likud party denies palestinian state

so now what? fucking netanyahuet, has anyone heard the shit he spews...i used to think the bottom of the well had been hit, now im not sure where itll end....

Rebuffing Sharon, Likud Party Repudiates Palestinian State

By STEVEN ERLANGER

ERUSALEM, May 12 — The Likud Party voted tonight in favor of a resolution never to allow the creation of a Palestinian state, defying its leader, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, as he put off a planned offensive into the Gaza Strip.

The vote does not change the policy of the current coalition government, but will make it harder for Washington to build on the current military lull and to begin serious political negotiations toward a Middle East settlement.

Mr. Sharon himself has said that a Palestinian state is inevitable, although in a strong speech to the party meeting tonight in Tel Aviv, he demanded an end to Palestinian terrorism and the enactment of political reform before there is any talk of establishing a state.

The vote is bound to anger the Arab world by suggesting that Palestinians should not expect a state to emerge from negotiations with Israel, and thereby giving an advantage to those groups, like the radical Palestinian movement Hamas, which argue for continued armed struggle.

Responding to the vote, a Palestinian spokesman, Saeb Erekat, said it "unmasked many things." The vote, he told The Associated Press, "just shows that the war being waged by Israel against the Palestinians is not a war against what they call terror, it's really their war to maintain the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza."

He said the vote was "a real slap in the face" for President Bush, who has spoken in favor of a Palestinian state.

The new pressures on Mr. Sharon come at a time of a fragile diplomatic opening. Egyptian, Saudi Arabian and Syrian leaders met this weekend and said they reaffirmed their commitment to a peace initiative, and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, is expected to come to the region next week to begin security talks.

The Gaza operation has not been scrapped, a senior Israeli military official said, but the army began sending home some of the reservists it had called up.

Mr. Sharon and the defense minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, decided that the element of surprise had been lost, that Palestinian militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad had gone into hiding and that there was a chance that an operation in Gaza would be fierce but not achieve its goals.

After some diplomatic pressure from both Washington and the Arab world, Mr. Sharon also sought to get credit by choosing not to launch a dangerous offensive in the tightly packed refugee camps of Gaza.

Israeli military officials said the army still intended to go into Gaza, although in a more limited and targeted way, depending on intelligence.

"The troops are still there," the senior military official said, "and we will have to go into Gaza sooner or later. Gaza is the capital of Hamas and a huge haven for terrorists that has been untouched by us."

The Likud Party vote tonight was orchestrated by Mr. Sharon's rival, the former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants to lead the party into elections. Mr. Netanyahu had bet on the Sharon government lasting only a few months, and he remains popular within Likud, taking a stance even further to the right of Mr. Sharon's and calling for the expulsion or elimination of Mr. Arafat.

The vote is a measure of the difficulty Washington has in trying to bring peace to the Middle East. The Bush administration has said publicly that the Palestinians should have an independent state as a conclusion of peace negotiations.

But Mr. Netanyahu, who still controls the Likud central committee from his own time as prime minister, organized the vote to undermine Mr. Sharon within his own party — at a time when Mr. Sharon has his highest approval ratings in opinion polls for his tough stance against terrorism and his military campaign against the Palestinians in the West Bank.

In his speech to the party meeting, Mr. Sharon again criticized the Palestinian leadership. "We do not deal at all with the Palestinian state now," Mr. Sharon said. "It does not stand on the agenda of the day."

He said the Palestinian Authority "must reform itself at its base in all areas — security, economic, legal and social — and it must take responsibility over itself.

"We cannot have peace with a corrupted, terrorist dictatorship," he added.

Mr. Netanyahu said that "it is clear now that we cannot reach any kind of solution at all with the Palestinians," and repeated his call for a buffer zone between Israel and Palestinian-ruled areas and the expulsion of Mr. Arafat.

Mr. Netanyahu said an independent Palestinian government might be possible, "but a state with all the rights of a state, this cannot be, not under Arafat, nor under another leadership, not today nor tomorrow."

Mr. Sharon has talked of an independent Palestinian state, but essentially a demilitarized one, without the means to attack Israel.

Despite Israel's military campaign in the West Bank, a senior defense ministry official said, "we are intercepting almost one suicide bomber a day and finding a car bomb a day."

Mr. Ben-Eliezer believes, the official said, that even in the West Bank, after the Israeli military operation that began March 29 and was recently concluded, "after two to three months, maybe four months, things will be back to the way they were before."

Mr. Ben-Eliezer told the Israeli cabinet today that Israeli forces had captured 15 would-be suicide bombers in raids launched into the West Bank over the last two weeks.

He told reporters today, touring the site of the suicide bombing Tuesday night near Tel Aviv, that Israel's decision to defer an assault should not be misinterpreted as a surrender to terrorism. "We reserve the right to respond when we want and how we want — period," he said. "It is our duty to fight against terror."

Beyond the military considerations, Mr. Sharon evidently did not want to face further international criticism now and disrupt what he regards as a favorable diplomatic climate, aides said, pointing to the Bush administration's support for the idea of needed reforms in the power structure of the Palestinian Authority — including a single, unified security service, less corruption and more democracy.

In a sign of the tensions in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian laborer shot dead his Israeli employer near a checkpoint leading to the Jewish settlement of Rafiah Yam, an army spokesman said. On the West Bank, in Tulkarm, Israeli soldiers raided the town again and arrested two men they said were Palestinian gunmen.

Mr. Sharon's decision to put off a strike into Gaza was also tied to new signs in the Arab world of a willingness to press Mr. Arafat to crack down on terrorists and to reform his administration.

In Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, today, President Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Abdullah, finished two days of talks on the Middle East, which on Saturday included the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

The men "discussed coordination with the Palestinian side" and urged the international community to help repair Palestinian towns and infrastructure destroyed in Israel's offensive, an Egyptian spokesman said.

In Bethlehem today, Christians of varying denominations prayed at the Church of the Nativity on the first Sunday since the end of a 39-day siege.

Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, an envoy of Pope John Paul II, led hundreds of Catholics in prayers along with the Latin Patriarch of the Holy Land, Michel Sabbah.

source:

todays new york times

They can come chill at my house.

grrr + d'oh + duh + damn! = how I feel about this!

here's a quick history lesson,

After the little strip of land that is now in such high demand

was 'liberated' by the League of Nations after the Second World War,

it fell into British control.

Originally Brittan proposed an Isreali Country, And Arab Country

AND a small international zone that would include Bethleham.

It would have been for the entire world.

But there was difficulty in brokering the deal,

so Brittan said in 1947...

"Fuck it! We out! You guys deal wit' it!"

and gave the whole chunk to the new Nation of Isreal.

and my big question...

If the Jewish People truly understand the importance of having a 'homeland'

(which they spent 2000 years working for)

why are they so opposed to giving the same thing to the Arabs?

Originally posted by mental invalid

"just shows that the war being waged by Israel against the Palestinians is not a war against what they call terror, it's really their war to maintain the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza."

 

well DUH. But you can't say that if you are a European, because that means you are anti-Semitic, apparently....:rolleyes:

noam, you leave tonite...i set up a meeting with arafat

zesto, good call...i dont think alot people realize the way isreal came to be....blame it on the brits!!

seriously though....WHAT THE FUCK

Can I bring that chick from Headline News;Rudi Baktiar?She's Iranian of the week.Ya heard!?

Seriously though,thanks for posting the article.

here's what the real (no offence) Noam has to say...

THE ROLE OF AMERICA IN PALESTINE: DUPLICITY AND TREACHERY

Time and again it has been asked why 'peace' is so elusive in the Middle East.

To understand the problem in Palestine one has to analyse of the partial and

self-interested role of America. Does America really want peace in the region?

Herein lies the problem.

The answer to this question has been elucidated years ago by authors such as

Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Israel Shahak and the late Ismail Al Faruqi. In some

quarters these personalities do not exist or never existed at all. I once

quoted from Israel Shahak`s work 'Jewish History, Jewish Religion' to a Jewish

Professor who questioned the existence of Israel Shahak.

In the forward of Noam Chomsky`s book 'Fateful Triangle- the United States,

Israel and the Palestinians', Edward Said comments: ' Chomsky`s major claim is

that Israel and the United States, especially the latter- are rejectionists

opposed to peace, whereas the Arabs, including the PLO, have for years been

trying to accommodate themselves to the reality of Israel. Chomsky supports

his case by comparing the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict-

so profoundly inhuman, cynical and deliberately cruel to the Palestinian people

with its systematically rewritten record as kept by those whom Chomsky calls

"The supporters of Israel."

Chomsky includes invaluable material on Oslo and Wye accords- "an unnecessary

line of Arab capitulation by which Israel has achieved all its tactical and

strategic objectives at the expense of every proclaimed principle of Arab and

Palestinian Nationalism and struggle. For the first time in the twentieth

century, an anti- colonial liberation movement has not only discarded its own

considerable achievements but has made an agreement to cooperate with a

military occupation before that occupation has ended."

Israel Shahak is of the same view that Israel has not really changed and like

America do not want peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs.

So coming to the crux of the question as to the real intention of America in

the region, the late Ismail Al- Faruqi sites two overriding American interests:

dictated assumption by the United States of the whole burden of European

colonialism in the area following World War II: Anti-Soviet military strategyand oil.

The creation of the state of Israel served at once all the purposes,

strategy and interest of America, viz:

*To provide, in case of another world war, a friendly base whose friendship to the

West depends upon its own inevitable need for protection by the West for survival.

*To provide a sore capable of draining all energies and resources of the surrounding

areas so as to retard, if not to render impossible, any reconstruction that would make

them more capable of resisting Western domination.

*Since the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula in the thirties, to provide a

strong but dependent friendly Israel which can be counted upon to assist in the security

of this tremendous and vital resource.

*To provide a cause which would throw the whole area into constant turmoil and thereby

enable Western domination to fulfil its colonialist exploitative objectives

more cheaply and easily.

*To provide an apparently non-Western 'hatchet' which can be manipulated and hurled by

the West at any state seeking to rid the area of Christian influence.

*To provide relief to the Western European conscience ridden with the guilt- complex of

West's crimes against the Jews over two millennia.

*To subvert the worldly power of Islam by splitting it into an Asian half and an African

half separated by an insurmountable barrier.

Noam Chomsky is also of the view that the strategic importance of the region lies primarily

in its immense petroleum reserves and the global power accorded by control over them and

crucially, from the huge profits that flow to the Anglo-American states, which have been

of critical importance for their economics.

It has been necessary to ensure that this enormous wealth flows primarily to the West,

not to the people of the region. That is one fundamental problem that will continue to

cause unrest and disorder. Another is the Arab- Israel conflict with its many ramifications,

which have been closely related to the major US strategic goal of

dominating the regions resources and wealth.

Dr. Anver Suliman

Executive member

Media Review Network

Laudium, South Africa.

just in case you missed this ...

*To subvert the worldly power of Islam by splitting it into an Asian half and an African half separated by an insurmountable barrier.