Very interesting post Jazz. I certainly understand and agree with your sense of frustration. I guess there is one point I would somewhat quibble with. I am not entirely sure that AQ started attacking us because of Israel. As I recall it, OBL never really even mentioned Israel and the Palestinians until well after 9-11, his messages prior to 9-11 were primarily filled with hate towards us. He really seemed to resent the US, not for it's freedoms but because of its status as the sole superpower. That resentment also explains why he went after the World Trade Center. As one of the tallest buildings in the Nation, it was a symbol of our proficiency at the globalization. I really think that is what was setting him off.
I will not argue that our backing of Israel is not at the root of our problems with much of the Middle East and it was certainly why the Palestinians were dancing in the street immediately after 9-11. However, Hamas and AQ are two different groups. I really think that if we ceased all support of Israel, AQ would still find a reason to attack us if they have the ability to do so.
palestinereview
· 11 months ago
The price of Zionism is the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
What is going on in Gaza is a massacre. A continuation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians which began in 1948.
And we are all subsidizing it with our tax money. Remember that on April the 15th!
Why was it that when the attack on the twin towers ( we all know was planned by Bush and his Zionist allies )took place every one judged so quick and retaliated even swifter,but the zionist has been killing off hundreds of thousands of palestinians over the past decades is kept under wraps and even America's Sweetheart Oprah say nothing.I believe the world condone it and is happy with the results wait till the shoe is on the other foot and you all out there are in need like those people are.Why sit around and do nothing all you do is say it should not happen but you do nothing about it. The weakest form of faith is to wish in your heart that it could stop the 2nd weakest form of faith is to say stop it the strongest form of faith is to stand up and physically stop it. Is South Africa and all the other countries so weak that they can't make Israel stop? A time will come that it will happen in all these other countries cause Israel won't stop here and then who will standv up for them? Cause by them Israel will be brazen and know you all fear them. That is what is meant with 1 new world order are you all blind? Stand up take your troops and oppose Israel and Bush's accomplishes stop them now while you still can. God watches and he sees you don't stand up for the oppressed. Israel is not the land of the jews they were denied entry into it after fashioning a Golden Calf the were made to wander the dessert for 40yrs and they were replaced by another nation because of their insolence. Hitler did to them, now they are doing worse to the Palestinians. I don't pity them i despise them for what they are doing. May they all go to hell
JSpencer
· 11 months ago
Good analysis Jazz.. Of course Israel's continuing conflicts are symptoms of a larger problem. Let's see... how much destruction and how many ruined lives throughout history can be traced to religious differences? Well, heck let's just go for complete disclosure for a moment here and call it differences in superstition. The way I see it, humans, for all their cleverness and promise, just aren't bright enough to live on this planet very successfully for extended periods of time without mucking things up. We are too greedy, too destructive, too superstitious, and too short-sighted. We consume and populate without regard to consequences or sustainability, and of course we keep fighting these idiotic wars - whether by proxy or directly. I have no doubt that if religion was treated by humans as a hobby instead of a raison d’être, then we'd all be much, much better off. OK, enough reality therapy, back to the calm and measured analysis. ;-) Let's just keep this in mind: The vast majority of problems humans face are caused by greed and ignorance; those are our true enemies, that is what the true "Forever War" has been, and that is where our true fight should be.
Jazz
· 11 months ago
JSpencer, we can paint that with an even broader brush. Pretty much all of mankind's woes can, at least from some perspectives, be seen as problems of our own making. We're a tribal bunch by definition and the only time we don't seem to be fighting with each other is when we're battling the elements for our lives. I'm fairly confident that when the first three cavemen finally stocked up enough mammoth meat to see them through for a couple of days, two of them came up with some reason that the other one was an asshole. :-)
Dave_Schuler
· 11 months ago
They hate us because they hate Israel, and we remain Israel’s eternal big brother on the playground.
Whether or not that's true, I doubt that the converse is true: whoever “they” are they won't stop hating us if we stop supporting Israel. Rather I think that rightly or wrongly we're seen as the current face of colonialism and we won't be any more popular than the British or the French were in their times. Or the Turks for that matter.
Brainster
· 11 months ago
Yes, of course the Cole was just about Israel, and 9-11 was all about Israel too even though Israel was third on the list of reasons that Osama gave for his fatwa against the US and Americans. The first two were the presence of US troops on Saudi soil and the sanctions imposed against Iraq (after the first Persian Gulf War).
