Bibi's conditions

If Obama were smart he would not fall for these ridiculous 'conditions'. As Israel take 10 million of our dollars a day, and 556 million alone for the illegal settlements, he is no, I repeat, no position to demand 'conditions' for a Palestinains state. By that logic the Palestinians could make their own demands for the Israeli state.

Go back to his Newsweek interview April20, 1998.
“At the end of the final settlement, the Palestinians would have their own territory and the ability to govern themselves, but none of the powers that could threaten Israel.” Nothing, nothing has changed.

The problem with this tactic is that the vast majority of Americans, about 70%, will realize that Israel is in the wrong and will see this tactic for what it is.

It is time for the US to stop all aid to Israel until Israel begins to act like a civilized country.

If Obama does not force Israel to take concrete steps toward peace -- stopping all settlements, ending house demolitions in East Jerusalem, opening Gaza to aid -- he will be perceived by the entire region and world as having caved in to Netanyahu, his presidency and prestige will be greatly weakened, and radicals and rejectionists will be empowered.

Link US loans and military aid to removal of the settlements and watch how fast the settlements would be removed.

I hope Obama doesn't fall for Bibi's BS.

1. Palestinians, thru their actions and electing Hamas, have shown themselves irresponsible with military arsenals.

2. Why should Israel give a state to people from land won from Jordan, that would support the enemies and destruction of the people who made their state, which never existed before in any form, other than a colony, existent?

3. Again, israel doesn't need another hostile army around it, and Israel has been on the right side of history during the Cold War and against Islamic terror. They didn't cheer 9/11.

4. Israel is the JEWISH STATE!

These conditions make a fool of Netanyahoo.

I'm sure the Palestinian's would be happy to have Israel accept the same conditions, particularly Israel being demilitarized. Many countries would appreciate that.

But I must ask, in the 21st century, are THEOCRACIES still sensible under ANY circumstances?

Israel is ready for nuclear confrontation with anyone who wants it. The oppressed decent people of Iran might appreciate it if Israel stepped in right now and taught the Iranian Islamofascist dictatorship a harsh lesson.They might even support it today. Anyone who thinks that Israel is some kind of pushover, when they can't even deal with Cuba, North Korea or Iran has no idea whom they're dealing with. Anyone who thinks that Israel's requirements that a state for the "poor oppressed Palestinians" be fully demilitarized, democratic and cooperative with the Jewish State as being unreasonable is no partner for peace. Israel is the victor and the Palestinians are the vanquished and they must either accept whatever terms Israel chooses to impose, or live as Israel's vassal forever. The Tamils are vanquished. The native American "indians" are vanquished. The Kurds don't expect to get a state soon either, so there is no rush. The Palestinians can wait till hell freezes over if they think that Israel is going to be pushed into submission by anybody.

I find all the comments so far very interesting. As is usual in these discussions about Israelis vs the Palestinians, there's a lot of demonizing by Israeli supporters of Palestinian supporters and vice versa and selective readings of historical facts to marshal one's argument or agenda.

In additions, mostly everyone shares their grandiose beliefs that they know what's best for the Israelis or the Palestinians, which of course is preposterous: only the Palestinians and the Israelis know what's best for themselves.

What is very clear is that the Israeli-Palestinian issue has become a screen for learned folks to project all kinds of beliefs: anti-Semitism, fear of Islamic fundamentalists, fear of the nuclear bomb, Holocaust denial, the politics of victimhood blah blah blah.

The other issue that is clear is that, increasingly, those who support one side or the other are willing to hurt those who don't agree with them both verbally and physically.

So I am very suspicious about people's opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What are people really angry about? If it's man's inhumanity to man i.e. Israel's oppression of the Palestinians; Palestinian suicide bombers, then surely there are far worse examples on the planet today which involve oppression and destruction of far more people. What about China's control of Tibet and it's destruction of Tibetan culture? What about Darfur and the murder and rape and homelessness of 2 million people? What about the generals of Mynmar who rule the Burmese with an iron fist? What about North Korea where Kim Jong Il, a certifiable madman, starves his people and threatens the world with nuclear bombs?

I'm afraid that compared to these far more serious issues, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not worthy of the world's attention. The loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives is not great. Hamas in Gaza acts pretty much as crazy as it wants to while the people are supported by the United Nations. The Israelis have created an advanced, highly technological secular society which has democracy, rule of law and capitalism. The Palestinians in the West Bank are coddled by the Western powers.

To me, what goes on daily between Israel and the Palestinians has become a crisis manufactured by Israelis, American and European Jews, Moslem Arabs, Iranian Moslems and the Left in Europe and the US. I don't think that the Taliban or teenage boys memorizing the Koran in madrassas in Pakistan have a clue what a Jew is or have ever even met a Jew. Ditto for Moslems in Indonesia. In fact, I don't think the billion plus Moslems in the world give Israel and the Palestinians a second thought.

