Stories From Occupied Palestine

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis

Monday August 02, 2010 14:26

by JMC & YOD

mccabej1 at tcd dot ie

This is a brief account of our travels to the West Bank in June 2010.

We visited the West Bank in June of this year for nine days - far too short a time to do justice to such a wonderful place and such welcoming people.

After being held at the Israeli border for over 5 hours we made our way to Jerusalem. When you dare to visit Syria you are, by default, deemed a security threat to the Israeli state. Unfortunately two of our travel party had Syrian visas in their passports. Only after lying to the authorities that we had no intention of visiting the West Bank were we allowed to continue on our way. Interestingly, just one week earlier at the same border crossing Noam Chomsky made the mistake of being honest enough to admit he intended to visit the West Bank on a lecturing tour. He was denied access. Obviously Professor Chomsky is a security threat. He might encourage Palestinian people to continue their legitimate struggle against Israeli occupation.

There is no city in the world comparable to Jerusalem with its cultural and religious mix, Muslims, Christians and Jews, mosques, synagogues and churches. As much of mankind’s history and culture as possible is concentrated in one city. If the world were to have a capital city, Jerusalem would have to be it. Breath taking as it is, you cannot help but feel intimidated and unsettled in Jerusalem by the weight of the Israeli security presence there. With Israeli soldiers and policemen at every corner of the street, always in pairs, always armed to the hilt and almost always too young, it doesn’t take long to get the message that the Israeli state is very much in charge here and Palestinians are not free. It doesn’t take very long to realise that this is a place of occupation: the Israelis are the occupiers and the Palestinians the occupied.

We arrived in Bethlehem next and it was there we saw the grey ugly separation barrier that cordons off most of the West Bank (and the Palestinian inhabitants within) from Jerusalem. It is this security wall that symbolises Israel as an Apartheid state. In April 2006, the length of the barrier approved by the Israeli government was 703km. In a 2004 the International Court of Justice found that "the construction of the wall, and its associated regime, are contrary to international law." In urban areas such as Bethlehem the barrier consists of an 8 metre high concrete wall. The wall in Bethlehem has virtually imprisoned the Palestinian occupants within, most of whom are not permitted from travelling to their capital city, Jerusalem, just 10km away. Can you imagine living in Palmerstown or Finglas or Blanchardstown and not being allowed travel to Dublin city centre, your own capital city, to work, to visit your family and friends, to socialise?

We made contact with a Palestinian guide in Bethlehem. He was a second-generation refugee. Like 750,000 other Palestinians, the Israelis had driven his parents from their homes in 1948 before he was born. He had been imprisoned at the age of 16 by the Israeli government for protesting during the First Intifada in the 1980s, when the Palestinian people rose up in resistance against the Israeli occupation. It was illegal in those days even to raise a Palestinian flag in the refugee camp. Now he makes his living as a tourist guide. He has recently been threatened by the Israeli authorities and is in danger of losing his licence as a guide for telling visitors to Bethlehem about the political situation. He brought us up to a height overlooking the town from where we could see the grey Apartheid wall surrounding the historic town with several Israeli settlements looming large outside. Israeli settlements are small to medium sized towns constructed on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. As of July 2009, approximately 304,569 Israelis live in the 121 officially recognised settlements in the West Bank and a further 192,000 Israelis live in settlements in East Jerusalem. According to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights centre, more than fifty percent of the land of the West Bank has been expropriated from Palestinian owners "mainly to establish settlements and create reserves of land for the future expansion of the settlements".

