i noticed asking him questions doesn't really bring any answers....
...and I don't see you contributing anything that would require me to answer you.
i am talking about the footage of the palestinian children that was broadcast on american media, most notably on fox news, that shows them dancing in the streets holding up peace signs. american media portrayed it as them celebrating 9/11 and claiming "victory".
you are the one making the accusation, i would think that you would at least know about this before you start making false claims being passed off as facts...
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
Resolution 181 gave what now is the country of Jordan to the arabs and the historical area west of the Jordan River in Israel to the Jews.
No it didn't. You really need to put down your 'Israel apologists handbook of 100 bullshit excuses for ethnic cleansing and Apartheid' for a second and address the facts instead.
The people who began calling themselves "palestinians" in the 1960's are simply arabs just as the other arabs in the middle east. All of the arabs came from the area of Arabia and spoke many dialects of Arabic. The arabs who lived in Israel before that time never had a government, never had a distinct currency, never had a capitol, never had any real accomplishments.
People who live in England, America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all speak English, therefore are they all English? Your use of the term 'Arab' to pretend that every Arabic speaking person in that part of the World is the same is just a lazy Orientalist fantasy.
No other people besides the Jews have ever considered Jerusalem as their capitol.
Really?
Here are the groups that have the greatest claim to the city:
A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.
B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second millennium BCE.
C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.
D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under the Sasanids.
E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and introduce a Syrian one.
F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.
G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin’s dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.
There has never been a distinct place called "East Jerusalem" before the arabs in Israel began calling it that for political reasons
Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. This annexation is considered illegal under international law.
'The expansion of Jerusalem’s borders incorporated not only the Jordanian municipality of Jerusalem but also land from surrounding Arab villages comprising close to one and a half times the size of Israeli and Jordanian Jerusalem combined. This de facto territorial annexation was never recognized by the international community and was declared to contravene international law, inter alia, in UN General Assembly Resolution 2253 and UN Security Council Resolution 478 (both of which passed unopposed).'
http://www.diakonia.se/sa/node.asp?node=841 'Annexation by the use or threat of force is prohibited under international law, as set forth in Article 2 of the UN Charter. This principle was restated in GA Resolution 2625 (XXV) of 1970, which noted that states must not use force to violate existing international boundaries or to solve international disputes, including territorial ones.
In 1980, the Israeli Knesset passed "Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel" which, on a higher constitutional level, declared Jerusalem to be Israel 's "eternal and indivisible" capital including the occupied East Jerusalem territory. In response to this basic law, the UN Security Council (UNSC) affirmed that acquisition of territory, annexation, by force is forbidden according to international law and confirmed the continued application of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the areas annexed by Israel. It also called upon member states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from the city.'
Today in Israel there are some 120 different languages and dialects spoken due to the influx of people coming home to Israel from all over the world.
Home? How is Israel the 'home' of someone born in New York or Moscow? Or Peru?: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/07/israel1 How 90 Peruvians became the latest Jewish settlers When a delegation of rabbis travelled to Lima to convert a group of South American Indians to Judaism, they added just one condition: come and live with us in Israel. As soon as these new Jews arrived in the country, they were bussed straight to settlements in the disputed territories. The Guardian, Wednesday 7 August 2002
The majority of Jews in Israel do speak Hebrew and it is the official language taught in schools, commerce, government, etc. Even most arabs speak Hebrew and many Jews speak arabic because of their interaction.
That's all very quaint and self-serving, but when the Zionist movement began, Jews had no common language and their traditions were in many cases wildly dissimilar or simply abandoned altogether. Zionism was a movement that advocated not so much the defense of an ethnic group, as the formation of such a group in Palestine, where those who were thought to fit a certain semi-racial category were to find refuge.
It appears you, Byrnzie, bought into the arab propoganda, hook line and sinker - but it seems to me like I won't be able to convince you of your error.
I don't deal in propaganda and bad history. I deal in the facts.
What good do the "palestinians" think is going to come out of sending 250+rockets into Israel this past week alone? Do you think Israel is going to sit idly by and not defend herself? Remember, the Israelis don't teach their kids how "honorable" it is to their family to engage in suicide bombings, either.
The rockets were a response to Israel's criminal extra-judicial assassination.
As for Israeli's supposedly existing on some moral high ground in relation to what they teach their kids, is this why Israeli settler children are encouraged to throw stones and rocks at Palestinian schoolchildren and spit at them?
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49730
'Leaving school in the afternoon, the [school]girls are subjected to abuse and intimidation by settler youths as they walk home. At one point, a settler boy, face contorted with hatred, viciously hurls stones at the group, injuring one.
...A particularly disturbing feature of settler culture is the role played by children, often very young, in initiating anti-Palestinian violence.
“The usual incidents,” recalls one soldier in Soldiers’ Testimonies from Hebron 2005-2007 (published by Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence), “are when Palestinian children finish school and they have to be protected, because otherwise they get beaten up by the Jewish kids.
...Spitting in the face of Palestinian passers-by is a regular event often encouraged by settler parents: “I saw a (settler) child, about three years-old walking along the ‘Prayer Route’, and a little Arab child passed him by. Just a little kid. What does he know? Also about three years-old.
“So the (settler) child spits at him thickly, square in the face. Really extreme … And his father walks with him, hand in hand, saying absolutely nothing.”
In another typical incident, a group of looting settler children emerged from a Palestinian shop they had just trashed. They saw an old Palestinian man in the street and, as one soldier remembers, “literally sprayed his eyes with teargas and broke his cane”.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/w ... ltops/6812
Their children dodge sticks and stones -— from settler children (and their parents) -— on their way to school every day as soldiers watch on indifferently; I and several other internationals accompanied the students to document and even shield the settler kids’ attacks.
Out of one house came Jamilya, whose mother was recently attacked by a settler girl who incited a mob to come rip the family’s door off. Their windows are caged like all others on the street, to block stones; occasional cracks show where small rocks still get through. At the military station, Jamilya climbed a set of stairs to her right and then entered school via a narrow stone path that was just reconstructed for the third time. More kids came from the opposite direction on a dirt path, passing a Palestinian house with graffiti across the main gate: “Arabs to the Gas Chambers.”
...Last week one settler child ran down the street flailing his arms and throwing stones at Palestinians in every direction. Soldiers prevented internationals from photographing saying, “It’s ok, it’s Purim. He’s just drunk.”
...Settlers from the illegal outposts have poisoned village water sources with dead chickens and dirty diapers, and cemented over cave entrances. They run down the hills into villages wearing masks and carrying baseball bats or large guns.
The people who began calling themselves "palestinians" in the 1960's are simply arabs just as the other arabs in the middle east.
Read on:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/10/14/fearsome-words/
The idea that all Arabic speakers shared in being Arabs began life, like most ethnic nationalisms, as an almost literary adventure. It originates in Syria, where progressive Christians developed it to counter Ottoman rule. The British, through T.E. Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ quickly seized on it enrol some inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula in the same cause. After 1919, the Syrian and Arabian strains of this doctrine met in uneasy coexistence. The British installed Arabian rulers in Syria/Lebanon and Jordan, not without complaints that their new subjects were ‘not Arabs’! It was again the British, in the 1940s, who presided over the foundation of an ‘Arab League’, partly as a move to keep the French from re-establishing their position in Lebanon.
One of the League’s founding members was Egypt. This might bring a smile to some of you who know the Middle East, because you have heard Egyptians make disparaging remarks about ‘the Arabs’ who frequent the nightclubs along the Nile, or listened to an elderly Egyptian tell you the story of just when he first discovered he was an ‘Arab’. But the myth of an Arab people is more than a successful British ploy. It took deep roots when Gamel Abdel Nasser fashioned it into a ideology of resistance to Western colonialism, not to mention a convenient tool for extending Egyptian power. As an oppositional creed, everyone from Berbers who hate ‘the Arabs’ to Egyptians who despise them to Palestinians who feel abandoned by them will proudly claim their Arab identity against the insults and depradations of the West.
Yet all know better. There are inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula who may plausibly be called Arabs. Most other Arabic speakers have little in common with these ‘Arabians’, and little sympathy for their culture or traditions. As for ‘Arab nationalism’, no longer is there a Nasser to fashion it into a progressive force; it has withered on the vine. Yet if Arab ethnic nationalism never gained enough force to harm others, it gained enough prominence to put the so-called Arab world at the losing end of moral ascendency.
The Arabs, understood as the ensemble of Arabic speakers, are by no stretch of the imagination ‘a people’. They pay a heavy price for this dubious self-description. On the one hand, it associates every Arabic speaker with every crime of every other Arabic speaker – this holds even for some whose native tongue isn’t Arabic but who live in officially ‘Arab’ countries. It is as if the Sudanese ‘Arab’ militias were the armies of a ‘people’ encompassing the Syrians of Tyre and the Berbers of Marrakesh.
Perhaps this bad press is a mere annoyance. But there is worse. Not only the rest of the world but ‘the Arabs’ themselves have come think they are somehow a hopeless case: why on earth can’t they unite? Why don’t they do more for the Palestinians? Why the endless bickering and mistrust? ‘The Arabs’ in these respects seem like perennial losers incapable of self-government, markedly inferior to ‘the Jews’. This impression is only partly countered by savvy remarks about an ‘Arab street’, always on the verge of rising up against their rotten rulers, yet never, it seems, more genuinely committed to the Palestinians than a fan club to their favorite football team. To the extent that unsustainable attempts at constructing an Arab identity have contributed to the decline of Middle East secularism, they have also contributed to the rise of fanatical religious extremists. This too has hurt the Arabic-speaking world.
Not only does Arab nationalism make ‘the Arabs’ look bad; it also obscures what is good. When Arab states support and sustain the Palestinians, it is much more from genuine altruism than from bogus racial solidarity. But to the extent that Arabs do not do all that is expected of them – do not take in the Palestinians, do not invite them in as fellow-Arabs, the reason is simple. The Palestinians are not fellow-Arabs. They have no home, no ‘homeland’ if you like, but Palestine. Wondering why their ‘brother Arabs’ do not to take them in makes as much sense as wondering why Northern Irish Protestants would not welcome as brothers their ‘fellow Anglophones’ from Dublin or Watts or the slums of Kingston, Jamaica.
Well, it was the Jews' land to begin with...
NOT to get biblical, but as archaeology shows, Jerusalem is the religious and political focus of the Jewish people from the time King David, from the Tribe of Judah and the village of Bethlehem, made it his fortress and the capitol of a united Jewish nation called Israel around 1000 BCE. Additionally, a Hebrew University archaeologist discovered a Jerusalem city wall from the time of King Solomon (10th century BCE), and said the finding “is the first time that a structure from that time has been found that may correlate with written descriptions of Solomon’s building in Jerusalem.” Artifacts found inside excavations around the City of David and within the Old City, the Temple Mount and Solomon’s Stables date the Jewish presence in Jerusalem as far back as 1000 BCE, during the time of King David.
Michael Neumann:
'In the case of a Jewish claim to Palestine, the claims are themselves dubious. Here it is not necessary to have decided on a truth, which may elude researchers forever. It is enough to show that there is serious controversy, and that is easily done. One account of recent findings can be found in 'The Bible Unearthed: Archeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the origin of It's sacred Texts'. It's authors are Israel Finkelstein, director of an archeological institute at Tel Aviv Uuniversity, and Neil Asher Silberman, director of a Belgian archeological institute and a contributing editor to 'Archeology' magazine. These writers display no political agenda and repeat to the point of saturation their admiration and respect for the Bible. Asher and Silberman introduce their work with the claim that:
"The historical sage contained in the Bible - from Abraham's encounter with God and his journey to Canaan, to Moses's delverance of the children of Israe from bondage, to the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah - was not a miraculous revelation, but a brilliant product of the human imagination."
