I got this in my email from a good friend and I don’t know how to answer it.
Where can I find your voice of reason re: the protests in the Middle East? I think it’s a trick by the Bushies to f*ck Obama. I heard a commentator on CNN say “Where were all these people protesting, when they could have beneficially helping build an infrastructure for the Palestinians?
So much more dramatic to protest than get their asses to work.
I’m stumped. After WWII, when the world set up the state of Israel, very little notice or attention was paid to the people who got displaced. Over time, US policy has taken a “tsk, tsk” approach to both Palestinian aggression and Israeli action. This “not our problem / not out fault” attitude has made, in my opinion, the problem much, much worse over the decades.
A smartassed thought I had years ago about how the US should have just given half of Texas to set up a New Israel seems more and more reasonable as the years, and this conflict, drag on.
Setting up a state for Palestine is a no-brainer, as far as just saying it goes, but, how do break down who gets what, and who goes where?
A great deal of the problem rests on the shoulders of the Palestinians. If there’s one thing that the Israeli military is: it’s a uniformed target.
Yes, when Israel decides it’s time to take military action, they don’t screw around. People die. When Palestinians decide it’s time to do something, it’s terrorism. Randomly shooting explosive rockets a few miles away to blow up soft targets before you leave to go to market, or prayer is terrorism. Suicide bombers targeting civilians and sneaking up on non combatants before blowing the whole area to hell is terrorism.
Israel does a lot of collateral damage when it fights, but, there it is, in uniform, a legitimate target of war.
Palestine has a reason to pissed. They got screwed by history, but as long as they continue to purposefully target civilians, or randomly shoot explosives into residential/commercial and non military targets, they’re not going to get anything they want. Every time a suicide bomber strikes; every time a random rocket explodes in a school, temple, a playground, the whole thing starts over, and the animosity grows.
So, what is there to do? What CAN be done? Everyone involved has blood on their hands in one way or another, so, pointing fingers and shifting blame won’t work. It’s too far past that.
Under Republican leadership, the US has invaded two countries on the pretense of fighting terrorism (one was guilty, the other a giant lie) yet, when Israel is attacked, day after day, the US tells it to mellow out and think things through.
On the other hand, what legitimate voice is speaking up for Palestine? Clinton tried, and things seemed to get better. Bush … well, he won’t talk to anyone who disagrees with him, so, all that’s happened in the last eight years is violent backsliding.
There’s no way to sum this up. Giant books by people far smarter than I am have been written on the topic, and nothing has worked yet. Anyone have any answers? Anti-semites / racist asshats need not respond. A voice of reason, I’m not.
The entire fight boils down to a disagreement over Abraham and if he had a wife and a concubine or two wives. The Jewish tradition clings to the former, the Islamic tradition to the latter. Once you realize the entire thing boils down to a “your mom” insult nearly as old as recorded history, you gain a bit of perspective as to how silly the entire thing really is.
well, if you want to go back to Abraham, then you can shrug your shoulders and say “hey, it’s their problem.”
A lot more has been done by Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Yassar Arafat.
Yassar, for example, refused to take the property offered by the Balfour decsion. They wanted all or nothing. Driving the Jews into the sea isn’t a great way to form a political agenda. I still say it is economy, economy, economy. Make the Palistine infrastructure more financially viable ane this has mmore chance of going away.
Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.
… what?
…C’mon, what’d’you expect from me?
But seriously, I think President Bush has done plenty during his administration with regards to the Israel Palestine question. Most notably, helping Hamas win power (whilst TOTALLY not seeing it coming) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/international/middleeast/30diplo.html
And then launching a plan to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas. Covertly. With force.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
Before they got caught and totally solidified Hamas’s hold on the region. (This, by the way, is the main reason I don’t think 9/11 was an inside job. That would have been… competent.) Anyone else remember that? Anyone? Hello? Is this thing on?
Also, I have it good authority that President Bush cut the cheese in the elevator and tried to blame it on Avi Dichter. I can’t name sources of courses, mostly because no one else seems to be able to see them, but it happened. And that’s why there will never be peace in the middle east.