Israel continues its merciless pounding of the defenceless.

[DanTheMan 0]

Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979, which got Egypt kicked out of the Arab League.

[acrossthepond 699]

It's because all of the Arab states except Egypt (and Syria, but they got forced into it by the Egyptians) are too pansy to fight. They were content to sit on the sidelines from '56 (Suez Crisis) on, providing absolutely minimal military support (think in terms of one jeep, twenty rifles, etc.) while talking up the Nasserist rhetoric and vocally sympathising with the Palestinians, but they never put their money where their mouths were.

 

After Egypt finally achieved a modicum of victory in 1973 only to see Israel (with American military support) devastate their 3rd army, win back all the territory they had lost, and push them back to the Suez Canal, they finally wised up and under the guidance of Sadat realised that fighting Israel in the name of "Arab unity" was only going to get Egyptians killed (at the time there was a joke - "We Arabs will never tolerate the existence of Israel. We'll fight them to the last Egyptian.") so they signed the US-brokered Camp David peace treaty which lasts to this day as well as securing billions of US foreign aid (making them as alex said, the 2nd highest recipient of US foreign aid). This, as Dan said, got them kicked out of the Arab League. It also got Sadat assassinated in 1981, leaving Mubarak to take over the country and slowly but surely turn it into a vassal of the US.

 

Israel's army could easily defeat any number of Arab states anyway, there's almost no possibility of an actual war between Israel and its neighbors. Not like any of them would be willing to fight for the Palestinians, who they call their "Arab brothers" but who they showed absolutely no sympathy or asylum to after they lost their homes in 1967.

[trophyshy 6432]

Thank you one and all for saving me a trip to Wikipedia.

 

Nuke's then, isn't it?

[Fop 1]

It's because all of the Arab states except Egypt (and Syria, but they got forced into it by the Egyptians) are too pansy to fight. They were content to sit on the sidelines from '56 (Suez Crisis) on, providing absolutely minimal military support (think in terms of one jeep, twenty rifles, etc.) while talking up the Nasserist rhetoric and vocally sympathising with the Palestinians, but they never put their money where their mouths were.

 

After Egypt finally achieved a modicum of victory in 1973 only to see Israel (with American military support) devastate their 3rd army, win back all the territory they had lost, and push them back to the Suez Canal, they finally wised up and under the guidance of Sadat realised that fighting Israel in the name of "Arab unity" was only going to get Egyptians killed (at the time there was a joke - "We Arabs will never tolerate the existence of Israel. We'll fight them to the last Egyptian.") so they signed the US-brokered Camp David peace treaty which lasts to this day as well as securing billions of US foreign aid (making them as alex said, the 2nd highest recipient of US foreign aid). This, as Dan said, got them kicked out of the Arab League. It also got Sadat assassinated in 1981, leaving Mubarak to take over the country and slowly but surely turn it into a vassal of the US.

 

Israel's army could easily defeat any number of Arab states anyway, there's almost no possibility of an actual war between Israel and its neighbors. Not like any of them would be willing to fight for the Palestinians, who they call their "Arab brothers" but who they showed absolutely no sympathy or asylum to after they lost their homes in 1967.

 

 

The whole thing kicked off with the arab states rejection of the UN partition plan (which would have seen the country spilt evenly.

 

 

 

Much of the time between 1946 and 1973 was various arab states fighting and trying to swallow up either the non-Jewish parts of the area (Jordan did it, Egypt too), or the whole area.

 

Like I said it's never been milk and honey there (and there's not been a state there prior to Israel since the crusade kingdoms nearly 1000 years ago), and the surrounding states have never given a monkeys about the "Palestinians", only their own goals and agendas.

 

 

Still true today.

[Park Life 70]

Ronny the boy Paul talking sense.

[Park Life 70]

The cynical use of white phosphorous over large areas. It is an indiscriminate skin dissolving weapon.

[Park Life 70]

How to starve Palestine.

[Guest Stevie]

Just goes to show you though, it boils down to it being wor fault if you look back through history. If us or America are going to go somewhere throw our weight about, we can't just fuck off and leave these monkey countries to their own devices, maybe when we carved Palestine up more than half a century ago we should've policed the place, it remains to be seen if our actions and eventual withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan will result in the same consequences.

