Comments by dansome1
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Posted on January 23 at 12:50 a.m.
These are but a few of the numerous factual errors and misinterpretations in these letters:
1. Sometimes violence is justified for self-preservation. In this case, Israel was fully justified, having exhausted other avenues to stop the rocket attacks on its civilians.
2. Follow the link to the BBC news story and you find that Mr. Steele both misquoted and incorrectly ascribed the 'shoah' quote to Israel's Prime Minister Olmert. According to the BBC, deputy Defense Minister Vilnai was in fact was trying to dissuade the Palestinians from continuing to fire rockets (prior to the Gaza invasion), noting that if they continue to do so they risk 'a big disaster' (the BBC's correct interpretation of the Hebrew word 'shoah', as opposed to 'the Shoah' - the Holocaust. Think 'a white house' vs. 'the White House'.).
3. Mr. McCullough sees no justification in using an air force against Gazan terrorist targets. By the same logic, the US military should go after al-Qaeda with knives and bare hands, not guns and jets... It's not about a fair fight in the schoolyard, it's about life and death. Sadly, Hamas, the elected representatives of the Palestinians, declared in both word and deed that they choose for their people death (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArJbn-lUC...). Israel chooses life, and so, after trying indirect diplomacy, economic sanctions and limited military operations, was left with the last resort - a full scale operation to eliminate Hamas' weapons and personnel.
4. For thirty years Israel was happy to provide Arabs with jobs while enjoying their inexpensive labor - a win-win situation, just like Mexicans in Santa Barbara, or Phillippinos in Saudi Arabia. Israel turned to other sources of labor when the Palestinian suicide bombers struck, for obvious reasons.
5. Israel's military occupation of Gaza, which ended in 2005, was by no means illegal - it was accepted internationally as the result of causus belli on the part of the previous occupier of Gaza – Egypt.
6. The widely reported comments of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA, indicate that it was Hamas - not Israel - who rejected the Palestinian overture (by Abbas) to restore the truce in mid-December.
7. The Palestinian rockets were not a response to Israel's closure of its borders with Gaza, having begun years before the closures which themselves were a response first to suicide bombers entering Israel from Gaza, and then to attacks by Hamas militants on the border crossings. Yes, the Palestinians attacked their own lifeline. The truth is, it was Hamas who succeeded in 'starving the Palestinians into submission' and total dependence, profiting from the closures both monetarily and politically – by controlling the black market for food and supplies, and discrediting its arch rival Fatah, who prior to 2006 retained nominal control of Gaza.
These are just a few examples with which the letters (and response) are riddled.
Dan Some, Santa Barbara
Posted on November 21 at 12:38 a.m.
Seems I have to take issue with various comments made throughout....
1. It's somewhat ambiguous, but my reading of getreal's post tells me it does not refer to Israel but rather to Hizbullah: "spend my days teaching children or doing volunteer work and spend my nights robbing banks or mugging people on the street" essentially matches David Lewis's report on Hizbullah.
2. Info's posts, though far from the sick, sick
language of Adonis_Tate or send2shepherd, still regurgitate some truthless and incendiary twists of language: "... I do not see (thankfully) Armenians victimizing others, as Israelis do to Palestinians, because Armenians were victimized in the past." This repeats an amazing contention previously written in the Independent by Jesse Aizenstat (the name behind Info?), that somehow Israel oppresses Palestinians because Jews were victims of past oppression. Pretty ridiculous. The simple fact is, Israel's treatment of Palestinians is a direct response to actions by Palestinians. For many years after Israel occupied the West Bank, relations between the majority of Jewish Israelis and the majority of Palestinian Arabs were just fine. Israel provided running water, electricity, phone service, health and social services, college campuses and jobs to Palestinians. Their situation was far better than it was under Jordanian rule. Inevitably things soured, with one of the primary causes being the vicious circle of terror attacks perpetrated by militant Palestinian factions (Fatah, PFLP, etc.), and Israel's defensive reprisals (and there were certainly other factors, including mistakes by Israel, typical of any occupation). To ascribe this unfortunate, but logical, progression to some kind of revenge for centuries of victimization at the hands of the world, is not only a far-fetched hypothesis but one that seems to deliberately and falsely present Jews and the people of Israeli as morally warped, undeserving of the right to basic self defense.
