Hamas cannot claim even to respect peace and human rights for its own people, much less Israelis, and that’s why it must be replaced with an entity that can negotiate for a peace agreement that is not built on the ashes of a democratic state.

In any case, I’d say both sides of the commenting divide have made their point.

COMMENTS FOR THIS POST ARE NOW CLOSED. (Additional comments that somehow make it past my spam filter for this post will be deleted).

What\s clear as day is that people here have one set of principles for Israel and another for Palestinians. That ISraeli life is deemed more valuable than that of Palestinians. We desperately need to a break from this kind of thinking

“Captive population”? Ducks in a shooting gallery?

Funny kind of ducks who have machine guns, RPGs and rockets and who are firing back with deadly intentions.

Oh, I forgot Ahmed you are saying that Israel has used disproportionate force because Israelis have killed over 500 Plasestinians, the vast majority being Hamas fighters, while only a small handful of Israelis have been killed.

I guess you are suggesting that from the 5,000 rockets Hamas launched into Israel at Sdereot and Ashkelon, since only a few Israelis were hurt or killed, the IDF forces should not have done any more damage to Hamas, be it in killing people and damaging buildings then Hamas did over the years when it daily broke the truce it had agreed was in place.

What a pathetically weak, besides the point and intellectually dishonest argument.

According to more then several opinion polls carried out in Gaza and the West Bank, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians support terrorism against Israelis, support the destruction of Israel and support all of Israel being taken for Palestinian land, ie. from Jordan to the sea.

That overwhelming majority has been reported at varying between 67% to about 85%, depending what is going on at the time that might stoke Jew hatred higher then average.

Just who then are the innocent Palestinians? Are you referring to the non-combattant parents of Palestinian children who commit a terrorist suicide bombing against Israelis and who are left not to mourn the death of their child, but to rejoice in his death and who encourage their other sons to follow their dead son’s example?

By these statitstics it would appear that 15 – 33 Palestinians out of every 100 might be innocent.

It means that 67 to 85 Palestinians out of every 100 are not so innocent and are supporting their leadership and all the fringe terrorist groups. When the allies bombed the hell out of Germany to end WWII, the number of Germans who did not support Hitler numbered far far more then the relative few Palestinians who want an end to war with Israel and do want to co-exist within the parameters of the much vaunted 2 state solution idea that is increasingly distant.

Ahmed you condemn Israel for not allowing journalists into the Gaza as if journalists would be there to take an accurate body count implying Palestinians are just too inept to make any more then a rough estimate.

It appears that Hamas has been acknowledging that the vast majority of those killed have been Hamas fighters.

As for Israel bombing mosques, universities and residential areas, you deliberately ignore that Hamas has used those facilities and areas to stockpile its armaments, munitions and rockets and to launch rocket attacks against Israel.

An inconvenient truth Ahmed?

Ahmed, your dissent as you call it is disingenuous or to be more blunt, plainly dishonest.

Your sympathies lie with the Palestinians. We get it. Being sympathetic to the Palestinians however should not keep an honest person from honestly assessing the situation.

It is your insistence in blaming Israel for any and all Palestinian suffering and for denying Palestinians their claimed rights, real or imagined and refusing to acknowledge any Palestinian wrongs and outright evil that marks you as a dyed in the wool anti-Semitic liar.

You are also a coward Ahmed when it comes to your fears that keep you from admitting and factoring into the equation any historical truths and current facts about Israel, the Arabs and the Israel- Jewish ongoing war with Palestinians/Arabs that speak volumes against the views you advocate for Palestinians and against Israel.

By suggesting Ahmed that this blog has denied you the right of dissent, you are playing the victim card. You have raised your voice in dissent and we here have concluded from your very own words that you are a typical dishonest cowardly anti-Semite blinded by hatred from seeing and dealing with realities.

What more need be said.

Dr. Gabor Mate and Ilan Pappe are two Jews who have because of their small lettered leftist ideologies chosen to become the useful idiots of the Palestinians.

