Advocate wrote:George, CI, I think that the unbiased sources are at complete disagreement with your positions.
Interesting argument from authority. But what authority? What unbiased sources? Do you dispute the facts I cited about the cynical offer put forward by Barak & Clinton? Do you dispute the facts I cited about the Israeli occupation of the West bank?
Advocate wrote: If Arafat wasn't offered a good deal, why didn't he make counterproposals, share the details with his people, etc.? Instead, he walked away, saying a deal would lead to his assassination, and then essentially went to war with Israel. Clinton accused him of walking away from a deal that would lead to a valid two-state solution.
I can't follow your logic here. Barak & Clinton responded to Palestinian aspirations with a cynical offer of 40% of the West Bank territory, broken up into 30+ disjoint parts, each completely surrounded by Israeli-held territory, and with no rights over the airspace above and the water flowing through their "territories". How could a viable political or economic state arise under such circumstances? This offer expressed such condescension and contempt that it didn't deserve a response. Arafat was right to reject it and he very likely would have been assassinated had he accepted it.
Advocate wrote: While you guys personally attack Dershowitz, you really don't shoot down his assertions, which are correct. You refer to him as a Zionist. Are you guys not Zionists?
I did not personally attack Dershowitz, but I did indeed expose his misstatements. He is a self-proclaimed Zionist. I am not. I do support the creation of a homeland for Jews, and I am sympathetic to the fate and aspirations of the Jewish emigrants from Europe after WWII. However I reject the notion that the escape of future generations of Jews in Israel from the injustices inflicted on their forbearers, must necessarily rest on a foundation of similar injustice to present and future generations of Palestinians,
Blue, all that is nonsense. Arafat basically embraced the terms of the settlement at Camp David. But he had a long history of pulling the Lucy trick (picking up the ball as it is to be kicked). He was truthful in saying that he feared assassination.
Both you and CI present pro-Pal sites in support of your nonsense. It is pretty predictable what they are saying.
Advocate, BS. Barak offered a maze not a state. Palestinains would have to travel 50 miles to reach a point 5 miles from where they started. His offer was completely unacceptable as Gush Shalom was unbiased enough to point out. None of that matters to you ass far as I can see. The Apartheid Wall dont seem to matter much either.
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=181 "there should be little difficulty in understanding why Palestinian negotiators would reject an offer based on a set of disconnected pieces of territory amounting to only 80 percent of the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine; a network of roads, bridges and tunnels accessible only to Israeli settlers and permanently guarded by Israeli soldiers; permanent loss of water resources; no shared sovereignty in Jerusalem; the right of return for refugees not even up for discussion; and with 80 percent of the illegal settlers to remain in place."
What would a comprehensive peace have looked like at Camp David?
A comprehensive peace would have called for an end to Israeli occupation-all the occupation, withdrawing Israeli troops from all of the West Bank and Gaza, returning Israel's borders to those of June 4, 1967. It would have called for an independent Palestinian state in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and the entire city of Jerusalem open between the two countries. It would have announced the closure of all settlements as Israeli military enclaves, with settlers given the option of moving back to Israel with compensation, or remaining in their settlement towns as ordinary citizens of the new Palestinian state. It would have acknowledged the Palestinian right of return and opened negotiations on how to implement that right. It would have created security guarantees for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, perhaps including international assistance in monitoring borders. As called for in the Saudi/Arab League peace proposal, normalization of relations between Israel and all the Arab countries would follow the end of Israel's occupation.
Then, the hard work of rebuilding a shattered economy and shattered society in Palestine, and rebuilding shattered lives in both Palestine and Israel, could begin.
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=180
Advocate et al, What part of "illegal occupation of Palestinian property" do you not understand? Show us where Israeli laws protects Palestininans from the illegal takeover of their property by Jews?
If you had no legal right to your own property in the US, and others took it over illegally, how would you feel and act? Like sheep, I'm sure. Show us how Israeli laws protects the Palestinians and their property, when and how they were enforced.
CI, I found this passage on the link you posted:
Quote:SECOND - It is openly stated in the books written by the founders of Zionism that the means by which they planned to establish a state was by instigating anti-Semitism, and undermining the security of the Jews in all the lands of the world, until they would be forced to flee to their state. And thus they did. They intentionally infuriated the German people and fanned the flames of Nazi hatred, and then helped the Nazis, with trickery and deceit, to take whole Jewish communities off to the concentration camps, and the Zionists themselves admit this. (See books Perfidy, Min Ha Meitsor, etc.). The Zionists continue to practice this strategy today, they incite anti-Semitism and then they present themselves as the "saviors". Here are two replies given by leaders of the Zionists during World War II, when they were asked for money to help ransom Jews from the Nazis. Greenbaum said "One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland." (G-d Forbid). Weitzman said, The most important part of the Jewish people is already in the land (of Israel) and those who are left, are unimportant (May we be spared).
I have to be real honest and lay this on the line, CI. This appears to me twisted. To believe that within the Jewish culture, internal elements within pre-Nazi era Germany would attempt to bring on the Holocaust by intentionally angering just the right Nazi influencers...this strikes me as the manifestation of paranoid thinking, more than having its root grounded in reality, but I wasn't there, I don't know, and it's possible that it could have happened.
An explanation of the origin of Nazi hatred toward the Jews, as I got it from a Nazi sympathizer I once knew many years ago is that Germany had been hard hit by World War I. One of the League of Nations' first orders of business was to demand reparations from Germany, effectively reverting a highly sophisticiated and technologically advanced nation into an agrarian nation. There was a national malaise during the depressed years of the Weimar Republic. Jews, who were always smart, financially savvy, and extremely clan-based, and seemingly indifferent to any sense of national loyalty, were sometimes seen flaunting their wealth in the faces of the poor, German national (other than Jewish-German nationals). While most Germans were barely living at or above the poverty line, Jews could be seen driving around in fancy cars, their wives wearing expensive clothing and jewelry, and could be seen dining in the fanciest restaurants.
Hitler was able to attain a meteoric rise due to his innate ability to inspire the German people and convince them that they were worthy, in fact, superior to other nations in the world (and to a large degree, he was right). Hitler sensed a horrible anger and despair within the German population and was uniquely able to wield this near infinite amount of intense pain into laser-like focus to create an external monster for his subjects to blame, namely the Jews. Hitler simply used the concept of class envy and named an enemy, which quickly became the centerpiece of the Third Reich. Hitler took it ten levels further, forming the alliance of an Axis that was set to avenge and conquer the world, that had so turned against Germany following the last World War, while he turned genocide against the Jews, which were enslaved at the mercy of the merciless Nazis.
Whether insiders of Jewish heritage were part of the intense tidal wave of Nazi anti-Semitism is a proposition that the URL posted failed to provide for me.
The assasination of Rabin is attributed to a deranged and extremist rabbi. Attributing this assasination to a Likud conspiracy seems a fragile argument with not enough substance to gain traction, in other words, Oliver Stone type of stuff.
This is really the type of conspiracy babble that we see within the 9-11 "Truth" squad, that advances that George W. Bush intentionally planned the crashing of jumbo jet airliners into the twin World Trade Center towers.
You did send me to the knowledge catachombs, however, and I found a link that seems to treat Israeli history in a succinct and evenhanded way. URL is
http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0107652.html . There, a reader will find an accounting of Israeli history that is anything but singularly favorable to Israel, yet within reasonable limits and facts.
blueflame1 wrote:What would a comprehensive peace have looked like at Camp David?
A comprehensive peace would have called for an end to Israeli occupation-all the occupation, withdrawing Israeli troops from all of the West Bank and Gaza, returning Israel's borders to those of June 4, 1967. It would have called for an independent Palestinian state in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and the entire city of Jerusalem open between the two countries. It would have announced the closure of all settlements as Israeli military enclaves, with settlers given the option of moving back to Israel with compensation, or remaining in their settlement towns as ordinary citizens of the new Palestinian state. It would have acknowledged the Palestinian right of return and opened negotiations on how to implement that right. It would have created security guarantees for both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, perhaps including international assistance in monitoring borders. As called for in the Saudi/Arab League peace proposal, normalization of relations between Israel and all the Arab countries would follow the end of Israel's occupation.
Then, the hard work of rebuilding a shattered economy and shattered society in Palestine, and rebuilding shattered lives in both Palestine and Israel, could begin.
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=180
My understanding of the events of the 2000 Camp David peace talks Clinton brokered, between Barak and Arafat were that everything spelled out above, sans the division of Jerusalem was offered to Arafat, and Arafat flatly walked out on the talks.
Monte Cargo, what crap. Right on this thread the Barak deal is posted and it's nothing like what you just pretended it to be. You might not realize this but the history and the offer are well documented. How would you like to be forced to travel 50 miles through Israeli checkpoints to visit a friend who lives 5 miles away? Would you feel free within such a state?
blueflame1 wrote:Monte Cargo, what crap. Right on this thread the Barak deal is posted and it's nothing like what you just pretended it to be. You might not realize this but the history and the offer are well documented. How would you like to be forced to travel 50 miles through Israeli checkpoints to visit a friend who lives 5 miles away? Would you feel free within such a state?
Clinton isn't known for being favorable to Israel. I wonder why he thought Arafat so unreasonable?
I have been listening on C-Span to a speech by Abbas. Among many other things, he complains bitterly about Hamas continuing to attack Israel despite Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. This, as you know, caused monies, etc., to be withheld from the Pals, and other negative actions against them.
I guess as a sop to the Jew-haters, he also stated that Israel continues to murder and wound Pals. Sure, Israel is entitled to retaliate for attacks on its citizens and territory.
Blue and CI, I assume you know that Arafat later said that he accepts the Camp David settlement. He then blamed Israel for rejecting the pact.
Palestinians Accept Camp David Peace Plan
HighMark Funds/Xinhua ^ | March 14, 2002
Posted on 05/14/2002 8:16:39 AM PDT by TomGuy
Palestinians Accept Camp David Peace Plan
GAZA, May 14, 2002 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said on Tuesday that the Palestinians accept the peace plan proposed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton two years ago at Camp David in the United States.
Arafat told reporters after meeting with bereaved Israeli families at his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah that the Palestinians have never rejected Clinton's proposal to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Arafat also accused both the former Israeli government under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the current one under Ariel Sharon of rejecting the Clinton plan.
Israel said that Arafat was the one who rejected what had been offered to the Palestinians at Camp David and such an offer had never been proposed to the Palestinians before.
A Palestinian Intifada (uprising) erupted in September 2000 after Israel and the Palestinians traded accusations that the other side rejected what had been offered at Camp David.
More than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds of thousands more injured during the uprising which is still raging in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, more than 500 Israelis have been killed and thousands of others injured.
Copyright 2002 XINHUA NEWS AGENCY.
Advocate wrote:
Arafat told reporters after meeting with bereaved Israeli families at his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah that the Palestinians have never rejected Clinton's proposal to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
"Clinton's proposal", I think, refers to the Clinton parameters, which were forwarded AFTER the failure at Camp David to come to a deal. These were not what was offered at Camp David.
http://www.fmep.org/documents/clinton_parameters12-23-00.html
Quote:(Note: After the failure of the Camp David Summit in July, 2000 to achieve a peace agreement between Israeli and Palestinian delegations led, respectively, by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, negotiations continued between the two sides and gaps between the parties on various issues were narrowed, but there was no comprehensive agreement.
In a last ditch effort, U.S. President Bill Clinton offered the following "Parameters" on December 23 to Israeli and Palestinian negotiators at a meeting in the White House. President Clinton's "Parameters" were not the terms of a final deal, but guidelines for final accelerated negotiations he hoped could be concluded in the coming weeks. He said his terms would not be binding on his successor when he would leave office in January 2001.
Arafat, after a delay, accepted the Clinton parameters, but with questions and reservations. Barak accepted the parameters, but Israel's position was also equivocal. The parameters laid the foundation for the final negotiations that took place in January 2001 at Taba before the election of Ariel Sharon in February 2001 that effectively ended the peace process. [See "Taba Agreement" below. The text of the Clinton Parameters follows. PCWilcox, 7/7/03])
FreeDuck, please dont confuse the issue with facts.
FD, as stated in your cited material:
"Arafat, after a delay, accepted the Clinton parameters, but with questions and reservations. Barak accepted the parameters, but Israel's position was also equivocal."
Keep in mind that the parameters were not negotiated, but were put forward unilaterally after Camp David. Thus, they never went beyond a rough framework for future discussion. At best, they were bait, including unacceptable terms, to get the talks going again. Arafat never embraced them, and attacked Israel just after Sharon was elected.
Moreover, if you read the piece I included, you will see that Arafat said he accepted the original Camp David pact.
And this:
For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel
An Interview with Phyllis Bennis
By Max Elbaum
Phyllis Bennis, a longtime analyst and activist around Middle East issues, is now head of the Middle East Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She is the author of From Stones to Statehood: The Palestinian Uprising, a book about the Palestinian intifada of the late 1980s, and Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's U.N. In this interview, Phyllis analyzes the racist character of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as well as its treatment of Palestinians who live within Israel's pre-1967 borders.
Max Elbaum [ME]: What do you see as the root cause of the current Palestinian uprising?
Phyllis Bennis [PB]: What's going on right now can be summed up in one word: occupation. Contrary to the U.S. media's portrayal, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is at the root of what the media at best identify only as a "disproportionate" use of violence by the Israelis on the West Bank and Gaza.
Certainly the Israeli troops' use of helicopter gunships, of machine guns mounted on tanks, and so on is profoundly disproportionate when used against a Palestinian civilian population armed only with stones and some old Kalashnikov rifles.
But the real issue is the Israeli military occupation of Palestine -- not only that it is inherently violent and a violation of international law and contrary to United Nations resolutions. Even if Israel used only proportionate violence, it would still be absolutely illegal, because the occupation of Palestinian land is illegal.
[ME]: And why is there an occupation?
[PB]: From its origins in the 19th century, Zionism centered on the idea of creating a specifically Jewish state in which Jews would be protected and privileged over non-Jews. Zionist occupation of Palestine was at first meager, amounting to about 10 percent of the population by 1900. By 1947, Jews were still only about 30 percent of the population of Mandate Palestine and owned only six percent of the land, but the UN Partition Resolution that year still assigned 55 percent of the land to a new Jewish state. However, by means of the 1947-48 war, Israel took over even greater expanses of land and forcibly expelled about 750,000 Palestinians. This travesty was the basis for the official founding of the Israeli state in 1948.
[ME]: In this latest intifada, there have been numerous protests by Arabs living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. What are their numbers and their conditions of life?
[PB]: Inside what is called the "Green Line" -- the unofficial borders of Israel before the 1967 war -- there are still about one million Palestinians, just under 20 percent of the total Israeli population. Most Palestinians are Muslim, some are Christian.
From 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians within Israel lived under explicit military rule. They were considered a military threat to the Israeli state, and they were ruled under a completely different set of laws than the Jewish population.
After 1966, military rule was lifted, but it was replaced by a set of Jim Crow-like laws designed to discriminate against Arabs in Israel. According to Adalah, an Arab rights organization, today there are at least 20 laws that specifically provide unequal rights and obligations based on what the Israelis call nationality, which in Israel is defined on the basis of religion. Israelis must carry a card which identifies them as either a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian. All non-Jews are second class citizens. The Israeli Supreme Court has dismissed virtually all cases which dealt with equal rights for Arab citizens.
[ME]: Can you be more specific about how this discrimination works and what it means?
[PB]: All Israeli citizens, including Palestinians, have the right to vote in elections for members of the Knesset (parliament) and for the prime minister. But not all rights are citizenship rights. Other rights are defined as nationality rights, and are reserved for Jews only. If you are a Jew, you have exclusive use of land, privileged access to private and public employment, special educational loans, home mortgages, preferences for admission to universities, and many other things. Many other special privileges are reserved for those who have served in the Israeli military. And military service is compulsory for all Jews (male and female), except for the ultra-Orthodox who get the same privileges as other Jews, but excludes Palestinians, who do not.
Over 80 percent of the land within Israel that was once owned by Palestinians has been confiscated. All told, 93 percent of Israel's land can only be leased or owned by Jews or Jewish agencies. Moreover, despite Israel's booming economy, Palestinian unemployment is skyrocketing -- Adalah says it is about 40 percent. In 1996 twice as many Arab citizens (28.3 percent) as Jewish citizens (14.4 percent) lived below the poverty line. Less than five percent of government employees are Arab. And eighty percent of all student drop-outs are Arab.
My comment: Exactly what was Israel willing to "give up" for peace after they illegally took over all this land from the Palestinians according to Clinton's Parameters?
There are also vast disparities between Arab towns and Jewish towns in government spending on schools, medical systems, roads and electricity, clean water, and social services.
Unlike any other country in the world, Israel does not define itself as a state of its residents, or even a state of its citizens, but as a state of all the Jews in the world. Jews from anywhere in the world, like me, can travel to Israel, declare citizenship, and be granted all the privileges of being Jewish that are denied to Palestinians who have lived in the area for hundreds of years.
[ME]: Are Palestinians within Israel participating in the current uprising?
[PB]: The recent resistance has seen a whole new level of involvement in demonstrations by Palestinians inside the Green Line. They are protesting the discrimination they face in Israel as well as the occupation itself and Israeli brutality against Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. Such protests are not completely without historical precedent; in 1976 there were a series of demonstrations on what became known as Land Day which protested continuing Israeli seizures of Palestinian land. Six Palestinian demonstrators, citizens of Israel, were killed by Israeli forces.
But this time there is a vast increase in the participation of Palestinians inside the Green Line. Their demonstrations have been met with the same brutal military tactics used against Palestinians in the West Bank. So, far 13 Israeli Palestinians have been killed. These tactics are in sharp contrast to the methods used by Israeli authorities in response to demonstrations by Israeli Jews.
In 1982, for example, when there was an upsurge of Jewish protests against the Israeli war in Lebanon, one Israeli Jewish protester was killed and there was such an enormous outcry that people remember his name to this day -- Emil Grunzweig. But when a Palestinian is killed by Israeli military occupation forces, that is not considered news. We might hear a body count, but we never hear their names, who their parents or children are, what they did for a living.
On the West Bank and Gaza, as well as inside the Green Line, police randomly fired live ammunition into crowds of unarmed Arab demonstrators that were throwing stones. The racist double standard is everywhere. A mob of Israeli Jews even attacked the house of an Arab member of the Knesset, Azmi Bishara. But the police would not act against the rioters.
Unfortunately, the years of occupation have created, or have allowed to flourish, an incredibly racist vantage point among the majority of Israeli Jews. The majority of Israeli Jews are willing to accept the killing of Palestinians and collective punishment of the Palestinian population as justified state policy.
[ME]: Can you tell us more about Palestinian politics within Israel?
[PB]: Not surprisingly, Palestinians inside Israel have historically felt themselves excluded and disempowered by the Israeli government. The Communist Party of Israel was long a predominantly Arab party and received the vast majority of Palestinian votes. The CP remains strong, but a few Palestinian Knesset members have recently allied themselves to the Labor Party and more and more Palestinians have joined newer nationalist blocs. Azmi Bishara, who leads the Tajamoah (National Democratic) Party, became the first Arab citizen to run for prime minister last year. He and others actually call for the "de-Zionization" of Israel -- for the transformation of Israel from a theocratic state privileging the Jewish majority to a democratic, secular state of all its citizens.
[ME]: You are painting a picture of an Israeli government, with the support of a substantial part of its Jewish population, which aims toward permanent subordination of Palestinian Arabs within its borders, along with domination over something that might be called a Palestinian state but what would really amount to a dependent Bantustan. Essentially the same vision that motivated apartheid South Africa.
[PB]: Yes. And there are even more complexities. Within Israel there are really four levels of citizenship, the first three being various levels of Jewish participation in Israeli society, which are thoroughly racialized. At the top of the pyramid are the Ashkenazi, the white European Jews. At the level of power the huge contingent of recent Russian immigrants -- now about 20 percent of Israeli Jews -- are being assimilated into the European-Ashkenazi sector, though they are retaining a very distinct cultural identity.
The next level down, which is now probably the largest component of the Jewish population, is the Mizrachi or Sephardic Jews, who are from the Arab countries. At the bottom of the Jewish pyramid are the Ethiopian Jews, who are black. You can go into the poorest parts of Jewish West Jerusalem and find that it's predominantly Ethiopian.
This social and economic stratification took shape throughout the last 50 years as different groups of Jews from different part of the world came, for very different reasons, to Israel. So while the divisions reflected national origins, they play out in a profoundly racialized way.
The Yemeni Jews in particular faced extraordinary discrimination. They were transported more or less involuntarily from Yemen to Israel. On arrival they were held in primitive camps, and many Yemeni babies were stolen from their mothers and given for adoption to Ashkenazi families. In the early 1990s a high-profile campaign began to try to reunite some of those shattered families.
Beneath all these layers of Jews come the Palestinian citizens.
A rigid hierarchy, highly racialized both within and between religious or national groups, orchestrates Israeli social life. Much of it is legally enforced. The most significant difference between this scenario and other similar ones is in the world's perception of the Israeli reality. For the overwhelming majority of the world's population, South Africa was always considered a pariah state. But Israel is not in that position. Israel is given a pass, if you will, on the question of racism. Because Jews were victims of the Nazi Holocaust, there's a way in which Israeli Jews are assumed to be either incapable of such terrible racialized policies, or that it's somehow understandable because of what Jews went through.
But the new intifada has refocused attention on the nature and extent of Israeli racism, among other things. You have new reports from Amnesty International looking at the Israeli treatment of its own Palestinian citizens -- minors, children, being arrested, beaten and held for days. Israel treats Palestinians, inside or outside the Green Line, as being less human than Jews. This is rooted in the very definition and Basic Law of the Israeli state. And the new intifada may give us a chance to challenge that apartheid character.
--
Max Elbaum is the former editor of CrossRoads magazine and author of Revolution in the Air: From Malcolm and Martin to Lenin, Mao & Che, a book about the new communist movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, forthcoming from Verso.
Bennis has been an untiring, one-sided advocate for the Pals. I would expect nothing less that her quoted material.
Advocate, Quit attacking the messenger and provide evidence what she says is not true. FACT: Palestinians owned over 80 percent of the land in Israel before the Jews/Zionists of Israel stole their land, and the percentages are now reversed; Jews "own" over 80 percent, and the Palestnians now own less than 20 percent. That was done illegally based on international laws. Israel is an aparthied state with no legal rights on Palestnian lands and freedoms.
So Israel is attacked from the begining. They don't take crap from the attackers and push back. They win land in the war and now they have to give it back?
Would any of you anti-Israel people feel the same way if Israel had lost land? Would you feel the same way about land having to be given back?
The land the Jews live in in Israel was purchased or was untitled. Much of it was desert wasteland. Much of the money used to purchase the land from Arabs was contributed by Jews in the United States and elsewhere, especially the Rothchild family.
CI, I, and others, have already refuted what was said by your Israel haters. How many times must it be repeated?
I don't understand your affection for the Pals who really hate the West, and treat their women worse than they treat their sheep. They are taught to hate Jews and the West from the time they are small children. But I guess it is fashionable for some to hate the winning side, regardless of the facts.
It's amazing to hear you say 'regardless of the facts,' advocate.
Could Israel do anything wrong, in your opinion? Is everything they have done, justified by the past?
Cycloptichorn
