The Real Facts about Gaza »
Posted By populist 12 months ago in Political NewsPeace will not be achieved by locking 1.5 million people into a prison of spiralling poverty and misery.
Failure to end the policy of isolation will only continue the cycle of increasing poverty and extremism in Gaza rather than bring an end to it.
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populist
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Endoscopy12 months ago
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What an absolute completely biased article. It leaves out some very basic facts that disproves their statements.
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1. The Hamas charter says that the ONLY ACCEPTABLE SOLUTION is for Israel to be DESTROYED and Sharia law set up in its place. They say that ANY LAND EVER CONQUERED by Islam has to REMAIN under Islam. Are they going after Spain next?
2. The basic reason for the borders being closed is because the same day that Israel pulled out of Gaza and left them to their own government suicide bombers and missiles came out of there and killed Israeli men, women, and children. Closing the borders stops the suicide bombers.
3. The second reason for the blockade is that it was found that Hamas was smuggling in missiles and other weapons and ammunition in loads of medical supplies.
Hamas has NEVER recanted their Charter which is documented with the Quran, hadith and Muslim scholars of the past. This is a religious war for them. Suicide bombers believe that they will go to paradise because they are dying taking the enemy with them. How do you make peace with a group whose avowed aim is your destruction.
Gaza voted in Hamas in a 2 to 1 ratio. They are solidly behind Hamas. They are paying the price for that backing.
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Radiofreeeuropa12 months ago
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It is awful and at some point the violence MUST stop. It's an almost impossible task, to tell someone whose father or son was killed by one group not to commit violent acts against that group, let alone generations of violent deaths...yet that is what must happen for at least probably 3 generations before real peace can be fathomed. The violence is understandable in that sense, but someone must rise above it seizing the high ground...winning the long term battle which has more to do with Ghandi than Hamas or Olmert.
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hyperbola12 months ago
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Actually the situation in Gaza is again one of ideologues seizing power. Common people usually manage to get along if they are not manipulated by the ideologues.
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Even in Sderot, Israelis Say No to Gaza Attack
It has been widely acknowledged that Israel began a public relations campaign soon after beginning their bombing campaign over Gaza. As usual, they have had plenty of help. One example of this was Alan Dershowitz's article "Israel, Hamas, and moral idiocy" which ran in the Christian Science Monitor on New Year's eve. In a tired tradition, Dershowitz tries to blame the Palestinians for making Israel kill them.
...I've been to Sderot: just over a year ago in November, 2007. ... I saw the devastating effects of the missiles from Gaza. Even though there had not been a death from these rockets in recent memory when I was there, I was not surprised to find that the missiles had inflicted an incredible mental wound on the residents. But I was surprised to find that although the people of Sderot who I met wanted the missiles to end they understood that militarism would not protect them. The people I met with were not calling for war, they were calling for negotiation. ... Even an IDF commander I met told me, off the record, "The Qassams [missiles] are like stones, there is no way to stop them. The only way is negotiation."
Even more amazing, residents of Sderot are organizing to try to end the attacks. Read the text of this petition signed by hundreds of Sderot's residents which has been posted at the website jews sans frontieres.
Clearly not all people in Sderot agree with these views, as has been shown. But it's also clear that Dershowitz and other proponents of the endless war will always use the people of Sderot as the cannon fodder they need in the moment. The residents of Sderot are primarily Mizrahi Jews, poor and working class, who have been settled on the periphery to play exactly this role. As much as Dershowitz might want to fight to the finish, those in the crossfire just want an end to the shooting.
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/01/05/even-in-...
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Radiofreeeuropa12 months ago
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It's easy to say from my easy chair, with food and water, and no rockets or tanks threatening me, but fire is fought with water.
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The old adage that we "fight fire with fire" is incorrect.
Fight war with pacifism.
Fight violence with peace.
Ghandi, Martin Luther King both won their wars and changed the world forever. Napoleon seemed to be doing well battle by battle but he lost his war and changed very little actually.
Fight fire with water.-
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hyperbola12 months ago
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And just look at how many fanatics we have here in America calling for genocide from afar.
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Jews sans frontieres: Sderot Jews Condemn Gaza Attack
Despite the ongoing rocket attacks on their town from Gaza in the last several years, some 500 Sderot residents have recently signed a petition calling to stop the IDF operation in the Strip and renew the truce with Hamas.
