Tag Archives: Sderot

Are Israeli settlers of occupied Sderot combatants or human shields of IDF?

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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?
Palestine 1947

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.

Was Sharon quote really not genuine?

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Are quotes being fraudulently attributed to Israeli ministers (as NMT’s indignant Israeli PR visitors are insisting)? We decided to look into the Ariel Sharon “fabrication” about who controls of America. Let’s just say our hasbara critics are going to wish they’d tempered their indignation. In the process, we found more indecorous pronouncements, which we’ve included with direct attributions from the Israeli press. Tokhis oyfn tish.

Did Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon say “I control America,” or words to such effect? It turns out this has been made a bone of contention since the alleged rebuke to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in October 2001.

The Israeli PR website CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) has been accusing Arab-sympathetic Washington Report, (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs -WRMEA) of orchestrating this story. The quote was picked up by the international press from Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who had attributed it to having been reported on Israeli radio station Kol Yisrael.

CAMERA claimed that Kol Yisrael denied having aired the quote. But Geyer could not discount the veracity of her multiple Israeli sources, whether or not they heard it on the radio or at the meeting, but the veteran journalist stood by her longstanding contacts. Under a coordinated barrage of LTE complaints by CAMERA, the Chicago Tribune issued this clarification on June 14, 2002:

“[the quote was] widely reported in the Palestinian press but cannot be confirmed in independent sources. Geyer and Universal Press Syndicate regret not having attributed the quote more specifically.”

Hardly an admission of “fabrication,” as CAMERA and this site’s hasbara propagandists are lauding.

And whether Sharon said it or not, Senator Fullbright, or Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had already spelled that notion out for posterity.

Perhaps Prime Minister Olmert’s recent claim to have interrupted George Bush mid-speech, to command Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to stand down on a United Nations vote condemning the recent Gaza attack, proves Israel’s influence, more loudly than pronouncing it.

But a statement about who claims to control whom, pales in comparison to what some Israeli ministers have voiced about their military objectives in Gaza. They remind me of American commanders, utterly oblivious to the Geneva Conventions.

Matan Vilnai
Here’s what Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai famously told Army Radio last year:

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger ‘Shoah’ because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

SHOAH is the Hebrew word for Holocaust; itself a word zealously trademarked by Zionists internationally to mean only the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews.

Israeli PR damage-control immediately jumped in to assert that by ‘Shoah,’ Vilnai had meant ‘disaster,’ the word’s original definition. (Would that be like asking Americans to believe that when Rudy Giuliani brings up 911, he’s talking about dialing emergency?)

Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter
at weekly cabinet meeting Sunday, Jan 20, 2008:

“the government must instruct the IDF to eliminate the rocket fire from Gaza entirely. These attacks need not be minimized or managed, but stopped completely irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians.”

Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit:

“any other country would have already gone in and leveled the area, which is exactly what I think the IDF should do – decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”

“We should let them know ‘you have to leave, this area will be taken down tomorrow’ and just take it down – that will show them we mean business. Sporadic actions are good, but they’re not good enough.”

(At the same meeting, according to Haaretz: legal experts were requested to prepare an opinion on a “gradual evacuation of the population” in Gaza from areas of fighting.)

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
at the annual Herzliya Conference Jan 23, 2008

“But there is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards at Sderot and other communities in the south.”

“Does anyone seriously think that our children will wet their beds at night in fear and be afraid to go out of the house and they [Gazans] will live in quiet normality?”