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MIT's Ted Postol Presents More Evidence On Iron Dome Failures
Lasrick (2629253) writes In a controversial article last week, MIT physicist Ted Postol again questioned whether Israel's vaunted Iron Dome rocket defense system actually works. This week, he comes back with evidence in the form of diagrams, photos of Iron Dome intercepts and contrails, and evidence on the ground to show that Iron Dome in fact is effective only about 5% of the time. Postol believes the real reason there are so few Israeli casualties is that Hamas rockets have very small warheads (only 10 to 20 pounds), and also Israel's outstanding civil defense system, which includes a vast system of shelters and an incredibly sophisticated rocket attack warning system (delivered through smart phones, among other ways).
TFA is very interesting & I'm smarter for having read it...
I'm glad people are looking at this kind of thing...it is *one* way to get some unbiased information
So, "5% effective"...
As TFA description reads, the number of Israeli casualties is mostly due to a combination of factors, including bomb shelters and early warnings...
I think the "Iron Dome" people would respond to TFA thusly:
"Yes, but **the program** is effective. "Iron Dome" is our missile defense system, which is one part of our civil defense, which is an entire program of things to keep people safe...if you look at the program in its entirity it's a success"
Thank you Dave Raggett
Postol has a long history opposing any form of missile defense. While his assessment may well be correct, it should be viewed with considerable skepticism until data from opposing viewpoints is examined against his. Postol's view can be summaraized as: "No missile or rocket defense can work, therefore we should not try."
It's literally better than nothing.
[anecdote] An employee in an Israeli office of my company happened to be on a business call when the alarms went off and he had to pull over and lay flat on the ground. The callees then witnessed an incredible bang (which, understandably, made most of the listener's pants a bit heavier). Apparently the Iron Dome intercepted a missile in the skies directly above the employee's head. He's lucky to be alive. [/anecdote]. Of course, now he's been drafted into the fight, so he might end up spending his life anyways, but hey, at least he lived to see another day.
So yeah, it might not be the best thing ever, but it sure as hell beats nothing.
As opposed to perfect precision strikes on that evil Palestinian hospital? Or is this "jew hating" somehow?
https://twitter.com/search?q=%...
but there are extremists on both sides, like parts of Hamas, (and similar on the other side, see the "settlers") that want to murder each other. Something tells me your are one of these extremists too.
story
20 rockets were found in a UN owned school in the Gaza strip. The UN is caliming they were not using the building and did not know the rockets were in the building. What happened to the rockets once the UN discovered they were hiding munitions for Hamas in a school? The UN did the only responsible thing possible and handed those rockets over to Hamas.
A good summary can be found here:
... and yet nobody has anything to say about the "Happy Holocoust" one-eyed smiley faces getting painted on christian fences:
...or the wholesale massacre of christian communities (which like the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian massacres, has been quite well-documented)
http://www.thereligionofpeace....
Neo-Nazis In Germany Compare Jews To NAZIS:
http://shoebat.com/.../neo-naz...
http://shoebat.com/.../antichr...
http://shoebat.com/.../muslims...
http://shoebat.com/2014/07/21/...
Spain is on the list:
http://shoebat.com/.../muslim-...
And so is Rome:
http://shoebat.com/.../muslims...
Meanwhile, in the land of the free, any intellectual discussion of this topic is prohibited (by shouty neo-commies), under threat of "hate speech" legislation, or being ostracised as a 'bigot', because left-wing viewpoints are by definition 'not up for discussion'.
His perspective is that success requires in-air destruction of the warhead. That is not what the system is designed to do. No system has successfully hit warheads in the air with any frequency. Second, Postol (and Lloyd and others) assert that the falling warheads aren't large enough to do damage. But mortar shells do substantial damage and then contain, even using Postol's numbers, perhaps 1/20th the TNT. That's enough to blow big holes and kill a lot of people. Where are the holes? Where is the structural damage to buildings? Where are the casualties?
I guess since I used to raise money for Israeli medical research and investments in Israeli industry, that would qualify me as an anti-Semite.
But let's look at what the real anti-Semites are saying -- the Jews who actually live there:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/di...
Reaping what we have sown in Gaza
Those who turned Gaza into an internment camp for 1.8 million people should not be surprised when they tunnel underneath the earth.
By Amira Hass
Jul. 21, 2014
A book on Israeli military psychology should have an entire chapter devoted to this sadism, sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy: A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally dangerous, 10 kilometers away.
In contrast to the common Israeli hasbara, Hamas isn’t forcing Gazans to remain in their homes, or to leave. It’s their decision. Where would they go?
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion...
What does Hamas really want?
Read the list of conditions published in the name of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and judge honestly whether there is one unjust demand among them.
By Gideon Levy
Jul. 20, 2014
we should stop for a moment and listen to Hamas; we may even be permitted to put ourselves in its shoes, perhaps even to appreciate the daring and resilience of this, our bitter enemy, under harsh conditions.
Read the list of demands and judge honestly whether there is one unjust demand among them: withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces troops and allowing farmers to work their land up to the fence; release of all prisoners from the Gilad Shalit swap who have been rearrested; an end to the siege and opening of the crossings; opening of a port and airport under UN management; expansion of the fishing zone; international supervision of the Rafah crossing; an Israeli pledge to a 10-year cease-fire and closure of Gaza’s air space to Israeli aircraft; permits to Gaza residents to visit Jerusalem and pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque; and an Israeli pledge not to interfere in internal Palestinian politics such as the unity government; opening Gaza’s industrial zone.
These conditions are civilian; the means of achieving them are military, violent and criminal. But the (bitter) truth is that when Gaza is not firing rockets at Israel, nobody cares about it. Look at the fate of the Palestinian leader who had had enough of violence. Israel did everything it could to destroy Mahmoud Abbas. The depressing conclusion? Only force works.
True, after Hamas started firing rockets, Israel had to respond. But as opposed to what Israeli propaganda tries to sell, the rockets didn’t fall out of the sky from nowhere. Go back a few months: the breakdown of negotiations by Israel; the war on Hamas in the West Bank following the murder of the three yeshiva students, which it is doubtful Hamas planned, including the false arrest of 500 of its activists; stopping payment of salaries to Hamas workers in Gaza and Israeli opposition to the unity government, which might have brought the organization into the political sphere.
It seems that Ted Postol defines a successful intercept as one where the opposing warhead is completely destroyed in mid-air and doesn't count a rocket being damaged enough to be knocked down over an area where it can detonate harmlessly. He also relies on personal and public photos and reports to draw his conclusions. This would miss a good portion of the rockets fired as most are fired at night, when photographing rockets and interceptions are much more difficult.
I'm not going to argue that he is right or wrong. It just seems to me that his extrapolations are not based on enough factual evidence to draw a conclusion with any amount of confidence.
It would be cool to find out just what the real statistics are. I'm pretty sure, though, that Israel classifies this information as a state secret and we may never know in our lifetimes.
Why should anyone believe a person with a clear agenda, no access and no evidence?
Wake me up when you have actual data to collaborate your (conspiracy) theory Israel's estimates are lies.
Israeli's collect the rockets and rocket parts they are able to find. The answer is knowable and evidence obtainable. Have you even tried?
Will Israel promise that if Hamas puts all its rocket launchers, military command and control, and military supplies neatly organised in easily identifiable military bases, Israel won't simply send a missile to figuratively cook all those eggs being put in one basket?
Will Israel remove the embargo being imposed of Gaza so that Hamas can buy better weapons that they can use to precisely target Israel military installations rather than have to make do with using cheap mortar and rockets that is just as likely to hit civillian targets as Israeli military installations?
If Israel is not willing to do the above, then don't complain when Hamas have to improvise just to have a fighting chance of defending themselves.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
The casualties are on the Palestinian side.
My parents are both in Israel. I go there frequently. Since the start of the rocket attacks I have talked with them daily. I can tell you Iron Dome works. Otherwise there would be far more destruction to property. Yes there are bomb shelters. I can tell you in Tel Aviv many people don't bother to go to them when the sirens go off. My dad says more people get hurt running to the bomb shelters because they trip/fall/etc. than from bombs.
Iron Dome is highly effective. Without it there would be not only significant casualties but also significantly more property damage. In fact my dad reported seeing an actual missile intercept over our building in Bat Yam.
I'm sure Iron Dome has it's flaws but the fact of the matter is the system has been saving lives almost daily for years. One other thing I am not sure if Slashdot readers are familiar with: The rocket attacks aren't a thing that happen every year or so. They are in Tel Aviv. In cities like Ashdod or Ashkelon they are a daily or weekly occurrence. You don't hear about it on the news but they have been going on for years. Iron Dome is continually operating and defending against these threats.
Despite all of this the problem remains: Rockets are being fired into a sovereign country. I don't think the US would build and use such a defensive system is say, for example, Mexico launched rockets into the US for years. I don't think there would be a Mexico after around one month. To that end the (hypothetical) US solution here is far more effective than Iron Dome. Sadly I think the only long term solution here is for Israel to use its full military might against the attackers.
If Israel is not willing to do the above, then don't complain when Hamas have to improvise just to have a fighting chance of defending themselves.
Two points: First, their improvisations are war crimes; second, Hamas are the aggressor. This is not particularly complicated.
That's idiotic. The idea was to get them away from civilian homes, so when Israel does have to retaliate and destroy them, innocent bystanders aren't killed in the process. Promising not to shoot back would be crazy, and your statement massively misses the point...
You'd have to first explain why Hamas has a military need to attack Israeli military bases in the first place, as opposed to, say, Israeli tanks and aircraft while they are in Palestine. Or why they need to attack at all, since they two are not at war with each other, and Israel could wipe them out in a matter of days if they ever did declare one.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
the goal of hamas is to kill Israeli civilians,
also,
Haj Amin al-Husseini
Ha'aretz is a completely left-wing news site. I like how nobody is pointing out the fact that Hamas also attacks Egypt. Hamas is a terrorist organization. They use death to achieve their goals. They are uncivilized. The moment they put down their bombs they can talk about how things aren't "fair." Life isn't fair; that doesn't give you the right to kill innocent people over it.
There are self hating members in any group. That doesn't mean that's an accurate assessment.
Don't tell anyone, but Iron Dome causes autism because it contains gluten! It's all part of a secret Illuminati plot, of course...
(Seeing as I live in Rishon Le Ziyyon, and watch interceptions every single day, and hear the distinctive sound of an interception (as opposed to a rocket hitting a building) several times a day, I reckon that the esteemed Mr. Postol would do well to loosen up his foil hat a bit)
The way he defines success and failure is framed to say all missile defense fails.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Extreme would be to drop a nuke on them. See? Isn't it fun using strawmen to argue your point.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
There. Fixed that for you.
You don't have a single clue what "genocidal" means, you twisted evil tool.
Do you call them uncivilized so that you can kill them and still sleep at night? Maybe you are past that point already. May your God have mercy on you.
There. Fixed that for you.
Fixed that for you.
Are you so high you don't realize how stupid that sounds? Why would they do such an illogical thing?
Here it comes, all the reactionary Jew hatred posts...
Here it comes, all the accusations of antisemitism just because someone criticizes Israel...
As often as I've seen people around here use strawmen when claiming not to, this is the first time I've seen someone imply they themselves were using a strawman but failed to.
The situation dictates that 'Palestine' should have only policing powers. Military protection should be granted by a neighbour state, perhaps even by Israel.
I suppose you think the Nazis didn't commit a genocide because they only managed to kill half the Jews. Don't take my word for it, take Naftali Bennett's. Israel is just following up on earlier promises. Of course, the plan goes back over 100 years!!
an Israeli from Tel Aviv estimates the success rate at 90%, which is thus high that some civilians actually go out and see the interceptions, instead of going into the shelters. Of course, Tel Aviv is farther away from Gaza and possibly has less rockets fired at them, but the difference in ground reports and what is reported here is staggering. Maybe these scientists need to dial back and first get some more data, instead of just looking at a couple of videos and/or photos.
The professor is saying that if the warhead is no destroyed the intercept fails. That's nonsense. If you knock it off course or cause it to fall off target then it succeeded.
Furthermore, the statistics seem to suggest that SOMETHING is stopping the missiles because we have fairly reliable figures on the number of missiles fired and the number of missiles that landed in populated areas. We also have stats from previous bombardments... comparing the two we can see a huge difference. So why is that? Is the suggestion that the israelis are lying? Its possible. But there's no evidence of that to hang an argument upon. And even if they were doing it for the sake of argument there is no data to define the extent of that deceit. Its all theoretical.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You know, those videos where rockets are hit, are those the 5%?
... it works for about 100%
and my point is: without clear evidence, both this and Postol's statements are equally Ill-founded.
Ted, shall we compromise on (100+5)/2?
I did RTFA, and he makes two real claims. His primary claim is that the iron dome system must be failing, because when the interceptor approaches the target from anything other than head on, the interceptor will fire its warhead at the wrong time. He implies that this failure is an inevitable consequence of geometry, but I don't see it. If you actually look at the diagrams, the interceptor has just a good a shot when approaching (say) from behind as from in front. In fact the odds look better to me from behind or the side, as the crossing speeds are lower and the shrapnel fan might actually run down the length of the target. The interceptor just needs to fire its warhead at a different moment. But his diagrams all show the warhead firing at the wrong time, for reasons that are not made clear.
Is the iron dome system smart enough to account for basic geometry? I would think so, since the problem is pretty simple, and the approach angle will be known by the radar even before launch. But I don't really know. And I don't think he does either.
His second claim might be more credible. He says that in hundreds of pictures of intercepts, only one clearly shows detonation of the incoming rocket. I don't know if this is true, and I don't trust his claim. But if it is true then it cries out for explanation.
It's as stupid as asking Hamas to put their armaments in military installations where Israel can destroy them as easily as stealing candy from a baby.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
He has no access to the system. He has no access to radar logs. He has no access to destroyed rockets, etc. He has some pics and a PowerPoint presentation.
I see.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There. Fixed that for you.
Fixed that for you.
Fixed it again. Sherpa Sherpa Bak-Allah. Mohammed Jihad!
Those opposed to Israel's right to exist and who are also shelling Israel and supplying weaponry for the attacks against Israel, STOP. Cease Fire or Cease to Exist. You hide behind children and attack Israel and blame Israel for responding to those attacks while {{You Blow Up Your Own Children Blaming Israel for their right to defend themselves.]] STOP THIS WAR NOW
They're not at war? Are you high? Hamas has declared war on Israel from day one. At this very moment Israel and Gaza is exchanging rockets missiles and bombs and hundreds of people are being killed every day. If, as you say, "Israel could wipe them out in a matter of days", then do it and get it over with.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
The problem is it is not sustainable. Each intercept missile cost $60,000, a rocket launched by hamas costs $800. Hamas can DDoS the hell of out Israel. All they need is decently trained soldiers and decent supply of rockets.
The root cause of this mess is that the Palestinians want their land back (after it was taken off them first in the post-WW2 UN partition plan that broke up Palestine into a Palestinian section and a Jewish section and then later further taken by the new state of Israel in various wars)
Yea, the important thing isn't if it works or not. The important thing is that the US taxpayers keep paying millions for every rocket that might knock down a Hamas missal. That way Israel can comfortably keep practicing genocide in Gaza and building more "settlements".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
he first assumes that only a head-on engagement can be successful, and all other engagements are failures. then, he counts how many engagements are head-on, and how many are otherwise, and finally comes up with a failure rate. if his initial assumption is wrong, then his calculation at the end is wrong. i'm not at all confident of his initial assumption, and he spends so little time on it.
why doesn't he instead gather pictures of engagements, gather more pictures of rocket impacts, then calculate a failure rate from there? this would be a more straight-forward approach, and he wouldn't have to rely on assumptions that are difficult to confirm. israel won't share iron dome missile specs with him, will they?
Of course, if you put an entire people inside an area more akin to the ghetto of Warsaw then a real country. An area with an insanely high population density an almost no way in our out for armed forces of their own the what did you expect really?
I am not condoning the firing of any weapon or participation in any combat activity amongst civilians but really... What do the Israeli expect??
On the other hand, where are the other Arab countries when it comes to really help out the Palestinians?
It ll never get solved, this conflict will stay a global source of misery for as long as we live probably.
In this "genocide", what percentage of targeted group has been exterminated? How many have been born at the same time? What Israel does might be oppression, "apartheid", invasion, whaetever, but genocide it ain't.
Iron dome designed to protect an area. If the artilery rocket is prevented from hitting that area it is a success.
Redefining success is a nice trick but it misses the point.
If a single shrapnel hit the rocket in mid flight it will rotate the rocket enough to change its ballistic flight and go into a stall.
True that in this scenario the warhead is still armed but it is not essential to success if it didnt reach its intended target area.
The problem is it is not sustainable. Each intercept missile cost $60,000, a rocket launched by hamas costs $800.
Israel's GDP is the equivalent of about US$250 billion. They can easily afford tens of thousands of intercept missiles if it keeps the population safe.
Hamas can DDoS the hell of out Israel.
DDoS attacks generally rely on multiplier effects, getting someone else to do most of the work for you. Botnets, service vulnerabilities like the NTP reflection attack, that sort of thing. Hamas don't appear to have any such advantage.
All they need is decently trained soldiers and decent supply of rockets.
And if they had three fully-equipped tank divisions and a carrier group, that would help too.
second, Hamas are the aggressor. This is not particularly complicated.
Israel bulldozes Palestinian homes and builds settlements, Hamas fires rockets into Israel.
"Both sides" is usually a shitty argument to make, but in this case, both sides have been aggressors for decades.
If it wasn't complicated, we'd have peace by now.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Postol says that the Hamas rockets are small and can't do much harm. But that's proven false by past Israeli experience.
In the 2006 Israel-Hizbullah war, about 40 Israeli civilians were killed by rockets from Lebanon. In the last couple weeks, exactly one Israeli civilian has been been killed by rockets from Gaza. What's changed between 2006 and now? Iron Dome has been developed.
Also, that Israeli civilian was a Bedouin. Bedouin are nomads who live in the countryside. Iron Dome does not attempt to intercept rockets heading for the countryside, because interceptors are too expensive. Is it just coincidence that the only Israeli to be killed by rockets was part of the minority who live in areas not protected by Iron Dome?
Or look at another incident. A single Hamas rocket hit an Israeli ranch and killed 30 cows. I don't care too much about the cows. But a cow is bigger than a person, one would expect more than 30 people to die if that rocket hit a collection of people. Nothing like that has happened. Why not?
