interview with Kenneth O'Keefe - Gaza flotilla Activist

polaris_x

Hamas is Israel's best friend right now ... without Hamas - Israel would not be able to continue to expand and stall any peace efforts ...

yosi

I don't think Israel has any right to exist as a Jewish-only state.

It isn't a Jewish only state. A large percentage of Israel's population are non-Jewish, and while in practice they often face discrimination, in principle they have the same rights under the law as Jewish Israelis, a not insignificant point.

The notion of the Zionist entity is a racist, discriminatory one that should never be accepted because it is just absolutely disgusting. The fact that Zionists refuse to coexist with palestinians in a binational solution because it "threatens the existence of Israel as a jewish state" is absolutely disgusting.

Why? What is so disgusting about a people wanting a state for themselves, especially when that state is explicitly committed to equal rights for all its citizens (again, I know they fall short in practice, but we're talking about an idea here). Is English nationalism racist? What about French nationalism? What about Dutch nationalism? Zionism is nothing other than Jewish nationalism, and while there are certainly Zionists who are racists (just as there are French nationalists who are racist), Zionism is not inherently so (and neither is French nationalism).

zionists would rather continue the conflict than give up their title as a jewish-supreme state.

Well yeah, if the choice is between simmering conflict and national suicide Zionists will choose conflict. But that is a false choice.

this of course not even mentioning the fact that israel is founded on ethnic cleansing, a fact not even worth debating. and what kind of argument are you going to bring up (if you choose to debate back): "oh, the americas were founded on ethnic cleansing too! remember the native americans??" that was fucking CENTURIES ago. there are people who are still alive who were kicked out of their homes waiting to return, there are MILLIONS of people living in refugee camps right now due to the creation of the zionist entity on their homeland. this is why i can never support the two-state solution because it does not have any justice for those who were kicked out of their homes and those massacred when the zionists took control of the land. it's unjust.

History isn't just. Live with it. If Israel had lost the war in '48 and the Jews living there had been killed or kicked out of their homes (as happened to those Jewish communities that were actually overrun by the Arab forces in that war) would that have been a just outcome? Did ethnic cleansing occur? Yeah, it did. Ethnic cleansing was enacted by both sides in the conflict (more so by the Israelis, but only because they were more often the winning side). But first, ethnic cleansing was not the universal policy of the Israelis in the war, as is evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were not forced to leave their homes, and who did not elect to leave on their own, and who are now citizens of Israel. And second, not all the refugees were kicked out of their homes. Most fled on their own, as often happens with civilian populations in conflict zones, and many more were told to leave by their leaders and to return once the Arabs had won the war (a fact for which there is ample historical evidence). So did the refugees get justice. No. But you don't remedy one injustice with another.

Byrnzie

yosi wrote:

Pepe, so from your last post I understand that you recognize that the rockets are no longer being fired at "illegal settlements," but rather at communities inside Israel. So why do you keep claiming that the rockets are "mostly" being fired at "illegal settlements" when since 2005 they have been fired EXCLUSIVELY at communities in Israel proper?

The occupation itself is an act of violence. It is a constant state of violence. 24 hour a day violence. The sporadic rocket attacks do not compare. The rocket attacks are not the cause of the occupation, they are merely a symptom.

yosi

Can you say evasion?

fuck

yosi wrote:

I don't think Israel has any right to exist as a Jewish-only state.

It isn't a Jewish only state. A large percentage of Israel's population are non-Jewish, and while in practice they often face discrimination, in principle they have the same rights under the law as Jewish Israelis, a not insignificant point.