Our guide brought us to Hebron, another Palestinian town under heavy occupation by Israeli forces. What we saw in Hebron will haunt us for the rest of our lives. An Israeli settlement of about 500 people exists right in the town centre under the protection of hundreds of Israeli soldiers who impose the brutality of the occupation on the local Palestinian people. Checkpoints, curfews and security cameras restrict Palestinians' every waking moment, their work, their social life, their worship, and their freedom of movement. There are daily reports of harassment, physical attacks and property damage by Israeli soldiers and settlers on the local population. We will never forget the image of piles of rubbish built up on the barbed wire above the Palestinian market, which had been thrown down by the Israeli settlers from their settlements above. Nor will we forget the bullet holes in the walls of the Ibrahimi Mosque, where on February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler opened fire on Muslims at prayer, killing 29 people. These are images of Israeli oppression that are etched in our memory.

We arrived in Ramallah, which is one of Palestine’s cultural capitals. It is here you get a strong sense of the Palestinian identity. It is a town alive with young students. Everyone is friendly. Everybody wants to tell you their story of what life is like under siege. They are quick to identify you as somebody who is sympathetic to their cause and they welcome you as a guest and as a comrade. When you say that you are Irish they reply ‘Ah yes, then you understand what this is like. The same thing has happened to you. Occupation.’ To be fair, we could never have understood just how bad the situation is in Palestine had we not seen it with our own eyes. Nevertheless it shows how ordinary people can be from entirely different backgrounds and cultures, and yet they can understand and relate to one another through struggle.

In the town of Nablus we visited Balata refugee camp. This is one of the most densely populated spots on the planet with between 30,000 to 40,000 people living in 2 kilometres squared. It was the refugees of Balata who were the first Palestinians in the West Bank to rise up and resist the occupation at the beginning of the First Intifada in the 1980s. The spirit of resistance is strong here. We met the family of a Palestinian freedom fighter who was murdered by the notorious Israeli Defence Force (IDF). His parents and his brother took us into their living room and made us some coffee. There were pictures of him on the wall, a young man in his twenties, about the same age as us. It was then we began to fully realise the true nature of the struggle that Palestinian people are engaged in. In situations where a whole nation of people are oppressed, occupied, humiliated and terrorised, there comes a time when ordinary people begin to resist. When you hold someone down long enough and humiliate them, when you lock them in a cage and degrade them, and when you steal from them the land that is theirs, you should not find it surprising when they begin to fight you back with everything they’ve got. To Israel, the United States and vast swaths of the western media, anyone who resists in this manner is a terrorist. Of course this is not surprising coming from the same people who once deemed Nelson Mandela a terrorist. He resisted too. The Israeli occupation is illegitimate and illegal. Where there is oppression there is resistance, and the Palestinian people have a right to resist.

Jenin, in the north, was the last stop on our trip. We visited Jenin refugee Camp which houses 16,000 people in 0.5 square kilometres. It was here that a famous battle took place between the occupying IDF and Palestinian militants during the Second Intifada in April 2002. During the course of the battle the IDF used Caterpillar Bulldozers to force their way into the camp, demolishing homes and neighbourhoods in their path. By the end of the end of the battle, over 50 Palestinians were killed, about half of whom were civilians, hundreds of people were injured and 4,000 were left homeless. In the aftermath, Human Rights Watch claimed that many of the cases of civilian casualties constituted war crimes. The camp had been reconstructed when we visited it, but many hallmarks of the destruction were still clearly to be seen. We were also shown the Freedom Theatre, in the heart of Jenin Camp. It is a project set up to encourage the growth of the arts and theatre among the youth of Jenin, to empower them and give them the means to challenge the harsh social reality they find themselves in. The project is a continuation of the Stone Theatre, which was set up by a Jewish lady, Arna Mer Khamis, and destroyed by the Israeli Invasion of the camp in 2002. One thing we learned about on our travels was that resistance to the occupation comes in many diverse forms other than just the physical aspect of resistance. The Western media neglect to mention projects such as the Freedom Theatre, the Siraj Centre in Bethlehem, which we also visited, and the many projects in towns and refugee camps throughout Palestine that aim to inspire and to educate the Palestinian people, especially the youth, to acquire the skills to resist and organise against the occupation through non-violent means.

