Watching the IDF (catch all)

[Tom Odom]

Israel is not going to be able to get a hearts and minds campaign going among the Palestinians. They are a people whose minds have been poisoned on a combination of religious bigotry and ethnic hatred, fortified by a real estate worshipping death cult mentality. This makes the classic counterinsurgency strategy unavailable. Israel has responded by attempting to isolate rather than work with the Palestinians in recent years.

Prospects for an agreement are remote because the Palestinians have nothing to offer the Israelis. The Palestinian Authority can't offer peace for land, becuase it can't deliver peace. It cannot or will not control those who want to explode around Israelis.

While the Israeli economy has suffered from the conflict, the Palestinian's economy has cratered into a true begger status where its "goverment" is scrambing to find donors to pay its police. That is not too surprising when hate and victimization appear to be their main commerce. One reason why this status exist if the 50 plus years of dependency on charity from the UN and others, which has subsidized their war against Israel. Without the subsidies they would have been forced to create a real economy with real jobs instead of haveing a fourth of the male population employed by the "security forces." Can you imagine the size of the US military and police force of a fourth of our population was so employed?

Merv,

The bigots live on both sides of the equation. Every argument you make applies to the Israelis as well as the Palestinians. The Israelis have ALWAYS worked to isolate and undermine the Palestinians; their long term stance--and it is still used--is that there are no "palestininans". The Palestinian dependence on UN funds for instance could be rewritten to state Israeli dependence on US funds. As for ethnic hatred, try living in Israel and then decide who hates whom. My take after decades of study and being on the ground, is neither side wears white hats; in many ways they deserve each other.

Tom

[Merv Benson]

I think there are some major differences. I would first note that the million or so Palestinians who live in Israel as oppose to the territories, rarely explode and kill Israelis. The Israelis target people who are hostile threats while the Palestinians target non combatants. That they cannot tell the difference suggest that they are blinded by their bigotry and strike out at "the other." indiscriminately. The Hamas death cult is clearly an organization of bigots. When faced with that kind of hostility it would not be surprising that the Israelis would hold them in low regard, just as we held the Japanese and Germans in low regard during World War II, but it cannot be argued that we were on the same moral plane with our enemies.