Posted on 03/30/2002 6:54:44 AM PST by veronica
As Israeli troops stormed the headquarters of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority Friday, a Palestinian spokesman warned that the Israelis are "playing with fire."
He should know.
Yasser Arafat took out the matches a year and a half ago, when he walked out of the Camp David negotiations just as peace seemed possible. He lit the fire when he freed Palestinian radicals to murder Israeli children in coffee houses and defile the Jewish Passover with a suicide bomb in Netanya.
He was huddling in a basement room Friday when the fire he started burned down his house.
Israeli troops began taking apart the compound in Ramallah where Arafat and his Palestinian Authority have been -- at least -- countenancing the attacks on Israeli civilians. They say it is an uprising against Israeli occupation. It is really an uprising against peace. And now the Israeli government appears to have had enough.
The attacks that Israel launched on Friday came after a period of restraint in the hope that one of the various peace proposals would gain traction. Palestinian radicals responded with the Netanya bombing, one in a Jerusalem business district, the Friday bombing of a supermarket and other violence.
The dovish Israeli politician, Ehud Barak, used a common American barnyard expletive to describe Arafat's behavior in recent months. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, who Friday urged restraint on Israel's part, was blunt enough about his derailed peacemaking efforts. "Let's be clear," he said, "about what brought it all to a halt -- terrorism."
That clarity has sometimes been lacking in the United States' war against worldwide terrorism. It has almost seemed, at times, that we were fighting terror only when it was directed at someone besides Israel. That the radical Palestinian terrorist organizations were not quite as evil and the rest of the evil axis.
Maybe that wasn't our intent, but that's how it sounded.
If this approach was intended to mollify the Arab governments, it has not worked, as Vice President Dick Cheney learned in his visit to Arab capitals last week, and maybe we should learn from that experience.
It is not that we should not maintain good relationships with the Arab world. But the time has passed when the United States can simply ignore policies that are not only anti-Israel, but anti-Jewish.
Talk about playing with fire.
Let me give it a try. The Jews are reviled for basically the same reason the US is hated. They are successful. Others are jealous.
It assumes the lack of prospects for peace. To the extent that reprisals may not stop the terrorism, a lack of reprisal wont stop it either. The US is not going to hamstring Israel by forcing her to take hits without a response. That would just be a bad strategy.
It's bad strategy for Israel to pull out of any territory without some kind of security arrangements. There are no assurances that the PA will even accept Israel withdrawing from the 1967 border, or act to prevent assaults from "rogue elements" even if they did. The PA is useless... Israel is on it's own, it has no partner for peace.
Is there a legitimate answer? Assuming it's true, why do you think it is?
Quite so .
. can Israel devise it's own solution?
What ever happened to "defense", Israel only uses retaliation. Build the often talked about wall. Stop Arabs from entering or leaving. That stops the suicide stuff. Then work on countering the "over the wall" shots. Or is Israel so spread out with all the settlements that it has no border thats defensible?
My take is that different societies have had different reasons for negative feelings about the Jews.
During medieval Christian times in Europe, the Jews were people who lived among them but said, in a way that 1) your food was not good enough for us 2) your children are not good enough for ours and 3) your G-d is also not good enough for us to replace ours (and BTW, it was our ancestors who orchestrated His death).
You want more? OK, here's some more. For the most part they could not own land nor be in a profession; they were thus businessmen, barterers, and moneylenders. Also, governments (notably the Poles) used them as tax collectors. And, they were good at it, acquiring wealth and other people's property when they defaulted on loans or taxes.
Edward I (Longshanks from the movie Braveheart ) fought the Welsh, Scots and Irish. He needed money for these wars of expansion. He borrowed heavily from the English Jews. Rather than repay, he had them all expelled from the country and seized their assets while defaulting on the loans. They did not re-enter until centuries later.
The Germans hated them partly because in some ways it seemed that they out-Germanned the Germans themselves as far as love for the Fatherland (e.g., German Jews had distinguished themselves in WWI) and their love for German Kultur. During the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jews had major positions throughout Germany in the arts, communications, science and academia.
So, in part, envy and jealosy played a role along with the Jews being The Other; i.e., alien, strange and mysterious. It's a complicated story, but at least this is a start. I hope this has been helpful.
They could build a fence, but who would be on the other side? Terrorists who would launch mortars and qassam missiles. And with the fence, they would be free to import all the weapons they wanted.
So it appears that they need to clean up the territories, and remove as many weapons and terrorist leaders as they can. This is the new strategy.
I think the tactic will be to remove Arafat's top advisors; Barghouti, Tirawi, Rajoub and others. These are the masterminds of the terror campaigns, and control a lot. If they are gone, Arafat remains an empty suit. He may (stress the word may) then be able to replace them with people who will actually work towards maintaining order in the PA, rounding up terrorists, acting against terror groups, etc. Arafat may be powerless to stop these men, who may kill him if Arafat appears 'soft'. So taking them out may (may!) help Arafat help the peace process.
Clearly, Arafat can't be killed or arrested for fear of making things impossible to resolve in the future. But taking out the advisors of terror might be a good step.
Jealousy. Ignorance. Missing a few chromosomes perhaps...:) All possible reasons. But the whole thing is based on a satirical song about hate and as I stated, Jews are not hated...by normal people. :)
I'm not so sure this is anything new, however, it certainly seems to be the plan at the moment. But at the end of the day, you know who will most pleased if Arafat is neutralized? Hamas! And Sharon simply will not have the time it would take to sort through 3 million people, and cut out the terrorist. The longer Sharon and his tanks are in the territories, the more difficult it is for Bush to support him. You keep that stuff on the 6 o'clock news long enough, and support for Israel will fade, and Bush will rush to stay in front of the new sentiment. At this point it has little to do with "righteousness" -- those tanks on TV will sink Israel -- just as the liberals turned against our troops in Vietnam because of what they saw on TV every evening
Even your moon god alah vomits in anger.
You lie, because there is nothing else you can do.
The arabs living on the west bank choose to live the way they do.
They are brainwashed into thinking that AraFAG and his goons will bring peace to them and destruction to the Israelis.
Come out and say it, you want all JEWS in the Middle east dead
It is no wonder that mien kiemf is the best selling book in the west bank and gaza
BTW...6 million Jews died by the hand of the Nazis, NOT ONE arab would die if they choose to live in peace with Israel
I will give you some time to go to Hamas.org to get an answer
NEVER AGAIN!!!
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