And your solution is laughable. Just let them fight it out and if Israel goes the way of Prussia, what the heck. And if Saudi Arabia goes the way of Hiroshima, I suppose that doesn't matter either. I mean it's not as if the Saudis were sitting on top of some natural resource that the rest of the world requires. We can all go solar I suppose?
JSpencer
· 11 months ago
In that case Jazz, the challenge will be for people to see the "tribe" as a global entity. Needless to say, we have our work cut out for us.
Slamfu
· 11 months ago
"The price of Zionism is the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians."
Oh thats rich. The muslims have been screaming nothing but exterminate the Jews from the get-go and its the Jews who are the ethnic racists. Typical propal crap. If the palestinian leadership could quit ranting about destroying Israel and stop bombing civilians for 10 seconds they might actually get a lick of peace in. However, they have at EVERY SINGLE OPPORTUNITY chosen war when peace was an option and this has cost them their nation and continues to increase their misery. Jazz has it right, not until Israel's neighbors let go their hatred will it stop. And that isn't ever going to happen.
Mike222
· 11 months ago
Holocaust is the genocidal crime against people based on their ethnicity. This genocide could be perpetrated through different means such as poison gas, guns, tanks, air raids, biological warfare, economical siege, starvation, destruction of vital natural resources, eviction into desert, and deprivation of basic vital materials among others, to produce the same result; mass deaths. For the last sixty years Palestinians have been suffering from all these methods in a deliberate programmed holocaust. The perpetrators are not Nazis, but those who claim to be survivors, and their descendents, of Nazi-caused holocaust; Zionist Jewish Israelis.
Jim_Satterfield
· 11 months ago
Both Mike222 and palestinereview are distorting the meaning of holocaust and genocide. There are approximately 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. This offensive has killed hundreds. Most of the dead are, in fact, Hamas fighters and leaders. This is not genocide. If in fact there has been a "programmed holocaust" against the Palestinians that has been taking place for decades I would appreciate an explanation for their explosive population growth in every area they live in.
GreenDreams
· 11 months ago
Good post, Jazz and interesting discussion. The USA's role in this war can be traced to a single incident. When Israel invaded Southern Lebanon in 1982, we parked a destroyer off the coast and lobbed shells into Lebanon to help Israel. Even more than standing shoulder to shoulder in the streets with Israel, the USA earned itself a special dark place of hatred for the seemingly cowardly act. Completely out of reach by fighters on the ground, the USA was the big bully friend of Israel lobbing death and destruction from our untouchable fortress a mile offshore.
The truck bomb against the US base in Lebanon was the direct result of the hatred born of that decision by the US. I believe had we limited our support to supplying arms to Israel but keeping our own military out of it, we would not have become the "great Satan" to the Muslim extremists.
As for who's "right" in this battle, neither are. It's time for Israel to grow up and realize that they will NEVER have peace in Gaza or the West Bank. They need to get the F* out and give it to the Palestinians, in return for an end to the conflict. And Palestinians have to wake up to the fact that they will NEVER destroy Israel. They have to learn to live with Israel right next door.
BTW, interesting take on the situation from Naomi Klein, who argues that Israel was once dependent on cheap Palestinian labor. With the fall of the Soviet Union, millions of poor Russian Jews took over that role and Israel lost any incentive to resolve the conflict. That cheap labor helped Israel become a giant in dot-com tech industries of the 90s. When that ended, Israel was in trouble. Until 9/11, when the "war on terror" suddenly handed them a new bonanza. Their fight with Palestinians and Arab states gave them a perception of ultimate experience in dealing with "terrorism". The security-state industry of Israel has now taken the place of those lost dot-com dollars. Peace with the Muslims no longer serves Israel's commercial interests.
mikkel
· 11 months ago
Do you think that was the defining moment for how the Arab world saw us or how we supported Israel too? I mean in a large way much of our role was shaped because this was (yet another) front in the Cold War with US and Russian proxies. It seems to me that a lot of our relationship to the world was defined in terms of stopping the communists but those parts of the world didn't see the conflict through that lens at all.
Don Quijote
· 11 months ago
. The USA's role in this war can be traced to a single incident. When Israel invaded Southern Lebanon in 1982, we parked a destroyer off the coast and lobbed shells into Lebanon to help Israel.
Try 1973, if it had not been for Operation Nickel Grass, Israel would have probably lost the war.
Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person.
This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. For decades, his analyses of the Middle East scene have made him a frequent thorn in the side of the Israel lobby.
For the first time in many years, Mr. Stauffer has tallied the total cost to the US of its backing of Israel in its drawn-out, violent dispute with the Palestinians. So far, he figures, the bill adds up to more than twice the cost of the Vietnam War.
