The Gaza dilemma

Publius

"Israel has a right to exist..."

Trouble is, Mr Forsyth, Hamas doesn't agree with you. And for all the idiotic bleatings of the Left about the UN and world government, we all know that "right to exist" is not determined, or maintained, by a vote of some will-o-the-wisp assembly. So what answer do you give those who tell you Israel does not have a "right to exist"? Do you have an answer, other than the absurd canard of "international law"?

Marbury

"But the process of breaking Hamas is going to be long and bloody." And it may never work, or if it does work it will do so only insofar as Hamas is replaced by a more extremist organisation. I think that normalising Hamas - a la Sinn Fein - is more plausible.

PayDirt

Marbury: The MidEast conflict is nothing like Irish troubles. This region has been fought over for centuries if not millennia. The protagonists are deeply backward, by that I mean they are forever looking back to the past. There really is so little hope of resolution until they get out of this backward mindset. It does not seem like they can do that left to themselves.

Ian C

Don't count the chickens, but it is looking like Israel has gotits strategy right this time.

It was hugely helped by the stupidity of Hamas to pick a fight at a time of US handover. Israel have gone about the operation in a soul destroying, but not indiscriminately threatening way, with a determination not to let Hamas back in the ring when its over. Another 2 or 3 weeks max. and they should be able to nail it.

Obama will be very sensible to let them finish it. He has nothing to gain there in the first few months of his presidency.

darsan

implacable-not capable of being appeased. one hundred million people foaming at the mouth to exterminate and politically correct west producing billions of words of casuistry. it shows what civilisation has come to. darsan

Helene Davidson

On what basis, exactly, does Israel have "a right to exist"? We -- the British -- took land that did not belong to us, and gave it a group of Jewish people whose history was, until that point, linked to Europe, not the Middle East. If the idea was to provide a homeland in compensation for the losses of WWII, the Jewish state should have been created in Germany. Claiming right of ownership after a 2000 year absence meant depriving the real-life inhabitants of Palestine of their own lands and heritage. The inherent unfairness behind the creation of the Israeli state is what was, and will continue, to bedevil relationships between both sides.

THX1138

The dilemma of the progressive Israeli from Haim Watzman from the excellent South Jerusalem blog

http://southjerusalem.com/2009/01/no-wimps-in-sojo/

Well worth reading & bookmarking this blog & obviously particularly relevant in the current situation

BTW I don't remember Jeffrey Goldberg being called a fantastic writer on this blog when he supported Obama for the Presidency

Henry Rogers

Helene,

You need to read a bit of history. Jewish immigration into Palestine began in Ottoman times but there already was a small Jewish population which had never left. Britain ruled Palestine (staying well clear might have been a better idea) afte WW1 under a League of Nations Mandate which it had to abandon in 1948 in wretched circumstances. The Turks ran the place for hundreds of years with as much or as little "right" to do so as Britain. The UN itself recognized the new state of Israel almost at once.

Chris

The UN didn't 'recognise' the state of Israel; it created it. This is from the Declaration of Establishment of the State of Israel at http://www.knesset.gov.il/docs/eng/megilat_eng.htm

'On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.'

I've yet to hear from those who say Israel was stolen from the Palestinians what the flag of Palestine was in 1948, or the name of its head of state, or the address of one of its embassies.

James Forsyth

TXX, I actually thought Goldberg's piece on McCain's foreign policy thinking was excellent and think I said so at the time.

Henry Rogers

Well said Chris, and Publius too right at the beginning. But of course from the point of view of Helene and many like her, it's always Britain's or the West's fault whatever the issue.

adrian drummond

To Henry

You write 'wretched circumstances' ... maybe mentioning Jewish terrorism would a clearer discription.

Hope gone crazy

Chris, your point is I think, that because these people didn't have a flag or an embassy, or perhaps even a football team, that it's OK to clear them off land that their families have occupied for generations? Cool.

Henry Rogers

Aidrian,

And where do you think that began, back in the 1930s when the Jews were attacked by Arab terrorists! Which is a good example of Paydirt's point "The protagonists are deeply backward, by that I mean they are forever looking back to the past." We could go back to the Crusades, the Islamic conquest, the Roman occupation with 5 star brutality by Vespasian and Titus and later by Hadrian reign. And so backwards. Certainly not and so on!

The wretched circumstances were that Britain was stony broke and there was b... all we could do about anything in Palestine anyway, except get blamed by both sides on the spot and by the rest of the world outside. Maybe breaking up the Ottoman Empire after WW1 wasn't such a smart idea.

Given a completely different situation, such as Malaya, terrorism as such was not a completely insoluable problem as events from 1948-1960 proved.

Henry Rogers

A thought for "Hope Gone Crazy", though a rather gloomy one. At the end of WW2 ethnic Germans were cleared out of Eastern Europe by Russia and its satellites. East Prussia is now a Russian enclave. Meanwhile the other Baltic States have an ethnic Russian minority they did not have in 1939. Things like that happen when people lose wars they provoke and sometime when they lose ones they didn't provoke. End of story? One can but hope.

And that's before we start thinking, a bit close to home this, about large populations of newcomers being allowed, even encouraged to settle in places with completely different cultural traditions.

dilys

Any chance of persuading the Angles, Saxons and Jutes to give Britain back to the Romano British?

Helene Davidson

At one stage. the Zionist movement considered Baja California as a potential homeland. Probably would have been a safer bet in the long run. And yes, I did read my history. And lived in the region for 11 years. And speak Arabic, having studied the region and its history. Many of the people I met, and worked with, are non-radical Palestinians who lost their homeland and can never return. That is what I meant by the fundamental unfairness. We did not have the right to do what we did in the aftermath of WW1, and the horrific wrongs inflicted on the Jewish populations of Europe in WWII did not justify what happened to the native Palestinian populations of what became Israel.

Henry Rogers

Helene,

Let's be blunt. Would you be prepared to risk WW3 to enable the 'displaced persons' (mostly German) to regain their homelands, from which they were driven in 1945 by the Russians?

If the Palestinians had put the resources they have put into trying to destroy Israel into developing the land they hold there would be two successful states in Palestine not one. Oh, and the area held by Israel would have been much, much smaller.