The Settlement Issue in Israel
Here's a headline you don't see everyday: Netanyahu Supports Evacuating Settlement Outposts by Force if Necessary. It's from today's Yediot Achranot, Israel's mass circulation daily. Bibi is taking this minor step in response to his U.S. visit and he's got the perfect person to do the dirty work: Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, the leader of the lost and forlorn Labor Party.
This is a small step, but a first step. And, it's ironic that Barak, who negotiated peace with one voice and let settlements expand with another during his own reign as Prime Minister, is now forced to take action by Bibi. This is probably a better scenario, with Bibi at the helm and not in the leadership of the opposition where he can cheer on the settlers' lobby.
There is no way that these outpost sitters will go quietly. They are the most extreme among the settlers, many of them are young people who grew up in the territories and know only a completely lawless way of life, living in outposts, starting without any amenities, willingly devoting themselves to an ideology that is so fierce it simply doesn't withstand the norms of a civilized society. They are not among any of the consensus in Israel, except for the very hard core right wing. There will be confrontations with the army because these folks don't recognize Israel's rule of law, nor do they recognize the IDF as a legitimate institution.
If Barak and Bibi want to move to step two, which would be serious settlement freeze and negotiations with the Palestinians as the U.S. appears strongly to be recommending, they will get this first piece over with quickly, and they will make clear that finally, after 42 years, Israel is ready to bring a semblance of the rule of law to the settler society.
Barak may be thinking twice right now about the way he negotatied his way back into his Defense Ministry seat. He sacrified the few remaining morsels of dignity that Israel's Labor Party had, but now he has the chance to show that he is sitting there for a reason. The settlers are fuming against him and saving their ire for Bibi to see how things play out. Reportedly, according to Yediot, the settlers' movement is not willing to cooperate just yet, until the government shows a green light to more settlement growth. This could be the beginning of a long, hot summer. For Israel's sake, let's hope that the Bibi-Barak duo show some resolve. But hope doesn't spring eternal, especially with an eye to past history.
The headline indicates that Netanyahu is an adept politician, able to learn while he was out of the prime-ministership from the successes and failures of Barak and Sharon, and able to deliver timely, crafted and targeted sound-bites to journalists and selected audiences. I cannot see that it indicates anything much beyond that. In terms of practical effective action it appears that all options are still on all tables in the Mideast, in the U.S. and around the world. We need to watch Israel-Palestinian developments closely, because they no longer look like being something that journalists will be able to put on auto-pilot as they are so wont to do.
May 24, 2009 11:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Unbelievable that you could state that Bibi is "an adept politician, able to learn while he was out of the prime-ministership"
"Bibi" is nothing but a psycho-fanatic nut and a bully. The ONLY reason he is as well received as he is in the West is because he is so "well spoken" For god sake SO WHAT? He speaks English without a perceptible accent and pitches to the Jewish community (Never forget! The HOLOCAUST!) evangelical right and neo-cons who are charmed by the fact that they don't have to think at all themselves or struggle to understand Hebrew or a thick accent. THAT'S why he's "liked" in the States. Its as shallow as that.
He's been investigated over and over again for CORRUPTION while out of office. He's a thug like the rest of the Likudniks and willing to trade with the devil (Lieberman) to get back INTO office. All he learned out of office was to avoid prosecution. Learned it well from Ariel Sharon and his sons apparently.
Ugh. Makes me SICK.
May 24, 2009 5:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Adept = proficient, e.g. able to become Israeli PM in two separate decades
Does not indicate anything much beyond that =
Does not indicate anything much beyond that
(e.g. likable, believable, good for the people of Israel)
May 24, 2009 6:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Any step towards peace is a big step. Let's hope there will be more...
I do find it amazing that the hopes and dreams of the millions who live in the region is under the auspices of some Israeli settlers. Politics trumps peace. Zealots rule. Why?
May 24, 2009 4:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
An article today in the L.A. Times: about Hillary's public comments regards Korea and Pakistan raising a lot of eyebrows.
Gee, how about the government of Israel?
If she starts blasting Bibi, we'll know that she's REALLY got balls. Balls enought to say fuck this Obama shellgame, resign late next year and declare her candidacy for 2012.
This current shellgame is beginning to remind me of when Reagan sat in the oval office.
May 24, 2009 4:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Netanyahu Supports Evacuating Settlement Outposts by Force if Necessary
...and the moon is made of green cheese.
May 24, 2009 5:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree. It's soundbites as the first commenter above said. Bibi got some flack to write the headline he wanted to see.
