All Christians are created equal

Not in the eyes of Israel, especially during Easter.

Israel, for the third year in a row, enforced a curfew on the West Bank and Gaza preventing the Christian populations from leaving their homes. The Churches in Israel were full of tourists, but you would be hard pressed to find a single native Christian. They could not go to the churches, could not practice their religion. In Israel, you aren’t a Christian Arab, you are the enemy.

Israel has put its best foot forward in recent years to attract Christian tourists. Often they stress the security measures that have been put in place to ensure the safety of their Abrahamic brothers. These measures, for all intents and purposes, are simply aimed at keeping “the Arabs” out. The problem with this policy is that it, like other Israeli policies, is collective punishment. Israel has the right to ensure the safety of its civilians (not just the Jewish ones) but at what cost?

The truth is that the Christian Palestinian population has decreased at steady pace since the foundation of Israel as a Jewish State. Before 1948 Christians accounted for upwards of 30% of the population, now estimates hover between 2% and 5%. People would like you to believe that this diaspora of Christians is due to ” Radical Islamofascists” who attack Christians and Jews because they Koran tells them so. Obviously the facts state the opposite.

If you look back upon the recent history of Palestine you will notice a trend. No Christians were killed. No attacks upon Christians around the holidays. You may even remember when some militants took refuge in a church in Bethlehem and, to the shock of the Zionists, were fed and warmly greeted by the priests. In reality the only enemy to Christians in the Middle East are the Zionist and their not-so Christian supporters.

On a regular basis Fundamentalist Christian churches advocate support for the Israeli state while overlooking their fellow Christian. It is not as though Christian Palestinians have been absent from the world stage either. Some of the most prominent names in Palestinian history have been Christian ones:  Hanan Ashrawi, Edward Said, Emile Habibi, George Habash, Afif Safieh, Nayef Hawatmeh, and Rifat Odeh Kassis.

Hawatmeh wasn’t even allowed to leave Gaza for 40 years. Was he a security threat? Was he going to blow him self up for 72 virgins? The policies of Israel can truly be seen for what they are in these instances. Racism. This is not an attempt at security but an attempt to religiously homogenize the region.

So ask yourselves if you saw any Arab Christians walking through Jerusalem today. I can tell you they were not in Bethlehem, not when its surrounded on three sides by a cement wall. They were not in Nazareth because of the curfew and travel restrictions. They were as they always have been, in their homes alongside their Muslim neighbors coloring eggs and waiting for their fellow Christians to raise their voice.

Israeli minister “warns” of Palestinian Holocaust

So Israel’s true colors come out? Israel has killed 14 civilians in gaza since monday of this week. Hamas has killed 1. This is Israeli justification for a “shoah” or as we say in english, a holocaust.

This is about as justified as Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Syria. I mean it has become apparent which side of this conflict truly wants to exterminate the other.

Has anyone heard of collective punishment? The people of Gaza and the West Bank are being slaughtered because of what the Nazi’s did and what Israel blames Hamas of doing now.

Guardian

BBC

Study: Palestinian suicide bombers not motivated by religion or mental illness

TORONTO - In an extensive study of Palestinian suicide bombings, three University of Toronto researchers have concluded that the bombers were not psychologically unstable and were often motivated by personal vengeance, not religious zeal.The study was carried out by political sociologist Robert Brym, with the assistance of two Ph.d students, Palestinian Bader Araj and Israeli Yael Maoz-Shai.
Writing in the academic journal Social Forces, Brym noted, “The organizers of suicide attacks don’t want to jeopardize their missions by recruiting unreliable people. It may be that some psychologically unstable people want to become suicide bombers, but insurgent organizations strongly prefer their cannons fixed.”He also found that the suicide bombers did not experience extraordinary high levels of economic deprivation.Furthermore, in his study published in Contexts, Brym concluded that a majority of bombers, like Palestinian female lawyer, Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, 29, who killed 21 civilians in a 2003 bombing at Maxim restaurant in Haifa, were “motivated by the desire for revenge and retaliation.”Jaradat acted to avenge the killings of her brother and cousin by Israeli security forces.Brym concluded, “In its origins and at its core, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not religiously inspired, and suicide bombing, despite its frequent religious trappings, is fundamentally the expression of a territorial dispute.” Brym and Araj identified the organizational affiliation of 133 out of 138 suicide bombers between September 2000 and July 2005. Sixty-four per cent were affiliated with Islamic fundamentalists groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, while the rest were aligned with secular groups such as Fatah.

