They wanted the land and they took it. And my point is that at very least that leaves the country with some kind of moral responsibility to repair some of the damage.

NOT TO MENTION that, as shitty as displacement is, if Arab armies didn't lock down Jerusalem, attack the Jews living there, and didn't blockade settlements so that people couldn't eat, the army wouldn't have felt it necessarily to throw Palestinians out of their homes to clear the blockade.

― Mordy, Thursday, January 8, 2009 3:00 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

This is nonsense. Displacement was part of Ben Gurion's plan. It may not have been a part of every version of zionism, but it was a part of the Ben Gurion version, which is the one that prevailed.

His plan was buying homes, which Israel did. They bought up a shitload of real estate, mostly using donations from the Diaspora community in America. They didn't throw people out of homes because of some grand plan tho. They did that to open up blockades.

none of this is relevant in 2008.
except for the interesting coincidence that harvey milk decided to be a homosexual at exactly the same moment that jews decided the torah said something about canaan in it.

Also, I happen to believe that the post-WWII Jewish community didn't do anything wrong by moving to Israel. I think they had a crisis of placement (for reasons the Palestinians aren't to blame for), and they wanted to return to a historical, cultural and, yes, religious homeland. And until the 6DW, they didn't throw any Palestinians out of their homes.

Oh come on, Mordy. Maybe we could have avoided all of this if the Marshall Plan had included a free boat trip and USA citizenship coupon for any survivor who wanted out of Europe.

Maybe, but it didn't. My point is just that blaming the Jews in Israel for displaced Palestinians is fucked up. Yes, there are displaced Palestinians, and yes, that needs to be fixed. But the Israeli's didn't /do it/ to them.

(please nobody show up and tell me that the marshall plan did in fact have that somewhere in it)

They weren't innocent victims. This isn't like the English settled Native American territories, and killed and displaced them to take their land.

I think the Marshall Plan explicitly didn't have that. Don't remember it totally off-hand, but I think the US pretty clearly did not want all those survivors.

haha "explicitly"

SECTION 33B-II
THERE WILL CERTAINLY NOT BE ANY PROVISIONS MADE TO OFFER CITIZENSHIP COUPONS OR FREE BOAT RIDES TO SURVIVORS OF HITLER'S ATTEMPT AT GENOCIDE NO NO NO NO NO

Right. I remember that section.

In a surprising twist, that particular article was lobbied for most heavily by none other than Dr. Brown, who some have speculated was acting on behalf of established northeastern deli operators who didn't want any more competition.

back to being vaguely serious, I think it's funny how easily the current situation regarding israel gets reduced to "displacement" when nobody would think to say the same thing about similarly dire and ludicrous shit happening in India and Pakistan, despite the fact that as far as I can tell there was no nationalized effort to systematically exterminate Hindus in the past century.