May 25, 2009 7:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you're right. And it's also important to note that this refers only to those settlements that Israel deems illegal, while under international law, all of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal.
It's also frightening to note that even as Netanyahu is making pretty noises about removing a few settlements, Lieberman's party is planning to introduce two very racist anti-Arab bills in the Knesset:
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1107ap_ml_israel_palestinians.html
(Sorry about the formatting...I'll figure it out one of these days.)
May 25, 2009 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
The outpost that was "destoyed" Maoz Esther is now being rebuilt for the FOURTH TIME. It's nothing more than a shell game. Israel has only designated about 25 of the 100+ outposts as illegal and even these get rebuilt and expanded every time.
May 26, 2009 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
If removing Jewish settlers is such a big deal with you, I'm sure you support removing them everywhere.
In particular, Rosenberg and his family are parasites who've done nothing to support this country, refuse to do anything, have been here for a shorter period of time than most Jews have been in Israel. And American Indians have a far, far better claim to American land than Arabs do to Palestinian land...and I'm sure they'd like to get back as much of it as they can.
But, of course, you don't support such a policy. Horrors! That would mean that you, personally, might have to give up something, might have to sacrifice. So you'll find all sorts of reasons to reject the analogy.
May 24, 2009 7:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Where, in the last hundred years, have Americans moved on to Indian reservations, taken the best land, built ugly fortified settlements, bulldozed Amerindian homes, oppressed and humiliated the natives at will, and then gone wailing like crybabies for help and support from a foreign legislature whenever the slightest international criticism surfaces? No doubt with your ingrained hypocritical bias, "you'll find all sorts of reasons to reject the analogy."
May 25, 2009 6:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why do it in the last hundred years when they'd done it all previously? No need to do it twice.
May 25, 2009 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Committing character assassination and launching endless propaganda barrages as part and parcel of a systematic campaign to corrupt and twist the internal politics of ANOTHER country is not something even the most ruthless killers of the U.S. Calvary in the Wild West resorted to, not once, not twice, not ever. When the West Bank settlers get their lying agents and brainwashed dupes out of the U.S. and back to their desert hell-holes, then we can perhaps make analogies between 2009 Israel and the American frontier of 1860s and 1870s - which by the way was not a terribly uncivilized place for its time compared with, say, the Pale of Settlement in Czarist Russia.
May 25, 2009 2:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Settling the West? Cowboys and Indians? John Wayne? All those movies and novels?
You must have lost your mind somewhere. I'd go back and look. Maybe no one recognized its value.
May 25, 2009 3:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
"And American Indians have a far, far better claim to American land than Arabs do to Palestinian land.." was your dubious analogy. If you don't like it, why did you bring it up? Grasping at any foolish rationalization for an Israel-is-always-right-no-matter-what dogma is bad enough; trying to attribute your sloppy thinking to others is truly beneath your abilities: Why not try commenting on the actual column re Netanyahu?
May 25, 2009 3:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Israelis, overwhelmingly, think the Arabs are unwilling to accept the legitimacy of Israel, to make peace. Absent that Israel's best strategy is to expand, expand, expand. Which, of course, makes the Arabs (and other Muslims) even more unwilling to make peace.
So there is no peace and will be none in the foreseeable future.
May 25, 2009 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's also true that Israelis, being human, are greedy and land-hungry...and have been so almost from the beginning. So what? You think the Palestinians, with the highest birth rate on earth, are any different?
May 25, 2009 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Precisely the Lebensraum argument that was used to justify the Holocaust. How convenient, a few thousand or million slaughtered here or there, just another day in a dog eat dog world? You might find a majority of West Bank settlers and Palestinian terrorists, plus a few neo-Nazis and other assorted crazed barbarians agreeing with that philosophy. Count me, and most Americans I know, dead set against it.
May 25, 2009 5:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly.
You've got it right...but you don't believe it's an accurate description of reality. I wish it wasn't...but it is...and it will become more and more obvious if we don't do something about overpopulation.
Here's something for you to think about. Were the Nazis defeated because they were evil? Did they really lose? They're gone - true - but Germany is doing well and European Jewry no longer exists...and what of left of it is again under attack.
May 25, 2009 5:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course the Nazis lost. Germany has paid more in compensation to Jews since World War II than they lost to begin with (materially, not morally of course which would be impossible). Neo-nazis are ignorant down-and-out losers with little hope of ever gaining any real power in Europe. European Jewry is flourishing and generally takes a very dim view of the West Bank settlers whose views you hold so dear. Maybe that is why you'd prefer to deny the existence of the former, and the kowtowing of the Israeli government and the US Congress, to the latter.
