Discuss: Fencing Israel

Peaceful coexistence can only be achieved when the parties decide to coexist peacefully.

Indeed Jerry, the solution is on the ground and not on the web.  It is and will be accomplished largely by the efforts of the Palestinian people themselves. Those of us who support a just solution to Palestine’s Israel problem can only do our best to support them in this endeavor. And discussions here are the least of it.  But they are necessary.  And as you say, there are two people on one ground and they shall remain there. Or at least they should remain there. Unfortunately, Israel’s plan, decades in formation, is to remove the Palestinians from the land and remove the land from the Palestinians. The effort is to alienate the Palestinian from his native soil.  The landless Palestinian can work anywhere and nowhere.  And Eretz Israel will be accomplished.

Larry, the first step in peaceful coexistence is for Israel to go home to Israel.  All else falls into place after that.  Like Iraq in Kuwait, like Indonesia in East Timor, and for that matter, like Serbia in Kosovo, the first step is for the occupier to go home. There is no peace under occupation, there is no ecology under occupation. Really, Israel cannot have it all.

Felice,

You’ve taken this far afield, but when you say ‘a people or political movement will turn to terrorism when it is denied any other means to pursue its political objectives’ you are saying ‘might makes right.’

In the historical record, the Indigenous Peoples of what are now the US, Canada, Alaskan, Mexico, and the various nations of South and Central America, and Australia did not turn to terrorism to pursue their political objectives. Nor did the people of the Indian subcontinent turn to terrorism to wrest independence from the British. Nor did Martin Luther King Jr.

Typical examples of people who have used terror more or less successfully to pursue their objectives are the Soviets, Khmer Rouge, and the Nazis.  As a bourgeois Jewish intellectual, I wouldn’t want to live in any of those societies. Nor would I be tolerated. Put another way, I would be treated the way they treated my aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. 

Do you really believe that American Zionists censor the media in this country? That’s so ridiculous - Warren Buffett owns the Washington Post. Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and a bunch of other media.  I know that the Ochs and Schultzbergers owned the NY Times and the Times owns the Boston Globe. And I know, the Jewish Lobby buys politicians, almost as many as the Gun Lobby, Exxon, and the House of Saud - or are they Zionists too?  And do you also believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?

I am attempting to end this circular discussion with some comity. When I said that there are two peoples on that land, palspal, you turned it into an accusation that Israel is attempting to “alienate the Palestinian from his native soil,” and that is not my intent, nor do I believe it is the intention of the Israeli government. Just as Palestinians will have to live with the “knowledge” that the Jews have sovereignty over part of “Palestine,” the Jews will have to live with the “knowledge” that Palestinians have sovereignty of parts of “Eretz Yisrael.” Commonly, that is what is known as the “two-state solution,” and that is what we should be advocating instead of attempting to rehash all the mutual tribulations of the past century.

Yehuda - Might makes right? You would bring up this term knowing that might over right is why there is a ‘Jewish state’ in what had been 98% Arab land? That it is Israeli might - from Merkava and Abrams tanks, F16s, and all manner of arms up to and including nuclear weapons that enables Israel to penetrate and occupy what little remains of Palestine? All this against a virtually unarmed people?  What ‘might’ do you speak of - unless you are referring to the ceaseless fortitude of the Palestinians who will “not go gently into that *good* night.”
The indigenous people of the Americas and Australia were wiped out by the millions, perhaps tens of millions - by state-terror and state-sanctioned terror. And you would have them as noble savages for not violently resisting.  The truth is, they did fight back. The popular image of Native Americans until just the most recent decades is that of ‘injuns’ - injuns who scalp and rape and kill white people. Custer was a victim of Indian ‘terrorism.’ In Tasmania, the Europeans exterminated the native people. Completely, 100%. Are you enobling the Tasmanians here for not fighting back? The British slaughtered the people of India as necessary. When the few thousand British civil servants and their quisling Indian partners could no longer hold back the will of 400 million Indians - Britain left. To the extent that lesson needs to be drawn from Gandhi - its that we await one from Israel.  As for MLK - the alter egos of the Southern Christian Leadership Movement were SNCC, the Black Panthers, and the Nation of Islam. As Malcolm X said:  “By any means necessary.” Your memories of 1960s America are slight and uneven.
To your list of typical examples of entities that have used terror successfully to pursue their objectives we would have to add Israel. Forty-one years (or some would say, sixty-one, or even a century)of state terror, and Israel is now ever closer to its goal of Eretz Israel in all of mandate Palestine. And the Palestinians will be forced, like Native-Americans and Native-Australians into ever-tightening cells, and then disappeared into a miscellaneous Arab status, or as a final solution, disappeared into obscure history.

