Booman Tribune

The Situation, Who Started It, and Israel's Right to Exist

by DuctapeFatwa
Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 07:11:26 PM EST

It was with interest that I listened last night to a FoxNews commentator describing with a breathless awe and undisguised admiration and glee, a weapon designed to "clear the area of all living things" that had been provided to Israel by the US, now currently being deployed against the people (and animals, and plants) of Lebanon.

How did it get to this low point in human history?

Who started this "Middle East Conflict" that now hurtles along a long-carved path inexorably toward its long-planned (but possibly, hopefully, with some wild cards and surprises) end?

In recent days, I have seen a lot of comments about this, and almost all of them go back to this or that phony "agreement" or other, based on some premise made up by people who do not live in refugee camps in Lebanon or the huddled warrens of Gaza. I have commented on the perfidy of Arafat, whose near genius as a warrior was trumped only by his subsequent love affair with swimmin' pools and movie stars, and for which love he forsook and forgot his erstwhile love of his people.

Thus, I, too have been guilty over the years of getting caught up in discussions of accords and borders, when all this is irrelevant, and I knew it even as I got caught up in it.

But eventually, it is a function of ancient-ness, I think, that one tends to cut backward to the chase, so to speak, no longer being fooled by those tempting mirages of "well here is what happened in MY lifetime, or the lifetime of my father or my grandfather, who talked about it all the time, so clearly everything began at that point."

Just as the current discussions on the subject of "immigration" in the US are nothing but the inevitable and predictable consequence of Europeans having invaded such a large and populous land mass that even the most assiduous and continuing attempts at genocide of the indigenous population have been unsuccessful, and never really had a chance, coupled with the different methods employed by the English and Spanish.

The former went for a more straightforward "kill em all" model, and in fact did achieve a greater degree of success with the tribes in the northern areas than the Spanish, who actually received a letter from the Pope in that time encouraging them to rape Indian women, and thereby create a holy race, and it is that holy race, steeped for centuries in a religion which forbids contraception, which is now predictably and inevitably reclaiming the continent, much to the disgruntlement of the descendants of the invaders, who had supposed that their ancestors had thoughtfully reduced the primitive natives to a handful of alcoholics languishing in the squalor of their "reservations" waiting for cirrhosis and malnutrition to do the work of the smallpox blankets of yesteryear.

So it is with the Middle East. One cannot talk about anything that has happened there since the days of Lawrence and Gertrude without the finger pointing back to Lawrence and Gertrude :)

One cannot talk about 1948, and the UN resolution that "created Israel" without both pointing out that the UN is an organization that was created by the US for the purposes of acting as a sort of international public relations office for US neo-colonialism, or without going back to Sykes-Picot, and thus, back to Lawrence and Gertrude, back to the US-UK colonialist adventurism that set in motion events in the region for decades to come, events that would impact the lives of people in countries far away, people whose grandfathers were not yet born.

And the same is true with "Iraq." One cannot discuss that without pointing out that Iraq, like many "countries" in the region, are the result of western map-carving to suit neo-colonialist business interests. Rich men, then as now, wanted more money.

It is kind of like the absurdity of the TV reports giving the opinion of this or that Middle Eastern nation, when what they are giving is the press release of the native overseer of one of these western-created territories, which has nothing to do with what the people who live there think, those people who suppposedly hate freedom, but who have been so carefully kept from the tiniest crumb of it for generations now.

Thus when people in the east say that they wish to get rid of "Israel," they are not saying they wish to get rid of a peaceful little country where Judaism is the state religion and a lot of people who live there are Jews, they are saying they wish to get rid of a glorified US weapons dump populated by a large number of US proxy gunmen who regularly engage in committing crimes against humanity on the neighbors, and even some of its own population (over 25% of Israeli children go to bed hungry every night), and kept stuffed with dollars to maintain it as the fat little guard dog of what the US considers its oil in the region, essentially just another client state, not unlike the one the speaker or writer saying he wishes to get rid of Israel lives in, just with more weapons and more dollars, and the permission to commit atrocities on more people, whereas in his own land, the gunmen are allowed to commit the atrocities only on people who oppose the US-installed emir or prince or sultan.

Indeed, one can even find people whose idea of "Jews" is as warped as some westerners ideas are of "Arabs" or "Muslims," the former defining "Jews" not as people who worship God according to Version 1 of the Abrahamic OS, or even an ethnic group, but people who subscribe to a particular ideology which like "American" means someone whose beliefs include the extermination of the speaker, where his western counterpart is likely to view "Arabs"/"Muslims" as evildoers who hate freedom and therefore want to kill Americans because they worship an idol called Mecca who wrote a book telling them to do so.

Of course both are the product of policies and propaganda carefully crafted over the generations by rich men who want more money, and have been quite successful in pre-empting any danger that any democracy might accidentally break out among the people of either west or east, therefore thwarting the generation of revenue.

We sometimes tend to forget, in all the discussions of this and that, that every time one human being fails to shoot another, whether with a pistol, a rifle, helicopter gunship or bomb, revenue for a rich man decreases.