May 26, 2009 5:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
There were 6 million Jews in Europe prior to WWII. They number, what?, a quarter of a million today. Here's a description of their situation
from A Chosen FewThat was in 1994, before the Muslim attack on Jews in Paris and London began in earnest.
So you're as full of shit about this as you are about everything else.
May 27, 2009 10:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
From the 1920's on the international community has intervened on the side of the Arabs. Without that intervention Israel would have truly extended from the sea to the Euphrates and from Suez to the Turkish border.
Israel engages in international diplomacy in an effort to reduce that intervention to a minimum.
I know you're a liberal but do try harder to get your facts straight.
May 25, 2009 9:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nice try. But your analogy (which is commonly used by those who wish to distract Amerians from understanding the I-P conflict) is a false one. The violence and oppression of white Americans toward Native Americans that occurred primarily during the 18th and 19th centuries, just can't be used to justify the same sort of behavior toward Palestinians in the 20th century and today.
You remember the 20th century, don't you? It was when the world finally recognized that the sort of "might makes right" violence and oppression that we ourselves sadly displayed back then is completely inimical to world peace and stability. We instituted international laws to prevent it, which Israel routinely violates. It is the violation of these international laws that leads many to see the more apt analogy is made to South African apartheid, which the world, to its credit, also condemned.
Besides, you aren't saying that our treatment of Native Americans is something that modern Israelis intend or desire to emulate, are you? If you are, I'd say that's not a particularly convincing argument.
May 25, 2009 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yours is just the 1948 argument; the world is different now - just in time to condemn the Israelis while exonerating everyone else. Amazing that you would take it seriously.
There is no international law...because there is no international government with powers of enforcement. What passes for such is just propaganda, used by various people for their own purposes and ignored otherwise.
Au, contraire. That's EXACTLY what I'm saying. I'm also saying their opponents would do the same or worse, if they could. Open your eyes. Human beings haven't changed since 1948. Not a bit.
May 25, 2009 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, and some human beings even in 1948 acted on the belief that two wrongs do not make a right, in America or anywhere else.
May 25, 2009 2:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Israelis and Palestinians are trying to make a state, not a right. From time immemorial intelligent people recognized the difference.
May 25, 2009 3:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
No intelligent person with half an ounce of objectivity could genuinely detect any state-making resulting from the slaughter of children in Gaza last January. If you really believe that Israel was being "defended" by blowing up civilians in Gaza until just a few days before Obama's inauguration, and thereafter "defended" by merely blockading and oppressing them, then your bias has twisted your mind in a pitiful knot.
May 25, 2009 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Spare me the self-righteousness, stop waving the bloody shirt. You look like a damn fool.
The Israelis and Palestinians are fighting a war, one that has lasted a very long time and has often been very ugly.
And that's being very charitable to you by assuming that you actually know what you are talking about and are not being very, very selective and dishonest in your presentation of the evidence (which you almost certainly are).
May 25, 2009 4:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Nuremberg trials were set up for a reason beyond victor's revenge. Even in a war -which Israel was not in in Gaza last Jan., wars are between armies, not one army against civilians- there are limits beyond which civilized people do not go lest they be condemned by humanity and history. Deny all you want, Jews with a conscience have got ahold of this West Bank settler hypocrisy, which they and many others have had enough of, & it will take a major action of the Arab terrorist counterpart to the settlers (both being co-killers of any move towards a peaceful two state solution) to get them to let go. No doubt there is a large enough Israeli cafe that can be sacrificed for the cause of Lebensraum for the West Bank expansionists.
May 25, 2009 5:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, no. Wars are between societies or countries. Armies are only one of the tools of war.
Here again you fail to grasp my arguments. It's the Jews (and others) who already have their stuff who are the hypocrites. The settlers are using the same methods, they're just latecomers to the game.
May 25, 2009 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Inner city gangs in U.S. cities are "newcomers" too, are you going to file comment after comment whitewashing them as well? (A rhetorical question, of course, since Hypocrisy is the guiding principle of settler dupes and tools).
May 26, 2009 5:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Settlement of the West Bank is clearly a strategy of the Israeli government. So you are comparing Israelis to inner city gangs, the implication being that neither has any legitimacy.
