MJ: Maybe things would be different if American newspapers carried columns by Gideon Levy instead of Thomas Friedman.

Compare: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055574.html

To:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/opinion/14friedman.html

Thomas Friedman - the chickenhawk with a human face. That's right, Mr. Friedman. We should allow the "education" of the Gazans to continue; something like a thousand - about a third children - have "graduated".

It's a good piece, and Haaretz has hands down the best coverage in the region. All kids are innocent. But look at Amos Harel's analysis, also in Haaretz.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055543.html

Let's just imagine what would have happened if the Gaza operation hadn't happened.

Let's say Israel has accepted the demands to open Hamas's borders, in return for the cessation of rocket fire.

Hamas would have rightly assumed that Israel was vulnerable to military pressure. It would have used the open borders to import vast amounts of Iranian weaponry. It would have continued shelling Israeli civilians. Eventually a far-right Israeli government would have been elected.

So this government invades Gaza, only this time Hamas is much better armed. There are far more Israeli casualties. As a result, Israeli troops operate with even less restraint and the total number of civilian deaths is vastly higher on both sides.

The loss of 400 children is a terrible thing. But it is better than the loss of 4,000 children.

The key is what happens AFTER the cease fire.

I am mystified by the oft repeated assertion that it is somehow an act of extreme heroism to question or criticize Israel. Particularly with respect to the Gaza war, I have read as many, if not more, pieces criticizing Israel than praising it. The idea that criticizing Israel is a demonstration of courage, sure to merit some undefined (and as yet unseen) retribution from the dreaded MSM, exists more in the author's mind and serves to prop up his self image as a lonely crusader speaking truth to the uninitiated.

And I should also point out that Gideon Levy is a columnist who is voicing his own, obviously heartfelt, opinion. In fairness, though, I would also add that the editorial board of Haaretz has also been increasingly critical of the war as it has continued.

Finally, I was struck by this in the poll:

"There is little support for a greater U.S. role in resolving the Gaza crisis. Just 17% believe the United States should be more involved than it is currently, 27% say the United States should be less involved, and nearly half (48%) say it is about as involved as it should be."

I liked this -- in the Washington Times, of all places!

What if it was San Diego and Tijuana instead?

Randall Kuhn
Wednesday, January 14, 2009

In the wake of Israel's invasion of Gaza, Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: "Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico."

Within hours scores of American pundits and politicians had mimicked Barak's comparisons almost verbatim. In fact, in this very paper on January 9 House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor ended an opinion piece by saying "America would never sit still if terrorists were lobbing missiles across our border into Texas or Montana." But let's see if our political and pundit class can parrot this analogy.

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players.

What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their homes in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people in the United States and abroad, planted forests on their former towns, creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy?

Sounds pretty awful, huh? I may be called anti-Semitic for speaking this truth. Well, I'm Jewish and the scenario above is what many prominent Israeli scholars say happened when Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza. But this analogy is just getting started.

What if the United Nations kept San Diego's discarded minorities in crowded, festering camps in Tijuana for 19 years? Then, the United States invaded Mexico, occupied Tijuana and began to build large housing developments in Tijuana where only whites could live.

And what if the United States built a network of highways connecting American citizens of Tijuana to the United States? And checkpoints, not just between Mexico and the United States but also around every neighborhood of Tijuana? What if we required every Tijuana resident, refugee or native, to show an ID card to the U.S. military on demand? What if thousands of Tijuana residents lost their homes, their jobs, their businesses, their children, their sense of self worth to this occupation? Would you be surprised to hear of a protest movement in Tijuana that sometimes became violent and hateful? Okay, now for the unbelievable part.

