I wish Brian would site sources.
I should have put sources:
The June 19, 1967 date marks an Israeli Cabinet vote that offered the land back to Syria.
(Remember that Arab states in general have not acted supportively toward a Palestinian state. Jordan and Egypt had Gaza and the West Bank from 48-67, but instead of giving them land that UN had set aside for their statehood, they created refugee camps that exist to this day. Jordan fought with the PLO and killed 1000s of Palestinian refugees in “Black September.” Syria massacred 1000s in June '76. The figures show more Palestinians killed by Arabs than anybody else. In 1990, Kuwait expelled 400,000, who had been living there. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas said it best in the PLO’s monthly newspaper in March '76: “Arab forces entered Palestine in 1948, supposedly, to protect the Palestinians, but instead they abandoned them, forcing them to emigrate and leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which Jews used to live.”)
Arafat quote taken from Yediyda Atlas in “Insight on the News,” April 1, 1996, in turn from the Norwegian daily Dagen, for which unfortunately I do not have the date at hand. Arafat was speaking in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel. But of course, Arafat’s mantra to his people is “Palestine from River to the Sea.”
This statement is consistent with the polls that show 85% of Palestinians supporting suicide killings against Iraelis and 87% of “liberating ALL of Palestine.”(May 18, 2002; NY Times) Its also consistent with the Palestinian Authority’s policy of naming summer camps after little girls who committed suicide killings.
Americans pay for the same message, such as this sermon on Palestinian Authority Radio (April 30, 1999):
“The Land of Muslim Palestine is a single unit which cannot be divided. There is no difference between Haifa and Shechem [Nablus], between Lod and Ramallah, and between Jerusalem and Nazareth…the land of Palestine is sacred waqf land for the benefit of all Muslims, east and west. No one has the right to divide it or give up any of it. The liberation of Palestine is obligatory for all the Islamic nations and not only for the Palestinian nation.”
As anyone who has read either thread knows, I’ve already determined that certain posters don’t discuss in good faith. These discussions are becoming tiresome. I’m asking anyone who argued with me (on either thread) that Israel should not be singled out for condemnation to also not respond to these posters. If necessary, from time to time, they can remark on their boycotts to remind readers (amidst reams of cloud-cover BS) that they don’t feel like addressing someone’s comments. If I don’t get a response back on the threads from you guys, I’ll assume you’re not reading the threads anymore, that the majority of their opposition has left them, and they’re just posting away on an ego spree. In this case, I may post from time to time a line that indicates this situation to newcomers who have the ill-luck to have stumbled onto the thread.
On the ACTUAL subject of “WW3,” and not Demonic Israel, what did the massacre of Christians in Sudan, the church bombings in Pakistan and the Bali bombing have to do with Israel?
Oh, Israel must have given these Islamists cases of manic-depression…
When Osama Bin Laden cited the secularization of Turkey as the beginning of his war, I wondered what the hell that had to do with Israel.
Islamists call Israel the “Little Satan” and U.S. the “Great Satan.” My fellow Americans, on Palestinian Authority TV [October 14, 2000] YOU paid for Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, appointed to the Fatwa Council to graciously tell us how Israel ranks with the U.S. in the Islamist world view:
“Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, whereever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them–and those who stand by them–they are all in one trench, against the Arabs and the Muslims–because they established Israel here, in the beating heart of the Arab world, in Palestine. They created it to be the outpost of their civilization–and the vanguard of their army, and to be the sword of the West and the crusaders, hanging over the necks of the monotheists, the Muslims in these lands. They wanted the Jews to be their spearhead.”
hmm… muslims and arabs are evil… now it all makes sense…
It’s funny how Brian keeps complaining about this thread and the people on it, yet he can’t seem to leave.
Ha, ha, ha! I just had a great laugh, reading that last humorous post.
“I’ve already determined that certain posters don’t discuss in good faith.”
Well, advocating a position against the occupation but for the right of Israel to exist is not only anti-Semitic, but it’s now actually “bad faith”. Also, any discussion of Israel’s poor humanitarian record in the occupied territories is also “bad faith”. Okay…some people are happier with their heads in the sand.
“These discussions are becoming tiresome.”
Nobody’s making him stay.
“I’m asking anyone who argued with me (on either thread) that Israel should not be singled out for condemnation to also not respond to these posters. If necessary, from time to time, they can remark on their boycotts to remind readers (amidst reams of cloud-cover BS) that they don’t feel like addressing someone’s comments.”
Now he sounds like a Christian fundamentalist! Or a communist. Any dissent must be silenced. He just hates it that people don’t agree with him. Besides, everyone’s been totally ignoring this guy, so I wonder who’s being boycotted.
I’m looking forward to the next one!
