The Palestine thread

[seafoid]

Hamas and the Israeli army need each other. 
That Hamas rhetoric reminds me of Syferus bigging up Roscommon.

It's as bad as Netanyahu drawing attention to the morality of Zionism

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.602742
Netanyahu on Tuesday compared Jews to Arabs, saying, "a deep and wide moral chasm separates us from our enemies: They sanctify death, and we, life; they sanctify cruelty, while we [sanctify] mercy."


The bigger issue is apartheid and Israel's drift ever rightward 
and what it all means for Judaism

[Mike Sheehy]

Hamas and the Israeli army need each other. 
That Hamas rhetoric reminds me of Syferus bigging up Roscommon.


The bigger issue is apartheid and Israel's drift ever rightward.

Really, so the side that calls for the destruction of the other side are the "nicer" guys are they ? How about you simply apply your condemnation of extremist views equally and unequivocally ?

Then again, since you yourself have called for the destruction of Israel (and have yet to withdraw or clarify the remark) it should be no surprise to anyone
that you are a fellow traveller of Hamas.

[seafoid]

I think the big risk is that Israeli society loses the plot. The Hamas charter is appalling but it is neither here nor there in terms of the dynamics of the system.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.602742
"Bullies and right-wingers who take it upon themselves to "punish" innocent Arabs make a mockery of the effort to conduct a focused battle against terror operatives while also insulting the families of the murdered Israeli teens and the public that shares their grief. The biggest concern is that these gangs will dictate the government's mood and pressure it into taking extreme and showy measures to satisfy their desire for revenge. From there it's but a short road to widespread outbreaks of violence and a total loss of control. "

Chemi Shalev
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/.premium-1.602697

"And hovering above all of this are Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, who persist in portraying our conflict with the Palestinians in stark terms of black and white, good versus evil; who describe Israel's adversaries as incorrigible and irredeemable; who have never shown the slightest sign of empathy or understanding for the plight of the people who have lived under Israeli occupation for nearly half a century; whose pronouncements serve to dehumanize the Palestinians in the eyes of the Israeli public; who perpetuate the public's sense of isolation and injustice; and who thus can be said to be paving the way for the waves of homicidal hatred that are now coming to light.  Some people will draw a parallel between the ugly right wing violence that swept Israel after the Oslo Accords and today's rising tide of dangerous racism, implicating Netanyahu in both: from his fiery anti-government speeches in Zion Square to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and from his harsh anti-Palestinian rhetoric to the outburst of horrid racism today. But that is an easy out. It is not Netanyahu who is to blame, it is the rest of us, Jews in Israel as well as those in the Diaspora, those who turn a blind eye and those who choose to look the other way, those who portray the Palestinians as inhuman monsters and those who view any self-criticism as an act of Jewish betrayal. "

[give her dixie]

[seafoid]

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.602742
Netanyahu on Tuesday compared Jews to Arabs, saying, "a deep and wide moral chasm separates us from our enemies: They sanctify death, and we, life; they sanctify cruelty, while we [sanctify] mercy."

[give her dixie]

A new facebook page titled "The People of Israel Demand Revenge", managed to gain over 32,000 "likes" in about 24 hours.Young Israelis post photos of themselves on this page calling for revenge against Palestinians. Among those young Israelis are soldiers, many of them from units that serve in the occupied Palestinian territories. All the photos in this post were taken from that facebook page. Expressing political opinion and taking photos inside army bases is strictly prohibited under IDF rules, which it the reason most of the soldiers covered or didn't show their faces.

Click on this link to see the disturbing images

http://muddleast.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/israeli-soldiers-call-for-revenge-against-palestinians/

[Mike Sheehy]

I think the big risk is that Israeli society loses the plot. The Hamas charter is appalling but it is neither here nor there in terms of the dynamics of the system.

So you are saying that the fact that Hamas regularly commit attacks and have stated their desire to destroy Israel is neither her nor there "in terms of the dynamics of the system"

You are either clueless or deliberately lying as to what you truly believe.

