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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 30, 2010 - 11:45am PT
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"Since we are into strait shooting and all maybe you will answer the question you keep running away from:
Would you like to live under the rule of Hamas?
And if not, why not?
Thanks, Skip"
Before I answer that (so as to shut your whining up) let me give you a little humorous history lesson.
Hamas, the evil organization that you quake in fear of, is really an Israeli creation. Funded and encouraged by NuttyYahoo himself. The wise and all powerful Mousad, fearful of the political power of Arafat and his well established Fatah party financed and promoted Hamas while simultaneously crushing Fatah. Then when the US and Israel forced early elections on Gaza they of course elected the organization that was providing them food, medicine and other critically needed social services. That didn't work out the way the power brokers thought it would. So they began strangling Hamas and by extension Gaza. That in return has rapidly radicalized large (but not all) segments of the Hamas political party. Israel has brought this upon themselves and rues the consequences of their own actions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hamas
History of Hamas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Before 1987
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas founder
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin returned to Gaza from Cairo in the 1970s, where he set up Islamic charities, founding Hamas in 1987 as an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. According to the Israeli weekly Koteret Rashit (October 1987), "The Islamic associations as well as the [Islamic university — founded in 1978 in Gaza] had been supported and encouraged by the Israeli military authority" in charge of the (civilian) administration of the West Bank and Gaza. "They [the Islamic associations and the university] were authorized to receive money payments from abroad." By the end of 1992, there were 600 mosques in Gaza. Hamas attracted members through preaching and charitable work before spreading its influence into trade unions, universities, bazaars, professional organizations and local government political races beginning in December 2004. “Thanks to Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad (Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks), the Islamists were allowed to reinforce their presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, the members of Fatah (Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine) and the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression”, according to L'Humanité.[1] Indeed Israel supported and encouraged Hamas' early growth in an effort to undermine the secular Fatah movement of Yasser Arafat.[2] According to UPI, Israel supported Hamas starting in the late 1970s as a "counterbalance to the Palestine Liberation Organization".[3] At that time, Hamas's focus was on "religious and social work". The grassroots movement concentrated on social issues such as exposing corruption, administration of waqf (trusts) and organizing community projects.
In a statement to the Israeli Parliament's (the Knesset) Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday February 12, 2007, Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert said "Netanyahu established Hamas, gave it life, freed Sheikh Yassin and gave him the opportunity to blossom".[4]
Now to answer your dumb ass question that to you is black and white with no qualifying conditions. So here is a qualifier; If I were a disenfranchised and desperate Palestinian living in the Israeli imposed open air prison of Gaza I would most certainly prefer Hamas repression to Israeli occupation. But I know you won't grasp what I am saying since in the myth based reality you reside in Israel is a shinning star of virtue and the ragged dirt niggers are all terrorists from birth.
History will prove you wrong. Or you could try to expand your perceptions by learning.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 30, 2010 - 01:46pm PT
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Because they are trapped in a Catch 22 imposed by Israel.
Their legitimate claim of the Right of Return will be considered, by Israel, even more completely dead if any other country takes responsibility for them. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 30, 2010 - 01:51pm PT
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Hey Fats, how cool is this?
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/idf-career-soldier-suspected-of-spying-for-hezbollah-1.299184
Published 14:49 30.06.10Latest update 14:49 30.06.10
IDF career soldier suspected of spying for Hezbollah
Suspect allegedly participated in drug smuggling gang that transferred sensitive military information to Hezbollah-linked figure in Lebanon.
By Anshel Pfeffer and Jack Khoury
Tags: IDF Hezbollah Lebanon
A career Israel Defense Forces soldier is suspected of spying for the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, the authorities revealed on Wednesday. The soldier, a resident of northern Israel, is suspected of having taken part in a gang that smuggled drugs from Lebanon and transferred sensitive military information on Israeli security to a Hezbollah-linked figure.
IDF career soldier suspected of spying for Hezbollah
Photo by: Yaron Kaminsky
The military police arrested the suspect several weeks ago, following a joint investigation with the Galilee police. He was brought before a judge for another extension of his remand on Wednesday at the military court in Haifa.
Meanwhile, five additional suspects have been arrested in connection with the case. Their remands were extended Wednesday at the Acre Magistrate's Court.
A senior military police official said after the arrests that "[the suspect] was aware of the fact that the information he was passing along would be used by Hezbollah to harm the security of the state."
