Tuesday February 3, 2009, 11:56 am
Now is the time for President Obama to face the truth about Palestine and Israel. But what is this truth?

The Israeli government has no intention of enabling the Palestinians to have their own state. Their claim that this is their intention should be seen as long running theatre to pacify the West. A small child can see through this, hence we conclude the Western governments must be witting players in this theatre. It is time for President Obama to close this play and insist the Israeli government stop pretending, and accept a Palestine state.

The Israeli government continues to increase the number of Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. The Obama administration must insist on a "no new settlers" policy starting from today, an agreed method of counting settlers, and for Israel to roll back a significant number of settlers within one year. It is an action the Israelis do not want to take; but without such action one cannot believe that the Israeli people are prepared to accept a Palestinian state.

The state of Israeli is engaged in the destruction of the Palestinians: to drive them out or to kill them.

To drive the Palestinians out the strategy is to reduce their standard of living and increase their poverty; this has been regularly documented by the World Bank. GDP is declining and unemployment is increasing. The real physical welfare of the Palestinian people is desperate and a direct result of Israeli actions. Talented Palestinians are leaving to take up careers elsewhere. Living and working in Palestine is a life spent in a hell made and maintained by the state of Israel. Despite the compelling evidence The Western nations refuse to acknowledge the true condition of the Palestinians.

To kill the Palestinians the strategy is to use occasional spurts of violence, while creating insecurity and uncertainty everywhere. The latest incursion is only the most dramatic. Death also comes to the minds of children through malnutrition, mental instability, and destruction of the education system. All of these are causes of a shorter life span. The Israelis are expert at establishing and supporting these means of ruining the lives of Palestinians.

To stop this tragedy President Obama must: (1) Compile and publish regularly legitimate statistics on condition in Gaza and the West Bank. (2) Work with the UN, World Bank and EU to deliver proper services along with employment opportunities. The Israeli wall must be torn down to enable the economy to function.

To gain an excuse for the application of violence the Israel state covertly supports Hamas. This support includes: secret funding through third parties that pose as Hamas supporters, and forbearance in completely blocking the flow of arms into Gaza enabling a trickle of guns, rocket components and ammunition to reach Hamas.

The objective of the Israelis is to drive the Palestinians to support Hamas, the only group seriously standing up to Israel. Hamas resistance provides justification for Israeli's repressive policy. Israel attacks on Hamas always fall short of complete destruction as the Israelis want Hamas to continue. To achieve this Hamas must be allowed to have some success, but not too much. Fatah, the other major Palestinian movement is losing support as Palestinian public opinion shifts to the "brave Hamas warriors." The outcome is the Israeli state continues to repress the people in Gaza.

Americans are afraid to speak out against Israel. The Israel lobby will seek retribution against any who undertake to explain the truth about Palestine. The tragedy of Gaza will slip from the headlines, but the shameful imbalance of coverage of newspaper like the New York Times and the major US television networks will continue. While bleating about violence around the world the residents of Gaza gain scant attention from American media. We can only hope that a more transparent policy by President Obama will improve the media coverage of the Palestinians plight.

The Israelis scream and shout about the need to attack Iran's nuclear weapons facilities and then settles for incursions into Palestine as a compromise. The same approach will be used with the Obama administration. Will Obama continue to endorse this abuse of Palestinians as a "compromise" to the refusal to attack Iran?

The Arab states care nothing for the Palestinians. The Arab citizens are angry, bitter and want action. But their governments are content to issue angry words and to do nothing. What, after all, can they do? Better to stay quiet. The Arab citizens seethe with frustration, but, unwilling to act together to achieve real results, are ineffective.

We will see the Obama administration running around trying to improve the situation. The Israelis will say: "Sure we will send $100 of food and medicine to Gaza residents, give us $1,000 for our trouble." Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is extortion, they say to the rest of the world: give us money and we will stop. Of course they take the money but they do not stop the abuse.