Thus, that peaceful little country, that homeland for Jews, never had a chance, it was never intended by the west that such a thing should exist, and ironically, it would have been the people of the east who would not really have minded having it, and once the US is removed, assuming enough humans survive to make such a thing still a question, it is my most fervent prayer, and my dearest belief, that at last there will be a homeland for Jews in Palestine, and that whether we kneel toward Mecca, fold hands and call the name of Mary, mother of Jesus, or davin toward the Wailing Wall, we will all pray together in Jerusalem.



Display:
Although this particular issue is not the focus nor the subject of the original article, for those few unfamiliar with this particular topic and have an interest, here are a couple of links:

One Israel child out of three is poor, a poverty report reveals. Every third child in Israel lives below the poverty line, according to an annual National Insurance Institute (NII) poverty report released recently.

Over 400,000 families in Israel suffer from "nutritional insecurity," a euphemistic term for "hunger." 28% of Israeli citizens, or 1,600,000 people are living in poverty. Among them are more than 600,000 hungry children. Those experiencing "nutritional insecurity" eat smaller portions, skip meals and, in extreme cases, don't eat for a whole day...

Israel News Agency Link

The report cites the Latet organization, which claims that poverty in Israel is far worse than indicated by the NII Poverty Report. This is because the poverty report examines only how much money is in the hands of every family in Israel and does not examine how much of this money goes on essential expenditures of poor children. The poverty report does not take into account, for example, that in some families with incomes that place them above the poverty line, some of the money is spent on drugs. Another figure in the report shows that 450,000 families are in need of immediate housing solutions...

One of the groups most discriminated against in Israel is the 60,000 Bedouin children living in the unrecognized settlements in the Negev and the Galilee. Most of them are denied basic services and infrastructure such as water, electricity and transportation and they suffer from a low level of health and education services. Bedouin children in the unrecognized settlements live in homes and attend schools where there are no shelters.

To demonstrate the discrimination against the Arab citizens, who constitute about one-fifth of the population...

The report also points to ethnic discrimination, of which the victims are mostly Ethiopian children and children of Mizrahi origins (Jews of Middle Eastern descent). As a blatant example of such discrimination, the report mentions the state-religious school in Ashdod, where Ethiopian students studied on a separate floor of the building apart from the rest of the students and had recess at different times from the other children. In this way they were able to have no contact with the other students...

Israel Newspaper Link

Israel leads West in child poverty

Israel has bypassed the United States and now leads Western countries when it comes to child poverty figures, according to a grim National Insurance Institute report...

Knesset Member Ehud Rassabi (Shinui) said the report proves the current economic policy is pushing the middle-class toward poverty, adding that social gaps are widening as well...

Israel Newspaper Link



one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed
by DuctapeFatwa (DuctapeFatwa@yahoo.com) on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 08:52:12 PM EST
60,000 Bedouin children are not "Israeli" children.

Israeli children = Israeli citizens

Israel is a Jewish state and only Jews can be citizens of that nation.

Your definition of "Israeli children" is quite elastic.  And I have already noted the serious malnutrition problems among ARAB (non-Jewish) children in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Not only that, but nowhere in any of your stories does it state that 25% of Israeli children "go to bed hungry".  

Actually, the number of "hungry" children in Israel is closer to perhaps 10%.  Even one hungry child is too many, of course, but child malnutrition is not the serious problem among Israeli citizens that it is among the Palestinian children, who are actually experiencing below-normal growth because of severe malnutrition in the Palestinian territories (especially the Gaza Strip).

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

by Man Without A Country on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 09:26:52 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Israel is a Jewish state and only Jews can be citizens of that nation.

Israel has yet to reach that state of, umm, "purity."

The ethnic cleansing campaign of the 40's we know mostly as the Nakbawas never completed, so there are indeed many Arab citizens of Israel -- well over one million. The situation gets even more complicated & the numbers larger when the Israel starts annexing land.

The Guardian ran an excellent article on Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens, a compare & contrast of its system of regulatory ethnic cleansing to that of apartheid South Africa. Well worth the read. Here's a snippet:

Four decades later, the increasingly complex world of Israel's system of classification deems Said Rhateb to be a resident of the West Bank - somewhere he has never lived - and an illegal alien for living in the home in which he was born, inside the Jerusalem boundary. Jerusalem's council forces Rhateb to pay substantial property taxes on his house but that does not give him the right to live in it, and he is periodically arrested for doing so. Rhateb's children have been thrown out of their Jerusalem school, he cannot register a car in his name - or rather he can, but only one with Palestinian number plates, which means he cannot drive it to his home because only Israeli-registered cars are allowed within Jerusalem - and he needs a pass to visit the centre of the city. The army grants him about four a year.

