Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
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Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Really?
then they better work on their Marksmanship based on the latest body counts
as it looks like a Cheney hunting outing
Really?
then they better work on their Marksmanship based on the latest body counts
as it looks like a Cheney hunting outing
ZZ CREAM
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
Fictionman
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Some people in this forum support terrorists.I am not one of them.FUCK HAMAS
Some people in this forum support terrorists.I am not one of them.FUCK HAMAS
reanimator
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
You moron.
Wrong #1: Hamas targets anyone alive in Israel.
Wrong #2: Hamas shields themselves with woman & children.
Right #1: Israel finally said ENOUGH!
Right #2: Israel warns Hamas they are coming and to get the shields out of the way, or it is THEY who are responsible for civilian casualties.
Right #3: Israel does what it says it is going to do.
Bless them!
By the way: You liberal loonies ever wonder why it is you're always on the short end of the stick? You wonder why whatever you talk about is a complaint about what the mainstream is doing? Kind of like the days of the hippies and longhairs. They could whine and moan and gripe and depict suffering all they wanted and all day long. Didn't make a difference though. Nope. All they did was waste their time with their peacenik and loony positions.
You moron.
Wrong #1: Hamas targets anyone alive in Israel.
Wrong #2: Hamas shields themselves with woman & children.
Right #1: Israel finally said ENOUGH!
Right #2: Israel warns Hamas they are coming and to get the shields out of the way, or it is THEY who are responsible for civilian casualties.
Right #3: Israel does what it says it is going to do.
Bless them!
By the way: You liberal loonies ever wonder why it is you're always on the short end of the stick? You wonder why whatever you talk about is a complaint about what the mainstream is doing? Kind of like the days of the hippies and longhairs. They could whine and moan and gripe and depict suffering all they wanted and all day long. Didn't make a difference though. Nope. All they did was waste their time with their peacenik and loony positions.
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Bush and Rice wanted Hamas in power ....
I notice Reaminator "I want to grow up to be like Glenn Beck" never mentions the history of that relationship
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, whose secret Palestinian intervention backfired in a big way. Photo illustration by Chris Mueller; left, by Debbie Hill/Sipa Press; right, by Issam Rimawi/ApaImages/Polaris; background by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters/Corbis.
<!-- end article photo --> The Gaza Bombshell
After failing to anticipate Hamas?s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
Bush and Rice wanted Hamas in power ....
I notice Reaminator "I want to grow up to be like Glenn Beck" never mentions the history of that relationship
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, whose secret Palestinian intervention backfired in a big way. Photo illustration by Chris Mueller; left, by Debbie Hill/Sipa Press; right, by Issam Rimawi/ApaImages/Polaris; background by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters/Corbis.
<!-- end article photo --> The Gaza Bombshell
After failing to anticipate Hamas?s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
reanimator
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Every time L&B gets wounded here, he pulls out some old item and rants about it. If he could only debate what he started then he wouldn't have to run and hide so often.
I can only imagine how he hurt for 8 straight years. Even now, with a loon coming in as president, conservatives care very little and don't get worked up about it. We simply wait for the half-breed to cut his own throat!
Every time L&B gets wounded here, he pulls out some old item and rants about it. If he could only debate what he started then he wouldn't have to run and hide so often.
I can only imagine how he hurt for 8 straight years. Even now, with a loon coming in as president, conservatives care very little and don't get worked up about it. We simply wait for the half-breed to cut his own throat!
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Is that right?
That is FACTS and the HISTORY of this relationship ....
You seem to be the one whose discussion of "facts" starts and ends with the
4th Reich talking pts such as "Bush freed the Iraqis"
I suggest maybe the Hannity forum for you as they are in need of some new recruits after the ASS WHIPPING that the "Party of No Morals" took in November ...
Is that right?
That is FACTS and the HISTORY of this relationship ....
You seem to be the one whose discussion of "facts" starts and ends with the
4th Reich talking pts such as "Bush freed the Iraqis"
I suggest maybe the Hannity forum for you as they are in need of some new recruits after the ASS WHIPPING that the "Party of No Morals" took in November ...
reanimator
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
If you're so incapable of debating the issues then I see why you can't stand Hannity or Rush. They'd tear you to pieces knowing how I'm ripping your false heart out whenever I choose. :LMAO
If you're so incapable of debating the issues then I see why you can't stand Hannity or Rush. They'd tear you to pieces knowing how I'm ripping your false heart out whenever I choose. :LMAO
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
"Rush" couldn't handle Joe the Plumber and Hannity hates anyone who is not dumb enough to buy copies of "The 4th Reich: America Under Bush 43"
Maddow would carve Mr Viagara and the "Freedom Tour" scammer Hannity
to shreds as Rachel has one thing going for her:
She deals with facts and is as Professional as it gets on interviews
"Rush" couldn't handle Joe the Plumber and Hannity hates anyone who is not dumb enough to buy copies of "The 4th Reich: America Under Bush 43"
Maddow would carve Mr Viagara and the "Freedom Tour" scammer Hannity
to shreds as Rachel has one thing going for her:
She deals with facts and is as Professional as it gets on interviews
IDENTITY
2
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
This is not a conservative versus liberal issue.
It's a factual issue.
Hamas is supported by terrorists who achieve their political goals by shooting rockets at innocent civilians.
Israel is responding after 8 years and 12,000 rockets.
Hamas hides behind men and children. They get killed. The blood is on Hamas.
Are Israelis in the South supposed to live in bunkers their whole life? Or are they allowed to live in peace?
This is not a conservative versus liberal issue.
It's a factual issue.
Hamas is supported by terrorists who achieve their political goals by shooting rockets at innocent civilians.
Israel is responding after 8 years and 12,000 rockets.
Hamas hides behind men and children. They get killed. The blood is on Hamas.
Are Israelis in the South supposed to live in bunkers their whole life? Or are they allowed to live in peace?
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Peace?
Will never happen and I am suprised Iran / Hebzollah has never blown up the
Temple Mount to "heat things up" and ignite the entire world against Israel
Israel is in a no win situation ... the size of Joisey and surrounded by 21 countries that want complete elimination
If we get to 2012 without nukes flying it will defy all Logic
Peace?
Will never happen and I am suprised Iran / Hebzollah has never blown up the
Temple Mount to "heat things up" and ignite the entire world against Israel
Israel is in a no win situation ... the size of Joisey and surrounded by 21 countries that want complete elimination
If we get to 2012 without nukes flying it will defy all Logic
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Is Israeli Policy Crazy?
by Ivan Eland
The "Israeli model" has long been held up by hawks in the United States as the gold standard for dealing with adversarial nation-states, guerrillas, and terrorists. The storyline goes that Israel is a small country surrounded by aggressive enemies that use unfair measures (including terrorism) to try to wipe it off the face of the map. Therefore, the thinking in Israel is that to survive, the Israelis must use disproportionate tactics to show how tough they are to instill fear in their vicious enemies. This paradigm, practiced by Israel since its inception in 1948, has been tactically sound and strategically disastrous.
It is a myth that throughout its history Israel has been outgunned by the Arabs. During and since the war over its creation in 1948, the Israelis have always had superior military power, resources, and training compared to the Arab states. As a result, oftentimes, Israel has been able to successfully deliver overwhelming and disproportionate blows to its enemies. Despite this tactical strength, Israel's enemies just seem to keep coming back and getting angrier. In other words, overwhelming tactical military victories don't deal with the social and political causes of the intense hate that Israel engenders. Because these root causes remain, Israel will continue to need to take draconian measures to ensure its security – for example, conducting the current heavy military attacks on Gaza.
Israel doesn't seem to get that superior power doesn't buy security as long as the adversary's grievance lingers. The enemy just gets more desperate and resorts to terrorism – either the suicide bombing of civilians or the firing of inaccurate rockets into Israeli towns from outside. Enlightened opinion in Israel should see the strategic idiocy in decades of living as a powerful armed camp and using a dominant military to either tactically defeat your enemies or quarantine them into giant pens – the West Bank and Gaza – and suppress them. If Israel would settle this 60-year state of war with its neighbors by giving up control over land that was taken by force from the Arabs in 1967, the Arabs and Israelis could grow rich together by conducting cross-border trade and investment and luring lucrative foreign investment from outside the region.
Of course, it is easy for observers outside the region to see how such a settlement of the Palestine problem could be reached on paper; it is much harder to overcome the decades of hatred to actually implement it. And Israel has no incentive to give up control over the land because it has overwhelming tactical military superiority and the support of a superpower. Yet Israel needs to put aside hatred of Arabs and solve the underlying grievance or violence will continue even if Israel launches a ground invasion of Gaza to take out Hamas.
Military attacks by Israel may cripple its enemies in a tactical military sense, but they only strengthen the Arab hatred and will for revenge. Ironically, Israel's current onslaught on Gaza, coming before the Israeli elections, aims to demonstrate to the Arabs that Israel is still tough subsequent to its last military debacle against the group Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. In that campaign, the Israelis used Hezbollah's rocket attack on northern Israel and the kidnapping and killing of a few Israeli soldiers as an excuse to pummel the entire country of Lebanon with air attacks and conduct a limited ground invasion. Hezbollah's military capabilities were significantly reduced, but its stature and political strength were increased by doing better than expected against the vaunted Israeli military. In the Arab world, you don't have to win, but just do better than expected.
This wasn't the first time that Israeli military action had had a counterproductive effect. In 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon to wipe out PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) infrastructure in that country. The Israelis sent the PLO packing, but the continuing Arab grievance then took a more sinister form in the creation of the Islamist group Hezbollah. Hezbollah burnished its resistance credentials by eventually kicking Israel out of Lebanon in 2000.
After the disastrous wars on Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, in which Israel won militarily but ultimately lost politically, one would think Israel would have avoided yet another disastrous disproportionate military response in response to Hamas's rocket attacks on southern Israel. But no such luck. If the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result, Israel's policy has to be deemed "crazy."
Even the best outcome for Israel is grim. If the Israeli military invades Gaza on the ground to wipe out Hamas and its military infrastructure and Egypt does not allow Hamas fighters to escape to its territory, the Arab grievance will likely merely morph into a more angry and virulent form after the almost certain eventual Israeli withdrawal. Alternatively, if Hamas is not completely wiped out – either because some fighters successfully melt back into Gaza's population or because Israel merely threatens a ground invasion but doesn't follow through – Hamas's stature will grow in Gaza and the Arab world for successfully withstanding the Israeli goliath – as Hezbollah's did after the Israeli onslaught against and withdrawal from Lebanon in 2006.
Instead of making peace with the Palestinians and Syrians by eliminating the underlying grievance and giving back their land, or at least answering minor provocations with limited tit-for-tat responses, Israel will likely continue flailing disproportionately against its enemies. This Israeli government policy will make the long-term security situation worse for the Israeli people – with the United States subsidizing and giving the green light to such irresponsible behavior. Same stuff, different year.
http://www.antiwar. com/eland/ ?articleid= 13992
Is Israeli Policy Crazy?
by Ivan Eland
The "Israeli model" has long been held up by hawks in the United States as the gold standard for dealing with adversarial nation-states, guerrillas, and terrorists. The storyline goes that Israel is a small country surrounded by aggressive enemies that use unfair measures (including terrorism) to try to wipe it off the face of the map. Therefore, the thinking in Israel is that to survive, the Israelis must use disproportionate tactics to show how tough they are to instill fear in their vicious enemies. This paradigm, practiced by Israel since its inception in 1948, has been tactically sound and strategically disastrous.
It is a myth that throughout its history Israel has been outgunned by the Arabs. During and since the war over its creation in 1948, the Israelis have always had superior military power, resources, and training compared to the Arab states. As a result, oftentimes, Israel has been able to successfully deliver overwhelming and disproportionate blows to its enemies. Despite this tactical strength, Israel's enemies just seem to keep coming back and getting angrier. In other words, overwhelming tactical military victories don't deal with the social and political causes of the intense hate that Israel engenders. Because these root causes remain, Israel will continue to need to take draconian measures to ensure its security – for example, conducting the current heavy military attacks on Gaza.
Israel doesn't seem to get that superior power doesn't buy security as long as the adversary's grievance lingers. The enemy just gets more desperate and resorts to terrorism – either the suicide bombing of civilians or the firing of inaccurate rockets into Israeli towns from outside. Enlightened opinion in Israel should see the strategic idiocy in decades of living as a powerful armed camp and using a dominant military to either tactically defeat your enemies or quarantine them into giant pens – the West Bank and Gaza – and suppress them. If Israel would settle this 60-year state of war with its neighbors by giving up control over land that was taken by force from the Arabs in 1967, the Arabs and Israelis could grow rich together by conducting cross-border trade and investment and luring lucrative foreign investment from outside the region.
Of course, it is easy for observers outside the region to see how such a settlement of the Palestine problem could be reached on paper; it is much harder to overcome the decades of hatred to actually implement it. And Israel has no incentive to give up control over the land because it has overwhelming tactical military superiority and the support of a superpower. Yet Israel needs to put aside hatred of Arabs and solve the underlying grievance or violence will continue even if Israel launches a ground invasion of Gaza to take out Hamas.
Military attacks by Israel may cripple its enemies in a tactical military sense, but they only strengthen the Arab hatred and will for revenge. Ironically, Israel's current onslaught on Gaza, coming before the Israeli elections, aims to demonstrate to the Arabs that Israel is still tough subsequent to its last military debacle against the group Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. In that campaign, the Israelis used Hezbollah's rocket attack on northern Israel and the kidnapping and killing of a few Israeli soldiers as an excuse to pummel the entire country of Lebanon with air attacks and conduct a limited ground invasion. Hezbollah's military capabilities were significantly reduced, but its stature and political strength were increased by doing better than expected against the vaunted Israeli military. In the Arab world, you don't have to win, but just do better than expected.
This wasn't the first time that Israeli military action had had a counterproductive effect. In 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon to wipe out PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) infrastructure in that country. The Israelis sent the PLO packing, but the continuing Arab grievance then took a more sinister form in the creation of the Islamist group Hezbollah. Hezbollah burnished its resistance credentials by eventually kicking Israel out of Lebanon in 2000.
After the disastrous wars on Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, in which Israel won militarily but ultimately lost politically, one would think Israel would have avoided yet another disastrous disproportionate military response in response to Hamas's rocket attacks on southern Israel. But no such luck. If the definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result, Israel's policy has to be deemed "crazy."
Even the best outcome for Israel is grim. If the Israeli military invades Gaza on the ground to wipe out Hamas and its military infrastructure and Egypt does not allow Hamas fighters to escape to its territory, the Arab grievance will likely merely morph into a more angry and virulent form after the almost certain eventual Israeli withdrawal. Alternatively, if Hamas is not completely wiped out – either because some fighters successfully melt back into Gaza's population or because Israel merely threatens a ground invasion but doesn't follow through – Hamas's stature will grow in Gaza and the Arab world for successfully withstanding the Israeli goliath – as Hezbollah's did after the Israeli onslaught against and withdrawal from Lebanon in 2006.
Instead of making peace with the Palestinians and Syrians by eliminating the underlying grievance and giving back their land, or at least answering minor provocations with limited tit-for-tat responses, Israel will likely continue flailing disproportionately against its enemies. This Israeli government policy will make the long-term security situation worse for the Israeli people – with the United States subsidizing and giving the green light to such irresponsible behavior. Same stuff, different year.
http://www.antiwar. com/eland/ ?articleid= 13992
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Cheney: Israel not seek US OK before invasion
By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer Ben Feller, Associated Press Writer
33 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that Israel did not seek U.S. approval before a ground invasion against Hamas, the bloodiest Mideast clash in years now escalating into urban warfare.
From the White House to Capitol Hill, U.S. officials remained firmly behind Israel. They urged a cease-fire, but put the onus on Hamas, as Israeli troops and tanks cut through the coastal Gaza strip. U.S. lawmakers defended Israel's ground incursion as a justifiable response to Hamas rocket fire on Israel.
Cheney said Israel "didn't seek clearance or approval from us, certainly" before thousands of soldiers pushed into Gaza after nightfall on Saturday.
He did not directly answer whether Israel informed its powerful ally, the U.S., of its plans before launching them. But the ground offensive, which followed a week of punishing aerial raids on Hamas, had been expected as Israeli forces mounted near the border.
"They have said, now, for a period of months — they told me on my last trip over there — that they didn't want to have to act, where Gaza was concerned," Cheney said. "They had gotten out of there three years ago. But if the rocketing didn't stop, they felt they had no choice but to take action. And if they did, they would be very aggressive, in terms of trying to take down Hamas. And that's exactly what's happened."
U.S. leaders have carefully noted the consequences of a new war, including a worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the death of civilians there. But they point blame one-sidedly on Hamas, which has called for the destruction of Israel and is deemed by the U.S. government to be a terrorist organization.
Sens. Harry Reid and Dick Durbin — the top two Democrats in the chamber — and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell all described Israel's actions as understandable. "I think what the Israelis are doing is very important," Reid said. "I think this terrorist organization, Hamas, has got to be put away. They've got to come to their senses."
Said McConnell: "Hamas is a terrorist organization. Imagine in this country (the U.S.) if somebody from a neighboring country were lobbing shells at our population. We'd do exactly the same thing. I think the Israelis are doing the only thing they can possibly do to defend their population."
Hamas-run Gaza has been largely isolated from the rest of the world since the Islamic militants won parliamentary elections in 2006. Then Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, expelling forces loyal to the moderate Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, who oversees the West Bank.
A senior U.S. defense official said on the day of the invasion that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was informed in general terms of the ground incursion and its objectives through normal Israeli defense channels. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was referring to confidential U.S.-Israeli contacts Saturday.
The ground invasion and live images of the fighting in Gaza drew international condemnations and dominated news coverage on Arab satellite TV stations, many of which aired footage of wounded Palestinians at hospitals. Hamas threatened to turn Gaza into an Israeli "graveyard."
The new fighting brought the death toll in the Gaza Strip to more than 500 since Dec. 27, according to Palestinian health officials and U.N. officials, who say at least 100 civilians are among the dead.
Cheney spoke on CBS' "Face the Nation," while Reid was on NBC's "Meet the Press" and McConnell on "This Week" on ABC.
http://news. yahoo.com/ s/ap/20090104/ ap_on_go_ pr_wh/us_ mideast/print
Cheney: Israel not seek US OK before invasion
By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer Ben Feller, Associated Press Writer
33 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that Israel did not seek U.S. approval before a ground invasion against Hamas, the bloodiest Mideast clash in years now escalating into urban warfare.
From the White House to Capitol Hill, U.S. officials remained firmly behind Israel. They urged a cease-fire, but put the onus on Hamas, as Israeli troops and tanks cut through the coastal Gaza strip. U.S. lawmakers defended Israel's ground incursion as a justifiable response to Hamas rocket fire on Israel.
Cheney said Israel "didn't seek clearance or approval from us, certainly" before thousands of soldiers pushed into Gaza after nightfall on Saturday.
He did not directly answer whether Israel informed its powerful ally, the U.S., of its plans before launching them. But the ground offensive, which followed a week of punishing aerial raids on Hamas, had been expected as Israeli forces mounted near the border.
