ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

No, you need to follow-up on what you actually said.

YOUR reference was to the 'state the Palestinians could have had long ago'. I credited you with the least ungenerous offer Israel has to date put on tha table - that of Barak in the late 1990s. What may come in the future was not referenced in your claim.

Israel has never so far conceded a willingness to transfer any of the West Bank land bordering Jordan, Syria or Lebanon to Palestinian control and I doubt very much that they will willingly do so in the future.

This evasion of yours follows an increasingly familiar pattern of wiggling out of corners by selectively addressing parts of the subject or changing it entirely.

You fail to mention that the Palestinians have been fighting the discrimination, repression since the days of Ottoman rule, through to the outright subjugation and oppression by the state of Israel perpetrated against them in the name of the Zionist cause, which was the establishment and maintenance of the ethnocentric state for Jews in Palestine.

What patent nonsense. You claim that Israel planned to somehow keep a new state in a box, bordering on no other countries. That is just too funny.

Infra, you give us the same old anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, crap, with no supporting facts. BTW, what about the Palestinian suppression of Christians, Jews, women, gays, et al. Never a word about this, huh?

Truly amazing. A bald denial of Israel's repeatedly declared positions ever since the 1967 war, and the well-published facts concerning Israeli PM Barak's proposals at the Clinton-sponsored direct negotiations at Camp David in 1999. This indeed was the "state" Arafat was offered, and it was the most "generous" Israeli proposal ever offered.

Your persistence in evading any attempt to pin you down on your numerous vague and unsubstantiated allegations of Israeli justice and accomodation to the Palestinian victims of its aggression is matched only by your repeated expressions of contempt for the "pals" (as you call them) and inferences that they have no rights in the matter and are merely some form of sub human "Jew haters".

This is both deceitful and hypocritical.

It's not that I don't provide supporting facts; it's that you offhandedly wave them off when they're inconvenient to your argument. But I'll post them again, for your perusal. Be sure to read them this time. OK?

Since the time when the first Ashkenazi colonizers, Zionists, arrived in Palestine (which was then still under Ottoman control) with their European chauvinism based on the racist nationalist ideologies of the times, the mid to late nineteenth century, the Zionists have been the oppressors in that land.

One of the handful of Zionists who bothered to take notice of the potential for strife between the European colonizers and the Arab natives, and the oppression visited upon the Arabs by those first Zionist colonists was Ahad Ha'am, the pen name of Asher Ginsberg, a Ukrainian Ashkenazi of whom the Jewish Virtual Library says was "the central figure in the movement for Cultural or Spiritual Zionism."

In an 1891 essay Ha'am wrote:

"We abroad are used to believe the Eretz Yisrael is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed ..... But in truth that is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains .... are not cultivated."

In another essay written in that same year he wrote:
"If a time comes when our people in Palestine develop so that, in small or great measure, they push out the native inhabitants, these will not give up their place easily."

In an article published in the Hebrew periodical Hameliz that year he wrote:
"[the Zionist pioneers believed that] the only language the Arabs understand is that of force ..... [They] behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even brag about it, and nobody stands to check this contemptible and dangerous tendency."

Again that year, in his pamphlet "Truth from Eretz Yisrael"he expanded on the previous article writing,
"[The Jewish settlers] treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamelessly for no sufficient reason, and even take pride in doing so. The Jews were slaves in the land of their Exile, and suddenly they found themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that ONLY exists in a land like Turkey. This sudden change has produced in their hearts an inclination towards repressive tyranny, as always happens when slave rules." 'Ahad Ha'Am warned: "We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going around it. But this is a GREAT ERROR. The Arab, like all sons of Sham, has sharp and crafty mind . . . Should time come when life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they WILL NOT easily step aside."

In 1914 in perhaps his most prophetic words he stated:
"'[the Zionists] wax angry towards those who remind them that there is still another people in Eretz Yisrael that has been living there and does not intend at all to leave its place. In a future when this ILLUSION will have been torn from their hearts and they will look with open eyes upon the reality as it is, they will certainly understand how important this question is and how great our duty to work for its solution."

From the time after the first world war that the British began to implement its promise to the Zionists to establish a national homeland for Jews in Palestine through their mandate, Palestinian endeavors to build national democratic institutions as the preliminary steps to statehood were thwarted by the British as the latter gave precedence to the Zionists' nationalist endeavors in Palestine. The British had hardly considered Palestinian nationalist aspirations at all, merely referring to them in its Balfour Declaration as "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," and in its Palestine Mandate simply as "other sections of the population." The thrust of Britain's involvement in Palestine was from the start detrimentally prejudiced against the very peoples indigenous to Palestine in favor of a people from Central and Eastern Europe.

Palestinian efforts to establish a parliament along democratic electorial lines were rebuffed by the British colonial secretary Lord Passfield who in a May 1930 meeting with Palestinian delegates responded thusly:

Of course, this Parliament as you call it that you ask for, would have to have as its duty the carrying out of the Mandate . . . the Mandatory power, that is the British government, could not create any council except within which the terms of the Mandate and for the purpose of carrying out the Mandate. This is the limit of our power . . . Would you mind considering our difficulty that we cannot create a Parliament which would not be responsible and feel itself responsible for carrying out the Mandate?

In effect Passfield was asking the Palestinian majority to put aside its own nationalist aspirations for the nationalist aspirations of the tiny minority of Zionist immigrants in Palestine.

In terms of external support for Palestinian efforts to build pre-state institutions, the colonialist powers largely thwarted the efforts of the Arab populations under their control from supporting and contributing to the Palestinians. Rashid Khalidi in his book, "The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood," describes how France through its Foreign Ministry in Paris and its colonial officials in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia prevented the sending of funds from these countries' peoples to the people of Palestine. France also prevented the travel of emissaries from the Maghribi community in Palestine to North Africa to request aid for the Palestinians such as after the 1929 Wailing Wall disturbances. In contrast France enabled the flow of large sums of capital to the yishuv from the Jewish communities of those selfsame North African countries whose non-Jewish populations it had blocked from sending aid to the Palestinians, and it facilitated the traveling of Palestinian Zionists to these North African countries under its control.

By the time the British dropped the problem it had created in Palestine onto the lap of the UN, and the latter's infamous recommendation to partition the country along ethnic lines, the Palestinians had no real or firm state structures through which to operate as a polity. After the 1948 war the territory that the UN recommended for allotment to the Palestinians was divided between Israel, Jordan and Egypt. After the 1967 war Israel arrogated and occupied the territories that Jordan and Egypt had controlled (the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively). Today the Palestinians have a weak, quasi-national jurisdiction, the Palestinian National Authority, which operated under the utter stricture of the state of Israel.

About Islamist Palestinian discrimination and repression of Christians, Jews, women, gays, et cetera, the rise of extremist religionism is a recent phenomenon in Palestine and the rest of the Middle East that is at its center a religiously motivated reaction against Western sociocultural, economic and military imperialism in that region.

The beginning of the solution to the problem of Islamism is for the particularly imperialistic Western nations to cease superseding the interests of the peoples in that region for their own interests.

Infrablue, Amen!

Infra, you mention the writings of a few anti-Zionist individuals, as though their statements are dispositive regarding the complex issues at hand. You are a great apologist for the Pals, despite their persistent terrorism, bigotry, intolerance, and, even, persecution of certain classes of their own people, as well as Jews.

The true facts are entirely different from those to which you allude. Most of the land in Israel was purchased for the settlers. After Israel was formed, about 600,000 Pals moved (temporarily, they thought) out of Israel in anticipation that Israel and the Israelis would be destroyed. These traitors were rightfully denied readmission to Israel. The Pals then joined in on attacks on Israel and its people, which persist to this day.

You say that Pal bigotry and persecution of minorities is something new. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What Advocate meant to say:

You are a great apologist for the Zionists, despite their persistent terrorism, bigotry, intolerance, and, even, persecution of certain classes of their own people, as well as Jews.

Huh??????????? I meant what I said.

Then you are still confused.

Holy ****! Your hatred of Israel has blinded you.

Holy ****! Your hatred of Pals have blinded you~!

Don't steal my lines.

Ahad Ha'am, whom the Jewish Virtual Library says was "the central figure in the movement for Cultural or Spiritual Zionism," an anti-Zionist?

Sidney James Webb, at the time Lord Passfield, who told the Palestinian delegation who had gone to him in an effort to establish a parliament along democratic electorial lines and were told that whatever council that could be established, it had to be subordinate and subservient to the interests of the Zionist cause, an anti-Zionist?

It's absolutely laughable how far you're having to reach to offhandedly dismiss as "dispositive" what these individuals, pro-Zionism individuals, had to say about, and, in the case of Lord Passfield, what he actually perpetrated in the name of Zionist discrimination and repression of the Palestinian people Advi.

Also, one issue is the terrorism, bigotry, intolerance and persecution that are perpetrated by some of the extremist elements within the Palestinian populace, another issue is the oppression and subjugation of the Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist state. The former does not justify the latter.

So, tell me about some of these complex issues at hand, Advi. Like when you stated on this thread, "Israel is not perfect, and has done some bad things." What are some of these bad things that Israel has done?



For all of the land that was purchased by the Zionists, it only amounted to about seven percent of all of Palestine. Most of the land in Israel was arrogated after their war of conquest, and the rest has come to be occupied by the Zionist state. As for the land purchases themselves after these lands were acquired by the Zionists for their cause they'd dispossess the Palestinian peasant farmers--who had lived on and worked those lands for generations--to create settlements for exclusive Jewish use, while at the same time implementing the Zionist policy of avoda ivrit-"Hebrew Labor," and the replacement of Arab agricultural laborers for Jewish ones. That is direct ethnic discrimination perpetrated by the Zionists in the name of the Zionist cause--the establishment of an exclusivist ethnocentric state in Palestine.



The Palestinians were "traitors" against a cause that necessarily discriminated against them and denied them self-determination, and you think that that is something contemptible? What can one say about this but point out that this is an indication of a severely deranged morality. What is contemptible is the Zionists' endeavor for their cause, let alone the cause itself, the establishment of an ethnocentrically discriminatory and oppressive state in Palestine.

The fuller truth of the issue of Palestinian flight during the catastrophe of 1948 is that the Palestinians fled the the areas they inhabited to avoid the fighting and the ethnic cleansing that the Haganah, the Zionists para-military organization which was the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces, was perpetrating in the name of the creation of the state of Israel. I've already written about this as well earlier in this thread, but I'll repost if just for you, Advi.

The Israeli historian, Benny Morris, talked about some of the facts he brings up in his book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited," in an Ha'aretz interview in January 1 of this year: "There were twenty-four small scale massacres perpetrated by the Israeli forces in 1948. Morris says, "in some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."

There was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order in Operation Hiram. "One of the revelations in the book [The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004] is that on October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth."



The denial of the Palestinian's Right of Return is, at best, an opinion arrived at by Zionists legalistic rationalizations--as it's officially delineated by the state of Israel itself here--that underly a more sinister motive--the discriminatory and oppressive maintenance of an ethnic majority in Israel. The failure of which is euphemistically referred to as "national suicide" and "destruction of the state," These euphemisms are employed in a manner much like the terms "anti-Semite" or "anti-Semitism" are employed, to obfuscate the underlying issues and to thwart and avert discussions thereof.



Nothing could be further from the truth just because you say so? And you accuse me of not providing facts! What gall!

Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians

A psychologist blames assaults on civilians in the 1990s on soldiers' bad training, boredom and poor supervision

Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem
Sunday October 21, 2007
The Observer

A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behaviour of the country's soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.

The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: 'At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.'
In the words of one soldier: 'The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That's when I enjoy it. It's like a drug. If I don't go into Rafah, and if there isn't some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.'

Another explained: 'The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides... As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.'

The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. 'We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn't throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,' he said.

The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. 'With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can't have children. Next time she won't throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn't have what to spit with any more.'

Yishai-Karin found that the soldiers were exposed to violence against Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of basic training. On one occasion, the soldiers were escorting some arrested Palestinians. The arrested men were made to sit on the floor of the bus. They had been taken from their beds and were barely clothed, even though the temperature was below zero. The new recruits trampled on the Palestinians and then proceeded to beat them for the whole of the journey. They opened the bus windows and poured water on the arrested men.

The disclosure of the report in the Israeli media has occasioned a remarkable response. In letters responding to the recollections, writers have focused on both the present and past experience of Israeli soldiers to ask troubling questions that have probed the legitimacy of the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces.

The study and the reactions to it have marked a sharp change in the way Israelis regard their period of military service - particularly in the occupied territories - which has been reflected in the increasing levels of conscientious objection and draft-dodging.

The debate has contrasted sharply with an Israeli army where new recruits are taught that they are joining 'the most ethical army in the world' - a refrain that is echoed throughout Israeli society. In its doctrine, published on its website, the Israeli army emphasises human dignity. 'The Israeli army and its soldiers are obligated to protect human dignity. Every human being is of value regardless of his or her origin, religion, nationality, gender, status or position.'

However, the Israeli army, like other armies, has found it difficult to maintain these values beyond the classroom. The first intifada, which began in 1987, before the wave of suicide bombings, was markedly different to the violence of the second intifada, and its main events were popular demonstrations with stone-throwing.

Yishai-Karin, in an interview with Haaretz, described how her research came out of her own experience as a soldier at an army base in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. She interviewed 18 ordinary soldiers and three officers whom she had served with in Gaza. The soldiers described how the violence was encouraged by some commanders. One soldier recalled: 'After two months in Rafah, a [new] commanding officer arrived... So we do a first patrol with him. It's 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn't so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers.

'He grabbed the boy. I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock...

'The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing."

Yishai-Karin concluded that the main reason for the soldiers' violence was a lack of training. She found that the soldiers did not know what was expected of them and therefore were free to develop their own way of behaviour. The longer a unit was left in the field, the more violent it became. The Israeli soldiers, she concluded, had a level of violence which is universal across all nations and cultures. If they are allowed to operate in difficult circumstances, such as in Gaza and the West Bank, without training and proper supervision, the violence is bound to come out.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said that, if a soldier deviates from the army's norms, they could be investigated by the military police or face criminal investigation.

She said: 'It should be noted that since the events described in Nufar Yishai-Karin's research the number of ethical violations by IDF soldiers involving the Palestinian population has consistently dropped. This trend has continued in the last few years.'

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2195924,00.html

xingu, There has always been reports of young Jews with a conscience who 1) refused to be conscripted into their IDF, and 2) the mental anguish they suffered from the brutality they have seen against Palestinians by other soldiers and themselves. Unfortunately, that's an exception rather than the rule; the majority enforce non-democratic actions against the Palestinians.