at the end of the day I don't care whose civilians are dying are for what reason but CIVILIANS are being slaughtered here and they are (for the most part) innocent people).
I'm just flying around the other side of the world to say I love you
Sha la la la i'm in love with a jersey girl
I love you forever and forever
Adel 03 Melb 1 03 LA 2 06 Santa Barbara 06 Gorge 1 06 Gorge 2 06 Adel 1 06 Adel 2 06 Camden 1 08 Camden 2 08 Washington DC 08 Hartford 08
i don't know where you are getting your information, but everything you typed about palestinians being able to move freely is wrong. what about the jewish only roads? what are your thoughts on the settlements? that is the root cause of this whole situation. the settlements are illegal and israel keeps expanding them and displacing palestinians from their homes and their land. what are your thoughts on the destruction of olive groves, which has all but destroyed the palestinian economy?[/quote]
I get my information from the source. I lived there for a few years not to long ago where do you get your information from?
They can move freely into Israeli cities, the checkpoint lines are long. It is a huge inconvenience but that's the price of safety. We do the same thing here with airlines and entering large stadiums or arenas.
Many Arabs want to work in Israel because they get paid better and get better benefits. What ? Arabs get benefits in Israel ? Yes its true. All ate welcome as long as you don't blow up people.
The Israelis left the setlements in Gazza in return for peace. Clearly one side did not hold up its end if the bargain.
The Israeli people would be subject to the same checkpoints if they wanted to travel to Gazza. They would make sure tjey are not known terrorists or have a bomb straped to their body.
Funny though, not many Israelis want to go to Gazza, ever wonder why?
Maybe because they would be killed instantly. Or maybe because they are not allowed in.
Wanna talk about apartheid ? Israelis can't go to the mosque in Jerusalem, everyone is welcome at the western wall
Is any of it making you think a little.
Ones objective is defeanse the other is destruction.
Do you think you could go to Gazza ?
Think about that
jk, since you were in gaza, at least i think thats what you said, did it feel like an open air prison?
im thinking about going to gaza on a fishing trip, were you able to go deep sea fishing, say more than 3 miles off the coast? thanks
In regard to the fishing, the IDF would protect you. So you probably could go fishing there if you like. You can't enter Gazza, but Israel would protect you in the water. I know what your thinking doesn't Israel control the ports ? And they don't let anything in? Well not really. Same as the checkpoints. They just want to make sure no guns or bombs or missles are coming in. They do their best but obviously some missles from Egypt and Iran were smugled in. Now the can reach Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But that'd not the point here. We were talking about your fishing trip. That would be fine.
I think you will find that as long as your not trying to blow people up, Israel and the people are pretty awesome, welcoming and excepting of all peoples and ideas.
In fact they have a gay pride parade every year.
How do you think something like that would go over in Gazza?
was just pointing out that originally israel was kind enough to let the palestinians fish the waters 20 miles out then for some reason they limited fishing to only 3 miles out. if i went fishing i dont want to be fired upon like the 13 yr old playing futbol was. i dont think he was trying to blow anyone up, maybe but i havent heard that.
I find it interesting. Some of the terms used in the article like Israeli arabs.
Arabs can live in Israel. But Israelis can't go to Gazza. The fact that you can have this question or debate shows that Arabs can and do exist inside of Israel. But the same cannot he said for Jews in Gazza. Why ? Why can't Jews go to Gazza? You and I both know they will be killed. But an Arab can live and work in Israel or live in Gazza and work in Israel.
Not every Israeli is perfect or even close to it. But neither are we. Ar those reports credible ? Maybe. But you have to realize how many Jewish people have been murdered on highways. How often cars pretend to be broken down and when you stop you are met with bullets and knives. There ate so many horror stories. So many stories of people boarding public buses with bombs on their chest. Boarding busses filled with woman and children. Too many stories of someone dressed up as an Israeli woman with a bomb on her chest walking into a pizza store and killing families.
Killing a girl the night before she was to be married. I know this girl she was very special to my family. She was a wonderful young girl. She used to visit the cancer patients at the hospital. I met her when my niece was a patient there. She would come with some if her friends and bring toys IR games and make the children laugh and have fun. This was a very difficult time for my family. My.niece was only 2. But this girl made her so happy. She took her on trips with hospital staff members. She really was a special person. Her father was a doctor in the ER. That meant he saw a lot of terror victims. He even worked on the terrorists themselves and tried to save their lives as well. He was also a great man.
Well the night before the girls wedding she went to dinner with her father, one last time just the two if them before she was married. But she never made it down the aisle. A terrorist with a bomb straped to his chest blew them up.
It's very sad. But maybe that's why some Israelis want some seperation maybe they are afraid for the lives. Maybe they just don't want to be blown.up.
Do you think Israel likes this stuff. Do you think they like being mean to the palastineans ?
Is their goal to hold them back ? No ,
Israel wants to live its life just like you and me. They are families, they want to keep advancing science and technology.
They want to continue doing great things for the world like building the technology for the first cell phone, continuing research to cure cancer, helping to create the first electric car.
They don't want war. They don't want to fight with anyone. They want to live. And they want to be safe.
There's talk of Israeli troops entering Gaza. Could this really happen? I think the situation would escalate in a very bad way if it did. Is Israel bluffing? But how long can both sides fire rockets at each other? The whole thing just blows my mind. I can't imagine firing a rocket into a city hoping that it will kill people... not caring if children are killed... it's human cruelty at its worse.
I am reminded of something I heard Christopher Hitchens say once... "For good people to do evil - that takes religion." He has a few good things to say specifically about Israel/Palestine too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxhyy9Wpb4
You can't imagine firing a rocket at a building and not caring if civilians die. Well neither can the IDF. They have long faced this problem. Their enemies don't value life. They find honour in killing. They stock pile weapons hidden near hospitals and other civilian areas. The leaders of Hammas hide behind people. They literaly use humans as shields because they know the Israelis wont fire at them if they ate surounded by families. This has been a very difficult part if the conflict for the IDF.
I mentioned it before but I will say it again. Before Israel bombs anything they drop thousands of papers and small posters in Arabic saying they will be bombed in 30 minute and civilians should run away.
Now for the first time they have talent over Arab radio broadcasts to publicize their planes atacks on weapon storages and Terrorist leaders. All to give the innocent a chance to run and be safe.
Yes Israel too can't bomb a building knowing their ate innocent people there.
I think the more you look into this age old conflict you will find you are more like the Israelis in objective and moral character.
I must stress this not about religion. It is about the hatred of one group against the other.
In fact when it comes to the Jewish religion, no wars are allowed. Only a defensive army us permited
The IDF, ISRAEL DEFEANSE FORCES , is only to.protect its people. Nothing more
Do you think Israel likes this stuff. Do you think they like being mean to the palastineans ?
Is their goal to hold them back ? No ,
Israel wants to live its life just like you and me. They are families, they want to keep advancing science and technology.
They want to continue doing great things for the world like building the technology for the first cell phone, continuing research to cure cancer, helping to create the first electric car.
They don't want war. They don't want to fight with anyone. They want to live. And they want to be safe.
Just like you and me.
the israeli govt is NOT just like me. please do not speak for me as if you know me. you dont... just as i dont know who you are.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
You can't imagine firing a rocket at a building and not caring if civilians die. Well neither can the IDF. They have long faced this problem. Their enemies don't value life. They find honour in killing. They stock pile weapons hidden near hospitals and other civilian areas. The leaders of Hammas hide behind people. They literaly use humans as shields because they know the Israelis wont fire at them if they ate surounded by families. This has been a very difficult part if the conflict for the IDF.
I mentioned it before but I will say it again. Before Israel bombs anything they drop thousands of papers and small posters in Arabic saying they will be bombed in 30 minute and civilians should run away.
Now for the first time they have talent over Arab radio broadcasts to publicize their planes atacks on weapon storages and Terrorist leaders. All to give the innocent a chance to run and be safe.
