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Author Topic: It's a mistake to assume Israel is acting in good faith
M. Spector
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posted 30 September 2006 12:54 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
A mistake too often made by those examining Israel's behavior in the occupied territories – or when analyzing its treatment of Arabs in general, or interpreting its view of Iran – is to assume that Israel is acting in good faith. Even its most trenchant critics can fall into this trap.
....
The problem with the "revenge" theory is that, however much a rebuke it is, it presupposes a degree of good faith on the part of the vengeance-seeker. You steal my toy in the playground, and I lash out and hit you. I have acted badly – even disproportionately, to use a vogue word B'Tselem also adopts – but no one would deny that my emotions were honest. There was no subterfuge or deception in my anger. I incur blame only because I failed to control my impulses. There is even the implication that, though my action was unwarranted, my fury was justified.

But why should we think Israel is acting in good faith, even if in bad temper, in destroying Gaza's power station? Why should we assume it was a hot-headed overreaction rather than a coldly calculated deed?

In other words, why believe Israel is simply lashing out when it commits a war crime rather than committing it after careful advance planning?


Read the whole article by Jonathan Cook

[ 30 September 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]


From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Ken Burch
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posted 03 October 2006 12:08 AM      Profile for Ken Burch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
OK, Israeli is clearly not acting in good faith on this point, and on a lot of others. No debate there.

What is your larger point though?


From: A seedy truckstop on the Information Superhighway | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Frustrated Mess
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posted 03 October 2006 05:09 AM      Profile for Frustrated Mess   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Did you read the whole article? It is very simple. It returns us to an earlier chapter in this debate. The assumption is that the Israeli government wants peace with their subjugated Palestinian subjects. That they are acting in good faith even when acting violently. The article argues that, in fact, they are not acting in good faith as their actions demonstrate they prefer controlled violence and eventual ethnic cleansing to peace with Palestinians.
From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Noise
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posted 03 October 2006 09:53 AM      Profile for Noise     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Ken - the other thread on this:


WIthout the assumption that Israel is working towards:

quote:
5. There could be a two-state solution, with a real Palestinian state living alongside a reformed Israel in which all live as equals.

Doesn't this question kinda become moot?

quote:
So, if YOU were running the Palestinian resistance effort, what would YOU do?

The insistance that the Palestines, leaders or people, can do ANYTHING to work towards that goal is based on Israel also having that same goal.


I made a reference towards it... It's possible the Palestinian leader to do such has already come about, and was promptly arrested and is being arbitrarily held in a prison ^^


From: Protest is Patriotism | Registered: May 2006  |  IP: Logged
Ken Burch
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posted 08 October 2006 03:00 PM      Profile for Ken Burch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I don't assume that the current Israeli government is working at this moment towards a two-state solution. But there has been widespread support for a two-state solution among ordinary Israeli citizens for almost two decades(this has been reduced due to the use of suicide bombings)and there can be the possibility of persuading them to elect a government that WILL back a two-state solution.

But this depends on the entire Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian community making it clear that, under a two-state solution or under another solution, Jews would be welcome to stay in Israel(at least in the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel)and never face violent attack again.

(As, of course, it depends on the entire Israeli population being willing to accept that the Palestinians having a right to a state comprising every millimeter of the West Bank and Gaza, within which Palestinians can count on living in peace and safety and without ever having their water supplies cut off or their olive trees cut down again.)

But it remains clear that Israel will never be FORCED to "act in good faith" through violence against Israeli civilians. Nor will it ever be effective to imply, as a lot of posters here seem to imply, that every Israeli is a bloodthirsty imperialist who wakes up every morning obsessed with tormenting all Palestinians.

A recognition of the humanity of both sides, by both sides, would help.

And can everybody please get it through their friggin heads that I am not, and have never been, an apologist for the Occupation or the Lebanon War? I want the Israeli government to radically change what it is doing. I thought this went without saying that people knew that, but apparently it doesn't.

I want the Israeli government to stop being an oppressor and to stop trying to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

I want the end to the roadblocks and the checkpoints, an end to the strip-searches and humiliations.

I want justice for everybody.

But it is certain that the current path the Palestinians are taking, just though their rage is, cannot liberate them.

[ 08 October 2006: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]


From: A seedy truckstop on the Information Superhighway | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Merowe
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posted 08 October 2006 04:16 PM      Profile for Merowe     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Recently in a post to my good intentioned lefty mom I ragged her for fencesitting on Israel. I made points similar to those that started this post.

