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Gaza Debate Goes Virtual
Ian Lamont writes "The war of words over the conflict in Gaza has moved from the real world to the Internet. Besides a furious stream of mini-debates on Twitter between supporters of and critics of Israel's military actions, there have also been demonstrations in Second Life at an Israel-themed sim and a collection of Facebook applications, including 'QassamCount' and 'Stop Israel's war crimes in Gaza.' Another project — 'mapping the war in Gaza' — was launched by Al Jazeera and takes user-submitted reports, tweets, and Microsoft Virtual Earth to track the number of casualties and other developments."
In addition to this, the series of website defacements we discussed a few days ago has now extended to sites controlled by NATO and the US Army.
It sounds like having a "discussion" about this conflict is a great way to generate traffic to ones website.
Just to add some supporting information to illustrate their point, some might be surprised to know that US soldiers are currently stationed in Egypt where they patrol that country's border with Gaza, making sure neither people nor food supplies can pass.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Switzerland is free to trade with it's neighbors and make arrangements for open (or closed) borders between them as it sees fit. Is Gaza in the same position?
Yes, Yes it would kill them. Probably not as bad as the gazans but letting gazans escape into Egypt without israels permission (which it wont give). Could very well jeopardize Egypts safety. Israel has given them very stern warnings about this, and no body wants to be israels next target. Cowardly? Sure. But they are doing it so the barrel doesnt swing south west.
Explain to me how this works, please? Swiss, being 100% surrounded by other countries, is occupied by them? or did I miss some leap of logic?
If one of Switzerland's neighbours blocked off all its borders, including those of its other neighbours, and periodically bombed and invaded it, that would be a much better comparison.
Occupation means presence at the territory in question.
No, it doesn't. The question of whether the Gaza Strip is occupied territory from a legal perspective looks interesting, but I think there's a good argument that it is.
The so called occupation hamas keeps on about is the occupation of so called palestinian territories pre-1947 - virtually all of the israeli state. That is why their charter still denies israel's right to exist. "So called", BTW, because back then there was no political entity correlating to the current palestinians.
Errm... that region had been called Palestine for about two millenia. To put things in perspective, that's longer than Islam has existed. (I think that's also rather longer than it was called Israel for, but it's hard to be sure.)
There was no political entity corresponding to the current Palestinians, yes - mainly because it's only recently that there have been countries in that part of the world. It was, however, a distinct region with varying degrees of autonomy.
The uncomfortable fact remains that the current Palestinians were indeed living in Palestine (the original definition of it), and did have their land and their homes taken from them to form the Jewish state of Israel. (There are people still alive who can remember this, even with the atrocious healthcare and life expectancy in the Palestinian territories.) They were about as happy with it as could be expected - which is to say, very angry. I think you'd get the same reaction in any Western country.
You can talk about rights all you want, but the bottom line is that nations hold territory through force or the threat of it, until they've been there long enough to be considered historically justified.
The creation of Israel wasn't about giving it back to some original inhabitants. It was about the presence of Jews in Palestine agitating for a homeland and pointing to the Holocaust as a reason they needed one, at a time when almost every ethnic group in the area was agitating for the same, and the people in charge generally agreed that everyone should have a homeland. At the time, the British were controlling what used to be the Ottoman Empire, and there was a variety of efforts to negotiate a partition of Palestine that would give both the Palestinians and Jews a homeland.
The history of those negotiations is long and tortured, and involves bad acts by all around: Zionists at the time were what we call terrorists today; Arab nations were deliberately obstructionist, believing they could prevent any land being given to the Jews who were already there, and also believing that they could destroy any Jewish partition if it happened.
It's one of the many ironies of Palestine that if the Arabs had accepted any of several partitions that were acceptable to the Zionists, they would have the majority of Palestine under clear control.
Regardless, you have an area controlled by the Ottoman Empire for centuries, followed by the British, and an attempt to settle partitions that would be agreeable to everyone who was right there. Negotiations failed, neighboring Arab countries invaded, and got their asses kicked. Repeat in 1967 and 1972. Each time, Israel took territory from the attackers (the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan). The Palestinians were run over by everyone.
So it's a huge shitpile of wrong, and the Palestinians are on the bottom of that pile, but talk of Israel's right to exist is a non-starter in teasing it out and finding a peaceful solution, mostly because every nation is legitimated in the same way as Israel: force and history. Everyone involved has dirty hands, and legitimate grievances.
Peace in Northern Ireland was achieved by starting from the point of trying to placate each side's core concerns, not trying to clear up a backlog of injustices.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
In the end, the British and UN proposed a two-state solution, which was accepted by most of the Jewish population (but notably not the Jewish terrorist organisations). However, the Arab nations weren't happy, since it involved kicking out the current Arab residents of the areas making up the proposed Jewish nation (i.e. the majority of the residents of said areas) - they wanted a one-state solution. The Jewish leaders declared independence prematurely, the surrounding nations invaded "to protect the Arab population", and in the end the Zionists won (and carried out a lot of ethnic cleansing in the process). Then they seized the land of Arabs who'd left or been forced out, without compensation, and handed it to Jews.
Also, you need some historical perspective:
Israel doesn't try to exclude non Jews the way Muslim nations do to non-Muslims.
Muslim nations didn't, in general, exclude Jews up until the founding of Israel. You additionally neglected to mention that Jews have a special right to citizenship that other people don't, and that a lot of the housing is Jewish-only. (Oh, and there's lots of racism, too.)
When "Zionists" were legally migrating back to their old homeland and buying up land from the Ottoman Empire, it was considered worthless wasteland until they developed it into garden
Not really. Firstly, people had been living there for millenia - it wasn't great compared to what the Jewish immigrants were used to, but it was hardly worthless wasteland. Secondly, converting arid land into something close to garden isn't hard - you just need some infrastructure and loads of water. A lot of said water was (and is) obtained from taking far more than their fair share of common rivers and water supplies - basically, they stole it. Despite this, and strict regulation of water use, they still ended up with unsustainable usage - and that's going to catch up with them in the future.
Israel responded by throwing out anyone inside its borders which seemed to be stabbing them in the back.
This isn't quite true. The Arab population living in "refugee camps" were generally not sent there by the Israeli, quite the contrary, in the lead-up to the 1948 war Golda Meir traveled all over trying to stop the Arabs from leaving. The Arab population (Palestinians as they call themselves today) fled the area because they were told to do so by the Arab military command leading up to the 1948 war. A handful were expelled from two cities between the Jewish area and Jerusalem to secure the transport of aid to the embattled Jewish population inside Jerusalem.
The refugee problem was created by the Arabs. It has consciously and cynically been maintained by most of the Arab countries ever since. The reason they do it is simple. With a population angry over the "Palestinian issue" nobody notices that a huge number of these states are run by corrupt, nasty megalomaniacs who only exploit their population for their own gain.
The reality is that if the Palestinian problem was ever solved with peace the regimes of the middle east would tumble like dominoes as people realized that their own leaders are the source of their misery, not Israel. The leaders of these regimes obviously don't want that, and the easiest way to prevent it is to make absolutely sure that the refugees from 1948 and their descendants live in poverty and misery.
The main benefactor of a peace with the Palestinians would be Israel, and they desire nothing else. Sadly the Palestinian leaders have never wanted peace and every peace agreement they have ever signed they have subsequently abandoned, some quite immediately.