Israelis see with their eyes that this conflict is different from past conflicts in terms of the damage done by rockets. Is it so strange to attribute that change to the new technology that has been developed?
> Here it comes, all the reactionary Jew hatred posts...
They are coming because you wrote that, practically a first post even.
It makes me wonder if your goal is to derail any thoughtful analysis of the story.
Isn't that one of the tactics from the recently revealed GCHQ/JTRIG "Disruption Operational Playbook?"
property damage is compensated by the zionist government. All claims are matter of public record.
It is easy to verify the ammount of rocket hits based on the claims and their sum.
Yes, you're exactly right. The best thing the human race could do is turn the entire place into a radioactive crater, then say "off you go, fight over that".
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Controversial is putting it controversially kindly. I may not be a physicist from MIT, but as an Israeli being shot at daily and many times before this conflict started, I can assure you that I see Iron Dome actually works. I guess all the pieces of metal I've seen fall from the sky several times in front of mine are just my imagination as well, and the various times I've seen rockets intercepted literally over my head. I suppose when I've personally seen rocket cases shredded to pieces, it was because they blew up by themselves in the sky. I also suppose the ones that did hit were just another variety that don't magically blow up in the sky. Clearly, I'll have to go enroll in MIT and study harder to understand what is happening right in front of me.
I can assure you that without Iron Dome, there would be a lot more damage in Israel. In Israel, it's like a God right now and is the most immediate form of protection we have from a very real and current existential threat. It's important to note we also have other missile interception systems, including the old Patriot missiles which have shot down a few drones this past week.
Really, such idiocy is dangerous.
Regarding the present situation, Hamas is clearly the aggressor, launching an unprovoked and strategically and tactically useless attack on Israel. Hamas wants Israel destroyed; Israel doesn't want to be destroyed. Not complicated.
Actual Israeli again.
I think it's important to also point out that just because Iron Dome hits a rocket doesn't mean we're safe. Everyone here knows the difference between a hit and an Iron Dome interception. In both cases there are very audible, but different booms. In both cases, danger. Many times after an interception, there are many other loud thuds and booms from falling pieces of metal, and many people have been injured or nearly injured by shrapnel.
Iron Dome keeps us safer, but you still have to go to a shelter even if the hit rate was 100% because there's a very real danger you can still be killed by the aftermath of an interception.
Well, as a Raytheon shareholder, I approve!
A buys oil from B.
B uses oil money to buy missiles it gives to C.
C fires missiles at D.
D buys interceptors from A to intercept C's missiles.
A bills US taxpayers for cost of interceptors.
(Since D does not have to pay for the interceptors, and C doesn't have to pay for missiles, they have no incentive really to pursue any other course of action than violence).
Only losers here are the US taxpayers, and the poor schmucks being targeted by missiles and retaliatory strikes.
Extreme would be to drop a nuke on them. See? Isn't it fun using strawmen to argue your point.
may be i'm a bit picky, but i'd say robbing their land, expelling them, denying access to water and healthcare, imprisioning them indefinitely with no warrant, and killing them at will or bombing them with white phosphor is quite extreme.
Well, except you know, where Israel has repeatedly broken international law. You forgot that part.
If you view either side as clearly in the right, you're a fucking fool. It's unfortunate that extremists like you tend to speak the loudest since you overshadow the many, many reasonable people affected by the conflict and give rise to the expectations of outsiders that everyone involved is just as bad as you. In fact, most people are victims of you extremists from both sides. You should feel like a terrible person for helping to perpetuate this conflict, and I only hope one day you find that awareness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBQty_YaxY .. thats enough for me.
They're not at war? Are you high? Hamas has declared war on Israel from day one. At this very moment Israel and Gaza is exchanging rockets missiles and bombs and hundreds of people are being killed every day. If, as you say, "Israel could wipe them out in a matter of days", then do it and get it over with.
Israel are trying to minimise casualties on both sides. Hamas are trying to maximise Israeli casualties, and use Palestinian casualties to their political advantage. It's a perfect example of asymmetrical warfare; the capabilities and aims of the combatants are completely different.
Israel has the military capability to destroy Gaza, just as the US had the military capability to destroy Iraq or Afghanistan back in 2003. But doing so is not in their long-term interests.
+1 Funny
(sorry, lacking mod points!)
They didn't steal the land, they bought it. They didn't expel them, the arabs left with the intention to come back with arab armies to steal back what they sold. Those who didn't leave became israeli arabs.
No worries dude! This is Merica, we'll save them, even if we have to kill every last one of them.
FTFY
If you view either side as clearly in the right, you're a fucking fool.
Israel is clearly in the right.
That doesn't mean that Israel is without fault. Clearly, they're not. But we have one side ready for peaceful coexistence and the other side who wants only the total destruction of their enemies.
The situation is not complicated. That doesn't mean solving it is easy; there are many simple problems that are hard to solve. But we can say for sure that false equivalencies do not help.
As much as I have sympathy for the Palestinians, their land is gone and it isn't coming back, no more than the Roman Empire is going to rise again and reclaim Palestine as a province for the Romans.
Is it fair that the land has left the hands of the Palestinians? Probably not. Did it happen? Yes. Will they ever get it back? Not in any meaningful way.
For their own sake, it is time to move on. If their answer is getting their own civilians killed, I'd think even unconditional surrender and exile would be preferable to any group that is actually concerned about their civilian population.
The Israelis are there. They aren't going anywhere, and they don't like the rhetoric that has been thrown at them about being cast into the sea. They remember genocide, and they aren't going back to Diaspora. The rocket attacks on the cities will only increase the resolve of a people who have the history that the Jews have.
Peaceful protest does work, probably better on a country that is a democracy like Israel than a war ever would. We've seen it work elsewhere. Israel can hold a hard line while rockets are shooting at their cities, but they cannot hide behind that excuse if the rockets stop falling. Violence has failed the Palestinians and their Arab allies for 70 years, and that isn't going to change now.
The time for what is "just" is over. It is now time to do what it takes to improve the future for everyone in Palestine. The bombs and rockets need to stop falling, and someone has to do it first. I think the Palestinians would have the most advantage from ending the struggle and adopting a policy that might actually net them more gains and fewer deaths of their own people. If Israel persists in extremist settlements and reprisals when there is nothing to reprise against, they will lose the support of their allies, and they need their allies. Painful as it would be, there is no military option for Palestine worth considering and so those actions should be set aside.
Remember Patriot Missiles from the 1st Iraq war?
Saddam was lobbing SCUDS at Israel & the US lent IDF a bunch of our trailer mounted ABM interceptors
We've got to assume the Israelis have the state of the art now...is this as good as it gets? Seems like it should be better, given what we had in 1991...I know Hamas isn't launching big fat slow SCUDS, but even so, technology has just gotten so much more precise & fast. I wonder if the intercept rate would be higher if Hamas didn't use DIY rockets among others.
Thank you Dave Raggett
FTFY
Yes, a very important point.
Actually, the root cause can be traced back another couple of decades, to the various crises in the British Mandate of Palestine following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. You might argue that the British handled things badly, but I'm not that sure that it could have been handled well. By the time World War II was over, there was little that could be done to repair the situation.
Israel has never shown themselves to be ready for peaceful coexistence (and neither has Hamas). The closest they've come to that is being agreeable to peacefully doing whatever they want; there have been plenty of times during ceasefires where they continue with illegal actions, knowing full well it'll result in return illegal actions by the other side.
Of course, if you put an entire people inside an area more akin to the ghetto of Warsaw then a real country. An area with an insanely high population density an almost no way in our out for armed forces of their own the what did you expect really?
I expect Israel would gladly hand the Gaza Strip back to Egypt at this point. It doesn't seem that Egypt wants it back.
First evidence from the article is shown in figures 4 and 4a ... As can be seen by inspecting the photograph in figure 4, there is significant damage in the area where the rocket fell. This damage was almost certainly due to the detonation of the rocket’s small warhead."
"Figure 4 and figure 4A show the consequences of a failure in the fuse timing
However, the figure is a cropped version of an image taken from Ynet article
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4541542,00.html
and the picture title is "The shrapnel that hit the Tel Aviv synagogue.".
As clearly seen in the full picture, there is very little damage that is easily explained by a steel tube falling through the roof. The picture clearly shows that there were no explosion. This was the only direct evidence of Iron Dome failure that is provided by the article. This "evidence" is malicious manipulation of an image that is easily available online.
The images and more facts can be found in ...
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?239702-An-Explanation-of-the-Evidence-of-Weaknesses-in-the-Iron-Dome-Defense-System
Since slashdot is not very graphics friendly
Israel has never shown themselves to be ready for peaceful coexistence
That is quite simply untrue. Israel has shown that consistently for decades.
Peaceful co-existence doesn't mean there won't be disagreements. Even closely allied nations disagree with one another all the time. It means there won't be war.
I(and neither has Hamas).
That, at least, is true. Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel; it's stated explicitly in their charter.
More than 500 Palestinians dead and climbing and you say Israel is trying to minimise casualties? Do you seriously expect people to believe that?
Absolutely, yes. If Israel were actually out to cause casualties, rather than to prevent them, the death toll would be enormous. If they were merely careless of civilian casualties, the death toll would not only be higher, it would be statistically correlated with the demographics of the Palestinian people, with deaths of women, children, and the elderly roughly in proportion to the size of those groups in the general population.
Instead, the Palestinian death statistics are massively skewed towards males aged 18-38. That can't happen if you're killing civilians either deliberately or carelessly. But it's exactly what you'd see if you were carefully targeting enemy combatants.
If Israel is not willing to do the above, then don't complain when Hamas have to improvise just to have a fighting chance of defending themselves.
Two points: First, their improvisations are war crimes; second, Hamas are the aggressor. This is not particularly complicated.
There is no crime in war. War has no law.
Regardless, if you want to morally judge the actions of both sides here, Israel comes out looking far, far worse.
So, please tell me.What do you think happens then?
That Israel will stop blocking humanitarian support for Palestinians?
Give them access to the resources that have been cut off?
Stop bulldozing their towns to make room for 'settlers' bought in from overseas?
Perhaps they will share some of the countries rather fine wealth with the people who have been forced out of the way?
They have a great track record of allow those things previously, haven't they..
No, they want the Palestinians gone, end of story - preferably wiped out so they cannot return.
How can you see that playing out? remember, these are PEOPLE here, not some kind of disease.
Israel wants only one outcome, and that has been quite clear for 30+ years, unfortunately.
And they call themselves people of god. disgusting.
The depressing conclusion? Only force works.
In what possible sense is force "working" for Hamas?
They're not at war? Are you high? Hamas has declared war on Israel from day one. At this very moment Israel and Gaza is exchanging rockets missiles and bombs and hundreds of people are being killed every day. If, as you say, "Israel could wipe them out in a matter of days", then do it and get it over with.
Israel are trying to minimise casualties on both sides. Hamas are trying to maximise Israeli casualties, and use Palestinian casualties to their political advantage. It's a perfect example of asymmetrical warfare; the capabilities and aims of the combatants are completely different.
Israel has the military capability to destroy Gaza, just as the US had the military capability to destroy Iraq or Afghanistan back in 2003. But doing so is not in their long-term interests.
Do yourself a favor and drop your agenda and take a fresh look at what has been going on for decades. Israel is absolutely not trying to minimize casualties. They'll do everything and anything they can get away with, toeing the line as long as they have the backing of the US, which prevents anyone from doing anything about their horse shit.
The Nazis didn't build gas chambers overnight, it started with a few thugs smashing windows, creating the ghettos...now you have Gaza the ghetto and the mass murder of its children...
They have been squeezed into a ghetto and there is nowhere to move on to each time an election brings another pogrom. It's not as if they can escape into Egypt.
The ancestors of the bunch of fascists running Israel at this point would be horrified by this situation, especially how each shooting fish in a barrel episode coincides with an election.
Will Israel promise that if Hamas puts all its rocket launchers, military command and control, and military supplies neatly organised in easily identifiable military bases, Israel won't simply send a missile to figuratively cook all those eggs being put in one basket? Will Israel remove the embargo being imposed of Gaza so that Hamas can buy better weapons that they can use to precisely target Israel military installations rather than have to make do with using cheap mortar and rockets that is just as likely to hit civillian targets as Israeli military installations? If Israel is not willing to do the above, then don't complain when Hamas have to improvise just to have a fighting chance of defending themselves.
I never knew that having a fighting chance is a prerequisite to adhere to the rules of war or that it is the responsibility of the stronger force to level the playing field. Well they are levelling the playing field but only one side.
As much as I have sympathy for the Palestinians, their land is gone and it isn't coming back, no more than the Roman Empire is going to rise again and reclaim Palestine as a province for the Romans.
No more than all that nazi plunder is coming back either.
To get our attention.
The GP even said that explicitly.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/where-have-all-the-gaza-rockets-gone.premium-1.510341
And even less this time around.
Regarding the present situation, it would be helpful if Israel would understand that it's been gradually increasing pressure those living in Gaza. Thinking what the living conditions are and have been for decades with those living in Gaza it would be miracle if they would not fight back with any means available to them.
Hamas shelling rockets to Israel does not help current situation. No, but I believe thinking Hamas side is that they have come to a point where it's pretty much only way to show they are not happy with the situation and make themselves heard. How complicated would it be to understand that on Israel side?
As long as they keep firing rockets at people, using their own people as human shields, they might as well let Israel block humanitarian aid, because humanitarian aid isn't going to get through anyway.
What happens is that some of the stuff you mention will likely happen. No one is suggesting that the Israelis are saints here. It will take time for a peaceful solution to turn the tide. Is that worse than not only death, but decades of deaths that have been completely ineffectual?
The realization needs to be made that there will never be improvement while Hamas is shooting rockets at Israeli civilians. It is simply PR cover for hardliner Israeli politicians to keep circling the wagons.
You need a peaceful Israel that feels safe enough to not have to circle those wagons for them to purge the extremist elements that they can't quite get rid of now.
Palestine as a current state is the worst kind of place carved out of completely impractical considerations. It's a failed state before it even had a chance to succeed. It needs peace more than it needs anything else to even have a chance.
Hamas, is more like a gang that thrives from exploiting the misery and anger of its people more than it is an organization for freeing them. If Hamas was serious about protecting its people, it would unilaterally stop the rocket attacks and only use defensive measures, even if ineffectual. They *know* that the rocket attacks won't stop the Israeli reprisals, its just that they can only seem to respond to any crisis with violence, possibly because it is the only way they can maintain the backing of their supporters.
There is no war to be won here. Just constant bombing into the distant future. The Palestinians can't conquer their ground back, and the Israelis won't budge unless the Palestinians stop pretending that it is still 1949 and they have addresses in what is now Israel. The Israelis grabbed that land by right of conquest, and then defended it against all comers, pretty much like every conqueror before them. Israel is there to stay, and Palestine is a shithole that will only improve if they stop pretending and get on with their future.
This isn't the fair way for them to move forward, it's merely the only way they will move forward. Peace, even if unilateral, is the best option for the Palestinians as a people.
Isreal made peace with Egypt. Isreal made peace with Jordan.
It takes two sides to make peace. If Hamas were to cease its attacks on Israel and concentrate the same efforts it puts into killing civilians into making the lives of the poor bastards that live in Gaza better, then there could be peace.
when I said this:
i was obviously referring to the "Iron Dome" system, not what is being launched at it
Thank you Dave Raggett
Precisely. Both sides is a good argument for taking away all the munitions and limiting imports/exports to humanitarian aid until the leaders of the two groups can behave like adults.
I've never really understood why war criminals are better than terrorists. Seems like a bit of semantics to me.
That being said, Israel could end things if they wanted to. There's no need for them to preserve the crushing poverty that makes it cheap and easy for Hamas and other terrorist groups to recruit suicide bombers and people to launch missiles at Israel.
Amira Hass and Gideon Levy are by no means unbiased reporters.
Sure the demands to not seem unreasonable but what has Hamas offered? Nothing at all. Until Hamas changes their views on the existence of Israel there will be no peace.
I would also like to point out that you have no references for what you call the Hamas conditions. As far as I can tell you might be making them up and/or embellishing them to make them look better.. Lets assume they are true look at a couple of demands
allowing farmers to work their land up to the fence;
So tunneling can be done without discovery.
release of all prisoners from the Gilad Shalit swap who have been rearrested
The swap which should never have been done as it rewards kidnappers.
expansion of the fishing zone
So fishing vessels can meet ships at sea and return with a "catch" of missiles
an Israeli pledge to a 10-year cease-fire
No pledge of a 10 year Cease fire from Hamas. A one sided cease fire is no cease fire at all.
closure of Gaza’s air space to Israeli aircraft;
So Hamas can fire rickets without danger of air strikes.
Lets look at the next few statements
Go back a few months: the breakdown of negotiations by Israel;
Maybe the refusal to even talk about removing their insistence of the destruction od Israel might have something to do about it.
the war on Hamas in the West Bank following the murder of the three yeshiva students,
Did the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian people do anything to catch the criminals?
stopping payment of salaries to Hamas workers in Gaza
According to this it was Fatah that cut off the funds and not Israel.
As to the opposition to a Hamas/Fatah Unity Government, who is to know which faction will come into control. It is just as likely Hamas will gain control and start up attacks again. Would you trust a government where one faction wants the destruction of your country? Again, as long as Hamas holds to the objective of the destruction of Israel all violence in the conflict is on their heads.
Yeah, those damned terrorist children in their terrorist-loving hospital beds. Good riddance!
Oh, but Israel warned them, right? Yeah, great how that goes down!
Gaza has been since the beginning like a giant open-air prison camp. Where the heck are the impoverished people trying to flee the conflict supposed to go? And for that matter, for everyone criticizing Hamas for fighting and storing weapons in or near civilian areas... there is nowhere in Gaza not near a civilian area, certainly nowhere further than a stray tank shell can fly - it's one of the most densely populated places on Earth, over 5 times denser than Taiwan and 11.6 times denser than Japan. Israel forced as many people as possible into as little land as possible. And not accidentally. What little farmland there is can be overrun in a matter of minutes. Israel could fill the entirity of Gaza with tanks and artillery at a density of over 100 per square mile.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
I'm not saying Israel should level the playing field. I'm saying people like you should not blame Hamas for doing what they have to do when they have no other choice.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
Unprovoked? You really are deluded. When was the first rocket fired by Hamas? I'll tell you, it was on 28 June 2014. Unprovoked means Israel did nothing before that. Is this true? How about when Israel demolished the homes of two suspected kidnappers on 26 June? In what civilised country do you demolish people's homes for punishment of an alleged crime without even holding trials to prove their guilt? Or even before that, when Israel detained 300 Palentinians without even offering any proof of their involvement in the kidnapping of the three boys? Unprovoked, you say?