There is more. If Rhateb is not legally resident in his own home, then he is defined as an "absentee" who has abandoned his property. Under Israeli law, it now belongs to the state or, more particularly, its Jewish citizens. "They sent papers that said we cannot sell the land or develop it because we do not own the land. It belongs to the state," he says. "Any time they want to confiscate it, they can, because they say we are absentees even though we are living in the house. That's what forced my older brother and three sisters to live in the US. They couldn't bear the harassment."   [snip]

According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Jerusalem's Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."   [snip]

The similarities between the situation of East Jerusalemites and black South Africans is very great in respect of their residency rights," says John Dugard, the international law professor widely regarded as the father of human rights law in South Africa and now the UN's chief human rights monitor in the occupied territories. "We had the old Group Areas Act in South Africa. East Jerusalem has territorial classification that has the same sort of consequences as race classification had in South Africa in respect of who you can marry, where you can live, where you can go to school or hospital."    [snip]

"Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem. "The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."   [snip]

During the 1990s, about 12 times as many new homes were legally built in Jewish areas as in Arab ones. Denied permission to build new homes or expand existing ones, many Palestinians build anyway and risk a demolition order. Israel's former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, routinely defends the demolitions by arguing that any civilised society enforces planning regulations. But Israel is the only western society to deny construction permits to people on the grounds of race. Until 1992, so did South Africa.   [snip]

Israeli law also restricts where non-Jews may live. "Muslims and Christians are barred from buying in the Jewish quarter of the old city on the grounds of "historic patterns of life of each community having its own quarter'," says Seidemann, in a phrase eerily reminiscent of apartheid's philosophy. "But that didn't prevent the Israeli government from aggressively pursuing activities to place Jews within the Muslim quarter. The attitude is: what's mine is exclusively mine, but what's yours is mixed if we happen to target it."   [snip]

I hate the term ethnic cleansing in the context of this," he says, "because of the connotations of rape and pillage, which this is not. But there was and is an active government effort using procedures such as this to rid targeted areas of its Palestinian residents and turn it into an exclusively or predominantly Jewish area. And I say, with regret, that the efforts have been moderately successful."   [snip]

The US state department's annual human rights report - not a document known for being hostile to Israel - concluded that there is "institutionalised legal and societal discrimination against Israel's Christian, Muslim and Druze citizens". "The government," it says, "does not provide Israeli Arabs, who constitute 20% of the population, with the same quality of education, housing, employment and social services as Jews."   [snip]

In the 2002 budget, Israel's housing ministry spent about £14 per person in Arab communities compared with up to £1,500 per person in Jewish ones. The same year, the health ministry allocated just 1.6m shekels (£200,000) to Arab communities of its 277m-shekel (£35m) budget to develop healthcare facilities.   [snip]

. . . The Israeli education ministry does not reveal its budget for each of the two systems, but 14 years ago a government report concluded that nearly twice as much money was allocated to each Jewish pupil as to each Arab child.

A Human Rights Watch report two years ago said the situation has not significantly changed and there remain "huge disparities in education spending" and that "discrimination against Arab children colours every aspect" of the education system. The exam pass-rate for Arab pupils is about one-third lower than that for their Jewish compatriots. In 2004, a threat by angry Arab Israeli parents in Haifa to register their children in Hebrew-language schools so shocked Jewish parents that the authorities quickly took steps to improve Arab schools there.

The suspicion with which the state still regards its Arab citizens was displayed by the recent revelation that the Shin Bet security service places Jewish teachers into Arab-language schools to monitor the activities of the other teachers. A Shin Bet official is also a member of the committee appointing teachers.
  Worlds Apart

And the tired adage in our that Israel must be allowed to do whatever it takes ito defend herself, apparently doesn't extend to its Arab citizens:

As the vulnerability of the village to a repeat of last Thursday's Katyusha attack was underlined by a volley of rockets on Karmiel three kilometres away, Mrs Ayub said that Hizbollah appeared not "to make a difference between Jews and Arabs. But we all eat from the same plate."

Najib Sjeer, 63, a former deputy superintendent of schools, echoed the frequent complaints about discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens by saying there were no warning sirens in the village and no shelters in the schools. While the village had not been caught up in a war since 1948, he added: "There are no public shelters. We have no protection.  

"We are a part of Israel but Israel does not see us as part of the country," he said.   link

Israel is a Jewish state and only Jews can be citizens of that nation.

Israel has yet to reach that state of, umm, "purity."

The ethnic cleansing campaign of the 40's we know mostly as the Nakbawas never completed, so there are indeed many Arab citizens of Israel -- well over one million. The situation gets even more complicated & the numbers larger when the Israel starts annexing land.

The Guardian ran an excellent article on Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens, a compare & contrast of its system of regulatory ethnic cleansing to that of apartheid South Africa. Well worth the read. Here's a snippet:

Four decades later, the increasingly complex world of Israel's system of classification deems Said Rhateb to be a resident of the West Bank - somewhere he has never lived - and an illegal alien for living in the home in which he was born, inside the Jerusalem boundary. Jerusalem's council forces Rhateb to pay substantial property taxes on his house but that does not give him the right to live in it, and he is periodically arrested for doing so. Rhateb's children have been thrown out of their Jerusalem school, he cannot register a car in his name - or rather he can, but only one with Palestinian number plates, which means he cannot drive it to his home because only Israeli-registered cars are allowed within Jerusalem - and he needs a pass to visit the centre of the city. The army grants him about four a year.

