A Plan for Peace in Three Parts - Part I

[theaustinescorts]

As I've said before, I've visited Israel many times, have many friends there, and prefer it to any muslim country I've visited. I don't want to see one Jew removed from Palestine, which I think is much improved by their presence there. But there needs to be a remedy for the injustices that brought the state of Israel into being or the US will be mired in conflict with the muslim world for a very long time, and it's becoming totally unaffordable for us. A remedy must be found.

My views are those of the very large peace movement in Israel, so for you to accuse me of anti-Semitism requires more evidence than you have so far put forward. The peace movement includes military officers who are permitted to recuse themselves from service in the occupied territories, as well as scholars of history who call for an international boycott on Israel to force it to end its illegal occupations.

Everything you've cited is consistent with my statements, which include clear acknowledgments that Jews in Europe have been subject to persecution for various reasons.

My point was that in the 2,000 year history of the diaspora the push for a Jewish state in Palestine is a very recent idea, only something which occurred after 1945. Even the Balfour Declaration seeks only a "home" and few Zionists before 1945 had an actual state as their goal.

You are also muddling the difference between the state of Israel not having a right to exist, and the Jews of Palestine not having a right to be there at all. Few Arabs in Palestine ever thought the Jews had no right to move there. In fact much of the land the Jews live on was purchased from Arabs in the 1920-45 period. The balance of the land was expropriated from Arabs who fled after Jewish terror campaigns, particularly after the Dier Yassin massacre in the spring of 1948.

The recently released archives of President David Ben-Gureon reveal that the American conquest of the native Americans is exactly the model that the expansionist Zionists sought to copy after 1945. They believed that they were actually bringing to the Arabs of Palestine a more progressive form of governance and economy than they could find otherwise [I actually see their point]. This sentiment continued well into the 1960s, when the Israeli leadership thought that the Arabs in the newly occupied lands after the 1967 war would actually welcome their "liberation" from rule by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.

These Israeli leaders were surprised however when the Arabs in these newly occupied territories began to resist, and that's how the Palestinian liberation movements were spawned.

For that matter President Truman was surprised when the Jews were not crushed by the Arabs in the 1948 War of Independence as Truman had hoped they would be. It was the Soviets who came to the Israeli's rescue, and thwarted Truman's diabolical plan to decimate the Jews of Palestine while pretending to aid them. Truman was actually a rabid anti-Semite.

When it comes to nationalism everyone in this matter is always surprised. Nationalism is the strong and driving force in this conflict.

I think the parallel with the native Americans has a fundamental truth in that both Israel and the US are built on conquered lands, but there are so many differences between the native Americans and the Arabs that the parallel ceases after that.

[shazzan]

First of all this would require way too much time to debate this so i am sticking to one post. I will say that TAE's reading of history is so absurdly off the rails that I would have to give a twenty page history lesson to address the distortions. Other people have addressed this somewhat so I won't bother.

I'm not one of those guys who thinks that Israel should hang on to the West Bank and Gaza. I really do want a successful peace process. But, I have been following this since 1995 and do not think the Palestinians are really interested in real peace. This conflict is about Israel's existence. I can already see the one state solution that TAE is probably going to propose, and it will all sound great in utopia land, but in the real world it will obviously be disastrous. The other thing nixing it is the fact that the sides have to accept it, and Israelis aren't going to voluntarily dissolve there own nation. You will have to wait for Iranian nukes for that. Hope the current round of negotiations work, but both sides minimum demands are so mutually exclusive, I'll be shocked if anything comes of it.

This is something I say often when debating this topic. It just boils down my view of things, and I think it is so obviously self-evident to anyone who is at all honest about the ME conflict. If the Palestinians collectively renounced all violence, threw their weapons into the sea, and focused on using Gandhi like methods to gain self-determination in the Occupied Territories, they would have their own state in short order. If Israel did the same thing they would be wiped of the map. Palestinian demands over the years have stayed pretty much the same, while Israel has made concession after concession. The real reason the process fell apart in 2000 and has not gone anywhere since, is that Israel has pretty much made almost all the concessions their society can accept, before self-preservation instincts start kicking in, and the Palestinians think time is on there side so they won't budge an inch in their demands. Those demands, like the return of millions of the descendants of Palestinians to Israel, put the existence of Israel in mortal danger. Israel's minimum requirements, like keeping some settlements in exchange for land swaps, or demanding the Palestinian state be demilitarized, would not prevent a Palestinian state from coming into existence.

[theaustinescorts]

What history which I've provided is untrue? Perhaps the fact that Israel was refused any aid whatsoever by Truman, and won their independence only because of military support from the Soviet Union? That's a little fact that American's who are pro-Israel like to forget. The facts are that Truman aided the Arabs hoping that they would destroy Israel before it could even begin, but the Soviet's intervened to stop it. Israel only came into existence because of Soviet aid - NOT that of the US. And there was a reason for that - establishing Israel was not a legitimate thing to do. That's why George Marshall and the State Department opposed it. Anyone today seeking to claim that Israel has a right to exist must confront George Marshall and all legitimate American authorities who pointed out otherwise at the time.