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
When the enemy are using human shields you don't call their bluff.
Do you know history at all? From 1516 to the end of WW2 the area was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. After WW2 it was controlled by the British. The British the partitioned it. Palestinians never had the land to want back.
The problem there is that Gazans procreate like rabbits. This is why the population density is so high and this is why they don't value human life that much.
Well, if Hamas didn't use hospitals, mosques, and playgrounds as rocket launch sites then there might be less to complain about when Israel bombs their rocket launch sites.
http://www.jpost.com/Operation-Protective-Edge/IDF-shows-photos-of-alleged-Hamas-rocket-sites-dug-into-hospital-mosques-368307
But then Hamas wouldn't have all those photos of dead and injured children to propagandize via the world's newsmedia.
I expect Israel would gladly hand the Gaza Strip back to Egypt at this point. It doesn't seem that Egypt wants it back.
That is of course very easy to say and a bit short sighted, perhaps even cynical.
I think it is without question that Gaza is a region where a lot of people got jammed into, completely surrounded by another state, even the waterfront is hermetically sealed off. No resources, not nothing ... Let the regular people out of Gaza then, support Arab states for wanting to take in Palestinian refugees etc etc...
Pertinent questions are:
Who created this situation in the first place (The borders of '48 come to mind)?
Save terrorists with different agendas, don't 'regular' Palestinians have a right to be upset about what happened to them? Let alone a right to take up arms in regular war? Other people have gone to war for less...
What about settlements?
I am really not wanting to put blame on a single party here but honestly, how can the international community (US, Europe, Israel, the Arab world) first create the situation that we have now (ie by not respecting the borders of eg '48 and then not expect this horrible cesspool to erupt? Of course people will react, violence will ensue and really, more violence will not stop anything.
Again, you cannot first coop everyone up in a small area of land and then "blame" opposing forces to use people as shields. Can people get out of Gaza if they want to? Regular, innocent people? I think not... Gaza is a ghetto for all intents and purposes.
That is a combination of revisionist history repeated in mainstream publications and outright lies.
Sure, some properties were sold. But does China have sovereignty over California because many Chinese nationals bought land there?
Have a look at the origins of Isreal. Its founded on Terrorism as Jewish extremists killed quite a few after world war 2.
Also when an individual buys land that doesn't alter what state it is part of and just because someone sells a bridge doesn't mean they have any right to. Its occupied territory so there could be no one with standing to sell it, unless its Isreal selling to itself.
Except most neighbours don't just bulldoze the houses on their border, rebuild them and then claim that that was theirs.
Maybe if the Isrealis stop grabbing more and more land they Palestinians will fire less rockets.
What exactly do you expect the Palestinians to do? Lie down and die so the jews can live in their houses?
No. The stated goals of hamas and other groups is to exterminate jews and wipe israel off the map. a "peace" agreements are just time to plan for those goals. Muhammad allegedly beheaded 600 jews himself, and exterminated a tribe of jews. blood libel still exists in the muslim world. israel got some shit incorrect but they are under constant attack, have been invaded by more countries since their founding than like anywhere else in the world. israel needs to abandon all settlements, revert to the pre-sixties borders but that isnt going to deter blood thirsty maniacs.
Instead, the Palestinian death statistics are massively skewed towards males aged 18-38. That can't happen if you're killing civilians either deliberately or carelessly. But it's exactly what you'd see if you were carefully targeting enemy combatants.
Or just people fitting that demographic.
You realize that "kidnapping" is provoked, right?
To date Israel has not shown any proof whatsoever that Hamas was in any way involved in the kidnapping.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
Israel is actually the aggresor as this is occupied territory, although they weren't the initial aggressor in the war. So anyone fighting against Israel are not terrorists unless terror is there methodology. Unfortunatly Hamas do seem to have a large number of wankers who think 2 wrongs make a right. This does serve the extremist factions though.
Hopefully the moderates can gain influence and de-escalate.
There is no crime in war. War has no law.
Tell that to Peter von Hagenbach, was was convicted and executed for war crimes in 1474 . He even offered the "only following orders" excuse.
Regardless, if you want to morally judge the actions of both sides here, Israel comes out looking far, far worse.
I'm not morally judging actions, I'm legally judging actions. Hamas is deliberately and systematically committing war crimes as defined by international law.
If Israel where not trying to minimize casualties they would just carpet bomb the whole of the Gaza strip back to the stone age. Would be a lot cheaper than the current effort.
There is no crime in war. War has no law.
The Geneva convention? You can disregard the law but you can do that with any law.
It is a treaty but says things you must not do which looks like a law to me.
With the ICC enforcement is even coming into place.
claims during the First Gulf War. George H. Bush early in the conflict claimed that the missile was 41 of 42 against scuds. Later analysis showed that the success rate may have been less that 10%.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
The palestinians & Israels agreed a 2 state solution. Israel went back on their word.
You're right it does take two sides.
No hatred here. Israel can do whatever the hell they like; I just want them to do it without US support in terms of funding or UN vetoes.
Building on occupied territory and displacing people is a different definition of peaceful coexistence than the one I use.
Also there where civilian killings in this time so even that definition fails.
But we have one side ready for peaceful coexistence and the other side who wants only the total destruction of their enemies.
Unfortunately, "peaceful coexistence" means land that families have farmed for generations being progressively taken away and given to Israeli settlers.
In recent times, there has been so significant violence directed at Israel from the West Bank portion of the occupied territories. In fact, it seems fairly clear that the people who live there are ready for peaceful coexistence. How has Israel thanked them for this? Just take a look at the changing map of the West Bank and it is obvious how it is being broken up and separated by Israeli settlements.
Israel could go a long way to maintaining the moral high ground if they just respected the 1967 borders.
So, we can see that Hamas is just following what it was organized to do. It's not difficult to understand.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I actually agree with this, but two things. Nearly 70 years have passed. The UN drew a line in the sand. What if Germans decided they wanted their land back, which they lost in war? Pakistan was founded at a similar time, largely for a religious group. The UN partly created this problem, the UN needs to solve the refugee crisis which is the Palestinian people, regardless of what their "leadership's" ideas are about changing history.
What might actually happen?
Palestine will be absorbed into Israel.
You may think that all Israeli want the Palestinians to be gone, but you're wrong. Not all Israeli hate everyone else that is not Jewish. Certainly there are some who do, but to conclude that everyone else thinks that way is extremely ignorant. It's almost like saying that every American likes to wear a cowboy hat, has slaves from Africa, goes to hunt and slaughter some native Americans and then heads home to read the Bible and to thank God for this glorious day. Most of the educated world will know that this view of 'the American' is bullshit.
Most likely Palestinians will be given the chance to apply for citizenship in Israel or will be 'asked' to leave. Not all Israelis are Jewish, there is already a number of Israeli Muslims.
The new Israelis will get the chance to experience some human rights. Women will be far less oppressed and homosexuals don't have to fear for their lives any more.
Infrastructure will be improved in former Palestine areas. Resources like wood, water and electricity will be provided, as well as social standards like education, medical care and everything else, that comes with an industrialized nation.
One Islamic nation less on this planet? Nothing to be really sad about, unless you endorse their, very real, application of divine law.
The Iron Dome is designed to stop Iranian ballistic missiles tipped with Chemical, biological and in the future nuclear weapons. The fact that it has trouble hitting Hamas's glorified model rockets doesn't make it any less effective in its true mission. And eve if it really was only 5% effective, I'd take 5% less ballistic missiles headed at my town thank you.
There. Fixed that for you.
You are correct, the Israeli terrorists are still alive.
If Ha'aretz is left wing wouldn't that make the others right wing as left and right is comparative so shouldn't be given anymore weight than Ha'aretz.
Much like in the US though, my understanding was that the residents didn't really have a concept of land ownership, so I'm not sure it was an entirely valid transaction.
jh
Three ceasefires have been proposed... Israel agreed to all three... Hamas agreed to none.
Hamas can get everything reasonable that it wants. All it has to do is stop firing rockets.
They don't shoot down every rocket. They only shoot down the ones that look like they will hit population centers.
And many of the Hamas rockets don't even make it to the border. Many of them have actually killed Palestinians (which, predictably, Hamas blames on Israel).
I know the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist in the peace process, when Israel agreed Palestinian's existed as well.
Not respecting borders recognized by most of the world seems a bit more on the war side than the disagreement side. I guess it's not so bad since it's done by Israel.
There is no crime in war. War has no law.
Tell that to Peter von Hagenbach, was was convicted and executed for war crimes in 1474 . He even offered the "only following orders" excuse.
Regardless, if you want to morally judge the actions of both sides here, Israel comes out looking far, far worse.
I'm not morally judging actions, I'm legally judging actions. Hamas is deliberately and systematically committing war crimes as defined by international law.
I would like it if the war criminals on both sides where held to account. Israel is also consistently violating international law as well. For instance building on occupied territories. It has also probably killed more civilians than Hamas as its more powerful.
But we have one side ready for peaceful coexistence and the other side who wants only the total destruction of their enemies.
No I suspect most people on both 'sides' would be perfectly happy to live their life's without killing each other. The extremists on both sides are dangerous.
The Zionists do not want Muslims any more than the radical Muslims want Jews.
Each intercept missile cost $60,000
How much does it cost Israel each time they don't intercept a rocket and it lands in a populated area?
Why should anyone believe a person with a clear agenda
Are you talking about Isreal and its military complex?
You sound like a white person living in America.
You know... A hypocrite.
Not bothering to minimise civilian casualties is not the same as deliberately maximally targeting them.
Carpet bombing isn't very effective for strategic targets (and I'd argue it never was), you can hit them with greater precision and a greater surety of elimination with other methods.
No, but the stronger force has responsibility to not cause more civilian casualties than the weak side. It is stronger and has greater latitude in not hitting civilians by having more options.
The trouble is that Arabs in Israel do seem to be second class citizens so I doubt they'd enjoy those human rights.
Where is your proof of so called "Terrorism" by the founders of Israel? Try if you may to find the differences between the Hamas' charter and the state of Israel declaration of independence, where one calls for killing of all Jews and the other for reaching out Israel's hand in peace. After you do that you can go ahead and admit you are an antisemi, just save us from your facts about Israeli "Terrorism".
The Palestinians may claim decent from the Palestinian region of the Ottoman Empire, which seems fair enough.
So, Gazans aren't supposed to reproduce?
I would say they are reproducing to replace those killed by constant war, famine, and disease. Or, maybe, they just enjoy having a large family like many others do.
It sounds to me that you don't value human life - mainly that of Gazans.
Who sold it and how did they have standing?
Interestingly the supreme court of Israel bought this up about the transfer of territory they occupy but has then been 'sold' to Israel. It decided there was no one with standing to sell it.
Sure the demands to not seem unreasonable but what has Hamas offered? Nothing at all.
What exactly are they supposed to offer? Perhaps they could stop making Israel look bad by just not telling us when Israel systematically half-starves them. Palestine is under attack every day.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You forgot to mention the Zionist terrorism that encouraged the British to leave and the recognition by the USA of the state of Israel for it own internal reasons against the advice of just about everyone (even people within the USA). If there had been peace and time things could have been sorted out better.
Israel could go a long way to maintaining the moral high ground if they just respected the 1967 borders.
You mean the boarders to the land occupied when those people invaded and tried to cut the country in half? Remember in 1967, it was the goal of the aggressors to wipe Israel off the map in its entirety.
Again, if there were simple solutions, there would be peace.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The problem there is that Gazans procreate like rabbits. This is why the population density is so high and this is why they don't value human life that much.
You have this entirely backwards, I'm not surprised you didn't log in to associate your name with your abject ignorance. Making people live like animals makes them act like animals. When you force any animal into a space too small and too poorly to support it then it will always behave badly. In this case, it's an instinctive survival mechanism built into all living things. When you kill them, they make more. Forms of life which don't do this tend to be driven to extinction by forms of life which do.
A similar mechanism can be seen at work here in the USA. The education system was compromised, whether simply for profit or intentionally to keep down the plebes. Now we're making more unwanted children. The difference is that we oppress ourselves, we don't need anyone to do it for us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What land exactly?
If you mean the west bank then it should be pointed out that that was taken from Jordan in a war that the arabs started. If you mean Gaza then you should be made aware of the fact that it was taken from the Egyptians in the same war.
They're not at war? Are you high? Hamas has declared war on Israel from day one.
Hamas didn't exist on day one. Hamas wouldn't likely exist at all without the extent of the occupation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It wasn't widely broadcast at the time but after Hamas came to power with 70% of the vote in what all international observers called a "free and fair" election. They declared a unilateral ceasefire and kept it for about 2yrs. During this time Israel and the west in general simply punished the palestinians for "picking the wrong team". This doesn't mean the palestinians are blameless Arafat fucked up a 2 state deal before that and was duly punished for it. However it's clear to see the palestinians are the significantly weaker under-dog, and the similarities with apartheid era South Africa is not lost on anyone old enough to remember it.
The hypocrisy and immorality inherent in international politics is simply offensive to any thinking person, the west bitches about Putin's rockets shooting down airliners while Israelis watch and cheer US bombs landing on hospitals from nearby hills. Neither of these events has anything to do with self defense, it's just the same old proxy wars the 5 veto powers have been playing since they agreed not to shoot directly at each other.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
(The following is purely about logistics, not a statement of support)
Hamas should start reducing the size of the warhead (or simply forgo explosives) on some of the missiles, to save on cost and construction-time.
Israel will still have to intercept, and the lower weight would likely result in more missiles getting into the actually-defended areas of Israel.
Alternatively, stop lopping missiles around for a year, then go to the world and explain how nice you've been, and how evil and cruel Israel is; bring it to the attention of the Russians and similarly interested parties, that Israel is support by the Americans, and the Palestinians should soon find themselves having new friends.
The Israelis suck at genocide then. Targeting one of the most densely populated places on earth and only managing to kill several hundred.
Worst. Genocide. Ever.
Also there are no Israeli settlements in Gaza, they pulled them all out and it resolved..... nothing!
No. The stated goals of hamas and other groups is to exterminate jews and wipe israel off the map. a "peace" agreements are just time to plan for those goals.
Yes, and the goal of Israel is to claim the entire region for the Israeli state. Two border expansions and an ongoing campaign of semi-starving the besieged populace next door suggest that this is in fact the case. And there is a sizable group of people who suggest that all Jews who do not feel the same are some sort of traitor, and that anyone who does not support Jewish dominance of the region is not just anti-Zionist, but an anti-Semite, making rational discussion impossible just as surely as invoking Godwin.
Meanwhile, this war is really not between the Jewish people and the Palestinians. The entire conflict has been reframed as a battle in the war between "The West" and Islam, or perhaps simply a shot, fired by the UK when they created the nation of Israel. You will note that the Jewish people already got kicked out of that region once. They laid claim to it, they attempted to take it away from the people who lived there already, they met with some success but were eventually ejected. The history of that region going back as long as we know about has been people killing other people for control of it, and now just look at it. Formerly lush and rich, now it's a bunch of sand and rocks over which people kill one another. It's lost all practical meaning, since it's now not particularly good for supporting human life. Of course, one meaning remains. As long as the people living there are fighting over some shitty sand in the shitty desert, they're not causing problems for anyone else.
This situation was deliberately engineered and now Israel and Palestine are playing precisely the game they were meant to play, for our benefit. Why else do you think the USA pours money into that hole? It's not because the leaders of the USA give a shit about Jews. They're largely the same camp of assholes who presided over WWII and delayed our entry into that conflict for economic reasons. Notably, we were selling Aluminum to Japan so they could make it into Zeroes, and selling fuel to Germany so they could drive across Europe — and yes, these profits were a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the subsequent benefits of building up our manufacturing systems while our "allies" were bombed.
tl;dr: $
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Israel has never shown themselves to be ready for peaceful coexistence
That is quite simply untrue. Israel has shown that consistently for decades.
Interrupting food shipments in order to deliberately keep an oppressed populace consistently underfed isn't just the opposite of peaceful, it's illegal.
Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel; it's stated explicitly in their charter.
And Israel has demonstrated that they are dedicated to control of the entire region, through border expansion. Don't really give a shit about propaganda on either side.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
The thing is: Arabs and Muslims are not the same. If you think about it then Arab culture and ethnicity did exist well before Islam.
There are Jewish AND Muslim Arabs in Israel. There are even Arab Muslims in Israeli politics, look up Raleb Majadele for example.
Although this isn't relevant: Feel free to point out a Jewish minister in any Islamic country.
You really think he would know if they actually took out the warhead? The warhead is going to land a dozen kilometers downrange. Of course there was an explosion in the sky - they're shooting a missile up at it, you're pretty much guaranteed an explosion. The question is whether it worked.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
And Palestine's is 4B GDP. Yes, they're poor, but not *that* poor. They can afford to spot weld fins onto a piece of drainage pipe, drill holes into a bit of steel plate and spot weld it on, fill it with sugar and fertilizer, and attach onto the front end a hollow shell containing several kilos of smuggled or homemade explosives triggered by a bullet casing connected to a nail and a spring. That's literally all a Qassam rocket is.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
Israel was also forced onto a Palestinian people who had absolutely no say in the matter. Prior to 1948 there was no Israel. It has no right to exist beyond the Zionist belief that it should.
Israel is clearly and utterly wrong. It is a forced "solution" on a people who had no dog in the fight up to that point (1948). It is in violation of more UN resolutions than any other country, ever. It flagrantly flouts international law and is backed in that 100% by the US, who uses UN veto votes and aggressive diplomatic and ecopnomic threats against anyone who dares challenge the Israeli blueprint for the region.
Hamas is already supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, interesting bedfellows, honestly.
Range and accuracy don't really interest Hamas. If you read up on their rocket design it wouldn't take a college engineering student or rocketry hobbyist more than 10 minutes to improve their design. They're interested in keeping them simple and fast to build, as little skilled machining as possible. I'm sure reducing weight would get it a little further but it's still not going to hit the broad side of a city, and it was never intended to.
But we have one side ready for peaceful coexistence and the other side who wants only the total destruction of their enemies.
