From http://normanfinkelstein.com/2014/in-a-world-of-gangster-states-all-praise-to-latin-america-the-last-refuge-of-humanity/
The decision of the Latin American countries to recall their ambassadors in Tel Aviv is a “deep disappointment”, says Israel.
El Salvador on Wednesday became the fifth Latin American country to withdraw its ambassador from Israel in protest at Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Peru have already recalled their ambassadors.
Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Yigal Palmor said that the move encourages Hamas; “this decision encourages Hamas which has been recognized as a terrorist organization by several countries. The countries standing against terror must act responsibly and should not reward them. While Hamas has been responsible for hindering a ceasfire, El Salvador, Peru and Chile were expected to support international attitude for peace and demilitarization of Gaza”, the statement said.
Earlier Israel criticized Brazil over its decision to recall its ambassador in protest at Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
Brazil was one of 29 countries in the UN Human Rights Council that voted last Wednesday to investigate Israel over its military offensive in Gaza.
During a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping on July 17, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said her country was “profoundly concerned by the dramatic events” in Gaza.
The Palestinian death toll from a devastating Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip rose to 1283, according to a Gaza Health Ministry spokesman.
According to the spokesman, at least 7170 Palestinians have also been injured in the ongoing Israeli attacks since July 7.
Syndicated from Anadolu Agency
Dear Archinect, please stop aiding in giving support to the apartheid colony of Israel through its private and public institutions and businesses. Please remove your listing of Israeli based institutions and businesses and desist from encouraging any commercial or cultural activity with this colonial entity whose main business is its war of crimes and theft of land (on which their architects build).
A family evacuates its home in response to Israeli air strikes on Gaza City yesterday; campaigners in Scotland say there is widespread revulsion against the attacks on Palestinians.
Campaigners in Scotland have succeeded in pressuring the organizers of an arts festival into removing the Israeli state-funded Incubator Theater Company from a city center venue in Edinburgh.
I do not know yet who your loved one was. She might have been a baby a few months old, or a young boy, a grandfather or one of your children or parents. I heard about your loved one’s death from Chico Menashe, a political commentator on Reshet Bet, Israel’s main radio station.
He explained that the killing of your loved one, as well as turning Gaza neighborhoods to rubble and driving 150,000 people from their homes, is part of a well-calculated Israeli strategy: this carnage will destroy the impulse of Palestinians in Gaza to resist Israeli policies.
I heard this while reading in the 25 July edition of the supposedly respectable Haaretz the words of the not so respectable historian Benny Morris that even this is not enough.
He calls the genocidal policies so far “refisut” — feebleness of mind and spirit. He demands far more massive destruction in the future with the knowledge that this is how you behave if you want to defend your “villa in the jungle,” as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak described Israel.
Inhuman wilderness
Yes, I am afraid to say the Israeli media and academia are fully behind the massacre apart from few, hardly audible voices in this inhuman wilderness. I am not writing this to tell you that I am ashamed — I long ago dissociated myself from this state ideology and do all I can as an individual to confront and defeat it. Probably it has not been enough; we are all inhibited by moments of cowardice, egotism and maybe a natural impulse to take care of our family and loved ones.
And yet I feel the urge today to make a pledge to you, which none of the Germans my father knew during the time of the Nazi regime was willing to make to him when the thugs committed genocide against his family. This is not much of a pledge at your moment of grief, but it is the best I can offer and saying nothing is not an option. And doing nothing is even less than an option.
This is 2014 — the destruction of Gaza is well documented. This is not 1948 when Palestinians had to struggle hard to tell their story of horror; so many of the crimes Zionist committed then where hidden and never came to light, even until today. So my first and simple pledge is to record, inform and insist on the truth.
My old university, University of Haifa, has recruited its students to disseminate Israel’s lies all over the world using the Internet, but this is 2014 and propaganda of this kind will not hold water.
Pledge to boycott
But surely this is not enough. I pledge to continue the effort to boycott a state that commits such crimes. Only when the Union of European Football Associations throws Israel out, when the academic community refuses to have any institutional ties with Israel, when airlines hesitate to fly there, and when every outfit that may lose money because of an ethical stance in the short-term understands that in the long run it will gain both morally and financially — only then we will begin to honor your loss.
Similar initiatives were sabotaged elsewhere by spineless politicians in Europe and the United States. But my pledge is to be part of the effort to overcome these hurdles. The memory of your loved one will be the driving force, together with the vivid memory of the suffering of the Palestinians in 1948 and ever since.
Slaughterhouse
I do it all egotistically. I really pray and hope that in this worst moment of your life when Palestinians stand in Shujaiya, Deir al-Balah or Gaza City, gazing at the slaughterhouse created by Israeli warplanes, tanks and artillery, you would not lose hope in humanity.
This humanity even includes Israelis, those who do not have the courage to speak but who express their horror in private as my overflowing email and Facebook inboxes attest, as well as the small handful who demonstrate publicly against the incremental genocide in Gaza.
It also includes those not born yet who perhaps will be able to escape a Zionist indoctrination machine that teaches them, from cradle to grave, to dehumanize the Palestinians to such a level that the burning alive of a sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy fails to move them or shatter their belief in their government, army or religion.
Defeated
For their sake, mine and yours, I wish we can also dream of the day after — when Zionism will be defeated as the ideology that governs our lives between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea and we all have the normal life we crave for and deserve.
So I pledge today not to be distracted even by friends and Palestinian leaders who still foolishly pin their hopes on the long-gone “two-state solution.” If one has the impulse to be involved in bringing regime change in Palestine, the only reason to do this is for a struggle for equal human and civil rights and full restitution for all those who are and were victimized by Zionism, inside and outside the beloved land of Palestine.
May whoever is your loved one rest in peace knowing that their death was not in vain — not because it will be avenged and revenged. We do not need more bloodshed. I still believe there is a way of bringing evil systems to an end with the power of humanity and morality.
Justice also means bringing the murderers who killed your loved one and so many others to court, and we must pursue bringing Israel’s war criminals to trial in international tribunals.
It is a far longer way and, at times, even I feel the impulse to be part of a force that uses hard power to end the inhumanity. But I pledge myself to work for justice, full justice, restorative justice.
This is what I can pledge — to work to prevent the next stage in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.
On Sunday morning, Israeli forces shelled the neighborhood of Shuja’iya in northern Gaza to the point of obliteration. At least 67 civilians were killed. Civilians' bodies littered the streets as rescue workers struggled to aid the wounded amid continued bombing.
The massacre did not happen because the neighborhood is a Hamas stronghold, as some Zionist media claimed. It was a mad act of revenge for a fact that would become clearer in the later days— the Palestinians are winning the war.
The land invasion of Gaza has been a miserable failure so far. As of Thursday morning, 32 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza, with one captured. This number of Israeli military fatalities, which occurred in less than a week since the start of the ground operation, is unprecedented in the history of land incursions on Palestinian territories.
...Parallels are already being made between the failure of the Israeli operation in Gaza and the Israeli defeat in Lebanon in 2006. July is not a good month for the Israeli war machine.
An accusation that has become frequently alleged by Israel throughout the ongoing operation is that Hamas uses civilians as human shields and deliberately puts Palestinian civilian lives in danger by denying them the opportunity to evacuate targeted areas. Hamas and activists in Gaza vigorously deny this charge.
The claim that Hamas intentionally prevents civilians from evacuating targeted areas has not been corroborated by independent reports from journalists covering the conflict. There is no evidence that Hamas coerces civilians. Even in the event that Hamas did indeed use civilians as human shields, which would be illegal under international law, it would not justify Israel’s bombardment of populated residential areas and housing structures.
The purpose of this accusation is to absolve Israel of wrongdoing by shifting the blame to Hamas, and also to deny agency to the Palestinian resistance. In a shameful display of intellectual dishonesty, the Israeli narrative affirms a thought process that deprives the Palestinian dead of their victimhood. Even as Israeli forces bombard the dispossessed and humiliated people of Gaza in their F-16 fighter jets and drones, they paradoxically blame Palestinian deaths on Palestinians themselves.
Israeli society has been utterly propagandized by emotionally manipulative and militaristic sloganeering, and while there are certainly dissenters and people who adamantly oppose the status quo, the majority of Israelis widely support the ongoing campaign against Gaza, primarily because they have been conditioned by the state to believe they are victims of both history and the present.
Israel’s leadership has shamefully preyed upon the historical trauma and persecution of the Jewish people to legitimize its occupation; it equates legitimate criticism with anti-Semitism, and any resistance to the state’s dehumanizing colonialism as an existential threat to the Jewish people. These tendencies have given rise to a rabid brand of ultra-nationalism that has clouded the Israeli conscience.
In recent years most of humanity has become more tolerant of groups who once seemed to be on the margins of society. But until now it’s still been acceptable to be offensive about one minority: the child murdering community.
At last it seems the mood is changing, and finally we’re beginning to hear the child murderers’ point of view.
For example one brave soul, prepared to speak out, is spokesman Uri Dromi, who explained on Radio 4 yesterday that although the Israeli government bombed a school that several children died in, the deaths are clearly the fault of the people who live in the areas being bombed.
What a refreshing change from that tired old thinking that always blames murder on the murderer. Mister Drome, once a spokesman for the Israeli government, said the Israelis were “lured into a trap, now Hamas sheds crocodile tears about the dead”.
ISIS -like all alqaeda groups- is a bunch of terrorists. They're the islamic equivalent of zionism. They think theyre entitled (the chosen one) to eliminate others in order to take over land and property to enforce their totalitarian purist rule. They have never really confronted israel (their worst and first enemies are other moslems, whether moderate sunnis, shias or other catholic ramifications then christians, jews and others). They want more deluded gullible people to join them, a ploy.
And please read the text accurately. They will strike everyone who stands in their way to Palestine. What does that mean? It means they'll create massacres on the way before they get to Palestine. This is good for Israel...not bad.
ISIS and its sisters are and were subsidized and helped by the likes of US pals, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey to encourage setting up an element that would combat the resistance axis tying Iran, Syria, Lebanon to Palestine. As a matter of fact, in Israel's estimation, these regressive infiltrated al qaeda bandits aid it in its fight against Iran, Syria and Hezbollah and theyre not graded as highly in terms of being security threats.
Al-Shifa hospital has received a phone call telling them a building of the hospital will be bombed.
At 16:30, the hospital received a call from an unlisted number, stating a building needed to be evacuated immediately.
The building is being used for overflow patients, and is directly across the road from the main hospital building. It is part of the hospital site, but building work has yet to be completed.
The hospital is now in the process of evacuating all staff and patients inside.
“I’d like to say that Israel’s threats to bomb Gaza’s largest hospital have reached a new low, but in light of its relentless atrocities and civilian massacres over the last 25 days, it’s hardly unexpected,” stated Joe Catron, U.S. International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist now in al-Shifa hospital.
Angered by the immoral and inhumane assault on Gaza, Gen Y is shaking up the conventional view of Mideast politics
International support for Israel is ebbing because the Holocaust narrative can no longer offer an omnipotent shield against a critique of the second narrative regarding the founding of the state of Israel. Israel is in fact risking losing the narrative war altogether, as more and more of the global public is asking questions that probe into that history, prompted by the evidence of Israeli’s current efforts to continue and expand Israeli power and land, efforts that are now increasingly regarded not as survival tactics but as violent colonial ones. In sum, there is now a widening band of light in between the heretofore seamless merger of the Holocaust and founding narratives, resulting in a weakening of the former in its capacity to act as an alibi for the latter. Again, this is especially important with regard to the U.S., which has been the world’s most generous supporter of Israel. More and more younger Americans, growing up well past the postwar era, find the Holocaust narrative to be less than absolutely and unquestionably a good reason to support the horrible killings in Gaza. And as they learn more, their support will wane further.
Palestine is being wiped off the map. Our communities are dying a slow death of deliberate attrition, neglect and ghettoisation. Israel continues to steal our lands, heritage, homes and history, and while Palestinian resistance is the only reason that its colonial project is still incomplete, time is not on our side. What we do have on our side, though, our truest strength, is truth and the moral high ground of an indigenous people fighting a system of colonial apartheid and ethnic cleansing. All resistance tactics available to us that maintain this fundamental strength should be explored or intensified.
“(The Yinon plan) is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.
“Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.”
....
he day after that devastating war ended, the US replaced Iraq over the then USSR as the country which was the biggest threat to America. A devastated, war torn nation of, at the time, just under seventeen million people. (2)
Then came the dispute with Kuwait over alleged oil theft and Dinar destabilizing with the then US Ambassador April Glaspie personally giving Saddam Hussein the green light to invade should he choose. The subsequent nation paralyzing UN embargo followed, then the 2003 decimation and occupation – another orchestrated downward spiral – and tragedy and now open talk of what has been planned for decades, the break up of Iraq.
Greater Israel” requires the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states.
“Mission accomplished” for both the US with its long planned redrawing of the Middle East and North Africa – and Israel, through whose friendship with the Iraqi Kurdish autocracy, was set to become pretty well a partner in an autonomous, independent Iraqi Kurdistan. Dream come true, from “the Nile to the Euphrates”, the final fruition of near seventy years of manipulation and aggression for domination of the entire region.
The all is also the vision of the super hawk, dreamer of destruction of nations, Lt Colonel Ralph Peters since the early 1990s. Here is his 2006 version (3.) Peters is a man whose vision of eternal war is seemingly an eternal wet dream. Here, again, for anyone unaware of the Colonel, is a repeat of that dream (US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 1997):
“There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts … around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. (US armed forces will keep) the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
“We have entered an age of constant conflict.”
Peters would make some of history’s most megalomaniacal expansionists look like gift offering peaceniks. His cartographic monument to arrogance: “The New Map of the Middle East Project”, of geographical restructure in far away places of which he gave less than a damn, was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006.\
However, speaking to Turkey's Anadolu news agency, Palestinian Health Ministry spokesman Ashar Qudra pointed out that the Israeli war machine has killed 1,458 Palestinians, including 330 children, 170 women and 60 elderly people; 8,375 people, including 2510 children, 1630 women and 310 elderly have been wounded. Almost all are civilians.
Eran Efrati, 28, was born and raised in Jerusalem. After graduating high school he enlisted in the IDF, where he served as a combat soldier and company sergeant in Battalion 50 of the Nachal Division. He spent most of his service in Hebron and throughout the West Bank. In 2009, he was discharged and joined Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers working to raise awareness about the daily reality in the Occupied Territories.
...Key points from this lecture
There is a heavy indoctrination in Israel, from an early age in schools, which uses the holocaust to create paranoia and fear against ‘the enemy’
Israeli soldiers are trained intensively for a war, whilst their actual military duties are to subdue and control Palestinians
Israeli soldiers routinely humiliate, intimidate, arrest, beat and kill civilian Palestinians to ‘protect’ illegal Jewish settlers in occupied territories
Many Israeli soldiers are aware what they are doing is wrong, but have no way out and feel pressured to continue
Palestinians who require medical attention, have to go through military checkpoints – to do this they require permits
They give these permits to lawyers of ‘Doctors without borders’ and then prevent them from going to the West Bank – meaning Palestinians do not receive permits
Israel uses a clever process to cover itself legally to the world
During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli soldiers were traumatised and confused the atrocities they saw in Gaza
Israel would bomb civilian areas to clear the way for Israeli ground forces, use tank shells, air-strikes and illegal white phosphorus
When wanting to speak out, via the ‘Breaking the Silence Campaign‘ the Haaretz newspaper refused to publish soldier testimonies after pressure by IDF Spokesman
Breaking the Silence campaign itself was censored by the IDF Spokesman
All media in Israel has to go through the IDF censorship
The Israeli government and military make a lot of money by selling its weapons to other repressive regimes around the world,
Israel tries and tests its weapons on Palestinians – ‘this is not (just) an occupation’ this is a laboratory for Israeli military weapons
Israel uses undercover units in the occupied territories to start riots, and then justify the use of weapons against Palestinian protesters
All police departments in the US are trained by the Israeli military and are taught the same brutal tactics used against Palestinians
US police departments have already used such tactics in suppressing protests in the US, such as the Occupy movement
Hit Israel where it hurts the most, boycott Israel
Two Palestinians have been killed and over 90 injured in West Bank as thousands marched against the IDF's assault on Gaza. The bloodshed happened after Israeli authorities used tear gas and live ammunition to block vocal yet seemingly peaceful rallies.
In the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem, a 22-year-old Tamer Faraj Sammur was shot in the chest during clashes with Israeli forces, AFP reports. Hamas urged the West Bank residents on Friday to stage a “Day of Anger” protest across another Palestinian enclave.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said she was looking into the incident. Another 14 Palestinians were injured by live and rubber-coated bullets shot by the Israeli army as more than 3,000 Palestinians took part in the demonstration.
WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO
A rally near Ramallah witnessed 19-year-old Odai Nafez Jaber allegedly wounded by three live bullets. The teenager died in the hospital, Alternative Information Center reports. Palestinians clashed with Israeli forces outside Israel's Ofer military prison
Israel gets signals from the US that it can do whatever it wants, so Tel-Aviv keeps refurbishing its weapons so that it could kill more Gazans, independent researcher and writer Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich told RT.
RT:What are the chances that the ceasefire will hold?
It seems that we are having incremental ceasefires for an incremental genocide. One has to understand the thinking that is behind all this as much as one does regret a single death; I do not care on which side. It is against the Zionist ideology to have a truce as Yitzhak Shamir said in 1997. So to think that they will give up the notion of taking over the whole of the land which they consider the Greater Israel - it is just not going to happen. What happens is we keep having these little ceasefires and then again the killings start anew. It also gives room to Israel to breath because international public opinion has turned against them, it now gives a kind of sense of credibility that they are really going to step back and allow you to take away the dead while they still continue to do destroy the tunnels which are the life saver for the Gazans, and at the same time come back and bomb what is left of you. It is really a travesty of justice and it is in violation of every human rights law and international law. I am just amazed at the UN for not calling it as it is which is genocide, if you look at the convention for prevention of genocide and punishment, and specifically in the Article 2. Everything that is happening in Gaza indicates it is genocide, and Mr. Ban Ki Moon's predecessor Kofi Annan in 2004 addressed the UN Commission of Human Rights and he said part of his biggest regrets was that he did not stop the Rwanda genocide and the warning signs were there.
T:Does the responsibility for the situation fully lie on Israel?
SS: The day the ground invasion of Gaza started was the day that the Malaysian plane was shot down in eastern Ukraine. I think as analyst we need to sit and connect all these links. And in fact Russians in January offered to develop the gas fields for Gaza. At the time of the 2009 assault on Gaza the British offered to develop the gas for the Gazans and the Israelis said “we will never buy gas from them.” They attacked and took over everything again. So this is not more about land, about water, about power and it will not go anywhere until Israel has stopped. In 1947 Israel killed a representative of the UN Bernadotte, and it told the world that it wouldn’t have limits. In 1967 it killed American crew members of the USS Liberty, the American government covered it up. This also signals to Israel that “you can do whatever you want and we’ll have you back.” And they do. They are refurbishing their weapons so that they could kill more Gazans. If anybody here is more guilty than the Israelis, it is the Americans. It is America that is responsible for what is happening 100 percent. We cannot just point finger at Israel. Nothing will be stopped until America stops its support.
From http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/07/29/israeli-soldier-admits-murdering-palestinian-civilians-was-a-pre-planned-act-of-revenge/
Israeli Soldier Admits Murdering Palestinian Civilians Was A “Pre-Planned Act Of Revenge”
Former Israeli military commander and Breaking the Silence researcher Eran Efrati has posted a statement to Facebook on his talks with IDF soldiers in Gaza, and reveals the deliberate killing of Palestinians by sniper fire in Shuja’iyya neighborhood as punishment for the death of soldiers in their units.
you're linking to someone in the press's interpretation and analysis of the white house's statement. you can read the source and come to your own conclusion, rather than relying on philip weiss's opinion
Article you are linking is already linked in the article I posted and I've read it before I posted. I am interested in the text and its interpretation by Philip Weiss in MondoWeiss. I share his opinion.
You know little about the diplomatic underpinnings in speech and writing between the governments. Go back to your desk and read the chapter again. And like I said it couple days ago, don't bug me until you have something useful to say.
Close your eyes and visualize a child that you know and love dearly. The child can be your son, daughter, sibling, nephew or niece, grandson or granddaughter or even the child of a friend. Next, imagine that child playing innocently. Now imagine a bomb falling fatally near that child with his/her little body parts flying in different directions. If you are repulsed from this mental exercise, good. That means you have at least a shred or more of human feelings which I can address.
The issue is this: That mental exercise is not something imaginary for the Palestinian people of Gaza, rather, it is their daily living hell.
Genocide is defined in the dictionary as "the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group." For close to a month now, Israel has been committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. At the time of this writing, 1600 Palestinians have been murdered by the Israeli military with the vast majority of them being civilians according to global media outlets and international human rights sources, although that number keeps changing by the hour. Also at the time of this writing, 360 of these civilians are children.
Medics give assistance to a wounded Palestinian girl upon her arrival at the hospital in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on August 2, 2014 after an Israeli attack. (Photo: AFP - Said Khatib)
Published Saturday, August 2, 2014
At least 296 Palestinian children and adolescents have been killed since Israel launched its terror campaign against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on July 8, the UN said on Saturday.
"Children make up for 30 percent of the civilian casualties," said the UN children's agency UNICEF, adding that the toll was based on deaths which it was able to verify and was likely to rise.
Dear Archinect, stop supporting the institutions and businesses on which thrives an entity that makes of genocide its routine business. Please boycott Israeli architects, universities et al.
As long as governments around the world maintain their support for Israel, it is up to ordinary people to take action. War on Want is working with grassroots Palestinian movements to build a global movement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it meets the following demands: an end to the Occupation; the right of return for Palestinian refugees; and equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
TAKE ACTION FOR PALESTINE
1. Boycott Israeli products – all Israeli products The Palestinian people are living under an apartheid regime, and the governments of the world do nothing about it. It is up to us, the peoples of the world, to hold Israel to account for its actions. Apartheid in South Africa was defeated with the help of a global boycott campaign. It’s time to boycott Israeli apartheid too.
2. Boycott corporations profiting from Israel’s illegal Occupation Companies profiting from the Occupation of Palestine include SodaStream, Sainsbury’s, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and British security company G4S. Join Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Roger Waters, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and thousands of others in calling on G4S to end its complicity in the Occupation. Add your name to the letter here.
3. Demand a two-way military embargo of Israel Israeli companies make enormous profits from military technology that is ‘field-tested’ on Palestinians. The UK government is buying this technology from Israel and selling British-made military equipment to Israel. Call for an immediate two-way arms embargo by adding your name here.
4. Know your facts The assault on Gaza is getting people to ask questions about Palestine. Be ready to answer these questions. Do your research and find out how Israel has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Order our free materials on Palestine from here.
5. Keep protesting Public opinion is shifting. Palestine needs you to keep voicing your opinions loud and clear, telling the government to put pressure on Israel to abide by international law. Turn your outrage into action for Palestine today.
TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains sexually explicit words and images.
As Israel’s latest assault on Gaza enters its third week, the destructive force unleashed upon the Strip has taken a massive toll, leaving over 650 Palestinians dead, over 4,200 wounded – mostly civilians – and over a hundred thousand homeless. As Gaza is pummeled, the level of anti-Palestinian racist incitement from top Israeli political, religious and cultural figures continues to ring at peak pitch, and has taken on a dangerous misogynistic tone.
Promoting the Rape of Gaza and Its Women
On July 21, Israeli media reported that Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of the West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba, issued a religious edict on the rules of engagement during wartime, which he sent to the country’s Defense Minister. The edict stated that according to Jewish religious law, it is permissible to bomb innocent Palestinian civilians and “to exterminate the enemy.”
While Lior is held in high regard, he is also associated with religious Zionism’s “conservative wing.” By contrast, David Stav, Chief Rabbi of the town of Shoham is considered to be a leader of religious Zionism’s “liberal” stream. In an op-ed published the same day news of Lior’s edict broke, Stav characterized the assault on Gaza as a holy war, which is mandated by the Torah itself and must be merciless.
While these leading religious figures called for wars of extermination, some secular Israelis suggested carrying out attacks of a more perverse nature.
The day after Lior and Stav made headlines, news emerged that the City Council of Or Yehuda, located in Israel’s coastal region, printed out and hung a banner supporting Israeli soldiers. The display included language suggesting the rape of Palestinian women. The text of the banner read: “Israeli soldiers, the residents of Or Yehuda are with you! Pound ‘their mother and come back home safely to your mother.”
This English translation of the Hebrew “Kansu” as “pound” (or its synonym “bang,”) literally means to beat, but also has a colloquial meaning connoting sexual penetration. In the Hebrew original, the double-entendre is inverted: “Kansu B’” has the colloquial meaning of physically attacking someone, but literally means to enter, sexually or otherwise – this sexual connotation can be found on multipleHebrew-languagesex blogs.
The phrase “their mother,” “ima shelahem” in Hebrew, also has the colloquial meaning of “with great intensity.” The idiom developed precisely because, for many people, witnessing their mother being assaulted is more painful than receiving a blow to their own person. In the context of the city’s banner, the language of sexualized violence is borrowed in order to articulate ruthless subjugation of Gaza’s Palestinian population.
Clearly the Or Yehuda City Council’s intent was to show support for the Israeli army with what it considered to be clever wordplay. By choosing the crass expression “Kansu ba-ima shelahem” – meaning “beat them with great intensity” and also “enter their mother” – the council was both encouraging violence toward Palestinians and subtly tapping into rape culture, which is widespread in Israel.
As Israel's brutal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continues unabated, the number of people voicing their support for Palestinian rights is increasing, including Western politicians and even celebrities. By speaking out for justice in Palestine, public figures also face a harsh backlash from pro-Zionists, but it seems that the longstanding culture of silence about Israel's continuing war crimes is becoming more and more tenuous.
“I woke up this morning and I learned that my tax dollars killed eight of my family members in Gaza. They were given an eight-second warning,” El-Haddad stated to members of Congress.
Fresh Israeli shelling kills 10 in UN shelter for displaced in Rafah
Published today (updated) 03/08/2014 18:37
The scene at the school after the shelling. (MaanImages)
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- 10 Palestinians were killed on Sunday after Israeli shells hit a UN school in Rafah where thousands of people were sheltering from the ongoing Israeli offensive.
Members of the Al-Ghoul family
Israel has shelled UN shelters for the displaced at least six times so far since the conflict began four weeks ago, killing dozens.
1st August 2014 | Gaza Ministry of Health | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
The Ministry of Health Gaza announces the closure of Al Najar Hospital in Rafah, due to Israeli shelling in the vicinity compromising its ability to guarantee the safety of patients and staff.
The hospital has now been evacuated, bringing to four the number of government hospitals closed by Israeli attacks in the past three and a half weeks.
This morning a group of over 70 people, mostly women and children carrying foreign passports, planned to take advantage of the ceasefire to leave Gaza and enter Egypt. Israel began bombing Rafah and the Egyptian personnel closed the Egyptian side of the border, leaving them trapped at the crossing, as the bombs fall around them. The Red Cross is not being allowed to reach them due to the bombing in the area.
Their nationalities include German, Norwegian, Bulgarian, and Egyptian.
The savage punishment of Gaza traces back to decades ago.
An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”
The old man’s message provides the proper context for the latest episode in the savage punishment of Gaza. The crimes trace back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from their homes in terror or were expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces, who continued to truck Palestinians over the border for years after the official cease-fire.
The punishment took new forms when Israel conquered Gaza in 1967. From recent Israeli scholarship (primarily Avi Raz’s “The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War”), we learn that the government’s goal was to drive the refugees into the Sinai Peninsula – and, if feasible, the rest of the population too.
Expulsions from Gaza were carried out under the direct orders of Gen. Yeshayahu Gavish, commander of the Israel Defense Forces Southern Command. Expulsions from the West Bank were far more extreme, and Israel resorted to devious means to prevent the return of those expelled, in direct violation of U.N. Security Council orders.
A demonstration began in solidarity with Gaza yesterday, beginning from al-Hussain Mosque in al-Khalil (Hebron) at 13:00. People walked from the mosque towards the city center, and stopped near the entrance of the souk (market) to listen to speeches. After that, most of the crowd continued down the streets near the souk and Bab Al-Zawiye checkpoint, where the crowd clashed with Israeli soldiers. Israeli soldiers threw stun grenades and fired live ammunition. A large group of young men threw stones at the soldiers from a few different areas; the young men also lit fires in the streets. Over 80 people were shot with live ammunition and were taken to hospital for medical treatment (photo by International Solidarity Movement. source :ISM Facebook page ).
Archinect, please boycott Israel (its about time!)
From http://normanfinkelstein.com/2014/in-a-world-of-gangster-states-all-praise-to-latin-america-the-last-refuge-of-humanity/ The decision of the Latin American countries to recall their ambassadors in Tel Aviv is a “deep disappointment”, says Israel. El Salvador on Wednesday became the fifth Latin American country to withdraw its ambassador from Israel in protest at Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Peru have already recalled their ambassadors. Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Yigal Palmor said that the move encourages Hamas; “this decision encourages Hamas which has been recognized as a terrorist organization by several countries. The countries standing against terror must act responsibly and should not reward them. While Hamas has been responsible for hindering a ceasfire, El Salvador, Peru and Chile were expected to support international attitude for peace and demilitarization of Gaza”, the statement said. Earlier Israel criticized Brazil over its decision to recall its ambassador in protest at Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. Brazil was one of 29 countries in the UN Human Rights Council that voted last Wednesday to investigate Israel over its military offensive in Gaza. During a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping on July 17, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said her country was “profoundly concerned by the dramatic events” in Gaza. The Palestinian death toll from a devastating Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip rose to 1283, according to a Gaza Health Ministry spokesman. According to the spokesman, at least 7170 Palestinians have also been injured in the ongoing Israeli attacks since July 7. Syndicated from Anadolu Agency
Israeli Military Torturing Palestinian Children
Why is Israel REALLY bombing Gaza
Dear Archinect, please stop aiding in giving support to the apartheid colony of Israel through its private and public institutions and businesses. Please remove your listing of Israeli based institutions and businesses and desist from encouraging any commercial or cultural activity with this colonial entity whose main business is its war of crimes and theft of land (on which their architects build).
Israeli play expelled from Edinburgh venue as Scots protest against Gaza attack
Submitted by Sarah Irving on Thu, 07/31/2014 - 10:23
gazachildren.jpg
A family evacuates its home in response to Israeli air strikes on Gaza City yesterday; campaigners in Scotland say there is widespread revulsion against the attacks on Palestinians.
(Ezz al-Zanoun / APA images)
Campaigners in Scotland have succeeded in pressuring the organizers of an arts festival into removing the Israeli state-funded Incubator Theater Company from a city center venue in Edinburgh.
To the family of the one thousandth victim of Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza
Ilan Pappe
The Electronic Intifada
27 July 2014
activestills1406443505k1ewi.jpg
Israelis in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square light candles for Palestinians killed in Gaza on 26 July.
(Yotam Ronen /ActiveStills)
I do not know yet who your loved one was. She might have been a baby a few months old, or a young boy, a grandfather or one of your children or parents. I heard about your loved one’s death from Chico Menashe, a political commentator on Reshet Bet, Israel’s main radio station.
He explained that the killing of your loved one, as well as turning Gaza neighborhoods to rubble and driving 150,000 people from their homes, is part of a well-calculated Israeli strategy: this carnage will destroy the impulse of Palestinians in Gaza to resist Israeli policies.
I heard this while reading in the 25 July edition of the supposedly respectable Haaretz the words of the not so respectable historian Benny Morris that even this is not enough.
He calls the genocidal policies so far “refisut” — feebleness of mind and spirit. He demands far more massive destruction in the future with the knowledge that this is how you behave if you want to defend your “villa in the jungle,” as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak described Israel.
Inhuman wilderness
Yes, I am afraid to say the Israeli media and academia are fully behind the massacre apart from few, hardly audible voices in this inhuman wilderness. I am not writing this to tell you that I am ashamed — I long ago dissociated myself from this state ideology and do all I can as an individual to confront and defeat it. Probably it has not been enough; we are all inhibited by moments of cowardice, egotism and maybe a natural impulse to take care of our family and loved ones.
And yet I feel the urge today to make a pledge to you, which none of the Germans my father knew during the time of the Nazi regime was willing to make to him when the thugs committed genocide against his family. This is not much of a pledge at your moment of grief, but it is the best I can offer and saying nothing is not an option. And doing nothing is even less than an option.
This is 2014 — the destruction of Gaza is well documented. This is not 1948 when Palestinians had to struggle hard to tell their story of horror; so many of the crimes Zionist committed then where hidden and never came to light, even until today. So my first and simple pledge is to record, inform and insist on the truth.
My old university, University of Haifa, has recruited its students to disseminate Israel’s lies all over the world using the Internet, but this is 2014 and propaganda of this kind will not hold water.
Pledge to boycott
But surely this is not enough. I pledge to continue the effort to boycott a state that commits such crimes. Only when the Union of European Football Associations throws Israel out, when the academic community refuses to have any institutional ties with Israel, when airlines hesitate to fly there, and when every outfit that may lose money because of an ethical stance in the short-term understands that in the long run it will gain both morally and financially — only then we will begin to honor your loss.
The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has had many achievements and continues its tireless work. The obstacles still include the false allegation of anti-Semitism and the cynicism of politicians. This is how an honorable initiative by British architects to force their colleagues in Israel to take a moral stance rather than be accomplices in the criminal colonization of the land was blocked at the last moment.
Similar initiatives were sabotaged elsewhere by spineless politicians in Europe and the United States. But my pledge is to be part of the effort to overcome these hurdles. The memory of your loved one will be the driving force, together with the vivid memory of the suffering of the Palestinians in 1948 and ever since.
Slaughterhouse
I do it all egotistically. I really pray and hope that in this worst moment of your life when Palestinians stand in Shujaiya, Deir al-Balah or Gaza City, gazing at the slaughterhouse created by Israeli warplanes, tanks and artillery, you would not lose hope in humanity.
This humanity even includes Israelis, those who do not have the courage to speak but who express their horror in private as my overflowing email and Facebook inboxes attest, as well as the small handful who demonstrate publicly against the incremental genocide in Gaza.
It also includes those not born yet who perhaps will be able to escape a Zionist indoctrination machine that teaches them, from cradle to grave, to dehumanize the Palestinians to such a level that the burning alive of a sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy fails to move them or shatter their belief in their government, army or religion.
Defeated
For their sake, mine and yours, I wish we can also dream of the day after — when Zionism will be defeated as the ideology that governs our lives between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea and we all have the normal life we crave for and deserve.
So I pledge today not to be distracted even by friends and Palestinian leaders who still foolishly pin their hopes on the long-gone “two-state solution.” If one has the impulse to be involved in bringing regime change in Palestine, the only reason to do this is for a struggle for equal human and civil rights and full restitution for all those who are and were victimized by Zionism, inside and outside the beloved land of Palestine.
May whoever is your loved one rest in peace knowing that their death was not in vain — not because it will be avenged and revenged. We do not need more bloodshed. I still believe there is a way of bringing evil systems to an end with the power of humanity and morality.
Justice also means bringing the murderers who killed your loved one and so many others to court, and we must pursue bringing Israel’s war criminals to trial in international tribunals.
It is a far longer way and, at times, even I feel the impulse to be part of a force that uses hard power to end the inhumanity. But I pledge myself to work for justice, full justice, restorative justice.
This is what I can pledge — to work to prevent the next stage in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.
Israel is losing the war
| Friday, 07.25.2014
On Sunday morning, Israeli forces shelled the neighborhood of Shuja’iya in northern Gaza to the point of obliteration. At least 67 civilians were killed. Civilians' bodies littered the streets as rescue workers struggled to aid the wounded amid continued bombing.
The massacre did not happen because the neighborhood is a Hamas stronghold, as some Zionist media claimed. It was a mad act of revenge for a fact that would become clearer in the later days— the Palestinians are winning the war.
The land invasion of Gaza has been a miserable failure so far. As of Thursday morning, 32 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza, with one captured. This number of Israeli military fatalities, which occurred in less than a week since the start of the ground operation, is unprecedented in the history of land incursions on Palestinian territories.
...Parallels are already being made between the failure of the Israeli operation in Gaza and the Israeli defeat in Lebanon in 2006. July is not a good month for the Israeli war machine.
From Israel always the victim… especially when it’s the executioner :
An accusation that has become frequently alleged by Israel throughout the ongoing operation is that Hamas uses civilians as human shields and deliberately puts Palestinian civilian lives in danger by denying them the opportunity to evacuate targeted areas. Hamas and activists in Gaza vigorously deny this charge.
The claim that Hamas intentionally prevents civilians from evacuating targeted areas has not been corroborated by independent reports from journalists covering the conflict. There is no evidence that Hamas coerces civilians. Even in the event that Hamas did indeed use civilians as human shields, which would be illegal under international law, it would not justify Israel’s bombardment of populated residential areas and housing structures.
The purpose of this accusation is to absolve Israel of wrongdoing by shifting the blame to Hamas, and also to deny agency to the Palestinian resistance. In a shameful display of intellectual dishonesty, the Israeli narrative affirms a thought process that deprives the Palestinian dead of their victimhood. Even as Israeli forces bombard the dispossessed and humiliated people of Gaza in their F-16 fighter jets and drones, they paradoxically blame Palestinian deaths on Palestinians themselves.
Israeli society has been utterly propagandized by emotionally manipulative and militaristic sloganeering, and while there are certainly dissenters and people who adamantly oppose the status quo, the majority of Israelis widely support the ongoing campaign against Gaza, primarily because they have been conditioned by the state to believe they are victims of both history and the present.
Israel’s leadership has shamefully preyed upon the historical trauma and persecution of the Jewish people to legitimize its occupation; it equates legitimate criticism with anti-Semitism, and any resistance to the state’s dehumanizing colonialism as an existential threat to the Jewish people. These tendencies have given rise to a rabid brand of ultra-nationalism that has clouded the Israeli conscience.
How willing is the US congress willing to impoverish the US in order to help their number one ally kill more children? Lets see...
UN Statements #Gazaunderattack
No Weapons found in UN Facilities
Israel guilty of attacking innocents.
How silly of me to assume it was Israeli bombs causing all the damage in Gaza
It’s clearly just a batch of explosive toasters
In recent years most of humanity has become more tolerant of groups who once seemed to be on the margins of society. But until now it’s still been acceptable to be offensive about one minority: the child murdering community.
At last it seems the mood is changing, and finally we’re beginning to hear the child murderers’ point of view.
For example one brave soul, prepared to speak out, is spokesman Uri Dromi, who explained on Radio 4 yesterday that although the Israeli government bombed a school that several children died in, the deaths are clearly the fault of the people who live in the areas being bombed.
What a refreshing change from that tired old thinking that always blames murder on the murderer. Mister Drome, once a spokesman for the Israeli government, said the Israelis were “lured into a trap, now Hamas sheds crocodile tears about the dead”.
Why Does Israel Keep Changing Its Story On Gaza?
American media's new pro-Israel bias: the same party line at the wrong time
Evolving conversations on the ground demand probing questions on-air. So why does TV news look like a Netanyahu ad?
uh oh! we told you so. now what?
Isis Pledge to Join the Palestinian Fight Against 'Barbaric Jews'
ISIS -like all alqaeda groups- is a bunch of terrorists. They're the islamic equivalent of zionism. They think theyre entitled (the chosen one) to eliminate others in order to take over land and property to enforce their totalitarian purist rule. They have never really confronted israel (their worst and first enemies are other moslems, whether moderate sunnis, shias or other catholic ramifications then christians, jews and others). They want more deluded gullible people to join them, a ploy. And please read the text accurately. They will strike everyone who stands in their way to Palestine. What does that mean? It means they'll create massacres on the way before they get to Palestine. This is good for Israel...not bad.
ISIS and its sisters are and were subsidized and helped by the likes of US pals, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey to encourage setting up an element that would combat the resistance axis tying Iran, Syria, Lebanon to Palestine. As a matter of fact, in Israel's estimation, these regressive infiltrated al qaeda bandits aid it in its fight against Iran, Syria and Hezbollah and theyre not graded as highly in terms of being security threats.
Israeli military announce they will bomb al-Shifa hospital in Gaza
Al-Shifa hospital has received a phone call telling them a building of the hospital will be bombed.
At 16:30, the hospital received a call from an unlisted number, stating a building needed to be evacuated immediately.
The building is being used for overflow patients, and is directly across the road from the main hospital building. It is part of the hospital site, but building work has yet to be completed.
The hospital is now in the process of evacuating all staff and patients inside.
“I’d like to say that Israel’s threats to bomb Gaza’s largest hospital have reached a new low, but in light of its relentless atrocities and civilian massacres over the last 25 days, it’s hardly unexpected,” stated Joe Catron, U.S. International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist now in al-Shifa hospital.
Projected protest: Pro-Palestine group beams flag on to Parliament
Doctors treating patients in Gaza have accused Israel of using experimental weapons on Palestinian civilians.
Millennials are over Israel: A new generation, outraged over Gaza, rejects Washington’s reflexive support
Angered by the immoral and inhumane assault on Gaza, Gen Y is shaking up the conventional view of Mideast politics
International support for Israel is ebbing because the Holocaust narrative can no longer offer an omnipotent shield against a critique of the second narrative regarding the founding of the state of Israel. Israel is in fact risking losing the narrative war altogether, as more and more of the global public is asking questions that probe into that history, prompted by the evidence of Israeli’s current efforts to continue and expand Israeli power and land, efforts that are now increasingly regarded not as survival tactics but as violent colonial ones. In sum, there is now a widening band of light in between the heretofore seamless merger of the Holocaust and founding narratives, resulting in a weakening of the former in its capacity to act as an alibi for the latter. Again, this is especially important with regard to the U.S., which has been the world’s most generous supporter of Israel. More and more younger Americans, growing up well past the postwar era, find the Holocaust narrative to be less than absolutely and unquestionably a good reason to support the horrible killings in Gaza. And as they learn more, their support will wane further.
Resistance to Israeli occupation can and must take many forms
Palestine is being wiped off the map. Our communities are dying a slow death of deliberate attrition, neglect and ghettoisation. Israel continues to steal our lands, heritage, homes and history, and while Palestinian resistance is the only reason that its colonial project is still incomplete, time is not on our side. What we do have on our side, though, our truest strength, is truth and the moral high ground of an indigenous people fighting a system of colonial apartheid and ethnic cleansing. All resistance tactics available to us that maintain this fundamental strength should be explored or intensified.
GraduatedLicensure, this is also for you
“The Israeli Dream”: The Criminal Roadmap Towards “Greater Israel”?
“(The Yinon plan) is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.
“Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.”
....
he day after that devastating war ended, the US replaced Iraq over the then USSR as the country which was the biggest threat to America. A devastated, war torn nation of, at the time, just under seventeen million people. (2)
Then came the dispute with Kuwait over alleged oil theft and Dinar destabilizing with the then US Ambassador April Glaspie personally giving Saddam Hussein the green light to invade should he choose. The subsequent nation paralyzing UN embargo followed, then the 2003 decimation and occupation – another orchestrated downward spiral – and tragedy and now open talk of what has been planned for decades, the break up of Iraq.
Greater Israel” requires the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states.
“Mission accomplished” for both the US with its long planned redrawing of the Middle East and North Africa – and Israel, through whose friendship with the Iraqi Kurdish autocracy, was set to become pretty well a partner in an autonomous, independent Iraqi Kurdistan. Dream come true, from “the Nile to the Euphrates”, the final fruition of near seventy years of manipulation and aggression for domination of the entire region.
The all is also the vision of the super hawk, dreamer of destruction of nations, Lt Colonel Ralph Peters since the early 1990s. Here is his 2006 version (3.) Peters is a man whose vision of eternal war is seemingly an eternal wet dream. Here, again, for anyone unaware of the Colonel, is a repeat of that dream (US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 1997):
“There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts … around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. (US armed forces will keep) the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
“We have entered an age of constant conflict.”
