Time Machine
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve heard references to the idea that Hamas is so dastardly that rockets kept getting fired at Israeli territory even while the cease-fire was on. And, you know, that’s true but the people putting the point that way are deliberately trying to deceive you:
A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory.
Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel, although no one was injured. The violence represented the most serious break in a ceasefire agreed in mid-June, yet both sides suggested they wanted to return to atmosphere of calm.
Point being, the cease-fire was imperfect and imperfectly observed for a variety of reasons. It was an inherently difficult situation since neither party to the agreement would recognize the other side’s legitimacy. But the problems with the cease-fire, and the violations of it, are in no sense reflections of some kind of inherent perfidy either of Arabs generally or Palestinians more specifically or Hamas in particular any more than Israeli incursions indicate a fundamental untrustworthiness of Jews or Israelis or the Kadima Party. It was a difficult situation and not one the United States chose to involve itself constructively with.
64 Responses to “Time Machine”
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January 9th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
A rational person could see the situation is more than Good vs. Evil but if the US Congress vote this afternoon is any indication some seem to see the Israel=Always Good, Hamas or whoever represents the Palestinians at any point = Irredeemably bad
January 9th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Matt, you silly goose. Both Olmert AND Livni have had surprisingly positive things to say recently about the Saudi Plan.
I’ll scout up the links, but meanwhile, I think it’s in part BECAUSE the Israeli center/center-left wants to move toward the Saudi Plan that explains this current Gaza crisis.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
You don’t think Livni wanted to provoke a break in the truce for political reasons?
The Israelis didn’t have to go into Gaza to accomplish their supposed objectives.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
MY,
you show a disturbing tendency to always offer the benefit of the doubt to the Islamists, whether anti-American or anti-Israeli?
why is that?
BA
PS — please stop referencing your Jewish past. You’re hispanic. there certainly is nothing wrong with that but you’re about as Jewish as a Ham sandwich.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Worse, the invasion is actually irrelevant, or worse, to accomplishing those objectives- it has to be a purely domestic politics, “looking tough” move. Have they learned nothing at all from watching our Iraq fiasco about the limited usefulness of conventional military force?
January 9th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Carter: Israel Broke Gaza Truce
Meanwhile, former President Jimmy Carter has denounced the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. Writing in the Washington Post, Carter criticizes Israel for breaking the six-month ceasefire by launching its November 4th attack that killed seven Hamas militants. He also faults Israel for failing to uphold its commitment to ease the humanitarian blockade of Gaza.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Steve LaBonne:
So what if you’re right? I do, as a matter of fact, think there’s more than just “look tough” domestic politics involved, but even that were the only thing, so what?
That’s the way politics is done. The absolutely quintessential “look tough for domestic political consumption” players have to be Hamas anyway. There isn’t even a shred of short-term tactical advantage to those idiot Qassam missiles, let alone any strategic advantage.
(earlier promisied link: Israel considers reviving Saudi peace plan to resolve conflict)
January 9th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
So both sides can continue this cycle of “looking tough” forever, at the constant cost of lives, and that’s OK with you?
Have you stopped to consider
1) How the hotheads on both sides make a good living off each other this way; and
2) Whether the invasion accomplishes any real security objective (there’s no reason to believe so)?
Less of this destructive cynicism will be needed to break the impasse.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
“There isn’t even a shred of short-term tactical advantage to those idiot Qassam missiles, let alone any strategic advantage.”
Wrong. It keeps the name Hamas in particular and the Palestinian situation on the front pages and in governments’ faces and that’s what Hamas wants. It’s “propaganda by the deed” and nothing more. People who think otherwise are idiots.
Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, the only country able to give Hamas what it wants is owned and operated by AIPAC. So, yeah, in that sense, they might as well quit firing them and adopt some more practical tactics - like hiring some outsiders to assassinate everybody in the Israel government.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Kudos to president Carter for standing up to AIPAC/ADL bullies.
Tide is changing. Israel’s not going to be foolishly and reflexively supported.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Yes, Israel Can Win in Gaza
Israel is significantly weakening Hamas – with Palestinian help.
By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
It seems that most of the West’s news reporters and pundits agree with Islamists everywhere that an Israeli victory in Gaza is impossible. They decry Israel’s defensive attack on Hamas, prophesying an inevitable strengthening of Islamism among Palestinians and a dark future for the Jewish state.
How do our commentators come to this conclusion? They point, most frequently, to Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, and echo Hezbollah’s claim that it won a great victory. Indeed, this narrative goes, in launching their rockets at Israel, Hamas leaders were imitating Hezbollah’s winning strategy.
In fact, Hezbollah was thoroughly shocked by the Israeli bombing campaign, and its supporters, who mostly live in southern Lebanon, are not likely to tolerate another wave of destruction caused by another Hezbollah attack. Even the inconclusive Israeli ground actions in Lebanon, which never involved more than six companies (roughly 600 men), resulted in the loss of some 400 Hezbollah fighters in direct face-to-face combat while Israel suffered only 30 casualties.
Of course, none of this prevented the Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah from claiming that he had won a great victory for God. Had his victorious claims actually been true, Israel should have been deterred from attacking Hamas. And by his logic, Israel would have cowered in fear of thousands of more rockets from Hamas, and the even more powerful rockets that Hezbollah would launch in tandem. Nasrallah certainly encouraged Hamas to attack Israel in language that implied he would intervene if a war ensued — a credible promise had he really won a victory in 2006.
But as soon as the fighting started in Gaza, Nasrallah reversed the terms of his declarations — threatening Israel if it attacked Lebanon (which of course nobody in Israel would want to do). When three rockets were fired from inside Lebanon on Thursday, Hezbollah wasted no time assuring the Israelis that it had nothing to do with it, and that it did not even have that type of rocket in their inventory. This is a familiar trope of the Palestinian experience. There is always some extremist leader ready to instigate the Palestinians to fight, implicitly promising his valiant participation — until the fighting begins and the promises are forgotten in fear of Israeli retaliation.
Another familiar Palestinian experience is that the extremists can always prevail politically over the moderates, but in so doing they split Palestinian society. A key metric of this disunity is, in fact, the success of Israel’s current war against Hamas.
Consider: According to Gaza sources, until the ground fighting started some 25% of the 500 dead were innocent civilians. The Israelis claimed that 20% of the casualties from the aerial attack were civilians. Either way, this was an extremely accurate bombing campaign. (Even in the 1991 and 2003 U.S. air campaigns against Iraq, when most of the bombs were already precision-guided, gross targeting errors killed many civilians.)
A targeting accuracy of 75% — by the lowest estimate — cannot have been merely obtained by overhead photography from satellites or reconnaissance aircraft, because few Hamas objectives were classic “high-contrast” targets such as bunkers or headquarters. Most targets were small groups of people in nondescript civilian vehicles that blend in with traffic, or inside unremarkable buildings. Nor could telephone intercepts have yielded much intelligence, because all Palestinians know that the Israelis have long combined voice recognition with cellular-grid location in order to aim missiles very accurately at single vehicles in traffic, or even at individuals standing about with their cellphones switched off.
So how did Israel do it? The only possible explanation is that people in Gaza have been informing the Israelis exactly where Hamas fighters and leaders are hiding, and where weapons are stored. No doubt some informers are merely corrupt, paid agents earning a living. But others must choose to provide intelligence because they oppose Hamas, whose extremism inflicts poverty, suffering and now death on the civilian population for the sake of launching mostly ineffectual rockets into Israel. Hamas completely disregards the day-to-day welfare of all Gazans in order to pursue its millenarian vision of an Islamic Palestine.
Some in Gaza must also resent Iran’s role in instigating the barrage of rockets fired on Israel. And all must know that the longer-range rockets are supplied by Iran along with money for Hamas leaders, while ordinary Palestinians languish in poverty. Senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayan, killed on Jan. 1, was a poorly paid academic, yet he died with his four wives and 10 of his children in spacious quarters. He obviously had enough money to heed the Quranic injunction against marrying more wives than one can afford. That too must arouse bitter opposition among poor Palestinian civilians, inducing some to help Israel target Hamas. Perhaps these informers include Fatah members, further antagonized by persecution. Last week alone, some 50 were reportedly tortured by Hamas.
Hamas won the 2006 election because it was the only available alternative when a majority of voters were disgusted by Fatah’s blatant corruption. Since then, many nonfundamentalist Palestinians have been oppressed by the puritanical prohibitions imposed by Hamas, while all Gazans have been greatly impoverished.
There is no evidence that support for Fatah has therefore increased, or that its surviving leaders could still rally their followers. This reality sets an upper limit on what Israel can achieve by ground combat — it cannot change the regime.
