It has been the same way for decades. Every time violence between the Israelis and Palestinians erupts, governments around the world urge de-escalation, a cease-fire agreement is reached, and experts warn that the situation cannot continue like this. But it has, and it will. Ultimately, this is not a problem that can be resolved through power, whether political or military. It can only be resolved through moral persuasion.
- ترجمہ >>>>
- فلسطین کی مدد 》》》
My Comments :
Yes I agree with Farid Zikria that : Palestinian issue can only be resolved through persuasion but “moral persuasion” is for human being it does not work for blood thirsty hounds!
This persuasion will be through the barrel of guns & missiles. Israel is a great military and economic power, it is difficult to defeat it militarily in conventional war by bunch of divided selfish puppet Arabs rulers, but May 2021 war proves that Hamas if adequately provided with modern weapons ( Missiles, Drones, Anti Aircraft, Anti Tank Missiles, satellite surveillance and intelligence system) it will make the life of Israeli population miserable, persuading their government to settle and resolve the issue.
[Brig Aftab Khan (r) https://SalaamOne.com/jihad ]
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Now Continue with Farid Zikrya’s Column ….
The recurring pattern of violence obscures a seismic shift that has taken place over the past few decades. Israel is now the superpower of the Middle East. A strategic studies institute at Bar-Ilan University recently laid out the disparities. Israel’s per capita GDP dwarfs that of its neighbors: it is 14 times that of Egypt, eight times that of Iran, nearly six times that of Lebanon, and nearly double that of Saudi Arabia. Israel has built an industrial and information-age economy that excels in highly sophisticated arenas such as artificial intelligence, computer-aided design, aviation and biotechnology. It spends 5 percent of its GDP on research and development, more than any country. It has built up foreign exchange reserves of more than $180 billion, placing it at No. 13 in the world, just ahead of Britain. For a nation of 9 million people, these are stunning numbers.
A military comparison between Israel and its neighbors is even more lopsided. Israel beat a combined Arab force in 1967 in six days. Today, the contest would be over in hours. Israel has a larger defense budget than Iran and enjoys both a quantitative and qualitative edge in crucial areas such as air power — even though Iran has almost 10 times the population. And, of course, Israel has the only nuclear arsenal in the region, estimated at almost 100 warheads.
It has been the same way for decades. Every time violence between the Israelis and Palestinians erupts, governments around the world urge de-escalation, a cease-fire agreement is reached, and experts warn that the situation cannot continue like this. But it has, and it will. Ultimately, this is not a problem that can be resolved through power, whether political or military. It can only be resolved through moral persuasion.
The recurring pattern of violence obscures a seismic shift that has taken place over the past few decades. Israel is now the superpower of the Middle East. A strategic studies institute at Bar-Ilan University recently laid out the disparities. Israel’s per capita GDP dwarfs that of its neighbors: it is 14 times that of Egypt, eight times that of Iran, nearly six times that of Lebanon, and nearly double that of Saudi Arabia. Israel has built an industrial and information-age economy that excels in highly sophisticated arenas such as artificial intelligence, computer-aided design, aviation and biotechnology. It spends 5 percent of its GDP on research and development, more than any country. It has built up foreign exchange reserves of more than $180 billion, placing it at No. 13 in the world, just ahead of Britain. For a nation of 9 million people, these are stunning numbers.
A military comparison between Israel and its neighbors is even more lopsided. Israel beat a combined Arab force in 1967 in six days. Today, the contest would be over in hours. Israel has a larger defense budget than Iran and enjoys both a quantitative and qualitative edge in crucial areas such as air power — even though Iran has almost 10 times the population. And, of course, Israel has the only nuclear arsenal in the region, estimated at almost 100 warheads.
Israel is powerful compared to its neighbors, but it is close to invulnerable compared to the Palestinians. The economic gap is a chasm; the military gap is too large to describe. You can see this in the comparative casualty numbers from the latest conflict or any recent conflict with the Palestinians: for every Israeli killed, there are 20 to 30 Palestinian deaths. Moreover, the Palestinians are politically weak and divided. They are led in Gaza by Hamas, a group despised even by Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In the West Bank, the 85-year-old Mahmoud Abbas runs an administration widely considered corrupt and dysfunctional, and he has postponed elections for 11 years.
In short, Israel doesn’t have any practical reasons to make a deal with the Palestinians. It doesn’t fear for its security. While the rocket attacks are unnerving and terrifying to civilians, they do not inflict much damage on the country. Israel’s ferocious and effective security services, aided by the construction of a wall along the West Bank and the creation of the Iron Dome air-defense system, have virtually eliminated fatalities from terrorism. Economic boycotts of any significance will not happen. Israel’s economy is too strong, diversified and advanced. Its trade and technology ties to countries have grown by leaps and bounds in the past two decades; countries such as Russia and India, once wary of Israel, now eagerly court the country and its tech industry. The reason that Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel has much to do with economic opportunities.
What is left is morality.
Israel — a powerful, rich and secure nation — is ruling over nearly 5 million people without giving them political rights. This is an almost unique situation in a post-colonial world. Israeli leaders can marshal valid excuses: The Palestinian leadership has rejected serious offers in the past; they are divided and vacillating. But, ultimately, that does not change the reality that the Palestinians live in conditions that are demeaning and degrading. They are denied self-determination, which is now a universal right.
Over the past two decades, Israel has moved toward a more and more intransigent position on the Palestinian issue. The government today is far more extreme than previous right-wing governments — from Begin to Sharon to Olmert — all of which made concessions for peace.
But the country remains a liberal democracy. It was founded by people who believed deeply that their new country should embody not just nationalism but also justice and morality. There are many in Israel who argue passionately that it can find a way for Israel to have security and Palestinians to have dignity. The only hope — and right now it looks remote — is that those forces will gain strength and one day lead the country to give the Palestinians a state of their own. That would finally fulfill Israel’s historical mission to be, in the words of Isaiah, “a light unto the nations.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/20/only-way-solve-israeli-palestinian-problem
Max Boot: This is a war Israel can’t win
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/18/israel-can-never-be-normal-country-long-palestinian-conflict-smolders/
#Zionism #AlQuds #Palestine #Israel
The End of Israel’s Illusion
By Shlomo Ben -Ami (ex Israeli Foreign Minister )
The prevailing consensus among Israelis that Palestinian nationalism had been defeated – and thus that a political solution to the conflict was no longer necessary – lies in tatters. And even as the violence escalates, it has become clear to both sides that the era of glorious wars and victories is over.
TEL AVIV – The sudden eruption of war outside and inside Israel’s borders has shocked a complacent nation. Throughout Binyamin Netanyahu’s 12-year premiership, the Palestinian problem was buried and forgotten. The recent Abraham Accords, establishing diplomatic relations with four Arab states, seemed to weaken the Palestinian cause further. Now it has re-emerged with a vengeance.
Wars can be triggered by an isolated incident, but their cause is always deeper. In this case, the trigger, the eviction of Palestinians in favor of Israeli nationalists in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, touched all the sensitive nerves of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, its humiliating control of access to the Al-Aqsa mosque, the ever-present memory of the 1948 Nakba (the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians when Israel was founded), and the grievances of Israel’s Arab minority are all fueling the current flare-up.
The prevailing consensus among Israelis that Palestinian nationalism had been defeated – and thus that a political solution to the conflict was no longer necessary – lies in tatters.
And even as the violence escalates, it has become clear to both sides that the era of glorious wars and victories is over.
TEL AVIV – The sudden eruption of war outside and inside Israel’s borders has shocked a complacent nation. Throughout Binyamin Netanyahu’s 12-year premiership, the Palestinian problem was buried and forgotten.
The recent Abraham Accords, establishing diplomatic relations with four Arab states, seemed to weaken the Palestinian cause further. Now it has re-emerged with a vengeance.
Wars can be triggered by an isolated incident, but their cause is always deeper. In this case, the trigger, the eviction of Palestinians in favor of Israeli nationalists in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, touched all the sensitive nerves of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, its humiliating control of access to the Al-Aqsa mosque, the ever-present memory of the 1948 Nakba (the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians when Israel was founded), and the grievances of Israel’s Arab minority are all fueling the current flare-up.
It may be true that the contested real estate in Sheikh Jarrah did belong to a Jewish family before 1948. But Palestinians saw the incident as part of Israel’s unrelenting drive to “Judaize” Jerusalem, and a striking injustice, because the state of Israel was built partly on the abandoned properties of Palestinian refugees. While Jews are entitled to reclaim property they owned before Israel’s founding, Palestinians may not. Those facing eviction in Sheikh Jarrah cannot recover the homes in Jaffa and Haifa that they once owned.
