Anonymous wrote:But Hamas started this particular fight. And is losing ...

apparently not. Two people not under the direction of Hamas killed three youth. Instead if treating it as a triple homicide, they started bulldozing houses, rounding up civilians by the hundreds and killing people.

Muslima wrote:So I decided to register

Interesting article : http://www.haaretz.com/general/the-country-that-wouldn-t-grow-up-1.186721

It would entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won't always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous population. Other countries and their leaders have understood this and managed comparable realignments: Charles De Gaulle realized that France's settlement in Algeria, which was far older and better established than Israel's West Bank colonies, was a military and moral disaster for his country. In an exercise of outstanding political courage, he acted upon that insight and withdrew. But when De Gaulle came to that realization he was a mature statesman, nearly 70 years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of 58 the time has come for it to grow up.

It's a brilliant article and it was written in 2006. Time has only made the observations more astute.

So I decided to register

Interesting article : http://www.haaretz.com/general/the-country-that-wouldn-t-grow-up-1.186721

It would entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won't always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous population. Other countries and their leaders have understood this and managed comparable realignments: Charles De Gaulle realized that France's settlement in Algeria, which was far older and better established than Israel's West Bank colonies, was a military and moral disaster for his country. In an exercise of outstanding political courage, he acted upon that insight and withdrew. But when De Gaulle came to that realization he was a mature statesman, nearly 70 years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of 58 the time has come for it to grow up.

The answer to the OP is that the Palestinians are accelerating Israel's evolution into a completely ultra-nationalist, fascist country that neither respects international law nor permits internal dissent. People who don't cling to rosy visions of Israel completely divorced from reality know this already, and it will lead to Israel's collapse in the not too distant future. And our country's continued support for Israel will only accelerate the decline of American power as well.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-gaza-war-has-done-terrible-things-to-israeli-society/article19737911/

But Hamas started this particular fight. And is losing ...

Anonymous wrote:Well, that's a pretty judgmental and odd response. A little work on reading comprehension would be advisable. The "aggressor" is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. One could argue that an entity that launches missiles into a country is an aggressor. Or one could argue--as ardent anti-Israel people would--that Israel's very existence makes it the aggressor. The U.S., even with the best and most cautious military in the world, caused countless civilian deaths in Iraq, Vietnam, and many other places. But the U.S. is too big to pick on, so bullies pick on Israel as a proxy. I believe fervently in a two-state solution and a peaceful coexistence. And if Israeli has violated international laws and norms, it should be held accountable. It is a U.N. recognized nation after all, as many seem to conveniently forget.

If "aggressor" is in the eye of the beholder, then it seems pretty clear that both parties are at fault.

Anonymous wrote:It would be good, too, if humanity looked at Hamas and said, how did that ever happen?

Hamas in the direct consequence and child of the Israel terrorist Policies on the Palestinian civilians. What is ironic is that the Palestinian group that would begin calling itself Hamas in 1987 was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a half-blind cleric partially paralyzed by a childhood sports accident. In the 1970s, Yassin’s interest was to turn Palestinians toward the Koran and to find their way through it, rather than through the PLO ( Yasser Arafat's party) . Israel saw an opportunity to battle the PLO from within its own Palestinian ranks by openly supporting Yassin and his followers. ( Can you believe that? Israel was the 1st supporter of Hamas)

Israel’s assumption that Yassin could be a viable alternative to Yasser Arafat was the same sort of miscalculation the United States committed in Iran in the 1970s, when the CIA cultivated radical Islamist groups there should the regime of the Shah of Iran falter or fall. In 1979, the regime did fall. The CIA had misread the forces of political Islam in Iran. It had also misread its reach: Political Islam wasn’t a fad. It was the future.

Lessons not learned, the United States, under the guidance of the Reagan administration, committed an equally catastrophic miscalculation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the CIA armed and supported Arab and Afghan mujahideen in their war against Soviet occupiers. Osama bin Laden was the Arab mujahideen’s leaders.

Like I said before, history loves to repeat itself~

It would be good, too, if humanity looked at Hamas and said, how did that ever happen?

Anonymous wrote:Being upfront about it is good. But U.S. policy is still centered on a two state solution. I will say this: Israel can't continue on this path forever. Eventually, it will lose U.S. support (the only people who support it now are Republicans for the most part, and there will never be a Republican president again).

US policy is centered on a two state solution, because that is what Israel wants, doesn't mean that is what is fair, and that is why the peace process will fail over and over again. I think Israel has started to lose a lot of international support. We are in the age of information, and we no longer just rely on what is being fed to us, people can do their own research, Palestinians are tweeting/facebooking what is happening there daily, so are journalist and activists, the world is learning more and more about what is going on there. I am afraid that one day, our descendants will look at this and think " How did our ancestors let this happen, who were these humans" the same way we look at slavery, the holocaust today and wonder what happened to humanity back then. Ironically, history has a way of repeating itself~

Being upfront about it is good. But U.S. policy is still centered on a two state solution. I will say this: Israel can't continue on this path forever. Eventually, it will lose U.S. support (the only people who support it now are Republicans for the most part, and there will never be a Republican president again).

