Links from my del.icio.us account for March 21st:
- Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques – IDF fashion 2009 – Haaretz – Israel News – Insane article about the T-shirt glamorizing killing Palestinan babies and raping Arab women that IDF soldiers make at the end of their tour of duty.
- U.N. rights envoy sees Israeli war crimes in Gaza – Richard Falk called the Israeli attacks a "massive assault on a densely populated urbanized setting" in which the entire civilian population had been subjected to "an inhumane form of warfare that kills, maims and inflicts mental harm."
- Hamas: We’ll kidnap more soldiers if Israel doesn’t show flexibility – Haaretz – Israel News – They should call the campaign "A thousand Shalits now". But Hamas did not even fight during the last war, are they even capable of carrying out more kidnappings?
- Israel to investigate killings of civilians in Gaza operation | McClatchy – More self-investigations.
- LRB · John Mearsheimer: The Lobby Falters – On the Freeman affair, and the way it was covered in the mainstream media. Mearsheimer concludes that more people are fighting back against the lobby, making its nefarious role public.
Even if Hamas was to capture another soldier… the "capturing prisoners" fetish is a dead-end strategy.
The famous/infamous Samir Quntar, for example, was sent originally to capture hostages, and then spent thirty years in Israeli prisons while other operations try to capture soldiers to release him… the inevitable implication was much suffering inflicted on Lebanese and Israeli civilians in this process… was an inch of Palestine rerturned in this way? What was the point?
These gun-happy militants would hate to admit it, but unarmed civilian resistance has (* under current conditions and balance of power*) much more power to achieve anything, while the armed struggle goes nowhere. Another captive soldier would mean enormous suffering for Palestinians, and the number of people who will die and taken prisoners as consequence will far outnumber the ones who perhaps eventually will be released.
Yet in south Lebanon and in the Palestinian Occupied Territories this tactic has also proven effective to a degree. It will take the right mix of military resistance and political leadership to achieve this, but targeting the military (and settlers) is certainly more justifiable and admirable than suicide bombing operations. I don't think there is any other similar situation where passive resistance alone has worked, or military options alone have worked, and it's pretty clear the Israelis have no intention to return the territory without some form of pressure.
To be sure, without pressure nothing will be achieved. I don't question the legitimacy of targetting the military, and I agree that in South Lebanon armed resistance did work – it eventually drove Israel out. Even there, non-violent means played a role that is not usually mentioned – it was unarmed civilian marches into the "security zone" which caused the occupation to collapse a month earlier than planned. (Barak aimed for a June pullout but the Lebanese pro-ISrael militia simply crumbled to dust once the marches started in May, leaving Israel no choice but to pack up and go almost overnight). And indeed, because of that experience, the most terrifying prospect for Israeli military commanders in West Bank and Gaza is non-violent mass protests e.g. directed at Gaza border. "They will climb the fences" – this is the real nightmare of Israelis, not the guerilla attacks such as the Shalit operation (successful in itself) , or the largely useless rockets. And non-violent protests are possible – see the bringing-down of the Gaza Egypt border last year.
What the Palestinians don't have, and Hizbulla has, is the strategic depth of an entire country, good supply lines, and strong military training. So it was naive of Hamas to think that they can replicate Hizbulla's success. The most that armed resistance can achieve in the West Bank and Gaza is a tactical Israeli "disengagement" making things actually worse.
In my opintion, the most effective weapon the Palestinians have today is a potential demand for voting rights within one state. Even if they use as purely tactical tool, this would scare Israelis a thousand times more than any military tactic.
I think mink, you have a point.
It is perhaps one route to get the Palestinians to live in one country with the Israelis and than they can use their voting power to try and affect the policies there. Of course, there would have to be a completely open franchise system in place first, which I do not see Israel doing.
The real solution still remains the two-state solution and America should do more to push this. Even Bush recognised this as the best solution.
I really do not not see what the foot-dragging is all about. Perhaps Obama will make a difference, or perhaps not. It appears the agenda for foreign policy is mostly controlled by careerists at the State Department, and they have their own axes to grind.
Peace would be so easy if anyone was really committed to it.