Palestine

[joanna bujes]

At 03:50 PM 06/11/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>One of the more curious aspects of the tit-for-tat violence is that
>Israel's response has largely been directed at the Palestinian
>Authority's security units, rather than at the Islamicists
>themselves. It has hit, for example, the headquarters of a police
>force in Nablus much disliked for reining in demonstrations. The two
>heads of Mr. Arafat's preventive security forces who had been most
>effective in cracking down on militants in the past, Mohammed Dahlan
>in Gaza and Jibril Rajoub in the West Bank, are said to fear they are
>targets of assassination after having come under Israeli gunfire.

Not at all curious. In all my reading about the Israeli/Palestine situation 
one thing clearly stands out: the eretz-Israel zionists are far more 
threatened by the Palestinians who want to cooperate than they are by those 
who are openly hostile.

Openly hostile groups (like Hamas), who may be said to "want to throw all 
the Jews into the sea" can "clearly" only be handled through warfare/terror 
etc. That is, there is not need to justify violence toward them. It's just 
"self-defense."

On the other hand, cooperative Palestinians raise the specter of 
the  non-threatening Palestinian state and make it look like Israeli 
"self-defense" is totally unnecessary...which undermines Israeli militarism 
and territorial aggression.

This, according to Hal Draper, goes all the way back to 1948 when the 
Palestinian villages that were directly wiped out by the Israeli terrorist 
paramilitary groups were outstanding by the fact that they were the most 
cooperative and non-hostile groups around.

Joanna Bujes