It is, honestly. I don't look forward to any significant crisis because we seem to keep failing on smaller ones. The fact that we haven't had nuclear exchanges is really the best we've been able to say about ourselves.
I'm not sure what the best option is, but the cartoon assumes too much by saying it's what both sides know they should do.
Again, I am not picking a side, but I know people (who are Jewish) who do NOT want a two-state solution--but they DO support full, 100%, equal citizenship rights for all non-jewish residents. There are even some Israeli MK's who support that idea--the argument from the right is "but then we Jews will be outnumbered! we won't have a [majority] Jewish state!" to which at least some who support this idea go: "You're right. That might be an issue. But that is still the best way for us to deal with the current situation."
Israel's right wing freaks out about that idea more than our right wing freaks out about border children or amnesty for illegal aliens in this country.
In any case, Israel wants our $3 billion annually and otherwise, not to say anything about how they conduct their business.
Oh, they want the money alright, but if it was in their best interests to throw us under the bus, I don't doubt for a moment that they would. RealPolitick, at it's finest.
Interesting question, thought I. So away to do some research I went. It seems that, depending on how you phrase the question, there is somewhere between 20-80% support for a two state solution in both Palestine and Israel.
Grant all the Palestinians Israeli citizenship, and this all changes from martial to criminal acts. Much less likely to be dealt with using bombs and rockets.
There are plenty of Arab Israelis, there need to be plenty more.
Roger Cohen has a nice column today on why it has been felt that the Jews need to have a state where they can control their own destiny, and not be a minority beholden still to another power.
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The question for European Jewry was always the same: belonging. Be they French or German, they worried, even in their emancipation, that the Christian societies that had half-accepted them would turn on them. Theodor Herzl, witnessing French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus case, wrote “The Jewish State” in 1896 out of the conviction that full acceptance for the Jews would never come.
Herzl was prescient. Zionism was born of a reluctant conclusion: that Jews needed a homeland because no other place would ever be home. Scrawny scholars would become vigorous tillers of the soil in the Holy Land. Jews would never again go meekly to the slaughter.
-- Roger Cohen at NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/opinion/roger-cohen-zionism-and-israels-war-with-hamas-in-gaza.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0)
However, he then goes on to argue that he cannot accept the taking of land on the West Bank by the Israelis, nor the treatment of Gaza as an open-air prison.
SHARE THE TRUTH: Israel accepted all four cease-fire offers, while Hamas rejected them, continuing to fire at Israel. pic.twitter.com/EQhuz5fkqa (http://t.co/EQhuz5fkqa)
— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) July 27, 2014 (https://twitter.com/netanyahu/statuses/493388116116242433)
The best way to combat terror is to allow Gazans to lead normal lives.
http://t.co/FoNLKGQOOk (http://t.co/FoNLKGQOOk) pic.twitter.com/LMbafGY6KT (http://t.co/LMbafGY6KT)
— Anonymous Press (@AnonymousPress) July 29, 2014 (https://twitter.com/AnonymousPress/statuses/493949802724331520)
So you are trying to bribe them to make nice with Israel? Well, I suppose they do have a goog laugh while spending your money on new suiced-bombing supplies and the such. I can see why you give money to Israel - since they are your biggest ally in Middle-East after USA and USSR managed to trick Britons out of Suez and a counterweight to your less than tractable allies in Arabia. But giving money to people who have promised to kill you and your friends...
You know, feeling righteous is a pleasant experience, but personally I think the only way to install both civilized behaviour (like freedom of religion or right to be free to marry and divorce) and normal lawkeeping there would be to pay Israel to win and install occupation authority over the whole Palestine.
Heh, well, I suspect there is more than a small voice in American government that would agree with you, but if we were to go in that direction, we would risk alienating all those oil-rich Arab countries too much, which might then only raise other kinds of havoc.
Well, if you were to point out that after extermination of Hezbollah and other terroristic organizations they won't be bothered by fanatics begging money for holy wars and such.... Anyhow, a chill in relations will probably pass in 10-20 years at most. A conservation of present situation in Palestine will protract bloodletting and chaos indefinately.
Because as it sits right now, the Palestinians are starving in the prisons the Israelis have given them of what's left of the land? As the above tweet shows, they are penned in to villages without access to work or good solid sources of food and often clean water.
