Palestine = Owned.

[Larry Pubes]

haaretz article(yes, haaretz is leftist on the issue, but it's still a sensible piece):

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=733427

 

A black flag

 

By Gideon Levy

 

A black flag hangs over the "rolling" operation in Gaza. The more the operation "rolls," the darker the flag becomes. The "summer rains" we are showering on Gaza are not only pointless, but are first and foremost blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to penetrate Syria's airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a quarter of a parliament.

 

A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization. The harsher the steps, the more monstrous and stupid they become, the more the moral underpinnings for them are removed and the stronger the impression that the Israeli government has lost its nerve. Now one must hope that the weekend lull, whether initiated by Egypt or the prime minister, and in any case to the dismay of Channel 2's Roni Daniel and the IDF, will lead to a radical change.

 

Everything must be done to win Gilad Shalit's release. What we are doing now in Gaza has nothing to do with freeing him. It is a widescale act of vengeance, the kind that the IDF and Shin Bet have wanted to conduct for some time, mostly motivated by the deep frustration that the army commanders feel about their impotence against the Qassams and the daring Palestinian guerilla raid. There's a huge gap between the army unleashing its frustration and a clever and legitimate operation to free the kidnapped soldier.

 

To prevent the army from running as amok as it would like, a strong and judicious political echelon is required. But facing off against the frustrated army is Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz's tyro regime, weak and happless. Until the weekend lull, it appeared that each step proposed by the army and Shin Bet had been immediately approved for backing. That does not bode well, not only for the chances of freeing Shalit, but also for the future management of the government, which is being revealed to be as weak as the Hamas government.

 

The only wise and restrained voice heard so far was that of the soldier's father, Noam Shalit, of all people. That noble man called at what is clearly his most difficult hour, not for stridency and not for further damage done to the lives of soldiers and innocent Palestinians. Against the background of the IDF's unrestrained actions and the arrogant bragging of the latest macho spokesmen, Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant of the Southern Command and Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, Shalit's father's voice stood out like a voice crying in the wilderness.

 

Sending tens of thousands of miserable inhabitants running from their homes, dozens of kilometers from where his son is supposedly hidden, and cutting off the electricity to hundreds of thousands of others, is certainly not what he meant in his understated emotional pleas. It's a shame nobody is listening to him, of all people.

 

The legitimate basis for the IDF's operation was stripped away the moment it began. It's no accident that nobody mentions the day before the attack on the Kerem Shalom fort, when the IDF kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from their home in Gaza. The difference between us and them? We kidnapped civilians and they captured a soldier, we are a state and they are a terror organization. How ridiculously pathetic Amos Gilad sounds when he says that the capture of Shalit was "illegitimate and illegal," unlike when the IDF grabs civilians from their homes. How can a senior official in the defense ministry claim that "the head of the snake" is in Damascus, when the IDF uses the exact same methods?

 

True, when the IDF and Shin Bet grab civilians from their homes - and they do so often - it is not to murder them later. But sometimes they are killed on the doorsteps of their homes, although it is not necessary, and sometimes they are grabbed to serve as "bargaining chips," like in Lebanon and now, with the Palestinian legislators. What an uproar there would be if the Palestinians had grabbed half the members of the Israeli government. How would we label them?

 

Collective punishment is illegitimate and it does not have a smidgeon of intelligence. Where will the inhabitants of Beit Hanun run? With typical hardheartedness the military reporters say they were not "expelled" but that it was "recommended" they leave, for the benefit, of course, of those running for their lives. And what will this inhumane step lead to? Support for the Israeli government? Their enlistment as informants and collaborators for the Shin Bet? Can the miserable farmers of Beit Hanun and Beit Lahia do anything about the Qassam rocket-launching cells? Will bombing an already destroyed airport do anything to free the soldier or was it just to decorate the headlines?

 

Did anyone think about what would have happened if Syrian planes had managed to down one of the Israeli planes that brazenly buzzed their president's palace? Would we have declared war on Syria? Another "legitimate war"? Will the blackout of Gaza bring down the Hamas government or cause the population to rally around it? And even if the Hamas government falls, as Washington wants, what will happen on the day after? These are questions for which nobody has any real answers. As usual here: Quiet, we're shooting. But this time we are not only shooting. We are bombing and shelling, darkening and destroying, imposing a siege and kidnapping like the worst of terrorists and nobody breaks the silence to ask, what the hell for, and according to what right?

[Larry Pubes]

interesting little piece by an IDF reservist:

 

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3271505,00.html

 

Look who's been kidnapped!

Hundreds of Palestinian 'suspects' have been kidnapped from their homes and will never stand trial

Arik Diamant

 

It's the wee hours of the morning, still dark outside. A guerilla force comes out of nowhere to kidnap a soldier. After hours of careful movement, the force reaches its target, and the ambush is on! In seconds, the soldier finds himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.

 

A smash in the face with the butt of the gun and the soldier falls to the ground, bleeding. The kidnappers pick him up, quickly tie his hands and blindfold him, and disappear into the night.

 

This might be the end of the kidnapping, but the nightmare has just begun. The soldier's mother collapses, his father prays. His commanding officers promise to do everything they can to get him back, his comrades swear revenge. An entire nation is up-in-arms, writing in pain and worry.

 

Nobody knows how the soldier is: Is he hurt? Do his captors give him even a minimum of human decency, or are they torturing him to death by trampling his honor? The worst sort of suffering is not knowing. Will he come home? And if so, when? And in what condition? Can anyone remain apathetic in the light of such drama?

 

Israeli terror

 

This description, you'll be surprised to know, has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It is the story of an arrest I carried out as an IDF soldier, in the Nablus casbah, about 10 years ago. The "soldier" was a 17-year-old boy, and we kidnapped him because he knew "someone" who had done "something."

 

We brought him tied up, with a burlap sac over his head, to a Shin Bet interrogation center known as "Scream Hill" (at the time we thought it was funny). There, the prisoner was beaten, violently shaken and sleep deprived for weeks or months. Who knows.

 

No one wrote about it in the paper. European diplomats were not called to help him. After all, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the kidnapping of this Palestinian kid. Over the 40 years of occupation we have kidnapped thousands of people, exactly like Gilad Shalit was captured: Threatened by a gun, beaten mercilessly, with no judge or jury, or witnesses, and without providing the family with any information about the captive.

 

When the Palestinians do this, we call it "terror." When we do it, we work overtime to whitewash the atrocity.

 

Suspects?

 

Some people will say: The IDF doesn't "just" kidnap. These people are "suspects." There is no more perverse lie than this. In all the years I served, I reached one simple conclusion: What makes a "suspect"? Who, exactly suspects him, and of what?

 

Who has the right to sentence a 17-year-old to kidnapping, torture and possible death? A 26-year-old Shin Bet interrogator? A 46-year-old one? Do these people have any higher education, apart from the ability to interrogate? What are his considerations? I all these "suspects" are so guilty, why not bring them to trial?

 

Anyone who believes that despite the lack of transparency, the IDF and Shin Bet to their best to minimize violations of human rights is naïve, if not brainwashed. One need only read the testimonies of soldiers who have carried out administrative detentions to be convinced of the depth of the immorality of our actions in the territories.

 

To this very day, there are hundreds of prisoners rotting in Shin Bet prisons and dungeons, people who have never been –and never will be – tried. And Israelis are silently resolved to this phenomenon.

 

Israeli responsibility

 

The day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped I rode in a taxi. The driver told me we must go into Gaza, start shooting people one-by-one, until someone breaks and returns the hostage. It isn't clear that such an operation would bring Gilad back alive.

 

Instead of getting dragged into terrorist responses, as Palestinian society has done, we should release some of the soldiers and civilians we have kidnapped. This is appropriate, right, and could bring about an air of reconciliation in the territories.

 

Hell, if this is what will bring Gilad home safe-and-sound, we have a responsibility to him to do it.

 

Arik Diamant is an IDF reservist and the head of the Courage to Refuse organization

[WORDISM45]

^very interesting read

[Smart]

Report: Israel agreed to abductors' demands

 

London-based al-Hayat reports that Israel said it would comply with terms set for release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. Newspaper states Israel agreed to free prisoners, withdraw from Gaza in return for Shalit's release, commitment to end rocket attacks

 

The London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat reported that Israel has agreed to the terms presented to it in the framework of the indirect negotiations with Corporal Gilad Shalit's kidnappers, held via Egyptian mediators.

 

According to the report, Israel has agreed to pull its forces out of Gaza, call off the closure imposed on the Strip, halt targeted killings, raids and arrest and release Palestinian ministers, parliament members and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, in exchange for Shalit's release and ending the Qassam attacks on Israel.

 

Al-Hayat reported that the offer that Shalit, who holds a dual French-Israeli citizenship, be transferred to France, has been withdrawn after France refused to receive the soldier in the frame of a deal. However, talks now concentrate on the possibility Shalit may be transferred to an Arab country, probably Egypt.

 

Meanwhile, Palestinian sources reported that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has decided to send member of the PLO Executive Committee, Taysir Khaled and head of the diplomatic committee at the National Palestinian Assembly, Abdullah Hurani to Damascus in order to hold talks with head of Hamas' politburo Khaled Mashaal, Hamas' leadership and Syrian officials, on Shalit's kidnapping.

 

According to reports, the Palestinians have formed a committee compiled of representatives from the presidential body, the Palestinian government, the Palestinian factions and the private sector, in a bid to formulate a unified stance regarding the issues currently on debate.

[Power Bill]

Apart from IDF incursions there have also been years of Isreali missile attacks on pretty random spots. Lots of innocent civilian deaths. Fuck Isreal and Fuck Hamas. Eat your fucking hummus and chill the fuck out already. I have good friends on both side of this conflict and even they know deep down that they are more alike than different.

Peace, please.

[El Mamerro]

Smart, where the hell did you get that article?

 

Israel is going apeshit.

[2342]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/12/mideast/index.html

 

Israel authorizes 'severe' response to abductions

 

 

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- The Israeli Cabinet authorized "severe and harsh" retaliation on Lebanon after Hezbollah guerillas kidnapped two soldiers and killed three others in a cross-border raid Wednesday.

 

Israel quickly blamed the Lebanese government for the raid -- and charged it with the soldiers' safe release -- and the Israel Defense Forces began hammering Lebanon with artillery and airstrikes hours before the Cabinet met to discuss a response.

 

It is the second time in three weeks that an Israeli soldier has been abducted. Concerns abound that the situation on Israel's northern border will escalate to the level it has reached in Gaza, where the IDF launched an ongoing offensive June 28 after the abduction of Army Cpl. Gilad Shalit three days prior. (Watch as people in Lebanon flee the violence -- 2:42)

 

At least 19 Palestinians were reported dead in Gaza in Wednesday's fighting, according to Palestinian sources. (Full story)

 

'Act of war'

Israel called Wednesday's abductions an act of war, and Maj. Gen. Udi Adam, head of Israel's Northern Command, said he has "comprehensive plans" to battle Hezbollah throughout Lebanon, not just in its southern stronghold.

 

"This affair is between Israel and the state of Lebanon," Adam said. "Where to attack? Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate -- not just southern Lebanon, not just the line of Hezbollah posts." (Watch as Israeli forces enter Lebanon -- 2:29)

 

Earlier, Israel's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, told Israel's Channel 10, "If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years."

 

Five more Israeli soldiers died in fighting following the raid. Four died in an attack on their tank, and another died as soldiers tried to help them, the IDF reported.

 

Four Israel civilians and six soldiers have been wounded so far in the fighting, which has included more than 100 airstrikes on what Israel says are Hezbollah bases, and road and bridges that could be used in transporting the kidnapped soldiers.

