Honest endeavors? What are you, Palestinian? Nothing they have done has been honest, the only honest way of achieving their own state would be through peaceful means.

I don’t think that justified armed resistance against a military aggressor is dishonest. But on that note, I don’t think all acts of Israeli aggression are unjustified either.
And um, if the only honest way of achieving a state is through peaceful means, that means Israel was founded upon dishonest means.

We should understand that the two-state solution is now more a Zionist idea, than a leftist or progressive idea. Tiny voice from the corner: my politics have always been Zionist, leftist, and progressive, and I see no other way to respect international law than to move to a two-state solution. Those two states are free to merge, of course. But first they musthave the autonomous ability to do so.
And Palestinian nationalism is more about Palestine instead of Israel than next to it. Some Palestinian nationalism. Not all. I hate the idea of flattening all Palestinian positions into the most extreme ones. Not just because I think it’s empirically incorrect, but also because it closes off the possibility of building alliances.
So, yeah, lots of Palestinian nationalism is more about Palestine instead of Israel instead of next to it. And seemingly all Arabic-language media, not coincidentally, is about the same thing. But there are others around; those are some of the folks who are going to be instrumental in getting somewhere.

8opus,
Let’s assume both your statements declaring 2state a progressive leftist principle and the necessity for building alliances are at once true. Where is the leftist progressive demand for a return to negotiations?
If there were a genuine peace movement anywhere on the political spectrum, it would demand that Palestinian leadership stop this shit as loudly as they condemn Israel’s attempts to deal with it. If there was any such thing as a genuinely progressive movement, it would demand that more than 3 of the 22 member nations in the Arab League recognize the 56-year-old state of Israel, so perhaps the Israeli electorate might again become confident enough in its security situation to elect another Rabin or Barak.

“sadly, i could probably be tempted to throw some rocks at those fundamentalist gaza settler idiots, myself”
aharon • 05/10/04 04:25pm
Do you know any ‘settlers’ in Gaza? Where they are originally from, why they are there? They are people, with families, who live on a section of land (from which Jews should apparently be ethnically cleansed from), because of two things: Their love and desire to live in their ancestral land of Israel, and the fact that the Israeli government makes it a whole lot more affordable to live their dream by giving them many incentives to live there.
So to be clear, you think 1-The Gaza Strip should be Judenrein, and 2-That it is the Jews living there who deserved to be stoned, but not the government of Israel, the entity largely responsible for their presence there.
Perspective, people. It is all we have.

Gaza our ancestral homeland??? Hmmm, accoding to what I read in the Bible (have you ever read it?) Gaza was the home of the Philistines and never part of the ancient Israelite kingdom.
But leave that aside for a moment. Do you think people can start stealing land from other people because some book written thousands of years ago says this land belongs to them? Maybe the Ameri-Indians should reconquer Manhattan and push all the people into refugee camps because its their ancestral homeland!
And as others have pointed out the Jewish national movement was extremely violent – and two of its terrorist leaders later became Prime Ministers of Israel. It’s kind of hypocritical, now that we got our state, for us to complain about the Palestinians using violence to get theirs. Fact is, without the violence, the Israeli people would never contemplate a two-state solution. In the 80s it was illegal in Israel to even talk to the PLO. Now Arik Sharon of all people has endorsed the two-state solution. Who says violence doesn’t pay?
A bit of perspective people.

Josef
What planet have you been living on? There is a ton of documented evidence that the Jewish liberation movement deliberately targeted Arab civilians. Didn’t you read the recent controversy over Benny Morris’ new book? In interviews he claims that its a shame the Jewish militants didn’t do more atrocities. The controversy isn’t about the facts of the atrocities, which are incontravertable. Rather, the dispute is over the morality of the actions. Some claim the means justify the ends. But if you believe that for your side, its equally true for the other side.
You are also ignoring the ton of evidence that Israeli soldiers deliberately target civilians in the current war. Living in denial is not a moral stance. Don’t we Jews always complain about Germans who claimed they didn’t know anything, labelling them liars and morally bankrupt? What makes it different when Jews claim they don’t know what Israelis did or are doing?