"They have said, now, for a period of months — they told me on my last trip over there — that they didn't want to have to act, where Gaza was concerned," Cheney said. "They had gotten out of there three years ago. But if the rocketing didn't stop, they felt they had no choice but to take action. And if they did, they would be very aggressive, in terms of trying to take down Hamas. And that's exactly what's happened."
U.S. leaders have carefully noted the consequences of a new war, including a worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the death of civilians there. But they point blame one-sidedly on Hamas, which has called for the destruction of Israel and is deemed by the U.S. government to be a terrorist organization.
Sens. Harry Reid and Dick Durbin — the top two Democrats in the chamber — and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell all described Israel's actions as understandable. "I think what the Israelis are doing is very important," Reid said. "I think this terrorist organization, Hamas, has got to be put away. They've got to come to their senses."
Said McConnell: "Hamas is a terrorist organization. Imagine in this country (the U.S.) if somebody from a neighboring country were lobbing shells at our population. We'd do exactly the same thing. I think the Israelis are doing the only thing they can possibly do to defend their population."
Hamas-run Gaza has been largely isolated from the rest of the world since the Islamic militants won parliamentary elections in 2006. Then Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, expelling forces loyal to the moderate Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, who oversees the West Bank.
A senior U.S. defense official said on the day of the invasion that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was informed in general terms of the ground incursion and its objectives through normal Israeli defense channels. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was referring to confidential U.S.-Israeli contacts Saturday.
The ground invasion and live images of the fighting in Gaza drew international condemnations and dominated news coverage on Arab satellite TV stations, many of which aired footage of wounded Palestinians at hospitals. Hamas threatened to turn Gaza into an Israeli "graveyard."
The new fighting brought the death toll in the Gaza Strip to more than 500 since Dec. 27, according to Palestinian health officials and U.N. officials, who say at least 100 civilians are among the dead.
Cheney spoke on CBS' "Face the Nation," while Reid was on NBC's "Meet the Press" and McConnell on "This Week" on ABC.
http://news. yahoo.com/ s/ap/20090104/ ap_on_go_ pr_wh/us_ mideast/print
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
"Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
"Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared."
July 25, 2008
Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?
by Paul Craig Roberts
"On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs."
- Martin Gilbert, Israel: A HistoryI had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.
Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: "I am a Zionist." Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.
Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.
Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.
Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer' s recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel's opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: "The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality."
Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.
In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.
The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as "visitors in their own city."
On December 10, 2007, MK Ephraim Sneh boasted in the Jerusalem Post that Israel had achieved " a true Zionist victory" over the UN partition plan "which sought to establish two nations in the land of Israel." The partition plan had assigned Israel 56 percent of Palestine, leaving the inhabitants with only 44 percent. But Israel had altered this over time. Sneh proudly declared: "When we complete the permanent agreement, we will hold 78 percent of the land while the Palestinians will control 22 percent."
Sneb could have added that the 22 percent is essentially a collection of unconnected ghettos cut off from one another and from roads, water, medical care, and jobs.
Rev. Are documents that the abuse of Palestinians' human rights is official Israeli policy. Killings, torture, and beatings are routine. On May 17, 1990, the Washington Post reported that Save the Children "documented indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting of children at home or just outside the house playing in the street, who were sitting in the classroom or going to the store for groceries."
On January 19, 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister, announced the policy of "punitive beating" of Palestinians. The Israelis described the purpose of punitive beating: "Our task is to recreate a barrier and once again put the fear of death into the Arabs of the area."
According to Save the Children, beatings of children and women are common. Rev. Are, citing the report in the Washington Post, writes: "Save the Children concluded that one-third of beaten children were under ten years old, and one-fifth under the age of five. Nearly a third of the children beaten suffered broken bones."
On February 8, 1988, Newsweek magazine quoted an Israeli soldier: "We got orders to knock on every door, enter and take out all the males. The younger ones we lined up with their faces against the wall, and soldiers beat them with billy clubs. This was no private initiative, these were orders from our company commander... . After one soldier finished beating a detainee, another soldier called him 'you Nazi,' and the first man shot back: 'You bleeding heart.' When one soldier tried to stop another from beating an Arab for no reason, a fist fight broke out."
These were the old days before conscience was eliminated from the ranks of the Israeli military.
In the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977, Ralph Schoenman, executive director of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, wrote: "Israeli interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Arab prisoners. Prisoners are hooded or blindfolded and are hung by their wrists for long periods. Most are struck in the genitals or in other ways sexually abused. Most are sexually assaulted. Others are administered electric shock."
Amnesty International concluded that "there is no country in the world in which the use of official and sustained torture is as well established and documented as in the case of Israel."
Even the pro-Israeli Washington Post reported: "Upon arrest, a detainee undergoes a period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by organized methods and prolonged periods during which the prisoner is made to stand with his hands cuffed and raised, a filthy sack covering the head. Prisoners are dragged on the ground, beaten with objects, kicked, stripped and placed under ice-cold showers."
Sounds like Abu Gharib. There are news reports that Israeli torture experts participated in the torture of the detainees assembled by the American military as part of the Bush Regime's propaganda onslaught to convince Americans that Iraq was overflowing with al-Qaeda terrorists. On July 23, 2008, Antiwar.com posted an Iraqi news report that the Iraqi government had released a total of 109,087 Iraqis that the Americans had "detained." Obviously, these "terrorist detainees" had been used for the needs of Bush Regime propaganda. No one will ever know how many of them were abused by Israeli torturers imported by the CIA.
Rev. Are's book makes sensible suggestions for resolving the conflict that Israel began. However, the problem is that Israeli governments believe only in force. The policy of the Israeli government has always been to beat, kill, and brutalize Palestinians into submission and flight. Anyone who doubts this can read the book of Israel's finest historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
Americans are a gullible and naive people. They have been complicit for 60 years in crimes that in Arnold Toynbee's words "are comparable in quality" to the crimes of Nazi Germany. As Toynbee was writing decades ago, the accumulated Israeli crimes might now be comparable also in quantity.
The US routinely vetoes United Nations condemnations of Israel for its brutal crimes against the Palestinians. Insouciant American taxpayers have been bled for a half century to provide the Israelis with superior military weapons with which Israelis assault their neighbors, all the while convincing America – essentially a captive nation – that Israel is the victim.
John F. Mahoney wrote: "Thomas Are reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: an active pastor who comes to the unsettling realization that he and his people have been fed a terrible lie that is killing and torturing thousands of innocent men, women and children. Not without ample research and prayer does such a pastor, in turn, risk unsettling his congregation. The Reverend Are has done his homework and, I suspect, has prayed often and long during the writing of this courageous book."
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was executed for his active participation in the German Resistance against Nazism.
Professor Benjamin M. Weir, San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote: "This book will make the reader squirm. It asks you to lend your voice in behalf of the voiceless."
Americans who can no longer think for themselves and who are terrified of disapproval by their peer group are incapable of lending their voices to anyone except those who control the world of propaganda in which they live.
The ignorance and unconcern of Americans is a great frustration to my friends in the Israeli peace movement. Without outside support those Israelis who believe in good will are deprived, by America's support for their government's policy of violence, of any peaceful resolution of a conflict began in 1947 by Israeli aggression against unsuspecting Palestinian villages.
Rev. Are wrote his book with the hope that the pen is mightier than the sword and that facts can crowd out propaganda and create a framework for a just resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his concluding chapter, "What Christians Can Do," Rev. Are writes: "We cannot allow others to dictate our thinking on any subject, especially on anything as important as Christian faithfulness, which is tested by an attitude towards seeking justice for the oppressed. It's a Christian's duty to know."
Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: "Speak up for the Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge."
More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of Israel, tried again to awaken Americans' moral conscience with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.
Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for all concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate all support for Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do Israel's bidding, and the media and evangelical "Christian" churches have been preparing the American people for the event.
It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not in the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin's doctrine that violence is the effective force in history and that the evangelical Christian Zionist churches agree.
http://www.antiwar. com/roberts/ ?articleid= 13193
"Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
"Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared."
July 25, 2008
Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?
by Paul Craig Roberts
"On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs."
- Martin Gilbert, Israel: A HistoryI had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.
Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: "I am a Zionist." Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.
Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.
Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.
Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer' s recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel's opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: "The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality."
Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.
In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.
The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as "visitors in their own city."
On December 10, 2007, MK Ephraim Sneh boasted in the Jerusalem Post that Israel had achieved " a true Zionist victory" over the UN partition plan "which sought to establish two nations in the land of Israel." The partition plan had assigned Israel 56 percent of Palestine, leaving the inhabitants with only 44 percent. But Israel had altered this over time. Sneh proudly declared: "When we complete the permanent agreement, we will hold 78 percent of the land while the Palestinians will control 22 percent."
Sneb could have added that the 22 percent is essentially a collection of unconnected ghettos cut off from one another and from roads, water, medical care, and jobs.
Rev. Are documents that the abuse of Palestinians' human rights is official Israeli policy. Killings, torture, and beatings are routine. On May 17, 1990, the Washington Post reported that Save the Children "documented indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting of children at home or just outside the house playing in the street, who were sitting in the classroom or going to the store for groceries."
On January 19, 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister, announced the policy of "punitive beating" of Palestinians. The Israelis described the purpose of punitive beating: "Our task is to recreate a barrier and once again put the fear of death into the Arabs of the area."
According to Save the Children, beatings of children and women are common. Rev. Are, citing the report in the Washington Post, writes: "Save the Children concluded that one-third of beaten children were under ten years old, and one-fifth under the age of five. Nearly a third of the children beaten suffered broken bones."
On February 8, 1988, Newsweek magazine quoted an Israeli soldier: "We got orders to knock on every door, enter and take out all the males. The younger ones we lined up with their faces against the wall, and soldiers beat them with billy clubs. This was no private initiative, these were orders from our company commander... . After one soldier finished beating a detainee, another soldier called him 'you Nazi,' and the first man shot back: 'You bleeding heart.' When one soldier tried to stop another from beating an Arab for no reason, a fist fight broke out."
These were the old days before conscience was eliminated from the ranks of the Israeli military.
In the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977, Ralph Schoenman, executive director of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, wrote: "Israeli interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Arab prisoners. Prisoners are hooded or blindfolded and are hung by their wrists for long periods. Most are struck in the genitals or in other ways sexually abused. Most are sexually assaulted. Others are administered electric shock."
Amnesty International concluded that "there is no country in the world in which the use of official and sustained torture is as well established and documented as in the case of Israel."
Even the pro-Israeli Washington Post reported: "Upon arrest, a detainee undergoes a period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by organized methods and prolonged periods during which the prisoner is made to stand with his hands cuffed and raised, a filthy sack covering the head. Prisoners are dragged on the ground, beaten with objects, kicked, stripped and placed under ice-cold showers."
Sounds like Abu Gharib. There are news reports that Israeli torture experts participated in the torture of the detainees assembled by the American military as part of the Bush Regime's propaganda onslaught to convince Americans that Iraq was overflowing with al-Qaeda terrorists. On July 23, 2008, Antiwar.com posted an Iraqi news report that the Iraqi government had released a total of 109,087 Iraqis that the Americans had "detained." Obviously, these "terrorist detainees" had been used for the needs of Bush Regime propaganda. No one will ever know how many of them were abused by Israeli torturers imported by the CIA.
Rev. Are's book makes sensible suggestions for resolving the conflict that Israel began. However, the problem is that Israeli governments believe only in force. The policy of the Israeli government has always been to beat, kill, and brutalize Palestinians into submission and flight. Anyone who doubts this can read the book of Israel's finest historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
Americans are a gullible and naive people. They have been complicit for 60 years in crimes that in Arnold Toynbee's words "are comparable in quality" to the crimes of Nazi Germany. As Toynbee was writing decades ago, the accumulated Israeli crimes might now be comparable also in quantity.
The US routinely vetoes United Nations condemnations of Israel for its brutal crimes against the Palestinians. Insouciant American taxpayers have been bled for a half century to provide the Israelis with superior military weapons with which Israelis assault their neighbors, all the while convincing America – essentially a captive nation – that Israel is the victim.
John F. Mahoney wrote: "Thomas Are reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: an active pastor who comes to the unsettling realization that he and his people have been fed a terrible lie that is killing and torturing thousands of innocent men, women and children. Not without ample research and prayer does such a pastor, in turn, risk unsettling his congregation. The Reverend Are has done his homework and, I suspect, has prayed often and long during the writing of this courageous book."
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was executed for his active participation in the German Resistance against Nazism.
Professor Benjamin M. Weir, San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote: "This book will make the reader squirm. It asks you to lend your voice in behalf of the voiceless."
Americans who can no longer think for themselves and who are terrified of disapproval by their peer group are incapable of lending their voices to anyone except those who control the world of propaganda in which they live.
The ignorance and unconcern of Americans is a great frustration to my friends in the Israeli peace movement. Without outside support those Israelis who believe in good will are deprived, by America's support for their government's policy of violence, of any peaceful resolution of a conflict began in 1947 by Israeli aggression against unsuspecting Palestinian villages.
Rev. Are wrote his book with the hope that the pen is mightier than the sword and that facts can crowd out propaganda and create a framework for a just resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his concluding chapter, "What Christians Can Do," Rev. Are writes: "We cannot allow others to dictate our thinking on any subject, especially on anything as important as Christian faithfulness, which is tested by an attitude towards seeking justice for the oppressed. It's a Christian's duty to know."
Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: "Speak up for the Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge."
More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of Israel, tried again to awaken Americans' moral conscience with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.
Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for all concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate all support for Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do Israel's bidding, and the media and evangelical "Christian" churches have been preparing the American people for the event.
It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not in the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin's doctrine that violence is the effective force in history and that the evangelical Christian Zionist churches agree.
http://www.antiwar. com/roberts/ ?articleid= 13193
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
The Rest of the World Sees It ...
Posted by Christopher Manion at 02:22 PM
Why can't we?
And Craig Roberts fills in the blanks on what we are not allowed to hear.
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times]LEAKED: graphic, uncensored video shows carnage in Gaza
[/FONT]RAW STORY
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times]Published: Sunday January 4, 2009
[/FONT]The following video contains material of a violent, graphic nature. Viewer discretion is advised.
As Israel's IDF wages it's own "media war" via Twitter and YouTube, uncensored footage from Palestine has been completely blacked out in the US.
Until now.
Saturday, before Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Gaza, a Palestinian with a camera witnessed a devastating bombing. His video shows the brutal, bloody results of an air strike on what appears to be a civilian area.
In the footage, scores of bodies -- men, women and children -- lay strewn about a Gaza market as abject chaos spirals around them. Some struggle to their feet, covered in concrete powder and blood, as others assess their injuries or join the effort to carry away wounded.
Within moments, men in camouflage holding automatic weapons and RPGs assert a growing number among the citizenry. The men, presumably affiliated with Hamas, appear to be helping with crowd control and medical response.
Details on the cameraman's identity were not forthcoming. Likewise, no casualty count for this particular attack is available.
"One Israeli soldier was killed and 32 wounded in the ground offensive, Israel said," reported Reuters on Sunday. "Four Israelis have been killed by the Hamas rocket strikes since December 27.
"Israeli officials said the offensive, whose stated aim is to wreck the militants' rocket-launching infrastructure, could last many days."
This video was first published by exiled Palestinian blogger Haitham Sabbah, on Jan 3, 2009.
http://rawstory. com/news/ 2008/Leaked_ graphic_video_ shows_carnage_ in_0104.html
May We No Longer Be Silent
Paul Craig Roberts
The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., John Bryson Chane, delivered on Oct. 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church.
The bishop's eyes were opened to Israel's persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon, he called on "politicians seeking the highest office in (our) land" to find the courage to "speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims" by the state of Israel.
Chane's courage was to no avail. As Justin Raimondo reported on Antiwar.com on Dec. 27, when America's new leader of "change" was informed of Israel's massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources * food, medicine, water and energy * America's president-elect Obama had "no comment."
According to the Dec. 26 Jerusalem Post, "At 11:30 a.m., more than 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters swept into Gazan airspace and dropped more than 100 bombs on 50 targets. ... Thirty minutes later, a second wave of 60 jets and helicopters struck at 60 targets. ... More than 170 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout the day. At least 230 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded ... ."
As I write, news reports are that Israel is sending tanks and infantry reinforcements in preparation for a ground invasion of Gaza.
Israel's excuse for its violence is that from time to time the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas fires off rockets into Israel to protest the ghetto life that Israel imposes on Gazans. The rockets are ineffectual for the most part and seldom claim Israeli casualties. However, the real purpose for the Israeli attack is to destroy Hamas.
In 2006, the United States insisted that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank hold free elections. When free elections were held, Hamas won. This was unacceptable to the Americans and Israelis. In the West Bank, the Americans and Israelis imposed a puppet government, but Hamas held on in Gaza. After unheeded warnings to the Gazans to rid themselves of Hamas and accept a puppet government, Israel has decided to destroy the freely elected government with violence.
Ehud Barak, who is overseeing the latest act of Israeli aggression, said in interviews addressed to the British and American public that asking Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas would be like asking the United States to agree to a ceasefire with al-Qaida. The terrorism that Israel inflicts on Palestinians goes unremarked.
According to the Dec. 28 London Times: "Britain and the United States were on a collision course with their European allies last night after refusing to call for an end to Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza. The wave of attacks marked a violent end to President George W. Bush's sporadic Middle East peace efforts. The White House put the blame squarely on Hamas." The British government also blamed Hamas.
For the U.S. and British governments, Israel can do no wrong. Israel doesn't have to stop withholding food, medicine, water and energy, but Hamas must stop protesting by firing off rockets. In violation of international law, Israel can drive West Bank Palestinians off their lands and out of their villages and give the stolen properties to "settlers." Israel can delay Palestinians in need of emergency medical care at checkpoints until their lives ebb away. Israeli snipers can get their jollies murdering Palestinian children.
The Great Moral Anglo-Americans couldn't care less.
In his 2005 Nobel Lecture, British playwright Harold Pinter held the United States and its British puppet state accountable for "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought." Everyone knows that such crimes occurred in the Soviet Union and in its East European empire, but "U.S.crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all" * this despite the fact that "the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked."
Soviet crimes, like Nazi ones, are documented in gruesome detail, but America's crimes "never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
America's is "a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think."
Pinter presents a long list of American crimes and comes to Iraq: "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was ... an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading * as a last resort, all other justifications having failed to justify themselves * as liberation."
Americans and their British puppets "have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.'
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" Pinter's question can also be asked of Israel. Israel has been in violation of international law since 1967, protected by the United States' veto of U.N. resolutions condemning Israel for its violent, inhumane, barbaric and illegal acts.
American evangelical Christians, who are degenerating into Zionists, are Israel's greatest allies. Jesus is forsaken, as Christians swallow whole the Israeli lies. A couple of years ago the U.S. Presbyterian Church was so distressed by Israel's immorality toward Palestinians that the church attempted to disinvest its investment portfolio from assets tainted with Israel. But the Israel lobby was stronger. The Presbyterian Church was unable to stand up for Christian principles and knuckled under to the Israel lobby's pressure.
This is hardly surprising considering that the U.S. government doesn't stand for Christian principles either.
America's doctrine of "full spectrum dominance" means that, like Vladimir Lenin's dictatorship, America is not bound by law or morality, but by power alone.
Pinter sums it up in a speech he had dreams of writing for President George W. Bush:
"God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it."
If only our ears could hear, this is the speech we have been hearing from Israel for 60 years.
To find out more about Paul Craig Roberts, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators. com .
http://www.creators .com/opinion/ paul-craig- roberts.html
The Rest of the World Sees It ...
Posted by Christopher Manion at 02:22 PM
Why can't we?
And Craig Roberts fills in the blanks on what we are not allowed to hear.
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times]LEAKED: graphic, uncensored video shows carnage in Gaza
[/FONT]RAW STORY
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times]Published: Sunday January 4, 2009
[/FONT]The following video contains material of a violent, graphic nature. Viewer discretion is advised.
As Israel's IDF wages it's own "media war" via Twitter and YouTube, uncensored footage from Palestine has been completely blacked out in the US.Until now.
Saturday, before Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Gaza, a Palestinian with a camera witnessed a devastating bombing. His video shows the brutal, bloody results of an air strike on what appears to be a civilian area.
In the footage, scores of bodies -- men, women and children -- lay strewn about a Gaza market as abject chaos spirals around them. Some struggle to their feet, covered in concrete powder and blood, as others assess their injuries or join the effort to carry away wounded.
Within moments, men in camouflage holding automatic weapons and RPGs assert a growing number among the citizenry. The men, presumably affiliated with Hamas, appear to be helping with crowd control and medical response.
Details on the cameraman's identity were not forthcoming. Likewise, no casualty count for this particular attack is available.
"One Israeli soldier was killed and 32 wounded in the ground offensive, Israel said," reported Reuters on Sunday. "Four Israelis have been killed by the Hamas rocket strikes since December 27.
"Israeli officials said the offensive, whose stated aim is to wreck the militants' rocket-launching infrastructure, could last many days."
This video was first published by exiled Palestinian blogger Haitham Sabbah, on Jan 3, 2009.
http://rawstory. com/news/ 2008/Leaked_ graphic_video_ shows_carnage_ in_0104.html
May We No Longer Be Silent
Paul Craig Roberts
The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., John Bryson Chane, delivered on Oct. 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church.
The bishop's eyes were opened to Israel's persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon, he called on "politicians seeking the highest office in (our) land" to find the courage to "speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims" by the state of Israel.
Chane's courage was to no avail. As Justin Raimondo reported on Antiwar.com on Dec. 27, when America's new leader of "change" was informed of Israel's massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources * food, medicine, water and energy * America's president-elect Obama had "no comment."
According to the Dec. 26 Jerusalem Post, "At 11:30 a.m., more than 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters swept into Gazan airspace and dropped more than 100 bombs on 50 targets. ... Thirty minutes later, a second wave of 60 jets and helicopters struck at 60 targets. ... More than 170 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout the day. At least 230 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded ... ."
As I write, news reports are that Israel is sending tanks and infantry reinforcements in preparation for a ground invasion of Gaza.
Israel's excuse for its violence is that from time to time the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas fires off rockets into Israel to protest the ghetto life that Israel imposes on Gazans. The rockets are ineffectual for the most part and seldom claim Israeli casualties. However, the real purpose for the Israeli attack is to destroy Hamas.
In 2006, the United States insisted that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank hold free elections. When free elections were held, Hamas won. This was unacceptable to the Americans and Israelis. In the West Bank, the Americans and Israelis imposed a puppet government, but Hamas held on in Gaza. After unheeded warnings to the Gazans to rid themselves of Hamas and accept a puppet government, Israel has decided to destroy the freely elected government with violence.
Ehud Barak, who is overseeing the latest act of Israeli aggression, said in interviews addressed to the British and American public that asking Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas would be like asking the United States to agree to a ceasefire with al-Qaida. The terrorism that Israel inflicts on Palestinians goes unremarked.
According to the Dec. 28 London Times: "Britain and the United States were on a collision course with their European allies last night after refusing to call for an end to Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza. The wave of attacks marked a violent end to President George W. Bush's sporadic Middle East peace efforts. The White House put the blame squarely on Hamas." The British government also blamed Hamas.
For the U.S. and British governments, Israel can do no wrong. Israel doesn't have to stop withholding food, medicine, water and energy, but Hamas must stop protesting by firing off rockets. In violation of international law, Israel can drive West Bank Palestinians off their lands and out of their villages and give the stolen properties to "settlers." Israel can delay Palestinians in need of emergency medical care at checkpoints until their lives ebb away. Israeli snipers can get their jollies murdering Palestinian children.
The Great Moral Anglo-Americans couldn't care less.
In his 2005 Nobel Lecture, British playwright Harold Pinter held the United States and its British puppet state accountable for "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought." Everyone knows that such crimes occurred in the Soviet Union and in its East European empire, but "U.S.crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all" * this despite the fact that "the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked."
Soviet crimes, like Nazi ones, are documented in gruesome detail, but America's crimes "never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
America's is "a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think."
Pinter presents a long list of American crimes and comes to Iraq: "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was ... an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading * as a last resort, all other justifications having failed to justify themselves * as liberation."
Americans and their British puppets "have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.'
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" Pinter's question can also be asked of Israel. Israel has been in violation of international law since 1967, protected by the United States' veto of U.N. resolutions condemning Israel for its violent, inhumane, barbaric and illegal acts.
American evangelical Christians, who are degenerating into Zionists, are Israel's greatest allies. Jesus is forsaken, as Christians swallow whole the Israeli lies. A couple of years ago the U.S. Presbyterian Church was so distressed by Israel's immorality toward Palestinians that the church attempted to disinvest its investment portfolio from assets tainted with Israel. But the Israel lobby was stronger. The Presbyterian Church was unable to stand up for Christian principles and knuckled under to the Israel lobby's pressure.
This is hardly surprising considering that the U.S. government doesn't stand for Christian principles either.
America's doctrine of "full spectrum dominance" means that, like Vladimir Lenin's dictatorship, America is not bound by law or morality, but by power alone.
Pinter sums it up in a speech he had dreams of writing for President George W. Bush:
"God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it."
If only our ears could hear, this is the speech we have been hearing from Israel for 60 years.
To find out more about Paul Craig Roberts, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators. com .
http://www.creators .com/opinion/ paul-craig- roberts.html
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Israel: Mythologizing a 20th Century Accident
by Gabriel Kolko
One of the many quirks of the nineteenth century's intellectual heritage was the great intensification of nationalism and – to quote one expert – the creation of "nation-ness," the consequences of which have varied dramatically all the way from the negligible to the crucial (as in the case of Israel) to war and peace in a vast strategic region. There was, of course, often a basis for various nationalisms to build upon, but the essentially artificial function of forming nations from very little or nothing was common.
Wars were the most conducive to this enterprise, and the emergence of what was termed socialism after 1914 – which had a crucial nationalist basis in such places as China and Vietnam – was due to the fact that foreign invasions greatly magnified nationalism' s ability to build on ephemeral foundations to merge socialism and patriotism. For a vital component of nationalism, often its sole one, was a hatred of foreigners – "others" – giving it largely a negative function rather than an assertion of distinctive values and traits essential to a unique entity. Myths, often far-fetched and irrational, were built. Zionism is the focus of this discussion but it was scarcely alone.
Vienna was surely the most intellectually creative place in the world at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century. Economics, art, philosophy, political theories on the Right as well as Left, psychoanalysis – Vienna gave birth or influenced most of them. Ideas had to be very original to be noticed, and most were. We must understand the unique and rare innovative environment in which Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Hungarian Jew who became the founder of Zionism, functioned. For a time he was also a German nationalist and went through phases admiring Richard Wagner and Martin Luther. Herzl was many things, including a very efficient organizer, but he was also very conservative and feared that Jews without a state – especially those in Russia – would become revolutionaries.
A state based on religion rather than the will of all of its inhabitants was at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century not only a medieval notion but also a very eccentric idea, one Herzl concocted in the rarified environment of cafes where ideas were produced with scant regard for reality. It was also full of countless contradictions, based not merely on the conflicts between theological dogmas and democracy but also vast cultural differences among Jews, all of which were to appear later. Europe's Jews have precious little in common, and their mores and languages are very distinct. But the gap between Jews from Europe and those from the Arab world was far, far greater. Moreover, there were many radically different kinds of Zionism within a small movement, ranging from the religiously motivated to Marxists who wanted to cease being Jews altogether and, as Ber Borochov would have it, become "normal." In the end, all that was to unite Israel was a military ethic premised on a hatred of those "others" around them – and it was to become a warrior-state, a virtual Sparta dominated by its army. Initially, at least, Herzl had the fate of Russian and East European Jews in mind; the outcome was very different.
Zionism was original but at the turn of the century its following was close to non-existent. An important exception was the interest of Lord Rothschild. Moreover, from its inception Zionism was symbiotic on Great Powers – principally Great Britain – that saw it as a way of spreading their colonial ambitions to the Middle East. As early as 1902 Herzl met with Joseph Chamberlain, then British Colonial Secretary, to further Zionist claims in the region bordering Egypt, and the following year he hired David Lloyd George – later to become prime minister – to handle the Zionist case. Herzl also unsuccessfully asked the sultan of the Ottoman Empire if he might obtain Palestine, after which he advocated establishing a state in Uganda – although his followers much preferred the Holy Land. Only the principle of a Jewish State, anywhere, appealed to him – but mainly for Jews in the Russian Empire. Herzl was only the first in the Zionist tradition of advocating a state for others; he was never in favor of all Jews moving there. Chaim Weizmann wrote Herzl in 1903 that the large majority of the young Jews in Russia were anti-Zionist because they were revolutionaries – which only reinforced Herzl's convictions. In 1913 British Intelligence estimated that perhaps one percent of the Jews had Zionist affiliations, a figure that rose in the Russian Pale – which contained about six million Jews – as the war became longer.
It was scarcely an accident that in November 1917 Lord Arthur Balfour was to make Britain's historic endorsement of a Jewish homeland in their newly mandated territory of Palestine in a letter to Rothschild. Some of these Englishmen also shared the Biblical view that it was the destiny of Jews to return to their ancient soil. Others thought that this gesture would help keep Russia in the war, and that nefarious Jews had the influence to do so. Most saw a Jewish state as a means of consolidating British power in the vast Islamic region.
Migration has been one of the universal phenomena of world history since time immemorial, and we know a great deal about its causes and motives. People migrate mainly out of necessity, generally economic, and they choose from existing options. They very rarely go someplace for the "blessings of liberty," or ideology; if they do such variable factors as economic deprivation or changes in laws should not exist. But in the case of Palestine and Zionism, Jews behaved like people everywhere and at most times.
It is a Zionist myth that there were many Jews who wished to go to a primitive, hot, dusty place and did so. They did not – and all of the available numbers prove this conclusively. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 the Pale was abolished and a very large number of the Jews in it moved to Russia's cities; many of them saw the Bolsheviks as liberators and filled the ranks of the revolution at every level. If they emigrated, and here the numbers are very important, it was not – if they had a choice – to Palestine.
From 1890 to 1924 about two million of the 20 million immigrants to the United States were Jews – overwhelmingly from East Europe. Other nations in the Western Hemisphere also attracted about a million Jews during this period, to which we must add Jewish migration to South Africa, Australia, West Europe, and the like. This does not mean that Jews were not "Zionists" but they had no intention whatsoever of embarking on Aliyah – of going to Palestine themselves. As Herzl believed, it was a project for others.
Jews in the Diaspora, like most ethnic groups, banded together in numerous organizations and nostalgia – and confusion – soon overwhelmed them. Organized Zionism grew in the U.S. as it had not in East Europe – but it demanded only money, thereby ultimately making Israel viable.
In 1893 there were an estimated 10,000 Jews in Palestine, 61,000 in 1920, and 122,000 in 1925. All of these figures are only the best-informed estimates; there were censuses in 1922 and 1931 only, and even the 1922 numbers are contested. But the general trend is beyond doubt and very clear. For every Jew who went to Palestine from 1890 to 1924, at least 27 went to the Western Hemisphere alone. Relatively, the Zionist project was the utopian dream of a tiny minority and it would have failed save for two factors, the Holocaust and the much-overlooked fact that in 1924 the U.S. passed a new immigration law based on quotas using the nationalities distribution in the 1890 census as a basis, effectively cutting off migration from East and South Europe to a mere trickle of what it had been.
In 1924, Jewish population in Palestine increased 5.9 percent but in 1925 – the first year the American law went into effect – it leaped 28 percent, and 23 percent in 1926. This was still a small minority of the Jews who left Europe but this sudden spurt was directly related to American policy. From 1927 to 1932 it never grew more than 5.3 percent annually and in 1927 it was a mere 0.2%. Very few Jews went to Palestine, and a small proportion of them were ideologically motivated; the vast majority migrated elsewhere.
The British had always been in favor of Jewish migration and after 1933 it grew greatly – Jews were six percent of the Palestinian population in 1912 but 29 percent in 1935 – but now it was increasingly composed of Jews from Germany rather than Poland. These Jews had to get out of Germany, where the Zionist movement had always been very weak, and they were scarcely ideological zealots. Had there been open migration to the U.S. they would have gone there. Arab riots after 1935 compelled the British to reduce the inflow and in 1939 they adopted a White Paper enforcing strict restrictions on immigration.
What is certain is that Hitler's importance must always be set in a larger context. Without him there never would have been a flow of Jews out of Germany, and very probably no state of Israel, but also crucial was the U.S. 1924 Immigration Act. Migrants went to Palestine out of necessity, in the vast majority of cases, not choice. Both of these factors were crucial, and to determine their relative importance is an abstract, futile enterprise. But without either the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine would have remained another exotic Viennese concoction, never to be realized, because while the Jews in the Diaspora were in favor of a Jewish state, virtually none living in safe nations were ever to uproot themselves and embark on Aliyah – the return to the ancient homeland. They had no reason to do so.
There were many promised lands and Herzl's exotic ruminations were scarcely the inspiration for the flow of Jews out of Europe. Israel's existence was an unpredictable accident of history. The past century has been full of them, everywhere. That is why the world is in such a perilous condition.
http://www.antiwar. com/kolko/ ?articleid= 11058
Israel: Mythologizing a 20th Century Accident
by Gabriel Kolko
One of the many quirks of the nineteenth century's intellectual heritage was the great intensification of nationalism and – to quote one expert – the creation of "nation-ness," the consequences of which have varied dramatically all the way from the negligible to the crucial (as in the case of Israel) to war and peace in a vast strategic region. There was, of course, often a basis for various nationalisms to build upon, but the essentially artificial function of forming nations from very little or nothing was common.
Wars were the most conducive to this enterprise, and the emergence of what was termed socialism after 1914 – which had a crucial nationalist basis in such places as China and Vietnam – was due to the fact that foreign invasions greatly magnified nationalism' s ability to build on ephemeral foundations to merge socialism and patriotism. For a vital component of nationalism, often its sole one, was a hatred of foreigners – "others" – giving it largely a negative function rather than an assertion of distinctive values and traits essential to a unique entity. Myths, often far-fetched and irrational, were built. Zionism is the focus of this discussion but it was scarcely alone.
Vienna was surely the most intellectually creative place in the world at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century. Economics, art, philosophy, political theories on the Right as well as Left, psychoanalysis – Vienna gave birth or influenced most of them. Ideas had to be very original to be noticed, and most were. We must understand the unique and rare innovative environment in which Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Hungarian Jew who became the founder of Zionism, functioned. For a time he was also a German nationalist and went through phases admiring Richard Wagner and Martin Luther. Herzl was many things, including a very efficient organizer, but he was also very conservative and feared that Jews without a state – especially those in Russia – would become revolutionaries.
A state based on religion rather than the will of all of its inhabitants was at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century not only a medieval notion but also a very eccentric idea, one Herzl concocted in the rarified environment of cafes where ideas were produced with scant regard for reality. It was also full of countless contradictions, based not merely on the conflicts between theological dogmas and democracy but also vast cultural differences among Jews, all of which were to appear later. Europe's Jews have precious little in common, and their mores and languages are very distinct. But the gap between Jews from Europe and those from the Arab world was far, far greater. Moreover, there were many radically different kinds of Zionism within a small movement, ranging from the religiously motivated to Marxists who wanted to cease being Jews altogether and, as Ber Borochov would have it, become "normal." In the end, all that was to unite Israel was a military ethic premised on a hatred of those "others" around them – and it was to become a warrior-state, a virtual Sparta dominated by its army. Initially, at least, Herzl had the fate of Russian and East European Jews in mind; the outcome was very different.
Zionism was original but at the turn of the century its following was close to non-existent. An important exception was the interest of Lord Rothschild. Moreover, from its inception Zionism was symbiotic on Great Powers – principally Great Britain – that saw it as a way of spreading their colonial ambitions to the Middle East. As early as 1902 Herzl met with Joseph Chamberlain, then British Colonial Secretary, to further Zionist claims in the region bordering Egypt, and the following year he hired David Lloyd George – later to become prime minister – to handle the Zionist case. Herzl also unsuccessfully asked the sultan of the Ottoman Empire if he might obtain Palestine, after which he advocated establishing a state in Uganda – although his followers much preferred the Holy Land. Only the principle of a Jewish State, anywhere, appealed to him – but mainly for Jews in the Russian Empire. Herzl was only the first in the Zionist tradition of advocating a state for others; he was never in favor of all Jews moving there. Chaim Weizmann wrote Herzl in 1903 that the large majority of the young Jews in Russia were anti-Zionist because they were revolutionaries – which only reinforced Herzl's convictions. In 1913 British Intelligence estimated that perhaps one percent of the Jews had Zionist affiliations, a figure that rose in the Russian Pale – which contained about six million Jews – as the war became longer.
It was scarcely an accident that in November 1917 Lord Arthur Balfour was to make Britain's historic endorsement of a Jewish homeland in their newly mandated territory of Palestine in a letter to Rothschild. Some of these Englishmen also shared the Biblical view that it was the destiny of Jews to return to their ancient soil. Others thought that this gesture would help keep Russia in the war, and that nefarious Jews had the influence to do so. Most saw a Jewish state as a means of consolidating British power in the vast Islamic region.
Migration has been one of the universal phenomena of world history since time immemorial, and we know a great deal about its causes and motives. People migrate mainly out of necessity, generally economic, and they choose from existing options. They very rarely go someplace for the "blessings of liberty," or ideology; if they do such variable factors as economic deprivation or changes in laws should not exist. But in the case of Palestine and Zionism, Jews behaved like people everywhere and at most times.
It is a Zionist myth that there were many Jews who wished to go to a primitive, hot, dusty place and did so. They did not – and all of the available numbers prove this conclusively. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 the Pale was abolished and a very large number of the Jews in it moved to Russia's cities; many of them saw the Bolsheviks as liberators and filled the ranks of the revolution at every level. If they emigrated, and here the numbers are very important, it was not – if they had a choice – to Palestine.
From 1890 to 1924 about two million of the 20 million immigrants to the United States were Jews – overwhelmingly from East Europe. Other nations in the Western Hemisphere also attracted about a million Jews during this period, to which we must add Jewish migration to South Africa, Australia, West Europe, and the like. This does not mean that Jews were not "Zionists" but they had no intention whatsoever of embarking on Aliyah – of going to Palestine themselves. As Herzl believed, it was a project for others.
Jews in the Diaspora, like most ethnic groups, banded together in numerous organizations and nostalgia – and confusion – soon overwhelmed them. Organized Zionism grew in the U.S. as it had not in East Europe – but it demanded only money, thereby ultimately making Israel viable.
In 1893 there were an estimated 10,000 Jews in Palestine, 61,000 in 1920, and 122,000 in 1925. All of these figures are only the best-informed estimates; there were censuses in 1922 and 1931 only, and even the 1922 numbers are contested. But the general trend is beyond doubt and very clear. For every Jew who went to Palestine from 1890 to 1924, at least 27 went to the Western Hemisphere alone. Relatively, the Zionist project was the utopian dream of a tiny minority and it would have failed save for two factors, the Holocaust and the much-overlooked fact that in 1924 the U.S. passed a new immigration law based on quotas using the nationalities distribution in the 1890 census as a basis, effectively cutting off migration from East and South Europe to a mere trickle of what it had been.
In 1924, Jewish population in Palestine increased 5.9 percent but in 1925 – the first year the American law went into effect – it leaped 28 percent, and 23 percent in 1926. This was still a small minority of the Jews who left Europe but this sudden spurt was directly related to American policy. From 1927 to 1932 it never grew more than 5.3 percent annually and in 1927 it was a mere 0.2%. Very few Jews went to Palestine, and a small proportion of them were ideologically motivated; the vast majority migrated elsewhere.
The British had always been in favor of Jewish migration and after 1933 it grew greatly – Jews were six percent of the Palestinian population in 1912 but 29 percent in 1935 – but now it was increasingly composed of Jews from Germany rather than Poland. These Jews had to get out of Germany, where the Zionist movement had always been very weak, and they were scarcely ideological zealots. Had there been open migration to the U.S. they would have gone there. Arab riots after 1935 compelled the British to reduce the inflow and in 1939 they adopted a White Paper enforcing strict restrictions on immigration.
What is certain is that Hitler's importance must always be set in a larger context. Without him there never would have been a flow of Jews out of Germany, and very probably no state of Israel, but also crucial was the U.S. 1924 Immigration Act. Migrants went to Palestine out of necessity, in the vast majority of cases, not choice. Both of these factors were crucial, and to determine their relative importance is an abstract, futile enterprise. But without either the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine would have remained another exotic Viennese concoction, never to be realized, because while the Jews in the Diaspora were in favor of a Jewish state, virtually none living in safe nations were ever to uproot themselves and embark on Aliyah – the return to the ancient homeland. They had no reason to do so.
There were many promised lands and Herzl's exotic ruminations were scarcely the inspiration for the flow of Jews out of Europe. Israel's existence was an unpredictable accident of history. The past century has been full of them, everywhere. That is why the world is in such a perilous condition.
http://www.antiwar. com/kolko/ ?articleid= 11058
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Rationalizing Gaza
How they do it
by Justin Raimondo
We all know the rationalization for Israel's brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip. After all, it's been reiterated endlessly over the airwaves by official and unofficial spokesmen for the Israeli government, on all channels, and with no rebuttal or skeptical perspective from Palestinians or, indeed, from anyone vaguely sympathetic to their plight. Their argument goes like this: if rockets were coming from Mexican territory and landing in San Diego, posing a threat to the life and safety of American citizens, we all know what would happen.
This is supposed to settle the question of the morality of the invasion, but it doesn't. Because what we are seeing in this argument is a variation on the old cherry-picking technique of the neocons in the Bush administration, who utilized "talking points" that were very selective in their presentation of the facts to make the case for invading Iraq.
What the rationalizers leave out, of course, is the ongoing blockade of Gaza, imposed after Hamas took control in the wake of its overwhelming election victory – and an attempted (and partially successful) coup d'etat by the losers of that election, the Fatah organization of the late Yasser Arafat (now headed up by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas). The blockade itself was an act of war, by which the Israelis struck the first blow.
With this correction made, then, let's revisit – and reverse – the Israeli argument, putting all the known facts in their proper context. If Mexico – in an attempt to regain its lost territory, the promised land of California – invaded California, drove the residents of San Diego from their city, cooped them up in, say, Death Valley, and wouldn't let anything but a basic minimum of consumer goods and medical supplies either in or out, well, we all know what would happen.
I won't waste your time or mine complaining about the brazenly Israeli-centric news coverage of the invasion by the English-speaking media. It's a given, like the weather, or, more accurately, the phenomenon of global warming – a man-made disaster. In any case, what's interesting is how Western perceptions of the Palestinian leadership have evolved over time, always in perfect accordance with the talking points put out by the Israeli embassy.
In the beginning there was Arafat, the first Palestinian leader to come to public prominence in the U.S. and Western Europe, who long embodied the Palestinian cause. Seen through the eyes of Israel's amen corner, he was a perfect villain: a radical, a terrorist, and a vicious anti-Semite, whose name was generally associated with intransigence and violence. The Israelis drove him out of Palestine and pursued him into Lebanon and points beyond, yet he endured. Longevity elevated him to semi-statesman status, and his perseverance would have led to a two-state solution if the U.S. negotiating team hadn't taken their instructions from Tel Aviv. He refused to relegate his people to a collection of defenseless bantustans. Be that as it may, in the end the Israelis besieged the ailing symbol of Palestinian resistance, then gloated that he had died of AIDS, rather than an Israeli bullet in the back of the head.
Fatah, traditionally afforded the same treatment as Arafat, has now been rehabilitated in the eyes of the Western media. In vivid contrast to Arafat's day, today we are told that Fatah is the vessel of pro-Western moderation. Yesterday they were dangerous terrorists who could not be talked to, today they are the recipients of U.S. aid. Abbas has basically taken the position that Hamas provoked the attack by launching rocket attacks after the cease-fire ran out, a position that further erodes his tenuous support among the populace and gives Hamas plenty of ammunition for future political gains.
Hamas, like Fatah before it, is today depicted much as Fatah once was – an exemplar of violent intransigence, an enemy whose fanaticism precludes negotiations, the only difference being the religious element. Fatah was always secular, whereas Hamas wants to establish an Islamic state in what is now Israel and the West Bank. Like Hezbollah, Hamas runs a wide variety of social and humanitarian programs: compared to the notoriously corrupt Fatah, these guys seem like angels to the average Palestinian. When Fatah lost out to Hamas big-time – in elections touted by President Bush as a triumph of democracy – "President" Abbas simply annulled the results, expelled the elected Hamas representatives from the Palestinian parliament, and outlawed the organization. The Israelis took it from there, with the blockade.
The pattern here is clear enough: whenever someone is actually opposing Israeli military aggression, that person or group is automatically characterized as a villain, a fanatic, a terrorist whose existence cannot be tolerated. Having demonized Arafat and driven him to his death, now they push Fatah and go after Hamas. Whichever group is more effective in resisting the occupation is targeted for destruction.
The history of Hamas provides more than a few ironies: it was originally sponsored by the Israelis in the late 1970s as a way to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and Arafat's personal leadership. Citing several former and current CIA officers, UPI's Richard Sale reported the Israelis provided "direct aid," including funding, to Hamas at its inception.
Under the name Al-Mujamma al-Islami, Hamas was registered as a legal association in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. "According to U.S. administration officials," reports Sales, "funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel." It soon branched out from propaganda and social work. Aside from splintering the Palestinian movement for national self-determination, Israeli support for Hamas was designed to keep tabs on militants considered dangerous by the Israelis. What happened, instead, was that spies and collaborators were caught and shot by the very effective Hamas counter-intelligenc e unit. This Frankenstein monster, rising to take the place of the PLO as the instrument of Palestinian rage, turned on its creator.
Hamas is the enemy Israel deserves, and nothing proves this more than the current bloody operation, which is inflicting heavy casualties on the Palestinians. A full 30 percent of the killed and injured are children.
The Israeli blitz demonstrates a new moral principle in action, one that stands the old Catholic just war theory on its head by establishing the concept of disproportionality. Whereas the old just war theorists insisted that responses to aggression must be proportionate to the provocation, this new theory – let's call it the Luciferian theory – holds just the opposite: that an overreaction is mandated in order to strike fear and awe into the enemy. This will supposedly deter them from stepping out of line in the future.
We saw this Bizarro World morality applied in Lebanon in 2006, when Israel invaded the country, killed over 1,000, mostly civilians, and devastated civilian targets, including hospitals and water plants – all because Hezbollah had kidnapped a few of their soldiers. Now Israeli government officials are claiming that because the Palestinians insist on fighting back and firing missiles as deep into Israel as Beersheba, this places a million Israelis in mortal danger, and therefore anything and everything is justified in "self-defense."
This mutant morality was prefigured by the Bushian theory of preemption, which arrogates to the U.S. the right to attack any nation on earth, based on the possibility that someone somewhere is plotting to do us harm, and it will now be upheld (or, at least, not contested) by the Obama administration. This war is sending a message not only to the Palestinians, but to the Americans: the Israelis are telling us that they, too, claim the "right" to preemptively go after their avowed enemies, at least in their own regional sandbox, without having to justify it in a way any normal code of morality or international law would condone.
The two most destructive and objectively anti-American forces in the Middle East – al-Qaeda affiliates and the Israelis – benefit the most from this fresh outbreak of a festering conflict, and the losers are the Palestinians and the American people, with the former enduring the slaughter and the latter paying for it.
We will pay for it not only in billions of our tax dollars, but in terms of the hate-America factor, which will skyrocket on the Arab "street" and inspire many to take up arms against us. These are prime recruits for the jihadists such as bin Laden, whose ultimate target is the continental United States. At the rate we are going, we'll have to close off the country entirely in order to keep out enemies both numerous and determined. In the end, however, nothing will protect us against the relatives and loved ones of the innocents Israel has slaughtered, with our help and full approval.
http://www.antiwar. com/justin/ ?articleid= 14001
Rationalizing Gaza
How they do it
by Justin Raimondo
We all know the rationalization for Israel's brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip. After all, it's been reiterated endlessly over the airwaves by official and unofficial spokesmen for the Israeli government, on all channels, and with no rebuttal or skeptical perspective from Palestinians or, indeed, from anyone vaguely sympathetic to their plight. Their argument goes like this: if rockets were coming from Mexican territory and landing in San Diego, posing a threat to the life and safety of American citizens, we all know what would happen.
This is supposed to settle the question of the morality of the invasion, but it doesn't. Because what we are seeing in this argument is a variation on the old cherry-picking technique of the neocons in the Bush administration, who utilized "talking points" that were very selective in their presentation of the facts to make the case for invading Iraq.
What the rationalizers leave out, of course, is the ongoing blockade of Gaza, imposed after Hamas took control in the wake of its overwhelming election victory – and an attempted (and partially successful) coup d'etat by the losers of that election, the Fatah organization of the late Yasser Arafat (now headed up by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas). The blockade itself was an act of war, by which the Israelis struck the first blow.
With this correction made, then, let's revisit – and reverse – the Israeli argument, putting all the known facts in their proper context. If Mexico – in an attempt to regain its lost territory, the promised land of California – invaded California, drove the residents of San Diego from their city, cooped them up in, say, Death Valley, and wouldn't let anything but a basic minimum of consumer goods and medical supplies either in or out, well, we all know what would happen.
I won't waste your time or mine complaining about the brazenly Israeli-centric news coverage of the invasion by the English-speaking media. It's a given, like the weather, or, more accurately, the phenomenon of global warming – a man-made disaster. In any case, what's interesting is how Western perceptions of the Palestinian leadership have evolved over time, always in perfect accordance with the talking points put out by the Israeli embassy.
In the beginning there was Arafat, the first Palestinian leader to come to public prominence in the U.S. and Western Europe, who long embodied the Palestinian cause. Seen through the eyes of Israel's amen corner, he was a perfect villain: a radical, a terrorist, and a vicious anti-Semite, whose name was generally associated with intransigence and violence. The Israelis drove him out of Palestine and pursued him into Lebanon and points beyond, yet he endured. Longevity elevated him to semi-statesman status, and his perseverance would have led to a two-state solution if the U.S. negotiating team hadn't taken their instructions from Tel Aviv. He refused to relegate his people to a collection of defenseless bantustans. Be that as it may, in the end the Israelis besieged the ailing symbol of Palestinian resistance, then gloated that he had died of AIDS, rather than an Israeli bullet in the back of the head.
Fatah, traditionally afforded the same treatment as Arafat, has now been rehabilitated in the eyes of the Western media. In vivid contrast to Arafat's day, today we are told that Fatah is the vessel of pro-Western moderation. Yesterday they were dangerous terrorists who could not be talked to, today they are the recipients of U.S. aid. Abbas has basically taken the position that Hamas provoked the attack by launching rocket attacks after the cease-fire ran out, a position that further erodes his tenuous support among the populace and gives Hamas plenty of ammunition for future political gains.
Hamas, like Fatah before it, is today depicted much as Fatah once was – an exemplar of violent intransigence, an enemy whose fanaticism precludes negotiations, the only difference being the religious element. Fatah was always secular, whereas Hamas wants to establish an Islamic state in what is now Israel and the West Bank. Like Hezbollah, Hamas runs a wide variety of social and humanitarian programs: compared to the notoriously corrupt Fatah, these guys seem like angels to the average Palestinian. When Fatah lost out to Hamas big-time – in elections touted by President Bush as a triumph of democracy – "President" Abbas simply annulled the results, expelled the elected Hamas representatives from the Palestinian parliament, and outlawed the organization. The Israelis took it from there, with the blockade.
The pattern here is clear enough: whenever someone is actually opposing Israeli military aggression, that person or group is automatically characterized as a villain, a fanatic, a terrorist whose existence cannot be tolerated. Having demonized Arafat and driven him to his death, now they push Fatah and go after Hamas. Whichever group is more effective in resisting the occupation is targeted for destruction.
The history of Hamas provides more than a few ironies: it was originally sponsored by the Israelis in the late 1970s as a way to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and Arafat's personal leadership. Citing several former and current CIA officers, UPI's Richard Sale reported the Israelis provided "direct aid," including funding, to Hamas at its inception.
Under the name Al-Mujamma al-Islami, Hamas was registered as a legal association in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. "According to U.S. administration officials," reports Sales, "funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel." It soon branched out from propaganda and social work. Aside from splintering the Palestinian movement for national self-determination, Israeli support for Hamas was designed to keep tabs on militants considered dangerous by the Israelis. What happened, instead, was that spies and collaborators were caught and shot by the very effective Hamas counter-intelligenc e unit. This Frankenstein monster, rising to take the place of the PLO as the instrument of Palestinian rage, turned on its creator.
Hamas is the enemy Israel deserves, and nothing proves this more than the current bloody operation, which is inflicting heavy casualties on the Palestinians. A full 30 percent of the killed and injured are children.
The Israeli blitz demonstrates a new moral principle in action, one that stands the old Catholic just war theory on its head by establishing the concept of disproportionality. Whereas the old just war theorists insisted that responses to aggression must be proportionate to the provocation, this new theory – let's call it the Luciferian theory – holds just the opposite: that an overreaction is mandated in order to strike fear and awe into the enemy. This will supposedly deter them from stepping out of line in the future.
We saw this Bizarro World morality applied in Lebanon in 2006, when Israel invaded the country, killed over 1,000, mostly civilians, and devastated civilian targets, including hospitals and water plants – all because Hezbollah had kidnapped a few of their soldiers. Now Israeli government officials are claiming that because the Palestinians insist on fighting back and firing missiles as deep into Israel as Beersheba, this places a million Israelis in mortal danger, and therefore anything and everything is justified in "self-defense."
This mutant morality was prefigured by the Bushian theory of preemption, which arrogates to the U.S. the right to attack any nation on earth, based on the possibility that someone somewhere is plotting to do us harm, and it will now be upheld (or, at least, not contested) by the Obama administration. This war is sending a message not only to the Palestinians, but to the Americans: the Israelis are telling us that they, too, claim the "right" to preemptively go after their avowed enemies, at least in their own regional sandbox, without having to justify it in a way any normal code of morality or international law would condone.
The two most destructive and objectively anti-American forces in the Middle East – al-Qaeda affiliates and the Israelis – benefit the most from this fresh outbreak of a festering conflict, and the losers are the Palestinians and the American people, with the former enduring the slaughter and the latter paying for it.
We will pay for it not only in billions of our tax dollars, but in terms of the hate-America factor, which will skyrocket on the Arab "street" and inspire many to take up arms against us. These are prime recruits for the jihadists such as bin Laden, whose ultimate target is the continental United States. At the rate we are going, we'll have to close off the country entirely in order to keep out enemies both numerous and determined. In the end, however, nothing will protect us against the relatives and loved ones of the innocents Israel has slaughtered, with our help and full approval.
http://www.antiwar. com/justin/ ?articleid= 14001
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Israel's 'Fait Accompli' in Gaza
by Eric Margolis
There are two completely different versions of what is currently happening in Gaza.
In the Israeli and North American press version, Hamas – "Islamic terrorists" backed by Iran – have in an unprovoked attack fired deadly rockets on innocent Israel with the intent of destroying the Jewish state.
North American politicians and the media say Israel "has the right to defend itself."
True enough. No Israeli government can tolerate rockets hitting its towns, even though the casualty totals have been less than the car crash fatalities registered during a single holiday weekend on Israel's roads.
The firing of the feeble, homemade al-Qassam rockets by Palestinians is both useless and counterproductive.
It damages their image as an oppressed people and gives right-wing Israeli extremists a perfect reason to launch more attacks on the Arabs and refuse to discuss peace.
Israel's supporters insist it has the absolute right to drop hundreds of tons of bombs on "Hamas targets" inside the 360 sq km Gaza Strip to "take out the terrorists."
Civilians suffer, says Israel, because the cowardly Hamas hide among them.
Actually, it is more like shooting fish in a barrel.
Omitting facts
As usual, this cartoon-like version of events omits a great deal of nuance and background.
While firing rockets at civilians is a crime so, too, is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an egregious violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions.
According to the UN, most of Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian refugees subsist near the edge of hunger. Seventy per cent of Palestinian children in Gaza suffer from severe malnutrition and psychological trauma.
Medical facilities are critically short of doctors, personnel, equipment, and drugs. Gaza has quite literally become a human garbage dump for all the Arabs that Israel does not want.
Gaza is one of the world's most-densely populated places, a vast outdoor prison camp filled with desperate people. In the past, they threw stones at their Israeli occupiers; now they launch homemade rockets.
Call it a prison riot, writ large.
Eyeing the elections
When the so-called truce between Tel Aviv and Hamas expired on December 19, Israeli politicians were in the throes of preparing for the February 10 national elections.
Israeli politics are playing a key role in this crisis.
