Israeli Special Forces Troops Enter Gaza
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Israel is determined to stop Hamas from launching missiles into their homeland. Troops entered Gaza Sunday morning to attack a missile launching site, marking the most extreme escalation yet in the nation’s conflict with Palestine. The Israeli military said there was “an exchange of fire” but that all of its troops returned across the border alive.
The brief ground incursion, combined with Israel’s decision to station tanks and troops along Gaza’s border, stoked fears of an even wider military campaign. The United Nations on Saturday called for a cease-fire, though both sides ignored the plea.
The military announced the raid on Twitter, and said there was “an exchange of fire” that left four Israel Defense Forces soldiers with minor injuries. The military did not say whether there were casualties on the other side, but said the soldiers all returned safely to Israel and that the mission was accomplished. The operation was carried out by special forces and did not appear to be the beginning of a broad ground offensive.
Some 160 Palestinians, including children, have died in the conflict so far; an Israeli air strike Saturday night killed at least 18 as they left a mosque.
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This is a world problem and Zionism has influenced history since the Balfour Agreement. Can you please do me a favor and look up “Benjamin Freedman 1961 Chicago Speech”. It’s not long
This is a former Zionist, present at Treaty of Versailles and he claims to expose the criminal element and tyranny of his government. I tend to believe him as spent the rest of his life and fortune fighting Zionists.
Again, this is part of my perspective. Please let me know what I can read to see your perspective better.
Cheers,
J B
jb. i have read some of benjamin freedman’s pamphlets, he argued his agenda with conviction and passion. he also has a reputation for stretching credulity and conflating fact with opinion. i remain very skeptical.
i cannot recommend anything for you that i think might explain my perspective any better than i already have.
peace. pj
I guess I do not understand the new settlements the Israelis are building on Palestian land. Maybe I’m misinformed but it seems all Israel would have to do is delay and eventually settlements will have more and more of the country.
Please let me know if I’m misunderstanding. My information comes from an Israeli upset with the “criminal”
Exploits of his government
jb. i hear your outrage at the settlement policy. you are certainly not alone in that outrage. outside of israeli long term planning i don’t think there are more than a handful of people in the world who don’t see these settlements as at best problematic and at worst an atrocity. to add perspective, war itself is the epitome of atrocity. these settlements are a tactic in the greater war. you can argue their effectiveness all day long, you can argue their legality….but if the settlement policy were to go away tomorrow, if the Israeli’s were to dismantle the settlements they have created and build no more, the war would continue. the atrocities would march right along in one form or another….atrocity by one side and then by the other…on and on and on.
to add perspective: when we describe this as an israeli/palestinian problem we state a misnomer. when we look at the land we call palestine both the jews and the arabs are palestinian. they both claim a legitimate right to land within that region and i could argue just as confidently the legitimacy of either and both of their claims. the right to land in the region is what keeps this war going, sometimes hot, sometimes warm…but ongoing none the less.
my perspective: the jews argue that they have a right to some of the land we call palestine, not all of it. the arabs believe they have no right to not one single inch of land there. that is the fundamental disagreement and both sides are intransigent. the strategies and tactics of war will continue until either the arabs agree to share the land or the jews pack up and leave. zionism is all the jews see they have left as a people, they aren’t going to leave until they are all killed…so, can the arabs ever agree to share the land or are they willing to kill every jew they can get their hands on? that is the question that must be answered before the war (this atrocity or that) can end.
my perspective is not the only one, it’s just mine.
peace, pj
There’s two Mike’s here guys :-).
I was not meaning to come across as belligerent. I was passionate and fired up at the language and bias Michael had in his blog. I can’t get the image of the Israeli
Soldiers protecting the constant settlement that continue to encroach the “Occuped territories”. I mean these people are losing more land daily and it’s the criminal element not the Jewish people to blame.
I sincerely apologize if you felt any hostility and will be more careful in my words in future.
Cheers,
J B
i must have missed something. mike’s post was…well, journalistic i thought. it seemed to pretty much just report the facts with what i saw as only a slight bias….in favor of seeing the arabs in gaza as more victim than the citizens of israel. i didn’t see much about the broader aspects of the conflict. i completely missed the part where he spread a bunch of lies and mis-information.
mike’s comment about anti-Semitism going back to the sixth century, i could have argued with…had it been relevant enough to the conversation. i could have argued that, since we are human beings, it could be said that the first semite produced the first anti-semite. i might have then said that i was right, but that doesn’t make him wrong. perspective.
maybe that’s why i assumed that my biased comment was what brought up your ire. when we fail to comprehend the perspective of others it kind of leaves our own perspective constrained.
Wow….soooo many lies. Or just uninformed
jb. i’m sorry my post provoked such belligerence in you. though my own bias is reflected, i had hoped to inject enough balance to have my point at least be heard. i really only wanted to present an alternate perspective than the one i precieved in the article, with malice toward none. the perspective in the article was not wrong, nor were the facts. perspectives are informative in themselves, not necessarily belligerent nor intended to provoke belligerence. belligerence is not conducive to conversation, it’s a conversation killer. i failed, at least in your case.
i am biased, i don’t confess…i state. my bias, like yours i suspect, is very deep seeded. my view of the jewish state is foundationally informed by my experience as the child of an american soldier in post war germany. i spent nine of my first 13 years living among the german people. three of those years were spent living just a couple of blocks from a d.p. camp. (d.p.-“displaced persons”) “displaced persons” was the military term, we called them refugee camps. the displaced persons in the camp i came to know were people from all over europe. they had only one thing in common, they were jewish people who had physically survived the holocaust. The years I spent there were my sixth through my eighth.
without going into detail my perspective was formed by intimate contact with one of those people. a deep affection developed between myself and one old jewish woman who had very little left inside her but kindness. through her i developed a personal relationship with the plight of the jewish people. I’m sure that my whole perspective on the israeli/arab conflict is filtered through the lens of that deep seeded bias.
i am biased but i will not succumb to belligerence, nor will i permit my bias to negate the legitimacy in the perspective of another.
peace, pj
Wow, you must not understand history very well. Google the USS Liberty and you may learn Isreal is not our friend. Look at the Lavonne Affair.
What right did Isreal have to Palestine? What right did they have to go
Past 67 borders. Isreal will eventually take all the land for itself. They have most of the county. Much more than the 2 state UN Declaration. How did that happen?!
No really, any response better explain that or you’re uninformed or lying. I’m a simple man so educate me…
It’s amazing that peace reigned for hundred of years, Muslims, Christians, and Jews living together peacefully. Enter the Balfour declaration, and look at results.
No side is correct but if you can’t see that only Gaza and West Bank are left WHILE new Israeli settlements are built every hour on land not theirs protected by tax dollars the Palestinians pay and you think you wouldn’t be pissed well….
disclaimer: i don’t think violence is going to end this conflict, it will only end when the surrounding arabs accept the legality of a jewish state in the area or the jews pack up and go sojourning in foreign lands again. when violence has everyone so tired out in the area…some agreement will be reached and a temporary peace will ensue. arabs and jews have lived on this land for as long as we have history to consult. they will continue to live on this land for as long as we have history to write. the jews want to stay and the arabs want them to leave
that being said: the ability to perpetrate violence at a more effective rate by one side or the other does not create a moral inequivalency. that you smack me in the face and i remain standing, only to smack you twice in the face and knock you down says nothing of the morality of our conflict. that’s a much deeper and more complex issue.
that tens of thousands of rockets are exiting gaza and blowing up in Israel seems to get no more than a passing mention in most media accounts of today. that the rockets aren’t as effective as the idf airstrikes seems to somehow make them less morally objectionable. to the Israeli’s who do get killed or maimed in the attacks the effectiveness of the rocket is 100%. the media goes to the sensational, Israeli airstrikes that kill people around the launch sites for those rockets gets the front page. hamas intentionally launches rockets into Israel from mosques and hospitals and elementary schools in order to force Israel into making choices. it’s a tactic…illegal but effective. attack the site or surrender to the tactic. the headline reads, “idf airstrike kills children at school” on page 2 we read that, “and oh, by the way, the school doubled as a rocket launching site.”
i’m not defending israeli violence or attacking hamas violence, i don’t think either side is looking far enough ahead to make rational choices, their dilemma is immediate. violence itself has a very poor record of providing long term solutions to long term problems. bravado and frustration perpetrate this and we, the insane species that we are, keep repeating it over and over and over again…expecting some new result.
We, all of us, are people and as people we are exceptionally flawed. We’ve been killing each other since we first peeked out of the cave, and will continue to do, at the slightest provocation. There is no solution for the Israel/Palestine conflict. It is rooted in generations of hatred, with anti-Semitism going back to the 6th century.