B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Punitive House Demolitions from the Perspective of International Law
1 Jan 2011
House demolition is an administrative procedure carried out without trial and without proof in court of the guilt of the person because of whom the action is taken. In the past, before the policy of punitive house demolitions was renewed during the al-Aqsa intifada, the demolitions were carried out following a military order given by the regional commander pursuant to Section 119 of the Emergency Defense Regulations of 1945. The section empowers the military commander to demolish a house - in any community, neighborhood, or street - of a resident of that area who carried out a violent offense. After the demolition order was delivered to the family, the IDF allowed the family to appeal to the military commander within forty-eight hours. In a decision made in 1989, the High Court of Justice held that, in the event the appeal is denied, the family must be allowed to petition the High Court before the house is demolished.
During the current intifada, until recently, the IDF acted differently. Israel treated the action as an imperative military action. Most of the house demolitions took place at night without any prior warning and without giving the occupants a demolition order, as required by Section 119 of the Emergency Defense Regulations. The occupants were given a few minutes to remove their possessions to avoid having them buried in the rubble. Israel remained vague in its statements relating to whether the demolitions were carried out pursuant to Section 119 or were an imperative military operation.
Whatever the legal basis, punitive house demolitions flagrantly breach international law which allows destruction of property only when necessary for a military operation (article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention). According to the official commentary of the International Committee of the Red Cross, “military operation” is defined as “the movement, maneuvers, and actions of any sort, carried out by the armed forces with a view to combat.” Punitive house demolitions do not meet this definition.
International law also prohibits collective punishment, i.e. the punishment of persons for acts committed by others (article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 50 of the Hague Regulations). House demolitions are a clear case of collective punishment in that the primary victims are relatives of the persons suspected of committing an offense.
Over the years, more than 150 judgments have been given in petitions against punitive house demolitions. The petitioners raised fundamental arguments contesting the legality of the measure, made contentions on the manner in which it was implemented, and argued against the use of the measure in specific cases. Other than in rare instances, the High Court denied the petitions and accepted the state's position that the measure, which is intended to deter Palestinians from carrying out attacks, is lawful. The High Court has ruled continuously that, insofar as the offenses involved are violent, aggressive action is needed, and demolition of the houses of the suspects is proper punishment.
The High Court rejected the argument that the measure constitutes collective punishment, holding that the purpose of the demolition is not punitive, but deterrent. According to the High Court, there is no distinction between house demolition and the imprisonment of someone who happens to be the head of a family, which also results in harm to his family. This comparison is flawed, however. The purpose of imprisonment is to deny certain rights of the offender. The suffering of his family is only a side-effect. If it were possible to neutralize the effect of incarceration on the family, the objective of the imprisonment would still be achieved. It would not be affected in the least.
The argument that Section 119 is inconsistent with the Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention was also rejected. The High Court has held several times that the two instruments are not relevant because Section 119 is part of the domestic law in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and according to the two instruments, the domestic law prevails when inconsistent with their provisions. This position conflicts with the accepted understanding of international law, whereby the actions of an occupying state are limited by international law, despite the powers given to the authorities by domestic law.
Regarding the refusal to give prior warning and to permit the family to appeal to the High Court of Justice before their home is demolished, the High Court accepted the state's position that giving prior notice is liable to endanger IDF forces and thwart the action. However, this reason is inconsistent with reality. In the West Bank, at least, during the period in which houses were demolished as punishment, the IDF had effective control over the entire area and was regularly present in almost all the cities, villages, and refugee camps. Also, having turned the action into a declared policy, the families were able, in some cases, to anticipate the demolition. In some cases, following a suicide attack, the Israeli media even reported on the intention of the IDF to demolish the house of the perpetrators. Therefore, Israel could no longer justify refusal to grant the right to be heard as grounds for maintaining the “element of surprise.”
You didn't look very hard. In the NY Times for April 12, 2002, Serge Schemann reported as follows:
"The Israeli police said today that they had found a belt with explosives in a Palestinian ambulance during a check at a roadblock inside the West Bank. The ambulance was headed toward Israel with the body of a Palestinian man, the police said, and they found the device alongside him. It was the second time in two weeks that Israel has reported finding explosives in an ambulance."
I think Brynzie's response clearly covers it, as for the Youseff Ibrahim 1993 article, it is purely shoddy journalism by an anti-islamist who in the rest of his article tries to drag the Palestinians down further into despair, basically creating a National Enquirer type article for the nyt, it’s no surprise Ibrahim no longer works for the nytimes and is now resigned to work at some racist right wing blog. Again, and still, before there was any claimed misuse ambulances were targeted and emergency care was hindered or blocked to the occupied population:
Nearly a year before Youseff's deft investigative piece:
"Two days after Aymon's death, Ismail and Mohammed Abdeen were shot dead as they warmed themselves on the roof of their home. A Gaza winter sun had finally come out. Ismail, 27, the father of four, was shot in the head and fell three stories into a pigeon coop below. As he lay face down and bleeding, soldiers tied his hands behind his back. An ambulance was denied access to the dying man for more than half an hour."
I can go on and post pdf links from B'tselem and other human rights organizations prior to 1993, their pdfs for those years are 200 pages long, and I am sure you will read through them, they have the info and write the State Department on how to obtain earlier reports, their archives don't back earlier than 10 years, but you can take it up with them. So to repeat myself again that given your dates of the misuse of ambulances MEANS that there was (GASP) a time before THERE WAS NO REPORTED MISUSE OF AMBULANCES, BUT THEY WERE STILL BEING ATTACKED. Ambulances are being attacked for no other reason than as another method for killing Palestinians, ambulances are searched thoroughly at checkpoints yet still delayed no matter how dire the situation, I repeat, as another method for killing Palestinians.
As to the facts, see above. I'm not trying to justify anything categorically. I'm sure there have been many instances where no justification is possible. All I'm saying is that now, today, the 18 year old IDF soldier on the ground is in a really difficult position, because on the one hand he knows that ambulances are neutral and should be left alone, but on the other hand he knows that terrorists have tried to use ambulances to aid in attacks. The situation is complex, and criticisms are more fairly made on a case by case basis.
Again, Brynzie's posting of Finkelstein's research and references clearly cover your "facts." HAH, if you want to go case by case there is not enough room on this forum to list how the accounts of the "18 year old" searching ambulances and STILL not allowing them to pass or move, culminating to the further death and demise of Palestinians seeking medical treatment, very telling is this portion:
Apart from the alleged March 2002 incident, the only documented misuses of an ambulance were committed by Israel. For example, "soldiers were crammed into a bullet-proof ambulance in order to get as quickly as possible to the house" of a wanted Palestinian; "IDF soldiers in Nablus forced several ambulance drivers to stop, get out of their ambulances, and stand between the soldiers and stone throwers"; "soldiers took control of an ambulance and used it to block entry to the hospital in Tulkarm." B'Tselem comments on these incidents and Israeli allegations:
'The IDF's use of ambulances for military purposes is especially disturbing in light of the repeated claims made by the IDF that Palestinians use ambulances to transport weapons and explosives....It should be noted that, with the exception of one case, and despite repeated requests by Physicians for Human Rights and the International Red Cross, the IDF has not presented any evidence to support this contention, not even in response to petitions filed in the Supreme Court.'
So ambulances "filled with explosives" are okay to shoot at when convenient or commandeer when convenient. Are they dangerous or not? In your support of israel you have deluded yourself into thinking that the "innocent" 18 year old has no choice but to target, attack, reroute, or block ambulances for fear of his own safety, but there are countless accounts of this not being true, the only threat the Palestinian imposes to the occupying army is that he is Palestinian. (Cont'd)
No, you've got it wrong (as does Sand). I'll quote from Hillel Halkin's review of Sand's book, since it does a better job explaining than I could (http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-ar ... l?page=0,0):
"Judaism, whether it is nearly four thousand years old, as biblical chronology would have it, or only 2,500 years old, as the revisionist Bible critics favored by Sand maintain, is inseparable from a Jewish “national consciousness.” Believing Jews throughout the ages have never doubted for a moment that they belonged to an am yisra’el, a people of Israel--nor, in modern times, have non-believing Jews with strong Jewish identities. It is precisely this that constitutes such an identity. Far from inventing Jewish peoplehood, Zionism was a modern re-conceptualization of it that was based on its long-standing prior existence...
...
To say that Jewish national identity was rooted in religion is not to say that it was merely religious. And in any case, for someone convinced, after Anderson and Gellner, that all national identities are “imagined” ones imposed on populations at some point in their history by ruling or intellectual elites, what does any of this matter? If nationhood or peoplehood is ultimately determined by subjective perceptions, Sand is barking up the wrong tree by laboring to prove that Jews lacked the objective qualifications for it. By his own standards, all that should count is what Jews felt and thought about themselves--and in all the enormous corpus of pre-nineteenth-century Jewish literature (from which, for understandable reasons, Sand does not quote), Jewish peoplehood is never treated as anything but an unchallenged and unchallengeable fact.
...
Far from having common biblical ancestors, [Sand] argues, most contemporary Jews would discover, if they could go far back enough in time, that they have diverse non-Jewish ones.
But in fact we can go far back in time, with the help of historical DNA studies, which have burgeoned in the last twenty years, and the most disgraceful pages in Sand’s book are those in which he displays an ignorant disdain for the work that has been done in this field by serious investigators. Without the least apparent understanding of how historical genetics works or what it can tell us, he attacks some of its most distinguished practitioners, such as Batsheva Bonné-Tamir of Tel Aviv University, Karl Skorecki of the Haifa Technion, and Doron Behar of the Rappaport Institute, for “internalizing the Zionist myth” and “seeking at all costs to discover a biological homogeneity” in order to create a “new discipline” designed to confirm “the Zionist idea of the Jewish nation-race.” Having myself worked for many years on a research project with Skorecki and Behar, I can testify that this impugning of their scientific integrity is libelous.
The irony is that the genetic studies that Sand dismisses lend him a measure of support. Overall, they show that while there is a high Y-chromosome correlation with an eastern Mediterranean profile among Jewish men from most parts of the world, indicating that many of them do have common Palestinian ancestors, the mitochondrial DNA correlation of Jewish women is much lower. Or, in less technical terms: while male gentiles have on the average entered Diaspora Jewish communities in only small percentages per generation over time, female gentiles --presumably because they were local inhabitants taken for wives by Jewish men in places like Yemen or North Africa--have done so more significantly.
But again: so what? There is nothing explosive about this. Judaism has always made it clear that the Jewish people is not biologically exclusive and can be joined by outsiders. And taking Sand on his own terms, what does any of this have to do with Jewish peoplehood, or with Zionism? If our Polish Jew included among his distant ancestors Khazars who became Jews in the eighth century, and our Moroccan Jew counted seventh-century Berber tribesmen among his forbears, why should this have weakened the nineteenth-century ties between them, or their attachment to an ancient homeland from which others of their ancestors did come, or their desire to see Jewish independence restored there? Sand, who studied at the École des hautes études in Paris and has written a book on Georges Sorel, would snort derisively if told that Sorel’s fellow Frenchmen were not a people because some of their progenitors were indigenous Celts while others were Germanic or Roman invaders. Yet when it comes to the Jews, he asks us to take a similar proposition seriously."
Finally, if you think that Judaism has no proven history in Palestine you have clearly been smoking some truly powerful stuff (or you've been listening to people that either don't know the history or willfully ignore it for their own political purposes). The historical connection between Israel and the Jewish people is beyond doubt.
No it isn't beyond doubt, if it was then an Shlomo Sand would have no basis or any references for his book. Shlomo Sand tackles Halkin's claims as unsupportable. Sand pretty much debunks the DNA story, "As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA has succeeded in identifying a specific marker to the Jews...It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased!" Without a single drop of blood taken, is it a really suprise that there isn't a dna marker, is there a Christian or Muslim or Hindu DNA marker? What if the Christians decided to go on another "Crusade" they can easily state that they, too, that they are an ethnicity with ties to Palestine with a proven history. What is to stop them, there claim would be just as legitimate as the Jewish claim.
Tom Segev in his review of the book:
“Israel’s Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Sand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened—hence there was no return.”
Sand states in the Invention of the Jewish People:
Nowhere in the abundant Roman documentation is there any mention of a deportation from Judea p. 131
Long before 70 CE there were large Jewish communities outside Judea p. 143
At the height of Judaism’s expansion, in the early 3rd century CE the Jewish population constituted 7 to 8% of all the Roman empire’s inhabitants p.167
A large part of Eastern European Jewry originated in the territories of the Khazar empire p.241
In his Intro: It is quite likely that an inhabitant of Hebron is closer in origin to the ancient Hebrews than are the majority across the world who identify themselves as Jews.
