The link on the front page reads ‘Hamas militants fire rockets into Israel’, and the article has a different headline that reads ‘Deadly infighting rages in Gaza’. The battle is one sided, with Hamas sending mortar rounds into the compound of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is a member of the Fatah party. Fatah was voted out of power in favor of Hamas, and the Palestinian state has since been cut off from international aid. Israel’s wall continues to zig and zag its way through the West Bank, and the checkpoints continue to prevent Palestinian Muslims and Christian citizens from engaging in the commerce that allows them to live. New Israeli settlements in Gaza continue to be built.
There is not enough money for the Palestinian state to pay for teachers, police, civil servants or to maintain the infrastructure. This was possible up until Hamas was elected. It wasn’t an attack on Israeli troops or civilians after Hamas was elected that prompted this cutoff of foreign humanitarian aid, but merely the outcome of the election itself. Almost as if the United States had absolutely zero capacity for understanding the fact that there would be no chance for a viable state to emerge or function in Palestine without this money, the amount of State Department information released regarding this ongoing situation is scant, and what we are made aware of in terms of US policy in the region, is motivated more by our own domestic politics than the reality for those living their lives in the midst of all this misery.
I point out the mistake on Yahoo’s front page this morning for the simple fact that by characterizing the events of the past couple days in Gaza as an attack on Israel, the US population is less likely to understand that what has actually broken out is a civil war. Equivalent to Democrats in Congress launching mortar rounds aimed at the White House, for the Palestinian state, this outbreak of violence is symptomatic of what our policy has wrought so far. From Gaza to the West Bank is a chunk of Israel that Palestinians are loathe to attempt crossing very often, if at all, and from within the isolated Gaza Strip, a civil war has ensued…one that will end the lives of innocent civilians, and for what?
Our country has kept the Saudi royal family in billions up to their necks for generations, yet we can’t provide the same amount of aid we had before? Saudi Arabia has been and will continue to export the capital necessary to carry out terrorist operations in several countries, yet they are excused and dealt with as equals (in spite of their historic failings in backing US plays within the region) , and the Palestinians, who are not sitting on oil, have nothing to fall back on in terms of the US besides unjustified condemnation and punishment. Who is the loser in all of this? If you believe it is somehow Israel, you are misinformed. The Palestinian government is killing itself, and since Israel happens to own everthing that surrounds these people, couldn’t it be possible that the real story isn’t at all about how it was somehow a “victim” here?
Couldn’t our news agencies call this one correctly? After they failed to look out for our interests in the run-up to our occupation of Iraq, perhaps they owe us one?
Maybe if Arafat studied some Scottish Enlightenment, he could have moved his state forward the way Deng Xiaoping did his, in the same timeframe, and Deng had a much lower GDP per capita to start out with …
go to a military history book to see how Israel expanded (it was the result of victories during war- I think giving territory back has only been an extremely recent phenomenon). We all know the Arabs use the Palestinians as pawns as part of their end game. But I do agree with you that Yahoo! news manipulates their headlines, I hate their star rating system too, it has somehow become politicized to how “good” the article is.
…of course, its very existence is an imposition of the West. To the victor go the spoils, apparently.
if we start talking about impositions we could trace back that very piece of land for as long as the historical record goes back when the Hebrews defeated the Canaanites. Now keep in mind GB didnt wave a magic wand and create Israel, there were Jews already living there as well before WWI or 1948. Now this is an imposition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab-Israeli_War. Getting attacked simultaneously on all sides. Oh, Arab countries kept palestinian land for themselves all the while by not granting them citizenship.
“The United Nations recommended to partition Palestine into a Jewish and Arab states, a plan which Arab leaders rejected….
By the war’s end, the region was divided between Israel, EGYPT and TRANSJORDAN.”
From the source above
I refer to UN Security Council Resolution 242, from 1967, following the Six Day War:
My whole point in all of this is to add to the conversation (not taken very well at KOS) a couple indisputable facts regarding Palestine…one being the geography, the other being that there is no way someone could argue that Israel ever complied or even meant to comply with this resolution.
I think those are two facts that are completely missing from the dialog that takes place in the US especially.
The air assault of Lebanon and US complicity in it for that many days…it really opened my eyes and motivated me to learn more about the history. How can anyone look at the map today, knowing that a permanent wall is being built around those areas in green, and consider it within Israel’s rights to carry on like this?
They never gave back what they agreed to give back in the first place, and instead have terrorized these Palestinian Muslims, Christians and Jews consistently for almost half a century since 1967. There’s no excuse for anyone to look the other way.
Unless Arabs are dogs…animals…then when does the bullshit stop and justice factor into the equation?
The original deal in 1948 Israel accepted, Arabs rejected. I am not saying the Israeli’s didnt make mistakes in building into the Palestinian area. What I am saying is that the Arabs are using the Palestinians as pawns for their agenda. That wall has saved alot of lives as suicide bombers caused no where near the destruction they have in the past. And as far as the Golan heights, etc; I would occupy those places too being that my nation had been attacked so many times and I need warning time to scramble my military. It takes 15 minutes to fly across the country of Israel. So if no one complied with the UN resolution, then we all know the UN is a sham, a no good organization that does not have any real power. Did you know that Israel accepted the land for peace deal when Clinton was prez and Arafat rejected it? Then the “intifada” began days later about the whole Sharon nonsense visiting a holy site. So much of this is a sham, its all planned propaganda and the Arabs are very good at it. Go watch the 15 min or so staged rioting broken down by a Boston University professor (in one tragic moment as a coffin is being carried down the street, it falls, only to have the “dead” person get back up and lay back down). All in all, this can be traced back directly to Genesis with the prophecy from the angel to Hagar “I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count…..He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers”. If you know your ancient history, you know the man he is talking about is Ishmael. And if you know the basics of Islam, you know Muslims/Arabs trace their ancestors through to Ishmael. And the Jews to Isaac.
And to just make clear, Arabs deserve justice as well. I am not one of those that believe the Arabs are not civilized enough to live democratically or peacefully. They have been indoctrinated in a society of fear and hate. It’s gonna take time.
I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to that topic lately, but if you search “Gaza civil war” you get a lot of hits. If you do a News search instead of a Web search it fills pages. I can’t decide if the administration’s hand’s off policy derives from apathy or ignorance. Both, maybe. Seems to me that even a little token diplomacy could avert bloodshed.
(Off-topic, but I’m using the comments thread because I don’t find another contact. Heads up that I have added to my last post regarding autism.)