Hamas won the elections

[TransformX]

Bla bla bla..
Hamas won not because of the stupid martyrs as much as because Israel (Sharon) evacuated the Gaza strip, leaving Hamas to take credit. Living in Canada, you know little about what's going on around here, so don't go guessing.

edit: now tell me mr. Know-all, what blood thirstyness are we talking about here, other than stupid martyrs?

[Umfriend]

Hamas won not because of the stupid martyrs as much as because Israel (Sharon) evacuated the Gaza strip, leaving Hamas to take credit.

Yes, that is what the right, like Nethanyahu, would like us all to believe. Please give me one good reason why many palestinians would have voted Fatah,PFLP or the Third Way if Israel had not evacuated Gaza. I believe Hamas was already very strong over 2 years ago and would have grown stronger without the disengagement as well.

[lowlifecat]

Bla bla bla..
Hamas won not because of the stupid martyrs as much as because Israel (Sharon) evacuated the Gaza strip, leaving Hamas to take credit. Living in Canada, you know little about what's going on around here, so don't go guessing.

edit: now tell me mr. Know-all, what blood thirstyness are we talking about here, other than stupid martyrs?

Actually, i am still reading the same sources as i was when i was living in the middle east. Where i am does not affect what i know.

Besides this is still a debate and your GUESS is as good as mine. ...or should i say the Likud's guess is as good as mine.

3 to 1, that's 3 palistinians dead for every israeli death. That says something. The fact that the IDF continued bimbing Hamas in the middle of a ceasefire (ironicly they haven't yet broken the ceasefire on thier end). Throwing a missile at someone who isnt fighting back is a little bloodthirsty in my books.

I already know your opinion on this very clearly, as you've descrived in this thread: http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=55583

You said that if you or someone close feels threatened; you would take matters into your hands and screw consiquence after. I thought this was a perfect example of how Israeli policy towards palistinians works (it's also why you stuck to that rediculas argument).

Whenever Israel feels threatened there is always a retaliation/escalation. missiles and bombs, uprooted oilive trees, homes razed. I could go on but it boils down to a lot of collective punishment.

You keep beating this beast over the head over and over and are always surprised when it comes back even more pissed at you then before. Maybe it's time you changed tactics and stop crying that they want to kill you.

Edit: The evacuation of Gaza most probably did have something to do with it (look at how Hezbollah became heroes(in the eyes of the lebanese) after the pullout from south lebanon). although i don't see hezbollah winning across the board in beirut anytime soon. The pull out itself isn't enough to give Hamas the edge it needed.

[TransformX]

Yes, that is what the right, like Nethanyahu, would like us all to believe. Please give me one good reason why many palestinians would have voted Fatah,PFLP or the Third Way if Israel had not evacuated Gaza.

Fact is, some people still voted for the Fatah, like it or not, it's Yasser Arafat's organization afterall. By the way, the Israeli left and extreme left say the same thing here. Thye say that this kind of single sided action, without a proper agreement and talks with the other side, are the kind of things that give power to the radicals and non mainstream organizations. So no, not only Bibi and the extreme right.

I believe Hamas was already very strong over 2 years ago and would have grown stronger without the disengagement as well.

It's strong, it would have grown yada yada yada, the evacuation was their biggest success by far. It's the first time the 'Hamas way' brought fruits other than bombing, deaths etc.

[TransformX]

Actually, i am still reading the same sources as i was when i was living in the middle east. Where i am does not affect what i know.

Besides this is still a debate and your GUESS is as good as mine. ...or should i say the Likud's guess is as good as mine.

Likud, like Kadima is a sad joke, nobody listens to them, at least nobody with a hint of sentient thought.

3 to 1, that's 3 palistinians dead for every israeli death. That says something. The fact that the IDF continued bimbing Hamas in the middle of a ceasefire (ironicly they haven't yet broken the ceasefire on thier end). Throwing a missile at someone who isnt fighting back is a little bloodthirsty in my books.

Now that's a bunch of total BS:
1. The 'cease fire' / Hudna was called as a single sided action, Israel was never a part of it.
2. Qasam rockets are part of a cease fire, or did your Canadian neighbour fire those?
3. AFAIK Az Adin El Kasam (Hamas assasination squads) are part of Hamas, yet never part of any cease fire / hudna, so go sell your propaganda to someone who'd buy it

I already know your opinion on this very clearly, as you've descrived in this thread: http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=55583

You said that if you or someone close feels threatened; you would take matters into your hands and screw consiquence after. I thought this was a perfect example of how Israeli policy towards palistinians works (it's also why you stuck to that rediculas argument).

Whenever Israel feels threatened there is always a retaliation/escalation. missiles and bombs, uprooted oilive trees, homes razed. I could go on but it boils down to a lot of collective punishment.

You keep beating this beast over the head over and over and are always surprised when it comes back even more pissed at you then before. Maybe it's time you changed tactics and stop crying that they want to kill you.

I see.. So bombing Sbarro and murdering women and children, aiming to murder civilian children at the Doflinarium, bombing busses etc. are acts of philantropy?
LLC, you'll have to try (much) harder than that. Or maybe you wouldn't feel threatened if such things happen to your family?

[TransformX]

I still fail to see why the PA uses every weapon and dirty trick in their arsenal to kill Israeli civilians, while we have to be holier than the pope and not bomb them to oblivion like they deserve to, if only due to their call to destroy Israel and all the Jews.

[Technoid]

I still fail to see why the PA uses every weapon and dirty trick in their arsenal to kill Israeli civilians, while we have to be holier than the pope and not bomb them to oblivion like they deserve to, if only due to their call to destroy Israel and all the Jews.

Easy, you claim to be the “Good Guys” that are surrounded by the evil Arab SOB’s.
Unfortunately that also means that you have to abide the “Good Guys” rules

[TransformX]

Have nothing to say to that..

[schmosef]

DEBKAfile reports: Palestinian financial assets begin flight from West Bank

DEBKAfile’s Palestinian sources reveal that senior Palestinian Authority officials, including ministers and security chiefs, have begun transferring their West Bank assets overseas. One source estimates that some $45 million were shifted in one day, Monday, Jan. 30. The worst hit was the Arab Bank. Businessmen, doctors and lawyers, worried by the regime change from Fatah to Hamas, are moving their businesses and assets to Europe and Gulf emirates. This flight of funds is a symptom of how little confidence the business community and elite have in Mahmoud Abbas’ ability to limit the Hamas drive to grab full control of government and its organs. Above all, the moneyed classes fear the property of prominent figures will be impounded to make a show of the corruption and thieving practiced by the defeated Fatah.

Hamas leaders came forward Monday with an assurance that private businesses and investments would be safe under the new administration. This reassurance had the opposite effect; it stepped up the drain of money. The small Nablus Stock Exchange, the Al Quds Index, reacted to the uncertainties by slumping 2% Monday, which would be comparable to a 25% dive for regular-sized bourse.

[KvHagedorn]

There are no good guys or bad guys.. just winners and losers. Pulling out of Gaza was giving up.. showing weakness.. losing by forfeiture.. a stupid, pathetic thing to do.

[schmosef]

If Israel wanted to keep Gaza long term they should have forced the Palestinians to move out back when they had the chance.

It's not that they left Gaza that was bad, it was the way they left.

They wanted to leave unilaterally but the US forced them to coordinate with Egypt and the PA, against Israeli security interests. Sharon wanted the political clout of the UN officially signing off on Israel's withdrawl and for that he needed the US observers to sign off. In the end they ended up asking for things that were never part of the plan in terms of concessions and handing over responsibility for maintaining security to the PA and Egypt.

What resulted (big surprise) was the Arab side breaking every security covenant that they made, while still demanding even more concessions from Israel. At this point Sharon was desperate to get the US sign off because that was about the only positive thing he could have pulled out of the whole debacle. And Rice was there to make sure that things were good and ****ed up. Rice completely doesn't get it.

A lot of blame goes to Shimon Peres for meddling and telling the US observers that the Palis need this and the Palis need that. It's like he wasn't even on Israel's side.

I have Israeli friends who tell me that they can't believe Shimon Peres has so much respect internationally because at home he's considered a complete loser and failure. No one trusts him.

Anyway, if you look back on the history of US influence in the conflict you could easily make a case that it's been disastrous.

They ****ed Israel in '74 when they wouldn't let them topple the regime in Damascus (I bet they wish they hadn't interfered now--if they even remember). They ****ed them in '81 by criticizing them over bombing the reactor in Iraq (something that they're glad about now). They ****ed Israel in '82 and that eventually led to 20 years of occupying southern Lebanon, something Israelis hated to have to do. They ****ed them during the entire Oslo period by tieing Israel's hands. They ****ed them during the start of this intifada by doing the same. And they're still ****ing them.

[KvHagedorn]

Well.. public opinion of the Arabs in Gaza is pretty low here.. there would be no significant support for them if Israel just took the least provocation as an act of war and went in and stomped the living shit outta them.

[schmosef]

Except that the Israelis actually have a conscience and don't want to kill people needlessly.

They care more about the Palis than ANYONE else.

[schmosef]

The true nature of the struggle

We are accustomed to think of the secular-religious divide that exists in Israel today as relating to denominational pluralism, conversions, civil marriage, Sabbath observance and other matters of ritual and budget allocations. All of this may be true, but it ignores the basic divide, which is one of values, world view and perception of ourselves and others.

