ITT A LIBERAL AMERICAN EX-PAT and A JEW debate ISRAEL (guess which side each is on)

[Zeppelin]

As I’m sure most of you have already heard, Israel yesterday opened fire on a group of peaceful humanitarian protesters attempting to breach the naval blockade of Gaza:

Deadly Israeli Raid Draws Condemnation

Deadly Israeli Raid on Aid Flotilla Draws Condemnation
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — Israel faced intense international condemnation and growing domestic questions on Monday after a raid by naval commandos that killed nine people, many of them Turks, on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza.

Turkey, Israel’s most important friend in the Muslim world, recalled its ambassador and canceled planned military exercises with Israel as the countries’ already tense relations soured even further. The United Nations Security Council met in emergency session over the attack, which occurred in international waters north of Gaza, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was flying home after canceling a Tuesday meeting with President Obama.

With street protests erupting around the world, Mr. Netanyahu defended the Israeli military’s actions, saying the commandos, enforcing what Israel says is a legal blockade, were set upon by passengers on the Turkish ship that was raided, the Mavi Marmara, and fired only in self-defense. The military released a video of the early moments of the raid to support that claim.

Israel said the violence was instigated by pro-Palestinian activists who presented themselves as humanitarians but had come ready for a fight. Organizers of the flotilla accused the Israeli forces of opening fire as soon as they landed on the deck, and released videos to support their case.

The Israeli public seemed largely to support the navy, but policy experts questioned preparations for the military operation; whether there had been an intelligence failure; and whether the Israeli insistence on stopping the flotilla had been counterproductive. Some commentators were calling for the resignation of Ehud Barak, the defense minister.

“The government failed the test of results; blaming the organizers of the flotilla for causing the deaths by ignoring Israel’s orders to turn back is inadequate,” wrote Aluf Benn, a columnist for Haaretz, on the newspaper’s Web site on Monday, calling for a national committee of inquiry. “Decisions taken by the responsible authorities must be probed.”

The flotilla of cargo ships and passenger boats was carrying 10,000 tons of aid for Gaza, where the Islamic militant group Hamas holds sway, in an attempt to challenge Israel’s military blockade of Gaza.

The raid and its deadly consequences have thrown Israel’s policy of blockading Gaza into the international limelight; at the Security Council on Monday voices were raised against the blockade, and the pressure to abandon it is bound to intensify.

Israel had vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza, where Hamas, an organization sworn to Israel’s destruction, took over by force in 2007.

Named the Freedom Flotilla, and led by the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, the convoy had converged at sea near Cyprus and set out on the final leg of its journey on Sunday afternoon. Israel warned the vessels to abort their mission, describing it as a provocation.

The confrontation began shortly before midnight on Sunday when Israeli warships intercepted the aid flotilla, according to a person on one vessel. The Israeli military warned the vessels that they were entering a hostile area and that the Gaza shore was under blockade.

The vessels refused the military’s request to dock at the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, and continued toward their destination.

Around 4 a.m. on Monday, naval commandos came aboard the Mavi Marmara, having been lowered by ropes from helicopters onto the decks.

At that point, the operation seems to have gone badly wrong.

Israeli officials say that the soldiers were dropped into an ambush and were attacked with clubs, metal rods and knives.

An Israeli official said that the navy was planning to stop five of the six vessels of the flotilla with large nets that interfere with propellers, but that the sixth was too large for that. The official said there was clearly an intelligence failure in that the commandos were expecting to face passive resistance, and not an angry, violent reaction.

The Israelis had planned to commandeer the vessels and steer them to Ashdod, where their cargo would be unloaded and, the authorities said, transferred overland to Gaza after proper inspection.

The military said in a statement that two activists were later found with pistols taken from Israeli commandos. It accused the activists of opening fire, “as evident by the empty pistol magazines.”

Another soldier said the orders were to neutralize the passengers, not to kill them.

But the forces “had to open fire in order to defend themselves,” the navy commander, Vice Adm. Eliezer Marom, said at a news conference in Tel Aviv, adding, “Their lives were at risk.”

At least seven soldiers were wounded, one of them seriously. The military said that some suffered gunshot wounds; at least one had been stabbed.

Some Israeli officials said they had worried about a debacle from the start, and questioned Israel’s broader security policies.

Einat Wilf, a Labor Party member of Parliament who sits on the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that she had warned Mr. Barak and others well in advance that the flotilla was a public relations issue and should not be dealt with by military means.

“This had nothing to do with security,” she said in an interview. “The armaments for Hamas were not coming from this flotilla.”

The fatalities all occurred aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish passenger vessel that was carrying about 600 activists under the auspices of Insani Yardim Vakfi, also known as I.H.H. Israeli officials have characterized it as a dangerous Islamic organization with terrorist links.

Yet the organization, founded in 1992 to collect aid for the Bosnians, is now active in 120 countries and has been present at recent disaster areas like Haiti and New Orleans.

“Our volunteers were not trained military personnel,” said Yavuz Dede, deputy director of the organization. “They were civilians trying to get aid to Gaza. There were artists, intellectuals and journalists among them. Such an offensive cannot be explained by any terms.”

There were no immediate accounts available from the passengers of the Turkish ship, which arrived at the naval base in Ashdod on Monday evening, where nearly three dozen were arrested, many for not giving their names. The base was off limits to the news media and declared a closed military zone.

The injured had been flown by helicopter to Israeli hospitals. At the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv, relatives of injured soldiers were gathered outside an intensive care unit when a man with a long beard, one of the wounded passengers, was wheeled by, escorted by military police.

Organizers of the flotilla, relying mainly on footage filmed by activists on board the Turkish passenger ship, because all other communications were down, blamed Israeli aggression for the deadly results.

The Israeli soldiers dropped onto the deck and “opened fire on sleeping civilians at four in the morning,” said Greta Berlin, a leader of the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement, speaking by phone from Cyprus on Monday.

Israeli officials said that international law allowed for the capture of naval vessels in international waters if they were about to violate a blockade. The blockade was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007. Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, said Monday that the blockade was “aimed at preventing the infiltration of terror and terrorists into Gaza.”

Despite sporadic rocket fire from the Palestinian territory against southern Israel, Israel says it allows enough basic supplies through border crossings to avoid any acute humanitarian crisis. But it insists that there will be no significant change so long as Hamas continues to hold Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured in a cross-border raid in 2006.

The Free Gaza Movement has organized several aid voyages since the summer of 2008, usually consisting of one or two vessels. The earliest ones were allowed to reach Gaza. Others have been intercepted and forced back, and one, last June, was commandeered by the Israeli Navy and towed to Ashdod. This six-boat fleet was the most ambitious attempt yet to break the blockade.

