This is quite bizarre. MaXtreme - the pieces you link to are so far removed from being impartial that they amount to being Israeli propaganda. A key part of every debate is not just presenting an opinion backed up by sources; not just assuming the sources you cite are factually correct, or even doing any research into their credibility or attempts to verify the material they've written; but to also acknowledge the credibility of sources on the other side of the debate.
One of your citations was "IsraelNationalNews.com" (already sounding nice and impartial) describing how a
single Palestinian child was 'saved' by an Israeli Defence (defence?!) Force medical team. Mysteriously it doesn't mention how this Palestinian child was injured in the first place, it just tells us his "life was in danger due to the worsening of his condition." OK then. But the problem is, the
single source for that article is the Israeli Defence Force themselves! Who, like any military aggressor (just putting it out there that they may be such a thing) are keen to spread news stories (let's call it propaganda) describing how great and humanitarian their soldiers are.
Perhaps they are, but I was somewhat baffled when you followed this argument up with a post attempting to disprove the "'atrocities' Israel are supposed to be committing on a 'daily basis'". I presume you cited the Beyond the Cusp blog to back-up your point (or make it for you), but it has only served to do the opposite. It describes how the friendly Israeli Defence Force (who 'saved' the life of a single Palestinian child) systematically killed hundreds of Palestinian children in an operation known as Cast Lead. I particularly liked the way they cited the well-known and respected organisation promoting human rights and calling out those who attack them, Amnesty International. The blog even provided
a link to the PDF report on the Israeli operation, or as they put it; "22 Days of Death and Destruction". Amnesty International state that as a result of the attack, which came without warning, "some 1,400 Palestinians had been killed,
including some 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians".
Hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks carried out using high-precision weapons – airdelivered bombs and missiles, and tank shells. Others, including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers. Aerial bombardments launched from Israeli F-16 combat aircraft targeted and destroyed civilian homes without warning, killing and injuring scores of their inhabitants, often while they slept. Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks.
Disturbing questions remain unanswered as to why such high-precision weapons, whose operators can see even small details of their targets and which can accurately strike even fast moving vehicles, killed so many children and other civilians.
It's a very damning and comprehensive report, which also gives 158 verifiable citations including from the United Nations. It describes how Israeli Defence Forces systematically hindered medical care for the wounded, blocking the passage of Palestinian Red Crescent (like the Red Cross) ambulances and forcing the medical teams to evacuate the civilians, including "four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses...too weak to stand up on their own", on donkey carts instead. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported: "Over the last 24 hours, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has not received Israeli approval for any of its coordination requests to reach those killed or injured. Nonetheless they have recovered 140 wounded and 22 dead.”
Certainly a different picture than that painted by the article describing how the heroes of the IDF saved a single Palestinian child's life, neglecting to mention how he had been injured in the first place.
Perhaps most tragic though is that the blog post you cited as an authority on this issue tells of the hundreds of civilian murders: "
there was not an overt out of proportional loss of civilian Palestinian life during Cast Lead." Which I think speaks for itself - both in terms of the repugnancy of the source you quote but also of the actions of the Israeli army: their indiscriminate targeting of civilians and their deliberate obstruction of medical services for the injured.
My intention, MaXtreme, is not to destroy your argument that Israel is an innocent force for good in the region (though I may have accidentally done that) or attack you personally in any way, but to challenge your one-sided opinion that seems to have close to no impartiality or criticism of the sources you cite. Yet you admit that your 'knowledge' comes from your "Jewish education from school, family lectures, tours around Israel and talks from Israelis." Again, none of these sound in the slightest bit impartial.
Perhaps one of the most striking things you said to Sam though was this:
I suggest you gain some true understanding into the origins of the conflict, rather than continue to be misguided by the lies from the Palestinian leadership, who teach their children to hate Jews and terrorise Israelis.
But what if we were to turn that on its head? What if
you needed greater understanding of the conflict? What if:
I suggest you gain some true understanding into the origins of the conflict, rather than continue to be misguided by the lies from the Israeli leadership, who teach their children to hate Palestinians and terrorise Palestinians.
The holocaust should be remembered as the horrific genocide of an entire people, but it should also be used as a reminder that such a thing should never be allowed to happen again. Whether this refers to the mass murder of a million people or, for example, 300 innocent children caught in a political crossfire, it doesn't matter. The Israeli justification of its repeated indiscriminate military attacks against civilian targets in no way reflects the dis-proportionality of both its retaliatory measures and pre-emptive strikes against supposed Palestinian military targets.
Adam raises the good point of how the West's portrayal of Israel is not impartial or fair - it is effectively propaganda disguising the mass atrocities committed by the Israeli armed forces. But it goes much higher than the mass media - the pro-Israeli lobby in the US has a reach far beyond. To quote Noam Chomsky (
source), when Barack Obama was a senator running for President, on his website "he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel's military actions until they had achieved their objectives, and censuring Iran and Syria because they were supporting resistance to Israel's destruction of southern Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years."
The representation of Israel is a fiction promoted by governments (particularly those of Israel and the US) that masks the consistent violations of human rights carried out by this so-called democratic peaceful state. Whilst I wouldn't have given this topic the name it has, and probably wouldn't even relate it to the Holocaust Memorial Day - it's still worthy of having our attention.
And just for the sake of balance - I am well aware that Hamas is also responsible for the killings of innocent Israeli civilians too. The above was in no way a defence of Hamas' actions in Gaza, particularly with regards to their indiscriminate rocket launching towards Israel. However, the disproportionate response of Israel, and their continued illegal settling of the West Bank, is doing far more to derail and hope of peace the region ever had.
