Breaking Gaza’s Will: Israel’s Enduring Fantasy

by Ramzy Baroud / January 28th, 2009

My three-year-old son Sammy walked into my room uninvited as I sorted through another batch of fresh photos from Gaza.

I was looking for a specific image, one that would humanize Palestinians as living, breathing human beings, neither masked nor mutilated. But to no avail.

All the photos I received spoke of the reality that is Gaza today – homes, schools and civilian infrastructure bombed beyond description. All the faces were either of dead or dying people.

I paused as I reached a horrifying photo in the slideshow of a young boy and his sister huddled on a single hospital trolley waiting to be identified and buried. Their faces were darkened as if they were charcoal and their lifeless eyes were still widened with the horror that they experienced as they were burned slowly by a white phosphorus shell.

It was just then that Sammy walked into my room snooping around for a missing toy. “What is this, daddy?” he inquired.

I rushed to click past the horrific image, only to find myself introducing a no less shocking one. Fretfully, I turned the monitor off, then turned to my son as he stood puzzled. His eyes sparkled inquisitively as he tried to make sense of what he had just seen.

He needed to know about these kids whose little bodies had been burned beyond recognition.

“Where are their mummies and daddies? Why are they all so smoky all the time?”

I explained to him that they are Palestinians, that they were hurting “just a little” and that their “mummies and daddies will be right back.”

The reality is that these children and thousands like them in Gaza have experienced the most profound pain, a pain that we may never in our lives comprehend.

“I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons,” Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who had recently returned from Gaza told reporters in Oslo.

“This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 meters

“We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb, because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations.”

The dreadful weapons are known as dense inert metal explosives (DIME), “an experimental kind of explosive” but only one of several new weapons that Israel has been using in Gaza, the world’s most densely populated regions.

Israel could not possibly have found a better place to experiment with DIME or the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas than Gaza.

The hapless inhabitants of the Strip have been disowned. The power of the media, political coercion, intimidation and manipulation have demonized this imprisoned nation fighting for its life in the tiny spaces left of its land.

No wonder Israel refused to allow foreign journalists into the tiny enclave and brazenly bombed the remaining international presence in Gaza.

As long as there are no witnesses to the war crimes committed in Gaza, Israel is confident that it can sell a fabricated story to the world that it is, as always, the victim, one that has been terrorized and, strangely enough, demonized as well.

The Jerusalem Post quoted Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on January 15.

“Livni said that these were hard times for Israel, but that the government was forced to act in Gaza in order to protect Israeli citizens.

“She stated that Gaza was ruled by a terrorist regime and that Israel must carry on a dialogue with moderate sources while simultaneously fighting terror.”

The same peculiar message was conveyed by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as he declared his one-sided ceasefire on January 17.

Never mind that the “terrorist regime” was democratically elected and had honored a ceasefire agreement with Israel for six months, receiving nothing in return but a lethal siege interrupted by an occasional round of death and destruction.

Livni is not as perceptive and shrewd as the US media fantasizes. Blunt-speaking Ehud Barak and stiff-faced Mark Regev are not convincing men of wisdom. Their logic is bizarre and wouldn’t stand the test of reason.

But they have unfettered access to the media, where they are hardly challenged by journalists who know well that protecting one’s citizens doesn’t require the violation of international and humanitarian laws, targeting medical workers, sniper fire at children and demolishing homes with entire families holed up inside. Securing your borders doesn’t require imprisoning and starving your neighbors and turning their homes to smoking heaps of rubble.

Olmert wants to “break the will” of Hamas, i.e. the Palestinians, since the Hamas government was elected and backed by the majority of the Palestinian people

Isn’t 60 years of suffering and survival enough to convince Olmert that the will of the Palestinians cannot be broken? How many heaps of wreckage and mutilated bodies will be enough to convince the prime minister that those who fight for their freedom will either be free or will die trying?

Far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman, a rising star in Israel, is not yet convinced. He thinks that more can be done to “secure” his country, which was established in 1948 on the ruins of destroyed Palestinian towns and villages. He has a plan.

“We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II,” said the head of ultra-nationalist opposition party Yisrael Beitenu.

A selective reader of history, Lieberman could only think of the 1945 atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But something else happened during those years that Lieberman carefully omitted. It’s called the Holocaust, a term that many are increasingly using to describe the Israeli massacres in the Gaza Strip.

It is strange that conventional Israeli wisdom still dictates that “the Arabs understand only the language of force.” If that were true, then they would have conceded their rights after the first massacre in 1948. But, following more than 60 years filled with massacres new and old, they continue to resist.

