A good op-ed piece from the NY Times (requires free registration) on some of the hard truths that folks will need to face in order to see peace in Israel. Author Thomas Friedman’s opinions?
- The world needs to recognize that Israel has to be able to something to stop terrorism within its borders.
- Israel has to, ultimately, give up the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians.
- The US and/or NATO will need to provide security and supervision of current Palestinian territories, to oversee their transition to an independent state, because, frankly, the Palestinians and, more particularly their leadership, cannot be trusted at the moment to run their territories on their own.
- Arab leaders in the region need to stop supporting (in all senses of the word) terrorism as a legitimate action (or, more properly, using their support of it as a tool to placate their own internal dissenters).
- The American Jewish community needs to let the US government criticize Israel as needed, including on such items as Jewish settlements on the West Bank.
If these truths are not faced and followed through on, Friedman asserts, nothing will improve, and things will only continue to deteriorate, with Israel using bigger guns, Palestinians using bigger bombs, and the hatred and violence only growing.
I think the article has a lot of value to say. I also think it’s extremely unlikely that we will see all — and possibly not any — of those “truths” faced. Dammit.
45 view(s)
tell me again why the united states is israel’s protective ‘big brother’? I have never understood why it is our business…
The first one, probably. Watching people get blown up in restaurants and busses every other day is pretty convincing to non-Eurowussies.
With Israel’s stupid proportional representation type of parliament there’s no way any government could survive trying to shut down the settlements.
The Palestinians don’t have the least idea how to run a state or an economy beyond handouts. I’ll vote against anyone who wants our soldiers in the middle of that mess. It is not worth betraying our military to try to save these people from each other.
Pisspot dictatorships will not act in a benign fashion.
I’ve never yet seen any article by an American Jewish writer that so much as mentions the settlements. Big mental blocks.
One reason for the ties between Israel and the US is that a large number of its population, especially in its founding, were from the US, which gives us both historic ties and ties from its supporters in the US. It’s been as loyal an ally as we’ve had in the region, not to mention the only half-way decent democracy in the area.
I’m not terribly sanguine about US troops being involved, and it doesn’t seem likely for political reasons both in the US and in Israel. But I have little to no confidence that matters can be settled without a strong military crackdown — and one orchestrated by Israel, let alone by any of its neighbors, seems likely only to make things worse.
Friedman claimed that the Palestinians would treat US troops as good guys, as the people helping them achieve statehood. But Hamas and many other groups mainly want Israelis dead and their foreign backers don’t give a damn about Palestinian statehood. Lose the distraction of the Palestinians’ plight and let their people focus on their own venality, incompetence, hypocricy and cruelty?
No, our soldiers would be attacked by kamikaze bombers within a week of arrival. It would not stop unless we used the kinds of measures that have been successful in keeping a lid on Palestinans in the past. Ottoman Turk type measures.
As in most discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this one seems to focus on the militant actions of a discrete minority in both factions. That is the sensationalistic nature of the news media around the world. I would suggest that there is more to this issue than a few people blowing themselves up with bombs, or soldiers shooting children playing outside a refugee camp.
What more could be involved? Can no one see the similarities between the comparatively newly founded state of Israel and all other nations in the history of the world. From inception to the point of saturation (and in some cases beyond even this) states have always expanded their borders, most often at the expense of some one else, to the maximum extent to which their military and economic might has allowed. Israel is merely following historical precedence.
At the fundamental root of this problem, as I and some others see it, is WATER. Without water, agriculture is impossible. Without water, most industrial processes are impossible. Without water, life is impossible. Look at a good map of the region, and tell me where the majority of the water lies.
If any progress toward peace is to be realized, in my opinion, the hawkish factions in both governments will have to be removed. Given the opportunity, most of the everyday citizenry on both sides would be able to not only co-exist, but to actually thrive as a community. Such is the nature of politics, that the narrow views of the wealthy, politically powerful dictate the direction of a nation. Ours is no different.
We will not see peace in this region until the fundamental issues are resolved. Terrorism is a fact of life from both sides of this conflict, there is no denying it. However, it is only an excuse for those with the most to gain to continue their propagation of imperialism. IMHO
Certainly when we speak of the Palestinian Arab “side,” the folks who make the biggest noise (both in terms of garnering public attention and in terms of waging a terror campaign) are probably a minority of the population. Part of that is due to the nature of militant minorities everywhere; part is because Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has been quite effective at uprooting any dissent to his rule.
Israeli politics have swung back and forth over the decades. To the extent that it is a democracy, presumably government actions reflect popular desire (though the nature of Israel’s constitution is such that fringe minority groups tend to get a larger voice than they should).
Still, there is probably some truth to the proposition that, if only the power-mad hawks on both sides were out of the way, everyone would live in peace and joy. Problem is, that’s not likely to happen, especially with ongoing intervention from the outside (when both the Iraqi and Saudi government basically provide life insurance pay-outs for the families of suicide bombers, there’s clearly some sinister fingers in that pie).
The expansion of Israel’s borders would be much less of a point at the moment had not her Arab neighbors tried to eliminate her altogether — and lost. That gave Israel the military opportunity to take land that fit in with the religious concept of Greater Israel. I would say that Israeli expansion into Greater Israel since then, via government-sponsored settlements, has been one of the biggest provocations from the Israeli side.
Water is certainly a problem in the area. Israel has definitely played politics with the water supply to the West Bank and Gaza. That being said, if there were a lasting peace in the area, that sort of game playing would subside to the normal level between nations.
The fundamental problems in the region are, as I see it:
Unfortunately, I don’t see any ways out of the mess that don’t involve rivers of blood.
