==> Pls visit new site at http://malaysia-today.net/ <==

Your objective maybe commendable, however, to pinpoint a certain side to be right or wrong is easier said than done, given the hazy history of this area. Your effort would be more relevant on matters regarding to homeground ,not that I am condoning any form of war. The fight to abolish ISA alone is enough to keep us all busy.

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Why have the same problem here.Abolish the ISA, abolish ketuanan first.
Then we can talk about something called as gaza.

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Poor Palestinians are being exploited by Muslim countries for their own domestic political agenda. Malaysia is no exception.

Hamas and its terrorist allies are short of funds. Furthermore the price of oil has fallen dramatically. What better way to fill the coffers of rogue Muslim countries than to provoke a war with Israel? Notice how Hamas is now suddenly flush with cash and the price of oil has risen? Who benefits when Palestinians suffer? Yes, it is the terrorist organisations and oil producing countries many of which are Arab Muslim.

It is a tragedy that Palestinians have to pay with their blood when rogue Muslim nations and their proxies want money.

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Better you get your own house in order before you go interfering in other county's situations

The Malaysian ego would go into Paranoia Mode if either Israel or Palestine were to interfere in Malaysian internal affairs, but of course its different when Malaysians interfere... you call it concern

Its OK to have an opinion ( no matter how ill informed that might be) But with this situation you are just playing the Mahathir Game of directing attention away from the situation at home when you simply cant cope

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Mr Corrigan,

What have you being a barrister & solicitor got to do with the Israeli-Palestinian issue? Is your professional qualification supposed to qualify you to speak with authority on this matter? I think not and you being some hot shot lawyer is irrelevant. You are still biased and no more correct than anyone else who has an opinion. So called facts are figures are not absolute truth as the many cycles of boom and bust in the financial markets teach us. Anyone can manipulate them to slant a story. Besides, it's not how many Israeli Hamas has killed that makes them culpable. It's the intention that counts and everyone knows Hamas intends to kill all Israelis if possible. Nobody is innocent in this conflict.

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ATTENTION
Guys,you all have to be aware that Hamas is listed as a terrorist organisation and those who attend such gathering will be noted by FBI ,and your entry into USA will be a problem in future.Remember ,it's Hamas that is provoking Israel ,by firing rockets endlessly into the civilian areas, which resulted in this justified retaliation.Hamas are working hand in hand with Hezbollah in Lebanon to achieve their goal of destroying this Jewish State.
I don't support both but I must say they must sit down and find a comprehensive solution to a lasting peace in the Middle East.You can't solve this problems with guns and bombs.I ask for solutions not compound to this problems.This problems are not easy but they must keep trying.It's their problem and they must try all means to solve it or otherwise they will have to live with it.
We ,as outsiders ,can't solve this problems becos even UN have failed.Israel listen to no one except USA.We all know they are working hand in hand to perpetuate this Jewish State.
I will not be attending such gathering becos it's illegal to support terrorist organisations and Hamas is one of them.Syed Hamid have said many time that we must not support terrorist organisations.We are law abiding citizens and we won't want to provoke Syed Hamid.

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I'm going for Barrak Obama inauguration on Jan 20, and I don't want to be deported at JFK international Airport by the FBI for supporting Hamas,a terrorist organisation .

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Even Mercy Malaysia have failed to deliver the 'so call aids' to the Palestinians.They are stop at the Egyptian border with Gaza.And malaysia itself is supporting this terrorist, Hamas, by giving US$ 1 million ,when in fact they keep reminding us not to support terrorist.What about supporting communist!

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I see even Malaysia Today trying to shape our thoughts and free thinking mind to support a Politised Palestinian Issues. Shame on YOU!!

As said before being deleted, the Measeured response from the Islamic world to this Palestine issues is DISPROPORTIONATE and UNFAIR to those who died from Suicide Bombing in Iraq, Afganistan and Genocide of 1 Million in Sudan Dafur. Don't support this move by Government UMNO-BN and fruit loop NGO. Malaysia too have thousands of children and mothers dying daily.

Don't ever donate to these NGO now stay focus on Malaysian Local needs.!! Kuman diseberang Laut boleh dilihat, Gajah dibibir tak nampak!!

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Help thyself before you can help others!Like in the plane,place the mask on yourself before you help others to place that mask.
In this grave financial crises,keep your money tight and only when RPK gives the green light,then we follow ,but not for the Palestinians.

