- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Happy New Year to Glenn and all fellow posters!
I think it is encouraging to read a thoughtful discussion on Townhall, and thank you, Glenn, for not turning down the opportunity; kudos to Hugh Hewitt to not just have you on to shout you down but engaging in a discussion worth to listen to or read.
Otherwise, the rollover into 2009 has been terrible, in the very sense of the word.
As a German and given our history, I always feel in a bind to comment about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Is it better to shut up? Is it as cowardly as my parents' and grandprents' generation not to speak up? Therefore, I was quite relieved to see that you basically think along the same lines as I do - though I certainly could not resume it as well. And I cannot help but remind us that the slowly creeping-in decision by the Labour governments and the later openly declared "Judea and Samaria" annexation policies by Menachem Begin of settlements in the Westbank and Gaza did lay a lot of additional ground for the mess Israelis and Palestinians are in today.
I very well remember the security arguments used by Moshe Dayan and others - and how could you deny the military logic of having strategic outposts given the geography? And yet, this "security" argument led not to less but to more violence.
It is true that at the end of the Clinton presidency Israel tried the peace venue. Unfortunately, the bending over was not sufficient, and interpretations about what caused the break-down of talks in "T-A-B-A" as Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled it out for Joe Scarborough differ considerably. The EU-Moratinos report paints a very different pictures than most US outlets do of "It was all Arafat's fault".
A note on Hitler: I do not think that the introduction of the appeasement problem in the discussion is totally unfair. The German people - independent of political outlook - probably thought the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 an act of justified restoration of national pride. Austrians had been vying to get into the Reich at the end of World War I - they were denied it. Opposition to unification in 1938 was due to opposition to Nazi politics, and while the act in itself was clearly illegal, most Austrians were quite happy about the Anschluss in 1938. The slope was slippery, though, as the incorporation of the "Sudetenland" with a strong German population took the logic of "Germany to the Germans" a step further - there were Czechs, there, too, and nobody really bothered about them. (At this step I would have intervened). There can be no doubt that the acceptance by the Western powers of each step emboldened Hitler more, and thus they caved in on Czechoslovakia, too. Had there been any resistance from Britain, France and the US, there are indications internal opposition within the German military might have tried a coup. With Hitler triumphing, they desisted.
Hewitt's question - a sincere one, I assume - is: peace negotiations are built on mutual concessions. With each concession, there is a risk that the other side will take advantage of it. There can be no doubt that Hamas took advantage of the truce, and violated it. How do you go about?
But Glenn had the right answer in pointing out that Hamas as the apparent underdog in the war while playing a strong card of asymmetric warfare - not playing by the rules, and in that respect comparable to the Nazis - it does not have the powerful war machine that Hitler had. (By the way, why is it that some people in the US are not happy that Germany has learned the lessons? Why are we now painted as foot dragging wimps?)
One last note to the former blog (London Lad), and on long German sentences: Only in rare instances and in good literature are those sentences bearable. Even the beautifully constructed phrases of Thomas Mann at times are tiring. But that is due to our German peculiarity of positioning the verb at the end of the sentence. Only after the remark of London Lad did I reread your sentence, Glenn. It is not half as intricate as some German ones, the sequence has rhythm, so London Lad, stop pouting!
And by the way, blogs are under even stronger time constraints than newspaper articles, and as the saying goes: Since I don't have the time to edit a short blog (post), I write you along one, with typos (yes, I look at you, London Lad!) and mis-wording (that's to me!).
