The two state solution fate

ahh
zionist sympathizers

merely a rerun of the nazi episode
and as conflicted as a militant treehugger

 

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pardon

...and a right wing homosexual

/snicker

 

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Beside the point.

Are you joking? There is a 8 meter high, 703 km long wall around the West Bank. :bugeye:

What?

(http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=84347&sectionid=351020202)

What? Read the above.

The charter has been amended to acknowledge Israels right to exist. You are ignorant of the situation. Furthermore, as they do not recognize themselves as a terrorist organization, this would be a bit hard to renounce. They are only a terrorist organization to those whose agendas necessitate this, and to those who are indoctrinated by Western media.

You are naive.

Please quote your references for this statement.

 

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Perhaps you could let me in on what "the point" is? Because other examples of nations under occupation seem to me to be rather relevant to the question of what Hamas's options are.

Yes, and goods and people are allowed to cross it. You do understand the difference between a fence and a blockade, right? The United States has similar fences along much of its border with Mexico: does that mean the United States is blockading Mexico?

Well, provide a citation if you want to convince me otherwise. AFAIK, Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist to this day, and this is, naturally, a key impediment to improved relations.

Okay, then, they can renounce the targetting of civilians, or however they want to put it. In my book, anyone who has trouble calling a group that sends suicide bombers to blow up pizzerias "terrorists" is not to be taken seriously.

A cogent rebuttal indeed. So I take it, then, that you consider elections the sum total of what consitutes democracy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_civil_skirmishes

 

No one is pretending that except Israeli apologists.

Everyone else assigns responsibility for the oppression to the oppressor, Israel. Israel is not forced to behave as it has, to expand and encroach and blockade and lay siege to people it has penned up itself. These are free choices by Israel, who is in complete military and economic control of the situation and has been for many years now.

Israel has created an apartheid State maintained by force of arms, full of people it has abused in many severe ways. Now what?

 

The West Bank has got a Berlin wall around it. Fact. Why do you think that is?

See below, it takes two to tango.

(http://humanprovince.wordpress.com/2007/7/19/more-on-israels-right-to-exist/)

Israel can enter into dialogue regarding the grievances. It takes two to tango.

And a group who slaughters 1300 people, half of which are woman and children are of course NOT terrorists and should be taken seriously?

Free and fair elections indicate what the people want. And what the people want constitutes "Democracy". Simple.

 

The truth of this matter, from your own reference: :bugeye:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_civil_skirmishes)

 

A terrorist state is one that governs it`s own people by terrorizing them. This is not the case with israel whose government is not that of the palestinians. It is the case however for the palestinians since their government does indeed govern them as much by intimidation and terror as by anything else, this being a result of their radioactive fanaticism. If they can do this to their own people, say by illegally booby trapping their homes, illegally forcing them to be cannon fodder, or illegally executing them for suspicion of collaborating with the israelis, there`s no telling what such criminals are capable of.

 

You don`t have a clue do you?

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You're clueless.

 

Disproportionality is a good strategy. I like to think if I got punched, my response would be highly disproportionate.

 

Anyway, now that I have you all fixated on me as an "Israeli Apologist" or "Zionist Sympathizer" or whatever, I might as well come clean about my purposes. I have no affinity for either side of the conflict. Both sides have a lot of really indefensible ideas about how states, societies and nations should operate, and just about the only outcome that would be worse than the current impasse would be for either side to prevail over the other. The spectacle of the two sides consumed with debasing one another (and so themselves) would almost be gratifying to watch, if it didn't produce so many real casualties (both in actual lives in the region, and in intellects around the world consumed by the rabbit's-hole of politicized discourse).

As a relatively young American, I find the idea of states based on ethnic and religious criteria to be offensive, and a certain recipe for conflict in most instances (especially this one). And that goes as much for Arab/Muslim states as Jewish ones. While I recognize that much of the world does not share my perspective on this matter, the fact remains that there is no "two state solution." Any approach that further reinforces the division in identity between the two sides leads inevitably to war, not peace.

There is only one path to peace, and it is for enough people to decide that they would rather see each other as brothers and live in harmony than dwell on their differences and seek to prevail over the other. In which case there will be no need for separate states. A single, multi-ethnic, secular state for all of the people in question is the only outcome worth pursuing or defending, in my book.

To quote Jonathan Sacks: "Peace involves a profound crisis of identity. The boundaries of self and other, friend and foe, must be redrawn."

Not an easy prospect, to be sure. The pressures that reinforce the identities in question are considerable. Certainly, it's going to take a lot for people who have lived through decades of conflict to get past it. But that doesn't mean that the rest of us, who participate only as observers and interact primarily with one another (and not the principals of the conflict) cannot take reasonable steps to ensure that our external discourse is healthy and productive.

What that means is fostering a discourse that emphasizes commonality, understanding and peace, and discourages division. What we have now, however, is the opposite of that. We have a situation wherein a small group of people have become highly emotionally invested in the conflict and the stances of others on it, to the point of identifying with one side or the other and debasing their own reasoning on the issue. Once people overcommit in this way, they quickly fall victim to zero-sum, us vs. them thinking, which leads inevitably to escalation of hostility and so reinforcement of division. This is essentially the same dialectic process that sustains all difficult political issues.