What Israel can do is weaken Hamas further in its current ground operations by raiding targets that cannot be attacked from the air — typically because they are in the basements of crowded apartment buildings — and by engaging Hamas gunmen in direct combat. Simply reducing the combat strength of Hamas is crucial, as it was in 2006 against Hezbollah, because while many like to parade dressed in the robes of martyrs, when there is actual fighting enthusiasm rapidly wanes.
With few exceptions, Israeli ground forces are not advancing frontally but are instead mounting a multiplicity of raids. If their target intelligence remains as good as it was during the air attack, they will run out of targets in a matter of days. That is when a cease-fire with credible monitoring would be possible and desirable for both sides as the only alternative to renewed occupation.
Hamas will claim a win no matter what happens, but then so did Hezbollah in 2006. And yet, for the most part, Hezbollah remains immobile and the Israeli northern border with Lebanon remains quiet. If Israel can achieve the same with Hamas in Gaza, it would be a significant victory.
Mr. Luttwak, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the author of “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace” (Belknap, 2002).
January 9th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
This situation presents an interesting negotiation issue. The only negotiating leverage possessed by Hamas is violence; Israel, naturally, wants Hamas to forego violence before commencing negotiations; and Hamas doesn’t want to give up its only leverage before negotiations even commence.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Sounds just like all the “Yes, the US can win in Iraq” horseshit. The neocons are like the Bourbons- they’ve forgotten nothing and learned nothing.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Reflexive knee-jerk reactions from people who support rogue and genocidal regime of Israel.
how much AIPAC pays you to copy/paste dickwad?
January 9th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
H-bob
Were you born a moron or you had to pay for it?
Violence started in November 4th where Israel broke the truce and killed 6 Hamas officials?
Oh another high-school-drop-out supporter of Israel eh?
January 9th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Farid said — how much AIPAC pays you to copy/paste dickwad?
Seriously dude, this is an American website - please learn English.
It’s “How much does AIPAC pay you to copy/paste dickwad?”
the answer is nothing — I love annoying Jew Haters like you.
Eddi
PS — could you throw out any more cliches? “genocide” — puhlease, don’t you see the irony of a Hamas supporter decrying genocide? further, if the Israelis wanted to commit genocide, a heckuva lot more than 280 civilians would be killed in 10 days of fighting.
Get a grip Farid — what’s it like in Tehran?
January 9th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Farid — do you mean to tell me that Hamas isn’t interested in violence? why smuggle all of those grad and Iranian missles.
The violence began the day Muhammed was born. Muslims love violence. they like it more than f*cking!
H-Bob rules!!!
January 9th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Steve:
“OK”? No. Very much to be expoected? Yes. Nobody ever won an election by looking weak in the face of the enemy. My view is that Kadima/Labor wants to inch toward the Saudi Plan, and I also think that the Arab regimes of the region know that and approve.
That’s why, despite the standard lip service, Hamas isn’t getting the support it might otherwise expect from those Arab governments–heck, Egypt has out-and-out betrayed Hamas.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Yeah, well, we had all sorts of excuses for the (equally political) Iraq war. How’s that worked out in terms of increasing our security and influence?
I don’t doubt that some Israeli politicians are deluding themselves along the lines you sketch. Trouble is, it probably IS a delusion.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
“So what if you’re right? I do, as a matter of fact, think there’s more than just “look tough” domestic politics involved, but even that were the only thing, so what?”
Right! If getting elected takes killing 700 or so Arabs, so what? They’re only fucking wogs anyway.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
The emphasis was on the last word Eddi and it was done rather elegently if I may say so.
BA, if you think some moron like H-Bob rules then you have to seriously consider counseling. Are you employed?
January 9th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Farid,
Seriously, are you a member of Hamas?
I’m serious. Let me get this straight — your buddies shoot 7000 missles into the sovereign territory of a country established by the UN, you say nothing, and when that country — established by the UN — fights back — under self-defense allowed any country on earth — you call for a boycott.
Only a member of Hamas would do so.
can you tell me the secret password?
BA
January 9th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Farid,
Elegantly said or not, it’s still not grammatically correct English.
Where are you from — seriously — it can’t be the USA? Canada? they love terrorists there. Must be Canada.
Eddi
January 9th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Steve:
Except the politicians probably AREN’T deluded. Their electorates, on the other hand ….
