Now, the Arabs say about the European Jewish illegal immigrants who came in and founded the state of Israel, "let them go somewhere else." Well, there’s a problem with the “somewhere else” thingy. Before Eichmann came up with his “Final Solution”, he went to every country in the world asking if they’d accept Europe’s Jews. “Here, take our Jews,” he said. “We’ll give’em to ya fer *free*!” Every single country on the planet turned him down. When ya got Jews that ya don’t want around, and ya wanna get rid of them, and nobody wants ta take them… well, we all know how that story ends. And it’s no surprise that Israel’s Jews don’t want to re-live it.
Maybe after Lebanon has been stable for a couple of decades then Israel’s Jewish population can figure out for themselves that acting like, well, Nazis, isn’t necessary for their safety. But right now, with car bombings and assassinations being the order of the day in Lebanon… well. Granted, a lot of that is meddling from Israel and Syria. But the fact that Lebanon can’t come together to deal with that meddling doesn’t bode well for the notion of a multi-cultural Palestine that gives both its Arabs and its Jews equal rights, even if both sides hadn’t spent the last forty years demonizing each other as baby killers and genocidal maniacs.
First thing we did at the behavior intervention center when two of our behavior-disordered kids got at it like that was the geographic cure — remove them from each other’s vicinity. Give’em separate timeout cubicles. Unfortunately, that seems to be the only thing that works when you got crap like this going on… and given that the Israeli Jews have atomic weapons, the notion that anybody is going to get them to go anywhere is pretty laughable. Especially since they still remember the last time, which ended up with Hitler’s “Final Solution”. Which means, well, somebody needs to step up to the plate and give the Palestinian Arabs a real home somewhere far, far removed from Israel. Otherwise there will be no peace. Just how it goes, when you got two punks going after it tooth and nail like that…
Of course, everybody keeps saying "it's someone else's problem" and nothing every happens. So it goes. The problem is not that there's no solution to the Palestinian problem. The problem is that everybody's being a stubborn ass and refusing to consider any such solution. The corrupt "Palestinian Authority" likes the Palestinians right where they are as a buncha ignorant impoverished slobs for them to rule over while they loot the monies given to them for the welfare of the Palestinians, Israel just wants the Pals gone, and nobody else is willing to step up and say "okay, we'll give them citizenship in our nation" because, well, either they hate darkies (the United States and Europe) or because they hate Israel (all of Israel's neighbors). So we get a buncha poor bastards with citizenship in no real state stuck in a Bantustan concentration camp with Israeli guns outside the barbed wire making sure they stay there, and a buncha Israelis who have seriously considered Hitler's "final solution" to the Palestinian problem (who shall be Israel's Eichmann?), and Palestinians figure they got nothing to lose but their chains and end up blowing themselves to bits all over the place, and so it goes. All because a buncha assholes want to be either bigots (Europe and the U.S.) or jerks (the entire goddamned Middle East, Israel included). Bah. Monkeys. Monkeys with bad fur and delusions of grandeur. You can have'em. Seriously.
-- Badtux the Monkey-observing Penguin
I owe you a long reply for your earlier one, but the last few days have been unusually busy and this one looks to be the same.
ReplyDeleteSeveral brief notes: a. I don't much like the Palestinians, seeing as I use public transportation and all, but I don't think you can call them slobs. They've built basically everything around here since 1967, both in the OT and in Israel.
b. Giving them a new land won't actually work. The little psychos have created a whole mythology out of the exile of 1948 and are at the moment worshiping olive trees and AK-47s, in this order. One of the commentators on my blog wrote pithily that "the 'authentic Jews' want to cut down the olive trees, and the 'authentic Arabs' want to copulate with them". No way in hell they'll take another land, especially if one was actually offered. They'd consider it a betrayal.
(And who are we to grudge them that, when one of the main line of attacks in politics is the mention of "Uganda" - the British plan to settle the Jews in eastern Africa, and a derogative for those who agreed?)
Hi, Yossi. "Poor slobs" is an Americanism for someone who's in a bad situation (poverty, inadequate housing, lack of worthwhile employment, etc.) rather than a statement of moral or physical hygiene. Sorry if you were confused about that.
ReplyDeleteRegarding whether the Palestinians would accept citizenship in another country, well, yes, you'd have your die-hards who refused to discuss the matter. But that is a small minority of any population. Most folks just want to live their lives in peace, and would accept any offer that seemed to give them the hopes of a good life. Affluence seems to solve a number of moral scruples that people have -- just look at the United States, which has allowed affluence to completely corrupt any morality which the nation ever advocated because, well, folks are just too doggone bought to bother dissenting in any real way despite a government which is horribly unpopular and behaving completely contrary to the will of the people. Or compare the situation of Muslims in Europe vs. Muslims in the United States. In the United States, we have no problems with Islamic terrorists (well, other than those a-hats who came here specifically to be terrorists) because, well, we buy'em off with beads and baubles. People who are citizens of a country, who participate in the civil life of a country, who have full legal rights in a country, whose children have a good chance of being better off in this country than their parents ever were, rarely do anything that will imperil that situation. By contrast, in Europe, you have the situation in e.g. France where the Algerians have been living there for generations and yet still aren't allowed to become French citizens. As a result they riot and burn stuff and so on and so forth. And I won't even start talking about Germany and the Turks, or Italy and the Albanians, or England and the Pakis...
