The Palestine thread

[Íseal agus crua isteach a]

GHD or anyone else that works in the besieged Gaza strip, my wife and I are trying to find out the name of these two children in the picture. Both there parents were murdered by the IDF. Any help would be appreciated.

[Nally Stand]

Israel has broken the truce already. A 20 year old Palestinian has been murdered and another 10 injured by the IDF in Gaza.

[seafoid]

Israel has broken the truce already. A 20 year old Palestinian has been murdered and another 10 injured by the IDF in Gaza.

Colonialism is always the same. The infected blankets, the Treaty of Limerick, the word  of a Zionist.

[Denn Forever]

Israel has broken the truce already. A 20 year old Palestinian has been murdered and another 10 injured by the IDF in Gaza.

Damn.  Where was this reported and is there a link?

[johnneycool]

bbc have it up now, you'd need to go looking for it..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20461914

[Denn Forever]

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed only that it had fired "warning shots" after seeing a group walking towards the border fence.  .....  Eyewitnesses said the group were farmers but the Israelis said they had been marching towards the border as if staging a protest.

Montgomery Alabama 2012.  I dispair.

[give her dixie]

I have just been catching up there now on the news. Seems that the farmers were on their own land on the Gaza side of the fence and they were shot. There is a video of the shooting, but due to the internet connection I have on the boat, I can't see it.

I havn't watched this link, but see if it works. 
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3527230439348

In the past, Israel has broken over 75% of agreed cease fires, and today is no different. Sasly though, the media always forgets these matters......

Considering over 50% of Israel are against the ceasefire, it wouldn't surprise me if the stir things up again. They will sink lower than a snakes belly for political (or land) gain

[Itchy]

Reports say they were trying to put an Hamas flag on the security fence. Thats all the trigger happy scumbags in the IDF need to justify murdering someone.

[seafoid]

It's a concentration camp fence in reality.

[seafoid]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6d83ec1e-33ec-11e2-9ce7-00144feabdc0.html


November 22, 2012 6:39 pm

Winning wars will not make Israel safe

By Philip Stephens

Amid the upheaval of the Arab uprisings, there have been a couple of constants in the Middle East. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's regime in Iran is still defying international pressure over its nuclear programme; and Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli government is attempting to scupper any prospect of a two-state accord with the Palestinians.

Israel's escalation of the conflict in Gaza can be seen as a simple act of deterrence: every nation has the right to defend itself. Mr Netanyahu's record suggests more complicated motives. He is fighting an election; and he wants to forestall any effort by Barack Obama's administration to restart peace negotiations. This summer Mr Obama vetoed an Israeli attack on Iran. Mr Netanyahu does not intend to give ground on Palestine.







The effect of Israeli attacks on Gaza has been to underpin Hamas's legitimacy across the Arab world and to weaken Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority. Not so long ago the Israeli government was talking, albeit through the Egyptians, to Ahmed Al-Jabari, the head of Hamas's military organisation. By killing Mr Al-Jabari, it created another martyr to Palestinian radicalism. Mr Abbas, sidelined by Israel's colonisation of the West Bank, struggles to seem relevant.

This is of a piece with the reactionary world view of the Israeli prime minister. Almost everything has changed in the Middle East; Mr Netanyahu has not. He lives in the shadow of a war hero brother, who perished during the Israeli rescue of hostages at Entebbe, and a father who believed Arabs would never make peace with Jews. As long as Hamas can be cast as terrorists, Mr Netanyahu can refuse to talk peace. The unspoken delusion is that Israel's security can be forever underwritten by military victories.

Even before the Arab uprisings the strategy had run out of road. Ehud Olmert, Mr Netanyahu's predecessor, also waged war on Hamas in an effort to show it would pay a heavy price for terror attacks. Mr Olmert, however, had also begun to understand that military might was not enough. He concluded that durable security depended on facing up to the decision Israel had long avoided: a negotiated withdrawal from the Palestinian territories. "The time has come to say these things," Mr Olmert remarked during the dying months of his premiership.

Mr Netanyahu is creating facts on the ground intended to defy this strategic logic. His settlement policy has left the West Bank resembling nothing so much as a Bantustan from South Africa's apartheid era. You hear his supporters say that it will soon be impossible for any Israeli leader to hand back the land.

All the while, Israel is running out of friends. Hamas hails from the same Islamist family as Mohamed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Not so long ago the US shunned contact with the Brotherhood. This week Mr Obama praised Mr Morsi for his leadership in brokering the Gaza ceasefire.

Turkey, once a close partner, is as hostile to the present government as is any Arab state. The leaders across Europe who this week affirmed Israel's right to defend itself did so through gritted teeth. Even Tony Blair, who as an international envoy to the region has never strayed far from Mr Netanyahu, seems to think it is time to talk to Hamas.

Mr Netanyahu draws a link between Palestine and Iran's nuclear programme. He says Israel can consider peace only when the US has dealt with the threat from an Iranian bomb. Logic runs in the opposite direction. International pressure cannot properly be mobilised against Tehran until the west shakes off the charge of double standards.

The parallel with Iran is anyway an uncomfortable one. Ayatollah Khamenei is a fellow reactionary. He shares Mr Netanyahu's view that military force is the sole source of security. Tehran sees a nuclear capability as an insurance policy against outside threats. The only hope of persuading the regime to forsake the bomb lies in a US offer of security guarantees.

Mr Obama's response to the latest crisis was to send Hillary Clinton, the outgoing secretary of state, to the region. The US president cannot stop there. His visit to Asia this week was another reminder of the pivot towards the Pacific – the US hope that it can shed responsibilities elsewhere to concentrate diplomatic and military resources in east Asia. The flare-up in Gaza was a reminder that some responsibilities cannot be shirked.