The attorneys representing the civilians arrested in the case said that their clients vehemently deny the charges against them. They said, furthermore, that the case has been blown out of proportion and that their clients were arrested only based on the testimony of the main suspect.
The identity of the suspect is still under a gag order.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 30, 2010 - 02:03pm PT
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And in all seriousness this is one of the most clear headed assessment of the Israeli/Palestinian condition and it's by an Israeli. I can't wait to be called an Anti-Semite.
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/strenger-than-fiction-israel-must-admit-to-its-mistakes-1.299206
Published 16:25 30.06.10Latest update 16:25 30.06.10
Strenger Than Fiction / Israel must admit to its mistakes
Like Abbas admitted that the second intifada was one of the worst Palestinian mistakes, Israel needs to admit to its worst mistake: the settlement enterprise.
By Carlo Strenger
Tags: Israel settlements Mahmoud Abbas David Grossman
A few days ago I leafed through David Grossman’s collection of essays Death as a Way of Life. It was published in 2003, in the midst of the second intifada, after the failure of the Camp David Summit. The most unsettling paragraph in the book is right at the beginning, in which Grossman writes of the silence that everybody here feels, somewhere, within the deafening noise of the media, political slogans, gun and mortar-fire:
PA President Mahmoud Abbas and U.S. peace envoy George Mitchell
Photo by: Archive
“This is the empty space in which every person, Israeli or Palestinian, knows with piercing certainty. All that he does not want or does not dare to know. There, within himself, he understands - even if he denies it at the top of his lungs, with shouts, even gunshots – that his life is being dissipated, squandered in a pointless struggle, and that his identity and self-respect and the one life he has to live are being endlessly expropriated from him in a conflict that could have been resolved long ago.”
Since 2003 the sense of pointlessness has only increased, and so has the pain over the waste of human potential and human lives. Grossman’s words reverberated in my soul as I witnessed Israel gradually giving up on the blockade on Gaza. Another instance of pointless, and in this case, inhuman struggle. Experts agree that, if anything, the blockade only strengthened Hamas by allowing the Islamist organization to take virtual control of all goods smuggled through the flourishing tunnel system, and thus gain a stranglehold over all of Gaza.
Now Israel is letting go, and yet no one is asking why our governments keep making wrong decisions. Public "wisdom" is that this is not a time for criticism; we must be patriotic because we are under attack. The problem, it is said, are not Israel’s misguided policies, but the external delegitimization campaign against Israel. Hence, here in Israel, we need to support the government, no matter what. This erects a barrier against critical thinking that can generate alternatives, and hence the same mistakes are bound to be repeated.
What can be done to break the chain of wrong decisions? Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recently gave an interesting example for this. A number of weeks ago he said in an interview on Egyptian TV that the second intifada was the greatest mistake in Palestinian history. This admission is significant because it is one of the first times that a Palestinian leader, instead of harping exclusively on Palestinian victimhood, assigned Palestinians some responsibility for their own fate.
The second intifada was indeed a terrible mistake. Two years of carnage wiped out Israel’s peace camp and built a case for the right wing: If Israel gives up territory to the Palestinians, the result is a wave of terror. The ongoing rocket fire into Southern Israel after the disengagement from Gaza ruined the little that was left of the peace camp. The Palestinians are indeed quite directly responsible for the move of Israel’s electorate to the right. If Abbas were to repeat his statement on Israeli TV, he would do much to build a case for the leftovers of the peace camp, possibly convincing them that it was worth taking a risk again for peace.
What admission of responsibility would be of use for Israel, both internally and externally? Israel would have to admit that the most terrible mistake it has made over the last thirty six years is to allow the building of settlements in the West-Bank. It is easy to point the finger only at the settlers and at the right-wing, but we shouldn’t forget that the Rabin and Barak governments expanded settlements more than any other government, as Akiva Eldar and Idith Zertal have shown in their book Lords of the Land.
The ongoing settlement activity eroded moderate Palestinians' belief that Israel really intended to allow the establishment of a dignified, contiguous Palestinian state. At best, most Palestinians felt, Israel would allow some kind of Bantustan.