With the exception of Eastern Europe...no Jewish people, as a single, cohesive entity--ever appeared.
In a separate rebuttal Sand states:
Zionism did however reconfigure the many and diverse Jewish communities into an “ethnic” people in which most of its members were to be seen as the descendants of the ancient Hebrews. As is well-known, a religious community cannot possess historical ownership rights over a land, whereas a people can. Thus the famous Zionist motto, “A people without a land for a land without a people”. Thus also the evolution of the profoundly rooted myth concerning the “Exile of Jewish people” by the Romans in the first years of the first millennium. It is indeed true that specialists of Jewish antiquity knew that the Exile had never taken place, yet up to and including the present day, most ordinary Israelis are convinced that it did indeed occur – after all, it’s inscribed in the “Declaration of Independence of Israel” and even on Israeli money bills.
Halkin states on contradictory terms: If our Polish Jew included among his distant ancestors Khazars who became Jews in the eighth century, and our Moroccan Jew counted seventh-century Berber tribesmen among his forbears, why should this have weakened the nineteenth-century ties between them, or their attachment to an ancient homeland from which others of their ancestors did come, or their desire to see Jewish independence restored there?
How is it possible to say the Polish Jew's distant ancestors are Khazars as he does in the first part of his sentence and still legitamize the Polish Jew's claim in an ancestral homeland in Palestine in the second part. Sand also goes onto state in his book that historically, many Jews never sought to emigrate to Palestine, that even after the Holocaust that:
"But the truth is that, even if there was great appeal in the Zionist myth, most of the Yiddish-speaking Jews did not want to emigrate to their “ancestral land”. Instead, they chose to emigrate to America. If the US had not blocked East European immigration from the 1920s onwards, it is highly questionable whether the state of Israel would ever have been founded. This merciless closing of the gates continued, as is well-known, before and after the Second World War and thus caused great suffering to the victims of the Nazi regime. It was much easier to compel the Arab population in Palestine to accept these miserable strangers that Europe had expelled rather than to receive them in the US. The majority of immigrants from Soviet Russia in the 1980s would also have preferred to emigrate to the West, but the State of Israel pressured the American president to help prevent such anti-patriotic tendencies. Eventually, these immigrants were obliged to land in Israel." http://inventionofthejewishpeople.com/2 ... ial-times/
Halkin also states: Sand, who studied at the École des hautes études in Paris and has written a book on Georges Sorel, would snort derisively if told that Sorel’s fellow Frenchmen were not a people because some of their progenitors were indigenous Celts while others were Germanic or Roman invaders. Yet when it comes to the Jews, he asks us to take a similar proposition seriously.
Halkin here is deliberately twisting what Sand has stated. The French are the people of France. The Jewish people refers to an ethnos created by Zionists to call on Jews to inhabit and usurp the land of Palestine, two different things. So his example does not address anything what Sand writes. I believe the core of Sand's thesis is, and I firmly believe he won't be the first jew or israeli to confront the truth in israel's creation is that there was no "historical right" to Palestine. As a professor, along with Finkelstein, they are not able to look past the striking similarities of what the Nazi's alleged to justify their destruction:
"This sort of "historical right" was also seized by the Romantic precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the Nazi's themselves, to justify the conquest of the East. Germany was said to have legitmate claims on Slavic territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was "already inhabited by the Germans in primeval times", fertilized by the most noble ancient German blood" 'germanic for many centuries and long before a Slav ste foot there," "Teutonic-German Volksboden for 3,000 years as far as the Vistula .... In the 6th and 7th century after Christ the Slavs pushed outward from their eastern homelands and into the ancient German land ... admittedly only for a few hundred years," etc. The Slavic "interlopers," by contrast, were seen as "history's squatters" who merely "existed" in surroundings that they "could not master"...A half century earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective Jewish state as Europe's "wall of defense against Asia," and 'an outpost of civilization against barbarism." page 101, Finkelstein Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict.
Finkelstein:
"In any event, Zionism's "historical right" to Palestine was neither historical nor a right. It was not historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right, except in the Romantic "mysticism" of "blood and soil" and the Romantic "cult" of "death, heroes, and graves." (The quoted phrases are Anita Shapira's.) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... ntent;col1
Two millennia of non-Jewish settlement, where does that history, the history of the Palestinians go, does it disappear into thin air? "Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore--and the run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over--like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?"--- Langston Hughes I am not smoking anything or ignoring a thing, I know my history, I don’t have to read a damn book or read some Zionist tract about how his imagined “right” supersedes the right of my family that worked, labored and birthed on the land for centuries to pass on to its legal and rightful heirs.
Jimmy Carter called what Americans knew about the Palestinian conflict “abominable.” Donald Neff former senior editor of Time Magazine: “Confusion about the origins of the conflict all too often has obscured Americans’ understanding of its true dimension. It began as a conflict resulting from immigrants struggling to displace the local majority population. All else is derivative from this basic reality.” (Cont'd)
I don't consider myself a liar, nor do I think that I'm lazy (at least not intellectually). "Transfer," in the context of this conflict, has a very specific meaning, to wit, the forced expulsion of Arabs from inside Israel. Though people on the far right fringes of Israeli society have suggested that this be done, it has never been the policy of any Israeli government to do so. The proof for that is, quite simply, that it has never been done nor attempted nor even to my knowledge discussed as a plausible possibility. As for the Livni quote, perhaps your grasp of English idiom is not quite perfect, but the phrase "there is no question of..." usually means that something is emphatically NOT being considered (the BBC apparently understood this quote the same as me, since they interpreted the quote as a "clarification" of Livni's earlier more ambiguous comments, meant to address Israeli Arab concern).
You're perfectly right that Palestinians in the West Bank have been displaced in favor of settlers, though this usually involves loss of access to agricultural land, not to one's physical home. Either way it's deplorable and I firmly believe that such evictions should stop, and that all settlement construction should be halted immediately. Still, your description of these evictions as "transfer" lose the specific connotations that the term has acquired.
It is again, no doubt, the policy of the Israeli government, AGAIN everything you stated here is an outright LIE. Perhaps your grasp of English idiom is not quite perfect. And I suggest you bookmark this website and brush up: http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/i ... tml?page=2
No question
This idiom means that something is certain or definite.
There is no question that you knew this. I do think you are lazy and lying about the transfer of Palestinians, but I don't think you are an idiot... South Africa Apartheid ended, the Berlin Wall came down... Justice for the oppressed was attainable and change was only possible when people became informed. The whole idiom thing brings your twisted responses down another level. I think you have no other purpose here on this thread or on the amt but to spread misinformation. So far this year, Israel has demolished 285 Palestinian homes and other structures, displacing 477 people, many for the 2nd or 3rd time. Again, these acts are not to make the conditions more liveable for the Palestinians, the whole of Israel's policy is to make life miserable in effect to force a transfer. You can play with words and idioms and connotations, but the reality on the ground is that land is STILL being taken, and the rightful owners of that land are being moved off of it. Zionists have condemned the Palestinians to constant losses of life, land and livelihood, but yet still like all murderous colonists want to write the history, control the narrative and dictate which words are to be used, which words aren't. Transfer, expulsion and systematic humiliation all apply to the suffering of the Palestinians. Your statement that the desruction of houses is "deplorable" and it should stop, is an empty statement, you are painting yourself as the compassionate zionist, but with the excuses of atroticities, such as transfer, the attack on ambulances, etc. you consistently belie yourself, you are trying to ride two donkeys with one ass. The two state solution is a concept, if executed will only come at the expense of the of lives of Palestinians. Zionism can't be reconciled with what was is justly due to the Palestinians. If there is to be peace, there must be equality. Zionism isn't equality, it can only exist with jewish supremacy.
You should really try to learn more about Zionism (and not from the sources that you would normally go to, since they don't seem to have given you a particularly good grasp of the basics). Zionism was never meant to end anti-semitism. There is nothing that Jews can do to end anti-semitism, just as there is nothing that African Americans can do to end racism. Bigotry is irrational and does not depend on how the victim of bigotry acts. Zionism, rather, insofar as it is a response to anti-semitism (which is only one aspect of the ideology) is about protecting the Jewish people from anti-semitism, since anti-semitism, unfortunately, isn't going anywhere. As for Howard Zinn, I'm very sorry that he feels that the Jews have soiled their purity, but quite frankly I don't give a shit. I'd much rather be a people that is able to protect itself against its enemies than a pure and innocent sacrificial lamb. It's all well and good for Zinn to consider Israelis so much worse than their innocent diaspora ancestors, but quite frankly I'm sure that the six million of those ancestors who wound up as ash would have traded some of the purety that Zinn seems to care so much for to have had the power to protect themselves.
Is that what the whole zionist enterprise was and is about? Responding to anti-semitism? I can't think of anything more dangerous and destructive to the victims of anti-semitism. So this response seems to be Yes, anti-semitism is correct, can't beat'em, so we will go and usurp another nation's land over here, out of the way of the way anti-semites. If you are comparing zionism to American racism, then let's compare. If the African Americans chose as a response to racism was "to go back to Africa", then question answered, problem solved?! If the women's movement in the US decided the laws against them needed a response and in their response sanctioned the claims against them, as does zionism with anti-semitism, then what would have that done for equality? Malcolm X and Susan B Anthony got it all wrong, just wasted time on their part. How unbelievably ridiculous.
Zinn never said that the jews were pure and should be an innocent sacrificial lamb, his books have done nothing but reveal that NO one should be sacrificed. Protecting yourself against "enemies" does not include the right to steal, destroy and be the aggressor. Zinn stated on the Holocaust:
“If the Holocaust is to have any meaning, we must transfer our anger to today's brutalities. We must respect the memory of the Jewish Holocaust by refusing to allow atrocities to take place now.
When Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history and look away from the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible irony, doing exactly what the rest of the world did in allowing the genocide to happen."
And stating that the Holocaust victims would have traded in that "purity" to protect themselves is oversimplifying the matter. Some of the survivors of the Holocaust did survive by despicable means, and some perished because they refused to trade in that "purity" and survive at the cost of others. You are not a spokesperson for the victims of the Holocaust, but you have no qualms about using them for your zionist beliefs. Noam Chomsky stated when referring to a Zionist leader, Nachem Goldman : "he said it's sacrilege to use the Holocaust as a justification for oppressing others. He [Goldman] was referring to something very real: exploitation of probably the world's most horrifying atrocity in order to justify oppression of others. That kind of manipulation is really sick." To use and re-use their ashes, as your last statement unabashedly does, to give full license to kill, bully and build nuclear arms which have the ability to create more death and destruction than ovens and camps and to state that this is being all done in their name, is, to echo Chomsky, sick.
No it isn't beyond doubt, if it was then an Shlomo Sand would have no basis or any references for his book. Shlomo Sand tackles Halkin's claims as unsupportable. Sand pretty much debunks the DNA story, "As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA has succeeded in identifying a specific marker to the Jews...It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased!" Without a single drop of blood taken, is it a really suprise that there isn't a dna marker, is there a Christian or Muslim or Hindu DNA marker? What if the Christians decided to go on another "Crusade" they can easily state that they, too, that they are an ethnicity with ties to Palestine with a proven history. What is to stop them, there claim would be just as legitimate as the Jewish claim.
Tom Segev in his review of the book:
“Israel’s Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Sand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened—hence there was no return.”
Sand states in the Invention of the Jewish People:
Nowhere in the abundant Roman documentation is there any mention of a deportation from Judea p. 131
Long before 70 CE there were large Jewish communities outside Judea p. 143
At the height of Judaism’s expansion, in the early 3rd century CE the Jewish population constituted 7 to 8% of all the Roman empire’s inhabitants p.167
A large part of Eastern European Jewry originated in the territories of the Khazar empire p.241
In his Intro: It is quite likely that an inhabitant of Hebron is closer in origin to the ancient Hebrews than are the majority across the world who identify themselves as Jews.
With the exception of Eastern Europe...no Jewish people, as a single, cohesive entity--ever appeared.
In a separate rebuttal Sand states:
Zionism did however reconfigure the many and diverse Jewish communities into an “ethnic” people in which most of its members were to be seen as the descendants of the ancient Hebrews. As is well-known, a religious community cannot possess historical ownership rights over a land, whereas a people can. Thus the famous Zionist motto, “A people without a land for a land without a people”. Thus also the evolution of the profoundly rooted myth concerning the “Exile of Jewish people” by the Romans in the first years of the first millennium. It is indeed true that specialists of Jewish antiquity knew that the Exile had never taken place, yet up to and including the present day, most ordinary Israelis are convinced that it did indeed occur – after all, it’s inscribed in the “Declaration of Independence of Israel” and even on Israeli money bills.