sorry this is so long, its just too good:v. To hell with “Palestinians”:
http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire050902.asp
by John Derbyshire
Why Dont I Care About the Palestinians?
The options, as I see them.
why don’t I care about the Palestinians? It is, of course, wrong of me not
to care. It can’t be much fun being a Palestinian. You, or your parents,
or your grandparents, ran for their lives in the 1948 war. You and/or
they, plus a couple of generations of uncles, aunts, siblings, and cousins
have been huddled in some squalid refugee camp ever since, living off
UNRWA handouts. (“UNRWA,” by the way, stands for “U.S. taxpayer.” But you
knew that!) There is no economy worth participating in. Your leaders won a
fragmented, halfway sort of autonomy for you at Oslo; but it didn’t work,
you’re not sure why. Nothing really got any better, and now the Israelis
have smashed it all up anyway. The other Arabs all hate you (a
little-known factor of Middle East political life, but one attested by my
colleague David Pryce-Jones, who knows the Arabs better than anyone).
Things look bad, and you are sunk in despair. Shouldn’t I feel sorry for
you?
Sure, I personally favor Israel in this conflict. That’s my right as a
freethinking person. I’m a Christian, though, aren’t I? Shouldn’t I have
some Christian compassion to spare for the poor suffering Palestinians?
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, etc., etc.
Well, I suppose I should, but to be honest about it, I don’t. Why not? Why
don’t I care about the Palestinians? The answer is NOT any of the
following.
I like taking showers with Jews.
Palestinians have dark skin and I’m a racist.
My name was originally Derbstein.
My British blood is boiling with shame over the lost empire.
I am a lackey of, or am trying to ingratiate myself with, the Jews who run
the U.S. media.
I am a cruel, hard-hearted bigot.
The answer isn’t exactly compassion fatigue, either. That’s pretty close,
though. I am aware of a certain level of compassion fatigue in regard to
the world at large, and it spills over into the Palestinian issue.
The other day I had the depressing experience of reading, one right after
the other, Stephen Kotkin’s wonderfully titled “Trashcanistan” in the
April 15th New Republic, then Helen Epstein’s “Mozambique: In Search of
the Hidden Cause of AIDS” in the May 9th New York Review of Books. The
first of these was a long portmanteau review of six books about the fates
of various components of the old U.S.S.R. in the years since the thing
fell apart. The second tries to discover why a sleepy rural area of
Mozambique, populated by courteous folk practicing a traditional way of
life, has high levels of AIDS.
Kotkin’s account of the ex-Soviet colonies Ukraine, Moldova, the central
Asian and Caucasian republics, etc. is hair-raising. Principal features
of the landscape here are utter economic collapse, “gangland violence
among state ministers,” rising Islamofascism and the flight of large
sectors of the population. (One-third of the able-bodied workforce of
Moldova has fled. I have just been reading another report about that
wretched country. Sample quote: “Experts estimate that since the fall of
the Soviet Union between 200,000 and 400,000 women have been sold into
prostitution perhaps up to 10 percent of the female population.”) Kotkin
writes beautifully about this appalling situation, which stretches across
the entire southern and western marches of the old U.S.S.R., illuminating
his account with memorable one-liners like: “Ukraine has gotten its state
and is eating it, too.”
Helen Epstein’s piece on Mozambique tells of a state of affairs just as
awful. The fundamental problem, she discovers, is that: “These people are
so poor … that sex has become part of their economy. In some cases, it’s
practically the only currency they have.” The men go away for months on
end to work in the South African mines where, of course, they console
themselves with prostitutes. The women left behind survive as best they
can, often by becoming the mistresses of the few local men who can
actually afford to eat. Why are they all so poor? Because Mozambique has
been wrecked by corruption, tribal war and stupid economics.
What a world! You can only read a certain amount of this stuff before you
start to avert your eyes. What on earth can anyone hope to do about all
this? All the simple explanations for the horrors that stain a large part
of our planet have been used up. We now know that it’s not the fault of
colonialism, or neo-colonialism, or capitalism, or socialism. It’s just
the way these places are. They can’t handle modernity, for some cultural
reason we don’t understand and can’t do anything about.
That’s the context in which I see the Palestinians. The Palestinians are
Arabs; and the Arabs, whatever their medieval achievements (as best I can
understand, they were mainly achievements of transmission “Arabic”
numerals, for example, came from India) are politically hopeless. Who can
dispute this? Look at the last 50-odd years, since the colonial powers
left. What have the Arabs accomplished? What have they built? Where in the
Arab world is there a trace or a spark of democracy? Of constitutionalism?
Of laws independent of the ruler’s whim? Of free inquiry? Of open public
debate? Where in your house is there any article stamped “Made in Syria?”
Arabs can be individually very charming and capable, and perform very well
in free societies like the U.S.A. There are at least two recent Nobel
prizes with Arab names attached. Collectively, though, as nations, the
Arabs are no-hopers.
All of this applies to the Palestinians. I spent some of my formative