There is more. If Rhateb is not legally resident in his own home, then he is defined as an "absentee" who has abandoned his property. Under Israeli law, it now belongs to the state or, more particularly, its Jewish citizens. "They sent papers that said we cannot sell the land or develop it because we do not own the land. It belongs to the state," he says. "Any time they want to confiscate it, they can, because they say we are absentees even though we are living in the house. That's what forced my older brother and three sisters to live in the US. They couldn't bear the harassment."   [snip]

According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Jerusalem's Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."   [snip]

The similarities between the situation of East Jerusalemites and black South Africans is very great in respect of their residency rights," says John Dugard, the international law professor widely regarded as the father of human rights law in South Africa and now the UN's chief human rights monitor in the occupied territories. "We had the old Group Areas Act in South Africa. East Jerusalem has territorial classification that has the same sort of consequences as race classification had in South Africa in respect of who you can marry, where you can live, where you can go to school or hospital."    [snip]

"Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem. "The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."   [snip]

During the 1990s, about 12 times as many new homes were legally built in Jewish areas as in Arab ones. Denied permission to build new homes or expand existing ones, many Palestinians build anyway and risk a demolition order. Israel's former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, routinely defends the demolitions by arguing that any civilised society enforces planning regulations. But Israel is the only western society to deny construction permits to people on the grounds of race. Until 1992, so did South Africa.   [snip]

Israeli law also restricts where non-Jews may live. "Muslims and Christians are barred from buying in the Jewish quarter of the old city on the grounds of "historic patterns of life of each community having its own quarter'," says Seidemann, in a phrase eerily reminiscent of apartheid's philosophy. "But that didn't prevent the Israeli government from aggressively pursuing activities to place Jews within the Muslim quarter. The attitude is: what's mine is exclusively mine, but what's yours is mixed if we happen to target it."   [snip]

I hate the term ethnic cleansing in the context of this," he says, "because of the connotations of rape and pillage, which this is not. But there was and is an active government effort using procedures such as this to rid targeted areas of its Palestinian residents and turn it into an exclusively or predominantly Jewish area. And I say, with regret, that the efforts have been moderately successful."   [snip]

The US state department's annual human rights report - not a document known for being hostile to Israel - concluded that there is "institutionalised legal and societal discrimination against Israel's Christian, Muslim and Druze citizens". "The government," it says, "does not provide Israeli Arabs, who constitute 20% of the population, with the same quality of education, housing, employment and social services as Jews."   [snip]

In the 2002 budget, Israel's housing ministry spent about £14 per person in Arab communities compared with up to £1,500 per person in Jewish ones. The same year, the health ministry allocated just 1.6m shekels (£200,000) to Arab communities of its 277m-shekel (£35m) budget to develop healthcare facilities.   [snip]

. . . The Israeli education ministry does not reveal its budget for each of the two systems, but 14 years ago a government report concluded that nearly twice as much money was allocated to each Jewish pupil as to each Arab child.

A Human Rights Watch report two years ago said the situation has not significantly changed and there remain "huge disparities in education spending" and that "discrimination against Arab children colours every aspect" of the education system. The exam pass-rate for Arab pupils is about one-third lower than that for their Jewish compatriots. In 2004, a threat by angry Arab Israeli parents in Haifa to register their children in Hebrew-language schools so shocked Jewish parents that the authorities quickly took steps to improve Arab schools there.

The suspicion with which the state still regards its Arab citizens was displayed by the recent revelation that the Shin Bet security service places Jewish teachers into Arab-language schools to monitor the activities of the other teachers. A Shin Bet official is also a member of the committee appointing teachers.
  Worlds Apart

And the tired adage in our that Israel must be allowed to do whatever it takes ito defend herself, apparently doesn't extend to its Arab citizens:

As the vulnerability of the village to a repeat of last Thursday's Katyusha attack was underlined by a volley of rockets on Karmiel three kilometres away, Mrs Ayub said that Hizbollah appeared not "to make a difference between Jews and Arabs. But we all eat from the same plate."

Najib Sjeer, 63, a former deputy superintendent of schools, echoed the frequent complaints about discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens by saying there were no warning sirens in the village and no shelters in the schools. While the village had not been caught up in a war since 1948, he added: "There are no public shelters. We have no protection.  

"We are a part of Israel but Israel does not see us as part of the country," he said.   link



". . . the more educated you are, the more indoctrinated you are. After all, propaganda is largely directed towards the privileged." -Noam Chomsky
by Arcturus on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 11:06:36 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I was not aware of that to be honest.
by observer393 on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 11:13:10 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Israeli children = Israeli citizens

Israel is a Jewish state and only Jews can be citizens of that nation.

Nope. Almost a fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs. You may be thinking of the immigration laws under which Jews get automatic approval for immigration and citizenship.

by MarekNYC on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 11:24:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]
.
Wikipedia - Arab citizens of Israel

Some Israeli politicians (notably Avigdor Liberman of Yisrael Beytenu, the 4th largest faction in the 17th Knesset) advocate the transfer of the large Israeli Arab towns near the West Bank (e.g. Tayibe, Umm al-Fahm, Baqa al-Gharbiyye), to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for Israeli settlements.

As the London Times notes: "Liberman plans to strengthen Israel's status as a Jewish state by transferring 500,000 of its minority Arab population to the West Bank, by the simple expedient of redrawing the West Bank to include several Arab Israeli towns in northern Israel. Another 500,000 would be stripped of their right to vote if they failed to pledge loyalty to Zionism."