Israel is feeding the terrorists every time they do that, but they keep doing it.
The Israeli military, relentlessly and methodically, is driving people out of the 3-kilometer (1.8 mile) buffer zone it says it needs to protect against Hamas rockets and tunnels. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the buffer zone eats up about 44 percent of Gaza’s territory.
What that means on the ground is scenes of extraordinary devastation in places like the Al Shajaya district approaching Gaza’s eastern frontier, and Beit Hanoun in the north. These were crowded neighborhoods less than three weeks ago. Now they have been literally depopulated, the residents joining more than 160,000 internally displaced people in refuges and makeshift shelters. Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “scorched earth.”
-- Jesse Rosenfeld at The Daily Beast (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/28/as-israel-enforces-its-buffer-zone-gaza-shrinks-by-40-per-cent.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29)
As much as I would hate to believe that, I cannot help suspecting that we are seeing the dream for Greater Israel being realized, not just Gaza but the West Bank, too.
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I haz a sad now
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But have a happy baby whale:
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/snark
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I'm not sure what the best option is, but the cartoon assumes too much by saying it's what both sides know they should do.
Again, I am not picking a side, but I know people (who are Jewish) who do NOT want a two-state solution--but they DO support full, 100%, equal citizenship rights for all non-jewish residents. There are even some Israeli MK's who support that idea--the argument from the right is "but then we Jews will be outnumbered! we won't have a [majority] Jewish state!" to which at least some who support this idea go: "You're right. That might be an issue. But that is still the best way for us to deal with the current situation."
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In any case, Israel wants our $3 billion annually and otherwise, not to say anything about how they conduct their business.
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You put two Jews in a room together and you'll have three opinions.
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*sigh* opinion polls...
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I'm thinking ... maybe 1%?
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Grant all the Palestinians Israeli citizenship, and this all changes from martial to criminal acts. Much less likely to be dealt with using bombs and rockets.
There are plenty of Arab Israelis, there need to be plenty more.
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~ ~ ~
The question for European Jewry was always the same: belonging. Be they French or German, they worried, even in their emancipation, that the Christian societies that had half-accepted them would turn on them. Theodor Herzl, witnessing French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus case, wrote “The Jewish State” in 1896 out of the conviction that full acceptance for the Jews would never come.
Herzl was prescient. Zionism was born of a reluctant conclusion: that Jews needed a homeland because no other place would ever be home. Scrawny scholars would become vigorous tillers of the soil in the Holy Land. Jews would never again go meekly to the slaughter.
-- Roger Cohen at NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/opinion/roger-cohen-zionism-and-israels-war-with-hamas-in-gaza.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0)
However, he then goes on to argue that he cannot accept the taking of land on the West Bank by the Israelis, nor the treatment of Gaza as an open-air prison.
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None of them?
well then.
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they get to the heart of the problem.
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A perpetual motion machine for hatred, racism, and assholes.
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Thanks for sharing!
I think I need to remember that site.
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Plus,, we want to seem like fair mediators.
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I can see why you give money to Israel - since they are your biggest ally in Middle-East after USA and USSR managed to trick Britons out of Suez and a counterweight to your less than tractable allies in Arabia. But giving money to people who have promised to kill you and your friends...
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this is why some Americans say it is time to stop spending this money.
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Anyhow, a chill in relations will probably pass in 10-20 years at most. A conservation of present situation in Palestine will protract bloodletting and chaos indefinately.
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Israel is feeding the terrorists every time they do that, but they keep doing it.
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What that means on the ground is scenes of extraordinary devastation in places like the Al Shajaya district approaching Gaza’s eastern frontier, and Beit Hanoun in the north. These were crowded neighborhoods less than three weeks ago. Now they have been literally depopulated, the residents joining more than 160,000 internally displaced people in refuges and makeshift shelters. Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “scorched earth.”
-- Jesse Rosenfeld at The Daily Beast (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/28/as-israel-enforces-its-buffer-zone-gaza-shrinks-by-40-per-cent.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29)
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I cannot help suspecting that we are seeing
the dream for Greater Israel being realized,
not just Gaza but the West Bank, too.