Thread: Obama calls for Israel's return to pre-1967 borders

Originally Posted by bigross86

Right. The Prime Minister of Israel is not a friend of Israel

He is pursuing policies that do not benefit Israel.

Yeah, those dastardly Israelis spending all their time trying to come up with new ways to kill American soldiers in the streets of Tel Aviv

Uhm the number of attacks on Americans for my country's support of yours is long and decades old.

Let them recognize Israel first, then we'll discuss giving them the right to vote.

They are not occupying your land, you are occupying thiers.

That's right. You're onto him!

name one solid step he has taken towards peace that did not start from the premise that Israel was entitled to break international law.

That's right. Palestinians that shoot ATGM's at school buses are resisting the threat of their future.

How many ATGMs do the Palestinians have vs how many 500lb bombs Israel drops in the West bank and Gaza....

Would you like us to stop having children too? Building today is mainly natural growth.

natural growth would be into the Negev, or upwards, or in areas outsie the territories. The building in the territories is conquest not growth.

They've got democracy in Gaza. If they want to change things, just vote Hamas out. Oh wait, they can't, they're scared for their lives in "democratic Gaza"

Israel wants hamas in power, thats why she enforces economic polcies designed to feed extremism.

Really? Since when do Israel and the US have a mutual defense treaty? How many US servicemen have died keeping Israel free?

The US rescued Israel in 73, risking our annihilation and dangerously depleting our stocks needed to defend Europe to do so, we have had troops in the Sinai since 79, we deployed troops in 90.

In response to indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilian territories? Fight fire with fire, seems to be the only way they learn. We've tried playing nice and turning the other cheek, we all saw how well that worked out

One has only to compare the list of the dead. Sure a rocket might hit a playground, but 500lb PGMs or hellfires hit the exact market they were targeted out. Not t mention the denial or water, medical care, healthy foods, destruction of livelihoods.... Seems the Palestinians are the ones trying to fight fire with fire. Israel came to the Territories, the Palestians did not come to Israel.

I'm sure he does. what's your point?

One day the blood money AIPAC spends won't work.

What terror attacks has Israel brought upon the US? 9/11 and Al-Qaeda's reason d'etre was over US presence in Saudi, IIRC.

You have a short memory, I remember the worlds first prime time sudice spectacular in Lebanon. I remember hijacked airlines and dead Americans

Which even more important ally has Israel cost the US?

Iran

That's right, because the country that treats them better than anywhere else in the world, even better than their own elected leaders in Gaza are the tyrants.

No Israel does not, just ask any Palestinian American. We don't keep them locked in ghettos.

We have, trust me. Apparently things here aren't quite that bad if they revolted in Tunis, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, but the only thing here happened on the Nakba? Even the call to return to the borders a week later was met with resonating silence. Yeah, things must suck here.

they've been in active revolt in varyign stages of action for almost a decade now.

Yup. That's the one. Especially all of those that protested peacefully, or rained stones and Molotov's on our soldiers and were met with rubber bullets, gas grenades and flash-bangs. The only ones shot at on the Nakba were those tearing down and crossing an international border of a country we're at war with. Usually you shoot to kill, not at the knees to wound.

Do you even bother to follow the list of the Palestinian dead? Oh BTW, shooting refugees fleeing to another country is a war crime.

Remember how 10 days ago there was a truck driver then went on a 2km rampage in Tel Aviv? Yeah, we shot his ass so hard. Oh, wait, my mistake, he's in jail.

And how many settler murderes of Palestinians are in jail?

Pushed in? Left voluntarily. And Israel are not the ones that keep them in refugee camps in Lebanon and deny them even the most basic rights. Yes, that's right, those poor oppressed Palestinians have more rights here than in any other country in the world.

You did not let them return after hostilties ceased, even those who stayed within the bounderies of the state of Israel. If they fled from one village to the next they were not alloed to return. And you have 4 million of them shoved into ghettos right now.

Yup, that's it. Speaking of roads traveled, you ever hear of Route 443? That's right, proper road in Israel opened to Palestinians.

A Palstinian cannot drive from one part of the West bank to the other without road blocks and checkpoints.

We do. I've got the scars from stones and glass bottles.

So the proper responce for glass is 5.56?

You mean more than they already are?

A Palestnmian is murdered by a settler almsot once a week, they are assaulted daily- how many settlers are in jail for it?

You've got it. We drive our Merkavas around Ramallah, Nablus, Beth Lehem and Jericho just for the hell of it. The bitch is cleaning out all the blood and guts from the wheel carriage and tracks afterwards. Bonus points if you can find an intact head or limb.

sigh....

No, the path of liberty. It was in the previous sentence. Should I quote it for you?

Words mean little compared to actions.

[quote]We have women stonings on Mondays, gay hangings on Wednesdays and Christians are persecuted on Thursday nights. It's an awesome pastime. [/qupote]

swap those for well poisionings, orchard cuttings, bomb droppings and shootings.

Why should they get the right to vote in a country they refuse to recognize and don't want to be citizens of? I want the right to vote in Iran. Whoop-de-freakin'-doo!

Iran didn't invade Israel

They don't want to be citizens. Hmmmm

It should not matter, israeli kids are born citizens, they don't have to choose.....

You are being obtuse

Who are the Palestinians descended from? The Romans, Greeks, Canaanites, Girgashites, Jebusites, Hittities, Amalekites, which ones?

Accoding to DNA the leading candidates are Jewish ancestors

What is wrong with you? Instead of looking at the perfectly relevant solution to a problem, you immediately go looking for more fights. For all your clamor about peace, you're full of shit sometimes.

Standing firm and saying theft is theft is not picking fights.

Or actually finding a solution. You really are a hatemonger, aren't you?

Yes I am so full of hate that all i want is for the Palestnians to enjoy thier own state in the lands they lived in, in 1967, and for Israel to enjoy the same.

How did you get hate from a stance for equality?

Makes sense, if you ask me. A true peace should have no need to be defended, but there's no reason to be stupid, is there? Throwing away your gun in a gunfight is an invitation to be shot in the ass. You may not need to use your gun, but it's a good thing to hold on to just in case of an emergency

Same applies to any palestnians state. They need an armed force big enough to make future Jewish encroachments painful.

No we don't. We occasionally attack militant targets with no warning, we don't systematically launch rockets indiscriminately at civilian territories.

Rockets being fired indiscriminately at civilian territories.Rockets being fired indiscriminately at civilian territories.Rockets being fired indiscriminately at civilian territories.Rockets being fired indiscriminately at civilian territories.Rockets being fired indiscriminately at civilian territories.

who kills more non-combatants?

Hmmm... Less people and they get less land. Shocking, isn't it?!

Not less people, half the population and 100% of the pre-1967 population of the terriroties.

Except we won't be attacking them all out trying to "push them to the sea", will we? We've promised time and again not to attack if the Palestinians won't. We retaliate.

BS, the settlers attack Palestnians daily.

I don't really believe in the same God you believe in, so I won't argue with you on theology. I do however believe that if there were someone who were going to talk in His name, it's not you. You're too much of a hatemonger and refuse to forgive. You might compare favorably to some Popes of the past, but that's not really saying much, is it?

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Forgiveness comes after the person who committed the offense apologizes and changes thier behavior.

For whoever is wondering, a large part of my responses were heavily sarcastic, used as a tool to prove to Zraver how incredibly stupid some of his arguments were. I have nothing against Zraver, we just don't get along. Zraver has some personality traits that I've discovered while reading his post and writing my rebuttal, but I've got a couple bad ones too.

You might recall that a while back I admitted to being racist against Palestinians. I was then told by some members here that I'm not a racist, just prejudiced, but you can look at it either way you want. If you'll look at the difference between my posts and Zraver's, I at least show a willingness to listen, forgive, live and coexist peacefully. I doubt you'll get anything like that from Zraver.

That being said, he doesn't live here, so it's easy for him to talk in the abstract. He doesn't have to worry about losing his and his newborn child's life because he feels like riding the bus.

In closing: If you read this post and actually believe some of those obviously sarcastic comments and get offended, then you have no one to blame but yourself.

Ross, you say your willing to learn and listen.... prove it investigate settler attacks on the Palestinians.

BTW my apologies for cherry picking, on my way to Joplin Mo is a few to link up with 7thsniper and help with the recovery.

Oh, you deal with bombs, I deal with torndaoes, basaball sized hail, CG lightning and wildfires. Not like my life is so easy.... Arkansas lost 3 more people last night to mother nature. Who knows how many really died in Joplin. Whens the last time Israel lost 100+ in 10 minutes time?

Ben, your assertion that the settlememts are matural growth is offensive and reveals the bankrupt nature of the Isreali right. If an expanding population is entitled to more land as you assert. Then how come the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem keeping losing more of the tiny bit they have?
They have an even faster growing population after all.

Second your government offered them some of the Negev, if its good that a primarily agricultural people can use ie well watered why not build the settlements there?

Isreal claims the 67 borders are mot defensible.... But Isreal did defend them and win. Since that victory when Isreal was fighting 3 to 1 Isreal has grown stronger in every measurable way. The Jordanian border is peacrful and Iraq no longer has an army to send West leaving only the small Jordanian Army yo your East- how is that indefensible?

Finnally why should Palestinians in the West Bank be pumished for what Hamas does in Gaza? Those endless rockets you went on about did not come from the West Bank. Fact violence im the West Bank generally flows ftom the settlers to the Palestinians.

How about the next time a settler murders a Palestinian you make a public post here about how the removal of 500 settler units is just compencence.

Until you are willing to take a hard look at the policies you support and declare that if the shoe was on the other foot and it was the Jews loosing land and lives via an occupying Palestinian government would be OK do not call me a hate monger.

We both know that noe that you have been challenged your gonna bail. You do it everytime your challenged. You still havent showed me where your nations policies are fumctionally different than the Nuremburg Laws.

fareed zakaria lays into bibi.
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Where Netanyahu fails himself and Israel - The Washington Post

Where Netanyahu fails himself and Israel
By Fareed Zakaria, Published: May 25

Conventional wisdom is fast congealing in Washington that President Obama was wrong to demarcate a shift in American policy toward Israel last week. In fact, it was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who broke with the past — in one of a series of diversions and obstacles Netanyahu has come up with anytime he is pressed. He wins in the short run, but ultimately, he is turning himself into a version of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, “Mr. Nyet,” a man who will be bypassed by history.

Here is what Netanyahu’s immediate predecessor, Ehud Olmert, said in a widely reported speech to the Israeli Knesset in 2008: “We must give up Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem and return to the core of the territory that is the State of Israel prior to 1967, with minor corrections dictated by the reality created since then.” Olmert, a man with a reputation as a hard-liner, said that meant Israel would keep about 6 percent of the West Bank — the major settlements — and give up land elsewhere. This was also the position of Ehud Barak, Israel’s prime minister during the late 1990s.

The Bush administration did not have a different position, as statements from the president and Condoleezza Rice make clear. Here is George W. Bush in 2008: “I believe that any peace agreement between them will require mutually agreed adjustments to the armistice lines of 1949 to reflect current realities and to ensure that the Palestinian state is viable and contiguous.” (The 1949 armistice lines is another way of saying the 1967 borders.)

Or consider this statement from last November: “[T]he United States believes that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.” That’s not Obama, Bush or Rice, but a statement jointly issued by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Netanyahu on Nov. 11, 2010.

Today, Netanyahu says that any discussion of the 1967 borders is treason and that new borders must reflect “dramatic changes” since then. So in three years, an Israeli prime minister’s position has gone from “minor corrections” to “dramatic changes.” Netanyahu’s quarrel, it appears, is with himself. Yet we are to think it is Obama who has shifted policy?

Why did Netanyahu turn what was at best a minor difference into a major confrontation? Does it help Israel’s security or otherwise strengthen it to stoke tensions with its strongest ally and largest benefactor? Does such behavior further the resolution of Israel’s problems? No, but it helps Netanyahu stir support at home and maintain his fragile coalition. And while Bibi might sound like Churchill, he acts like a local ward boss, far more interested in holding onto his post than using it to secure Israel’s future.

The newsworthy, and real, shift in U.S. policy was Obama publicly condemning the Palestinian strategy to seek recognition as a state from the U.N. General Assembly in September. He also questioned the accord between Fatah and Hamas. Obama endorsed the idea of a demilitarized Palestinian state, a demand Israel has made in recent years. Instead of thanking Obama for this, Netanyahu created a public confrontation to garner applause at home.

Netanyahu’s references to the “indefensible” borders of 1967 reveal him to be mired in a world that has gone away. The chief threat to Israel today is not from a Palestinian army. Israel has the region’s strongest economy and military, complete with an arsenal of nuclear weapons. The chief threats to Israel are from new technologies — rockets, biological weapons — and demography. Its physical existence is less in doubt than its democratic existence as it continues to rule millions of Palestinians in serf-like conditions — entitled to neither a vote nor a country.

The path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been clear for 20 years. Israel would cede most of the land it conquered in the 1967 war to a Palestinian state, keeping the major settlement blocks. In return, it would get a series of measures designed to protect its security. That’s why the process is called land for peace. The problem is that Netanyahu has never believed in land for peace. His strategy has been to put up obstacles, create confusion and wait it out. But one day there will be peace, along the lines that people have talked about for 20 years. And Netanyahu will be remembered only as a person before the person who made peace, a comma in history.

Ifr defensible borders are the issue and the valley in the west bank needs to be held why don't they offer the lowlands of northern Israel in exchange?

The path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been clear for 20 years. Israel would cede most of the land it conquered in the 1967 war to a Palestinian state, keeping the major settlement blocks. In return, it would get a series of measures designed to protect its security. That’s why the process is called land for peace. The problem is that Netanyahu has never believed in land for peace. His strategy has been to put up obstacles, create confusion and wait it out. But one day there will be peace, along the lines that people have talked about for 20 years. And Netanyahu will be remembered only as a person before the person who made peace, a comma in history.

No, I think the options are peace or the eventual destruction of Israel.

Originally Posted by astralis

fareed zakaria lays into bibi.
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....
Why did Netanyahu turn what was at best a minor difference into a major confrontation? Does it help Israel’s security or otherwise strengthen it to stoke tensions with its strongest ally and largest benefactor? Does such behavior further the resolution of Israel’s problems? No, but it helps Netanyahu stir support at home and maintain his fragile coalition. And while Bibi might sound like Churchill, he acts like a local ward boss, far more interested in holding onto his post than using it to secure Israel’s future.

The newsworthy, and real, shift in U.S. policy was Obama publicly condemning the Palestinian strategy to seek recognition as a state from the U.N. General Assembly in September. He also questioned the accord between Fatah and Hamas. Obama endorsed the idea of a demilitarized Palestinian state, a demand Israel has made in recent years. Instead of thanking Obama for this, Netanyahu created a public confrontation to garner applause at home.

Netanyahu’s references to the “indefensible” borders of 1967 reveal him to be mired in a world that has gone away. The chief threat to Israel today is not from a Palestinian army. Israel has the region’s strongest economy and military, complete with an arsenal of nuclear weapons. The chief threats to Israel are from new technologies — rockets, biological weapons — and demography. Its physical existence is less in doubt than its democratic existence as it continues to rule millions of Palestinians in serf-like conditions — entitled to neither a vote nor a country.

