PIxies cancel Israel concert after deadly Gaza raid

[bjorn_skurj]

If nonviolent resistance could (at least play a role in) convincing the Brits to give up India, then it can do anything.

[Chinese Apple]

If nonviolent resistance could (at least play a role in) convincing the Brits to give up India, then it can do anything.

 

Violent overthrow seems to have had more rapid success historically, however. (I live in the Irish Republic.)

[ih8music]

LOL. This sounds like "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey."

It is.

[uncool2pillow]

LouieB is dead right about non-violent resistance. I had a long discussion about this issue several years ago. He was much less sympathetic to Israel than I am, but we both agreed that Israel could NOT nor would WANT to handle the international pressure that would come upon them if they continued to oppress the Palestinians for, say 3 years, with only non-violence in return. It still wouldn't settle all the tricky land disputes, but it would force Israel into much more serious negotiations.

[bjorn_skurj]

Violent overthrow seems to have had more rapid success historically, however. (I live in the Irish Republic.)

Yeah, it only took the Irish three centuries to get the Brits to (mostly) leave!

[Chinese Apple]

How many of those three centuries were they peacefully resisting and how many were truly violent? The Chinese would still be under Manchurian rule if they peacefully resisted. And nevermind the Americans who decided not to put up peacefully with taxation without representation.

 

International pressure doesn't carry the weight it used to. There are too many conflicts around the world and everyone has problems of their own.

 

I am not into war but I think at some point it is ridiculous to expect anyone should peacefully resist unwanted advances when there is no end in sight. Why don't the isralis also peacefully resist? I'm glad we can all discuss this and offer up our points of view but sadly none of us can be the arbiter.

 

And anyway I started this thread because I was amazed that the pixies dared to take a stand, and risk being blacklisted.

[uncool2pillow]

How many of those three centuries were they peacefully resisting and how many were truly violent? The Chinese would still be under Manchurian rule if they peacefully resisted. And nevermind the Americans who decided not to put up peacefully with taxation without representation.

 

International pressure doesn't carry the weight it used to. There are too many conflicts around the world and everyone has problems of their own.

 

I am not into war but I think at some point it is ridiculous to expect anyone should peacefully resist unwanted advances when there is no end in sight. Why don't the isralis also peacefully resist? I'm glad we can all discuss this and offer up our points of view but sadly none of us can be the arbiter.

 

And anyway I started this thread because I was amazed that the pixies dared to take a stand, and risk being blacklisted.

Here's the problem in this conflict. The oppression of the Palestinians is directly connected to a history of violent attacks against the Israeli people. The Palestinians of Gaza elected Hamas who has called for the destruction of Israel. Without the violence, the Israelis no longer have a justification for the oppression and many more of their own citizens -- not withstanding international pressure -- wouldn't stand for it.

[Chinese Apple]

Chicken or the egg? Ad nauseum.

 

I heard a preschool teacher say about a girl in her class that she doesn't always start fights but she always ends them. Maybe that's all that matters in any conflict. We can argue till we are blue in the face about Palestine. There are people who devote their lives to finding a resolution and are being paid to do it and still they can't come up with a viable solution. or decide who is right or wrong. It's great to be so unequivocally sure of one point of view.

 

I believe killing the protesters on the flotilla was wrong. I am glad the pixies will bring attention and dialogue to these developments.

 

I think Helen Thomas was exasperated and secretly taped and the man who taped her probably has made some racial epithets Inhis life he would not want aired. I think Rush Limbaugh makes a living out of being offensive but is not sanctioned with the same force because the people he offends are not as powerful. It's not just about hate speech.

[LouieB]

Here's the problem in this conflict. The oppression of the Palestinians is directly connected to a history of violent attacks against the Israeli people. The Palestinians of Gaza elected Hamas who has called for the destruction of Israel. Without the violence, the Israelis no longer have a justification for the oppression and many more of their own citizens -- not withstanding international pressure -- wouldn't stand for it.

Actually I am totally sympathetic to Israel. I have consistantly said that Israel has a right to exist and security, and it isn't going away. I also know that the Palestinians are partially at fault because they refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist. The idea of non-violence resistance has to be coupled with a desire not only for an actual nation, but also that they are ready to live side by side with Israel. And certainly Israel has made overtures that teh Palestinians have not accepted. The second Intifada came at a crucial juncture which ended talks.

 

But Israel also can not go on indefinitely with their current policies either, so as usual both sides have to give and maybe give alot. I have also said for years that both the Israelis and Palestinians are sitting on one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world and peace will bring both lots of money. Neither seems to really want to negotiate in good faith so we have blockades, killing and a ton of posturing on both sides.

 

All this is pretty Pollyannaish, but only the hope is that somehow this cycle will break. Meanwhile the perception that Israel is in the wrong is the prevailing image in most people's minds, not only this current event, but the invasion of Gaza a year and a half ago. A sharp change in tactics by the Palestinians could break this thing open tomorrow.

 

LouieB

[Sunken mountain]

Israel is the only country in the world whose neighbors have been trying to kill it more or less non-stop from Day 1.

 

I just read the all thread waiting for a sentence like that,so thanks.

I´m agree with Louie B and really sad ,because my English isn´t good enough for introduce a word in the thread :Iran ,and discuss about it.

The future of all of us depends on Israel more than we want ,and even if we don´t like his way of "play" sometimes,it´s the only democratic country in this area

[Chinese Apple]

Bringing this up again only because I wanted Noam Chomsky to have the last word.

 

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-real-threat-aboard-the-freedom-flotilla-by-noam-chomsky

 

Israel’s violent attack on the Freedom Flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza shocked the world.

 

By Noam Chomsky

 

Friday, June 11, 2010

 

Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime.

