BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Switchboard >

Israel vs Hamas - Collective punishment

  
 
sTe
22:25 / 29.06.06
I've not heard a large amount of detail on the latest situation in Gaza and was quite surprised not to find a thread on this already, but perhaps we've all become desensitized to goings on in Israel / Palestine and people have generally given up hope that there will every be a peaceful resolution. However I am a hopeless optimist and still look forward to a day when two states can exist in freedom and safety for all. I would guess this is also the wish of the majority of people living in the area (at least those who are affected in some way by "the Troubles" there).

The large scale destruction of buildings and killing of suspected militants is undoubtedly collective punishment on a mass scale. I don't believe this is acceptable behavior from any government and think that the Family of Nations should take steps to discourage or prevent this. On the other hand, the elected Palestinian government refuses to recognise the right of the state of Israel to exist and whereas in the past there has been more distance between the acts of paramilitary organisations and the Palestinian authority, and it has been the Israeli government (IMO) carrying out state sponsored 'terrorist' acts, there is now a more obvious link and it could be viewed that the two states are at war, rather than previously a nation being punished on masse for the actions of a minority of it's citizens.

Fortunately neither side (as yet) has declared full scale war on the other as they can see the potential consequences of this, either the destruction of Palestine or an all out world war involving many other Arab states and the US, with nuclear weapons a strong possibility.

So what should have been the response to the murder and kidnap of Israeli soldiers?

It seems obvious to me that every time there is retaliation from Israel for the latest retaliation from one of the Palestinian linked groups, that it will lead to more people taking up the cause of these groups as inevitably innocent people are caught up in the killing.
Surely a more sensible course of action would be a more focused response; either through negotiation or a search & rescue operation (appreciate that this would be extremely difficult for Israeli forces to execute in Palestine territory). What does anyone else think, what would you have done in this situation if were you leading the Israeli governement?
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
14:45 / 30.06.06
What do you do if the people you're supposed to negotiate with have a stated aim of killing you, your family, your countrymen and wiping your country from the face of the earth. What do you do?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
19:13 / 30.06.06
Try and convince them not to with the full backing of the international community?

Israel has the upper hand, it has more power, more money, more water, a cohesive and funded military force and the only way that peace will be acheived is if they treat the Palestinians as if they have as much right to exist as comfortably as Israelis. They have consistently failed to do so and the situation has escalated since Rabin was killed in 1995.

The Israeli action is appalling, this action is basically institutional racism, they're punishing a huge number of people because they're all Palestinian for the actions of a few again and I'm not even going to go into the kidnapping of elected Hamas members. I think it's worse when the state does it, that the Palestinians have elected the state to respond with as much extremism only shows us just how bad things have got.

I'm constantly worried that I'm going to say something terrible in this thread but when Rabin died, everyone was so torn up and there was a desperate hope that someone would come along and escalate what he had done, pull it up, make it happen. I think everyone knew that it wasn't going to but it still disappoints me and makes me extremely angry that Israel rejected the very notion of peace so thoroughly.
 
 
elene
20:15 / 30.06.06
As David Ben-Gurion put it in the late 1930s, “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”

To achieve this goal, the Zionists had to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was simply no other way to accomplish their objective. Ben-Gurion saw the problem clearly, writing in 1941 that “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.” Or as Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it, “the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.”

...

David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress: If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country ... We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’

The Israel Lobby And U.S. Foreign Policy
John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Walt
 
 
sTe
23:39 / 30.06.06
So the idea of a state of Israel based on religious and idealistic and historical rights cannot in essence work with a Palestinian state occupying some/all of the same land?

Well bollocks, it's too late to consider the why's and wherefores of how this situation came to be, no one race of people are going to give up their claim to the land they both (with some justification) believe to be theirs by right. Surely that's one of the reasons the UN was founded to settle disputes when both parties are in the right as far as they are concerned, and to avoid a fullscale war when this happens?

Any ideas on what the UN could actually do on the ground to attempt to help both parties work towards a multicultural two state scenario where the hatred on both sides was reduced to a level where individual racists could be dealt with in a court of law and the majority on both sides could accept the rights of the other to exist alongside them?

Setting up a mass media control (ala "the Western World") of what people are told/educated would be a start I think. Would this be restricting freedoms, thought police stylee, if someone in the mode of Rupert Murdoch completely blitzed both sides with positive propaganda to the level where "the man on the street" couldn't understand why the government hated the other government they're not so bad (highlight the good stuff, Israeli/Palestine Orchestra working together, electricity being supplied over the border despite everything, the good Palestinian (i.e. Samaritan, although that maybe new testament) helping the injured Israeli soldier etc...

That's not impossible, that's just media, it may work, maybe...

What other ways forward are there? Surely the might and mind of Barbelith can offer some hope in one of the most troubled and hate filled disputes of the world today?
(otherwise I think we are wasting our time trying to sound clever to each other)
 
 
sTe
23:44 / 30.06.06
sorry didn't mean to say that Barbelith is pointless if we do not solve all the world's problems, obviously there is a lot of other value with the sharing of information points of view etc.. just I get frustrated at times
 
 
sTe
23:47 / 30.06.06
Just we could do so much more!

(triple posting very bad etiquette sorry should think before pressing buttons, but anyway...)
 
 
elene
07:32 / 01.07.06
You seem to think the UN can do something, sTe, but it can't. Israel is in control of Palestine and the USA will veto any resolution against Israel at the UN security council. The UN is helpless. You also greatly underestimate Israel's military strength. It's the fifth most powerful nuclear power in the world. It has by far the strongest military in the Middle-East. No one can tell it what to do. Well, the USA could, somewhat, but it won't. The Palestinians, in contrast, don't have a viable state, they are controlled by Israel but don't possess the same rights Israelis do. This is not a matter of a few racists on each side. Israel has strongly racist citizenship laws. Citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens can't become citizens themselves, nor do they have the right to live in Israel.
 
 
w1rebaby
11:32 / 01.07.06
So what should have been the response to the murder and kidnap of Israeli soldiers?

You might find the following interesting:

---
Few readers of a British newspaper would have noticed the story. In the Observer of 25 June, it merited a mere paragraph hidden in the "World in brief" section, revealing that the previous day a team of Israeli commandos had entered the Gaza Strip to "detain" two Palestinians Israel claims are members of Hamas.

The significance of the mission was alluded to in a final phrase describing this as "the first arrest raid in the territory since Israel pulled out of the area a year ago". More precisely, it was the first time the Israeli army had re-entered the Gaza Strip, directly violating Palestinian control of the territory, since it supposedly left in August last year.

As the Observer landed on doorsteps around the UK, however, another daring mission was being launched in Gaza that would attract far more attention from the British media - and prompt far more concern.

Shortly before dawn, armed Palestinians slipped past Israeli military defences to launch an attack on an army post close by Gaza called Kerem Shalom. They sneaked through a half-mile underground tunnel dug under an Israeli-built electronic fence that surrounds the Strip and threw grenades at a tank, killing two soldiers inside. Seizing another, wounded soldier the gunmen then disappeared back into Gaza.

Whereas the Israeli "arrest raid" had passed with barely a murmur, the Palestinian attack a day later received very different coverage. The BBC's correspondent in Gaza, Alan Johnstone, started the ball rolling later the same day in broadcasts in which he referred to the Palestinian attack as "a major escalation in cross-border tensions". (BBC World news, 10am GMT, 25 June 2006)
---
(continued)
 
  
Add Your Reply