Who started? (Gideon Levy)

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"We left Gaza and they are firing Qassams" - there is no more precise a formulation of the prevailing view about the current round of the conflict. "They started," will be the routine response to anyone who tries to argue, for example, that a few hours before the first Qassam fell on the school in Ashkelon, causing no damage, Israel sowed destruction at the Islamic University in Gaza.

Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but "they started."

They are also "breaking the rules" laid down by Israel: We are allowed to bomb anything we want and they are not allowed to launch Qassams. When they fire a Qassam at Ashkelon, that's an "escalation of the conflict," and when we bomb a university and a school, it's perfectly alright. Why? Because they started. That's why the majority thinks that all the justice is on our side. Like in a schoolyard fight, the argument about who started is Israel's winning moral argument to justify every injustice.

So, who really did start? And have we "left Gaza?"

Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like "partition" and "an end to the occupation," did result in the dismantling of settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' departure from Gaza, but it did almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to their bitter fate. Now, less than a year after the disengagement, it is going back, with violence and force."

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[AlamoDemoc]

1. We the American people are to blame...we arm the Israelis with

our tax dollars. Of course, we re to blame.

[cali]

2. What crap.

I don't mean to be rude, but this really irritates me whether it's about Iraq, or Israel or the lack of funding for family planning or the funding for religious celibacy programs for kids or, or, or. There are people to blame, assigning blame to every taxpaying US citizen is not legitimate. Collective blame is no more legitimate than collective punishment.

[AlamoDemoc]

5. Our foreign policy is to blame. Period. All else is futile argument

[cali]

6. Do you see the difference

between saying "We the American people are to blame...we arm the Israelis with our tax dollars. Of course, we re to blame.", and saying that our foreign policy is to blame? (even if you did gratuitously, erroneously, and imperially declare that all other arguments were futile) If you can't see the difference between those two declarations, then truly, discussing anything with you is futile.

[AlamoDemoc]

7. Are you suggesting that we aren't responsible of our choice of

government? We elect our governments and regardless of what our elected governments do, we are responsible of their actions. Therefore, we the tax bayer/voter are to blame of what our governments do and what they do with our tax dollars....inside or outside of our borders.

[Totallybushed]

23. No, we're not to blame.

The election was stolen in 2000 and 2004.

However, the Palestinian side is to blame because they will not recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewsih state. they insist on a fictitious "right of return", and the immediate cause, they kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

[Recursion]

15. *shrug*

I've never been to the Levant and I don't pretend to understand it. I have been to Africa, and I do have some understanding of the effects of US and European imperialism, and frankly blaming every problem on that is a little facile. While the US still has a lot of cleanup to do in a lot of regions, to try to deny peoples' responsibilities for their own actions smells to me like the kind of "white man's burden" racism that led us to be imperialistic in the first place. Israelis and Palestinians refuse to make the neccessary sacrifices for peace. The US and Europe and the USSR the Arab nations made this problem worse, but ultimately only the Israelis and Palestinians can solve it, by changing their behavior.

[YankeeFan]

27. So You Are Blaming President Johnson For Arming Israel?

Up until the Six Day War Israel got most of their munitions from Europe, France in particular. After that, Uncle Sam started delivering much of its arsenal. Check out the airlift we did for the War of Atonement.

[Tom Joad]

9. I agree with Cali on this. Common folks don't make foreign policy

or domestic policy for that matter. That is in the hands of the fat cats that buy the candidates and the political parties.

We do have responsibility to do all we can to change that. We can, too. We will.

Go to US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation at
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/index.php

[Igel]

3. Who started it?

The Jews who didn't convert and who weren't properly submissive; who took seriously claims of autonomy, within strictures that should have led to penury, and did reasonably well on the whole.

The Jewish immigrants who thought they were buying land, but who pitched a fit when they were defrauded: the land deals were denied, or declared illegal, but no compensation was possible or proper. They complained and cried 'injustice' in a non-submissive way.

The Jews, esp. the immigrants, who obviously weren't inferior to the fellahin, and who didn't want to act as though they were inferior, and submit.

