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Vidar
Lv 4
Vidar asked in Politics & GovernmentPolitics · 9 years ago

Why is the Israel/Gaza conflict being framed as "Israel's right to self-defense"?

Why does the narrative always focus on Israel?

Don't Palestinians have a right to defend themselves?

They are, after all, the ones being forced to live in the world's largest open-air prison at conditions intentionally just above humanitarian crisis levels.

The news always talks about Israel defending itself against rocket attacks from Gaza...implying that such rocket attacks are unprovoked.

The reality is far different.

Israel actually set off the current cycle of violence by murdering a 13-year old Gazan boy. Do Palestinians not have a right to retaliate?

If an unprompted Gazan rocket killed an Israeli child, would the media not then be using that as the excuse for Israel to pound Gaza with high-tech weaponry?

The same thing happened in late 2008, during the election. It is admitted fact, even in Israel, that the IDF was the initial aggressor against which Gazans were retaliating against. Even so, it was still framed as "Israel defending itself".

Isn't this similar to Mike Tyson knocking out Pee Wee Herman, and when Pee Wee wakes up and slaps Mike, Mike claims self-defense as he breaks Pee Wee's neck?

9 Answers

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  • 9 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    "Hey, we provoked a group of people and they attacked us back! Let's kill the militants and civilians so that more civilians become militants so we can keep killing Palestinians in claim of self defense!"

  • Anonymous
    5 years ago

    Your question makes 3 assumptions. a million. The Jewish people have a non secular declare to the land. 2. it is the only way they justify there presence there. 3. through doing so as that they exclude all others from the land. ingredient one i can not communicate via fact i do no longer skinny kit is contested. ingredient 2 and 3 are incorrect. you're assuming Israel only cam in and took over the land and now they'd desire to justify it. traditionally this isn't what hap pend. There has constantly been a Jewish presence interior the land of Israel. constantly. different than that Jews living interior the land offered almost all the land they moved into. bear in mind that interior the early 1900's there the place no longer even a million million people there now the are very almost ten. So on the time no person replaced into kicking all people els out of there land. No we could forward slightly to 1947. The UN proposed a plan. Israel replaced into meant to get purely the land the place that they had the wide-unfold public of the land - and the arabs the place that they had the wide-unfold public. No conquering or something. Israel replaced into to get the place that they had a majority inhabitants. The Jews jumped at opportunitynity to settle for the deal and declIndependencendec. The Arabs collectivla incednced a conflict. for this reason THe borders have been slightly altered forom the unique plan. yet no longer through plenty. back THe Jewish state replaced into based the place the Jewish people held the mojority inhabitants. NO colonialazation or something. with regard to assumption 3 below Israeli rule there is reigious freedom for the 1st time interior the land for 2,000 years. Muslums, Christians, Jews and others walk around freally in all of Israel. THeonly exeption is that Jews can not pray on the temple mount. So properly Israel has a biblical suitable to the land, all others are welcome there besides.

  • 7 years ago

    The conflict between Palestine and Israel is sometimes described as an ancient, unsolvable religious conflict fuelled by a perpetual cycle of violence and revenge. At other times it is described as a David versus Goliath struggle where “underdog” Israel tries to survive amidst a sea of terrorist Arabs.

    Yet the origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict do not date back to time immemorial. The conflict began with Zionist colonisation last century and the mass expulsion of Palestinians when the state of Israel was formed in 1948. It is not a conflict about religion, but about land.

    Israel is no underdog. It is an imperialist power in its own right. The country’s air force is a quarter of the size of the US air force; its overall conventional military might is estimated by think tank Global Firepower to be 11th largest in the world.

    In addition to this extremely strong conventional army, Israel is one of nine countries to have nuclear weapons. Its stockpile is estimated to be more than 100 bombs.

    The US-Israel relationship

    Its relationship to the big imperialist powers was spelled out by Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in 1951: “[S]trengthening Israel helps the Western powers maintain equilibrium and stability in the Middle East. Israel is to become the watchdog.

    “There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But if for any reason the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.”

    In exchange for acting as the West’s regional enforcer, Israel gets substantial military aid – currently $3 billion per year from the US government – access to military technology, and political and diplomatic support. Israel is a Goliath, not a David. The only other states in the region with conventional military power close to Israel’s are Turkey and Egypt, neither of which have nuclear weapons.

    Palestine’s history

    For well over 1,000 years before the formation of the Israeli state, Palestine had been inhabited by a Muslim majority and a Jewish minority who lived together largely in peace. When the Crusades brought rampaging Christians to Jerusalem in 1099, Jews and Muslims fought and died together defending the city.

    Due to the rising popularity of Zionism (a political ideology that argues that Jews and non-Jews cannot live together in peace, and that Jews therefore need to establish their own country), the 20th century brought increasing Jewish migration to Palestine. Notorious British anti-Semitic politician Lord Arthur Balfour saw an opportunity in the Zionist cause to get Jews to leave England and to use them as colonists for the British Empire. In 1917 came the Balfour Declaration, which pledged a degree of British support to the Zionist project.

    The 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine was a turning point in the dispossession of the Palestinians. Historic Palestine was divided into two states – a Palestinian state comprising 43 percent of the land, an Israeli state with 56 percent and Jerusalem as a shared capital. Prior to the partition, Jewish ownership of land in Palestine was around 6 percent and the Jewish population was estimated at 30 percent.

    This wide-scale theft of land by Zionists led to rebellion and war. Zionist militias carried out massacres aimed at terrorising the Palestinian population into fleeing.

    On 9 April 1948, members of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist militia, assaulted the village of Deir Yassin. At the end of the attack, Jacques de Reynier, an International Red Cross observer, declared:

    “The first room was dark, everything was in disorder, but there was no-one. In the second, amid disembowelled furniture and all sorts of debris, I found some bodies cold. Here the cleaning up had been done with machine guns, then hand grenades. It had been finished off with knives, anyone could see that.

    “The same thing in the next room but as I was about to leave, I heard something like a sigh. I looked everywhere, turned over all the bodies, and eventually found a little foot, still warm. It was a little girl of ten, mutilated by a hand grenade, but still alive; everywhere it was the same horrible sight … there had been 400 people in this village; about fifty had escaped.

    “All the rest had been deliberately massacred in cold blood for, as I observed for myself, this gang was admirably disciplined and acted only under orders.”

    This wave of terror and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is referred to as al-Nakba – the catastrophe. In Israel, it is celebrated as Independence Day. For more than 60 years, the Palestinians ethnically cleansed and their descendants have not been able to return.

    Since its foundation, Israel has been fiercely expansionist. In 1967, in the space of six days, it seized what remained of Palestine, occupying the Gaza Strip and West Bank as well as parts of Syria and Egypt. This Six Day War proved to the United States how powerful an ally Israel could become. The loss of Iran as an ally after the 1979 revolution cemented the Zionist state as America’s key ally in the region.

    What would a real solution look like?

    Many have argued for a return to the pre-1967 borders and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the existing Israeli state. This would offer nothing to those expelled during al-Nakba. Events today prove that such a Palestinian state would forever be insecure with such a powerful, well-armed and expansionist neighbour.

    The only just solution in Palestine is to have one democratic state that offers equal rights for Arabs and Jews, and the right for Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. Achieving this “one state solution” would require dismantling the racist apartheid state of Israel and breaking the power of US imperialism in the region.

    It’s no small task. But it is the only way justice can be served.

  • Mike
    Lv 7
    9 years ago

    The narrative doesn't always focus on Israel. It focuses on Israel blowing the hell out of innocent people as if they are the aggressors and ruthless murders while totally ignoring the aggression they've absorbed for years.

    So your post is based on a false premise.

    If Israel is so against the poor Palestinians. Why did they bother giving up control of the Gaza strip against their better judgement in 2005 to begin with ?

    Did they do it so Palestine could elected Hamas terrorist as leaders and endure years of rocket attacks ?

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  • 9 years ago

    It's mass murder or genocide, not war. Self defence my ***.

  • justa
    Lv 7
    9 years ago

    Why do you always ignore that Gaza has chosen to elect a terrorist organization to lead them, and to send a thousand rockets into Israel in one week, and then complain when they respond? And even stranger, once the Arabs are hit they complain and want Israel to make concessions as if they were the ones losing.

    Don't want to get hit...don't attack. Really very simple.

  • 9 years ago

    The corporate media's role is to propegate the. Tinterests of the corporate interests and one of them is indocrinating people into siding with Israel and America on almost everything.t

  • 9 years ago

    Historically, Israel would not bother anyone if they would leave them alone. They are merely trying to survive. It is a religious war and always has been.

  • Anonymous
    9 years ago

    Cause it's the TRUTH & one of the FEW TRUTHS @ that !!! The one's killing innocents, using them as human shields, setting up their rockets in neighborhoods, mosque's & school are MUSLIM HAMAS Terrorists so that's who's getting innocents killed not Israel !!

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