[seafoid]

Netanyahu's comparison of civilized Israeli Jews with savage Palestinians goes back a long way in colonial practice. Giraldus Cambrensis was a Welsh propagandist in the 12 century who wrote that "the Irish were so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture. A wild and inhospitable people who live like beasts and are devoted to laziness as well as barbarian, treacherous and vicious" 

[seafoid]

This is a very good article on the mental blockages that mean Israelis are not interested in peace

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-peace-conference/1.601122

"1) Loss aversion
In the 1980s, Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman single-handedly changed the psychology of decision making by showing that a number of powerful factors create systematic biases in how we decide. One of their most famous theorems is that humans are guided by loss aversion. We are often in situations in which we have to weigh the potential loss of something we currently have against what is to be potentially gained by taking a certain risk. They have shown that we are far more guided by fear of loss than by the prospect of gain.
Loss aversion plays a crucial role in Israel's reluctance to move toward peace. Israel currently has a number of assets that it stands to lose in any peace agreement acceptable to the Palestinians. It has full security control over Area C and the all-important Jordan Valley, partial control over Area B, and the de-facto option of incursions into Area A if Israel's security establishment wants to prevent attacks against Israel from one of the Palestinian population centers. Israel, at least on paper, has control over the greater Jerusalem area, including the various holy sites, as well as over a variety of sites in Judea and Samaria that play a great role in the Bible. Israel stands to lose all of these in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Of course, much is to be gained from peace. Since Israel's founding, Israelis have been singing that one day we will be able to live here in peace. Ostensibly, any peace agreement will require the Palestinians to declare an end to the conflict and that they have no further demands. Add to this that the Arab Peace Initiative would add peace and full recognition by the Islamic world.
On paper, the gains outweigh the losses dramatically. The occupation has pushed Israel into ever-growing international isolation. The threat from the BDS Movement against Israel has been gaining momentum and is beginning to become more concrete. Israel's economy could flourish enormously if the Arab world's financial assets and natural resources were to be combined with Israel's technological and managerial know-how.
But Israelis, like all humans, are primarily guided by loss aversion. Most Israelis fear that the Gaza scenario will repeat itself: Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and southern Israel was exposed to rocket attacks for years. Israel's relinquishment of security control over the West Bank would open Israel's population centers to the same danger. The latter scenario is not a paranoid fantasy. Iraq and Syria have become hotbeds of jihadist organizations, and if Israel no longer controls the Jordan Valley and large parts of the West Bank, Al-Qaida fighters might indeed come within shooting distance of Tel Aviv, Kfar Sava, Herzliya and all of Israel's center.
Research has shown that most Israelis have come to loathe the term "peace." The idea of real peace, not only with the Palestinians but also with the Arab world, seems like a science-fiction scenario entertained by dreamy leftists. As opposed to that, almost all Israelis remember the horrors of the second intifada and the shelling of Israel from Gaza and Lebanon. The majority of Israelis, therefore, feel that the loss of security is far more concrete than the gain of something they do not believe in.
Loss aversion is even more pronounced in politicians. They are only rewarded for positive results that emerge before the next elections, and they are severely punished for immediate negative results. The fate of Israel's left, which was virtually wiped out after the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000 and the onset of the second intifada, is an indelible warning for every politician, who fears a brutal end to his or her political career if a peace agreement leads to further violence. As opposed to this, the gains of such peace seem abstract, distant and insecure.
2) The need to justify the occupation
One of Israel's most respected writers, David Grossman, once wrote that, behind the deafening noise of shrill political rhetoric, in every Israeli and Palestinian's soul there is a dark, silent place in which they know all of the horrible suffering of this conflict was utterly futile and useless. It is psychologically almost impossible to realize and accept that you have been mistaken for decades, and that the horrors of the past could have been avoided.
The former Shin Bet security service chiefs interviewed in Dror Moreh's poignant documentary "The Gatekeepers" all describe the moral price of the occupation – for example, of causing Palestinians to turn against their own people and collaborate with Israel. Moreh's interviewees are the exception rather than the norm. They have the human strength to say that their jobs made them do terrible things. For most humans, it is almost impossible to do terrible things and live with the realization that these acts were immoral.
Almost every Israeli in the last 47 years has done military service in the territories. Almost all of them have had to do things that go against human decency and morality – often not for the sake of Israel's security at large, but to protect some isolated outpost of settlers. If indeed Israel were to reach peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world, most Israelis would have to live with the painful realization that most of what Israel has done to the Palestinians was unnecessary; that Israel could have ended the occupation a long time ago; and that the energies and resources invested in the West Bank's colonization could have been invested in Israel's flourishing instead.
This idea is too difficult to bear, and the regret would be unendurable. It is, therefore, psychologically imperative to create a narrative that explains why the occupation was inevitable; why Israel had no choice but to hang onto the West Bank; why all the sacrifice in human lives, moral turpitude and political isolation were necessary for Israel's survival.
Israel's right-wing politicians instinctively know they need to reassert daily that the occupation is a military and moral necessity. This is why they keep explaining why a Palestinian state is an existential threat to Israel, and why Israel's left has been selling empty illusions for decades. Of course, their case has been strengthened enormously by the second intifada and the shelling of southern Israel. But the constant fanning of fear not only serves Israel's right politically. It also provides Israelis with a justification not only for the status quo, but for the expropriation, oppression and humiliation of Palestinians that Israelis have participated in for the last 47 years, to preserve the occupation.
All of this is all-too-human. Only a few have the human strength of Moreh's interviewees to look into the camera and say: "We did terrible things, and most of them could have been avoided if only the political leadership had realized that the occupation is Israel's catastrophe." Most Israelis, like most humans, need a narrative that justifies Israel's actions as inevitable.
3) Inability to let go of Zionism as a revolutionary movement
This leads to the third psychological level. The history of Israel's occupation and gradual colonization of the West Bank cannot be understood without the religious-Zionist movement that emerged from the 1967 war. The students of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook interpreted Israel's victory in the Six-Day War as the onset of the Messianic Age. Every hill, stone and village in what they call Judea and Samaria acquired theological meaning, and every new settlement had metaphysical significance. Israel was not occupying another people: It was fulfilling God's plan for the Jewish people, and for humanity as a whole, by speeding up messianic redemption.
Most Israelis do not share this messianic interpretation of the occupation. But deep down, many Israelis feel that the settlers are the real Zionists; that the rest of us have become complacent, ordinary citizens who have lost the revolutionary ardor that once characterized the Zionist movement. The settlers continue the ethos of acre after acre, of settling the land and building the country.
This, I believe, is part of Israelis' enormous difficulty in stopping the settlers in their drive to undermine the last remaining chance for the two-state solution. Somehow, Israelis feel that if there is no deeper meaning for our being here, the suffering, danger and insecurity were not worth the while. While Israelis may not fully share the settlers' ideology, many admire them and feel that the settlers provide a laudable model to justify the whole Zionist project.
The instability of the Middle East and the Arab Spring's disintegration into chaos have made Israel's situation more difficult. Chances that Israel will live in safety and "normality" in the coming decades are slim. To bear all this, many Israelis feel there must be a metaphysical justification for the Zionist project. Otherwise, deep down, they wonder: Was the whole project worth the pain, the trouble and the ongoing risk? "

[haveaharp]

Netanyahu's comparison of civilized Israeli Jews with savage Palestinians goes back a long way in colonial practice. Giraldus Cambrensis was a Welsh propagandist in the 12 century who wrote that "the Irish were so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture. A wild and inhospitable people who live like beasts and are devoted to laziness as well as barbarian, treacherous and vicious"

Giraldus didnt think much of the local talent

"Duvenald, king of Limerick, had a woman with a beard down to her navel, and also, a crest like a colt of a year old, which reached from the top of her neck down her backbone, and was covered with hair. The woman, thus remarkable for two monstrous deformities, was, however, not an hermaphrodite, but in other respects had the parts of a woman; and she constantly attended the court, an object of ridicule as well as of wonder. The fact of her spine being covered with hair, neither determined her gender to be male or female; and in wearing a long beard she followed the customs of her country, though it was unnatural in her. Also, within our time, a woman was seen attending the court in Connaught, who partook of the nature of both sexes, and was an hermaphrodite. On the right side of her face she had a long and thick beard, which covered both sides of her lips to the middle of her chin, like a man; on the left, her lips and chin were smooth and hairless, like a woman"

[rossiewanderer]

Where or how does one begin to quantify tragedy and inhumanity due to human conflict?

Must one always support one side in a deadly game of life and death?Therefore further fueling the hatred and killing.

There are many critical humanitarian crisis due to war and corrupt governance throughout the world especially the Muslim/Islamic/African world.

