Jimmy Carter Expresses His Admiration For Hamas

I actually had to read this twice to believe it:

Carter said Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns with the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

And just to put that comment in perspective, George W. Bush won a fair and democratic election (twice, in fact) and Carter has never stopped attacking Bush at every opportunity. This increasingly nasty piece of work really should stop speaking in public. He really is a hateful apologist for the very worst elements in the Middle East.

Far from encouraging Hamas's move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.

"That action was criminal," he said in a news conference after his speech.

"The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah," he said.

Carter said the United States and others supplied the Fatah-controlled security forces in Gaza with vastly superior weaponry in hopes they would "conquer Hamas in Gaza" – but Hamas this month routed Fatah because of its "superior skills and discipline."

He said plans to reopen international aid to the West Bank, but clamp down on aid to Gaza, would imprison 1.4 million Gazans. He called for both territories to be treated equally.

Just incredible. Ignore the fact that Hamas are the ones who separated the Palestinians. It is Hamas who made repeated "ceasefires" then violated them as soon as they were ready. Ignore the atrocities of Hamas and demand no accountability for their behavior. It's wonderful that Crater has elected himself to lead Hamas. He should move in with his buddies at once. And leave this country alone. Go away, Jimmy.

• 

  By Kathy, June 19, 2007 @ 5:47 pm

  So you think it’s right for the U.S. to talk about democracy, and then when a key democratic institution — free and fair elections — produces a result that the U.S. doesn’t like, support an opposition group to overthrow the freely and fairly elected government?

  I’m sorry, I don’t understand that. Democracy is good, except when we don’t like the results?

  Also, VERBALLY attacking the policies of an elected president is not the same thing as supporting an ARMED INSURRECTION against an elected government.

• 

  By Gaius, June 19, 2007 @ 5:54 pm

  Hamas conducted an armed insrrection against the govenment, or hadn’t you noticed.

  Nazis held elections, too. So by Carter’s rules, that was just ducky.

  Quit trying to cover for this. There is no excuse for Carter’s statements and you diminish yourself by trying.

• 

  By Kathy, June 19, 2007 @ 9:04 pm

  Hamas IS the government, Gaius. Hamas won the elections. Hamas was the people’s choice.

  And yes, the Nazis did win an election; and the fact that they then proceeded to destroy the very democratic institutions that put them in office does not invalidate those democratic institutions.

  And the United States has no right — NO RIGHT, Gaius — to support an opposing faction over the legitimately elected government in Gaza or the West Bank or anywhere else.

• 

  By Gaius, June 19, 2007 @ 9:35 pm

  Kathy, you really are unbelievable. Hamas just committed an armed insurrection against the entire Palestinian people And you apologize for them.

  And you’re wrong, incidentally. The Nazis did not dismantle the “democratic” process. They simply used it to give themselves legitimacy.

  Which appears to be perfectly cool with you and yours. Unbelievable. Go live with Jimmy and his pals.

• 

  By Gaius, June 19, 2007 @ 9:46 pm

  Here’s your Hamas, Kathy:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Suicide_Bomber

  http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/isrl-pa/

  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article544334.ece

  Go read about the choice you defend.

• 

  By daveinboca, June 19, 2007 @ 10:10 pm

  On cue, Jimmy Carter steps forward and demonstrates again that there is no fool like an old fool [h/t: Ben Franklin].

  Let’s see where this serial idiot got it wrong this time. The US should not favor Fatah over Hamas because….”[it would be an] effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples.”?

  Fatah has renounced violence and has recognized the possibility of recognizing Israel. Abu Mazen has met with the Israeli PM in an effort to achieve a peaceful solution down the road.

  Hamas has espoused terrorism, kidnaps Israeli soldiers and launches missiles into Israel while attempting terrorist attacks on Israel. Its leadership refuses to consider any diplomatic measures toward Israel. I could go on…..

  But it already sounds like the Palestinians are two peoples.

  So the US should treat Fatah and Hamas the same?

  How long ago did this terminal retardo Carter lose the last of his marbles? And why doesn’t he just shut up and stop proving Ben Franklin’s old adage again and again and again……

• 

  By Kathy, June 19, 2007 @ 10:42 pm

  Hamas is not my choice, Gaius. It’s the Palestinians’ choice — a majority of them, anyway.

  Neither Hamas nor Fatah are known for scrupulous observance of human rights. But U.S. is only making things worse by actively supporting Fatah. In fact, the joint U.S.-Israeli economic boycott of Gaza is what helped lead to this latest violence.

  Either you believe in democracy, or you don’t, Gaius. If you do, then you cannot advocate for the U.S. to try to overturn or change or manage the results of democratic elections in other countries, no matter how deeply you hate the results.

  This situation is for the people living in that region to resolve, not us. We have no right to involve ourselves in something we don’t even fully understand, and we are only making the lives of Palestinians worse by doing so.

• 

  By Kathy, June 19, 2007 @ 10:52 pm

  So the US should treat Fatah and Hamas the same?

  The U.S. should mind its own business. Your very question assumes a right that we do not have — the right to decide which political outcome we prefer in other parts of the world that do not belong to us, and then to actively interfere in those places to make those outcomes happen.

  Like it or not, Hamas was the choice of the majority of Palestinians who voted, Hamas enjoys enormous popularity in the Gaza Strip, and we are just going to have to find ways to accept that reality and cope with it. Or, if we really hate Hamas that much, we might be better advised to encourage our ally, Israel, to take steps that would help lead to change in the day to day conditions of Palestinians’ lives — the conditions that make an organization like Hamas so popular.

• 

  By P. Ami, June 19, 2007 @ 11:02 pm

  The Palestinians, under their system, had every right to choose their government. They made their choice and have to pay the concequences of that choice since it led to rockets fired at their neighbors and the continued vilification of a fellow democratic nation. They gave a mandate to Hamas’ pledge to destroy Israel. You are right, the Palestinian’s chose. They chose Hamas and so are not victims of anything but their own bad judgement.

  The Israeli’s and American’s also chose. They chose governments that wish to contain Hamas and crush its will to destroy Israel. One hopes they are crushed to the point that all Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza decide they have had enough and move themselves a few kilometers east into the first Palestinian nation, the Kingdom of Jordan. That is the nature of choice.

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  By Gaius, June 19, 2007 @ 11:06 pm

  < ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

  You can enable the behaviors, as you have chosen to do. I'd rather not. Because you seem to not care at all that the "will of the people" in question fully intend – and have and continue to openly advocate – the eradication of another people.

  Your idea of democracy sucks. You demand the "will of the people" prevail – unless you don't like the outcome. In which case it is your self-imposed duty to do everything within your power to bring the "will of the people" into line with your particular indoctrination.

  You've gone right over the edge and you don't care a whit.

  Go away, Kathy, Seriously. I have no time for people who turn their back on the rest of humanity in the name of "democracy". I mean it – go away. You are exactly – precisely what people like Pol Pot counted on as supporters. If I get 50.00001% of people to vote for it, would it be ok to eradicate anyone who disagrees with me – it's the "will of the people", after all.

  Go away. Grow up.

• 

  By kourosh, June 20, 2007 @ 7:14 am

  Here is the answer to the ignorant and uneducated Carter:

  http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813077590&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

  To Carter Stoning, beheading, arrest and torture of 000s of students, women apartheid by Islamists and Khomeinists mean nothing. He has his small brain set on election. Somebody must tell him Saddam got 99% of the vote, Khomienie got 98% of the vote, Ahmadinejad got 67% of the vote, and Hitler got 73% of the vote. What is important is not the number of the vote by Hamas under special and devastating conditions, but what these murderous entities preach. Is the number of vote justifies anti-civilization, and anti-democratic ideologies of these Khomeinists and Islamists animal.

  Carter is actually against humanity, since due to his inability to understand real issues and due to his masked religious beliefs; he caused all catastrophes that exist now as the result of Khomeinism and Islamism. Exactly the same way that Lenin and Stalin are responsible for mass murdering of the people around the world as a result of anti-human Marxism ideology, and Hitler is responsible for murdering millions of innocent people and all killed in WWII. I put Carter in the same league as Stalin, and Hitler, based on their contributions to human catastrophes and in the second tier of the same chart are Saddam, Khomeinie, OBL, and Kim of NK.

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  By Quilly Mammoth, June 20, 2007 @ 9:03 am

  < ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

  What Kathy is really saying is that since the Democrats won the majority of seats in the '06 election that when Bush vetoes bills they have the right to take up arms, drag Republican lawmakers into the street and shoot them, and run the Republican leadership out of DC. Because that is exactly the situation in the PA.

  Neither the PA nor the United States is set up with a "winner take all" form of Democracy…though people like Kathy don't know that. Hence the childish rages that "Bush is a Dictator" and "We shouldn't support the government of the PA when _one_ of the parties tries to take over teh whole thing".

• 

  By Kathy, June 20, 2007 @ 10:10 am

  I’m not sure if Gaius’s demand that I “go away” means he is banning me from commenting here, so I will attempt to post the following:

  What Kathy is really saying is that since the Democrats won the majority of seats in the ‘06 election that when Bush vetoes bills they have the right to take up arms, drag Republican lawmakers into the street and shoot them, and run the Republican leadership out of DC. Because that is exactly the situation in the PA.

  That’s an interesting analogy. You appear to be saying that Fatah is the Republican Party and Hamas is the Democratic Party. You are putting an American political overlay on top of a conflict on the other side of the world that has no similarity to American political history or current political reality at all. In truth, if you wanted to make an analogy between the U.S. and the Palestinian situation, you would have to posit that the two major parties had been in armed conflict with each other for a long time, that one of the parties won Congress in a landslide, that the other party did not accept the election results, that the two parties continued to fight bitterly, and that a foreign superpower supported the party that lost the election over the party that won it, and imposed an economic boycott to try to force the party that won the election out of power. Then you would have to posit that the two U.S. parties agreed to form a coalition government; but it wasn’t really a good-faith, legitimate agreement, because the two sides still hated each other, and the only reason they agreed to form the coalition government was because they were forced to do so by the pressure of the humanitarian crisis created by the economic boycott. Then you would have to posit that the two parties, since their coalition really was not based on any genuine understanding or intention, kept on fighting each other in the streets, and finally the coalition completely fell apart, and open civil war began.

  Nowhere in your analogy do you include the element of a foreign power politically and economically intervening in this imaginary armed conflict between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Nor do you include the element of sovereignty. The U.S. is a sovereign nation with a 250-year political history. The Gaza Strip is part of an occupied region in which a stateless people have been forced to live under the rule of an outside country for the past 40 years — and in refugee status for 20 years before their land was officially occupied.

  There is no comparison, and your analogy is dishonest.

• 

  By Quilly Mammoth, June 20, 2007 @ 5:17 pm

  No, Ma’am, your analogy, and in fact your analysis, is dishonest.

  You said:

  Hamas IS the government, Gaius. Hamas won the elections. Hamas was the people’s choice.

  Which is an untruth. Hamas won a majority in the election but they are not the government.

  And just in case you missed it, Israel is a sovereign nation. That endures daily attacks from people clearly not socially capable of being able to have their own government.

  You said:

  . The Gaza Strip is part of an occupied region in which a stateless people have been forced to live under the rule of an outside country for the past 40 years

  Yet another untruth. The Gaza Stri[p is not occupied at the current moment. You can track the time when the Gaza strip reverted to control of the Palestinians by the news reports of the destruction of greenhouses and other advanced agricultural operations…by the people you claim should be the sole governing body in Gaza

  Hamas IS the government

  The biggest irony of all:

  if you wanted to make an analogy between the U.S. and the Palestinian situation, you would have to posit that the two major parties had been in armed conflict with each other for a long time, that one of the parties won Congress in a landslide, that the other party did not accept the election results, that the two parties continued to fight bitterly,

  First, Fatah and Hamas have not been in armed conflict for a long time. (For the record that was yet another untruth of your’s, Kathy). Second, the Left side of Democrat party has been bitterly opposed to the current administration because they did not accept the results of an election.

  Third, you don’t know history _at all_. At times in our history both the French and the English interfered in our country. The French tried to undermine the administration of Washington, the British interfered in our trade and they interfered in our Civil War by supporting one group over another.

  Fourth, still another untruth:

  foreign superpower supported the party that lost the election over the party that won it, and imposed an economic boycott to try to force the party that won the election out of power.

  Kathy, I can understand that when you don’t know the facts it’s easy to come to the wrong conclusion. The fact of the matter is that American economic support for the PA was held for exactly one reason: That Hamas recognize Israel’s Right to Exist.

  Since you oppose the use of force (one diplomatic tool) and you oppose trade and economic sanctions(the other tool in the Diplomat’s belt) clearly you support Hamas’s goal. What other option can we suppose you support when you advocate giving funding to a group that is dedicated to the extinction of the Jews? How would you stop Hamas?

• 

  By Kathy, June 20, 2007 @ 8:23 pm

  Hamas won a majority in the election but they are not the government.

  Hamas won the election, which gave them control of the organs of government. Fatah refused to turn them over, and set up his own cabinet in the West Bank, so now the Palestinian people are living under two separate governments.

  Israel is a sovereign nation. That endures daily attacks from people clearly not socially capable of being able to have their own government.

  The Palestinians are a stateless people who endure not only daily attacks but daily violations of their basic human rights and have also been enduring a military occupation since 1967. Your second sentence above is racist, pure and simple. Palestinians are no more or less “socially capable” of governing themselves than any other people. The Palestinian people’s condition is the result of social, economic, and political factors imposed on them by others, not any inherent ability to govern themselves.

  What other option can we suppose you support when you advocate giving funding to a group that is dedicated to the extinction of the Jews? How would you stop Hamas?

  I did not advocate funding a group dedicated to the extinction of the Jews. I advocated, and advocate, not giving truckloads of money and military resources to the Fatah-run West Bank while starving the Hamas-run Gaza Strip of food and medicine. Aside from being repulsive on an ethical level, it’s also quite counterproductive to the goal of achieving peace and reconciliation among Palestinians or between Palestinians and Israel, which means that in the long run it’s not good for the Jews, either.

  It is not our job to “stop” Hamas. It is our job to recognize that we cannot bomb, invade, starve, bribe, subvert, or play divide and conquer with countries or leaders or governments or people we happen not to like or approve of. It is not our job to remake the entire world in America’s image. It is our job to learn how to get along with people we don’t like and allow others to do the same.

• 

  By Gaius, June 20, 2007 @ 8:31 pm

  44%, Kathy. That’s what they won. 44%. And they overthrew their own government by force.

  Their system is Parliamentary. You’re wrong, and you are so very tiresome.

  Answer my question: if I get 50.00001% of people to agree with me, is it okay to eradicate anyone who disagrees with me?

  That’s your gold standard for democracy, after all. The will of the people.

• 

  By Quilly Mammoth, June 20, 2007 @ 9:35 pm

  Your second sentence above is racist, pure and simple

  CONGRATULATIONS! Kathy, you have just invented yet another corollary to Godwin’s Law!!!

  I did not advocate funding a group dedicated to the extinction of the Jews

  Uhmmm..Yes, you did:

  that a foreign superpower supported the party that lost the election over the party that won it, and imposed an economic boycott to try to force the party that won the election out of power.

  That, Ma’am, is…once again…our other diplomatic tool. “Promise not to kill all the Jews and we’ll give you welfare.”

  We didn’t hold funds from the PA because we loved Fatah more than Hamas; rather it is because Hamas refused to agree to give up their genocidal ideology. That you, Ma’am, oppose withholding funds from groups that advocate genocide must make any sane person question what point you are arguing.

  Truly, I could pick apart your arguments all day long because your premises are not based on fact or rational argumentation. They are based on talking points and Ivory Tower ideology and not on reality.

  Why on earth do think that we are evil because we refuse to fund a group dedicated to the extinction of anther ethnic group? It baffles me and saddens me.

• 

  By P. Ami, June 20, 2007 @ 11:07 pm

  The Palestinians are not a stateless people Kathy. Their state is called Jordan. Take some time to read actual history and facts rather then filling your mind with revisionist, radical cant.

• 

  By Kathy, June 21, 2007 @ 9:46 am

  Uhmmm..Yes, you did:

  that a foreign superpower supported the party that lost the election over the party that won it, and imposed an economic boycott to try to force the party that won the election out of power.

  Say WHAT? Where is the statement in there that I advocate that the U.S. fund a group dedicated to killing Jews?

  44%, Kathy. That’s what they won. 44%. ,,, Their system is Parliamentary.

  You don’t provide a source for your statistic. I am well aware that their system is parliamentary. In a parliamentary system, the majority party in parliament chooses the prime minister and has either direct or indirect control (depending on the country) over passing and carrying out the laws. It is those powers that Fatah refused to turn over.

  Answer my question: if I get 50.00001% of people to agree with me, is it okay to eradicate anyone who disagrees with me?

  Of course not — and as awful a president as he is, George W. Bush at least has not tried to do that.

  With regard to the Palestinian situation, Hamas did not try to eradicate anyone who disagreed with them. And they did not try to overthrow the government. Political parties that have majority power in a government, and thus control over the organs of government (at least in a parliamentary system) are not known for “overthrowing the government.” Why would they? They *are* the government.

  That’s your gold standard for democracy, after all. The will of the people.

  I would say it’s a fairly important ingredient, yes. But the will of the people does not refer only to winners in elections. It also refers to how well the government elected by the people carries out their wishes and responds to their concerns. And if the government is NOT doing that, it’s the people’s obligation — but also the people’s *right* — to make known their displeasure through the tools of democracy (I’m sure you know what those are, and I don’t have to enumerate them). With specific reference to the Palestinian elections, Palestinians are the ones who have the obligation and the right to object to and work to change their government’s policies if they don’t reflect the people’s will. The U.S. does NOT have that obligation, nor — more to the point here — does it have the RIGHT. So you can tell me repeatedly up and down every day till you’re out of breath that Hamas does not reflect the will of the people, or that the will of the people is tyrannical, or whatever — but that still will not be the point here, which is that it is not the place of the U.S. government to decide what Palestinians want or should want and intervene to obtain that result.

  We didn’t hold funds from the PA because we loved Fatah more than Hamas; rather it is because Hamas refused to agree to give up their genocidal ideology. That you, Ma’am, oppose withholding funds from groups that advocate genocide must make any sane person question what point you are arguing.

  The funds the U.S. have been withholding from Hamas paid for food, medicine, social services, schools, and other essential and life-maintaining services. What you call “withholding funds from Hamas” was actually “starving Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip of the things they needed to live.” That, too, is genocidal, not to mention illegal under international law.

  Your statement is nonsense, and it begs the question. The Bush administration began withholding funds to Hamas in November 2006, immediately after Hamas won its landslide victory. So no matter how you spin it, it’s about the U.S. paying lip service to democracy but not being prepared to accept the results of democracy (i.e., do we approve of who won the election) if the outcome is not what we wanted. The Bush admin wanted the Palestinians to democratically elect, in free and fair elections, the candidates of whom we approved. That did not happen, so the U.S. promptly turned around and withheld funds from the P.A. to punish Hamas. This is not the way democracy works.

  Why on earth do think that we are evil because we refuse to fund a group dedicated to the extinction of anther ethnic group? It baffles me and saddens me.

  That is not what we did. We did not simply decline to fund a group whose activities we find objectionable. We actively *funded* one group and DE-funded another group in another people’s government in order to affect the demise, or failure, of that government. What we did was active, not passive. And as I wrote above, by withdrawing our funding of the Palestinian Authority, we effectively initiated a starvation campaign against every single child, woman, and man living in the Gaza Strip. I cannot justify that. I don’t understand how you can justify it. And I feel just as baffled and saddened at that as you do on your side.

  The Palestinians are not a stateless people Kathy. Their state is called Jordan. Take some time to read actual history and facts rather then filling your mind with revisionist, radical cant.

  You perhaps should take your own advice, because your assertion here is factually wrong and morally reprehensible. Palestinians are not Jordanians. They are Palestinians, most of whom today were born in refugee camps and have lived in refugee camps, in the most wretched imaginable conditions, since 1948. Or, to be more precise, most Palestinians today are the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Palestinians who lost their homes and land in 1948. They have lived all their lives in statelessness; it’s all they have ever known.

• 

  By P. Ami, June 21, 2007 @ 6:39 pm

  Kathy,
  Were your standards for moral reprehension any higher I might have to lift my foot in stepping over them.

  Jordan is the Arab State made from the British Palestinian Mandate and was, in that time, called Trans-Jordan. Israel is the Jewish State that was once part of Trans-Jordan and commonly referred to as Palestine. But, the whole region was called the British Palestinian Mandate. A Palestinian Arab is simply an Arabic speaker whose dialect is peculiar to this region. In every other way there is very little to differentiate a Palestinian Arab from a Syrian Arab or a Saudi Arabian. 70% of Jordan’s population shares a dialect, ethnic and cultural habits as well as a history with those refugees you wrote about. The Jordanian Palestinians and the people whom Hamas and Fatah bleed dry today ceased to share a narrative only when the Jewish State was actualized and these refugees refused to be a part of it. They ran to Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan in the hopes that when the Arab armies killed the Jews they would be able to return and take the homes left by the dead. When that didn’t happen they hoped to gain citizenship in the states where they sat in refuge. Their Arab brothers failed to do that as well. When Israel conquered Gaza, Judea and Samaria the refugees finally got jobs, were build facilities to provide them with modern utilities and were built homes and schools. These homes were refused because it would mean these Arabs could no longer claim their refugee checks from the UN.

  One could call the 20th Century the century of refugees. Jews, Europeans, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Africans of different ilk all suffered this fate in the 20th Century. Only this group of Arabs has maintained this special designation into the 21st.

  Kathy, if both the US and Israel claim, time and again, that if Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist and will accept the agreements set down by previous representatives of this refugee group the money will be released, why do you claim otherwise? Why does Hamas refuse to recognize Israel and its right to exist? Why does Hamas have money to buy weapons but not enough to buy supplies for their constituents? Can that not be considered more culpable , if Hamas won’t feed their own people then if the rest of the world refuses to arm Hamas? Arms suppliers have Hamas in the eRolodex, while food suppliers market elsewhere. Why do you blame Israel and the US for this?

  Fatah was not voted out of government any more then the Republicans were voted out last November. There are still Fatah members in the Parliament and in that system, it is not a coup when a second party makes its influence felt. Why do you not recall that the first act in this civil war was the murder of a Fatah member’s small children, by Hamas, as they were being taken from school? I am no defender of either party. Hamas is no more a victim then Fatah and both victimize the Palestinian people.

  You argue tired points that beg tired replies. You are a tool and like all tools, you lack intellect. You lack reason. You lack sense and you are on the losing side of history. While a tool can be true, you lack that ability. The refugees must surrender their desire for Israel’s destruction. They must accept citizenship in THEIR one state that actually works (Jordan). They should leave Israel, abandon their camps and build real homes. Every other refugee, with far less support from the world, with stronger claims to the land they once sat on, and with hurdles much more substantial then what the Jewish State ever wished or was allowed to place before them, all these other people built homes. Instead your pet refugees dig their graves. There is a solution and its called Jordan.

• 

  By Kathy, June 22, 2007 @ 2:19 pm

  < ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> The Jordanian Palestinians and the people whom Hamas and Fatah bleed dry today ceased to share a narrative only when the Jewish State was actualized and these refugees refused to be a part of it. "…when the Jewish State was actualized…" Translation: When the indigenous people living on the land that is now the state of Israel were dispossessed so that the Jewish people could have their state. "… and these refugees refused to be a part of it." Translation: And these refugees refused to accept their dispossession gratefully and go away quietly. "They ran to Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan in the hopes that when the Arab armies killed the Jews they would be able to return and take the homes left by the dead." Translation: Palestinians who lost their homes and land in 1948 hoped to gain them back via military means. "When that didn’t happen they hoped to gain citizenship in the states where they sat in refuge." Translation: When that didn't happen, they continued to hope and yearn while they subsisted in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, where they had been forced to flee after their homes and land were stolen from them. When the surrounding states in which the Palestinians lived as *refugees* — not "in refuge,* which has a very different connotation — declined to give the Palestinians citizenship, Israel blamed those states, and the Palestinians themselves, for not doing what would have been most convenient for Israel after Israel had dispossessed the Palestinians. "When Israel conquered Gaza, Judea and Samaria the refugees finally got jobs, were build facilities to provide them with modern utilities and were built homes and schools. These homes were refused because it would mean these Arabs could no longer claim their refugee checks from the UN." When Israel conquered and occupied Gaza and the West Bank — together known as the Occupied Territories, not Judea and Samaria (those are biblical names, not contemporary geographic or political designations) — Palestinian refugees were forced to subsist in the most abject poverty and oppression. Unemployment was rampant; the jobs that those Palestinians who were lucky enough to be working had, were the most menial, low-paid jobs imaginable, in Israel, working for Israelis — the jobs no Israeli would touch. And Palestinians had to run a daily gauntlet even to get to those jobs, being subject to humiliating bodily searches, harassment, and other indignities every time they tried to cross over into Israel to get to those jobs. The IDF also routinely blew up homes en masse to collectively punish the entire Palestinian people for the acts of specific individuals. This too, btw, is against international law. "One could call the 20th Century the century of refugees. Jews, Europeans, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Africans of different ilk all suffered this fate in the 20th Century. Only this group of Arabs has maintained this special designation into the 21st." Translation: It's not Israel's fault that Palestinians are still refugees. That was a long time ago that Israel stole their homes and lands, and they should have gotten over it and moved on already. They should have just sucked it up and disappeared, like all those other refugees who became refugees because maybe someone a long time ago did something terrible to them. Can't they just shut up and stop talking so LOUDLY about their misery? So Israel turned them into refugeees, so what? That's the way the cookie crumbles. It's their responsibility to accept the injustice and just go away. FACT: Some of those groups — Jews, Europeans, and Japanese, for instance — were helped via huge sums of money and resettlement programs from the West, including the United States. There has never been a Marshall Plan for the Palestinians. Quite the opposite, in fact. FACT: Palestinians are far from the only human grouping who have lived for years as refugees. They are, however, one of the few (if not the only) refugee population who have been actively blocked from ameliorating their refugee status via ongoing and continuing military, economic, and political policy on the part of two world powers (Israel and the U.S.) to keep them from getting what would take them out of refugee status: a national home of their own. Kathy, if both the US and Israel claim, time and again, that if Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist and will accept the agreements set down by previous representatives of this refugee group the money will be released, why do you claim otherwise? Your question begs the point. The relevant question is not why I don't "believe" Israel's or the U.S.'s claims that they will release the funds once Hamas recognizes Israel's right to exist; the relevant question is, Can Israel or the U.S. legally or morally withhold P.A. tax money that pays for social services, schools, food, medicine, and other humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians in order to keep Hamas government officials or militants from getting their hands on the money? The answer, both legally and morally, is NO. And even Israel is now reluctantly acknowledging that fact, because it DID recently agree to release the frozen Palestinian funds, under increasing pressure from Europe and even the U.S. The money will be transferred to the P.A. via a process that will keep it out of the hands of Hamas government officials or militants, but will allow it to reach the people living in Gaza who are being slowly murdered for lack of the humanitarian goods that money pays for. If they actually follow through and do this, then I will give them the appropriate credit. "Fatah was not voted out of government any more then the Republicans were voted out last November." And I never said otherwise. But if the Republicans, after losing Congress last November, had blocked the Democratic majority from selecting their own majority leader, or refused to allow the majority leader or the House Speaker to carry out their duties, you would probably (hopefully) agree that this was unacceptable. The refugees must surrender their desire for Israel’s destruction. I agree. The corollary is that Israel has to surrender *its* desire for a greater Israel that includes Gaza and the West Bank. And Israel has to surrender its desire to deny Palestinians their own nation-state. They do not have that now. With what money should they do this? With what resources of any kind? Has Jordan *offered* citizenship to the Palestinian people? Is Jordan prepared to help Palestinians "abandon their camps" and "build real homes" — even if Palestinians wanted to do so or were under any legitimate obligation to do so? The fact is, Jordan is *not* the Palestinians' state, and repeating ad infinitum that it *is,* will not make it so and does not make it so. You *want* Jordan to be the Palestinian people's real home; it would solve so many problems for YOU, as a supporter of Israel's *right* to keep land it conquered in battle and annexed illegally. Furthermore, the Palestinians are not IN Israel. Of course, there are Palestinian Arabs in Israel, but these are not the Palestinian refugees we are discussing. The Palestinians who have been living in refugee camps in the territories occupied by Israel for 40 years are NOT in Israel. They are living on land that has until recently been subject to a full-scale military occupation by Israel, and now is in some kind of limbo of nominal self-rule, but is still not an independent, sovereign nation with its own viable economy and government. It is people like *you* who need to give up this delusion that Gaza and the West Bank are somehow a legitimate part of Israel. *They are not.* Every other refugee, with far less support from the world, with stronger claims to the land they once sat on…," If an owner's deed to plots of land and homes sitting on those plots of land and generations of families who have lived in those homes and on that land do not constitute the strongest kind of claim to that land, I don't know what does. You are saying that Palestinians have no legitimate claim to the land that was taken from them in 1948 because it was taken from them. The land belongs to Israelis because they took it. That is definitely a point of view that exists out there, but I don't happen to buy it. And the truth is that the Palestinian people has very little support outside of the Middle East. …all these other people built homes. Instead your pet refugees dig their graves. There is a solution and its called Jordan. This is the same morally bankrupt argument you made earlier, and in plain English, it's garbage. First of all, it's not even true. In 2006, according to the UNHCR, there approximately 10 million refugees worldwide from at least half a dozen countries: 2.1 million Afghan refugees, 1.5 million Iraqis (it's larger now), 686,000 Sudanese, 460,000 Somalis, and 400,000 refugees from Burundi and the Congo (respectively, not combined). The above figure of 10 million does NOT include the Palestinians, of whom there are 4.3 million. Refugees are defined as people dispossessed from their homes who are living outside their own country. There are also millions of internally displaced peoples. According to the UNHCR, "At the end of 2006, the total number of conflict-related IDPs worldwide was estimated at 24.5 million. …" Second, your statement "all these other people built homes" is blaming refugees for being refugees, instead of blaming the social, economic, and/or political circumstances that forced them into refugee status.