January 9th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I gather that the point MY is trying to make by bringing up the Arab proposal and this reminder of not only bad commentary and Hamas’s not always being the instigator of a small series of bad acts is that there is still a way out of the bad bad mess. I would hope so, but I’m not sanguine.
The Isrealis have never proposed something as close to the status quo ante 1967 as the Arab proposal; EBarak’s proposal included two security cordons cutting thru the West Bank. Still, that’s the best they’ve been willing to offer. Someone else’s security cordon within one’s own territory would be unacceptable to any sovereign state so really Barak’s proposal was a non-starter and he should have known so; Arafat could have been a wonderful man, but he’d not have been able to sell that.
There are some fake problems in all this. Some of the settlers, those living in big towns because they like the subsidy for doing so, could in fact stay with some sort of residency visa provided they were willing to abide by the laws of a Palestinian state. The quid pro quo would have to be something like work visas for Palestinians who cross the border and work in Israel. This is very ordinary and doesn’t require Israel keeping any settlements beyond the Green Line. In deed, there are no good legal reasons for Israel to keep any settlements and very good legal prohibitions on their doing so.
There would (and this could prove tricky) some sort of arrangement so that folks could get to the various religiously important sites…fair enough.
But that leaves two very difficult problems.
First, why should Palestians give up their rights under the requisite portions of the Geneva Conventions (to which Israel is a party) to return to their homes, like any other refugee. Just how much cash would that take? Just how willing would Israel be to build up a Palestinian infrastructure (just like we’re supposed to do in Iraq under those same Geneva Conventions)? This is a big deal, but in order for the Palestians to be willing to give this positive right up, there will have to be a pretty sweet pot, at least I’d guess so.
Second, what gets done about those settlers who are not amenable to either residence visas in a Palestinian State or to obeying the laws of such a state?
If Kadima/Labor are not willing to come up with some sort of constructive counter or contribution then the sort of small violations of cease fires MY references above are of a piece with the bigger problems with the publically stated Israeli positions (i.e. not helpful). The Israelis have a bulk of the political cards, save one; they cannot have security without the Palestinians. This doesn’t mean Kadima/Labor drink babies blood, far from it. It may just mean they haven’t got it to do what they ought to do given their legal obligations, their legal obligations being very clear and so far profoundly unmet.
On another note, if MY says he’s Jewish, he’s Jewish; there is no inherent contradiction between being Jewish and having an Hispanic name (see BA @ 4 for one of those “Jane you ignorant slut” moves that just help so much without actually being funny).
January 9th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Israel doesn’t have the guts to end its starvation blockade of Gaza much less make peace with the Palestinians. They’re digging their own grave and when they’re gone - they’ll try and blame it on the people they call “filthy, shvatz, goyim.”
January 9th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Also, Israel never let the full amount of supplies into Gaza; only about 30% or so. The original terms of the cease fire were never implemented.
Bad faith all around! Hooray mid-east!
January 9th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
BA, Eddi, act your age.
January 9th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
more in sorrow,
who made you the arbiter of taste on this site?
go f*ck yourself you arab loving whore.
January 9th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
I can only hope they are.
Did this post get linked over at LGF or something? At least when Farid and SLC get into it they put some effort into the insults.
January 9th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
BA,
No one did.
Now, act your age, unless you actually think calling someone you don’t know a nigger-lover (or as you so elegantly put it “go f*ck yourself you arab loving whore”) is actually helpful to your cause or to civil discussion of difficult issues. FWIW, I don’t have a dog in your fight and I don’t find myself insulted, only saddened, by juvenial behavior.
January 9th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
MIS,
since Farid called me a “dickwad” I suppose he should “act his age”? or is he 6.
and since you didn’t include him in your missive, you obviously are a whore. f*ck you.
unless you run this site, STFU and let us insult each other. this ain’t William Buckley’s crossfire, missy. It’s a crappy little blog. I come here to annoy liberals. I get my jollies this way.
I’m never disappointed.
I couldn’t find a more anti-semitic, clueless group of people if I tried.
peace out!!!
ps — MY is certainly not a jew.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
And Eddi, you are a real Maimonides. I bet your mother’s proud.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
I assure all commenters that there is no arbiter of taste on this site when it comes to comments regarding Israel, Palestine, Jews, Arabs, and Muslims in general.
