Yair Gamliel, the seven-year-old boy whose skull was fractured by an ax-wielding terrorist in the settlement of Bat Ayin on Thursday, is the son of Ofer Gamliel, one of three men convicted in 2003 and sent to prison for 15 years for a failed bomb plot against a Arab girls school in east Jerusalem. ...In 2003, the Jerusalem District Court convicted Gamliel, together with Yarden Morag and Shlomo Dvir, of attempted murder. The cell came to be known as the Bat Ayin Underground. It had planted an explosives-packed cart in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of A-Tur in 2002, between Mokassed Hospital and an Arab girls elementary school across the street.
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Glorification of the religious fascists from a certain Israel Harel in your beloved Haaretz today, Phil:
…national-religious youth are making their mark – qualitatively, quantitatively and actively – on nearly every significant deed in the country, leading a movement of optimism and of personal example for society as a whole, despite malicious mudslinging. Jealous figures warn the religious are taking over the army. Dr. Motti Golani told Army Radio that jihad motivates national-religious youth just as it does Hamas. Others note the dominant presence of religious Zionism in the new settlement movement in the Galilee and the Negev, which they say will "inevitably" lead to friction with the Arabs and Bedouin. The first whisperings of resentment can also be heard in other centers of hegemony – academia and the justice system. There too, particularly in junior positions, members of the religious community have begun to take their rightful place. Anyone who can rise above this pettiness and evaluate these changes without jealousy or prejudice will find that this generation of upright youth is the product of a deep grounding in values, at home, in schools and in the community – and not of a conspiracy to take over the country's centers of power…
What goes around comes around. Karma. Can you imagine what that father feels like stuck in jail with his seven-year-old son dead? Will the pain he caused the parents of the Arab schoolgirls wash over him?
So much pain on both sides.
As for the JPost, I notice that Hilary Leila Krieger (what a name!) has not one but two pieces quite subtly undermining Washington's Israel policy in today's online edition, one especially focused on Gates and Iran, the other on Clinton and the settlements. I say, 'subtle,' because it doesn't seem to me worth picking out any particular lines that are give-aways of her tactic; it's cumulative, oblique, indirect undermining of Washington's credibility, consistency, honesty, courage, etc.
Both of these "men" are terrorists. The difference is that Arabs and their cheerleaders consider them heroes, while Israel puts its terrorists in prison.
Ofer Gamliel is an armed robber. All the colonists are armed robbers. Yair Gamliel's fate is terrible. No child should be living in such an environment. Whose fault is that? His father brought him ethnic cleansing. What kind of twisted moral freak brings his children with him during the commission of an armed robbery?
"Israel puts its terrorists in prison"
When, of course, it isn't electing them prime minister.
Colin,
The Palestinians are the descendants of the Arab imperial conquerors of the Land of Israel, it's just that you are on their side. What kind of twisted moral freak sends her child with a bomb strapped to her into a supermarket? An Arab supremacist Mujahidah. The people you support, de facto, with their lie that they'll stop–or that you think they'll stop–at the '67 borders.
Will the pain he caused the parents of the Arab schoolgirls wash over him?
So much pain on both sides.
Posted by: MRW. | April 03, 2009 at 10:21 AM
What Pain? The bomb didn't go off, the Arabs had a scare.
The scare is equivilent to the deliberate murder of a 7 year old? Are you the second coming of Phil?
Considering, you stole their country Euro, you should be happy with the 67' borders. You don't have a right to 1% of Historic Palestine.
No, LD, they stole Eretz Israel from the Greeks who succeeded the Romans who stole it from the Jews. You can call it Palestine from North America, but it is Eretz Israel.
Bear in mind that unlike you, I have always lived with or around Arabs who call themselves "Palestinian". About one-third were Lebanese-born, although denied Lebanese citizenship, about one-third were West Bank Christians, and one-third were Israeli citizens. Unfortunately, because they were defined as expatriates or infidels, even within Israel and the West Bank, no Palestinian Authority government would take their concerns into account and so the official position was that terror would continue until the Jews left.
Most Israelis are aware that they CAN live with the bulk of Palestinians, the problem is that the political settlement must sideline the extremists on both sides. Your doctrinaire Palestine-not-Israel approach is a non-starter.