This is the authors' exceedingly polite way of saying that the Biblical accounts are sometimes nonsense, sometimes deliberate lies, exaggerations, and distortions. The status of the Biblical Kingdom is particularly relevant to the Jewish claims to Palestine. One of Asher and Silberman's more devastating findings is that:
"The Biblical borders of the land of Israel as outlined in the book of Joshua had seemingly assumed a sacred inviolability...the Bible pictures a stormy but basically continuous Israelite occupation of the land of Israel all the way to the Assyrian conquest. But a reexamination of the archaeological evidence...points to a period of a few decades [in which Israel existed], between around 835-800B.C.E..."
In other words, they find that the "Great" Jewish Kingdom existed in something like it's fabled extent for a tiny fraction of the period traditionally alleged. Even then, their boundaries never came close to the "Greater Israel" of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism. The rest of the time. Judah and Israel are thought to have been, for the most part, very primitive entities, devoid of literate culture or substantial administrative structure, extending to only a small, landlocked part of what is now called Palestine. The great structures of the Biblical era are, all of them, attributed to Canaanite cultures. Moreover, the inhabitants of Biblical Israel and Judah seem to have been, for most of the time and for the most part, practitioners of Canaanite religions rather than Judaism, or of various synthetic cults. These "Israelites" were not, that is, "Jewish" in one important sense of the term. The authors refer to the Biblical Kingdom at it existed as a "a multi-ethnic society." The idea that such a past could validate a Jewish historical claim to Palestine is simply ludicrous, even if it could be shown - which it cannot - that today's Jews are in some legal sense, heirs to the ancient Israelite Kingdoms.'
Speaking of ethnic nationalism and racism, one of your sources of information is the infamous Michael Neumann, the self-hating Jewish blowhard from Toronto University? He took great lengths to de-stigmatizing the term "anti-Semite" and all the while flew the flag of his true colors as blatantly anti-Semitic. The same guy who infamously wrote:
"If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy [of helping the Palestinians] means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care."
Hmm...just put an RPG in his hands and he'd fire on his own people without thinking twice, if afforded the opportunity.
Ed...buddy...pal...stay true to your word and play Boise again.
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Speaking of ethnic nationalism and racism, your source of all your information is the infamous Michael Neumann, the self-hating Jewish blowhard from Toronto University? He took great lengths to de-stigmatizing the term "anti-Semite" and all the while flew the flag of his true colors as blatantly anti-Semitic. The same guy who infamously wrote:
"If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy [of helping the Palestinians] means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care."
Hmm...just put an RPG in his hands and he'd fire on his own people without thinking twice, if afforded the opportunity.
Really pathetic attempt to smear the messenger with the old 'self-hating Jew' nonsense. Because any Jew who criticizes Israel's crimes must be a self-hating Jew, and their writings dismissed, whereas the writings of any self-loving Jew must be accepted at face value.
Michael Neumann clarified exactly what he intended by the above statement, published without his permission by 'Jewish Tribal Review' who Neumann regards as anti-Semitic:
'I will not self-censor my writings because they may be misused by antisemites, and it is only in this very particular and limited sense that I 'don't care' about encouraging antisemitism. Antisemites misuse all sorts of materials, including the statements of committed Zionists and of Mahatma Gandhi. It would be futile and impossible for me to tailor my writings to avoid such misuse.'
'...let me begin with the greatest absurdity, the claim that I am antisemitic. In rejecting this claim I do not hide behind my Jewishness; there may have been, on rare occasions, Jewish antisemites. But there is nothing even close to antisemitism in my opinions.
Take the material that has caused the most outrage, a private email correspondence allegedly reproduced on the Jewish Tribal Review site. I have never denied that such a correspondence occurred, but only said the truth: that the site is not to be trusted, and that, lacking the original emails, I cannot vouch for its accuracy. I am distressed that the CJC has made so much of the material, not because it embarrasses me, but because it legitimates a truly poisonous, truly antisemitic site. I will comment on the material as if it were accurate, because that is the only way I can refute the claims made on its basis. However at the same time I repudiate that material. No one has disputed that it was published, not only without my consent, but against my express wishes.
What is almost comical about the use of the Jewish Tribal Review material is its context. The correspondence exists only because I published an article called "Blame Yourself: American Power and Jewish Power". This article is entirely devoted to attacking the myth that Jews control America: I believe and hope it to be one of the most systematic and effective attacks on that myth published to date.
As a result of its publication, I received a good deal of hate mail. One message I kept, entitled "Neumann the Zionist", reads as follows:
"Neumann's Jewish stripes finally begin to show, as we all knew they would. The Jews commandeer American foreign policy and make it do their dirty work, then send their mole Neumann to tell the goyim that its all their fault. How utterly predictable. You, Chomsky, Bennis, you're all the same. Go pick up your paycheck from the ADL. Show me a Jew who criticizes Israel and I'll show you a Zionist who hasn't had his coming out party yet. You just had yours."
The Jewish Tribal Review is much more polite, but it was precisely their unhappiness with my contentions that provoked the email exchange.
In this exchange, two sentences have been quoted entirely out of context: it strains my conciliatory intentions to believe that the quoting was done in good faith. Both occur in the following passage:
"My sole concern is indeed to help the Palestinians, and I try to play for keeps. I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose. This means, among other things, that if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care."
I am the first to admit, and regret, the disturbing and intemperate language of the paragraph, but in context its meaning is not alarming. My correspondent has reproached me for showing no interest in further investigations into Jewish power. Having failed to demonstrate that Jews control America, he nevertheless wants me to endorse open-ended, unsystematic investigations into Jewish ownership. He wants me, that is, to help him dig up dirt on the Jews, in the guise of pursuing The Truth.
In this context, it could hardly be clearer that my reply concerns my political writing, not my academic work. My political writing has a political, not an academic purpose; it is to help the Palestinians. For reasons detailed in the "Jewish power' article under discussion, I believe that the myth of Jewish control of America - an antisemitic myth - harms and discredits the Palestinian cause. So I say that, even if it is true that Jews own this or that or the other thing, I am not *interested* in such truths.
My correspondent takes this, in mock horror, as some admission that I habitually twist the truth to suit my political objectives; I regret to say that the CJC happily embraces this interpretation.
But my statement means what it literally says: that I am not *interested*, as I write on behalf of the Palestinians, in irrelevant truths, truths that don't further the Palestinian cause.
It does not mean that I am out to conceal or twist truths. It does mean - which is what I am saying - that I am not about t o climb on board in search of Jewish power when that project has nothing to do
with the welfare of the Palestinians. Later on I make clear that, in general, I do believe that political objectives may trump the obligation to be truthful, but go on to say that almost everyone believes this. Lies were used to hide Jews from Hitler, and indeed at times to defeat him; it is childish to believe that, in politics, one must always be truthful. But I have never seen any occasion to bend the truth on behalf of the Palestinians, and I take great care for the factual accuracy of my claims.
What then of the statement: "If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care"?
In the first place, as the preceding statements make clear, I am stressing the importance of the Palestinian cause by considering extreme possibilities. I first say that "if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it." In other words, I first say that I will not uncover truths detrimental to the Jewish people if that doesn't help the Palestinians. This hardly sounds like the project of an antisemite.
In the second place, the statement is neither antisemitic, nor does it encourage antisemitism. It raises a remote possibility, and says that, should what I do - my writing - encourage antisemitism, that will not deter me. As I said in my letter to the National Post: "I will not self-censor my writings because they may be misused by antisemites, and it is only in this very particular and limited sense that I 'don't care' about encouraging antisemitism. Antisemites misuse all sorts of materials, including the statements of committed Zionists and of Mahatma Gandhi. It would be futile and impossible for me to tailor my writings to avoid such misuse." The notion that I would even contemplate deliberately cultivating antisemitism is absurd, not only because my family has been decimated by (Nazi) antisemites, but also because I have argued, at length, that Zionists manipulate antisemitism to their own purposes.
(The Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen, in http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h-col.html, is of much the same
opinion.)
Finally, the import of the passage can be understood by making a substitution in some of it. Suppose a committed defender of Israel had said:
"My sole concern is indeed to defend Israel, and I try to play for keeps. I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose. This means, among other things, that if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, I still don't care."
Of course I have left out the part about the destruction of the Israeli state, but that cannot be considered an antisemitic comment. It should now be clear that a willingness to tolerate these extreme consequences is neither antisemitism nor encouragement to antisemitism. Indeed the noted Israeli dove, Uri Avnery, has accused Zionists of exactly the same refusal to be deterred by antisemitic reactions: see his essay, "Manufacturing Antisemites". Like me, Zionists certainly care about the reactions - they won't just let such reactions stand in their way...
The notion that I am antisemitic or racist becomes even more absurd in the light of my repeated claims that Israeli crimes endanger and discredit the Jewish people - not because Israeli crimes ought to be blamed on all Jews, but because they are committed in the name of all Jews. (Many Jews object to this: hence the dissident Jewish organization called "Not In My Name".) Why would an antisemite care about this? Why have these repeated assertions, readily available to the CJC, never made it into their polemics?
...This is not to deny that my criticism of Israel is savage; I do indeed call Israel "an emerging evil". But I have no hatred of Israel, pathological or otherwise. Israel is an abstraction; to hate it would be foolish. Like all nations it contains wonderful and awful people; it is far too complex and heterogenous to hate.'
Michael Neumann:'In short, the real scandal today is not antisemitism but the importance it is given. Israel has committed war crimes. It has implicated Jews generally in these crimes, and Jews generally have hastened to implicate themselves. This has provoked hatred against Jews. Why not? Some of this hatred is racist, some isn't, but who cares? Why should we pay any attention to this issue at all? Is the fact that Israel's race war has provoked bitter anger of any importance besides the war itself? Is the remote possibility that somewhere, sometime, somehow, this hatred may in theory, possibly kill some Jews of any importance besides the brutal, actual, physical persecution of Palestinians, and the hundreds of thousands of votes for Arabs to be herded into transit camps?"
In February 2009, Neumann and his brother Osha Neumann asked the Israeli president to remove their grandmother’s name from the Yad Vashem because of the 2008-2009 Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. Neumann wrote that
'I do not believe that the Jewish people, in whose name you [i.e the israeli president] have committed so many crimes with such outrageous complacency, can ever rid itself of the shame you have brought upon us. Nazi propaganda, for all its calumnies, never disgraced and corrupted the Jews; you have succeeded in this...you blacken our names not only by your acts, but by the lies, the coy evasions, the smirking arrogance and the infantile self-righteousness with which you embroider our history... You will never pay for your crimes and you will continue to preen yourself, to bask in your illusions of moral ascendancy.'
Hmm...just put an RPG in his hands and he'd fire on his own people without thinking twice, if afforded the opportunity.
Why? Because he stands up for the rights of the Palestinians and criticizes Israel's crimes?
This may come as some surprise to you, but not all Jews support Israel's crimes. There are many Jews in the World, such as Michael Neumann, Norman Finkelstein, Uri Avnery, Henry Siegman, e.t.c, who have the decency and integrity to oppose Israeli Apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
Don't forget that Muslim women don't pray and Jewish women don't wail with the men. This game of yes they are the same is too easy.
I wonder how many Jews and Arabs haven't told their offspring to hate each other. May just be a step in the right direction. But then you look at how some are treated and it will never stop. And really who cares, the faster they wipe each other out the better the world will be.
The poison from the poison stream caught up to you ELEVEN years ago and you floated out of here. Sept. 14, 08
And really who cares, the faster they wipe each other out the better the world will be.
I care.
This 60 year old U.S-backed ethnic cleansing is a fucking travesty. Americans should be ashamed that their tax dollars help to fund this shit.
My local political representative (M.P)in England received a finely honed e-mail from me last week on this issue. The prick was quoted in the Guardian as saying he supported the forced resignation of another MP after she said that Israel could not continue to exist in it's present form. My M.P said she was 'indulging in conspiracy theories' and attempting to 'delegitimize Israel'. His response to me essentially admitted that he didn't actually know what he was talking about.
I wonder how many Jews and Arabs haven't told their offspring to hate each other. May just be a step in the right direction. But then you look at how some are treated and it will never stop. And really who cares, the faster they wipe each other out the better the world will be.
When a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was killed in the West Bank city of Jenin by Israeli soldiers who mistook his toy gun for the real thing, it could have been just one more blip on the news: one more war, one more child, one more human tragedy that ripped the heart out of a family and a community, but rippled no further into the world’s consciousness.