Let's be clear: actions speak louder than words. It is obvious to the dispassionate observer that Israeli government policy is expansionist. They have never dealt in good faith with the Palestinians. With total military/economic supremacy, they do as they please, and it pleases them to build settlements on land that is not theirs, and kill, yes, kill, anyone who stands in their way, be they child, man or woman, Arab, Israeli or foreign.

Sweep away the subsequent propaganda pollution of words that somehow, miraculously, continues to obscure this simple truth from too many observers and you have the cold hard truth at the center of manifest Israeli foreign policy.

Drop in a government, ANY government there that one might seriously consider as a peacemaking rather than landtaking agent and I would expect the Palestinians to come to the table.

But, since Reagan, there has been no such government, quite the opposite.

And STILL we discuss how the Palestinians might change their tactics? These tactics that are so obviously the acts of desperate, hopeless people, spent after decades of innumerable peaceful and principled protests?

We discuss the wrong camp.


From: Dresden, Germany | Registered: Apr 2003  |  IP: Logged
Frustrated Mess
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posted 09 October 2006 07:35 AM      Profile for Frustrated Mess   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Let us put aside Israel’s worse failure -- as the stronger party -- to honour any of these conditions. Observers rarely note that Israel has never recognised the Palestinians’ right to statehood, not even in the Oslo accords, nor has it defined the extent of its own borders; it has not for one moment renounced violence against Palestinian resistance to occupation; and it has consistently broken its agreements, including by expanding its illegal settlement programme and by annexing Palestinian land under cover of building the West Bank wall.

But more strangely, observers have also failed to note both that Fatah, first under Arafat and then Abbas, agreed to all three conditions years ago and that Fatah’s compliance to Israeli demands never helped advance the struggle for statehood by one inch.

The struggle for Palestine's soul


From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Ken Burch
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posted 09 October 2006 03:16 PM      Profile for Ken Burch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Yes, the Israeli government has done a lot of horrific things. Yet, only a few years ago, the vast majority of the Israeli PEOPLE supported a two-state solution. The suicide bombings destroyed that support.

Particularly when Hamas and the Al-Aksa Martys Brigade deliberately orchestrated suicide bombings during Israeli election campaigns and did so for the sole purpose of goading Israeli voters into electing hardline thugs like Netanyahu and Sharon. There is no way that the Palestinian people ever benefited from Likud defeating Labor in Israeli elections. Nor did the Palestinians benefit from Israeli politicians being given pretexts for
using progressively more hard-line tactics against Palestinians.

What the Israeli left needed was to be able to demonstrate that the Palestinians could be trusted, if they were to establish a state, not to use that state to wipe out Israel proper. Just as Israeli refusal to accept territorial limits caused the Arab countries to justifiably reject partition as a solution, Palestinian refusal to give up absolutely on absorbing pre-1967 Israel as well as the West Bank and Gaza into a Palestinian state was used by the Israeli right to justify building more of the bigoted right-wing settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

At some point, there needs to be trust established on both sides.

At the moment, Israel needs to stop brutalizing Palestine and Hamas equally needs to guarantee that, once a Palestinian state is established in ALL of the West Bank and Gaza, there will never again be violent attacks against Israelis.

This isn't too much to ask, really.


The question is not one of telling the Palestinians to surrender. The question is how to help them succeed.

As to the thread title, could we not also question the degree to which HAMAS is acting in good faith?


For example, the whole question of recognition of Israel. Really, if they recognized Israel WITHIN THE PRE-1967 boundaries, Hamas would be losing nothing.

It would not mean recognizing the legitimacy of the Occupation, nor would it mean approving of what the Israeli government and the IDF have done to Palestinians.

It would simply take away the last excuse the world had for not fully supporting Palestinian self-determination.


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Cueball
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posted 09 October 2006 03:31 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Ken Burch:
Yes, the Israeli government has done a lot of horrific things. Yet, only a few years ago, the vast majority of the Israeli PEOPLE supported a two-state solution. The suicide bombings destroyed that support.

Yes, well most Palestinians had accepted the two State solution as the defacto best deal they could achieve, yet Israel persisted in increasing settlement construction during the so-called peace process, in an overt attempt to change the facts on the ground, and even in this relative quite period Israel continued to arrest an kill Palestinians.

