I am off to Baghdad on Sunday for an Arab League conference on Palestinian detainees held in Israel. This is part of my determination to devote more of my time to helping the Palestinian cause. It seems to me we are at a crucial point where the Palestinians are in genuine danger of an accelerated genocide, as Israeli intentions to annex Est Jerusalem and the West Bank become ever plainer.
In retrospect, my life has mostly been based on the idea that I may not be able to do much to help in a particular situation, but it is incumbent on me to try. So I am trying.
A “two state” solution has, from the start, been advanced in bad faith by promoters such as Blair and Bush, with the intention always that it would be a Bantustan solution. For those too young to recall, the grand plan of apartheid South Africa was that the black population would be corraled into a number of small regions which would become “independent states”.
I have said before that I am often pleasantly surprised by Sky News security correspondent Sam Kiley, who seems to get away with talking great sense by hiding behind a Ross Kemp style persona. A couple of days ago he reported from the West Bank that Israel was “moving towards an apartheid state”. There is no doubt that is true – even in Israel proper, there are over three hundred ethnically based Israeli laws prescribing different treatment for Jews and others, across almost every activity of the state. I fear Sam Kiley will not be on mainstream TV long – a tendency to tell the truth being career fatal.
Bibi’s desire to kill off the two state solution is a terrible, genocidal threat but strangely also an opportunity. Botha and De Klerk did not succeed, and Bibi may not either. I personally would have deplored a Bantustan based solution, with crammed and split Palestinian lands deprived of resources, water, communications and any hope of economic viability.
The ultimate solution must involve a proper single state in Israel/Palestine which is blind and fair in its laws to race and religion. That solution can ultimately bring security to the people of Israel, not based on their ability to kill or evict their neighbours and steal their land. The essentials of the agreement will have to be most people staying where they are – including most West Bank settlers – and very serious compensation to dispossessed Palestinians, with the settlements enlarged to become mixed communities.
On the Palestinian detainee question, for me it shows up yet again Israel’s extraordinary capacity for shameless sophistry in matters of international law. Israel justifies its naval blockade on the San Remo Convention, which is only applicable in times of armed conflict. Israel states that it is in a de facto permanent armed conflict. However it denies being in an armed conflict when it comes to its treatment of Palestinain detainees, captured outside Israel, who are not treated as prisoners of war. Both positions cannot be held simultaneously, but secure in the collusion of the West’s bought politicians, Israel does so.
Crossposted, sorry. Chomsky says it far better.
I don’t live there, I’m afraid, but doubt I would’ve been a dodger (Not liked very much out there!)
Thing is though, they didn’t steal their house. There are no Israelis in Gaza. Yes, there is a blockade, but they also have a border with Gaza. Why don’t you blame them for not opening it up? Would you open up your border to a country who’s stated goal is to wipe you out?
Looks like the boycott of Israel is having some effect. That’s good. If Israeli artists and academics want a place amongst the international community of nations then they’d be best advised to put pressure on their own govt to cease its barbaric policies against the Palestinians, rather than attacking the international community.
There’s no point in having any discussions whilst Israel continues its criminality. That’s just rewarding them for terror.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4316494,00.html
I, too am often an outlier in American clogs and find it frustrating when people misconscrew(sic) my commentary. But it is a valuable teacher for me. The crucible makes stronger alloys in your bones, and muscles grow with injury.
Contrary to Oneil’s fanciful claim, it is in fact the case that Israel’s whole policy, military and political, is to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their land.
As ever with the Israelis, whatever they accuse others of doing is in fact what they’re doing themselves.
And that’s quite a typical symptom of the persecution complex many writers have ascribed to the Israeli state.
I should have used the word ‘humanity’ Clark, meaning the quality of being humane, kindness, benevolence, not ‘humanism’.
I don’t live there, I’m afraid, but doubt I would’ve been a dodger (Not liked very much out there!)
Peer group pressure is a wonderful thing. Hand out white feathers do they?