Peters would make some of history’s most megalomaniacal expansionists look like gift offering peaceniks. His cartographic monument to arrogance: “The New Map of the Middle East Project”, of geographical restructure in far away places of which he gave less than a damn, was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006.\
Israel has used 50,000 missiles in Gaza, killing almost 1,500 Palestinians
However, speaking to Turkey's Anadolu news agency, Palestinian Health Ministry spokesman Ashar Qudra pointed out that the Israeli war machine has killed 1,458 Palestinians, including 330 children, 170 women and 60 elderly people; 8,375 people, including 2510 children, 1630 women and 310 elderly have been wounded. Almost all are civilians.
russell bran weighs in a bit. it's always nice to hear from him.
http://youtu.be/V_m98GAdqKM
Ex-Israeli soldier speaks out… what he says will change everything you think you know about Israel
Eran Efrati, 28, was born and raised in Jerusalem. After graduating high school he enlisted in the IDF, where he served as a combat soldier and company sergeant in Battalion 50 of the Nachal Division. He spent most of his service in Hebron and throughout the West Bank. In 2009, he was discharged and joined Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers working to raise awareness about the daily reality in the Occupied Territories.
...Key points from this lecture
Two killed, dozens injured as IDF opens fire on West Bank Day of Anger (VIDEO)
Two Palestinians have been killed and over 90 injured in West Bank as thousands marched against the IDF's assault on Gaza. The bloodshed happened after Israeli authorities used tear gas and live ammunition to block vocal yet seemingly peaceful rallies.
In the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem, a 22-year-old Tamer Faraj Sammur was shot in the chest during clashes with Israeli forces, AFP reports. Hamas urged the West Bank residents on Friday to stage a “Day of Anger” protest across another Palestinian enclave.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said she was looking into the incident. Another 14 Palestinians were injured by live and rubber-coated bullets shot by the Israeli army as more than 3,000 Palestinians took part in the demonstration.
WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO
A rally near Ramallah witnessed 19-year-old Odai Nafez Jaber allegedly wounded by three live bullets. The teenager died in the hospital, Alternative Information Center reports. Palestinians clashed with Israeli forces outside Israel's Ofer military prison
Over 100 Gaza civilians killed overnight as Israel searches for missing IDF soldier
From: 'If anybody is more guilty of Gaza conflict than the Israelis, it is the Americans'
Israel gets signals from the US that it can do whatever it wants, so Tel-Aviv keeps refurbishing its weapons so that it could kill more Gazans, independent researcher and writer Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich told RT.
RT:What are the chances that the ceasefire will hold?
It seems that we are having incremental ceasefires for an incremental genocide. One has to understand the thinking that is behind all this as much as one does regret a single death; I do not care on which side. It is against the Zionist ideology to have a truce as Yitzhak Shamir said in 1997. So to think that they will give up the notion of taking over the whole of the land which they consider the Greater Israel - it is just not going to happen. What happens is we keep having these little ceasefires and then again the killings start anew. It also gives room to Israel to breath because international public opinion has turned against them, it now gives a kind of sense of credibility that they are really going to step back and allow you to take away the dead while they still continue to do destroy the tunnels which are the life saver for the Gazans, and at the same time come back and bomb what is left of you. It is really a travesty of justice and it is in violation of every human rights law and international law. I am just amazed at the UN for not calling it as it is which is genocide, if you look at the convention for prevention of genocide and punishment, and specifically in the Article 2. Everything that is happening in Gaza indicates it is genocide, and Mr. Ban Ki Moon's predecessor Kofi Annan in 2004 addressed the UN Commission of Human Rights and he said part of his biggest regrets was that he did not stop the Rwanda genocide and the warning signs were there.
T: Does the responsibility for the situation fully lie on Israel?
SS: The day the ground invasion of Gaza started was the day that the Malaysian plane was shot down in eastern Ukraine. I think as analyst we need to sit and connect all these links. And in fact Russians in January offered to develop the gas fields for Gaza. At the time of the 2009 assault on Gaza the British offered to develop the gas for the Gazans and the Israelis said “we will never buy gas from them.” They attacked and took over everything again. So this is not more about land, about water, about power and it will not go anywhere until Israel has stopped. In 1947 Israel killed a representative of the UN Bernadotte, and it told the world that it wouldn’t have limits. In 1967 it killed American crew members of the USS Liberty, the American government covered it up. This also signals to Israel that “you can do whatever you want and we’ll have you back.” And they do. They are refurbishing their weapons so that they could kill more Gazans. If anybody here is more guilty than the Israelis, it is the Americans. It is America that is responsible for what is happening 100 percent. We cannot just point finger at Israel. Nothing will be stopped until America stops its support.
From http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/07/29/israeli-soldier-admits-murdering-palestinian-civilians-was-a-pre-planned-act-of-revenge/ Israeli Soldier Admits Murdering Palestinian Civilians Was A “Pre-Planned Act Of Revenge” Former Israeli military commander and Breaking the Silence researcher Eran Efrati has posted a statement to Facebook on his talks with IDF soldiers in Gaza, and reveals the deliberate killing of Palestinians by sniper fire in Shuja’iyya neighborhood as punishment for the death of soldiers in their units.
White House says US can’t stop ‘tsunami’ of boycott and isolation if Israel won’t end ‘occupations’
However still one sided, soft warnings and reality checks for Israel are starting to roll in.
you're linking to someone in the press's interpretation and analysis of the white house's statement. you can read the source and come to your own conclusion, rather than relying on philip weiss's opinion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/08/remarks-prepared-white-house-coordinator-middle-east-north-africa-and-gu
Article you are linking is already linked in the article I posted and I've read it before I posted. I am interested in the text and its interpretation by Philip Weiss in MondoWeiss. I share his opinion.
You know little about the diplomatic underpinnings in speech and writing between the governments. Go back to your desk and read the chapter again. And like I said it couple days ago, don't bug me until you have something useful to say.
Oooooooôoooöooóooøōoooõòooóöo-SNAP!!!!
The superhumans of Gaza
Rifat Audeh
Saturday, 02 August 2014 15:50
Rifat Audeh
Close your eyes and visualize a child that you know and love dearly. The child can be your son, daughter, sibling, nephew or niece, grandson or granddaughter or even the child of a friend. Next, imagine that child playing innocently. Now imagine a bomb falling fatally near that child with his/her little body parts flying in different directions. If you are repulsed from this mental exercise, good. That means you have at least a shred or more of human feelings which I can address.
The issue is this: That mental exercise is not something imaginary for the Palestinian people of Gaza, rather, it is their daily living hell.
Genocide is defined in the dictionary as "the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group." For close to a month now, Israel has been committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. At the time of this writing, 1600 Palestinians have been murdered by the Israeli military with the vast majority of them being civilians according to global media outlets and international human rights sources, although that number keeps changing by the hour. Also at the time of this writing, 360 of these civilians are children.
Orhan this might interest you. The point of the article is exactly that which i was trying to convey a few posts up.
Why isn’t the Islamic State fighting Israel?
Israel has killed nearly 300 children in Gaza: UN
Medics give assistance to a wounded Palestinian girl upon her arrival at the hospital in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on August 2, 2014 after an Israeli attack. (Photo: AFP - Said Khatib)
Published Saturday, August 2, 2014
At least 296 Palestinian children and adolescents have been killed since Israel launched its terror campaign against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on July 8, the UN said on Saturday.
"Children make up for 30 percent of the civilian casualties," said the UN children's agency UNICEF, adding that the toll was based on deaths which it was able to verify and was likely to rise.
Dear Archinect, stop supporting the institutions and businesses on which thrives an entity that makes of genocide its routine business. Please boycott Israeli architects, universities et al.
From source:
As long as governments around the world maintain their support for Israel, it is up to ordinary people to take action. War on Want is working with grassroots Palestinian movements to build a global movement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it meets the following demands: an end to the Occupation; the right of return for Palestinian refugees; and equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
TAKE ACTION FOR PALESTINE
1. Boycott Israeli products – all Israeli products
The Palestinian people are living under an apartheid regime, and the governments of the world do nothing about it. It is up to us, the peoples of the world, to hold Israel to account for its actions. Apartheid in South Africa was defeated with the help of a global boycott campaign. It’s time to boycott Israeli apartheid too.
