...by placing virtually all the blame for the impasse on Israel, discourages the Palestinians from coming to the negotiating table. Because they believe they are winning the war of public opinion, they do not believe they need to compromise.

The time has come for the world to point a harsh finger at the Palestinian leadership, and to make clear to them that they will not be rewarded for their intransigence. The Palestinians must know that the only way they will get a viable state is to sit down and negotiate on such an entity with the Israeli government. This will require painful compromises on both sides, not just the Israeli one.

Skewed against Israel

The Palestinian leadership must also learn that violence will not get them a state, although it may win them positive press in some parts of the world. The Palestinian tactic of initiating terrorist and rocket attacks against Israel, knowing that Israel will retaliate, and expecting that the international community will either condemn Israel or describe the ensuing events as “a cycle of violence,” has scored points for the Palestinian side. But this is not a game where the team with the most points wins. The Palestinians may be winning in the court of public opinion, because the court of public opinion is skewed against Israel, but they are no closer to achieving statehood than they were when they rejected previous offers.

This is not to say that Israel is blameless for the current situation. Its policies of settlement building, particularly in areas that will probably become part of a Palestinian state, have been a mistake from the very beginning. But the primary fault for the current impasse lies squarely at the feet of the Palestinian leadership. The time has come for the international community, the media and those who truly want peace to begin putting pressure on the Palestinian leadership to come to the negotiating table and agree to the kinds of compromises that are essential if a two-state solution is to be achieved. The Palestinians must give up their so-called “Right of Return.” They must agree to an essentially demilitarized Palestinian state. They must agree that Israel has the right to defend itself against rocket and terrorist attacks. They must agree to territorial compromises, with land swaps that recognize the realities on the ground.

Israel must make compromises as well, especially with regard to settlements in areas that will be part of a Palestinian state.
The way forward is through bilateral, unconditional negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government. For the moment, there are no prospects for a peaceful resolution of the Gaza situation. The best that can be hoped for is a long-term cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. If a Palestinian state in the West Bank emerges from negotiations, the people in Gaza may well come to recognize that their interests would be better served by aligning themselves with those who seek peace rather than continued warfare. When the United Nations partitioned Mandatory Palestine, it explicitly contemplated a nation-state for the Jewish people alongside a nation-state for the Arab people. The two-state solution requires that each side recognize the legitimacy of the other.
The Palestinian Authority must acknowledge that Israel is the legitimate and authentic nation-state of the Jewish people, in which all citizens are equal under the law. Israel must recognize that Palestine is the nation-state of the Palestinian people, hopefully with equal rights for all its citizens and residents. Only then can the dream of enduring peace be fulfilled.

If this were to come to pass, the peace dividend – not only for Israelis and Palestinians, but for the entire world – would be incalculable. So let us all incentivize both sides to negotiate a real peace that will endure, and that can serve as a model for other conflicts.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/peace/1.685309

Ignored bc of messenger and bc message calls out fake friends of Palestinians

I fixed it for you. On edit: I like how he rebuffs the law too, even the international court.

Lawless Dershowitz.

You think you know better than him?

Maybe you're a world famous lawyer too.

his lies. But you can champion him if you like.

He's a lawless man who is famous for excusing torture.

http://www-tc.pbs.org/inthebalance/pdf/dershowitz-tortured-reasoning.pdf

But hey it makes for good deflection.

The real reason he's hated so much is he's a Jewish American Zionist very successful democrat lawyer who is passionate for the Jewish State and wins arguments.
Has the facts on his side.

That's the real reason for the venom.

a decent man to defend them, well color me surprised.

He's a propagandist of the worst kind.

That you imagine the reason he is vilified is not b/c excusing torture isn't
enough to sicken people, well...good luck with your champion.

Lawless Dershowitz.

Your post.

Violence against children

Torture and other cruel or degrading treatment or punishment

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/docs/co/CRC-C-ISR-CO-2-4.pdf

B'tselem, HRW, AI all have documented abuses.

Anything but the OP topic huh ?

The alleged great deals, he sounds like Trump.

The Palestine Papers made that clear and he believes the Palestinians
are being coddled and enabled by the ICC and other groups to
not negotiate with Israel..all nonsense.

http://www.aljazeera.com/palestinepapers/

That says it all...

That's why he's hated so....

Last edited Sun Nov 15, 2015, 11:57 PM - Edit history (1)

disapprove of that type of conduct...some appreciate his efforts.

Rather, what you mean is that you disagree with his views.

But this is interesting. I read the link you provided and find it compelling and entirely rational. You disagree with it, obviously. So much so that you consider the man who became Harvard's youngest professor and famously defended OJ Simpson, to mostly be known for this.

