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.

Comments

Second life sim

[Anonymous Coward]

there have also been demonstrations in Second Life at an Israel-themed sim

...and it's only a matter of time until the virtual Islamic trolls fire virtual rockets and bomb their virtual busses while cowardly hiding amongst virtual women and children.

Re:Second life sim

[alcmaeon]

yeah, and the virtual Jews can bewail their virtual victimhood while carpet bombing virtual UN safe houses and virtual civilian populations with virtual US supplied advanced weapons.

Re:Second life sim

[h4rm0ny]

You got to admit though, it's a lot easier to play the victim when you're starving, walled into a tiny area and can only defend themselves with scraps of old military hardware and bits of rubble against a rich country armed with the latest in US air power that assassinates their democratically elected leaders.

Just saying, you know? ;)

Re:Second life sim

[h4rm0ny]

Israel left Gaza three and a half years ago. Other than providing them with fuel, water, and electricity (for FREE) Israel has had no involvement with Gaza, other than retaliating for rocket strikes. Until two weeks ago, that retaliation was usually limited to simply withholding the free fuel, water, and electricity.

If this is so, then why has the Israeli military deliberately targeted Gaza's power infrastructure, blowing up local power stations and stopping aid packages providing food and medicine? You make it sound as though Israel generously supports a destitute population, but in fact, they artificially limit how many supplies are allowed in, US soldiers are stationed in Egypt to keep its border with Gaza sealed after an incident a couple of years ago where local people opened it and Palestinians nipped across to buy groceries, fuel, concrete mix (believe it or not), etc. before returning. Their retaliation was not "simply withholding free fuel, water and electricity" but also food and preventing the importing of non-free supplies, even free aid from other countries, with the use of force.

"Furious stream of mini-debates on Twitter"?

[Scareduck]

What, how does this go? Infidel! Terrorist! Am not. Are so! Twitter: insanely useless or just a huge waste of time?

Re:"Furious stream of mini-debates on Twitter"?

[DriedClexler]

In a submission I made that didn't get accepted, I linked the New York Times article on Israel's use of Twitter to give their side (israelconsulate page). Favorite response?

israelconsulate: we R pro nego[tiation]. crntly tlks r held w the PA + tlks on the 2 state soln. we talk only w/ ppl who accept R rt 2 live."

I'd like to see that stats on traffic.

[Samschnooks]

It sounds like having a "discussion" about this conflict is a great way to generate traffic to ones website.

Re:I'd like to see that stats on traffic.

[Eli Gottlieb]

Why do you think it's come up for a third time on Slashdot?

Re:I'd like to see that stats on traffic.

[timeOday]

Maybe we should go start our own website for stuff nobody cares about or wants to discuss.

correction

[alcmaeon]

I should have said "virtual Zionists" instead of "virtual Jews" since a lot of Jews, including Israeli ones, have courageously condemned Israel's actions.

Israel, the Jewish state, wants to conflate itself with all Jews, and obfuscate the reality, but the fact is, it doesn't speak for all Jews anymore than Saudi Arabia speaks for all Muslims.

Re:correction

[h4rm0ny]

Yep - you definitely should have, but you more than make up for it by attempting to counter the Israeli government's attempts to portray Jewish = Supporter of Israeli Government. To provide a little balance, there are some pretty nasty people who pretend that they represent the Arab people when they clearly are some its worst enemies (Egyptian rulership, I'm looking at you). Would it kill the Egyptians to open the Gaza gate and let some aid and supplies through? Well no, it wouldn't, but it might cost them some favours from the US government.

Re:correction

[burris]

Would it kill the Egyptians to open the Gaza gate and let some aid and supplies through? Well no, it wouldn't, but it might cost them some favours from the US government.

As Egypt has consistently pointed out, Gaza is occupied by Israel so it's up to Israel whether the border is opened. Ignoring Israel would jeopardize the peace they have found with them.

Re:correction

[h4rm0ny]

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.

Re:correction

[burris]

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?

