I am reposting this article, which was hidden by LA Indymedia, because it is of great value. It is by no means a diatribe; it is by no means anti-Semitic.

It is important for oppressed peoples within the boundaries of the US to have a clear picture of occupied Palestine.

Like the US, South Africa under Apartheid, Australia, New Zealand and the former Rhodesia, Israel is a white colonial settler state.

The authors don't make that argument. Their argument is much milder. They fail to point out that in every single historcial instance, white colonial settler states must target the population whose land they steal. It goes with the territory, so to speak.

They fail to point out that the US is a white colonial settler regime, and that its system, like that of the Zionists, is inherently and inescapably racist.

This is especially important for the Chican@ people and other Native peoples to understand. It is a mirror of our own situation. Censoring this piece robs of us information and perspectives we need to understand in order to pursue our own freedom, and its censorship is an attack on our needs as a people.

For all its weaknesses, the essay provides much worthwhile food for thought, and a perspective silenced and censored in both the mainstream media - and, clearly, here at Indymedia.

Juan Santos


Zionism as a Racist Ideology
by The Christisons • Monday, Jul. 17, 2006 at 8:36 PM

What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism. Israel worries constantly, and its American friends worry, about the destruction of Israel. We are all made to think always about the existential threat to Israel, to the Jewish people. But the nation in imminent danger of elimination today is not Israel but the Palestinians. Such a policy of national destruction must not be allowed to stand.

Zionism as a Racist Ideology
Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

During a presentation on the Palestinian-Israeli situation in 2001, an American-Israeli acquaintance of ours began with a typical attack on the Palestinians. Taking the overused line that "Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," he asserted snidely that, if only the Palestinians had had any decency and not been so all-fired interested in pushing the Jews into the sea in 1948, they would have accepted the UN partition of Palestine. Those Palestinians who became refugees would instead have remained peacefully in their homes, and the state of Palestine could in the year 2001 be celebrating the 53rd anniversary of its independence. Everything could have been sweetness and light, he contended, but here the Palestinians were, then a year into a deadly intifada, still stateless, still hostile, and still trying, he claimed, to push the Jews into the sea.

It was a common line but with a new and intriguing twist: what if the Palestinians had accepted partition; would they in fact have lived in a state at peace since 1948? It was enough to make the audience stop and think. But later in the talk, the speaker tripped himself up by claiming, in a tone of deep alarm, that Palestinian insistence on the right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced when Israel was created would spell the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. He did not realize the inherent contradiction in his two assertions (until we later pointed it out to him, with no little glee). You cannot have it both ways, we told him: you cannot claim that, if Palestinians had not left the areas that became Israel in 1948, they would now be living peaceably, some inside and some alongside a Jewish-majority state, and then also claim that, if they returned now, Israel would lose its Jewish majority and its essential identity as a Jewish state.*

This exchange, and the massive propaganda effort by and on behalf of Israel to demonstrate the threat to Israel's Jewish character posed by the Palestinians' right of return, actually reveal the dirty little secret of Zionism. In its drive to establish and maintain a state in which Jews are always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that Palestinians, as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be allowed to return. The dirty little secret is that this is blatant racism.

But didn't we finish with that old Zionism-is-racism issue over a decade ago, when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975 General Assembly resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism or racial discrimination"? Hadn't we Americans always rejected this resolution as odious anti-Semitism, and didn't we, under the aegis of the first Bush administration, finally prevail on the rest of the world community to agree that it was not only inaccurate but downright evil to label Zionism as racist? Why bring it up again, now?

The UN General Assembly based its 1975 anti-Zionist resolution on the UN's own definition of racial discrimination, adopted in 1965. According to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, racial discrimination is "any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life." As a definition of racism and racial discrimination, this statement is unassailable and, if one is honest about what Zionism is and what it signifies, the statement is an accurate definition of Zionism. But in 1975, in the political atmosphere prevailing at the time, putting forth such a definition was utterly self-defeating.

So would a formal resolution be in today's political atmosphere. But enough has changed over the last decade or more that talk about Zionism as a system that either is inherently racist or at least fosters racism is increasingly possible and increasingly necessary. Despite the vehement knee-jerk opposition to any such discussion throughout the United States, serious scholars elsewhere and serious Israelis have begun increasingly to examine Zionism critically, and there is much greater receptivity to the notion that no real peace will be forged in Palestine-Israel unless the bases of Zionism are examined and in some way altered. It is for this reason that honestly labeling Zionism as a racist political philosophy is so necessary: unless the world's, and particularly the United States', blind support for Israel as an exclusivist Jewish state is undermined, unless the blind acceptance of Zionism as a noble ideology is undermined, and unless it is recognized that Israel's drive to maintain dominion over the occupied Palestinian territories is motivated by an exclusivist, racist ideology, no one will ever gain the political strength or the political will necessary to force Israel to relinquish territory and permit establishment of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state in a part of Palestine.

Recognizing Zionism's Racism

A racist ideology need not always manifest itself as such, and, if the circumstances are right, it need not always actually practice racism to maintain itself. For decades after its creation, the circumstances were right for Israel. If one forgot, as most people did, the fact that 750,000 Palestinians (non-Jews) had left their homeland under duress, thus making room for a Jewish-majority state, everyone could accept Israel as a genuine democracy, even to a certain extent for that small minority of Palestinians who had remained after 1948. That minority was not large enough to threaten Israel's Jewish majority; it faced considerable discrimination, but because Israeli Arabs could vote, this discrimination was viewed not as institutional, state-mandated racism but as the kind of discrimination, deplorable but not institutionalized, faced by blacks in the United States. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with their two million (soon to become more than three million) Palestinian inhabitants, was seen to be temporary, its end awaiting only the Arabs' readiness to accept Israel's existence.

In these "right" circumstances, the issue of racism rarely arose, and the UN's labeling of Israel's fundamental ideology as racist came across to Americans and most westerners as nasty and vindictive. Outside the third world, Israel had come to be regarded as the perpetual innocent, not aggressive, certainly not racist, and desirous of nothing more than a peace agreement that would allow it to mind its own business inside its original borders in a democratic state. By the time the Zionism-is-racism resolution was rescinded in 1991, even the PLO had officially recognized Israel's right to exist in peace inside its 1967 borders, with its Jewish majority uncontested. In fact, this very acceptance of Israel by its principal adversary played no small part in facilitating the U.S. effort to garner support for overturning the resolution. (The fact of U.S. global dominance in the wake of the first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union earlier in 1991, and the atmosphere of optimism about prospects for peace created by the Madrid peace conference in October also played a significant part in winning over a majority of the UN when the Zionism resolution was brought to a vote of the General Assembly in December.)

Realities are very different today, and a recognition of Zionism's racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies being played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is to be any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been permanently scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as Zionism is recognized as the driving force in the occupied territories as well as inside Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be considered in isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its own way as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances are "right" for ignoring Zionism's fundamental racism.

As Israel increasingly inserts itself into the occupied territories, and as Israeli settlers, Israeli settlements, and Israeli-only roads proliferate and a state infrastructure benefiting only Jews takes over more and more territory, it becomes no longer possible to ignore the racist underpinnings of the Zionist ideology that directs this enterprise. It is no longer possible today to wink at the permanence of Zionism's thrust beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is now clear that Israel's control over the occupied territories is, and has all along been intended to be, a drive to assert exclusive Jewish control, taming the Palestinians into submission and squeezing them into ever smaller, more disconnected segments of land or, failing that, forcing them to leave Palestine altogether. It is totally obvious to anyone who spends time on the ground in Palestine-Israel that the animating force behind the policies of the present and all past Israeli governments in Israel and in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has always been a determination to assure the predominance of Jews over Palestinians. Such policies can only be described as racist, and we should stop trying any longer to avoid the word.

When you are on the ground in Palestine, you can see Zionism physically imprinted on the landscape. Not only can you see that there are settlements, built on land confiscated from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not live. Not only can you see roads in the occupied territories, again built on land taken from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not drive. Not only can you observe that water in the occupied territories is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities, so inequitably that Israeli settlers are allocated five times the amount per capita as are Palestinians and, in periods of drought, Palestinians stand in line for drinking water while Israeli settlements enjoy lush gardens and swimming pools. Not only can you stand and watch as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian olive groves and other agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and demolish Palestinian homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel is constructing across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall fences off Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater security for Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians, to define a border for Israel that will exclude a maximum number of Palestinians.

But, if this is not enough to demonstrate the inherent racism of Israel's occupation, you can also drive through Palestinian towns and Palestinian neighborhoods in and near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps the most cruelly racist policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions, the preeminent symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish predominance. Virtually every street has a house or houses reduced to rubble, one floor pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken concrete bulldozed into an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, has observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls "The Message" to Palestinians. The Message, Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent [i.e., stop attacking Palestinians]." The deeper meaning of The Message, as carried by the bulldozers so ubiquitous in targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is that "You [Palestinians] do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."

In the end, Halper says, the advance of Zionism has been a process of displacement, and house demolitions have been "at the center of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians" since 1948. Halper enumerates a steady history of destruction: in the first six years of Israel's existence, it systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel, fully 85 percent of the villages existing before 1948; since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000 Palestinian homes. More homes are now being demolished in the path of Israel's "separation wall." It is estimated that more than 4,000 homes have been destroyed in the last two years alone.

The vast majority of these house demolitions, 95 percent, have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews and assure the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem, from the beginning of the occupation of the eastern sector of the city in 1967, Israeli authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to prevent the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the "Jewish character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71 percent Jewish, 29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel draw zoning boundaries to prevent Palestinian expansion beyond existing neighborhoods, expropriate Palestinian-owned lands, confiscate the Jerusalem residency permits of any Palestinian who cannot prove that Jerusalem is his "center of life," limit city services to Palestinian areas, limit development in Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue residential building permits to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian homes that are built without permits. None of these strictures is imposed on Jews. According to ICAHD, the housing shortage in Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units, and 2,000 demolition orders are pending.

Halper has written that the human suffering involved in the destruction of a family home is incalculable. A home "is one's symbolic center, the site of one's most intimate personal life and an expression of one's status. It is a refuge, it is the physical representation of the family,maintainingcontinuity on one's ancestral land." Land expropriation is "an attack on one's very being and identity." Zionist governments, past and present, have understood this well, although not with the compassion or empathy that Halper conveys, and this attack on the "very being and identity" of non-Jews has been precisely the animating force behind Zionism.

Zionism's racism has, of course, been fundamental to Israel itself since its establishment in 1948. The Israeli government pursues policies against its own Bedouin minority very similar to its actions in the occupied territories. The Bedouin population has been forcibly relocated and squeezed into small areas in the Negev, again with the intent of forcing an exodus, and half of the 140,000 Bedouin in the Negev live in villages that the Israeli government does not recognize and does not provide services for. Every Bedouin home in an unrecognized village is slated for demolition; all homes, and the very presence of Bedouin in them, are officially illegal.

The problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized villages is only the partial evidence of a racist policy that has prevailed since Israel's foundation. After Zionist/Israeli leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.e., the Palestinians) making up the majority of Palestine's population (a two-thirds majority at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli governments institutionalized favoritism toward Jews by law. As a Zionist state, Israel has always identified itself as the state of the Jews: as a state not of its Jewish and Palestinian citizens, but of all Jews everywhere in the world. The institutions of state guarantee the rights of and provide benefits for Jews. The Law of Return gives automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world, but to no other people. Some 92 percent of the land of Israel is state land, held by the Jewish National Fund "in trust" for the Jewish people; Palestinians may not purchase this land, even though most of it was Palestinian land before 1948, and in most instances they may not even lease the land. Both the Jewish National Fund, which deals with land acquisition and development, and the Jewish Agency, which deals primarily with Jewish immigration and immigrant absorption, have existed since before the state's establishment and now perform their duties specifically for Jews under an official mandate from the Israeli government.

Creating Enemies

Although few dare to give the reality of house demolitions and state institutions favoring Jews the label of racism, the phenomenon this reality describes is unmistakably racist. There is no other term for a process by which one people can achieve the essence of its political philosophy only by suppressing another people, by which one people guarantees its perpetual numerical superiority and its overwhelming predominance over another people through a deliberate process of repression and dispossession of those people. From the beginning, Zionism has been based on the supremacy of the Jewish people, whether this predominance was to be exercised in a full-fledged state or in some other kind of political entity, and Zionism could never have survived or certainly thrived in Palestine without ridding that land of most of its native population. The early Zionists themselves knew this (as did the Palestinians), even if naïve Americans have never quite gotten it. Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, talked from the beginning of "spiriting" the native Palestinians out and across the border; discussion of "transfer" was common among the Zionist leadership in Palestine in the 1930s; talk of transfer is common today.

There has been a logical progression to the development of Zionism, leading inevitably to general acceptance of the sense that, because Jewish needs are paramount, Jews themselves are paramount. Zionism grew out of the sense that Jews needed a refuge from persecution, which led in turn to the belief that the refuge could be truly secure only if Jews guaranteed their own safety, which meant that the refuge must be exclusively or at least overwhelmingly Jewish, which meant in turn that Jews and their demands were superior, taking precedence over any other interests within that refuge. The mindset that in U.S. public discourse tends to view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a perspective almost exclusively focused on Israel arises out of this progression of Zionist thinking. By the very nature of a mindset, virtually no one examines the assumptions on which the Zionist mindset is based, and few recognize the racist base on which it rests.

Israeli governments through the decades have never been so innocent. Many officials in the current right-wing government are blatantly racist. Israel's outspoken education minister, Limor Livnat, spelled out the extreme right-wing defense of Zionism a year ago, when the government proposed to legalize the right of Jewish communities in Israel to exclude non-Jews. Livnat justified Israel's racism as a matter of Jewish self-preservation. "We're involved here," she said in a radio interview, "in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jews, as opposed tothose who want to force us to be a state of all its citizens." Israel is not "just another state like all the other states," she protested. "We are not just a state of all its citizens."

Livnat cautioned that Israel must be very watchful lest it find in another few years that the Galilee and the Negev, two areas inside Israel with large Arab populations, are "filled with Arab communities." To emphasize the point, she reiterated that Israel's "special purpose is our character as a Jewish state, our desire to preserve a Jewish community and Jewish majority hereso that it does not become a state of all its citizens." Livnat was speaking of Jewish self-preservation not in terms of saving the Jews or Israel from a territorial threat of military invasion by a marauding neighbor state, but in terms of preserving Jews from the mere existence of another people within spitting distance.

Most Zionists of a more moderate stripe might shudder at the explicitness of Livnat's message and deny that Zionism is really like this. But in fact this properly defines the racism that necessarily underlies Zionism. Most centrist and leftist Zionists deny the reality of Zionism's racism by trying to portray Zionism as a democratic system and manufacturing enemies in order to be able to sustain the inherent contradiction and hide or excuse the racism behind Zionism's drive for predominance.

Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of a political philosophy like Zionism that masquerades as democratic is that it requires an enemy in order to survive and, where an enemy does not already exist, it requires that one be created. In order to justify racist repression and dispossession, particularly in a system purporting to be democratic, those being repressed and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and predatory. And in order to keep its own population in line, to prevent a humane people from objecting to their own government's repressive policies, it requires that fear be instilled in the population: fear of "the other," fear of the terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater. The Jews of Israel must always be made to believe that they are the preyed-upon. This justifies having forced these enemies to leave, it justifies discriminating against those who remained, it justifies denying democratic rights to those who later came under Israel's control in the occupied territories.