Halkin states on contradictory terms: If our Polish Jew included among his distant ancestors Khazars who became Jews in the eighth century, and our Moroccan Jew counted seventh-century Berber tribesmen among his forbears, why should this have weakened the nineteenth-century ties between them, or their attachment to an ancient homeland from which others of their ancestors did come, or their desire to see Jewish independence restored there?
How is it possible to say the Polish Jew's distant ancestors are Khazars as he does in the first part of his sentence and still legitamize the Polish Jew's claim in an ancestral homeland in Palestine in the second part. Sand also goes onto state in his book that historically, many Jews never sought to emigrate to Palestine, that even after the Holocaust that:
"But the truth is that, even if there was great appeal in the Zionist myth, most of the Yiddish-speaking Jews did not want to emigrate to their “ancestral land”. Instead, they chose to emigrate to America. If the US had not blocked East European immigration from the 1920s onwards, it is highly questionable whether the state of Israel would ever have been founded. This merciless closing of the gates continued, as is well-known, before and after the Second World War and thus caused great suffering to the victims of the Nazi regime. It was much easier to compel the Arab population in Palestine to accept these miserable strangers that Europe had expelled rather than to receive them in the US. The majority of immigrants from Soviet Russia in the 1980s would also have preferred to emigrate to the West, but the State of Israel pressured the American president to help prevent such anti-patriotic tendencies. Eventually, these immigrants were obliged to land in Israel." http://inventionofthejewishpeople.com/2 ... ial-times/
Halkin also states: Sand, who studied at the École des hautes études in Paris and has written a book on Georges Sorel, would snort derisively if told that Sorel’s fellow Frenchmen were not a people because some of their progenitors were indigenous Celts while others were Germanic or Roman invaders. Yet when it comes to the Jews, he asks us to take a similar proposition seriously.
Halkin here is deliberately twisting what Sand has stated. The French are the people of France. The Jewish people refers to an ethnos created by Zionists to call on Jews to inhabit and usurp the land of Palestine, two different things. So his example does not address anything what Sand writes. I believe the core of Sand's thesis is, and I firmly believe he won't be the first jew or israeli to confront the truth in israel's creation is that there was no "historical right" to Palestine. As a professor, along with Finkelstein, they are not able to look past the striking similarities of what the Nazi's alleged to justify their destruction:
"This sort of "historical right" was also seized by the Romantic precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the Nazi's themselves, to justify the conquest of the East. Germany was said to have legitmate claims on Slavic territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was "already inhabited by the Germans in primeval times", fertilized by the most noble ancient German blood" 'germanic for many centuries and long before a Slav ste foot there," "Teutonic-German Volksboden for 3,000 years as far as the Vistula .... In the 6th and 7th century after Christ the Slavs pushed outward from their eastern homelands and into the ancient German land ... admittedly only for a few hundred years," etc. The Slavic "interlopers," by contrast, were seen as "history's squatters" who merely "existed" in surroundings that they "could not master"...A half century earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective Jewish state as Europe's "wall of defense against Asia," and 'an outpost of civilization against barbarism." page 101, Finkelstein Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict.
Finkelstein:
"In any event, Zionism's "historical right" to Palestine was neither historical nor a right. It was not historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right, except in the Romantic "mysticism" of "blood and soil" and the Romantic "cult" of "death, heroes, and graves." (The quoted phrases are Anita Shapira's.) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... ntent;col1
Two millennia of non-Jewish settlement, where does that history, the history of the Palestinians go, does it disappear into thin air? "Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore--and the run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over--like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?"--- Langston Hughes I am not smoking anything or ignoring a thing, I know my history, I don’t have to read a damn book or read some Zionist tract about how his imagined “right” supersedes the right of my family that worked, labored and birthed on the land for centuries to pass on to its legal and rightful heirs.
Jimmy Carter called what Americans knew about the Palestinian conflict “abominable.” Donald Neff former senior editor of Time Magazine: “Confusion about the origins of the conflict all too often has obscured Americans’ understanding of its true dimension. It began as a conflict resulting from immigrants struggling to displace the local majority population. All else is derivative from this basic reality.” (Cont'd)
Hey byrnzie how the hell are u buddy!!! Looks like there's another warrior in here to help in this battle for truths. Thanks viva for posting and helping spread the word.
Hey byrnzie how the hell are u buddy!!! Looks like there's another warrior in here to help in this battle for truths. Thanks viva for posting and helping spread the word.
Glad to be here, thanks.
Here's a good link, the article by Lisa Goldman, what I find interesting is at the end of the article, they post facebook comments made by zionists about the boy.
African asylum seekers injured in Tel Aviv race riots
Violence breaks out after inflammatory speeches as protesters join politicians to demonstrate against rising Israeli immigration
Conal Urquhart and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 May 2012
Dozens of African asylum seekers were injured as race riots broke out in Tel Aviv on Wednesday night.
Thousands of protesters joined politicians to protest against the arrival of an estimated 60,000 asylum seekers in Israel in recent years. But after inflammatory speeches the demonstration broke out into violence.
Witnesses reported seeing men and women being beaten and shops and properties being attacked. Police said nine people were arrested.
The protesters were addressed by politicians including Miri Regev and Danny Danon of the ruling Likud Party. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Regev described the asylum seekers as a "cancer in our body," and promised to do everything "in order to bring them back to where they belong".
Danny Danon, who heads a lobby group which seeks to deal with the issue of illegal immigration, said the only solution to the problem would be to "begin talking about expulsion".
"We must expel the infiltrators from Israel. We should not be afraid to say the words 'expulsion now'," he was reported as saying.
Thousands of asylum seekers have arrived in Israel from Eritea and South Sudan, escaping poverty but also oppressive regimes and political instability.Most are bound for Europe, but find Libya blocked to them by the government and civil war.
Often travellers are taken to Israel by Bedouin people smugglers, abused and held to ransom for months at a time before they are deposited on the border where Israel is building a new fence. Once in Israel, they are looked after by Israeli non-governmental agencies and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
Some work illegally and the majority live in the poorest areas of Tel Aviv where they find themselves in competition with working class Israelis mostly from a Middle Eastern or north African background. The sparse greens and parks of south Tel Aviv are dominated by the African migrants who sleep there at night.
Anger has been growing in the city and earlier this year the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the migrants threatened the Jewish character of Israel.
Been away for a bit...seems I missed an exceptional outpouring of vitriol. Viva, I'll put it very simply, I don't care what Sand writes, or what you think, and frankly none of it matters at all. You can hate Israel and disparage Jewish peoplehood all you like; the fact is, Israel exists and it's not going anywhere. There are those on the Israeli right who disparage Palestinian peoplehood. Historically, they may very well be correct (I certainly think they have a better argument than Sand does), but it doesn't matter. What matters is the here and now, and in the here and now the Palestinians have formed a national consciousness requiring others to deal with them as a nation. Even if you reject Jewish peoplehood historically, in the here and now you have to deal with the fact that we Jews consider ourselves a nation, and that Israel is our state. I'd recommend that perhaps your time is better spent working towards Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation than spreading more hatred of Israel. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians are going anywhere, and the two peoples simply have to find a way to live together.
Despite what you apparently believe about me (without ever having met me, or even trying to have a discussion of this issue with me in a calm, respectful, non-confrontational tone), my compassion for the Palestinians is truly heartfelt, and my anger at Israeli policy is sincere. I am, however, a Zionist, and I'm not going to apologize for that. My Zionism does not mean that I don't believe that Palestinians should have a state of their own where they can live in peace and with dignity (in fact, I'd say that my Zionism, to a great extent, motivates this belief). If you're willing to discuss this issue in private without the anger (or at least try to) I'd be more than happy to do so. I really believe that constructive dialogue between people on opposite sides of this conflict will do a lot more good than hatefully trying to undermine the legitimacy of the other side.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Been away for a bit...seems I missed an exceptional outpouring of vitriol. Viva, I'll put it very simply, I don't care what Sand writes, or what you think, and frankly none of it matters at all. You can hate Israel and disparage Jewish peoplehood all you like; the fact is, Israel exists and it's not going anywhere. There are those on the Israeli right who disparage Palestinian peoplehood. Historically, they may very well be correct (I certainly think they have a better argument than Sand does), but it doesn't matter. What matters is the here and now, and in the here and now the Palestinians have formed a national consciousness requiring others to deal with them as a nation. Even if you reject Jewish peoplehood historically, in the here and now you have to deal with the fact that we Jews consider ourselves a nation, and that Israel is our state. I'd recommend that perhaps your time is better spent working towards Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation than spreading more hatred of Israel. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians are going anywhere, and the two peoples simply have to find a way to live together.
Despite what you apparently believe about me (without ever having met me, or even trying to have a discussion of this issue with me in a calm, respectful, non-confrontational tone), my compassion for the Palestinians is truly heartfelt, and my anger at Israeli policy is sincere. I am, however, a Zionist, and I'm not going to apologize for that. My Zionism does not mean that I don't believe that Palestinians should have a state of their own where they can live in peace and with dignity (in fact, I'd say that my Zionism, to a great extent, motivates this belief). If you're willing to discuss this issue in private without the anger (or at least try to) I'd be more than happy to do so. I really believe that constructive dialogue between people on opposite sides of this conflict will do a lot more good than hatefully trying to undermine the legitimacy of the other side.
Vitriol? Calm, respectful, non confrontational tone? I am not the one with the gun, or the tanks or the military aircraft or nuclear weapons. But lets not forget that I am the angry vitriolic confrontational one. Not sure how I should respond to the "good zionist." How about bowing, would bowing help? I am supposed to be hospitable, huh? Forgot my role, anything else I can politely help you to, I am means besides my house, land and life? No hatred, just pure unvitriolic nonconfrontational submission to the man with the gun and the bomb who supports creating a more comfortable open air jail cell out of compassion. I mean, are 200 settlements in the West Bank enough? Maybe we can get Abbas to the negotiating table for this two state solution and expand on those. And then we can shove the Palestinians inside israel into the bantustans, ghettos, open air prison cells and ta dah, problem solved.
Sand's book was a bestseller in israel, a lot of israelis do care what he thinks. A lot of israelis know what their true history is, some lie about it, delude themselves, or state "frankly none of it matters at all." There will be more like Sand whether you think he matters or not. Israel is having a demographic "problem." Israel will not exist as it is. The Palestinian population is growing, for it to continue to exist, the apartheid system they have in place will have to become more oppressive. That is the reality, "the here and now" and that is what you have selected to justify and defend, an undemocratic apartheid state supporting jewish supremacy over the indigenous population. That is zionism, liberal or right, in a nutshell. There are many Jews who don't consider themselves a "nation" and are against the state of israel and refuse to live there. There was never an israel before 1948, and before the creation of zionism there never has been a call or desire by the world jewry to settle in Palestine. The israeli right have a better argument than Sand does? Yes, indeed, I have heard it all before, the keys and title to the land that the majority of Palestinians own belong to houses in Jordan, right? The Palestinians will never concede their right to return to their homeland over to immigrants from Russia, Poland, Morocco, Brooklyn, whatever. Where is the justice in that? Israel is against justice and equality, but for peace? That's the joke that has been repeated to the Palestinians and the international community perpetually. Look at history, Apartheid and inequality does not last. If there is room for an immigrant from Brooklyn, then there is room from a Palestinian from Palestine.
Like I said, vitriol. The offer is on the table if you'd like to actually discuss the issue with me thoughtfully rather than simply yelling angrily in public.
Also, how exactly is it that in your mind my support for a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza is equivalent to support for a "more comfortable open air prison"?
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
come on byrnzie.. its not racism.. i know perhaps im being presumptive but this is to do with ethnicity and i think you know that. i think you know that racism is a social construct.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
how exactly is it that in your mind my support for a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza is equivalent to support for a "more comfortable open air prison"?
Would you be opposed to the Palestinians' right to have a capable military, a right all sovereign nations enjoy? Or are they not civilized enough for it?
It's very amusing how you ask your question presupposing what my answer will be. No, I have no problem with an eventual Palestinian state having a military, although I would not be surprised if certain restraints on armaments are part of a final peace deal.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Like I said, vitriol. The offer is on the table if you'd like to actually discuss the issue with me thoughtfully rather than simply yelling angrily in public.
Also, how exactly is it that in your mind my support for a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza is equivalent to support for a "more comfortable open air prison"?