So, I'm curious... what exactly is your disagreement with his argument?

the government is going to torture in a ticking time bomb scenario..so, let's have them get
a warrant to do it!

He is a fucking degenerate.

would be that torture is never justified, no matter what scenario, correct?

What about that ticking time bomb scenario though... let's say a large dirty bomb is in downtown Tel Aviv, and the perpetrator has been apprehended but is unwilling to divulge the location. You are arguing that the ethically correct thing would be for Israel to refrain from hurting this single terrorist in order to save the lives of thousands of innocent Israelis?

What if it wasn't mere thousands, but tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives at stake? How many Jews would be an acceptable death toll before you reconsidered this position?

illegal.

Your question is exclusive to Jews, why is that? Dershowitz wrote his piece in
response to the US attacks, nothing exclusive to Israel as far as I am aware.

Israel's high court finally outlawed torture in 1999. Pathetic it was ever
legal, but nationalism can do terrible things to a governments leaders sense
of morality.

Israeli court outlaws torture
http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/07/israel

you still have not answered my questions.

They don't have to be Jews. Let's make them Americans.
How many Americans would need to die before you would consider torturing a single individual.

I realize that torture is illegal, but I'm not talking about the legality right now. I'm talking about the ethics of it. Namely, under what circumstances would torturing someone be ethical?

illegal..which means you do not do it, period. It is unethical to torture people, no matter the circumstance.

Torture in certain scenarios absolutely leads to reliable intel. The argument against the reliability of information gleaned from torture is that the victim will say anything in order to get the pain to stop. So any confessions, or the names of co-conspirators or really anything that can't be easily verified can't be trusted as accurate info. But the opposite holds for information that CAN be easily verified. For example, let's say you had a bomb that required a code to disarm. Since the torture would only stop after the correct code was given, and the code is easily verifiable.

Also, in this scenario, torture actually IS legal. From the link you provided yourself:

under the Geneva Convention..we are signers and so is Israel. Only politics and
their level of power could keep them immune from prosecution, not that they
have a legal loop hole in the GC.

That they keep looking for a legal loop hole does not make their position ethical,
it makes you a contrived government..one who should have no respect.

These attempts are made b/c the more that was revealed about what they
did, the more desperate the CIA became to cover their ass.

Torture intel as accurate? NO, it is not. You're relying on apologists for torture,
why do you keep doing that? Cheney is one of them.

Virtually all of the top interrogation experts – both conservatives and liberals (except for those trying to escape war crimes prosecution) – say that torture doesn’t work:

Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 says:

“Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

The C.I.A.’s 1963 interrogation manual stated:

Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.

According to the Washington Post, the CIA’s top spy – Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service – said that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration. “I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint.”

The CIA’s own Inspector General wrote that waterboarding was not “efficacious” in producing information

A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks (Milton Bearden) says (as quoted by senior CIA agent and Presidential briefer Ray McGovern):

It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose.

This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

A former high-level CIA officer (Philip Giraldi) states:

Many governments that have routinely tortured to obtain information have abandoned the practice when they discovered that other approaches actually worked better for extracting information. Israel prohibited torturing Palestinian terrorist suspects in 1999. Even the German Gestapo stopped torturing French resistance captives when it determined that treating prisoners well actually produced more and better intelligence.

Another former high-level CIA official (Bob Baer) says:

And torture — I just don’t think it really works … you don’t get the truth. What happens when you torture people is, they figure out what you want to hear and they tell you.


http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/policy/army/fm/fm34-52/chapter1.htm

To answer your question, the war on terror has only produced more terror, world wide. I did
not support Bush/Cheney wars and never will. War is not an excuse to torture and very few
wars have been necessary.

morally bankrupt.

Your assertion here isn't even correct.

presumed the US would torture..not that it is legal under those circumstances.

You're confused.

You just seem to be focusing on tertiary bits of our discussion. I'll try and make this as straightforward as possible.

You believe that torture is never ethical. Even if faced with immediate and devastating consequences to innocent civilians, (the ticking bomb scenario), you do not think that torture can ever be justified. (Regardless as to how serious the threat faced is.)

Would you say this is an accurate portrayal of your viewpoint?

Torture is not legal and it is never ethical under any circumstances.

Your post#47:

incidentally...

Your assertion here isn't even correct.

Torture is illegal, period.


As your link says, torture is illegal EXCEPT in ticking time bomb type scenarios. Which is exactly the scenario discussed by Dershowitz in making his argument.

The new ruling stipulates that officers using torture will be exempted only if they can show evidence of an impending threat to civilian lives.

Israel is still subject to GC as they're a signer, among other treaties.

Groups like free.gaza and supporters of bds have convinced the Palestinians they can get it all and all they have to do is suffer a little while longer. Just more in a long line of people and causes that have never had realistic expectations and most couldn't care less about the Palestinians in the first place.