Democracy or Ethnocracy: Territory and Settler Politics in Israel/Palestine

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

by Oui on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 02:02:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]
the UN is an organization that was created by the US for the purposes of acting as a sort of international public relations office for US neo-colonialism

Yeah, right. In an alternate history SF story perhaps. Or maybe a wingnut article about the UN with 'communists' replaced by 'US'. The UN was created by the victorious allies of WWII - i.e. including both the US and the USSR. The idea was to institutionalize international conflict resolution. All countries try to use it as a public relations office - it's part of the international relations dance.  Or are you suggesting that as all international law is created only at the sufferance of the more powerful countries, it is therefore illegtimate.  

they are saying they wish to get rid of a glorified US weapons dump populated by a large number of US proxy gunmen who regularly engage in committing crimes against humanity

what crimes - international law is just a neocolonialist construct, right?

by MarekNYC on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 09:14:51 PM EST

good points, and in my opinion, whether that was your intention or not, you deserve an answer.

Greed has always been the most powerful motivator of mankind and mover of human events. It is an urge, an instinct, arguably stronger even than the urge of an adolescent to reproduce, although the adolescent may not think of his "urges" in quite those terms. :)

Violent behavior is also an age-old predeliction of our rather sorry species, and much of the efforts toward creating societies, toward advancement, has been directed controlling those urges for reproduction and violence.

Greed, however, has been a bit less assiduously addressed, with the result that by the time of the little kingdoms and principalities of days ancient and old, though there were already by then laws against murdering ones neighbor, at least under some circumstances, and laws against this or that aspect of expression of sexuality, generally directed against women, it was understood that everyone existed to serve the king, that the purpose of everything in the kingdom was to make the king richer, including forays over to the next kingdom, the goal of which would be to seize THAT king's coffers of gold and jewels.

There have been, also, throughout history, brave and courageous people who have dared to attempt to persuade society to put checks on greed, and usually they have been killed, by people who prefer their greed unchecked.

Nevertheless, there has been a slow but nearly universal movement toward a new way, a new philosophy of statehood, that says that instead of all the people existing for the purpose of enriching the king, and therefore the state, that the state's reason for existing is to provide for the well-being of the people, a philosophy which of its nature requires some checks on greed.

Thus, despite permitting Russia, not without its own fair share of greed, the US created the UN to assist in effecting its neo-colonial activities around the globe, and while on its face, this may have been "unique" in a sense, its basis in greed was far from unique, and far from new.

And if you read the UN charter, and consider US policies, the "wingnuts" you refer to have a point, although not, perhaps, the point they think they have.

Taken on its face, the UN charter is quite clearly so at odds with US policies that if the UN is in fact that lofty-principled, high-minded of purpose international body you are not alone in yearning for, the US has no business in the UN, and should have been summarily and unceremoniously dismissed with accompanying drummers and uniformed guards escorting it out of the building long ago. But the building is in New York.

As for the very good question you ask about international laws. No, the laws themselves are not the problem. But just like laws in many places in the US, maybe in your own community, laws are intended to be complied with by the poor, not the rich.

For example, there have long been laws in most communities in the United States against driving while intoxicated, and even stiffer penalties for those who cause the loss of life or property while driving in an intoxicated state.

Yet the beloved first lady of the US, Laura Bush, had, when a teen, an unfortunate automotive incident that sadly resulted in the loss of the life of another human being, and this was handled as such things were at that time, and are sometimes handled today, when such an event befalls a young member of the affluent class, and the young future Mrs. Bush was spared the indignity of sordid precinct offices or dingy jail cell, and went on to graduate high school with unblemished record, continue on to university, and make her parents very proud of her as a fine librarian. Was this not the best outcome for all concerned (well, except for the victim)? Why should such bright promise have been cut down because of one foolish lapse of girlish judgment?

Not quite the same way the same incident would have been handled had the driver been a 16 year old of color, or a poor white girl from a family considered "redneck" or "white trash," who would not be attending university or becoming a librarian, nor marrying the scion of a wealthy family and going on to support him in a political career culminating in being installed as president of the US by the very highest court in the land. A poor girl of any color might instead have been asked why she was still attending school instead of bringing in a paycheck, a big strong girl like that. Or perhaps such a girl would already have been pregnant with her first child, the result of a night of teen passion with the son of one of the town's finest families, who did not have to tell her that their relationship, whatever its consequences, ended when he dropped her off a couple of blocks from her house, that his car not be seen and wrong ideas not be gotten. We are painting a rosy picture here deliberately, that her child's conception occurred as the result of a consensual act, possibly surrounded by a few moments of heady, if glorious, false hope that she might be a cinderella princess. The more likely story would be, well, it would be better told somewhere else than here, because it could become an entire diary or six.

So back to laws. Let's consider the laws against cocaine use. Not a law to mess around with, unless you happen to be affluent. American society has advanced so much that today, in most cases, even Afro-Americans can purchase the same justice the rich white kids get if they have enough money, which they are less likely to have, but it is the principle that counts, after all.

Thus, the rich white kid who gets caught "experimenting" with cocaine can expect to have his life interrupted once or twice a week by a boring counselling session, or if he gets one of those tough no-nonsense judges, every Saturday for two or three months spent planting pansies in front of the courthouse, or being the gopher for Meals on Wheels or some similar organization, before he goes off to university and makes his parents very proud.

The poor black kid gets ten years in an institution that is virtually guaranteed to destroy whatever potential he may have had for - well, life.

