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Israel, Palestine and Iran


Swerbs

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The BBC's coverage in this is quite shameful. They have been speaking of Israeli "retaliation" against "militants", obscuring the timeline of what has happened, making out there is an equality of threat on both sides.

Peter, with respect I think you've got the timeline mixed up:

Hamas was firing rockets at towns and cities in Southern Israel for weeks prior to the Israeli decision to start hitting them back. Whether it's a fair fight, whether they have a parity of equipment or of reach is irrelevant. Hamas started this round of conflict but took the metaphorical knife to a gun fight. More fool them, frankly, unless provoking a war was exactly what they intended in the first place.

You could (and probably will) counter with arguments of refugees, land grabs in 1948 et al, none of which obscures the fact that now, in this conflict, Hamas were the instigators and Israel is responding as any other government on earth would be forced to do, in an attempt to end the rocket fire against its territory. I also agree with Snowy that the bus bombing by Hamas has knackered any serious chance of a cease fire. Again, you'd be hard pressed to surmise that this wasn't the express intention of doing it at all, knowing as they do how the Israeli government will be forced to respond.

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Peter, with respect I think you've got the timeline mixed up:

Hamas was firing rockets at towns and cities in Southern Israel for weeks prior to the Israeli decision to start hitting them back. Whether it's a fair fight, whether they have a parity of equipment or of reach is irrelevant. Hamas started this round of conflict but took the metaphorical knife to a gun fight. More fool them, frankly, unless provoking a war was exactly what they intended in the first place.

You could (and probably will) counter with arguments of refugees, land grabs in 1948 et al, none of which obscures the fact that now, in this conflict, Hamas were the instigators and Israel is responding as any other government on earth would be forced to do, in an attempt to end the rocket fire against its territory. I also agree with Snowy that the bus bombing by Hamas has knackered any serious chance of a cease fire. Again, you'd be hard pressed to surmise that this wasn't the express intention of doing it at all, knowing as they do how the Israeli government will be forced to respond.

The timeline is discussed in some detail here.

Last time around,

that Israel broke that ceasefire first, as well.

The Israeli narrative tends to be dominant, though. They are very well practised at pushing stories to new media to create the image of them as an innocent wronged party. But it's not true.

What's more interesting is why Israel did this. There are various suggestions, including testing what the Egyptian response would be, trying out the missile defence system before needing it against more serious weapons, and obviously the impending elections.

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Source: "The Electronic Intifada".....*raises eyebrow in a sceptical fashion*

:)

I think I'd rather accept what they say than Mark Regev. Or the IDF, with their reports of 111 injured people, most of whom turn out to be suffering with anxiety.

Shows how good my bloody forecasting skills are. :D

I'm afraid your forecasting skills may turn out to be right. But let's hope not.

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Supposedly this is the ceasefire agreement. I dunno. It's off the internet.

Obvious problem is that while Israel commands all Israeli forces, Hamas doesn't control all Palestinian factions. Especially since the guy best placed to exert pressure on them was murdered a few days ago.

A8PqxlDCAAAGLCe.jpg

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Great news that there is at least a chance for this to de-escalate but as Peter alludes to above, should more than a slack handful of rockets now be fired at Israel Bibi and friends can turn to Obama and say 'we told you so' before unleashing holy hell on Gaza. I understand the point that Hamas doesn't control every militant in Gaza, but they wanted to be the government there so like everywhere else in the world the buck stops with them.

Chuckled at the Hamas guy making his speech praising Iran for financing and arming them, a proper two fingered salute to Israel, the US and the West in general.

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A better title would be taken from the text, Are They Even Jewish?

Israel Is Not Jewish

by Myles Hoenig / November 21st, 2012

In 1982 I attended an international teachers’ Summer Institute over a period of eight weeks. It so happened to have fallen right in the middle of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The teachers were from all continents and of all faiths. Like the Director and myself, there was a Jewish contingency of teachers. The participants were East and West Europeans, Pakistanis, Africans, and there were Palestinians. Who amongst us really understood what a Palestinian was? The Sabra and Shatila massacres were to follow just a few short months later. As I spoke with the Director, the shame and embarrassment we both felt were palpable, and we were very clear to all who inquired that Israel did not represent us.