 

Talks or bust

Shortly after Hezbollah fighters attacked an IDF military vehicle between Zar'it and Shtula and kidnapped the soldiers, the Islamic militia's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, called the abductions as "our natural, only and logical right."

 

He further said that the soldiers had been taken "far, far away" and that no Israeli military campaign would secure their release. Hezbollah has demanded "direct negotiations" regarding a prisoner exchange with Israel.

 

"We want our prisoners released," Nasrallah said.

 

But Israel has rebuffed that demand, saying -- as it has to the Palestinians -- that a prisoner exchange would encourage more kidnappings. Government spokesman Gideon Meir said Israel wanted the soldiers returned "immediately without any precondition -- no negotiation."

 

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, like his general, pointed the finger at Lebanon, not just Hezbollah.

 

The raid was "not a terror attack, but an operation of a sovereign state without any reason or provocation," he said. "The Lebanese government, which Hezbollah is part of, is trying to undermine the stability of the region, and the Lebanese government will be responsible for the consequences."

 

Hezbollah, which enjoys substantial backing from Syria and Iran, is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel. The group holds posts in Lebanon's government.

 

Ambassador pulled

Lebanon has tried to distance itself from the raid that sparked the most recent hostilities, recalling its ambassador to the United States, Farid Abboud, for making "irresponsible" public comments, said Lebanese Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh.

 

Hamadeh would not divulge the comments. But Abboud appeared to endorse Hezbollah's call for a prisoner swap during an interview Wednesday with CNN International.

 

"We have our prisoners. They have prisoners. An exchange would be appropriate, and I think it will resolve the problem," Abboud said.

 

Israel, which pulled its troops out of southern Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation, has exchanged prisoners with Hezbollah before, most recently in 2004 when Israel exchanged more than 400 Palestinian, Lebanese and Arab prisoners for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers.

 

An international plea

The United States and the United Nations urged Hezbollah to release the soldiers, and the White House called the raid "an affront to the sovereignty of the Lebanese government." Washington also called on Syria and Iran to cut off their support to the group.

 

"Hezbollah's actions are not in the interest of the Lebanese people, whose welfare should not be held hostage to the interests of the Syrian and Iranian regimes," the White House said in a statement.

 

Syria and Iran are the scapegoats because of their support for Hezbollah and because the Lebanese government does not have the capacity to expand its authority into the south, where Hezbollah maintains control, U.S. State Department officials said.

 

As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on regional leaders to exercise restraint to prevent the conflict from spreading, a former U.S. ambassador warned that the fighting "could easily widen further."

 

"We may see reoccupation of southern Lebanon, which would be unfortunate," said Edward Walker, who oversaw U.S. missions in Israel, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

 

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke three times Wednesday with Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Sinora, who came to power in the 2005 Cedar Revolution that ousted a pro-Syrian government.

 

Sinora is seen as friendly to the United States. The Bush administration has urged him to disarm Hezbollah through a process of national reconciliation.

 

Rice asked Sinora to exercise what influence his government has to secure the freedom of the soldiers captured on Wednesday. She also spoke with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni twice, and with Olmert and Annan.

 

Meanwhile, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit was in the Syrian capital, where he was urging Damascus to exercise its influence over Hezbollah.

 

CNN's Elise Labott contributed to this report.

 

Copyright 2006 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Find this article at:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/12/mideast/index.html

[2342]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5175160.stmIsrael attacks Beirut's airport

 

Israeli aircraft have fired rockets at the runways of Beirut's international airport in Lebanon, forcing its closure and the diversion of flights.

It follows the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah militants.

 

Meanwhile, 10 civilians were killed in fresh Israeli air raids in southern Lebanon, security sources said.

 

Israeli jets have pounded targets in southern Lebanon in retaliation for the soldiers' capture. Israel has said it holds Lebanon responsible.

 

The Beirut airport is Lebanon's only international airport.

 

It is located in the Lebanese capital's Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs.

 

Shortly after Israeli shells began falling on the runways, a senior airport official announced the facility was closed and asked scheduled flights to divert to Cyprus.

 

Israeli PM Ehud Olmert said the soldiers' capture was an "act of war", but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah insisted the two would only be returned via talks.

 

Mr Olmert said he held Beirut responsible, but Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora denied any knowledge of the Hezbollah operation and refused to take responsibility for the soldiers' capture.

[2342]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/737827.html

 

Hezbollah attack / Gov't okays massive strikes on Lebanon; Israel readies for rocket attacks in north

 

By Haaretz Correspondents and Agencies, By Amos Harel, Aluf Benn and Gideon Alon

 

The Israel Defense Forces began preparing last night for a widespread aerial assault on Lebanon, after the cabinet approved a "severe" response to Hezbollah's attack on the northern border yesterday, which ended with eight soldiers dead and two kidnapped.

 

Although nothing is definitely known about the abducted soldiers' condition, they are believed to be alive, since little of their blood was found at the scene of the attack.

 

 

 

Advertisement

 

The response will include a series of aerial attacks against Hezbollah, and particularly against the batteries of rockets aimed at Israel that the organization has stationed along the northern border. This operation is expected to last for several days. The IDF also recommended various operations aimed at the Lebanese government and strategic targets in Lebanon.

 

In a sharp departure from Israel's response to previous Hezbollah attacks, the late-night cabinet session unanimously agreed that the Lebanese government should be held responsible for yesterday's events. In the past, Israel has generally pointed its finger at Hezbollah's patrons, Syria and Iran.

 

"Israel holds the sovereign government of Lebanon as responsible for the action which emanated from its territory and for the safe return of the abducted soldiers," the government said in a statement issued after the meeting. "Israel must act with appropriate severity in response to this attack and it will do so. Israel will respond in a forthright and severe manner against the perpetrators responsible and will act to prevent future efforts and actions directed against Israel."