Meanwhile Ehud Barak prevericated on the Final Settlement deal at Camp David, demanding soveriegnty over a further 3% of the West Bank and effective Israeli military control over 50% of the rest, until such a time as Israel felt it was OK for the IDF to leave, as determined by its own time schedule.

For instance, did you know that increased settlment of the West Bank by Israel directly abrogated the terms of the Oslo agreement by increasing Israeli water usage, something which was specifically restriced by the accord and agreed to by Yitzhak Rabin?

And of course in 1999, prior to the election campaign Israel took the unprecedented step of assasinating via rocket the moderate leader of the PFLP, and thereby setting of the chain of events which led to the tit for tat exhanges and the rise in Palestinian militancy of the election.

So, yes, other than the repeated provocations by Israeli leadership, and its intransigence over minor details of the OSLO final status agreement, killings of Palestinian leadership and civilians by the IDF, you are right, it was the Palestinian suicide bombings that turned Israeli popular opinion against Oslo, what is curious about your analysis is it ignores how Israel turned Palestinians against Oslo, and making its chief Palestinian supporter (Yasser Arafat) appear to be an ineffective monkey incapable of delivering on the quasi promises of the Oslo accord.

Now remember when the IDF Appache helicopters are assasinating Palestinian ledearship, they are acting on the authority of the state of Israel, and that when Hamas sent of its suicide bombers it was acting against the authority of the Palestinian Authority, with the specific purpose of undermining Yasser Arafat, and the PA, and Oslo.

However you chose to ignore the state sanctioned provocations of the IDF, and the policies of the Israeli government in regards to settlement construction (in direct contravention of the letter and the spirit of the Oslo accord) as irrelevant, while assigning complete legitimacy to the activities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad two entities without any kind of official status as representative of the Palestinian will.

Just as you are now choosing to ignore the fact that prior to recent massacre on the beach by the IDF, and the assassintion of the PA security chief in Gaza, Hamas had ordered a more or less effective 18 month cease fire, while Israel continued to arrest and kill Palestinians at will, claiming that ongoing ineffective rocket attacks by some Palestinians that wounded few and killed even fewer, are somehow the cause of the Palestinians plight.

In other words you have bought into "the devil made me do it" Israeli line, which ignored in the Oslo period the efforts of the PA to reign in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and made the PA (and all Palestinians) directly repsonsible for the activties of fringe militant groups acting outside of official authority, while ignoring the fact that Israeli abrogations of Oslo, were the explcit policy of successive Israeli governements, including so called "doves" like Ehud Barak, and assign blame for the collapse of the two state solution to the primary victims of the occupation.

The facts are right there in front of your face and you keep moaning about suicide bombers, even when there aren't any, and you fail to see that changes in Palestinian tactics do not result in a consequent change in Israeli tactics and they keep killing Palestinians regardless of any ceasefires or declarations made by Palestinian leadership.

[ 09 October 2006: Message edited by: Cueball ]


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
a lonely worker
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posted 09 October 2006 05:11 PM      Profile for a lonely worker     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Unfortunately one of the biggest problems is that any form of criticism is quickly supressed:

In N.Y., Sparks Fly Over Israel Criticism

quote:
Two major American Jewish organizations helped block a prominent New York University historian from speaking at the Polish consulate here last week, saying the academic was too critical of Israel and American Jewry.

The historian, Tony Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University's Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of Europe. Judt was scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the consulate. Judt's subject was the Israel lobby in the United States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest debate.

An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly concluded Judt was too controversial.

"The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure," Kasprzyk said. "That's obvious -- we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that."

Judt, who was born and raised in England and lost much of his family in the Holocaust, took strong exception to the cancellation of his speech. He noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later this month at Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish group had complained. Other prominent academics have described encountering such problems, in some cases more severe, stretching over the past three decades.

The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling.


How can progress ever be made when only one side is allowed to speak? It's time this censorship ends.


From: Anywhere that annoys neo-lib tools | Registered: Jul 2005  |  IP: Logged
Ken Burch
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posted 09 October 2006 07:12 PM      Profile for Ken Burch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Agreed. There needs to be full discussion of what Israel is doing and has done.
From: A seedy truckstop on the Information Superhighway | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Ken Burch
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posted 10 October 2006 01:46 PM      Profile for Ken Burch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
And I've NEVER ignored the injustices perpetrated by the Israeli government. I condemn all of them and always have. I just disagree with what has been done to oppose them because, clearly, if armed struggle hasn't worked yet, it isn't going to.

