12 steps to peace for Israel

sees Israel as the source of all violence int he Middle East
Israel is not the only source of violence in the Mid-East.
ignores the fact that Israel has constantly been under attack from other countries and terrorist groups
Israel has been under attack because of their own aggression.
ignores how Israeli cities are hit by missiles aimed at killing civilians and Israel responds to these attacks going after the people who shot them
Israel's "responses" to attacks are far out of proportion,e.g. the current destruction of Gaza.
excercising their right to defend themselves
Thieves don't have the right to self-defense. If you rob me, you can't claim you are protecting yourself when I try to retrieve my property.
ignores groups that call for Israel's destruction
The PLO has agreed to allow Israel the territory behind the Green Line in return for peace. Israel has refused that offer.
have nothing to contribute other than violence and hate
What has Israel contributed?
ignores groups that invest tremendous resources in trying to raise generations of youth fed on a diet of steady hate
Like the IDF, Yaakov. How could a generation raised under the violent thumb of the IDF not hate Israelis? You haven't suffered an iota of what the average Palestinian has suffered, and yet here you are, preaching hatred, justifying mass murder. You need to take Step 1.
ignores how Israel has constantly said that if its enemies stop attacking, then Israel will not fire back
I provided several examples that showed the lie in that promise, months without a single Israeli death due to Palestinians that were immediately followed by months with high double- and triple-digit killings by Israelis.

I had hopes for Kadima, but it seems they were in vain.

I will write about suicide bombers later. The short form is that I regard it as probably the most ethical tactic in a war of resistance.

I have not said I abhor violence, I have said I abhor robbery. If someone robbed me, I would gift them with violence. If someone claimed they had the right of self-defense during the course of a robbery, I would laugh at them.

What I abhor is dishonesty. Thus my rudeness to you.

I would however not like to think Newsvine harbours supporters of terrorism

Look in your mirror.

It would be better if Israelis weren't blown up in the street, however, their complaints about it seem absurd when they are blowing up so many more Palestinians. It's as if they don't believe Palestinians have the same rights to security that they want. The Israelis are engaging in so mucn more violence than the Palestinians that it is hypocritical to even mention the what the Palestinians are doing to fight back. When the Israelis renounce violence, then it will be time to condemn Palestinian violence, but until that happens, calling the Palestinians "terrorists" is nothing short of dishonest.

If Israel simply accepted the offers of peace they have been given, instead of playing the bully and trying to steal even more land, they wouldn't be getting blown up (not that anyone's been blown up recently [though the selective tears continue to flow]).

What happens to Palestinian peace activists? They are murdered or tortured by Israel.

Nonviolent activism doesn't work against people who live by Stalin's dictum. There has to be a sense of shame in the target population, not a sense of entitlement and contempt.

I'm not surprised you missed the point. Here's a Palestinian advocate of peace in Fatah, Thabet Thabet, and what does Israel do? In their enduring quest for peace, they murdered him.

You're a fine one to talk about double standards. You were exhulting over Israel's attack on Gaza. When Palestinians get killed by Israel, you say it's the Palestinians' fault because they were "human shields." But Israeli leaders live behind truly effective human shields, and Israeli soldiers go home to their human shields every night after their shifts.

Banging on about the ills of the IDF just takes attention away from the fundamental obstacle to genuine peace.

The Palestinians have offered peace. The fundamental obstacle to peace is the Israelis. They have blocked efforts at peace at every point. This article outlined the history much more completely than I ever could.

Nonetheless, the PLO's position continued to evolve until in November
1988 it officially accepted a two-state solution of its conflict with Israel. Under
the terms of the PLO commitment, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and
Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, would agree to be largely demilitarized,
would accept the stationing of international peacekeeping forces along
its borders with Israel, would end terrorism and all forms of attack on Israel
from its territory, would refrain from alliances with Arab rejectionist states, and
in all probability would agree to a settlement of the refugee problem on the
basis of a token return to Israel, combined with large-scale international economic
compensation of the refugees and their resettlement in the Arab world.7

Two years after the Oslo agreements were signed, Rabin announced his detailed
plans for a permanent settlement with the Palestinians: there would no
return to the pre-1967 borders; a united Jerusalem, including the Jewish settlements
in East Jerusalem, would remain under exclusive Israeli sovereignty;
most of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza would remain there, under
Israeli sovereignty; free access to and military control over the settlements
would be assured by a series of new roads to be built throughout the territories;
Israel's security border "in the broadest meaning of that term" would be the
Jordan River, meaning that Israel would retain settlements and military bases
in the Jordan River valley, deep inside Palestinian territory. What the Palestinians
would get was an "entity" that would be the "home to most of the Palestinian
residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. . . . We would like this
to be . . . less than a state."8

The entire history of the relationship of Israel with its neighbors has consisted of this kind of double-dealing rejection of genuine offers of peace, with an extra layer of lies on top.

