As long as U.S. support for the killing frenzy is strong, it will continue.

countries the way the Palestinians allow their people to harass Israel, we would invade. In fact, I believe I remember reading that we have occasionally and surely by mistake chased criminals or tried to foil crime at the Mexican border in recent years.

It's time for Hamas to police its own borders with Israel.

On edit, I don't think my post is clear. If one of the countries bordering our country disputed the border, the solution would be to negotiate fair borders, not to allow citizens of one country to harass the citizens of the other. Hamas allows Palestinians to harass Israelis. Instead, they should return to the negotiating table with realistic expectations.

The time for settling these kinds of border disputes is past. We really all, across the world, should not permit the suffering that results when people attack each other at their borders. I do not blame Israel in this dispute. Israel and Palestine both need safe borders. They don't need to claim each other's territory, but as long as one of them claims territory of the other, the other has to defend itself. I don't really think that Israel would claim territory from Palestine if Palestine would live in peace with Israel.

illegal Israeli settlements from their lands, removed barriers to their building homes, removed barriers from farming and harvesting their crops, treated them like first class citizens instead of second then they may have more international support since they would be acting as a humanitarian nation.


But let's not do that so we can see where the killing gets them.



Israeli airstrike hits Gaza family's home, killing 12

http://www.democraticunderground.com/113421896

The same place where the terrorists fire the rockets from .

People seem to forget that fact - or be ignorant to it.

Your quote: "Israel can do nothing ever to gain international support anyway."

Well they could if they tried. I made that clear, but you want to whine a little more about it.


Israel would be in a greater position to negotiate it's point about security against Hamas if it didn't act like a colonial power.

But keep up the pity party, King D.

Where are there any Isralis settlements left in Gaza? Link this time please.

My Quote.

Perhaps if Israel showed the Palestinians respect by removing illegal (1)Israeli settlements from their lands (I never mentioned settlements in Gaza), (2)removed barriers to their building homes,(3) removed barriers from farming and harvesting their crops, (4)treated them like first class citizens instead of second then they may have more international support since they would be acting as a humanitarian nation.

That's the problem with the cheerleaders and apologists. They like to gloss over what they cannot argue against.

Israel has been intensively lobbying EU states against recognition (of a Palestinian state) and has issued threats against the Palestinian leadership, including saying it will seek to overthrow the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, if the general assembly vote goes ahead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/19/palestinian-statehood-wins-european-backing

Want to argue the above snippit away? Israel will do whatever it takes to keep Palestine down.
They should be ashamed of that seeing how long they have wandered in the wilderness as a people.

"Self-defense" IS the correct word for the current action against the frenzy of Hamas rockets (almost certainly supplied by Iran). The "anti-Israeli-defensive-rockets" faction should be in FAVOR of ground troops being sent in for precision engagements. Less civilian Gazan deaths from Israli rockets, right?

Afghanistan anyone? Iraq? Everyone is allowed to invade so long as is not Israel. Everyone is allowed to invade as long as it's tens of thousands of miles away from your doorstep. But Gaza, being on Israel's doorstep and rocketing its citizens constantly, that's a no-no.

The hypocrisy and double standards are breath-taking.

You're allowed to invade, you think, if you were hurt. Others typically disagree.

You're allowed to strike back, if it's proportional. Better that you kill 10k because you had 10k of your own killed than to kill 1000 to prevent the deaths of 10.

You're also allowed to strike back on the condition that you don't won. We dislike seeing people lose. Sometimes I think we dislike seeing people win even more, unless we see ourselves winning--then it's possibly okay (as long as the "we" doesn't include our domestic enemies--they have to only lose).

You're never allowed to strike back against those we consider in our group. If we have a $200k home, iPhone 5, nice computers wired into a network with our HDTV over a wireless network, an IRA, a nice hybrid car and donate heavily to our party we can still consider ourselves in solidarity with the oppressed (without pondering seriously why they're oppressed). An assault on a 21-year-old unemployed man who gets money from Islamic Jihad and has spent more time in a mosque than in a school in the last 5 years is one of ours, and to strike him is to hurt us even more.

