A lot has happened over the past 2 weeks and we can learn much. A few takeaways:
1. Civilian casualties on any side are unacceptable. Israeli's were killed and injured by rockets fired from Hamas and Palestinian civilians (including an Israeli trained doctor's children) were killed by poorly(?) aimed Israeli mortars.
2. Ceasefires with an end-date should not be entered into. It pre-supposes that at the end of the ceasefire, hostilities can and should resume.
3. In the Middle East conflict, the United States' interest is for their not to be a conflict. We do not have any good allies in the Middle East. Period.
4. There is enough blame to go around, and the only people who get hurt are civilians. As a friend of mine so rightly said on facebook: "don't you see what your stupid religions cause? Fuck you Israel and fuck you Hamas" or something along those lines. So rightly said.
4 comments:
I liked most of what you had to say until you said we have no friends in the Middle East and agreeing with what a jackass said about religion. Everybody has a right to believe what they want, so long as they don't kill for their reason. Hamas has done so and not Israel. Israel has a right to defend itself and Hamas has to be destroyed in order to stop the attacks. As far as the rest of the Middle East, they hate Palestine but help them only when they're fighting with Israel. I'm against a ceasefire too because Hamas will start up again. We need to support Israel because they're our closest allies and Hamas hates America and has made threats against America before.
700 Israelis arrested for protesting against war
In eight years: twenty Israelis died from Gaza rockets, 4,000 Israelis died from car accidents.
PACIFICA – About 700 Israelis have been arrested for protesting against the war on Gaza since the beginning of the deadly offensive, said Neve Gordon, chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel on Monday.
"700 Israelis have been arrested since this war began, because they protested this war. This has not made it to an international media, and it’s an act of intimidation by the state against those who protest the war," Gordon told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!.
On the number of Israeli deaths, Gordon said: "between ten and twenty people, Israelis, have died from rockets in the eight years that rockets have been launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel. During the same amount of time, 4,000 Israelis have died from car accidents."
But Israel still used that as an excuse to bomb Gaza.
"From these twenty people, we’re allowed to enter into the Gaza Strip and bomb them from the air into their cage and kill 275 children," said Gordon, who is also the author of the book Israel’s Occupation.
Gordon criticized Israel's continuous violations of international law.
"Disproportionality is a term from international law. Israel has been defying international law and international agreements and international decisions from 1967, or probably from before. One of these decisions is that Israel must return these (Palestinian) territories. And by maintaining and holding onto these territories through violent means," said Gordon.
Although Gordon opposes Gaza rocket fire, he explained that the Palestinians are trying to defend themselves.
"The right to self-defense is a right to self-defense from violence. We have to understand that the occupation itself is violence. It’s an act of violence. Putting people in a prison, in a prison of one million and a half million people and keeping them there for years on end without basic foodstuff, without allowing them to enter and exit when they will, is an act of violence. Without electricity, without clean water, it’s all an act of violence. And these people are resisting. I am against the way they’re resisting, but we have to look at their violence versus our violence," said Gordon.
The open expression of religion is by far the biggest problem in the Middle East. There are two groups of people who are 99.9999999999% alike in culture and genetics except one decided to to worship Mohammad/Allah and the other decided not to.
Religion is the root of most modern conflicts. I don't have a problem with someone being religious, but as soon as they say, or think, that their religion is better than the others (and this definitely goes both ways in the above conflict), you've got a problem.
Hence: this conflict is caused by Islam and Judaism.
That ananymous post is about a guy who is a self-hater and is no good. He taught at U of M and was not using real facts to criticize Israel. By the way, it's Hamas/Arabs who want to wipe out a Jewish state, not the other way around. Israel has let Arabs live in their borders for years and treats them better than the Arab countries treat them.
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