2009-01-06, 19:03 | Link #62 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Antwerp area, Belgium, Europa
Age: 48
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In a conflict that has been going on for 60 years the whole "Who started it?" discussion is utterly pointless. And one should remember the line between terrorist and freedom fighter is very small. Not that blowing up a restaurant is a good thing to do, but the same can be said about attack helicopters bombing schools.
This issue can't be solved until a way is found to allow the Palestinians to live in a comfortable way where they can work and live in decent conditions, if they achieve this terrorism from their side will die out due to lack of a reason. However in order to achieve this Israel would need to make some big concessions which will make them very vulnerable to any attacks dring the transition period which, realistically, will take over a decade at minimum, probably more. In order to even get remotely close to a solution both parties need to trust one another which is extremely hard if half the Israeli government is very anti-palestinian. At the same time the leading Palestinians don't agree with one another (so who to talk to) and on top of that alot of them come from groups that have been blowing up restaurants in the past 20 years. Not a great basis to negotiate any agreement. This problem is far more complex than a simple "we attack them out of self defense" a statement used by both sides. The conflict is the result of unresolved issues which happened after Israel was created 60 years ago. This isn't a black&white problem where one side are the "good ones" and the other are the "bad ones". Both sides have blood on their hands but at the same time both sides have very valid claims as well. |
2009-01-06, 19:06 | Link #63 |
Observer/Bookman wannabe
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Singapore
Age: 38
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Aye. For peace to happen, both sides would need leaders to tell them that no, your demands cannot be met 100%, or even most of them for that matter. Take the compromise if you want peace, or postpone the fight for future generations. It's really your call for both sides.
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2009-01-06, 19:12 | Link #64 | |
Gregory House
IT Support
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Over six hundred. Over six fucking hundred. Most of them innocent civilians. How many Israelites died in the same week? Four. Four soldiers. And by their own fire. You've got to be fucking kidding me if you believe that one of the countries with the most powerful military around the globe, backed both economically and military by the most powerful country in the world, is doing this to survive. Stop eating media shit. Grow a brain, for fuck's sake. Even the conservative US media crap is stepping down a bit from defending Israel.
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2009-01-06, 19:29 | Link #65 | |||
Aria Company
Join Date: Nov 2003
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050426.html There's a video of recent news in that link, but I'm referring to the text story under it. "Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well." Quote:
So a friend of yours claims they're faking the intelligence to make Israel attack schools and planting the bodies? Sorry, but your friend is not a reliable source. The rest of that is merely an excuse to try to justify Israel's actions. Hamas doing bad things does not give Israel the right to do bad things in retaliation. This will only end if one side decides to try to break the cycle of violence. Israel is the one in a much better position to do it. Quote:
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2009-01-06, 19:30 | Link #66 |
Observer/Bookman wannabe
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Singapore
Age: 38
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Israel is in trouble. Why? Because it cannot even command the allegiance of many of its own Arabs citizens, who unsurprisingly is on the side that legitimacy of Israeli rule is becoming 0. Also, forget the "destroy Israel" howls of the Arab world. It's the Jews they're after.
What's more, the Arab-Israeli population is growing. Demographically, Israeli Jews are staring at a situation which they cannot handle and (for most of them) want to pretend that it wouldn't happen. Only Jewish state in the world? Soon, the Jews would be a minority in that state. What then? A Jewish identity for the state, or an Israeli identity?
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2009-01-06, 19:55 | Link #67 |
Banned
Join Date: Nov 2008
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The assumption that if the Palestinians renounced violence Israel would give up its goal of "redeeming" the land God gave them thousands of years ago is silly. Anybody who believes propaganda that blatant has been drinking too much Kool-Aid.
You only have to look at what's happened on the West Bank in the last few years. After Arafat died and Abbas took over, Fatah has been enforcing a ceasefire on the West Bank. The Israeli response has been to expand the settlements and increase the number of roadblocks from 470 to 630. There are now over 280,000 Israelis living in settlements in the West Bank, and another 200,000 in and around East Jerusalem. Large numbers of those would have to be moved if there was a peace deal with Palestinians. Israeli governments know they could never achieve that. In 1994 when Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Muslims in a mosque in Hebron, Yitzhak Rabin looked at removing the Hebron settlers. The army warned him there would be civil war if he tried, and instead Rabin moved thousands of Palestinians from Hebron to safeguard the settlement. Things have got worse since then. Israel can never stick to a peace treaty with the Palestinians and the Israeli governments know it, which is why their strategy is always to delay peace talks |
2009-01-06, 20:11 | Link #68 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jun 2008
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Renouncing violence worked for Gandhi, it could have worked for the Palestinian cause. How many humanitarian aid organizations would have leapt to the cause of the poor disenfranchised likeable Palestinians? But instead, they brought their cause to the world scene..... through hijacking, kidnapping and murder. |
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2009-01-06, 20:36 | Link #69 |
Observer/Bookman wannabe
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Singapore
Age: 38
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@mg1942: Actually, independence was no antidote to the sub-continent's troubles. With independence came the bloody split of India. The horrors of that period is another of those stories which is not well-known. I dare say that it was the British who got the better deal out of it. They get to leave smelling like roses, while ethnic tensions continue to fester in India and Pakistan.
Founding a state and running it are often two different matters.
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2009-01-06, 22:05 | Link #70 | |
books-eater youkai
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Betweem wisdom and insanity
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The status of Jerusalem will always be a problem. If Jerusalem could become a city-state like the Vatican, it might help, but it would need to be a independent city-state.