Yes Israel too can't bomb a building knowing their ate innocent people there.
I think the more you look into this age old conflict you will find you are more like the Israelis in objective and moral character.
I must stress this not about religion. It is about the hatred of one group against the other.
In fact when it comes to the Jewish religion, no wars are allowed. Only a defensive army us permited
The IDF, ISRAEL DEFEANSE FORCES , is only to.protect its people. Nothing more
Where does hatred of one group against the other come from? Thin air?
Certainly religion doesn't always cause hatred, but it does separate people into groups. When people grow up in one group, they then end up looking at people in other groups as "others".
This is what has happened to you. This is what makes you unable to understand the reality of what Palestinians are living with.
......The IDF, ISRAEL DEFEANSE FORCES , is only to.protect its people. Nothing more
the modern state of israell is a settler state and like all settler states it seeks to depopulate the land it requires for its growth. thats how they work. thats how it worked in australia.thats how it worked in canada. thats how it worked in the US and thats how its working in israel. settler states dont care if the land they want is occupied or not. they move in and set out to spread their footprint as far as it can go. i understand the need for expansion, for without it the settler state would cease to exist... eventually incorporated within the native population. consequently we have the coralling of those 'in our way' into enclaves where they can be contained and controlled... where their familial and societal ties are fragmented and dissolved. unfortunately for the israeli govt, the palestinians arent defenseless natives incapable of defending themselves and theyre sick to death of being oppressed. and so as long as the palestinian people are oppressed, there will never be peace and israel due to her actions will always feel the need to 'defend' herself. and sadly the palestinian people will continue to be seen as the aggressor.. which when you think about it is just mindboggling.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
You can't say this is apartheid. It simply is not. Arabs from Gazza and the west bank are able to go anywhere in Israel. They can have jobs and work in Israel. The only thing is they must pass through a check point to make sure they are not known terrorists or have bombs strapped to their body. Those conditions are pretty reasonable. You can't argue with that.
I think it's perfectly clear that the definition of 'Apartheid' applies perfectly to the occupied territories.
Sharon's Bantustans are far from Copenhagen's hope
Akiva Eldar
During his visit two weeks ago to Israel, former Italian prime minister Massimo D'Alema hosted a small group of Israelis - public figures and former diplomats - to a dinner at a Jerusalem hotel.
The conversation quickly turned to the conciliatory interviews Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave to the press for their Independence Day editions. One of the Israelis, of the type for whom it's second nature, no matter who is in government, to explain and defend Israeli policy, expressed full confidence in Sharon's peace rhetoric. He said the prime minister understands the solution to the conflict is the establishment of a Palestinian state beside Israel.
The former premier from the Italian left said that three or four years ago he had a long conversation with Sharon, who was in Rome for a brief visit. According to D'Alema, Sharon explained at length that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.
The defender of Israel quickly protested. "Surely that was your personal interpretation of what Sharon said."
D'Alema didn't give in. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister."
Supplementary evidence backing D'Alema's story can be found in an expensively produced brochure prepared for Tourism Minister Benny Elon, who is promoting a two-state solution - Israel and Jordan. Under the title "The Road to War: a tiny protectorate, overpopulated, carved up and demilitarized," the Moledet Party leader presents "the map of the Palestinian state, according to Sharon's proposal." Sharon's map is surprisingly similar to the plan for protectorates in South Africa in the early 1960s. Even the number of cantons is the same - 10 in the West Bank (and one more in Gaza). Dr. Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, notes that the South Africans only managed to create four of their 10 planned Bantustans.
The Bantustan model, says Liel, was the ugliest of all the tricks used to perpetuate the apartheid regime in most of South Africa's territory. By 1986, unrest in the Bantustans turned into ongoing rioting and terror, which descended into coups in the so-called independent regimes, and South African intervention. The minuscule support the Bantustan governments did enjoy evaporated, so by January 1994, they were finally dismantled and became integrated into the united South Africa of black majority rule.
No country recognized the Bantustans nor did any drop embargoes against South Africa. But veteran leaders of the black struggle against apartheid remember that business people from Israel and Taiwan were the only foreigners who developed business relations with the Bantustan governments. The permission given to the largest of the Bantustans, Bophutatswana, to open a diplomatic office in Tel Aviv infuriated American opponents of the apartheid regime, including Senator Ted Kennedy, and some of the Jewish congressmen of the time.
An Israeli who spent many years nurturing Israeli relations with Africa was also at the dinner hosted by the Italian prime minister. He said that whenever he happened to encounter Sharon, he would be interrogated at length about the history of the protectorates and their structures.
'In a 2007 report, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine John Dugard stated that "elements of the Israeli occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law" and suggested that the "legal consequences of a prolonged occupation with features of colonialism and apartheid" be put to the International Court of Justice.[20] South Africa's statutory research agency the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) stated in a 2009 report that "the State of Israel exercises control in the [Occupied Palestinian Territories] with the purpose of maintaining a system of domination by Jews over Palestinians and that this system constitutes a breach of the prohibition of apartheid."[21] Based on these findings, Richard Falk, the successor of John Dugard as UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine has detailed some of the indicators of apartheid in the occupied territories [22]:
* preferential citizenship, visitation and residence laws and practices that prevent Palestinians who reside in the West Bank or Gaza from reclaiming their property or from acquiring Israeli citizenship, as contrasted to a Jewish right of return that entitles Jews anywhere in the world with no prior tie to Israel to visit, reside and become Israeli citizens;
* differential laws in the West Bank and East Jerusalem favouring Jewish settlers who are subject to Israeli civilian law and constitutional protection, as opposed to Palestinian residents, who are governed by military administration;
* dual and discriminatory arrangements for movement in the West Bank and to and from Jerusalem; discriminatory policies on land ownership, tenure and use; extensive burdening of Palestinian movement, including checkpoints applying differential limitations on Palestinians and on Israeli settlers, and onerous permit and identification requirements imposed only on Palestinians;
* punitive house demolitions, expulsions and restrictions on entry and exit from all three parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The Special Rapporteur concludes that this "general structure of apartheid that exists in the Occupied Palestinian Territories ... makes the allegation increasingly credible despite the differences between the specific characteristics of South African apartheid and that of the Occupied Palestinian Territories regime".
This conflict is not about religion its not about apartheid its about one thing and one thing only...pure and simple Hate.
Wrong. It's about Israel wanting all of the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea to itself, in breach of international law, and the will of the whole of the international community - excluding the U.S.
Israel's army is called the I.D.F it stands for Israeli Defeanse Forces. That's its only objective.
If that's its only objective, then why have they been protecting the Illegal settlers and encroaching on Palestinian land and terrorizing and subjugating them for the past 60 years?
And it should be noted that even today Israel provides the Palestinians with goods including food medicine and materials to enable electricity. Yes the same electricity that powers the rocket launchers that sends thousands of muddled into its citys Israel also uses helicopters to drop leaflets down in the native language to warn civilians of a coming strike. They do this because Hammas stores their arsenal if weapons around civilian populations and their leaders like to live behind human shields.
Do you have any evidence that Israel allows enough food and medicine's into Gaza? Do you have any evidence that dropping leaflets on densely populated areas before shelling those same areas, and dropping white phosphorous on them, has ever been effective? Where do you propose the residents of these same densely populated areas run to?
As for Palestinian fighters using human shields, where's your evidence of that? Every investigation into this by all of the Worlds leading human rights organizations has found zero evidence of it. Although the Israeli's have been found to use Palestinians as human shields on numerous occasions.
Now for the first time in the conflict Israel has taken over the radio in Gazza. Why?
As anither way to communicate with the civilians to clear areas that will soon be bombed.
And where should these people run to? You do know that U.N safe houses were bombed and destroyed during Operation Cast Lead, right?
Remember the disengahement ? When Israel removed all of its people from the Gazza strip in return for peace.