It's curious to me that shooting a missile into a crowded market is regarded as less immoral than walking into a crowded market and blowing up yourself and the occupants. The pilot who fired the missile goes home to a hot dinner and a warm bed, and next week, he fires another missile killing another dozen innocents. The suicide bomber goes to the morgue with his victims, and kills no more. The next homicide bombing needs only a target and someone willing to pull a trigger. The next suicide bombing needs someone else who feels so injured by his targets that he is willing to die with them.

Suicide bombers are produced by Israel's generation-long oppression of the Palestinians. They have created enemies who are so angry at them, they are willing to commit suicide in order to strike back. If Israel was to leave the West Bank, the ranks of suicide bombers would quickly be depleted, even if every currently willing bomber still carried out his intentions. But instead, they continue to create new bombers.

In all the years of the conflict, the offenses of the Palestinians against the Israelis are dwarfed by the offenses that have been visited upon them, that are being visited on them right now. You and I can agree that killing is an immoral act, one that should be taken only under the most extreme of circumstances. I believe that the Israelis, through their actions, have created the extreme circumstances that justify their deaths at the hands of Palestinians, especially since a few simple acts could end the threat they live under.

Have the Palestinians hurt their cause? Would they be doing better if they were using Gandhian tactics? The Palestinians who have gone that route have been murdered by the Israelis, with not an iota of attention from the Western press. At the beginning of the current intifada, the Israelis murdered 400 Palestinians before there was a single suicide bombing. Did you see headlines that said "IDF kills hundreds of Palestinians?" No, you saw headlines that said "Palestinians riot."

Back in the '70s, when Palestinian groups were lashing out at pretty much at random, they did hurt their cause badly. But they aren't hijacking airplanes and throwing people off of cruise ships any more...not that you would know it from the level of rhetoric that is aimed at them. For example, yesterday I read Thomas Friedman's column where he accused the Arab world of refusing to make peace with Israel...four years ago, the Arab League agreed to recognize Israel's '67 borders, the PLO has done the same, and Hamas just did the same a couple of weeks ago, but to Friedman, a well-respected commentator with a strong interest in the area, it was as if those events never happened.

Z Magazine draws a pointed contrast between the way the news media handled events in Serbia, and how they handle ones in the occupied territories.

The injury to the Palestinian cause comes from propagandists, who have no concern for facts or reality, not from Palestinians.

I never said that.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you held that position, however, the apologists for Israel obviously do.

fascist, warped Islam that is being taught to many Muslims these days

True. However, the question is, how do we deal with that? Killing Muslims isn't the solution, no matter what Cal Thomas may be telling us.

it most definitely has not brought the Palestinians one step closer to having a state of their own.

Then it has been just as effective as negotiation, and other non-violent attempts to achieve that end.

Just because there was a period without suicide bombing does not mean Palestinians ever adopted Ghandi or MLK's tactics of nonviolent resistance. That would have been something that none of the world's media could ignore.

They've certainly done a good job of ignoring the nonviolent Palestinians so far, as well as the violent Israeli reaction to them.

And now, bombing the hell out of Lebanon is called a reasonable reaction to provocation, while return fire from Lebanon is an "major escalation." Go figure.

The Israelis had an excellent chance to work toward peace three weeks ago, and in a remarkable coincidence, they invaded Gaza at that exact moment. Now they've decided that the hell they put the Lebanese through for two decades wasn't enough, they really need to do it again.

12 steps to peace may sound like a joke to some people, but it's obvious to me that Israel as a society is addicted to violence, and won't stop this until they can admit it. All their current actions are doing is giving credibility to the idea that driving them into the sea is the only real chance for peace in the region.

I agree that there are a lot of Israelis who want peace, but they have little or no effect on the aggregate entity that is Israel. They need to get their asses into gear and start changing things. Until that time, Israel as an aggregate is the aggressor and the cause of the conflict.

I consider suicide bombing ethical because it is self-limiting. The suicide bomber acts in response to overwhelming offense, and suicide bombing only continues so long as overwhelming offense creates new suicide bombers. If suicide bombing is not an ethical tactic, then there is no ethical use of force whatsoever, not in self-defense, not even blocking a blow.

People who care about Israel need to lie about what Israel is doing, because otherwise, they would alienate anyone who cares one bit about justice.

