An Israeli air attack on Gaza, which has massacred over 200 people including women and children, has been portrayed by the global media as a “retaliation” for the rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza (map source: Wikipedia). The Israeli air-strike comes at a time when Israeli politicians are campaigning for a general election.
Three key points that have not been highlighted in the corporate media:
- It was the Israelis who broke the truce, as the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom points out.
- The rocket attacks from Gaza onto Israeli territory have not killed or injured a single Israeli, reports Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada.
- Gaza has been under a terrible and suffocating Israeli siege, which has caused immense suffering among the entire 1.5 million population. “Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren,” says Ali Abunimah. It is vicious collective punishment.
According to the reknown Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, peace between Israel and Palestine is not impossible to achieve. The terms of such a peace settlement would include:
- A sovereign and viable state of Palestine to be established side by side with Israel.
- The border based on the pre-1967 Armistice Line (the “Green Line”). Insubstantial alterations by mutual agreement on an exchange of territories on a 1:1 basis.
- East Jerusalem and all Arab neighborhoods as the capital of Palestine. West Jerusalem and all Jewish neighborhoods as the capital of Israel.
- All Israeli settlements will be evacuated
- Israel will recognise in principle the right of the refugees to return. … The number of refugees who will return to Israeli territory will be fixed by mutual agreement, it being understood that nothing will be done that materially alters the demographic composition of the Israeli population.
- The West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip constitute one national unit. An extraterritorial connection (road, railway, tunnel or bridge) will connect the West Bank with the Gaza Strip.
- Israel and Syria will sign a peace agreement. Israel will withdraw to the pre-1967 line and all settlements on the Golan Heights will be dismantled. Syria will cease all anti-Israeli activities conducted directly or by proxy.
- In accordance with the Saudi Peace Initiative, all member states of the Arab League will recognise Israel and establish normal relations with it. …
First the article by Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace group:
Saturday 27/12/08
The war in Gaza – vicious folly of a bankrupt government (and Amos Oz will soon regret having supported it)The war in Gaza, the bloodshed, killing, destruction and suffering on both sides of the border, are the vicious folly of a bankrupt government. A government which let itself be dragged by adventurous officers and cheap nationalist demagoguery, dragged into a destructive and unnecessary war which will bring no solution to any problem – neither to the communities of southern Israel under the rain of missiles nor to the terrible poverty and suffering of besieged Gaza. On the day after the war the same problems will remain – with the addition of many bereaved families, wounded people crippled for life, and piles of rubble and destruction.
The escalation towards war could and should have been avoided. It was the State of Israel which broke the truce, in the ‘ticking tunnel’ raid on the night of the US elections two months ago. Since then the army went on stoking the fires of escalation with calculated raids and killings, whenever the shooting of missiles on Israel decreased.
The cycle of bloodshed could and should be broken. The ceasefire can be restored immediately, and on firmer foundations. It is the right of Israel to demand a complete end to shooting on its territory and citizens – but it must stop all attacks from its side, end completely the siege and starvation of Gaza’s million and half inhabitants, and stop interfering with the Palestinians’ right to choose their own leaders.
Ehud Barak’s declaration that he is stopping the elections campaign in order to concentrate on the Gaza offensive is a joke. The war in Gaza is itself Barak’s elections campaign, a cynical attempt to buy votes with the blood and suffering in Netivot and Sderot, Gaza and Beit Hanun. Also so-called peace seekers such as Amos Oz, who give this offensive their support and encouragement, could not afterwards shrug off responsibility.
Contact: Adam Keller, Gush Shalom Spokesperson, adam@gush-shalom.org
And this article from Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada:
Gaza massacres must spur us to action
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2008“I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing.” Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel’s latest massacres were broadcast around the world.
A short time earlier, US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel’s attacks, and others will follow.
Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers. Among those Israel labels “terrorists” were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school.
Shmerling’s joy has been echoed by Israelis and their supporters around the world; their violence is righteous violence. It is “self-defense” against “terrorists” and therefore justified. Israeli bombing — like American and NATO bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan — is bombing for freedom, peace and democracy.
The rationalization for Israel’s massacres, already being faithfully transmitted by the English-language media, is that Israel is acting in “retaliation” for Palestinian rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since the six-month truce expired on 19 December (until today, no Israeli had been killed or injured by these recent rocket attacks).
But today’s horrific attacks mark only a change in Israel’s method of killing Palestinians recently. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.
What the media never question is Israel’s idea of a truce. It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.
As John Ging, the head of operations of the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), told The Electronic Intifada in November: “there was five months of a ceasefire in the last couple of months, where the people of Gaza did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence. We in fact at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food.”
That is an Israeli truce. Any response to Israeli attacks — whether peaceful protests against the apartheid wall in Bilin and Nilin in the West Bank is met with bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel’s attacks, killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never ceased for one single day during the truce. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has acceded to all of Israel’s demands, even assembling “security forces” to fight the resistance on Israel’s behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian or her property or livelihood from Israel’s relentless violent colonization. It did not save, for instance, the al-Kurd family from seeing their home of 50 years in occupied East Jerusalem demolished on 9 November, so the land it sits on could be taken by settlers.
Once again we are watching massacres in Gaza, as we did last March when 110 Palestinians, including dozens of children, were killed by Israel in just a few days. Once again people everywhere feel rage, anger and despair that this outlaw state carries out such crimes with impunity.
But all over the Arab media and internet today the rage being expressed is not directed solely at Israel. Notably, it is directed more sharply than ever at Arab states. The images that stick are of Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni in Cairo on Christmas day. There she sat smiling with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Then there are the pictures of Livni and Egypt’s foreign minister smiling and slapping their palms together.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported today that last wednesday the Israeli “cabinet authorized the prime minister, the defense minister, and the foreign minister to determine the timing and the method” of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Everywhere people ask, what did Livni tell the Egyptians and more importantly what did they tell her? Did Israel get a green light to turn Gaza’s streets red once again? Few are ready to give Egypt the benefit of the doubt after it has helped Israel besiege Gaza by keeping the Rafah border crossing closed for more than a year.
On top of the intense anger and sadness so many people feel at Israel’s renewed mass killings in Gaza is a sense of frustration that there seem to be so few ways to channel it into a political response that can change the course of events, end the suffering, and bring justice.
But there are ways, and this is a moment to focus on them. Already I have received notices of demonstrations and solidarity actions being planned in cities all over the world. That is important. But what will happen after the demonstrations disperse and the anger dies down? Will we continue to let Palestinians in Gaza die in silence?
Palestinians everywhere are asking for solidarity, real solidarity, in the form of sustained, determined political action. The Gaza-based One Democratic State Group reaffirmed this today as it “called upon all civil society organizations and freedom loving people to act immediately in any possible way to put pressure on their governments to end diplomatic ties with Apartheid Israel and institute sanctions against it.”
The global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (http://www.bdsmovement.net/) provides the framework for this. Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term commitment to make sure we do not wake up to “another Gaza” ever again.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
So how come Hamas still has the resources to launch over 3000 rockets into Israel?
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Dude Anil, you’re being a great disappoimment wrt this Mid-East issue which is something much older than most of us. If, by this time, after the advent and advantage of the InterNet, you have not discovered the truth about the whole matter, there remains little possibility of your doing so anytime in the future. It is a disservice to what is Truth and not a good idea to play the role of useful idiots – unless, perhaps, it might be for private fiscal reason. All presumption of sufficient overall soundness and astuteness simply cannot exist at this rate, as with blogger KTemoc’s position.
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Hutch, “Some people need to read the Hamas Charter..”
Yes, as if the PLO’s one isn’t bad enough!
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Half a century ago there was no Israel. Today they have taken over half of Palestine. The Palestinians are being pushed into the sea inch by inch. To ask the Palestinians to stop resisting is like asking a woman being raped to stop fighting!
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Dear sir
Can you please highlight the current massacre of the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip in your blog. Thank you very much for your kind-heartedness.
Best regards.
————————————————–
from http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk
Gaza today: ‘This is only the beginning’
By Ewa Jasiewicz – Free Gaza.org December 27, 2008
As I write this, Israeli jets are bombing the areas of Zeitoun and Rimal in central Gaza City. The family I am staying with has moved into the internal corridor of their home to shelter from the bombing. The windows nearly blew out just five minutes ago as a massive explosion rocked the house. Apache’s are hovering above us, whilst F16s sear overhead.
