another viewpoint from a south-african jew... these guys kinda know a few things about apartheid... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Kasrils http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/umrabulo/umrabulo27/art11.html http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/umrabulo/umrabulo28/art12.html
David and Goliath, huh? Yes indeed. There are 5,415,000 Jews in Israel Israel... occupies...10,000 square miles The Arab World is consisting of 23 countries with a combined population of 325 mln (325,000,000) people, and spanning two continents The Arab world stretches 5 million (5,000,000) square miles
wow this desert is quite overwhelmin' innit lil' zionist skoolboy? why not call it israel? i mean is so sparely populated by arabs etc... particularly somalia... completely full of arabs chock-a-block, somalia, hey lil' zionist skoolboy... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia#Demographics
Please, for your own sake be careful, always have him wear a condom, even when you perform oral sex on him. Aids in Africa
more on-topic, sthg lil' zionist skoolboy doesn't seem to want people to discuss... i wonder why..... "David and Goliath Who is who in the Middle East / Part 1 The recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon and continuing atrocities in the Gaza Strip are merely the latest in a long list of acts of criminal aggression by the state of Israel, writes Ronnie Kasrils. Israel has traditionally been likened to the biblical David - a comely young shepherd boy who slew the monstrous Goliath of the Philistines and saved his people from slavery. Not anymore. Despite its small size, Israel has become the world's fifth top military power, boasting sophisticated land, sea and air forces and, according to general estimates, an arsenal of several hundred nuclear weapons. In its entire history it has seldom balked at using military force against its far weaker opponents, in preference to negotiations and diplomacy. In the manner of former colonial powers it has deprived the Palestinian people of their land and right to self-determination and treats them with extreme brutality born of racist contempt. Tireless Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has stated: "World opinion is always on the side of the underdog. In this fight, we are Goliath and they are David. In the eyes of the world [outside the US], the Palestinians are fighting a war of liberation against a foreign occupation. We are in their territory, not they in ours. We are the occupiers, they are the victims."1 Given its record of force even Israel's government spokespersons have switched metaphors and are choosing different comparisons to describe their country. Israel is like the elephants of the Kruger National Park, explained Ariel Sharon's former adviser, Ra'anan Gissin, on a recent visit to South Africa. He was speaking as a guest of the conservative South African Zionist Federation, an unabashed advocacy group ready to defend anything Israel does - right or wrong; labelling anyone critical of Israel an "anti-Semite" or "self-loathing Jew" in an attempt to intimidate non-Jew and Jew alike. "We just want to be left alone," Gissin declared to an admiring audience. "We seem docile but if you wound us we can go crazy because we are an endangered species".2 The Lebanon Onslaught Yet it is Israel that is a danger to its neighbours and imperils its own people by fomenting war instead of seeking peaceful diplomatic solutions. As the world has seen, Lebanon - a country half Israel's size - has just experienced the wrath of the behemoth: its people killed and maimed; much of its capital, towns and villages, airports and harbours, highways, roads and bridges, electricity, fuel and water facilities destroyed. So awesome has been the devastation that Gissin could just as well have used the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina to describe Israel's wrath. The horror is that what was unleashed on Lebanon was the wilful fury of man, not some unavoidable act of nature. The apparent trigger of rage was the seizure by Hezbollah on 12 July of two Israeli soldiers - one originally from Durban. "Kidnapping" was the way Israel termed the capture of its soldiers on duty in a tense border area. When Israel seizes Palestinians or Lebanese it talks about "arrest", "capture" or "detention of terrorists". At the height of this crisis Israel apprehended 41 Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament, including eight cabinet ministers and the deputy prime minister, elected in the democratic elections of January 2006 - but peremptorily seized for membership of a "terrorist" organisation. Israel holds over 9,000 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, women and children among them. Several have been held for longer than Nelson Mandela's incarceration. In retaliation for a Palestinian action from the Gaza Strip on 25 June, in which one Israeli soldier was captured on the border - following the Israeli abduction of a civilian Gazan doctor and his son the previous day - the people of the miniscule enclave3 have paid a heavy price of 262 killed up to mid-September. Vital infrastructure has been flattened, including Gaza's only electricity generation plant. There is great hardship, lack of water and nobody is allowed to leave what has long been a hermetically sealed open-air prison. The Gaza Strip is the most densely populated place on earth, and the poorest in the northern hemisphere. The siege and daily bombardment continues unabated after three months in what is tantamount to a creeping genocide. One