Israel/Gaza

yosi wrote:

You're saying that if Israel alone changes but Hamas stays the same there will be peace. I'm telling you that that is an incredibly ill-informed, or naive, or intentionally misleading argument. BOTH Israel and Hamas need to change for there to be a lasting peace. The alternative is that Israel changes, makes peace with whatever moderate Palestinian partner it can find, but is eventually forced to respond to continued Hamas violence.

You'll respond that there won't be continued Hamas violence, but therein lies our disagreement.

This is just conjecture. Self-serving conjecture that makes a veiled excuse for the continuation of the occupation and settlement building, all in the name of 'security'.

yosi wrote:

Byrnzie wrote:

yosi wrote:

I love how you've taken what I've said and made it mean the opposite of what I wrote. Just because I think Hamas is an obstacle to peace doesn't mean I don't think there's a lot Israel should be doing to create better conditions on the ground, e.g., freezing all settlement construction, significantly easing up on checkpoints and closures in the West Bank, significantly opening up imports/exports for Gaza, and changing the laws that incentivize living in the settlements so as to instead incentivize settlers to move back to Israel proper. The reason I harp on the obstacle posed by Hamas isn't because I want the occupation to continue, it's because I want it to end, and it will end that much faster, I believe, if Hamas is made to change its ways.

Well here we will have to disagree. Because I don't see how the continuance of the occupation has anything at all to do with the behaviour of Hamas.
It would be like the French in Algeria in the 60's saying that they refuse to leave Algeria and grant it it's independence because of the fact that the FLN keep attacking them.
The Israeli occupation isn't in place because of anything Hamas are doing. It's in place because the Israeli leadership wants the land that belongs to the Palestinians. It wanted the land before the formation of Hamas, and it still wants it today.

Here, finally, is where we disagree!

The connection as I see it, is this: The Israeli government has to decide to end the occupation. The government answers to the electorate. The electorate completely distrusts the Palestinians. In particular, they look at the popularity of Hamas, deriving from its refusal to abandon violence, relative to the much more moderate PA, and they conclude that ending the occupation will result in Hamas coming to power in the West Bank just as they did in Gaza. They further look at Hamas' rhetoric and actions and conclude that Hamas will continue to be committed to violence even once the occupation ends, and that the sort of rocket fire emanating from Gaza today will be coming from the West Bank in the future as well. Such fire, in addition to of course not being peace, would be completely intolerable for Israel because, in contrast to the rockets from Gaza, which until this year didn't impact the major population centers of the country, rockets from the West Bank would easily be able to reach every corner of the country. In such a situation the government would very quickly be forced to respond, and if limited airstrikes and incursions (such as we've seen in Gaza) aren't sufficient to end the fire (which they likely wouldn't be, given the experience so far with Gaza) they would eventually feel forced to reoccupy the West Bank to ensure security for the populace...and then you're right back where you started.

The conclusion is that the Israeli electorate is only going to demand that the government end the occupation (or support a government that decides to try to do so) if they feel that doing so isn't going to lead to the above scenario. That means that to get the Israeli electorate to buy in you have to somehow deal with Hamas.

You will, of course, argue that the Israeli understanding of Hamas is wrong (I personally don't think it is), and that if the occupation was ended Hamas would all of a sudden become a bunch of peace-loving cuddly bunny rabbits. But whether the Israeli perception is correct or not is beside the point. The point is that you have to change the perception if you want to see progress, and the only way I can see of changing the perception is by getting Hamas to abandon the rhetoric and actions that fuel the perception in the first place.

Funny, but I read numerous reports during the latest Israeli attack on Gaza that stated that the Israeli's living in areas where Hamas's crappy rockets were falling felt in no way frightened or intimidated by them.
And yet here you are claiming that Hamas rockets are what cause Israeli's to support the occupation. Sorry, but this is just utter crap.
Also, did you read the article posted by Drowned_Out earlier in this thread that makes it clear that the only time any Israeli's are killed by rocket attacks is when Israel launches another one of it's incursions?


http://mondoweiss.net/2012/11/dissectin ... tacks.html

'...For the entire duration of the 2008 Hamas–Israel cease-fire—even after Israel had broken the cease-fire on Nov. 4—not a single person was killed by rocket or mortar fire into Israel. Yet approximately two hours after Israel’s commencement of Operation Cast Lead, one person in Israel was struck and killed by shrapnel from a Qassam rocket. Two days later, three more people were killed in Israel from Gaza rocket and mortar attacks.

And for an entire year before Operation Pillar of Cloud, not a single Israeli was killed by rocket or mortar. Yet approximately sixteen hours after Pillar of Cloud commenced, a rocket from Gaza killed three Israelis.

It was during both military operations that Israel endured the highest number of fatalities from Gaza rockets and mortars in the shortest time spans.

...Rocket fatalities are more likely to happen during major Israel “anti-rocket” operations. Note that I say that fatalities are more likely to happen, rather than fatalities increase. Because fatalities are so rare, when they do happen in a burst, they appear more as instigations rather than incidental progressions.

...

A verrry slow genocide

If we borrow the IDF’s claim that more than 12,000 rockets have been fired into Israel in the last twelve years (which I dispute later), we get a kill rate of less than 0.217%. Thus in order to secure a single kill, we should expect to fire about 500 rockets. However, if the goal is to specifically kill Jews rather than foreign workers and Palestinian laborers, then it gets harder. Only 21 Jews have been killed by this method, bringing the kill rate down to 0.175%.

If this sounds disturbing or even anti-Semitic, note that I am just testing the argument of the current Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who, during Operation Cast Lead, co-wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the Gaza rockets and mortars were “more than a crude attempt to kill and terrorize civilians—they were expressions of a genocidal intent.”

Yet the statistics demonstrate that it is much less than a “crude attempt to kill.” One can imagine easier ways to kill a random person than to manufacture and fire 500+ homemade rockets.

As for genocide, at the going kill rate, it would require 4,477,714,286 rockets and mortars, and 4,477,714 years to kill all the Jews in Israel. This is assuming that Israel’s Jewish population does not increase. And of course we would need to factor in the limited range of the projectiles, which would require Israel’s non-growing Jewish population to all congregate in the western Negev by the year 4479726 CE, give or take a few years.

But by then, all of Israel’s Jewish population will have already been exterminated by the country’s other violent killer, automotive accidents.

It makes more sense, then, to suppose that there are political rationales for the firing of rockets and mortars.