If you watch it for a few decades you will see the sides alternating, when Israel makes a peaceful move in conjunction with Fatah, Hamas retaliates with rockets. When Hamas declares and keeps a 2yr ceasefire, Israel lays the boots in. Israel does want a 2 state solution but only if they can veto who's running it, in the meantime they call it an occupation territory so that it doesn't screw up the demographics of a jewish state, similar to the way S.Africa denied the black a vote to keep their "white demographic" intact. Fatah has been widely seen as Israeli puppets by people in Gaza since the death of Arafat. The Israelis came close to a resolution with Arafat in the 90's but he backed out at the last minute over the "right of return", Arafat wasn't the only one punished because of that act of political disobedience.
The situation also has similarities with the British occupation of Ireland in the early 20th century, the Brits solved that mess in the 80's and 90's by talking the high moral ground of allowing full participation on the political side while simultaneously infiltrating the IRA and bringing members of the military wing to justice via criminal courts and local police. Trust has to start somewhere and Israel are supposed to be the grown up government in this equation.
Hamas cannot defeat Israel, from a purely militarily POV Hamas is a nuisance largely of Israel's and Egypt's own making. When will Isreali soldiers follow the lead of the Brits in 1980's N. Ireland and remove their riot helmets while on street patrol. Replace the live ammo with rubber, swap real cannons for water cannons, stop shifting the border, stop evicting people and bulldozing homes that have been occupied for centuries by the same family, bring your own extremist dogs to heal to show the palestinians how it's done.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
so the population of Gaza has grown from under 600k people when Israel first took over in 1967 to over 1.8 million today. Not a very successful genocide....the Nazi's actually managed to reduce the total population of Jews during their time in power.
I shouldn't even touch this discussion, but "genocide" is not the right word here. The Muslims are out-reproducing the Jews. In 2005 there were 1.2 million Muslims and 5.3 million Jews in Israel/Palestine. Now there are 1.65 million Muslims and 5.3 million Jews. That's a 45% increase in the Muslim population and a 14% increase in the Jewish population over the same period.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm not saying Israel should level the playing field. I'm saying people like you should not blame Hamas for doing what they have to do when they have no other choice.
Ofcourse they have other choices:
How about not shooting thousands of rockets into israel.
How about not stashing rockets in schools or building command bunkers under hospitals.
It's not like they are winning anyway.
Please stop throwing about the claim of "genocide". You're insulting all those that actually suffered through a real episode of genocide.
Read what I wrote again - iron dome doesn't have to be good enough to stop SCUDs to stop these things. Clear enough yet?
What exactly are they supposed to offer?
There's two concessions that would grease the wheels to allow peace to happen. Either Hamas is barred from any government capacity in Palestine or Hamas recognizes Israel's right to exist. Barring either of those concessions, any cease fire will only last until something else relights the powderkeg. You cannot negotiate with a party that doesn't recognize your existence unless you have leaders in that party that can see the forest for the trees like Anwar Sadat following the Yom Kippur War who was, incidentally, assassinated by Islamic jihadists for signing peace with Israel. That peace treaty also lead to Egypt getting kicked out of the Arab league until 1989.
Israel has demonstrated in the past that it wants peace. It has removed Israeli settlers from Gaza, forceibly. It returned the entire Sinai pennisula to Egypt once the peace treaty following the Yom Kippur War was concluded. However that requires that the other party will engage honestly in negotiations that are seeking lasting peace. I cannot honestly say that will ever occur with Hamas.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The Germans 'agreed' to a treaty for peace, but you can try and get Nazi treasure still if they stole them from you so this would seem to dispute the standard you claim.
Also only 47 years have passed since the '67 war.
...rather than the hate riddled Jewish/Palestinian arguments and comments that started with post 1?
Contrary to the reports in the media that Iron Dome has shot down 370 or so of the 2000 rockets, the system is significantly less effective - or so it would seem.
The article cites the relatively small size of the rockets, the small payload (10-20 pounds), lack of guidance control, and sparse population are the likely factor in the limited civilian deaths rather than the effectiveness of Iron Dome. Throw in the fact that these aren't exactly large targets to hit either, is it any wonder it misses?
Of possible factor is that Iron Dome, like CIWS onboard US ships, can determine which rockets actually pose a threat to civilians and not engage those rockets.
Sadly, people can be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As some one else posted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_%28group%29
Now I'd like an apology for calling me an antisemite please.
Israel did back out of the 2 state solution worked out with the PLO though which did contribute to this.
So many self hating Jews here joining up with the anti-Semites. Just what the Arabs and their English friends/terrorist sympathizers are aiming for. Going to be sad if we have to fight WWII again because nobody seems to read and understand history any longer.
How about the following;
1. Recognize Israel's right to exist
2. Stop shooting rockets across the border
3. Stop sending assassins over the border
4. Stop building tunnels under the border
5. Actively stop their people from attacking Israel.
Obviously the most important one is the first one. There can be no peace when one side is still trying to destroy the other.
Peaceful coexistence on Israel's terms. That's an interesting interpretation of peaceful coexistence.
jh
Amira Hass is an Israeli Arab, not a Jew like you say.
Gideon Levy is a Jew, but he's also a fringe anti-Zionist (yes, Israel has freedom of expression so such people can write newspaper columns. Doesn't mean the newspaper that publishes them will get many readers, and in fact Haaretz has had major financial difficulties in recent years)
And both of them argue the same thing in your quotes: "Palestinians have it so bad, how could anyone in their situation NOT try to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible?"
I'm sorry, but where I come from, there are NO excuses for intentionally killing civilians. Not because you didn't get a diplomatic agreement on the terms you want, not because someone is wrongly preventing you from farming your field, not because your cousin is in jail. NOTHING justifies war crimes.
Israel's pre-1960 borders? The ones were the West Bank belonged to Jordan and Gaza belonged to Egypt?
If it brought a real chance at peace, I believe Israel would agree to that. But Jordan doesn't want the West Bank anymore. Egypt doesn't want Gaza. Israel's pre-1960 borders still would not create a country called Palestine.
Jordan and Egypt don't want to deal with the Palestinian problem anymore than Israel does.
I have a hard time attacking the immigrants when they had to defend themselves from an Arab invasion literally THE DAY the Mandate expired. Nobody will accuse the Middle East of being tactful.
Since then, actions on both sides have been more and more regrettable.
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Bottom line it works. More than a thousand rockets, almost no deaths and injuries. Personally, I think israel is right not to publish details of how the system works, as doing so only gives technical information to Iran (and hence Hamas and Hezbollah and Syria and ISIS) and guidance on how to defeat the system - I mean would the US have published technical information about how successful sonar was at defeating submarines during WW II and how it worked, during the war? Of course not. Mr. Postol will just have to wait.
One define criteria for success however one wants to that something works or doesn't, but ijn this case the test seems pretty clear - number of dead and injured. And on this criteria, the system is a success.
As much as I have sympathy for the Israelis, their moral justification is gone and it isn't coming back, no more than the Ghengis Khan is going to make reparations to a large swath of the planet and regain the respect and sympathies of those whose families he slaughtered.
Is it fair that the moral high ground has left the hands of the Israelis? Probably not. Did it happen? Yes. Will they ever get it back? Not in any meaningful way.
For their own sake, it is time to move on. If their answer is to keep killing Arabs, I'd think even unconditional surrender and capitulation would be preferable to any group that is actually concerned about ethical action.
The Arabs are angry. They aren't going anywhere, and they don't like the rhetoric that has been thrown at them about being crammed into concentration camps. They remember genocide, and they aren't going back to having even more of their land annexed. The airstrikes and ground assaults will only increase the resolve of a people who have the history that the Palestinians have.
Peaceful protest did not work, especially with a country that embraces apartheid mentality like Israel does. Israel holds a hard line while rockets are shooting at their cities, and they quietly continue encroaching on Palestinian land whenever the rockets stop falling. Violence has been the only way the Palestinians have been able to preserve the integrity of their territory for 66 years, and that isn't going to change now.
The time for what is "just" has never existed. It is now time to do what we have always done. The bombs and rockets need to stop falling, and the political will to stop them simply does not exist in Israel. It's clear that the Palestinians would be subject to continually escalated injustice and land grabs by ending the struggle and bending over for the Israelis. If Israel persists in extremist settlements, as they have continually done for decades, particularly during peacetime, they will never lose the support of their chief ally, the United States. Painful as it would be, there is no military option for Palestine worth considering, but even the military option that is not worth considering is superior to the alternatives: demographic suicide as Arabs gain a majority, or official disenfranchisement of non-Jewish segments of the population.
See how that works? You're basically advocating that they just give up on life, abandon all hope, and tape their ass cheeks open for their Jewish masters. Probably about as offensive as someone suggesting that the Jews just save Hamas the trouble and go marching into the ocean on their own. If you could only take a minute to step back and see how intractable this disagreement is, you'd come to the same conclusion I did:
There's one solution that's guaranteed to shut these idiots up. Nuke Jerusalem. Hell, nuke the British Mandate of Palestine. All of it. A lot. Until it's below sea level. Of course, give plenty of advance notice. Even a year or two. There's no need to kill anyone. "Clear out, guys. We're nuking." Then if there's still some religious zealots that want to fight over their little corner of Biblical land, they can do so in wetsuits, and we won't have to hear about rockets and settlers anymore. When two kids aren't willing to share a toy, eventually their bickering gets annoying enough that the responsible adults just take away the fucking toy. The fact that my suggested solution doesn't draw much popular support is explained one of two ways: Either the conflict in the Middle East isn't sufficiently annoying yet, or we're not responsible adults.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I wonder... what if we borrowed Tel Aviv for a few decades, cleared out all the Israelis and instead filled it with the current residents of Camden, NJ, then forced them into ever-worsening poverty, then subjected them to airstrikes and ground assaults.... and then offered to return the territory to Israel?
Do you think Israel would want it back?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Are Palestinian Arabs a distinct ethnic group from those living a few miles away in e.g. Jordan? If not, calling it "genocide" seems about as accurate as the entire concept of racial superiority.
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There isn't anything right about Israel's ongoing program to cleanse and annex Palestine. Except that it is perpetrated by nice white looking folk of European descent verses mostly muslim brown arabs.
"Allowing farmers to work their land up to the fence"
That's code for "Allow Jihadists posing as farmers to dig a smuggling tunnel under the fence", right?
It has also probably killed more civilians than Hamas as its more powerful.
Wow, that's not wildly unsubstantiated or anything. Citation very much needed. Which side is the one that won't stop lobbing rockets over the border?
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The other choice that they "don't have" is not trying to wipe Israel off the map.
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As long as they keep firing rockets at people, using their own people as human shields, they might as well let Israel block humanitarian aid, because humanitarian aid isn't going to get through anyway.
What happens is that some of the stuff you mention will likely happen. No one is suggesting that the Israelis are saints here. It will take time for a peaceful solution to turn the tide. Is that worse than not only death, but decades of deaths that have been completely ineffectual?
The realization needs to be made that there will never be improvement while Hamas is shooting rockets at Israeli civilians. It is simply PR cover for hardliner Israeli politicians to keep circling the wagons.
You need a peaceful Israel that feels safe enough to not have to circle those wagons for them to purge the extremist elements that they can't quite get rid of now.
Palestine as a current state is the worst kind of place carved out of completely impractical considerations. It's a failed state before it even had a chance to succeed. It needs peace more than it needs anything else to even have a chance.
Hamas, is more like a gang that thrives from exploiting the misery and anger of its people more than it is an organization for freeing them. If Hamas was serious about protecting its people, it would unilaterally stop the rocket attacks and only use defensive measures, even if ineffectual. They *know* that the rocket attacks won't stop the Israeli reprisals, its just that they can only seem to respond to any crisis with violence, possibly because it is the only way they can maintain the backing of their supporters.
There is no war to be won here. Just constant bombing into the distant future. The Palestinians can't conquer their ground back, and the Israelis won't budge unless the Palestinians stop pretending that it is still 1949 and they have addresses in what is now Israel. The Israelis grabbed that land by right of conquest, and then defended it against all comers, pretty much like every conqueror before them. Israel is there to stay, and Palestine is a shithole that will only improve if they stop pretending and get on with their future.
This isn't the fair way for them to move forward, it's merely the only way they will move forward. Peace, even if unilateral, is the best option for the Palestinians as a people.
The Palestinians did try to make peace with Israel but Mossad assassinated the head negotiator during the negotiation process which resulted in the 2012 conflict eruption. In my opinion, Israel does not want the conflict to end, doing so would impact their settlement programs.
By your logic, it would be perfectly fine if Russia decided to invade Ukraine, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, *stan and annexed them back into the USSR. Or if China decided that it wanted Vietnam, Korea, Japan, etc. Or even if India decided it wanted to annex some more lands. With a combined effort between the three, they would be quite capable of annexing quite a bit of real estate without having USA or Europe being capable of helping their allies to prevent it.
so is israel going to recognize Palestine?
Because Jews and Christians in all those other Muslim countries totally aren't second-class citizens. Nope.
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Ah crap, replied to wrong comment.
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I challenge you to find a "left wing" US news outlet that asks Americans to reconsider if the war on Al-Qaeda is just. Hint: There is none. The fact that there are Israelis who are against the military action in Gaza shows that there are a lot more shades of gray in Israel attacking Gaza than there were in the US attacking Afghanistan.
Ah, a down mod after asking for an apology after being incorrectly insulted. Interesting.
Only if they're very stupid would they build the tunnel entrance visible from the other side. They'd be seen going in and out.
Are German Jews a distinct ethnic group from those living a few miles away in e.g. Palestine or Brooklyn? If not, calling it "genocide" seems about as accurate as the entire concept of Aryan Superiority.
Israel's ethnic cleansing is absolutely a genocide. They want to eliminate the Palestinians as a national group so there is no opposition to Israel annexing Palestinian land without the Palestinians. This plan is revealed by Israeli leaders words ("There is no such thing as a Palestinian") and Israel's actions over the last 50-70 years.
Cleansing land so you can annex it without undesirables is wrong. It is wrong to destroy people's capacity to make food and force them to the brink of starvation, cutting off their electricity, destroying their sewage systems, destroying or damaging nearly every house while preventing their repair, all so you can force the residents to get lost so you can come back and resume the colonization you tried for forty years.
Will Israel promise that if Hamas puts all its rocket launchers, military command and control, and military supplies neatly organised in easily identifiable military bases, Israel won't simply send a missile to figuratively cook all those eggs being put in one basket?
Sounds like there are only two options, protect your weapons at the expense of civilians or put them all in the same place where they can be taken out easily. Is this an intentional false dilemma or do you really believe that?
>You mean the boarders to the land occupied when those people invaded and tried to cut the country in half?
Who are "those people"? I doubt very much that the farmers on that land had the military might to attack Israel.
What the Arab states did in 1967 was wrong but that does not make it okay for Israel to treat the people of the occupied territories in the way that they have.
I can see two possible resolutions to the issue of the occupied territories:
* Absorb those territories into Israel and give the people living there Israeli citizenship and all the rights that come with it
* Allow the people living there to form their own nation and let them get on with it
Right now, Israel's actions do not point towards either of these approaches. They don't want the inhabitants of the occupied territories to become Israeli citizens but they keep taking more and more land from them in a way that makes it impossible for them form a viable nation.
Just to be clear, I don't think Israeli policy is the only problem (far from it). Several groups who claim to represent the palestinians (e.g. Hamas) are either criminal gangs or religious extremists who most definitely do not have the best interests of the people in mind. However, the best chance of a peaceful solution is the marginalisation of extremist groups and I don't think current Israeli policy is doing that. Grabbing land in the West Bank and collective punishment for the actions of the militants only drives support for them.
The British had Ireland for a lot longer than Israel has held the occupied territory and Ireland gained independence so think the Palestinians can as well.
Actually they dont buldoze anyone's home for settlements. They did used to settle unoccupied land but since 100 years ago muslim leaders feel that the land should be a muslim land and not some, western-like, liberal state. So they started violence for religious reasons. It has been a war since then. In the last 30 years there have not been a palestinian house destroyed so jews can live there. It is just butthurt for loosing the war they started and keep bringing it back.
How about the following;
1. Recognize Israel's right to exist
Obviously the most important one is the first one. There can be no peace when one side is still trying to destroy the other.
Well, since Israel doesn't recognize Palestine's right to exist, and is trying to destroy Hamas, there can be no peace as long as we continue to support Israel with its current policies.
Unprovoked? You really are deluded. When was the first rocket fired by Hamas? I'll tell you, it was on 28 June 2014.
I'm happy to inform you that you have been lied to by the media. The rockets are shot at Israel daily, just they are not reported because it is not news until we shoot back. In fact, Hamas killed a three year old girl with a rocket on 23 June 2014:
http://www.israelnationalnews....
Both Israelis _and_ Gazans live in fear of Hamas. Your media should have reported how Hamas took over Gaza in 2006, lining up and exectuting Fatah policemen with a bullet in the back of the head one by one as the policemen kneeled blindfolded. If memory serves me right, one mass grave had 47 bodies in it.
I'm posting anon because I don't have Lastpass yet installed on this new Kubuntu install. I'm this guy:
http://slashdot.org/~dotancohe...
Amira Hass [wikipedia.org] and Gideon Levy [wikipedia.org] are by no means unbiased reporters.
Okay, find me a biased American reporter who writes articles asking Americans to sympathize with Al-Qaeda. You won't, because no such reporter exists. That should be enough evidence to show that the Israeli attack on Gaza more morally ambiguous than the American attack on Afghanistan.
The swap which should never have been done as it rewards kidnappers.
Okay, maybe in your mind the prisoner swap was unjust. But it was still legally binding. By rearresting the prisoners, the Israeli government has violated its own laws and has clearly shown that Israeli law do not apply equally to Israelis and West Bankers. This only serves to add fuel to the fires of discontent that Hamas is trying to ignite. Seriously, what was Israel trying to accomplish with the rearrests?
So tunneling can be done without discovery.
You mean the tunnels that were built so that Gazans could smuggle in the fuel that they need to run their power plants and get enough electricity to power their desalinization plants so that they don't all die of thirst? These tunnels were not built for military purposes, and if Israel had not tried to convert Gaza into an "open air prison" with two closed borders no way out, they would have never been built in the first place. Then Hamas would not have pre-existing a tunnel network that it could easily expand into Israeli territory and Israel would have no need to further push the Gazans into destitution by shutting down their farms. First Israel removes Gaza's access to drinking water, and now its access to food. Tell me, who is trying to wipe who off the face of the earth?
Did the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian people do anything to catch the criminals?
