Apology before the attack

[GHook93]

Quote by: Zeebadee I don't think that Americans living in Texas or New York would peacefully give up their land and homes to provide space for a Jewish Homeland. So why are Palestinians expected to do so?

Your claim is always the same, why should the Palestinians be forced to give up their home-land, yet you believe the Jews should be forced to give up their homeland. Typical.

[rez]

This is getting good. I am learning more. Before I share any sources that I have, I want to see others investigate the issue.

What do you guys know about the "partitioning of the Ottoman Empire?" Seems like all this chaos starts with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

[Zeebadee]

Quote by: GHook93 Your claim is always the same, why should the Palestinians be forced to give up their home-land, yet you believe the Jews should be forced to give up their homeland. Typical.

The Jews didn't have a homeland until 1948, when Palestinian land was given to them without the consent of those living there.

[rez]

Quote by: Zeebadee The Jews didn't have a homeland until 1948, when Palestinian land was given to them without the consent of those living there.

actually you are wrong to say "Palestinian land" it was more like British land after the Ottoman Empire fell. It was the British that decided who would own the land...This was the British Mandate in present day Palestine.

Some promises were made and broken though...

edit to add: Maybe shrike should address what that promise was and how it was broken.

[GHook93]

Quote by: Zeebadee Of course Israel accepted the partition plan, they got what they wanted. And it's disingenuous to claim that after stealing something it's the other side that starts the violence when they try to get it back.

Go back to when the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. All these Arab countries had no problem accepting those partition plans.

[rez]

Quote by: GHook93 Go back to when the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. All these Arab countries had no problem accepting those partition plans.

LOL what?

Britain made other promises during the war that conflicted with the Husayn-McMahon understandings. The Arabs were tricked into a revolt against the Ottoman Empire because they were promised an Arab nation by Britian.

[Zeebadee]

Quote by: GHook93 Go back to when the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. All these Arab countries had no problem accepting those partition plans.

13 countries voted against the partition plan: Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen.

Looks to me like "All these Arab countries" actually DID have a problem accepting it.

[GHook93]

Quote by: Zeebadee The Jews didn't have a homeland until 1948, when Palestinian land was given to them without the consent of those living there.

Collective ignorance. The Jews made their home in Israel long before Islam was even a religion. Answer this one, when was there a Palestinian independent government and country? NEVER.

So just because the Arabs contributed to the explusion of the Jews from Israel/Palestine and then settled in Palestine/Israel, it is fine to say they have the only valid claim and were there first?

[GHook93]

Quote by: Zeebadee 13 countries voted against the partition plan: Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen. Looks to me like "All these Arab countries" actually DID have a problem accepting it.

Did they get countries in the End or is Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yeman, Afghanistan etc. still part of the Ottoman Empire?

[rez]

Quote by: GHook93 Answer this one, when was there a Palestinian independent government and country? NEVER.

I think the Arabs were more entitled to have a independent Arab state moreso, then Jews had to have their own state.

[Zeebadee]

Quote by: GHook93 Did they get countries in the End or is Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yeman, Afghanistan etc. still part of the Ottoman Empire?

Obviously, the vote I was speaking of was the plan to partition Palestine.

BTW, when was Iran a part of the Ottoman Empire?

[GHook93]

Quote by: rez I think the Arabs were more entitled to have a independent Arab state moreso, then Jews had to have their own state.

You are entitled to your opinion!

[jose]

Israel is being allowed to destroy the very notion of a state of Palestine and is imprisoning an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure." The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft. Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure," this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth. "Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack] ..." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war," suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children." Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] by using a competing religious alternative," in the words of a former CIA official. Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this. With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today ..." On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director ... The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is ... an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation." The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment ... The shadows of human beings roam the ruins ... They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions." Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants. More than 40 percent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr. Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper's wound." A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust." Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare. I met Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 percent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 percent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 percent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 percent witnessed shootings; 95.8 percent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed." He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships." Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises." Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media," so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 percent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism," "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians. There are honorable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply. A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction" and one that "refuses to recognize Israel and wants to fight not talk." This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for a ten-year cease-fire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions ... If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]."