The fellahin who objected when Jews got to be a significant minority and started setting their own community-internal standards.

Fellahin acted badly, were told they were doing good, and acted worse; the Empire backed them up, first the Ottoman, then the British. The Jews objected, acted badly in self-defense, were told they were out of line, and acted even worse. Then WWII happened.

All else is epilogue.

[cali]

4. That's ridiculous.

For you all else is epilog, that's not true for millions of others. Even so forget the past for a minute, How is Israel's incursion into Gaza legitimate right now.

I'm no fan of Gideon Levy- he's a practioner of the type of writing I most dislike- but he makes some good points in this piece, despite his predilection for a heavily biased narrative.

[Igel]

8. Yes, it's ridiculous. Somewhat.

But the question itself is ridiculous. It presumes a starting point. Find it, and make it such that both sides agree on it. Good luck. Each side selects the starting point to serve their own ends.

Either we stop asking the question, "Who started it?" and ascribe the origin of the cycle of violence to the mists of prehistory, or we take a serious stab at determining when the problem really started.

It wasn't with the withdrawal from Gaza, or the '67 war, or the founding of Israel. It was before that. Hamas' attitude predates WWII.

The first rock was thrown a century ago. But as long as everybody keeps asking "Who started it?", with the assumption being that it must be in the last 20 years (or whatever), you never get far enough back to see the same rhetoric, attitudes, and actions *before* all the emotional, political, and rhetorical baggage that's occurred since '45. The real problems were pretty much set in concrete back then, and everything else has been the same story over and over, with only one change of any note: government. That, unfortunately, is fairly incidental.

[Violet_Crumble]

16. What sort of writing is Gideon Levy a practitioner of?

The only form of writing Gideon Levy is a practitioner of is one where he's openly critical of his own government's policies towards the Palestinians....

[cali]

18. Actually,

all writers have a style of writing. It's not what Levy says that I don't like, it's his style of writing. I think of him as a 'heavy breather'. He's about as subtle as a sledgehammer. That simply isn't a style of writing I admire. Levy doensn't do nuance. I can't do without it.

[Violet_Crumble]

21. I could understand that of Uri Avnery....

...but Gideon Levy, along with Amira Hass, are two of the best Israeli writers on the conflict....

[eyl]

26. While I suually don't agree with her,

Hass is a good reporter. Levy, OTOH, is more of a polemist than a "real" journalist, IMO; and he seems to have a "means justifies the ends" approach to journalistic integrity.

For example, there's an article in Ma'ariv by Amnon Dankner (Hebrew only, unfortunately, but I can translate it in more detail if requested). It discusses the case (which I recall was mentioned here at the time) of a Palestinian who was found dead, tied to a donkey, some hours after being arrested by Border Patrol troops. The Ministry of Justice investigation ruled there were no grounds to support that, but Levy claimed it was a murder by those troops, and supported his claims by describing another case were Border Patrol troopers tied a man to a donkey and had him dragged, injuring him. However:

1) When the results of the first investigation were made public, Levy approached the MoJ, telling them there was another case of a Palestinian who had been dragged. Levy refused to give any details of the man (though those details later appeared in his articles).

2) Upon further investigation, neither the PA, B'Tselem, nor the supposed victim's own mother (note this was a relatively young man, and thus likely still lived with his family) knew anything about any such attack on him.

[Tom Joad]

10. I appreciate G. Levy pointing out the hypocrosy of the whole mess.

Do read the article.

[MrPrax]

11. I thought even as they pulled out...

of the callousness and sheer maliciousness of destroying all the settlement communities instead of just simply transferring them over to the Palestinians, who have very little.

Such an act would have certainly went along way to winning the hearts and minds of some in Palestine -- instead out of spite, perfectly good communities and their structures were destroyed.

Immoral and wasteful.

[pelsar]

12. how about reading? learning?

the palestenians requested that the settlements be destroyed..they rightly so planned on avoiding a "house" grab and planned on buidling hi rises...
where do you get you "information from"....electronicantifada?, www.evil_israel.com?