The poor are dramatically over-represented in the facilities of America's dynamic and growing prison industry (a perennial investor favorite). This is not, despite popular myth, because the poor commit more crimes, but because the poor can afford fewer lawyers. And I am deliberately not even going into the fact that the poor are more likely to get arrested in the first place, because I am, believe it or not, trying to be brief and resist the temptation to digress.

So it is not the laws themselves that are an instrument of neo-colonialism, it is the very selectivity of their enforcement that is an invaluable aid in perpetuating neo-colonialism, especially on the part of the US, because if those laws were enforced against Americans, it would be the Hague that was the dynamic and growing prison industry, and every US president since there were international laws or a Hague to try the violators, and a sizeable majority of members of every cabinet and congress since that date, would either be occupying a cell there, or lie buried on the prison grounds.

And as for Israel, in addition to enjoying that same immunity from those international laws, for a nation that owes its very existence to a UN resolution, it sure is in violation of a lot of them, about seventy, I think. Of course US has recently forbidden any further resolutions that could be interpreted as critical of Israel, so they won't be violating any more.

one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed

by DuctapeFatwa (DuctapeFatwa@yahoo.com) on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 05:21:56 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I'll only say this:

I will be happy if someone has shown up (on the left) who will make an argument that isn;t first and foremost a condemnation of Israel.

I do not say that because I am the kind of person likely to make such an argument, but becaue I want this site to have a full an open debate from the left end of hte spectrum.  

by BooMan on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 09:22:29 PM EST
[ Parent ]

get a left, and I would be happy to see the people of Israel get a country instead of a weapons dump with shopping malls.

And I think that it is something that you should be proud of, that so many who participate on your website are people who are opposed to crimes against humanity and feel free to say so here.

That is quite a compliment to you, and one that if you do not appreciate now, I pray that the Situation will not preclude you having the experience of appreciating it in retrospect, as an old man.

one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed

by DuctapeFatwa (DuctapeFatwa@yahoo.com) on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 05:42:04 AM EST
[ Parent ]
 Good luck in this venture.

 So-called "friends of Israel" are the blindest of the blind.  You've grabbed the 'third-rail' with both hands.  And you'll be hated and reviled for that.

by proximity1 on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 01:11:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]
 
 the idea that among the "Left" (U.S. "Left"?) one finds only automatic criticism of Israel is truly laughable.

 There is plenty of complete and utter knee-jerk unconditional defense of Israel on the American "Left"--self-described as such.  To see it is really hard: you have to open your eyes.

by proximity1 on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 01:12:12 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I've often commented that on Democrat partisan blogs (I suppose that is what is considered "leftist" in the States) Israel is considered one of the sacred cows. Those of us who are into turning sacred cows into hamburger are bound to run into some very irritated folks. Which reminds me, it's getting to be lunch time.

The Mahatma X Files. Peace With Attitude.
by James Benjamin (the_bokononist at yahoo dot com) on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 02:03:15 PM EST
[ Parent ]
and the elitist security council. Why are some countries more important than others. That never made sense to me.
by observer393 on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 11:08:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
and the elitist security council. Why are some countries more important than others. That never made sense to me.

power - they wanted that veto or they wouldn't recognize the UN, so they got it.

pragmatism - after the experience of WWII and WWI the chief danger was seen as open warfare between the major powers, without a veto for all of them there was the risk that instead of an instrument for preventing war between them the UN could become a means of starting and legitimizing it.

by MarekNYC on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 12:09:15 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I just think that the security council and veto doom the whole effort. Some are more equal than others. Mold the world in our image. These are things that spring into my mind.
by observer393 on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 02:29:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]
(over 25% of Israeli children go to bed hungry every night)

Nope.  Actually, Israel's life average life expectancy is 79.1 years.

Israel's infant mortality rate is 6.89 per 100,000 live briths.  The United States' infant mortality rate is 6.43 per 100,000 live births.

Israel ranks #1 among nations for the percentage of males reaching the age of 65, a key indicator of a nation's health.  Over 85% of Israeli males reach the age of 65.  The runner-up to Israel is Sweden, where 84.8% of all males reach the age of 65.  That's a remarkable statistic, given Israel's near-perpetual state of war and Sweden's lack of armed conflict for the past 60 years.

Child malnutrition IS a serious problem amongst the Palestinian children of the Gaza Strip, particularly since the Israeli stranglehold imposed beginning January 2006.  22% of all Palestinian children are suffering from some degree of malnutrition.  This is NOT the case among Israeli (Jewish) children, where child malnutrition is so rare that it is not statistically significant.

I haven't fact-checked your entire diary because A. it's not my job and B. there aren't that many facts in it, but again...we have a diary without any links whatsoever.  The one fact I did check, you got spectacularly WRONG.  The fact that I have anyone who wishes to challenge your assertions must do a considerable amount of independent research, when source-linking is standard for most diaries that make factual and especially statistical claims, makes me question the entire validity of every "fact" you claim.

MY SOURCES (cited so that anybody who wants to can verify my claims):

http://www.nationmaster.com/country/is-israel/hea-health
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/aug2002/pale-a16_prn.shtml


Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

by Man Without A Country on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 08:19:48 PM EST
.
Israel Poverty: One In Three Children Are Hungry

Over 1.4 million people, or 22.4 percent of the Israel population, were classified as poor last year. That number included 652,000 children, representing 30.8 percent of the country's children. After six years of stability, the number of poor families rose sharply last year from 18.1 percent to 19.3 percent of all families.