 

Ministers declined to give details of the measures approved last night, saying that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had asked them to stay mum. However, the IDF's recommendations including attacks on Lebanon's power grid, which Israel struck once before, in 1999. The army also recommended imposing a partial or complete naval and aerial blockade on Lebanon - for instance, preventing civilian aircraft from landing in Beirut.

 

The IDF did not recommend moving ground forces into Lebanon at this time. However, Hezbollah is likely to respond to the Israeli attacks with massive rocket launches at Israel, and in that case, the IDF might move ground forces into Lebanon, both to create a temporary buffer zone in the southern part of the country and to destroy Hezbollah's network of outposts and rockets along the border. The goal of any such operation would also be to ensure that this network could not be rebuilt.

 

Residents of northern border communities have already been ordered into shelters, and Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered the Home Front Command to prepare for the defense of dozens of other communities that were not vulnerable to Hezbollah fire in the past, but are now reachable with the long-range rockets Hezbollah has deployed in recent years.

 

"We may be facing a completely different reality, in which hundreds of thousands of Israelis will, for a short time, find themselves in danger from Hezbollah's rockets," said a senior defense official. These include residents of the center of the country.

 

The army also began preparing for a limited call-up of the reserves, since this might be necessary if a ground operation in Lebanon is approved. Thus far, however, no call-up has been approved.

 

Yesterday's attack, the cabinet agreed, had created a completely new situation on the northern border, and government sources said that Israel must take steps that will "exact a price" and restore its deterrence.

 

Olmert rejected Hezbollah's demand that Israel purchase the kidnapped soldiers' freedom by releasing Lebanese and Palestinian terrorists jailed in Israel.

 

The cabinet also decided to demand that the international community enforce UN Security Council resolutions calling for the Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah and assume control of the border with Israel. Currently, Hezbollah effectively controls southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese army stays away.

 

Olmert was informed of the Hezbollah attack while he was meeting with the parents of Corporal Gilad Shalit, the soldier who was kidnapped on the Gaza border last month. After that, he held a scheduled meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is on his first visit to Israel. The joint press conference afterward, however, inevitably focused on the events in the north.

 

At the conference, Olmert accused Lebanon of an act of war against Israel and threatened a painful Israeli response. "This morning's events are not a terror attack, but the act of a sovereign state that attacked Israel for no reason and without provocation," he said. "The Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah is a part, is trying to undermine regional stability. Lebanon is responsible, and Lebanon will bear the consequences of its actions."

 

He also lashed out at Syria, calling it a "terrorist government by nature that supports, backs and encourages terrorist operations." However, he did not blame Damascus for the Hezbollah attack, and in contrast to his harsh threats against Beirut, said merely that "suitable preparations must be made to deal with this behavior by Syria's government."

 

"The State of Israel and the citizens of Israel are currently facing a test," Olmert continued. "We have managed to pass difficult tests [in the past], even more difficult and complex than the current ones. We, the State of Israel, the entire nation, will also succeed in overcoming those who are trying to harm us now."

 

Peretz also placed the blame for the attack squarely on Beirut. "We're skipping the stage of threats and going straight to action," said Peretz. "The goal is for this incident to end with Hezbollah so badly beaten that not a man in it does not regret having launched this incident."

 

The IDF General Staff took a similarly hard line, with one senior officer declaring that Israel should send Lebanon's infrastructure "30 years backward" in response to the attack.

[HardyHarHar]

I really disagree with what Israel's doing. And I think they're losing a lot of credibility. The U.S. of A. officially allows certain 'soft torture' methods one of which is waking a person up at intervals so they never get any deep sleep. By using sonic boom bombs over Palestine, Israel is applying this 'soft torture' method to a whole nation.

[HardyHarHar]

Also I don't get the whole "terrorist" thing. I mean war is war right? whether you use a backpack filled with tnt or a helicopter you're still killing people. The difference is that terrorism is used only in desperation. Furthermore, George Bush's War on Terror is ridiculous, it's like saying War on Stealth Bombers. This whole mess oughta be settled over a game of chessboxing.

[2342]

Having lived in Israel – and being Jewish- I can honestly say -I have no idea what the hell is going on there now. I have always had serious issues with the “state of Israel” due to their derogatory treatment of the Palestinians- taking their land- their freedoms- rights. I can see both sides- and the side I am seeing now- is flat out crazy. I am sincerely at a loss of words over their tactics now- where is this going? What do they “really” hope to accomplish other than more death and destruction?

 

I was in Israel when a suicide bomber detonated his bomb – after I was pulled from the rubble- and woke up- I could not hear a damn thing for 3 days- not even my own screaming at the Israeli authorities and blaming them for the bombing because of their treatment of Palestinians.

 

Seriously- WTF?

[HardyHarHar]

Yes, what is Israel doing? I couldn't imagine that it's a simple land grab, but maybe they are trying to create a buffer zone. Remember that Israel recently pulled out the people living in the West Bank and - if I remember correctly - destroyed their apartment buildings. Rescuing the soldier seems like a pretty flimsy reason to start such an aggressive war.

[MAR]

Even I'm a bit apprehensive about whats going on right now. The last thing Israel needs is a full out war.

 

But 1 for 1000+ palestinians plus whatever the lebanese militants ask for for the other two captured? thats a bit to much to swallow and complying will only bring about more kidnappings.

 

No, I dont like it, but I see no other viable choice.

[the.crooked]

you don't think this shit was planned?

 

 

There is a direction to this, and it's the anhilation(sp? too late in the night) of the palestinian state.

 

 

lets consider something real quick. Why did isreal pull out of palestine? What would that do to the credibility of Isreal if in fact an "act of war" were then commited against them after they seemingly did "the right thing" and cleared out of the land?

 

 

Please, this shit has been on the drawing boards for a minute, and please beleeb that we helped them with it.

