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Tags: aussie-dave, blogs, israel, jerusalem-post, jewish, jewish-blogs
CRAP! What do you know about this blog? Have you bothered to do a search here for what I’ve written about Palestinian terror? No, you haven’t. If you had bothered to spend 5 minutes doing that you’d have found multiple references & entire posts deploring it, deploring Palestinian suicide bombing, expressing condolence to Israeli victims. But the difference between you and me is that I honor the Midrash which recounts that God was deeply angry at His angels who rejoiced at the death of the Egyptians pursuing the Children of Israel into the Red Sea. He says to them: “Hush, my children [the Egyptians] are drowning and you rejoice?? You in turn spurn such human feeling for YOUR enemy.
And you know what’s in the mind of Israeli intelligence officers who execute such attacks how?? When you do intelligence/surveillance work on a potential target you scope out who’s on the premises. You monitor comings and goings. I’m virtually certain they knew they would kill innocents in advance and they decided to do so anyway. They wanted the “kill” more than they cared about the consequences for innocents.
I do & yet again have said so several times in this blog. Legitimate efforts at self-defense (that is LEGAL under Israeli AND international law) are perfectly valid. You find a bomber wearing a belt, kill them if you have to. You develop evidence that someone is planning an attack you capture them & bring them to justice. But you don’t drop a 2,000 bomb levelling an apartment house filled with 18 innocent Palestinians including women & children in order to kill a single terrorist (which happened), no matter how dastardly. And if you decide to do so anyway, you assure that you will at some point in the future face the bar of justice, either Israeli or international. I know how you right-wingers hate the concept of international justice since you’re sure it’s simply a mouthpiece for anti-Israel propaganda. But I welcome international justice. A Spanish judge first brought Augusto Pinochet to the bar of justice and now Chile itself is trying him. THe same will occur to those Israeli officers (& Palestinian militants) with innocent blood on their hands.
Well, in that case let’s assume the Palestinians terrorists say the same thing. They’re engaged in war against Israel. I admit that their targets are generally far more indiscriminate than Israel’s. But why can’t an Islamic Jihad bomber say the same thing to justify his killings of Israeli innocents?
This is Israeli policy & your justification for it. This is not international law. In fact, Israel in this & other important ways is in flagrant conflict with international law. You might say you don’t give two hankies about that. But an Israeli general came within a hair’s breath of being detained in England several months ago for planning & executing the assassination of the Palestinian militant, Shehadeh, an incident which led to the killings of 18 innocent Palestinians. This case has also been brought before the Israel Supreme Court which has used every possible stratagem to duck it. Perhaps once an Israeli is apprehended (as happened to Pinochet) & charged with war crimes then Israeli justice will realize it has to confront this issue head on.
Palestinian militants do accept the imminent possibility of their own deaths at Israel’s hands. But they do so in the faith that many others will rise to take their place. I’m not glorifying this fact. I wish no Palestinian would take the place of any suicide bomber. But the fact remains that extrajudicial assassination has very little impact other than killing a single man. No doubt, you’ll attempt to argue that this technique has worked because terror is down. To which I’d reply that terror is down because Hamas is, perhaps temporarily, suspending offensive action against Israel. Islamic Jihad has not done so & has had success in perpetrating such crimes (viz. today’s attack)–despite Israel’s best efforts to wipe out their operatives. Such Israeli quasi-terror is palliative at best.
Israel takes it upon itself to be judge, jury and executioner. That’s pretty much the dictionary definition of extrajudicial assassination.
I’ve been responding to comments here in my free time and not had a chance to see the news. I’m very sorry to hear of this attack. Though it is little consolation to the injured, some of whom I’m sure grievously so, I’m glad to hear that only the suicide bomber died.
I’m not interested in getting into a debate about what UN resolutions say or mean. The Green Line IS the internationally recognized border. Even in the period following the 1967 border, Israel recognized it as such. Subsequent governments decided that it didn’t mean what it meant and decided to create their own “facts on the ground.” I find it interesting that someone who calls himself “liberal” on the I-P conflict refuses to recognize the Green Line as Israel’s international border.
Not at all, if my view be “biased” I am pleased to say this “bias” is shared with many within Israel too and not the wild-eyed radicals you enjoy so much poking snarky fun at. I just read this powerful denunciation of Israel’s insatiable appetite for Palestinian land (referring to the most recent Hebron settler melee) by an Israeli satirist in the pages of Ynet of all places:
CAVALIER?!! You call me cavalier? How dare you. I’m sorry, but you’ve made me very angry. Do you call caring enough about Israel and Israelis to want to see an end of horrible bloodshed CAVALIER?! This is life and death stuff. I know that. You know that. But don’t dare assume that I say the things I say without taking very seriously the consequences of saying them.
You see what I object to so strongly in your point of view and others who say similar things (oh so many have made this accusation against me before) is that only YOUR perspective shows proper love and respect for Israel’s interests. No one who isn’t sitting at that cafe about to get blown up can have enough proper perspective and judgment to appreciate the cauldron you live in. Only Israelis have the right to say what Israel should do. I reject this categorically. I am a Jew. I am a member of Klal Yisrael no less than you. Israel is a reflection on me as a Jew. I feel an obligation to make my voice heard on issues I care deeply about as a Jew & this is one of them, whether you welcome it or not.
I’ve lived in Israel two years. I have close family and friends living there. I’ve made numerous trips & staffed UJA missions there. But that’s all besides the point. Most of all, I care. I care in my way and if you don’t like it or don’t think it’s “good enough,” that’s your own look-out. Not mine.
As for my home, garden & children…did you ever stop to think that it is precisely because I cherish these things so much in my own life that I wish them for all Israelis (& Palestinians for that matter)? It is because those things are dear to me that I deplore this tragic bloodshed. If I did not have such things then perhaps I would be more glib in speaking about the I-P conflict. But I assure you I am in deadly earnest & understand what’s at stake for both sides.
Wrong again. I don’t begrudge Israel the right to defend itself. I support the IDF’s struggle to protect Israel and Israelis. After all, the Six Day War is what first motivated me to care about Israel. But there are ways in which a nation can defend and hold its head high as a nation and there are ways that lead a nation to become a pariah among nations. What good is a nation’s freedoms and liberties if it has forfeited it’s right to a seat at the table of nations? Lest you find these views so wild-eyed & radical as to be beyond the pale, you should reread your Ahad Ha-Am. He said virtually the same things over 100 years ago.
“CRAP! What do you know about this blog?”
Only what I’ve read in your posts and comments stemming from your tired tirade against the Jewish blog awards- but it was more than enough. And like most of the traffic you got thanks to that tirade, I came, I saw, and I won’t be coming back. Try not to miss me too much.
“But why can’t an Islamic Jihad bomber say the same thing to justify his killings of Israeli innocents?”
If you believe that a terrorist and a terrorist HUNTER are morally equivalent, please resign from the Jewish race- we don’t need your kind.
You surely would have won one of those awards had you been nominated. “Best Example of a Blog Whose Title Bears No Resemblance to its Contents” would have been all yours.
You really need to calm down. Yoga would do wonders for your high blood pressure.
I was really getting excited until I noticed that not five minutes went by before you left another set of droppings in my comments section. But anyway my reaction to your statement above: “good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Now that’s funny. I’ll miss you as much as I miss the runs.
I will on one condition–that you join me with your own resignation first. I’d be resigning as a service to my “race” because your loss from the ranks would greatly improve the quality of our genetic pool.
I have some advice for you too, but unlike you I do have some standards and won’t provide it here.