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Panda

Why is it that every time the subject of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict comes up the Zionist supporters try to turn it into an ancient history lesson about what happened in biblical times and before?

I suppose its because such ancient history is the very foundation of their justification for human rights abuses and war crimes in these modern times. Omitting to mention or discuss the fact that the Palestinian people, which included Muslims and Jews, have lived in relative harmony for centuries prior to this western colonialist establishment of a Jewish homeland based on ancient claims to the land.

Its about time we stopped talking about the Zionist right to Palestinian land based on ancient historical claims and started considering the Palestinians rights to live on their land which they have occupied for centuries.

D Mac

With that big wall there it look like an internment camp.

callippo

Omitting to mention or discuss the fact that the Palestinian people, which included Muslims and Jews, have lived in relative harmony for centuries

you've spectacularly failed to take on board that there were no 'Palestinian people' until 1918. Until then there was no entity called Palestine, except as a foreign, Latin/European word.

Jews, Arabs, and others living in the region NEVER called it that.

also, you're floating another common misconception the anti-Israel brigade would dearly love the world to believe - namely, that Jews and Arabs lived in some sort of peace and tranquil state prior to the advent of modern Zionism.

this is simply not true.

Historic Arab/Muslim oppression of Jewish Dhimmis

Jews and Christians were dhimmis, a “protected” people (protected from who and what?). As such, they weren’t allowed to pray in public, testify in court (not even in self defense), often had to wear distinctive clothing (heaven forbid someone might not know that this was a “protected person” and thus might treat them respectfully rather than diminutively). Muslims forced Jews to live in ghettos (millah) before Europeans copied this innovation. Up until the holocaust, the claim that Muslims treated Jews better than Christians is debatable – and a bizarre defense.

The above was true almost for the entire 1300 years that Jews lived under Arab/Muslim rule. To quote the Tunisian Jewish scholar Albert Memmi (Jews and Arabs, trans. Eleanor Levieux, J. Philip O'Hara Inc., Chicago, 1975, pgs. 20-27):

|| if we leave out the crematoria and the murders committed in Russia, from Kichinev to Stalin, the sum total of the Jewish victims of the Christian world is probably no greater than the total number of victims of the successive pogroms, both big and small, perpetrated in the Moslem countries.

|| the supposed "idyllic life" led by Jews in the Arab countries is all a myth! The truth... is that we were, first of all, a minority in hostile surroundings and, as such, we had all the fears of the overly weak, their constant feeling of precariousness... Never, except for two or three eras with very clear boundaries in time, such as the Andalusian period… have the Jews lived in the Arab countries otherwise than as diminished people in an exposed position, periodically overcome and massacred so that they would be acutely conscious of their position.

Ironically, those exceptional eras ended up disastrously, such as the massacre of 5,000 Jews in Grenada in 1066.

callippo

Even in “Palestine” this was the case: The Jerusalem Jews were bitterly and mercilessly persecuted during the 17th century reign of an Arab ruler Ibn Barouk who bought the rule from Murad IV. In 1660 the entire Jewish community was massacred by Arabs with only one survivor.

Johann van Egmont and John Hayman wrote that oppression was so great that Jews "pay for the very air they breathe."

In 1674, the Jesuit Father Michael Naud wrote that Jews were "paying heavily to the Turk for their right to stay here.... They prefer being prisoners in Jerusalem to enjoying the freedom they could acquire elsewhere... The love of the Jews for the Holy Land... is unbelievable."

In 1834 the inhabitants of Eastern Palestine crossed the Jordan River to join natives of Nablus, Hebron, and Bethlehem, 40,000 of them rushed on Jerusalem and looted the city for 5 days where the Jews had their homes sacked and their women raped. (DeHass, History, vol V, p.393).

Between 1848 - 1878, before the advent of modern Zionism, scores of incidents involving anti-Jewish violence, persecution, and extortions filled page after page of documented reports from the British Consulate in Jerusalem. Due to the harsh conditions, toward the end of the century 1/3rd of the Jewish population emigrated elsewhere.

The Hamas Covenant quotes the teaching of Muhammad as related by al-Bukhari and Moslem:

The Avalon Project : Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy

|| Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.

|| "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

notice that it's kill Jews, not kill Zionists.