Nearly thirty years later Jews with a conscience are feeling the same. Only this time we are including extreme anger. The hijacking of Jewish ethos by murderous psychopaths in Israel, and their counterparts in the US, is unbearable. Although I can’t exactly say that I was raised in the most liberal of families in America, where racial and religious diversity were an asset, there was something there that taught us deep down that ‘never again’ means that for all people. When the most persecuted ethnic group outside of the Roma in Europe mimic their very tormentors regarding other people’s lives, one must take a stand and be heard.

The guilt trip that the enablers, like AIPAC and Christian and Jewish Zionists, lay on most Americans is masterful. Obama, the Congress, the media, academia all tremble at the very thought that just expressing an ounce of humanism would bring down the walls of Jericho on their careers. Many progressive pundits had hopes that this past election proved how little power AIPAC has now that it lost every race it slithered and slandered its way through. How short lived that was.

One can be blind to human suffering and play the geopolitical card. Israel is the West’s colonial outpost in a region of the world where its natural resources are coveted by imperial and capitalist powers. It doesn’t matter that Israel calls itself democratic and that the United States’ other allies in the region are oppressive and repressive to its own citizens. In the world of the 1%, human suffering barely rates as a line item on a spread sheet.

The extent of gross human rights violations in Gaza has certainly reached Nazi-like proportion. The enormity of collective punishment in Gaza equals the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto. Rockets fired into Israel proper that certainly cause terror amongst the inhabitants but does so little damage with such few casualties is being met with F-16 bombardments of Gaza neighborhoods. Firing indiscriminately into neighborhoods from the air is reminiscent of Guernica, where the Luftwaffe practiced aerial bombardment on a civilian population.

It is time to stop being afraid to equate Israel with the Nazis. Are they even Jewish? Nowhere in the Talmud is it taught that when your home is destroyed it is your right to take another’s and put them out. Yet the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from pre-Israeli statehood to the present stands as a stark contrast to what it is to be Jewish. Targeting women and children, families, water towers and other forms of infrastructure, is sheer barbarism. The brute racism by Israel’s leading figures, as supported by opinion polls of its people, can only be compared with Grand Dragons and neo-Nazis.

It is time for all people of conscience, especially Jews, to stand up and put a stop to the practices of such an insane country.

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The mistrust and hatred is too deep there for them to accomplish anything of significance. Now Israel will use the Iranian-made rockets that Hamas used against them as justification for engagement with Iran. Maybe this is what Israel wanted all along.

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Harry Fear @harryfear

This afternoon a group, of mostly Gazan children, crossed over the border into Israel to inspect a rusty previously-bombed Israeli jeep…

… just over the green line from Gaza's Khan Yunis; Israeli soldiers opened fire injuring 4.

3:51 PM - 22 Nov 12

Seems like fairly poor marksmanship. Small targets, but still it's not like they were shooting back.

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Source: "The Electronic Intifada".....*raises eyebrow in a sceptical fashion*

For a different source on ceasefires and how they end, see this.

...We analyzed the entire timeline of killings of Palestinians by Israelis, and killings of Israelis by Palestinians, in the Second Intifada, based on the data from the widely-respected Israeli Human Rights group B'Tselem (including all the data from September 2000 to October 2008)...

...it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern -- in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause -- becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days...

The recent ceasefire which preceded this last conflict fits this pattern. The ceasefire was broken by Israel, shooting a mentally ill man walking in the buffer zone and then making medics wait for six hours before attending him (he died of his injuries), but the mainstream media generally repeated the Israeli narrative that the rockets had just started again for no reason. The Israeli lobby is very well organised, especially with regard to putting continual pressure on media to repeat the Israeli line as though it were fact. Many of the people who pressure the media on behalf of Israel appear to be people who believe the Israeli spin, rather than people who knowingly lie. It's really quite effective.

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And now the BBC reports that a Palestinian has been shot dead, inside Gaza, and 13 injured, because the Israelis thought they might have been intending to mount a protest. In their own territory. Eyewitnesses said the group were farmers.

The last sentence of that report is quite astonishing. "Shootings around the Gaza border happen fairly often and do not always lead to an escalation of violence...". Think about that.

It is important, in trying to understand this, to be aware of what Israel routinely does in these border areas. They routinely shoot towards Palestinian farmers, sometimes as a provocation, sometimes trying to damage tractors. Similarly, they shoot at Palestinian fishing boats. Both sets of actions are part of the daily intimidation and oppression which has become the way of life.

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