“Freedom or death,” is the popular Palestinian mantra. These are not simply words, but a rule by which Palestinians live and die. Gaza is the proof and Israeli leaders are yet to understand.

My son persisted. “Why are Palestinians so smoky all the time, Daddy?”

“When you grow up, you’ll understand.”

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press). Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs, Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). Read other articles by Ramzy, or visit Ramzy's website.

This article was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 9:18am and is filed under Antiwar, Children/Youth, Genocide, Human Rights, Israel, Middle East, Racism, Terrorism (state and retail).

20 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. emma said on January 28th, 2009 at 2:16pm #

    Dear Mr. Baroud: thank you for your article. alternet has this interesting article on a new book out. Those same ideas were taught to us by our (jewish) history prof on the middle east 30 years ago. It does alas not help the Gazans right now, but it does undermine a lot of excuses to justify Israel’s murders. In the end one has to keep on publishing where-ever possible.

    Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
    By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
    Posted on January 28, 2009, Printed on January 28, 2009
    http://www.alternet.org/story/122810/

    What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same “children of Israel” described in the Old Testament?

    And what if most modern Israelis aren’t descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn’t “return” to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?

    What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora — the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews’ exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh’s clutches — is all wrong?

    That’s the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.

    Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the same scrap of land — holy in all three of the world’s major Abrahamic religions — based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There’s probably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimately tied to the ancient.

    Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale — familiar to all Jewish families — of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the “Jewish people” — sons and daughters of ancient Judea — wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners — from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.

    This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority — in the United States as well as Israel — who believe that God bestowed a “Greater Israel” — one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories — on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.

    Inventing a People?

    Zand’s central argument is that the Romans didn’t expel whole nations from their territories. Zand estimates that perhaps 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area. They became the progenitors of today’s Palestinian Arabs, many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their homeland during the 20th century.

    As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarized, in a review of the book in Ha’aretz:

    There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened — hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua.
    But this begs the question: if the ancient people of Judea weren’t expelled en masse, then how did it come to pass that Jewish people are scattered across the world? According to Zand, who offers detailed histories of several groups within what is conventionally known as the Jewish Diaspora, some were Jews who emigrated of their own volition, and many more were later converts to Judaism. Contrary to popular belief, Zand argues that Judaism was an evangelical religion that actively sought out new adherents during its formative period.

    This narrative has huge significance in terms of Israel’s national identity. If Judaism is a religion, rather than “a people” descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel remaining a “Jewish state.”

    And that brings us to Zand’s second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation — the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished “people” — was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, “It’s all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel.”

    Zand Gets Slammed; Do His Arguments Stand Up?

    The ramifications of Zand’s argument are far-reaching; “the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendants,” he told Ha’aretz. Zand argues that Israel should be a state in which all of the inhabitants of what was once “British Palestine” share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, rather than maintaining it as a “Jewish and democratic” state, as it’s now identified.

    Predictably, Zand was pilloried according to the time-tested formula. Ami Isseroff, writing on ZioNation, the Zionism-Israel blog, invoked the customary Holocaust imagery, accusing Zand of offering a “final solution to the Jewish problem,” one in which “No auto da fe is required, no charging Cossacks are needed, no gas chambers, no smelly crematoria.” Another feverish ideologue called Zand’s work “another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel.”

    That kind of overheated rhetoric is a standard straw man in the endless roil of discourse over Israel and the Palestinians, and is easily dismissed. But more serious criticism also greeted Zand’s work. In a widely read critical review of Zand’s work, Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, slammed the author’s second assertion — that Zionist academics had suppressed the true history of Judaism’s spread through emigration and conversion in favor of a history that would give legitimacy to the quest for a Jewish state.

    Bartal raised important questions about Zand’s methodology and pointed out what appears to be some sloppy details in the book. But, interestingly, in defending Israel’s academic community, Bartal supported Zand’s more consequential thesis, writing, “Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions.” Bartal added: “no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically ‘pure.’ ” He noted that “[i]mportant groups in the [Zionist] movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely.”

    “As far as I can discern,” Bartal wrote, “the book contains not even one idea that has not been presented” in previous historical studies. Segev added that “Zand did not invent [his] thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.”

    One can reasonably argue that this ancient myth of a Jewish nation exiled until its 20th century return is of little consequence; whether the Jewish people share a common genetic ancestry or are a far-flung collection of people who share the same faith, a common national identity has in fact developed over the centuries. But Zand’s central contention stands, and has some significant implications for the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

    Changing the Conversation?