Mate sounds like he deplores the violent excesses of Palestinians. He also presents a hope for peace in saying both Palestinians and Israelis have a right to live in peace, but that platitudinal nod towards a supposedly balanced view, is undermined by Mate singling out Israel for his condemnation.

Mate is anything but balanced and reasonable.

Approving reference to Ilan Pappe is just as revealing. Pappe is one of the new breed of new historians who are anti-Zionist in the extreme and who swallow the Palestinian propaganda historical revisionist narrative hook, line and sinker. Pappe after years of increasingly angry and hostile anti-Israel teaching was fired last year from the Bar Ilan University in Haifa, which was about as tolerant a university as the most tolerant, but even Pappe finally abused their tolerance to the point he became intolerable to the University.

He has found a teaching position at a British University where his anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic views are a welcome addition to a university that shares his particular views.

Ahmed, you may as well throw into your mix another Jew, Norman Finkelstein who is the child of Holocaust survivors. He, like Pappe and Mate were born Jewish, but that is about their only connection to their religious heritage.

Given their views, you would not be able to distinguish them from all the other pro-Palestinians/anti-Israel and anti-semitic voices of the world.

As I said before Ahmed, you have in support of your views, noted a number of pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel advocates who just happen to have been born Jewish. You have noted them to imply that because they have a Jewish connection their views are imbued with instant credibility and righteousness and that serves to support your views as credible and righteous.

Get real Ahmed. You don’t fool anyone with such debating tactics.

These left wing, peace at any cost and pacifists you reference, whether born Jewish or not are all possessed by their looney ideological zeal that has led them to find meaning for their lives in serving as useful idiots for Palestinians/Arabs in their ongoing war against Israel.

Being a useful idiot in the cause of Palestinians who have nothing but anti-semitism in common with them, is not what I call a noble and meaningful calling.

Each to their own I guess, but in the end Ahmed, the cloak you have covered yourself in to try to disguise your true anti-semitic nature is in tatters and that which you hold close to you has become transparent.

Admit what you are and find a blog where your kind of anti-semitic ideas will be cheered and you can feel good about that.

With all due respect to those suffering in Gaza right now, this appears to be the only “genocide” in history with the victims recording year-after-year double-digit population growth.

That’s a nice trick, as the Darfurians might tell you.

Without endorsing every tactic and action of the Palestinian
resistance, we have to understand that Israeli government policy hasnever been one of defense, only of domination. They supported Hamas when it suited them, they will try to crush Hamas when that suits them.

The real crime of the Palestinians are not the rockets, not the suicide bombers, but resistance itself: whether peaceful or violent. Non-violent protests have also evoked brutal and even murderous responses from the Israeli army. The Palestinian’s very existence denies the legitimacy of the Zionist claim of Palestine having been “a land without a people.”
That they don’t agree to being exiled forever, to being denied their human, civil and political rights, that they don’t agree to
disappear—that is the real crime of the Palestinians.

And if some of my fellow Jews assert that after 2,000 years we still have an attachment to the land and claims on it, do we really believe that the Palestinians will, after mere decades, surrender their rights, no matter how many of them are killed, jailed, tortured, and humiliated?

Peace is possible, and both Palestinians and Israelis have a right to lives of security, to an existence where they don’t have to fear their children being killed nor their children being compelled to kill others. It’s good to recall that there is another Israel, not just that of the politicians and the generals and the settlers. It’s the Israel of those thousands—that saving remnant–who demonstrate in Tel Aviv against this
latest atrocious war, and of those young people who choose jail and social opprobrium rather than serve as jailers, oppressors and murderers of Palestinians.

As the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has said, “In the name of the
holocaust memory let us hope the world would not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue.” Pappe, himself the son of Holocaust survivors, uttered those words in 2006. Not much has changed since then, only for the worse.

I am not politically correct so I won’t mince words.

Your posts reveal you to be not just anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic.

You clearly accept the pro-Palestinian propagandist’s view of the Israel – Palestinian/Arab conflict.

