Probably not helpful to evoke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I thought the Interior Minister talking about the Middle Ages was intemperate enough, but at least it didn’t bring America into the discussion.
Also, too, comparing the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians to scoring a soccer goal is Peggy Noonanish in its stupidity.
I think it’s very helpful. Let the Zionists like Gilad Sharon continue to show their ugly faces for everyone to see what they truly, honestly believe. Then maybe we can stop pretending that Israel has ever wanted peace.
If Sharon’s son harbors such views, I can only imagine what the “moderate Kadima” PM Sharon really thinks.
At least the comments to that article on Jpost are all appalled at the inhumanity of the entire article.
It’s amazing that people can think like that.
I was born and raised Jewish and for many years Israel could do no wrong in my eyes. Eventually I woke up. Articles like this wake more and more people up. But I must say I’m fearful for the Palestinians. Will there be anything left of that community by the time the U.S. finally withdraws its nearly unconditional support.
Proof that teabaggers exist everywhere.
Question is, whether Israel has any chance at overcoming assholes like this and hanging on to their democracy going forward.
Israel’s much-vaunted “democracy” is a democracy if ad only if you define democracy strictly based on the fact that leaders are elected. If you define democracy in a broader sense than that, then Israel’s democracy is, at best deeply, deeply flawed.
that headline is awful. “decisive conclusion” practically rhymes with “final solution”.
ugh.
And now we have this from Israel’s Deputy Minister of Defense:
Israeli minister vows Palestinian ‘holocaust’
My question would be what would happen if the US didn’t support Israel and either Israel was never created or it ceased to exist? Would there be peace in the Middle East or would the other countries start turning on each other given the major cultural differences between all of them?
What kind of a dumbass question is that?
You can choose not to answer it but you have to think through it. The consequences go beyond I/P.
No, no one has to think such a supercilious, pointless question through. And if the answer would be that the countries would now be fighting with each other, what does that have to do with the present situatuion. Oh, you mean Israel is the lesser of two evils. Or do you mean that Israel is all good and the other possibilities all bad?
Thanks for a well-thought-out response, Quentin. Much better than mine was! 🙂
I’m not saying that Israel is all good, but I am saying it may be the lesser of 2 evils.
It doesn’t really matter though, it’s never going to end. Neither side wants it to.
It is quite impossible to see how having a bunch of people from another continent push their way into a place, and force out the overwhelming majority of the native inhabitants in order to create an uber-aggressive highly expansionist country with the most militarized society in the world can possibly be the lesser evil.
And you are wrong that neither side wants it to end. There is only one side that does not want it to end until they have grabbed it all. Please do not confuse not wanting it to end with an unwillingness to give away everything – your home, your land, your history, your future, your childrens’ legacy, and your very identity. They are not the same thing.
I have no obligation to spend time or mental energy thinking through an impertinent, irrelevant question.
I can understand the sentiments in this article. An enraged, threatened man rants of revenge without caring about the implications of his words. You can see it when he says that the “images” will be unpleasant: he’s not even thinking of the consequences of his proposal in terms of the real impact on its human targets.
OK, if we’re honest, we’ve either experienced something similar in ourselves or someone we know and care about, even if it was before they (or we) were fully mature. The striking thing about this article is that it was published and speaks for so many people in Israel. If there’s a modicum of ethics in a society, this is the kind of thing that’s spouted under the influence of alcohol to a dear friend who’ll speak to the better nature of the raving avenger and show them a truer picture of justice. It’s the kind of desperate moment that happens in private and passes in confidence. It’s not the kind of thing that gets submitted to a newspaper, published by a newspaper, with the name of a veteran politician’s son as the author.
This article shows us that we need to treat Israel with the healthy skepticism that one treats a relative of a murder victim: with compassion, yes, but with absolutely no right or opportunity to sit on a jury, pass a sentence, and mete out punishment. We need to stop sending Israel arms, stop sending Israel money, and stop excusing Israel’s behavior.
Israel is not the victim here, it is the criminal reaping the consequences of its crimes.
Such genocidal opinions are aso an indication that, just like in the case of the last invastion of Lebanon, the government of Israel is NOT in total control of the situation. To contradict an earlier post of yours, the IDF couldn’t fully eliminate the threat and remove all rockets, not in the past and not now. Worse, with Hamas’s new long-range rockets, they can’t even pretend that this is what they are doing. Meanwhile, just as in the past, the IDF keeps attacking civilian targets, trusting their population to ignore such things like the attack on the media tower now (which also housed international media).
I quote The Guardian on what a Hamas leader told the press. This is spin, too; and the interesting part for me is that it is apparently aimed at several audiences at the same time, including the Israeli electorate and US media.
Israel-Gaza: truce talks ongoing in Cairo – live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk
Now the reason I quote this here is the ominous sentence on the “terrified enemy which has miscalculated“. This could be a simple boast and denigration of the enemy, but it could also be an indication of a realisation that Israel’s leadership is panicking and is bent on escalation as a consequence. If so, Hamas is apparently taking that into account.
If you can’t hit military targets, hit people – seems like not only Hamas is following that now:
Israel-Gaza: truce talks ongoing in Cairo – live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk
Israel has ALWAYS, since the pre-state period, targeted civilians. If they have not targeted civilians, they they are the worst shots on the planet.
Israel is the biggest piece of stolen real estate on earth. Now I’ve finally got that off my chest. This too: it’s nothing less than western reparations to the surviving European Jews for the massacre of their people in WW 2. So who stole the Palestinians’ lands and property: for sure I can conclude that without the collusion of the US and Europe all this could not have happened and, more importantly, continue to happen. Shame on you Mr. Obama, shame on you. After both your election victories we—the Palestinians—have been treated to this spectacular display of violent, raging hypocrisy.
Come to think of it there are bigger pieces of stolen land—the USA? I’ll leave it at that.
There’s also Australia. 🙂
But the creation of Israel by theft of land and ethnic cleansing took place post-WWII during a period in whic the world was supposed to be more enlightened.
There was quite an interesting discussion about Israel/Palestine on UP with Chris Hayes on Sunday morning. I’m sure it’s available on video for anyone who is interested.
I have been called an anti-Semite by some right-wing sites over the years, but I have never had a problem in my comment section or suffered any consequential backlash for blogging about Israel in a critical manner. I don’t know why I am able to get away with it, but it probably has something to do with why I have alway succeeded in having a civil comments section in general.