Reporting was contributed by Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Dina Kraft from Tel Aviv, Rina Castelnuovo from Ashdod, Fares Akram from Gaza and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

The Israeli Navy says that they were fired upon first, but this seems highly doubtful as all of the ships were thoroughly searched prior to embarking from their point of origin in Turkey, and not a single firearm was discovered during that search. I suppose if you’re a conspiracy theorist, that wouldn’t matter to you because you’ve already just assumed that the inspection by turkish forces intentionally ignored the presence of firearms, but then you’d also be ignoring the fact that Turkey has been one of Israel’s strongest allies and LITERALLY (lol) has nothing to gain by provoking this kind of situation with Israel.

But for devil’s advocate sake, let’s assume that the protesters did fire first: does that still justify the killing of nine people aboard the ships and the wounding of dozens of others? What if it was just one rogue element who somehow managed to sneak about a small firearm? Does that really pose any real threat to the extremely capable and experienced Israeli armed forces? They’re incapable of using a sniper to take out that one person?

We aren’t even getting into the bigger issue yet, which is whether or not this naval blockade of Gaza is justified either legally or morally. Israel claims that the aid they let into Gaza is sufficient for the healthy functioning of the economy, but if this were true then why do hundreds, if not thousands, of tunnels exist under the Egyptian border to smuggle in necessary items for daily life, such as food and clean water? Why are Gazans forced to rebuild their houses with bricks forged from mud and junk piles, because Israel won’t allow any concrete or construction materials into the area?

Why do we support a country whose very existence is founded on the basis of religious exceptionalism? Israel considers itself a “democracy” but unlike most modern democracies the existence of the country is founded purely on the basis of providing a State for people of the Jewish faith. Given the terrible history of many Jews, most people somehow seem to think this is justified, but what other democracies exist only to serve one group of people, at the expense and forcible exclusion of others? I don’t think anybody here would still support the old system in America of forcible exclusion of blacks and other minorities from the system, yet many of these same people who would never support that somehow justify themselves in supporting just such a system in Israel.

Now for a bit of history:

Jews living in the Diaspora have long aspired to return to Zion and the Land of Israel,[46] though the amount of human effort that should be spent towards such aim is a matter of dispute in Judaism.[47][48] That hope and yearning was articulated in the Bible,[49] and is an important theme of the Jewish belief system.[47] After the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, some communities settled in Palestine.[50] During the 16th century, communities struck roots in the Four Holy Cities—Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and Safed—and in 1697, Rabbi Yehuda Hachasid led a group of 1500 Jews to Jerusalem.[51] In the second half of the 18th century, Eastern European opponents of Hasidism, known as the Perushim, settled in Palestine.[52][53][54]

The first large wave of “modern” immigration, known as the First Aliyah, began in 1881, as Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.[55] Although the Zionist movement already existed in theory, Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl is credited with founding political Zionism,[56] a movement which sought to establish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, by elevating the Jewish Question to the international plane.[57] In 1896, Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews), offering his vision of a future state; the following year he presided over the first World Zionist Congress.[58]

The Second Aliyah (1904–1914), began after the Kishinev pogrom; some 40,000 Jews settled in Palestine, but nearly half of them left.[55] Both the first and second waves of migrants were mainly Orthodox Jews,[59] but those in the Second Aliyah included socialist pioneers who established the kibbutz movement.[60] During World War I, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued what became known as the Balfour Declaration, which “view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. At the request of Edwin Samuel Montagu and Lord Curzon, a line was also inserted stating “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.[61]

The Jewish Legion, a group of battalions composed primarily of Zionist volunteers, assisted in the British conquest of Palestine. Arab opposition to the plan led to the 1920 Palestine riots and the formation of the Jewish organization known as the Haganah (meaning “The Defense” in Hebrew), from which the Irgun and Lehi paramilitary groups split off.[62] In 1922, the League of Nations granted the United Kingdom a mandate over Palestine under terms similar to the Balfour Declaration.[63] The population of the area at that time was predominantly Arab and Muslim, with Jews accounting for about 11% of the population.[64]

The Third (1919–1923) and Fourth Aliyahs (1924–1929) brought an additional 100,000 Jews to Palestine.[55] Finally, the rise of Nazism in the 1930s led to the Fifth Aliyah, with an influx of a quarter of a million Jews. This caused the Arab revolt of 1936–1939 and led the British to cap immigration with the White Paper of 1939. With countries around the world turning away Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, a clandestine movement known as Aliyah Bet was organized to bring Jews to Palestine.[55] By the end of World War II, the Jewish population of Palestine had increased to 33% of the total population.[65]

After 1945, Britain found itself in fierce conflict with the Jewish community, as the Haganah joined Irgun and Lehi in armed struggle against British rule.[66] At the same time, thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe sought shelter in Palestine and were turned away or rounded up and placed in detention camps by the British. In 1947, the British government withdrew from the Mandate of Palestine, stating it was unable to arrive at a solution acceptable to both Arabs and Jews.[67] The newly created United Nations approved the Partition Plan for Palestine (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181) on November 29, 1947, which sought to divide the country into two states—one Arab and one Jewish. Jerusalem was to be designated an international city—a corpus separatum—administered by the UN.[68]

he Jewish community accepted the plan,[69] but the Arab League and Arab Higher Committee rejected it.[70] On December 1, 1947, the Arab Higher Committee proclaimed a three-day strike, and Arab bands began attacking Jewish targets.[71] Jews were initially on the defensive as civil war broke out, but they gradually moved onto the offensive.[72] The Palestinian Arab economy collapsed and 250,000 Palestinian-Arabs fled or were expelled.[73]

On May 14, 1948, the day before the expiration of the British Mandate, the Jewish Agency proclaimed independence, naming the country Israel.[74] The following day, the armies of five Arab countries—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq—attacked Israel, launching the 1948 Arab–Israeli War;[75] Saudi Arabia sent a military contingent to operate under Egyptian command; Yemen declared war but did not take military action.[76] After a year of fighting, a ceasefire was declared and temporary borders, known as the Green Line, were established.[77] Jordan annexed what became known as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations by majority vote on May 11, 1949.[78] According to UN estimates, 711,000 Arabs, or about 80% of the initial Arab population of the area that became Israel, were expelled or fled the country during the conflict.[79] The fate of these Palestinian refugees remains a major point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[80][81]

Like so many fuck ups of the twentieth century, a lot of the blame can be placed at the hands of the British empire. Ironically enough, prior to the British Empire’s meddling in the region, a not insignificant number of Jews lived quite peacefully in Israel with their Palestinian neighbors, as they did in many other Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq and Iran. The forced partition and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom today still live in exile in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, to this day has created what basically amounts to an unsolvable problem, as the resettlment of these Palestinians onto their land is basically out of the question, and yet where are they to go?

Thus, the phrase “Death to Isreal” should not be interpreted as a call to kill all Jews, but rather to abolish the system set up by the now defunct British Empire. If Isreal is to really consider itself a liberal democracy, then perhaps it should stop enforcing forced quotas of “non-Jews” into the country in order to guarantee that they remain a majority voting bloc. Would you support the forced deportation of non-white legal citizens in order to guarantee a forced majority in your country? Then why would you support it in Isreal?

Death to Isreal.