The dynamics of this dysfunction are easy to observe. Pick any partisan poster you like (doesn't matter which side), and then go find some blatant propaganda in one of their posts (which shouldn't take long). Then, call them on said falsehood, and watch what happens. Dollars to donuts, they will, without any evidence, regard you as an agent of "the enemy" and respond with a barrage of (typically canned) propaganda, along with various subtle and not-so-subtle aspersions about your moral and intellectual character. In their minds, they represent the "right" side, and anyone who opposes them in any way is then a part of the problem, knowingly or not. Likewise, any action they take to harm anyone on the "wrong" side must therefore also contribute to the "right" cause as well, no matter how debased or irrelevant such action might be. And so we end up with people thinking that calling someone an asshole on SciForums represents some kind of contribution to historical justice.

You will also see the dialectic expressed in more immediate ways, such as the bizarre insistence that only one side uses "terror," the subversion of what consistutes formerly-meaningful categories like "democracy" or "civilian," emphasis on the question of "who started it?" over "what do we do now?" and all the classic master/slave moral impasses.

Once someone has subdued their critical facilities to their emotional attachment to one side, they become addicted to the feeling of self-righteousness that they get out of these conflicts, and make the crucial mistake of confusing victory for peace. Having swallowed the lie that their efforts contribute to some ultimate victory for "morality" or "justice," they are unable to see that this very dialectic is what sustains the conflict, and that they are helping to murder the cause of peace.

As long as there are enough people devoted to the dialectic, there will be political factions that exploit it to rule each side (for example, the current popularity of Hamas and Likud). The only way to disempower them is to break the power of the identities that drive the conflict. Which will require vast courage, love and dignity on the parts of many people on both sides of the conflict. There's not a lot that we can do about this one way or the other, given the limited relevance of our discourse, but one thing we CAN do is oppose the processes of division and strife, and seek to replace them with a unity of understanding and integrity.

The primary obstacle to that, of course, is the intense energy that the partisans put into these dialogues, and the corresponding ego rush that they derive from them. It is a difficult matter to find similarly-motivated non-partisans, hence the enduring power of the divisions in question. Absent such a counterforce, then, the only option seems to me to be to undermine the influence that the partisans are able to exert on the discourse, as well as the satisfaction that they derive from it. This is accomplished primarily by, on the one hand, discrediting the bullshit that they so carelessly spew (both in terms of basic facts and implicit assumptions), asking them hard questions (which defy reductive, prepared responses), all while simultaneously refusing to fulfill their need for a "bogeyman" to be seen attack (i.e., refuse to let them box you into supporting the opposite of whatever they claim to support). There is only one conversation these people are interested in having, and if you refuse to have it with them, they tend to eventually short circuit. This may not result in them re-evaluating their stances, but it does cut down on their credibility considerably.

Anyway, this is not an easy task, and I don't claim to be great at carrying it out, but that's my perspective. Hopefully some of the partisans who've spent so many hours of the past few weeks working themselves into a lather over my playing the devil's advocate now feel used and dissatisfied. More importantly, perhaps some of the more thoughtful posters that nevertheless seem drawn to partisanship now have some food for thought, or at least a more accurate set of ideas about me.

 

Of course. It makes no sense whatsoever to have a rule that says that it is the aggressor's (in this case hamas's) right to choose how much force it`s enemy (in this case israel and really all the civilized nations of the world) will use against them. In fact the proper use of overwhelming force actually limits civilian casualties since it allows the objectives to be achieved more cleanly and quickly instead of nickel and diming the palestinians to death in a protracted campaign.

 

Of course, we would have to ask why you got punched in the first place?

 

Absolutely. Thats been my stance all along.

 

1. That old Hiroshima and Nagasaki argument is morally vacuous.
2. The aggressor in this instance is Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Which, as I have stated countless times, is the reason for the conflict.

If Russia reclaimed Alaska due to historical reasons, can Alaskans defend themselves?

 

So we have to ask the question why hamas launched rockets in the first place. They say it is in response to israel controlling it`s borders. But now we have ask why israel decided to control gaza's borders. The reason is that as a response to israel unilaterally pulling out of gaza, instead of taking the ball and running with it, the palestinians elected fanatics as their government. This government as it`s first act reiterated their charter which calls for the destruction of israel. Since hamas are an elected government, this was a declaration of war. So israel has a right to defend itself, which means doing what they can to ensure that weapons cannot be smuggled into gaza. This is not only for the safety of israelis, but for the safety of the palestinians as well. Certainly hamas douldn`t give a rat's ass about their own people.

 

Now ask yourself how Israel has a right to defend an illegal occupation while Palestinians have no right to resist being occupied.

 

yeah because using weaponary that causes high collateral damage is for the safety of the palestinians.

 

Quad

As decent a notion the above is, we have this thinking ingrained Zionist mindset to contend with: