United Liberty
On Israel and Palestine, We Should Call It A Day
Tue, 01/06/2009 - 12:03pm | posted by Michael Orion Powell
Back in 2004, when I was coming of age politically, I strongly sympathized with the Palestinian cause. I’ve always found the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes during the creation of the state of Israel to be a mistake of modern society, and I find it blaringly obvious that the black-haired and brown skinned refugees in the West Bank have a more rooted history with the Middle East than the brown-haired and white skinned Jewish college students from Seattle and New York who go to Israel to find themselves.
My support for Palestinians dissipated, however, as I became more aware of the horrors of modern Islamism. The Palestinian people have voted Islamists into power through Hamas. Peace has never been on the Islamist agenda and so peace is not what the Palestinians have gotten.
It may seem very simple and devoid of policy but the only solution I see for the Middle East is an upsurge of secular pluralism. That seems like hopelessly wishful thinking, however, as the Middle East has been rooted in faith for millenia. The prominent religion in the region is led by a figure who was both a prophet and a military leader and preached religious governance. How can we expect secularism from a region like that?
Two years ago, a similar episode happened between Hezbollah and Israel, in which rockets once again were launched on Israeli towns and the Israelis responded with overwhelming force. It seems like this is just an endless cycle with no progress and no one learning from mistakes. It’s hopeless. I would rather have President-elect Barack Obama paying attention to issues in our own country than spend his term trying to talk sense into religious zealots.
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you where Israel is coming from then. We want to live in peace. We are a tiny, vulnerable nation surrounded by powerful Arab military regimes. We have to fight for our survival everyday and without friends our friends at AIPAC who make sure that Israel is America’s number one priority we will all be killed again. Never again! even if we have to gas all the Palestinians.
The holocaust occurred in Europe, not in the Middle East. Adolf Hitler was raised in Austria, not the West Bank.
The Zionists chose their neighborhood. If the Zionists had just wanted peace, they would have argued for a homeland in a sanguine part of the world like New Zealand or Canada. How about Alaska? Then you could see Russia from your house.
Alas, they needed to have the Holy Land, which happens to be right smack dab in the Middle East, sandwiched by Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. What happened since the creation of Israel was totally predicable by any rational person. Seeing as we’re talking about the intensely zealous, however, rationality may be a lot to ask.
Also, Anonymous, I find your talking of gassing anybody particularly disturbing. Do you want to go full circle and put people in ovens too? How about adding skulls, iron crosses and swastikas to the IDF uniform? “Never again.” Right. What about when you’re the group doing it again?
Anyways, I’m not attached to either side. If that Holy Land is important enough to kill and die for, I doubt anything that I or like minded people have to say will even make a dent. I just worry about those people who are not zealots and were born into that insanity. They deserve a decent shot at life.
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson
so you’re going to lump the millions of palestinians behind the minority which is hamas? i find this rather alarming. and how can the u.s. wash its hands from the problems in the region when it pays out $4billion in american tax dollars to israel? i think when this stops we can actually call it a day.
You could say that ceasing aid to said parties could be a facet of the US “calling it a day.”
And Hamas isn’t really a minority, is it? It is the elected Palestinian leadership.
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson
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