The tragedy of Sderot is that nobody in Israel cares about the people of Sderot beyond the lip service to their utility as sacrificial lambs for the "national cause" (i.e. the cause of ethnic cleansing and apartheid.)
Well, some Sderot residents are stepping up to the task and speaking for themselves. Their petition calls on the government to keep the peace is here in Hebrew. Unfortunately no translation, but see my translation below.
the petition continues:
On the other side of the border live a million and a half Palestinians under unbearable conditions, and most of them want, like we do, calm and the opportunity of a future for themselves and their families.
We live in the feeling that you have wasted that period of calm, instead of using it to advance understandings and begin negotiations, as well as for fortifying the houses of residents as promised.
We call on the Prime Minister and the Defense minister not to listen to the voices of incitement and do everything they can to avoid another round of escalation, to secure the continuation of the calm and to work...towards direct or indirect negotiations with the Palestinian leadership in Gaza in order to reach long term understandings.
We prefer a cold war without a single rocket to a hot war with dozens of victims and innocent fatalities on both sides.
We ask you to offer us the possibility of political arrangement and hope and not an endless cycle of blood.
This petition has been gathering signatures in Israel since the 11th of November. Needless to say, it was ignored by the murderous office holders of Israel.
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/01/06/jews-san...
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bubba212 months ago
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I probably don't try hard enough to really understand ALL of the politics and history involved in this never-ending violence. It is a mess of Biblical proportions and probably will never end as long as the planet is in existence.
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I think both sides are at fault for wanting to kill each other off and never actually REALLY trying to get along peacefully.
Blockades are fine if they are ONLY dealing with what they REALLY want to stop the flow of - in this case, weapons. But blockades do NOT have to stop food, water, medical supplies, and PEOPLE who have no weapons.
For Israel to slaughter civilians in Gaza just because rockets have been fired by Hamas into Israel that have killed less than 10 civilians is wrong and it is NOT necessary. Period.-
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hyperbola12 months ago
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It is not really very complicated bubba.
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Silence on Gaza is Complicity - We’re All War Criminals Now
The conflict causing this violence is not centuries old. Nor is it too complex to address. Prior to 1900, Jews and Palestinians lived together in Palestine for generations without the extreme levels of hatred and violence which now exist. With the advent of Zionism, the political movement to establish a Jewish state in all of historic Palestine, tensions began to escalate. The leaders of the Zionist movement sought to control more and more of what they considered to be land promised to them by God. In 1947-48, the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland by Zionist militias and the creation of the Jewish state of Israel began the conflict in earnest.
Since then, Israel’s continued seizure of Palestinian land through the establishment of illegal settlements in the West Bank has accelerated the aggression. In addition, Israel has refused to abide by UN resolution 194 which guarantees Palestinians the right of return to or compensation for lands taken from them during the war in 1947-48. As a result of that war and the 1967 war Israel expanded well beyond the borders alloted to it by the original partition of Palestine and has been in violation of the Geneva Conventions as well as the terms of the original United Nations partition plan since its inception.
Though rarely if ever spoken about in any media source, the real reason for the conflict in Palestine is not Jews or Palestinians, it is the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Zionism, a virulent form of ethnic nationalism, fosters a culture of exclusivity and entitlement within Israeli society. Jews are “The Chosen People” living in “The Promised Land.” These inherently racist attitudes create an atmosphere which legitimizes collective punishment and human rights abuses against Palestinians simply because they are not Jews. Jewish lives are valued more than Palestinian lives. This attitude was epitomized by the statement of extreme right wing Israeli Rabbi, Eliyah, in April of 2008. “The life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs." -
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Endoscopy12 months ago
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Hyper is lying again. The Muslim acceptable lying to protect Islam.
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What he leave out is the Hamas charter that anybody can read on line. Hamas has as the only acceptable solution the destruction of Israel and Sharia law put in its place. They have NEVER recanted that charter. They use their religious documents and scholars of the past to create that document. To them it is jihad and the suicide bombers are going to paradise because they die killing the enemy.
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antibrainwasher12 months ago
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Palistinians are incapable of governing themselves without religious insanity leading to totalitarianism.
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When religious santified tribalism trumps anything else, like in palistine or any arab country, there can only be dictatorship, revolution, extreamism, endlessly, unless you can export revolution like Iran or Saudi Arabia.
