Friedman on Israel

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Clarissa

October 28, 2015

OK, last news item for today is Friedman’s great article on Israel:

Israel is a really powerful country. It’s not a disarmed Costa Rica. No one expects it to give up everything. But fewer and fewer can understand why it puts so much energy into explaining why it can’t do anything, why the Palestinians are irredeemably awful and why nothing Israel could do would affect their behavior. I truly worry that Israel is slowly committing suicide, with all the best arguments.

There doesn’t seem to be a strategy in place in Israel. All I’m seeing (and as we can see from the linked piece, I’m not alone) is a series of tactical decisions that aim to serve some situational need of the next 40 seconds. Beyond that, there is nothing.

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9 responses to “Friedman on Israel”

el

October 28, 2015

Friedman wrote:

“It needs to be an alternative that at least tests Palestinians to really control some territory —”

Well, PA controls some territory:

[wiki] “According to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority was designated to have exclusive control over both security-related and civilian issues in Palestinian urban areas (referred to as “Area A”) and only civilian control over Palestinian rural areas (“Area B”). The remainder of the territories, including Israeli settlements, the Jordan Valley region and bypass roads between Palestinian communities, were to remain under Israeli control (“Area C”).” /end quote

Abu Mazen didn’t have elections for years because of fearing Hamas. (“Mahmoud Abbas was elected to serve until 9 January 2009,” but continued till “resigned as leader of the PLO on 22 August 2015”.)

What happens when they control some territory, get as many weapons as they wish (right? o/w it’s not “really control” situation), then Hamas comes to power and now has anti-plane missiles and tanks? Will Israel and others say “we tested, the experiment failed, now we stop”?

In your post named “Israel” you wrote :

// I hate it when politicians pretend that “the two-state solution” will stop the terrorism instead of realizing that the day the Palestinians receive their well-deserved sovereignty the number of terror attacks against Israel will grow exponentially.

What strategy is possible for Israel then that will be good for the Jewish people? Besides the strategy of “we’ll try to gain hold of as much land as we can,” which seems to be what’s going now.

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Dreidel

October 28, 2015

As el notes above, Friedman’s article doesn’t offer anything new. It merely lists multiple past missed opportunities on the part of the Palestinians, and then recommends a not-very-original solution (“land for peace”) that has already failed with the Palestinians.

The “official” land-for-peace deals that Israel worked out decades ago with Jordan and Egypt succeeded because those deals were with stable, friendly nation-states whose national interest was avoidance of conflict with Israel.

The unofficial land-for-peace that Israel attempted with the Palestinians in Gaza was a complete failure because the Hamas thugs ruling Gaza don’t want peace with Israel on any terms — they simply want Israel’s utter destruction.

Abbas doesn’t have the power to control the Palestinians in the West Bank, so Israel would be stupid to yield territory there under the present (and unlikely to change anytime soon) circumstances.

As for the settlements: The U.N. may consider them “illegal,” but it has been obvious since at least the Yom Kippur War in 1973 that NO Israeli government (never mind Netanyahu) is EVER going to go back to the indefensible 1967 borders, and any future final peace deal is going to involve land swaps in which much of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem are incorporated into Israel’s borders.

Friedman writes, “We forget how much the parties need America at times to play the reality principle to break the paralysis in their internal politics.” True, but at this point in time, what has John Kerry got to offer that either side will find acceptable?

Unless the present situation escalates out of control — such as Hamas goading Netanyahu into reoccupying Gaza and starting a major conflict (still unlikely) — I expect that the seemingly endless, miserable status quo will continue indefinitely. Everyone says that this is unacceptable, yet that’s how it’s been now, for almost 70 years.

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Dreidel

October 29, 2015

“Israel is a really powerful country. It’s not a disarmed Costa Rica.”

I agree. Israel should stop playing victim (No enemy in history was ever more thoroughly defeated and shamed than Nazi Germany), and take definitive steps to take care of its resident but resistive savages once and for all — like the victors in the United States and Australia, both peaceful lands today.

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1. Stringer Bell
  
  October 29, 2015
  
  Savage muslims just like the savage native americans and aborigines.
  
  I like how you thought this was a completely OK thing to say in polite company. I mean, it’s one thing to say this at your local Klan get together but you seem to be so divorced from reality that you actually thought this would be OK to say on a blog on a liberal academic.
  
  Dude, this is not a blog of your intellectual peers. You may find people of your kind at stormfront dot org. Try it out if you haven’t already. You’ll make lots of friends there.
  
