Analysis by Ralph E. Stone
January 8, 2008
Much of the reportage on Israeli’s response to the Hamas rocket and mortar attacks gives the reader the impression that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a relatively recent event. What is sometimes lost in such coverage is the deep background. Of course, Hamas has much to answer for, but the present conflict is but the latest chapter in a long saga stretching back to the creation of Israel in 1947. Then, the United Nations partitioned the land, allotting the Jews 55 percent of Palestine. The Arabs did not agree to this partition. In the 1948 “war of independence” (called the “El Naqua,” the catastrophe, by the Arabs), Israel ended up with 78 percent of the area of Palestine. This war displaced 750,000 Palestinians and over 450 Arab villages were erased.
In the war of 1967, the remaining Palestinian territory was captured by Israel. Out of this captured land, Israel created the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by chopping up the land into isolated enclaves surrounded by Jewish settlements and Israeli occupation forces. The Palestinians lost 78 percent of their land to Israel and are left with 22 percent.
Recently, Israel has erected a wall or fence, which cuts deep into Palestinian territory, joining large Jewish settlement blocks to Israel, further confining the Palestinians to isolated enclaves. Israel continues to establish new settlements (called outposts), demolishing homes and uprooting plantations in the process.
Since Israel instituted a strict closure policy in 2000, the Palestinian economy has been on a downward trend. Fuel, electricity and materials to maintain water and sanitation are under Israeli control. The lack of investment in public infrastructure and private enterprises is eroding the limited remaining Palestinian economic base. The economic blockade has devastated the Gaza private sector and driven almost all industrial producers out of business. The poverty rate in Gaza and the West Bank is estimated to be 79.4 percent and 45.7 percent respectively. The unemployment rate is about 26 percent in the West Bank and about 36 percent in Gaza. Most of the 1.5 million Gazans cannot exit into Israel or Egypt.
Is it any wonder that the Palestinians believe that Israel’s ultimate goal is to take over the entire country and to drive out the non-Jewish population?
What do the Palestinians want? The Palestinians want “Two States for Two Peoples”—Israel and Palestine—which means the peaceful coexistence of two independent states with West Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel, including the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter, and East Jerusalem to be the capital of Palestine, including the Temple Mount, with open borders between between the two states. They want a return of territories annexed by Jewish settlements. They want Israel to recognize the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees as an inalienable human right with the establishment of a Committee of Truth and Reconciliation to establish the historic facts with the right of return for some and compensation for others. They want to establish joint control of the water resources. And finally, they want a security pact between Israel and Palestine, endorsed by the the international community and reinforced by international guarantees.
President Barack Obama may be the last hope for a lasting resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Without a peace agreement, the United States partiality toward Israel will continue to fuel Arab anti-American sentiment. It will also generate continued support for Al Qaeda. I am hopeful, but not optimistic.
Ralph E. Stone is a retired Bay Area attorney.
The Hunger Site
January 13, 2009 at 12:42 pm
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/01/12/white.phosphorus/?iref=mpstoryview
By Ben Wedeman, CNN
JERUSALEM (CNN) — The international group Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of firing weapons containing white phosphorus into Gaza. The group demands that the alleged practice cease.
The group’s researchers in Israel “observed multiple air-bursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus over what appeared to be the Gaza City/Jabaliya area” on Friday and Saturday, the organization said on its Web site.
“Israel appeared to be using white phosphorus as an ‘obscurant’ [a chemical used to hide military operations], a permissible use in principle” under the laws of war, the HRW posting said.
“However, white phosphorus has a significant, incidental, incendiary effect that can severely burn people and set structures, fields, and other civilian objects in the vicinity on fire,” the posting said. “The potential for harm to civilians is magnified by Gaza’s high population density, among the highest in the world.”
HRW said the use of white phosphorus in Gaza would violate “the requirement under international humanitarian law to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian injury and loss of life.”