So, the point is what? It’s okay for Israel to bomb Palestinians into submission, killing children catching birds and elderly innocent bystanders because, shockingly, Palestinians don’t like Israelis? It reminds me of that saying “the floggings will continue until morale improves”.
Let’s think about this. How would Americans react if foreigners (let’s make them Arabs, as one guy here really HATES Arabs) moved to America, purchased about 50% of the land in a geographic area, and then declared independence? Well, Americans wouldn’t like it, I’m guessing. And then, what if this new nation occupied lands around it for ‘security’, although they conveniently also felt that God gave them this land? What if they treated the Americans living there as sub-humans? Would America decide that these Arabs ‘deserve’ a country within the former USA? Should they? Would Americans be racists if they didn’t support this new nation?
Well, the PA has recognized Israel. They’ve negotiated with Israel as well, but Israel has nothing to lose by sandbagging the process. That’s why they can try to force unilateral agreements on Palestine, and then withdraw them if Arafat so much as has a question about any of it. In fact, if Israel was so eager to make that agreement, why did Arafat think he agreed to the terms, only to find that he was considered to not have? Hell, Israel could have implemented that agreement unilaterally. However, it’s not enough that they stole this land from the Palestinian people – they want much more.
Well, on the topic of Palestinians being massacred, it looks like there’s finally some movement in bringing Israel’s war criminals to justice. While we’re all familiar with Sharon’s evil and despicable acts at the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut (for which he’ll stand trial in Brussels after his term as PM has mercifully ended), it looks as though others are also being investigated. Check out Sabra and Shatila: Trial of Sharon and – they’re finally going after Israeli general Amos Yaron for his crimes against humanity as well.
Soon, God-willing, we’ll have leadership in Israel of sufficient moral fortitude to end the occupation and the crimes against humanity.
hehe, i really don’t care about this thread anymore but this fool ‘brian smith’ decides to PM me regarding this subject:
"Muslims and Islamists are two different groups of people. Not all Muslims are Islamists; all Islamists profess to be Muslims. Have you done any research on Islamist movements?
“Of course if you knew this, then you were just descending to a clear tactic of character assassination that you imagine has been so vigorously and thoroughly applied to critics of the Iraq war. That adds hypocrisy to salt your outrageous comments about Deuteronomy, Likud and American Jews.”
can you believe this guy?
brian, don’t fucking pm me with this shit anymore, if you really want to do something go join israel’s armed forces and kill all these evil ‘islamists’ if you want… i really don’t care.
if you want some tips on how you can get your bench up, be nice to me and i may respond to you.
Hehe, that’s great. I just got in, and needed a good laugh! Man, this Brian guy is on top of things. Maybe next he’ll differentiate Jews from Zionists for us.
The funny thing is that he’s posted friggin’ 500 posts on two threads about this, but we still don’t know what his opinion is. We know he hates Muslims and Arabs, but what is his position?
Danh’s opinion is clear. Mine is, as well. I think everyone here knows I support Israel’s right to exist, but I oppose the occupation (or, to be more precise, I oppose America’s support for this). Glute’s concern is for security of Israel. But what the fuck does Brian think?
Does he think Muslims are inherently evil and therefore deserve to be occupied? Does he think Palestinians deserve to remain occupied as the price for being allied with the Axis during WWII (although the actual Axis countries are not under similar burdens)? Does he think that the occupation is wrong, but that there are greater wrongs that deserve greater relative attention? Or does he think that Israel can do whatever they want? Perhaps he’s just a troll. What the fuck is Brian’s point? It’s interesting that we don’t actually know by now.
Check out a great article by one of my favorite Israeli truth-tellers, Uri Avnery. It’s at www.redress.btinternet.co.uk/uavnery32.htm
Well, it looks like other Americans are seeing the injustices occuring in the occupied territories. Check this out, from New Yorkers erect a "Separation" Wall in Midtown Manhattan | The Electronic Intifada.
New Yorkers erect a “Separation” Wall in Midtown Manhattan
Press Release, Coalition of NYC activist groups, 10 November 2003
ARABS, JEWS AND OTHER CONCERNED NEW YORKERS MARCH TOGETHER TO PROTEST ISRAEL’S “SEPARATION FENCE”
New York City, Nov 9th – Approximately 150 New Yorkers converged at Bryant Park, Manhattan, carrying three sixty-yard mock “walls” depicting the 25-ft.-high wall enclosing the Palestinian people in the West Bank. The protesters marched down 42nd street to Grand Central Station where they carried the wall inside to display it for passer-bys, while chanting “Tear Down the Wall.”
“We are sending a message to our governments to stop their support of this hideous act of ethnic cleansing veiled behind ‘security’ rhetoric,” said Omar Jamal of SUSTAIN-NYC. “Because the wall separates between Palestinians and their land, their source of livelihood, they are forced to leave their villages to find new sources to feed their families.”