Ehud Barak, the defense minister and leader of the Labour party, and Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and leader of the Kadima party, are trying to prove themselves tougher than Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-line Likud party – and one another.
Israel's elections are only six weeks away, and Likud was leading until the air raids on Gaza began. Kadima and Labour are now up in the polls.
The heavy attacks on Gaza are also designed to intimidate Israel's Arab neighbors, and make up for Israel's humiliating 2006 defeat in Lebanon, which still haunts the country's politicians and generals.
A fait accompli
When the air raids on Gaza began, Barak said: "We have totally changed the rules of the game."
He was right. By blitzing Hamas-run Gaza, Barak presented the incoming US administration with a fait accompli, and neatly checkmated the newest player in the Middle East Great Game – Barack Obama, the US president-elect – before he could even take a seat at the table.
The Israeli offensive into Gaza now looks likely to short-circuit any plans Obama might have had to press Israel into withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders and sharing Jerusalem.
This has pleased Israel's supporters in North America who have been cheering the war in Gaza and have been backing away from their earlier tentative support for a land-for-peace deal.
Israel's successes in having Western media portray the Gaza offensive as an "anti-terrorist operation" will also diminish hopes of peace talks any time soon.
Obama inherits this mess in a few weeks. During the elections, Obama bowed to the Israel lobby, offering a new US carte blanche to Israel and even accepting Israel's permanent monopoly of all of Jerusalem.
As he concludes forming his cabinet, his Middle East team looks like it may be top-heavy with friends of Israel's Labour party.
Obama keeps saying he must remain silent on policy issues until George Bush, the outgoing US president, leaves office, but his staff appear happy to avoid having to make statements about Gaza that would antagonize Israel's American supporters.
Obama will take office facing a Middle East up in arms over Gaza and the entire Muslim world blaming the US for the carnage in Gaza.
Unless he moves swiftly to distance himself from the policies of the Bush administration, he will soon find himself facing the same problems and anger as the Bush White House.
Arab deal killed
Israel's Gaza offensive is also likely to torpedo the current Saudi-sponsored peace plan, which had been backed by all members of the Arab League.
The plan, now likely defunct, had called for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders and share Jerusalem in exchange for full recognition and normalized relations with the Muslim world.
Arab governments will now be unable to sell the deal as they face a storm of criticism from their own people over their powerlessness to help the Palestinians of Gaza.
Egypt, in particular, is being widely accused of collaborating with Israel in further sealing off and isolating Gaza. It seems highly unlikely they will be able to advance a peace plan with Israel for now.
This is a bonus for right-wing Israelis, who have always been dead set against any withdrawal and strongly supported the attack on Gaza.
Other Israeli factions who were always lukewarm about the Saudi peace plan are now unlikely to reconsider it.
Israel's security establishment is committed to preventing the creation of a viable Palestinian state, and refuses to negotiate with Hamas. Unable to kill all of Hamas' men, Israel is slowly destroying Gaza's infrastructure around them, as it did to Yasser Arafat's PLO.
Israel's hardliners point to Gaza and claim that any Palestinian state on the West Bank would threaten their nation's security by firing rockets into Israel's heartland.
Mighty information machine
Israel is confident that its mighty information machine will allow it to weather the storm of worldwide outrage over its Biblical punishment of Gaza. Who remembers Israel's flattening of parts of the Palestinian city of Jenin, or the US destruction in Falluja, Iraq, or the Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Beirut?
The US media has focused on the rockets being fired on Israel from Gaza.
Though the torment of Gaza is seen across the horrified Muslim world as a modern version of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising by Jews against the Nazis during World War Two, Western governments still appear bent on taking no action.
Though Israel's use of American weapons against Gaza violates the US Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts, the docile US Congress will remain mute.
Israel's assault on Gaza was clearly timed for America's interregnum between administrations and the year-end holidays, a well-used Israeli tactic.
Hamas refuses to recognize Israel as long as Israel refuses to recognize Hamas and the rights of millions of homeless Palestinian refugees.
It calls for a non-religious state to be created in Palestine, meaning an end to Zionism. Ironically, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and late leader of Hamas, had spoken of a compromise with Tel Aviv shortly before he was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
An inherited mess
Israel's hopes that it can bomb Gazans into rejecting Hamas are as ill-conceived as its failed attempt in 2006 to blast Lebanon into rejecting Hezbollah.
The Fatah regime on the West Bank installed by the US and Israel after Yasser Arafat's suspicious death will be further discredited, leaving the militants of Hamas as the sole authentic voice of Palestinian nationalism.
Hamas, the militant but still democratically elected government of Gaza, is even less likely to compromise.
The Muslim world is in a rage. But so what? Stalin liked to say "the dogs bark, and the caravan moves on," and as long as the US gives Israel carte blanche, it can do just about anything it wants.
The tragedy of Palestine will thus continue to poison US relations with the Muslim world.
Those Americans who still do not understand why their nation was attacked on 9/11 need only look to Gaza, for which the US is now being blamed as much as Israel.
Unless Israel can make 5 to 7 million Palestinians disappear, it must find some way to coexist with them. Israeli leaders on the center and right continue to avoid facing this fact.
The brutal collective punishment inflicted on Gaza will likely strengthen Hamas and reverse any hopes of a Middle East peace in the coming years.
www.ericmargolis. com
Israel's 'Fait Accompli' in Gaza
by Eric Margolis
There are two completely different versions of what is currently happening in Gaza.
In the Israeli and North American press version, Hamas – "Islamic terrorists" backed by Iran – have in an unprovoked attack fired deadly rockets on innocent Israel with the intent of destroying the Jewish state.
North American politicians and the media say Israel "has the right to defend itself."
True enough. No Israeli government can tolerate rockets hitting its towns, even though the casualty totals have been less than the car crash fatalities registered during a single holiday weekend on Israel's roads.
The firing of the feeble, homemade al-Qassam rockets by Palestinians is both useless and counterproductive.
It damages their image as an oppressed people and gives right-wing Israeli extremists a perfect reason to launch more attacks on the Arabs and refuse to discuss peace.
Israel's supporters insist it has the absolute right to drop hundreds of tons of bombs on "Hamas targets" inside the 360 sq km Gaza Strip to "take out the terrorists."
Civilians suffer, says Israel, because the cowardly Hamas hide among them.
Actually, it is more like shooting fish in a barrel.
Omitting facts
As usual, this cartoon-like version of events omits a great deal of nuance and background.
While firing rockets at civilians is a crime so, too, is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an egregious violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions.
According to the UN, most of Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian refugees subsist near the edge of hunger. Seventy per cent of Palestinian children in Gaza suffer from severe malnutrition and psychological trauma.
Medical facilities are critically short of doctors, personnel, equipment, and drugs. Gaza has quite literally become a human garbage dump for all the Arabs that Israel does not want.
Gaza is one of the world's most-densely populated places, a vast outdoor prison camp filled with desperate people. In the past, they threw stones at their Israeli occupiers; now they launch homemade rockets.
Call it a prison riot, writ large.
Eyeing the elections
When the so-called truce between Tel Aviv and Hamas expired on December 19, Israeli politicians were in the throes of preparing for the February 10 national elections.
Israeli politics are playing a key role in this crisis.
Ehud Barak, the defense minister and leader of the Labour party, and Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and leader of the Kadima party, are trying to prove themselves tougher than Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-line Likud party – and one another.
Israel's elections are only six weeks away, and Likud was leading until the air raids on Gaza began. Kadima and Labour are now up in the polls.
The heavy attacks on Gaza are also designed to intimidate Israel's Arab neighbors, and make up for Israel's humiliating 2006 defeat in Lebanon, which still haunts the country's politicians and generals.
A fait accompli
When the air raids on Gaza began, Barak said: "We have totally changed the rules of the game."
He was right. By blitzing Hamas-run Gaza, Barak presented the incoming US administration with a fait accompli, and neatly checkmated the newest player in the Middle East Great Game – Barack Obama, the US president-elect – before he could even take a seat at the table.
The Israeli offensive into Gaza now looks likely to short-circuit any plans Obama might have had to press Israel into withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders and sharing Jerusalem.
This has pleased Israel's supporters in North America who have been cheering the war in Gaza and have been backing away from their earlier tentative support for a land-for-peace deal.
Israel's successes in having Western media portray the Gaza offensive as an "anti-terrorist operation" will also diminish hopes of peace talks any time soon.
Obama inherits this mess in a few weeks. During the elections, Obama bowed to the Israel lobby, offering a new US carte blanche to Israel and even accepting Israel's permanent monopoly of all of Jerusalem.
As he concludes forming his cabinet, his Middle East team looks like it may be top-heavy with friends of Israel's Labour party.
Obama keeps saying he must remain silent on policy issues until George Bush, the outgoing US president, leaves office, but his staff appear happy to avoid having to make statements about Gaza that would antagonize Israel's American supporters.
Obama will take office facing a Middle East up in arms over Gaza and the entire Muslim world blaming the US for the carnage in Gaza.
Unless he moves swiftly to distance himself from the policies of the Bush administration, he will soon find himself facing the same problems and anger as the Bush White House.
Arab deal killed
Israel's Gaza offensive is also likely to torpedo the current Saudi-sponsored peace plan, which had been backed by all members of the Arab League.
The plan, now likely defunct, had called for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders and share Jerusalem in exchange for full recognition and normalized relations with the Muslim world.
Arab governments will now be unable to sell the deal as they face a storm of criticism from their own people over their powerlessness to help the Palestinians of Gaza.
Egypt, in particular, is being widely accused of collaborating with Israel in further sealing off and isolating Gaza. It seems highly unlikely they will be able to advance a peace plan with Israel for now.
This is a bonus for right-wing Israelis, who have always been dead set against any withdrawal and strongly supported the attack on Gaza.
Other Israeli factions who were always lukewarm about the Saudi peace plan are now unlikely to reconsider it.
Israel's security establishment is committed to preventing the creation of a viable Palestinian state, and refuses to negotiate with Hamas. Unable to kill all of Hamas' men, Israel is slowly destroying Gaza's infrastructure around them, as it did to Yasser Arafat's PLO.
Israel's hardliners point to Gaza and claim that any Palestinian state on the West Bank would threaten their nation's security by firing rockets into Israel's heartland.
Mighty information machine
Israel is confident that its mighty information machine will allow it to weather the storm of worldwide outrage over its Biblical punishment of Gaza. Who remembers Israel's flattening of parts of the Palestinian city of Jenin, or the US destruction in Falluja, Iraq, or the Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Beirut?
The US media has focused on the rockets being fired on Israel from Gaza.
Though the torment of Gaza is seen across the horrified Muslim world as a modern version of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising by Jews against the Nazis during World War Two, Western governments still appear bent on taking no action.
Though Israel's use of American weapons against Gaza violates the US Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts, the docile US Congress will remain mute.
Israel's assault on Gaza was clearly timed for America's interregnum between administrations and the year-end holidays, a well-used Israeli tactic.
Hamas refuses to recognize Israel as long as Israel refuses to recognize Hamas and the rights of millions of homeless Palestinian refugees.
It calls for a non-religious state to be created in Palestine, meaning an end to Zionism. Ironically, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and late leader of Hamas, had spoken of a compromise with Tel Aviv shortly before he was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
An inherited mess
Israel's hopes that it can bomb Gazans into rejecting Hamas are as ill-conceived as its failed attempt in 2006 to blast Lebanon into rejecting Hezbollah.
The Fatah regime on the West Bank installed by the US and Israel after Yasser Arafat's suspicious death will be further discredited, leaving the militants of Hamas as the sole authentic voice of Palestinian nationalism.
Hamas, the militant but still democratically elected government of Gaza, is even less likely to compromise.
The Muslim world is in a rage. But so what? Stalin liked to say "the dogs bark, and the caravan moves on," and as long as the US gives Israel carte blanche, it can do just about anything it wants.
The tragedy of Palestine will thus continue to poison US relations with the Muslim world.
Those Americans who still do not understand why their nation was attacked on 9/11 need only look to Gaza, for which the US is now being blamed as much as Israel.
Unless Israel can make 5 to 7 million Palestinians disappear, it must find some way to coexist with them. Israeli leaders on the center and right continue to avoid facing this fact.
The brutal collective punishment inflicted on Gaza will likely strengthen Hamas and reverse any hopes of a Middle East peace in the coming years.
www.ericmargolis. com
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
The Israel rules
America's support of the Gaza attack proves once again that our mythical image of Israel has blinded us to its faults -- a myopia with devastating consequences for both countries.
By Gary Kamiya
Jan. 06, 2009 |
As Israel continues its Gaza assault, which has now resulted in more than 500 dead and 2,300 wounded Palestinians, with five Israelis killed, the following thought experiment is worth performing.
America's founding sin, its dispossession of its native inhabitants, has not taken place in the 19th century, but continuously during the last 60 years. America has not completed its ethnic cleansing, has walled off millions of exiles and must contend with an armed resistance movement. Washington, despite international demands and U.N. insistence that it do so, refuses to resolve the issue by returning a portion of the land it had taken. Approximately 1.5 million of those native Americans, most of them refugees from their ancestral homes who have never been allowed to return, are imprisoned in a tiny, squalid area whose exits, water, heat, fuel, medicine and food are controlled by Washington. In their despair and their disillusionment with their corrupt leadership, those people elect a radical, rejectionist movement (which Washington had helped to foster, to undercut the native's original leadership) that denies America's right to exist and has a history of viciously striking at U.S. citizens using any means it can, including suicide bombers and crude homemade rockets that have killed two dozen Americans in seven years.
To punish these people for choosing a government it considers a terrorist organization, Washington imposes a harsh blockade, with a top American official joking that the U.S. is going to put the natives "on a diet." The rejectionist government agrees to a cease-fire with the expectation that the blockade will be lifted. When the blockade is not lifted, and following a U.S. raid into their territory, the rejectionists begin firing the rockets again. Washington then launches a carefully planned aerial assault on the tiny, largely defenseless area, raining bombs down on one of the most densely populated places on earth, killing militants and civilians alike and bombing houses filled with women and children. It then launches a ground invasion of the area. Throughout, America paints itself as an innocent victim, which has been forced with a heavy heart to take surgical, conscientious military actions against terrorist fanatics who threaten its very existence.
This comparison to the current Gaza invasion is not, of course, exact. Israel is a tiny state, a fraction the size of the U.S. The Indians never posed a serious threat to American settlers, nor did they have neighboring allies who launched an all-out war on the U.S. in 1776. Nor were large tracts of American territory acquired by legally purchasing them from absentee native landlords. But the larger parallels remain. If such a scenario had taken place, how would the world and America react? At a minimum, there would be massive protests. Large numbers of American citizens would take to the streets, denouncing the slaughter and insisting that their government reach a political settlement with the natives.
Much of the rest of the world is outraged by Israel's assault on Gaza. But the United States -- the beacon of democracy, the champion of freedom, a nation founded on revolutionary anti-colonialism -- is applauding it.
The Bush administration has placed the onus for the Israeli assault entirely upon Hamas, and blocked a cease-fire proposal in the U.N. Security Council to give Israel more time to crush its foe. Congress -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- is almost unanimously behind Israel's war. This, despite the fact that polls show that American citizens are closely divided on whether Israel should have attacked Gaza. As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has noted, there is no other issue in which "citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice."
Whatever President-elect Barack Obama may think about the attack, or the larger Israeli-Palestinian crisis, he has remained prudently silent. So far his only circulating statement is a fatuous comment made during the campaign -- and promptly trotted out by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to justify the assault -- that if his house with his daughters in it were being subjected to rocket attacks, he would "do everything in my power to stop that." Obama may have a clear mandate to change America's direction in the Middle East, but even he has deemed it too politically dangerous to say anything critical of Israel.
After five years of George W. Bush's "war on terror," a war whose ideology and methods followed Israel's militarist approach to the letter, and which has failed in every conceivable way, America has still not learned that there are no military solutions in the Middle East.
America is backing Israel's assault despite the fact that it is seriously injurious to our national interests, and ultimately to Israel's as well. Israel's actions will not make it safer, and in the long run could endanger its very existence. But Israel, surrounded by a sea of enemies, has far more reason to cling to its belief in militarism than America does.
Why does America give Israel a blank check to do what it wants, even when its actions are so manifestly contrary to our self-interest? Because we hold Israel to a different standard than other states. We follow what we might call "the Israel rules."
In their groundbreaking 2006 book, historians John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt popularized the term "The Israel lobby." The term is useful as far as it goes, and applies accurately to powerful lobbies like AIPAC. But as one of the more perceptive commentators on Middle Eastern affairs, Time's Tony Karon, noted in his Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, the term is insufficiently dialectical -- that is, it fails to capture the way Americans have internalized received opinions about Israel. "The Israel rules," on the other hand, avoids imputing coercive power solely to an entity or group of entities, and highlights the fact that many of the constraints that govern discussions of Israel are self-generated.
"Pro-Israel" commentators -- I use the scare quotes because many of them are Likudnik hawks whose policies are, in fact, harmful to Israel -- argue that Americans have always felt an affinity for Israel because it is a plucky, embattled democracy, a national soul mate. While there is a lot of sentimental "land without a people" nonsense in this argument, it is not entirely devoid of truth. There is much to admire in the astonishing self-creation of the Jewish state. Had it not been for the inconvenient presence of an indigenous people, it would have been cause for unalloyed celebration. And this feeling of kinship is immeasurably strengthened and sanctified by the most potent historical fact behind the special status America has accorded Israel: the Holocaust.
Because Israel came into existence in the shadow of the Holocaust, and because it was immediately attacked by Arab states bent on destroying it, it has become an eternal victim in America's eyes. The historical truths of Israel's creation, above all the fact of Palestinian dispossession, simply cannot compete with the tragic, beautiful myth of an embattled people, the survivors of one of the worst genocides in human history, returning to live in their historic homeland. The enduring power of this myth is understandable. The idea that history's "ultimate victims," as the late Palestinian- American scholar Edward Said sympathetically called the Jews, created their own state by expelling its native inhabitants, is appalling. It seems almost cosmically wrong: A story this dark should not, cannot, close without a happy ending.
That is the emotional and psychological nut. Throw in geo-strategic reasons (the U.S. embraced Israel as a Cold War bulwark against Soviet expansion), a powerful domestic lobby, and the singular ineptitude of the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular, and you have the ingredients for an enduring myth. When other states refuse to make just compromises and insist on smashing their enemies into submission, we call them rogue states. When Israel does it, it is fighting off an eternal Holocaust, and that gives it carte blanche to do whatever it wants. Never mind the fact that the Palestinians do not pose an existential threat to Israel, and that over the last eight years between 200 and 300 Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli. As the occupation grinds into its seventh decade and Israel's enemies have become ever more fanatical, it becomes easier to fit them out with Hitler masks. The Palestinians have played the role of villains beautifully, making the myth seem increasingly plausible.
Not everyone believes the myth. In fact, only a minority of Americans do. But the Israel rules must be obeyed nonetheless, lest one be accused of anti-Semitism, radicalism, sympathy for terrorists, or, more subtly, lest one anger or offend one's friends and acquaintances. The Israel rules apply to Jews and non-Jews alike. Courageously outspoken American Jews like Joe Klein, Philip Weiss, Richard Silverstein and M.J. Rosenberg are routinely savaged for daring to deviate from the party line on Israel. Not many choose to subject themselves to this abuse, especially when much of it comes from your own friends, from your political cohort, from your people. Much easier to remain silent. Why has the New York Times run only one Op-Ed piece during the entire Gaza assault, while not a single one of its columnists weighed in until Bill Kristol's predictable defense of Israel on Monday? Because it's an unpleasant, no-win subject.
The subject of Israel splits the American left and the American intelligentsia, a fact that has had far-reaching consequences. As the historian Tony Judt has persuasively argued, divisions over Israel are a large part of the reason that the left's response to Bush's Iraq war was so feeble. Judt's piece, not surprisingly, was published by the London Review of Books, as was the Mearsheimer and Walt article that grew into their book. Ironically, there is a much more freewheeling debate about Israel's policies in Israel's superb newspaper Haaretz than there is any American paper. In a searing recent piece in the paper, "And there lie the bodies," Gideon Levy argued that Israel's indifference to Palestinian casualties is a sign of a collective moral collapse. "The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest," Levy wrote. No such piece could ever appear in any mainstream American publication.
As any student of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis knows, the best work on it has been done by Israelis. From Amos Elon to David Grossman, from Benny Morris (notwithstanding his later incarnation as an unabashed exponent of ethnic cleansing) to Ilan Pappe, from Amira Hass to Tom Segev, Israeli writers and historians have done the painstaking and courageous work that has made it possible to begin dismantling their state's founding myths and see it for what it is -- neither a supervillain nor a superhero, but a state like any other, which should be judged by the same standards as any other.
One of the reasons many people of good will are reluctant to speak out is that in one sense, the Israel rules reflect values and beliefs that are wholly admirable. Siding with Israel is a way of announcing solidarity with the Jewish people and a rejection of anti-Semitism. It is, in a sense, an apparently benign form of ethnic affirmative action: Israel gets extra credit on its moral SAT test. But affirmative action for Israel is like affirmative action for blacks. It is a concept with a sunset provision, one that must eventually fade away.
After 60 years of lockstep U.S. support, the era of Israeli exceptionalism must end. It is no longer justifiable, if it ever was. America may continue to have a "special relationship" with Israel, but that special relationship must be strictly limited: It cannot be allowed to damage America's larger interests. Israel is not synonymous with some transcendental, sentimental idea of Jewishness. It is simply a state, neither perfect nor imperfect, and must be treated like any other state. We can no longer afford to follow the Israel rules.
We cannot afford to for three reasons. First, Israel's current war, which it snuck in at a "perfect time" during the holidays and in the last days of its greatest "friend" and "supporter," George W. Bush, is immoral and illegal. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself, like any other state. But not all acts of self-defense are legally or morally equivalent.
Israel is "defending itself" against a people that it dispossessed and has occupied for decades, and specifically by bombing a densely populated territory that it has been collectively punishing for a year and a half. Collective punishment is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. By bombing universities, mosques, lines of graduating police recruits, farms and houses filled with women and children, Israel is violating the law of proportional response. It is the same strategy it pursued in its disastrous 2006 war against Lebanon, when it fired thousands of cluster bombs into civilian areas in the south so as to force a Shiite population transfer, and piling up heaps of corpses with the purpose of "bolstering its deterrence." Such actions, in which civilian casualties are accepted or even pursued in the interests of achieving strategic goals, are a textbook form of state terrorism, and under the circumstances of Israel's vise-grip on Palestinian lives, no more morally justifiable than Hamas' repellent attacks. America should not be supporting such actions, whether they are carried out by an ally or not.
Second, Israel's actions are harming America. In the eyes of the world, and in particular the Arab-Muslim world, whatever Israel does might as well have been done by America. We fund Israel to the tune of $3 billion a year, we provide its advanced weaponry and we carry diplomatic water for it. In effect, Israel is the U.S. Obviously, if its actions are harmful to our national interests, we should oppose them. And the Gaza assault is clearly inimical to our interests, unless one believes that making deadly enemies of most Arabs and Muslims in the world, and making the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace even more remote is in our national interests. One of the things that motivated Osama bin Laden to launch the 9/11 attacks was televised film of Israel bombing Beirut apartment buildings during its 1982 war. What burning hatred is being grown in Arab/Muslim hearts as Gaza explodes? And what bitter harvest will it produce?
Finally, Israel's actions are not in its own interest. As Talleyrand said of Napoleon's murder of the Duc d'Enghien, Israel's attack on Gaza is worse than a crime -- it is a blunder. Israel is attempting once again to ensure its security by killing its enemies, while refusing to acknowledge the reasons for their enmity or to pursue a just political settlement that would resolve the conflict. As Haaretz editor-at-large Aluf Benn, a perceptive analyst of the Israeli polity, pointed out in Salon, there are deep historical reasons for Israel's allegiance to a doctrine of overwhelming military superiority. It's a doctrine that goes back to the father of revisionist Zionism, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who insisted that Israel must break its foes' will to resist with an "iron wall." But as the last 60 years have shown, that live-by-the- sword ethos not only does not work, it is self-defeating.
Israel deserves lasting security. But it cannot kill its way into it. It may succeed in temporarily reducing the number of homemade rockets that Hamas fires into southern Israel. It may kill some Hamas leaders and militants and set back Hamas. As Benn notes, the Israeli assault has extremely modest strategic aims, and is merely intended to buy time: It is just "another one of Israel's long list of cross-border operations."
In this light, the 2008 Gaza war is little different from the Gaza raid of 1955 led by Ariel Sharon, in which Israeli paratroopers destroyed the Egyptian army headquarters on the outskirts of Gaza City, killing 37 Egyptian soldiers. The parallels between that raid and Israel's current assault are striking. According to historian Avi Shlaim in his classic "The Iron Wall," the 1955 raid was ordered by Israeli Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion to assuage public anger over terrorist fedayeen attacks, prove that he was a strong leader and "cut [Egyptian president Gamal Abdul] Nasser down to size by exposing the military impotence of his regime." Substitute Ehud Barak for Ben-Gurion, rocket attacks for fedayeen raids and Hamas for Nasser, and nothing has changed in 53 years. Except one crucial thing: The entire Arab-Muslim world now instantly sees the bloody consequences of Israel's actions on television.
And just as the 1955 Gaza raid did not end fedayeen attacks or diminish Nasser, any short-term security Israel may gain from its Gaza assault will be outweighed by the long-term deterioration of its strategic position. The Israeli attack will not finish off Hamas; it will eventually make it stronger, just as Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon made Hezbollah stronger. It will not crush the Palestinian desire for justice, or, sadly, for vengeance. It will not dry up the hatred that has poisoned so many minds on both sides of this tragic conflict -- it will only make it worse. It will not "teach the Arabs a lesson," or change the regional dynamic in its favor. It will only weaken Mahmoud Abbas and the moderate Arab states, which are increasingly seen by their people as quisling regimes. If Israel continues along this course, it will isolate itself from the rest of the world, which will increasingly see it as a rogue state.
I hold no brief for Hamas. Its use of terror is morally repellent, and its charter is filled with anti-Semitism. But one does not get to choose one's enemies -- and they are the ones you must make peace with. And at least a temporary peace is still possible. As the veteran Mideast analyst Helena Cobban has noted, Hamas is not a monolithic group of fanatical terrorists. It is prepared to sign off on a long-term truce with Israel.
Contrary to the Holocaustology that sees all Israel's enemies as the second coming of Adolf Hitler, Hamas is not the problem; it is a symptom. Treating it as the problem only prolongs the crisis. The problem is political and historical: the dispossession of Palestinians and the ongoing Israeli occupation of their land. Until that fundamental problem is resolved -- and the hour when it can be resolved by a two-state solution may already have passed -- Israel and America's attempts to bludgeon Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims into submission will only generate more hatred, more violence and ever more extremism.
What the gung-ho war hawks in Israel and America do not realize is that if Israel continues down this road, it will jeopardize its very existence. The world has changed, and time is not on Israel's side. Israel has always been surrounded by neighbors who detest it. Some of those states are ruled by regimes that have been bought off by the U.S., such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Afraid of their own Islamist radicals, they have remained largely silent as Israel has pounded Hamas. But those regimes will not last forever, and there is no guarantee that their successors will embrace the same policies. The real danger to Israel is radical Islam. Jihadism is the X factor that could threaten Israel's survival. Popular rage at Israel across the Arab-Muslim world has been festering for decades, and outrages like the Lebanon war and the Gaza assault have brought it to a boil. With their fury deprived of an outlet by their corrupt and sclerotic regimes, more and more Muslims are turning to religious radicalism.
Israel knows this story only too well because it helped create it. Israel strengthened Hamas in the 1980s because it wanted to undercut the PLO. Now it is trying to undercut Hamas, and by doing so, is strengthening al-Qaida-like jihadists. It is as if Israel actually wants to turn its political enemies into religious ones, so that it can convince itself and the world that it has no choice but to exterminate or be exterminated. In an age of portable weapons of mass destruction and suicidal zealots, this is not a wise strategy.
If the U.S. was truly Israel's best friend, as it claims it is, it would tell it unequivocally that its Gaza war and its larger policy of trying to pound its foes into submission is not just immoral, but counterproductive and injurious both to Israel's interests and America's. It would insist on an immediate cease-fire, which includes the lifting of the Israeli siege of Gaza, and begin pressuring both sides to accept a long-term political settlement, along the lines of the Arab League peace plan, the Clinton parameters and the Geneva Accords. It would bolster Abbas by dismantling settlements in the West Bank, removing checkpoints and improving Palestinian lives. It would insist that the best and only way to undermine the radical rejectionists and the jihadists (who are not the same thing) is through a just peace.
In the end, this isn't about ideology but results. The region is in chaos, hard-liners are gaining power and peace is further away than ever. President-elect Obama claims to be a pragmatist. This is his chance to prove it. He has the opportunity to change course, to start pursuing Mideast policies that work. He must make it clear to Israel that the blank check is expired, the amen corner disbanded.
If Obama has the wisdom and courage to reject the Israel rules, he can begin to broker a lasting Mideast peace, weaken extremists, restore America's standing in the region and ensure Israel's long-term viability. If he doesn't, the wound will simply keep festering, and the infection will keep spreading.
-- By Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon. com/opinion/ kamiya/2009/ 01/06/gaza_ war/
The Israel rules
America's support of the Gaza attack proves once again that our mythical image of Israel has blinded us to its faults -- a myopia with devastating consequences for both countries.
By Gary Kamiya
Jan. 06, 2009 |
As Israel continues its Gaza assault, which has now resulted in more than 500 dead and 2,300 wounded Palestinians, with five Israelis killed, the following thought experiment is worth performing.
America's founding sin, its dispossession of its native inhabitants, has not taken place in the 19th century, but continuously during the last 60 years. America has not completed its ethnic cleansing, has walled off millions of exiles and must contend with an armed resistance movement. Washington, despite international demands and U.N. insistence that it do so, refuses to resolve the issue by returning a portion of the land it had taken. Approximately 1.5 million of those native Americans, most of them refugees from their ancestral homes who have never been allowed to return, are imprisoned in a tiny, squalid area whose exits, water, heat, fuel, medicine and food are controlled by Washington. In their despair and their disillusionment with their corrupt leadership, those people elect a radical, rejectionist movement (which Washington had helped to foster, to undercut the native's original leadership) that denies America's right to exist and has a history of viciously striking at U.S. citizens using any means it can, including suicide bombers and crude homemade rockets that have killed two dozen Americans in seven years.
To punish these people for choosing a government it considers a terrorist organization, Washington imposes a harsh blockade, with a top American official joking that the U.S. is going to put the natives "on a diet." The rejectionist government agrees to a cease-fire with the expectation that the blockade will be lifted. When the blockade is not lifted, and following a U.S. raid into their territory, the rejectionists begin firing the rockets again. Washington then launches a carefully planned aerial assault on the tiny, largely defenseless area, raining bombs down on one of the most densely populated places on earth, killing militants and civilians alike and bombing houses filled with women and children. It then launches a ground invasion of the area. Throughout, America paints itself as an innocent victim, which has been forced with a heavy heart to take surgical, conscientious military actions against terrorist fanatics who threaten its very existence.
This comparison to the current Gaza invasion is not, of course, exact. Israel is a tiny state, a fraction the size of the U.S. The Indians never posed a serious threat to American settlers, nor did they have neighboring allies who launched an all-out war on the U.S. in 1776. Nor were large tracts of American territory acquired by legally purchasing them from absentee native landlords. But the larger parallels remain. If such a scenario had taken place, how would the world and America react? At a minimum, there would be massive protests. Large numbers of American citizens would take to the streets, denouncing the slaughter and insisting that their government reach a political settlement with the natives.
Much of the rest of the world is outraged by Israel's assault on Gaza. But the United States -- the beacon of democracy, the champion of freedom, a nation founded on revolutionary anti-colonialism -- is applauding it.
The Bush administration has placed the onus for the Israeli assault entirely upon Hamas, and blocked a cease-fire proposal in the U.N. Security Council to give Israel more time to crush its foe. Congress -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- is almost unanimously behind Israel's war. This, despite the fact that polls show that American citizens are closely divided on whether Israel should have attacked Gaza. As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has noted, there is no other issue in which "citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice."
Whatever President-elect Barack Obama may think about the attack, or the larger Israeli-Palestinian crisis, he has remained prudently silent. So far his only circulating statement is a fatuous comment made during the campaign -- and promptly trotted out by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to justify the assault -- that if his house with his daughters in it were being subjected to rocket attacks, he would "do everything in my power to stop that." Obama may have a clear mandate to change America's direction in the Middle East, but even he has deemed it too politically dangerous to say anything critical of Israel.
After five years of George W. Bush's "war on terror," a war whose ideology and methods followed Israel's militarist approach to the letter, and which has failed in every conceivable way, America has still not learned that there are no military solutions in the Middle East.
America is backing Israel's assault despite the fact that it is seriously injurious to our national interests, and ultimately to Israel's as well. Israel's actions will not make it safer, and in the long run could endanger its very existence. But Israel, surrounded by a sea of enemies, has far more reason to cling to its belief in militarism than America does.
Why does America give Israel a blank check to do what it wants, even when its actions are so manifestly contrary to our self-interest? Because we hold Israel to a different standard than other states. We follow what we might call "the Israel rules."
In their groundbreaking 2006 book, historians John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt popularized the term "The Israel lobby." The term is useful as far as it goes, and applies accurately to powerful lobbies like AIPAC. But as one of the more perceptive commentators on Middle Eastern affairs, Time's Tony Karon, noted in his Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, the term is insufficiently dialectical -- that is, it fails to capture the way Americans have internalized received opinions about Israel. "The Israel rules," on the other hand, avoids imputing coercive power solely to an entity or group of entities, and highlights the fact that many of the constraints that govern discussions of Israel are self-generated.
"Pro-Israel" commentators -- I use the scare quotes because many of them are Likudnik hawks whose policies are, in fact, harmful to Israel -- argue that Americans have always felt an affinity for Israel because it is a plucky, embattled democracy, a national soul mate. While there is a lot of sentimental "land without a people" nonsense in this argument, it is not entirely devoid of truth. There is much to admire in the astonishing self-creation of the Jewish state. Had it not been for the inconvenient presence of an indigenous people, it would have been cause for unalloyed celebration. And this feeling of kinship is immeasurably strengthened and sanctified by the most potent historical fact behind the special status America has accorded Israel: the Holocaust.
Because Israel came into existence in the shadow of the Holocaust, and because it was immediately attacked by Arab states bent on destroying it, it has become an eternal victim in America's eyes. The historical truths of Israel's creation, above all the fact of Palestinian dispossession, simply cannot compete with the tragic, beautiful myth of an embattled people, the survivors of one of the worst genocides in human history, returning to live in their historic homeland. The enduring power of this myth is understandable. The idea that history's "ultimate victims," as the late Palestinian- American scholar Edward Said sympathetically called the Jews, created their own state by expelling its native inhabitants, is appalling. It seems almost cosmically wrong: A story this dark should not, cannot, close without a happy ending.
That is the emotional and psychological nut. Throw in geo-strategic reasons (the U.S. embraced Israel as a Cold War bulwark against Soviet expansion), a powerful domestic lobby, and the singular ineptitude of the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular, and you have the ingredients for an enduring myth. When other states refuse to make just compromises and insist on smashing their enemies into submission, we call them rogue states. When Israel does it, it is fighting off an eternal Holocaust, and that gives it carte blanche to do whatever it wants. Never mind the fact that the Palestinians do not pose an existential threat to Israel, and that over the last eight years between 200 and 300 Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli. As the occupation grinds into its seventh decade and Israel's enemies have become ever more fanatical, it becomes easier to fit them out with Hitler masks. The Palestinians have played the role of villains beautifully, making the myth seem increasingly plausible.
Not everyone believes the myth. In fact, only a minority of Americans do. But the Israel rules must be obeyed nonetheless, lest one be accused of anti-Semitism, radicalism, sympathy for terrorists, or, more subtly, lest one anger or offend one's friends and acquaintances. The Israel rules apply to Jews and non-Jews alike. Courageously outspoken American Jews like Joe Klein, Philip Weiss, Richard Silverstein and M.J. Rosenberg are routinely savaged for daring to deviate from the party line on Israel. Not many choose to subject themselves to this abuse, especially when much of it comes from your own friends, from your political cohort, from your people. Much easier to remain silent. Why has the New York Times run only one Op-Ed piece during the entire Gaza assault, while not a single one of its columnists weighed in until Bill Kristol's predictable defense of Israel on Monday? Because it's an unpleasant, no-win subject.
The subject of Israel splits the American left and the American intelligentsia, a fact that has had far-reaching consequences. As the historian Tony Judt has persuasively argued, divisions over Israel are a large part of the reason that the left's response to Bush's Iraq war was so feeble. Judt's piece, not surprisingly, was published by the London Review of Books, as was the Mearsheimer and Walt article that grew into their book. Ironically, there is a much more freewheeling debate about Israel's policies in Israel's superb newspaper Haaretz than there is any American paper. In a searing recent piece in the paper, "And there lie the bodies," Gideon Levy argued that Israel's indifference to Palestinian casualties is a sign of a collective moral collapse. "The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest," Levy wrote. No such piece could ever appear in any mainstream American publication.
As any student of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis knows, the best work on it has been done by Israelis. From Amos Elon to David Grossman, from Benny Morris (notwithstanding his later incarnation as an unabashed exponent of ethnic cleansing) to Ilan Pappe, from Amira Hass to Tom Segev, Israeli writers and historians have done the painstaking and courageous work that has made it possible to begin dismantling their state's founding myths and see it for what it is -- neither a supervillain nor a superhero, but a state like any other, which should be judged by the same standards as any other.
One of the reasons many people of good will are reluctant to speak out is that in one sense, the Israel rules reflect values and beliefs that are wholly admirable. Siding with Israel is a way of announcing solidarity with the Jewish people and a rejection of anti-Semitism. It is, in a sense, an apparently benign form of ethnic affirmative action: Israel gets extra credit on its moral SAT test. But affirmative action for Israel is like affirmative action for blacks. It is a concept with a sunset provision, one that must eventually fade away.
