Though both Israel and Hamas are accused of war crimes during last year’s Operation Cast Lead, Human Rights Watch confirms its role as US policy whip by admonishing Hamas to account for its killing of civilians, yielding the AP headline: Human rights group: Hamas targeted civilians. February 5th is the deadline imposed by the UN for both parties to respond to charges made in the Goldstone Report. Fair enough, Hamas rockets killed three residents of Sderot while the IDF killed 1,400 in Gaza. But confusion always resurfaces about Sderot, formerly the Arab town of Najd. Can settlers deliberately mobilized to occupy Sderot, be excluded as legitimate targets of their dispossessed victims? Is Israel hiding behind civilian settlers which it moves illegally to advance its hold on conquered land?
The question of Sderot’s legitimacy provokes nothing but confusion. Some Israelis claim Sderot was part of the territory which the UN set aside for a Jewish State in 1947. Maps reveal rather that Sderot was seized in the warfare which erupted when the UN decision was announced. Sderot was overrun when Israel made its unilateral declaration of statehood, when Zionist forces expanded on the initial UN proposal, and fell back to the Green Line of 1949. Thus other Israelis defend Sderot as a “post-withdrawal” and “‘Green Line’ city.” A telling concession.
Both Israeli claims on Sderot profit by the confusion that the term “occupied territories” implies lands seized by Israel since 1967. Palestinians are constantly blamed for Arafat refusing to accept a compromise that would restore the 1967 boundaries. Ignoring the Palestinians’ right of return to properties taken well before.
Palestinians can be fully in the right to reject the UN’s reapportionment of their lands. But even if everyone was forced to adhere to the UN demarcations, Sderot would not be Israel’s. The dispossessed Palestinians have a right to reject the occupation of lands stolen in the wake of refugees fleeing the onslaught, now called the Nakba.
I find it revealing that you call the residents of Sderot “human shields” of the IDF — and say that this justifies attacks on them by Hamas. I.e., it is legitimate to attack human shields.
How progressive of you.
Is this a joke?
If you regard Pre-67 Israel as “Occupied Territory” does that mean that Israel has NO right to exist on ANY territory?
Do you honestly believe that the world would be a better place of the Middle East was free of Jews?
I’m very sad that you do not regard yourself as part of “The Tribe”. Maybe if you did you would have some sympathy for the working class residents of Sderot whose children have grown up in constant fear of missile attacks for the crime of being Jewish in a neighbourhood that doesn’t like Jews.
And yes I have a lot of sympathy for the children of Gaza who have lived under an oppressive Islamic rule since Israel withdrew in 20005
Do YOU believe that the Palestinian people, many of whom have been in Palestine/Israel (Samaria) since the time of Joshua have no right to remain? Or exist?
IDF’s argument is that people who have been there for centuries and in some cases Millennia are there to provide “Human Shields” for Hamas.
Since the IDF Argument is that they, and ONLY they, are the True Israel, I guess it’s really hard for them to accept that.
The same Biblical evidence used to justify the IDF Argument justifies the Palestinian Argument.
The same DNA evidence used to justify the IDF Argument justifies the Palestinian Argument.
The two thousand year old olive groves and vineyards there justify the Palestinian Argument AND prove the IDF Argument about it being an “Empty Land” to be a LIE.
If IDF wants to rob PEOPLE and kill them if they resist they need to come up with a better excuse than flimsy LIES.
Ezra and Nehemiah made almost the same argument, with an important exception. They DID acknowledge that the Palestinians/Samaritans were in fact the Kingdom of Israel.
Incidentally, the same argument used for the reconquest of Israel by ONE faction of Judah “the land without people for a people without land” AND the more rabid Racist comments from Ezra and Nehemiah were used in America by the English conquistadores. Some IDF propagandists try to use that against anybody in America that doesn’t bow down and worship Bibi Netanyahu and his comrades.
I’ll see that card and raise One Mountain in Tennessee which my family had in their possession for more than a thousand years, the Cherokee version of Mount Zion, which the Rich Anglo-Americans (who also finance Bibi and finance the IDF propaganda campaign) are about to blast apart with high explosives, take away the coal and anything else they can sell, and then give the resulting Poisoned Land back to, not the Cherokee, but to the “poor” people of Tennessee as a park, so the children of the “poor” about whom the IDF apologists care So Very Much, (enough to put us into their propaganda)…
can play in the poison left behind by their arrogant worship of their “god” the Yankee Dollar.
IDF isn’t doing that. Their biggest financial backers in the United States, however, ARE.
With no coherent answer from the Internet Propaganda Division of the IDF.
Since these Very Rich Anglo-Americans also support IDF with Tax-Exempt monetary donations, meaning simply that the Taxes they otherwise would owe on that money are refunded to them from those of us who actually have to PAY taxes…
That means that we, the American Taxpayers, are funding the IDF death squads. Without our permission being either solicited or our questioning of that policy being welcome.
“No Taxation without Representation!” right(wing)?
There’s also OFFICIAL payments to support the Israeli Economy, but not the economy of the poorest citizens, who IDF has blockaded and considers such things as Food and Water to be “contraband” and justification to Kill People who provide that “contraband” using Foreign Aid.
So we, the Taxpayers, pay for Guns unofficially and Butter Officially.
but not the Very Rich Supporters of IDF, their “contributions” are refunded to them, so they’re not actually giving their own money away…
Now, I, as a Worker who paid not only my taxes, but the taxes of my Landlord and, since the Rich don’t make their own money, the Workers make it for them… I paid my employers’ taxes as well.
I can therefore with every bit as much actual Right and Authority negotiate a New Financial Treaty with Israel.
Either we pay for Guns, officially, in which case the Taxpayers have an immediate say in whether or not to approve it…
Or we pay for Butter. In which case we, the Taxpayers, also would have an Immediate Say in whether or not IDF or Bibi Netanyahu can deny OUR Foreign Aid to a large portion of the people… as he’s doing now.
Right now, Bibi and the “heroic” Murderers in the IDF are denying not only Government Funded and Approved Aid to the Palestinian people they’re denying any Private not-tax-deductible-aid as well.
Nehemiah and Ezra, for all their Racist rantings against the Samaritan ISRAELITES they were displacing and disinheriting, also had a few things to say about treating the poor with righteous measure. When they weren’t having them killed for the “crime” of being racially impure, that is.
So did the ISRAELITE (meaning Not Kingdom of Judah) prophets Moses, Joshua, Ezekiel…
I point that out because here in America a lot of people use cherry-picked references out of any and all context to Biblical Sources for promoting Bibi and his Murder Spree.
Truth is a two edged sword that cuts both ways. Get used to it because it isn’t going away.