The “Separation Wall” is being built deep inside the Green Line, the 1948 armistice line which is internationally recognized as Israelis eastern border. According to a United Nations Special Rapporteur, the construction of the wall amounts to “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land. As the building of the Wall progresses, Palestinians may lose more than 50% of the lands in the West Bank, including much of its most fertile agricultural land.
The concrete wall averages 25 feet high, with armed watchtowers, and a wide “buffer zone,” including electric fences, trenches, cameras, sensors, and security patrols. The wall is being built only yards from homes, schools and farms. So far, 36 groundwater wells have been confiscated, 3,500 acres of land has been razed and 102,000 trees have been uprooted.
“The fall of the Berlin Wall, which also took place on November 9th, teaches us that walls constructed on the back of human suffering can and will fall” said Martin Cohen of Jews Against The Occupation-NYC. Cohen recently returned from the West Bank. “Any device designed to trample on the most basic of human rights, such as the right to life, is doomed upon its inception.”
Protesters said that the building of the wall mirrors Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass,” the pogrom in 1938 in which the Nazi Regime confiscated Jewish property, the anniversary of which also is November 9th.
The protest was endorsed by: Palestine Action Forum of New York (PAFNY), A.W.A.R.E., NY-NJ Al nAwda, New York City Labor Against The War (NYCLAW), Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee-New York (ADC-NY), Direct Action Palestine (DAP), Stop U.S.Tax Aid to Israel NOW-NY (SUSTAIN-NY), Jews Against The Occupation, New York (JATO-NYC). For more information about the protest, contact (917) 562-3358. For more information about Israelis construction of the Apartheid Wall, visit: www.stopthewall.org.
Well, Yasir Arafat is desparately trying to win peace with Israel again. Let’s wish him well, and let’s hope Sharon can abandon his dream of forcing the Palestinians out of the occupied territories and can accept peace.
Check out this article from New Cabinet Approved, Arafat Seeks to Restart Mideast Talks - The New York Times to read about Arafat’s latest outreach.
Cabinet Approved, Arafat Calls for Peace Talks
By GREG MYRE
Published: November 13, 2003
AMALLAH, West Bank, Nov. 12 ? The Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, and his prime minister called Wednesday for reconciliation with Israel and delivered strong pleas to restart the troubled Middle East peace plan in speeches to the Palestinian parliament, which approved a new government.
“We do not deny the right of the Israeli people to live in security side by side with the Palestinian people also living in their own independent state,” Mr. Arafat told the parliamentary session, which was held at his badly damaged compound in Ramallah.
After more than two months with virtually no contact between the two sides, Israel is also signaling its willingness to talk to the new Palestinian government led by Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, though its boycott of Mr. Arafat remains in force.
“It is high time for us and you, Israel, to come out of this destructive war that will never provide either of us with security,” he said.
Israel quickly dismissed Mr. Arafat’s remarks. “You cannot hold an olive branch in one hand and a ticking bomb in the other,” said Dore Gold, an adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Speaking immediately after Mr. Arafat, Mr. Qurei, 65, commonly known as Abu Ala, said his top priorities were to “attain a complete and mutual cease-fire with the Israeli government” and to restart the Mideast peace plan, known as the road map. He also called for an end to the “chaos of weapons” in the Palestinian areas, and said the Palestinian Authority needed to impose “law and order” in areas it controls.
Later, Palestinian lawmakers voted 48 to 13 to confirm Mr. Qurei’s government, ending two months of political uncertainty that followed the resignation of the previous prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas.
In the improved political climate, Palestinian and Israeli cabinet ministers are likely to meet in coming days. If those sessions go well, they will try to arrange a meeting between Mr. Qurei and Mr. Sharon, both sides said.
The previous Palestinian government assumed office in April on a similarly upbeat note, followed by several meetings between the prime ministers. But peace efforts collapsed in August amid Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli military crackdowns directed at militants.
Israel says the Palestinian leadership must break up the violent factions and sees little hope of that with Mr. Arafat retaining his dominant political position, including the continued control of the security forces.
While Mr. Arafat struck a conciliatory note, he has made similar remarks in the past, and much of his speech covered the more familiar terrain of sharp criticism directed at Israel.
“This is a criminal Israeli war that is an attempt to uproot the Palestinian people and impose settlers on our land, and prevent us from establishing a Palestinian state,” he said.
Mr. Arafat reluctantly agreed to establish a prime minister’s post this year after demands by Palestinian reformers as well as Israel and the United States.
