this is where I get frustrated, you are twisting jews and zionist to be one. I think your definition of zionist is not a very positive one and by combining the term with the word Jew you are painting Jewish people in negative light. There is no need to include the word Jew in your statement. In my opinion it would be like saying Asian/ rapists or something to that degree
Not all Jews are zionists.
No shit, Sherlock. Did you ignore me asking that the distinction be made more clearly by upstanding Jews refusing to get so defensive when Americans challenge the overreaching Zionist agenda? To his credit, Paycheck seems to do just that. Why can't you and HAZ and Alien do the same?
Plus re-read the context of the Jews/Zionists coupling...which points to BOTH Jews and Zionists as being manipulated by ulterior motives.
You seem to expect people to assume such an extreme position, as if we are supposed to entirely disconnect Zionism from from anything having to do with Judaism. But that's not the case, is it?
this is where I get frustrated, you are twisting jews and zionist to be one. I think your definition of zionist is not a very positive one and by combining the term with the word Jew you are painting Jewish people in negative light. There is no need to include the word Jew in your statement. In my opinion it would be like saying Asian/ rapists or something to that degree
Not all Jews are zionists.
No shit, Sherlock. Did you ignore me asking that the distinction be made more clearly by upstanding Jews refusing to get so defensive when Americans challenge the overreaching Zionist agenda? To his credit, Paycheck seems to do just that. Why can't you and HAZ and Alien do the same?
Plus re-read the context of the Jews/Zionists coupling...which points to BOTH Jews and Zionists as being manipulated by ulterior motives.
You seem to expect people to assume such an extreme position, as if we are supposed to entirely disconnect Zionism from from anything having to do with Judaism. But that's not the case, is it?
Now deal with it, please.
OH god is this the point where things get ugly again?
its simple wordplay and you keep doing it. I'm not asking for a disconnect, but you keep linking the 2 as if you can't have one without the other.
you mention that both jews and Zionists are being manuipulated by alterior motives, I don't quite understand where your coming from with that. The thing is Jews are much more than just zionists by by grouping the ethnic group/ religious group with the zionists you are making it so that we are one and the same.
And for clarification can you please state a definition of what Zionist means to you?
But crazy folks just don't listen...la la la la la la la la la la la la la la...AlienIVERSON...la la la la la la la la la la la la la...DJ Cosmo...la la la la la la la la la la la la la....AlienIVERSON...la la la la la la la la la la la la la...DJ Cosmo...la la la la la la la la la la la la la...Now what?
this is where I get frustrated, you are twisting jews and zionist to be one. I think your definition of zionist is not a very positive one and by combining the term with the word Jew you are painting Jewish people in negative light. There is no need to include the word Jew in your statement. In my opinion it would be like saying Asian/ rapists or something to that degree
Not all Jews are zionists.
No shit, Sherlock. Did you ignore me asking that the distinction be made more clearly by upstanding Jews refusing to get so defensive when Americans challenge the overreaching Zionist agenda? To his credit, Paycheck seems to do just that. Why can't you and HAZ and Alien do the same?
Plus re-read the context of the Jews/Zionists coupling...which points to BOTH Jews and Zionists as being manipulated by ulterior motives.
You seem to expect people to assume such an extreme position, as if we are supposed to entirely disconnect Zionism from from anything having to do with Judaism. But that's not the case, is it?
Now deal with it, please.
OH god is this the point where things get ugly again?
its simple wordplay and you keep doing it. I'm not asking for a disconnect, but you keep linking the 2 as if you can't have one without the other.
you mention that both jews and Zionists are being manuipulated by alterior motives, I don't quite understand where your coming from with that. The thing is Jews are much more than just zionists by by grouping the ethnic group/ religious group with the zionists you are making it so that we are one and the same.
And for clarification can you please state a definition of what Zionist means to you?
The dictionary definition works for me:
Zi??on??ism n. A Jewish[/b] movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish[/b] homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel.
I do not hate Jews. America is kind enough to help countries when they run into problems. I???m very proud of that. However, America has been funding???to the tune of $3 billion per year--Israel???s endless wars with its neighbors for too long.
Someone mentioned, Egypt which has been a close 2nd--at about $2.5 billion--for a number of years. There are clear reasons to have access to the Suez etc, but again this amount is way overkill.
There are no other countries receiving aid at those levels (accept Iraq and Afghanistan during FY 2004).
I always say, ???Israel, we got your back, but you need to start paying your own way.???
However, America has been funding???to the tune of $3 billion per year--Israel???s endless wars with its neighbors for too long.
The aid program for Israel that you disdain started as a result of a peace treaty forged with one of the agressors of "Israel's endless wars." And 20 out of the 22 states of the Arab league are still technically at war with Israel. Throughout the 1990s the Jewish state succeeded in opening trade missions in Qatar and Tunisia. But for the most part the Nasserite stance of the rest of the Arab world has not ceased. It has only changed insofar as now instead of raising armies to drive the Jews to the sea militarily they are funding the most egregious example of institutionalized child abuse the world has known since I don't know pre-union factories. Seriously, Israel's foreign minister does not raise money for the families of suicide bombers attacking civilians in Riyadh on state run television, that's Prince Nayaf in Saudi Arabia. I think most Americans would be proud that they are supporting a state that survives against these odds. To pretend it's none of our business is to shirk the responsibilities of leading the civilized world.
You always make good sense until you slip in this little neo-con codes.
That's where we will NEVER agree.
I'm not going to say you are wrong and presume I am right, but that whole neo-con sole superpower stuff does not make sense. For example, we are less than 5% of world population. We barely make anything these days. We pretty much manage money and try to tell people what to do. We are consumers mostly. Yet somehow, also a superpower. Hmm? IMO--that's walking on thin ice. Or should I say driving a tank on thin ice. Not very smart. Jesus Moses I hope I'm wrong.
However, America has been funding???to the tune of $3 billion per year--Israel???s endless wars with its neighbors for too long.
The aid program for Israel that you disdain started as a result of a peace treaty forged with one of the agressors of "Israel's endless wars." And 20 out of the 22 states of the Arab league are still technically at war with Israel. Throughout the 1990s the Jewish state succeeded in opening trade missions in Qatar and Tunisia. But for the most part the Nasserite stance of the rest of the Arab world has not ceased. It has only changed insofar as now instead of raising armies to drive the Jews to the sea militarily they are funding the most egregious example of institutionalized child abuse the world has known since I don't know pre-union factories. Seriously, Israel's foreign minister does not raise money for the families of suicide bombers attacking civilians in Riyadh on state run television, that's Prince Nayaf in Saudi Arabia. I think most Americans would be proud that they are supporting a state that survives against these odds. To pretend it's none of our business is to shirk the responsibilities of leading the civilized world.
Sorry Homie Israel is just as bad at this as the terrorists... the Israeli army is notorious for blatantly attacking unarmed civilians...
The Jewish/Zionist/Christ-Killer infiltration of Aryan mall rides continues. Here we see another strutter advancing the cause. Archaic, I'm sorry, but like you said, this was inevitable.
The Jewish/Zionist/Christ-Killer infiltration of Aryan mall rides continues. Here we see another strutter advancing the cause. Archaic, I'm sorry, but like you said, this was inevitable.
The Jewish/Zionist/Christ-Killer infiltration of Aryan mall rides continues. Here we see another strutter advancing the cause. Archaic, I'm sorry, but like you said, this was inevitable.
for the most part, i agree, but what guzzo was refering to is "ones own state" where one refers to a particular ethnicity. when rights and freedoms are extended or withheld from someone based on their citizenship status, it is indeed nationalism. when rights and freedoms are extended or withheld from someone based on their race or ethnicity, it is racism.
The dictionary definition works for me:
Zi??on??ism n. A Jewish movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel.
Maybe a little classic Zionist political philosophy would help clear this up (we often forget the ideological underpinnings of the movement amidst talk of foreign aid and arms sales).
As many of the original Zionist thinkers maintainted, the Jews are a nation. The Jewish religion is merely one aspect of their national identity, others being a common language and history. Israel, as national home to the Jewish people, does not base its immigration policies on ethnicity, but rather on nationality. Take it or leave it, but the Irish, Italians, Germans and countless other governments define their citizenship criteria based largely on national identity. The US, it's easy for us to forget, is an exception in this regard, as our "nationality" is based on immigration and civic participation, etc.
America is kind enough to help countries when they run into problems. I???m very proud of that. However, America has been funding???to the tune of $3 billion per year--Israel???s endless wars with its neighbors for too long.
1948 War of Independence: Started by neighboring Arab states and Palestinians.
1967 Six-Day War: Started by neighboring Arab states.
1973 Yom Kippur War: Started by neighboring Arab states.
The Jewish/Zionist/Christ-Killer infiltration of Aryan mall rides continues. Here we see another strutter advancing the cause. Archaic, I'm sorry, but like you said, this was inevitable.
there's a little terrorist sneaking up behind the ride!!... watch out!!
Sorry Homie Israel is just as bad at this as the terrorists... the Israeli army is notorious for blatantly attacking unarmed civilians...
The Israeli army is notorious among pseudo scholars and apologists for terror for blatantly attacking unarmed civilians. Indeed you can find long discourses on the subject in the Egyptian media right alongside columns reviving the blood libel. But the facts are slightly different. The worst example of such atrocities involve the massacre of Sabra and Shetila. The offense in this case was that the Israeli military allowed Philangist militias to infiltrate the refugee camps at night and slaughter whole families. I might add that for this indirect and awful crime Israel's defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon was summarily dismissed from his post. Contrast that say with the plotters of the Sbarro pizzeria bombing who have streets named after them in Gaza. Indeed if you look at the actual UN reports and casualty statistics say for Israel's operations against Jenin you find that very few innocents were actually killed, somewhere along the lines of 21 people most of whom were firing at the soldiers. At the time howeber Yasser Abd Rabbo claimed that thousands had been slaughtered. If anything America could learn so much from Israel about how a democracy fights a war against terrorists.
America is kind enough to help countries when they run into problems. I???m very proud of that. However, America has been funding???to the tune of $3 billion per year--Israel???s endless wars with its neighbors for too long.
1948 War of Independence: Started by neighboring Arab states and Palestinians.
1967 Six-Day War: Started by neighboring Arab states.
1973 Yom Kippur War: Started by neighboring Arab states.
2000 Al-Aqsa Intifada: Started by Palestinians.
Just sayin'.
interesting. i mean, im ignorant to the whole thing, but are you saying that these "arab states" just up and decided to start some shit over nothing? seems odd.
Marwan Hassib Barghouti, on behalf of the Palestinian People, Plaintiff
- Versus -
The State of Israel, Defendant
Statement of Indictment
The State of Israel is directly and indirectly criminally responsible for committing specific acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, including uprooting Palestinians by military attacks, arbitrary arrests and illegal imprisonment, administrative detention, attacks on women, children and the elderly, systematic and wanton destruction of property and homes, systematic expropriation and dispossession, violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, including assassinations, confiscation of lands and property, creation of separate reserves and Bantustans, disrupting public life and terrorizing a whole population, including through acts of collective punishment and reprisals, racial discrimination, stealing, looting and plundering, infliction of serious bodily or mental harm, including torture, ill-treatment, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, mutilation, causing death and serious injury, deliberate imposition of living conditions calculated to cause physical destruction in whole or in part, approving and implementing legislative measures calculated to prevent Palestinians from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of Palestinians, exploitation of labor, persecution of organizations and members, depriving persons of fundamental rights and freedoms because they oppose military occupation, colonialism, or apartheid, and other criminal acts.
Violated Laws, Treaties, and Conventions
The State of Israel is criminally responsible for crimes, which are stated to be the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. These include:
The crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression as defined and specified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, as corrected by the proc??s-verbaux of 10 November 1998 and 12 July 1999.