[Sinistral]

I’m not particularly fond of Israel because in the past few years it has acted in bad faith regarding conflict resolution and expansion and become more and more extreme in its stances. My understanding is that the rightwing elements of Israeli society, particularly the ultra orthodox have been gradually gaining clout and influence in the government. To be fair, this polerization is a phenomenon we’ve observed in other parts of the western world, in Canada, the US and Europe, but it doesn’t excuse the awful things that have happened in the past few years with the continued provocation with its expansion, the use of clusterbombs and phosphorous weapons in civilian areas.

I don’t believe Israel should be abolished and I don’t think its realistic to expect it, but I also don’t believe its current situation is viable. Israel needs to resolve the issues with the Palestinians, it needs to make sacrifices, it needs to stop its expansion into the West Bank and East Jerusalem by ceasing to build settlements and it needs to stop the siege of Gaza.

That being said, this is a separate issue than the one in Gaza.

Right now if you read articles about the assault, 2 messages come through:a) Israel is terrible for shooting the unarmed flotilla members with no reason, b) Even if the flotilla members attacked the Israeli commandos, they shouldn’t have boarded the ships, so its their fault anyway. I think the second the argument is ridiculous and the fact anyone would even think of making that argument is because they don’t want to take responsibility for what they did. They’re just using Israel as a scape goat. A lot of what we’re seeing go around is a massive knee jerk reaction to the assault, regardless of what happened during the assault.

Concerning the specific issue of the assault on the flotilla, I only saw one video http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/israels-status-slips-as-governments-around-world-condemn-raid/article1587399/#video of the event on the ship where the shootings took place, but its pretty damn clear from the look of it that the activists stupidly brought this on themselves by swarming and attacking the commandos. You just don’t do this without thinking the commandos aren’t going to defend themselves.

Whether or not the commandos should’ve gone in is distinct from what happened when the commandos did. The commandos going in doesn’t justify swarming the commandos.

Edit: Something you didn’t mention in your rant, Zepp, is the current apartheid in Israel, in regards to its Arab citizens. A few articles were written on the topic of whether Israel wants to be Jewish or a democracy and how the Arab Israeli citizens were discriminated against and treated like second class citizens. The situation with the Arabs within Israel is not just an issue of the ones who fled / were pushed out during the mid 20th century, but the current one about equality and social stability.

[LockeJV]

The Israelites are God’s chosen people, and Israel is the Promised Land that God promised them. Anyone trying to take God’s land from His people, like those Gentile protesters, will suffer God’s wrath and judgment, just like in the Old Testament. The Unites States should support Israel through this, so our country continues to receive God’s blessings. Unfortunately for us, we have a black, heathen and Muslim president that is not even from the USA, who will use this opportunity try and spite the Lord. We must pray for God to open Obama’s eyes so he accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior, and so that he continues to wage war against the Muslims. After all, Biblical prophecy states that the Jews and Muslims will always be at war, so we should constantly be at war against Muslim, Gentiles, non-Christian and homosexual countries along with Israel.

[Cidolfas]

Biblical prophecy? That’d be tough, considering Muslims didn’t exist when the Bible was written. Jews and Muslims got along fairly well for hundreds of years; the last century is something of an anomaly, in fact.

Sin, go look up the word “apartheid”. It’s not synonymous with “discrimination”; if it was, Ontario would be an apartheid society because its constitution explicitly supports only one religion (Catholicism) in terms of education funding. No, Israel (get the spelling right people!) is not perfect, but it also is not keeping Arabs holed up in separate schools, separate washrooms, etc. There are Arab Members of Knesset and Arab judges. There are places that need work, certainly, but Israel has many thriving human rights organizations and a liberal court system to help them along. And while this isn’t a blanket excuse, do keep in mind that a Jew under Palestinian rule in the West Bank or Gaza would not have anywhere near the same amount of rights (starting with life and going downwards) as an Arab living in Israel. Many Arabs prefer to live in Israel than in those places specifically because of this.

As for the flotilla thing - Israel and Egypt both offered to take the humanitarian aid and deliver it to the Gazans beforehand, as they have with all the other humanitarian shipments. This was not really a humanitarian effort; it was a political protest which Israel had warned multiple times would result in them being boarded. Once they were boarded, maybe someone should have told them that a really good way of committing suicide is to charge armed soldiers with knives and other weapons.

As for Gaza in general - Israel acts the way it does because, quite frankly, it doesn’t trust the Gazans as far as they can throw them. Every time they lessened the restrictions, Hamas used those opportunities to import weapons and use them to attack Israelis. Construction materials were used for bunkers. Tunnels were used for smuggling weapons. Contrast this with the situation in the West Bank, where checkpoints have been relaxed, goods can flow freely, and their economy is the fastest-growing one in the Arab world.

The question of Israel as a Jewish state is a thorny one in today’s day and age, but imagine this - Vatican City suddenly has a large influx of Muslims and Jews who like its liberal values. They immigrate in the tens of thousands. Vatican City ceases to become a Catholic state. Do you think all the priests would be okay with that? What if a majority of Christians overwhelmed Saudi Arabia, elected a Christian president, who then threw out the Muslims from their holy places due to sheer numbers? It’s not pretty, but Israel, like many other places, was created as a state for a particular people, and they are not interested in being effectively removed from their own country by demographics.

Again, Israel is not perfect, and I can guarantee an investigation will be launched into what happened here. Somebody dropped the ball.

[Hades_Vulvuhzela]

Does that really pose any real threat to the extremely capable and experienced Israeli armed forces? They’re incapable of using a sniper to take out that one person?

That was a pretty good post, but this part bothers me. A sniper firing from a helicopter toward a moving boat at 4am at someone he doesn’t know exists? This seems not to fit in with the rest of your post, which I thought was pretty well thought-out otherwise.

[Zeppelin]

That was a pretty good post, but this part bothers me. A sniper firing from a helicopter toward a moving boat at 4am at someone he doesn’t know exists? This seems not to fit in with the rest of your post, which I thought was pretty well thought-out otherwise.

Alright. Well then why did the assault happen at 4AM when it was dark anyway. Israel has helicopters, sniper rifles, night vision…let’s be generous and say that the protesters managed to bring in some small arms, maybe even some assault weapons. Do you think they’d really have the capability to be a threat to Israeli helicopters at 4AM in the middle of nowhere in international waters? The very fact that all of this was happening in the middle of night basically shows that what I said was right: that some protesters in a shitty old boat would be absolutely zero threat to highly trained high-tech Israeli commandos in the middle of the night in the middle of the sea. It only lends more credence to the idea that Israel started this fight, and not the other way around, and having the cover of night would make it even more difficult to get any video or pictures of the Israeli commandos instigating the fight.

[Cidolfas]

First, who said anything about threats? Second, who said anything about helicopters?

The soldiers were on boats. The plan was for them to board the ships, tell the captain to stop, and divert them toward Israeli shores. They didn’t want to kill anyone. The soldiers were armed with paintball guns - as well as handguns, which they used when they were attacked and their CO told them they could. The main questions are

1. Why didn’t they wait until the boat was actually in Gazan waters before boarding?
2. Why were they so unprepared for violence, e.g. not coming in with pepper spray or other nonlethal methods?
3. Why did the CO feel justified in his order, considering the PR fallout this caused?

