I certainly don't think that Israel can work safely and productively with any organization that preaches such narrow minded hate.
However, that fact should not be used as the rationalization for systematic injustice inflicted on all the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank for over 39 years. Indeed the fanaticism of Hamas is in part a reaction to the Israeli injustice which feeds it, and which, in turn, is used by Zionists to rationalize further injustice.
There are more rational voices on both sides of this bitter dispute, which has already lasted far too long. However,on both sides, they are only rarely heard.
Moreover, our unquestioning support for Israel has, in a perverse way, emboldened the most radical elements on both sides by shielding them from the bad effects of their policies in the case of the Israelis, and by providing them an excuse for unreasonable hatred in the case of the Palestinians.
Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.
Article One
The Islamic Resistance Movement draws its guidelines from Islam; derives from it its thinking, interpretations and views about existence, life and humanity; refers back to it for its conduct; and is inspired by it in whatever step it takes.
Beginning with the U.N. partitioning of Israel in 1947, (since this can go back much further I'll start here), the history I've read indicates that it was the Arab states that immediately went to war with Israel. It is also my understanding that at the conclusion of each of these wars, Israel got more and more territory as a result of winning each battle. It is also understood that once Israel concluded each battle, Israel would then claim the land, and take the property assets (houses, businesses) as part of the spoils of victory. This is fairly normal, isn't it?
Certainly the consent of the governed is a core element of the political philosophy of the United States. The support of conquest followed by the taking of property, houses and business, as you indicated, and of the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the territory, as you only inferred, is contrary to our most basic political beliefs.
Conquest, followed by such ethnic or religious cleansing is most certainly outside the norms for the modern world. Serbia tried it in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the world rightly intervened. Something more or less like it may be going on in the Southern Sudan and we can see a similar (though less effective) reaction. Apartheidt South Africa tried to create the fiction that the native peoples were not really residents of the Nation, but rather only guest workers from the Bantustands, which as the fiction went, were "independent countries". This policy justly made that government a pariah state in the modern world. Israel's policies with respect to the people of the territories it has conquered in the several wars (most notably the 1967 War which began with a preemptive israeli attack on her neighbors) are hardly different from these examples.
I agree with you that the West is confronted with an increasingly intransigent Islam - a product of some inherent defects in the internal political development of that culture (more or less as Bernard lewis has described it), and augmented by the ill effects of European colonialism (seventy years ago most of the Moslems in the world were ruled- misruled - by European masters, from the Soviet Empire to Britain, France and the Netherlands.). However the cure for that is not more conquest, more ethnic cleansing and more misrule, and the historical evidence to prove this point is more than ample.
Posted on Tue, Jan. 02, 2007
Commentary
Truth at last, while breaking a U.S. taboo of criticizing Israel
By George Bisharat
Americans owe a debt to former President Jimmy Carter for speaking long hidden but vital truths. His book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid breaks the taboo barring criticism in the United States of Israel's discriminatory treatment of Palestinians. Our government's tacit acceptance of Israel's unfair policies causes global hostility against us.
Israel's friends have attacked Carter, a Nobel laureate who has worked tirelessly for Middle East peace, even raising the specter of anti-Semitism. Genuine anti-Semitism is abhorrent. But exploiting the term to quash legitimate criticism of another system of racial oppression, and to tarnish a principled man, is indefensible. Criticizing Israeli government policies - a staple in Israeli newspapers - is no more anti-Semitic than criticizing the Bush administration is anti-American.
The word apartheid typically evokes images of former South Africa, but it also refers to any institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another. Carter applies the term only to Israel's rule of the occupied Palestinian territories, where it has established more than 200 Jewish-only settlements and a network of roads and other services to support them. These settlements violate international law and the rights of Palestinian property owners. Carter maintains that "greed for land," not racism, fuels Israel's settlement drive. He is only partially right.
Israel is seizing land and water from Palestinians for Jews. Resources are being transferred, under the guns of Israel's military occupation, from one disempowered group - Palestinian Christians and Muslims - to another, preferred group - Jews. That is racism, pure and simple.
Moreover, there is abundant evidence that Israel discriminates against Palestinians elsewhere. The "Israeli Arabs" - about 1.4 million Palestinian Christian and Muslim citizens who live in Israel - vote in elections. But they are a subordinated and marginalized minority. The Star of David on Israel's flag symbolically tells Palestinian citizens: "You do not belong." Israel's Law of Return grants rights of automatic citizenship to Jews anywhere in the world, while those rights are denied to 750,000 Palestinian refugees who were forced or fled in fear from their homes in what became Israel in 1948.
Israel's Basic Law of Human Dignity and Liberty establishes the state as a "Jewish democracy" although 24 percent of the population is non-Jewish. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, counted 20 laws that explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews.
The government favors Jews over Palestinians in the allocation of resources. Palestinian children in Israel attend "separate and unequal" schools that receive a fraction of the funding awarded to Jewish schools, according to Human Rights Watch. Many Palestinian villages, some predating the establishment of Israel, are unrecognized by the government, do not appear on maps, and thus receive no running water, electricity, or access roads. Since 1948, scores of new communities have been founded for Jews, but none for Palestinians, causing them severe residential overcrowding.
Anti-Arab bigotry is rarely condemned in Israeli public discourse, in which Palestinians are routinely construed as a "demographic threat." Palestinians in Israel's soccer league have played to chants of "Death to Arabs!" Israeli academic Daniel Bar-Tal studied 124 Israeli school texts, finding that they commonly depicted Arabs as inferior, backward, violent, and immoral. A 2006 survey revealed that two-thirds of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in a building with an Arab, nearly half would not allow a Palestinian in their home, and 40 percent want the government to encourage emigration by Palestinian citizens. Last March, Israeli voters awarded 11 parliamentary seats to the Israel Beitenu Party, which advocates drawing Israel's borders to exclude 500,000 of its current Palestinian citizens.
Some say that Palestinian citizens in Israel enjoy better circumstances than those in surrounding Arab countries. Ironically, white South Africans made identical claims to defend their version of apartheid, as is made clear in books such as Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull.
Americans are awakening to the costs of our unconditional support of Israel. We urgently need frank debate to chart policies that honor our values, advance our interests, and promote a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. It is telling that it took a former president, immune from electoral pressures, to show the way.
The debate should now be extended. Are Israel's founding ideals truly consistent with democracy? Can a state established in a multiethnic milieu be simultaneously "Jewish" and "democratic"? Isn't strife the predictable yield of preserving the dominance of Jews in Israel over a native Palestinian population? Does our unconditional aid merely enable Israel to continue abusing Palestinian rights with impunity, deepening regional hostilities and distancing peace? Isn't it time that Israel lived by rules observed in any democracy - including equal rights for all?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
George Bisharat ([email protected]) is a professor of law at University of California Hastings College of the Law. He writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.
I'm not sure whether you're talking about the Palestinians that live inside the 1967 Israeli boundaries or outside. Inside the Israeli bounds, the Palestinians enjoy health care, voting rights in the Knesset, and a lot of privileges that were missing in South Africa. Outside the borders, Israel only has a duty to defend itself.
While it's agreed that the 1967 War was initiated by the Israelis, you're very guilty of disseminating misleading propoganda with audacious omissions of facts, such as Nasser ordering a withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Forces (UNEF) that were stationed on the Egyptian-Israeli border, which removed the international buffer between Egypt and Israel which had existed since 1957. You also left out the Egyptian blockade of all Israeli goods in and out of the straits of Tiran. You left out the fact that even though President Johnson declared the Gulf of Acaba was an international waterway and that Israel complied with a U.S. request, to hold off on military action, Syria, Egypt and Iraq were mobilizing their forces along the Golan Heights and during the six day war, Jordan fought Israel. Expecting a country to stand for a complete blockade of their goods is a trifle much, in my opinion.
It all gets back to the simple point that the warring Arab nations and groups deny Israel's basic right to exist. You can chastise Israel and the United States all you like, and argue that Israel's borders are too big, but the Israeli's have no such counterpoint in their belief system about the Arab nations.
... Olmert practically showered Abbas with kisses when the latter visited Jerusalem recently to seek peace.
Israel continues to beg for peace, and Olmert practically showered Abbas with kisses when the latter visited Jerusalem recently to seek peace.
