Daniel Pipe's is the commentator quoted by VImothy, whose point you described as the 'crux' of the matter.
Ok – forget about "Daniel Pipes". We’re arguing about what he’s saying, not who he is. According to Marxists, a thing is true or false according to who says it. We should be able to go beyond that.
Pipes says that,
The Arab-Israeli conflict is often said… to be the world's most dangerous conflict – and, accordingly, Israel is judged the world's most belligerent country.
Do you agree? You certainly seem to agree that it is the world’s most dangerous conflict. And, if you follow the link in Pipes’ article, it seems that many people feel the same way.
Then he says that,
It flies in the face of the well-known pattern that liberal democracies do not aggress; plus, it assumes, wrongly, that the Arab-Israeli conflict is among the most costly in terms of lives lost.
Do you agree? You might disagree with the first part of that sentence (later, please), but you have already conceded the second.
Pipes ranks the Israel-Arab conflict number 49 on a list of conflicts causing mass death, post 1950. He states that,
These figures mean that deaths in Arab-Israeli fighting since 1950 amount to just 0.06 percent of the total number of deaths in all conflicts in that period. More graphically, only 1 out of about 1,700 persons killed in conflicts since 1950 has died due to Arab-Israeli fighting.
Do you disagree with that? I assume that you do, and that is the reason you have been attacking
The Black Book of Communism. As I’ve said, I will come to those criticisms later. However, even if you (for whatever reason) claim that the deaths attributable to Communism were
only (!) between 65 and 93 million, the deaths resulting from the Arab-Israeli conflict make a very small percentage of the total number of deaths in the last fifty-seven years. You can’t disagree with that, as far as I can see. We should also remember that this includes the entirety of the conflict, including Arab initiated wars of aggression against Israel, including times when (shock-horror) they were receiving no aid whatsoever from the USA. The total is not simply deaths of Palestinians and Israelis.
To return (yet again!) to my original question, why Israel? For instance, why not Syria? And I’m not only referring to western critics, but also to Arab radicals. If Israel is to be attacked for it’s mistreatment and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians, why aren’t other Middle Eastern governments attacked for the same reason? It’s obviously not the oppression of Muslims (i.e. the identity of the victims) that is the cause of the wider conflict (meaning this ideological or political argument as well as the “kinetic” instances of the same, like Arab terrorism and Israeli air strikes), but the fact that it is Israel doing the oppression (i.e. the identity of the oppressor), not other Sunni Arab states, that enrages the extremists. They think it’s their job. Why don’t they complain when Hamas murders other Palestinians? Why don’t they complain when Iran executes children? Do you complain?
Is this really so hard to accept? Do theological reactionaries (to the 7th C, FFS) think like liberal westerners? I seriously doubt it. “End the occupation of Muslim lands”, not “Liberate the Middle East from tyranny” (and remember the Middle East – including Palestine -- is not solely Muslim).
It seems so obvious that it doesn’t even need comment, but
if the Israelis were Arabs, no one in the Middle East would give a damn.
Do you disagree? Were there mass demonstrations over the Hama massacre, over Black September, over the invasion of Kuwait, over the murder and torture of Arabs and Kurds (remember them? Not in the Mid East) in Iraq, over the oppression of women and minorities in Saudi Arabia, of opposition groups in Egypt, of religious minorities in Palestine?
Why Israel? Israel should be criticised, but it is also a tiny oasis of liberal democracy in a sea of dictatorships. Are you criticising them proportionately? If so, fine. I salute your consistency. HMLT isn’t, though. And it is clear that on a global-historical scale the Israeli-Arab conflict is tiny – even more so if you look at it in terms of deaths of Palestinians and ignore Israeli casualties (hey – its their fault, after all), and Arab casualties in the wars (hey – they’re in the past, after all), the conflict is small. In Darfur,
1 million people have been murdered by Islamic insurgents over the last ten years. It is a conflict that hasn’t lasted as long as the Arab-Israeli conflict (i.e. as long as Israel has existed), so if you're measuring the seriousness of a conflict according to its length, I guess it still pales in comparison to the later. But even so, it seems incredible that this receives such a pitiful amount of press compared to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Do you disagree? (Surely you cannot).
