Forum rules: No one-line posts please. This is an international political discussion forum moderated in English, so please post in English only. Thank you.
When talking about India’s terrorism woes, the country that is often praised and held up by many Hindus as an example of a country which India should learn from is Israel. Israel is seen as a country surrounded by a sea of hostile neighbours, with populations far greater than Israel’s, some of which don’t formally recognize the right of Israel to even exist.
Israel is being criticized left right and centre for its recent military action in Gaza. There are only a few voices speaking in Israel’s favour. I for one fully respect Israel’s right to take strong action to prevent further terrorist attacks against its citizens. Article 51 of the UN Charter attests to every nation’s right to self-defense when attacked.
Israel has undertaken its latest campaign with the aim of decimating the capability of Hamas to operate as an organization, so that it no longer has the capability of targeting Israeli citizens the way it has been. Hamas is an organization that doesn’t recognise the right of Israel to exist at all, in the same way that organizations such as Lakshar-e-Tayyaba want to see the entire India come under Islamic rule. Hamas has claimed responsibility for hundreds of terrorist attacks which have targeted and killed thousands of Israeli civilians.
According to respectable estimates, approximately 1300 people were killed in Israeli military actions in Gaza, of which about a quarter were civilians. Any civilian loss of life is a tragedy, but at the same time the figure doesn’t represent military action which is indiscriminate. Rather, the casualty figures show an effort to target military action towards Hamas targets rather than an indiscriminate killing spree. Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. If Israel were a truly careless aggressor, the proportion of civilian casualties could have been far greater.
There are several similarities between the situations that India and Israel find themselves in today, but also several differences. The most hardcore enemies of both countries cannot tolerate India or Israel’s very existence, and both have faced devastating terrorist attacks for decades.
Israel, despite its tiny size, has an immense technological and military advantage over the Palestinian Authority. India has a sizeable military advantage over Pakistan too, but with both countries having nuclear weapons, the consequences of escalation are far more serious. The horrors of modern warfare and the human suffering by a fourth Indo-Pak war could be catastrophic. That doesn’t mean that we should be forever fearful of taking stern action against Pakistani based terrorists, due to her nuclear capability, but that all other means should be exhausted first before thinking of military action against Pakistan (with the exception of appeasement which should never be contemplated even for a second). A better option would be determined targeted operations by the intelligence services and Special Forces against confirmed terrorist and terrorist training facilities inside both Pakistan and any other country which willfully allows such activities to exist on its soil. Such a move by India would be very difficult to oppose, and would gain widespread support. Prior to 1997, India did indeed have an impressive intelligence network within Pakistan, before the lunatic decision by the then “United Front†Government to dismantle all its intelligence network within Pakistan as a gesture of goodwill.
What is particularly different about Israel compared with India is the way in which politicians simply have to do something determined about terrorism, because the public mood would never tolerate a government to stay in power that didn’t protect them forthrightly. In India the public forgets government lapses and incompetence very fast. The media in India is less responsible, quickly forgetting serious issues of national security for trivial gossipy trash. A mood needs to be created in Indians that will not tolerate a government that doesn’t protect its people.
Producerist - National Libertarian - Enlightened Nationalist
The author shows little understanding of the nature of this conflict. Here is another view from India, in video form, with the issue of Palestine coming up at 20:50:
September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too. On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles.)
How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today.
In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." That set the trend for the Israeli State's attitude towards the Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, "Palestinians do not exist." Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eschol said, "What are Palestinians? When I came here (to Palestine), there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was a desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing." Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians "two-legged beasts." Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them "grasshoppers" who could be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of ordinary people.
In 1947, the U.N. formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 per cent of Palestine's land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76 per cent. On the 14th of May 1948 the State of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza strip came under Egyptian military control, and formally Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
Over the decades there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Tens of thousands have lost their lives. Accords and treaties have been signed. Cease-fires declared and violated. But the bloodshed doesn't end. Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions, in virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, twenty-four hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. And when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity. With not much hope in sight. They have no control over their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their water supply. So when accords are signed, and words like "autonomy" and even "statehood" bandied about, it's always worth asking: What sort of autonomy? What sort of State? What sort of rights will its citizens have?
Young Palestinians who cannot control their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel's streets and public places, blowing themselves up, killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hardening both societies' suspicion and mutual hatred of each other. Each bombing invites merciless reprisal and even more hardship on Palestinian people. But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic. Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government's daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse for old-fashioned, nineteenth-century colonialism, dressed up as a new fashioned, twenty-first century "war".
Israel's staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the U.S. The U.S. government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every U.N. resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States - taxpayers money.
What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves - more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history - to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a victory? When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for or, the rights to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone regardless of their ethnicity or religion?
Palestine was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But now the weak, undemocratic, by all accounts corrupt but avowedly nonsectarian P.L.O., is losing ground to Hamas, which espouses an overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam. To quote from their manifesto: "we will be its soldiers and the firewood of its fire, which will burn the enemies."
The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they have arrived at this destination? September 11, 1922 to September 11, 2002 - eighty years is a long time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine? Should they just take Golda Meir's suggestion and make a real effort not to exist?
- By ingliz
- By JohnRawls
- By Potemkin