The path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been clear for 20 years. Israel would cede most of the land it conquered in the 1967 war to a Palestinian state, keeping the major settlement blocks. In return, it would get a series of measures designed to protect its security. That’s why the process is called land for peace. The problem is that Netanyahu has never believed in land for peace. His strategy has been to put up obstacles, create confusion and wait it out. But one day there will be peace, along the lines that people have talked about for 20 years. And Netanyahu will be remembered only as a person before the person who made peace, a comma in history.

The issue is that Israel is capable of implementing peace accords while the other side is capable of only fairy tales. Zakaria restating those fairy tales and adding amusing bits from his own imagination (rockets and biological weapons new?) adds nothing to the debate.

The reality is:

• Hamas is out to destroy Israel.
• PA is corrupt and utterly incompetent.
• The Palestinians are in the sorry state they are in because Iran and others prop up people who mislead them so.
• There is no way any of the above could possibly ever lead to a realistic peace for Israel.
• The way out is to disrupt pillars of this megalith to failure.
• The first obstacle to doing so is an Iran that thinks it can turn nuclear.

citanon,

thanks for re-hashing likud talking points. you didn't address any of the points in his article, namely, how netanyahu is deliberately misinterpreting obama's words and moving his own goalposts.

Originally Posted by Roosveltrepub

Ifr defensible borders are the issue and the valley in the west bank needs to be held why don't they offer the lowlands of northern Israel in exchange?

Because they only have a tiny piece of land to start with? The entire size of Israel and the occupied territories could fit comfortably inside some of our high country stations, and we're a 'small Island' in the south Pacific.

I'll get to this all tomorrow, I've been drinking steadily since 12 in the afternoon. Student Day rocks!

When it comes down to it, this is simply becoming an agreement between the US and Israel. What guarantees can the US offer that Hamas and Hezbollah (and for that matter the PA) isn't going to continue to attack and kill Israelis once Israel withdraws to the pre-67 borders?
I understand the criticisms of Netanyahu but I also don't blame him: everyone knows that the Palestinians will continue to kill Israelis by every means possible and those means will be considerably enhanced by the creation of a Palestinian state.

By that same argument, everybody knows that Israel will continue to shaft Palestinians' goal of self-independence and the quasi state of apartheid against Palestinians.

You cannot choose to ignore one side's misdeeds while castigating the other side's misdoings. No, if you are gonna castigate one side, you need to castigate the other side. Otherwise, just shut up and stay out and let the Israelis and Palestinians sort it out between themselves. There's no reason why US has to get involved in this in the first place.

It is abundantly clear that both sides are not willing to compromise and frankly, any capital spent on resolving this are wasted because the results do not justify the effort and capital expended. Both sides are just gonna do stuff to make you ever regret the day that your mother was born. If I were the US President, I would just nod politely and say non-committal things and stay the hell out of this conflict and tell both sides to resolve the issue.

BigRoss, you should take cognizance of the fact that President Obama has expended enormous capital like previous Presidents trying to help Israel versus balancing the enormous interests US has in Middle East such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia whose geographical interests hold more power and influence on American economy. Hell, if it was any other country besides Israel, US would simply tell that country to fvck off and stop wasting US's time and patience. It is a testament to the lobbying power of AIPAC and its constituents in US.

I don't understand how US is gonna do any better. It can't.

What impetus has Israel to treat with the Palestinians in any other fashion than they currently are? Every scenario makes them worse off. Less land, more attacks and even greater condemnation if and when they respond. The only international actions possible are to place greater sanctions and isolation against Israel. It's a lose-lose situation for any Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu as prime minister is irrelevant.

Lets Imagine a Palestinian state is created along the lines suggested by the US. Hamas/al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade/Hezbollah etc continue to fire rockets of greater quality than those currently deployed from Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.


What should Israels response be?