The recent success of Hamas in the elections for the Palestinian parliament should serve to focus the attention of our leaders and public on a hard fact that Israel has always chosen to ignore until now: that the Arab-Israeli struggle is at its core a religious dispute. Only by appreciating and understanding this unpleasant but very real truth does the struggle take on a somewhat rational and understandable, and perhaps even predictable, pattern.

Since the leadership, political and academic, of the Zionist movement from its founding in 1897 and later of the State of Israel itself has always been devoutly secular and disdainful, if not downright hostile, to traditional Jewish beliefs, values and religious practices, it placed itself in a mind-frame that did not appreciate the Arab position on the emergence of the Jewish national home in the Land of Israel.

If we care nothing about our religion, the Jewish leadership seemed to say, then it should be true that they - the Arabs - must also not allow religion to play a decisive role in reconciling our differences.

In effect, we always maintained that since we had freed ourselves of the constraints of our religion and thus saw our way forward to territorial solutions that would end the conflict, it was obvious that eventually the Arabs would also become completely secularized - the wave of the future, as Marx predicted - and the rose garden of the Middle East would then begin to bloom.

BUT THIS was and is a gross underestimation of the strength and tenacity of the faith and practices of Islam among its adherents. Europe may by now have shed most of its Christianity, but the Muslim world, which currently spans the globe, refuses to give up on Islam and the Koran. And a Jewish state in the heartland of the Muslim Middle East is a denial of the tenets of Islam as they have been interpreted for centuries on end; just as Jewish survival throughout the millennia served as a denial of early basic Christian tenets.

The mere existence of such a Jewish state, no matter what its borders, would still remain an affront to Islam even if it was completely disarmed and headed by Yossi Beilin. Thus, the president of Iran, among other Muslim leaders, would still be duty-bound to call for its destruction, God forbid. And he and they mean exactly what they threaten.

The secularization of Israeli society has brought much harm - physical, social, economic and psychological - to the Jews here in Israel. It has torn families apart, embittered vast sections of the public against one another, blinded generations to the richness of their Jewish heritage and distorted any understanding of the true nature of the struggle for the existence of the State of Israel.

The Arabs view us as the latter-day reincarnation of the Crusaders of the Middle Ages. The struggle and triumph over the Crusaders was a victory of Islam over Christianity, pure and simple. It reinforced in the Muslim mind the exclusivity and superiority of Islam over all other faiths. It strengthened the concept of dhimmi in the Muslim world, whereby non-Muslims could exist in their society solely in a subservient, second-class state of being, and even then only at the sufferance of the Muslim rulers themselves.

Religion was the motivating force in that struggle. It remains so in our current struggle.

THE TRUTH is that territory, water rights, refugees, monetary compensations and mutual reparations are all items that can be negotiated and eventually even compromised. But religious beliefs and faith dogmas are not susceptible to such tactics of negotiation and compromise.
Israel undoubtedly contributed to Hamas's success by its shortsighted bluffing over the unacceptability of Hamas as a player in the arena of the Arab-Israeli contest. As usual, we could not keep our mouths shut. However, even more subtly and insidiously, Israel highlighted Hamas and gave it enormous strength on the Arab street by refusing to recognize it as the Islamic religious organization it is. We preferred to see Hamas only as a terrorist organization, which it also is. But that is not what, at its core, it really is. It is a religious organization.

America can label Osama bin Laden an arch-terrorist, which again he certainly is; but in the Muslim world he is viewed as a religious leader, an accepted interpreter of the Koran and of Islamic principles. The Muslim world does not speak out strongly against him - not so much out of fear as out of Islamic faith.

And this is why victory for the secular West - even born-again Christian George W. Bush is pretty much secularized and, in any event, certainly an "infidel" - in Iraq or anywhere else in the Arab world is so difficult and problematic.

The Cold War was fought on a secular basis. The current terrorist war is a religious struggle between the true believers and the secular "infidels," who do not seem to understand their enemy and its true motivation.

I DO not expect the current candidates for prime minister in Israel to easily shed their secular mind-traps. But if they and the secular Israeli society generally showed more knowledge, appreciation and understanding of Judaism, its practices, customs and world view, and were less slavishly devoted to the ideas, fads and political correctness of the current secular Western world, we would have a much more logical, realistic and successful policy in the struggle in which we are engaged.

Through understanding and knowing ourselves we would have a more accurate view of our adversaries. In the yeshiva we were taught that understanding the difficulty, the inherent problem itself, constituted half the solution.

A religious struggle conducted from a purely secular point of view cannot really ever be concluded successfully, for the true core problem remains unrecognized. And this is the true religious-secular fault line that divides Israel today.

The writer, a rabbi, is a essayist, historian and lecturer.

[schmosef]

funny "hmm" or funny "haha"?