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Racist mahathir and family have never donated a single cent and yet they keep on asking people to donate.Leadership by example!Lot of bullshit!

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All Malaysians stand up and be counted!
All around the globe people are crying out for a permanent solution that would ensure peace for both Palestinians AND Israelis. It DOESN'T have to be political, because the HUMANITY aspect is the most important thing. How can you people with clear conscience accept the fact that innocent civilians are killed like their lives worth nothing?

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Shahidan... you make your argument sound so plausible ... but

"ISA and other repressive legislation at home before you can support others in a much worse plight than we have ever been in...."

If the problems at home were only about which language should be used on the street signs in Penang you might have a point

But they arent .. there are massive infringements of human rights going on in the the streets, the polling booths and homes of Malaysians as I write

You show the hypocrisy of your statements by concentrating on I v P situation, but you conveniently ignore the Sudan, Somalia and anywhere else in the world where muslims are slaughtering each other and innocent bystanders.

You are just another Mahathirist clone

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I am inclined to believe that HAMAS is a terrorist organisation. We should not support any organisation simply because they say they are muslims.

Like Al Fatah, HAMAS survive and their leaders proper on foreign donations. Their leaders pocket a big chunk of the donations. With the balance, they buy weapons and fire rockets into Israel to keep the war going. This is their strategy to keep donations pouring in.

Of course we don't condone the Israeli attack. But HAMAS don't want to stop the war because of its hidden agenda explained above.

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Darfur - half a million dead and worst atrocities by fellow Muslim and not a pig squeal.
Muslim on muslim warfare is a family affair, so outsiders should STFU ?
Or perhaps they are raisin heads ?
Now we have this angst, frenzy and loud condemnation from these NGOs.
Ptui ....

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I don't think Hamas is a terrorist organization. First of all, Hamas is a popularly-elected party in a fully democratic election. Second, the Palestinians have been living under illegal Israel occupation for almost 50 years, where their freedom and liberty are constantly being infringed upon. The Palestinians do have the right to fight for everything that have been taken away from them; their homes, lands, and the Palestine state/nation (Yes, as in 1919, the Palestinian people were provisionally recognized as an independent nation by the League of Nations in League Covenant article 22(4) as well as by the 1922 Mandate for Palestine that was awarded to Great Britain).

Imagine yourself in this situation, as one writer have put it : `.. you've lived on a big island somewhere for thousands of years and one day some international organization decides unilaterally to take away your land and give it to some group. That group decides to push you away from the land that is sacred to you and puts you in a small corner. Then, they construct a wall to prevent you from leaving that place, they put an economic blockade so you starve to death and slowly but surely become a land with no chance for prosperity. Also, you are constantly targeted with raids and complete control of your supposed sovereign piece of land.'

Now what are you going to do? Submit to the illegal occupiers and oppressors? Move to other places/countries? Or stand up for your people and your homeland?

Well this is the case of Gaza, Palestine and the Palestinian people. Palestinian people and Hamas have decided to stand up against the illegal presence and occupation of Israel in their homeland. Hamas is a 'resistance and liberation political party, since its main purpuse is to liberate itself from the concentration camp in which they rule called the Gaza strip and to get backs the lands and territory the UN stole from them in 1948, with the backing of the United States.'

To the Israeli, the US, and apparently some misinformed MT readers, Hamas is seen as a terrorist organization. But historical facts are still historical facts, and Hamas and the Palestinian people do have the right to get back what is rightfully theirs by all means possible. You may disagree if Hamas uses violence as a mean to achieve their end, but if you are in their shoes, would you not rise in arms for your people and nation after the oppressors kill your people and leaders, force your families to live in a modern concentration camps and deprive you of foods and basic necessities?

Don't you think Hamas has every right to rebel against their imperialistic oppressors who took their land, exploit their people, violate their basic human rights and enslave them in a 21st century concentration camp?

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Excerpts from http://www.counterpunch.org/makdisi01072009.html

LChuah
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"What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?" by Saree Makdisi (Jan 1, 2009)

...As for Israel itself: once again it has revealed its true nature to the world. It was only after the first reports came in of their own serious fatalities—soldiers caught in an ambush, though the censored news reports from Israel claim that it was all friendly fire—that the Israeli media suddenly started carrying reports wondering whether things have gone too far.

“The Price of Stubbornness over Gaza Exit is Dead Soldiers,” write Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in Ha’aretz. “For the first time, Israeli TV broadcasts raised the question of whether it was worthwhile for the operation to continue.”