Re:correction

[Idiomatick]

Pst. It isn't their old homeland. Even if you read the bible god expelled the jews from the area. They have never owned or run any land in the area, they lived in the region sure. Oh and the orriginal Zionists were terrorists that carved a chunk out of muslim land for themself. After the holocaust nobody could politically say anything bad about the jewish people. And they were pitied so they were given land which had been promised to return to muslims. The borders were more than shaky since its inception and have since that date ever increased in israels favour thanks to them being significantly richer than their neighbors. Oh and as for expulsion, arabs have been expelled from israel more than a few times, the arabic population in israel is much much smaller than it was in the 80s obviously.

Re:correction

[makomk]

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.

Re:correction

[makomk]

The way the early Jewish settlers founded Israel was nowhere near as rosy as you claim. Basically, Palestine underwent mass immigration of Jews, starting with the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe, and hugely changing the population make-up. This had the same ugly results as such immigration usually does - paranoia, violence, murder, the usual. The Jewish population responded with more violence and terrorism. Britain tried limiting immigration to keep a lid on the situation, but were attacked by Jewish terrorists and driven out.

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.

Re:correction

[terjeber]

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.

Well this should be straigtforward...

[feepness]

Since my side is completely blameless and your side is the obvious aggressor.

No actually it isn't

[GuloGulo]

"You got to admit though, it's a lot easier to play the victim when you're starving, walled into a tiny area and can only defend themselves with scraps of old military hardware and bits of rubble against a rich country armed with the latest in US air power that assassinates their democratically elected leaders."

What are they "defending themselves" from? Oh right, retaliation from their rocket attacks.

It's a lot harder to play the victim when you chose the path of violence in the first place.

Imagine how this conflict would go if the Palestinian's weren't so cowardly and instead used non-violent protests. You know, like Gandhi.

Nah, that kind of stuff never works.

 

Re:No actually it isn't

[burris]

So the occupation, colonization, and annexation aren't violent? There's a reason why colonizing land you occupy is forbidden by the 4th Geneva convention, it's because it amounts to ethnic cleansing.

Re:No actually it isn't

[value_added]

There's a reason why colonizing land you occupy is forbidden by the 4th Geneva convention, it's because it amounts to ethnic cleansing.

Ethnic cleansing is only one of three choices, and the least attractive. The other two are establishing a single state (and giving the Palestinians the right to vote), and apartheid (or, if your prefer gentler language, establishing permanent ghettos).

The first won't happen because the Israelis know full well that in a democracy, the majority Palestians would vote them all out of power. That leaves the second, which is just as good given that the settlement activity accelerating since the end of 1967 war has already created de facto ghettos. The irony with the ghetto strategy, of course, is that the Palestinians' economic condition is nearly the same as black Africa, and their daily hardships are not unlike those suffered by South Africans once upon a time not too long ago. For those who don't remember, the South African "terrorists" eventually took power.

Israel lost the moral high ground long ago, so Israel is there for the Israelis to lose. That would happen sooner than later if the US would get out of the way, but given the decades-long monotony of public discourse on the subject ("Israel can do no wrong"), it's doubtful that the impetus for change will come from these shores.

I have THE solution

[Anonymous Coward]

No really. The definitive solution : me move all palestinian to say, the south pole. We move all Israelien to the north Pole. We let them cool down there. Then while everybody is gone, we double check no living being are left in the "holy" shitty land. Then we put atom bomb at regular space, to transform the whole shebang in a giant parking lot. Once this is done, we SALT the earth. In depth. Once this is done, we put all kind of traps, mine, bomb, automated gun sentries. Anybody trying to go back on their shitty holy land get blasted to smithern. Problem solved.

Re:One state solution

[burris]

Why is evacuation of Israeli colonies in the West Bank unrealistic? Israel evacuated their colonies in Gaza, they can do it in the West Bank. The settlements would be good partial reparation to the Palestinians. It's not like Israel and the colonists didn't know that what they were doing was illegal and wrong.

Otherwise, I'm right with you on the one state solution. Don't forget a constitution that's the supreme law of the land (along with treaties) that guarantees equal rights for all persons.

Israel's right to exist?