After 60 years of lockstep U.S. support, the era of Israeli exceptionalism must end. It is no longer justifiable, if it ever was. America may continue to have a "special relationship" with Israel, but that special relationship must be strictly limited: It cannot be allowed to damage America's larger interests. Israel is not synonymous with some transcendental, sentimental idea of Jewishness. It is simply a state, neither perfect nor imperfect, and must be treated like any other state. We can no longer afford to follow the Israel rules.
We cannot afford to for three reasons. First, Israel's current war, which it snuck in at a "perfect time" during the holidays and in the last days of its greatest "friend" and "supporter," George W. Bush, is immoral and illegal. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself, like any other state. But not all acts of self-defense are legally or morally equivalent.
Israel is "defending itself" against a people that it dispossessed and has occupied for decades, and specifically by bombing a densely populated territory that it has been collectively punishing for a year and a half. Collective punishment is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. By bombing universities, mosques, lines of graduating police recruits, farms and houses filled with women and children, Israel is violating the law of proportional response. It is the same strategy it pursued in its disastrous 2006 war against Lebanon, when it fired thousands of cluster bombs into civilian areas in the south so as to force a Shiite population transfer, and piling up heaps of corpses with the purpose of "bolstering its deterrence." Such actions, in which civilian casualties are accepted or even pursued in the interests of achieving strategic goals, are a textbook form of state terrorism, and under the circumstances of Israel's vise-grip on Palestinian lives, no more morally justifiable than Hamas' repellent attacks. America should not be supporting such actions, whether they are carried out by an ally or not.
Second, Israel's actions are harming America. In the eyes of the world, and in particular the Arab-Muslim world, whatever Israel does might as well have been done by America. We fund Israel to the tune of $3 billion a year, we provide its advanced weaponry and we carry diplomatic water for it. In effect, Israel is the U.S. Obviously, if its actions are harmful to our national interests, we should oppose them. And the Gaza assault is clearly inimical to our interests, unless one believes that making deadly enemies of most Arabs and Muslims in the world, and making the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace even more remote is in our national interests. One of the things that motivated Osama bin Laden to launch the 9/11 attacks was televised film of Israel bombing Beirut apartment buildings during its 1982 war. What burning hatred is being grown in Arab/Muslim hearts as Gaza explodes? And what bitter harvest will it produce?
Finally, Israel's actions are not in its own interest. As Talleyrand said of Napoleon's murder of the Duc d'Enghien, Israel's attack on Gaza is worse than a crime -- it is a blunder. Israel is attempting once again to ensure its security by killing its enemies, while refusing to acknowledge the reasons for their enmity or to pursue a just political settlement that would resolve the conflict. As Haaretz editor-at-large Aluf Benn, a perceptive analyst of the Israeli polity, pointed out in Salon, there are deep historical reasons for Israel's allegiance to a doctrine of overwhelming military superiority. It's a doctrine that goes back to the father of revisionist Zionism, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who insisted that Israel must break its foes' will to resist with an "iron wall." But as the last 60 years have shown, that live-by-the- sword ethos not only does not work, it is self-defeating.
Israel deserves lasting security. But it cannot kill its way into it. It may succeed in temporarily reducing the number of homemade rockets that Hamas fires into southern Israel. It may kill some Hamas leaders and militants and set back Hamas. As Benn notes, the Israeli assault has extremely modest strategic aims, and is merely intended to buy time: It is just "another one of Israel's long list of cross-border operations."
In this light, the 2008 Gaza war is little different from the Gaza raid of 1955 led by Ariel Sharon, in which Israeli paratroopers destroyed the Egyptian army headquarters on the outskirts of Gaza City, killing 37 Egyptian soldiers. The parallels between that raid and Israel's current assault are striking. According to historian Avi Shlaim in his classic "The Iron Wall," the 1955 raid was ordered by Israeli Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion to assuage public anger over terrorist fedayeen attacks, prove that he was a strong leader and "cut [Egyptian president Gamal Abdul] Nasser down to size by exposing the military impotence of his regime." Substitute Ehud Barak for Ben-Gurion, rocket attacks for fedayeen raids and Hamas for Nasser, and nothing has changed in 53 years. Except one crucial thing: The entire Arab-Muslim world now instantly sees the bloody consequences of Israel's actions on television.
And just as the 1955 Gaza raid did not end fedayeen attacks or diminish Nasser, any short-term security Israel may gain from its Gaza assault will be outweighed by the long-term deterioration of its strategic position. The Israeli attack will not finish off Hamas; it will eventually make it stronger, just as Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon made Hezbollah stronger. It will not crush the Palestinian desire for justice, or, sadly, for vengeance. It will not dry up the hatred that has poisoned so many minds on both sides of this tragic conflict -- it will only make it worse. It will not "teach the Arabs a lesson," or change the regional dynamic in its favor. It will only weaken Mahmoud Abbas and the moderate Arab states, which are increasingly seen by their people as quisling regimes. If Israel continues along this course, it will isolate itself from the rest of the world, which will increasingly see it as a rogue state.
I hold no brief for Hamas. Its use of terror is morally repellent, and its charter is filled with anti-Semitism. But one does not get to choose one's enemies -- and they are the ones you must make peace with. And at least a temporary peace is still possible. As the veteran Mideast analyst Helena Cobban has noted, Hamas is not a monolithic group of fanatical terrorists. It is prepared to sign off on a long-term truce with Israel.
Contrary to the Holocaustology that sees all Israel's enemies as the second coming of Adolf Hitler, Hamas is not the problem; it is a symptom. Treating it as the problem only prolongs the crisis. The problem is political and historical: the dispossession of Palestinians and the ongoing Israeli occupation of their land. Until that fundamental problem is resolved -- and the hour when it can be resolved by a two-state solution may already have passed -- Israel and America's attempts to bludgeon Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims into submission will only generate more hatred, more violence and ever more extremism.
What the gung-ho war hawks in Israel and America do not realize is that if Israel continues down this road, it will jeopardize its very existence. The world has changed, and time is not on Israel's side. Israel has always been surrounded by neighbors who detest it. Some of those states are ruled by regimes that have been bought off by the U.S., such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Afraid of their own Islamist radicals, they have remained largely silent as Israel has pounded Hamas. But those regimes will not last forever, and there is no guarantee that their successors will embrace the same policies. The real danger to Israel is radical Islam. Jihadism is the X factor that could threaten Israel's survival. Popular rage at Israel across the Arab-Muslim world has been festering for decades, and outrages like the Lebanon war and the Gaza assault have brought it to a boil. With their fury deprived of an outlet by their corrupt and sclerotic regimes, more and more Muslims are turning to religious radicalism.
Israel knows this story only too well because it helped create it. Israel strengthened Hamas in the 1980s because it wanted to undercut the PLO. Now it is trying to undercut Hamas, and by doing so, is strengthening al-Qaida-like jihadists. It is as if Israel actually wants to turn its political enemies into religious ones, so that it can convince itself and the world that it has no choice but to exterminate or be exterminated. In an age of portable weapons of mass destruction and suicidal zealots, this is not a wise strategy.
If the U.S. was truly Israel's best friend, as it claims it is, it would tell it unequivocally that its Gaza war and its larger policy of trying to pound its foes into submission is not just immoral, but counterproductive and injurious both to Israel's interests and America's. It would insist on an immediate cease-fire, which includes the lifting of the Israeli siege of Gaza, and begin pressuring both sides to accept a long-term political settlement, along the lines of the Arab League peace plan, the Clinton parameters and the Geneva Accords. It would bolster Abbas by dismantling settlements in the West Bank, removing checkpoints and improving Palestinian lives. It would insist that the best and only way to undermine the radical rejectionists and the jihadists (who are not the same thing) is through a just peace.
In the end, this isn't about ideology but results. The region is in chaos, hard-liners are gaining power and peace is further away than ever. President-elect Obama claims to be a pragmatist. This is his chance to prove it. He has the opportunity to change course, to start pursuing Mideast policies that work. He must make it clear to Israel that the blank check is expired, the amen corner disbanded.
If Obama has the wisdom and courage to reject the Israel rules, he can begin to broker a lasting Mideast peace, weaken extremists, restore America's standing in the region and ensure Israel's long-term viability. If he doesn't, the wound will simply keep festering, and the infection will keep spreading.
-- By Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon. com/opinion/ kamiya/2009/ 01/06/gaza_ war/
reanimator
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
When everyone gets tired of laughing at Road Dog for cutting & pasting:LMAO
The reason you hate Hannity is because he exposes every warped value you clowns believe in. The reason you like Maddow? Because she comes across as a stupid broad. Besides, she's a dike. And if she were black you'd have a dream come true liberal trilogy!:+textinb3:+textinb3:+textinb3
When everyone gets tired of laughing at Road Dog for cutting & pasting:LMAO
The reason you hate Hannity is because he exposes every warped value you clowns believe in. The reason you like Maddow? Because she comes across as a stupid broad. Besides, she's a dike. And if she were black you'd have a dream come true liberal trilogy!:+textinb3:+textinb3:+textinb3
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Dawg:
this says it soooooo well:
After five years of George W. Bush's "war on terror," a war whose ideology and methods followed Israel's militarist approach to the letter, and which has failed in every conceivable way
Dawg:
this says it soooooo well:
After five years of George W. Bush's "war on terror," a war whose ideology and methods followed Israel's militarist approach to the letter, and which has failed in every conceivable way
reanimator
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
I wonder....do all liberal nutjobs talk to themselves and respond to their own posts on these forums?:LMAOBut at least with the 2 chances you give yourself each time you could at least get the facts straight (not to mention the oft-unintended glaring spelling & grammar errors....:+textinb3)
The country's "war on terror" has been for the last SEVEN years:LMAO
And there's no such thing as "failure" when thousands upon thousands of Islamic extremists are either killed, wounded, imprisoned or ridiculed. We should learn a thing or two about eliminating T-O-L-E-R-A-N-C-E and D-I-V-E-R-S-I-T-Y from our vocabulary as the Israelis obviously have. The best ridicule I've seen and with the most mocking effect, is to piss on their violence-inducing Koran as they look on!
op:
I wonder....do all liberal nutjobs talk to themselves and respond to their own posts on these forums?:LMAOBut at least with the 2 chances you give yourself each time you could at least get the facts straight (not to mention the oft-unintended glaring spelling & grammar errors....:+textinb3)
The country's "war on terror" has been for the last SEVEN years:LMAO
And there's no such thing as "failure" when thousands upon thousands of Islamic extremists are either killed, wounded, imprisoned or ridiculed. We should learn a thing or two about eliminating T-O-L-E-R-A-N-C-E and D-I-V-E-R-S-I-T-Y from our vocabulary as the Israelis obviously have. The best ridicule I've seen and with the most mocking effect, is to piss on their violence-inducing Koran as they look on!
op:
mr merlin
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
You can always tell when the israelies(or us) are doing well in a conflict because the arabs will start demanding a cease fire and all of a sudden they are real concerned about civilian casualties(after randomly firing rockets the other way).
You can always tell when the israelies(or us) are doing well in a conflict because the arabs will start demanding a cease fire and all of a sudden they are real concerned about civilian casualties(after randomly firing rockets the other way).
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Hezbollah is holding back for now ....
2009 most likely we see a 3 front war break out as Hezbollah has been
stockpiling in the Beka
Hezbollah is holding back for now ....
2009 most likely we see a 3 front war break out as Hezbollah has been
stockpiling in the Beka
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Id maybe if u heard both sides of the argument and not be a blind follower of our jewish press u might think differently. Then again i doubt it. Why is it that all around the world people are protesting Israel and there isn't one protest in another country supporting Israel?
January 9th, 2009 3:04 pm
30 Confirmed Dead in Shelling of Gaza Family
By Alan Cowell / New York Times
The death toll in the shelling of a family compound in Gaza rose to 30, the United Nations said in a report issued on Friday, as relief workers continued to comb through wreckage they had been denied access to for days after the attack.
The episode has ignited intense international criticism of the Israeli military for its failure to allow relief workers to reach the scene in a timely manner. On Friday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, also pointed to the deaths in the family compound as cause for an independent investigation into possible war crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza.
"Incidents such as this must be investigated because they display elements of what could constitute war crimes," she told Reuters.
Initial reports on Monday said 11 members of the extended Samouni family had been killed and 26 wounded, according to witnesses and hospital officials, with five children aged 4 and under among the dead.
The new report, by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, was based on eyewitness accounts. It did not give a figure for the number wounded.
"There was no water, no bread, nothing to eat," in the days after the shelling, 13-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim Samouni, whose mother was among those killed, told Reuters. "I got up on my own. I had my wound tied and I got up to get them water from outside, trying to hide from tanks and planes. I went to our neighbors and called on them until I almost fainted. I brought a gallon of water."
Members of the Samouni family said that they were rounded up late Sunday night by Israeli soldiers and ordered to gather for their own safety in a single dwelling in the impoverished Zeitoun district of Gaza city, a Hamas stronghold. The next morning, they said, the building was shelled.
In its report on Friday, the United Nations agency confirmed the family's account, saying that 110 people had been forced into the house on Sunday. "The next day the house was shelled," Allegra Pacheco, an agency spokeswoman, told BBC television, quoting unidentified witnesses.
Only on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement on Thursday, did Israel give Red Cross representatives permission to enter Zeitoun, and what the operatives found there chilled them. Four small children in the Samouni household, so weak they could not stand unassisted, cowered next to the corpses of slain mothers, the Red Cross said on Thursday. At least 12 corpses lay on mattresses and three more bodies were found in another house.
Surviving family members said they were sure more people remained buried under the rubble without food or water, and were in danger of dying. Members of B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, told the Washington Post that soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces were in the neighborhood and aware of the citizens' misery.
"What these family members say consistently is that the I.D.F. was close by," said a spokeswoman for the group. "This wasn't some remote area."
Family members said they had been trying since last Saturday to contact the Red Cross to be evacuated but no help came. At the time, Israeli forces were in the early stages of a ground offensive in Gaza, and relief workers were barred from the area.
Initial accounts by members of the Samouni family said they believed the house in which they gathered had been the target of an air-strike at 6 a.m. Monday. But the Red Cross said Thursday that the building had been "affected by Israeli shelling."
The Zeitoun killings have ignited an international outcry. While Ms. Pacheco said her organization was reserving judgment for now about who was responsible for the 30 reported deaths, the Red Cross issued a rare and sharply critical statement saying it believed "the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded."
Israeli officials said that they were examining all the allegations, that they did not aim at civilians and that they were not certain that the source of fire that killed and wounded the United Nations drivers was Israeli.
"We do our utmost to avoid hitting civilians, and many times we don't fire because we see civilians nearby," said Maj. Avital Leibovich, chief army spokeswoman for the foreign media. "We are holding meetings with U.N. officials to try to work out a mechanism so that their work can go forward."
She said that the army learned of the Red Cross allegations in a media report, and that the committee had not yet presented the evidence of what she called "these very serious allegations" to the army.
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Id maybe if u heard both sides of the argument and not be a blind follower of our jewish press u might think differently. Then again i doubt it. Why is it that all around the world people are protesting Israel and there isn't one protest in another country supporting Israel?
January 9th, 2009 3:04 pm
30 Confirmed Dead in Shelling of Gaza Family
By Alan Cowell / New York Times
The death toll in the shelling of a family compound in Gaza rose to 30, the United Nations said in a report issued on Friday, as relief workers continued to comb through wreckage they had been denied access to for days after the attack.
The episode has ignited intense international criticism of the Israeli military for its failure to allow relief workers to reach the scene in a timely manner. On Friday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, also pointed to the deaths in the family compound as cause for an independent investigation into possible war crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza.
"Incidents such as this must be investigated because they display elements of what could constitute war crimes," she told Reuters.
Initial reports on Monday said 11 members of the extended Samouni family had been killed and 26 wounded, according to witnesses and hospital officials, with five children aged 4 and under among the dead.
The new report, by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, was based on eyewitness accounts. It did not give a figure for the number wounded.
"There was no water, no bread, nothing to eat," in the days after the shelling, 13-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim Samouni, whose mother was among those killed, told Reuters. "I got up on my own. I had my wound tied and I got up to get them water from outside, trying to hide from tanks and planes. I went to our neighbors and called on them until I almost fainted. I brought a gallon of water."
Members of the Samouni family said that they were rounded up late Sunday night by Israeli soldiers and ordered to gather for their own safety in a single dwelling in the impoverished Zeitoun district of Gaza city, a Hamas stronghold. The next morning, they said, the building was shelled.
In its report on Friday, the United Nations agency confirmed the family's account, saying that 110 people had been forced into the house on Sunday. "The next day the house was shelled," Allegra Pacheco, an agency spokeswoman, told BBC television, quoting unidentified witnesses.
Only on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement on Thursday, did Israel give Red Cross representatives permission to enter Zeitoun, and what the operatives found there chilled them. Four small children in the Samouni household, so weak they could not stand unassisted, cowered next to the corpses of slain mothers, the Red Cross said on Thursday. At least 12 corpses lay on mattresses and three more bodies were found in another house.
Surviving family members said they were sure more people remained buried under the rubble without food or water, and were in danger of dying. Members of B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, told the Washington Post that soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces were in the neighborhood and aware of the citizens' misery.
"What these family members say consistently is that the I.D.F. was close by," said a spokeswoman for the group. "This wasn't some remote area."
Family members said they had been trying since last Saturday to contact the Red Cross to be evacuated but no help came. At the time, Israeli forces were in the early stages of a ground offensive in Gaza, and relief workers were barred from the area.
Initial accounts by members of the Samouni family said they believed the house in which they gathered had been the target of an air-strike at 6 a.m. Monday. But the Red Cross said Thursday that the building had been "affected by Israeli shelling."
The Zeitoun killings have ignited an international outcry. While Ms. Pacheco said her organization was reserving judgment for now about who was responsible for the 30 reported deaths, the Red Cross issued a rare and sharply critical statement saying it believed "the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded."
Israeli officials said that they were examining all the allegations, that they did not aim at civilians and that they were not certain that the source of fire that killed and wounded the United Nations drivers was Israeli.
"We do our utmost to avoid hitting civilians, and many times we don't fire because we see civilians nearby," said Maj. Avital Leibovich, chief army spokeswoman for the foreign media. "We are holding meetings with U.N. officials to try to work out a mechanism so that their work can go forward."
She said that the army learned of the Red Cross allegations in a media report, and that the committee had not yet presented the evidence of what she called "these very serious allegations" to the army.
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reanimator
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
IDENTITY SAID: "Why is it that all around the world people are protesting Israel and there isn't one protest in another country supporting Israel?"
Because just as in this country, only the idiots, the violence lovers, and the ignorant march in the streets and protest. You never see conservatives make such fools of themselves, toss bombs, throw rocks, or try to get arrested, because most all of them are responsible citizens backing the people who are doing the right things.