    The primary reason it’s so difficult to discuss the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is the remarkably effective job supporters of Israel’s control of the Occupied Territories — including Gaza, still under de facto occupation — have done equating support for Palestinian self-determination with a desire to see the destruction of Israel. It effectively conflates any advocacy of Palestinian rights with the specter of Jewish extermination.

    That’s certainly been the case with arguments for a single-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Until recent years, advocating a “single-state” solution — a binational state where all residents of what are today Israel and the Occupied Territories share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship — was a relatively mainstream position to take. In fact, it was one of several competing plans considered by the United Nations when it created the state of Israel in the 1940s.

    But the idea of a single, binational state has more recently been marginalized — dismissed as an attempt to destroy Israel literally and physically, rather than as an ethnic and religious-based political entity with a population of second-class Arab citizens and the legacy of responsibility for world’s longest-standing refugee population.

    A logical conclusion of Zand’s work exposing Israel’s founding mythology may be the restoration of the idea of a one-state solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this contentious region. After all, while it muddies the waters in one sense — raising ancient, biblical questions about just who the “children of Israel” really are — in another sense, it hints at the commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of earth, both have faced historic repression and displacement and both hold dear the idea that they should have a “right of return.”

    And if both groups in fact share common biblical ties, then it begs the question of why the entirety of what was Palestine under the British mandate should remain a refuge for people of one religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are guaranteed equal protection — equal protection under the laws of a state whose legitimacy would never again be open to question.

    Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

    © 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
    View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/122810/

  2. RH2 said on January 28th, 2009 at 2:36pm #

    (“Blunt-speaking Ehud Barak and stiff-faced Mark Regev are not convincing men of wisdom. Their logic is bizarre and wouldn’t stand the test of reason.”)

    Zionism will never stand the test of reason. Zionism is the reason for distortion, lying and hatred.

  3. kahar said on January 28th, 2009 at 3:32pm #

    Well said, Ramzy.

    “..protecting one’s citizens doesn’t require the violation of international and humanitarian laws,..”
    Israel can easily stop the fireworks from Hamas by employing the relatively cheap tried and tested Phalanx anti-missile system, but then how could Israel continue to justify its genocides? Israel would be dead and wiped of the face of history. Israel is a vicious disgusting monstrosity created by the dirty scum British.

  4. giorgio said on January 28th, 2009 at 5:29pm #

    Israel Shahak, an Israeli who wrote “Jewish History, Jewish Religion…”
    states in his book:

    “According to the Jewish religion, the murder of a Jew is a capital offence and one of the three most heinous sins (the other two being idolatry and adultery). Jewish religious courts and secular authorities are commanded to punish, even beyond the limits of the ordinary administration of justice, anyone guilty of murdering a Jew … When the victim is a Gentile, the position is quite different. A Jew who murders a Gentile is guilty only of a sin against the laws of Heaven, not punishable by a court. To cause indirectly the death of a Gentile is no sin at all.

    “Thus, one of the two most important commentators on the Shulhan ‘Arukh explains that when it comes to a Gentile, “one must not lift one’s hand to harm him, but one may harm him indirectly, for instance by removing a ladder after he had fallen into a crevice … there is no prohibition here, because it was not done directly.” …

    “A Gentile murderer who happens to be under Jewish jurisdiction must be executed whether the victim was Jewish or not. However, if the victim was Gentile and the murderer converts to Judaism, he is not punished.”

    Then Shahak gives us a rabbi’s answer to an Israeli soldier who has asked whether or not it is proper to kill Arab women and children. In his answer the rabbi quotes from the Talmud: “The best of the Gentiles — kill him; the best of snakes — dash out its brains.”

    Uri Avneri, the 86 yr old Israeli peace activist, states in a recent article
    titled “On the Wrong Side of History” that:

    “Israel is the product of the narrow nationalism of the 19th century, a nationalism that was closed and exclusive, based on race and ethnic origin, blood and earth. Israel is a “Jewish State”, and a Jew is a person born Jewish or converted according to Jewish religious law (Halakha). Like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, it is a state whose mental world is to a large extent conditioned by religion, race and ethnic origin.”

    Once he called Ehud Barak “a “peace criminal”, because he brought about the failure of the 2000 Camp David conference and shattered the Israeli peace camp. Now he must call him a “war criminal”, as the person who planned the Gaza War knowing that it would murder masses of civilians.”

    Does one need to elaborate any further on Israel’s government pyschopathic minset, after these two distinguished Israelis have made it so clear and evident ?