Can the Israeli state be trusted? Absolutely not. In their dealings with the United States they have deliberately attacked the US Navy [USS Liberty] and carried out intelligence operations against the United States despite repeated assurances this was not being done. The objectives of the Israeli state remain taking more and more land in the West Bank and pushing Palestinians out of Palestine.

Can anything be done? Probably not. The only path out of this mess is determined leadership by the United States to develop the economies of the West Bank and Gaza, with Hamas violence stopping, withdrawal of some settlers and immediate progress towards a Palestinian state. The Israeli government cannot dodge such an aggressive stand from the US.


Forrest Cookson is an economist.

Tuesday February 3, 2009, 12:09 pm
If Israel didn't want the Palestinians to have their own land then why have they given them any when they are not obligated to do so. The land that the Palestinians were supposed to have in 1948 was rejected and under International Law, became part of current Israel. They were not interested in it until after the end of the 1967 war, because the Arab nations had promised them the land after they had destroyed Israel. When that didn't happen then they decided to use these people as media & political pawns.

It helps when you know the real history & facts, not the history & facts that you & other people want to believe.

Tuesday February 3, 2009, 12:11 pm
I$rael has illegally occupied Palestinian land for over 40 years; when are the Israelis leaving?

Tuesday February 3, 2009, 6:15 pm
Gillian
As Blue say:
I$rael has illegally occupied Palestinian land for over 40 years; when are the Israelis leaving?

Tuesday February 3, 2009, 6:17 pm
Gillian M.
Yes...It helps when you know the real history & facts...but seems that you only know story

Wednesday February 4, 2009, 8:29 pm
It's an unfortunate fact of war, that when an army conquers land, it is entitled to keep it. That is what happened in 1967. Israel won, the Arabs lost. In any war (as far back in history as one cares to go) it has always been so and it is entirely up to the conquering nation wether they want to return those lands or not. Wether that is fair or not, is an entirely different question.

Wednesday February 4, 2009, 8:36 pm
There is a rather amazing map of Israel/Palestine at the end of that video, "Gaza 2009:We will never forget" where it shows the takeover of Palestine by Israel, allowing the space for the Palestinians to shrink and shrink until it is down to almost nothing. Quite enlightening.
Here's the vid link:
Gaza 2009:We Will never forget"

Thursday February 5, 2009, 12:57 am
Marena Chen wrote: "It's an unfortunate fact of war, that when an army conquers land, it is entitled to keep it."

That is absolute rubbish! You believe in "might makes right" do you? Well international law does not say that might makes right. Armies have sometimes kept conquered land an sometimes not kept that land. But they have never been "entitled to keep it", except in some deranged authoritarian imaginations, like in the mind of Hitler, for example.

"That is what happened in 1967. Israel won, the Arabs lost."

So the Indigenous people of Palestine don't count as human beings? They fought on the side of the Arabs, and they were the ones who the Israelis colonised in 1967 and continue to colonise, but they don't even rate a mention in your writing.... In case you didn't know, the Indigenous people of Palestine have been there for thousands of years. They are not "Arabs". A few Arabs came north out of Arabia, into Palestine, during the main expansion phase of Islam, and they ruled over Palestine, but that does not make Palestinian people all "Arab".

"In any war (as far back in history as one cares to go) it has always been so and it is entirely up to the conquering nation wether they want to return those lands or not."

- That is rubbish. We have the United Nations and international law now. I recommend you look them up. You might learn something about this topic you claim to know so much about. And even before we had the United Nations and international law, nations negotiated about what nation could keep what land.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_conquest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_integrity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied_territories

