Hamas shut off the power to Palestine

[Risto 0]

Zionism will ultimately fail

It’s quite obvious who is failing

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

That said, Israel should make more of an effort to allow peaceful palestinians to assimilate, but that cannot be done until the violence stops and the entire region is mostly unified.

Israel has a sizeable Palestinian population (1.4 million) within its borders who are Israeli citizens and are fully assimilated.

"Fully assimilated," you say ? You're hilarious.

Israel is the very definition of a racist state: it discriminates between its citizens on the basis of religion/ethnicity, and grants them different levels of legal rights and privileges -- favoring its own Jewish citizens as well as all Jews anywhere in the world over its own Palestinian Arab citizens.

Most Arab Israelis are restricted as to where they can live -- usually it means living in separate settlements or towns, apart from Jewish settlements and towns. These Arab towns have less services, fewer chances to expand and develop. If families even try to move, they find out quick: Arab Israelis aren't wanted in Jewish Israeli neighborhoods:

Adel Kaadan wants out. The main street in Kaadan's hometown 20 miles north of Tel Aviv is lined with neatly manicured flower beds and decorative palm trees. Off main street, however, the sidewalk ends, and the cracked asphalt and littered streets reveal the darker face of Arab life in Israel -- one of poverty, discrimination, neglect and violent distress.

For six years now, Kaadan has tried to move his family out of the run-down, overcrowded Arab town of Baqa to the greener pastures of Katzir, a small Jewish village built on state-owned land, where open spaces, whitewashed houses and impeccably paved streets form a picture of suburban bliss. But the Katzir municipal council has barred Kaadan from building a home there for a simple reason: He's an Arab.

Comprising roughly 18 percent of the country's population, Israeli Arabs like Kaadan pay taxes, vote in Israeli elections and speak Hebrew. Tired of being treated as a second-class citizen, Kaadan sued the state in 1995. On paper, he won. But in practice, Kaadan and many other Arabs are still waiting for Israel to uphold their basic human rights.

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2000/11/03/israeli_arabs/index.html

Israel even runs a segregated school system:

Nearly one in four of Israel's 1.6 million schoolchildren are educated in a public school system wholly separate from the majority. The children in this parallel school system are Israeli citizens of Palestinian Arab origin. Their schools are a world apart in quality from the public schools serving Israel's majority Jewish population. Often overcrowded and understaffed, poorly built, badly maintained, or simply unavailable, schools for Palestinian Arab children offer fewer facilities and educational opportunities than are offered other Israeli children. This report is about Israel's discrimination against its Palestinian Arab children in guaranteeing the right to education.

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2/ISRAEL0901-01.htm

Israel oppresses the Bedouin population especially hard, refusing to "officially recognize" their towns. Many of these are settlements built after the wars of 1948 and 1967 -- camps they were forcibly removed to -- but since they don't "officially" exist, this means Israel does not connect them to water, electricity, sewer, etc. Their schools are the worst, the population is living in poverty. And every so often, Israel comes in to bulldoze what little they have left:

For less than four dollars an hour, the Jewish teenagers removed furniture, clothes, kitchenware and toys from the homes and loaded them on to trucks. As they worked diligently alongside the many policemen who had come to secure the destruction of 30 houses in two unrecognised Bedouin villages, Bedouin teenagers stood by watching their homes being emptied.

When all the belongings had been removed, the bulldozers rapidly destroyed the homes. All those present, Jews and Bedouins, were Israeli citizens; together they learned an important lesson in the discrimination characterising civic life in the Jewish state.

The current demolitions are part of a strategy that began with the foundation of the state of Israel. Its ultimate objective is the Judaisation of space. In this case, the demolitions were carried out in order to establish two new Jewish villages. Their establishment, though, is part of a much larger plan that includes the construction of about 30 new Jewish settlements in the Israeli Negev, the seizure of Bedouin land for military needs, and the creation of dozens of single-family farms on land that has been inhabited by Bedouins since they were relocated to the region by the state in the early 1950s.

After witnessing the demolitions, a Bedouin activist asked one of the Jewish teenagers why he had agreed to participate in the eviction. Without hesitating, the teenager replied: "I am a Zionist and what we are doing here today is Zionism."

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/neve_gordon_and_erez_tzfadia/2007/12/privatising_zionism.html

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

The people who were expelled from Palestine 60 years ago are all dead. The so-called

"refugees" are their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who have never lived in

the villages their great-grandparents were expelled from and wouldn't be able to tell Ramle

from their elbow.

As far as these people are concerned, they already have a perfectly good Palestinian state.

