Some people are so predictable.

Israeli startups endure missile attacks
My progressive friend out in Oregon finds the lament by an 18-year-old internet denizen who has launched his own startup in Tel Aviv less than understandable.
Good grief, isn’t there enough to go around?
Ok, I consider myself a reasonable person and to those who blame the Israelis for all the mess in the Middle East, I only ask one question: What is it you want them to do?
I am sorry, but I really don’t have a clue. I mean if you want them to trade the West Bank and Gaza as a nation for the Palestinians, then pray tell me why it is the Palestinians who don’t seem to want to accept that offer? I mean it has been offered to them several times, always to be rejected on one premise of another.
Now, I am not a rocket scientist, but it seems that a compromise is in order here (sort of like the one that was offered in 1947 but precipitated a war of extermination against the “Zionists” who were only looking for place without the imminent threat of extermination on land that they and their ancestors had lived on for millennia).
Now, I know that for some reason, which I don’t know and don’t think he does either, a Palestinian friend of his (who lived near where we grew up together) got himself assassinated by an Israeli operative who fled prosecution to Israel. This truly was a tragedy, although I expect that the Israeli operative felt he had a perfectly logical reason to put a bomb on the man’s doorstep. That is what happens when you are in a conflict and it seems to me that the “Palestinians” and the “Israelis” have been in that conflict all my life.
Granted, the Palestinians who have been cooped up in “refugee” camps (if you want to call them camps) for those 65 years have had a pretty rough go of it. They have been made a lot of promises over the years by their leadership and their Arab Muslim brethren which have only led to their suffering.
I don’t know the answer. I do know that one way to stop the attacks and counter-attacks is to stop the attacks in the first place. You don’t want to be bombed: then stop bombing the other guy. It works both ways. Unfortunately, it seems, at least to this observer in the US of A, that there are factions within the Palestinian national wannabees who just don’t want to accept a Jewish-Israeli presence in the region.
I think it is fine that the UN granted the Palestinians a nation status (albeit only as a non-voting observer), but in return the Palestinians should have expected some response (like the Israeli announcement that it is going to expand its settlements around Jerusalem and on the West Bank). I mean, do you really expect the Israelis to sit there and do nothing.
Jiminy Christmas, do you really expect those of the Jewish faith to just stand by and do nothing? They tried that once and about 6 million of them died in just Europe in a little more than six years – the direct result of a rather well-documented “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”
It would seem logical to me that the descendants of their survivors would be a little less likely to just sit back and let the equivalent of their entire population die again.
So, they have nuclear weapons? You got a problem with that? They haven’t used them yet, and I suspect that they won’t unless they are about to get overrun. Just a guess on my part, but I do understand the Masada complex of no surrender, no retreat.
Do you have a problem with them trying to keep rockets and bombs from being given to people who fully intend to use them, regardless of what agreement their political leaderships strike? Seems rational to me.
It also seems rational when you are outnumbered and surrounded, that you try to put together the biggest stick on the block (especially when your neighbors have spent 65 years trying to eliminate you).
(Arab-Israeli Military Balance)
The irony to me is that the Jordanians could have absorbed the West Bank at any time between 1947 and 1967 and I doubt there would have been much said about it. The same could be said with the Gaza Strip, by the Egyptians before 1967. But that didn’t happen. Why it didn’t happen, you need to ask the Jordanians and the Egyptians, but I suspect that it has something to do with their own internal politics and the fact that the West Bank Arabs and the Gaza Arabs aren’t of their tribe or something.
Still, it comes back to what is the solution? Obviously it has to be a two-state solution, unless you want the Jews to agree to commit suicide, which is not an option that I would ask of them.
If it is a two-state solution, then the Palestinians need to pony up a realistic alternative for a map that allows the Israelis not to exist but to survive and be viable; just as the Israelis need to pony up their version of said map.
Such a map needs to take the realities of what is on the ground today and not was there 65 years ago. Sorry, but what is past is past and we can’t go back there even if we wanted to do so.
Unfortunately, my progressive friend out West, bless his heart, probably doesn’t see it that way, nor, apparently, do the folks in the region. Wish they did, however, because it would save so many lives from being damaged and destroyed.
Still, would someone tell me rationally what they expect the Israelis to do? Not what they should have done before, but what should they do now?

War is a tragedy

We are seeing an all too familiar tragedy being played out in the Middle East, yet again.

It is not just in Syria, where 40,000 people have been killed in a savage civil war and hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee its violence.

It is not just the dozens of people who have already died in the conflict between the Palestinians in Gaza and Israel.

Anywhere you look, you see this kind of violence seemingly becoming routine. It is, as I said, a tragedy. It also is understandable.

In Syria, it is about power and who wields it. The Alawites, the Sunnis, the Shi’as and probably a half dozen interest groups are battling over who rules Damascus.

In Gaza, it is merely a rerun of something we have witnessed for nearly 65 years, if not centuries.

I know my progressive friend out west is practically foaming at the mouth over the Israelis bombing Gaza, but what choice do they really have? Really, tell me, because I want to know.

The Jews in Israel are survivors and descendants of survivors of horrors we here in North America cannot even begin to contemplate. We can empathize a little in the U.S., I suppose, because for 40 years we lived under the Sword of Damocles of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War. Fortunately, that holocaust didn’t happen and its tentacles that stretched around the globe in proxy wars never really touched home.

But the Israelis today live with a holocaust that threatens them every day and they remember a Holocaust 70 years ago that wiped out six million Jews. Just as the Palestinians trapped in Gaza and the West Bank face their own fears of a holocaust.

Unfortunately, the Israelis never set out to kill all the Palestinians and drive them into the sea. The Palestinians and the Arab Muslim nations surrounding the Jewish enclave on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea have pretty much made it obvious, if not unequivocal, that they do intend to kill all the Jews and if possible drive them into that sea.

I guess it is hard to understand that war mentality, the siege mentality; such an existential threat would have on a people after 65 years. Especially if your enemies continue to fire rockets, missiles and bombs at you.

The Palestinians in Gaza basically triggered the latest round of violence with the seemingly incessant stream of rockets into Israel, with ever increasing range on such missiles.

I know the Gazans are trapped, but unfortunately, from my point of view, they are attacking the wrong enemy. They should be attacking the Egyptians and the Jordanians and the Syrians who basically have kept them cooped up, stoking the Palestinians’ anger and letting countries like Iran and Russia smuggle in arms and other war material over the years.

I know that is not politically correct, nor probably approved by anybody, but it takes two to fight wars, especially if neither side wants to lose its existence.

The sad thing, apparently, if it was a state, a nation, that the Palestinians want, then they could have had that years and years ago. However, they have chosen not to accept that. The only way they would accept it, apparently, was if they cast out the Jews and unfortunately they have just as much right to the land as Palestinians, for in reality, they are Palestinians too, just not Arab Muslims. Seven years ago, the Israelis gave the Palestinians Gaza and the Palestinians turned it in to a prison camp, rather than develop it.

So, what we see today is only going to get worse and bloodier. The Israelis are not going to stop defending themselves and walk into the gas chambers again, and the Palestinians will not stop their asymmetrical warfare (regardless of the price that “civilian” women and children will pay in the blowback) unless they get the whole loaf.

Sad, isn’t it? Tragic and absolutely so human of us.