We would all be the wiser to leave the Israelis and the Palestinians to their own devices to sort out their problems. It's up to them if they want to keep killing each other or if they want to sit down together and hack out a peace plan. I'm a Jew and I've decided that I'm going to have a happy life no matter what they decide.

I hope you have a happy life regardless of what happens. My mother had a happy childhood in Poland in the 1920s. Many German Jews had very happy lives in Germany and France and Holland, etc. But it's amazing what a Depression can do. Already too many voices are blaming the whole crisis on the "Jewish bankers" and AIPAC and Israel and so on. To my ears it sounds vaguely familiar. But then I am the child of Holocaust survivors, born in a DP camp after the war, so maybe I'm just too sensitive. My mother of blessed memory used to say, "The times may change, but people don't." No one can say for certain what will be. Few people predicted an economic crisis of this size again. So let's hope it all blows over. That's what many Jews said about Hitler in 1938: "It'll just blow over, you'll see!"

jgarbuz: I respect your views. You have lived in Israel; I have not. Nevertheless, I don't believe there will ever be peace in the ME unless the leaders of Israel, Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah and Iran are willing to sit down and talk with each other face to face. Peace will never come through talking through proxies e.g. Israel going through Egypt to talk with Hamas; Iran using Hamas and Hezbollah as proxies. This refusal on all sides to act grown up and talk with one another is absurd. It makes a difficult situation even more difficult. In addition, I agree with you that the US should get out of the ME and stop supporting Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Let those who live in ME figure it out themselves.

Kenneth Sorenson: Your list is impressive, but it's all one-sided. You blame Israel, but as you point out, the Arabs did not support the Palestinians and treated them much worse than Israel treats them. It's only recently that the Arabs have fallen in love with the Palestinians cause. But many Palestinian scholars believe that the support by Arab dictators of the Palestinians and their demonizing of Israel is simply a ruse to take the spotlight off how they oppress their own people.

Antisemitism has been used successfully by the Catholic Church, the Nazis, Stalin and Moslem rulers and clerics for almost 2000 years to rally their own people against a "common enemy" - the Jews. Just blame the Jews for everything!!!

In fact, these days, the Moslem world and its media are doing a terrific job of rallying ignorant Arabs, Iranians and the Pakistanis against the "abomination" Israel. This is very easy for Moslem immams and dictators to do because Jews are detested in the Qu'ran where they are considered subhuman - compared to pigs and monkeys. All the drivel that Ahbadinejad of Iran, Hanyia of Hamas and Nasrallah of Hezbollah spout about Israel and Jews is straight from the Moslem holy book. In fact, to kill a Jew is considered a holy act in the Qu'ran and pleasing to Allah.

So, Kenneth Sorenson, Israel's enemies don't really need your list of how Israel has screwed up everything in the ME: Moslems and Arabs are doing a fine job on their own!!

Anyway, at some point, the Palestinians have to take responsibility for introducing terror into the equation: the murder of innocent Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers. There would be no continued building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and there would be no Israeli occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank if Yassir Arafat and his buddies hadn't ripped off his own people to the tune of millions and deposited the money in Swiss Banks.

They have also promoted the hideous belief that Allah loves Moslem murderers of innocent people, a total distortion of the teachings of the Qu'ran. They call this justifiable "resistance".

Palestinian dictators like Arafat and Hanyia have sold Palestinian youth on martyrdom. This is a heinous crime against their own people and the existence of Israel has nothing to do with it. It's how Palestinian leaders fuck over their own people while hiding out like cowards.

jgarbuz: One of the problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that about 95% of people in the West have no clue about the life of Mohamed, the history of Islam or what is in the Qu'ran. As such, it is very difficult to understand why it is that Moslems have such a virulent hatred against Jews and the creation of Israel.

I think it's very important that Westerners understand that just as the Catholic Church developed a doctrine of demonizing Jews as the killers of Christ, Mohamed demonized Jews as an abomination to Allah.

After Mohamed received his Revelation from the angel Gabriel who dictated the Qu'ran to him, he returned to Mecca and began preaching a doctrine of peace and love, concern for the poor etc similar to that of Jesus. However, Mohamed was a member of the ruling family of Mecca who were merchants and they came to detest Mohamed and his message. Eventually they tried to kill him!

Mohamed and his band of followers fled to Medina where they arrived penniless. There were 3 Jewish tribes in Medina. These tribes remain a mystery to scholars. Were they Arabian converts to Judaism? No one knows for sure. At first, these tribes were willing to look after Mohamed and his followers while he considered the Jews "the People of the Book" and respected them, but when Mohamed asked the rabbis to acknowledge him as a messenger of God like Moses and the Jewish prophets, the story goes that the rabbis laughed in his face. This made him furious and thus began his hatred of Jews.

