Ehud Olmert (see above) has called his country's conflict against Palestinians in the West Bank a "war", according to Al Jazeera. I support Israel, but if they decide to fight the Palestinians, the Palestinians will fight them back. Inflammatory remarks like these are a roll of the dice, and exactly what the peace process does not need. A month or two ago it seemed as though Fatah, the Palestinian moderate party, would be willing to negotiate. Not anymore, and they have good reasons. This is not a tough-guy rhetorical competition. Pseudo-war leads to real war, and real war leads to Iraq, but ten times worse.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
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2 comments:
Eyck, there is a number of flaws with your post. The hyperlink for the al Jazeera source says nothing about then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert supposedly saying that he's at war with the Palestinians in the West Bank. It's an article about Israel's raids on Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. According to the Al Jazeera article, Olmert declared that he's at war with Palestinian terrorists [though the article calls the terrorists "fighters"]. Here's Olmert's remarks [according to your Al Jazeera source]:
"A war is going on in the south, every day, every night.
"We cannot and will not tolerate this increasing fire at Israeli citizens ... so we will continue to operate, with wisdom and daring, with the maximum precision that will enable us to hit those who want to attack us."
Do you know what? He's right. By the time you wrote this post, the people in southern Israel [especially Sderot] had to deal with rocket attacks for 7 years. Now, in 2010, it's 9 years that the people in Southern Israel [especially Sderot] had to deal with rocket attacks. You complain about this remark and you give the Palestinians an excuse to fight Israel. When you look at the suffering people in Sderot dealt with, you can easily see that that remark was totally legitimate.
This article talks about an Israeli air raid on a car, where even Hamas acknowledges that the people in the car were terrorists [Hamas acknowledged that it was Islamic Jihad members]. This is using the source in your hyperlink. I encourage readers to fact check this themselves and they can see what I'm talking about. Also, you complain about "tough-guy rhetorical competition". What about the constant incitement in the media and textbooks that is promoted by both the Fatah regime in the West Bank and the Hamas regime in Gaza? Have you read the Hamas charter? What about all the rhetoric throughout Israel's history that calls for Israel's destruction and for the genocide of her Jewish majority? That's okay? But Olmert saying that he's at war with terrorists, who terrorize people in southern Israel, isn't okay? Surely, something must be wrong with that analysis. It's not that "Israel sticks its tongue out at the Palestinians". It's that the Palestinians have been waging a Nazi-like war of extermination on Israel and her Jewish inhabitants. And Israel bends over backwards to not discriminate against Arabs and Palestinians. Arab Israelis and even Palestinians in the territories have access to Israel's Supreme Court, where they can lodge all the complains they want, with the Supreme Court ruling in their favor many times.
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