The settlements are also the reason why Israel now finds itself so deeply internationally isolated. The argument that "the world condemns us no matter what" is based on a dangerous simplification. It doesn’t distinguish between those who would love to see Israel dismantled and look for any justification to delegitimize Israel, and between Western States who are basically friendly toward Israel, but demand that it behaves according to the standards of the West. The West has come to see colonization as illegitimate. And while the West accepts and supports Israel’s existence in pre-1967 borders, it is constantly taken aback and infuriated by the settlements, because they cannot be justified by Israel’s security concerns and are indeed a colonial enterprise.
I cannot see any Israeli leader who would make this admission clearly. He or she would instantly become unelectable. It would be too heavy a burden for Israel’s collective psyche to truly say, with Grossman, that so many lives have been squandered in a pointless project, based on a combination of messianic beliefs and misguided power-politics. To say that Israel has wasted enormous human, financial, political, moral and military resources in the Byzantine structure of double road systems and settlements. To admit that it has caused enormous human suffering for Palestinians over the last decades.
There is no alternative but to learn to live with the pain that, as David Grossman wrote in 2003, all this suffering was for absolutely nothing; now we are adding another seven years of horrible mistakes. Only when we are able to face this pain, will Israel finally be able to stop making the same mistakes time and again. And then, gradually, a dialogue with Palestinians may emerge in which both sides will be able to admit that, far from just being victims, both Israelis and Palestinians have simply been wrong, countless times.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 30, 2010 - 02:17pm PT
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Why won't it change?
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 30, 2010 - 09:40pm PT
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How can it be a clash of Civilizations if you consider the other side completely uncivilized?
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Mimi
climber
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Jun 30, 2010 - 09:47pm PT
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Good point.
But alas, we are all still savages.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jun 30, 2010 - 09:55pm PT
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Gandhi was once asked what he thought about western civilization, and he is said to have replied that he thought it would be a good idea.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 30, 2010 - 10:34pm PT
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Ha, ha, ha, Anders, that's great. What he meant was that it would be a good idea if the west was civilized. It went right over the heads of the west at the time.
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Mimi
climber
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Jun 30, 2010 - 10:39pm PT
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Yes, he probably thought of Britain or Western Civilization as an oxymoron, but he was striving for the same 'western' freedoms for his people against the caste system. Even more entrenched than Imperialism.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Jun 30, 2010 - 10:41pm PT
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Yes it was a comment of savvy social and nuanced political understanding.
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Mimi
climber
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Jun 30, 2010 - 10:42pm PT
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Are you quoting Axelrod again?
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Uh oh, don't tell Fattrad.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/russia-to-deliver-armored-vehicles-to-palestinian-authority-1.299428
Published 16:25 01.07.10Latest update 16:25 01.07.10
Russia to deliver armored vehicles to Palestinian Authority
A Russian foreign ministry spokesman says armored personnel carriers to be delivered to Jordan and transferred to PA 'in the coming days.'
By Haaretz Service and Reuters
Tags: Israel news Russia Palestinian Authority Hamas
Russia will deliver 50 armored personnel carriers to the Palestinian Authority in the near future, a spokesman for Russia's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.
"In the coming days 50 armored personnel carriers will be delivered to Jordan and then will be handed over to Palestinian security forces in the West Bank," spokesman Andrei Nesterenko told reporters.
Russia first offered to supply armored personnel carriers to the Palestinians for internal security as early as 2005, but Israel initially opposed the delivery.
Moscow has also been increasing its efforts of late to include Hamas – the Gaza Strip rival of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas - in Middle East peace talks.
A Russian tank rolls off a trailer as it prepares to take part in practice for a military parade in Moscow on May 4, 2010.
Photo by: Reuters
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov met earlier this week and reportedly disagreed over Moscow's increased efforts to include Hamas in Mideast peace talks.
"In all our talks with Hamas we have tried to convince them to switch to the political track, and support the Arab peace initiative," Lavrov said on Tuesday.
The two ministers also reportedly differed on how to proceed with peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, with the Russian foreign minister saying that negotiations must be advanced through the formation of a joint commission that would also include representatives of the Quartet and the Arab League.
Lavrov also warned that "in the absence of progress in the political track extremist elements in the Palestinian nation will be strengthened."
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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OBama flexes his diplomatic muscle and Israel complies. Perhaps there is hope after all.
