Israel/Palestine in the News

I don't assert that the land Israel currently holds (regardless of it's status) was annexed illegally.

I was trying to determine if any country other than Israel is currently in possession of land that was determined by Resolution 181 to go toward the formation of a Palestinian State.

The answer to that appears to be "no".

Which in a way is a good thing: Fewer people at the negotiating table trying to extract concessions.

 

Did it occur to you that they could be firing at the helicopter there because:
a) having no helicopters of their own, firing from the ground is their only real option for attacking a helicopter
and
b) the helicopter is at their home, not the other way around?

 

I would have to agree that right now there isn't any land from the intial partition that is held by any Arab state. My point is that had the arab states not launched their war in 48 in an attempt to destroy Israel then we wouldn't be having this discussion about Palestine because that land that was meant for them would now be theirs. Also, the fact that Egypt and Jordan stole that land from them really begs the question as to why the Pali's aren't directing their rage at those 2 instead of pointing the finger soley at Israel?

This isn't to say that Israel is innocent in all this, but given the known facts, and given the conditions that the refugees are forced to live in in syria, Jordan, and lebanon it raises the question of why are the arab states doing what they are to keep the Pali's down?

It seems like the biggest enemy to any Paletine state are other arabs who seem content to use them as a tool against Israel.

 

Well actually I thought the first point was that you cannot define a civlian from a combatent insofar as hamas is concerned due to a lack of any uniform to id them apart from the civilian populace as required under the Geneva Convention.

As a result of this, you can shoot a hamas gunmen, but someone can pick up the body leaving the gun and claim he was an innocent killed by the oppresive IDF. Great for propaganda.

 

No joke.

I was explaining why you might see men with machine guns shooting at Israeli helicopters.

What are you getting at with the uniform thing? It's a ********ing insurgency. What do you expect, them to wear little pink bullseyes? Surely this isn't about them playing fair?

 

Wow, this is getting silly - the only point that was discussed was that there is now way to say who is Hamas and who is not since there is not unfirms and many are using weapons dressed as plain cloth civilians. That's all. And that's why many "innocents" are counted as such becasue of that making Israel seem like all they do is kill "innocent" Palestinians.

 

The Arab states that started that war aren't the Palestinian people. You can't convict Jordan but punish the Palestinians.

Regardless, those countries no longer hold any of that land. Israel does.

I agree they are using them. Which really begs the question of why the Israelis continue to stall on getting the Pali's politically and socially stabilized and in a position to exert their own sovereignty. Proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah would have a much harder time assimilating into the populace to achieve their terrorist goals if the Palestinians had anything looking like a better option.

I guess what I'm saying is this...

You hold the land. You have the power to give these people a state. Giving them a state would be a good thing. Full stop. The only people that would be hurt would be the extreme religious wingnuts on both sides.

 

Congratulations, you've just described how an insurgency works. Glad you understand the concept now.

So what's the problem again?

It really seems like you're upset because it's not fair.

 

I am not upset, just bedazzled that the point has been missed time and time again.

The only think that's not "fair" is people, similar to yourself, who are mistaken many times by the lies they are shown and told regarding the true statistics about this conflict.

 

So Israel gets attacked, gets land, and now is supposed to give it back because it was not Palestinians who attacked? Uhhm, sure, that sounds nice, crazy, but nice, considering the fact that when Israelis gave back Gaza, they got 40,000 rockets and a Hamastan, making Israel's southern border much safer .

Jordan should accept Palestinians and so should Egypt and I bet Israel would be OK with giving most, if not all of WB to Jordan, as they planned before, if Jordan accepts the Palestinians. However, Palestinians will not have thier "own" country. And if they want their own country, they cannot expect Israel to givew them all they want and they sure better try to show some cooperation and compromise, unlike Gaza.

 

Like what?

I'm not against you on this.

I'm just pointing out that:
1. The current situation is terrible for all sides and not one that can maintained forever.
2. The only reasonable way for this to end is for there to be a Jewish and Palestinian state.
3. Israel currently possesses all of the land that would constitute those two nations.

But instead of talking about what that end result would look like and how to acheive it, you'd rather bitch about the fact that in just about every armed conflict in human history, people with a massive military disadvantage tend to hide in the population for safety.

 

Yes. What's your other long term option? Seriously?

Not even the state of Israel acknowledges this line of thinking as an option. It's a non-starter. Why bring it up?

No shit they're not going to get what they want.

