quote:
Originally posted by dmm:
I can't help but rebut some comments posted here. Here goes:
1) Israel's military occupation of the West Bank began after they defeated a bunch of enemies, INCLUDING THE PALESTINIANS, who tried to push them into the sea. Question for all you SEIV players: What do you do with a defeated enemy? Give him all his planets back, and no apology necessary?
2) This occupation has not been brutal, as alleged on this forum. In fact, the West Bank has seen unprecedented prosperity over the Last 34 years. The West Bank Palestinians are much wealthier than the Syrian or Jordanian Palestinians. And it wouldn't have gone on for 34 years if the PLO and other Palestinian Groups had not made it their mission to destroy Israel.
3) To compare the "intifada" casualties to the recent US deaths is pure BS. First, most of the intifada deaths either occurred during a riot or were assassinations of known terrorists (or harborers of terrorists). Innocent civilian deaths, although certainly tragic, have been a small minority. Second, the numbers of intifada deaths, innocent or otherwise, do not approach 30,000, not even after 34 years of supposedly brutal military occupation.
4) To compare the economic casualties of the intifada to the recent US destruction is pure BS. The whole West Bank isn't worth one World Trade Center tower.
Now, to deal with your other comments (though this will appear before the comment on your final remark...)
You first four points actually are one single point. And not a pleasant one.
Actually, Israeli occupation begins in 1948. They NEVER HAD ANY RIGHT to the land to begin with. It's been one long invasion, just like the creation of the United States from the 'new' world, that just happened to have several million inconveniant natives. Do you challenge the historical record that the Palestinians had been living there for centuries? Or are they the wrong color to have rights to land they've occupied for centuries? They were trying to 'push them into the sea' because they CAME FROM THE SEA. They were invaders. The SE IV analogy is just as relevant on the other foot. How do you deal with an invader? Give him your territory with a smile and wander off to die? Or fight back?
The small technical differences between the Israeli occupation and some other historical parallels, that the Palestinians have not been slaughtered
en masse but piecemeal, or that the people who are courageous enough to resist openly are more likely to get shot hardly makes it morally right. Living in this media-saturated age, they know they can't get away with open mass-murder. If not for the ubiquity of cameras, I have little doubt they'd find ways to reduce the population of Palestinians more quickly.
But you really betray the vulgar American mindset that makes people angry by your final comment. The 'value' of the West Bank is irrelevant. These people want the right to live their own lives, with self-determination and dignity, not performing menial labor for Israelis at pittance wages when their mood is good, and cowering in the ramshackle homes their wages can buy when their mood is bad. Human dignity is not about money, and having a lot of it doesn't make a stupid dork a better human being. Both Israelis and Americans are unable to deal effectively with the Arabs (of which the Palestinians are just one sub-division) precisely because they cannot think of them as anything but grubby primitives who don't know their place. Until this attitude changes, both nations are going to continue to have problems like the intifada and the WTC event. Not that such behavior is "justifiable" but it is pretty much inevitable when you oppress people that some of them will snap and start doing crazy things. Unfortunately, as usually happens with violence, the propogation is mostly random. The 'revenge' of some twisted true believer will end up hitting other innocents rather than the actual oppressor. The thousands of office workers in the WTC are hardly responsible for US foreign policy supporting Israeli conquest. I can only hope that the US does not continue the cycle, but takes considerable care to properly identify the
individuals behind this WTC attack and acts intelligently to punish only those individuals.
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 12 September 2001).]
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