I’m pretty convinced it’s the quickest set of topics leading to open public calls for one’s favored enemy to be killed and to escalate to sexual insults really quick. I don’t know why the public calls for death are so closely tied to sexual taunts, but I’m sure an amateur psychoanalyst could propose a functional hypothesis.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Luttwak is a known hawk for Israel and is full of shit in his analysis. The notion that Palestinians are fingering Hamas personnel for Israeli execution is too stupid to even comment on. It’s pure speculation based on his estimates of what the Israelis can or can not do with their intelligence.
It’s not like the Israelis don’t have HUMINT on the ground in Gaza. They do, of course. And that probably did play a part in however well the Israelis have done in taking out actual Hamas fighters,
None of that is relevant to the Israeli claims that most of the people they’re killing are Hamas fighters, a claim Luttwak takes at face value, despite all the Red Cross and hospital reports of the opposite fact.
The Norwegian doctor at one hospital said that since the fighting began, they took in ONE Hamas fighter versus hundreds of civilian injured, fifty percent of whom were women and children.
Furthermore, if drop a 2,000 pound with a kill radius in the hundreds of feet in the middle of a residential area, you’re going to kill civilians as well as your target - assuming your target actually was there at the time. This is called a “war crime” by any definition.
As for how much impact this has on Hamas, the answer is: nothing that can’t be rebuilt when you have 1.5 million people to draw on whose relatives have been killed by your enemies in Israel.
This statement is also bullshit: “Some in Gaza must also resent Iran’s role in instigating the barrage of rockets fired on Israel.” No evidence has been presented by anybody that Iran had anything to do with this.
Luttwak is a Zionist tool.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Yes anyone Jews who doesn’t subscribe to “Let’s kill all the Palestinian children” tenet of Zionism is not Jew.
Go fuck yourself, seriously.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Idiot Fareed,
I think your beloved Gazan people would be better off if you guys spent less time fantasizing about killing Jews, and more time actually doing something productive, like building factories or planting olive trees. But then, I suppose fantasizing about killing Jews is more fun. That is why Gaza is probably the most miserable place to live north of the Sudan.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
More in Sorrow is also correct that there are problems in dealing with the Palestinian right of return.
This is why the proper approach to the situation is as follows:
The international community, in the form of the UN backed by US military and economic force, sidelines both Hamas and the Israeli government by reversing its partition of Palestine in 1948, declaring Israel an illegal state and dissolving it de jure, if not de facto.
What happens next is what matters:
1) Israel is required by the UN to completely and verifiably disarm its entire nuclear arsenal, enforced by a complete international boycott and blockade if it does not comply. Among other things, this will establish US credibility when negotiating with Iran about opening their nuclear energy program to greater transparency.
2) Both the Palestinian territories and Israel’s territory are declared a UN Protectorate. While the details of the resulting state are worked out, nobody has the authority to do anything without consulting the UN administrators. That means no more settlements, no military actions of any kind on either side.
3) The UN sets up a commission of persons from both inside and outside both Palestine and Israel to set up a state and a Constitution which will govern the combined territories in a one state solution.
4) The Constitution will provide for both Sharia law and secular law, for the Israeli military to be the core self defense force of the new state (they being better equipped and trained than the Palestinian forces), and for law enforcement to be initially separated between Palestinian and Israeli forces dependent on neighborhood. Jerusalem becomes the capital of the new State. Full civil rights are recognized for all citizens. A mechanism for free and open elections is specified. The usual minuteae are specified.
5) The state is established and open elections are held for governing positions. No leaders of either Hamas, Fatah or current or prior members of the Israeli government are allowed to stand for election - only new faces. Every vote is equal. The elections are monitored heavily by the UN.
6) The right of return issue is dealt with in two ways:
a) People with documented title to land that was seized by anybody in recorded history are allowed to return to that land provided it has not been converted to uses that are valuable to the existing economy. In such cases, compensation and equivalent land are paid.
This compensation is financed by the UN tithing its members. This allows adequate compensation to be paid without bankrupting the new state or the existing economy. Since it is based on legal documentation, the only arguments allowed are in civil court, with evidence.
b) Palestinians without documented title to land may either return to Palestine as they choose, provided they have means and do not place a burden on the state, OR they can be relocated to other countries with compensation and support again provided via the UN.
This explicitly requires giving up the notion that the territory is “Jewish” or that the majority population must always remain “Jewish”. This is an unacceptably racist situation, especially given the illegal status of the Jewish immigration and the Jewish state. If the Zionists don’t like it, they can take it up with the UN or go find some other country to invade.