  5. bozh said on January 29th, 2009 at 8:13am #

    emma,
    thnx for your input. some 20yrs ago i said that the ashkenazic voelken are an admixture of euros and asians who latched onto judaism.
    may not have anything to do with judeans let alone israelites. thnx

  6. Gideon said on January 29th, 2009 at 9:59pm #

    Hamas Rally Video clip
    http://www.road90.com/watch.php?id=vqj3CnvcIg

    Hamas MP, Fathi Hamad
    Al-Aqsa TV (Gaza)
    Feb 29, 2008
    (feel free to do your own translation from Arabic)

    “The Palestinian people have developed their methods of death and death seeking”

    “For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, the elderly excel and so do the children”

    “This is why they have formed human shields of women and children and the elderly”

    “As so they are saying to the Zionists: we desire death as you desire life”

    Enough said ?

    Gideon

  7. Hue Longer said on January 29th, 2009 at 10:47pm #

    ”Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipes us out”.–Adolf Gurion

    Enough said?

  8. mary said on January 30th, 2009 at 1:52am #

    Here is an example of one of Bozh’s European arrivistes who started life as a bouncer in a nightclub in Moldova and is now seeking election, Avigdor Lieberman .

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7856623.stm

    Nice guy. In November 2006, he called for the execution of any Arab Knesset members who meet with representatives of the Palestinian government. This is not mentioned in the BBC report neither is his statement earlier this month that “Israel must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II.”

    The report reads like propaganda for the Israeli state if not for Lieberman. Ms Adler reports from Jerusalem so you might say that she is embedded.

  9. Gideon said on January 30th, 2009 at 11:20am #

    Hamas’s enduring fantasy of Israel’s destruction will continue bringing misery to Gazans. Once they abandon their culture of death, terror tactics and strategy and focus on the community and economic development than it may give Peace a chance.

    Mary
    Thx for the link.
    Could you name an Arab country that ever had a Gay parade?

    This BBC article emphasizes that Israelis are tired of Arab terror.
    You could learn a lot about the mood in the country from Israeli democracy at work and local politics: 20 different parties, including Communist Party and about 12 Israeli Arab members of the Parliament. Arabs and Jews in Israel have the same rights. Arabic is the second National Language in Israel!

    Quote from the article you provided:
    “We Israelis are fed-up with terror, fed-up with being told we can get peace with the Palestinians, peace with any of our neighbours in exchange for land. We pull out of Gaza – what happens? We get rockets fired at us. We pull out of southern Lebanon… what do we get? Rockets fired at us.”

    Hue
    VALUE of LIFE not DEATH!
    Check out the history records, any of them, including Arab sources:

    1. Jews bought most of the land that became the basis for Jewish state in 1948 UN decision.
    2. Jews accepted and established State of Israel, Arabs rejected the Arab state, told Arabs living in the new Israel territory to leave and attacked Israel. Those who left became refugees, those who stayed became Israeli citizens, over a million of Israeli Arab citizens prefer to live in Israel rather than leave to live in ANY future Palestinian state or any Arab country – that’s quite a vote of confidence!
    3. Israelis created in 60 years a country and lifestyle that is an envy of all its neighbors, GDP bigger than all of them combined and that’s without availability of any natural resources! Israelis converted desert and swamps into agricultural producing lands.
    4. What did the Palestinians achieve in the last 60 years? What about the 20 years they have been under Jordanian and Egyptian rule 1948-1967?

    PLO contributions to the neighboring Arab countries:
    1972 – War – attempt to take over Jordan – Back September – kicked out
    1975 – War – attempt to take over Lebanon – kicked out 1982

    They did not try in Syria or Egypt. Too difficult?

    THE ONLY HOPE for PEACE is driven by economic development.
    Palestinians can learn a lot from Israel and Israel is ready to share its knowledge and experience them and help them when Palestinians abandon the strategy and tactics of TERROR.
    Peace will come when Palestinians love of their children would overweight their hate of Israelis. Unfortunately children indoctrination of hate, “Homicide Belts” children camps, martyrdom celebrations are not contributing to change the minds, but reinforcing the culture of Death.

    Until Gazans will grow a leadership with a vision and resolve to improve the life of Gaza people, and VALUE LIFE more than DEATH, Gazans will continue to live in misery, dragging the whole region into continuous conflicts.

    Off course, one should not be so naive as to think that Palestinians are in control. Every neighboring Arab country is involved and now far away country Iran is pulling the strings in Gaza. All these Muslim power brokers are prepared to fight till the last Palestinian. We all remember how Arafat did a road show to all the Arab countries in 2000 to review and approve/disapprove Israel’s peace proposal. Unfortunately Arafat did not have the balls and the Arab world did not have any interest ( if they remove Israel as a threat, they run a risk that their own people will go to the street to protest their own misery and start burn their own flags, maybe even demand Gay parades …)

    That’s why there need to be a resolution of the Arab – Israeli conflict. Peace with Syria and Lebanon, wall to wall recognition of Israel and establishment of diplomatic relations by the members of the Arab League. Arab world should follow the examples of Egypt and Jordan.

