The IDF's response to non-violent protest [warning: disturbing graphic images in article]

only the other day they blew apart a car on the West Bank because they thought the people in it looked shifty, and it turned out they were Israeli settlement security guards. This kind of thing goes on all the time, but it's only when people who aren't arabs get killed that the world takes notice.

If you're interested in Israeli bulldozer drivers, this article is fascinating: http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/kurdi_eng.html It's a translation of an interview with one that originally appeared in a mass market Israeli tabloid. It is perhaps the single most interesting thing about the current Israel-Palestine situation that I have read.

I dunno I've never met any Bush supporters. I saw Richard Prebble give a pro-Bush speech today and I guess they're a reasonable approximation of him.

fair enough - sorry for snipping at you, hamish. i only read about this killing and saw the photos today, and it upset me for personal reasons. those comments made me want to vomit.

I agree. But I also know that you can be the most liberal, Peace Now-supporting, Labor-voting, anti-Sharon Israeli and still get blown up on a bus, or a coffee shop, or walking down the street.

I wish I could convince my liberal friends of this fact: suicide bombers are NOT looking for a political or diplomatic solution to the disputed settlements. They are NOT looking to rally Israelis sympathetic to the idea of a Palestinian state (and despite what the Western press would have you believe, there are many Israelis who'd happily give up the settlements for peace). They simply want to kill as many Jews as possible. Until this changes, both sides will continue to commit atrocities and suffer deaths.

Mike has a point in that it seems to me that the extremist wings of both sides have now dehumanised the other so effectively that the background politics of the situation barely matter in terms of individual incidents. The concept of arguing about right and wrong in what has essentially become a gang war seems ridiculous.

There is a consistent position that there's a difference between killing someone who knows they are in danger and someone who has no idea until they're dead.

I don't agree with this, I'm just saying.

I get very emotional about this issue, because I have friends and loved ones in Israel who genuinely wish for peace, to the extent of giving up land. They don't dance in the streets and hand out candy when Arabs are killed. Can the Palestinians say the same?

Do you really need to ask this question Mike?

Hstencil I see your point - I think foreign nationals who believed the IDF wouldn't hurt one of them were very naive, though.

This is slightly disturbing (not as much as the pics), but here's a link to emails she wrote to her family before she died: http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,916299,00.html. In it she seems aware of danger, but relatively stoic. I don't want to take anything too far out of context, but one of her emails has the statement "I still feel like I'm relatively safe and think that my most likely risk in case of a larger-scale incursion is arrest."

Absolutely. Not at the start, but at a point before it was inevitable. From the article:

Initially he dropped sand and other heavy debris on her, then the bulldozer pushed her to the ground where it proceeded to drive over her.

I think you do these people considerable insult to suggest that they're only accidentally risking their lives.

And I think part of the point of foreign nationals protesting is that their death will make the news. Which is true.

It hasn't here. Even the liberal NY Times hasn't run a story about this.

(Goldstein massacared a load of Palestinians in Hebron on Purim a number of years ago; loads of mentalists seem to see him as some kind of inspirational figure)

I think, though, that it would be better to move discussion of this kind of issue to an area of fundamental human values, rather than an examination of which side has the nicer people. it's hard do see where house demolitions and driving bulldozers over people fit in with fundamental human values.

That's why I'm not so sure I like Tom's "gang war" analogy: one gang is an organized and coherent nation-state while the other isn't even a gang, just an assortment of unallied subsects.

at times I don't think the Palestinian solidarity people (of which I count myself one) really engage enough with the suicide bomber issue. It's very easy to justify (even unconvincingly) the brutal oppression of the Palestinians when pictures of a blown up bus are on the airwaves. This is despite the suffering of Palestine being far greater than that of Israel.

(sorry, crosspost)

Man that just depresses me.

I don't know if I've ever felt more disgusted in my adult life than after the Hebron incident.

I read about it first on whatever American news source my home computer links to on my start page... yahoo news or something.

Nabisco - if you ever talk to any Palestinians they are quite adamant that they are Palestinians. Israel and its supporters has historically sought to deny the existence of Palestinians as a distinct ethnic group - viz. Golda Meir's Orwellian comment that there are no such thing as Palestinians, or the continuous attempt to assign other nationalities to leading Palestinians such as Edward Said or Arafat himself.

of course, ethnicity and nationality are human constructs, often imposed indirectly. If a big Syria had come into being after the first world war, then today's Palestinians would probably consider themselves south Syrians.

I mean, I don't want to assail the peace groups too much. I'm sure some of them feel a kind of impotence familiar to many Americans at this very moment. But I don't like it when they refuse to acknowledge their own complicity (in a broad sense) in the IDF's actions. I mean, as much as it pains me, I have to acknowledge some complicity in Bush's war as I've not done all I can to stop it.

Clarification for Amateurist and DV: I mean politically! Not culturally or ethnically! Israel functions as a coherent nation-state with a single government that can claim to act on behalf of its collective citizens. "Palestine" functions as a cultural population, sure, but one with a rickety leadership that cannot claim to act "for" anyone and is under constant attack from openly defiant groups with different agendas. The actions that are most usually perceived as being the actions of "the Palestinians" are, in this country, suicide bombings -- actions taken by small subsects of the population opposed to the nominal power structure, and whose support among "the Palestinians" as a population isn't exactly clear.

All I mean by this is that it isn't helpful to say "the Israelis did this, and the Palestinians did that." "The Israelis" means something -- it refers to the official decisions of a democratic government. "The Palestinians" means very little -- at best it's conjecture about a group that isn't coherently allied.

Who is this singular "American media" person who is controlling the thousands of news outlets in the US?

This is a minor story because there are bigger things to worry about. The American public is not in the mood to hear about one college student who was run over in a war zone. Even two or three months ago, this would have been a huge story, but now there's just not a lot of interest.

Hahahahaha, THE JEWS!

(sorry a horrible joke I know, but just thought I'd play on the never-ending stupid "Zionist conspiracy" bullshit.)

This is a minor story because there are bigger things to worry about. The American public is not in the mood to hear about one college student who was run over in a war zone. Even two or three months ago, this would have been a huge story, but now there's just not a lot of interest.

Does the media manufacture that interest, tho? I mean, is what a Dixie Chick says about George Bush really more important than a member of one of our allies' armed forces killing one of our citizens?