The intent was to reduce the power concentrated in his hands, but Mr. Arafat has consistently resisted efforts to weaken his authority. Most of the 24-member cabinet is loyal to Mr. Arafat, and Mr. Qurei is seen as having little room to act without Mr. Arafat’s consent.
Here’s new news on the wrongs purpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians. I suppose these ex-security chiefs must also be anti-Semites? From www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html?hp
Ex-Security Chiefs in Israel Push for Truce
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 14, 2003
JERUSALEM (AP) – Four former Israeli security chiefs sharply criticized Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s policies toward the Palestinians on Friday, warning in unusually bold terms that Israel is headed for catastrophe if it does not reach a peace deal soon.
The unprecedented warning comes as Sharon’s government weighs how to approach the new government of Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia. An expected meeting between the leaders would be the first such high-level encounter in months.
The four former security chiefs, respected for their combined 18 years experience as leaders of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, called on the Israeli government to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the only way to avoid more violence after more than three years of fighting.
“It is clear to me that we are heading toward a crash,” said Carmi Gilon, one of the group.
Their comments came two weeks after army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon said the government needed to ease restrictions that have increasingly angered Palestinians. Another of the four, Yaakov Perry, said it was no coincidence that those closest to the conflict came to the same conclusion.
“Why is it that that everyone, Shin Bet directors, chiefs of staff, former security personnel … become the advocates of reconciliation with the Palestinians?” Perry said. “We know the material, the people in the field and surprisingly enough, both sides.”
Qureia, the Palestinian prime minister, is trying to secure an agreement from Palestinian militants to halt attacks on Israelis in anticipation of a broader truce with Israel.
Israel’s security services are reportedly divided on whether to accept a truce. The military believes a cease-fire is a step in the right direction and is ready to halt targeted killings of Palestinian militants, the Maariv daily reported Friday. The current Shin Bet chief is concerned that armed groups will use the lull to reorganize for more attacks.
Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who has played a key role in mediating previous truce efforts, will meet with Qureia and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Monday, Palestinian officials said. It was unclear if he would meet with Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders to ask for their cooperation.
But the spiritual leader of Hamas ruled out any prospects for an immediate end to attacks on Israelis.
We have no objection to any dialogue with the (Palestinian) prime minister,'' Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told a rally in the Gaza Strip on Friday. We are willing to listen to any proposal. We will give him answers … but in the current situation, we can’t talk about any cease-fire.‘’
The former Shin Bet directors recommended far more than a cease-fire, saying Israel needed a true peace agreement as soon as possible.
The four – Ami Ayalon, Avraham Shalom, Perry and Gilon – spoke in an interview with the Yediot Ahronot daily published Friday.
``We are taking sure, steady steps to a place where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people,‘’ Ayalon told the newspaper.
The Shin Bet is in charge of preventing attacks on Israelis, runs a network of Palestinian informers throughout the West Bank and Gaza and interrogates Palestinian security detainees. The agency also provides security for Sharon.
The group of former Shin Bet leaders said that for its own survival Israel needs to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip even if leads to a clash with some of the 220,000 Jewish settlers who live there.
They said Sharon’s preoccupation with trying to halt attacks by Palestinians before agreeing to peace talks is at best misguided, and at worst a ploy to avoid concessions.
Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat praised the former security chiefs. ``It reflects the realistic policy required from the Israeli side,‘’ he said.
Former Israeli President Ezer Weizman accused the former Shin Bet leaders of undermining the government, calling them the ``four musketeers.‘’
This really makes me furious,'' Weizman told Israel Television. We have a country that is in a very delicate situation.‘’
With peace efforts stalled, a number of former and current officials have questioned Israel’s direction in the conflict, and several have come up with alternate plans of their own.
The Shin Bet chiefs discussed a peace proposal written by Ayalon and Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh that envisions a Palestinian state in virtually all the areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
During the Yediot interview, Perry, Shalom and Gilon added their signatures to a petition calling for the implementation of the proposal, joining 100,000 Israelis and about 60,000 Palestinians.
Sponsors of a separate proposal, the so-called Geneva Accord negotiated by former Israeli and Palestinian officials, prepared to mail hundreds of thousands of copies to homes in Israel. They are to reach mailboxes Sunday.
On the Palestinian side, the plan is to be published in newspapers, since the West Bank and Gaza Strip don’t have a developed mail system.
“…the West Bank and Gaza Strip don’t have a developed mail system”. How sad that the Israelis occupiers of Palestine don’t even let Palestinians have mail.
Well, the Palestinian people are reaching out to Israel, again, in support of peace. Let’s hope Israel can look beyond their religious zealotry and can support peace. Or, at least let’s hope the US stops supporting the destruction of a people in the name of religious extremism. Here’s an article from the New York Times, at www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html.
Palestinian Militants to Consider Truce
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 16, 2003
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) – Palestinian militants are sending ``very positive’’ signals that they are ready for a cease-fire with Israel, a top aide to the Palestinian prime minister said Sunday, a day before Egypt’s intelligence chief arrives for truce talks.
Cabinet secretary Hassan Abu Libdeh said in an interview with The Associated Press that he is confident Israel and the Palestinians can halt three years of fighting very soon. Whether a cease-fire can hold, he cautioned, will depend largely on Israel.
Abu Libdeh’s boss, Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, hopes to reach a cease-fire as a first step of resuming talks on the U.S.-backed ``road map’’ peace plan, which envisions full Palestinian independence by 2005. The plan has stalled amid violence and Palestinian political wrangling.
The Palestinian factions are giving us very positive indications,'' Abu Libdeh said. I think that if Israel does not play around with us, they are willing to go as far as possible … but it is all in Israel’s hands.‘’
Qureia said Sunday that truce talks with the militants would begin soon after the arrival Monday of Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. The Egyptian, who has helped mediate past cease-fires, is coming to assist Qureia in talks with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
It was unclear whether the two groups, responsible for dozens of suicide bombings over the past three years, would participate in the meetings.
Qureia hopes to persuade Islamic militant groups to end attacks against Israel as a first step toward securing an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire. A cease-fire also could strengthen Qureia, whose government was sworn into office last week. An earlier truce – hammered out by his predecessor – collapsed over the summer in a fresh wave of bloodshed.
That cease-fire was declared unilaterally by the militant groups. On Sunday, Hamas’ political leader, Khaled Mashaal, said his group would only consider ending the violence if Israel reciprocates.
``If you can stop (Israel’s) aggression and get an initiative from it and from America, then come to the Palestinian resistance and we will study it,‘’ Mashaal said Sunday in Beirut, Lebanon.
Israel, however, has not said whether it would agree to halt its military operations. Israeli officials have said they must continue acting against what they term ``ticking bombs’’ – what they call militants who are on the verge of carrying out attacks, although critics say officials define the term too broadly.
Despite the misgivings, Abu Libdeh said he is confident the fighting can be halted. ``My analysis is that it will happen for sure,‘’ he told AP.
Abu Libdeh, who holds a Ph.D. in statistics from Cornell University, has emerged as an influential voice in the new Palestinian government. Closely involved in Palestinian contacts with Israel and the United States, he indicated that progress is already taking place behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces in the West Bank town of Tulkarem arrested a Palestinian activist they said was armed. Naif Jarad, 47, a member of the Palestine National Council, a PLO body.
Abu Libdeh said Qureia is serious about bringing peace to the region. If the new government fails, the Palestinians, suffering from widespread unemployment, poverty and lawlessness in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, will pay ``a very high price,‘’ he said.
But he said that Israel must be ready to work with the Palestinians.
Israel has imposed a series of measures on the Palestinians, including travel restrictions and construction of a massive security barrier cutting through lands the Palestinians consider their own.
Israel will have to come back to its senses and come back and think of the requirements of the other partner,'' he said. In exchange, the Palestinians will try as much as possible to put their own house in order.‘’
Qureia and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have been preparing for a possible summit in the coming days to discuss the road map.
Israel has previously demanded the Palestinians crack down on militant groups as a first step. That move is called for in the road map, but it also sets requirements of Israel – such as a settlement freeze – that Israel has ignored.
Qureia says he will not clamp down on militants, but instead prefers to use persuasion to end the attacks. Israeli officials have hinted they may be softening their stance, and would judge Qureia primarily by whether he succeeds in bringing quiet.
Abu Libdeh noted that the Israeli and Palestinian people are both ``sick and tired’’ of the fighting.
Public discontent has put new pressure on Sharon, a hard-line former army general. Last week, four former chiefs of Israel’s Shin Bet security service joined the chorus of criticism, warning of a catastrophe if a peace deal is not reached soon.
On Sunday, Israeli backers of an unofficial peace plan known as the ``Geneva Accord’’ began a mass mailing of the document. The authors, which include former Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, hope to build support for their proposal.
The plan would create a Palestinian state on nearly all the land Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War, including disputed holy sites in Jerusalem. In return, Palestinians would give up their demand for a ``right of return’’ for Palestinian war refugees and their descendants to Israel.
Sharon has vehemently opposed the Geneva plan, but it has gained enough traction in Israel to prompt a widespread debate.
Uri Zaki, spokesman for Israeli negotiator Yossi Beilin, said almost two million copies of the 47-page document were mailed to Hebrew-speaking households. Arabic copies will be mailed out next week to Israel’s Arab citizens, and copies are also being distributed to the Russian-speaking population, he said.