Some organizations, such as Meals4Israel, Table to Table, Meals On Wheels, and WIZO are now rushing in to feed starving children. You can help by entering one of these sites and making an immediate contribution to feeding to the Israel poor.

Israel: Poverty Could Be Election Capital

LET AVIV (Business Week) Nov. 28, 2005 -- ... is expected to grow 4.5% in 2005. But the improvement has not trickled down to large segments of the population. The number of Israelis living under the poverty line tops 20% and continues to rise. Most of the benefits from the boom and from Netanyahu's policies have been enjoyed by workers in Israel's so-called Silicon Wadis, where the country's high-tech industry is concentrated.

Hard Hit
The Likud may thus prove vulnerable in development towns such as Sderot, where Peretz served as mayor in the early 1990s. Established in the '50s in outlying areas, these are largely populated by low-income immigrants from North Africa. Traditionally, they have been a bastion of Likud support. But it's precisely these towns, where unemployment runs well above the 9% national average, that Netanyahu's policies have hit hardest.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

by Oui on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 12:30:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]
DF, there can be little doubt that US intervention is often cause for, umm, disorder.  But animosity toward Jews has a long and sad history, the details of which google can provide better than I.  The "culmination" of this continuum of events was Hitler's little experiment in rigidly organized genocide, killing some 6,000,000 Jews along with 6,000,000 others including gypsies, gays and the disabled.  My point, and I do have one, is that while the US may have a prominent role here, animosity toward Israel would likely exist even without an American presence.

Fear will keep the local systems in line. -Grand Moff Tarkin Survivor Left Blogistan
by boran2 (blogistan@yahoo.com) on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 08:38:31 PM EST

as late as the 1950s, it was pretty standard procedure that Jews, even though they might be of European origin and therefore free of any taint of "color," were nevertheless not even permitted to join the local country club so that their children might swim in the pool.

And a very good argument can be made that in addition to the obvious and certainly primordial strategic and business reasons for the establishment of Israel, it was no small help that politically at the time, neither US or UK politicians were eager to be seen as having abetted the influx of a large number of Jews to those countries.

My point is not that there has never been a need for a Jewish homeland, on the contrary, I am saying that that need is a very real one, but one that was not effected by US actions in the late 1940s. Few people who went to live in Israel would have listed among their reasons for doing so the wish to generate additional revenue for American and British companies. Those folks, as the saying goes, "wuz robbed."

one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed

by DuctapeFatwa (DuctapeFatwa@yahoo.com) on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 09:03:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I took an international relations course when I was in college, and I remember (vaguely--this was YEARS) the lectures about the history, assorted theories and the establishment of Israel that you have outlined so well.

And, having lived in God-knows-how-many multicultural neighborhoods were everyone got along, what is going on today makes no sense to me.  

Long story short/dot connecting necessary--according to all of the bullshit rationalizations that are used to justify Israel's actions, if anyone should bear a grudge against the government of Russia or the Russian people, it should be me and I don't, never have, and never will!!

I've got more important things to worry about, other than my great-grandparents and grandparents, as there is NOTHING anyone can do about it!  

"First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." Mahatma Gandhi

by Street Kid on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 09:22:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]

to live in such a hood, and the last few days, that is about all any of us can talk about: That people will and do get along, regardless of differences in faith tradition, ethnicity, etc. and that there is more than one part of the world where people in fact did so, and did so for a very long time until concerted efforts were made to generate conflict - and revenue for key western business interests!

We actually enjoy, and celebrate our differences, in food, in music, art, religion, we share and mix n' match and debate and laugh at each other and ourselves and our descendants, and at this time, of course, we weep, for dreams and lives and nations deferred and we try to keep a balance between pragmatic despair and illusory hope, we send and phone and parcel out airport shuttle duty and make room and hug and through our tears and discovering that no one, NO ONE ever has enough bathrooms, we debate and laugh at each other and ourselves, and weep, and send and phone...

one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed

by DuctapeFatwa (DuctapeFatwa@yahoo.com) on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 12:30:15 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Isn't it great?  Maybe that is why I don't understand all of these self-imposed/inflicted grievances...

"First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." Mahatma Gandhi
by Street Kid on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 01:23:10 AM EST
[ Parent ]
.
If this account is true (we have to be careful of the ME treachery, exaggerations, propaganda and outright lies ...) the death sentence of enemy combatants and non-adherence to the Geneva Conventions was not an idea of the Bush administration. Although at Rummy's Defense Department the origins of his advisors could have been very familiar.

Dr. Jacques DeReynier's Memorandum on Deir Yassin

Right at the beginning of their [Irgun] attack, they had by loudspeaker warned the women and children to surrender and they had their lives saved. 150 women and children, only, surrendered themselves and were sent over to the English. The remainder were considered combatants and paid with their lives for non-execution of the order.

... Finally the head officer told me that the Irgun is absolutely inclined in the future as in the past to respect the Geneva Conventions and that in order for me to have a formal confirmation I must make contact with their Commander in Chief whom I will find in the Tel Aviv district.  

... The Jewish Agency, shocked, declared that they accepted my request absolutely, sincerely regretted what happened, but unfortunately lacked any power over the Irgun, extremists acting on their own initiative.

