There was a very sad afternoon for my twin and I when we were kids when we spent a while at one of the more significant crossroads of the Trail of Tears thinking about what our forbears had done to the Native American population. Gaza brings up similar feelings for me -- there're just as many Arabs selling out other Arabs as there were Native Americans doing the same back then, and, just like then, the only rational conclusion for the native population involved is "game over, dude".
Peace talks so far speak of a "two state solution" and not only do not countenance any return of palestinian properties taken (these seizures are mostly known, right down to the street addresses), but also of no right to participate in any meaningful way in the Israeli population -- as the local Jews say "or else we'd be a minority in our own country". This's slightly different than our history here, when, even though our idea of America was a country of, by and for white people, there was plenty of land for everyone. Like the situation with Israel, though, the native population had already occupied the best land, so clearly that had to change. Palestinian Arabs are now squished into cantons, ghettos or reservations (depending on whose rhetoric you favor) that make the idea of a single continuous, autonomous and sovereign state as laughable as the pretext of Native American reservations' sovereignty that the government maintains today (Native Americans on "their" land can barely spit without BIA's approval).
The Native Palestinians are a conquered and defeated people existing solely where the Israelis chose to crowd them, with water rights solely when they don't contravene the interests of the steadily increasing numbers of incoming Zionists. The Fatah and Hamas organizations are flag-wavers on a sinking ship and the other regional Arab states who continue to throw the Palestinians under the proverbial bus so as to distract their own populations from their local tyrannies are well aware of this fact and are perfectly happy to see Palestinians slaughtered 10-to-1 (8.5 years of rocket attacks have killed 28 Jewish Israelis (the Israelis that Israelis care about), making the death toll from the current operation about 10-1 -- thus easily satisfying Blair's Law of Insurrection). Thus there's no hope of other Arab states coming to the Philistines' rescue to overthrow Israel (nor would Western "consciences" countenance an undoing of their solution to Hitler's "solution").
Israelis will never allow the Palestinians to co-habitate with them for fear of losing racial hegemony (the clear game-plan to satisfy "Never Again" being to maintain a country just for them plus just enough defanged second-class Arabs as are needed to clean their commodes), nor can any viable nation be pieced together from disconnected regions whose occupants enjoy no right of travel between them. The big question is: when are the Palestinians going to realize that the game is up, that resistance at this point is utterly futile, and that their only hope is to seek extradition to other countries where they can be taken advantage of in a new Arab version of the Grapes of Wrath?
14 comments:
I don't really want to comment on this mess. Historically speaking, you can't really fix the blame on who started what and who is to blame for screwing who. Where does it start? The Romans? The British for the original partition? All of Europe and the US for not letting the Jews leave Germany in the 1930's? The same group for always keeping the Jews separate so they always had a nice whipping boy? The Palistians for not trying to work with the Jews when this all started? The same group along with every Arab/Muslim state who called for the total destruction of Israel with no survivors right after the Holocaust?
I have stopped trying to fix blame and just go with who I think is more sane and stable (aka Israel). After all this time, the Israelies can't ever put down there weapons or they would be wiped out. I honestly believe this, the Arabs have proven that their word on situations like this isn't worth the breath to say it. That is a nasty situation any way you cut it and I am just glad I live here in the US and not there. Maybe the Palistians should "give peace a chance"? Not trying to be flippant here, but have they ever?
I don't disagree with anything you've written here, but your last point is happening today, just not enough. Many Palestinians have already left and extradited to other countries to start a new life, including the US. The problem becomes the hundreds of thousands of others who currently live in nearby states (Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan) who still have no opportunities in those countries but have been living there as "refugees" for decades now. They're still in tent cities and they still cling to the dream of going back. If one really wanted to end the mideast crisis, and I mean REALLY end it - that country would take ALL of the refugees away from that region, subsidize them for a few decades to get on their own feet (education, job opportunities, integration, etc.) and let that new culture take root away from Palestine.
I know my explanation sounds simplistic, but, Israel's neighbors want a solution to the Palestinian problem not to end Israel, but to get all the refugees off their land so they can attempt to get their countries back on track. As long as you have the refugees in the nearby states it doesn't matter what you do to them inside Israel - they'll still be on the other side of the fence slavering to get in because they can still see what was taken from them, and they'll drag those neighboring countries with them since they sometimes outnumber the natives.