3. Info's contention that Israel is responsible for the brainwashing of Palestinian children to become suicide bombers is as misinformed as the contention that Al Qaeda perpetrated 9/11 because of America's colonialization of the Muslim world. Suicide bombing of civilians is unique (and ubiquitous) to radical fundamentalist Islam throughout the world, and is part of the culture of death that it employs to obtain total mind control over its minions. Non-fundamentalist Palestinians such as Fatah, full participants in the resistance movement, suffer the same retributions but do not teach their children to become suicide bombers. Even while suffering the devastation of daily suicide attacks by Palestinians, Israel did not teach its children hatred or revenge, and the same is true of any civilized society.
4. Last comment for Peter Melnick: I'm surprised that you're surprised...
Dan Some
Posted on August 16 at 11:28 p.m.
Correction - just redid the math without rounding off - Israeli Arabs make up 15% of the adult population. But they don't all vote for Arabs - the majority actually vote for 'Jewish' parties, which have some Arab representatives. The Arab parties tend to be too extreme for most of the Israeli Arab populace. And they have the freedom to vote however they like.
Posted on August 16 at 10 p.m.
1. Israeli Arabs make up 20% of the total population of Israeli citizens, but only 10% of the adult population. That accounts pretty squarely for their representation in the Knesset.
2. The Arabs in the West Bank are citizens of **Jordan**, as a result of Jordan taking over the West Bank in 1948 and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. Egypt did the same in Gaza, but did not extend citizenship, leaving the poor Palestinians in Gaza stateless.
3. These days, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza vote for **members of their own parliament and their own government**. First they elected Arafat and his gang, then tossed them out because of corruption and elected everyone's favorite political party, Hamas. Pretty audacious to suggest that they vote in their own elections and Israel's, too.
- Dan Some
Posted on August 14 at 10:02 p.m.
HCW:
Either you are not very skilled at critical reading, or deliberately choose to twist my words. I hope it is the former. But first, pardon me for not stating it clearly: my name is Dan Some, just like my username. No secrets there.
Jesse Aizenstat made many useful points. However, he had nothing to say about labeling the Palestinian acts solely as terror and the Israeli as non-terror, though you ascribe this to him - perhaps wishful thinking on your part.
I certainly did not state or imply that individual Palestinians may not struggle non-violently; I linked the wholesale violence quite clearly to Arafat and Hamas/Jihad. These leaders, unfortunately, have been rather successful in turning the average Palestinian away from peaceful means. In all recent polls, the majority of Palestinians support violence including suicide bombing as the only means of obtaining their goals. Those who advocate non-violent means, sadly, must fear for their lives from their own people. For example, Sari Nusseiba and Hanan Ashrawi, prominent moderate Palestinian leaders before the PLO arrived, were basically threatened into silence by the Fatah. That’s real enforcement, not Jesse’s imagined dark forces.
I have no illusions about personal bias influencing all discussion. But, while Aizenstat's article promotes honest brokerage, he himself repeats in various instances the kind of hate-filled, patently false and unsubstantiable, and often ridiculous, claims that are designed to demonize Israel and break down honest dialog.
Another dishonest aspect of the article was the claim that supports of Palestine are silenced in America; this was obviously false as evident by his own publication, and clearly a setup for the critical replies that arrived so he could dutifully announce his own martyrdom.
Jesse implies his own expertise based on his allusions to a month spent in the West Bank. What he saw was undoubtedly real, but lacking context. His generalizations of isolated incidents to "their unspoken doctrine of global dilution of the Palestinian people and culture" is one of the typical baseless Arab propaganda pieces he threw in; it sounds like a quote straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is not about his personal view of things, but hate-mongering, which is rather disappointing in view of much of the rest of the article.
You appear disapproving of my considering myself something of an expert. Well, 20 years spent as an adult in the place does give you more than an inkling of what's going on.
Finally, I find it rather telling that those supporters of Israel besides myself who object to the propaganda in Aizenstat's and HCW's writings, are both card-carrying, left-leaning dove peaceniks who support dialog between Israel and the Palestinians. Those who support the Palestinians moderates (rather than blindly oppose Israel), would be better served by sticking to facts and rational arguments.
- Dan Some
Posted on August 13 at 9:33 p.m.
Joe Cain in one breath calls for a stop to blindly sanitizing one side (Israel) while demonizing the other (Palestine), and in the next breath for studying Jesse Aizenstat's article which... blindly sanitizes one side (Palestine) while demonizing the other (Israel). Not particularly helpful, if you ask me.