In the Gaza case, of course, the worldwide Muslims are playing the role of the protesting fools, because they know their side asked for it, they're getting it crammed BIG TIME! up their miserable asses...AND THEY DON'T LIKE IT!
Muslims are good at protesting, burning flags, firing guns in the air like morons, and wasting all their time shouting hate. Why? Because most of them are poor slobs, and they have absolutely nothing to lose from running around making idiots out of themselves. Third world protesting methods are something successful Americans & Jews expect and admire, because it makes them look all the more foolish.91023i2ndw;l
IDENTITY SAID: "Why is it that all around the world people are protesting Israel and there isn't one protest in another country supporting Israel?"
Because just as in this country, only the idiots, the violence lovers, and the ignorant march in the streets and protest. You never see conservatives make such fools of themselves, toss bombs, throw rocks, or try to get arrested, because most all of them are responsible citizens backing the people who are doing the right things.
In the Gaza case, of course, the worldwide Muslims are playing the role of the protesting fools, because they know their side asked for it, they're getting it crammed BIG TIME! up their miserable asses...AND THEY DON'T LIKE IT!
Muslims are good at protesting, burning flags, firing guns in the air like morons, and wasting all their time shouting hate. Why? Because most of them are poor slobs, and they have absolutely nothing to lose from running around making idiots out of themselves. Third world protesting methods are something successful Americans & Jews expect and admire, because it makes them look all the more foolish.91023i2ndw;l
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
What about the marchers on Tianemmen Square? The protestors in many Latin American countries throughout the 1980s challenging US protected dictatorships and getting slaughtered?
ID, also you are crazy if you think Israel hasn't attacked civvies before. They have.
What about the marchers on Tianemmen Square? The protestors in many Latin American countries throughout the 1980s challenging US protected dictatorships and getting slaughtered?
ID, also you are crazy if you think Israel hasn't attacked civvies before. They have.
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
You never see conservatives make such fools of themselves ...
:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO
You never see conservatives make such fools of themselves ...
:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO:LMAO
IDENTITY
2
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
israel does not target innocent civilians. hamas has a whole city of tunnels built in gaza. israel is bombing it. bombing the rocket launching locations. i have no sympathy for the hamas sympathizers who are killed in these defensive missions.
israel does not target innocent civilians. hamas has a whole city of tunnels built in gaza. israel is bombing it. bombing the rocket launching locations. i have no sympathy for the hamas sympathizers who are killed in these defensive missions.
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
This is a nitemare ...
Israel is like Roseanne Barr's husband: ya either fuck or ya get fucked on other fronts
This is a nitemare ...
Israel is like Roseanne Barr's husband: ya either fuck or ya get fucked on other fronts
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
It's like this:
It's like this:
Doc Mercer
EOG Master
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Thank God Bush had nothing to do with Hamas coming into power:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
Thank God Bush had nothing to do with Hamas coming into power:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
no, really it's like this:
It's like this:
no, really it's like this:
reanimator
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Excellent! And just another reason why no one in the world really cares about the idiotic, immoral "innocent civilians" who get wiped off the face of the earth while sympathizing with a terrorist organization.
It's like this:
Excellent! And just another reason why no one in the world really cares about the idiotic, immoral "innocent civilians" who get wiped off the face of the earth while sympathizing with a terrorist organization.
prymetyme6
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Hey Road Dawg....How the the fuck would you handle rockets coming into your country for the last 6 years....12,000 rockets....How the fuck do you handle it??
Israel is doing everything they can to limit civilians...But when Hamas on purpose uses the civilians as shields its almost impossible...
So once again, Road Dawg, how the hell would you handle this mess? Do you just let the rockets pour into your country?
All Israel wants is to live in peace. All Hamas wants is the destruction of Israel. The only negotiating they want is to get the land of Israel.
What the fuck would the United States do if Canada slummed in rockets daily into minnesota??
Oh yea and Fuck Alabama....Loved when my gators crushed....
Hey Road Dawg....How the the fuck would you handle rockets coming into your country for the last 6 years....12,000 rockets....How the fuck do you handle it??
Israel is doing everything they can to limit civilians...But when Hamas on purpose uses the civilians as shields its almost impossible...
So once again, Road Dawg, how the hell would you handle this mess? Do you just let the rockets pour into your country?
All Israel wants is to live in peace. All Hamas wants is the destruction of Israel. The only negotiating they want is to get the land of Israel.
What the fuck would the United States do if Canada slummed in rockets daily into minnesota??
Oh yea and Fuck Alabama....Loved when my gators crushed....
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Pure Propaganda From the Papers of Record
Philip Giraldi
The Israeli propaganda machine has called up its allies in the media and Congress to make sure that no one will condemn the invasion of Gaza, which has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians, most of them civilians and many of them children. The pictures of small bodies lined up to be buried are convincing evidence that something is very wrong in Gaza, but leaders in Congress from both parties have nonetheless rallied to the cause of Israeli victimhood, putting all the blame for the conflict on the Palestinians.
Folks outside the United States who do not have the benefit of the Israel lobby to guide their thinking are seeing the carnage in a different way, noting the disproportionate nature of the Israeli attack and also the unlikelihood that Tel Aviv's stated objectives are obtainable without utterly destroying Gaza's infrastructure and turning the strip of land into a military-occupied moonscape. Many are also wondering what Israel's actual goals might be, since the invasion will only empower Hamas politically, not destroy it. Is it to tie the incoming Obama administration irrevocably to Israel's security agenda or to strengthen the Kadima Party in the lead-up to national elections next month? Only time will tell, but, as always, the Palestinians will bear the brunt of the suffering, and the United States will surely pay some price for green-lighting the Israeli offensive.
The Washington Post, as always, has not been shy in its support of Israel. It has featured editorials and a preponderance of letters to the editor strongly supporting the Israeli position. No less than 11 opinion pieces by Israeli politicians Tzipi Livni and Ephraim Sneh, American professor Robert Lieber, Israeli academic Yossi Klein Halevi, Jim Hoagland, John Bolton, Michael Gerson, and Charles Krauthammer (twice) have all exonerated Tel Aviv in the current crisis and accused Hamas of being solely responsible. Referring to the invasion, Richard Cohen wrote last week that " It takes real stupidity to blame it on Israel." That shared the page with a piece by Anne Applebaum that asserted, astonishingly, that Hamas believes " the continuing firing of rockets into southern Israel will, sooner or later, somehow bring about the dissolution of the Jewish state." It is clear that complete ignorance of what one is writing about has never deterred anyone on the Post's opinion pages.
The Post also did not ignore the visual message, making sure that Israeli suffering was seen to be at least equal to that of the Palestinians. On its front page on Dec. 30, it featured side-by-side photos of a weeping Palestinian woman whose five young daughters had been killed by an Israeli bomb next to an elderly Israeli women obviously distraught because a Palestinian rocket had "hit the town of Sderot," killing and injuring no one. That, apparently, is parity at the Washington Post.
The New York Times has been little better, with its letters to the editor, op-eds, and editorials supporting Israel's right "to defend itself" countered only by a single splendid rebuttal piece by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Two pieces by the paper's resident "conservatives" were particularly revealing. Bill Kristol and David Brooks are a latter-day Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, though it is sometimes difficult to tell who is the straight man and who is the clown. Both invariably present their arguments dishonestly, setting up straw men and laying out questionable assumptions that inevitably lead to the answer they are seeking.
They also work in tandem. Kristol, a good deal less clever than Brooks, sets up the official line on Mondays in terms that are sure to be heavily criticized, and Brooks follows a day or two later with a much subtler presentation of the same bill of goods. The Times reader, impressed by the greater sophistication of Brooks, nods his head in agreement, unaware that he has also pretty much bought into Kristol. This syncretism should not surprise anyone, however, as Brooks once worked for Kristol at the Weekly Standard.
Kristol's " Why Israel Fights" is dedicated to convincing the reader that Israel is fighting the Islamofascists in Gaza so that the United States will not have to do so. According to Kristol, "An Israeli success in Gaza would be a victory in the war on terror – and in the broader struggle for the future of the Middle East." He describes Hamas as a "terror-friendly and almost death-cult-like form of Islamic extremism" allied "with a terror-sponsoring and nuclear-weapons- seeking Iranian state (aided by its sidekick Syria)." As the U.S. is also a target of "Islamic terror," Washington must "stand with Israel as it fights," because Israel is "doing the United States a favor by taking on Hamas now." If Israel had "refrained from using force to stop terror attacks, it would have been a victory for Iran." Finally, "Israel's willingness to fight makes it more possible that the United States may not have to."
Kristol's op-ed touches all the hot buttons – nuclear weapons, terrorists, Iran, and even hapless Syria – and he argues that only Israel is willing to stand up to the challenge. And he makes clear to Mr. American Reader that Israel's savvy politicians are doing something that protects the United States and could make it less necessary for Washington to get involved in a new shooting war. Kristol's surmises and linkages are, of course, largely hogwash, from his embrace of the "war on terror" concept to his demonization of Iran. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are primarily resistance movements that have grown into political parties, something that Kristol knows perfectly well. Neither threatens the United States. Israel was and is a colonial power intent on strangling the Palestinians so it can steal their land. If the Palestinians respond to violence with violence, it is not surprising, nor is it necessarily in America's national interest to further Israel's apartheid policies.
David Brooks' " The Confidence War" takes off in a slightly different direction, arguing that Israel invaded Gaza to gain the psychological advantage over its opponents. Along the way, he observes that "extremist groups believe in the eventual extermination of Israel . … The extremists' goal is to kill as many Jews as possible and wait for God (or Iran) to kill the rest." Israel however, seeks to "restrain the brazenness of the extremists … and to suppress terrorism week by week and month by month." Israel's violence "doesn't necessarily beget violence. It sometimes prevents it." Brooks also praises the deadly efficacy of the Israeli assault in which numerous targets were hit simultaneously from the air, a reversal of Lebanon 2006 and evidence of the "recuperative powers a democracy is capable of" (sic).
For Brooks, an Israeli victory is essential to gain the upper hand over extremists and terrorists and to "master events," his framing of the argument coming full circle and his message reinforcing that of Kristol. Arabs who oppose Israel are always terrorists and extremists. Brooks assumes that his readers will agree that all of Israel's opponents in the Middle East seek the Jewish state's extermination in spite of all the evidence that a solid majority among Palestinians and even Iranians are willing to accept Israel's existence and do not want a war. Israel, by way of contrast, is portrayed as a democracy that acts with restraint and only reacts to evil. The horrors of its settlement policy, which has been the single greatest factor in creating the current reality, are not mentioned. Brooks' observation that violence itself can have a salutary effect if it terrifies people enough to inhibit further violence would seem to be fallacious if one looks at the endless of cycle of conflict that Israel's heavy-handedness has thus far provoked.
In short, to read America's self-described newspapers of record is to receive the Israeli propaganda line in its purest form. There are signs that many Americans are not buying into the nonsense, that an increasing percentage sympathize with the Palestinians and even more do not want the U.S. involved in the conflict. The rise of the Internet as a source of information, which makes it as easy to read papers from London or Dubai as from New York, has been a dramatic development. It is now harder for the Israeli spinners to make believe that an attack on a school was actually a strike against terrorism when the evidence to the contrary can be found on YouTube. Hopefully some day, the information explosion will completely discredit pundits like Brooks and Kristol and put them out of business.
http://www.antiwar. com/orig/ giraldi.php? articleid= 14044
Pure Propaganda From the Papers of Record
Philip Giraldi
The Israeli propaganda machine has called up its allies in the media and Congress to make sure that no one will condemn the invasion of Gaza, which has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians, most of them civilians and many of them children. The pictures of small bodies lined up to be buried are convincing evidence that something is very wrong in Gaza, but leaders in Congress from both parties have nonetheless rallied to the cause of Israeli victimhood, putting all the blame for the conflict on the Palestinians.
Folks outside the United States who do not have the benefit of the Israel lobby to guide their thinking are seeing the carnage in a different way, noting the disproportionate nature of the Israeli attack and also the unlikelihood that Tel Aviv's stated objectives are obtainable without utterly destroying Gaza's infrastructure and turning the strip of land into a military-occupied moonscape. Many are also wondering what Israel's actual goals might be, since the invasion will only empower Hamas politically, not destroy it. Is it to tie the incoming Obama administration irrevocably to Israel's security agenda or to strengthen the Kadima Party in the lead-up to national elections next month? Only time will tell, but, as always, the Palestinians will bear the brunt of the suffering, and the United States will surely pay some price for green-lighting the Israeli offensive.
The Washington Post, as always, has not been shy in its support of Israel. It has featured editorials and a preponderance of letters to the editor strongly supporting the Israeli position. No less than 11 opinion pieces by Israeli politicians Tzipi Livni and Ephraim Sneh, American professor Robert Lieber, Israeli academic Yossi Klein Halevi, Jim Hoagland, John Bolton, Michael Gerson, and Charles Krauthammer (twice) have all exonerated Tel Aviv in the current crisis and accused Hamas of being solely responsible. Referring to the invasion, Richard Cohen wrote last week that " It takes real stupidity to blame it on Israel." That shared the page with a piece by Anne Applebaum that asserted, astonishingly, that Hamas believes " the continuing firing of rockets into southern Israel will, sooner or later, somehow bring about the dissolution of the Jewish state." It is clear that complete ignorance of what one is writing about has never deterred anyone on the Post's opinion pages.
The Post also did not ignore the visual message, making sure that Israeli suffering was seen to be at least equal to that of the Palestinians. On its front page on Dec. 30, it featured side-by-side photos of a weeping Palestinian woman whose five young daughters had been killed by an Israeli bomb next to an elderly Israeli women obviously distraught because a Palestinian rocket had "hit the town of Sderot," killing and injuring no one. That, apparently, is parity at the Washington Post.
The New York Times has been little better, with its letters to the editor, op-eds, and editorials supporting Israel's right "to defend itself" countered only by a single splendid rebuttal piece by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Two pieces by the paper's resident "conservatives" were particularly revealing. Bill Kristol and David Brooks are a latter-day Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, though it is sometimes difficult to tell who is the straight man and who is the clown. Both invariably present their arguments dishonestly, setting up straw men and laying out questionable assumptions that inevitably lead to the answer they are seeking.
They also work in tandem. Kristol, a good deal less clever than Brooks, sets up the official line on Mondays in terms that are sure to be heavily criticized, and Brooks follows a day or two later with a much subtler presentation of the same bill of goods. The Times reader, impressed by the greater sophistication of Brooks, nods his head in agreement, unaware that he has also pretty much bought into Kristol. This syncretism should not surprise anyone, however, as Brooks once worked for Kristol at the Weekly Standard.
Kristol's " Why Israel Fights" is dedicated to convincing the reader that Israel is fighting the Islamofascists in Gaza so that the United States will not have to do so. According to Kristol, "An Israeli success in Gaza would be a victory in the war on terror – and in the broader struggle for the future of the Middle East." He describes Hamas as a "terror-friendly and almost death-cult-like form of Islamic extremism" allied "with a terror-sponsoring and nuclear-weapons- seeking Iranian state (aided by its sidekick Syria)." As the U.S. is also a target of "Islamic terror," Washington must "stand with Israel as it fights," because Israel is "doing the United States a favor by taking on Hamas now." If Israel had "refrained from using force to stop terror attacks, it would have been a victory for Iran." Finally, "Israel's willingness to fight makes it more possible that the United States may not have to."
Kristol's op-ed touches all the hot buttons – nuclear weapons, terrorists, Iran, and even hapless Syria – and he argues that only Israel is willing to stand up to the challenge. And he makes clear to Mr. American Reader that Israel's savvy politicians are doing something that protects the United States and could make it less necessary for Washington to get involved in a new shooting war. Kristol's surmises and linkages are, of course, largely hogwash, from his embrace of the "war on terror" concept to his demonization of Iran. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are primarily resistance movements that have grown into political parties, something that Kristol knows perfectly well. Neither threatens the United States. Israel was and is a colonial power intent on strangling the Palestinians so it can steal their land. If the Palestinians respond to violence with violence, it is not surprising, nor is it necessarily in America's national interest to further Israel's apartheid policies.
David Brooks' " The Confidence War" takes off in a slightly different direction, arguing that Israel invaded Gaza to gain the psychological advantage over its opponents. Along the way, he observes that "extremist groups believe in the eventual extermination of Israel . … The extremists' goal is to kill as many Jews as possible and wait for God (or Iran) to kill the rest." Israel however, seeks to "restrain the brazenness of the extremists … and to suppress terrorism week by week and month by month." Israel's violence "doesn't necessarily beget violence. It sometimes prevents it." Brooks also praises the deadly efficacy of the Israeli assault in which numerous targets were hit simultaneously from the air, a reversal of Lebanon 2006 and evidence of the "recuperative powers a democracy is capable of" (sic).
For Brooks, an Israeli victory is essential to gain the upper hand over extremists and terrorists and to "master events," his framing of the argument coming full circle and his message reinforcing that of Kristol. Arabs who oppose Israel are always terrorists and extremists. Brooks assumes that his readers will agree that all of Israel's opponents in the Middle East seek the Jewish state's extermination in spite of all the evidence that a solid majority among Palestinians and even Iranians are willing to accept Israel's existence and do not want a war. Israel, by way of contrast, is portrayed as a democracy that acts with restraint and only reacts to evil. The horrors of its settlement policy, which has been the single greatest factor in creating the current reality, are not mentioned. Brooks' observation that violence itself can have a salutary effect if it terrifies people enough to inhibit further violence would seem to be fallacious if one looks at the endless of cycle of conflict that Israel's heavy-handedness has thus far provoked.
In short, to read America's self-described newspapers of record is to receive the Israeli propaganda line in its purest form. There are signs that many Americans are not buying into the nonsense, that an increasing percentage sympathize with the Palestinians and even more do not want the U.S. involved in the conflict. The rise of the Internet as a source of information, which makes it as easy to read papers from London or Dubai as from New York, has been a dramatic development. It is now harder for the Israeli spinners to make believe that an attack on a school was actually a strike against terrorism when the evidence to the contrary can be found on YouTube. Hopefully some day, the information explosion will completely discredit pundits like Brooks and Kristol and put them out of business.
http://www.antiwar. com/orig/ giraldi.php? articleid= 14044
prymetyme6
EOG Addicted
Re: Hamas attacks civilians; Israel attacks terrorists.
Road Dawg...Anyone can find articles that are one sided both ways...You dumb FUck...go post another article, im sure there are thousands of them....
Do you want me to show you 10 videos of the past week that show Hamas firing rockets from Mosques, Schools, and right near UN buildings? Answer this question.
Do you not want Israel to exist? If so, how should they with constant attack?
Road dawg if your such a big man answer my questions.....if you post another bullshit article well...then GO FUCK YOURSELF
Road Dawg...Anyone can find articles that are one sided both ways...You dumb FUck...go post another article, im sure there are thousands of them....
Do you want me to show you 10 videos of the past week that show Hamas firing rockets from Mosques, Schools, and right near UN buildings? Answer this question.
Do you not want Israel to exist? If so, how should they with constant attack?
Road dawg if your such a big man answer my questions.....if you post another bullshit article well...then GO FUCK YOURSELF