• 

  By Kathy, June 22, 2007 @ 2:26 pm

  I apologize for the confusing ital. I did proofread, but I obviously forgot to put in a closing ital tag, and missed that. So to clarify, the last 8 or so paragraphs, which are in ital, were written by me, *except* for the two short quotes from P. Ami — which P. Ami will probably understand, since he (or she) wrote them.

• 

  By P. Ami, June 24, 2007 @ 11:26 am

  < ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

  “…when the Jewish State was actualized…” Translation: When the indigenous people living on the land that is now the state of Israel were dispossessed so that the Jewish people could have their state.

  Your response is full of misinformation and much is lost in translation. You make it seem as though no Jews lived on the land before 1948 and from a Jew free zone a new state was established over an old one. The survivors of the Holocaust were only one group of Jews who returned to their land. They returned to their land which had no rulers and no precedent of autonomous, local rule since the last Jewish State, Before the Common Era.

  The Jews who lived in Israel by 1948 had been one of two types of Jew. There was the Jew who had lived in Jerusalem, Hebron or Sefed for scores of generations, where, as dhimi, they were regularly brutalized, taxed from poverty into abject poverty, and survived the many diseases that wracked this “criminally and morally” disused bit of land. This bit of land, successively stolen from the Jews by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Muslims of all kinds had, at the time, been the property of Arabs and Turks as part of the Ottoman Empire. Under the Turks and then the Brits, another group of Jews began to return to the land they had been forcibly expelled from and kept from returning to by various imperial lords. Never where they expelled by a group of people calling themselves Palestinians and or from any people who had any kind of local autonomy in this land, ever. The reason this is the case is that there had never been a Palestinian people in the sense you mean (Arabs indiginous to the Biblical land of the Israelites) until 1948.

  The First Rising of Jews joined those that had kept the lights in Hebron, Jerusalem and Sefed in the middle 19th century. Jewish life in the Land of Israel never ceased but those there had remained poor. Most studied Torah. The returning Jews worked the land and did those menial jobs most Arabs had neglected to do for the land and for themselves. Those Jews who returned from exile bought their land back. These were mostly swamps and other unaridable properties. They bought them from Arabs and Turks. They worked with some of the few Arabs living on that land to reclaim these tracts from waste. You will find all sorts of diary entries of Jews discussing the mutual benefit to Arabs and Jews when they worked together. One can see why the hope existed in those days. Arabs living in Turkey, Syria and Egypt came to the Land of Israel, in the time of the Turks, in order to work lands reclaimed by Jews. These migrant laborers of the Ottoman Empire are the ancestors of your refugees.

  Current events shows the hopes of these humanist Jews to be unfounded as the Muslims who settled there did not appreciate, for a multitude of cultural reasons, the presence of Jews who did not behave as dhimi aught to. Only individual Arabs were prepared to work with Jews as equals. But, under the influence of people like the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Arabs in the Land of Israel transformed this gnawing oddity in their minds, Jews behaving as if equal to Muslims, into the sort of Jew hatred endemic to the region today. The Jew hating Mickey Mouse on Hamas television shows for kids has precedence of over 100 years.

  The Jews, between the middle 18th century until the 1940’s, established newspapers, parks, hospitals, funds for the old and poor, playhouses and various other organs of normal life. Don’t get me wrong. They were poor. But, they were focused on building a future and even as the Turks taxed exorbitantly and in disputes always judged on the side of fellow Muslims the Arabs grew covetous. They performed the great traditional pastime of Christian and Muslim alike, pogroms against the Jews. Even as the Jews were prepared to invest in those institutions listed above, they had come unprepared for war. It took many years to arm and learn to defend themselves. The Arabs were astounded to be dealing with Jews who refused dhimitude. Astonishment turned to fear. Fear turned to anger. Anger turned to hate and the dark side of humanity was in full effect. The Mufti of Jerusalem was an ally of Hitler. He tried to get the Nazis to build him concentration camps in the West Bank, because so many Jews lived there, had bought land there and were thriving relative to the Arabs. They held a mob assault against the Jews who had lived in Hebron since ancient days. This was all before the UN existed, before the US was very much involved in the area and certainly before that “Catastrophe” your refugee pets are so obsessed with.

  “… and these refugees refused to be a part of it.”

  Translation: And these refugees refused to accept their dispossession gratefully and go away quietly.

  Here your ignorance is evident again. There were incidents of expulsion during the War of Independence but most Arabs made refugees of themselves. The Arab-Israeli is proof of Israel’s will to let the Arabs remain. Those that ran away, in response to Arab propaganda, found themselves, when the war was over, in lands whose government did not recognize Israel’s existence and maintained their state of belligerence with the Jewish State. I am familiar with your difficulty absorbing reason and your ignorance of historical precedence but, when did a nation take in a mass of people, arriving from a country that refused to renounce its state of war, and who sympathized (culturally, religiously and politically) with this enemy? I think this happened to the Trojan’s once when at war with the Greeks. Not only did Israel unwisely wish to include Arabs in the Jewish State (Jews are not allowed in Saudi Arabia, nor are they welcome to live in Syria or Jordan) but those that had chosen to side with Israel’s enemy were behind enemy lines by 1948. Israel was in no position to show the refugees the kindness it extended to Arab-Israelis.

  “They ran to Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan in the hopes that when the Arab armies killed the Jews they would be able to return and take the homes left by the dead.”

  Translation: Palestinians who lost their homes and land in 1948 hoped to gain them back via military means.

  And still do. Yet, you expect Israel to support them in this effort by letting them have their tax money.

  “When that didn’t happen they hoped to gain citizenship in the states where they sat in refuge.”

  Translation: When that didn’t happen, they continued to hope and yearn

  For the death of the Jews and the destruction of the Jewish State.

  while they subsisted in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, where they had been forced to flee after their homes and land were stolen from them.

  No, they abandoned the land. They ran towards their Arab brothers and Arab lands, not chased away by the Jews.

  When the surrounding states in which the Palestinians lived as *refugees* — not “in refuge,* which has a very different connotation —

  Whatever connotation you erroneously refuse to recognize, refugee is the noun form of; a human being who seeks refuge away from home. This applies to your refugees as they are currently squatting in Israel.

  “declined to give the Palestinians citizenship”

  Israel blamed those states, and the Palestinians themselves, for not doing what would have been most convenient for Israel after Israel had dispossessed the Palestinians.

  Some people move on. Others sit in their hovels, poison their children with hate, and plan evil futures for their hosts (Your refugees have been expelled from Kuwait and Jordan because of the hate or violence they fermented in those states and Lebanon had has its share of problems with the refugees but hasn’t the strength to remove them).

  You seem to miss the point that it would have been convenient for the Arabs if they had simply absorbed the refugees. Instead of spending generations in the self-induces squalor they are currently embattled over, the refugees could have settling into homes in Arabs lands, with Arab businesses, Arabs doctors and lawyers trying to make contributions to their country, Jordan. Instead they struggle in a self induce poverty on someone else’s land, send homicide bombers against the Jews, teach their kids to hate Jews, throw each other off buildings and blame the world for their evil acts. “Israel made us kill each other. I shot my fellow Arab because America made me do it”.

  Before surgery doctors sometimes take blood from the patient. It is kept in reserve in case complications arise and a transfusion is needed. The body absorbs its own blood easiest. This would have been the case if Jordan would have taken in their fellow Palestinians at the time and if Lebanon had taken in their fellow Arabs. Instead you either expect the Jews to abandon their own land or take a foreign and malignant people into their midst. It would be like transplanting a jackal’s cancerous kidney into a healthy mule.

  “When Israel conquered Gaza, Judea and Samaria the refugees finally got jobs, were build facilities to provide them with modern utilities and were built homes and schools. These homes were refused because it would mean these Arabs could no longer claim their refugee checks from the UN.”

  When Israel conquered and occupied Gaza and the West Bank — together known as the Occupied Territories, not Judea and Samaria (those are biblical names, not contemporary geographic or political designations)

  Again, you display ignorance and avoid responding to the point of the statement. These lands are called Judea and Samaria in the circles who retain the connection to that land since biblical days. In circles who only became aware of the place because of current events they are called the West Bank. I think we can all agree that currently these territories are the circles of hell and there is no question that this particular hell is created by the Arabs who should stop squatting on Jewish lands and instead move to their country, Jordan. The Kuwaitis kicked them out in 1992. Its time Israel do the same (I suggest a much kider method of expulsion. I suggest that all money ear marked for the PA instead go to Jordan. I suggest that the Arabs in Gaza, Judea and Samaria be offered money, by Israel and international community, to leave withing a year. If they leave withing 3 years they would get half the original amount and if they left within 5 years they would get one third of the amount. I suggest the amount be substantial enough to assist these people in their adjustment to their homes in Jordan. This would all be much cheaper and more humane then any deal on the books today). But, the point was that even when Israel offered aide, it was refused. It was refused even before the idea had entered anyone’s mind that the West Bank could be made into a second Palestinian state. Israel had tried to move the refugees out of camps and into proper living spaces back in the 1970’s. Remember, this was when the PLO still refused the two-state solution. This was when the PLO was hoping to take over Jordan and then use the army to destroy Israel, thus unifying what they deem to be all of Palestine. At this time the Jordanians also refused the two state solution and were trying to get Israel to abandon Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the Heshamite Kingdom of Jordan.

  Palestinian refugees were forced to subsist in the most abject poverty and oppression. Unemployment was rampant; the jobs that those Palestinians who were lucky enough to be working had, were the most menial, low-paid jobs imaginable, in Israel, working for Israelis — the jobs no Israeli would touch.

  The refugees were asked to become self sufficient through accepting the sorts of jobs they were qualified for. There were plenty of menial jobs available to the refugees. Most refused to work. Educated Arab-Israelis get good jobs and can go to University so you can’t blame oppression by the Jews. There are Arab doctors, lawyers, politicians etc… in Israel. Those squatting on the West Bank and Gaza refused to learn in the schools Israel built. They refused the homes Israel built them. They still went to doctors trained in Israel. Many of these doctors are Arabs who didn’t run away in 1948 when the Arab Armies commanded them. I suggest you go have some brain surgery done by an uneducated Arab squatter. You might learn something and I like the odds of this improving you arguments. This would be, putting your money where your mouth is. It makes no sense to hire people unqualified for the work you require. It was the rules of the market place and refusal to even participate in this market place which kept the refugees poor, not oppression by the Jews.

  Plenty of Israelis work menial jobs so, not only is your description of the refugee’s plight disingenuous but your profile of Israelis is false. Jews milk cows, clean refuse, they clean apartments, they scrub the stairways and the kibbutz movement was still strong in those days. You know who did their menial labor? The kibbutz members and the mostly Jewish volunteers. Kathy, you are an ignorant bigot.

  And Palestinians had to run a daily gauntlet even to get to those jobs, being subject to humiliating bodily searches, harassment, and other indignities every time they tried to cross over into Israel to get to those jobs. The IDF also routinely blew up homes en masse to collectively punish the entire Palestinian people for the acts of specific individuals. This too, btw, is against international law.

  These daily gauntlets did not begin until the Intifada. The house demolitions, knocked over by tanks not exploded as you stated, didn’t begin until the Second Intifada. Before then you would find very little security between Judea-Samaria and the rest of Israel. The destruction of homes was, again, only after the Intifada and after many homicide bombings had eroded security. The destruction of homes was an experiment in trying to minimize casualties when capturing criminals involved in homicides. The fact that the criminals hid amongst their kin and friends can easily be recognized as aiding and abetting a criminal. Consider that these criminals are waging what they consider a war and do so without uniforms, designation of rank or insignias. This, legally, means they, and those who hide them, are not subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. According to international law, these people can be executed without trial. Instead Israel routinely captures these criminals, tries them in transparent courts and imprisons them according to contemporary standards. They certainly don’t capture these criminals, tie up their hands and drop them from 14 story buildings, nor does Israel have mobs of Israelis grabbing lost Arabs in Jewish parts of town, dragging them upstairs, call their family so they can hear the death rattle and then throw the body out so the mob can beat on the corpse.

  “One could call the 20th Century the century of refugees. Jews, Europeans, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Africans of different ilk all suffered this fate in the 20th Century. Only this group of Arabs has maintained this special designation into the 21st.”

  Translation: It’s not Israel’s fault that Palestinians are still refugees.

  Finally, you are correct. Israel has a part to play in the refugee problem and might have done things better. But, one cannot put the majority of the blame on Israel. The refugees are a crisis for all humanity but Israel’s first responsibility is to help its own people. Even the Arab-Israelis come before the refugees. While Israel is under existential threat by the refugees and while the refugees seek to invade Jewish lands, Israel’s responsibility lies in protecting itself against them.

  That was a long time ago that Israel stole their homes and lands , and they should have gotten over it and moved on already. They should have just sucked it up and disappeared, like all those other refugees who became refugees because maybe someone a long time ago did something terrible to them.

  No, something terrible did not “maybe” happen to Jews. Many terrible things were, without question, done to the Jews. Interesting that you choose to qualify your statement in this manner. You grow so irritated by my calling Judea and Samaria by its traditional name but you seek to qualify whether horrible things were done to Jews. The ancestors of those who squat in Judea, Samaria and Gaza did many terrible things to the Jews. But, that is not why the Arabs should have gotten over it and assimilated into those familiar environments in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and beyond. They should have done so because it was better for them, better for their children and better for humanity in general to get over this resentment. It would have been better for them to accept responsibility for the situation they were in. They chose the losing side of the war and tried to aid the Arab Armies by leaving the land. Finally, they should have done as other refugees had done because the land they claim is not theirs. No one suggests the refugees need to disappear. They need to simply move someplace else and live normal and, one hopes, happy lives amoung their fellow Arabs.

  Even after the horrible things were done to Jews, they moved on. We did it 70AD and again when the Romans and then the Christians visited hardships on us in our land for hundreds of years. We move on scores of times over the 500 years of dhimitude under the Muslims. We moved on when the Spaniard were elevated by our contributions to them and then violently expelled us as thanks. Even my grandparents who had never been traitorous to their host nations, were enslaved, purposely starved, their family systematically murdered and whole way of life, intact for hundreds of years in Poland, was destroyed less then 10 years before the refugee’s “Catastrophe”. My grandparents moved on too. With no help from Germany, Poland, or the US for that matter, my grandparents made a life for themselves. Meanwhile, refugees who, for the most part, volentarily set off in a time when my grandparents were still thin with want, settled, festered and taught their children hatred.

  Can’t they just shut up and stop talking so LOUDLY about their misery? So Israel turned them into refugees, so what? That’s the way the cookie crumbles. It’s their responsibility to accept the injustice and just go away. FACT: Some of those groups — Jews, Europeans, and Japanese, for instance — were helped via huge sums of money and resettlement programs from the West, including the United States. There has never been a Marshall Plan for the Palestinians. Quite the opposite, in fact. FACT: Palestinians are far from the only human grouping who have lived for years as refugees.

  The Marshall Plan had little to do with refugees. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. A portion of the Marshall Plan exercised control over refugee camps. The refugees got nothing from the Marshall Plan other then a place to stay for a short while until they decided where to live. After this they were left to themselves. The problem with your refugees is they decided to stay in the camps and the world let them.

