Posts Tagged ‘Palestine’

Top Ten Myths about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

June 19, 2010

Jeremy R. Hammond, Foreign Policy Journal, June 17, 2010

A Palestinian boy throws a stone at an Israeli  tank in the occupied West Bank.

Myth #1 – Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the region.

Although Arabs were a majority in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel, there had always been a Jewish population, as well. For the most part, Jewish Palestinians got along with their Arab neighbors. This began to change with the onset of the Zionist movement, because the Zionists rejected the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and wanted Palestine for their own, to create a “Jewish State” in a region where Arabs were the majority and owned most of the land.

For instance, after a series of riots in Jaffa in 1921 resulting in the deaths of 47 Jews and 48 Arabs, the occupying British held a commission of inquiry, which reported their finding that “there is no inherent anti-Semitism in the country, racial or religious.” Rather, Arab attacks on Jewish communities were the result of Arab fears about the stated goal of the Zionists to take over the land.

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Terrorism — Cause and Effect

May 29, 2010

Jack A. Smith, Antiwar.com, May 29, 2010

“Terrorists” and “terrorism” have become Washington’s monomania since 9/11, guiding the foreign/military policies of the American superstate and holding its population in thrall.

“The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term,” President Barack Obama said April 11, is the possibility that terrorists might obtain a nuclear weapon. The second biggest threat to world history’s mightiest military state, it goes without saying, are terrorists without nuclear weapons but armed with box-cutters, rifles or homemade explosives.

It’s “terrorism” 24/7 in the United States — the product of a conscious effort by the Bush Administration to keep the American people in the constant clutches of existential fear, in large part to justify launching endless aggressive wars. Anything goes if the target is said to be “terrorism,” as long as the Pentagon’s violence takes place in smaller, weaker countries usually populated by non-Europeans.

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Talking Palestine To Power

April 15, 2010

By Sonja Karkar, ZNet, April 14, 2010

Sonja Karkar’s ZSpace Page

Today, there is no excuse for not knowing the truth about Palestine, especially what is happening in Gaza. Even taking into account the disinformation spread in mainstream media, there are enough glimpses one gets of a ravaged Gaza and a brutalized people that should compel us to ask questions. There are enough websites and blogs easily available for anyone to learn more, even if it requires sifting through and evaluating the available information. Certainly, the alarm bells should be ringing when our political leaders declare undying fealty to Israel or cavalierly wear it as a badge of honour, despite the documented reports of Israel’s war crimes by human rights groups and official enquiries.

But the world lacks courage from government leaders, acquiescent mainstream media, nongovernmental organizations dependent on government support, academics looking for tenure and populations too long fed on a diet of Zionist myths. People are terrified of being labelled anti-Semitic, a mendacious charge against anyone criticizing Israel. Palestinians too, afraid of being further shunned and disadvantaged in countries that give them refuge, so often remain silent. Not only do people fear repercussions, but speaking the truth or even just hearing it has a way of taking people out of their comfort zones. They fear their troubled consciences may require them to act and so they bury their heads deeper into the sand where they hope even the sounds of silence might be extinguished.

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The U.N. Partition Plan and Arab ‘Catastrophe’

April 14, 2010
by Jeremy R. Hammond, Foriegn Policy Journal, April 13, 2010

The following is excerpted from The Rejection of Arab Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Arab-Israeli Crisis.

In 1947, Great Britain, unable to reconcile its conflicting obligations to both Jews and Arabs, requested that the United Nations take up the question of Palestine. In May, the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created by a General Assembly resolution. UNSCOP’s purpose was to investigate the situation in Palestine and “submit such proposals as it may consider appropriate for the solution of the problem of Palestine”.

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Was Israel legitimate at anytime?

April 12, 2010

by Jeff Gates, Foreign Policy Journal, April 11, 2010

The history of Israel as a geopolitical fraud will fill entire libraries as those defrauded marvel at how so few deceived so many for so long. Those duped include many naive Jews who—even now—identify their interests with this extremist enclave.

Israeli leaders are wrong to worry about “de-legitimization.” They are right to fear that a long-deceived public is fast realizing that Israel’s founding was key to an ongoing deception.

The Invention of the Jewish People did not begin with Shlomo Sand’s 2009 bestseller by that title. There was no Exile says this Jewish scholar. Nor was there an Exodus. So how could there be a Return, the core premise of Israeli statehood?

If this patch of Palestinian land never rightly belonged to a mythical Jewish People, what then for the legitimacy of the “Jewish homeland.” And for that depiction by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in his November 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild?

Were Christians likewise seduced by Sunday school teachings reliant on the phony findings of Biblical archeologist William Albright? Shlomo Sand chronicles how in the 1920s Albright interpreted every excavation in Palestine to “reaffirm the Old Testament and thereby the New.”

In 1948, President Harry Truman, a Christian Zionist, was advised by Secretary of State George Marshall not to recognize this enclave as a state. This WWII general assured Truman that he would vote against him—and did.

That military tradition resurfaced in January 2010 when General David Petraeus dispatched a team to brief Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the perils that Israel still poses to U.S. national security. Mullen was reportedly shocked.

He should not have been surprised. Such insights are hardly new. More than six decades ago the Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Truman about the “fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders” and their plans for “Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.”

In December 1948, Albert Einstein and 27 prominent Jews urged us “not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.” They warned that a “Leader State” was the goal of the “terrorist party” that has governed Israel over all but a handful of the past 62 years.

The Joint Chiefs foresaw the “Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the U.S.] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.”

Soon after Truman recognized Israel, his presidential campaign train was “refueled” by Zionist Jews with $400,000 in contributions ($3.6 million in 2010 dollars). Soon thereafter, Israel betrayed the U.S. by allying with the British and the French to invade Egypt.

Though London and Paris soon abandoned the operation, months more were required to dissuade Tel Aviv from pursuing their expansionist agenda then—as now—for Greater Israel.

Outraged by Israeli duplicity, Eisenhower sought help to rein them in.  He soon found that even then (as now) the Israel lobby dominated Congress. Thus the former Supreme Allied Commander appeared on television with an appeal directly to the American people. Then—unlike now—a U.S. Commander in Chief threatened to reduce assistance to Israel.

To revamp Israel’s tattered image, New York public relations expert Edward Gottlieb retained novelist Leon Uris to write Exodus. Jewish Zionists have routinely proven themselves skilled storytellers and masterful mythmakers.

This 1958 bestseller was translated into dozens of languages and quickly made into a movie for the 1960 Christmas season starring Paul Newman and featuring Peter Lawford, brother-in-law of the just-elected President John F. Kennedy.

The Myth of a Loyal Ally

Phil Tourney survived the June 8, 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 Americans dead and 175 wounded. The region-wide dynamics accompanying that provocative Six-Day land grab guaranteed the conflicts that remain so perilous to U.S. national security.

It was during this Israeli operation that Tourney gave a one-fingered salute to armed Israeli troops as they hovered in helicopters over the USS Liberty while preparing to rappel to the deck and, he surmises, kill the survivors and sink the ship.

Just then the captain aboard a nearby U.S. carrier scrambled jets to assist a vessel under attack by an “ally.” When Israeli intelligence intercepted the transmission, the helicopters fled only to have President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recall our fighters.

Soon thereafter, Israeli torpedo boats pulled alongside the USS Liberty to inquire if those aboard needed assistance. Those same boats had just blown a hole in the hull, killing 25 Americans. Israeli machine-gunners had then strafed stretcher-bearers, firemen, life rafts and even the fire hoses—all clear war crimes. Only then did this ally display the chutzpah to ask if our servicemen required assistance.

Had that notorious land grab failed to advance the narrative of Israel as the victim, what might be the condition of U.S. national security today? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently conceded the duplicity that continues to typify this “special relationship.”

As he confessed: “Our policy on Jerusalem is the same policy followed by all Israeli governments for 42 years, and it has not changed. As far as we are concerned, building in Jerusalem is the same as building in Tel Aviv.”

In other words, the 1967 war was neither defensive nor preemptive but an outright taking of land that, one year later, Tel Aviv acknowledged as precisely what concerned the Pentagon 62 years ago.

In effect, Netanyahu confirmed that this relationship reflects multi-decade premeditation. The U.S. has since discredited itself by protecting this “ally” from the rule of law for its taking and brutal occupation of land that rightly belongs to others.

Even now, few know that Mathilde Krim, a former Irgun operative, was “servicing” our Commander-in-Chief in the White House the night the 1967 war began. Her husband, Arthur, then chaired the finance committee for the Democratic National Committee.

Even now, few Americans know the role in that cover-up played by Admiral John McCain, Jr. Or the role still played in this sordid history by his son, Republican Senator John McCain III.

Are those who champion this “state” the same belief-makers responsible for the myth of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Iraqi meetings in Prague? Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories? High-level Iraqi contacts with Al Qaeda? Iraqi yellowcake uranium from Niger?

Was any of that intelligence legitimate? Whose interests were served by deceiving the U.S. to wage war in the Middle East? By the Suez Crisis? By the Six-Day War? By covering up the attack on the USS Liberty?

Adhering to an Enemy?

How are U.S. interests served by treating Israel as a legitimate state? When was Israeli behavior anything other than duplicitous? At what point do we concede the common source of the storylines foisted on an imperiled global public?

Who created the narrative that saw us segue seamlessly from a global Cold War to a global War on Terrorism? Remember the promise of a post-Cold War “peace dividend”? Who induced the U.S. to wage a war whose costs could total $3 trillion, including $700 billion in interest?

Why is debt always the prize? At the end of WWII, the U.S. was home to 50% of the world’s productive power. Were we induced to hollow out our economy by the same consensus-shapers that induced us to wage war in the Middle East?

Do these devastating dynamics trace to a common source?

Who benefits from the “Islamo” fascist narrative? Whose storyline—really—is The Clash of Civilizations? Who has long spied on the U.S. and routinely transferred to other nations our most sensitive defense technologies?

Who had the means, motive, opportunity and, importantly, the stable nation state intelligence required to perpetrate such a debilitating fraud from inside the U.S. government? And from inside other governments that joined the “coalition of the willing”?

If not Israel and its supporters—who? In effect, are those now advocating an “unbreakable bond” with Israel giving aid and comfort to an enemy within?

Israel is right to worry. It was never legitimate. As both an enabler and a target of this fraud, the U.S. has an obligation to concede its source—and to secure the weapons of mass destruction now under the control of this enclave.

Jeff Gates is author of “Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk” and “The Ownership Solution”. Read more articles by Jeff Gates.
http://www.criminalstate.com

Hamas wants talks with Americans, Europeans

February 4, 2010

Middle East Online,  Feb 4, 2010


‘The establishment of a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders’

Ismail Haniya: Israel must recognise rights of Palestinian people before asking for recognition.

GAZA CITY – Hamas is ready for dialogue with the international community, including the United States and European Union, the leader of the democratically elected Palestinian movement Ismail Haniya said.

“Hamas is ready to dialogue with the world, international community, the US, the (Middle East) Quartet and the Europeans,” Haniya said Wednesday.

The resistance movement has been in power in the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip since June 2007 after a routing out Fatah forces, to prevent a US-backed coup against Hamas’s democratic election.

Under pressure from Israeli lobbies, the US and the EU refuse to hold formal talks with the democratically elected movement, branding it a “terrorist” organisation.

One of the main obstacles to opening a dialogue is the Hamas’s refusal to officially recognise Israel. The Quartet demands an explicit recognition.

“They have to recognise us first, the right of the Palestinian people, we are the victims,” said the 48-year-old, who repeated that Hamas supports “the establishment of a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders.”

The Palestinians want their future state based on borders before the Israeli occupation of June 1967, which are recognosised by the international community, with its capital in East Jerusalem, a Palestinian territory under illegal Israeli occupation.

The Hamas prime minister said his movement had come “closer in political terms” to conditions issued by the Quartet — the US, EU, Russia and the United Nations — to open dialogue, including a “long-term ceasefire.”

Hamas has stopped resistance rocket attacks against Israel since a Hamas-Israeli ceasefire following the end of Israel’s devastating offensive against Gaza a year ago.

Haniya said he was determined to “establish Palestinian reconciliation and to have fair elections… in all Palestinian homes, including Jerusalem.”

Regarding “reconciliation, it is moving. It needs a strong push to reach a signature” with Fatah, the rival movement headed by Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas.

A senior Fatah official, Nabil Shaath, made a rare visit to the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in a bid to encourage stalled reconciliation efforts.

Shaath, a member of the central committee of Fatah, met with Khalil al-Hayya, a senior official from Hamas.

“We are one people, we have one homeland. Every Palestinian has the right to move in his own land at any time,” Haniya said. “If he (Shaath) asks for a meeting, we will do nothing to prevent it.”

After talks mediated by Egypt, Hamas has refused to sign a unity deal that was proposed by Cairo in October unless it is amended to reflect what the group says were previous understandings reached with Fatah.

Both Egypt and Fatah have said the deal is final.

In addition, relations between Hamas and Egypt have deteriorated recently after an armed confrontation at the Rafah border crossing that killed one Egyptian and wounded several Palestinians.

“What happened in Rafah did not affect the strategic relationships between Egypt and Hamas,” said Haniya, adding the “Egyptian role should continue and we welcome all Arab efforts for reconciliation, and Egypt has to be there.”

“It is no secret that the US and Israel do not want reconciliation but we are committed to reach it.”

Robert Fisk: Why does the US turn a blind eye to Israeli bulldozers?

January 31, 2010

Most of the West Bank is under rule which amounts to apartheid by paper

Robert Fisk, The Independent/UK, January 30, 2010

“Palestine” is no more. Call it a “peace process” or a “road map”; blame it on Barack Obama’s weakness, his pathetic, childish admission – like an optimistic doctor returning a sick child to its parents without hope of recovery – that a Middle East peace was “more difficult” to reach than he imagined.