That's exactly what the Arabs say, and exactly my take on you leftist scum. You, like the Arabs, want to see Israel destroyed but, unlike them, are too fearful to say so openly. When they lie and fabricate it is clearly to dupe fools like you. When you do so it's because you are self-deluded cowards. They want to "throw the Jews into the sea" or "force the newcomers to return from whence they came (Europe mostly, prewar-war Nazi Europe if possible)", a policy which the Jews among you support if only it will guarantee their safety and wealth in America.
Gag. Puke.
May 27, 2009 11:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
ordinary said:
There is no international law...
and, in reply to my comment that he/she must not really be saying that Israelis intend or desire to emulate our own treatment of Native Americans, said:
I find your comments so extraordinary and so unbelieveably ethnocentric that they take my breath away. Do you not remember that one of the prominent reasons why the international community decided to strengthen international law after the failure of the Treaty of Versailles and WWII concerned a certain German leader who decided to commit genocide against a certain ethnic group?
You really aren't saying, are you, that Israel is not obligated to follow the Geneva Conventions because they represent a horrible injustice committed by the world against the Jewish people? It certainly sounds as if that's what you're saying, but I have to admit that I'm having a very difficult time wrapping my head around such an incredible statement. Believe me, I've heard some other pretty amazing things from those promoting a hasbara view of Israel in my time, but this this is such an outrageous claim that I'm sure I must have misunderstood you.
May 25, 2009 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why would you find my comments "ethnocentric"?...unless you mean that I think people are still very tribal, which I do...but I'm sure that's NOT what you mean. And why do you insist on focusing on Israel when talking about violations of the Geneva Conventions? I'm afraid it's more likely that you are anti-Jewish than I am "ethnocentric".
Of course I remember what happened following WWII and why the United Nations was established. But there's a lot of space between the word and the deed, between intentions and actions, between bullshit and real motivations, and between the needs and desires of all the various nations, tribes, religions, etc.
Don't you remember the long, long period immediately following the end of the war when the Arabs were going to "throw the Jews into the sea"? Probably, you view those statements through the same haze which you view the current threats of Hamas, Hizbullah, Ahmadinejad.
In sum, it strikes me that you are someone totally unable to believe that Machiavelli was deadly serious...and accurate. As accurate today as he was 500 years ago.
May 25, 2009 6:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
At the same time, Israel is refusing to freeze settlement
growth and claiming they have an "unwritten agreement that
lets them do this. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/23/AR2009052301536.html
May 24, 2009 7:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
The below is the link to a video describing the slaughter and incineration of civilians in GAZA where 225 civilians were killed in 4 minutes by helicopter gunships. In all, 313 children were killed in the massacre in January. The video examines the motives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjRjkVb_r1M&annotation_id=annotation_854925&feature=iv
May 25, 2009 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Now that the markets have crashed the only thing the English produce is bullshit, so far as I can tell.
May 25, 2009 10:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps, the English ought to learn from the Israelis, and spy on America to steal technology. Haven't heard of any English spies getting busted in America, unlike Israel. But then again, judging from your comments, you probably have a 'Free Jonathan Pollard' bumper sticker on your car.
May 25, 2009 12:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Are you seriously suggesting that all good ideas come only from America, that the only reason Israelis produce things while the English don't is because they steal our ideas?
Hearing isn't your problem. You've got shit for brains.
May 25, 2009 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ordinary: we hail Finkelstein.
You do the memory of Heinrich Himmler so proud, proudly.
He speaks such truth to your pride.
May 25, 2009 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
You don't even rise to the level of "useful" idiot.
May 25, 2009 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
RE:"...They are the most extreme among the settlers, many of them are young people who grew up in the territories and know only a completely lawless way of life, living in outposts, starting without any amenities..."
NETANYAHU'S FATHER: “...The Bible finds no worse image than this of the man from the desert. And why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases. The tendency towards conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetuate war.”…
..."The two states solution doesn’t exist. There are no two people here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population...there is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation… they only call themselves a people in order to fight the Jews..." - Benzion Netanyahu, 2009 interview
SOURCE OF NETANYAHU'S FATHER'S WORDS - http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2009/04/04/bibis-fathers-answer-to-the-arab-problem-hang-em-in-the-town-square/
May 25, 2009 5:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
I guess that rotten apple didn't fall from the rotten tree.
May 26, 2009 12:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ordinary needs Jesus in his heart. Pray for him.
May 26, 2009 9:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
I can't. I only pray for human beings.
May 26, 2009 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's quite a substantial argument...and enormously witty to boot.
May 27, 2009 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink