Open thread - Questions about the current conflict, history, etc.

[Lithos]

I would like to try an experiment and to provide an outlet for general-natured question about recent events.

This is an open thread for those with these types of specific fact based questions about history and culture. This is not an open thread for partisan or general editorialization about the conflict. Please keep things factually based - "loaded/biased/slanted" questions (ex. the infamous "When did you stop beating your wife") will be removed.

Normal rules concerning civility, etc. also apply.

Lithos
DU Moderator

[tekisui]

1. Thanks for this.

[EFerrari]

2. I would like to ask people monitoring this who in the American government

has made a statement? Dennis did last week as did another congresswoman from California (sorry, I cannot remember her name).

[tekisui]

3. Johndroe, condi and chimpy are the only ones I've seen.

Other than Kucinich.

[EFerrari]

4. Two CA congresswomen have issued statements. One was a Republican hawk

and the other was a Democrat who urged restraint.

[oberliner]

6. Senate Majority Leader Reid Voices Support For Recent Israeli Air Strikes on the Gaza Strip

"I continue to closely monitor events in Gaza," Reid said in his statement. "I strongly support Israel's right to defend its citizens against rocket and mortar attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza, which have killed and injured Israeli citizens, and to restore security to its residents."

"Hamas' failure to stop these attacks," Reid continued, "only exacerbates the humanitarian situation for the residents of Gaza and undermines efforts to attain peace and security in the region."

http://www.rttnews.com/Content/PoliticalNews.aspx?Node=B1&Id=812183

[EFerrari]

8. Thanks, oberliner. n/t

[oberliner]

9. No problem - curious to see other responses to your question

Been looking for other statements online.

[Jefferson23]

18. Too bad Reid doesn't have the integrity to speak about the advisory decision, ICJ, made in 2004.

Instead he like so many other Dems do nothing but continue to enable the Israeli government, a complete disgrace.

[Idealism]

17. Robert Wexler supports Israel's actions

[cali]

21. Lois Capps and Donna Edwards have both made statements

critical of the Israeli attack on Gaza.

[EFerrari]

25. Thanks, cali. All I dug up was endless Cynthia news pieces. n/t

[oberliner]

27. Here is the Donna Edwards statement according to TPM

"I am deeply disturbed by this week's escalation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, as I have been by the ongoing rocket fire into southern Israel. To support Israel and to ease the humanitarian crisis facing the people of Gaza, the United States must work actively for an immediate ceasefire that ends the violence, stops the rockets, and removes the blockade of Gaza.

"Israel has a right to protect its citizens, but I remain convinced that military measures have only a limited role to play -- a political and diplomatic resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the only way to stop the violence permanently and bring long-term stability to the region. As Americans, we too have a strong interest in ensuring peace, stability, and security in the Middle East and that is why I am committed to supporting active American diplomacy in the region, working together with partners in the international community, from the earliest days of President-elect Obama's administration. America should not sit on the sidelines, as we are doing today -- this does a disservice to our own national interests and security and is unhelpful in bringing stability and security to Israel and the Middle East."

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/02/rep_donna_edwards_d-md_stands/

[EFerrari]

35. Donna Edwards, MD:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=4760879&mesg_id=4760879

[HEyHEY]

5. Cut the civility clause or no dice!

;-)

[OCAtheist]

7. US Aid to Israel

Is the Sinai Agreement considered the major point of US aid to Israel? And, is Henry Kissinger thought to be the prominent architect of the agreement?

[Idealism]

16. The US aid to Israel flowed much before the Sinai Agreement

U.S. aid to Israel (pop. 4.8 million) from 1949 to 1997 totaled over $134 billion. The total US foreign aid to Israel for the same period exceeded the total aid to all of Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean combined (pop. 486 million).

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/24-us-aid-to-israel-fuels-repressive-occupation-in-palestine/

I am not certain this number is correct, but you get the idea, as far as a starting point for aid.

Here is a Congressional Research Service report on recent US Foreign Aid to Israel. It doesn't talk about when the aid first started, but it does note that in 1976 (a short time after Sinai) that the US became the biggest donor to Israel. Also, according to the CRS pdf, since 1985, the US has provided $3 billion in grants to Israel. It is important to consider, however, that US Foreign Aid program does not include special grants and generously structure loan agreements made with Israel, so it is not the complete amount given to them.

http://www.usembassy.it/pdf/other/IB85066.pdf

[Duckhunter935]

34. US aid for the Palestinians

United States economic assistance for the Palestinians has averaged about $85
million per year since Israel and the PLO signed the 1993 Declaration of Principles.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/crs/45198.pdf

Not near enough but at least it is something

[Duckhunter935]

10. Here is a few different timelines

I wish we all could just get along

TimeLine of Israeli-Palestinian History and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
http://www.mideastweb.org/timeline.htm

Timeline of Palestinian History and Politics this one goes way back
http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/timelines/timelinepales.html

Peace process in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_process_in_the_Israeli-Palestinian_conflict

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

11. I know a bit of the history of the area

How Britain(mostly) betrayed the Arabs after WWI and carved up the region into protectorates rather than letting them have independence. But that was Great Britain. When and how exactly did the US get involved and become Israel's best buddy, and why?

[Duckhunter935]

13. Kind of think it was a cold war thing

As most arab countries seen to have been armed by the Soviet Union and Israel was the main US ally in the area. Of course Iran was our ally back then also.

[The Magistrate]

23. In Somewhat Condensed Form, Ma'am

Under President Truman, the U.S. voted for the Partition in 1947. That was about the extent of it for a long while. Initially, Israel received its most important early support from the Soviet Union, which saw it as potential left wedge against English and French colonial interests in the region (remember that Zionism in its foundational stage had signifigant Socialist elements), and from European governments, particularly France, which were in the hands of people who had been Resistance types during WWII, and were quite affronted by the prominence in Arab opposition to Israel of Arab Nationalists who had backed Hitler.

Under President Eisenhower, relations with Israel were frosty, capped by the Suez fiasco of 1956, in which Israel assisted England and France in attempting to seize the Suez Canal from the new government of Col. Nasser in Egypt, an action President Eisenhower opposed and quashed. The Soviets had before 1950 dropped Israel, and begun to court emerging Arab anti-colonial elements, which Col. Nasser typified. President Eisenhower sought to compete with the Soviets for the allegiance of this political trend, but eventually was out-bid.

During the period of President Kennedy, Israel lost the support of France under President de Gaulle, and for the first time acquired some weapons from the United States. It was under President Johnson, under the impetus of the 'Six Day War' in 1967, that Israel first began to receive the whole-hearted patronage of the United States. By this time the Arab world was solidly aligned with the Soviet Union, and the effectiveness of Israeli forces, and the hostile relations between israel and the Soviet Union, made Israel a useful conventional military ally against Soviet incursion into the region, which was feared, though never actually occured.

This relation continued through the cold war, and down to the present day, complicated somewhat by the decision of Egyptian President Sadat to break ties with the Soviet Union and become a U.S. client. In many ways, the alliance has outlived its time; or at least the original geo-political underpinnings of it have faded away. It remains as strong as it is for emotional reasons more than practical ones, at least on the part of the United States. In present conditions, alliance with Israel does not bring any particular benefit to the United States, and from some angles, can be seen as bringing some difficulties. The major impetus behind the alliance is cultural affinity. Israel is a 'Western' state; Israel is in some ways a 'frontier society'; Israel is the 'Biblical Land' and the United States is 'a Christian country': the enemies of Israel do not much like the United States either, and are distinctly foreign and far from 'Western', and this, too, tends to drive the two peoples closer together emotionally.

[Alamuti Lotus]

29. Excellent posting

Throw in something about Nasserist rivalry with the Wahhabis and Hashemites, and it's ready for print.

[The Magistrate]

32. As Was Said, Sir: Condensed Form

One could rabbit on for scores of thousands of words to try and get all the detail in, and it would be necessary to repair to the bookshelves and brew more coffee....

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

30. thank you, sir

This was a very good explanation.

[The Magistrate]

33. Happy To Be Of Service, Ma'am

[azurnoir]

37. Well written synopsis

however there is one small point on which I must disagree

"the United States is 'a Christian country'"

seeing this in print never fails to raise my hackles to their maximum height, America is a Christian majority country but it is most certainly nor a Christian country and was never intended to be because as I am sure you well know our "founding fathers" were Mason and such a state would run counter to Masonic principles.

[The Magistrate]

38. Understood, Ma'am

But in terms of cultural tradition, and widespread conditioning sentiment among the people, it strikes me as taxonomically accurate and necessary in this context. A portion of English support for the early stages of the Zionist enterprise stemmed from this cultural feature as well. It is not just widespread Christian up-bringing, but Christian up-bringing of the sort which stemmed from Puritan roots and inculcated particular identification with Old Testament tales as part of a "New Israel" (in the sense of the Christian worshipper being part of a new 'People of God' that has inherited the covenant from the original Chosen, and thus is in some sense a part of them, and of the Old Testament).

[question everything]

182. Still, there have always been strings attached

First, any foreign aid that involves funds to purchase arms mandates that that purchase would be done in the U.S. So you can tell that Israel has been helping the "military industrial complex' even if you hate everything military.

You mentioned Lyndon Johnson. The 1967 war took place, of course, at the height of the Vietnam war and any soviet made weapons were made available for inspection by U.S. military personnel. Indeed, many American made weapons were tested live when used by Israel.

When an Iraqi pilot defected with his Soviet-made MIG fighter, American military personnel were there to inspect it. (That pilot may have ended up with a new identity in this country.)

And then there are the run of the mill pressure. Some 10 years ago - I think - El Al, the Israeli airline, was considering purchasing new aircraft. Our State Dept. made it clear to the Israeli government that such purchase would have to be of Boeing, not the European Airbus, and Israel complied.

[bernynhel]

233. I wonder if you would still consider Israel of no "particular benefit"

to the United states if you had taken into consideration the elimination of Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1982, for which Israel was, at the time, soundly criticized by every country voicing an opinion, including the U.S., but is now granted kudos for the action, the U.S.'s current position regarding the developing nuclear capabilities in Iran then add the obvious answer to "What would Israel do?" should, at a critical moment, the complexities involving the U.S.'s low-self-esteem-about-what-the-rest-of-the-world-thinks-of-us-at-the-moment,etc. spurs the U.S. into inaction. In addition, Israel, as has always been the case for the last forty + years, has been the U.S.'s only reliable source of intelligence in the region with the acknowledgment that perhaps Israel may not have always deemed it prudent to share, unconditionally.

Another historical note: It was Israel, at a time when the U.S. had supported the Muhudajeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, who had, thanks to the retreat and or surrender of various invading Arab armies over the course of several wars, had the free world's largest stockpile of Soviet military arms and equipment in "like new" condition, some of which interested U.S. participants had negotiated with the Israelis to be delivered into the hands of Afghan militia.

[The Magistrate]

234. Both Items Are Within The Cold War Period, Sir

When the alliance was clearly of mutual benefit.

[Wetzelbill]

175. A bit more for you

In the 1947 vote, the United States leveraged several states that weren't necessarily for the partition to vote for it, this is because Truman was heavily lobbied by American Zionists who were, of course, in favor of the partition. So immediately the future state of Israel got some help from the United States. Then we began to use them as an ally in the context of the Cold War.

Also, from 1952-1965 U.S. economic and military assistance to Israel averaged about 60 million annually. Then from 1965-1973, the aid rose to an average of 230 million a year. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the decade following, the aid has then averaged 2.32 BILLION a year. It hasn't ever dropped below 3 billion a year since then. And before 1985 the aid was lent out as loans, but ever since have been 100 percent grants. From 1948 to 1993, nongovernmental assistance to Israel (mostly from American Jews) totaled 17 billion. Another interesting fact, from 1978-88 the U.S. gave Israel 29 billion in military and economic assistance, which is more than double the cost of the Marshall Plan for all of Europe after WW2.

But prior to 1962, Israel received little in military aid from us, Kennedy and Johnson gave them about 250 million all told during their administrations, but it was Nixon and Ford who truly ratcheted things up. Eventually we even gave them access to sophisticated weapons technology etc.

You can see a few things here. Aid and support for Israel went up as the Cold War heightened. It also went up as Movement Conservatism rose to prominence. Part of that was due to the Cold War, because Movement Conservatism needed that big enemy to fight, but as the Evangelicals power within the movement grew you also began to see and unquestioning support of Israel based on religious grounds, probably culminating in the last disastrous 8 years of Bush policy where Israel had no constraints and diplomacy was virtually nonexistent, much to the detriment of all players involved.

(my figures are mostly from "Politics In The Middle East" James A. Bill and Robert Springborg 5th edition, the basic analysis in the last paragraph is all my own)

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

12. A question about peace groups

I know that at one time Sufis in Palestine were working to build bridges with Jewish Israelis, but that the PLO stopped them. I also have heard about joint Israeli-Palestinian business ventures that apparently have gone bust due to walls/barriers erected by the government. Is there any peace movement going on now other than the kids refusing to serve in the IDF?

[EFerrari]

14. Combatants for Peace -- combatants from both sides:

http://www.combatantsforpeace.org/

New Profile is new and has gotten a lot of heat from the Israeli government:

http://www.newprofile.org/default.asp?language=en

Jewish Voice for Peace:
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/

That's a start, anyway :hi:

[Duckhunter935]

15. Here you go

Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis too many too post here is a link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projects_working_for_peace_among_Israelis_and_Palestinians

[pelsar]

20. much of the joint ventures...

got stopped when the suicide bombers appeared....entry into israel was no longer a "sure thing' especially in the beginning when there was a semi panic in the various security depts in attempts to stop them.

lately with the restored security for israelis some are now being restored.

[LeftishBrit]

153. Many

Those under the umbrella of the Alliance for Middle East Peace

www.allmep.org

The One Voice Movement:

www.onevoicemovement.org

Various projects supported by the New Israel Fund and by the British Shalom Salaam Trust.

www.newisraelfund.org

www.bsst.org.uk


The Parents Circle, a peace and reconciliation organization set up by bereaved family members of people killed on both sides.

www.theparentscircle.org

[OCAtheist]

19. Humanitarian Efforts

I was reading the Cynthia McKinney thread in General Discussion and saw the list of humanitarian groups helping in Gaza, but has anyone read if any aid is being allowed through?

[Idealism]

24. I heard they eased up and allowed UN food aid through since day 2 of the bombings

But I haven't been able to verify more than one source saying it (Haaretz)

[OCAtheist]

28. Food aid is a good step, but...

...not much help when you have a pneumothorax or arterial bleed. I'd like to see medical aid allowed.

[Idealism]

31. I would like to see industrial diesel allowed in. What good is food in winter without electricity?

Like the Israeli Supreme court mandated. There are rolling blackouts often lasting 20 hours per day in Gaza. Here is a detailed report by several Israeli human rights groups on electricity in Gaza:

http://www.gisha.org/UserFiles/File/Press%20Materials/HR%20groups%20-%20resumption%20of%20gaza%20fuel%20supplies%201-1-09%20-%20online%20version.pdf

[azurnoir]

36. 300 Palestinians were allowed in to Israel for medical treatment

I will look for the link.

[Raineyb]

146. What good is that going to do exactly?

I doubt that the UN is going to send in people with food aid into areas where there is open conflict and no civilian zones to go into.

Regards

[GoesTo11]

22. Does anyone know what SOS nominee Clinton's views are?

I know she hasn't said much now (there's one SOS at a time), but she's certainly had time to form some opinions.

[question everything]

183. During the primaries she vigorously defended Israel, but it was against

Iran.

And this is the joker than no one is talking about. From where does Hamas get all those rockets and guns? Yes, they are smuggled in tunnels from the Sinai but what is the source? And from where does Hamas get money to pay the smugglers?

Answer Iran. Which, apparently is still doing this even though it is facing economic hardship with the price of oil going down and down.

As with the Hezbollah war in 2006 we heard that the Arab countries were glad of the war, were hoping that Israel would at least cripple it and Hamas now, both run to their own beat, however they would never come out and join forces to do this.

[Alamuti Lotus]

26. *Why* don't you stop beating your wife?

On a more serious note, good idea--hope this works out.

[Name removed]

39. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[oberliner]

40. Biased/loaded question

Wouldn't you say?

[Idealism]

42. Explain how

[oberliner]

48. You are taking a position not asking a question

The question is loaded in that it is not really a question but a rhetorical statement/condemnation of the US.

[Idealism]

50. Perhaps, because of these failures to uphold the law, the US is indeed complicit?

See post #49. It is not my opinion, I am voicing others.

[bemildred]

41. You are assuming that we have a government of laws.

That matter is still much in dispute.

[The Magistrate]

43. He is Also Assuming, Sir, the Application Of Those Statutes By Judges Would Be To His Taste

Mostly they would not be.

The things are not nearly so clear cut as some would like them to be.

[bemildred]

47. But you have to have a government of laws first.

Otherwise your question does not come up, since otherwise one can expect application of statutes to always be to the governments taste.

Still your question would be the next one.

[The Magistrate]

54. True Enough, My Friend

[Idealism]

49. Well, according to these sources, they

definitively say that there has been collective punishment, and thus, an international law broken. Perhaps you can say the government doesn't exactly 'know' where all the USAID gets spent by Israel. Also, Israel's refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty has not interrupted any military aid given to them, which is directly a violation of the Proxmire Act of the NPT. It is possible that Pakistan, as well, has violated this requirement of US foreign military aid (although I am not sure if the aid we give them is earmarked specifically as 'military' or 'economic growth').

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=17616
Gaza Blockade: 'collective punishment' condemned

Posted: 21 January 2008

Warning of public health emergency in territory as even aid is cut off

Israel's blocking of all fuel supplies to Gaza was condemned as collective punishment today as Amnesty International warned of an emerging public health emergency in the territory.

Amnesty International is calling for an immediate lifting of the fuel blockade and of other restrictions that have been preventing entry or exit of people and goods from the Israeli-occupied territory.

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-30214320071029
EU warns against 'collective punishment' in Gaza
Mon Oct 29, 2007 4:28pm IST

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The European Union warned Israel on Monday against imposing "collective punishment" on the 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by reducing the territory's fuel supplies.

UNITED NATIONS

Press Release
http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/0/183ED1610B2BCB80C125751A002B06B2?opendocument
9 December 2008
The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk, issued the following statement:

GENEVA -- In recent days the desperate plight of the civilian population of Gaza has been acknowledged by such respected international figures as the Secretary General of the United Nations, the President of the General Assembly, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Last week, Karen AbyZayd, who heads the UN relief effort in Gaza, offered first-hand confirmation of the desperate urgency and unacceptable conditions facing the civilian population of Gaza. Although many leaders have commented on the cruelty and unlawfulness of the Gaza blockade imposed by Israel, such a flurry of denunciations by normally cautious UN officials has not occurred on a global level since the heyday of South African apartheid.

[The Magistrate]

52. None Of These Things Are Ruling By Judges In a Competent Tribunal, Sir

And you will not draw me into debate on the details. You have not asked a question of fact that can be answered by providing same.

You are dealing with a body of law which in most instances consists of statute solely, and has no body of case law and precedent by which to make ready assessments of how the statute is to be applied.

[Idealism]

53. Thats the problem with International law I suppose

No true set of courts or guidelines, which means countries can break the laws with impunity.

[The Magistrate]

55. Some Body Of Case Law And Precedent is Emerging, Sir

Mostly from the tribunals on Yugoslavia, and to a lesser extent on Rwanda and some other places on the west Coast of Africa, and from Cambodia.

Generally the judges have interpreted things much more closely than the human rights groups or U.N. officials do; genocide convictions in Yugoslavia, for example, were hard to gain, though conviction came in most instances of the 'lesser charge' of murdering prisoners.

[Idealism]

44. Sigh, it isn't the first time the US gov't has turned their head to crimes

[The Magistrate]

46. This Is Not A Question Concerning Facts, Sir, But An Invitation To Debate

That is not what this thread has been set up for by the moderator of the forum.

[Idealism]

51. When does something become fact?

And how many people must acknowledge something to be before it is accepted as one?

The UN press release I'd say would make it as close to a fact as something could be...

http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/0/183ED1610B2BCB80C125751A002B06B2?opendocument

[The Magistrate]

56. That Is At Best A Prosecutor's Opening Speech, Sir

It does not even lay out an actual case, and is certainly not the verdict of a trial.

[Adsos Letter]

45. Interesting thread.

[bridgit]

57. "history"? Borders? 48? Shout out the date? UN accords? The walls of Jericho?

It is never been 'an eye for an eye'. It has always been 'an eye for 100 blind eyes'. One drop of blood for 100. One life for 100. The ratio has little been since...100:1, that's the way it is. Argue with it but that's the way it is. And sometimes it is what it is and nothing more ~

[Shaktimaan]

58. I don't understand most of this post...

but the conflict has certainly not been defined by a 100:1 casualty ratio. During the War of Independence, for example, Israel lost fully 1% of its entire population. According to your ratio that would leave zero Arabs from 1949 onwards.

Argue with it but that's the way it is.

No, I swear, there are still Palestinians left on the planet. Several million of them, in fact. Argue with it but that's the way it is.

[bridgit]

59. The *current* conflict is sporting a ratio of essentially 100:1, check it!!

4 Israeli dead...400 and counting Palestinians, the matter, the numbers are beyond dispute. It's easy to hide behind 48/67/UN this & that...that's where we hide, that's where we do not understand

[Shaktimaan]

90. I don't dispute the ratio for the past week or so.

But you said that it was ALWAYS 100:1, and that is not the case.

This conflict is over 100 years old and is extremely complicated. To look at a single aspect of it from only the past week and make judgements based solely on that is pointless. One should not judge anyone in this manner.

It's easy to hide behind 48/67/UN this & that

It's easy to hide behind the history of the conflict? Are you serious? Why would you reject having a comprehensive understanding of the history of the conflict before making blanket statements about it? I find it disturbing that you would so quickly dismiss the complex history of this conflict as "this&that" while assuming that you could glean enough knowledge from a single week's events.

that's where we do not understand

well... clearly.

[bridgit]

91. Oh please, this "conflict" is not merely "over 100 years old" it's millinea old...

It didn't start in 48, nor end in 67, nor was it modulated to an agreeable conclusion by any UN this & that. That much *is* clear whether you prefer to understand it or not. The oral & scriptural traditions of the Hebrew people are your guidelines to the values the Jews place upon their citizenry. They are your blithe brush strokes *you* have employed that are become, certainly in my opinion: void, of either prose or poetries

"Why would you, yeah you reject having a comprehensive understanding of the history of the conflict" without understanding the people, the principles. Many do hide behind historical dates. Wasting precious time; they bobble them in the palms of their hands. They recite them as though they are the end-game itself. Though if that were the case why does the game go on? But here's one for you, and don't take my word for it by all or any means, when...

As though being blown dry: the Caterpillar's recitation of history dried Alice right out being filled with hot air. Then he bid Alice run along unless she were interested in taking a nap in that he was about to recite dates they being so boring,


It is a knowable thing, to know, that while and in spite of anyone that may come up in here to argue otherwise: Israel values humanity...they value their very bones. And that has been the case for a long, long, long, long-long time. Well more than a "100 years"

Your umbrage is with 100:1? Then pick your own number, do your own math.

[excess_3]

60. Q. what utility does the word 'civilian' have, ...

when every Gazan is a civilian?

the use of that word doesn't narrow down
the range of people being discussed.

[oberliner]

62. Every Gazan is a civilian?

Where do you get that from?

The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades certainly would not call themselves civilians.

After the first days of the bombing, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees representative said:

We have been compiling a list of civilian casualties from medical and hospital sources," said Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the UNRWA agency.

"We have 51 confirmed civilian casualties including women and children."

Clearly the UNRWA believes that the word "civilian" narrows down the range of people being discussed.

[excess_3]

70. what Gazans would be non-civilians?

(to my knowledge, Gaza does not
have an army)

armed Gazans still are civilians

what they call themselves, does not matter

what does matter,
is being a sworn-in soldier and wearing a uniform,
or not

[oberliner]

73. Perhaps you can ask the The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees

They have made statements about the numbers of civilian casualties.

The UN Secretary General has also called on Israel to make sure to make a distinction between combatants and civilians during the conflict.

[hack89]

97. Hamas has an organized and trained army of 20,000 men

Today, the group has five brigades corresponding to five sections of the Gaza Strip - North, Center, Gaza City, and two brigades in the South. Each brigade has a commander and several battalions. Alongside the battalions there are special forces - units with expertise in rocket fire, mortar attacks, roadside bombs and commando operations.

In Gaza, the IDF would face an army of close to 20,000 armed men, among them at least 15,000 Hamas operatives. The rest are from Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Resistance Committees.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1229868807023&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

[The Magistrate]

63. In Partisan War, Sir, Not a Lot, is The Short Answer

The actual category is 'non-combatant' as distinguished from 'combatant'.

Partisan or guerrilla war involves forces on at least one side which are technically civilians, in that they are not members of a state's regularly constituted armed forces. The modern laws of war make some allowance for this sort of force (formerly, persons taken in arms out of uniform were subject to summary execution), but it is difficult to fit into the legal framework. Among other things, such forces are supposed to wear some identifying item signifying they are combatants separate from the non-combatant populace, and this regulation is wholly, and from the point of view of such forces necessarily, ignored. It is essential for the survival of partisan forces, let alone for their eventual success, that the combatants be able to blend in with, and conceal themselves among, the non-combatant populace. This form of concealment is their most effective counter to the superior firepower of conventional foes, and serves as their equivalent of 'rear areas' for a conventional force. But it brings them into continual conflict with laws of war regulating the responsibility of combatants to take up positions with regard for the safety of non-combatants, so these are not involved in enemy attacks on combatants. The enemy engaged with such forces is continually put to the choice of engaging and likely doing harm to non-combatants, or refraining from engaging, thus sparing non-combatants but endangering their own forces through the continued existence of their foe.

When a partisan or guerrilla force is guiding its actions by doctrines of 'peoples war', and enjoys genuine mass support, the matter becomes even murkier. A great many people who are not actively members of the armed guerrilla force will still willingly perform a variety of actions to assist it: they will observe and report, they will carry messages, provide shelter, hide and store weapons, and the like. Whether people engaged in such activities are counted as combatants or not is a vexed question, not susceptible of an easy answer.

[Name removed]

61. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[THUNDER HANDS]

64. how come if Israel has one of the top-5 militaries in the world

they need to mandate all their citizens serve time in the armed forces?

If they ever had to fight a really large ground war, they'd probably have help from their allies (ie, us).

[Lithos]

65. Probably not

The last three major land wars (1967, 1973, 1982) were fought without a ground ally.

L-

[aranthus]

151. Because

Israel is still a very small country, with a population of only about 7 million, of whom about 2.5 million (male and female) are eligible and fit to serve. Israel's standing military is therefore relatively small, about 177,000. The standing military forces of the Arab states are far larger. The only way that Israel can maintain its superiority is to have a large citizen army. They can't afford to depend on other countries to defend it, especially since no other country has ever sent troops to help Israel in any war with the Arabs.

[question everything]

184. There has never been a non-Israeli soldier who fought

in any of Israel's wars.

So you can sleep well, knowing that you will not be sent to fight on Israel's behalf (that is, if you think that this is your duty to serve in the armed forces, as most Israelis do).

[Lithos]

192. 1956 - Sinai

I believe the British and French landed paratroopers into the Suez area though Israel had already secured victory by that time.

L-

[aranthus]

199. True. However.

In 56 the British and French were not coming to the aid of the Israelis. Instead, they were using Israel's approach to the Suez Canal as an excuse to invade and retake the canal for themselves (as they had previously agreed with the Israelis).

[LeftishBrit]

240. Their allies haven't fought in any of their wars yet

And if a country is at war/ frequently in conflict/ in danger of conflict, then it usually does have conscription. Perhaps it's a good thing that Israel does have universal military service: at least the leaders have to take into account when making decisions that their own kids could get sent to war.

[Median Democrat]

66. Aren't Israel and Hamas's Leaders Both Democratically Elected? Does That Make War Legitimate?

Hamas refused to renew the truce. Israel refuses to halt its current offensive. There is a lot of talk directed at the "leadership" but, shouldn't criticism be directly leveled at those Palestinians and Israelis who voted for their respective leaders?

I always hear folks claim that the Israeli/Palestinian people want peace. Okay. So, why do they elect leaders who insist on promoting violence? Does anyone want to make the argument that the Israeli/Palestinian people should not be held accountable for the action of the leaders they democratically elected?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/18/AR2006021801571.html

/snip

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Feb. 18 -- The radical Islamic group Hamas took control of the Palestinian parliament Saturday during a somber swearing-in ceremony, and legislators from the new majority quickly made clear that they would not abide by signed agreements that recognize Israel's right to exist.

In a speech to the new 132-seat Palestinian Legislative Council, the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, staunchly defended past agreements with Israel, including the 1993 Oslo accords that created the Palestinian Authority and legislature that Hamas entered Saturday. Abbas, the Palestinian Authority's president, called for the immediate renewal of negotiations with the goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, declaring, "There is a Palestinian partner" for such talks.

"We, as presidency and government, will continue our commitment to the negotiation process as the sole political, pragmatic and strategic choice through which we reap the fruit of our struggle and sacrifices over the long decades," Abbas told lawmakers gathered here in the government compound known as the Muqata, as well as those who participated by teleconference from the Gaza Strip.

Past agreements with Israel were backed by Abbas's Fatah party, now a minority for the first time. Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, maintains that negotiations have failed to achieve Palestinian independence and has favored an armed campaign that has included more than 50 suicide attacks inside Israel during the most recent uprising.

/snip

So, Hamas was elected on the premise that an armed campaign would achieve better results. Given this mandate, isn't it better to let the hostilities continue so that Hamas can deliver on its democratic mandate from the Palestinian electorate?

[bridgit]

67. I've read where Israeli's are 65%+ in favor of these actions cause they're tired...

of lying Palestinian leaders read here Hamas; lobbing rockets into their even sparsely populated areas of Israel. They're tired of suicide bombers blowing up pizza parlors and coffee shops, market places and such. If Palestinians desire the crossings be relaxed...then let them be a part of logging some verifiable, noteworthy span of time & peace; let that be filed and placed on the books in earnest. But they will not. And so the road blocks stay up. They become tighter. Traffic is chocked. And people seemed shocked, shocked!! -- as to why. As though they had no clue whatsoever. They may be able to claim they've tried, but they can't really say their leaders have cause their leaders keep threatening the death, chaos & destruction of Israel.

[Name removed]

68. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Lithos]

69. Hamas never won a majority of the vote

Fatah splintered itself such that Hamas won a plurality (not a majority) which allowed them to win enough seats to assume control of parliament. There was no mandate, though like Republicans here, they went ahead and pretended there was.

As for Israel, the government in power now is a coalition one which is a bit more complicated in that smaller parties carry at times more power than their voting size would otherwise warrant. I will let someone from Israel comment here as figuring out all of the relationships and goals for a given situation requires a playbill to keep the plot and actors defined.

L-

[ProgressiveMuslim]

92. That is not true. Following Hamas' surprise victory, they begged Fatah to form a unity

government and work together.

Fatah, preferring to see their rivals lose, chose to support the US & Israel's isolation of Hamas.

It's really inaccurate to blame that on Hamas.

[Lithos]

94. I would not use the word "beg"

Everything I read indicates they came in much like the Republicans did following Clinton. Their attitude was not one of cooperation and bipartisanship, but rather one of haughtiness.

As for the election, they did not win a majority. Their parliamentary majority was due more to the structure of how delegates were awarded than any mandate.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

96. My point stands. Hamas was caught completely off guard and ill-prepared and they admitted as much.

They definitely beseeched (insert the verb of your choice here) Fatah to create a unity government.

The haughtiness was on the part of Fatah, which basically told Hamas to go fuck itself, even if that meant screwing the people of Palestine.

[The Magistrate]

99. Hamas, Ma'am, Made the Right Noises: A Tribute the Skill Of Its Political Leadership

Which has never been in question; they are skilled at what they do. In political life one often asks for things in order to put the onus of refusal on a hostile party, so that it becomes possible to say 'look, we tried!' as one proceeds to do what one intended to do all along to do down a rival. Relations between Hamas and Fatah were those of a revolutionary party to a ruling element, and no revolutionary party ever has or ever will form a genuine front with a ruling element it seeks to supplant, nor has any ruling element ever entered into a genuine front with a revolutionary party it seeks to suppress. As the saying goes "Don't watch the lips, watch the hands."

[ProgressiveMuslim]

100. One thing one can safely say about Hamas...

They mean what they say, and generally don't engage in a lot of political double talk.

Since you don't hear them in Arabic, or I'm assuming, have access to the info they put out, I wouldn't expect you would know this.

[The Magistrate]

101. Again, Ma'am, My Ignorance Is Legend....

It has always been my practice to leave judgement of the worth of my contributions to their audience.

[Lithos]

111. The problem is who to listen to

Hamas is a loosely organized group with several factions including those who follow Mashal and those who follow those local to Gaza.

[Malikshah]

116. Are we speaking of Hamas, Likud, Kadima, or Labor here?

Or Fatah?

That is the nub.

Watch the hands in all cases. Problem is only a few selected hands are slapped. Again, another nub in the history.

[The Magistrate]

117. The Axion Applies To All, Sir, in My View

And most could use a bit of a wash....

[aranthus]

154. What do you mean by, "legitimate?"

Are you using it as a stand in for "just war?" If so, I don't think it matters whether the governments are elected or not. Let's assume that two governments are dictatorial, and further that government A has grievances against government B, that B refuses to satisfy. So A attacks B, and B responds. Now assume that they are both democracies, and that the same events occur. As between the state actors, nothing has changed. It's still a dispute between two governments. A still has grievances. B still has a right to self defense. What makes the war just, is the nature of A's grievance and the reasons for B's refusal to satisfy that grievance. For example, the Soviet Union fought a just war against Germany in World War II because the Germans invaded the USSR to murder its people and take the country for themselves. Both the USSR and Germany were dictatorships. Moreover, since Germany was a dictatorship, one could at least argue that the Germans were not responsible. Nevertheless, the Allies bombed German cities relentlessly and ruthlessly, because it was necessary to win the war.

As to whether Hamas was elected to conduct a war against Israel, I think that is stretching the remaining of Hamas' electoral victory. I think it is more accurate to say that Hamas was elected for several reasons, but largely in spite of the fact that it was the war party. Either way, I don't think that it matters for purposes of this discussion whether Hamas is the duly elected government or if they have no more political legitimacy than the Nazis. They are the government, and excercise sufficient control such that they can be held responsible for the rocket attacks on Israel.

[Violet_Crumble]

71. Are biased/slanted answers allowed?

I'm talking about one I've just seen in this thread that answers a question by saying that people who live in a democracy deserve what they get when it comes to violence....

[The Magistrate]

72. That Bit Started As A Separate Thread, Ma'am, That Was Combined Into This

[Violet_Crumble]

74. Ah, I'm having heaps of trouble keeping up lately...

There was one thread yesterday that really confused me until I figured out it was a combined one...

[Idealism]

75. Need help finding death tolls from Israel for suicide bombers

Approximate start of toll would be around 2006.

The reason Israel gives for the blockade of Gaza is due in large part to trying to keep out suicide bombers. Anyone have rough estimate numbers from a reliable source?

[Lithos]

76. A vague question

First, 2006 is not a good year to consider this as the history of suicide bombing goes back to 1994. Second, what do you classify as a suicide attack? Many shooting sprees were essentially suicidal in nature, but are a bit different than those would strap on a bomber's belt. Third, many of the current security measures were in place by 2006 (road blocks, the start of construction of the Wall, etc.) to which claims of preventative success will be made. And last of all, you would have to figure in somehow, those bombers which were intercepted (gave up, defected, killed prior to the attack, etc.) prior to reaching the target - the number of interceptions did go up with the tightening of Israeli security.

That said, assuming just the bomber's belt attack, from the period 1994 to 2005, Hamas alone accounted for 490 deaths. You can see that the number peaked and was declining by 2005 when only two successful attacks were made with at least 29 failed attempts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hamas_suicide_attacks

[Idealism]

78. Does Islamic Jihad get counted among Hamas' suicide bomber death tolls?

[The Magistrate]

79. A Seperate Link Is Given For That Body, Sir

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_Islamic_Jihad_suicide_attacks

[Idealism]

81. Thank you

[Lithos]

80. Don't think so

there was a separate listing for Islamic Jihad.

[Idealism]

82. The reason I asked since 2006

was since Hamas came to power and that it was supposed to be the final straw that forced Israel's hand into blockading off the Strip, so was kind of surprised to find the deaths tapering off around 2004 in those links. Why is it that no Israeli-Palestinian death totals are available after 2005 on that link group?

[Lithos]

83. My guess

The strategy had been shown as being unable to breach the Israeli checkpoints and security and that rockets were proving more effective at the goal of creating fear/terror. If you look at 2005, you will see a high number of failed attempts; the only two detonations were at Israeli checkpoints.

Also, if you look on similar graphs, you will see a significant shift beginning in 2006 in the attacks from the Gaza strip away from mortars to rockets which were proving far more effective as a terror-inducing weapon in that they could leap over Israeli security check points. The increasing range and sophistication of each generation of rocket design meaning that the number of Israeli population within range had increased from a few tens of thousands to currently a half-million.


L-

[Idealism]

85. I was under the impression that Hamas' current arsenal

only allowed them to reach 40 km from the boarder. Perhaps that was the Qassam rockets range, I don't seem to recall them naming specifics. Do you know of any estimates of Hamas' likely rocket holdings and their relative range from the boarder?

I recall a Haaretz article saying that Dimona was within range, but the next day the IDF said it overestimated Hamas' rocket range and that the nuclear site was safe.

[Lithos]

89. 40 km is the top range at this point

The effective range of a Grad/Katyusha is about 25km. This places several large cities of Ashdod (200k), Ashkelon (110k), Kiryat Gat (50k) and Be'ersheva (190k) and several smaller towns such as Sderot within range. It is hard to judge, but I would say that about 600-700k people are theoretically in range. Also, Ashdod is one of Israel's larger ports, so there is a fairly significant economic relevance as well.

Dimona was never in range. It is about 60km at its closest to Gaza. However, if that range is reached, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would also be targets as they are about the same distance.

[The Magistrate]

84. Mostly Because There Have Not Been Many Attacks Inside Israel Since Then, Sir

Here is a list from the Israeli Foreign Ministry:

Jan 19, 2006 - Thirty-one people were wounded in a suicide bombing in a shawarma restaurant near the old central bus station in Tel Aviv. The Jerusalem Battalions of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.

Mar 30, 2006 - Four people were killed when a suicide bomber hitchhiker disguised as an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student detonated his explosive device in a private vehicle near the entrance to Kedumim.

Apr 17, 2006 - Eleven people were killed and over 60 wounded in a suicide bombing during the Passover holiday near the old central bus station in Tel Aviv, at the Rosh Ha'ir shawarma restaurant, site of the Jan 19 bombing. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.

Jan 29, 2007 - Three employees of a bakery in the southern city of Eilat were killed in a suicide bombing. The Islamic Jihad and the Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.

Feb 4, 2008 - Lyubov Razdolskaya, 73, of Dimona was killed and 38 wounded - Razdolskaya's husband critically - in a terror attack carried out by a suicide bomber at a shopping center in Dimona. A police officer shot and killed a second terrorist before he detonated his explosive belt. A Hamas statement from Gaza praised the attack, calling it an "heroic act".

Mar 6, 2008 - Eight students of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem were killed when a terrorist armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle infiltrated the yeshiva and opened fire in the library where about 80 people were gathered, mostly teenagers. Eleven others were wounded, three critically. The terrorist, a resident of East Jerusalem, was killed by an IDF officer.

May 14, 2008 - At about 6 pm an Iranian-made Grad rocket launched from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip hit a busy shopping mall in central Ashkelon. 90 people were wounded, four of them seriously, among them a 24-year-old mother and her infant daughter.

July 2, 2008 - Three people were killed and over 50 wounded in a terror attack in Jerusalem. Driving a bulldozer on Jaffa Road between the Central Bus Station and the Mahane Yehuda market, the terrorist plowed into cars and pedestrians as well as two public buses carrying some 50 passengers. Police shot and killed the terrorist.

Note that the last three are not the classic 'suicide bomber' pattern you enquired of.

[Idealism]

86. Question: No one in what you posted does it say "Hamas took responsibility"

or something to that effect. The closest I saw was "Hamas praised the act calling it heroic"

Are these all understood to be from Hamas members, excluding the Islamic Jihad or Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades?

[The Magistrate]

87. No, Sir, It Was Simply the Total List

My apologies for any confusion. The point was the relative scarcity, as you had enquired about the absence of any information past 2005.

This source seperates out incidents involving Hezbollah to the north, and centered on the Lebanon War of 2006; when these are all lumped in as 'terrorism' it obscures things a bit.

[Idealism]

88. Ah, forgot about that incident possibly distorting figures

It is very difficult to find clear cut answers to these few questions in recent years, it seems.

[Kurska]

77. Regardless fo the answer that'd be hard to interpt

Can't those numbers regardless of what they say be spinned very easily?

Too few and you could say israel is either making a mountain out of a molehill or that blockade is preventing suicide bombings.

To many and you could say israel is entirely justified in their fear of suicide bombers or that the blockade isn't effective so why keep doing it.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

93. For anyone who is interested in a Palestinian perspective

here are a couple of sites that collect a variety of op-eds and other kinds of info from a pro-Palestinian point of view.

http://gazasiege.org/

http://imeu.net/

http://www.miftah.org/

[scarletwoman]

95. Thank you for providing this. I'd like to add a link to Mideastweb's article on Zionism,

which I found to be exceptionally informative:

http://www.mideastweb.org/zionism.htm

The history of Zionism and the creation of Israel

<snip>

"Zionism" derives its name from "Zion," (pronounced "Tzyion" in Hebrew) a hill in Jerusalem. The word means "marker" or commemoration. "Shivath Tzion" is one of the traditional terms for the return of Jewish exiles. "Zionism" is not a monolithic ideological movement. It includes, for example, socialist Zionists such as Ber Borochov, religious Zionists such as rabbi Kook, revisionist nationalists such as Jabotinsky and cultural Zionists exemplified by Asher Ginsberg (Achad Haam). Zionist ideas evolved over time and were influenced by circumstances as well as by social and cultural movements popular in Europe at different times, including socialism, nationalism and colonialism, and assumed different "flavors" depending on the country of origin of the thinkers and prevalent contemporary intellectual currents. Accordingly, no single person, publication, quote or pronouncement should be taken as embodying "official" Zionist ideology.

Background

Zionism did not spring full blown from a void with the creation of the Zionist movement in 1897. Jews had maintained a connection with Palestine, both actual and spiritual, even after the Bar Kochba revolt in 135, when large numbers of Jews were exiled from Roman Palestine, the remains of their ancient national home. The Jewish community in Palestine revived and, under Muslim rule, is estimated to have numbered as many as 300,000 about 1000 AD, prior to the Crusades. The Crusaders killed most of the Jewish population of Palestine or forced them into exile, so that only about 1,000 families remained after the reconquest of Palestine by Saladin. The Jewish community in Palestine waxed and waned with the vicissitudes of conquest and economic hardship, and invitations by different Turkish rulers to displaced European Jews to settle in Tiberias and Hebron. At different times there were sizeable Jewish communities in Tiberias, Safed, Hebron and Jerusalem, and numbers of Jews living in Nablus and Gaza. A few original Jews remained in the town of Peki'in, families that had lived there continuously since ancient times.

In the Diaspora, religion became the medium for preserving Jewish culture and Jewish ties to their ancient land. Jews prayed several times a day for the rebuilding of the temple, celebrated agricultural feasts and called for rain according to the seasons of ancient Israel, even in the farthest reaches of Russia. The ritual plants of Sukkoth were imported from the Holy Land at great expense.

From time to time, small numbers of Jews came to settle in Palestine in answer to rabbinical or messianic calls, or fleeing persecution in Europe. Beginning about 1700, groups of followers led by rabbis reached Palestine from Europe and the Ottoman Empire with various programs. For example, Rabbi Yehuda Hehasid and his followers settled in Jerusalem about 1700, but the rabbi died suddenly, and eventually, an Arab mob, angered over unpaid debts, destroyed the synagogue the group had built and banned all European (Ashkenazy) Jews from Jerusalem. Rabbis Luzatto and Ben-Attar led a relatively large immigration about 1740. Other groups and individuals came from Lithuania and Turkey and different countries in Eastern Europe.

At no time between the Roman exile and the rise of Zionism was there a movement to settle the holy land that engaged the main body of European or Eastern Jews. The condition of Jews both in Europe and Eastern countries made such a movement unimaginable. Many, however, were attracted to various false Messiahs such as Shabetai Tzvi, who promised to restore Jews to their land. For most Jews, the connection with the ancient homeland and with Jerusalem remained largely cultural and spiritual, and return to the homeland was a hypothetical event that would occur with the coming of the Messiah at an unknown date in the far future. European Jews lived, for the most part in ghettos. They did not get a general education, and did not generally engage in practical trades that might prepare them for living in Palestine. Most of the communities founded by these early settlers met with economic disaster, or were disbanded following earthquakes, anti-Jewish riots or outbreaks of disease. The Jewish communities of Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem and Hebron were typically destroyed by natural and man-made disasters and repopulated several times, never supporting more than a few thousand persons each at their height. The Jews of Palestine, numbering about 17,000 by the mid-19th century, lived primarily on charity - Halukka donations, with only a very few engaging in crafts trade or productive work.

It's a very long and complicated piece, and I had to read it twice through the first time I came across it to "get" a lot of it. However, it seems to be very even-handed and dispassionate, and a useful historical resource.

sw

[The Magistrate]

98. That is A Useful Piece, Ma'am, And Fairly Lays Out the Matter

Two slight supplemental points, on English relations at the outset, seem worth providing.

The early 'British Zionism' of Lord Palmerston et. al. in the mid-nineteenth century was, at the governmental level, a feeler for increased English influence in the Ottoman sphere as that old imperium began to decline. One of the means by which European powers in that day sought to effectively meddle in the affairs of the declining Ottoman was to constitute themselves protectors of some non-Moslem minority under Ottoman rule, and take the occasion of harm done to same as pretext for imposing some measure or other on the Sultan's government. Czarist Russia set itself up as the protector of Eastern Orthodox minorities, and France as the protector of Catholic ones. Protestants, particularly Anglicans, being conspicuously thin on the ground the Ottoman ruled, England was shut out from access to this form of meddling, and could gain concessions from the Ottoman only by the sometimes awkward method of backing the none too popular "Turk' against some other Western power. A concentration of Jewish subjects under English sponsorship could have provided England this sort of internal client. As things developed, of course, England found other ways to press exactions against the Ottoman in the latter nineteenth century.

The author expresses some bewilderment at Mr. Churchill's estimate of Jewish power in the latter days of World War One, and of the consequent benefit he expected England and the Allies would gain by aiding the early Zionists. It is an odd feature of Western culture in the fin de siecle period that belief in conspiratorial Jewish influence on a grand scale was widespread, especially among ruling elites. A particular feature of this was a belief that 'the Hidden Hand of the Jew' was raised against Czarist Russia in vengeance for the Black Hundreds pogroms in the period. As is often the case with such widespread delusions, a fact or two could be pointed to in proof: to give one example, the Japanese military effort pressed against Russia to decisive victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was largely sustained with loans from the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. in New York, whose principals stated openly they did so to do Russia harm, and would consider the money well spent even if they lost every dime of it. The Bolshevik Revolution was widely considered to be a creation of this 'Hidden Hand of the Jew': writings of the period, including not just those of Mr. Churchill but of President Wilson, and many others great and small, could be cited in wearying abundance to demonstrate the point. There is no doubt that a good portion of the motivation of the English government in adopting the Balfour Declaration was to get 'the Hidden hand of the Jew' on the side of the Allies against the Central Powers, and get it to leave off its death-grip on Russia, as they perceived the case of 'Jewish Bolshevism' to be.

[scarletwoman]

127. Your "supplemental points" are much appreciated! I so appreciate any additional information to aid

in my overall understanding of how things have reached such a pass.

Salaam and Shalom,
sw

[The Magistrate]

143. Happy To Be Of Service, Ma'am!

It is a damned bad pass things have got to, and whatever side of the conflict one is more partial to, it cannot be viewed with anything but profound regret.

"The dead know only that it is better to be alive."

[mmonk]

102. So how did the latest conflagration start? Facts preferable to opinion please.

[Trajan]

103. Facts ...

People hate ....

IBTL ?

[Duckhunter935]

104. Does it really matter now

They just need to stop it - both sides

[mmonk]

105. I just wanted to know. I haven't been following.

How can it be stopped without knowing how or why it escalated?

[Raineyb]

147. How does one hold two sides equally responsible for slaughter

when one side clearly has all the power?

I don't get this at all.

Regards

[peacetalksforall]

106. I agree, we need every detail of the lead up to this massacre so that we can be

justified in whichever position we take. I don't know what led up to this. But, if there had been something quite awful, we would have been hearing about it. There is another video on DU right now by a teacher-journalist who talked about Israelis shooting at Gaza fishermen.

Israel always gets the camera and the mike - we don't have much chance of learning the real truth if we don't watch alternative news.

Israel should officially stop asking for sympathy. They have crossed the line with the force of an avalanche.

Whatever we learn, I start from a position of total abandonment of any support for Israel. This is the most classic example of excess killing in their entire history as a nation.

Go to Raw Story if you can't find the latest video of a former marketplace within the Gaza Strip.

[mmonk]

107. Neither political party in the US will abandon support.

[stillcool]

108. Depends on who/what

you are willing to believe. Was there ever a halt to the violence?

[mmonk]

109. I was looking for circumstances and instances, not who to believe.

Surely facts exist.

[The Magistrate]

110. The Thing To Remember, Sir, is That this Is Simply the Latest Battle In A Long War

It is not a case of a peaceable condition being altered by some event that changes the condition to one of war, rather it is a case of entrenched foes pressing a an on-going fight in a manner that seems desirable to their leadership at present.

The government of Israel and Hamas regard one another with extreme hostility, and utter distrust. Each believes the other wants to destroy it utterly, and can find good ground for that belief. Israel considers the election of Hamas to government in Gaza to have been a severe blow to its policy and plans, and has aimed to undo that action; Hamas considers its election to government in Gaza an opening of incalculable value, which might lead to its control of Arab Palestinian political life, and regional prestige as the leading opponent of Israel.

These two hostile parties entered into a cease fire late last spring: it was an act of convenience rather than good faith on both sides, and neither seems to have taken it as anything but an opportunity to mature plans against the other. Israel, by credible reports, immediately commenced planning for an offensive against Hamas in Gaza, and with connivance of elements of Fatah continued actions against Hamas in the Jordan valley. Hamas in Gaza immediately commenced building up an arsenal of improved rockets and preparing fortifications, and allowed some rockets to be fired by allied militant groups into Israel from Gaza. As the cease-fire neared expiration, both sides put into action the preliminaries of plans long matured, for mutual provocations with an eye towards procuring a showdown.

That showdown is in progress at present.

[mmonk]

113. Yes, I knew it was just the latest in a long war. Thanks for your last paragraph

which expounded on the maturing of plans and the build up nearing the expiration of the cease fire. That is what I was more or less looking for in my question. It answers quite a bit.

[question everything]

185. A major fact that is missing: in 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza

Gaza has not been an occupied land since then.

Yet, it continued to send rockets at Israeli homes since then. Every day, every day. This is what Obama saw when he visited there and made his famous comment about doing whatever was in his power to stop anyone sending rockets at his daughters' rooms.

Just because the missiles have not caused many fatalities does not mean that Israelis should live like that. And this is why most of our leaders have expressed support for Israel, giving their own examples of Miami, or San Diego, or other places that are within 30 miles of the Mexican border.

And when you ask Hamas what it wants, the reply, in Arabic, for local consumption, is that it seeks the annihilation Israel.

Why should anyone accept this and live like that? Why should anyone even care about "proportion" if the enemy continues its attacks and continues to express its desire to annihilate you?

[stillcool]

112. I think everyone has their own facts,..

here's a bunch of news organizations that might be helpful..

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Independent_Media/Internet_News_Information.html

[mmonk]

115. Thanks

[backscatter712]

114. Could the mods could provide us a place for photos and videos of the current Gaza violence?

OK, maybe there's been problems in the past with graphic videos and photos being posted deceptively or out-of-context, and maybe that's why there's now the rule that OPs cannot have videos or images.

Nevertheless, with the current violence in Gaza, there's been a lot of videos and images, which are current and relevant, and I personally believe should be seen by those who have the stomach to see them. They've been moderated into oblivion, and I don't believe that is right.

Maybe the mods should start a media thread here in I/P specifically for pictures and videos of the violence in Gaza, so there's a place where it can go for those who want to post it or view it. Have a vetting process in place, so deceptive videos and images can be dealt with, and put plenty of warnings so those who don't want to see pictures of violence don't get caught unaware.

I just don't think that the images coming out of Gaza should be unseen.

[methinks2]

119. go to the Information Clearinghouse website

they have uncensored news and links

[Lithos]

122. Couple of comments

First, there is a huge issue with images coming out of Gaza at the moment, most notably in that they are constructed/selected not with the thought to provide factual information, but to shape emotions. In many cases, context is lost or distorted. (Ie, you don't see everything). It also doesn't help that people see things that they want to see and that a nice title can prejudice someone's viewing. Photographs and images are extremely visceral and among the most powerful emotional devices known, but they are also among the easiest tools to create a false fiction.

Second, when we allowed images to be posted, it became a huge war between posters to see who could out do the others. So, we ended up with a war of pictures of victims, including dueling images from both sides. This was one of the more disgusting things to deal with and completely non-productive and extremely inflammatory. One picture may be worth a thousand words, but one picture can also be worth a thousand flames.

Third, back to context. We have a huge problem, especially in I/P, with people being "helpful" (or are part of a PR campaign). The problem is, we're seeing many photographs and videos coming up which have absolutely NOTHING to do with the current events in Gaza.

One example, there is a video which is sourced to a Gazan blogger which is making the rounds which I've removed quite a few times. This video has gotten people stirred up and claims to show the aftermath of an Israeli aerial bombing of a Gaza marketplace occurring sometime over the past few days. Only problem is, it is from 2005 and involved a weapons handling error by Hamas militants moving a cache of weapons and did not involve the IAF at all. This type of action is gross propaganda and given the source (Gaza) is likely done knowingly, but is nonetheless quite effective in shaping opinions and becomes a story in itself, rather than the real events going on. I have also removed pictures which go back to the first Intifada and and yet others which were of the US in Iraq (labeled as Israel) which have absolutely nothing to do with Gaza.

So, no, it is not likely that we'll allow photographs or videos.

Lithos
DU Moderator

[backscatter712]

123. Thanks for responding.

I'm glad to hear an honest answer.

I just heard the news about that video that turned out to be the results of an exploding truck of Hamas' Qassams rather than an IDF airstrike.

Best to make sure the facts are known in those cases.

[Name removed]

125. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[IsItJustMe]

118. Are Gaza and the West Bank to be ultimately governed by the same government, and if so, is this

stated in a U.N. mandate?

[aranthus]

152. It would make sense, but it does not have to be.

The UN has no authority to issue Mandates that require people of separate areas to have the same government. It has no authority, for example, to tell North and South Korea to unify. All it can do is suggest, and countries are free to ignore those suggestions (known as General Assembly resolutions), and often have. What matters is that the Palestinians see themselves as one people living in separated areas. It's their business whether they have a unified state or two states.

[Name removed]

120. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

121. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[wellst0nev0ter]

124. Apparently Israel And Hamas Agreed To A Ceasefire June 19 of Last Year

Since that time until November 6, when Israeli troops attacked Hamas militants at a tunnel, a total of at least 36 rockets and several mortars were fired from Gaza, none of them reportedly fired by Hamas. I honestly want to know if that development still means that Hamas broke the truce.

[The Magistrate]

126. The Question, Sir, Must Involve Some Degree Of Opinion In Any Answer

It boils down to the question of whether Hamas had the capacity to prevent those launches, and if it did, failed to exercise it effectively.

The standard view is that a government is responsible for attacks launched against a neighboring state from its terrotory; that it has a responsibility to prevent them, and if failing in that, a responsibility to do everything in its power to arrest the perpetrators of them.

[wellst0nev0ter]

138. I Should Add That There Were Apparently More Rockets

Launched from Gaza two days before the ceasefire than was launched the entire four months leading up to the attack in early November. Although those rocket attacks in the interim were unfortunate, the scale does lead me to believe that they have largely held up their end of the bargain, especially in the eyes of blockades, which incidently would be a declared an act of war if the year was 1967 and we had different players.

[Idealism]

237. Did they not arrest several of the Brigade?

I read reports awhile back saying that Hamas policemen arrested several Fatah-linked Brigade members for allegedly firing rockets into Israel back in September or October, iirc.

[Boojatta]

128. I don't know whether human rights have a basis in agreed-upon facts, but...

I have a question about the idea of a right of return.

For example, suppose that today there are no Palestinians legally residing in territory XYZ. Also, suppose that in the year 1844 a Palestinian man and his wife voluntarily emigrated from territory XYZ to India. If all of their descendants were born in India, then is that a reason to assert that the descendants of that man and woman have no claim whatsoever to enter and acquire citizenship in territory XYZ?

Of course, if you construe return in individual terms and refuse to consider ancestry, then you could claim that descendants of that man and woman aren't returning if and when they try to enter territory XYZ. If they were born and reared in India, then they can return to India, but they cannot be correctly said to return to territory XYZ, especially if they have never personally made even so much as a short visit to territory XYZ.

Is there any particular reason that the word "return" in a human right of return must be interpreted to mean something like "reverse migration of people whose personal ancestors were, without a legal basis, deported?

This may be obvious, but perhaps I should explain why I include the words "without a legal basis." For example, if a man emigrates from some country to America, is convicted of armed robbery and deported, and he later has children in the country to which he was deported, then those children cannot rely upon the fact that their father was deported from America to claim a right of return to American.

Note one of the defining conditions of my hypothetical scenario: today there are no Palestinians legally residing in territory XYZ. To say that the descendants of that man and woman have no right of return seems to enforce a new status quo of territory XYZ as being "cleansed" of Palestinians. Precisely how the "cleansing" occurred doesn't seem to be as important as the fact that the law functions to maintain that status quo.

[SharonRB]

129. Insight into the I/P situation from my cousin, a transplanted American living in Israel

Yesterday, my uncle, who lives in St. Croix, sent the following note to me and several other people, including my cousin, a PhD who has lived in Israel for many, many years:

I'm writing this while watching TV news about the Israeli military advancement into Gaza. I find myself with the identical feelings I had while watching the US invasion of Iraq and the same question in my mind. WHY?? After all these years of death and destruction in Iraq I still have been unable to find out WHY?? And so I am writing those of you who are strong supporters of Israel to help me understand WHY Israel is doing this? Can any of you please tell me what Israel hopes to gain from the death and destruction. And if there is some kind of gain, do you really think it is worth this kind of slaughter?

Your help would be much appreciated since my heart remains remains torn between Israel's survival and the plight of the Palestinian people. Thanks

The following is the response sent by my cousin. I hope it helps bring some perspective to the situation from someone living it everyday. My cousin wrote it very quickly, so please forgive any sentences that could be more clearly written. The added bold is mine.


Uncle XXXXX,

I really hesitated before replying and I'm doing so without enthusiasm because my heart is that mich more torn than yours. I cannot and do not want to vanquish the sense of revulsion that you too seem to be feeling about the civilian casualties on the other side - here too. I have no doubt that I feel this sense of revulsion much more strongly than you do since I also feel personal responsibility. But you already answered the question without realizing it. Chamas has fulfilled its dream in creating a situation in which Israel must choose between its own survival and the obliteration of Chamas' will and ability to continue to bombard Israeli civilians with an average of anywhere between 20 and 70 rockets a day. Neither I, nor anybody in Israel that I've come into contact with, feels that they have the right to take the life of Palestinians in Gaza lightly, even this is what Chama has done.

Israel would have been very happy to renew the ceasefire even on the old terms that were extremely detrimental to Israel because it allowed Chamas to arm itself with well over 3000 rockets that could now reach all of Israel's major population centers in the southern part of the country (all of my wife's family, for instance, in 8 different towns and cities have been bombarded). But a week and a half ago Chamas decided the cease fire was over and fired the next day 70 rockets into Israel killing and reaping destruction. (In fact, this was but the pinnacle of rocket fire that they began just a few weeks earlier, while pretending to still maintain the ceasefire - and increased day by day from 3 to 10 to 20 etc.) During all this time, Israel did nothing but warn that it would attack if it did not return to the cease fire.

Chamas' response was to incease the rocket fire even more. Anyone who's followed the speeches made by Chamas leaders and those of its allies - Iran and Chizballa - in the days that preceeded Israel's operation can understand that it was goaded into thinking that Israel's lack of response in the weeks previous to this operation, its willingnees (which many consider utter stupidity) to tolerate rocket attacks from across its border from Chamas units over the last eight years, Israel's withdrawl from Gaza 3 years ago, and its willingness to end its incursion into Lebanon to fight Chizballah with a stakemate (after that Iranian ally breached its borders by attacking and capturing Israeli troops on Israeli soil) indicates that Israel is reaching the final phase of its existence (just as Chamas, Chizbalah, Iran and Al Kaeda and others have predicted) and no longer maintains the will to fight.

The fact of the matter is, it really is a question of survival or destruction, first of all on Israel's part for two reasons:
1 - In the Mid-East and Muslim world today there are two basic trends. The much less popular one is that of the relatively - a term that perhaps should be used loosely - moderate Arab governments and Abu Mazen of the Palestinian authority, who see their future somehow tied into the fate of the west and therefore seem to be willing to come to terms with the fact of Israel's existence in the long term. The second and much more pervasive stream consists of Iran, Al Kaeda, Chizballa, Chamas and the impoverished masses who've accepted their doctrine of holy war against the west, and especially against Israel - actually believing that God is leading them to a slow but certain victory over the Satanic presence (meaning me) in their midst.

What makes this a question of Israel's success or survival: First off, as long as Israel was perceived as strong, able and willing to fight the quest for its destruction was put on hold. But after embarking on a policy of conciliation with the more moderate elements of the mid-East, making peace with Egypt and Jordan, agreeing that a Palestinian state ought to be established in the place of the occupation that began in 1967, withdrawing from Gaza etc., Israel has come to realize that not only has it embarked on a course of a more rational and healthy form of co-existence with some of its neighbors, it has at the same time convinced those who seek its destruction and are committed to achieving that goal that it no longer has the power it once had to do anything about it. That is, in Israel's pursuit of a more healthy situation for all has resulted in losing what's called in the vernacular - it's ability to deter those who are doing all in their power, and who actually have the power, to bring about its destruction. The operation in Gaza is intended to, as I said above, make Chamas desist from firing rockets into Israel and to make it and its allies understand that when pushed to the wall, it does have the ability and the will to foil its plans.

2 - If it were not for the fact that Chamas' means of operation, that is - firing rockets from within its own population centers and and then hiding in residential builings and carrying out their operations there, the previous explanation would be true but unnecessary. It would be sufficient to say that when a country is attacked consistently by rocket and missile fire from across its borders it has the moral obligation to respond in order to protect its citizens. When considering what I wrote above, in the present situation, the lack of response really is one that if it continued would ultmately lead to Israel's destruction for another reason: For the first time, the civilian populations that have been under Chamas fire for so long, having its expections of the government to respond and put an end to it left high and dry, seemed to be on the verge of picking up and running. This would be disastrous for any country, even more so considering the jihadic expectations from the Arab and Muslom world that are fueled by Israel's perceived weakness.

Of course there things that cannot be seen in pictures: For instance, the heart wrenching moral dilemma of Israel's leadership of going after those who not only threaten to destroy you, but who are actively pursing that goal and getting closer to it, or refraining from doing so because they know precisely where the terrorists are: they're hiding behind civilians, many who are totally innocent of any wrongdoing. For a very long time, Israel decided not to respond for fear of civilian casualties. When it reached the point of 70 missiles a day, Israel decided its moral obligations to its own citizens and future existence override that of protecting the civilians that Chamas - not Israel - placed in harm's way. Israel is doing all it can not to fire on civilians - but because of how Chamas situates itself within the civilian population, about 10% of the casualties in Gaza are nonetheless civilian. Did Israel answer the moral dilemma properly? I'm too personally involved to answer, but don't for a moment think that Israeli hearts are torn any less than yours is, despite the easy vilification of Israel by those who never have anything to lose.

[Karenina]

130. We have no choice but to kill them. THEY have forced our hand.

It is indeed quite unfortunate, but they have only themselves to blame. WHAT would you have us do?

[WeDidIt]

136. When a people are subjugated and relegated to sub-human status

one must expect them to lash out.

[question everything]

186. By whom? Gaza is a free land

if they are "subjugated and relegated to sub-human status" they should blame their own leaders.

[Idealism]

131. I guess this is why most Israeli's are for this invasion

They don't understand what their government is doing to Palestinians. Gaza has been blockaded for two years. Israel hasn't allowed near adequate levels of industrial diesel into the Strip so for much of the day there is no power in parts of Gaza. The Israeli Supreme court even ruled that the IDF must allow more diesel in, but as several Israeli human rights groups note, it still hasn't reached Courts mandated levels. The West Bank has not escaped incursion, although not yet at full blockade. Rather, rich Palestinian farmland gets routinely taken from peasants by the IDF and annexed. Each year the West Bank grows smaller and smaller. The water supply is even controlled by the IDF, the Western Aquifer has been under their command for several years, as well.

Neither side is innocent.

[sandnsea]

132. Right, not one mention of the blockade

in that email and what that has done. Of course, there is also no mention that weapons are smuggled through the tunnels and checkpoints by Palestinian supporters either. Neither side is innocent, exactly so.

[Shaktimaan]

202. That's funny.

They don't understand what their government is doing to Palestinians.

I have yet to meet an Israeli that did not have a good grasp of the complex issues that their state faces regarding the Palestinian conflict. What is far more likely is that you don't fully understand the conflict and thus misunderstand the reasons that a majority of Israelis support the invasion.

Your above statement is itself not quite accurate either.

Rather, rich Palestinian farmland gets routinely taken from peasants by the IDF and annexed. Each year the West Bank grows smaller and smaller.

The IDF routinely takes farmland away from Palestinian peasants? The West Bank grows smaller every year? Well, during Oslo the Palestinians gained sovereignty over areas of the west bank for the very first time in recorded history. IDF troops redeployed from areas that had been under direct occupation for decades. The situation is far more complex than the simple explanation you've provided. For example, directly following Israel's departure from Gaza in 2005, Hamas began launching their rocket campaign. The blockade was initiated in response to the Qassam attacks. Which themselves were made possible (at the level we are seeing now) by Israel's departure from Gaza.

It's true that the Palestinians are oppressed. But one of the reasons that so many Israelis support the oppressive actions is because all recent attempts at making concessions to them resulted in drastically increased terrorism.

[Idealism]

206. Oslo and what is happening now are two different time periods

The IDF has definitely been stealing farm land from West Bank Palestinians.

It is with this aid that Israel has been able to continue the comprehensive and unrelenting occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Today, Israel is bulldozing Palestinian farmers’ olive trees in order to build an encompassing 30-foot high cement wall with gun towers and electric fencing to imprison Palestinians and the entire West Bank. Israeli forces have commandeered the Western Aquifer (which constitutes 50% of the West Bank water supply) and thousands of acres of Palestinian agricultural land. The wall around Jerusalem will bring the now divided Holy City fully under Israeli control and effectively strangle West Bank economy and agriculture. The wall includes a 15-foot deep, 20-foot wide trench (Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported it would be filled with raw sewage), a dirt path that will be a “killing zone” for Palestinians who try to access it, an electrified fence, and a two-lane Israeli patrol road.

Since Israel barred most Palestinians from working inside Israel, unemployment in the West Bank has soared to over 50 percent. Agriculture is therefore more important than ever. Square foot by square foot, olive tree by olive tree, village by village, Israel is relentlessly taking over Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza with the full support of the American taxpayer.

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/24-us-aid-to-israel-fuels-repressive-occupation-in-palestine/

The article is a few years old, but nothing has changed.


And no, the blockade of Gaza had nothing to do with rocket attacks. Rocket attacks weren't prevalent from Gaza by Hamas until 2006, after the blockade was imposed. It was imposed because of suicide bombers originating from Gaza, which were some Hamas members as well as other extremist groups. Since the blockade, suicide bombings have been almost entirely halted from Gaza.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

134. When a nation is occupied and besieged for 40+ years, does it have a moral right to resist?

[The Magistrate]

141. If You Will Insist On Debating In This Thread, Ma'am

The question is not whether there is a right to resist.