Which must take precedent?? Who's agenda catch's the populist support of full time campaigners in countries like Ireland?
Which one is fashionable for the 'People that try to make a difference'?

[LeoMc]

So a 17 year old Palestinian is a child but 2 16 year old Israelis are illegal settlers!

I would draw no distinction. All murders are to be condemned equally and I know you have done so GHD. However the semantics of spin mean that the message is lost as we search for the alternatives behind the message.

[give her dixie]

11 injured in multiple Israeli airstrikes on Gaza

Eleven Palestinians were injured overnight Wednesday as Israel attacked 15 targets in the Gaza Strip, medics said.

Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said 11 Palestinians were hospitalized following multiple airstrikes, including a 17-year-old boy who sustained shrapnel wounds near Gaza City.

Another airstrike targeted a Hamas training base west of Gaza City, with an elderly woman and teenage girl sustaining injuries in the northern Gaza Strip.

Three airstrikes targeted Hamas training bases in the al-Shujaiyya neighborhood of Gaza City and the city of Beit Hanoun, while a further three airstrikes targeted an area near the former PA intelligence headquarters in northern Gaza.

In southern Gaza, an airstrike targeted a military base belonging to Hamas near Rafah.

Israel's army said it carried out strikes against 15 Hamas targets in Gaza "including concealed rocket launchers, weapon storage facilities and terror activity sites."

Twenty rockets were fired at Israel since Wednesday, Israel's army said, with one hitting a home in the city of Sderot, with no injuries reported.

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=709615

[give her dixie]

Israel demolishes eight West Bank homes


Israeli bulldozers destroyed eight houses early Thursday in a northeastern West Bank village, Palestinian media reported.

News agency WAFA quoted mayor Sami Sadeq as saying that 20 bulldozers demolished the homes in the town of al-Aqabah.

The homes were built using tin and burlap some 20 years ago. Sadeq also noted that the occupying forces had never threatened to destroy the facilities.

Usually Israeli soldiers demolish homes under the pretext that they were built without a permit after issuing notices to the tenants.

Roughly 94 percent of Palestinian applications for building permits are rejected, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

The group estimates that Israeli authorities have demolished about 27,000 Palestinian structures in the West Bank since 1967.

Thursday's home demolitions comes amid an ongoing crackdown on Palestinians in the aftermath of the killing of three Israeli settlers whose bodies were discovered in field near Hebron on Monday.

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/israel-demolishes-eight-west-bank-homes

[give her dixie]

Govt warns Irish citizens against investing in occupied Palestinian territories

The Government has advised Irish citizens against investing or doing any business with firms in the occupied Palestinian territories of Arab East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

The advice also applies to Syria's Golan heights, which Israel also captured in the Six-Day War of 1967.

The move is in line with many other EU countries and the advice has recently been issued by the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Portugal.

In a statement, the Department of Foreign Affairs said Ireland and its EU Partners have a clear position on Israeli settlements.

It said: "The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights are territories which have been occupied by Israel since 1967.

"Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible.

"The EU and its Member States will not recognise any changes to the pre-1967 borders, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties."

It goes on to say that financial transactions, investments, purchases, as other economic activities, including tourism, in Israeli settlements or benefiting Israeli settlements carry legal and economic risks.

This stems from the fact that the Israeli settlements, according to international law, are built on occupied land and are not recognised as a legitimate part of Israel's territory.

The department said potential buyers and investors should be aware that a future peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, or between Israel and Syria, could have consequences for property they purchase or economic activities they promote in these settlements.

In case of disputes, the department says it could be very difficult to ensure national protection of their interests.

Israel captured the occupied Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War.

An estimated 300,000 Palestinians were displaced from the West Bank and Gaza as a result of the war.

Settlements are viewed as illegal by the international community and many view Israel's building of settlements as a means of colonising the land it has captured.

Israel has already de-facto annexed part of its 1967 gains: the Golan Heights  and East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as their capital.

Neither move has been recognised internationally.

Construction of new Jewish homes in the West Bank rose 123% year-on-year in 2013.

This surge coincided with peace talks that faltered earlier this year.

Successive Israeli governments have said the blocs, illegal under international law, should remain part of Israel in any negotiated deal with the Palestinians.

However, the Geneva Convention states "the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies".

http://www.rte.ie/news/2014/0703/628310-govt-israel/