[HardyHarHar]

I'm suspicious of conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them. What you suggest would not surprise me, but I think it's bad judgement to decide that that is the truth. Every government has a revolutionary movement against it. The danger in this is that revolution can be usurped by power hungry "revolutionaries." That is what happened with the shah in Iran and with the Czar in Russia; I don't want that to happen in America.

[Smart]

it's short sighted and ignorant to suggest that the VERY recent pull out was gonna be such a big publicity boondoggle for Israel that they could wage open warfare against the Palestinians AND LEBANON. Lebanon being an entirely different country, and the particular country that is really getting their ass hammered (some more) in all of this.

[MAR]

you don't think this shit was planned?

 

No, but I find your alacrity to jump to conclusions most disturbing.

[serum]

everything in politics is planned. break off palastine a little tiny piece of whats actaully owed to them and then demand more concessions. people are sitting around starving waiting for back paychecks because israel doesnt like their choice of hamas. motherfuck israel. why the fuck do palastinian funds run through israel anyways? why even hold an election. its obvious why hamas was elected into power, because fatah was corrupt and didnt get anything accomplished. now the only thing being accomplished is all out war in the middle east. all for what one soldier? fuck him. one soldier does not excuse israel from bombing the fuck out of wherever and whoever they choose. maybe we should just start bombing the fuck out of pakistan because im sure bin laden is up there somewhere. does the heat make people hard fucking headed or just plain insane?

[Smart]

everything in politics is planned.

 

Everything in football is planned, that doesn't make it a bad thing.

 

The conspiracy angle keeps falling flat due to the flagrant failure to recognize the difference between Hamas and Hezzbollah.

[nino1]

the real question is, what are YOU gunna do when they start doing this shit in america? please believe it will happen in this decade.. american troops or national guard or fema, when the shit hits the fan and martial law is declared, "for national security". im going to be chilling deep in mexico with a big stash of weed and tequila. if you have brown skin or you're not protestant or you've ever talked/thought/searched online/checked out a book about resisting the government, your name is on a LIST. "i did't stand up when they came for the trade unionists because I was not a trade unionist, I did not stand up for the gypsies because i was not a gypsie..... and when they came for me, there was no one left to stand" --Catholic priest killed by Nazis during WWII (the quote is much longer,i just paraphrased for brevity)

[serum]

every time israel gives up anything, i'm waiting for them to take it right back. i wasnt suggesting conspiracy theory, more like heres a baseball and if you are good little boys and girls ill give you a bat and as soon as the monkey business starts im going to take away the whole damn park and the baseball diamond. the israelis know the monkey business is going to start as soon as they leave the room, its just a matter of time until the palastinians fuck it up for themselves. but my problem is who the hell thinks its ok for israel to be the authority over this situation. some middlemen need to be set up. perhaps some neutral country like sweden. america even being involved as the mediator is a joke.

[Smart]

bump for hezbollah' date=' takin no shit for 30+ years.[/quote']

 

 

yeeeah... I'm sure you meant "not quite 25 years" huh...

[MAR]

every time israel gives up anything' date=' i'm waiting for them to take it right back.[/quote']

 

I love how people blatently disregard the other sides problems as if there is a clear right and wrong. Did you ever think that maybe the palestinians are also to blame? They threatened, kassam rocketed, and now captured a soldier to use as a bargining chip. Israel has re-entered its "former" territory to make sure it's people are safe and refuse to be jerked around any more.

[2342]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2268240,00.html

 

Briefing: Israel's reasons for its armed retaliation

 

Times correspondent Roland Watson hears from leaders in Tel Aviv the motives behind Israel's massive armed response to yesterday's raid by Hezbollah across the Lebanese border

 

"Israel has taken a big strategic decision by launching such a ferocious response against Lebanon and Hezbollah and it has done so for various reasons.

 

"Firstly, suffering a second kidnapping, this time of two soldiers, is something that Israel cannot afford to be seen to accept. The Israeli armed forces hold a peculiar and central place in Israeli life: every family has a relative or a friend serving in uniform. The Government simply must to do everything in its power to get the soldiers back.

 

"From a political perspective, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remains very new and untried. What's more, Olmert has no military experience, and neither does Amir Peretz, his Defence Minister, which is unusual.

 

"Most Israelis would deny that this makes Olmert a weak Prime Minister, and many say that the opposite, that the situation shows the strength of Israeli democracy. But there is undoubtedly a sense outside Israel, in the Palestinian Territories in the southern Lebanon, that this is a government that can be tested. This perception of weakness is something that Israel is eager to address.

 

"The third reason is that there is a sense at senior levels of the Israeli Government that the response to the first kidnapping, of the tank soldier Corporal Gilad Shalit, who was taken hostage by Palestinian gunmen on June 25, was not strong enough.

 

"Even though the response involved Israeli soldiers re-entering territory in Gaza that it had evacuated last year, and even though Israeli jets bombed Gaza's main power station and bridges, there was a still question mark over whether Israel had the appetite for a fight. In particular, the buzzing of President Assad's private residence in Syria had a ring of weakness.

 

"As to where this is going: at the moment, Israel does not seem to be thinking about an exit strategy. I think Israel's calculation is that this is a sufficiently large crisis to prompt the international community to step in and get tough with Syria for its support of Hezbollah and to make the Lebanese Government accountable for actions that take place within its borders.

 

"I think we can expect a day or two more of the Israeli bombardment of Hezbollah targets inside Lebanon. The Israeli military justified today's bombing of Beirut airport because they said it was used freely to channel arms from Iran to Hezbollah. Despite pressure from hawkish elements in the Israeli military establishment, there is no plan at present to take military action against Syria."

[2342]

Here is a short chronology of previous Israeli attacks in Lebanon.

 

December 1968 - Israeli commandos blow up 13 passenger planes on tarmac of Beirut airport, in reprisal for an attack by Lebanese-trained Palestinians on an Israeli airliner in Athens.

 

April 1973 - Israeli elite troops, including former prime minister Ehud Barak disguised as a woman, entered Beirut flats and shot dead three Palestinian guerrilla officials.

 

March 1978 - Israel invades south Lebanon and sets up occupation zone. Most troops withdraw within weeks, leaving behind a 10-km (six-mile) wide zone held by Israel's Lebanese Christian allies, the South Lebanon Army (SLA).

 

January 1979 - Israeli secret service agents detonate a car bomb in west Beirut, killing Ali Hassan Salameh, the security chief of PLO's Fatah group, and four bodyguards. Salameh, known as Abu Hassan, was one of the plotters of a guerrilla attack against Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics in 1972.

 

June 1982 - Israel invades Lebanon. Syrian army ousted from Beirut and thousands of Palestinian guerrillas under Yasser Arafat leave by sea after bloody 10 week-siege.

 

September 1982 - Israel captures Beirut after pro-Israeli Christian leader Bashir Gemayel, who days earlier had been elected president, was assassinated. Hundreds of civilians in Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila are killed by Christian militiamen allowed in by Israeli troops.

 

May 1983 - Israel and Lebanon sign peace agreement under U.S. patronage. Syria opposes it, and it is never ratified.

 

March 1984 - Peace agreement with Israel is cancelled and Lebanese President Amin Gemayel breaks with Israel under Syrian pressure. Hizbollah, the Shi'ite Muslim "Party of God," makes first public appearance.

 

June 1985 - Israel pulls back to a self-declared border security zone in south Lebanon controlled by Israeli forces and their Lebanese militia allies.

 

February 1992 - Israeli helicopter gunships rocket car convoy in south Lebanon, killing Hizbollah leader Sheikh Abbas Musawi, his wife and six-year-old son.

 

1993 - In response to rocket attacks by Hizbollah guerrillas, Israel unleashes "Operation Accountability", a week-long air, artillery and naval blitz.

 

April 1996 - Israel launches 17-day blitz, "Operation Grapes of Wrath", its second blitz against south Lebanon and Hizbollah.

 

June 1999 - SLA retreats from Jezzine enclave north of Israeli zone it held for 14 years.

 

May 2000 - Israel ends 22-year occupation of south Lebanon.

 

July 2006 - Israel strikes Beirut airport and blockades Lebanese ports after Hizbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight.

 

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L13828799.htm

[Larry Pubes]

just read this a bit earlier, some of you may find it interesting..

 

The Palestinian Catastrophe, Then and Now

 

Commentary: On the story we almost never hear about—the Palestinian one—and an anniversary few of us have ever considered

 

By Sandy Tolan

July 10, 2006

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/07/palestinian_catastrophe.html

 

Under the pretext of forcing the release of a single soldier "kidnapped by terrorists" (or, if you prefer, "captured by the resistance"), Israel has done the following: seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices, and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders of the IDF" (Israel Defense Forces); loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza"; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.

 

Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-up Gaza, are in many cases down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security: nearly 10,000 Palestinians locked in Israeli jails, many without charge; 4,000 Gaza and West Bank homes demolished since 2000 and hundreds of acres of olive groves plowed under; three times as many civilians killed as in Israel, many due to "collateral damage" in operations involving the assassination of suspected militants.

 

"Wake up!" shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer from Gaza on San Francisco's "Arab Talk" radio in late June. "The Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our children are born to live. Don't these people have any heart? No feelings at all? The world is silent!"

 

For the Palestinians, Omer's cry speaks to a collective understanding: That the world sees the life of an Arab as infinitely less valuable than that of an Israeli; that no amount of suffering by innocent Palestinians is too much to justify the return of a single Jewish soldier. This understanding, and the rage and humiliation it fuels, has been driven home again and again through decades of shellings, wars, and uprisings past. Indeed Omer's plaintive words form a mantra, echoing all the way back to the first war between the Arabs and the Jews, and especially to 5 searing mid-July days 58 years ago.

 

"The Catastrophe"

 

The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba or the Catastrophe by Palestinians. For generations of Americans raised on the heroic story of Israel's birth, especially as written by Leon Uris in Exodus, there is no place for al-Nakba. Yet this fundamental Palestinian wound, and the power of its memory today, cannot simply be wished away.

 

The obscure anniversary in question, July 11-15, is little known outside of Palestinian memory. Yet it helped forge the fury, militancy, and Palestinian longing for land in exile that helps drive the conflict today. In fact, it's not possible to understand today's firefights without first understanding the Nakba, and especially what transpired under the brutal sun just east of Tel Aviv in the midsummer of 1948.

 

On July 11, 1948, a convoy of halftracks and jeeps from Israeli Commando Battalion Eighty-Nine approached the Arab city of Lydda on the coastal plain of Palestine. The 150 soldiers were part of a large fighting force made up of Holocaust survivors, literally just off the boats and themselves the dispossessed of a European catastrophe, as well as Jews born in Palestine who had sharpened their fighting skills in World War II with the British army. Their jeeps were mounted with Czech- and German-made machine guns, each capable of firing at least 800 rounds per minute. The battalion leader, a young colonel named Moshe Dayan, had passed along orders for a lightning assault that relied on firepower and total surprise.

 

The war had officially begun in May, following months of hostilities between Arabs and Jews. In November 1947, the United Nations had voted to partition Palestine into two states, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. For the Zionist movement, as for many people around the world, this represented a guarantee of a safe haven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. The Arab majority in Palestine, however, wondered why they should be the solution to the Jewish tragedy in Europe. They owned the vast majority of the land, including 80% of its citrus groves and grain fields, and the Arab population that fell on the Jewish side of the partition had no desire to become a minority on their own land. They wanted an Arab-majority state for all the people of Palestine, and they appealed for help from neighboring Arab states to prevent the Jews from establishing the state of Israel.

