Prisoner exchange

[toguy5252]

Proportional also doesn't mean that the side with nuclear weapons, predator drones, chemical weapons....gets to kill at will.
I don't think you understand that military occupying powers are bound by law to treat the occupied people humanely.
Not try to economically and physically try to starve them and shoot them when they get too close to the fence.

And you think proportionality means inventing fictional claims and crimes on the part of the Israeli's Keep up the good work. It has been working for the Palestinians for 60 years.

 

[fuji]

Proportional also doesn't mean that the side with nuclear weapons, predator drones, chemical weapons....gets to kill at will.
I don't think you understand that military occupying powers are bound by law to treat the occupied people humanely.
Not try to economically and physically try to starve them and shoot them when they get too close to the fence.

It means that so long as Israel is using a reasonable amount of force relative to its objective that it's legal, even if Hamas crowds people around the target.

Israel does not abrogate any of its responsibilities by using what force is necessary to destroy those who are attacking its territory.

I am still waiting for you to cite any resolution of the UNSC which described the occupation as illegal by the way.

 

[groggy]

It means that so long as Israel is using a reasonable amount of force relative to its objective that it's legal, even if Hamas crowds people around the target.

Israel does not abrogate any of its responsibilities by using what force is necessary to destroy those who are attacking its territory.

I am still waiting for you to cite any resolution of the UNSC which described the occupation as illegal by the way.

Goldstone also said there was no evidence that Hamas either put targets in crowded areas or used human shields, that just a fallacy.
Using 'whatever force is necessary' means not paying attention to international laws, which is why they are in trouble, thanks for pointing that out.
And, who said anything about the UN SC, there are plenty of resolutions going back to 242 that will do fine.
If you want to get technical, the UN resolution accepting Israel's statehood was not a UN SC resolution, and in fact had two conditions attached that Israel has reneged on.
They have not allowed a Palestinian state to be established on the 1947 borders and are working towards a state with different rights for different people.
Perhaps Israel should have its statehood revoked.

 

[fuji]

Sorry groggy but proportionate use of force is in compliance with international law, even if it yields lopsided casualty figures.

Where in resolution 242 does it say the occupation is illegal? It doesn't say that. You are as usual just making up bullshit. Israel's occupation of Gaza is an unfortunate but legal and necessary response to Palestinian aggresion.

Resolution 242 says that an eventual peace deal should see the Palestinians recognize Israel (and Israel recognize the Palestinian State) and include the withdrawl of Israeli forces. It did not call for an immediate withdrawl, or assert that their presence was illegal. It called for the two sides to negotiate a peace deal that would accomplish recognition of Israel and an Israeli withdrawl. That still hasn't happened yet.

 

[groggy]

I'm going to post an excellent article from Al Jazeera today. Has some very interesting points.

In 1991, negotiations started officially and unofficially between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (and the Palestinians associated with it) and the Israeli government. At the time, Israel had occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip for the previous 24 years.

Today, 20 years later, Israel and President Obama insist that the only way to bring about peace, and presumably end the Occupation, is to continue with negotiations. It is unclear if what Obama and Israel are claiming is that Israel needs 24 years of negotiations in order to end its 24-year occupation of Palestinian land, so that by the time the occupation ends, it will have lasted for 48 years.

This of course is the optimistic reading of the Israeli and US positions; the reality of the negotiations and what they aim to achieve, however, is far more insidious.

The negotiations have been based on specific goals to end certain aspects of the Israeli relationship to the Palestinians, namely some of the parts introduced since the 1967 war and the occupation, and the beginning of exclusive Jewish colonial settlement of these territories.But what always remains outside the purview of negotiations is the very core of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, which the Palestinians are told cannot be part of any negotiations.

These off-limits core issues include what has happened since 1947-1948, including the expulsion of 760,000 Palestinians, the destruction of their cities and towns, the confiscation and destruction of their property, the introduction of discriminatory laws that legalise Jewish racial, colonial and religious privilege and deny Palestinian citizens of Israel equal rights and reject the right of the expelled refugees to return.

