Israel - Palestine Conflict. **Mod note in OP - updated 1st August**

Gringo180

Another UN school flattened with sleeping kids in it by the oh so brave IDF. I feel sick!!

Lone Stone

mad muffin wrote: »

The guy wouldn't show his ID then resisted arrest.

user2011

What reason did he give them to ask for his passport/ID? Wearing a Palestine flag on the scarf? Palestine flag on his cap? Or saying the words of support for Palestine near Israeli kids?

True democracy at play :rolleyes:

pedro1234

Here's a great article from The Naton debunking 5 Israeli talking points. I can't link to the actual article so here's the text (article is at thenation.com/article/180783/five-israeli-talking-points-gaza-debunked)

Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.

Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.

This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children’s bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza’s shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 2008–09. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact.

Below I address five of Israel’s recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers.

1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.

As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable.

The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel’s responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel’s jurisdictional control. Israel does have the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, but it must do so in accordance with occupation law and not other laws of war. Occupation law ensures greater protection for the civilian population. The other laws of war balance military advantage and civilian suffering. The statement that “no country would tolerate rocket fire from a neighboring country” is therefore both a diversion and baseless.

Israel denies Palestinians the right to govern and protect themselves, while simultaneously invoking the right to self-defense. This is a conundrum and a violation of international law, one that Israel deliberately created to evade accountability.

2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

Israel argues that its occupation of the Gaza Strip ended with the unilateral withdrawal of its settler population in 2005. It then declared the Gaza Strip to be “hostile territory” and declared war against its population. Neither the argument nor the statement is tenable. Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people.

Israel argues that the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrates that ending the occupation will not bring peace. Some have gone so far as to say that Palestinians squandered their opportunity to build heaven in order to build a terrorist haven instead. These arguments aim to obfuscate Israel’s responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank. As Prime Minister Netanyahu once explained, Israel must ensure that it does not “get another Gaza in Judea and Samaria…. I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007. The siege has created a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term.

3) This Israeli operation, among others, was caused by rocket fire from Gaza.

Israel claims that its current and past wars against the Palestinian population in Gaza have been in response to rocket fire. Empirical evidence from 2008, 2012 and 2014 refute that claim. First, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the greatest reduction of rocket fire came through diplomatic rather than military means. This chart demonstrates the correlation between Israel’s military attacks upon the Gaza Strip and Hamas militant activity. Hamas rocket fire increases in response to Israeli military attacks and decreases in direct correlation to them. Cease-fires have brought the greatest security to the region.

During the four months of the Egyptian-negotiated cease-fire in 2008, Palestinian militants reduced the number of rockets to zero or single digits from the Gaza Strip. Despite this relative security and calm, Israel broke the cease-fire to begin the notorious aerial and ground offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-two days. In November 2012, Israel’s extrajudicial assassination of Ahmad Jabari, the chief of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, while he was reviewing terms for a diplomatic solution, again broke the cease-fire that precipitated the eight-day aerial offensive that killed 132 Palestinians.

Immediately preceding Israel’s most recent operation, Hamas rocket and mortar attacks did not threaten Israel. Israel deliberately provoked this war with Hamas. Without producing a shred of evidence, it accused the political faction of kidnapping and murdering three settlers near Hebron. Four weeks and almost 700 lives later, Israel has yet to produce any evidence demonstrating Hamas’s involvement. During ten days of Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank, Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. Its military operation targeted Hamas members released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. It’s these Israeli provocations that precipitated the Hamas rocket fire to which Israel claims left it with no choice but a gruesome military operation.

4) Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians.

Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested. Israel, however, would not be any more tolerant of Hamas if it strictly targeted military objects, as we have witnessed of late. Israel considers Hamas and any form of its resistance, armed or otherwise, to be illegitimate.

In contrast, Israel has the eleventh most powerful military in the world, certainly the strongest by far in the Middle East, and is a nuclear power that has not ratified the non-proliferation agreement and has precise weapons technology. With the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to target single individuals and therefore to avoid civilian casualties. But rather than avoid them, Israel has repeatedly targeted civilians as part of its military operations.

The Dahiya Doctrine is central to these operations and refers to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon in 2006. Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said that this would be applied elsewhere:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.

Israel has kept true to this promise. The 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission to the Gaza Conflict, better known as the Goldstone Mission, concluded “from a review of the facts on the ground that it witnessed for itself that what was prescribed as the best strategy [Dahiya Doctrine] appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.”

According to the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israel directly targeted civilians or recklessly caused civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead. Far from avoiding the deaths of civilians, Israel effectively considers them legitimate targets.

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5) Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields.

This is arguably one of Israel’s most insidious claims, because it blames Palestinians for their own death and deprives them of even their victimhood. Israel made the same argument in its war against Lebanon in 2006 and in its war against Palestinians in 2008. Notwithstanding its military cartoon sketches, Israel has yet to prove that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure to store military weapons. The two cases where Hamas indeed stored weapons in UNRWA schools, the schools were empty. UNRWA discovered the rockets and publicly condemned the violation of its sanctity.