The essence of this plan is simple:
1) FORCE both Jews and Palestinians to live together. Don’t allow them ANY separation via a separate “state” (which will immediately lead to a war in which Israel gets to do whatever it wants anyway, because it will no longer be an “occupying power”) or via one side having “authority” over the other.
The vast majority of both Palestinians and Israelis, like people everywhere, are too busy trying to survive their own lives to make war on each other. It’s the politicians and activists and people who make money off war who have nothing better to do who start wars. Surveys have shown that both Palestinians and Israelis do not actually “hate” each other, they just hate what they’ve been told about each other or what they’ve directly experienced from each other via terrorism or Israeli military action.
Forcing both groups to live and work together in a single state is the only possible approach to making that work.
2) By returning the entire area under UN control, both Hamas, Fatah and the Israeli government - which means all the Islamic fanatics and Zionist freaks - are sidelined. They are summarily thrown out of power.
And if they try to resist using force, the UN dumps 500,000 US/German/British/French/whoever troops in there to damp it down long enough for the rest of the plan to work.
Some people might think that would just be as bad as Iraq. Well, Iraq is bad. And Iraq is still a powderkeg waiting to blow up. But the difference is that Israel is a functioning economy and Palestinians have motivation to make things better for themselves. The combo of the two will work as long as the fanatics ON BOTH SIDES are sidelined and too busy trying to survive to take effective military action to interrupt the new program.
People have to stop thinking that just making Hamas go away is going to solve anything. As long as the Zionist freaks on the Israeli side aren’t sent away as well, Israel will just keep on trashing the Palestinians, making settlements and will NEVER come to a just solution. They have no motivation to do so because their power comes from precisely pursuing the Zionist dream.
The Zionist dream has to be CRUSHED once and for all by the international community. That community must decide that the cost for that pipe dream has been TOO HIGH and the only solution is to eliminate it and get back on the track of the Palestinian Mandate.
The only two alternatives to this solution are simple:
1) All Palestinians must be driven from the territories and Israel given control of the entire area. This leaves the Zionist freaks to cause more mischief with their neighboring states in their imperialist pursuit of “Eretz Israel”. This is not a valid solution.
2) All Jews must be driven from the territories and the Palestinians given control of the entire area. This is a valid solution, given the illegal nature of the Zionist state, but unworkable given the number of Jews in the area - unless you’re in favor of nuking Israel, which isn’t a workable solution either.
In other words, either you are for a single state solution imposed by the international community on both parties, or you are for ethnic cleansing and/or genocide.
Take your choice. There is no way a “two state” solution is even remotely workable as long as you have Islamic or Zionist freaks in either state.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Hector: “more time actually doing something productive, like building factories or planting olive trees”
Only to see them bulldozed by the Israelis for more settlements.
You’re an idiot, Hector.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Hector,
It’s been proven time and time again that you are a moron. Trying to label anyone who opposes Israel antisemitic has become tiring and very ineffective.
Don’t be lame you stupid fuckstick. Be creative.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Fareed,
Nice job building Gaza infrastructure, again. What a pleasant place your Hamas murderers have made of it. I will give them credit, apparently they have one of the highest birth rates in the world. Apparently the two things Hamas commandoes know how to do is to kill Jewish women and children, and to treat women like slaves.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Apparently Mr. Hack resents the fact that Zionists actually believed in doing productive things with their lives, like planting trees and reclaiming the desert, rather than holding up bank tellers to feed their smack habits. How was Leavenworth again, Hack?
January 9th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Hack,
Fortunately, your pipe dream is just that. Unlike you, and unlike the Hamas p*ssies, the Zionists and Israelis are actual men, who are prepared to fight to defend their way of life. Three thousand years from now, there will be a Jewish State somewhere in the world. Maybe not in Palestine, if you people are successful in your genocide campaign. But somewhere in the world, there will be a pure Jewish State, Jewish by ethnicity and Jewish by state religion, and it will have no place for Hamas p*ssies or for feckless drug addicts like yourself.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Palestinians have suffered greatly and fought bravely. What are you talking about?