Our travels in Palestine came to an end in Jericho. The struggle for justice for Palestine and its people goes on, but they are not alone, nor are they forgotten. We will never forget the kindness and warmth of the Palestinian people who welcomed us into their homes and their land, and taught us the importance of ordinary people sticking together and resisting oppression whenever or wherever we are faced with it.

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to: Hasbara-Bot #489213CF (a.k.a 'Frank' Adam')

by Hu Bris

Fri Sep 17, 2010 03:25

"The Middle East is Moslem by conquest, Israel was legally bought out of slavery"
Hasbara-Bot #489213CF (a.k.a 'Frank' Adam')

Pant's on fire, 'Frankie'. Tsk tsk.

The map below , based on land ownership statistics compiled by the British government in Palestine [for tax purposes and therefore likely to be quite accurate], summarizes the respective holdings of the Arab and Jewish communities in 1945.

It shows that the Jewish population of Palestine legally owned less than 7% of the land at that time.

How can you establish a Jewish state in a place where such a small fraction of the land is in Jewish hands, except by taking over that large proportion of the land that belongs to non-Jews?

'Frank Adam' is a liar - this1946 map of land ownership in Palestine proves it

by David Ben Gurion

Fri Sep 17, 2010 03:11

"Perhaps we can now have a more evenly balanced discussion and consider some of the explanations for Israeli behaviour are in the quite outrageous Moslem supremacism and various Arab aggressions over the years."

ehh, just a minute there Hasbara-Bot #489213CF (a.k.a 'Frank' Adam') even the hard-core zio-racists that established the experiment in State-racism, known as 'Israel', disagree with you on that one Hasbara-Bot #489213CF (a.k.a 'Frank' Adam'/ aka 'Not so . . . ')

for example

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."
-- David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

Dear 'Frank', could you PLEASE STOP LYING, even if only for a little while?
Thanks in advance
Yours,
David Ben Gurion

balanced my ass

by V for vendetta

Tue Sep 14, 2010 22:15

"Vendetta can admit that it is NOT just Israel that has done wrong."

No problem admittting that frank. There is plenty of wrong doing in the world. Doesn't mean Israel hasn't done plenty of wrong too though. That's what THIS thread is about.

as for the possibility of a balanced discussion with hasbara about anything. I "frankly" doubt it

It's like trying to have a balanced discussion between David and Goliath after Goliath has ransacked your town, and Goliath is complaining that the media is not treating him fairly.

The fact is there is NO equality in this situation. Treating the tortured prisoner and his rich well funded oppressor equally is grossly unbalanced. It's like pitting home made fireworks against an F16 isn't it. Let's be "frank" about it

At last!

by Frank Adam - private citizen

Tue Sep 14, 2010 19:26

Vendetta can admit that it is NOT just Israel that has done wrong.

Perhaps we can now have a more evenly balanced discussion and consider some of the explanations for Israeli behaviour are in the quite outrageous Moslem supremacism and various Arab aggressions over the years.

The US might have been clumsy in its reactions to "9/11" but the Bin Liner's action was about the stupidest politcal mistake since Hitler declared war gratuitously on the USA.

frank...

Mon Sep 13, 2010 13:49

just because other people did wrong things, doesn't alter the fact that what israel are doing is wrong. It is a fallacious argument.

again, frank..

by opus diablos - the regressive hypocrite party

Sun Sep 05, 2010 12:35

..you misrepresent to suit your preconceived conclusions.

It is the two-faced abuse by hasbara -pumpers of UN machinery I decry.
Less distortion.Less contortion.
Every lie deepens the hole.Ultimately that profits no-one.
The earth is in the hands of a cabal of corporate gangsters 'by conquest'.
Israel/Palestine is but ONE of the tapestry of divisions by which they rule us all for their own deluded ends.

'.. black eye and bruised shins..'?

Nakba, Sabra, Shatilla, Cast Lead, occupation and expulsion, collective punishment..etc, etc...

By that definition the holocaust was a grazed knee.