On the Palestinian side, where mail service is sporadic, details of the agreement are being published in newspapers. A copy appeared in Sunday’s edition of al-Quds, an Arabic-language paper published in east Jerusalem.
My previous post should have read “Well, the Palestinian people are reaching out to Israel, again, in support of peace. Let’s hope Israel can look beyond their own religious zealotry and can support peace. Or, at least let’s hope the US stops supporting the destruction of the Palestinian people in the name of Zionist extremism. Here’s an article from the New York Times, at www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html.”
There’s a very sad story about the occupation at usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/2166/?PHPSESSID=d131ef8c02643456e5e12259b03d389d
Voiding the Palestinians: An Allegory
by M. Shahid Alam
(Saturday 15 November 2003)
?Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.? - Gandhi [1]
?Palestine will be as Jewish as England is English.? - Chaim Weizman [2]
On October 29, 2003, a leading Israeli daily, Ha?aretz, reported a rape-murder that occurred more than fifty years ago at Nirim, an Israeli military outpost in the Negev. The victim was a Palestinian girl, in her early or mid-teens, or younger; the perpetrators of this crime were members of the Israeli Defense Force.[3] Six days later, The Guardian also reported this crime, but US papers did not think this was news that is fit for print.[4] In the United States, the media prefers to shield Israel from adverse notice.
What is the significance of a single rape-murder in the long and tortuous history of the dispossession of one people by another? No dispossession ever makes a pretty picture. Moreover, the dispossession of Palestinians is no ordinary dispossession. It is not ordinary because it involved the complete voiding of one people by another: Palestine had to be emptied of its ancient Palestinian population to make room for Jews. It is not ordinary because much of this emptying was telescoped within a few short months (in 1948) rather than over centuries or decades. It was not ordinary because the people doing the voiding had themselves been voided from their spaces in Europe, a people with brilliant accomplishments, voided from the spaces they had helped to enrich. It is not ordinary because the voiding, the violence it demanded, had been carefully planned, orchestrated, justified, explained, excused, and, after it?s success, celebrated and glorified in Israeli and Western media.
What is the significance of a single rape-murder ? I ask again ? in the midst of the voiding of Palestine implemented through the deceit of declarations and the farce of international laws; through repeated wars and grinding repressions; through the backing of great powers and support of the world?s organized Jewry; through ethnic cleansings, orchestrated massacres and obliterated villages; through bombings of cinder block apartments, hospitals, schools and workshops; through armed settlements built on hilltops; through house demolitions, curfews, sieges, trenches, and bypass roads dividing communities; through a million daily humiliations at a thousand checkpoints; and now through a gargantuan wall, coiling, advancing, ominous, that dreams of squeezing the last drop of blood from beleaguered Palestinian communities in the West Bank?
Perhaps this single rape-murder is significant. The voiding of a people necessarily involves suffering on a monumental scale. The Zionists built their Jewish state by destroying the lives of millions of Palestinians over three generations. The scale of this suffering has been documented in reports, in statistics of villages destroyed, houses demolished, and men, women and children evicted from their homes, robbed, incarcerated, bombed, shot at, tortured, killed. However, statistics do not tell stories; they will not grip the reader with the pain of the victims. As the Holocaust reveals its hellish intent in images and artifacts, so the narrative of Palestinian voiding must be conveyed in images, metaphors and allegories, each of which contains in miniature, in essence, the great pain that the Palestinians have endured for more than eighty years.
We must read the Ha?aretz disclosure of the rape-murder in the Negev as an allegory of the fate decreed by the god-like Zionists for an inferior Arab population. Read with understanding, the report reveals the darkness at the heart of the Zionist project, its racism, its moral obtuseness, its blindness to the irony of the grave injustice the Zionists intended to do to the Palestinians. The rape-murder of a nameless Palestinian girl ? most likely a minor ? by IDF soldiers graphically conveys the unequal contest between the Zionists and Palestinians, as the Zionists sought to void the Palestinians so that they could resurrect a Jewish state that had been dead for some eighteen hundred years.
The only written record of the rape-murder, before the Ha?aretz report, is to be found in the diary of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. He made a terse but telling entry about this episode. ?It was decided and carried out: they washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her.?[5] Ben-Gurion could be describing a military operation, efficiently completed, according to plan, without hesitation, and without any loss of time. His verbs are active verbs: they speak of strong men, determined men, confident of their power to decide, to execute, to wash, to cut, rape and kill. The decisiveness, the finality of their actions is awe-inspiring.
On the morning of August 12, 1949, the Platoon Commander at the Nirim outpost in the Negev, Second Lieutenant Moshe, organized a patrol with six soldiers. During their patrol, they shot and killed a Palestinian after he threw down his rifle and was running away. Later, they captured two unarmed Arab men with a girl. The men were driven away with shots fired over their heads, but the girl was taken back to the outpost at Nirim. The patrol had decided that she was ?fuckable.? On their way back to the outpost, the patrol shot and killed six camels, leaving them to rot.