That view is marked by fundamental pervasive dishonesty, twisted logic, if not an absence of logic, an ignorance of history or an inability to face and deal with history and thus a compulsion to invent and revise history to accord with pro-Palestinian historical narratives and tacit, if not substantive support or making facile and demonstrably false excuses for Muslim Jew hatred that is rampant throughout the Middle East and that includes Palestinian society, be it in Gaza or in the West Bank, ie. Judea and Samaria,.

It is with this kind of twisted mindset that you have come to this blog falsely accusing pro-Israel supporters of advocating murder and violence against Palestinians and denial of their rights.

You have noted that some non-Muslims share your views as regards Israel and the Palestinians.

To speak generally, those non-Muslims who align with your views, come from the looney leftwing of Western society. That includes a number of Jewish writers whom you have pointed to in another post. That they are Jewish does not imbue their criticisms of Israel with instant credibility.

These ideological simpletons are compelled by their emotional attachments to their leftist ideology to equate weak with good and powerful with evil. They have thus thrown in with the Palestinians, their perception of the underdog, against Israel.

These left wing loonies serve as useful idiots for the Jew hating Palestinians, Arabs and fundamentalist Muslim Islamists with whom they have absolutely nothing in common, save their Jew hatred which for them comes not from Islam, but from Christianity.

Christians have made great efforts to rid their religion and religious cultural thinking of anti-semitism. They have not been entirely successful. Witness Western left wing loonies and regular common garden variety Christian anti-semites who still are around.

Still Christianity at least has made serious efforts to rid itself of the stain of anti-semitism and they continue to try.

The same cannot be said of Islam and of a very great many Muslim political, religious and advocacy leaders in Muslim nations and throughout the West.

Let me mention a few facts for you Ahmed.

Palestinian Jew hatred did not start with the creation of the State of Israel.

Do you recall Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, an Arab Nationalist leader who in the early part of the 20th century disseminated hatred against Jews in the region and incited his fellow Arabs to violence against Jews. He was appointed by the British to be Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 – 1948. In that capacity he continued to incite Arabs to violence against the Jews which was bloody between 1936 – 1939.

During WWII, el-Husayni traveled to Germany, met with Hitler, set up an office in Germany and offered Hitler his services to commit genocide of the Jews in the region of the British mandate.

Is it any wonder that in the Muslim Middle East including Gaza and the West Bank under Fatah’s control, that the best selling book is Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Incidentally the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian Secret Service fictional tale that visciously demonized Jews is the second best selling book.

That should tell you something.

History thus records the Nazi roots of Palestinians, and their systemic and cultural Jew hatred that calls for the genocide of Jews, the destruction of Israel and the taking of all of Israel for an Arab Palestinian state.

Though worded somewhat differently, both the Hamas and PA/Fatah founding Charters incite Jew hatred, call for the death of Jews and the realization of the dream to destroy Israel and take all of Israel for the Arab Palestinian people.

Ahmed, another fact you don’t want to deal with is that the stated intention of the Arab nations in 1948 was to commit genocide of the Israelis – Jews. That was the stated intention of the other genocidal wars the Arabs started against Israel, but failed.

What you have done in your comment Ahmed is completely ignore history or even the recent events that led to this war being Hamas 5,000 rocket attacks against Israel over the past 18 months contrary to Hamas’s words it would keep the truce.

Israel finally retaliated in self defence and it is only Israel’s self defence military actions you have seized upon.

You ignore as well that so called innocent Palestinians have been killed because Hamas sets up their military installations and rocket launch pads in civilian areas precisely to use these civilians as Human Shields.

In so doing, Hamas is not only solely responsible for Palestinian civilian deaths, Hamas is breaching the Geneva Convention and is engaging in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I would have thought that might have mattered to you Ahmed.

If perchance you are not anti-semitic as you appear and do hold an honest anti-Israel opinion that would make you quite a rare anomaly.

If you are such an anomaly Ahmed, then I invite you to go head to head with me on history and current events.

If however you are nothing more then the anti-semite you appear to be, then get lost.

“It’s clear to me that this the conflict has in many ways taken onreligious overtones but at it’s base it’s about land, dispossesion and occupation.”

