Since it's been a while since we had an Israel/Palestine thread...

Monday, March 8

“Bibi came by at three for his afternoon session. At four he refused to leave and claimed my house was actually his. Then he locked me in the basement overnight while he lavishly entertained his friends upstairs. When I tried to escape, he called me a terrorist and put me in shackles. I begged for mercy, but he said he could hardly grant it to someone who didn’t even exist.”

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vimothy said:

Was just gonna ask about that!

I can find nothing in the news. It must be a hoax

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grizzleb said:

Also evidence of the massive decline in the standard of BBC documentary. I can't remember the last time I saw such a high quality, documentary lacking sensationalism on the BBC .

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...A report quietly submitted by IDF Military Advocate General Avichai Mandelblit to the United Nations two weeks ago regarding Israel’s conduct during Operation Cast Lead confirms the key findings of the Goldstone Report. The report (full version here), which documents 150 ongoing investigations, has outraged the Israeli Army. “It looks as though they were frightened by Goldstone,” remarked an IDF officer. Another military official expressed anger that after a previous IDF report asserting the legality of shelling civilian areas with white phosphorous, a chemical weapon, the Mandelblit report has issued recommendations limiting the munition’s use. “It looks like tying your own hands behind your back. Why should a weapon with which there is no problem be limited?” the official asked.

Mandelblit’s confirmation of the IDF’s use of white phosphorous in Gaza against a UN compound is one of his report’s most remarkable admissions. He has directly contradicted a lie told over and over again to the Israeli public in the immediate aftermath of Cast Lead, and repeated in an April 2009 IDF report, that “no phosphorous munitions were used on built-up areas.”

Discussion of white phosphorous use is buried in the body of the report, on page 21 in a section on the UNRWA Field Office Compound:

One of the most widely reported incidents during the Gaza Operation involved the UNRWA field office compound, where three individuals were injured and significant property damage resulted from the use of smoke-screen munitions containing white phosphorous. Additional damage occurred due to the use of high explosive shells in the vicinity of the compound.

Besides the deployment of white phosphorous munitions, the Mandelblit Report acknowledges that the IDF Military Advocate General has launched a criminal investigation into the killing of 26 members of the Al-Samouni family (p. 6); that the army may have used human shields (pp. 9-11); knowingly shelled a UNRWA school filled with children in order to neutralize a single enemy mortar launcher, causing large-scale civilian deaths in the process; knowingly attacked a mosque with “powerful” missiles in order to kill two unknown terrorist “operatives” (p. 17); bombed a police graduation ceremony (p. 19), killing four civilians in the process (according to Goldstone the IDF killed 9 civilians and 99 cops); killed a civilian raising a white flag (p. 22); fired on a horse-drawn carriage carrying wounded civilians, killing a number of people in the process (p. 24); fired flechette-filled tank shells in the immediate vicinity of a “condolence tent,” killing civilians in the process (p. 25); bulldozed the Sawafeary Chicken Coops (pp. 27-28) in order to obtain “a clear line of sight” for soldiers in the area; destroyed a cement packaging plant in a vain search for tunnels (p. 29); destroyed a series of factories, claiming it “did not know the structures were used to produce food products” (p. 30); and implicitly acknowledged that it destroyed private property (p. 33).

Although Mandelblit lays the blame for many killings at the feet of IDF commanders, he invokes the army’s firing policy to justify the killings. So long as soldiers claimed in their testimonies that they may have seen enemy operatives in the area (Mandelblit acknowledges extreme difficulty gathering testimony from Palestinian victims), he was able to claim that the soldiers followed the “Law of Armed Conflict.”...

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In November 1947, the United Nations voted in favor of the partition of Palestine, proposing the creation of a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a UN-administered Jerusalem.[16] Partition was accepted by the Zionist leadership but rejected by Arab leaders, and a civil war began. Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948 and neighboring Arab states invaded the next day. Since then, Israel has fought a series of wars with neighboring Arab states,[17] and has occupied territories, including the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, beyond those delineated in the 1949 Armistice Agreements.