I'm not anti-Israel, I am anti-dishonesty. I was a news junkie as a child, and read every page of the local newspaper and the news magazines. I remember reading about the plucky Israelis, who fought off an overwhelming army through pure guts. But later on, I learned the difference between what the Israelis were doing in the West Bank, and what I read in the mainstream news media. It made me suspicious of what I'd read before, and I gradually learned more and more about the true history of the region, about how the "plucky" Israelis actually outnumbered and outgunned their enemies, how they'd attacked first, how they'd seized territory and driven out the residents, how they'd made a backdoor deal with Jordan's dictator for the West Bank, how they'd tried to drive the Palestinians out, how they'd consistently violated the agreements they'd made, and it outraged me that I had been lied to so consistently. It still outrages me that I am being lied to so consistently, with Israeli attacks referred to as "reprisals," and inadequate responses to the attacks referred to as "escalation."

As far as I am concerned, the Palestinians are acting in self-defense. No, I wouldn't necessarily be using the same tactics that they are using, but I'm not there fighting, and it's pretty obvious that nonviolent tactics are met in exactly the same way as violent tactics by the Israelis, so I have a hard time faulting the Palestinians for fighting back.

If Israeli ground troops come to harm when attacking Palestinians, then is what they do ethical? It's also "self-limiting', just less so.

Wrong. It's not self-limiting because the vast majority of IDF killers return to kill again. If the IDF only used suicide bombers, I suspect there would be peace in the Middle East.

1. If Israel really rolled over and played dead, do you really think Palestine will even contemplate only pushing for pre-1967 borders, and even consider recognizing Israel as a sovereign state? I've seen nothing that in any way backs up that claim.

Who said "roll over and play dead?" Is a straw man the only thing you can beat?

Jack, the 9/11 bombers were delusional.

AdipicAcid, I don't regard suicide bombing as perfectly moral, I regard it as being more ethical than homicide bombing, for reasons that I pointed out.

When a monster attacks you, you may need to become one in order to survive. We aren't always given the choice of whether to look into the abyss or not, some of us have the bad luck of being born in it.

You dispute that the 9/11 bombers were delusional?

You know, I find it interesting that our exchange began when you defended someone who was exulting over Israel's attack on Gaza. Somehow, you found my disgust with him offensive, but you found his celebration of death and destruction unremarkable.

My position on suicide bombing is that, given the various options of violent resistance, it has more ethical validity than most. Only shooting soldiers might stand higher, but given that IDF soldiers are carefully protected, that's a limited option.

It's more ethical to walk into a crowded market, look at the people there, and detonate a bomb you are carrying than it is to fly over a crowded market, look down on the people there, and drop a bomb on them.

Do you understand the self-limiting aspect of suicide bombing? It is a tactic which can only be used when you have people who feel such despair that they are willing to die in order to kill the people they blame for their despair.

Given conditions in Palestine, I am not surprised that there are people who feel that sort of despair. After all, any one of them could be killed simply because an Israeli soldier happens to feel murderous today. Their lives are in a constant state of disruption because of the occupation and the iron fist of the IDF. What hope do they have? Israel has shown no indication that it will ever leave them in peace, its actions only indicate that it will gradually attempt to herd them into smaller and smaller enclaves. Why wouldn't you be willing to die to strike back at the people who have made your life miserable since you were born? Why wouldn't you want to walk into a pizza parlor where they were pretending to be decent human beings, laughing and eating with their family and friends on land that they stole from your family and friends, while your family and friends are being slowly choked to death a couple of kilometers away?

If Israel removes its hand from the throats of the Palestinians, the number of people who feel such hatred and despair that they are willing to die for it will drop quickly. That's the whole point of my endorsement of suicide bombing: in order to be a victim of suicide bombers, you must have created them in the first place. They don't spring full-formed from the brow of Ares, they are created by years and years of abuse by the people who die at their hands.

I would tend to favor non-violent resistance, except, as I have pointed out before, non-violent resistors are treated the same by the Israelis as violent ones, and the news media simply ignores them.

Blowing up a crowded place full of Israeli individuals against whom you have no evidence of monstrous crimes is very different from, say, walking/sneaking up to a group of israeli soldiers and saying "Ha! *click*"

The fact that they are in Israel is strong evidence for monstrous crimes. Additionally, every Israeli man below the age of 50 is a member of the military reserves, so roughly half of any crowd are soldiers. We recently saw one of our Israeli apologists accuse Palestinian resistance fighters of using human shields...Israel garrisons its troops in their own homes. Isn't that using the population as human shields?