Candide

Er... umph.

What has happened to Strewth? I miss him. I hope he is well.

Candide,

Your premise seems to be, how can we take a bad situation and make it worse.

1) Making Jerusalem independent -- not a new suggestion. It was part of the never-implemented 1947 partition plan. A "Jewish, Christian & Islamic triumvirate", if each side is equal, unfairly reduces Jewish and magnifies Muslim and especially Christian power in proportion to their actual numbers. City residents would probably prefer that, while the city remain open and united, the Jewish parts be administered by Israel and the Arab parts by Palestine. The real difficulty is with the Old City, in particular the holy places. An international, multireligious regime over the Temple Mount is worth considering.

2) It would only be fair to force all parties to comply with UN resolutions, not just Israel. And there is no international border between Israel and the West Bank, just an armistice line.

3) To arm the Palestinians on a par with Israel is a recipe for disaster, and would not result in a "cold war" stalemate. This suggestion ignores the existence of multiple, well-armed and aggressive Arab states, Iran, and groups like Hizbullah; ignores differences between the Arabs and Israelis in land size, natural resources, population size, political culture, etc; and pretends that the aims of the two sides are comparable. Just one example: Israel needs and apparently has strategic weapons to deter attacks from distant Arab and Muslim countries (such as Iran), but such weapons are useless in the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

4) Living like rabbits? What does this mean? Candide, on both sides we are people, not animals, and ought not be subject to outside "experimentation". As I indicated before, as far as international armed conflicts go, ours is hardly the most bloody, so what make you think your intervention would be welcome? If anything, outside "help" has only exaserbated the problems here. No externally imposed solution can replace what is really needed -- for the sides to sit down in direct negotations and make peace.

Sganot,
" ‘Living like rabbits’ ? What does this mean? Candide, on both sides we are people, not animals, and ought not be subject to outside 'experimentation'"

While I agree with 99% of what you've posted, I think your criticism of Candide in the above & the allusion to animal experimentation is a little unfair.She/he made a valid point.

Population growth (with all it's implications) has contributed to the problem(s) both in the Israel/Palestine conflict & further north in Lebanon & it will have a major bearing on how these problems are viewed by the rest of the world and resolved in the future.

Additionally, cultures/countries have to take on board the lesson that they cannot go forth & multiply –without thought or plan for the future - & the rest of the world will pickup the tab .

Clueless in Gaza
Colin Andersen's fatuous article ignores the simplest and most obvious truth: the entire world in the end belongs to Allah and the Muslims. And Israel, a sovereign state run by Jews, is a particular affront, not only for where it is, but because the traditionally despised Jews were in charge of that sliver of land.
The Arab war against Israel is a "religious" war if we consider Islam to be a religion. It is promoted by, springs from, the tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics, of Islam. Local and non-local Muslims know this. And the Israelis, of course, prefer not to recognize that it is so, because such recognition would also lead them to conclude, inexorably, that there is no end to this war, and that negotiations are merely occasions for Arab duplicity, as Mohammed ("War is deception") demonstrated in his own treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya. Muslim Arabs, local ("Palestinians") and non-local, understand perfectly why Israel must be exterminated. They differ on the instruments through which this may best be achieved, and on the amount of time it will take -- the Rapid Jihadists of Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Slow Jihadists of Abbas's PLO. But the understanding of what the end result must be, is shared by all of them.
It's disturbing that people who know nothing of the Mandate for Palestine or the longer demographic history of that area, nonetheless make pronouncements without this knowledge. How many know, for example, that about 90% of the land was land owned by no one except, possibly, the Ottoman rulers, and that their title passed to the British as mandatory authority, to be held in trust for the intended successor government, that of the Jewish National Home? That loaded word "occupied" (as in "occupied Arab lands" -- a phrase that says the case is closed, and we can all go home), or "occupation," which are terms that evoke goose-stepping Germans marching into Paris, and clearly suggest that the "occupier" has no valid title, no claim, to the land he is occupying. CONTINUED.

But Israel does possess a title far superior to that of the local Arabs, many of them descendants of the Egyptians and Iraqis and others who flooded in during the Mandatory period -- even though the place was supposed to be the one small sliver in the entire Middle East, that Jews would have to reconstruct their commonwealth and not to be treated, as they were everywhere, as dhimmis.
Israel’s operation in Gaza comes less than a year after its unilateral retreat, when about 8,000 Jews were expelled from communities some of them had lived in for decades. This would mean “disengagement“ from their enemies — the Palestinians would have Gaza to themselves and violence would be thwarted by the security fence. Israel would be better off without Gaza than with it. But the surrender of Gaza didn’t appease Hamas and Fatah. Instead, it convinced them that Israelis were weak, that terrorism worked. In the following months, the Palestinian war against Israel continued without letup. All that changed was the frontline — with the Jewish settlements and soldiers gone, it moved up to the border, making it easier than ever for attacks to penetrate Israel. The security fence has been no panacea. Towns in southern Israel have been bombarded by hundreds of rockets fired over the fence.
Israel, along with Kashmir, Chechnya, Southern Thailand, Sudan, Philippines etc, and soon-to-be Somalia/Ethiopia, are examples of the lesser jihads, which, in aggregate, make up the global (greater) jihad.
The global jihad is an ideological problem, not a racial one. The race card is skillfully used by the dhimmi Left to blunt criticism of jihad activity: they know that the worst thing one can be in the Western public eye today is a racist.

If we could all cut the crap out now maybe we could look at what is happening today and try and force some sort of resolution for the people living today in the hopelessness of Gaza and now Beirut which is being illegally bombed to bits.

1. Blowing up infrastructure in the Gaza is a war crime and Israel need to be condemned loudly - except Bush and Howard and Blair, the trio of lying killers back Israel and the rest of the world just want peace. The question here is what did the 1.3 million civilians of the Gaza do to deserve this brutality? Did they blow up Israel? It is over 45degrees every day, how do they chill their children's food, the milk and the water to prevent disease? The hospitals have little electricity and medicine, how do they treat the hundreds of injured?

2. Beirut civilians - blowing up the civilian infrastructure was a war crime, killing over 75 civilians is a war crime, blowing up the bridges and roads, bombing ordinary people to punish someone else who walks free is a war crime.

3. Bombing Haifa is a war crime by the Lebanese. The people of Haifa did not bomb Beirut.

Does anyone else see how futile it all is? We sit here in our armchairs playing armchair warriors and it is the people of three nations that are suffering mightily.

We have to convince that moron Bush and the two poodles that Israel is just plain wrong on this one - soldiers are part of a war machine, the power supply, the roads, the airports and other structures are not.

Except I guess with the shocking war crimes committed by the moron Bush and his two poodles in Iraq the high moral ground is somewhere on the bottom of the oceans.