ot. Palestinian Israeli conflict.

[The-Shoveler]

[quote=scaredyclassic]

althoug health care is pretty good in Israel, and I think free…[/quote]

Israel was basically founded as a socialist country.

Go figure.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=paramount][quote=scaredyclassic][quote=paramount]No one wins
It’s a war of man,
No one wins
It’s a war of man.[/quote]

well, actually, body count wise, israel is kinda winning.[/quote]

True, and more specifically children body count wise.[/quote]

What other kinds of war are there? Holy wars? Are there winners there?

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=paramount][quote=scaredyclassic][quote=paramount]No one wins
It’s a war of man,
No one wins
It’s a war of man.[/quote]

well, actually, body count wise, israel is kinda winning.[/quote]

True, and more specifically children body count wise.[/quote]

Neil Young in general hits the nail on the head

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=Hatfield]It’s unfortunate that AIPAC has made it impossible for any US politician to take any kind of remotely balanced approach to the region.

The situation is a total, intractable mess. At the same time, when you carve yourself a country out of somebody else’s land, you gotta expect there’s gonna be trouble. It would be like Texas gaining its independence by seceding from the union, only to have France come and claim it because parts of Texas were once French.[/quote]

Not sure that’s entirely true as the Jews there were buying up lots of lland.i don’t know how much extra they were going to get beyond their purchased sections.

What about the idea that land tends to go to the strongest hands who develop it best. The Israelis developed way better than the Arabs kinda like we did a lot more with the continent than those laid back native americans. Sure it’s not fair but it’s the way of the world.

I don’t find that very compelling …

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=paramount][quote=scaredyclassic][quote=paramount]No one wins
It’s a war of man,
No one wins
It’s a war of man.[/quote]

well, actually, body count wise, israel is kinda winning.[/quote]

True, and more specifically children body count wise.[/quote]

I wonder if we killed more kids in Iraq or Israel in gaza. I bet it’s close.

[scaredyclassic]

Health care looks really good in israel. Maybe it’s worth dual citizenship?

[UCGal]

My husband observed the other day that there are similarities between how the Nazi’s pushed the jews into walled ghettos in Warsaw, and how the Israeli’s have pushed the Palestinians into walled ghettos in Gaza and the West Bank. No freedom of movement or economic opportunity for those in the ghettos.

Kind of ironic.

[all]

It makes it somewhat easier to be bad ass if you have unconditional support of the only super-power. With the level of financial and political support it is kind of funny to see the media in Israel barking at Kerry and the administration. Maybe it is just a mask?

IIRC, Serbs were pushed out of Kosovo for being way less aggressive while having historic claim to the land at least as good as Jews do.

Giving in does not seem to be an option for Israel. My Jewish neighbor argues that pulling out of Gaza in the first place was a mistake. Seems kind of self-evident today. On the other hand you have demographics working against you. There was a story few days ago about a middle-aged guy who lost his house and his workplace, but he managed to evacuate with his eight children, all eight in their twenties. Same day was another similar story, a town major who lived in a destroyed house with his four adult sons and their families. If families are having 5-10 children as a norm you will end up with a lot of hot-blooded male adolescents with nothing to do and Israel to blame.

Maybe another 6-day war would by few years of peace? But it does not seem like that can be repeated. Maybe if you nuke someone they will stop messing with you?

[scaredyclassic]

They were bad ass when they were all alone over there. They’re still batshit crazy.

[CDMA ENG]

[quote=paramount][quote=CDMA ENG][quote=paramount]No one wins
It’s a war of man,
No one wins
It’s a war of man.[/quote]

You’re so far right is ridiculous and now your quoting a lefty?

CE[/quote]

I would only seem far right to a far left liberal.

And no we won’t be meeting in the middle.[/quote]

hmmm… Wish that were true. I think most of the ppl here are moderates. Including myself… and you are indeed very right of center… So… no..

CE

[FlyerInHi]

A state based on religion sounds so against principles of human rights.
Lots of Jews of Eastern Europe migrated to Israel in the last few decades.
Can Israel really sustain the Jewish state long term?

[SK in CV]

[quote=scaredyclassic]i think the plan is like bombing Dresden, you just make war so unpalatable that people give in.

[/quote]
[quote=scaredyclassic]
I wonder if we killed more kids in Iraq or Israel in gaza. I bet it’s close.[/quote]

I’m not sure exactly what the death toll is in Gaza from this current round, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 last I heard. It’s been going on for a little over 3 weeks now. Almost 25,000 died during the firebombing of Dresden, over a 3 day period.

The number of child casualties in Iraq has been estimated as high as 50,000, out of highest estimates of a million total casualties.

The total number of direct casualties on both sides in the Israel/Palestinian conflict over the last 25 years is around 25,000. Solely for the purpose of adding some perspective, that 25,000 is dwarfed, by an order of magnitude, the more than 250,000 direct casualties in the last 3 years in the current conflict in Syria.

[HenryPP]

I’ve always loved all things history. Mainly economic and political history, but also including some military history. So I was pretty interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I can’t really say that one side has a monopoly on moral behavior. Both have behaved quite badly. However, over the years, as I’ve read and seen more and more, I’ve become less and less sympathetic to the Israeli side, and more sympathetic to the Palestinians. Especially as they are by far the weaker side. I originally got interested in this as a military conflict. But then I realized that this is not really a “military conflict,” sort of like how a 12th grader beating up a 3rd grader and taking his lunch money is not really “a schoolyard fight.”