It's called Jordan.

Most of this ridiculous post has already been addressed.

But I must add one more correction: there are *lots* of refugees still alive who were expelled in 1948 -- and there are others from the second wave of expulsions in 1967. Obviously, many of these people are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s now, but they're certainly not "all dead." (You *do* know there are Holocaust victims still alive today, don't you ?)

For instance, here is a refugee living at al Amari camp in Ramallah -- she is 104 years old:

And by the way -- plenty of Palestinians have seen their former homes with their own eyes. Some can even see them from their refugee camps.

[mawilson 2,133]

Most Arab Israelis are restricted as to where they can live

Please explain this statement. Restricted how? Who's stopping them from moving to, say, Tel-Aviv?

It's not like you need the government's permission to rent an apartment.

Hell, even I rented an apartment in Tel-Aviv when I was there, and I don't even have a Teudat-Zehut (Israeli ID card.)

By the way, the ID card used to include the "nationality" of the card holder. They don't even do that anymore - there's no way to tell if the card holder is a Jew or an Arab.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Hamas intentionally targets children and old people. Israel targets terrorists and occasionally hits civilians (probably set up as human shields by hamas).

Look. If you are not going to bad mouth a known terrorist group (Hamas) why would I badmouth a sovereign nation defending itself? Besides they are God's chosen people. Best not to piss off God.

The body count doesn't back up your claim:

9/29/00 - 1/31/08

Palestinians killed by Israeli army: 4485

Israelis killed by Palestinians: 1031

Palestinian children killed by Israeli army: 878

Israeli children killed by Palestinians: 119

Source: B'Tselem

Do the math. More than 1 out of every 5 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers has been a child -- and many of these were killed by sniper fire with direct shots to the head. Fewer than 1 out of every 8 Israelis killed by Palestinians has been a child.

The Palestinians are killing far fewer kids than your "chosen"....

[Ban Hammer 13,445]

The Palestinians are killing far fewer kids than your "chosen"....

maybe they got bad aim.........

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Hamas intentionally targets children and old people. Israel targets terrorists and occasionally hits civilians (probably set up as human shields by hamas).

Look. If you are not going to bad mouth a known terrorist group (Hamas) why would I badmouth a sovereign nation defending itself? Besides they are God's chosen people. Best not to piss off God.

The body count doesn't back up your claim:

9/29/00 - 1/31/08

Palestinians killed by Israeli army: 4485

Israelis killed by Palestinians: 1031

Palestinian children killed by Israeli army: 878

Israeli children killed by Palestinians: 119

Source: B'Tselem

Do the math. More than 1 out of every 5 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers has been a child -- and many of these were killed by sniper fire with direct shots to the head. Fewer than 1 out of every 8 Israelis killed by Palestinians has been a child.

The Palestinians are killing far fewer kids than your "chosen"....

Palestinians like their human shields.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Hamas intentionally targets children and old people. Israel targets terrorists and occasionally hits civilians (probably set up as human shields by hamas).

Look. If you are not going to bad mouth a known terrorist group (Hamas) why would I badmouth a sovereign nation defending itself? Besides they are God's chosen people. Best not to piss off God.

The body count doesn't back up your claim:

9/29/00 - 1/31/08

Palestinians killed by Israeli army: 4485

Israelis killed by Palestinians: 1031

Palestinian children killed by Israeli army: 878

Israeli children killed by Palestinians: 119

Source: B'Tselem

Do the math. More than 1 out of every 5 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers has been a child -- and many of these were killed by sniper fire with direct shots to the head. Fewer than 1 out of every 8 Israelis killed by Palestinians has been a child.

The Palestinians are killing far fewer kids than your "chosen"....

Palestinians like their human shields.

Wow. That surely wins the award for sickest, most morally irresponsible armchair judgement of the week.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

But there WERE no rockets until 2001 -- more than 34 years after Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began.

hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are wrong......

yup

Well don't take my word for it. You can always look it up:

Production of the Qassam rocket began in September 2001, following the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

...

The Qassam rocket was first launched into Israeli territory on March 5, 2002, by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/wor...amas-qassam.htm

Next...

Here's an idea.... stop occupying Palestinian land and stop oppressing Palestinian civilians -- stop murdering, kidnapping, assaulting and torturing them, and stop stealing their property. Sheesh.

Here's another idea. Stop indiscriminately launching rockets at Israelis, stop destroying Jewish peoples' property and infrastructure, stop sending your children into Israel with the sole purpose of blowing themselves up and taking as many people as possible with them, stop hiding your terrorists behind women and children and then blaming the Israelis when you intentionally placed them in harm's way.