  As for Jewish refugees, Jews in America helped other Jews resettle. Israel also took in refugees. As I said, some people take responsibility for their own. Arabs, in the case of your pet refugees, did not. Meanwhile, your refugees received assistance from Israel in the building of all kinds of modern facilities. We are not speaking of the thriving country the Jews have built Israel into. Meat and dairy were hard to come by well into the 1950’s. Inflation rates were astronomical. Israeli money was rehabilitated numerous times. The change from Lira to Shekel to New Shekel was, each time, a response to an economy wasting itself on subsidies of various goods and services by the government for a population assimilating Jewish refugees expelled from homes in Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Ethiopia and various other Muslim countries that had thrown them out and stolen their property on the way. Meanwhile, your pets were aided by the UN with the UN Palestinian Refugee program that continues to fund the camps today. Still Israel spent its resources on providing services for the Arab refugees. Israel never had UN assistance. Israel only ever got significant assistance beginning in the 1980’s as part of the Camp David Accord (as does Egypt). In other words, the Jewish refugees had to fend for themselves or gain benefits from their own people, just like every other refugee but those Arabs who squat on Israel. Those Germans who lived for generations in Bohemia, Poland and the eastern parts of France were not given much other then orders to move to a Germany they hadn’t lived in for generations. Your refugees get aid and still hate the world for a plight they created by choosing the Arab Armies over the IDF.

  They are, however, one of the few (if not the only) refugee populations who have been actively blocked from ameliorating their refugee status via ongoing and continuing military, economic, and political policy on the part of two world powers (Israel and the U.S.) to keep them from getting what would take them out of refugee status: a national home of their own.

  They were blocked, in a much more direct manner, by the Arabs who refused to give them citizenship after failing in that famous boast of pushing the Jews into the sea. The Arab Armies promised them the homes of the dead Jews. When they failed to win these homes they left their Arab brothers to fester in camps. Why did the Egyptians not grant the refugees citizenship when Egypt held Gaza from 1948-1967? Why didn’t Jordan or Lebanon give the refugees this status in that time and why don’t you complain about the Lebanese government, which today has plenty of refugees, living there since the 1948, and still won’t grant them citizenship. In fact they just recently ceased shelling a refugee camp that had risen up in rebellion against that host. These refugees have actually lived in Lebanon longer then most of their ancestors lived in the Land of Israel. No Arab country, though sharing a culture, a language and religion with your refugees want them but you insist that Jews, whose culture is foreign to the refugees, whose language and customs are foreign and who blame the Jew for every evil under the sun, you expect the Jews to share their country with these foreigners or give it up to them completely. Meanwhile the native Israelis accepted the Holocaust survivors in the 40’s, the various Jewish refugees from Muslim expulsions in the 60’s, the Ethiopians in the 80’s and the Russians in the 90’s. These refugees learned how to get on in the Israeli system, accepted homes and various services and finally made a life for themselves as best they could. The Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza refused the same opportunities Israel gave them there.

  “Kathy, if both the US and Israel claim, time and again, that if Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist and will accept the agreements set down by previous representatives of this refugee group the money will be released, why do you claim otherwise?”

  Your question begs the point. The relevant question is not why I don’t “believe” Israel’s or the U.S.’s claims that they will release the funds once Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist; the relevant question is, Can Israel or the U.S. legally or morally withhold P.A. tax money that pays for social services, schools, food, medicine, and other humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians in order to keep Hamas government officials or militants from getting their hands on the money?

  No Kathy, I asked you a relevant question and you avoided it by asking a different one. In order to beg the point, as you accused me of doing, I would have had to state in my question the answer I wanted from you. I realize logic is not your strength and while I am fully prepared to attack you ad hominum style, at least I understand what this logical fallacy means. Meanwhile, your use of “begging the point” either displays further weakness in the use of logic or the misusage of a pedantic phrase used in logic. Either way, you avoided explaining yourself, yet again. You state you don’t believe Israel’s claim. That is fine. I don’t believe any Arab’s claim that they accept Israel’s right to exist. I don’t believe the Arab world intends to stop at a two state solution. I think the two state solution is the next step in the Final Solution. I believed Arafat when he told his people that he would agree to Saladin’s Peace, a common tactic used in the Arab world, when weak you broker a cease fire. When strong you destroy your enemy. That is what I think Fatah intends. It is certainly what Hamas states openly and it is what I think the rest of the Arabs are waiting for as well.

  To answer your question, yes Israel is obligated to withhold the money. Until the refugees cease to support a party that wastes resources on trying to destroy Israel, Israel is morally obligated to protect its citizens from that threat. Beyond that, it is Israel’s obligation to lay siege onto those people who wish to destroy Israel and kill its people.

  Is it right that what money does get through to the PA is used to buy weapons to point and shoot at the Jews and rival politicians rather then to feed, cloth and shelter the people? Is it right that when Israel promises to release the money Hamas refuses the offer while their people suffer as you describe? If Hamas accepted the terms and then Israel betrayed them, the onus would be on Israel. Instead it is Hamas that starves and murders its people and keeps proper services from running in the territories they are obligated to keep in order.

  The answer, both legally and morally, is NO. And even Israel is now reluctantly acknowledging that fact, because it DID recently agree to release the frozen Palestinian funds, under increasing pressure from Europe and even the U.S.

  Israel agreed to release the funds solely to the refugees who claim they do not work towards Israel’s destruction and have begun to do so. Perhaps admitting that blows too big a hole in your bigoted worldview.

  The money will be transferred to the P.A. via a process that will keep it out of the hands of Hamas government officials or militants, but will allow it to reach the people living in Gaza who are being slowly murdered for lack of the humanitarian goods that money pays for. If they actually follow through and do this, then I will give them the appropriate credit.

  Judging by what you deem inappropriate I’ll not be pleased by the credits you might give. Again, why does Hamas buy weapons when it could be buying food? How exactly is the money being kept out of Hamas’ hands. If they are kept from Hamas, this solves few real problems because Hamas now has less pressure on it to provide for their people and can continue to waste money on destruction

  “Fatah was not voted out of government any more then the Republicans were voted out last November.”

  And I never said otherwise. But if the Republicans, after losing Congress last November, had blocked the Democratic majority from selecting their own majority leader, or refused to allow the majority leader or the House Speaker to carry out their duties, you would probably (hopefully) agree that this was unacceptable.

  The President of the PA did what was legal under the PA Charter. Abu Mazzan is legally the president of the PA and has the authority to act as he has. Cabinets are subject to haggling. Hamas chose one of its leaders to be the PA Prime Minister and he was recognized in this office by Fatah. So, I can only think you are revising current events with as much poetic license as you do history.

  The refugees must surrender their desire for Israel’s destruction. I agree. The corollary is that Israel has to surrender *its* desire for a greater Israel that includes Gaza and the West Bank.

  As if either of us can haggle over these issues and make them come into being. As I see it, Israel will renounce her rights to the parts of Israel that are on the East Bank of the Jordan River. Israel liberated Jerusalem and the West Bank side of Judea and Samaria in a war that began as a defensive one and ended with Israel having secured somewhat defendable borders. Although the roads to all the major Arab capitals were open to the IDF in 1967 Israel showed restraint in not taking all the rest of our lands. Moving the Arabs into Arab countries is the agreement that arrives at a just and workable peace. We keep our lands on the west side of the Jordan your Arabs should stay on the eastern side.

  And Israel has to surrender its desire to deny Palestinians their own nation-state.

  Israel has no desire to deny the refugees their own nation-state. It is called Jordan. I think it best if Israel does not allow the refugees to establish a state divorced of the bulk of Palestinians (the current citizens of Jordan) and run by thugs such as run the PA today. That said, unfortunately it seems Israel’s current government seems intent on letting that tragedy unfold and has already sold out their own people by giving up the land those people fought and died to liberate.

  They do not have that now. With what money should they do this? With what resources of any kind? Has Jordan *offered* citizenship to the Palestinian people? Is Jordan prepared to help Palestinians “abandon their camps” and “build real homes” — even if Palestinians wanted to do so or were under any legitimate obligation to do so? The fact is, Jordan is *not* the Palestinians’ state, and repeating ad infinitum that it *is,* will not make it so and does not make it so.

  I time and again give reasons why Jordan is Palestine. Even Arafat considered Jordan to be Palestine. You on the other hand show not a single bit of reason to oppose this other then to say again, “it is not”. If I say that salary is a word related to the word salt, and I show you the reasoning for this, would you deny it simply because you don’t like to think of soldiers being paid in spices? Provide reasons and respond to questions. Your cant is obnoxious and your avoidance of questions is one of many signs of your weak reasoning.

  You *want* Jordan to be the Palestinian people’s real home; it would solve so many problems for YOU, as a supporter of Israel’s *right* to keep land it conquered in battle and annexed illegally.

  That us true. I want to solve Israel’s problems. What a bad guy I am. I also think my solution solves the refugees’ problem. Settle the refugees on the Arab side of the Jordan River, the Eastern Bank, and let them start a normal life in an Arab country, not a Jewish one.

  I suppose you have heard of Black September? This is another catastrophic date in the refugee calendar. This was when the Jordanian army slaughtered at least 7 thousand refugees because Arafat was trying to stage a coup to become the head of Jordan. I don’t know if he was going to have himself crowned or if he would have received a Nobel Prize for this had he succeeded. The fact is that Arafat considered Jordan a part of Palestine.

  Lets again address inaccuracies in your text. Israel only ever annexed Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights are not an issue between Israel and the refugees so unless you like to defend Syria then let’s stay out of that. As for Jerusalem, if Israel had done the right thing in 1967 it would have annexed Judea and Samaria at the same time as it did Jerusalem and then expelled the Arabs from these lands. Instead the Israeli government, always an idiot for the Arab version of peace, wanted to negotiate with Egypt the return of the Sinai for peace with them. They also wished to negotiate the return of Judea and Samaria for peace with Jordan. Egypt refused until the early 1980s and that got the man who agreed to this killed. Since then there has been no fighting between Israel and Egypt. Jordan refused Israel’s offers until finally deciding to bequeath this territory, not theirs in the first place, to the refugees (perhaps knowing that if Israel did return this land the refugees would be Jordan’s problem). Israel in the 1990’s tried to negotiate a settlement with the refugees and this was refused. Today, the refugees have a democracy and in that context voted in a party whose charter includes the destruction of Israel as its goal. You want Israel to release money to these people?

  Furthermore, the Palestinians are not IN Israel. Of course, there are Palestinian Arabs in Israel, but these are not the Palestinian refugees we are discussing. The Palestinians who have been living in refugee camps in the territories occupied by Israel for 40 years are NOT in Israel. They are living on land that has until recently been subject to a full-scale military occupation by Israel, and now is in some kind of limbo of nominal self-rule, but is still not an independent, sovereign nation with its own viable economy and government. It is people like *you* who need to give up this delusion that Gaza and the West Bank are somehow a legitimate part of Israel.

  Considering your sensitivity to conotations I wonder why you would use a word like delusion when stating that Judea and Samaria are Israel. I have very good reference material to substantiate my claim. Gaza,I don’t care much about so long as the government there is not hostile to Israel. It can be Egyptian, Jordanian or if no one else ojects it can be taken over by the refugees. It cannot, though, be allowed to foster activities meant to undermine the nations around that strip of land.

  I need not give up my idea that Judea and Samaria are Jewish nor will I. Our deed on the land runs well into Jordan but I am willing to accept the current borders for the sake of peace with Israel’s neighbors.

  *They are not.* Every other refugee, with far less support from the world, with stronger claims to the land they once sat on…,” If an owner’s deed to plots of land and homes sitting on those plots of land and generations of families who have lived in those homes and on that land do not constitute the strongest kind of claim to that land, I don’t know what does.

  Exactly. This is why these lands are the Land of Israel. We hold the deed and it is called the Torah. My deed is also in my circumcision as it is in my father’s, grandfather’s and all my ancestors back to Abraham. The deed is marked on my son. If you want to suggest that Muslim boys are cicumcised as well, fair enough. But, their ritual has no connection, intended or otherwise, to the deed on Israel. Ours is. We lived on that land even through conquest, plague, massive punitive taxations, pogroms and dhimitude. We continued to practice our rite of circumcision even when made punishable by death. This is only one, very dramatic, sign of our connection to our land. The Arabs are new comers. Besides this ancient deed, we have the deeds granted by the Ottomans. We have bought the land with blood, sweat and sheer stubbornness, hundreds of times and with uncounted lives. Using the varied business practices of hundreds of eras we have bought the lands. We have paid taxes to foreign and domestic despots as well as to just rulers. We have maintained a physical and spiritual link to this land that no amount of revision will destroy. When was there ever a Palestinian people? When did a Palestinian people ever rule the lands we speak of? Okay, the Italian, the French, the German and the American are recent nationalities as well. The English are only a thousand years old. The French are younger and the Italians and Germans younger still. But, the Palestinian, as you try to distinguish him, has never had a homeland. This is not due to oppression through out the centuries. It is because a Palestinian never existed before 1948. You suggest some sort of precedence that trumps Jewish nationality and Jewish claims to the Land of Israel. All this is revisionism and false.

  You are saying that Palestinians have no legitimate claim to the land that was taken from them in 1948 because it was taken from them. The land belongs to Israelis because they took it. That is definitely a point of view that exists out there, but I don’t happen to buy it.

  — I do not say that. I say that the Palestinians have no legitimate claim to the land because this land was stolen from the people who have been living on it for millennia and it also belongs to those who finally returned to it beginning in the 19th Century. Even then they bought the land from deed holders. Even then they had to protect it from thieves. Even then they were told they could not keep it. Even after all that, we are there. Your line of reasoning is used only when bigots refuse to recognize the legitimacy and justice of all that I have spelled out to you. When civility breaks down, such as you see your refugees so anxious to allow, then it boils down to the reasoning you wish to project onto me. As if I only suggest that might makes right. All my comments on this site are arguments against violence and instead appeal to reason, logic, precedence and justice. Might does not always make right but sometimes the mighty happen to be correct. When truth, logic, justice and decency are ignored then a gun may be required.

  Bob Dylan was once asked what he thought his music was about. He replied that he always felt he was on the side of the underdog. He was then asked, but what if the underdog turns out to be a son of a bitch. Dylan replied, that would be pretty bad.

  And the truth is that the Palestinian people has very little support outside of the Middle East.

  Have you been to San Francisco? Have you spent any time amoung people in LA. Have you been to Universities? Have you read Le Monde, the London Times, the LA Times, the NY Times? Have you been to England? Have you been to Europe? Give me a break. The sons of bitches have plenty of support in these places.

