What good can it bring? How about a stoppage the the 400 rockets that have reigned down on Israel over the past week? Oh, I forgot. That's just a result of "the occupation" so how dare Israel defend its citizens.
You conveniently forget to mention that the attack on Palestinian areas 'over the past week' began before any firing of rockets. It began after a media-campaign of incitement of racial hatred by the Israeli leadership after three illegal settlers were murdered, and after the Israeli leadership decided to lie to the Israeli people and pretend that they hadn't found the bodies, and that they didn't already know who the perpetrators were.
Do you support the illegal Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine?
Regardless of whether you'd like to admit it or not, there have been Jews in what is now Israel for over 2000 years. Gaza is not occupied, and for every inch the Israelis have given up, they've only been met with violence in return. If your starting point is that the entire State of Israel is illegitimate, then there really is nothing to talk about at the bargaining table.
Two questions for you:
1. Do you support the illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine?
2. What did Israel 'give up'? Are you talking about their removal of a handful of settlers from Gaza, which were then sent to live in the illegal settlements in the West bank? http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/09/gaza-s10.html"the withdrawal from Gaza is nothing more than a smokescreen to mask Israel’s consolidation of a far more significant land grab of the West Bank, land it has brutally occupied for nearly 40 years in breach of international law and in defiance of countless United Nations resolutions."
Gaza was turned into a virtual prison after the Gaza 'pullout', and the people left to starve. According to Sarah Roy, (Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University), Gaza was "deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution", and "96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million [was left] dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs." http://electronicintifada.net/content/destroying-gaza/8324
Is that the magnanimous, generous 'giving up' that you're referring to?
He's one of those people who will chime in with some New York Times headline bullshit that he can't defend or support, and then disappear into the night.
What good can it bring? How about a stoppage the the 400 rockets that have reigned down on Israel over the past week? Oh, I forgot. That's just a result of "the occupation" so how dare Israel defend its citizens.
it IS a result of the occupation.
what would you do if someone came onto your property, burned your olive grove, took your land, bulldozed your house, jailed your father, and displaced your family?
personally, i would probably want to attack those people. and i would probably die to avenge my family.
Yes, that is a great strategy that is sure to lead to peace. Regardless of whether you'd like to admit it or not, there have been Jews in what is now Israel for over 2000 years. Gaza is not occupied, and for every inch the Israelis have given up, they've only been met with violence in return. If your starting point is that the entire State of Israel is illegitimate, then there really is nothing to talk about at the bargaining table.
Wait, what? Now I'm confused. If Jews have been living there for 2000 years and Palestinians have been living there for 2000 years, how come Israel was "created" 60+ years ago? And how come it says land of Palestine (phalistine) in the bible?
Ya I called them firecrackers cuz that's what they are and you know it. Stop pretending that they're some crazy ass missiles/rockets that are killing Israelis left and right. If they are, then how come the media isn't saying so? Are you now gonna tell us the media is biased against Israel? Or better yet anti-Semitic? Israel has been the ONLY country that has used chemical weapons against the Palestinians in this tragedy. White phosphorus to be exact. Something AGAINST the international law, but then again, when has Israel ever followed or obeyed the law.....rhitorical question.
Actually the bible doesn't refer to the land as Palestine. That name is derived from the name that was imposed on the territory by Rome after the Great Revolt, which took place between 66-70 C.E., which is well after the Bible (Old Testament) was compiled (a few hundred years after).
Calling them firecrackers is a massive understatement. These are long-range rockets that are plenty fatal. The lack of Israeli fatalities is due to a combination of factors, including the relative lack of accuracy of the rockets themselves, but much more importantly the fact that Israel has a well-developed early warning system and an extensive bomb-shelter infrastructure, and to a lesser extent an interception capacity with Iron Dome. But if one of these rockets were to strike an occupied structure they could be plenty fatal.
Just to be clear, I totally disagree with any sort of land operation. I don't think Israel can ignore the rocket fire and do nothing, but a ground assault won't accomplish anything long-term and will entail a lot more risk for the civilian population of Gaza.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Byrnzie, aside from the Max Blumenthal article, can you point me to other news source that are independently reporting this claim about Israel intentionally suppressing information about the kidnappings? I haven't seen that reported in the press I follow, and I would have expected to see something like that. From reading the blumenthal piece itself, it feels to me like he's presenting his own theory as fact, so can you point me to anyone else who corroborates the claim?
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Byrnzie, aside from the Max Blumenthal article, can you point me to other news source that are independently reporting this claim about Israel intentionally suppressing information about the kidnappings? I haven't seen that reported in the press I follow, and I would have expected to see something like that. From reading the blumenthal piece itself, it feels to me like he's presenting his own theory as fact, so can you point me to anyone else who corroborates the claim?
I only posted the first third of the article - it's quite long. If you click on the link and scroll down he goes into it in more detail and links to various sources to support his claim.
http://www.dci-palestine.org/documents/eight-children-killed-israeli-airstrikes-over-gaza 'The five families that reside in the building evacuated immediately after an Israeli aerial drone fired a warning missile. A number of neighbors, however, gathered on the roof in an effort to prevent the bombing. Shortly after 3 p.m., an Israeli airstrike leveled the building, and killed seven people, including five children, on the spot and injured 28 others.
Hussein Yousef Hussein Karawe, 13, Basem Salem Hussein Karawe, 10, Mohammad Ali Faraj Karawe, 12, Abdullah Hamed Karawe, 6, and Kasem Jaber Adwan Karawe, 12, died immediately, according to evidence collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. Seraj Abed al-Aal, 8, succumbed to his injuries later that evening.
DCI-Palestine confirmed two other Palestinian teenagers died in strikes across Gaza. An Israeli attack killed Ahmad Nael Mahdi, 15, from Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, and wounded two of his friends, one of which remains in critical condition. Ahmad Mousa Habib, 16, from Gaza City’s Al-Shujaiyah neighborhood, and his 22-year-old cousin were killed while riding a motorcycle, DCI-Palestine sources said.
DCI-Palestine is confirming reports of at least three other children killed in the strikes on Tuesday.'
Sieradski’s subversion of the ad brings to the fore the reality that Palestinians experience, and which is rarely heard in US mainstream media.
Sieradski explained to me in an email why he created his spoof:
"The ADL has been a consistent embarrassment to the Jewish community and its campaign to justify the bombing of Gaza is just the latest act in a storied history of shameful behavior. While Israel does have a legitimate right and responsibility to protect its citizens from attack, and while I strenuously oppose all attacks against civilians, to pretend that this current escalation is merely a defensive measure by Israel and not part of a greater policy to undermine the PA unity deal is to deny the obvious.
American Jews are not a monolithic entity that uniformly support Israel’s destructive military policies and extrajudicial killings. It unnerves me to see reports from folks like Khaled Abu Toameh (who is no leftist radical) that Hamas has offered Israel a ceasefire multiple times in the past few days, demanding only that Israel stop targeting Hamas members with extrajudicial killings and release the 500 or so individuals arbitrarily arrested during its investigation into the kidnapping of the three murdered Israeli teens. Israel has rejected the offer. That means this is a war of choice, not a war of necessity. That makes the ADL’s propaganda campaign all the more insidious.
My Jewish community opposes occupation and warfare and supports the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace and security. The ADL does not speak for us. I am unafraid to make that explicitly clear."
It’s quite satisfying that the ADL’s original ad got retweeted just 26 times, while Sieradski’s spoof is at close to 800 retweets!
What good can it bring? How about a stoppage the the 400 rockets that have reigned down on Israel over the past week? Oh, I forgot. That's just a result of "the occupation" so how dare Israel defend its citizens.
You conveniently forget to mention that the attack on Palestinian areas 'over the past week' began before any firing of rockets. It began after a media-campaign of incitement of racial hatred by the Israeli leadership after three illegal settlers were murdered, and after the Israeli leadership decided to lie to the Israeli people and pretend that they hadn't found the bodies, and that they didn't already know who the perpetrators were.
Do you support the illegal Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine?
"Three illegal settlers."Or you could be less of an asshole and describe them as they were: three teenagers waiting at a bus stop. There was evidence that the boys were likely dead, but no definitive proof without the bodies. There is zero evidence that they knew where the bodies were as you allege. And yes, I support the Israeli occupation of Israel. You are quite the troll.
Regardless of whether you'd like to admit it or not, there have been Jews in what is now Israel for over 2000 years. Gaza is not occupied, and for every inch the Israelis have given up, they've only been met with violence in return. If your starting point is that the entire State of Israel is illegitimate, then there really is nothing to talk about at the bargaining table.
Two questions for you:
1. Do you support the illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine?
2. What did Israel 'give up'? Are you talking about their removal of a handful of settlers from Gaza, which were then sent to live in the illegal settlements in the West bank? http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/09/gaza-s10.html"the withdrawal from Gaza is nothing more than a smokescreen to mask Israel’s consolidation of a far more significant land grab of the West Bank, land it has brutally occupied for nearly 40 years in breach of international law and in defiance of countless United Nations resolutions."
Gaza was turned into a virtual prison after the Gaza 'pullout', and the people left to starve. According to Sarah Roy, (Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University), Gaza was "deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution", and "96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million [was left] dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs." http://electronicintifada.net/content/destroying-gaza/8324
Is that the magnanimous, generous 'giving up' that you're referring to?
1) I support Israel. I don't believe what is happening is ethnic cleansing. That is a gross oversimplification of a complex situation for the purposes of shock and propaganda.
2) What did Israel give up? They were pressured to "remove settlements" just as you and your ilk are always demanding. Did it give more security in Gaza for Israel? I'd say just the opposite. To people like you, everything Israel does is a public relations ploy. Is Gaza a nice place to live? Hardly. Is it a prison as you would like to suggest? Hardly. http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/steve-feldman/gaza-prison-or-paradise/
You see Byrnzie, unlike you, I believe in intellectual honesty. You can view this as a propaganda war and take one side, or you can admit that there are valid claims on both sides and this is an enormously complex and fragile situation. There is a failure of leadership on both sides. The situation is a mess. It is precisely because of people like you, who exist on both sides of this conflict, why there where never be peace. Just go on continuing to fan the flames of hatred and see where it gets us.
The best and simplest history of the region I've read was recently up on Reddit. It's not perfect, but it's a nice and simple summary for people to appreciate how we got to where we are today. You'll find it's a lot more involved than Byrnzie would like to admit and doesn't just read, "Jews stole land from Arabs and are ethnically cleansing them like Nazis." Link here : LINK Ok, I want to start in the 1800s, but we need some catch-up for that...
The Story So Far is that Jewish people lived in what is currently called Palestine a thousand or two years ago, but were conquered by a wide variety of other people and eventually sent into a known-world-wide diaspora. This is why you find Jewish people throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia. The Jewish people are persecuted in most of these places, mostly because they are a minority and tend to keep to themselves, and occasionally take jobs that make other people not like you (e.g., bankers). That's another story though. The Jewish people manage to persevere, though, and consider the Land of Israel to be their homeland to which The Messiah will some day return them.
Around the late-1800s, some Jewish people got tired of waiting for The Messiah, and the Zionist Movement was founded. These were people dedicated to creating a Jewish homeland. Preferably in Israel but they were willing to negotiate. In the early 1900s they established a fund to help this happen.
At the time, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, and this fund was used to buy land (perfectly legally) in Palestine from the people who lived there at the time (the ancestors of modern-day Palestinians but then known simply as "Arabs") and start settlements into which Jewish immigrants were settled. Some of Israel's largest modern cities (such as Tel Aviv) were started around this time.
There was a law at the time stating that a settlement was legal if it was surrounded by a wall and had a watchtower. Jewish people would go over to unclaimed lands at night, and before morning would surround a large area with a wall and build a watchtower. Wham, instant settlement. And they did a lot of this right near Arab lands.
This was perfectly legal at the time, but obviously lead to some friction, as you might imagine. The Muslim Arabs were worried about a lot of Jewish people moving in next door.
In the 1920s, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the newly formed League of Nations declared Palestine to be a British mandate. The British, well aware of the tensions between the Arabs and the Jews, tried to calm things down by simply disallowing Jewish immigration to Palestine. This lead to a lot of illegal immigration - Jewish people would cram into tiny boats and sail in under cover of night, to be met on the shore by established settlers. More overnight settlements popped up, and more tension between the Jews and Arabs, and the Jews and British! The Jewish settlers utilised a lot of terrorist tactics at this time. The whole thing was kinda chaotic.
Bottom line from all this is that the Arabs were worried/mad at the Jews moving into their territory, whereas the Jews believed they were fulfilling their destiny and moving back to their homeland - and were doing it (mostly) legally - buying lands, starting legal settlements, etc - until the British outlawed immigration (but even then, they were buying and settling legally).
After World War II, when the aftermath and absolute horrors of The Holocaust were revealed, the world decided that yeah, maybe the Jewish people should have their own homeland. The Balfour Deceleration, all the way back in 1917, had the British stating their support for establishing a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. The newly formed UN voted on this, and in 1948 the State of Israel declared it's independence.
The very next day, the entire rest of the Middle East started a war against them. They lost. There were a few more minor wars after that. Then in 1967, there was a major one.
When I say "major", I don't mean by length. It is known in Israel as "The Six-Day War". In it Israel was attacked by seven of it's neighbours, who were thoroughly defeated to such a degree that Israel pushed it's own borders to more "natural" geographical areas - they pushed the border with Syria farther north, taking over the Golan Heights, with Jordan up to the Jordan river, taking over The West Bank and East Jerusalem, and pushed the border with Egypt all the way to the Suez Canal, taking over Gaza and the entire Sinai Peninsula.
So this kinda sucked for the Arabs living in The West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They were now part of Israel.
Israel actually tried to integrate them. Many received full Israeli citizenship, with full rights. the only exception to this was that they were exempt from military service.
This is the part where I turn this into Personal Anecdotes and "I Was There" accounts. I was born in Israel in the 1970s. I was actually born right after the last "big" war (all the wars after that were 'operations' and 'conflicts'). Until the first Gulf War (1990) I never had to use a bomb shelter (which are a part of every home, or at least every community in Israel). In fact, by the time I was in my teens, we were using the bomb shelters as storage areas. And there were Arabs everywhere.
Admittedly, they mostly had what I now would consider menial, labour-intensive jobs. Construction, hauling, gardening. When I was a kid, my perception was that hey, these people that I occasionally hear Adults say we should be afraid of seem nice. This one guy, Daud, worked as a gardener/groundskeeper in my neighbourhood. All the kids loved him and he obviously loved kids. He'd bring us fruit from the village he lived in.
If you'd have asked me when I was 10 or so, I'd have told you that when I'm older I'd probably have Arab neighbours, and my kids would play with their kids, and they'd come over to borrow some sugar and crap like that. Yeah, other Arab countries were The Enemy, but hell, we had peace with Egypt, we had practical peace with Jordan, and "our" Arabs were nice! Then, in 1987, it all went to hell.
It was one of those things that just escalates out of hand rather than people just sitting down and $%&* talking to each other. There were some problems at a refugee camp, both Arabs and Israelis being killed, then some riots, then an Israeli army truck hit a car, killing four Palestinians, and people decide it was intentional and molotov cocktails start flying.
This is when we started hearing the term "Palestinian", by the way. and by "we" I mean me and the normal population of Israel. This is when they started blocking Palestinians from working and living outside Gaza and the West Bank. This is where we started learning that taking a bus to work might mean dying. This is where fears that should be unreasonable start making people do stupid, stupid things. And you know what? It never got un-stupid. It's been almost 30 years, you'd think some people would remember how well things were going...
ANYway. Right now, the whole area is a powder-keg. And sadly, there are a LOT of idiots playing around with matches, thinking that when the thing explodes they can go "Hey you started it!" when it doesn't matter who started it when you're both sitting on the damn thing. There's a lot more to this - proxy wars, set-up-to-fail diplomacy, extremist idiots on both ends. But I think I've ranted for long enough (: I hope this is at least somewhat coherent!
Interesting indeed, they were warned. So we can agree that Israel tries to prevent civilian casualties.
No, we can't agree on that, because they don't. I asked you what you think about the Israeli's deliberately targeting unarmed civilians, dropping white phosphorus, and killing medical personnel. I take it you're perfectly happy with all of those?
Israeli troops say they were given shoot-to-kill order Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv The Guardian, Monday 5 September 2005
Israeli military prosecutors have opened criminal investigations following allegations by soldiers that they carried out illegal shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed Palestinians.
The 17 separate investigations were prompted by the testimony of dozens of troops collected by Breaking the Silence, a pressure group of former Israeli soldiers committed to exposing human rights abuses by the military in suppressing the Palestinian intifada. The investigations cover a range of allegations, including misuse of weapons and other misuses of power.
Some of the soldiers, who also spoke to the Guardian, say they acted on standing orders in some parts of the Palestinian territories to open fire on people regardless of whether they were armed or not, or posed any physical threat.
The soldiers say that in some situations they were ordered to shoot anyone who appeared on a roof or a balcony, anyone who appeared to be kneeling to the ground or anyone who appeared on the street at a designated time. Among those killed by soldiers acting on the orders were young children.
While the background to the soldiers' experience is the armed conflict that has been going on in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since October 2000, many of the shootings occurred in periods of calm when there was no immediate risk to the soldiers involved.
Yehuda Shaul, the co-founder of Breaking the Silence, said it aimed to show that individual soldiers were not to blame for killings of innocent Palestinians. "It is the situation which is to blame and that is created by military and political leaders, not the soldiers on the ground," he said.
The testimonies shed light on how around 1,700 Palestinian civilians have been killed during the second intifada.
From a distance of 70 metres and through the sight of his machine gun, Assaf could tell that the Palestinian man was aged between 20 and 30, unarmed and trying to get away from an Israeli tank. But the details didn't matter much, because Assaf's orders were to "fire at anything that moved".
...It was not the first time that Assaf had killed an innocent person in Gaza while following orders, but after his discharge he began to think about the things he did.
"The reason why I am telling you this is that I want the army to think about what they are asking us to do, shooting unarmed people. I don't think it's legal."
Assaf is not alone. In recent months dozens of soldiers, including the son of an an Israeli general, all recently discharged, have come forward to share their stories of how they were ordered in briefings to shoot to kill unarmed people without fear of reprimand.
...According to B'Tselem, 3,269 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in almost five years. About 1,700 are believed to have been civilians and 654 minors.
...The statistics collected by the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group show that on May 14, Diya Gawadreh, 13, was killed by a live bullet. Kamal Amjad Nawahda, 13, was shot by Israeli soldiers on May 22. He died on May 27.
After Moshe returned to his paratroop unit, he said there were several incidents when children and teenagers were killed after bullets aimed at their legs hit their chests. The attitude was, he said, "so kids got killed. For a soldier it means nothing. An officer can get a 100 or 200 shekel [£12.50-£25] fine for such a thing."
A common theme in the soldiers' testimony was the desire to avenge Israeli casualties and inflict collective punishment on Palestinians.
...Asma Moghayyer, 16, and her brother Ahmed, 13, were shot as they went to collect clothes from a rooftop washing line. The Israeli army insisted the children had been blown up by a roadside bomb. However, journalists visiting the morgue saw only single bullet wounds to the head.
The truth, said Rafi, was that they were shot by an Israeli soldier following clear orders to shoot anyone on a roof regardless of their role in the conflict.
Rafi says that his overriding impression of the operation was "chaos" and the "indiscriminate use of force". "Gaza was considered a playground for sharpshooters."
And this was 3 years before the attack on Gaza which left 1,600 civilians dead, and when the Goldstone report found the IDF guilty of war crimes, such as the following:
'Israeli soldiers shot dead 11 unarmed Palestinian civilians carrying white flags during Israel's offensive in Gaza earlier this year, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, which said Israel had failed to investigate the killings adequately.
The deaths – including those of five women and four children – took place in seven separate incidents across Gaza in areas controlled by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), where there was no fighting and no Palestinian fighters were nearby...'
Though don't misunderstand me JK18472. I realize that you don't give a fuck about the Palestinians, and that you'll continue spouting more of your crap in your lame effort to shift any blame from the Israeli's.
Israel does more to try to prevent civilian deaths than any army in the history of the world. This is well documented.
The Gaza RulesLINK Israel, unlike Hamas, isn’t trying to kill civilians. It’s taking pains to spare them.
According to many critics, Israel is slaughtering civilians in Gaza. It’s “purposefully wiping out entire families,” says an Arab member of Israel’s parliament. It’s committing “genocide—the murder of entire families,” says Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Iran says Israel has committed “massacres against the defenseless Palestinians.”
The charges are false. By the standards of war, Israel’s efforts to spare civilians have been exemplary.
Israel didn’t choose this fight. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the terrorist organizations that dominate Gaza, claim that Israel provoked the conflict by arresting Hamas members in the West Bank. But arrests in one territory don’t justify aerial bombardment from another. Israel didn’t hit Gaza until terrorists had fired more than 150 rockets into Israel and had rejected a cease-fire.
Some of the pictures that purport to show devastation from the Israeli strikes are fakes borrowed from other wars. As of Wednesday afternoon, the death count ranged from 30 to 50 or more, depending on where you mark the onset of the conflict. Every death is tragic, and the longer the assault goes on, the higher the toll will go. Still, given that Israel has launched more than 500 airstrikes, you’d have to conclude that either Israel is failing miserably to kill people or, more plausibly, it’s largely trying not to kill them.
Israel’s defense minister admits his forces have targeted “terrorists’ houses” as well as “arms, terror infrastructures, command systems, Hamas institutions, [and] regime buildings.” The houses belong to Hamas military leaders. An Israeli official boasts that “there's not a single Hamas brigade commander that has a home to go back to.” Israel’s legal rationale for targeting these homes is that they were “terror command centers” involved in rocket fire or other “terror activity.” But while Israel has tried to kill commanders in their cars (and has succeeded), it has avoided unannounced strikes on their homes.
The last time Israel targeted buildings in Gaza, a year and a half ago, it used leaflets and phone calls to warn residents to get out beforehand. It also fired flares or low-impact mortars (known as a “knock on the roof”) to signal impending strikes. Human rights groups didn’t accept these measures as protection from legal responsibility, but they did hail them as progress. Israel claims to be applying the same measures today. Hamas and other Palestinian sources confirm that the Israeli military has issued phone warnings to families in the targeted homes.
The worst civilian death toll—seven, at the latest count—occurred in a strike on the Khan Yunis home of a terrorist commander. Hamas calls it a “massacre against women and children.” But residents say the family got both a warning call and a knock on the roof. An Israeli security official says Israeli forces didn’t fire their missile until the family had left the house. The official didn’t understand why some members of the family, and apparently their neighbors, went back inside. The residents say they were trying to “form a human shield.”
Human shields are a difficult problem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Hamas is responsible for civilian deaths in Gaza, because it deliberately sets up rocket launchers and military infrastructure in civilian areas. That excuse is too broad. The low death rate in this week’s airstrikes—and the explanations from Israeli officials as to how the casualty rate has been minimized—show that it’s possible to degrade Hamas’ military assets without killing hundreds of people.
The Khan Yunis scenario is different. There, the human shield was voluntary. According to Ha’aretz, an Israeli officer insisted on Wednesday morning that if other civilians followed this example—responding to prestrike warnings by going onto the roofs to form human shields—Israel wouldn’t be deterred. Maybe the officer was bluffing. But what if this scenario happens again? And what if the would-be martyrs appear on the roof while Israel still has time to avert the strike, which wasn’t the case in Khan Yunis? Would their deaths be homicide? Would they be suicide?
That’s a tough call. But anyone concerned about the deliberate targeting of civilians in this conflict should first look at Hamas. The rocket fire from Gaza into Israel began well before the Israeli assault on Gaza. Initially, the rockets were Islamic Jihad’s idea. But in the last few days, Hamas has joined in with gusto, claiming credit for missiles fired at several Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.
Apologists for Hamas argue that its weapons are less precise than Israel’s, so collateral damage is inevitable. That won’t wash. Hamas now has longer-range missiles, known as M-302s or R-160s, that are more precise than its clumsy old Grad rockets. It has been firing the new missiles at cities anyway. Hamas has also flatly rejected the principle of sparing civilians. According to a Hamas spokesman, “All Israelis have now become legitimate targets.”
I’ve criticized Israel for demolishing the West Bank homes of suspected Arab terrorists. That policy is indefensible. But in the Gaza war, it’s clear that Israel has gone to great lengths to minimize civilian deaths. The same can’t be said of Hamas.
1) I support Israel. I don't believe what is happening is ethnic cleansing. That is a gross oversimplification of a complex situation for the purposes of shock and propaganda.
Here's the definition of ethnic cleansing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing 'Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory with the intent of creating a territory inhabited by people of a homogeneous or pure ethnicity, religion, culture, and history. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), as well as mass murder, and intimidation.
Ethnic cleansing is usually accompanied with the efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social centers, farms, and infrastructure, and by the desecration of monuments, cemeteries, and places of worship.'
Israeli leaders, along with prominent Israeli historians, themselves have described what's happening in the region as ethnic cleansing. But you don't believe it is.
2) What did Israel give up? They were pressured to "remove settlements" just as you and your ilk are always demanding. Did it give more security in Gaza for Israel? I'd say just the opposite. To people like you, everything Israel does is a public relations ploy. Is Gaza a nice place to live? Hardly. Is it a prison as you would like to suggest? Hardly. http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/steve-feldman/gaza-prison-or-paradise/
Nice way of avoiding addressing any of my points. And your pathetic article is hardly worth responding to. Some people on 'Trip Advisor' have described Gaza as paradise? Really? And that's enough evidence to satisfy you is it? By the way, David Horowitz is a neo-Conservative racist and bigot. Is he a hero of yours?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/04/11/david-horowitz-s-corrosive-projects/ 'FrontPage (FP) is primarily a platform for extreme Zionists to smear leftists, to attack academics who may be critical of Israel or the current US imperial proclivities, and to hurl ritual abuse against "jihadists" in reality, a thinly-veiled racist attack on Muslims or Arab people. Denigrating and insulting labels are flung around in FP, and its writers often brand anyone near the left with such labels as "racist", "jihadist", "anti-semite", etc. The American progressive broadcaster Al Franken’s photo appears with a "racist" label juxtaposed; Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old ISM volunteer who was killed by the Israeli army, is portrayed as "matron martyr saint for the pro-terrorism Left, the Joan of Arc of Palestinian terrorism". FrontPage also loves to denigrate: Prof. Juan Cole, Prof. Ward Churchill, Prof. Noam Chomsky Simply put, civility and integrity are in short supply at FP.'
You see Byrnzie, unlike you, I believe in intellectual honesty. You can view this as a propaganda war and take one side, or you can admit that there are valid claims on both sides and this is an enormously complex and fragile situation. There is a failure of leadership on both sides. The situation is a mess. It is precisely because of people like you, who exist on both sides of this conflict, why there where never be peace. Just go on continuing to fan the flames of hatred and see where it gets us.
That's cute. I simply happen to be on the same side as Amnesty International, the U.N, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Gideon Levy, e.t.c. Though I realize that for Israel apologists like you, and fans of racist bigots like David Horowitz, Amnesty, and the U.N, e.t.c. are extremist, radical organizations, that 'fan the flames of hatred'.
The best and simplest history of the region I've read was recently up on Reddit. It's not perfect, but it's a nice and simple summary for people to appreciate how we got to where we are today. You'll find it's a lot more involved than Byrnzie would like to admit and doesn't just read, "Jews stole land from Arabs and are ethnically cleansing them like Nazis." Link here : LINK
Israel does more to try to prevent civilian deaths than any army in the history of the world. This is well documented.
Is that why every single human rights organization has accused Israel of war crimes? Is that why Israeli soldiers themselves have testified to deliberately targeting civilians? Is that why on average, Israel has murdered one Palestinian child every three days for the past 13 years?
1) I support Israel. I don't believe what is happening is ethnic cleansing. That is a gross oversimplification of a complex situation for the purposes of shock and propaganda.
Here's the definition of ethnic cleansing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing 'Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory with the intent of creating a territory inhabited by people of a homogeneous or pure ethnicity, religion, culture, and history. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), as well as mass murder, and intimidation.
Ethnic cleansing is usually accompanied with the efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social centers, farms, and infrastructure, and by the desecration of monuments, cemeteries, and places of worship.'
Funny, but I can give examples of all of those things on the Palestinian side. First off, there are many many Arabs living in Israel. However, a future Palestinian state would by have to be Judenrein per Abbas. LINK “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands,” Abbas told the Egyptian press.
How about removing physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group? Yeah, the Palestinians are doing that too. LINK 1LINK 2
Do you even read or think about the nonsense you are writing?
By the way, do you think that any warnings for people in the vicinity to leave would not reach the ears of any Hamas fighters in the area? If so, then what purpose does destroying a house, or an apartment block, serve other than as a form of collective punishment, which is a war crime under international law? And are you going to repeat the same lie that Hamas fighters use civilians as human shields, even though on countless occasions, and after numerous investigations, no evidence has arisen to support this claim?
Why don't you simply admit that you don't give a fuck about Palestinians, and that you regard their lives as worthless?
You see Byrnzie, unlike you, I believe in intellectual honesty. You can view this as a propaganda war and take one side, or you can admit that there are valid claims on both sides and this is an enormously complex and fragile situation. There is a failure of leadership on both sides. The situation is a mess. It is precisely because of people like you, who exist on both sides of this conflict, why there where never be peace. Just go on continuing to fan the flames of hatred and see where it gets us.
That's cute. I simply happen to be on the same side as Amnesty International, the U.N, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Gideon Levy, e.t.c. Though I realize that for Israel apologists like you, and fans of racist bigots like David Horowitz, Amnesty, and the U.N, e.t.c. are extremist, radical organizations, that 'fan the flames of hatred'.
Yeah, I wouldn't be too proud of counting those people as your friends either. Although I realize for Palestinian apologists like you, everyone who opposes your view is a racist bigot.
Funny, but I can give examples of all of those things on the Palestinian side. First off, there are many many Arabs living in Israel. However, a future Palestinian state would by have to be Judenrein per Abbas. LINK “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands,” Abbas told the Egyptian press.
That's not evidence. That's something that somebody may, or may not have, said. Either way, I've also read Abbas stating that Israeli's will be free to live within the borders of a future Palestinian state. Show me some evidence of Israeli's being ethnically cleansed. You can't, because they haven't.
Meanwhile...
U.N. rights investigator accuses Israel of 'ethnic cleansing'
By Stephanie Nebehay Fri Mar 21, 2014
(Reuters) - A U.N. human rights investigator accused Israel on Friday of "ethnic cleansing" in pushing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem and cast doubt that the Israeli government could accept a Palestinian state in the current climate.
He spoke against a backdrop of deadlocked peace talks and accelerating Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem which Palestinians say is dimming their hope of establishing a viable state on contiguous territory.
Israel says Palestinian refusal to recognise it as a Jewish state is the main obstacle. U.S. President Barack Obama this week pressed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to help break the impasse, saying both sides must take political risks before the April 29 deadline for a framework deal.
Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told a news conference that Israeli policies bore "unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing".
Yeah, I wouldn't be too proud of counting those people as your friends either. Although I realize for Palestinian apologists like you, everyone who opposes your view is a racist bigot.
Nah, just people like you, who try and excuse and justify ethnic cleansing, and the murder of Palestinian men, women and children. Say hello to David Horowitz for me.
DAVID HOROWITZ "I spent 25 years in the American Left, whose agendas are definitely to destroy this country. The American left wanted us to lose the Cold War with the Soviets and it wants us to lose the war on terror. So I don't make any apologies for that." — On the "Riz Khan" Show, Al Jazeera, Aug. 21, 2008
"Some polls estimate that 10 percent of Muslims support Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. An al-Jazeera poll put the number at 50 percent. In other words, somewhere between 150 million and 750 million Muslims support a holy war against Christians, Jews, and other Muslims who don't happen to be true believers in the Quran according to bin Laden." — In the Columbia Spectator, Oct. 15, 2007
"There are 150 Muslim Student Associations on American campuses. The Muslim Student Associations were created by Hamas and funded by Saudi Arabia. … [The associations] are Wahhabi Islamicists, and they basically support our enemies." — On Fox News' "Neil Cavuto Show," Aug. 15, 2006
And are you going to repeat the same lie that Hamas fighters use civilians as human shields, even though on countless occasions, and after numerous investigations, no evidence has arisen to support this claim?
No evidence? I can give you evidence from yesterday! Funny how you have blinders on and can only see one side.
LINK Hamas Vows Revenge After Use of Human Shields Goes Awry The events leading up to the strike offer an insight into the difficulties facing IDF forces in combating Gaza-based terrorism. It also provides a revealing glimpse into the way Hamas and other terrorist groups violate international law through the use of human shields. Israeli leaders have in the past referred to such tactics as a "double war crime": firing missiles at Israeli civilians, while using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
Witnesses said an Israeli drone launched a warning flare prior to the strike, in a bid to allow innocent civilians to evacuate the area. Instead, relatives and neighbors gathered at the house to act as human shields, but shortly afterwards an F-16 fired a missile which leveled the building.
In response, Hamas said "all Israelis" would be potential targets for retaliation. "The Khan Yunis massacre... of children is a horrendous war crime, and all Israelis have now become legitimate targets for the resistance," spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said on Facebook.
Hamas has repeatedly vowed to target Israeli civilians, including in a recent propaganda video aimed at the residents of the southern Israeli city of Beersheva.
Earlier, three terrorists were killed in a separate strike on a car in the Daraj neighborhood in the center of Gaza City, Qudra said.
Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV showed gruesome images of charred body parts being loaded onto ambulance stretchers.
Family members said all of them were Hamas militants, identifying one as Mohammed Shaaban, 32, a senior commander in Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades. He was also head of the group's naval operations, they said.
Comments
Do you support the illegal Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine?
1. Do you support the illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine?
2. What did Israel 'give up'? Are you talking about their removal of a handful of settlers from Gaza, which were then sent to live in the illegal settlements in the West bank? http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/09/gaza-s10.html "the withdrawal from Gaza is nothing more than a smokescreen to mask Israel’s consolidation of a far more significant land grab of the West Bank, land it has brutally occupied for nearly 40 years in breach of international law and in defiance of countless United Nations resolutions."
Are you referring to the fact that the Israeli's themselves have admitted that the Gaza 'pullout' was just a public relations ploy to enable them to triple settlement construction in the West Bank? http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/top-pm-aide-gaza-plan-aims-to-freeze-the-peace-process-1.136686
Gaza was turned into a virtual prison after the Gaza 'pullout', and the people left to starve. According to Sarah Roy, (Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University), Gaza was "deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution", and "96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million [was left] dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs." http://electronicintifada.net/content/destroying-gaza/8324
Is that the magnanimous, generous 'giving up' that you're referring to?
He's one of those people who will chime in with some New York Times headline bullshit that he can't defend or support, and then disappear into the night.
Calling them firecrackers is a massive understatement. These are long-range rockets that are plenty fatal. The lack of Israeli fatalities is due to a combination of factors, including the relative lack of accuracy of the rockets themselves, but much more importantly the fact that Israel has a well-developed early warning system and an extensive bomb-shelter infrastructure, and to a lesser extent an interception capacity with Iron Dome. But if one of these rockets were to strike an occupied structure they could be plenty fatal.
Just to be clear, I totally disagree with any sort of land operation. I don't think Israel can ignore the rocket fire and do nothing, but a ground assault won't accomplish anything long-term and will entail a lot more risk for the civilian population of Gaza.
Think what you will.
http://www.dci-palestine.org/documents/eight-children-killed-israeli-airstrikes-over-gaza
'The five families that reside in the building evacuated immediately after an Israeli aerial drone fired a warning missile. A number of neighbors, however, gathered on the roof in an effort to prevent the bombing. Shortly after 3 p.m., an Israeli airstrike leveled the building, and killed seven people, including five children, on the spot and injured 28 others.
Hussein Yousef Hussein Karawe, 13, Basem Salem Hussein Karawe, 10, Mohammad Ali Faraj Karawe, 12, Abdullah Hamed Karawe, 6, and Kasem Jaber Adwan Karawe, 12, died immediately, according to evidence collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. Seraj Abed al-Aal, 8, succumbed to his injuries later that evening.
DCI-Palestine confirmed two other Palestinian teenagers died in strikes across Gaza. An Israeli attack killed Ahmad Nael Mahdi, 15, from Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, and wounded two of his friends, one of which remains in critical condition. Ahmad Mousa Habib, 16, from Gaza City’s Al-Shujaiyah neighborhood, and his 22-year-old cousin were killed while riding a motorcycle, DCI-Palestine sources said.
DCI-Palestine is confirming reports of at least three other children killed in the strikes on Tuesday.'
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/spoof-adl-ad-justifying-attack-gaza-goes-viral
The point of the original ADL ad is to encourage the target audience – Americans – to identify with Israel and see Israel’s brutal violence that targets Palestinian family homes and kills children – as natural, reasonable and justified “self-defense.”
Sieradski’s subversion of the ad brings to the fore the reality that Palestinians experience, and which is rarely heard in US mainstream media.
Sieradski explained to me in an email why he created his spoof:
"The ADL has been a consistent embarrassment to the Jewish community and its campaign to justify the bombing of Gaza is just the latest act in a storied history of shameful behavior. While Israel does have a legitimate right and responsibility to protect its citizens from attack, and while I strenuously oppose all attacks against civilians, to pretend that this current escalation is merely a defensive measure by Israel and not part of a greater policy to undermine the PA unity deal is to deny the obvious.
American Jews are not a monolithic entity that uniformly support Israel’s destructive military policies and extrajudicial killings. It unnerves me to see reports from folks like Khaled Abu Toameh (who is no leftist radical) that Hamas has offered Israel a ceasefire multiple times in the past few days, demanding only that Israel stop targeting Hamas members with extrajudicial killings and release the 500 or so individuals arbitrarily arrested during its investigation into the kidnapping of the three murdered Israeli teens. Israel has rejected the offer. That means this is a war of choice, not a war of necessity. That makes the ADL’s propaganda campaign all the more insidious.
My Jewish community opposes occupation and warfare and supports the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace and security. The ADL does not speak for us. I am unafraid to make that explicitly clear."
It’s quite satisfying that the ADL’s original ad got retweeted just 26 times, while Sieradski’s spoof is at close to 800 retweets!
2) What did Israel give up? They were pressured to "remove settlements" just as you and your ilk are always demanding. Did it give more security in Gaza for Israel? I'd say just the opposite. To people like you, everything Israel does is a public relations ploy. Is Gaza a nice place to live? Hardly. Is it a prison as you would like to suggest? Hardly. http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/steve-feldman/gaza-prison-or-paradise/
Link here : LINK
Ok, I want to start in the 1800s, but we need some catch-up for that...
The Story So Far is that Jewish people lived in what is currently called Palestine a thousand or two years ago, but were conquered by a wide variety of other people and eventually sent into a known-world-wide diaspora. This is why you find Jewish people throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia. The Jewish people are persecuted in most of these places, mostly because they are a minority and tend to keep to themselves, and occasionally take jobs that make other people not like you (e.g., bankers). That's another story though. The Jewish people manage to persevere, though, and consider the Land of Israel to be their homeland to which The Messiah will some day return them.
Around the late-1800s, some Jewish people got tired of waiting for The Messiah, and the Zionist Movement was founded. These were people dedicated to creating a Jewish homeland. Preferably in Israel but they were willing to negotiate. In the early 1900s they established a fund to help this happen.
At the time, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, and this fund was used to buy land (perfectly legally) in Palestine from the people who lived there at the time (the ancestors of modern-day Palestinians but then known simply as "Arabs") and start settlements into which Jewish immigrants were settled. Some of Israel's largest modern cities (such as Tel Aviv) were started around this time.
There was a law at the time stating that a settlement was legal if it was surrounded by a wall and had a watchtower. Jewish people would go over to unclaimed lands at night, and before morning would surround a large area with a wall and build a watchtower. Wham, instant settlement. And they did a lot of this right near Arab lands.
This was perfectly legal at the time, but obviously lead to some friction, as you might imagine. The Muslim Arabs were worried about a lot of Jewish people moving in next door.
In the 1920s, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the newly formed League of Nations declared Palestine to be a British mandate. The British, well aware of the tensions between the Arabs and the Jews, tried to calm things down by simply disallowing Jewish immigration to Palestine. This lead to a lot of illegal immigration - Jewish people would cram into tiny boats and sail in under cover of night, to be met on the shore by established settlers. More overnight settlements popped up, and more tension between the Jews and Arabs, and the Jews and British! The Jewish settlers utilised a lot of terrorist tactics at this time. The whole thing was kinda chaotic.
Bottom line from all this is that the Arabs were worried/mad at the Jews moving into their territory, whereas the Jews believed they were fulfilling their destiny and moving back to their homeland - and were doing it (mostly) legally - buying lands, starting legal settlements, etc - until the British outlawed immigration (but even then, they were buying and settling legally).
After World War II, when the aftermath and absolute horrors of The Holocaust were revealed, the world decided that yeah, maybe the Jewish people should have their own homeland. The Balfour Deceleration, all the way back in 1917, had the British stating their support for establishing a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. The newly formed UN voted on this, and in 1948 the State of Israel declared it's independence.
The very next day, the entire rest of the Middle East started a war against them. They lost.
There were a few more minor wars after that. Then in 1967, there was a major one.
When I say "major", I don't mean by length. It is known in Israel as "The Six-Day War". In it Israel was attacked by seven of it's neighbours, who were thoroughly defeated to such a degree that Israel pushed it's own borders to more "natural" geographical areas - they pushed the border with Syria farther north, taking over the Golan Heights, with Jordan up to the Jordan river, taking over The West Bank and East Jerusalem, and pushed the border with Egypt all the way to the Suez Canal, taking over Gaza and the entire Sinai Peninsula.
So this kinda sucked for the Arabs living in The West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They were now part of Israel.
Israel actually tried to integrate them. Many received full Israeli citizenship, with full rights. the only exception to this was that they were exempt from military service.
This is the part where I turn this into Personal Anecdotes and "I Was There" accounts.
I was born in Israel in the 1970s. I was actually born right after the last "big" war (all the wars after that were 'operations' and 'conflicts'). Until the first Gulf War (1990) I never had to use a bomb shelter (which are a part of every home, or at least every community in Israel).
In fact, by the time I was in my teens, we were using the bomb shelters as storage areas.
And there were Arabs everywhere.
Admittedly, they mostly had what I now would consider menial, labour-intensive jobs. Construction, hauling, gardening. When I was a kid, my perception was that hey, these people that I occasionally hear Adults say we should be afraid of seem nice. This one guy, Daud, worked as a gardener/groundskeeper in my neighbourhood. All the kids loved him and he obviously loved kids. He'd bring us fruit from the village he lived in.
If you'd have asked me when I was 10 or so, I'd have told you that when I'm older I'd probably have Arab neighbours, and my kids would play with their kids, and they'd come over to borrow some sugar and crap like that. Yeah, other Arab countries were The Enemy, but hell, we had peace with Egypt, we had practical peace with Jordan, and "our" Arabs were nice!
Then, in 1987, it all went to hell.
It was one of those things that just escalates out of hand rather than people just sitting down and $%&* talking to each other. There were some problems at a refugee camp, both Arabs and Israelis being killed, then some riots, then an Israeli army truck hit a car, killing four Palestinians, and people decide it was intentional and molotov cocktails start flying.
This is when we started hearing the term "Palestinian", by the way. and by "we" I mean me and the normal population of Israel. This is when they started blocking Palestinians from working and living outside Gaza and the West Bank. This is where we started learning that taking a bus to work might mean dying. This is where fears that should be unreasonable start making people do stupid, stupid things. And you know what? It never got un-stupid. It's been almost 30 years, you'd think some people would remember how well things were going...
ANYway.
Right now, the whole area is a powder-keg. And sadly, there are a LOT of idiots playing around with matches, thinking that when the thing explodes they can go "Hey you started it!" when it doesn't matter who started it when you're both sitting on the damn thing.
There's a lot more to this - proxy wars, set-up-to-fail diplomacy, extremist idiots on both ends. But I think I've ranted for long enough (: I hope this is at least somewhat coherent!
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/06/israel1
Israeli troops say they were given shoot-to-kill order
Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv
The Guardian, Monday 5 September 2005
Israeli military prosecutors have opened criminal investigations following allegations by soldiers that they carried out illegal shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed Palestinians.
The 17 separate investigations were prompted by the testimony of dozens of troops collected by Breaking the Silence, a pressure group of former Israeli soldiers committed to exposing human rights abuses by the military in suppressing the Palestinian intifada. The investigations cover a range of allegations, including misuse of weapons and other misuses of power.
Some of the soldiers, who also spoke to the Guardian, say they acted on standing orders in some parts of the Palestinian territories to open fire on people regardless of whether they were armed or not, or posed any physical threat.
The soldiers say that in some situations they were ordered to shoot anyone who appeared on a roof or a balcony, anyone who appeared to be kneeling to the ground or anyone who appeared on the street at a designated time. Among those killed by soldiers acting on the orders were young children.
While the background to the soldiers' experience is the armed conflict that has been going on in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since October 2000, many of the shootings occurred in periods of calm when there was no immediate risk to the soldiers involved.
Yehuda Shaul, the co-founder of Breaking the Silence, said it aimed to show that individual soldiers were not to blame for killings of innocent Palestinians. "It is the situation which is to blame and that is created by military and political leaders, not the soldiers on the ground," he said.
The testimonies shed light on how around 1,700 Palestinian civilians have been killed during the second intifada.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/06/israel
Israeli soldiers tell of indiscriminate killings by army and a culture of impunity
From a distance of 70 metres and through the sight of his machine gun, Assaf could tell that the Palestinian man was aged between 20 and 30, unarmed and trying to get away from an Israeli tank. But the details didn't matter much, because Assaf's orders were to "fire at anything that moved".
...It was not the first time that Assaf had killed an innocent person in Gaza while following orders, but after his discharge he began to think about the things he did.
"The reason why I am telling you this is that I want the army to think about what they are asking us to do, shooting unarmed people. I don't think it's legal."
Assaf is not alone. In recent months dozens of soldiers, including the son of an an Israeli general, all recently discharged, have come forward to share their stories of how they were ordered in briefings to shoot to kill unarmed people without fear of reprimand.
...According to B'Tselem, 3,269 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in almost five years. About 1,700 are believed to have been civilians and 654 minors.
...The statistics collected by the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group show that on May 14, Diya Gawadreh, 13, was killed by a live bullet. Kamal Amjad Nawahda, 13, was shot by Israeli soldiers on May 22. He died on May 27.
After Moshe returned to his paratroop unit, he said there were several incidents when children and teenagers were killed after bullets aimed at their legs hit their chests. The attitude was, he said, "so kids got killed. For a soldier it means nothing. An officer can get a 100 or 200 shekel [£12.50-£25] fine for such a thing."
A common theme in the soldiers' testimony was the desire to avenge Israeli casualties and inflict collective punishment on Palestinians.
...Asma Moghayyer, 16, and her brother Ahmed, 13, were shot as they went to collect clothes from a rooftop washing line. The Israeli army insisted the children had been blown up by a roadside bomb. However, journalists visiting the morgue saw only single bullet wounds to the head.
The truth, said Rafi, was that they were shot by an Israeli soldier following clear orders to shoot anyone on a roof regardless of their role in the conflict.
Rafi says that his overriding impression of the operation was "chaos" and the "indiscriminate use of force". "Gaza was considered a playground for sharpshooters."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/13/israeli-soldiers-gaza-deaths-allegations
Israeli soldiers killed unarmed civilians carrying white flags in Gaza, says report
Peter Beaumont
The Guardian, Thursday 13 August 2009
'Israeli soldiers shot dead 11 unarmed Palestinian civilians carrying white flags during Israel's offensive in Gaza earlier this year, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, which said Israel had failed to investigate the killings adequately.
The deaths – including those of five women and four children – took place in seven separate incidents across Gaza in areas controlled by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), where there was no fighting and no Palestinian fighters were nearby...'
Though don't misunderstand me JK18472. I realize that you don't give a fuck about the Palestinians, and that you'll continue spouting more of your crap in your lame effort to shift any blame from the Israeli's.
The Gaza Rules LINK
Israel, unlike Hamas, isn’t trying to kill civilians. It’s taking pains to spare them.
According to many critics, Israel is slaughtering civilians in Gaza. It’s “purposefully wiping out entire families,” says an Arab member of Israel’s parliament. It’s committing “genocide—the murder of entire families,” says Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. Iran says Israel has committed “massacres against the defenseless Palestinians.”
The charges are false. By the standards of war, Israel’s efforts to spare civilians have been exemplary.
Israel didn’t choose this fight. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the terrorist organizations that dominate Gaza, claim that Israel provoked the conflict by arresting Hamas members in the
West Bank. But arrests in one territory don’t justify aerial bombardment from another. Israel didn’t hit Gaza until terrorists had fired more than 150 rockets into Israel and had rejected a cease-fire.
Some of the pictures that purport to show devastation from the Israeli strikes are fakes borrowed from other wars. As of Wednesday afternoon, the death count ranged from 30 to 50 or more, depending on where you mark the onset of the conflict. Every death is tragic, and the longer the assault goes on, the higher the toll will go. Still, given that Israel has launched more than 500 airstrikes, you’d have to conclude that either Israel is failing miserably to kill people or, more plausibly, it’s largely trying not to kill them.
Israel’s defense minister admits his forces have targeted “terrorists’ houses” as well as “arms, terror infrastructures, command systems, Hamas institutions, [and] regime buildings.” The houses belong to Hamas military leaders. An Israeli official boasts that “there's not a single Hamas brigade commander that has a home to go back to.” Israel’s legal rationale for targeting these homes is that they were “terror command centers” involved in rocket fire or other “terror activity.” But while Israel has tried to kill commanders in their cars (and has succeeded), it has avoided unannounced strikes on their homes.
The last time Israel targeted buildings in Gaza, a year and a half ago, it used leaflets and phone calls to warn residents to get out beforehand. It also fired flares or low-impact mortars (known as a “knock on the roof”) to signal impending strikes. Human rights groups didn’t accept these measures as protection from legal responsibility, but they did hail them as progress. Israel claims to be applying the same measures today. Hamas and other Palestinian sources confirm that the Israeli military has issued phone warnings to families in the targeted homes.
The worst civilian death toll—seven, at the latest count—occurred in a strike on the Khan Yunis home of a terrorist commander. Hamas calls it a “massacre against women and children.” But residents say the family got both a warning call and a knock on the roof. An Israeli security official says Israeli forces didn’t fire their missile until the family had left the house. The official didn’t understand why some members of the family, and apparently their neighbors, went back inside. The residents say they were trying to “form a human shield.”
Human shields are a difficult problem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Hamas is responsible for civilian deaths in Gaza, because it deliberately sets up rocket launchers and military infrastructure in civilian areas. That excuse is too broad. The low death rate in this week’s airstrikes—and the explanations from Israeli officials as to how the casualty rate has been minimized—show that it’s possible to degrade Hamas’ military assets without killing hundreds of people.
The Khan Yunis scenario is different. There, the human shield was voluntary. According to Ha’aretz, an Israeli officer insisted on Wednesday morning that if other civilians followed this example—responding to prestrike warnings by going onto the roofs to form human shields—Israel wouldn’t be deterred. Maybe the officer was bluffing. But what if this scenario happens again? And what if the would-be martyrs appear on the roof while Israel still has time to avert the strike, which wasn’t the case in Khan Yunis? Would their deaths be homicide? Would they be suicide?
That’s a tough call. But anyone concerned about the deliberate targeting of civilians in this conflict should first look at Hamas. The rocket fire from Gaza into Israel began well before the Israeli assault on Gaza. Initially, the rockets were Islamic Jihad’s idea. But in the last few days, Hamas has joined in with gusto, claiming credit for missiles fired at several Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.
Apologists for Hamas argue that its weapons are less precise than Israel’s, so collateral damage is inevitable. That won’t wash. Hamas now has longer-range missiles, known as M-302s or R-160s, that are more precise than its clumsy old Grad rockets. It has been firing the new missiles at cities anyway. Hamas has also flatly rejected the principle of sparing civilians. According to a Hamas spokesman, “All Israelis have now become legitimate targets.”
I’ve criticized Israel for demolishing the West Bank homes of suspected Arab terrorists. That policy is indefensible. But in the Gaza war, it’s clear that Israel has gone to great lengths to minimize civilian deaths. The same can’t be said of Hamas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
'Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory with the intent of creating a territory inhabited by people of a homogeneous or pure ethnicity, religion, culture, and history. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), as well as mass murder, and intimidation.
Ethnic cleansing is usually accompanied with the efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social centers, farms, and infrastructure, and by the desecration of monuments, cemeteries, and places of worship.'
Israeli leaders, along with prominent Israeli historians, themselves have described what's happening in the region as ethnic cleansing. But you don't believe it is. Nice way of avoiding addressing any of my points. And your pathetic article is hardly worth responding to. Some people on 'Trip Advisor' have described Gaza as paradise? Really? And that's enough evidence to satisfy you is it?
By the way, David Horowitz is a neo-Conservative racist and bigot. Is he a hero of yours?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/04/11/david-horowitz-s-corrosive-projects/
'FrontPage (FP) is primarily a platform for extreme Zionists to smear leftists, to attack academics who may be critical of Israel or the current US imperial proclivities, and to hurl ritual abuse against "jihadists" in reality, a thinly-veiled racist attack on Muslims or Arab people. Denigrating and insulting labels are flung around in FP, and its writers often brand anyone near the left with such labels as "racist", "jihadist", "anti-semite", etc. The American progressive broadcaster Al Franken’s photo appears with a "racist" label juxtaposed; Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old ISM volunteer who was killed by the Israeli army, is portrayed as "matron martyr saint for the pro-terrorism Left, the Joan of Arc of Palestinian terrorism". FrontPage also loves to denigrate: Prof. Juan Cole, Prof. Ward Churchill, Prof. Noam Chomsky Simply put, civility and integrity are in short supply at FP.'
“In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands,” Abbas told the Egyptian press.
How about removing physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group? Yeah, the Palestinians are doing that too. LINK 1 LINK 2
Do you even read or think about the nonsense you are writing?
And are you going to repeat the same lie that Hamas fighters use civilians as human shields, even though on countless occasions, and after numerous investigations, no evidence has arisen to support this claim?
Why don't you simply admit that you don't give a fuck about Palestinians, and that you regard their lives as worthless?
Either way, I've also read Abbas stating that Israeli's will be free to live within the borders of a future Palestinian state.
Show me some evidence of Israeli's being ethnically cleansed. You can't, because they haven't.
Meanwhile...
U.N. rights investigator accuses Israel of 'ethnic cleansing'
By Stephanie Nebehay
Fri Mar 21, 2014
(Reuters) - A U.N. human rights investigator accused Israel on Friday of "ethnic cleansing" in pushing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem and cast doubt that the Israeli government could accept a Palestinian state in the current climate.
He spoke against a backdrop of deadlocked peace talks and accelerating Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem which Palestinians say is dimming their hope of establishing a viable state on contiguous territory.
Israel says Palestinian refusal to recognise it as a Jewish state is the main obstacle. U.S. President Barack Obama this week pressed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to help break the impasse, saying both sides must take political risks before the April 29 deadline for a framework deal.
Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told a news conference that Israeli policies bore "unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing".
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http://www.alternet.org/story/151738/10_of_america's_most_dangerous_hatemongers?page=0,2
10 of America's Most Dangerous Hatemongers
DAVID HOROWITZ
"I spent 25 years in the American Left, whose agendas are definitely to destroy this country. The American left wanted us to lose the Cold War with the Soviets and it wants us to lose the war on terror. So I don't make any apologies for that."
— On the "Riz Khan" Show, Al Jazeera, Aug. 21, 2008
"Some polls estimate that 10 percent of Muslims support Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. An al-Jazeera poll put the number at 50 percent. In other words, somewhere between 150 million and 750 million Muslims support a holy war against Christians, Jews, and other Muslims who don't happen to be true believers in the Quran according to bin Laden."
— In the Columbia Spectator, Oct. 15, 2007
"There are 150 Muslim Student Associations on American campuses. The Muslim Student Associations were created by Hamas and funded by Saudi Arabia. … [The associations] are Wahhabi Islamicists, and they basically support our enemies."
— On Fox News' "Neil Cavuto Show," Aug. 15, 2006
LINK
Hamas Vows Revenge After Use of Human Shields Goes Awry
The events leading up to the strike offer an insight into the difficulties facing IDF forces in combating Gaza-based terrorism. It also provides a revealing glimpse into the way Hamas and other terrorist groups violate international law through the use of human shields. Israeli leaders have in the past referred to such tactics as a "double war crime": firing missiles at Israeli civilians, while using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
Witnesses said an Israeli drone launched a warning flare prior to the strike, in a bid to allow innocent civilians to evacuate the area. Instead, relatives and neighbors gathered at the house to act as human shields, but shortly afterwards an F-16 fired a missile which leveled the building.
In response, Hamas said "all Israelis" would be potential targets for retaliation. "The Khan Yunis massacre... of children is a horrendous war crime, and all Israelis have now become legitimate targets for the resistance," spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said on Facebook.
Hamas has repeatedly vowed to target Israeli civilians, including in a recent propaganda video aimed at the residents of the southern Israeli city of Beersheva.
Earlier, three terrorists were killed in a separate strike on a car in the Daraj neighborhood in the center of Gaza City, Qudra said.
Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV showed gruesome images of charred body parts being loaded onto ambulance stretchers.
Family members said all of them were Hamas militants, identifying one as Mohammed Shaaban, 32, a senior commander in Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades. He was also head of the group's naval operations, they said.