actually the government still doesn't afford them rights. very quickly, some examples:
"Property ownership and housing
The Israel Land Administration, which administers 93% of the land in Israel (including the land owned by the Jewish National Fund), refuses to lease land to non-Jewish foreign nationals, which includes Palestinian residents of Jerusalem who have identity cards but are not citizens of Israel. When ILA land is "bought" in Israel it is actually leased to the "owner" for a period of 49 years. According to Article 19 of the ILA lease, foreign nationals are excluded from leasing ILA land, and in practice foreigners may just show that they qualify as Jewish under the Law of Return.[194]
Israeli law also discriminates between Jews and Arabs regarding rights to recover property owned before the dislocations created by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.[13][dead link] The 1950 Absentees Property Law stipulated that any property within post-war Israel which was owned by an Arab who had left the country between November 29, 1947 and May 19, 1948, or by a Palestinian who had merely been abroad or in area of Palestine held by hostile forces up to September 1, 1948, lost all rights to that property. Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes by Jewish or Israeli forces, before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but remained within the borders of what would become Israel, that is, those currently known as Arab citizens of Israel, are deemed present absentees by the legislation. Present absentees are regarded as absent by the Israeli government because they left their homes, even if they did not intend to leave them for more than a few days, and even if they did so involuntarily.[195]
Following the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel occupied the West Bank, from where it annexed East Jerusalem, Israel then passed in 1970 the Law and Administration Arrangements Law allowing for Jews who had lost property in East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1948 war to reclaim it.[14][dead link] Palestinian residents of Jerusalem (absentees) in the same positions, and Arab Israelis (present absentees), who owned property in West Jerusalem or other areas within the state of Israel, and lost it as a result of the 1948 war, cannot recover their properties. Israeli legislation, therefore, allows Jews to recover their land, but not Arabs.[15]"

"Opposition to intermarriage
Intermarriage is prohibited by Jewish law.[200] In the case of mixed Arab-Jewish marriages, emotions run especially high. A 2007 opinion survey found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage was equivalent to “national treason”. A group of Jewish men in Pisgat Zeev have started patrolling the town to stop Jewish women from dating Arab men. The municipality of Petah Tikva has also announced an initiative to prevent interracial relationships, providing a telephone hotline for friends and family to report Jewish girls who date Arab men as well as psychologists to provide counselling. The town of Kiryat Gat launched a school programme in schools to warn Jewish girls against dating local Bedouin men.[201][202]
In February 2010 Maariv reported that the Tel Aviv municipality has instituted an official, government-sponsored counselling program to discourage Jewish-Arab dating. The anti-missionary group Yad L'Achim has performed army-style "rescue operations" of Jewish women from their Gentile husbands.[203]"

"Knesset
The Mossawa Center — an advocacy organization for Arabs in Israel — blames the Knesset of discrimination against Arabs, and claims a 75% increase in discriminatory and racist bills submitted to the Knesset in the year 2009. According to the report, 11 bills deemed by the center to be "discriminatory and racist" were placed on the legislature's table in 2007, while 12 such bills were initiated in 2008. However, in 2009 a full 21 bills deemed discriminatory by the Mossawa Center were discussed in the Knesset.[205]
The reports categorizes as "racist" proposals such as giving academic scholarships to soldiers who served in combat units, and a bill to revoke government funding from organizations acting "against the principles of the State."[205] The Coalition Against Racism and the Mossawa Center, which works to promote equality, claimed that the proposed legislation seeks to de-legitimize Israel's Arab citizens by decreasing their civil rights.[206]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citiz ... rimination

there are tons more examples to be found but I don't have time for that. anyway, your logic is faulty. because they have rights "in principle" but not "in practice", the non-Jewish population of Israel should be satisfied. Great!

The notion of the Zionist entity is a racist, discriminatory one that should never be accepted because it is just absolutely disgusting. The fact that Zionists refuse to coexist with palestinians in a binational solution because it "threatens the existence of Israel as a jewish state" is absolutely disgusting.

Why? What is so disgusting about a people wanting a state for themselves, especially when that state is explicitly committed to equal rights for all its citizens (again, I know they fall short in practice, but we're talking about an idea here). Is English nationalism racist? What about French nationalism? What about Dutch nationalism? Zionism is nothing other than Jewish nationalism, and while there are certainly Zionists who are racists (just as there are French nationalists who are racist), Zionism is not inherently so (and neither is French nationalism).

it is the formation of a state on someone else's territory at their expense. how do you not see a problem with this? were you born blind or something?

this of course not even mentioning the fact that israel is founded on ethnic cleansing, a fact not even worth debating. and what kind of argument are you going to bring up (if you choose to debate back): "oh, the americas were founded on ethnic cleansing too! remember the native americans??" that was fucking CENTURIES ago. there are people who are still alive who were kicked out of their homes waiting to return, there are MILLIONS of people living in refugee camps right now due to the creation of the zionist entity on their homeland. this is why i can never support the two-state solution because it does not have any justice for those who were kicked out of their homes and those massacred when the zionists took control of the land. it's unjust.

History isn't just. Live with it. If Israel had lost the war in '48 and the Jews living there had been killed or kicked out of their homes (as happened to those Jewish communities that were actually overrun by the Arab forces in that war) would that have been a just outcome?

so the Palestinians should deal with the consequences based on the hypothetical scenario that if the Jews had lost the war, they could have possibly been ethnically cleansed. that's what you're suggesting? the Jewish communities were actually living perfectly fine in Palestine until Zionism came into the picture, so you're actually just talking out of your ass right now.

Did ethnic cleansing occur? Yeah, it did. Ethnic cleansing was enacted by both sides in the conflict (more so by the Israelis, but only because they were more often the winning side).

by both sides? what the fuck are you talking about, who did the Palestinians ethnically cleanse and when? don't even try to fucking compare, it's despicable, there were 800,000 palestinians forced from their homes.

But first, ethnic cleansing was not the universal policy of the Israelis in the war, as is evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were not forced to leave their homes, and who did not elect to leave on their own, and who are now citizens of Israel.

jesus christ, where are all the quotes from israeli leaders who clearly pointed out that ethnically cleansing was a clear policy and necessary for the founding of the state. i can't be bothered with this right now, but seriously, save the bullshit. the fact that palestinians remained does not prove shit other than that the israelis were fine with a minority population so long as the majority of the palestinians left. because then the israeli jews could have the majority population.

And second, not all the refugees were kicked out of their homes. Most fled on their own, as often happens with civilian populations in conflict zones, and many more were told to leave by their leaders and to return once the Arabs had won the war (a fact for which there is ample historical evidence). So did the refugees get justice. No. But you don't remedy one injustice with another.

first of all, the arab leaders thing is horse shit and has been proven so several times, your evidence is just zionist propaganda. the fact remains that many were kicked out of their homes, and many fled due to the zionist organizations' tactic of employing fear throughout the communities. but if they simply fled on their own and it was not the fault of the zionists, then why haven't they been allowed to return? and the "you don't remedy one injustice with another" applies to MY argument, not yours. you can't justify the founding of the jewish state at the expense of another population. but what the fuck do you care, your mother was born jewish so you're chosen to live on someone else's land.

Byrnzie

yosi wrote:

This is a direct quote from the Hamas charter.

"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."

So yeah, Hamas believes God gave them the land. I don't believe that about the Jews. Neither did most of the people that established Israel (they were almost all stridently secular).

Plenty of talk here about the Hamas charter. How about we take a look at what the Israeli's have had to say over the years?


'The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs.

"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover...

"The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world," he said.'
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party
Tuesday, 10 April, 2001




"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy."
-- Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat."
-- Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)

"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."
-- Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.

"The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya (=Jewish immigration), and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country."
-- Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service.

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
-- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

"A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."
Jewish Historian Benny Morris interviewed by Haaretz Magazine (January 8, 2004).

Commy

Byrnzie wrote:

yosi wrote:

This is a direct quote from the Hamas charter.

"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."

So yeah, Hamas believes God gave them the land. I don't believe that about the Jews. Neither did most of the people that established Israel (they were almost all stridently secular).

Plenty of talk here about the Hamas charter. How about we take a look at what the Israeli's have had to say over the years?


'The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs.

"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover...

"The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world," he said.'
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party
Tuesday, 10 April, 2001




"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy."
-- Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat."
-- Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)

"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."
-- Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.

"The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya (=Jewish immigration), and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country."
-- Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service.

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
-- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

"A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."
Jewish Historian Benny Morris interviewed by Haaretz Magazine (January 8, 2004).

seems what you believe, Yosi, is not based in reality.