Yet, this core, which the Israelis summarise as Israel's right to be, and to be recognised as, a "Jewish" state, is what is always invoked by the Israelis themselves as central to beginning and ending the negotiations successfully and which the Palestinians, the Israelis insist, refuse to discuss.

But the core issues of the question of the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis have always been based on the agonistic historical, geographic and political claims of the Palestinian people and the Zionist movement.

While the Palestinians have always based their claims on verifiable facts and truths that the international community agreed upon and recognised, Israel has always based its claims on facts on the ground that it created by force and which parts of the international community would only recognise as "legitimate", retroactively.

How is one then to sift through these competing notions of truths and facts on the one hand, and facts on the ground, on the other?

The core issues of the US and Israeli agenda were best articulated in the speeches delivered by Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the United Nations (UN) last month in response to the PLO's bid for statehood at the UN. It is there where both Netanyahu and Obama invoked what they called "truths" and "facts" to assert Israeli facts on the ground. As I will show, their strategy is engineered to convert Israeli facts on the ground from antonyms of truths and facts to synonyms with them.

The first 'fact'


Even Netanyahu has no genealogical connection to the ancient Hebrews [GALLO/GETTY]
Let me begin with what Zionists and the US have defined as the first "fact", which is by definition not open to any doubt or question. Obama insists: "These facts cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland."

Netanyahu echoes Obama by listing this first "fact" as the first "truth," or rather by making sure that "the light of truth will shine" at the UN through his words: "It was here in 1975 that the age-old yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient biblical homeland ... was ... branded ... shamefully, as racism." He added later "and we will know that [the Palestinians are] ready for compromise and for peace ... when they stop denying our historical connection to our ancient homeland."

Now, this insistence that the first fact, nay the first truth, that Palestine is the historic homeland of modern European Jews who resided in Europe and not of the Palestinian people who lived in it for millennia, turns out to be neither factual nor truthful, though it indeed remains the primary and first claim made by Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The claim relies on anti-Semitic notions propagated initially by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and later by secular anti-Semitism, both of which insisted that modern European Jews were blood and genetic descendants of the ancient Hebrews respectively, which is precisely how eighteenth century European philology's reference to Jews as "Semites" would soon be transformed in the hand of political and racial anti-Semitism by the late nineteenth century from a "linguistic" category into a "racial" and biological one.

It is based on these anti-Semitic claims - that millenarian Protestants, secular anti-Semites, and Zionists called for the "restoration" of European Jews to the alleged homeland of their alleged ancestors.

The uncontroversial academic and historical facts that European Jews are descendants of European converts to Judaism from the centuries before Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century are unquestionable axioms in academic scholarship, including by Zionist historians.

No respected historian of European Jewry has ever argued that European Jews, or for that matter Moroccan, or Iraqi, or Yemeni Jews, were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. All respected scholars recognise them as descendants of converts to Judaism.

But even if the wildest genetic fantasies of anti-Semites and Zionists of Jews as a "race" were "proven", would this make ancient Palestine, where the ancient Hebrews cohabited with other ancient peoples, the historic land of modern European Jews?

And even if one were to commit oneself to the science-fiction of Christian biblical archaeology which accompanied European colonialism in the nineteenth century and on which Israeli archaeology continues to be based, would that mean that modern Jews, now posited as direct genetic and biological descendants of the ancient Hebrews could claim the land where the ancient Hebrews lived with the Canaanites among other myriad groups as their own exclusive national domain and take it from its inhabitants who lived in it for millennia?

Could anyone today, except genocidal racists, link Germanic populations to an Aryan origin that started in northern India and based on that link, argue that northern India is the ancient homeland of all German-speaking people to which they must return and evict the current inhabitants of the land as nothing but recent interlopers in the land of the White Aryans?

These fantastical scenarios are precisely what Obama and Netanyahu tell us are undeniable facts and truths.

Indeed they both insist on them being the first fact, the very first indubitable principle of Zionism, which they want to impose on the international community and on the Palestinians!

 

[groggy]

part 2

The second "fact"

Obama's second fact is asserted with a rhetorical flourish: "Let's be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbours that have waged repeated wars against it ... These facts cannot be denied."