Violations of 85 United Nations Security Council Resolutions
Violations of the following:
Charter of the United Nations;
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;
Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity;
Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War;
Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War;
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts;
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts;
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights;
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms;
Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples;
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination;
International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid;
Convention against Discrimination in Education;
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women;
Convention on the Political Rights of Women;
Convention on the Rights of the Child;
Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners;
Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners;
Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment;
United Nations Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of Liberty;
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
Principles on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
Principles of Medical Ethics Relevant to the Role of Health Personnel, particularly Physicians, in the Protection of Prisoners and Detainees against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials;
Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials;
Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers;
United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice;
Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary;
Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions.
Specific charges against the State of Israel
I. War crimes and crimes against humanity
1. The State of Israel and its predecessor agents have committed various acts of genocide, killing thousands of Palestinian civilians, causing serious bodily and mental harm to thousands of Palestinians, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring physical destruction, including but not limited to the following cases:
2. Between 1948 and 1949, the State of Israel killed at least 13,000 Palestinians. During the June 1967 war, the State of Israel killed, although official figures have never been released, at least 15,000 Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians.
3. In Lebanon, the State of Israel killed over 29,500 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians, 40% were children. During various invasions, the State of Israel forcibly evicted more than 100,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
4. Between December 1987 and September 1993, the State of Israel killed over 1,300 Palestinian civilians, including over a quarter under the age of 16, wounded more than 100,000, and demolished 2,089 homes. Bet
ween 1993 until the end of 1999, the State of Israel has killed 492 Palestinian civilians. Between 1993 and the end of 1999, the State of Israel has demolished approximately 1,000 Palestinian homes, leaving more than 5,000 Palestinians homeless.
5. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel and its army and citizens have killed 1,639 Palestinians, including 336 children.
6. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel has killed at least 103 Palestinians, of which half were simply bystanders, including women and children, in state-sponsored assassinations.
7. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel has killed more than 550 Palestinians through shelling and bombardments of civilian and public infrastructure, homes, schools and other places. The State of Israel has caused death and injury to more Palestinians at checkpoints and due to prevention of medical access or restrictions of movement.
8. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel has severely injured, maimed and wounded at least 20,000 Palestinians, leaving more than 2,000 Palestinians permanently disabled. In that same period, the State of Israel demolished more than 985 Palestinian homes.
9. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel has launched military attacks on Palestinian civilians. These attacks include shootings, shelling and bombings in their homes, schools, universities, hospitals, field clinics, and workplaces. The State of Israel targeted clearly marked ambulances and paramedics, journalists, and human rights defenders. The State of Israel has used heavy weaponry and ammunition against Palestinians, including bombs, mortar shells, tank shells, air-to-ground and ground-to-ground missiles fired from attack helicopters and F-16 warplanes, naval warships, tanks and armored personnel carriers. The State of Israel is also responsible for the death of Palestinians, who have been shot and killed by Israeli snipers, shooting high-velocity live ammunitions at civilians in civilian areas. In this period, the State of Israel has killed and injured a disproportionate number of women and children, clearly-marked medical personnel, human rights defenders and journalists.
10. Since 1967, the State of Israel has caused casualties by exploding objects and flares, including objects thrown from military jeeps and helicopters, mines and explosives, and flammable objects. These objects have either exploded, causing shrapnel wounds, or caught fire, causing severe burns. For example, on February 13, 1989, Iktimal Dim (6) was killed, and her brother, 'Isam Dim (10), injured by shrapnel from an exploding device thrown from an Israeli helicopter hovering above the village of Tayasir. Since 1967, a great number of Palestinians have been wounded or killed after stepping on mines or other explosives planted by the Israeli army.
11. Since 1948, the State of Israel ordered and encouraged its military's brutal use of physical force against unarmed, mostly young Palestinians. This includes the systematic beating of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers and police, which gained particular notoriety in 1988, after the late Yitzhak Rabin, then Defense Minister, announced a policy of 'force, might, and beatings' on January 18, 1988. Palestinians have been beaten randomly, without any apparent connection to protests, they were often taken from their homes or off the streets and brutally assaulted. Beatings were also typically carried out by groups of Israeli soldiers acting in concert rather than individually. Beating incidents have taken place in situations where the victim offered no resistance. For example, on 19 and 21 January 1988, in the village of Huwarra, Israeli soldiers rounded up twenty residents, drove them to a remote area, bound and gagged them, and then deliberately broke their arms and legs. The lack of proper investigations into cases where Palestinians have been severely injured or killed as a result of beatings further confirms the fact that beatings are a policy of the State of Israel.
12. Between 1949 and 1956, the State of Israel killed at least 5,000 Palestinian refugees, mostly farmers trying to return home, either to live, see relatives or to harvest their crops.
13. The State of Israel has imposed severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, including through closures, besiegement, curfews and the use of trenches, fences, iron gates and walls. The State of Israel controlled, restricted, closed and altogether denied Palestinian access to key facilities, goods and services, including humanitarian aid and assistance, including hospitals and field clinics, basic supplies such as medicines, food and water, education, denial of Palestinian access to schools and universities, denial of Palestinian access to workplaces, businesses, agricultural areas, industries, family and community life.
14. The State of Israel has assaulted Palestinian women in various ways, including illegal and indiscriminate use of lethal force by Israeli military authorities, resulting in deaths or injuries, the deliberate abuse of tear gas by Israeli military, resulting in suffocation, health problems, and miscarriages among Palestinian women, soldiers' brutality, sexual harassment and intimidation by Israeli soldiers, the use of obscene language, exposure, urinating on women, molestation and attempted rape, arrest, interrogation and torture inside Israeli prisons, hostage taking, expulsion, obstruction and harassment of women's committees and charitable organizations, raids on women's centers, kindergartens and cooperatives.
15. The State of Israel has deliberately induced humanitarian crisis, with impoverishment of Palestinian civilians and starvation policies. The State of Israel has restricted movement, denied and hindered access to humanitarian aid and assistance, food and water, medical supplies and aid, hospitals, work and education.
II. Denial of Health Care
16. The State of Israel has allowed its military to beat and detain wounded Palestinians, obstruct attempts by medical personnel and others to aid critically injured Palestinians, delay ambulances transporting injured Palestinians, physically mistreat doctors and other health care professionals, mistreat wounded Palestinians, raid medical facilities, shoot at ambulances, and adopt measures which have reduced the quality and availability of health services. These abuses illustrate a disregard for the most fundamental humanitarian norms on the part of the State of Israel.
III. Expulsions
17. The State of Israel has systematically dispossessed, uprooted and expelled Palestinian communities, in whole or in part, forcing remaining Palestinian communities to live in separate, inferior, less fertile, fragmented and non-contiguous enclaves within its own boundaries and the occupied Palestinian territories. To reduce the number of Palestinians within the historic boundaries of Palestine from 70% to 50%, the State of Israel has used various methods, including forcible expulsions, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
18. The State of Israel has forcibly expelled more than 780,000 Palestinians, which amounted to 60% of the total Palestinian population, and depopulated and completely destroyed 531 Palestinian villages and localities. In 1948, the State of Israel internally displaced approximately 37,500 Palestinians. Even after the armistice agreements of 1949, the State of Israel continued to expel thousands of Palestinians, notably from the 'Little Triangle', and in the south from Majdal, to Faluja and Bir Saba, the Hebron region, and from the east and north of the Sea of Galilee.
19. The State of Israel also carried out round-ups in Palestinian villages, and expelled those Palestinians it decided were 'illegals'. In the Negev desert, for example, between 1949 and 1953, the State of Israel expelled close to 17,000 Bedouin. In 1953 alone, the State of Israel forcibly expelled 7,000 Bedouin. Such expulsions were often con
ducted with brutality. That same year, on October 14, 1953, an Israeli commando unit, under command of the current Prime Minister of the State of Israel, killed 69 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, and blew up 45 Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Qibiya. On October 29, 1956, the State of Israel killed forty-nine Palestinian villagers, including fifteen women and eleven children in Kafr Kassim, a Palestinian village in the little Triangle. The villagers were lined up and shot for breaking a curfew (for which they had not been informed). One day later, on October 30, 1956, the State of Israel forcibly expelled approximately 5,000 Palestinians from Krad al Baqqara and Krad al Ghannama into Syria.
20. In 1967, the State of Israel forcibly expelled 388,500 Palestinian civilians, including 188,500 for the second time.
21. Between 1967 and 2002, the State of Israel deported 1,531 Palestinians, including mayors, writers, students and university lecturers, as a punitive measure. In August 1971 alone, the State of Israel deported 600 Palestinian refugees living in the Gaza Strip. Between 1987 and 1999, in East Jerusalem alone, the State of Israel, revoked residency rights of 3,327 Palestinians.
22. To date, the State of Israel has prevented the return of approximately 6 million Palestinian refugees, who have either been expelled or displaced. On October 26, 1948, the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion established the 'Transfer Committee' and adopted its recommendations preventing the return of Palestinian refugees. To date, approximately 250,000 internally displaced Palestinians are prevented from return to their homes and villages. Since 1948, the State of Israel has uprooted approximately three-quarter of the Palestinian people from their land, making this the largest and one of the longest standing unresolved refugee cases in the world today. The majority of Palestinian refugees, living inside the occupied Palestinian territories, and internally displaced Palestinians living within the boundaries of the State of Israel, live within 100 miles of their places of origin but are denied their right to return to their homes and lands.
IV. Home demolitions and destruction of property
23. Since 1967, the State of Israel has demolished at least 9,000 Palestinian homes, leaving 50,000 Palestinians homeless. In August 1971 alone, the State of Israel and the Israeli army, led by Israel's current Prime Minister, demolished 2,000 Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 12,000 Palestinian refugees for the second time in their lives.
24. In 1948 and after, the State of Israel plundered and looted Palestinian property spread over hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, including homes, household effects, cash, heavy equipment, trucks and whole flocks of cattle. The total quantity of Palestinian property confiscated by the State of Israel amounted to over 4 million acres of land, the looting and confiscation of tens of thousands of homes, apartments, shops, factories and other facilities.
V. Land Confiscation and Colonization
25. The State of Israel confiscated 800,000 acres of cultivated Palestinian farmland, including crops, olives, tobacco, and fruit. Additionally, the State of Israel confiscated livestock-goats, sheep, and hens.
26. The State of Israel confiscated assets of the Muslim waqf, endowments of land and property, accounting for one-tenth of all land in Palestine before 1948, and 70 per cent of all ships in some Palestinian towns, besides urban estate, houses and businesses. It is estimated that the State of Israel has confiscated, destructed and plundered US$1.8 billion of Palestinian refugee moveable property and lands. Today this is valued at US$ 209 billion.
27. Since 1948, the State of Israel has confiscated 96% of the land owned by Palestinians for use by Israeli Jews only. Since 1967, the State of Israel has confiscated 58% of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, for use by Israeli Jews only.
28. Since 1967, the State of Israel has been responsible for establishing, financing and protecting illegal Jewish colonies (settlements) in the West Bank and Gaza. The State of Israel has confiscated 40,000 acres of land to build a vast road system in the occupied Palestinian territories, which are only allowed to be used by its army and settlers. Most of this land was under cultivation by Palestinian farmers.
29. Since 1967, the State of Israel has transferred 400,000 settlers into the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.
30. Since 1967 to September 2001, the State of Israel has built 123 illegal settlements on confiscated and expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, hosting 198,000 settlers. Between 1993 and September 2001, the population of settlers increased from 100,000 to 198,000, and thus approximately doubled. In occupied East Jerusalem, between 1997 and September 2001, the State of Israel increased the number of settlers to 167,000. Between 1993 and August 2001, the State of Israel confiscated over 70,000 acres of Palestinian land. In 1999 alone, the State of Israel confiscated approximately 10,000 acres of Palestinian land. Since February 2001 alone, the State of Israel has built at least 34 new settlements, excluding expansion of existing illegal settlements.