And there you have a microcosm of the israeli propaganda machine, the zionists agitate, lie, twist, spin and then blame the Palestinians for getting "angry" or resisting. They want "calm" negotiating or debate, when they have built walls, checkpoints and consficate land and people. The tanks roll in, the military helicopters fly overhead, a nuclear arsenal is at hand but the zionists would like to have all believe that the Palestinians are the angry arabs not willing to negotiate. Which leads to the two state solution debate, the Oslo Accords, a way to expedite the Allon plan of 1967 of "geographic inclusion, demographic exclusion." In return for the collaboration of Arafat, the Palestinians were supposed to get an independent state. "From the beginning of negotiations, restrictions were implemented on the Palestinians, first that the Palestinians don't constitute a single people, second, the fragmentation of occupied Palestinian territory into discrete units separated from each other by areas of israeli control, third, the transfer of the day to day administration and policing of the population to a severely limited form of Palestinian government and fourth, the maintenance of Israeli control over all external borders, airspace and territorial waters, so that all Palestinian contact with the outside world would be mediated by Israel" ----Saree Makdisi, p.81-82, Palestine Inside Out From there Arafat was to "negotiate" a state. The end result was the further cantonization, ie, imprisonment of Palestinians. The wall was built, settlements accelerated, and the creation of bypass roads, roads that only Jews are allowed to use, increased. The wall cut off Palestinians from their farm land, health services, jobs, education, etc. The two state solution? No thanks. The last time a two state solution was mentioned by a world leader was Obama, who stated that based on 67 borders the Palestinians should be able to build their own viable state. And that went over well didn't it? Netanyahu rushed over to the POTUS and bullied him into silence, the supposed leader of the free world. Did Obama dare to speak up about a two state "solution" again?
I am your equal, I have the right to live in my home country as your equal.
Yes, you're right, when you're fighting in densely populated civilian areas civilians will be killed. That is an unavoidable fact, which is why the laws of war do not categorically consider civilian deaths to be unjustified. I would've expected you to know that already given how much you rant about international law. The difference between justifiable (though tragic) collateral damage and terrorism is this: collateral damage is the result of an attack on a legitimate military target; terrorism is an attack on a target that is categorically illegitimate. But again, I'm sure you already knew that.
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much' - Why The American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End
P.116: "Indiscriminate attacks differ from direct attacks against civilians,' Israel's leading authority on International law, Yoram Dinstein, observed, in that "the attacker is not actually trying to harm the civilian population": the injury to the civilians is merely a matter of "no concern to the attacker." From the standpoint of LOIAC [Law of International Armed Conflict], there is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction: they are equally forbidden. [Yoram Dinstein - 'The Conduct of Hostilities under the law of International Armed Conflict' 2004].
It is perfectly clear that every Palestinian terrorist who has killed a civilian meant to do so. That is not at all the case, and most likely not the case, for the vast majority of Palestinian civilian deaths.
Tell that to the 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl who was shot 17 times at close range by an Israeli Captain. '[Witnesses] said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.
...[Witnesses] described her as at least 100 yards from the military post which was in any case well protected.
...After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.' http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
You could also tell it to the wheelchair-bound Palestinian man who was shot and then run over by a tank:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/ ... -does-fit/
Human Rights Watch reports that of the “twenty-two civilian killings” during the Israeli siege of Jenin, “Many of them were killed willfully or unlawfully, and in some cases constituted war crimes. Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man, was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on April 10 as he was moving his wheelchair—equipped with a white flag—down a major road in Jenin. Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a quadriplegic, was crushed to death in the rubble of his home on April 7 after IDF soldiers refused to allow his family to remove him from their home before a bulldozer destroyed it.”
In recent months dozens of soldiers, including the son of an an Israeli general, all recently discharged, have come forward to share their stories of how they were ordered in briefings to shoot to kill unarmed people without fear of reprimand.
Israeli military prosecutors have opened criminal investigations following allegations by soldiers that they carried out illegal shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed Palestinians.
Some of the soldiers, who also spoke to the Guardian, say they acted on standing orders in some parts of the Palestinian territories to open fire on people regardless of whether they were armed or not, or posed any physical threat.
The soldiers say that in some situations they were ordered to shoot anyone who appeared on a roof or a balcony, anyone who appeared to be kneeling to the ground or anyone who appeared on the street at a designated time. Among those killed by soldiers acting on the orders were young children.
Also, on the subject of not intentionally harming civilians, how do you explain the following?:
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much' - Why The American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End
P.145: In February 2008 HRW [Human Rights Watch] issued a report entitled 'Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006'. The report found that Israel dropped as many as 4.6 million cluster submunitions on south Lebanon during the war. It was the "most extensive use of cluster munitions anywhere in the world since the 1991 Gulf war," while relative to the size of the targeted area the density of the attack was historically unprecendented. (Apparently the only reason Israel did not drop yet more cluster munitions was that it's stocks had been depleted). Some 90 percent of these cluster munitions were dropped "during the final three days when Israel knew a settlement was imminent," the U.N ceasefire resolution having already been passed but not yet gone into effect.
P146: Israel's cluster munition attacks on Lebanon were indiscriminate in multiple respects: the inaccuracy of their delivery (or carrier) systems; the "wide dispersal patterns" of such weapons; and the "high dud rates" endangering civilians returning to their homes after the ceasefire. In addition, the saturation use of these weapons in civilian areas multiplied manyfold the inherent dangers posed by them.
P.147: HRW reported that Israel's cluster attacks "blanketed" both "built-up areas" and "fields", resulting in the high saturation of towns and villages," and the "systematic 'flooding' of certain villages and populated areas."
The "vast majority" of cluster munitions targeted "population centers" such as towns and villages. In the village of Yohmor, "bomblets littered the ground from one end...to the other. They were on the roofs of all the houses, in gardens and spread across roads and paths. Some were even found inside houses." In the village of Zwtar al-Sharkiyeh deminers had to remove "2000-3000 submunitions" inundating a primary school and it's environs, although "Hezbollah had not used the school at any time during the war and there had been no Hezbollah forces anywhere in the town."
Meanwhile, according to a "very conservative" estimate, "submunitions contaminated at least 26 percent of south Lebanon's agricultural land," transforming olive and citrus groves and tobacco fields into "de facto minefields." Many fields were simply "abandoned," while desperate farmers continued to work others despite the lethal hazards. From the ceasefire until December 2009 the explosion of duds caused 227 civilian casualties, of whom 35 percent were children.
P148: According to HRW, individuals bear responsibility for "war crimes" if they "intentionally or recklessly" authorize or conduct attacks "that would indiscriminately or disproportionately harm civilians." In other iterations HRW defines war crimes as attacks that are "knowingly or recklessly indiscriminate or deliberate"; the "knowing or reckless disregard for the foreseeable effects on civilians and other protected objects"; "deliberate attacks on civilians, as well as indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks when committed with knowledge or reckless indifference to their illegal character": military justification and with criminal intent."
P.149: Consider now HRW's description of the Israeli cluster attacks on Lebanon:
By their very nature, these dangerous, volatile submunitions [i.e, the duds] cannot distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, forseeably endangering civilians for months or years to come.
It is inconceivable that Israel...did not know that...it's strikes would have a lasting humanitarian impact.
Many of the cluster attacks on populated areas do not appear to have had a definite military target. Our researchers...found only one village with clear evidence of the presence of Hezbollah forces out of the more than 40 towns and villages they visited.
The staggering number of cluster munitions rained on south Lebanon over the three days immediately before a negotiated ceasefire went into effect puts in doubt the claim by the IDF that it's attacks were aimed at specific targets or even strategic locations, as opposed to being efforts to blanket large areas with explosives and duds.
Cluster munition attacks on or near population centers, like those launched by Israel, give rise to a presumption that they are indiscriminate, as the weapons are highly imprecise with a large area effect that regularly causes foreseeable and excessive civilian casualties during strikes and afterwards.
P.150: Given the extremely large number of submunitions employed and their known failure rates, harm to remaning and returning civilians was entirely foreseeable.
Israel was well aware of the continuing harm to Lebanese civilians from the unexploded duds that remained from it's prior use of munitions in South Lebanon in 1978 and 1982.
The paucity of evidence of specific military objectives, the known dangers of cluster munitions, the timing of large scale attacks days before an anticipated ceasefire, and the massive scope of the attacks combine to point to a conclusion that the attacks were of an indiscriminate and disproportionate character.
A senior U.N demining official said he had "no doubt" that Israel had deliberately hit built-up areas with cluster munitions, stating "these cluster bombs were dropped in the middle of villages".
Israeli soldiers were well aware of the large numbers of duds their cluster strikes were producing. A soldier said that his...commander gave a "pep talk" after a period of heavy fire, saying, "just wait until Hezbollah finds the little presents we had left them".
Given the sheer number of cluster duds on the ground, casualties are unavoidable.
P.151: In South Lebanon in 2006, Israel employed a means of warfare that was likely to cause significant harm to civilians - unreliable and inaccurate submunitions used widely and heavily in populated areas. Despite ample past experience of the deadly effects of cluster duds on the civilian population of South Lebanon, awareness of the impending end of the war, and the knowledge that there would be a legacy of unexploded duds creating de facto minefields, the IDF did not refrain from launching these attacks...The post-ceasefire casualties have to our knowledge all been civilians or deminers, and civilian access to agricultural areas and property has ben severely affected. The aftereffects of israel's cluster strikes were foreseeable by the IDF.
The paucity of evidence of specific military objectives, the known dangers of cluster munitions, the time of large-scale attacks days before an anticipated ceasefire, and the massive scope of the attacks themselves lead to the conclusion that the attacks were of an indiscriminate and disproportionate character.
We found scant evidence that would demonstrate a concrete and direct military advantage with relation to any possible military objectives, such as attacking fighters, rocket launchers, or strategic locales.
When considering the foreseeable civilian damage that could ensue, the anticipated and soon-approaching end to the armed conflict weighs heavily against Israel's last-minute saturation of civilian areas with old cluster stockpiles...The fact that duds would turn civilian areas into de facto minefields, given the large number of submunitions employed and their known failure rates, was foreseeable - testimony from soldiers (and the reported IDF prohibition of firing cluster munitions into areas it would subsequently enter) indicate that the IDF knew this.
A composite distillation of these HRW statements would read: Just before an agreed-upon ceasefire Israel saturated Lebanese civilian areas having no military targets with cluster munitions; the inevitable and foreseeable - in fact foreseen - consequence was that many Lebanese civilians were injured and killed.
P.152: Like HRW, the U.N Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli cluster attacks were indiscriminate...many towns and villages were littered with the bomblets as well as large tracts of agricultural land," and that "the use of cluster munitions by [the] IDF was of no military advantage."
come on byrnzie.. its not racism.. i know perhaps im being presumptive but this is to do with ethnicity and i think you know that. i think you know that racism is a social construct.
No, racism isn't a social construct. You were right the first time; it has to do with ethnicity.
rac·ism
[rey-siz-uhm] Show IPA
noun
1.
a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2.
a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3.
hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.
Firebombing of house containing 10 Eritreans is latest example of growing racism stoked by politicians and media
Harriet Sherwood
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 June 2012
Behind the metal door and up a narrow, blackened stairwell, fear hung in the air along with the smell of smoke. No one wanted to talk. A young woman scrubbing clothes in a plastic basin mutely shook her head. A man sweeping the floor with a toddler clinging to his legs said one word: "No." Another, bringing bags of food from the nearby market, brushed past without making eye contact.
As for the 10 Eritreans who had been trapped in a ground-floor apartment when the blaze began at 3am, they had gone. Four were in hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation; the rest had fled.
The overnight firebombing of a downtown Jerusalem building which houses refugees from sub-Saharan Africa was the latest in a string of attacks set against the backdrop of rising anti-migrant sentiment in Israel, fuelled by inflammatory comments by prominent politicians. Often described as infiltrators by ministers, the media, the army and government officials, migrants have also had labels such as "cancer", "garbage", "plague" and "rapists" applied to them by Israeli politicians.
The arsonists who struck the Jerusalem apartment, located in a religious neighbourhood of the city, scrawled "get out of our neighbourhood" on its outside wall. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said: "This was a targeted attack which we believe was racially motivated." The foreign ministry condemned the "heinous crime".
But on the street outside the building, the official response had little resonance with a man who arrived in Israel from Eritrea 14 years ago but was too scared to give his name. "People look at you, they curse you. They say, 'Go back to your country.' We are very afraid," he said.
Tensions were inevitable, according to Moshe Cohen, the owner of a nearby jeweller's shop. "They drink, they fight among themselves, they play African music on shabbat [the Jewish sabbath] when people want to pray. What started in Tel Aviv happens here now."
He was referring to a series of firebombings of apartments and a nursery over the past month in southern Tel Aviv, an area in which African migrants are concentrated. Shops run by or serving migrants were smashed up and looted in a violent demonstration last month in which Africans were attacked. Many Israelis were shocked at the display of aggressive racism in their most liberal city.