  10. mary said on January 30th, 2009 at 11:50am #

    Answer 1 No. A try at a sidetrack?

    Answer 2 That would be the democracy that has banned three Israeli Arab parties from participating in your forthcoming elections?

  11. Hue Longer said on January 30th, 2009 at 6:45pm #

    Gideon,

    You’ve had these corrections pointed out to you time and again so I wonder if you’re trying to convince me of what you already learned is not true or if you’re just doing your job. A bit of advice here in peddling lies would be to drop the fallacies–The well poisoning makes you look mad and it doesn’t sell

  12. Gideon said on January 30th, 2009 at 6:54pm #

    Mary
    This is exactly Democracy at work! ( I assume you are familiar with the three branches of Democracy: executive, legislative and judicial?)

    Jan 26, 2009
    Israel’s Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the decision by the Central Elections Committee (CEC) to bar Israeli Arab parties from running in next month’s parliamentary election.

  13. Gideon said on January 30th, 2009 at 7:08pm #

    Hue

    I do not believe that insults are an option on Dissident Voice when you can’t bring up an argument. Stop running away from hard questions.

    Pls , do you home work and come back with something insightful.

  14. Hue Longer said on January 30th, 2009 at 7:37pm #

    “1. Jews bought most of the land that became the basis for Jewish state in 1948 UN decision”.

    This was in response I assume to my quote from Ben.

    “Most of the land that became the basis”? If these are your words, you’re plying sophistry. Absentee Arab property swindlers aside, this statement attempts to say that Jews bought most of the land they now occupy and rule in the Middle East while containing the hidden caveat of “basis”. It’s clever, but my “insult” was spot on.

    Is there a need to go into this one as much as I’ve already done other than to point out what you are doing?

  15. kalidas said on January 30th, 2009 at 8:01pm #

    Shucks, I wonder if anyone will ever publish an English version of Solzhenitsyn’s “Two Hundred Years together?”
    Hard to believe such an epic work from such a famous and respected master is not available in the English language.
    Or maybe it isn’t hard to believe at all.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/25/russia.books

  16. Gideon said on January 30th, 2009 at 10:08pm #

    Hue

    What percentage of the land that became the State Israel in 1948 UN decision was purchased by Jews from Arab land owners?

  17. Hue Longer said on January 30th, 2009 at 11:45pm #

    Gideon,
    Am I to legitimize your earlier sophistry and start fishing for red herrings with you? Which one is right, “a land without a people for a people without a land”, “we bought it” or as Uncle Ben said, “heheh, of course we fucking stole it”? When you alternately change from one contradiction to the next as the circle of the sell dictates, are you compartmentalizing or just doing your job?

  18. Gideon said on February 3rd, 2009 at 12:43am #

    Hue

    You do not have the answer or can’t make yourself write it?

  19. bozh said on February 3rd, 2009 at 6:15am #

    “hamas’ enduring fantacy of destruction of israel will continue bringing misery on gazans” is a type of statement that only a selfhating ‘jew’ cld make.
    if indeed palestinians fantasize about destruction of israel, IOF wld be aware of it as well as all the other observers.
    note how the utterer of this selfcontradictory statement separates gazans from pals.
    this is quite an eristic utterance.
    since, obviously, israel cannot be destroyed, why wld israel be killing civilians then?
    we all know that pals have not been a military threat to israel let alone a potential destroyer of israel since at least ’73.

    “jews have accepted israel in ’48”. where is this acceptance? israel of ’48 had been rejected by US/Israel,

    there are factors for israeli blockade of gaza and continuing misery inflicted on people in the lager; manifestly, it is not the danger gazans or palestinians represent.
    is it stupidity, lust for more land, hatred, lunacy, tribalism?

    defenders of israeli crimes generally like to dwell on ripples; their truth and falsehoods amounting to a molehill; casting a tiny shadow on mountains of israeli crimes.
    and they desperately avoid penetrating the tiny whisps in order not to espy own crimes.
    folks, this is a panhuman trait; ‘jew’ too are humans. thnx

  20. Hue Longer said on February 3rd, 2009 at 6:48am #

    Gideon,

    Do you not understand what I mean by “legitimizing” or is it that you like to beat your wife?