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2. Clarissa
  
  October 29, 2015
  
  It seems like Nazism hasn’t been defeated all that well, if at all.
  
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Dreidel

October 29, 2015

How do you find my post so quickly, Stringer Boy? Are you gifted like the gentle dogs and vicious coyotes in my Arizona backyard, who have more brain space devoted to the smell of blood than the odor of reason?

Let me give you a brief history of how advanced civilization conquerors savages who get in its way: The superior knowledge and military firepower of the advanced civilization quickly overcomes the stone-age defenses of the savages, and the more intelligent of the primitives realize all the advantages of, say, living in houses instead of teepees, and riding to the nearest McDonald’s in a Porsche instead of on a bareback pony.

Today, fully 78% of Native Americans have left the reservations and are successfully assimulating into U.S. society, and the other 22% who choose to cling to their ancient, dying lifestyle of reservation-based despair and disease have made their decision.

In the Middle East, the generic Arabs currently labeled “Palestinians” have had 67 years to accept the fact they are have been CONQUERED, that all the wishful thinking in the world isn’t going to turn back the clock, that NOBODY is coming to their rescue, and that if they expect to be treated by their conquerors like civilized human beings instead of rabid dogs, they need to put their knives and rockets away.

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1. el
  
  October 29, 2015
  
  Dreidel, the comparison with Native Americans doesn’t work. You’ve yourself said that the solution to their situation is successful assimilation into US society. (I suppose that as an American citizen you’re aware of Native Americans’ situation better than of situation in Israel.) However, practically no Israeli Jew wants to live in one country with and assimilate all Palestinians from PA and Gaza into Israeli society. It would threaten Jewish majority in Israel and thus the nature of the state as the nation state of the Jewish people. Only really extreme Right, who wants to pay Palestinians to leave, wants to take all land with Palestinians and then gradually begin granting them citizenship.
  
  The Jewish majority wants Palestinians to go away somewhere, to separate even from the ones with Israeli resident (or even citizen) status. That’s why Lieberman, who talked about land swaps and population exchanges (Arab populated parts of Israel for land where there are settlements), is quite popular. That’s why Netanyahu recently mentioned the possibility of taking away resident status from Arabs of East Jerusalem. Only not wanting to give land and divide Jerusalem is why it hasn’t happened (yet?).
  
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Anonymous

October 29, 2015

el, you’re right, that was a bad analogy. American-style assimilation of the Palestinians into the Jewish State won’t work, because the Palestinians don’t want to become assimilated Jews in a Jewish State; their desire is to become Palestinian Israeli citizens who can vote the Jews out of power and ultimately destroy Israel as as Jewish State.

That leaves either expulsion of the Arabs or apartheid status for them as the ultimate choice in a one-state solution. The world today won’t tolerate an apartheid situation, but over the last century, unpleasant expulsions of refugees have worked reasonably well at a geopolitical level: Many millions of Germans were expelled from ancient German territories in 1945 at the end of WWII, many into countries where they were unfamiliar with the language or the culture, and by 1950 — a mere 5 years, they were all settled.

The generic “Palestinian” Arabs have natural homelands — same language, same culture — in surrounding Arab states like Jordan and Egypt. So it should be MUCH easier for them to transfer ten miles into countries with their same culture than it was for the Germans to cross continents into totally alien lands, and yet successfully become productive, contented citizens.

All this could have happened decades ago, if Jordan had accepted the Palestinians after annexing the entire West Bank in 1948, and Egypt had annexed Gaza and granted Egyptian citizenship to the Palestinians that same year.

This could happen today, if their fellow Arabs would accept the Palestinians as equal citizens in their own right, and the Palestinians would give up their nightmare fantasy of destroying Israel.

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Dreidel

October 29, 2015

NOTE: THE WAY THIS NUTTY WORDPRESS PROGRAM WORKS, YOU’RE EVENTUALLY GOING TO SEE A REPLY TO “EL” FROM “ANONYMOUS,” WHEN IT WAS ACTUALLY POSTED BY “DREIDEL,” WHO WAS TOO SLEEPY TO FILL IN THE “EMAIL” AND “NAME” INFO BEFORE HITTING THE “POST COMMENT” BUTTON.”

REST ASSURED THAT IT WAS POSTED BY ME, SO YOU HATERS-OF -ISRAEL CAN DIRECT YOUR IRE ACCORDINGLY.

IN THE MEANTIME I’M GOING TO BED, AND NOT GOING TO WAIT FOR WORDPRESS TO TAKE ITS OWN GOOD TIME TO POST THE COMMENT. GOODNIGHT!

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