Free Gaza Movement announces postal service to Gaza

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Is easier to an RPG smuggled into Gaza than a letter.

Really ? And your source for this information is.... ?????

"Since January 2003, the tunnels have been used to smuggle large amounts of various types of weapons into the Gaza Strip, including dozens of RPG rockets and launchers, hundreds of kilograms of explosives, hundreds of rifles (mainly Kalashnikov AK47s) and tens of thousands of bullets, cartridges and other types of ammunition"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle4228420.ece

Your source says nothing about your claim about how easy/hard it is to smuggle letters (which is what I questioned you about.) Or are you trying to say that RPGs fit through these tunnels, but letters won’t (and don’t) ?

If the Israelis didn't guard their border the attacks would cease? Some prior examples please?

Israel is welcome to guard its own borders -- this is every country’s right. What is *not* Israel’s right is to impose its control over foreign traffic, goods, civilian travelers, etc. on borders that are *not* Israel’s -- for instance the border between Gaza and Egypt, or Gaza’s sea coast, the entire length of the West Bank’s border with Jordan, or Palestinian air space.

Nor does Israel have the right to forcibly and illegally expand its own borders -- appropriating large swaths of Palestinian territory within the occupied West Bank on which it has established illegal Jewish-only colonies built on land confiscated from Palestinian farmers and businessmen, and which it has stationed its military forces on permanent deployment in order to protect these illegal squatters from the rightful (and resentful) Palestinians owners.

Israel does not have the right to appropriate 80% of the water from the Palestinian West Bank -- cutting Palestinians to an average of 66 liters a day per capita (and in some areas such as Tubas, as little as 30 liters a day) while piping 9-10 times that amount per capita to its illegal settlers, as well as to Israel's national water carrier. (The World Health Organization guidelines consider 100 liters a day as the minimum amount needed for basic human health.)

The question you should be asking is -- “If Israel didn’t occupy, appropriate and colonize Palestinian land and resources, would the instigation for Palestinian violence and resistance cease ?” I mean -- why don’t you give some prior examples (please) of Palestinians attacking Israelis/Zionists *before* they invited themselves into Palestinian land and starting helping themselves to other people’s stuff ?

Ziologic always cracks me up. Israel illegally invades, occupies, tries to colonize and annex a foreign territory, but its supporters are upset that those people fight back. Can you give me some reason why they shouldn’t they fight back ? International law gives an occupied people the right to fight their occupiers by any means necessary. Israel should not be surprised that its violent and illegal actions provoke a violent response.

Shooting into Israel just gives the Israelis a reason to shoot back with better weapons.

“Shoot back ?” Israel has completely sealed the Gaza strip -- refusing to allow civilians to leave or enter, blocking anything except sporadic and totally inadequate amounts of food, medicine, and electrical power for 1.5 million people. This is far beyond the parameters of how civilians must be treated by occupying armies during times of military conflict. Denying civilians basic human needs, or the right to flee during wartime, or the right to return to their property -- these are serious violations of international law. In fact, they are war crimes.

Why aren’t you acknowledging how all those Palestinians -- men, women, and children (more than half of the population under 18) -- just happened to end up crammed into Gaza in the first place ? They were forced there by Zionist militias and the Israeli army, so that the State of Israel could appropriate their property and claim it as part of Israel.

I mean really -- what did Israel’s leaders really expect would happen ?

What Israel has done to Gaza -- this entire disgusting display of self-righteous state-led lust for revenge on an entire population because a relatively few militants dared to fight back violently against a violent occupation -- this is absolutely appalling and intolerable and quite illegal. And Israel has been repeatedly told to stop this behavior.

Israel seized both the West Bank and Gaza (along with Jerusalem, the Sinai and the Golan Heights) in 1967 -- the war that *Israel* started, which it launched in order to annex territory and water sources.

Yep, Israel struck first but what about Egypt, Jordan and Syria? Land and water weren't the main reasons for the 6 day war.

"In his speech to Arab trade unionists on May 26, Nasser announced: "If Israel embarks on an aggression against Syria or Egypt, the battle against Israel will be a general one and not confined to one spot on the Syrian or Egyptian borders. The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel."[66][67]

Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban wrote in his autobiography that he found "Nasser's assurance that he did not plan an armed attack" convincing, adding that "Nasser did not want war; he wanted victory without war".[68][69] Writing from Egypt on 4 June 1967 New York Times journalist James Reston observed: "Cairo does not want war and it is certainly not ready for war. But it has already accepted the possibility, even the likelihood, of war, as if it had lost control of the situation."[70]

Writing in 2002 American National Public Radio journalist Mike Shuster expressed a view that was prevalent in Israel before the war that the country "was surrounded by Arab states dedicated to its eradication. Egypt was ruled by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a firebrand nationalist whose army was the strongest in the Arab Middle East. Syria was governed by the radical Baathist Party, constantly issuing threats to push Israel into the sea."[71] With what Israel saw as provocative acts by Nasser, including the blockade of the Straits and the mobilization of forces in the Sinai, creating military and economic pressure, and the United States temporizing because of its entanglement in the Vietnam War, Israel's political and military elite came to feel that preemption was not merely militarily preferable, but transformative."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War

LOL your quotes actually support what I'm saying -- Israeli leaders have admitted that Israel launched an unnecessary war in order to seize territory and resources. Here are some more quotes for ya:

"[There was] no threat of destruction" but

the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was justified so that Israel could "exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies."