UN radio reports say one blast was a target close to the main gate of Al Shifa hospital – Gaza and Palestine’s largest medical facility. Another was a plastics factory. More bombs continue to pound the Strip.
Sirens are wailing on the streets outside. Regular power cuts that plunge the city into blackness every night and tonight is no exception. Only perhaps tonight it is the darkest night people have seen here in their lifetimes.
Over 220 people have been killed and over 400 injured through attacks that shocked the strip in the space 15 minutes. Hospitals are overloaded and unable to cope. These attacks come on top of existing conditions of humanitarian crisis: a lack of medicines, bread, flour, gas, electricity, fuel and freedom of movement.
Doctors at Shifaa had to scramble together 10 make shift operating theatres to deal with the wounded. The hospital’s maternity ward had to transform their operating room into an emergency theatre. Shifaa only had 12 beds in their intensive care unit, they had to make space for 27 today.
There is a shortage of medicine – over 105 key items are not in stock, and blood and spare generator parts are desperately needed.
Shifaa’s main generator is the life support machine of the entire hospital. It’s the apparatus keeping the ventilators and monitors and lights turned on that keep people inside alive. And it doesn’t have the spare parts it needs, despite the International Committee for the Red Cross urging Israel to allow it to transport them through Erez checkpoint.
Shifaa’s Head of Casualty, Dr Maowiye Abu Hassanyeh explained, ‘We had over 300 injured in over 30 minutes. There were people on the floor of the operating theatre, in the reception area, in the corridors; we were sending patients to other hospitals. Not even the most advanced hospital in the world could cope with this number of casualties in such a short space of time.’
And as IOF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenaz said this morning, ‘This is only the beginning.’
But this isn’t the beginning, this is an ongoing policy of collective punishment and killing with impunity practised by Israel for decades. It has seen its most intensified level today. But the weight of dread, revenge and isolation hangs thick over Gaza today. People are all asking: If this is only the beginning, what will the end look like?
11.30am
Myself and Alberto Acre, a Spanish journalist, had been on the border village of Sirej near Khan Younis in the south of the strip. We had driven there at 8am with the mobile clinic of the Union of Palestinian Relief Committees. The clinic regularly visits exposed, frequently raided villages far from medical facilities. We had been interviewing residents about conditions on the border. Stories of olive groves and orange groves, family farmland, bulldozed to make way for a clear line of sight for Israeli occupation force watch towers and border guards. Israeli attacks were frequent. Indiscriminate fire and shelling spraying homes and land on the front line of the south eastern border. One elderly farmer showed us the grave-size ditch he had dug to climb into when Israeli soldiers would shoot into his fields.
Alberto was interviewing a family that had survived an Israeli missile attack on their home last month. It had been a response to rocket fire from resistance fighters nearby. Four fighters were killed in a field by the border. Israel had rained rockets and M16 fire back. The family, caught in the crossfire, have never returned to their home.
I was waiting for Alberto to return when ground shaking thuds tilted us off our feet. This was the sound of surface to air fired missiles and F16 bombs slamming into the police stations, and army bases of the Hamas authority here. In Gaza City , in Diere Balah, Rafah, Khan Younis, Beit Hanoon.
We zoomed out of the village in our ambulance, and onto the main road to Gaza City , before jumping out to film the smouldering remains of a police station in Diere Balah, near Khan Younis. Its’ name – meaning ‘place of dates’ – sounds like the easy semi-slang way of saying ‘take care’, Diere Bala, Diere Balak – take care.
Eyewitnesses said two Israeli missiles had destroyed the station. One had soared through a children’s playground and a busy fruit and vegetable market before impacting on its target.
Civilians Dead
The aftermath of Israeli airstrikes
There was blood on a broken plastic yellow slide, and a crippled, dead donkey with an upturned vegetable cart beside it. Aubergines and splattered blood covered the ground. A man began to explain in broken English what had happened. ‘It was full here, full, three people dead, many many injured’. An elderly man with a white kuffiyeh around his head threw his hands down to his blood drenched trousers. ‘Look! Look at this! Shame on all governments, shame on Israel, look how they kills us, they are killing us and what does the world do? Where is the world, where are they, we are being killed here, hell upon them!’ He was a market trader, present during the attack.
