Israel VS Palestine

[chrisfan]

No Kenny.

[shin]

Um.

[skvorisdeadsorta]

Kay Jay:
International revulsion at the Israeli army's terrorizing of the West Bank Palestinian towns, and in particular its destruction of the Jenin refugee camp, has created a new political situation for the Zionist state.

The last vestiges of the image of Israel as the refuge of a persecuted people have been largely blown away by the missile blasts from U.S.-supplied helicopter gunships hitting defenseless concentrations of Palestinian refugees. At the same time, the liberal or even left image of the Zionist state has evaporated as the defense of Israel is more and more assumed by the right and even the extreme right in the United States.

The ranking House Republican, Texas right-winger Dick Armey, even came out on a TV talk show in favor of removing the remaining Palestinian population from the West Bank and full annexation of the territory to the state of Israel. Armey was quoted in the May 4 issue of the British Guardian as saying, "I happen to believe that the Palestinians should leave."

However, if the most truculent defense of Zionist repression has come from the right, virtually the entire U.S. political establishment has lined up behind Israel. Thus, both houses of Congress have voted for motions declaring that "the U.S. and Israel are now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism."

On the other hand, the weekend of April 20 was marked by the first mass demonstrations in U.S. history in support of the Palestinians- around 30,000 in San Francisco and 100,000 in Washington, D.C. Up until now, Zionist influence in liberal and labor organizations has been sufficient to prevent large united-front protests against the murderous actions of the Israeli settler state.

The damning images and testimonies of Israeli terror against whole civilian populations have set in motion a mass movement in defense of human and democratic rights comparable to the movement against the imperialist war in Vietnam in the 1960s.

In Western Europe the mass protests have been even larger and broader than in the United States, and in the Arab world they represent a vast upsurge that is frightening even the corrupt reactionary caste that rules Saudi Arabia.

The most visible atrocities were in the refugee camp of Jenin, where Human Rights Watch found and published concrete evidence of war crimes by the Israeli army. The New York Times attempted to play down this report by stressing that HRW had found no proof of a "massacre" of Palestinians but only of some excesses. By contrast, the British Guardian headlined the accusation of war crimes.

And a more complete report was given in the Italian Il Manifesto of April 4. The left daily paper noted that the HRW report said the Israeli troops had completely destroyed 140 houses, most of them multifamily units, and badly damaged another 200, leaving about 4000 people-a fourth of the population of the camp-without shelter.

HRW was able to confirm 52 dead, a figure the authors of the report expected to grow as more bodies are found. Nearly half of them, 22, were civilians-including children, old people, and physically handicapped. For example, Jamal Fayd, a 37-year-old paralyzed man, was buried under the ruins of a house by Israeli soldiers who refused to allow his family time to get him out.

The report detailed many cases where the Israeli forces used civilians as human shields-for example, forcing a 65-year-old woman to stay atop a roof in front of an Israeli army unit during a helicopter bombardment.

The most egregious violation of international law revealed by the report was that "many of the civilian deaths documented were owing to deliberate or illegal executions." That is, the Israeli troops deliberately murdered residents of the camps, obviously for the purpose of terrorizing the population.

In its May 3 issue, the British daily Independent gave some dramatic details: "The most serious evidence in the report is the testimony of a 16-year-old identified as Ibrahim Z., who says he witnessed Israeli soldiers execute Jamal al-Sabbagh, an unarmed civilian.

"Ibrahim told HRW he was in a group of Palestinian men detained by Israeli soldiers. The soldiers ordered Mr. al-Sabbagh to put his bag on the ground. The report quotes Ibrahim: 'He did. They told us to take off our trousers. While we were taking our trousers off, they shot him.'

"According to the witness, the soldiers fired two bullets, one at him and one at Mr. al-Sabbagh. They missed Ibrahim, who says Palestinians were then ordered to take Mr. al-Sabbagh's body to the hospital."

Moreover, the Israeli forces prevented any medical aid from going to the the camp residents for 11 days. The report noted that at least two persons had died as a result. It also noted that if the Israelis argued that they had to stop Palestinian medical aid from going in for security reasons, they were obligated by international law to provide medical aid themselves.

That could certainly be no great problem for such a huge military machine. But they did not. They simply let people suffer and die, again obviously to terrorize the entire population.

This spectacle shocked the world. But the British Guardian reported in its April 27 edition that the sort of outrages that were committed in Jenin were repeated on a vast scale on the West Bank: "'Jenin is not so different from any of the other attacks,' said Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. 'The focus of the international community has been on events in Jenin, but equally serious violations took place in Ramallah, particularly, and in Nablus.'"

The Guardian noted: "Human rights organizations have not even begun to investigate the raids on the smaller West Bank towns and villages such as Dura. The scale of the offensive, the biggest since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, is too forbidding, as is its use of a military curfew to deny international organizations access."

In the case of the village of Dura, the first human rights worker reached it only after it had been under military curfew for 17 days.

The paper noted four cases of local residents being killed by aerial bombardment as they walked about in the normal course of their lives. It reported the callous and brutal treatment of a local wounded man, Farooq Said Ahmed: "The army allowed an ambulance through 10 hours later, by which time his jeans were so soaked in his own blood that he considered wringing them out.

"It took three hours to reach the hospital, he said. Twice soldiers shot at the ambulance, and twice they stopped it, unloading him on his stretcher, prodding his injured leg until he yelled in pain, and flipping him over on his face to check for weapons on both occasions."

The Guardian's report concluded: "Nothing that happened in Dura is extraordinary in the context of the past month."

In the May 4 issue of The Independent , Robert Fisk pointed out that the Israeli incursion into Nablus the day before was the first one that had not been linked propagandistically to retaliation for Palestinian attacks, indicating that from now on the Zionist forces will attack Palestinian territory any time they choose under the vague pretext of averting future terrorist actions.

The Israeli army has not yet attacked the Gaza strip, the Palestinian territory that the Zionists covet the least. It is a small strip of desert crowded by more than a million and a quarter Palestinians, mainly refugees.

There are only 6000 Zionist settlers there, as opposed to 400,000 on the West Bank (although the settlers occupy most of the desirable agricultural land and the Israeli premier, Ariel Sharon, recently referred to a settlement that came under attack as being as much Israel as Tel Aviv.)

However, the Palestinians fear that an Israeli attack is imminent. And their situation is increasingly desperate, as even the Zionist daily Jerusalem Post was obliged to recognize in its May 2 issue: "Over 80 percent of the 1.3 million Gazan Palestinians live under the poverty level and their per-capita income has returned to the level it was in 1968, about $400 a year.

"According to the IDF [Israeli Defense Force], the Palestinian Authority's institutions are in 'complete chaos.'"

The conditions are hardly better on the West Bank. The Palestinian economy has been ruined. The Palestinian Authority and the state services it provided have been shattered. The population is desperate.

And yet, the U.S. authorities, which claim to be an arbiter seeking to accomplish peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, insist that the onus is on the Palestinian Authority head, Yasir Arafat, to "stop the terror"-that is, they demand that he attack the fighters resisting the Israeli assaults. That is something that he physically and politically cannot do.

At this point, the question arises: What is the real purpose of all the talk and the initiatives being floated for a diplomatic settlement, since the Zionists are clearly not prepared to give the Palestinians any significant concessions and the Palestinians cannot continue living as they have been.

The only answer is that these moves are essentially a cover-up for an operation designed to crush the Palestinian nation completely and perhaps completely drive it from its historic land, as right-wing politicians in the U.S. like Dick Armey now openly say.

The Palestinians and the Arabs in general find it increasingly difficult to believe that the Israelis could really be defying the United States. They know that the Zionist state is a creature of Washington.

Secretary of State Colin Powell never had any intention of forcing the Israelis to withdraw from the Palestinian areas. His purpose in his trip to the Middle East was to play Pontius Pilate, to try to wash the hands of American imperialism in the eyes of the Arab people. It seems that he was unsuccessful.

Thus, the political cost of the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians and the general imperialist assault on the resistance of the oppressed peoples in the Middle East is proving very high for the U.S. and its allies.

It is the job of the anti-imperialist movement worldwide, including in the imperialist countries themselves, to make it even higher until the murderous system begins to break down-and with it the capitalist system that spawned it and maintains it.

The following demands are pertinent:

· For a democratic, secular Palestine-with equality for all!

· For the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes!

· Dismantle the settlements!

· End U.S. aid to apartheid Israel!

The article above was written by Gerry Foley, and first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.

[skvorisdeadsorta]

TO DEFEND Israel today is to be either callous or wilfully ignorant. Had Julie Burchill bothered during her visit there to cross the few miles from Israel to Gaza or the West Bank, she would have seen such human suffering as to disturb even her frenetic adulation of Israel. She might have seen the daily lot of nearly three million Palestinians as they battle with army checkpoints, curfews, random shootings, arbitrary arrests and air raids. She might have found that the “superJews” she so admires humiliate and oppress Palestinians at a whim: last year, at the Nablus checkpoint, a middle-aged man was made to strip, get down on all fours and bark like a dog before he could enter his city. Women in labour routinely wait at checkpoints until some give birth there and see their babies die.
Those that survive live a blighted childhood. Since September 2000, Israel has killed more than 660 Palestinian children and wounded 9,000 — such as little Iman, sprayed with bullets when walking to school in Rafah last month, even after she died. Thousands of children are traumatised by the daily horrors they witness. For a Palestinian child, life under Israeli occupation means turning 15 and seeing the army come to arrest you if you are male, or seeing your friends bleed to death because no ambulance is allowed to rescue them.



It is difficult to convey the scale and effect of Israel’s abuses of Palestinian lives through statistics alone. But these are horrifying enough: since 2000, nearly 4,000 Palestinians killed, and 30,000 injured; 400 were assas-sinated; and 25,000 homes were demolished. In addition, hundreds of acres of farmland were destroyed. No state on earth, except Israel, could get away with these atrocities, now routinely justified as “defence” against Palestinian “ terrorism”.

The truth is that the West, which created Israel, cannot bear to see what it has done. In trying to solve the problem of Jewish persecution in Europe, which culminated in the Holocaust, Western powers helped to establish the Jewish state as a refuge for the Jews and their own consciences. A compelling argument at the time, it became unassailable when Old Testament stories about the ancient Israelites and their exploits in the Holy Land were thrown in.

But these were European sensitivities arising from European events that had nothing to do with the people who paid the price for Israel’s establishment. Most Palestinians are Muslims who do not accept the Biblical version of events. So why were they sacrificed to assuage European guilt and fulfil Zionist ambitions? And who cares to compute the cost to the Palestinians of creating Israel 56 years ago? Far easier to ignore all that and cling to the romantic illusion of an Israel of fearless pioneers and liberal upholders of civilised, Western values. But the ugly reality behind this myth is showing and people like Julie Burchill will have to take note some day.



Ghada Karmi is a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

[skvorisdeadsorta]

From the following Blog:http://wakeupfromyourslumber.blogspot.com/2006/07/shocked-at-israeli-atrocities-dont-be.html

Some of you may have seen this clip of a young Lebanese boy in the hospital whose face was badly disfigured today by white phosporous used by Israelis.

You may be shocked at Israeli use of chemical weapons that are banned internationally, or appalled at their reckless disregard for civilian lives or their systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure.

Well, don't be - because it's business as usual for Israelis.

If Hezbollah emerges from the fighting with its "military arm more or less intact ... my God they're going to use it as a victory" [.]

"As long as they don't lose, they don't have to win ... because they'll be standing up to the Israelis and in this part of the world that is a victory."

--Timur Goksel, university professor
and former U.N. adviser in south Lebanon


Does 'emerging more or less intact' sound like an offensive military strategy to you?

Not to me.

If merely 'standing up to Israelis' is considered 'a victory', it can only be because complete extermination of Arab resistance is STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE for Israelis.

No one DARES defy them.

"We created terror among the Arabs and all the villages around. In one blow, we changed the strategic situation."
Sound familiar?

Those are the words of Menachem Begin boasting about the Israeli massacre of over 250 unarmed men, women and children at Deir Yassin in 1948.

How about this:

Th[e] plan rests on the assumption that there will be no international forces stationed in the country which are capable of effective action [. . . ]


* * *


4. Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.
Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the. armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.
That's an excerpt from Hagana's Plan D, an Israeli military strategy drawn up in March of 1948 that entailed the evacuation of the Palestinian population from the areas of a future Jewish state. But, it reads like a blueprint for what's happening today in Lebanon.

First, they got rid of the Syrians. Then, they proceeded to destroy the "population centers" in Lebanon with OVER 4,000 ariel sorties, driving the civilian population from their homes. Now, they begin their search and control operations to exterminate ALL resistance.

Hezbollah actions such as blowing up an Israeli warship with an Iranian-made radar-guided missile or firing rockets at the once out-of-range city of Haifa have shattered taboos and astounded Israel and the world.
How dare these sub-human beasts on legs defy the supreme power of Zionists?

If you are shocked and appalled at Israeli atrocities in Lebanon these last weeks, then all I can say is that YOU DON'T KNOW ISRAELIS. They are capable of much worse and, unfortunately, we will all see - THAT is, after all, their plan.
"The massacre was not only justified, but there would not have been a state of Israel without the victory at Deir Yassin."

[--Menachem Begin]


Unashamed of their deed and unaffected by world condemnation, the Zionist forces, using loud-speakers, roamed the streets of cities warning Arab inhabitants "The Jericho road is still open," they told Jerusalem Arabs "Fly from Jerusalem before you are killed, like those in Deir Yassin."
It seems that if anyone has failed to learn from history, it is the world - NOT Israelis.

Israelis merely repeat it.

[KayJay]

Thank you for the information, Skvor. I didn't say Israel has done no wrong. I am not defending Israel. What I said is that I could find nothing Israel has done to justify Hezbollah's goal of wiping out all Jews. Please let me know if you find anything that will justify that. I will not be back at this board, so please don't hesitate to email me at [e-mail]

Thanks.

Have a nice day!

[skvorisdeadsorta]

I'm not justifying it. These are examples that I'm showing that if you look hard enough, both sides have something going on that would justify annihiliation of the other to some degree from their point of view.

[kmc]

I am pretty sure Mel Gibson would agree with Hezbollah.

[luke]

I think he just wants to make Mad Max a reality already.

Israel's only friend in the Middle East: The Ayatollah of Rock 'n Rolla.

[kmc]

Is Thunderdome in Israel?

[luke]

I think it was in Australia, but I'm sure Tina Turner could move it around if she wanted to.

Hopefully after Mad Max takes down the Israelis, Pac and Dre will do a video there. "Tel Aviv Love", maybe.

West Bank!

[skvorisdeadsorta]

I feel a renewed interest in Rock the Casbah......

[limitdeditionlayla]

rockysigman said:

luke said:

I dunno, seems plainly obvious to me that "Jewish" refers interchangeably to an ethnicity and a religion.

How this could be "news" to anyone is pretty baffling, though.

Is ethnicity the same as race though?

Although I guess since race is a completely made up thing, it can sort of refer to whatever people want it to refer to.

I think 'ethnicity' is a cultural term, whereas 'race' is more a biological one. Jews are not a 'race' by any biological standard - they're considered caucasian along with (most) Europeans, as well as parts of central Asia/the Middle East. Then again, the way humans are currently classified into races is very flawed.

As Luke & Rocky have both said, the term 'Jew' refers to anything you want it to, an ethnicity, culture & religion. But not strictly a race.

[limitdeditionlayla]

the bitterness between Arabs & Jews - I don't think even they know anymore why its there. Its as though its become a part of their culture & thats what makes it so sad. When something becomes that ingrained, how can you remove it?

[limitdeditionlayla]

I'd like to see global conflicts fought in a Thunderdome. Two world leaders enter. One world leader leaves.

we don't need another heeeero...