People need to stop living in fear as to what someone 'might' do and own up to their own actions on both sides. Just because one side is committing wrongs, it still doesn't excuse you to go on making more wrongs in their place and calling it justified.
yeah of course. suicide bombings and stuff killing innocent israeli civilans isn't completely justified...
O.k then. Please explain how you think that Israel does not, and never has, engaged in terrorism.
In fact, whilst keeping at the forefront of your mind the fact that Israel is still currently engaged in a brutal 40 year military occupation, please explain how you think that Israel is exempt from being labeled a terrorist state.
Without making any apologies for the occupation itself, Israel tried in good faith to end the occupation in 2000 but was rebuffed. They then tried to unilaterally end the occupation in Gaza with the aim of continuing the process in the West Bank, but in light of what Gaza has become have refrained from the continuation. I think that it is dishonest to continue to fault Israel for an occupation that the majority of Israelis vehemently wish to end and have attempted to end but can't because of the violence and rejection they have encountered from the Palestinians. As for Israeli "terror," Israel has no policy that seeks to randomly cause harm to innocent Palestinians. Innocents have certainly been harmed, but this was not the gov't's intention. In certain instances, such as the cutting down of orchards and the razing of houses, I think that Israel has enacted a terrible policy, however to call it terror is unjust since however flawed such actions are they did not occur in a vacuum but are the result of specific security concerns. The difference between these actions and those of Palestinian terrorists is that it is the policy of groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad to kill innocents, and in light of Israel's attempt at ending the occupation in 2000 I really see no justification for their actions at all (and there is never a justification for intentionally harming civilians).
sorry dude. not opinions. they're facts. all i stated were death tolls and number of innocent people in jails given from sources like bbcnews, etc.
...it's not solely based on numbers. it's based on history of israeli treatment of the palestinian people. and ignore intent? PLEEEEASE. what? the israelis just happened to 'accidently' kill 6000 innocent people and 'accidently' threw thousands of innocent people in jail?
come on. you can't be that ignorant.
most people haven't been there, so i understand you assuming I haven't. unfortunately for you though, i have been there and seen things through my own eyes. it is more complicated. i wasn't really trying to simplify it, but at the same time people still do make it more complicated than it already is (sorry if that doesnt make sense. it does in my head but i just dont know how to say it correctly.) still though, when you see the difference between israel and palestine, you can really see the difference and see for yourself who is really being oppressed.
well, true. peace does need to be talked about, but how can that happen when you have israeli supporters running about complaining of things like "palestine teaches its kids how to die for allah!!" and suicide bombings and such (which is all filled with pure propaganda) and at the same time want peace? and not only that but they completely ignore the fact that palestinians are the ones being oppressed.
you see the media all the time. you saw this video with george galloway. he proved to you just how biased the media is. the media helps control people's minds and alter's people's opinions in the US. how are the people in the US supposed to want peace between the two people when the media just shows palestinian suicide bombers all the time but never israeli attacks on palestinians?
I don't quite know what to say. The numbers are the result of an assymetrical conflict. Israel is in the position of fighting a war in civilian areas. The fact that so many more Palestinians have been killed is the result of this. Your right that the Palestinians are being oppressed, and if this discussion were occuring in 1999 it would be entirely different, but again, in 2000 Israel tried to end the occupation so at this point your argument holds very little water with me. As for the media, I see it very differently, and I could give you links to videos that do as good a job of exposing media bias against Israel. Finally, your right that there is a propaganda element to the "Palestinians teach their children hate," but then again the videos you see are real. Sometimes the best propoganda is the truth. (By the way I don't think all Palestinian children are brought up this way. Its hopefully very few, but there certainly has developed a culture of violence among the Palestinians which I've commented on more extensively in another thread).
I'm sorry for putting it like this, but your statement is patently ridiculous. You may believe that the media is biased in favor of Israel, but I for example happen to believe just the opposite. Leaving that aside, it is not honest to premise a debate on the "fact" of Israeli terror, since that is the very issue being debated. A honest and fair place to start would be with an entirely clean slate.
So you don't think that Israel has committed any acts of terrorism? I listed about 5 obvious examples earlier in the thread.
Without making any apologies for the occupation itself, Israel tried in good faith to end the occupation in 2000 but was rebuffed...I think that it is dishonest to continue to fault Israel for an occupation that the majority of Israelis vehemently wish to end and have attempted to end but can't because of the violence and rejection they have encountered from the Palestinians.
So Israel attempted to end the occupation in 2000 but was rebuffed? And why was it rebuffed? Would you like me to explain to people on here why it was rebuffed, seeing as you have declined to do so yourself?
O.k then:
Chomsky: The Barak proposal in Camp David, the Barak-Clinton proposal, in the United States, I didn't check the Canadian media, in the United States you cannot find a map, which is the most important thing of course, check in Canada, see if you can find a map. You go to Israel, you can find a map, you go to scholarly sources, you can find a map. Here's what you find when you look at a map: You find that this generous, magnanimous proposal provided Israel with a salient east of Jerusalem, which was established primarily by the Labor government, in order to bisect the West Bank. That salient goes almost to Jericho, breaks the West Bank into two cantons, then there's a second salient to the North, going to the Israeli settlement of Ariel, which bisects the Northern part into two cantons.
So, we've got three cantons in the West Bank, virtually separated. All three of them are separated from a small area of East Jerusalem which is the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural life and of communications. So you have four cantons, all separated from the West, from Gaza, so that's five cantons, all surrounded by Israeli settlements, infrastructure, development and so on, which also incidentally guarantee Israel control of the water resources.
This does not rise to the level of South Africa 40 years ago when South Africa established the Bantustans. That's the generous, magnanimous offer. And there's a good reason why maps weren't shown. Because as soon as you look at a map, you see it.
Solomon: All right, but let me just say, Arafat didn't even bother putting a counter-proposal on the table.
Chomsky: Oh, that's not true.
Solomon: They negotiated that afterwards.
Chomsky: That's not true.
Solomon: I guess my question is, if they don't continue to negotiate -
Chomsky: They did. That's false.
Solomon: That's false?
Chomsky: Not only is it false, but not a single participant in the meetings says it. That's a media fabrication . . .
Solomon: That Arafat didn't put a counter-proposal . . .
Chomsky: Yeah, they had a proposal. They proposed the international consensus, which has been accepted by the entire world, the Arab states, the PLO. They proposed a settlement which is in accordance with an overwhelming international consensus, and is blocked by the United States.
Solomon: If you don't talk -
Chomsky: Yeah, they did talk. They talked. They proposed that.
Solomon: Once they walked out of Camp David,
Chomsky: They didn't walk out of Camp David . . .
Solomon: Both camps . . .
Chomsky: No, no, both sides walked out of Camp David.
Solomon: All right, once Camp David disbands, the radicals take over the process, my question is, how do . . .
Chomsky: No, no, the radicals didn't take over the process.
Solomon: You don't think that the Sharon, the right-wing Israeli . . .
Chomsky: No, Barak stayed in power for months. Barak cancelled it. That's how it ended.
Solomon: OK. The problem that people look at now in the Middle East is they say it's spun out of control because the radicals are on both sides now.
Chomsky: No, there's three sides. You're forgetting the United States. The radicals in the United States who have blocked this proposal for 25 years, continue to block it.
Solomon: How do we get back, now, there's so much distrust?
Chomsky: The first way we get back is by trying the experiment of minimal honesty. If we try that experiment of minimal honesty, we look at our own position and we discover what I just described. That for 25 years, the United States has blocked the political settlement, which is supported by the majority of the American population and by the entire world, except for Israel.
The first thing we do is accept the honesty and look at it. We take a look at Camp David and we see how it's the same. The United States was still demanding a Bantustans style settlement and rejecting the overwhelming international consensus and the position of the American people.
We then discovered the United States immediately moved to enhance terror in the region. So, let's continue. On September 29th, Ehud Barak put a massive military presence outside the Al Aqsa Mosque, very provocative, when people came out of the Mosque, young people started throwing stones, the Israeli army started shooting, half a dozen people were killed, and it escalated.
The next couple of days -- there was no Palestinian fire at this time -- Israel used U.S. helicopters (Israel produces no helicopters) to attack civilian complexes, killing about a dozen people and wounding several dozen.
Clinton reacted to that on October 3, 2000 by making the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel new military helicopters which had just been used for the purpose I described and of course would continue to be.
The U.S. press co-operated with that by refusing to publish the story. To this day, they have not published the fact.
