Withdraw support and assist the Palestinians BY TIMOTHY BRENNAN and DOUG ROSSINOW Guest Columnists What we have witnessed in recent days in the Middle East is not a law-abiding nation defending itself against terror, but rather "asymmetric warfare" between a nation, Israel, armed with the most modern weapons and a people, the Palestinians, armed with their willingness to die while taking others with them. Although Americans have seen extensive press coverage of the violence, few readers grasp its actual character. In the last week, the Israeli military dragged people from their homes and indiscriminately shot them in the streets. Able-bodied men and boys were rounded up, arbitrarily incarcerated and physically abused. Snipers stationed in Ramallah killed anyone attempting to leave their homes to resist the march of Israeli tanks. There are, in short, deeply disturbing similarities between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians at this very moment and what was roundly condemned only a few years ago as "ethnic cleansing" in Serbia. This historical lack of context makes it difficult for Americans to understand why Israel has so enraged Arabs and Muslims both. Few Americans appreciate, for example, that non-Jews within the state of Israel are not accorded the same rights under the law as Jews. It is an openly discriminatory state, and in this sense shares features with what we used to call "apartheid" in South Africa. The highly publicized and lurid aspects of the conflict, however, typically conceal an equally violent one that is much less well known — the Israeli policy of displacement, banishment and settling the occupied territories. Any glance at a map of the region shows you immediately what Israel has been trying to do. They are building Jewish settlements (often the settlers are recent arrivals from Russia or Brooklyn) throughout Palestinian land at the same time that they are destroying Palestinian homes, olive orchards and schools with bulldozers. There are something like 140 Israeli settlements involving as many as 400,000 people. Historical Palestine is being erased, continuing a process begun in 1947. Once reduced to rubble, its towns are given Hebrew names as buildings are erected in their place. The heralded Oslo accords led to a doubling of the Israeli settler population on the West Bank in the 1990s. That fact led directly, and quite logically, to the present Palestinian disillusionment with "negotiations." What can Americans do? The United States — which pays an estimated $5 billion dollars to Israel annually — is a contractual member of both the Nuremberg Charter and the Genocide Convention, as well as the U.N. Charter. There is both legal and moral leverage to force our government to withdraw support immediately from the state of Israel. We can, in this spirit, also call for a humanitarian intervention against Israel in order to physically protect the Palestinian people from the Israeli army. Actions in the international legal arena, moreover, need not preclude a campaign of economic disinvestment from Israel as took place in the movements against the apartheid regime of South Africa. We hear much about how Yasser Arafat is supposedly an "obstacle to peace" and must be replaced with more tractable Palestinian leadership. It is time for Israelis, and Americans, to recognize that their governments' long-standing policies form entrenched obstacles to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. Either those governments must change their policies, or our two peoples must muster the will to change our governments, if any real progress is to be made. ========================================== And Hydra, Many wear masks because if they are caught on camera in a protest Israel will mark them and have their Mossad and Secret police arrest them or assasinate them. Love the free state of Israel!
F.D. Khan, Sometimes I get worried about you. You might be losing your faith in Bush and good old fashioned American conservatism.
WHY DOES NO ONE EVER ADDRESS THE FACT THAT THE PALASTINIANS DO NOT HAVE ANY RIGHTS IN MOST ARAB WORLDS? The Palastinian people have done NOTHING to deserve a country all they have done is whine and kill, and why should they get anything for that? Hell, they should be condemned for what they are doing. In my opinion, Israel should completely disarm the palastinian state. They should then turn it over to Egypt to police, and when the Palastinians have PROVEN that they want peace, then, and ONLY then should they get the right to self govern. DaDakota
And why has nobody explained how the Palestinians never once demanded their own homeland while Jordan ruled the West Bank from 1948-1967? The cries from the Palestinian people for sovereignty only came after Israel took over the West Bank during the Six Day War. Why? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they don't actually care about a country of their own and all they want is the total destruction of the state of Israel. Ya think? Happy Yom Ha'atzmaut everyone!
Dakota said: The Palastinian people have done NOTHING to deserve a country To quote another document: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, You know Dakota, I thought we had decided whether people had the right to be indeopendent and self governing.
Thomas Sowell had a very interesting idea regarding the whole "land for peace" sham: "Land for peace has in practice meant land for promises. Perhaps Israel should have responded to this misleading phrase by saying: "You want land for peace? We agree! Give us six months of peace and we will turn over so many acres of land. Make that a whole year of peace and we will turn over so many square miles of land. And if you can behave like decent human beings for five consecutive years, we will give you enough land to have your own country. "However, if you start raising hell after that, we will send in our troops and tanks, to take back the land you got under false pretenses."
It's pretty funny to me how people always bring up how Israeli's can now no longer go out to their discos or their restaurants for fear of suicide bombings in public places. Lost in all this is the fact Palestinians live with the fear of having their <i>homes</i> destroyed.
It really saddens me to see so much arguing in this forum. I guess I should have realized it when making it. I would like instead to change this topic from who is right and wrong to amicable solutions that are FAIR to both sides. We sit here and complain and fume at politicians not willing to comprimise their ego's for peace, yet we can not do it behind the anonymity of a computer screen. Lets talk about solutions. My belief is that some parties on both sides are putting up impossible barriers to peace. - Some Palestinian extremist groups don't want peace and they are ignorant enough to think they can win. With Israeli's American Weapons and American Nuclear Secrets and Weapons they would die before giving up that country and they would take the entire Middle East with them, I'm almost 100% sure of that. - Some Israeli's want all Palestinians expelled from even the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, which will not happen without genocide, which I don't feel is a feasible solution. - Some Israeli's say any terrorist attacks, even 1, will halt the peace process. This is allowing the terrorist groups that don't want peace to win. FACT: We cannot let the extremist Palestinians and Israelis control the outcome of this horrible situation. It must be the moderates that force the extreme left and right out of political process.
Khan, Now we have some common ground. I propose that Israel give up the West Bank to be controlled by Jordan, or Egypt, to be kept in trust for the Palastinian people. As long as they do not support terrorism, and can peacefully coexist with Israel, then they will get their country. Also, If I were Israel, I would LOCK down my borders, build another Berlin Wall until the situation is better under control. You know it took the Atom bomb to stop the suicide attacks of the Japanese, let's hope that history does not repeat itself. DaDakota
President George W. Bush again threw US support behind Israel, calling Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a "man of peace" as aid workers picked through the rubble of his army's attack on the West Bank. THIS IS GETTING RIDICULUOUS. EITHER BUSH IS A LIAR, A WIMP OR AN IDIOT Poor dubya, from: "Enuf is enouf", "I meant what I said" (he continued the tall in the saddle and plain speak of his early post 9/11 days) to a mere week later, Sharon is a "man of peace." Of course there are new reports of Israelis taking over town today. Sharon, man of peace
You've got to be kidding. There's no comparrison to a kamikaze pilot who flies a plane into a military target and a suicide bomber who kills civilians. Either way, that still didn't justify dropping two Nukes on heavily populated cities and killing over 140,000 thousand instantly and having a death toll of about 210,000 by 1950. Not to mention the people who died many years later from nuclear fallout.
Kind of. What the atom bomb did prevent, though, was the deaths of 10M Japanese civilians & who knows how many hundreds of thousands of allied troops.