To understand the Arabs’ effort to eliminate Israel, one only has to remember that the state of Israel was instituted by outside forces, with little or no recourse to the people whose “Palestinian” land was “given” to “Israel”, which up until 1948 had never been a state, but only a religion.
Since we are assuming the Arabs to be the “bad guys” here, let’s assume a little further and play a what-if game. “What if” the current world powers were Saudi Arabia and Iraq? And, “what-if” they decided that Muslims had been mistreated (the decision probably having been reached with the help of political lobbying by Muslim factions from different places where they had faced discriminatory or persecutory actions by their own governments), and took by force the land where you, and your ancestors, had lived for thousands of years. Suddenly, there is the state of “Islam”, protected by those world powers that set it up, and you have almost nothing. What do you feel?
Israeli democracy is not so different than our own. We purport to enable government of the people, by the people and for the people; but, in reality government is led, and legislation is fueled by whomever has the economic and political clout to maintain PACs and pay for advertising time on TV, rather than by the will of the ordinary citizen. Until the majority of the people begin to do their own thinking, and demand that governments represent their wishes rather than, say Enron’s, nothing will change.
While I agree that all of the factors you mentioned as fundamental elements of the crisis are real, I recognize them as elements of governmental (ie, ruling) ploys to retain power, rather than the views of common people. There, just as here, popular opinion is mandated by government, whether openly or clandestinely.
And, unfortunately, I must agree also, that I see no way out of the current situation that does not entail great loss of life.
So were the Germans and Russians justified in carving up the land of Poland between them, since Poland had not existed as a separate entity for centuries? Granted, it had been a while longer since there had been a Jewish state in Palestine, but I’m not sure the cases are all that different.
No, I can’t say that I believe the establishment of any nation at the expense of another has been justified. But the difference here is that neither Great Britain nor America is involved directly in this conflict. Neither has physical custody of the land involved. In the case of Germany and Russia dividing Poland, they each inhabited and controlled their spoils. In the case of Israel, land was taken from the Arabs by Great Britain and the US, which was then given to the Jews for their state of Israel. In my mind it is a totally different situation.
There are those even in Israel who see the occupied territories as illegal and immoral. To date, 402 members of the Israeli army reserves have become, in effect, concientious objectors (doesn’t that bring back memories of Viet Nam?) to being forced to serve in the territories because of their recognition that Israel is imposing dictatorial rule over people to whom they deny citizenship. If you would like to read more about this, visit http://www.seruv.org.il/defaulteng.asp , a site for the refuseniks.
Actually, in the case of Poland, its (re)creation in 1918 came from territory carved out of Germany and Russia at the Versailles Conference, as dictated by the winners — the US, Great Britain, France and Italy.
The problem is, a phrase like “the establishment of any nation at the expense of another” describes any sort of national creation, whether we’re talking about a period of five years or 5,000. Should Bosnia have been sponsored into independence? It could only happen at the expense of Yugoslavia — but that state was created at the expense of Austria-Hungary, with territory taken back at the expense of the Ottoman Turks. Is creation of Bosnia at the expense of “Greater Serbia” a good thing or a bad thing? Who gets to decide?
At this point, the state of Israel has been in existence around 50 years. Is that long enough to give it a claim to the land and territory? At what point do we say that the generations who have been born and raised there have some sort of moral stake in their land and safety, vs. Palestinian Arabs in refugee camps who haven’t lived there for that long.
Certainly there are dissenters in Israel against the current military action. Fortunately for them, the most they’ve faced has been imprisonment — “collaborators” on the Palestinian side have been strung up ad hoc.
But I don’t disagree with the concept of splitting off the West Bank for Palestinians as the least unjust solution — though we’re again discussing “establishing a nation” at the cost of another (the West Bank most recently belonged to Jordan). (The Gaza Strip is another question, IMO.) Israel’s settlement policy in that area has been, at best, inflammatory. But the question is, in the face of ongoing intransigence by Israel on the subject, and a vocal and forceful minority, if you will, among the Palestinian Arabs (and their Arab brethren) that would just as soon see Israel destroyed, and is willing to send suicide bombers as a first step toward that … what’s the best solution now? Today? And while that’s being hashed out, is Israel unjustified in taking military action to suppress organizations and areas who are blowing up its civilians?
If I were to move into the house next to yours, quietly, orderly, causing as little disturbance to the neighborhood as possible, I’m certain we could become at least passable friends. On the other hand, if I were to move in with all my cousins and their cousins, moving fences to enlarge my yard and closing off access routes, there is little likelihood that we would ever speak to one another outside of arguments, or in a court room.
In today’s world there is precious little land that is not claimed by someone. Just as on a personal level I don’t think I, or anyone for that matter, have the right to displace someone just so that I can have his place, I don’t believe nation building has a place at all. If, for example, some one from California wants to move to Nevada, that’s fine… until they start trying to turn Nevada into another California. If they like California that much, let them stay there. Moving to a broader scale, if a group of people are unhappy in their situations, let them move to where they think they could be happy. But they don’t have the right to take what they want at the expense of others. Whether we like it or not, we are moving into a global community. The economies of the world are inextricably linked. Technology has made transportation and communication things of little thought. There is just no room for tribalism any longer. Cooperation on a global scale is the only way I can see the continued existence of the human race. I know this is idealistic, and does little for the crisis in the Middle East, but it has to start somewhere. I choose to let it start with me.
I’m not sure how you balance the direction of “if a group of people are unhappy in their situations, let them move to where they think they could be happy” with “they don’t have the right to take what they want at the expense of others.”
That having been said, I definitely agree that: