What a shock! The Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip don't want to leave!
I have never attempted to hide my views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is essentially thus: both sides are fucking irrational ("My Big-Beard-In-The-Sky promised me this land!" "No, mine did!"), and neither has anything like an airtight claim to the land (the Palestinians come closer). That said, in a conflict between a major government with one of the most well-trained armies in the world, and a homeless group of refugees with rocks and homemade bombs, my tendency will be to sympathise with the latter. So generally, I support the Palestinian's position.
Even so, I can't get behind this whole Gaza Strip withdrawal plan. It really wasn't thought out that well - what possible motivation would people have for peaceably leaving their homes of several decades, to make room for a population they largely regard as the most vile group of people on earth?
It's one of the problems that I have always seen in the conflict, which is that it's not between governments, as between groups of people. There will not be peace in the Middle East just because Ariel Sharon makes concessions for the Palestinians, there will be peace only after the Israeli people come to find such concessions both necessary and acceptable.
16 August 2005
1 comment:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
I think this whole Gaza settlement pullout is representative of the fact that the majority of people in Israel are going, why the fuck do we have the most extreme zionists living in pockets surrounded by Palestinians? Last I header it was 55 percent for "disengagement", 39 percent against and six percent undecided... Didn't most of these settlments start because of huge government subsidies? So I guess the lesson we should take from this is, if the government gives you anything, expect it to be taken away in a few elections time.
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