I imagine a Sheik of the Israeli Islamic Movement cursing the "one-state solution" as supporters of Hamas throw his infidel @$$ from a rooftop in the formerly-Israeli, always Arab, always Muslim and currently Islamist-governed municipality of Umm al-Fahm.
Lovers of the French Algeria parallel forgot that the first thing the FLN Algerian government did was kill 1,000-3,000 settlers and 100,000-300,000 Muslims. S'aba s'nine, barakat!
Actually, most DNA studies now suggest that most Palestinians are descendants of the original Israelites, neighboring tribes and earlier tribes. In most areas of ancient Arab conquest, the original inhabitants of the conquered areas were not expelled or killed but were absorbed into the Arab civilization. This concept of assimilation of the native poplation is something that the present day state of Israel doesn't get, nor do most of its apologists.
If Israel and earlier Zionists had treated the indigenous population with fairness and equality they wouldn't be having violent problems now. But the problem is that Zionism from its very inception sought to exclude and demean the native Palestinians. You can't set up a country based on inequality and injustice and expect that the result will be anything other than violence–from both sides. The oppressing side will use violence in order to maintain the inequality, and the oppressed side will use violence in an attempt to overthrow that inequality.
Tree,
"Jews, sons of clinking gold, are the lowest and least of all peoples."–al-Filastin daily newspaper, 1913. Bear in mind that the Ottoman government enforced policies that reflected that, even entertaining thoughts of mass deportations in 1917.
Oddly, 1913 was also the year the United Kibbutz movement closed membership to Arabs, at the famous meeting at Ein Harod. Unlike you, I do not lay the blame for this mutual exclusion solely at the feet of Zionism. The Railway Union retained the most extensive, most amicable mixed membership the longest, and workers did not actually begin massacring each other in the factories until '47, arguably after a string of (preventable) Irgun provocations.
I notice you have no problem with the not-quire-thirteen-hundred years (638CE-1917CE) of autocratic Muslim government and institutionalized inequality and discrimination. Nor do you recognize that Israeli civil law is the most liberal the Arab citizens of Akka, Haifa, and Jaffa have ever known. I doubt you actually want to argue the minutiae of the Land Law of 1961, or that you could READ either the Hebrew or Arabic original of that pivotal act of "discrimination." But you certainly want the disestablishment of the State of Israel.
Very little of the violence is directed against agents of the state, or against its discriminatory practices, in fact, only the Fahimis regularly demonstrate against discriminatory provisions of the land law. A bit more of the violence is directed against settlers, the army, and the occupation. The bulk of the violence is aimed at extirpating Israel, and the bulk of the security response is aimed at stopping terror at its origins–the weapons caches and workshops of Gaza and the Casbahs of the cities of the West Bank spine.
Bear in mind that unlike you, I have always lived with or around Arabs who call themselves "Palestinian". Posted by: Eurosabra | April 03, 2009 at 05:54 PM
Are we supposed to be impressed by the fact that you are a Jewish pied noir?
@ Eurosabra
And before then, didn't Joshua steal Canaan, starting with his massacre at Jericho?
Euro,
Its always interesting to get the fruits of the Israeli mythos as inculcated by the Israeli education system regurgitated back so faithfully by one of its students.
Political Zionism, by its very purpose and origin was always an exclusionary ideology. To try to pretend that it was not so is so pointless since it is the early Zionists themselves that dispute you.
You only "notice" what you have already pre-conceived and projected. I believe that throughout history we should struggle to move forward towards a more just society rather than one that is less just. I am not "OK" with any discrimination in the past, regardless of who was behind it, I simply acknowledge that the past is past and cannot be changed. The only thing I have any small hope of changing is the present and future. Israel oppresses with my tax dollars and ostensibly in my name. Israeli rule in the occupied territories has been more oppressive than much of Middle Eastern rule of centuries ago. Be proud- the new state of Israel has even managed to be less inclusive than much of the even earlier Israelite rule, according to the recently discovered archeological record.
If your aim at criticizing past Muslim rule is to"prove" that Muslims and/or Arabs are incapable of dealing justly with Jews, I would warn you that, by that logic, a similar implication that Israeli rule over Arab
non-Jews likewise "proves" that Jews are incapable of dealing justly with non-Jews would be its corollary. Both implications are the result of faulty logic, but if you were consistent you would recognize the bigoted error of your argument.
