Levite do you think that Israel's right to exist makes it alright for Israel to do whatever it pleases, even to mass exterminate a people it considers outsiders in it's country? At this rate I'd hate to see what Israel does next, mass extermination or deportation of all non-Orthodox Jews? I could live in Israel if I wanted to, I don't want to, because frankly I don't think it's special and I like America better.
My support for Israel has nothing to do with the actions of the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate or the Ultra-Orthodox political parties. The former institution I would like to see dismantled, and the latter institutions I would like to see voted out of the Knesset by the populace. I disagree nearly as violently with the Ultra-Orthodox as I do with the anti-Zionists.
As for "mass extermination:" please. According to a very leftist source (
B'Tselem), total casualties for the Israel-Palestinian conflict from 1987 to 2008 are fewer than 8,000 (Israelis and Palestinians both). If we add in the years 1984-1987 and 2009-10, let's be generous and say perhaps there might be a little under 10,000 total. This is out of 7.45 million Israelis, and 3.95 million Palestinians. That is hardly mass extermination, even if the majority of casualties suffered were Palestinian.
Not to mention that, if we look around the world in the same period, there was a succession of civil wars in the Congo that killed over 275,000 people; maybe 500,000 to 1,000,000 died in the Iran-Iraq war; the first Gulf War killed nearly 40,000 directly, and perhaps as many as 100,000 indirectly; over 100,000 died in the Yugoslav wars; regimes in Liberia, Sudan, Rwanda, Syria, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and other countries massacred many tens of thousands of civilians.... Just in that period alone, the conflicts, wars, uprisings, and massacres taking place in the world are so many, and so staggeringly high in casualties, it boggles the mind. But what do we all spend our time talking about? Israel, and its wicked, wicked "massacres" of the Palestinians. But that has nothing to do with anti-Semitism! Ridiculous notion. It's purely a coincidence that amidst all this unrestrained slaughter, it's the careful, restrained attempts of the Jewish State to resist being overrun by terrorists that garners all the attention and the shock and the condemnation.
Yes, I did say careful and restraint. For all the instances where IDF soldiers have refused to abide by the high honor code they were sworn to, or where such soldiers have become demoralized and desensitized by the endless conflict to the point of becoming reckless or unethical in their dealings with the civilians amongst whom the terrorists cravenly hide, I still say that overall, Israel has acted with restraint.
Israel has the best-trained, most advanced military in the Middle East, if not even further bounds. If Israel really was the bloodthirsty, unrelenting mass exterminators that people like to portray it as, there would be no Palestinians left. Any day Israel wanted to, it could flatten the West Bank and Gaza into a Stone Age parking lot. They could solve their problem the really old fashioned way: just kill everyone who's not you. But they don't do that. They defend when attacked. They work and plan as best as is possible to minimize collateral damage in large military actions and retaliatory strikes. They try to punish perpitrators and those who give aid and comfort to terrorists not with death (or deliberate injury, as is commonly practiced in Saudi Arabia, and other such countries), but with destruction or confiscation of property, or imprisonment. Even during these long, sustained periods of closed borders, Israel still permits Palestinian ill and injured to enter Israel and receive treatment there. The Red Cross is still permitted to deliver aid to refugees. And Israel still tries to play this game of "peace negotiations," where somehow every offer, every gesture that Israel puts forward is inevitablyjudged insultingly insufficient, while they hope in vain for a real dialogue partner to emerge. They even hold financial revenues in trust for the Palestinian people, should the Palestinians ever find a leader who won't cheat his citizens blind. And within Israel, Jewish and Arab civil rights activists work to try and better the social condition of Arab Israeli citizens-- even those sympathetic to Palestinian causes-- who, in the meantime, enjoy a higher standard of living and more freedoms than their kin in most of the nearby Arab nations (except maybe Jordan, Qatar, and Bahrain: they seem to be doing okay)..
Yeah. That's bad, all right.