Maybe the PLA would have caught the criminals if they had a real police force, but Israel will not allow them to maintain one. Likud doesn't want the PLA to have a police force capable of controlling the terrorists, because if they did, Israel would no longer have the excuse of occupying the West Bank for "security purposes." Besides, Abbas has already said that he supports the Israeli bombings in Gaza. (It is clear that he was strong armed into saying this, but if Israel could strong arm the PLA into that, they could have easily strong armed the Palestinian Police into searching for the criminals as well.)
According to this [bbc.com] it was Fatah that cut off the funds and not Israel.
Let's be real. For all intents and purposes, Fatah = Israeli military government 2.0. It is a sham. It is nothing but a thin veil over the same IDF-run government that has been in power in the West Bank since the 40s.
All this ignores the fact that Israel, in retaliation for the killings of the Israeli civilians has killed 600 Palestinians. One of the US generals involved in the initial invasion of Afghanistan (I don't remember exactly who -- Dunford maybe) said that the US has achieved the lowest rate of civilian deaths in any war in history. About 15% of people killed by US forces in the initial invasion were civilians. Let's say that the IDF matched this rate and that 85% of the Palestinian deaths are Hamas and 15% are civilians. (Highly unlikely considering the dense urban environment of Gaza, but let's just assume this.) Then ninety Palestinian civilians are dead. Ninety for three. Gaza is a meat grinder right now. Israel has "warned" the civilians to leave, but the Egyptian border is closed, so where can they go? And the fact that the IDF is undertaking this action so close the the Palestinian General elections.... They are trying to send a message to West Bankers: This is what will happen to you if you vote for Hamas. This is what we will do to you. Some democracy those West Bankers have, eh?
Israel's ethnic cleansing is absolutely a genocide. They want to eliminate the Palestinians as a national group
Beg pardon? Ethnicity and nationality are two very different things. You can't call it ethnic cleansing if it isn't targeting an ethnicity. Google calls genocide "the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation." So ethnic cleansing and national cleansing are both subsets of genocide (then you get into fun terminology twists like "religious vs. ethnic Jews"). For them to be the same thing requires that all the inhabitants of the country are the same ethnicity, and no significant populations of that ethnicity exist outside the country either.
Labeling it "genocide" supposes that the motivation of Israeli killing Palestinians is to wipe out the Palestinians as a group (can you have an "accidental genocide?"). I would think that their goal is instead to keep them suppressed so as to minimize their ability to hurt them (Israel), NOT to wipe them out. Although of course you will probably find hardliners in the population that think they *should* just wipe them all out.
Sorry about the pedantic hair-splitting, but this argument looks like it's swiftly degenerated into name-calling and moderation swing, so I'm trying to bring a little objective definition to the discussion.
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If Israel is not willing to do the above, then don't complain when Hamas have to improvise just to have a fighting chance of defending themselves.
Two points: First, their improvisations are war crimes; second, Hamas are the aggressor. This is not particularly complicated.
Israel blockaded Gaza right after Hamas won the elections. A blockade is an act of war. It's an attack. Hamas is fighting back against Israel's attacks in one of the few, inadequate ways open to them. If you don't like it, stop the blockade.
The Nazis blockaded the Warsaw Ghetto. The ghetto militants also fought back with futile measures.
The Nazis said that for every German soldier murdered, they would kill 20 Jews. I read Ringelblum's Warsaw Ghetto diaries. The similarity to Gaza is striking.
Could you point me in the direction of the statistics you are citing that show a skew towards males aged 18-38 in Palestinian death statistics? A bit of googing didn't turn up any death statistics broken down by age, either historical or relating specifically to the current Israeli actions in Gaza.
The United Nations has stated that 80% of Palestinians killed in the current offensive were civilians:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10967279/UN-80-per-cent-of-Palestinians-killed-in-Israeli-offensive-are-civilians.html
This quote would not seem to indicate the kind of skew that you are claiming:
"Of 160 deaths that had occurred by Sunday, 133 – 80 per cent – had been among Gaza's civilian population, OCHA said, including 35 children and 27 women. Only 26 were established to have belonged to "armed groups" while the status of another nine men was unverified."
Nope. Imho Israelis would welcome US occupation. Rule of law. Constitution. Separation of church and state. No draft. Representative democracy. Land as private property. They will produce their way out of poverty and buy the damn land back. Jews are doing well in all free countries. The problem of militant islam will still exist and dear NJ folk will have to deal with it
Gee, are German and Polish Jews an ethnicity or a nationality? Who gives a a fuck? Only genocidal pieces of shit... Israel is trying to drive these people out so their land can be annexed and settled with some other group of people and you're "splitting hairs." Ethnic cleansing ahoy!
Really? You're going to try and pull that stunt? This territory was a well settled part of several empires starting with Rome. The idea that the people that happened to reside there in 1940 had "American Indian" notions of land ownership is absurd and assinine.
These people were former subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In a word, yes. Where in recent history has Israel stated their desire to eradicate Palestine?
There are still groups whose sworn goal is the total destruction of Israel and yet people complain about Israel stealing houses. I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder.
You conveniently ignored the part where I said I really doubt Israel's goal is genocide.
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> Israel's ethnic cleansing is absolutely a genocide.
There is no such thing.
Otherwise, there simply would not be any Palestinians left by now. The problem would have been sorted out by simply having exterminated everyone from the occupied territories.
THAT is what genocide is.
Don't use terms you clearly don't understand.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It seems to work just fine. It successfully transfers US funds to several Israeli contractors for a product that they hope to market to other nations.
Care to back that up with any references to recent statement about Israel not recognizing Palestine's right to exist? Here is evidence counter to that argument. As for Hamas, destroying an organization who's main stated goal is the destruction of one's country seems to be a prudent thing to do. If Hamas get what it wants Israel will not exist. If Israel gets what it wants Israel and Palestine will exist.
I'm curious as to what defines 'civilian' in this. I'm not entirely sure that just because someone is not in uniform would classify them as civilian. I don't think there is a standard terrorist uniform.
He means day one of Hamas' existence, silly. It's p. obvious that's what he meant.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I'm not morally judging actions, I'm legally judging actions. Hamas is deliberately and systematically committing war crimes as defined by international law.
Great, you want to judge both sides impartially by international law, let's judge them by international law.
1. Settlements beyond the 1967 borders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Legal opinion on settlements in the occupied territories
In the late 1960s, Meron was legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and wrote a secret 1967 memo[17] [18] [19] for Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who was considering creating an Israeli settlement at Kfar Etzion. This was just after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Meron's memo concluded that creating new settlements in the Occupied Territories would be a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Eshkol went ahead to create the settlement anyway, and therefore set the conditions which began the Movement for Greater Israel and Israel's settlement enterprise.
2. Killing non-combatants
From the Goldstone Report:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...
773. At about 12.50 p.m., Khalid Abd Rabbo, his wife Kawthar, their three daughters, Souad (aged 9), Samar (aged 5) and Amal (aged 3), and his mother, Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo, stepped out of the house, all of them carrying white flags. Less than 10 metres from the door was a tank, turned towards their house. Two soldiers were sitting on top of it having a snack (one was eating chips, the other chocolate, according to one of the witnesses). The family stood still, waiting for orders from the soldiers as to what they should do, but none was given. Without warning, a third soldier emerged from inside the tank and started shooting at the three girls and then also at their grandmother. Several bullets hit Souad in the chest, Amal in the stomach and Samar in the back. Hajja Souad was hit in the lower back and in the left arm.
[The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. The Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible.]
After the first Gaza war, Israeli government lawyers warned top officials not to travel in certain parts of Europe, because they might be arrested for violating the Geneva Conventions. A lot of them were shooting their mouths off with customary Israeli arrogance about "making them suffer" because they had elected Hamas, and using "overwhelming force".
It has also probably killed more civilians than Hamas as its more powerful.
Wow, that's not wildly unsubstantiated or anything. Citation very much needed. Which side is the one that won't stop lobbing rockets over the border?
Its substantiated by historical precedence. Look at the large number of civilians killed in Iraq & Afghanistan and I don't think they where deliberately killing them.
Hamas as a recent organisation with far more limited resource just hasn't had the capacity or time to kill as many.
I think if offered the chance Hamas might well go on a genocidal rampage but they haven't had the opportunity.
Why then the comment? It was intended to offer a question of the proportionality of response in the harm caused vs the harm prevented. Unfortunately on specific points I can't easily tell what the truth is so I bought up the general topic.
I do think Hamas are a full of killers & wankers, please don't mistake that.
Even Egypt doesn't want to deal with these people. That's why the Egyptian side of the Gaza strip is also closed.
From their point of view, Gaza is full of the same kind of nutbags that they just got done deposing.
Jordan and Egypt both could probably end this mess tomorrow by claiming the respective territories bordering their countries. They don't want the Palestinians anymore than anyone else does.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
clear you're a troll who likes to start arguments over nothing
respond again and I will actually take the time to email the moderators and report you
Thank you Dave Raggett
I didn't object to that statement for being nonfactual so much as coming off as very sloppy research and implying a general carelessness for the topic that I'm sure all those involved would find incredibly offensive. The rest of your points sound pretty reasonable so I'll assume you probably didn't mean it that way.
There's obviously more than enough blame to go around, unfortunately.
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The victims hatred of their oppressor isn't a good reason to continue ethnic cleansing. Are the Palestinians not human beings who shouldn't be chased away by a nuclear armed state so the land can be settled by a different group of people? I guess you're with Naftali Bennett in that you think the Palestinians have brought their genocide upon themselves.
Okay, find me a biased American reporter who writes articles asking Americans to sympathize with Al-Qaeda.
Maybe he is not a reporter but this guy is an American on al-Qaeda's side.
That should be enough evidence to show that the Israeli attack on Gaza more morally ambiguous than the American attack on Afghanistan.
Sorry but the opinions if two biased people don't make what they say true.
Okay, maybe in your mind the prisoner swap was unjust. But it was still legally binding.
It is common law that any contract signed under duress is null and void. I would say "Sign or we keep your soldier" would be considered duress.
You mean the tunnels that were built so that Gazans could smuggle in the fuel ...
And arms and rockets into Gaza. They will also be used, as Hamas has stated and is doing now, to strike at Israel.
Abbas has already said that he supports the Israeli bombings in Gaza
Do you have any reference for this statement?
Maybe the PLA would have caught the criminals if they had a real police force, but Israel will not allow them to maintain one.
Did you even look at the date of that report? That happened twenty years ago. Things have changed.
Fatah = Israeli military government 2.0.
So if Fatah is a sham then any coalition between Hamas and Fatah is also a sham. You can not have it both ways.
Israel has "warned" the civilians to leave, but the Egyptian border is closed, so where can they go?
They have not been told to leave all of the Gaza Strip. They have been told to leave certain areas where operations will be held. Operations outside those areas are in direct retaliation to Hamas rocket attacks. Maybe Hamas should stop using their own people and human shields?
Then ninety Palestinian civilians are dead. Ninety for three.
It is not just about the deaths of 3 Israelis. It is also about the launching of rockets into Israel. While they cause few deaths they cause great terror. Would you feel safe if at any moment a rocket or mortar round could fall out of the sky and kill you? Read this for some perspective. It is like poking a bear. If Hamas pokes Israel enough times with rockets and terrorist attacks they will be swatted by the IDF.
This is what will happen to you if you vote for Hamas. This is what we will do to you. Some democracy those West Bankers have, eh?
I see no problem with that. If the Palestinians vote for Hamas they are voting for more rocket attacks and more Israeli retaliation. If they vote for a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel they deserve to bear the consequences of that vote. Showing those consequences is not a bad thing.
how did this happen?
http://abcnews.go.com/Internat...
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
No, I think it's rather different, but yes, I do think a semi-nomadic people like the bedouins have a rather different view. Given the land rights they had dated back to the Ottoman era, and were widely ignored, they're probably right not to believe in land ownership.
jh
I agree, as long as you bar from the israeli government all the jewish fundamentalists
I don't think civilians are defined, just soldiers. I believe that under the Geneva convention a soldier has to be part of a force with a uniform that can met out discipline and control its members.
IANAL of course
Yes, I wondered about the cost disparity in the recent drone shoot down.
Limiting the supply of rockets and shooting at those that remain coupled with civil defense seems to be working.
An alternative strategy might be to send return fire to the launch site within seconds.
If it was a near certainty that the launch site would blow up soon after a launch,
it seems like the folks doing the launch would become fairly unpopular.
Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. -Matthew 26:52
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They will produce their way out of poverty and buy the damn land back.
You've apparently never been to Camden. These people have failed to produce their way out of poverty for decades. Hint: they're not Jews.
Also, you're an asshole. Jews are doing well in all free countries, so that's why the Palestinians in Gaza are so poor? It's because they're not Jews? It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they're living in a concentration camp? Non sequitur much?
Cue cries of "These people?!?! These people?!?!"
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Israel doesn't seem to recognize the existence of a Palestinian country or a Palestinian people.
Which kind of makes it a moot point in the discussion, if you ask me.
Both sides also have censorship and both sides have strong political forces that need 'an enemy' to stay in power.
no apology required because there was no actual insult, as the term "antisemite" has long been rendered meaningless by the sheer abuse by israeli propaganda. calling you "antisemite" is the same as calling you "terrorist". you can't possibly feel insulted by that because media has shown that anyone can be called that without the slightest ground. next time any zionist stooge calls you "antisemite" just politely ask him to explain it with other words, because you don't know what "antisemitism" means, and even less so in the context of the current discussion.
it's a downside of language perversion: vocabulary erodes slowly away.
I do wonder why they had to go into Gaza to destroy the tunnels though. Wouldn't destroying them from the other end be easier as Egypt seems more friendly to such things atm. and if its the ones in Israel that should be even easier.
If this is the case, it is amazing that the civilian casualty rate is what it is. Israel HAS been doing as much as possible to reduce civilian casualties then.
The UN partly created this problem, the UN needs to solve the refugee crisis which is the Palestinian people, regardless of what their "leadership's" ideas are about changing history.
In 1922, the League of Nations gave Britain the "Mandate for Palestine."
Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
The World Zionist Organization lobbied the British Government heavily and so Israel in Palestine was created,
despite previous promises that Palestine would become and independent Arab State.
And this is all the UN's problem for insisting on 1967 borders?
What performance characteristics make a rocket defense effective? To successfully intercept an artillery rocket of the type Hamas has been firing, an Iron Dome interceptor must destroy the warhead on the front end of the rocket. If the Iron Dome interceptor instead hits the back end of the target rocket, it will merely damage the expended rocket motor tube, basically an empty pipe, and have essentially no effect on the outcome of the engagement. The pieces of the rocket will still fall in the defended area; the warhead will almost certainly go on to the ground and explode."
tl;dr: Terminal intercept is hard. This is something we already know. For boost-phase or midcourse intercepts, however, destroying the rocket booster is more than enough to screw up the warhead's ballistic trajectory, bringing it down well short of the mark (entire cities) where they explode harmlessly in the wilderness. Unfortunately, after a half-hour of searching Google, I was unable to find any concrete data or information on the common intercept profiles of Iron Dome launches, the interceptor missiles capabilities, or likewise. One of the best civilian sources (i.e. people who sell technical information on military weapons to journalists, like Janes,) globalsecurity.org, has a sparse article long on general information and completely lacking hard data or numbers. This indicates to me that the data is simply highly classified and not being published, which makes perfect sense for a new defense system currently being employed against attackers who are actively adapting to it.
This means that, in addition to the ratio of boost-phase/midcourse/terminal intercepts Postol is making very free assumptions about the interceptor's warhead weight, their blast profile, the composition, density and thickness of their fragmentation jackets, density of the resulting fragmentation cloud, the exact range, detonation parameters and capabilities of the proximity fusing systems and the position of the Iron Dome batteries vis-a-vis the launch sites. If interceptors are indeed making frequent "tail chases," this would imply the rockets are flying over the batteries on their way to their targets, and the rockets are in fact performing mid-course intercepts - if they were located near the target area, intercepts would much more frequently be coming in from the front quarter. The latter is highly undesirable because (as Postel notes) its much harder to guarantee a "hard kill" of a warhead as opposed to simply shooting down the entire vehicle, but also because the combined closing speed of front-quarter intercepts drastically reduces the interception window, and thus accurate intercepts. The more time the interceptor has to track the target, compute solutions and make course-corrections, the better its chances of getting as close to the mark as possible.
Finally - and this should go without saying - Postel's entire argument is predicated on (apparently) a handful of contrail pictures with no context, frame-of-reference, or further data, this appears to constitute his "proof." If he has, in truth, analyzed gazillions of contrail images, then he should be presenting his portfolio of images, each one with as much contextual data as is available, along with his analysis. This is what actual, paid military analysts who know what they're doing would do, and indeed what most scientists know to do - document, document, document. If Postel wishes to idly theorize, then by all means, let him theorize: but to post such drivel as an actual argument is an insult to anybody with half a fucking brain.
Seriously? Twitter? Even if your link really lead to an accusation of a strike on hospital (which it does not), would it have been credible? How about a more reliable source? Oh, sorry, you can't use that, because that page begins with Israel's explanation: "The Israeli military said it had targeted a cache of anti-tank missiles in the hospital's "immediate vicinity".
And we know very well, from sources both impartial and even those biased towards the Arabs, that Hamas does use such civilian buildings for weapons-caches.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You left out the best part of the Hamas founding document, where they establish extermination of Israeli Jews as their official policy.
Yes, it is universally considered *very* peaceful to *steal land* and *build settlements* on the land of the people you're negotiating with.
I suppose that running a years-long economic blockade could be considered "peaceful coexistence" if ghettoizing your declared enemy is part of your world view. (Oh, we know, we know... it's all to prevent rocket-making materiel from entering Gaza. It's just so, so convenient that choking the flow *all* materials but the most basic stops missile-building (which it doesn't).
People believe whatever they want to believe and call it "truth."
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Before the 2 state solution with the PLO neither recognised the other.
- The ad says, you offer a quest, said Halfelf to the Mayor. But it does not explain, what sort of quest. Could you clarify? ... And send in troops, - gloomily added the Mayor.
- It is really simple - shrugged the Mayor. See that hill? There is a goblin on top of it with a grenade-launcher. Periodically he begins shooting at the town. That's, basically, the problem...
- Ok, understood. We must kill the goblin...
- Oh, no! Mayor's eyes widened and he started waving his hands. He can must not be killed under any circumstances!
- Why? - asked Gnome? He is a goblin!
- That's just it! If we kill him, the world community will say, it was genocide and we are all racists.
- So what? Let them whatever...