The questions are whether it is the right thing to do, in the sense of being the wisest course, most likely to bring about the best obtainable result for the people involved, and whether it is conducted in a right manner, that is not criminal under the laws of war.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

144. I'm responding to the bolded question in the poster's thread.

Which the poster purposely drew attention to.

[question everything]

187. Gaza has not been occupied since 2005 (nt)

[GoesTo11]

137. Since no one else said it, thanks

for posting this personal piece that presents what an Israeli who supports the current actions is really thinking. This is a far cry from the "bloodthirsty" and "kill them all" and "genocide" motivations for Israel's actions that I keep seeing on DU. Either this was written by a decent person (which I believe your cousin is) or it is a devious ploy to act concerned to further trick the world into allowing evil. If one believes this is sincere, what is a sensible response - what is some American internet poster going to tell Israelis that they haven't already thought about?

[Shaktimaan]

150. Thank you...

for an excellent and well-reasoned post that explains some of the intricacies of the conflict from an Israeli perspective. I feel that this conflict is often looked at in overly simplistic terms and simplistic assumptions are made about the motivations of people on both sides.

This post did a good job at revealing some of the complexities Israel faces both in terms of strategy and tactics, (not to mention morality.) Asking people "why?" will almost always garner a truer and more interesting response than just assuming you already know.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

155. Here is insight from an Arab blog, that truly describes the feelings of many.

*I hope this will be allowed to stand. There is not much info in the West that accurately describes the mood in the Arab world. I think it is very, very important for Americans to understand where Middle Easterners are coming from.

And I'm assuming since we are able to hear the feelings of those in Israel, readers will be allowed to read the feelings of those in the Arab world.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


"Whatever the outcome of the Israeli war on Gaza, things have changed forever. Like the July 2006 war on Lebanon, this one will make us stronger. Every day, every hour, every minute liberates us further. We are stronger are freer because we know we are right. How can we not be right when we are a handful of poor, marginalized and excluded people fighting Israel with its all its might and its modern technologies? How can we be wrong when we are fought by the imperialists, by the very same regimes that are oppressing the peoples of the world; by those who have built their fortunes on squeezing nations out of their wealth? How can we be wrong when the ruling classes of the Arab World are against us? We are right both objectively and subjectively: we are right because our cause is just and we are right because those who want to eliminate us are tyrants, thieves and tormentors.


Before 2000, we were scared of the Israelis. There is no shame in admitting that: the Israelis had won all the wars against the Arabs and they had one of the most powerful armies in the world. They had F16s, Apache helicopters and big guns. They even had nuclear bombs. And they had all the rich and powerful countries behind them.


South Lebanon was occupied, and the rulers of Lebanon, the rich and powerful, did not care. The Resistance in South Lebanon was working quietly, organizing itself. It inflicted severe blows to the occupiers, but somehow this was not covered enough: there was no Al Jazirah, no satellite TV channels. There was no internet. Satellite TV and internet communications has changes us. It has made us witness what was being done to us. It has woken us up to injustice. It has give a voice to the oppressed, a voice as strong if not stronger than that of the oppressor. Before this, they used to show us what they wanted. Today, we see everything.


Around the early 90’s the Resistance in South Lebanon started to take videos of its operations. People were able to see the achievements and identify with the Resistants. This was a major turning point. The Resistance fighters became heroes. We needed heroes.


In 2000, Israel withdrew humiliatingly from South Lebanon. This was the first Arab victory in a long time. The Resistance was magnanimous, and did not seek revenge on the collaborators. The Lebanese state gave mild sentences to the collaborators who had tortured the Resistants, killed them and raped their wives and daughters and sisters under their very eyes. The Resistance accepted this because it was victorious. If anyone had any doubts about its triumph, this is the proof: only the victorious can show magnanimity.


In 2006, Israel launched one of its most vicious and murderous attacks on Lebanon. It destroyed a significant part of the infrastructure. It pulverized homes and crushed their inhabitants. It killed thousands, mostly civilian children, women and men. The cameras of the whole world were able to see our children as they were extracted from the rubbles. The Resistance stood its ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the Israeli army. Few Israeli civilians were killed. The Resistance became the champion of the oppressed of the World. It gave people pride. It broke the fear barrier. No, it didn’t break it, it transferred it: now it was the turn of the Israelis to be scared.


The liberation from fear was an important turning point in the lives of the Arabs. We are not scared any more. They may kill us and kill our children and we will not be scared anymore. Only angrier.


We also liberated ourselves from shame. We used to walk with our heads down and hide behind our powerlessness to avoid taking action. We were subdued. We blamed ourselves. We did not have faith. We despised ourselves and all the Arabs. We wanted to be something else, someone else. Now, we want to be ourselves. They can kill us, they can kill our children, and they can destroy all the buildings and all the schools. They cannot kill our spirit anymore.


And we also liberated ourselves from the West. It used to matter so much to us: we were always seeking the West’s approval. If their media said that we should make peace on Israeli terms, we parroted them and believed it. We wanted the West’s endorsement, as if this endorsement made us a little bit like them. We were always ready to change our course, to change our beliefs in order to appear like them, in order to please the writers on CNN and BBC and Time and Newsweek. We wanted them to think of us as “civilized”. And when they did not see the injustice in what the Israelis did, we did not see it either. They called us backwards and we called ourselves backwards.


Now we don’t care anymore. We know we are right. We know they are ignorant, superficial and self-centered. We know they change their opinions everyday. We know they would always find something wrong with us, unless we become subservient, submissive and docile.


Now we are strong. Their blows cannot hurt us. Do you see all these little children torn to pieces by Israeli bombs? They are not dead: each one of them has given life to a hundred, a thousand, a million partisan who will continue the struggle.”

http://landandpeople.blogspot.com/2009/01/discussion-with-old-friend.html

----------------------------------

People's anger is impossible to quantify...

[Name removed]

133. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

135. Terrific piece on history of Hamas from Alternet:

http://www.alternet.org/audits/116855/america%27s_hidden_role_in_hamas%27s_rise_to_power/

[Lithos]

139. Devil's Dance-Floor: A Brief History of the Levantine Coast (Pt. 1 -- Antiquity to the 20th Century)

Something The Magistrate wrote back on June 17, 2002.

*****************************************************

The Magistrate - Devil's Dance-Floor: A Brief History of the Levantine Coast (Pt. 1 -- Antiquity to the 20th Century)

From Ancient Times To The Current Era

In the Levant, before Roman times, the Jordan River valley and the littoral west of it were inhabited by Semitic people, most of whom identified themselves in some manner with the religious national practice of Judaism. They believed themselves to share a common descent from the ancestor Abraham through the son of his age, Isaac, and that this country they lived in had been given to Isaac’s descendants for a dwelling by their deity. This national religiosity centered on cultic rituals at the Temple in Jerusalem, and pilgrimage there was required of Jews.

The area constituted a natural cockpit for conflict between Egypt at the south, and various northern powers such as Syria and Assyria, and eastern powers such as Babylon. The Assyrians and Babylonians, in their successive conquests of the Jewish kingdoms of Israel at the north and Judea at the south, each deported to their respective capital the ruling strata of landlords and scribes from the conquered country, while leaving the peasantry to cultivate for taxes, and raising up to local eminence new families, who could be relied on to be loyal to the foreign rulers. The new power of Persia, on conquering Babylon, returned to their former homes the varied congeries of provincial aristocrats they found about that imperium’s capital, in order that these might establish governments loyal to Persia there.

Alexander the Great’s defeat of Persia extended Hellenistic rule to the Levant. Many elements of Jewish religious belief and cultural practice were hostile to the Hellenistic culture of the region’s new rulers. The idea of a unitary deity jibed with the logical speculations of leading Greek philosophers; at the same time, the common belief of Egyptian, Syrian, and Greek was that the Jews really worshipped an ass-headed image of the demoniac Typhon, the Malign Sun of Egypt, in their temple sanctuary.

Many Jews took up Hellenistic ways, taking Greek names, even having scraps of skin grafted to conceal circumcision. Other Jews reacted with fiercer attachment to their religious custom. These latter found a champion in the Temple slaughterer, Judah Maccabbee. His rebellion succeeded against a Sellucid monarchy in Syria beset by greater external foes, and was secured with assistance from the rising Roman power in the west.


Roman Rule

By the time Rome extended Imperial rule to the Levant, many Jews already resided elsewhere. They were established in Alexandria in Egypt, in Damascus, and in Mesopotamia, under the Hellenistic imperiums, as well as in Greek cities; there was a sizable population of Jews in Rome itself, and Jews resided in communities of Roman Gual and Spain. Some of these Jews outside the Levant were certainly converts: the Latin poet Horace laments those lazy-bones who choose to follow Moses to have a day in seven idle, at great cost to sociability and diet, in his view. In Greek cities particularly, Jewish teachers expounding their views of deity attracted some following among the philosophically inclined.

Roman rule in the Levant reinforced the cultural and political incompatibilities that had brought on the previous Maccabbean outbreak. Accommodationist Jews, including the hereditary Temple priesthood, and the court of a client King of Judea who had replaced the Maccabbees, were vigorously opposed by Jews who were "zealous for the Law," whether as monastics in the desert or as rebels against Rome, and not infrequently as both. Zealots of all sorts believed themselves to be at least the vanguard of the "Anointed King" they believed their deity had promised soon to raise up, and who would restore Judean glory; leaders often proclaimed themselves to be that very Messiah. Most Jews amid the turmoil believed at least the prophecies circulating which said now was when the world would end. Preachings that this would inaugurate eternal life for the righteous were eagerly embraced by the people, and bitterly opposed by the Temple priests.

Zealot rebellion was crushed by Roman soldiers in the seventh decade of our era’s first century. Amid great slaughter Jerusalem and the Temple were sacked and razed; thousands of Jews were taken back west as slaves, and thousands fled, south into Alexandria, and on west into Cyrenaica (Libya), or east to Mesopotamia, and Parthian rule. A punishing tax was levied on Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire, and Messianic preachers regarded as seditious sorcerers by the authorities. At the start of the second century, Jews in Alexandria and Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia rose in rebellious riot against Rome. Zealot rebellion broke out once again in Judea in 132, under the Messiah Bar Kochba. Roman suppression this time proved final: Imperial edict forbid Jews to set foot in Jerusalem, to circumcise, or to accept converts: the very name of the province was changed from Judea to Palestine (after the ancient Philistines of Gaza).

This disastrous issue led surviving Jewish clergy to repudiate belief the Messiah was imminent. Zealots were banned from Synagogue congregations, and many writings most Jews had in the previous two centuries believed to be inspired prophecy were now rejected. One Messianic sect benefited greatly by the Roman decapitation of Judaism. Christians had gained most of their converts in Greece and points west; this largely Gentile body of believers in a Risen Messiah had no particular attachment to the Temple, and circumcision was not required of converts. Preachers of this sect spared no effort to show belief in their Risen Messiah was something different from, even opposed to, Judaism.

Most of the populace in the newly minted province of Palestine remained Jews in some form or other, though colonies of retired Roman soldiers were settled there, along with some pagan Arabs from Syria and Mesopotamia. As Christianity became predominant in the Roman Empire, it became predominant in the Levant as well, though there remained many there who would not abjure Judaism, just as many Jews elsewhere under Roman rule continued adherence to their creed. With Christianity become the state religion of Rome early in the fourth century, Judaism was placed under severe proscriptions once again, and Christian clergy often preached mobbing and murder against Jews.

While the west of the Roman Imperium succumbed to the impact of Germanic invasions, the Levant, administered from the new capital at Constantinople, was routinely menaced with invasion by Parthian and resurgent Persian armies from the east. Roman rule ran at best no more than a hundred miles into the Levantine hinterland. The old province of Palestine was divided into four new provinces: Palestine in the center, roughly equivalent to ancient Judea; Palestine Lesser to its north, comprising Gallilee; Desert Palestine to its south, comprising Sinai and the Negev; and Arabia, consisting of lands east of the Jordan River.


Advent Of Islam

The emergence of Islam early in the seventh century of our era would profoundly affect the Levant. Islam arose at Mecca, an ancient center of Arab tribal religions on the east coast of the Red Sea. Mohammed first believed his revelation to be the essence of Judiasm, of which he knew almost nothing, and bade his earliest disciples turn northeast towards Jerusalem for prayer. Mohammed was disabused of this notion by contact with Jews at Medina, after which he understood his revelation to be the essence of religion revealed to Abraham, and grown clouded by human error in both Judaism and Christianity. Since a son of Abraham, Ishmael, was reputedly father to the Arab peoples, some connection of the ancient Arab cultic center at Mecca to the religion of Abraham could be asserted; further, any sites connected to Abraham and his immediate descendants took on sacred color to the new faith.

Mohammed succeeded within two decades in unifying an Arab nation in the Saudi peninsula under Islam, and following his death at Mecca in 632, his leading followers moved Arab armies north to attack Persian rule in Mesopotamia, and Roman rule in the Levant and Syria. Within five years the leading cities of Syria and the Levant, Damascus, the port of Antioch, and Jerusalem, fell to Arab Islam. In battle and sack, unbelievers were widely seized for slaves, but speedy conversion brought immunity. With Persian power broken simultaneously, the rule of Arab Islam in the Levant bought a condition of settled peace there that Constaninople’s rulers had been unable to secure. Unbelievers, whether Jew or Christian, were assessed a head tax in lieu of the military service they were forbidden, and within a myriad of restrictions were allowed to practice their faiths and manage their own affairs so long as they kept the peace. The desert Arabs being none too numerous a people, their conquest of the region brought little alteration to the composition of its populace.

In the last years of the seventh century, Arab Islam erected its first monumental architecture, at Jerusalem; the domed mosque where Abraham was said to have been commanded to sacrifice Isaac, overlooking the fragment of wall that remained of the Jerusalem Temple. In the rapidly established Islamic sphere, stretching west through Egypt clear to Spain, north beyond Syria, and east past Mesopotamia into Persia, the Levant reverted to its ancient situation of buffer cum battlefield for powers centered on Cairo to the south, Damascus to the north, and Baghdad to the east. Leading figures of the Arab clans dominant in the Levant lent themselves to one or the other, whether as administrators or rebels, in attempts to preserve at least their local authority. Nor was the civil strife of Islam all that afflicted the region. Crusaders from Catholic Europe invaded in the eleventh century, slaughtering Moslems, Jews, and schismatic Christians alike. Mongol pagans swept in from the east to do the same in the thirteenth century, followed by Tamerlane at the start of the fifteenth century.

Ottoman Turk authority, after the Timurid irruption, would go unchallenged for centuries in the Levant, beyond the jostling of over-proud governors in Cairo and Damascus. Most of the still largely Semitic populace now in the Levant identified themselves in some manner as Arab Moslems; a substantial minority did so as Arab Christians. Though very few still owned themselves to be Jews, the ways of Arab Islam differed little from those once prevalent as Jewish practice in the region. Islamic Law regulated life in as fine a grain as Mosaic Law; dietary practices, and concepts of ritual purity, remained similar. Religiosity still focused through a text and a location, simply changed from Torah and Jerusalem to Koran and Mecca. Theologians explained the various calamities of invasion that had befallen Islamic realms as divine punishment for various flaws in the proper belief and practice of Islam, just as the old priests of Jerusalem had explained in their time the calamities befalling Judea.

Unbelievers, being barred from owning land, were driven either to the hazards of urban and commercial life, or status as tenant in perpetuity. The cities of Damascus, Alexandria, and Baghdad were centers of Jewish population under Ottoman rule, with large numbers of Jews living as well further east in Persia, and off to the west in Spain. Many of the latter been driven out of Catholic Europe; other Jews expelled from that place had fled eastward into lands still then pagan, taking up a rural existence there. In the centuries since Rome crushed the Zealous, a conviction not quite credal had grown up among Jews that return to Jerusalem must await the Messiah; there was a smack of impiety about the idea of journeying there for any purpose but a life of prayer. Jews expelled from Spain on its conquest by Catholics mostly settled in Baghdad and Damascus.


The Ottoman Decline

Ottoman Islam’s centuries of war with European Christendom did not effect the Levant directly, save as the defeated effort impoverished the Ottoman realm, and weakened the Sultan’s power generally. Ottoman decrepitude was complete at the start of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon briefly brought the soldiers of Revolutionary France to the Levant. While Christian Greece rebelled against ________________________________ebellion by the Ottoman Governor in Egypt, with Bourbon French assistance gained him the rule of Syria as well, while in Europe Greece drove out Ottoman rule. In the wake of these defeats, the Ottoman Sultan promulgated constitutional and legal reforms: their provisions for legal equality between believers and unbelievers, and for allowing the latter to own land with believers as tenants, met with a riotous reaction among the Moslem populace and clergy, and went into abeyance.

A dispute over precedence between Latin Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christian clergy, among the shrines at Bethlehem, led the latter clerics to appeal to the Orthodox Czar of Russia to pressure the Turks to a favorable ruling. Latter Empire France, under Napoleon’s nephew, came to the support of the Catholic clergy in the matter in 1850 at the Turkish court. Complications ensued, issuing in the Crimean War, with France and England supporting the Ottoman against the Czar. The Ottoman allowed French investors to purchase land in the Levant, to institute commercial tobacco cropping; a French syndicate gained the right to construct a canal at Suez.

