It's complicated. I grew up in a house that was very observant, so yeah we were religious, but it was also a very intellectual household that looked at religion with a critical eye. So, for example, I grew up in a house that readily accepted that the bible was written by people, probably by multiple people over a very long period of editing. So essentially I grew up in a house that was religious, but approached religion in a very open and non-dogmatic way. For me Judaism is one of many ways of accessing the divine, but more importantly religious practice plays a significant cultural role within Jewish communities, binding everyone together through shared ritual and custom. It preserves our history through texts and traditions and holidays. I mean basically Judaism isn't really like other religions because it isn't just a religion, it's an entire culture and heritage and history. This is going to be a flawed analogy, but it's like maybe if you took the Church of England, and mixed in English history and English folk customs and like all the little cultural things that bind the English together and make them recognize themselves as authentically English. I don't know, it's kind of hard to sum up your entire identity.
thank you.
No problem.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
My Jewishness is a national trait based in history, culture, and ethnicity, and not primarily in religion. I leave it to you to decide where your homeland is, just as I would ask others to leave that decision to me rather than to preach arrogantly about what it is and is not acceptable for me to believe.
A Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Fearsome Words?
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
October 14, 2009
In April of this year I was invited by the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Association to speak at one of their meetings. The meeting was to have taken place in the Parliament building in Ottawa, where I have spoken previously without incident. John Ivison, in the National Post newspaper, published a not particularly vicious or unbalanced attack on me, deploring the invitation. After this, without any contact with me and without seeing the content of my talk, the meeting was 'postponed'. It is now clear that the postponement was permanent.
This might seem spineless, but it involved more than the National Post article.
Ivison reports that Alykhan Velshi, director of communications for Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, had the following to say:
"In a free country like Canada, Mr. Neumann has the right to air his noxious views. The corollary, of course, is that we can and must criticize them. Neumann's farrago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate are completely repugnant to our government, and we make no apology for saying so."
Bob Rae (former Ontario premier, former head of the New Democratic Party, now a high-ranking Liberal Party leader) is reported to have been '"surprised and disappointed" that the parliamentary group thought Mr. Neumann had something positive to contribute'.
Here is the alleged farago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate - unaltered since before the attacks. Readers may judge for themselves whether the allegations have merit.
* * *
Nationalism and the Israel-Palestine Conflict
For a brief period in the 1970s I worked in the Vancouver used book trade. I got to know a legend among booksellers - Bill Hoffer. Bill was a skilled purveyor of Canadian first editions and a great bluffer. Once I found him in earnest and extended conversation with one of 'his' authors; later I asked Bill whether the guy's stuff was any good. "I don't read it," said Bill, "I just sell it.".
Bill told me that the secret of the used book business was 'gaining moral ascendency' over the customers (whom he called 'civilians'). This meant making them feel like you were more knowledgeable about and more committed to whatever they were interested in. Intimidate the customer a bit, and your business flourishes.
The Israelis gained moral ascendancy long ago; some reputed people called 'the Arabs' never had it. This involved more than PR skills. It also involved terrible confusions about nationalism. They're the secret weapon of the Zionists and the secret weakness of 'the Arabs'.
Zionist ideology has always departed from a question: every people has its state; why not the Jews? A 'no' answer would tie you to that evil of evils, antisemitism. The rights of 'the Jewish people' meant Israel had a morally titanic 'right to exist'. It meant that the relentless expansion of Jewish settlement was, far from a mortal threat to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the area, the mere completion of the long Jewish Odyssey. It was just part of the long journey home.
As for the Palestinians, they described themselves as Arabs. This sounded like they *had* a home; it was the whole Arab world. If their 'Arab brothers' would not take them in, well, that was no fault of the Zionists. So if the Palestinians were squeezed ever further into unlivable enclaves, it was the Arabs who were to blame. The Arabs would rather dispute a tiny strip of their vast possessions than grant the Jews their little homeland.
These claims - we're just a people like any other, we just want to go home - are the last bastion of lsrael's crumbling moral stature. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy. Israel's rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era. The confusions that sustain them not only raise racial crusading to a moral imperative; in other ways they bring unjust disrepute and demoralization on the entire so-called Arab world.
If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology. Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe. There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine. As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe. Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it? And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can't possibly explain - the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as 'subhumans' in inhuman prison camps?
There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities. It fairly stares us in the face. It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics - poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans. It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics. This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.
Before proceeding let me forestall a predictable objection. I intend to trace the ravages of ethnic nationalism, not by any means to make Zionists into Nazis. It is entirely unnecessary to take this false step, which would obscure rather than clarify the repellent aspects of Zionism. The offspring of ethnic nationalism are a nasty brood, but of course the Nazis were in a league of their own.
Wilson legitimized this atrocious doctrine during the peace negotiations that ended the First World War. Wilson's own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, anticipated its consequences all too accurately:
"The more I think about the President's declaration as to the right of 'self-determination,' the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands.
"What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent, disorder, and rebellion? Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it? How can it be harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed?
"The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle in force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!"
For his prescience Lansing incurred Wilson's disfavour and was forced to resign. He seemed a fussy old spoilsport, unwilling to grant peoples their rights - peoples, or, as he puts it in the language of his era, races. Could he not see the progressive implications of Wilson's doctrine? Did he not understand that the self-determination of peoples - races, ethnic groups - was a sacred human right?
Well, one person did, the person who wrote:
"If the race is in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated the question of legality is only of secondary importance. The established power may in such a case employ only those means which are recognized as 'legal'. yet the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the oppressed will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of all possible resources.
"Only on the recognition of this principle was it possible for those struggles to be carried through, of which history furnishes magnificent examples in abundance, against foreign bondage or oppression at home.
"Human rights are above the rights of the State."
Ah, human rights, which belong not only to individuals but to 'peoples'. This champion of human rights was Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf. (Murphy translation, line 4084, Volume I, chapter iii)
Hitler 'understood' that peoples had a right to their homeland. The 'national' part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries. It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of 'peoples', races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs. Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction. The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it. Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans?
Of course this was nonsense. The 'German people' was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their 'homeland' were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs. But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing's worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson's and Hitler's endorsement of ethnic nationalism. It infects even our condemnations of 'the Germans' for the Nazi era.
To condemn 'the Germans' means this: even if you'd spent the war in an orphanage because your parents had died in street battles with the Nazi black shirts, you would share in Germany's collective guilt. You share in it not because of anything you have done, but because you were, by birth, a German. We might call this 'collective responsibility', but that's just a respectable name for racial guilt, the guilt of a 'people'. From the rubble of the Nazi empire, the rubbish of ethnic nationalism rises up and takes an honoured place among our orthodoxies. From this rubbish comes the right of a fictitiously collective 'Jewish people' to a 'homeland'.
That link is explicit. The Nazi conception of a Jewish people lies at the heart of Israel's famous right of return. Don't take my word for it. Listen instead to the AMERICAN-ISRAELI COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE (AICE), which describes itself as "a nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship by emphasizing the fundamentals of the alliance - the values our nations share". To explain in what sense 'Jews' have a right to return to their homeland, the AICE states that "At present, the definition is based on Hitler's Nuremberg Laws: the right of Return is granted to any individual with one Jewish grandparent, or who is married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. As a result, thousands of people with no meaningful connection to the Jewish people theoretically have the right to immigrate." AICE neglects to mention that such persons also have the actual right to immigrate, and to obtain citizenship. On the other hand, a stateless Palestinian refugee, perhaps living a precarious existence in France, has no such right of return, even if his ancestors inhabited Palestine itself for a thousand years. Palestine, it seems, is not is the 'homeland' of Palestinians, but only of the Jews.
'Jew', in other words, does not refer to those who espouse Judaism or embrace Jewish culture. 'Jew' means 'of Jewish ancestry'. In virtually every Canadian jurisdiction, ancestry is explicitly cited as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Ancestry is just a contemporary stand-in for the older notion of race and is generally used in references to racial discrimination.(**) Like skin colour, it's something you cannot change, and therefore a particularly repugnant basis for determining civic status.
For the homeland to *belong* to the Jews is for them to have *sovereignty* there. Thus Article 7(a) of Israel's Basic Law stipulates that "A candidates' list shall not participate in the elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include... negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people." The Jewish people, in other words, are sovereign, and hold the power of life and death over all non-Jewish inhabitants under state control. Lest this seem overdramatic, note how the Israeli ministry of justice commented on a court case in March 2009: "The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective."(***)
So a miracle appears among us. The very ideology of homelands and peoples under whose auspices the Jews were all but exterminated has become the sustaining ideology of Israel, a state devoted to Jewish ethnic sovereignty. This is why we always hear that Israel - not Israelis - has a right to exist. What matters are not the citizens of a state, but the state itself, the totemic icon of 'the Jewish people'. The fatal confusion that legitimized ethnic nationalism at the Paris Peace Conference now legitimizes Israel itself. When Zionists suggest that the French and Germans have a right to their states, they conveniently forget that this means the *inhabitants* of France and Germany, not those of some French or German *ancestry*, not a 'people' in the sense of an ethnic group. (The world was outraged when it suspected that Britain's 'patrial' immigration laws were designed to favor those of ethnically British ancestry.) But 'the Jewish people' have a right to their state, and this is supposed to be some lofty ideal. Why? Because ethnic nationalism has taken on the cloak of civic nationalism, and we are too stupid to notice. Had ethnic nationalism not shed a single drop of blood, we should still be ashamed for crediting its mystique of peoples, historical wrongs, collective vices and virtues, ineluctable destinies. Abstractions and myths that could not even gain entrance to a university's ivory towers flow daily from the lips of supposedly practical people.
