[Uh-Oh]Israel and Gaza on the brink of all out WAR

nothing wrong with generalizations if they are applied and qualified appropriately

 

I missed it -- where did Hamas advocate "kill all Jews"? They are calling for the dissolution of Israel and replacing it with an Islamic state, though some of their leaders have softened that stance in recent years for political reasons. Is this taken to mean the same thing, or did they explicitly call for the Jewish people to be killed off?

 

An old classmate of mine from grad school published this op-ed in the New York Times today about life in Israel. It's also worth mentioning that she's a Rockets fan and she is originally from Houston.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/hope-for-a-peaceful-israel-dwindles.html?ref=opinion&_r=1&

I’m Losing Hope for a Peaceful Israel
By JESSICA APPLE
Published: November 16, 2012


SINCE Wednesday, when Israel killed Hamas’s military chief, Ahmed al-Jabari, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas had fired rockets and mortars only into southern Israel. So on Friday, when I heard an air-raid siren sound in Tel Aviv, I assumed it was a test. But just for a moment. Then I snapped to my senses, grabbed my phone and ran to my apartment building’s stairs. I began to make my way down, running at first, thinking only of my three young sons. Two were in a judo lesson. One was with his grandmother. I could not get to them.

On the second-floor landing, I paused. My heart was racing, but my legs wouldn’t. I was weighing my options, and none seemed good. And eight steps above the lobby of my building I came to a very somber conclusion: this is how life is going to be here, and I can’t change it. Hope for a peaceful Israel is diminishing.

We have no one to make peace with, says the voice on the street. That may be true, but so is this: In Israel, too, our leaders — on all sides — have failed to move toward peace.

Yes, peace negotiations with Hamas are questionable. But just a few weeks ago, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that he would not allow a third intifada to break out, and that although he is a refugee from Safed, a city in northern Israel, he does not intend to return there as anything but a tourist. “Palestine for me,” he said, “is the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital; this is Palestine, I am a refugee, I live in Ramallah. The West Bank and Gaza is Palestine, everything else is Israel.” The office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by saying, “There is no connection between the Palestinian Authority chairman’s statement and his actual actions.”

Mr. Netanyahu has been ignoring the peace process for most of his current four-year term. For the first time since Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands in 1993, and as Israel prepares to elect a new Knesset in January, its political leaders are not talking about a two-state solution.

When I moved to Israel 15 years ago, the picture was very different. There was never a question of whether Israel and the Palestinians would make peace, only of when. The dream of peace inspired me, and even after an intifada, scores of suicide bombings and a war, I stayed in Israel. I remained hopeful.

But today, as the missiles get closer to Tel Aviv, I think of leaving. It’s not the missiles that are breaking me. It’s the lack of an alternative to them.

Mr. Netanyahu has avoided the Palestinian issue while enabling and encouraging settlement building; he has ignored the Arab initiative and focused solely on the threat of Iran. Late last month he struck a coalition deal with his ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to have their two parties run one slate in the next elections in January. It signaled that Mr. Netanyahu would have no plans to make peace if he were re-elected.

Now Mr. Netanyahu has chosen to enter into a conflict that ensures that the vote in the upcoming elections will be about security — something he says he can provide. There is no great surprise in that. The surprise is that there is no opposition to Mr. Netanyahu’s policies — a signal that Israelis are resigned to living indefinitely with the threat of war.

Israel’s Labor Party — Yitzhak Rabin’s party — which has traditionally stood for peace, has, instead, been quiet on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Under the leadership of a journalist turned politician, Shelly Yachimovich, Labor has reshaped itself into a social democratic party focused on social justice, the cost of living and the middle class. Last year, demonstrations touched off by the rising cost of cottage cheese drew half a million Israelis to the streets to protest the high cost of living. Ms. Yachimovich seized social justice as an issue and became its political face.

But she skirted the Palestinian issue. She has not promised to stop settlement building and has never acknowledged the hypocrisy of calling for social justice within the Green Line, which marks the limits of Israel proper, while ignoring the lack of it in the Palestinian territories beyond. If you were to define today’s Labor, you might say it’s the party that represents Israelis’ right to fairly priced cheese. Some Labor figures still press for peace negotiations, of course, but their voices don’t get through.

And as Israel pummels the Gaza Strip, there is no Israeli political leader saying, as Rabin did, “Enough of blood and tears.” Ms. Yachimovich has, in fact, supported the government’s actions as just, without questioning whether they are wise.

How the situation in Gaza plays out is likely to determine the outcome of Israel’s election. I feel safe in saying that this January, Israelis will be casting a vote for peace or war. Will Israel bury the two-state solution once and for all, or can it somehow retain a hope of being a Jewish democratic state living in peace with its neighbors? Last night as I said good night to my older sons, I set their flip-flops in front of their beds. “If you hear a siren,” I said, “slide your feet into your shoes and run downstairs.” I would grab our 3-year-old, I said, and be right behind them. “Don’t wait for me. Just go.”

There aren’t too many years before today’s flip-flops become tomorrow’s army boots, and I do not want my sons to grow up to a never-ending conflict that Israel accepts as immutable. I do agree that Israel has the right to protect its citizens. But I condemn Israel’s current leaders for failing to recognize that the best defense is peace.