Needing an enemy has meant that Zionism has from the beginning had to create myths about Palestinians, painting Palestinians and all Arabs as immutably hostile and intransigent. Thus the myth that in 1948 Palestinians left Palestine so that Arab armies could throw the Jews into the sea; thus the continuing myth that Palestinians remain determined to destroy Israel. Needing an enemy means that Zionism, as one veteran Israeli peace activist recently put it, has removed the Palestinians from history. Thus the myths that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, or that Palestinians all immigrated in modern times from other Arab countries, or that Jordan is Palestine and Palestinians should find their state there.

Needing an enemy means that Zionism has had to make its negotiating partner into a terrorist. It means that, for its own preservation, Zionism has had to devise a need to ignore its partner/enemy or expel him or assassinate him. It means that Zionism has had to reject any conciliatory effort by the Palestinians and portray them as "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to make peace. This includes in particular rejecting that most conciliatory gesture, the PLO's decision in 1988 to recognize Israel's existence, relinquish Palestinian claims to the three-quarters of Palestine lying inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize Israel's "right" to exist there.

Needing an enemy means, ultimately, that Zionism had to create the myth of the "generous offer" at the Camp David summit in July 2000. It was Zionist racism that painted the Palestinians as hopelessly intransigent for refusing Israel's supposedly generous offer, actually an impossible offer that would have maintained Zionism's hold on the occupied territories and left the Palestinians with a disconnected, indefensible, non-viable state. Then, when the intifada erupted (after Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at Israeli police and the police responded by shooting several demonstrators to death), it was Zionist racism speaking when Israel put out the line that it was under siege and in a battle for its very survival with Palestinians intent on destroying it. When a few months later the issue of Palestinian refugees and their "right of return" arose publicly, it was Zionist racism speaking when Israel and its defenders, ignoring the several ways in which Palestinian negotiators signaled their readiness to compromise this demand, propagated the view that this too was intended as a way to destroy Israel, by flooding it with non-Jews and destroying its Jewish character.

The Zionist Dilemma

The supposed threat from "the other" is the eternal refuge of the majority of Israelis and Israeli supporters in the United States. The common line is that "We Israelis and friends of Israel long for peace, we support Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, we have always supported giving the Palestinians self-government. But 'they' hate us, they want to destroy Israel. Wasn't this obvious when Arafat turned his back on Israel's generous offer? Wasn't this obvious when Arafat started the intifada? Wasn't this obvious when Arafat demanded that the Palestinians be given the right of return, which would destroy Israel as a Jewish state? We have already made concession after concession. How can we give them any further concessions when they would only fight for more and more until Israel is gone?" This line relieves Israel of any responsibility to make concessions or move toward serious negotiations; it relieves Israelis of any need to treat Palestinians as equals; it relieves Israelis and their defenders of any need to think; it justifies racism, while calling it something else.

Increasing numbers of Israelis themselves (some of whom have long been non-Zionists, some of whom are only now beginning to see the problem with Zionism) are recognizing the inherent racism of their nation's raison d'etre. During the years of the peace process, and indeed for the last decade and a half since the PLO formally recognized Israel's existence, the Israeli left could ignore the problems of Zionism while pursuing efforts to promote the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that would coexist with Israel. Zionism continued to be more or less a non-issue: Israel could organize itself in any way it chose inside its own borders, and the Palestinian state could fulfill Palestinian national aspirations inside its new borders.

Few of those nettlesome issues surrounding Zionism, such as how much democracy Zionism can allow to non-Jews without destroying its reason for being, would arise in a two-state situation. The issue of Zionism's responsibility for the Palestinians' dispossession could also be put aside. As Haim Hanegbi, a non-Zionist Israeli who recently went back to the fold of single-state binationalism (and who is a long-time cohort of Uri Avnery in the Gush Shalom movement), said in a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the promise of mutual recognition offered by the Oslo peace process mesmerized him and others in the peace movement and so "in the mid-1990s I had second thoughts about my traditional [binational] approach. I didn't think it was my task to go to Ramallah and present the Palestinians with the list of Zionist wrongs and tell them not to forget what our fathers did to their fathers." Nor were the Palestinians themselves reminding Zionists of these wrongs at the time.

As new wrongs in the occupied territories increasingly recall old wrongs from half a century ago, however, and as Zionism finds that it cannot cope with end-of-conflict demands like the Palestinians' insistence that Israel accept their right of return by acknowledging its role in their dispossession, more and more Israelis are coming to accept the reality that Zionism can never escape its past. It is becoming increasingly clear to many Israelis that Israel has absorbed so much of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem into itself that the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples can never be separated fairly. The separation wall, says Hanegbi, "is the great despairing solution of the Jewish-Zionist society. It is the last desperate act of those who cannot confront the Palestinian issue. Of those who are compelled to push the Palestinian issue out of their lives and out of their consciousness." For Hanegbi, born in Palestine before 1948, Palestinians "were always part of my landscape," and without them, "this is a barren country, a disabled country."

Old-line Zionist Meron Benvenisti, who has also moved to support for binationalism, used almost identical metaphors in a Ha'aretz interview run alongside Hanegbi's. Also Palestine-born and a contemporary of Hanegbi, Benvenisti believes "this is a country in which there were always Arabs. This is a country in which the Arabs are the landscape, the natives.I don't see myself living here without them. In my eyes, without Arabs this is a barren land."

Both men discuss the evolution of their thinking over the decades, and both describe a period in which, after the triumph of Zionism, they unthinkingly accepted its dispossession of the Palestinians. Each man describes the Palestinians simply disappearing when he was an adolescent ("They just sort of evaporated," says Hanegbi), and Benvenisti recalls a long period in which the Palestinian "tragedy simply did not penetrate my consciousness." But both speak in very un-Zionist terms of equality. Benvenisti touches on the crux of the Zionist dilemma. "This is where I am different from my friends in the left," he says, "because I am truly a native son of immigrants, who is drawn to the Arab culture and the Arabic language because it is here. It is the land.Whereas the right, certainly, but the left too hates Arabs. The Arabs bother them; they complicate things. The subject generates moral questions and that generates cultural unease."

Hanegbi goes farther. "I am not a psychologist," he says, "but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds."

While some thoughtful Israelis like these men struggle with philosophical questions of existence and identity and the collective Jewish conscience, few American defenders of Israel seem troubled by such deep issues. Racism is often banal. Most of those who practice it, and most of those who support Israel as a Zionist state, would be horrified to be accused of racism, because their racist practices have become commonplace. They do not even think about what they do. We recently encountered a typical American supporter of Israel who would have argued vigorously if we had accused her of racism. During a presentation we were giving to a class, this (non-Jewish) woman rose to ask a question that went roughly like this: "I want to ask about the failure of the other Arabs to take care of the Palestinians. I must say I sympathize with Israel because Israel simply wants to have a secure state, but the other Arabs have refused to take the Palestinians in, and so they sit in camps and their hostility toward Israel just festers."

This is an extremely common American, and Israeli, perception, the idea being that if the Arab states would only absorb the Palestinians so that they became Lebanese or Syrians or Jordanians, they would forget about being Palestinian, forget that Israel had displaced and dispossessed them, and forget about "wanting to destroy Israel." Israel would then be able simply to go about its own business and live in peace, as it so desperately wants to do. This woman's assumption was that it is acceptable for Israel to have established itself as a Jewish state at the expense of (i.e., after the ethnic cleansing of) the land's non-Jewish inhabitants, that any Palestinian objection to this reality is illegitimate, and that all subsequent animosity toward Israel is ultimately the fault of neighboring Arab states who failed to smother the Palestinians' resistance by anesthetizing them to their plight and erasing their identity and their collective memory of Palestine.

When later in the class the subject arose of Israel ending the occupation, this same woman spoke up to object that, if Israel did give up control over the West Bank and Gaza, it would be economically disadvantaged, at least in the agricultural sector. "Wouldn't this leave Israel as just a desert?" she wondered. Apart from the fact that the answer is a clear "no" (Israel's agricultural capability inside its 1967 borders is quite high, and most of Israel is not desert), the woman's question was again based on the automatic assumption that Israel's interests take precedence over those of anyone else and that, in order to enhance its own agricultural economy (or, presumably, for any other perceived gain), Israel has the right to conquer and take permanent possession of another people's land.

The notion that the Jewish/Zionist state of Israel has a greater right to possess the land, or a greater right to security, or a greater right to a thriving economy, than the people who are native to that land is extremely racist, but this woman would probably object strenuously to having it pointed out that this is a Jewish supremacist viewpoint identical to past justifications for white South Africa's apartheid regime and to the rationale for all European colonial (racist) systems that exploited the human and natural resources of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia over the centuries for the sole benefit of the colonizers. Racism must necessarily be blind to its own immorality; the burden of conscience is otherwise too great. This is the banality of evil.

(Unconsciously, of course, many Americans also seem to believe that the shameful policies of the U.S. government toward Native Americans somehow make it acceptable for the government of Israel to pursue equally shameful policies toward the Palestinians. The U.S. needs to face its racist policies head on as much as it needs to confront the racism of its foremost partner, Israel.)

This woman's view is so very typical, something you hear constantly in casual conversation and casual encounters at social occasions, that it hardly seems significant. But this very banality is precisely the evil of it; what is evil is the very fact that it is "hardly significant" that Zionism by its nature is racist and that this reality goes unnoticed by decent people who count themselves defenders of Israel. The universal acceptability of a system that is at heart racist but proclaims itself to be benign, even noble, and the license this acceptability gives Israel to oppress another people, are striking testimony to the selectivity of the human conscience and its general disinterest in human questions of justice and human rights except when these are politically useful.

Countering the Counter-Arguments

To put some perspective on this issue, a few clarifying questions must be addressed. Many opponents of the occupation would argue that, although Israel's policies in the occupied territories are racist in practice, they are an abuse of Zionism and that racism is not inherent in it. This seems to be the position of several prominent commentators who have recently denounced Israel severely for what it does in the West Bank and Gaza but fail to recognize the racism in what Israel did upon its establishment in 1948. In a recent bitter denunciation of Zionist policies today, Avraham Burg, a former Knesset speaker, lamented that Zionism had become corrupted by ruling as an occupier over another people, and he longed for the days of Israel's youth when "our national destiny" was "as a light unto the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality." These are nice words, and it is heartening to hear credible mainstream Israelis so clearly denouncing the occupation, but Burg's assumption that before the occupation Zionism followed "a just path" and always had "an ethical leadership" ignores the unjust and unethical policy of ethnic cleansing that allowed Israel to become a so-called Jewish democracy in the first place.

Acknowledging the racist underpinnings of an ideology so long held up as the embodiment of justice and ethics appears to be impossible for many of the most intellectual of Israelis and Israeli defenders. Many who strongly oppose Israel's policies in the occupied territories still, despite their opposition, go through considerable contortions to "prove" that Israel itself is not racist. Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the Jewish magazine Tikkun and a long-time opponent of the occupation, rejects the notion that Zionism is racist on the narrow grounds that Jewishness is only a religious identity and that Israel welcomes Jews of all races and ethnicities and therefore cannot be called racist. But this confuses the point. Preference toward a particular religion, which is the only aspect of racism that Lerner has addressed and which he acknowledges occurs in Israel, is no more acceptable than preference on ethnic grounds.

But most important, racism has to do primarily with those discriminated against, not with those who do the discriminating. Using Lerner's reasoning, apartheid South Africa might also not be considered racist because it welcomed whites of all ethnicities. But its inherent evil lay in the fact that its very openness to whites discriminated against blacks. Discrimination against any people on the basis of "race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin" is the major characteristic of racism as the UN defines it. Discrimination against Palestinians and other non-Jews, simply because they are not Jews, is the basis on which Israel constitutes itself. Lerner seems to believe that, because the Palestinian citizens of Israel have the vote and are represented in the Knesset, there is no racial or ethnic discrimination in Israel. But, apart from skipping over the institutional racism that keeps Palestinian Israelis in perpetual second-class citizenship, this argument ignores the more essential reality that Israel reached its present ethnic balance, the point at which it could comfortably allow Palestinians to vote without endangering its Jewish character, only because in 1948 three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forced to leave what became the Jewish state of Israel.

More questions need to be addressed. Is every Israeli or every Jew a racist? Most assuredly not, as the examples of Jeff Halper, Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, and many others like them strikingly illustrate. Is every Zionist a racist? Probably not, if one accepts ignorance as an exonerating factor. No doubt the vast majority of Israelis, most very good-hearted people, are not consciously racist but "go along" unquestioningly, having been born into or moved to an apparently democratic state and never examined the issue closely, and having bought into the line fed them by every Israeli government from the beginning, that Palestinians and other Arabs are enemies and that whatever actions Israel takes against Palestinians are necessary to guarantee the personal security of Israelis.

Is it anti-Semitic to say that Zionism is a racist system? Certainly not. Political criticism is not ethnic or religious hatred. Stating a reality about a government's political system or its political conduct says nothing about the qualities of its citizens or its friends. Racism is not a part of the genetic makeup of Jews, any more than it was a part of the genetic makeup of Germans when Hitler ran a racist regime. Nor do Zionism's claim to speak for all Jews everywhere and Israel's claim to be the state of all Jews everywhere make all Jews Zionists. Zionism did not ask for or receive the consent of universal Jewry to speak in its name; therefore labeling Zionism as racist does not label all Jews and cannot be called anti-Semitic.

Why It Matters

Are there other racist systems, and are there governing systems and political philosophies, racist or not, that are worse than Zionism? Of course, but this fact does not relieve Zionism of culpability. (Racism obviously exists in the United States and in times past was pervasive throughout the country, but, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a racist governing system, based on racist foundations and depending for its raison d'etre on a racist philosophy.) Many defenders of Israel (Michael Lerner and columnist Thomas Friedman come to mind) contend that when Israel is "singled out" for criticism not also leveled at oppressive regimes elsewhere, the attackers are exhibiting a special hatred for Jews. Anyone who does not also criticize Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il or Bashar al-Assad for atrocities far greater than Israel's, they charge, is showing that he is less concerned to uphold absolute values than to tear down Israel because it is Jewish. But this charge ignores several factors that demand criticism of Zionist racism. First, because the U.S. government supports Zionism and its racist policy on a continuing basis and props up Zionism's military machine with massive amounts of military aid, it is wholly appropriate for Americans (indeed, it is incumbent on Americans) to call greater attention to Zionism's racism than, for instance, to North Korea's appalling cruelties. The United States does not assist in North Korea's atrocities, but it does underwrite Zionism's brutality.

There is also a strong moral reason for denouncing Zionism as racist. Zionism advertises itself, and actually congratulates itself, as a uniquely moral system that stands as a "light unto the nations," putting itself forward as in a real sense the very embodiment of the values Americans hold dear. Many Zionist friends of Israel would have us believe that Zionism is us, and in many ways it is: most Americans, seeing Israelis as "like us," have grown up with the notion that Israel is a noble enterprise and that the ideology that spawned it is of the highest moral order. Substantial numbers of Americans, non-Jews as well as Jews, feel an emotional and psychological bond with Israel and Zionism that goes far beyond the ties to any other foreign ally. One scholar, describing the U.S.-Israeli tie, refers to Israel as part of the "being" of the United States. Precisely because of the intimacy of the relationship, it is imperative that Zionism's hypocrisy be exposed, that Americans not give aid and comfort to, or even remain associated with, a morally repugnant system that uses racism to exalt one people over all others while masquerading as something better than it is. The United States can remain supportive of Israel as a nation without any longer associating itself with Israel's racism.