But these also are not facts at all. Not even Israeli historians of Israel's wars agree with them. But Israeli politicians and ideologues of course do. In his UN speech, Netanyahu himself echoes Obama's words by telling us that Israel is threatened by its neighbours, that it is "surrounded by people sworn to its destruction and armed to the teeth by Iran" and enjoins presumably the American part of his audience at least not to "forget that the people who live in Brooklyn and New Jersey are considerably nicer than some of Israel's neighbours."

These racist overtones aside, the academic and historic record shows us however that it was Zionist forces who have waged war against the Palestinians in the wake of the 1947 Partition Plan starting on November 30, 1947.

By May 14, 1948, when Israel declared itself a state, it had expelled 400,000 Palestinians from their homes and was capturing their lands and territories, which were assigned to the Arab state. When three (not five!) Arab armies invaded Zionist-held Palestine on May 15, 1948, they were intervening to stop the expulsion of the Palestinian people and to protect their lands from being taken over by Zionist forces. At the end of the war, they failed miserably at their task. Israel was able to expel another 360,000 Palestinians and to capture half the territories of the Arab state adding them to the Jewish state.

In 1956, Israel invaded Egypt along with Britain and France. This was in addition to intermittent but continuous cross border raids into the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egyptian-held Gaza over the decades to come.
In 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and occupied their territories and all of the remaining lands of Palestine.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories (Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights), which Israel had earlier occupied, in an attempt to reclaim them but failed. They did not invade Israel itself.
In 1978, in 1982, and in 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon killing tens of thousands of people.
In 2008-2009, Israel invaded Gaza.
These are the undeniable facts that the international community and historians and the actual documentary record proves. As such, Israel was never invaded by its neighbours, except in 1948 - which was an attempt to stop Israel's invasion of Palestinian territory and the expulsion of Palestinians.

That Israel won the majority of these wars cannot change the facts that it initiated them and that it has been the aggressor on its neighbours since even before its establishment in 1947. Indeed, Israel would launch raids on Iraq in 1981 and on Tunisia in 1985, neither of which was an immediate neighbour and without the slightest military provocation from either.

That Israel and the Zionist movement have been the aggressor in the region for the past century are the undeniable facts.

That Obama wants to assert that Israelis were victims of their neighbours is nothing short of imposing a fact on the ground by sheer American rhetorical and political power unrelated to real events. Obama's invocation of honesty here turns out to be nothing short of a call for outright dishonesty.

But this "fact" for Obama derives from the "first fact", namely, if European Jews have the right to colonise Palestine, expel the Palestinians, confiscate their lands, occupy them and discriminate against them by virtue of the first fact of their bogus historic claim, then any Palestinian or Arab resistance to the Zionists' murderous campaigns is nothing short of aggression on Jews.

 

[groggy]

There is lots more, really worth reading, but will just give a link for the rest.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011102583358314280.html

Interesting, eh?
Netanyahu is really a Polish Jew?
Israel shot down a civilian jet?
Most Jews in Israel are of European descent and not semitic?
Netanyahu calling for all Palestinians to leave if there is a two state solution?

 

[basketcase]

If the best they can do is argue about who has what genes, the Palestinians will continue to wait for their own state.

 

[fuji]

Groggy, do you think the massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya was a signal from Hamas that they were ready to begin negotiating peace with Israel?

 

[fuji]

What a load of crap:

By May 14, 1948, when Israel declared itself a state, it had expelled 400,000 Palestinians from their homes and was capturing their lands and territories, which were assigned to the Arab state. When three (not five!) Arab armies invaded Zionist-held Palestine on May 15, 1948, they were intervening to stop the expulsion of the Palestinian people and to protect their lands from being taken over by Zionist forces. At the end of the war, they failed miserably at their task. Israel was able to expel another 360,000 Palestinians and to capture half the territories of the Arab state adding them to the Jewish state.

In 1956, Israel invaded Egypt along with Britain and France. This was in addition to intermittent but continuous cross border raids into the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egyptian-held Gaza over the decades to come.
In 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and occupied their territories and all of the remaining lands of Palestine.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories (Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights), which Israel had earlier occupied, in an attempt to reclaim them but failed. They did not invade Israel itself.
In 1978, in 1982, and in 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon killing tens of thousands of people.
In 2008-2009, Israel invaded Gaza.