Mike: nope, they haven't. That's why I also referred to them as Philistines (an older name of theirs). While it's pretty obvious that I think Balfour was the same kind of wrong as Andrew Jackson's handiwork over here, I'm no fan of, well, honestly, any Arab regime. I'd call them a bunch of Mordor-esque thug-ocracies, but that would be uncharitable to Mordor-esque thug-ocracies (Burma). But the big point, regardless of my frothing at the mouth, is that the Palestinian non-Jews HAVE LOST. The game is long up, and the old addage of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" doesn't apply because the Zionists won't stand for it. There are no meaningful options within the former Palestinian territory for these people. Granted, there are "fight the power" folks over there who think lobbing APERS rockets constitutes meaningful resistance, but those folks are moron tools of Hamas and have no future either.
Sometimes it really is time to just quit.
Alex: true. I believe if everyone simply acknowledged that it's done and that there will be no return to their homes & orchards, the Palestinian refugees would chuck their enshrined former-house-keys and could set to becoming citizens of whichever thug-ocracy they've landed in. The Israelis, in spite of their willingness to throw the US under the bus whenever convenient, have too staunch an ally in the US for anyone to put that genie back into the bottle.
But you don't want the Palestinians stuck with another thugocracy - you want them scattered to good places so they can flourish, not rot. Forcing the refugees to become citizens of Jordon/Syria/Egypt/Lebanon does not solve the problem - it makes it worse. You have to get them to places where they can start again and establish their own cultural enclaves, but, with the possibility of growing and doing better. Then and only then you solve the problem.
Or so I think.
Alex, I think you are off on that one. They need to assimilate. I agree with Jimon this one. The Palistians are on the final loosing end. Speaking as someone who has had rockets and mortars launched at him for a year, that is no way to fight a war. Especially if you can't hit the broad side of a barn shooting on the inside. Homemade rockets? These guys are done for, its just a matter of time. I get Jim's point, its not a nice ending or very just, but its an ending. The Arabs could have really put these guys to use, many had lots of education and wanted to work. But no jobs or hope or love from any Arab country. They got used and used poorly as PR Props for the bleeding hearts.
I have to think that it is finally getting to the point that Israel is going to say "You know what? We don't care what anyone thinks. Everytime we do something, good or bad, you beat us up. Its never enough, its never in time, or its just evil. So screw you, we are going to finish this and if you don't like it, stop us." The US won't, Europe can't, Russia can't (probably don't want to as it helps their arms sales), and we all know that no Arab country can do squat. Going by the Indian comparison, we are seeing or at most waiting for the Wounded Knee to end it.
Mike,
Assimilation only works if the local populace wants them there, and they don't. No one wants them in the middle east - not the Israelis, not the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Egyptians, or even most of the Arab world. So if we are to learn from history at all, assimilation won't work for the Palestinians at all. Some have chosen to undertake their own diaspora and have thrived outside of the middle east, but just leaving the rest of them there to continue losing is a great idea either. If genocide in the Sudan is not to be tolerated, why should a slow death of a culture and race be tolerated either?
Both of us have studied history and sure, we can make a very convincing case that the Palestinians have lost. The state and land and culture as was known can no longer exist. But is it really right to just let it die? The only historical examples where letting it die seemed to have worked is where the culture was completely annihilated, or so smashed that the remainder had no choice but to assimilate, and even then there were long term consequences.
I say let's learn from history and try something different. It's really hard for the Islamic world to hate us if we follow one of their core principles and help one of those Islamic cultures move to a better life.
Perhaps I'm being naive, but, there only military solution left is to wipe them out - every one of them, including the children, and that is an option that even Israel can't quite pull off, and we can't either. So what if they can't fight? Just because the enemy is a pushover doesn't always mean you should smash them because you can. There has to be a point to war, and the continued fighting of Hamas has only one point - to salvage an Arab pride and to act like a Tar Baby - to let the Israelis and US get stuck on and waste our time and resources while their supporters take advantage of our distraction.
Again, perhaps I'm being naive, but assimilation will not, and can not work with this group of people.
Oh it can work, but like you said they need a place to grow in. And you are correct in that that place in NOT the Middle East. It could be if someone would work it (Jordan springs to mind, but that is a long shot).
I don't mean to sound snide here, but learn from history? We have, and we are seeing the exact historic result of a weaker power fighting a stronger power in a fight that has evolved into something very personal. Right or wrong don't enter into this equation, power and will to use it do. And who is right in this case? Morals are the slippery slope and the equvalent of a @$^hole, everyone has one (or in this case a set of them) and each one is different. Whose set do we use here? Palistine? Hamas? Israel? US? UN? Russia? China?
I am not trying to be rude here Alex and I value your opinion on these things because you have a great mind and give stuff like this a great deal of thought, but sometimes the answers are not nice. This is one of those cases. The Trail of Tears was a horrible thing, wrong and done by a true bastard. But it happened. I will use a quote from the book "This Kind of War". It was about Korea and the final sentence was "The lesson of the Korean War was that it happened". Right, wrong, ready or not, misjudgements on both sides, whatever. It simply happened and we had to deal with it and the mess that rose from it. I see this as the same thing. The one unarguable fact of this whole mess is that it happened/ing. And we have to deal with it, right or wrong, good or evil, opinion versus opinion.