Finally, there are critical practical reasons for acknowledging Zionism's racism and enunciating a U.S. policy clearly opposed to racism everywhere and to the repressive Israeli policies that arise from Zionist racism. Now more than at any time since the United States positioned itself as an enthusiastic supporter of Zionism, U.S. endorsement, and indeed facilitation, of Israel's racist policies put this country at great risk for terrorism on a massive scale. Terrorism arises, not as President Bush would have us believe from "hatred of our liberties," but from hatred of our oppressive, killing policies throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and in a major way from our support for Israel's severe oppression of the Palestinians. Terrorism is never acceptable, but it is explainable, and it is usually avoidable. Supporting the oppression of Palestinians that arises from Israel's racism only encourages terrorism.

It is time to begin openly expressing revulsion at the racism against Palestinians that the United States has been supporting for decades. It is time to sound an alarm about the near irreversibility of Israel's absorption of the occupied territories into Israel, about the fact that this arises from a fundamentally racist ideology, about the fact that this racism is leading to the ethnicide of an entire nation of people, and about the fact that it is very likely to produce horrific terrorist retaliation against the U.S. because of its unquestioning support. Many who are intimately familiar with the situation on the ground are already sounding an alarm, usually without using the word racism but using other inflammatory terms. Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen recently observed that "Israel's atrocities have now intensified to an extent unimaginable in previous decades." Land confiscation, curfew, the "gradual pushing of Palestinians from areas designated for Jews" have accompanied the occupation all along, he wrote, but the level of oppression now "is quite another story.[This is] an eliminationist policy on the verge of genocide."

The Foundation for Middle East Peace, a Washington-based institution that has tracked Israeli settlement-building for decades, came to much the same conclusion, although using less attention-getting language, in its most recent bimonthly newsletter. Israel, it wrote, is "undertaking massive, unprecedented efforts beyond the construction of new settlement housing, which proceeds apace, to put the question of its control of these areas beyond the reach of diplomacy." Israel's actions, particularly the "relentless" increase in territorial control, the foundation concluded, have "compromised not only the prospect for genuine Palestinian independence but also, in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year occupation, the very sustainability of everyday Palestinian life."

It signals a remarkable change when Israeli commentators and normally staid foundations begin using terms like "unprecedented," "unimaginable in previous decades," "in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year occupation," even words like "eliminationist" and "genocide." While the Bush administration, every Democratic presidential candidate (including, to some degree, even the most progressive), Congress, and the mainstream U.S. media blithely ignore the extent of the destruction in Palestine, more and more voices outside the United States and outside the mainstream in the U.S. are finally coming to recognize that Israel is squeezing the life out of the Palestinian nation. Those who see this reality should begin to expose not only the reality but the racism that is at its root.

Some very thoughtful Israelis, including Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, and activists like Jeff Halper, have come to the conclusion that Israel has absorbed so much of the occupied territories that a separate, truly independent Palestinian state can never be established in the West Bank and Gaza. They now regard a binational solution as the only way. In theory, this would mean an end to Zionism (and Zionist racism) by allowing the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples to form a single secular state in all of Palestine in which they live together in equality and democracy, in which neither people is superior, in which neither people identifies itself by its nationality or its religion but rather simply by its citizenship. Impossible? Idealized? Pie-in-the-sky? Probably so but maybe not.

Other Israeli and Jewish activists and thinkers, such as Israel's Uri Avnery and CounterPunch contributor Michael Neumann, have cogently challenged the wisdom and the realism of trying to pursue binationalism at the present time. But it is striking that their arguments center on what will best assure a decent outcome for Palestinians. In fact, what is most heartening about the newly emerging debate over the one- versus the two-state solution is the fact that intelligent, compassionate people have at long last been able to move beyond addressing Jewish victimhood and how best to assure a future for Jews, to begin debating how best to assure a future for both the Palestinian and the Jewish people. Progressives in the U.S., both supporters and opponents of present U.S. policies toward Israel, should encourage similar debate in this country. If this requires loudly attacking AIPAC and its intemperate charges of anti-Semitism, so be it.

We recently had occasion to raise the notion of Israeli racism, using the actual hated word, at a gathering of about 25 or 30 (mostly) progressive (mostly) Jews, and came away with two conclusions: 1) it is a hard concept to bring people to face, but 2) we were not run out of the room and, after the initial shock of hearing the word racist used in connection with Zionism, most people in the room, with only a few exceptions, took the idea aboard. Many specifically thanked us for what we had said. One man, raised as a Jew and now a Muslim, came up to us afterward to say that he thinks Zionism is nationalist rather than racist (to which we argued that nationalism was the motivation but racism is the resulting reality), but he acknowledged, with apparent approbation, that referring to racism had a certain shock effect. Shock effect is precisely what we wanted. The United States' complacent support for everything Israel does will not be altered without shock.

When a powerful state kills hundreds of civilians from another ethnic group; confiscates their land; builds vast housing complexes on that land for the exclusive use of its own nationals; builds roads on that land for the exclusive use of its own nationals; prevents expansion of the other people's neighborhoods and towns; demolishes on a massive scale houses belonging to the other people, in order either to prevent that people's population growth, to induce them "voluntarily" to leave their land altogether, or to provide "security" for its own nationals; imprisons the other people in their own land behind checkpoints, roadblocks, ditches, razor wire, electronic fences, and concrete walls; squeezes the other people into ever smaller, disconnected segments of land; cripples the productive capability of the other people by destroying or separating them from their agricultural land, destroying or confiscating their wells, preventing their industrial expansion, and destroying their businesses; imprisons the leadership of the other people and threatens to expel or assassinate that leadership; destroys the security forces and the governing infrastructure of the other people; destroys an entire population's census records, land registry records, and school records; vandalizes the cultural headquarters and the houses of worship of the other people by urinating, defecating, and drawing graffiti on cultural and religious artifacts and symbols ­ when one people does these things to another, a logical person can draw only one conclusion: the powerful state is attempting to destroy the other people, to push them into the sea, to ethnically cleanse them.

These kinds of atrocities, and particularly the scale of the repression, did not spring full-blown out of some terrorist provocations by Palestinians. These atrocities grew out of a political philosophy that says whatever advances the interests of Jews is acceptable as policy. This is a racist philosophy.

What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism. Israel worries constantly, and its American friends worry, about the destruction of Israel. We are all made to think always about the existential threat to Israel, to the Jewish people. But the nation in imminent danger of elimination today is not Israel but the Palestinians. Such a policy of national destruction must not be allowed to stand.

-----

* Assuming, according to the scenario put forth by our Israeli-American friend, that Palestinians had accepted the UN-mandated establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, that no war had ensued, and that no Palestinians had left Palestine, Israel would today encompass only the 55 percent of Palestine allocated to it by the UN partition resolution, not the 78 percent it possessed after successfully prosecuting the 1948 war. It would have no sovereignty over Jerusalem, which was designated by the UN as a separate international entity not under the sovereignty of any nation. Its 5.4 million Jews (assuming the same magnitude of Jewish immigration and natural increase) would be sharing the state with approximately five million Palestinians (assuming the same nine-fold rate of growth among the 560,000 Palestinians who inhabited the area designated for the Jewish state as has occurred in the Palestinian population that actually remained in Israel in 1948). Needless to say, this small, severely overcrowded, binational state would not be the comfortable little Jewish democracy that our friend seems to have envisioned.

Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit.

Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

They are also contributors to CounterPunch's hot new book: The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org

Colonized Palestine and the Iron Wall

http://takingaim.info/

The Iron Wall

The tension between the claim that the land was empty and the demand that the “non-existent” inhabitants be ruthlessly subjugated was less acute when Zionists discussed strategy among themselves. The reality of what was necessary to colonize Palestine took precedence over propaganda.
One of the ideological forbears of Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, is known as the founder of “Revisionist Zionism”, the Zionist current which had little patience with the liberal and socialist facade employed by the “labor” Zionists. [Revisionist Zionism is represented today by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.]
In 1923 Jabotinsky wrote The Iron Wall, which could be called a benchmark essay for the entire Zionist movement. He set forth bluntly the essential premises of Zionism which had, indeed, been laid out before, if not as eloquently, by Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann and others. Jabotinsky’s reasoning has been cited and reflected in subsequent Zionist advocacy – from nominal “left” to so-called “right”. He wrote as follows:
There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some general understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization of a country took place with the agreement of the native population. Such an event has never occurred.
The natives will always struggle obstinately against the colonists – and it is all the same whether they are cultured or uncultured. The comrades in arms of [Hernan] Cortez or [Francisco] Pizarro conducted themselves like brigands. The Redskins fought with uncompromising fervor against both evil and good-hearted colonizers. The natives struggled because any kind of colonization anywhere at anytime is inadmissible to any native people.
Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs.
They have the precise psychology that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.
It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and by every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same condition exists now.
Even an agreement with non-Palestinians represents the same kind of fantasy. In order for Arab nationalists of Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus to agree to pay so serious a price they would have to refuse to maintain the Arab character of Palestine.
We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.
Whether through the Balfour Declaration or the Mandate, external force is a necessity for establishing in the country conditions of rule and defense through which the local population, regardless of what it wishes, will be deprived of the possibility of impeding our colonization, administratively or physically. Force must play its role – with strength and without indulgence. In this, there are no meaningful differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.
To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer, ’absolutely untrue.’ This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any sweet words nor for any tasty morsel, because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall. [27]

The Metaphor of Iron
The theme and imagery of coercive iron and steel evoked by Vladimir Jabotinsky was to be taken up by the nascent national socialist movement in Germany, even as Jabotinsky had, in turn, been inspired by Benito Mussolini. The mystical invocation of iron will in the service of martial and chauvinist conquest united Zionist, colonial and fascist ideologues. It sought its legitimacy in legends of a conquering past.
Cecil B. de Mille’s Samson and Delilah was more than a Hollywood biblical romance about the perfidy of woman and the virtue of manly strength. It carried, as well, the authoritarian values of the novel from which it was adopted, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Samson, which trumpeted the necessity of brute force if the Israelites were to conquer the Philistines.
“Shall I give our people a message from you?” Samson thought for a while, and then said slowly: “The first word is iron. They must get iron. They must give everything they have for iron – their silver and wheat, oil and wine and flocks, even their wives and daughters. All for iron! There is nothing in the world more valuable than iron.” [28]
Jabotinsky, the siren of “an iron wall through which the local population can not break through” and of “the iron law of every colonizing movement ... armed force”, found his call echoed in major Zionist forays against victim peoples in the decades to come.
Israel’s current Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, launched the 1967 war as Chief of Staff with “Iron Will”. As Prime Minister in 1975 and 1976 he declared the policy of Hayad Barzel, the “Iron Hand”, in the West Bank. Over 300,000 Palestinians were to pass through Israeli prisons under conditions of sustained and institutionalized torture exposed by the Sunday Times of London and denounced by Amnesty International.
His successor as Chief of Staff, Raphael Eitan, imposed the “Iron Arm” – Zro’aa Barzel – on the West Bank, and assassination was added to the repressive arsenal. On July 17, 1982, the Israeli cabinet met to prepare what the London Sunday Times would term “this carefully pre-planned military operation to purge the camps, called Moah Barzel or ‘Iron Brain’”. The camps were Sabra and Shatila and the operation “was familiar to Sharon and Begin, part of Sharon’s larger plan discussed by the Israeli cabinet”. [29]
When Yitzhak Rabin, who had supported the Revisionist Likud in Lebanon during the war, became Shimon Peres’ Minister of Defense in the current “national unity” government, he launched in Lebanon and the West Bank the policy of Egrouf Barzel, the “Iron Fist”. It is the “Iron Fist” which Rabin again cited as the basis for his policy of allout repression and collective punishment during the 1987-1988 Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza.
It’s interesting to recall, as well, that Jabotinsky located his colonial impulse in the doctrine of the purity of blood. Jabotinsky spelled this out in his Letter on Autonomy:
It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than his own. In order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.
This theme was further elaborated by Jabotinsky:
The source of national feeling ... lies in a man’s blood ...in his racio-physico type and in that alone. ...A man’s spiritual outlook is primarily determined by his physical structure. For that reason we do not believe in spiritual assimilation. It is inconceivable, from the physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of pure Jewish blood can become adapted to the spiritual outlook of a German or a Frenchman. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid, but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish. [30]
The adoption of chauvinist doctrines of racial purity and the logic of the blood were not confined to Jabotinsky or to the revisionists. The liberal philosopher, Martin Buber, located his Zionism equally within the framework of European racist doctrine:
The deepest layers of our being are determined by blood; our innermost thinking and our will are colored by it. [31]
How was this to be implemented?

Probably because they threatened IMC, like this:

SchtarkerYid
by JA, Exactly when and where? Thursday, Jul. 13, 2006 at 11:14 AM

JA, Exactly when and where can I find you on the streets of Berkeley passing out candy? I'll meet you there. I have some new toys that I'd like to show you.
SchtarkerYid
by Its just a matter of time now Thursday, Jul. 13, 2006 at 11:09 AM

Its just a matter of time now. The crazed Islamic supremicists and their appologists have, once again attacked Israel, essentially demanding war. Israel has no choice but to fight this new war with devastating effectiveness. After that, the shattered smoking ruins of Hamas and Hezbollah may one day wish to discuss peace. HaShem will deliver the enemies of Israel into the hands of the students of his Torah.

On the decline of
by self-righteousness Thursday, Jul. 13, 2006 at 8:07 AM

Sigh. Of course, SJ, if JA were to die, I'd pass out candy on the streets of Berkeley. (Although in his case, fruits and nuts might be more approrpriate)

Chazack, chazack v'nit chazack. Todays going to be a tough one.

Liberate the People of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip from the Terrorist Occupation and the Puppet Governments that Harbor them.

If the governments of Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are unwilling to disarm the Iranian controlled terror organization that operate in their territories, or if they are incapable of doing so, then they are not worthy of international recognition as legitimate regimes.

by Ehud Tokatly

UN Security Council resolutions and International treaties define crimes against humanity as the "participation in and knowledge of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, and the multiple commission of [such] acts ... against any civilian population". These international binding instruments go on to impose uniform mandatory counter-terrorist obligations on all states to "bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of terrorist attacks and stresses that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable".

The ongoing terrorist aggression carried out by the Islamist criminals of Hizbollah and Hamas against uninvolved civilians within Israel's internationally recognized boundaries constitute a policy of premeditated crimes against humanity and the rulers of Lebanon and the PA are guilty of harboring and supporting these offenders.

Therefore, the international community, including the UN, USA, EU, G8 and NATO, must send a task force to liberate the people of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip from the terrorist occupation and the puppet governments that harbor terror. They should enforce law and order until both these societies prove in actions that they are ready to operate within the parameters of International Law.

The entire world knows full well that Israel will keep the peace and respect her neighbors, as soon as the terrorists stop their criminal attacks.

UN, USA, EU, G8 and NATO?

Obviously this person thinks people haven't been paying attention to Iraq. What business do these corrupt institutions have trying to liberate people? LIberate Palestine from Israel. Liberate Israel from the Zionists. Liberate Saudi Arabia from the royal family. Liberate America from the Neo-cons, and while you're at it, liberate America from oil barons.

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified -- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.

But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster, and it has come time for all of us -- all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, all Americans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies -- to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.

The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel. “This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral,” wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society. Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel’s arrogance.

We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts

Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized. But a military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.

A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a moral country.

A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began -- is not a society with a conscience.

A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)

Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in “moral collapse.”

Michel Warschawski writes of an “Israeli madness” and “insane brutality,” a “putrefaction” of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a “gang of hoodlums,” he says, a state “that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive.”

As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries -- if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass.


Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.

U.S. support for Israeli terror:
NEW YORK — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against the Lebanese resistance movement Hizbullah, The New York Times revealed on Saturday, July22 .