International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true. It attributed the high death toll in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch notes:

The evidence Human Rights Watch uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes [Israel’s] argument…we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.

In fact, only Israeli soldiers have systematically used Palestinians as human shields. Since Israel’s incursion into the West Bank in 2002, it has used Palestinians as human shields by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their cars or forcing them to go into a home where a potential militant may be hiding.

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Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, “whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.”

In the over thee weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.

Beyond the body count and reference to law, which is a product of power, the question to ask is, What is Israel’s end goal? What if Hamas and Islamic Jihad dug tunnels beneath the entirety of the Gaza Strip—they clearly did not, but let us assume they did for the sake of argument. According to Israel’s logic, all of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians are therefore human shields for being born Palestinian in Gaza. The solution is to destroy the 360-kilometer square strip of land and to expect a watching world to accept this catastrophic loss as incidental. This is possible only by framing and accepting the dehumanization of Palestinian life. Despite the absurdity of this proposal, it is precisely what Israeli society is urging its military leadership to do. Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into submission, and it certainly cannot bomb them into peace.

notfromhere

user2011 wrote: »

What reason did he give them to ask for his passport/ID? Wearing a Palestine flag on the scarf? Palestine flag on his cap? Or saying the words of support for Palestine near Israeli kids?

True democracy at play :rolleyes:

Do u think our lovely Gardai do not beat up people

wes

So now we have supporters of Israel coming out against peaceful protests and wrongful arrest. I have to say the stunning excuses for anything the Israeli state does is astonishing.

Buzz Killington the third

notfromhere wrote: »

Do u think our lovely Gardai do not beat up people

Don't use straw man arguments, deal with the issue at hand if you want to be taken seriously.

WakeUp

Arab league demands international protection from genocide for the Palestinian people:

Assistant Secretary-General of the Arab League for Palestine and Occupied Arab Territories Affairs Mohammad Subeih has said it is now high time to provide immediate international protection for the Palestinian people.

“We cannot keep silent at the genocide, and violations of the international humanitarian laws and the UN Charter by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza Strip,”

http://7daysindubai.com/arab-league-demand-international-protection-genocide-palestinian-people/

hatrickpatrick

user2011 wrote: »

What reason did he give them to ask for his passport/ID?

Many police apologists will refuse to even acknowledge this as a legitimate question, and this is not unique to the Israel/Palestine conflict. They seem to believe that all instructions / requests by members of the police are automatically legitimate and that any refusal to comply is automatically illegitimate. Sickening attitude if you ask me. Authority should always be questioned.

mad muffin

wes wrote: »

So now we have supporters of Israel coming out against peaceful protests and wrongful arrest. I have to say the stunning excuses for anything the Israeli state does is astonishing.

I simply choose the lesser of the two evil. I cannot and will not side with an Islamic terrorist group. No matter how just their cause may seem at this point in time.

user2011

notfromhere wrote: »

Do u think our lovely Gardai do not beat up people

Answer a question with question?

Little CuChulainn

mad muffin wrote: »

I simply choose the lesser of the two evil. I cannot and will not side with an Islamic terrorist group. No matter how just their cause may seem at this point in time.

Nobody is asking you to. Condemning Israels genocide does not require you to support Hamas.

Judgement Day

mad muffin wrote: »

If you guys are so concerned. I suggest you hire a boat or a plane and head over to Gaza, instead of banging away at your keyboards.

My pints are not one or lost in a one sided argument.

Israel us wrong and the Palestinians are right?

The Middle East is not as black and white as that.

If you're reading that out of this thread you really are as blinkered as you appear. :rolleyes:

ElChe32

http://www.unrwa.org//newsroom/official-statements/unrwa-strongly-condemns-israeli-shelling-its-school-gaza-serious#.U9jgCdJLOmo.twitter

"The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times, to ensure its protection; the last being at ten to nine last night, just hours before the fatal shelling"


17 times and still they fired on a school holding women and children? How can anyone defend Israel's actions? Barbaric savagery played out under our watch. This madness has to stop.

Tuisceanch

Tuisceanch wrote: »

Here is some information from his blog.
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/06/a-young-american-jew-describes-being-arrested-for-standing-in-opposition-to-the-jerusalem-day-parade.html

Someone posted a video which shows a sequence of events and subsequently I posted the blog of the young man in question which describes the sequence of events and yet the automatic lazy response is to suggest that he was arrested for not showing his ID. Really!? Are you sure about that? The timeline doesn't suggest that as the reason.

Gringo180

Does anybody think the Americans can step in or even the Saudis to stop this?? This is an out and out genocide and this Neytanyahu is a physchopath!