Well it lasted a bit. But then the rockets started flying again. So Israel put up the check points. Now Hammas says they won't stop unrolled Israel stops the checkpoints.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... s-1.136686
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass who was one of the initiators of the disengagement plan:
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians...
You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
http://normanfinkelstein.com/2005/unpub ... awal/#ngfc
In a recent study entitled One Big Prison, B’Tselem observes that the crippling economic arrangements Israel has imposed on Gaza will remain in effect. In addition, Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza’s land borders, coastline and airspace, and the Israeli army will continue to operate in Gaza. “So long as these methods of control remain in Israeli hands,” it concludes, “Israel’s claim of an ‘end of the occupation’ is questionable.”
The respected organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) is yet more emphatic that evacuating troops and Jewish settlements from inside Gaza will not end the occupation: “Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around its periphery, and restricting entrance and exit, it remains in control.”
The world’s leading authority on the Gaza Strip, Sara Roy of Harvard University, predicts that Gaza will remain “an imprisoned enclave,” while its economy, still totally dependent on Israel after disengagement and in shambles after decades of deliberately ruinous policies by Israel, will actually deteriorate.[4] This conclusion is echoed by the World Bank, which forecasts that, if Israel seals Gaza’s borders or curtails its utilities, the disengagement plan will “create worse hardship than is seen today.”
Just once I wish one of the people who regularly jumps all over Israel on these threads whenever violence flares up would just take a second and try to put themselves in the Israelis' shoes and think about what they would do in their position.
If Israel is out to ethnicly cleanse the Palestinians from all the land between the Jordan and the sea then they must be really bad at ethnic cleansing. They have a superpowerful military and it's been over 40 years since the occupation started, and yet somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank than when Israel conquered those territories.
And again, please, somebody explain to me how lobbing hundreds of rockets at civilian population centers that are inside Israel, not in occupied territory, constitutes a defensible form of resistance? How is it that any of you can feel so comfortable defending such actions?
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Regarding "apartheid"...The occupation is awful on its own terms, but the comparison to apartheid is simply lazy and inaccurate.
Yes, there are seperate road systems in the occupied West Bank. They were built for security purposes because many Israelis were being attacked on the roads. They are not meant to serve a racial/religious/ethnic segregationist purpose, as is evident from the fact that they are open for the use of any Israeli citizen regardless of whether they are Jewish or not.
No, Palestinians in the West Bank aren't Israeli citizens and therefore can't vote in Israeli elections. But they have never been Israeli citizens and the territory they live in is held by Israel under a legal regime of belligerant occupation. Giving the Palestinians citizenship and the vote would mean annexation of the West Bank to Israel, i.e., making the occupation legally permanent in contravention of international law.
Yes, Israel grants preferential citizenship to Jewish immigrants to the country through the law of return, but is in this regard really not all that different from many other countries that have similar laws of return for members of the national diaspora. Since Israelis Jews understand the Jewish people to be a national group it is not at all unnatural for them to institute such a law...you can disagree, but then ask yourself whether it's not a bit presumptuous of you to dictate to another group of people what is and is not a legitimate form of self-determination?
Yes, Palestinian communities in the West Bank are often physically seperated from Jewish communities - again, barriers and checkpoints were largely only created for security purposes relatively recently.
Basically, the occupation is terrible and should end. The settlements are terrible and should either be uprooted or turned over to Palestinian sovereignty. I agree with all that. But there simply isn't a state of apartheid in place, and those things that may, in some manner approximate elements of an apartheid system serve entirely different goals, i.e. security rather than bigotry.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Just once I wish one of the people who regularly jumps all over Israel on these threads whenever violence flares up would just take a second and try to put themselves in the Israelis' shoes and think about what they would do in their position.
What would I do in their position? Well, if I were an Israeli settler, living on land stolen from the Palestinians and knew that my living there was illegal, immoral, and unjustified, then I'd leave and go and live in Israel, or return to the U.S or Russia, or whatever country I came from.
If Israel is out to ethnicly cleanse the Palestinians from all the land between the Jordan and the sea then they must be really bad at ethnic cleansing. They have a superpowerful military and it's been over 40 years since the occupation started, and yet somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank than when Israel conquered those territories.
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..."
And again, please, somebody explain to me how lobbing hundreds of rockets at civilian population centers that are inside Israel, not in occupied territory, constitutes a defensible form of resistance? How is it that any of you can feel so comfortable defending such actions?
They have a right to resist occupation by any means at their disposal.
Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions
Hamas and Gaza
January 13, 2009
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
...But what of Israel's right of self-defense? It exists, but it doesn't apply.
Israel, when it conquered the occupied territories in 1967, could have established a sovereign Palestinian state. This would have made the Palestinians, not a subject people at the mercy of their conqueror, but an independent people, responsible for their own acts and for keeping the peace with other sovereign states. Had the Palestinians then attacked Israel, Israel would have had the right to respond in self-defense.
But Israel didn't do that. Instead, it kept the Palestinians at its mercy, and its mercy didn't materialize. Israel embarked on a settlement policy that amounted to a declaration of war on a helpless population. The settlements were part of a project to take the Palestinians' land, all of it, for the use and enjoyment of the Jewish people. Of course Israel did not explicitly say it was going to take from the Palestinians the very ground on which they stood. But the settlements kept spreading, mopping up an increasing share of vital resources, and behind them was a settler movement, hugely powerful not only in the occupied territories but in Israel itself. This bunch of coddled fanatics, many of them American, quite openly proclaimed their determination to secure the whole of Biblical Israel for exclusively Jewish use. The Israeli government backed these racial warriors with unlimited military protection and extensive financial support.
These trends continue to the present day. Sure, Israel got the settlers out of Gaza, and I'm convinced that even Ariel Sharon, not to mention his successors, truly desired to resolve the conflict by withdrawing from the occupied territories and allowing something like a Palestinian state. But my convictions have no weight against what any reasonable Palestinian, or any reasonable human being, has to conclude: that given the continued strength of the settler movement, the continued popularity of the Israeli right, the continued military protection of the West Bank settlements, their continued expansion, and the Israeli government's all-too-obvious readiness to fight for whatever is politically popular to the last drop of Palestinian blood... given all this, the Palestinians are still faced with a mortal threat. They are still faced with a sovereign whose intentions, if not entirely clear, clearly countenance alternatives leading to an extreme humanitarian disaster for the Palestinians, and perhaps to the entire expropriation of most Palestinians' necessities of life.
This means that Israel is the aggressor in this conflict, and the Palestinians fight in self-defense. Under these circumstances, Israel's right of self-defense cannot justify Israeli violence. Israel is certainly entitled to protect its citizens by evacuation and other non-violent measures, but it is not entitled to harm a hair on the head of a Palestinian firing rockets into Israeli cities, whether or not these rockets kill innocent civilians.
Self-defense gives you the right to resist attacks by any means necessary, and therefore, certainly, by the only means available. The Palestinians don't have the option of using violence which hits only military targets - apparently even the Israelis, with all their intelligence data and all their technological might, don't have that option! But suppose a bunch of thugs install themselves, with their families, all around your farm. They have taken most of your land and resources; they're out for more. If this keeps up, you will starve, perhaps die. They are armed to the teeth and abundantly willing to use those arms. The only way you can defend yourself is to make them pay as heavy a price as possible for their siege and their constant encroachment on your living space. You're critically low on food and medical supplies, and the thugs cut off those supplies whenever they please. What's more, the only weapons available to you are indiscriminate, and will harm their families as well as the thugs themselves. You can use those weapons, even knowing they will kill innocents. You don't have to let the thugs destroy you, thereby sacrificing your innocents (including yourself) to spare theirs. Since innocents are under mortal threat in either case, you needn't prefer the attackers' to your own.