We have posters here who believe the last 15 years for Palestinians have been worth the wait and that Arafat was right to reject 2 states in 2000.

Turns out the biggest supporters & champions of occupation, settlements, and apartheid are the most hostile critics of Israel policy. When given the choice, Arafat made the right call & the past 15 years and thousands of lives later have been worth the wait.

Point is, it's not about a Palestinian state to them. It's about no Jewish state.

And I've felt that way since arafat walked away from the best deal they could have ever gotten. Actually it turns out the best deal they could have gotten was in 1947 but they and their pals went to war instead. And all the suffering since then is their own fault for letting their hatred of a Jewish state get in the way of their best interest.

Israel will not remove a single one of the 600 000 obstacles to the two-state solution anyway, and there's no way that a Palestinian state would be viable without removing basically every single one of the illegal settlements. They're all in the wrong place. If there was a single settlement that wasn't like a strangler vine for nearby Palestinian communities, I don't see why a swap would be possible, but there isn't...

BTW, is the Dersh forgiven already?

(1) two thirds of the 600,000 you refer to are in Jerusalem neighborhoods and in about four or five Jewish towns near or next to the green line. Proposed maps by Israel including land swaps and do not retain the numerous smaller settlements.
(2) Netanyahu has been explicit in willingness to withdraw from a lot of territory in part of a peace that includes security and would be held to that in negotiations.

No guarantee it will work, but people like Sanders, Clinton and Obama still think a two state negotiated agreement is the best chance.

and the two-state solution is absolutely impossible without their complete removal. Palestinian Jerusalem is completely ringed in by Jewish settlements, and there's no horizontal direction where it can expand. The settlements were placed around Eastern Jerusalem for that very purpose, and they serve that purpose very well.

I remember looking very closely at a map of the settlements once to find if there actually were any settlements that didn't inhibit a Palestinian state. Mitzpe Shalem was the only settlement that I could find that could stay in place without making a Palestinian state less feasible. The problem is that the settlements are like a pastrami sandwich that make a Palestinian state impossible. It's not only about how many people live there, it's about their location - they're all in the wrong place.

BTW do you have an actual map of these swaps? From what I understand, Israel likes to boast about these generous offers, but there are no actual maps to go with the offers...

expand?

In general, the map seems to favor Israel, and only a fool would accept something that doesn't follow the border. Did Clinton really hate the Palestinians that much? The offer was a scam.

Last edited Wed Nov 18, 2015, 08:33 AM - Edit history (1)

Arafat later accepted the proposal and regretted turning it down.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/22/israel

Their own state, half of Jerusalem, no more settlements or occupation or fake Apartheid claims - is not a scam.

15 years and thousands of lives later have not been worth the wait.

They should have accepted.

And anyone supporting that rejection supports ongoing misery for Palestinians.

It's as simple as that.

If you have seen where, for example, Mt. Scopus, French Hill and Ramat Eshkol are in Jerusalem, what they are like, it is hard to conceive of Israel dismantling these or whatever. If you didn't come with a map of the greenline and check exactly where you are, you would just say "I am in a neighborhood Jerusalem" and wouldn't know which side of the greenline you were on. This is not the case for far flung settlements - if you were in a circle of trailer homes surrounded by a fence on top if a hill overlooking an Arab village surrounded by a fence and another one or two in the distance, you would say "what am I doing here?" I expect Israel to give up the latter in any peace deal. Jerusalem, as many have said, is complicated.

I'm not suggesting that Israel should dismantle the settlements in Eastern Jerusalem - I'm just saying that they make the two-state solution impossible. The way things are now, the two-state solution is not possible, and the one-state solution will happen on its own.

....to those who reject a Jewish state altogether & promote 1-state with an Arab majority.

Same offer as 15 years ago. Olmert's offer of 2008 could be offered too.

So it's nonsense to claim the 2 state solution is over.

I think that the Israelis and Palestinians should be allowed to make whatever decisions they want about their future, as long as it's feasible and not immoral. Unfortunately, the presence of the settlements makes a two-state solution unfeasible on the ground. Israel's destruction of Palestinian economic and political infrastructure makes the two-state solution unfeasible in another way. And what use would the swaps be anyway? The Palestinians would swap land they need for a state for land they don't need for a state.

Short of divine fiat, it's not even remotely possible that a two-state solution will happen.

What incentives does Israel have for making peace with the Palestinians?
What could Israel possibly gain from the Palestinians it doesn't already have or could take from them by force if it wanted to?

Follow-up questions, if your answer is "peace":
In what respect do supporting and legalizing illegal Westbank settlements contribute to a climate of peace between Palestinians and Israelis?
What kinds of assurances do the Palestinians have that achieving a legal/political solution with Israel will deter Israel from continuing with this illegal action?