[Park Life 70]

Just goes to show you though, it boils down to it being wor fault if you look back through history. If us or America are going to go somewhere throw our weight about, we can't just fuck off and leave these monkey countries to their own devices, maybe when we carved Palestine up more than half a century ago we should've policed the place, it remains to be seen if our actions and eventual withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan will result in the same consequences.

 

With Iraq the plan always has been to divide it up, and I think it will break up into perhaps three bits, of course there will be chaos for quite a bit when the West pulls out. Again with Iraq democracy has given control to the Shia in the Govt and we don't like them (Iranian backed). Keep trying to export this mythological democracy (America is in no way a democracy its a moneyocracy) and the result nearly always go against us (Iraq, Palestine,Iran and Venezuela recently).

 

There are geo-economic reasons we piss about abroad to do with assets and arms sales etc, but the costs are increasingly outweighting the benefits.

Aghanistan will never change, over 200 years, no one has changed one thing there, it is ttibal and they love fighting each other and periodically change sides.

The experiment with radicalising Islam there to fight the Russians will go down in history as one of the biggest mistakes America has ever made, for what it left behind (Taliban/Various militias) send out a signal to world islam that with funding they can change the destiny of countries (q Chechnya/ 7/7, 9/11, Bosnia and next to topple will be Pakistan with mad mullahs and madrassas waiting in the wings). AMERICA doesn't really have a foreign policy, it has a financial and multinational business core that propogates short term greed and quick fixes.

 

Israel is a real danger to the world, you see how a country the size of a thumbnail has America and the U.N. cowering, even scared to say a bad word about the carry on where they are slaughtering women and children on a daily basis.

 

Israel needs dealing with by the international community once and for all.

[Happy Face 29]

The deaths of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, and of Israelis (Muslim and Christian Arab, and Druse and Bedouin, as well as Jewish, don't forget, in Ashdod and Sderot), are hardly ennobled by the sordid realization that the timing of the carnage has been determined by three sets of electoral calculation.

 

The first and the most obvious is the interregnum between U.S. presidencies, in which only the faintest of squeaks will be heard from our political class as our weapons are used to establish later bridgeheads and to realign our uneasy simultaneous patronage of the Israeli and the Egyptian and the Palestinian establishments. Benny Morris, one of the most tough-minded Israeli intellectual commentators, used to speculate that Israel would employ the Bush-Obama transition to strike at Iranian nuclear sites. He may have been wrong in the short term, but, in fact, the current attack on Gaza and Hamas is the same war in a micro or proxy form.

 

Second comes the impending February election in Israel. Until last week, Benjamin Netanyahu was strongly favored to come back as the man whose hard line against territorial concessions had been vindicated by the use of long-evacuated Gaza as a launching pad for random missile attacks. It now seems unlikely that he can easily outbid the current ruling coalition, at least from the hawkish right. (Remember that all the nonsense of the so-called "Al-Aqsa intifada," which wasted so much time and life in the last decades, was first instigated by an electoral rivalry between Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, in which the latter showed himself more hard-line than the former by waddling militantly across the Temple Mount in the company of an armed band. For such vanities do children end up screaming in the streets over the mangled bodies of their parents—and vice, if I may so phrase it, versa.)

 

The third consideration, and the least noticed, is the fact that this month is the one where new elections for the Palestinian Authority have to be called by President Mahmoud Abbas, if not actually held. Before the new year, I talked to one or two knowledgeable Palestinians who argued that, under then-present conditions, Hamas had to hope that such elections would not soon take place. Life in Islamic Gaza was not such as to induce ecstatic happiness and prosperity among the populace: In common with many fundamentalist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood in its local Palestinian incarnation had badly overplayed its hand. It seems improbable that we'll ever know what would have happened in a free vote, but I think it's safe to say that recent events have further postponed the emergence of a democratic and secular alternative among the Palestinians. I even think it's possible that some people in Israel and some other people in Gaza do not want to see the emergence of such a force, but let me not be cynical.

 

So, that is why this nasty confrontation is taking place this time instead of at another time. But each miniature of the picture also implies its own enlargement, which in turn suggests that if the latest Gaza war hadn't come at this time, it would certainly have come at another. Again and as usual, Morris' work is instructive. As one of the most stern of the "revisionist" historians of Israel's founding who went deep into his own country's archives to show that Palestinians had been the victims of a deliberate ethnic cleansing in 1947-48, Morris is accustomed to looking disagreeable facts in the face. I strongly recommend a reading of his Dec. 29 op-ed in the New York Times. In it, he described not so much what he saw when he himself looked facts in the face as what Israelis see when they look outward and inward. To the north, Hezbollah local missiles backed by Syria and Iran, two dictatorships, one of which may soon possess nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. To the south and west, Hamas in Gaza. In the occupied territories of the West Bank, the same old colonial rule over the unwilling and the same mad confrontation with the Messianic Jewish settlers. Within Israel itself, an increasing tendency for Israeli Arabs to identify as Arabs or Palestinians rather than Israelis. Overarching everything, the sheer demographic fact that Israeli law, and Israeli power, governs or dominates more and more non-Jews, fewer and fewer of whom are interested in compromise. (It was this demographic imperative, if you remember, that made even Sharon give up the idea of "greater Israel," a scheme for which many state-subsidized Israeli settlers are still very much willing to die—and to kill.)

 

Compared with the threat to its very existence that had been posed in 1967, wrote Morris, the only changes that now favored Israel were the arrival of another 2 million or 3 million Israelis and the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal. But how reassuring, really, are those developments? Where are the new immigrants to go, unless onto disputed land? And on whom can the nukes be employed? On Gaza? In Hebron? These places would still be there, right next to the Jewish community, even if Damascus and Tehran were ashes. Only the messianic could even contemplate such an outcome. (What a pity there are so many of them locally.)

 

Confronted with this amazing concatenation of circumstances, and with some of the frightening blunders—such as the last invasion of Lebanon—that have resulted from it, some Israeli politicians appear to think that taking a tough line in Gaza might at least be good for short-term morale. This was the clear implication of the usually admirable Ethan Bronner's New York Times front-page reports on Dec. 28, 2008, and Jan. 4, 2009. So why not just come right out with it and say that one is bombing for votes?

 

It is only when one begins to grasp all the foregoing that one understands exactly how disgusting and squalid is the behavior of the Hamas gang. It knows very well that sanctions are injuring every Palestinian citizen, but—just like Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq—it declines to cease the indiscriminate violence and the racist and religious demagogy that led to the sanctions in the first place. Palestine is a common home for several religious and national groups, but Hamas dogmatically insists that the whole territory is instead an exclusively Muslim part of a future Islamic empire. At a time when democratic and reformist trends are observable in the region, from Lebanon to the Gulf, Hamas' leadership is physically and economically a part of the clientele of two of the area's worst dictatorships. (Should you ever be in need of a free laugh, look up those Western "intellectuals" who believe that a vote for an Islamist party and an Islamic state is a way to vote against corruption! They have not lately studied Iran and Saudi Arabia.) Gaza could have been a prefiguration of a future self-determined Palestinian state. Instead, it has been hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood and made into a place of repression for its inhabitants and aggression for its neighbors. Once again, the Party of God has the whip hand. To read Benny Morris is to be quite able—and quite free—to doubt that there should ever have been an Israeli state to begin with. But to see Hamas at work is to resolve that whatever replaces or follows Zionism, it must not be the wasteland of Islamic theocracy.

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2207872/

[Happy Face 29]

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

 

In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—BDS for short—was born.

 

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.… This international backing must stop."

 

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counterarguments.