PS - If the House of Saud had a dime’s worth of influence in DC (or the US media)their momentous 2002 offer - still on the table - of full peace and recognition of Israel would be common knowledge. The Saudis have no power - and attempt to exert no influence - other than to collaborate with Washington on oil supplies and prices.

Jerry - Great tribulations must be addressed, not swept under the rug by the winning side. They cannot be dismissed as mutual any more than violence by American slaves could be equated with that of their slavemasters. Creating the landless, stateless Palestinian has always been the Israeli goal - as it is now. From the Yishuv days of Purity of Land and Labor when Palestinians were removed from their very farms to collect in the cities, to the forced exodus of Palestinians by the Zionists beginning in 1947 - and again in 1967, to the Orwellian ‘Present Absentee’ status Palestinians enjoyed, to the housing and water permitted neither granted nor denied, to the passports not recognized, to the transfer of the Jewish population onto Palestinian lands, to the 520 roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank, to the life denying wall around the WB, to the closure of WB&G;to ingress and egress of goods, money and people at the whim of the Israelis, What part of alienation of the Palestinians from their land do you not understand?  Fatah long ago implicitly and then explicitly recognized Israel in writing in three languages - it netted Palestinians not one dunam of land.
The two-state solution rules out neither the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to democratize Israel (that is, work toward making Israel a state of all its citizens), nor the right of refugees to legally return home to their country, since called Israel.

Israel currently consists of or occupies all of mandate Palestine. There is no reason the native natural people of this land has compromise further on this. So I fully understand why you would not want to rehash history that reveals how Israel came by its 100 to nothing shutout over the Palestinians.

Palspal, (I have a feeling that you are more a “loyal” Palestinian than a pal)You want to address great tribulations? Six million Jews died in the holocaust and there wasn’t anyone willing to take them in as refugees during World War II.  Over 50 million Indians became refugees on the Indian subcontinent, but only the Palestinian People have a special commission of the UN dedicated to their “refugee status.”

Great tribulations?  How is it that all the Arab states, among them some of the wealthiest nations in the world could not help their “brethren” if they are in such tribulation?

No! This is a group that killed civilians for years and introduced terrorism and airplane highjacking and even suicide bombers onto the world scene.  Israel would not have spent millions of dollars on a fence if some of the Palestinians didn’t come into Israel and kill its civilians.  And all of this terror was “justified” and aimed at getting world attention to their problem while greater tribulations occur with less or transient attention being paid?

What of the racist genocide currently being carried out by the Arabs in Darfur against native populations? Can you compare the problems of the Palestinians with the Darfurians? Look at what happened in Uganda under Idi Amin, who now lives in a comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia.

Then you actually come out against the two-state solution, which when taking into consideration the demographics of the situation means the end of Israel, you reveal the cards you are playing.

That is the only goal you wish to have, the end of Israel, the end of a Jewish state, as though they never lived there before these “native natural” Palestinians came on the scene.

If you want history, I’ll give you history, but then you’ll have more questions to answer than heretofore. Romans took away Jewish sovereignty by the sword from the native natural Jewish population, and when Rome adopted Christianity, the Christian Rome forbid Jews from living in the country though a few always always managed living there.  The Muslims took by force what the Romans had previously taken by force, but that did not make them any more native naturals than the Christians and the Romans, neither of which claim the territory that the Romans renamed as Palestine.

Many of us have been attempting to draw this situation to a close by establishing—for the first time in history—a Palestinian state where none has ever existed before.

But that is not good enough for you. The character of the Palestinians, still tribalistic rather than civil, and the Jews, who have established a civil society in Israel are disparate, and their living in one state at this time is not compatible. That is why a two-state solution is the best solution, and Israel should not have to give up its current character and become another Arab state where the Yahud can be tolerated as a dhimmi.

I think not.