ISRAEL: WHEN WILL THE WEST DO SOMETHING?

[donnie]

Am I alone in feeling outraged that Blair et al have said and done nothing about Israel's incursion into Gaza following the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier?

I have been very outspoken on MN about my opposition to the Israeli Government in the past and make no bones about the fact that I do regard it as verging on being a rogue state. Their sustained oppression of the Palestinians is repulsive to me and I see them as legitimised terrorists.

Opinions please.

Was it the Iranian president who recently described Israel as 'a cancer?'

Yes it was, he's definitely a loon. However so far empty threats. Personally I'd rather my country described as a cancer than live under occupation ( like in the West Bank and east jerusalem) live under seige and daily bombardment ( like Gaza and more recently Lebanon).
And the Israeli government aren't averse to saying nasty things either. One that particularly grated was 'we are not trying to make the people in Gaza starve, just lose some weight'.
Nice.

bloss, if you actually believe that Israel does not routinely bomb residential areas in its military operations then you are on some weird trip. Israel has been bombing residential areas of the occupied territories for years, always under the pretext of targeting Fatah or Hamas ' terrorists' ( their term - definitely not mine )and always killing civilians in the process. Plus they usually do it at night.

Also, whoever thinks that Israel has some sort of moral high ground by virtue of the fact that their government is elected - let us not forget their roll call of Prime Ministers, which includes Menachim Begin , a fully paid up member of Stern Gang and Irgun, and Ariel Sharon, who invaded Beirut in the 1980s and ordered the mass killings of hundreds if not thousands of civilians there.

Last night my DH actually said to me that he really hopes all Arab states unite to fight the Israelis and TBH I agreed with him.That is how awful this situation is.

I agree with Saadia - there is a nasty racist smell about all of this: Arabs largely ignored by the West , again.

I just keep thinking how difficult it must be for Israel to negotiate with people whose avowed missions are the destruction of the State of Israel. Where do they start??

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The Iranian PM Mr Ahminajad is just enjoying winding up the US.
For many Arabs (cerainly Palestinians to start with) denying Israel is pretty key considering it was the Palestinians land who was robbed in the first place(FWIW at the time of the inception of Israel was a mxture of 65% muslim 15% Christian and 20% Jewish - whcih co existed without any great problem.)So anyone who takes your land and then calls it theirs is talking through a hole in their arse... So from that point of view I understand
But it is obvious now that there has to be a two state solution. With equal rights to Jerusalem.
And Israel should bloody go back and respect the borders which were granted in the first place, instead of the new border wall they have just gone ahead with.
Terrorism is wrong, but be reminded it is not withut extreme provocation.
For a sobering thought just compare the figures of dead for each side.
It is not tit for tat and the press reports suicide bombings in Israel, yet hardly reports on Israel incursions into Gaza where 10's of people lose their lives at once.
It is a huge mess, a cyclic war. Solutions are not simple and will require strong and visionary leadership and international help to achieve any lasting peace.

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Looking at Europe (in a very amateur historian kind of way), I think there are two ways to peace. Either one side wipes the other side out/completely over powers them, or they reach a stage where the people are more concerned about economic health than fighting each other. I think this is why 60 years after the second world war I am sitting in an office with Spanish, German, Italian, Polish and Czheck (sp?) people working for an international company. I don't think that Israel can win peace militarily, certainly not when they are fighting suicide bombers, and certainly not by killing and maiming people's children. However, Lebanon was a country that might have been on the cusp of an economic revival. Crystal were about to start package ski holidays there. Slowly, if the Israelis in power had wanted peace I think there was a way forward.

I have been following this thread without comment, but I think now is the time for some actual facts (as opposed to vitriolic and ignorant sweeping statements) to be put forward. I do recognise that some people here aren't really interested in the facts but I still think it's worth doing for the sake of those who are. So here we go...

The argument that Israel doesn't want peace:

US President Bill Clinton presented ideas on borders, Jerusalem and land transfers to the Israeli and Palestinian delegations at the Camp David Summit in 2000. His plan called for far-reaching concessions from Israel, which Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to in the hope of achieving peace. The proposal also included an historic offer to the Palestinians, offering 91% of the West Bank in contiguous territory, all of Gaza, Arab neighbourhoods of east Jerusalem, a Palestinian state plus the dismantling of settlements. Yasser Arafat rejected this offer and instead opted for violence, resulting in the September 2000 Palestinian outbreak of violence. Despite this, Israel was still willing to negotiate with Arafat. In December 2000, Clinton proposed another deal for an Israeli withdrawal from 97% of the West Bank, which Barak accepted but which was once again dismissed by Arafat, despite his not presenting a counter-offer at either opportunity.