Also, nobody said the protesters fired first. What they said is that the soldiers came onboard and were attacked with hand-to-hand - but just as lethal - weaponry.

Here’s an actual video, btw.

Btw, anybody saying this ruined the Israel-Turkey relationship hasn’t been paying attention - in recent years it’s gone steeply downhill.

[Hades_Vulvuhzela]

I never said I thought anyone was a threat to the Israelis, only that a sniper’s job would be made difficult by the current situation. If I was in charge of the Israeli force there, whether I decided to board them or not, I most likely would not deploy snipers because they would be ineffective.

As for the capability of being a threat… it doesn’t matter if the boat had it. What matters is what it was safe for the Israeli military to assume. From their POV this is very simple and the correct response is obvious: They set up a blockade. Then:

The Israeli military warned the vessels that they were entering a hostile area and that the Gaza shore was under blockade.

The vessels refused the military’s request to dock at the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, and continued toward their destination.
Assuming this is true, the Israeli force had no choice but to act as if the boat was carrying weapons, or at least something that someone didn’t want them to discover if they docked in Ashdod.

Forget about asking whether or not the situation can be made forgivable, and instead think about how it could have been avoided. Israel’s hand was forced here imo. Knowing as little as they knew at the time, I’m not sure ANY nation on earth could have responded differently. The people who got killed on the boat got killed because the people in charge of the boat were outrageously stupid, not because Israel’s military policy needs revising, although I would say it probably does, for completely unrelated reasons.

Second, who said anything about helicopters?

The raid was a helicopter air drop according to the article Zepp posted. If there were going to be snipers, they would be on the choppers. Which would be pointless imo. The situation couldn’t have been solved by sniping the-one-guy-with-the-gun that Zepp seems to think the Israelis knew about.

[Cidolfas]

Yep, you’re right. I got confused because I saw a picture of the soldiers heading in boats towards another ship, but I believe that was simply another ship in the same flotilla. I think the one in question refused to be boarded, hence the air drop.

[The_984]

The question of Israel as a Jewish state is a thorny one in today’s day and age, but imagine this - Vatican City suddenly has a large influx of Muslims and Jews who like its liberal values. They immigrate in the tens of thousands. Vatican City ceases to become a Catholic state. Do you think all the priests would be okay with that? What if a majority of Christians overwhelmed Saudi Arabia, elected a Christian president, who then threw out the Muslims from their holy places due to sheer numbers? It’s not pretty, but Israel, like many other places, was created as a state for a particular people, and they are not interested in being effectively removed from their own country by demographics.

The Vatican example fails, I think, because it’s not a democracy. I guess it’s a theocracratic monarchy (for lack of a better term; I know it’s not an actual Ye Olde King Monarchy). The Pope is head of both the Roman Catholic Church and the actual state. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy; limiting immigration to keep the Muslims in the majority doesn’t run counter to the ideals of a monarchy. Part of zepp’s point was that it seems counter to the ideals of democracy to purposely prop up one demographic so that it remains in the majority (in this case, Israel props up the Jewish demographic by limiting immigration by non-Jews).

Also, it would be hilarious to see ten thousand Muslims trying to wander around the .17 sqaure miles the Vatican makes up.

[Curtis]

As Cid pointed out, Israel made a technical mistake by attacking the ship in international waters. That being said, I believe Israel was justified in what they did. They’re at war with forces in Gaza; as a result, they’ve blockaded that country as a military strategy. Allowing aide in would have undercut that strategy. By trying to violate the blockade, Turkey was effectively interjecting itself into the war on Gaza’s side as a military ally, and should not be surprised that Israel responded with a military action(trying to seize the Turkish ship).

As for why the authorization was made to allow the use of sidearms, if you watch the videos of the attack, its clear the Israeli soldiers were in real danger. The crew of the ship were attacking with the intent to kill or incapacitate; and the soldiers even avoid using their guns for at least a minute(this is longer than it sounds considering they were getting wailed on by pipes and clubs). Most likely, the Israelis did not believe the crew would actually attack themj, which is why they didn’t use gas first before boarding. After the battle began, this was not an option due to their own men being on the ship.

[Curtis]

Israel’s anti-immigration laws have nothing to do with religion, or Israel’s status as a “Jewish” state. Its about ethnicity. Like it or not, as already noted, countries are generally founded to provide homes to certain ethnic groups, and its within the rights of any country to keep out or limit other ethnic groups. Afterall, America does and has done this throughout its entire history; for instance, we let Mexican immigrants into the country by generally deport illegal Haitians. Also, Israel being a “Jewish state” has much more to do with ethnicity than it does religion; the Israeli government is basically secular.

[Rigmarole]

As Cid pointed out, Israel made a technical mistake by attacking the ship in international waters.

A technical mistake? Either Israel’s position that intercepting a ship bound to break an embargo is legally ok stands or Israel boarded a ship in international waters without leave by its captain, which is piracy. Besides, there are two take-aways: Israel doesn’t care enough about its international image or the life of those who oppose its actions (imagine the fallout if Henning Mankel was more than slightly hurt) and since Lebanon its projected image of top efficiency has suffered.

[Cidolfas]

Curtis: All good points.

Israel is certainly under far more scrutiny than any other democracy on the face of the earth, including America. The number of Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed since 2003 dwarfs the number of people (of any sort) killed by Israelis since, well, ever, by orders of magnitude, but there are far more protests against Israel’s “war crimes” than America’s.

Israel has generally performed pretty admirably in terms of keeping civilians safe wherever possible; they are in a bad position and try to do well. But any army is run by people, most of those people have guns, most of their operations are near civilians, and inevitably things go wrong.

I’ve heard murmurings that the organization behind this particular ship had ties to terrorists… not sure how true it is, but Israel can’t on the one hand say they were suspicious because of those ties, and then say they weren’t prepared to be attacked.

I also wonder why reports say they did go in with paintball guns… if they wanted to do something non-lethal, wouldn’t they use something that didn’t look like a real gun? Maybe the protesters started attacking them because they thought they were being shot at with real bullets.

And Rigamarole: To a certain extent, yes, Israel doesn’t care about its international image. That’s because it’s practically impossible for Israel to do anything that actually improves it. No matter what they do, others find ways to criticize it. After they pulled out of Gaza, the praise lasted about a week before degenerating back to the status quo. Israel has basically decided that worrying about it is counterproductive.

[Zeppelin]

I normally try to avoid these kinds of picking-apart other posts’ replies, but there’s way too much going on in these posts so here goes nothing:

Biblical prophecy? That’d be tough, considering Muslims didn’t exist when the Bible was written. Jews and Muslims got along fairly well for hundreds of years; the last century is something of an anomaly, in fact.

