"|Here come the golden oldies; here comes the Hezbollah."

[digitaldiscipline]

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/20091855216577820.html

You know, there's a reason that people have developed a stereotypical view of middle-eastern dudes as hot-headed jackasses.

"We are ready to sacrifice our souls, our brothers and sisters, our children, our loved ones for what we believe in." - Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader

I'm all for standing up for one's beliefs, but indiscriminate, cross-border rocket fire? Really? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ASSHOLES?

And don't think I'm just blindly siding with the Israelis on this; they, and the Palestinians, are like two unruly kids in the back seat of a station wagon on a cross-country trip, poking each other with their colored pencils over and over again out of pure, spiteful antagonism, not trying to do anything but piss the other one off.

I don't have an answer that borders on anything like practical terms, but, you know, "Not being complete cocks about everything to everyone in the immediate vicinity" shouldn't be so wildly untenable as a first step.

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Israel needs ninjas to hang out in Gaza and Lebanon, waiting for people to do terrorist stuff, and then kill them quietly. That way you've got no collateral damage, and if the biggest hotheads just silently disappear, there's none of this "family honor" crap that says you have to take up your brother's fight, even if he was a flaming asshat, just 'cause someone capped him for being an asshat.

Also, Israel should cut out their policy of treating non-Jews as second class citizens. It's really hard to sympathize with them when they're acting like the US in 1875.

[mitejen.livejournal.com]

I thought Israels ninjas were Mossad. :D

But yeah you're point about their treatment of non-Jews is 100% accurate.

[mitejen.livejournal.com]

I get that too--that feeling like everyone in that area has been wired with a hair-trigger vengeance complex since birth about everything. Of course the craziest people have the loudest voices and sane people don't yell bloody murder at the drop of a hat, but that apparently doesn't make good television.

[ruefullyamused.livejournal.com]

*hatdrop*

BLOODY MURDER!

Then again, I don't know that etcet would vouch for my sanity ;)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I've never known you to wear a hat, either....

[ruefullyamused.livejournal.com]

Damn, no photos of me in my ass' ears readily available

[mitejen.livejournal.com]

Heh, touche. Of course since sanity's relative it's all a crap shoot anyway.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

The media can take its share of the blame for that last bit.

[ruefullyamused.livejournal.com]

In my usual arrogant way, I have the answer to everything. Except this time. Part of me wants to think, "whoever the aggressor is, they both need to chill the fuck out" but that just ain't gonna happen. So I turn to my flimsy grasp of history for context. Another LJ friend posted this recently: Palestinian loss of land 1946 - 2000 (http://kwitsach-hadera.livejournal.com/689805.html)

So, things I need to read up on before I have much more opinion than I do:

Exactly who decided in 1946 that Israel is a state and that the state would be those little white dots of land in map 1? Who was for it? Who was against it?

What the hell happened in 1947 that turned so much green map space white? Who was for it? Who was against it?

Same questions for maps 3 and 4 really. My knowledge of the history may be feeble, but something tells me that folks in the green map areas didn't consistently say, "Hey, Israel, here's some white-out." I could be wrong, of course. But if green map space wasn't converted to white map space by free will, I might jump to conclusions and assume it was converted by force or coercion. In which case I might also jump to more conclusions and assume that maybe the folks in the shrinking green areas are a mite peeved. Does that make them less ignorant asshats? Of course not.

So faced with their ignorance and my own ignorance, I only have recourse to my favorite bumper sticker: WWID? (what would *I* do?). Well, if I were living my hardscrabble existence in a shithole and thought it was my shithole then someone came along and told me a sad story about another bunch of luckless folk who don't even have shitholes of their own and took my shithole away to give it to someone else, with the proviso that I could then live in a collective shithole with a bunch of other pissed off shithole dwellers and that our "benefactors" would be kind enough to offer us hospitals, education and other goodies if only we accepted their generous eviction, but that if we balked and showed our ire with such meager force as we have we could expect *massive* organized, well-funded, hi-tech state military reprisals backed by the might of the whole goddamned infidel world, I think my molotov-throwing arm would bulk up quite quickly.

[mitejen.livejournal.com]

Awesome summation!

Also, imagine an entire generation who only know the Israelies as 'those fuckers who stole our parents' shithole' and the situation comes into even sharper focus. The young can be a powerful resource when it comes to mobilizing the crazy.

[ruefullyamused.livejournal.com]

The young can be a powerful resource when it comes to mobilizing the crazy.

And vice versa, hah.

[satorisearching.livejournal.com]

Exactly who decided in 1946 that Israel is a state and that the state would be those little white dots of land in map 1? Who was for it? Who was against it?

In 1946, Israel wasn't a state. The first map appears to be estimations of where Jewish and Arab populations were in the British Mandate of Palestine at the time. Of course, it doesn't show population density, some of that green was probably fairly empty desert. At that time the European powers who won WWII still had a lot of Jewish refugees from the holocaust that they didn't know what to do with, so the idea of creating a Jewish state to send them to rather than absorb them into their own populations was becoming popular

What the hell happened in 1947 that turned so much green map space white? Who was for it? Who was against it?

The UN Partition Plan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine) happened. The UN tried to create a two state solution. The US and Israel were for it. The Arab League was against it. Israel accepted the plan, and declared itself a state. Arab violence started, the major Arab states declared war, Israel won the war, and many Palestinian refugees from the new Israeli territory ended up in Gaza (at that time under Egyptian control).

The Egyptians didn't want to absorb a bunch of refugees, either, so the camps that most Gazans still live in were set up. Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights (now collectively referred to as "the occupied territories") were taken by Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (often called the Yom Kippur War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War)).

Pretty much the Palestinians have been screwed over by everyone, both the other Arab powers and the Israelis. Nobody wants them. Israel now controls their territory, but doesn't want to absorb them into the general population, because if they have the right to vote, it would change the Jewish nature of the State of Israel. But the general militancy of the Palestinian population has kept a lot of Israelis, especially their center-right and right-wing political parties, afraid of giving them a state of their own.

[ruefullyamused.livejournal.com]

Given the choice of work or reading the articles, I think I'll read the articles (well, catch as catch can). Thanks.

[the_axel]

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under The British Mandate by Tom Segev is essential to understanding the birth of the current situation in that chunk of land.

[ruefullyamused.livejournal.com]

Bumped to the top of my reading list. There's things I'd rather read, but since I know I'm gonna want to bitch about our collective political involvement I better have something like a leg to stand on, heh. Thanks.

[smaugchow.livejournal.com]

The thing that bugs me is that the USA gets the shit end of the stick for eveything that happens over there. If the Jews and Arabs want to kill each other into eternity then by all menas, have at each other and enjoy the bloodbath, but I'd like to have American hands out of it. Obiviously we had a large role int eh creation of Israel and in arming them, but we need to lay off the constant political ass-kissing and appeasement. We sit by and assert Israel's right to defend itself as it bombs schools and is so random with it's fire that most Jewish losses have been by friendly fire (that was a nugget I heard last week - might be obsolete now.)

Israel will never act responsibly when they know America has their backs. If we leave them to reap what they sow, they'll either extinguish themselves or shape up.

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

I'm in agreement that Hezbollah are dangerous lunatics who would not be missed if they all died.

However, Israel's response resembles the older kid in the back seat of the station wagon, on being poked with a pencil, stabbing its sibling with a steak knife, shooting its parents in the head, setting fire to the car & driving the blazing explosive inferno doom-buggy right over its grandparents...