It would have been cheaper too take a chunk of Texas, transfer the Israeli Jews there and call it New Israel.
mikkel
· 11 months ago
There are a few things that almost no one talks about.
The Palestinian people have been around since basically forever and have never had a homeland. They were the ones that had a full independence movement going and then near its tipping point Israel was formed all of a sudden.
None of the other Arab groups like the Palestinians. They've always been subjugated and now those countries just use them as a political wedge to keep Israel busy. In an amazing interview I heard a few years ago, one of the princes of Jordan even admitted as much. He said that he thought the Arab countries were far more culpable for the Palestinian crisis than Israel because they like the current situation, don't want there to be Palestine for the fear that their own Palestinian populations will get uppity, and generally treat those people like crap. I remember reading something from Michael Totten where he was explaining how deep the ethnic hatred was in that region and he was going down the list to the effect of "the Persians hate the Turks and Arabs and Jews, the Turks like the Jews but hate the Arabs and Persians, the Kurds love the Jews and hate the Turks and Persians, the Arabs dislike everyone but the Turks and EVERYONE hates the Palestinians."
So basically a large part of what's going on is that external influences are manipulating thousands of years of resentment so it's easier for them to control their own populaces. We'd be fools not to realize this, and that they also don't mind the backlash it creates against the United States as well, because that makes us double down and provide the governments even more support. Of course the longer this goes on, the more backlash there is and the more radicalization there is...but it's important to look at it as a regional problem.
Overall I agree completely with Dave Schuler that the vast majority of our foreign policy problems are just a result of be the world's superpower and thus inherently a colonial power. If China does supersede us, everyone will be going after them. It is just impossible to have so much power and not be a target of scorn, envy, etc. and not make major mistakes. Personally this is why I think the US should voluntarily give up power and stop trying to dominate world discourse so much. Sure things would get a bit more expensive for us and our consumerism wouldn't be supported, but I think that's a small price to pay.
GreenDreams
· 11 months ago
It's true that the Arab/Israeli conflict has been a part of the proxy war with Communists, but the Soviets wisely kept their own military out of it. Until Afghanistan, when they learned how stupid it is to try and occupy a country in the Middle East. How the Russians must be laughing about us bogged down in the same quagmire, as if we didn't learn from Vietnam (we didn't).
GreenDreams
· 11 months ago
Interesting. I had forgotten the airlift that led to the oil embargo. If only we had followed Carter's plan of diligent energy conservation, alternative energy and CAFE standards, we would not need Middle Eastern oil at all by now. Is it too late to "opt out" of that permanently troubled part of the world?
It will be interesting to see what happens next, as obviously we can't afford this kind of largess in the future. Of course, since we don't pay our bills anyway, it is our children who get to suffer the cost as a part of the $12 trillion debt we have obligated them for. They will also have the burden of repairs and upgrades to the national infrastructure we have neglected all these years we were building the Israeli infrastructure (and that of Afghanistan and Iraq) and our bloated military. Man, are we ever good at spending money we don't have.
ChrisWWW
· 11 months ago
From an American standpoint I think the way forward is clear. If our government is intent on meddling in Israel, it needs to do so in a way that promotes peace and restores our standing with the Palestinians and their sympathizers.
If we smarten up and stop trying to control the events in every corner of the world, then we should stop giving aid to Israel and extricate ourselves. This also means we should stop running interference for them in the United Nations.
If we want to be humanitarians, we should offer to accept any and all immigrants from the occupied territories and Israel proper, which is the same offer we should extend to Iraqis.
All Comments
I will not argue that our backing of Israel is not at the root of our problems with much of the Middle East and it was certainly why the Palestinians were dancing in the street immediately after 9-11. However, Hamas and AQ are two different groups. I really think that if we ceased all support of Israel, AQ would still find a reason to attack us if they have the ability to do so.
What is going on in Gaza is a massacre. A continuation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians which began in 1948.
And we are all subsidizing it with our tax money. Remember that on April the 15th!
The Palestine Review
http://palestinereview.com
Whether or not that's true, I doubt that the converse is true: whoever “they” are they won't stop hating us if we stop supporting Israel. Rather I think that rightly or wrongly we're seen as the current face of colonialism and we won't be any more popular than the British or the French were in their times. Or the Turks for that matter.
And your solution is laughable. Just let them fight it out and if Israel goes the way of Prussia, what the heck. And if Saudi Arabia goes the way of Hiroshima, I suppose that doesn't matter either. I mean it's not as if the Saudis were sitting on top of some natural resource that the rest of the world requires. We can all go solar I suppose?