But the dream of a “two-state” Israeli-Palestinian solution, a security-drenched but noble settlement to decades of warfare between Israelis and Palestinians is as good as dead.

Both the United States and Europe now stand idly by while the Israeli government effectively destroys any hope of a Palestinian state; even as you read these words, Israel’s bulldozers and demolition orders are destroying the last chance of peace; not only in the symbolic centre of Jerusalem itself but – strategically, far more important – in 60 per cent of the vast, biblical lands of the occupied West Bank, in that largest sector in which Jews now outnumber Muslims two to one.

This majority of the West Bank – known under the defunct Oslo Agreement’s sinister sobriquet as “Area C” – has already fallen under an Israeli rule which amounts to apartheid by paper: a set of Israeli laws which prohibit almost all Palestinian building or village improvements, which shamelessly smash down Palestinian homes for which permits are impossible to obtain, ordering the destruction of even restored Palestinian sewage systems. Israeli colonists have no such problems; which is why 300,000 Israelis now live – in 220 settlements which are all internationally illegal – in the richest and most fertile of the Palestinian occupied lands.

When Obama’s elderly envoy George Mitchell headed home in humiliation this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated his departure by planting trees in two of the three largest Israeli colonies around Jerusalem. With these trees at Gush Etzion and Ma’aleh Adumim, he said, he was sending “a clear message that we are here. We will stay here. We are planning and we are building.” These two huge settlements, along with that of Ariel to the north of Jerusalem, were an “indisputable part of Israel forever.”

It was Netanyahu’s victory celebration over the upstart American President who had dared to challenge Israel’s power not only in the Middle East but in America itself. And while the world this week listened to Netanyahu in the Holocaust memorial commemoration for the genocide of six million Jews, abusing Iran as the new Nazi Germany – Iran’s loony president supposedly as evil as Hitler – the hopes of a future “Palestine” continued to dribble away. President Ahmadinejad of Iran is no more Adolf Hitler than the Israelis are Nazis. But the “threat” of Iran is distracting the world. So is Tony Blair yesterday, trying to wriggle out of his bloody responsibility for the Iraq disaster. The real catastrophe, however, continues just outside Jerusalem, amid the fields, stony hills and ancient caves of most of the West Bank.

The Rogue State: Israeli violations of U.N. Security Council Resolutions

January 28, 2010
Foreign Policy Journal, January 27, 2010

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Following is a list of United Nations Security Council resolutions directly critical of Israel for violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions, the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions, international terrorism, or other violations of international law.

Res. 57 (Sep. 18, 1948) – Expresses deep shock at the  assassination of the U.N. Mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, by Zionist terrorists.

Res. 89 (Nov. 17, 1950) – Requests that attention be given to the expulsion of “thousands of Palestine Arabs” and calls upon concerned governments to take no further action “involving the transfer of persons across international frontiers or armistice lines”, and notes that Israel announced that it would withdraw to the armistice lines.

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Egypt’s shameful ban on freedom marchers

January 6, 2010
Laura Durkay reports from Cairo on the efforts of the Gaza Freedom Marchers to show their solidarity with Palestine—and the crackdown by Egyptian authorities.

Socialist Worker, January 4, 2010

Participants in the Gaza Freedom March call for an end to the siege at a Cairo protest (Mike Connolly)Participants in the Gaza Freedom March call for an end to the siege at a Cairo protest (Mike Connolly)

IN THE last week of 2009, 1,360 activists from 43 countries converged on Cairo for the Gaza Freedom March. We intended to enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing, controlled by Egypt, for a display of mass international solidarity with the Palestinian people on the one-year anniversary of Israel’s punishing attack that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians and injured thousands more.

Organizers in the U.S., Gaza and around the world spent the past six months planning a December 31 march of Palestinians and internationals to the Eretz crossing with Israel, in the north of the Gaza Strip–plus two days of meetings and trips to the areas of Gaza most heavily damaged by Israel’s attack. Many people were calling it the largest-ever gathering of international solidarity activists in Palestine.

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An open letter to President Barack Obama

November 22, 2009

Haidar Eid, Socialist Worker , November 19, 2009

A young boy in Kahn Yunis, Gaza

Dear Mr. President:

You will probably not read this letter due to your busy schedule and the huge number of messages you receive from presidents, kings, princes, sheiks and prime ministers. Who is a Palestinian academic from Gaza, after all, to have the guts to write an open letter to the president of the United States of America?

What has triggered this letter is a picture of your Excellency sitting with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That, of course, happened before 2004–i.e., before you underwent a process of metamorphosis which I personally think is unprecedented in history.

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