The argument that Israel targets civilians

Israel does not target innocent people but, as in any conflict, casualties do occur. In this current conflict, Hizbollah terrorists are deliberately sheltering within civilian communities and the Lebanese government is allowing this to happen. For every accusation of an unnecessary Palestinian death against the Israeli Defence Force, an inquiry is launched by the Israeli authorities, and if it stands up, appropriate action is taken against soldiers. Yet, there have been several instances where conclusive evidence revealed that accusations against Israeli soldiers were not only unfounded, but actually fabricated in order to shift responsibility for the deaths from Palestinian terrorists.

Conversely, Palestinian terrorists do set out with the aim of murdering innocent Israeli men, women and children, and this deliberate murder of innocent people cannot be justified or excused. The Palestinian Authority failed to combat the tide of suicide bombings and at times allowed the problem to escalate. In order to protect Israeli civilians, Israel has pursued a policy of pre-emptive strikes against known terrorists. Without Palestinian action to end terror attacks on Israelis ? an obligation stipulated throughout all the Oslo accords and clearly delineated in Phase I of the Roadmap ? Israel has no choice but to do what it can to protect the lives of innocent Israelis.

Apologies for the length of this subject but I think Israel's complex history clearly needs to be spelt out to understand this current conflict.

Well like any statistical argument it depends which stats /facts you trot out
Like Palestiniann youths throwing stones at an Israel tanks and being returned on with tank fire one sunny afternoon.
No one is blameless in this. Fact. Both sides have committed awful acts against the other.

Gaza is a Palestinian refugee camp, it stands to to reason that the groups that are Palestinian such as Hamas and the actual Palestinian goverment live there too.
It is the most densely populated piece of land inthe WHOLE world. To say that because they are targetting terrosists makes it ok to lob boms onto tower blocks of resident housing does not make it ok. And the terrosits are civilians certainly suicide bombers mostly are.
And thanks GOD the British did not choose to use that argument when in the conflict over Northern Ireland.
And if Israel supported Barak so much why did they vote him out and put Sharon in power if they wanted that solution following up.

Also that failure was also due to Syria wanting ALL of the Galn Heights back and Barak naively assuming otherwise.
When it comes to Hamas and Hizbollah I do not admire the tactics of suicide boming, but I understand why they fight the war

Chestnutter Afafat did mess up in 2000. Still doesn't justify their behaviour towards the Palestinian people since.
They conducted a bombing raid on a Gazan refugee camp today. Since when is a refugee camp a legitimate target.

Also whist Palestinian militants may still be fighting for the destruction of the state Israel (of which they have no hope in succeeding), Israel is busy destroying the state of Lebanon ( and is doing it very effectively.
WTF??????

I think more Palestinian children have been killed in the conflict than Israel children by suicide bombers. Palestinain children have been killed playing in their gardens and on their way to school by Israeli solders. We all know this. Why is it that when the US army kill Iraqi civilians or Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian or lebanese children it is not intentional? I think it's disgusting. I am disgusted by Israel and by the US and UN. To set out to destroy a whole country like that. I am boycotting Israeli goods and hope others will too!

Why is Israel the one state uniquely, which is allowed to bomb civilians because terrorists hide among them?

Does anyone believe that the British government would have been justified in bombing the Ardoyne? Or Catford, for that matter (the idiot IRA terrorist who blew himself up on a bus by accident lived round the corner from me in Catford - I'm so glad the British army didn't feel the need to strafe the local streets to get him). Or that the Spanish government would have been justified in bombing Basque towns because ETA terrorists lived there? Or that the German govt would have been justified in bombing bits of Hamburg because those loonies whose name escapes me lived there? Or that the Italian government would have been justified in bombing the streets of Bologna to get the members of the Red Brigades who undoubtedly sheltered among the civilians there? What about Bradford or Leeds? Aren't there some suicide bombers hiding there? Shall we give the army carte blanche to go and bomb the streets to finish them off?

Other sovreign states tackle their terrorism problem slightly differently to Israel, in a way which respects the need to take into account the risk of civilian casualties. Not just to pay lip service to it.

You're absolutely spot on Caligula.
And FairyMum I think a boycott of Israeli goods is a very good idea. They provide British supermarkets with lots of fruit and veg. Well worth checking where they come from when you buy.

Pifle: in answer to you, I think that the reason Israelis voted Barak out and Sharon in was because the Palestinian rejection of a two-state solution made them realise that what the Palestinians truly want was NOT a peaceful solution, but the complete destruction of Israel. Given that the Palestinians had rejected peace, I think Israelis felt that defending Israel against terrorism had to be the priority, and Sharon offered that possibility.