Citing US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Times said the decision to ship the weapons quickly came after relatively little debate within the administration.

The arms shipment has not been announced publicly. The officials who described the administration's decision to rush the munitions included employees of two government agencies, one of whom described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel, the Times said.

The munitions are actually part of a multimillion-dollar arms-sale package approved last year which Israel is able to tap when it needs to, the officials told the paper.

But some US military officers said the request for expedited delivery was unusual and indicated that Israel has many targets it plans to hit in Lebanon.

Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, the newspaper said, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means.

An Israeli army spokesman said Saturday that Israel will pursue its war on Hizbullah with more military incursions into south Lebanon, but will not unleash a full-scale invasion "for the moment."

"It will probably widen, but we are still looking at limited operations," he said. "We're not talking about massive forces going inside at this point."

Israel has been building up its forces at the border and has called up3 , 000reserves.

Thousands of Lebanese civilians have fled north fearing Israel will invade and expand an11 -day-old bombardment of Lebanon which has killed 345 people, mostly civilians.

Lebanese families packed into cars and pickup trucks and clogged roads to the north after Israeli planes dropped leaflets on Friday warning residents of south Lebanon to flee for safety beyond the Litani river, about 20 km ( 13miles) from the border.

Foreigners have also flooded out of the country. Ships and aircraft worked through the night scooping more tired and scared people from Lebanon and bringing them to Cyprus and Turkey.

"False Promise"

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will go to the Middle East on Sunday, July23 , while resisting international pressure for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hizbullah.

Some US analysts doubt Rice's prospects for stopping 10 days of fighting because of her reluctance to talk to key players — Hizbullah and its backers, Iran and Syria.

Resisting calls from the United Nations, Europe and the Arab world, she said an immediate cease-fire would produce a "false promise" that would allow Hizbullah to re-emerge in the future to attack Israel, the top US ally in the region.

"An immediate cease-fire without political conditions does not make sense," she said.

"If you simply look for a cease-fire ... we will be back here in six months again," she added. "What I won't do is go to some place and try to get a cease-fire that I know isn't going to last."

As part of a political solution, Rice said there would be a need for a "robust" international force inside Lebanon but added that the United States was still discussing with its partners what its mandate would be.

US troops were not anticipated in any expanded international peace force for Lebanon, she said.

The Bush administration faced some pressure at home to do more to try to end the violence in the Middle East as US Senate Democratic leaders called on the president to immediately appoint a special envoy to the Middle East.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a letter to Bush that they were "surprised" that Rice plans only a brief stop in the region.

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said Friday he had formally asked the Israeli and Lebanese governments a day earlier to guarantee safe passage routes by land, air and sea into and out of Lebanon.

More than500 , 000people, over a third of them children, had been touched in Lebanon by the conflict and more than 100 , 000Lebanese were now in Syria, most of whom needed assistance, Egeland told the UN Security Council.

http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2006-07/22/01.shtml

"Israel is a white colonial settler state..."

Wait a minute- Jews and Arabs are both Semites, so I'm not sure where you got this idea. Can anyone clarify this for me? Thanks...

Non Jews in Israel have the right to vote, they have full civil rights. The only political party in Israel that called for the expulsion of the Arabs was banned from Israel as "inciting racism".

"Not by might and not by power, but by spirit alone, we shall live in peace.

Miraculous days bring clearer insights.
After Tuesday's 52 rockets being shot at Tsfat and only three people lightly
injured, I woke up Wednesday morning, with what was for me, getting to the
kernel of this war.
There are 4 holy cities in the Land of Israel according to our tradition and each is connected to an element.
Hebron is earth, as the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, (Sarah/Abraham, Rebbeca/Isaac, Leah/Jacob) are buried there.
Jerusalem is fire as it is the Heart where the eternal flame burns.
Tiberias is water as the main body of inland water is there.
And Tsfat is air, the mystical city.
Someone asked a Holy man the other day, "Why is Tsfat being so heavily bombarded?"
"Because Tsfat is a holy city and the source of evil behind this is the head of Iran. The source of evil is trying to destroy holiness."
This gave a new thought to the endless boom, boom , boom. Made it a little easier to hear. But something didn't totally settle in me. "Holiness" – "Evil"…what does that really mean?
Wednesday morning it came to me.
Tsfat, the city of air. Air is Life.
This is the war that is within us all that is being expressed outside on the planet in technicolor. This is the war between choosing Life, and choosing Death. Terrorists blow themselves up, send children out to the front line, hide behind innocent people, in their fight to bring death to others, and then glorify it. This is the most extreme expression of "choosing death".
We all have it subtly and not so subtly within us.
Death is the lack of life force within something.
Lack, our sense of lack that eats at our innards, is an expression of feeling dead within. At the basic level, when we are hungry, our body is saying "I am in the process of decay and if some life force- food is not put in me I will die."
At this point in Creation, we have no choice in this aspect of lack within ourselves.
But there is the other lacks that is within our realm of choosing Life or choosing Death.
Appreciation is an active expression of choosing Life. Articulating consciously appreciation for even the littlest things, brings more of a sense of life. Try a day of consciously appreciating everything, even the roll of toilet paper you are using. Ahhh……Life.
A day of constantly focusing on what is lacking will bring such an energy drain, one will feel "dead" by the evening.
Believing in oneself is an expression of choosing Life. The more I believe in my ability to become who I was truly created to be, the more Life comes through me. All fallen fears come from not humbly believing in one's becoming one's unique self- one's unique gift to the planet. We all know the feeling of how fear literally creates a feeling of tightness, shortness of breath, block, disconnection….expressions of death. Hearing the boom, boom outside, I watch how the close booms are technicolor vibrations of death, intending to bring fear and death, or at best just destruction.
Destruction……hmmm…… Israel bombs are intended to destroy the infrastructure of Hizballah/Hamas….create a disconnection. (Homeopathically removing the force of "disconnection" through disconnection.) May God protect all of the innocent Lebonese and Palestinian people who are being held "hostage" as the Hizbollah/Hamas/Fatah hides amongst them.
Which brings another insight into this hologram……Since everything that is happening in the physical world represents inner dimensions that are within us all, what is this desire for death- Hizbollah/Hamas/Fatah- hiding deeply, intertwined within our desire for Life- the innocent Lebonese and innocent Palestinians?
Perhaps if we all contemplate that and find it within ourselves, we can help protect the innocent Lebonese and Palestinian people who are now being used as "shields" for the death focus. Where do we try to "fool" ourselves, make justifications, or blame others, because of our lack of appreciation and/or lack of belief in who we uniquely are?
In Israel now (and outside) there is a tremendous sense of coming together, sense of love and care. Even in the world of "money making." All the hotels in Jerusalem are giving discounts for citizens in the north. Free entrance to the zoo, discounts at grocery stores, 50% off SMS messages to "stay in touch with those you care for" as it is advertised. Now why do we need to have our existence threatened in order to come to a place of unity, cooperation, deep care? Something to think about when we are looking at the phenomena within ourselves. Everything that is happening on the outside collectively is happening within us individually.

Monday was my day of breakdown. In the morning I started arranging for 3 of our children who were in Jerusalem, to move on to different places. When I heard that a suicide bomber was caught up the street from where the children were staying, fear gripped me so deeply, my mind went into chaos. Where should the children be? I frantically tried to "figure out" the safest place which at the time seemed "nowhere."
"Bring them back to Tsfat! How can Ohr Eden go to Bnei Brak? Its near Tel Aviv! How can Hodaya and Yisrael Labe go to Emanuel? There are Palestinian villages all around that place!"
I burst into tears and just sobbed for a few minutes, allowing the tension that I had been holding to release.
"Ahh….this is exactly what these evil people want. They want me to be in fear," came to my mind.
"And who is allowing them to be a vehicle of possibly implanting fear?" a subtle inner voice asked.
"OK. Yes, obviously the Holy One is allowing them to play this out."
"And why would the Holy One, who wants Life and is the Creator and Love itself, why would He direct such a thing?" from the subtle inner voice.
"To force me to the place of knowing, not just in my head, but truly in my being, that it is truly in His control. I make my efforts to make wise/healthy choices, but ultimately Life and Death are in the Divines Providence."
I then understood what I needed to do. Each choice/step I would take, should come from a place of choosing connection (in Jewish spirituality terms it means "mitzvah"- that which is intended to bring Divine connection.)
I calmed down. My mind cleared. The obvious was for Ohr Eden to go to Bnei Brak where his yeshiva/school was temporarily being moved to Bnei Brak. There he would be spending his day learning Torah, with the intention of bringing Life to the world.
The other two children would be going to Emanuel to be with Hodaya's father. OK. Honoring one's father is an act of connection.
So the plans were set, and I felt in alignment again (as much as possible at this point.)
Yesterday when I quickly ran out into our courtyard to water the garden, hearing the booms, I thought "choose fear and focus on the booms or choose some expression of life. But what intention can I have while watering the plants?"
As I sprayed the lilac tree, as the water came pouring out, I saw myself spraying life into the life…..the water flowing onto to these green innocent life giving plants….."Life, life, life" I kept thinking as the water flowed.
I ran back inside and got a call from Eliyahu McKlain. For those of you who don't know this special soul, he is a young Jewish man who has dedicated his life to making connections between different peoples of different cultures and religion here in Israel and abroad. A few years ago he snuck into Iraq and stood on stage in a huge auditorium, with his tzit tzit hanging (these are the strings of a garment the Jewish men who follow the spiritual practice of Judaism to remind them of constantly being connected to the Divine) and addressed his cousins as a Jew from Israel.
Eliyahu called to see how we were. He told me something that was like water to my soul. He has been getting calls from Palestinians who want to know more about his work and be involved. One woman in particular said
"I am not buying into this death message anymore." She wants to immediately get active in his work.

There is a "commandment" in the Torah which is one of the fundamental principles in Judaism. (I dislike the word "commandment" because it doesn't give over the true meaning of the Hebrew word, which is the true directive. In hebrew the word is – "mitzvah"- which means to join together, to join in the Divine. It is a directive as a means to connect with/in the Holy One.)

"I call the heaven and the earth witness in you today, the life and the death. I set before you the blessing and the curse. Choose Life." (Deuteronomy 30:19)

We are setting out in a few hours for Jerusalem, the holy fire of the heart, for Shabbat. May the Holy One guide all of our paths in Life through our choosing Life. And as all of us choose Life, may it bring an end to this war, and a removal of those evil forces within us and without that are intent on death.

Shabbat Shalom,
Adinah

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Notes from northern Israel

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth hit the international headlines for the first time in this vicious war being waged by Israel mostly on Lebanese civilians. Reporter Matthew Price, corseted in a blue flak jacket in Haifa, told BBC viewers that for the first time Hizbullah had targeted Nazareth late on Sunday. “Nazareth is a mostly Christian town”, he added, managing to cram into a single sentence of a few words two factual mistakes and a disturbing hint of incitement.

Whatever the precision of its rockets (and Nazareth’s residents are certainly worried enough about that), Hizbullah struck not at Nazareth but at a site some distance from Nazareth -- a site of strategic significance to Israel, though I cannot say more than that as we are now officially under martial law in the country’s north.

Matthew Price was also wrong about Nazareth being a “mostly Christian town”. During the 1948 war in which Israel’s army ethnically cleansed much of the surrounding area of Palestinians, Muslim villagers fled to Nazareth in search of sanctuary. Today, two-thirds of the city’s 75,000 inhabitants are Muslim -- or at least they are by the religious classification system imposed on all citizens by the Israeli authorities.

Which brings us to the nasty element of incitement from our BBC reporter.

Several Israeli armaments factories and storage depots have been built close by Arab communities in the north of Israel, possibly in the hope that by locating them there Arab regimes will be deterred from attacking Israel’s enormous armory. In other words, the inhabitants of several of Israel’s Arab towns and villages have been turned into collective human shields -- protection for Israel’s war machine.

Before the strike close to Nazareth late on Sunday night, several Arab villages in the north had been hit by Hizbullah rockets trying to reach these factories. No one at the BBC saw the need to mention these attacks nor the fact that “mostly Muslim” villages had been hit. So why did the strike against Nazareth -- and its mistaken Christian status -- became part of the story for the BBC?

Because Israel wants to portray Hizbullah, and its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, as a crazed Islamic militia, as fanatical Muslims who hate Jews and Christians with equal vehemence. This is all part of Israel’s claim that it is fighting George Bush’s “war on terror”. Predictably, the BBC obliged by regurgitating this piece of racist nonsense.

If anybody still doubts that Israel is shaping the news agenda of broadcasters like the BBC, here was as good as the proof.

* * *

According to the jingoistic Jerusalem Post, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the army are delirious at their success in dictating the headlines and tone of foreign news broadcasts.

Ehud Olmert’s media adviser, Assif Shariv, told the Post that the international media were interviewing Israeli spokespeople four times as much as spokespeople for the Palestinians and Lebanese. Another government adviser, Gideon Meir, boasted: “We have never had it so good. The hasbara [propaganda] effort is a well-oiled machine."

Which may explain why we know so little about what is happening in Lebanon and Gaza -- and why we know so little about what is happening inside Israel too.

To remind you, I, like other residents of northern Israel, am under martial law. As are the foreign journalists -- and in addition they are required to submit their copy to the military censor. So all I can tell you, without breaking the law, is that you are not hearing the entire picture of what has been happening here in the Galilee.

Certainly, a piece of news that I doubt you will hear from the foreign media, although bravely the liberal Hebrew media has been drawing attention to the matter, is that the “only democracy in the Middle East” has all but silenced al-Jazeera from reporting inside Israel.

The reason is clear: until recently al-Jazeera had been running rings around the local and foreign press.

Al-Jazeera is the Arab world’s most serious and popular news gatherer, and essential viewing for anyone who wants to get a realistic idea of the news from both sides of the border. When I heard the missile strike close by Nazareth on Sunday night, al-Jazeera told me what had happened a full half hour before the Israeli media, and a day before my colleague Matthew Price.

How do they do it? Because most of their staff in Israel are Israeli citizens, as well as being Palestinian Arabs. Their journalists belong to the forgotten fifth of the Israeli population whose citizenship is Israeli but whose nationality is Palestinian.

So not only do al-Jazeera’s reporters know the northern patch of Israel like home ground (because it is home ground) but they are also not cravenly waiting for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and army’s spokesman to tell them what is going on.

Watching al-Jazeera has been a revelation: it has dedicated a substantial portion of its coverage to events inside Israel as well as in Lebanon, in stark contrast to Israeli broadcasters who rarely use any of the footage from Lebanon.

Similarly, al-Jazeera faithfully translated Ehud Olmert’s speech word for word into Arabic, and then included a lengthy analysis from a local correspondent for its viewers. Israeli broadcasters, on the other hand, repeatedly mistranslated the televised words of Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah into Hebrew and English, removing context and his calls for negotiation.

Similar misrepresentations of Nasrallah’s position in the foreign media presumably reflected their over-reliance on the Israeli broadcasters.

But al-Jazeera’s coverage inside Israel -- the Arab world’s best chance of being exposed to the Israeli point of view -- is being effectively shut down. In the past two days, its editor has been arrested on two occasions and another senior journalists taken in for questioning. According to its reporters, they cannot move from their office without being followed by the Israeli security services.

Why are they receiving this treatment? Because, according to Israel’s only serious newspaper, Haaretz, the country’s Hebrew media have been inciting against them. In particular Reshet Bet radio station, one of several wings of the Israeli media loyal to the government, has been telling lies that al-Jazeera is revealing classified information, namely the location of rocket strikes.

Is the claim true? According to Haaretz again: “Other TV networks, including Israeli news services, made similar reports without suffering from police intervention.”