Agreed…there were thriving Jewish populations throughout most of the Middle East up until around the end of World War I through World War II

Sin, go look up the word “apartheid”. It’s not synonymous with “discrimination”; if it was, Ontario would be an apartheid society because its constitution explicitly supports only one religion (Catholicism) in terms of education funding.

Is that true? Anyway, even if it is, it’s probably just one of those artifact laws left over from hundreds of years ago that nobody pays attention to anyway. Just because you can find something on http://www.funnylaws.com/ isn’t exactly a bulletproof retort to an accusation about something as serious as apartheid.

No, Israel (get the spelling right people!) is not perfect, but it also is not keeping Arabs holed up in separate schools, separate washrooms, etc. There are Arab Members of Knesset and Arab judges. There are places that need work, certainly, but Israel has many thriving human rights organizations and a liberal court system to help them along. And while this isn’t a blanket excuse, do keep in mind that a Jew under Palestinian rule in the West Bank or Gaza would not have anywhere near the same amount of rights (starting with life and going downwards) as an Arab living in Israel.

One thing Israel does right is social issues. At least, I think they are on par with most of Western Europe, and at least ahead of the US in most respects. You are right about the education, though most Israeli and Arab children do attend separate schools, and I don’t know enough about Israeli society to say whether this is purely a choice, or whether it’s more of a “choice” in the American sense, as in forces of segregation actively work to keep them apart.

Israeli schools are divided into four tracks: state, state-religious, Haredi (hinukh atzma’i) and Arab.[1] The majority of Israeli children attend state schools. State-religious schools, catering to youngsters from the Orthodox Jewish sector, offer intensive Jewish studies programs. Schools in the Arab sector teach in Arabic and offer a curriculum that emphasizes Arab history, religion and culture. There are also a small number of bilingual and multicultural schools for both Jewish and Arab children such as the Galil Jewish-Arab School and the Hand in Hand “Gesher al HaWadi” School, run by the Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish Arab Education in Israel.

Secondary education prepares students for the Israeli matriculation exams (bagrut). These are exams covering various academic disciplines, which are studied in units (yehidot limud) of one to five on an ascending scale of difficulty. Students with a passing mark on the mandatory matriculation subjects (Hebrew language, English language, mathematics, scripture, history, state studies and literature), who have been tested on at least 21 units, and passed at least one 5-unit exam, receive a full matriculation certificate. In 2006/7, 74.4% of Israeli 12th graders took the bagrut exams while only 46.3% were eligible for a matriculation certificate. In the Arab and Druze sectors, the figures were 35.6% and 43.7% respectively.[4]

Not surprisingly, Israeli children perform quite a bit better than minority Arab children, which is pretty standard in the West as well, but still no justification for the poor performance.

Many Arabs prefer to live in Israel than in those places specifically because of this.

This is a highly contentious quote. I wouldn’t go around making statements like this. Do they really prefer to live in Israel, or do they live there simply because blockades/embargoes/trade restrictions keep the Palestinian areas drastically poorer than Israeli areas? I’m sure if the Palestinian areas were opened up more and sufficient services provided, many people would choose to stay back in there homeland.

As for the flotilla thing - Israel and Egypt both offered to take the humanitarian aid and deliver it to the Gazans beforehand, as they have with all the other humanitarian shipments. This was not really a humanitarian effort; it was a political protest which Israel had warned multiple times would result in them being boarded. Once they were boarded, maybe someone should have told them that a really good way of committing suicide is to charge armed soldiers with knives and other weapons.

And perhaps someone should have told the armed soldier it was committing political suicide by rushing into a boat of civilians in international waters in the middle of the night. Though Israel had “promised” to deliver the goods, many of the goods in the shipment were listed as banned materials from entering gaza, even simple things like cement or pencils are on the banned list of goods to enter Gaza, so was there really a guarantee the supplies would get to where they needed to go? But yes, you are right, a large element of this was a political protest. Their goal was to bring international attention to this blockade, which for the most part has gone unreported on in the media, and to that extent I guess you could call it successful. I don’t believe the organizers hoped there would be losses of life like this, and it’s tragic that it happened, but ultimately many of these kinds of protests have resulted in losses of life, and we can only hope they didn’t die for nothing, and that some kind of substantial change will happen because of this.

As for Gaza in general - Israel acts the way it does because, quite frankly, it doesn’t trust the Gazans as far as they can throw them. Every time they lessened the restrictions, Hamas used those opportunities to import weapons and use them to attack Israelis. Construction materials were used for bunkers. Tunnels were used for smuggling weapons. Contrast this with the situation in the West Bank, where checkpoints have been relaxed, goods can flow freely, and their economy is the fastest-growing one in the Arab world.

This argument is a bit of chicken and egg, and as such I don’t really want to get bogged down in it. I’m just going to say that the fact you don’t “trust” somebody is no excuse to keep them locked up inside what amounts to a ghetto and slowly starve them to death. You don’t do it if you’re America, South Africa, China or Israel. I’m no supporter of Hamas, but they are an unfortunate product of Israeli policy toward Gaza. Marginalization of a group of people almost inevitably leads to its radicalization, and the only way out of it is to completely free them, engage with them as equals with respect and afford them the full 100% rights of Israeli citizens. There is absolutely no doubt this would result in the death of Israeli citizens, as certain aspects of the Gazan population have been radicalized beyond any hope of reconciliation. However, in the long term openness, democracy and the full respect of human rights will lead any group of people toward peace. You cannot put the responsibility for Peace in the hands of the Palestinians: the group with the power, control and leverage can only provide this. Unfortunately, it’s a decision Israel might never be willing to make, and thus I see no other solution, and this stupid shit is just going to keep happening over and over…

Regarding your “idealistic portrait” of the West Bank, while it is certainly much better off than Gaza, it’s still one of the worst places in the world to live, and it is truly an Apartheid state. Only 17% of West Bank land is actually in control of the Palestinian Authority, and it is not a contiguous piece of land. Rather, it is broken up into a number of tiny islands separated by Israeli controlled land, and travel in between the different zones is highly restricted. Most people in the West Bank spend their entire lives there unable to leave, and spend most of their lives inside their tiny pieces of controlled land which can be as small as 2 square kilometers. Here are some images:

You see those red lines striking through the map? Those are Israeli roads which Palestians are not even allowed to drive on. There are many places in the West Bank where divided highways exist with walls in between them. This is because Israeli cars must drive on one side, while Palestinian cars must drive on the other. This is not apartheid how?

http://tinypic.com/r/70gwud/6

Image linked because of large size. The dark red areas are palestinian settlements. Notice how they are small and spread out like islands. The darkest yellow “Zone A” is areas both controlled and administered by the Palestinian Authority. The middle hue yellow is areas controlled by Israel but nominally administered by the PA. The light yellow are completely in control of Israel. The other colors…well you can see for yourself from the legend at the bottom. You are technically correct that the West Bank has the fastest growth rate in the Middle East, but there is a caveat. Most of that growth is concentrated in the Israeli settlement areas of the WEst Bank where most of the development is occurring. There is little growth in completely Palestinian controlled areas. How can there be, when there isn’t even a functioning airport in the territory? Once again, you should be careful with these statistics.