Most recently in 2000 and 2008. See the map in #24 above. No more occupation, no more settlements, half of Jerusalem, big compensation package for refugees. Israel also agreed to the recent 2014 Kerry/Obama initiatives recently while the Palestinians said "No". And that's basically all the Palestinians have to keep doing - is saying 'No'. They're not being called out on it - they want their war with Israel to continue because they want it all.

In fact, after each offer in 2000, 2008, and 2014 - the Palestinians decided to attack Israel (Intifada 2, Gaza war 2008-09, and 2014). And the rest of the world lets them get away with it.

Israel proved themselves long ago by making peace with Egypt and Jordan.

A palestinian state means that (at least some of) the currently illegal and formerly illegal settlements in the Westbank have to be dissolved. And for that, an israeli government would have to confront the nationalist elements of Israel and the jewish religious extremists.

I just don't see a scenario where an israeli government could pull this off in parliament, escpecially not a right-wing government like Netanyahu.

Just imagine Netanyahu giving this speech:
"We have reached an agreement with the Palestinian National Authority. I am happy to announce that we have achieved a bi-national solution with a State of Israel and a State of Palestine living side-by-side in peace. Negotiations weren't easy and contain a shared Jerusalem as both nation's capitals and land-swaps in the Westbank, meaning several israeli settlements there will be dissolved and their land handed over to the Palestinian National Authoriy and vice versa."

If they were serious about their own state, they wouldn't have rejected 3 offers in the past 15 years & would not have attacked Israel each time.

Agreed?

They would have made counter-proposals about land swaps, at worst. Your problem is you think this is really a land dispute when it's a religious one and always has been. The so-called right of return is proof of that, as that has nothing to do with land and everything to do with replacing Israel with Palestine.

All your arguments are based in the assumption that the cause of the conflict lies deep in the past, at times that predate Israel and from the early years of Israel.

You are not even entertaining the possibility that Israel possibly could have done something in the recent years that makes the Palestinians mad at Israel. (Not directly mad at the Jews! Mad at Israel, with the Jews as easily recognizable (-> via cultural anti-semitism) scapegoats for the IDF and the State of Israel!)

(EDIT: I am not disputing your explanation of the cause. I am saying that there is more than one cause and that the causes aren't exclusively part of some distant historic past.)



Land-dispute and religious dispute cannot be separated in Israel: Ask the jewish settlers in the Westbank, the extremist minority who drives the current israeli right-wing government, why they are settling in the Westbank in the first place and what they think about giving up this land for all time. They are ready to die out there for the glory of Jehova.
Owning the land is a central religious theme for both sides.

Ask yourself:

0. Why all the efforts to keep Jews out of Israel during the Holocaust years?
1. Why did the Palestinians oppose a Jewish state and partition back in 1947 and choose war instead?
2. Why the war on Israel in 1967? Or 2000? 2008? 2014?

There were no settlements prior to Israel's existence or before 1967. The Arab nations rejected all calls for recognition, peace, or negotiations right after the '67 war in Khartoum. The problem is Palestinian refusal to accept a Jewish state in that region.

Same problem today.

Why deny the obvious?

Finally: Were the Palestinians wrong to reject every offer for 2 states since the 1937 Peel Commission? Including the 1947 Partition, 1967 Khartoum, 2000 Camp David, 2008 Olmert, 2014 Kerry/Obama?

Has it been worth the wait for the Palestinians, yes or no?

week before it was Palestinian incitement this week it's everybody's well everybody except the ones perpetrating the occupation that is

Both sides have a different version about what happened in 1948. The Israeli's think they did nothing wrong as it relates to Palestinians and the 700,000 Palestinians who fled did so on their own because someone told them to do so.

The Palestinians contend that they were forced to leave out of fear for their lives and that there were massacres carried out against them.

I believe the Palestinian side and until Israel admits that this is what happened they will never be able to make peace with the Palestinians. This is the Former Foreign Minister of Israel admitting this is what happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=h-FLIBkTg8g (watch the first 5 minutes).

What you are describing are competing narratives, neither of which are really accurate, or to be taken at face value as accurate.

Have you actually read Shlomo Ben-Ami's book? It's very good, and, to my mind, very neutral.

The Palestinians did largely flee on their own, but of course it was because they were fleeing for their lives. You can't characterize it as Israel used to, "leaving because they wanted to or because Arab leaders told them to." But no one really believes that anymore anyway. They were fleeing a war zone.

And of course there were massacres. On both sides, the difference being that the Israelis had nowhere to go. Of course the war began with the Palestinians' decision to reject the peace terms and attack Jewish settlements. The first attack was actually a massacre on Jewish civilians.