I know this is not a simple problem and no simple solution will suffice, but why does Israel continue to do the one thing they know will provoke more violence ? Is housing in such short supply in Israel? Is land in short supply that this is the only area that they can build on? I just don't understand http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/02/i...41c34b3d540410&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE Israel Plans to Build 600 New Homes in Settlements By GREG MYRE Published: October 2, 2003 ERUSALEM, Oct. 2 — Israel announced today it intended to build about 600 new homes in three large West Bank settlements, a move that contradicts the current Middle East peace plan. The announcement came a day after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government approved the construction of barriers deep inside the West Bank to guard Jewish settlements. Palestinians expressed anger at both decisions, with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, calling the barrier a "wall of racism." "What does the wall mean? It means that this government is destroying and ending the peace process," Mr. Arafat said at his badly damaged headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "How long will this silence in the face of Israeli crimes last." The Middle East peace plan, known as the road map, has stalled as the violence continues, and neither side is meeting obligations listed in the first phase of the plan. Israel is supposed to halt all settlement activity, but government officials say Israel is not required to do this until the Palestinian leadership first cracks down on violent Palestinian factions. An advertisement in the Haaretz newspaper invited construction firms to bid on building the new homes in the settlements. The plan calls for 530 additional houses in Betar Ilit, a fast-growing settlement south of Jerusalem, along with 50 new homes in Maale Adumim, to the east of Jerusalem, and 24 more in Ariel, a settlement to the north of Jerusalem. In the government decision Wednesday, Ariel was one of the settlements that is to be shielded by the new barrier. "We not only have the right to keep building, it is the obligation of the Jewish state to help us build," said Adi Mintz, director general of the Settlers Council, which represents Israelis living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip settlements. The United States has said it will reduce loan guarantees for Israel because of the ongoing settlement building, and may make additional cuts in response to the construction of the West Bank barrier. President Bush "continues to believe that the fence presents a problem," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in Washington. "We also have concerns about continuing settlement activity." Mr. Sharon has been a leading proponent of settlement building for decades, and his government includes many ministers who are committed to expanding the nearly 150 settlements scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians want the settlements dismantled, saying they will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to establish a contiguous Palestinian state in peace negotiations. The total number of settlers has reached 230,000, double the figure of a decade ago, when the initial Israeli-Palestinian peace talks began. Palestinian militants have frequently attacked settlers during the past three years of fighting, and residents in the more isolated settlements say they remain vulnerable. However, the larger settlements, which are heavily guarded by the Israeli security forces, are comparatively safe and continue to attract new residents. The settlement population has been growing at a rate of about 10,000 annually over the past three years, despite the fighting. "Sharon's definition of a Palestinian state is a bunch of strips of land that have no contiguity," said Dror Etkes, a spokesman for Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements. "Sharon always speaks about a long-term interim solution with the Palestinians," Mr. Etkes said. "But with his policies, there will be nothing left to negotiate in the long term." The Haaretz newspaper, a liberal daily, recently estimated that annual Israeli government spending on civilian needs in the settlements was more than $500 million, and that the security costs in the West Bank and Gaza were around $900 million a year. The newspaper also estimated that the settlements have cost Israel roughly $10 billion dollars in civilian spending since they began going up after Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war. The Israeli government does not publish figures on the costs of settlements.
It's not like the Palestinians are holding up their end of the bargain under the Oslo Accords. So what's good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Peace?......Peace? There will be no peace until the so-called "Palestinians" are no longer used as a battering ram in the Arab nations' attempt to push the Jews into the sea. Until they are assimilated back into the Arab countries where they belong just as the Arab jews were assilimated by Israel, there will be no peace. There is no peace without victory.
Hmm...I was trying to think of historical examples to prove you wrong, but isn't Macbeth a historian or something...I'll let him do it.
To me, this whole business of settlement construction is tantamount to carefully planned ethnic/religious cleansing. I mean displacing arabs/muslims to make way for jewish families from other regions like Russia is to me just wrong because the land they're all working with is so scarce to begin with. Gaza is apparently already extremely densely populated. So where are these people supposed to go?
Well, when called upon... Before I respond, I'd need to clarify what bama is saying; are you saying that peace is only the natural conclusion of resolved conflict? That when there is a conflict, there must be a decisive victory for peace to be the result? If so, to pre-empt your statemtn, the single most decisve 'victory' on the world stage in recent memory...in fact, the peace agreement which derived most from that exact mindset was...*drum roll please*...World War One and the Treaty of Versailles. Which led to....well, I don't think you have to be an historian to figure that one out. On the other hand, and this is an interesting bit of history...do you realize that the US of A has been in more military engagements/year SINCE the US " victory" during the Cold War then during? So that meant that...before victory...there was more relative peace, as an example. Or go back further in history, and you might just find that the biggest obstacle to the pursuit of peace was those who believed in the virtue of the pursuit of victory as a means to that end. Inevitably you make more enemies in conflict than in peace; look at all the people we've fought against in the past 50 odd years; Mao, trained by us during a military conflict...Ho Chi Mihn; trained by us during a military engagment. Saddam Hussein, put in power by us because of a military conflict. Noriega, Osama Bin Laden, etc. etc...all of them the result of conflict which ended in 'victory'. The history of peace and conflict shows that at times they have a positive relationship, but for the most part it is directly inverse. Most wars have been fought for insufficient reasons, with poor planning, unclear objectives, and uneccesary cost, largely because of people believing in out dated slogans like " Without victory there is no peace." That applies to occassional situations, like Hitler, where his stated objective and capacity to achieve it, combined with an atmosphere of extremism largely the result of the previous 'victory', almost made any other alternative impossible. To take something as starkly black and white, and in such a conventional format as that and try and apply it to Israel or Iraq, which are totally different circumstances, is the exact same kind of mistake that several higher ups almost used to our absolute destruction, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There's a read for you, if you want enlightenment on the 'no peace without victory' way of thinking...read what those who espoused exactl that wanted to do with Cuba, and what the reult would have been. Or what those ( and it's scary reading) who believed that wanted to do during the Cold War...does the phrase " limited nuclear engagement" sound familiar? If not, be happy...but those who believed that the Cold War was 'half victory, half-defeat', as it was called, and said that it needed resolution would have brought on Armageddon. And there were more of them than you think. Basically what I'm saying is that very few slogans can be applied to military history carte blanche, and the one you chose would be very low on the list of possibilities. But possibly I misunderstood what you were saying.
