Trent Shipley wrote: >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. > But here, both sides are doing just that - the Palestinians rarely engage Israeli authorities, preferring the "let's go and murder a bunch of civilians" approach. Calculated Genocide is a long way from what we see from the Israelis. There is plenty enough of that going on in the rest of the world, so that when the Israelis restrain from doing that, you should give them credit for it.
>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. > Again, Israel is careful to only "retailiate". The only advances since 1948 have been response to an external attack (the ongoing settlement expansion is again a detrimental effect, but not really on the scale of the advances made in conflict). This puts Israel in a similar position to the Phillipines v Moro, Spaniards v Basques etc, and not on the same scale as China v Tibet or Indonesia v E. Timor/Indonesia v Irian Jaya, which is how you seem to be characterising the Israeli position. >If there were a Palestinian State, Israel could "justify" and conduct war >against it. > Actually - no. The world has moved on from that - we won't accept it in Kuwait, we won't accept it in Falklands/Malvinas - Indonesia may well be the last to successfully attack and occupy another country, and that's not working out so well either. >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. > Actually, their problem is that their international position IS important to them (whether they like it or not, the US will enforce this), whereas China, Sudan etc don't really give a damn what other countries think of the counter-insurgency programs. The only success the Palestinians enjoy over the others you mentioned is a high international profile - ironically largely due to Israel's free press and democratic standards. > >(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. > How do you define successful - invade, occupy, resettle with your own people and use force to quell the nationalist movements among indigenous people? Indonesia has done a pretty good job here. Five years ago it would have been called an unqualified success, and it is certainly more recent than the above examples (given that the Russians started their project in the century before last, however ongoing it may be). The US has a number of colonies in SE Asia (albeit very small ones), and Northern Ireland could be counted in many ways, as could Hong Kong until a few years ago. Interestingly - these are all islands rather than mainland Eurasia. Cheers Russell C.