Political leaders did not allow the violence to temper their verbal onslaught against the migrants. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel's national identity was at risk from the flood of "illegal infiltrators". Interior minister Eli Yishai suggested that Aids-infected migrants were raping Israeli women, and all, "without exception", should be locked up pending deportation. They do not believe "this country belongs to us, to the white man", he said in an interview.
And, while touring the fence that Israel is building along its border with Egypt to deter migrants, MP Aryeh Eldad said: "Anyone that penetrates Israel's border should be shot – a Swedish tourist, Sudanese from Eritrea, Eritreans from Sudan, Asians from Sinai. Whoever touches Israel's border – shot." He later conceded that such a policy may not be feasible "because bleeding hearts groups will immediately begin to shriek and turn to the courts".
According to the immigration authority, there are 62,000 migrants in Israel, where the population is 7.8m. Over 2,000 migrants entered Israel via Egypt last month, compared with 637 last May. The construction of the 150-mile (240km) southern border fence, due to be completed later this year, is thought to be increasing in the short term the numbers attempting to cross into Israel .
Nearly all are given temporary permits to stay in Israel which must be renewed every three or four months and specifically exclude permission to work. Many end up being employed on a casual basis for a pittance, living in overcrowded, rundown apartments and confined to the fringes of society. In desperation, some turn to petty crime.
On Sunday, a law came into effect allowing the Israeli authorities to jail migrants for up to three years. People helping or sheltering migrants could face prison sentences of between five and 15 years.
Netanyahu also ordered ministers to accelerate efforts to deport 25,000 migrants from countries with which Israel has diplomatic relations, principally South Sudan, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Ethiopia.
He conceded it was not possible to deport around 35,000 migrants from Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia. Eritreans and Sudanese make up more than 90% of those who have illegally crossed the Israel-Egypt border in recent months.
One out of 4,603 applicants was granted asylum status last year.
Although some commentators and community activists have said that Israel, a state founded by and for refugees from persecution, should be sympathetic and welcoming to those fleeing violence and oppression, the prevailing mood is one of intolerance.
"This phenomenon is getting bigger and bigger," said Poriya Gets of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, based in Tel Aviv. It was being stoked by politicians and rightwing organisations, she added. "We now see hotspots of tension between refugees and local people in many towns."
Her organisation had also been targeted. "We've had phone calls, people cursing and saying ugly things, like, 'We hope you will be raped and we are coming to burn you.' The politicians must take responsibility. They are trying to make the fire bigger."
Also, numbers do not prove intent. It is perfectly clear that every Palestinian terrorist who has killed a civilian meant to do so. That is not at all the case, and most likely not the case, for the vast majority of Palestinian civilian deaths.
In case there's still any doubt as to the complete falsity of your comment:
Rachel Corrie verdict exposes Israeli military mindset
Corrie's parents have not received justice, but their quest reveals the lie of the IDF's claim to be the world's 'most moral army'
Chris McGreal
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 August 2012
Reporters covering Israel are routinely confronted with the question: why not call Hamas a terrorist organisation? It's a fair point. How else to describe blowing up families on buses but terrorism?
But the difficulty lies in what then to call the Israeli army when it, too, at particular times and places, has used indiscriminate killing and terror as a means of breaking Palestinian civilians. One of those places was Rafah, in the southern tip of the Gaza strip, where Rachel Corrie was crushed by a military bulldozer nine years ago as she tried to stop the Israeli army going about its routine destruction of Palestinian homes.
An Israeli judge on Tuesday perpetuated the fiction that Corrie's death was a terrible accident and upheld the results of the military's own investigation, widely regarded as such a whitewash that even the US ambassador to Israel described it as neither thorough nor credible. Corrie's parents may have failed in their attempt to see some justice for their daughter, but in their struggle they forced a court case that established that her death was not arbitrary but one of a pattern of killings as the Israeli army pursued a daily routine of attacks intended to terrorise the Palestinian population of southern Gaza into submission.
The case laid bare the state of the collective Israeli military mind, which cast the definition of enemies so widely that children walking down the street were legitimate targets if they crossed a red line that was invisible to everyone but the soldiers looking at it on their maps. The military gave itself a blanket protection by declaring southern Gaza a war zone, even though it was heavily populated by ordinary Palestinians, and set rules of engagement so broad that just about anyone was a target.
With that went virtual impunity for Israeli troops no matter who they killed or in what circumstances – an impunity reinforced by Tuesday's verdict in Haifa.
The Israeli military commander in southern Gaza at the time was Colonel Pinhas "Pinky" Zuaretz. A few weeks after Corrie's death, I (as the Guardian's correspondent in Israel) spoke to him about how it was that so many children were shot by Israeli soldiers at times when there was no combat. His explanation was chilling.
At that point, three years into the second intifada, more than 400 children had been killed by the Israeli army. Nearly half were in Rafah and neighbouring Khan Yunis. One in four were under the age of 12.
I focused on the deaths of six children in a 10-week period, all in circumstances far from combat. The dead included a 12-year-old girl, Haneen Abu Sitta, killed in Rafah as she walked home from school near a security fence around one of the fortified Jewish settlements in Gaza at the time. The army made up an explanation by falsely claiming Haneen was killed during a gun battle between Israeli forces and Palestinians.
Zuaretz conceded to me that there was no battle and that the girl was shot by a soldier who had no business opening fire. It was the same with the killings of some of the other children. The colonel was fleetingly remorseful.
"Every name of a child here, it makes me feel bad because it's the fault of my soldiers. I need to learn and see the mistakes of my troops," he said. But Zuaretz was not going to do anything about it; and by the end of the interview, he was casting the killings as an unfortunate part of the struggle for Israel's very survival.
"I remember the Holocaust. We have a choice, to fight the terrorists or to face being consumed by the flames again," he said.
In court, Zuaretz said the whole of southern Gaza was a combat zone and anyone who entered parts of it had made themselves a target. But those parts included houses where Palestinians built walls within walls in their homes to protect themselves from Israeli bullets.
In that context, covering up the truth about the killings of innocents, including Corrie, became an important part of the survival strategy because of the damage the truth could do to the military's standing, not only in the rest of the world but also among Israelis.
The death of Khalil al-Mughrabi two years before Corrie died was telling. The 11-year-old boy was playing football when he was shot dead in Rafah by an Israeli soldier. The respected Israeli human rights organisations, B'Tselem, wrote to the army demanding an investigation. Several months later, the judge advocate general's office wrote back saying that Khalil was killed by soldiers who had acted with "restraint and control" to disperse a riot in the area.
But the judge advocate general's office made the mistake of attaching a copy of its own confidential investigation, which came to a very different conclusion: that the riot had been much earlier in the day and the soldiers who shot the child should not have opened fire. In the report, the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Einat Ron, then spelled out alternative false scenarios that should be offered to B'Tselem. The official account was a lie and the army knew it.
The message to ordinary soldiers was clear: you have a free hand because the military will protect you to protect itself. It is that immunity from accountability that was the road to Corrie's death.
She wasn't the only foreign victim at about that time. In the following months, Israeli soldiers shot dead James Miller, a British television documentary journalist, and Tom Hurndall, a British photographer and pro-Palestinian activist. In November 2002, an Israeli sniper had killed a British United Nations worker, Iain Hook, in Jenin in the West Bank.
British inquests returned verdicts of unlawful killings in all three deaths, but Israel rejected calls for the soldiers who killed Miller and Hook to be held to account. The Israeli military initially whitewashed Hurndall's killing but after an outcry led by his parents, and British government pressure, the sniper who shot him was sentenced to eight years in prison for manslaughter.
That sentence apparently did nothing to erode a military mindset that sees only enemies.
Three years after Corrie's death, an Israeli army officer who emptied the magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl, Iman al-Hams, and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was cleared by a military court.
Iman was shot and wounded after crossing the invisible red line around an Israeli military base in Rafah, but she was never any closer than 100 yards. The officer then left the base in order to "confirm the kill" by pumping the wounded girl full of bullets. An Israeli military investigation concluded he had acted properly.
Tuesday's court verdict in Haifa will have done nothing to end that climate of impunity. Nor anything that would have us believe that Israel's repeated proclamation that it has the "most moral army in the world" is any more true than its explanation of so many Palestinian deaths.
Yes, you're right, when you're fighting in densely populated civilian areas civilians will be killed. That is an unavoidable fact, which is why the laws of war do not categorically consider civilian deaths to be unjustified. I would've expected you to know that already given how much you rant about international law. The difference between justifiable (though tragic) collateral damage and terrorism is this: collateral damage is the result of an attack on a legitimate military target; terrorism is an attack on a target that is categorically illegitimate. But again, I'm sure you already knew that.
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much' - Why The American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End
P.116: "Indiscriminate attacks differ from direct attacks against civilians,' Israel's leading authority on International law, Yoram Dinstein, observed, in that "the attacker is not actually trying to harm the civilian population": the injury to the civilians is merely a matter of "no concern to the attacker." From the standpoint of LOIAC [Law of International Armed Conflict], there is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction: they are equally forbidden. [Yoram Dinstein - 'The Conduct of Hostilities under the law of International Armed Conflict' 2004].
Comments
B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Punitive House Demolitions from the Perspective of International Law
1 Jan 2011
House demolition is an administrative procedure carried out without trial and without proof in court of the guilt of the person because of whom the action is taken. In the past, before the policy of punitive house demolitions was renewed during the al-Aqsa intifada, the demolitions were carried out following a military order given by the regional commander pursuant to Section 119 of the Emergency Defense Regulations of 1945. The section empowers the military commander to demolish a house - in any community, neighborhood, or street - of a resident of that area who carried out a violent offense. After the demolition order was delivered to the family, the IDF allowed the family to appeal to the military commander within forty-eight hours. In a decision made in 1989, the High Court of Justice held that, in the event the appeal is denied, the family must be allowed to petition the High Court before the house is demolished.
During the current intifada, until recently, the IDF acted differently. Israel treated the action as an imperative military action. Most of the house demolitions took place at night without any prior warning and without giving the occupants a demolition order, as required by Section 119 of the Emergency Defense Regulations. The occupants were given a few minutes to remove their possessions to avoid having them buried in the rubble. Israel remained vague in its statements relating to whether the demolitions were carried out pursuant to Section 119 or were an imperative military operation.
Whatever the legal basis, punitive house demolitions flagrantly breach international law which allows destruction of property only when necessary for a military operation (article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention). According to the official commentary of the International Committee of the Red Cross, “military operation” is defined as “the movement, maneuvers, and actions of any sort, carried out by the armed forces with a view to combat.” Punitive house demolitions do not meet this definition.
International law also prohibits collective punishment, i.e. the punishment of persons for acts committed by others (article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 50 of the Hague Regulations). House demolitions are a clear case of collective punishment in that the primary victims are relatives of the persons suspected of committing an offense.
Over the years, more than 150 judgments have been given in petitions against punitive house demolitions. The petitioners raised fundamental arguments contesting the legality of the measure, made contentions on the manner in which it was implemented, and argued against the use of the measure in specific cases. Other than in rare instances, the High Court denied the petitions and accepted the state's position that the measure, which is intended to deter Palestinians from carrying out attacks, is lawful. The High Court has ruled continuously that, insofar as the offenses involved are violent, aggressive action is needed, and demolition of the houses of the suspects is proper punishment.
The High Court rejected the argument that the measure constitutes collective punishment, holding that the purpose of the demolition is not punitive, but deterrent. According to the High Court, there is no distinction between house demolition and the imprisonment of someone who happens to be the head of a family, which also results in harm to his family. This comparison is flawed, however. The purpose of imprisonment is to deny certain rights of the offender. The suffering of his family is only a side-effect. If it were possible to neutralize the effect of incarceration on the family, the objective of the imprisonment would still be achieved. It would not be affected in the least.
The argument that Section 119 is inconsistent with the Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention was also rejected. The High Court has held several times that the two instruments are not relevant because Section 119 is part of the domestic law in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and according to the two instruments, the domestic law prevails when inconsistent with their provisions. This position conflicts with the accepted understanding of international law, whereby the actions of an occupying state are limited by international law, despite the powers given to the authorities by domestic law.
Regarding the refusal to give prior warning and to permit the family to appeal to the High Court of Justice before their home is demolished, the High Court accepted the state's position that giving prior notice is liable to endanger IDF forces and thwart the action. However, this reason is inconsistent with reality. In the West Bank, at least, during the period in which houses were demolished as punishment, the IDF had effective control over the entire area and was regularly present in almost all the cities, villages, and refugee camps. Also, having turned the action into a declared policy, the families were able, in some cases, to anticipate the demolition. In some cases, following a suicide attack, the Israeli media even reported on the intention of the IDF to demolish the house of the perpetrators. Therefore, Israel could no longer justify refusal to grant the right to be heard as grounds for maintaining the “element of surprise.”
I think Brynzie's response clearly covers it, as for the Youseff Ibrahim 1993 article, it is purely shoddy journalism by an anti-islamist who in the rest of his article tries to drag the Palestinians down further into despair, basically creating a National Enquirer type article for the nyt, it’s no surprise Ibrahim no longer works for the nytimes and is now resigned to work at some racist right wing blog. Again, and still, before there was any claimed misuse ambulances were targeted and emergency care was hindered or blocked to the occupied population:
Nearly a year before Youseff's deft investigative piece:
"Two days after Aymon's death, Ismail and Mohammed Abdeen were shot dead as they warmed themselves on the roof of their home. A Gaza winter sun had finally come out. Ismail, 27, the father of four, was shot in the head and fell three stories into a pigeon coop below. As he lay face down and bleeding, soldiers tied his hands behind his back. An ambulance was denied access to the dying man for more than half an hour."
http://www.wrmea.com/component/content/ ... -gaza.html
And three years earlier, this article summarizes a State Department report,
"Israeli security forces were also accused of entering hospitals and clinics and using roadblocks to disrupt ambulance service."
http://www.wrmea.com/component/content/ ... eport.html
I can go on and post pdf links from B'tselem and other human rights organizations prior to 1993, their pdfs for those years are 200 pages long, and I am sure you will read through them, they have the info and write the State Department on how to obtain earlier reports, their archives don't back earlier than 10 years, but you can take it up with them. So to repeat myself again that given your dates of the misuse of ambulances MEANS that there was (GASP) a time before THERE WAS NO REPORTED MISUSE OF AMBULANCES, BUT THEY WERE STILL BEING ATTACKED. Ambulances are being attacked for no other reason than as another method for killing Palestinians, ambulances are searched thoroughly at checkpoints yet still delayed no matter how dire the situation, I repeat, as another method for killing Palestinians.
Again, Brynzie's posting of Finkelstein's research and references clearly cover your "facts." HAH, if you want to go case by case there is not enough room on this forum to list how the accounts of the "18 year old" searching ambulances and STILL not allowing them to pass or move, culminating to the further death and demise of Palestinians seeking medical treatment, very telling is this portion:
So ambulances "filled with explosives" are okay to shoot at when convenient or commandeer when convenient. Are they dangerous or not? In your support of israel you have deluded yourself into thinking that the "innocent" 18 year old has no choice but to target, attack, reroute, or block ambulances for fear of his own safety, but there are countless accounts of this not being true, the only threat the Palestinian imposes to the occupying army is that he is Palestinian. (Cont'd)
No it isn't beyond doubt, if it was then an Shlomo Sand would have no basis or any references for his book. Shlomo Sand tackles Halkin's claims as unsupportable. Sand pretty much debunks the DNA story, "As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA has succeeded in identifying a specific marker to the Jews...It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased!" Without a single drop of blood taken, is it a really suprise that there isn't a dna marker, is there a Christian or Muslim or Hindu DNA marker? What if the Christians decided to go on another "Crusade" they can easily state that they, too, that they are an ethnicity with ties to Palestine with a proven history. What is to stop them, there claim would be just as legitimate as the Jewish claim.
Tom Segev in his review of the book:
“Israel’s Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Sand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened—hence there was no return.”
Sand states in the Invention of the Jewish People:
Nowhere in the abundant Roman documentation is there any mention of a deportation from Judea p. 131
Long before 70 CE there were large Jewish communities outside Judea p. 143
At the height of Judaism’s expansion, in the early 3rd century CE the Jewish population constituted 7 to 8% of all the Roman empire’s inhabitants p.167
A large part of Eastern European Jewry originated in the territories of the Khazar empire p.241
In his Intro: It is quite likely that an inhabitant of Hebron is closer in origin to the ancient Hebrews than are the majority across the world who identify themselves as Jews.
With the exception of Eastern Europe...no Jewish people, as a single, cohesive entity--ever appeared.
In a separate rebuttal Sand states:
Zionism did however reconfigure the many and diverse Jewish communities into an “ethnic” people in which most of its members were to be seen as the descendants of the ancient Hebrews. As is well-known, a religious community cannot possess historical ownership rights over a land, whereas a people can. Thus the famous Zionist motto, “A people without a land for a land without a people”. Thus also the evolution of the profoundly rooted myth concerning the “Exile of Jewish people” by the Romans in the first years of the first millennium. It is indeed true that specialists of Jewish antiquity knew that the Exile had never taken place, yet up to and including the present day, most ordinary Israelis are convinced that it did indeed occur – after all, it’s inscribed in the “Declaration of Independence of Israel” and even on Israeli money bills.
Halkin states on contradictory terms: If our Polish Jew included among his distant ancestors Khazars who became Jews in the eighth century, and our Moroccan Jew counted seventh-century Berber tribesmen among his forbears, why should this have weakened the nineteenth-century ties between them, or their attachment to an ancient homeland from which others of their ancestors did come, or their desire to see Jewish independence restored there?
How is it possible to say the Polish Jew's distant ancestors are Khazars as he does in the first part of his sentence and still legitamize the Polish Jew's claim in an ancestral homeland in Palestine in the second part. Sand also goes onto state in his book that historically, many Jews never sought to emigrate to Palestine, that even after the Holocaust that:
"But the truth is that, even if there was great appeal in the Zionist myth, most of the Yiddish-speaking Jews did not want to emigrate to their “ancestral land”. Instead, they chose to emigrate to America. If the US had not blocked East European immigration from the 1920s onwards, it is highly questionable whether the state of Israel would ever have been founded. This merciless closing of the gates continued, as is well-known, before and after the Second World War and thus caused great suffering to the victims of the Nazi regime. It was much easier to compel the Arab population in Palestine to accept these miserable strangers that Europe had expelled rather than to receive them in the US. The majority of immigrants from Soviet Russia in the 1980s would also have preferred to emigrate to the West, but the State of Israel pressured the American president to help prevent such anti-patriotic tendencies. Eventually, these immigrants were obliged to land in Israel."
http://inventionofthejewishpeople.com/2 ... ial-times/
Halkin also states: Sand, who studied at the École des hautes études in Paris and has written a book on Georges Sorel, would snort derisively if told that Sorel’s fellow Frenchmen were not a people because some of their progenitors were indigenous Celts while others were Germanic or Roman invaders. Yet when it comes to the Jews, he asks us to take a similar proposition seriously.
Halkin here is deliberately twisting what Sand has stated. The French are the people of France. The Jewish people refers to an ethnos created by Zionists to call on Jews to inhabit and usurp the land of Palestine, two different things. So his example does not address anything what Sand writes. I believe the core of Sand's thesis is, and I firmly believe he won't be the first jew or israeli to confront the truth in israel's creation is that there was no "historical right" to Palestine. As a professor, along with Finkelstein, they are not able to look past the striking similarities of what the Nazi's alleged to justify their destruction:
"This sort of "historical right" was also seized by the Romantic precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the Nazi's themselves, to justify the conquest of the East. Germany was said to have legitmate claims on Slavic territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was "already inhabited by the Germans in primeval times", fertilized by the most noble ancient German blood" 'germanic for many centuries and long before a Slav ste foot there," "Teutonic-German Volksboden for 3,000 years as far as the Vistula .... In the 6th and 7th century after Christ the Slavs pushed outward from their eastern homelands and into the ancient German land ... admittedly only for a few hundred years," etc. The Slavic "interlopers," by contrast, were seen as "history's squatters" who merely "existed" in surroundings that they "could not master"...A half century earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective Jewish state as Europe's "wall of defense against Asia," and 'an outpost of civilization against barbarism." page 101, Finkelstein Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict.
Finkelstein:
"In any event, Zionism's "historical right" to Palestine was neither historical nor a right. It was not historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right, except in the Romantic "mysticism" of "blood and soil" and the Romantic "cult" of "death, heroes, and graves." (The quoted phrases are Anita Shapira's.)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... ntent;col1
Two millennia of non-Jewish settlement, where does that history, the history of the Palestinians go, does it disappear into thin air? "Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore--and the run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over--like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?"--- Langston Hughes I am not smoking anything or ignoring a thing, I know my history, I don’t have to read a damn book or read some Zionist tract about how his imagined “right” supersedes the right of my family that worked, labored and birthed on the land for centuries to pass on to its legal and rightful heirs.
Jimmy Carter called what Americans knew about the Palestinian conflict “abominable.” Donald Neff former senior editor of Time Magazine: “Confusion about the origins of the conflict all too often has obscured Americans’ understanding of its true dimension. It began as a conflict resulting from immigrants struggling to displace the local majority population. All else is derivative from this basic reality.” (Cont'd)
It is again, no doubt, the policy of the Israeli government, AGAIN everything you stated here is an outright LIE. Perhaps your grasp of English idiom is not quite perfect. And I suggest you bookmark this website and brush up:
http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/i ... tml?page=2
No question
This idiom means that something is certain or definite.
There is no question that you knew this. I do think you are lazy and lying about the transfer of Palestinians, but I don't think you are an idiot... South Africa Apartheid ended, the Berlin Wall came down... Justice for the oppressed was attainable and change was only possible when people became informed. The whole idiom thing brings your twisted responses down another level. I think you have no other purpose here on this thread or on the amt but to spread misinformation. So far this year, Israel has demolished 285 Palestinian homes and other structures, displacing 477 people, many for the 2nd or 3rd time. Again, these acts are not to make the conditions more liveable for the Palestinians, the whole of Israel's policy is to make life miserable in effect to force a transfer. You can play with words and idioms and connotations, but the reality on the ground is that land is STILL being taken, and the rightful owners of that land are being moved off of it. Zionists have condemned the Palestinians to constant losses of life, land and livelihood, but yet still like all murderous colonists want to write the history, control the narrative and dictate which words are to be used, which words aren't. Transfer, expulsion and systematic humiliation all apply to the suffering of the Palestinians. Your statement that the desruction of houses is "deplorable" and it should stop, is an empty statement, you are painting yourself as the compassionate zionist, but with the excuses of atroticities, such as transfer, the attack on ambulances, etc. you consistently belie yourself, you are trying to ride two donkeys with one ass. The two state solution is a concept, if executed will only come at the expense of the of lives of Palestinians. Zionism can't be reconciled with what was is justly due to the Palestinians. If there is to be peace, there must be equality. Zionism isn't equality, it can only exist with jewish supremacy.
Is that what the whole zionist enterprise was and is about? Responding to anti-semitism? I can't think of anything more dangerous and destructive to the victims of anti-semitism. So this response seems to be Yes, anti-semitism is correct, can't beat'em, so we will go and usurp another nation's land over here, out of the way of the way anti-semites. If you are comparing zionism to American racism, then let's compare. If the African Americans chose as a response to racism was "to go back to Africa", then question answered, problem solved?! If the women's movement in the US decided the laws against them needed a response and in their response sanctioned the claims against them, as does zionism with anti-semitism, then what would have that done for equality? Malcolm X and Susan B Anthony got it all wrong, just wasted time on their part. How unbelievably ridiculous.
Zinn never said that the jews were pure and should be an innocent sacrificial lamb, his books have done nothing but reveal that NO one should be sacrificed. Protecting yourself against "enemies" does not include the right to steal, destroy and be the aggressor. Zinn stated on the Holocaust:
“If the Holocaust is to have any meaning, we must transfer our anger to today's brutalities. We must respect the memory of the Jewish Holocaust by refusing to allow atrocities to take place now.
When Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history and look away from the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible irony, doing exactly what the rest of the world did in allowing the genocide to happen."
And stating that the Holocaust victims would have traded in that "purity" to protect themselves is oversimplifying the matter. Some of the survivors of the Holocaust did survive by despicable means, and some perished because they refused to trade in that "purity" and survive at the cost of others. You are not a spokesperson for the victims of the Holocaust, but you have no qualms about using them for your zionist beliefs. Noam Chomsky stated when referring to a Zionist leader, Nachem Goldman : "he said it's sacrilege to use the Holocaust as a justification for oppressing others. He [Goldman] was referring to something very real: exploitation of probably the world's most horrifying atrocity in order to justify oppression of others. That kind of manipulation is really sick." To use and re-use their ashes, as your last statement unabashedly does, to give full license to kill, bully and build nuclear arms which have the ability to create more death and destruction than ovens and camps and to state that this is being all done in their name, is, to echo Chomsky, sick.
Thanks for posting this. Interesting stuff.
Not bad mate, not bad. Long time, no see.
A long overdue thanks for your posts, too.
Here's a good link, the article by Lisa Goldman, what I find interesting is at the end of the article, they post facebook comments made by zionists about the boy.
http://972mag.com/author/lisa/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ma ... mmigration
African asylum seekers injured in Tel Aviv race riots
Violence breaks out after inflammatory speeches as protesters join politicians to demonstrate against rising Israeli immigration
Conal Urquhart and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 May 2012
Dozens of African asylum seekers were injured as race riots broke out in Tel Aviv on Wednesday night.
Thousands of protesters joined politicians to protest against the arrival of an estimated 60,000 asylum seekers in Israel in recent years. But after inflammatory speeches the demonstration broke out into violence.
Witnesses reported seeing men and women being beaten and shops and properties being attacked. Police said nine people were arrested.
The protesters were addressed by politicians including Miri Regev and Danny Danon of the ruling Likud Party. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Regev described the asylum seekers as a "cancer in our body," and promised to do everything "in order to bring them back to where they belong".
Danny Danon, who heads a lobby group which seeks to deal with the issue of illegal immigration, said the only solution to the problem would be to "begin talking about expulsion".
"We must expel the infiltrators from Israel. We should not be afraid to say the words 'expulsion now'," he was reported as saying.
Thousands of asylum seekers have arrived in Israel from Eritea and South Sudan, escaping poverty but also oppressive regimes and political instability.Most are bound for Europe, but find Libya blocked to them by the government and civil war.
Often travellers are taken to Israel by Bedouin people smugglers, abused and held to ransom for months at a time before they are deposited on the border where Israel is building a new fence. Once in Israel, they are looked after by Israeli non-governmental agencies and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
Some work illegally and the majority live in the poorest areas of Tel Aviv where they find themselves in competition with working class Israelis mostly from a Middle Eastern or north African background. The sparse greens and parks of south Tel Aviv are dominated by the African migrants who sleep there at night.
Anger has been growing in the city and earlier this year the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the migrants threatened the Jewish character of Israel.
Despite what you apparently believe about me (without ever having met me, or even trying to have a discussion of this issue with me in a calm, respectful, non-confrontational tone), my compassion for the Palestinians is truly heartfelt, and my anger at Israeli policy is sincere. I am, however, a Zionist, and I'm not going to apologize for that. My Zionism does not mean that I don't believe that Palestinians should have a state of their own where they can live in peace and with dignity (in fact, I'd say that my Zionism, to a great extent, motivates this belief). If you're willing to discuss this issue in private without the anger (or at least try to) I'd be more than happy to do so. I really believe that constructive dialogue between people on opposite sides of this conflict will do a lot more good than hatefully trying to undermine the legitimacy of the other side.
Vitriol? Calm, respectful, non confrontational tone? I am not the one with the gun, or the tanks or the military aircraft or nuclear weapons. But lets not forget that I am the angry vitriolic confrontational one. Not sure how I should respond to the "good zionist." How about bowing, would bowing help? I am supposed to be hospitable, huh? Forgot my role, anything else I can politely help you to, I am means besides my house, land and life? No hatred, just pure unvitriolic nonconfrontational submission to the man with the gun and the bomb who supports creating a more comfortable open air jail cell out of compassion. I mean, are 200 settlements in the West Bank enough? Maybe we can get Abbas to the negotiating table for this two state solution and expand on those. And then we can shove the Palestinians inside israel into the bantustans, ghettos, open air prison cells and ta dah, problem solved.
Sand's book was a bestseller in israel, a lot of israelis do care what he thinks. A lot of israelis know what their true history is, some lie about it, delude themselves, or state "frankly none of it matters at all." There will be more like Sand whether you think he matters or not. Israel is having a demographic "problem." Israel will not exist as it is. The Palestinian population is growing, for it to continue to exist, the apartheid system they have in place will have to become more oppressive. That is the reality, "the here and now" and that is what you have selected to justify and defend, an undemocratic apartheid state supporting jewish supremacy over the indigenous population. That is zionism, liberal or right, in a nutshell. There are many Jews who don't consider themselves a "nation" and are against the state of israel and refuse to live there. There was never an israel before 1948, and before the creation of zionism there never has been a call or desire by the world jewry to settle in Palestine. The israeli right have a better argument than Sand does? Yes, indeed, I have heard it all before, the keys and title to the land that the majority of Palestinians own belong to houses in Jordan, right? The Palestinians will never concede their right to return to their homeland over to immigrants from Russia, Poland, Morocco, Brooklyn, whatever. Where is the justice in that? Israel is against justice and equality, but for peace? That's the joke that has been repeated to the Palestinians and the international community perpetually. Look at history, Apartheid and inequality does not last. If there is room for an immigrant from Brooklyn, then there is room from a Palestinian from Palestine.
Also, how exactly is it that in your mind my support for a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza is equivalent to support for a "more comfortable open air prison"?
come on byrnzie.. its not racism.. i know perhaps im being presumptive but this is to do with ethnicity and i think you know that. i think you know that racism is a social construct.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
And there you have a microcosm of the israeli propaganda machine, the zionists agitate, lie, twist, spin and then blame the Palestinians for getting "angry" or resisting. They want "calm" negotiating or debate, when they have built walls, checkpoints and consficate land and people. The tanks roll in, the military helicopters fly overhead, a nuclear arsenal is at hand but the zionists would like to have all believe that the Palestinians are the angry arabs not willing to negotiate. Which leads to the two state solution debate, the Oslo Accords, a way to expedite the Allon plan of 1967 of "geographic inclusion, demographic exclusion." In return for the collaboration of Arafat, the Palestinians were supposed to get an independent state. "From the beginning of negotiations, restrictions were implemented on the Palestinians, first that the Palestinians don't constitute a single people, second, the fragmentation of occupied Palestinian territory into discrete units separated from each other by areas of israeli control, third, the transfer of the day to day administration and policing of the population to a severely limited form of Palestinian government and fourth, the maintenance of Israeli control over all external borders, airspace and territorial waters, so that all Palestinian contact with the outside world would be mediated by Israel" ----Saree Makdisi, p.81-82, Palestine Inside Out From there Arafat was to "negotiate" a state. The end result was the further cantonization, ie, imprisonment of Palestinians. The wall was built, settlements accelerated, and the creation of bypass roads, roads that only Jews are allowed to use, increased. The wall cut off Palestinians from their farm land, health services, jobs, education, etc. The two state solution? No thanks. The last time a two state solution was mentioned by a world leader was Obama, who stated that based on 67 borders the Palestinians should be able to build their own viable state. And that went over well didn't it? Netanyahu rushed over to the POTUS and bullied him into silence, the supposed leader of the free world. Did Obama dare to speak up about a two state "solution" again?
I am your equal, I have the right to live in my home country as your equal.
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much' - Why The American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End
P.116: "Indiscriminate attacks differ from direct attacks against civilians,' Israel's leading authority on International law, Yoram Dinstein, observed, in that "the attacker is not actually trying to harm the civilian population": the injury to the civilians is merely a matter of "no concern to the attacker." From the standpoint of LOIAC [Law of International Armed Conflict], there is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction: they are equally forbidden. [Yoram Dinstein - 'The Conduct of Hostilities under the law of International Armed Conflict' 2004].
Tell that to the 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl who was shot 17 times at close range by an Israeli Captain. '[Witnesses] said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.
...[Witnesses] described her as at least 100 yards from the military post which was in any case well protected.
...After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
You could also tell it to the wheelchair-bound Palestinian man who was shot and then run over by a tank:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/ ... -does-fit/
Human Rights Watch reports that of the “twenty-two civilian killings” during the Israeli siege of Jenin, “Many of them were killed willfully or unlawfully, and in some cases constituted war crimes. Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man, was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on April 10 as he was moving his wheelchair—equipped with a white flag—down a major road in Jenin. Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a quadriplegic, was crushed to death in the rubble of his home on April 7 after IDF soldiers refused to allow his family to remove him from their home before a bulldozer destroyed it.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/06/israel
Israeli soldiers tell of indiscriminate killings by army and a culture of impunity
In recent months dozens of soldiers, including the son of an an Israeli general, all recently discharged, have come forward to share their stories of how they were ordered in briefings to shoot to kill unarmed people without fear of reprimand.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/06/israel1
Israeli troops say they were given shoot-to-kill order
Israeli military prosecutors have opened criminal investigations following allegations by soldiers that they carried out illegal shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed Palestinians.
Some of the soldiers, who also spoke to the Guardian, say they acted on standing orders in some parts of the Palestinian territories to open fire on people regardless of whether they were armed or not, or posed any physical threat.
The soldiers say that in some situations they were ordered to shoot anyone who appeared on a roof or a balcony, anyone who appeared to be kneeling to the ground or anyone who appeared on the street at a designated time. Among those killed by soldiers acting on the orders were young children.
Also, on the subject of not intentionally harming civilians, how do you explain the following?:
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much' - Why The American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End
P.145: In February 2008 HRW [Human Rights Watch] issued a report entitled 'Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006'. The report found that Israel dropped as many as 4.6 million cluster submunitions on south Lebanon during the war. It was the "most extensive use of cluster munitions anywhere in the world since the 1991 Gulf war," while relative to the size of the targeted area the density of the attack was historically unprecendented. (Apparently the only reason Israel did not drop yet more cluster munitions was that it's stocks had been depleted). Some 90 percent of these cluster munitions were dropped "during the final three days when Israel knew a settlement was imminent," the U.N ceasefire resolution having already been passed but not yet gone into effect.
P146: Israel's cluster munition attacks on Lebanon were indiscriminate in multiple respects: the inaccuracy of their delivery (or carrier) systems; the "wide dispersal patterns" of such weapons; and the "high dud rates" endangering civilians returning to their homes after the ceasefire. In addition, the saturation use of these weapons in civilian areas multiplied manyfold the inherent dangers posed by them.
P.147: HRW reported that Israel's cluster attacks "blanketed" both "built-up areas" and "fields", resulting in the high saturation of towns and villages," and the "systematic 'flooding' of certain villages and populated areas."
The "vast majority" of cluster munitions targeted "population centers" such as towns and villages. In the village of Yohmor, "bomblets littered the ground from one end...to the other. They were on the roofs of all the houses, in gardens and spread across roads and paths. Some were even found inside houses." In the village of Zwtar al-Sharkiyeh deminers had to remove "2000-3000 submunitions" inundating a primary school and it's environs, although "Hezbollah had not used the school at any time during the war and there had been no Hezbollah forces anywhere in the town."
Meanwhile, according to a "very conservative" estimate, "submunitions contaminated at least 26 percent of south Lebanon's agricultural land," transforming olive and citrus groves and tobacco fields into "de facto minefields." Many fields were simply "abandoned," while desperate farmers continued to work others despite the lethal hazards. From the ceasefire until December 2009 the explosion of duds caused 227 civilian casualties, of whom 35 percent were children.
P148: According to HRW, individuals bear responsibility for "war crimes" if they "intentionally or recklessly" authorize or conduct attacks "that would indiscriminately or disproportionately harm civilians." In other iterations HRW defines war crimes as attacks that are "knowingly or recklessly indiscriminate or deliberate"; the "knowing or reckless disregard for the foreseeable effects on civilians and other protected objects"; "deliberate attacks on civilians, as well as indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks when committed with knowledge or reckless indifference to their illegal character": military justification and with criminal intent."
P.149: Consider now HRW's description of the Israeli cluster attacks on Lebanon:
By their very nature, these dangerous, volatile submunitions [i.e, the duds] cannot distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, forseeably endangering civilians for months or years to come.
It is inconceivable that Israel...did not know that...it's strikes would have a lasting humanitarian impact.
Many of the cluster attacks on populated areas do not appear to have had a definite military target. Our researchers...found only one village with clear evidence of the presence of Hezbollah forces out of the more than 40 towns and villages they visited.
The staggering number of cluster munitions rained on south Lebanon over the three days immediately before a negotiated ceasefire went into effect puts in doubt the claim by the IDF that it's attacks were aimed at specific targets or even strategic locations, as opposed to being efforts to blanket large areas with explosives and duds.
Cluster munition attacks on or near population centers, like those launched by Israel, give rise to a presumption that they are indiscriminate, as the weapons are highly imprecise with a large area effect that regularly causes foreseeable and excessive civilian casualties during strikes and afterwards.
P.150: Given the extremely large number of submunitions employed and their known failure rates, harm to remaning and returning civilians was entirely foreseeable.
Israel was well aware of the continuing harm to Lebanese civilians from the unexploded duds that remained from it's prior use of munitions in South Lebanon in 1978 and 1982.
The paucity of evidence of specific military objectives, the known dangers of cluster munitions, the timing of large scale attacks days before an anticipated ceasefire, and the massive scope of the attacks combine to point to a conclusion that the attacks were of an indiscriminate and disproportionate character.
A senior U.N demining official said he had "no doubt" that Israel had deliberately hit built-up areas with cluster munitions, stating "these cluster bombs were dropped in the middle of villages".
Israeli soldiers were well aware of the large numbers of duds their cluster strikes were producing. A soldier said that his...commander gave a "pep talk" after a period of heavy fire, saying, "just wait until Hezbollah finds the little presents we had left them".
Given the sheer number of cluster duds on the ground, casualties are unavoidable.
P.151: In South Lebanon in 2006, Israel employed a means of warfare that was likely to cause significant harm to civilians - unreliable and inaccurate submunitions used widely and heavily in populated areas. Despite ample past experience of the deadly effects of cluster duds on the civilian population of South Lebanon, awareness of the impending end of the war, and the knowledge that there would be a legacy of unexploded duds creating de facto minefields, the IDF did not refrain from launching these attacks...The post-ceasefire casualties have to our knowledge all been civilians or deminers, and civilian access to agricultural areas and property has ben severely affected. The aftereffects of israel's cluster strikes were foreseeable by the IDF.
The paucity of evidence of specific military objectives, the known dangers of cluster munitions, the time of large-scale attacks days before an anticipated ceasefire, and the massive scope of the attacks themselves lead to the conclusion that the attacks were of an indiscriminate and disproportionate character.
We found scant evidence that would demonstrate a concrete and direct military advantage with relation to any possible military objectives, such as attacking fighters, rocket launchers, or strategic locales.
When considering the foreseeable civilian damage that could ensue, the anticipated and soon-approaching end to the armed conflict weighs heavily against Israel's last-minute saturation of civilian areas with old cluster stockpiles...The fact that duds would turn civilian areas into de facto minefields, given the large number of submunitions employed and their known failure rates, was foreseeable - testimony from soldiers (and the reported IDF prohibition of firing cluster munitions into areas it would subsequently enter) indicate that the IDF knew this.
A composite distillation of these HRW statements would read: Just before an agreed-upon ceasefire Israel saturated Lebanese civilian areas having no military targets with cluster munitions; the inevitable and foreseeable - in fact foreseen - consequence was that many Lebanese civilians were injured and killed.
P.152: Like HRW, the U.N Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli cluster attacks were indiscriminate...many towns and villages were littered with the bomblets as well as large tracts of agricultural land," and that "the use of cluster munitions by [the] IDF was of no military advantage."
No, racism isn't a social construct. You were right the first time; it has to do with ethnicity.
rac·ism
[rey-siz-uhm] Show IPA
noun
1.
a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2.
a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3.
hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ju ... grant-hate
Israel turns on its refugees
Firebombing of house containing 10 Eritreans is latest example of growing racism stoked by politicians and media
Harriet Sherwood
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 June 2012
Behind the metal door and up a narrow, blackened stairwell, fear hung in the air along with the smell of smoke. No one wanted to talk. A young woman scrubbing clothes in a plastic basin mutely shook her head. A man sweeping the floor with a toddler clinging to his legs said one word: "No." Another, bringing bags of food from the nearby market, brushed past without making eye contact.
As for the 10 Eritreans who had been trapped in a ground-floor apartment when the blaze began at 3am, they had gone. Four were in hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation; the rest had fled.
The overnight firebombing of a downtown Jerusalem building which houses refugees from sub-Saharan Africa was the latest in a string of attacks set against the backdrop of rising anti-migrant sentiment in Israel, fuelled by inflammatory comments by prominent politicians. Often described as infiltrators by ministers, the media, the army and government officials, migrants have also had labels such as "cancer", "garbage", "plague" and "rapists" applied to them by Israeli politicians.
The arsonists who struck the Jerusalem apartment, located in a religious neighbourhood of the city, scrawled "get out of our neighbourhood" on its outside wall. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said: "This was a targeted attack which we believe was racially motivated." The foreign ministry condemned the "heinous crime".
But on the street outside the building, the official response had little resonance with a man who arrived in Israel from Eritrea 14 years ago but was too scared to give his name. "People look at you, they curse you. They say, 'Go back to your country.' We are very afraid," he said.
Tensions were inevitable, according to Moshe Cohen, the owner of a nearby jeweller's shop. "They drink, they fight among themselves, they play African music on shabbat [the Jewish sabbath] when people want to pray. What started in Tel Aviv happens here now."
He was referring to a series of firebombings of apartments and a nursery over the past month in southern Tel Aviv, an area in which African migrants are concentrated. Shops run by or serving migrants were smashed up and looted in a violent demonstration last month in which Africans were attacked. Many Israelis were shocked at the display of aggressive racism in their most liberal city.
Political leaders did not allow the violence to temper their verbal onslaught against the migrants. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel's national identity was at risk from the flood of "illegal infiltrators". Interior minister Eli Yishai suggested that Aids-infected migrants were raping Israeli women, and all, "without exception", should be locked up pending deportation. They do not believe "this country belongs to us, to the white man", he said in an interview.
And, while touring the fence that Israel is building along its border with Egypt to deter migrants, MP Aryeh Eldad said: "Anyone that penetrates Israel's border should be shot – a Swedish tourist, Sudanese from Eritrea, Eritreans from Sudan, Asians from Sinai. Whoever touches Israel's border – shot." He later conceded that such a policy may not be feasible "because bleeding hearts groups will immediately begin to shriek and turn to the courts".
According to the immigration authority, there are 62,000 migrants in Israel, where the population is 7.8m. Over 2,000 migrants entered Israel via Egypt last month, compared with 637 last May. The construction of the 150-mile (240km) southern border fence, due to be completed later this year, is thought to be increasing in the short term the numbers attempting to cross into Israel .
Nearly all are given temporary permits to stay in Israel which must be renewed every three or four months and specifically exclude permission to work. Many end up being employed on a casual basis for a pittance, living in overcrowded, rundown apartments and confined to the fringes of society. In desperation, some turn to petty crime.
On Sunday, a law came into effect allowing the Israeli authorities to jail migrants for up to three years. People helping or sheltering migrants could face prison sentences of between five and 15 years.
Netanyahu also ordered ministers to accelerate efforts to deport 25,000 migrants from countries with which Israel has diplomatic relations, principally South Sudan, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Ethiopia.
He conceded it was not possible to deport around 35,000 migrants from Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia. Eritreans and Sudanese make up more than 90% of those who have illegally crossed the Israel-Egypt border in recent months.
One out of 4,603 applicants was granted asylum status last year.
Although some commentators and community activists have said that Israel, a state founded by and for refugees from persecution, should be sympathetic and welcoming to those fleeing violence and oppression, the prevailing mood is one of intolerance.
"This phenomenon is getting bigger and bigger," said Poriya Gets of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, based in Tel Aviv. It was being stoked by politicians and rightwing organisations, she added. "We now see hotspots of tension between refugees and local people in many towns."
Her organisation had also been targeted. "We've had phone calls, people cursing and saying ugly things, like, 'We hope you will be raped and we are coming to burn you.' The politicians must take responsibility. They are trying to make the fire bigger."
In case there's still any doubt as to the complete falsity of your comment:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ry-mindset
Rachel Corrie verdict exposes Israeli military mindset
Corrie's parents have not received justice, but their quest reveals the lie of the IDF's claim to be the world's 'most moral army'
Chris McGreal
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 August 2012
Reporters covering Israel are routinely confronted with the question: why not call Hamas a terrorist organisation? It's a fair point. How else to describe blowing up families on buses but terrorism?
But the difficulty lies in what then to call the Israeli army when it, too, at particular times and places, has used indiscriminate killing and terror as a means of breaking Palestinian civilians. One of those places was Rafah, in the southern tip of the Gaza strip, where Rachel Corrie was crushed by a military bulldozer nine years ago as she tried to stop the Israeli army going about its routine destruction of Palestinian homes.
An Israeli judge on Tuesday perpetuated the fiction that Corrie's death was a terrible accident and upheld the results of the military's own investigation, widely regarded as such a whitewash that even the US ambassador to Israel described it as neither thorough nor credible. Corrie's parents may have failed in their attempt to see some justice for their daughter, but in their struggle they forced a court case that established that her death was not arbitrary but one of a pattern of killings as the Israeli army pursued a daily routine of attacks intended to terrorise the Palestinian population of southern Gaza into submission.
The case laid bare the state of the collective Israeli military mind, which cast the definition of enemies so widely that children walking down the street were legitimate targets if they crossed a red line that was invisible to everyone but the soldiers looking at it on their maps. The military gave itself a blanket protection by declaring southern Gaza a war zone, even though it was heavily populated by ordinary Palestinians, and set rules of engagement so broad that just about anyone was a target.
With that went virtual impunity for Israeli troops no matter who they killed or in what circumstances – an impunity reinforced by Tuesday's verdict in Haifa.
The Israeli military commander in southern Gaza at the time was Colonel Pinhas "Pinky" Zuaretz. A few weeks after Corrie's death, I (as the Guardian's correspondent in Israel) spoke to him about how it was that so many children were shot by Israeli soldiers at times when there was no combat. His explanation was chilling.
At that point, three years into the second intifada, more than 400 children had been killed by the Israeli army. Nearly half were in Rafah and neighbouring Khan Yunis. One in four were under the age of 12.
I focused on the deaths of six children in a 10-week period, all in circumstances far from combat. The dead included a 12-year-old girl, Haneen Abu Sitta, killed in Rafah as she walked home from school near a security fence around one of the fortified Jewish settlements in Gaza at the time. The army made up an explanation by falsely claiming Haneen was killed during a gun battle between Israeli forces and Palestinians.
Zuaretz conceded to me that there was no battle and that the girl was shot by a soldier who had no business opening fire. It was the same with the killings of some of the other children. The colonel was fleetingly remorseful.
"Every name of a child here, it makes me feel bad because it's the fault of my soldiers. I need to learn and see the mistakes of my troops," he said. But Zuaretz was not going to do anything about it; and by the end of the interview, he was casting the killings as an unfortunate part of the struggle for Israel's very survival.
"I remember the Holocaust. We have a choice, to fight the terrorists or to face being consumed by the flames again," he said.
In court, Zuaretz said the whole of southern Gaza was a combat zone and anyone who entered parts of it had made themselves a target. But those parts included houses where Palestinians built walls within walls in their homes to protect themselves from Israeli bullets.
In that context, covering up the truth about the killings of innocents, including Corrie, became an important part of the survival strategy because of the damage the truth could do to the military's standing, not only in the rest of the world but also among Israelis.
The death of Khalil al-Mughrabi two years before Corrie died was telling. The 11-year-old boy was playing football when he was shot dead in Rafah by an Israeli soldier. The respected Israeli human rights organisations, B'Tselem, wrote to the army demanding an investigation. Several months later, the judge advocate general's office wrote back saying that Khalil was killed by soldiers who had acted with "restraint and control" to disperse a riot in the area.
But the judge advocate general's office made the mistake of attaching a copy of its own confidential investigation, which came to a very different conclusion: that the riot had been much earlier in the day and the soldiers who shot the child should not have opened fire. In the report, the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Einat Ron, then spelled out alternative false scenarios that should be offered to B'Tselem. The official account was a lie and the army knew it.
The message to ordinary soldiers was clear: you have a free hand because the military will protect you to protect itself. It is that immunity from accountability that was the road to Corrie's death.
She wasn't the only foreign victim at about that time. In the following months, Israeli soldiers shot dead James Miller, a British television documentary journalist, and Tom Hurndall, a British photographer and pro-Palestinian activist. In November 2002, an Israeli sniper had killed a British United Nations worker, Iain Hook, in Jenin in the West Bank.
British inquests returned verdicts of unlawful killings in all three deaths, but Israel rejected calls for the soldiers who killed Miller and Hook to be held to account. The Israeli military initially whitewashed Hurndall's killing but after an outcry led by his parents, and British government pressure, the sniper who shot him was sentenced to eight years in prison for manslaughter.
That sentence apparently did nothing to erode a military mindset that sees only enemies.
Three years after Corrie's death, an Israeli army officer who emptied the magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl, Iman al-Hams, and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was cleared by a military court.
Iman was shot and wounded after crossing the invisible red line around an Israeli military base in Rafah, but she was never any closer than 100 yards. The officer then left the base in order to "confirm the kill" by pumping the wounded girl full of bullets. An Israeli military investigation concluded he had acted properly.
Tuesday's court verdict in Haifa will have done nothing to end that climate of impunity. Nor anything that would have us believe that Israel's repeated proclamation that it has the "most moral army in the world" is any more true than its explanation of so many Palestinian deaths.
Care to respond to this Yosi?