If it ends up to be a lousy division, the two state solution, the Palestinians will tap into the well-spring of past abuse and humiliation feeding on the sense of being crippled, suffering and angry which is likely to get very destructive. The Israeli Right was certainly astute in pointing that out showing how the peaceniks like Shimon Peres could embrace a disengagement that worsened a problem and led to Hamas taking power in Gaza. Stage two might be a Hamas style group in the Palestinian Authority controlled area. Maybe any division is not a solution but rather more oil on the fire. More Iron Domes to repress the conflagration.
(see link at end) …Two rockets were fired at Tel Aviv on Saturday. One landed harmlessly, probably at sea. The other was intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system in the sky above the city. An Iron Dome antimissile battery had been hastily deployed near the city on Saturday in response to the threat of longer-range rockets….
—Ivo Livi (alias Yves Montand) est né en Toscane et débarque à Marseille avec sa famille en 1923. Les temps sont difficiles et Ivo est obligé d’aller travailler à l’usine dès l’âge de 11 ans. —Read More:http://www.journaldesfemmes.com/people/argent/dossier/premiers-jobs-de-stars-inattendus/yves-montand-etait-coiffeur.shtml
…Since Wednesday, Iron Dome has knocked 245 rockets out of the sky, the military said, while 500 have struck Israel. The American-financed system is designed to intercept only rockets streaking toward towns and cities and to ignore those likely to strike open ground.
There have been failures — on Saturday a rocket crashed into an apartment block in the southern port city of Ashdod, injuring five people — but officials have put its success rate at 90 percent.
Analysts said there is no clear end to the conflict in sight, since Israel neither wants to re-engage in Gaza nor to eliminate Hamas and leave the territory to the chaos of more militant factions.
“Ultimately,” said Efraim Halevy, a former chief of Israel’s intelligence service, “both sides want Hamas to remain in control, strange as it sounds.”
But Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Al Azhar University here, cautioned that “there is no military solution to the Gaza problem.”
“There has to be a political settlement at the end of this,” he said. “Without that, this conflict is just going to go on and on.”…read more:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html?ref=middleeast a
—Alas, none of this is surprising. We live in a militarized culture and US mainstream media is ideologically, if not materially, embedded with the aggressors. In all fairness, however, Engel’s empathy (or attempts at) with Palestinian civilians was evident in one of his tweets. On 16 November he tweeted the following jewel from Gaza city:
“So many drones over #Gaza city it sounds like everyone is out mowing their lawns in the dark”
The drones hovering over Gaza (and those guiding them) would be quite giddy to know that their good work is likened to that of lawnmowers (weeding out unwanted growth and making sure the terrain is green.) Mowing life is more like it.—Read More:http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/8476/mowing-the-lawn-in-gaza image:http://deadbro
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Anyone who thinks Hamas is going to beg for a cease-fire, that Operation Pillar of Defense will draw to a close and quiet will reign in the South because we hit targets in the Gaza Strip, needs to think again.
With the elimination of a murderous terrorist and the destruction of Hamas’s long-range missile stockpile, the operation was off to an auspicious start, but what now? This must not be allowed to end as did Operation Cast Lead: We bomb them, they fire missiles at us, and then a cease-fire, followed by “showers” – namely sporadic missile fire and isolated incidents along the fence. Life under such a rain of death is no life at all, and we cannot allow ourselves to become resigned to it.
A strong opening isn’t enough, you also have to know how to finish – and finish decisively. If it isn’t clear whether the ball crossed the goal-line or not, the goal isn’t decisive. The ball needs to hit the net, visible to all. What does a decisive victory sound like? A Tarzan-like cry that lets the entire jungle know in no uncertain terms just who won, and just who was defeated….
Daniel Greenfield:The Arab Spring transformed Egypt from a peace partner into an enemy and transformed Hamas from the finger of a distant Iran to the arm of a nearby Islamist Egypt. The visit by Qatar’s Emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani to Gaza signaled that Hamas now had the full support of the sugar daddy of Sunni Islamists and the architect of the Arab Spring. A few weeks later the war was on.
Like the attacks of September 11, 2012, including the assault on the Benghazi mission, Hamas’s rocket attacks are a show of Islamist strength. But they are also a way for the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt to distract Egyptians from a collapsing economy while shaking down Obama for some more money in exchange for brokering ceasefires and reining in the “extremists.”—Read More:http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-gaza-war/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FrontpageMag+(FrontPage+Magazine+»+FrontPage) image:http://muckrack.com/link/BOwd/keene-trust-me-this-fat-pig-is-the-problem
To accomplish this, you need to achieve what the other side can’t bear, can’t live with, and our initial bombing campaign isn’t it.
THE DESIRE to prevent harm to innocent civilians in Gaza will ultimately lead to harming the truly innocent: the residents of southern Israel. The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences.
The Gaza Strip functions as a state – it has a government and conducts foreign relations, there are schools, medical facilities, there are armed forces and all the other trappings of statehood. We have no territorial conflict with “Gaza State,” and it is not under Israeli siege – it shares a border with Egypt. Despite this, it fires on our citizens without restraint.
Why do our citizens have to live with rocket fire from Gaza while we fight with our hands tied? Why are the citizens of Gaza immune? If the Syrians were to open fire on our towns, would we not attack Damascus? If the Cubans were to fire at Miami, wouldn’t Havana suffer the consequences? That’s what’s called “deterrence” – if you shoot at me, I’ll shoot at you. There is no justification for the State of Gaza being able to shoot at our towns with impunity. We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.
There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.
Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared.
IF THE government isn’t prepared to go all the way on this, it will mean reoccupying the entire Gaza Strip. Not a few neighborhoods in the suburbs, as with Cast Lead, but the entire Strip, like in Defensive Shield, so that rockets can no longer be fired.
There is no middle path here – either the Gazans and their infrastructure are made to pay the price, or we reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip. Otherwise there will be no decisive victory. And we’re running out of time – we must achieve victory quickly. The Netanyahu government is on a short international leash. Soon the pressure will start – and a million civilians can’t live under fire for long. This needs to end quickly – with a bang, not a whimper. Read More:http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=292466
….Is Zionism simply an illusion based on the false premise articulated by Golda Meir that israel is a people without land and Palestine is a land without people. That was chutzpah to consider there were no Arabs there. And when that realization struck the colonial divide and conquer procedures began splitting the Arabs, cookie cutter style into their respective camps, which allowed Israel to lord it over the region. Israel’s own population was segregated as well; there is a case for Zionism as racism given the range of traits associated with racism without the worst element, the biological. The hatred for the Gentile seemed transferred to the Arab. In any event they were a necessary “other.” It may not be a pure hatred but it has its element of reactionism that works on the aspects of dispossession, inequality and non-democratic values although it can be said that the Arabs , it can be said, have often done their darndest to bring out the worst in everyone involved. ….
COMMENTS