The question of Israel as a Jewish state is a thorny one in today’s day and age, but imagine this - Vatican City suddenly has a large influx of Muslims and Jews who like its liberal values. They immigrate in the tens of thousands. Vatican City ceases to become a Catholic state. Do you think all the priests would be okay with that? What if a majority of Christians overwhelmed Saudi Arabia, elected a Christian president, who then threw out the Muslims from their holy places due to sheer numbers? It’s not pretty, but Israel, like many other places, was created as a state for a particular people, and they are not interested in being effectively removed from their own country by demographics.

Again, Israel is not perfect, and I can guarantee an investigation will be launched into what happened here. Somebody dropped the ball.

984 already replies to this. The Vatican isn’t really a country, as it only has an actual population of about 12 people. It’s a statistical anomaly in the world. Regarding Saudi Arabia, are you saying that since Saudi Arabia does something, that it’s OK for Israel to do the same thing? Saudi Arabia is a far worse country than Israel in most respects, and I could go on just as long a tirade about it as I am with Israel. It’s a despotic, harsh, racist, sexist regime and I wish nothing more than that it comes tumbling down with all the rest of the governments of its kind. So why do I pick on Israel? Because they claim themselves to be a liberal, modern, open and democratic society, and yet there are all these elements to it that I’ve just mentioned in which it tends to act more like a state like Saudi Arabia. I hold any State with claims to being open and democratic to the same standards, that it truly createst equal opportunities and affords equal human rights to all of its citizens. I’ve complained about this in America with the Health Care debate, because America fails to provide equal human rights to all its citizens in this regard, and now I’m claiming the same thing about Israel. And for all its failings, Saudi Arabia at least tends to avoid doing things like killing civilians on boats out in international waters.

[Zeppelin]

Curtis: All good points.

Israel is certainly under far more scrutiny than any other democracy on the face of the earth, including America. The number of Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed since 2003 dwarfs the number of people (of any sort) killed by Israelis since, well, ever, by orders of magnitude, but there are far more protests against Israel’s “war crimes” than America’s.

You are right that Israel is hardly the only democracy guilty of blatant human rights abuses. Quantitatively speaking, America’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in far greater destruction and loss of life than Israeli actions have. Heck, forget about that…the actions of the British Empire in its reign of hundreds of years was probably the most destructive venture in the history of the world. I would encourage you to make a thread and enlighten us further on these issues if you really feel strongly about them.

One reason I think Israel gets more scrutiny than others is due to its location. It’s technically located in the Middle East, and it is thus more on the “front lines” of the action than other countries area. Given its location, it is also seen as somewhat of a catalyst for Arab and Muslim radicalization. The actions Israel takes against Palestine have ripple effects throughout the entire Middle East that tend to have the result of increased Anti-Western feelings. Thus, peace in the area is seen as a critical first step toward general better relations with the region.

And Rigamarole: To a certain extent, yes, Israel doesn’t care about its international image. That’s because it’s practically impossible for Israel to do anything that actually improves it. No matter what they do, others find ways to criticize it. After they pulled out of Gaza, the praise lasted about a week before degenerating back to the status quo. Israel has basically decided that worrying about it is counterproductive.

I’m sure that if Israel completely opened up the borders of Gaza and the West Bank and gave the people full and equal citizenship with all the rights that come with it, you wouldn’t hear anybody in the international community complaining. Unfortunately, this is an option that’s not on the table, as Israel is unwilling to sacrifice short-term security issues (and arguably racial and ethnic prejudices) in favor of a peaceable long-term, democratic solution

[Cidolfas]

Is that true? Anyway, even if it is, it’s probably just one of those artifact laws left over from hundreds of years ago that nobody pays attention to anyway

Actually, it was the flashpoint for the provincial election six years ago. The person who wanted to eliminate it and offer equality to all schools was soundly defeated because the electorate thinks that Catholic schools are somehow intrinsically less “parochial” than other religions. It means a difference in millions of dollars of funding every year, and it means that to raise a single child in a Jewish school costs well over $10,000 a year, whereas Catholic children get it for free.

Do they really prefer to live in Israel, or do they live there simply because blockades/embargoes/trade restrictions keep the Palestinian areas drastically poorer than Israeli areas? I’m sure if the Palestinian areas were opened up more and sufficient services provided, many people would choose to stay back in there homeland.

Right now, their “homeland” of Gaza is ruled by people who stone gays to death, have no intention of providing women’s rights, and are generally led by leaders who steal most of the money for themselves. That’s precisely why people prefer to live in Israel.

I’m no supporter of Hamas, but they are an unfortunate product of Israeli policy toward Gaza.

Hamas and their spiritual predecessors have been around since at least 1947, well before Israel occupied Gaza. Hamas’s charter says nothing about being angry at Israel’s occupation: their goal is and always has been to destroy Israel entirely, as impossible as that may seem. Hamas preaches that the entire Israel - not just Gaza - is Palestinian land.

Marginalization of a group of people almost inevitably leads to its radicalization, and the only way out of it is to completely free them, engage with them as equals with respect and afford them the full 100% rights of Israeli citizens.

And that process is slowly happening in the West Bank, because those people and leaders have shown some small indication of wanting to do so. Hamas is by definition a terrorist organization, Gazans still want them in power, and as long as that’s true Israel is not going to trust them. Let’s not forget that Israel completely got out of Gaza in 2005; the result was literally thousands of rockets fired against civilians in Israeli towns like Sderot. That’s still fresh in people’s minds, hence the trust issue.

There is absolutely no doubt this would result in the death of Israeli citizens, as certain aspects of the Gazan population have been radicalized beyond any hope of reconciliation.

Any government’s number one goal is and must be to make sure their people aren’t killed by others. No government would specifically pursue a tactic that they know would result in the deaths of their own people.

This is not apartheid how?

It’s not apartheid because under an apartheid regime, blacks were marginalized for no other reason than because they were black. In this case, Palestinians are restricted from doing things and being places because in the past, when they weren’t restricted, they attacked and murdered Israelis. The reason those roads were closed is because Israelis went under sniper fire every time they drove them. Very different situation. And I never said the West Bank was a utopia; I said it’s “growing” at an incredibly fast rate, and it is. These things don’t happen overnight, and attempts to make instant changes usually backfire. Trust needs to be built, on both sides. It will take time, but the direction looks promising. (Btw, I was not talking about population growth, but economic growth - number of startup companies, average GDP, etc. - which has nothing to do with your graph.)

And for all its failings, Saudi Arabia at least tends to avoid doing things like killing civilians on boats out in international waters.

No, they prefer to stone them in public courts. In any case… I admit, Saudi Arabia is not the model we should be looking at. The question basically becomes “do the Jews deserve their own state?” and considering the hell that everybody else has put them through in the past, I’d argue that the answer is yes. When the holy places of Israel were under Arab control, Israelis were denied access; parts of the Western Wall were used as a garbage dump; the Tomb of Joseph was lynched, burned down, and replaced with a mosque. Under Israeli control, all Arab holy sites are given Arab oversight; Jews are forbidden from visiting their own holiest site, the Temple Mount, because the Israeli government forbids it. Israel as a government is far better than practically anything the Palestinians would set up.

