my friend Rob used to say, and, made wise by Iraq, Andrew Sullivan seems to agree with him here. Multinational force, to protect the Palestinians. And surely that means, get back to the Green Line?
OK but General Petraeus, what about the WMD?
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Why on Earth would any Palestinian trust the U.S. government to protect their security?
We should try invading China or Russia. We should try fighting countries 'our own size'.
The entire world should be invading the United States.
WMD = War-Mongering Diaspora
Because then Palestinians should be able to use US Army jeeps to kidnap Israelis from Israeli soil…it's just not for UNFIL and Lebanese anymore…
Speaking of kidnappings, Eurosabra.
Seems some people are unaware that as far back as Afarat Palestine has asked for multinational peacekeeping forces….repeatedly.
Israel is the one that has always refused to agree to that and we all know why…their outright slaughters of the Palestines and land confiscations would have to stop if internationals bound by international laws were in the field.
Are you listening Obama to Jones and Mitchell who have both called for this for some time now?
Or you rather see this:..cause Tony Karon is dead right.
Worried about apartheid? Too late, Mr Olmert, it’s already here
by Tony Karon
Last Updated: March 22. 2009 8:30AM UAE / March 22. 2009 4:30AM GMT In one of her last acts as US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice had Nelson Mandela’s name removed from America’s terrorist watch list. Many Americans were shocked to learn that their favourite former political prisoner had ever been deemed a terrorist. That is because they had forgotten, or were too young to know, that the US under Ronald Reagan – like Britain under Margaret Thatcher – had backed the apartheid regime in South Africa as a Cold War ally.
Isolating South Africa through sanctions and boycotts was certainly not the choice of Mrs Thatcher or Mr Reagan, but their governments were eventually forced to take action by the outrage of their own electorates at the suffering apartheid inflicted. The international anti-apartheid movement began at the grassroots among religious, community and labour groups, but it grew sufficiently powerful to force governments to distance themselves from a regime that they had viewed sympathetically. And that is a lesson that terrifies Israel’s leaders.
Israeli government officials have spoken openly since the Gaza conflict of their growing sense of isolation. Despite their most strenuous PR efforts, the 1,417 Palestinian deaths they caused in Gaza (compared with 13 Israelis, four by “friendly fire”) made it hard to sell the idea that Israel was the victim in the conflict. Israel’s narrative did not fit the images of the Gaza clash. It’s hard to convince people that the guys with the F-16s and Apache helicopters and the tanks are little David, while those facing them with side-arms, mortars and a handful of improvised unguided missiles are actually Goliath.
Coddled in their own narrative in which they are the eternal victims, Israelis are not accustomed to finding themselves the focus of international moral opprobrium. And they see in it a mortal threat.
The recent Gaza donor conference at Sharm el Sheikh was a familiar exercise of nations pledging large amounts of money while respecting taboos imposed by Israel that effectively block reconstruction. That was in marked contrast to the aid convoy led by the maverick British MP George Galloway that arrived in Gaza two weeks ago, comprising some 100 trucks and ambulances loaded with medical and humanitarian supplies funded and collected at grassroots level in churches, mosques, trade union branches and community groups all over Britain.
Sure, the amount of aid delivered was small potatoes relative to the need, but the gesture showed that hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons no longer accept their government’s equivocation on the fate of the Palestinians. That is exactly how the international anti-apartheid movement was born, back when the governments of the US and Britain were happy to concur with Pretoria that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.
In a remarkable interview last November, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert cautioned that unless it could achieve a two-state solution quickly, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished”. The reason, he said, was that Israel would be internationally isolated. “The Jewish organisations, which are our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”
Jewish communities in western countries have long been Israel’s trump card against international pressure, because they mobilise support for Israel and restrain critics by painting opposition to Israel’s policies as motivated by hostility to Jews – a toxic accusation in a world still sensitive to the horrors of the Holocaust. But what was palpable during the Gaza conflict was the diminished enthusiasm of young Jewish people abroad for Israeli militarism, and the increasing willingness of many to openly challenge Israel.
This change is personified by Jon Stewart, the Jewish-American comic whose Daily Show is the premier vehicle of contemporary American political satire. Stewart mercilessly mocked American politicians for their slavish echoing of the Israeli narrative during the Gaza conflict. “It’s the Möbius strip of issues,” he sarcastically enthused. “There’s only one side!” Clearly, the younger, hipper Jewish liberal mainstream exemplified by Stewart intends to judge Israel on the basis of its actions, rather than express morally blind ethnic solidarity.