Imprisoning a Whole Nation - by John Pilger

[PatrickHenry]

I am currently reading the definitive history regarding what the Zionists of Israel's inception did to the Palestinian residents of that area.

By Israeli historian Ilan Pappe




Thoroughly researched and objective, he substantiates how the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the early Zionists were carried out.

Here's the review:

In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity beginning in the 1948 war for independence, and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet, in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units led by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the "architect of ethnic cleansing." The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948-49, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. Framing his argument with accepted international and UN definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants. An accessible, learned resource, this volume provides important inroads into the historical antecedents of today's conflict, but its conclusions will not be easy for everyone to stomach: Pappe argues that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today, and calls for the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation. Without question, Pappe's account will provoke ire from many readers; importantly, it will spark discussion as well. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I urge those who are not ardent Zionists to read this book. Maybe even the Zionists among us might change their views after perusing it...

[GHook93]

Quote by: PatrickHenry I Thoroughly researched and objective, he substantiates how the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the early Zionists were carried out. Here's the review: I urge those who are not ardent Zionists to read this book. Maybe even the Zionists among us might change their views after perusing it...

Who aren't ardent Zionist, but rather ardent anti-semites perhaps?

The name of the book says it all! "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestise," I am sure this book is as biased against the Jews as you are. Why not also read the Turner Diaries to learn about race relations in the US? lol

[PatrickHenry]

Au contraire, GHook. The author is an Israeli historian. I don't see how an Israeli is biased against Jews...

And I have no bias against any ethnicity, regardless of your hatred for white people. You are the one who targets me for being white in Hawaii. Israel Jerusalem policy condemned

[shrike]

Quote by: rez War is what is wrong with it. No matter how peaceful you make the Jews out to be, they are involved in a war. ?

So? I still don't get you point. Is like blaming victim of robbery just because he was involved in it.

wow I gave you legit argument and you threw it away. I will try again. Why would Muslims sell the land to Jews if Muslims did not want Jews to live there. Sounds like a disagreement among Muslims...

Because they probably wanted the money

There are two sides when people negotiate. If one side disagrees there is no agreement. If Israel decided to solve the conflict peacefully then why would they put themselves in a position where they had to defend themselves

I am thinking you again blaming the victim and not real perpetrators of the violence

[shrike]

Quote by: Zeebadee The Jews didn't have a homeland until 1948, when Palestinian land was given to them without the consent of those living there.

There was not a Palestinian land and there was majority consent. You keep repeating this stuff over and over again but it will not turn to truth no matter how you want it..

[shrike]

Quote by: rez Some promises were made and broken though...

Please don't talk in clues. If you have something on the mind just say it.
I of course have a few guesses what are you talking about but I want you to say it.

[shrike]

Quote by: PatrickHenry I am currently reading the definitive history regarding what the Zionists of Israel's inception did to the Palestinian residents of that area. By Israeli historian Ilan Pappe Thoroughly researched and objective, he substantiates how the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the early Zionists were carried out. Here's the review: I urge those who are not ardent Zionists to read this book. Maybe even the Zionists among us might change their views after perusing it...

Ilan Pappe are known communist pseudo-historian with make up massacres that never happened and support Hammas.

Pappé was involved in a controversy over an M.A. thesis by Teddy Katz, about an alleged massacre by Israeli troops in 1948 in the Palestinian village of Tantura.[3] Pappé publicly supported Katz. In December 2000, as defendant in a libel case, Katz retracted his allegations about the massacre, but then retracted his retraction. The M.A. thesis, which had originally received an unprecedented 97% mark, was reconsidered and eventually disqualified by the University of Haifa because of alleged research misconduct. Katz was subsequently awarded a "non-research" MA.[4][5]

Yeah reliable source on History:rolleyes:

Au contraire, GHook. The author is an Israeli historian. I don't see how an Israeli is biased against Jews

So what if he Israeli Jew does it gave some divine knowledge about Israeli conflict. And yes Jews can hate Jews there is nothing new about that.

PH did you ever considered to read books that don't fit you worldview?