January 13, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Also, under international law it is a war crime to blockade civilian populations, a war crime to attack civilian populations and a war crime to deny them safe haven to flee and conversely, it is the duty and responsibility of those under occupation and blockade to actively resist as well as the duty and responsibility of everyone to assist those in adhering to international law in the face of war crimes.
-marc
January 13, 2009 at 11:36 am
No matter what, we are complicit in war crimes because our tax dollars are paying for Israel’s 1) Targeting of civilians, 2) indiscriminate selection of targets and 3) disproportionate military response.
Those crimes were defined by the US post WWII during the same bout of anguish which led to the creation of Israel.
The two state solution has been rendered impossible, the only solution is to ditch the theocracies and create a single secular democratic state with full civil rights and religious freedoms for all. This can only happen if the US disengages from the conflict because the US is not an honest broker.
Hopefully, the Madoff ponzi scheme has sucked the financial oxygen from AIPAC and the American pro-zionist lobby, leaving the only source of funding for the enforcing fealty amongst American politicians towards Israeli apartheid the recycling to quell the home front of US tax dollars sent to Israel.
-marc
January 13, 2009 at 2:54 am
Unfortunately the answer is all too understandable. The vast majority of violent and abusive adults were themselves physically and/or sexually abused as children.
If one examines history, it seems that entire peoples can also be seen to have adopted the abuses of their oppressors. The Jews who made their way to Palestine were bitterly abused in Europe. It is no surprise that those emigrants became violent oppressors themselves.
This does not excuse their behavior, but it at least helps us understand it better.
The crucial question is, how is it that some individuals and peoples who are badly abused do -not- go on to become abusers themselves?
African Americans for example were also bitterly tortured and abused, and yet they have not shown a marked propensity to abuse others themselves. If anything, as a group, they have shown profound restraint and level headedness in the face of centuries of oppression.
Indeed Jews themselves who emigrated from holocaust Europe to the U.S. don’t seem prone to abusiveness either.
My guess is that the difference is that Israelis were abused -and- were placed at the top of a new hierarchy in Israel and given completely disproportionate technological power and impunity over their neighbors.
So previous abuse, plus unlimited power and impunity perhaps leads to an oppressor mentality and pathological lashing out at others who have much less power to fight back.
Whites who fled oppression in Europe and emigrated to the Americas also found themselves with distinct technological advantages in tools of violence (such as steel weapons and horse infantry) and they became arguably even more vicious toward the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere than Israel is today toward the indigenous peoples of Palestine.
This would all suggest that the best way to end the crisis in Palestine is to end the vast imbalance in power and self determination between the Israelis and Palestinians so that neither people has dominance over the other, and each can come to a table as equals to work out their differences.
And this brings us back to the need to boycott and divest from Israel and at the same time cut off the $3 billion per year U.S. weapon subsidies to Israel so that Palestine can stand up and face Israel as an equal.
I believe, as some others do, that the least residual violence would result from the formation of a single democratic state for both groups to share.
January 12, 2009 at 7:29 pm
How can a People, who have been persecuted for centuries and were the victims of the Holocaust, in turn persecute the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip?
January 11, 2009 at 2:20 pm
The points you have laid out above are a complete fairy story cooked up by reactionary hyper-Zionist propagandists, which bears absolutely no relation to reality whatsoever. The fact that it relies on books of myth rather than real accounts of history for its basic argument is particularly telling.
If you want to know the truth about the history of Israel in Palestine, go to the web site of the unbiased Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein, who has made it his core work to tell the truth about the Israeli invasion and occupation of Palestine; and especially of the origins and cynical purposes of the hogwash written above. The address is http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/
Let’s cut through the crap. For hundreds of years the Palestinian people lived on the land that is now comprised of Israel and the two tiny prison like reservations that are the West Bank and Gaza. In the late 40’s the Palestinians were driven violently off of their lands and out of their homes into those two prison enclaves, and Israel has occupied, terrorized, committed mass racist murder, and made Palestinian lives a living hell ever since.