 

1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures—quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non–Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

 

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

 

2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing echoes of South African apartheid in the occupied territories: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said that the architecture of segregation that he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid." That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

 

3. Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

 

4. Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less. This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

 

Coming up with our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, e-mails and instant messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start implementing a boycott strategy, dialogue increases dramatically. And why wouldn't it? Building a movement requires endless communicating, as many in the antiapartheid struggle well recall. The argument that supporting boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at one another across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

 

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of those very high-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, the managing director of a British telecom specializing in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax. "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

 

Ramsey says that his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

 

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

 

Further Information:

The only international news network covering every aspect of the war on Gaza is Al Jazeera English. The station isn't available in North America but you can watch it live in high-quality through www.livestation.com (player download is required).

 

Link

[Fop 1]

Opinion?

[Rob W 0]

It's because all of the Arab states except Egypt (and Syria, but they got forced into it by the Egyptians) are too pansy to fight. They were content to sit on the sidelines from '56 (Suez Crisis) on, providing absolutely minimal military support (think in terms of one jeep, twenty rifles, etc.) while talking up the Nasserist rhetoric and vocally sympathising with the Palestinians, but they never put their money where their mouths were.

 

After Egypt finally achieved a modicum of victory in 1973 only to see Israel (with American military support) devastate their 3rd army, win back all the territory they had lost, and push them back to the Suez Canal, they finally wised up and under the guidance of Sadat realised that fighting Israel in the name of "Arab unity" was only going to get Egyptians killed (at the time there was a joke - "We Arabs will never tolerate the existence of Israel. We'll fight them to the last Egyptian.") so they signed the US-brokered Camp David peace treaty which lasts to this day as well as securing billions of US foreign aid (making them as alex said, the 2nd highest recipient of US foreign aid). This, as Dan said, got them kicked out of the Arab League. It also got Sadat assassinated in 1981, leaving Mubarak to take over the country and slowly but surely turn it into a vassal of the US.

 

Israel's army could easily defeat any number of Arab states anyway, there's almost no possibility of an actual war between Israel and its neighbors. Not like any of them would be willing to fight for the Palestinians, who they call their "Arab brothers" but who they showed absolutely no sympathy or asylum to after they lost their homes in 1967.

 

 

the Israeli Airforce is bigger than the RAF & the Luftwaffe combined I believe - who the hell want s to take that lot on? Especially whenever they look like losing the US pile in with aid - and of course there is the nuclear issue -

[Park Life 70]

It's because all of the Arab states except Egypt (and Syria, but they got forced into it by the Egyptians) are too pansy to fight. They were content to sit on the sidelines from '56 (Suez Crisis) on, providing absolutely minimal military support (think in terms of one jeep, twenty rifles, etc.) while talking up the Nasserist rhetoric and vocally sympathising with the Palestinians, but they never put their money where their mouths were.

 

After Egypt finally achieved a modicum of victory in 1973 only to see Israel (with American military support) devastate their 3rd army, win back all the territory they had lost, and push them back to the Suez Canal, they finally wised up and under the guidance of Sadat realised that fighting Israel in the name of "Arab unity" was only going to get Egyptians killed (at the time there was a joke - "We Arabs will never tolerate the existence of Israel. We'll fight them to the last Egyptian.") so they signed the US-brokered Camp David peace treaty which lasts to this day as well as securing billions of US foreign aid (making them as alex said, the 2nd highest recipient of US foreign aid). This, as Dan said, got them kicked out of the Arab League. It also got Sadat assassinated in 1981, leaving Mubarak to take over the country and slowly but surely turn it into a vassal of the US.

 

Israel's army could easily defeat any number of Arab states anyway, there's almost no possibility of an actual war between Israel and its neighbors. Not like any of them would be willing to fight for the Palestinians, who they call their "Arab brothers" but who they showed absolutely no sympathy or asylum to after they lost their homes in 1967.

 

 

the Israeli Airforce is bigger than the RAF & the Luftwaffe combined I believe - who the hell want s to take that lot on? Especially whenever they look like losing the US pile in with aid - and of course there is the nuclear issue -

 

 

It's at moments like this I wish I was the captain of a Polaris sub. Red October an all that.

[Fop 1]

the Israeli Airforce is bigger than the RAF & the Luftwaffe combined I believe - who the hell want s to take that lot on? Especially whenever they look like losing the US pile in with aid - and of course there is the nuclear issue -

 

The Israeli Air force has 700 aircraft, the RAF has 1100.