And neither will Israel.

That's called compromise.

And yes, the Palestinians will, someday, have their own country. And much if not all of that land will come from land Israel currently occupies.

 

It's rather simple - sometimes what we are told affects our opinions. When one hears that IDF killed 10 Palestinians, you feel bad and blame Israel. However, those facts are many times altered and out of those 10, 9 were terrorists most of the time. But because the media reports falsely, one's opinion changes. What another poster showed previously was how a member, actually commander of a Hamas, was counted as a civilian, now don't you think that's odd?
I am not bithching about it, but rather pointing it out as it DOES matter what people believe. I see it too often, especially at all these ANSWER, Amnesty International type of events where seemingly rational people act and think irrationally since they were fed crap.

As to your questions...

My solution is simple - Kick all Palestinians (Israeli Arabs) out of Israel, kick Jewish settlers out of WB and give it to Palestinians and take all settlers who lived in WB into proper Israel - so there is a Jewish state and Arab state.

If not, let Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt take their previous land and grant Palestinians citizen status in those countries.

Nothing else will work

 

Doesn't this present an interesting paradox? If you see a helicopter overhead firing missiles into your neighborhood, you can do nothing, in which case you might be an accidental target, or fire back, in which case you become a legitimate target?

Hamas might have some sort of uniform:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDltV-aea2g"]YouTube- Hamas Marching[/ame]
(you might want to mute the "hey-nanny-hey" song)
Whether they fight in uniform is another thing. I don't know what to make of the people in the street. I don't think the children pointing in the air are spotters, unless you somehow believe that the armed men cannot see a helicopter almost directly overhead. If people stay inside, their building can be flattened. If people come outside, they can be struck directly or by shrapnel.

I would think that the Palis are also angry at Egypt & Jordan. After all, wasn't "Black September" named for the Jordanian suppression of the Palestinians in that country?

 

Of course. Civil war is often worse than fighting a foreign enemy.

I know.
But, there was a discussion earlier about IDF in plainclothes shooting & killing murder suspects in the West Bank. So, I guess whether in uniform or not, Israel is always right & it's the converse for the Palis.

 

Western forces did not annihilate Germany. There were millions of German soldiers who surrendered, then were processed & released. The Soviets dealt more harshly with their own liberated POWs than the western armies did with the Wehmacht. There were also tens of millions of Germans who survived the war. None more were killed in the west, although, again, the civilians & industry were treated far more harshly in the Soviet sector, whether in the future East Germany or among those Germans expelled from other central European countries or former Austrian or German lands.

You characterizatioons are unnecessary. You choose to respond to my posts, apparently as the self-appointed spokesperson for the Israeli hard-line position. No one is forcing your to do so. I disagree with you.

Not that you realize it, but the IDF are invading & the plainclothes Palestinians, who may or may not be Hamas, are defending. If people in the West Bank saw a bunch of people attacking a house & fired at them, would you expect those people to don uniforms first, when even it turns out that the attackers are IDF dressed as civilians?

P.S. Mods, aren't we a few posts past the supposed 1,200 post limit? Obviously, if we had limited ourselves to posting news articles with just a few well-reasoned replies, there would only be about 250 ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/world/middleeast/31children.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast

 

Good, very observant on your end.

Do we really need to remind you the job of special ops working in enemy territory? Or should IDF just wear their uniforms and march into Gaza hoping to catch Hamas terrorists off guard? Hamas are not defending, they are terrorists who are being hunted down like dogs that they are, plain and simple. You make it sound like they are doing an honorable thing, defending...

 

No, but they also can't dictate the dress code for their enemies.

That you appear to suggest that annihilation of the Palestinian populations of Gaza & the West Bank might be necessary.

I get, but disagree with, your point. You can decry everything Hamas does, but justify it when the IDF does the same thing.
What word would you prefer to describe rolling tanks & thousands of troops into Gaza? Incursion?

Same to you, and oddessit. Let's all wish for peace in the ME.

 

You can be condescending as much as you want, but facts are facts.


Here's a nice few quotes for you:

"I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it." Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's Chief of Staff in 1967, in Le Monde, 2/28/68

Menahem Begin had the following remarks to make: "In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." New York Times, August 21, 1982 and Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."

Moshe Dayan (the Defense Minister in 1967) who gave the order to conquer the Golan Heights, said many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and that the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland... Dayan stated "They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land... We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was... The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us." The New York Times, May 11, 1997