31. Since 1967, the State of Israel have neither prevented assaults by Israeli settlers on Palestinian individuals and communities, nor effectively intervened to stop such assaults. For example, on June 2, 1980, as a result of car bombs placed by Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli army, the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah, Bassam Shaka'a and Karim Khalaf, were severely maimed. On February 24, 1994, an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, entered the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron and opened fire on worshippers, marking the end of Ramadan. Twenty-nine Palestinians were killed. The State of Israel failed to intervene, except to kill another six Palestinians. The State of Israel has ordered its soldiers to cooperate with settlers engaging in wanton violence against Palestinian residents. Furthermore, the State of Israel has failed to hold Israeli settlers responsible for their actions. Israeli settlers have killed and wounded Palestinians, and destroyed, vandalized, or stolen large amounts of Palestinian property.
32. To this date, the State of Israel has continued this policy of land expropriation, land destruction, agricultural property destruction and home demolitions both inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Inside Israel, the State of Israel has maintained a policy of continually establishing new settlements for Jews only that also serve to isolate and cut off Palestinian communities. In addition, the State of Israel has imposed massive restrictions on Palestinian construction.
33. Inside Israel, the State of Israel has confined Palestinians into restricted, deliberately under-developed enclaves with reduced access to necessary resources, services and facilities. The State of Israel has no laws to prevent discrimination in issues of land ownership, leasing, and residency issues. The State of Israel uses quasi-governmental agencies and zoning or planning laws to confine Palestinians and particular areas and prevent natural growth. In occupied East Jerusalem, the State of Israel prevents Palestinians access to 66% because of Israeli zoning, planning and building restrictions. In other parts of the occupied Palestinian territories, the State of Israel has confined Palestinians to Bantustan-style enclaves, again with reduced access to necessary resources, including water supplies, services and facilities.
VI. Water Confiscation
34. Since 1967, the State of Israel has confiscated more than 80% of Palestinian groundwater. Shortly after the June 1967 war, the State of Israel destroyed 140 Palestinian water pumps in the Jordan Valley, used to irrigate Palestinian farms in the
area. Since 1967, all water management in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been placed under Israeli military rule.
35. The State of Israel has strategically established illegal colonies to tap Palestinian groundwater and springs, enabling discriminatory allocation of water resources. Per capita basis, Israelis consume more than five times as much water as Palestinians, even though their population is only twice that of Palestinians, despite widespread dry periods where Palestinian municipal water supplies literally dry up for months during the summer.
36. In April and May of 2002 alone, the State of Israel has caused destruction to the Palestinian water sector worth of US$ 7 million. In that period, the State of Israel destructed water networks, denying Palestinians access to running water for up to two weeks at a time.
37. The State of Israel has systematically dug trenches across main roads, disrupting water and sewer mains and telecommunication lines to Palestinians homes, caused intentional damage to pumping facilities, intentional destruction of water transmission lines from wells located outside city limits, obstruction of municipal crews from carrying out emergency repair work, killing a municipality engineer in Nablus. A well operator from Jenin was taken hostage twice.
VII. Due Process Violations and Torture
38. Since 1967 to date, the State of Israel has arbitrarily detained over 620,000 Palestinians. In 1989 alone, the State of Israel detained 50,000 Palestinians, representing 16% of the entire male population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip between the ages of 14 and 55. By way of comparison, that same year, out of a total African population of 24 million in South Africa, no more than 5,000 or 0.2% were detained for security offenses against the apartheid regime.
39. Since 1948, the State of Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians without charge or trial.
40. Over 200 Palestinian prisoners have died while in Israeli custody, due to torture, ill-treatment, deprivation of medical treatment, and neglect.
41. The State of Israel has systematically tortured and ill-treated approximately 80% of all Palestinian detainees. Methods of torture used by the State of Israel include both psychological and physical torture, including beatings of sensitive organs, choking, pulling of hair off the body, prolonged solitary confinement, subjecting Palestinian detainees to noise, screams, and threats against their families. Other forms of torture and ill-treatment applied by the State of Israel against Palestinian detainees include forcing a person to stand, hooded and handcuffed, for long periods of time, while depriving him of food or sleep, starvation, the use of electric shocks, burnings, beatings with hands, fists, truncheons, and boots, deprivation of food, sleep, and basic hygiene, resulting in lice and general discomfort, and forcing detainees to stand for protracted periods of time.
42. In the occupied Palestinian territories, the State of Israel has established military courts that do not comply with fair trial standards.
43. The State of Israel provides virtual impunity for those Israeli soldiers and settlers, who commit crimes against Palestinians. The State of Israel has failed to investigate or properly and impartially investigate or prosecute those Israeli soldiers and settlers, who have committed crimes against Palestinians. The State of Israel has denied any remedy for Palestinian victims, including denies compensation.
VIII. Destruction of Means of Livelihood
44. Since 1967, the State of Israel has uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees. In 1984, the State of Israel issued a military order which made it illegal for Palestinians to plant a new or replacement fruit tree without a permit. During the summer of 1988, the state of Israel burnt 8,000 olive and fruit trees and thousands of dunums of wheat. Between 1993 and August 2001, the State of Israel has uprooted 280,000 fruit and olive trees belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank alone. In 2001 alone, the State of Israel uprooted 23,551 fruit and olive trees.
45. The State of Israel has deliberately strangulated the Palestinian economy with forced dependency through border controls of imports and exports, exploitation of natural resources, de-development of Palestinian industries and businesses, violation of the full range of employment and workers' rights, including through closures and curfews.
46. The State of Israel has deliberately imposed a range of measures and acts that have diminished the living conditions of Palestinians to an extent that can only result in their physical destruction. Methods include the confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian land and other natural resources, particularly, water, which has seriously affected the health and viability of Palestinian communities and their way of life. The State of Israel has damaged Palestinian property and environment through the use of heavy weaponry and has permitted dumping toxic and hazardous products. The State of Israel has imposed restrictions on movement on Palestinians in and out of Palestinian localities, affecting population centers and their associated agricultural and economic communities, including restrictions on movement, depriving them of access to their land and property.
IX. Discrimination and Apartheid
47. The State of Israel imposed a tax system on Palestinians, while, in per capita terms, Israeli Jews received fifty times more grants than Palestinians. Of aid spent in the occupied Palestinian territories, 96.5% was spent on Israeli settlers, and 3.5% on the 90% Palestinian population. In 1992, discounting East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers constituted barely 6% of the West Bank and Gaza populations. Although since 1970, the State of Israel required Palestinian workers to pay dues for the Histadrut, Palestinian workers cannot be members of this trade union federation. Between 1970 and 1994, the Histadrut confiscated NIS 700 million from Palestinian workers without these workers being represented.
48. Since 1948, the State of Israel has increasingly imposed segregation and apartheid, including by cutting off Palestinians from access to wider Arab communities in neighboring Arab states, cutting Palestinians from their families and communities in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
49. Since 1967, the State of Israel has separated and isolated Palestinians in East Jerusalem from their families in other parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since 1987, the State of Israel has separated and isolated Palestinian communities through barbed wired fences and iron gates, for example Dheishe refugee camp, near Bethlehem. Since 1989, the State of Israel has segregated, isolated and separated the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and to outside neighboring countries.
50. Since 1993, the State of Israel has denied Palestinians in the West Bank access to the Gaza Strip and Israel. Since this period, the State of Israel has used curfews, partial and total closures on an ad hoc basis. Since 1993, the State of Israel further separated Palestinian communities inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, separating villages from cities and villages from villages, through checkpoints, bypass roads, settlements and closures.
51. Since March 2001, the State of Israel dug trenches into main roads, cutting of all movement for Palestinian villagers to any other area, including urban centers upon which they rely for work, education, humanitarian aid and assistance, including medicines, field clinics and hospital, and crucial supplies, including food and water. Since June 2001, the State of Israel dug more trenches and erected iron gates in some areas, closing off villages and cities. Since June 2002, the State of Israel has segregated, separated and isolated more than 11,000 Palestinians living between the 1967-demarcation line and a currently built
wall or so-called 'security fence' in the north of the West Bank.
X. Denial of Freedom of the Press
52. The State of Israel has barred journalists access to areas, subjected journalists to physical violence and harassment, arrested and detained journalists, restricted access to Palestinian sources of information, for example, the closure of press agencies, impersonation of journalists and confiscation of materials, including footage, cameras, and films.
XI. Denial of Education
53. The State of Israel has repressed Palestinian education by closures, raids and destruction. The State of Israel has killed, injured, detained and harassed Palestinian professors, lecturers, teachers and students. The State of Israel has regularly closed schools and universities in the West Bank and Gaza for prolonged periods, disrupting Palestinian education, and has banned alternative education. Furthermore, the State of Israel has occupied many schools and destructed school property. The State of Israel has raided schools and universities and used tear gas inside school buildings.
XII. Denial of Freedom of Religion
54. The State of Israel has obstructed and harassed worship. The State of Israel has raided mosques and harassed worshippers. The State of Israel has allowed its soldiers to shoot tear gas inside places of worships, have assaulted mosques and churches, has disrupted the burial rites of Palestinians.
How do you measure the success of terrorism? Is it by the numbers of civilians killed, maimed and terrorized or the level of disruption and fear brought to peoples' daily lives? Israel scores very highly on both these counts.
Surely though, the ultimate measure of success is the ability to use terrorism to achieve your aims and get away with it. By this measure, Israel is the most successful terrorist state of the 20th century and looks like continuing its winning streak into the 21st century.
Israel has its own special way of recognizing the achievements of its great terrorists ??? by electing them its prime minister. There are no less than three Israeli prime ministers who have long terrorist histories.
The current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, cemented his place in the hall of fame with his leading role in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, including the massacres by Israeli-backed militias in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Earlier in his Israeli army career Sharon was responsible for the slaughter of 69 civilians in the Qibya village in Jordanian-controlled territory in 1953.
The Israeli prime minister at the time of the 1982 invasion, Menachem Begin, was a leader of the Irgun, one of the main terrorist groups in the Zionist movement. In the 1930s and 1940s the Zionists were trying to establish the Israeli state in what was then British-occupied Palestine.
In 1937, the Irgun launched a terror campaign against Palestinian civilians, setting off bombs in markets and attacking buses. In one attack on the Haifa fruit market 74 Arabs were killed and 129 wounded. In 1946, the Irgun set off a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing about 100 Arab, British and Jewish victims.
Another Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, started his career in this same period as a leader of the Zionist terrorist group, the Stern gang. The Stern gang was responsible for the assassination of the UN mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadette, and a French UN observer in September 1948.
As central leaders of these groups Begin and Shamir both went on to play a crucial role in the terrorist activities carried out during the 1948 war.
`Ethnic cleansing??? The term ???ethnic cleansing??? came into general use when it was used to describe the atrocities carried out by the Serbian nationalist forces in their push to create a Serbian state in Bosnia.
To carry out this particular form of terrorism is one thing, but as former Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic has found out, it is quite another thing to get away with it. In terms of getting away with ethnic cleansing, Israel is in a class of its own.
Ethnic cleansing was always going to be essential to achieving the Zionist movement's aim of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. This movement sought to escape the oppression suffered by Jewish minorities throughout history by setting up a state controlled exclusively by Jews, ruling over a country in which Jews were the majority. The process of creating such a state in Palestine would inevitably involve systematic discrimination against the non-Jewish people of Palestine.
Through a combination of lobbying, military force and terrorist activity the Zionist movement was able to win the support of the US and other powerful nations for a UN partition plan which would create a Jewish state in Palestine. The 1947 UN partition plan violated the right of the Arabic-speaking Palestinian people to national self-determination, as it denied them the opportunity to vote on whether or not they agreed to the UN plan to hand over a part of their national homeland to a colonial-settler state.