Thursday February 5, 2009, 12:59 am
Simon, you're One of those people, who likes to think that if you say something often enough, it is or should be truth and otherwise well-meaning people who don't know the whole truth will accept your truth as you say it is even though it ISN"T.
The millions of Palestinians who left as refugees don't have any right of return, and I can tell you without equivocation that no Israeli government EVER will EVER agree to that. Firstly, many of those who left Palestine since 1948 weren't forced out, contrary to what noted propaganda rags like al-Quds and Al-Jazeera might tell you. They left for a variety of reasons:
From http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/1948--israel--and-the-palestinians-br--the-true-story-11355
"In Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by their alleged betters for the crime of “selling Palestine” to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching themselves with impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi, who vowed to fight “until Palestine is either placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country,” facilitated the transfer of 7,500 acres to the Zionist movement, and some of his relatives, all respected political and religious figures, went a step further by selling actual plots of land. So did numerous members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian Arab clan during the Mandate period, including Muhammad Tahir, father of Hajj Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem."
SO IF EVEN THE FAMILY OF THE NOTORIOUSLY ANTI-JEWISH LEADER THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM WAS SELLING LANDS TO JEWS FOR CREATION OF A JEWISH STATE IN 1957-48 AND EARLIER AND DISPLACING THOSE LIVING ON IT, WHAT RIGHT DO THE DISPLACED HAVE TO RE-CLAIM IT, SIMON, GIVEN THAT THESE WERE LEGITIMATE REAL ESTATE TRANSACTIONS???

IN OTHER WORDS, IF YOU SELL ME YOUR HOUSE THAT I'M RENTING TO OUR GOOD FRIEND, BLUE BUNTING, WHY DOES BLUE HAVE THEN HAVE THE RIGHT TO RE-OCCUPY IT SIXTY YEARS LATER IF I DIDN'T FORCE HER OUT VIOLENTLY AND/OR ILLEGALLY???
THAT'S NOT THEWAY THESE TRANSACTIONS WORK, EITHER IN THE MIDDLE EAST, OR ANYWHERE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER, BUT WHEN IT INVOLVES JEWS AND ARABS, SOMHOW, AN EXCEPTION MUST BE MADE? A LITTLE DISCRIMINATORY TOWARDS JEWS...SURE SMELLS AND WALKS LIKE A DUCK!
There was also in 1947-48 a concerted efforts by Palestinian extremists to incite the Palestinian population to violence again the newlyy arrived Jews, even though these communitiies were working together far more than otherwise(see the same article):

Indeed, many had vacated even before the outbreak of hostilities, and still larger numbers decamped before the war reached their own doorstep. “Arabs are leaving the country with their families in considerable numbers, and there is an exodus from the mixed towns to the rural Arab centers,” reported Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner, in December 1947, adding a month later that the “panic of [the] middle class persists and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country.”

Furthermore, the same article states:
"By the time of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, the numbers of Arab refugees had more than trebled. Even then, none of the 170,000-180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000-160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.

The exceptions occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations—reducing civilian casualties, denying sites to Arab fighters when there were no available Jewish forces to repel them—rather than political design. They were, moreover, matched by efforts to prevent flight and/or to encourage the return of those who fled. To cite only one example, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising top Arab-affairs advisers, local notables, and municipal heads with close contacts with neighboring Arab localities traversed Arab villages in the coastal plain, then emptying at a staggering pace, in an attempt to convince their inhabitants to stay put."
Even more:
"Tens of thousands of rural villagers were likewise forced out by order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or the ALA. Within weeks of the latter’s arrival in Palestine in January 1948, rumors were circulating of secret instructions to Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas to vacate their villages so as to allow their use for military purposes and to reduce the risk of becoming hostage to the Jews" The ALA ---"the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), the volunteer Arab force that did much of the fighting in Palestine in the months preceding Israel’s proclamation of independence." Most of the ALA were in fact ourside fighters from Iraq and other places in the Arab world:
the Iraqi general Ismail Safwat, commander-in-chief of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), the volunteer Arab force that did much of the fighting in Palestine in the months preceding Israel’s proclamation of independence. Safwat lamented that only 800 of the 5,000 volunteers trained by the ALA had come from Palestine itself, and that most of these had deserted either before completing their training or immediately afterward. Fawzi Qawuqji, the local commander of ALA forces, was no less scathing, having found the Palestinians “unreliable, excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized warfare virtually unemployable.”
So we see that far from being forced out by Palestine Jews and Zionists, most of those leaving,WERE ACTUALLY FORCED OUT BY THE INCITEMENT OF THEIR RADICAL PALESTINIAN BROTHERS RHOUGH THEIR RADICAL ANTI-JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS!