Ethnic Cleansing 101: The Case of Lifta Village

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

by Oui on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 03:30:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]

It is a longstanding policy that has enjoyed a longstanding history of wide bipartisan support - universal in fact.

Any politician who does not express unconditional support for Israel is effectively announcing his plans to effect an immediate career change.

one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed

by DuctapeFatwa (DuctapeFatwa@yahoo.com) on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 05:34:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]
DuctapeFatwa writes:

"Just as the current discussions on the subject of "immigration" in the US are nothing but the inevitable and predictable consequence of Europeans having invaded such a large and populous land mass that even the most assiduous and continuing attempts at genocide of the indigenous population have been unsuccessful, and never really had a chance, coupled with the different methods employed by the English and Spanish.

"The former went for a more straightforward "kill em all" model, and in fact did achieve a greater degree of success with the tribes in the northern areas than the Spanish, who actually received a letter from the Pope in that time encouraging them to rape Indian women, and thereby create a holy race, and it is that holy race, steeped for centuries in a religion which forbids contraception, which is now predictably and inevitably reclaiming the continent, much to the disgruntlement of the descendants of the invaders, who had supposed that their ancestors had thoughtfully reduced the primitive natives to a handful of alcoholics languishing in the squalor of their "reservations" waiting for cirrhosis and malnutrition to do the work of the smallpox blankets of yesteryear."

And I just say:  Damn! I wish I could write that sharp. It is, of course, crap to say a pope advocated rape. But the point is probably essentially true.

Where is the Kwisatz Haderach? That is, where is the person with the vision deep enough to see how this sloshing back and forth of DNA unfolds over time?

by Arminius on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 11:32:43 PM EST

seen in some museum somewhere, and I am sure that someone with better internet research skills than I can boast can unearth it.

Of course, it must be viewed in its historical and cultural context; the indigenous people were not seen by the Europeans as quite human, much as their modern descendants are not seen as quite human by the descendants of the invaders, one of which the other day, an American politician, to be exact, made some remarks that equated them with livestock.

The rape of indigenous women, in other words, occurred within the context of achieving what was believed to be a greater good for the Europeans, especially when presented in the context of their religious beliefs,  much in the same way that crimes against humanity today are committed in what is believed by their various apologists and champions to be a greater good for US corporations, service to whom has become for many in the west as much of a de facto religious practice as service to the Catholic church was to Spaniards of yesteryear!

one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed

by DuctapeFatwa (DuctapeFatwa@yahoo.com) on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 11:42:51 PM EST
[ Parent ]
But I add to this:  I do not buy into the incredible cynicism of this article. Even some of the airiest news babes actually get it more accurately than this.
by Arminius on Mon Jul 17th, 2006 at 11:36:11 PM EST
[ Parent ]

not yet old.

What you call cynicism, it is my prayer that human life will continue on the earth long enough for you to join me in calling "old."

Been there, done that, already saw twelve different versions of the movie, they all sucked and the t-shirt shrunk old.

The difference this time is that advances in weapons technology have made the ending of this latest version movie one that we must, in our own way and as best we can, recognize will sadly deprive many, many people, in fact, most people, possibly all people, of that pleasure.

one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed

by DuctapeFatwa (DuctapeFatwa@yahoo.com) on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 02:08:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Parable For The Laying of The Foundation of The House

                                           to the victims of the Middle East

And we what are we, the stuff of wandering,
straying and straying,
a parable for the laying of the foundation of the house.
And I asked that you be
one of the olive saplings
storing up within you the fruit's promise,
the code of old age.
And I asked that you be
like the foot of a date-palm innundated by mighty waters.
And I know they will come now
to appease and to glorify
and I asked that you just be,
that you be present.

-- Erez Bitton, born in Algeria, lives in Tel Aviv,
    translated from the Hebrew by Ammiel Alcalay,
    fr. Keys to the Garden, (City Lights Books, 1996)


". . . the more educated you are, the more indoctrinated you are. After all, propaganda is largely directed towards the privileged." -Noam Chomsky

by Arcturus on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 04:17:13 AM EST
.
Keys to the Garden
Translated from the Hebrew by Ammiel Alcalay.  

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

by Oui on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 05:09:08 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Thanks for putting up the link! I was too lazy last night to hunt it down.

There are, though, two other major translators involved (Marsha Weinstein & Susan Einbinder), along with a handful of others. Ammiel edited it, along with contributing some of his own translations.

Keys to the Garden is the poetry of Israel's Middle Eastern Jews -- who live in a sort of second class, marginalized status themselves. Many of its writers were unaware of the each others' work, even of their existence, until collected together in an American published book.

From the ending of the Forward:

To make enemies by building layers of hatred through false assumptions and dichotomies, misrepresentations and ideology presented as history is to commit the most atrocious acts of self-destruction, for we are all multiple and cannot pretend to be exclusively this or that. My own Hebrew first name and Arabic last name tell me as much. The writing of mizrahi Jews offers us intimate passage into worlds we need to know more about, and I  am very grateful to have been and continue to be a channel through which access to these journeys can be provided.


". . . the more educated you are, the more indoctrinated you are. After all, propaganda is largely directed towards the privileged." -Noam Chomsky
by Arcturus on Tue Jul 18th, 2006 at 02:27:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]


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