Dug

I often wonder WHY this hatred toward the Jews over millenia.
as a general rule where there's smoke there's fire. By which I mean there must be a reason the Jews are disliked so much.

Panda

"The above was true almost for the entire 1300 years that Jews lived under Arab/Muslim rule. "

"Ironically, those exceptional eras ended up disastrously, such as the massacre of 5,000 Jews in Grenada in 1066."

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Get over it Callippo, Israel didn't exist for thousands of years before the western colonialists created the place in 1948. No amount of quoting ancient history will make it right for the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land in these modern times.

crazy dog

Brilliant posts, nice to see somebody who really knows what they are talking about put it over so well. Baffling to me how so many fall for the 'Palestinian'=victims Israel= brutal occupier Arab propaganda, and who believe the conflict is actually about land.

sabang

As I suspected. calippo is a malevolent wanker, crazy dog a victim.

Your neo-Nazi fantasies were exploded, long ago. And yes, I compare you to them.


http://teakdoor.com/us-domestic-issu...ht=finkelstein (Intellectual Hypocricy! The Finkelstein story.)

woodenshoe

callippo,
these are the only two lines in your many posts i could find that had any relevance to the subject:

logically line 2 says they were NOT the majority before 1880.

logically line 2 also says they were NOT the majority in other places.

so OTHER ppl already lived there.

line 1 says Jews came from OUTSIDE the area to move there.

and that is really all i need to know.

woodenshoe

He could be a member of JIDF and pasting from their database.

Jewish Internet Defense Force

brilliant my (insert bodypart here)....

sabang

Unfortunately (for some), research has shown that Palestine was one of the most affluent places in the 'Arab' world, due to it's trade. A rather unexpected consequence of Joan Peters attempted fraud- which incidentally was an attempt to deny an indigenous people their identity- was a bit of research. Olives and Jaffa oranges were exported to Europe and Nth Africa, probably the biggest exports.

Some say it was the trading prowess of the Phoenicians/ Hebrews/ Philistines- but I say look at the map and the confluence of geography and climate. Constantinople was even more affluent.

__________________
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

callippo

Unfortunately (for some), research has shown that Palestine was one of the most affluent places in the 'Arab' world, due to it's trade.

excuse me, but what time period are you talking about?

Time and again we see the false claim, regurgitated yet again here, that "Palestine" (a Latin/European word which was defined by Europeans in the 19th century on the basis of the Jewish homeland) was an existing Arab country, that it was an "Arab land". As if Jews weren't still present, and remained present throughout the time Arabs began colonizing it. As if the land was full of Arabs and with no Jews.

Here follows accounts by travelers who visited, in the 18th and 19th centuries :

In 1738 Thomas Shaw ["Travels and Observations"] described a land of

|| barrenness.... from want of inhabitants.

In 1785 Constantine Francois de Volney ["Travels Through Syria and Egypt"] recorded the population of the three main cities.

Jerusalem had a population of 12,000 to 14,000. Bethlehem had about 600 able-bodied men. Hebron had 800 to 900 men.

In 1835 Alphonse de Lamartine wrote ["Recollections of the East", published 1838]:

|| Outside the city of Jerusalem, we saw no living object, heard no living sound... a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, in the highways, in the country... The tomb of a whole people.

Recall that by this time Jews (despite being expelled in 1660 and the subject of several massacres) formed a plurality in Jerusalem.

Echoing these sentiments, in 1857 the British consul in Jerusalem, James Finn, wrote [British Foreign Office Documents 78/1294, Pol. No. 36] :

|| The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.


Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) needs no introduction to North American audiences, but for those not familiar with him Twain is one of America's most prolific writers. Perhaps you've even heard of such classics as "Huckleberry Fin" and "Tom Sawyer". Twain's works are known for his accurate description of the setting (a literary genre known as realism).

In 1869 he wrote The Innocents Abroad. It was a compilation of his recent journey aboard a steam ship that was the world's first cruise ship. In the preface, Twain writes that:

|| This book is a record of a pleasure trip. ...it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him.... I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly

The book is broken down into 62 chapters. Here are some excerpts:

|| There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent [Gilboa] -- not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings. ...No man can stand here by deserted Ain Mellahah....

|| [a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds -- a silent mournful expanse.


Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) needs no introduction to (most) North Americans, but for those not familiar with him Twain is one of America's most prolific writers. Perhaps you've even heard of such classics as "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer". Twain's works are known for his accurate description of the setting (a literary genre known as realism).