 

Fighting intensified in the early months of 1948. In April, a massacre by the Jewish militia Irgun in the Arab village of Deir Yassin shot waves of fear through Arab Palestine; this provoked a reprisal massacre by Arabs of Jewish doctors and nurses on the road to Hadassah hospital near Jerusalem. In the meantime, in the wake of Deir Yassin many thousands of Arab villagers fled for safe haven, intending to come back once the hostilities ceased.

 

On May 13, the Arab coastal town of Jaffa fell, and refugees began filling the streets of Lydda and the neighboring town, al-Ramla. The next day, in a speech to the Jewish provisional council, David Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence, and on May 15, Arab armies crossed the borders to launch attacks on the new Jewish state. The Arab and Jewish fighting forces on the ground, contrary to subsequent narratives much-repeated in the West, were relatively equal as the war began. For a time the Arabs appeared to have a slight edge, but during a four-week truce that began on June 11, Israel was able to break a U.N. arms embargo, and as the war resumed in early July, Israel had a decided advantage.

 

In the late afternoon of July 11, the convoy of Battalion Eighty-Nine turned left off a dirt track and roared toward Lydda. At the edge of town they began shooting from the convoy's mounted machine guns -- tens of thousands of bullets in a few minutes. "Everything in their way died," wrote the correspondent for the Chicago Sun Times, in an article headlined "Blitz Tactics Won Lydda." The Commandos were followed by Israel's regular army, which occupied Lydda and brutally put down a brief local uprising: 250 people died, including at most four Israeli soldiers as well as up to 80 unarmed civilians in a local mosque. In the meantime, Israeli planes had strafed the two towns and dropped fliers demanding the Palestinians take flight to the east, toward the kingdom of Transjordan. Local Palestinian doctors worked feverishly, without electricity, using strips of bed sheets for bandages as they struggled to save the wounded.

 

The next day, Major Yitzhak Rabin ordered the expulsion of the Arab civilian population of Lydda and of the neighboring town of al-Ramla.

 

Stumbling into History

 

These expulsions have long been a point of contention for those who see Israel only through the lens of its triumphant emergence after the Holocaust. Leon Uris's mega-bestselling novel, Exodus, which many Americans were raised on, powerfully told one side of the story, that of the birth of Israel out of the Holocaust. Yet we are left knowing nothing of the Arab perspective: their history, their culture, their hopes, and their tragedy in 1948.

 

I've spent much of the last eight years trying to understand the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict from both sides for my book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. I've come to understand that the Nakba is as fundamental to the Palestinian narrative as the Holocaust is to the Israeli one. It is not possible to grasp the depths of the current tragedy, to say nothing of the fury and despair of the Arabs, without understanding the roots of the Palestinian catastrophe.

 

The expulsions from Ramla and Lydda as well as from other Palestinian towns and villages in 1948 is documented in Israeli state, military, and kibbutz archives, and by numerous Israeli historians, including Benny Morris (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Crisis; 1948 and After); Tom Segev (1949: The First Israelis), and Alon Kadish (The Conquest of Lydda, published by the IDF). Further corroboration of the expulsions in Lydda and Ramla comes from the writing of Yigal Allon, then chief of Israel's Palmach (army); by a local kibbutz leader of the day, Israel Galili B; by Rabin himself in his memoirs; and by dozens of interviews I did for The Lemon Tree in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon since 1998.

 

The expulsions of the Palestinians from Lydda and Ramla began en masse on July 13 and continued for three days. The Arabs of al-Ramla, who had surrendered without incident, were put on buses and driven to the front lines of the fighting, where (like the Arabs of Lydda) they were ordered out and told to walk.

 

From Lydda, Palestinians were marched out of town and toward the hills in the general direction of the Christian hill town of Ramallah, more than 20 miles away. Jewish soldiers would later recall a desire to punish the Arabs of Lydda for their aborted uprising; some soldiers confiscated gold from the refugees, and shot in the air behind them to speed their departure. (That same month in an Israeli cabinet meeting, as the historian Benny Morris has documented, minister Aharon Cohen declared that Israeli troops in Lydda had been "ordered" to "take from the expelled Arabs every watch, piece of jewelry or money" so that, arriving completely destitute, they would become a burden on the Arab legion," the army of King Abdullah of neighboring Transjordan.)

 

The Palestinians had planned for a short journey, in miles and in days; many had no time to gather sufficient supplies for the arduous journey ahead. They left behind nearly all their belongings: dishes and vases, leather and soaps, Swedish ovens and copper pots, framed family pictures, spices for makloubeh, and the flour for the dough of their date pastries. They left their fields of wild peas and jasmine, their passiflora and dried scarlet anemone, their mountain lilies that grew between the barley and the wheat. They left their olives and oranges, lemons and apricots, spinach and peppers and okra; their sumac; their indigo.

 

The one thing the Arabs did bring was whatever gold they had stored for safekeeping; it would become their traveling savings bank, their means to stave off starvation in the coming days. They strapped chains, coins, or gold bars to bodies that would seem to grow heavier with each step.

 

At least 30,000 Palestinians, and possibly as many as 50,000, moved through the hills toward Ramallah in the immediate aftermath of their expulsion from Ramla and Lydda. John Bagot Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion, recalled "a blazing day in the coastal plain, the temperature about a hundred degrees in the shade."

 

From Lydda and from al-Ramla, the people went along dirt tracks, camel trails, and open country. The earth was baked hard and hot along the "donkey road." If a donkey can make it, recalled an Arab from Ramla in an interview with me, perhaps they could too. The refugees quickly shed their suitcases, and then their outer clothing. Water ran out early. When they came to a cornfield, some sucked the moisture out of kernels of corn. Several refugee women told me of arriving at a well with a broken rope and removing their dresses to dip them in the stagnant water below so that children could drink from the cloth. One elderly woman -- a teenager at the time -- recalled watching a boy pee into a can, so that his grandmother could drink from it.

 

"We raved onward like a mammoth beast, awkward, clumsy," Reja-e Busailah, a refugee from Lydda, remembered in an essay written 40 years later with a vividness that shows how deeply the event was burned into memory. "I began to hear of new things. I would pass people lying, resting in the heat without shade. I would hear them talk of the old father or grandfather who had been left behind." There were stories of mothers who became delirious and left their babies; of mothers who died while nursing; of a strong young man who carried his grandfather on his back like a sack of potatoes; of a man who took the gold from his old wife and left her to die. "Some would throw a cover on a woman's body," Busaileh wrote. "We would pass dead babies and live babies, all the same, abandoned on the side or in ditches... Someone talked later of having seen a baby still alive on the bosom of a dead woman…. It was only then that I thought to myself that, had I known, I would have carried it instead of the gold."

 

For the old people, and the very young, it was often too much. Busaileh himself was close to giving up. "If only the sun would go away, if only the thirst, if only the gold…I went down again. This time I lay on my back. A woman passed and uttered words of pity as though over someone already dead. I got up ashamed and afraid..."

 

Of all the stories of the Palestinian Nakba, none surpasses this march through the hills from al-Ramla and Lydda 58 years ago this month. "Nobody will ever know how many children died," Glubb would recall in his memoir, A Soldier with the Arabs. The Death March, as the Palestinians call it, along with the massacre at Deir Yassin, represent two of the central traumas that form the Palestinian catastrophe. Countless thousands fled from their villages, many because of "whispering campaigns" by Israeli military intelligence agents, which, following Deir Yassin, were designed to spark Arab fears of another massacre. Tens of thousands more were driven from their homes by force.

 

A Case of Never Again Gone Mad

 

The Nakba is so little known in the west, and its central narrative so contrary to the familiar "Uris history," that I went to extraordinary lengths in my book to document it. My source notes alone come to 30,000 words. My most compelling sources on the expulsions for Western readers will be the Israelis themselves. Rabin, in his memoir, described how in the critical days of mid-July 1948, he asked Ben-Gurion what to do with the civilian population of Ramla and Lydda, and that the prime minister had "waved his hand in a gesture which said, 'Drive them out!'"

 

Yigal Allon, writing in the journal of the Palmach in July 1948, described the military advantages of the mass expulsions: Driving out the citizens of Ramla and Lydda would alleviate the pressure from an armed and hostile population, while clogging the roads toward the Arab Legion front, seriously hampering any effort to retake the towns. Allon also described in detail the psychological operations whereby local kibbutz leaders would "whisper in the ears of some Arabs, that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived," and that "they should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while there is still time... The tactic reached its goal completely

 

The refugees from Ramla and Lydda arrived in exile, transforming the Christian hill town of Ramallah into a repository of misery and trauma. One hundred thousand refugees crowded into school yards, gymnasiums, convents, army barracks, or slept in olive groves, caves, corrals, barnyards, and on open ground along the roadsides. They would, in the end, join more than 600,000 other refugees to form an ever growing, ever more desperate Palestinian diaspora.

 

In the coming years, the rage, humiliation, loss, and longing for home of the exiled refugees would coalesce around a single concept: Return. This, in turn, helped build what the Palestinians would call their liberation movement, whose tactics ever since would be considered the heroic acts of freedom-fighters by one side, and terrorism by another.

 

The trauma of the Nakba has shaped the identity of Palestinians, honed their fury, and built a memory album around stone arches, rusted keys, golden fields, and trees that now no longer exist, and whose mythically abundant fruits grow more bountiful in the imagination with each passing year.

 

In the most recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, as in countless explosions of battles past, the trauma is only re-engaged. Fifty-eight summers after the Nabka -- as Palestinian women again sell off their gold to buy olives and bread; as Israeli planes again drop leaflets with dire warnings for Arab civilians; as doctors lacking medicines or electricity again struggle to rescue the wounded -- a déjà vu settles over the old men and women of the refugee camps, and in the vast diaspora beyond, reminding them of yet another bitter anniversary year.

 

The latest attacks by Israel in Gaza, ostensibly on behalf of a single soldier, recall the comments by extremist Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, in his eulogy for American Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 slaughtered 27 Palestinians praying in the Cave of the Patriarchs, part of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. "One million Arabs," Perrin declared, "are not worth a Jewish fingernail."

 

Israelis, too, are a traumatized people, and Israel's current actions are driven in part by a hard determination, born of the Holocaust, to "never again go like sheep to the slaughter." But if "never again" drives the politics of reprisal, few seem to notice that the reprisals themselves are completely out of scale to the provocation: for every crude Qassam rocket falling usually harmlessly and far from its target, dozens, sometimes hundreds of shells rain down with far more destructive power on the Palestinians. For one missing soldier, a million and a half Gazans are made to suffer. Today, Israel's policy is a case of "never again" gone mad.

 

The irony is that, contrary to helping build the safe harbor they have sought for so long, the Israeli government, just like the U.S. in Iraq, is only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage.

 

Sandy Tolan is the author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2006). He directs the Project on International Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, where he was an I.F. Stone Fellow. He has produced dozens of documentaries for National Public Radio, reported from the Middle East since 1994, and from more than two dozen countries over the last 25 years. He has also served as an oral history consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

[the.crooked]

No' date=' but I find your alacrity to jump to conclusions most disturbing.[/quote']

 

 

im just very leary of anything that goes on these days.

[2342]

Israel’s foreign ministry says it has information that Lebanese guerrillas are trying to transfer the captured Israeli soldiers to Iran, The Associated Press reports. CNN is working to confirm..............http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/13/mideast/index.html

 

Maybe America is behind this after all- and perhaps there was a “drawing on the board” after all……..Christ in a side car…..

 

Iran???? WTF???

[MAR]

that would explain why they took out the airport...