He began to pick up splattered tomatoes he had lost from his cart, picking them up jerkily, and putting them into plastic bags, quickly. Behind a small tile and brick building, a man was sitting against the wall, his legs were bloodied. He couldn’t get up and was sitting, visibly in pain and shock, trying to adjust himself, to orientate himself.
The police station itself was a wreck, a mess of criss-crossed piles of concrete – broken floors upon floors. Smashed cars and a split palm tree split the road.
We walked on, hurriedly, with everyone else, eyes skyward at four apache helicopters – their trigger mechanisms supplied by the UK ‘s Brighton-Based EDM Technologies. They were dropping smoky bright flares – a defence against any attempt at Palestinian missile retaliation.
Turning down the road leading to the Diere Balah Civil Defence Force headquarters we suddenly saw a rush of people streaming across the road. ‘They’ve been bombing twice, they’ve been bombing twice’ shouted people.
We ran too, but towards the crowds and away from what could possibly be target number two, ‘a ministry building’ our friend shouted to us. The apaches rumbled above.
Arriving at the police station we saw the remains of a life at work smashed short. A prayer matt clotted with dust, a policeman’s hat, the ubiquitous bright flower patterned mattresses, burst open. A crater around 20 feet in diameter was filled with pulverised walls and floors and a motorbike, tossed on its’ side, toy-like in its’ depths.
Policemen were frantically trying to get a fellow worker out from under the rubble. Everyone was trying to call him on his Jawwal. ‘Stop it everyone, just one, one of you ring’ shouted a man who looked like a captain. A fire licked the underside of an ex-room now crushed to just 3 feet high. Hands alongside hands rapidly grasped and threw back rocks,
blocks and debris to reach the man.
We made our way to the Al Aqsa Hospital. Trucks and cars loaded with the men of entire families – uncles, nephews, brothers – piled high and speeding to the hospital to check on loved ones, horns blaring without interruption.
Hospitals on the brink
Entering Al Aqsa was overwhelming, pure pandemonium, charged with grief, horror, distress, and shock. Limp blood covered and burnt bodies streamed by us on rickety stretchers. Before the morgue was a scrum, tens of shouting relatives crammed up to its open double doors. ‘They could not even identify who was who, whether it is their brother or cousin or who, because they are so burned’ explained our friend. Many were transferred, in ambulances and the back of trucks and cars to Al Shifa Hospital.
The injured couldn’t speak. Causality after casualty sat propped against the outside walls outside, being comforted by relatives, wounds temporarily dressed. Inside was perpetual motion and the more drastically injured. Relatives jostled with doctors to bring in their injured in scuffed blankets. Drips, blood streaming faces, scorched hair and shrapnel cuts to hands, chests, legs, arms and heads dominated the reception area, wards and operating theatres.
We saw a bearded man, on a stretcher on the floor of an intensive care unit, shaking and shaking, involuntarily, legs rigid and thrusting downwards. A spasm coherent with a spinal chord injury. Would he ever walk again or talk again? In another unit, a baby girl, no older than six months, had shrapnel wounds to her face. A relative lifted a blanket to show us her fragile bandaged leg. Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was making stilted, repetitive, squeaking sounds.
A first estimate at Al Aqsa hospital was 40 dead and 120 injured. The hospital was dealing with casualties from the bombed market, playground, Civil Defence Force station, civil police station and also the traffic police station. All leveled. A working day blasted flat with terrifying force.
At least two shaheed (martyrs) were carried out on stretchers out of the hospital. Lifted up by crowds of grief-stricken men to the graveyard to cries of ‘La Illaha Illa Allah,’ there is not god but Allah.
Who cares?
And according to many people here, there is nothing and nobody looking out for them apart from God. Back in Shifa Hospital tonight, we meet the brother of a security guard who had had the doorway he had been sitting in and the building – Abu Mazen’s old HQ – fall down upon his head. He said to us, ‘We don’t have anyone but God. We feel alone. Where is the world? Where is the action to stop these attacks?’