The UN plan was also grossly unfair in that it granted the 30% of the population who were Jewish 54% of the land of Palestine, including the most fertile areas. Despite the obvious bias of the UN plan in favor of Zionism, it did not resolve the ???Arab question???.
In the area allocated to the Jewish state, Jews only barely outnumbered Palestinians (498,000 Jews to 497,000 Palestinians) and at this time the Zionist settlers only owned 6% of the land.
The solution was ethnic cleansing. By waging a war of terror against the civilian Palestinian population, the Zionists were able to occupy 81% of the total area of Palestine by the end of the 1948 war.
One of the worst acts of terror during this war was the Deir Yasseen massacre. On April 9, 1948, the Irgun and the Stern gang attacked the village of Deir Yasseen and massacred 120 villagers. To ensure that the massacre had maximum effect in forcing Palestinians to flee, the terrorist forces raped women and girls, butchered infants and cut open the womb of a nine-months pregnant woman.
This was just one of a number of massacres that terrorized more than 90% of the Palestinian population into fleeing their homes.
After forcing the Palestinian population to flee the villages, the Israeli forces would often blow up the houses to ensure the residents had nothing to return to. To reinforce the point, the Israeli authorities then ???legally??? confiscated the homes, fields and property of all Palestinians who had not been in their ???regular place of residence??? on September 1, 1948.
The media coverage of the attacks on New York has emphasized that the victims of terrorism are not just those killed and injured but also their families, and the society as a whole. Today there are more than 3.7 million Palestinian refugees registered by the UN and about another two million who are not registered. These refugees are the victims of the acts of terrorism carried out in the 1948 war and of further terrorist acts carried out in the last 53 years.
In the Balkans, some refugees have been allowed to return ??? but not in Israel. There, Palestinian refugees are not allowed to return, despite the fact that under international law they have every right to. UN resolution 194 passed in 1948 explicitly affirms this right ??? but Israel's ethnic cleansing and defiance of this UN resolution goes unpunished by the UN and the US.
While the Palestinian victims of Israeli terrorism are left to rot in refugee camps, Israel struts the world stage claiming to be a democracy. This Israeli form of ???democracy??? is based on driving out more than half the indigenous population of the country and thereby denying their right to participate in any aspect of society.
Meir Kahan, one of Israel's best known civilian terrorists, openly acknowledged this fact. According to Kahan: ???There is no question of setting up democracy in Israel because democracy means equal rights for all, irrespective of racial or religious origins. You can't, on the one hand, want a Jewish state and, at the same time, give non-Jews the right to become a majority.???
Denying the right of Palestinian refugees to return is therefore essential to maintaining Israeli ???democracy???.
Hostage taking Hollywood has produced numerous films in which ???evil terrorists???, usually Arabs, take innocent civilians, usually Americans, hostage and make demands that must be met before the hostages are released.
We all know the script: the ruthless hijackers kill a hostage to show they mean business, the US government refuses to negotiate with terrorists, one of the hostages is a Special Forces-trained superhero who leads the fight against the hijackers, eventually killing them all and setting the hostages free.
These ???Hollywood principles??? generally reflect the public stance of the US government in relation to terrorism. This tough ???no negotiations, blow the terrorists away??? stance was exactly that taken by the US and its allies in relation to the Taliban's offer to negotiate on a international trial for bin Laden. Any suggestion that there should be negotiations or an assessment of the legitimacy of the territorial claims was dismissed as appeasement and rewardi
ng terrorist aggression.
Do these principles apply to Israel?
Israel's 1948 acquisition of territory by force went unpunished. No doubt encouraged by this success, in 1967 Israel invaded the rest of Palestine and parts of Egypt and Syria, taking millions of civilians hostage. Israel demanded that its ???right to exist??? be recognized before it would withdraw and release the hostages. The passing of UN Security Council resolution 242 calling on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories had no effect.
So did the US launch immediate military action against Israel? No. It called for negotiations while continuing to provide Israel with massive military aid.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria took military action to attempt to free their citizens and territory held hostage by Israel, exercising their right to self-defense under international law. The US response was to provide Israel with all the emergency military aid it needed to defeat Egypt and Syria.
The experience of Egypt's 1977 peace treaty with Israel seems to confirm the argument that negotiating with terrorists only encourages them. After Egypt had met Israel's demands for recognition and had its territory returned, Israel promptly invaded Lebanon in 1978, and again in 1982.
In effect, Israel has held millions of innocent civilians hostage since 1967 and has killed thousands of Palestinians who have resisted this. While in Hollywood movies and in Afghanistan, it is quite legitimate for the ???civilised world??? (read, the US and its allies) to kill ???terrorists???, those Palestinians who have exercised their right, under international law, to resist the illegal Israeli occupation of their land have been designated ???terrorists??? themselves.
During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon the civilian toll from the terrorist activities of the Israeli army was 12,000 killed, 40,000 wounded, 300,000 homeless.
Over the course of the invasion the Israeli army used a range of terror weapons on civilians including cluster bombs and phosphorous bombs and shells. The use of phosphorous bombs and shells for military objectives is banned under the 1980 UN Geneva convention.
This description of their effect by journalist Robert Fisk explains why: ???Dr Shamaa found that the two five-day old twins had already died but they were still on fire. `I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames???, she said. `When I took them out half an hour later they were still burning???.???
The Israeli army entrusted the dirtiest work of the invasion to their right-wing Lebanese allies, the Phalangists. On September 15, 1982, the Israeli army sealed the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in West Beirut and Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon authorized a unit of 150 Phalangists to enter the camps.
The Phalangists preceded to slaughter at least 1000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians over a two-day period while the Israeli army looked on.
Just because Israel is the most successful terrorist state in the world does not mean there is no role for Israeli civilians in carrying out terrorist acts.
On February 25, 1994, Barukh Goldstein, an Israeli settler, massacred around 50 Palestinian worshippers at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. Goldstein was a well-known leader of Kach, an extreme right-wing Zionist organization. Wearing a military uniform he entered the mosque and emptied two clips of a machine gun into Muslim worshippers. In the two weeks following the massacre, the Israeli army continued Goldstein's work by killing another 30 Palestinians.
While fanatical settlers such as Goldstein are directly involved in terrorizing Palestinian civilians, it is the ???ordinary??? Israeli settlers who provide a cover and excuse for Israeli state terrorism and further ethnic cleansing.
Protecting these Israeli civilians provides an excuse for the Israeli army to station large numbers of troops in the Palestinian territories. The land on which these illegal settlements are built, and the ???security zones??? around them, is confiscated from Palestinians. To ensure the settlers can travel freely, ???Israeli-only??? roads have been built which divide the Palestinian territories and have required the confiscation of even more Palestinian land.
While renowned for its large-scale atrocities, Israel combines this with smaller-scale daily terrorism, which has the greatest impact. For the past 34 years Israeli soldiers have held up Palestinian civilians at gunpoint on a daily basis.
Much has been made of the fact that those killed in New York were just ordinary people going about their daily business. The fear that you be could killed at any moment for no good reason is one of the worst effects of terrorism. This is a fear that Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories have lived with on a daily basis for over 30 years.
For Palestinians, however, the people who may kill them are not invisible; they are right in front of them every day pointing automatic weapons at them as they go about their daily business. They are the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints, who may open fire at a suspicious movement, and the armed settlers, many of whom believe Palestinians should be expelled at gunpoint.
This is not an abstract fear, as most Palestinians have a close relative who has been killed or wounded by the Israeli army or has had their home blown up or bulldozed by the Israelis as punishment for resisting the occupation. According to Amnesty International, 2650 Palestinian houses were destroyed by Israel between 1987 and 2000.
The support of the US government has been crucial to Israel's terrorist success. The US continues to provide Israel with massive levels of military and non-military aid: $US3 billion in 1997 alone and a total $US74 billion since 1949.
With the continuing support of the US government, Israel's position in terrorism's number one spot looks secure for some time. On the same day that the Israeli army continued its ethnic cleansing program by demolishing 18 Palestinian houses in Gaza, the US called on Palestinians to stop their violence and crack down on terrorism so that ???negotiations??? with Israel can continue.
The Jewish/Zionist/Christ-Killer infiltration of Aryan mall rides continues. Here we see another strutter advancing the cause. Archaic, I'm sorry, but like you said, this was inevitable.
Amnesty International is concerned about the deterioration of the human rights and humanitarian situation as a result of the Israeli army incursion in the Jabalya refugee camp and surrounding areas in the northern Gaza Strip (including sectors in the nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya).
In the past week (since the evening of Tuesday 28 September) more than 70 Palestinians have been killed, more than a third of whom were unarmed and including some 20 children. Hundreds of others have been injured.
The Israeli army has repeatedly used excessive force, including heavy shelling from tanks and helicopter gunships. Experience has shown that the use of such weapons and the manner in which they have been deployed by the army in densely populated residential areas (the Jabalya refugee camp is one of the most densely populated places in the world, with more than 100,000 Palestinians living in less than two square kilometres), invariably results in a high rate of death and injury of bystanders and people who are not involved in armed confrontation. These tactics betray a lack of respect for fundamental human rights principles, including the right to life.
In certain areas the Israeli army has also unlawfully destroyed or damaged homes, schools, water and electricity networks, roads, and other crucial infrastructure. Israeli forces have hindered access to medical services -- not only for those injured in the military operation but also those who need medical care for other reasons, including women who need to give birth. When able to reach those in need (they often cannot reach those in need of medical treatment) ambulances have on several occasions come under Israeli army fire.
Strict closures have also been imposed throughout the Gaza Strip in the past week, cutting the Gaza Strip into four isolated sections, paralysing all aspects of life, with people unable to reach their workplace and students unable to reach the universities. In addition schools in the area besieged by the Israeli army in the northern Gaza Strip are closed. Thousands of people living in the besieged areas are also experiencing shortages of food and other essential goods.
Amnesty International is calling on the Israeli authority to:
?? put an immediate end to the use of excessive lethal force
?? put an immediate end to unlawful destruction and damage of Palestinian homes and properties, roads and other infrastructure
?? allow immediate access to medical care and other essential services for the Palestinian population in the affected areas
?? respect the right to freedom of movement for the Palestinian population elsewhere in the Gaza Strip
Amnesty International also calls on Palestinian armed groups not to initiate attacks and armed confrontation with Israeli troops from amongst residential areas, as this puts the local residents at risk of return fire and retaliation from the Israeli army, and reiterates its call on Palestinian armed groups to put an end to attacks directed against Israeli civilians in Israel or in the Occupied Territories.
You always make good sense until you slip in this little neo-con codes.
That's where we will NEVER agree.
I'm not going to say you are wrong and presume I am right, but that whole neo-con sole superpower stuff does not make sense. For example, we are less than 5% of world population. We barely make anything these days. We pretty much manage money and try to tell people what to do. We are consumers mostly. Yet somehow, also a superpower. Hmm? IMO--that's walking on thin ice. Or should I say driving a tank on thin ice. Not very smart. Jesus Moses I hope I'm wrong.
1) America for the last ten years has been the leading exporter of small arms. 2) America controls more spy satellites, intercept stations, supercomputers that decode emails etc.. than all of the world's nations combined. 3) America has an effective veto in the world bank and IMF not to mention an actual veto at the United Nations Security Council. 4) America controls more aircraft carriers, has more fighter plains and bombers, than any other nation on the planet. 5) The CIA has trained the vast majority of the world's spy and internal security services. 6) Hollywood movies are consistently the most popular entertainment in most of the third world. 7) America's Navy secures the world's major sea lanes that deliver oil to China, Japan and East Asia.
I could go on. My only point is that all this hegemony should be wielded in the interest of a cause more noble than the preservation of former client dictators.
If anything America could learn so much from Israel about how a democracy fights a war against terrorists.