 

That means the Luftwaffe must operate -426 aircraft, not they +426 they claim.

[Park Life 70]

the Israeli Airforce is bigger than the RAF & the Luftwaffe combined I believe - who the hell want s to take that lot on? Especially whenever they look like losing the US pile in with aid - and of course there is the nuclear issue -

 

The Israeli Air force has 700 aircraft, the RAF has 1100.

 

That means the Luftwaffe must operate -426 aircraft, not they +426 they claim.

 

Our pilots are better and we can count on the locals creating diversions.

[Happy Face 29]

Opinion?

 

Yes, I think they are.

[Fop 1]

Opinion?

 

Yes, I think they are.

Interesting, in what way?

[trophyshy 6432]

'Bin Laden' recording calls for holy war over Gaza conflict

 

Message on Islamist websites purporting to be from the al-Qaida chief condemns inaction of Arab governments

 

Peter Walker and agencies

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 January 2009 13.11 GMT

Article history

 

 

A new audio message purportedly from the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, has called for all Muslims to launch a holy war to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to Islamist websites.

 

The recording, which the websites said was by Bin Laden, also condemned Arab governments for preventing their people from acting to "liberate Palestine".

 

"Our brothers in Palestine, you have suffered a lot … the Muslims sympathise with you in what they see and hear. We, the mujahideen, sympathise with you also," Reuters reported the speaker as saying in the 22-minute tape titled A Call for Jihad to Stop the Aggression Against Gaza. "We are with you and we will not let you down. Our fate is tied to yours in fighting the crusader-Zionist coalition, in fighting until victory or martyrdom."

 

Previous messages from al-Qaida have been posted on the same websites. The authenticity of the recording could not be confirmed, although reports said the voice appeared to be the same as that used in earlier messages claimed to be from the al-Qaida chief.

 

In the tape, Bin Laden said the US was losing its dominant position in the world: "The jihad of your sons against the crusader-Zionist coalition is one of the key reasons for these destructive effects among our enemies. God has bestowed us with the patience to continue the path of jihad for another seven years, and seven and seven … The question is, can America continue its war with us for several more decades to come? Reports and evidence would suggest otherwise."

 

Al-Qaida has posted more than 60 messages from Bin Laden, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other leaders since the 11 September attacks in 2001.

 

Last week, Zawahiri called on Muslims to attack western and Israeli targets around the world in protest at events in Gaza.

 

The previous three messages attributed to Bin Laden and posted over the past nine months also concerned the Palestinian question. In an audio message last May, he urged Muslims to break the Israeli-led blockade of Gaza and battle Arab governments that dealt with Israel.

 

The latest message was accompanied on the websites by a photograph of Bin Laden and one of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Islam's third holiest shrine.

[Fop 1]

Pretty verbose for a corpse.

[manc-mag 1]

Pretty verbose for a corpse.

 

Bit like you in the sack I'd imagine.

[trophyshy 6432]

Pretty verbose for a corpse.

Imagine how much YOU could spew forth?

 

Fop-zombie-diatribe.....hmmmmm.

[Park Life 70]

Pretty verbose for a corpse.

 

He's been dead for years.

[Fop 1]

Pretty verbose for a corpse.

 

He's been dead for years.

amazing how much damage can be done without proof of a body though.

 

Pretty verbose for a corpse.

Imagine how much YOU could spew forth?

 

Fop-zombie-diatribe.....hmmmmm.

Fop's a ghost in the machine.

 

 

Pretty verbose for a corpse.

 

Bit like you in the sack I'd imagine.

Verbose in the sack?

 

Although I bet you do imagine Fop in the sack an awful LOT.

[Park Life 70]

Half the terrorists in London were having coffee with Mi5 on a weekly basis before 7/7. The covenant it was called iirc. We wouldn't even let the Americans talk to them. The cia and nsa were totally down with the Bosnia and Kosovo thing even to the point of flying in C15 full of arms and equipment. Half of Bin Laden's men in Afganistan had satellite phones given to them by....Yes you guessed it.