-All great human questions are at base religious in nature. That you are convinced “it’s about land…” is only your way of integrating information into a certain world view, one that relies on most dubiously reducing a complex humanity to supposedly definitive causes.

But, in your (secular) religion of material causes, what does it mean to think that a place that is witness to a rather disordered world of fighting factions and tribes, united only by a hatred of Israel and America, yet highly dependent on outside aid, bereft of much of any kind of economy or productivity worth anything in the modern world, a place that is highly urbanized and populated has a problem that is “at base” about land (and not, say, education, or religious madness, or resistance to modernity)? Do you suggest the problem will be solved by finding a suitable number of olive groves or pasture for this once largely Bedouin population that has grown immensely since Western medicine and food came to the Middle East? Is a return to a peasant economy the solution for 1.5 million people in a world where all land must become productive if we are to feed the world?

Yours is really a meaningless statement, a Utopian gesture as if all the problems of a dysfunctional city would disappear if they were given some more land, to live like their ancestors. In other words, your comment is blind to all the dysfunctions of contemporary Palestinian life which won’t go away if all the Jews are defeated and eliminated from the land. Your comments are blind to the fact that whatever happened 60 years ago, the problems of today are not reducible, for purposes of blame, to past events. Do you not see that Gaza is in large part a culture that lives off an interminable “peace process” that is really about keeping up a low-level interminable war so as to extort money and other aid from the outside world wringing its hands about the whole ugly affair and fearful that the Global Intifada might come next to their shores, and thus willing to pay blackmail in hopes of appeasement? Do you not see that whatever legitimate claims of injustice may once have existed should no longer be taken seriously once a culture plunges into fanatacism and martyrdom and helps constitute an existential threat to others? History’s centre of gravity moves on; it is no longer about “land”; it is now about the claims of a now global intifada to oppose modernity throughout the West, whether Paris or London or Vancouver, by recourse to a world view that pits a now Islamic-led world of outsiders against the supposed hegemony of the successfully modern?

“The last thing I’ll say is that the idea that people here can speak of Palestinians as fostering a “dealth cult” culture, at a time in which they are being killed at a 100 to 1 ratio, when a quick glance at any report of Amnesty International, B’teselem or Human Rights Watch will show you that the IDF is engaged in constant violations of human rights in the occupied territories, including the use of human shields, inprosonment, collective punishment and deliberate targetting of civilians demonstrates what little regard for Palestinians lives you have.”

-is it not possible for you to imagine that those who care about Palestinian lives might believe they have no plausible future as long as they remain entrapped in a world dominated by war lords and diplomats, and that the violence we find awful we may think nonetheless inevitable, even necessary, in the struggle to separate the human shields from their gunmen, and to separate willing voters for Hamas from their insane ideologies?

And don’t you see that your very own comment is evidence of a worship of victimhood? What is meaningful to you in understanidng this conflict? Some fancied apprehension of the killing ratio? As if all that mattered were the blood count and not arguments about the nature of disorder, cultural failure, and the models and forms of reciprocity we might look to if we really cared about Palestinian lives. Frankly, what I see you caring about is maintaining the endless bloody addiction to Palestinian victimhood, that can only be redeemed by demonization of Israel and martial combat. That’s what I mean by “death cult”.

But if you really cared about Palestinian lives, you might ask questions like why have Palestinians never been integrated into the neighboring Arab nations that have managed to eliminate most of their former Jewish and Christian populations? or, why don’t the Palestinians accept the only truly modern and successful Middle Eastern nation – Israel – as a model to follow in friendship? why is it impossible for most Muslims religiously to accept the idea of a Jewish state, or at least a state in which Jews would share power with Muslims and hence sometimes be in superior positions to them?

Unless and until people like you start attending to hard reality, at odds with ideological fancies, and asking how Palestinians can accept their own place in history, i.e. recognize the established fact of Israel, and not wish things away with pompous talk about “those of us with a longer historical memory” you are doing nothing but worshiping victims and encouraging their further creation. You are thus, as are many in the West, including many of our most famous intellectuals and academics, a death cultist.