On the face of it, the latest escalation of violence is following the template of all inter-ethnic wars. Muslims observing Ramadan shouted nationalist slogans and clashed with Israeli right-wing groups chanting “Death to the Arabs.” The Israelis haughtily marched with their national flag on Jerusalem Day, marking Israel’s capture in 1967 of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, the site of the biblical Second Temple, and of Al-Aqsa, completed in the year 705. Battles in and around the Al-Aqsa compound erupted, with worshipers inside throwing stones at the Israeli police, who responded by firing rubber-tipped bullets and other projectiles, wounding hundreds.
But the young Arab protesters could claim victory, for they forced the postponement of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling on the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. They also forced the police to change the route of the Jerusalem Day march away from the Muslim Quarter in the Old City.
The flare-up spilled over into pre-1967 Israel, where Islamist groups incited young Israeli Arabs. Mixed Jewish-Arab cities that were supposed to be exemplars of coexistence, such as Acre, Ramla, Jaffa, and Lod, erupted in an orgy of violence and vandalism. Lod was practically taken over by gangs of young Arabs. This was a pogrom, said Jewish residents. An old Jewish woman spoke of memories of Kristallnacht. The mayor of Lod drew the same comparison.
But Jerusalem has emerged as the crucible of conflict. It offered Hamas a golden opportunity to assert its predominance over Israel’s collaborators in the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority and sweep away PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s moribund leadership.
Under Israeli pressure, Abbas had just canceled legislative elections for fear that Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2006, would win and extend its control to the West Bank.
Abbas framed his decision as a protest against Israel’s refusal to allow the Palestinians in East Jerusalem to participate in the elections. But the truth is that the PA’s presence in East Jerusalem had practically vanished, with the vacuum filled by a mostly secular young Palestinian generation that turned the Temple Mount (Haram Al-Sharif to Muslims) into the symbol of their resistance to Israeli occupation.
In the current eruption of violence, Hamas connected all the dots needed to gain primacy in the Palestinian national movement. It positioned itself as the protector of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, as the spearhead of the Palestinians’ national and religious struggle against the Israeli-Jewish occupier, and also as the voice of the Arab minority in Israel proper.
Israelis and their complacent government were caught off guard. Hamas conducted an unprecedentedly massive missile attack on Israeli cities. They even launched salvos at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, sending half the country’s population to shelters. Israelis were left to wonder how their vulnerable home front could withstand a war with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia across the border in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has an arsenal of 150,000 missiles many times more lethal than Hamas’s.
To make its case, Hamas was willing to pay a high price. Israel’s punitive airstrikes on Gaza have been devastating, targeting Hamas military commanders with brutal efficiency. But Hamas knows that in the asymmetric wars of this era, a militia hidden among two million civilians in one of the world’s most densely populated areas has practical immunity from defeat.
Hamas also knows that the war’s reverberation throughout the region will force neighbors like Egypt and Hamas’s patron, Qatar, to mediate a ceasefire.
From the debris of Gaza, Hamas will then claim victory, not necessarily on the battlefield, but in the minds of its people.
At that point, Hamas will have achieved its main objectives: an utterly discredited PA and heightened prestige as the ultimate protector of Islam’s holy shrines in Jerusalem.
Paradoxically, Netanyahu has no interest in destroying Hamas. Quite the contrary: he has struck an unwritten deal with it against Abbas’s PA, which his governments have consistently done all they could to weaken and humiliate.
A Hamas Islamic state in Gaza offers Netanyahu the ideal pretext to reject peace negotiations and a two-state solution. Netanyahu even allowed Qatar to keep Gaza functioning by paying the salaries of Hamas’s functionaries.
Israel certainly cannot claim victory. The fragile coexistence between Jews and Arabs within its borders has been shaken. The prevailing consensus among Israelis that Palestinian nationalism had been defeated – and thus that a political solution to the conflict was no longer necessary – lies in tatters. And even as the violence escalates, it has become clear to both sides that the era of glorious wars and victories is over.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, is Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace. He is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.
By Project Syndicate
This is a war Israel can’t win
The peace movement slogan “War is not the answer” is not always right. Sometimes — as in the struggle against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — war is the only answer. But that bromide certainly applies to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. However long Hamas continues rocketing Israel, and however long Israel continues bombing the Gaza Strip….》》》》
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/18/israel-can-never-be-normal-country-long-palestinian-conflict-smolders/
#Zionism #AlQuds