I have never seen a worse distortion of the truth in all my life.

1948: Arab war of aggression against Israel's existence

1956: Arab's commit an act of war and Israel/Britain retaliate

1967: Arab war of aggression against Israel

1973: Arab war of aggression against Israel

1978: Arab war of aggression against Israel

If you go back and look at what the Arabs said in all those wars they never said "hey we are going to take back our own territory", they always talked about annihilating Israel entirely. Your historical revisionism is extremely dishonest, and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

I love how it says "invaded their own territories", since when was Gaza / West Bank Egyptian or Jordanian territory?? My god what a crock of shit. If you stand by that claim you ought to support return Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan, and skipping the notion of a Palestinian state.

 

[groggy]

I think he puts out pretty good arguments.
Now you're going to have to find something to back up what you're saying.
Let's see some proof that Egypt was trying to take over all of Israel and not reclaim their own territory, for a start.

And here's a good question for you:
Do you support Israel's shooting down of a Libyan commercial jet liner in 1973?

 

[fuji]

What arguments? He makes a bunch of false propaganda claims.

As for the 1973 incident, Israel does not support that either. It happened while Israel and Egypt were at war, but they have admitted it was an error in judgement, apologized, and paid compensation to the victims.

 

[groggy]

What arguments? He makes a bunch of false propaganda claims.

As for the 1973 incident, Israel does not support that either. It happened while Israel and Egypt were at war, but they have admitted it was an error in judgement, apologized, and paid compensation to the victims.

So that leaves Israel and the US as the only countries to have ever shot down passenger jets?
And here's a question for you, since there is no doubt that a passenger jet would be anything but civilians, was it a war crime?
In my books, yes.

 

[fuji]

So that leaves Israel and the US as the only countries to have ever shot down passenger jets?

Nope, why would you think that? Did you bother even researching the topic before writing that? Of course not. You are a clown. You assume that the US and Israel are evil and that any bad thing in the world is attributed to them. Had you looked you would discover that there are unfortunately several cases of civilian jets being shot by mistake over the years. NATO (France or Italy, unclear which) and Russia for example have both shot down commercial jets by mistake. For example the ironically named KAL 007 that the Russians shot down when it similarly went off course and the Russians mistook it for a spy plane.

The problem in this case was that for whatever reason the Libyan jet refused to respond on radio and refused to obey the instructions of the Israeli military to divert to an airport. It was flying erratically over Israeli territory during a war and IDF concluded its refusal to comply indicated it was military. When IDF intercepted it, it changed course and evaded Israeli jets, maintained radio silence, and visually indicated to the Israeli pilots that it would refuse to comply, so they concluded it was attempting to flee (really, it was just correcting course). They tried to force it to land, unfortunately causing it to crash instead. Later they concluded that they made an error in judgement, and that forcing it down was a mistake, but their intent was not to kill civilians, so no it would not be a war crime.

A commercial jet intercepted by military fighters really should respond on radio and follow instructions, especially as in this case if there is a war on. The co-pilot survived and recounted that he knew they were being ordered to land and gave various reasons for not complying, but that was probably a mistake. Israel equally has admitted that it was too quick to conclude it was military, but that's a common theme in all cases of commercial jets being shot down by accident.

"I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing. I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing. It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use."

That was the Russian pilot's statement after he shot down KAL 007, I quote it just to show you the kind of thinking and tension that leads to shooting down such a plane in the context of a war or cold war.

 

[scouser1]

Fuji you obviously take your history from the Likud approved textbooks, 1956 was a total act of aggression by a combined Brit/French and Israeli force on Egypt, 1967 the Israelis attacked Egypt first after troops had massed in the Sinai, which was Egyptian territory. This whole victim act of Eretz Israel is old and boring, this is the only country in the world that has not defined it's borders, practices international occupation, continues to steal Palestinian land under the pretext of security. It would be like if British maps still showed Dublin as a British city, how many people would stand for it? But since Israeli right wingers can bring out the good old "anti Semitic" label of any critic, and then add in some songs and dances about Auschwitz and Buchenwald, no one even Jews are allowed to criticize Israeli foreign policy.