Jessica Apple, a writer in Tel Aviv, is a co-founder and editor in chief of the diabetes magazine ASweetLife.org.

 

Building housings or long-term ethnic cleansing?

 

Israel leadership needs war to justify expansion. Hamas leadership needs war to regain lost land. Leadership is the problem. The majority desire peaceful negotiations.

 

From what I have read it is a silent majority.

 

http://www.memritv.org/search/en/results/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0.htm?k=hamas jews&bAdvSearch=false

hey, just a land dispute, right?

Why people tie themselves in moral knots to defend this evil is beyond me.

 

Nah, they both just need war to stay elected. Netanyahu and Hamas are polling higher than they were last week.

Last night the army installed Iron Dome in Tel Aviv. About 30 min ago it intercepted a missile. It was close enough to feel it. This has no sign of ending soon.

 

Well, in a vacumn, sure. Fact is at this point the Israelis don't believe for a minute that the Palestinians can or will negotiate in good faith, especially as fragmented as they are. 2000, before the Second Intifada, was the best chance, but noooooo, that Noble Prize winner Arafat had to launch the Second Intifada.

 

An American friend in my neighborhood just posted on youtube:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/V55mYZO5Dtc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Why would it be the Palestinians? Israel is a nation of immigrants and it's population is relatively wealthy and well educated. The US, Canada, Australia or most other Western countries could absorb them to the benefit of that country. The Palestinians are relatively poor and less well educated and has the refugee camps that exist to this day in Lebanon and Jordon show that they are far more a burden to other Middle Eastern countries that are not so affluent to begin with.

While maybe you don't believe there is a bias the fact that you and another poster reflexively look at the Palestinians as being the ones that should move does show a bias. My point is is that neither people should or are going to move and arguments that one side should just unilaterally give up are unrealistic and unhelpful to addressing the situation.

 

Stay safe Deji, it seems with each conflict the terrorist groups have longer range rockets.

I was specifically referring to tallanvor saying this conflict is happening because Muslims want to kill Jews. Displacement, occupation and a seige of Gaza for years might have something to do with it as well

 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/DVZfgIsDjiE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Gaza is not occupied

 

How do you smuggle Fajr 5s into Gaza? Through Egypt?

 

Is that why rockets are flying in from Egypt? Egyptians feel they have been displaced?

Read the whole post.

 

Deji;

Thanks for your posts from inside Israel and they really give a good view of how f^(ked up this situation is and with blame to all sides. The Netanyahu government has not been an honest broker regarding peace and have played fast and loose with war (not just with the Palestinians but with the Iranians). The Palestinians have been ill served by Hamas and other radical groups who refuse to accept the reality of Israel with the alternative being the corrupt and weak PA. Morsi and other Arab leaders are not helping the situation with rhetoric and not so veiled threats at Israel. All of this is a powder keg that potentially plunges the reason back into another Arab Israel war that will help no one.

Morsi in particular should be considering very carefully the possibility of war between Egypt and Israel. Egypt is still in turmoil from the Arab spring and cannot afford a war with Israel. Morsi's own rhetoric though may make that inevitable if he riles up the Egyptian populace enough to demand war.

As I said earlier it seems really tragic that there isn't another Rabin in the region. A leader with the moral stature and respect to make the type of choices needed to make peace.

 

RocketsJudoka / JayZ750:
No one is going to move anywhere, except for maybe the brain drain to continue for the best and brightest looking for better opportunities elsewhere. I'm pretty skeptical at this point of even most of the settlements being dismantled. The ultra-right talk about deporting Palestinians to Jordan, but that won't ever happen. Even Liberman's solution is a land swap proposal to exchange the settlement blocs for arab areas within the green line, and the people in those communities are totally against it.

I don't see a long-term solution other than a single state and universal suffrage, and that's because the powers that be have done everything possible to prevent two states.

Commodore:
True, Gaza isn't occupied, but it's completely cut off and the people have little to no freedom of movement. And that's not likely to change when even that can't seem to prevent Iranian missiles from being smuggled in, unfortunately. As it is, the Israeli government makes it tough even for family members to travel to the West Bank to visit / study at a university and so on.

Azadre:
The Fajrs were apparently dismantled and smuggled through tunnels. The next time the army wants to bomb the tunnels on the Egyptian border, there will be a lot less complaint from the Israeli Left (and the West).

Tallanvor:
The rockets from Egypt aren't from the Egyptian military. If they were, there would be Israeli tanks halfway to Cairo by now. Sinai has become way less secure since the Arab Spring, but the Egyptian army still cooperates pretty well with the army to try and catch the terrorists responsible. Despite all the rhetoric, the officers on both sides aren't fools.

 

The problem is . . . after the WWII
The countries involved in the DECIDING . . .England, US and Russia
made the decision where it would be located without nary a worry about
who was there already. How much say did the Arab world have in that decision.

Why not make Isreal in Wisconsin? somewhere in Russia?
Why was the decision to put Isreal at its current location?

Rocket River
Trying to find some historical perspective

 

History shows that war cements fragile governments. Look at Iran in the 1980s for example.

I do not believe any other Arab nation will get involved at this point.