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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- mazel tov to @bluenatic and @grandstreet on the birth of their baby girl 2 weeks ago
- RT @JTownCrier: Tropper? Kolko? Margulies? Balkany? Dwek? Rubashkin? NO. Moetzes Gedolei Torah condemn AVI WEISS as more offensive. 2 weeks ago
- Rorschach from Watchmen is the new Freddy Krueger http://bit.ly/7s61Cj 2 weeks ago
- More updates...
07/16/08
A raw deal
I would never say that exchanging land for peace is capitulation to terrorism. That’s chiefly because I think that Palestinians have as legitimate a claim to Palestine as we Jews do Israel. Likewise, I think the Southern Lebanese have a legitimate claim to the Golan Shebaa Farms.
But trading Hezbollah a child killer for dead soldiers?
Look, I want Israel to do everything in its power to make peace with its neighbors. And I want Regev and Goldwasser’s families to have peace as well. But this is just obscene.
Handing over Samir Kuntar says quite explicitly, “Keep killing us and we’ll give you everything you want.”
That’s no bargain at all. And that’s certainly not what I call the Road to Peace.
i follow you, except on the golan. where do the lebanese have a claim or a history? the tiny sliver of lands called har dov or shebaa farms was ironically by the UN ruled to have never been part of Lebanon, only Syria, something which Syria maintains as well. And given the ongoing belligerent threat from Hezbollah and the strategic purpose Har Dov serves overlooking southern Lebanon, I don’t see where any legitimacy comes in.
Kuntar, admitted child murderer, did serve more time in jail than we’ve been alive. I’m not sure Israel loses so much by releasing him. It’s the other younger prisoners we released who worry me. To me, imprisonment– whether criminal or war/POW/political– is only legitimate if preventative and serves a credible deterrent. I doubt anyone who was hesitating about murdering Israeli children will now say ‘hey! i might only have to serve 30 years! let’s do this!’
But as with past releases– several hundred, even thousands, that Israel gave up in past deals– the still-active ones often become our worst enemies and murderers. Sheikh Yassin, eg.
i’m all for land for PEACE– real, mutual, educate-children, Germans-and-French freely traveling and trading and coexisting and intermarrying PEACE. But what we have with Egypt (state-controlled press leading the world in dissemination of anti-semitism, smuggling into Gaza…) It might be a cease-fire but it’s not peace. It’s not worth giving up our very, very scarce bits of land for half-assed promises, and no right to take it back if they don’t hold up their end of the deal. Only for PEACE.
actually, syria maintains shebaa farms belongs to lebanon.
“Support for the Lebanese claim was reiterated in January 21, 2006, by the President of Syria in a speech before the convention of the Arab Lawyers Union in Damascus and translated into English by SANA, the official state news agency of Syria.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.....n_position
that hezbollah can use that land to attack israel does not mean that the people who live there do not feel themselves part of the lebanese nation.
if you can believe the Wiki account of the murders and think that he has spent enough time in prison.. its time to shoot the bastard.
Just sickening.
Kill women, children, a police officer, get 4 consecutive life sentences, and get traded for 2 corpses.
I call bullshit.
Whatever happened to not negotiating with terrorists?
yep. Total agreement on my end. This is senseless.
I’m sure they put a tracking microchip in his spleen or something.
But on an adminstritive level, everybody wins. Hezbollah leaders get to feel a sense of accomplishment, Israeli leaders can both give the impression of piety, recreate an authentic feeling of Israeli unity in outrage, co-misery, and a sense of nobility that was hard to feel two weeks ago. And the government leaders who’ll be either villified or solemnly agreed with are already hated or solemnly agreed with. Everybody in charge wins (again).
The remains of two, twenty, two hundred or two thousand soldiers are expendable and an acceptable cost in the pursuit of freedom and security for Israel.
If two families have to wait many years to have their children buried so be it. A greater good is served if the terrorists can be routed and a stable and functional peace can be built between Israel and Lebanon (and between Israel and the Palestinians, for that matter).
Such a goal is not served by telling them “OK, if you want to get any of the people we’ve captured back, just kidnap or kill our soldiers or civilians.” All that will do is encourage more terrorism and legitimize the activities of the perpetrators, turning international opinion against Israel and swelling militants’ ranks because they can go to those around them and say that they’re ‘winning’.
The problem is I know that such a view probably isn’t politically viable in Israel. :\
[...] Turn to the Left Posted on July 18, 2008 by CPO In a depressing week dominated by posts about the prisoner swap deal with Hezbollah, where can one find solace? [...]
I guess accepting Israeli state police accusations and convictions in secret state trials as truth passes as an anarchist point of view in Israel.
yaman,
#1. i don’t live in israel anymore. haven’t for a year.
#2. who’s accepting state police accusations? samir kuntar admits proudly to the crime he committed, and promises to do the same again. more so, eyewitnesses to the incident attest to what happened w/o any disparity between their stories.
#3. anarchists believe in the rights of people, not in the rights of political organizations and actors to deprive others of their rights. the right to life is the first right to which we are all entitled. samir kuntar deprived at least two people of their right to life, including a small child, using a nationalist cause as his justification. it is a skewed and fucked up world when he elicits more sympathy than his victims. should that constitute the definition of what it means to be an anarchist in your book — to take the side of the violator over the violated — you can count me out.
That is way too simplistic a way of looking at the situation.
Do you think the Israeli government doon’t realise the deal was unfair and a raw deal? Of course they did. So why did they go ahead with it? Because there was something much greater at stake here – the principle of the IDF to never leave a man behind. Yes, the price was damn high but the alternative is even higher… to see what I’m talking about read the article on the swap at http://www.bravejeworld.blogspot.com
not as simple as it seems…