Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 20 Editor's Choice: 1
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Only response
[Read the article: Israel's failed-state strategy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Besides living in Israel for 19 years, and serving in the Israeli army, I have written quite a bit on this topic over the past several years. No argument supporters of Israeli acts of violence is new to me - I have heard them all already, and you can find a response somewhere on my weblog. For that reason, I don't usually like to engage in back and forth,. But the level of ignorance displayed in this previous letter is truly astonishing. This will be my only response though, even to future comments.
"'When Israel targets civilian installations and populations it's government justifies these actions by saying it is necessary to 'burn a lesson into the Palestinians consciousness that violence against Israel will lead to a lethal response."
"Why did you put that phrase in quotation marks? What Israeli government official made that statement? Or are you just lying?"
I put the phrase in quotes because it is a translation from the Hebrew of a phrase quite commonly used by Israeli leaders, political and military, to justify actions against Palestinians. Arik Sharon used it all the time when he was PM. Cole brings a variation used by Olmert just a few days ago when he said:on July 2 “I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza. I want them to know what it’s like...”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060702/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_palestinians
This ties into Israel deliberately attacking civilian installations. There are numerous documented examples of this going back for years, and Arik Sharon, as noted, never hid the fact that he was fighting a war against Palestinian civilians. But let's stick to just this past week. Israel bombed electric plants, schools, and government agencies just in the past few days. Israel made no bones about these being civilian installations - Olmert justified it with the sentance above. He claims all he is doing is making the Palestinians "uncomfortable." But when hospitals don't have regular electricity, people are more than uncomfortable - they die. Old people and young children die from heat exhaustion. And so on and so forth.
The most recent flare up didn't start in a vacuum. There has been a cease fire in effect for quite sometime which held pretty well. Since the Hamas has been elected, Israel has withheld payments of funds it collects on the PA's behalf and using the US' influence, have pressured other governments not to provide funds to the PA. The people who are suffering are Palestinian civilians, who don't have sufficient funds to feed their families. Is slowly starving civilians more justified than blowing some up? Wasn't these Israeli actions of deliberately targetting Palestian civilians an act of war? If you believe such acts justify violence then you are justifying Hamas counter attacks, including the bombing of Sderot and capturing the soldier.
Personally, I find violence against civilians always unjustified, so I equally oppose the actions of the Israeli government and Palestinian militants. But if you support violence on one side, you justify it on the other, since the arguments both sides use are identical.
The fact that there were 600,000 Jews living in the Britsh Mandate in 1948 doesn't negate my argument in the least. Go back to 1848 then 1748 then 1648 and do a population comparison. Yes Jews have continuously lived in the land of ther ancestors and have a deep attachment to it. But when the Zionist movement began, the Jews were not in control demographically or politically. Like I said, read Jabotinsky.
Yes, there has never been a sovereign country called Palestine controlled by the Palestinians. But the UN document which mandated the creation of the State of Israel also mandated the creation of the State of Palestine. The international legal basis for the two states is identical.
As your signature state, please learn about this conflict before publicly commenting on it.