Majid Salim, stood beside his comatosed mother, Fatima. Earlier today she had been sitting at her desk at work – at the Hadije Arafat Charity, near Meshtal, the Headquarters of the Security forces in Gaza City. Israel’s attack had left her with multiple internal and head injuries, tube down her throat and a ventilator keeping her alive. Majid gestured to her, ‘We didn’t attack Israel, my mother didn’t fire rockets at Israel. This is the biggest terrorism, to have our mother bombarded at work’.
The groups of men lining the corridors of the over-stretched Shifaa hospital are by turns stunned, agitated, patient and lost. We speak to one group. Their brother had both arms broken and has serious facial and head injuries. ‘We couldn’t recognise his face, it was so black from the weapons used’ one explains. Another man turns to me and says. ‘I am a teacher. I teach human rights – this is a course we have, ‘human rights’. He pauses. ‘How can I teach, my son, my children, about the meaning of human rights under these conditions, under this siege?’
It’s true, UNRWA and local government schools have developed a Human Rights syllabus, teaching children about international law, the Geneva Conventions, the International Declaration on Human Rights, The Hague Regulations. To try to develop a culture of human rights here, to help generate more self confidence and security and more of a sense of dignity for the children. But the contradiction between what should be adhered to as a common code of conducted signed up to by most states, and the realities on the ground is stark.
International law is not being applied or enforced with respect to Israeli policies towards the Gaza Strip, or on ’48 Palestine, the West Bank, or the millions of refugees living in camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
How can a new consciousness and practice of human rights ever graduate from rhetoric to reality when everything points to the contrary – both here and in Israel ? The United Nations have been spurned and shut out by Irael , with Richard Falk the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights held prisoner at Ben Gurion Airport before being unceremoniously deported this month – deliberately blinded to the abuses being carried out against Gaza by Israel . An international community which speaks empty phrases on Israeli attacks ‘we urge restraint…minimise civilian casualties’.
The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet. In Jabbaliya camp alone, Gaza ‘s largest, 125,000 people are crowded into a space 2km square. Bombardment by F16s and Apaches at 11.30 in the morning, as children leave their schools for home reveals a contempt for civilian safety as does the 18 months of a siege that bans all imports and exports, and has resulted in the deaths of over 270 people as a result of a lack of access to essential medicines.
A light
There is a saying here in Gaza – we spoke about it, jokily last night. ‘At the end of the tunnel…there is another tunnel’. Not so funny when you consider that Gaza is being kept alive through the smuggling of food, fuel and medicine through an exploitative industry of over 1000 tunnels running from Egypt to Rafah in the South. On average 1-2 people die every week in the tunnels. Some embark on a humiliating crawl to get their education, see their families, to find work, on their hands and knees. Others are reportedly big enough to drive through.
Last night I added a new ending to the saying. ‘At the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel and then a power cut’. Today, there’s nothing to make a joke about. As bombs continue to blast buildings around us, jarring the children in this house from their fitful sleep, the saying could take on another twist. After today’s killing of over 200, is it that at the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel, and then a grave?’ Or a wall of international governmental complicity and silence?
There is a light through, beyond the sparks of resistance and solidarity in the West Bank, ’48 and the broader Middle East. This is a light of conscience turned into activism by people all over the world. We can turn a spotlight onto Israel’s crimes against humanity and the enduring injustice here in Palestine, through coming out onto the streets and pressurizing our governments; demanding an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation, broadening our call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and for a genuine Just Peace.
Through institutional, governmental and popular means, this can be a light at the end of the Gazan tunnel.
—–
Ewa Jasiewicz is an experienced journalist, community and union organizer, and solidarity worker. She is currently Gaza Project Co-coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement.
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Dear sir
For the benefit of some of your comentators.
Best regards
from palestinethinktank.com/2008/12/29/gilad-atzmon-eine-kleine-nacht-murder-how-israeli-leaders-kill-for-their-peoples-votes/
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The problem between Palestinian and Israelis are complicated daily by some foreign powers and also by their own unwillingness to fulfill the UN peace treaty and territorial agreement. Zionist want to expand it border over it smaller neighbor land through its military mights, while Hamas does not want to recognize Israel statehood and right to exist,it wants to destroy state of Israel and it civilian population by terror, both aim to kill as many civilians as possible in their attack to reach their goal. Until both start to grow up and behave in a civilized way, world community will be left with no option but will continue to see violence in that region.
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“It was the Israelis who broke the truce, as the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom points out.”
Izzat so?
http://tinyurl.com/98oc47
Hamas terrorists have only themselves to blame for Israeli retaliation
Sunday, December 28th 2008, 8:46 PM
There is terrible guilt to be ascribed in this weekend’s Israeli raids on Gaza – and it falls squarely and solely on the shoulders of the death-to-Israel fanatics of Hamas.
It was rocket-firing, suicide-bombing Hamas that broke a six-month-long truce by raining missiles down on southern Israel, necessitating a stern – and remarkably precise – military response.
The predictable cries of outrage across the Arab world notwithstanding, two of the most interested parties in that axis – Egypt and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – took the remarkable step of pinning blame for the Palestinian lives that have been lost and the Palestinian blood that has been shed on the terror gang that rules Gaza.
At a press conference with the Egyptian foreign minister, Abbas made crystal-clear that Hamas had refused to listen to reason in the days leading up to Israel’s strikes:
“I say in all honesty, we made contact with leaders of the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip. We spoke with them in all honesty and directly, and after that we spoke with them indirectly, through more than one Arab and non-Arab side.
“We spoke with them on the telephone and we said to them: We ask of you, don’t stop the ceasefire, the ceasefire must continue and not stop, in order to avoid what has happened, and if only we had avoided it.”
The truce, brokered by Egypt, had maintained a shakiest pretense of quiet until Hamas defaulted – once again and as always – to violence to achieve its aims.
As Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni accurately put it:
“Hamas violated, on a daily basis, this truce. They targeted Israel, and we didn’t answer. But unfortunately, Hamas misunderstood the fact that Israel didn’t retaliate, and only last week we had in a day 80 rockets, missiles, mortars on Israeli civilians.
“More than that, they used the field of truce in order to rearm themselves. They smuggled weapons, they built a small army in Gaza Strip, so the situation was unbearable.”
Those rockets have made life a living hell in the Israeli territory closest to Gaza – and Hamas has steadily acquired models that possess even longer ranges, greater accuracy and higher lethality.
Two missiles launched from the Gaza Strip landed a full 25 miles inside Israel – a reach that puts hundreds of thousands of the country’s citizens in danger.
With the death toll standing at approximately 300, Hamas forces transformed themselves in front of television cameras from defiant fighters into supposed victims of supposed Israeli excess……
The rest : http://tinyurl.com/87nx8z
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Glad to see a number of you guys are willing to defy PC and speak up for Israel. It’s a shame that Anil has swallowed the Arab propaganda hook, line and sinker.
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Here are two passages from the Old Testament of the Bible which might explain why some people feel no mercy for the suffering Palestinians (Philistines):
Zephaniah 2:
4 For Gaza will be abandoned And Ashkelon a desolation; Ashdod will be driven out at noon And Ekron will be uprooted.
5 Woe to the inhabitants of the seacoast, The nation of the Cherethites! The word of the LORD is against you, O Canaan, land of the Philistines; And I will destroy you So that there will be no inhabitant.
Jeremiah 47:
4 On account of the day that is coming To destroy all the Philistines, To cut off from Tyre and Sidon Every ally that is left; For the LORD is going to destroy the Philistines, The remnant of the coastland of Caphtor.
5 “Baldness has come upon Gaza; Ashkelon has been ruined. O remnant of their valley, How long will you gash yourself?
6 “Ah, sword of the LORD, How long will you not be quiet? Withdraw into your sheath; Be at rest and stay still.
7 “How can it be quiet, When the LORD has given it an order? Against Ashkelon and against the seacoast— There He has assigned it.”
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Palestinians = Philistines?
LOL! This denotes the level of study done!
But if you must quote OT Scriptures, here’s a couple of lines there that’re intriguing to note:
God purportedly said to Israel
Genesis 12:3 (RSV)
“12:3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.”