 

But the crime is nothing new. For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats between Cyprus and Lebanon and killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes holding them hostage in Israeli prisons.

 

Israel assumes that it can commit such crimes with impunity because the United States tolerates them and Europe generally follows the U.S.’s lead.

 

As the editors of The Guardian rightly observed on June 1, “If an armed group of Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the high seas, killing at least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a NATO task force would today be heading for the Somali coast.” In this case, the NATO treaty obligates its members to come to the aid of a fellow NATO country—Turkey—attacked on the high seas.

 

Israel’s pretext for the attack was that the Freedom Flotilla was bringing materials that Hamas could use for bunkers to fire rockets into Israel.

 

The pretext isn’t credible. Israel can easily end the threat of rockets by peaceful means.

 

The background is important. Hamas was designated a major terrorist threat when it won a free election in January 2006. The U.S. and Israel sharply escalated their punishment of Palestinians, now for the crime of voting the wrong way.

 

The siege of Gaza, including a naval blockade, was a result. The siege intensified sharply in June 2007 after a civil war left Hamas in control of the territory.

 

What is commonly described as a Hamas military coup was in fact incited by the U.S. and Israel, in a crude attempt to overturn the elections that had brought Hamas to power.

 

That has been public knowledge at least since April 2008, when David Rose reported in Vanity Fair that George W. Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Elliott Abrams, “backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.”

 

Hamas terror included launching rockets into nearby Israeli towns—criminal, without a doubt, though only a minute fraction of routine U.S.-Israeli crimes in Gaza.

 

In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreement on Nov. 4 of that year, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket.

 

Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous invasion of Gaza on Dec.27.

 

Like other states, Israel has the right of self-defense. But did Israel have the right to use force in Gaza in the name of self-defense? International law, including the U.N. Charter, is unambiguous: A nation has such a right only if it has exhausted peaceful means. In this case such means were not even tried, although—or perhaps because—there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed.

 

Thus the invasion was sheer criminal aggression, and the same is true of Israel’s resorting to force against the flotilla.

 

The siege is savage, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest stage of longstanding Israeli plans, backed by the U.S., to separate Gaza from the West Bank.

 

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass, a leading specialist on Gaza, outlines the history of the process of separation: “The restrictions on Palestinian movement that Israel introduced in January 1991 reversed a process that had been initiated in June 1967.

 

“Back then, and for the first time since 1948, a large portion of the Palestinian people again lived in the open territory of a single country — to be sure, one that was occupied, but was nevertheless whole. …”

 

Hass concludes: “The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel’s military superiority.”

 

The Freedom Flotilla defied that policy and so it must be crushed.

 

A framework for settling the Arab-Israeli conflict has existed since 1976, when the regional Arab States introduced a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international border, including all the security guarantees of U.N. Resolution 242, adopted after the June War in 1967.

 

The essential principles are supported by virtually the entire world, including the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran) and relevant non-state actors, including Hamas.

 

But the U.S. and Israel have led the rejection of such a settlement for three decades, with one crucial and highly informative exception. In President Bill Clinton’s last month in office, January 2001, he initiated Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Taba, Egypt, that almost reached an agreement, participants announced, before Israel terminated the negotiations.

 

Today, the cruel legacy of a failed peace lives on.

 

International law cannot be enforced against powerful states, except by their own citizens. That is always a difficult task, particularly when articulate opinion declares crime to be legitimate, either explicitly or by tacit adoption of a criminal framework—which is more insidious, because it renders the crimes invisible.

 

Source: ITT

[bjorn_skurj]

No, wait - Amos Oz should have the last word!

 

Israeli Force, Adrift on the Sea

 

By AMOS OZ

ARAD, Israel

 

FOR 2,000 years, the Jews knew the force of force only in the form of lashes to our own backs. For several decades now, we have been able to wield force ourselves — and this power has, again and again, intoxicated us.

 

In the period before Israel was founded, a large portion of the Jewish population in Palestine, especially members of the extremely nationalist Irgun group, thought that military force could be used to achieve any goal, to drive the British out of the country, and to repel the Arabs who opposed the creation of our state.

 

Luckily, during Israel’s early years, prime ministers like David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful to use it only as a last resort. But ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been fixated on military force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.

 

Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and Monday’s violent interception of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid there are the rank products of this mantra that what can’t be done by force can be done with even greater force. This view originates in the mistaken assumption that Hamas’s control of Gaza can be ended by force of arms or, in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.

 

But Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.

 

Thus, the only way for Israel to edge out Hamas would be to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Israel has to sign a peace agreement with President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah government in the West Bank — and by doing so, reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip. That latter conflict, in turn, can be resolved only by negotiating with Hamas or, more reasonably, by the integration of Fatah with Hamas.

 

Even if Israel seizes 100 more ships on their way to Gaza, even if Israel sends in troops to occupy the Gaza Strip 100 more times, no matter how often Israel deploys its military, police and covert power, force cannot solve the problem that we are not alone in this land, and the Palestinians are not alone in this land. We are not alone in Jerusalem and the Palestinians are not alone in Jerusalem. Until Israelis and Palestinians recognize the logical consequences of this simple fact, we will all live in a permanent state of siege — Gaza under an Israeli siege, Israel under an international and Arab siege.

 

I do not discount the importance of force. Woe to the country that discounts the efficacy of force. Without it Israel would not be able to survive a single day. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget for even a moment that force is effective only as a preventative — to prevent the destruction and conquest of Israel, to protect our lives and freedom. Every attempt to use force not as a preventive measure, not in self-defense, but instead as a means of smashing problems and squashing ideas, will lead to more disasters, just like the one we brought on ourselves in international waters, opposite Gaza’s shores.

 

 

Amos Oz is the author, most recently, of the novel “Rhyming Life and Death.”

 

This was translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman.