Matt Yglesias

28 Responses to “Israel’s Test”

1. Publius Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

   Bravo. It would be nice (for both Israelis and Palestinians) if the failure of the Israeli government to adhere to its own law, as well as that of the international community, garnered more attention.

2. blowback Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

   Move on from the concept of the Israeli removing the illegal settlements. All the Israeli government needs to do is reach an agreement with the Palestinians and then tell the “settlers” that the IDF is pulling out in, say, 28 days and that the “settlers” will then be subject to Palestinian law enforcement.

3. mark f Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

   Israel hates Israel.

4. ben Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 1:49 pm

   To paraphrase Nixon:

   “It’s not illegal if the Israelis do it.”

   /cue rant from SLC

5. joe from Lowell Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 2:02 pm

   I agree with blowback.

   Why isn’t “Fine, you can be a Palestinian citizen” the answer here?

   They’ll be running after the IDF trucks as they pull away.

6. J.E. Dundee Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

   The book, “Lords of the Land,” by two Israeli scholars, was reviewed in “The New York Times Book Review,” October 14, 2007, by Adam LeBor. LeBor writes that the West Bank is “a lawless place, where the Jewish settler, rifle in one hand and prayer book in the other, is undisputed king. The settlers have their own roads, guarded by the Israeli army, water, electricity, supplies and —-occasional if well-publicized crackdowns aside—substantial impunity from the law. Much of the land on which their settlements stand, was, as Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar detail in this important book, simply stolen. The settlements are illegal, in contravention of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to occupied territories.” LeBor notes that more than a third of the West Bank is “now off limits to Palestinians.” The book also documents the minimal sentences handed down to settlers who kill Arabs. These sentences consist of a few months community service or a small amount of time in jail.

7. Farid Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 2:31 pm

   J.E. Dundee

   Israel has never been interested in international law. It’s not applicable to them as far as they’re concerned. Of course this whole enterprise is fiannced and unconditionally backed by the US government.

   The move to dismantle the settlements in Hebron has systematically been politcized to fool the world how serious Israel is about peace. Israelis are not geniunely interested in peace with Palestinians. Their whole victimhood identity is intensely intertwined with their inferiority/superiority complex as a nation and the only way to sustain that complex is by indefinite conflict with people who were violently forced and killed out of their own land.

8. spokeytown Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

   Large-scale withdrawal ain’t gonna happen. Given all the drama and clothes-rending and soul-searching that happens when a few wingnuts are evacuated from Gaza or Hebron, does anyone really think Israel will manage to evacuate half a million people? That’s how many settlers are in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

   So if Israel can’t pull out, the best they can offer the Palestinians is a series of disconnected blobs/bantustans, which no Palestinian (Hamas, Fatah, Dog Catchers’ Holy Martyrs League, etc.) will ever agree too. Which leads to the following disaster–if there aren’t two states then there’s gonna be one. And that state will have an Arab majority and that will be the end of Israel. The whole point of Zionism was that, after centuries of pogroms and inquisitions and ghettos and holocausts and on and on, there would be one place in the world where Jewish culture and religion and language and everything else could survive and thrive, no matter what happens in the rest of the world. That will be gone and the Israelis will have no one to blame but themselves; it won’t matter if the Palestinians are all terrorists or if they’re peaceful as kittens.

   What’s amusing is how so many people treat this as a problem with no possible solution. Annex an area full of Arabs and you’ll suddenly have a lot of Arabs on your hands. How hard is this really? I get the feeling that, if Israel annexed China, a bunch of Very Serious Israeli Hawks would wake up one morning and say “Oh my goodness! How did our country get overwhelmed with Chinese people?” Well….

9. David Says:
   December 5th, 2008 at 4:50 pm

   Which leads to the following disaster–if there aren’t two states then there’s gonna be one

   There will be a full-scale war ala 1948 before
   than ever happens.

10. Bloix Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 5:11 pm

    1) The Israeli government isn’t evacuating the settlers voluntarily. They are carrying out an order of the Israeli Supreme Court, which held that “the house of contention” belongs to a Palestinian.

    2) The settlers’ response has been to riot – shooting innocent people, burning houses and orchards, and descrating graves. From today’s Ha’aretz:

    Settler violence erupted Thursday in protest against the eviction. Settlers torched fields, olive groves and yards in a wadi between Hebron and the settlement of Kiryat Arba. They also opened fire on Palestinians, wounding three.

    Settlers hurled stones at Palestinian vehicles on a number of roads in the areas of Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron. In Bitin, north of Ramallah, settlers broke into a home and vandalized Palestinian property, and in several other West Bank villages, anti-Muslim graffiti was sprayed on mosque walls…

    Settlers also attacked Palestinians near the village of Burin, and Palestinians said cars were set alight near Tel Rumeida, a village near Hebron…

    One of the leaders of the settler group told Haaretz: “The price will be costly and painful. Someone will pay a very high price for the crime committed at the House of Contention.” …

    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1043794.html

    Either the government is going to back down or the confrontation with the settlers is going to reach a crisis. I expect that the government will back down. They have never yet failed to put off the inevitable confrontation with the settler movement.

11. SLC Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 6:36 pm

    Re Farid

    Mr. Farid is partially correct. The Government of Israel has no intention of making peace with the Palestinians on the latters’ terms, which include the resettlement of inhabitants of refugee camps in Israel. Of course, if the Palestinians should suddenly drop this demand, they might find that even a Likud Government would be forced to cut a deal.

12. Mythbuster Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 7:05 pm

    David writes in response to this comment (”Which leads to the following disaster–if there aren’t two states then there’s gonna be one):

    There will be a full-scale war ala 1948 before
    than ever happens.

    You mean, Israel will engage in full-scare ethnic cleansing before that happens. As you may recall, the Albanian civilians were not “at war” with Milosevic before they were driven from their homes.

13. SLC Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 7:10 pm

    Re Mythbuster

    Given how incompetent the Government of Israel is at ethnic cleansing as evidenced by the more then 1 million Arabs currently living there, I doubt that the Palestinians have much to worry about. The Arabs are much better at the practice, having ethnically cleansed some 800,000 Jews from countries like Iraq in 1948/1949.

14. Richard Steven Hack Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 8:11 pm

    As usual, SLC babbles bullshit. The one million Arabs living directly IN Israel are treated as second-class citizens, and their (minimal) representatives in the government are usually treated as “terrorists in waiting” or otherwise charged with crimes whenever they dare to speak about peace with Syria or whoever.

    He claims the Arabs cleansed 800 thousand Jews from Arab lands, forgetting that this only occurred after Israel cleansed considerably more than that in the same time period. He also ignores all the Iranian Jews who are perfectly happy living in Iran and wouldn’t move to Israel if you paid them.

    However, one thing is clear: Israel cannot survive another fifty years in its present form. Either it will be destroyed in a military conflict that might cost millions of lives on both sides or it will be forced to return to the 1947 UN decision and be recreated as a Palestinian bi-national state. There is no other feasible outcome.

    The two-nation solution is a dead issue because of the settlements and because Israel will merely treat a Palestinian state as a state it can attack and destroy in a genocidal war rather than an “occupied territory” it has to treat under international law (despite the fact that it regularly violates all international law in its treatment of that territory today.)

    The only solution to Israel is that every single Zionist freak needs to be put out of his misery and definitely not allowed in the government. And this will never happen because a large percentage of Israelis are Zionist freaks who drank the Kool-Aid of Zionism, one of the most despicable, racist, fascist, imperialist, colonialist doctrines ever invented, on a par with Hitler’s National Socialism.

15. El Cid Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 10:46 pm

    The liberal Israeli press decides to stop beating around the bush:

    Standing up to Jewish terrorism
    By Haaretz Editorial

    The government’s decision to declare the House of Contention in Hebron a closed military zone was an inevitable step, but if it does not lead to the necessary phase then it is liable to fail. Following the latest riots two days ago, Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared that the government would not reconcile with the rampaging by “extremist forces.” At about the same time, those in charge of the “forces” lashed out at the government, the courts, the army and the media, as if we were dealing with two legitimate, opposing sides.

    The time has come to cease the vague characterizations and call a spade a spade. We are not dealing with “marginal groups,” “extremists who have gone out of control,” and other attempts at verbal acrobatics that are designed to paper over a harsh reality.

    For a long time now, settlers in Hebron and other areas of Judea and Samaria (and East Jerusalem) have engaged in unruly behavior whose only goal is to violently threaten the Palestinians while undermining Israel’s sovereignty.

    By any official standard recognized worldwide, this is terrorism that sows fear and disrupts the proper management of a state.

    It is difficult to fathom the way Israeli politics and society were seduced into turning a blind eye toward the growing Jewish terrorism. Ever since the heads of the Jewish underground were released as part of a shady deal, this trend, which was given the deceptive term “wayward weeds,” has continued.

