Israel announces new land grab

http://www.rte.ie/news/2014/0901/640564-israel/

Apparently the largest in many years, it has even drawn a rebuke from the US (who nevertheless will do nothing to prevent it).

The Palestinians who own the land have 45 days to appeal. Not sure how that works - perhaps someone can explain how you appeal against your land being stolen?

Clearly, it was in the best interest of Hamas to accept the ceasefire. People didn't buy it when I said the rockets are about Palestinians believing they are dying anyway. Here's another pound of flesh.

However, the article engages in a bit if hyperbole. We Americans care little for terms like hectare, so reading 400 hectares and a quote about how substantial it is made me think a hectare was actually something large. But it isn't, and this is apparently a grand total of 1.54 square miles. Stolen land is stolen land, but people ought to be accurate.

True. Though to understand the size of the actual landgrab, you have to keep in mind how scarce livable land is in this area, and that the land controlled by and in protection of the new settlement will be much larger, just as it was with previous settlements.

And yes, this shows exactly how much Palestinians had to gain by ceasing their attacks on Israel.

1.54 square miles isn't a massive area of land compared to some of our countries, but it's more significant when you look at how small some of these places area. The entire West Bank is only 2000 square miles, and Israel aleady has full control of 60% of that (with military control over more of it).

Well, if it's the government doing the stealing, and there is no higher authority to keep them in line, and the appeals courts are stacked in favor of "what guv'mint wants, guv'mint gets" over individual rights . . .

I guess you don't.

Agreed, but that's the kind of extra information required to get people to notice.

To give an idea of how much land this is, when Lewis and Clark surveyed the land west of the Appalachia's, they divided the land into townships and each township is six square miles. The center square mile was originally reserved for public schools. So, if you live in a small township in which the original school buildings were built, that area of land is a square mile. Or, if you're from the Chicagoland area, Midway airport sits on that center square mile site. So, the amount of land talking about is smaller than two Midways.

However, as has been stated upthread, the amount of arable land in that area is far less, percentage-wise, than that of the US - which, most likely is why Israel is attempting to take it, and, duh, stolen land is stolen land. You would think a country based on the same God as the Christian God would know thou shalt not steal.

Or to put it into terms we 'Merkins can comprehend, Israel is the size of Massachusetts, if you subtracted an area the size of Rhode Island from it. The West Bank is roughly the size of Delaware.

Here's a question: Since people like to say that the policy the US and the USSR had of MAD, prevented WWIII from happening, why doesn't the world help the Palestinians reach military parity with the Israelis? If MAD kept the US and USSR from blowing everybody up, shouldn't the same policy work elsewhere?

I suspect putting nuclear weapons in the hands of Hamas would ensure MAD would happen between Israel and perhaps the rest of the arab world, rather than prevent it.

Because giving people who are willing to martyr themselves for their religion access to weapons of mass destruction is lunacy.

As far as the land grab goes, certainly provocative of the Israelis. But less so than say firing a rocket and hoping it hits an apartment building.

At this point, it looks like the Israelis (or at least the party in power in the government now) believes they can't have peace.

Maybe something to do with the Palestinians putting in charge a group that wants to destroy not only the nation of Israel but the Jewish people.

What Stallion and Demiurge said. Also, the other Arab nations in the region certainly have the capability of arming the Palestinians (just as they had the capacity to absorb the refugees of the first diaspora in 1948 and all the subsequent ones, but chose to let them languish in camps instead), but they haven't done so. Why? Because the Palestinians are their cannon fodder. They keep Israel in a constant state of alert without endangering Saudi or Syrian or...other more "valuable" lives.

MAD only prevented direct, all-out, nuclear war (or anything that might lead to it) from happening. It didn't prevent Viet Nam, Angola, Korea...

If all you're looking for is the Israelis and the Palestinians not starting a nuclear war between themselves, you have that now. No need to give nuclear weapons to the Palestinians. And if you want to look for something that will prevent the kind of skirmishes that killed a couple of thousand people the last two months from happening, then you have to look somewhere other than MAD for a precedent, because MAD never prevented that kind of thing from happening.

For what it's worth, I didn't take Tuckerfan's post to mean arming Hamas with nukes. More a suggestion of better parity between factions.

Didn't take long.

Exactly.

Yes. It started in the first post.

Well, forgive us if references to MAD and equality with a nuclear power were taken as references to WMDs.

I'm not entirely certain how they wouldn't be.

I figured it'd be obvious that handing out nukes to anybody is a really bad idea.

West Bank is Fatah. Hamas is Gaza.

Yeah, I know. Both represent Palestinians. Fatah has been more cooperative, and now West Bank settlements continue. What lesson does Hamas learn from this?

Even with this the people of the West Bank are MUCH better off than those in Gaza.

Can't we just blame Fox News for this?

Before this week's landgrab? Or after it? How about after next week?

Don't tell me you don't know that Palestine is not represented by one government? The West Bank in recent years has been doing exactly what Israel cheerleaders say Gaza should do, and the authority there does not get along with Hamas at all.

Have the Palestinians, or Hamas starting bitching about it yet? Outside of their usual and ongoing desire to destroy Israel?

Technically at the moment they are - the Hamas-Fatah unity government until elections can be held - again.

The U.S. and U.S.S.R had virtually no common borders.

When one side tried to threaten the other from close range (Cuban Missile Crisis for example) then all hell tended to break loose (or come close)