The Middle East is Moslem by conquest, Israel was legally bought out of slavery

Sat Sep 04, 2010 19:01

If you run round in circles decrying the UN then you return to might is right which is what the Arabs did and do - between themselves as much as any. Their only real complaint is that they thought they would give the Zionists a kicking and got the black eyes and bruised shins themselves.

This dispute will not be solved by simply returning to 1967 because for twenty years the Arab parties did not use the 49 - 67 situation to create an Arab Palestine any different from Jordan or Egypt. Why ?

The Israeli withdrawals from Lebanon Gaza as all and sundry had advised would defuse he situation and permit peace did not work either as the resultant further violence aborted the plannned withdrawal from the ex- Jordanian West Bank.

If this week's Ghada Karmi allegation in the Guardian is true that Abbas went to Washington because his foreign aid subs were threatened then the penny has dropped in the white House and we might see some eventual evolutiontwards a peace .

there you go again..

Sat Aug 28, 2010 23:16

down on your knees elevating the UN even as Israel pisses from a height on repeated resolutions against its ethnic war of attrition on the Palestinian people.

Look up 'consistency' in your directory of hasbara.

Joke?

Sat Aug 28, 2010 20:43

Lieb-ensraum is love room (???) The British used to categorise Cairo for brothels and not the politcal sort either. I know from experience computer screens are notoriously diificult for spotting spelling mistakes but if OD means leb-ensraum which is living space he is still skidding. Israel is one thousandth of the Earth's population but a seventh of one thousandth of its acreage. Epithets cloud the argument and in this case they have clouded the author's brains as well.

Israel behaves as it does because Cousin Ishmael's behaviour has been consistently illegal, cynical and violently disregarding of UN two state policy for over sixty years. The 1967 events are consequences of the basic Arab gamblers' politics that caused 1948. It is not that you do not have the same rights as Israel, the problem is in those who refuse Israel the same rights as everybody else.

thanks frank

Mon Aug 23, 2010 10:41

for the telepathic psychoanalysis. I hope you feel purged. How did you get to know me so well.Projection, perhaps.

Aside from all your ad hominem logorrhoea, there is not much use putting forward an alternative proposal to someone incapable of listening or reading with anything but a preconcieved 'enemies of Israel' tunnel-vision reception for even the mildest of criticism for the my-way-or-the-high-way peacemaking of Tel Aviv.

Theology.Again we approach the dark heart of the matter. The theocratic centre of Israel's purported and much vaunted 'democracy' (so long as you are Jewish, a moveable feast which can be a religious designation, a tribal label, and a national identity; and all within the same theocratric logic of we're right cos our god is bigger than yours.
I may fly the flag of the hypocrite party, but the only thing frank about your communications is your nom de plume. Keep defending the Zionist liebensraum project,
That '..so there is your answer..' sums it up. The monocular dictation of self-certitude run rancid. If you look hard enough for malice, even where there is none, it will climb out for you from behind your own eyebrows.

Needs one to know one!

Sun Aug 22, 2010 23:48

I recognize xenophobic but also that Israel’s enemies do not use it, but are disproportionate with racist; which the friends of the late unlamented USSR shortened in the 60’s from racialist to rhyme with facist as Fascist faded as a political swearword because the action had switched from Europe to Jim Crow US and Boer S. Africa.

Devil’s Work hiding behind a snob show of school – or is it Church - Latin has certainly named himself regressive hypocrite appropriately because self-definition as separate ethno – religious apartness (apartheid is only the Afrikaans spelling) is precisely what Ireland did in opting out of the UK. Then we have hard cases in SF who are surprised and offended about the reality that there are quite a few in the world – and N. Ireland - who prefer to remain British.

There are also perfectly good theological reasons why Jews prefer to be Jews rather than take up the Trinity and the atonement sacrifice – human sacrifice - of Jesus; or the utter fatalism of Islam.