-
- Khm... - thought Halfelf aloud - So, this shithead shoots at you from a grenade-launcher, and you tolerate it and would not hit back?
- Right, admitted the Mayor. Otherwise, we'll be called "aggressors".
- Alright, how about, perhaps, not kill him, but push him out some place far?
- From his hill? Impossible! Then they'll call us "occupiers".
- Catch him and take the grenade-launcher away?
- "Expropriators".
- Lock him up together with the weapon?.. Ok, Ok, don't answer, - quickly added Halfelf, when the Mayor started opening his mouth. - I understand. An interesting case indeed.
- So, what do you want from us? - asked the Princess? Can't kill him, can't disarm him, can't be chased away either — what's left? Counsel him? That's not what we do...
- Oh, no... For counseling we would've called for a psychiatrist. But then, by the way, the world community would've accused us of applying psychological pressure.
- And defiling the ancient traditions, - added Gnome, nodding his head. - Shooting at people from a grenade-launcher is part of goblins' traditional pastimes!
- Yes, yes - said the Mayor, - no you understand.
- So, what do you want from us? - asked the Princess again?
- Deliver a parcel to him, - sighed the Mayor.
- To whom? The goblin?
- Yeah. You see, up there on the hill, there is not much food. In about an hour he'll get hungry, announce a cease-fire and begin negotiations. He does that every day. Demands food, wine, weapons, sometimes other things. And then, we eats his full, proclaims, that the negotiations are at a dead-end and he is forced to resume fire. The world community is very sympathetic — they consider him very principled.
- And if you decline to bring him food?..
- Then they'll say, that...
- Ok, ok, we get it, - Poluelf waved his hands. So, why do you need us — why not send your own?
- We have — none came back...
- What? Did goblin kill them all?
- He claims, he did not.
- Huh?..
- And the world community believes him.
- Erm...
- Then they'll accuse us of provocations. You see, it is he, the goblin, who demonstrates peaceful initiative. It is his gesture of good will. If anything went wrong, it can only be our fault. It is obvious... But you are foreigners, maybe, he will not touch you.
- Ok, - summarized Halfelf. - If we shred the political wrappings, we must take the parcel from the customer and deliver it to client, right? A usual mail-quest. And everything else is your own problem. Right?
- Right, - confirmed the Mayor, - agreed?
- One question, - Princess raised her hand. You are so afraid, that the world community will call you "aggressors", "militarists", and worse — what are they calling you now?
- "Idiots," - answered the Mayor with sadness.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
LOL. Gotta love all these self proclaimed "Experts":
Physicist Theodore (Ted) Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT, said that Iron Dome is flawed and "has a success rate of less than 5 percent", and that "the primary reasons for fewer casualties in Israel are the abundance of shelters nearby and the early warning system."
But if anything is flawed, it's his logic and fact checking. For example, very few HAMAS missiles hit buildings or shelters. Most missiles that were not intercepted hit open spaces. Also, Israelis have a fraction of the warning time Palestinians have. Israelis only get a 15 second warning from the siren system while Israel has been giving Palestinians 5 minute warning "knocks" to evacuate the target buildings.
The Israeli Institute of National Security Studies published a detailed reply to MIT Professor Ted Postol's claim about the "ineffectiveness of the Iron Dome", labeling it "dubious research without access to credible data."
The New York Times reported July 9 that Israel "has said that the [Iron Dome] system has a success rate of nearly 90 percent in intercepting the missiles it is meant to thwart."
An interception makes a much bigger bang due to a direct line of sight. Tel Aviv has many buildings and a rocket that actually lands would dampen that noise considerably. In a a couple of cases I even saw the smoke in the sky from the interceptions.It works rather well for those specific type of amateurish rockets. Maybe its a placebo but Tel Aviv is a very dense city, if they fired that many rockets (and I heard a lot of explosions) they should have killed quite a few people or at least demolished some cars. I heard of only one incident (in Tel Aviv) where a car was damaged and that was when a rocket hit a gas station.
So the author should probably fly over here and inspect the data in person, field work. Its not as risky as it sounds.
To date Israel has not shown any proof whatsoever that Hamas was in any way involved in the kidnapping.
Of course not, it's all a conspiracy to distract the world from the Ukranian -Dutch plot to infect Moscow with the Z virus via their zombie plane, which collapsed under their incompetence when they shot their own airliner down while trying to assassinate Putin who had just thwarted a Jovian space manta ray invasion. Some of you people are really gullible.
The landowners sold them before the end of the mandate. They had standings because their property was recognized by the previous state that had sovereignty over the land: the Ottoman empire then by the British empire who had a mandate over the land.
It's as stupid as asking Hamas to put their armaments in military installations where Israel can destroy them as easily as stealing candy from a baby.
If a skilled boxer deliberately but not-criminally insults and bumps into me, saying "what are you gonna do?" and I then take a (provoked) swing at him, I'm going to get my ass beat. That doesn't make it right for him to provoke, but his being ethically/morally wrong doesn't change the outcome.
If I really want to play in the NBA/NHL/FIFA/whatever, but I can't even run a mile because I only have one leg, or no cardio ability, I'm not going to get what I want.
The Palestinians are a bunch of poor people that NO ONE in that region wants. The Islamist use them as a media weapon against Israel and Israel is a landlord who wants the rent-controlled people out of the building. Europe goes "tsk tsk religious people" or tsk tsk "Muslims" if they're religious and otherwise ignores it when they can, and Asia... Asia has its own issues and couldn't care less other than to say "tsk tsk non Asian people"
The Palestinians, quite frankly, are the geo-political equivalent of 40 acres and a mule wannabes or a buggy whip union protesting outside a Tesla plant. Maybe you should have gotten a better deal, but you didn't. The Lenape Tribe of Native Americans are not getting Penthouse condos in NYC, and the Palestinians aren't getting control of Jerusalem. Even if Israel was pushed into the sea, Egypt/Jordan and, forgive my American lack of geographic knowledge, any other country in the area desiring a new port/pipeline would push the surviving Palestinians into yet another ghetto.
God, anytime someone says "world Zionist organization" you know it's a nut job from the Middle East who hates the west unless he is getting handouts, and is more than likely too busy to give a further reply because he is on his way out to kill his sister to defend his families honor.
Vomit.
Agreed.
How dare the Israelis not die when we try to kill them!
Um, it's pretty well documented by the British and at the UN, in their reports of the Stern Gang terrorism. Avram "Yair" Stern - who is pretty unequivocally one of the founders of modern Israel - blew up British military vehicles and bases, sabotaged rail lines, shot at trains, blew up a mine, destroyed international telegraph lines, attacked police stations, and robbed banks. His Lehi fanatics were completely unconcerned about civilian casualties (including any Jews who did not support them) and willing to ally with any military power that would send them weapons, including the Nazis.
This is all a matter of record and the state of Israel does not contest any of it; so why are you claiming otherwise?
The USA has terrorists among our founders, too. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys come to mind... although I guess they weren't in the same league as Stern.
Yes, I do. Funny enough, the only thing Arabs hated more than Palestinians was the Jews... So this worked out well for most Arab countries.
Maybe he is not a reporter but this guy [nydailynews.com] is an American on al-Qaeda's side.
There is a huge difference between a fundamentalist terrorist nut and two law-abiding respected citizens of a nation that write for a major news outlet. I can't believe I have to explain that. This is your best counterexample? Really?
Sorry but the opinions if two biased people don't make what they say true.
Sure, they are "biased." And in my opinion, you are "biased." You can't just dismiss someone else's opinion as biased; you have to prove why it is wrong. Besides, if there is anyone who is likely to be biased in favor of a nation on the international stage, it would be two people who are residents of said nation.
They have not been told to leave all of the Gaza Strip. They have been told to leave certain areas where operations will be held.
I assume you are referring to knock on the roof warnings? Read this:
You go to your mosque for daily prayer. No one warns you because the mosque itself is not the target for a bombing, but as you exit the mosque, you are killed by shrapnel from the next building. If you can be killed in this way, it is clear that remaining in Gaza is not safe. You cannot always avoid the places that will be bombed because you do not always know the places that will be bombed. The only safe thing would be to leave the city entirely. If the IDF really cared about minimizing civilian casualties, they would have allowed this. But they did not want to allow Hamas agents to slip into Egypt, so civilians be damned. Strategically, it would be better to strike empty military infrastructure in an abandoned city than what is happening now. Sure, because the IDF did not allow evactuation, 200 Hamas fighters are dead, but 200 is not enough to put a stopper on Hamas or even to inconvenience them very much.
So if Fatah is a sham then any coalition between Hamas and Fatah is also a sham. You can not have it both ways.
I never said anything about a coalition between Hamas and Fatah, but I agree. Any coalition between Hamas and Fatah is also a sham. The Palestinians don't have any "real" options on the table. They have a sham government (Fatah) or terrorists (Hamas). Israel allowed Palestinians to have a real option, they wouldn't vote for Hamas.
It is common law that any contract signed under duress is null and void. I would say "Sign or we keep your soldier" would be considered duress.
Then you have a very poor understanding of common law. Duress applies to individuals, not to governments. If the Palestinians has Netanyahu locked in a room with a gun to his head and said "sign this or we will kill you," that would have been null and void over duress. But when two countries are meeting at a civilized dialogue over a prisoner exchange, it is pretty much understood that not signing the agreement means that both sides will keep their prisoners. I mean are kidding me? Threatening to keep hold of a pris
The landowners sold them before the end of the mandate. They had standings because their property was recognized by the previous state that had sovereignty over the land: the Ottoman empire then by the British empire who had a mandate over the land.
At that point there wasn't a state of Israel to sell it to and when individuals sell land to each other it doesn't involve a change in nationality.
stop trying to occupy Israel, stop trying to steal Jewish land, stop trying to expell the Jews "into the sea" etc.
The Arab and Muslim polulations of the world have 99% of the land in the middle east but they cannot have peaceful and successful societies without that little sliver of land that holds the one Holy site of the Jewish faith. The whole world proved only 60 years ago that they Jews will only ever be truly safe in their own nation, and they have that nation now on the land that was their land centuries before Islam even existed - but SOMEHOW that little bit of soil is the only place where a subset of the Arab/Lebanese/Jordanian/Egyptian/Muslim population can live and they need it ALL (the Palestinans and nearly every neigboring nation went to war against the Jews rather than share the land in a "two-state solution" decades ago).
I will develop some smattering of sympathy for the Palestinan civilians when they disassociate themselves from Hamas and Hezbollah and their stated goals to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. I will develop more sympathy for them when they allow at least as much freedom for people in their society to freely practice any religion of their choice as the state of Israel permits within its borders, and as much freedom for women as Israel provides to women. Until that time, Palestinians get EXACTLY as much sympathy from me as NAZI civilians in WWII germany - they've been raining rockets on the civilian population of Israel so they deserve the same carpetting of their cities by firebombs that Dresden got from Britain and ANYTHING less than that by Israel is downright merciful.
It's not the Israelis who are blocking the border crossing into Egypt. Which is one the problems overlooked in the media: even other Arab states, like Jordan and Egypt, won't allow Palestinians to immigrate.
First, drop the "World Zionist Organization" crap - you just outed yourself as [1] a rabid muslim fanatic the civilzed world should keep an eye on, or [2] a nutjob Klansman/"White Supremacist" who is such an ignorant fool he thinks it makes sense to pretend to be defending a Christian society (which, not being actually personally religious, he thinks means a "white society") while hating Jews (not noticing that Jesus was a Jew), or [3] wear tin foil hats and spends his time worrying about the Queen of England, the Freemasons, the Rothschilds and the Bilderbergs.
Second, Who gave the British the right to promise ANYTHING in the middle east to ANYBODY???? Most of the lines the Brits drew in the sands of the middle east had disasterous results as they (a civilized NATION) tried to draw national boundaries and give national identities to backward primitive tribal barbarians.
Third, There WAS no promise that the whole region would go to the "Palestinians" as they are called today; partly because the Jews were also promised lands there and partly also because it was common at the time to also refer to Jews living in the British-controlled areas as residents of "Palestine" just as the non-Jews there.
Anybody who tries to declare Israel to be in some way illegitimate because of its recent historical roots (being re-established by westerners, primarily Britain, drawing lines on a map) must ALSO agree that Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabai are also all illegitimate since all of these nations were similarly carved-out by British cartographers and diplomats.
Hamas wants Israel destroyed because the creation of Israel destroyed Palestine. There is no simple right/wrong or good/evil here. Israel keeps confiscating more land and shows no signs of stopping until Gaza and The West Bank are under their control. Both sides are fighting incursion but only one side has international support.
The Zionists chose Palestine and the UN went along with that choice. How would we feel if the UN instead had carved out ½ of New York City, or Paris or Vatican City and gave it to the Jews as a homeland? There would be outrage and retaliation for generations. Sound familiar?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
You could swap "Israel" and "Hamas" in your list, and have the exact same list of arguments.
Meanwhile, Israel is isolating itself internationally, committing war crimes right and left, and showing to Muslims worldwide that they are assholes. I'm not denying that Hamas are assholes too, but seeing Israel's excessive use of force (and mass-punishment) Israel will be the loser of this conflict (just like last time...).
Personally, I believe Hamas or any other terrorist organisation will not destroy Israel. Israel will destroy itself instead.
Israel has never shown themselves to be ready for peaceful coexistence (and neither has Hamas).
This article is quite relevant to the above claim...
Israel has, for decades, been willing to recognize a "Palestinan state" and has made that commitment in writing many times. They were willing to right from the start of the modern state on Israel in 1948 and they have been as part of EVERY negotiation of the past 60+ years. The Palestinans have NEVER recognized the right of Israle to exist as a Jewish state IN WRITING. The problem you so cleverly mask with your dishonest rhetoric is that the Palestinains of Hamas and Hezbollah define "Palestine" as ALL the land currently in Gaza, the West Bank, AND ISRAEL (which is why the entire region is marked on their maps and flags as "Palestine"). By THAT dishonest definition, the Jew-haters lie to ignorant westerners compaining that Israel refuses to accept "Palestine" (in other words: "the Jews refuse to all die or move to Germany and Poland"). The second deceitful tactic the Palestinains use (but which you did not use) is to say they MIGHT accept a future state of Israel (while refusing to accept that it would be a Jewish state) as long as there is a "right of return" .... by which they mean "you can draw lines on a map and call the area Israel, but we retain the right to flood it with Arab Muslim immigrants and replace the Jewish population with a Muslim one (so that it becomes as illusory as Hobbiton)
There's a simple set of facts here: Israel pulled out of the Gaza, uprooting their citizens from their homes and leaving lots of infrastructure behind. After they left, the Palestinians COULD have used the area to build a new thriving modern society with freedom for all its residents thereby proving that a future Palestinain nation would be a trusted and peaceful place (they could similarly have been productive in the West Bank). The Palestinians, however, chose to elect the terrorists of Hamas to run their Gaza affairs and THEY in-turn used money and construction resources to buy weapons and build bunkers and tunnels for waging war against the Jews. Now, after watching Gaza used as a launchpad for THOUSANDS of rockets AIMED AT CIVILIANS, Israel has had to send troops back into the Gaza. Hamas and the Palestinans of Gaza built nothing of value, and Hamas curried favor with its Iranian pay-masters by preparing the Gaza to be the expendable forward weapons site that would (along with its "human shield" civilians) be sacrificed as a suicidal "second front" in any future war between Israel and Iran.
Every rocket Hamas fires and every tunnel it built was a re-direction of resources that could instead have been money for food, medicine, housing, schools, etc for Palestinians in the Gaza. If the Palestinians preferred to use their resources poking a tiger in the eye, then they deserve the inevitable mauling they get.
I am not the only one who see Arima Hass as biased.
Andrea Levin, executive director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting said the newspaper was doing "damage to the truth" and sometimes making serious factual errors but not often correcting them. Earlier, in 2001, Levin criticized Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass for inaccurate reporting and said that Haaretz is fueling anti-Israel bias.
Gideon Levy also has his detractors.
Sorry but the words of two propagandists do not carry no more weight than a terrorist.
Israel allowed Palestinians to have a real option, they wouldn't vote for Hamas.
How is Israel stopping the Palistinians from forming a viable perty that is not Hamas or Fatah. The Palestinians are not children to be controlled by Israel.
You cannot always avoid the places that will be bombed because you do not always know the places that will be bombed.
Israel does not bomb areas randomly. They bomb areas where missiles are being launched from. As I said, perhaps Hamas should cease trying to youe civilians as human shields for their launchers.
That is exactly what is happening in Egypt right now,
That is a completely different situation. The government that Israel is trying to not allow into power is trying to destroy Israel. That is completely different than a government intimidating their own people to stay in power.
You totally missed my point. Sure, those tunnels are being used to funnel rockets into Gaza now but they were originally built because the residents of Gaza were literally dying of thirst
No, I didn't believe your point. Show me anything to support that position. I think that the tunnels were built from the start to circumvent the blockade of arms into Gaza. That they are also used to bring in supplies is secondary.
In no circumstance is it okay to seek vengeance for the crimes of a government by attacking its people.
Since those people continually voted that government into power it is no longer just the crimes of the government. It becomes the crimes of the people as well.
if the Israeli government hadn't forced Palestinians to stick to three "Safe Passages" while allowing Israelis to wander the West Bank as they please,
Israelis are not wandering the West Bank in suicide vests. Opening the border with The Strip will open Israel to attack. By opening Safe Passages trade is allowed and security concerns are addressed.
... then Hamas would have no power.
I disagree completely. Hamas will have power as long as there is a faction of Palestinians that believe that Israel can be destroyed. The war started when the Arab League attacked Israel on it's formation and has yet to stop.
It all comes down to this. Hamas exists and must be dealt with. What is your solution? Should Israel open the borders of the Gaza Strip to allow arms in and experience daily rocket and other terrorist attacks? Will this get Hamas out of power? All I see it doing is solidifying Hamas' hold on the Strip as they will appear to their people as winning. Sorry but that is not a solution. Until the Palestinian people see Hamas as the cause of their problems Hamas will always be a problem.
Some people would like to paint the conflict as Israel versus the terrorists,
It is Israel vs the terrorists but with the Palestinian people caught in between. It is time for the Palestinian people to throw out Hamas and create a new Government that can actually talk peace with Israel. The Israeli people have no control over that. It is up to the Palestinian people. One huge step would be to form groups to stop the roc
the land of Israel which they had been squatting on for a few generations?
