Huda Kishawi is a Palestinian teenager living in Gaza. She has received several English language scholarships in the past and has a passion for writin
The world needs to wake up and realize what life is like for people in Gaza.
My name is Huda Kishawi, a 16-year-old Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip. While the constant shelling of Gaza has calmed down despite the end of a ceasefire, I am writing to let the world imagine the plight of Gazans.
I have witnessed three wars so far, but this is the worst conflict I have ever experienced. Since June, my brother and I have waited in Gaza City for the Egyptian border to open, in order to travel and follow our parents who had left the territory in that same month. I didn’t expect a war to be just around the corner.
Over the first couple of days, we heard loud explosions that quickly escalated, with heavy airstrikes taking place in different parts of the territory. The situation continued to worsen and it was clear that a new war on Gaza had begun. The death toll soon rose and continues to take the lives of innocent civilians; it currently stands at over 2,035 Palestinians.
From the onset, we heard news of entire families being wiped out by Israeli shelling. Images of innocent children who were sleeping or playing when they were targeted surely brought tears to those watching international news. Indeed, it is a very difficult moment when you witness a father wanting to say farewell to his sons, but instead their bodies are just a pile of ash; or when you see a mother holding her dead daughter and collecting her body parts after a missile obliterates their home; or when you see children covering their ears so they can’t hear the constant sound of bombs exploding. That’s the situation of people living in the open air prison of Gaza.
It is also a horrific moment when the shelling gets closer and you don’t know if you have to evacuate your home. Will you be able to take everything with you? Or will you have to leave all your past behind and only be left with memories, should a missile turn your bedroom into broken bricks? In these moments, it is impossible to imagine what will happen next. When the attacks escalated at the height of hostilities, people asked themselves: Where can we go? What can we do? Will our lives end in the next few minutes? It has been so difficult to answer these simple questions.
Nowhere To Go
It is true the Israeli military had warned some people to evacuate, but the problem was, where do you go? The fear is that the place you are evacuating to might be the next target. That’s why a lot people sought shelter in UN schools, but even those were hit by Israel. Simply put, Palestinians had nowhere to run and hide. Thousands of houses that were full of happiness and memories were completely or partially demolished. If neighboring countries such as Egypt don’t stand by our side, who will help us overcome this crisis?
It is a very difficult moment when you witness a father wanting to say farewell to his sons, but instead their bodies are just a pile of ash; or when you see a mother holding her dead daughter and collecting her body parts after a missile obliterates their home; or when you see children covering their ears so they can’t hear the constant sound of bombs exploding. That’s the situation of people living in the open air prison of Gaza.
Our only crossing point to the outside world that is not controlled by Israel was closed by Egyptian authorities for almost two months, which prevented thousands of desperate people from fleeing Gaza. We just want the border crossing to stay open to allow Palestinians to evacuate under these difficult conditions, and to allow injured people to get the medical help they need. Just think of those dozens of people killed because of the lack of medical supplies. Does this not push you to support your fellow humans in Gaza?
Before the recent ceasefire, people braced themselves for more massacres, similar to what happened in the Shujayea neighborhood, in Rafah and Khan Younis. But the problems in Gaza took on another dimension when Israel bombed the only power station that provides the territory with electricity. Don’t you think this level of suffering is more than enough? Don’t you think the people of Gaza have the right to live like every other person on earth?
It is probably impossible for most people to imagine the exact feelings of Palestinians living under constant attack. We are tired of this harsh lifestyle we have to endure. If we don’t die from missiles or fear controlling us, we might die from thirst as water has been running out. Our lives have stopped. Hospitals are chaotic and running out of supplies; it has gotten to the point where even beds are scarce. In fact, everything has been scarce since Gaza’s door was locked in 2007.
Despite all this, many people around the world support Israel and accuse us of being “terrorists.” If you are still convinced it is Israel’s right to defend itself from atrocities by targeting mosques, hospitals, UN schools, demolishing houses filled with civilians and decimating Gaza’s infrastructure — and you don’t believe it has violated international law — I am not going to explain the plight of Palestinians anymore. My only wish is to stay alive and return to a peaceful life. The world needs to wake up and realize what life is like for people in Gaza.
For the Palestinians, the choice is between occupation by proxy in the West Bank and a war in Gaza. Both offer no hope, and neither are forms of freedom. The Israeli promise — that an end to armed struggle will bring freedom — is not trustworthy, as the experiences of past years has shown. It simply never happens. The quiet years in the West Bank have not brought the Palestinians any closer to an independent state, while the truce in between wars in Gaza has not brought about a relief from the siege. One can debate the reasons for why this happened, but one cannot debate reality.
Hamas tells the Palestinians the simple truth: freedom comes at the cost of blood. The tragedy is that we usually provide the evidence. After all, the evacuation of settlements in Gaza came after the Second Intifada, not as a result of negotiations. The Oslo Accords came after the First Intifada; before that, Israel turned down even the convenient London Agreement between Shimon Peres and Jordan’s King Hussein.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Gaza gunmen killed 18 alleged spies for Israel on Friday, including seven who were lined up behind a mosque and shot after midday prayers, in response to Israel's deadly airstrikes against top Hamas leaders.
Two of those killed were women, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which called for an immediate halt to what it said were "extra-judicial executions."
Hamas media portrayed the killings as the beginning of a new crackdown, under the rallying cry of "choking the necks of the collaborators."
The Al Majd website, which is close to the Hamas security services, said suspects would now be dealt with "in the field" rather than in the courts in order to create deterrence.
The Hamas-run Al Rai said the same punishment would soon be imposed on others.
The killings came a day after an Israeli airstrike on a house in southern Gaza killed three senior military leaders of Hamas.
Earlier in the week, another strike killed the wife and two children of Mohammed Deif, who is in charge of the Hamas military wing. Deif's fate remains unclear.
Friday's events began with the shooting of 11 alleged informants at the Gaza City police headquarters in the morning. Of the 11, two were women, the Palestinian rights center said.
Later in the day, seven men were killed outside the city's downtown al-Omari mosque as worshippers were wrapping up noon prayers. Several dozen people were near the mosque at the time, said one of the witnesses, 42-year-old Ayman Sharif.
Sharif said masked gunmen lined up seven people against a wall. A piece of paper was affixed above the head of each of them, with his initials and his alleged crime.
Sharif quoted one of the gunmen as saying the seven "had sold their souls to the enemy for a cheap price" and had caused killing and destruction.
The commander of the group then gave the order to the others to open fire form their automatic rifles. He said the bodies were collected by an ambulance and the gunmen left.
Do you know what these spies do? They tell Israel whom to assassinate, how and where. We have and had their share in Lebanon. They do it for money and clout.
There is not to be any confusion here. Its a war being waged against Palestinians and the rule of war and, especially, the rules they live under are extraordinary and do not succumb to those of civilian life and peaceful relations between countries. Do we even imagine that the court system in Gaza functions properly under the conditions they live in? Do you know, for instance, that spies working for Israel in Gaza have been functioning without such punitive actions for many many years until this point, untilin a military this last murderous spree by their employer, Israel.
Yes, in a war, in a military situation, under such extraordinary situations, this is what happens to spies. The mention of court in that article is funny and I bet is being phrased without context...what court? Gaza is in ruins...and before it was in ruins, people were on the verge of near starvation, chocked by Israel's siege.
Yes, this will happen. But why do you paste it into this thread? By showing us that Hamas executes spies who help Israel in murdering Palestinian resistance factions and destroying PAlestinian infrastructure (erm, what, do you think they're going to give them a kiss on their forehead and let them go?) , do you wish to further vilify the Palestinians side by vilifying Hamas and therefore, in however pathetic manner possible, somehow suggest that Israel is not the actual villain here?
After its, Israel's, sordid history of a racist colonizer, its history of massacres and population displacement and this latest massacre of civilians and children...all you care to do is tell us that Hamas execute spies who make it easier for Israel to kill the Palestinian population? Atrociously myopic.
Russia Today's Cross Talk hosted Jadaliyya co-Editor Mouin Rabbani along with Daniel Calic and Norman Finkelstein for a discussion of Palestinian resistance to Israeli military incursion in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli blockade of Gaza was also discused, as was the question of whether Israeli bombardment of Gaza constitutes war crimes.
Benjamin Netanyahu was given the opportunity to choose between peace and war, and he chose war
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A relative of four Palestinian boys, all from the Bakr family, mourns over the body of one of the boys at the morgue of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, on July 16, 2014
“Mowing the lawn.” That’s the obscene phrase used in Israeli military circles to describe how, every couple of years or so, Gaza is subjected to an awesome display of firepower to trim back Hamas’s military capabilities and ambitions.
...In fact, Israel’s Prime Minister was never serious about allowing the creation of an independent Palestine. How do I know? Because he said so himself, in stunning remarks on Friday which the world’s media has inexcusably ignored. Confirming what many of us have long suspected, Netanyahu argued that “there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” In other words, no Palestinian sovereignty on the West Bank, no two-state solution, and no peace.
This is the context to the violence we are now witnessing. Apart from providing catharsis for a nation still enraged by the West Bank kidnappings, the bloodletting is intended to counter the threat posed by Hamas pragmatism.
...Should it forget its lines in future and begin making moderate noises, Israel can always fire up the lawnmower again. In Gaza, all flesh is grass.
The remark, which likened killing hundreds of men, women and children – many of them noncombatants – with trimming the grass, was greeted with a light tittering around the room, which was filled with some of Washington’s most elite, highly educated and well-paid Middle East experts. Not a single one objected to the panelist’s black humor.
On the contrary, several analysts and experts were grinning at the reference to Israel’s strategy of mounting periodic attacks on the Palestinians to cull each new generation of militants. Such is the nonchalance of Washington’s policy-advising cognoscenti toward the ongoing and systematic genocide of Gaza’s oppressed population.
The cavalier language is symptomatic of the policymaking community’s increasingly pervasive tendency to disregard and disparage the humanity of Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks, which are often waged by Israel’s high-tech drones and U.S.-supplied F-16’s. There is also a tendency to ignore or downplay Israeli war crimes.