The United Nations has voted repeatedly to declare that the Israeli occupation and apartheid wall are completely illegal and has repeatedly directed Israel to leave; a direction of international law which Israel has never complied with.
That is the truth.
All please get a start with Norman Finkelstein and search out the real truth for yourself. Another excellent source of unbiased reporting on Palestine is the journalist Robert Fisk. See http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/
January 11, 2009 at 7:25 am
BRIEF FACTS ON THE ISRAELI CONFLICT TODAY….
These are incredible times. We have to ask what our role
should be in the on going conflict in the Middle east. The below facts seem to get lost on the public and revisionist history writers. If we keep repeating the lies and words of the revisionist writers over and over again, it does not make them facts. To this day some still profess to the belief that the Holocaust never happened, more revisionist history. We must never allow ourselves to be misled into believing what we think we know to be the truth. If we are to have an honest discussion about the conflict and struggles of Jews today we must begin at the beginning and not at the end…….
1. Nationhood and Jerusalem . Israel became a nation
in 1312 B.C.E. Two thousand years before the rise of Islam.
2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves
as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 B.C.E., the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.
4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 C.E.
Lasted no more than 22 years.
5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the
Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.
6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the
Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.
7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem .
8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray with their
backs toward Jerusalem .
9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: In 1948 the Arab refugees
were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
10 The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.
11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in1948
is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.
12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or
integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey .
13. The Arab – Israeli Conflict: The Arabs are represented
by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.
14. The P.L.O.’s / Humas Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them.
15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were
desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.
16. The U.N. Record on Israel and the Arabs: of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel .
17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on
before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.
18. The U.N was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.
19. The U.N. Was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives .
20. The U.N. Was silent while the Jordanians enforced an
apartheid-like policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
Let the discussion begin…….
January 9, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Note that I did not make any assertions about Hamas’ relation to international law. It’s pretty hard to do anything about any Palestinian breaches of law when Israel is breaking international law with orders of magnitude more seriousness and orders of magnitude more destructive results.
Only when Israel stops, will it have any legitimate standing to ask any of us to challenge actions taken against it.
And since when does one person’s breach of law justify more serious breaches on the part of another? You clearly lack a even a rudimentary personal grounding in basic morality, with your salivating over the prospect of Israel destroying an entire group of people regardless of anything they have or have not done as individuals.
Hamas is just as diverse as Sinn Fein and the IRA. And yet you juvenilely condemn them all; not to mention all of the women and children who must be plowed through and killed to achieve your desired result of wiping Hamas out.
January 9, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Hamas is concerned with international law? Ha! Only someone who is wilfully ignorant can make that claim. Israel is going to destroy Hamas before any kind of a phony ceasefire.
January 9, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Rob, you need to stop focusing on the past and pay attention to the situation on the ground. Hamas has changed its position and stated that it will pursue a two state solution with Israel.
In any case, Israel needs to end its occupation before the two parties can even begin such negotiations. As the clear international law breaker, Israel must back down first.
January 9, 2009 at 9:58 am
While one may dispute the original premise of an Israeli state carved out of nomadic lands, it is a greater failure to not recognize the vortex of tribalism that has allowed other Arab states to assist in the decades long impoverishment of the Palestinians, their Muslim brothers.
I wonder if we can’t look at the “Kingdoms” of Jordan or the wealthy Saudi Arabia, Lebanon perhaps, and urge them to put some of their abundant resources into raising the Palestinians out of their plight in ways other than the covert support of Islamic extremism. However, the abandonment of the Palestinians serves a passive service to these appointed states who also do not want the presence of the Israeli state.
The irony of one oppressed people oppressing another rings throughout history. Certainly, Jews have faced oppression over the millenia. It is human nature unfortunately; nothing short of a spiritual awakening to our connectedness will allow us to overcome the tendency to dominate another group.
