As you say, Bushbred, more wisdom and understanding are needed, and as Kant surely implies, peace and its lasting solution will go well beyond one person – whether it be a Napoleon, Reagan, Gorbachev, Bush or an Obama, through whom a false hope is placed.

Kindest of Regards

relda (BB)

Relda (Bushbred)

‘But do the countries of Australia, America, Russia or China etc., reach anywhere near the same ‘perfection’ as demanded of Israel?’

Who wants Israel to be perfect? I just want Israel to stop persecuting, dispossessing, bombing, maiming, crippling, imprisoning, walling up, ghettoising, bulldosing, humiliating and ethnically cleansing Palestinians. I’m sure the isolated, embattled, numbingly grief-stricken Palestinian people have a similar barometer of ‘perfection’ to hold up to the State of Israel as well.

Also, re Israel’s ‘legitimacy’ – this is a rhetorical furphy, especially given Israel’s powerful status in the West and the cowardly realpolitik of the Arab states. The Israeli obsession with being ‘wiped off the map’ is more of a paranoid projection of its denied guilt about Israel’s own de-legitimization of the Palestinian people and culture, coupled with the trauma of the Jews’ own past persecution.

Unlike the indigenous-annihilation crimes that Australia, the US, Canada etc committed, Israel is annihilating the Palestinian culture within full view of the world community.

Because we can’t cover up Israel’s crimes against humanity, the West is desperately trying to maintain a culture of Israeli absolution. I won’t make any huffy declarations that Israel ‘can’t keep getting away with it’. It can, it does and, unless the compassionate people of the world make themselves heard, it most likely will.

Bushbred

I don’t have much knowledge of Kant or his Perpetual Peace philosophy, except for a brief perusal of the not always reliable Wikipedia.

All I can say is that perpetual peace can never be achieved. It’s a delusion that keeps justifying war and military expenditure.

Conflict is an essential part of humanity. War is not. Because conflict is human, we have allowed ourselves to be brainwashed – generation after generation – into believing that war is human as well.

Humanity will always stand up for itself in the face of unfairness, aggression and injustice. That involves conflict. War was invented to monopolise the human right to conflict, by bringing all the resources and rules of conflict under control of the governments of nation states.

"Israel has become one of the worst perpetrators of ethnic cleansing in modern history"

Oh, come off it! The Palestinian population is INCREASING! Either Israel is supremely incompetent at ethnic cleansing (where the point is to reduce the population, not increase it), or ethnic cleansing just isn't happening.

Criticise Israel for legitimate reasons, but bollocks about ethnic cleansing merely undermines your argument, and shows you know little about the conflict and are simply interested in making Israel look bad. It's because of people that criticise Israel out of hand without knowing much about the conflict that accusations of anti-Semitism start getting flung around.

Hint: The Palestinian population is increasing at a faster rate than surrounding, non-occupied Arab countries. How is that ethnic cleansing, exactly?

Elder of Zion

Ethnic cleansing is not about 'reducing' population numbers. It's a term first coined by Western sources to describe 'mass killings, deportation, rape, internment, and intimidation engaged in by rival ethnic groups ... with the goal of rendering ethnically mixed areas homogeneous and thereby establishing a de facto claim on ethnic grounds to sovereignty over disputed territory'. [Answers.com]

Israel's policy towards the Palestinians fulfills all these requirements (the only possible exception being rape). OLO space restrictions prevent an adequate description of the extensive ethnic cleansing policies practised by the State of Israel on the Palestinian people over a 60-year period. However, suffice to say:

1947 - 720,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from 77% of Palestine, 418 villages destroyed and several massacres occurred - the most notorious being Deir Yassin. Successive conflicts and aggressions by Israel have caused Palestinian refugee numbers to increase to 4.5 million, many still living in UN refugee camps after 3 or more generations and denied right of return.

Today, three-quarters of Palestinians are displaced and more than half are displaced outside the borders of their homeland.

Since 1967, 300,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned without trial and over 500,000 have been subjected to torture, abuse and neglect within prison, often leading to deaths in custody.

From 1967 - 2008, Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory has been one of illegal and active colonisation - land confiscations, the building of 200 Jewish settlements and the transferring of more than 400,000 Jewish settlers to Palestinian territory.

Jerusalem has been actively 'de-Arabised' with the construction of 12 neighbourhoods transplanting 25,000 Jewish settlers.

Considering that, in 1947, 94% of Palestinian land was owned by Palestinians, who comprised 65% of the population (90% in 1918), the heavily reduced and demoralised state of Palestinian culture constitutes ethnic cleansing on a grand scale.

In terms of Palestinian population increases, this is mostly racist hysteria-mongering from the Netanyahu camp. Population studies do not bear this out and, even if they did, it's common knowledge that poverty and extreme survival conditions induce people to bear more children.

Quick correction ...

In previous post, I wrote: 'Considering that, in 1947, 94% of Palestinian land was owned by Palestinians...'

I should have written: ''Considering that, in 1947, 94% of land in what is now Israel was owned by Palestinians...'