Same can be said for Apartheid Israel. How'd that work out for South Africa. The 30% muslims in Israel have a birth rate of 5 per couple, more than double the jewish tribe.
They should give odds in Las Vegas, how long will gods chosen strand of DNA infest the craphole worthless holy land, where the baby jew god was born and the jew zombie god was executed by the romans and then floated to heaven. How long before the arabs sneak in a hydrogen bomb in a backpack?
I give it about 25 years tops. 50 years would get you 2 to 1 odds.-
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hyperbola12 months ago
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Why do you say that? The Palestinians in Gaza were doing a reasonable job until submitted to two years of a total blockade that starved them and then to another set of zionist crimes against humanity. These jewish israelis have a more realistic perception of the christians and moslems.
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Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?
Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007 have raised their voice in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza earlier this week. Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, who organized the petition, has been silent, as have his co-signatories from Princeton, Northwestern, and Cornell Universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most others who signed similar petitions, like the 11,000 professors from nearly 1,000 universities around the world, have also refrained from expressing their outrage at Israel’s attack on the leading university in Gaza. The artfully named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, which organized the latter appeal, has said nothing about the assault.
While the extent of the damage to the Islamic University, which was hit in six separate airstrikes, is still unknown, recent reports indicate that at least two major buildings were targeted, a science laboratory and the Ladies’ Building, where female students attended classes. ...
..the Islamic University is the first and most important institution of higher education in Gaza, serving more than 20,000 students, 60 percent of whom are women. It comprises 10 faculties — education, religion, art, commerce, Shariah law, science, engineering, information technology, medicine, and nursing — and awards a variety of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Taking into account that Palestinian universities have been regionalized because Palestinian students from Gaza are barred by Israel from studying either in the West Bank or abroad, the educational significance of the Islamic University becomes even more apparent.
Those restrictions became international news last summer when Israel refused to grant exit permits to seven carefully vetted students from Gaza who had been awarded Fulbright fellowships by the State Department to study in the United States. After top State Department officials intervened, the students’ scholarships were restored — though Israel allowed only four of the seven to leave, even after appeals by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
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Endoscopy12 months ago
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More lies hyper. You leave out the very day that Israel left was the day the missiles started and the suicide bombers came out of Gaza. They were found to be smuggling in missiles and weapons with medical supplies as cover. These people have absolutely no honor. There is a verse in the Quran that says war is deception. They live up to that. If pushed hard they will follow the example of Muhammad making a treaty and breaking it at the first chance to gain an advantage. Treaties mean absolutely nothing to these people. They follow Muhammad's example on that.
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reallypsst12 months ago
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The truth is Palestinians cant survive without Israel their get everything from water to food and even work,why is it they can never get a responsible government to represent them.It shows the world they are not ready for Independence and are mainly radical militants themselves !
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hyperbola12 months ago
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Actually when the Palestinians are not sabotaged by the zionists, they do very well. How much commerce did the jews produce when they were cooped up in the Warsaw Ghetto?
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Israel Tightens Chokehold on Village of Entrepreneurs
Nilin, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, is home to nearly 5,000 Palestinians. Known as the "village of entrepreneurs", it has more than its share of millionaires. But that looks set to change.
Traditionally, Nilin has enjoyed the benefits not only of a thriving agricultural industry on its plentiful outlying lands, but also of four factories that supply goods ranging from cola to fuel to Palestinians across the Ramallah region.
Encircled by half a dozen Jewish settlements like Hashmonaim – all illegal under international law – the village is slowly being sealed off in a fashion that may soon make its isolation almost as complete as Gaza's.
Since May, Israel has begun building its separation barrier along one length of the village, cutting it off from 250 hectares, or 40 per cent, of its farmland. The land will be effectively annexed to the neighboring settlements.
Copying the strategy of nearby Palestinian villages, the people of Nilin have begun a campaign of mainly nonviolent protests to delay the work in the hope that world opinion, or the Israeli courts, will win them a reprieve. ...
"We have no choice but to resist because the other option is that we watch our economy being slowly strangled to death. Israel wants us to leave this land for the settlers, but we are not going anywhere. We will continue struggling for our right to stay here."
http://www.propeller.com/story/2008/11/15/israel-t...
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truthiness12 months ago
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there are two facts here that people seem to feel are in opposition to each other, but in truth simply exist at the same time.