In the case of the once nomadic and still tribalistic Middle East, that compulsion to dominate has pitted the Palestinians as the victims. However, to not comprehend and articulate the history of the regional and worldwide oppression of Jews as well as the current oppression of the Palestinians, an important piece of the dialogue is missing – that which will ultimately play a part in the healing.
I submit this comment at the risk of Progressive voices attacking me, which is another form of oppression. Go figure.
January 9, 2009 at 9:44 am
Hamas is in fact dedicated to the destruction of Israel, which is clearly stated in its charter. Your version of history implies the destruction of Israel as a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I hope that Israel is successful in destroying Hamas in Gaza before it agrees to a cease-fire.
January 8, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Actually Rob, Hamas’ publicly announced position is that it recognizes Israel and that it is willing to accept a two state solution. And regardless of what we might like or not like about Hamas, it was in fact duly elected by the Palestinian people in both Gaza and the West Bank to govern Palestine.
Israel on the other hand is far from a democratic state because its Christian, Muslim and Palestinian citizens -within- Israel are granted only second class citizenship and do not enjoy the same rights as Israeli Jews. Palestinian Israeli’s are particularly oppressed.
But all of this is beside the point.
The issue here is that 60 years ago Israel illegally invaded Palestine, and has illegally occupied, terrorized and committed horrendous war crimes, genocide and extreme apartheid in Palestine ever since.
This issue is very simple. Israel is in complete defiance of international law and it must be forced to comply immediately.
Once we get that blatant mess cleaned up, then maybe we can worry about how democratic Palestine’s duly elected government is.
January 8, 2009 at 11:45 am
Stone talks about what the Palestinians want but fails to mention Hamas—dedicated to the destruction of Israel—the fascist organization that now controls Gaza. Hamas supports so-called honor killings and the murder of gays. Odd that SF progressives support a fascist mini-state that wants to destroy the only democracy in the Middle East, where womens’ rights and gay rights are protected.
January 8, 2009 at 11:28 am
Ralph,
I know you couldn’t include an exhaustive history, but one important point missing is the role of the Zionist terrorist organizations Irgun and Haganah in the founding of Israel and that many of the terrorists became top leaders in the Israeli government (including Begin). Of course, they thought of themselves as liberators at the time (like Hamas and PLO). It’s so ironic to see Palestinian groups so labeled today.
January 8, 2009 at 10:48 am
Obama represents no hope at all, and furthermore, we do not need him to do so. It is we the people ourselves who must force an end to the Israeli occupation.
Obama stood before the powerful and rabidly pro Israel APAIC lobby and announced that he will defend Israel’s ‘right’ to retain a ‘Jewish’ state and that he will support Israel in co-opting all of Jerusalem to itself. Obama’s cabinet is also vehemently pro Israel. So why would you say that Obama may be our ‘last hope’ when he represents absolutely no hope whatsoever.
More importantly, why depend on the government of the United States at all when there is no need to?
We, the people of the world, can solve this problem perfectly well, just as we solved the problem of South African apartheid, by launching a global boycott of, and divestment from, Israel until it ends its unlawful occupation, attacks and sieges on Palestine.
The United States, whether under Republican or Democrat rule, will -never- end the wrenching stalemates within Palestine and within the broader Middle East, because if various Arab states, Palestine and Israel all made peace with each other, they would immediately unite together and move to take control of the oil reserves in their region, just as Venezuela and Bolivia have done with their own oil and natural gas reserves.
It is clearly in U.S. and global corporate interest to keep the region permanently destabilized and at odds with itself so that corporate elites will forever be able to run the show in the region.
Expecting the U.S. government to do something to solve the Mid-East crises is like expecting a meat eater to immediately switch to a diet of tofu and alfalfa sprouts.
We, the people, must all launch a massive global grassroots push to initiate a global boycott and divestment, and force Israel through massive economic pressure to end its occupation, and mass murder, of Palestine and its people.
There is no need to wait for Obama to do anything. Let’s just roll up our sleeves and get this done.