Politics

This is not supposed to be a political blog, but someone sent me the following article and I could not sit still. I read it over and over and was more and more frustrated every time I read it. This article is full of myths and untruths, which leads me to believe that the writer is at best uninformed or at worst disingenuous.
Since this is such an important topic I have decided to go through the entire article and fisk (that's FISK with a K!) it, so as to point out exactly what I don’t agree with.
With the risk of coming off as condescending, I want to just say that from a critical thinking point of view if anyone tells you that one side in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is a total aggressor throughout history and the other side is a total innocent victim, whether he means Israel and the Palestinians or vice-versa, they are BS-ing you for the reasons I mentioned above (ignorance or a hidden agenda).
Well, let’s get to it – my comments are in bold:



http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/14/when-israel-expelled-palestinians/

When Israel expelled Palestinians: What if it was San Diego and Tijuana instead?

01.14.2009 The Washington Times
By Randall Kuhn
Randall Kuhn is an assistant professor and Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He just returned from a trip to Israel and the West Bank.

"Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico." Within hours scores of American pundits and politicians had mimicked Barak's comparisons almost verbatim. In fact, in this very paper on January 9 House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor ended an opinion piece by saying "America would never sit still if terrorists were lobbing missiles across our border into Texas or Montana." But let's see if our political and pundit class can parrot this analogy.

I agree that this analogy is lacking. Simply because it does not take into account past grievances and baggage.

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations.
The author is misleading here. He implies that the Palestinian population was driven out of Israel due to racist reasons. There is nothing in that sentence that is true. The myth of ethnic cleansing has been debunked many times.
Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players.

In order to understand this issue one has to go back to November 1947 when the UN decided by a majority vote in the General Assembly to create a Jewish state next to an Arab state in the area that was then under British Mandate control. While the Jewish Leadership accepted the partition plan the Arab leadership declared war and aimed to annihilate the Jewish population.

http://focusonjerusalem.com/48warfull.html

Most of the Arab population fled willingly due to promises from the Arab armies that if they left the armies could wipe out the Jews easily and they would be able to come back. Unfortunately the armies lost and the people that left could not come back. The local Arabs that didn’t want to flee remained in the new Israeli state and became citizens of Israel, with Israeli passports and representation in the legislature. What does this have to do with baseball players???

What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their homes in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people in the United States and abroad, planted forests on their former towns, creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy? Sounds pretty awful, huh? I may be called anti-Semitic for speaking this truth. Well, I'm Jewish and the scenario above is what many prominent Israeli scholars say happened when Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza. But this analogy is just getting started.

Israel did not force anyone into Gaza. The Gaza strip was a part of Egypt at that point. And which prominent Israeli scholars? If it is Ilan Pappe and his friends, they are well known anti-Zionists who argue that the state of Israel should not exist. Yes, we have an extremist leftist group too.

What if the United Nations kept San Diego's discarded minorities in crowded, festering camps in Tijuana for 19 years? Then, the United States invaded Mexico, occupied Tijuana and began to build large housing developments in Tijuana where only whites could live. And what if the United States built a network of highways connecting American citizens of Tijuana to the United States? And checkpoints, not just between Mexico and the United States but also around every neighborhood of Tijuana? What if we required every Tijuana resident, refugee or native, to show an ID card to the U.S. military on demand? What if thousands of Tijuana residents lost their homes, their jobs, their businesses, their children, their sense of self worth to this occupation? Would you be surprised to hear of a protest movement in Tijuana that sometimes became violent and hateful? Okay, now for the unbelievable part.

This is where it goes from being a bad analogy on the author’s part to an outright lie. It was not the UN that kept that people in camps for 19 years. The Gaza strip belonged to Egypt and the West Bank belonged to Jordan. It was the Egyptian and Jordanian brothers of the Palestinians that kept them in the squalor. The UN had relief agencies that helped the refugees. Why did the Egyptians and Jordanians not build them permanent housing and ease their poverty? One theory is that leaving them to rot in those camps served as a political pressure point on Israel. If this is true than the tragedy here is that the Palestinian refugees were held hostages of Political interests by their Arab brothers.

