Last night 66 Israel Defence Forces soldiers were wounded when a Qassam rocket struck an IDF basic training base near Kibbutz Zikkim. The attack comes at a time both the Israeli and Palestinian Governments are preparing for the international meeting in November. Attacks like these are an everyday occurrence in The challenge for both Palestinians and Israelis in these situations is exactly the same as that faced by political leaders in Northern Ireland after the Omagh bombing in 1998 – to resist the temptation to abandon the peace process as a lost cause because certain radical elements in society prefer conflict to conciliation.
Of course the situation vis-à-vis
11 comments:
It's Catch 22 for the Palestinians, I am sorry to say. If they are peaceable they'll get nothing and if they cause conflict they'll get nothing. Just count ourselves lucky we weren't born in Gaza.
Some Palestinians might want peace but a great many do not. They were offered everything they wanted in the 90s but the vile Arafat couldn't imagine peace so he started the intifada.
At least the current gov seems more reasonable (it's all relative of course).
I won't know how to start thinking about this until you tell us if the "IDF basic training base near Kibbutz Zikkim" was in Israel proper or in the illegally occupied territories. Also, I need to know how many Palestinians have been killed this week.
Rockets from Gaza couldnt reach the occupied territories dimwit
Bahad 4, also known as Batar Zikim, is 5 miles south of Ashkelon in the Negev, the kibbutz it takes its informal name from having been founded in 1949.
" Anonymous said...
I won't know how to start thinking about this until..."
Yeah right. Methinks the rest of your comment makes your stance on these matters crystal clear. How strange you are 'anonymous'!
Annonymous 2.44: What rot! You should get your history right!
The trouble with the Palestinians is that they could never accept 'yes' for an answer.
The Israeli's desire for a homeland is entirely understandable after a millenia of murderous percsecution.
During the years before it's formal foundation (1850 onwards), Jews (mostly refugees from Eastern Europe and the Pogroms) emigrated to 'Palestine' - then just a backwater of the Ottoman empire - and lived in land which they (or rather Jewish philantrophiosts) purchased from Arabs - and which the Arans were happy to sell.
Until Jews started purchasing the land and moving to Palestine, the population was falling and the Arabs were leaving in droves - mostly for Eygypt (people such as Yassa Arafats parents).
Only when the new settlers started irrigating and making something useful out of the land did the Arabs kick up a fuss, claim they were being forced off their land (land which they had happily sld only a few years before), and started killing the Jews who were living in the land quite legally and legitimally.
In the 1920s, and in the face of almost permanent Arab attacks, expulsions from the land they had legitimately purchsed and owned, and insescent hostility, the Jews called for a seperate homeland, where Jews and Arabs would live seperately, but in peace alongside each other. The Arabs refused, and in 1923, the British (who had taken over control of 'Palestine after the first world war and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire) gave the Golan Heights to Syria and established an independent Jordon, forcing and restricting Jews to settle only in Palestine.
However, we British did nothing to defend the Jews against the Arab hostility, and in 1929, rioting lead to thousands of Jews killed in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron and other places. In responce to the British refusal to do anything, the Jews formed the Haganah - their own militia - to defend themselves against Arab attacks!
Again, in the 1930's the Jews tried for a seperate homeland and a two-state solution, and again the Arabs refused, instead calling for a halt to all Jewish immigration, and a siding with Hitler.
Once war broke out, Haganah was declared illegal and the Jews were again defenceless against Arab attacks.
After the war, and in the face of pressure from the UN to allow 100,000 Jewish refugees to settle in Israel, we British finally gave in and allowed Israel to formally exist - but only on fairly inhospitable land.
Once again, the Arabs refused to accept this, and once the British withdrew, the Jews and Palestinians were left to slug it out.
The rest is history.
I am afraid that, although so much of what Israel does today is dispicable and wrong, the Arabs and the Palestinians can only look to the failure of their forbears to sieze three historic opportunities for a peaceful settlement, and their waging of nearly 100 years of war against the Jews the real root cause of their predicament.
They are sadly doing the same now, by electing a bucng of hardliners who simply will not acept that Israel has a legal right to exist in peace, and to defend herself and her borders.
And before you ask, I am not Jewish!
Go here for more detailed analysis
http://adrianyalland.blogspot.com/2006/07/in-defence-of-israel.html
Adrian,
History is little more than storytelling. The facts on the ground don't always fit the subsequent narrative. Try to fit the following into your own storyline. It is a quote from TE Lawrence who knew a thing or two about Palestine.
'You know of course the root differences between the Palestine Jew and the colonist Jew: to Feisal the important point is that the former speak Arabic, and the latter German Yiddish. He is in touch with the Arab Jews (their H.Q. at Safed and Tiberias is in his sphere) and they are ready to help him, on conditions. They show a strong antipathy to the colonist Jews, and have even suggested repressive measures against them. Feisal has ignored this point hitherto, and will continue to do so. His attempts to get into touch with the colonial Jews have not been very fortunate. They say they have made their arrangements with the Great Powers, and wish no contact with the Arab Party. They will not help the Turks or the Arabs.'
You see that, even from the outset, the colonists showed little inclination to integrate with the Palestinians.
Ah, yes, the Arab Jews.
Over half of Israeli Jews are now Sephardic, with little or no ethnic memory of the Holocaust, but rather culturally Arab, while the Israeli Arabs ordinarily so called continue to grow at a far healthier rate than do the ageing, dying Ashkenazi Zionists.
Put these two factors together, and Israel is simply reverting to membership of a much older, deeper and wider Levantine society of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze Arabs, with its capital (insofar as it has one) at Damascus; Greater Syria, if you will.
That, in turn, will be a very significant and welcome force for pan-Arabism against “political Islam”.
The Ashkenazim could prevent this by the simple expedient of having children. They are not doing so, and they are not going to do so. Indeed, the single most common name for new born baby boys within Israel’s pre-1967 borders is now Muhammad.
Is there an alternative? Well, if it can be so described, then it has now made itself abundantly clear.
How I was scorned on my blog and elsewhere a couple of months ago for pointing out a few home truths about what Israeli society was now like. But now, to apparently universal shock yet entirely predictably, an Israeli neo-Nazi gang has been discovered.
The Law of Return, the touchstone of Zionism, is flooding Israel with resolutely Russian-speaking pork sausage munchers of the most tenuous Jewishness, who are at best Christians, and in some cases violent Nazis. This is impossible to arrest without repealing the Law of Return.
(On the ever-expanding lists of Book That I Will Write Eventually is a study of the post-War political impact, right up to the present day, of each of the foreign divisions of the SS and Waffen SS, even leaving aside the persistent rumours of British and American divisions, some of whose members would presumably still be alive. Of course, I’ll first have to teach myself to read German properly.)
Thus is dying the Zionist project, not dramatically as a result of an Iranian or Iraqi nuking, but slowly, though determinedly and irreversibly. The question now is who will inherit the spoils. The little Muhammads? Or the Little Hitlers? It will be one or the other.
I know which I’d prefer, and I know which anyone who still thinks that the Holocaust is important ought to prefer. Do they?
If so, then they must repeal the Law of Return, thereby consigning Zionism to the history books.
Nice One Adrian. Just in time for Rosh Hashanah!
Good call Shane. It has to be said that expecting nothing bad to happen at all puts progress in the hands of the nutters. Clearly they do not want progress.
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