That land was Israel for CENTURIES before Christianity arose, and THAT was about seven centuries before Mohammed was born and then brought Islam into existence... there is NO rational way that Islam can have a claim to that land that supercedes the Christian claim to various sites there AND there is no way for the Chrisitian sites there to have a claim that supercedes the Jewish claim. Jerusalem is the "City of [king] David" and the "Temple Mount" which is currently the site of Al Aqsa Mosque is the remains of the foundation of two ancient, successive Jewish Temples. Many of the ancient Jewish cities in the area, like Bethlahem (Bet Lahem), the birthplace of Jesus (a Jew) are currently occupied by Palestinians. The Palestinians did not even get it by taking it in war from the Jews (as so many nations in history have been created). The Jews were driven off the land by the Romans and the various wandering tribes of nomadic arabs in the region simply squatted on that land - without ever even trying to create a country of their own.
The Palestinians are the Gypsies of the middle east... this is a cultural and political thing NOT a racial thing (the Palestinians are NOT a truly homogenous group, they're a mix of Lebonese, Jordanians, Egyptians, etc). They live where they live becasue their great grand parents liked to camp there, but they never tried to create anything; they had no flag (insert Eddie Izzard clip here). Generations of Palestinians camped-out there without building a nation, without creating any lasting institutions, without establishing any identity. It was not until the 1970's when Yasser Arafat (an Egyptian, NOT a Palestinian) and his buddies started pushing the idea as a political tactic in their fight to get rid of the Jews (which he admitted in an interview) that people started referring to a "Palestinain Nation" or a "Palestinain People" (as an identity for a people rather than as a generic reference to people living in a geographic area)
If you look at the program in its entirety, terrorist rockets, missiles, and bombs have killed about 600 Israeli citizens in the last few weeks. 2 of those citizens were Jews killed by Hamas rockets. The rest of the Israeli citizens were Palestinians, primarily civilians in Gaza, and Iron Dome did nothing to stop them. It may have stopped some of Hamas's incompetent rocket attacks, but it didn't protect Israeli civilians from the militant Army's better equipment.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
when Christians can build churches and Jews can build Synagogues in Mecca and Medina, and other Muslim "Holy" cities and can serve in the elected legislatures of islamic countries and have their testimony held to be equal to that of a Muslim in any court in any Muslim country.
Israel allows Arabs to be elected into their legislature, and allows all religions to be freely practiced in their country - even tolerating Muslim control of the Jewish Temple Mount. The Al Aqsa Mosque on the Jewish Temple Mount, with Muslims preventing Jews from praying there is the exact equivalent of a Jewish Temple being build over the Kabba in Mecca and a bunch of orthodox Jews preventing Muslims from making the Hajj. Any time a Jew attempts to pray on the Temple Mount, the Palestinians riot and kill people and threaten to start a war. Just imagine if every time a Muslim tried to go to Mecca a bunch of radical Jews went crazy and killed poeple and threatened to start a war...
The truly idiotic thing is that the Muslim faith has no claim to Jerusalem. Their presence there is just a passive-aggressive style affront to their enemies, "the Jews". Like wandering tomcats who piss on stuff to mark it as their property, the Muslims erected a mosque atop the only Holy site of the Jews.... Mohammed never even went to Jerusalem ... the muslim tradition is that Mohammed went to "a far city" in a dream. There's no more legitimacy to the idea that this "far city" was Jerusalem than that it was Sao Palo, or Berlin, or Tokyo.
What is your solution? Should Israel just sit by while rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip?
Care to back that up with any references to recent statement about Israel not recognizing Palestine's right to exist? Here is evidence counter to that argument.
Oh, 5 years ago. I was wondering where you got that from. Yes, Bibi said he would accept the Palestinian state, subject to a long list of unacceptable conditions -- such as continuing to expand the settlements. Since that time, Palestine applied to the United Nations and the Israelis (through the US) prevented the UN from considering it.
The Guardian, Sunday 14 June 2009 16.22 EDT
The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, last night said for the first time he would accept an independent Palestinian state, but only on condition it was demilitarised and that the Palestinians recognised Israel as the state of the Jewish people.
In a key policy speech intended to address growing US pressure for a move towards peace in the Middle East, Netanyahu defended Israel's position and said he wanted to make peace, but despite his mention of a Palestinian state he offered few substantial concessions.
He praised the Jewish settlers who live in east Jerusalem and on the occupied West Bank and refused US calls for a halt to all settlement growth. He also said Palestinian refugees, who were forced out or fled from their homes during the 1948 war, would not be allowed to return to what is today Israel. Jerusalem, he said, must remain united under Israeli control.
What is your solution? Should Israel just sit by while rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip?
They could have accepted (with negotiations) any of several peace offers, such as the Arab Peace Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , or the offers of help from the South Africans like Bishop Tutu.
They refused, and the sticking point was the settlements. If you look at a map of Israel and the West Bank, with the settlements on them, you'll see why that's so unacceptable to the Palestinians. One of the Israeli negotiators said that he would not have accepted that deal if he was a Palestinian. The settlement Ariel is right in the middle of the narrowest part of the west bank, and cuts it in half.
It's understandable that the Israeli government wouldn't give up the settlements, given the political power of the settlers in Israel (and in the US), but they're clearly illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That was the opinion of Theodor Meron, Israel's own chief legal counsel in 1967, but Levi Eshkol went ahead and settled the west bank anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In order to prevent Israel from ever giving up the settlements, the settlers created more settlements, many of which were illegal even under Israeli law, in order to create "facts on the ground" (i.e.,if enough people break the law, the government won't be able to stop them). So when you let the settlers stay there, you're rewarding their illegal behavior and violence.
Israel's right and their supporters always claim that the Palestinians "Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," but actually the Israelis have constantly been rejecting opportunities to make peace.
Where in recent history has Israel stated their desire to eradicate Palestine?
In the Likud Charter, among other places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note, I did not say that fighting to defend yourself in an invasion was the wrong thing to do. Of course people freshly invaded would have a right to fight back, and should fight to deter invaders.
This is about what the situation is after decades of war and failure. The invasion is over, the land is gone, the Israelis are going nowhere. Indeed, the Israelis have nowhere else to go. There's nowhere to send them back to, even if they were willing.
There is a generation, even two or three on both sides, that probably doesn't even remember Palestine before Israel and who has never lived in any other place. What made sense as demands even twenty years ago is starting to become worse than pointless. The youth of Palestine are being held down by the struggle of their forebears.
The fact is that people have been invaded and won, or lost, since time immemorial. The only time it ever gets any better for those who have lost is when they find another way other than constant conflict. As I said before, the Palestinian militants are puppets of those who want to antagonize Israel, Palestinians themselves will gain nothing from it other than poverty and death. They may try and take some Jews down with them, but what good is that to anyone?
Provocation is illegal in itself here.
If Israel grabs the land of the Palestinians, they have to actually deal with the Palestinians.
What made most of the annexations possible is that war caused Palestinians to become refugees and they left. While it wasn't entirely voluntary, due to fear, it was a situation that opened up a considerable amount of now-Israeli territory to be further colonized without having to forcibly remove large numbers of people.
The Palestinians have nowhere else to go. If Israel wants their land, they need to take the Palestinians too. Does that mean apartheid or something in Israel? Perhaps it does. They also had apartheid in South Africa, once upon a time, but I am not sure it would come to that.
I don't think Israel truly wants the Territories. It would threaten the Jewish majority. What allows the Israelis to take more land is the wars that push people out of it and in that sense, the Palestinians are playing into the hands of either Israel or their "benefactors" in Iran or the Arab countries, who are more interested in attacking Israel by proxy to maintain the popularity of their own regimes.
I don't suggest that the Palestinians leave, although I wouldn't personally stay, but all they have to do is not go anywhere. They just need to stop indiscriminate civilian attacks. They can take defensive actions inside their borders, just stop the civilian attacks. The world will tire quickly of the Israeli army and air force mowing down people who are truly only defending themselves, if that even happens.
I am not the only one who see Arima Hass as biased.
Andrea Levin, executive director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting said the newspaper was doing "damage to the truth" and sometimes making serious factual errors but not often correcting them. Earlier, in 2001, Levin criticized Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass for inaccurate reporting and said that Haaretz is fueling anti-Israel bias.
CAMERA believes that anyone who doesn't follow their right-wing party line is biased and anti-Israel, even Zionists like Hass and Levy who have spent their lives in Israel. The people who work for CAMERA, like Levin, have never worked as journalists, and they have no idea of what it's like to be out in the field eyewitnessing events, and getting both sides, as Hass and Levy do.
Amira Hass lives in the territories and sees what happens with her own eyes. Andrea Levin sits on her ass in Boston and says that Hass is lying. Who do you take seriously?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Commenting on the incident, Gershom Gorenberg, of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, stated "CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media. And like others engaged in the narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy."
From your own reference;
The Likud Constitution[31] of May 2014 is more vague and ambiguous. Though it contains commitments to the strengthening of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, it does not explicitly rule out the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The Irish were, by far, the majority in Ireland. Additionally, Ireland is fairly separate from Great Britian (the island) and there was no question of forcing the British out of their own homeland.
And of course, the British are *still* there. In Northern Ireland.
If anything, the Palestinians are already "independent" of Israeli rule, the majority Palestinian areas are part of the Palestinian state, like the majority Irish are in control of the Irish state.
So, Palestine is already "there". Most of the Irish stopped fighting after they got what Palestine has now. The Irish government, for the most part, didn't try and claim Northern Ireland as part of their "ancestral homeland" for very long. The IRA groups did, but they were never properly representative of the Irish. If anything, the Irish did what I would hope the Palestinians do today... took their independence and did what they could with it.
Independence isn't the Palestinian's problem. It's that they keep getting interfered with by Israel on one side, and their "friends" in the Muslim world, on the other. They need to stand up and stop doing what is pissing off the majority of Israelis, and then stand up to their so-called friends, and refuse to be their proxy soldiers anymore.
You asked me where they said that. Their charter said they would eradicate Palestine, and they revised it.
Hamas also revised their Charter. Hamas is also open to accepting Israel and having peace with Israel, if you listen to what their spokesmen say. Israel has also assassinated Hamas leaders, like Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing, who were preparing peace overtures.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11...
Op-Ed Contributor
Israel’s Shortsighted Assassination
By GERSHON BASKIN
Published: November 16, 2012
Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.
Gershon Baskin is a co-chairman of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit.
They could have accepted (with negotiations) any of several peace offers, such as the Arab Peace Initiative
You mean a peace initiative heralded by a Massacre. The problem with the peace initiative is that those signing it have no control over Hamas. Do you really believe that Israel could have signed an Arab Peace treaty after the massacre and subsequent Intifada? The other issue with the Arab Peace initiative is that it requires return to the 1967 borders. The Arab League attacked in 1967 and several times after and now they want to call "no harm no foul"? The repatriation issue has the same problem.
The settlement Ariel is right in the middle of the narrowest part of the west bank, and cuts it in half.
If you mean the Arial on this map you are a bit off.
So when you let the settlers stay there, you're rewarding their illegal behavior and violence.
So by returning to 1967 borders and allowing people who left to clear the way for the destruction of Israel you are rewarding illegal behavior and violence. It strikes both ways.
even Zionists like Hass and Levy
All Israelis are not Zionists.
I also like the contradictions in your statements.
Hass ... who have spent their lives in Israel.
Amira Hass lives in the territories
How can someone live in Israel and the territories at the same time?
You might also want to post the rest of that paragraph from the wiki article.
Commenting on the incident, Gershom Gorenberg, of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, stated "CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media. And like others engaged in the narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy." Gorenberg criticized CAMERA for telling members not to share information about the campaign with media, and he also argued Ini's definition of accuracy "only means not printing anything embarrassing to his own side". David Shamah, of The Jerusalem Post, stated that "the vast anti-Israel lobby that haters of our country have managed to pull together" hate it when groups like CAMERA mess up "their anti-Israel propaganda with (gasp!) facts".
If you want to follow international law, Israel has to return to the 1967 borders. If they don't return to the 1967 borders, they're not following international law.
I support international law. If you don't support international law, don't complain when the other side commits massacres (like the ones the Israelis are committing on the Palestinians, even in the West Bank).
How is any of the above a troll? How is it even critical of you?
Just because you disagreed with me about the usefulness of X some time back enough to mark me "foe" should not be a reason why I can not discuss other unrelated issues where it even appears we agree, but I just have a bit more to add (look at Rei's post for detail, that poster has much more again to add on the subject and shows what I was attempting to convey).
And what's with the threat? If you feel you really are being trolled then just do it instead of threatening to do so.
Is Hamas's revised charted published anywhere?
Which specific international law are you citing?
Is the threat of death of any real concern to people who think their existence is going to be *much* better once they die?
Their general belief is that once they die, most especially when in service to their God, Heaven and all its glory ( and virgins ) awaits.
Sure sounds like a better existence than the miserable life they currently live.
On Earth, you only have 80 odd years of living, in Heaven its a literal eternity.
If dying for God is a guaranteed ticket to Heaven, no wonder death holds no fear.
Of course, if you put an entire people inside an area more akin to the ghetto of Warsaw then a real country.
...then a real country....what?
Then a real country looks bad?
then a real country....fuck I dont have a clue what youre trying to say.
What ARE you trying to say?
And Israel has demonstrated that they are dedicated to control of the entire region, through border expansion.
Like when Israel returned Sinai to Egypt? Pulled out of Gaza? Withdrew in Lebanon?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The same international law that Theodore Meron, Israeli foreign ministry chief counsel, used in 1967. Which includes the Geneva Conventions.
One side usually follows the Geneva Conventions because the other side agrees to it. The Nazis didn't follow the Geneva Conventions on the Soviet front in WWII, and so neither did the Soviets. At Stalingrad, they didn't take prisoners.
If you don't follow the Geneva Conventions, don't complain about terrorists. You're a terrorist too.
J.J. Goldberg, who is no apologist for Hamas, has discussed this in some detail in his columns in The Forward.
Great, you want to judge both sides impartially by international law, let's judge them by international law.
If you want to go that way you should be prepared for the possibility that international law won't be on your side. (Which I'm not sure you are.)
Are the Settlements Illegal?
Eshkol went ahead to create the settlement anyway, and therefore set the conditions which began the Movement for Greater Israel and Israel's settlement enterprise.
"Movement for Greater Israel"? They kind of shot that to hell when they returned Sinai to Egypt, didn't they? (How much land was that compared to the territory of Israel proper?)
2. Killing non-combatants
From the Goldstone Report:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...
The "Goldsone Report"?
Goldstone: You Cannot Undo a Slander
Richard Goldstone, the formerly respected South African jurist who disgraced himself by lending his name to a sinister and libelous U.N. report condemning Israel for war crimes, has now issued a very public retraction. “If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote in the Washington Post, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” New information has persuaded him, he said, “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel. ......
For the better part of four years, Israel suffered more than 10,000 missile attacks against its civilians from Gaza. When it finally used military force to stop the attacks, Israel, in the words of British colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”
All of this was not just knowable when Goldstone signed on as front man for the U.N. lynch mob, it was known. The Goldstone Report was intended, and has since been employed, to stigmatize any Israeli self-defense as a war crime.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Hamas wasn't created until after 20 years of Israeli occupation, during which time Israel tried to establish colonies for the exclusive use of Jews in preparation for annexing as much of Gaza as possible with as few non-Jews as possible. When Hamas was created, half the population had been waiting 40 years to return to their own homes in Israel which they cannot do because they aren't Jewish. Now Israel just wants to keep turning the screws until the people of Gaza break and flee to Egypt so Israel can resume Judaizing it.
but other than that, it's totally Hamas' fault...
Which includes the Geneva Conventions.
The only part of the Geneva convention that Israel has broken is about settlements in occupied territory which has nothing to do with original borders. At the end of many wars borders have changed. A good example of that being the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1 which created the British Palestinian Mandate.
The Nazis didn't follow the Geneva Conventions on the Soviet front in WWII,
The treatment of prisoners also has nothing to do with the restoration of boarders to an arbitrary point.
Here is an official rebuttal of one if Goldberg's recent articles.
Rather than searching for tunnels into Israel they could just drop GBU-57A/B and collapse all the tunnels at close to zero risk of Israel casualties and lower financial cost, but at almost certain massive Palestinian casualties. Even old WWII design Tallboy or Grand Slam bombs would probably be just as effective.
Like when Israel returned Sinai to Egypt? Pulled out of Gaza? Withdrew in Lebanon?
You don't get points for giving up what you can't hold at the time anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That minute was over 40 years ago, and they're still using them.
Most of the newer high-powered SAMs built in Russia are capable of missile intercept (of shorter-ranged ballistic missiles), and they've still got a huge ABM system around Moscow.
Then Israel got big points all around. They weren't kicked out of any of those places, especially Sinai.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
My "side" is international law. I want to judge the situation by international law and let the chips fall where they may. I don't have any sympathy for people on either side who kill innocent civilians -- especially 3-year-old children. Members of Hamas who killed innocent Israeli civilians should be prosecuted and punished -- as long as Israelis who killed innocent Palestinian civilians are also prosecuted and punished.
1. What's the point of the Nicholas Rostow article? He goes through all the arguments for and against the illegality of the settlements (without mentioning Meron), and at the end says that we should ignore the issue of illegality and instead do whatever it takes to achieve peace.
So he's arguing that Israel doesn't have to follow the law.
Well, if Israel doesn't have to follow the law, why does Hamas have to follow the law?
2. After the publication of the Goldstone report, Goldstone received a huge amount of pressure and abuse, including death threats, from Israeli right-wing society and their supporters. This is more of the same.
When the Goldstone commission worked on their report, they asked the Israeli government to help them. The Israeli government refused. After the report, the Israeli government issued statements in their defense that they hadn't made before. That's what Goldstone meant when he said, “If I had known then what I know now.”
After the publication of the report, after all that pressure, Goldstone conceded one point. The report said that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians. When the Israelis released information that they didn't give the commission when the commission originally asked for it, Goldstone changed his position and said that there was no evidence that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. Since he never gave his supporting evidence, it's impossible to know why or whether it's true. That was his personal opinion, and the Goldstone Commission never officially made that change.
So what? It's still true that an Israeli soldier shot and killed a 3- and 5-year old child, while their grandmother was carrying a white flag, and the Israeli never investigated the incident or prosecuted the soldier. This was documented by investigators from many news and human rights organizations. There were about a dozen "white flag" incidents like this in the Goldstone report, and B'Tselem and Amnesty International have documented hundreds of murders like this during the occupation, without prosecution or even investigation by the Israeli government.