Until this point, the Israeli media—and most of the country’s liberal intelligentsia, never mind the militant right wing—had been moralistically defending the bombing, and sometimes actually cheering it on. Starting the attacks on a Saturday was a “stroke of brilliance,” the Guardian’s Seamus Milne quotes the country’s biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot as saying; “the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed.”

The daily Ma’ariv agreed: “We left them in shock and awe.” The rational and genuinely ethical voices of Amira Hass and Gideon Levy have never seemed more isolated.

The brute fact of the matter is that, as long as their air force is killing an entirely defenseless people, the Israeli public and media do cheer them on. As soon as they start paying any kind of price—no matter how grotesquely out of proportion to the level of damage their soldiers are inflicting on unarmed and innocent people—their bloodlust quickly cools. In Gaza, the Israeli infantry won’t take a single step forward unless the ground in front of them—and everything and everyone in it, armed, unarmed, whoever and whatever they are—has been safely cleared away for them by the air or by artillery.

“These are ‘Georgia rules,’ which are not so far from the methods Russia used in its conflict last summer,” write Harel and Issacharoff in Ha’aretz. “The result is the killing of dozens of non-combatant Palestinians....It is a method that leaves a swath of destruction taking in entire streets, and does not distinguish military targets from the homes of civilians.”

I’m not sure where the “Georgia” reference comes from: the Israelis used the very same tactics in Jenin and Nablus in 2002, and in southern Lebanon in 2006 and 1982. And it would be an act of futility to point out—for the millionth time—that the Israeli method of warfare takes place in sweeping disregard for the principles of international humanitarian law, not to mention total contempt for innocent human life. This is not to mention that most of the casualties pouring into Gaza’s morgues and hospitals are the victims of the sheer indiscriminate unleashing on densely populated civilian areas of high explosive ordnance from land, sea and air that has been characteristic of Israel’s military style since at least the 1970s.

To be continued

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Continued

Israel’s disregard for innocent human life is not motivated only by a desire to forestall the political consequences—especially during an electoral campaign—of Israeli military casualties. It is also a clear indicator of the contempt that Israel has for Palestinian life in general. The cold, hungry, tired, desperate, and terrified men, women and children that Israel is now sweeping away by the dozen in balls of fire and showers of shrapnel are the very same people that it had already reduced to what one UN official months ago warned was “a subhuman existence,” the deliberate product of the siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza for over three years, beginning in 2005, before the election of Hamas. They are the same people whose political and human rights Israel has been stifling since the occupation of 1967—twenty years before the creation of Hamas. They are the same people who were ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948 because, as non-Jews, they were inconveniently cluttering up the land that European Zionists wanted to turn into a Jewish state, no matter what the land’s actual population had to say about it.

Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza today is, in short, a direct extension of its disregard for Palestinian life since 1948, and what is happening in Gaza today is the continuation of what happened six decades ago. Eighty percent of the people crammed into Gaza’s hovels and shanties are refugees or the descendants of refugees that armed Zionist gangs, which eventually coalesced into the infant Israeli army, terrorized from their homes elsewhere in southwestern Palestine in 1948. They have been herded, penned, and slaughtered by a remorseless power that clearly regards them as subhuman. If you think I’m stretching the point, I’m not. Listen to the words of Professor Arnon Sofer, the government consultant who did so much to help plan the isolation and imprisonment of Gaza, in a interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2004: “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,” Sofer predicted.

“Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure on the border is going to be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” Sofer admitted only one worry with all the killing, which will, he says, be the necessary outcome of a policy that he himself helped to invent. “The only thing that concerns me,” he says, “is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

Meticulously and clinically thought through even before the first rocket from Gaza claimed a life inside Israel, the slaughter in Gaza today has nothing to do with rockets or with Hamas. As Sofer himself explains, it is the purest and most distilled expression of Zionist ideology. “Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee ‘peace,’” Sofer says in that same interview; “it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews.”

And that—taken right from the horse’s mouth—is what the slaughter of innocents in Gaza is fundamentally about: the people being killed today are the ones for whom there is no room in the Zionist vision of the state. They are regarded as an excess population. Not even Malthus thought that a redundant population should just be lined up and shot, or bombed into the ground. But, clearly, times have changed since 1798.

This inhuman madness will end only with the end of the violent ideology that spawned it—when those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously and ethnically exclusivist state in what has always been a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed.

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Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation.