But something extraordinary happened that turned Ahmed Khatib’s tragic 2005 death into a gift of hope for six Israelis whose lives were on the line: while overwhelmed with grief, Ahmed’s parents consented to donating their son’s organs. Suddenly, amid the violence and entrenched hatred surrounding an intractable conflict, a simple act of humanity rose above the clamor and captured worldwide attention.
Heart of Jenin tells the story of Ahmed’s tragic death and his father Ismael Khatib’s journey to visit three of the organ recipients two years later. One of Ahmed’s kidneys went to an Orthodox Jewish girl and his other kidney went to a Bedouin boy. While his parents hesitated to donate Ahmed’s heart, it now beats in the chest of a Druze girl.
“I see my son in these children,” Khatib says.
Crossing from northern Israel to the Negev desert and ending up in Jerusalem, Khatib encounters every complexity of the conflict: deep-seated animosity, hardened judgments, and heartfelt generosity. While laying bare the deep divisions between Israelis and Palestinians, Heart of Jenin offers a rare vision of common humanity and hope.
the power of indoctrination ... it basically removes one's ability to think critically ... even one of my most ardent right wing conservative friends understands that bulldozing people's homes is wrong ... and trying to rationalize these actions through semantics or technicalities is disingenuous and ignorant ...
Wow its the third time I have read all that and I am still not moved. Really thought you would bring something more this time. Keep up the fight you'll get them to stop fighting soon.
"The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles."
— Socrates
The quiz was made up by people who fear the word Palestine, how can you fear a word? You want to see a zionist shake? Say Palestine...they will literally have a physical reaction.
Much like the those on the opposite side react to the word Zionist. :geek:
Yes, I forgot to post my zionist quiz. You missed the point.
Yes, I forgot to post my zionist quiz. You missed the point.
Let me guess - you got it from familykoran.org?
Neither Abbas nor Obama can explain how anyone could have recognized a UN-designated Palestinian state that Palestinian leaders and the Arab states themselves have rejected.
Of the troubles in Ireland, William Butler Yeats once wrote, "Great hatred and little room maimed us from the start." In Palestine at the start, there was PLENTY of room - more than enough room for a prosperous Jewish state and a prosperous Arab state. After WWI ended, with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations established the "Mandate For Palestine", including all the land that is Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, plus the entire territory east of the Jordan River now called the Kingdom of Jordan.
The area under the mandate was as large as Syria and about half as large as Iraq, the total population at the time was less than 1 million, of whom 10% were Jews. It was in that vast, underdeveloped and underpopulated territory that the British had promised in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration to "Support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The declaration also promised that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
Open Jewish immigration to the area was encouraged, as was freedom of speech, religion and assembly for the Arabs of Palestine, rights they had sorely lacked under Turkish rule. Mired for more than two centuries in backwardness and poverty, "Palestinians" were never recognized by the Ottoman Empire as possessing any national identity. The "Palestinians" quickly took advantage of their new freedom to speak bluntly, demanding a stop to the Jewish immigration which had just begun. Said one Arab representative during the Paris Peace Conference, "We will push the Zionists into the sea, or they will send us back into the desert."
Aref (Pasha) Dajani, representative to the Administrative Committee of the Muslim-Christian Association, warned that "It is impossible to live with the Jews. In all the countries where they are at present, they are not wanted because they always arrive to suck the blood of everybody. If the League of Nations will not listen to the appeal of the Arabs, this country will become a river of blood." Well, as promised, blood did flow, when the Palestinian demand to end Jewish immigration was not granted.
Jerusalem was the first flashpoint for regular Arab attacks on Jewish communities. In April 1920, Palestinians from nearby towns poured into the Old City. The Muslim mayor of Jerusalem and other notables worked up the crowd to launch a jihad against the Jews. “If we don’t use force against the Zionists and against the Jews, we will never be rid of them,” urged a newspaper editor. The crowd shouted back “we will drink the blood of the Jews!”
Shouting Islamic slogans like “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword,” thousands surged through the Jewish Quarter and into West Jerusalem. The mobs vented their rage against any Jew they could find, burning and looting homes and stores and even attacking British and Arab policemen.
After several days of rioting, the final toll was six Jews dead, hundreds beaten and widespread destruction of property. What became known as the Nebi Musa Riot was the opening shot in a 90-year war to reverse the Balfour Declaration. And things soon got worse as the Allies, to assuage the fears of Arab monarchs, separated the land east of the Jordan River out of the total area accessible to Jewish immigrants and created the Emirate of Transjordan. Reconciling the aspirations of Arabs and Jews became far more tenuous after the Balfour Declaration had to be carried out in the truncated area of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
There was now much less room and a great deal more hatred.
The decades that followed were marred by perpetual violence against the Jews, both in Palestine and in Europe. The two were often linked. Under the leadership of the Grand Mufti and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arabs of Palestine waged an endless jihad against their Jewish neighbours. When the British sent a royal commission to investigate a solution, the Jews — represented by Chaim Weizmann — pressed for a partition of the territory into two states, even if the territory assigned to the Jews was the size of a tablecloth.
The Peel Commission’s final report, published in July 1937, proposed such a division. The Jews were offered an independent state in a small enclave, along the sea coast, from Tel Aviv to the north of the country, constituting about 20 percent of the remaining Mandate territory, while the Palestinian Arabs would get 80 percent for their own state.
Desperate for any means to be able to bring in large numbers of the endangered European Jews, the Zionists reluctantly accepted the commission’s partition plan. Led by the Mufti, the Arabs rejected partition out of hand and pressed on with the armed revolt against the Mandate.
The British succeeded in putting down the violence for a time. Al-Husseini was sent into exile, ultimately, in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, where he lived as a special guest of the Fuerher. But severe limitations were placed on Jewish immigration to the Holy Land in the years leading up to the Holocaust, that undoubtedly directly led to the deaths of many thousands of European Jews.
Now, following the atrocities of the Second World War, Britain relinquished authority over the Mandate to the newly formed United Nations. The UN created yet another commission to try and figure out what to do with the contested territory.
The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended by a vote of seven to three yet another two-state solution, another partition plan, to the General Assembly. This plan would have seen the territory divided almost equally between Jews and Arabs. Once again, the Zionists made public their acceptance of the proposal and, once again, Arab officials announced that any partition would be met with rivers of blood.
Shortly after, the 20-member Arab League sent their newly organized Arab Liberation Army against the Jews of Palestine. Elements of five regular Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, invaded Israel on May 15, 1948. Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam vowed, “This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”
But despite their overwhelming numbers and heated rhetoric, after a year of fighting, it was the Jewish state that won a decisive victory. Based on the 1949 Armistice lines, Israel’s territory expanded by almost 40 percent. The Palestinian Arabs were the big losers. For the second time in 10 years, their leaders rejected a partition plan that would have given them independence and more land, designated for their state, than for the Jewish state.
Instead, they ended up with nothing, and 650,000 Palestinians became refugees. Jordan’s King Abdullah sent his Arab Legion to occupy the Palestinian West Bank and annexed the territory to his kingdom. Egypt took the Gaza Strip, and for the next 18 years, denied Palestinians any civil rights.
It never occurred to the rulers of Jordan or Egypt to create a state for the homeless Palestinians, nor did new Palestinian leaders like Yasser Arafat protest this occupation of their land by foreign rulers.
Three times in the past decade, Israeli prime ministers have offered Palestinian leaders an independent state, far more generous than anything Jordan and Egypt ever controlled when they controlled the West Bank and Gaza. At Camp David in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to the borders suggested by President Clinton that would have established a West Bank/Gaza Palestinian state with some territorial adjustments and with the Palestinians getting East Jerusalem as their capital.
For his part, Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat walked out of negotiations, went back home and launched the second Intifada. Invoking Islamic Jew hatred as justification, the Palestinians conducted a three-year, brutal campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli pizza parlors, wedding halls and discotheques.
In 2005, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon decided it was against Israel’s security interests to govern the 1.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Sharon dismantled all of the Jewish settlements and pulled Israeli forces back across the 1967 borders between Israel and Gaza, without even any land swaps.
As an added bonus, Israel left the Palestinians a thriving flower export industry to help jumpstart the local economy. The Palestinians’ response to this generosity? First, they destroyed the donated greenhouses and then launched a war of missiles and rockets against civilian targets in Israel. In a September 2008 meeting in Jerusalem, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert presented president Mahmoud Abbas with a detailed map of a future Palestinian state that, with land swaps, would constitute close to 100 percent of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza prior to the June 1967 war.
Olmert also offered to divide Jerusalem, enabling the Palestinians to locate their capital in the eastern half of the city. Promising to come back the next day for further discussions, Abbas took Olmert’s map to his Ramallah office, just a few miles outside Jerusalem, for his aides to study.
But Abbas never returned with the map. This was the last time the Israeli and Palestinian leaders met.
Many times over the last 63 years, both the international community and the State of Israel have offered the Arabs of Palestine their own state. Each time, these offers have been met by more violence against Jewish citizens. Neither President Abbas nor President Obama are ignorant of this fact. They simply both choose to ignore it.
For Mr. Abbas, this refusal seems to be part of a consistent thread woven throughout the Arab war against the Jews. Mr. Obama’s positions remain more mysterious.
I NEVER said Israel was perfect. Never. However, the settlements are a direct result of Arab terror against the Jews. More attacks? More settlements. Everyone in Israel knows this. Is it right? No...but neither are the indiscriminate attacks against helpless Israeli civilians. The aid? Well if you knew history, you'd know that the "Palestinians" signed the Oslo accords which stated that the 2 state solution will be based on NEGOTIATIONS. The blockade? Come on, I don't need to answer.
Irrational Islamic Jew-hatred is the root cause of the problem in the middle east. And you would have to be blind or politically constipated not to see that, or to not want to see it. It's often said (because its true) that if the Arabs laid down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Jews were to lay down their weapons, they would be massacred. That's because the Palestinians (or Muslim Arabs, for you hair-splitters) do not want peace - they want. The Jews. Dead. They could have their own state by now if they wanted it, but they don't want it - they just want an end to the Jewish state. And thanks to their religion, their so-called "religion of peace", they have the same delusions of manifest destiny and disregard, and the same grisly agenda as Hitler - not the other way around, as the well-versed byrnzie, and all of his blind biased bullshit (and yes, it is bullshit) would like you to believe. If they had their way, they would all commit genocide today. They wouldn't wait until tomorrow. It's NOT EVEN A SECRET.
Ed...buddy...pal...stay true to your word and play Boise again.
Seattle, 12.7.93
Salt Lake, 6.21.98
Mountain View, 10.30.99
Mountain View, 10.31.99
Boise, 11.3.00
Portland, 9.26.09
Yes, I forgot to post my zionist quiz. You missed the point.
Let me guess - you got it from familykoran.org?
I give up. You're fucking hopeless.[/quote]
And therein lies the point there isn't a familykoran.org and there isn't a zionist quiz. Hopeless to zionist rationalization and thought? Huge compliment.
Hopeless to zionist rationalization and thought? Huge compliment.
No. Hopeless that you actually are so delusional that you think there is or ever was a sovereign entity called Palestine. Palestine is to Israel as Oz was to Kansas.
On that note, I bid you adieu.
Post edited by Jerome230 on
Ed...buddy...pal...stay true to your word and play Boise again.
Seattle, 12.7.93
Salt Lake, 6.21.98
Mountain View, 10.30.99
Mountain View, 10.31.99
Boise, 11.3.00
Portland, 9.26.09
What was the religion of the "ancient country of Palestine"?
It wasn't much different in ancient times as it is today. The Religion of Palestine mainly includes a large section of Sunni Muslims and a considerable section of the Christians and Jews. The Jewish community in Palestine accounts for 0.6% of the total population in the Gaza strip. There is also Jewish community in the West Bank area. About 17% of the population in West Bank is Jew.