2. Boycott corporations profiting from Israel’s illegal Occupation
Companies profiting from the Occupation of Palestine include SodaStream, Sainsbury’s, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and British security company G4S. Join Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Roger Waters, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and thousands of others in calling on G4S to end its complicity in the Occupation. Add your name to the letter here.
3. Demand a two-way military embargo of Israel
Israeli companies make enormous profits from military technology that is ‘field-tested’ on Palestinians. The UK government is buying this technology from Israel and selling British-made military equipment to Israel. Call for an immediate two-way arms embargo by adding your name here.
4. Know your facts
The assault on Gaza is getting people to ask questions about Palestine. Be ready to answer these questions. Do your research and find out how Israel has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Order our free materials on Palestine from here.
5. Keep protesting
Public opinion is shifting. Palestine needs you to keep voicing your opinions loud and clear, telling the government to put pressure on Israel to abide by international law. Turn your outrage into action for Palestine today.
Israel’s War Against Gaza’s Women & Their Bodies
July 23rd, 2014
TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains sexually explicit words and images.
As Israel’s latest assault on Gaza enters its third week, the destructive force unleashed upon the Strip has taken a massive toll, leaving over 650 Palestinians dead, over 4,200 wounded – mostly civilians – and over a hundred thousand homeless. As Gaza is pummeled, the level of anti-Palestinian racist incitement from top Israeli political, religious and cultural figures continues to ring at peak pitch, and has taken on a dangerous misogynistic tone.
Promoting the Rape of Gaza and Its Women
On July 21, Israeli media reported that Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of the West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba, issued a religious edict on the rules of engagement during wartime, which he sent to the country’s Defense Minister. The edict stated that according to Jewish religious law, it is permissible to bomb innocent Palestinian civilians and “to exterminate the enemy.”
While Lior is held in high regard, he is also associated with religious Zionism’s “conservative wing.” By contrast, David Stav, Chief Rabbi of the town of Shoham is considered to be a leader of religious Zionism’s “liberal” stream. In an op-ed published the same day news of Lior’s edict broke, Stav characterized the assault on Gaza as a holy war, which is mandated by the Torah itself and must be merciless.
While these leading religious figures called for wars of extermination, some secular Israelis suggested carrying out attacks of a more perverse nature.
The day after Lior and Stav made headlines, news emerged that the City Council of Or Yehuda, located in Israel’s coastal region, printed out and hung a banner supporting Israeli soldiers. The display included language suggesting the rape of Palestinian women. The text of the banner read: “Israeli soldiers, the residents of Or Yehuda are with you! Pound ‘their mother and come back home safely to your mother.”
This English translation of the Hebrew “Kansu” as “pound” (or its synonym “bang,”) literally means to beat, but also has a colloquial meaning connoting sexual penetration. In the Hebrew original, the double-entendre is inverted: “Kansu B’” has the colloquial meaning of physically attacking someone, but literally means to enter, sexually or otherwise – this sexual connotation can be found on multiple Hebrew-language sex blogs.
The phrase “their mother,” “ima shelahem” in Hebrew, also has the colloquial meaning of “with great intensity.” The idiom developed precisely because, for many people, witnessing their mother being assaulted is more painful than receiving a blow to their own person. In the context of the city’s banner, the language of sexualized violence is borrowed in order to articulate ruthless subjugation of Gaza’s Palestinian population.
Clearly the Or Yehuda City Council’s intent was to show support for the Israeli army with what it considered to be clever wordplay. By choosing the crass expression “Kansu ba-ima shelahem” – meaning “beat them with great intensity” and also “enter their mother” – the council was both encouraging violence toward Palestinians and subtly tapping into rape culture, which is widespread in Israel.
Breaking a culture of silence, public figures increasingly voice support for Palestinian rights
As Israel's brutal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continues unabated, the number of people voicing their support for Palestinian rights is increasing, including Western politicians and even celebrities. By speaking out for justice in Palestine, public figures also face a harsh backlash from pro-Zionists, but it seems that the longstanding culture of silence about Israel's continuing war crimes is becoming more and more tenuous.
Israel's propaganda machine is finally starting to misfire
Israel's 'dream of Israeli and Palestinian children playing together' is somewhat hypocritcal when you look at the 230 children killed in Gaza
Israeli airstrike massacres family of prominent physician and author
“I woke up this morning and I learned that my tax dollars killed eight of my family members in Gaza. They were given an eight-second warning,” El-Haddad stated to members of Congress.
Fresh Israeli shelling kills 10 in UN shelter for displaced in Rafah
Published today (updated) 03/08/2014 18:37
The scene at the school after the shelling. (MaanImages)
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- 10 Palestinians were killed on Sunday after Israeli shells hit a UN school in Rafah where thousands of people were sheltering from the ongoing Israeli offensive.
Members of the Al-Ghoul family
Israel has shelled UN shelters for the displaced at least six times so far since the conflict began four weeks ago, killing dozens.
Gaza Ministry of Health: “Al Najar Hospital in Rafah evacuated as Israeli genocidal rampage continues”
in Gaza, Reports August 1, 2014
1st August 2014 | Gaza Ministry of Health | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
The Ministry of Health Gaza announces the closure of Al Najar Hospital in Rafah, due to Israeli shelling in the vicinity compromising its ability to guarantee the safety of patients and staff.
The hospital has now been evacuated, bringing to four the number of government hospitals closed by Israeli attacks in the past three and a half weeks.
Action Alert: Children trapped at the Rafah crossing
This morning a group of over 70 people, mostly women and children carrying foreign passports, planned to take advantage of the ceasefire to leave Gaza and enter Egypt. Israel began bombing Rafah and the Egyptian personnel closed the Egyptian side of the border, leaving them trapped at the crossing, as the bombs fall around them. The Red Cross is not being allowed to reach them due to the bombing in the area.
Their nationalities include German, Norwegian, Bulgarian, and Egyptian.
At least 60 killed and over 300 injured today in Gaza
Obama: Israel has to defend itself (source)
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Noam Chomsky: What the American Media Won't Tell You About Israel
The savage punishment of Gaza traces back to decades ago.
An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”
The old man’s message provides the proper context for the latest episode in the savage punishment of Gaza. The crimes trace back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from their homes in terror or were expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces, who continued to truck Palestinians over the border for years after the official cease-fire.
The punishment took new forms when Israel conquered Gaza in 1967. From recent Israeli scholarship (primarily Avi Raz’s “The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War”), we learn that the government’s goal was to drive the refugees into the Sinai Peninsula – and, if feasible, the rest of the population too.
Expulsions from Gaza were carried out under the direct orders of Gen. Yeshayahu Gavish, commander of the Israel Defense Forces Southern Command. Expulsions from the West Bank were far more extreme, and Israel resorted to devious means to prevent the return of those expelled, in direct violation of U.N. Security Council orders.
A demonstration began in solidarity with Gaza yesterday, beginning from al-Hussain Mosque in al-Khalil (Hebron) at 13:00. People walked from the mosque towards the city center, and stopped near the entrance of the souk (market) to listen to speeches. After that, most of the crowd continued down the streets near the souk and Bab Al-Zawiye checkpoint, where the crowd clashed with Israeli soldiers. Israeli soldiers threw stun grenades and fired live ammunition. A large group of young men threw stones at the soldiers from a few different areas; the young men also lit fires in the streets. Over 80 people were shot with live ammunition and were taken to hospital for medical treatment (photo by International Solidarity Movement. source :ISM Facebook page ).
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