The actions Israel takes against Palestine have ripple effects throughout the entire Middle East that tend to have the result of increased Anti-Western feelings.

This is mainly because cynical Arab governments use it to rile up their people so they won’t notice all the human rights abuses and outright theft they’re engaging in.

Unfortunately, this is an option that’s not on the table, as Israel is unwilling to sacrifice short-term security issues (and arguably racial and ethnic prejudices) in favor of a peaceable long-term, democratic solution

Short-term security? You mean like… oh, having hundreds of thousands of Arabs getting official aid from other Arab governments, setting up a military, invading Israel and killing thousands of people? That kind of security? Yep, you’re right.

[Zeppelin]

Actually, it was the flashpoint for the provincial election six years ago. The person who wanted to eliminate it and offer equality to all schools was soundly defeated because the electorate thinks that Catholic schools are somehow intrinsically less “parochial” than other religions. It means a difference in millions of dollars of funding every year, and it means that to raise a single child in a Jewish school costs well over $10,000 a year, whereas Catholic children get it for free.

That’s pretty dumb…in my own personal opinion, I don’t think any religious schools should get any funding from the State…only public schools teaching the public curriculum. But, I suppose if you absolutely need to have your God education, it should at the very least be evenly distributed. Just wondering if any other Canadians could comment on this as well, if any of you are familiar with it.

Right now, their “homeland” of Gaza is ruled by people who stone gays to death, have no intention of providing women’s rights, and are generally led by leaders who steal most of the money for themselves. That’s precisely why people prefer to live in Israel.

Right, that’s my point. If the Gaza territory was opened up and liberalized and allowed an equal say in Israeli politics, you would see the influence of Hamas disappear overnight. I would not confuse the popular election of Hamas with popular support for Hamas’ policies of completely obliterating Israel. Like most citizens everywhere, most Palestinians would just like a peaceful place to live and prosper, but when people are denied that right we shouldn’t be too surprised when they turn to more radicalized elements with delusions of grandeur who can make promises they can’t keep. If you can’t prosper yourself, you might as well take out a few of your oppressors with you. The fact is that Hamas is not a group that can be taken out through military actions. The only way you can ensure the destruction of Hamas is to create a far preferable alternative: in this case, full and equal access to the Israeli democratic system.

Hamas and their spiritual predecessors have been around since at least 1947, well before Israel occupied Gaza. Hamas’s charter says nothing about being angry at Israel’s occupation: their goal is and always has been to destroy Israel entirely, as impossible as that may seem. Hamas preaches that the entire Israel - not just Gaza - is Palestinian land.

Sure, this is true…but let’s remember that Hamas does not represent all Palestinians, and in the context of Arab / Israeli conflict is a relative newcomer to the scene. There is no reason to believe they will be around forever, esp. if the Palestinian people are given actual freedom.

And that process is slowly happening in the West Bank, because those people and leaders have shown some small indication of wanting to do so. Hamas is by definition a terrorist organization, Gazans still want them in power, and as long as that’s true Israel is not going to trust them. Let’s not forget that Israel completely got out of Gaza in 2005; the result was literally thousands of rockets fired against civilians in Israeli towns like Sderot. That’s still fresh in people’s minds, hence the trust issue.

I thought you said before that the West Bank was a model for the Palestinians, with the Middle East’s highest economic growth rate. Now you’re saying it’s slowly becoming a hotbed for the growth of terrorism? Well, which one is it? Doesn’t seem to me that i could be both. Gazans do not necessarily want Hamas in power, but what choice do they really have? The PA was unable to deliver even a basic level of services to them, and most Gazans see that Israel seems only interested in keeping Gaza completely shut off from the outside world. Incidents like these ship boardings only work to consolidate Hamas’ power, because people see them as the only possible way out of their situation. Gazans are not given any other reasonable alternative. Also…thousands of rockets…heh.

Between 2005 and 2007, Palestinian groups in Gaza fired about 2,700 locally-made Qassam rockets into Israel, killing four Israeli civilians and injuring 75 others.

It’s true there were thousands of rockets fired…that killed four people. Now, I’m not saying four people killed is an “acceptable” loss, but in my home town of Chicago there are over 500 people murdered on the streets every year, but you don’t see the Army or the National Guard coming in and completely barricading off the entire city and launching military actions against the populace. No, instead there is a slow and steady focus on bringing back jobs into the city, redeveloping poor areas…it’s a process that will take decades, and maybe it won’t even work, but this is how normal, rational people deal with these kinds of problems. In Israel, the deaths of four people in three years causes a massive military incursion that kills over 1,300 Palestinians, a large number of whom were innocent civilians (perhaps you would consider no Palestinian “innocent”?) including children. Israel should and must deal with the issue of rockets being fired, but this isn’t the way that democratic countries typically deal with internal strife.

Any government’s number one goal is and must be to make sure their people aren’t killed by others. No government would specifically pursue a tactic that they know would result in the deaths of their own people.

Governments act all the time in ways that endanger the short-term safety of their people in order to gain a sense of more long-term peace and stability. Plenty of governments voluntarily enter into wars with other countries which put their people directly into harm’s way to ensure the peace and stability of the nation in the long-term. When the government of the US pressed ahead with sweeping civil rights legislation, it knew that years of protests, riots and racially-incited murders would rise in the short term, but the leaders of the country had the foresight to realize that in the long-term it would save many more lives than were lost in the years of social upheaval. If you want to simply get into a body count calculus, look at the latest gaza offensive. From 2005 to 2007, four people were killed by rocket attacks into Israel. In a three week span, 13 Israelis were killed in the Gaza offensive. The rockets have stopped for now, but at what cost? Israel is now, more than at any time in the last 30 years or so, stuck in the region without any allies and you’ve got countries like Turkey planning on brining in more flotillas surrounded with destroyers. It doesn’t seem to me like a solution for long-term peace.

It’s not apartheid because under an apartheid regime, blacks were marginalized for no other reason than because they were black. In this case, Palestinians are restricted from doing things and being places because in the past, when they weren’t restricted, they attacked and murdered Israelis. The reason those roads were closed is because Israelis went under sniper fire every time they drove them. Very different situation. And I never said the West Bank was a utopia; I said it’s “growing” at an incredibly fast rate, and it is. These things don’t happen overnight, and attempts to make instant changes usually backfire. Trust needs to be built, on both sides. It will take time, but the direction looks promising. (Btw, I was not talking about population growth, but economic growth - number of startup companies, average GDP, etc. - which has nothing to do with your graph.)

