On Wednesday 05 December 2001 15:07, you wrote: > << I agree with Trent for the most part. The Palestinians are at war with > Israel and have every right to fight back, but even I do not support > killing civilians. >> > > By that logic, the Israelis are at war with the Palestinians and have every > right to fight back, with the same ban on killing civilians.
This is basically true. The big problem is that everyone agrees that Israel is still the occupying power in the West Bank. Some Jews and Christians would go so far as to say that the West Bank *IS* Israeli sovereign territory by divine decree. Making total war on foreigners is one thing. Making total war on a state's own (barely armed) subjects can at best be interpreted as collective responsibility or brutal massacre. In the worst case it amounts to calculated genocide. This is even more apparent when the subjects are a non-citizen subordinate "caste" and ethnically distinct from the occupying party. Yes. Israel has the "right" to engage their Palestinian enemy. However, fighting a counter-insurgency necessarilly makes one the oppressor of a victimized weaker party. It also complicates matters for the agressor and gives the inherently weaker party a superior political-military position than if they were a recognized sovereign state that had to fight a "justified" (provoked) invasion by a tormented enemy. If there were a Palestinian State, Israel could "justify" and conduct war against it. How do you justify a war against an hostile, indigenous, and oppressed and occupied people? It is an insurmountable PR problem. (One answer is to just do it! Damn public opinion and scoffing at international standards. NB. This usually works. Israel's problem is that the Palestinians aren't quite as weak as the Kurds, or Brazilian indians, or dissident regligious groups in China, or Sub-Sahelian Africans in Sudan, or... Actually the Palestinians have been remarkably efficient at making the Zionists pay for every advance in the Zionist project. The early Zionists really had no choice but to coduct their project for a (then secular) Jewish homeland in Zion. It is ironic that the strength of the indigenous population made it a territory particularly ill suited for total colonization. Coastal Eurasia (except the Artic coast) is just too technologically advanced and densely populated for easy colonization. ================= (Question: What are the most recent successful colonial projects along the non-Arctic coasts of Eurasia?) There were Germanic and Latin Conquests over Celts in the European peninsula. There is also the ongoin Russian colonization of far north-eastern Eurasia. Any others?