I've responded to you above and that's engagement enough. Are you also going to lie about whether I did or did not engage? Evidence is abundant here that I've engaged with people from the other side...except when they start to pretend like I've not engaged and carried on making the same insipid accusations as if my words meant little to them.
But if, by engagement, you want me to see, sympathize with and argue the side of the colonizing racist entity called Israel that has been founded on the murder, banishment and oppression of another people that is ongoing...and you want me to participate in that complicit and ugly game of demonizing the latter's resistance, there is no chance in hell. It is you, your brainwashed focusing on vilifying Hamas that clouds out the far larger picture, who refuses to engage with reality - who has been blinded by your biased media and political industry that profits in supporting the colonizing Zionist entity over the right of an indigenous people to remain on their land, without harassement, torture, being killed, being displaced,etc.
It is you who cannot engage with the reality that clearly demonstrates who is oppressing whom, who is stealing others' people's homes and lands as we speak and kicking them out, who massacres innocents and who has a long history of massacres to drive fear into the heart of people and force them to flee outside Palestine.
An oppressed and colonized people's right to resist is far above your ugly attempts at obfuscation and vilification- and has more humaneness at its heart that does brainwashing Zionist smear campaigns and lies. Of course I refuse to engage, in that sense, with their banal evil. I leave it to you, the weak of mind, the brainwashed to fall for that vile nonsense and "engage" with it.
"Hasbara engineers have tried to dismiss and demonise this groundswell of international solidarity with Palestinians by presenting it as an exclusively Muslim cause. Rallies in support of Palestine have always been diverse gatherings of people of all faiths and ethnicities. Condemnation of Israeli crimes has come from all around the world, including from Israeli intellectuals, international political figures andprominent academics. Even Israeli citizens have mobilised against the war in Gaza, against the hostile current of the majority."
Not like the childish personalized rants here by the anonymous posters, this is a valid counter argument against the boycott. I am just putting it out there neutrally. Something to think about and strategize.
Was that a serious question? You can find my answer here in this thread; I had absolutely no qualms about stating that Israel does not have the right to exist, did not have the right to exist and will not have the right to exist. Will you accuse me of anti-Semitism now? Are you going to go through that pathetic pile of Zionist rhetorical arsenal that means chicken shit now that its been outed as nothing but propaganda?
yes, its not childish - although I also don't see the behavior exhibited by some here as childish but rather yobbish, bullyish, and calculatedly subject to Zionist propaganda. I don't see why one should see this as childish. It is certainly vitriolic, sometimes plainly stupid and mostly redundant, tired and transparently disingenuous. Not really childish.
As for Noam Chomsky - and indeed Norman Finkelstein- both of who are paradoxically (as shown in their writings and interviews) against Israeli policies and yet are also against the BDS movement, I have yet to hear or read a valid logically admissible reason from both of them. It is without a doubt that the boycotting of the south African apartheid regime was paramount in leading to its fall. No where does Chomsky or Finkelstein really point out to why this would not work with Israel - the latter sees the boycott as a threat to it and the BDS movement is gaining greater traction with each year. There are many reasons to suspect that Chomsky's and Finkelstein's stance apropos the boycott movement are not driven solely by the proven logic that boycotting is an effective and peaceful tool to rein Israel in.
Yes, its not childish what he says...but that does not mean that its valid either. People in the BDS movement are well aware of what Chomsky and Finkelstein have to say about the BDS movement (and, indeed, each of these individuals for their own voiced objections).
To my mind, there is absolutely no ambiguity about this. You buy from Israel, you support it economically. You engage with it culturally, via its institutions and entities, you support it. You support it, you support the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. That Chomsky and Finkelstein don't see this will lead to their being left behind in the dust after a period where they were at the forefront of fighting for Palestinian rights.
".Professor Chomsky points out that South African apartheid is different than Israel’s. Yes, South Africa had no desire to ethnically cleanse the Africans, as their subjugation was the whole point, whereas an ethnically “pure” settler nation—well, with a sufficient supply of the Other left behind as cheap labor—is Israel’s. But … so? More specifically, Professor Chomsky says that those building the boycott movement against South Africa devoted years to educating and building a case, homework that the Palestinian movement has not done. This is not only a dubious argument on its face, but it is also untrue. People have worked tirelessly since the early 1950s to do precisely what the Professor advocates, but for reasons touched on above, these attempts at informing the public faced a particularly impenetrable wall. Even if we eliminate Palestinian writers and activists, whom the West sidelined altogether, there were people like Alfred Lilienthal and Moshe Menuhin actively and eloquently saying fifty and sixty years ago what still can barely be heard in the mainstream media. Palestinian and Western scholars continued to research, write, expose; and the voices grew numerous over the years, with Israeli scholars eventually joining the ranks. The cumulative wealth of documentation and activism is extraordinary. Yet Professor Chomsky dismisses the movement for justice in Israel-Palestine as not having done its homework?
But perhaps Professor Chomsky’s strangest statement of all, a rather terrifying statement on the face of it, is that “There is no reason to expect Israel to accept a Palestinian population it does not want.” There you have it, all condensed into one sentence, an admission that Israel is a racially predicated state and that the rights of the Palestinians themselves must remain subservient to it. There is no reason to expect a settler nation to accept the people whose land it took. Everything is framed in terms of what Israel wants, or what Israel will or will not agree to. Is this the same Noam Chomsky whose Manufacturing Consent and Fateful Triangle sit on my bookshelf?"
There are many reasons to suspect that Chomsky's and Finkelstein's stance apropos the boycott movement are not driven solely by the (fallible and historically discredited) rationale that boycotting is not an effective and peaceful tool to rein Israel in.
tammuz you are absolutely right on the "childish." I want to change it to your description. I apologize from the children.
Yes Chomsky has definitely made a blunder here in his strategic/logistical talk show.
BDS start to beat its drums really loudly now and it is partially responsible for Israelis to internalize the problem more louder than ever. There is a political momentum against the occupation (with all its giant chapters) and recent carnage, both in Israel and in Jewish communities overseas, not including the already well organized Arab opinion and writing accumulated over the years and not including changing public opinion around the world.
Really, with all due respect to Chomsky, what was he thinking saying "educating and building a case" ?
Tammuz, what is the end-goal that you envision or propose? The formation of a new state? The displacement of Jews from the region? I'm asking in earnest.
i think quondom answered your question fairly well above serious (as i had the same question)
The solution and scenario proposed by this thread is obvious: boycott Israel.
i've been kind of thinking about what he said. i think i was overly complicating things as i tried to learn more about the history of the conflict, which is very complicated. of course this is not a commercial sort of boycott. archinect doesn't sell israeli stuff, so the proposal isn't to reduce their profits. the archinect forums trade information, and they do so freely and internationally. what i think the boycott intends then, is to limit israeli's from being able to engage the discussion, so that only the opinion of tammuz and orhan can be heard in this forum?
so, from this perspective, the boycott is not intended to resolve the conflict, but rather to control information.
when tammuz was asked about his propaganda, he said israel is producing propaganda. when asked about his whitewashing he said israel is whitewashing. assuming this is how the conversation goes, i will just assume israel is trying to control the conversation too, which i'm sure they are, and which is not relevant to this forum thread at all.
Curt, exactly. They disregard any good evidence of another side as propagandist and/ or ridiculous. Even when I showed them the opinion of Palestine itself. med., it's Israel's fault that this thread sucks...
The British film-maker wants an ‘absolute boycott of all the cultural happenings supported by the Israeli state’ and has labelled the US a ‘bully’ at the Sarajevo film festival
Ken Loach at the Cannes film festival in May 2014. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP
Ken Loach has called for a boycott of all cultural and sporting events supported by the Israeli state, and condemned the support offered to Israel by the US and UK.
On Aug 23, Israeli airstrikes flattened a 10 story apartment building in a crowded residential neighborhood in Gaza. Residents were unable to secure any of their lifelong possessions, dozens of families are left homeless.
A nine-year-long campaign to hold Israeli architects responsible for their role in dispossessing Palestinians reached a significant stage on 19 March. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) approved a call for its Israeli equivalent to be suspended from the International Union of Architects.
This decision echoes an important precedent. In 1978, RIBA protested against apartheid in South Africa by severing its links with the South African Schools of Architecture.
While the campaign for an academic boycott of Israel has grown in recent years, the 19 March vote could be the first successful action against Israel’s professional institutes. This decision — the result of mobilization by Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, backed by eminent architects and academics around the world — has put the spotlight on how Israeli architects assist the occupation in a most unethical way.
The Ontario branch of the Canadian Federation of Students, representing more than 300,000 university students in the province, has unanimously passed a motion to boycott Israel.
Executive member Anna Goldfinch says the motion to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or BDS) Movement in support of Palestine received no opposition at its annual general meeting last weekend.
The decades long Zionist monopoly on the flow of information on the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy allowed the Israelis to build solid support among Americans and others based on the racist stereotyping of Arabs generally and the Palestinians in particular. Thus, not only has academic freedom and other forms of free exchange not humanized the Israelis, it has led to the corruption of a good number of people in the West, particularly American politicians.
Now, after 40 years, a growing number of academics are reacting to this inhumane state of affairs. We are insisting that the situation we are in now, as regards academic freedom, is a perverse one. Essentially, in order to maintain the academic freedom of Israeli scholars and teachers we are asked to acquiesce in their direct or indirect abetting of the destruction of, among other aspects of Palestinian life, Palestinian academic freedom. We will not do this. I suggest to you that the only way to avoid this predicament (which essentially turns the ideal of academic freedom against itself) is to qualify this principle, and make it a corollary of academic freedom that it can not apply to those who systematically and consistently deny it to others. In order to do this in as fair and consistent a way as possible, the present academic boycott movement is aimed at halting all cooperation with Israeli academic and research institutions rather than any particular list of individuals.
Whether it is burning alive a Palestinian youth from Jerusalem, or the fatal shooting of two others, just for the fun of it in Beitunia, or slaying whole families in Gaza, these are all acts that can only be perpetrated if the victim is dehumanized.
I will concede that all over the Middle East there are now horrific cases where dehumanization has reaped unimaginable horrors as it does in Gaza today. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the EU and Israel’s other friends in the world.
The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.
Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else.
It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.
A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.
Cessation of the incremental genocide in Gaza and the restitution of the basic human and civil rights of Palestinians wherever they are, including the right of return, is the only way to open a new vista for a productive international intervention in the Middle East as a whole.
"It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way."
Probably the first thing in many pages that makes sense.
Non Sequitur, perhaps because you've been paying more attention to your assumptions about where I'm coming from rather than really where I'm coming from. I completely agree with Ilan Pappe (an Israeli historian critical of Israel) as well and indeed there have been comments here previously to the same effect.
Eventually, its about what they're doing...not your religion. This is why the misrepresentation of this issue as being about religion (muslims pitted against jews) was always calculated to disguise the simple and plain colonialism undertaken by Zionists against Palestinians Similarly, we now have that new Israel that calls itself the Islamic State (previous ISIL/ISIS), people coming from all parts of the world in the name of an extremist interpretation of religion in order to colonize and murder, thinking that God makes them more special and more deserving than others.
More than 1,200 Gazans have been killed, about 80 percent of them civilians. But Israelis’ hands are clean and their consciences are quiet - so quiet you could cry.
It’s so easy to be an Israeli; your tender conscience is pure as the driven snow: Everything is Hamas’ fault. The rockets are the fault of Hamas; that can be taken for granted. Hamas started the war, for no reason; that, too, “goes without saying.” Hamas is a vicious terrorist organization, beasts in human form, born to kill, fundamentalists – and apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Some 400,000 Palestinians have been displaced. More than 1,200 have been killed, about 80 percent of them civilians, half of these women and children. Around 50 families have been obliterated, their homes bombed with them inside. It has reached the dimensions of a real massacre. But Israelis’ hands are clean and their consciences are quiet – so quiet you could cry. It’s Hamas’ fault.
We’ll leave the root causes of this cursed repression and denial to the psychologists. Since the days when Israel accused the Palestinians of killing their own children by means of the Israel Defense Forces, we haven’t seen such denial. After incubating for years, the disease is now a raging epidemic whose carriers are now symptomatic. The national conscience hasn’t moved a muscle in response to this atrocity, and there are forces working to keep it that way.
But even through the malignant cloud of denial, even understanding how easy it is to blame everything on Hamas — Israel has never had such a convenient enemy, which can be framed for all its sins – we must ask whether everything really is the fault of Hamas. Is Israel genuinely completely innocent? In the face of bleeding, ruined Gaza, the work of Israeli hands, such denial is incomprehensible.
Hamas is a vicious terror organization? How has it been more vicious than the IDF in this war? In that it doesn’t “knock on the roof” 80 seconds before bombing a home? That it aims its rockets at civilian populations, just as the IDF does, but less effectively? That it wants to destroy Israel? How many Israelis want to destroy Gaza? Meanwhile, everyone knows who is destroying whom.
Israel’s sanctimoniousness reaches a peak in its concern for Gaza’s residents: Look at how Hamas oppresses them, cry the Israeli democrats, so solicitous of Palestinian rights. Hamas is tyrannical, but its tyranny is nothing compared to that of Israel, which has subjected the Gaza Strip to a seven-year siege and a 47-year occupation.
What has destroyed Gaza’s society and economy is above all the siege, and thanks to those who seek its welfare, who imposed it. Thanks also to those who are worried about its lack of democracy, who are shocked by the corruption, who denounce its leaders for staying in luxury hotels or hiding in bunkers, who are troubled by the enormous sums used for tunnels and rockets instead of playgrounds and after-school activities. Truly, thanks.
What about Israel? Do its leaders live in tents? Aren’t enormous sums spent on superfluous submarines and secret explosives, instead of on health, education and welfare? Hamas is fundamentalist? Israel is on the way. Hamas oppresses women? That’s bad, but Israel has that too, at least in one large community.
Why did Gazans elect Hamas, instead of a moderate leadership? Because the moderates have been trying for years to achieve something, anything, and all they have received is humiliation and Israeli rejectionism. Has Israel given the Palestinians a reason to choose the Palestine Liberation Organization’s route of diplomacy over Hamas’ violent resistance? Has the PLO brought them an inch closer to statehood or freedom?
Hamas at least won the release of 1,000 prisoners and also preserved a measure of self-respect, even at the terrible price that the desperate Gazans are now willing to pay. What has Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas brought his people? Nothing. A photo op with Barack Obama.
I’m no fan of Hamas, quite the contrary. But Israel’s attempt to put all the blame on Hamas is outrageous. The international community will soon judge this war’s atrocities. Hamas may be reprimanded, deservedly, but Israel will be condemned and ostracized far more. And then Israelis will say, ‘It’s Hamas’ fault. And the world will laugh.
"Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all out war, a war which will last for generations. ~Yasser Arafat~
"The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel." ~ Yasser Arafat ~
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel. For our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of Palestinian people, since Arab national interest demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism". ~ Zahir Muhse'in ~
long before Avraham Stern, i think you would look at the 1929 riots in jerusalem, including the hebron massacre.
what the israelis are doing, and what they've done is horrible. but that doesn't excuse the palestinian's actions. no, israeli's conscious shouldn't be clear, and no, it's not all hamas's fault. but hamas is part of it; there's not point in pretending they haven't done anything wrong, even if you do think it's justified.
i think it's clear from history that the racism in the area isn't the same as the racism in south africa during apartheid. the palestinians and israelis have given each other a lot of good reason to hate each other. it's not economic, it's fear and anger. if you wanted to ease that tension, which obviously you don't, you would try to ease the fear rather than foment it.
this is why i think it's important for you to talk more about a reasonable way forward, rather than just looking at the past. both sides have done horrible things. i don't think it's fair for anyone to say israel is the good guy, but obviously that doesn't make the palestinians the good guy.
if what you want is to continue the violence and racist apartheid policy, but you want to change the dominant race, then say so.
no, both sides have not done equally equivalent horrible things. That is misrepresentative and clouds over the fact that Israel is a colony aiming to take the place of Palestinians. Even the Hebron massacre is to be read from that perspective - the knowledge that Zionists were taking over Palestinian lands.
Settlers today will say that Jews have lived in Hebron for a long time, and the 1929 Hebron Massacre proved that co-existence between Jews and Arabs was impossible, so the only solution is military. But is this a fair assessment? Was not the ’29 massacre an expression of anti-colonial sentiment, of fear that the new Yishuv, Zionism, was expelling Arabs from their land, and would eventually take political control over Arab lands?
Modern settlers in Hebron live fully within the most extreme kind of Zionist ideology. But it would be unfair to retroactively ascribe this to Jews living there in the 19th century. The Palestinian nationalist movement has always said that prior to Zionism, Jews and Muslims and Christians lived in Peace in Palestine, and I have no reason to doubt this.
If this is true, then there is an alternative history to the Jewish presence in Hebron, a story which Palestinians and activists should tell – a story in which the Jews of Hebron in the 19th century would despise what happens there today, a story in which it would not even be clear that the current Jews in Hebron’s claimed forefathers were not Zionists, and were perhaps anti-Zionists.
This is potentially a compelling story, a story which challenges the Zionist narrative at its extremist core, and a narrative which refuses to submit to the “moderate” racism of Zionism by denying the essentiality of anti-semitism, and reading racist sentiments in the region as products of colonial intervention and to some extent objective conflicts between groups, produced in their reality by political leaders who were themselves racist.
...Most of their victims were members of the old Yishuv, few of whom sympathized with political ZIonism, though many were close to the ideals of religious ZIonism. What happens to have caused alarm among the Arab populace was the establishment in 1924 of an Orthodox yeshiva that quickly attracted large numbers of students from Europe and the United states (some 265 in 1929), who again were mostly non-ZIonists or even anti-Zionist, but who with their Western clothes and habits looked like Zionists to the local arabs. Shocking as the assaults were, they were not a pogrom (the persecution of Jews carried out under governemnt auspices); the majority of Jews in Hebron were saved by their Arab neighbors.
from “A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel”, by Gudrun Krämer, Graham Harman, page 232
No matter how you push and pull, how you try to avoid looking at the blatantly obvious truth, that Israel = Zionist colonization of Palestine and that this is responsible for all the consequential evils and all the violence in that geography and has disastrous repercussions for the larger geography, no matter how you want to escape the blatant truth that Israel is a unique instance of a religio-ideological colonization by Russians, Europeans and others of land which belonged to and on which dwelled, worked and was culturally profuse an indigenous people who were kicked out or live under oppression and the obvious policies of ethnic cleansing...if you don't see that, then you're deluded.
Israel was and continues to be a racist colonizing entity - this is obvious in its building more and more "illegal" settlements on Palestinian lands (although Israel is all illegal and built on Palestinian land). Those who wish to remain blind to this as well, who inanely call for "forgetting the past" and moving on do not see that it is in the nature of that colonial racist entity to be colonial and racist, its past proves it, its present proves it, the whole trajectory of its history proves this.
Resistance of a people against an oppressor, against an entity that wishes to ethnically cleanse them, is a right. There is no way that anyone can make that inane moral equivalence between the colonized and the colonizer, the victim and the criminal.
actually, i'm bringing up the past. quite the opposite of 'forgetting the past.'
people came and went, into and out of this area, pretty much since time began. due to the religious significance in jerusalem, pilgrims from europe were coming and going for hundreds of years before the british mandate, before the balfour declaration, before the hebron massacre, even before the ottomon empire. for example, richard the lionhearted was famous for his trip, leaving traces of his european ancestory in jerusalem as far back as the 12th century.
so, you're saying the ethnic population can only consist of the arabs who crossed in and out of the borders from adjoining countries, and the non-arab people, who had been in the area for centuries, are considered non-native zionists? by the way, king richard was not a zionist.
so to be clear, you either picked a moment in history a very very long time ago, and said the decedents of this group of people are allowed to rule, and no other. or you picked a race, and said their decedents have a right to rule.
all of the evils in this area do not fall solely on the shoulders of the people currently living under the government of israel today. that is ridiculous. if someone within hamas makes a conscious decision with intent to kill civilians, they're just as responsible for that decision and an israeli that makes the same decision.
i am not a zionist. i don't think israel should 'cleanse' the palestinians. i don't think israel has a right to all of the land that was formerly in the british mandate.
on the other hand, i don't think the palestinians should 'cleanse' the israelis. i don't think they have a right to all of the land they want. they do have a right to resist the oppressive government that is blockading them, but that doesn't mean getting their own civilians killed is something to be proud of.
if you understand the history, then you should understand how this is different than apartheid, and you should understand what noam chomsky was saying in orhan's earlier link. if you want to end the racism, part of that is going to include israel having some sense of security that the palestinians aren't going to attack civilian targets as they've repeatedly done in the past. i'm not defending israel; it doesn't justify their actions. however, i do believe no progress can be made without that.
instead, you're saying you want the palestinians to attack whatever civilian target they want, to breed more hate and fear, and increase the racist sentiment, because they're "native." what do you have to gain? a few more people protesting in canada?
the end of apartheid in south africa was racial equality. what you're promoting is further racial segregation.
Only the cannanites have true rights to Palestine. Where are they again?
I would like to think that this would ultimately be resolved by adhering to the 1947 borders laid out by the UN, but the Arabs have never recognized them, nor did they ever propose borders of their own or work in a constructive fashion towards a resolution - that has not changed in 60 years, but it must if there is to be peace. Israel is not going anywhere.
Seeing as how the Islamic State just took control of a border crossing into Golan Heights, I fear the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be the least of our worries in a year or two. A regional Sunni - Shi'a - Jewish war is terrifying to contemplate.
I'm currently toggling between two books, one written by a Palestinian (Edward Said "The Question of Palestine") with the aim of bringing into the visible a reality that was (and is in the process of being) forcibly disappeared: a real people, a culture and a burgeoning country rooted in their own homeland for countless generations and, yes, express the cross fertilization of the region entire as well as exhibiting (also mentioned within western and arab sources) indigenous specificity. In other words, like most other people of the so called "old world". Indigenous...but not insular.
The other is by an Israeli (Shlomo Sand "The Invention of the Land of Israel") with the aim of bringing into the visible a forgery that was (and is in the process of being) forcibly fabricated : the invention of a "Land of Israel" on the basis of an invented historically non-corroborated myth of being exiled, of a divine claim, an invented Jewish people (, in the sense of singular ethnicity) and a 19th century colonial program for the disappearing of the country and culture Edward Said speaks about. Also interestingly, it is about the forgery of religion by nationalism, Judaism by Zionism. One can say that Jewry itself has been virtually colonized by Zionism at the virtual stage so as to proceed with a more physical colonization.
In other words, its like reading about both sides of a perverse mirror. The side of the tangible being represented as an illusion and the side of the illusion being represented as tangible. I've chosen sections which especially have to do with language, the forgery of a language in order to mask the true existence of another, Israel in order to mask and extinguish Palestine.
Edward Said: "...we must understand the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism as a struggle between a presence and an interpretation, the former constantly appearing to be overpowered and eradicated by the latter. What was this presence? No matter how backward, uncivilized and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on the land. Read through any nineteenth century account of the travels in the Orient - Chateaubriand, Mark Twain, Lamartine, Nerval, Disraeli - and you will find chronicled there accounts of Arab inhabitants on the land of Palestine. According to Israeli sources, in 1822 there were no more than 24,000 Jews in Palestine, les than 10 percent of the whole, overwhelmingly Arab population.
...The truth is, of course, that if one were to read geographers, historians, philosophers, and poets who wrote in Arabic from the eighth century on, one would find references to Palestine; to say nothing of innumerable references to Palestine in European literature from the Middle Ages to the present.
...Despite the steady arrival in Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there anything other than a huge Arab majority. For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 176,606 against a total of 1,033,314; in 1936, Jewish numbers had gone up to 384,078 and the total to 1,366,692; in 1946 there were 608,225 Jews in a total population of 1,912,112. In all these statistics, "natives" were easily distinguishable from the arriving colonists. But wh0 were these natives? All of them spoke Arabic, and were mainly Sunni Muslims although a minority among them were Christians, Druzes and Shiite Muslims - all of whom spoke Arabic too. Approximately 65% of the Palestinian Arabs were agricultural people who lived in about 500 villages where ground crops were grown. The principal Palestinian cities - Nablus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Acre, Jaffa, Jericho, Ramlah, Hebron, and Haifa - were built in the main by Palestinian Arabs, who continued to live there even after the encroaching Zionist colonies expanded to them...Modern Palestinian social, economic, and cultural life was organized around the same issues of independence and anti colonialism prevalent in the region, only for the Palestiniansm there were the legacy of Ottoman rule, then Zionist colonialism, then British mandatory authority (after World War 1) to contend with more or less all together." - Edward Said, "The Question of Palestine" pp 8-12
Shlomo Sand: " After many years of studying history, I believe neither in the past existence of a Jewish people, exiled from its land, not in the premise that the Jews are originally descended from the ancient land of Judea. There can be no mistaking the striking resemblance between Yemenite Jews and Yemenite Muslims, between North African Jews and the indigenous Berber population of the region, between Ethiopian Jews and their African neighbours...or between the Jews of Eastern Europe and the members of the Turkish and Slavic tribes that inhabited the Caucasus and southeast Russia. To the dismay of anti-Semites, the Jews were never a foreign "ethnos" of invaders from afar but rather an autocthonous population whose ancestors, for the most part, converted to Judaism before the arrival of Christianity or Islam.
...Even when the writings of important Zionist figures such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Ber Borochov, and many others- who, like most of their supporters, used the standard term "Palestine" (or Palestina, the Latin form used in many European languages at the time) - are translated into Hebrew, this appellation is always converted into the "Land of Israel"....Some pro-Zionist historians also attempt to incorporate the terms into other languages.... (Simon) Schama, who titled his book commemorating the colonizing enterprise of the Rothschild family Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel , despite the fact that during the historical period in question, the name of Palestine was customarily used not only by all the European languages but also by the Jewish protagonists discussed in Schama's book.
...History can be ironic, particularly with regard to the invention of traditions in general and traditions of language in particular. Few people have noticed, or are willing to acknowledge, that the Land of Israel of biblical texts did not include Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem or their surrounding areas, but rather only Samaria and a number of adjacent areas.
...In actuality,as one of the many names of the region - some of which were no less accepted in Jewish tradition such as the Holy Land, the Land of Canaan, the Land of Zion, or the land of Gazelle - the term "Land of Israel" was a later Christian and rabbinical invention that was theological, and by no means political in nature.
...Only in the earl twentieth century, after years in the Protestant melting pot, was the theological concept of "Land of ISrael" finally converted into a clearly geonational concept. Settlement Zionism borrowed the term from the rabbinical tradition in part to displace the term "Palestine", which, as we have seen, was then widely used not only throughout Europe but also by the first generation Zionist leaders. In the new language of the settlers, the Land of Israel became the exclusive name of the region.
This linguistic engineering - part of the construction of ethnocentric memory, and later to involve the Hebraization of the names of regions, neighbourhoods, streets, mountains, and riverbeds- enables Jewish nationalist memory to make its astonishing leap back in time over the territory's long non-Jewish history. Much more significant for our discussion, however, is the fact that this territorial designation, which neither included not related to the vast majority of the population, quickly made made it easier to view that majority as an assemblage of subtenants or temporary inhabitants, living on land that did not belong to them. Usage of the term "Land of Israel" played a role in shaping the widely held image of an empty land - "a land without a people" eternally designated for a "people without a land". Critical examination of this prevalent but false image, which was in fact formulated by an Evangelical Christian, better enables us to understand the evolution of the refugee problem during the 1948 war and the revival of the settlement enterprise in the aftermath of the 1967 war.
.May main goal in this book is to deconstruct the concept of the Jewish "historical right" to the Land of Israel, and its associated nationalist narratives, whose only purpose was to establish moral legitimacy for the appropriation of territory. From this perspective, the book is an effort to critique the official historiography of the Zionist Israeli establishment and, in the process, to trace the ramifications of Zionism's influential paradigmatic revolution within a gradually atrophying Judaism, From the outset, the rebellion of Jewish nationalism against Jewish religion involved a steadily increasing instrumentalization of the latter's words, values, symbols, holidays, and rituals." - Shlomo Sand, "The Invention of the Land of Israel", from the chapter entitled Introduction: Banal Murder and Toponymy
Archinect, please boycott Israel (its about time!)
Blog | Middle East & North Africa | Politics
Gaza: Living Through a War
360°ANALYSIS
Huda Kishawi is a Palestinian teenager living in Gaza. She has received several English language scholarships in the past and has a passion for writin
The world needs to wake up and realize what life is like for people in Gaza.
My name is Huda Kishawi, a 16-year-old Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip. While the constant shelling of Gaza has calmed down despite the end of a ceasefire, I am writing to let the world imagine the plight of Gazans.
I have witnessed three wars so far, but this is the worst conflict I have ever experienced. Since June, my brother and I have waited in Gaza City for the Egyptian border to open, in order to travel and follow our parents who had left the territory in that same month. I didn’t expect a war to be just around the corner.
Over the first couple of days, we heard loud explosions that quickly escalated, with heavy airstrikes taking place in different parts of the territory. The situation continued to worsen and it was clear that a new war on Gaza had begun. The death toll soon rose and continues to take the lives of innocent civilians; it currently stands at over 2,035 Palestinians.
From the onset, we heard news of entire families being wiped out by Israeli shelling. Images of innocent children who were sleeping or playing when they were targeted surely brought tears to those watching international news. Indeed, it is a very difficult moment when you witness a father wanting to say farewell to his sons, but instead their bodies are just a pile of ash; or when you see a mother holding her dead daughter and collecting her body parts after a missile obliterates their home; or when you see children covering their ears so they can’t hear the constant sound of bombs exploding. That’s the situation of people living in the open air prison of Gaza.
It is also a horrific moment when the shelling gets closer and you don’t know if you have to evacuate your home. Will you be able to take everything with you? Or will you have to leave all your past behind and only be left with memories, should a missile turn your bedroom into broken bricks? In these moments, it is impossible to imagine what will happen next. When the attacks escalated at the height of hostilities, people asked themselves: Where can we go? What can we do? Will our lives end in the next few minutes? It has been so difficult to answer these simple questions.
Nowhere To Go
It is true the Israeli military had warned some people to evacuate, but the problem was, where do you go? The fear is that the place you are evacuating to might be the next target. That’s why a lot people sought shelter in UN schools, but even those were hit by Israel. Simply put, Palestinians had nowhere to run and hide. Thousands of houses that were full of happiness and memories were completely or partially demolished. If neighboring countries such as Egypt don’t stand by our side, who will help us overcome this crisis?
It is a very difficult moment when you witness a father wanting to say farewell to his sons, but instead their bodies are just a pile of ash; or when you see a mother holding her dead daughter and collecting her body parts after a missile obliterates their home; or when you see children covering their ears so they can’t hear the constant sound of bombs exploding. That’s the situation of people living in the open air prison of Gaza.
Our only crossing point to the outside world that is not controlled by Israel was closed by Egyptian authorities for almost two months, which prevented thousands of desperate people from fleeing Gaza. We just want the border crossing to stay open to allow Palestinians to evacuate under these difficult conditions, and to allow injured people to get the medical help they need. Just think of those dozens of people killed because of the lack of medical supplies. Does this not push you to support your fellow humans in Gaza?
Before the recent ceasefire, people braced themselves for more massacres, similar to what happened in the Shujayea neighborhood, in Rafah and Khan Younis. But the problems in Gaza took on another dimension when Israel bombed the only power station that provides the territory with electricity. Don’t you think this level of suffering is more than enough? Don’t you think the people of Gaza have the right to live like every other person on earth?
It is probably impossible for most people to imagine the exact feelings of Palestinians living under constant attack. We are tired of this harsh lifestyle we have to endure. If we don’t die from missiles or fear controlling us, we might die from thirst as water has been running out. Our lives have stopped. Hospitals are chaotic and running out of supplies; it has gotten to the point where even beds are scarce. In fact, everything has been scarce since Gaza’s door was locked in 2007.
Despite all this, many people around the world support Israel and accuse us of being “terrorists.” If you are still convinced it is Israel’s right to defend itself from atrocities by targeting mosques, hospitals, UN schools, demolishing houses filled with civilians and decimating Gaza’s infrastructure — and you don’t believe it has violated international law — I am not going to explain the plight of Palestinians anymore. My only wish is to stay alive and return to a peaceful life. The world needs to wake up and realize what life is like for people in Gaza.
Israeli leaders incite hatred against Palestinians and are shocked when people listen (and act)
Why do Palestinians continue to support Hamas despite such devastating losses?
For the Palestinians, the choice is between occupation by proxy in the West Bank and a war in Gaza. Both offer no hope, and neither are forms of freedom. The Israeli promise — that an end to armed struggle will bring freedom — is not trustworthy, as the experiences of past years has shown. It simply never happens. The quiet years in the West Bank have not brought the Palestinians any closer to an independent state, while the truce in between wars in Gaza has not brought about a relief from the siege. One can debate the reasons for why this happened, but one cannot debate reality.
Hamas tells the Palestinians the simple truth: freedom comes at the cost of blood. The tragedy is that we usually provide the evidence. After all, the evacuation of settlements in Gaza came after the Second Intifada, not as a result of negotiations. The Oslo Accords came after the First Intifada; before that, Israel turned down even the convenient London Agreement between Shimon Peres and Jordan’s King Hussein.
http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2014-08-22-ML-Israel-Palestinians/id-0ef6bae57d6b419dac6a8886bdb4dc49
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Gaza gunmen killed 18 alleged spies for Israel on Friday, including seven who were lined up behind a mosque and shot after midday prayers, in response to Israel's deadly airstrikes against top Hamas leaders.
Two of those killed were women, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which called for an immediate halt to what it said were "extra-judicial executions."
Hamas media portrayed the killings as the beginning of a new crackdown, under the rallying cry of "choking the necks of the collaborators."
The Al Majd website, which is close to the Hamas security services, said suspects would now be dealt with "in the field" rather than in the courts in order to create deterrence.
The Hamas-run Al Rai said the same punishment would soon be imposed on others.
The killings came a day after an Israeli airstrike on a house in southern Gaza killed three senior military leaders of Hamas.
Earlier in the week, another strike killed the wife and two children of Mohammed Deif, who is in charge of the Hamas military wing. Deif's fate remains unclear.
Friday's events began with the shooting of 11 alleged informants at the Gaza City police headquarters in the morning. Of the 11, two were women, the Palestinian rights center said.
Later in the day, seven men were killed outside the city's downtown al-Omari mosque as worshippers were wrapping up noon prayers. Several dozen people were near the mosque at the time, said one of the witnesses, 42-year-old Ayman Sharif.
Sharif said masked gunmen lined up seven people against a wall. A piece of paper was affixed above the head of each of them, with his initials and his alleged crime.
Sharif quoted one of the gunmen as saying the seven "had sold their souls to the enemy for a cheap price" and had caused killing and destruction.
The commander of the group then gave the order to the others to open fire form their automatic rifles. He said the bodies were collected by an ambulance and the gunmen left.
Do you know what these spies do? They tell Israel whom to assassinate, how and where. We have and had their share in Lebanon. They do it for money and clout.
There is not to be any confusion here. Its a war being waged against Palestinians and the rule of war and, especially, the rules they live under are extraordinary and do not succumb to those of civilian life and peaceful relations between countries. Do we even imagine that the court system in Gaza functions properly under the conditions they live in? Do you know, for instance, that spies working for Israel in Gaza have been functioning without such punitive actions for many many years until this point, untilin a military this last murderous spree by their employer, Israel.
Yes, in a war, in a military situation, under such extraordinary situations, this is what happens to spies. The mention of court in that article is funny and I bet is being phrased without context...what court? Gaza is in ruins...and before it was in ruins, people were on the verge of near starvation, chocked by Israel's siege.
Yes, this will happen. But why do you paste it into this thread? By showing us that Hamas executes spies who help Israel in murdering Palestinian resistance factions and destroying PAlestinian infrastructure (erm, what, do you think they're going to give them a kiss on their forehead and let them go?) , do you wish to further vilify the Palestinians side by vilifying Hamas and therefore, in however pathetic manner possible, somehow suggest that Israel is not the actual villain here?
After its, Israel's, sordid history of a racist colonizer, its history of massacres and population displacement and this latest massacre of civilians and children...all you care to do is tell us that Hamas execute spies who make it easier for Israel to kill the Palestinian population? Atrociously myopic.
Gaza's Resistance: RT interviews Daniel Calic, Norman Finkelstein, and Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani
Aug 24 2014by Jadaliyya Interview
Russia Today's Cross Talk hosted Jadaliyya co-Editor Mouin Rabbani along with Daniel Calic and Norman Finkelstein for a discussion of Palestinian resistance to Israeli military incursion in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli blockade of Gaza was also discused, as was the question of whether Israeli bombardment of Gaza constitutes war crimes.
(this is ancient in terms of Gaza genocide terms but..).thinking about the Israeli term "mowing the lawn")
From The Israeli offensive in Gaza isn't an attack on Hamas, it's an attack on peace
Benjamin Netanyahu was given the opportunity to choose between peace and war, and he chose war
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A relative of four Palestinian boys, all from the Bakr family, mourns over the body of one of the boys at the morgue of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, on July 16, 2014
“Mowing the lawn.” That’s the obscene phrase used in Israeli military circles to describe how, every couple of years or so, Gaza is subjected to an awesome display of firepower to trim back Hamas’s military capabilities and ambitions.
...In fact, Israel’s Prime Minister was never serious about allowing the creation of an independent Palestine. How do I know? Because he said so himself, in stunning remarks on Friday which the world’s media has inexcusably ignored. Confirming what many of us have long suspected, Netanyahu argued that “there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” In other words, no Palestinian sovereignty on the West Bank, no two-state solution, and no peace.
This is the context to the violence we are now witnessing. Apart from providing catharsis for a nation still enraged by the West Bank kidnappings, the bloodletting is intended to counter the threat posed by Hamas pragmatism.
...Should it forget its lines in future and begin making moderate noises, Israel can always fire up the lawnmower again. In Gaza, all flesh is grass.
More on genocidal mowing...
Killing People as 'Mowing the Lawn': How Israeli Hardliners and Official Washington Dehumanize the People of Palestine
November 17, 2012 |
In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.”
The remark, which likened killing hundreds of men, women and children – many of them noncombatants – with trimming the grass, was greeted with a light tittering around the room, which was filled with some of Washington’s most elite, highly educated and well-paid Middle East experts. Not a single one objected to the panelist’s black humor.
On the contrary, several analysts and experts were grinning at the reference to Israel’s strategy of mounting periodic attacks on the Palestinians to cull each new generation of militants. Such is the nonchalance of Washington’s policy-advising cognoscenti toward the ongoing and systematic genocide of Gaza’s oppressed population.
The cavalier language is symptomatic of the policymaking community’s increasingly pervasive tendency to disregard and disparage the humanity of Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks, which are often waged by Israel’s high-tech drones and U.S.-supplied F-16’s. There is also a tendency to ignore or downplay Israeli war crimes.
You're completely unwilling to engage and incredibly defensive of Hamas.
I've responded to you above and that's engagement enough. Are you also going to lie about whether I did or did not engage? Evidence is abundant here that I've engaged with people from the other side...except when they start to pretend like I've not engaged and carried on making the same insipid accusations as if my words meant little to them.
But if, by engagement, you want me to see, sympathize with and argue the side of the colonizing racist entity called Israel that has been founded on the murder, banishment and oppression of another people that is ongoing...and you want me to participate in that complicit and ugly game of demonizing the latter's resistance, there is no chance in hell. It is you, your brainwashed focusing on vilifying Hamas that clouds out the far larger picture, who refuses to engage with reality - who has been blinded by your biased media and political industry that profits in supporting the colonizing Zionist entity over the right of an indigenous people to remain on their land, without harassement, torture, being killed, being displaced,etc.
It is you who cannot engage with the reality that clearly demonstrates who is oppressing whom, who is stealing others' people's homes and lands as we speak and kicking them out, who massacres innocents and who has a long history of massacres to drive fear into the heart of people and force them to flee outside Palestine.
An oppressed and colonized people's right to resist is far above your ugly attempts at obfuscation and vilification- and has more humaneness at its heart that does brainwashing Zionist smear campaigns and lies. Of course I refuse to engage, in that sense, with their banal evil. I leave it to you, the weak of mind, the brainwashed to fall for that vile nonsense and "engage" with it.
Do you believe that the state of Israel has a right to exist?
The grand failure of Israeli hasbara
"Hasbara engineers have tried to dismiss and demonise this groundswell of international solidarity with Palestinians by presenting it as an exclusively Muslim cause. Rallies in support of Palestine have always been diverse gatherings of people of all faiths and ethnicities. Condemnation of Israeli crimes has come from all around the world, including from Israeli intellectuals, international political figures andprominent academics. Even Israeli citizens have mobilised against the war in Gaza, against the hostile current of the majority."
Not like the childish personalized rants here by the anonymous posters, this is a valid counter argument against the boycott. I am just putting it out there neutrally. Something to think about and strategize.
Israel boycott campaign risks backfiring- Noam Chomsky
Does it piss you off that a white guy shoots a black guy and all of a sudden no one in the media gives a shit about your story?
I don't even want to go into example you gave. Are you someone? What's your name?
Serious Question,
Was that a serious question? You can find my answer here in this thread; I had absolutely no qualms about stating that Israel does not have the right to exist, did not have the right to exist and will not have the right to exist. Will you accuse me of anti-Semitism now? Are you going to go through that pathetic pile of Zionist rhetorical arsenal that means chicken shit now that its been outed as nothing but propaganda?
......................................................................................................
Orhan,
yes, its not childish - although I also don't see the behavior exhibited by some here as childish but rather yobbish, bullyish, and calculatedly subject to Zionist propaganda. I don't see why one should see this as childish. It is certainly vitriolic, sometimes plainly stupid and mostly redundant, tired and transparently disingenuous. Not really childish.
As for Noam Chomsky - and indeed Norman Finkelstein- both of who are paradoxically (as shown in their writings and interviews) against Israeli policies and yet are also against the BDS movement, I have yet to hear or read a valid logically admissible reason from both of them. It is without a doubt that the boycotting of the south African apartheid regime was paramount in leading to its fall. No where does Chomsky or Finkelstein really point out to why this would not work with Israel - the latter sees the boycott as a threat to it and the BDS movement is gaining greater traction with each year. There are many reasons to suspect that Chomsky's and Finkelstein's stance apropos the boycott movement are not driven solely by the proven logic that boycotting is an effective and peaceful tool to rein Israel in.
Yes, its not childish what he says...but that does not mean that its valid either. People in the BDS movement are well aware of what Chomsky and Finkelstein have to say about the BDS movement (and, indeed, each of these individuals for their own voiced objections).
To my mind, there is absolutely no ambiguity about this. You buy from Israel, you support it economically. You engage with it culturally, via its institutions and entities, you support it. You support it, you support the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. That Chomsky and Finkelstein don't see this will lead to their being left behind in the dust after a period where they were at the forefront of fighting for Palestinian rights.
Here is a good article on this issue : Chomsky and BDS
From which a snippet:
".Professor Chomsky points out that South African apartheid is different than Israel’s. Yes, South Africa had no desire to ethnically cleanse the Africans, as their subjugation was the whole point, whereas an ethnically “pure” settler nation—well, with a sufficient supply of the Other left behind as cheap labor—is Israel’s. But … so? More specifically, Professor Chomsky says that those building the boycott movement against South Africa devoted years to educating and building a case, homework that the Palestinian movement has not done. This is not only a dubious argument on its face, but it is also untrue. People have worked tirelessly since the early 1950s to do precisely what the Professor advocates, but for reasons touched on above, these attempts at informing the public faced a particularly impenetrable wall. Even if we eliminate Palestinian writers and activists, whom the West sidelined altogether, there were people like Alfred Lilienthal and Moshe Menuhin actively and eloquently saying fifty and sixty years ago what still can barely be heard in the mainstream media. Palestinian and Western scholars continued to research, write, expose; and the voices grew numerous over the years, with Israeli scholars eventually joining the ranks. The cumulative wealth of documentation and activism is extraordinary. Yet Professor Chomsky dismisses the movement for justice in Israel-Palestine as not having done its homework?
But perhaps Professor Chomsky’s strangest statement of all, a rather terrifying statement on the face of it, is that “There is no reason to expect Israel to accept a Palestinian population it does not want.” There you have it, all condensed into one sentence, an admission that Israel is a racially predicated state and that the rights of the Palestinians themselves must remain subservient to it. There is no reason to expect a settler nation to accept the people whose land it took. Everything is framed in terms of what Israel wants, or what Israel will or will not agree to. Is this the same Noam Chomsky whose Manufacturing Consent and Fateful Triangle sit on my bookshelf?"
Sorry, to edit:
There are many reasons to suspect that Chomsky's and Finkelstein's stance apropos the boycott movement are not driven solely by the (fallible and historically discredited) rationale that boycotting is not an effective and peaceful tool to rein Israel in.
tammuz you are absolutely right on the "childish." I want to change it to your description. I apologize from the children.
Yes Chomsky has definitely made a blunder here in his strategic/logistical talk show.
BDS start to beat its drums really loudly now and it is partially responsible for Israelis to internalize the problem more louder than ever. There is a political momentum against the occupation (with all its giant chapters) and recent carnage, both in Israel and in Jewish communities overseas, not including the already well organized Arab opinion and writing accumulated over the years and not including changing public opinion around the world.
Really, with all due respect to Chomsky, what was he thinking saying "educating and building a case" ?
sez the guys that want sympathy from Americans
Tammuz, what is the end-goal that you envision or propose? The formation of a new state? The displacement of Jews from the region? I'm asking in earnest.
i think quondom answered your question fairly well above serious (as i had the same question)
The solution and scenario proposed by this thread is obvious: boycott Israel.
i've been kind of thinking about what he said. i think i was overly complicating things as i tried to learn more about the history of the conflict, which is very complicated. of course this is not a commercial sort of boycott. archinect doesn't sell israeli stuff, so the proposal isn't to reduce their profits. the archinect forums trade information, and they do so freely and internationally. what i think the boycott intends then, is to limit israeli's from being able to engage the discussion, so that only the opinion of tammuz and orhan can be heard in this forum?
so, from this perspective, the boycott is not intended to resolve the conflict, but rather to control information.
when tammuz was asked about his propaganda, he said israel is producing propaganda. when asked about his whitewashing he said israel is whitewashing. assuming this is how the conversation goes, i will just assume israel is trying to control the conversation too, which i'm sure they are, and which is not relevant to this forum thread at all.
Okay, so they want to control information, but to what end?
This thread looks like it totally sucks....
Ken Loach calls for cultural boycott of Israel
The British film-maker wants an ‘absolute boycott of all the cultural happenings supported by the Israeli state’ and has labelled the US a ‘bully’ at the Sarajevo film festival
Ken Loach at the Cannes film festival in May 2014. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP
Ken Loach has called for a boycott of all cultural and sporting events supported by the Israeli state, and condemned the support offered to Israel by the US and UK.
In another gruesome act against Palestinians, the Israeli regime has attacked a UN school sheltering displaced and defenseless people against the Israeli offensive in the besieged Gaza Strip.
(Source: Facebook page of Eyes on Palestine)
Children martyrs of Joda family. They were murdered after targeting their house east Jabalyiah north west Gaza strip yesterday.
الأطفال الأشقاء الثلاثة من عائلة جودة الذين استشهدوا مع والدتهم أمس بقصف منزلهم في جباليا
#GazaUnderAttack #PrayforGaza #SupportGaza #StopIsrael #IstandwithPalestin #Gaza #AjaGaza #Palestine #ICC4Israel #BoycottIsrael #US #USA #IOF — with Brendan Fraizer.
Israeli air strikes flatten 10 story apartment building in Gaza residential neighborhood
Published on Aug 23, 2014
On Aug 23, Israeli airstrikes flattened a 10 story apartment building in a crowded residential neighborhood in Gaza.
Residents were unable to secure any of their lifelong possessions, dozens of families are left homeless.
Israel Shooting Ambulance And Civilians
To remind:
From Boycotting the architects of Israel’s occupation
A nine-year-long campaign to hold Israeli architects responsible for their role in dispossessing Palestinians reached a significant stage on 19 March. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) approved a call for its Israeli equivalent to be suspended from the International Union of Architects.
This decision echoes an important precedent. In 1978, RIBA protested against apartheid in South Africa by severing its links with the South African Schools of Architecture.
While the campaign for an academic boycott of Israel has grown in recent years, the 19 March vote could be the first successful action against Israel’s professional institutes. This decision — the result of mobilization by Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, backed by eminent architects and academics around the world — has put the spotlight on how Israeli architects assist the occupation in a most unethical way.
Ontario university students unions vote to join boycott against Israel
TORONTO — The Canadian Press
The Ontario branch of the Canadian Federation of Students, representing more than 300,000 university students in the province, has unanimously passed a motion to boycott Israel.
Executive member Anna Goldfinch says the motion to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or BDS) Movement in support of Palestine received no opposition at its annual general meeting last weekend.
As for this accusation of the "flow of information":
From Why an academic boycott of Israel is necessary
The decades long Zionist monopoly on the flow of information on the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy allowed the Israelis to build solid support among Americans and others based on the racist stereotyping of Arabs generally and the Palestinians in particular. Thus, not only has academic freedom and other forms of free exchange not humanized the Israelis, it has led to the corruption of a good number of people in the West, particularly American politicians.
Now, after 40 years, a growing number of academics are reacting to this inhumane state of affairs. We are insisting that the situation we are in now, as regards academic freedom, is a perverse one. Essentially, in order to maintain the academic freedom of Israeli scholars and teachers we are asked to acquiesce in their direct or indirect abetting of the destruction of, among other aspects of Palestinian life, Palestinian academic freedom. We will not do this. I suggest to you that the only way to avoid this predicament (which essentially turns the ideal of academic freedom against itself) is to qualify this principle, and make it a corollary of academic freedom that it can not apply to those who systematically and consistently deny it to others. In order to do this in as fair and consistent a way as possible, the present academic boycott movement is aimed at halting all cooperation with Israeli academic and research institutions rather than any particular list of individuals.
From Israel’s incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto
The way forward
Whether it is burning alive a Palestinian youth from Jerusalem, or the fatal shooting of two others, just for the fun of it in Beitunia, or slaying whole families in Gaza, these are all acts that can only be perpetrated if the victim is dehumanized.
I will concede that all over the Middle East there are now horrific cases where dehumanization has reaped unimaginable horrors as it does in Gaza today. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the EU and Israel’s other friends in the world.
The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.
Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else.
It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.
A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.
Cessation of the incremental genocide in Gaza and the restitution of the basic human and civil rights of Palestinians wherever they are, including the right of return, is the only way to open a new vista for a productive international intervention in the Middle East as a whole.
Claiming the 800th's post to myself!
"It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way."
Probably the first thing in many pages that makes sense.
Non Sequitur, perhaps because you've been paying more attention to your assumptions about where I'm coming from rather than really where I'm coming from. I completely agree with Ilan Pappe (an Israeli historian critical of Israel) as well and indeed there have been comments here previously to the same effect.
Eventually, its about what they're doing...not your religion. This is why the misrepresentation of this issue as being about religion (muslims pitted against jews) was always calculated to disguise the simple and plain colonialism undertaken by Zionists against Palestinians Similarly, we now have that new Israel that calls itself the Islamic State (previous ISIL/ISIS), people coming from all parts of the world in the name of an extremist interpretation of religion in order to colonize and murder, thinking that God makes them more special and more deserving than others.
Gaza Everywhere
A simple map app to help visualize Gaza's relative size in comparison to locations around the world.
Here is a poetic one via Haaretz few weeks ago.
By Gideon Levy | Jul. 31, 2014 | 5:28 AM |
It’s all Hamas’ fault, right Israel?
More than 1,200 Gazans have been killed, about 80 percent of them civilians. But Israelis’ hands are clean and their consciences are quiet - so quiet you could cry.
It’s so easy to be an Israeli; your tender conscience is pure as the driven snow: Everything is Hamas’ fault. The rockets are the fault of Hamas; that can be taken for granted. Hamas started the war, for no reason; that, too, “goes without saying.” Hamas is a vicious terrorist organization, beasts in human form, born to kill, fundamentalists – and apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Some 400,000 Palestinians have been displaced. More than 1,200 have been killed, about 80 percent of them civilians, half of these women and children. Around 50 families have been obliterated, their homes bombed with them inside. It has reached the dimensions of a real massacre. But Israelis’ hands are clean and their consciences are quiet – so quiet you could cry. It’s Hamas’ fault.
We’ll leave the root causes of this cursed repression and denial to the psychologists. Since the days when Israel accused the Palestinians of killing their own children by means of the Israel Defense Forces, we haven’t seen such denial. After incubating for years, the disease is now a raging epidemic whose carriers are now symptomatic. The national conscience hasn’t moved a muscle in response to this atrocity, and there are forces working to keep it that way.
But even through the malignant cloud of denial, even understanding how easy it is to blame everything on Hamas — Israel has never had such a convenient enemy, which can be framed for all its sins – we must ask whether everything really is the fault of Hamas. Is Israel genuinely completely innocent? In the face of bleeding, ruined Gaza, the work of Israeli hands, such denial is incomprehensible.
Hamas is a vicious terror organization? How has it been more vicious than the IDF in this war? In that it doesn’t “knock on the roof” 80 seconds before bombing a home? That it aims its rockets at civilian populations, just as the IDF does, but less effectively? That it wants to destroy Israel? How many Israelis want to destroy Gaza? Meanwhile, everyone knows who is destroying whom.
Israel’s sanctimoniousness reaches a peak in its concern for Gaza’s residents: Look at how Hamas oppresses them, cry the Israeli democrats, so solicitous of Palestinian rights. Hamas is tyrannical, but its tyranny is nothing compared to that of Israel, which has subjected the Gaza Strip to a seven-year siege and a 47-year occupation.
What has destroyed Gaza’s society and economy is above all the siege, and thanks to those who seek its welfare, who imposed it. Thanks also to those who are worried about its lack of democracy, who are shocked by the corruption, who denounce its leaders for staying in luxury hotels or hiding in bunkers, who are troubled by the enormous sums used for tunnels and rockets instead of playgrounds and after-school activities. Truly, thanks.
What about Israel? Do its leaders live in tents? Aren’t enormous sums spent on superfluous submarines and secret explosives, instead of on health, education and welfare? Hamas is fundamentalist? Israel is on the way. Hamas oppresses women? That’s bad, but Israel has that too, at least in one large community.
Why did Gazans elect Hamas, instead of a moderate leadership? Because the moderates have been trying for years to achieve something, anything, and all they have received is humiliation and Israeli rejectionism. Has Israel given the Palestinians a reason to choose the Palestine Liberation Organization’s route of diplomacy over Hamas’ violent resistance? Has the PLO brought them an inch closer to statehood or freedom?
Hamas at least won the release of 1,000 prisoners and also preserved a measure of self-respect, even at the terrible price that the desperate Gazans are now willing to pay. What has Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas brought his people? Nothing. A photo op with Barack Obama.
I’m no fan of Hamas, quite the contrary. But Israel’s attempt to put all the blame on Hamas is outrageous. The international community will soon judge this war’s atrocities. Hamas may be reprimanded, deservedly, but Israel will be condemned and ostracized far more. And then Israelis will say, ‘It’s Hamas’ fault. And the world will laugh.
Heya! Indefinite cease-fire. We can finally begin the process of healing and repairing the archinect community.
"Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all out war, a war which will last for generations.
~Yasser Arafat~
"The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel."
~ Yasser Arafat ~
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel. For our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of Palestinian people, since Arab national interest demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism".
~ Zahir Muhse'in ~
This is how Zionist colony called Israel, early on, forced itself on the indigenous Palestinian people
A Summary of Zionist Terrorism in the Near East — 1944-1948
long before Avraham Stern, i think you would look at the 1929 riots in jerusalem, including the hebron massacre.
what the israelis are doing, and what they've done is horrible. but that doesn't excuse the palestinian's actions. no, israeli's conscious shouldn't be clear, and no, it's not all hamas's fault. but hamas is part of it; there's not point in pretending they haven't done anything wrong, even if you do think it's justified.
i think it's clear from history that the racism in the area isn't the same as the racism in south africa during apartheid. the palestinians and israelis have given each other a lot of good reason to hate each other. it's not economic, it's fear and anger. if you wanted to ease that tension, which obviously you don't, you would try to ease the fear rather than foment it.
this is why i think it's important for you to talk more about a reasonable way forward, rather than just looking at the past. both sides have done horrible things. i don't think it's fair for anyone to say israel is the good guy, but obviously that doesn't make the palestinians the good guy.
if what you want is to continue the violence and racist apartheid policy, but you want to change the dominant race, then say so.
yep
no, both sides have not done equally equivalent horrible things. That is misrepresentative and clouds over the fact that Israel is a colony aiming to take the place of Palestinians. Even the Hebron massacre is to be read from that perspective - the knowledge that Zionists were taking over Palestinian lands.
From The power of appropriating history: thoughts on the settlers in Al-Khalil
Settlers today will say that Jews have lived in Hebron for a long time, and the 1929 Hebron Massacre proved that co-existence between Jews and Arabs was impossible, so the only solution is military. But is this a fair assessment? Was not the ’29 massacre an expression of anti-colonial sentiment, of fear that the new Yishuv, Zionism, was expelling Arabs from their land, and would eventually take political control over Arab lands?
Modern settlers in Hebron live fully within the most extreme kind of Zionist ideology. But it would be unfair to retroactively ascribe this to Jews living there in the 19th century. The Palestinian nationalist movement has always said that prior to Zionism, Jews and Muslims and Christians lived in Peace in Palestine, and I have no reason to doubt this.
If this is true, then there is an alternative history to the Jewish presence in Hebron, a story which Palestinians and activists should tell – a story in which the Jews of Hebron in the 19th century would despise what happens there today, a story in which it would not even be clear that the current Jews in Hebron’s claimed forefathers were not Zionists, and were perhaps anti-Zionists.
This is potentially a compelling story, a story which challenges the Zionist narrative at its extremist core, and a narrative which refuses to submit to the “moderate” racism of Zionism by denying the essentiality of anti-semitism, and reading racist sentiments in the region as products of colonial intervention and to some extent objective conflicts between groups, produced in their reality by political leaders who were themselves racist.
On the mistaken targeting of non-Zionist Jews in the 1929 riots:
...Most of their victims were members of the old Yishuv, few of whom sympathized with political ZIonism, though many were close to the ideals of religious ZIonism. What happens to have caused alarm among the Arab populace was the establishment in 1924 of an Orthodox yeshiva that quickly attracted large numbers of students from Europe and the United states (some 265 in 1929), who again were mostly non-ZIonists or even anti-Zionist, but who with their Western clothes and habits looked like Zionists to the local arabs. Shocking as the assaults were, they were not a pogrom (the persecution of Jews carried out under governemnt auspices); the majority of Jews in Hebron were saved by their Arab neighbors.
from “A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel”, by Gudrun Krämer, Graham Harman, page 232
No matter how you push and pull, how you try to avoid looking at the blatantly obvious truth, that Israel = Zionist colonization of Palestine and that this is responsible for all the consequential evils and all the violence in that geography and has disastrous repercussions for the larger geography, no matter how you want to escape the blatant truth that Israel is a unique instance of a religio-ideological colonization by Russians, Europeans and others of land which belonged to and on which dwelled, worked and was culturally profuse an indigenous people who were kicked out or live under oppression and the obvious policies of ethnic cleansing...if you don't see that, then you're deluded.