Of course not. I'm sure you don't blame Zionism for any of its decisions. You're barely able to admit that deadly terrorist acts by Irgun may have led to violent and deadly confrontations between competing co-workers. Its funny that you call the kibbutz' decision a "mutual
exclusion" when it was purely a Zionist decision. Or are you suggesting that Arabs requested to be excluded from the Hebrew kibbutz and asked not to work on Zionist owned land? Quite a silly an a-historical statement. And of course you ignore the larger issue Jewish land leases that prohibited non-Jews from ever buying. leasing or working on the land, and the Kibbush Ha'avoda, or Jewish conquest of labor, that took hold during the second and third aliyas.
This seems to be your mode of argumentation, doesn't it? If someone doesn't want to argue the minutiae of the Land Law of 1961, then they must not be knowledgeable enough to know discrimination when they see it, as if the question of discrimination rides solely on the sophist's interpretation of verbiage used to justify just one of numerous discriminatory Israeli land laws. (Of course, if they do want to argue the "minutiae",then you've successfully derailed the larger discussion, haven't you?)
Pretty silly argument, don't you think? Let's apply it to other situations, why don't we. Anyone who couldn't read Afrikaans had no right to criticize South African apartheid, and non-German readers had no right to criticize the Third Reich if they didn't want to discuss the minutiae of the various Nazi laws in their original German . I'm sure their laws sounded much more reasonable in the original German.
See, its a specious argument of ludicrous apologetics, no matter who uses it.
Most of the violence is a product of the occupation and earlier and continuing dispossession. The occupied Palestinians have it worse than the second class Arab citizens within the green line, and so the resulting violence from the occupied is much greater. Again, its amusing to see that you don't think that the army or the occupation are agents of the state. You really have to contort the facts in order to argue your point, don't you? Frankly, the settlers, financed and armed by the state, could arguably be considered agents of the state as well, as the huge settlement program has always been a state instituted, controlled and financed project.
But no, you want us to believe that all the Palestinian violence is caused by unexplainable and fanatical hatred of Jews and Israel, unaffected by the miserable conditions that Israel forces upon the Palestinians. Here's a clue for you. If you oppress a group of people for decades on end, they aren't going to like you, and some of them are going to get so desperate that they react violently.
Israel has spent billions on settlements in the West Bank, and considers them the forefront of its "security response". From Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/954967.html
The other huge "security" expense initiated by Israel is the "security" wall, which likewise steals land from West Bank Palestinians and, as most Israeli officials admit, does nothing to prevent a determined suicide bomber from entering Israel, since Israeli estimates of the number of West Bank Palestinians arrested in Israel while looking for work at over 1000 per week. (
Tree,
No one around me has ever tried to resolve the issue by argument. I have lived with a few Palestinians, and had a few try to kill themselves around me, and have had a few quite simply try to kill me. The end result is that I and all my friends, whether Israeli Jews or Palestinian Arabs, are survivors of quite a few disasters that your opposition to a two-state settlement will merely prolong. Unfortunately, I cannot convince you of the error of your doctrinaire ways, and don't really have the time. The crucial point, which you missed, was that Zionists and Palestinian nationalists alike beat the stuffing out of the non-nationalist Left in Palestine, leaving a large number of Jews like myself with Zionism as a lesser evil. I really should not be ARGUING to the extent that I have my hands full with treating Israeli survivors here in the US, and I am more interested in handling things in a more constructive fashion.
So, Euro decides not to address Tree's issues. Israeli "survivors" here in the USA take up all her time.
They live in bombed out dumps, with IDF shit on everything they own, thanks to goy USA taxpayers. So many more have died than pals. OK.
It would probably help if you didn't insist that everyone who discusses the issue has to be able to discuss the minutiae of various Israeli laws in the original Hebrew in order to be taken seriously, or imply by other supercilious means that those who disagree with you are not qualified to speak on the subject, as you have done on this and other sites numerous times.