Lone Stone

well he explains what the situation was in that other video i posted, and why you ask some one for their id when all they are doing is taking part in a peacefull protest. He wasn't even being disruptive. The comments from Israelis in the comments of those videos is just shocking, looks like the years of mass condition by the state has done its job.

Buzz Killington the third

mad muffin wrote: »

I simply choose the lesser of the two evil. I cannot and will not side with an Islamic terrorist group. No matter how just their cause may seem at this point in time.

Nobody who is trying to defend the innocent people of Palestine are siding with a terrorist group. However Israeli supports need to look closer at who they're supporting at this stage.

hatrickpatrick

Gringo180 wrote: »

Does anybody think the Americans can step in or even the Saudis to stop this?? This is an out and out genocide and this Neytanyahu is a physchopath!

The Americans can't do anything at all about Israel as long as the ADL and AIPAC retain their obscene level of control over American politicians. The Saudis seem reluctant to get directly involved in most conflict issues, not just this one.

mad muffin

Judgement Day wrote: »

If you're reading that out of this thread you really are as blinkered as you appear. :rolleyes:

I can tell you one thing.

Something is definitely wrong with the iOS 7 keypad

DamagedTrax

mad muffin wrote: »

I simply choose the lesser of the two evil. I cannot and will not side with an Islamic terrorist group. No matter how just their cause may seem at this point in time.

i think you've gotten a little confused as to the meaning of the word 'lesser'.

RustyNut

mad muffin wrote: »

I simply choose the lesser of the two evil. I cannot and will not side with an Islamic terrorist group. No matter how just their cause may seem at this point in time.

A zionist terror group is more to your taste then?

I dont support any terror group, I just want the killing and suffering to stop and it is israel that is bringing the vast majority of the terror,death,suffering and distruction and are the only ones with the control to stop it.

mad muffin

Lone Stone wrote: »

Some guys blog…

wes

mad muffin wrote: »

I simply choose the lesser of the two evil.

I fail to see how settler colonial state are the lesser or 2 evils, seeing settler colonialism tends to end in genocide, if allowed to run its course.

mad muffin wrote: »

I cannot and will not side with an Islamic terrorist group.

Your presenting a false set of choices. No one here supports Hamas's rocket attacks, and one can support Palestinians and not Hamas. So just more nonsense.

mad muffin wrote: »

No matter how just their cause may seem at this point in time.

The Palestinian cause has always been just, the tactics used by some Palestinians not so much. Zionist settler colonist are the aggressors in this conflict, there cause has never been a just one, taking land from another group of people, regardless of the horrible treatment of Jews in the past is wrong. The Zionist causes and methods are both unjust.

KahBoom

Gringo180 wrote: »

Does anybody think the Americans can step in or even the Saudis to stop this?? This is an out and out genocide and this Neytanyahu is a physchopath!

The US supports it (think of Israel like the 51st US state), and congress just passed a bill to increase military funding for Israel's Iron Dome - the last time Israel did this, the US were shipping huge amounts of weaponry to Israel while their stocks were running low, to continue the bombing; probably the same now.

BeerWolf

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

The Saudis seem reluctant to get directly involved in most conflict issues, not just this one.

Saudi's will do jack - they're only interested in money. This conflict has zero interests to them.

hatrickpatrick

mad muffin wrote: »

I simply choose the lesser of the two evil. I cannot and will not side with an Islamic terrorist group. No matter how just their cause may seem at this point in time.

Nobody's asking you to. You can condemn the actions of Israel without necessarily picking another side to support. You can condemn all sides if you wish without supporting any, indeed.

I'm getting pretty tired of the "If I condemn one group, I automatically endorse another" fallacy that gets thrown around in these debates. It's insidious. Would one have been automatically endorsing the Real IRA by condemning the UDA?

mad muffin

RustyNut wrote: »

A zionist terror group is more to your taste then?

I dont support any terror group, I just want the killing and suffering to stop and it is israel that is bringing the vast majority of the terror,death,suffering and distruction and are the only ones with the control to stop it.

I don't know.

But I sure as he'll don't have to worry about any Zionist terror group blowing me up in a bus, train, plane, and so on.

hatrickpatrick

BeerWolf wrote: »

Saudi's will do jack - they're only interested in money. This conflict has zero interests to them.

Pretty much yeah. Saudi Arabia seems to operate a foreign policy largely based on isolationism as far as regional conflict is concerned, with the exception of Iran which they seem to actively despise.

Gringo180

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

The Americans can't do anything at all about Israel as long as the ADL and AIPAC retain their obscene level of control over American politicians. The Saudis seem reluctant to get directly involved in most conflict issues, not just this one.

Sickening, know wonder the Americans are so hated in the middle east, there silence on this massacre will end up with more dead Americans unfortunately. How stupid can they be to not see there support of this terrorist state is costing them lives. Even the Egyptians can open up there borders to help them out but the coward General Cici is in the pockets of the zionists!

The Saudis could stop this at the drop of a hat if they cut there oil supply off to the yanks and Israelis.