I certainly would not jump to defend every action of ANY army in relation to treatment of civilians, but I recognise that the Israeli army is under far more scrutiny than ANY other international military force and, while horrible incidents do occur (as in any conflict) from time to time, I do think the media cover this disproportionately.

Caligula - the only way in which you can compare the Middle East conflict with the threat from UK Islamist extremists is in the shared ideological aim of Islamic militants to create a 'khilafah' (universal Islamic state). Israel is the size of Wales and Gaza comprises a fraction of that so bombing Bradford is a ridiculous comparison to make (and that's without even mentioning the vastly different historical contexts...)

...and with regards to boycotting Israeli goods, this hurts Israeli Arabs and Palestinians just as much as as other Israelis because many of them work in these export industries.

chestnutter I think you're deliberately missing the point. It's not the size of the country or the aim of the terrorists. It's how a sovereign state deals with terrorism that's the issue.

chestnutter may I ask what the Israeli proposal for governing Jerusalem is? Was that not always a major sticking point in negotiations?

Caligula - the point is that no other state faces terrorism on such a sustained, determined, orchestrated and well-funded scale. I would hope that if London were in a situation where it faced random suicide bombs on a weekly basis - without warning to civilians (unlike the IRA on many occasions, although not to minimise the severity of that conflict)- where militants were blowing themselves up outside teenage discos and other despicable targets - well if that was happening, then to be honest I would expect an unequivacle response from our Government (although bombing within its own country would clearly not be one of them!) But if Bradford existed as a separate state, and was full of people planning to attack me on the way to work, then yes, I would want the Government to take some radical action to prevent that.

Saadia - yes, Jerusalem is a sticking point but Jews have been living in Jerusalem continuously for several millennia, and for over a century have formed the majority of its population. Despite being the focus of Jewish religious aspirations, Israel also respects the claims of other religions to their holy sites in Jerusalem. Under Israeli law, every person has access to their holy sites, and each religion governs its own holy sites.

Alsofrom the Israeli point of view that initial roadmap which Arafat rejected and reusmed violence after had flaws for them as well
from the intenet below

The most fundamental flaw was the renunciation of Jewish claims to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel cannot be renounced by a transitory Israeli government. The present government has no right to deprive future generations of Jews and Israelis of their legal patrimony.
So thats what Barak was ejected it is also why Rabin was asassinated, the Israelis want thei cake and to eat it too.

on a funded scale?? The Palestinians, like the way the USA funds Israel to the tune of £15b a year you mean? On that scale
laughable quite honestly

'Israel also respects the claims of other religions to their holy sites in Jerusalem. Under Israeli law, every person has access to their holy sites, and each religion governs its own holy sites'

Except the Masjid Al Aqsa. The Jews claim the dome of the rock is theirs and want to demolish the mosque, haven't they already excavated underneath the mosque in the hopes it will collapse?? Some parts of the mosque are not useable because of this.

$15bn? As you said Piffle, "like any statistical argument it depends which stats /facts you trot out". How about the $6million of EU aid to Palestinians which Arafat embezzeled through his wife? Israel is the only (tiny) democracy among its hostile Arab neighbours, none of whom have ever lifted a finger to help the Palestinians or offer them refuge. I don't know where your $15 billion figure came from. The only reason the Iranians fund Hamas is because it wants to bring down Israel - it couldn't care a jot about the suffering of the Palestinians. Personally I don't have a problem with the US funding Israel - if they didn't I assume that it would've been wiped of the map by now - and if you've ever visited you'd know that would be a tragedy.

Now i have to sleep, newborn only gave me 2 hours last night so no time at the moment to get into the dome of the rock/western wall argument... but give me time... !

Going back a few steps, the UN says Israel IS responsible for protecting civilians in the areas it attacks. In theory it could therefore be prosecuted for war crimes. Unfortunately ( I wonder why) Israel is not a party to the International Criminal Court. ( Fot the sake of fairness Hezbollah isn't either. But then they are not a sovereign state.)

This is an extract from BBC News Online:

The Commissioner, Louise Arbour, has raised the possibility of prosecution. "The scale of killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control," she said.

"International humanitarian law is clear on the supreme obligations to protect civilians during hostilities.

"Indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians.

"Similarly, the bombardment of sites with alleged innocent civilians is unjustifiable."

"Unfortunately ( I wonder why) Israel is not a party to the International Criminal Court" - why not then?

As far as I'm aware, the USA, China, and Russia are also among those not included, but you infer that there's a 'special' reason for Israel's non-inclusion which I'm interested to hear about.