January 9th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
If I can squeeze between the various cocksuckers and whores and pussies and smack addicts…
The Luttwak post is interesting in its completely cramped vision. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt (which we really shouldn’t) and assume he’s right when he says that Hamas was getting unpopular, so much so that some Gazans were starting to go to the Israelis with intelligence, thus allowing Israel to hit them so hard. Furthermore, that Israel can back Hamas off far enough that the rocket fire will stop and Hamas will be more amenable to peace talks.
What if, rather than try our damndest to overthrow the legally elected rulers of the Palestinians, we (the US and Israel) had sat back and waited for them to either moderate or fuck up? The Palestinians would eventually vote for Fatah, or maybe someone else who was moderate and not corrupt, once Hamas screwed up badly enough. Now, though, they’re martyrs. Luttwak himself says Israel can’t change the regime. WELL, THE PALESTINIANS COULD, WITH THE VOTE. Now either the vote won’t happen, or Hamas will win the vote. Also, no matter what else happens there are a bunch of dead Palestinians who didn’t need to be dead. And there are a bunch of relatives bent on revenge. If Luttwak’s right and this war will keep Hamas from firing rockets for a few months, we still know that the rockets are coming eventually, or the suicide bombers, or something else. We KNOW this. But if Israel had given Fatah something, like reversing the trend of enthusiastically growing the settlements every single year for decades, maybe there wouldn’t be rockets. Or maybe there wouldn’t be rockets if Israel had just acted to maintain the ceasefire rather than break it.
It’s obvious that Israel has one card in the deck–attack attack attack–and equally obvious that it doesn’t work. Luttwak shows this better than anyone.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Please, please let me never imagine that in 3,000 years hence we are still stuck with this crap.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
The fucktard Hector is off his med again.
Dear Fucktard
Murderers by all accounts are those fucking thugs in Tel Aviv. They have murdered 700 innocent people.
Go jerk off your local priest motherfucker.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
and more time actually doing something productive
From someone who spends his life in Crusader dressup, that’s funny.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
First of all, that picture is hilarious. Am I really supposed to believe that that guy just “unearthed” a bright pink child’s plush toy — which is both miraculously unharmed and totally clean — from underneath that pile of rubble? I guess those Isreali missiles were strong enough to turn that entire house into a pile of rubble, twisted wire, and sand, but they weren’t strong enough to get any dirt on a child’s plush toy.
If you saw this type of stuff in a Hollywood movie, you’d laugh because it’s so fake. But since you’re being fed this stuff by the Palestineans, you swallow it whole. It’s Pallywood.
Intellectual honesty does not require arriving at some middle ground conclusion that blames both sides. It merely requires looking at the facts honestly and without preconceived biases. If the facts show that one side is in the wrong, then your conclusion does not need to be milquetoast.
If you believe Hamas, one of the reasons they chose to violate the ceasefire was because, without the constant war against Israel, they were losing political support. So they decided to start it up again. And they’ve used the war as cover to start arresting and executing Fatah members as “collaborators” with Isreal.
Meanwhile, you’re going through contortions to try to portray both sides as equally culpable. You cite to the first few paragraphs of that news story, which points out that Israelis killed one Palestinean gunman, but you don’t point out why he was killed. The story says that “in response” the Palestineans fired 35 rockets into Isreal (so much for a proportional response), but doesn’t point out that the rocket attacks were going on long before the event in question.
Both sides in this are not equally culpable. That’s not to say that the Israeli incursion will be successful, or that the Palestineans are responsible for all the problems in this dispute. But let’s face it, if the Palestineans were to lay down their arms and become complete pacifists, we’d have peace. If the Israelis did the same, they’d be overrun and slaughtered. Not exactly equivalent.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Actually, if any toys were to survive in a warzone, it would seem likely to be precisely things like plush toys, rather than things which break. Basically, a plush toy is just cloth sewn around batting or stuffing, and seems more likely to survive than many more breakable household goods. I’m sure there’s some Wikipedia / blast fan page which could truly tell us, but I’m not going to look it up.
January 9th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
“if the Palestineans were to lay down their arms and become complete pacifists, we’d have peace. If the Israelis did the same, they’d be overrun and slaughtered.”
Hallucinatory bullshit. This idiot has never bothered to study what Zionism is ABOUT nor any of the official political statements concerning the expansion of Israel by any of the officially elected leaders of Israel since 1948.
In other words, this guy is a moron.
Again, the ONLY solution to the problem is to sideline BOTH the Hamas fanatics and the Zionist freaks, dissolve Israel as a Jewish state and reform it as a bi-national state.
