WATCH: IDF Soldier Screams At Israeli Activists: 'You Are Worse Than The Arabs'

[Ken Burch]

124. I don't have to choose between Israel and Hamas

Last edited Tue May 14, 2013, 04:09 PM - Edit history (2)

I am not Palestinian, and it's not my place to make any choices about the country.

Furthermore, it's not as if Hamas would be gone today if only Israel had stayed in Gaza. It would still be there, and it would still be able to do everything its doing now.

We both know that nothing MORE democratic would be happening in Gaza if Israeli troops had stayed. Israel had never encouraged democratic local governance anywhere in Palestine(ask all the officials in local Palestinian government who THOUGHT they'd be allowed to actually take up the offices they'd been democratically elected to, only to be arrested or in some cases badly injured or even killed instead, as some elected West Bank mayors were in the 1980's). And any group that did end up in power in Palestine BECAUSE Israeli troops were still there would automatically be permanently discredited in the eyes of the Palestinian people, which would make anything negotiated with said group useless from the start. You can't really dispute that particular point.

Hamas, an organization I despise, rose in influence precisely BECAUSE of the Occupation, precisely because Israel stayed and refused, for decades, to negotiate with the leadership the Palestinian people had indicated they wanted Israel to negotiate with...therefore damaging that leadership, making it look useless(to go along with the other serious flaws it had)and giving Hamas, a group that was previously totally irrelevant in political terms, the chance to say "if you back us, we can get what the PLO couldn't get". You could, in fact, compare it to the way that Hitler got his big break in show business precisely because the French and British governments of the day did everything they could to strangle the Weimar Republic in its cradle...destroying democracy in Germany just because that democracy had come to power as a result of the people of Germany overthrowing the Kaiser(the French and the Brits didn't want to set the precedent of rewarding a European country for overthrowing its heriditary monarch and establishing a non-aristocratic society, so they enabled the worst tyrant in the 20th century instead).

The problem here goes back to the thing you most obsessively defend...the Israeli governments' obsession with trying to decide by itself who the "acceptable and recognized" Palestinian leadership would be...a strategy that was always doomed, because it was simply never going to happen that the groups Israel WOULDN'T negotiate with would simply vanish. You STILL think the world should have accepted the Israeli leadership's idea that destroying the PLO and artifically creating a different leadership was anything close to an effective strategy, and that it could have worked, somehow, if only everyone else had accepted the Occupation and said nothing about how your troops were treating Palestinians(including nonviolent Palestinian civilians). The problem is the armed groups were always going to be there, and were always going to have arms. Therefore, they were always going to be the groups the Israeli side would HAVE to engage. The Palestinian people were never going to accept any leadership the Israelis imposed on them from without(which is what the leaders you speak of were always going to be, since they were never going to have any personal popularity among Palestinians, which is actually quite unfair to those leaders, since they could have been effective if only YOUR side hadn't obsessively meddled).

If you want to end a war and you know that a World War II-style "unconditional surrender" peace was impossible(as Israel always DID know regarding the Palestinians), then you HAVE to negotiate with the people who are actually fighting against you, not the people you'd rather negotiate with. That is the choice YOU refuse to accept.

To accept the choice you want to force me to accept(unconditional, unquestioning defense of the Occupation as an eternal fact of life)is to agree that the conflict could NEVER be resolved and that life could never be changed for the Palestinian people. It's the same to accept the OTHER things you want to force me to accept...the conclusion that the whole conflict is solely the responsibility of the Arabs, that the Arabs and the Palestinians are inseparable, that there is no real Palestinian identity, that Palestinians have no real grievances, and that the Palestinian resistance was never based on anything other than hatred for hatred's sake.

Sorry, but I can't accept every single delusion of the Israeli right. A lot of Israelis don't accept those things either...why should I accept them if THEY don't?

I disagree with a lot of the tactics the Palestinian side, but let's be real...they could have been totally Gandhian and everything would still be the same....because YOUR country's leaders care more about denying the Palestinian people a homeland and a life, and about trying to force the world into unquestioningly defending them on this out of guilt for horrific past events that no Palestinian or other Arab bore any guilt for and that almost nobody living in Europe, the UK or North America had anything to do with.

It would be right-wing for me to do what you want...to do nothing but shriek denunciations at the Palestinian side and to accept the arrogant Likudnik insistence that everything is about what the Palestinians do and nothing at all must be asked of the Israeli side. To make that choice, as you want me to, would be to eternally declare AGAINST peace and justice. I couldn't do that and retain any humanity at all.

Both sides are to blame for the situation...it wasn't totally the Arabs fault in 1948, and it was equally both sides fault after 1967. And there is simply no way to use the continuance of the occupation to make Palestine more democratic. If the U.S. wasn't democratic when IT gained independence(and it clearly was far more repressive in 1789 than the West Bank and Gaza are today if you happened to be black, Native American, a woman, a non-Christian or gay in that era) than I have no right to demand that any OTHER country be totally democratically pure BEFORE it can get a foreign army off of its soil. Jordan is just as much an anti-democratic
nightmare as the West Bank and Gaza, as far as that goes, and you never make any sanctimonious comments about them, for some reason.

As for the other countries...what are you saying? Do you really think the U.S. should have sent in troops to stop the old Arab regimes from falling(I assume that's what your comments about those places means)? Exactly what would THAT have achieved? And the U.S. DID intervene in Libya so what would you have preferred there? A fight to save Ghadaffi, for God's sake?

When an entire country has risen against a ruler, it's over. It's impossible to keep that ruler in power. And, as events in Iran after 1979 showed(those events were the direct result of the U.S. and the U.K. having made one of your so-called "hard choices" and reinstated the Pahlevis after everyone in Iran had made it clear it wanted them out forever in 1950. the year Mossadegh came to power and moved Iran towards democracy)restoring a tyrant never has any results but making life worse. Everything would be worse in Egypt if Mubarak had survived. Everything in Tunisia would be worse if their old tyrant had been saved, and the same in all the other places.

There IS no such thing as a "good" dictator. There's only a dictator. And there can't be any such thing as a leader that still has any right to lead when the people of her or his country made it clear they wanted that leader out.

So stop already with the "we should have saved the lesser evils everywhere" thing. There are no lesser evils. All evil dictators are the same in the end and none can truly provide stable allies for anybody.

There is NO CHANCE that keeping the Occupation in place can make Palestinians more liberal-and if it can't do that, it can't make anything safer for Israelis. That's not me saying that...it's the logic of your own argument saying it.

People are only going to take a liberal path if its on their terms...they can't be made to take it as a spoil of someone else's conquest. What's happened in Iraq proves that.