Thing is though, they didn’t steal their house. There are no Israelis in Gaza. Yes, there is a blockade, but they also have a border with Gaza. Why don’t you blame them for not opening it up? Would you open up your border to a country who’s stated goal is to wipe you out?
Most of the population of Gaza consists of refugees from Israel or their descendants. Most of the villages “targeted” (wrong word, but the best I can do) by Qasams prior to the most recent assault, were formerly Arab villages. As was Beersheba. The occupants left in 1948, never to return. My analogy is sound.
I think you’re confusing Gaza (not a country – yet) with Iran. Which didn’t say its goal was to wipe Israel out either.
By “they” above, I assume you mean the Egyptians. Who are still being paid as nearly much by the USA not to open the Gaza border as Israel gets in protection money. Not the answer you wanted, I fear.
Oniel Samuel at 6 Dec, 2:36 pm
Please clarify; are you saying that you’re unpopular in Israel?
Herbie; It’s not just Palestinians, or even Iranians in the crosshairs of the Zionists. Anyone who stands in their way is eliminated. For years I have heard theories about CIA and Mafia connections to JFK’s murder. Never once have I heard about Mossad being involved. Meyer Lansky, Jack Ruby are just part of the picture. Assassination is their specialty (Mossad)
http://globalfire.tv/nj/03en/jews/sec_jfk.htm
Oh, sorry, I misread; I understand now.
Please, everyone, slow down. We do not have appropriate software to show who is replying to whom. The thread moves fast. Take the time to reference what you’re replying to, and think twice before clicking “Submit Comment”; check your own comments for your own assumptions.
Oniel Samuel, beneath the “Submit Comment” button there are some tags. You can include these in your comment for emphasis, bold and
“Most of the population of Gaza consists of refugees from Israel or their descendants. Most of the villages “targeted” (wrong word, but the best I can do) by Qasams prior to the most recent assault, were formerly Arab villages. As was Beersheba. The occupants left in 1948, never to return. My analogy is sound.”
Are you suggesting that there were no Jews living there?
“I think you’re confusing Gaza (not a country – yet) with Iran. Which didn’t say its goal was to wipe Israel out either.” –
Just 2 excerpts from the Hamas Charter:
“Those organizations operate [in a situation] where Islam is absent from the arena and alienated from its people. Thus, the Muslims must fulfill their duty in confronting the schemes of those saboteurs. When Islam will retake possession of [the means to] guide the life [of the Muslims], it will wipe out those organizations which are the enemy of humanity and Islam.”
“As to the objectives: discarding the evil, crushing it and defeating it, so that truth may prevail, homelands revert [to their owners], calls for prayer be heard from their mosques, announcing the reinstitution of the Muslim state. Thus, people and things will revert to their true place.”
By “they” above, I assume you mean the Egyptians. Who are still being paid as nearly much by the USA not to open the Gaza border as Israel gets in protection money. Not the answer you wanted, I fear.
Regardless of the reasons (which are questionable), should you not be putting as much pressure on Egypt as you do on Israel?
Oneil –
…it will wipe out those organizations which are the enemy of humanity and Islam
If the cap fits…there’s a simple fix. Don’t be the enemy of Islam. Anyway, I’d be a tad bitter if I’d been democratically voted in as a government and immediately proscribed as a terrorist organisation by a, er, friend of Islam.
“As to the objectives: discarding the evil, crushing it and defeating it, so that truth may prevail, homelands revert [to their owners], calls for prayer be heard from their mosques, announcing the reinstitution of the Muslim state. Thus, people and things will revert to their true place.”
Could equally be read as a call for the restoration of the Ottoman empire. One of the few not to lay into the Jews…
Should I be putting pressure on Egypt? I’m not putting pressure on anyone. I’m stating my views. But if I were, I’d go for the source of the problem, not its hapless instrument.