And it looks like the extremist Liberman is being cut out of the loop and distanced. Ha, ha, ha.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/report-obama-pressured-israel-and-turkey-to-hold-secret-talks-1.299357
9:28 01.07.10
Report: Obama pressured Israel and Turkey to hold secret talks
Barak opposed idea of Ben-Eliezer meeting Turkish FM, according to associates; Lieberman furious with Netanyahu for not informing him of plan, but says matter won't lead Yisrael Beiteinu to quit coalition.
By Barak Ravid and Haaretz Service
Tags: Barack Obama Turkey Israel news Gaza flotilla
A senior Israeli official's secret meeting with the Turkish foreign minister in Switzerland was apparently held due to pressure from the Obama administration, sources in Jerusalem said Thursday.
The White House prompted and coordinated the meeting between Israeli Industry, Trade, and Labor Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the source confirmed in response to a report in the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.
Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Turkish FM Ahmet Davutoglu.
Photo by: AP
The meeting was held Wednesday without permission from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who reacted furiously to the news that such talks were held without his knowledge or consent.
Associates of Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he had opposed the meeting and told Prime Minister Netanyahu as much, though ultimately decided not to veto the matter.
The defense minister had declined advice to hold his own meeting with the Turkish envoy to the U.S. or even Davutoglu during his recent visit to Washington, the associates added.
Davutoglu took off for Zurich on a private plane to maintain the clandestine nature of the talks, Hurriyet reported on Thursday, and the conference room was booked under a fake name.
During their two-hour meeting, Davutoglu reportedly reiterated Turkey's demand that Israel apologize for its May 31 raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla that left nine Turkish activists dead.
After learning about the meeting, Lieberman warned that the move had damaged his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"The foreign minister takes a very serious view of the fact that this occurred without informing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs," Lieberman's office said in a statement immediately following the report. "This is an insult to the norms of accepted behavior and a heavy blow to the confidence between the foreign minister and the prime minister."
Lieberman on Thursday rejected Netanyahu's bid to meet, though denied speculations that his Yisrael Beiteinu party was planning to leave the coalition over the matter.
"The system of considerations here must be different… this is a big, strong and stable coalition… this is the time to think big and not just about what the headline will be in the newspaper on Friday."
The foreign minister said his response could not be considered an unwarranted "outburst", telling Israel Radio: "The Prime Minister's Bureau should have considered and dealt with this matter differently, or at the very least consulted [with me]."
"Suddenly we discover that the defense minister and other senior officials were in on the matter and that the whole process was coordinated with the U.S.," he said. "When you heard all these details and every half an hour there are more details, it becomes completely unreasonable."
Ben-Eliezer, a Knesset member of Defense Minister Ehud Barak's Labor party, has over the past few weeks expressed concern over Israel's deteriorating relationswith Turkey. Ties between the once-close allies have come close to breakdown following a deadly raid by Israeli commandos on a Turkish-flagged aid ship a month ago.
Wednesday's talks were apparently aimed at repairing the diplomatic damage.
Later on Wednesday, Netanyahu's office released a statement that cited technical grounds for the failure to inform Lieberman of the meeting in Zurich.
Turkish officials had approached Ben-Eliezer personally with a request for an informal discussion, which the prime minister had seen no cause to block, the statement said.
"In recent weeks there have been several attempts at contacts with Turkey of which the foreign ministry was aware," the statement said. "The foreign minister was not informed for technical reasons only. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is working in full cooperation with the foreign minister and will clarify the incident with him."
Lieberman's hard-line Yisrael Beiteinu party is the second largest in the government coalition, behind Netanyahu's Likud. But the foreign minister's right-wing views have made him unpalatable to many of Israel's allies and he has often taken a back seat internationally, leaving high-level diplomacy to Netanyahu and Barak.
Following Israel's May 31 raid, Ben-Eliezer broke with other ministers in demanding an international inquiry into the incident, in which nine pro-Palestinian activists with Turkish citizenship were killed.
Israel is conducting its own probe, led by a former Supreme Court judge and monitored by two international observers.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Iran: Persian, mostly Shiite, often fundamental.
Turkey: Turkish, mostly secular Sunnis.
Palestine: Arab, mixed Sunni and Shiite, mixed secular and fundamental.
Wild suggestions that the Palestinians somehow have much in common with either Turks or Iranians need to address the long-term differences between those peoples, going back centuries or more.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Couchmaster posted;
"Slant-bias heads up: Written by a former Israeli ambassador."
That is all you need to know. Slant Bias....