  …all these other people built homes. Instead your pet refugees dig their graves. There is a solution and its called Jordan”

  This is the same morally bankrupt argument you made earlier, and in plain English, it’s garbage. First of all, it’s not even true. In 2006, according to the UNHCR, there approximately 10 million refugees worldwide from at least half a dozen countries: 2.1 million Afghan refugees, 1.5 million Iraqis (it’s larger now), 686,000 Sudanese, 460,000 Somalis, and 400,000 refugees from Burundi and the Congo (respectively, not combined). The above figure of 10 million does NOT include the Palestinians, of whom there are 4.3 million. Refugees are defined as people dispossessed from their homes who are living outside their own country. There are also millions of internally displaced peoples. According to the UNHCR, “At the end of 2006, the total number of conflict-related IDPs worldwide was estimated at 24.5 million. …” Second, your statement “all these other people built homes” is blaming refugees for being refugees, instead of blaming the social, economic, and/or political circumstances that forced them into refugee status.

  I didn’t say that the Palestinians are the only refugees in the world. There is no other group of people who began their status as refugees in the middle of the last century and continue holding this status. You want to blame folk who defended themselves against the refugees and managed to survive. You want to blame those who from 1948-1967 had no possible way to remedy the situation while the Arab nations and fellow Palestinians in Jordan could have. You want to blame those who since 1967 have been trying to find a party who will make peace with them and take back the land. They found one party, Egypt, and this peace has held for 25 years. The refugees have time and again refused peace. They refuse to engage with Israel as a legitimate representative of the people indigenous to the Land of Israel, the Jews. That being the case, I hope Israel washes its hands of them. Secure the borders and ship them out. All the Arabs should leave. The Israeli Arabs as well as the refugees in Judea and Samaria. The refugees knew what they were doing when they voted Hamas into power. Now the Israeli-Arab admits to wanting to de-Jew the Jewish State. We all know what Hamas intends and they don’t try to hide it. As with their whole history, from their beginning in 1948, these fictional people, never a nation, never a State, different from other Arabs as much as New Englanders differ from other Americans, have refused to accept that the Jew has his home in Israel. Until you recognize this fact, Kathy, that Israel is mine as is Judea and Samaria, then we too are enemies.

  You may revise history but I have a memory of events as they happened to me and to my family. My grandparents and parents participated in the history you revise. We will pass the truth on to my children. You fool yourself with your revisionism. Your lies are a blemish on the lives and deaths of the many who have suffered through what only sends you reeling into indignant ideological blathering and these lives and deaths include the Arabs you believe you defend. The truth I saw, my father saw, and my grandfathers saw with their own eyes, you only read about. The truth that I know you can only reply to with, “It is not so” and then try to replace the truth with cant. I do not make enemies with people because they are German, Polish, Arabs, Muslims, Christian or any other grouping of human being. I only make enemies of those who actively participate in recreating history into their own voidlike image and do so to rob me of my legacy and inheritance. You are on the wrong side of history Kathy. I’ll be happy when you repent or become that which you distort.

  (Edit – I had to close an open tag and a lot of formatting was lost)

• 

  By P. Ami, June 24, 2007 @ 2:14 pm

  editor- The format looked fine when I sent it down. It showed itself brilliantly after I submitted. I’m sure I closed all the tags. I think the form this post has taken, since your closure of the loose tag, has dissipated all my meaning into a confusion caused by one disembodied voice speaking every part. If you wish, I will retag this comment and repost it. Until then this comment is best taken off the board.

• 

  By Gaius, June 24, 2007 @ 4:40 pm

  Trust me, there was a tag open or I would not have edited it. (it fouls the whole comment stack up if I don’t). Go ahead and retag the whole thing and I’ll remove the earlier one once you have.

• 

  By Gaius, June 24, 2007 @ 5:23 pm

  P. Ami – you have an italic tag and a bold tag open – I can’t post this or the entire site goes wonky. If you can please double check and fix the tags I’ll post it.

• 

  By P. Ami, June 24, 2007 @ 6:37 pm

  Gaius, sorry about wonking you up. Thanks for your help. I’ve obviously written quite a bit, giving the troll plenty to eat. I might have to stop feeding her soon.

• 

  By Kathy, June 24, 2007 @ 9:36 pm

  P. Ami,

  First of all, don’t worry overmuch about the formatting problem that makes it look like “one disembodied voice is speaking every part.” I thought my last post looked that way, too — but the truth is, when I read your latest, above, it was perfectly clear to me which were my quotes and which were your replies. For my part, I have decided to use quotes instead of ital tags; if I forget to close a quote, at least it doesn’t create formatting problems. [And Gaius, I apologize again for messing up the formatting and causing you extra work. I know how annoying that is.]

  “You make it seem as though no Jews lived on the land before 1948 and from a Jew free zone a new state was established over an old one.”

  Well, if I did that, it certainly was not my intention, because I know there were Jews living on the land that became the modern state of Israel. There has always a Jewish population, decimated though it was after 70 C.E., that continued to live in the land, all through the millennia up until the present. But there was no nation-state there that belonged to the Jewish people. The fact that Jews lived there continuously since Roman times does not, in my view, give them any more of a claim to the land than the Palestinians had by virtue of the fact that *they* had been living there for centuries, too.

  “There were incidents of expulsion during the War of Independence but most Arabs made refugees of themselves. The Arab-Israeli is proof of Israel’s will[ingness] to let the Arabs remain.”

  I don’t believe that last is necessarily true. There could be and I’m sure are any number of reasons why some Palestinians ended up staying when most Palestinians (the ones who weren’t killed) fled, but to point to that as “proof” that Israel would have allowed all the indigenous people to stay in the land they appropriated to make Israel is, in my view, an unwarranted leap of logic.

  “…when did a nation take in a mass of people, arriving from a country that refused to renounce its state of war, and who sympathized (culturally, religiously and politically) with this enemy?”

  Well, again, this begs the question (and btw, “begging the question” means to answer a question by assuming as true the very issue that is being argued). The reason for the state of war was the establishment of the State of Israel on land that was lived on and owned by others. Palestinians did not sell their land, nor did the Jews offer to pay them for the land; it was taken from them by force. This was the entire reason for the “state of war” to begin with.

  Me: Translation: Palestinians who lost their homes and land in 1948 hoped to gain them back via military means.

  P. Ami: And still do. Yet, you expect Israel to support them in this effort by letting them have their tax money.

  I expect that Israel would respect international norms — not to mention the requirements imposed by Jewish law and tradition for ethical behavior — and not deny food, medicine, and other essential for human survival to an entire population in order to achieve political ends.

  I do not expect Israel to give up its right to self-defense. By the same token, I do not expect the Palestinians to give up their right to an independent, sovereign state of their own. And although I do think Palestinians are deluding themselves if they think they will get the Right of Return, I also believe that it is not unreasonable for Palestinians to expect that some kind of acknowledgment from Israel of the historic injustice done to them, and of the suffering they experienced because of it, would be forthcoming.

  “No, they abandoned the land. They ran towards their Arab brothers and Arab lands, not chased away by the Jews.”

  I think I understand what you’re saying. The Jews forcibly expropriated the land and homes of the Palestinians living in what became Israel, and engaged in wholesale slaughters of the local Palestinian population, but that doesn’t mean they wanted the Palestinians to *leave.* The Jews did not *chase them away.* It was the Palestinians’ *choice* to flee the violence directed against them. They didn’t *have* to leave. The Jews didn’t *ask* them to leave. They could have stayed and been killed.

  But look, since they *did* jump to the conclusion that the Jews meant to chase them away, why *not* take over the homes and land they left behind? They left their stuff; that gave Jews the right to take them.

  I admit, though, I would love to see how you would react if you were told you had forfeited ownership rights over your personal property because you fled at a moment when your life was in danger.

  “These daily gauntlets did not begin until the Intifada. The house demolitions, knocked over by tanks not exploded as you stated, didn’t begin until the Second Intifada. Before then you would find very little security between Judea-Samaria and the rest of Israel. …”

  “… between Judea-Samaria and the rest of Israel”: This absolutely nails me to the floor. “Judea-Samaria” in this context clearly refers to the Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Clearly, it hasn’t occurred to you that those settlements — which you refer to as if they were something wholly unremarkable — might have had something to do with the disintegrating security situation between “Judea-Samaria” and the “rest of Israel.”

  I know how much you hate Palestinians, and Arabs in general, Ami — it comes through loud and clear — but Palestinians are human beings just like anyone else, and most human beings will fight when they are backed against the wall. Even if they don’t have uniforms.

  In other words, when you write, “When truth, logic, justice and decency are ignored then a gun may be required,” I agree.

  “Israel agreed to release the funds solely to the refugees who claim they do not work towards Israel’s destruction and have begun to do so.”

  That is inaccurate. Israel agreed to release the funds to the Palestinian Authority via the European Union, which will use some kind of mechanism or process to ensure that it goes to legitimate humanitarian uses and not to killing.

  “I realize logic is not your strength and while I am fully prepared to attack you ad hominum style, at least I understand what this logical fallacy means.”

  I think that your argumentation is more emotional than logical. As for your being fully prepared to attack me ad hominem style, I agree.

  “I time and again give reasons why Jordan is Palestine. Even Arafat considered Jordan to be Palestine. You on the other hand show not a single bit of reason to oppose this other then to say again, “it is not”.”

  Ami, clearly Jordan is not Palestine. Jordan is Jordan. It’s a sovereign nation, and it’s not called Palestine. You are arguing that Jordan *should* be Palestine, maybe based on the fact that Palestinians are two-thirds of Jordan’s population. But that does not equate to Jordan being Palestine.

  The reality is, Jordan does not want to be Palestine, and the Palestinians do not consider Jordan to be Palestine. I did some research on this just now, and I came up with two interesting quotes, one from an Arab source and one from an Israeli.

  The first is from Sam Bahour, Foreign Policy in Focus, May, 2001. Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessman who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, but returned to his family home on the West Bank after the 1993 Oslo Accords. Here is what he wrote (in part):

  “The Israeli government, Sharon in particular [remember, this was written in 2001], and a great number of Israeli citizens are living in a dream world to believe that the indigenous Palestinian people would accept anything less than a fully independent Palestinian State on the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem. This State, which the Palestinians are calling for, would amount to a Palestinian concession to Israel of 78% of historic Palestine.”

  The second quote comes from a conference held in July 2004, in Jerusalem. The writer is Professor Asher Susser. Susser is “Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University.” The following quotes are from a paper he wrote:

  “Jordan was created as a solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict over Palestine. And Jordan’s history, like that of Palestinians and Israelis, has been shaped very much by the turning points of the conflict, 1948, 1967, 1987, 2000, etc. Historically, the Jordanians sought to inherit Palestine. And it was Hussein who used to say in the 1950s and early 1960s that “Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.” But that is long gone. …

  Israeli and Palestinian identities have emerged with historical narratives that are separated by what is presently an unbridgeable perceptual divide. Zionism, in the way the Jews see it, is, needless to say, extremely different from the way in which it is seen by Palestinians. For the Jews, Zionism is the ultimate self-defense of the Jewish people against their historical fate. For the Palestinians, it is net aggression against them, from the very outset.
  [...]
  Israel’s victory in 1948 was for the Jews an act of defiance against their historical fate; their greatest victory in 2000 years, the attainment of statehood and sovereignty and national liberation. For the Palestinians it was entirely the opposite. No less than a national catastrophe. The differences in the narratives and the collective memory are not just of nuance, they are totally opposed to each other. The Palestinian nakba is a traumatic defeat, dispersal of a people, loss of homeland and refugeedom, which Palestinians recognize as a great historical injustice. All these combined are no less than the formative experience and historical core of Palestinianness. Israeli identity and Palestinian identity may certainly be influenced by each other, and have been created and recreated as part of the confrontation between them, but there is an enormous gulf that separates these two narratives.

  Just as Israeliness and Palestinianness have come into being, Jordanianism has evolved as a distinct identity in its own right not to be underrated or underestimated. It is no less distinct than Palestinianness, no less distinct than Jewish nationalism, and is not about to disappear either. There are some Israelis and some Palestinians, who think of Jordan and Jordanianness as some form of artificial creation. But if one is to read the literature about nationalism of the last decade and more, one would observe that all identities and all nationalisms are invented and imagined in one way or another. The Jordanians in that respect are no different.

  But it did not start that way. In the Jordanians’ mind, after 1948 and the incorporation of the West Bank, the Jordanian identity and the Palestinian identity were to merge into the essentially Jordanian Arab identity and to unite in the name of Arabism. The term “West Bank” was a Jordanian invention intended to de-Palestinize the area. The West Bank could, after all, have retained the name Palestine. It was the core area of Arab Palestine. The Jordanian term “West Bank” was a means of diluting its national identity, by giving it a geographic designation and thereby subordinating it to East Bank domination.

  But the war of 1967 changed all that. Jordan’s loss of control over the West Bank also meant Jordan’s loss of control over the Palestinian historical fate. The loss of the West Bank, the largest area of historical Palestine, which remained after the 1948 war in Arab hands, meant the loss of control of the area of decision of the fate of Arab Palestine. Jordan’s loss of the West Bank was, therefore, the end of Jordanian domination over the Palestinian question.
  [...]
  The three entities that have emerged from the British Mandate are here to stay. They have all developed their vibrant and genuine collective identities, and all three have been shaped in one way or another by the conflict. But if there is to be a resolution of the conflict, it will have to rest on the recognition that Jordan is Jordan, Palestine is Palestine, and Israel is Israel. …”

  The url for this quote is http://www.passia.org/meetings/2004/July-28-Confederation.htm.

  Now, what I take from Susser’s thoughts here, if I were to sum it up briefly, is this: The “Jordan is Palestine” idea goes back a long way and has a historical logic to it, because Jordan is largely Palestinian and was part of historic Palestine. However, Palestinian identity has been so profoundly shaped by their decades of experience as refugees, and by the fact that they experience what happened in 1948 as a national catastrophe and a searing historic injustice, that now Palestinians don’t think of themselves as Jordanians anymore. They have been shaped into a separate people with their own national identity, and they don’t identify with Jordan. Nothing less than their own Palestinian state will feel like justice to them.

  “But, the Palestinian, as you try to distinguish him, has never had a homeland. This is not due to oppression through out the centuries. It is because a Palestinian never existed before 1948.”

  This is an interesting point, given what I quoted above. It may even be an arguable point. But if it’s true, it’s true because the Palestinian people were actually and literally created out of the experience of losing their land and homes in 1948 and then living as refugees for 60 years, and under occupation for 40. You could analogize it to the experience of Exodus, which forged the identity of the Jewish people. Of course, Jews’ history goes back long before captivity in Egypt, but their sense of *peoplehood* is often said to have been forged by their centuries of enslavement in Egypt and then the experience of fleeing Egypt and wandering in the Sinai for 40 years until they got back to their ancestral home.

  Like it or not, whether the Palestinians existed as a people before 1948 or not, they exist as a people now. And also like it or not, the Palestinian people are not going to accept less than their own Palestinian state. If Israel “washes its hands” of them, “secures the borders,” and expels them from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel’s troubles will increase by orders of magnitude. One would think that the past 40 years would have taught people like you that when people feel themselves to be oppressed, brutalized, and subjugated, they cannot just be “got rid of” — unless you literally exterminate them, as the Nazis almost succeeded in doing with the Jews. But some people just never, ever learn.

  The only security, peace, and justice for Israel lies in addressing, in good faith, the Palestinians’ desire for the same things Israel wants. Blowing them off will never work, and will only make things worse.