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1) Hamas is a terrorist organization that commits terrible acts against innocent people.
2) Israel, in its zeal to defend itself, has crossed over the line into war crimes a number of times including erecting a blockade, aerial assaults, and bulldozing houses that caused innocent civilians to suffer.
there are two other facts that people seem to feel contradict each other, but in truth simply exist at the same time
1) Israel has a right to exist as a secure sovereign state
2) Palestine has a right to exist as a secure sovereign state
all four of these statements must be accepted as true by the interested parties before any realistic steps towards peace can be made.-
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hyperbola12 months ago
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Actually Hamas is entitled under international law to defend itself against zionist occupation. The real terrorists in the mideast are the pseudo-jewish zionists - as this Israeli points out. Note that already at the time of the Lebanon crime against humanity by zionists, their future crime in Gaza was already predictable.
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Oren Ben-Dor: Who are the real terrorists in the Middle East?
...What exactly is being defended by the violence in Gaza and Lebanon? Is it the citizens of Israel or the nature of the Israeli state? I suggest the latter. Israel's statehood is based on an unjust ideology which causes indignity and suffering for those who are classified as non-Jewish by either a religious or ethnic test. To hide this primordial immorality, Israel fosters an image of victimhood. Provoking violence, consciously or unconsciously, against which one must defend oneself is a key feature of the victim-mentality. By perpetuating such a tragic cycle, Israel is a terrorist state like no other.
Many who wish to hide the immorality of the Israeli state do so by restricting attention to the horrors of the post-1967 occupation and talking about a two-state solution, since endorsing a Palestinian state implicitly endorses the ideology behind a Jewish one.
The very creation of Israel required an act of terror. In 1948, most of the non-Jewish indigenous people were ethnically cleansed from the part of Palestine which became Israel. This action was carefully planned. Without it, no state with a Jewish majority and character would have been possible. Since 1948, the "Israeli Arabs", those Palestinians who avoided expulsion, have suffered continuous discrimination. Indeed, many have been internally displaced, ostensibly for "security reasons", but really to acquire their lands for Jews.
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hyperbola12 months ago
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And truthiness, let's be clear that the zionists have done everything in their power to ensure that a "palestinian state" in non-viable. It is now time to forget about that charade and adopt the ONLY solution that is viable and consistent with American democracy and international law: a single state in all of Palestine with equal rights for all independent of race or religion.
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The brilliant offer Israel never made
To get peace talks started again means confronting a few myths
.... With Israel, it will be necessary to challenge some deeply held illusions about the peace process and why it broke down. Chief among these is the assertion that the Palestinians rejected a "generous" Israeli offer at Camp David two years ago. It is a view that spans the Israeli political spectrum, uniting the hard right with born-again rejectionists like Ehud Barak, confirming all in their belief that political dialogue has been exhausted and that Arafat is an inveterate terrorist. It is time for some constructive revisionism.
Barak's proposal for a Palestinian state based on 91% of the West Bank sounded substantive, but even the most cursory glance at the map revealed the bad faith inherent in it. It showed the West Bank carved into three chunks, surrounded by Israeli troops and settlers, without direct access to its own international borders.
The land-swap that was supposed to compensate the Palestinians for the loss of prime agricultural land in the West Bank merely added insult to injury. The only territory offered to Palestinian negotiators consisted of stretches of desert adjacent to the Gaza Strip that Israel currently uses for toxic waste dumping. The proposals on East Jerusalem were no better, permitting the Palestinians control of a few scattered fragments of what had been theirs before 1967.
Barak offered the trappings of Palestinian sovereignty while perpetuating the subjugation of the Palestinians. It is not difficult to see why they felt unable to accept. The only surprise is how widely the myth of the "generous offer" is now accepted. ....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/10/commen...-
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truthiness12 months ago
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once again you tell lies and half truth in order to present a distorted, propagandized view of the situation
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this is a balanced report of the events that transpired at that meeting
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/...
it does not claim any one side was completely innocent or guilty.
every time you here someone say "the other is to blame" you know they are full of sht. no situation this complex could be that simplified.
why should the Israelis, or the Palestinians, have to give up a homeland? should the french? or the Chinese? is it racist of the Irish to want an Irish nation?
it is one thing to point out when others make mistakes, or even do terrible things, but to continuously barrage one side or the other of a situation as being the sole problem betrays a personal bias the eludes logic or fairness.
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