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Published 10:51 02.07.10Latest update 10:51 02.07.10
How to win with Hamas
Never has Israel had an enemy so perfectly attuned to the Jewish state's weaknesses, so impervious to its strengths. For more than 20 years - ever since Israel inadvertently midwifed the founding of Hamas at the outset of the first intifada - the organization has leveraged Israel's every tactic into tangible, stepwise political gain.
By Bradley Burston
Traditionally, Israel's only truly abundant and reliable resource has been enemies. But never one quite like Hamas. No matter what Israel has tried - undermining its power base, annihilating its leadership, sapping its international backing, bleeding it, jailing it, starving it, expelling it - Hamas has always emerged with new might.
Never has Israel had an enemy so perfectly attuned to the Jewish state's weaknesses, so impervious to its strengths. For more than 20 years - ever since Israel inadvertently midwifed the founding of Hamas at the outset of the first intifada - the organization has leveraged Israel's every tactic into tangible, stepwise political gain.
Now, at long last, Benjamin Netanyahu has a chance to beat Hamas at its own game. He can free Gilad Shalit. Or he can do nothing, and lose again. It is finally time for Israel to radically revise its thinking about Hamas. To say that Israel's policies toward it have failed, is to only hint at the magnitude of the failure.
In the last decade alone, resolute and wrongheaded governments have paved the way for one Hamas victory after another. They allowed Sharon his walk in the Temple Mount, putting an effective end to peace talks. They crippled Fatah-Palestinian Authority forces in an onslaught at the onset of the ensuing second intifada, leaving Hamas untouched and emboldened. They denigrated and shunned the PA in the disengagement from Gaza, which allowed Hamas to claim the withdrawal as a personal triumph. They resisted the deployment of international peacekeepers to curb rocket fire. The overwhelming force applied during the Gaza War - against a Hamas enemy which in large part refrained from combat, led to serious civilian losses and international condemnation. Most recently, and most profoundly, the siege of Gaza intended to topple Hamas has backfired into one of Hamas' principle triumphs, especially since the flotilla fiasco.
Why is it that time after time, Israel sets a trap for Hamas and is shocked to find itself falling straight into it? Beyond everything else, our inability to successfully confront Hamas has to do with that most tragic and deep-seated of our misconceptions regarding the Palestinians: the unshakable, eternal faith among Israelis that "we know the Arabs." Yet the actual equation is simple: It is Hamas that knows Israelis like no one else. Indeed, Israelis, at this point in time, don't even know themselves.
The long war with Hamas has changed Israel, and for the worse. It has in many ways robbed the country of the ability to make decisions courageously and independently. From suicide bombings to rocket attacks to its demands for Gilad Shalit - Hamas has made many Israelis grow callous to the plight of Palestinians, as a whole, and to lose faith both in the efficacy of their own government and in the very possibility of peace.
Hamas remembers and exploits what we have forgotten: the underlying dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas understands that the basic motivating force of post-Holocaust Jews is fear, and that the basic motivating force of post-Nakba Palestinians is humiliation. Hamas understands that Israel's attempts to address its fears often cause Palestinians additional humiliation. And Hamas knows even better that Palestinians' attempts to redress their humiliation often deepen Israelis' fears.
On the face of it, Israel's aversion to meeting Hamas' terms for the release of Shalit are well founded. Many of the prisoners whose release the organization is demanding have commanded horrifying terror operations, and may even press for new attacks upon their release. And Hamas will certainly claim as a victory a deal predicated on its own terms.
But this week, two of the men who put Hamas commanders behind bars, two men who know the risks better than anyone - former Shin Bet chiefs Yaakov Peri and Ami Ayalon - publicly endorsed agreeing to the organization's terms. They declared that when all factors are taken into consideration, Israel must give precedence to the most fundamental promise it makes to its soldiers: to bring them home if captured, no matter what.
It is time for Israel to stop allowing Hamas to change it for the worse. The present government, adopting the organization's antipathy to peace talks, cites Hamas as an excuse for avoiding those talks. The previous government, declaring all-out war on Hamas, adopted its practice of waging war on civilians.
It is time for Israel to once again be Israel. To stick by the principles that once made this nation strong. To abide by the promises it made to those who are willing to risk everything in its name.
The irony is that to a remarkable degree, Hamas keeps its promises. Israel must do no less. The nation that cannot honor the faith of its own soldiers and their families is already dying at heart. Where Israel fails to be true to itself, Hamas wins.
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