Cosign. Check the percentages of combatants killed versus bystanders on each side. Let's be real: Suicide bombers exist for the sole purpose of killing innocents (they go so far as to target places of leisure). The Israeli army on the other hand exists to protect the people and the state. Their purpose has never been to kill innocents, and when it does happen - as in the one-ton bomb dropped on a building in Gaza in attempts to eliminate a known terrorist residing there - you see widespread condemnation of any resulting civilian casualties in the Israeli media and often courts martial. The suicide bombers on the other hand get kindergartens literally named after them.
Marwan Barghouti founded the al-Aqsa martyrs brigade, an organization that freely admits to recruiting teenagers to explode themselves in markets, shopping malls and on busses. Using his indictment against Israel is like siting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the conditions inside Gitmo.
If anything America could learn so much from Israel about how a democracy fights a war against terrorists.
Cosign. Check the percentages of combatants killed versus bystanders on each side. Let's be real: Suicide bombers exist for the sole purpose of killing innocents (they go so far as to target places of leisure). The Israeli army on the other hand exists to protect the people and the state. Their purpose has never been to kill innocents, and when it does happen - as in the one-ton bomb dropped on a building in Gaza in attempts to eliminate a known terrorist residing there - you see widespread condemnation of any resulting civilian casualties in the Israeli media and often courts martial. The suicide bombers on the other hand get kindergartens literally named after them.
Yeah, Israel only displaces innocents.
You fight a people throwing rocks with tanks...and presto...suicide bombers become the reality.
Ain't too hard to understand. You initiate a war against citizens by bulldozing their homes and they should have every right to retaliate against your citizens.
Amnesty has been criticized by other human rights organizations for characterizing suicide bombers and their recruiters as civilians. Indeed, the organization has rarely criticized the Palestinians far more crude targeting of civilians. The issue here is not that innocent Palestinians have not been killed by Israelis, the question is whether Israel is morally equivalent to their enemies. And the answer to that question is a resounding no.
Amnesty has been criticized by other human rights organizations for characterizing suicide bombers and their recruiters as civilians. Indeed, the organization has rarely criticized the Palestinians far more crude targeting of civilians. The issue here is not that innocent Palestinians have not been killed by Israelis, the question is whether Israel is morally equivalent to their enemies. And the answer to that question is a resounding no.
If anything America could learn so much from Israel about how a democracy fights a war against terrorists.
Cosign. Check the percentages of combatants killed versus bystanders on each side. Let's be real: Suicide bombers exist for the sole purpose of killing innocents (they go so far as to target places of leisure). The Israeli army on the other hand exists to protect the people and the state. Their purpose has never been to kill innocents, and when it does happen - as in the one-ton bomb dropped on a building in Gaza in attempts to eliminate a known terrorist residing there - you see widespread condemnation of any resulting civilian casualties in the Israeli media and often courts martial. The suicide bombers on the other hand get kindergartens literally named after them.
Yeah, Israel only displaces innocents.
You fight a people throwing rocks with tanks...and presto...suicide bombers become the reality.
Ain't too hard to understand. You initiate a war against citizens by bulldozing their homes and they should have every right to retaliate against your citizens.
All is fair in love and war...
you konw for someone who claims not to be prejudiced against Jews you certainly are pretty damn prejudiced against Jews...oh wait it's a little more easier on your conscience if you call them Zionists
Comments
No shit, Sherlock. Did you ignore me asking that the distinction be made more clearly by upstanding Jews refusing to get so defensive when Americans challenge the overreaching Zionist agenda? To his credit, Paycheck seems to do just that. Why can't you and HAZ and Alien do the same?
Plus re-read the context of the Jews/Zionists coupling...which points to BOTH Jews and Zionists as being manipulated by ulterior motives.
You seem to expect people to assume such an extreme position, as if we are supposed to entirely disconnect Zionism from from anything having to do with Judaism. But that's not the case, is it?
Now deal with it, please.
OH god is this the point where things get ugly again?
its simple wordplay and you keep doing it. I'm not asking for a disconnect, but you keep linking the 2 as if you can't have one without the other.
you mention that both jews and Zionists are being manuipulated by alterior motives, I don't quite understand where your coming from with that. The thing is Jews are much more than just zionists by by grouping the ethnic group/ religious group with the zionists you are making it so that we are one and the same.
And for clarification can you please state a definition of what Zionist means to you?
The dictionary definition works for me:
Zi??on??ism
n.
A Jewish[/b] movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish[/b] homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel.
Someone mentioned, Egypt which has been a close 2nd--at about $2.5 billion--for a number of years. There are clear reasons to have access to the Suez etc, but again this amount is way overkill.
There are no other countries receiving aid at those levels (accept Iraq and Afghanistan during FY 2004).
I always say, ???Israel, we got your back, but you need to start paying your own way.???
The aid program for Israel that you disdain started as a result of a peace treaty forged with one of the agressors of "Israel's endless wars." And 20 out of the 22 states of the Arab league are still technically at war with Israel. Throughout the 1990s the Jewish state succeeded in opening trade missions in Qatar and Tunisia. But for the most part the Nasserite stance of the rest of the Arab world has not ceased. It has only changed insofar as now instead of raising armies to drive the Jews to the sea militarily they are funding the most egregious example of institutionalized child abuse the world has known since I don't know pre-union factories. Seriously, Israel's foreign minister does not raise money for the families of suicide bombers attacking civilians in Riyadh on state run television, that's Prince Nayaf in Saudi Arabia. I think most Americans would be proud that they are supporting a state that survives against these odds. To pretend it's none of our business is to shirk the responsibilities of leading the civilized world.
You always make good sense until you slip in this little neo-con codes.
That's where we will NEVER agree.
I'm not going to say you are wrong and presume I am right, but that whole neo-con sole superpower stuff does not make sense. For example, we are less than 5% of world population. We barely make anything these days. We pretty much manage money and try to tell people what to do. We are consumers mostly. Yet somehow, also a superpower. Hmm? IMO--that's walking on thin ice. Or should I say driving a tank on thin ice. Not very smart. Jesus Moses I hope I'm wrong.
Sorry Homie Israel is just as bad at this as the terrorists... the Israeli army is notorious for blatantly attacking unarmed civilians...
The Jewish/Zionist/Christ-Killer infiltration of Aryan mall rides continues. Here we see another strutter advancing the cause. Archaic, I'm sorry, but like you said, this was inevitable.
gangster!
what's a "GICLEURS"?
Maybe a little classic Zionist political philosophy would help clear this up (we often forget the ideological underpinnings of the movement amidst talk of foreign aid and arms sales).
As many of the original Zionist thinkers maintainted, the Jews are a nation. The Jewish religion is merely one aspect of their national identity, others being a common language and history. Israel, as national home to the Jewish people, does not base its immigration policies on ethnicity, but rather on nationality. Take it or leave it, but the Irish, Italians, Germans and countless other governments define their citizenship criteria based largely on national identity. The US, it's easy for us to forget, is an exception in this regard, as our "nationality" is based on immigration and civic participation, etc.
1948 War of Independence: Started by neighboring Arab states and Palestinians.
1967 Six-Day War: Started by neighboring Arab states.
1973 Yom Kippur War: Started by neighboring Arab states.
2000 Al-Aqsa Intifada: Started by Palestinians.
Just sayin'.
Nonsense. Back your shit up. [And by that I mean cite your source.]
there's a little terrorist sneaking up behind the ride!!... watch out!!
The Israeli army is notorious among pseudo scholars and apologists for terror for blatantly attacking unarmed civilians. Indeed you can find long discourses on the subject in the Egyptian media right alongside columns reviving the blood libel. But the facts are slightly different. The worst example of such atrocities involve the massacre of Sabra and Shetila. The offense in this case was that the Israeli military allowed Philangist militias to infiltrate the refugee camps at night and slaughter whole families. I might add that for this indirect and awful crime Israel's defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon was summarily dismissed from his post. Contrast that say with the plotters of the Sbarro pizzeria bombing who have streets named after them in Gaza. Indeed if you look at the actual UN reports and casualty statistics say for Israel's operations against Jenin you find that very few innocents were actually killed, somewhere along the lines of 21 people most of whom were firing at the soldiers. At the time howeber Yasser Abd Rabbo claimed that thousands had been slaughtered. If anything America could learn so much from Israel about how a democracy fights a war against terrorists.
interesting. i mean, im ignorant to the whole thing, but are you saying that these "arab states" just up and decided to start some shit over nothing? seems odd.
- Versus -
The State of Israel, Defendant
Statement of Indictment
The State of Israel is directly and indirectly criminally responsible for committing specific acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, including uprooting Palestinians by military attacks, arbitrary arrests and illegal imprisonment, administrative detention, attacks on women, children and the elderly, systematic and wanton destruction of property and homes, systematic expropriation and dispossession, violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, including assassinations, confiscation of lands and property, creation of separate reserves and Bantustans, disrupting public life and terrorizing a whole population, including through acts of collective punishment and reprisals, racial discrimination, stealing, looting and plundering, infliction of serious bodily or mental harm, including torture, ill-treatment, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, mutilation, causing death and serious injury, deliberate imposition of living conditions calculated to cause physical destruction in whole or in part, approving and implementing legislative measures calculated to prevent Palestinians from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of Palestinians, exploitation of labor, persecution of organizations and members, depriving persons of fundamental rights and freedoms because they oppose military occupation, colonialism, or apartheid, and other criminal acts.
Violated Laws, Treaties, and Conventions
The State of Israel is criminally responsible for crimes, which are stated to be the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. These include:
The crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression as defined and specified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, as corrected by the proc??s-verbaux of 10 November 1998 and 12 July 1999.
Violations of 85 United Nations Security Council Resolutions
Violations of the following:
Charter of the United Nations;
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;
Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity;
Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War;
Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War;
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts;
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts;
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights;
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms;
Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples;
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination;
International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid;
Convention against Discrimination in Education;
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women;
Convention on the Political Rights of Women;
Convention on the Rights of the Child;
Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners;
Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners;
Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment;
United Nations Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of Liberty;
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
Principles on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
Principles of Medical Ethics Relevant to the Role of Health Personnel, particularly Physicians, in the Protection of Prisoners and Detainees against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials;
Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials;
Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers;
United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice;
Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary;
Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions.
Specific charges against the State of Israel
I. War crimes and crimes against humanity
1. The State of Israel and its predecessor agents have committed various acts of genocide, killing thousands of Palestinian civilians, causing serious bodily and mental harm to thousands of Palestinians, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring physical destruction, including but not limited to the following cases:
Baldat al-Shaikh (January 30-31, 1947), Yehida (December 13, 1947), Khisas (December 18, 1947), Qazaza (December 19, 1947), Katamon (July 5, 1948), Deir Yassin (April 9/10, 1948), Naser al-Din (April 13, 14, 1948), Tantura (May 15, 1948), Beit Daras (May 21, 1948), Lydda (July 11, 1948), Dawayma (October 29, 1948), Houla (October, 26, 1948), Sharafat (February 7, 1951), Kibya (October 14, 1953), Kafr Kassim (October 29, 1956), Gaza City (April 5, 1956), Khan Younis (November 3, 1956), Rafah (November 12, 1956), Al-Sammou' (November 13, 1966), Kawnin (October 15, 1975), Bint Jbeil (October 21, 1976), Abbasieh (March 17, 1978), Adloun (March 17, 1978), Saida (April 4, 1981), Fakhani (July 17, 1981), Beirut (July 17, 1981), Sabra and Shatila (September 16-18, 1982), Jibsheet (March 27, 1984), Sohmor (September 19, 1984), Seer al-Gharbiah (March 23, 1985), Maaraka (March 5, 1985), Zrariah (March 11, 1985), Homeen al-Tahta (March 21, 1985), Jibaa (March 30, 1985), Yohmor (April 13, 1985), Tiri (August 17, 1986), Al-Naher al-Bared (December 11, 1986), Ain al-Hilwe (September 5, 1987), Nablus (December 16, 1988), Nahhalin (April 13, 1989), Oyon Qara (May 20, 1990), Siddiqine (July 25, 1990), Jerusalem (October 8, 1990), Hebron (February 25, 1994), Jalabia (March 28, 1994), Aramta (April 15, 1994), Erez (July 17, 1994), Deir al-Zahrani (August 5, 1994), Nabatiyeh (March 21, 1994), Sohmor (April 2, 1996), Mansuriah (April 13, 1996), Nabatiya (April 18, 1996), Qana (April 18, 1996), West Bank/Gaza (September 25-28, 1996), Tarqumia (March 10, 1998), Janta (December 22, 1998), Beirut (June 24, 1999), Western Baq'a (December 29, 1999), Jerusalem (September 29, 2000), Idna (July 19, 2001), Nablus (July 31, 2001), Beit Rima (October 24, 2001), Jenin (April 3-21, 2002), Nablus (April 3-21, 2002).