In analyzing data pertaining to Israeli counterterrorist operations, Brym said “we do know that of the nearly 600 suicide missions launched in Israel and its occupied territories between 2000 and 2005, fewer than 25 percent succeeded in reaching their target. Israeli counterterrorist efforts thwarted three-quarters of them using violent means.”

However, his study found that harsh repression can intensify bombings and prompt bombers to devise more lethal methods to achieve their aims.

“In general, severe repression can work for a while, but a sufficiently determined mass opposition will always be able to design new tactics to surmount new obstacles. One kind of ’success,’ usually breeds another kind of ‘failure’ if the motivation of insurgents is high.” In an interview, Brym said: “I’m no fan of Hamas, but I believe that Israel and Hamas at some point have to sit and negotiate.”

In a paper to be published in Studies in Conflict on Terrorism this year, Araj concludes that harsh state repression “should not be perceived only as a reaction to suicide bombing” but “often precedes and is a major cause of suicide bombing.”

Haaretz

So just so we aren’t mistaken : “often precedes and is a major cause of suicide bombing” means that Israel’s own repressive and discriminatory government is the reason for the “terrorism”. Its not religious zealots, its Israeli murder of civilians that creates suicide bombers. This has been stated as fact by those in the Arab and Human worlds for years, its a shame that it took so long for the west and namely Israel to catch on.

But they won’t catch on because in related news:

Hebron – Ma’an – Israeli authorities issued a military order on Saturday to confiscate 766 dunams (a dunam is 1000 square meters) of Palestinian land belonging to the West Bank town of Adh-Dhahiriyya as well as land belonging to the Ramadin clan south of Hebron. The land is to be used for expansion of the Israeli settlement of Eshkolot.

Palestinian cartographic expert Abdul-Hadi Hantash told Ma’an’s reporter that the Israeli authorities handed warrants to Palestinian farmers. According to the Israelis the confiscation orders fall under the category of “border adjustment.”

Hantash compared the confiscation orders with his maps, and concluded that the affected area will actually be more than 900 dunams. An additional 2400 will fall behind the Israeli separation wall, which he says is a form of indirect confiscation.

I hardly think that expanding settlements is part of the US sanctioned agreement OR tolerated by international law. This isn’t even eminent domain because Hebron is in the West Bank, meaning there will be no payment for the land taken. 766,000 square meters of land used to farm and feed people has been confiscated by Israel. How is this a democratic and free country, how is this a country which we as Americans support?

It is time that people look at this situation objectively and see who truly is being terrorized.

Power to the (Palestinian) People

By Jeff Halper

The people of Palestine have done it again, taking their own fate in their hands after being let down by their own “moderate” political leadership and, indeed, the entire international community in their struggle for freedom. Early this morning they simply blew up the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, breaking a siege imposed on them by an Arab government in collaboration with Israel.

We, the peoples of the world, should take great pride and encouragement in this quintessentially civil society refusal to accept subjugation, to abandon their fate to governments, including their own, for whom the lives of ordinary people are simply grist for their political charades - Annapolis and its subsequent “peace process” being but the last cynical expression. For the Palestinians represent far more than just themselves. Their refusal to submit to the dictates of governments, or to governments’ lack of interest in the well-being of people in general, reflects the desire of billions of oppressed people for identity, freedom, a decent life and actualization of their collective and individual rights and potentials. Most of the oppressed, the “wretched of the earth” as Franz Fanon called them a half-century ago, are too preoccupied with the daunting daily struggle for survival to organize and resist. Others do resist in a myriad of ways, but are most often repressed by their own political and economic “leaders,” disappearing anonymously from view. In a few cases they have managed to mount effective resistance to oppression, even to prevail - though the billions spent on “counterinsurgency” warfare by the US, Europe, Russia, Israel and many “developing” nations augur ill for peoples attempting to overthrow oppressive regimes.