The remark about the Holocaust is spot on ignorant and illustrative. When it occurred precisely because no other nation nor state would take in the Jewish people in total, it made Zionism into the biggest –most agonised, “Told you so! “ in history. All the other nations had a state to look after them & their refugees inclusive the 12 ½ million German refugees in 1945 and the 12 million from the partition of the Raj. As Christopher Sykes summed up in his, “Crossroads to Israel,“ consider what if the gypsies had had a “Jewish Agency.” Further there is a “control” group - or rather event in Jewish history itself – the Chmielnitsky rebellion and massacres across the Ukraine and S. Poland about 1648. These too killed probably a third of the then World’s Jews and are forgotten because they were not salvaged as the Israeli state salvaged and commemorated the Holocaust. The domino psychological effects led on to the Shabtai Zvi false Messiah episode and the rise of the emotionalist Hassidic movement.

Inter alia the Armenians did not get full benefit from Soviet Armenia just because it was Soviet and note how though the Jews created a memorial day for the Holocaust before the 40’s ended the €U felt obliged fifty years after 1945 to create a public “secular” memorial day because it had become clear as Yugoslavia and the USSR collapsed that big massacres could repeat themselves – as indeed the Holocaust was a repetition, Hitler dismissing doubters with, “Who remembers the Armenians?”

If Jews get the spotlights it is because they are an easy cat to kick and the Arabs both as anti-Zionists and anti-Semites work every system to row and shout about and with Israel for reasons they are too crudely clear about. The Arab states for oil and Cold War votes have been allowed to get away with gumming up a third of UN time and process and hijack the anti-racism conference to the exclusion of all other problems so there is your answer. The tragedy is that the Arab states have enough petrodollars to have been able to rehabilitate and mop up their 1948 misjudgements in two years at any time since1950.

There is nothing neo- about land nor feudal which sees it as tied to rent in service and harvest. Our freehold ideas are entirely Roman because they invented the freehold concept. If both the Roma and other nomads as well as the stingy local authorities provided proper parking/ camping and waste disposal respect the real problems of waste disposal could be cleared.

Typically Devils Work provides no working detailed alternative to the nation state ie to the psychological commitment to make a big organisation work so presumably his delusions about his own Irish past and hatred of neighbours near and far is a personal displacement psychology.

the nation state?

Sun Aug 22, 2010 11:13

After the twentieth century I would have expected anyone would be inclined to question the nation state. As long as it is kept in perspective the nation state is a structure we can use to monitor and manage and correct the worst excesses of our behaviour. Its when we elevate it above being a tool for the management of human affairs, and deify it as the purpose of our collective existence in itself, that we tip over into the behaviours of Naziism, and other septic excrescences.

Besides, its 2010, our problems are planetary, our challenge is to manage our species survival into the next generation without repeating the fuck-ups of the past with the exponentially more destructive weapons of the present. It might be handy to bring a few other species along, also.
The nation state, without a framework of international law to, literally, earth it, will be a handicap rather than an asset. Israel's repetitive contempt for international law is reminiscent of the raison d'etat mentality of the nineteenth century and earlier. The great game-plan has to change.
It probably wont. Neither Pax Britannia, Americana, nor any other flat-earth code is sufficient for the spherical job.

Or, as William Inge put it,
'A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours'.

special is not superior

by Tim Johnston

Sat Aug 21, 2010 17:58

now you're questioning the very concept of the nation state. Or is it only in relation to Israel that you do?
And you wonder why pro-Israel types question the motives of the pro-Palestinian side?

Racist inflation?

Sat Aug 21, 2010 12:04

Perhaps you prefer xenophobic. What else is it if Israelis define themselves as an ethnic/religious 'apart' group, self- designated for special treatment as superipor to the indiginous Palestinian people(as they dispossess them in a 'neighbourly' act of generosity) except an inversion of the Nazi code of verminising all untermenschen and Jews in particular?
Funny when we hear of the holocaust the other minorities never get the same prominence as the self-chosen people. Nothing to say about the return of xenophobic Europe and the escalation of evictions and deportations of the Roma. All consequences of our neo-feudal exclusionary belief in land possession.
And the UN your football. If Israeli media were all as racist and myopic as you, Frank, anti-semitism would flourish all the faster. Your krauthammer sophistry contributes nothing to a solution, other than fanning the flames of those who would like a re-run of the final.

Tantrums and insults !!!

by Frrank Adam - private citizen

Sat Aug 21, 2010 01:28

Regardless of Ben Gurion's openly Zionist opinions, Ireland did not receive many, if any Jewish refugees when it could have saved people from certain death pre-war or given them a post war chance to repair their lives. Has not taken on many Palestinian refugees either?

Most Arab states have been and are committing war crimes since they rejected UN 181 and thereby broke their UN Charter obligations as members - and are still doing so. Stop treating Israel as a cat to kick while you and most others suck up to Arab oil. It will make no difference to the petrol price if Israel falls into the Med tomorrow - and no difference to the PA's inability to unite or run a democratic prosperous Arab state in Palestine.

Why do you inflate the word racist - a weasel for colour prejudice insofar as it survived 1939 - 45 which disgraced all "race" based politics. Since when are Arabs a "race" anyway? Arabs call themselves a "nation" both in Arabic (umma), Islam, and their Nationalist politics. Is it because of the notorious ill feelings of Irish nationalism that you cannot envisage that after a lifetime of hostilities other peoples might also be feeling justifiably suspicious and resentful regardless of "race" ?

Whatever you think of those teasing you with your Israeli obsessions - and your lives are not in the line of Arab violence - Israel is a sideshow which the Arab states use to divert from their own misdeeds and two million dead in Kuwait, Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, the Aouzou Strip, W. Sahara and Sudan's Darfur and southern Christians and animists. None of this will be solved by diversionary outrage about Israel and for the money wasted keeping "Palestine "refugees"" in "camps" these sixty years it could all have been resettled in Arab Palestine a lifetime ago like India and Europe.

Use the press indexes for 1948 - 52 to see that the Iraqi Jews who wanted to leave had registered to do so in 1950- for which they had to surrender their citizenship BUT the two (Mills 36) bombs went off in late Jan 51 and the police did not solve the incidents. The Iraqis had done more than enough to encourage their Jews to leave by levying an extraordinary contribution on them to help pay for Iraq's interference in the 1948 Palestine war - rather like Goering fining German Jews for Kristallnacht - besides the Iraqi pogrom of 1941 and the March ‘51 law depriving stateless Jews of their property.

always hear about Sabra and Shatilla...?

Thu Aug 19, 2010 13:44

Do we?
Maybe all ye Zion-loving Arab-hating racist righties still chortle about your handiwork over the nineteenth, but I seldom hear them mentioned.
Keep pumping the whataboutery, freeman.Maybe when its all out of your system you'll be free of your bias.
And the topic is the current situation and escalating brutality of Bibi's regime.That could have a bearing.

Double standards

by A Freeman

Wed Aug 18, 2010 22:52

Why is it we always hear about Sabra & Shatila and never a word about the massacre carried out at the Lebanese coastal town of Damour in 1976? On 20th January 1976 the people of Damour were subjected to a savage onslaught by the PLO and its Lebanese muslim allies which resulted in the slaughter of 500-600 Christians (only 30 of the dead were militiamen, the rest were unarmed civilians of all ages) and the desecration of the village church and cemetery. I suppose because the PLO carried it out it's perfectly OK as far as the Israel-hating lefties are concerned?

to: Hasbara-Bot #489213CF

Wed Aug 18, 2010 20:12

nobody except Israel gave the poorer Jews of the Arab World refuge.
The Jews of Iraq

Article by Naeim Giladi

An Iraqi Jew tells his story of Zionist activities that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors.

http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/zionism/impact/iraqij...s.cfm
I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. .....