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Contrast the restraint of Chaim Weizmann saying that the Zionists would settle for a state "the size of a tablecloth" with Hamas's insistence --and the bulk of Fatah as well--that the whole of Palestine, min al-nahr ila al-bahr, from the river to the sea, belongs to Palestinians and the historical outcome of the fight of the two nationalisms is easy to understand.

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craner said:

Fouad Ajami

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considering what happened in the war, why wasn't there a country carved out for the roma? it is the holocaust that got the world behind a jewish state perhaps, but the modern Jewish state was not born out of WW2. ... there are several books out there that can provide the history of zionism and the origins of the state of israel...

i don't think the majority of people in palestine in the 20s through 40s wanted jews to leave the region. there were obvious tensions (especially after the Balfour Declaration, where it became obvious to those in Palestine the intentions of creating a separate Jewish state), but no where near the anti-Semitism in the West. in fact, most colonial sources agree that tensions between Zionist immigrants and the local Christian and Muslim Arabs was BECAUSE of the Balfour Declaration and subsequent talk of a Jewish state, not just a homeland.

furthermore, being opposed to a jewish state is FAR different from wanting jews to leave. there had been Sephardic Jews in Palestine and North Africa for a long while. being opposed to a Jewish state is FAR different from racism. the imperialist powers had no right to legislate a Jewish state within the territory of the Palestinian people. i see no good reason why any right-thinking Palestinian in 1947 (or 1917 for that matter) would support the actions of the imperialist Western powers. even more so when this action is being forced on a former colony--in those early days of decolonialism and self-determination, no less. if you were a Palestinian in 1947, it would be supporting the colonial occupiers, the Western imperialists, to accept a Jewish state.

they carved Palestine into a homeland for the Jews--into a Palestinian state and a Jewish one. why? was this the ONLY solution to a history of Western pogroms against the Jews? and what right-thinking Palestinian would accept this answer? why should Jerusalem need to be a UN occupied city when the tension in Jerusalem really only started after Balfour and talk of a Jewish state?

living with the Jews? over the centuries, the Palestinians had gotten along better with the Jewish population than their European neighbors. living with them is one thing. a Jewish state is quite another.

there was plenty of anti-Jewish rhetoric before independence. plenty of Zionist rhetoric against the Arabs. attacks, murders, riots--all went both ways. it was not a peaceful time--the end of a colonial regime rarely is. it should be noted that British officers who were anti-Zionists have been condemned by history for being somewhat complicit in Arab riots and violence against Jews. this is deplorable, but i mention it to show the ultimate responsibility is certainly not Arab leaders, but the criminal colonial occupation by (mainly) Britain.

i think it is Historical Revisionism to begin blaming Arabs for the situation today because of a resistance to the 2 state solution in the 40s, resistance to a policy forced on them by decades of Western imperialism

read about the Balfour Declaration, the history of nonreligious Zionism, the British Mandate, all that shit. i think you will empathize even more with the Palestinians after reading it.

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padraig (u.s.) said:

yeah, Tristan Anderson, last March. shot in the face w/a tear gas canister in a West Bank village while taking pictures there several hours after a demo against the Wall. wound up having part of his frontal lobe removed, was in a near-coma for six months. although, I guess more recently he's been doing better (relatively) - he's still blind in his right eye, the left side of his body is paralyzed, he has problems w/his short-term memory, impulse control, etc - that doesn't really convey how awful the ordeal was tho here's a recent, more-in depth FAQ on his condition & case written by his partner , at least now he's awake, able to move around (in a wheelchair) and do cognitive & physical therapy. it sounds like he's coming home to California soon (he's been in an Israeli hospital since the shooting), I really hope to see him next time I'm in the Bay Area. unsurprisingly, the criminal investigation into his shooting by the Israeli police was a total whitewash, tho his lawyers have filed an appeal to re-open it; there's also a pending civil case (more in the FAQ).

even a year later the whole thing still makes me boil with indescribable rage when I think about it. if you could've known him before - he was (still is, f**k, need to stop thinking about him in the past tense) just a gem of human being. one of the few.

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In First Interview Since Critical Injury at West Bank Protest, U.S. Peace Activist Tristan Anderson Urges Iran to Free Jailed Hikers

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