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2009-01-06, 22:06 | Link #71 | ||||
Love Yourself
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Northeast USA
Age: 38
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On the other hand, Israel is not specifically targeting Palestinian citizens. I'm not going to claim that everyone in the Israeli government or chain of military command tries their hardest to avoid civilian casualties, or that there aren't some who feel gleeful about it. I'm sure there are. But in general they do what they can to minimize casualties. If Israel responded to rocket attacks by randomly bombing apartments and schools then we could make a comparison. They're doing a crappy job at precision revenge killings (which is a ridiculous concept in itself), but that's what they're attempting to do. I also think that Hamas knows this. I don't believe it's a coincidence that rockets aren't fired from deserted areas. They know that Israel will likely clumsily respond with too much force, and as a result civilians will become involved. Having more people against Israel generally translates to more power and support for Hamas. Why wouldn't Hamas want that? Quote:
What for? Is it worth it? Will it lead to anything? Israel isn't saintly to be certain, but they're not actively going out and killing people - not unprovoked, anyway. Maybe they are attempting to muscle the Palestinians out, but that should be dealt with in a more civilized manner (if possible). It seems that the demand for the Palestinian side is that Israel practically remove itself from the region entirely - an unreasonable demand, and not something that any amount of fighting is likely to accomplish. Not without genocide occurring. Perhaps the fighting started because the "civilized" manners of Palestinian protest were ignored. Fine, Palestine has showed that it's upset and that it's willing to use force to get what it wants. It's been showing that for some time now, and it's drawn both Israelis and Palestinians into a cycle of violence and suffering. Stop the violence, and attempt negotiations again. Get more people involved if necessary. And if the negotiations continue to fail, consider whether the demands being made are unreasonable. Quote:
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2009-01-06, 22:27 | Link #72 |
Observer/Bookman wannabe
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Singapore
Age: 38
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On Jerusalem, it wouldn't be enough to nuke it. Nukes don't ensure that people in the future would not return. For Jerusalem to be taken off the agenda, it must be made into a wasteland, where only animals or insects could survive. Maybe then would they stop fighting.
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2009-01-06, 22:52 | Link #73 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: PMB Headquarters
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Considering that Israel had launched an attack on the Hamas which resulted in about 30 civilian deaths near an United Nations school, aren't the U.N. going to do something to intervene? Unlike the Hamas who uses home-made rockets, the Israeli military have advanced weaponry and how did that attack resulted near a non-Hamas infrastructure? No matter how just the Israeli government claims, their actions proves to be questionable. The ones they had killed mostly aren't Hamas, but everyday civilians. Seems problematic..
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2009-01-07, 01:38 | Link #75 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Feb 2003
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The UN can't just 'intervene'. Specifically, anything beyond sending angry letters (and even sending particularly angry letters, for that matter) requires the agreement of all five of the UN's permanent veto-holding nations. This makes sense when you think about it; the purpose of the UN is to provide a forum for diplomacy, not a big stick nations can use to hit each other (they have to do that themselves), and therefore anything it actually does has to have the agreement of all of the world's most powerful nations. But the US has very close ties to Israel, and will use its veto power to block the UN from doing, well, anything. Having one of the most powerful nations in the world on your side tends to accomplish things like that. |
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2009-01-07, 01:45 | Link #76 |
Observer/Bookman wannabe
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Singapore
Age: 38
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But, do Israel and the US have the same interests? No. They may have similar interests, but when you remember that Israel's location is very unfriendly compared to the US's, unconditional support cannot be justified. Yes, the Israeli lobby in Washington has tons of influence, but perhaps the US might want to do something about it.
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2009-01-07, 02:31 | Link #77 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: PMB Headquarters
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The only interest the two countries share seem to be oil and perhaps, control of the Middle East region. On the contrary, this is merely speculation. The United Nations on the other hand can't really do much as pointed out that it is actually run and controlled by 5 major nations in which 2 of them are siding with Israel, while 2 don't really care. This leaves France who probably can't do much on their own. Generally, I don't expect to see a peaceful end to the current Middle East crisis within these few months. |
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2009-01-07, 06:56 | Link #79 | |
Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
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and its not like they dont have enough country's that they live in and if you say that they are here bacause of the history that means that they do want to kill us because that is the only way that they will get israel, because if u speak about history i think we win that department considering we are there before there were moslims and arab's or even christian's for that matter |
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2009-01-07, 07:23 | Link #80 |
Le fou, c'est moi
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Age: 34
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^Oh, <bleep>. Fine, you are now responsible for the criminal genocides and enslavement inflicted upon the so-called Philistines, original inhabitants of the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, done for religious and political reasons and if we are to believe your own mythologies also done horribly.
Pay up. Apologize. They came before you, don't they? Why should you people have it when, far worse than the Arabs, who actually weren't taking the land from you but rather from the Romans, or the Ottomans, who conquered it from the Mamluks, your great-great-great-great-ancestors (may be) took it directly from its original owners, possibly. Spoiler:
Also, cue "my friend" issues on the internet. Why should we trust what you say when you're shown to be completely biased for one side? Where is the link to the "news?" Even if a "news" source doesn't have a website like most do these days something as big as that's going to get uploaded on youtube somehow, so why don't you show us where? And really, did the Palestinians want to die as much as you insinuate they do? Again with that "they" and "us," neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have clean hands here. Blame on, it's your country, your war, and as you yourself said your sufferings -- we just happen to think you're not ever going to get peace (except for facetious, or if not facetious then bloody racist, "flatten them all" answers) unless you people talk to each other and stop thinking of the other side as evil and inhuman. |
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