So I have no doubt, having watched it happen in practice, that if there were ever a sincere offer of citizenship that most of the Palestinians would eventually accept the situation and happily leave the nutballs behind to blow themselves up or whatever. Not that any such offer would ever be forthcoming. As I pointed out at the end of my latest posting, everybody seems to want to be jerks or racists, it's all about thinking with their balls, not their brains. So it goes. And so those who just want to live their lives get shafted by, well, jerks and bigots. Might as well be describing most of human history with that last sentence.
- Badtux the History Penguin
Oh, regarding the "Uganda Option", it was never a particularly good option because the Jews would have been a minority there and in the same basic situation as Europe before Hitler -- as a minority population under the rule of non-Jews and thus subject to pogroms and worse. However distasteful the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 war, it's unclear what alternative Europe's Jews had, given that most of Europe's Jews were still in Hitler's concentration camps in 1947 (those who were not in Britain's concentration camps set up to intern those trying to make it to Palestine).
ReplyDelete- Badtux the History Penguin
Badtux, you're probably aware of how Arab nations discriminate against Palestinians who have moved to their countries. The Gulf States like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are terrible for this. Large percentages of the population can't vote (even in the sham elections), are subject to deportation if they get out of line, and most importantly, don't get a cut of the oil money that's spread around the upper crust who qualify as "citizens." Ditto for Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, where masses of Palestinians live in refugee camps (refugee cities, they've turned into in some places) but they're not a part of regular society.
ReplyDelete(Lest you think I'm picking on Arab states in general, I'd note that similar prejudice against immigrants happens in other countries. Hell, even I can't vote here because I'm essentially a migrant labourer.)
Also, don't forget the Palestinians' devotion to their homeland. Unlike shallowly-rooted Americans, they've been on their patch of ground for thousands of years. That's why they hold the grudge and want to reclaim the villages where their great-to-the-power-of-10 grandparents are buried. Humans are tribal at heart (it's just that in modern Western societies, we use sports teams as a substitute to satisfy our tribal urges.) The Palestinians tribe is not going to go gently when another tribe wants to kick it off.
What makes you think that there's a chimpanzee's chance that any other nation would accept loads of Palestinians? Language barriers, who owns the land they'd be plopped on, who builds their houses, where do they find work and food, and most importantly, where will the water for them come from? All these questions... Not gonna happen!
I think it's more likely that Israelis will be driven out. Sure, Israel has its "Samson Option" of unleashing atomic hellfire on any nation that would overrun it. But like Biblical Samson who pulled down the Temple to crush the Philistines who imprisoned him, dying in the process, it would also be the death of Israel.
Either there would be catastrophic retaliation from outside, fallout would make the land uninhabitable, or Israeli society would fracture because so many people would be revulsed that the Jews had become genociders. Since the days of the Patriarchs, Yossi, isn't that what has brought the Nation of Israel down when it was stronger than its external enemies -- when the Hebrews began fighting amongst themselves?
It might come to that anyway. If global warming, Peak Oil and Malthusian population collapse hit, there will be horrors unimagineable. (Another reason I'm glad to be here in the continent the rest of the world doesn't give a stuff about.)
When the Crusaders were driven out of the Holy Land, streets in many Levantine cities ran ankle deep with blood. (I've read it was knee-deep in Jerusalem when the Crusaders conquered it, because they were nasty massacre-ers, they were.) We may live long enough to see that again, although we'll probably only get vague rumours of the event, because it would take a global system crash for that to happen, and teh Intertubes will be off, along with the electricity and water. Not something I'm looking forward to.
The truly radical solution would be for Israelis and Palestinians to stop fighting over folk tales about Imaginary Sky Beings. Israel would have to do some "hard yards" as they say here and allow Palestinians to squeeze back into their houses. Many Israelis would have to move out of the houses/land they've appropriated. Palestinians would have to stop being such rejectionist jackasses.
But the Palestinians whose arses I've wiped -- (I've scoured the bums of so many ethnic groups, so I feel like I know a little about them) -- are more Westernised than many Arab societies. (Those Syrians -- what pieces of work, and don't get me started on Macedonians!) They'd make good citizens of a new "Palastisrael." Or "Israelistine."
Anyway, the best way would be for both sides to stop warring, co-exist in a unified nation and get down to the serious business of outbreeding each other and competing on the basis of crooked politics. But that would be too easy. Therefore, I expect blood.