Zionists bought into ethnic nationalism because it served them well. 'Arabs' bought into it too, partly as a reaction to Zionist colonization. It has not been enough to say: the Zionists wish to impose racial sovereignty on these Palestinian individuals; this in unacceptable. One must also ask: are not the Palestinians a people? is Palestine not their homeland? do they not also have a right of self-determination? But if ethnic nationalism has given the Palestinians some chance at meeting the Zionists on their own terms, it has on the whole served 'the Arabs', and therefore the Palestinians, badly.
In the Middle East, ethnic nationalism has always been greeted with polite acceptance and a certain embarrassment. The idea that all Arabic speakers shared in being Arabs began life, like most ethnic nationalisms, as an almost literary adventure. It originates in Syria, where progressive Christians developed it to counter Ottoman rule. The British, through T.E. Lawrence 'of Arabia' quickly seized on it enrol some inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula in the same cause. After 1919, the Syrian and Arabian strains of this doctrine met in uneasy coexistence. The British installed Arabian rulers in Syria/Lebanon and Jordan, not without complaints that their new subjects were 'not Arabs'! It was again the British, in the 1940s, who presided over the foundation of an 'Arab League', partly as a move to keep the French from re-establishing their position in Lebanon.
One of the League's founding members was Egypt. This might bring a smile to some of you who know the Middle East, because you have heard Egyptians make disparaging remarks about 'the Arabs' who frequent the nightclubs along the Nile, or listened to an elderly Egyptian tell you the story of just when he first discovered he was an 'Arab'. But the myth of an Arab people is more than a successful British ploy. It took deep roots when Gamel Abdel Nasser fashioned it into a ideology of resistance to Western colonialism, not to mention a convenient tool for extending Egyptian power. As an oppositional creed, everyone from Berbers who hate 'the Arabs' to Egyptians who despise them to Palestinians who feel abandoned by them will proudly claim their Arab identity against the insults and depradations of the West.
Yet all know better. There are inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula who may plausibly be called Arabs. Most other Arabic speakers have little in common with these 'Arabians', and little sympathy for their culture or traditions. As for 'Arab nationalism', no longer is there a Nasser to fashion it into a progressive force; it has withered on the vine. Yet if Arab ethnic nationalism never gained enough force to harm others, it gained enough prominence to put the so-called Arab world at the losing end of moral ascendency.
The Arabs, understood as the ensemble of Arabic speakers, are by no stretch of the imagination 'a people'. They pay a heavy price for this dubious self-description. On the one hand, it associates every Arabic speaker with every crime of every other Arabic speaker - this holds even for some whose native tongue isn't Arabic but who live in officially 'Arab' countries. It is as if the Sudanese 'Arab' militias were the armies of a 'people' encompassing the Syrians of Tyre and the Berbers of Marrakesh.
Perhaps this bad press is a mere annoyance. But there is worse. Not only the rest of the world but 'the Arabs' themselves have come think they are somehow a hopeless case: why on earth can't they unite? Why don't they do more for the Palestinians? Why the endless bickering and mistrust? 'The Arabs' in these respects seem like perennial losers incapable of self-government, markedly inferior to 'the Jews'. This impression is only partly countered by savvy remarks about an 'Arab street', always on the verge of rising up against their rotten rulers, yet never, it seems, more genuinely committed to the Palestinians than a fan club to their favorite football team. To the extent that unsustainable attempts at constructing an Arab identity have contributed to the decline of Middle East secularism, they have also contributed to the rise of fanatical religious extremists. This too has hurt the Arabic-speaking world.
Not only does Arab nationalism make 'the Arabs' look bad; it also obscures what is good. When Arab states support and sustain the Palestinians, it is much more from genuine altruism than from bogus racial solidarity. But to the extent that Arabs do not do all that is expected of them - do not take in the Palestinians, do not invite them in as fellow-Arabs, the reason is simple. The Palestinians are not fellow-Arabs. They have no home, no 'homeland' if you like, but Palestine. Wondering why their 'brother Arabs' do not to take them in makes as much sense as wondering why Northern Irish Protestants would not welcome as brothers their 'fellow Anglophones' from Dublin or Watts or the slums of Kingston, Jamaica.
The ethnic nationalism of the Zionists is a big success; that of 'the Arabs', to their credit, a big failure. Perhaps we overestimate the extent to which the West can contribute to resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, not least because we are so dead set in regarding the 'Arab world' - which has given Israel a bloody nose on more than one occasion - as a bunch of losers. But certainly Western peacekeeping initiatives, especially from Canada and the US, are undermined by the painfully obvious efforts of our leaders not to adore the Israelis too passionately, and not to despise 'the Arabs' too thoroughly. Unfortunately 'the Arabs', now fond of their fictitious identity, are complicit in creating this bias.
This has to change, but it cannot change without abandoning the revolting principles we have so blindly espoused. That will not be easy. We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival. We take the Zionist adoration of Israel, its commitment to racially Jewish rule of Palestine, as a paean to freedom and human rights. We look up to Israel for precisely what should make us abhor it. The 'self-determination of peoples' is a poison set in the very heart of our humanitarian ideologies. Neutralize it and Israel will lose its moral ascendency.
Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at a Canadian university. He is the author of What's Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche and The Case Against Israel. He also contributed the essay, "What is Anti-Semitism", to CounterPunch's book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at <!-- e --><a href="mailto:mneumann@live.com">mneumann@live.com</a><!-- e -->
You have a problem with Israel, period. I get it. There is no point in offering a response to this. We aren't going to agree, so I'm just going to leave it alone.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
You have a problem with Israel, period. I get it. There is no point in offering a response to this. We aren't going to agree, so I'm just going to leave it alone.
You mean you are incapable of offering a response to the points made in this article.
As I said above, this article nails it.
And, no, I don't have a problem with Israel per se. I have a problem with the occupation post '67. A full and immediate withdrawal to those borders is the very least the Israelis can do.
You have a problem with Israel, period. I get it. There is no point in offering a response to this. We aren't going to agree, so I'm just going to leave it alone.
You mean you are incapable of offering a response to the points made in this article.
As I said above, this article nails it.
And, no, I don't have a problem with Israel per se. I have a problem with the occupation post '67. A full and immediate withdrawal to those borders is the very least the Israelis can do.
That is so disingenuous. You post an article that says that essentially the very principles underpinning Israel's legitimacy are bullshit, but then say your problem is solely with the occupation and not with Israel. I'm calling bullshit. I'm not going to engage in an argument with you about whether nationalism is a legitimate philosophy. You clearly seem to think it isn't, and I feel it is. We aren't going to agree. Give it a rest.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
That is so disingenuous. You post an article that says that essentially the very principles underpinning Israel's legitimacy are bullshit, but then say your problem is solely with the occupation and not with Israel. I'm calling bullshit. I'm not going to engage in an argument with you about whether nationalism is a legitimate philosophy. You clearly seem to think it isn't, and I feel it is. We aren't going to agree. Give it a rest.
'Ethnic nationalism', not 'Nationalism'. This article makes a sound point that the basic principles behind the Zionist brand of ethnic nationalism are no different to the basic principles that underpinned the ethnic nationalism of the Nazis.
And this has nothing to do with what I think. Try taking me out of the equation. I'm simply interested in the facts.
And, yes, this article makes it clear, as does his book 'The Case Against Israel', that the very principles underpinning Israel's legitimacy are bullshit. But Michael Neumann also points out in his book that he is against the occupation and that he recognizes that Israel now has a right to remain within it's 1948 - or 1949 - borders.
If you are interested in facts please provide facts and not opinions. Again, opinions are not facts just because you happen to agree with the opinion. And again I'm not going to get into an argument about nationalism with you. It is too large of a topic and there is utterly no point.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
A question for all those so enraged by Palestinian deaths: where is your rage at Hamas, which fights without uniforms and from within dense civilian populations? By doing so they are cynically putting civilians directly in the line of fire. If they donned uniforms and fought along a front line, as armies do, civilians would be largely out of harms way. So where is your rage for Hamas? It would seem that you are more interested in bashing Israel than bashing those responsible for the deaths of Palestinian innocents, in which case you would be enraged at Israel and Hamas in equal measure.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
A question for all those so enraged by Palestinian deaths: where is your rage at Hamas, which fights without uniforms and from within dense civilian populations? By doing so they are cynically putting civilians directly in the line of fire. If they donned uniforms and fought along a front line, as armies do, civilians would be largely out of harms way. So where is your rage for Hamas? It would seem that you are more interested in bashing Israel than bashing those responsible for the deaths of Palestinian innocents, in which case you would be enraged at Israel and Hamas in equal measure.
Israel puts civilians directly in the line of fire by creating more and more illegal settlements in the midst of those whose land they've stolen.
The Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but this does not apply to the Occupied territories.
8. Also urges all States, unilaterally and in co-operation with other States, as well as relevant United Nations organs, to contribute to the progressive elimination of the causes underlying international terrorism and to pay special attention to all situations, including colonialism, racism and situations involving mass and flagrant violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms and those involving alien domination and occupation, that may give rise to international terrorism and may endanger international peace and security;
14. Considers that nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration, the right of these peoples to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support;
That is not an answer to the question. You have simply attempted to change the topic. If you don't care about Hamas' tactics that directly endanger Palestinians then I have to ask whether you really care about the Palestinians at all or simply hate Israel.