There are about 0.7% of Christians in Palestine in the Gaza strip while the percentage of Christian community in the West Bank is 8%. People from various religion of Palestine are an integral part of the land of Palestine. The Sunni Muslims accounts for 86% of the Palestinian population. There are about a meager 2% of Shi'is Muslims in Palestine. Thus it holds that the Islam community accounts for 88% of the population in Palestine.
The Christian community also includes Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Protestants and Armenian Orthodox. There are about 1.2% of Greek Orthodox, 0.6% of Roman Catholics, 0.6% of Protestants and 0.03% of Armenian Orthodox in Palestine.
Besides the above, there are people from other religious communities in Palestine. These include the Bahai and the Samaritans. There are about 0.1% of Bahai in Palestine. The Samaritans also account for 0.1% of the population in Palestine.
Dude, I gotta ask, did you cut and paste that or did you have all that info in your head? If you had it in your head, that's amazing. If you cut and paste, where'd you get it from?
What was the religion of the "ancient country of Palestine"?
It wasn't much different in ancient times as it is today. The Religion of Palestine mainly includes a large section of Sunni Muslims and a considerable section of the Christians and Jews. The Jewish community in Palestine accounts for 0.6% of the total population in the Gaza strip. There is also Jewish community in the West Bank area. About 17% of the population in West Bank is Jew.
There are about 0.7% of Christians in Palestine in the Gaza strip while the percentage of Christian community in the West Bank is 8%. People from various religion of Palestine are an integral part of the land of Palestine. The Sunni Muslims accounts for 86% of the Palestinian population. There are about a meager 2% of Shi'is Muslims in Palestine. Thus it holds that the Islam community accounts for 88% of the population in Palestine.
The Christian community also includes Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Protestants and Armenian Orthodox. There are about 1.2% of Greek Orthodox, 0.6% of Roman Catholics, 0.6% of Protestants and 0.03% of Armenian Orthodox in Palestine.
Besides the above, there are people from other religious communities in Palestine. These include the Bahai and the Samaritans. There are about 0.1% of Bahai in Palestine. The Samaritans also account for 0.1% of the population in Palestine.
Dude, I gotta ask, did you cut and paste that or did you have all that info in your head? If you had it in your head, that's amazing. If you cut and paste, where'd you get it from?
what do you think about the lavon affair, or operation susannah as it was called? ya know, when israel had operatives plant bombs at movie theaters and other places us and uk military frequented in the efforts to blame the bombings on muslims and draw us into their war??
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Hopeless to zionist rationalization and thought? Huge compliment.
No. Hopeless that you actually are so delusional that you think there is or ever was a sovereign entity called Palestine. Palestine is to Israel as Oz was to Kansas.
On that note, I bid you adieu.
Are you kidding me? You refer to Palestine repeatedly, you refer to the UN Partition plan, they were partitioning the land of Palestine.
In Palestine at the start, there was PLENTY of room - more than enough room for a prosperous Jewish state and a prosperous Arab state.
The land that belonged the Palestinians, the land that about which the Zionist leader Jabotinsky stated:
"a voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable, now or in the foreseeable future...precisely because they are not a mob, but a living nation" taken from Finkelstein, the Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
So when in history before 1948 was there a sovereign entity called israel?!!! Never.
You want to argue on the one hand that the Arabs didn't want to split Palestine in half and then on the other hand that it never existed, as you in your original post, there are the quotes around Palestine, a fictional Oz, right. Its there, its everywhere, it exists, as a living nation, to quote Jabotisky, as the ancestral homeland of the Palestinians and you can revise and run from it and make up your nice little quizzes, but its as real as my beating heart, and the hearts of Palestinians worldwide.
Neither Abbas nor Obama can explain how anyone could have recognized a UN-designated Palestinian state that Palestinian leaders and the Arab states themselves have rejected.
Of the troubles in Ireland, William Butler Yeats once wrote, "Great hatred and little room maimed us from the start." In Palestine at the start, there was PLENTY of room - more than enough room for a prosperous Jewish state and a prosperous Arab state. After WWI ended, with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations established the "Mandate For Palestine", including all the land that is Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, plus the entire territory east of the Jordan River now called the Kingdom of Jordan.
The area under the mandate was as large as Syria and about half as large as Iraq, the total population at the time was less than 1 million, of whom 10% were Jews. It was in that vast, underdeveloped and underpopulated territory that the British had promised in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration to "Support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The declaration also promised that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
Open Jewish immigration to the area was encouraged, as was freedom of speech, religion and assembly for the Arabs of Palestine, rights they had sorely lacked under Turkish rule. Mired for more than two centuries in backwardness and poverty, "Palestinians" were never recognized by the Ottoman Empire as possessing any national identity. The "Palestinians" quickly took advantage of their new freedom to speak bluntly, demanding a stop to the Jewish immigration which had just begun. Said one Arab representative during the Paris Peace Conference, "We will push the Zionists into the sea, or they will send us back into the desert."
Aref (Pasha) Dajani, representative to the Administrative Committee of the Muslim-Christian Association, warned that "It is impossible to live with the Jews. In all the countries where they are at present, they are not wanted because they always arrive to suck the blood of everybody. If the League of Nations will not listen to the appeal of the Arabs, this country will become a river of blood." Well, as promised, blood did flow, when the Palestinian demand to end Jewish immigration was not granted.
Jerusalem was the first flashpoint for regular Arab attacks on Jewish communities. In April 1920, Palestinians from nearby towns poured into the Old City. The Muslim mayor of Jerusalem and other notables worked up the crowd to launch a jihad against the Jews. “If we don’t use force against the Zionists and against the Jews, we will never be rid of them,” urged a newspaper editor. The crowd shouted back “we will drink the blood of the Jews!”
Shouting Islamic slogans like “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword,” thousands surged through the Jewish Quarter and into West Jerusalem. The mobs vented their rage against any Jew they could find, burning and looting homes and stores and even attacking British and Arab policemen.
After several days of rioting, the final toll was six Jews dead, hundreds beaten and widespread destruction of property. What became known as the Nebi Musa Riot was the opening shot in a 90-year war to reverse the Balfour Declaration. And things soon got worse as the Allies, to assuage the fears of Arab monarchs, separated the land east of the Jordan River out of the total area accessible to Jewish immigrants and created the Emirate of Transjordan. Reconciling the aspirations of Arabs and Jews became far more tenuous after the Balfour Declaration had to be carried out in the truncated area of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
There was now much less room and a great deal more hatred.
The decades that followed were marred by perpetual violence against the Jews, both in Palestine and in Europe. The two were often linked. Under the leadership of the Grand Mufti and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arabs of Palestine waged an endless jihad against their Jewish neighbours. When the British sent a royal commission to investigate a solution, the Jews — represented by Chaim Weizmann — pressed for a partition of the territory into two states, even if the territory assigned to the Jews was the size of a tablecloth.
The Peel Commission’s final report, published in July 1937, proposed such a division. The Jews were offered an independent state in a small enclave, along the sea coast, from Tel Aviv to the north of the country, constituting about 20 percent of the remaining Mandate territory, while the Palestinian Arabs would get 80 percent for their own state.
Desperate for any means to be able to bring in large numbers of the endangered European Jews, the Zionists reluctantly accepted the commission’s partition plan. Led by the Mufti, the Arabs rejected partition out of hand and pressed on with the armed revolt against the Mandate.
The British succeeded in putting down the violence for a time. Al-Husseini was sent into exile, ultimately, in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, where he lived as a special guest of the Fuerher. But severe limitations were placed on Jewish immigration to the Holy Land in the years leading up to the Holocaust, that undoubtedly directly led to the deaths of many thousands of European Jews.
Now, following the atrocities of the Second World War, Britain relinquished authority over the Mandate to the newly formed United Nations. The UN created yet another commission to try and figure out what to do with the contested territory.
The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended by a vote of seven to three yet another two-state solution, another partition plan, to the General Assembly. This plan would have seen the territory divided almost equally between Jews and Arabs. Once again, the Zionists made public their acceptance of the proposal and, once again, Arab officials announced that any partition would be met with rivers of blood.
Shortly after, the 20-member Arab League sent their newly organized Arab Liberation Army against the Jews of Palestine. Elements of five regular Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, invaded Israel on May 15, 1948. Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam vowed, “This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”
But despite their overwhelming numbers and heated rhetoric, after a year of fighting, it was the Jewish state that won a decisive victory. Based on the 1949 Armistice lines, Israel’s territory expanded by almost 40 percent. The Palestinian Arabs were the big losers. For the second time in 10 years, their leaders rejected a partition plan that would have given them independence and more land, designated for their state, than for the Jewish state.
Instead, they ended up with nothing, and 650,000 Palestinians became refugees. Jordan’s King Abdullah sent his Arab Legion to occupy the Palestinian West Bank and annexed the territory to his kingdom. Egypt took the Gaza Strip, and for the next 18 years, denied Palestinians any civil rights.
It never occurred to the rulers of Jordan or Egypt to create a state for the homeless Palestinians, nor did new Palestinian leaders like Yasser Arafat protest this occupation of their land by foreign rulers.
Three times in the past decade, Israeli prime ministers have offered Palestinian leaders an independent state, far more generous than anything Jordan and Egypt ever controlled when they controlled the West Bank and Gaza. At Camp David in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to the borders suggested by President Clinton that would have established a West Bank/Gaza Palestinian state with some territorial adjustments and with the Palestinians getting East Jerusalem as their capital.
For his part, Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat walked out of negotiations, went back home and launched the second Intifada. Invoking Islamic Jew hatred as justification, the Palestinians conducted a three-year, brutal campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli pizza parlors, wedding halls and discotheques.
In 2005, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon decided it was against Israel’s security interests to govern the 1.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Sharon dismantled all of the Jewish settlements and pulled Israeli forces back across the 1967 borders between Israel and Gaza, without even any land swaps.
As an added bonus, Israel left the Palestinians a thriving flower export industry to help jumpstart the local economy. The Palestinians’ response to this generosity? First, they destroyed the donated greenhouses and then launched a war of missiles and rockets against civilian targets in Israel. In a September 2008 meeting in Jerusalem, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert presented president Mahmoud Abbas with a detailed map of a future Palestinian state that, with land swaps, would constitute close to 100 percent of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza prior to the June 1967 war.
Olmert also offered to divide Jerusalem, enabling the Palestinians to locate their capital in the eastern half of the city. Promising to come back the next day for further discussions, Abbas took Olmert’s map to his Ramallah office, just a few miles outside Jerusalem, for his aides to study.
But Abbas never returned with the map. This was the last time the Israeli and Palestinian leaders met.
Many times over the last 63 years, both the international community and the State of Israel have offered the Arabs of Palestine their own state. Each time, these offers have been met by more violence against Jewish citizens. Neither President Abbas nor President Obama are ignorant of this fact. They simply both choose to ignore it.
For Mr. Abbas, this refusal seems to be part of a consistent thread woven throughout the Arab war against the Jews. Mr. Obama’s positions remain more mysterious.
Can you provide a link to this piece that you copied and pasted?
... Many times over the last 63 years, both the international community and the State of Israel have offered the Arabs of Palestine their own state. Each time, these offers have been met by more violence against Jewish citizens. Neither President Abbas nor President Obama are ignorant of this fact. They simply both choose to ignore it...
wow how magnanimous of them to offer the palestinians their own land in exchange for being supplanted and oppressed. and what of those palestinians who reside in israel.. would they be allowed to stay or should they be forcably removed to this new fabulous palestinian state.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Neither Abbas nor Obama can explain how anyone could have recognized a UN-designated Palestinian state that Palestinian leaders and the Arab states themselves have rejected.
Of the troubles in Ireland, William Butler Yeats once wrote, "Great hatred and little room maimed us from the start." In Palestine at the start, there was PLENTY of room - more than enough room for a prosperous Jewish state and a prosperous Arab state. After WWI ended, with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations established the "Mandate For Palestine", including all the land that is Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, plus the entire territory east of the Jordan River now called the Kingdom of Jordan.
