Can you look at this map and say Israel does not systemically appropriate land?

Nathan Gardels


Editor, NPQ, Global Services of Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media
Posted: March 18, 2010 11:39 AM

Brzezinski: Israeli Expansion of Settlements Is Against U.S. National Interest

The recent announcement by Israel that it will expand settlements in East Jerusalem may be the straw that breaks the impasse in the Middle East. It appears to be igniting yet another intifada, fueling anti-Americanism across the Middle East and countering President Obama's whole effort to reconcile with the Muslim world.

Israel and America are hardly about to part ways, but the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has now pitted the interests of his right wing political coalition against US national interests. How can the Obama White House stand for that? I spoke about these issue with Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America's most prominent strategic thinkers, who was national security adviser to U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Nathan Gardels: Let's go back to basics. It is clear that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict stands at the center of what motivates so much terrorism against the United States. In this context, the Netanyahu government's insistence on expanding settlements -- despite President Obama's high-profile promise to stop them in his Cairo speech -- does more than undermine U.S. credibility. Isn't it, fundamentally, against U.S. strategic interests?

If the U.S. backs down in its demand, fueling the "third intifada" now under way in the Palestinian territories, won't that be a gift to the terrorist recruiters as well as to Iran's regime, thus further threatening U.S. interests in the whole Middle East?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Absolutely. It threatens the lives of American soldiers stationed in the Middle East and fighting in Afghanistan because it intensifies support for Muslim extremism.

Gardels: Because such an intifada threatens U.S. strategic interests -- and thus deepens the rift between U.S. and Israel -- doesn't that harm Israel as well?

Brzezinski: Ehud Barak, Netanyahu's defense minister and former prime minister, said it better (on Jan. 26) than I can: Unless there is a two-state solution, "any other situation -- and not an Iranian bomb or any other external threat -- is the most serious threat to Israel's future."

Yet a two-state solution becomes impossible as the settlements proliferate on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

Barak also said (on Feb. 2) that if there is no two-state solution Israel "is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

Gardels: As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz editorialized earlier this week: "Israel is not America's strategic asset, but America is the source of Israel's strength, and it is essential to rein in the lunacy that threatens to shatter the link between the two countries. . . . The government headed by Netanyahu is now emerging as a strategic threat [to Israel]."

Brzezinski: I agree with Haaretz. And that is why the issue is not between America and Israel but between America and an extreme right-wing government in Israel whose prime minister proclaims that he accepts a two-state solution while striving to make it impossible to achieve.

Gardels: What should the Israelis do?

Brzezinski: Israel needs a government of national unity, and not one beholden to the extreme right. It is as if Hamas dominated the Palestinian side.

Gardels: What is the role of the Quartet group -- Europe, Russia, the UN and the U.S. -- meeting in Moscow (March 19), in moving forward?

Brzezinski: The Quartet should put on the table what the entire international community would endorse: the basic outlines of a peace of reconciliation, the only kind of peace likely to endure.

The principles of any movement toward reconciliation are clear: no right of return for Palestinians; two capitals in East and West Jerusalem; return to the 1967 lines with one-to-one swaps of territories in adjusting those lines; a demilitarized Palestinian state with either U.S. or NATO forces on the Jordan River to guarantee Israel's strategic security.

The so-called "reality" is the simple fact that 1. Jews continue to expand settlements on Palestinian lands (that's illegal),

2. Jews have killed innocent children,

3. Israel is not a democracy,

and 4. there are many Jews who believes the facts as I do.

oralloy, Either you are just plain stupid or don't understand international laws against the seizure of private lands.

I'm sure you'll just sit quietly if your land is taken over by somebody who doesn't pay for it legally.

You're an idiot who can't be rationalized with on very basic levels of ethics and humanity.

An idiot.

As that the only thing you can come up with?

You're not only a child of ignorance, but are a admitted bigot.

Thankx Robert for posting these maps. It definitely upholds the cliched statement that a picture says a thousand words.

I have been arguing for a long time that Israel is the actual terrorists in the whole middle east conflict but people call me a terrorist sympathizer and that I don't have any idea what I'm talking about when I ask them;

"Wouldn't you be pissed off if someone came into your town and told you to get the hell out and don't come back?

Because that is basically what has been happening to the Palestinians ever since the establishment of Israel in the late 40s.

You want to know why they are upset with the US, because the US supports Israel stealing their homes right out from under them and leaving them with nothing

and then on top of that calling them the terrorists.

They have nothing to fight back with so they use what ever means they can drum up and that tends to be undermined tactics such as bombings to get their point across.

Advocate, You are one ignorant ass; you believe in "ONE" article written by somebody with no brains, no common sense, and no heart.

Why don't you try living in the "real" world?

Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed
September 29, 2000 - Present

124 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,452 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information)

Israelis have killed more children than the other way around. That's a fact.

Quote:

Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed
September 29, 2000 - Present

124 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 1,452 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information)

Yeah, sure, collateral damage. What a shame!

Friday, December 17, 2010
Israeli forces shoot Palestinian teen dead on fishing boat
Ma’an- A Palestinian boy died Friday afternoon after Israeli gunboats opened fire on his fishing boat and flipped it over off the coast of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.