Tuesday 8th of October 2024
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a year of murdering, assassinating, killing, erasing thousands of people....

It has been a year of erasing a people, systematically, ruthlessly and unrelentingly. A massacre here and another there. 500 killed yesterday and ‘only’ 140 today.

It has been a year of obliterating a culture, an identity and a collective memory. A year of levelling universities, libraries and museums. A year of burning archives, photographs and centuries-old manuscripts. A year of bombing mosques and churches.

It has been a year of rendering the land uninhabitable, inch by inch. An olive orchard bulldozed here and a water treatment plant bombed there.

 

A year of erasing a people    By Sawsan Madina

 

It has been a year of unspeakable horrors for the children. An American surgeon said that “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.” Other doctors wrote about the children who were deliberately shot in the head or chest ‘..on a regular or even a daily basis.’ The iconic ‘Napalm Girl’ photo is said to have prompted the end of the Vietnam war. Today, we watch hundreds of images of maimed and burnt Palestinian children but none seems to herald an end to the inferno in Gaza.

It has been a year of killing those bearing witness. A year when a ‘Press’ helmet and vest became an invitation to the bullets of Israeli snipers and a death sentence.

It has been a year of ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ and ‘Human Shields’.

It has been a year of shame for Arab governments and rage on the Arab street. Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told Antony Blinken “Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do.”

It has been a year of pleas from human rights organisations, open letters from doctors, and proceedings at the ICJ. It has been a year of student encampments and protests across the globe. A year of weekly calls for a ceasefire. And all the while, Israel continued to do what Israel has always done, bomb and destroy.

It was the year the ‘Hannibal Directive’ and the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ entered the lexicon. It was the year I googled the word ‘Amalek’.

It was a year when we learned that our expressions of anguish over the slaughter of Palestinians were a threat to social cohesion. And our speaking up against genocide was bringing an overseas ‘conflict’ here.

It was the year I bought a kaffiyeh.

It was a year when I made new Jewish friends at the pro-Palestine weekly rallies. Their courage, compassion and solidarity have sustained me and meeting them every week has been a bright spot in my calendar.

It was a year of two vastly different accounts of one reality. A year of Jonathan Cook, Aaron Maté, Norman Finkelstein, Chris Hedges, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Patrick Lawrence et al. on the one hand and the complicit media on the other.

It was a year when I was dumbfounded at the ease with which the occupier was portrayed as the victim and the besieged as the perpetrators. A sleight of hand by a top magician.

It was the year that ‘impunity’ danced and sang on the rooftops.

It was the year when calls for a ceasefire were labelled antisemitic. And calls for equal rights for Palestinians were labelled hate speech.

It was a year when I sometimes felt sorry for the spokespersons of the White House, trying to field logical questions from a few outspoken journalists. How often can one keep saying, with a straight face ‘ We are waiting for Israel to investigate’, ‘I don’t yet have all the information’, ‘I have no further comments’?

It was a year when I watched ‘The Zone of Interest’ and thought of Gaza. And learned that it was a taboo to have such thoughts or make such connections.

It was the year the best of international literature piled on my coffee table, unread, while I spent hours every day reading about the genocide in Gaza.

It was a year that I learned the old Palestinian names of some Israeli towns and remembered ‘The Search Warrant’: Patrick Modiano’s profound meditation on loss, memory and the obliteration of history.

It was a year that I was consumed by guilt every time I went shopping for makeup. Standing at the counter comparing shades of lipstick, I would think of the chant at our weekly rally as we marched past David Jones: ‘while you’re shopping, bombs are dropping’. And I would think of the women in Gaza with their faces covered in dust from bombed buildings, grime from lack of soap and water, and blood from being trapped inside a shooting range.

It was a year when the politicians voiced their ‘concern’, declared that every loss of innocent life was a tragedy, renewed their commitment to the tired old two-state solution, called on all parties to de-escalate, and made hollow pronouncements about peace.. and the bombs kept dropping.

