http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=14079
Israel was founded on ethnic cleansing by Ilan Pappe
Date: 06 / 08 / 2006 Time: 10:51
-The present dismal reality unfolding in the Middle East has clear historical roots and a journey into the past may help to illuminate what lies behind the destructive policies of Israel in both Palestine and Lebanon.
-Zionism arrived in Palestine in the late 19th as a colonialist movement motivated by national impulses. The colonisation of Palestine fitted well the interests and policies of the British Empire on the eve of the First World War.
With the backing of Britain, the colonisation project expanded, and became a solid presence on the land after the war and with the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine (which lasted between 1918 and 1948).

While this consolidation took place, the indigenous society underwent, like other societies in the rest of the Arab world, a steady process of establishing a national identity. But with one difference. While the rest of the Arab world was shaping its political identity through the struggle against European colonialism, in Palestine nationalism meant asserting your collective identity against both an exploitative British colonialism and expansionist Zionism. Thus, the conflict with Zionism was an additional burden.

The pro-Zionist policy of the British mandate there naturally strained
the relationship between Britain and the local Palestinian society.This climaxed in a revolt in 1936 against both London and the expanding
Zionist colonisation project. The revolt, which lasted for three years, failed to sway the British mandate from a policy it had already decided upon in 1917. The British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, had promised the Zionist leaders
that Britain would help the movement to build a homeland for the Jewish
people in Palestine.

The number of Jews coming into the country increased by the day - although even at that point, during the 1930s, the Jews were just a quarter of the population, possessing 4 percent of the land.

As resistance to colonialism strengthened, the Zionist leadership became convinced that only through a total expulsion of the Palestinians would they be able to create a state of their own. From its early inception and up to the 1930s, Zionist thinkers propagated the need to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population of Palestine if the dream of a Jewish state were to come true.

The preparation for implementing these two goals of statehood and ethnic supremacy accelerated after the Second World War. For the British the country lost its strategic importance once they were evicted from India.It was a tense place that required the presence of British forces in equal numbers to those kept by the empire in the Indian sub continent - without obvious imperial rewards.

While the Zionist leadership finalised a plan for taking over the land and expelling the people between 1946 and 1948, the Palestinian leadership hoped the British empire would transfer to them their country in which they were still the vast majority and the indigenous population.

But Britain decided to transfer the issue of Palestine to the United Nations (UN) in February 1947. Palestine was the first conflict in which it was asked to mediate in a significant way. It offered a pro-Zionist solution, and a very unjust and impractical one at that.

The first obstacle was that since the Palestinians demanded to be treated as any other Arab national movement, they expected the international community to recognise, without any conditions, their natural right to the country.They did not expect this right to be negotiated with a colonialist
movement. They therefore boycotted the process.

The UN ignored this and the special committee it appointed for the question, Unscop (United Nations Special Committee for Palestine) conversed only with the Zionist leadership. It devised a solution that catered for the needs and aspirations of that side alone. In any case, the Palestinians had a difficult time presenting the moral side of their demands due to the Holocaust. The Western international community was only too happy to evade any
discussions about the implications of the genocide in Europe and to drop the problem on Palestine's doorstep.

The inevitable result of this approach was accepting almost unconditionally the Zionist demands for a state in Palestine.

Territorial

At the end of November 1947, the UN offered to divide Palestine into two states almost equal in their territorial space. The Jews were only one-third of the population by 1947 and most of them had arrived in Palestine only a few years earlier.The categorical Palestinian refusal to go along with this deal,
backed by the Arab League, allowed the Zionist leadership to plan carefully
the next step. Between February 1947 and March 1948, a final plan for ethnic cleansing was prepared. The Zionist leadership defined 80 percent of Palestine (Israel todaywithout the West Bank) as the space for the future state.This was an area in which one million Palestinians lived next to
600,000 Jews.

The idea was to uproot as many Palestinians as possible. From March 1948 until the end of that year the plan was implemented despite the attempt by some Arab states to oppose it, which failed. Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, 531 villages were destroyed and 11 urban neighbourhoods demolished.

Half of Palestine's population was uprooted and half of its villages destroyed. The state of Israel was established in over 80 percent of Palestine, turning Palestinian villages into Jewish settlements and recreation parks, but allowing a small number of Palestinians to remain citizens in it.

The June 1967 war allowed Israel to take the remaining 20 percent of Palestine.This seizure defeated in a way the ethnic ideology of the Zionist
movement. Israel encompassed 100 percent of Palestine, but the state
incorporated a large number of Palestinians, the people who Zionists made such an effort to expel in 1948.

The fact that Israel was let off easily in 1948, and not condemned for
the ethnic cleansing it committed, encouraged it to ethnically cleanse a
further 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But the June 1967 war was too short - six days - and the international community more aware. Palestinian society was more experienced. Hence Israel was left with a large number of Palestinians under its control and could not complete the job.

The Palestinian national movement rose again in the form of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and even if it did not liberate one square inch of Palestine, it did relocate the Palestinian issue and the 1948 Nakbah (catastrophe) in the centre of world public attention.

The ethnic cleansing operation was also defeated by the persistence and resilience of those Palestinians that were allowed to stay in Israel.They became one quarter of the population. Demography thus became the major issue in Israel's national security agenda. It overshadows any other concern, be it for social equality, democracy or human rights.

The educational system, the media and the politicians all stress the danger that Palestinians constitute for the state of Israel's existence and the Jewish citizen's wellbeing. In this situation the Israeli left urges downsizing the territory, the right calls for downsizing the Palestinians. But the moral and ideological distance between the two poles of the political system is very short indeed.

After two uprisings in the occupied territories and a failed international diplomatic effort that totally ignored the root of the conflict as represented above, we are now back to the very basics of the conflict.
--Impose--
-For the last six years, with the full backing of its Jewish electorate, successive Israeli governments have tried to impose by force what for them is the ideal solution. It consists of imprisoning large numbers of Palestinians in enclaves
in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, controlling thorough an apartheid system the Palestinian minority in Israel, and rejecting categorically any repatriation of the Palestinian refugees. This plan is fully backed by the US.
-Bush's neo-conservative presidency pursues its own unilateralism, trying to impose by military means and intimidation its economic and strategic values on the rest of the world. Only two movements in the area resist Israel and the US. Sadly for people of the left, like myself, they are not from our school, but we should respect their steadfastness and will to resist occupation and colonisation. These are Hamas and Hizbollah.
-Israel feels it has now a window of opportunity to eliminate these forces in Gaza and in Lebanon - and beyond in Syria and Iran.The regional war that is developing may in the short run undermine these two forces, but in the long run it may mean Israeli confrontation not only with the Arab world but with the Muslim world as a whole. At that point, the US might abandon it, and the Jewish state would end like the crusader's kingdom of medieval times.
-A disaster thus is looming for us all - Jews and Arabs - and it is only Europe that could avert it, if it would stop slaving its interests and ours, to the interests of the US and Zionism.
-Ilan Pappe is an Israeli-born professor at Haifa University. This article first appeared in Socialist Worker 2011, 29 July 2006 (www.socialistworker.co.uk)

Israel Is Hooked On Militarism
Nation: U.S. Supports Bombs Instead Of Peace In Middle East
(The Nation) This article was written by Robert Scheer.

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Those who mindlessly support Israel, right or wrong, from President Bush on through the cheerleaders in Congress and the media, betray the security of the Jewish state. They are enablers who have encouraged Israel's dependency on the drug of militarism as a false escape from the difficult accommodations needed to bring peace to the Middle East.

For too many pundits and politicians, bombing just seems so much simpler — until, as happened in Qana, Lebanon, on Sunday, those bombs blow up to your nation's disgrace, slaughtering scores of innocents whose only crime was to be in the crossfire. The alternative to such excessive violence — an authentic peace process — had been supported by every American president since Harry Truman. Yet it was abruptly abandoned, indeed ridiculed, by the Bush administration, which bizarrely believes it can re-create the Middle East in a more U.S.-friendly form. The president has framed this process with a simplistic good-versus-evil template, which has the Christian West and Jewish Israel on an unnecessary collision course with the Muslim world.

Israel foolishly jumped at the tempting opportunity presented by Bush, who believes all the complex issues dividing the Middle East can be neatly summarized as the choosing of sides in a playground game called "the post-9/11 war on terror."