Anonymous wrote:Clearly, having Israel become a recognized nation-state under international law wasn't the outcome that many--including foreign policy experts--wanted, but there it is. Those who do not truly want a two-state solution should just say so. It is better to have that argument out in the open.

I have no qualms about saying that I DO NOT SUPPORT a Two-State "Solution". Palestine/Israel is as unpartitionable as was South Africa and Northern Ireland, where similar ethnic conflicts had also defied resolution for generations. In both places, it was only when the dominant group dropped its insistence on supremacy that a political settlement could be reached. What was once unimaginable happened: Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and F.W. de Klerk's National Party joined hands in a national unity government in 1994. Leaders in Northern Ireland made similar progress .

Neither political marriage came about through love, but through necessity and with outside pressure. In time, social reconciliation may come, but it has not been the prerequisite for political progress in South Africa or Northern Ireland. Such pressure on Israel as the strongest party is necessary, which is why I support the growing movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions modeled on the antiapartheid campaign. At the same time, we must begin to construct a vision of a nonracial, nonsectarian Palestine-Israel, which belongs to all the people who live in it, Israeli Jews, Palestinians, and all exiles who want to return and live in peace with their neighbors. Do you think Nelson Mandela would have been what he is today and South Africa what it is today, if they decided on a 2 state solutions asking all the Blacks to stay in SOWETO and giving the Whites the Best Part of the country? How many times in History do we have to go through this for people to understand that you can't come into someone's country, occupy it, terrorize them, push them into the most impoverished part and expect that they will just sit there peacefully and leave happily ever after

Clearly, having Israel become a recognized nation-state under international law wasn't the outcome that many--including foreign policy experts--wanted, but there it is. Those who do not truly want a two-state solution should just say so. It is better to have that argument out in the open.

The head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:

“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter–a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN’s own charter.”
Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction.

An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:

“...the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN...In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”
And American Vice Consul William J. Porter foresaw another outcome of the partition plan: that no Arab State would actually ever come to be in Palestine.

How chilling !!!!!!

Oh and approximately 50 years before, a movement called political Zionism had begun in Europe. Its intention was to create a Jewish state in Palestine through pushing out the Christian and Muslim inhabitants who made up over 95 percent of its population and replacing them with Jewish immigrants.

As this colonial project grew through subsequent years, the indigenous Palestinians reacted with occasional bouts of violence; Zionists had anticipated this since people usually resist being expelled from their land. In various written documents cited by numerous Palestinian and Israeli historians, they discussed their strategy: they would buy up the land until all the previous inhabitants had emigrated, or, failing this, use violence to force them out.

When the buy-out effort was able to obtain only a few percent of the land, Zionists created a number of terrorist groups to fight against both the Palestinians and the British. Terrorist and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later bragged that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the Middle East and to the world at large.

Finally, in 1947 the British announced that they would be ending their control of Palestine, which had been created through the League of Nations following World War One, and turned the question of Palestine over to the United Nations.

At this time, the Zionist immigration and buyout project had increased the Jewish population of Palestine to 30 percent and land ownership from 1 percent to approximately 6 percent.

Since a founding principle of the UN was “self-determination of peoples,” one would have expected to the UN to support fair, democratic elections in which inhabitants could create their own independent country.
Instead, Zionists pushed for a General Assembly resolution in which they would be given a disproportionate 55 percent of Palestine. (While they rarely announced this publicly, their stated plan was to later take the rest of Palestine.)

Anonymous wrote:Well, that's a pretty judgmental and odd response. A little work on reading comprehension would be advisable. The "aggressor" is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. One could argue that an entity that launches missiles into a country is an aggressor. Or one could argue--as ardent anti-Israel people would--that Israel's very existence makes it the aggressor. The U.S., even with the best and most cautious military in the world, caused countless civilian deaths in Iraq, Vietnam, and many other places. But the U.S. is too big to pick on, so bullies pick on Israel as a proxy. I believe fervently in a two-state solution and a peaceful coexistence. And if Israeli has violated international laws and norms, it should be held accountable. It is a U.N. recognized nation after all, as many seem to conveniently forget.

Which means giving 90% of the Good Fertile Land to Israel and 10% to Palestinian? No, Palestine will never stand for this! Regardless of what you think the UN recognizes or did, the UN created this mess. It is the weakest organization in the world. How many times did they try to cite Israel for war crimes and what happened? In reality, while the UN General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes. Third, the US administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations, and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon. The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state. It was this armed aggression, and the ethnic cleansing of at least three-quarters of a million indigenous Palestinians, that created the Jewish state on land that had been 95 percent non-Jewish prior to Zionist immigration and that even after years of immigration remained 70 percent non-Jewish. And despite the shallow patina of legality its partisans extracted from the General Assembly, Israel was born over the opposition of American experts and of governments around the world, who opposed it on both pragmatic and moral grounds.