2. Between 1948 and 1949, the State of Israel killed at least 13,000 Palestinians. During the June 1967 war, the State of Israel killed, although official figures have never been released, at least 15,000 Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians.
3. In Lebanon, the State of Israel killed over 29,500 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians, 40% were children. During various invasions, the State of Israel forcibly evicted more than 100,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
4. Between December 1987 and September 1993, the State of Israel killed over 1,300 Palestinian civilians, including over a quarter under the age of 16, wounded more than 100,000, and demolished 2,089 homes. Bet ween 1993 until the end of 1999, the State of Israel has killed 492 Palestinian civilians. Between 1993 and the end of 1999, the State of Israel has demolished approximately 1,000 Palestinian homes, leaving more than 5,000 Palestinians homeless.
5. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel and its army and citizens have killed 1,639 Palestinians, including 336 children.
6. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel has killed at least 103 Palestinians, of which half were simply bystanders, including women and children, in state-sponsored assassinations.
7. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel has killed more than 550 Palestinians through shelling and bombardments of civilian and public infrastructure, homes, schools and other places. The State of Israel has caused death and injury to more Palestinians at checkpoints and due to prevention of medical access or restrictions of movement.
8. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel has severely injured, maimed and wounded at least 20,000 Palestinians, leaving more than 2,000 Palestinians permanently disabled. In that same period, the State of Israel demolished more than 985 Palestinian homes.
9. Since the end of September 2000, the State of Israel has launched military attacks on Palestinian civilians. These attacks include shootings, shelling and bombings in their homes, schools, universities, hospitals, field clinics, and workplaces. The State of Israel targeted clearly marked ambulances and paramedics, journalists, and human rights defenders. The State of Israel has used heavy weaponry and ammunition against Palestinians, including bombs, mortar shells, tank shells, air-to-ground and ground-to-ground missiles fired from attack helicopters and F-16 warplanes, naval warships, tanks and armored personnel carriers. The State of Israel is also responsible for the death of Palestinians, who have been shot and killed by Israeli snipers, shooting high-velocity live ammunitions at civilians in civilian areas. In this period, the State of Israel has killed and injured a disproportionate number of women and children, clearly-marked medical personnel, human rights defenders and journalists.
10. Since 1967, the State of Israel has caused casualties by exploding objects and flares, including objects thrown from military jeeps and helicopters, mines and explosives, and flammable objects. These objects have either exploded, causing shrapnel wounds, or caught fire, causing severe burns. For example, on February 13, 1989, Iktimal Dim (6) was killed, and her brother, 'Isam Dim (10), injured by shrapnel from an exploding device thrown from an Israeli helicopter hovering above the village of Tayasir. Since 1967, a great number of Palestinians have been wounded or killed after stepping on mines or other explosives planted by the Israeli army.
11. Since 1948, the State of Israel ordered and encouraged its military's brutal use of physical force against unarmed, mostly young Palestinians. This includes the systematic beating of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers and police, which gained particular notoriety in 1988, after the late Yitzhak Rabin, then Defense Minister, announced a policy of 'force, might, and beatings' on January 18, 1988. Palestinians have been beaten randomly, without any apparent connection to protests, they were often taken from their homes or off the streets and brutally assaulted. Beatings were also typically carried out by groups of Israeli soldiers acting in concert rather than individually. Beating incidents have taken place in situations where the victim offered no resistance. For example, on 19 and 21 January 1988, in the village of Huwarra, Israeli soldiers rounded up twenty residents, drove them to a remote area, bound and gagged them, and then deliberately broke their arms and legs. The lack of proper investigations into cases where Palestinians have been severely injured or killed as a result of beatings further confirms the fact that beatings are a policy of the State of Israel.
12. Between 1949 and 1956, the State of Israel killed at least 5,000 Palestinian refugees, mostly farmers trying to return home, either to live, see relatives or to harvest their crops.
13. The State of Israel has imposed severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, including through closures, besiegement, curfews and the use of trenches, fences, iron gates and walls. The State of Israel controlled, restricted, closed and altogether denied Palestinian access to key facilities, goods and services, including humanitarian aid and assistance, including hospitals and field clinics, basic supplies such as medicines, food and water, education, denial of Palestinian access to schools and universities, denial of Palestinian access to workplaces, businesses, agricultural areas, industries, family and community life.
14. The State of Israel has assaulted Palestinian women in various ways, including illegal and indiscriminate use of lethal force by Israeli military authorities, resulting in deaths or injuries, the deliberate abuse of tear gas by Israeli military, resulting in suffocation, health problems, and miscarriages among Palestinian women, soldiers' brutality, sexual harassment and intimidation by Israeli soldiers, the use of obscene language, exposure, urinating on women, molestation and attempted rape, arrest, interrogation and torture inside Israeli prisons, hostage taking, expulsion, obstruction and harassment of women's committees and charitable organizations, raids on women's centers, kindergartens and cooperatives.
15. The State of Israel has deliberately induced humanitarian crisis, with impoverishment of Palestinian civilians and starvation policies. The State of Israel has restricted movement, denied and hindered access to humanitarian aid and assistance, food and water, medical supplies and aid, hospitals, work and education.
II. Denial of Health Care
16. The State of Israel has allowed its military to beat and detain wounded Palestinians, obstruct attempts by medical personnel and others to aid critically injured Palestinians, delay ambulances transporting injured Palestinians, physically mistreat doctors and other health care professionals, mistreat wounded Palestinians, raid medical facilities, shoot at ambulances, and adopt measures which have reduced the quality and availability of health services. These abuses illustrate a disregard for the most fundamental humanitarian norms on the part of the State of Israel.
III. Expulsions
17. The State of Israel has systematically dispossessed, uprooted and expelled Palestinian communities, in whole or in part, forcing remaining Palestinian communities to live in separate, inferior, less fertile, fragmented and non-contiguous enclaves within its own boundaries and the occupied Palestinian territories. To reduce the number of Palestinians within the historic boundaries of Palestine from 70% to 50%, the State of Israel has used various methods, including forcible expulsions, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
18. The State of Israel has forcibly expelled more than 780,000 Palestinians, which amounted to 60% of the total Palestinian population, and depopulated and completely destroyed 531 Palestinian villages and localities. In 1948, the State of Israel internally displaced approximately 37,500 Palestinians. Even after the armistice agreements of 1949, the State of Israel continued to expel thousands of Palestinians, notably from the 'Little Triangle', and in the south from Majdal, to Faluja and Bir Saba, the Hebron region, and from the east and north of the Sea of Galilee.
19. The State of Israel also carried out round-ups in Palestinian villages, and expelled those Palestinians it decided were 'illegals'. In the Negev desert, for example, between 1949 and 1953, the State of Israel expelled close to 17,000 Bedouin. In 1953 alone, the State of Israel forcibly expelled 7,000 Bedouin. Such expulsions were often con ducted with brutality. That same year, on October 14, 1953, an Israeli commando unit, under command of the current Prime Minister of the State of Israel, killed 69 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, and blew up 45 Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Qibiya. On October 29, 1956, the State of Israel killed forty-nine Palestinian villagers, including fifteen women and eleven children in Kafr Kassim, a Palestinian village in the little Triangle. The villagers were lined up and shot for breaking a curfew (for which they had not been informed). One day later, on October 30, 1956, the State of Israel forcibly expelled approximately 5,000 Palestinians from Krad al Baqqara and Krad al Ghannama into Syria.
20. In 1967, the State of Israel forcibly expelled 388,500 Palestinian civilians, including 188,500 for the second time.
21. Between 1967 and 2002, the State of Israel deported 1,531 Palestinians, including mayors, writers, students and university lecturers, as a punitive measure. In August 1971 alone, the State of Israel deported 600 Palestinian refugees living in the Gaza Strip. Between 1987 and 1999, in East Jerusalem alone, the State of Israel, revoked residency rights of 3,327 Palestinians.
22. To date, the State of Israel has prevented the return of approximately 6 million Palestinian refugees, who have either been expelled or displaced. On October 26, 1948, the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion established the 'Transfer Committee' and adopted its recommendations preventing the return of Palestinian refugees. To date, approximately 250,000 internally displaced Palestinians are prevented from return to their homes and villages. Since 1948, the State of Israel has uprooted approximately three-quarter of the Palestinian people from their land, making this the largest and one of the longest standing unresolved refugee cases in the world today. The majority of Palestinian refugees, living inside the occupied Palestinian territories, and internally displaced Palestinians living within the boundaries of the State of Israel, live within 100 miles of their places of origin but are denied their right to return to their homes and lands.
IV. Home demolitions and destruction of property
23. Since 1967, the State of Israel has demolished at least 9,000 Palestinian homes, leaving 50,000 Palestinians homeless. In August 1971 alone, the State of Israel and the Israeli army, led by Israel's current Prime Minister, demolished 2,000 Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 12,000 Palestinian refugees for the second time in their lives.
24. In 1948 and after, the State of Israel plundered and looted Palestinian property spread over hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, including homes, household effects, cash, heavy equipment, trucks and whole flocks of cattle. The total quantity of Palestinian property confiscated by the State of Israel amounted to over 4 million acres of land, the looting and confiscation of tens of thousands of homes, apartments, shops, factories and other facilities.
V. Land Confiscation and Colonization
25. The State of Israel confiscated 800,000 acres of cultivated Palestinian farmland, including crops, olives, tobacco, and fruit. Additionally, the State of Israel confiscated livestock-goats, sheep, and hens.
26. The State of Israel confiscated assets of the Muslim waqf, endowments of land and property, accounting for one-tenth of all land in Palestine before 1948, and 70 per cent of all ships in some Palestinian towns, besides urban estate, houses and businesses. It is estimated that the State of Israel has confiscated, destructed and plundered US$1.8 billion of Palestinian refugee moveable property and lands. Today this is valued at US$ 209 billion.
27. Since 1948, the State of Israel has confiscated 96% of the land owned by Palestinians for use by Israeli Jews only. Since 1967, the State of Israel has confiscated 58% of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, for use by Israeli Jews only.
28. Since 1967, the State of Israel has been responsible for establishing, financing and protecting illegal Jewish colonies (settlements) in the West Bank and Gaza. The State of Israel has confiscated 40,000 acres of land to build a vast road system in the occupied Palestinian territories, which are only allowed to be used by its army and settlers. Most of this land was under cultivation by Palestinian farmers.
29. Since 1967, the State of Israel has transferred 400,000 settlers into the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.
30. Since 1967 to September 2001, the State of Israel has built 123 illegal settlements on confiscated and expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, hosting 198,000 settlers. Between 1993 and September 2001, the population of settlers increased from 100,000 to 198,000, and thus approximately doubled. In occupied East Jerusalem, between 1997 and September 2001, the State of Israel increased the number of settlers to 167,000. Between 1993 and August 2001, the State of Israel confiscated over 70,000 acres of Palestinian land. In 1999 alone, the State of Israel confiscated approximately 10,000 acres of Palestinian land. Since February 2001 alone, the State of Israel has built at least 34 new settlements, excluding expansion of existing illegal settlements.