Even as Israeli officials admitted last week that they were hoping to “rebrand” Israel’s image abroad, the Israeli media were reporting that six Israeli soldiers who had fought in Gaza were alleging that men in their units had indiscriminately killed Palestinian civilians because of what they said were permissive rules of engagement. There is only so much that “rebranding” can achieve when it is the product, rather than its packaging, that is at the root of the problem.
And that is where the apartheid warning used by Mr Olmert and other Israeli advocates of a two-state solution becomes an unintended confession. It is not some demographic milestone that will tip Israel into the realm of apartheid, because apartheid is a qualitative rather than a quantitative term: it refers to a situation in which a whole category of people were denied the rights of citizenship in the state that ruled over them. South Africa’s apartheid would have been no more acceptable to the world had black people comprised 45 per cent of the population rather than 80 per cent. And since 1967, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza have been living under the control of a state that denies them citizenship.
What Mr Olmert and others are really saying, without realising it, is that Israel is already in an apartheid situation – and that if it doesn’t end that situation soon, the world will notice and begin to respond accordingly.
Tony Karon is a New York-based analyst and editor, who blogs at Rootless Cosmopolitan.www.tonykaron.com>>>>>>>>>>>
Or do we have to wait till Israel kills every last man, woman and child in Palestine?
Hamas detainees go into a prison system and a judiciary, receive medical visits, and in the overwhelming mass, survive.
Israeli kidnap victims vanish into a black hole of torture and come back as mutilated corpses, if ever.
Its "detainees" if Israel does it and "kidnap" if Palestinians or Lebanese do it.
Eurosabra, I would love your justification for use of differing words.
@
"Because then Palestinians should be able to use US Army jeeps to kidnap Israelis from Israeli soil…it's just not for UNFIL and Lebanese anymore…
Posted by: Eurosabra | March 26, 2009 at 11:19 PM>>>>>>>
Oh that's right I almost forgot the world wide conspiracy to destroy the jews!
Let's see how does it go again..?… all the world, the Arabs and gentiles and Europe and the UN and the EU and New Zeland and the Red Cross and Chavez and the Girl Scouts and the little lady across the street are all in this universal secret plot to get Israel to make a pariah of itself by commiting war crimes and slaughtering women and children so the world can blame the Jews and swoop in and finish off what Hitler started for good this time.
Yea, now it comes back to me. Been so long since I went to the neighborhood meeting on the World Wide Conspiracy to Destroy the Jews that I forgot the plan.
Yes, Eva, holding mutilated corpses of soldiers you've tortured to death as bargaining chips is kidnapping, murder, and extortion. Hamas detainees are brought into a judicial system. It has its faults, of course, such as the abuse of administrative detention, and Israel should be more diligent to either charge or release illegal combatants, or actually hold uniformed combatants as POWs, but there is a qualitative difference. That you do not acknowledge this is a function of your nostalgia for Jedwabne and Kielce, but that cannot be helped.
the creation of an American-led, U.N.-mandated multinational force for a transitional period of up to 15 years leading to full Palestinian control of their security.
They will just be an international force in the service of jewish colonial apartheid. Can you imagine if instead of black majority rule in South Africa, there have been an American-led, UN-mandated force to occupy the majority black areas, and prevent violence against the Afrikaaners, primarily responsible to an Afrikaaner orientated lobby in the US?
The test for any move to a solution is it a move towards decolonising the relationship between jewish colonials and arab natives? The answer here is No, it is a further intensification of that colonialism.
Another one for Eurosabra. How many soldiers is Hamas holding? One? How many detainees are there in Israel? 10,000 at a conservative estimate?
Are they treated justly? Read and make up your own mind.
B'Tselem reports that Israel has been regularly torturing Palestinians (minors too) for decades.
In fact, Israel legalizes the tactics it accuses the Palestinian resistance of carrying out.
Torture? Israel does it regularly.
Kidnapping? Israel legalized it until 2000 and still does it regularly.
Human shields? Israel does it regularly and even fought an Israeli Supreme Court ban on the tactic.
Terrorism? Israel is a rogue State. They carry out terrorism as a matter of dogma.
Well, we know from the 90s that the exchange rate is 450 terrorists for one dead body. And that rate was set by the Palestinian negotiators themselves. So one live man might be worth all of the thousands of detainees. It's not my fault that's the proportion Palestinians value themselves at.
@ Eurosabra
"That you do not acknowledge this is a function of your nostalgia for Jedwabne and Kielce, but that cannot be helped."
Pretty gratuitous personal assault on Eva, the messenger, Euro. Some might even say racist. Anyone here think this was deserved from our diluted sabra?
BTW, Euro, your response to dance is really weak. Why do you continually ignore the imbalance of power, as if that's not a very significant aspect of the I-P situation?
More @ Eurosabra
"…function of your nostalgia for Jedwabne and Kielce, but that cannot be helped."