In 1869 he wrote The Innocents Abroad. It was a compilation of his recent journey aboard a steam ship that was the world's first cruise ship. In the preface, Twain writes that:

|| This book is a record of a pleasure trip. ...it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him.... I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly

The book is broken down into 62 chapters. Here are some excerpts:

|| There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent [Gilboa] -- not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings. ...No man can stand here by deserted Ain Mellahah....

by the way, this village, mentioned by Twain, is one that Arab propagandists list it as been “ethnically cleansed” in 1948. Other historical accounts speak of 100 villages which had already been abandoned, due to natural causes such as malaria, by around 1900.

|| [a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds -- a silent mournful expanse.


Some estimates put the population as low as 100,000 in the mid 19th century, just 150 years ago, and in decline. This in a land that 2000 years ago, in "primitive" times, supported as many as 7 million people and in which, today, 10 million people reside.

this what the Zionists argued with the Mandate authorties back in the 1920s. They claimed, that with proper stewardship, the land, i.e. today's Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, could support 10 million people in the future, in other words even more than the millions it supported in biblical times. The British, who saw only an inhospitable, barren landscape, refused to believe it possible. But ninety years later the Zionists have been proved right. The land DOES support 10 million people, for sure, some more comfortably than others - but just imagine how much comfortably some of those inhabitants (i.e. mainly the Arab ones) might be living today had they not rejected co-existence at every turn and every attempt at peaceful co-existence under a two-state solution from partition to the collapse of Camp David in 2000?

Sabang, presumably taking his cue from that fraud Norman Finkelstein, seems to have a bee in his bonnet about Peters' book. While it is not a book I would recommend without considerable reservations, (some of the scholarship is very sloppy, and she doesn't reference any Arab sources), one of its main claims - that many Arabs from all over the region were newcomers attracted to the areas of Jewish and British development, has not been refuted by scholars.

then of course, by the 1930s and 1940s, many Arabs, seeing that Palestine wasn't the total backwater that it had become by the mid-19th century, but had instead become, suddenly, a fast growing economic area, turned round and wanted all the cake for themselves, rejecting partition and instead choosing to violently attempt to 'throw the Jews into the sea'.

sabang

That I do- the whole finkelstein story as well.

Incidentally, what would you think about a 'one state' solution- y'know Israel/ Palestine with jewish & palestinian citizens. I've never seen the big problem with it, but it seems most Israeli's want a 'Jewish' state, even if smaller.

MrG

Agreed. No matter what bit of minutia is finally true, it's still ancient history. Present day reality is more compelling.

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/boyle.html

Panda

The thing is that as long as the USA funds, arms and protects Israels aggression against the Palestinian people, Israel will continue to expand their illegal occupation of Palestinian land undeterred by international law or international opinion.

The USA purports to act as peacemaker in this conflict, yet in reality they are nothing more than a covert arm of the Zionist war machine.

The US government could pull the reins in on the Israeli illegal criminal activities tomorrow if they choose to by simply pulling funding for the Israeli war machine.
Israel is the worlds largest recipient of US foreign aid. Virtually all of it now going to the Israeli military. Why does a wealthy country like Israel need such a large chunk of US foreign aid to fund their military? And further, why is USA continuing to fund Israels expanding occupation of Palestine?

Even today as Hillary Clinton goes to the ME for mock peace talks, the Israelis refuse to halt their illegal expansion of Zionist settlements on Palestinian land.
The Palestinians have said that halting the expansion of Israeli settlement on Palestinian land is the fundamental issue and peace talks can not proceed until it stops. So what does Hillary say to that? Well, she reckons the Palestinians are just being hard to get on with and talks should proceed.