Yes, Bukko, I'm aware of how Palestinians are treated in the Arab world. The Palestinians have become the new Jews of the Middle East -- a hated minority with a real home nowhere. And will always be trouble as long as that's so, given Middle Eastern culture which pretty much sez if you're going to be treated like subhuman scum, the solution is to go out like a man, not on your knees.
ReplyDeleteAs for the notion that the current Palestinians were living in Palestine for thousands of years, well, you do have a point, since most of them are Jews who converted to Islam during the long years of Islamic rule. There are few "true" Arabs amongst the Palestinians (as in, people whose direct ancestry leads back to the Arabic Peninsula). But you might as well point out that East Prussia was a Germanic state for thousands of years. It's Poland now, regardless of how Germans think of it as the ancestral homeland of the predecessor of the modern German state.
Regarding the aftermath of the collapse of the Crusader states, we have no good sources to indicate widespread massacres, just second or third hand stories that probably are propaganda. On the other hand, we have first-hand accounts from actual participants as to how the Crusaders treated the Jewish population of Jerusalem when they conquered it. They apparently were right proud of the fact that they broke into the synagogues and slaughtered the Jews to the last man and sold off their women and children into slavery and prostitution, and wrote letters home bragging about it.
Regarding the geographic cure's improbability, as I point out, while the geographic cure would solve the Palestinian problem, other nations are either bigots (Europe and the U.S.) or jerks (the entire friggin' Middle East) so the chances of it happening are zero. But it *would* solve the problem. If the friggin' two legged monkeys who infest this planet weren't too busy hooting and howling and flinging feces at each other and were interested in solving their problems instead. That's the problem with monkeys, they think with their balls rather than their brains. They'd rather be right than do right. Sigh. This penguin celebrates the upcoming extinction of the human race due to radical climate change and the breeding of super-viruses that will spread through the weakened population like the Sword of God. Too bad the monkeys will take out most of the rest of the world with them, but (shrug). Monkeys. What can ya do with'em?
- Badtux the Misanthropic Penguin
You know, next time someone talks about the Palestinians' right of return, I'm going to suggest that the Arab nations allow the right of return to the Jews they booted out of their own countries. Or at least financially compensate said Jews.
ReplyDeleteI know; I'm not optimistic about such a thing happening either.
Then maybe I'll ask why Israel happily accepted these Jews from Arab countries while the Arab nations refuse to give citizenship to Palestinians.
You don't think the Palestinians are being USED AS POLITICAL PAWNS, do you?
All the fools to single Israel out for blame should include Israel's neighbors.
Anyone agree? Anyone?
I agree Truffle! But my opinion couints for naught...
ReplyDeleteTux, if global warming and super-viruses do clean up the monkey problem, that would not be a bad thing for the planet. (Not so good for this money, but I've had half a century of living damned well, so I shan't complain too much, as long as it's quick.)
Are you familiar with the book "The World Without Us"? It's a scientific look at what Nature would do to our bodies, our houses, our cities, in a day, a week, a decade, a century, if the monkeys suddenly disappeared. It wouldn't be such a bad thing for the planet. As Faulkner said in his 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature speech, "The Earth abides."
My only worry is that monkeys will fling their atomic poo on the way out. That could take a bit longer to bounce back from.
My only hope is that Aussie possums evolve into the next dominant species. They're way cuter than monkeys.
Well, Truffle, we here in the United States still haven't compensated Japanese-Americans for the properties we stole from them in 1942 when we rounded them all up and took them to the concentration camps, so good luck on your little quest for justice there. Oh, BTW, the reason we give for not compensating them: "Nobody *forced* them to sell all their property at a horrible loss, they *chose* to do so." Same reason the Arabs give for why they won't compensate the Jews who moved from around the Middle East to Israel... "we didn't *force* them to sell all their property at a horrible loss, they *chose* to do so." Why do you expect Arabs to be any better than Americans, Truffle? Just ain't happenin'.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Palestinians being a political football, yes and no. Some of Israel's neighbors simply do not have the resources to support any more people -- see, e.g., Jordan (which BTW *did* grant Jordanian citizenship to any Palestinian who washed up there), which is at the limits of its water supply. Others have their own problems (Lebanon, which has been in the middle of civil war or incipient civil war for the last seventy years and wants another party to said civil war about the same way you want a sore tooth). But of course then you have the Arab states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia who are happy to have Palestinians... but only as serfs doing manual labor that they themselves don't want to do, not as citizens. Because, well, they hate themselves some Israel and it's handy to have the Pals to use as cannon fodder against Israel. Jerks.
It's all about who has the biggest swinging dick, rather than about what's right for people. So it goes. Monkeys. Bah, humbug.
-- Badtux the Misanthropic Penguin