....a ground invasion by Israel will lose Israel International support and sympathy.

Really?

Fuck him.

This is just a friendly discussion board.

... about Mr. Hauge's misinformed opinion.

collaboration with the Iraq war.

Hague isn't the worst British politician (which itself says a lot about our current government), but he's very very far from the best either.

Could've fooled me...

Have you ever seen a UN General Assembly vote tally with anything related to Israel?

If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abba_Eban

If the UN tried to pass a resolution demanding that Israel dismantle its illegal settlements and make sure its citizens lived within its borders then Israel would most likely flip the UN the bird; while the USA vetoed any such plan.

... one new settlement for every rocket fired. One settlement dismantled for every month without rocket fire.

That should sort out the situation, one way or the other, pretty quickly.

I believe that the total number is higher with 102 outposts for a total of 223. To remove all of these settlements would take 18 years with your equation. 18 years.

You and I know that will never happen with Israel's consent. The settlers will just dig in, and Israel has no intention of returning the land unless enough pressure is put on them to do so.

And to your idea of one new settlement for every rocket fired leaves out the problem of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians by IDF troops or Israelis by Hamas troops. Did you want to add that to the equation as well?

The settlements are illegal. If Israel wanted to remove them they would have done so by now, but it would be disastrous for the party(s) in power to do that since these people vote. 190K of them by last count. The incentive has to come from outside.

The thing that worries Israel is that eventually Palestine will be given statehood rights, and when that happens they will have to face the UN on these same illegal settlements and other abuses. It could also be argued that Hamas will have to face the same charges on abuses.

Oh, BTW, I am all for the UN de-fanging Hamas by gunpoint if necessary just as I am of them telling Israel that it is time to fall in line.

No Hamas rockets, no IDF reprisals, no targeted killings. It is not up to Israel or he Palestinians to work this out since they can't. There are too many players involved for anything to happen except skirmishes and pitched battles for the foreseeable future and beyond: more dead children and families torn apart renewing the cycle.

The funny thing is that I am a humanist. I could care less who prays to Allah or Yahweh. They are all Semites and related by genetics. I don't like fanatics or cheerleaders on either side.

I just don't like it that Israel, our only real ally in the region, gets US treasure and Presidential/Congressional approval to keep this bullshit going.

This shit has got to stop on all sides.

... that guarantees no attacks AND an end to occupation in less than 20 years? If so, no one is talking about it.

You say settlements are illegal -- well opinions differ -- is there anyone arguing that rocket attacks on Israeli civilians ARE legal?

That's a fact.

Are planning to tell me that the legality of these settlements is debatable?

Rocket attacks are just as illegal as massive land theft is.


Your plan is unworkable. The UN needs to step in.

Ha! Turn the West Bank into Lebanon -- yea, that's gonna happen.

is limited in what it can do to Palestine. Soon enough he UN will recognize the Palestinians, and then what?

Will Israel dig in its heels? Expand more settlements? Become a pariah state?


The more and more you write makes me understand that you are not just a supporter of Israel but a hater of the UN and any of their rulings.

Do you believe that the Israeli settlements are illegal? Yes or no?

You have that backwards ... was it a typo?

That much is clear when reading your post.

If our nation were pro-Israel, we would not engage in mindless sycophantry. We cover Israel's ass at every single turn, we hold Israel to absolutely no standards of behavior that we would hold our other allied nations to. Can you imagine the United States responding to the British killing several dozen civilians, by telling the people getting bombed to "exercise restraint" while praising the British? I can't, this is an attitude we express towards exactly one nation on earth.

And it does that nation no good. It's like enabling an addict, it doesn't help them with the problems they face. It maintains the status quo at the best. Which is ultimately the goal of our nation; "it's this way now so we want to keep it this way forever, so we don't have to think about what we might have to do if things were different."

It's not "support for Israel," it's political lethargy and indifference.

but with regard to Britain and killing civilians ..you surely have not forgotten the Iraq bombings of 2003; the subsequent war and occupation; Blair's poodledom as Bush not only praised and enabled him, but led him? The Coalition of the Willing?

So

'exactly one nation on earth.'

Hardly.