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We should instead focus on issues affecting us first before we try something which is near impossible that even big brothers of Arab league of nations cant even get it done effectively all these years ! We should put more pressure on the govt to get rid of ISA and all those ills which are just as important as they hamper the national interests and even social security . Sure,we want peace everywhere but charity begins at home !!!

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Here is a Jewish rabbi talking some sense. Obviously much more progressive than the morons on MT who think that we should fight for justice on our home turf only, but step out of Malaysia and it is not our problem. Are these the people who are clamouring for change and have they the values to construct something better?

From The Times

January 5, 2009

It breaks my heart to see Israel's stupidity
It has a right to respond to attacks, but will not achieve its ultimate aim - peace - until it stops thinking in military terms

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine.

The UK Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...tributors/

article5446519.ece



Israel's attempt to wipe out Hamas is understandable, but stupid. No country in the world is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from neighbouring territory day after day. If Mexico had a group of anti-imperialists bombing Texas, imagine how long it would take for America to mobilise a counterattack. Israel has every right to respond.
But the kind of response matters. Killing 500 Palestinians and wounding 2,000 others (at the time of writing) is disproportionate. Hamas can harass, but it cannot pose any threat to the existence of Israel. And just as Hamas's indiscriminate bombing of population centres is a crime against humanity, so is Israel's killing of civilians (at least 130 so far in Gaza, not to mention the thousands in the years of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza).
Hamas had respected the previously negotiated ceasefire except when Israel used it as cover to make assassination raids. Hamas argued that these raids were hardly a manifestation of a ceasefire, and so as symbolic protest it would allow the release of rocket fire (usually hitting no targets). But when the issue of continuing the ceasefire came up, Hamas wanted a guarantee that these assassination raids would stop. And it asked for more. With hundreds of thousands of Palestinians facing acute malnutrition, Hamas insists that the borders be opened so that food can arrive unimpeded. And in return for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, it asks for the release of 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.
Hamas has made it clear that it would accept the terms of the Saudi Arabian peace agreement, though it would never formally recognise Israel. It would live peacefully in a two-state arrangement, but it would never acknowledge Israel's "right to exist". This position is unnecessarily provocative, and is deeply self-destructive for Palestinians who believe it is the only symbolic weapon they have left.
How do we get out of this destructive spiral? The first step is for the world to demand an immediate ceasefire. That ceasefire should be imposed by the United Nations and backed unequivocally by America. Its terms must include the following:
— Hamas stops all firing of missiles, bombs or any other violent action originating from the West Bank or Gaza, and co-operates in actively jailing anyone from any faction that breaks this ceasefire.
— Israel stops all bombing, targeted assassinations or any other violent actions aimed at activists, militants, or suspected terrorists in the West Bank or Gaza, and uses the full force of its army to prevent any further attacks on Palestinians.
— Israel opens the border with Gaza and allows free access to and from Israel, subject only to full search and seizure of any weapons. Israel allows free travel of food, gas, electricity, water and consumer goods and materials including from land, air, and sea, subject only to full search and seizure of any weapons or materials typically used for weapons.
— Israel releases all Palestinians in detention and returns them to the West Bank or Gaza according to the choice of the detainees or prisoners. Hamas releases Gilad Schalit and anyone else being held by Palestinian forces.
— Both sides invite an international force to implement these agreements
— Both sides agree to end teaching and/or advocacy of violence against the other side in and outside mosques, educational institutions, and the media.
— This ceasefire would last for 20 years. Nato, the UN, and the US all agree to enforce this agreement and impose severe sanctions in the event of any violations.
These steps would make a huge difference, isolate the most radical members of each side from the mainstream, and make it possible to then begin negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a broader and deeper set of issues.
The basic condition for creating peace is to help each side feel "safe". A first and critical step is to speak in a language that is empathic toward the suffering of each people in a climate of discourse in which both sides' stories are heard and understood.