Let me spell this out for you. Israel's rights are beside the point. Hamas knows that when they attack Israel, Israel will respond. By adopting the tactic of not wearing uniforms and fighting from within the civilian population, so that Israel cannot easily distinguish between combatants and civilians, Hamas is knowingly putting civilians directly in the line of fire. If you care at all about the lives of Palestinians how can this not enrage you?
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
A question for all those so enraged by Palestinian deaths: where is your rage at Hamas, which fights without uniforms and from within dense civilian populations? By doing so they are cynically putting civilians directly in the line of fire. If they donned uniforms and fought along a front line, as armies do, civilians would be largely out of harms way. So where is your rage for Hamas? It would seem that you are more interested in bashing Israel than bashing those responsible for the deaths of Palestinian innocents, in which case you would be enraged at Israel and Hamas in equal measure.
i've have never claimed that i support Hamas, but i can assure you that i do not have equal measures of rage against them. it's not even close to comparable. perhaps i'm just more realistic than you. think about what is happening right now. Israel is brutally occupying the Palestinian people. to me, it seems like all you are doing by asking that question, is to shift attention from Israels disgusting crimes.
i wish people would stop trying to distract from the real issue by using the both sides are to blame argument. it's old, it's tired, it's a lie and it's wrong. you simply cannot blame both sides equally. there is only one side occupying the other.
you also said "Hamas are cynically putting civilians directly in the line of fire." you know what i don't get? where is all this so called "evidence" of Hamas using all those people as human shields. where is it? if so many of the casualties happen because Hamas was deliberately using civilians, where the hell is all this evidence. i'm sure amongst all the billions of dollars we give to fund the brutal occupation, Israel must have some pretty damn fancy and sophisticated cameras or spying equipment yeah? another thing that i don't understand is why Israel didn't allow reporters to enter Gaza while they carried out their massacre. wouldn't they want the rest of the world to see Hamas putting civillians directly in the line of fire? so where is it?
Hamas is not even the issue yosi. how many times have they said they'd be willing to accept a two-state solution, and said they'd be willing to fuck off the rockets, and make peace with Israel if they withdraw to the '67 borders?
stop apologizing for Israel's repulsive behaviour. stop making excuses for them. why isn't it an acceptable principle that those doing the killing should be held responsible for it?
the people that are living in Gaza are not there because they want to be there or because of Hamas. why are they there yosi? because they are trapped in their open air prison that Israel drove them to. caged in like animals and they have nowhere to go. no way out. they can't leave.
i'm getting tired of my long assed posts. i feel like i'm saying the same thing over and over. look, the only one that can fix things is Israel. and that's not gonna happen any damn time soon while the bully keeps blaming the victim.
I'm really very sorry but you can and should blame both sides, especially when we're talking about Hamas. Do you know when Hamas really started to get going with attacks against Israelis? 1994, right after the Oslo process got going. Think about that for a second. Here you have a fundamentalist Islamic organization, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and they start to carry out suicide bombings at exactly the moment when a peace process is starting that had the promise at the time to bring a negotiated end to the occupation. Hamas has always done everything it can to undermine the peace process, and its reasons are plain. They do not want peace with Israel. Their charter says this explicitly, as do their leaders on an almost daily basis.
As for evidence of Hamas' cynical exploitation of the civilian population, it is copious. To begin with every human rights organization worth its salt has cited Hamas' in this regard for blame. And in point of fact Israel regularly films every target before they bomb it. I'm betting you didn't know this, but during the Gaza offensive Hamas would regularly take up positions inside civilian buildings from which they would fire on Israeli targets. Israel would then call the residents of the building to tell them to leave because they were about to return fire. Hamas would then force all the residents to go up onto the roof knowing that Israeli drones would be filming the target and that Israel would not bomb the building with the civilians standing on the rooftop. In order to combat this Israel built a special missile that had no explosive charge and would not cause damage that they could fire at the building without causing anyone harm so as to make clear to the civilians the seriousness of Israel's intention to return fire and get them to leave before they got hurt. This happened repeatedly, and was filmed repeatedly.
As for Hamas saying they would be willing to accept peace, this is simply a useful distortion of what they have actually said. What they said was that they would accept a long-term ceasefire if Israel would return to the '67 border. And at the same time Hamas' leaders keep affirming that they will never recognize Israel's legitimate right to exist. So why would Israel ever accept such a deal. They'd be giving up everything that they would have given up in the Oslo peace accords, to an organization pledged to their destruction, and they wouldn't even get a peace treaty in return. All they'd get is a cease-fire. That's just insane!
Look, we have our disagreements, but you seem like a good guy. I'm really shocked that you are throwing your hat in with Hamas here. These are really, really bad guys. I mean this is like radical-left-willful-blindness-in-the-face-of-Stalinism shit. Disagree with Israeli policy all you want. Don't cut Israel any slack. But seriously, in Hamas you're allying yourself (so to speak) with some of the worst people imaginable, or at the very least excusing their actions. I would really recommend that you find as much information as you can about these guys before so cavalierly giving them a free pass.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
A few choice quotes taken directly from the Hamas charter, which is still the defining document for the Hamas movement, and which Hamas refuses on principle to ammend:
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up."
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
"After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."
I mean for gods sake, these guys are quoting the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"! They are straight up anti-semites, who believe that they have a divine mandate from god to redeem Islamic land from infidels. Are these really the kind of people you want to be giving a free ride to? This is not a zero sum game. Blame Israel all you want, but maybe, in the interest of intellectual honesty, fairness, balance, decency, whatever, reserve some outrage for these guys as well.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Look, we have our disagreements, but you seem like a good guy. I'm really shocked that you are throwing your hat in with Hamas here. These are really, really bad guys. I mean this is like radical-left-willful-blindness-in-the-face-of-Stalinism shit. Disagree with Israeli policy all you want. Don't cut Israel any slack. But seriously, in Hamas you're allying yourself (so to speak) with some of the worst people imaginable, or at the very least excusing their actions. I would really recommend that you find as much information as you can about these guys before so cavalierly giving them a free pass.
don't put words in my mouth please. the first 8 words of my post.
i've have never claimed that i support Hamas
let me make it real simple for you.
I do not support Hamas. I don't give a shit about Hamas. i care about the ordinary Palestinian people that Israel are brutally and inhumanely treating while they continue with their illegal occupation. by trying to equally apportion blame between Hamas and Israel, all you are doing is trying to shift attention from Israels disgusting crimes.
Here's what wikipedia has to say about Hamas' ceasefire offer:
The New York Times's Steven Erlanger contends that Hamas excludes the possibility of permanent reconciliation with Israel. "Since the Prophet Muhammad made a temporary hudna, or truce, with the Jews about 1,400 years ago, Hamas allows the idea. But no one in Hamas says he would make a peace treaty with Israel or permanently give up any part of Palestine.".[47] Mkhaimer Abusada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University writes that Hamas talks "of hudna, not of peace or reconciliation with Israel. They believe over time they will be strong enough to liberate all historic Palestine.”[47]
That sounds like a real willingness to make peace. :roll:
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Yes, I suppose I am trying to shift some blame onto Hamas, but rightly so. You are outraged that 1,300 Palestinians were killed in Gaza last year. Well, Hamas shares a large part of the blame for that. That is simply the truth. All I'm saying is that for all the talk on this thread about caring for the Palestinians, all the rage is directed at only one offending party when the truth is that there are many offending parties. Another example: why is it that aside from Jordan the Arab world has kept Palestinians living in refugee camps for 60 YEARS! There were millions of refugees in the years after WWII, and many of them could not or would not go back to the homes they had left. All of these were absorbed by other countries except for the Palestinians who have been denied the right to citizenship, and have been forced to live in squalor in refugee camps. Why? Because the refugees are a politically useful tool to use against Israel. The Palestinians have gotten royally fucked by everyone. What bothers me is that only Israel gets blamed for it. Maybe Israel deserves most of the blame, and maybe it doesn't. But it doesn't deserve all of the blame, and I think it is curious that those people who claim to care about the Palestinians are entirely unwilling to address the full scope of the situation, and are only interested in raging at Israel.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Is that not the same kind of talk that Israel would have regarding their right to their historic homeland?
Strangely enough, in this week's Time there is an article regarding role Elad (organisation controlling archeologic digs in Jerusalem) has and tactics used in 'recovering' this historical homeland.
That is not an answer to the question. You have simply attempted to change the topic. If you don't care about Hamas' tactics that directly endanger Palestinians then I have to ask whether you really care about the Palestinians at all or simply hate Israel.
Let me spell this out for you. Israel's rights are beside the point. Hamas knows that when they attack Israel, Israel will respond. By adopting the tactic of not wearing uniforms and fighting from within the civilian population, so that Israel cannot easily distinguish between combatants and civilians, Hamas is knowingly putting civilians directly in the line of fire. If you care at all about the lives of Palestinians how can this not enrage you?
Israel deliberately targets unarmed civilians. Therefore your lame attempt to justify the killing of Palestinian civilians by blaming Hamas is redundant.
Look, we have our disagreements, but you seem like a good guy. I'm really shocked that you are throwing your hat in with Hamas here. These are really, really bad guys. I mean this is like radical-left-willful-blindness-in-the-face-of-Stalinism shit. Disagree with Israeli policy all you want. Don't cut Israel any slack. But seriously, in Hamas you're allying yourself (so to speak) with some of the worst people imaginable, or at the very least excusing their actions. I would really recommend that you find as much information as you can about these guys before so cavalierly giving them a free pass.
Sure, Hamas are the evil bogeymen. And before them it was the PLO that sent shivers down your spine.
For a basic tooth filling and crown, the price difference is negligible: $17 at a regular clinic, $15 at Al Quds Clinic. The real distinction is in the extras.
“It’s safer to come to an Islamic place, where you can find a doctor who’s not only a good dentist, but a good Muslim,” said Najwa abu Mustafa, 24, who sat one recent afternoon in the sunny waiting room with several other women, shrouded in black veils but for the thin openings around their eyes. “You’re putting yourself in God’s hands.”
The small clinic on the edge of one of the Gaza Strip’s biggest refugee camps is one of hundreds of medical centers, food banks, summer camps and schools across the West Bank and Gaza operated by Islamic charities, many of them linked to the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas.
The militant group’s recent victory in parliamentary elections is testimony in part to its long track record on the streets. Its services are often perceived as being of higher quality and less tainted by corruption than the cumbersome and often ineffective social network operated by the Palestinian Authority controlled until now by Fatah.
The work Hamas does at home is an often-overlooked key to the domestic popularity of an organization most known elsewhere for killing. The United States has declared Hamas a terrorist organization, and U.S. and Israeli counter-terrorism experts have cited numerous instances in which Al Qaeda and Hamas drew funding from international Islamic charities. Hamas also reportedly has used schools and hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza to store weapons and plan attacks.
Faced with U.S. and European measures aimed at preventing charity funds from being funneled into terrorism, Hamas has erased many of its traceable financial links to the humanitarian programs. But Hamas figures remain on the boards and in management of the programs, which analysts say have become an essential component of the group’s public support.
“Hamas has been very good at compartmentalizing their activities – where they have a soup kitchen, for example, they simply give soup, nothing more,” said Mouin Rabbani of the International Crisis Group, which studied Islamic social activism in the occupied territories. “But it all fits into a broader pattern of popular mobilization and becomes another way of seeking support for the organization.”
Over the last two decades, several large Islamic charities have come to be closely associated with Hamas, including the Mujamma Islami network, Al Salah Society, the Islamic Center and the Islamic University of Gaza. But the International Crisis Group said there was little “substantial evidence” that Islamic welfare institutions “systematically divert” funds to support terrorist activity.
“Hamas doesn’t have much in the way of resources, but they have a big network of charity working in order to reduce the suffering of the Palestinian people,” said Sami abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the group in Gaza. “People feel the credibility of Hamas, and its ability to make change through the charity organizations that it runs.”
In Gaza, Al Salah Society’s school for 1,000 orphans and other youngsters in the teeming town of Deir al Balah stands in sharp contrast to the crumbling concrete and dusty streets around it, a fenced-in oasis of palms and neat classrooms.
“Muslims are the best nation created in the world,” says a banner hanging outside the school, next to another that says, “Those who learn more earn a higher degree in paradise.”
Al Salah’s director, Ahmad Kurd, was recently elected mayor of Deir al Balah, and Hamas scooped up two of the region’s three parliamentary seats in the January elections.
“In 1994 there was an Israeli operation which destroyed several Palestinian houses [of families of suspected militants] in one of the poorest neighborhoods,” Kurd said. “I had to meet with the Israeli commander, and he asked me, ‘Why are you supporting and helping those victims who lost their homes?’
“I told him, ‘The Red Crescent is helping, the Churches United organization also gives some help to them, the Catholic Relief organization, the United Nations. And Al Salah Society is there as well. Is it forbidden?’ And he was not able to respond to that.”
When Israeli forces launched a major incursion into the southern Gaza refugee camp of Rafah in 2004, leaving nearly 1,500 residents homeless, Al Salah sent fundraisers with megaphones down the streets, going door to door, standing on street corners and outside the mosques. Women were asked to drop their gold necklaces into the collection boxes. Poor families gave sacks of rice. Al Salah collected $1 million worth of food, valuables and cash in Gaza, one of the poorest places in the Middle East.
Yet Kurd said it would be a mistake to think Hamas won the votes because of its charity work.
“The people are getting a lot more money from America, from the international community. The international donors distributed perhaps $6 billion in the last 10 years. The Islamic charity organizations didn’t pay out 1% of that money,” he said.
Palestinians associate U.S. aid with Washington’s support for Israel, he said. “The Palestinian feels, ‘You give me that money, and you kill me. You give me money, and you destroy my house. You give me money, and you send planes to kill our kids.’ ”
Abu Zuhri, the Hamas spokesman, said international aid had focused on public works projects but had done little to provide direct help to the poor, or to those families that have lost a breadwinner in the conflict with Israel.
“Unfortunately, the Western side has donated for projects like cleaning the streets or painting the walls, but they didn’t give anything for the care of orphans,” he said. Some of the most controversial programs operated by the Muslim charities provide stipends, housing and direct financial aid to the families of suicide bombers.
In the narrow alleyways of the sprawling refugee camp at Deir al Balah, hundreds of families get cash payments of $40 to $100 a month from Mujamma Islami and Al Salah, along with meat, beans, flour and eggs.
“We would be completely destitute without this help,” said Ataf Ostaz, 41, who has nine children and whose husband died of a stroke two years ago. “Naturally, we gave our votes to Hamas, because they are the ones who touch our need.”
The unlikely mix of services offered at Al Quds Clinic – pediatrics, maternal healthcare, orthodontics and post-surgical care – is no accident. Mujamma Islami, which opened the center in October 2002, conducted a survey of the clinics already operating in Khan Yunis.
“We did studies and reached the decision that some services are not good enough in government hospitals, and so we decided to offer these services ourselves,” said clinic director Atiya Abumoaamar. “The point is that the public hospitals are very, very cheap, so where we compete with them is not in prices, but in quality.”
At the same time, fees generally are substantially lower than those at private clinics.
Caseloads now reach up to 400 patients a month, and if there is a profit at the end of the month, Abumoaamar splits it with doctors and office staff. Otherwise, they work without salary as volunteers. The effort has been judged such a success that two more clinics are opening soon, with funding from the Saudi-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth.
“If the international community will just give it a chance and will not isolate it, if donors don’t freeze the funds, if the Arab countries help make some solution, I guarantee that Hamas will do a better job of running this society,” Abumoaamar said.
But some Palestinians point out that there is a big difference between operating schools and clinics and running a government for 3 million people.
“The Palestinian Authority has to reach everyone, and in a situation of closures, unemployment reaching unprecedented figures, and in an environment in which you are constantly being undermined, these services are obligatory,” said Issam Younis, director of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City.
“Hamas has done its homework. Over the years, they have established very good social services, they have the maximum use of the mosque,” he said. “And it will be good to have Hamas in the government. Welcome! But think of the situation.
“With Abu Mazen [current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas], the international community transferred only $350 million of the $1 billion they were supposed to send for 2005. This is with the good guys in charge, not the terrorists!” he said. “Imagine how things will be with Hamas.”"
I'm really shocked that you are throwing your hat in with Hamas here. These are really, really bad guys. I mean this is like radical-left-willful-blindness-in-the-face-of-Stalinism shit. Disagree with Israeli policy all you want. Don't cut Israel any slack. But seriously, in Hamas you're allying yourself (so to speak) with some of the worst people imaginable, or at the very least excusing their actions. I would really recommend that you find as much information as you can about these guys before so cavalierly giving them a free pass.
This is one of the most insightful articles I've come across on the I-P issue. I suggest you click on the link and read it in it's entirety.
The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam
Henry Siegman
16 August 2007
'..Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in Israel’s dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas’s moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas...
In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.
The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.
Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants...
In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.
Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to rid themselves of Israel’s occupation, even when that violence has despicably targeted Israel’s civilian population. It is not to sanction the murder of civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most situations in which a people’s drive for national self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israel’s own struggle for national independence was no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past Arabs had ‘sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’
The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.
Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they received comparable territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected this. To be sure, in the past the Palestinian demand of a right of return was a serious obstacle to a peace agreement. But the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002 leaves no doubt that Arab countries will accept a nominal and symbolic return of refugees into Israel in numbers approved by Israel, with the overwhelming majority repatriated in the new Palestinian state, their countries of residence, or in other countries prepared to receive them.
It is the failure of the international community to reject (other than in empty rhetoric) Israel’s notion that the occupation and the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no agreement that is acceptable to Israel, that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and the efforts of all peace envoys. Future efforts will meet the same fate if this fundamental issue is not addressed.
What is required for a breakthrough is the adoption by the Security Council of a resolution affirming the following: 1. Changes to the pre-1967 situation can be made only by agreement between the parties. Unilateral measures will not receive international recognition. 2. The default setting of Resolution 242, reiterated by Resolution 338, the 1973 ceasefire resolution, is a return by Israel’s occupying forces to the pre-1967 border. 3. If the parties do not reach agreement within 12 months (the implementation of agreements will obviously take longer), the default setting will be invoked by the Security Council. The Security Council will then adopt its own terms for an end to the conflict, and will arrange for an international force to enter the occupied territories to help establish the rule of law, assist Palestinians in building their institutions, assure Israel’s security by preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and oversee the implementation of terms for an end to the conflict...'
I have to ask whether you really care about the Palestinians at all or simply hate Israel.
you need to understand something. it is not anti-semitic to defend Palestinian human rights. every single person in the world is entitled to basic human rights whether Israel and it's supporters like it or not.
pretty much the whole of the rest of the world criticizes the Israeli occupation. do they hate Israel too?
poor poor Israel. :roll:
you know what i think? the only reason people cry anti-semitism when it's clearly not the case, is just so they can try and discredit and silence anyone that has different views to theirs.
and they do that because they know that they can't win the argument based on the facts.
pretty much the whole of the rest of the world criticizes the Israeli occupation. do they hate Israel too?
Hmm ... If you look at the numerous UN resolutions targeting Israel over the past few decades, the vast majority (if not all of them) are tabled by countries with predominately Arabic, Muslim populations. So yes, they probably DO hate Israel, if you want the truth. Not saying that these folks don't have valid concerns. Just saying that there IS animosity there, and I'm not convinced that these nations are all just playing the hero and trying to rescue Palestine. Jordan, to name one example, wanted (and wants, present tense) NOTHING to do with Palestinian refugees.
A few choice quotes taken directly from the Hamas charter, which is still the defining document for the Hamas movement, and which Hamas refuses on principle to ammend:
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up."
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
"After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."
I mean for gods sake, these guys are quoting the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"! They are straight up anti-semites, who believe that they have a divine mandate from god to redeem Islamic land from infidels. Are these really the kind of people you want to be giving a free ride to? This is not a zero sum game. Blame Israel all you want, but maybe, in the interest of intellectual honesty, fairness, balance, decency, whatever, reserve some outrage for these guys as well.
what i find hilarious is the guy you quoted first died in 49...and yet when i posted quotes from Israeli government officials and whatnot saying similar things you said "the past is the past, give me something current" i had quotes in there that were 40 years after this guy died :roll:
nice set of double standards ya got yourself there
and i started a thread where Hamas said they woulod recognize Israel within the '67 borders, care to reply in that?
Hamas: We have already stated repeatedly that we accept the existence of Israel within the 1967 borders as a political reality even if we do not approve its moral legitimacy.
Israel on the other hand has never recognised the right of a Palestinian state to exist even under the PA, despite the PA recognising Israel's right to exist. All Israel has recognised is the legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
I have to ask whether you really care about the Palestinians at all or simply hate Israel.
you need to understand something. it is not anti-semitic to defend Palestinian human rights. every single person in the world is entitled to basic human rights whether Israel and it's supporters like it or not.
pretty much the whole of the rest of the world criticizes the Israeli occupation. do they hate Israel too?
poor poor Israel. :roll:
you know what i think? the only reason people cry anti-semitism when it's clearly not the case, is just so they can try and discredit and silence anyone that has different views to theirs.
and they do that because they know that they can't win the argument based on the facts.
When did I say anyone was anti-semitic? I said Hamas is anti-semitic, and I said that I think people on this thread are way too easy on Hamas, but I never said any of you guys are anti-semitic. I quite frankly don't care what the rest of the world thinks. This line of argument is tantamount to "if everyone else were jumping off a bridge would you do it too." Just because a lot of people think something it doesn't make it right. And I don't think they hate Israel (or at least not all, or even most of them). I think they are uninformed, or misinformed, or only partially informed.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
A few choice quotes taken directly from the Hamas charter, which is still the defining document for the Hamas movement, and which Hamas refuses on principle to ammend:
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up."
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
"After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."
I mean for gods sake, these guys are quoting the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"! They are straight up anti-semites, who believe that they have a divine mandate from god to redeem Islamic land from infidels. Are these really the kind of people you want to be giving a free ride to? This is not a zero sum game. Blame Israel all you want, but maybe, in the interest of intellectual honesty, fairness, balance, decency, whatever, reserve some outrage for these guys as well.
what i find hilarious is the guy you quoted first died in 49...and yet when i posted quotes from Israeli government officials and whatnot saying similar things you said "the past is the past, give me something current" i had quotes in there that were 40 years after this guy died :roll:
nice set of double standards ya got yourself there
and i started a thread where Hamas said they woulod recognize Israel within the '67 borders, care to reply in that?
Hamas: We have already stated repeatedly that we accept the existence of Israel within the 1967 borders as a political reality even if we do not approve its moral legitimacy.
Israel on the other hand has never recognised the right of a Palestinian state to exist even under the PA, despite the PA recognising Israel's right to exist. All Israel has recognised is the legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.
The al-Banna quote was taken from the Hamas charter, which remains in effect today as the defining document for the organization. If I really have to explain to you how this is current then there is hardly any point in arguing with you.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
i''m tired of repeating myself. no one really gives a fuck what you say anyway.
all i know is i might not have as many fancy links as some of you, but when i post, i post from my heart. and i know where my heart is. it's with the ordinary, beautiful, Palestinian people. and the kids. those poor innocent children. what's their crime again?
they are a child born in Gaza. that's their crime.
our spirit will never die
we will not go down
in Gaza tonight.
Comments
No problem.
I think this article pretty much nails it:
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann10142009.html
A Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Fearsome Words?
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
October 14, 2009
In April of this year I was invited by the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Association to speak at one of their meetings. The meeting was to have taken place in the Parliament building in Ottawa, where I have spoken previously without incident. John Ivison, in the National Post newspaper, published a not particularly vicious or unbalanced attack on me, deploring the invitation. After this, without any contact with me and without seeing the content of my talk, the meeting was 'postponed'. It is now clear that the postponement was permanent.
This might seem spineless, but it involved more than the National Post article.
Ivison reports that Alykhan Velshi, director of communications for Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, had the following to say:
"In a free country like Canada, Mr. Neumann has the right to air his noxious views. The corollary, of course, is that we can and must criticize them. Neumann's farrago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate are completely repugnant to our government, and we make no apology for saying so."
Bob Rae (former Ontario premier, former head of the New Democratic Party, now a high-ranking Liberal Party leader) is reported to have been '"surprised and disappointed" that the parliamentary group thought Mr. Neumann had something positive to contribute'.
Here is the alleged farago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate - unaltered since before the attacks. Readers may judge for themselves whether the allegations have merit.
* * *
Nationalism and the Israel-Palestine Conflict
For a brief period in the 1970s I worked in the Vancouver used book trade. I got to know a legend among booksellers - Bill Hoffer. Bill was a skilled purveyor of Canadian first editions and a great bluffer. Once I found him in earnest and extended conversation with one of 'his' authors; later I asked Bill whether the guy's stuff was any good. "I don't read it," said Bill, "I just sell it.".
Bill told me that the secret of the used book business was 'gaining moral ascendency' over the customers (whom he called 'civilians'). This meant making them feel like you were more knowledgeable about and more committed to whatever they were interested in. Intimidate the customer a bit, and your business flourishes.
The Israelis gained moral ascendancy long ago; some reputed people called 'the Arabs' never had it. This involved more than PR skills. It also involved terrible confusions about nationalism. They're the secret weapon of the Zionists and the secret weakness of 'the Arabs'.
Zionist ideology has always departed from a question: every people has its state; why not the Jews? A 'no' answer would tie you to that evil of evils, antisemitism. The rights of 'the Jewish people' meant Israel had a morally titanic 'right to exist'. It meant that the relentless expansion of Jewish settlement was, far from a mortal threat to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the area, the mere completion of the long Jewish Odyssey. It was just part of the long journey home.
As for the Palestinians, they described themselves as Arabs. This sounded like they *had* a home; it was the whole Arab world. If their 'Arab brothers' would not take them in, well, that was no fault of the Zionists. So if the Palestinians were squeezed ever further into unlivable enclaves, it was the Arabs who were to blame. The Arabs would rather dispute a tiny strip of their vast possessions than grant the Jews their little homeland.
These claims - we're just a people like any other, we just want to go home - are the last bastion of lsrael's crumbling moral stature. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy. Israel's rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era. The confusions that sustain them not only raise racial crusading to a moral imperative; in other ways they bring unjust disrepute and demoralization on the entire so-called Arab world.
If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology. Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe. There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine. As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe. Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it? And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can't possibly explain - the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as 'subhumans' in inhuman prison camps?
There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities. It fairly stares us in the face. It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics - poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans. It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics. This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.
Before proceeding let me forestall a predictable objection. I intend to trace the ravages of ethnic nationalism, not by any means to make Zionists into Nazis. It is entirely unnecessary to take this false step, which would obscure rather than clarify the repellent aspects of Zionism. The offspring of ethnic nationalism are a nasty brood, but of course the Nazis were in a league of their own.
Wilson legitimized this atrocious doctrine during the peace negotiations that ended the First World War. Wilson's own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, anticipated its consequences all too accurately:
"The more I think about the President's declaration as to the right of 'self-determination,' the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands.
"What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent, disorder, and rebellion? Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it? How can it be harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed?
"The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle in force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!"
For his prescience Lansing incurred Wilson's disfavour and was forced to resign. He seemed a fussy old spoilsport, unwilling to grant peoples their rights - peoples, or, as he puts it in the language of his era, races. Could he not see the progressive implications of Wilson's doctrine? Did he not understand that the self-determination of peoples - races, ethnic groups - was a sacred human right?
Well, one person did, the person who wrote:
"If the race is in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated the question of legality is only of secondary importance. The established power may in such a case employ only those means which are recognized as 'legal'. yet the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the oppressed will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of all possible resources.
"Only on the recognition of this principle was it possible for those struggles to be carried through, of which history furnishes magnificent examples in abundance, against foreign bondage or oppression at home.
"Human rights are above the rights of the State."
Ah, human rights, which belong not only to individuals but to 'peoples'. This champion of human rights was Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf. (Murphy translation, line 4084, Volume I, chapter iii)
Hitler 'understood' that peoples had a right to their homeland. The 'national' part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries. It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of 'peoples', races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs. Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction. The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it. Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans?
Of course this was nonsense. The 'German people' was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their 'homeland' were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs. But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing's worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson's and Hitler's endorsement of ethnic nationalism. It infects even our condemnations of 'the Germans' for the Nazi era.
To condemn 'the Germans' means this: even if you'd spent the war in an orphanage because your parents had died in street battles with the Nazi black shirts, you would share in Germany's collective guilt. You share in it not because of anything you have done, but because you were, by birth, a German. We might call this 'collective responsibility', but that's just a respectable name for racial guilt, the guilt of a 'people'. From the rubble of the Nazi empire, the rubbish of ethnic nationalism rises up and takes an honoured place among our orthodoxies. From this rubbish comes the right of a fictitiously collective 'Jewish people' to a 'homeland'.
That link is explicit. The Nazi conception of a Jewish people lies at the heart of Israel's famous right of return. Don't take my word for it. Listen instead to the AMERICAN-ISRAELI COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE (AICE), which describes itself as "a nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship by emphasizing the fundamentals of the alliance - the values our nations share". To explain in what sense 'Jews' have a right to return to their homeland, the AICE states that "At present, the definition is based on Hitler's Nuremberg Laws: the right of Return is granted to any individual with one Jewish grandparent, or who is married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. As a result, thousands of people with no meaningful connection to the Jewish people theoretically have the right to immigrate." AICE neglects to mention that such persons also have the actual right to immigrate, and to obtain citizenship. On the other hand, a stateless Palestinian refugee, perhaps living a precarious existence in France, has no such right of return, even if his ancestors inhabited Palestine itself for a thousand years. Palestine, it seems, is not is the 'homeland' of Palestinians, but only of the Jews.
'Jew', in other words, does not refer to those who espouse Judaism or embrace Jewish culture. 'Jew' means 'of Jewish ancestry'. In virtually every Canadian jurisdiction, ancestry is explicitly cited as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Ancestry is just a contemporary stand-in for the older notion of race and is generally used in references to racial discrimination.(**) Like skin colour, it's something you cannot change, and therefore a particularly repugnant basis for determining civic status.
For the homeland to *belong* to the Jews is for them to have *sovereignty* there. Thus Article 7(a) of Israel's Basic Law stipulates that "A candidates' list shall not participate in the elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include... negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people." The Jewish people, in other words, are sovereign, and hold the power of life and death over all non-Jewish inhabitants under state control. Lest this seem overdramatic, note how the Israeli ministry of justice commented on a court case in March 2009: "The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective."(***)
So a miracle appears among us. The very ideology of homelands and peoples under whose auspices the Jews were all but exterminated has become the sustaining ideology of Israel, a state devoted to Jewish ethnic sovereignty. This is why we always hear that Israel - not Israelis - has a right to exist. What matters are not the citizens of a state, but the state itself, the totemic icon of 'the Jewish people'. The fatal confusion that legitimized ethnic nationalism at the Paris Peace Conference now legitimizes Israel itself. When Zionists suggest that the French and Germans have a right to their states, they conveniently forget that this means the *inhabitants* of France and Germany, not those of some French or German *ancestry*, not a 'people' in the sense of an ethnic group. (The world was outraged when it suspected that Britain's 'patrial' immigration laws were designed to favor those of ethnically British ancestry.) But 'the Jewish people' have a right to their state, and this is supposed to be some lofty ideal. Why? Because ethnic nationalism has taken on the cloak of civic nationalism, and we are too stupid to notice. Had ethnic nationalism not shed a single drop of blood, we should still be ashamed for crediting its mystique of peoples, historical wrongs, collective vices and virtues, ineluctable destinies. Abstractions and myths that could not even gain entrance to a university's ivory towers flow daily from the lips of supposedly practical people.
Zionists bought into ethnic nationalism because it served them well. 'Arabs' bought into it too, partly as a reaction to Zionist colonization. It has not been enough to say: the Zionists wish to impose racial sovereignty on these Palestinian individuals; this in unacceptable. One must also ask: are not the Palestinians a people? is Palestine not their homeland? do they not also have a right of self-determination? But if ethnic nationalism has given the Palestinians some chance at meeting the Zionists on their own terms, it has on the whole served 'the Arabs', and therefore the Palestinians, badly.
In the Middle East, ethnic nationalism has always been greeted with polite acceptance and a certain embarrassment. The idea that all Arabic speakers shared in being Arabs began life, like most ethnic nationalisms, as an almost literary adventure. It originates in Syria, where progressive Christians developed it to counter Ottoman rule. The British, through T.E. Lawrence 'of Arabia' quickly seized on it enrol some inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula in the same cause. After 1919, the Syrian and Arabian strains of this doctrine met in uneasy coexistence. The British installed Arabian rulers in Syria/Lebanon and Jordan, not without complaints that their new subjects were 'not Arabs'! It was again the British, in the 1940s, who presided over the foundation of an 'Arab League', partly as a move to keep the French from re-establishing their position in Lebanon.
One of the League's founding members was Egypt. This might bring a smile to some of you who know the Middle East, because you have heard Egyptians make disparaging remarks about 'the Arabs' who frequent the nightclubs along the Nile, or listened to an elderly Egyptian tell you the story of just when he first discovered he was an 'Arab'. But the myth of an Arab people is more than a successful British ploy. It took deep roots when Gamel Abdel Nasser fashioned it into a ideology of resistance to Western colonialism, not to mention a convenient tool for extending Egyptian power. As an oppositional creed, everyone from Berbers who hate 'the Arabs' to Egyptians who despise them to Palestinians who feel abandoned by them will proudly claim their Arab identity against the insults and depradations of the West.
Yet all know better. There are inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula who may plausibly be called Arabs. Most other Arabic speakers have little in common with these 'Arabians', and little sympathy for their culture or traditions. As for 'Arab nationalism', no longer is there a Nasser to fashion it into a progressive force; it has withered on the vine. Yet if Arab ethnic nationalism never gained enough force to harm others, it gained enough prominence to put the so-called Arab world at the losing end of moral ascendency.
The Arabs, understood as the ensemble of Arabic speakers, are by no stretch of the imagination 'a people'. They pay a heavy price for this dubious self-description. On the one hand, it associates every Arabic speaker with every crime of every other Arabic speaker - this holds even for some whose native tongue isn't Arabic but who live in officially 'Arab' countries. It is as if the Sudanese 'Arab' militias were the armies of a 'people' encompassing the Syrians of Tyre and the Berbers of Marrakesh.
Perhaps this bad press is a mere annoyance. But there is worse. Not only the rest of the world but 'the Arabs' themselves have come think they are somehow a hopeless case: why on earth can't they unite? Why don't they do more for the Palestinians? Why the endless bickering and mistrust? 'The Arabs' in these respects seem like perennial losers incapable of self-government, markedly inferior to 'the Jews'. This impression is only partly countered by savvy remarks about an 'Arab street', always on the verge of rising up against their rotten rulers, yet never, it seems, more genuinely committed to the Palestinians than a fan club to their favorite football team. To the extent that unsustainable attempts at constructing an Arab identity have contributed to the decline of Middle East secularism, they have also contributed to the rise of fanatical religious extremists. This too has hurt the Arabic-speaking world.
Not only does Arab nationalism make 'the Arabs' look bad; it also obscures what is good. When Arab states support and sustain the Palestinians, it is much more from genuine altruism than from bogus racial solidarity. But to the extent that Arabs do not do all that is expected of them - do not take in the Palestinians, do not invite them in as fellow-Arabs, the reason is simple. The Palestinians are not fellow-Arabs. They have no home, no 'homeland' if you like, but Palestine. Wondering why their 'brother Arabs' do not to take them in makes as much sense as wondering why Northern Irish Protestants would not welcome as brothers their 'fellow Anglophones' from Dublin or Watts or the slums of Kingston, Jamaica.
The ethnic nationalism of the Zionists is a big success; that of 'the Arabs', to their credit, a big failure. Perhaps we overestimate the extent to which the West can contribute to resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, not least because we are so dead set in regarding the 'Arab world' - which has given Israel a bloody nose on more than one occasion - as a bunch of losers. But certainly Western peacekeeping initiatives, especially from Canada and the US, are undermined by the painfully obvious efforts of our leaders not to adore the Israelis too passionately, and not to despise 'the Arabs' too thoroughly. Unfortunately 'the Arabs', now fond of their fictitious identity, are complicit in creating this bias.
This has to change, but it cannot change without abandoning the revolting principles we have so blindly espoused. That will not be easy. We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival. We take the Zionist adoration of Israel, its commitment to racially Jewish rule of Palestine, as a paean to freedom and human rights. We look up to Israel for precisely what should make us abhor it. The 'self-determination of peoples' is a poison set in the very heart of our humanitarian ideologies. Neutralize it and Israel will lose its moral ascendency.
Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at a Canadian university. He is the author of What's Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche and The Case Against Israel. He also contributed the essay, "What is Anti-Semitism", to CounterPunch's book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at <!-- e --><a href="mailto:mneumann@live.com">mneumann@live.com</a><!-- e -->
You mean you are incapable of offering a response to the points made in this article.
As I said above, this article nails it.
And, no, I don't have a problem with Israel per se. I have a problem with the occupation post '67. A full and immediate withdrawal to those borders is the very least the Israelis can do.
That is so disingenuous. You post an article that says that essentially the very principles underpinning Israel's legitimacy are bullshit, but then say your problem is solely with the occupation and not with Israel. I'm calling bullshit. I'm not going to engage in an argument with you about whether nationalism is a legitimate philosophy. You clearly seem to think it isn't, and I feel it is. We aren't going to agree. Give it a rest.
'Ethnic nationalism', not 'Nationalism'. This article makes a sound point that the basic principles behind the Zionist brand of ethnic nationalism are no different to the basic principles that underpinned the ethnic nationalism of the Nazis.
And this has nothing to do with what I think. Try taking me out of the equation. I'm simply interested in the facts.
And, yes, this article makes it clear, as does his book 'The Case Against Israel', that the very principles underpinning Israel's legitimacy are bullshit. But Michael Neumann also points out in his book that he is against the occupation and that he recognizes that Israel now has a right to remain within it's 1948 - or 1949 - borders.
Israel puts civilians directly in the line of fire by creating more and more illegal settlements in the midst of those whose land they've stolen.
The Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but this does not apply to the Occupied territories.
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/42/a42r159.htm
General Assembly
94th plenary meeting - 7 December 1987
8. Also urges all States, unilaterally and in co-operation with other States, as well as relevant United Nations organs, to contribute to the progressive elimination of the causes underlying international terrorism and to pay special attention to all situations, including colonialism, racism and situations involving mass and flagrant violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms and those involving alien domination and occupation, that may give rise to international terrorism and may endanger international peace and security;
14. Considers that nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration, the right of these peoples to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support;
http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/En ... -2009.html
'The State of Israel is not entitled to invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter (the right to self defense) with respect to the occupied Palestinian territory.'
Let me spell this out for you. Israel's rights are beside the point. Hamas knows that when they attack Israel, Israel will respond. By adopting the tactic of not wearing uniforms and fighting from within the civilian population, so that Israel cannot easily distinguish between combatants and civilians, Hamas is knowingly putting civilians directly in the line of fire. If you care at all about the lives of Palestinians how can this not enrage you?
i wish people would stop trying to distract from the real issue by using the both sides are to blame argument. it's old, it's tired, it's a lie and it's wrong. you simply cannot blame both sides equally. there is only one side occupying the other.
you also said "Hamas are cynically putting civilians directly in the line of fire." you know what i don't get? where is all this so called "evidence" of Hamas using all those people as human shields. where is it? if so many of the casualties happen because Hamas was deliberately using civilians, where the hell is all this evidence. i'm sure amongst all the billions of dollars we give to fund the brutal occupation, Israel must have some pretty damn fancy and sophisticated cameras or spying equipment yeah? another thing that i don't understand is why Israel didn't allow reporters to enter Gaza while they carried out their massacre. wouldn't they want the rest of the world to see Hamas putting civillians directly in the line of fire? so where is it?
Hamas is not even the issue yosi. how many times have they said they'd be willing to accept a two-state solution, and said they'd be willing to fuck off the rockets, and make peace with Israel if they withdraw to the '67 borders?
stop apologizing for Israel's repulsive behaviour. stop making excuses for them. why isn't it an acceptable principle that those doing the killing should be held responsible for it?
the people that are living in Gaza are not there because they want to be there or because of Hamas. why are they there yosi? because they are trapped in their open air prison that Israel drove them to. caged in like animals and they have nowhere to go. no way out. they can't leave.
i'm getting tired of my long assed posts. i feel like i'm saying the same thing over and over. look, the only one that can fix things is Israel. and that's not gonna happen any damn time soon while the bully keeps blaming the victim.
As for evidence of Hamas' cynical exploitation of the civilian population, it is copious. To begin with every human rights organization worth its salt has cited Hamas' in this regard for blame. And in point of fact Israel regularly films every target before they bomb it. I'm betting you didn't know this, but during the Gaza offensive Hamas would regularly take up positions inside civilian buildings from which they would fire on Israeli targets. Israel would then call the residents of the building to tell them to leave because they were about to return fire. Hamas would then force all the residents to go up onto the roof knowing that Israeli drones would be filming the target and that Israel would not bomb the building with the civilians standing on the rooftop. In order to combat this Israel built a special missile that had no explosive charge and would not cause damage that they could fire at the building without causing anyone harm so as to make clear to the civilians the seriousness of Israel's intention to return fire and get them to leave before they got hurt. This happened repeatedly, and was filmed repeatedly.
As for Hamas saying they would be willing to accept peace, this is simply a useful distortion of what they have actually said. What they said was that they would accept a long-term ceasefire if Israel would return to the '67 border. And at the same time Hamas' leaders keep affirming that they will never recognize Israel's legitimate right to exist. So why would Israel ever accept such a deal. They'd be giving up everything that they would have given up in the Oslo peace accords, to an organization pledged to their destruction, and they wouldn't even get a peace treaty in return. All they'd get is a cease-fire. That's just insane!
Look, we have our disagreements, but you seem like a good guy. I'm really shocked that you are throwing your hat in with Hamas here. These are really, really bad guys. I mean this is like radical-left-willful-blindness-in-the-face-of-Stalinism shit. Disagree with Israeli policy all you want. Don't cut Israel any slack. But seriously, in Hamas you're allying yourself (so to speak) with some of the worst people imaginable, or at the very least excusing their actions. I would really recommend that you find as much information as you can about these guys before so cavalierly giving them a free pass.
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up."
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
"After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."
I mean for gods sake, these guys are quoting the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"! They are straight up anti-semites, who believe that they have a divine mandate from god to redeem Islamic land from infidels. Are these really the kind of people you want to be giving a free ride to? This is not a zero sum game. Blame Israel all you want, but maybe, in the interest of intellectual honesty, fairness, balance, decency, whatever, reserve some outrage for these guys as well.
i've have never claimed that i support Hamas
let me make it real simple for you.
I do not support Hamas. I don't give a shit about Hamas. i care about the ordinary Palestinian people that Israel are brutally and inhumanely treating while they continue with their illegal occupation. by trying to equally apportion blame between Hamas and Israel, all you are doing is trying to shift attention from Israels disgusting crimes.
The New York Times's Steven Erlanger contends that Hamas excludes the possibility of permanent reconciliation with Israel. "Since the Prophet Muhammad made a temporary hudna, or truce, with the Jews about 1,400 years ago, Hamas allows the idea. But no one in Hamas says he would make a peace treaty with Israel or permanently give up any part of Palestine.".[47] Mkhaimer Abusada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University writes that Hamas talks "of hudna, not of peace or reconciliation with Israel. They believe over time they will be strong enough to liberate all historic Palestine.”[47]
That sounds like a real willingness to make peace. :roll:
i've have never claimed that i support Hamas, but i can assure you that i do not have equal measures of rage against them.
do you hold equal rage for Israel and Hmas?
just curious.
No I don't. I have a lot more anger for Hamas.
you have no idea. really.
it's pointless debating with you.
Strangely enough, in this week's Time there is an article regarding role Elad (organisation controlling archeologic digs in Jerusalem) has and tactics used in 'recovering' this historical homeland.
Israel deliberately targets unarmed civilians. Therefore your lame attempt to justify the killing of Palestinian civilians by blaming Hamas is redundant.
Sure, Hamas are the evil bogeymen. And before them it was the PLO that sent shivers down your spine.
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/02 ... g-charity2
Hamas Victory Is Built on Social Work
By Kim Murphy
March 02, 2006
For a basic tooth filling and crown, the price difference is negligible: $17 at a regular clinic, $15 at Al Quds Clinic. The real distinction is in the extras.
“It’s safer to come to an Islamic place, where you can find a doctor who’s not only a good dentist, but a good Muslim,” said Najwa abu Mustafa, 24, who sat one recent afternoon in the sunny waiting room with several other women, shrouded in black veils but for the thin openings around their eyes. “You’re putting yourself in God’s hands.”
The small clinic on the edge of one of the Gaza Strip’s biggest refugee camps is one of hundreds of medical centers, food banks, summer camps and schools across the West Bank and Gaza operated by Islamic charities, many of them linked to the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas.
The militant group’s recent victory in parliamentary elections is testimony in part to its long track record on the streets. Its services are often perceived as being of higher quality and less tainted by corruption than the cumbersome and often ineffective social network operated by the Palestinian Authority controlled until now by Fatah.
The work Hamas does at home is an often-overlooked key to the domestic popularity of an organization most known elsewhere for killing. The United States has declared Hamas a terrorist organization, and U.S. and Israeli counter-terrorism experts have cited numerous instances in which Al Qaeda and Hamas drew funding from international Islamic charities. Hamas also reportedly has used schools and hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza to store weapons and plan attacks.
Faced with U.S. and European measures aimed at preventing charity funds from being funneled into terrorism, Hamas has erased many of its traceable financial links to the humanitarian programs. But Hamas figures remain on the boards and in management of the programs, which analysts say have become an essential component of the group’s public support.
“Hamas has been very good at compartmentalizing their activities – where they have a soup kitchen, for example, they simply give soup, nothing more,” said Mouin Rabbani of the International Crisis Group, which studied Islamic social activism in the occupied territories. “But it all fits into a broader pattern of popular mobilization and becomes another way of seeking support for the organization.”
Over the last two decades, several large Islamic charities have come to be closely associated with Hamas, including the Mujamma Islami network, Al Salah Society, the Islamic Center and the Islamic University of Gaza. But the International Crisis Group said there was little “substantial evidence” that Islamic welfare institutions “systematically divert” funds to support terrorist activity.
“Hamas doesn’t have much in the way of resources, but they have a big network of charity working in order to reduce the suffering of the Palestinian people,” said Sami abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the group in Gaza. “People feel the credibility of Hamas, and its ability to make change through the charity organizations that it runs.”
In Gaza, Al Salah Society’s school for 1,000 orphans and other youngsters in the teeming town of Deir al Balah stands in sharp contrast to the crumbling concrete and dusty streets around it, a fenced-in oasis of palms and neat classrooms.
“Muslims are the best nation created in the world,” says a banner hanging outside the school, next to another that says, “Those who learn more earn a higher degree in paradise.”
Al Salah’s director, Ahmad Kurd, was recently elected mayor of Deir al Balah, and Hamas scooped up two of the region’s three parliamentary seats in the January elections.
“In 1994 there was an Israeli operation which destroyed several Palestinian houses [of families of suspected militants] in one of the poorest neighborhoods,” Kurd said. “I had to meet with the Israeli commander, and he asked me, ‘Why are you supporting and helping those victims who lost their homes?’
“I told him, ‘The Red Crescent is helping, the Churches United organization also gives some help to them, the Catholic Relief organization, the United Nations. And Al Salah Society is there as well. Is it forbidden?’ And he was not able to respond to that.”
When Israeli forces launched a major incursion into the southern Gaza refugee camp of Rafah in 2004, leaving nearly 1,500 residents homeless, Al Salah sent fundraisers with megaphones down the streets, going door to door, standing on street corners and outside the mosques. Women were asked to drop their gold necklaces into the collection boxes. Poor families gave sacks of rice. Al Salah collected $1 million worth of food, valuables and cash in Gaza, one of the poorest places in the Middle East.
Yet Kurd said it would be a mistake to think Hamas won the votes because of its charity work.
“The people are getting a lot more money from America, from the international community. The international donors distributed perhaps $6 billion in the last 10 years. The Islamic charity organizations didn’t pay out 1% of that money,” he said.
Palestinians associate U.S. aid with Washington’s support for Israel, he said. “The Palestinian feels, ‘You give me that money, and you kill me. You give me money, and you destroy my house. You give me money, and you send planes to kill our kids.’ ”
Abu Zuhri, the Hamas spokesman, said international aid had focused on public works projects but had done little to provide direct help to the poor, or to those families that have lost a breadwinner in the conflict with Israel.
“Unfortunately, the Western side has donated for projects like cleaning the streets or painting the walls, but they didn’t give anything for the care of orphans,” he said. Some of the most controversial programs operated by the Muslim charities provide stipends, housing and direct financial aid to the families of suicide bombers.
In the narrow alleyways of the sprawling refugee camp at Deir al Balah, hundreds of families get cash payments of $40 to $100 a month from Mujamma Islami and Al Salah, along with meat, beans, flour and eggs.
“We would be completely destitute without this help,” said Ataf Ostaz, 41, who has nine children and whose husband died of a stroke two years ago. “Naturally, we gave our votes to Hamas, because they are the ones who touch our need.”
The unlikely mix of services offered at Al Quds Clinic – pediatrics, maternal healthcare, orthodontics and post-surgical care – is no accident. Mujamma Islami, which opened the center in October 2002, conducted a survey of the clinics already operating in Khan Yunis.
“We did studies and reached the decision that some services are not good enough in government hospitals, and so we decided to offer these services ourselves,” said clinic director Atiya Abumoaamar. “The point is that the public hospitals are very, very cheap, so where we compete with them is not in prices, but in quality.”
At the same time, fees generally are substantially lower than those at private clinics.
Caseloads now reach up to 400 patients a month, and if there is a profit at the end of the month, Abumoaamar splits it with doctors and office staff. Otherwise, they work without salary as volunteers. The effort has been judged such a success that two more clinics are opening soon, with funding from the Saudi-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth.
“If the international community will just give it a chance and will not isolate it, if donors don’t freeze the funds, if the Arab countries help make some solution, I guarantee that Hamas will do a better job of running this society,” Abumoaamar said.
But some Palestinians point out that there is a big difference between operating schools and clinics and running a government for 3 million people.
“The Palestinian Authority has to reach everyone, and in a situation of closures, unemployment reaching unprecedented figures, and in an environment in which you are constantly being undermined, these services are obligatory,” said Issam Younis, director of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City.
“Hamas has done its homework. Over the years, they have established very good social services, they have the maximum use of the mosque,” he said. “And it will be good to have Hamas in the government. Welcome! But think of the situation.
“With Abu Mazen [current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas], the international community transferred only $350 million of the $1 billion they were supposed to send for 2005. This is with the good guys in charge, not the terrorists!” he said. “Imagine how things will be with Hamas.”"
This is one of the most insightful articles I've come across on the I-P issue. I suggest you click on the link and read it in it's entirety.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/henry-sieg ... ocess-scam
The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam
Henry Siegman
16 August 2007
'..Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in Israel’s dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas’s moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas...
In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.
The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.
Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants...
In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.
Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to rid themselves of Israel’s occupation, even when that violence has despicably targeted Israel’s civilian population. It is not to sanction the murder of civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most situations in which a people’s drive for national self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israel’s own struggle for national independence was no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past Arabs had ‘sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’
The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.
Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they received comparable territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected this. To be sure, in the past the Palestinian demand of a right of return was a serious obstacle to a peace agreement. But the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002 leaves no doubt that Arab countries will accept a nominal and symbolic return of refugees into Israel in numbers approved by Israel, with the overwhelming majority repatriated in the new Palestinian state, their countries of residence, or in other countries prepared to receive them.
It is the failure of the international community to reject (other than in empty rhetoric) Israel’s notion that the occupation and the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no agreement that is acceptable to Israel, that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and the efforts of all peace envoys. Future efforts will meet the same fate if this fundamental issue is not addressed.
What is required for a breakthrough is the adoption by the Security Council of a resolution affirming the following: 1. Changes to the pre-1967 situation can be made only by agreement between the parties. Unilateral measures will not receive international recognition. 2. The default setting of Resolution 242, reiterated by Resolution 338, the 1973 ceasefire resolution, is a return by Israel’s occupying forces to the pre-1967 border. 3. If the parties do not reach agreement within 12 months (the implementation of agreements will obviously take longer), the default setting will be invoked by the Security Council. The Security Council will then adopt its own terms for an end to the conflict, and will arrange for an international force to enter the occupied territories to help establish the rule of law, assist Palestinians in building their institutions, assure Israel’s security by preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and oversee the implementation of terms for an end to the conflict...'
pretty much the whole of the rest of the world criticizes the Israeli occupation. do they hate Israel too?
poor poor Israel. :roll:
you know what i think? the only reason people cry anti-semitism when it's clearly not the case, is just so they can try and discredit and silence anyone that has different views to theirs.
and they do that because they know that they can't win the argument based on the facts.
Hmm ... If you look at the numerous UN resolutions targeting Israel over the past few decades, the vast majority (if not all of them) are tabled by countries with predominately Arabic, Muslim populations. So yes, they probably DO hate Israel, if you want the truth. Not saying that these folks don't have valid concerns. Just saying that there IS animosity there, and I'm not convinced that these nations are all just playing the hero and trying to rescue Palestine. Jordan, to name one example, wanted (and wants, present tense) NOTHING to do with Palestinian refugees.
what i find hilarious is the guy you quoted first died in 49...and yet when i posted quotes from Israeli government officials and whatnot saying similar things you said "the past is the past, give me something current" i had quotes in there that were 40 years after this guy died :roll:
nice set of double standards ya got yourself there
and i started a thread where Hamas said they woulod recognize Israel within the '67 borders, care to reply in that?
Hamas: We have already stated repeatedly that we accept the existence of Israel within the 1967 borders as a political reality even if we do not approve its moral legitimacy.
Israel on the other hand has never recognised the right of a Palestinian state to exist even under the PA, despite the PA recognising Israel's right to exist. All Israel has recognised is the legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
When did I say anyone was anti-semitic? I said Hamas is anti-semitic, and I said that I think people on this thread are way too easy on Hamas, but I never said any of you guys are anti-semitic. I quite frankly don't care what the rest of the world thinks. This line of argument is tantamount to "if everyone else were jumping off a bridge would you do it too." Just because a lot of people think something it doesn't make it right. And I don't think they hate Israel (or at least not all, or even most of them). I think they are uninformed, or misinformed, or only partially informed.
The al-Banna quote was taken from the Hamas charter, which remains in effect today as the defining document for the organization. If I really have to explain to you how this is current then there is hardly any point in arguing with you.
all i know is i might not have as many fancy links as some of you, but when i post, i post from my heart. and i know where my heart is. it's with the ordinary, beautiful, Palestinian people. and the kids. those poor innocent children. what's their crime again?
they are a child born in Gaza. that's their crime.
our spirit will never die
we will not go down
in Gaza tonight.