This is an interesting and detailed account outlining how some people can create History.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/06/how-american-history-magazine-censored-palestine/
Clark. If I step over a line I expect to be moderated, but do not deliberately tax or stress moderation resources, robust language and emotional responses are part and parcel of honest adult debate and sometimes called for. Israel’s position is diabolical absolutism and is leading us and them towards a cataclysm for all of humanity. It is a position which is indefensible. Israel blew it in 1948-1949 and thereby forfeited any chance of a sustainable existence. It continues to compound that almighty pre-meditated crime with continuing outrages. The survival of its people is not at stake, their back is not to the wall, but the idea of a religious supremacist state is utterly finished. All oniel has overlooked in his script unless I’ve missed it, is ‘what-aboutery’, so I’ll pre-empt it: I do not doubt that UK government’s crimes of the colonial era are comparably despicable but more recent actions such as Iraq, served mostly Israeli ends and cannot in any way be ascribed to self interest, oil included.
Oniel, the lies came thick and fast. The first sentence softened us up, the second was dreadful, dishonest, disgusting, negating the first. The alleged ethnic cleansing of Jews in Arab countries and north Africa is an absurd and disingenuous. Having cleaned out the Palestinian population, the ‘cultured’ European Jews found they preferred wielding guns to hoes, didn’t want to dirty their hands working the land and actively sought Jewish Arab and African immigrants to do the dirty work, cowardly terrorism carried out Jew on Jew was amongst the tactics used. Your attempt to equate Palestinian losses with those migrants misfortune which was itself at the hands of or reaction to Israeli/Zionist plotting was risible. It is that master race tendency which is abhorrent, Israel does not just want be left alone, it will always find some new whipping boy victims to exercise its pathological and worst aspects, it is the human condition. It isn’t Israel that lives in constant fear it is the rest of the Arab world, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, all have and will again fall victim to Israeli paranoia and covetousness, it is high time it was stopped and uncomfortable truths faced before this running sore engulfs us all.
But since we’re in Q&A mode, Oniel, speaking as a Jewish person not living in Israel, what’s your solution? Putting pressure on the Palestinians? It doesn’t work, does it? That’s the sinful part of Israeli policy. It not only doesn’t work, but it makes people hate you. And then you say, “Fine, let them hate me as long as they fear me” (variously attributed to Tiberius, Caligula and Nero) That’s quite a heritage, no?
Thanks Oniel. I never expected to go down the route of disproportionality, i just researched the facts to find out what was actually – besides all the framing and explaination – going on. And there seems to be no denying that they re disproportionate. If less Palestinians were harmed, they would less so, and if more Israelis were harmed they would be more so. The situation is what it is then – disproportionate, a thousand thought experiments can distract from it, but it actually is what it is. The Israeli Palestine situation is not in recent decades disproportionate to the order of 1:2 or 1:5 – it is to the order of 1:100 I found it staggering.
re. Hamas Human shield policy – I don’t see strong evidence for it actually. Hamas fighters would seem to be a paramilitary resistance organisation, like the french resistance for example. If Israelis where cornered and ‘operated’ on the way Gazans are, i would expect them to violently resist and not by camping out in the open firing primitive rockets, they would hide anywhere and everywhere they could. They are the desperate ones, a much reported policy of human sheilds does not reduce any part Israels damage.
“If rockets were aimed at your house..?”
I grew up in a paramilitary conflict zone and my family were targeted by paramilitaries, my cousin in law was maimed, friends lost parents. Car bombs, pub bombs, torturous executions, dirty tricks, snipers… Some semblance of rule of law was maintained. “Shoot to kill policy” was officially denied, terrorist suspects released for lack of evidence, the idea of bombing the police/army no-go-zones or the Republic of Ireland was quite sensibly dismissed as so disproportionate and inflamatory not to mention murderous, as to be preposterous – at least to the majority and importantly to the forces in charge…
I feel heavy, for you seem sincere and decent yet loyal like i was and still am a bit to my kind, but you are so immersed in the web of argumentation around your conflict, you do respond to my highlighting of the huge kill ratio, with limitlessly emotive and single sided talking points about rocket threat and reported hamas tactics. There is almost nothing to those things you know, they are questions without solid answers. How you see them only depends on where you happened to be born and who you happened to hear, what unquestionably counts is who has been killed and hurt.