Oh, and Joe, I could show you a few streets in Israel which are not privileged to be insulated from the Palestinians, and have a bunch of bomb craters in them. I could show you a few Israeli civilians who were shot up, suicide bombed, or otherwise attacked.
There's a war going on there, often simmering on a low fire, sometimes flaring up. War is not a very nice circumstance to be in. You always have to watch your back. If you feel your life or that of your loved ones is threatened, you take the necessary safeguards. Just ask the boys and girls in Iraq.
The Middle East is not a very nice neighborhood. If you would like to know what a paradise it would be without Israel, travel Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Iran, and the rest. There you will learn a new lesson on what life is like for the less privileged, or even for the equally privileged - equally privileged to kill each other, to rot forever in a dissenter's prison cell. The Palestinians can be grateful that Israel provides the Red Cross access to POW's / incarcerated terrorists - unfortunately, Israelis captured by Hamas/Hizbullah etc. are not afforded the same.
As an Israeli, I pity very much the average Palestinian, who is caught between a rock and a hard place. The Arab countries and the Palestinian leadership have shafted them, preventing any peaceful resolution and keeping generations of refugees, while Israel has stood firm in refusing to curl up and die. Said leaders have also inculcated their people with enough hate and national/religious extremism that things won't get better soon.
Unpleasant as the facts of life may be, until the Palestinians are ready for peace, Israel will stand strong in defending the lives of its citizens. - Dan Some
Posted on August 3 at 12:46 a.m.
In 'Enforced Silence', Jesse Aizenstat expresses an admirable desire for improving the lot of a downtrodden people. Unfortunately, the naive hype widely misses its mark. It is understandable how, leaving a cushy American home for the stark reality of a refugee camp, he was shocked into seeing the situation as 'a blatant atrocity to the human experience'. Perhaps if he were exposed to, say, the indescribable inhumanity of the concentration camps that his ancestors suffered, or the more recent hells of Darfur and some other choice locales around the world, his description of a West Bank Palestinian refugee camp - where residents live by choice, so they can get a UN handout - would be toned down.
If he knew what true apartheid was, he might be more reluctant to throw the term around regarding a political reality which is quite unrelated to the former racial oppression in South Africa. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is political, not racial. Those Palestinian Arabs who live within the 1949 armistice lines are full citizens of Israel, with access to full political representation, whereas those residents of what is destined to be an independent Palestinian state are, of course, not Israeli citizens. They were offered, and rejected, full sovereignty in 1948 and again in 2000. Like Hamas' current, clearly stated policy, Arafat and all previous Palestinian representatives were not willing to settle for anything less than wiping Israel off the map. Comparing this to apartheid is an affront to all those black South Africans who suffered and struggled non-violently for their freedom. If the Palestinians had acted anywhere near as nobly as the blacks in South Africa, there would not have been a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians today.
I find it ironic that the author accuses America of "enforced silence... regarding the Israel/Palestine calamity", when any college student can get his opinion on the matter published (as long as it supports the Palestinians and accuses Israel of apartheid and other evils). Even more amusing is the implication that he, having spent an entire month in the West Bank, is now an expert on 'the situation on the ground'. If he had bothered to spend his time in Israel with open eyes and ears rather than a heart full of preconceptions, he would not have come up with the absurd contention that Israelis are ‘transformed by a thirst for revenge’. The Israeli people have a thirst for peace and a normal existence free of the threat of war and terror, but not at the cost of committing political or physical suicide. It was not, as Aizenstat claimed, ‘history’ that taught the Israeli government to ‘take no chances’ – it was the Palestinian militants, and the Arab regimes that played the Palestinians for pawns.
Aizenstat calls for the U.S. to ‘support honest negotiations’. He would do well to take his own advice, and support honest dialog rather then the trumped-up, vile hype which extremism feeds on.
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Previous Month
Posted on January 25 at 10:26 a.m.
Some food for thought, for all those liberals who love to hate Israel:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt...
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1030...
EastBeach: If you seek objective, in-depth information about Israel/Palestine, the best places to look are Haaretz and Jerusalem Post - the news, not necessarily the opinions (of which the mix will never satisfy anyone's taste, left, right, Arab or Israeli). They won't have as much Palestinian perspective as you might like (Haaretz will have more).
And if you want something a little more upbeat than the standard news, check out israel21c.org which has all kinds of stories on Israeli-Palestinian partnerships.
On Two Upset About Gaza