ISHMAEL AND THE ARABS
““He will be a wild man; his hand (will be) against every man and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” – (Genesis 16:12) ”
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Ahhh…..sick of this issue. Just brothers killing each other for land. Can’t reason with people who look up to the sky in hope for answers. History has shown us, this war will never end.
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Finally, they managed to get the oil price going up!
Now, may be with more Palestinians killed there won’t even be a recession in the coming year.
A midle East “crisis” has to be created whenever there is a lull in the markets of the world.
Unfortunately the proverbial lamb here happens to be the decendents of Ismaeal.
Happy New Year.
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Liveblogging:
The IAF renewed their air strikes early this morning, reportedly dropping at least 16 bombs on Hamas government buildings and security compounds, killing 10 and injuring more than 40.
For their part, the terrorists are trying to draw Israel into a ground operation and “fight like men.” Yes, apparently this whole conflict is over a girl. For what it’s worth, they will likely get their way.
Meanwhile, Hamas are intensifying their propaganda given they are losing the PR war.
For a start, they are claiming that many of their casualties were “normal policemen” who did not fire rockets into Israel, and it was for this reason that they did not run away and hide like “real men” evacuate their headquarters but instead went ahead with their graduation ceremony. Of course, Israel’s disinformation campaign and element of surprise had nothing to do with it.
In addition, Hamas are speaking with forked tongue, saying one thing to the international community and one thing to their own people.
In other news, the IDF is “ready to go all the way” (I guess this really is all over a girl), the EU is to press Israel to behave like Europe, Israeli PM Olmert has instructed officials to not talk about the truce (think Fawlty Towers), and a molotov cocktail was thrown at a synagogue…in Chicago.
Updates (Israel time)
6:08AM: Well look at that. They are recycling old (and incorrect) signs.
7:32AM: A short time ago, Israel allowed 100 trucks carrying food and aid to enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
9:05AM: The Israeli navy has turned back the Free Gaza ship on its way to Gaza, ordering it to return to Cyprus. But that might be a problem:
However, sources close to the activists on the ship claim it does not have enough fuel to reach the Island.
Oops.
For their part, they are claiming they were attacked by the Israeli navy!
The Dignity, a Free Gaza boat on a mission of mercy to besieged Gaza, is being attacked by the Israeli Navy in international waters. The Dignity has been surrounded by at least half-a-dozen Israeli warships. They are firing live ammunition around the Dignity, and one of the warships has rammed the civilian craft causing an unknown amount of damage. Contrary to international maritime law, the Israelis are actively preventing the Dignity from approaching Gaza or finding safe haven in either Egypt or Lebanon. Instead, the Israeli navy is demanding that the Dignity return to Cyprus – despite the fact that the ship does not carry enough fuel to do so. Fortunately, no one aboard the ship has yet been seriously injured.
Sounds to me like a desperate ploy to turn public opinion against Israel. Given the lengths Israel has gone to to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, I seriously doubt they would risk hurting a bunch of press-hungry moonbats, them being terror-supporters notwithstanding.
9:12AM: Contradictory claims on the Free Gaza mailing list, with one member saying the Israeli Navy claims they didn’t know it was an aid ship and they are now allowing them in, and another saying the boat is badly damaged and is heading toward Lebanon.
9:58AM: The Israeli Foreign Ministry admits we “clashed” with the Free Gaza ship after the ship failed to respond to Israeli naval radio contact, but denies any shooting took place.
10:10AM: A little off-topic, but worth mentioning.
The four-year-old son of Gavriel and Rivak Holtzberg, who were killed in the terror attack on the Chabad house in Mumbai, has died of a severe genetic disease overnight.
If I am not mistaken, he lived in Israel. He is not the small boy who was saved by the nanny and who was shown crying out for his mother.
11:15AM: Yesterday’s rocket attack victims were a Jew, a Bedouin and a Druse.
11:25AM: Get a life: Would you believe anti-Israel protests in Second Life?
http://www.israellycool.com
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Here are two passages from the Old Testament of the Bible which might explain why some people feel no mercy for the suffering Palestinians (Philistines):….drachen
You`ve been had.
Let us examine the truths here:
Arab “Palestinian?” with Flag of “Palestine?”1) There never was a Palestinian state or a Palestinian nation. There are no Palestinian people, per se. Rather, these are Arabs living in a region that historically has been called many things, including “Palestine.”
2) Israel did not go to war against a Palestinian state and occupy its land. Rather, Israel was attacked by six Arab countries at once. She defended herself, defeated her attackers, and won the so-called territories, not from the Palestinians, but from Jordan and Egypt.
3) Jerusalem was never the capital of any state but Israel. It was certainly never the capital of a country that never existed. Why should the Palestinians get any part of it? Because they want it? Because they have terrorists?
4) Jerusalem, under the current Israeli control, is a free and open city. Israel, as a democracy, guarantees freedom of religion within its borders. Contrast this fact with areas that have come under Palestinian occupation. What percentage of Christians have left in recent years because they cannot stand the harassment and persecution?
5) Most Arabs living in Palestine today are not indigenous to the region. It was not until after the Jews had changed deserts and swamps into a productive and thriving land that the Arabs started migrating there. Arafat himself was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. Did you know that?
The belief that giving the Palestinians a state will bring peace is a delusion. The truth is that they want it all. The short-term goal is a state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza. The long-term goal is a state which includes all of “historical Palestine,” including Jordan.
How do I know this?
The late Faisal Husseini, Arafat’s Jerusalem representative, a man who was cultured, sophisticated and considered the most moderate of all the Palestinians, shortly before his death on May 31, 2001, expressed his true feelings in an interview with the popular Egyptian newspaper el Arav. Husseini said: “We must distinguish the strategies and long-term goals from the political-phased goals which we are compelled to accept due to international pressures.” But the “ultimate goal is the liberation of all of historical Palestine.” Explicitly he said: “Oslo has to be viewed as a Trojan Horse.”
He even added and clarified that it is the obligation of all the Palestinian forces and factions to see the Oslo Accords as “temporary” steps, as “gradual” goals, because in this way, “We are setting an ambush for the Israelis and cheating them.” He also differentiated between “strategic,” long-term, “higher” goals, and “political” short-term goals dependent on “the current international establishment, balance of power” etc.
All of historical Palestine! Does not this include all of Israel and all of Jordan?
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What Is Palestine?
http://tinyurl.com/8vgttf
q/
“What, then, is Palestine? Palestine is a national fiction.” u/q
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Israel is supposed to do nothing and waiting to be slaughtered by Islamic terrorist Hamas used by Iran as proxy to destroy its statehood, many will want to see that to happen, sorry Israel is not like India even though it is small.
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Lets look at the facts here. Hamas wants to wipe the jews and israel off the face of this planet. The Iranians want it also. The Arab states would love it and just about every other shallow minded person will like it.
Now looked back a could of thousand years. This conflict has been going on for years ever since Abraham. ismail was born and we know he went on to father the 12 arab tribes. Issac was born with Gods blessing and we know the 12 jewish groups.
This battle has been going on cause the arabs feel the jews stole their birth right. Sadly they can’t see beyond this and the fact which remains, they are all brothers sharing the same blood.
I advice any christian or smart person not to get involved. If you pick the wrong side, trust me the bible is clear what will happen. Don’t come inbetween God and his chosen people or you be cursed.
Want a case example? UK was totally against the rebirth of israel in 1948. They treated the jews badly and ever since, the once GREAT britain has losts its “GREAT”ness. UK today is nothing in the big scheme of things and shocking when at one time they nearly rules 2/3 the world.
America took away land from israel and gave it to the Palestinians (gaza) and now they are caught in the middle. 9/11, Katharina, Andrew just some of the increased activities over there.
I pray that Israel will be protected but at the same time, I accept what I read in Revelations. If anyone is filled with the Holy Spirit, they will know where I am coming from. Those that aren’t, please pray to be touched by IT.
For non-believers, GUARANTEED Salvation comes from only ONE Person. We all know HIM as Yeshua or to the arabic speaking folks, Yasū‘. Ponder a bit on that name.
God bless.
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Hamas is an illegally established government that should be remove so the democratic Palestinian government can secure a permanent peace agreement that will stabilize the region. But for some reason no one is talking about this option
With a strong Palestinian government in place lasting peace can be achieve
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