Think about what would happen if, after expelling all of the minorities from San Diego to Tijuana and subjecting them to 40 years of brutal military occupation, we just left Tijuana, removing all the white settlers and the soldiers? Only instead of giving them their freedom, we built a 20-foot tall electrified wall around Tijuana? Not just on the sides bordering San Diego, but on all the Mexico crossings as well. What if we set up 50-foot high watchtowers with machine gun batteries, and told them that if they stood within 100 yards of this wall we would shoot them dead on sight? And four out of every five days we kept every single one of those border crossings closed, not even allowing food, clothing, or medicine to arrive. And we patrolled their air space with our state-of-the-art fighter jets but didn't allow them so much as a crop duster. And we patrolled their waters with destroyers and submarines, but didn't even allow them to fish.

Would you be at all surprised to hear that these resistance groups in Tijuana, even after having been "freed" from their occupation but starved half to death, kept on firing rockets at the United States? Probably not. But you may be surprised to learn that the majority of people in Tijuana never picked up a rocket, or a gun, or a weapon of any kind.

The majority, instead, supported against all hope negotiations toward a peaceful solution that would provide security, freedom and equal rights to both people in two independent states living side by side as neighbors. This is the sound analogy to Israel's military onslaught in Gaza today. Maybe some day soon, common sense will prevail and no corpus of misleading analogies abut Tijuana or the crazy guy across the hall who wants to murder your daughter will be able to obscure the truth. And at that moment, in a country whose people shouted We Shall Overcome, Ich bin ein Berliner, End Apartheid, Free Tibet and Save Darfur, we will all join together and shout "Free Gaza. Free Palestine." And because we are Americans, the world will take notice and they will be free, and perhaps peace will prevail for all the residents of the Holy Land.

Randall Kuhn is an assistant professor and Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He just returned from a trip to Israel and the West Bank.

Nice having Haaretz publish opposing views. But it should be pointed out that the polls in Israel today show that 92% support the invasion of Gaza. The Israeli people are quite capable of listening to opposing views without it interfering with their blood lust. They are quite cognizant of the actions needed to defeat their enemies. It is the American people that need to be protected from these dissenting views -- if our people were fully aware of what was happening there, support for Israel would likely disappear.

MJR: I would be more admiring of your courage in speaking out if you were to confront some of the hateful anti-Israel rhetoric your blog seems to attract with the same zeal you direct against AIPAC and even other, far more moderate Israel supporters who actually agree with you more than you realize.

MJ:

You should reflect on AB Yehoshua's answer to Levy.

here is it: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055977.html

ok, here's what you're saying ! you come take my land and since 50 years have gone by, i have to deal with it?
my next point is that, i dont think shelling by hamas prompted the current israel offensive, i think it is a well calculated move to silence the palestinians for the next 4 yrs because they are not sure what they will get under pe obama.
that is why Israel targets infrastructure, they will be busy trying to have some semblance of an existence,in essence Israel is pummelling them to submission.
if you understand the creation of the State of Israel then you will understand this has been their mo. check my earlier post a quote by Moshe Dayan, a decorated israeli general

This conflict is of no benefit to the US. Israel is not a US ally, it is a dependent nation which sucks away 3 billion a year in aid. I say the US solution to this is disengagement from the issue, we did not create this problem, and we will not solve it. The US has no vested interest in the conflict. Let the Israelis fight the palestinians in any way they choose, but let them know that they fight alone, and will have to make thier own agreements with Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran without US backing. The current situation is that the US will militarially back and supply any Israeli action without question. This has to end. It is unsustainable.

Just cold statistics here, but there are about 1.3 billion Muslims, and about 13 million jews. WHy not just bring over the jews in israel into the US and be done with it, it if foolish to pissoff an entire religion with a 100 to 1 advantage.

Here is an excerpt from the Jerusalem Post where Israeli are asked about how they feel about the war and the casualties on the other side:

Reporter's Notebook: An emotional disconnect

Jan. 15, 2009
Haviv Rettig Gur , THE JERUSALEM POST
After three weeks of driving around a country at war, one thing about this time is abundantly clear. Just about every Israeli Jew supports the IDF operation in Gaza.

We already knew this from the polls, of course. A Wednesday survey by Tel Aviv University reported the support at a staggering 94 percent among Israeli Jews. But hearing this first-hand offers an insight the polls can't give: the rationale for that support despite international condemnation and images of carnage out of Gaza.