In this the Palestinians stand at the forefront, in the front lines of peoples’ insistence everywhere that their rights, well-being and fundamental values as human beings be respected by governments. And they do so (and I write this as an Israeli with great sorrow and shame) against one of the world’s strongest and most ruthless military powers - a power that has dispossessed them from 85% of their land, which is trying to transform its occupation into a permanent regime of apartheid, which has spent decades impoverishing and disenfranchising them; the fourth largest nuclear power which nevertheless casts itself as the victim. Not only have the Palestinians experienced the dehumanization all oppressed and colonized peoples experience, not only have they been made into the embodiment of the rich and powerful’s greatest fear, evil “terrorists” who may tear down their privileged “civilization,” but they have been turned into guinea pigs. Israel is able to gain an edge in the counterinsurgency industry and win entree into the heart of the American military/hi tech complex by turning the Occupied Territories into a laboratory for the development of fiendish weaponry and tactics intended for use against people.And yet the Palestinian people - and in particular those who remain sumud, steadfast, in Palestine - continue not only to resist but to surprise and confound its would-be Israeli master at every turn. Despite unlimited control, a complete monopoly over the use of force, utter callousness and a vaunted Shin Beit, Israel’s military intelligence, Palestinians vote as they want, resist, carry on their daily lives with dignity - and blow huge holes in the walls and policies constructed in order to imprison and defeat them.

All this is not on the minds of those desperate people who surged into Egypt today. They may not have the “Big Picture.” Yet they deserve the respect and gratefulness of every person who cherishes a better world based on human rights and dignity, a world that is inclusive. As an Israeli Jew, I have been saddened and mortified that my own people, after all they have experienced, cannot see what they are doing to others. But on a larger scale, not as an Israeli Jew but as a human being, I take heart in the Palestinians’ active refusal to be ground under a global system that is producing unimaginable wealth and power for a few at the expense of the growing ranks of the wretched.I am not a Palestinian; I am not one of the oppressed. I only hope I can use my privilege in an effective way in order to redeem the gift the people of Gaza have given all of us: the realization that the people do have power and can prevail even in the face of overwhelming power. We may each express our responsibility towards the people of Gaza in whatever way most suits us, but as the privileged we must do something. We owe the Palestinians and the Palestinians writ large at least that.

(Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions - ICAHD).

Israel is like Benjamin Linus

Who’s ready for the gas chambers!!

OK so you need to be a LOST fan to truly appreciate this but I will try.

Israel had placed Gaza under a blockade therefore breaking international law by using collective punishment (lets say only 1 in X is a terrorist, you cannot punish all of X for the acts of the 1). Then Israel claims to avoid a humanitarian crisis by letting fuel enter Gaza, but not enough to get the only power plant operational. The completely close the border causing 73 people to die waiting for medical treatment.

That led to this.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Tens of thousands of Palestinians poured from the Gaza Strip into Egypt Wednesday after masked gunmen with explosives destroyed most of the seven-mile wall dividing the border town of Rafah.

The Gazans crossed on foot, in cars or riding donkey carts to buy supplies made scarce by an Israeli blockade of their impoverished territory. Police from the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, directed the traffic. Egyptian border guards took no action.

It is like John Locke (no not that John Locke but this John Locke) blowing up the submarine, which solved Benjamin’s problem. He cannot destroy the only way home, it would look bad. Ben is always one step ahead, making people think the choices they make are their own. The lives of people are simply chess pieces. 

Israel put in place a situation in which they manipulate the militants and the civilians populace like replaceable chess pieces. What does Israel want more than anything in this world but can’t actually do themselves for fear of looking bad? Mass emigration from the Gaza Strip into another country that is not Israel.  With less people in Gaza there is more chance to continue their ethnic cleansing of Bilad al-Sham.

Think about it, why would the Gazans go to Egypt instead of Israel (besides the Israeli policy of shoot anyone darker than snow)? Some reports claim that 350,000 people left Gaza to get groceries and other necessities. Imagine is 350K Gazans were to go into Israel, what kind of stir that would cause. But no, the people were controlled into doing something else.  

Perhaps it is too lighthearted to compare a TV show with a genocidal government. I mean the token arab on the show isn’t even arab. Perhaps its better, he will live longer that way.

Artwork on the apartheid wall

Here is some christmas photos from Bethlehem (the place Santa was born) :

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all photos shamelessly linked from supertouchblog who took most from Santa’s Ghetto