At the outpost, while Moshe was away on another patrol, the Platoon Sergeant, Michael prepared the girl for rape. He removed her traditional garments, forced her to stand under a water pipe, and washed her with his own hands, while everyone watched. The washing done, he dressed her in a jersey and shorts, and took her back to a hut where he raped her. When the girl complained to Moshe about the rape, he ordered his men to wash her ? again ? ?so that she would be clean for fucking.? The soldiers cut the girl?s hair, washed her head with kerosene, placed her under the water pipe, and sent her back to the hut in jersey and shorts. She was now clean.
Later the same day, the soldiers at the Nirim outpost gathered in a large tent for the festivities of Sabbath eve. The Platoon Commander, Moshe, inaugurated the Sabbath by blessing the wine, a soldier read from the Bible, after which there was singing, eating, drinking, jokes and fun. Before the party ended, Moshe asked his men to decide the Palestinian captive?s fate with a vote. They had two options: the captive could work in the kitchen; or they could have her. The girl?s fate was decided democratically. The soldiers chanted, ?We want a fuck.? Commander Moshe carried out the will of the majority. He and his sergeant went in first, leaving the girl unconscious.
The next morning, when the Palestinian girl protested, the Platoon Commander threatened to kill her. And, indeed, later, he ordered Sergeant Michael to execute the girl. They stripped her before execution; a soldier wanted his shorts back. The Sergeant, accompanied by a medic and two soldiers, took the girl out in the desert and shot her in the head as she ran. Overcome by pity, just in case she was alive and in pain, a soldier pumped a few more bullets into the girl?s body. Washed clean, her hair cut, raped repeatedly, the Palestinian captive now lay dead in a shallow grave.
Second Lieutenant Moshe drove down to Be?er Sheva later that same evening to watch a movie. At the theatre, he met his Battalion Commander, Major Yehuda Drexler, who had ordered that the Palestinian captive be taken back to where she had been found. When the Major asked his subordinate if he had done so, Moshe replied: ?They killed her, it was a shame to waste the gas.? A Palestinian?s life is not worth a gallon or half of gas.
When Captain Uri, the Company Commander, asked Second Lieutenant Moshe to explain what had happened to the Palestinian girl, this is what he wrote in his report:
?In my patrol on 12.8.49 I encountered Arabs in the territory under my command, one of them armed. I killed the armed Arab on the spot and took his weapon. I took the Arab female captive. On the first night the soldiers abused her and the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world (emphasis added).?
That was all. It was dismissive in its terseness, as if to say it would be a waste of our time discussing the rape-murder of a Palestinian. However, if you insist on a report, here it is: We found an Arab girl, raped her, and ?I saw fit to remove her from the world.?
It is that last phrase that is so haunting, imperial, Biblical, even divine. It sums up the ethos of a whole age, an imperial age that took pride in its superior race and its civilizing mission. An age in which various Europeans nations ?saw fit? to conquer, colonize, enslave, exterminate, displace, ?liberate? or ?educate? the rest of humanity, anyone different from them in color or religion. No matter what injury the Europeans inflicted on the natives, it had to be good for them. Nothing but goodness could flow from such superior beings. Zionism and its fruit, Israel, are but late flowerings of that Imperial age.
At the trial for this rape-murder, which was held in secret the same year, Second Lieutenant Moshe denied raping the girl. ?Morally speaking,? he argued, ?it was impossible to sleep with such a dirty girl.? Most likely, he knew that this was an argument that would carry weight. It is a basic premise of the civilizing mission. ?The native is always dirty, his clothes filthy, his manners crude.? There is an added twist here. ?It isn?t raping an Arab girl that would have been immoral, but that she was dirty.? The Court acquitted Moshe of rape, though he received a sentence of 15 years for murder.
Moshe offered a second defense. He told the Court repeatedly that Captain Uri, one of the Company Commanders in the battalion, had told him in private that when it came to the Arabs, he should engage in ?killing, slaughter.? The Court rejected this charge with its own psychoanalysis. The Judges wrote: ?The court believes that the words ?killing, slaughter? originate in a psychosis that seems to have taken root in the officer?s blood, to the effect that Arabs were to be massacred indiscriminately.? The Court chose not to cross-examine Captain Uri on this point.