31. Since 1967, the State of Israel have neither prevented assaults by Israeli settlers on Palestinian individuals and communities, nor effectively intervened to stop such assaults. For example, on June 2, 1980, as a result of car bombs placed by Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli army, the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah, Bassam Shaka'a and Karim Khalaf, were severely maimed. On February 24, 1994, an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, entered the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron and opened fire on worshippers, marking the end of Ramadan. Twenty-nine Palestinians were killed. The State of Israel failed to intervene, except to kill another six Palestinians. The State of Israel has ordered its soldiers to cooperate with settlers engaging in wanton violence against Palestinian residents. Furthermore, the State of Israel has failed to hold Israeli settlers responsible for their actions. Israeli settlers have killed and wounded Palestinians, and destroyed, vandalized, or stolen large amounts of Palestinian property.
32. To this date, the State of Israel has continued this policy of land expropriation, land destruction, agricultural property destruction and home demolitions both inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Inside Israel, the State of Israel has maintained a policy of continually establishing new settlements for Jews only that also serve to isolate and cut off Palestinian communities. In addition, the State of Israel has imposed massive restrictions on Palestinian construction.
33. Inside Israel, the State of Israel has confined Palestinians into restricted, deliberately under-developed enclaves with reduced access to necessary resources, services and facilities. The State of Israel has no laws to prevent discrimination in issues of land ownership, leasing, and residency issues. The State of Israel uses quasi-governmental agencies and zoning or planning laws to confine Palestinians and particular areas and prevent natural growth. In occupied East Jerusalem, the State of Israel prevents Palestinians access to 66% because of Israeli zoning, planning and building restrictions. In other parts of the occupied Palestinian territories, the State of Israel has confined Palestinians to Bantustan-style enclaves, again with reduced access to necessary resources, including water supplies, services and facilities.
VI. Water Confiscation
34. Since 1967, the State of Israel has confiscated more than 80% of Palestinian groundwater. Shortly after the June 1967 war, the State of Israel destroyed 140 Palestinian water pumps in the Jordan Valley, used to irrigate Palestinian farms in the area. Since 1967, all water management in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been placed under Israeli military rule.
35. The State of Israel has strategically established illegal colonies to tap Palestinian groundwater and springs, enabling discriminatory allocation of water resources. Per capita basis, Israelis consume more than five times as much water as Palestinians, even though their population is only twice that of Palestinians, despite widespread dry periods where Palestinian municipal water supplies literally dry up for months during the summer.
36. In April and May of 2002 alone, the State of Israel has caused destruction to the Palestinian water sector worth of US$ 7 million. In that period, the State of Israel destructed water networks, denying Palestinians access to running water for up to two weeks at a time.
37. The State of Israel has systematically dug trenches across main roads, disrupting water and sewer mains and telecommunication lines to Palestinians homes, caused intentional damage to pumping facilities, intentional destruction of water transmission lines from wells located outside city limits, obstruction of municipal crews from carrying out emergency repair work, killing a municipality engineer in Nablus. A well operator from Jenin was taken hostage twice.
VII. Due Process Violations and Torture
38. Since 1967 to date, the State of Israel has arbitrarily detained over 620,000 Palestinians. In 1989 alone, the State of Israel detained 50,000 Palestinians, representing 16% of the entire male population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip between the ages of 14 and 55. By way of comparison, that same year, out of a total African population of 24 million in South Africa, no more than 5,000 or 0.2% were detained for security offenses against the apartheid regime.
39. Since 1948, the State of Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians without charge or trial.
40. Over 200 Palestinian prisoners have died while in Israeli custody, due to torture, ill-treatment, deprivation of medical treatment, and neglect.
41. The State of Israel has systematically tortured and ill-treated approximately 80% of all Palestinian detainees. Methods of torture used by the State of Israel include both psychological and physical torture, including beatings of sensitive organs, choking, pulling of hair off the body, prolonged solitary confinement, subjecting Palestinian detainees to noise, screams, and threats against their families. Other forms of torture and ill-treatment applied by the State of Israel against Palestinian detainees include forcing a person to stand, hooded and handcuffed, for long periods of time, while depriving him of food or sleep, starvation, the use of electric shocks, burnings, beatings with hands, fists, truncheons, and boots, deprivation of food, sleep, and basic hygiene, resulting in lice and general discomfort, and forcing detainees to stand for protracted periods of time.
42. In the occupied Palestinian territories, the State of Israel has established military courts that do not comply with fair trial standards.
43. The State of Israel provides virtual impunity for those Israeli soldiers and settlers, who commit crimes against Palestinians. The State of Israel has failed to investigate or properly and impartially investigate or prosecute those Israeli soldiers and settlers, who have committed crimes against Palestinians. The State of Israel has denied any remedy for Palestinian victims, including denies compensation.
VIII. Destruction of Means of Livelihood
44. Since 1967, the State of Israel has uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees. In 1984, the State of Israel issued a military order which made it illegal for Palestinians to plant a new or replacement fruit tree without a permit. During the summer of 1988, the state of Israel burnt 8,000 olive and fruit trees and thousands of dunums of wheat. Between 1993 and August 2001, the State of Israel has uprooted 280,000 fruit and olive trees belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank alone. In 2001 alone, the State of Israel uprooted 23,551 fruit and olive trees.
45. The State of Israel has deliberately strangulated the Palestinian economy with forced dependency through border controls of imports and exports, exploitation of natural resources, de-development of Palestinian industries and businesses, violation of the full range of employment and workers' rights, including through closures and curfews.
46. The State of Israel has deliberately imposed a range of measures and acts that have diminished the living conditions of Palestinians to an extent that can only result in their physical destruction. Methods include the confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian land and other natural resources, particularly, water, which has seriously affected the health and viability of Palestinian communities and their way of life. The State of Israel has damaged Palestinian property and environment through the use of heavy weaponry and has permitted dumping toxic and hazardous products. The State of Israel has imposed restrictions on movement on Palestinians in and out of Palestinian localities, affecting population centers and their associated agricultural and economic communities, including restrictions on movement, depriving them of access to their land and property.
IX. Discrimination and Apartheid
47. The State of Israel imposed a tax system on Palestinians, while, in per capita terms, Israeli Jews received fifty times more grants than Palestinians. Of aid spent in the occupied Palestinian territories, 96.5% was spent on Israeli settlers, and 3.5% on the 90% Palestinian population. In 1992, discounting East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers constituted barely 6% of the West Bank and Gaza populations. Although since 1970, the State of Israel required Palestinian workers to pay dues for the Histadrut, Palestinian workers cannot be members of this trade union federation. Between 1970 and 1994, the Histadrut confiscated NIS 700 million from Palestinian workers without these workers being represented.
48. Since 1948, the State of Israel has increasingly imposed segregation and apartheid, including by cutting off Palestinians from access to wider Arab communities in neighboring Arab states, cutting Palestinians from their families and communities in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
49. Since 1967, the State of Israel has separated and isolated Palestinians in East Jerusalem from their families in other parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since 1987, the State of Israel has separated and isolated Palestinian communities through barbed wired fences and iron gates, for example Dheishe refugee camp, near Bethlehem. Since 1989, the State of Israel has segregated, isolated and separated the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and to outside neighboring countries.
50. Since 1993, the State of Israel has denied Palestinians in the West Bank access to the Gaza Strip and Israel. Since this period, the State of Israel has used curfews, partial and total closures on an ad hoc basis. Since 1993, the State of Israel further separated Palestinian communities inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, separating villages from cities and villages from villages, through checkpoints, bypass roads, settlements and closures.
51. Since March 2001, the State of Israel dug trenches into main roads, cutting of all movement for Palestinian villagers to any other area, including urban centers upon which they rely for work, education, humanitarian aid and assistance, including medicines, field clinics and hospital, and crucial supplies, including food and water. Since June 2001, the State of Israel dug more trenches and erected iron gates in some areas, closing off villages and cities. Since June 2002, the State of Israel has segregated, separated and isolated more than 11,000 Palestinians living between the 1967-demarcation line and a currently built wall or so-called 'security fence' in the north of the West Bank.
X. Denial of Freedom of the Press
52. The State of Israel has barred journalists access to areas, subjected journalists to physical violence and harassment, arrested and detained journalists, restricted access to Palestinian sources of information, for example, the closure of press agencies, impersonation of journalists and confiscation of materials, including footage, cameras, and films.
XI. Denial of Education
53. The State of Israel has repressed Palestinian education by closures, raids and destruction. The State of Israel has killed, injured, detained and harassed Palestinian professors, lecturers, teachers and students. The State of Israel has regularly closed schools and universities in the West Bank and Gaza for prolonged periods, disrupting Palestinian education, and has banned alternative education. Furthermore, the State of Israel has occupied many schools and destructed school property. The State of Israel has raided schools and universities and used tear gas inside school buildings.
XII. Denial of Freedom of Religion
54. The State of Israel has obstructed and harassed worship. The State of Israel has raided mosques and harassed worshippers. The State of Israel has allowed its soldiers to shoot tear gas inside places of worships, have assaulted mosques and churches, has disrupted the burial rites of Palestinians.
Surely though, the ultimate measure of success is the ability to use terrorism to achieve your aims and get away with it. By this measure, Israel is the most successful terrorist state of the 20th century and looks like continuing its winning streak into the 21st century.
Israel has its own special way of recognizing the achievements of its great terrorists ??? by electing them its prime minister. There are no less than three Israeli prime ministers who have long terrorist histories.
The current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, cemented his place in the hall of fame with his leading role in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, including the massacres by Israeli-backed militias in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Earlier in his Israeli army career Sharon was responsible for the slaughter of 69 civilians in the Qibya village in Jordanian-controlled territory in 1953.
The Israeli prime minister at the time of the 1982 invasion, Menachem Begin, was a leader of the Irgun, one of the main terrorist groups in the Zionist movement. In the 1930s and 1940s the Zionists were trying to establish the Israeli state in what was then British-occupied Palestine.
In 1937, the Irgun launched a terror campaign against Palestinian civilians, setting off bombs in markets and attacking buses. In one attack on the Haifa fruit market 74 Arabs were killed and 129 wounded. In 1946, the Irgun set off a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing about 100 Arab, British and Jewish victims.
Another Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, started his career in this same period as a leader of the Zionist terrorist group, the Stern gang. The Stern gang was responsible for the assassination of the UN mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadette, and a French UN observer in September 1948.
As central leaders of these groups Begin and Shamir both went on to play a crucial role in the terrorist activities carried out during the 1948 war.
`Ethnic cleansing???
The term ???ethnic cleansing??? came into general use when it was used to describe the atrocities carried out by the Serbian nationalist forces in their push to create a Serbian state in Bosnia.
To carry out this particular form of terrorism is one thing, but as former Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic has found out, it is quite another thing to get away with it. In terms of getting away with ethnic cleansing, Israel is in a class of its own.
Ethnic cleansing was always going to be essential to achieving the Zionist movement's aim of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. This movement sought to escape the oppression suffered by Jewish minorities throughout history by setting up a state controlled exclusively by Jews, ruling over a country in which Jews were the majority. The process of creating such a state in Palestine would inevitably involve systematic discrimination against the non-Jewish people of Palestine.
Through a combination of lobbying, military force and terrorist activity the Zionist movement was able to win the support of the US and other powerful nations for a UN partition plan which would create a Jewish state in Palestine. The 1947 UN partition plan violated the right of the Arabic-speaking Palestinian people to national self-determination, as it denied them the opportunity to vote on whether or not they agreed to the UN plan to hand over a part of their national homeland to a colonial-settler state.
The UN plan was also grossly unfair in that it granted the 30% of the population who were Jewish 54% of the land of Palestine, including the most fertile areas. Despite the obvious bias of the UN plan in favor of Zionism, it did not resolve the ???Arab question???.