I read one of Craigs best comments here ever earlier in the thread where he recalled how much hatred and bitterness there was towards the Germans after WWII yet a fine peace now.
Hope
Ben
Did you know that Gaddafi claimed that JFK was killed by the Mossad on the orders of Ben-Gurion after JFK insisted on full access to and monitoring of the Dimona facility to prevent Israel developing nuclear weapons? He suggested that Obama was afraid to get too tough with Israel in case they assassinated him as well.
Maybe that was the speech too far for Gaddafi? Link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmNzEpbkftU
Oh Jack Ruby? You mean Jacob Leon Rubenstein
Cryptonym, You still haven’t told me where I’ve lied. Stop using the same old, quite frankly boring rhetoric of “the lies come thick and fast”. Are you telling me the Jews who ‘left’ their homes from surrounding countries leaving all their property, businesses and everything else behind, just to fulfil their dream of going back to their homeland? That is risible at best. There must have to be a very good reason for them to leave so many assets behind – Ethnic cleansing, forced expulsion. Call it what you want
@Phil. Poor old Chomsky. There he sits in the MIT surrounded on all sides by research projects funded by the Masters of War. Is it any wonder that he is such a depressingly typical American pragmatist? For him politics (“the real world”) is the art of the possible. But the real world is not just the power of the Western military industrial complex and its Israeli outpost. It is also the enormous power of the on-going Egyptian revolution taking place as we write. The reality is that politics is the (dialectical materialist) science of making what is not possible today possible tomorrow.
Egypt is the most populous and urbanised Arab country and Cairo, with its 20 million inhabitants (in the metropolitan area), is the 16th largest metropolis in the world.
From Wikipedia Demographics of Egypt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt
We have already seen the effect of the first stage of the Arab Spring on Gaza. The Israeli bombing was cut short and ended because the political dynamics in the region have changed. We even saw on a smaller scale the effect of the Egyptian revolution on Israel. Last year there was a prolonged rebellion on the streets by the Israel poor in parallel with the global Occupy movement.
Chomsky does not take account of this aspect of the “real world” in his calculations.
See p44 onwards of this PDF for an excellent demolition of American pragmatism:
http://marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/dom.pdf
Sorry, that should have read: There must have been a very good reason….
Komodo – “Putting pressure on the Palestinians? It doesn’t work, does it?”
No it doesn’t work. Pressure needs to be put on both sides. For all I care lock both idiots (Netanyahu and Abbas) in a room and don’t let them out until they get their s*it together.
And no, I wouldn’t say “Fine, let them hate me as long as they fear me”. It would be more along the lines of “Fine, let them hate me as long as they can’t kill me”
Ohhhh….Dimona….
http://www.vosizneias.com/118732/2012/12/04/jerusalem-israel-rejects-un-call-to-open-nuke-program-to-probe
Two days ago. And since it was built. Exceptionalism in the glow of bremsstrahlung radiation…
Oniel Samuel, 2:36 pm
This looks inaccurate to me. Gaza is partly a refugee population. Just because the house wasn’t in Gaza doesn’t mean it wasn’t taken.
That’s a strange site, Ben.
I can’t even remember now what the official explanation was for the JFK assassination – why Oswald was supposed to have done it alone etc.
They used to talk about the Kennedy family curse of course. I’m sure though if we looked at all the political leaders who have been assassinated we could come up with better explanations than the lone nutjob trope. Even a statistical sampling of those assassinated against those not might even provide better answers than official enquiries.
Why Kennedy. Why not Bush. Why Lincoln. Why not Johnson, etc etc.