    Under the hypocritical umbrella of “national unity” and the self-righteous threat of “a rift in the nation,” the rampaging has become the norm, a daily routine. The settlers utter profanities, spit, beat, sow ruin and destruction, while the army turns a blind eye in the best-case scenario and takes part in the worst.

    The House of Contention is therefore the culmination of a dangerous progression of events, and the widespread public protest that should have arisen among the sane portion of society after these events has not materialized because the heart of Israeli society has been desensitized for quite some time. Only in such a setting could a former ambassador (Danny Ayalon) who recently joined Yisrael Beiteinu, a party that espouses clear-cut racist values, appear as the lawyer for the offending group and warn: “The settlers are part and parcel of us and we must not tear them away from the nation.”

    The extreme right-wing activist Daniella Weiss also warns that in Hebron “we will not turn the other cheek,” and the settlers holed up in the House of Contention openly call for their admirers to aid them in their struggle against the army. These calls for rebellion, which are tinged with cries of persecution, frighten the government.

    This week, Israel has reached the point of no return, which will also determine who controls the state: the justice system and a government elected by democratic means, or Jewish terrorism.

    If the government does not remove, as soon as possible and without fear of violence, the riotous core of settlers in Hebron, which has disengaged from the state and its institutions and now endangers the public, the blood of the victims of religious fanaticism in the territories will be on its hands.

    No less grievous would be the message sent to the plunderers that they were victorious and proof for the silent majority in Israel that the future of the Jewish Zionist state is being held hostage by those who pray for its destruction. No other moral claim, not even the just claim of the Jewish people for a national home, will stand, either at home or abroad, against such a capitulation to terror.

16. J.E. Dundee Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 11:27 pm

    The above Israeli editorial which calls a spade a spade is in sharp contrast to the Israel Lobby propaganda here, such as the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens’ 12/2/08 piece “Media Narratives Feed Terrorist Fantasies.” Stephens claims that although the captured Mumbai terrorist Azam Amir Kasab said the Chabad House attack was to avenge Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, terrorists like Kasab have merely been misinformed by the media: these so-called atrocities are just fantasies. I guess the 800,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948 by terror groups such as Irgun, etc, are just a fantasy too.

17. pseudonymous in nc Says:
    December 6th, 2008 at 12:54 am

    Last month, there was a fundraiser in Brooklyn for the Hebron Fund.

    The settlers in this case are basically a bunch of arriviste nutjobs, who most Israelis wouldn’t want living anywhere the fuck near them. Nor do their Brooklynite backers or west-coast goyim Kahanists like SLC have to live near them.

18. Richard Steven Hack Says:
    December 6th, 2008 at 1:47 am

    Yeah, SLC actually claims he hates Israelis! So he says, but he loves Zionist freaks like himself.

19. SLC Says:
    December 6th, 2008 at 6:37 am

    Re pseudonymous in nc

    Nor do their Brooklynite backers or west-coast goyim Kahanists like SLC have to live near them.

    Mr. pseudonymous is seriously in error here. I live 3000 miles from the west coast and have for several years.

20. foxtrotsky Says:
    December 6th, 2008 at 4:34 pm

    Richard Steven Hack writes:

    The only solution to Israel is that every single Zionist freak needs to be put out of his misery….

    This badly needs a rewrite. People are understandably sensitive about the use of phrases like “put out of his misery,” “only solution,” and “every single [one],” even if they apply only to “Zionist freaks” and not Jews generally.

21. Richard Steven Hack Says:
    December 6th, 2008 at 11:33 pm

    Not my fault that somebody in history came up with the phrase “Final Solution” and used it to describe mass murder.

    The reality right now is that Israel is on the brink of collapse because the Zionist freaks are rioting in the streets. After decades of catering to them and implementing their program – not to say pogroms – against the Palestinians, the Israeli government reaps what it sowed. There’s absolutely no difference between these scum and the Nazi Brownshirts who used violence to get their way in pre-1938 Germany.

    And until they are dealt with – and the fascist power seekers in Israel who constantly return to controlling the government there – like Netanyahu – nothing can be done to solve the Palestinian question.

    And as long as every criticism of Israel is met with the nonsensical “anti-Semitic” claim, nothing will be done.

    The end result is as I said: Israel will either suffer a nuclear terrorist incident which kills hundreds of thousands, resulting in Israel attacking the other Arab nations with its nuclear arsenal, killing millions, and thereafter Israel is put down by the international community – or Israel is dissolved as a Zionist state and remade into a bi-national Palestinian state.

    There is no other outcome as long as whackjobs are running the country and catering to even worse whackjobs like SLC.

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