In the area allocated to the Jewish state, Jews only barely outnumbered Palestinians (498,000 Jews to 497,000 Palestinians) and at this time the Zionist settlers only owned 6% of the land.
The solution was ethnic cleansing. By waging a war of terror against the civilian Palestinian population, the Zionists were able to occupy 81% of the total area of Palestine by the end of the 1948 war.
One of the worst acts of terror during this war was the Deir Yasseen massacre. On April 9, 1948, the Irgun and the Stern gang attacked the village of Deir Yasseen and massacred 120 villagers. To ensure that the massacre had maximum effect in forcing Palestinians to flee, the terrorist forces raped women and girls, butchered infants and cut open the womb of a nine-months pregnant woman.
This was just one of a number of massacres that terrorized more than 90% of the Palestinian population into fleeing their homes.
After forcing the Palestinian population to flee the villages, the Israeli forces would often blow up the houses to ensure the residents had nothing to return to. To reinforce the point, the Israeli authorities then ???legally??? confiscated the homes, fields and property of all Palestinians who had not been in their ???regular place of residence??? on September 1, 1948.
The media coverage of the attacks on New York has emphasized that the victims of terrorism are not just those killed and injured but also their families, and the society as a whole. Today there are more than 3.7 million Palestinian refugees registered by the UN and about another two million who are not registered. These refugees are the victims of the acts of terrorism carried out in the 1948 war and of further terrorist acts carried out in the last 53 years.
In the Balkans, some refugees have been allowed to return ??? but not in Israel. There, Palestinian refugees are not allowed to return, despite the fact that under international law they have every right to. UN resolution 194 passed in 1948 explicitly affirms this right ??? but Israel's ethnic cleansing and defiance of this UN resolution goes unpunished by the UN and the US.
While the Palestinian victims of Israeli terrorism are left to rot in refugee camps, Israel struts the world stage claiming to be a democracy. This Israeli form of ???democracy??? is based on driving out more than half the indigenous population of the country and thereby denying their right to participate in any aspect of society.
Meir Kahan, one of Israel's best known civilian terrorists, openly acknowledged this fact. According to Kahan: ???There is no question of setting up democracy in Israel because democracy means equal rights for all, irrespective of racial or religious origins. You can't, on the one hand, want a Jewish state and, at the same time, give non-Jews the right to become a majority.???
Denying the right of Palestinian refugees to return is therefore essential to maintaining Israeli ???democracy???.
Hostage taking
Hollywood has produced numerous films in which ???evil terrorists???, usually Arabs, take innocent civilians, usually Americans, hostage and make demands that must be met before the hostages are released.
We all know the script: the ruthless hijackers kill a hostage to show they mean business, the US government refuses to negotiate with terrorists, one of the hostages is a Special Forces-trained superhero who leads the fight against the hijackers, eventually killing them all and setting the hostages free.
These ???Hollywood principles??? generally reflect the public stance of the US government in relation to terrorism. This tough ???no negotiations, blow the terrorists away??? stance was exactly that taken by the US and its allies in relation to the Taliban's offer to negotiate on a international trial for bin Laden. Any suggestion that there should be negotiations or an assessment of the legitimacy of the territorial claims was dismissed as appeasement and rewardi ng terrorist aggression.
Do these principles apply to Israel?
Israel's 1948 acquisition of territory by force went unpunished. No doubt encouraged by this success, in 1967 Israel invaded the rest of Palestine and parts of Egypt and Syria, taking millions of civilians hostage. Israel demanded that its ???right to exist??? be recognized before it would withdraw and release the hostages. The passing of UN Security Council resolution 242 calling on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories had no effect.
So did the US launch immediate military action against Israel? No. It called for negotiations while continuing to provide Israel with massive military aid.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria took military action to attempt to free their citizens and territory held hostage by Israel, exercising their right to self-defense under international law. The US response was to provide Israel with all the emergency military aid it needed to defeat Egypt and Syria.
The experience of Egypt's 1977 peace treaty with Israel seems to confirm the argument that negotiating with terrorists only encourages them. After Egypt had met Israel's demands for recognition and had its territory returned, Israel promptly invaded Lebanon in 1978, and again in 1982.
In effect, Israel has held millions of innocent civilians hostage since 1967 and has killed thousands of Palestinians who have resisted this. While in Hollywood movies and in Afghanistan, it is quite legitimate for the ???civilised world??? (read, the US and its allies) to kill ???terrorists???, those Palestinians who have exercised their right, under international law, to resist the illegal Israeli occupation of their land have been designated ???terrorists??? themselves.
During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon the civilian toll from the terrorist activities of the Israeli army was 12,000 killed, 40,000 wounded, 300,000 homeless.
Over the course of the invasion the Israeli army used a range of terror weapons on civilians including cluster bombs and phosphorous bombs and shells. The use of phosphorous bombs and shells for military objectives is banned under the 1980 UN Geneva convention.
This description of their effect by journalist Robert Fisk explains why: ???Dr Shamaa found that the two five-day old twins had already died but they were still on fire. `I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames???, she said. `When I took them out half an hour later they were still burning???.???
The Israeli army entrusted the dirtiest work of the invasion to their right-wing Lebanese allies, the Phalangists. On September 15, 1982, the Israeli army sealed the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in West Beirut and Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon authorized a unit of 150 Phalangists to enter the camps.
The Phalangists preceded to slaughter at least 1000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians over a two-day period while the Israeli army looked on.
Just because Israel is the most successful terrorist state in the world does not mean there is no role for Israeli civilians in carrying out terrorist acts.
On February 25, 1994, Barukh Goldstein, an Israeli settler, massacred around 50 Palestinian worshippers at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. Goldstein was a well-known leader of Kach, an extreme right-wing Zionist organization. Wearing a military uniform he entered the mosque and emptied two clips of a machine gun into Muslim worshippers. In the two weeks following the massacre, the Israeli army continued Goldstein's work by killing another 30 Palestinians.
While fanatical settlers such as Goldstein are directly involved in terrorizing Palestinian civilians, it is the ???ordinary??? Israeli settlers who provide a cover and excuse for Israeli state terrorism and further ethnic cleansing.
Protecting these Israeli civilians provides an excuse for the Israeli army to station large numbers of troops in the Palestinian territories. The land on which these illegal settlements are built, and the ???security zones??? around them, is confiscated from Palestinians. To ensure the settlers can travel freely, ???Israeli-only??? roads have been built which divide the Palestinian territories and have required the confiscation of even more Palestinian land.
While renowned for its large-scale atrocities, Israel combines this with smaller-scale daily terrorism, which has the greatest impact. For the past 34 years Israeli soldiers have held up Palestinian civilians at gunpoint on a daily basis.
Much has been made of the fact that those killed in New York were just ordinary people going about their daily business. The fear that you be could killed at any moment for no good reason is one of the worst effects of terrorism. This is a fear that Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories have lived with on a daily basis for over 30 years.
For Palestinians, however, the people who may kill them are not invisible; they are right in front of them every day pointing automatic weapons at them as they go about their daily business. They are the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints, who may open fire at a suspicious movement, and the armed settlers, many of whom believe Palestinians should be expelled at gunpoint.
This is not an abstract fear, as most Palestinians have a close relative who has been killed or wounded by the Israeli army or has had their home blown up or bulldozed by the Israelis as punishment for resisting the occupation. According to Amnesty International, 2650 Palestinian houses were destroyed by Israel between 1987 and 2000.
The support of the US government has been crucial to Israel's terrorist success. The US continues to provide Israel with massive levels of military and non-military aid: $US3 billion in 1997 alone and a total $US74 billion since 1949.
With the continuing support of the US government, Israel's position in terrorism's number one spot looks secure for some time. On the same day that the Israeli army continued its ethnic cleansing program by demolishing 18 Palestinian houses in Gaza, the US called on Palestinians to stop their violence and crack down on terrorism so that ???negotiations??? with Israel can continue.
It means "Sprinklers"!
Amnesty International is concerned about the deterioration of the human rights and humanitarian situation as a result of the Israeli army incursion in the Jabalya refugee camp and surrounding areas in the northern Gaza Strip (including sectors in the nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya).
In the past week (since the evening of Tuesday 28 September) more than 70 Palestinians have been killed, more than a third of whom were unarmed and including some 20 children. Hundreds of others have been injured.
The Israeli army has repeatedly used excessive force, including heavy shelling from tanks and helicopter gunships. Experience has shown that the use of such weapons and the manner in which they have been deployed by the army in densely populated residential areas (the Jabalya refugee camp is one of the most densely populated places in the world, with more than 100,000 Palestinians living in less than two square kilometres), invariably results in a high rate of death and injury of bystanders and people who are not involved in armed confrontation. These tactics betray a lack of respect for fundamental human rights principles, including the right to life.
In certain areas the Israeli army has also unlawfully destroyed or damaged homes, schools, water and electricity networks, roads, and other crucial infrastructure. Israeli forces have hindered access to medical services -- not only for those injured in the military operation but also those who need medical care for other reasons, including women who need to give birth. When able to reach those in need (they often cannot reach those in need of medical treatment) ambulances have on several occasions come under Israeli army fire.
Strict closures have also been imposed throughout the Gaza Strip in the past week, cutting the Gaza Strip into four isolated sections, paralysing all aspects of life, with people unable to reach their workplace and students unable to reach the universities. In addition schools in the area besieged by the Israeli army in the northern Gaza Strip are closed. Thousands of people living in the besieged areas are also experiencing shortages of food and other essential goods.
Amnesty International is calling on the Israeli authority to:
?? put an immediate end to the use of excessive lethal force
?? put an immediate end to unlawful destruction and damage of Palestinian homes and properties, roads and other infrastructure
?? allow immediate access to medical care and other essential services for the Palestinian population in the affected areas
?? respect the right to freedom of movement for the Palestinian population elsewhere in the Gaza Strip
Amnesty International also calls on Palestinian armed groups not to initiate attacks and armed confrontation with Israeli troops from amongst residential areas, as this puts the local residents at risk of return fire and retaliation from the Israeli army, and reiterates its call on Palestinian armed groups to put an end to attacks directed against Israeli civilians in Israel or in the Occupied Territories.
1) America for the last ten years has been the leading exporter of small arms.
2) America controls more spy satellites, intercept stations, supercomputers that decode emails etc.. than all of the world's nations combined.
3) America has an effective veto in the world bank and IMF not to mention an actual veto at the United Nations Security Council.
4) America controls more aircraft carriers, has more fighter plains and bombers, than any other nation on the planet.
5) The CIA has trained the vast majority of the world's spy and internal security services.
6) Hollywood movies are consistently the most popular entertainment in most of the third world.
7) America's Navy secures the world's major sea lanes that deliver oil to China, Japan and East Asia.
I could go on. My only point is that all this hegemony should be wielded in the interest of a cause more noble than the preservation of former client dictators.
Cosign. Check the percentages of combatants killed versus bystanders on each side. Let's be real: Suicide bombers exist for the sole purpose of killing innocents (they go so far as to target places of leisure). The Israeli army on the other hand exists to protect the people and the state. Their purpose has never been to kill innocents, and when it does happen - as in the one-ton bomb dropped on a building in Gaza in attempts to eliminate a known terrorist residing there - you see widespread condemnation of any resulting civilian casualties in the Israeli media and often courts martial. The suicide bombers on the other hand get kindergartens literally named after them.
Yeah, Israel only displaces innocents.
You fight a people throwing rocks with tanks...and presto...suicide bombers become the reality.
Ain't too hard to understand. You initiate a war against citizens by bulldozing their homes and they should have every right to retaliate against your citizens.
All is fair in love and war...
by whose morals are you basing this on?
you konw for someone who claims not to be prejudiced against Jews you certainly are pretty damn prejudiced against Jews...oh wait it's a little more easier on your conscience if you call them Zionists