It was the year I read Mohammed El-Kurd’s poem ‘Small Talk‘:

‘”How far is Palestine?” She asks. It’s a fifteen hour plane ride away, a dozen unresolved UN resolutions away, a few history lessons away, and a hundred and some military checkpoints away, too much G4S-provided asphyx-iation.’

It was a year that food lost its taste as Gaza starved.

It was a year when I often imagined what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. How would the world have reacted if Arabs were behind exploding pagers in Tel Aviv? What would the headlines have screamed? How many countries in the Middle East would Israel and the US have bombed? It was a year during which I found myself playing these ‘inverting’ mental games with mainstream media headlines, news bulletins’ stories and politicians’ pronouncements.

It was a year that grief took up residence in my heart and none of the previous year’s pleasurable pastimes could dislodge it.

It was a year at the beginning of which we did not imagine that the daily carnage could last for a month. Too shocking to last for even a week, we thought. Now, a whole year later, we are told that the carnage will continue at least until after the US elections, because the American President is a lame duck and the Israeli Prime Minister is waiting for total victory. The inane details that decide who will eat and who will starve, who will live and who will die.

https://johnmenadue.com/a-year-of-erasing-a-people/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

a bit of zionism....

 

FROM LARRY JOHNSON...

 

Yesterday, I sent an email to a discussion group in which I participate that is comprised of many prominent Americans who are very pro-Zionist. My email contained the spreadsheet of the Israeli Foreign Ministry data on “Palestinian terror attacks since 2000.” My point in sending the spreadsheet was to show that there is a large discrepancy between the public narrative, which claims Israel is the victim of unrelenting terrorist attacks, and the actual facts. I received the following response from a very smart person, who embodies the mindset that is widespread in Israel. I believe it is important to listen to others, even those you strongly disagree with, and try to have a dialogue. I prefer talking over killing. Here is what this person wrote:

So since 2020, 3000 Israelis murdered by Palestinians.  What about 1980-1999?  Another 3000?  And before 1980?  The Arabs were murdering Jews in Israel when Israel was called Palestine.  From the 1920s at least.  So say 6000 out of a population of 8 million?  That would be 225,000 Americans, proportionally.  Would we stand for 200,000 Americans murdered by terrorists and just sit on our hands?  What if native Americans did this in attempt to gain sovereignty over their native lands.  Would we tolerate it?  No, of course not.

Larry, it is one thing to try to be objective with just presenting numbers, but quite another to represent an agenda under the guise of “just presenting numbers.”  You certainly know that the numbers of deaths claimed by the Palestinians are greatly enlarged by them for PR value, and that they include all of the Hamas terrorists killed in the fighting, at least 20,000 according to the Israelis.  Further, you know that (a) Hamas uses civilians as shields in order to increase the civilian death count for exactly the agenda you are describing (which violates the Geneva war convention and is a war crime), and (b) Israel has the world’s lowest civilian-to-combatant death ratio of any army, the US included, and this in inner city fighting which is notoriously difficult.  Omitting these facts and just pretending that the numbers speak for themselves is an agenda, and to give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps not the one you really want to espouse.

What is really occurring here is that Jews have fully resettled their indigenous homeland at a time after Arabs had colonized it and claimed according to Islamic theology that colonized land becomes Dar al-Islam.  We Jews are asserting our natural right to live in our indigenous homeland, and that includes the so-called West Bank, which is where the very name Jews comes from.  Over the last 150 years, we in fact purchased back essentially all of our indigenous land.  That the remaining Arabs won’t voluntarily go back to their indigenous Arabia has led to multiple wars.  Because Israel is a democratic country, if the Arabs would live peaceably as citizens of Israel, they could stay and enjoy all civil rights of Israeli citizenship.  Many have.  But Islam is restive for sovereignty over everyone else, and this is the central fact that has prevented a peaceful resolution.  It is basically the same as Spain–Islam still considers Spain Dar al-Islam because it once occupied Spain.  We Jews are the rightful indigenous owners of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, including Yehuda and Shomron (the West Bank) and Gaza, but are willing to deal with practical issues to make this peaceful.  The Arabs, who assert Islamic colonization rights, are not, and the land is not theirs, and Israelis have fought numerous defensive wars to keep the ownership of our indigenous lands.

Here is my response:

1. If you want to make the proportionality argument, then apply it uniformly to the Palestinians as well as the Israelis. The current killing of Palestinians by aerial bombardment, over the last year, exceeds anything done by Israel in the last 70 years. The estimate for the number of Palestinian deaths is not from Palestinian sources. It is from The Lancet, a British Medical Journal that you know quite well (here is the link — https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext). According to The Lancet:

By June 19, 2024, 37 396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.1 The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services,2 the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry,3 which found claims of data fabrication implausible.4

Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza Health Ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure.5 The Ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders. This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously. Consequently, the Gaza Health Ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll. As of May 10, 2024, 30% of the 35 091 deaths were unidentified.1

The fact remains that Palestinians are being killed at a disproportionate rate and that Israeli tactics include the bombing of hospitals, schools, mosques and churches.

As far as your question, “What would we do if terrorists killed 250,000 Americans?,” we already know the answer to that. NOTHING. I refer to the deaths of Americans from Fentanyl. More than 150,000 died in 2022-2023, and we go happily about our business.

Israel asserts in the media that it is under constant terror threat, yet the data from the Israeli Foreign Ministry paints an entirely different picture. Their statistics, not mine, show that 73% of the attacks took place in Gaza and the West Bank, not Israel per se. 

2. With regard to who has legitimate rights to live in the land now claimed by Israel, when was the last time prior to 1948 that a Jewish leader ruled over the lands now called Israel and Palestine? It has been more than 2,000 years. Is the following chronological list of who ruled incorrect?

70 AD Second Temple destroyed

132 AD Bar Kochba Revolt

390 AD Split of the Roman Empire, Byzantine period begins

Byzantine Rule — 245 years

635 AD The Levant was conquered by an Arab army under the command of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb in 635, and became the province of Bilad al-Sham of the Rashidun Caliphate.

First Arab Muslim Rule — 464 years

1099 AD First Crusade captures Jerusalem

Crusade Rule — 188 years

1187 AD Saladin takes Jerusalem peacefully

Saladin Rule — 57 years

1244 AD Jerusalem was sacked by the Khwarezmian Tatars 

Khwarezmian Tatars Rule — 3 years

1247 AD Khwarezmians were driven out by the Ayyubids

1248 AD Mamluks rule

Ayyubids/Mamluks Rule — 269 years

1516 AD conquered by Turkish Sultan Selim I 

Ottoman Rule — 401 years

1917 AD Brits vanquish Turks and take control of Israel

British Rule — 31 years

Israel Rule — 1948 to present

I realize you present a point of view that is commonly held now among Israeli political leaders, but to pretend that the Palestinians have no legitimate claim or right to live where their families lived for generations means that the war for the land will continue. According to two different scholars:

In 1919, Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians constituted 90 percent of the population of Palestine, just before the third wave of Jewish immigration and the setting up of British Mandatory Palestine after World War I. Christison, Kathleen (2001). Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. University of California Press. p. 32.

Andrea, Alfred J.; Overfield, James H. (2011). The Human Record: Sources of Global History, Volume II: Since 1500(7th ed.). Cengage Learning. p. 437. ISBN 978-1-133-42004-0.

I do not have a magical solution to what appears to be an insoluble problem. But I strongly believe that killing Palestinian women and children is not in concert with traditional Jewish values.

 

https://sonar21.com/a-zionist-perspective-on-why-israel-is-entitled-to-palestine/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.