Is That Legal?

I disagree with you about the synagogue burning. I believe the Palestinians understand the semiotics as well as you and I do. Sure, I “understand” it in the sense that casual brutality and blind hatred and prejudice is the norm when the official Arab world deals with Jews; but I do not “understand” it as in “excuse” or “tolerate” the rationale behind it. The state, or state sanctioned attackers, burn or attack synagogues in every other corner of the Arab world too, if the local branch of the Diaspora is foolish enough to out themselves. It is understandable in the same way that the issuance of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is understandable. I predict that this will just be cited in the near future in PA textbooks and speeches and news accounts as the first victorious step by Hamas, Hezbollah and friends, towards the complete eradication of Israel.

There is a strong military strategic argument to be made that long term stability in any region is served by nations picking geographic boundaries that pose barriers to military attack. Poland is often cited as a counter example. Lacking imposing and difficult to traverse geographic frontiers, it is easily attacked and hard to defend. Germany and France have large sections of border regions that are mountainous and thickly forested, and inhospitable to attack, hence the attack route favored by most commanders – including the Allies in late WWII has usually but not invariably cut through the easily traversed flatlands of the Netherlands and Belgium. If the Israelis give up the Golan Heights, much of Israel will be much more vulnerable to artillery and armor attack.

This isn’t a meant to be a sarcastic question, but why settle on the lines of 1967 as the proper line of Israeli withdrawal? Why not the lines of ’56 or of the camps of early ’48? What makes the retention of land gained in a counterattack, less moral than the seizure of weakly defended lands during the course of a revolution?

It's a bit of a Catch-22: The Israeli army destroyed every other building in the settlements, for reasons which pass my understanding, but couldn't, apparently, bring themselves to demolish the (decommissioned)synagogues even knowing that this result was highly likely (more so, perhaps, with all the other buildings gone?).

They wanted these images, simple as that.

"enough confidence in its capacity to survive" Israel currently (2002) has somewhere between 75 and 200 nuclear weapons. http://www.thebulletin.org/article_nn.php?art_ofn=so02norris

"since being attacked by its neighbours in 1967" "Israel's attack against Egypt on June 5 began what would later be dubbed the Six-Day War." http://www.answers.com/topic/six-day-war (Of course it is a lot more complicated than one sentence.)

Now why would the Palestinians burn those empty synagogues?

From Benny Morris's interview with Ha'aretz "Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history."

And in our case it effectively justifies a population transfer.

"That's what emerges."
And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba?
"You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. …"
[…]
"We have to try to heal the Palestinians. Maybe over the years the establishment of a Palestinian state will help in the healing process. But in the meantime, until the medicine is found, they have to be contained so that they will not succeed in murdering us."

To fence them in? To place them under closure?

"Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."

http://www.counterpunch.org/shavit01162004.html

Now the question is what is the nature of the symbolism of the burning synagogues in this picture?

Oh, sorry Edwin, I guess I must have missed the rationale. It's perfectly legit revolutionary ardor behind synagogue burning, right? My false consciousness must have blinded me to the people's righteous struggle.

My understanding (from an Israeli who would know) is that the Israelis and the PA agreed the Israelis would destroy their houses because those houses, built for small single families, are not appropriate for the Palestinian lifestyle, in which large extended families live together. Thus, the Palestinians would have torn down the houses anyway and preferred that the Israelis bear the cost. The Israelis had agreed to tear down the synagogues as well but at the last minute relented to arguments that to do so would be sacreligious. Thus, the Israelis knew the Palestinians would destroy the synagogues. Which doesn't entirely undermine Eric's point about the symbolism, but certainly casts it in a different light. Incidentally, the Israelis agreed not to tear down greenhouses (and other economically productive structures) and as far as I know did not do so) because the Palestinians want to make use of them.

Al Mawiwa - who the fuck is talking about revolutionary ardour? It's called hatred. It is the same hatred as the Native population in North America had for the white people when they tried, and were almost successful in driving them into the sea. Is hatred so hard a word to use? My objection is that this hatred is not the hatred that Hitler had for the Jews (or the Zionists for the Palestinians).

Eric clearly understood that it was hatred. I only objected to the nature and meaning of that hatred. It is not the Palestinians that are to be compared to Hitler. Grynszpan's attack against Germans as a group must be understood in a historical context. Hitler and his conspirators were very quick to carefully link "Jewish" violence to the evilness of the Jewish people. While Eric did try to provide some distance and understanding, he still made the false link – Palestinians and Nazism, ignoring the real link between Zionism (and Judaism in who's name it claims to operate) and Fascism.

I am truly sorry that there is not a Gandhi around when you need one. In the mean time we will have to deal with the anger and violence of the oppressed.

"The assassination [Ernst vom Rath] provided Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Chief of Propaganda, with the excuse he needed to launch a pogrom against German Jews. Grynszpan's attack was interpreted by Goebbels as a conspiratorial attack by "International Jewry" against the Reich and, symbolically, against the Fuehrer himself. This pogrom has come to be called Kristallnacht, "the Night of Broken Glass."
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/kristallnacht.html

"These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.

Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle, recently published a letter titled "Not in My Name." Signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies. Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also pointed out the relevance of the South African experience. "

Against Israeli Apartheid Desmond Tutu and Ian Urbina (07/02)
http://www.merip.org/newspaper_opeds/Tutu_IU_Israeli_Apartheid.html

Peter's right. Israel's reasons for leveling the settlements are not difficult at all to understand. They did it because the PA asked them to. Some of the extensive settlement greenhouses were moved to the Negev, but many acres were left for the Palestinians at their request. The greenhouses have not been spared by the looters either despite the best efforts of Palestinian authorities to protect them.

They wanted these images, simple as that.

I completely supported the Gaza handover and hope to see the process continue in the West Bank, but you would have to be blind not to see the political and social costs of the transfer for Israel. The nation has been ripped apart by the action, and scenes of the IDF destroying synagogues would only have added fuel to the fire. Whether the government gave in to pressure to cancel the scheduled razings because they honestly judged it the lesser of two evils or simply to save their own political skins, I can't say, but the suggestion that this was nothing but a calculated move to influence international opinion seems absurd on the face of it.

the real link between Zionism (and Judaism in who's name it claims to operate) and Fascism.

Edwin, I realize that emotions run high on both sides of this issue and people who prefer anger to understanding can find plenty of material out of which to build an entirely one-sided view of the situation which demonizes one group or the other, but even that context cannot obscure the overt anti-Semitism of linking Judaism to fascism. Also, your attempts to create an equivalence between an ongoing campaign of terror and the killing of one German by one Jewish youth, and between the occupation and the Holocaust are offensive on too many levels to explore here.

Beth:

It was not my intention to link Judiasm to fascism. Rather it was my intention to link Zionsism to fascism, and to note that Zionists claim to speak for all Jews.

As for the offense of creating an equivalence between an "ongoing campaign of terror", and the Holocaust - 1. I am not the one who started the comparisons - Eric Muller did. 2. to claim that the Holocaust is much worse than the occupation is something you can not say. A lot more people died in the Holocaust (I am assuming we are referring to the Jewish experience only here) - but it lasted a significantly shorter time period than the occupation has lasted. The effects of multi-generational living under the occupation may very well be worse for the survivors than the short term reign of Hitler.

" to claim that the Holocaust is much worse than the occupation is something you can not say.

Oh really? I'll say it and so will anyone else with an ounce of logic or the slightest sense of proportion. You might want stop reading garbage at Counterpunch, et. al and try exercising what's left of your brain.

I agree with David

Gaza's problem not resolved yet, I think, as media talking last times.