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(continued from above)

Yet Israel, as the militarily superior power, ought to take the first steps: implementing a massive Marshall Plan in Gaza and in the West Bank to end poverty and unemployment, rebuild infrastructure and encourage investment; dismantle the settlements or make settlers become citizens of a Palestinian state; accept 30,000 Palestinian refugees annually back into Israel for the next 30 years, apologise for its role in the 1948 expulsions and offer to co-ordinate a worldwide compensation effort for all that Palestinians lost during the Occupation; and recognise a Palestinian state within borders already defined by the Geneva Accord of 2003.
This is the only way Israel will ever achieve security. It is the only way to permanently defeat Hamas and all extremists who wish to see endless war against Israel.
The most significant contribution the new Obama administration could make to Middle East peace would be to embrace a strategy that homeland security is best achieved not by military or economic domination but by generosity and caring for others. If this new way of thinking could become a serious part of US policy, it would have an immense impact on undermining the fearful consciousness of Israelis who still see the world more through the frame of the Holocaust and previous persecutions than through the frame of their actual present power in the world.
It breaks my heart to see the terrible suffering in Gaza and in Israel. As a religious Jew I find it all the worse, because it confirms to me how easy it is to pervert the loving message of Judaism into a message of hatred and domination. I remain in mourning for the Jewish people, for Israel and for the world.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine. ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

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Malaysian NGO's should work harder to free all detainees under ISA rather than go fight for other countries. You fellow citizens need you more than ever. Think charity at home first.

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Perhaps this article will enlighten those who look at the situation only from incidents preceding the present aggression perpetuated by Zionist Israel.

Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State

> By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
> Let us get one thing perfectly straight. If the wholesale mutilation and degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to continue; if Israel's will is at one with that of the United States; if the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and all the international legal agencies and organizations spread across the globe are going to continue to sit by like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making repeated "calls" for a "ceasefire" on "both sides"; if the cowardly, obsequious and supine Arab States are going to stand by watching their brethren get slaughtered by the hour while the world's bullying Superpower eyes them threateningly from Washington lest they say something a little to their disliking; then let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth is taking place.
> The state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to do with "Terror". It has nothing to do with the long-term "security" of the Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it is aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today. It has nothing to do with some conjured-up "war" - a cynical and overused euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale enslavement of any nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert that its resources are its own; that doesn't want one of the Empire's obscene military bases sitting on its cherished land.
> This crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace. It is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash'al or Ismail Haniyeh. It is not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest only now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop into the catastrophe that it is today. The Islamist factor has colored and will continue to color the atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted the current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the world's population. The primary symbols today are Islamic - the mosques, the Qur'an, the references to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these symbols could disappear and the impasse would continue.
> There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat's Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political environment. They are the result of something entirely different than what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They have become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle East today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant, deadly, angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their places.
> Strip away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony; for power over the weak and dominion over the world's wealth. Worse yet you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to cover up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories and models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our very culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.

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> Strip away the current symbols and language of the victims of our selfish and devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned and unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the 'wretched of the earth' begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave them alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their olives and their thyme; asking you first politely and then with increasing disbelief why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the land of their ancestors; unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of ravishment and devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and checkpoints and crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, concrete bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and death. Why is life without these policies and instruments of hell impossible?
> The answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable, sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. It had no intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the 1950s. It had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and reinterpreted UN Security Council Resolution 248 to its own liking despite the overwhelming international consensus stating that Israel would receive full international recognition within secure and recognized borders if it withdrew from the lands it had only recently occupied.
> It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the United Nations in 1974, when -alone with the United States-it voted against a two-state solution. It had no intention of allowing a comprehensive peace settlement when Egypt stood ready to deliver but received, and obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive of the rights of Palestinians and the remaining peoples of the region. It had no intention of working toward a just two-state solution in 1978 or 1982 when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut so that it might annex the West Bank without hassle. It had no intention of granting a Palestinian state in 1987 when the first Intifada spread across occupied Palestine, into the Diaspora and the into the spirits of the global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately aided the newly formed Hamas movement so that it might undermine the strength of the more secular-nationalist factions.
> Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at Oslo where the PLO was superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at the wealth and prestige it gave them at the expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into the world's satellites and microphones its desire for peace and a two-state solution, it more than doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements on the ground in the West Bank and around East Jerusalem, annexing them as it built and continues to build a superstructure of bypass roads and highways over the remaining, severed cities and villages of earthly Palestine. It has annexed the Jordan valley, the international border of Jordan, expelling any 'locals' inhabiting that land. It speaks with a viper's tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security.
>

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cont;

Through the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that attempted to cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of oblivion; through the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges and infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.
> Israel, with the unconditional and approving support of the United States, has made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over and over again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no viable Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the rest of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the 'international community'? What will it take to see past the lies and indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.
> The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede to Israel's demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they live alongside its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d'etre, the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel's reason for being change if the Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?
> The lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.

> Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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