Oh thats rich. The muslims have been screaming nothing but exterminate the Jews from the get-go and its the Jews who are the ethnic racists. Typical propal crap. If the palestinian leadership could quit ranting about destroying Israel and stop bombing civilians for 10 seconds they might actually get a lick of peace in. However, they have at EVERY SINGLE OPPORTUNITY chosen war when peace was an option and this has cost them their nation and continues to increase their misery. Jazz has it right, not until Israel's neighbors let go their hatred will it stop. And that isn't ever going to happen.
The truck bomb against the US base in Lebanon was the direct result of the hatred born of that decision by the US. I believe had we limited our support to supplying arms to Israel but keeping our own military out of it, we would not have become the "great Satan" to the Muslim extremists.
As for who's "right" in this battle, neither are. It's time for Israel to grow up and realize that they will NEVER have peace in Gaza or the West Bank. They need to get the F* out and give it to the Palestinians, in return for an end to the conflict. And Palestinians have to wake up to the fact that they will NEVER destroy Israel. They have to learn to live with Israel right next door.
BTW, interesting take on the situation from Naomi Klein, who argues that Israel was once dependent on cheap Palestinian labor. With the fall of the Soviet Union, millions of poor Russian Jews took over that role and Israel lost any incentive to resolve the conflict. That cheap labor helped Israel become a giant in dot-com tech industries of the 90s. When that ended, Israel was in trouble. Until 9/11, when the "war on terror" suddenly handed them a new bonanza. Their fight with Palestinians and Arab states gave them a perception of ultimate experience in dealing with "terrorism". The security-state industry of Israel has now taken the place of those lost dot-com dollars. Peace with the Muslims no longer serves Israel's commercial interests.
Try 1973, if it had not been for Operation Nickel Grass, Israel would have probably lost the war.
Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US
It would have been cheaper too take a chunk of Texas, transfer the Israeli Jews there and call it New Israel.
The Palestinian people have been around since basically forever and have never had a homeland. They were the ones that had a full independence movement going and then near its tipping point Israel was formed all of a sudden.
None of the other Arab groups like the Palestinians. They've always been subjugated and now those countries just use them as a political wedge to keep Israel busy. In an amazing interview I heard a few years ago, one of the princes of Jordan even admitted as much. He said that he thought the Arab countries were far more culpable for the Palestinian crisis than Israel because they like the current situation, don't want there to be Palestine for the fear that their own Palestinian populations will get uppity, and generally treat those people like crap. I remember reading something from Michael Totten where he was explaining how deep the ethnic hatred was in that region and he was going down the list to the effect of "the Persians hate the Turks and Arabs and Jews, the Turks like the Jews but hate the Arabs and Persians, the Kurds love the Jews and hate the Turks and Persians, the Arabs dislike everyone but the Turks and EVERYONE hates the Palestinians."
So basically a large part of what's going on is that external influences are manipulating thousands of years of resentment so it's easier for them to control their own populaces. We'd be fools not to realize this, and that they also don't mind the backlash it creates against the United States as well, because that makes us double down and provide the governments even more support. Of course the longer this goes on, the more backlash there is and the more radicalization there is...but it's important to look at it as a regional problem.
Overall I agree completely with Dave Schuler that the vast majority of our foreign policy problems are just a result of be the world's superpower and thus inherently a colonial power. If China does supersede us, everyone will be going after them. It is just impossible to have so much power and not be a target of scorn, envy, etc. and not make major mistakes. Personally this is why I think the US should voluntarily give up power and stop trying to dominate world discourse so much. Sure things would get a bit more expensive for us and our consumerism wouldn't be supported, but I think that's a small price to pay.
It will be interesting to see what happens next, as obviously we can't afford this kind of largess in the future. Of course, since we don't pay our bills anyway, it is our children who get to suffer the cost as a part of the $12 trillion debt we have obligated them for. They will also have the burden of repairs and upgrades to the national infrastructure we have neglected all these years we were building the Israeli infrastructure (and that of Afghanistan and Iraq) and our bloated military. Man, are we ever good at spending money we don't have.
If we smarten up and stop trying to control the events in every corner of the world, then we should stop giving aid to Israel and extricate ourselves. This also means we should stop running interference for them in the United Nations.
If we want to be humanitarians, we should offer to accept any and all immigrants from the occupied territories and Israel proper, which is the same offer we should extend to Iraqis.