Edited to add: I agree that there are horrible things happening from both sides. But seriously, do you really think it's as simple as you state it?

Wow. Way to take my remark entirely out of context. I made it very clear that I was responding to *this* over-simplification of the conflict (which I even quoted in my post):

Sure. Blame Israel. You're so transparent. Here's an idea.... STOP FIRING ROCKETS AT ISRAELI CIVILIANS. Sheesh

But you edited that part out. And then, to top it off, you essentially riff on the same one-sided view as Lucky Strike and present it as a "response" to me, and tell me *I'm* "over-simplifying" the conflict.

Good job at the spin............................................................................

....... not.

But that's ok. Lucky Strike thinks you're a genius.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

LuckyStrike: You are great at avoiding. I asked you few simple questions and yet you avoid answering them. You can answer 'yes' or 'no.' It should be very simple. I have answered what you asked me:

My questions to you are:

1. Do you think Israeli occupation of Arab lands is a problem?

2. Do you think Israeli should continue expanding settlement (Bush's Road map, international law clearly ask to stop settlement activities) in the occupied land?

3. Do you think British were right when leaders like Shamir and Begin were wanted for terrorist activities?

I did answer you that I don't support firing rockets and any terrorist activities no matter who does it (Arab, Israeli, Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc).

None of your questions have anything to do with the terrorists know as Hamas and the people that voted for them.

a. Do you support Hamas? I support Israel.

b. Should Israel exist?

1. No. The Arabs have huge amounts of land in the Middle east, surround and hate anything Jewish. Boy the Arabs are greedy. Besides, the Jew have more of a claim to the land than the Palestinians.

Hmmm it makes total sense now ! You have 100 cars and I have none. I take 3 of your cars at gunpoint. If you get mad, well it's because you hate me for my religion. Obviously you have plenty of cars, so you are just being greedy if you want your cars back. Also God told me I could have your cars.

2. They should keep what they have but not expand territory.

That's what the UN has been trying to tell Israel for 60 years.

3. What does that matter now? They are dead. We have living terrorists to deal with.

Um Yitzhak Shamir wishes to inform you that reports of his death have been highly exaggerated. Yes he's like 82 but he's not an ex-Shamir just yet.

The Palestinians will not be happy with anything that is given to them. They will continue their terrorist activities.

See that little blue slice? That's little ole Israel. See the see of green (the red too) around it? That's Arabs that want the blue to go away.

What exactly has been "given" the Palestinians so far ? For the last 60 years, "the Arabs" (as a political coalition) and the Palestinians as a people have made far more efforts (and concessions) to peace than the Israelis, only to be rebuffed, attacked, ignored, isolated, or given endless excuses and delays.

LOL your Big Scary Map o' Green isn't "The Arabs" -- it has a bunch of countries that aren't predominantly "Arab" at all -- like Egypt, Somalia, Mauritania.... And a couple of these countries have pretty darned good relations with Isarel....

But LMAO at the Comoros being highlighted as part of the Terrifying Green Threat ! The COMOROS !!!!

But anyway thanks for yet another insight into the complete and utter paranoia of the Zionist view of the world.

[Ban Hammer 13,445]

But there WERE no rockets until 2001 -- more than 34 years after Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began.

hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are wrong......

yup

Well don't take my word for it. You can always look it up:

Production of the Qassam rocket began in September 2001, following the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

...

The Qassam rocket was first launched into Israeli territory on March 5, 2002, by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/wor...amas-qassam.htm

Next...

Here's an idea.... stop occupying Palestinian land and stop oppressing Palestinian civilians -- stop murdering, kidnapping, assaulting and torturing them, and stop stealing their property. Sheesh.

Here's another idea. Stop indiscriminately launching rockets at Israelis, stop destroying Jewish peoples' property and infrastructure, stop sending your children into Israel with the sole purpose of blowing themselves up and taking as many people as possible with them, stop hiding your terrorists behind women and children and then blaming the Israelis when you intentionally placed them in harm's way.

Edited to add: I agree that there are horrible things happening from both sides. But seriously, do you really think it's as simple as you state it?

Wow. Way to take my remark entirely out of context. I made it very clear that I was responding to *this* over-simplification of the conflict (which I even quoted in my post):

Sure. Blame Israel. You're so transparent. Here's an idea.... STOP FIRING ROCKETS AT ISRAELI CIVILIANS. Sheesh

But you edited that part out. And then, to top it off, you essentially riff on the same one-sided view as Lucky Strike and present it as a "response" to me, and tell me *I'm* "over-simplifying" the conflict.

