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It’s all too one sided, Biggy. You fail to take account of the state of mind created in some in fledgling Israel by Arab aggression and the early forces that helped create Israel. You excuse the Palestinians everything and condemn Israel for everything. It’s not a balanced view and therefore improbable to advance peace and justice.
Incidentally, when dismissing the idea of a non-violent way forward for the Palestinians you cited examples of why it wouldn’t work that included instances of violence on the Palestinian part. Non-violent doesn’t mean low level violence. And it certainly does work and has been shown to work. Ask an Indian.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Israel annexed the lands you are talking about after being attacked by the arabs The arabs got a good kicking as per usual and the Israelis withdrew from a lot of the land they had conquered
Of course the Palestinians cant annex land from Israel – they haven’t got the firepower
If they had the slightest bit of sense they would get rid of their weapons first – get rid of the Terrorist organisations which now govern the Palestinians – and go cap in habd to the Israelis and work something out
When the Israelis were attacked by Egypt and Syria, no country was conquered, no part of Egypt or Syria, was taken, the battles were fought on Palestinian soil who had no part in the war. so it was actually neutral ground, which they had no right to retain.
Actually, the battles were fought on proposed Palestinian soil. The Arab aggression came even before the nation had a chance to flicker into being.
I’m looking at the issue from a legitimacy perspective. The law is not on the side of the Israeli government but is on the side of the ordinary palestinian. If it seems one-sided that’s because legally it pretty much is. Yes the militants break the law when they target civilians but the scale of violations on the Israeli side is much higher. Even today Switzerland condemned Israel for violating the Geneva Conventions in its attacks on civilian infrastructure. The law is clear, Israel must leave the land it took in 1967 and it must respect the rights of innocent civilians. Likewise the militants should not target israeli civilians. Only one-side is occupying and oppressing the other so it is a fairly one-sided affair.
As I already stated, non-violent protests get dealt with brutally with tear gas, baton charges and live ammo. If journalists and paramedics are being shot and killed then what makes you think a demonstrator won’t be? In fact peace activists like Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie have been murdered by the Israeli military. They were involved in non-violent protest but were still murdered and defamed.
You could argue the toss about the taking of the Sinai or golan or West bank but the fact remains that it is illegal under the UN charter to take land by war. Security council resolution 242 states clearly that Israel has no right to keep the land it took during the 6 day war. Whatever our opinions the facts are that Israel’s annexation of arab land, its settlements and its wall have no legitimacy under international law. Also its treatment of palestinian civilians has frequently violated the geneva conventions. Those are facts not opinions.
That’s exactly why and how non-violent protest works, Bigstuff. If only one side is ever brutalising t’other, then it quickly becomes obvious and opinion shifts towards the truly oppressed. If Israel lost its international backers in this way, if general opinion can be made to count for more than the Zionist lobby in the Whitehouse, the the Palestinians would quickly begin to make progress. As it is, every rocket attack on a schoolyard, intentional or not, sets back their cause.
But it doesn’t work as the examples I gave you proved. Westerners who get killed like Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie get a lot of media coverage, the average palestinian peace activist gets little coverage if he gets beaten up or shot dead during a protest. The pro-Israel lobby is too powerful to lose influence over human rights abuses otherwise they would have lost influence years ago. The fact is that what matters most to US politicians is their own domestic constituencies. They are not going to jeopardize votes or finance over the persecution of foreigners in a land far away. No senator is going to sacrifice his job over the issue of Palestine. So it’s wishful thinking to assume non-violent portest will make any diffference.
@Mr Bigstuff wrote:
The fact is that what matters most to US politicians is their own domestic constituencies.
That’s exactly my point. I think we’re agreed, at least you and I, that we want a viable Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. The key player is the United States. As it is, the Zionist lobby is more powerful than the Palestinian lobby. Hence no serious pressure on Israel. If the Palestinians could shift that so that general public opinion outweighed the Zionist lobby in America’s politicians minds then America’s one sided support for Israel would fade. Their best bet is therefore non-violent protest. I don’t agree that the news media would keep quiet about that sort of campaign. That’s verging on the net kooky side of things.
Palestinians need to play to California, not Tehran.
Rachel Corrie was a US citizen, she was involved in peaceful protests against human rights abuses by the Israeli military. She was deliberately killed by an Israeli bulldozer. How did America react? With indifference.
The biggest problem is the bias in the US media on this issue. Until that changes then people will remain ill-informed and misled. Nothing the Palestinians do will change US policy, change will have to come from within the USA itself which will be hard when the news reports are so biased.
Pointing to isolated incidents, however tragic and typical, is not the plan, Bigstuff. It has to be a continued and popular withdrawing to purely peaceful means. That way, when the abuses happen, there is nothing else for the Western media to report. Gandhi’s campaign wasn’t immediately successful. It took the Indian people enduring repeated incidents of great hardship, violence and loss to shame Britain into withdrawal. That’s why I mentioned it takes more balls than the armed approach. A truly fitting form of jihad, even.
Also, it is not just a matter of placard waving protest. Non-cooperation is a vital part. Like all modern economies, Israel goes looking for cheap labour and the Palestinians climb over each other to oblige. How about a spot of work withdrawing fraternité instead of collaboration?
Consider the alternative, Bigstuff, and assume the Palestinians continue with their suicide belts, AKs and Qassams. What do you think they will achieve?
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