the USA, Israel, and national interest

yeah same here :/

I had a bad thought, but my God has room for evil thoughts regarding Joe the Plumber. In fact, He encourages them.

seriously if anything can unite israel and palestine imo it might be this noble cause

Oh, Joe, you magnificent ass, I do hope you don't die; that would be too good for you.

Speaking of human shields....

xpost - Mordy, that's why I said "in a weird way." We're talking on an individual psychological level here, not an institutional one (there's very little "institutional level" for Palestinians!). Israelis have a sense of security at stake; Palestinians don't hugely enjoy one even in the best of times. There is not a ton built there to hold onto. Yeah, lives and services matter as much as ever, but it's not easy to get loads of people in a space where they look happily on the entity that takes those things in an effort to have more of them. It seems pretty clear at this point that IDF bulldozer tactics don't encourage Palestinians to cooperate with Israel, they encourage Palestinians to take militant stances toward Israel, and to support militants. Whereas I think that when Palestinians have something concrete in their hands that they've built and gained, their internal politics are going to be more cautious; they're going to look toward leaders who offer a way of protecting that and don't risk falling back to nothing. But when you're already pretty close to nothing and very, very far from those gains and don't have the kind of institutional representation that takes larger, longer-term positions, then -- as Dan says way more succinctly -- it's much easier to drift toward militancy.

I dunno, Laurel, Joe might make a better projectile than a shield. Perhaps somebody could do some testing...

yeah no Xtians ever died in the Holy Land amirite

im glad were all wishing death on some midwestern goofball

Oh come off it, Max. He gave up the right to be considered a "harmless" "goofball" months and months ago.

Joe said that if Obama is elected it would spell the end of Israel. I'm not sure why Joe wants to be there when it happens.

Anyway, I'm not wishing death on him at all -- didn't you see that God will protect him from mortar fire?? He could be the Israelis' greatest asset, plant that guy in front of anything you want to protect and you've got a winnar.

multi-xpost

People who have no security whatsoever in their lives or possessions learn to be profligate with both, since there is no reason for them to think that they will be under their control tomorrow. One of the "lessons" Israel has systematically taught the Palestinians is that they, the Israelis, can take away the lives and possessions of the Palestinians at will.

Paradoxically, their lack of power is a very potent reason why the Palestinians constantly seek to fight rather than negotiate. If peace is given to them as a gift from Israel, it will not be a peace they will ever trust and the profound asymmetry of power, which Israel insists upon maintaining and demonstrating with great frequency, is at the heart of the matter. The only way forward is to move toward an equalization of power, and this is impossible under current Israeli policy, which promotes Israeli security far, far above Palestinian security.

This is an interesting theory. I don't think I have the background in group psychology to know whether it's true or not. Have studies been done (or articles published) that argue the merits of it?

I mean, this isn't comparable (because Palestinians aren't children), but when I was a kid, I was often punished for misbehaving. I felt like I had no control. But that didn't make me more violent and wild. This obviously might be different, but I don't think it's self-evident that lack of appearance of agency leads to militancy.

(I don't want to understate the amount I'm distancing my childhood anecdote from this situation. 100% different. I'm just saying that the argument isn't self-evident to me.)

I learned it from studying Irish history.

It's not comparable, because when you were a kid, you could look forward to adulthood that would include some measure of power over yourself and possibly others around you, as you witnessed other adults having.

Being a little flip here, but I think there's plenty of recent empirical evidence that nations taking such disciplinarian stances toward peoples they've conquered are not often paid back with smiling cooperation. I dunno, it does seem somewhat basic and self-evident to me that militant groups breed quite well among people who have very little, and whose very little is at the mercy of someone else -- or at least better than they do when said people are busily investing in their own development and the opportunities of their own lives, with a sense that they can safely build those things . . .

Aimless OTM.

If it helps, Mordy, a more acceptable group-psych truism might be that when people group themselves into nations (even unrecognized quasi-nations), they invest their national super-identities with an enormous amount of pride. As a result, few nations are happily willing to knuckle under to an enemy state, to become the vassal of their "oppressors". Basically, if you force a person or group to recognize and accept their own powerlessness, they will probably always hate you for it.

Conversely, if you work to engage with and empower a person or group, while you risk having them use that power against you, you at least stand a chance of building a healthy LTR.

If I understand correctly, though several neighboring countries offered to absorb refugees after 1948, only Jordan followed through. Are there any good explanations floating around of why this is? I've assumed that it was some combination of their leaders wanting to keep pressure on Israel, and not wanting to absorb what would probably be a serious economic hit, but no doubt there are other angles.

Of course to "solve" the problem you'd need to combine this with compensation. But I have no idea how many Palestinians would accept $$$ + resettlement to Syria, or Egypt, or Libya. (Depends on the $$$, I suppose.)

And you can "discipline" a regime, but short of old-school colonization I'm not sure how feasible it is to "discipline" a populace.

If I understand correctly, though several neighboring countries offered to absorb refugees after 1948, only Jordan followed through. Are there any good explanations floating around of why this is? I've assumed that it was some combination of their leaders wanting to keep pressure on Israel, and not wanting to absorb what would probably be a serious economic hit, but no doubt there are other angles.

A lot of the Middle East really doesn't like the Palestinian people, as much as they might love the cause.

maybe 'doesn't like' is the wrong phrasing. 'doesn't think very highly of'

(without getting involved in it again, i'm just dropping by this thread to say nabisco otm.)

I am also dropping in to say: as usual, Aimless totally OTM.

More on 'human shields' in Gaza - mothers crushed to death trying to "shield" their children from Israeli bombs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/world/middleeast/09redcross.html

The statement said a team of four Palestine Red Crescent ambulances accompanied by Red Cross representatives made its way to Zeitoun Wednesday where it “found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all, there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses.”

In another house, the statement said, the rescue team “found 15 other survivors of this attack including several wounded. In yet another house, they found an additional three corpses. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do. There were several other positions of the Israeli Defense Forces nearby as well as two tanks.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/world/09fighter.html?hp

alternatively:

He was told that there were more serious cases than his, that he needed to wait. But he insisted. “We are fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.

“Why are you so happy?” a reporter asked. “Look around you.”

would it really be a stretch to call that depraved?

Are there depraved people? Sure. Some run into occupied houses to escape shelling, others are named Nurse Znaty. Extending the depravity of this or that individual to the entire group they supposedly represent could be called a kind of depravity, too. Especially if it's used to justify killings.

xpost - Is there any pertinent meaning of the word "depraved" that particularly matters here?

only when we're playing 'who's the bad guy' - which, for like 75% of this thread - we seem to still be.

Apologies if this has been posted already, but this is pretty good.

only when we're playing 'who's the bad guy'.

― iatee

Calling people "depraved" is playing into that game. Feeling the need to go, "no, look at this example of depravity on the other side" every time the issue comes up is being so totally dominated by the game you can't even see outside it.

no I totally agree that I was playing into the game

only when we're playing 'who's the bad guy' - which, for like 75% of this thread - we seem to still be

I think this happens because this is the #1 issue on which no one ever accepts that anyone just means what they say. Any statement, no matter how banal or incontrovertible -- "well, Israelis have children" -- is read as putting forth an argument as to who the bad guy is. We could probably all afford to avoid this, the reading behind statements and inferring thrusts that may not really be there.

Fair enough (xpost). And nabiscOTM.

Anyway, Yglesias article Alfred linked OTM. Then again, I've been baffled for years by the total failure of both Democrats and Republicans to take any kind of stand against any Israeli action or policy, so I'm not optimistic about the likelihood of "change" here.

I get the feeling that Obama's not planning or hoping to be the next Jimmy Carter though.

If I understand correctly, though several neighboring countries offered to absorb refugees after 1948, only Jordan followed through.

Syria absorbed a lot of Palestinians, giving them almost but not quite the same rights as Syrian citizens. The Syrian leadership after 1948 apparently proposed a full peace treaty with Israel (rather than an armstice) and offered to take something like all displaced Palestinians, but they received no reply to this offer (I read this in the chapter by Joshua Landis in the Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan edited book "The War for Palestine").

http://www.hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/boratism.jpg

So, hey, how about the text written on dreadlock whitey's flag. Subversion or massive point missing?

hahahahaha

I just went to this tonight: Crisis in Gaza: The US, Israel, and Palestine Panel: John Mearsheimer, Norman Finkelstein and Ali Abunimah. They all agreed that Israel really has no interest in a viable Palestinian state, that the actual goal has been the same for a while: to get as much land and enclose the Palestinians behind a wall (Greater Israel/Iron Wall). Apparently this is no secret in the Israeli press, and leaders often say as much. As far as timing, Finkelstein argued its to make up for the lost cred from Lebanon in 2006 (which incidentally, did not take place during an election season). Don't think any of these guys put much faith in U.S. gov't response.

Lolz.

Well, I'm sure Mearsheimer, Finkelstein and Abunimah are all great friends of Israel and are only trying to present all sides of the issues. :/

hoos the bad guy

There is a certain inevitability to the story of the 30 people killed by the Israeli army, after it shelled the building it had evacuated them to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/09/gaza-palestinians-israel-evacuees-zeitoun

Is it not a contradiction to imply that commentators should be both "great friends of Israel" and also try "to present all sides of the issues"?

oh great, gavin and flyboy are back.

i dont think theyve ever posted on this thread before