I probably need to clarify my point: 1. You have to have a decisive victory, but you also must also win the peace as well. With our Marshall Plan following WWII, not only did we rebuild Europe, we made sure that it was a "peace with honor" that did not shame Germany, like the Treaty of Versaillies did. That damned Treaty was the root cause of WWII. When you win, you really shouldn't rub it in. 2. I learned in one of my poly-sci classes that statistics show that democracies rarely engage in conflict, especially when they have many trade entanglements that would make a war a pointless and expensive proposition. Also, statistics show that totalatarian states can not live in peace with democratic ones. The Israeli/Arab states situation is one of them. Until the Mideast adopts some sort of democracy and actively trade with Israel, thus linking their economies, there will be no peace. The China example, where a totalitarian state becomes more liberal economically, but remains totalitarian, is one that will lead to conflict unless China becomes a democracy.
It is really time for people of good will to boycott Israeli goods and services till they stop these illegal settlements that do so much to prevent peace. Here's some figures from a good Israeli site that is opposing the settlements. ******** Settlements are built on 1.7% of West Bank land and control 41.9% The Settlement of Nili, Ramallah district, the West Bank. Photo: Eyal Weizman Today, B'Tselem hosted a press conference to release its new report, Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank. B'Tselem's researcher, Yehezkel Lein, presented the report and the accompanying map which details the built-up areas and the land reserved for future development of West Bank settlements. International humanitarian law prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory. An occupying power is also prohibited from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area, unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population or are for urgent military needs. Israel's settlement policy violates these regulations. B'Tselem's report was published following extensive research and despite difficulties in obtaining information from the Civil Administration. The report makes available to the public for the first time comprehensive information regarding the extent of human rights violations resulting from the establishment of settlements in the West Bank. The research reveals that while the built-up areas of the settlements constitute only 1.7% of the land in the West Bank, the municipal boundaries are over three times as large: 6.8%. Regional councils constitute an additional 35.1%. Thus, a total of 41.9% of the area in the West Bank is controlled by the settlements. The report presents the various mechanisms by which Israel's governments have taken control of land and have encouraged Israeli citizens to move to settlements. These techniques include the de facto annexation of the settlements to Israel, the planning system which invests significant resources to expand the settlements, and the granting of numerous economic incentives intended to raise the standard of living in the settlements. For example, in the year 2000, Jewish local councils in the West Bank received grants from the government averaging sixty-five percent more those received by their counterparts inside Israel. Settlement regional councils received grants averaging 165% more than their counterparts in Israel. Given that the settlements are illegal, and in light of the myriad human rights violations that they cause, B'Tselem calls on the Israeli government to work to dismantle all of the settlements. “From a human rights perspective, there is no other conclusion that can be reached,” said Yehezkel Lein, author of the report, at today's press conference. Until the process of evacuation is undertaken, B'Tselem calls on the Israeli government to take a number of interim steps to minimize the violation of human rights and international law. Among other steps, the Israeli government should: Halt all new construction in the settlements; Halt the planning and construction of new by-pass roads; Return to Palestinian communities all the non-built-up areas attached to settlements and regional councils; Halt the policy of providing incentives to encourage Israeli citizens to move to the settlements, and allocate resources instead to encourage settlers to relocate to within the borders of the State of Israel. link
Great, are we going to get a direct bill or will we pay for their new settlements in installments??? And then we can't forget that we need to give them more military funding to 'protect' the settlements. Lets see they'll need Apache Helicopters, some F-16's, anything else?? I'm sick of paying for this crap with my tax dollars. Until Israel realizes its not financially feasible to create new settlements that have to be guarded they will never cease to build them. The only reason their economy hasn't collapsed is because of our financial and military support.
glynch, which of their goods are you going to boycott? diamonds? tourism? arms? computers/software? industrial machinery? medical instrumentation? 1) few woman can be convinced than you're really not getting her that diamond because you're "making a statement against israel". 2) few devout christians and jews going on a pilgrimage to the holy land will be deterred by israeli policies. 3) typical consumers don't buy arms. unless you're talking uzis, whose buyers i really doubt will agree with this boycott. 4) as for the corporate consumers for IT, industrial machinery, and medical instrumentation, adopting an anti-israeli stance is corporate suicide in america. 5) And most importantly, if you led any sort of boycott of Israel, you'll be immediately branded an anti-semite or neo-nazi. Good luck finding a job! ------------------- my point is not to disagree with you. i love what you write here, it's just that consumer boycotts against israel won't work. The only thing that can restrain Israel is the US govt. But this administration, like the ones before it, has been simply patsies for israel.