About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, most because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs. .. . .

could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those Palestinians who didn't sign up for transfers were taken by force-just put in trucks and dumped in Gaza. About four thousand people were driven from al-Majdal in one way or another. The few who remained were collaborators with the Israeli authorities. . . . .

I was disillusioned at what I found in the Promised Land, disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism's cruelties. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the "Oriental" Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948. . . . . .

to: Hasbara-Bot #489213CF ↑

Wed Aug 18, 2010 19:31

Did Ireland admit 5 000 Jewish refugees - inclusive before 39 and after 45?

Yitzchak Greenbaum, a famous Zionist, proclaimed that

“one cow in Palestine was worth more than all the Jews in Poland.”

The infamous David Ben-Gurion said in 1938:

"If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany by taking them to England, and only half of the children by taking them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel."~

And anyway what does your silly off-topic question quoted above have to do with the fact that the Zionist entity called 'Israel' is almost daily committing war crimes against the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine?

Fireside general!!

Wed Aug 18, 2010 17:20

Israel is not abstract - but a necessity given that when the chips were down in the late thirties nobody was giving Europe's Jews much refuge and when the Arab World threw its tantrum over their - deserved - Palestine defeats in 1948 and since, nobody except Israel gave the poorer Jews of the Arab World refuge.

The US at least gave refuge to nearly a third of German Jews when Ireland was a 1/40th the US. Did Ireland admit 5 000 Jewish refugees - inclusive before 39 and after 45?

Before getting holy about "abstractions" it was the Vatican of the controversial Pius XII that objected to UN 181 and got its Latin American majority populations and governments in the name of RC abstractions to vote against - that is why the odd concept of an internationalised Jerusalem came in despite the majority Jewish population there by gerrymandering the boundary to include the outlying Arab villages.

Grasp that for a lot of Arabs and Europeans - pace Ernie Bevin - having Jews in Israel is a lot more convenient than having them for neighbours - in New York as EB said, which the Palestine Arabs are only too ready to prove in only too concrete a manner, but you fall for them instead of telling them to sign off, build and trade - abstractly of course - it is so nice to feel judgementally "good" instead of funding and real building and negotiation about real security and the real economy.

'..the israeli command erred...' Frank

Tue Aug 17, 2010 19:38

as Eichmann 'erred'. When will you recognise the ever-unfolding ' banality of evil'?Whatever its flags or symbols or excuses. Or the numbers of innocents butchered in the name of sacred fucking abstractions.

Most Christian Majesty as France's kings styled themselves

Tue Aug 17, 2010 19:20

or do you prefer the Spanish fidelissimus? Is it not the point of The Faith that one can sleep soundly? Does not our would be Devil sleep soundly without a qualm for the 30 000 Palestinians killed in Black September or the other 30 000 Palestinians killed by Assad Snr at Tel el Zataar? As one of my French left and atheist acquaintances once summed up a discussion, "C'est vrai La France est un pays de reference catholique." - Verily France is a country of Catholic criteria. So is Ireland or so many of your co-correspondents would be more questioning of yourselves considering what you have been fed might be wrong in part.

Whatever Israel's part in the context of Sabra & Shatila the actual perpetrators were good Christians, Arabs reverting to their Arab non- governmental culture despite Israel having tried to train them into regular military not to take the experience personally. The Israeli court of inquiry found that was expecting too much of Arab participants in an Arab civil war - as the Arab actions proved - and it was in that overconfidence that the Israeli command erred in not understanding the Arabs they were dealing with both as allies and enemies. Meanwhile as the recent Mevi Marmora tapes show there is no need to train any jihadi in knife work.

thats the beauty of hasbara, Frank

Tue Aug 17, 2010 15:33

It gives you the inside track on 'proper' and 'improper' .Must be comforting when the remote-controlled assassins are firing the drones at suspects (and any inconvenient malicious bystanders)to be reassured that ' Israel has never gone in for the cold-blooded insensitivity of the judicial execution of political rebels'.

I guess thats why everyone slept so soundly since Sabra and Shatilla.

Republican History

Tue Aug 17, 2010 15:16

The casualties of the Irish Civil War and summariness of its justice was heavier than the preceding 800 fatalities each side of the War of Independence.

Five of my Uncles fought in various Republican campaigns across Europe or Palestine as each World War wound down to sweeping up the breakages. It is an ironic pity that the rebels always find that being in government boots is not as simple as it looks in cafes or in shebeens, and end up using similar methods; though Israel has never gone in for the cold blooded insensitivity of judicial execution of political rebels. Romantic heroes are so unromantic in chokey when, prison widowed, you have to visit them better fed than yourself. Pity you can not visit or look forward to the release of the 800 or is it occasionally 8000 Iranians hanged annually by the present maniacal killjoys.

Interference in Iran or anywhere (US in UK over The Troubles, Palestine ditto) was not proper, but nationalisation without paying off the former owners in scrip was not proper either. Though if the offer was made it is singularly not shouted about by those one would expect to publicise it.

Nor would it be normal for one great power seeing its rival steal a march by indirect means let it pass without attempting to square it off. Ref this improper sort of internationalism do remember Israel was helped to win in 1948 particularly by the captured German arms Uncle Joe sent in order to do down John Bull; so what is the gripe? - that Churchill gave Michael Colllins the field guns to put Dev out to cool his heels?

Do some real "devilling" in the press files of 1947 - 77 and note how Arab perverse refusals to cut losses and make peace early has so, very, simplified, the situation in Palestine, while Egypt got back Sinai but nothing more than what it could have had in 1947.

perhaps

Tue Aug 17, 2010 14:31

You think Mubarak's a healthier regime, or would prefer the pleasures of the mess your democratic heros have made of Iraq. Keep taking the iron.

Ironic

Tue Aug 17, 2010 14:19

Before the US supported Hussein - or the anti-Communist Greeks post 1944 for that matter - it was the delight of HMG to do so. It is ironic to see an anti-colonial Irish author favouring HMG over "The Great Republic." Perhaps our Devil's Work by inference prefers the rule of the Nasserists and Ba'athists - but would he want to live in those regimes?

Ta for the eyeful tower..Sean

Tue Aug 17, 2010 14:01

but some of the lead cast on the flotilla lodged in the heads of unarmed civilians.As some of the phosphorous in Gaza tends to.

Jerusalem

by Sean Og

Tue Aug 17, 2010 13:44

Its all in the eye of the beholder

Funny I was also in Jerusalem in June and the only excitement was when someone fainted at an open air concert and there was a mild panic until
the paramedics arrived .
My travels in West Bank and other areas led me
to think there was much less security in evidence
than in years gone by . Certainly there were fewer soldiers around
even in Jerusalem and I and others wandered around the various parts
of the Old City without let or hindrance -there was a group of Muslim school
children-girls - on a tour of the Holy Sepulcher and the Western Wall when I was there .

There was also a very relaxed atmosphere on the roads along route 60 up to
Nablus from Rammallah .
Traffic seemd to flow easliy with no distinction between the
cars - whether from Israel proper or the PA controlled areas
except for a notice saying that Jewish Israeli Citizens were forbidden
to drive into Rammallah .

surely a bit presumptive , Frank...

Tue Aug 17, 2010 13:26

Unless you know the couple personally. But, you being so well informed on the region, can you tell us if that was before the CIA recruited King Hussein onto the payroll? And, while you are ranging so wide, what did you think of the coup that brought the Shah to the Peacock throne?

Croc tears

Tue Aug 17, 2010 13:11

Pity you were not so sorrowful when the Jordanians locked down the city between 1948 and 67 and made it difficult for Christians half of whom left, and broke the armistice so that Jews had no access at all to their synagogue and libraries.

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