[ZekoMal]

Why does it have a right to exist? I understand perfectly well that the good ol' Bible tells us Israel ought exist, but it didn't exist for a while because everyone sacked the place and took it as their own. We didn't bring back Rome Israel or Persia Israel; we brought back the first Israel, for the 'league of nations' opted to do it. After the first World War. Now, I'm not that good with math...but from the end of the reign of a Judaism country to World War 1....gonna guess other people lived there.

To give you a faaaaint idea of what I'm hinting at. Imagine if the US wasn't in the UN, and the UN decided that Native Americans needed their land back. So, they gave them the entire east coast of the US, to be their land. They were given basically whatever they wanted, and they began to push the US citizens gradually to the west, claiming various areas that are more desirable than others (IE, they take Yellowstone national park, leave us Death valley). They are far richer than the US citizens, and have far more support (although Canada and Mexico support the US citizens, lets just say the UN has marked them as third world terrorists). So, let's say that the US citizens scrap together some money, and a small group that want to win back their land, bomb the native Americans. The retaliation? The natives start bombing the civilians that didn't have a thing to do with it. They keep bombing, despite the UN telling them to stop.

Seems like a stretch.

Of course, I don't see why Israel was reinstated. People lived there after the Israelites got wiped out, and then the rest of the world told the Palestinians (arguably not the same exact people who did this), were told to shove over.

I'll probably get modded troll though...it's very mean and uncool to be pro-Palestine civilians. Nope, if you think Israel is wrong, you are a pro-terrorist.

Re:Israel's right to exist?

[jjohnson]

You're massively underinformed about the history of that specific region and the formation of Israel. Rather than type it up here, I'll refer you to Wikipedia for the (very contentious) history of Palestine, which gives a reasonably balanced view.

I'll address your analogy, though: Israel's right to exist is inherent in the same right to exist that most nations have. They have successfully defended their territory in three wars (and it's in those wars that were launched against them that they expanded their territory). It's not noble, it's not morally right (or wrong), it's just how most nations come into existence and stay there. The U.S. was founded by settlers who moved in on the natives, took over their land, and used force to marginalize them on reserves. If, by your argument, you're saying that Israel has no "right to exist", then neither does the U.S.

As a general matter of history, the early 20th century was dominated by the idea that every distinct people should have a homeland. Much of the border drawing following WWI was done with that in mind, and Zionism is only the most successful of a wide variety of ethno-nationalist movements from the early 20th century, largely because they were able to defend themselves in those three wars.

Re:Israel's right to exist?

[jjohnson]

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.

Re:Why is it always violence?

[ragnathor]

Try everyday in small villages no one gives a shit about. Read Palestinian media and Arab news and you'll see plenty of non-violent protests (one sided reporting of course).

What happens at these non-violent protests, such as demonstrations against the construction of the "security wall" in the West Bank? The protesters get stoned by right wing Israeli settlers, or are dispersed by tear gas and rubber bullets from the Israeli army.

Re:Here's the bottom line

[ScentCone]

I think it's wrong to try to force someone to live (or not live) within some arbitrary geographical region

And plenty of Arabs (and every other culture) live in Israel. The point of the Israelis is that Jews needed (historically - um, just look it up) a place where they can go live without being slaughtered for being Jewish. Enough of the world agreed with that proposition to actually set it up that way half a century ago.

The Israelis aren't saying who may or may not live in Palestine - they're only saying that whoever it is, or whatever mix of people it is, can't be allowed to shoot thousands of missiles across the border and into residential areas for the specific purpose of randomly killing civilians, for years on end, without a response that finally ends it. The Palestinians have shown that they cannot even form a coherent voice and functioning government within their own population - even when dozens of other countries pay for and help to run their elections. How can Israel have a sustained, peaceful relationship with a neighbor when half of that neighbor's elected government body is willing to shoot the other half down in the street in order to preserve the latitude to act on one of their stated, foundational tenets: that Israel should be destroyed, and its Jewish residents all killed.

There is only one party in the conflict between Israel and the militant, missile-lobbing terrorists in Gaza that operate on a principle of race- and culture-based segregation and extermination: that would be Hamas and its Islmaist backers.