-- General Ezer Weitzman, former Commander of the Israeli Air Force, New York Times, 8/21/82 and Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."

"The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land ... and they dreamed about it... they didn't even try to hide their greed for the land...

We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was... The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us."

-- Moshe Dayan, Israeli Defense Minister in 1967, The New York Times, 3/11/97

"In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves.

We decided to attack him."

-- Menachem Begin, New York Times, 8/21/82 and Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."

"I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it."

-- Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's Chief of Staff in 1967, in Le Monde, 2/28/68

"The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war."

-- Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 3/19/72

Throughout its history, Israel has used offensive military actions to attempt to expand its territory, while "justifying" its actions to the international community on the pretext that it is fighting enemies who want to destroy it. And it seems a lot of people believe it.

Anyway -- just trying to follow your logic here -- how does Israel’s former dispute with the Egyptian government somehow morph into a justification to steal territory from the Palestinians ? Especially since Israel and Egypt have had a peace agreement for 30 years now ?

Why doesn't Israel just kick the Palestinians out of the West Bank? Hmm?

You mean the same way Israel ethnically cleansed the rest of pre-1948 Palestine ? Well.... plenty of members of the Israeli government as well as the Israeli settler movement have called for Israel to do exactly that.

But there are some things the world just won’t tolerate any more -- driving 3.5 million people out of their land en-masse would result in some rather negative publicity. So Israel is doing it piece by piece instead. The military closes an area for “security reasons,” forcing Palestinians who live or farm there out of the land. Then Israel declares the area “abandoned,” transfers it to the state, and then begins to colonize it with government-subsidized settlers, stationing army units there to protect them from the rightful owners. Israel uses the same procedure to connect these illegal settlements to Israel proper -- confiscating more land, and cutting Palestinian areas off from each other. This is repeated over and over, and Palestinians are squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. Looking at a map of the illegal settlements in the West Bank makes it all too obvious -- see how Palestinian territory has been sliced up by the settlements and their "access roads" and the areas that the Israeli military has made completely off-limits to its owners:

It's a calculated strategy to divide the Palestinian people into “manageable” herds, which can then be placed under closure and made totally dependant on Israel’s opening the gate for people, food or products to move in or out. As the economy slowly strangles, and daily life is made more and more miserable, Israel’s hope is that the Palestinians will eventually be worn down until they give up and leave.

To be continued.....

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

So in fact it's Israel that has been eliminating Palestinians from their land, not vice-versa.

There are no Israelis in Gaza.

Don’t cut and paste snippets of my posts out of context and then try to twist what they refer to. I was answering your comment here:

Um, it's the Palestinians who want to eliminate Jews off PA territory.

Um the Zionists have been publicly proclaiming their intention to shove Palestinians out of all of Palestine, by force if necessary, in order to seize the entire territory since the Zionist movement began. Do I have to post the quotes of their leaders

again

????? And that's pretty much what they've been doing ever since -- they already drove most of the Arab population out of what is now Israel, and are attempting to the same thing in the West Bank.

So in fact it's Israel that has been eliminating Palestinians from their land, not vice-versa.

And again -- how do you think all those Palestinians ended up in Gaza ? 90% of them are refugees -- families driven out of their land in what is now Israel. And much this land was appropriated from Palestinians in 1947-1948 -- *outside the area allotted to Israel under the UN mandate.* So as I said, it’s the Israelis who have eliminated Palestinians from PA territory, not vice-versa.

In many cases, Israelis are actually living in the houses of Palestinians who were expelled. In some cases, refugees are in a camp within eyesight of their former homes.

I agree with you that the settlements were/are a bad idea.

That‘s the understatement of the century. It was a completely illegal and immoral idea which is a major factor in inciting the conflict since 1967.

Yet Israel continues.

"Very few" ????? Where in the world do you get these ideas ??? There are now approximately half a million Jewish settlers living illegally in the West Bank.

You are correct.

I also want to point out that there is no comparison or equivalence between illegal Israeli settlers living on Palestinian land, and the indigenous Arab population (the small percentage that avoided ethnic cleansing) that remains in Israel. Israeli Arabs are not immigrants; their families lived there long before the arrival of the Zionists and by international law have full rights to their property. In contrast, illegal Israeli settlers are colonists inserted via a military occupation and who have no right to squat on Palestinian land.

Again -- Palestinians aren't occupying Tel Aviv. Israel is the illegal occupier, and that puts Israel in the wrong. You might want to brush up on the law (and the Geneva convention) before you post again. Because *both* give Palestinians the *right* to oppose their occupiers by any and all means.

I'm for an independent Palestinian state but I don't see any indication that the PA will really give up on getting "their" land back in Israel which would be the rest of Israel. Agreements and what is said mean little when military power is the only thing that really decides the borders in the Middle East.

The Palestinian Authority HAS officially recognized Israel since 1988, when Yasser Arafat agreed that Israel has a right to live within safe, secure borders. The PA repeated that agreement at Oslo in 1993, formally recognizing the State of Israel within the 1967 borders -- which is actually much more territory than the U.N. mandate set aside for Israel. So technically speaking, Israel really has no legal claim to anything beyond the 1948 borders (at least not without Palestinian agreement.) The PA has agreed to recognize Israel within the much greater 1967 borders, and has agreed to make minor adjustments with mutually-agreeable transfers of sections of territory.

However, Israel has *never* recognized the Palestinian state.

Another quote...

"I would have joined a terrorist organization."

-- Ehud Barak's response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Ha'aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.