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Rantings of a Sandmonkey

Be forewarned: The writer of this blog is an extremely cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, disgruntled sandmonkey. If this is your cup of tea, please enjoy your stay here. If not, please sod off

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

A palestinian civil war?

It seems to be starting.

posted by The Sandmonkey @ 10/04/2005 02:05:00 AM

3 Comments:

At 10/04/2005 02:07:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It already started in 2001, nobody noticed it but its quite clear now.

 
At 10/04/2005 09:55:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

First, a little tangent into English terminology. The word 'militia' is often used to refer to organizations like armed Hamas units. Militia originally referred to the feudal levy that included peasants. In England, it goes back to Saxon days, before the Norman Conquest. The Saxon term was 'fyrd.' It continued in England and in the US (and in other British colonies) down to the present. The key point is that it was the grass-roots military embodiment of the whole community and of the government. Members spent most of their time in private life. They trained routinely only a small fraction of each year. They carried out official duties only in emergencies. Militias were official. They were comprehensive.

Confusingly, the term was dropped in the US and Britain around 1900. In the US, the successor to the militia is the National Guard. The US Constitution provides that the militia or National Guard are institutions of the various US states, such as California and Massachusetts. The Constitution allows the President to take over command of the militia of one or more particular state in certain emergencies. In the UK, the successors to the militia include the Reserves and Territorials and Volunteers (I think).

[Just to add to the confusion, the US state National Guards are part-time units. I think that the Iraqi National Guardsmen serve full time.]


The current modern usage of militia differs from the traditional one in that "militias" now usually originate within a faction of the community and are not at all official or fully subordinate to any government.

In my opinion, they are antithetical to government in general and democratic government in particular.

In England, laws against 'livery' prohibited a nobleman from organizing and maintaining his own private army. (No other private citizen or group was likely to do so.) These laws go back the the Middle Ages, say, roughly 1300. Laws also required individuals to obtain the permission of the King to fortify a building (e.g. a castle).

A Palestinian state cannot, I think, co-exist with militias. Or, to be more precise, the existence of militias is one reason that no Palestinian state now exists and none can be formed until the militias are effectively disbanded.

Relations with Israel are only one reason. If destruction of the state of Israel is the Palestinian Arab goal, then militias are not an obstacle. Any future of coexistence with Israel is almost impossible in the presence of militias. It is obvious that negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs must in the future, as they have in the past, involved trades and compromises. The militias mean that the Palestinian Authority cannot effectively offer peace to Israel because it cannot deliver.

Michael in Framingham

 
At 10/04/2005 08:39:00 PM, Blogger Papa Ray said...

Listen, this is not complicated. Even I understand it.

Arabs hate Jews.

Always have.
Always Will.

Papa Ray

 

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