It continued when Bush came in. One of his first acts was to send Israel a new shipment of one of the most advanced military helicopters in the arsenal. That continues right up to a couple of weeks ago with new shipments. You take a look at the reports, from say Jenin, by British correspondents like Peter Beaumont for the London Observer. He says the worst atrocity was the Apache helicopters buzzing around, destroying and demolishing everything.
Now, this is enhancing terror, and we may easily continue. On December 14th, the Security Council tried to pass a resolution calling for what everyone recognized to be the obvious means for reducing terror, namely sending international monitors. That's a way of reducing terror.
This happened to be in the middle of a quiet period, which lasted for about three weeks. The U.S. vetoed it. 10 days before that, there was a meeting at Geneva of the high-contracting parties of the 4th-Geneva convention, which has unanimously held for 35 years that it applies to Israel. The meeting condemned the Israeli settlements as illegal, condemned the list of atrocities -- willful destruction of property, murder, trials, torture.
What happened in that meeting? I'll tell you what happened in that meeting. The U.S. boycotted it. Therefore, the media refused to publish it.
Therefore, no one here knows that the United States once again enhanced terror by refusing to recognize the applicability of conventions which make virtually everything the United States and Israel are doing there a grave breech of the Geneva convention, which is a war crime.
These conventions were established in 1949 in order to criminalize the atrocities of the Nazis in occupied territory. They are customary international law. The United States is obligated, as a high-contracting party, to prosecute violations of those conventions. That means to prosecute its own leadership for the last 25 years. They won't do it unless the population forces them to. And the population won't force them to as long as they don't know it's a fact. And they won't know it's a fact as long as the media and loyal intellectuals keep it secret.
The goal of the Oslo process was accurately described in 1998 by Israeli academic Shlomo Ben-Ami just before he joined the Barak government, going on to become Barak's chief negotiator at Camp David in summer 2000. Ben-Ami observed that "in practice, the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever." With these goals, the Clinton-Rabin-Peres agreements were designed to impose on the Palestinians "almost total dependence on Israel," creating "an extended colonial situation," which is expected to be the "permanent basis" for "a situation of dependence." The function of the Palestinian Authority (PA) was to control the domestic population of the Israeli-run neocolonial dependency. That is the way the process unfolded, step by step, including the Camp David suggestions. The Clinton-Barak stand (left vague and unambiguous) was hailed here as "remarkable" and "magnanimous," but a look at the facts made it clear that it was -- as commonly described in Israel -- a Bantustan proposal; that is presumably the reason why maps were carefully avoided in the US mainstream. It is true that Clinton-Barak advanced a few steps towards a Bantustan-style settlement of the kind that South Africa instituted in the darkest days of Apartheid. Just prior to Camp David, West Bank Palestinians were confined to over 200 scattered areas, and Clinton-Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another and from the fourth canton, a small area of East Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian life and of communications in the region. And of course separated from Gaza, where the outcome was left unclear.
But now that plan has apparently been shelved in favor of demolition of the PA. That means destruction of the institutions of the potential Bantustan that was planned by Clinton and his Israeli partners; in the last few days, even a human rights center. The Palestinian figures who were designated to be the counterpart of the Black leaders of the Bantustans are also under attack, though not killed, presumably because of the international consequences. The prominent Israeli scholar Ze'ev Sternhell writes that the government "is no longer ashamed to speak of war when what they are really engaged in is colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era." This new policy is a regression below the Bantustan model of South Africa 40 years ago to which Clinton-Rabin-Peres-Barak and their associates aspired in the Oslo "peace process."
None of this will come as a surprise to those who have been reading critical analyses for the past 10 years, including plenty of material posted regularly on Znet, reviewing developments as they proceeded.
Exactly how the Israeli leadership intends to implement these programs is unclear -- to them too, I presume.
It is convenient in the US, and the West, to blame Israel and particularly Sharon, but that is unfair and hardly honest. Many of Sharon's worst atrocities were carried out under Labor governments. Peres comes close to Sharon as a war criminal. Furthermore, the prime responsibility lies in Washington, and has for 30 years. That is true of the general diplomatic framework, and also of particular actions. Israel can act within the limits established by the master in Washington, rarely beyond.
I don't quite know what to say. The numbers are the result of an assymetrical conflict. Israel is in the position of fighting a war in civilian areas. The fact that so many more Palestinians have been killed is the result of this.
Why don't you just say it like it is?
Israel is a modern army supported 100% by the worlds only superpower and is in the position of fighting a war as an illegal occupying army. The fact that so many more Palestinians have been killed is the result of this.
I think that it is dishonest to continue to fault Israel for an occupation that the majority of Israelis vehemently wish to end and have attempted to end but can't because of the violence and rejection they have encountered from the Palestinians.
I don't quite know what to say. The numbers are the result of an assymetrical conflict. Israel is in the position of fighting a war in civilian areas. The fact that so many more Palestinians have been killed is the result of this. Your right that the Palestinians are being oppressed, and if this discussion were occuring in 1999 it would be entirely different, but again, in 2000 Israel tried to end the occupation so at this point your argument holds very little water with me. As for the media, I see it very differently, and I could give you links to videos that do as good a job of exposing media bias against Israel. Finally, your right that there is a propaganda element to the "Palestinians teach their children hate," but then again the videos you see are real. Sometimes the best propoganda is the truth. (By the way I don't think all Palestinian children are brought up this way. Its hopefully very few, but there certainly has developed a culture of violence among the Palestinians which I've commented on more extensively in another thread).
These comments above say everything anyone needs to know about the mindset of those who support Israeli terror.
It's all right here in a nutshell.
In a May 23, 2007 article titled "We Are Sowing Thorns" on the Elaph website, Egyptian liberal author Kamal Gabriel [1] decried what he termed "the psychology and the culture of violence and hatred" in the Palestinian territories and in the Middle East in general. He wrote that those who had encouraged this phenomenon had intended to use it against Israel and the West, but that once it took root it became impossible to control, and has led to domestic infighting in the Gaza Strip and in Iraq.
The following are excerpts: [2]
"The All-Against-All Infighting… [Has] Become the Mental and Psychological Makeup of the Palestinian People"
"What is going on now in the Gaza Strip, since Israel withdrew from it, is a clear example that exposes the faults of what we have done. The domestic infighting among brothers of the same homeland, wretched from the occupation and wretched from the yielding of their culture, is too great and too dangerous to be [just] the result of differences of opinion among the factions, or the absence of a strong central government, or even of what they call the weapons anarchy.
"It is definitely all of this. But the most dangerous thing about this, and that which the bilateral meetings between the sides, or meetings under the auspices of a third party… or even the folkloric Arab League summits have been unable to overcome, is that the all-against-all infighting and its basic code have become the mental and psychological makeup of the Palestinian people, as a natural result of the predominant discourse of hostility and incitement. [This discourse] has been adopted by Palestinians of all persuasions and in all the factions - religious, pan-Arab revolutionary, and leftist. It is a discourse whose aim was sowing hatred, having recourse to violence, and enjoying spilling blood.
"At first it was directed against the so-called the Israeli enemy, and it uprooted any possibility of or tendency towards rational mutual comprehension or of recourse to discussion, dialogue, and negotiation - what is known as peaceful resolution - and it raised the slogan of 'clinging to the choice of resistance.' But one clings to goals, not methods, and resistance (meaning armed resistance) cannot, psychologically and culturally, be the only choice for peoples to achieve their goals, without there being any alternative…
"Perhaps this is [an example of] the only [psychological] state in which the goal and the means are seen to become united in the choice of violence. This occurs when someone is overcome with the spirit of vengeance…
"The culture and psychology of violence has been able to take possession of the Palestinian people for two reasons. The first is that the discourse of violence had already managed to be the only one on the scene, which was emptied of any counter-discourse when the rational thinkers fled or were forced to keep out of sight - [either] out of desperation or in order to preserve the wellbeing of themselves and their families amidst the vast flood of feelings of violence that began to sweep away everything in its path.
"The second reason is that the predominant discourse of violence, most of which was formed by the religious discourse, was not the discourse of a means that attempts to achieve a goal - for instance, the liberation of the homeland - but rather was a discourse of violence and sacred killing in the name of jihad, which the literature of violence considered to be a duty that had been neglected and which needed to be carried out by every believer. [This was written,] for instance, in 'Abd Al-Salam Farag's book The Neglected Duty, which has been an authoritative source for the jurisprudence of jihad since the 1970s."