I honestly think that a chunk of Arab regimes would be perfectly happy to assimilate the Palestinians if Israel handed them five billion dollars, or, if it handed each such Palestinian $10,000.
If there's one thing you can always buy in this world, it's a totalitarian regime. Doubly so for the Arab ones.
I'm not taking your comments as snide, but rather that I didn't explain myself well enough.
What I mean by learn from history is that we shouldn't just let it happen again. Sure - everything is pointing to what will happen if things continue the way they're going. We can look at current events and say with certainty what is going to happen. I'm suggesting not letting it happen and trying something else. We know what's going to happen, so, do we just let it happen or do we try something else that has not been done before? To borrow from Jim's comment - I would propose to take the money we give to Israel each year and relocate the Palestinians who want to leave (those wanting to leave is key) and give them options of relocating to the US or some other country willing to take them. Issue again here is willingness - if no one is willing to take them and they're not willing to leave, then they die and we wipe our hands of them; forget they exist even. Those that are willing to relocate are given a chance to start over - and they're partly subsidized for awhile again with the money that we've given to Israel all these years for their security. If we remove the problem that causes us to give Israel financial aid, I don't think they need it any more. I would propose that the relocation offer go to the refugees in the states of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt as well.
Devil of course is in the details...and I'll admit up front there are flaws in my plan, namely what I expect to be a major lack of willingness on the rest of the world to help solve the problem by taking these refugees and helping out with financial aid. I guess it just galls me that we have an obvious conclusion here for what will happen to an entire group of people, with loads of historical precedent indicating the nastiness that will happen, and the world will let it happen again. My larger concern is who will be next after this? Which minority loses hard next time? More dauntingly - when will it be my turn? Are we doomed as a species to always do this over and over and over? My only reason for thinking that this should occur, in a very cold and logical way, is that this is survival of the fittest and what allows us to evolve and move forward. We have a culture that no longer is strong - remove it and move on.
Again - when are we the weak ones to be rooted out? I don't like it.
Novel idea, but we'll be giving them aid anyway. If it were just AIPAC and Evangelicals seeking to imminentize the eschaton, that would be one thing, but even despite their constant disloyalty, they're the closest thing we have to a dependable ally near the Suez canal. If they try to close the canal again, we'll be attacking from Israel.
Because of considerations like this, merely moral aspects such as forcible relocation, constant privation, etc., simply don't matter, and the atrocities of the past will be repeated, just like the past's atrocities were themselves defeated. Just ask the Armenians....
oops: replace "defeated" with "repeated".
Yes, the Armenians came to mind more than once as I wrote my thoughts.
Cleanse, Rinse, Repeat. There are days where history seems more like fate than something to learn from.
Well, it just became a bit more academic. The IDF has moved in on the ground. I read some of the Hamas Press releases and they are reminding me of the stuff Poland was putting out in 1939. I haven't heard "gallant" used yet, but I don't think its far off. On a professional note, I am looking forward to seeing what changes the IDF have made since 2006 in southern Lebannon. Hamas has planned the fight to be exactly like what the Hezbollah did then, and Israel has been planning to beat that. My money is on the IDF on this one in a major way. Totally different terrain, no real allies nearby (aka Syria), and they are much less trained than the Hez is. And they won't be too many surprises, the IDF has a big intel network in Gaza unlike against the Hez.
I know that this may sound cold as all hell, but my profession is arms and this is the kinda stuff that I need to be studying. And its one step removed in this case (ie no Americans involved) which makes it a bit easier to study (for me anyway, reading a After Action Report and then reading names you know as part of the losses changes things in a big way).
Mike,
I don't think you're being cold - I fully understand why this interests you professionally. I'm the same way about fire. Remember "The Station" nightclub fire in Rhode Island awhile back. When I saw it on the news the morning after it happened I wasn't thinking "how horrible" I was watching the picture with an analytical eye and predicting rightly that the room would go to flashover on screen before the tape ended. I was sadly right.
My strong interest in military history and tactics has me interested in this as well, but while I'm also interested to see what sort of tactics show up (so I can start thinking of new materials to defend against it) I'm a bit more disturbed by the outcome as I've posted above. I'm guessing though that while Israel will win this, the ashes of this particular fire will still be left to smolder and they'll ignite again in a few months.
I think most of us can be of two minds, but yes, it's easier to study these things when you're not directly involved.
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