Discuss: Fencing Israel

You guys and your pals should really get a life. Stop blaming Israel, the Jews and America for all your problems.  Look to the future, build schools, hospitals, factories.  Stop killing children.

Cohen is right. How do you justify suicide bombings? And note he says ‘Stop killing children.’ All children: Israeli children, Arab children.  We are children before we choose a religion or national identity. 

But this is an article about the ecological ramifications of Israel’s security fence, not who is right and who is wrong, or who is more right or who is more wrong.

Yehuda - The Arab and Muslim nations have a lot to answer for regarding their own governance.  An uncertain amount of it is internal, but much of their problem stems from the colonial arrangements made by the European powers and much stems from US policies that prop up dictators and arrange for international economic policies that severely curtail full participation in the global economy.  Thus most of the region has a growing population of young men with no political outlets and few economic prospects. Since other -isms have failed them in the last half century it is no wonder many are retreating into Islamism.

The biggest and most visible wound on that landscape is Israel.  Israel was founded by outsiders, and is to this very day supported and encouraged by outsiders so as to not come to terms with its confiscation of Arab land and the forced dispossession of its people.  Israel is given an annual stipend to continue its reckless behavior and is protected diplomatically from international sanctions. The first step on the Israeli road to recovery from this addiction is to admit they did what previous colonizers did - conquer a land inhabited by others.  Instead, Israel continues to behave in a manner that puts almost all the world at risk. Thus we are confronted with retrograde opinions on this site that STILL posit that there are no Palestinian people - even as they displace them in what remains of Palestine - and even as the Israeli government long ago was forced to recognize them as a people by political exigencies.

Yes, the problem is Israel. Israel cannot claim it wants peace when the evidence - nay, the proof - is that they want land. It cannot claim it seeks peace while (even as we speak) put more settlers in Palestine. It cannot claim it wants peace as it kills Palestinians wantonly. Palestinians do not kill Israelis, Israelis kill Palestinians - in Palestine.  Israel has killed about 4500 Palestinians since 09/2000 - in Palestine.  It has killed about 970 children over that span - in Palestine.  Of these, 145 have been infants and toddlers. The number of Palestinian children killed approximates the number of ALL Israelis killed, including soldiers(!) - and the bulk of Israeli deaths are in - you guessed it...Palestine.  So stop blaming the Palestinians for being in the way of your bulldozers. Stop bombing Palestinian schools, hospitals, factories - and stop killing children.  Start coming to terms with the fact that in the 21st century, a race-based Apartheid state cannot last. Israel cannot be a democracy and a Jewish state - not unless it kills them all.

Larry - As I made clear in my opening posts - ecological issues are mere window-dressing when one is in the act of eliminating another people.  Ecology and ethnic cleansing are antithetical.  And once again, I will remind you of the weight of numbers.  Israeli high school grads are trained to leave their country and attack others - that is why the murder by Israelis of Palestinian children (since 2000) is almost equal to the ENTIRE number of Israeli dead including soldiers.  Apparently, killing Arab kids doesn’t make it onto the radar screen. (You only have to count deaths that make the US media to realize this is so.)

And finally, there is right and wrong. The Palestinians were the people of that land - and to this day are an essentially unarmed population up against the most modern and practiced military in the world.  You have NO right to banish them from anywhere in Israel, never mind confine them to isolated cell blocks in what remains of Palestine.  If you insist on doing so, see that you do it with your own money and ‘fess up that you can do it because might makes right - and not because of some other specious ‘moral’ arguments.

Palspal and others of the opinion that Israel and the Jews are marring the landscape have a lot of nerve.  Where did the Palestinians come from, but from the Arabian peninsula in the 7th-8th century.  The Jews were there earlier and were forced out by Rome and the Byzantines.  In fact, the Arabs who came into “Palestine” recognized the patrimony of the Jews to the land by letting them come and resettle, and although the Romans and Byzantines were never 100 percent successful, Jewish resettlement in Jerusalem began with the Arab conquest.

Ahistorical claims turn black with rot as soon as they’re uttered, so let us try to stay with the facts, and hope the two peoples find a way of sharing the land. The fence is a reaction to violence, and when that violence stops this fence will stop existing.

No, Jerry, the Palestinians were in Palestine thousands of years before the Hebrew goatherders arrived, they were there when the Jews left (and there is no evidence they were driven out of anywhere but Jerusalem - if that), and they were there when the Europeans shipped in early in the 20th century. So the Palestinians are the native natural people of that land - and the genetic record confirms the archeological record.
The Palestinians let the Jews settle in Palestine basically because they (unlike Israeli Jews) have a live and let live culture. But the Jews did not come in peace, they came to take the land - and are on the verge of expropriating the final 22% even as I type this. The proof is in the pudding, that would be the settlers.  The Wall was put up to pen Palestinians in - but it does not keep Israelis out.  Israeli children are raised to leave their country and kill the children of others.  There can be no peace, not real peace, until Israel exists no more and is replaced by a secular democratic state of all who live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Suicide bombing, live and let live, am I missing something?

Yes, Yehuda - you are missing just about everything.  You are missing the Israeli:Palestine kill ratio which is historically somewhere between 4:1 and 7:1.  You are missing that the Palestinians are killed in what remains of Palestine and the Israelis are largely killed in… Palestine. You are missing that Israel attacked and occupied the WB&G;in 67 and for a quarter-century the opposition to the occupation was overwhelmingly non-violent. During that period, Israel began its population transfers, putting Jews in and making life extremely difficult for non-Jews by dividing and sub-dividing the physical spaces in which they were allowed to freely move in.  When Palestinians objected, their bones were broken, when they persisted, they were killed.  By the late 80s, the Palestinians stepped up their resistance to the collective punishments, the house arrests, the long term curfews, the mass round-ups, the village-league farces, the torture at the Russian Compound and elsewhere, the imprisonment of children, the denial of housing permits (as if Palestinians need apply to Jews in order to live in their own country), the denial of water permits (while Jewish kids swam in subsidized pools).  Should I go on about what’s missing from your picture?  What’s missing is that Israel has no legitimate business in what remains of Palestine.  Take your wall and settlers and go home.  The world gifted you with a state - be satisfied with it.  And stop raising your kids to leave their country and kill - 972 children since 11/00 - or almost the same number as ALL Israelis killed in that period.  That’s what you are missing.