Gaza ***GRAPHIC PICS***

So what does isreal expect to gain by slaughtering the people of Gaza? It sure as hell won't stop the terrorists from doing what they do best.

badbrains said:

Interesting. Are media supposed to be bias????

https://twitter.com/buzzfeed/status/490161353936896001

I don't consider that bias. What would you do if anybody threatened to destroy your car?? That's a lot nicer than I would have been.

WMAmorican said:

Apologists for Hamas attribute the fighting to supposed Israeli occupation and blockade. Occupation? There isn't a soldier, settler or single Israeli in Gaza. It was less than 10 years ago that Israel uprooted it settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians. There was no blockade. Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had produced fruit and flowers for export. It opened border crossings and encouraged commerce. The whole idea was to establish a model for two states living peacefully and productively side by side.

That's just bullshit, as anybody with even the slightest understanding of this conflict knows.

'In a study entitled 'One Big Prison', the respected Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem observed that the crippling economic arrangements Israel had imposed on Gaza would remain in place. In addition, Israel would continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza's land borders, coastline, and airspace, and the Israeli army would continue to operate in Gaza. "So long as these methods of control remain in Israeli hands," B'Tselem concluded, "Israel's claim of 'an end of the Occupation' is questionable". HRW (Human Rights Watch) was even more emphatic that evacuating settlers and troops from inside Gaza would not end the occupation: "Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around it's periphery, and restricting entrance and exit, it remains in control."

Gaza was turned into a virtual prison after the Gaza 'pullout', and the people left to starve. According to Sarah Roy, (Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University), Gaza was "deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution", and "96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million [was left] dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs." http://electronicintifada.net/content/destroying-gaza/8324

And just what did Israel 'give up'? Are you talking about their removal of a handful of settlers from Gaza, which were then sent to live in the illegal settlements in the West bank? http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/09/gaza-s10.html "the withdrawal from Gaza is nothing more than a smokescreen to mask Israel’s consolidation of a far more significant land grab of the West Bank, land it has brutally occupied for nearly 40 years in breach of international law and in defiance of countless United Nations resolutions."

Are you referring to the fact that the Israeli's themselves have admitted that the Gaza 'pullout' was just a public relations ploy to enable them to triple settlement construction in the West Bank? http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/top-pm-aide-gaza-plan-aims-to-freeze-the-peace-process-1.136686

Is that the magnanimous, generous offer that you're referring to?

WMAmorican said:

It makes no sense...unless the whole point is to draw Israeli counter-fire, producing dead Palestinians (children are even better!) for international media. Which is why Hamas actually urges its people NOT to seek safety when Israel drops leaflets warning of an imminent attack.

Another Fox News soundbite? Show me some evidence that Hamas urges it's people not to seek safety during Israeli bombardments. You can't, because they haven't. What you can provide is evidence of Hamas spokesmen praising those Palestinians who attempted to prevent their apartment building from being bombed by standing on the roof. Big difference.
And bombing civilian homes is still a war crime.

WMAmorican said:

To deliberately wage war so your own people are killed is moral insanity, but it rests on a sickly rational premise: Given the way the world treats Israel, along with historical ignorance and reflexive sympathy for the supposed underdog, Palestinian casualties undermine Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense. So Hamas’ depravity sort of makes evil sense. All the morons condemn Israel, a state warred upon for 66 years yet goes to extraordinary lengths to AVOID harming the innocents its enemies use as shields.

It’s really to the Israelis’ credit that amid all this madness they don't just bomb the living fuck out of all their neighbors that want to eradicate them.

Israel's latest massacre of Gazan civilians has nothing to do with self-defense, despite what your t.v set is telling you. If the Israeli's wanted to defend themselves then they'd begin abiding by international law, end the occupation, and fortify their legal borders. But they're not interested in peace, as 47 years of encroaching settlements, and routine attacks on it's neighbours demonstrates.

This is what Israel wants. They want complete control of all the area between the river and sea, in line with their Zionist dream of racial supremacy:


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/henry-siegman/the-great-middle-east-peace-process-scam

'...all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

...Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future as ‘the current reality in the territories’. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank.’ Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: ‘The question is not “What is the solution?” but “How do we live without a solution?”’ Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, summarises the situation as follows:

"Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River."

This book looks good. May have to order a copy:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/18/cursed-victory-history-israel-occupied-territories-ahron-bregman-review

Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories – review

Ahron Bregman's account of nearly five decades of Israeli occupation is hard-hitting and rich in telling details

Avi Shlaim
The Guardian, Friday 18 July 2014

The purpose of Israel's current offensive in the Gaza Strip is to protect the status quo – with itself in control of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. In 2005, it carried out a unilateral disengagement from Gaza, but under international law it is still the occupying power because it controls access by land, sea and air. In 2007 Israel imposed an economic blockade, cutting the Gaza Strip off from the West Bank and from the rest of the world. A blockade is a form of collective punishment proscribed by international law.

The death toll is a grim reflection of the asymmetry of the conflict. In the past fortnight, the Palestinians have suffered over 220 fatalities, 80% of whom were civilians; in Israel, only one man was killed by a rocket fired from Gaza. Israel claims that its assault is an act of self-defence to put an end to the Hamas rocket attacks against its civilians. Hamas claims it is engaged in legitimate resistance to Israel's military occupation. The chain of action and reaction is endless. But the underlying cause of the violence is Israeli colonialism.

...Ahron Bregman is an Israeli scholar with impeccable liberal credentials who teaches in the department of war studies at King's College London. He served in the Israeli army for six years, but left Israel because of the occupation and because of the military's violent suppression of the first intifada. He is the author of four books on Israel and its conflict with the Arabs. Two of these – The Fifty Years War and Elusive Peace – accompanied BBC television series that drew on in-depth and remarkably candid interviews with key players from Israel, the Arab world and the US. Full use is made of that earlier oral history in the present book; it is supplemented by additional interviews.

...He is at his best when dealing with the diplomacy surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially in 1999-2000 when Ehud Barak was prime minister. Barak was a former chief of staff, and his country's most highly decorated soldier, but he was no diplomat. In a curious inversion of Clausewitz's famous dictum, he regarded diplomacy as the pursuit of war by other means. For Barak, Syria was a major military threat to Israel whereas the Palestinians were not. By making peace with Syria, Barak hoped to change the entire strategic landscape of the region and to leave the Palestinian Authority so weak and isolated that it would have no alternative but to accept his paltry terms.

A peace deal with Syria was indeed possible but it carried a price tag: complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, which left the Syrians with access to the north-eastern shore of Lake Tiberias. A meeting between Barak and the Syrian foreign minister under American patronage at Shepherdstown, in January 2000, collapsed when Barak refused to pay that price. Despite this failure, Barak persuaded Clinton to do his bidding at a make-or-break summit with President Hafez al-Assad in Geneva two months later. It was a fool's errand. Once again Barak got cold feet, fearing the electoral consequences of withdrawal from the Golan Heights. On the morning of the meeting, he gave Clinton a script that insisted on Israeli sovereignty over a 400-metre-wide strip of land between Syria and the lake. So the summit was doomed before it even started and themuch-vaunted breakthrough turned into a spectacular setback. Clinton discovered to his cost that there was no sweet-talking Hafez al-Assad.

Having implicated the US president in two entirely predictable failures on the Syrian track, Barak belatedly and grudgingly turned his attention to the Palestinian track, to "the other woman". Once again, he prevailed on the US president to embark on a make-or-break summit, and once again the president tended to behave not as an honest broker but as Israel's lawyer. Arafat warned Clinton that the positions of the two sides were too far apart, that more time was needed to prepare the ground, and that failure at the top would make matters worse. Clinton urged Arafat to come anyway and promised that, in the event of failure, there would be no finger-pointing.

The summit convened at Camp David on 11 July 2000; it lasted 14 days. Honouring a secret pledge, the American peace processors did not present to the Palestinian delegation any papers without consulting the Israelis first. The first American paper tabled at Camp David had Israel's fingerprints all over it and only served to confirm Arafat's suspicion that the whole summit was an Israeli-American ruse to trap him. His suspicions were not eased by Barak's refusal to meet with him face-to-face to negotiate over the "final status" issues: borders, security, the right of return of the 1948 refugees, and Jerusalem.

The sticking point was Jerusalem. Arafat insisted, as he had done all along, on Palestinian sovereignty over al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in the Old City of Jerusalem. Barak's rejection of Palestinian sovereignty over the Muslim Noble Sanctuary sealed the fate of the summit. Violating his pledge to Arafat, Clinton immediately blamed him for the failure. Although Arafat contributed to the diplomatic deadlock by his aggressively passive posture, the additional evidence unearthed by Bregman confirms the view I have long held – that the two principal reasons for the collapse of the summit were Barak's intransigence and Clinton's mismanagement.

...Bregman describes Israel as "a heavy‑handed and brutal occupier". He regards the four decades of occupation chronicled in this book as a black mark on Israeli, and indeed, Jewish history. He finds it depressing that a people that has suffered such unspeakable tragedies of its own can behave so cruelly towards another. The only sign of hope in this otherwise bleak picture is that the occupation may carry within it the seeds of its own demise. By forcing the Palestinians to live in squalor, Bregman concludes, Israel has "hardened those under its power, making them more determined to put an end to the occupation, by violent means if necessary, and live a life of dignity and freedom".