Freedom of the press rarely means much when governments go to war. The local media usually consider it their patriotic duty not only to strip of vital context the information they offer their viewers but they often falsify the record too. Much of Israel’s media are clearly doing both jobs with some accomplishment.

But the fact that some in the Israeli media see it as part of their job to silence journalists not as craven as themselves is the real eye-opener. Maybe they realise al-Jazeera just makes them look like propagandists.

* * *

Nabila Espanioly, the director of a charitable organization in Nazareth promoting women and children’s interests, makes a point worth remembering as the foreign and Israeli media huddle in the shelters of Haifa and Nahariya interviewing terrified “Israelis”.

In fact, they are talking not to Israelis but to Israeli Jews. The fifth of the Israeli population who are not Jewish but Arab are rarely to be found hiding in public shelters because the authorities neglected to build any in their towns and villages.

In other words, although the Israeli army has sited several important weapons factories and military intelligence posts close to Arab communities in the north, the Israeli government has not offered the Arab residents any protection should there be fall-out -- quite literally in the case of the Katyusha rockets -- as a result.

This is another tiny facet of the discrimination endured for decades by the country’s Arab population that so rarely surfaces in media coverage of Israel.

Similarly oblivious to the ironies, the Israeli and foreign media have been running heart-warming stories about how “Israelis” are opening their homes and hearths to their compatriots fleeing the north. Again for “Israelis” substitute “Israeli Jews”.

No one I know here in Nazareth believes they would find much of a welcome in Tel Aviv or Beersheva should they go looking for one. Which leaves them with nowhere to run should they need to.

The only Arab communities out of the line of Hizbullah fire are those in the southern Negev belonging to the Bedouin. But that is not much comfort. Most of the Negev’s 150,000 Bedouin have been forced to live in squalid tents and metal shacks by an Israeli government that bulldozes anything more permanent. The authorities also deprive many of the Bedouin communities of water and all public services. So sweating it out with the Katyushas may be the better option.

* * *

A final footnote -- one to ponder in the quieter moments after the worst of the suffering is over. Those Israeli Jews fleeing for their lives as they head south to the quiet -- so far at least -- of Tel Aviv and beyond offer a small echo of events nearly six decades ago when 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes by the Israeli army.

Israeli Jews have always taken the view -- and happily tell any outsiders as much -- that the “Arabs” lost the right to their homes in the war of 1948 because they “fled” (in fact many were forcibly expelled, but let that drop for the moment).

The Israeli government has adopted much the same view, even refusing to allow the 250,000 of its own Arab citizens who are classified as internal refugees -- their ancestors fled the fighting in 1948 but have citizenship because they stayed inside what is today Israel -- to return to their original homes and land.

So how exactly should we regard those Israeli Jews now fleeing from Nahariya and Haifa? Should they lose their homes, their land and their bank accounts just as the Palestinians did in 1948?


Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book, “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State”, is published by Pluto Press. His website is http://www.jkcook.net

www.counterpunch.org/Cook07192006.html

that publishes Zionist propaganda.

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Ambulances fired on by Israel, says Red Cross

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Ed O'Loughlin Herald Correspondent in Tyre and agencies
July 25, 2006
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ISRAELI forces pushed up to the edge of Bint Jbeil, a large town on Lebanon's southern border, yesterday as heavy fighting continued.

Thousands of Lebanese civilians are still believed to be in the area, trapped in their homes by Israeli bombardment. Dozens of Lebanese civilians had earlier been killed or wounded by Israeli aircraft as they tried to comply with Israeli orders to flee the area or die.

Israeli jets repeatedly bombed the area east and south of Tyre in the dark, with reports of eight civilians killed and six wounded.

The Red Cross in Tyre said that five of its volunteers and three patients were wounded when Israeli aircraft attacked two ambulances on Sunday night. The attack took place near Qana when an ambulance from Tyre arrived to evacuate three patients from the border town of Tibnin.

The drivers said that two guided missiles were fired at each ambulance. Three patients - a woman, her son and grandson - were all re-injured, the son losing his leg to a direct hit from one of the kinetic-energy anti-tank missiles.

Ambulance drivers - until Sunday night the only people able to drive out into the killing zone - report that the roads around Tibnin are strewn with wrecked vehicles and uncollected bodies. The Red Cross has now been forced to abandon all attempts to rescue wounded from Tibnin.

More than 369 Lebanese have died since the fighting began on July 12, almost all of them non-combatants. Twenty Israeli combat personnel have died and 17 Israeli civilians have been killed.

Israel has ruled out a large-scale re-invasion of Lebanon but says it will carry out "pinpoint" incursions to locate and destroy Hezbollah positions.

The leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, said yesterday that Israeli attacks in south Lebanon will not prevent the guerilla group from firing missiles into northern Israel.

"Any Israeli incursion will not have political results unless it achieves any of the announced goals, most importantly to stop the bombardment of Zionist settlements … and I assure you that this goal will not be achieved," he told a Lebanese newspaper.

Hezbollah says it will not halt its fire until Israel in turn agrees to cease its bombardment of Lebanon and to negotiate a prisoner exchange.

The violence broke out after a Hezbollah border raid killed eight Israeli soldiers and captured two. Lebanon's Foreign Minister said yesterday that the two captured Israeli soldiers "are OK and in good health".

"I was basing it on what Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said," the minister, Fawzi Salloukh, said. "So let the United Nations or another friendly party come to Lebanon and start the negotiations [for a swap]."

On Sunday the Israeli Defence Force said that its troops had in turn captured two Hezbollah fighters in fighting at the border.

Mayssoun Sukarieh writing from Shatila Camp, Beirut, Electronic Lebanon, 24 July 2006

Sabra ... Sabra ... Sabra ...

I am sitting waiting for a cab to take me to Sabra, so I stroll down to Shatila to visit friends.

Many taxi cabs pass, but not one accepts to take me, until someone suggests he'll take me to the other side and I get in from almost two streets away.

"It is not safe, daughter, didn't you watch the news? They started hitting Palestinians."

The taxi driver was referring to the five missiles that hit Rashidiyyeh Camp, in the suburbs of Tyre, and which left six injured, among them a four month old girl.

Though he made me pay three times the fare, the taxi driver still wanted to take passengers along.

"Salim Salam Bridge?" one prospective passenger asked.

"Get off my back! Bridge?! Am I crazy enough to go under a bridge? Wait for me till the war is over; I'll take you to any bridge you want then!"

At the gates of the camps, heaps of garbage were the first thing to catch the eye. "Sukleen -- the local waste managmennt company -- is not collecting garbage anymore. Most of its workers are foreigners and they left," a Shatila resident told me.

"Not that we were included in Sukleen activities before. As you know, daughter, we get nothing from the Lebanese government services. But at the outskirts of the camps, from the four sides, there are garbage containers for the neighbouring Lebanese areas that were part of Sukleen activities. They haven't been collecting them for a four days now, and we are suffocating from the smell with every breath we take. What can we do daughter? We can do nothing ... We can only wait ..."

More
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5195.shtml

No one in their right mind would ever deny there is a bias in the US
media favoring Israel. The media makes it seem Israel’s interests and
the interests of the West are identical when in fact, other than the
racist violence directed towards people of color, they are not always
the same. Meanwhile this same media demonizes and vilifies Arabs and
Muslims the same way the US media dehumanized and denigrated Native
Americans and Africans in years past. As far as the US media is
concerned, Israel can do no wrong, no matter what they do, no matter how
repugnant and ruthless their policies and actions are.

*From The Ramparts*
Junious Ricardo Stanton
*Pro-Israeli Media Bias Is Real And Deliberate*

“Media bias does not occur in random fashion; rather it moves in the
same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor,
corporations over corporate critics, affluent whites over inner-city
poor, officialdom over protesters, the two-party monopoly over leftist
third parties, privatization and free market ‘reforms’ over public
sector development, U.S. dominance of the Third World over revolutionary
or populist social change, nation-security policy over critics of that
policy, and conservative commentators and columnists like Rush Limbaugh
and George Will over progressive or populist ones like Jim Hightower and
Ralph Nader (not to mention more radical ones). The built-in biases of
the corporate mainstream media faithfully reflect the dominant ideology,
seldom straying into territory that might cause discomfort to those who
hold political and economic power, including those who own the media or
advertise in it.” Methods of Media Manipulation by Michael Parenti from
the book *20 years of Censored News* by Carl Jensen and Project Censored
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/MediaManip_Parenti.

I went to Virginia for a family reunion last week. While relaxing in the
hotel I was channel surfing and came across one of the corporate
propaganda cable stations I think it was Fox News and they were actively
rationalizing Israel’s bombardment of Lebanese civilian neighborhoods.
Next I turned on CNN and there was Lou Dobbs (supposedly one of the good
guys) speaking with a Lebanese ambassador attempting to get the man to
denounce Hezbollah and make the Lebanese people who are the victims the
criminals. To the ambassador’s credit he was having none of it and
remained steadfast pointing to Israel’s fifty-eight year history as a
ruthless aggressor engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Shortly
thereafter I turned the television off. The latest crisis in the “Middle
East” is more of the same ol’ okey-doke where the corporate mind control
apparatus goes into over-drive to demonize Arabs and Muslims while
depicting the Ashkenazim invader/settlers as the rightful heirs to the
land who are merely defending their right to survive. Implicit in the
propaganda is the preposterous notion the Ashkenazim are God’s chosen
people and their “Promised Land”, stretches from the Nile to the
Euphrates Rivers.

No one in their right mind would ever deny there is a bias in the US
media favoring Israel. The media makes it seem Israel’s interests and
the interests of the West are identical when in fact, other than the
racist violence directed towards people of color, they are not always
the same. Meanwhile this same media demonizes and vilifies Arabs and
Muslims the same way the US media dehumanized and denigrated Native
Americans and Africans in years past. As far as the US media is
concerned, Israel can do no wrong, no matter what they do, no matter how
repugnant and ruthless their policies and actions are. The US mind
control apparatus is spinning Israel’s latest aggression which by the
way; was planned long before Hezbollah engaged, killed and captured (
they did not kidnap) Israeli soldiers and tank crews that knowingly (and
probably deliberately) come into Lebanon territory as purely defensive!?
Meanwhile the rest of the world that has not been subjected to the
Zionist media blackouts, suppression and propaganda like we have here,
sees the massive carnage Israel is inflicting on innocent civilians in
Lebanon and their critical civilian infrastructure and the US uncritical
support of the carnage as the same ol same ol’. Of course the US media
sycophants justify Israel’s overkill, their use of high tech jets, tanks
and heavy ordnance missiles because Hezbollah has fired “rockets” (which
are nowhere near as lethal as the advanced weaponry and heavy ordnance
Israel is using) into Israeli territory.

If it weren’t for the Internet or satellite television AmeriKKKans would
not know or see the slaughter and havoc Israel has unleashed on Beirut
and Gaza. Certainly one will neither see nor hear any reports that
depict the level of violence from a Lebanese or Palestinian perspective
in the US media . The news is almost always totally lopsided in favor of
Israel. However this bias will not alter reality, just as the corporate
media cheerleaders for the NeoCon debacle in Iraq has not altered the
reality there or in Afghanistan or Haiti, three failed examples of Bu$h
and Co.’s imperialistic regime change policies. “Not unlike Fox News and
CNN, Mr. Uygur puts forward the distortion, in fact a lie, that Hamas
and Hezbollah ‘started the hostilities,’ thus legitimizing Israel’s
criminal and murderous behavior. As usual, the corporate media, and this
includes the Young Turks and Sirius Satellite Radio, ignore the fact
both Hamas and Hezbollah are resistance movements, completely legitimate
under international law... Of course, lobbing rockets at Israeli
citizens is a violation of this principle, but ‘kidnaping’ Israeli
soldiers—who were, regardless of the lies spun by the corporate media,
on the Lebanese side of the border when they were captured—is legal, as
all sides in a conflict routinely take prisoners of war. As well, the
puny rockets of Hezbollah, based on seventy year old technology, pale in
comparison to Israel’s high-tech munitions, provided by the American tax
payer, a chump as usual. http://kurtnimmo.com

If you want to really know what’s going on in the world, turn off the
mainstream media, put down the New York Times, the Washington Post or
their clones and search the news stands and the Internet for reliable
sources of information. You can also listen to short wave radio,
Internet radio or glean your news from media not as biased or distorted
as the lap dogs for the NeoCon war/ethnic cleansing agenda. Make no
mistake the bias is real and deliberate. The good news is we don’t have
to go for the okey-doke.

Great link:
http://www.washington-report.org/archives/July_2006/0607016.html

How sickening

U.S. Arms Sales to Israel End Up In China, Iraq
by Jonathan Reingold


Bill Clinton spoke at Hunter College in New York on Tuesday, challenging President Bush to send American troops as part of an international peacekeeping force to the Middle East. What many Americans don’t know is that U.S. forces might as well be there already.

From 1990 to 2000 U.S. military aid to Israel totaled over $18 billion. No other nation in the world has such a close relationship with the U.S. military and arms industry.

The UN, Amnesty International and other groups have raised questions about the extent the to which U.S. military aid is abetting human rights abuses by Israeli forces operating in the West Bank. These debates will no doubt continue for some time. In the mean time, however, there is another aspect of the American-Israeli relationship that may have an even greater impact on U.S. and Israeli security in the long run: the ongoing transfer of American arms technology from Israel to potential U.S. (and Israeli) adversaries around the globe.

From the most sophisticated warplanes to tank engines, artillery systems and armored vehicles, the United States is Israel's one-stop shopping center. Last year alone the U.S. sold one hundred top-of-the-line F-16s to Israel for a total of over $3 billion. That same year Israel purchased 9 of the newest Apache helicopter version equipped with the Longbow Radar system. The helicopter-buying spree didn't end with the Apaches. Israel bought fifteen Cobra attack helicopters last year along with twenty-four Black Hawk transport helicopters.

Besides selling aircraft, the United States is also Israel's preferred vendor for missiles. Although Israel has designed its own version of the U.S. air-to-air AIM9 sidewinder missile, the Python 3, it still relies on the U.S. for its ground attack technology. Two years ago Lockheed Martin sold Israel approximately 80 AGM-142D Popeye air-to-surface missiles. Israel also buys the AGM65 Maverick air-to-surface missile produced by Hughes and Raytheon.

In addition, the U.S. sells Israel the engines for its "indigenous" Merkava main battle tank. In 1999 Israel purchased 400 power packs for their Merkava fleet. The Merkava was developed by Israel so that it wouldn't have to rely on "fickle" countries like Britain, France or Russia when it was in the midst of a conflict.

Transactions between the U.S. and Israel are not necessarily worrisome by themselves; after all, as Israel has proved, there are a host of countries willing to sell the weapons it needs. Currently, Germany is Israel's source for submarines, and if Israel really needed fighters, Russia is always looking to make a buck and always seems to have a surfeit of aircraft and other excess defense articles.

The real danger comes in Israel's habit of reverse engineering U.S. technology and selling to nations hostile to U.S. interests. Israel's client list includes Cambodia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the South Lebanon Army, India, China, Burma and Zambia. The U.S. has most recently warmed up to India and is now in fact competing with Israel for arms sales there, but the other Israeli customers remain dubious at best.

Perhaps the most troubling of all is the Israeli/Chinese arms relationship. Israel is China's second largest supplier of arms. Coincidentally, the newest addition to the Chinese air force, the F-10 multi-role fighter, is an almost identical version of the Lavi (Lion). The Lavi was a joint Israeli-American design based upon the F-16 for manufacture in Israel, but financed mostly with American aid. Plagued by cost overruns, it was canceled in 1987, but not before the U.S. spent $1.5 billion on the project.

Last April, when the Navy EP-3E surveillance plane was forced to land in China after a Chinese F-8 fighter flew into its propeller, photos show Israeli built Python 3 missiles under the fighter's wings.

If Israeli weapons sales to China induce misgivings, including the most recent U.S. blocked sale of Israel's Phalcon airborne radar, the beneficiaries of Chinese arms transfers of Israeli-American technology are even more disturbing. In 1996, as disclosed in the UN Register of Conventional Arms, China sold over 100 missiles and launchers to Iran, along with a handful of combat aircraft and warships. Even worse, in 1997 the New York Daily News reported that Iraq had deployed Israeli-developed, Chinese PL-8 missiles in the no-fly zones, endangering American pilots.

Americans deserve to know where their money is being spent, and how money allocated for friends and technology shared with friends can all too easily end up in the wrong hands, threatening all parties involved. At a minimum, discussions on a new security framework for the Middle East should include plans to monitor and restrict Israeli transfers of U.S.-origin military equipment to potential adversaries. Otherwise, this deadly technology could come back to haunt U.S. and Israeli forces in future conflicts.

Jonathan Reingold is a research associate for the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute and a military analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

###

This article makes it clear that Zionism is a form of supremism and bigotry, steeped in religion that allows Israel to rationalize a continued plague ov violence and terror against anyone who stands in its way.

EIRUT -- Two UN peacekeepers were wounded Saturday when an Israeli airstrike hit near their border post in southern Lebanon, a spokesman said.

The two soldiers from the Indian battalion of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon were "moderately wounded as a result of the impact of an aerial bomb that hit in the vicinity" of their position in the borded village of Adaisseh, UNIFIL spokesman Milos Strugar said.

The two soldiers were evacuated to a UNIFIL hospital in the town of Ibl Saqi.

Strugar said the observation tower inside the position was damaged.

Four unarmed officers with the UN observer force in south Lebanon were killed in an Israeli airstrike that destroyed their bunker in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. The deaths sparked an angry spat between the world body and Israel when UN chief Kofi Annan said the hit appeared intentional, which Israel denied.

The UN has a 2,000-member peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, sent to the area since 1978. The lightly armed force has often come under fire in the last 28 years from all sides although its positions along the frontier are clearly marked with the UN initials in black and painted in white, with the blue UN flags fluttering.

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http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060728/UN_airstrike_060729/20060729?hub=World

From mass targeting of mobile phones with voice and text messages to old-fashioned radio broadcasts warning of imminent attacks, Israel is deploying a range of old and new technologies in Lebanon as part of the psychological operations ("psyops") campaign supplementing its military attacks.


According to US and UK media outlets, Israel has reactivated a radio station to broadcast messages urging residents of southern Lebanon to evacuate the region.

Some reports have named the station as the Voice of the South.

The South Lebanon Army, a Christian militia backed by Israel, operated a radio station called Voice of the South from Kfar Killa in southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s.

The station closed down in May 2000 when Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon.

Cash for tip-offs

The Israeli newspaper Maariv on Sunday reported the appearance of a website called All 4 Lebanon which offered payment for tip-offs from Lebanese citizens "that could help Israel in the fight against Hezbollah".

More
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5217484.stm

Abu Shadi Jradi pulled bodies out of wreckage for hours - two toddler girls wearing tiny gold earrings, a small boy whose pale blue pacifier still hung from his neck. Somewhere in the middle, he slumped beneath a tree and wept.

"There are so many children, so many children," the veteran civil defence worker said Sunday, barely able to get out the words.

The dead still had signs of their last moments, when dozens of members of the Shalhoub and Hashem families had gathered together for shelter and company during another night of Israeli bombardment. Kids wore the shorts and t-shirts they slept in. One body was wrapped in a child's bed sheet covered with Raggedy Ann and Andy figures.

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http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2006/07/30/1710610-ap.html

Israel's prime minister stated that the villagers were ordered to leave. These people, who are so poor, who have nowhere to flee to, who have no means of fleeing and are simple in their beliefs that God will protect them, crossed their fingers and waited in the basement of a residential building, praying they would be spared.

These people, who were too terrified to leave because of the shelling around them interspersed with Israel's threatening leaflets to leave, had to pay the price of a very legitimate fear.

But it seems that Qana is cursed. Forever cursed to shake the world into action - just like 10 years ago. It is cursed into being the sorriest victim - the one where the world screams (or maybe whispers) "enough!"

The women and children of Qana are forever cursed to be the collateral damage that even the strongest stomach can't handle.

More
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=74370

Into the Meat Grinder
A NATO Force Would Benefit Israel, Not Lebanon

By ROBERT FISK

Beirut.

Every foreign army--including the Israelis--comes to grief in Lebanon.

So, how come George Bush and Blair, after their inevitable disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, believe that a Nato-led force is going to survive on the south Lebanese border? The Israelis would obviously enjoy watching its deployment--it will be time for the West to take the casualties--but Hizbollah is likely to view its arrival as a proxy Israeli army. It is, after all, supposed to be a "buffer" force to protect Israel--not, as the Lebanese have quickly noted, to protect Lebanon--and the last NATO army that came to this country was literally blasted out of its mission by suicide bombers.

How blithely the US and British governments have erased the narrative of the old Multinational Force--the MNF--which arrived in Beirut to escort Palestinian guerrillas out of Lebanon in August of 1982 and then, after the massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian guerrillas at the Sabra and Chatila camps by Israel's proxy Lebanese militia, returned to protect the survivors and extend the sovereignty of the Lebanese government.

Does that sound familiar? And they also came to train the Lebanese army--one of the missions being foisted on the new Bush-Blair army--and they failed. Blown up by suicide bombers at their Beirut headquarters with the loss of 241 American lives, the US Marines retreated into the ground, digging earthworks beneath Beirut airport.

And there they lived until the newly-trained Lebanese army broke apart in February 1984, at which point, President Ronald Reagan decided to "redeploy" his troops offshore. Like other famous historical redeployments. Napoleon's redeployment from Moscow, for example, or Custer's last redeployment--it represented a national disaster, a colossal blow to US prestige in the region and a warning that such Lebanese adventures always end in tears. The French left shortly afterwards. So did the Italians. A company of British troops had been the first to scuttle out.

So, how come anyone believes that the next foreign army to arrive in the Lebanese meat-grinder is going to be any more successful? True, the MNF was not backed by a UN Security Council resolution. But since when were Hizbollah deferential to the UN? One of the world's toughest guerrilla armies is not going to hand over its guns to NATO generals. But most of the force will be Muslim, we are told. This may be true, and the Turks are already unwisely agreeing to participate. But are the Lebanese going to accept the descendants of the hated Ottoman empire? Will the the Shia south of Lebanon accept Sunni Muslim soldiers?

Indeed, how come the people of southern Lebanon have not been consulted about the army which is supposed to live in their lands? Because, of course, it is not coming for them. It will come because the Israelis and the Americans want it there to help reshape the Middle East. This no doubt makes sense in Washington, where self-delusion rules diplomacy almost as much as it does in Israel. But America's dreams usually become the Middle East's nightmares.

And this time, we will watch a NATO-led army's disintegration at close quarters. South-west Afghanistan and Iraq are now so dangerous that no reporters can witness the carnage being perpetrated as a result of our hopeless projects. But, in Lebanon, it's going to be live-time coverage of a disaster that can only be avoided by the one diplomatic step Messrs Bush and Blair refuse to take: by talking to Damascus.

So when this latest foreign army arrives, count the days, or hours, to the first attack upon it. Then we'll hear all over again that we are fighting evil, that "they"--Hizbollah or Palestinian guerrillas, or anyone else planning to destroy "our" army--hate our values; and then, of course, we'll be told that this is all part of the "War on Terror"--the nonsense which Israel has been peddling. And then perhaps we'll remember what George Bush senior said after Hizbollah's allies suicide-bombed the Marines in 1982, that American policy would not be swayed by a bunch of "insidious terrorist cowards".

And we all know what happened then. Or have we forgotten?

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.

Support for Hizbullah among the Lebanese is at an all time high, reports Lucy Fielder from Beirut

Gaby Elias is proud of his daily sorties to the southern city of Sidon to bring displaced people to shelters in Beirut. "I see bombs, I see planes, and I am not scared," he says. He pulls a pendant from under his T-shirt and a cross beaten into the metal catches the light. "Jesus saves me. Do you know Jesus?" In this orange house in the Beirut area of Achrafieh, the headquarters of Christian leader Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement, people clad in its trademark orange run around registering the displaced and handing out whatever supplies local donors or concerned Beirutis have brought in.

If Israel hoped one by-product of its devastation of the Shia-dominated areas of Beirut and the south would be to stoke smoldering conflicts, as many here believe, there are few signs of success, for now at least. A segment of Lebanese opinion remains quietly against Hizbullah. But in response to the killing of more than 800 Lebanese civilians, at the time of writing, and displacement of approximately one million people -- nearly a quarter of Lebanon's population -- opinion has rallied.

Despite the tendency of Hizbullah's critics to dismiss its support-base as a hard core of brainwashed Shias, the last couple of weeks have seen a clear emergence of majority support for the self- styled 'Islamic Resistance', in fractured Lebanon as well as across the Arab world. A poll by the Beirut Centre for Research and Information between 24 and 26 July found that 70 per cent of respondents, spread across Lebanon's main sects, supported Hizbullah's seizure of the soldiers on 12 July. Support for Hizbullah's current resistance against Israel rose to 87 per cent of the 800 respondents.

For some, support is moral and political as well as humanitarian. Asked whether they back the resistance, two young FPM supporters and volunteers at the nearby Tabaris state school immediately say 'to the end'. Few would have believed a year ago that a majority of Maronite Christians would support Hizbullah's capture of two Israeli soldiers and subsequent fight against Israel, even while the West with which they are traditionally allied blames the Shia group for Lebanon's ruin.

Aoun returned from 15 years' exile in Paris last year riding high on a wave of anti-Syrian sentiment and with close ties to the West. He advocated implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which stipulates disarming Hizbullah and which Israel says it is out to enforce through military might. But instead of joining the so-called 14 March movement, the former army commander, who fought a ruinous campaign against the Syrians at the end of the civil war, aligned with Hizbullah to weaken the anti-Syrians and commandeer a majority of popular opinion. The alliance has stood the test of a brutal assault on the country and forged national unity more than any other factor apart from the Israeli bombing.

More
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/806/re62.htm

Resistance renews itself

The more havoc Israel wreaks, the more resistance it will face, writes Serene Assir
---

It's only a question of time before Israel, as other colonial-settler states have before, implodes. Throughout history, there have been attempts by foreign powers or waves of settlers to expropriate land and to cleanse it of its inherent identity embodied in its indigenous population. Of this, Israel is the epitome, not the exception. For not only has Israel appropriated the land, it has also renamed it, while its colonisers have famously sought to teach their children that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land." The brazenness with which the Zionist project has redrawn geopolitical maps according to its own strategic interest -- while simultaneously abusing international goodwill and distorting truth in portraying Israel to Western public opinion as the perpetual victim -- is amazing.

But much as we would like the world to be different, politics is still decided by might and not right. Few states, however enlightened their populace may be, willingly give credence to the weak. To medium or smaller states on the whole, the powerful, industrially advanced and wealthy nations -- see, for instance, the unrivalled United Nations Security Council permanent members -- are better allies than the weak. Even fewer nations, especially in our globalised world, will pledge support to those unable or, worse, unwilling to invest in capital ventures, massive arms sales or multi-billion dollar deals.

Only if, through endurance, the weak overcome the strong do the heroes and villains of school textbooks reverse roles. What the textbooks tend to miss out, however, is the overall shifting of political parameters against the interests of settlers and a given colonial idea that takes place in the meantime.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/806/re63.htm

People say no
by Al-Ahram Weekly

Public opinion in Lebanon overwhelmingly rejects US-Israeli plans for cleansing Lebanon of Hizbullah, writes Amal Saad-Ghorayeb*
---

The latest Israeli massacre at Qana of 60 civilians, over half of whom were children, will only reinforce the shift in Lebanese public sentiment towards Hizbullah, as revealed in the first poll conducted since fighting began 12 July. The Beirut Centre for Research and Information (BCRI), along with myself, conducted a survey to gauge the Lebanese people's views of the main actors and events in the ongoing conflict. The survey's findings suggest that the Bush administration has to seriously rethink its pitiful attempt to frame the US's unbridled support for the Israeli onslaught against Lebanon as part of both its democracy and "war on terror" agendas, as exemplified by Bush's recent contention that, "Hizbullah ... are willing to kill and to use violence to stop the spread of peace and democracy," and his framing of the conflict as "part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East". Such crude casuistry falls far out of step with Arab mainstream opinion, as revealed in poll statistics, which shows that Hizbullah's resistance has unprecedented popular support in Lebanon while the US has lost all credibility as a peacemaker amongst the Lebanese.

Of the 800 respondents polled throughout Lebanon, including the displaced, 87 per cent claimed they supported Hizbullah's "resistance to Israeli aggression", with 80 per cent of all Christians and Druze, 89 per cent of all Sunnis and 96 per cent of all Shias declaring their support. These findings are all the more significant when compared to the results of a similar survey conducted just five months ago, which showed that only 58 per cent of all Lebanese believed Hizbullah had the right to remain armed, and hence, continue its resistance activity. In effect, Israel's aggression against Lebanon has had the unintended consequence of increasing nationwide support for the resistance, which it would not have otherwise enjoyed. Thanks to the high death toll, with close to one quarter on the population displaced, and the colossal material destruction of the economy wreaked by Israel's war machine, Hizbullah's "logic of resistance" and deterrence has been both vindicated and demonstrated. It has stepped in to fill the huge political and military vacuum left by the state, the resistance's ongoing counter-attacks paralysing Israel on the ground. The Lebanese reject the self- designated role that US and Israeli officials have taken on as spokespersons for the Lebanese, along with their purported favour of ridding the Lebanese, once and for all, of Hizbullah.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/806/op33.htm

Winner takes all
by Al-Ahram Weekly

Any ceasefire package that does not get the consent of Hizbullah is doomed, writes Omayma Abdel-Latif
--

It took another massacre for the US to force the Israelis to halt their aggression and declare a 48-hour suspension of air raids. But it also took a new massacre for both Hizbullah and the Lebanese government to limit differences on the crisis and speak with one voice. The Qana crime has no doubt hardened the stand of embattled Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, forcing him to adopt Hizbullah's line. A few hours after the disclosure of the massacre, Siniora insisted that Lebanon was not going to negotiate before a ceasefire was declared.

The scene of Nabih Berri, parliament speaker, sitting next to Siniora in a press conference hours after the massacre was telling of a government and an opposition united not just in grief but also in their political demands -- at least for now. Siniora even praised Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah "for his sacrifices", hinting that retaliation was justified. Whether or not this signals a shift in policy remains to be seen.

As diplomatic efforts gain momentum with the convening of the UN Security Council to discuss conditions for the deployment of international forces in the south, many are hopeful that the internal Lebanese front will remain united in the face of growing pressure from the US and Israel to make painful concessions that could come at the expense of the country's unity.

During the week, shuttle diplomacy between Beirut and New York revealed a number of draft proposals for a ceasefire package that aims to stand in a middle ground between Lebanon and Israel. The issue topped the agenda of talks held between the French foreign minister and his Iranian counterpart at the Iranian embassy in Beirut on Monday. Although little came out of the meeting, press reports viewed it as part of larger efforts to engage Iran and Syria in a final settlement.

But it was the shift of tone adopted by the Lebanese premiere following Qana massacre that left many puzzled.

