A Response to Bloggers Seeing Israel in the Wrong

This post is actually a comment I left on someone else’s post. I’ve decide to post it on my blog as well since I feel that it contains a lot of important information and points I would like to make. I have posted several other similar comments on other sites, so I will probably post these in the future. This is the post in almost its entirety (minus a personal commendation to the blogger himself).

Not ALL Israeli soldiers are saints, but hardly any army in the world can claim that. It’s enough just to mention the pictures from Iraq with the
US and British soldiers to prove that point. However for the most part these are 18-year-old kids and 35-year-old men who would like nothing more than to be at home.

As for the wall. If you ask almost any Israeli (and I’m not talking about any extremists or fundamenstalists), you will hear that in an ideal world we wouldn’t need to wall. It’s uglying up our country as well. We don’t want it. but the documented proof is that stince that wall has gone up, the amount of suicide bombers making it into Israel has decreased dramatically.

The Palestinian government is doing a great job (I’m being completely serious here) in stopping terrorists. I know they do a lot to make sure they don’t get through, and they work religiously with Israel on this. (Again, I am being serious.) When you couple that together with the roadblocks and the border points, they are extremely efficient together at stopping ALMOST all the suicide bombers from getting through into
Israel.

Unfortunately, the system is not yet working perfectly. In an ideal world, and the world that Israelis hope is nearby, Israel won’t have to put up roadblocks anymore and we would be able to depend 100% on the Palestinian government to stop any potential terrorism from entering our country.

If you think that no Israelis opppose the building of the wall then you are wrong. We would much rather this money go towards helping the poor and homeless in our country, to help with hunger, education, etc. We have plenty of domestic problems that have gone almost completely unaddressed since the inception of the country for the simple reason that if you can’t ensure your citizens are safe, you can’t expect to work on welfare.

No one here wants to starve anyone, Palestinian or otherwise. When you have terrorist orgainzations (excluding Hamas since basically for the past year at the very least they haven’t carried out any acts of terror) threatening to send in terrroists on our holiest of days, sometimes we have no choice but to disallow any of them to enter our country. Even then they get through.

Speaking of Hamas, however, they still don’t recognize our right to exist and still call for the destruction of our country. So while they have temporarily (their words) halted terrorist attacks, they still openly state that we should be wiped off the face of this earth. A large portion of the problems they are having nowadays is because they refuse to recognize Israel and enter peace talks. You can’t possibly expect us to withdraw all our troops and let palestinians get everything without getting anything in return.

We already pulled out of the Gaza strip and misplaced thousands of people. In return we only got more terrorism and nothing in return. So, yes, it was unilateral and it was intended to be, but you’d think one act of good will would be returned with another. It’s the only way peace can be achieved. There is no relationship in the world where one person gives and gives and gives and the other side doesn’t. One will end up breaking up with the other.

As for calling any organization trying to establish their country a terrorist organization, that is true in cases where excessive killing is used as the only means. You’re right about Israel having resistance organizations that assisted in establishing the country. Yes, they also resorted to physical harm, though they went more for blowing up bridges. There were several organizations struggling to help create the state of Israel, and the moment that it was declared these ceased to exist.

The Haganah and Palmach became part of the Israeli army (they didn’t have any terrorist activities anyway – they didn’t believe in violence, those were the Irgun and Lechi), and the irgun and lechi were invited to join israeli forces as well.

Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of israel, almost caused a civil war in the case of Altalena, preferring to shoot his own people (israeli jews) than let them smuggle arms into jerusalem with the sole purpose of attacking arabs. You can read more about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altalena

As for Liberman, eyes are wide open right now. The labor party is threatening to leave the coalition if Liberman gets out of line, and Liberman in resopnse has stated that he does not intend on changing the directin the government has been going in.

I can understand the election of Hamas in a way – the Palestinians are desperate for a leadership that will do something, and hamas acted, even if it was by blowing hundreds of israeli women and children to pieces. You think we don’t have hundreds of dead children? you don’t see the pictures because we do not publicize them out of respect for the dead (which, by the way, why open caskets don’t exist in Judaism).

You’re right, the cell phone solution is a band-aid, and not a very effective one. mostly one of those with disney characters on it. My point about that article was that people are trying to take care of the symptoms in order to alleviate the pain as much as possible so that an actual diagnosis can be found and treated.

I await the day where someone will suddenly think up a solution to solve the problems on both sides. I think Israel has a lot to offer the palestinians. thousands of them work in israel anyway, and were the terrorism to end, more would be able to work in our country, which would help them economically.

For years they were the victims of Arafat’s government where the funds they received went to fund themselves instead of assisting the palestinians who needed it for their infrustructure, education, and even food and medications.

Regarding the illegal settlements being built I think they are wrong: they are illegal because the government does not approve either, and you have seen that they have torn them down. yesterday or the day before there was a meeting adn articles about pulling out of those territories voluntarily. i’m not sure i’ve seen it in english, but i can find it for you if you’d like. Most israelis (again, not extremists and fundamentalists) agree that we shouldn’t build these settlements, and if makes you feel any better, we are often perplexed by why people would choose to build those settlements to begin with.

Israelis and palestinians have worked together before, and it saddens me that it is more than anything due to our governments (though i do see the palestinians government more to blame here than ours) that we don’t cooperate more. You can read stories all the time about israelis who donated their family members’ organs to palestinians and vice versa. There’s no reason this can’t go on into other categories as well.

Israelis aren’t anti-arab, which you can see both by our peace treaties with jordan and egypt (not to mention tourism with egypt, and former tourism with jordan until the intifada broke out in 2000), as well as the large amount of israeli arabs.

I think the biggest problem facing us right now is the fact that while israelis accept palestine’s right to exists, our right to exist is still not recognized my most arab and muslim countries, which you can’t deny (i can point you to many sources – from Ahmadinejad to palestinians officials to the hezbollah). I think once our mere existance is accepted and recognized, we will then have some more common ground upon which we will be able to begin building two states for two peoples.