And Hector, none of your Zionist freaks are going to last out this century, let alone three thousands years from now. In fact, it’s not likely that humans will last out this century, much less three thousand years from now.
And for your information, I have never indulged in drugs of any kind - not even pot - unless you count megavitamins as drugs, which technically they are. Naturally, no one at Leavenworth or any other joint I was in believed that when I told them, but it is entirely true. I also don’t drink (and I despise drunks) or smoke. The only substances I abuse are ice cream and pizza.
Which is probably why I think better than a religiously addled brainfart like yourself.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:22 am
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January 10th, 2009 at 1:24 am
“First of all, that picture is hilarious. Am I really supposed to believe that that guy just “unearthed” a bright pink child’s plush toy — which is both miraculously unharmed and totally clean — from underneath that pile of rubble? I guess those Isreali missiles were strong enough to turn that entire house into a pile of rubble, twisted wire, and sand, but they weren’t strong enough to get any dirt on a child’s plush toy.”
If you look at the physics of it, it’s pretty obvious the toy is being thrown to him.
But if you want to make an absurd conspiracy out of it, go ahead!
January 10th, 2009 at 8:15 am
Biased, deceitful rubbish. Anti-Israel, in that sense.
January 10th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Re: Naturally, no one at Leavenworth or any other joint I was in believed that when I told them, but it is entirely true.
Of course they didn’t believe you, Hack, because you’re a liar as well as a violent criminal. You decided to rob banks because you were too lazy to actually work for a living, just like all the Hamas p*ssies like Fareed.
If the Jew-haters like you and Fareed get their way, the Jews will have to pack up and go somewhere else (because the Jews have too much dignity to want to share a country with lazy cocksuckers like you). Perhaps they’ll buy a bit of Somalia from the Somalis. In 100 years, the Jewish State in Somalia will be a thriving, verdant, prosperous and equitable oasis of peace and goodwill on the continent. In 100 years, the entire territory of Jew-Free Palestine will be the same kind of s–thole that Gaza is today. And do you know why? Because the ruling factions among the Palestinians (not the people as a whole) are made up of p*ssies like you and Fareed, who would rather whine, force girls into harems, and blame other people for the fact that they don’t want to work and build a functioning society.
January 10th, 2009 at 10:38 am
The Comish (sic)(@49) concludes:
But let’s face it, if the Palestineans were to lay down their arms and become complete pacifists, we’d have peace. If the Israelis did the same, they’d be overrun and slaughtered. Not exactly equivalent.
There are extremely good reasons why counterfactuals of this sort have no place in social analyses, whatever pertinence they may have in logic and rhetoric.
No one suggests that the Israelis disarm; certainly the Arab League has not proposed that the Israelis disarm. Nor is ending an illegal occupation or ceding control of borders to a region’s inhabitants the same thing as disarming; suggesting that these two are somehow synonymous is simply bad argument. Any solution yielding peace will have to involve both an end to the occupation and a cessation of Israeli control of Palestinian borders, save for the borders between Israel and Palestine. Unfortunately, the Israeli government has never proposed doing this; Ehud Barak’s much touted proposal included two Israeli security cordon crossing the West Bank, for example. Until the Israelis prove willing to at least met these two legal requirements, as per their obligations under the requisite portions of the Geneva Conventions, it is very hard to see how any lasting peace can be brought about. Persumably any independent Palestinian state would have to become party to these conventions as a condition of their independence; at such a time the Palestinians would lose whatever rights they have under those conventions to resist the occupation because that occupation would have ceased existing and because they would have control of their own borders with the proviso stated above. Until such time, however, the Palestinians are by definition, as per those conventions, civilians who have the right to resist an illegal occupation just as any ostensibly unoccupied territory’s border should be under the control of the terrotitory’s presiding entity. That some portion of Palestinian resistance has been lamentable, at best, does not detract from their legal position or Israel’s legal obligations. The question of moral equivalence doesn’t come into it, save perhaps as an ongoing obstacle to getting folks to sit down an negotiate.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
“# BA Says:
January 9th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
more in sorrow,
who made you the arbiter of taste on this site?
go f*ck yourself you arab loving whore.”
Unless you accept that Palestinians crave getting their children killed while Israel only bombs out of compassion and urgent self-defense (not because there’s an election coming, heaven forbid), you’re an arab-loving whore.
Hard not to love Israel these days isn’t it?
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