• 

  By P. Ami, June 25, 2007 @ 1:37 am

  “There has always a Jewish population, decimated though it was after 70 C.E., that continued to live in the land, all through the millennia up until the present.”

  But there was no nation-state there that belonged to the Jewish people. The fact that Jews lived there continuously since Roman times does not, in my view, give them any more of a claim to the land than the Palestinians had by virtue of the fact that *they* had been living there for centuries, too.

  The Palestinians had not lived there for centuries. They came in response to the development of the land by the Jews who returned to their native lands in the 19th century. Read Mark Twain’s experience in the Holy Land. When he was there in the 19th century the land was empty but for some Bedouin and Jews living in Hebron and Jerusalem. Plague and malaria had made its way through a number of times and the economy was depressed due to Ottoman stagnation. The Arabs who lived on those lands had moved to other places and only us kooky Jews came back when the disease had moved on.

  “There were incidents of expulsion during the War of Independence but most Arabs made refugees of themselves. The Arab-Israeli is proof of Israel’s will[ingness] to let the Arabs remain.”

  I don’t believe that last is necessarily true. There could be and I’m sure are any number of reasons why some Palestinians ended up staying when most Palestinians (the ones who weren’t killed) fled, but to point to that as “proof” that Israel would have allowed all the indigenous people to stay in the land they appropriated to make Israel is, in my view, an unwarranted leap of logic.

  First off, it is perhaps not conclusive that Israel would have allowed them to stay but it’s a pretty clear indicator or that propensity. Second, not many Arab civilians were killed. The War of Independence was remarkably light on the IDF murdering civilians. These 60 years of warfare, between Arabs and Jews, has been remarkably free of Jews murdering civilians. There has been collateral damage and even that has been relatively light. Lets be honest now, urban warfare gets messy no matter how careful you want to be. There are bad apples and mistakes but consider that one side, the Jewish one, considers the targeting of civilians as evil while the other, the Arabs, considers it an act elevated to holiness.

  We will never know for sure what would have happened had the refugees not fled. The fact is that those who stayed were given citizenship in the Jewish State. Meanwhile, those who left were denied citizenship in the Arab countries they fled to.

  “…when did a nation take in a mass of people, arriving from a country that refused to renounce its state of war, and who sympathized (culturally, religiously and politically) with this enemy?”

  Well, again, this begs the question (and btw, “begging the question” means to answer a question by assuming as true the very issue that is being argued).

  Let me say it in a better fashion. No nation has ever taken in a mass of refugees arriving from another nation when those refugees sympathize (culturally, religiously and politically) with an enemy still at war with the former. I was asking the question because, as much as I’m pretty sure that this has never happened, I was leaving you the option to respond with a situation where it did.

  The reason for the state of war was the establishment of the State of Israel on land that was lived on and owned by others. Palestinians did not sell their land, nor did the Jews offer to pay them for the land; it was taken from them by force. This was the entire reason for the “state of war” to begin with.

  When adults form opinions about subjects they know nothing about I am reminded of teens playing doctor and their younger siblings calling it healthcare. Jews did buy the land they lived on by 1948. Israel then declared independence on those lands they had legally bought. The Arabs then attacked the Jews on this land. So, the state of war preceded any of Israel’s offensives.

  “Me: Translation: Palestinians who lost their homes and land in 1948 hoped to gain them back via military means.

  P. Ami: And still do. Yet, you expect Israel to support them in this effort by letting them have their tax money.”

  I expect that Israel would respect international norms — not to mention the requirements imposed by Jewish law and tradition for ethical behavior — and not deny food, medicine, and other essential for human survival to an entire population in order to achieve political ends.

  What norms are you referring to? What country provides funds for another country whose ruling party states explicitly that it is working towards the destruction of the country providing it with funds. Name me one precedence by which you could establish the first in a long list of occurrences by which we could call this an international norm. If the refugees were innocent victims of Hamas I might begin to see some loophole that could relieve the suffering of those poor people. But no, they voted Hamas into power and support them to this day. As far as I know, the international norm is you do not supply your enemies.

  “No, they abandoned the land. They ran towards their Arab brothers and Arab lands, not chased away by the Jews.”

  I think I understand what you’re saying. The Jews forcibly expropriated the land and homes of the Palestinians living in what became Israel, and engaged in wholesale slaughters of the local Palestinian population, but that doesn’t mean they wanted the Palestinians to *leave.* The Jews did not *chase them away.* It was the Palestinians’ *choice* to flee the violence directed against them. They didn’t *have* to leave. The Jews didn’t *ask* them to leave. They could have stayed and been killed.

  I have addressed this in previous paragraphs. There were no wholesale slaughters of Arabs during the War of Independence. There are plenty of Arab-Israelis. I believe something like 2.5 million. Where they murdered? You remind me of the propagandists who call the war between Israel and the refugees another holocaust. Recall that in the Holocaust the murder rates began to tail off because the Germans had begun to run out of Jews to kill. Meanwhile, during their holocaust the refugee population has actually increased. Your whole premise regarding Israel’s actions and intentions is false.

  “These daily gauntlets did not begin until the Intifada. The house demolitions, knocked over by tanks not exploded as you stated, didn’t begin until the Second Intifada. Before then you would find very little security between Judea-Samaria and the rest of Israel. …”

  “… between Judea-Samaria and the rest of Israel”: This absolutely nails me to the floor. “Judea-Samaria” in this context clearly refers to the Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

  No, it refers to the whole West Bank. Again, you don’t respond to my pointing out your false statements regarding Israel’s methods in combating the refugees who make war on her. No, you choose to focus on the semantics of what is the morally correct name for the lands deeded to the tribes of Judah (my tribe, btw and the capital of my tribal lands is Hebron) and Simeon. This sort of false incredulity is typical of “your sort” of people.

  Clearly, it hasn’t occurred to you that those settlements — which you refer to as if they were something wholly unremarkable — might have had something to do with the disintegrating security situation between “Judea-Samaria” and the “rest of Israel.”

  It certainly angers the refugees but appeasement of the Arabs has never done Israel any good. When the Arabs were given what they wanted they rampaged and raged for more. Have a look at the haggling that went into trying to get the Arabs to agree to some sort of Jewish homeland in the 1940’s. The Arabs never had any intention other then to control all the lands and submit the Jews to dhimitude. Read their literature, both today and all the way back to the 18th century, not to mention to Mohamed’s time. The Arabs never hid their intentions.

  The settlements are remarkable. They are remarkable that Jews have managed to develop autonomy in their own lands again and have reclaimed lands stolen from their ancestors thousands of years ago.

  I know how much you hate Palestinians, and Arabs in general, Ami — it comes through loud and clear — but Palestinians are human beings just like anyone else, and most human beings will fight when they are backed against the wall. Even if they don’t have uniforms.

  So, Arabs are allowed to break the international laws of war while Jews are not. A double standard only last so long as there are two parties to have standards for.

  In other words, when you write, “When truth, logic, justice and decency are ignored then a gun may be required,” I agree.

  You agree unless that truth, logic, justice and decency all stand on the side of the Jewish homeland.

  “Israel agreed to release the funds solely to the refugees who claim they do not work towards Israel’s destruction and have begun to do so.”

  That is inaccurate. Israel agreed to release the funds to the Palestinian Authority via the European Union, which will use some kind of mechanism or process to ensure that it goes to legitimate humanitarian uses and not to killing.

  Forgive me if I am dubious about these vague mechanisms the EU will use. I may be wrong but I recall that the money is going to the West Bank which retains some semblance of normalcy.

  “I realize logic is not your strength and while I am fully prepared to attack you ad hominum style, at least I understand what this logical fallacy means.”

  I think that your argumentation is more emotional than logical. As for your being fully prepared to attack me ad hominem style, I agree.

  Logic and emotion are not mutually exclusive. My reasoning follows a pretty straight line of logic. Perhaps you are a robot who maintains emotional stasis under all condition. I am not that sort of robot. I am capable of thinking reasonably even when my emotions run deep

  “I time and again give reasons why Jordan is Palestine. Even Arafat considered Jordan to be Palestine. You on the other hand show not a single bit of reason to oppose this other then to say again, “it is not”.”

  Ami, clearly Jordan is not Palestine. Jordan is Jordan. It’s a sovereign nation, and it’s not called Palestine. You are arguing that Jordan *should* be Palestine, maybe based on the fact that Palestinians are two-thirds of Jordan’s population. But that does not equate to Jordan being Palestine.

  A rose by any other name. If Jordan is 70% Palestinian then how is it not a Palestinian state?

  The reality is, Jordan does not want to be Palestine, and the Palestinians do not consider Jordan to be Palestine. I did some research on this just now, and I came up with two interesting quotes, one from an Arab source and one from an Israeli.

  It’s about time you did some research on a subject you have such strong opinions about. The reality is, Israel does not want the refugees in Judea and Samaria and the refugees don’t want Jews to have autonomy anywhere. Again your double standard flies in the face of reason and swoops down into the bowels of bigotry

  The first is from Sam Bahour, Foreign Policy in Focus, May, 2001. Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessman who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, but returned to his family home on the West Bank after the 1993 Oslo Accords. Here is what he wrote (in part):

  “The Israeli government, Sharon in particular [remember, this was written in 2001], and a great number of Israeli citizens are living in a dream world to believe that the indigenous Palestinian people would accept anything less than a fully independent Palestinian State on the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem. This State, which the Palestinians are calling for, would amount to a Palestinian concession to Israel of 78% of historic Palestine.”

  That statement is false. Israel is now on less then 30% of the Palestinian Mandate.

  The “Jordan is Palestine” idea goes back a long way and has a historical logic to it, because Jordan is largely Palestinian and was part of historic Palestine. However, Palestinian identity has been so profoundly shaped by their decades of experience as refugees, and by the fact that they experience what happened in 1948 as a national catastrophe and a searing historic injustice, that now Palestinians don’t think of themselves as Jordanians anymore. They have been shaped into a separate people with their own national identity, and they don’t identify with Jordan. Nothing less than their own Palestinian state will feel like justice to them.

  You can twist your thought, from one side to the next but won’t take the reasonable and just leap into straight thinking. This same thinking was rampant in England in the build-up to WWII. People reasoned that once Germany had regained their national honor they would leave the world alone. It didn’t occur to the Powers in those days that Hitler was a maniac and had tapped into the maniacal part of the human psyche, activating a national insanity. Does it occur to you that the refugee’s sense of grievance is so exaggerated that nothing but Israel’s destruction would feel like justice to them? Look who they voted to head the PA.

  “But, the Palestinian, as you try to distinguish him, has never had a homeland. This is not due to oppression through out the centuries. It is because a Palestinian never existed before 1948.”

  This is an interesting point, given what I quoted above. It may even be an arguable point. But if it’s true, it’s true because the Palestinian people were actually and literally created out of the experience of losing their land and homes in 1948 and then living as refugees for 60 years, and under occupation for 40.

  Okay, so now you are simply accepting facts I pointed out in previous comments to you. Take the next step and the next and the next. First step, get all the facts. Next step, take plenty of time to think them over. Next step, develop a well thought out context for the events you have studied and consider why certain choices were made. Next step, weigh them against the current situation. Finally, form an opinion but only if you have to.

  You could analogize it to the experience of Exodus, which forged the identity of the Jewish people. Of course, Jews’ history goes back long before captivity in Egypt, but their sense of *peoplehood* is often said to have been forged by their centuries of enslavement in Egypt and then the experience of fleeing Egypt and wandering in the Sinai for 40 years until they got back to their ancestral home.

  The above are more of your twisty thoughts. In one of your above statements you mention that Israel needs to admit to the refugees the suffering inflicted upon them etc… How the hell do you inflict anything onto a nation that hadn’t yet defined itself. You state yourself that the refugees define their nationhood by the events of 1948 and then 40 years of occupation. None of the occupation had occurred and the national identity hadn’t yet been forged and yet Israel was expected to account for these people as if they were a nation in 1948. Rather then comparing the Israelites to the refugees let me give you a better analogy.

  Suppose, G-d forbid, the US had weakened to the point that it ceased in resisting the migration of some obscure Indian tribe to Louisiana. Suppose that the Indian tribes that had inhabited Louisiana before the whites had come around returned to these lands and in so doing had created new homes for themselves. Suppose the Cajuns, once they realized what was happening, being used to their submissive Indians, began to attack the returning Indians. Suppose then that the Cajuns, who are in every way as American as a Buckeye or a Hoosier decided they needed their own country because these Indians can fight back. Not just any country but that very land where the Indians had settled. One says, “but sir you have a country and its called the United States”. The Cajuns reply, “Yes, I am American but this invasion of Indians has distinguished me as a Cajun and now I want a country called Cajunstan”. The funny thing about this analogy is that the Cajuns are actually more distinct a sub-group of Americans then the Palestinians are from other Arabs. At the end of it all you don’t want to blame the US for defeating the Indians or the French for selling the land to the US, or the Cajuns who moved there from Canada and subjugated the Indians they found. You want to blame the Indians for returning to what had been stolen from them in the first place.

  Just because someone wants a nation-state it does not mean they get one. Your logic is this, the disappointment that the Jews survived the Arab attacks of 1948 so effected the refugees that they can’t stand to return to the normal living of Arab life in Jordan. Instead they must wrestle with Israel and with each other over a land that was never theirs. Instead of receding into a peaceful life they prefer a war zone. With these people you expect reconciliation? They are as unreasonable as the Germans in the Weimar Republic that kept complaining about the stab in the back that had defeated them in WWI. They kept insisting on honor and revenge. They eventually insisted on overlordship. There are so many corollaries in today’s world, compared to the interwar years, that I am quite convinced that appeasement is not the answer.

  Like it or not, whether the Palestinians existed as a people before 1948 or not, they exist as a people now. And also like it or not, the Palestinian people are not going to accept less than their own Palestinian state. If Israel “washes its hands” of them, “secures the borders,” and expels them from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel’s troubles will increase by orders of magnitude.

  What leads you to that line of cant?

  One would think that the past 40 years would have taught people like you that when people feel themselves to be oppressed, brutalized, and subjugated, they cannot just be “got rid of” — unless you literally exterminate them, as the Nazis almost succeeded in doing with the Jews. But some people just never, ever learn.

  If the Nazis taught people like me anything its that when a people exaggerate their sense of victimization, their news is nothing but propaganda, they teach their children to hate Jews, they promise their constituents one thing and the rest of the world another, they vote in a party dedicated to destroying another nation, they destroy political dissidents, are devoted to death with a cultish rigidity and the world seems poised to give them what they want in the hopes this will make them rational and settle their grievances (even though the tenants of their fanaticism is world domination) its time to protect the Jews and start carpet bombing the maniacs. My “send them to Jordan” solution is a desire for kindness.

• 

  By Gaius, June 25, 2007 @ 6:05 am

  I’m not worked up. Unfortunately, the editing tools for commenters are more or less non-existent. But I have to get rid of open tags or everything gets reformatted.

• 

  By P. Ami, June 25, 2007 @ 11:33 am

  PS- I have been looking at all the current articles and there is no doubt that Israel is releasing the funds to Abbas and his terror group, not to Hamas nor the agencies they control.

• 

  By Kathy, June 25, 2007 @ 2:37 pm

  “The Palestinians had not lived there for centuries. …”

  They were living there in 1948, though, right? Israel was not founded on abandoned or unoccupied land.