Basically, the US led (so called) ME peace talks are a complete farce. How can USA as Israels primary military and financial backer claim to be an independent peacebroker? These so called peace talks are nothing more than stalling tactics designed to allow the US funded Israelis to tighten their grip on Palestinian territory.

callippo

the Illinois professor is entitled to interpret the Fourth Geneva Convention however he wants. Other people interpret it very differently.

we noticed that the Arabs never used it, even though it was passed in 1949, to claim settlements as being 'illegal' before 1997. Then suddenly, after Rabin got shot and the Oslo Accords - which never mentioned 'settlements' once - went bad, the Arabs and their cheerleaders, including him, started trotting it out.

it might have been an idea had the Arabs accepted, not just the 1947 partition plan,but the 2000 Camp David clinton Parameters too, then they wouldn't be in this mess, would they :

by the way, what the Arabs rejected in 2000 was :

1. An independent, internationally recognized and sovereign Palestinian Arab state

2. In 97% of the territories

3. Contiguous in Gaza and the "West Bank"

4. With Jerusalem as the capital of the nation state

5. Including the Arab neighborhoods of "eastern" Jerusalem and the Christian and Muslim sections of the old city.

6. With the so-called "right of return" to the nascent state

CC6. And a US$30 Billion fund to compensate and resettle "refugees".

Here's some questions

1: Why wasn't the Clinton Compromise "enough"? Did Arafat want another 3% = 70 square miles primarily inhabited by Jews - or nothing?

2: Why didn't Arafat make a counter-offer (traditional in negotiations done in good faith)?

3: Why was Arafat willing to make a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on less than half the territory offered and without eastern Jerusalem and US$30 Billion in aid?

what more did they or do they want? What more can they possibly hope to get? Do they really think they can possibly hope to ever get anything more?

puppy

Wrong.

Hamas are just as bad as Israel.

callippo

Kandil had a good job. When the manager left for vacations, he'd leave Kandil in charge. He became the manager's manager, really, in charge of the whole nature reserve. And he was making 6500 shekels a month - more than fifteen hundred dollars ! How could he leave a job like that ?

People in his village said that he should, during the first INTIFADA. His bosses got him a permit to come to Israel for work - that wasn't the problem. But he wasn't paying honour to the national struggle : how could he still work for the Jews ? He liked the idea of a country called Palestine, but not at the cost of his family's well-being. One of his sons had bad health problems - the boy couldn't do much of anything except make kids of his own, whose support, of course, fell to Kandil. So he kept on working.

Things improved once the Oslo peace process started. Arafat came back and the PA was installed - on a flood of money. But when Rabin was killed and everything turned sour - the martyr bombings started up, no-one had a job anymore, and Kandil stuck out like a man on a flagpole in a bad wind.


Men in masks came to his house and warned him to quit working for the Jews. One night, they left a Molotov cocktail at his door with a book of matches. His wife got scared and begged him to quit. Someone drove past his house and shot at it. He had no choice...so he wrote a letter to his bosses, telling them he couldn't make it to work anymore. They were sympathetic, but life goes on, they found a replacement, and gave Kandil a pension - after all, he'd been working for them for twenty three years.


So in 1996 Kandil was without a job, like almost everyone else. He took a few construction jobs - at least, while they were still building things in the West Bank. Or he'd sneak into Israel and fill in as a labourer for the Jews.

Kandil was away on a job when a man named Musa from the next village told his sons he wanted to talk to his father. When he came again, he said to Kandil - 'everybody knows you, and you have nothing to worry about. But the people from the Police Service in Ramallah would like to talk to you. Go tomorrow to the Muqata and have coffee with them.


He arrived at the compound at 10 am, and he sat on the stairs until six thirty in the afternoon. Then, three men in civilian clothes took him up to the third floor and into a small room, where they beat him without mercy for three hours. At ten o'clock, they picked him up off the floor, trussed his hands together behind his back, and trussed his feet. Then they hung him from a hook, head down, with his mangled face about a foot from the floor.


The next day the beating started again and went on all day. when the cops got bored they'd hang him from his hook again and go drink tea. Everyone who came hit Kandil. People who came to visit the guards - friends, just passing by - were invited to Kandil's cage, to hit him or kick him. To impress them, the Cops would show their friends how the real pros do it, with a thick doubled up electric cord - that was like getting hit twice at once.


Funny thing was, they didn't ASK ANYTHING. For sixteen days nobody asked anything, or told him anything - they just beat him. Then, they brought him a blank sheet of paper and they told him - 'Name, family name, and signature'. Kandil wrote down his name and signed.


One day, two Red Cross ladies turned up. One was German, the other an Arab who translated. They gave him soap, toothpaste and a little towel. But the guards had warned Kandil he was not to open, or touch, anything they gave him. The Red Cross was giving the PA sixteen dollars a day for each prisoner, which kept the jail in business.