Palestinian technical teams prefer these buildings to be destroyed so that PNA can use this area to meet the expected population growth in 2020.

http://withdraw.sis.gov.ps/english/conf/conf-moi.html

[MrPrax]

13. You might have a point...sorta

The agreement does leave the final decision though to Israel -- that was a Palestinians 'request'.

But this is interesting here:

AMY GOODMAN: Amira Hass, what about what happens to these settlements after? The reports are that they won't allow Palestinians in for a few weeks, and then I know some of the settlers have burned their homes. Is the Israeli government going to demolish the others, or will Palestinians be able to move into them?

AMIRA HASS: The houses are going to be demolished. I think it was also something that also the Palestinians wished for, because the houses do not fit the Palestinian requirements and Palestinian needs. There are houses for -- large houses for small families. And this is too luxurious for Palestinian reality, especially in the Gaza Strip. So the agreement is that Israel -- the Israeli bulldozers, they have become very expert during last years in demolishing houses, the Palestinian houses. So they will first demolish the houses in one stroke, take away the dangerous parts like asbestos -- asbestos roof, and take away the water barrels, water tanks, and then they come and demolish the rest of it. Then Palestinian contractors and workers will evacuate the rubble to Sinai. This is the plan. So it will take, I guess, a few weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of demolishing homes, I have noted over the last few days with the mainstream press in the United States, there's been a great effort to get the voices of Jewish settlers out, and you can hear the pain in their voices as they talk about their homes for many years, being forced out of them. And I was wondering if you think this should be a model of the coverage of what happens to Palestinians? Now, in the case of Palestinians, of course, their, for example, homes that are being demolished, we rarely hear that kind of extended interview with a Palestinian whose home has just been destroyed.

AMIRA HASS: Well, that’s, of course, the fault of, as you say, the mainstream media, and which pains much more the loss more the loss of a huge house built at the expense of the Palestinians than the loss of thousands of Palestinian houses and very, very un-modest houses, and this is an understatement, which were very often demolished in order to safeguard the security of those very settlements. Actually, during the last five years, the Gaza Strip, both houses and neighborhoods and fields were destroyed in order to facilitate the army's job at securing the life of 8,000 or the comfort of 8,000 Jews. And this is at the expense of 1 million Palestinians -- almost 1.5 million Palestinians.
Democracy Now

Your link wasn't very helpful as it is only conference notes and that passage seems to be about 'outstanding issues'?

"Regarding Eretiz(sp?)terminal and buildings inside settlements, minister Dahlan said that it is up to Israel to destroy them or not, but if Israel decides to destroy them, it must remove their ruins. Palestinian technical teams prefer these buildings to be destroyed so that PNA can use this area to meet the expected population growth in 2020. Dahlan affirmed that PNA is ready to participate in removing the ruins to anywhere out of Gaza Strip; this will create work opportunities for many Palestinian workers."
Conference held by the Ministry of Information

I know that in most cases, the only buildings Israel left were synagogues, which were, as expected, promptly torched by the Palestinians.

But it was interesting to find out more about the disreality of the settler mindset in that they built houses that would have been more in keeping with an American suburbs than reflective of a desert. Also interesting to see that the Palestinians really didn't have any use for most of these McMansions.

As far as the businesses go, how many Israelis sold them to the Palestinian Authority as was provided in the agreement? Were any other than the highly publized 'greenhouses' that an American donated to the PA? Do you know? I can't find much on that point.

[pelsar]

14. few business were there....

outside of the greenhouses most of the business were service oriented...stores, municpalities, etc -self serving, nothing that had any real use for the palestenains.

my link was "quick one"....before the withdrawl there was plenty of discussion of what to do...it was obvious to all that the suburban style dwellings were not appropriate for the palestenains.

and spare me the discorse on environmental design, as if the settlers somehow had this additional bit of "evil in them"
in that they built houses that would have been more in keeping with an American suburbs than reflective of a desert

would you like to show me any modern society that developes adobe style housing for the desert on a large scale?...or are you now going to claim that the hi rises in gaza are somehow more appropriate for desert design?.......