Think about what would happen if, after expelling all of the minorities from San Diego to Tijuana and subjecting them to 40 years of brutal military occupation, we just left Tijuana, removing all the white settlers and the soldiers? Only instead of giving them their freedom, we built a 20-foot tall electrified wall around Tijuana? Not just on the sides bordering San Diego, but on all the Mexico crossings as well. What if we set up 50-foot high watchtowers with machine gun batteries, and told them that if they stood within 100 yards of this wall we would shoot them dead on sight? And four out of every five days we kept every single one of those border crossings closed, not even allowing food, clothing, or medicine to arrive. And we patrolled their air space with our state-of-the-art fighter jets but didn't allow them so much as a crop duster. And we patrolled their waters with destroyers and submarines, but didn't even allow them to fish.

So after 19 years the Arab states attacked Israel (1967 – the 6 day war). Israel won and conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because the previous Israeli borders (as agreed upon by the UN) were indefensible. So now Israel had control of those refugees that were left to fester in the refugee camps for 19 years by their Arab brethren. As a side note in those years of occupation civil infrastructure, sewage, water works and other facilities were developed by Israel in those territories. Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza regularly came into Israel itself to work.
There is no wall around Gaza, there is a fence just like on any border between countries.

http://richmond.indymedia.org/newswire/display/15243/index.php

Now as far as the crossings are concerned, and security – when Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005, it was a unilateral move. This was probably a mistake but there are reasons Israel felt it should not negotiate it’s withdrawal with the Palestinians. In an honor-shame society such as theirs, this would be seen as weakness. When Israel disengaged the borders were open at first. Secretary of State Condi Rice and the EU were part of an agreement to keep the crossings open. But terrorists regularly attempted terror attacks and suicide missions on the crossings themselves. They had to be closed as a security measure. Even the EU representatives abandoned their posts because it was too dangerous. Not letting people get close to the fence comes from the fact that they get close enough and then they shoot their short-range Kassam mortars into Israeli civilian areas close to the Gaza border.

Would you be at all surprised to hear that these resistance groups in Tijuana, even after having been "freed" from their occupation but starved half to death, kept on firing rockets at the United States? Probably not. But you may be surprised to learn that the majority of people in Tijuana never picked up a rocket, or a gun, or a weapon of any kind.

Since the days that Yasser Arafat was allowed to return to the West Bank and to Gaza as part of the Oslo accords (1996) and the Palestinian Authority was created as a governing body the Palestinians have received BILLIONS in aid. Unfortunately it went to the corrupt rulers and to their military factions to continue and build up their arms. It did not find its way to the Palestinian people.

The majority, instead, supported against all hope negotiations toward a peaceful solution that would provide security, freedom and equal rights to both people in two independent states living side by side as neighbors. This is the sound analogy to Israel's military onslaught in Gaza today.
The majority of Palestinians actually supported the exact opposite when electing Hamas in a democratic election. Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and explicitly states that it will use violence and terror to destroy Israel. How does choosing this party constitute “supported against all hope negotiations…”? Sounds very romantic but it is not true.
When Hamas DID come into power, the US, the UN, the EU and Israel said they would be happy to negotiate with it on three conditions: It renounces terrorism, it accepts Israel’s right to exist and it honors past agreements with Palestinian Government. They said no to all three. Were those unreasonable requests? And would people who support negotiations say no to these?

Maybe some day soon, common sense will prevail and no corpus of misleading analogies abut Tijuana or the crazy guy across the hall who wants to murder your daughter will be able to obscure the truth. And at that moment, in a country whose people shouted We Shall Overcome, Ich bin ein Berliner, End Apartheid, Free Tibet and Save Darfur, we will all join together and shout "Free Gaza. Free Palestine." And because we are Americans, the world will take notice and they will be free, and perhaps peace will prevail for all the residents of the Holy Land.


Last but not least, I guess it may not be the author’s intent but you asked me about the devastation and the civilian casualties.
First thing you need to understand that Israel has been dealing with rockets from the Gaza Strip for 8 years. Yes, even after Israel pulled out the first thing they did was fire rockets. For 8 years it has been responding what people might call “proportionately” with minimal civilian casualties and doing pinpoint surgical operations to take out the teams that shoot the rockets. The trouble of course is that the shooting is done FROM civilian areas, which by international standards is a war crime. But tragically that makes that area a legitimate military target. Have you been hearing about this for 8 years? I don’t think so.
The feeling in Israel today is that enough is enough. If these surgical pinpoint operations do not help that something more forceful is needed. The reason there are so many civilian casualties is because Hamas hides explosives in civilian homes, fires out of schools and hospitals and uses civilians as human shields. There needs to be international pressure on Hamas to understand why they are willing to sacrifice their civilian population fighting a military battle they KNOW they have no chance of winning, rather than negotiate with Israel like the author of this piece maintains they want to do.