The ladies couldn't do much for Kandil. He talked to them for an hour or so. He told them he didn't know why he was there, and he showed them the marks on his body from the beatings. The German lady started to cry.


The Red Cross would come once a month. Apart from that, Kandil's jailers did as they pleased. The worst beatings came at the beginning and end of each shift, when the senior ranks were present, and every guard had to show how avid he was for the work.


Finally, after months and months, a man called Ashraf turned up - a prosecutor, and big wheel in the PA, and told Kandil what he had done to cause offence to the Palestinian people. It turned out that Kandil had been involved in the kidnapping of two Hezbollah bigwigs who had disappeared from Lebanon ten years before. Though everyone knew it was the Israelis that snatched them, what the Palestinians wanted to know was who had ratted them out. Now, at last, that canker was settled - it was Kandil, despite the fact that he'd never been to Lebanon in his entire life.


Kandil had also organized the kidnap of twelve soldiers from the Jordanian legion, which would help to clear up a long - standing dispute between the PLO and the Hashemite monarchy there. He'd also murdered two young boys from the hills near his village and ALSO... he had fired a gunshot at a member of a powerful family there.


When he read the last charge, Kandil knew what had happened. It was the rival clan in his own village. One of their cousins had been shot at - and their honour required that someone must pay the price...and that someone was Kandil, who fifteen hundred dollars a month from the Jews had got him noticed.


When Kandil finished reading the charges Ashraf had put in front of him, he was taken back to his cage and hung upside down again, just like any other day, and in the morning, the beatings started again like nothing had happened. And so it went on, day after day.

Then one day, everything stopped. He was left hanging in his cell all day. There was no food, no shouts, no guards, no orders, nothing ! The shots outside had changed to big explosions - bombs or cannon shells, something tremendous, all day and night. And then the next night, at about seven PM, he heard it - HEBREW.. ! The Israeli Army had destroyed the Muqata, and the soldiers were searching through the wreckage.


There were one hundred and ninety six prisoners, and Kandil was the last to be found - they didn't get him off his hook until the other prisoners told the soldiers that there was a cage behind - a - door - behind - a - door, and that they'd missed one. Everyone was loaded onto trucks, and taken to an Israeli camp.
At four thirty in the morning, in the rain, the soldiers came with food - and every prisoner got two rolls, one with cream cheese and one with yellow cheese and yoghurt, a fresh bottle of clean mineral water, and an orange. And five cigarettes ! They didn't sell them on the street like the Palestinian Police did with the ten cigarettes a day the Red Cross provided the prisoners at the now destroyed Muqata with.


Then, daylight came, and everyone got a mattress and two blankets for their cot...and breakfast ! There was matzoh (unleavened bread), white cheese, tomatoes, peppers, five more cigarettes, and tea. And then they raised tents to keep out the rain, and made their beds, and then...lLunch ! There was chicken scvhnitzel, along with the matzoh. And it went on like that, every single day, for ten days, until the Israelis told him he was free, and he could go home.


A year later, Kandil was still amazed : 'If only a teth of the Palestinians behaved as the Israelis behaved,' he said, 'I want you to put it in your book : I don't wish for anybody - not even the ones from the other family - ever to fall imto the hands of those animals. You know, I used to be for a Palestinian State, I was in favour. Now I want the Israelis to wipe them out, and send them all to Hell'.




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woodenshoe

Hamas is the RESULT of at least 65 years of injustice, NOT the cause...

callippo

Hamas is the RESULT of at least 65 years of injustice, NOT the cause.

I know that when you get out of bed and accidentally stub your toe in the morning, you want to blame that and anything else bad that happens on evil Israel and the Jews, but unfortunately for you, Hamas, like Al Quieda, is an offshoot of an organisation called the Egyptian Brotherhood, an organisation that has been terrorist, violent, and extremist from it's very beginning in 1928. It's part of a tide of Islamic fundamentalism that has swept across the Middle East and then later the rest of the world from 80 years ago. It's just the localised manifestation of a wider phenomenon and Hamas, or something very like it, would very much exist even if Israel did not.

I bet these bozos would like to think that if Israel suddenly announced they were throwing in the towel and relocating to Madadasgar, then the violent, fundamentalist, terrorist organisations like Hamas that want to impose their perversion of Islam on everybody else by force would disappear just like that.