"The Hatred was Transformed from Hatred of Zionism to Hatred of Jews, the Sons Of Apes and Pigs"
"This was translated into political language in the slogan that the Arab-Israeli struggle is an existential struggle, and not a struggle over borders, and its implementation in practice was the so-called martyrdom-seeking operations for killing Israeli civilians. The hatred was transformed from hatred of Zionism to hatred of Jews, the sons of apes and pigs.
"Perhaps no one has noticed - for where are we to find someone to notice, in the absence of reason and rationality? - that when you take an individual or a group away from the culture of using reason and peaceful dialogue, and replace it with the culture of violence and of killing those who are different, you cannot then afterwards control it and direct it to be used against one single side.
"This is what we said: It starts with the Zionist enemy who is occupying the Holy Land, and then the violence and the hatred spread dangerously, like fire, in the psyche of the one over which they have gained mastery. They consume everything around them - and the first thing they consume is the light of reason. The individual loses his natural balance, which is based on the balance between peaceful tendencies [that encourage] peace, and angry tendencies that incite to violence…
"Thus we observed, and gave our blessing to, the conflagrations of violence and hatred, and they extended from [being aimed at] the Zionist enemy to [being aimed at] anyone who befriended it or helped it - even if they helped us as well, and even if it was someone on whom we depended for medicine, food, and everything.
"Our violence and hatred extended to America, England, and the other Western countries, and there is a BBC journalist who is still a prisoner of our jihad-fighting organizations…"
"The Natural Consequence of… the Culture and Psychology of Violence… is the Fraternal Violence We See [Today]"
"The natural consequence of the rule of the culture and psychology of violence and its expansion is the fraternal violence we see [today], which has defied and will [continue to] defy all attempts to contain it - [violence among brothers] whom we all agree are miserable by any standard.
"The state of the Palestinian territories is perhaps the most critical in this respect… but we can give similar examples from all corners of what is called the greater Middle East - among them what is happening in Iraq among the Sunnis, the Shi'ites, and the Ba'thists as a result of the influence of the Ba'thist-Saddamist discourse…
"There are thousands of other examples, which seem at first sight less important and less acute in their level of violence, but that we assess as more serious because they indicate the expansion of the culture and psychology of violence and the rejection of discussion… This is among regular people in their daily lives…
"Violence naturally exists at all times and in every place. But we are in the midst of a striking growth in violence, not to say an increase at a catastrophic rate. In my estimation, this is the fruit that we are harvesting because we sowed thorns for over half a century.
"Thus, the crisis in the region is not the amount of disagreements in points of view or differences in interests [between ourselves] and our neighbors or the world. In both of these [cases], reason and dialogue can find solutions, whether comprehensive or partial, that are completely satisfactory, acceptable, or at least can be borne.
"Rather, the true crisis in the region is that the peoples of the region need psychological and cultural reeducation - which must necessarily be preceded by halting the discourse of violence, incitement, and hatred, in all its colors and classifications.
"But can this come about when the fires of hatred have already broken out [everywhere]?"
(me now)
I don't think this guy has any sympathy for Israel's occupation, which should make what he has to say about the Palestinians all the more forceful. I simply can't understand Byrnzie why you can't accept that the situation is simply for complicated than you present it. Israel isn't perfect. The Palestinians aren't perfect. If I can accept this why can't you? Oh and by the way Chomsky is full of shit. The map he is talking about didn't reflect Israels final offer (rejected by Arafat) which was about 97% of the West Bank (contiguous) East Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and the Temple Mount, and a highway connecting the West Bank and Gaza. This is what Israeli leaders privy the the talks say. This is what American leaders privy to the talks say. Hell, even other Arab diplomats have publicly stated that Arafat practically committed a crime by walking away from that deal.
In a May 23, 2007 article titled "We Are Sowing Thorns" on the Elaph website, Egyptian liberal author Kamal Gabriel [1] decried what he termed "the psychology and the culture of violence and hatred" in the Palestinian territories and in the Middle East in general. He wrote that those who had encouraged this phenomenon had intended to use it against Israel and the West, but that once it took root it became impossible to control, and has led to domestic infighting in the Gaza Strip and in Iraq.
"The culture and psychology of violence has been able to take possession of the Palestinian people for two reasons. The first is that the discourse of violence had already managed to be the only one on the scene, which was emptied of any counter-discourse when the rational thinkers fled or were forced to keep out of sight - [either] out of desperation or in order to preserve the wellbeing of themselves and their families amidst the vast flood of feelings of violence that began to sweep away everything in its path.
"Perhaps no one has noticed - for where are we to find someone to notice, in the absence of reason and rationality? - that when you take an individual or a group away from the culture of using reason and peaceful dialogue, and replace it with the culture of violence and of killing those who are different, you cannot then afterwards control it and direct it to be used against one single side.
"Rather, the true crisis in the region is that the peoples of the region need psychological and cultural reeducation - which must necessarily be preceded by halting the discourse of violence, incitement, and hatred, in all its colors and classifications.
(me now)
I don't think this guy has any sympathy for Israel's occupation, which should make what he has to say about the Palestinians all the more forceful. I simply can't understand Byrnzie why you can't accept that the situation is simply for complicated than you present it. Israel isn't perfect. The Palestinians aren't perfect. If I can accept this why can't you? Oh and by the way Chomsky is full of shit. The map he is talking about didn't reflect Israels final offer (rejected by Arafat) which was about 97% of the West Bank (contiguous) East Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and the Temple Mount, and a highway connecting the West Bank and Gaza. This is what Israeli leaders privy the the talks say. This is what American leaders privy to the talks say. Hell, even other Arab diplomats have publicly stated that Arafat practically committed a crime by walking away from that deal.
Please provide your 'real map' then. Please explain what was on offer to the Palestinians at Camp David.
And as for the piece you copied and pasted above? What a joke! I won't waste my time commenting any more on it. The parts I've highlighted speak for themselves. I can see you must have really struggled to dig up that piece of obvious nonsense. Well done!
Oh and by the way Chomsky is full of shit. The map he is talking about didn't reflect Israels final offer (rejected by Arafat) which was about 97% of the West Bank (contiguous) East Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and the Temple Mount, and a highway connecting the West Bank and Gaza. This is what Israeli leaders privy the the talks say. This is what American leaders privy to the talks say.
Oh and by the way Chomsky is full of shit. The map he is talking about didn't reflect Israels final offer (rejected by Arafat) which was about 97% of the West Bank (contiguous) East Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and the Temple Mount, and a highway connecting the West Bank and Gaza. This is what Israeli leaders privy the the talks say. This is what American leaders privy to the talks say. Hell, even other Arab diplomats have publicly stated that Arafat practically committed a crime by walking away from that deal.
Arafat didn't walk away from the deal. Both sides walked away from the deal, and Barak finally canceled it.
The last two maps on the page represent the final two offers made to the Palestinians. The maps you provided were earlier proposals and don't reflect the final offer Arafat walked away from.
The last two maps on the page represent the final two offers made to the Palestinians. The maps you provided were earlier proposals and don't reflect the final offer Arafat walked away from.
'...if informal reports are correct, the final offer of the Israeli side was indeed generous relative to earlier offers - but it is not clear that the offer was really made. The map of the "final Israeli offer" that has been published in several places (see below) didn't include enclaves or zones of temporary authority. However, according to the non-paper of Miguel Moratinos which summarized the negotiations, there was nonetheless disagreement between the sides about borders, Jerusalem and refugees. Moratinos notes that the Israelis made an offer which Barak later rescinded as invalid. It is not clear if the map of the final offer of January 2001 published in several places is the one that was rescinded by Israel.
On January 27, both sides published a statement saying they had never been closer to agreement, but Barak, facing elections, suspended the talks.'
'These maps were provided by FMEP. Though they were not disputed by the sides, according to Dennis Ross they were NOT an accurate reflection of President Clinton's bridging offer. According to the maps, the Palestinian state would have been permanently divided into several sub areas in the West Bank , separated by areas of Israeli Control. Striped areas would have remained under Israeli control for 12 to 20 years. According to FMEP, The calculation that the Palestinians were getting 97% of the land ignores the area of Jerusalem and the striped areas. In actuality, the area of the Palestinian state would initially be about 70% of some 2,200 square miles.'
Hey everybody, look about happens when Israel steps back and lets Palestine fend for itself!
**scans horizon**
Nope, no desert utopia has materialized.
Israel hasn't stepped back though has it. Hamas won a democratic election and yet has been undermined by Israeli and U.S interference and divide and conquer tactics.
Your comment is meaningless.
Israel hasn't stepped back though has it. Hamas won a democratic election and yet has been undermined by Israeli and U.S interference and divide and conquer tactics.
Your comment is meaningless.
ah yes. the actions of hamas are very democratic arent they
so I guess bush's actions are irrelevant, he was elected too.
In the context in which we were discussing Hamas, yes. Bush's actions aren't democratic in my opinion, but that doesn't mean that foreign elements should encourage civil war in America.
In the context in which we were discussing Hamas, yes. Bush's actions aren't democratic in my opinion, but that doesn't mean that foreign elements should encourage civil war in America.
maybe i'm misunderstanding the context. hamas is destroying the opposition by force. but then again, maybe that is the will of the people. so they are acting democratic.
and in america, you can criticize bush all you want without fear of death or imprisonment. does that happen in gaza if you criticize hamas?
maybe i'm misunderstanding the context. hamas is destroying the opposition by force. but then again, maybe that is the will of the people. so they are acting democratic.
and in america, you can criticize bush all you want without fear of death or imprisonment. does that happen in gaza if you criticize hamas?
Firstly, this particular thread is about Israeli terror. You lost the argument. Now you're resorting to grabbing at crumbs which suggest that Palestinians are inherently violent and incapable of living together. Your posts reek of ignorance of the situation over there, and of racism.
Firstly, this particular thread is about Israeli terror. You lost the argument. Now you're resorting to grabbing at crumbs which suggest that Palestinians are inherently violent and incapable of living together. Your posts reek of ignorance of the situation over there, and of racism.
wrong thread. I apologize. how is recognizing that hamas destroyed the opposition by force racist?
Without making any apologies for the occupation itself, Israel tried in good faith to end the occupation in 2000 but was rebuffed......and in light of Israel's attempt at ending the occupation in 2000 I really see no justification for their actions at all.
July/August 2002
The Myth of the Generous Offer
Distorting the Camp David negotiations
The seemingly endless volleys of attack and retaliation in the Middle East leave many people wondering why the two sides can't reach an agreement. The answer is simple, according to numerous commentators: At the Camp David meeting in July 2000, Israel "offered extraordinary concessions" (Michael Kelly, Washington Post, 3/13/02), "far-reaching concessions" (Boston Globe, 12/30/01), "unprecedented concessions" (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). Israel’s "generous peace terms" (L.A. Times editorial, 3/15/02) constituted "the most far-reaching offer ever" (Chicago Tribune editorial, 6/6/01) to create a Palestinian state. In short, Camp David was "an unprecedented concession" to the Palestinians (Time, 12/25/00).
But due to "Arafat's recalcitrance" (L.A. Times editorial, 4/9/02) and "Palestinian rejectionism" (Mortimer Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report, 3/22/02), "Arafat walked away from generous Israeli peacemaking proposals without even making a counteroffer" (Salon.com 3/8/01). Yes, Arafat "walked away without making a counteroffer" (Samuel G. Freedman, USA Today, 6/18/01). Israel "offered peace terms more generous than ever before and Arafat did not even make a counteroffer" (Chicago Sun-Times editorial, 11/10/00). In case the point isn‘t clear: "At Camp David, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians an astonishingly generous peace with dignity and statehood. Arafat not only turned it down, he refused to make a counteroffer!" (Charles Krauthammer, Seattle Times, 10/16/00).
This account is one of the most tenacious myths of the conflict. Its implications are obvious: There is nothing Israel can do to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors. The Israeli army’s increasingly deadly attacks, in this version, can be seen purely as self-defense against Palestinian aggression that is motivated by little more than blind hatred.
Locking in occupation
To understand what actually happened at Camp David, it's necessary to know that for many years the PLO has officially called for a two-state solution in which Israel would keep the 78 percent of the Palestine Mandate (as Britain's protectorate was called) that it has controlled since 1948, and a Palestinian state would be formed on the remaining 22 percent that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem). Israel would withdraw completely from those lands, return to the pre-1967 borders and a resolution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 would be negotiated between the two sides. Then, in exchange, the Palestinians would agree to recognize Israel (PLO Declaration, 12/7/88; PLO Negotiations Department).
Although some people describe Israel's Camp David proposal as practically a return to the 1967 borders, it was far from that. Under the plan, Israel would have withdrawn completely from the small Gaza Strip. But it would annex strategically important and highly valuable sections of the West Bank--while retaining "security control" over other parts--that would have made it impossible for the Palestinians to travel or trade freely within their own state without the permission of the Israeli government (Political Science Quarterly, 6/22/01; New York Times, 7/26/01; Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 9-10/00; Robert Malley, New York Review of Books, 8/9/01).
The annexations and security arrangements would divide the West Bank into three disconnected cantons. In exchange for taking fertile West Bank lands that happen to contain most of the region’s scarce water aquifers, Israel offered to give up a piece of its own territory in the Negev Desert--about one-tenth the size of the land it would annex--including a former toxic waste dump.
Because of the geographic placement of Israel’s proposed West Bank annexations, Palestinians living in their new “independent state” would be forced to cross Israeli territory every time they traveled or shipped goods from one section of the West Bank to another, and Israel could close those routes at will. Israel would also retain a network of so-called “bypass roads” that would crisscross the Palestinian state while remaining sovereign Israeli territory, further dividing the West Bank.
Israel was also to have kept "security control" for an indefinite period of time over the Jordan Valley, the strip of territory that forms the border between the West Bank and neighboring Jordan. Palestine would not have free access to its own international borders with Jordan and Egypt--putting Palestinian trade, and therefore its economy, at the mercy of the Israeli military.
Had Arafat agreed to these arrangements, the Palestinians would have permanently locked in place many of the worst aspects of the very occupation they were trying to bring to an end. For at Camp David, Israel also demanded that Arafat sign an "end-of-conflict" agreement stating that the decades-old war between Israel and the Palestinians was over and waiving all further claims against Israel.
Violence or negotiation?
The Camp David meeting ended without agreement on July 25, 2000. At this point, according to conventional wisdom, the Palestinian leader's "response to the Camp David proposals was not a counteroffer but an assault" (Oregonian editorial, 8/15/01). "Arafat figured he could push one more time to get one more batch of concessions. The talks collapsed. Violence erupted again" (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). He "used the uprising to obtain through violence...what he couldn't get at the Camp David bargaining table" (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/21/00).
But the Intifada actually did not start for another two months. In the meantime, there was relative calm in the occupied territories. During this period of quiet, the two sides continued negotiating behind closed doors. Meanwhile, life for the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation went on as usual. On July 28, Prime Minister Barak announced that Israel had no plans to withdraw from the town of Abu Dis, as it had pledged to do in the 1995 Oslo II agreement (Israel Wire, 7/28/00). In August and early September, Israel announced new construction on Jewish-only settlements in Efrat and Har Adar, while the Israeli statistics bureau reported that settlement building had increased 81 percent in the first quarter of 2000. Two Palestinian houses were demolished in East Jerusalem, and Arab residents of Sur Bahir and Suwahara received expropriation notices; their houses lay in the path of a planned Jewish-only highway (Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 11-12/00).
The Intifada began on September 29, 2000, when Israeli troops opened fire on unarmed Palestinian rock-throwers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, killing four and wounding over 200 (State Department human rights report for Israel, 2/01). Demonstrations spread throughout the territories. Barak and Arafat, having both staked their domestic reputations on their ability to win a negotiated peace from the other side, now felt politically threatened by the violence. In January 2001, they resumed formal negotiations at Taba, Egypt.
The Taba talks are one of the most significant and least remembered events of the "peace process." While so far in 2002 (1/1/02-5/31/02), Camp David has been mentioned in conjunction with Israel 35 times on broadcast network news shows, Taba has come up only four times--never on any of the nightly newscasts. In February 2002, Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz (2/14/02), published for the first time the text of the European Union's official notes of the Taba talks, which were confirmed in their essential points by negotiators from both sides.
"Anyone who reads the European Union account of the Taba talks," Ha'aretz noted in its introduction, "will find it hard to believe that only 13 months ago, Israel and the Palestinians were so close to a peace agreement." At Taba, Israel dropped its demand to control Palestine's borders and the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians, for the first time, made detailed counterproposals--in other words, counteroffers--showing which changes to the 1967 borders they would be willing to accept. The Israeli map that has emerged from the talks shows a fully contiguous West Bank, though with a very narrow middle and a strange gerrymandered western border to accommodate annexed settlements.
In the end, however, all this proved too much for Israel's Labor prime minister. On January 28, Barak unilaterally broke off the negotiations. "The pressure of Israeli public opinion against the talks could not be resisted," Ben-Ami said (New York Times, 7/26/01).
Settlements off the table
In February 2001, Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel. Sharon has made his position on the negotiations crystal clear. "You know, it's not by accident that the settlements are located where they are," he said in an interview a few months after his election (Ha'aretz, 4/12/01).
They safeguard the cradle of the Jewish people's birth and also provide strategic depth which is vital to our existence.
The settlements were established according to the conception that, come what may, we have to hold the western security area [of the West Bank], which is adjacent to the Green Line, and the eastern security area along the Jordan River and the roads linking the two. And Jerusalem, of course. And the hill aquifer. Nothing has changed with respect to any of those things. The importance of the security areas has not diminished, it may even have increased. So I see no reason for evacuating any settlements.
Meanwhile, Ehud Barak has repudiated his own positions at Taba, and now speaks pointedly of the need for a negotiated settlement "based on the principles presented at Camp David" (New York Times op-ed, 4/14/02).
In April 2002, the countries of the Arab League--from moderate Jordan to hardline Iraq--unanimously agreed on a Saudi peace plan centering around full peace, recognition and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders as well as a "just resolution" to the refugee issue. Palestinian negotiator Nabil Sha'ath declared himself "delighted" with the plan. "The proposal constitutes the best terms of reference for our political struggle," he told the Jordan Times (3/28/02).
Ariel Sharon responded by declaring that "a return to the 1967 borders will destroy Israel" (New York Times, 5/4/02). In a commentary on the Arab plan, Ha'aretz's Bradley Burston (2/27/02) noted that the offer was "forcing Israel to confront peace terms it has quietly feared for decades."
Not sure if it's been posted, but here's another link to Galloway praising the Iraqi "insurgents".
2000: Lubbock; 2003: OKC, Dallas, San Antonio; 2006: Los Angeles II, San Diego; 2008: Atlanta (EV Solo); 2012: Dallas (EV Solo); 2013: Dallas; 2014: Tulsa; 2018: Wrigley I
Thanks Byrnzie for posting that stuff about Camp David. The Palestinians were right to walk away from the shit that so many people believe was a good deal. Ever see a map of what was proposed for the West Bank and the palestinian state ? Its a fucking joke. Numerous Israeli-controlled roads essentially formed something like a grid through much of the WB, roads which were not passable to the Palestinians, and which effectively created dozens of little enclaves where one Palestinian would be separated from the next. Not only that, but the Israeli arm that juts eastward into central WB was to be extended further eastward, almost dividing the WB into two parts.
Colin Powell himself said about Palestinian statehood and Camp David that it must be a viable state, "not one cut up into a thousand pieces".
Thanks Byrnzie for posting that stuff about Camp David. The Palestinians were right to walk away from the shit that so many people believe was a good deal. Ever see a map of what was proposed for the West Bank and the palestinian state ? Its a fucking joke. Numerous Israeli-controlled roads essentially formed something like a grid through much of the WB, roads which were not passable to the Palestinians, and which effectively created dozens of little enclaves where one Palestinian would be separated from the next. Not only that, but the Israeli arm that juts eastward into central WB was to be extended further eastward, almost dividing the WB into two parts.
Colin Powell himself said about Palestinian statehood and Camp David that it must be a viable state, "not one cut up into a thousand pieces".
Yeah, I've seen the maps. Go back one page on this thread and you'll see my links to the maps.
An interesting quotation on the Israeli situation:
Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas Foreign Minister, says: “Even if the U.S. gave us all its money in return for recognizing Israel and giving up one inch of Palestine, we would never do so even if this costs us our lives.”
2000: Lubbock; 2003: OKC, Dallas, San Antonio; 2006: Los Angeles II, San Diego; 2008: Atlanta (EV Solo); 2012: Dallas (EV Solo); 2013: Dallas; 2014: Tulsa; 2018: Wrigley I
An interesting quotation on the Israeli situation:
Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas Foreign Minister, says: “Even if the U.S. gave us all its money in return for recognizing Israel and giving up one inch of Palestine, we would never do so even if this costs us our lives.”
I would like to see this quote in it's full context. I would also like to know what recognizing Israel means. Are we asking that they recognize Israel in it's current form, thereby legitimizing the illegal occupation and the illegal settlements?
I would like to see this quote in it's full context. I would also like to know what recognizing Israel means. Are we asking that they recognize Israel in it's current form, thereby legitimizing the illegal occupation and the illegal settlements?
I'm not sure why people refuse to believe Radical Islamists, like Hamas members, when they say exactly what they mean. They want Israel gone; they'll kill (Muslims or Jews or anyone) to get it done. They're not playing with semantics or using the word "recognize" in some ambiguous way.
Groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, etc., constantly denounce Israel as evil and worthy of death, calling for jihad against it and the West. And still some here ask for the "context" of a quotation that directly says what they want. Are we really this naive?
2000: Lubbock; 2003: OKC, Dallas, San Antonio; 2006: Los Angeles II, San Diego; 2008: Atlanta (EV Solo); 2012: Dallas (EV Solo); 2013: Dallas; 2014: Tulsa; 2018: Wrigley I
Comments
yeah of course. suicide bombings and stuff killing innocent israeli civilans isn't completely justified...
Without making any apologies for the occupation itself, Israel tried in good faith to end the occupation in 2000 but was rebuffed. They then tried to unilaterally end the occupation in Gaza with the aim of continuing the process in the West Bank, but in light of what Gaza has become have refrained from the continuation. I think that it is dishonest to continue to fault Israel for an occupation that the majority of Israelis vehemently wish to end and have attempted to end but can't because of the violence and rejection they have encountered from the Palestinians. As for Israeli "terror," Israel has no policy that seeks to randomly cause harm to innocent Palestinians. Innocents have certainly been harmed, but this was not the gov't's intention. In certain instances, such as the cutting down of orchards and the razing of houses, I think that Israel has enacted a terrible policy, however to call it terror is unjust since however flawed such actions are they did not occur in a vacuum but are the result of specific security concerns. The difference between these actions and those of Palestinian terrorists is that it is the policy of groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad to kill innocents, and in light of Israel's attempt at ending the occupation in 2000 I really see no justification for their actions at all (and there is never a justification for intentionally harming civilians).
I don't quite know what to say. The numbers are the result of an assymetrical conflict. Israel is in the position of fighting a war in civilian areas. The fact that so many more Palestinians have been killed is the result of this. Your right that the Palestinians are being oppressed, and if this discussion were occuring in 1999 it would be entirely different, but again, in 2000 Israel tried to end the occupation so at this point your argument holds very little water with me. As for the media, I see it very differently, and I could give you links to videos that do as good a job of exposing media bias against Israel. Finally, your right that there is a propaganda element to the "Palestinians teach their children hate," but then again the videos you see are real. Sometimes the best propoganda is the truth. (By the way I don't think all Palestinian children are brought up this way. Its hopefully very few, but there certainly has developed a culture of violence among the Palestinians which I've commented on more extensively in another thread).
So you don't think that Israel has committed any acts of terrorism? I listed about 5 obvious examples earlier in the thread.
So Israel attempted to end the occupation in 2000 but was rebuffed? And why was it rebuffed? Would you like me to explain to people on here why it was rebuffed, seeing as you have declined to do so yourself?
O.k then:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14120.htm
Chomsky: The Barak proposal in Camp David, the Barak-Clinton proposal, in the United States, I didn't check the Canadian media, in the United States you cannot find a map, which is the most important thing of course, check in Canada, see if you can find a map. You go to Israel, you can find a map, you go to scholarly sources, you can find a map. Here's what you find when you look at a map: You find that this generous, magnanimous proposal provided Israel with a salient east of Jerusalem, which was established primarily by the Labor government, in order to bisect the West Bank. That salient goes almost to Jericho, breaks the West Bank into two cantons, then there's a second salient to the North, going to the Israeli settlement of Ariel, which bisects the Northern part into two cantons.
So, we've got three cantons in the West Bank, virtually separated. All three of them are separated from a small area of East Jerusalem which is the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural life and of communications. So you have four cantons, all separated from the West, from Gaza, so that's five cantons, all surrounded by Israeli settlements, infrastructure, development and so on, which also incidentally guarantee Israel control of the water resources.
This does not rise to the level of South Africa 40 years ago when South Africa established the Bantustans. That's the generous, magnanimous offer. And there's a good reason why maps weren't shown. Because as soon as you look at a map, you see it.
Solomon: All right, but let me just say, Arafat didn't even bother putting a counter-proposal on the table.
Chomsky: Oh, that's not true.
Solomon: They negotiated that afterwards.
Chomsky: That's not true.
Solomon: I guess my question is, if they don't continue to negotiate -
Chomsky: They did. That's false.
Solomon: That's false?
Chomsky: Not only is it false, but not a single participant in the meetings says it. That's a media fabrication . . .
Solomon: That Arafat didn't put a counter-proposal . . .
Chomsky: Yeah, they had a proposal. They proposed the international consensus, which has been accepted by the entire world, the Arab states, the PLO. They proposed a settlement which is in accordance with an overwhelming international consensus, and is blocked by the United States.
Solomon: If you don't talk -
Chomsky: Yeah, they did talk. They talked. They proposed that.
Solomon: Once they walked out of Camp David,
Chomsky: They didn't walk out of Camp David . . .
Solomon: Both camps . . .
Chomsky: No, no, both sides walked out of Camp David.
Solomon: All right, once Camp David disbands, the radicals take over the process, my question is, how do . . .
Chomsky: No, no, the radicals didn't take over the process.
Solomon: You don't think that the Sharon, the right-wing Israeli . . .
Chomsky: No, Barak stayed in power for months. Barak cancelled it. That's how it ended.
Solomon: OK. The problem that people look at now in the Middle East is they say it's spun out of control because the radicals are on both sides now.
Chomsky: No, there's three sides. You're forgetting the United States. The radicals in the United States who have blocked this proposal for 25 years, continue to block it.
Solomon: How do we get back, now, there's so much distrust?
Chomsky: The first way we get back is by trying the experiment of minimal honesty. If we try that experiment of minimal honesty, we look at our own position and we discover what I just described. That for 25 years, the United States has blocked the political settlement, which is supported by the majority of the American population and by the entire world, except for Israel.
The first thing we do is accept the honesty and look at it. We take a look at Camp David and we see how it's the same. The United States was still demanding a Bantustans style settlement and rejecting the overwhelming international consensus and the position of the American people.
We then discovered the United States immediately moved to enhance terror in the region. So, let's continue. On September 29th, Ehud Barak put a massive military presence outside the Al Aqsa Mosque, very provocative, when people came out of the Mosque, young people started throwing stones, the Israeli army started shooting, half a dozen people were killed, and it escalated.
The next couple of days -- there was no Palestinian fire at this time -- Israel used U.S. helicopters (Israel produces no helicopters) to attack civilian complexes, killing about a dozen people and wounding several dozen.
Clinton reacted to that on October 3, 2000 by making the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel new military helicopters which had just been used for the purpose I described and of course would continue to be.
The U.S. press co-operated with that by refusing to publish the story. To this day, they have not published the fact.
It continued when Bush came in. One of his first acts was to send Israel a new shipment of one of the most advanced military helicopters in the arsenal. That continues right up to a couple of weeks ago with new shipments. You take a look at the reports, from say Jenin, by British correspondents like Peter Beaumont for the London Observer. He says the worst atrocity was the Apache helicopters buzzing around, destroying and demolishing everything.
Now, this is enhancing terror, and we may easily continue. On December 14th, the Security Council tried to pass a resolution calling for what everyone recognized to be the obvious means for reducing terror, namely sending international monitors. That's a way of reducing terror.
This happened to be in the middle of a quiet period, which lasted for about three weeks. The U.S. vetoed it. 10 days before that, there was a meeting at Geneva of the high-contracting parties of the 4th-Geneva convention, which has unanimously held for 35 years that it applies to Israel. The meeting condemned the Israeli settlements as illegal, condemned the list of atrocities -- willful destruction of property, murder, trials, torture.
What happened in that meeting? I'll tell you what happened in that meeting. The U.S. boycotted it. Therefore, the media refused to publish it.
Therefore, no one here knows that the United States once again enhanced terror by refusing to recognize the applicability of conventions which make virtually everything the United States and Israel are doing there a grave breech of the Geneva convention, which is a war crime.
These conventions were established in 1949 in order to criminalize the atrocities of the Nazis in occupied territory. They are customary international law. The United States is obligated, as a high-contracting party, to prosecute violations of those conventions. That means to prosecute its own leadership for the last 25 years. They won't do it unless the population forces them to. And the population won't force them to as long as they don't know it's a fact. And they won't know it's a fact as long as the media and loyal intellectuals keep it secret.
http://www.medialens.org/articles/the_articles/articles_2002/znet_chomsky.html
The goal of the Oslo process was accurately described in 1998 by Israeli academic Shlomo Ben-Ami just before he joined the Barak government, going on to become Barak's chief negotiator at Camp David in summer 2000. Ben-Ami observed that "in practice, the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever." With these goals, the Clinton-Rabin-Peres agreements were designed to impose on the Palestinians "almost total dependence on Israel," creating "an extended colonial situation," which is expected to be the "permanent basis" for "a situation of dependence." The function of the Palestinian Authority (PA) was to control the domestic population of the Israeli-run neocolonial dependency. That is the way the process unfolded, step by step, including the Camp David suggestions. The Clinton-Barak stand (left vague and unambiguous) was hailed here as "remarkable" and "magnanimous," but a look at the facts made it clear that it was -- as commonly described in Israel -- a Bantustan proposal; that is presumably the reason why maps were carefully avoided in the US mainstream. It is true that Clinton-Barak advanced a few steps towards a Bantustan-style settlement of the kind that South Africa instituted in the darkest days of Apartheid. Just prior to Camp David, West Bank Palestinians were confined to over 200 scattered areas, and Clinton-Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another and from the fourth canton, a small area of East Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian life and of communications in the region. And of course separated from Gaza, where the outcome was left unclear.
But now that plan has apparently been shelved in favor of demolition of the PA. That means destruction of the institutions of the potential Bantustan that was planned by Clinton and his Israeli partners; in the last few days, even a human rights center. The Palestinian figures who were designated to be the counterpart of the Black leaders of the Bantustans are also under attack, though not killed, presumably because of the international consequences. The prominent Israeli scholar Ze'ev Sternhell writes that the government "is no longer ashamed to speak of war when what they are really engaged in is colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era." This new policy is a regression below the Bantustan model of South Africa 40 years ago to which Clinton-Rabin-Peres-Barak and their associates aspired in the Oslo "peace process."
None of this will come as a surprise to those who have been reading critical analyses for the past 10 years, including plenty of material posted regularly on Znet, reviewing developments as they proceeded.
Exactly how the Israeli leadership intends to implement these programs is unclear -- to them too, I presume.
It is convenient in the US, and the West, to blame Israel and particularly Sharon, but that is unfair and hardly honest. Many of Sharon's worst atrocities were carried out under Labor governments. Peres comes close to Sharon as a war criminal. Furthermore, the prime responsibility lies in Washington, and has for 30 years. That is true of the general diplomatic framework, and also of particular actions. Israel can act within the limits established by the master in Washington, rarely beyond.
Why don't you just say it like it is?
Israel is a modern army supported 100% by the worlds only superpower and is in the position of fighting a war as an illegal occupying army. The fact that so many more Palestinians have been killed is the result of this.
These comments above say everything anyone needs to know about the mindset of those who support Israeli terror.
It's all right here in a nutshell.
The following are excerpts: [2]
"The All-Against-All Infighting… [Has] Become the Mental and Psychological Makeup of the Palestinian People"
"What is going on now in the Gaza Strip, since Israel withdrew from it, is a clear example that exposes the faults of what we have done. The domestic infighting among brothers of the same homeland, wretched from the occupation and wretched from the yielding of their culture, is too great and too dangerous to be [just] the result of differences of opinion among the factions, or the absence of a strong central government, or even of what they call the weapons anarchy.
"It is definitely all of this. But the most dangerous thing about this, and that which the bilateral meetings between the sides, or meetings under the auspices of a third party… or even the folkloric Arab League summits have been unable to overcome, is that the all-against-all infighting and its basic code have become the mental and psychological makeup of the Palestinian people, as a natural result of the predominant discourse of hostility and incitement. [This discourse] has been adopted by Palestinians of all persuasions and in all the factions - religious, pan-Arab revolutionary, and leftist. It is a discourse whose aim was sowing hatred, having recourse to violence, and enjoying spilling blood.
"At first it was directed against the so-called the Israeli enemy, and it uprooted any possibility of or tendency towards rational mutual comprehension or of recourse to discussion, dialogue, and negotiation - what is known as peaceful resolution - and it raised the slogan of 'clinging to the choice of resistance.' But one clings to goals, not methods, and resistance (meaning armed resistance) cannot, psychologically and culturally, be the only choice for peoples to achieve their goals, without there being any alternative…
"Perhaps this is [an example of] the only [psychological] state in which the goal and the means are seen to become united in the choice of violence. This occurs when someone is overcome with the spirit of vengeance…
"The culture and psychology of violence has been able to take possession of the Palestinian people for two reasons. The first is that the discourse of violence had already managed to be the only one on the scene, which was emptied of any counter-discourse when the rational thinkers fled or were forced to keep out of sight - [either] out of desperation or in order to preserve the wellbeing of themselves and their families amidst the vast flood of feelings of violence that began to sweep away everything in its path.
"The second reason is that the predominant discourse of violence, most of which was formed by the religious discourse, was not the discourse of a means that attempts to achieve a goal - for instance, the liberation of the homeland - but rather was a discourse of violence and sacred killing in the name of jihad, which the literature of violence considered to be a duty that had been neglected and which needed to be carried out by every believer. [This was written,] for instance, in 'Abd Al-Salam Farag's book The Neglected Duty, which has been an authoritative source for the jurisprudence of jihad since the 1970s."
"The Hatred was Transformed from Hatred of Zionism to Hatred of Jews, the Sons Of Apes and Pigs"
"This was translated into political language in the slogan that the Arab-Israeli struggle is an existential struggle, and not a struggle over borders, and its implementation in practice was the so-called martyrdom-seeking operations for killing Israeli civilians. The hatred was transformed from hatred of Zionism to hatred of Jews, the sons of apes and pigs.
"Perhaps no one has noticed - for where are we to find someone to notice, in the absence of reason and rationality? - that when you take an individual or a group away from the culture of using reason and peaceful dialogue, and replace it with the culture of violence and of killing those who are different, you cannot then afterwards control it and direct it to be used against one single side.
"This is what we said: It starts with the Zionist enemy who is occupying the Holy Land, and then the violence and the hatred spread dangerously, like fire, in the psyche of the one over which they have gained mastery. They consume everything around them - and the first thing they consume is the light of reason. The individual loses his natural balance, which is based on the balance between peaceful tendencies [that encourage] peace, and angry tendencies that incite to violence…
"Thus we observed, and gave our blessing to, the conflagrations of violence and hatred, and they extended from [being aimed at] the Zionist enemy to [being aimed at] anyone who befriended it or helped it - even if they helped us as well, and even if it was someone on whom we depended for medicine, food, and everything.
"Our violence and hatred extended to America, England, and the other Western countries, and there is a BBC journalist who is still a prisoner of our jihad-fighting organizations…"
"The Natural Consequence of… the Culture and Psychology of Violence… is the Fraternal Violence We See [Today]"
"The natural consequence of the rule of the culture and psychology of violence and its expansion is the fraternal violence we see [today], which has defied and will [continue to] defy all attempts to contain it - [violence among brothers] whom we all agree are miserable by any standard.
"The state of the Palestinian territories is perhaps the most critical in this respect… but we can give similar examples from all corners of what is called the greater Middle East - among them what is happening in Iraq among the Sunnis, the Shi'ites, and the Ba'thists as a result of the influence of the Ba'thist-Saddamist discourse…
"There are thousands of other examples, which seem at first sight less important and less acute in their level of violence, but that we assess as more serious because they indicate the expansion of the culture and psychology of violence and the rejection of discussion… This is among regular people in their daily lives…
"Violence naturally exists at all times and in every place. But we are in the midst of a striking growth in violence, not to say an increase at a catastrophic rate. In my estimation, this is the fruit that we are harvesting because we sowed thorns for over half a century.
"Thus, the crisis in the region is not the amount of disagreements in points of view or differences in interests [between ourselves] and our neighbors or the world. In both of these [cases], reason and dialogue can find solutions, whether comprehensive or partial, that are completely satisfactory, acceptable, or at least can be borne.
"Rather, the true crisis in the region is that the peoples of the region need psychological and cultural reeducation - which must necessarily be preceded by halting the discourse of violence, incitement, and hatred, in all its colors and classifications.
"But can this come about when the fires of hatred have already broken out [everywhere]?"
(me now)
I don't think this guy has any sympathy for Israel's occupation, which should make what he has to say about the Palestinians all the more forceful. I simply can't understand Byrnzie why you can't accept that the situation is simply for complicated than you present it. Israel isn't perfect. The Palestinians aren't perfect. If I can accept this why can't you? Oh and by the way Chomsky is full of shit. The map he is talking about didn't reflect Israels final offer (rejected by Arafat) which was about 97% of the West Bank (contiguous) East Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and the Temple Mount, and a highway connecting the West Bank and Gaza. This is what Israeli leaders privy the the talks say. This is what American leaders privy to the talks say. Hell, even other Arab diplomats have publicly stated that Arafat practically committed a crime by walking away from that deal.
But this gabriel guy isn't?
Ok...
Please provide your 'real map' then. Please explain what was on offer to the Palestinians at Camp David.
And as for the piece you copied and pasted above? What a joke! I won't waste my time commenting any more on it. The parts I've highlighted speak for themselves. I can see you must have really struggled to dig up that piece of obvious nonsense. Well done!
And this is what the maps say...
http://arab.sa.utoronto.ca/map9.PAL.Oslo-II.bmp
http://arab.sa.utoronto.ca/map92.PAL.CampDavid2000.bmp
http://arab.sa.utoronto.ca/map99.PAL.land-loss.jpg
Arafat didn't walk away from the deal. Both sides walked away from the deal, and Barak finally canceled it.
http://www.mideastweb.org/lastmaps.htm
From your own source:
'...if informal reports are correct, the final offer of the Israeli side was indeed generous relative to earlier offers - but it is not clear that the offer was really made. The map of the "final Israeli offer" that has been published in several places (see below) didn't include enclaves or zones of temporary authority. However, according to the non-paper of Miguel Moratinos which summarized the negotiations, there was nonetheless disagreement between the sides about borders, Jerusalem and refugees. Moratinos notes that the Israelis made an offer which Barak later rescinded as invalid. It is not clear if the map of the final offer of January 2001 published in several places is the one that was rescinded by Israel.
On January 27, both sides published a statement saying they had never been closer to agreement, but Barak, facing elections, suspended the talks.'
'These maps were provided by FMEP. Though they were not disputed by the sides, according to Dennis Ross they were NOT an accurate reflection of President Clinton's bridging offer. According to the maps, the Palestinian state would have been permanently divided into several sub areas in the West Bank , separated by areas of Israeli Control. Striped areas would have remained under Israeli control for 12 to 20 years. According to FMEP, The calculation that the Palestinians were getting 97% of the land ignores the area of Jerusalem and the striped areas. In actuality, the area of the Palestinian state would initially be about 70% of some 2,200 square miles.'
**scans horizon**
Nope, no desert utopia has materialized.
Israel hasn't stepped back though has it. Hamas won a democratic election and yet has been undermined by Israeli and U.S interference and divide and conquer tactics.
Your comment is meaningless.
Their actions are irrelevant. They were voted into power in a democratic election.
so I guess bush's actions are irrelevant, he was elected too.
In the context in which we were discussing Hamas, yes. Bush's actions aren't democratic in my opinion, but that doesn't mean that foreign elements should encourage civil war in America.
and in america, you can criticize bush all you want without fear of death or imprisonment. does that happen in gaza if you criticize hamas?
Firstly, this particular thread is about Israeli terror. You lost the argument. Now you're resorting to grabbing at crumbs which suggest that Palestinians are inherently violent and incapable of living together. Your posts reek of ignorance of the situation over there, and of racism.
July/August 2002
The Myth of the Generous Offer
Distorting the Camp David negotiations
By Seth Ackerman
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1113
The seemingly endless volleys of attack and retaliation in the Middle East leave many people wondering why the two sides can't reach an agreement. The answer is simple, according to numerous commentators: At the Camp David meeting in July 2000, Israel "offered extraordinary concessions" (Michael Kelly, Washington Post, 3/13/02), "far-reaching concessions" (Boston Globe, 12/30/01), "unprecedented concessions" (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). Israel’s "generous peace terms" (L.A. Times editorial, 3/15/02) constituted "the most far-reaching offer ever" (Chicago Tribune editorial, 6/6/01) to create a Palestinian state. In short, Camp David was "an unprecedented concession" to the Palestinians (Time, 12/25/00).
But due to "Arafat's recalcitrance" (L.A. Times editorial, 4/9/02) and "Palestinian rejectionism" (Mortimer Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report, 3/22/02), "Arafat walked away from generous Israeli peacemaking proposals without even making a counteroffer" (Salon.com 3/8/01). Yes, Arafat "walked away without making a counteroffer" (Samuel G. Freedman, USA Today, 6/18/01). Israel "offered peace terms more generous than ever before and Arafat did not even make a counteroffer" (Chicago Sun-Times editorial, 11/10/00). In case the point isn‘t clear: "At Camp David, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians an astonishingly generous peace with dignity and statehood. Arafat not only turned it down, he refused to make a counteroffer!" (Charles Krauthammer, Seattle Times, 10/16/00).
This account is one of the most tenacious myths of the conflict. Its implications are obvious: There is nothing Israel can do to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors. The Israeli army’s increasingly deadly attacks, in this version, can be seen purely as self-defense against Palestinian aggression that is motivated by little more than blind hatred.
Locking in occupation
To understand what actually happened at Camp David, it's necessary to know that for many years the PLO has officially called for a two-state solution in which Israel would keep the 78 percent of the Palestine Mandate (as Britain's protectorate was called) that it has controlled since 1948, and a Palestinian state would be formed on the remaining 22 percent that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem). Israel would withdraw completely from those lands, return to the pre-1967 borders and a resolution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 would be negotiated between the two sides. Then, in exchange, the Palestinians would agree to recognize Israel (PLO Declaration, 12/7/88; PLO Negotiations Department).
Although some people describe Israel's Camp David proposal as practically a return to the 1967 borders, it was far from that. Under the plan, Israel would have withdrawn completely from the small Gaza Strip. But it would annex strategically important and highly valuable sections of the West Bank--while retaining "security control" over other parts--that would have made it impossible for the Palestinians to travel or trade freely within their own state without the permission of the Israeli government (Political Science Quarterly, 6/22/01; New York Times, 7/26/01; Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 9-10/00; Robert Malley, New York Review of Books, 8/9/01).
The annexations and security arrangements would divide the West Bank into three disconnected cantons. In exchange for taking fertile West Bank lands that happen to contain most of the region’s scarce water aquifers, Israel offered to give up a piece of its own territory in the Negev Desert--about one-tenth the size of the land it would annex--including a former toxic waste dump.
Because of the geographic placement of Israel’s proposed West Bank annexations, Palestinians living in their new “independent state” would be forced to cross Israeli territory every time they traveled or shipped goods from one section of the West Bank to another, and Israel could close those routes at will. Israel would also retain a network of so-called “bypass roads” that would crisscross the Palestinian state while remaining sovereign Israeli territory, further dividing the West Bank.
Israel was also to have kept "security control" for an indefinite period of time over the Jordan Valley, the strip of territory that forms the border between the West Bank and neighboring Jordan. Palestine would not have free access to its own international borders with Jordan and Egypt--putting Palestinian trade, and therefore its economy, at the mercy of the Israeli military.
Had Arafat agreed to these arrangements, the Palestinians would have permanently locked in place many of the worst aspects of the very occupation they were trying to bring to an end. For at Camp David, Israel also demanded that Arafat sign an "end-of-conflict" agreement stating that the decades-old war between Israel and the Palestinians was over and waiving all further claims against Israel.
Violence or negotiation?
The Camp David meeting ended without agreement on July 25, 2000. At this point, according to conventional wisdom, the Palestinian leader's "response to the Camp David proposals was not a counteroffer but an assault" (Oregonian editorial, 8/15/01). "Arafat figured he could push one more time to get one more batch of concessions. The talks collapsed. Violence erupted again" (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). He "used the uprising to obtain through violence...what he couldn't get at the Camp David bargaining table" (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/21/00).
But the Intifada actually did not start for another two months. In the meantime, there was relative calm in the occupied territories. During this period of quiet, the two sides continued negotiating behind closed doors. Meanwhile, life for the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation went on as usual. On July 28, Prime Minister Barak announced that Israel had no plans to withdraw from the town of Abu Dis, as it had pledged to do in the 1995 Oslo II agreement (Israel Wire, 7/28/00). In August and early September, Israel announced new construction on Jewish-only settlements in Efrat and Har Adar, while the Israeli statistics bureau reported that settlement building had increased 81 percent in the first quarter of 2000. Two Palestinian houses were demolished in East Jerusalem, and Arab residents of Sur Bahir and Suwahara received expropriation notices; their houses lay in the path of a planned Jewish-only highway (Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 11-12/00).
The Intifada began on September 29, 2000, when Israeli troops opened fire on unarmed Palestinian rock-throwers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, killing four and wounding over 200 (State Department human rights report for Israel, 2/01). Demonstrations spread throughout the territories. Barak and Arafat, having both staked their domestic reputations on their ability to win a negotiated peace from the other side, now felt politically threatened by the violence.
In January 2001, they resumed formal negotiations at Taba, Egypt.
The Taba talks are one of the most significant and least remembered events of the "peace process." While so far in 2002 (1/1/02-5/31/02), Camp David has been mentioned in conjunction with Israel 35 times on broadcast network news shows, Taba has come up only four times--never on any of the nightly newscasts. In February 2002, Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz (2/14/02), published for the first time the text of the European Union's official notes of the Taba talks, which were confirmed in their essential points by negotiators from both sides.
"Anyone who reads the European Union account of the Taba talks," Ha'aretz noted in its introduction, "will find it hard to believe that only 13 months ago, Israel and the Palestinians were so close to a peace agreement." At Taba, Israel dropped its demand to control Palestine's borders and the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians, for the first time, made detailed counterproposals--in other words, counteroffers--showing which changes to the 1967 borders they would be willing to accept. The Israeli map that has emerged from the talks shows a fully contiguous West Bank, though with a very narrow middle and a strange gerrymandered western border to accommodate annexed settlements.
In the end, however, all this proved too much for Israel's Labor prime minister. On January 28, Barak unilaterally broke off the negotiations. "The pressure of Israeli public opinion against the talks could not be resisted," Ben-Ami said (New York Times, 7/26/01).
Settlements off the table
In February 2001, Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel. Sharon has made his position on the negotiations crystal clear. "You know, it's not by accident that the settlements are located where they are," he said in an interview a few months after his election (Ha'aretz, 4/12/01).
They safeguard the cradle of the Jewish people's birth and also provide strategic depth which is vital to our existence.
The settlements were established according to the conception that, come what may, we have to hold the western security area [of the West Bank], which is adjacent to the Green Line, and the eastern security area along the Jordan River and the roads linking the two. And Jerusalem, of course. And the hill aquifer. Nothing has changed with respect to any of those things. The importance of the security areas has not diminished, it may even have increased. So I see no reason for evacuating any settlements.
Meanwhile, Ehud Barak has repudiated his own positions at Taba, and now speaks pointedly of the need for a negotiated settlement "based on the principles presented at Camp David" (New York Times op-ed, 4/14/02).
In April 2002, the countries of the Arab League--from moderate Jordan to hardline Iraq--unanimously agreed on a Saudi peace plan centering around full peace, recognition and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders as well as a "just resolution" to the refugee issue. Palestinian negotiator Nabil Sha'ath declared himself "delighted" with the plan. "The proposal constitutes the best terms of reference for our political struggle," he told the Jordan Times (3/28/02).
Ariel Sharon responded by declaring that "a return to the 1967 borders will destroy Israel" (New York Times, 5/4/02). In a commentary on the Arab plan, Ha'aretz's Bradley Burston (2/27/02) noted that the offer was "forcing Israel to confront peace terms it has quietly feared for decades."
Not sure if it's been posted, but here's another link to Galloway praising the Iraqi "insurgents".
Colin Powell himself said about Palestinian statehood and Camp David that it must be a viable state, "not one cut up into a thousand pieces".
Yeah, I've seen the maps. Go back one page on this thread and you'll see my links to the maps.
Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas Foreign Minister, says: “Even if the U.S. gave us all its money in return for recognizing Israel and giving up one inch of Palestine, we would never do so even if this costs us our lives.”
I would like to see this quote in it's full context. I would also like to know what recognizing Israel means. Are we asking that they recognize Israel in it's current form, thereby legitimizing the illegal occupation and the illegal settlements?
I'm not sure why people refuse to believe Radical Islamists, like Hamas members, when they say exactly what they mean. They want Israel gone; they'll kill (Muslims or Jews or anyone) to get it done. They're not playing with semantics or using the word "recognize" in some ambiguous way.
Groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, etc., constantly denounce Israel as evil and worthy of death, calling for jihad against it and the West. And still some here ask for the "context" of a quotation that directly says what they want. Are we really this naive?