The anger should be specifically directed towards the Israeli government, not EVERY SINGLE ISRAELI.

The resistance can be built on telling the world about what Israel has done in the West Bank and Gaza, and to its own Arab citizens. Ideas can work just as well as guns, better in fact.

There has been widespread support for the Palestinian cause around the world. People like Rachel Corrie DIED for the Palestinians. Please stop the "the world doesn't give a shit" rhetoric, because it is bogus and you know it, Cueball and Mess.

There has to be a better way than what is currently being done. It is hardly a call for surrender to say this.


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Cueball
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posted 10 October 2006 02:04 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
You keep talking about this as if assigning blame is an essential quality of the search for a just solution. It is not.
From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Ken Burch
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posted 10 October 2006 04:30 PM      Profile for Ken Burch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Not assigning blame. Finding an effective approach to change the situation.
From: A seedy truckstop on the Information Superhighway | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Frustrated Mess
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posted 10 October 2006 05:20 PM      Profile for Frustrated Mess   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
There has been widespread support for the Palestinian cause around the world. People like Rachel Corrie DIED for the Palestinians. Please stop the "the world doesn't give a shit" rhetoric, because it is bogus and you know it, Cueball and Mess.

There has to be a better way than what is currently being done. It is hardly a call for surrender to say this.



Yes, Palestinians should lay down and surrender their lives to the bulldozers waiting for you to rally world opinion?

Why don't you? Why don't you do it now? Why don't you book meeting halls and church halls and schools to tell the world about Israeli injustice against Palestinians? Let us know how your first day goes.


From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Ken Burch
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posted 10 October 2006 09:31 PM      Profile for Ken Burch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Actually, I'm willing to do that. As are a lot of other people.

And let me ask you, what exactly do YOU do to help the Palestinian cause that puts you in such a exalted place to judge me, Mess?

And again, why do you have such an abiding faith in the armed struggle as the only possible effective approach to liberating Palestine, given that it has thus far been singularly useless in achieving that objective?

Yes, Israel has done terrible things, but why insist on using terrible and ineffective methods to oppose Israel?

Do you really have anything to offer to this discussion other than irrational rage?

What is the use of just saying, in effect, "Israel is totally evil and anything whatsoever is justified to oppose what it has done"?

Could you at least try to suggest some positive ideas to change the situation?

Anger must be channelled and focused towards effective approaches to fighting injustice.
Simply lashing out for the sake of lashing out achieves nothing.

[ 10 October 2006: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

[ 10 October 2006: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]


From: A seedy truckstop on the Information Superhighway | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 11 October 2006 01:08 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Ken Burch:
Yes, Israel has done terrible things, but why insist on using terrible and ineffective methods to oppose Israel?

It not about supporting terrible methods, but about recognizing there inevitability. Given that some Palestinians are going to be so pissed off and angry that they really don't give a fuck what you think or believe, there will always be violence, and some of that violence will amount to war crimes. There is nothing that can be done about that.

You seem to think that if Hamas gives up the sword, that all Palestinians will fall into line. Sorry it doesn't work that way. It didn't work that way when Yasser Arafat was around trying to keep a lid of Palestinian violence, quite the opposite.

There was nothing that Arafat could do to hold in militants who felt the peace process was not working, and as such they grew, until now, when the militant faction of Hamas is now equal in popularity to the PA.

If Hamas stopped using violent means (which they have more or less, you seem to keep forgetting) some other organization would grow in its place to take the struggle to the level of armed resistance.

You just don't get it. This is inevitable and impossible to prevent. But instead of recognizing this fact, and acting accordingly, you insist on talking about something that can not be stopped from happening as if it can, and then saying that this is the most important blocakge to movement forward.

So, instead of focussing attention on the actual causes of the injustice you insist on making an arguement which only serves to support the Israeli position, which you say you oppose, by making Palestinian violence the central thing upon which you focus.

In fact, by focussing on this inevitable aspect of the struggle, as the key and sailent issue which needs to be addressed you are reinforcing the status quo, because you are making your support conditional upon an impossible condition, that being the end of Palestinian violence, precisely the conditions that Israel insists on knowing full well that its provocation and continued occupation will incite further violence by someone or other, even if it is not Hamas.

Its like you are saying that civil rights movement under MLK should have been able to do something about Malcolm X, and was somehow responsible for what the NoI were doing, as if the injustice to American blacks was no longer a worthwhile cause because different faction took different approaches to the resistance.

What is sailent regardless of the means is the original injustice, and the cause of that resides with Israeli intransigence, not the suicide bombers.


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Frustrated Mess
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posted 11 October 2006 05:47 AM      Profile for Frustrated Mess   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
What he said.

And tell me, Ken, do actually read any of the links that are provided?

Here is one you that underlines precisely what Cueball is stating:

quote:
Israel has always found reasons for oppressing, destroying and killing in Gaza, whatever the circumstances. Let us not forget that Israel’s occupation began four decades ago, long before anyone had heard, or dreamt, of Hamas. Israel’s rampages through Gaza have continued unabated, even though Hamas’ military wing refrained from retaliating to Israeli provocations and maintained a ceasefire for more than a year and a half.

Shalit is the current pretext, but there are a host of others that can be adopted should the need arise. And that is because as far as Israel and its American patron are concerned, any Palestinian resistance to the illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is unacceptable. Whatever the Palestinians do -- apart from submitting willingly to occupation and permanently renouncing their right to statehood -- is justification for Israeli “retaliation”.

Absolute political and military inactivity is the only approved option for the Palestinians, both because it implies acceptance of the occupation and because then the world can quietly forget about the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. On the other hand, Palestinian activity of any kind -- and especially in pursuit of goals like national liberation -- must be punished.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

The struggle for Palestine's soul

Here is something else you might consider reading:

quote:
Neighbors report that Israeli soldiers had been beating her husband because he wasn't answering their questions. Foolishly or valiantly, how is one to say, the 35-year-old woman had interfered. She tried to explain that her husband was deaf, screamed at the soldiers that her husband couldn't hear them and attempted to stop them from hitting him. So they shot her. Several times.

Her name was Itemad Ismail Abu Mo'ammar.

She didn't die, though. That took longer. It required her life to flow out of her in the form of blood for several hours, as Israeli soldiers refused to allow an ambulance to transport her to help. Her husband and children could do nothing to save her.



http://www.counterpunch.org/weir10062006.html

Put yourself in the shoes of a Palestinian facing such brutality every day just because you are not the right religion. Put yourself in the shoes of that woman's children who watched their mother dying. Murdered because she tried to intervene while their deaf father was being beaten for being deaf. Think about that for just five minutes.

And you still think the issue is not Israel and the occupation but how they defend themselves? If so, we have nothing left to say.


From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Ken Burch
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posted 11 October 2006 08:21 AM      Profile for Ken Burch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I never said that Israel and the occupation weren't the issues. There is no contradiction between saying that and saying that what Palestinians have been doing to resist the occupation isn't working and isn't going to work.

And I do read the links. I agree that what Israel does and has done in the Occupation is completely unacceptable. Nothing I've said calls my views on that into question.

I want Palestinians to get a state. I can want that without supporting Hamas.

Giving unconditional support to anything anybody claims to be doing in support of Palestinian rights serves no purpose. If Israel can't be assumed to be acting in good faith, the same thing can be said for a number of Palestinian factions. The Occupation doesn't justify EVERYTHING, y'know.

You know full well that it is impossible to defend Palestinian violence and still get anyone to listen to you when you speak of the evils of the Occupation. To do the first makes it impossible to effectively do the second.

And you also know that violence of the type that has been used can NEVER lead to a victory for binationalism or anything progressive in the Middle East. It can only lead to a state that's a clone of Iran.

What keeps being forgotten is the way in which the most hardline elements in Israeli politics use some of the things some Palestinians have done to whip the Israeli electorate into line behind hardline policies. I was trying, in these threads where you and I have argued, Cueball, to help come up with suggestions for other approaches that might work better. Loyalty to a cause is all good and well, but loyalty to ineffectiveness is useless.

There has to be some way, some way that those of us outside of Palestine can help find, to help Palestinians find, for once, an effective way to resist the occupation. There has to be a way we can help them resist that doesn't give the Israeli right propaganda victory after propaganda victory.

Oh, and one other thing:

I know that it wasn't about Shalit. OK? I've known that for weeks. Please stop implying that I've been duped by Israeli propaganda. I haven't. I know what's going on.

[ 11 October 2006: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

[ 11 October 2006: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

[ 11 October 2006: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]


From: A seedy truckstop on the Information Superhighway | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged

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