"The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East," Bush said Monday. "When democracy spreads in the Middle East, the people of that troubled region will have a better future." Apparently, Bush is unclear on the fact that Lebanon's prime minister — elected after the country's celebrated "Cedar Revolution" — has condemned the uncritical support provided by the United States for Israel since this conflagration began. Or that Hezbollah is an important part of that democratic government because of its popularity among the Shiite Muslims of southern Lebanon. Bush's neoconservative foreign-policy cabal argued that troublesome regimes, such as that of Saddam Hussein, could be easily transformed into pliable, West-leaning democracies. Instead, the opposite has happened. Throughout the region, elections hyped by Bush have turned out to be a vehicle for the expression of religion-fueled rage against Israel and its U.S. sponsor.

Even the elected leaders in "liberated" Iraq are denouncing Israel and the United States. On Monday, the Iraqi prime minister appeared at a memorial service in which he and other speakers condemned Israel. Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most important leader in post-Hussein Iraq, broke from his usually circumspect public statements to denounce this "outrageous crime," while Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the country's most powerful militia and a key parliamentary bloc, railed against "the ominous trio of the United States, Israel and Britain, which is terrorizing Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and other occupied nations."

Meanwhile, Israel, with U.S. support, has ignored what it had learned through its occupation of Palestinian territories and previous disastrous attempts to subdue Lebanon: Compromise from a position of strength is more effective than seeking a pyrrhic total victory. Not only has each attempt to crush local resistance begat more radical and disciplined enemies, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, but the likelihood of rage-fueled "blowback" is exponentially increased.

"There's going to be another 9/11, and then we're going to hear all the usual claptrap about how it's good versus evil, and they hate us because we're good and democratic, and they hate our values and all the other material that comes out of the rear end of a bull," London Independent correspondent Robert Fisk told interviewer Amy Goodman of the radio program "Democracy Now!" after watching dozens of children's corpses being stuffed into plastic bags or wrapped in rugs.

It is true that the Israeli withdrawals of the past half-decade, nearly complete in the case of Lebanon and cynically minimal in the Palestinian territories, did not resolve all the disputes or stop all violence. Yet the abandonment of the peace process and the renewed reliance on bombs will prove far more costly for Israel. Long after Bush is gone from office, Israel will be threatened by a new generation of enemies whose political memory was decisively shaped by these horrible images emerging from Lebanon. At that point, Israelis attempting to make peace with those they must coexist with will recognize that with friends such as Bush and his neoconservative mentors, they would not lack for enemies.

By Robert Scheer
If you like this article, check out www.thenation.com for more investigative reports, timely editorials and incisive columns

Israel has sealed her fate
She is Martyred
Dr. Mary

He whispered sweet words to her ear
And she turned and kissed him
Full on the mouth
Warm and loving and alive
They make babies
Beautiful, beautiful babies
For years they have made babies
But each time
And each baby
Is sweet and new
And unique

But no more

Today is the last time
They shared love and words
Laughter and smiles
What would they change?
Or what would they add
One more time to love
One more special word
A look or a touch
Words to carry the other babies
Through all the years
Without their mother
And a husband with out his love

For they are gone

And even the baby is gone
Israel came for a visit
In the neighborhood
And laughter and love and smiles
Have died today
A baby just 8 months
A daughter old enough to say
“The Jews have killed us”
And still another daughter
15, a young woman, and a beauty
Lays with shrapnel in her head

They have no more words past today


As for their mother
She died in her husbands arms
Her last words were of faith
That is more comforting than love
She left a legacy today
Whispered in love
“I testify that there is but one God
And that prophet Muhammad
Is the messenger of God”
In stealing her life
Israel has sealed her fate

She is Martyred

This mothers legacy
Is written in blood and words
That out last even memory
Her sons and her daughters
Her husband left alone
Have a treasure to keep them
Through the cold long nights
And dragging days that lie ahead
For she loved
She believed
In dying she did not forget them

She spoke of the greatest love

A husband can follow this path
A child can follow this path
A son or a daughter
On this path are equals
It is faith with love
It is hope and memories
It is the desire to stay
When knowing it is time to go
And it is going with honor
Mother, wife, lover, maker of the home
She is never far away

