Israelis Sue Government For Laser Cannons

An anonymous reader writes "Residents of a southern Israeli town want a real-life laser cannon to protect them against Palestinian rocket attacks. And they're suing the national government, for failing to provide the ray gun defense. The U.S.-Israeli Tactical High Energy Laser project was widely considered to be the most successful energy weapon ever built. But the toxic chemicals needed to generate THEL's megawatts of power made the thing a logistical nightmare. It was scrapped. Now, the residents of Sderot want it back. And they're taking Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to court to make it happen."

Comments

Re:Please stay on topic

[MrSteveSD]

I should imagine that the fact that a larger town like Ashkelon has also been hit by rockets might result in this Laser project being revived. It should be noted that up until 1948 Ashkelon used to be called al-Majdal and was home to some 10,000 Arabs. Their homes were taken and they were ethnically cleansed and moved to Gaza. A few years later the name al-Majdal was also erased and it was renamed Ashkelon. Don't expect the news reports to tell you any of this stuff though.

To pre-empt the comments that will follow, it's not relevant to point out Israeli action in Gaza and get into a debate over whether it's justified or not - this topic is about residents of Sderot taking completely non-violent, legal action, over repeated aggressive and violent attacks from a neighbouring region.

Plenty of Palestinians think that non-violent methods such as protests are the best way forward as well. The problem is they often get beaten up or shot either with real or plastic bullets. In the recent crisis the IDF shot dead an unarmed 13 year old boy at a protest. A while back I watched a video of the IDF spokeswoman trying to explain why they had fired tank shells at unarmed protesters. She said they were just firing near to them to "warn them". Tanks shells for crowd control?

It's good that the people of Sderot can use legal action. If they were Palestinians they would have far less options and that anger would find other more bloody ways of expressing itself. Indeed, if you go back to the 40s in Israel, you will find exactly that situation.

Re:Sweet!

[oceaniv]

"The Palestinians try and kill as many babies, women, children and non-combatant civilians as possible. When it happens, they celebrate, just as they did on 9/11 and just as they did last week." I'll just pretend you sound completely rational and not like a bigoted racist who is trying to dehumanize another severely oppressed group... say what? they're intentionally killing "babies"... wont' somebody save the children? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iman_al-Hams Iman Darweesh Al Hams was a 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops in a "no man's" zone near the Philadelphi Route on 5 October 2004 in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Hit by more than a dozen bullets, her death was one of series of incidents cited by human rights groups as illustrative of a "culture of impunity" among the Israel Defense Forces.[2] It is also one of the few instances, among the hundreds of cases in which Palestinian children and teenagers have been killed by army fire, in which the army actually launched an investigation.[3] Ultimately however, no one was held responsible for her death. There was no explanation from the officer or the court as to how al-Hams came to have 17 bullet wounds to her arms, legs, torso and face.

Re:Please stay on topic

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The Palestinians have never wanted peace with Israel as evidenced by Arafat's rejection of Ehud Barak's offer of land for Palestinian statehood in 2000 and then no Palestinian counteroffer. There were two main reasons Arafat rejected Barak's offer in 2000 - it did not include the right of return of palestinians to their original land or at least a 1-to-1 swap for equivalent land and it divided the so-called "palestinian state" into 4 discontiguous islands, surrounded by, and thus controlled by israel. This is basic current events Zuke, why don't you know it?

As for a counter-offer? The counter-offer was on the table and already agreed to by israel over a decade earlier - UN resolutions 242 and 338 which both israel and palestine accepted in 1991 and reaffirmed at Oslo in 1993.

To say that palestinians have "never wanted peace" when they had agreed to a plan a decade earlier is completely facetious. Now, a right-winger will respond that the palestinians didn't agree to oslo in good faith. A left-winger will respond that israel didn't agree to oslo in good faith either. My opinion is that each side let themselves be over-come by their own radical elements - bombers on the palestinian side and militant settlers on the israeli side.

Clearly there is plenty of opportunity for peace. But as long as opinions like yours are prevalent, they become a self-fullfilling prophecy.

Re:Please stay on topic

[Zemran]

Ehud Barak's offer of land for Palestinian statehood in 2000

The land offer was a very clever con trick. There was no way that it could have been accepted because it was so stupid. The trouble is that the general public do not read it, they just want sound bites. They read that 95% of the land was offered back to the Muslims and that sounds good but the 5% was the settlements and the roads to those settlements. The roads being the main problem as that means that even though you can see your neighbours house or the local shop, it may be across the road and if you step on to that road you are liable to be shot. So you have to travel many miles up to the settlement, go around the settlement and travel back down the other side of the road just to visit your neighbour or shop. The problem of the settlements is not just the land they are on, it is also the roads that the Muslims are not allowed to step on. Give the Muslims the roads?

Arafat did counteroffer, he wanted the settlements to go but that was not on offer, therefore the roads were still no go areas.