Her comment basically accuses Eva of taking in anti-semitism with her mother's milk. It is an anti-Polish canard of the first hostile rank.
Otherwise, it's good to talk about Jedwabne and Kielce for they were horrible pogroms. But one should not tar a whole ethnic group for the sins of individuals, nor reduce wartime Poland's ethnic complex to a black hat-white hat cowboy movie.
No Polish leader of any standing ever offered to work for the Nazis. And no military unit was formed under German Command from Polish volunteers. (By 1942, the Waffen-SS was filling up with volunteer divisions from France, Holland, Russia, Scandinavia, Hungary, Ukraine and even Bosnia. But they never got any Poles. There were more British volunteers for the Waffen-SS than there were Polish volunteers.)
Most Poles lived at, the utter mercy of the Gestapo or the N.K.V.D.; sometimes both.
All Polish institutions– abolished, all Polish enterprises –confiscated, and all Polish la–cancelled. Thus there was no Polish collective that might subsequently have been held collectively responsible except perhaps the Underground Resistance.
Jedwabne took place during the war (1941, I think).
During 1939-1941 the Soviets eventually murdered more Polish nationals than did the Germans–in the Spring of 1940 alone the NKVD executed 21,857 members of the Polish leadership. About four-fifths of all victims were betrayed to the NKVD by local leftists mostly of Jewish background.
Context, context–and it never helps to use racist slurs.
Eva has this "thing" for kidnapped, tortured, mutilated Jews. She ignores that only ONE Israeli kidnap victim has returned alive, the drug dealer Elhanan Tanenbaum, and only ONE is known to be alive. Of TENS of missing. She compares that on a one-to-one moral basis to thousands of Palestinian detainees in good health, held in known locations, in contact with legal representation. Nostalgie de la boue.
She seems to be doing a reverse-1968. Oppress the Polish Jews as Zionists, and the Zionists as enemies of humanity. No refuge for Jews, even beyond Poland. The whole world as Brezezinka. It's nice to know she is powerless, and that Poland's post-war Jews mainly escaped from the country that can do "anti-Semitism without Jews."
Shammai Leibowitz's blog, if you haven't found it yet, is great on legal questions of admin detention. Felicia Langer may have a blog as well. They are the two main admin detention defense lawyers with international name-recognition.
Yeah
The capture of the Nazi criminal Gilad Shalit is routinely referred to in Israel as "a kidnapping."
The Israelis are so full of shit. Small wonder the entire world turns from them in utter revulsion.
Euro
Yeah, those thousands of Palestinians detained apparently forever–you know a lot about how they are treated. And how many Palestinian leaders even of the lowest rung, have been assassinated? We know your rule of thumb, 100 dead or tortured and imprisoned Pals for one Jewish finger nail clipping.
Eudrosabra – There is a difference in approach between us IMHO based on discriminatory attitudes that we have learned to abhor. We read your words differently than you, hear them differently, understand them differently. We actually have a different understanding of power than you do, which makes sense because you seemingly have been raised in a society that is racist, and in such a society the power of the dominant class is ubiquitous and few people think about it – to them, that's the way it should be.
This sentence obviously is ok with you: "So one live man might be worth all of the thousands of detainees. It's not my fault that's the proportion Palestinians value themselves at." To us, it reads of domination so pervasive that you are unable to perceive the imbalance of power. Israel holds THOUSANDS of Palestinians (including children,) in prison, who you dismiss as "detainees in good health, held in known locations, in contact with legal representation." It sounds like you consider that a comfortable existence. Oh, yes, too bad there's no legal recourse for them. Meanwhile TENS of Israelis are missing, much more important an issue to you.
It is only because of racism that the people of Israel are able to continue on in their daily activity without concern for the death and destruction rained on the Palestinians. Otherwise, there would be empathy on the part of the society. More people would say WTF? as we do, rather than believing intermittent rocket fire was somehow worse than missile fire plus recurring military campaigns in which hundreds or thousands of people die plus continual round-ups of people imprisoned for suspect political association.
The disparity of treatment reminds of apartheid because it's based in the same issue, institutionalized prejudice. You can't see it because you are of it. You've been trained not to see it, yet to defend it. Pretty good work on their part, too bad it's for a failed cause. Israel is seventy years behind the times in social practice, even further behind in political and philosophical thought.
For the Palestinians, Israel is the equivalent of a police state.
Margaret, do you see that Suzanne is unappreciative of the goys who give her shelter? To her, they are just animals–dogs on the leash. She does fear if they ever grew a mind of their own. She likes to play victim in her own mind–lacking any individual personality, she joins the collective of chosen in her own mind–makes her feel important.
Shiksa, I am beginning to think you are jealous of Suzanne's sexy sleaze style.