This may not be the most high-minded conclusion. However it's a conclusion we are forced to accept - we who very clearly countenance the killing and maiming of civilians in situations not nearly so precarious as what it is to be a Palestinian in the conquered, shrinking occupied territories. The thugs should keep their families from harm by ceasing their onslaught and withdrawing from the scene. Israel's obligation is similar. It must defend itself at the least cost to others. It should keep its families from harm by giving the Palestinians complete control of their external borders and allowing the creation of a Palestinian state. After this, if Israel is attacked, it can respond. Before, its response is not legitimate self-defense but continued aggression.
at the end of the day I don't care whose civilians are dying are for what reason but CIVILIANS are being slaughtered here and they are (for the most part) innocent people).
absofuckinlutely right....
but when u hate something,.,you cant see from hate..you get blind...
"...Dimitri...He talks to me...'.."The Ghost of Greece..".
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
Regarding "apartheid"...The occupation is awful on its own terms, but the comparison to apartheid is simply lazy and inaccurate.
Yes, there are seperate road systems in the occupied West Bank. They were built for security purposes because many Israelis were being attacked on the roads. They are not meant to serve a racial/religious/ethnic segregationist purpose, as is evident from the fact that they are open for the use of any Israeli citizen regardless of whether they are Jewish or not.
But they do serve a racial/religious/ethnic segregationist purpose,so your point is moot.
Palestinians in the West Bank [...] live [..] under a legal regime of belligerant occupation.
Except the occupation isn't legal. It's a crime under international law, and constitutes a crime against humanity.
http://www.btselem.org/settlements
Israel created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation and discrimination, with two separate systems of law in the same territory. One system, for the settlers, de facto annexes the settlements to Israel and grants settlers the rights of citizens of a democratic state. The other is a system of military law that systematically deprives Palestinian of their rights and denies them the ability to have any real effect on shaping the policy regarding the land space in which they live and with respect to their rights. These separate systems reinforce a regime in which rights depend on the national identity of the individual.
..The existence of the settlements brings with it the violation of many human rights of Palestinians, including the right of property, the right to equality, the right to a suitable standard of living, and the right to freedom of movement.
http://www.btselem.org/settlements/international_law
The establishment of settlements in the West Bank violates international humanitarian law which establishes principles that apply during war and occupation. Moreover, the settlements lead to the infringement of international human rights law.
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory (Article 49). The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term, or unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population.
The establishment of settlements results in the violation of the rights of Palestinians as enshrined in international human rights law. Among other violations, the settlements infringe the right to self-determination, equality, property, an adequate standard of living, and freedom of movement.
Basically, the occupation is terrible and should end. The settlements are terrible and should either be uprooted or turned over to Palestinian sovereignty. I agree with all that. But there simply isn't a state of apartheid in place, and those things that may, in some manner approximate elements of an apartheid system serve entirely different goals, i.e. security rather than bigotry.
They have nothing to do with security, and they do not justify the continuation of the settlements.
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..."
today all the israeli school children have off from school so they can write little notes and messages to the palestinian children hiding in their basements
today all the israeli school children have off from school so they can write little notes and messages to the palestinian children hiding in their basements
oh and those that are scoreboard watching:
Halftime
104 - 3
As a famouns coach once said when being accused of running up the score on the other team - "I can only coach one team."
Your scoreboard idea is disgusting. Not that I mind you mentioning how many civilians Hamas has hidden within to "defend" themselves. That's fine. Just the terms you put on human life.
CBS reporter noted that they evacuated their building (which is the main media enclave in Gaza) a few days ago b/c:
1) They knew Hamas was using it to run their operations
2) Israel warned them that it would be a target
You can't blame Israel (alone) for what Hamas has used as its military strategy.
(And BTW a dozen or so of the civilian deaths within Gaza have been confirmed as coming from misfired Hamas bombs. So, you may want to adjust your "score" a bit.)
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
today all the israeli school children have off from school so they can write little notes and messages to the palestinian children hiding in their basements
oh and those that are scoreboard watching:
Halftime
104 - 3
both things here are so wrong..
1st ..putting kids write on the bombs..how shitty is this..(btw,i hope all remember when we all saw that writing on the bombs for the first time..)
and 2nd...we are talking about human lifes here..you cant use this football terms as joke for deaths..
its so wrong..
"...Dimitri...He talks to me...'.."The Ghost of Greece..".
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
the score was wrong, lets wait for the official score once this ends, sounds like a ceasefire truce will happen soon
i suspect israel is satisfied at this point with the destruction and most if not all of the objections were met
murder 13 year old playing football near neutral zone
wait for response - rockets and mortars
assassinate hamas military commander
wait for response - rockets and mortars
justification to implement "pillar of defence"
make clear to palestinians (leaflets, radio and tv)- support hamas = hell on earth (if lucky instant death)
bombardment of gaza "military installations" and "militants" back to the stone ages
agree to ceasefire truce
outcome
win support in wake of upcoming elections (2nd time nutandyahoo pulled that from his playbook)
thwart palestinian authority effort to be recognized by the UN as a non member state 11/29/12
deplete hamas weaponry (limit retaliatory strikes from impending iran bombings)
garner US support against Eqypt, Syria, Qatar, Turkey and of course Iran
try to break the "will" of the palestinians (unsuccessful past 45 yrs)
at the end of the day I don't care whose civilians are dying are for what reason but CIVILIANS are being slaughtered here and they are (for the most part) innocent people).
You don't care why they're dying? Then you're going to have a hard time doing anything to stop it.
As Desmond Tutu said, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
B, perhaps I wasn't clear (although I doubt that in your frothing rage you ever really read what I write with any sort of careful attention); by "legal regime of belligerant occupation" I didn't mean that the occupation is legal. I was using "legal" to indicate a frame of reference for the following terms (i.e., Israel's control of the West Bank is legally analyzed under the international laws governing "belligerant occupation"). I'm in law school; I talk like a lawyer.
The occupation writ large is legally distinct from the settlements. I agree with you that the settlements are most likely illegal under the laws governing belligerant occupation (though I'd have to study up a bit more to be sure). That said, the military occupation of the West Bank, as distinct from the settlement project, is not illegal - Israel holds the West Bank under a state of belligerant occupation, which is a concept in international law that delineates the duties of an occupying military power towards the occupied population and its freedom of action with regard to matters of security, etc. Israel has never explicitly annexed the West Bank (and has affirmatively voted down attempts from within the government to do so). The territory was conquered in a military conflict ('67 war) and until there is another sovereign to whom Israel can cede responsibility for the territory (in this case a Palestinian state) through a negotiated withdrawal its continued occupation of the territory is legal (which is not to say that all the actions taken in furtherance of the occupation are legal - that's a seperate question). As usual you've collapsed a number of very complicated realities about which you seem to personally be only partially informed into one utterly inaccurate and inadequate black and white conclusion.
I'm just not even going to bother responding to your rejoinders regarding the road system and the security purposes of Israeli actions since they were nothing more than conclusory statements that you're right and I'm wrong, except to say that I didn't claim that the security purposes of these measures justifies the settlement project (I don't believe that they do, so please don't put your own twisted words in my mouth).
Finally, I find your notion that all means are legitimate in resisting occupation to be nothing less than a complete abandonment of legality, ethics and morality. To take your argument to its logical extreme, Hamas would be well within its rights to acquire an arsenal of nukes and instantly annihilate the populations of Israel and all the other countries that support her, because hey, all's fair in resisting occupation. So what if it's genocide on a global scale, they were just resisting occupation. I know it's an absurd example, but that's the point. The idea that all means are legitimate in resistance to occupation is logically indefensible unless you're willing to give up on any notion of morality, law and ethics altogether. And if you aren't able to draw any moral limits then I fail to see why anyone should take you seriously when you fling moral accusations at Israel. You just aren't credible.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Well, since my last comment got removed because the comment I was commenting on got removed, I want to reiterate a point I was making about religion and how it relates to this conflict.
I was saying that I am deeply interested in history, and in not seeing it repeated. Throughout history, when people have been motivated by religion, it has produced some fascinating art, but it has done nothing good in the area of politics.
It brings me no joy if I offend anyone here who is religious. But this is a Pearl Jam website, and the song Do the Evolution does an excellent job of mocking religion, so when I join in the anti-religious chorus on this particular website, I feel like I should be preaching to the choir, and it's a bit strange that many here in the choir aren't singing the same song. So if religion still needs to be mocked here, I'll be happy to do it. I think fighting religion is a fight that is vital to creating a safe and secure world for our children, and it should be fought everywhere.
Ethnic division is always a terrible thing when it is taught to children, but the teaching of religious division to children seems even more damaging and long-lasting. For example, there is no ethnic division between Muslims and Hindus living in India, but the religious division there has brought about acts of murder and torture from both sides. I think it's because religion plays into the fear of what happens to you after you die. People don't want their children to know about contrary opinions about what you should believe in order to enter Paradise after death. Adults don't want to hear it either.
There may be something like heaven. I really hope there is. But I am certain that there is no holy land on Earth. We are all on this Earth for a very short time and there is nothing here worth killing or dying for... I hope one day we all we realize this.
Well, since my last comment got removed because the comment I was commenting on got removed, I want to reiterate a point I was making about religion and how it relates to this conflict.
I was saying that I am deeply interested in history, and in not seeing it repeated. Throughout history, when people have been motivated by religion, it has produced some fascinating art, but it has done nothing good in the area of politics.
It brings me no joy if I offend anyone here who is religious. But this is a Pearl Jam website, and the song Do the Evolution does an excellent job of mocking religion, so when I join in the anti-religious chorus on this particular website, I feel like I should be preaching to the choir, and it's a bit strange that many here in the choir aren't singing the same song. So if religion still needs to be mocked here, I'll be happy to do it. I think fighting religion is a fight that is vital to creating a safe and secure world for our children, and it should be fought everywhere.
Ethnic division is always a terrible thing when it is taught to children, but the teaching of religious division to children seems even more damaging and long-lasting. For example, there is no ethnic division between Muslims and Hindus living in India, but the religious division there has brought about acts of murder and torture from both sides. I think it's because religion plays into the fear of what happens to you after you die. People don't want their children to know about contrary opinions about what you should believe in order to enter Paradise after death. Adults don't want to hear it either.
There may be something like heaven. I really hope there is. But I am certain that there is no holy land on Earth. We are all on this Earth for a very short time and there is nothing here worth killing or dying for... I hope one day we all we realize this.
Gimli 1993
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
Well, since my last comment got removed because the comment I was commenting on got removed, I want to reiterate a point I was making about religion and how it relates to this conflict.
I was saying that I am deeply interested in history, and in not seeing it repeated. Throughout history, when people have been motivated by religion, it has produced some fascinating art, but it has done nothing good in the area of politics.
It brings me no joy if I offend anyone here who is religious. But this is a Pearl Jam website, and the song Do the Evolution does an excellent job of mocking religion, so when I join in the anti-religious chorus on this particular website, I feel like I should be preaching to the choir, and it's a bit strange that many here in the choir aren't singing the same song. So if religion still needs to be mocked here, I'll be happy to do it. I think fighting religion is a fight that is vital to creating a safe and secure world for our children, and it should be fought everywhere.
Ethnic division is always a terrible thing when it is taught to children, but the teaching of religious division to children seems even more damaging and long-lasting. For example, there is no ethnic division between Muslims and Hindus living in India, but the religious division there has brought about acts of murder and torture from both sides. I think it's because religion plays into the fear of what happens to you after you die. People don't want their children to know about contrary opinions about what you should believe in order to enter Paradise after death. Adults don't want to hear it either.
There may be something like heaven. I really hope there is. But I am certain that there is no holy land on Earth. We are all on this Earth for a very short time and there is nothing here worth killing or dying for... I hope one day we all we realize this.
Why do folks think that others who may fight don't believe this, too (not saying you, but I see this all the time)?
It's like the old saying from the cold war - we are truly safe b/c so and so love their children, too (Russia at that time). The meaning went beyond the children. It really was the fact that Russians loved living, so the mutually assured destruction was kept at bay b/c they realized their action would have a RE-action.
I'm not so sure terrorist organizations like Hamas have that same ethos. When you see suicide bombers, etc., it calls into question their ability to differentiate life and death.
I would profer that Israel is on the same ethical ground as us on this - life is better than death. (Which is not to argue or say that they don't kill people. But, the fact that they wouldn't strap a bomb to themselves to attack others, make a point, "defend themselves or whatever you'd like to call it). Can the same be said for Hamas and other similarly situated terrorist organizations?
When faced with an enemy that doesn't honor life like most ethical humans do, you are forced to fight and kill and die if necessary. It doesn't make you ethically bankrupt. It proves you understand the REALITY you deal with.
Just because someone fights a war does not mean the like it or want it. There is a clear deliniation on what each sides pathos is here regardless of how some would like to color it.
Your neighbor comes at your child with a gun, are you just going to stand there b/c you don't like guns? Is it possible you might wind up killing your neighbor if it is the only way to save your child even though killing is against every fiber of your moral being?
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
Comments
Sha la la la i'm in love with a jersey girl
I love you forever and forever
Adel 03 Melb 1 03 LA 2 06 Santa Barbara 06 Gorge 1 06 Gorge 2 06 Adel 1 06 Adel 2 06 Camden 1 08 Camden 2 08 Washington DC 08 Hartford 08
I get my information from the source. I lived there for a few years not to long ago where do you get your information from?
They can move freely into Israeli cities, the checkpoint lines are long. It is a huge inconvenience but that's the price of safety. We do the same thing here with airlines and entering large stadiums or arenas.
Many Arabs want to work in Israel because they get paid better and get better benefits. What ? Arabs get benefits in Israel ? Yes its true. All ate welcome as long as you don't blow up people.
The Israelis left the setlements in Gazza in return for peace. Clearly one side did not hold up its end if the bargain.
The Israeli people would be subject to the same checkpoints if they wanted to travel to Gazza. They would make sure tjey are not known terrorists or have a bomb straped to their body.
Funny though, not many Israelis want to go to Gazza, ever wonder why?
Maybe because they would be killed instantly. Or maybe because they are not allowed in.
Wanna talk about apartheid ? Israelis can't go to the mosque in Jerusalem, everyone is welcome at the western wall
Is any of it making you think a little.
Ones objective is defeanse the other is destruction.
Do you think you could go to Gazza ?
Think about that
im thinking about going to gaza on a fishing trip, were you able to go deep sea fishing, say more than 3 miles off the coast? thanks
I think you will find that as long as your not trying to blow people up, Israel and the people are pretty awesome, welcoming and excepting of all peoples and ideas.
In fact they have a gay pride parade every year.
How do you think something like that would go over in Gazza?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 23548.html
Arabs can live in Israel. But Israelis can't go to Gazza. The fact that you can have this question or debate shows that Arabs can and do exist inside of Israel. But the same cannot he said for Jews in Gazza. Why ? Why can't Jews go to Gazza? You and I both know they will be killed. But an Arab can live and work in Israel or live in Gazza and work in Israel.
Not every Israeli is perfect or even close to it. But neither are we. Ar those reports credible ? Maybe. But you have to realize how many Jewish people have been murdered on highways. How often cars pretend to be broken down and when you stop you are met with bullets and knives. There ate so many horror stories. So many stories of people boarding public buses with bombs on their chest. Boarding busses filled with woman and children. Too many stories of someone dressed up as an Israeli woman with a bomb on her chest walking into a pizza store and killing families.
Killing a girl the night before she was to be married. I know this girl she was very special to my family. She was a wonderful young girl. She used to visit the cancer patients at the hospital. I met her when my niece was a patient there. She would come with some if her friends and bring toys IR games and make the children laugh and have fun. This was a very difficult time for my family. My.niece was only 2. But this girl made her so happy. She took her on trips with hospital staff members. She really was a special person. Her father was a doctor in the ER. That meant he saw a lot of terror victims. He even worked on the terrorists themselves and tried to save their lives as well. He was also a great man.
Well the night before the girls wedding she went to dinner with her father, one last time just the two if them before she was married. But she never made it down the aisle. A terrorist with a bomb straped to his chest blew them up.
It's very sad. But maybe that's why some Israelis want some seperation maybe they are afraid for the lives. Maybe they just don't want to be blown.up.
Is that crazy? Is that asking too much ?
Is their goal to hold them back ? No ,
Israel wants to live its life just like you and me. They are families, they want to keep advancing science and technology.
They want to continue doing great things for the world like building the technology for the first cell phone, continuing research to cure cancer, helping to create the first electric car.
They don't want war. They don't want to fight with anyone. They want to live. And they want to be safe.
Just like you and me.
I am reminded of something I heard Christopher Hitchens say once... "For good people to do evil - that takes religion." He has a few good things to say specifically about Israel/Palestine too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxhyy9Wpb4
Here, Hitchens talks about how the peace process is held hostage by the "parties of God": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09AykYXO2Ig
And here are your parties of God:
Israeli soldiers reading their holy texts today:
Egyptians showing their support for Gaza during Friday prayers, shouting 'God is great':
Religion is to blame.
I mentioned it before but I will say it again. Before Israel bombs anything they drop thousands of papers and small posters in Arabic saying they will be bombed in 30 minute and civilians should run away.
Now for the first time they have talent over Arab radio broadcasts to publicize their planes atacks on weapon storages and Terrorist leaders. All to give the innocent a chance to run and be safe.
Yes Israel too can't bomb a building knowing their ate innocent people there.
I think the more you look into this age old conflict you will find you are more like the Israelis in objective and moral character.
I must stress this not about religion. It is about the hatred of one group against the other.
In fact when it comes to the Jewish religion, no wars are allowed. Only a defensive army us permited
The IDF, ISRAEL DEFEANSE FORCES , is only to.protect its people. Nothing more
the israeli govt is NOT just like me. please do not speak for me as if you know me. you dont... just as i dont know who you are.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Where does hatred of one group against the other come from? Thin air?
Certainly religion doesn't always cause hatred, but it does separate people into groups. When people grow up in one group, they then end up looking at people in other groups as "others".
This is what has happened to you. This is what makes you unable to understand the reality of what Palestinians are living with.
the modern state of israell is a settler state and like all settler states it seeks to depopulate the land it requires for its growth. thats how they work. thats how it worked in australia.thats how it worked in canada. thats how it worked in the US and thats how its working in israel. settler states dont care if the land they want is occupied or not. they move in and set out to spread their footprint as far as it can go. i understand the need for expansion, for without it the settler state would cease to exist... eventually incorporated within the native population. consequently we have the coralling of those 'in our way' into enclaves where they can be contained and controlled... where their familial and societal ties are fragmented and dissolved. unfortunately for the israeli govt, the palestinians arent defenseless natives incapable of defending themselves and theyre sick to death of being oppressed. and so as long as the palestinian people are oppressed, there will never be peace and israel due to her actions will always feel the need to 'defend' herself. and sadly the palestinian people will continue to be seen as the aggressor.. which when you think about it is just mindboggling.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I think it's perfectly clear that the definition of 'Apartheid' applies perfectly to the occupied territories.
Even Ariel Sharon admitted as much:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/fe ... pe-1.10275
Sharon's Bantustans are far from Copenhagen's hope
Akiva Eldar
During his visit two weeks ago to Israel, former Italian prime minister Massimo D'Alema hosted a small group of Israelis - public figures and former diplomats - to a dinner at a Jerusalem hotel.
The conversation quickly turned to the conciliatory interviews Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave to the press for their Independence Day editions. One of the Israelis, of the type for whom it's second nature, no matter who is in government, to explain and defend Israeli policy, expressed full confidence in Sharon's peace rhetoric. He said the prime minister understands the solution to the conflict is the establishment of a Palestinian state beside Israel.
The former premier from the Italian left said that three or four years ago he had a long conversation with Sharon, who was in Rome for a brief visit. According to D'Alema, Sharon explained at length that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.
The defender of Israel quickly protested. "Surely that was your personal interpretation of what Sharon said."
D'Alema didn't give in. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister."
Supplementary evidence backing D'Alema's story can be found in an expensively produced brochure prepared for Tourism Minister Benny Elon, who is promoting a two-state solution - Israel and Jordan. Under the title "The Road to War: a tiny protectorate, overpopulated, carved up and demilitarized," the Moledet Party leader presents "the map of the Palestinian state, according to Sharon's proposal." Sharon's map is surprisingly similar to the plan for protectorates in South Africa in the early 1960s. Even the number of cantons is the same - 10 in the West Bank (and one more in Gaza). Dr. Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, notes that the South Africans only managed to create four of their 10 planned Bantustans.
The Bantustan model, says Liel, was the ugliest of all the tricks used to perpetuate the apartheid regime in most of South Africa's territory. By 1986, unrest in the Bantustans turned into ongoing rioting and terror, which descended into coups in the so-called independent regimes, and South African intervention. The minuscule support the Bantustan governments did enjoy evaporated, so by January 1994, they were finally dismantled and became integrated into the united South Africa of black majority rule.
No country recognized the Bantustans nor did any drop embargoes against South Africa. But veteran leaders of the black struggle against apartheid remember that business people from Israel and Taiwan were the only foreigners who developed business relations with the Bantustan governments. The permission given to the largest of the Bantustans, Bophutatswana, to open a diplomatic office in Tel Aviv infuriated American opponents of the apartheid regime, including Senator Ted Kennedy, and some of the Jewish congressmen of the time.
An Israeli who spent many years nurturing Israeli relations with Africa was also at the dinner hosted by the Italian prime minister. He said that whenever he happened to encounter Sharon, he would be interrogated at length about the history of the protectorates and their structures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_apartheid
Crime of apartheid
'In a 2007 report, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine John Dugard stated that "elements of the Israeli occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law" and suggested that the "legal consequences of a prolonged occupation with features of colonialism and apartheid" be put to the International Court of Justice.[20] South Africa's statutory research agency the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) stated in a 2009 report that "the State of Israel exercises control in the [Occupied Palestinian Territories] with the purpose of maintaining a system of domination by Jews over Palestinians and that this system constitutes a breach of the prohibition of apartheid."[21] Based on these findings, Richard Falk, the successor of John Dugard as UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine has detailed some of the indicators of apartheid in the occupied territories [22]:
* preferential citizenship, visitation and residence laws and practices that prevent Palestinians who reside in the West Bank or Gaza from reclaiming their property or from acquiring Israeli citizenship, as contrasted to a Jewish right of return that entitles Jews anywhere in the world with no prior tie to Israel to visit, reside and become Israeli citizens;
* differential laws in the West Bank and East Jerusalem favouring Jewish settlers who are subject to Israeli civilian law and constitutional protection, as opposed to Palestinian residents, who are governed by military administration;
* dual and discriminatory arrangements for movement in the West Bank and to and from Jerusalem; discriminatory policies on land ownership, tenure and use; extensive burdening of Palestinian movement, including checkpoints applying differential limitations on Palestinians and on Israeli settlers, and onerous permit and identification requirements imposed only on Palestinians;
* punitive house demolitions, expulsions and restrictions on entry and exit from all three parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The Special Rapporteur concludes that this "general structure of apartheid that exists in the Occupied Palestinian Territories ... makes the allegation increasingly credible despite the differences between the specific characteristics of South African apartheid and that of the Occupied Palestinian Territories regime".
Wrong. It's about Israel wanting all of the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea to itself, in breach of international law, and the will of the whole of the international community - excluding the U.S.
If that's its only objective, then why have they been protecting the Illegal settlers and encroaching on Palestinian land and terrorizing and subjugating them for the past 60 years?
Do you have any evidence that Israel allows enough food and medicine's into Gaza? Do you have any evidence that dropping leaflets on densely populated areas before shelling those same areas, and dropping white phosphorous on them, has ever been effective? Where do you propose the residents of these same densely populated areas run to?
As for Palestinian fighters using human shields, where's your evidence of that? Every investigation into this by all of the Worlds leading human rights organizations has found zero evidence of it. Although the Israeli's have been found to use Palestinians as human shields on numerous occasions.
And where should these people run to? You do know that U.N safe houses were bombed and destroyed during Operation Cast Lead, right?
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... s-1.136686
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass who was one of the initiators of the disengagement plan:
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians...
You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
http://normanfinkelstein.com/2005/unpub ... awal/#ngfc
In a recent study entitled One Big Prison, B’Tselem observes that the crippling economic arrangements Israel has imposed on Gaza will remain in effect. In addition, Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza’s land borders, coastline and airspace, and the Israeli army will continue to operate in Gaza. “So long as these methods of control remain in Israeli hands,” it concludes, “Israel’s claim of an ‘end of the occupation’ is questionable.”
The respected organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) is yet more emphatic that evacuating troops and Jewish settlements from inside Gaza will not end the occupation: “Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around its periphery, and restricting entrance and exit, it remains in control.”
The world’s leading authority on the Gaza Strip, Sara Roy of Harvard University, predicts that Gaza will remain “an imprisoned enclave,” while its economy, still totally dependent on Israel after disengagement and in shambles after decades of deliberately ruinous policies by Israel, will actually deteriorate.[4] This conclusion is echoed by the World Bank, which forecasts that, if Israel seals Gaza’s borders or curtails its utilities, the disengagement plan will “create worse hardship than is seen today.”
Nonsense.
If Israel is out to ethnicly cleanse the Palestinians from all the land between the Jordan and the sea then they must be really bad at ethnic cleansing. They have a superpowerful military and it's been over 40 years since the occupation started, and yet somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank than when Israel conquered those territories.
And again, please, somebody explain to me how lobbing hundreds of rockets at civilian population centers that are inside Israel, not in occupied territory, constitutes a defensible form of resistance? How is it that any of you can feel so comfortable defending such actions?
Yes, there are seperate road systems in the occupied West Bank. They were built for security purposes because many Israelis were being attacked on the roads. They are not meant to serve a racial/religious/ethnic segregationist purpose, as is evident from the fact that they are open for the use of any Israeli citizen regardless of whether they are Jewish or not.
No, Palestinians in the West Bank aren't Israeli citizens and therefore can't vote in Israeli elections. But they have never been Israeli citizens and the territory they live in is held by Israel under a legal regime of belligerant occupation. Giving the Palestinians citizenship and the vote would mean annexation of the West Bank to Israel, i.e., making the occupation legally permanent in contravention of international law.
Yes, Israel grants preferential citizenship to Jewish immigrants to the country through the law of return, but is in this regard really not all that different from many other countries that have similar laws of return for members of the national diaspora. Since Israelis Jews understand the Jewish people to be a national group it is not at all unnatural for them to institute such a law...you can disagree, but then ask yourself whether it's not a bit presumptuous of you to dictate to another group of people what is and is not a legitimate form of self-determination?
Yes, Palestinian communities in the West Bank are often physically seperated from Jewish communities - again, barriers and checkpoints were largely only created for security purposes relatively recently.
Basically, the occupation is terrible and should end. The settlements are terrible and should either be uprooted or turned over to Palestinian sovereignty. I agree with all that. But there simply isn't a state of apartheid in place, and those things that may, in some manner approximate elements of an apartheid system serve entirely different goals, i.e. security rather than bigotry.
What would I do in their position? Well, if I were an Israeli settler, living on land stolen from the Palestinians and knew that my living there was illegal, immoral, and unjustified, then I'd leave and go and live in Israel, or return to the U.S or Russia, or whatever country I came from.
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..."
They have a right to resist occupation by any means at their disposal.
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann01132009.html
Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions
Hamas and Gaza
January 13, 2009
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
...But what of Israel's right of self-defense? It exists, but it doesn't apply.
Israel, when it conquered the occupied territories in 1967, could have established a sovereign Palestinian state. This would have made the Palestinians, not a subject people at the mercy of their conqueror, but an independent people, responsible for their own acts and for keeping the peace with other sovereign states. Had the Palestinians then attacked Israel, Israel would have had the right to respond in self-defense.
But Israel didn't do that. Instead, it kept the Palestinians at its mercy, and its mercy didn't materialize. Israel embarked on a settlement policy that amounted to a declaration of war on a helpless population. The settlements were part of a project to take the Palestinians' land, all of it, for the use and enjoyment of the Jewish people. Of course Israel did not explicitly say it was going to take from the Palestinians the very ground on which they stood. But the settlements kept spreading, mopping up an increasing share of vital resources, and behind them was a settler movement, hugely powerful not only in the occupied territories but in Israel itself. This bunch of coddled fanatics, many of them American, quite openly proclaimed their determination to secure the whole of Biblical Israel for exclusively Jewish use. The Israeli government backed these racial warriors with unlimited military protection and extensive financial support.
These trends continue to the present day. Sure, Israel got the settlers out of Gaza, and I'm convinced that even Ariel Sharon, not to mention his successors, truly desired to resolve the conflict by withdrawing from the occupied territories and allowing something like a Palestinian state. But my convictions have no weight against what any reasonable Palestinian, or any reasonable human being, has to conclude: that given the continued strength of the settler movement, the continued popularity of the Israeli right, the continued military protection of the West Bank settlements, their continued expansion, and the Israeli government's all-too-obvious readiness to fight for whatever is politically popular to the last drop of Palestinian blood... given all this, the Palestinians are still faced with a mortal threat. They are still faced with a sovereign whose intentions, if not entirely clear, clearly countenance alternatives leading to an extreme humanitarian disaster for the Palestinians, and perhaps to the entire expropriation of most Palestinians' necessities of life.
This means that Israel is the aggressor in this conflict, and the Palestinians fight in self-defense. Under these circumstances, Israel's right of self-defense cannot justify Israeli violence. Israel is certainly entitled to protect its citizens by evacuation and other non-violent measures, but it is not entitled to harm a hair on the head of a Palestinian firing rockets into Israeli cities, whether or not these rockets kill innocent civilians.
Self-defense gives you the right to resist attacks by any means necessary, and therefore, certainly, by the only means available. The Palestinians don't have the option of using violence which hits only military targets - apparently even the Israelis, with all their intelligence data and all their technological might, don't have that option! But suppose a bunch of thugs install themselves, with their families, all around your farm. They have taken most of your land and resources; they're out for more. If this keeps up, you will starve, perhaps die. They are armed to the teeth and abundantly willing to use those arms. The only way you can defend yourself is to make them pay as heavy a price as possible for their siege and their constant encroachment on your living space. You're critically low on food and medical supplies, and the thugs cut off those supplies whenever they please. What's more, the only weapons available to you are indiscriminate, and will harm their families as well as the thugs themselves. You can use those weapons, even knowing they will kill innocents. You don't have to let the thugs destroy you, thereby sacrificing your innocents (including yourself) to spare theirs. Since innocents are under mortal threat in either case, you needn't prefer the attackers' to your own.
This may not be the most high-minded conclusion. However it's a conclusion we are forced to accept - we who very clearly countenance the killing and maiming of civilians in situations not nearly so precarious as what it is to be a Palestinian in the conquered, shrinking occupied territories. The thugs should keep their families from harm by ceasing their onslaught and withdrawing from the scene. Israel's obligation is similar. It must defend itself at the least cost to others. It should keep its families from harm by giving the Palestinians complete control of their external borders and allowing the creation of a Palestinian state. After this, if Israel is attacked, it can respond. Before, its response is not legitimate self-defense but continued aggression.
but when u hate something,.,you cant see from hate..you get blind...
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
But they do serve a racial/religious/ethnic segregationist purpose,so your point is moot.
Except the occupation isn't legal. It's a crime under international law, and constitutes a crime against humanity.
http://www.btselem.org/settlements
Israel created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation and discrimination, with two separate systems of law in the same territory. One system, for the settlers, de facto annexes the settlements to Israel and grants settlers the rights of citizens of a democratic state. The other is a system of military law that systematically deprives Palestinian of their rights and denies them the ability to have any real effect on shaping the policy regarding the land space in which they live and with respect to their rights. These separate systems reinforce a regime in which rights depend on the national identity of the individual.
..The existence of the settlements brings with it the violation of many human rights of Palestinians, including the right of property, the right to equality, the right to a suitable standard of living, and the right to freedom of movement.
http://www.btselem.org/settlements/international_law
The establishment of settlements in the West Bank violates international humanitarian law which establishes principles that apply during war and occupation. Moreover, the settlements lead to the infringement of international human rights law.
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory (Article 49). The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term, or unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population.
The establishment of settlements results in the violation of the rights of Palestinians as enshrined in international human rights law. Among other violations, the settlements infringe the right to self-determination, equality, property, an adequate standard of living, and freedom of movement.
They have nothing to do with security, and they do not justify the continuation of the settlements.
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..."
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/01y ... 2/350x.jpg
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ligso ... o1_500.jpg
oh and those that are scoreboard watching:
Halftime
104 - 3
As a famouns coach once said when being accused of running up the score on the other team - "I can only coach one team."
Your scoreboard idea is disgusting. Not that I mind you mentioning how many civilians Hamas has hidden within to "defend" themselves. That's fine. Just the terms you put on human life.
CBS reporter noted that they evacuated their building (which is the main media enclave in Gaza) a few days ago b/c:
1) They knew Hamas was using it to run their operations
2) Israel warned them that it would be a target
You can't blame Israel (alone) for what Hamas has used as its military strategy.
(And BTW a dozen or so of the civilian deaths within Gaza have been confirmed as coming from misfired Hamas bombs. So, you may want to adjust your "score" a bit.)
1st ..putting kids write on the bombs..how shitty is this..(btw,i hope all remember when we all saw that writing on the bombs for the first time..)
and 2nd...we are talking about human lifes here..you cant use this football terms as joke for deaths..
its so wrong..
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
i suspect israel is satisfied at this point with the destruction and most if not all of the objections were met
murder 13 year old playing football near neutral zone
wait for response - rockets and mortars
assassinate hamas military commander
wait for response - rockets and mortars
justification to implement "pillar of defence"
make clear to palestinians (leaflets, radio and tv)- support hamas = hell on earth (if lucky instant death)
bombardment of gaza "military installations" and "militants" back to the stone ages
agree to ceasefire truce
outcome
win support in wake of upcoming elections (2nd time nutandyahoo pulled that from his playbook)
thwart palestinian authority effort to be recognized by the UN as a non member state 11/29/12
deplete hamas weaponry (limit retaliatory strikes from impending iran bombings)
garner US support against Eqypt, Syria, Qatar, Turkey and of course Iran
try to break the "will" of the palestinians (unsuccessful past 45 yrs)
As Desmond Tutu said, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
The occupation writ large is legally distinct from the settlements. I agree with you that the settlements are most likely illegal under the laws governing belligerant occupation (though I'd have to study up a bit more to be sure). That said, the military occupation of the West Bank, as distinct from the settlement project, is not illegal - Israel holds the West Bank under a state of belligerant occupation, which is a concept in international law that delineates the duties of an occupying military power towards the occupied population and its freedom of action with regard to matters of security, etc. Israel has never explicitly annexed the West Bank (and has affirmatively voted down attempts from within the government to do so). The territory was conquered in a military conflict ('67 war) and until there is another sovereign to whom Israel can cede responsibility for the territory (in this case a Palestinian state) through a negotiated withdrawal its continued occupation of the territory is legal (which is not to say that all the actions taken in furtherance of the occupation are legal - that's a seperate question). As usual you've collapsed a number of very complicated realities about which you seem to personally be only partially informed into one utterly inaccurate and inadequate black and white conclusion.
I'm just not even going to bother responding to your rejoinders regarding the road system and the security purposes of Israeli actions since they were nothing more than conclusory statements that you're right and I'm wrong, except to say that I didn't claim that the security purposes of these measures justifies the settlement project (I don't believe that they do, so please don't put your own twisted words in my mouth).
Finally, I find your notion that all means are legitimate in resisting occupation to be nothing less than a complete abandonment of legality, ethics and morality. To take your argument to its logical extreme, Hamas would be well within its rights to acquire an arsenal of nukes and instantly annihilate the populations of Israel and all the other countries that support her, because hey, all's fair in resisting occupation. So what if it's genocide on a global scale, they were just resisting occupation. I know it's an absurd example, but that's the point. The idea that all means are legitimate in resistance to occupation is logically indefensible unless you're willing to give up on any notion of morality, law and ethics altogether. And if you aren't able to draw any moral limits then I fail to see why anyone should take you seriously when you fling moral accusations at Israel. You just aren't credible.
I was saying that I am deeply interested in history, and in not seeing it repeated. Throughout history, when people have been motivated by religion, it has produced some fascinating art, but it has done nothing good in the area of politics.
It brings me no joy if I offend anyone here who is religious. But this is a Pearl Jam website, and the song Do the Evolution does an excellent job of mocking religion, so when I join in the anti-religious chorus on this particular website, I feel like I should be preaching to the choir, and it's a bit strange that many here in the choir aren't singing the same song. So if religion still needs to be mocked here, I'll be happy to do it. I think fighting religion is a fight that is vital to creating a safe and secure world for our children, and it should be fought everywhere.
Ethnic division is always a terrible thing when it is taught to children, but the teaching of religious division to children seems even more damaging and long-lasting. For example, there is no ethnic division between Muslims and Hindus living in India, but the religious division there has brought about acts of murder and torture from both sides. I think it's because religion plays into the fear of what happens to you after you die. People don't want their children to know about contrary opinions about what you should believe in order to enter Paradise after death. Adults don't want to hear it either.
There may be something like heaven. I really hope there is. But I am certain that there is no holy land on Earth. We are all on this Earth for a very short time and there is nothing here worth killing or dying for... I hope one day we all we realize this.
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
Why do folks think that others who may fight don't believe this, too (not saying you, but I see this all the time)?
It's like the old saying from the cold war - we are truly safe b/c so and so love their children, too (Russia at that time). The meaning went beyond the children. It really was the fact that Russians loved living, so the mutually assured destruction was kept at bay b/c they realized their action would have a RE-action.
I'm not so sure terrorist organizations like Hamas have that same ethos. When you see suicide bombers, etc., it calls into question their ability to differentiate life and death.
I would profer that Israel is on the same ethical ground as us on this - life is better than death. (Which is not to argue or say that they don't kill people. But, the fact that they wouldn't strap a bomb to themselves to attack others, make a point, "defend themselves or whatever you'd like to call it). Can the same be said for Hamas and other similarly situated terrorist organizations?
When faced with an enemy that doesn't honor life like most ethical humans do, you are forced to fight and kill and die if necessary. It doesn't make you ethically bankrupt. It proves you understand the REALITY you deal with.
Just because someone fights a war does not mean the like it or want it. There is a clear deliniation on what each sides pathos is here regardless of how some would like to color it.
Your neighbor comes at your child with a gun, are you just going to stand there b/c you don't like guns? Is it possible you might wind up killing your neighbor if it is the only way to save your child even though killing is against every fiber of your moral being?