  “Read Mark Twain’s experience in the Holy Land.”

  I will — if for no other reason than that I love Mark Twain. Even allowing for Twain’s intelligence and perceptiveness, however, I don’t think Twain’s writings should, or reasonably can, be used to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the 21st century.

  “The Arabs who lived on those lands had moved to other places and only us kooky Jews came back when the disease had moved on.”

  It deeply saddens me when another Jew uses the word “disease” to refer to a group of human beings. I was raised to believe that if being Jewish meant anything, it meant that we shared a strong connection to other peoples who are persecuted or disenfranchised or despised. For a Jew to use the word “disease” to describe human beings shocks me and appalls me to the core of my being. My grandmother and most of my father’s extended family were murdered because they were thought to be “a disease” — and I can’t even take comfort in knowing that their suffering and deaths made those of us who remained more determined never to think of other human beings in that way.

  “Second, not many Arab civilians were killed. The War of Independence was remarkably light on the IDF murdering civilians. These 60 years of warfare, between Arabs and Jews, has been remarkably free of Jews murdering civilians. There has been collateral damage and even that has been relatively light.”

  That is, to put it mildly, a remarkable statement. Clearly, you believe it and I am not going to change your mind. I guess if you refuse to acknowledge that Palestinians can be truthful chroniclers of their own experience, and if you believe that all Palestinians are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, then you can convince yourself that there actually are no Palestinian civilians. I don’t know how else to explain it.

  “No nation has ever taken in a mass of refugees arriving from another nation when those refugees sympathize (culturally, religiously and politically) with an enemy still at war with the former.”

  Except that the refugees we are discussing did *not* arrive from another nation. They were not living in another nation. They were expelled from what is now the nation called Israel.

  “Jews did buy the land they lived on by 1948. Israel then declared independence on those lands they had legally bought. The Arabs then attacked the Jews on this land.”

  The Jews bought the land from whom? The indigenous people living there at the time?

  “What norms are you referring to?”

  These norms. (Use Find and Find Next to look for the keyword “food.”)

  “It certainly angers the refugees but appeasement of the Arabs has never done Israel any good.”

  You call it “appeasement”; I call it a deliberate provocation.

  “…Jews have managed to develop autonomy in their own lands again and have reclaimed lands stolen from their ancestors thousands of years ago.”

  This is not a legally authoritative argument. In my opinion, it’s not a morally compelling argument, either. If it were, there wouldn’t be a square inch of land on the planet that could not legitimately be reclaimed by the peoples from whom it was taken through conquest.

  “So, Arabs are allowed to break the international laws of war while Jews are not.”

  Resisting an armed military that is on your land is not breaking the international laws of war. Denying food and medicine to an entire population is.

  “You agree unless that truth, logic, justice and decency all stand on the side of the Jewish homeland.”

  Actually, I don’t agree that either side has a monopoly on truth, logic, justice, or decency. Life is rarely if ever that black and white.

  “Logic and emotion are not mutually exclusive. My reasoning follows a pretty straight line of logic. Perhaps you are a robot who maintains emotional stasis under all condition. I am not that sort of robot. I am capable of thinking reasonably even when my emotions run deep.”

  I’m definitely not a robot that maintains emotional stasis under all conditions. Your point here is true, and well taken. Touche.

  “If Jordan is 70% Palestinian then how is it not a Palestinian state?”

  Because 4.3 million Palestinian refugees do not feel it to be such, and will never accept it as such. They might have at one time, but not anymore. Too much has happened in the past 60 years.

  If you’re having trouble understanding this, answer this: If colonial America was 100% British in 1620, and if most colonists considered themselves British before the Revolution, why did they consider themselves American after the Revolution? How did British subjects become the American people?

  “Does it occur to you that the refugee’s sense of grievance is so exaggerated that nothing but Israel’s destruction would feel like justice to them? Look who they voted to head the PA.”

  No, actually, it doesn’t. I don’t think the Palestinians’ sense of grievance is exaggerated, for one thing. And I think if Israel agreed to a two-state solution, and even more so if it acknowledged the legitimacy of Palestinian feelings about 1948 and 60 years of refugee status, it would go an enormously long way toward a state of peaceful coexistence between the two peoples.

  Also, I don’t see the logic in continuing to follow a policy that fans the flames of Palestinian anger and increases their sense of grievance. When you say, “Look who they voted to head the PA,” you are taking a consequence and treating that consequence as if it had no context in the years of unresolved grievances themselves. Why not ask what are the social and economic and political conditions in Gaza that might explain why Hamas is so popular there?

  “Okay, so now you are simply accepting facts I pointed out in previous comments to you.”

  Uh, no. I am telling you that what you pointed out to me, even if true, is irrelevant. And I’m suggesting something additional, which is that if the Palestinian people were created by decades of a shared experience of disenfranchisement, persecution, and oppression, then, ironic as it is, they were created by Israel and its policies toward them. Israel created the Palestinian people.

  “Just because someone wants a nation-state it does not mean they get one.”

  That is true. But it’s not the point. Refusing to acknowledge the reality of the Palestinian people, the legitimacy of their desire for national sovereignty, and the need to work toward achieving it, can only be harmful to Israel’s national security interests, both in the short and the long run.

  Self-determination has been recognized in the past century as a compelling human right. The 4.3 million Palestinian refugees living in Gaza and the West Bank have an enormously strong sense of peoplehood, and they both want and deserve to have a state of their own.

  “What leads you to that line of cant?”

  Ami, it’s true. Israel will not be able to achieve secure borders, safety, national security, or peace while 4.3 million Palestinians live in abject misery and raging anger across the Green Line, or across the border with Jordan. Setting aside the fact that deporting the Palestinians to Jordan would be a gross human rights violation (yes, the Geneva Convention forbids mass deportations), it would not serve Israeli interests well at all. Palestinians are not going to give up their dreams or drop their anger because Israel expels them from Gaza and the West Bank and deports them to Jordan. If you think doing such a thing will end Israel’s vulnerability to terrorism and violent reprisals, you are wrong. Plus, it will increase the hostility toward Israel of all the other countries in the region.

  “… they teach their children to hate Jews,…”

  Didn’t you tell me in another post that you planned to teach your children to hate Palestinians?

• 

  By P. Ami, June 25, 2007 @ 7:37 pm

  I haven’t even finished reading your reply Kathy but you already went way off the reservation and I need to get this out. When I said disease, I meant Malaria and plague. Notice how the previous sentence, in my comment, provides the context for that choice of words?

• 

  By P. Ami, June 26, 2007 @ 4:10 am

  Kathy, this conversation has become a history lesson for you and normally one is paid to dissolve ignorance. The trouble I have to go through in order to educate you about facts may never yield results if at the same time you do not work to overcome your habitual leaps of illogic, powered by poor information. I will once again put forth the effort to help you along the way of rightful thinking. This response to your latest essay will be given in full but, I think, from here on in I will only point you in helpful directions if you require more information or lessons in logic and truth.

  “The Palestinians had not lived there for centuries. …”

  They were living there in 1948, though, right? Israel was not founded on abandoned or unoccupied land.

  You just begged the question, right? The settlers are in Judea and Samaria now, right?

  “Read Mark Twain’s experience in the Holy Land.”

  I will — if for no other reason than that I love Mark Twain. Even allowing for Twain’s intelligence and perceptiveness, however, I don’t think Twain’s writings should, or reasonably can, be used to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the 21st century.

  It may not resolve the conflict. The point is to develop a proportional sense of context. If you compare Nazi’s to Israelis (not saying you do, but it is often done) then the sense of proportion is hugely distorted. I pointed this out to you in response to your comparing my suggestion that the refugees be redistributed in Jordan. Jews in Nazi Germany were dehumanized, they had no civil liberties, they were starved in order to kill them, they were enslaved and sent to camps to be gassed and cremated. Half the Jewish population in the world was killed in a 4-year period. The refugee population has grown during the 40-year period that they spent squatting on Jewish land. That provides a measure of proportion in relation between Israel and Nazi Germany. Mark Twain’s testimony provides us with a context to what was really happening on the lands under contention. Background is not the argument but it provides context, establishes precedence and helps build a character analysis of the people’s involved.

  “The Arabs who lived on those lands had moved to other places and only us kooky Jews came back when the disease had moved on.”

  It deeply saddens me when another Jew uses the word “disease” to refer to a group of human beings. I was raised to believe that if being Jewish meant anything, it meant that we shared a strong connection to other peoples who are persecuted or disenfranchised or despised. For a Jew to use the word “disease” to describe human beings shocks me and appalls me to the core of my being. My grandmother and most of my father’s extended family were murdered because they were thought to be “a disease” — and I can’t even take comfort in knowing that their suffering and deaths made those of us who remained more determined never to think of other human beings in that way.

  Justifying myself to you is degrading. All you had to do was be a little more careful in reading what I wrote and I wouldn’t have to waste time on defending myself as a person, and you wouldn’t waste time attacking me for a bigot. I respect civil rights and the individual’s right, whoever they are, to actualize their life under liberty and to pursue their freedom. When people are free to choose between opinions they often make errors in judgment. Some make evil errors in action. Sometimes a whole people makes these errors. There is a difference between a mistake and intentional cruelty. If you shoot at a criminal and it kills an innocent, that is a mistake and one may be culpable. When you target the innocent, that is intentional cruelty and in this your have far deeper guilt. It is the difference between unintentional manslaughter and Murder one. Read history and you will see who has done the first rather then the second sort of act. It begins with “I” and ends with “DF”. Not so with the refugees.

  “Second, not many Arab civilians were killed. The War of Independence was remarkably light on the IDF murdering civilians. These 60 years of warfare, between Arabs and Jews, has been remarkably free of Jews murdering civilians. There has been collateral damage and even that has been relatively light.”

  That is, to put it mildly, a remarkable statement. Clearly, you believe it and I am not going to change your mind. I guess if you refuse to acknowledge that Palestinians can be truthful chroniclers of their own experience, and if you believe that all Palestinians are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, then you can convince yourself that there actually are no Palestinian civilians. I don’t know how else to explain it.

  The refugees can be truthful chroniclers but often are not. Have a read about Pallywood, Jenin and the various other accusatory fictions that target the IDF and have been shown, time and again, to be false. Look, if I want to stretch reason, I could say that, considering that Hamas and Fatah are both terrorist organizations and in the last election took in more then 90% of the refugee vote then, in that way, the refugees are close enough to unanimous in support of terrorists. This is an effective argument but I understand that it is not a fair assessment. The reason it is unfair is the following. Throughout the conflict between the Jews and Arabs, Arabs who wanted to work with the Jews, wanted to compromise with us, wanted to benefit from the many changes we were bringing to the land, were often murdered by Arabs who wanted none of these things. They were, as the Arabs thought, collaborators. These activities did two things. One, it reduced the Arab’s sense of security if he worked with the Jews for a thriving interaction between us. Second, it killed off those leaders who would have shown the way for Arabs to get along with us. Those intelligent and moderate folk in the Palestinian-Arab community were bred out of the gene pool, so to speak (this is euphemism so don’t take it literally). The leaders who remained were the ruthless and ideological hatemongers such as Husseini, Arafat and many others. As these leaders became the near unanimous influence on the refugees, the refugee only ever learned to view the Jew as their leaders wished them to. They were taught the narrative provided to them by hatemongers. I have no doubt that if given a chance to interact with Jews and Israelis, to do business, to conduct friendships and to feel a reasonable sense of security doing so, the refugees would have a different view of 1948, the “occupation” and Israel in general.

  You seem to think it impossible that this sort of hatred can exist without good cause. If you have learned anything about your peoples’ history you would know otherwise. Maybe we should have converted to Christianity to show the Christians that we didn’t really mean to kill their messiah. Maybe we should have stopped circumcising our sons to show the Romans that, yes, we are good Roman citizens. Maybe we should have avoided making money from the few opportunities to earn an honest living so the gentiles wouldn’t think we are trying to dominate the world. Now, maybe we should accept the “Palestinian Narrative”, hand over our lands and stop defending what is ours, to show the Arabs that we really aren’t the latest colonialist, crusader plotting to take over the Muslim World.

  Let me let you in on some hard facts. The highest estimates of Arab civilian and unarmed soldiers massacred in the Israeli War of Independence is 850 from of a population of refugees, estimated at the time, of 700,000 people. Notice I include unarmed Iraqi, Saudi, Jordanian, Yemeni, Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian soldiers that may have been killed as prisoners and I leave out the many hundreds of thousands of Arabs who remained in what had become Israel and the 60 thousand of soldiers who tried to invade Israel from all seven nations that attacked her. So, for innocent Arab dead to Arab refugees we have a ratio of 850 to 1. That amounts to just over .1% of the civilian population being massacred. If you look at the casualty numbers for Israel during the war, a full 1% of the population was killed out of 600,000 people. Out of the 6,373 Jewish casualties a full 2000 of them were civilian. That would be .3% of the population and 1 out of ever 100 Jews was killed while 1 of every 3 casualties were civilian. Any way you slice it, more Jews, a greater percentage of the Jewish population and a larger ratio of soldier to civilian casualties were suffered by the Jews during the war. Remember, one requires knowledge of context and proportion. The Jews call it a War of Independence because we won. The Arabs call their minor defeat a catastrophe. You have taken the exaggerated sense of victimization and accepted it in spite of all the facts that for a reasonable mind, a mind only slightly distorted by emotional involvement, a mind less prone to platitude and idealism, a mind with a sense of proportion would never accept.

  “No nation has ever taken in a mass of refugees arriving from another nation when those refugees sympathize (culturally, religiously and politically) with an enemy still at war with the former.”

  Except that the refugees we are discussing did *not* arrive from another nation. They were not living in another nation. They were expelled from what is now the nation called Israel.

  I was discussing the possibility, in the late 40’s up until 1967, of letting the refugees return to the lands they occupied before the Arabs had attacked Israel. I established, with that point, that Israel did not have the option to let the refugees return to their homes whether it wanted to or not. Although the Arab Armies had attacked Israel for their own greedy reasons, not for the refugees (recall that Jordan had the West Bank from 1948-1967 and never bequeathed them their Palestine. Recall that Gaza was under Egyptian control in that same period and never initiated any nation-state called Palestine), the refugees sympathized with these armies and established camps in these sympathetic hosts who happen to be at war trying to remove the Jews from their nation. Is it reasonable to think that Israel should have, during a state of war (which lasted for scores of years as none of the Arab countries recognized Israel or rescinded their declaration of war with it until Egypt did as part of the Camp David Accord), invited the refugees back from behind enemy lines? That is what I mean by arriving from another nation.

  “Jews did buy the land they lived on by 1948. Israel then declared independence on those lands they had legally bought. The Arabs then attacked the Jews on this land.”

  The Jews bought the land from whom? The indigenous people living there at the time?

  Yes, those returning to the land in the 19th century and into the 20th bought the land from the deed holders. Some were Arabs living on the land, at the time. Others were Turks who were the legal owners of the land. This is where some of the Rothechild money went in the 19th century. They had to bribe the Ottomans extortionate sums just for the right to buy the land from the deed holders. Again, study history.

  “What norms are you referring to?”