I wouldn’t exactly say apartheid didn’t have any justifications either. It wasn’t simply because they had black skin. There were a whole slew of social, economic and theological justifications that were behind Apartheid. At one level, the Whites of South Africa simply believed that since they had brought commerce and trade, the “higher” forms of development, to South Africa, that they should be able to reap the rewards of it. There were beliefs that European culture was superior to African culture and that they were better suited to rule. There was the belief that White mastery was a God-ordained rule. Regardless of the justifications, it seems to me many of the results are the same, and I am a more results-oriented kinda guy. All I see are millions of people living in what amounts of apartheid ghettos. Being born into a Palestine-area is pretty much a jail sentence, even though your only crime was to be born in that area. Even if there is an element of that population that is hell-bent on your destruction, it is not justification for the virtual imprisonment of millions of innocent people. I suppose that this is the key element we disagree on, and there is probably no way for us to meet common ground. Your arguments that somehow Israeli rule is still better because they afford a few token freedoms to a small minority population lucky enough to live on the other side of the wall doesn’t really mean much to me when it comes at the cost of locking up millions in ghettos. It seems to me to be missing the bigger picture.

[Cidolfas]

If the Gaza territory was opened up and liberalized and allowed an equal say in Israeli politics, you would see the influence of Hamas disappear overnight.

You say “liberalized” like it’s the simplest thing in the world. And what do you mean - you want to allow Gazans to vote in Israeli elections? That makes zero sense to me, considering no Israelis live in Gaza or vice versa.

Like most citizens everywhere, most Palestinians would just like a peaceful place to live and prosper

Where are your statistics coming from? Most polls done there show a sky-high preference for violent tactics against Israelis, suicide bombings, “martyrdom operations”, and the desire to kick the Israelis out for good and have a “one-state solution” which contains nothing but Palestine. In fact, the only thing that seems to be gradually wearing the Gazans down is precisely the fact that Hamas has been ostracized and their lives have been nothing but worse since they came to power.

Sure, this is true…but let’s remember that Hamas does not represent all Palestinians, and in the context of Arab / Israeli conflict is a relative newcomer to the scene. There is no reason to believe they will be around forever, esp. if the Palestinian people are given actual freedom.

An idealistic view, for sure, but not one borne out by the facts. Hamas was elected democratically and to the best of my knowledge, if another election would take place today they’d be elected again. They represent the Gazan people. The Israeli government can’t go around hoping that the Palestinians will suddenly like them. That’s what happened in Oslo in 1993, and it sparked the bloodiest spate of suicide bombings and Israeli deaths ever. Israel was very optimistic at that time. Israelis were killed by weapons they gave Palestinian security forces and trained them to use. They’ve learned their lesson. Back to the trust issue, again.

I thought you said before that the West Bank was a model for the Palestinians, with the Middle East’s highest economic growth rate. Now you’re saying it’s slowly becoming a hotbed for the growth of terrorism? Well, which one is it?

Hamas doesn’t rule in the West Bank. It’s Gaza that’s become a hotbed for terrorism.

t’s true there were thousands of rockets fired…that killed four people.

And terrorized hundreds of thousands, costing billions in building bomb shelters and people living in fear of their lives. The reason why the death toll wasn’t bigger is simply because Israel really, really doesn’t want its people to die, regardless of how much international sympathy that would bring them. Hamas takes the exact opposite approach, trying to place its forces amongst the largest number of civilians so all the news cameras can catch the funerals. And the comparison to murders in Chicago is ridiculous - the murderers are not part of an organized group living in a foreign land specifically targeting civilians. This is not “internal” strife; Israel has no military presence inside Gaza and there is not a single Jew living there. This is a foreign entity, supplied and aided by Iran, firing rockets into a sovereign state.

(perhaps you would consider no Palestinian “innocent”?)

Please don’t try to paint me as an extremist. It doesn’t become you.

Plenty of governments voluntarily enter into wars with other countries which put their people directly into harm’s way to ensure the peace and stability of the nation in the long-term.

Correction: Governments ask soldiers to enter into war. Governments do not put their civilian populations at risk.

When the government of the US pressed ahead with sweeping civil rights legislation, it knew that years of protests, riots and racially-incited murders would rise in the short term, but the leaders of the country had the foresight to realize that in the long-term it would save many more lives than were lost in the years of social upheaval.

Again - you are comparing the actions of random individuals to that of a terrorist organization financed by a foreign country whose specific desire is to wage war against the country. You can’t simply wish them away.

t one level, the Whites of South Africa simply believed that since they had brought commerce and trade, the “higher” forms of development, to South Africa, that they should be able to reap the rewards of it. There were beliefs that European culture was superior to African culture and that they were better suited to rule. There was the belief that White mastery was a God-ordained rule.

Dude… you are seriously comparing the justification of “God-given right for white power” to the one involving your people not being murdered? I have a feeling you’d think a little differently if it were your brothers and cousins living near the Gaza border.

Even if there is an element of that population that is hell-bent on your destruction, it is not justification for the virtual imprisonment of millions of innocent people.

I don’t disagree with this, and certainly I would love for there to be a better solution. The difference is that I take into consideration that as a government, Israel’s first and foremost duty is to protect its people. The blockade may not be the best way to do this; the checkpoints may not be the best way to do this. But the Israeli government cannot sacrifice people’s lives because of morals or ethics or duty. There are most probably ways to address the long-term solution while keeping Israeli lives safe in the short-term, and a forward-thinking government can probably come up with one.

[Sinistral]

There are things I sympathize with Israel and I can understand, the biggest of which is the security situation. While ridiculously inefficient, the bombings, rockets and mortar fire nevertheless are not appropriate.

However, the problem is that there are other ways aside from the military over reactions like Operation Cast Lead, that Israel is not helping itself. Its one thing to debate the right of return of Palestinians, which is obviously a logistical nightmare, but Israel continues to create problems for itself with its provocative and illegal settlement activity. If Israel were simply defensive in its approach to the Palestinian conflict and responding to the unjustified and continuous assault they face daily, then the situation would be different. However, you overlook how things like settlement activity is in itself an ongoing form of assault that the Israelis refuse to cease doing.

Also, its not because Israeli Arabs have a higher standard of living relative to those of Palestinians in Gaza, that they are not discriminated against heavily within Israeli society.

If you want to compare the god given right to white power to Israel, its easy to do because many people in Israel see it as their Holy Land :P. They are a minority of Jews suppressing a majority of Arabs, like the white Afrikaaners were suppressing a majority of black Africans.

Also, for the record, racism is alive and well in Canada. Its not just a Quebec problem, though the Quebeckers are the most vocally racist. Its just that racism manifests itself differently from the US for historical and socio-economic reasons. Because of these differences, many Canadians hypocritically claim to be above racism, but its just a lot of bullshit. They simply aren’t challenged on the racism of their views and behavior.

You both need to take a step back and look at the situation right now practically and objectively. Israel is not going to go away, but Israel is not innoncent. The status quo is not viable and will only continue to degenerate. The Israeli-Palestininan conflict is a blight which helps no one, except as Cid accurately pointed out and which many Arabs I know will also claim, help prop up dictators everywhere by creating a lengthy distraction.