There are millions of people in the region and each of those millions of people has their own unique world view.

So what? Some world views are objectively better than others. Hamas wants to cling to a world view that embraces a backwards-looking, mysoginistic, medievalist militant theocracy-by-sword. They get cash and weapons from groups that think women shouldn't be able to read, or which would stone them to death for having been raped by a stranger. La la la, just another world view, right?

If the Palestinians put down their weapons there would be no Palestine.

Israel pulled every last resident and military person out of Gaza explicitly on the Palestinian promise that the attacks out of Gaza would end, and that Gaza wouldn't be a base camp for Hamas terrorism and violence. The Palestinians never had a better chance to simply take control of that territory through a peaceful and democratic government that wanted to actually become the nation that everyone wants to see. But instead, Hamas took control of it, and the Palestinian people are too scared to put them out of power. Just like the majority of Iraqis were too worn down and scared to death of the Baathists and of Saddam to get rid of him - even when his actions brought more and more sanctions and hardship and death. Israel (and the rest of the world, if they weren't so chickenshit about the faux diplomatic issues) must do to Hamas in Gaza what the coalition did to Saddam. Make them go away so that a working civic society has a chance to take hold, just as it gradually is in Iraq, only a few years later.

Hamas can't survive unless they can posture themselves as the defiant heros, fighting off Israel. But ever since Israel removed everything of theirs from Gaza, Hamas has had no enemy there to valiantly fight. So what do they do? Spend months making thousands of cowardly missiles launches at random civilian targets in order to provoke the military response they need in order to have some way to prove their worth. They're getting more than they asked for, and have mis-interpretted what happened recently with Hezbollah in Beirut. If the Palestinians force Hamas to stop attacking Israel, the conflict will stop. But Hamas kills Palestinians who want it to stop, don't they? So Israel's hand has been forced, and they're doing it the hard way. And they still send out leaflets telling Palestinian civilians to get away from areas wh

Re:Here's the bottom line

[copponex]

This is not a matter of multiple world views, all jostling for an equal share of turf and air time. This is militant, murderous thugs (Hamas) willing to kill anybody in order to prevent a modern, civil, democratic society from taking shape in their neighborhood.

It's quite a bit more complicated than that. I'm going to avoid the point-counterpoint monotony, but in general, the problem with your viewpoint is that you assume that Hamas is the will of the Palestinian people, which is true only in the current circumstance.

For instance, you could reason that all Japanese are murderous bastards for what they did to the Chinese in the 1930s. But that is not the will of the Japanese people, nor is the rise of Mexican drug gangs the will of the Mexican people, nor was the rise of the Nazi party the will of the German people.

Hamas was voted into power because the Palestinians had given up on diplomacy, because Israel refuses to work for peace. Israel refuses to work for peace because if there is an establishment of a Palestinian state, three things are probable. One is that they will not be able to seize any more land that they want to have. Two is that they won't get all of Jerusalem. Three is that eventually, and I'm talking in a hundred years, the Israeli state would cease to exist due to immigration and the natural progression of democratic demands for freedom from religion. Israel is "officially" Jewish, officially for one ethnic group and one religion, and the only state in the world with such a status. It's likely that under normal democratic functions, this will disappear, and that is something unacceptable to the hard liners who are currently running the country.

Blaming the Palestinians for voting Hamas in is like blaming the Black community for forming the Black Panthers. After your home has been taken, after your friends have been killed indiscriminately, after you see your children grow up in total poverty, after being under a foreign occupier's iron grip for sixty years, a society becomes quite damaged. But this is the goal for the occupier. As Ben-Gurion said, he hoped time would heal his wounds. He hoped the world would excuse Israel for the heinous acts it has committed to get what it wants, however much you agree with their goals.

All Israel is doing in Gaza right now is guaranteeing there is no peace, because peace means the end of their acquisition of Palestinian property. They destroyed Lebanon, they got Hezbollah. They destroyed the PLO, they got Hamas. These are predictable outcomes, and the planners of Israel are not stupid.