A few days before the massacre, relations between Hizbullah and the Lebanese premiere were strained after Siniora revealed a seven- point plan to last week's Rome conference on ending hostilities. Among the proposals, Siniora called for an immediate ceasefire to be followed by a comprehensive and final settlement for all remaining issues between Lebanon and Israel. This includes the Shebaa Farms, Israel submitting a map of landmines it planted during its occupation of South Lebanon, as well as the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon. The most controversial point, and which elicited Hizbullah's wrath, came when Siniora made a vague promise to disarm Hizbullah.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/806/re73.htm

Third generation Arab revolutionaries
by Al-Ahram Weekly
Though different in method, the Arab world's contemporary rebels share common ground with legends of the past, writes Abdel-Moneim Said*
--

Hassan Nasrallah impressed me greatly the one and only time I met him, in February 2000. He represented a new brand of Arab revolutionary, a definite change from the long and tedious run of pan-Arabists and Nasserists. At the time, I was a member of an Al-Ahram journalists' delegation on a tour of various Middle Eastern countries. We had let it be known that during our Lebanese stop we would like to meet the Hizbullah leader and, according to Talal Suleiman, editor-in-chief of As-Safir, the desire was mutual. That interview, which appeared in the press soon afterwards, has remained permanently etched in my memory and has mingled with and helped shape my thoughts and impressions from reading and watching the many interviews and television appearances Nasrallah has had since then, especially following the eruption of the current Lebanese crisis.

In general, Arab politicians fall into one of two categories. The first is made up of those who accept the local, regional or international rules of the game and existing balances of power. They see themselves as players whose task it is to further the interests of their people and themselves in accordance with established norms. In general, they are averse to the use of arms and have little faith in the masses. They also hate surprises. The other category consists of revolutionary leaders. Whether sincere in their beliefs or not, they reject the rules of the game and the given balances of power and do their utmost to sabotage these and turn them upside-down. They place great faith in military action and the role of the masses in shaping history, and they believe that the shocks and jolts of revolution provide the jump-starts that drive history forward by qualitative leaps and bounds.

The Arab world has known three generations of revolutionary leaders over the past century. During the early 20th century, there appeared the first luminaries, such as Saad Zaghloul, Alal Al-Fasi, Habib Bourguiba, Shukry Al-Kuwatli, Abdel-Aziz Al-Saud. These are the leaders who steered the great popular uprisings that propelled their countries to independence and sovereign statehood, after having overridden those politicians who not only bowed to the rules of the game but who saw revolution as an aberration from the natural course of evolution through which a nation had to pass in order to progress. To those familiar with Egyptian history the contrast between Saad Zaghloul and Mustafa Al-Nahhas, on the one hand, and Adli Yakin and Ismail Sidqi epitomises the division between the two types of leaderships. Still, the dividing line did not form an impenetrable barrier. That one person could cite the rallying cry, "Saad's revolutionary leadership under occupation is preferable to Yakin's kowtowing under independence," and another could cite this as evidence that the people were not yet mature enough for independence suggested a certain fuzziness in the dividing line. In all events, with the emergence of the state and its governing institutions, the revolutionary and the statesman could respectfully acknowledge the importance of the role played by each,

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/806/op130.htm

This speaks volumes

(re: "Israel is a white colonial settler state...")
"Wait a minute- Jews and Arabs are both Semites"

No, many Jews cling to a RACIST CONCEIT that all Jews are of middle eastern ancestry, but it's very obvious that many European Jews are not. European Jews seem to like to think of themselves as "semites" because then their xenophobia toward non-Jewish Europeans can have an imaginary racist dimension to it, which seems to be of tremendous importance to them. Oh but they're not obsessive virulent racists, no-no, just cancel that thought you anti-Semite Hitler you. You can say that about honkies or nips, but don't say it about Jews. no-no that's RACIST

I have known blond-haired grey-eyed very Germanic-looking Jews. There are huge numbers of Orthodox Russian Jews who are red-haired, blue-eyed, and have milky-white skin. They could pass for nordic. Their European-ness is revealed not just by their lack of pigment and other semitic features, but also by their arrogant colonial asshole jerk-off attitudes. This is a very European peculiarity. Western caucasians are far and away more greedy and criminal when it comes to stealing other peoples' lands than any other racial group on earth, and European Jews are likewise far and away the most arrogant in this respect relative to Jewish populations that stayed in the Middle East or scattered eastward and southward

It was European Jews, exclusively, who pushed the zionist program to colonize the ME from the 1880s on. Look into it. Look at a picture of most any leader of world zionism, especially the psychopathic variant launched by Jabotinsky, and you'll see an obviously European face.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (Born in Odessa, Ukraine; very slavic looking)
http://www.saveisrael.com/images/jabo5.jpg

Yitzhak "Shamir" (leading pre-state Israeli terrorist; born Icchak Jaziernicki in Belarus; faked his name up to sound Sephardic, as have many Ashkenazi Israelis):
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/9/93/225px-Yitzhak_Shamir.jpg

Menachem Wolfovich Begin (leading pre-state Israeli terrorist; born in Brest, Belarus; very Russian (slavonic) face)
http://www.axisglobe.com/Image/2006/03/29/begin_small.JPG

David "Ben-Gurion" (born David Grün in Płońsk, Poland; very Germanic-looking; also faked up a Sephardic-sounding name for himself)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/Paula_and_David_Ben_Gurion_1915.jpg

Ariel "Sharon" (born Ariel Scheinermann to Russian immigrant parents; also faked up a Sephardic name)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Ariel_Sharon.jpg
Nothing semite-looking about this guy!

and so it goes

Ashkenazi Jews are Europeans, not "semites." When they deny this, they're being self-deluded liars

Without the Europeanoid colonial arragance from this particular quarter, modern zionism never would have taken off. They're just another pack of white-ass European land thieves. As with all European land-stealing assholes, their entire rationale for stealing Israel was and is a pack of racist lies

I have known blond-haired grey-eyed very Germanic-looking Jews. There are huge numbers of Orthodox Russian Jews who are red-haired, blue-eyed, and have milky-white skin. They could pass for nordic. Their European-ness is revealed not just by their lack of pigment and other semitic features, but also by their arrogant colonial asshole jerk-off attitudes.


Tw- are you judging people by the color of their skin? How very very 1950's of you.

Do you hhave anything to say about the brown skinned Yemite Jewsin Israel? How about the black skinned Ethiopian Jews in Israel? The majority of Jews in Israel are not from European heritage.

Justice" Comes to Qana
Patrick McGreevy writing from Beirut, Live from Lebanon, 4 August 2006

"Qana" by Mazen Kerbaj. View more of his work.
The attacks of 11 September 2001 gave many ordinary Americans a palpable experience of injustice. Addressing both houses of Congress nine days later, President Bush proclaimed: "Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." By nearly conflating justice and revenge, the President - and, alas, the vast majority of Americans who applauded him - lost an opportunity to see with new clarity, justice itself cast into relief by the very experience of injustice. Instead, the United States launched an endless war, the first stage of which was to be called Operation Infinite Justice.

This week "justice" came to the Lebanese Village of Qana. The United States had blocked every attempt to end the violence, and, before the attack, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon had announced that "everyone who is still in south Lebanon is linked to Hizbullah." The Anglo-American-Israeli juggernaut had brought "justice" to "our enemies."

Reacting to the horrors of World War II, the bold-thinking Max Horkheimer suggested that we finally make social progress from the experience of the opposite of justice. We learn about the value of the individual life, for instance, from the experience of a world that treads mercilessly on human lives and bodies, treating them as so much soulless stuff. Though a European Jew, Horkheimer was a dialectical materialist, and therefore no kind of theist. Yet he believed that the notion that each human is equally and, in a sense, infinitely valuable, was a religious innovation. "The very concept of the soul as the inner light, the dwelling place of God," he wrote, "came into being only with Christianity, and all antiquity has an element of emptiness and aloofness by contrast." To our modern sensibilities, he observed, "some of the Gospel teachings and stories about the simple fishermen and carpenters of Galilee seem to make the Greek masterpieces mute and soulless - lacking that very 'inner light' - and the leading figures of antiquity roughhewn and barbaric." For Horkheimer, this insight came from the painful experience of its negation, and any hope of justice lay, paradoxically, in the deep experience of injustice. Hence, "the anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born," and we could expect insight from those "who have gone through the infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression."

Hassan Nasrallah speaks to the Arab world and the Muslim World about their common experience of injustice. Do not doubt its deep resonance, its truth. Qana is just the latest, and one of the clearest, and most globally visible, examples. Can those who launched the endless war finally recognize the infinitely valuable "inner light" so callously snuffed out of each of those dusty child corpses? Will Nasrallah, and those now fixated on his voice, see justice, against the background of injustice, any more clearly than did Bush and those fixated on his voice? Can we expect such magnanimity, given the asymmetry of the suffering?

In human affairs, cycles of violence and revenge, cascades of injustice, are not inevitable. Our sole hope is that we have not only an inner light but an ability to choose and act, to consider not only means, but ends, with what Horkheimer called reason - that having lived through hell, we might see not only the injustice done to us, but the horror of injustice no matter who is the victim. A simple thing. We know the alternative.

You Ashkenazi "zionists" (i.e. delusional "Jewish race" bigots) are the ones with the idiot race obsession. It's blatantly obvious. You wanna go claiming you're "semites," I'll bust your bubble every time

What part of this flew over your head?:
"Ashkenazi Jews are Europeans, not "semites." When they deny this, they're being self-deluded liars"

http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2006/08/117131.shtml

FYI - Review of Derick jensen's So. Cal talk

Jensen is a beacon of sanity in a Western world gone totally mad

Even as you deny the race obsession, you end up revealing it by referring to this screed laced with genetic and racial content:

the existence of "secular" Jews (a ridiculous construct)

"One is a Jew through ... being born of a Jewish mother..." (yup, genetic Judaism right here folks. what is this 'niplet snipping' nonsense?)

"a contractual issue (between a deity ... and a people ... who serve as the paradigm of all peoples)" (Yup, the Jews are the definitive 'people' whom G-d particularly recognizes as 'people,' so that everybody else isn't quite 'people.' Yes we already knew you think this way)

"...males of THE TRIBE..."

"A Jew is not a believer in a particular theology (an absurd claim) ... but a theologically defined people." (amazing and ludicrous semantic acrobatics here)

"... you inherit [Jewishness]..."

All this talk of "a PEOPLE" is just an encoded way of referring to race, since it obviously has genetic underpinnings, as this guy more or less states directly. That you can read this yourself and yet not see it is just another display of how self-deluded you are

I read a sci fi book years ago, "A Canticle for Leibowitz" about a post apocolyptical society that had banned all forms of technology as a way of averting another catastrophe. Part of the ban, however, included the written word, in all its forms. (the title came from a group of cloistered monks who were busy at work, illuminating and preserving every bit of written speech they could find, including old shopping lists). All the old sci fi seems to be coming to pass in our lifetime

I've been reading some of Richard Heinbergs material- he's a local writer. Same basic premise- our economy is based on non-sustainable growth, because of the limit of the supply of petroleum.

What I fear wil happen in the short term is an exacerbation of existing class differences- as the controlling classes hoard the remaining resources. I can see it today- rising temperatures around the country affect only the poor- the rich are in their air conditioned homes, their air conditioned cars and their air conditioned offices. I also wonder about the proliferation of bottled water for sale in the grocery stores- i wonder at one point, is our government going to decide that bottled water is so plentiful that they no longer have the obligation to supply it to us through our taps?

Even as you deny the race obsession, you end up revealing it by referring to this screed laced with genetic and racial content:

"One is a Jew through ... being born of a Jewish mother..." (yup, genetic Judaism right here folks. what is this 'niplet snipping' nonsense?)

You forget the conversion part- anyone can convert. No genetics involved.
And, uh, he's a non-native speaker of English. He is talking about circumcison.

"...males of THE TRIBE..."

Yeah- he's pretty sexist.

"A Jew is not a believer in a particular theology (an absurd claim) ... but a theologically defined people." (amazing and ludicrous semantic acrobatics here)

Why? He's right.

since it obviously has genetic underpinnings, as this guy more or less states directly. .....

Or conversion. Or conversion. Or conversion. What part of that did you miss? ANYONE can become Jewish. Anyone, any color, any former religion. No genetics involved.

Tee Wdumbya:
"I have known blond-haired grey-eyed very Germanic-looking Jews. There are huge numbers of Orthodox Russian Jews who are red-haired, blue-eyed, and have milky-white skin. They could pass for nordic. Their Europeaness is revealed not just by their lack of pigment and other semitic features, "

There's no such unique thing as distinctly Semitic bodily features. O Tee Wdumbya. Remember the Samaritans that I bring up every now and then? Well, until 1924 they maintained genetic purity -- never intermarrying with members of other ethnicities or religions since they stopped marrying Jews before 200 BC. Guess what? In the early 20th century some members among them were reported by visiting Western scholars to be tall, red headed and blue or green eyed. I'd have shown you the webpage but it's down now.

Tee Wdumbya:
"Western caucasians are far and away more greedy and criminal when it comes to stealing other peoples' lands than any other racial group on earth,"

This is hogwash and just reinforces how flamboyantly stupid you are! The Japanese for instance were very greedy of Chinese territory and Korea last century. And then whaddabout those intra Korean and Viet Nam wars; how 'bout the Arab Caucasions of Morocco occupying the territory rightly claimed by the Polisario, the Arab Sudanese territorial greed against the Animists and Christians of the south, the past occupation by Ehiopia of Erithrean land, etc etc.


Tee Wdumbya:
"and European Jews are likewise far and away the most arrogant in this respect relative to Jewish populations that stayed in the Middle East or scattered eastward and southward "

But you recently affirmed that Separdim originate from the Iberian peninsula and therefore are essentially European Jews too. But you didn't now mean that, you skulking racist rodent! Hahaha!!


Tee Wdumbya:
"It was European Jews, exclusively, who pushed the zionist program to colonize the ME"

You're dismissed as a White supremacist crypto-Nazi canard wielding arch-liar.


Tee Wdumbya:
"Vladimir Jabotinsky (Born in Odessa, Ukraine; very slavic looking)

"Yitzhak "Shamir" (leading pre-state Israeli terrorist; born Icchak Jaziernicki in Belarus; faked his name up to sound Sephardic, as have many Ashkenazi Israelis)

"Menachem Wolfovich Begin (leading pre-state Israeli terrorist; born in Brest, Belarus; very Russian (slavonic) face)

"David "Ben-Gurion" (born David Grün in Płońsk, Poland; very Germanic-looking; also faked up a Sephardic-sounding name for himself)

"Ariel "Sharon" (born Ariel Scheinermann to Russian immigrant parents; also faked up a Sephardic name)

"Nothing semite-looking about this guy! "

O White supremacist goosestepper! From the earliest times, from before 1000 BC, Semites featured a diversity of racial features apart from not including Mongoloid racial types. There was never a Semite race! Semitism WAS and IS about CULTURE and LANGUAGE!!!

What you in your boundless arch-racist idiocy term "Sephardic names" are Jewish Hebrew names!! They are derived from either the biblical or post-biblical period or are simply Hebrew!

Now remind us.. do YOU have the putative Scottish racial features?

Almost half the fatalities in the Gaza in July were civilians
Report, B'Tselem, 5 August 2006

The body of Khetam Taieh, 11, lies at the morgue of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, 24 July 2006. Khetam was killed in Israeli artillery shelling at a housing project in northern Gaza Strip. (MaanImages/Wesam Saleh)

In July, the Israeli military killed 163 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, 78 of whom (48 percent) were not taking part in the hostilities when they were killed. Thirty-six of the fatalities were minors, and 20 were women. In the West Bank, 15 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in July. The number of Palestinian fatalities in July was the highest in any month since April 2002.

Of the incidents B'Tselem investigated in Gaza over the past month, the organization has identified four cases in which Israel may have committed grave breaches of the laws of war. A total of 15 Palestinian civilians were killed in these incidents, including 7 minors, the details of which are as follows:

# Air Force missile hits group of youths, killing six
On 12 July 2006, a group of youths sought shelter from IDF bombing. Ten of the youths went and hid in a big pit. A missile fired from by an Air Force plane hit the pit, killing six of the youths, five of them minors: Mahmmuad al-'Asar, Ibrahim a-Nabahin and Ibrahim Qatush, age 15, Ahmad Abu hajaj, age 16. Salah Abu Maktomah, age 17 and Hassan 'Abeid, age 18.

# IDF fires two shells at residence and kills four members of the family
On 21 July 2006, a few members of the Hararah family went onto the roof of their house in the a-Sheja'iyeh neighborhood in Gaza City to watch tanks advancing toward the neighborhood. One of the tanks fired a shell at the house. It hit the staircase and killed Muhammad Hararah, 45, the brother of the owner of the house. Almost immediately afterwards, another shell was fired at the same spot, killing the mother of the family, Sabah, 45, and two of her sons, Muamen, 16, and 'Amer, 23.

# Air Force missile hits horse-drawn cart killing a woman and her grandchild
On 24 July 2006, two youngsters left their family's farm in the Beit Lahiya area after shells had fallen on the farm's land. They went by horse-drawn wagon and on the way picked up two of their family. A missile, fired by an Air Force plane, made a direct hit on the wagon, killing Khairieh al-'Attar, 58 and her grandchild Nadi al-'Attar, 11. Another member of the family, Shadi, 14 was injured.

IDF tank shell lands next to housing project, killing three civilians.
On 24 July 2006, an IDF fired a shell that fell next to the a-Nada Towers, a housing project located in the northern Gaza Strip. The shelling killed three civilians, one of them a minor: Saleh Naser, 14, Sadeq Naser, 33, and S'adi Na'im, 29.

The IDF did not issue a statement regarding any of these cases, nor acknowledge that these civilians had been killed. It is unclear why, in these four cases, the Israeli military fired at unarmed civilians and at residential apartments. According to B'Tselem's investigation, there were no armed Palestinians or weapons stored in any of these locations.

Even if the armed forces did not intend to strike civilians, as senior IDF and government officials state repeatedly, B'Tselem's investigations raise a grave concern that these attacks were launched without taking due caution and without verifying that the targets were not civilian structures, as required by the laws of war.

Furthermore, according to the principle of proportionality, it is forbidden to carry out an attack, even against a military object, with the knowledge that it is liable to cause injury to civilians that is excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated from the attack. Thus, even if the killing of the 15 civilians in these four incidents resulted from their proximity to armed Palestinians or to weapons, the magnitude of the "collateral" harm to civilians raises the grave concern that the attacks were disproportionate.

B'Tselem has requested the Judge Advocate General to order a Military Police investigation into the circumstances of these cases, and if the suspicions are validated, to prosecute the persons responsible.

"What I fear wil happen in the short term is an exacerbation of existing class differences- as the controlling classes hoard the remaining resources."

I wholeheartedly agree, and I foresee a global class struggle so grisly it will make all previous wars look humane. As the global environmental crisis deepens while meanwhile populations continue to mount, at some point it will come to pass that a critical mass of people, even Westerners, will be watching their children starve. This is incomparable for jolting people out of their selfish trance and turning their vengeance on the REAL enemy, i.e. monarchal supreme parasites. History has borne this out time and again

It is at this moment that these elites, with their amoral cost/benefit balance-sheet logic, will decide that current numbers of 'human capital' have tipped into being more of a liability than an asset, per their own interests. And then they'll adjust the numbers. Drastically. They'll do it by releasing the bio-engineered superplagues their science slaves are currently creating for them, probably with this exact eventuality in mind. We'll of course be told it's some spontaneous product of Momma Nature. What with all the "bird-flu" hype I feel like we're already being primed with disinfo.

As weapons of mass-extermination, biological agents are infinitely superior to nukes. Nukes produce so much collateral damage in so many ways that I can't see a scenario in which using them would be other than stupid. Biological agents on the other hand are fantastically surgical. They wipe out all the people, potentially even more thoroughly than nukes, while leaving everything else intact. All it would take to kill an entire city is a big stealth drone flying a few thousand feet above it in the middle of the night. This is so neat and elegant and clean, just the sort of diabolical crime they adore.

Since a bio-weapons apocalypse scenario is so much more favorable than a nuclear one, this liberates them to actually DO IT, and morality has no pertinence here. We're all just livestock to them, and this will be end-of-season "herd 'em to the feedlots" time

These dynastic monarchists have a superb sense of history, I'm quite sure. They know where it's REALLY been and they know exactly where it's going. They have whole armies of super-geniuses helping them map this out, and they're hardly stupid themselves. If the mile-high King Kong (average people worldwide) were to wake up and turn on them, they'd be fucked and they know it, and they see it coming. They're making plans for it.

"They'll do it by releasing the bio-engineered superplagues their science slaves are currently creating for them, probably with this exact eventuality in mind."


There are internet bloggers who claim this is already being done through "free flu shots" and the like.... Much easier to control than arial spraying. And you'd be picking off the very old and very young who are just a drain on society anyway.

Damn. I'm ending up as paranoid as you.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Thousands of Sadrists Rally for Hizbullah in Baghdad
Guerrilla Uprising in Mosul


Some 100,000 Sadrists rallied against Israel's war on Lebanon [Ar.] in Sadr City on Friday, their ranks swelled by an influx of demonstrators from Maysan and Wasit provinces. Al-Zaman notes that this demonstration comes two days after a similar big event for the same purpose held by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. They also noticed a significant phalanx of women demonstrators, which Western reporters seem to have missed. The estimate of 100,000 comes from the LA Times, and strikes me as plausible. The US military attempted to play down the numbers, but frankly I don't trust them on something like this, which has ideological implications.

Al-Hayat [Ar.] says that despite the enormous size of the crowd, there were no untoward incidents. (The Mahdi Army checked the demonstrators carefully as they came into Sadr City, and the Ministry of the Interior, which gave a permit for the rally, also provided security). On leaving, however, some demonstrators were fired upon as they passed through the volatile Dura district of the capital. Two days ago during the SCIRI rally, al-Hayat says, Sunni guerrillas killed 3 of them. US troops intervened toward the end and were responsible for the deaths of two demonstrators.

This time, US troops set up a security perimeter around Sadr City, using tanks and armored vehicles. Demonstrators raised both Lebanese and Iraqi flags and chanted against Israel and in favor of Hizbullah. Some wore white funeral clothing, announcing their willingness to risk martyrdom. They burned US and Israeli flags.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that [Ar.] they chanted, "Death to America, Death to Israel!" They carried large posters with images on them of Sheikh Hasan Nasrullah, the leader of the Hizbullah, and Muqtada al-Sadr. Young demonstrators chanted, "We are the troops that Nasrullah is calling for, and we shall burn Haifa!"

Shaikh Hazim al-Ariji, of the Sadr movement, delivered a sermon in which he blamed Israel and in which he announced his solidarity with Hizbullah, which he compared to the Iraqi Mahdi Army. Hizbullah had thrown a fright into the Israelis because they clearly are not afraid of death, he said.

Some 33 persons died or were announced dead in Iraq's civil war violence. A tribal chieftain in Basra was assassinated.

In Mosul, from which the US withdrew most of the 3500 troops that it just sent to Baghdad, local guerrillas staged a virtual uprising against local Iraqi police and soldiers. The US military appears to be playing musical chairs, attempting to pacify Baghdad by bring troops there, but then losing control of the security situation in Mosul!

There were big demonstrations Friday in Cairo, Amman and Pakistan against the Israeli war on Lebanon.

George W. Bush had to be briefed that there are two major branches of Islam before the Iraq War. He did not know what Shiism was. He said, "I thought the Iraqis were Muslims."

posted by Juan @ 8/05/2006 06:27:00 AM

So if your purported "semite" identity doesn't correspond to race, why do you keep using 'anti-Semite' and 'racist' interchangeably?

"... a hysterical bipedal RACIST joke ... a White supremacist crypto-NAZI..."

There are just a few too many of these Freudian gaffes out there for your talk to jibe with your walk. Sah-reeee. You better drive around Mos Eisely and inflict yourself on a different checkpoint

"The Japanese for instance were very greedy of Chinese territory and Korea last century."

The Japanese were content to be completely insular from ancient times until the Western "opening" of their society. They went psycho for about 50 years beginning in the 1890s and now they've settled right back down again.

The Chinese have one of the oldest advanced cultures on earth, and yet have never expanded beyond Eastern Asia. They are content with this sphere. Of all far-eastern cultures, only the Mongols became voracious land-grabbers. Far easterners don't begin to compare to Europeans for being insatiable land-thieves

"whaddabout those intra Korean and Viet Nam wars"

Oh yah, you mean their wars to throw Western pasty-faced colonizing fucks out of their ancestral territories? Oh yah, good point Imm-Bow-Sile! How "greedy" of them!

"how 'bout the Arab Caucasions of Morocco occupying the territory rightly claimed by the Polisario"

The Islamic Arabs had their period of great expansion during the "Middle Ages," in which they spread Westward across North Africa, into part of Spain, and Eastward to the Western frontier of Persia, a wealthy military power able to halt their progress. Their faith, however, proceeded eastward as far as China and the Philippines. From then on, Islamic societies stopped spreading and settled down to mind their own business. It's Western imperialism that's whipped up their militarism in modern times, just like it has everywhere else it's clomped its bloody paws.

"the Arab Sudanese territorial greed against the Animists and Christians of the south, the past occupation by Ehiopia of Erithrean land, etc etc."

None of this remotely compares to the European gobbling up of the ENTIRE PLANET. This is the point you were responding to in the first place, Imm-Bow-Sile, remember?

"Western caucasians are far and away more greedy and criminal when it comes to stealing other peoples' lands than any other racial group on earth"

Hey Tia:

"Or conversion"

Yeah, that's right, OR conversion. This doesn't refute what I said. There is ALSO a racial ideology lurking here, and he plainly said as much

"why of all religions and ethnicities on Earth you continuously snivel only about the Joooos!"

Get your sayan PR-mole closet-fascist baby-butchering mind-cop asshole off this **US LEFTIST** site, leave my country the fuck alone (that goes double for your fellow traitors who live here) and you will never hear from me again

"What's with this "Semite identity" brainfart?"

Take this up with your traitor headcase friends

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/07/169449_comment.php#170116

http://la.indymedia.org/news/hidden.php?id=169449#172850

Yup, here he goes with the Jedi double-entendre again

"you arch-bigot are **antisemitically racist**"

Yeah, just cement that last brick in place, Imm-Bow-Sile. I'm wearing my mini-skirt and cheering you on with pom-poms!

Yes, It is a Crusade!
Tony Blair's Mad Speech About Iraq

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Dear Prime Minister,

Among the letters I receive about Iraq a few are clearly written by demented people. Their paranoid style is easily recognizable. They use capital letters to distinguish the forces of darkness and the forces of light in Iraq. They have a simple-minded, conspiratorial explanation for the war. They are ignorant of well-substantiated facts about Iraq and the Middle East. They are openly contemptuous of critics who do not share their crystal-clear vision of events.

I was astonished, reading your speech on the Middle East delivered to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on August 1, to find all the traits of those insane letter writers. There is even the same mad person's obsessive capitalization. In the complex crises in the Middle East and beyond you say you see primarily 'a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam.' Your vision is an apocalyptic one. You see 'an elemental struggle about values' and it turns out that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq 'were not just about changing regimes but changing value systems. The banner was not actually "regime change" it was "values change."'

Some of this is syrupy guff much along the lines that Private Eye's fictional Tony Blair, the Vicar of St Albans, often utters. But if taken seriously it means that the US and Britain intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq to interfere with the Muslim religion and to support those Muslims who agree with Tony Blair's interpretation of their faith. In other words the claim by the Islamic fighters in Iraq is that their religion is under attack by new crusaders from the west is, by your admission, entirely correct. A further deeply disturbing aspect of your speech is its ignorance. Sometimes this is even admitted. In years before 9/11 you say "We had barely heard of the Taliban." But the Taliban, backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, had been taking control of Afghanistan for years. Surely you had more than barely heard of them.

As with so many paranoid single cause-explanations of the world your speech shows blindness to other, often fundamental, developments. In Iraq this means not only that the US and British governments have no idea what is going on but, because they can never admit error, they are unable to devise new policies to replace those that have failed. This has been the pattern of the last three years since the fall of Saddam Hussein. For instance you say that it is Muslim religious extremism alone which causes violence in the region and their actions have nothing to do with the US occupation. But all the evidence is to the contrary. A poll by the Ministry of Defence last year showed that 82 per cent of Iraqis want US and British forces to withdraw from the country.

I have been visiting Iraq since 1978 and have been spending half my time in the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was evident from the summer of 2003 that the five million string Sunni community supported armed resistance. Whenever I went to where an American soldier had been killed or wounded local people were dancing with joy. It was this which gave strength to extreme Islamic groups. They had a friendly environment in which to operate. Al Qaeda had no base in Iraq before 2003; its few adherents' only base was in the Kurdish mountains beyond the control of Baghdad. It was entirely the doing of George Bush and yourself that they have now established themselves in Iraq and grow stronger by the day. Instead you suggest that the real problem is that 'Syria allowed Al-Qaeda operatives to cross the border.'

Reactionary Islam does not fear elections because it wins them. The victors in the last election in Iraq in December 2005 were the Shia and Sunni religious parties among the Arabs and the Kurdish parties. The main secular group under Iyad Allawi, despite strong support from the US and Britain, did poorly at the polls. Traditional Islam is growing stronger in Sunni Iraq because it has shown that it can fight the foreign invader in a way that secular nationalists, like Saddam Hussein, demonstrably failed. Among the Shia it is the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the nationalist cleric, who won 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament. The political success stories in Iraq are of those who combine Islam, nationalism and an ability to fight. The US, with Britain trotting along behind, may soon find it embroiled in a war with the 15-16 million strong Shia community in Iraq as well as with the Sunni.

Your speech is essentially a 'neo-con' view of Iraq. It is frighteningly unaware of reality on the ground. Your own departing ambassador William Patey wrote in a memo to you leaked last week that a civil war was more likely than a democracy. Some 3,000 civilians were killed in June. Gen John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, told a Senate Committee on Thursday that "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I have seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that it not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war."

In the eyes of most Iraqis the civil war started six months ago if not before. There are now two wars going on in Iraq: one is between Shia and Sunni and the second between insurgents and occupiers. Iraq is splitting apart. The country may survive as a geographical expression but not more. Twice in the last century British prime ministers claimed they had discovered the source of all evil in the Middle East. Lloyd George wanted to fight Ataturk and Turkey in 1922 and lost office immediately. Anthony Eden went to war to overthrow Nasser in 1956 with equally grim consequences for himself. Your intervention in Iraq has been even more disastrous from the British point of view.

I only hope al Qaeda, Hezbollah or Hamas do not translate your speech into Arabic since every paranoid paragraph confirms their claim that they are battling a western crusade against Islam.

Patrick Cockburn writes for the Independent of London and CounterPunch. He is the author of the Broken Boy.

You don't get to see this in the right wing mainstream media.