LET ME SAY THIS AGAIN:
MOST OF THOSE ARABS LEAVING PALESTINE as a result of the creation of Israel were not forced out by Jews or Zionists, they were o-erced byt he vioence going on and directed incited by Palestinan extemeist groups both pan-Arab and Palestinian in content.
THIS IS NOT GROUNDS FOR THE RIGHT OF PALESTINIAN REFUGEES TO RETURN SIMON, PERHAPS THOSE COUNTRIES WHO HELP INCITE THIS MAS POPULAR EXODUS CAN FINALLY, AT LONG LAST, TAKE CARE OF THEIR PALESTINIAN BROTHERS AND SISTERS PROPERLY AND STOP DENYNG THEIR CRITICAL ROLE IN THIS DIASPORA.

So, what's the end game to those who, like Simon, favor repatriation to Israel/Palestine? It is the demographic annihilation of Israel b creating an Israeli state that is mostly Arab and lack a Jewish majority. having failed militarily to force an Arab state in the land of U.N.-aproved Israel since 1948, they seek to create another majority Arab state de facto through msssive additions of Palestinians, most of whom left reluctantly, but voluntarily, in the chaos of Israel's War of Independence. This is a sinister agenda, Simon, and you and the others who call for this so-called Palestinian 'Right of Return" can deny it as long as you like and on as many articles as you like, but history doesn't support their claim to repatriation.

NOT NOW, Not EVER!

Thursday February 5, 2009, 5:58 am
Simon, don't treat the world as ewverybody is an idiot: You call refugees randchildren of Arabs who left Israel and are living in other Arab countries? They are UN beggars, and that's all.

Israel accepted all Jews whom Arabs expelled; Arabs should accept Arabs whom Jews expelled. End of story.

And Jews are as "Indigenous people of Palestine" as Arabs living in Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Syria, etc. Palestine is a region, and it belongs not only to Arabs.

Thursday February 5, 2009, 6:53 am
Amena A, please don't forget that 80% of Palestine British had given to Jordan. That means, 30% rippoff for Israel already, even before separating West Bank and Gaza.

Thursday February 5, 2009, 7:16 am
Simon I am sorry that you are such a shallow person who takes everything others have to say out of context so that you can ram YOUR FACTS down people's throats. Enough allready with the hackneyed diatribe. Everyone has the right to voice their opinion without being belittled by you at every turn.

Thursday February 5, 2009, 9:09 am
Why was a Jewish state on territory that they belonged longggg years ago?

Thursday February 5, 2009, 10:39 am
Madalena, did you by any chance heard about The Land of Israel? Did you wondered where is it?

Thursday February 5, 2009, 11:08 am
I have heard of a land that God promised to the Jews but
I do not have the habit of listening to any god.

Thursday February 5, 2009, 11:11 am
An enlightened Israeli leader once said:


"If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" -- David Ben Gurion

Thursday February 5, 2009, 6:23 pm
Blie Banting, everybody sais stupid and wrong things from time to time, including Ben Gurion. Who cares what he said, do you listen to him on any issues?

Arab leasders told Arabs living in Palestine to get out for 2-3 weeks until Arab military will finish off the Jews, and look what happened with now refugees...

Closer to the subject, if Hamas and Gasa population which elected them did want peace and state, they would have it long time ago and the picture would not be called "The Gaza Horror Show".

Why do you guys try to protect Islamic Fashist mobvement, while many Arabs sincerely hate it? They are Iranian pawns, and don't care of regular folks.

Sunday February 15, 2009, 4:37 pm
Israel deliberately blocked aid: UNOfficial says UN stocks sabotaged; Olmert wants pullout 'ASAP'


How Social Media War Was Waged in Gaza-Israel Conflict