You're accusing Hamas of violating international law. Do you also accuse Israel of violating international law?
The only part of the Geneva convention that Israel has broken is about settlements in occupied territory which has nothing to do with original borders. At the end of many wars borders have changed.
Israel has also broken the part in the Geneva conventions that prohibit killing of civilians when there is no military necessity for doing so. B'Tselem and Amnesty International have documented thousands of cases.
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...
773. At about 12.50 p.m., Khalid Abd Rabbo, his wife Kawthar, their three daughters, Souad (aged 9), Samar (aged 5) and Amal (aged 3), and his mother, Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo, stepped out of the house, all of them carrying white flags. Less than 10 metres from the door was a tank, turned towards their house. Two soldiers were sitting on top of it having a snack (one was eating chips, the other chocolate, according to one of the witnesses). The family stood still, waiting for orders from the soldiers as to what they should do, but none was given. Without warning, a third soldier emerged from inside the tank and started shooting at the three girls and then also at their grandmother. Several bullets hit Souad in the chest, Amal in the stomach and Samar in the back. Hajja Souad was hit in the lower back and in the left arm.
[The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. The Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible.]
The Issac Asimov solution of radiation poisoning of the land would be a very effective solution. We could even give them warning it was coming to allow them to leave, not that they would do that.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
For the kneejerks among us who will undoubtedly not understand the subtlety I was trying to convey there, the saying can be interpreted to apply to both the Israelis and the Palestinians alike.
The Mandate ends and the Israelis get invaded...
so they take up arms to defend themselves...
and after doing so successfully they go on the offensive and capture more territory...
then the Palestinians take up arms to resist and try to get their territory back...
so they keep sending suicide bombers and launching rockets over the border...
so the Israelis retaliate with helicopter airstrikes...
And on and on and on.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I see /. is going Postol again.
In America land was owned by tribes, it routinely changed hands in wars.
Natives certainly knew they were selling land to the white tribe. They might have been fuzzy on white individuals owning land.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When you wander across a piece of land once per year you certainly _don't own it_. You own a right to cross it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The reds in America aren't going to reconsider the war on Al-Queda. They've decided it's unjust and that's it. Leftists never reconsider. That's why they are still leftists.
MSNBC and 'Democracy Now' (news from a non-reality based perspective) are the poster children.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Of course; they would build a dozen out buildings first. Then only use one to start a tunnel.
You'd have to be very stupid to think that was a show stopper problem
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just like in the 'stans', if their brothers in arms retrieve the weapons they are counted as 'civilians'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The nationality change came later, but 'Israelis' (Baron Rothschild in large part) had bought and owned a lot of the land. They were poor and the land was cheap. (Because they planned on taking it back all along?)
They are doing it today in East Jerusalem. The Arabs will murder any of their own that sells to a jew, so they take the money and RUN.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't think 'spot welding' means what you think it does.
What I saw on TV was someone incompetently using a stick welder.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How much does a F-16 sortee and a 2000lb dumb bomb cost? Cause that can get a dozen missiles, the crew and the human shields in one go.
A bargain and completely understandable, just based on your cost argument.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I never said what Palestine is doing understandable based on the cost argument.
I dont have a side in this war, I find both of them equally deplorable. However the economics of a tool used, and how the other side can react to a tool, can be discussed freely, without taking a side. My point was the iron shield which was specifically build to stop rockets from Palestinian territory. The flaw is it is too expensive compared to rocket is takes down. Building rocket or purchasing good rockets is not that expensive. A few weeks of bootcamp is all is required to train soldiers on rockets (with iran and saudi backing, it costs peanuts to train them, and get better rocket tech)
The decision to maintain the war with the Palestinians and spend crazy money on defense systems with a 5% success rate, as well as not just wiping them from the planet is that their economy is intrinsically linked to their defense and security industries. These defense and security industries which are a large part of their economy maintain their reputation across the world as leaders in defense and security systems precisely because of the ongoing conflicts that ensue to this day.
Considering that a large part of their economy, many large employers of high skilled workers in Israel, have an intrinsic bias in the continuance of the conflict, it wouldn't be a far fetched idea to assume that they have some kind of lobbying influence in their home country as well as the US to ensure that pro-war candidates get elected to public offices. Again, walling in the palestinians, burning their homes, targeting schools and hospitals indiscriminately, not allowing them to leave and suppression of their economy are the exact policies that one should enact on a people if they are counting and hoping on breeding terrorism, which in turn creates a market for their industries products.
I am not absolving the palestinians from their actions, but when you remove all hope from a people, then they burn with anger and are willing to go to extreme measures to lash out.
Its time to return most of California to Mexico, and the lands back to the native indians.
Jerusalem and Jordan and the current land of Israel were always inhabited by Jews. For over 100 years Jews were buying up land in that area. There is no way that Israel will tolerate terrorism against it.
Hamas has refused to recognize peaceful co-existance. Their charter says to have muslim world domination and death to infidels and Jews. Had Hamas concentrated in building infrastructure, schools, universities, roads, etc, the hundred of millions of dollars poured into cement walls for tunnels was a theft from their citizens.
Israel wants peace. Trade with neighbours would have helped Lebanon,Jordan, Gaza, Palestine, and more to improve the life of all residents. Shame on power blind leaders--only 1 religion allowed, and Christianity is amoungst many excluded.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
i love that someone just downmodded **only my responses** on this deepthread between me and dblll (whom i still suspect may have multiple accounts, regardless of UID)
i protest these downmods...either downmod us both or not at all...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Those are good arguments for not letting a launch site get off a second shot.
You realize that Israel has computer controlled counter batteries and isn't using them (yet). A 155mm shell is cheaper then a rocket. Much less a dozen rockets, a launch crew of 4 and their whole extended families.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
DDoS attacks generally rely on multiplier effects, getting someone else to do most of the work for you. Botnets, service vulnerabilities like the NTP reflection attack, that sort of thing. Hamas don't appear to have any such advantage.
Hamas is the "someone else" in this case.
That makes Postol stupid.
i have no idea why anyone is upset at civilian casualties. certainly no one seems concerned about casualties on the other side.
Someone throws rockets at you - you go in and clean it up - civilian shields and all.
And if you find rockets in a UN compound you can flatten that as well.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/chief-alarmed-rockets-put-gaza-site-24685070
Except the surrounding Arab countries do not want the people from Gaza.
From 1948 until 1967 Gaza was under the control of Egypt. The refugee camps were kept and quarantined by Egypt. There has been no movement of the surrounding Arab countries to absorb the people from Gaza, with the leadership preferring to keep them in squalor and as something you can point the media to. To absorb those refugees would be to agree that Israel as a country exists and will not be driven into the sea any time soon.
Post 1967, when Israel gave the Sinai peninsula back to Egypt, Egypt specifically refused to take Gaza back also. I can't say I blame them.
Jews bought a few percent of Palestina, yes. In some cases by extortion and other ugly methods. They also expelled the arabs, and terrorized arabs which made the arabs flee the country. Maybe you havent heard about the terror? For instance this massacre:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin
Or this terror group, killing lot of people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
By international law, a country under occupation has the right (and obligation) to protect it's citizens to the aggressive occupation force. Israel illegally (against many UN resolutions) occupy 95% of Palestina since 1967. In this case, Israel is the aggressor, breaking international law.
By the Geneve convention, an occupying army is not allowed to move it's own citizens into occupied territory and build houses. This is to forbid an occupying army to take over the land. Israel is breaking the Geneve convention too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention#Section_III._Occupied_territories
"They didn't steal the land, they bought it". Yeah, and 100% of the Palestinian refugees that left those hundreds of towns and villages in 1948 told you personally "I wanted to sell my house and farm and leave, I absolutely was not forced into it". Right? Right?
Hate to brake it to you but isreal itself was also founded by terrorists, so there's no good argument to be found in that corner.
It's also well known that the buses targeted by suicide bombers were being used by uniformed members of the IDF for transportation. Did that make them valid military targets?
Revisionist BS. War started because a small pack of terrorist colonialists fresh off the boat from Europe declared they owned almost all the land. Terrorists because they engaged in massacres and bombings and assassinations of those who favored peace with Arabs even if they were Jewish.
Two more things: Israel is free to pursue crimes and property lost before that. If only Palestinian lives had the same value as Jewish art stolen in the 30's.
And the theft of Palestinian land was hardly a one time event that happens almost a century ago; it's been a daily event as people who have lived there for hundreds of years are forced off their land to make way for new settlements.
The UN also stipulated that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return as a condition of Israeli statehood, a condition that Zionists have no intention of ever honoring.
Ah, the time honored racist deflection of blaming other nations for Israel's war crimes. Man, if only Turkey had kept Saddam in line, Bush wouldn't have had to start an illegal war that resulted in a million dead and a four million refugees! Damn those Turks!
The ones that are revisionist fantasy?
Where the king of Jordan was assassinated after he claimed ownership of the land? "Jordan is the Palestinian state" is one of the more pernicious myths on the issue.
You mean in Cleopatra's day? Gaza has never belonged to modern Egypt, and if you're referring to the time that it was administered by the Egyptian government, I suggest you look up the definitions of "own" and "administer".
Can you try that again, but without the revisionist lies this time?
Reading about the Mandate now. You probably have a lot of fair points. But I find it interesting that when the Brits initially set up the post-Ottoman government, even then the Arabs were doing their best to screw over the immigrants.
Samuel tried to establish self-governing institutions in Palestine, as required by the mandate, but was frustrated by the refusal of the Arab leadership to co-operate with any institution which included Jewish participation.
I won't argue that they should have welcomed them with open arms and put them in charge or anything but a little effort to get along before the endless cycle of killing starts would be nice instead of "we refuse to work with anyone who's a Jew."
Then they try to make a legislature:
The 1922 Palestine Order in Council[14] established a Legislative Council, which was to consist of 23 members; 12 elected, 10 appointed and the High Commissioner.[15] Of the 12 elected members, eight were to be Muslim Arabs, two Christian Arabs and two Jews.[16] Arabs protested against the distribution of the seats, arguing that as they constituted 88% of the population, having only 43% of the seats was unfair.[16] Elections were held in February and March 1923, but due to an Arab boycott, the results were annulled and a 12-member Advisory Council was established.
They give Arabs 11 of the 12 elected positions and they still pitch a fit. Presumably the Arabs expected the Brits to appoint 10 Jews for the latter part of the council...which may have been accurate, I suppose. But saying "we only get 43% of the seats" seems blatantly misleading unless somebody can actually show that all 10 of those appointed were Jewish.
In 1930, Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam arrived in Palestine from Syria and organised and established the Black Hand, an anti-Zionist and anti-British militant organisation. He recruited and arranged military training for peasants and by 1935 he had enlisted between 200 and 800 men. The cells were equipped with bombs and firearms, which they used to kill Zionist settlers in the area, as well as engaging in a campaign of vandalism of the settlers-planted trees and British constructed rail-lines.[18] In November 1935, two of his men engaged in a firefight with a Palestine police patrol hunting fruit thieves and a policeman was killed. Following the incident, British police launched a manhunt and surrounded al-Qassam in a cave near Ya'bad. In the ensuing battle, al-Qassam was killed.[18]
Oh, and the first mention of armed violence is some Arab guy bringing the ruckus. Although I strongly suspect that this is because we're talking Wikipedia so the pro-Israeli crowd is probably on the scene.
The death of al-Qassam in 1936 generated widespread outrage in the Arab community. Huge crowds accompanied Qassam's body to his grave in Haifa. A few months later, in April 1936, the Arab national general strike broke out. The strike lasted until October 1936, instigated by the Arab Higher Committee, headed by Amin al-Husseini. During the summer of that year, thousands of Jewish-farmed acres and orchards were destroyed, Jewish civilians were attacked and killed, and some Jewish communities, such as those in Beisan and Acre, fled to safer areas.(Gilbert 1998, p. 80) The violence abated for about a year while the British sent the Peel Commission to investigate.(Khalidi 2006, pp. 87–90)
So this al-Qassam guy is out there murderin' it up and when they catch him, the Arabs promptly revolt and start burning whatever Jewish land they can get at. Naturally.
Following the Arab rejection of the Peel Commission recommendation, the revolt resumed in autumn of 1937. Over the next 18 months, the British lost control of Nablus and Hebron. British forces, supported by 6,000 armed Jewish auxiliary police,[20] suppressed the widespread riots with overwhelming force. The British officer Charles Orde Wingate (who supporte
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Call it very un-PC and on-the-nose, but I wonder whether these Arab guys in Palestine didn't get so bent out of shape about this because they were generally used to just conquering anyone who disagreed with them historically.
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Thanks so much for your input. I post a perfectly balanced view saying both sides are to blame and your response is, "Hate the Jews more. You're not hating them enough."
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Some good history, some whataboutery, but what entitled 10% of the population, almost all of whom were immigrants from Europe, to carve a state out for themselves without the consent of the people already living there? That's the bottom line.
Yeah, right next to the part where you want Palestinians to be shoved into ovens.
/rolls eyes
If we can get away from the lame straw men for a minute, claiming there are two sides is massively unbalanced. There is the oppressor and the oppressed. There are those who have stolen the land, and there are refugees. Claiming there are "two sides" here is as nonsensical as claiming there were "two sides" in South Africa, or during the Trail of Tears, for the same reasons.
Maybe you're an honest person, as opposed to a racist propagandist like cold fjord, and you haven't managed to pull your head out of the thick propaganda and revisionist history heaped onto all things I/P.
Mine used to be in a similar place, but at some point you just can't fucking do it any more. The current round of war crimes should do that for any person with a conscious or strain of empathy. How do three kidnappings in the West Bank justify a rampage through Gaza? Bulldozing homes, re-arresting prisoners freed in the Gilat trade, weeks after the Israeli government pretty much knew that the teens were dead. Bombing schools and hospitals, sometimes more than once, and killing over 500 people.
Which, if done here in the United States and adjusted for population, would be like 90,000 Americans dying from a foreign assault.
Wow, that's so utterly and totally not what I'm saying it's comical.
So all the Jews should have just got back on their boats and left? This was during WWII. They should have just gone back to Germany (while we're on the topic of ovens), right? The whole conversation reads like a joke.
Jews: Can we stay here? We're kind of being exterminated* at home.
Arabs: No.
Jews: Umm...okay. We'll stay anyway.
British: We don't want any trouble. Be cool with this, Arabs.
Jews: So...maybe we could both have a say in government? That way nobody gets stomped on.
Arabs: No. We refuse to participate in any government that has even one Jew in it.
Jews: Hmm. Okay then. So...a two-state solution?
Arabs: No, we want it all.
Jews: So you're basically saying, "Fuck off, back into the water with you."
Arabs: Yup.
British: Sooooo...we're tired of dealing with you guys' shit. We're leaving now. Best of luck.
Jews: OH SHI-
[promptly gets attacked by the militaries of pretty much all neighboring Arab countries in addition to the Palestinians]
The Israelis are always a bit out of control, but I see why when I look at the history. Any time they let their guard down for a second, they get curb-stomped. And their enemies have frequently demonstrated that showing them any leniency will just come back to bite them in the ass. So we're reduced to "can I hit this guy hard enough that he won't come back at me." The answer seems to be no.
But I've come to the realization that most of the world's problems can't actually be solved. If they could, they would have been already, in all the biggest cases.
Bombing schools and hospitals, sometimes more than once, and killing over 500 people.
I assume that the reason said hospitals are bombed is, like Bosnia, that people are hiding military equipment in them. If you want hospitals to be safe, don't fucking do that. But to avoid getting bombed, they hide their stuff in hospitals in order to take advantage of the other side's proper conduct in war. If they DON'T bomb the hospital then, they're never going to stop putting anything they don't want destroyed in it. And they then complain about the hospital getting bombed. This whole argument is so massively retarded I can't even find words to say what's wrong about it. The only thing more bloody than a war is a war where the sides won't even follow the baseline rules.
*ACTUAL genocide
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I suppose the only way to solve the problem is to just get the Israelis to all lie down on their backs, open the gates, and just let their enemies in to kill them all.
Oh...you wanted a reasonable, liberal solution? I was confused by the conversation we were actually having.
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You're in outer fucking space. I'll speak slowly and use small words: why did the events in Europe entitle settlers to move to a place that had nothing to do with Germany and lay claim to all the land and murder anyone that favored coexistence over the creation of a Jewish state on non-jewish land.
So, lets fix your horseshit analogy:
Jews: Can we stay here? We're kind of being exterminated* at home.
Arabs: Sure
Jews: Umm...okay. Now can we have all your land?
British: We don't want any trouble. Jewish terrorists, please stop bombing us.
Jews: Fuck you. And we'll take all the land and you'll like it.
Arabs: How bout no. You colononialists can't just take our land without our consent.
Me: So all the Jews should have just got back on their boats and left?
You: Yes.
FTFY. It seems obvious this conversation between us is never going to work. I won't accept that 100.00% of the problem is the Israelis' fault and you won't seem to accept anything less.
Oh, and please don't use the quote function if you're going to lump together statements I made in two separate posts into one paragraph. That's misrepresentation.
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Errrmmm I think that's where the problem began, everything after this point is irrelevant as the local population made it abundantly clear that they did not want an outside group settling in their land but the said foreign group decided to settle there anyway...
In more recent history (1997 or 1998 I believe), the Hazara genocide in Mazar Sharif, Afghanistan by the Taliban was amongst the worst genocides post the Holocaust. If hundreds of thousands Hazara survivors from all over Afghanistan decided to pack their bags, get on boats and attempt to settle in say, Australia or America, what exactly would the reaction of the local populations be? I highly doubt the said local populations would welcome these 'invaders' with open arms and garlands just because they were kinda being exterminated in their own lands...Also, bear in mind that in this particular case, the Americans were mostly responsible for creating the Taliban and arming and training them with the aid of Pakistan. The goal (which was accomplished) was to bring the U.S.S.R. to her knees whereas the Palestines had absolutely no part to play in the creation of the Nazi party.
It would have, if that — destroying the soldier's transportation — were the goal. But it is not. The goal of blowing up a bus is to make the population — civilians — afraid. That, by definition, is terrorism.
To put it differently, if the IDF started providing a separate transport for these soldiers going home for the weekend — prohibiting them from using the regular buses, Hamas would still try to blow up the regular transit. On contrast, if Hamas were to stop using schools and hospitals to store weapon caches or, indeed, fire from, Israel would not be shooting at those installations.
Got any more false analogies for me?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.