years in Hong Kong, a barren piece of rock with zero natural resources,
under foreign occupation, chock-full of refugees from the Mao tyranny. The
people there weren’t lounging in UNRWA camps or making suicide runs at the
governor’s mansion. They were trading, building, speculating,
manufacturing, working with the result that Hong Kong is now a glittering
modern city filled with well-dressed, well-educated, well-fed people,
proud of what they have accomplished together, and with a higher standard
of living than Britain herself. If, following the Oslo accords or for
that matter, in the 20 years of Jordanian occupation the Palestinians had
taken that route, had set aside their fantasies of revenge and massacre,
and concentrated on building up something worth having, I might have
respect for them. As it is, I don’t.
The only halfway sympathetic thing I can find to say about the
Palestinians is that UNRWA has surely been part of the problem. If you go
to the UNRWA website, you will see how proud they are of having fed,
clothed, sheltered, educated and cared for the Palestinian refugees of
1948… and their children… and their grandchildren. The number of
people UNRWA cares for has gone from 600,000 in 1948 to nearly four
million today. Now, I understand that the prime impulse of bureaucracies,
especially welfare bureaucracies, is the consolidation and expansion of
their turf, and a steady increase in the number of their “clients”; but
this is ridiculous. The good people of Hong Kong should go down on their
knees every night and thank God that there was no UNRWA in the colony in
1949. So, come to think of it, should the German and East European
refugees who flooded into Western Europe after WWII. (I have seen the
number 14 million somewhere the Sudeten Germans alone numbered three
million. Where are the festering camps? Where are the suicide bombers?)
Even if their lives had not been poisoned by the ministrations of a huge
welfare bureaucracy, though, I doubt the Palestinians would have got their
act together. None of the other Arabs have. Everywhere you look around the
Arab world you see squalor, despotism, cruelty, and hopelessness. The best
they have been able to manage, politically speaking, has been the
Latin-American style one-party kleptocracies of Egypt and Jordan. Those
are the peaks of Arab political achievement under independence, under
government by their own people. The norm is just gangsterism, with thugs
like Assad, Qaddafi, or Saddam in charge. It doesn’t seem to be anything
to do with religion: the secular states (Iraq, Syria) are just as horrible
as the religious ones like Saudi Arabia. These people are hopeless. We are
all supposed to support the notion of a Palestinian state. Why? We know
perfectly well what it would be like. Why should we wish for another
gangster-satrapy to be added to the Arab roll of shame, busy manufacturing
terrorists to come here and slaughter Americans in their offices? I don’t
want to see a Palestinian state. I think I’d be crazy to want that.
What, actually, are the possible futures for the Palestinians? I think the
following list is exhaustive.
1. An independent state, under Arafat or someone just as thuggish.
2. Military occupation by Israel.
3. Re-incorporation into a Jordanian-Palestinian nation.
4. Some sort of U.N. trusteeship.
5. Expulsion from the West Bank and Gaza, those territories then
incorporated into Israel.
Number 1 is what we are all supposed to want. As I have already indicated,
I don’t want it, and I can’t see why anyone else would, either. Except
Palestinians, I suppose: If they yearn to be ruled by amoral hoodlums (as,
according to polls, they apparently do), I suppose they have some
theoretical right to see their wishes fulfilled but why should the rest
of us allow it to happen, given the dangers to us? Number 2 might work for
a time, but the Israelis would eventually get fed up with it, and then
we’d move on to one of the other options. Number 3 would get us back to
the pseudo-stability of pre-1967, but is deeply unpopular with Jordanians
and look what happened in 1967! Number 4 undoubtedly has the UNRWA
bureaucrats drooling, but as with number 1, it’s hard to see what’s in it
for the rest of us. Aren’t we handing over enough of our money in welfare
payments to our own people?
Which leaves us with number 5: expulsion. I am starting to think that this
might be the best option. I’m not the only one, either. Here is Dick
Armey, Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, talking to
Chris Matthews on Hardball:
MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are
now living on the West Bank should get out of there?
Rep. ARMEY: Yes.
When I say “the best option,” I don’t mean “best for the Palestinians”. I
don’t think they have any good options. Being Arabs, they are incapable of
constructing a rational polity, so their future is probably hopeless
whatever happens. Their options are the ones I listed above: to be ruled
by gangsters, or Israelis, or Jordanians, or welfare bureaucrats. Or to go
live somewhere else, under the gentle rule of their brother Arabs. Would
expulsion be hard on the Palestinians? I suppose it would. Would it be any
harder than options 1 thru 4? I doubt it. Do I really give a flying
falafel one way or the other? No, not really.
Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor

avi green es un gillipollas integral

Avi,
Tony Blair is a “leftist” (opposite the Thatcherite Torries, remember). And it’s just too damn tragic that his policies confronting the Arab-Muslim establishment and its death cult proxies are hitched to Bush-Cheney’s falling star. Blair needs a liberal ally in the White House and we need our allies back.

“Jewish Oreo fuck”? oh man.