In the various peace negotiations what have the Israeli's offered to give up? The only things they've offered have been to allow the Arabs to live in autonomous zones in the west bank and Gaza which would be surrounded like Bantustans by Israeli zones. It's a proposal so ridiculous that no one takes it seriously except for the American media and politicians.

You're right that the reason for this is Israeli security. Just look at the map and you'll see why. But their security issues are no more justification than when the USSR seized and held all of eastern Europe for fifty years as their security buffer. Or when the Germans and Russians invaded Poland in 1939 so they would have a security buffer against each other. You just cant use your geographic security as an excuse to occupy someone else. In this case doing so has created costs not only for Israel, but for the US, and my interest is in the security issues of the US far more than that of anyone in the middle east.

Yet despite all this the closest that any agreement came was in June of 2000 when Arafat and Barak met at Camp David with Clinton. It came un-done when Barak refused to allow Arabs back into Israel to re-claim their properties illegally seized since 1948 [the so-called right of return]. And that had nothing to do with security, it had to do with the the illegal nature of the state of Israel itself, and that they will never concede even if they were to gain recognition and legitimacy in return.

The Israeli's just don't have to do it. They have atomic weapons and other military advantages their enemies do not. They just don't have to make any concessions at all. The only real pressure for them to do so comes from within Israeli itself, because of the conscience of their own minds. The US has never put any pressure on them since Camp David in 1978.

You're right in that I'm convinced a two-state solution will never fly. The Arabs don't want some land some place to replace what they've lost. They want back what was illegally taken from them, and they don't want to live in a state where they are automatically third-class citizens by virtue of their creed. Anyone would want the same.

btw, the Iranians will never nuke Israel because doing so would not aid in any problem the Iranians have. Anytime the Iranians want to bother Israel all they have to do is send a note to Hezbollah in Lebabon and they can make the Israeli's scream.

Furthermore, the Israelis HAVE NO MILITARY CAPABILITY WHATSOEVER to attack Iran. That's laughable. Israel has no aircraft with the range to do so, and they would never get to overfly Jordan like they did in 1980 with a handful of tiny jets to drop a single bomb on the Osirik reactor. All this chatter in the media about an Israeli attack on Iran is perposterous. In fact everything in the American media about the middle east is ridiculous.

[shazzan]

Since you don't think Israel has a right to exist, I don't see much point to this thread. I don't care about the logic or historical reasons you throw out to justify your views. If you deny the right for either side in the conflict to exist, you are frankly not interested in peace at all. Israel isn't going to stick a gun in its mouth and pull the trigger, nor should you expect them too. Even if you are a 100% correct in your historical analysis, which you are not, you still shouldn't expect it. They are a nation because they made themselves a nation, just like every other nation has done at some point in their history. Heck, the Palestinians are a people because they believe it. I could write an essay about the Palestinian identity being contrived and the refugee issue being artificially maintained and inflated by the Arab world, but there is no point. Just like the Israelis, the Palestinians are a people because they willed it. It's part of there collective narrative and psyche. Even if it was artificially created in the 60s, it's a reality today. I don't expect them to give up their desire for nationhood, just as I don't expect that from Israelis.

[theaustinescorts]

On the contrary I'm seeking a realistic solution which acknowledges that Israel should never have been created in the first place but would permit the Jews to continue prospering there along side the Arabs in a single pluralistic state.

I'm well aware that Americans are only familiar with the last thirty years of the US-Israel relationship in which Israel has been our "ally," and that there many assaults on us have been swept under the rug. Two notable examples are their attack on the US Navy vessel Liberty in 1967, and the Jonathan Pollard spy case in which they passed our intel to the Soviets. It was the Soviet Union and Stalin which was the sole source for security aid when Israel came into being. It was only after the Soviets switched sides and started sending arms to Egypt in the 1950s that Israel sought to improve its relations with ourselves.

Most Americans have no idea that in it's early years Israel had virtually hostile relations with the US, which provided no aid whatsoever to Israel because it was considered such a problem. And the only reason why the US began helping Israel was to counterbalance the Soviet position in Egypt and Syria. Now that the US has staked out this bizarre position that Israel must exist it's pretty difficult to retreat from it.

And of course the antics of the Palestinian Arab leaders hasn't helped the image of their cause here either. Yasser Arafat was a criminal thug, probably not even from Palestine, and hijacked their movement to enrich himself personally. Most Arab leaders are similar. The Arabs hate their leaders. There isn't a single leader in the entire Arab world that I know of who isn't despised by their own people.

I'm neither pro-Israeli or pro-Arab; I'm pro-American, and this problem is causing us disaster.

In the coming years the US will have to re-structure itself financially, and it will no longer be able to afford spending this much on the military. Military "solutions" will have to be replaced with others.