While living in Medina, Mohamed received ongoing revelations from Allah which were of an increasingly violent nature. These revelations included the doctrine that Allah had abandoned his covenant with the Jewish people because they had abandoned him and stopped worshiping him in the ways that were required in the Torah. Jews were no longer His "Chosen People". They were an abomination and He detested them. He now favoured Mohamed and his followers. All that Allah required was total submission to His will.

In addition, in these revelations of Medina, Allah claims that those who refuse to accept Islam are Satan's minions and that all devout Moslems should kill them to honour Him. Thus, murder of non-Moslems, infidels, is a holy act in Islam. Osama bin Laden, his henchmen and the Taliban believe this and hence justify their murder of non-Moslems and those Moslems who do not believe as they do as holy acts pleasing to Allah.

With the support of Allah to carry on murder and mayhem, Mohamed who remained penniless, decided to attack the caravans of his tribe that were carrying goods to Mecca to get booty. The story goes that one of the Jewish tribes in Medina decided to warn the caravan of Mohamed's intent and, along with members of the caravan, they fought against Mohamed and his men. The Jews and the caravan members lost the battle, and, to wreak vengeance on all the Jewish tribes of Medina for betraying him, Mohamed supervised the beheading of 700 males from one tribe, seized all the land and possessions of the tribes along with the most attractive women [It is said that Mohamed had a Jewish wife!] and banished the remaining survivors from Medina.

The British scholar of world religions, Karen Armstrong, says of Mohamed's massacre of the Jewish tribes of Medina: oh well, that's how Arabs dealt with folks they didn't like in those days; perfectly common, and the Arab tribes survived by plundering each other, so there's nothing exceptional about what Mohamed did.

Nevertheless, the doctrine of Allah abandoning His covenant with the Jews and His advocacy of murdering non-believers of Islam became part of the beliefs of Islam. There are passages to these effects in the Qu'ran. However, the doctrines of peace and love that Mohamed preached earlier in Mecca are also in the Qu'ran, along with respect for the Jews as being "the People of the Book". Since the Qu'ran was first compiled, Moslem scholars have wrestled with these passages which contradict one another!

So is Islam a religion of peace? Most Moslems say emphatically "yes" and point to passages in the Qu'ran to that effect, while Al Qaeda, the Taliban and fellow travelers say "No" and cite passages that justify murder and mayhem.

Consequently, it is very easy for Moslem rulers and imams to foment rage against Jews and Israel and demand, as do Ahbadinejad of Iran, Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Hanyia of Hamas that Israel should be destroyed and that such an act would be holy and pleasing to Allah. No other world religion, not Judaism, not Christianity, not Buddhism, not Hinduism would claim that the destruction of an entire people is a holy act.

Worse, those in the West who demonize Israel and rail against its oppresion of the Palestinians based on some modern notion of "human rights" remain willfully ignorant of Islam's core beliefs about Jews. The Palestinians, the Arab and Iranian Moslems really don't need their support. They have all the justification they need to destroy Israel.

And after they succeed in doing that, they will come after the defenders of Western "human rights" who are obviously infidels, in league with Satan and an abomination to Allah!!

jgarbuz: Thanks for your kind words. I don't think that most people on the Left have a clue about this early history of Mohamed and the Jews. But does Obama know? Hillary Clinton? Does NATO teach any of this to its American, Canadian and British and other forces before they go fight in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I studied Western history in high school in Toronto along with thousands of other Canadian youth in the 60s. We focused on the history of the British empire, Canada, the US and Europe. We were taught absolutely nothing about the history of Africa, the Arabs, Islam, India, China, Korea, Japan etc. I also graduated with a BA in English from the U of Toronto along with thousands of other Canadians who got a BA in something or other. We thought of ourselves as highly educated people; yet we remained totally ignorant about the so-called 3rd World.

After 9/11, I felt tremendous fear about Al Qaeda. I had no idea who they were, where they came from - nothing!! In order to calm down, I set out to inform myself about the history of Arabs, Mohamed and Islam. The Toronto library system is the best public library in North America: they really do have every book on every subject. I had no problem whatsoever taking out books immediately on the history of Arabs, Mohamed and Islam, and I was able to renew them over and over again for months at a time. In the twinkling of an eye, the whole world had become vulnerable to the machinations of a group of fanatical jihaddi Moslem terrorists, and nobody in Toronto gave enough of a shit to inform themselves about how and why this had happened!!!

Over the years, I have found that, like yourself and myself, the people who are most informed about the Arabs, Mohamed and Islam are Jews, particularly Jewish scholars in the US and Israel, I guess for obvious reasons: although both Christians and Jews were considered dimmis in Moslem countries i.e. "people of the Book" who didn't have to convert to Islam, but had to pay a yearly tax, Moslems had a particularly virulent hatred toward Jews e.g. Shia Moslems in Persia had many primitive superstitions that demonized Jews, crazy stuff like don't let a Jew's shadow fall on you etc.

Another issue that Westerners are totally ignorant about is the difference between Sunni and Shia Moslems. After 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the Western journalists went on and on about the hatred between Sunni and Shia Moslems in Iraq, but did they ever once stop and explain why this was or what each group believes? Not at all, so to the average Westerner who follows the news, these words "Sunni" and " SHia" mean absolutely nothing!! So how can they understand what is going on today in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan?

How many Westerners know that the holy sites of the Shia are in Iraq? Wouldn't that have something to do with Iran's "interference" in Iraq? How many know that these holy sites honour the lives of Mohammed's nephew Ali and his 2 sons who were murdered by the Sunni caliphs soon after Mohammed died? Why? Because Mohamed never named a successor. After the death of their leader, Arab tribes were gather together and collectively nominate a new leader. Arabs did not have kings. So after Mohammed's death, a dispute arose between those followers who collectively named a successor and those family members of Mohamed who claimed that only a member of Mohammed's family should be the successor. The former are known as Sunnis and the latter are the Shia. The Shia were centred in what is now Iraq and they fought several vicious battles with the Sunni warriors who were under the direction of their caliph. Ali and his sons were murdered in these battles and the Shia considered them martyrs. Their tombs are loated in Iraq.

For about 1400 years or so, Sunnis and Shias have been slugging it out about who are the true Moslems. One of the Shia rituals for honouring the deaths of the martyrs is for the men to strip bare to the waste and in a group flagellate themselves and draw blood. Saddam Husein, a lapsed Sunni, detested the Shia and found this ritual particularly abhorant, so he not only oppressed the Shia in the very place of their holy sites but he banned them from acting out this ritual.

How is it possible to understand the clashes between the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq that erupted shortly after the American invasion and still continue without understanding this history. The Americans liberated the Shia from Sadham's iron fist, and obviously, the Sunni felt very threatened because it was payback time. That is why, at first, the Iraqi Sunni were so willing to welcome Al Qaeda, Arab Sunnis into Iraq.

Al Zaquawi, the Jordanian, who became the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, detested the Shia. There are tapes posted on Moslem websites of him railing against the Shia for hours on end!!

jgarbuz: I think that what you say is very inisghtful. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict at its core is not about bits of land. It is a spiritual conflict. Cain and Abel is a good analogy, but Isaac and Ishmael is more accurate. You may recall that Jacob fell in love with his Uncle Laban's youngest daughter, Rachel, and wanted to marry her. Laban made him work 7 years for Rachel's hand. On the wedding night, Jacob discovered that Laban had fooled him: he had married Leah, the elder daughter instead, so he had to work another 7 years for Rachel.

Leah and Rachel gave birth to 12 sons who became the fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel. Jacob's favourite sons, Joseph and Benjamin, came from Rachael. But in Jacob's household, there was a servant girl, Hagar. Jacob slept with her and she gave birth to a son, Ishmael. Rachel came to detest Hagar and Ishmael and demanded that Jacob abandon them in the desert which he did to please her. The Torah goes on to explain that Ishmael became the leader of a great nation, the Arabs!!!

Arab Moslems do claim Ishmael as the rightful heir of the spiritual legacy that goes back to Abraham. In addition, the Qu'ran picks up on the story of Hagar and Ishmael and what happened to them in the desert. A miracle occurred when an angel made water flow from the rocks. This event and the suffering of Hagar and Ishmael is commemorated every year when Moslem pilgrims go to Mecca and run back and forth around the kaaba, imitating the movements of Hagar [unfortunately, I have forgotten the details of this ritual, but I know it does honour Hagar].

Thus, what you say is true: the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a spiritual conflict between 2 brothers over who has God's favour. JHWH favours the Jews, and Allah favours the Moslems, but, of course, JHWH and Allah are one and the same. It's also interesting that this conflict between 2 brothers is at the root of the Sunni and Shia dispute. Which group has inherited the true mantle of Mohamed and are favoured by Allah?

jgarbuz: You have a good, caring heart and a core set of beliefs which are so important in these muddled times when so many are confused. As for the divisions within the Jewish communities: I think that it's a healthy sign. Jews are not monolithic: we are free thinkers and these different viewpoints make for a vibrant community....I have enjoyed very much this conversation with you and I wish you all the best.