  These norms. (Use Find and Find Next to look for the keyword “food.”)

  This provision regards internees. The population in Gaza is not interned.

  “It certainly angers the refugees but appeasement of the Arabs has never done Israel any good.”

  You call it “appeasement”; I call it a deliberate provocation.

  You would require quite a lot more education and intellectual development to gain the authority required to rename a phenomenon. I’ll go ask my 16 month old what he wants to call it.

  “…Jews have managed to develop autonomy in their own lands again and have reclaimed lands stolen from their ancestors thousands of years ago.”

  This is not a legally authoritative argument. In my opinion, it’s not a morally compelling argument, either. If it were, there wouldn’t be a square inch of land on the planet that could not legitimately be reclaimed by the peoples from whom it was taken through conquest.

  Again, what is a perfectly moral and legal argument for the Arab is illegitimate for the Jew. The famous double standard of the self-hating Jew, “We must be more moral then they. We must sacrifice more then they”.

  These arguments are not legal or moral to who? You decided that being Jewish had something to do with a universal moral code (I suppose being Christian, Muslim or Buddhist does not contain a moral code of behavior. Is there anything that distinguishes these codes from each other?), yet your arguments run the spectrum of moral relativism. One man’s appeasement is another man’s provocation. One man’s building is another man’s scaffold. One man’s wife is another man’s mistress. Your moral relativism is designed to undermine meaning and manipulate those with A.D.D. and bumper sticker politics. Being Jewish is having been born to a Jewish mother. Living as a Jew is following the Mosaic Laws as interpreted by the Sanhedrin and its successors. The high level, sagacious moral codes passed down by our sages are primers for us Jews to emulate as best we can but, as with all things, only the best of us accomplish the highest levels of good behavior. Being a Jew is not about being a nice guy. There are some mean aspects to Jewish Law. Being Jewish, though, is about keeping that law. There are Jewish laws that define how one fights a war. The fact that we also follow the Geneva Conventions is an added bonus. Our deed, as written in the Torah and promulgated by our ritual circumcisions, is a moral and legal argument that, although you as a Jew have forsaken it, is not the case for myself. Now, I am not interested in teaching my child to hate. I am teaching him to be discerning. What I said I was teaching my children is their history. I will impart to them my story and the stories my parents and grandparents passed onto me. I will teach them G-d’s Laws. I will teach them the traditions as our ancestors lived them and I will teach them to think and act as best as they can, in light of their culture. I will raise my children to be good human beings and when the Arabs cease to behave with such deliberate cruelty towards our people, when they prove that they wish to have peace and quit asking us for concessions that threaten our security, then I, along with my children will regard the Arabs as partners in peace. Until then they are my enemy. You seem convinced this will never happen and that the Arab will only be satisfied with territories that undermine my county’s security. So, under those conditions, this war can get serious very quickly.

  “So, Arabs are allowed to break the international laws of war while Jews are not.”

  Resisting an armed military that is on your land is not breaking the international laws of war. Denying food and medicine to an entire population is.

  You are wrong in both cases. You ignore my mention that Hamas is the one denying their people food and medicine by spending it instead on their drug, violence. The refugees ignore the conventions of legal resistance to a military force. One is only obligated to provide food and treatment to prisoners of war. The folk in Gaza are not prisoners of war unless one deems euphemism to be the same as definition.

  “You agree unless that truth, logic, justice and decency all stand on the side of the Jewish homeland.”

  Actually, I don’t agree that either side has a monopoly on truth, logic, justice, or decency. Life is rarely if ever that black and white.

  In this case, you are correct. Israel has made many errors and has sometimes participated in horrible acts. The majority of these types of acts are on the Arab side (recall the numbers regarding civilian deaths in the text above. These war figures are just one of countless examples), just as the majority of goodwill is on Israel’s

  “If Jordan is 70% Palestinian then how is it not a Palestinian state?”

  Because 4.3 million Palestinian refugees do not feel it to be such, and will never accept it as such. They might have at one time, but not anymore. Too much has happened in the past 60 years.

  My view is that with a strong enough will and vision one can find a way to convince the refugees to move on to Jordan. I do not think it need be violence that motivates the Palestinians. Google the Alon Plan.

  If you’re having trouble understanding this, answer this: If colonial America was 100% British in 1620, and if most colonists considered themselves British before the Revolution, why did they consider themselves American after the Revolution? How did British subjects become the American people?

  First. the colonists did not want to break away from England. Many colonials retained loyalty to the Crown after the Revolution. A huge percentage of colonials weren’t British or English even before the war. The conditions in the colonies (distance from mother country, demographics, the attitude of the Americans towards the English in terms of resentment, the danger America posed to Britain once independence was established, etc…) were completely different. I didn’t say the refugees don’t have their reasons for wanting a second Palestinian state or for wanting to destroy Israel. I simply have better reasons as why they should not gain either goal. The US never threatened Britain with destruction. The Colonial Army did not, in its charter, establish the killing or domination of all Brits to be a goal. Lets say this together, “Context and facts”. Say it now to yourself. Now, meditate on this for another few years and then lets hear what analogy you care to invent the next time.

  “Does it occur to you that the refugee’s sense of grievance is so exaggerated that nothing but Israel’s destruction would feel like justice to them? Look who they voted to head the PA.”

  No, actually, it doesn’t.

  That naiveté is the biggest difference between you and me.

  I don’t think the Palestinians’ sense of grievance is exaggerated, for one thing. And I think if Israel agreed to a two-state solution, and even more so if it acknowledged the legitimacy of Palestinian feelings about 1948 and 60 years of refugee status, it would go an enormously long way toward a state of peaceful coexistence between the two peoples.

  Israel agreed to a two state solution many times from the early part of the 20th century until today. The Arabs have, each time, refused. Again, study the history.

  Also, I don’t see the logic in continuing to follow a policy that fans the flames of Palestinian anger and increases their sense of grievance. When you say, “Look who they voted to head the PA,” you are taking a consequence and treating that consequence as if it had no context in the years of unresolved grievances themselves. Why not ask what are the social and economic and political conditions in Gaza that might explain why Hamas is so popular there?

  Not to compare Israel to the PA but I have been suggesting you do the same as regards the Jews and Israel. Your double standards would astonish me if I hadn’t been subjected to it so many times. You could use your same logic to justify the Germans for voting in the Nazi party. Guess what, its not a reach in comparing the methods and desires of the Nazis to the methods and desires of the refugees. One of their great heroes, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a good friend of Hitler’s. He spent a number of years, during the war, as a special guest of the German leader. His protégé, Yasser Arafat, took many indirect lessons from the “Great” Austrian. When life is difficult one finds it difficult to behave in a civilized and decent manner. One may understand why people respond to challenges as they do but it doesn’t excuse it when their response is evil. You should read “The Last Lion”. It’s a biography of the great Winston Churchill. You will learn quite a lot about the conditions in Nazi Germany but what is more germane is you will get a good look at the twisty thinking inherent in appeasers for evil.

  “Okay, so now you are simply accepting facts I pointed out in previous comments to you.”

  Uh, no. I am telling you that what you pointed out to me, even if true, is irrelevant. And I’m suggesting something additional, which is that if the Palestinian people were created by decades of a shared experience of disenfranchisement, persecution, and oppression, then, ironic as it is, they were created by Israel and its policies toward them. Israel created the Palestinian people.

  It seems the defining trait of irrelevance is anything that casts your opinion into doubt.

  “Just because someone wants a nation-state it does not mean they get one.”

  That is true. But it’s not the point. Refusing to acknowledge the reality of the Palestinian people, the legitimacy of their desire for national sovereignty, and the need to work toward achieving it, can only be harmful to Israel’s national security interests, both in the short and the long run.

  How so?

  Self-determination has been recognized in the past century as a compelling human right. The 4.3 million Palestinian refugees living in Gaza and the West Bank have an enormously strong sense of peoplehood, and they both want and deserve to have a state of their own.

  “What leads you to that line of cant?”

  Ami, it’s true. Israel will not be able to achieve secure borders, safety, national security, or peace while 4.3 million Palestinians live in abject misery and raging anger across the Green Line, or across the border with Jordan. Setting aside the fact that deporting the Palestinians to Jordan would be a gross human rights violation (yes, the Geneva Convention forbids mass deportations), it would not serve Israeli interests well at all. Palestinians are not going to give up their dreams or drop their anger because Israel expels them from Gaza and the West Bank and deports them to Jordan. If you think doing such a thing will end Israel’s vulnerability to terrorism and violent reprisals, you are wrong. Plus, it will increase the hostility toward Israel of all the other countries in the region.

  You respond to my question asking you to substantiate your cant with more cant. Read the writings and speeches of all the most popular politicians and educators who support creating a second Palestinian country. They don’t stop at legitimizing this failed enterprise of theirs. They continue on and argue that Israel is illegitimate. You keep ignoring that Hamas wished to create its Palestinian state first on Gaza, Judea and Samaria as a step towards taking the rest of Israel. You seem to think they will stop at Gaza and the West Bank. They insist that they won’t.

  Okay Kathy, I’ve made my points. If you can’t wrap your mind around the soundness of my arguments now then nothing else I say will. I am perfectly satisfied that without a total upgrade of your cognitive faculties you will not be capable of accepting the truth I write to you. You will twist you will turn. You will label all information that should persuade a reasonable person to a sound view of the conflict as irrelevant. You will respond again to facts and logic with cant and distortions. You will continue to think that to recognize your enemy as unjust, unfair, unbalanced and unmasked is a form of bigotry. You will think that that to recognize your people as noble, just, fair and flawed is chauvinistic ethnocentricism. I can tell you this, the refugees are defined by their hate of the Jew, the Jew is defined by his desire to end hatred.

• 

  By Kathy, June 26, 2007 @ 5:40 pm

  “The trouble I have to go through in order to educate you about facts may never yield results if at the same time you do not work to overcome your habitual leaps of illogic, powered by poor information. I will once again put forth the effort to help you along the way of rightful thinking.”

  ROFL!

  “The settlers are in Judea and Samaria now, right?”

  In the year 1948, which is the year Israel was founded as a modern state, Palestinians were *already* in the land that is now that modern state of Israel.

  Palestinians were also in the West Bank when the Jewish settlers moved there. The Palestinians were there first, having been forced into refugee camps by war; then the settlers moved in.

  In both cases, Jews moved onto land that already had people living on it — the Palestinians.

  So I don’t really follow your logic here.

  “The point is to develop a proportional sense of context. If you compare Nazi’s to Israelis (not saying you do, but it is often done) then the sense of proportion is hugely distorted.”

  I agree that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians cannot be compared to the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people. And I also am offended when the two are compared. I don’t think the Nazi genocide can truly be compared with anything. It’s arguably the most horrifying example of man’s inhumanity to man in all of human history. Believe me, my feelings about the Holocaust are just as strong as yours are; both my parents survived it, and my father’s mother died in Sobibor. And I am very well educated on the specifics, trust me.

  All of the above having been said, I don’t think that the Nazi genocide and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people *must* be the same, or equivalent, for the latter to be considered a serious offense against human rights. I can elaborate on that if you want me to, but in the interests of some level of brevity, I won’t unless you do.

  “You seem to think it impossible that this sort of hatred can exist without good cause. If you have learned anything about your peoples’ history you would know otherwise.”

  I can’t even begin to fathom why you would say this. I have written nothing here that could reasonably lead you to believe that I think *all* extreme hatred exists for good cause (which is a syntactically parallel way of expressing what you said). I happen to believe that hatred is always a corrosive emotion, and it’s never conducive to positively moving forward. The fact remains that in some cases hatred is rooted in a real injustice — either historical or personal; while in many other cases hatred is rooted in nothing but ignorance and fear. If I feel hatred for the doctor whose medical error resulted in my having a child who had Tay-Sachs disease, and died at the age of 3, is that the same kind of thing as if I felt hatred for a family living next door to me because they are black, and I don’t like black people? In neither case is it a good thing to hate someone, but in one case there is a real injustice, or harm, in which the hatred is rooted; and in the other there is not. Surely this kind of distinction is not beyond your understanding — especially since your understanding exists, as you have told me, at such a high and advanced level.

  “I’ll go ask my 16 month old what he wants to call it.”

  Your 16-month-old does not yet know how to hate, or express hatred in ugly language. That is the magic, and at the same time the sadness (because it doesn’t last) of very young children.

  “The famous double standard of the self-hating Jew, “We must be more moral then they. We must sacrifice more then they”.”

  You would require quite a lot more education and intellectual *and moral and ethical* development to gain the authority required to tell me what a self-hating Jew is.

  I could go ask my 17-year-old daughter what she thinks. I’ll bet I’d get a more intelligent and thoughtful answer than I have from you.

  “Being Jewish, though, is about keeping that law. There are Jewish laws that define how one fights a war.”

  Yes, indeed. I particularly like the one contained in Deut. 20:19-20.

  “One is only obligated to provide food and treatment to prisoners of war.”

  Actually, this is not true on a substantive basis. But it’s also not true on the basis of relevance to what I wrote. The legal and ethical issue relevant to Israel freezing the PA’s tax money has to do with *denying* food and treatment, in a negative sense, by denying the funds that belong to the PA and that are used to purchase food and treatment. This is not an issue of positively providing food and treatment; it’s an issue of taking an action that makes it impossible for people to obtain the food and treatment for themselves.

  “Google the Alon Plan.”

  I did, and the Alon Plan is not in any way a plan to move Palestinians to Jordan. It involves setting up several enclaves on the West Bank in which Palestinians would be permitted to exist. They would, nominally, be allowed self-rule, but they would not have sovereignty, or their own state, or even a contiguous plot of land to live on.

  “That naiveté is the biggest difference between you and me.”

  I would argue that the real naivete lies in believing that Israel can be safe and secure with 4.3 million angry Palestinians across its borders, or that Palestinians, after 60 years of being refugees and 40 years of being ruled by a foreign country, will settle for anything less than their own sovereign state and an acknowledgment of the historic injustice done them.

  “You will continue to think that to recognize your enemy as unjust, unfair, unbalanced and unmasked is a form of bigotry. You will think that that to recognize your people as noble, just, fair and flawed is chauvinistic ethnocentricism.”

  You might want to rethink this, unless you are willing to agree that, if it’s true, it’s true on the Palestinian side as well as on the Israeli side.

  At any rate, if you decide not to answer this, thank you for a stimulating debate. I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed it.

• 

  By P. Ami, June 26, 2007 @ 7:43 pm

  My mistake, the Elon Plan.

  I was stimulated in the same way one is stimulated by a streetwalker. Cheap thrills and a hollow climax.

  I will close, as no one else has the poor sense I did in slowing down to ask your price, with a quote of Winston Churchill’s which applies quite well to your mental block.

  “There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long dismal catalog of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes it’s jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history”.

  You will no doubt think this more appropriate a lesson for myself then for you but that is where I have failed you. I do not have the time to waste anymore on a mind lacking the ability to honestly and deeply reflect on what it reads. You, unfortunately, are mentally blocked. I will have some consolation in knowing that even Churchill could not convince his people, though they had all the same facts before them, of the implications and dishonor inherent in appeasing the disproportionately grieved who make blood letting their mystic duty.

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