During his first term Mr Obama blinked in the face of Mr Netanyahu's intransigence. He took advice from officials who said that the US could never challenge Israel.

What is required now is American leadership – a decision by the White House to set out the parameters for a settlement and to seek broad regional and international support for them. The elements are familiar enough: a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps; unbreakable security guarantees for Israel and its recognition across the Arab world; and a shared capital in Jerusalem. Past Israeli leaders have accepted this as a fair template. If Mr Netanyahu rejects it, he must explain why.

The time has also come for Europeans to leave the sidelines. Instead of whispering behind their hands, they should say publicly what they agree privately. After all, they need do no more than take Mr Olmert's script: Israel's security and democracy cannot indefinitely survive the subjugation of Palestinians. One way to start would be to offer European backing for Palestinian statehood at the UN. If there is a single lesson from the tumultuous events of the past few years, it is that the era of the armed reactionary is coming to a close.

[stew]

By all means condemn Hamas- they kill people too, they aren't always particularly tolerant - but they haven't ruined the lives of 5 million Jews the way the Israeli government has in the case of the palestinians.
Most Israelis don't want to know what they have done to Gaza. They don't want to accept the reality of Israeli state violence.

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/gaza-requiem-six-remarks-on-image-perceptions-and-four-dead-palestinian-children.premium-1.479828

But there is a Reuters picture that I wish I hadn't seen. I looked at it, almost by accident, and it has been seared into my memory ever since. It shows 6 year old Jamal Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 4 year old Yousef Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 7 year old Sarah Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, and one year old Ibrahim Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, all lying together, faces bruised, eyes closed, breaths extinguished, on a steel gurney in a Gaza morgue.
They were killed in an air force bombing raid in what Israel says - and I am absolutely convinced - was a regrettable human error.
But most Israelis haven't seen this picture. They wouldn't want to, even if they could. They may have heard of, but they certainly haven't devoted too much attention to, the killing of the 8 members of the al-Dalu family. Many of them were harshly critical of Haaretz for having chosen to devote a main headline to their demise.

The ordinary Israeli people are the ones who need to see the pictures. While they have their own dead they will not ask questions and while Hamas fire rockets the Generals in Tel Aviv can paint the picture of the big bad ogre who needs to be exterminated.

While Hamas terrorism goes un-condemned the Generals know their high tech terrorism cannot be fully condemned and that those who condone one act of terrorism while condemning another can be painted as Anti-semites.

Who is supposed to condemn Hamas? The Arabs ? 

The whole terrorism/ moral army framing of the conflict is bullshit. As is the anti Zionist= antisemite argument.
Palestinians have their homes demolished because they aren't Jewish. The Israeli approach to the conflict
is utterly amoral. And it makes Jewish ethics more or less redundant.

What difference would it make anyway if Hamas was condemned? Would it change Israel?
Would Israel stop building settlements ?


http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/01/27/erekat-finally-hits-mark#

"(Israeli Foreign Mimnister) Livni is recorded confirming what Palestinians have always accused Israeli governments of doing: creating facts on the ground to prevent the possibility of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza."

When Mr Erekat asked Ms Livni: "Short of your jet fighters in my sky and your army on my territory, can I choose where I secure external defence?". She replied: "No. In order to create your state you have to agree in advance with Israel – you have to choose not to have the right of choice afterwards. These are the basic pillars."

"Israel takes more land [so] that the Palestinian state will be impossible . . . the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we'll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the state". She conceded that it had been "the policy of the government for a really long time".

Anyone with respect for rules of war and who detests the targeting of civilians should condemn Hamas and at the same time Israel. That does not take from the fact that Israel is a murderous rogue state which treats the people of Gaza like dogs in a ghetto. However, if you are unable to be balanced and critical of both sides when their is cause to be then your opinion is worthless and counter productive.

Well put Sir, that said the rules of war are never followed by anybody.

Both are at fault but Israel needs to be reigned in and Obama needs to grow a pair and set them straight on a few things!!! Enough of this shite.

[orangeman]

There's a couple of good photos in this montage  -

http://www.rte.ie/news/galleries/2012/1123/the-week-in-pictures-gallery.html

[give her dixie]

A Palestinian man on Monday died of wounds sustained in an Israeli strike that killed two of his relatives on the first day of Israel's military offensive on the Gaza Strip.

Ahmad Ali Masharawi sustained major burns when an Israeli missile hit his garden in Gaza City on Nov. 14. His infant nephew, 11-month-old, Omar Masharawi, was killed immediately, as was his pregnant sister-in-law Hiba Mashharawi Turk.

BBC correspondent Paul Danahar wrote on Twitter that Ahmad Masharawi had been trying to carry Omar to safety when the house was hit engulfing them both in flames.

Omar's father and Ahmad's brother is BBC employee Jihad Masharawi, whose image cradling his dead son became a symbol of the conflict.

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=542043

[Denn Forever]

Is the truce holding up? 

[give her dixie]

At this stage, Israel have violated the truce 4 times, killing one man and seriously injuring several others.

Talks are ongoing today in Egypt between Hamas and Israel in order to iron out further details.

Click on this link for news on the retirement of Ehud Barak who has taken the fall for what has been seen in Israel as a defeat.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/barak-the-great-hope-that-turned-into-a-bitter-disappointment.premium-1.480714/barak-the-great-hope-that-turned-into-a-bitter-disappointment.premium-1.480714