The area under the mandate was as large as Syria and about half as large as Iraq, the total population at the time was less than 1 million, of whom 10% were Jews. It was in that vast, underdeveloped and underpopulated territory that the British had promised in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration to "Support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The declaration also promised that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
Open Jewish immigration to the area was encouraged, as was freedom of speech, religion and assembly for the Arabs of Palestine, rights they had sorely lacked under Turkish rule. Mired for more than two centuries in backwardness and poverty, "Palestinians" were never recognized by the Ottoman Empire as possessing any national identity. The "Palestinians" quickly took advantage of their new freedom to speak bluntly, demanding a stop to the Jewish immigration which had just begun. Said one Arab representative during the Paris Peace Conference, "We will push the Zionists into the sea, or they will send us back into the desert."
Aref (Pasha) Dajani, representative to the Administrative Committee of the Muslim-Christian Association, warned that "It is impossible to live with the Jews. In all the countries where they are at present, they are not wanted because they always arrive to suck the blood of everybody. If the League of Nations will not listen to the appeal of the Arabs, this country will become a river of blood." Well, as promised, blood did flow, when the Palestinian demand to end Jewish immigration was not granted.
Jerusalem was the first flashpoint for regular Arab attacks on Jewish communities. In April 1920, Palestinians from nearby towns poured into the Old City. The Muslim mayor of Jerusalem and other notables worked up the crowd to launch a jihad against the Jews. “If we don’t use force against the Zionists and against the Jews, we will never be rid of them,” urged a newspaper editor. The crowd shouted back “we will drink the blood of the Jews!”
Shouting Islamic slogans like “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword,” thousands surged through the Jewish Quarter and into West Jerusalem. The mobs vented their rage against any Jew they could find, burning and looting homes and stores and even attacking British and Arab policemen.
After several days of rioting, the final toll was six Jews dead, hundreds beaten and widespread destruction of property. What became known as the Nebi Musa Riot was the opening shot in a 90-year war to reverse the Balfour Declaration. And things soon got worse as the Allies, to assuage the fears of Arab monarchs, separated the land east of the Jordan River out of the total area accessible to Jewish immigrants and created the Emirate of Transjordan. Reconciling the aspirations of Arabs and Jews became far more tenuous after the Balfour Declaration had to be carried out in the truncated area of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
There was now much less room and a great deal more hatred.
The decades that followed were marred by perpetual violence against the Jews, both in Palestine and in Europe. The two were often linked. Under the leadership of the Grand Mufti and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arabs of Palestine waged an endless jihad against their Jewish neighbours. When the British sent a royal commission to investigate a solution, the Jews — represented by Chaim Weizmann — pressed for a partition of the territory into two states, even if the territory assigned to the Jews was the size of a tablecloth.
The Peel Commission’s final report, published in July 1937, proposed such a division. The Jews were offered an independent state in a small enclave, along the sea coast, from Tel Aviv to the north of the country, constituting about 20 percent of the remaining Mandate territory, while the Palestinian Arabs would get 80 percent for their own state.
Desperate for any means to be able to bring in large numbers of the endangered European Jews, the Zionists reluctantly accepted the commission’s partition plan. Led by the Mufti, the Arabs rejected partition out of hand and pressed on with the armed revolt against the Mandate.
The British succeeded in putting down the violence for a time. Al-Husseini was sent into exile, ultimately, in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, where he lived as a special guest of the Fuerher. But severe limitations were placed on Jewish immigration to the Holy Land in the years leading up to the Holocaust, that undoubtedly directly led to the deaths of many thousands of European Jews.
Now, following the atrocities of the Second World War, Britain relinquished authority over the Mandate to the newly formed United Nations. The UN created yet another commission to try and figure out what to do with the contested territory.
The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended by a vote of seven to three yet another two-state solution, another partition plan, to the General Assembly. This plan would have seen the territory divided almost equally between Jews and Arabs. Once again, the Zionists made public their acceptance of the proposal and, once again, Arab officials announced that any partition would be met with rivers of blood.
Shortly after, the 20-member Arab League sent their newly organized Arab Liberation Army against the Jews of Palestine. Elements of five regular Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, invaded Israel on May 15, 1948. Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam vowed, “This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”
But despite their overwhelming numbers and heated rhetoric, after a year of fighting, it was the Jewish state that won a decisive victory. Based on the 1949 Armistice lines, Israel’s territory expanded by almost 40 percent. The Palestinian Arabs were the big losers. For the second time in 10 years, their leaders rejected a partition plan that would have given them independence and more land, designated for their state, than for the Jewish state.
Instead, they ended up with nothing, and 650,000 Palestinians became refugees. Jordan’s King Abdullah sent his Arab Legion to occupy the Palestinian West Bank and annexed the territory to his kingdom. Egypt took the Gaza Strip, and for the next 18 years, denied Palestinians any civil rights.
It never occurred to the rulers of Jordan or Egypt to create a state for the homeless Palestinians, nor did new Palestinian leaders like Yasser Arafat protest this occupation of their land by foreign rulers.
Three times in the past decade, Israeli prime ministers have offered Palestinian leaders an independent state, far more generous than anything Jordan and Egypt ever controlled when they controlled the West Bank and Gaza. At Camp David in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to the borders suggested by President Clinton that would have established a West Bank/Gaza Palestinian state with some territorial adjustments and with the Palestinians getting East Jerusalem as their capital.
For his part, Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat walked out of negotiations, went back home and launched the second Intifada. Invoking Islamic Jew hatred as justification, the Palestinians conducted a three-year, brutal campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli pizza parlors, wedding halls and discotheques.
In 2005, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon decided it was against Israel’s security interests to govern the 1.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Sharon dismantled all of the Jewish settlements and pulled Israeli forces back across the 1967 borders between Israel and Gaza, without even any land swaps.
As an added bonus, Israel left the Palestinians a thriving flower export industry to help jumpstart the local economy. The Palestinians’ response to this generosity? First, they destroyed the donated greenhouses and then launched a war of missiles and rockets against civilian targets in Israel. In a September 2008 meeting in Jerusalem, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert presented president Mahmoud Abbas with a detailed map of a future Palestinian state that, with land swaps, would constitute close to 100 percent of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza prior to the June 1967 war.
Olmert also offered to divide Jerusalem, enabling the Palestinians to locate their capital in the eastern half of the city. Promising to come back the next day for further discussions, Abbas took Olmert’s map to his Ramallah office, just a few miles outside Jerusalem, for his aides to study.
But Abbas never returned with the map. This was the last time the Israeli and Palestinian leaders met.
Many times over the last 63 years, both the international community and the State of Israel have offered the Arabs of Palestine their own state. Each time, these offers have been met by more violence against Jewish citizens. Neither President Abbas nor President Obama are ignorant of this fact. They simply both choose to ignore it.
For Mr. Abbas, this refusal seems to be part of a consistent thread woven throughout the Arab war against the Jews. Mr. Obama’s positions remain more mysterious.
Can you provide a link to this piece that you copied and pasted?
Thanks.
If you bothered to watch the first video I sent you, you would already have that answer. I just found a transcript so I wouldn't have to re-type it all.
For the record, byrnzie, I may not agree with what you say, but this is not a personal attack on you. I respect that you are able to sensibly debate about it, and to paraphrase Voltaire, "I will fight to the death for your right to say it." and I apologize if emotion may have come in the way of what I am trying to say. Thank you.
Ed...buddy...pal...stay true to your word and play Boise again.
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Are you kidding me? You refer to Palestine repeatedly, you refer to the UN Partition plan, they were partitioning the land of Palestine.
Right! It is/was the name of the region! the name "Palestine" doesn't even have roots in Arabic. The name "Palestine" refers to a region of the eastern Mediterranean coast from the sea to the Jordan valley and from the southern Negev desert to the Galilee lake region (if memory serves me correctly) in the north. The word itself derives from "Plesheth", a name that appears frequently in the Bible (apologies for even going there) and has come into English as "Philistine". Plesheth, (root name - "palash") was a general term meaning rolling or migratory. This referred to the Philistine's invasion and conquest of the coast from the sea. They did not speak Arabic. They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical connection with Arabia or Arabs. The word Palestine (or Palestina) originally identified the region as "The Land of The Philistines", a war-like tribe that inhabited much of the region alongside the Hebrew people. But the older name from antiquity for this region was not Palestine, but Canaan. From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has had the only united, independent, sovereign "Nation-State" that ever existed in "Palestine" west of the Jordan River. I promise you, I'm not making this up.
Ed...buddy...pal...stay true to your word and play Boise again.
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the settlements are a direct result of Arab terror against the Jews.
How is placing Israeli civilians in the line of fire a result of Palestinian terror attacks?
Michael Neumann - 'The Case Against Israel' P107-108
'Some Israeli's may have seen the first Post-1967 settlements as outposts, advance warning stations guarding the new frontiers against possible attack. This never made a lot of sense: why not just have real advance warning stations, military positions, instead? No one has ever explained why a sprawl of civilian subdivisions and enclaves was required when, to all appearances, a few purely military outposts would have fulfilled any defensive functions at least as well, and at far less cost to both Israeli's and Palestinians. Dayan himself stated that "from the point of view of the security of the State, the establishment of the settlements has no great importance." Other officials shared his assessment:
"We have to use the pretext of security needs and the authority of the military governor as there is no way of driving out the Arabs from their land as long as they refuse to go and accept our compensation..."
In 1969 moreover, Dayan had emphasized that the settlements were eternal: "the settlements established in the territories are there forever, and the future frontiers will include these settlements as part of Israel." In private, he had already in 1967 made it quite clear how the Palestinians were not, in fact, to have a secure and tolerable existence: "there is no solution," he said, "and you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever prefers shall leave..."
...The settler movement's messianic notions of racial destiny have been amply documented. Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former Major General and intelligence chief in the Israeli Defense Forces, describes how they interpret the "halakha - the body of religious laws designed to encode a unique and binding lifestyle." Harkabi, like others, considers Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook to be the mentor of the Gush Emunim settler movement and cites him as saying at a public meeting that:
"I tell you explicitly that the Torah forbids us to surrender even one inch of our liberated land. There are no conquests here and we are not occupying foreign lands; we are returning to our home, to the inheritance of our ancestors. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God - and the more the world gets used to this thought the better it will be for them and for all of us..."
Irrational Islamic Jew-hatred is the root cause of the problem in the middle east. And you would have to be blind or politically constipated not to see that, or to not want to see it. It's often said (because its true) that if the Arabs laid down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Jews were to lay down their weapons, they would be massacred. That's because the Palestinians (or Muslim Arabs, for you hair-splitters) do not want peace - they want. The Jews. Dead. They could have their own state by now if they wanted it, but they don't want it - they just want an end to the Jewish state. And thanks to their religion, their so-called "religion of peace", they have the same delusions of manifest destiny and disregard, and the same grisly agenda as Hitler - not the other way around, as the well-versed byrnzie, and all of his blind biased bullshit (and yes, it is bullshit) would like you to believe. If they had their way, they would all commit genocide today. They wouldn't wait until tomorrow. It's NOT EVEN A SECRET.
No, irrational Islamic Jew hatred is just a convenient fantasy that you've concocted to justify and excuse Israel's continuing construction of racist, illegal, Jewish-only settlements on land stolen from the Palestinians.
Here's what Hamas have said regarding their support of the international consensus on a two-state solution that is supported by the whole World - excluding the U.S, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau:
Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal: “We are with a state on the 1967 borders, based on a long-term truce. This includes East Jerusalem, the dismantling of settlements and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.’
Comments
you are the one making the accusation, i would think that you would at least know about this before you start making false claims being passed off as facts...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
No it wasn't.
Demographics in Palestine
Year Jews Arabs
1800 6,700 268,000
1880 24,000 525,000
1915 87,500 590,000
1931 174,000 837,000
1947 630,000 1,310,000
There was also never a nation of Israel as it is defined by Jews today.
No it didn't. You really need to put down your 'Israel apologists handbook of 100 bullshit excuses for ethnic cleansing and Apartheid' for a second and address the facts instead.
Partition Plan Map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... 47.svg.png
People who live in England, America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all speak English, therefore are they all English? Your use of the term 'Arab' to pretend that every Arabic speaking person in that part of the World is the same is just a lazy Orientalist fantasy.
Really?
Here are the groups that have the greatest claim to the city:
A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.
B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second millennium BCE.
C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.
D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under the Sasanids.
E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and introduce a Syrian one.
F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.
G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin’s dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.
Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. This annexation is considered illegal under international law.
'The expansion of Jerusalem’s borders incorporated not only the Jordanian municipality of Jerusalem but also land from surrounding Arab villages comprising close to one and a half times the size of Israeli and Jordanian Jerusalem combined. This de facto territorial annexation was never recognized by the international community and was declared to contravene international law, inter alia, in UN General Assembly Resolution 2253 and UN Security Council Resolution 478 (both of which passed unopposed).'
http://www.diakonia.se/sa/node.asp?node=841
'Annexation by the use or threat of force is prohibited under international law, as set forth in Article 2 of the UN Charter. This principle was restated in GA Resolution 2625 (XXV) of 1970, which noted that states must not use force to violate existing international boundaries or to solve international disputes, including territorial ones.
In 1980, the Israeli Knesset passed "Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel" which, on a higher constitutional level, declared Jerusalem to be Israel 's "eternal and indivisible" capital including the occupied East Jerusalem territory. In response to this basic law, the UN Security Council (UNSC) affirmed that acquisition of territory, annexation, by force is forbidden according to international law and confirmed the continued application of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the areas annexed by Israel. It also called upon member states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from the city.'
Home? How is Israel the 'home' of someone born in New York or Moscow? Or Peru?: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/07/israel1
How 90 Peruvians became the latest Jewish settlers
When a delegation of rabbis travelled to Lima to convert a group of South American Indians to Judaism, they added just one condition: come and live with us in Israel. As soon as these new Jews arrived in the country, they were bussed straight to settlements in the disputed territories.
The Guardian, Wednesday 7 August 2002
That's all very quaint and self-serving, but when the Zionist movement began, Jews had no common language and their traditions were in many cases wildly dissimilar or simply abandoned altogether. Zionism was a movement that advocated not so much the defense of an ethnic group, as the formation of such a group in Palestine, where those who were thought to fit a certain semi-racial category were to find refuge.
I don't deal in propaganda and bad history. I deal in the facts.
The rockets were a response to Israel's criminal extra-judicial assassination.
As for Israeli's supposedly existing on some moral high ground in relation to what they teach their kids, is this why Israeli settler children are encouraged to throw stones and rocks at Palestinian schoolchildren and spit at them?
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49730
'Leaving school in the afternoon, the [school]girls are subjected to abuse and intimidation by settler youths as they walk home. At one point, a settler boy, face contorted with hatred, viciously hurls stones at the group, injuring one.
...A particularly disturbing feature of settler culture is the role played by children, often very young, in initiating anti-Palestinian violence.
“The usual incidents,” recalls one soldier in Soldiers’ Testimonies from Hebron 2005-2007 (published by Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence), “are when Palestinian children finish school and they have to be protected, because otherwise they get beaten up by the Jewish kids.
...Spitting in the face of Palestinian passers-by is a regular event often encouraged by settler parents: “I saw a (settler) child, about three years-old walking along the ‘Prayer Route’, and a little Arab child passed him by. Just a little kid. What does he know? Also about three years-old.
“So the (settler) child spits at him thickly, square in the face. Really extreme … And his father walks with him, hand in hand, saying absolutely nothing.”
In another typical incident, a group of looting settler children emerged from a Palestinian shop they had just trashed. They saw an old Palestinian man in the street and, as one soldier remembers, “literally sprayed his eyes with teargas and broke his cane”.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/w ... ltops/6812
Their children dodge sticks and stones -— from settler children (and their parents) -— on their way to school every day as soldiers watch on indifferently; I and several other internationals accompanied the students to document and even shield the settler kids’ attacks.
Out of one house came Jamilya, whose mother was recently attacked by a settler girl who incited a mob to come rip the family’s door off. Their windows are caged like all others on the street, to block stones; occasional cracks show where small rocks still get through. At the military station, Jamilya climbed a set of stairs to her right and then entered school via a narrow stone path that was just reconstructed for the third time. More kids came from the opposite direction on a dirt path, passing a Palestinian house with graffiti across the main gate: “Arabs to the Gas Chambers.”
...Last week one settler child ran down the street flailing his arms and throwing stones at Palestinians in every direction. Soldiers prevented internationals from photographing saying, “It’s ok, it’s Purim. He’s just drunk.”
...Settlers from the illegal outposts have poisoned village water sources with dead chickens and dirty diapers, and cemented over cave entrances. They run down the hills into villages wearing masks and carrying baseball bats or large guns.
Read on:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/10/14/fearsome-words/
The idea that all Arabic speakers shared in being Arabs began life, like most ethnic nationalisms, as an almost literary adventure. It originates in Syria, where progressive Christians developed it to counter Ottoman rule. The British, through T.E. Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ quickly seized on it enrol some inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula in the same cause. After 1919, the Syrian and Arabian strains of this doctrine met in uneasy coexistence. The British installed Arabian rulers in Syria/Lebanon and Jordan, not without complaints that their new subjects were ‘not Arabs’! It was again the British, in the 1940s, who presided over the foundation of an ‘Arab League’, partly as a move to keep the French from re-establishing their position in Lebanon.
One of the League’s founding members was Egypt. This might bring a smile to some of you who know the Middle East, because you have heard Egyptians make disparaging remarks about ‘the Arabs’ who frequent the nightclubs along the Nile, or listened to an elderly Egyptian tell you the story of just when he first discovered he was an ‘Arab’. But the myth of an Arab people is more than a successful British ploy. It took deep roots when Gamel Abdel Nasser fashioned it into a ideology of resistance to Western colonialism, not to mention a convenient tool for extending Egyptian power. As an oppositional creed, everyone from Berbers who hate ‘the Arabs’ to Egyptians who despise them to Palestinians who feel abandoned by them will proudly claim their Arab identity against the insults and depradations of the West.
Yet all know better. There are inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula who may plausibly be called Arabs. Most other Arabic speakers have little in common with these ‘Arabians’, and little sympathy for their culture or traditions. As for ‘Arab nationalism’, no longer is there a Nasser to fashion it into a progressive force; it has withered on the vine. Yet if Arab ethnic nationalism never gained enough force to harm others, it gained enough prominence to put the so-called Arab world at the losing end of moral ascendency.
The Arabs, understood as the ensemble of Arabic speakers, are by no stretch of the imagination ‘a people’. They pay a heavy price for this dubious self-description. On the one hand, it associates every Arabic speaker with every crime of every other Arabic speaker – this holds even for some whose native tongue isn’t Arabic but who live in officially ‘Arab’ countries. It is as if the Sudanese ‘Arab’ militias were the armies of a ‘people’ encompassing the Syrians of Tyre and the Berbers of Marrakesh.
Perhaps this bad press is a mere annoyance. But there is worse. Not only the rest of the world but ‘the Arabs’ themselves have come think they are somehow a hopeless case: why on earth can’t they unite? Why don’t they do more for the Palestinians? Why the endless bickering and mistrust? ‘The Arabs’ in these respects seem like perennial losers incapable of self-government, markedly inferior to ‘the Jews’. This impression is only partly countered by savvy remarks about an ‘Arab street’, always on the verge of rising up against their rotten rulers, yet never, it seems, more genuinely committed to the Palestinians than a fan club to their favorite football team. To the extent that unsustainable attempts at constructing an Arab identity have contributed to the decline of Middle East secularism, they have also contributed to the rise of fanatical religious extremists. This too has hurt the Arabic-speaking world.
Not only does Arab nationalism make ‘the Arabs’ look bad; it also obscures what is good. When Arab states support and sustain the Palestinians, it is much more from genuine altruism than from bogus racial solidarity. But to the extent that Arabs do not do all that is expected of them – do not take in the Palestinians, do not invite them in as fellow-Arabs, the reason is simple. The Palestinians are not fellow-Arabs. They have no home, no ‘homeland’ if you like, but Palestine. Wondering why their ‘brother Arabs’ do not to take them in makes as much sense as wondering why Northern Irish Protestants would not welcome as brothers their ‘fellow Anglophones’ from Dublin or Watts or the slums of Kingston, Jamaica.
Michael Neumann:
'In the case of a Jewish claim to Palestine, the claims are themselves dubious. Here it is not necessary to have decided on a truth, which may elude researchers forever. It is enough to show that there is serious controversy, and that is easily done. One account of recent findings can be found in 'The Bible Unearthed: Archeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the origin of It's sacred Texts'. It's authors are Israel Finkelstein, director of an archeological institute at Tel Aviv Uuniversity, and Neil Asher Silberman, director of a Belgian archeological institute and a contributing editor to 'Archeology' magazine. These writers display no political agenda and repeat to the point of saturation their admiration and respect for the Bible. Asher and Silberman introduce their work with the claim that:
"The historical sage contained in the Bible - from Abraham's encounter with God and his journey to Canaan, to Moses's delverance of the children of Israe from bondage, to the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah - was not a miraculous revelation, but a brilliant product of the human imagination."
This is the authors' exceedingly polite way of saying that the Biblical accounts are sometimes nonsense, sometimes deliberate lies, exaggerations, and distortions. The status of the Biblical Kingdom is particularly relevant to the Jewish claims to Palestine. One of Asher and Silberman's more devastating findings is that:
"The Biblical borders of the land of Israel as outlined in the book of Joshua had seemingly assumed a sacred inviolability...the Bible pictures a stormy but basically continuous Israelite occupation of the land of Israel all the way to the Assyrian conquest. But a reexamination of the archaeological evidence...points to a period of a few decades [in which Israel existed], between around 835-800B.C.E..."
In other words, they find that the "Great" Jewish Kingdom existed in something like it's fabled extent for a tiny fraction of the period traditionally alleged. Even then, their boundaries never came close to the "Greater Israel" of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism. The rest of the time. Judah and Israel are thought to have been, for the most part, very primitive entities, devoid of literate culture or substantial administrative structure, extending to only a small, landlocked part of what is now called Palestine. The great structures of the Biblical era are, all of them, attributed to Canaanite cultures. Moreover, the inhabitants of Biblical Israel and Judah seem to have been, for most of the time and for the most part, practitioners of Canaanite religions rather than Judaism, or of various synthetic cults. These "Israelites" were not, that is, "Jewish" in one important sense of the term. The authors refer to the Biblical Kingdom at it existed as a "a multi-ethnic society." The idea that such a past could validate a Jewish historical claim to Palestine is simply ludicrous, even if it could be shown - which it cannot - that today's Jews are in some legal sense, heirs to the ancient Israelite Kingdoms.'
Ethnic Nationalism and racism alive and well in the 21st century.
"If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy [of helping the Palestinians] means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care."
Hmm...just put an RPG in his hands and he'd fire on his own people without thinking twice, if afforded the opportunity.
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Really pathetic attempt to smear the messenger with the old 'self-hating Jew' nonsense. Because any Jew who criticizes Israel's crimes must be a self-hating Jew, and their writings dismissed, whereas the writings of any self-loving Jew must be accepted at face value.
Michael Neumann clarified exactly what he intended by the above statement, published without his permission by 'Jewish Tribal Review' who Neumann regards as anti-Semitic:
'I will not self-censor my writings because they may be misused by antisemites, and it is only in this very particular and limited sense that I 'don't care' about encouraging antisemitism. Antisemites misuse all sorts of materials, including the statements of committed Zionists and of Mahatma Gandhi. It would be futile and impossible for me to tailor my writings to avoid such misuse.'
..and in more detail here: http://mneumann.tripod.com/cjctripo.txt
'...let me begin with the greatest absurdity, the claim that I am antisemitic. In rejecting this claim I do not hide behind my Jewishness; there may have been, on rare occasions, Jewish antisemites. But there is nothing even close to antisemitism in my opinions.
Take the material that has caused the most outrage, a private email correspondence allegedly reproduced on the Jewish Tribal Review site. I have never denied that such a correspondence occurred, but only said the truth: that the site is not to be trusted, and that, lacking the original emails, I cannot vouch for its accuracy. I am distressed that the CJC has made so much of the material, not because it embarrasses me, but because it legitimates a truly poisonous, truly antisemitic site. I will comment on the material as if it were accurate, because that is the only way I can refute the claims made on its basis. However at the same time I repudiate that material. No one has disputed that it was published, not only without my consent, but against my express wishes.
What is almost comical about the use of the Jewish Tribal Review material is its context. The correspondence exists only because I published an article called "Blame Yourself: American Power and Jewish Power". This article is entirely devoted to attacking the myth that Jews control America: I believe and hope it to be one of the most systematic and effective attacks on that myth published to date.
As a result of its publication, I received a good deal of hate mail. One message I kept, entitled "Neumann the Zionist", reads as follows:
"Neumann's Jewish stripes finally begin to show, as we all knew they would. The Jews commandeer American foreign policy and make it do their dirty work, then send their mole Neumann to tell the goyim that its all their fault. How utterly predictable. You, Chomsky, Bennis, you're all the same. Go pick up your paycheck from the ADL. Show me a Jew who criticizes Israel and I'll show you a Zionist who hasn't had his coming out party yet. You just had yours."
The Jewish Tribal Review is much more polite, but it was precisely their unhappiness with my contentions that provoked the email exchange.
In this exchange, two sentences have been quoted entirely out of context: it strains my conciliatory intentions to believe that the quoting was done in good faith. Both occur in the following passage:
"My sole concern is indeed to help the Palestinians, and I try to play for keeps. I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose. This means, among other things, that if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care."
I am the first to admit, and regret, the disturbing and intemperate language of the paragraph, but in context its meaning is not alarming. My correspondent has reproached me for showing no interest in further investigations into Jewish power. Having failed to demonstrate that Jews control America, he nevertheless wants me to endorse open-ended, unsystematic investigations into Jewish ownership. He wants me, that is, to help him dig up dirt on the Jews, in the guise of pursuing The Truth.
In this context, it could hardly be clearer that my reply concerns my political writing, not my academic work. My political writing has a political, not an academic purpose; it is to help the Palestinians. For reasons detailed in the "Jewish power' article under discussion, I believe that the myth of Jewish control of America - an antisemitic myth - harms and discredits the Palestinian cause. So I say that, even if it is true that Jews own this or that or the other thing, I am not *interested* in such truths.
My correspondent takes this, in mock horror, as some admission that I habitually twist the truth to suit my political objectives; I regret to say that the CJC happily embraces this interpretation.
But my statement means what it literally says: that I am not *interested*, as I write on behalf of the Palestinians, in irrelevant truths, truths that don't further the Palestinian cause.
It does not mean that I am out to conceal or twist truths. It does mean - which is what I am saying - that I am not about t o climb on board in search of Jewish power when that project has nothing to do
with the welfare of the Palestinians. Later on I make clear that, in general, I do believe that political objectives may trump the obligation to be truthful, but go on to say that almost everyone believes this. Lies were used to hide Jews from Hitler, and indeed at times to defeat him; it is childish to believe that, in politics, one must always be truthful. But I have never seen any occasion to bend the truth on behalf of the Palestinians, and I take great care for the factual accuracy of my claims.
What then of the statement: "If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care"?
In the first place, as the preceding statements make clear, I am stressing the importance of the Palestinian cause by considering extreme possibilities. I first say that "if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it." In other words, I first say that I will not uncover truths detrimental to the Jewish people if that doesn't help the Palestinians. This hardly sounds like the project of an antisemite.
In the second place, the statement is neither antisemitic, nor does it encourage antisemitism. It raises a remote possibility, and says that, should what I do - my writing - encourage antisemitism, that will not deter me. As I said in my letter to the National Post: "I will not self-censor my writings because they may be misused by antisemites, and it is only in this very particular and limited sense that I 'don't care' about encouraging antisemitism. Antisemites misuse all sorts of materials, including the statements of committed Zionists and of Mahatma Gandhi. It would be futile and impossible for me to tailor my writings to avoid such misuse." The notion that I would even contemplate deliberately cultivating antisemitism is absurd, not only because my family has been decimated by (Nazi) antisemites, but also because I have argued, at length, that Zionists manipulate antisemitism to their own purposes.
(The Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen, in http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h-col.html, is of much the same
opinion.)
Finally, the import of the passage can be understood by making a substitution in some of it. Suppose a committed defender of Israel had said:
"My sole concern is indeed to defend Israel, and I try to play for keeps. I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose. This means, among other things, that if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, I still don't care."
Of course I have left out the part about the destruction of the Israeli state, but that cannot be considered an antisemitic comment. It should now be clear that a willingness to tolerate these extreme consequences is neither antisemitism nor encouragement to antisemitism. Indeed the noted Israeli dove, Uri Avnery, has accused Zionists of exactly the same refusal to be deterred by antisemitic reactions: see his essay, "Manufacturing Antisemites". Like me, Zionists certainly care about the reactions - they won't just let such reactions stand in their way...
The notion that I am antisemitic or racist becomes even more absurd in the light of my repeated claims that Israeli crimes endanger and discredit the Jewish people - not because Israeli crimes ought to be blamed on all Jews, but because they are committed in the name of all Jews. (Many Jews object to this: hence the dissident Jewish organization called "Not In My Name".) Why would an antisemite care about this? Why have these repeated assertions, readily available to the CJC, never made it into their polemics?
...This is not to deny that my criticism of Israel is savage; I do indeed call Israel "an emerging evil". But I have no hatred of Israel, pathological or otherwise. Israel is an abstraction; to hate it would be foolish. Like all nations it contains wonderful and awful people; it is far too complex and heterogenous to hate.'
Michael Neumann: 'In short, the real scandal today is not antisemitism but the importance it is given. Israel has committed war crimes. It has implicated Jews generally in these crimes, and Jews generally have hastened to implicate themselves. This has provoked hatred against Jews. Why not? Some of this hatred is racist, some isn't, but who cares? Why should we pay any attention to this issue at all? Is the fact that Israel's race war has provoked bitter anger of any importance besides the war itself? Is the remote possibility that somewhere, sometime, somehow, this hatred may in theory, possibly kill some Jews of any importance besides the brutal, actual, physical persecution of Palestinians, and the hundreds of thousands of votes for Arabs to be herded into transit camps?"
In February 2009, Neumann and his brother Osha Neumann asked the Israeli president to remove their grandmother’s name from the Yad Vashem because of the 2008-2009 Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. Neumann wrote that
'I do not believe that the Jewish people, in whose name you [i.e the israeli president] have committed so many crimes with such outrageous complacency, can ever rid itself of the shame you have brought upon us. Nazi propaganda, for all its calumnies, never disgraced and corrupted the Jews; you have succeeded in this...you blacken our names not only by your acts, but by the lies, the coy evasions, the smirking arrogance and the infantile self-righteousness with which you embroider our history... You will never pay for your crimes and you will continue to preen yourself, to bask in your illusions of moral ascendancy.'
Why? Because he stands up for the rights of the Palestinians and criticizes Israel's crimes?
This may come as some surprise to you, but not all Jews support Israel's crimes. There are many Jews in the World, such as Michael Neumann, Norman Finkelstein, Uri Avnery, Henry Siegman, e.t.c, who have the decency and integrity to oppose Israeli Apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
Byrnzie in a landslide.
The poison from the poison stream caught up to you ELEVEN years ago and you floated out of here. Sept. 14, 08
Don't forget that Muslim women don't pray and Jewish women don't wail with the men. This game of yes they are the same is too easy.
I wonder how many Jews and Arabs haven't told their offspring to hate each other. May just be a step in the right direction. But then you look at how some are treated and it will never stop. And really who cares, the faster they wipe each other out the better the world will be.
The poison from the poison stream caught up to you ELEVEN years ago and you floated out of here. Sept. 14, 08
I care.
This 60 year old U.S-backed ethnic cleansing is a fucking travesty. Americans should be ashamed that their tax dollars help to fund this shit.
My local political representative (M.P)in England received a finely honed e-mail from me last week on this issue. The prick was quoted in the Guardian as saying he supported the forced resignation of another MP after she said that Israel could not continue to exist in it's present form. My M.P said she was 'indulging in conspiracy theories' and attempting to 'delegitimize Israel'. His response to me essentially admitted that he didn't actually know what he was talking about.
Anyway...
You may find this movie interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kYn-UFyrgU
Heart of Jenin
When a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was killed in the West Bank city of Jenin by Israeli soldiers who mistook his toy gun for the real thing, it could have been just one more blip on the news: one more war, one more child, one more human tragedy that ripped the heart out of a family and a community, but rippled no further into the world’s consciousness.
But something extraordinary happened that turned Ahmed Khatib’s tragic 2005 death into a gift of hope for six Israelis whose lives were on the line: while overwhelmed with grief, Ahmed’s parents consented to donating their son’s organs. Suddenly, amid the violence and entrenched hatred surrounding an intractable conflict, a simple act of humanity rose above the clamor and captured worldwide attention.
Heart of Jenin tells the story of Ahmed’s tragic death and his father Ismael Khatib’s journey to visit three of the organ recipients two years later. One of Ahmed’s kidneys went to an Orthodox Jewish girl and his other kidney went to a Bedouin boy. While his parents hesitated to donate Ahmed’s heart, it now beats in the chest of a Druze girl.
“I see my son in these children,” Khatib says.
Crossing from northern Israel to the Negev desert and ending up in Jerusalem, Khatib encounters every complexity of the conflict: deep-seated animosity, hardened judgments, and heartfelt generosity. While laying bare the deep divisions between Israelis and Palestinians, Heart of Jenin offers a rare vision of common humanity and hope.
— Socrates
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... ByJb7QQ9U#!
And another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc9imoJW ... re=related
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Is this what it's come to now? You begin by posting a cartoon from familybible.org, and now you ask me to address a couple of silly Youtube clips.
I can't be bothered to watch them, so what point, or points, in either of these two videos would you like me to address?
Yes, I forgot to post my zionist quiz. You missed the point.
I was just curious what your thoughts were on them. And I never knew about familybible.org...
You're a rude lot.
Let me guess - you got it from familykoran.org?
Neither Abbas nor Obama can explain how anyone could have recognized a UN-designated Palestinian state that Palestinian leaders and the Arab states themselves have rejected.
Of the troubles in Ireland, William Butler Yeats once wrote, "Great hatred and little room maimed us from the start." In Palestine at the start, there was PLENTY of room - more than enough room for a prosperous Jewish state and a prosperous Arab state. After WWI ended, with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations established the "Mandate For Palestine", including all the land that is Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, plus the entire territory east of the Jordan River now called the Kingdom of Jordan.
The area under the mandate was as large as Syria and about half as large as Iraq, the total population at the time was less than 1 million, of whom 10% were Jews. It was in that vast, underdeveloped and underpopulated territory that the British had promised in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration to "Support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The declaration also promised that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
Open Jewish immigration to the area was encouraged, as was freedom of speech, religion and assembly for the Arabs of Palestine, rights they had sorely lacked under Turkish rule. Mired for more than two centuries in backwardness and poverty, "Palestinians" were never recognized by the Ottoman Empire as possessing any national identity. The "Palestinians" quickly took advantage of their new freedom to speak bluntly, demanding a stop to the Jewish immigration which had just begun. Said one Arab representative during the Paris Peace Conference, "We will push the Zionists into the sea, or they will send us back into the desert."
Aref (Pasha) Dajani, representative to the Administrative Committee of the Muslim-Christian Association, warned that "It is impossible to live with the Jews. In all the countries where they are at present, they are not wanted because they always arrive to suck the blood of everybody. If the League of Nations will not listen to the appeal of the Arabs, this country will become a river of blood." Well, as promised, blood did flow, when the Palestinian demand to end Jewish immigration was not granted.
Jerusalem was the first flashpoint for regular Arab attacks on Jewish communities. In April 1920, Palestinians from nearby towns poured into the Old City. The Muslim mayor of Jerusalem and other notables worked up the crowd to launch a jihad against the Jews. “If we don’t use force against the Zionists and against the Jews, we will never be rid of them,” urged a newspaper editor. The crowd shouted back “we will drink the blood of the Jews!”
Shouting Islamic slogans like “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword,” thousands surged through the Jewish Quarter and into West Jerusalem. The mobs vented their rage against any Jew they could find, burning and looting homes and stores and even attacking British and Arab policemen.
After several days of rioting, the final toll was six Jews dead, hundreds beaten and widespread destruction of property. What became known as the Nebi Musa Riot was the opening shot in a 90-year war to reverse the Balfour Declaration. And things soon got worse as the Allies, to assuage the fears of Arab monarchs, separated the land east of the Jordan River out of the total area accessible to Jewish immigrants and created the Emirate of Transjordan. Reconciling the aspirations of Arabs and Jews became far more tenuous after the Balfour Declaration had to be carried out in the truncated area of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
There was now much less room and a great deal more hatred.
The decades that followed were marred by perpetual violence against the Jews, both in Palestine and in Europe. The two were often linked. Under the leadership of the Grand Mufti and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arabs of Palestine waged an endless jihad against their Jewish neighbours. When the British sent a royal commission to investigate a solution, the Jews — represented by Chaim Weizmann — pressed for a partition of the territory into two states, even if the territory assigned to the Jews was the size of a tablecloth.
The Peel Commission’s final report, published in July 1937, proposed such a division. The Jews were offered an independent state in a small enclave, along the sea coast, from Tel Aviv to the north of the country, constituting about 20 percent of the remaining Mandate territory, while the Palestinian Arabs would get 80 percent for their own state.
Desperate for any means to be able to bring in large numbers of the endangered European Jews, the Zionists reluctantly accepted the commission’s partition plan. Led by the Mufti, the Arabs rejected partition out of hand and pressed on with the armed revolt against the Mandate.
The British succeeded in putting down the violence for a time. Al-Husseini was sent into exile, ultimately, in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, where he lived as a special guest of the Fuerher. But severe limitations were placed on Jewish immigration to the Holy Land in the years leading up to the Holocaust, that undoubtedly directly led to the deaths of many thousands of European Jews.
Now, following the atrocities of the Second World War, Britain relinquished authority over the Mandate to the newly formed United Nations. The UN created yet another commission to try and figure out what to do with the contested territory.
The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended by a vote of seven to three yet another two-state solution, another partition plan, to the General Assembly. This plan would have seen the territory divided almost equally between Jews and Arabs. Once again, the Zionists made public their acceptance of the proposal and, once again, Arab officials announced that any partition would be met with rivers of blood.
Shortly after, the 20-member Arab League sent their newly organized Arab Liberation Army against the Jews of Palestine. Elements of five regular Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, invaded Israel on May 15, 1948. Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam vowed, “This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”
But despite their overwhelming numbers and heated rhetoric, after a year of fighting, it was the Jewish state that won a decisive victory. Based on the 1949 Armistice lines, Israel’s territory expanded by almost 40 percent. The Palestinian Arabs were the big losers. For the second time in 10 years, their leaders rejected a partition plan that would have given them independence and more land, designated for their state, than for the Jewish state.
Instead, they ended up with nothing, and 650,000 Palestinians became refugees. Jordan’s King Abdullah sent his Arab Legion to occupy the Palestinian West Bank and annexed the territory to his kingdom. Egypt took the Gaza Strip, and for the next 18 years, denied Palestinians any civil rights.
It never occurred to the rulers of Jordan or Egypt to create a state for the homeless Palestinians, nor did new Palestinian leaders like Yasser Arafat protest this occupation of their land by foreign rulers.
Three times in the past decade, Israeli prime ministers have offered Palestinian leaders an independent state, far more generous than anything Jordan and Egypt ever controlled when they controlled the West Bank and Gaza. At Camp David in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to the borders suggested by President Clinton that would have established a West Bank/Gaza Palestinian state with some territorial adjustments and with the Palestinians getting East Jerusalem as their capital.
For his part, Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat walked out of negotiations, went back home and launched the second Intifada. Invoking Islamic Jew hatred as justification, the Palestinians conducted a three-year, brutal campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli pizza parlors, wedding halls and discotheques.
In 2005, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon decided it was against Israel’s security interests to govern the 1.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Sharon dismantled all of the Jewish settlements and pulled Israeli forces back across the 1967 borders between Israel and Gaza, without even any land swaps.
As an added bonus, Israel left the Palestinians a thriving flower export industry to help jumpstart the local economy. The Palestinians’ response to this generosity? First, they destroyed the donated greenhouses and then launched a war of missiles and rockets against civilian targets in Israel. In a September 2008 meeting in Jerusalem, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert presented president Mahmoud Abbas with a detailed map of a future Palestinian state that, with land swaps, would constitute close to 100 percent of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza prior to the June 1967 war.
Olmert also offered to divide Jerusalem, enabling the Palestinians to locate their capital in the eastern half of the city. Promising to come back the next day for further discussions, Abbas took Olmert’s map to his Ramallah office, just a few miles outside Jerusalem, for his aides to study.
But Abbas never returned with the map. This was the last time the Israeli and Palestinian leaders met.
Many times over the last 63 years, both the international community and the State of Israel have offered the Arabs of Palestine their own state. Each time, these offers have been met by more violence against Jewish citizens. Neither President Abbas nor President Obama are ignorant of this fact. They simply both choose to ignore it.
For Mr. Abbas, this refusal seems to be part of a consistent thread woven throughout the Arab war against the Jews. Mr. Obama’s positions remain more mysterious.
I NEVER said Israel was perfect. Never. However, the settlements are a direct result of Arab terror against the Jews. More attacks? More settlements. Everyone in Israel knows this. Is it right? No...but neither are the indiscriminate attacks against helpless Israeli civilians. The aid? Well if you knew history, you'd know that the "Palestinians" signed the Oslo accords which stated that the 2 state solution will be based on NEGOTIATIONS. The blockade? Come on, I don't need to answer.
Irrational Islamic Jew-hatred is the root cause of the problem in the middle east. And you would have to be blind or politically constipated not to see that, or to not want to see it. It's often said (because its true) that if the Arabs laid down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Jews were to lay down their weapons, they would be massacred. That's because the Palestinians (or Muslim Arabs, for you hair-splitters) do not want peace - they want. The Jews. Dead. They could have their own state by now if they wanted it, but they don't want it - they just want an end to the Jewish state. And thanks to their religion, their so-called "religion of peace", they have the same delusions of manifest destiny and disregard, and the same grisly agenda as Hitler - not the other way around, as the well-versed byrnzie, and all of his blind biased bullshit (and yes, it is bullshit) would like you to believe. If they had their way, they would all commit genocide today. They wouldn't wait until tomorrow. It's NOT EVEN A SECRET.
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Let me guess - you got it from familykoran.org?
I give up. You're fucking hopeless.[/quote]
And therein lies the point there isn't a familykoran.org and there isn't a zionist quiz. Hopeless to zionist rationalization and thought? Huge compliment.
No. Hopeless that you actually are so delusional that you think there is or ever was a sovereign entity called Palestine. Palestine is to Israel as Oz was to Kansas.
On that note, I bid you adieu.
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Dude, I gotta ask, did you cut and paste that or did you have all that info in your head? If you had it in your head, that's amazing. If you cut and paste, where'd you get it from?
http://www.mapsofworld.com/palestine/so ... stine.html
what do you think about the lavon affair, or operation susannah as it was called? ya know, when israel had operatives plant bombs at movie theaters and other places us and uk military frequented in the efforts to blame the bombings on muslims and draw us into their war??
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Are you kidding me? You refer to Palestine repeatedly, you refer to the UN Partition plan, they were partitioning the land of Palestine.
The land that belonged the Palestinians, the land that about which the Zionist leader Jabotinsky stated:
"a voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable, now or in the foreseeable future...precisely because they are not a mob, but a living nation" taken from Finkelstein, the Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
So when in history before 1948 was there a sovereign entity called israel?!!! Never.
You want to argue on the one hand that the Arabs didn't want to split Palestine in half and then on the other hand that it never existed, as you in your original post, there are the quotes around Palestine, a fictional Oz, right. Its there, its everywhere, it exists, as a living nation, to quote Jabotisky, as the ancestral homeland of the Palestinians and you can revise and run from it and make up your nice little quizzes, but its as real as my beating heart, and the hearts of Palestinians worldwide.
Can you provide a link to this piece that you copied and pasted?
Thanks.
wow how magnanimous of them to offer the palestinians their own land in exchange for being supplanted and oppressed. and what of those palestinians who reside in israel.. would they be allowed to stay or should they be forcably removed to this new fabulous palestinian state.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
If you bothered to watch the first video I sent you, you would already have that answer. I just found a transcript so I wouldn't have to re-type it all.
For the record, byrnzie, I may not agree with what you say, but this is not a personal attack on you. I respect that you are able to sensibly debate about it, and to paraphrase Voltaire, "I will fight to the death for your right to say it." and I apologize if emotion may have come in the way of what I am trying to say. Thank you.
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Right! It is/was the name of the region! the name "Palestine" doesn't even have roots in Arabic. The name "Palestine" refers to a region of the eastern Mediterranean coast from the sea to the Jordan valley and from the southern Negev desert to the Galilee lake region (if memory serves me correctly) in the north. The word itself derives from "Plesheth", a name that appears frequently in the Bible (apologies for even going there) and has come into English as "Philistine". Plesheth, (root name - "palash") was a general term meaning rolling or migratory. This referred to the Philistine's invasion and conquest of the coast from the sea. They did not speak Arabic. They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical connection with Arabia or Arabs. The word Palestine (or Palestina) originally identified the region as "The Land of The Philistines", a war-like tribe that inhabited much of the region alongside the Hebrew people. But the older name from antiquity for this region was not Palestine, but Canaan. From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has had the only united, independent, sovereign "Nation-State" that ever existed in "Palestine" west of the Jordan River. I promise you, I'm not making this up.
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How is placing Israeli civilians in the line of fire a result of Palestinian terror attacks?
Michael Neumann - 'The Case Against Israel' P107-108
'Some Israeli's may have seen the first Post-1967 settlements as outposts, advance warning stations guarding the new frontiers against possible attack. This never made a lot of sense: why not just have real advance warning stations, military positions, instead? No one has ever explained why a sprawl of civilian subdivisions and enclaves was required when, to all appearances, a few purely military outposts would have fulfilled any defensive functions at least as well, and at far less cost to both Israeli's and Palestinians. Dayan himself stated that "from the point of view of the security of the State, the establishment of the settlements has no great importance." Other officials shared his assessment:
"We have to use the pretext of security needs and the authority of the military governor as there is no way of driving out the Arabs from their land as long as they refuse to go and accept our compensation..."
In 1969 moreover, Dayan had emphasized that the settlements were eternal: "the settlements established in the territories are there forever, and the future frontiers will include these settlements as part of Israel." In private, he had already in 1967 made it quite clear how the Palestinians were not, in fact, to have a secure and tolerable existence: "there is no solution," he said, "and you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever prefers shall leave..."
...The settler movement's messianic notions of racial destiny have been amply documented. Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former Major General and intelligence chief in the Israeli Defense Forces, describes how they interpret the "halakha - the body of religious laws designed to encode a unique and binding lifestyle." Harkabi, like others, considers Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook to be the mentor of the Gush Emunim settler movement and cites him as saying at a public meeting that:
"I tell you explicitly that the Torah forbids us to surrender even one inch of our liberated land. There are no conquests here and we are not occupying foreign lands; we are returning to our home, to the inheritance of our ancestors. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God - and the more the world gets used to this thought the better it will be for them and for all of us..."
No, irrational Islamic Jew hatred is just a convenient fantasy that you've concocted to justify and excuse Israel's continuing construction of racist, illegal, Jewish-only settlements on land stolen from the Palestinians.
Here's what Hamas have said regarding their support of the international consensus on a two-state solution that is supported by the whole World - excluding the U.S, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau:
Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal: “We are with a state on the 1967 borders, based on a long-term truce. This includes East Jerusalem, the dismantling of settlements and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.’