I think the thing that bothers me the most about Israeli behavior is the hypocrisy. A lot of other countries and militaries behave brutally. But they don’t pretend or claim that they are all sunshine and flowers. Israel does. Basically, when it comes to Israel, I’ve learned to go by their actions, not their words. Some examples:

Israel continually claims to want a “2 state solution.” But then they keep grabbing Palestinian land. That’s the land the Palestinians are supposed to build their supposedly future state on. Claiming you want a peaceful “2 state solution” and then doing everything in your power to sabotage that is hypocrisy.

Israel got the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 “6 Day War.” Israel claimed that this was a defensive war. But when you actually look at what happened, you see that Israel struck first, and struck first MASSIVELY with their entire air force. This is like WW2 Japan saying that Pearl Harbor was a defensive action.

Also, during the 1967 war, Israel attacked the crap out of the USS Liberty, an American navy spy-ship that was nearby and listening in on the war. Even though it was a clear day and the ship was flying a massive American flag and Israeli fighter planes had flown over it several times – positively ID’ing it as American, the Israeli air force and navy proceeded to attack it for several hours, almost sinking it, and killing 34 American sailors and injuring 171. Aside from bombing the crap out of the ship, the American survivors claim that Israeli gunboats machine-gunned the lifeboats full of American sailors. They would have sunk the ship, too, and probably killed all the sailors, had a Russian navy ship not come on the scene to investigate. Israel then said “Oh, sorry, we didn’t realize that was an American ship.” Ummm, bullshit.

And the reason they attacked the USS Liberty? I read a book by one of the surviving officers from the Liberty, who speculated that the Israelis wanted to sink the Liberty because they knew it was a sophisticated spy-ship and it could monitor some things that the Israeli government and military did not want the world to know. Two items he listed were that, first, Israel was preparing to invade Syria to capture the Golan Heights. And second, that Israeli troops were at that moment perpetrating a war crime in the Sinai, killing several hundred Egyptian POW’s. At first I thought the second explanation was unlikely (stupidly, I believed the Israeli army claims about purity of arms and all that). Then a few years later, several Israeli parliamentarians stood up in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) and said “Why yes, we did kill several hundred prisoners of war in the Sinai in 1967. And we did it in 1956 too.” I see!

And in this latest war in Gaza, two things stood out for me. First, an Israeli ambassador saying that the Israeli army is so peaceful and careful to avoid civilian casualties that they deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Huh? Every report on the current fighting, including Israeli reports, say that the vast majority of Palestinian casualties have been civilians. Over 1,000 of the 1,400 dead Palestinians have been civilians, including hundreds and hundreds of children. (Meanwhile, only 3 of the 59 Israeli dead have been civilians – the remaining 56 dead Israelis have all been soldiers). UN refuge areas hit and destroyed, schools destroyed, hospitals bombed, over a thousand homes deliberately targeted and destroyed. Every single one of these is considered a contravention of the laws of war. Nobel Peace Prize?

And then I saw a video of a bunch of Israelis dancing and singing “It’s a school holiday in Gaza because all the children there are dead!” Wow!

But the thing that’s worst is that the US seems to have a weird battered wife syndrome relationship with Israel. No matter what Israel does, America supports it and pays for it. Pays in terms of money (several $Billion/year). And pays in terms of world relationships and even pays in terms of blood – a lot of the conflicts the US has gotten into in the last few decades have been for Israel’s sake and because of this mulish support for Israel.

Even after Israel literally blows up a girls school in Gaza, killing dozens and injuring hundreds, and a vegetable market, again killing dozens and injuring hundreds, you have the spectacle of American politicians rushing to show their support for Israel. From both parties (apparently, that is one thing that unites Democrats and Republicans). And sending piles of American taxpayer dollars there. Just how much “campaign donation” money are they getting from AIPAC anyway?

And Israel is the only country in the world that can attack and insult a sitting American president and secretary of state, and almost all of congress will side with them. John Kerry proposed a cease-fire that Israel didn’t like, so the Israeli government and media all attacked him and some even called his proposal a “massive terrorist attack.” Wow! (I had gotten used to Israelis calling anyone they didn’t like “a terrorist” – but I never expected they would call the sitting US secretary of state that). Even more weird was that he, the secretary of state of the world’s supposedly only superpower, then had to get in front of the cameras and say that nobody was more pro-Israel than him. As an American citizen, watching my government officials grovel before a foreign power that was actively insulting them was a bit hard to stomach.

Of course, the Palestinians have some really odious people in their midst, and a lot of the Islamists in the Middle East are downright scary. But at least with those clowns things are clear-cut. Some of them don’t even try to pretend to be in the 21st century. Some are literally trying to recreate the 7th century. (Although to be fair to the Palestinians, it’s the ISIS goons in Syria and Iraq who are going for the 7th century stuff, not Palestinians. The Palestinians give the impression that they only want to go back to the late 19th century).

So the hypocrisy factor is not the same. And all those dead and injured Palestinian children (watch some of the videos, if you can) have nothing to do with any of that. Although I’m sure that many of the Palestinian children that do survive this war will be some of the most extreme fanatics we’ll see in the next couple of decades, based on their childhood trauma.

Israel acts the same way – “God gave me this land” religious fanaticism combined with thuggish brutality – but Israel then turns around and pretends to be a civilized 21st century society. I guess that’s the part that annoys me the most – the hypocrisy of it.

[paramount]

Israel gives new meaning to the phrase “women and children first.”

[Hobie]

HenryPP: Nice read but think about this in respect to the hypocrosity referencing Israel.

Israel purchased the land from Arabs in 1947. Including malaria infested swampland which they drained and constructed homes. Can you fault them for defending it?

Israel certainly believes in the concept of, “opening a can of WhupAss on ya” if you mess with them. Again, can’t say I blame them and actually the US should take a lesson here. ( specifically the nancy boy political environment post WW2 )

And PM Netanyahu sums it up quite well: Silence will be met with silence.

[Author]

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