Shortly after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the governor of Egypt sold his shares in the enterprise to the English government. As the Ottoman struggled against a new round of Balkan rebellion and Czarist aggrandizement, the bankruptcy of the Egyptian government allowed England and France to insist on administering its financial affairs. An Islamic rebellion against this indignity to Egypt in 1882 gave England pretext to invade; England quickly succeeded in gaining open control of the still nominally Ottoman entity of Egypt, and awarded itself sovereign authority over the Suez Canal.

Ottoman authority over the Levant necessarily was exercised at the end of the nineteenth century through the Syrian governor at Damascus. Local posts of the Ottoman officialdom in the Levant were mostly apportioned between two leading and rival Arab clans of the region, the Husseinis and the Nashashibis. There had been a general collapse in Ottoman finances, which allowed European banks to dictate policy in economic matters to the Sultan’s government. These dictates included some enforcement of previously promulgated Western concepts of title, and allowing landlord status to unbelievers alike with believers.

Jews and Christians in Ottoman realms sought to transmute the ephemeral wealths of commerce into the security of real estate where they could. Some Moslem landowners took to loans and speculations on their lands; there was a spreading practice of absentee landlordism that broke traditional relations with the tenantry on the pasturages and orchards and grainfields. In the Levant, there were Jews especially desirous of buying land. Some were pious philanthropists, seeking rents to endow lives of prayer in Jerusalem; some sought lands for potential resettlement by Jews from Europe, as part of the fledgling Zionist movement.


Advent Of Zionism

Desire to extract Jews from Europe by immigration to the Levant arose toward the end of the nineteenth century in reaction to Czarist excesses against Jews in Russia, and the political tempest of the Dreyfus affair in France. The tool of Nationalism the Czars wielded to such effect against the Ottoman in the Balkans recoiled in its effect against Czarist rule of all the Russias: Czarist political police resolved on an ideology of Pan-Slav supremacy as an antidote to rebellious sentiments, identifying the Jew as the wholly foreign cause of all ills, and instigating campaigns of mob murder against Jews. The much less numerous Jews remnant in western Europe had been freed during the nineteenth century from various legal debilities, if not from all cultural ones. The furor of Anti-Semitic agitation that broke out in Republican France over the framing of the Jew Dreyfus for a spy shocked many assimilated Jews in Europe, as did the great success of Anti-Semitism in Viennese elections.

Zionism was generally opposed by rabbis as impious, particularly in eastern Europe, where clergy were professionally suspicious of Messianic fervors that invariably issued in tragic consequences for Jewish communities. Zionism’s adherents there mostly were modernist and secular in orientation; many viewed the project in a left utopian light. Jews assimilated into European and American countries often opposed Zionism for fear emphasizing a separate nationhood of Jews would cast a cloud on their current citizenship. Zionism would remain a distinctly minority sentiment among Jews, but inspired a sufficient number of both leading figures and followers to sustain itself at the start of the twentieth century. In the two decades preceding World War One, Zionists of various stripe solicited funds from wealthy Jews to purchase land in the Levant for a Jewish national endowment, and to finance immigration of Jews to that land.

Zionist efforts acquired but a trifling proportion of land, and convinced no more than forty thousands of the world’s then twelve million Jews to return to the Levant from Europe and America. Still these results had a large and unsettling effect on the country. Set against the Levantine Arab populace of some six hundred thousands, the number of immigrants was significant. The presence of ready buyers for land drove up its price, igniting speculations and forced sales. Arab Moslems bitterly resented the ownership of land by Jews, even as leading Arab landowners sold them land; when Jewish landowners wanted tenantry cleared off their property, Ottoman gendarmerie wreaked their will in regular order, leading to increased resentment of Ottoman rule in the Levant. Regular petition of the Ottoman authorities by leading Arab citizens produced no alteration in the circumstance. In Damascus, intellectual agitation against Ottoman rule of Arabs, and secret societies began to form toward the same end.

[Lithos]

140. Devil's Dance-Floor: A Brief History Of The Levantine Coast (Part 2 -- England Succeeds The Turk)

A continuation of The Magistrate's Earlier work.

**************************

Devil's Dance-Floor: A Brief History Of The Levantine Coast (Part 2 -- England Succeeds The Turk)

The Great War Comes To The Levant

Reformist “Young Turk” officers in 1908 commenced a mutiny that succeeded in deposing the Ottoman Sultan in 1909. The avowedly secular character of their program weakened the authority of Turk over Arab, in the latter’s view; worse, the new regime lost prestige by immediate and disastrous embroilment in war with Italy over Libya in 1911, and with the Greeks and Balkan Slavs in 1913. In the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, Arab adherents of the literalist Wahhabbi sect raised a banner of revolt against Turkic rule, clashing with the Turk-appointed Arab authority at Mecca, the Hashemite chieftain Hussein. The intellectual agitations and secret societies of Arab Nationalists emerging early in the last century at Damascus and Cairo began to secure allegiance from a few Arab officers and officials.

World War One broke out in 1914. The “Young Turk” regime sought protection against Russia and England and France by cleaving to the Sultan’s recent ally Germany, builder of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, with its new Hejaz line from Damascus to Medina. The situation of communities of unbelievers in the Turkic Levant became precarious; Christian Arabs were traditionally associated with France, and the greatest proportion of immigrant Jews there, being from Czarist countries, could readily be regarded as enemy aliens. One Zionist politician in the Turkic Levant, Ben-Gurion, resolved on a loyalist posture, wearing a tarbush and proposing Jews enlist in the Turkish army. His new hat did not prevent him being deported. Another Zionist, the journalist Jabotinsky, proposed recruitment of a Jewish Legion to assist the English nearby in Egypt. The leading Arab clans in the Levant, the al’Husseinis and the Nashashibis, competed in display of loyalty to the war-time Turkic authorities at Damascus and Jerusalem, in hope of favor against the interloping Jews, and in fear of English invasion.

England’s policies concerning Turks, Arabs, and Jews in the Levant grew out of a concatenation of misapprehensions so profound they must be described as delusional. Leading lights of the London Foreign Office believed Jews controlled a power of international finance that was the “hidden hand” behind many world events. Jews, it was believed, had contrived the “Young Turk” rebellion, and had directed Turkey to war against the Czar as punishment for his pogroms. Zionism’s leading lobbyist, Chaim Weitzman, a scientist who greatly improved England’s munitions production, came to be regarded as a sort of accredited ambassador from this “hidden hand” of Jewish finance. England’s military command at Cairo believed if an Arab Caliphite were proclaimed from Mecca, all Islam’s faithful would turn against impious Turkic rulers. The Turk’s appointed Arab chief at Mecca, Hussein the Hashemite, who could claim descent from Mohammed, was recruited to the design. English intelligence on the region was so poor they plotted in ignorance of the Wahhabbi rising already underway, as much against him as the Turks, and they gave great credence to rumors of armed Arab conspiracies against Turkic rule at Damascus, that were in fact largely notional.

At the start of 1915, a Turkish army was marched from Syria to cross the Suez Canal and invade Egypt. The attempt was routed by English troops on the Canal’s west bank, and the fleeing Turkish soldiers sacked Gaza and Jaffa in their retirement up the coast road. England dispatched an army of Commonwealth soldiers to Gallipoli, and set an India Army force advancing north from Basra toward Baghdad. Turkish authorities in Damascus and Jerusalem set their political police to rounding up Arab Nationalists. Dozens of proclaimed agitators and secret society members, many of them leading local citizens, were hanged; among those executed at Jerusalem was the chief Islamic cleric of Gaza. Gallipoli ended in Turkish victory at the start of 1916; the India Army force near Baghdad was besieged to ignominious surrender at Kut. Hussein the Hashemite’s proclaimed revolt in the Arabian Hejaz achieved no more immediate result than to provide a color under which a force of English-officered Egyptians landed to drive a minuscule Turk garrison from Mecca.

Still, mid-level French and English diplomats met to apportion shares of the Turkic dominions their governments yet hoped to acquire by fortune of war. The resultant Sykes-Picot Agreement divided a northern French sphere from a southern English one, by a line running just south of Damascus and well north of Baghdad. The agreement recognized the Lebanon coast of Syria with its Christian populations as an area of especial French interest, and Palestine (understood by the usage of the time to include the whole Jordan valley and an ill-defined stretch of desert east of it, akin to the old East Roman jurisdiction of Arabia), was recognized as an area of especial English interest. England’s military officialdom, in soliciting Hussein the Hashemite to act at last, had promised the crown of an Arab Nation in Damascus to his son Feisal. England’s new War Cabinet, prodded by Lloyd George, was quietly considering whether to make use of Zionism in ruling Palestine, and decided on forming the Jewish Legion proposed by Jabotinsky.

Turkish troops in the Levant were ensconced in Gaza on the coast road under German officers; they had turned out its 40,000 inhabitants into the countryside, going house to house with whips. Successive English attacks from Egypt early in 1917 met bloody repulse at the Gaza entrenchments. Turkic authorities renewed their hangings of Arab Nationalists; the Turkish governor in Jerusalem in the feast days ordered the entire population of Jaffa and its suburbs, including Jewish Tel Aviv, some 40,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews, to depart their homes, and was only prevented from ordering a similar expulsion of Jerusalem’s inhabitants, a great proportion of whom were ailing and elderly Jews, by threats from the German Consul. Food was at famine prices in the Levant, and disaffection against the Turk becoming general among both Arabs and Jews.

A force of Hashemite Arab rebels in the summer rode around the Turkish garrison at Medina to seize the port of Aquaba in the Negev. Renewed English attack from Egypt, under a new commander, Gen. Allenby, flanked the Gaza defenses, routing their Turkish garrison. A body of Hashemite Arabs transported by sea to Aquaba, with Hussein’s son Feisal made an English general to lead them, moved alongside the English. Descending as irregulars on the retreating Turks, they were often joined by embittered local Arabs. A wave of Turkish hangings included a group of Jews who had spied to good effect for the English in preceding months. On November 2, with Turkish forces visibly collapsed in the Levant, England’s War Cabinet made public the long contemplated Balfour Declaration, endorsing a “national home” for Jews in Palestine: many believed that by England’s doing so, the “hidden hand” of Jewish finance would at last be removed from upholding the German Kaiser, and the vengeance on Russia of the Bolsheviks would be ceased.


England Occupies The Levant

English soldiers entered a destitute and disordered Jerusalem early in December of 1917. They were greeted by enthusiastic crowds of Arabs and Jews, as their liberators from the Turk. More than a third of the city’s populace, including half its Jews, had perished since 1914 of epidemic and famine. The Arab Mayor of Jerusalem, an al’Husseini, formally turned over the city to Gen. Allenby, who promptly declared a military administration, putting into abeyance such civilian measures as the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration. Turkish forces, regrouped in Galilee, threatened the English lines north of Jerusalem; at the start of 1918, Gen. Allenby sent troops east across the Jordan, including Feisal’s 3,000 Arab irregulars, but the Turks forced them to retreat. In March, Gen. Allenby was forced to halt offensive operations, for he was stripped of most of his troops by England’s need to reinforce English armies defeated in France by a German offensive.

England’s military government at Jerusalem for occupied Palestine left undisturbed the Arab portion of the local Turk-appointed officialdom there, to continue its duties under England’s auspices, as officers were used to doing with native peoples. The London Foreign Office dispatched to Palestine a committee of Zionists, led by Chaim Weitzman, to administer Jewish affairs there for the military governor; they arrived at Jerusalem in the spring of 1918. Ben-Gurion was returned, so was Jabotinsky; there was some local recruiting for the still token Jewish Legion. The al’Husseini clan, predominant among the Arab officialdom and clergy, began to turn against the English as patrons of the Jews; the Nashashibi clan saw accommodation with the Jews as a balance against their old rivals in courting the new English rulers. The Islamic clerical authority of the Waqf over the environs of the monumental domed mosque at Jerusalem was left undisturbed by England’s military governor.

Gen. Allenby received reinforcements in the summer, and attacked the Turks in late September, striking not directly first toward Damascus, as the Turks expected, but instead near the coast through the old Mediggo battlefield. Aeroplanes cooperating with cavalry turned the Turk retreat to a rout. With Feisal’s Arab Legion engaged against the railway from Medina, soldiers of the Jewish Legion were used to seize a ford across the Jordan, through which English cavalry rode to complete the Turkish defeat east of the river. Government officials, whether Turk or Arab, fled Damascus with its garrison. Leading citizens there formed an ad hoc government, which greeted the arrival at Damascus hours later of a column of Commonwealth horsemen, operating considerably in advance of their orders. The ad hoc Damascene government was hostile to the Hashemite Feisal, and accordingly was put aside by a few English officers and an armor car, to great local consternation that a parade of English soldiers through the city only aggravated.

Feisal arrived at Damascus to learn from Gen. Allenby that the Arab Nation he would rule would contain no part of the Lebanon coast, or of Palestine, and further that Feisal’s Damascus government would have to accept a French officialdom. Feisal refused the conditions, and dispatched a small force to Bierut, where they raised his National flag. A small force of French troops was landed from warships, then a large force of English troops marched in; Feisal’s force obeyed Gen. Allenby’s order to depart. Feisal himself was packed off to Paris and the Peace Conference at the start of 1919. Arab Nationalists at Jaffa convened in May to declare their adherence to the Arab Nation at Damascus, which claimed in Feisal’s name the whole of Palestine and the Lebanon coast. Leaders of the al’Husseini clan associated with the “Arab Club” in Damascus, one of the major parties of the nascent government there. A Zionist parade in Jerusalem on the anniversary of the Balfour declaration met hostility from Arab onlookers; a following Arab Nationalist parade protesting Zionist immigration and English rule there met hostility from Jewish onlookers.

Early in 1920 Arab bands from Syria under the National flag of Feisal began raids against French lodgments in the Lebanon. Villages of unbelievers were often harried on suspicion of aiding the hated Franks. In the northmost Galilee were several Zionist villages: at the start of March, an Arab band’s suspicion one of these harbored fleeing French soldiers led to a brief trial of arms that produced the emblematic martyr of early Zionist fighters, the one-armed veteran Trumpledor. In early April, the customary crowds gathered from the countryside in Jerusalem for the Moslem Feast of Moses, coinciding with the Christian Easter. Speakers, clerical and otherwise, including the new al’Husseini Mayor of Jerusalem, Musa Kazim, and his young kinsman Haj Amin, addressed a crowd of some seventy thousands, declaring Palestine must be ruled from Damascus, and freed from Jews. Riotous assault by Arabs against Jews commenced, which could not be halted for several days: the English military governor had less than 200 policemen in Jerusalem, mostly Indian Moslems. A few dozen Zionist fighters, mostly Jewish Legion veterans, and led by Jabotinsky, took part in the violence. Five Jews and four Arabs were killed; over two hundred Jews and about twenty Arabs were badly injured. Musa Kazim al’Husseini was dismissed from office, and a Nashashibi made Mayor of Jerusalem; Haj Amin al’Husseini was convicted of sedition but pardoned, and Jabotinsky was imprisoned. In London, Prime Minister Lloyd George decided to dissolve military administration in Palestine in favor of civil authority, and to incorporate the Balfour Declaration in the terms of the governing Mandate for Palestine being negotiated at the League of Nations.

A French army was marched east from Beruit, encountering little Syrian resistance before entering Damascus in July of 1920, and evicting Feisal’s government entirely. Arab tribes in the desert east of the Jordan hosted its officials; France threatened invasion of Trans-Jordan Palestine to quell this unrest, and denounced England’s affiliation with Zionism. In Mesopotamia, an India Office administration had met revolt when it attempted to collect taxes from Arab clans; in the Arabian Peninsula, the Wahhabbi rebels, led by Ibn Saud, had inflicted decisive defeat on England’s original Hashemite client Hussein. The Civil Governor installed at Jerusalem, Gov. Samuel, had been the first Jew appointed to an English Cabinet, and had written the first memorandum suggesting the course adopted in the Balfour Declaration. The three dozen organized factions of Arab Nationalists in Palestine, with several thousand enrolled adherents in toto among them, joined in a Palestine Arab Congress, which selected an Arab Executive and made former Mayor Musa Kazim al’Husseini its presiding officer. The Zionist Commission gained ascendancy over the traditional Orthodox authorities in administering Jewish affairs in Jerusalem, and Jabotinsky was released from jail.


Churchill Takes Charge

At the start of 1921 Winston Churchill became England’s Colonial secretary. In March at the Cairo Conference, he imposed his scheme for maintaining England’s power in the region. Rebellion in Mesopotamia would be quelled by the Royal Air Force, and the Arab Nation of Iraq would be created, with Feisal the Hashemite crowned its King at Baghdad. Quarrel with France would be removed by dividing Palestine from French Syria in a manner apportioning to the latter the Litani River and northern Galilee; the turbulent eastern districts of Trans-Jordan Palestine would be pacified by Feisal’s martial brother Abdullah, installed as Emir of Trans-Jordan. England would directly rule the region west of the Jordan under a Mandate from the League of Nations stipulating creation of a Jewish “national home”; Churchill envisioned the Zionist authorities providing capital to develop the region which England, laboring under the crushing costs of the late Great War, could not do.

On adjournment of the conference, Churchill went to Jerusalem, where he was greeted by Arab Nationalist demonstrations denouncing Zionist immigration. Abdullah the Hashemite rebuked the crowds, and Churchill angrily rejected a demand by Musa Kazim al’Husseini that England rescind the Balfour Declaration. During Churchill’s visit the aged Mufti of Jerusalem died. Gov. Samuel, advised to court the al’Husseini clan, agreed to appoint the pardoned young Haj Amin al’Husseini to the post, after hearing him express support for English rule, even though Haj Amin was not among the candidates proposed by Jerusalem’s Islamic clerics.

On May Day at Jaffa, after a large march by Jewish Socialists, a march by some sixty Jewish Communists calling for a Soviet revolution against English rule was fired on by Arab policemen. Arab mobs emerged to attack Jews in the streets and in their homes, joined often by Arab police. The demobilizing Jewish Legion was quartered nearby; many of its soldiers took arms, and next day launched attacks against Arab neighborhoods. In the countryside around Jaffa, Arab mobs gathering to attack Jewish villages were broken up by warning bombs from English aeroplanes; fighting did not cease till English warships stood in to the coast. Almost a hundred people were killed, Jews and Arabs in roughly equal proportion; about a hundred and fifty Jews, and about half as many Arabs, were badly injured. English police arrested Arabs and Jews at Jaffa and in its environs, to bitter complaint from both peoples. Leading Arab Nationalists, including Musa Kazim al’Husseini of the Arab Executive, seized the opportunity of the murderous outbreak to demand the English halt immigration by Jews. Gov. Samuel agreed to a hiatus, and several small vessels with about three hundred Jews all told aboard were turned back from Palestine to Istanbul; he also decreed Tel Aviv to be a city with its own administration, including police, separate from Jaffa.

Gov. Samuel in his King’s Birthday address in June, stressed that establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine should not harm Arab rights and interests. He was roundly denounced by Zionist politicians in Palestine, from the accommodationist Ben-Gurion to the martial Jabotinsky. Not only Gov. Samuel’s suspension of Jewish immigration, but the severing of the Litani River and northern Galilee to French Syria, and creating the Emirate of Trans-Jordan, were odious to Zionist aspirations. In late July in London, Chaim Weitzman met Churchill and Prime Minister Lloyd George at Lord Balfour’s home. Weitzman was told Jews would soon be allowed into Palestine again, and that a blind eye would be turned to Zionist acquisition of rifles.

The Palestine Arab Congress, citing various pronouncements of U. S. President Wilson, petitioned the League of Nations to end England’s rule of Palestine. A delegation from the Palestine Arab Congress led by Musa Kazim al’Husseini met Churchill in London in August, demanding England bar Jews from acquiring more land in Palestine. Churchill replied Jews did not take land; Arabs sold it. At the end of October Gen. Congreve, officer commanding English soldiers in Egypt and Palestine, declared the Army’s sympathies lay with the Arabs, rather than with a Jewish Palestine. On the Balfour anniversary, Nov. 2, Arabs mobbed the Jewish Quarter at Jerusalem, and were turned back by Zionist fighters throwing dynamite; five Jews and three Arabs were killed.

Amid great public debate in England over the wisdom of Government policy in Palestine, Churchill early in 1922 engaged a Jewish firm to electrify Palestine with dams on the Jordan, which could also provide irrigation for modern commercial agriculture. The Wahhabbi fighters of Ibn Saud pursued their quarrel with the Hashemites by striking north into Emir Abdullah’s Trans-Jordan, and were only defeated by copious use of English aeroplanes and armored cars. The League of Nations proposed its Palestine Mandate formally to England in June. The Palestine Arab Congress telegraphed complete rejection of the act to Geneva. In London, Churchill’s oratory carried the Commons, and on his White Paper, clarifying that commitment to a Jewish “national home” in Palestine meant no more than some arrangement west of the Jordan, the League of Nations awarded its Mandate to rule Palestine to England as law on July 22, 1922.

[pinto]

145. And what a dance. Thanks for posting these.

[The Magistrate]

203. Thank You, Sir

I recall that I got partway through a third installment, working it up to about 1925, but never posted it, and have not been able to find the file: I fear it has been lost in the collapse of the old P.C. lash-up I used in those days.

[Project Grudge]

142. History of Palestine

Nationalism is so 19th century.

I've been reading up on my history of Palestine and I just want to make sure I have it right.
There has never been a country of Palestinians from what I understand at least since the 13th century (and before that it was held by the crusaders). The Mamluks had the area in the 14th century. Then, the Ottoman Empire controlled the are until the 1920s (and they weren't very friendly to sparsely populated area). Then the Brits basically had control when the land from the losing parties of WWI was divided up. After the Brits and WWI, Israel controlled the land (a large influx of jewish population slightly before this time from the late 30s on).

Is all that right?


Also, it seems even before all of that the the Bedouins were there long before anyone else (or at least until people labeled themselves). And the Bedouins got the shaft much like the Native Americans in the US. According to Wikipedia, the Bedouins don't like to be confused with palestinians and disassociate themselves from the term.


So, I guess my observation is, how can a people who haven't been able to nationalize in basically a millennium expect to do it now and why did it only become such an important part of their cultural identity when a different religion controlled the land?

And another general question: It appears that "allies" like Egypt and Syria could care less about the Palestinians, so there doesn't seem to be any uproar in the Muslim community, just from Western protestors. Why do other Islamic countries distance themselves from Palestine?

[wellst0nev0ter]

149. Yep, There Was Absolutely No One Living In That Region

Until the Zionists showed up, so whatever Israel is doing now is perfectly okay.

Hell, I bet it was okay for us to invade Eye-Rack since it wasn't a real nation until this century, right?

[ProgressiveMuslim]

158. Forget that the poster ignores the fact that the entire colonized world was developing national

aspirations.

The grasp of history of some posters here is underwhelming.

[Wetzelbill]

174. yeah and they also forget

that the idea of having a Jewish nation there is based on a Jewish nation that existed a few thousand years ago, when the descendants of that nation are mostly what we call the "Palestinian" people today.

[Name removed]

148. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[teotwawki]

156. "As the Arabs see the Jews" King Abdullah of Jordan, 1947 essay in American Magazine

Summary

This fascinating essay, written by King Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah, appeared in the United States six months before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the article, King Abdullah disputes the mistaken view that Arab opposition to Zionism (and later the state of Israel) is because of longstanding religious or ethnic hatred. He notes that Jews and Muslims enjoyed a long history of peaceful coexistence in the Middle East, and that Jews have historically suffered far more at the hands of Christian Europe. Pointing to the tragedy of the holocaust that Jews suffered during World War II, the monarch asks why America and Europe are refusing to accept more than a token handful of Jewish immigrants and refugees. It is unfair, he argues, to make Palestine, which is innocent of anti-Semitism, pay for the crimes of Europe. King Abdullah also asks how Jews can claim a historic right to Palestine, when Arabs have been the overwhelming majority there for nearly 1300 uninterrupted years? The essay ends on an ominous note, warning of dire consequences if a peaceful solution cannot be found to protect the rights of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine.

A really interesting essay, especially in light of current events. see the full text at link
http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/kabd_eng.html

[shaayecanaan]

157. Excellent article

Well worth a read.

[question everything]

188. And yet, there were secret meetings between King Abdullah and Golda Meir

Had he not been murdered - by a Palestinian - a true co-existence may have been established between Israel and Trans Jordan.

[Shaktimaan]

232. Truly an interesting article.

And more than a little hypocritical and self-serving as well.

His main point is to plea for the sanctity of Palestine for the Palestinians and describes how the Zionists create a credible threat to Palestinian nationalism. If Zionism continues, he fears that Palestine will not have a chance to nationalize under its true owners, the Palestinians.

I wonder what his own justification was for his own kingdom. He was, after all, a Hashemite king ruling over a land of Palestinians. And when the war of independence was finally over, it was Jordan who immediately took the remaining land originally pledged to Palestine, the West Bank, and annexed it itself. It was Jordan and Egypt which prevented a Palestinian state from occurring, if not for that Palestine might have existed now for 60 years.

He also makes a plea for Jerusalem. As it should be open to the people of all three religions, he reasoned.

However the UN's Partition Plan which would have designated Jerusalem as an international city was rejected by Jordan and the rest of the Arabs. The sections of Jerusalem (and the entire west bank) which Jordan conquered were ethnically cleansed of Jews entirely (who at that point were a majority in the city) and the old city closed off to them. Only after east Jerusalem's liberation by Israel was the city finally open to all three religions, as Abdullah suggested.

He said that no one was more shocked than the Arabs by Hitler's treatment of the Jews. I wonder if he spoke to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem before making that statement... considering that the pre-eminent Palestinian leader and politician was actually one of Hitler's allies, (and occasional guest.)

Of course there's more, but I think the point's been made.

[Name removed]

159. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[subsuelo]

160. Israel attacked first in 1967

Look it up, get your facts straight, then we'll talk thanks

[aranthus]

164. No. The Palestinians and Syrians did.

Read "Six Days of War," by Michael Oren. The Palestinians and Syrians had fomenting a general war for years. Syrian attacks on Israel and the Egyptian closing of the Straits of Tiran were acts of war, justified only if those countries were actively at war with Israel. In that case, Israel had a right of self defense to respond with military force. The Jordanians and Iraqis also attacked Israel before Israel attacked Jordan or Iraq.

[subsuelo]

169. You are wrong.

Israel attacked first.

You can type away all the justifications and excuses you can dream up but it doesn't change the fact that Israel launched an attack first.

[question everything]

189. I really like it how the ones that insist that Israel attacked first

always refer to Egypt while completely ignore Jordan and Syria who joined the fun.

Yes, Israel started a pre-emptive strike on Egypt after Nasser kicked the UN peacekeeping force from Gaza, amassed huge number of troops and tanks and fighter plans in the Sinai and blockaded the straits of Tiran. This last act is a recognizable act of war.

Israel specifically sent warning to King Hussein to stay out but he did not. Look at the map of pre 1967 Israel. Do you really think that it was going to start military actions on three fronts?

[Recursion]

223. That's a stretch

It was a tactical "first strike" in the sense that they attacked armies that were massing on the borders and themselves starting an invasaion.

That's a far cry from a "pre-emptive first strike" like we employed in Iraq.

[Recursion]

224. Although, it is ironic that ultimately Israel was attacking because of a blockade

Which is now being denied as a legitimate causus belli

[LeftinOH]

161. The residents of Gaza and West Bank were living in Egypt and Jordan, respectively...

but not citizens of those countries (IIRC). Presumably, as far as Egypt and Jordan were concerned, their definition of a Palestinian homeland was= all of Israel, EXCEPT Gaza and West Bank. I've always wondered how Gaza and West Bank were considered (if at all) as Palestinian territory between 1947 and 1967..(?)

[question everything]

181. While the residents of the West Bank did get a Jordanian citizenship

that allowed them to vote, get elected, even to emigrate, the Gazans were in limbo, no citizenship.

Either way, the 1967 war started with Egypt's Nasser kicked out the UN peace troop from Gaza, and had their own troops there. The Jordanian "Arab Legion" staged its attack from the West Bank.

As Yasser Arafat and George Habash started building a national movement (secular one, in contrast to Hamas and Hezbollah), the late King Hussein and Anwar Sadat decided that even if Israel withdrew, they were not interested in these territories.

[Malikshah]

162. Golda? Is that you? Some responses

Palestinians were there; some remained in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel (i.e., Israeli-Arabs), others in a variety of camps in the surrounding countries.

The annexation of which you speak was by Transjordan and was not accepted by the world, much less the Palestinians. Egypt did not annex Gaza, but controlled it.

Israel attacked in June 1967.

First read a history of the events, please. Then discuss.

[question everything]

191. The question was: where was their desire for a statehood?

Because they certainly did not embrace the UN 1947 vote for a two states solution.

They did not sent suicide bombers to the streets of Amman or Cairo. They did not march in the streets of Paris and Amsterdam demanding independence.

[Malikshah]

194. Imagine if you will the experience of families living for generations in a land. Villages that

had been there so long you can't remember when they were founded.

Then foreigners come in a lay claim to the land. They increase in number, but not by much. But they're backed by other foreigners. The newcomers are of a different culture/different civilization. They are recognized as legitimate by the other foreign powers while your own leadership, as diffuse as it had been for centuries, is not.

The rules of the game have changed over night and you and your family are behind the eightball because the people calling the shots won't address your concerns.

A generation later, the newcomers still do not own a majority of the land anywhere major, and their numbers still put them in the minority of the total population.

The other powers, outside the region, however, decide to create a state giving the newcomers the most fertile lands, the size of which are far out of proportion to their actual demographic numbers.

Cut ahead 60 years and you are told to compromise more and are asked inane questions about statehood.

Charles Smith's work on the Arab-Israeli conflict with documents is a great place to start.

[aquart]

163. Where, exactly, IS Transjordan?

Because I'm damn sure Israel didn't quadruple in size after 1967.

[Malikshah]

167. Transjordan was created out of the initial plans for the Palestine mandate

in around 1922. Transjordan was created to better control the bedouin population in that particular area so as not to cause more problems for the British as they played the alchemist game with people's lives in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine. Much like in Egypt and Iraq, Britain's solution was to create a constitutional monarchy in Transjordan. In Iraq they created the monarchy, throne, and place Faysal b. Husayn (of TE Lawrence fame) on the throne. In Transjordan, they placed Faysal's brother Abdallah b. Husayn. Husayn, the two kings' father, was given the Hijaz as an independent Arab kingdom, but was so not liked by the various local elements there that when Ibn Saud came along in the 1930s, the British told Husayn to give it up and go into exile.

We're still dealing with the legacy of the 1920s here folks. Get used to it unless someone wakes the hell up.

The future? Here's a hint. The U.S. followed in large part the British Playbook from the 1920s when dealing with Iraq in 2003-2008.

You poison the pot from the get go (CPA, etc.) the result will eventually bubble over and explode. (It too from 1925 to 1958 for Iraq to fester and explode)

Garbage in...garbage out.

[question everything]

200. Actually, Iraq was given as a consolation prize to Faisal

after he was kicked from Syria that was controlled by the French.

Either way, the boundaries of the countries in what we call now the Middle East were arbitrarily drawn, mostly by Churchill.

[Name removed]

165. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[AnOhioan]

171. Thanks for adding such valuable insight to the thread

Not

[aranthus]

166. What does that change?

Are you trying to suggest that the expression by Palestinians (of every stripe) of the desire for a homeland is fraudulent, each and everyone? I can't accept that, and neither do most Israelis. However Palestinian nationalism developed and when (which I think is an interesting anthropological question regarding any ethnicity or nationality), they are there now, and Israel is not going to make peace by denigrating their existence, anymore than Palestinians are going to make peace by claiming that the Jews belong in Europe.

[Wetzelbill]

170. it's a racist concept

This stuff has been floating around forever. It's very similar to how Manifest Destiny in our own country is justified.

[aranthus]

172. I think that it's bigotry.

Denying Palestinian national existence is anti-Palestinianism similar to how denying Jewish national existence and the right to a state in Israel is antisemitism. I don't think that either is racism, because neither Palestinians nor Jews are a race. I think that the term, "racism," has become over used, and has been made to stand in for other forms of bigotry. Support terminological precision.

[Wetzelbill]

173. I can go with that

I was being more conceptual, meaning that that sort of thing is tied to race, like I mentioned in the U.S. with Manifest Destiny and American Indians. But in terms of this conflict, yeah, bigotry is a better way to put it.

[question everything]

193. Of course they have a right for a homeland and nationality

but it is hypocritical to blame Israel for the misery of the Palestinians when their misery has been self inflicted in some cases.

There are young people here who have no idea and no desire to understand the history of the region - not on this thread I will add. Clearly people on this thread have shown their desire to know more.

There are young people who cannot even imagine a tiny Israel, surrounded by strong armies attacking it from all directions.

The victory in 1967 was big surprise for Israel itself and, sadly, it did not know how to handle this and continued to make mistakes that compounded the problem.

As I have posted several times in the last several years: there were about 700,000 Arab refugees that fled from what became the State of Israel, and a similar number of Jews fled Arab countries. The Jews were absorbed and became citizens of Israel, while the Arabs have been sitting in squalid refugee camps for more than 60 years now.

Why have they need been absorbed by Jordan, and Egypt and Syria and Iraq and Saudi Arabia to be integrated in their societies? Because none of this countries are true democracy and flaming the resentment of the Palestinians has been an easy diversion from, say, keeping open societies.

[Wetzelbill]

168. they were there

and in Egypt, Jordan etc. After Sykes-Picot they've never been in control of anything to ask for a state or even fight for one. Not in the Westphalian sense that we all consider statehood. The Jewish people had been migrating there somewhat since even before the turn of the century, so it wasn't as if they all of a sudden showed up either, but the Palestinians were fully colonized, they weren't in a position, had no unity and had no support to create the Western concept of a state. It wasn't that long before when the whole area was just whacked up regardless of culture or anything else.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

178. Is this a genuine question about the history of Palestinian political aspirations (as

old as Zionist aspirations) or an attempt to prove the old canard: "there's not such thing as a Palestinian?"

[The Magistrate]

190. It Does Seem Rather Loaded, Ma'am

Perhaps you could provide an answer from your own knowledge of the history involved.

[Lithos]

197. To divert the question slightly.

Have you read any of the following?

Khalidi's "Palestinian Identity", Kimmerling's book "The Palestinian People", or Musli's "Origins of Palestinian Nationalism"?

All very good books to the matter. I think Kimmerling's book is the most approachable.



L-

[The Magistrate]

176. Since '67 War Has Come Up, Sir, Here Is Piece Of Mine From The Old Days That Might Be Helpful...

Israeli commencement of what became the Six Day War did not turn on whether Nasser meant to invade Israel, or whether his deployed forces could have done so. The crisis arose from an on-going battle between Israel and Syria that reached a crescendo during April.

Nasser was bound to the new Ba'athist regime in Syria by a mutual defense pact, even as the Ba'athists were challenging his status as paramount Arab leader. When Nasser declared the Strait of Tiran closed to Israeli ships late in May, he had known for a decade, since the first Israeli withdrawl from Sinai in 1957, doing so would be considered cause for war.

The confrontation with Syria grew out of the water wars at the Golan Heights. Both Israel and Syria sought here to divert headwaters of the Jordan River from their natural course. The Syrian projects resolved on late in 1964 were on a grandiose scale, and frankly aimed to parch northern Israel, in cooperation with other works projected in Lebanon.

In 1965, Israel and Syria waged a limited war at the Golan, which subsided when Syria abandoned work on the projected diversions of waters. In the course of these hostilities, the Syrian government began to host a newly formed body of Arab Palestinian irregulars, Fatah, and provided assistance to them in their operations against Israel.

These ranged in character from sabotage of orchards or irrigation works to murder of farm families. The Fatah raiders seldom penetrated much beyond the border, and often were halted there. Israel responded to these activities by attacking Syrian army detachments on the border near any Fatah incursion. Sometimes Israeli forces operated commando style; sometimes they would engage in provocative maneuvers to draw Syrian fire, locating positions to attack them better.

Early in 1966, government of Syria came into the hands of the Ba’athist Party. Fatah operatives began to infiltrate through Jordan, in hopes of avoiding the most active Israeli defenses. Jordan’s King opposed this development, but the nature of the country, and custom of its inhabitants, militates in favor of the intrepid handful against the police cordon. The Israeli government, finding its border with Jordan increasingly crossed by Fatah irregulars, took the pretext of an incursion by Fatah mine-layers in November to launch a major attack against a Jordanian garrison near Hebron.

The exercise did not achieve its object of ending Fatah incursions through Jordan, but only embittered Jordan’s King, and reduced his popularity among his people, many of whom clamored for war. Jordan’s forces west of the river were reinforced, and kept on alert. The Syrian Ba’athists showed a growing bellicosity; the Ba’athists, being a species of socialist, had found a ready sponsor in the Soviet Union, and were receiving quantities of Soviet munitions, and Soviet advisors. Nasser was becoming isolated among the Arab governments he hoped to dominate through his projected Arab Federation, because of his continued inaction regarding Israel.

In the spring of 1967, Israeli cultivation of land at the Golan border with Syria was resumed. It drew Syrian shellfire, and the limited war of ’65 was resumed. Both sides committed air forces, and in early April, all of a group of six Syrian jet fighters were shot down by Israeli jet fighters.

This aerial defeat for Syria, and the increasing intensity of the conflict, concerned the Soviets. Fearing their new Ba’athist client would be forced to fight Israel alone, they decided to force the pace of events. Nasser was informed by Soviet sources that Israel was massing troops to invade Syria. It is impossible to say if Nasser believed or disbelieved the report; it was certainly plausible, and any current Egyptian intelligence estimates could not have conclusively shown him it was false.

Nasser deployed two thirds of his army to Sinai; a sizeable force, certainly for the defensive frontage, and well positioned to advance if Israel was indeed embroiled to the north. He then dismissed United Nations monitor detachments in demilitarized zones on his border with Israel.

Nasser’s closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships late in May was so flagrant a violation of current Sea Law that at first it was seriously proposed a joint fleet of United States, English, and French navy vessels steam to suppress any Egyptian blockade. Such military interference with commerce on the high seas as Nasser declared was (and still is) universally considered to activate a nation’s right of self-defense against aggression.

The Israeli government resolved to vindicate its rights to maritime commerce by striking through Sinai to capture the straits. This was begun by attacking and destroying the Egyptian air force at its bases. Air forces of Syria, Jordan and Iraq, in response to mutual assistance pacts with Egypt, undertook air attacks against Israel. The planes of these air forces were shot down there, or destroyed after landing by Israeli air attacks.

In arid country armor is helpless without air cover, and infantry helpless without armor; the Egyptian forces were quickly routed. With the most sizeable opponent neutralized, Israel struck in turn at Jordan, wrecking its forces west of the river, and seizing all of Jerusalem, then at Syria, seizing the watershed at the Golan.

Some irony may be noted in how Syria, which had indulged in the bouts of limited war at Golan, and sponsorship of Fatah, that had lit the train under these events, came out of their explosion relatively least damaged of the Arab powers. Nasser, who was least involved in beginning the crisis, paid heavily for his blunders during it; he had tried late to bluff his way back into the lead, and been called. Jordan’s King had been left little choice, caught between the Syrian sponsored Fatah campaign, Israeli retaliation for it, and the growing bellicosity of his own people.

The Israeli government’s actions, too, were conditioned by popular feelings. The people of Israel certainly took Nasser’s dismissal of U. N. monitors, and blockade of Tiran, as prelude to war. The Israeli government’s actions were also conditioned by knowledge all the Arab regimes were bound together by mutual assistance pacts, ensuring any war could become an affair of one against all no matter how it began. Israel’s right to war to lift the blockade declared at Tiran was undisputed; from the moment various Arab governments chose to honor pacts with Egypt and engage Israel, they were open participants in a war.

Once that occurred, it ceased to matter if Israel had any “real” cause for war with Jordan, or with Syria at the Golan. Nor does it matter whether Israel “had” to attack either party, after the initial exchange. The condition of war existed; that in its turn conditioned all ensuing events.

[Mike 03]

177. Great idea for a thread. It's very hard sometimes to ask questions about this conflict, because

tensions run so high that you can think you are trying to ask a question in the most neutral way but it comes out wrong and someone is upset.

Other than always wanting to discuss the movie "Munich", which I thought was a great movie, utterly fascinating, but whose point I was unsure about (I was a toddler at the time of the event), and some question about the Oslo Accords (but never mind that for now), I am only curious about this:

How many miles long is the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt?

I keep hearing about all these tunnels and smugglers. Is it that long a border that it cannot be properly checked for tunnels? On the maps, it looks like it's so short you could walk it in an hour or so.

[The Magistrate]

179. A Couple Of Hours, Perhaps, Sir

Eight or nine miles, if recollection serves.

[Mike 03]

180. Thank you, Sir.

Magistrate, I have to say, you are probably the kindest, most polite, courteous persons I have ever met here.

Thank you for not insulting me, which usually happens whenever I post here lately.

Thank you!

On Edit:

You remind me why I was so happy to find this place in the first place.

[Lithos]

195. It is about 40-45 miles

if you walk the circumference of the three landward sides.

Gaza is more or less rectangular, about 5 miles wide and about 35 miles long.

The reason why the tunnels are such a problem and hard to identify has to do with the density of population along the Egyptian border. One of the largest towns, Rafah, is directly on the border with only a small security strip separating the two countries. The Egyptian border is also fairly well built up. This means that people can start a tunnel in the basement of one house and end it in the basement of another.

L-

[Mike 03]

205. Wow, I had no idea. Thank you, Lithos

It looked really small/short, like a blip, on the map CNN had been showing.

This is just another reason there should be a place for people who care and want to learn but just don't know enough to be in this forum, lol.

Thanks for making this thread, though.

[excess_3]

196. Gaza, West Bankia , connected?, how so?

before WWI, both were part of
the Otttoman middle east, along with ...
(present) Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, SA, etc.


1920 - 1948, both were part of the British Mandate

since 1948, any connection is ? .

.........................
hells bells, maybe Egypt and Syria (both being Arab) should
get together. or maybe,
Pakistan and Bangladesh, both being formerly British

[Lithos]

198. Your question/concern/point is?

?

[question everything]

201. Funny. First you combine a new thread with this

and then you delete the post, even though it has generated many responses back and forth.

I guess this, too, will be deleted.

[Mike 03]

204. What we need here at DU is an "Israel/Palestine Forum For Dummies." I think there are a lot

of people like me who care a lot about what is happening there but are not as well informed as others, and could use some forum to ask question with the understanding that they might accidentally be offensive to some, but are not intended to be.

Over the last few years I have felt empathy for both sides. Reading Noam Chomsky made me empathetic for the Palestinians. Seeing the movie "Munich" made me empathetic to both sides. And watching Israel attempt "Land for Peace" and having it blow up in their faces made me empathetic for Israel. And then there is the human element of seeing human beings on both sides grieving for lost loved ones, which makes me sad for them.

I just go back and forth like a teeter-totter.

There MUST be some solution we are all just not seeing. Every problem has a solution.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

207. A hypothetical question regarding the conflict in Gaza

This will probably turn into a flame war and get locked, but what the hell, I'm curious as to what sort of responses this will get:

Let's say that hypothetically at some point during the past couple of years (say between the Israeli pullout and now) a leader had emerged in Gaza who espoused a theory of resistance similar to that of Ghandi - namely resisting through non-violent civil disobedience. Assuming that such a leader were able to persuade the various factions in Gaza that this was the proper way forward, where do you think we would be today? Better off, or worse? Again, this is all hypothetical, but I'm just curious.

[Barack_America]

208. There's nothing violent in digging tunnels to smuggle in food and medicine.

And considering that's what Gaza did to trigger Israel to break the cease fire, I'm guessing that a non-violent leader in Gaza wouldn't have changed much.

But if that non-violent leader had arisen in Israel, OTOH...

[cali]

212. right. but that's not the only use for the tunnels.

and your answer has zip all to do with what the OP asked.

[Recursion]

209. Ghandi's primary tactic was a boycott and economic self-reliance

The situation in Gaza makes that impossible.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

210. Well, I suppose it's worth asking...

...whether adoption of a policy of nonviolence would change that situation. I just find the whole question interesting because I see strong parallels between the actions of the British and the actions of Israel with respect to Gaza.

[aranthus]

215. Now try answering the question.

Nice try at deflecting, but the truth is far different. Had a Gandhi arisen in Gaza, then there would not have been a blockade, and Gazans would have a chance to build economic self reliance. I understand that you don't like Israel, but to make excuses for Hamas, as you have done, is just beneath contempt.

[Recursion]

222. Nice false ad hominem

I do like Israel. I'd like to see the Israeli citizens happy and safe. But seeing that will require some pretty significant changes on the part of their government.

[aranthus]

226. Not ad hominem at all.

Merely a characterization of your prior posting. And you still haven't answered the question.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

211. Sorry mods, I'd have posted this in I/P in the first place...

...but I thought stuff posted in I/P had to refer to a specific, recent piece of news. My apologies.

[Idealism]

213. The First Intifada was non-violent in the beginning

It didn't go so well, so they turned to aggression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada


Over the course of the first intifada, an estimated 1,100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and 160 Israelis were killed by Palestinians.

[The Magistrate]

217. Not In The Ghandian Sense, Sir

More accurate than 'non-violent' would be 'rioting without employment of firearms or explosives'.

[Idealism]

219. Ghandian and non-violent are not mutually exclusive

It wasn't comparable to Ghandi's efforts, more akin to America during the revolution. Civil disobedience was their main tool, but the OP asks if these things have been tried, which they have in the past without success. Gaza only barely hangs on between forced economic relations with Israel and on humanitarian aid, there is no plausible argument that people who sustain themselves on less than $2 per day could effectively boycott a country into changing a fundamental course.

PS. don't forget rocks were a big arsenal at the time, too!

[The Magistrate]

220. Actually, Sir, It Is

There were certainly elements of the movement for independence in India who employed violence, but The Mahatma specifically excluded it as a proper course of action.

The fact remains no widespread movement on lines of Ghandian non-violence has been attempted in the history of this conflict by the Arab Palestinians. That is probably a shame, as it could have worked pretty well.

[Idealism]

221. I don't know how well it could've worked

I would like to see some type of diplomacy used, but I believe Gaza is not even close to controlling their own destiny. The West Bank may be in a better situation, but that is all relative.

[aranthus]

214. We all know what would have happened.

The attempts by other posters to mis-direct and side step the issue show that even they know it. Things would be better in Gaza, and in all of Palestine. There would first of all, have been no blockade (since that was the result of =Hamas' violent position and violence). That means no food shortages, no fuel shortages, and a build up of Gaza's economy. There would have been no rockets. There would have been moves toward peace.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

216. Jesus, I feel like Alice having gone down the rabbit hole.

Fine. We can have a whole fucking forum for raving batshit, vaguely racist 9/11 conspiracy theories, a whole forum for people who think vaccines cause autism, but I can't have a goddamn thread to myself, even in the appropriate forum, for a question I found interesting. Blerg.

(No offence to you, Lithos. I know you do your best.)

[The Magistrate]

218. My Personal View, Sir

Is that such a thing would have repaid the cause of Arab Palestine handsomely.

The basic problem here is that 'hard men' on either side prop one another up politically within their own societies. Their actions continually provide the other reason for fear to spread within their respective populations. If one side were to step decisively away from this, it is possible the dynamic might break apart. There is no question the majority of people on both sides desire peace more than victory, and would accept a compromise solution.

[azurnoir]

229. What is "down" the rabbit hole is your slanted question

what you are phishing for is that everything would have been flowers and rainbows and the Palestinians would have perfect little lives thus making the current state of affairs Hamases fault and exonerating Israel who of course only wants peace. The problem is that both societies are dominated by warrior religions and no such leader would have been possible for either side unless of course there was a mass conversion to Hinduism or one of its sects and even then history tells us that Ghandi was killed bya Hindu extremist so even that did not work out so well and IMO that same fate would have awaited anyone who was Ghandian and in fact did the nearest to that two people to arise in the ME those being Yitzak Rabin and Anwar Sadat what is interesting to note though is that out of that came the Islamic nation of Pakistan and there has been relative albeit not always quiet between the two nations

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

230. No, that's not what I wanted to hear at all.

Quite the contrary, I don't think matters would be much different than they are now. I was curious to hear what others thought. You know... opinions. Like I said, I think my discussion of this on DU is pretty much done.

[lightningandsnow]

225. What was the region like before 1948?

[The Magistrate]

227. Between WWI And WWII, Ma'am

The region we now call the Middle East was colonial property, controlled by England and France, with England having the largest share, namely Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and the Palestine Mandate, and France having Syria and Lebanon. Libya, to the west of Egypt, was Italian; France ruled the remainder of the North African coast, save a small pocket in Morocco ruled by Spain. England had great influence over Iran (Persia), to a point of de facto colonial control. Saudi Arabia was more or less independent, but the matter is too complicated to put simply for summary.

England's Palestine Mandate came from the League of Nations, a precursor to the present United Nations. This directed the establishment of a 'Jewish national home' in that territory. This was understandably unpopular with the native Arab inhabitants, and was resisted, with outbreaks of violence being routine. These climaxed in the Arab Revolt of 1936, which is pretty much the foundation, or solidification, of modern Arab Palestinian Nationalism.

From the late 1930s and into the Second World War, many Arab Nationalists, applying the 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' principle, made common cause in some degree with the rising German Reich, hoping it would remove English and French colonial power from the region. This phenomenon played a particular role in Egypt, the Palestine Mandate, and in Iraq, but only in the last did it issue into fighting of any scale, after the pro-Axis 'Golden Square' coup in the spring of 1941.

After WWII, France retained little authority in Syria, but still held close ties with Lebanon. England retained great influence over the Farouk monarchy in Egypt, and very close relations with Jordan, but less influence in Iraq. The Palestine Mandate became a seat of considerable conflict, with Arab and Jewish guerrilla groups fighting one another and the English. Levels of violence were high, and when a Labor government was elected in England, a dissolution of the British Empire was set in train, including divestiture of India. This government had no stomach whatever for holding on to the Palestine Mandate.

[lightningandsnow]

228. Interesting!

Thank you.

[Mike 03]

231. One thing is really upsetting and pissing me off.

Initially, I was basically thinking that Israel has the right to go into Gaza and settle this because they have tried "land for peace" and what they got in return was rockets.

But WHY are they bombing U.N. shelters, trucks and installations, when the United Nations is providing the Israeli military with their exact coordinates to avoid such mistakes? That really makes me very, very angry.

Now not only are civilians being killed but it seems like the U.N. is being targeted, and now, understandably, they have pulled out of the Gaza strip altogether. Some of them were killed.

There is no reason at all that the Israelis need to bomb the United Nations peacekeepers or impair their efforts to provide some sort of relief to those who are displaced due to the war.

This is just so wrong.

Why????

[Recursion]

238. Umm

but it seems like the U.N. is being targeted, and now, understandably, they have pulled out of the Gaza strip altogether.

And that doesn't answer "why?" for you?

[peacetalksforall]

235. Is anyone here on DU in the know about the Arabic press in relation to the Gaza Strip?

Writers are always commenting on the lack of support for Palestinians by other Arabic countries - has that changed since December 26/27?

[Recursion]

236. I only read Al-Ahram regularly -- it's in Mubarak's pocket

And it's towing Mubarak's line pretty closely so far, though of course even it is showing photos you will never see in the US.

They Thursday Al Quds should be at the newsstand at Harvard Square tomorrow; I'll grab a copy and follow up if the snowstorm allows.

[Name removed]

239. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.