[MrPrax]

17. There you go...

I agree...!!!

and NO I would not in any way shape or form accuse Israelis being 'evil' for insane urban planning in deserts as there is more than enough 'evil' to go around on that score. Arab dictators and their various vanity projects like golf courses and wheat fields (rem that Saudi goal? heh) are just as enivornmentally noxious as Palm Springs, Phoenix or any of a dozen re-located instant towns that the old Soviet Union used to throw up at a moments notice.

The thing that bugs me is the fanatic defense of the indefensible regardless of which US client state is doing it. Then having the gall to suggest that what goes in say Israel in the same as the West. That is about as ridiculous as the current business Pro-China propaganda which wants to paint good old China as some struggling little industrial power with 'growing pains' no different than England in the 19th century...I don't buy that propaganda either. They are shitholes that don't provide for their little people.

Being little people I tend to note these things about the modern state and the fact that more and more 'Great Leaders©' have visions, like drunken shaman of old, that usually gets a whole lot of 'little people' killed, imprisoned, poisoned, tortured or worked to death for little more than providing Great Leaders© with more guns, power and justifications to kill of 'little people'.

Nothing personal...even though I am one of the 'Chosen' People...but I prefer 'little people' ;-)

[Phx_Dem]

19. Phoenix is "environmentally noxious"?

Water mgmt out here in the west is a lot more complicated than most people realize. I don't understand your comment.

[pelsar]

20. i believe the idea.....

revolves around environmental design...designing with the land and with the local resources and not "taking city design A" and simply placing it anywhere and everywhere while ignoring the local environment.

Whereas the more primitive societies were well adapted to their local environments, mainly because they didnt have the resources to control it, todays society is very different. Those living in the desert want their climate controlled environment just as much as those living in N. Canada....local building materials may have a better insulation, etc but will be more expensive to build with, hence our cities will tend to use the same materials whereever they are...and look similar, irreguardless of the local environment.

I doubt our poster above would be willing to live in Arizona and use less water then a resident of Michigan (which would be the result of a more environmental conscience populace). I think that is what he was getting at.

(and just for the fun of it....i have a masters in environmental design)

[Phx_Dem]

22. There is plenty of water in AZ

and the farmers in the state use 88%+ of it. Energy use comparisons? According to this reasearch study using identical homes, Phx. used $1339 in a year compared to $1215 for Vancouver BC, $1453 for Halifax NS, $1626 for Toronto ON, $1770 in Quebec City PQ, and a whopping $2101 for Winnipeg MT.

http://www.concretethinker.com/Content%5CUpload%5C296.pdf

[pelsar]

24. thats the "wrong attitude"...

dont get me wrong i'm an advocate of "proper design" i'm well aware of the needs and demands of modern society.....i was just making some guesses of what the previous post was all about.

Arizona, the area of phoenix is semi arid to arid, with a certain type of environment that has limited water resources, plenty of sun, few clouds,etc

In theory (and in expermental homes) the desert sun, proper building materials, and design, the individual home in the arizona and other semi arid places could use incredibly small amounts of man produced energy to provide for their needs. However, it means getting rid of the classic suburban home, two car garage, central climate controlled air, the lawn etc, revising ones life style etc.......except for the few who are "in tuned " with their environment, it wont be done.

[Phx_Dem]

25. Yea, I get what your saying

but as I pointed out in my last post, homes in very cold environments use more energy but I don't hear anyone telling them to change their houses or move to a more hospitable area.

Personally I don't like xeriscaping, but I grew up out here and am a little sick of the desert. I like green lawns, plants, trees, two-car garages and ranch homes, sorry. I do have a very good evap. on my roof if that helps! (right next to my heat pump). Also, all my plants trees etc are drip irrigated, which everyone out here does.

[IndianaGreen]

28. Who cares who started this shit, the important thing is to stop it!

If you have two children fighting constantly over a toy, you take that toy away from both of them.

Perhaps it is time for both sides to be forcibly removed from that land over which they had fought for so long, and nuke it so that no human can set foot on it for at least 100,000 years. That will end the bickering, and we can all return to our regular TV programming!

Sorry fundamentalists Christians, but we also postponed the Second Coming until the "Holy Land" stops being radioactive.