Over the past three weeks, as evidence of civilian suffering in Gaza flooded media outlets worldwide, I asked Israelis what they thought of the fighting in Gaza and the suffering of the local population.

From hi-tech entrepreneurs in Ramat Gan to social workers in Sderot, taxi drivers and graduate students alike, the responses were almost as consistent as the level of support for the operation. The responsibility for the conflict, and for the suffering in Gaza, rests solely on Hamas, Israelis say. They often added that there could be no peace with an enemy who placed their own children in the line of fire.

"I'm disconnected emotionally from what is happening in Gaza," said Yamit Shkolnik, a 26-year-old Jerusalemite and new mother. "It doesn't anger me or sadden me. It doesn't make me happy either." That's because "they use their dead to kill us. They shoot from inside houses, and we have to take out those houses."

Eli Magen, a graduate student from Modi'in, said he is on the Left, but insists, "We've tried everything to make peace. We pulled out of 85% of the territory we conquered in 1967, and it got us missiles on our heads. Then they went and elected Hamas. What are we supposed to do with a group that thinks and acts like the Ku Klux Klan? There's nothing Israel could have done to avoid this fight."

A few foreigners have noticed the detachment with which Israelis approach the Gaza conflict. According to New York Times bureau chief Ethan Bronner, "Most Israelis have written Gaza off. Even before the war, they did not focus on the human toll and suffering there. When the war started, that was pushed even farther away."

Israelis feel there is little they can do to change the reality in Palestine, so they don't feel responsible for it, Bronner believes.

Most people I spoke to said Hamas was the cause of Israelis' consensus.

According to Aharon Rose, a researcher in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University, Israelis generally support a withdrawal from the West Bank, but they are so disillusioned by Palestinian violence they would be hard-pressed to trust a Palestinian regime within rocket distance of Tel Aviv.

"Hamas has destroyed the moral argument of the Palestinian cause" for the majority of Israelis who believed in it, Rose said, noting that "the party that won the last election [Kadima] ran on a platform of pulling out of Judea and Samaria."

"At the end of the day, we understand that there won't be peace," Shkolnik said. "Hamas is talking about something else entirely. They don't hide the fact that they want to kill us and take the country. For a long time, we didn't believe they thought that. In the disengagement, we tried to do something that would bring peace, but it only brought worse suffering for us and for them. If they force me to choose between our suffering and theirs, I prefer theirs."

Nadav Raz, a Chinese medicine practitioner and an urban combat trainer for the IDF, said he used to feel sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

"Up until four years ago, we were conquering them as occupiers. But we left the Gaza Strip and they elected a government that has taken them to war. Right now, I don't feel anything toward them. Why can't Hamas stop shooting?"

Hamas rejectionism leaves Israel with little choice, most of the interviewees said.

"The Palestinians are living under a regime that decided to commit suicide," according to Dr. Vered Noam, a professor of Talmud at Tel Aviv University. "We did not want to rule over them. We even destroyed Jewish settlements to give the Arab population control over its own destiny."

Noam said he feels the suffering in Gaza acutely, "and I look forward to the day when peace arrives and things are better for the Palestinians, but if they don't let us live our own lives even after we pull out, then we have no choice but to fight and defend ourselves."

"You're not going to find a Jew who feels good about civilian casualties," believes Miriam Gur-Arie, a taxi driver from Modi'in who has a son in the army. "But we don't have to suffer because they've got a stupid government."

"The responsibility is on Hamas. From what I see, that's the general opinion in Israel. The very fact that they built tunnels from house to house so leaders can escape and fighters can hide, but they didn't build a single shelter for their civilian population, speaks volumes. Even if we do care for their suffering, we can't be expected not to protect ourselves," Gur-Arie said.

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Hamas did not go to Israel, Israel came to hamas and if you dont want missiles being fired in the backyard get out of their backyard