Sergeant Michael pleaded that he was merely following orders when he executed the girl. The judges rejected his plea, but passed a ?very light? sentence of five years in prison because of extenuating circumstances. ?At the time there was a general feeling of contempt for the life of Arabs in general and infiltrators in particular, and sometimes wanton events occurred in this sphere. All this helped to create an atmosphere of ?anything goes.? We are convinced that this atmosphere existed at the Nirim outpost too (emphases added).? The judges at the Nuremberg trial too could have urged the same extenuating circumstance when passing sentences on Nazi criminals. After all, the Nazis too operated in a general climate of deep hatred against Jews, a hatred that had been bred for close to two thousand years. Thankfully, the judges at Nuremberg did not use this argument.
In addition, when Moshe accused Captain Uri of urging ?killing, slaughter? against Arabs, the judges dismissed this is as the invention of a psychotic mind. Yet, in arguing for a reduced sentence, they use the argument that there existed at the time ?a general feeling of contempt for the life of Arabs in general.? Were the judges at the murder-rape trial of the Palestinian girl schizophrenic? Or, were they only protecting their own kind?
Those who are familiar with the tragedy of Palestinian dispossession will have read ? as I have ? in the events of August 12 and 13, 1949, at the Nirim military outpost in the Negev, an allegory of that dispossession. In two days, this nameless girl, a minor, was made to suffer the degradation, shame, abuse, rape and, eventually, death, which has been the fate ? figuratively, and, in many cases, concretely ? of the Palestinians and their homeland for more than eighty years. We observe several striking parallels between the two gory narratives. We see it in the girl?s capture by a platoon of soldiers; in the Commander?s decision to decide her fate by a vote; in the question about the girl?s fate that is put to vote (use her as a slave worker or sex slave); in stripping the girl of her traditional garments, washing her, cutting her hair; raping her, the officers going in first; in the order for her execution when she protests; in the secret trial held; in the officer?s language (?I saw fit ??); in the acquittal from rape charges; in the light sentences; and in the judges? use of extenuating circumstances.
And now the parallels are being pushed towards a final convergence ? in the final obliteration of the national existence of Palestinians ? with the building of the strangulating wall; with levels of unemployment among Palestinians reaching 70 percent; with malnutrition among Palestinian children reaching famine levels; with the acceleration in the pace of ethnic cleansing; the unashamed American backing for the war-criminal, Ariel Sharon?s extreme right-wing policies; and growing demands for a final round of ethnic cleansing to rid historical Palestine of all Palestinians. At least, that is the intent of the Neoconservatives, Christian Zionists and Israel?s right-wing Likudniks. It is an intent that all right-thinking people ? including right-thinking Americans and Israelis – must oppose before the American-Israeli warmongers, with their fingers on nuclear buttons, push the world over the precipice.
There’s another good and informative article from mediamonitors.com. It’s at http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/1220/. I attached the first few paragraphs for reference, but I recommend reading the whole article. It’s a shame that the US media are so biased in their coverage that we cannot hear the truth and decide this issue for ourselves.
In the United States, the Palestinian narrative receives the same brutally dismissive treatment meted out to the dispossessed natives whose moving plight it strongly conveys. Concrete evidence is blocked and barred entrance at the gates of serious social discourse much as Palestine?s pregnant women are stalled and forced to give birth dangerously at checkpoints; important historical facts and statistics are swept aside like the lives of stone-throwing youths shot dead by ruthless occupation soldiers; undeniable facts on the ground are met with shameful silence by the mainstream media, their mastery over the art of indifference evidenced by a lack of outrage against the crushing realities imposed upon an increasingly desperate Palestinian mass pressed under the Israeli boot.
No doubt complicity in colonialism requires such cowardice as a national necessity: can a nation hand over its billions, its tanks, its fighter aircraft - its foreign policy – to a settler-state without also relinquishing every basic and fundamental principle of human justice? The last of these exports, of course, must be cloaked in the most deliberate distortions and obfuscations, hidden and buried under layers of disinformation and lies, so as to soothe the conscience of initial doubters and stifle criticism evinced by those unimpressed with the farce playing out before them.
One of the primary court jesters in this gruesome debacle is William Safire, ardent Zionist, columnist for America?s paper of record, and personal friend of indicted war criminal and mass murderer Ariel Sharon – who, naturally, holds the position of Prime Minister of Israel. On October 1st, our eminent columnist published a wonderfully deceptive and revealing piece titled, ?The Arafat Barrier?. Mr. Safire justifies the creation of Israel?s monstrous twenty-foot high, barb-wire-adorned apartheid wall by invoking the specter of Arafat as an all-pervasive demon whose evil influence can only be exorcised by erecting a massive physical barrier. In less than two pages, Mr. Safire manages to pack and compress so many lies and myths into his argument one almost expects his salvos to explode straight out of an Israeli tank barrel and into the body of whatever Palestinian standing in the way.
That is enough. Thankyouverymuch.
Or, in less PC terms…
DIE THREAD, DIE!