You do realize that you are assigning to me WAY WAY WAY MORE POWER than I have. I am under no illusions that my stand on this question will have any agency at all. As I've stated before, Israel could have created two states at any time after 1967, and before that time could have had overwhelming influence towards a peaeful two state solution. Now it has already created, in essence, one state, with two unequal sets of laws and governance according to ethnicity and/or religion. What I stand for is a system that is not apartheid, that treats people as equals regardless of their ethnicity or religion. Whether that means one state or twenty does not matter as long as equality and justice is its base. If you think that is not possible than you are underestimating both Jews and Palestinians. But in any case, there will never be a just settlement unless the Israelis (and specifically Israeli Jews) can grasp that the Palestinians are every bit as human as they are and entitled to the same rights that they take for granted.
The "two-state" solution is dead, and Israel killed it with its settlements. What we have is one state controlled by Israel. Where my advocacy differs from reality is in calling for equality.
My belief is that the Israeli "us over here, and them over there" attitude is what is standing in the way of a just and peaceful settlement. It creates and fosters racist attitudes towards the "other". I've seen the power of Israeli Jews working non-violently side by side with Palestinians and seen the acceptance and closeness that comes from that shared struggle. That is the only future that is worth fighting for. Anything else is just more death and destruction.
I don't consider standing for full equality to be particularly doctrinaire, nor will you convince me that it is wrong to seek it. Why would you want to? What you are saying is that we have to accept overbearing oppression and injustice because if we don't we might end up with overbearing oppression and injustice from the other side. But they are both wrong; the fear of the possibility of oppression cannot excuse the existence of oppression. We have to try for better, or we as humans will gain nothing.
I get that you fear some unknown bogeyman of repressive Islamic rule, but that fear is more the result of your upbringing and schooling than it is real. Things may reach a point where continuing violence is the only inevitable result but we are not there yet. If only a critical number of Israelis would join with Palestinians in the fight for equal treatment then Israel could be well on its way to solving the problem. That would be doing things in the most constructive fashion.
If you are going for full equality, it will have to be in a context of peace, and the best way to do that currently is a two-state solution that builds on the thin reeds of the Israeli & Palestinian democratic traditions, such as they are. You are NOT going to de-Zionize Israel overnight to the profit of rejectionists like Hamas, Fateh, and the DFLP/PFLP (functionally those parties are as rejectionist of Jews as parties like Likud, Israel Beitenu, National Union, etc are to non-Jews.) I realize that pushing for an evolution of the Israeli system on the basis of parties like Meretz (still too Z. for some), Balad, Hadash, Ra'am-Ta'al and extraparliamentary opposition like Kedma and the Islamic Movement is très unsexy, but you do what you can with what you have.
So, cut off the aid already, BE and outsider trying to dictate surrender to Islamism to Israeli Jews, but don't argue that you're trying to democratize Israel through anti-Jewish blandishments, non-engagement with the democratic opposition to Zionism, and the cut-off of aid. (And be sure to cut aid to UNRWA, too, as it goes to Hamas. Whoops. You don't want to cut off Hamas.)
That fear is a reflection of how many times Islamists have tried to kill me, and how many Palestinians have died at their hands in the OPT. Obviously, Islamic rule is a non-starter, and without marginalizing the Islamic parties, or getting Hamas to adopt the Islamic Movement's position on violence, you will not arrive at a one-state solution. Violence is Hamas's preferred tool because it is an Arabo-Islamic thugocracy, and while I might hope that Israeli Islamists might prevail, in reality they would go the way of the MNA versus the FLN.
If two-state really IS dead, you are either going to have to have an alliance between some Jews and Arabs against some other Jews and Arabs, or the one-state will be Israel with no Palestinian population, or (much less likely) Hamas from the river to the sea.
Since you have proclaimed one-state dead and you do NOT favor such alliances, being merely anti-Israel, advocating a cut-off rather than channeling aid to the relatively democratic parties, NGOs and civil society organizations, you are de factor a supporter of Hamas from the river to the sea.
I would also add the '67 to '87 was the SUCCESSFUL period of one-state, and that the Palestinians brought it to an end with the Intifada, when they decided to be "a free people in [their] own land." So I think two-state is still viable, even given the inanities of the Green Line and Blue Line borders, because the people on those lines COULD make them function, and oddly things might be better with a cleaner border. (The disorder came from people being cut-off, so post-'67 to '87 unified Arab-Israel-Palestine was MORE functional until the building of the Separation Fence.)
Again, even the '47 Partition plan assumed a customs union. We have interdependence without amity.