I didn't think I've ever see this on the MSM. Video embedded.
Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. That’s a fact. The same is true for Palestinians - that point seems to get missed. Palestinians are, at best, third class citizens in the nation of their birth. The Israeli government, on an ongoing basis, declares parcels of land on which Palestinians live to be either of military or archeological importance, causing residents to be evicted. Sometimes there’s a court case, and almost always, the Palestinians lose. Yet months or weeks later, that same “important” land suddenly becomes home to a brand-new Israeli settlement. As more and more Jewish settlers take over land on which Arabs lived, the Occupied West Bank becomes de facto more Israeli and, in the explicit hopes of the Israeli government, more Jewish. This is a long-standing and deliberate attempt to force Arabs - who have lived in that land sometimes for hundreds of years - out. It is an attempt to dilute their presence, because to have Arabs as full participants is, in the opinion of the Israeli government and courts, diluting Israel.
May 15, 2021
Ali Velshi: The right to exist goes both ways
re: Israel's "withdrawal" from Gaza
ReplyDeleteOlder article from the Independent.
The pasta, paper and hearing aids that could threaten Israeli security
Members of the highest-ranking American delegation to tour Gaza were shocked to discover that the Israeli blockade against the Hamas-ruled territory included such food staples as lentils, macaroni and tomato paste.
"When have lentil bombs been going off lately? Is someone going to kill you with a piece of macaroni?" asked Congressman Brian Laird. It was only after Senator John Kerry, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raised the issue with Defence Minister Ehud Barak after their trip last month that Israel allowed the pasta in. Macaroni was considered a luxury item, not a humanitarian necessity, they were told. The total number of products blacklisted by Israel remains a mystery for UN officials and the relief agencies which face long delays in bringing in supplies. For security reasons such items as cement and steel rods are banned as they could be used by Hamas to build bunkers or the rockets used to target Israeli civilians. Hearing aids have been banned in case the mercury in their batteries could be used to produce chemical weapons.
Yet since the end of the war in January, according to non-government organisations, five truckloads of school notebooks were turned back at the crossing at Kerem Shalom where goods are subject to a $1,000 (£700) per truck "handling fee".
Paper to print new textbooks for Palestinian schools was stopped, as were freezer appliances, generators and water pumps, cooking gas and chickpeas. And the French government was incensed when an entire water purification system was denied entry. Christopher Gunness, the spokesman for the UN agency UNRWA responsible for Palestinian refugees, said: "One of the big problems is that the 'banned list' is a moving target so we discover things are banned on a 'case by case', 'day by day' basis."
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said: "Israel's blockade policy can be summed up in one word and it is punishment, not security."
I think that this may be a firing offence.
ReplyDeleteAnd re. Israeli military, they’re going to bomb and bomb until they run out of bombs. Once the US restocks their arsenal, gratuitously, they will resume their bombing. Then, when hardly anything remains standing, then, perhaps, Israeli ground forces enter Palestinian territory.
Kill ratio? The usual — for every dead Israeli, 100, give or take a dozen, dead Palestinians.
Notice a pattern? Every 5 years it so, violence erupts. It’s like a pressure release valve. I think it’s preplanned by Israel. Demonically clever.
Erdogan. What a comedian. Turkey and Israel are strategic partners.
lastgreek,
ReplyDeleteI think it’s preplanned by Israel.
Yes, I believe so.
As Israelis have said, Iran's plan to surround Israel in a "ring of fire". Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranians in Syria, HAMAS in Gaza, and Yemen in the south.
Israel has been bombing in Syrian relentlessly in what it calls "the war between wars". It knows at some time it will have to engage with Hezbollah again, and it wants to fight on one front at a time, so they deal with Gaza first, and that is by provoking them into battle, which is easy to do.
What was unexpected this time for Israel was Palestinians in Israel proper joining in to some degree. While they live fairly good lives and are the least likely to fight, they are the biggest threat. If the casualties begin to rise further, the West Bank Palestinians will join in.
The story of David and Goliath... where David keeps getting his ass kicked.
ReplyDeleteFurther to my comment,
ReplyDeleteNote that these are Israeli writers, which if they were biased, would be biased in the other direction.
While Israel makes tactical gains, Hamas is proving the strategic victor
While Israel is seeking and achieving tactical successes — such as the air assault on Hamas’s “metro” network of tunnels across northern Gaza, the toppling of high-rise blocs of Hamas significance, and strikes at weapons stores and rocket launchers — Hamas is achieving strategic success, attaining primacy in the Palestinian, Arab and even Israeli spheres.
Hamas has managed something unprecedented in the past day or two: Apart from its own incessant barrages of fire deep into Israel, it has mobilized thousands of Palestinian protesters in the West Bank, prompted minor rocket fire from Lebanon and from Syria, and, most significantly, has drawn extremist Israeli Arabs into its battle — emblemized by the sight of demonstrators from Umm al-Fahm gathering to shout threats outside the neighboring Moshav Mai Ami. These and the other violent indications of a descent toward civil war within Israel are being seen in the Palestinian sphere as significant Hamas achievements.
While all eyes are on Gaza, Gaza is only half the story
It’s seven days now into the latest rocket war with Hamas, and the organization has spent the better part of six of them quietly, evasively begging for a ceasefire.
That’s not because the organization is cowed. The opposite. It has already achieved its main strategic goal from the fighting — to sideline Fatah and become the preeminent power within the Palestinian national movement.
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There are many reasons for that, from Israeli public opinion shocked by the rocket barrages of Monday evening to the belief among Israeli planners, rooted in the past decade of relative quiet, that Hamas can be deterred for years at a time if each round of fighting causes enough damage to the organization.
But there’s another reason, a more fundamental one that has only been tangentially mentioned in the coverage of the fighting, an Israeli calculation that reaches far beyond Gaza’s borders.
The Middle East is watching closely as events unfold in Gaza. Some of the keenest of those observers, Israel knows, are enemies far more dangerous than Hamas.
On Israel’s northern border, Iran-armed Hezbollah sits on a stockpile of rockets and missiles buried in South Lebanon’s towns and villages that dwarfs Hamas’s arsenal by an order of magnitude — a strategic threat bolstered by neverending supplies of ever deadlier missiles from Tehran.
There is a deep link between the Gaza operation and the Lebanese front, a link that has existed between the two theaters at least since the summer of 2006 when a Hamas cross-border attack on IDF soldiers — the abduction of Cpl. Gilad Shalit — escalated into an Israeli operation in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis. Two weeks later, on July 12, with Israeli forces still operating in Gaza, Hezbollah launched its own deadly attack on an Israeli military patrol on the northern border, sparking what Israelis would come to call the Second Lebanon War.
Take away Trumps policy of dialogic negotiation and you’re only left with warfare...
ReplyDeleteTrump had the uncanny ability to make matters worse. But to be fair to him, it was without any malice or vindictiveness. There can’t be any when it comes to sociopaths.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you guys do when you are driving and come upon a dead end tee in the road where you have to make a decision to make a left or right?
ReplyDeleteDo you just drive straight into the woods and have to call AAA for a tow all the time?
Chief Inspector Morse: "Get an ambulance to Hanbury House. Fast as you can. Some fool in a sports car just drove into a tree!"
ReplyDeletePS: It's Monday. Does Ali Velshi still have a job at MSNBC?