 

[groggy]

Alright, I should have looked that up, those were the only two I had heard about. Shocking how many times its happened.

However, they shot at a civilian plane that was attempting to 'flee'. That's not an attempt to make it change directions and land, you could shoot in front of the plane and accomplish that. That Russian quote would equally apply to this case, if you can get visual contact with the pilot, you're close enough to see passengers. They made a choice to risk killing civilians, that's not a mistake, that's a crime. You wouldn't shoot a bus for driving in the wrong lane, would you?

 

[DATYdude]

grog, do a little research about the claim that modern Jews have no genetic connection to ancient Israelites. That is disproven by genetic research.

The claim is often repeated because it is necessary to the argument that Jews have no connection to the land of Israel.

My argument goes like this:

Lets agree that Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homeland in 1948. Let's say they lived in exile for, say, 1900 years, but maintained a connection through those years to some degree or another. Would their "right" to be a nation-state in their historical homeland be extinguished by the passage of time? You would probably say no.

So when it's the Jews you would have to come to the same conclusion, UNLESS you challenged the premise of the original argument by saying NO THESE AREN'T THE SAME PEOPLE WHO WERE EXPELLED! And despite genetic evidence to the contrary, some still hang on to that premise.

Note that there are many people who say that (a) many of the Arabs who were in Palestine in 1948 were recent immigrants, and (b) many of the refugees now are people with no connection to Arabs living in Palestine in 1948 but rather people who were happy to be fed by the UN and who claimed to be refugees. I'm not making that claim, but I'm pointing it out as the flip-side of the same "deny their rights" coin.

One can go into the question of how factual these arguments are, but I'd say they are a distraction. As The sociologist W.I. Thomas wrote: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." So if Jews and Arabs define themselves in terms of nationhood, their definitions create the reality. Now it's time to deal with it, not deny it.

BTW that Al-Jazeera piece is very one-sided and plays directly to the Al-Jazeera audience. I'd love to see anything espousing the opposite view there, but until I do I'm gonna ignore it.

 

[fuji]

Fuji you obviously take your history from the Likud approved textbooks, 1956 was a total act of aggression by a combined Brit/French and Israeli force on Egypt

You've overlooking that closing the canal to Israeli ships is widely recognized as having been an act of war.

1967 the Israelis attacked Egypt first after troops had massed in the Sinai, which was Egyptian territory.

Let's get some facts straight. Israel and Egypt were at war. They had a negotiated a ceasefire which was to be monitored by UN peacekeepers. While still at war with Israel, Egypt went on the radio and declared its intention to destroy Israel, massed troops on the Israeli border for attack, and then expelled the peacekeepers.

What would you do? Wait to be annihilated?

The Arab States, which were still at war with Israel, broke the ceasefire terms and were clearly planning to attack Israel. This isn't supposition: They said so.

 

[fuji]

However, they shot at a civilian plane that was attempting to 'flee'.

At the time they shot it down they believed it was a military plane attempting to flee. They jumped to that conclusion too quickly, and have apologized for that, and compensated the victims. But they did not have the intention to shoot down a civilian plane, they believed it to be a military plane when they pulled the trigger. Just like the Russians believed KAL007 was military, and the same is true, so far as I can tell, for pretty much every other case around the world where civilian jetliners have been shot down.

 

[groggy]

You've overlooking that closing the canal to Israeli ships is widely recognized as having been an act of war.

Let's get some facts straight. Israel and Egypt were at war. They had a negotiated a ceasefire which was to be monitored by UN peacekeepers. While still at war with Israel, Egypt went on the radio and declared its intention to destroy Israel, massed troops on the Israeli border for attack, and then expelled the peacekeepers.

What would you do? Wait to be annihilated?

The Arab States, which were still at war with Israel, broke the ceasefire terms and were clearly planning to attack Israel. This isn't supposition: They said so.

In other words, Israel attacked first.