Mini-schnauzer: I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.

If you want to talk about hurting people’s feelings, consider the following: challenging the legitimacy of Israel’s self defense means siding with genocidal racists and legitimizing their cause. I have friends and family in Israel that I would like to see unharmed.

Furthermore if you or the rest of you really cared about the Palestinians you’d care how the rest of the Muslim world treats them. Thats the real apartheid, with limits on civil rights, movement, economic participation, and plumbing. Look at Lebanon if you don’t believe me.

If you justify Hamas and Fatah then you are admiting that this was never about the Palestinians in the first place. This is about the genocide of Israel’s citizens. Before the first intifada, Israel invested in the occupied land. They built schools, homes, infrastructure, hospitals. When terrorist violence started, Israel began disengaging and persuing policies that protected its own. The world cried “APARTHEID!!” even then, as if these actions existed in a vacuum. If Fatah and Hamas are so concerned about Palestinian suffering, they’ll quit their terrorism. They have no right to strike at Israeli civilians.

The anti war movement used to try to veil the fact that it was anti-Jewish, not just anti-Israel. Now you go to an anti-war rally anywhere on earth and you’ll see slogans supporting the killing of Jews. “Jews are terrorist!” “attack all Zionist businesses!” “Throw the Jews down the Well” “Jews control America” etc. And yet these same people get all irate when we call Arabs terrorists, which is equally unfair.

the walling-off and checkpoints etc. are because since ’48 the Pals and have been trying to ethnically cleanse Israel. It may surprise you that I’m not thrilled about what happened when Israel was created. However it misses the point which is that it is there now and has been for a few generations. Forcible removal of a large population is ethnic cleansing, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Some people still have a double standard when they say “DESTROY ISRAEL!” as if its ok if the Palestinians and Arabs are doing it but not OK if the Israelis are doing it. I say its not ok if anyone does it. The world holds Israel to a higher than normal standard and holds the Palestinians to no standard whatsoever. To call the Gaza wall or any security measure in the West Bank “apartheid” is to deliberately ignore the context in which they exist; it delegitimizes Israel’s effort to protect its own and is thus is passively saying that Palestinian murder of Israeli civilians should go on unchecked. If the Palestinians can behave themselves, there will be no wall or lock down or blockade. Simple as that. Fatah and Hamas want to ethnically cleanse Israel.

As for reaping what one sows, this is from a Blogger friend of mine:

One of the usual responses by Palestinian Arabs to terror attacks – besides celebration
and joy – is to tell the West that these attacks are a “natural reaction” to
“Zionist crimes.”

Hamas used those words yesterday as they praised the attack, and a Firas Press op-ed said
the same thing this morning.

No one seems to notice that only the Arabs are allowed to “naturally” murder.
Israel doesn’t have that luxury – its acts must withstand the tightest scrutiny before
even being decided upon. Those evil Zionists cannot naturally believe in revenge or
murder because those are, well, evil. But the poor oppressed Palestinian Arabs are
naturally allowed to act aggressively.

In other words, those who defend terror attacks in this way are telling the world that
all Palestinian Arabs simply do not have the same capacity for free will that the
Zionists have.

The defenders and justifiers of terror are the racists, openly saying that Palestinian
Arabs cannot act like adults – they are children or animals or mentally disabled people
who cannot be blamed for acting in bad ways because they do not have the mental
capabilities to think soberly and logically. Only the hated Jews have that ability, you
see.

So only the Jews can be blamed for any civilian deaths, because they are the adults and
know better. The Palestinian Arabs aren’t.

The world buys into this farce to some extent, always assuming that the Israelis have
more ability to act in a logical manner than Arabs can, and therefore asking more
concessions from the adults than from the slightly defective children.

Only Israel seems to expect Arabs to act as adults, as people who understand the concept
of responsibility and who realize that actions have consequences. For everyone else,
including the Arabs themselves, the Arab world can act as it pleases because it simply
does not have the maturity that the Jews do.

Arabs acting like animals is “natural,” according to their defenders. Isn’t
that as racist as can be?

@nyokki – all i have to say to that is “so?” Saying that the way the sign does falsely attributes those words to an ethnic group with a wide array of opinions. It would be equally fallacious to say that all Jews support Israel.

It may surprise you to know that Israel actually has about as much freedom of speech as the US does. There are anti-zionist Israelis, Marxists, Leninist, Stalinists, Holocaust deniers, flat-earth believers, secularists, Arab and Palestinian-sympathizing Jewish Israelis too. They aren’t persecuted by the government in any way. There’s a joke in Israel that the Israelis and Palestinians have at least one thing in common: they are both allowed to criticize the Israeli government equally.

@JamesTuskGeorge:

Ethnic cleansing consists of extermination and/or explusion. Israel hasn’t done either. Please get your terms right.

I would agree with you that Hamas doesnt have a chance of achieving it’s genocidal goals. I think they know it too, and they are profiting off of that fact. If they lay down their arms and actually tried to govern, they would have to answer for the fact that they are incompetent at it. They don’t invest in infrastructure, they don’t allow many civil rights. They impose more restrictions than even Fatah does.

I think I might have said all of this before but I think i have to say it again:

Fatah doesnt really want a Palestinian state. It is entirely questionable that they even want to destroy Israel and for one reason: if Israel ceased to exist, there would be no distraction from the fact that Fatah has been exploiting the Palestinians and oppressing them continuously since before even the 6 day war.

About the plight of the average Palestinian, I agree, they are suffering and live in shitty conditions. Thing is, what is Israel supposed to do? They put that security squeeze on the Pals because without it, the terrorist Pals would blow themselves up in markets, schools, buses, and night clubs. Before they did suicide bombing, they would take hostages and murder them. Before the six day war, they did hit and run attacks too. If Israel didn’t have the occupation with it’s security checkpoints and all that, the terrorists would run rampant and no Israeli would be safe. The terrorists know this too. They know they can’t win militarily so they do what they do so Israel will put the squeeze on the Pal civilians – which the complicit world press views in a vacuum and this kills Israel’s image in the world. Terrorism is basically a device for endangering your own side for political gain. It’s quite ingenious when you think about it.

A side note: between the ’48 war and the Six Day War, Jordan and Egypt illegally occupied the West Bank and Gaza respectively. Where was the world’s outrage about that? Where was the Palestinian outrage? When Arafat helped in the six day war, he wasnt fighting to liberate the territories. he was fighting to destroy Israel.

If the world gave a rat’s ass about the Pal civilians, they wouldnt keep giving money to Fatah and Hamas. Those two don’t distribute the aid.

This was never about the Pal civilians and you know it. The muslim world knows it, the West knows it, and most importantly, a sizable minority of Palestinians know it. However we never hear from them because they get shot if they speak out.

Yes the Palestinian civilians are suffering under the occupation. If you merely say “stop the occupation,” and ignore the rest of it, then I am more pro-Palestinian than you.

Show me one society on earth that is monolithic in it’s politics. I dare you.

re: ‘So?”

you’re taking htis strangely as far as I can tell right now. I’m trying to figure out what the big deal is. So i didnt get the joke. So what? I’m so used to being in fight-mode about this subject that its hard to get humor about it. This is a big deal to me.

Also don’t forget that the Jewish settlers in the region that is now Israel, (we’re talking from the mid-1800’s to Israel’s creation) weren’t colonists but refugees from oppression in europe for the most part.

I don’t yet know how you feel about this but if you’re against their right to have settled there, perhaps you should do some anthropological research and figure out where the people in your bloodline started out and go back there.

If you’re anti-israel’s existence then you’re pro-ethnic cleansing. There’s no way around it.