Liz is wrong; Israel is in the moral right
Ryan | 14 06 2007If you're a first time visitor, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, which will keep you up to date with all the latest New School Politics posts. Thanks for visiting!
I must fundamentally disagree with Liz’s characterization of Israel:
Once again, Palestinians are dying. This time, however, they’re not actually being killed by the Israelis.
…
Israel is clearly in the wrong with its imperialistic attitude toward its Arab neighbours, but if the Palestinians want a nation of their own, they must prove that they can govern it without terrorizing their citizens.
Let us first observe that Israelis are so too always being killed, the difference is they’re always being killed by Palestinians! That’s just one example of the primitiveness of the culture surrounding Palestinians–they’re essentially engaged in tribal warfare. You cannot begin characterizing Israelis and Palestinians on equal moral grounds when Likud and Labor handle disagreements through elections and open debate while Hamas and Fatah handle them with TNT and roadside bombs. Do not ignore the distinctive moral nature of each side when examining the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: Israel is a free and secular republic while a Palestinian state would resemble nothing more than another Arab dictatorship, ruled by Shari’ia and bent on complete destruction of Israel.
Second, it is completely backwards to smear Israel as imperialistic towards its Arab neighbors when its Arab neighbors initiated the years of perpetual conflict nearly six decades ago. Immediately after its founding in 1947, five surrounding Arab nations, not counting stateless forces such as the Arab Liberation Army, invaded Israel with the goal of destroying the UN Partition plan and obliterating Israel. Only after Israel single-handedly defeated the cohilition of five nations did they proceed to take the land that was designated for Palestine, in the same way that Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula only after Egypt took control of the Straights of Tiran in 1967.
It is ironic that Palestinians today beg for an independant state when the origional partition plan was itself a two state solution. The Palestinians were the ones who invaded Israel and ultimately erradicated the partition.
The military force that Israel has used over its history has always been for the moral purpose of protecting its freedom against neighboring belligerents. Imagine for a moment that your nation, upon its conception, was invaded by five neighboring states and lived in a state of constant terror and constant hostility as you were surrounded by an entire region of people who wanted nothing short of its annihilation. How could that nation not be justified in fighting back? While the entire ”international community” of bleeding hearts weeps for Palestine, Israel has stood firm in recognition of the fact that freedom is not free, and that in order to defend the freedom of its people, the Israeli government must use unequivocal military force against its attacker, lest its freedom cease to exist.
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Good point, but you must examine the basis and legitimacy
Elizabeth | 14 06 2007Good point, but you must examine the basis and legitimacy of Israel’s existence in the first place.
IMO, you (Ryan) are completely right. Israel has always defended
Simmons | 14 06 2007IMO, you (Ryan) are completely right. Israel has always defended itself fairly and justly. With power comes critics (like what’s happening to the U.S.).
"You cannot begin characterizing Israelis and Palestinians on equal moral
Iacopo | 14 06 2007“You cannot begin characterizing Israelis and Palestinians on equal moral grounds when Likud and Labor handle disagreements through elections and open debate while Hamas and Fatah handle them with TNT and roadside bombs.”
nice.
Ryan, cudos, anyone who has too examine the basis and
Eftychis | 14 06 2007Ryan, cudos, anyone who has too examine the basis and legitimacy of Israel’s existance in the first place needs to examine their history. Aside from the moral factor (where the Israeli’s are in the right as they represent an open and democratic nation, unlike Palestine where in the official foreign policy blog it is now being reported that Hamas is executing Fatah party members in the streets) Israel has a historic precident for its existance.
The Palestinians do not deserve a state when they continue to infringe upon basic human rights and do not respect even their own rights to life, liberty, and property. In addition to that, most of the Palestinians were kicked off of land in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, they were ethnic minorites who were taken advantage of and when they were displaced they had no where to go but back towards Palestine. However, when they did so they found that a new state had been created. What all of these Palestinian lovers fail to recognize is that there are more people of Islamic decent (Palestinians are majority Shia I believe but there is a mix with Sunni too) inside of Israel today. In fact, Israel will cease to be a majoritarian Jewish state by 2010 (according to Thomas Friedmans 2003 Discovery Times Channel documentory, “Straddling the Fence.) My point is that there are millions of Palestinians living inside of Israel as Israel citizens enjoying modern western life, there is nothing keeping the ones throwing rocks in the streets from making their lives better.
Perhaps if they stopped spending their days burning flags, convincing their children to blow themselves up, and protesting, and tried to make their lives better through constructive means they would make progress.
[...] piece together an international force to bring peace to the Palestinian territories.
New School Politics » Pay No Attention to the Coup Behind the Curtain | 15 06 2007[...] piece together an international force to bring peace to the Palestinian territories. As Ryan so eloquently noted, Israel is not in the wrong here. Over the past fifty year, they have time and time again [...]