Mostly official enquiries are there to sustain the impression that the latest bad thing is just an aberration, a rotten apple, a deviation from the norm etc etc. and this works remarkably well for those who never read any history, or anything else for that matter. Those who do however realise that whacking is very much a part of political life.
Aaronovitch disputes this…
Anon; Ruby was tied to Myer Lansky and was ordered to make the hit. He didn’t even know Oswald was going to be transferred until he got to the appointed place.
Later Ruby says to his defense lawyer William M. Kunstler that he killed Oswald “for the Jews.” On each of the occasions Kunstler talked to him, Jack Ruby repeated that ‘I did this that they wouldn’t implicate Jews.’(See: Kunstler, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, 1994, p. 158) and during Kunstler’s last visit Ruby handed him a note in which he reiterated that his motive was to ‘Protect American Jews from a pogrom that could occur because of anger over the assassination.’ Jack Ruby had a long-standing relationship with the major crime syndicates. On his prison death bed, when a friend asked him to tell the truth before he dies, Ruby said: ‘Listen, you know me well, and you know that I am a reasonable businessman. I wouldn’t have done it if I did not have to.’
Very much off topic. Where the temperature in Tel Aviv is about 20C and presumably is the same in Gaza, this is a weather warning for the moors of Devon next week. Mr Hand is an amateur meteorologist and has his own weather station.
WARNING: There is a 70% risk that, as the weather turns bitterly cold next week with winds from the east, heavy snow with upland blizzard conditions will set in on Dartmoor from midweek onwards. There is a 20% risk that isolated upland communities could be cut off in the heaviest snowfall seen in years on the moor. Please keep a careful eye on Met Office forecasts.
http://www.lyneside.demon.co.uk/weeklydiscussions.htm
The temperature in Baghdad at the moment ranges between 19 and 21C
Very high confidence that after a fine and frosty weekend the weather will turn bitterly cold next week in an easterly flow with an increasing risk of heavy snow as the week progresses. Snow is not guaranteed but at present seems possible as per the warning.
Thatcrab – I wouldn’t expect the Palestinian fighters to shoot from open fields. I would rather they didn’t shoot at all. If they didn’t, we would be halfway to sorting this mess.
Again, the disproportionate level of killing is not for want of trying on the Palestinian side. You have obviously done your research of the number of deaths, and so I would hope you also researched how many rockets fired at Israel versus how many fired at Gaza. I think you may be surprised.
Re: Human shields
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0wJXf2nt4Y
I am sorry if I came across as robotic with a lack of emotion in my posts. I am used to having to put a block up in order to respond to some commenters. Of course I feel for anyone who would have to deal with any sort of violence especially when it is being carried out in such confined spaces. But how can it be stopped? Piling the blame on one side certainly won’t work. All that will achieve is heels further dug in and a tougher foe to fight.
Hope indeed 🙂
Oniel
“For all I care lock both idiots (Netanyahu and Abbas)”
Yeah. One’s as bad as the other, eh.
I think I’ve pointed out the reason for and flaw in this kind of gibberish before.
The dominant group always retreats to this position when embarrassed by the actions of its group. It does this only when adopting such a position brings no material impact to bear upon on its dominance.
Oneil
“I wouldn’t expect the Palestinian fighters to shoot from open fields. I would rather they didn’t shoot at all. If they didn’t, we would be halfway to sorting this mess.”
This is a joke presumably. No one’s that stupid.
Israel’s policy is to etnically cleanse the Palestinians. They’re not interested in peace through compromise.
Herbie; They’re almost all strange sites, just like UFO’s.
The salient points can be verified, while filtering out some of the speculation and spittle. Take Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/04/29/gordon-duff-rfk-killing-revelations-are-they-a-third-rail-issue/
Sirhan, if we can call him by one name only, was not the shooter, this has been long established and easily proven even without heading into the area of conspiracy. The shooters were pursued out of the building, reportedly a woman screamed out, “We killed Kennedy!” as she ran out the rear exit.