Israel was and continues to be a racist colonizing entity - this is obvious in its building more and more "illegal" settlements on Palestinian lands (although Israel is all illegal and built on Palestinian land). Those who wish to remain blind to this as well, who inanely call for "forgetting the past" and moving on do not see that it is in the nature of that colonial racist entity to be colonial and racist, its past proves it, its present proves it, the whole trajectory of its history proves this.
Resistance of a people against an oppressor, against an entity that wishes to ethnically cleanse them, is a right. There is no way that anyone can make that inane moral equivalence between the colonized and the colonizer, the victim and the criminal.
actually, i'm bringing up the past. quite the opposite of 'forgetting the past.'
people came and went, into and out of this area, pretty much since time began. due to the religious significance in jerusalem, pilgrims from europe were coming and going for hundreds of years before the british mandate, before the balfour declaration, before the hebron massacre, even before the ottomon empire. for example, richard the lionhearted was famous for his trip, leaving traces of his european ancestory in jerusalem as far back as the 12th century.
so, you're saying the ethnic population can only consist of the arabs who crossed in and out of the borders from adjoining countries, and the non-arab people, who had been in the area for centuries, are considered non-native zionists? by the way, king richard was not a zionist.
so to be clear, you either picked a moment in history a very very long time ago, and said the decedents of this group of people are allowed to rule, and no other. or you picked a race, and said their decedents have a right to rule.
all of the evils in this area do not fall solely on the shoulders of the people currently living under the government of israel today. that is ridiculous. if someone within hamas makes a conscious decision with intent to kill civilians, they're just as responsible for that decision and an israeli that makes the same decision.
i am not a zionist. i don't think israel should 'cleanse' the palestinians. i don't think israel has a right to all of the land that was formerly in the british mandate.
on the other hand, i don't think the palestinians should 'cleanse' the israelis. i don't think they have a right to all of the land they want. they do have a right to resist the oppressive government that is blockading them, but that doesn't mean getting their own civilians killed is something to be proud of.
if you understand the history, then you should understand how this is different than apartheid, and you should understand what noam chomsky was saying in orhan's earlier link. if you want to end the racism, part of that is going to include israel having some sense of security that the palestinians aren't going to attack civilian targets as they've repeatedly done in the past. i'm not defending israel; it doesn't justify their actions. however, i do believe no progress can be made without that.
instead, you're saying you want the palestinians to attack whatever civilian target they want, to breed more hate and fear, and increase the racist sentiment, because they're "native." what do you have to gain? a few more people protesting in canada?
the end of apartheid in south africa was racial equality. what you're promoting is further racial segregation.
Only the cannanites have true rights to Palestine. Where are they again?
I would like to think that this would ultimately be resolved by adhering to the 1947 borders laid out by the UN, but the Arabs have never recognized them, nor did they ever propose borders of their own or work in a constructive fashion towards a resolution - that has not changed in 60 years, but it must if there is to be peace. Israel is not going anywhere.
Seeing as how the Islamic State just took control of a border crossing into Golan Heights, I fear the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be the least of our worries in a year or two. A regional Sunni - Shi'a - Jewish war is terrifying to contemplate.
I'm currently toggling between two books, one written by a Palestinian (Edward Said "The Question of Palestine") with the aim of bringing into the visible a reality that was (and is in the process of being) forcibly disappeared: a real people, a culture and a burgeoning country rooted in their own homeland for countless generations and, yes, express the cross fertilization of the region entire as well as exhibiting (also mentioned within western and arab sources) indigenous specificity. In other words, like most other people of the so called "old world". Indigenous...but not insular.
The other is by an Israeli (Shlomo Sand "The Invention of the Land of Israel") with the aim of bringing into the visible a forgery that was (and is in the process of being) forcibly fabricated : the invention of a "Land of Israel" on the basis of an invented historically non-corroborated myth of being exiled, of a divine claim, an invented Jewish people (, in the sense of singular ethnicity) and a 19th century colonial program for the disappearing of the country and culture Edward Said speaks about. Also interestingly, it is about the forgery of religion by nationalism, Judaism by Zionism. One can say that Jewry itself has been virtually colonized by Zionism at the virtual stage so as to proceed with a more physical colonization.
In other words, its like reading about both sides of a perverse mirror. The side of the tangible being represented as an illusion and the side of the illusion being represented as tangible. I've chosen sections which especially have to do with language, the forgery of a language in order to mask the true existence of another, Israel in order to mask and extinguish Palestine.
------------------------------------------------------
Edward Said: "...we must understand the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism as a struggle between a presence and an interpretation, the former constantly appearing to be overpowered and eradicated by the latter. What was this presence? No matter how backward, uncivilized and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on the land. Read through any nineteenth century account of the travels in the Orient - Chateaubriand, Mark Twain, Lamartine, Nerval, Disraeli - and you will find chronicled there accounts of Arab inhabitants on the land of Palestine. According to Israeli sources, in 1822 there were no more than 24,000 Jews in Palestine, les than 10 percent of the whole, overwhelmingly Arab population.
...The truth is, of course, that if one were to read geographers, historians, philosophers, and poets who wrote in Arabic from the eighth century on, one would find references to Palestine; to say nothing of innumerable references to Palestine in European literature from the Middle Ages to the present.
...Despite the steady arrival in Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there anything other than a huge Arab majority. For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 176,606 against a total of 1,033,314; in 1936, Jewish numbers had gone up to 384,078 and the total to 1,366,692; in 1946 there were 608,225 Jews in a total population of 1,912,112. In all these statistics, "natives" were easily distinguishable from the arriving colonists. But wh0 were these natives? All of them spoke Arabic, and were mainly Sunni Muslims although a minority among them were Christians, Druzes and Shiite Muslims - all of whom spoke Arabic too. Approximately 65% of the Palestinian Arabs were agricultural people who lived in about 500 villages where ground crops were grown. The principal Palestinian cities - Nablus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Acre, Jaffa, Jericho, Ramlah, Hebron, and Haifa - were built in the main by Palestinian Arabs, who continued to live there even after the encroaching Zionist colonies expanded to them...Modern Palestinian social, economic, and cultural life was organized around the same issues of independence and anti colonialism prevalent in the region, only for the Palestiniansm there were the legacy of Ottoman rule, then Zionist colonialism, then British mandatory authority (after World War 1) to contend with more or less all together." - Edward Said, "The Question of Palestine" pp 8-12
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomo Sand: " After many years of studying history, I believe neither in the past existence of a Jewish people, exiled from its land, not in the premise that the Jews are originally descended from the ancient land of Judea. There can be no mistaking the striking resemblance between Yemenite Jews and Yemenite Muslims, between North African Jews and the indigenous Berber population of the region, between Ethiopian Jews and their African neighbours...or between the Jews of Eastern Europe and the members of the Turkish and Slavic tribes that inhabited the Caucasus and southeast Russia. To the dismay of anti-Semites, the Jews were never a foreign "ethnos" of invaders from afar but rather an autocthonous population whose ancestors, for the most part, converted to Judaism before the arrival of Christianity or Islam.
...Even when the writings of important Zionist figures such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Ber Borochov, and many others- who, like most of their supporters, used the standard term "Palestine" (or Palestina, the Latin form used in many European languages at the time) - are translated into Hebrew, this appellation is always converted into the "Land of Israel"....Some pro-Zionist historians also attempt to incorporate the terms into other languages.... (Simon) Schama, who titled his book commemorating the colonizing enterprise of the Rothschild family Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel , despite the fact that during the historical period in question, the name of Palestine was customarily used not only by all the European languages but also by the Jewish protagonists discussed in Schama's book.
...History can be ironic, particularly with regard to the invention of traditions in general and traditions of language in particular. Few people have noticed, or are willing to acknowledge, that the Land of Israel of biblical texts did not include Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem or their surrounding areas, but rather only Samaria and a number of adjacent areas.
...In actuality,as one of the many names of the region - some of which were no less accepted in Jewish tradition such as the Holy Land, the Land of Canaan, the Land of Zion, or the land of Gazelle - the term "Land of Israel" was a later Christian and rabbinical invention that was theological, and by no means political in nature.
...Only in the earl twentieth century, after years in the Protestant melting pot, was the theological concept of "Land of ISrael" finally converted into a clearly geonational concept. Settlement Zionism borrowed the term from the rabbinical tradition in part to displace the term "Palestine", which, as we have seen, was then widely used not only throughout Europe but also by the first generation Zionist leaders. In the new language of the settlers, the Land of Israel became the exclusive name of the region.
This linguistic engineering - part of the construction of ethnocentric memory, and later to involve the Hebraization of the names of regions, neighbourhoods, streets, mountains, and riverbeds- enables Jewish nationalist memory to make its astonishing leap back in time over the territory's long non-Jewish history. Much more significant for our discussion, however, is the fact that this territorial designation, which neither included not related to the vast majority of the population, quickly made made it easier to view that majority as an assemblage of subtenants or temporary inhabitants, living on land that did not belong to them. Usage of the term "Land of Israel" played a role in shaping the widely held image of an empty land - "a land without a people" eternally designated for a "people without a land". Critical examination of this prevalent but false image, which was in fact formulated by an Evangelical Christian, better enables us to understand the evolution of the refugee problem during the 1948 war and the revival of the settlement enterprise in the aftermath of the 1967 war.
.May main goal in this book is to deconstruct the concept of the Jewish "historical right" to the Land of Israel, and its associated nationalist narratives, whose only purpose was to establish moral legitimacy for the appropriation of territory. From this perspective, the book is an effort to critique the official historiography of the Zionist Israeli establishment and, in the process, to trace the ramifications of Zionism's influential paradigmatic revolution within a gradually atrophying Judaism, From the outset, the rebellion of Jewish nationalism against Jewish religion involved a steadily increasing instrumentalization of the latter's words, values, symbols, holidays, and rituals." - Shlomo Sand, "The Invention of the Land of Israel", from the chapter entitled Introduction: Banal Murder and Toponymy
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