She walks the winds of the heart

He of the red rimmed eyes
The lonely nights and empty arms
He of the gray come too soon
He holds the key
To forgiveness or
He holds the key to hate
The right of justice is his
An eye for an eye
A life for a life
But what life in all of Israel
Is worthy to atone for her

Not one, no not one



Gaza- Ma'an- Date: 29 / 07 / 2006
Samir Ukal Jneid, the bereaved father and husband wandered among those who came to offer condolences without seeing anyone because his eyes were red and tired from the rivers of tears they had shed.
His unbearable story began with the simultaneous death of his wife and two daughters - while a third daughter fights for her life as the Israeli shrapnel which hit her is still lodged in her head. The remnants of the house's walls - stand as testimony of the history and blood of the recent residents.
Sumayya, 15 used to ask her father, "Who will take care of those children?" when she such stories on the news.
And 17 years of marriage ended in a moment.

Date: 29 / 07 / 2006 Time: 13:51
Gaza- Ma'an- Samir Ukal Jneid, the bereaved father and husband, wandered among those who came to offer condolences without seeing anyone because his eyes were red and tired from the rivers of tears they had shed.

The young man became old quickly and suddently - and early, very early. His unbearable story began with the simultaneous death of his wife and two daughters - while a third daughter fights for her life as the Israeli shrapnel which hit her is still lodged in her head. The remnants of the house's walls - which the family were in when the house was shelled - stand as testimony of the history and blood of the recent residents.

Maria Ukal, his daughter, said before she passed away, "The Jews have killed us." The other daughter, just 8 months old, was not old enough to identify her killers.

As for their mother, she died in her husband's hands and was able to say, "I testify that there is but one God and that prophet Muhammad is the messenger of God." Three loved ones were lost within a blink of an eye - the eyes of a father and husband which still tell of the calamity that befell his family.

The third daughter, Sumayya, 15, remains alive but is in a state of clinical death. She had never expected to have this experience that she saw on TV almost every day, when she used to ask her father, "Who will take care of those children?"

After 17 years of marriage, the brutal Israeli occupation stole three of Samir's children and his wife. We pray that God enables him a future with his remaining children.

Willy Nilly Peace Plan .... In a Week or Two has passed and now in a week or Two is added on again..... In The meantime babies are being killed and Israel accuses Hezbollah of hiding behind civilians as an excuse for bombing them even in an agreed to ceasefire.....

Breaking a ceasefire should not suprise us..... it was done in Palestine while Hamas kept their word. So who is the true terror organization? The one who keeps their word in ceasefire or the one who gives their word and never keeps it...and kills daily?

America opposes peace in Lebanon while women and children continue to die. First Rice said in a week or two / next week....
well that has passed and now Bush himself says in a week or two....

Obviously they do not give a damn about life/death or destruction/suffering. Infact America is delivering new supplies of bombs to kill even more Lebanese.

I guess the most fearful thing is watching for how America will reap what she is sowing. We claim to be a Christian people.... but of course we are Native religion, Muslim, Hindu, Budist, Wiccan, and many more. The Bible promises "as ye sow, so shall ye reap". Our great fearless leader says he prays to God and depends on Him for guidance. So then he must accept the ineveidable that we "reap what we sow".

Perhaps we have ...... Katrina, the 2006 summer Heatwave killed over 120 in California alone, suffering and death come to us all. But is some of this from cause and effect?

Hmmmmmmmmm.... worth considdering I think.

In Lebanon if supplies are not delivered people will soon die from lack of water and food and medical care. The UN asked for a three day ceasefire to get supplies in and civilians out but Israel refused. The after the horror of one building bombed down on 57 civilians sleeping in the early morning hours.... a 48 hours ceasefire was agreed to but 30 minutes into it Israel bombed and killed more civilinas in the same little city.

Qana... Cana .... where Jesus turned water into wine to celebrate a wedding and open the miraculous part of his public ministry... Israel is killing and killing and accuses Hamas of hiding behind civilians... Such liars. If civilians thought their babies were being killed for Hezbollah ..... They would object and make them move just to save their babies. As a mother I would kill to save my babies... if someone used me as a shield, that man could die and I would work against him..... but you watch there is support for Hexbollah.

They are not making families feel used or abused. They have supported and helped the people. They are not using and hiding behind the people.

Revenge is the creators!

It will come in it's time.