Good job at the spin............................................................................

....... not.

But that's ok. Lucky Strike thinks you're a genius.

wikipedia shows 2000......

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

WoM's posts make me sea-sick

[Risto 0]

That's what the UN has been trying to tell Israel for 60 years.

Perhaps arabs should have listen to the UN 60 years ago.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Let's see... where were we ?

Ah, Mawilson again...

Here are the actual FACTS about what it was like for Palestinians working in Israel before the Second Intifada, and it ain't your rosy little fairy tale:

Since the beginning of the occupation following the 1967 war, Palestinian labor played a role in the Israeli economy roughly similar to that played by Mexican labor in California. Palestinian territories provided a supply of low-wage labor for Israeli employers. Like many Mexican immigrant workers in the United States, Palestinians who work in Israel lacked basic rights and government protections once they crossed the border. They constituted the most easily exploited and expendable segment of the Israeli labor force.

On and off throughout these decades, prior to the closure of the border three years ago, thousands of Palestinians would spend up to five hours a day in checkpoints in order to find work as day laborers in Israel in construction, agriculture, and service industries. Before 2000, 40% of all employed Palestinians worked in Israel. Work was usually temporary, with a high dismissal rate. Palestinians working in Israel were taxed up to 20% of their salary, despite being ineligible for most Israeli government benefits. Exorbitant court fees prevented most Palestinians from bringing charges against their employers.

So bloody what? Yes, they were a source of cheap labor. You don't see Mexicans complaining and starting an intifada, do you?

I never said things were perfect. Things were better, even you can't deny that.

LOL.

The Intifada isn't some protest about the working conditions for Palestinians in Israel.

The Intifada (again, meaning "uprising" in Arabic -- literally "shaking off") is a response to Israel's continuing illegal military occupation and ongoing seizure of territory in the West Bank and Gaza, while promises of peace and a final negotiation for the Palestinian state were left to stagnate.

I am not surprised that you (coming from a Zio-centric point of view) perceive the years preceding October 2000 as somehow "better" for Palestinians (although you get confused between Palestinian Israeli citizens and Palestinians in the occupied territories.) The fact is -- things were much better for *Israel* before the Palestinians started fighting back.

You need to come to terms with what actually happened, and how Israel's own policies led to the Intifada and the situation today.

Here is a pretty good capsule of post-1967 history for you (what they don't teach you in Hasbara class):

Having been badly bruised by the misgovernment of the Jordanians which preceded it, [Palestinians] imagined that Israeli rule was unlikely to be worse. West Bank life throughout the ’70s and early ’80s was rather serene, and Gaza was far from the hellhole it later became. Men earned decent wages working in Israel, and the standard of living—refrigerators and washing machine became commonplace—was rising. Universities were absorbing young people; travel by car and bus was easy. The absence of danger drew Israelis to local restaurants to dine on Arab delicacies, tourists visited from abroad and émigrés often returned home to be with their families. Except in the refugee camps and at a few guard posts at crossroads, it was rare even to see soldiers, much less to feel their intrusions.

Settlements at that time were few, but, after the Likud Party won the election of 1977 on a pro-settlement platform, that began to change. Within a few years, settlers living in temporary trailer parks were driving through Arab villages on their way to work, stopping for groceries in street markets en route home. At the same time, Palestinian demography was changing, with the rise to maturity of a new generation that did not know 1967 and which found the settlers’ presence provocative. Though serious violence was still uncommon, occasionally a teenager threw a rock and smashed a windshield.

I recall once visiting a settler family living at the end of a narrow, rutted road in the shadow of an old British police station. Over the kitchen table, a young mother argued passionately that the army should provide settlers with more protection from the nearby Arabs. Rather naively, I asked whether she saw any possible compromise between the settlers and their neighbors, who had lived on the land for centuries. Her answer: “There is no compromise. This is our land. The Torah says so.” Slowly, it became clear that these Jews were planning to stay, and the new generation of Palestinians rising to maturity sensed that patience had serious limits, and that action was required if Israel was ever to evacuate them. Meanwhile, Israelis were growing increasingly comfortable with the spoils of their 1967 conquest. In 1987, a spontaneous, basically nonviolent uprising called the intifada broke out. Since then, with only brief respites, the confrontation between the sides has grown steadily more intense, and more brutal.

Ehud Barak was an Army general elected Prime Minister who also had ties to the settler movement. Settlement expansion intensified under his administration. He also stepped up pressures on the Palestinian people after Arafat refused "extremely generous" offer at Camp David -- where he proposed a Palestinian state made up of disconnected Bantustans, totally surrounded by the Israeli army.

Then came "the Bulldozer" Ariel Sharon, first as Army general then as Defense Minister. His own government found him *personally responsible* for the massacres of thousands of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila during Israel's assault on Lebanon in 1982. But this war criminal was quite the Comeback Kid. Sharon became leader of his longtime political group -- the rightwing settler party Likud, which calls for Israel's annexation and settlement of the entire West Bank (along with all of the Golan Heights, Gaza and Jerusalem.) By 2000, he was popular enough to run for Prime Minister, and win.

The predictable result was the second intifada, more violent than the first, on which Sharon, as candidate for prime minister, deliberately poured fuel by invading the Temple Mount with a band of soldiers. After his election, says Warschawski, Sharon embarked on a program that was “essentially punitive ... meant to teach the Palestinians a lesson for having dared to defy the occupation.”

...

In an interview in the newspaper Haaretz after he was elected prime minister in 2001, Sharon expressed a belief that Israel’s permanent security was an ongoing objective that might take a century to attain. The War of Independence, he said, was just the opening chapter. A peace treaty, he said, was no guarantee, and if a Palestinian state became unavoidable, he would permit it to cover no more than 42 per cent of the land that was envisioned for it by the international community and in U.N. resolutions.

“It’s not by accident,” he said, “that the settlements are located where they are. They safeguard the cradle of the Jewish people’s birth and also provide strategic depth which is vital to our existence.” It was Sharon’s idea, say Zertal and Eldar, to create chains of settlements to control the West Bank’s key aquifer and strategic hills. “I see no reason for evacuating any settlement,” he told Haaretz. Even after solemnly promising Bush to halt building in the territories, he kept pouring in funds, often selecting the construction sites himself. By conceding the principle of a Palestinian state, he hoped to keep Arabs from ever voting in Israel; he even had the army pull out of the Gaza Strip, though he ceded nothing in the West Bank. Time was working in Israel’s favor, Sharon insisted, and a hasty peace would only be a barrier to its achieving its security goals.

...

The wall, however, is only one part of an elaborate system of control created by the army, bringing Palestinian social life, along with the local economy, to a virtual halt. Palestinians suspected of terrorism, along with “collateral” victims, are killed almost daily in a program of “targeted assassinations.” Israeli prisons, which have locked up an estimated 700,000 Palestinians since 1967, at any given moment hold some 10,000, most of them without charges. Over local and international protests, the army performs hundreds of home demolitions a year, a form of collective punishment usually inflicted on families whose children it has arrested. Meanwhile, the network of settlers’ highways, lined with barbed wire to stop pedestrian crossings, has effectively divided the West Bank into enclaves, isolating segments of the population from one another. No family can escape the system. In making clear that the Palestinian state it envisaged would consist of these separated cantons, Israel promised to link them with roads and tunnels for the use of Arabs alone. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians said they were not interested.

Under Sharon, at the start of the second intifada, the army took a major step further: It enlarged to more than 500 its web of checkpoints throughout the interior of the West Bank. Most sit within Arab towns or between Arab villages or outside Arab schools or clinics or mosques. Getting through them requires permits issued by the security services, reminiscent of those required of blacks under the old South African regime. At times, the quid pro quo for these permits is collaboration with the authorities, sowing further social divisions. Young soldiers with little supervision man the checkpoints; if they are not actually trained to intimidate and humiliate, that is how they behave. Passing a checkpoint may take hours; mothers have lost sick children en route to clinics; fathers are berated in front of their children; complainers often wind up in detention pens after their papers are confiscated. Conceivably checkpoints protect Jewish settlements, but almost all are too far from the border to have an impact on the security of Israel itself. The only real function of the checkpoints, experts agree, is to disrupt Palestinian life.

- Milton Viorst is a former correspondent for The New Yorker who has written six books on the Middle East. His most recent is “Storm from the East: The Struggle between the Arab World and the Christian West

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/page2...ic_predicament/

So this is what happened, and this is how we got to where we are today.

Events don't occur in a vacuum -- the Intifada didn't just appear out of nowhere. If you don't or won't look at the history and context of the events in the conflict, and how each step led to the next, then you will never understand how to end it.

[HLM 1]

way to go wife of mahmoud.... the truth has to be said!!!!! the world has to know!!!!

innocent ppl of palestine need to be heard......

btw hamas means absolutely nothing to arabs thats not why we re here.....so keep mentioning them as much as u want we re not defending them.