Israeli soldier died in this period. Militants in Gaza have periodically fired makeshift rockets into Israel. However, if we are looking for the initial trigger of the current round of conflict we need to be reminded that the killing of an entire Palestinian family on a Gaza beach by an Israeli shell ended a Palestinian unilateral truce that had lasted almost a year. It was this Israeli attack that prompted the 25 June action. The death toll on the Lebanese side between 12 July and 14 August 2006 was over 1,200 human beings killed - of which one-third were children -according to general media reports. Thousands more have been mutilated and many more have seen their homes razed to the ground. A staggering one-quarter of a population of four million was displaced. The Israeli Air Force launched over 7,000 air attacks, and its navy conducted an additional 2,500 bombardments, reinforcing the massive artillery, tank and ground force assault. All this against a weak country, with no air force or navy to speak of. There have been wry comments that if this was the way Lebanon's moderate government was "rewarded" after Syria's withdrawal in 2005, how would Israel treat its real adversaries? National resistance from Lebanon came overwhelmingly from Hezbollah, but also included the communist combatants of the National Resistance Front, which has mourned the loss of seven experienced fighters out of 184 battlefield deaths on the Lebanese side. Hezbollah fired several thousand rockets into northern Israel, including the city of Haifa, which caused light damage but constituted a huge psychological impact, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing south. Forty-two Israeli civilians were killed. This was in response to Israel's initial bombardment of central and southern Lebanon and, within a few days, Beirut. Significantly it was the national resistance on the ground against the Israeli invasion force that inflicted most casualties on the Israeli military, 120 of whom were killed. At the village of Qana in the south of Lebanon, 56 people died instantly -forty of them children - when the building they sought shelter in was hit by an Israeli precision-guided missile. Israel claimed Hezbollah had been firing rockets from or near the building. This was shown to be untrue. The same village, said to be a Hezbollah stronghold, had seen 150 inhabitants die in a similar attack in 1996. Israel justified these massacres in the same way that apartheid security forces explained similar assaults on Southern African frontline states, claiming the "terrorists" hide among the people. Lebanon's agony continued as Israel applied a punitive land, sea and air blockade. The United Nations (UN) had to plead with the Israeli government to allow a special corridor for emergency humanitarian supplies. Israel, whose founding-fathers pledged it would radiate as an inspirational "light unto the nations", displays the aggressive mentality of a corrupt colonial power; brutally drowning in blood and flames any resistance to its rule. To claim that Israel was responding to provocation is the cynical old ploy of pinning the blame on the victims. We saw plenty of that in apartheid South Africa. Investigations into the weapons Israel has used in Lebanon are being conducted by eminent geneticists. New and hitherto unknown injuries to corpses raise the possibility that Israel used "direct energy" weapons and chemical or biological weapons during the conflict.4 These also included suction and white phosphorous bombs used against civilian centres with ghastly results. Over one million American-made cluster bombs and bomblets were dropped on the south. Ninety percent of these were dropped in the last three days before the ceasefire, constituting a dormant lethal minefield.
Since the ceasefire, fifty-two Lebanese, the majority children, have been killed by these mines. "What we did was insane and monstrous," stated an Israeli commander, in an interview with an Israeli newspaper.5 The UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, labelled the cluster bomb attacks "completely immoral".6 An Amnesty International Report published findings that point to an Israeli policy of deliberate destruction of Lebanese civilian infrastructure during the onslaught on that country. "Israel's assertion that the attacks on the infrastructure were lawful is manifestly wrong. Many of the violations identified in our report are war crimes, including indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks," said Amnesty official Kate Gilmore.7 Israel's claim that it gave people ample warning to get out of areas it planned to bomb was seen to be an absolute sham, since escape routes along the road network had been effectively destroyed and Israel's aircraft fired on any vehicle on the move. It was mainly the families of the poor, the weak and disabled, unable to flee, who were killed while sheltering in their homes or nearby buildings or caught in the open. Amnesty found this a clear contravention of the conduct of war that forbids the deliberate targeting of civilians. Amnesty likewise criticised Hezbollah for firing missiles indiscriminately into Israel but made it perfectly clear that Israel's actions were totally overwhelming, excessive and disproportionate, and that Lebanon suffered catastrophic destruction.8 The celebrated Norwegian writer, Jostein Gaarder, regarded as a friend of the Jewish people, was so shocked he wrote: "It is time to learn a new lesson: We no longer recognise the state of Israel. We could not recognise the South African apartheid regime...We call child murderers 'child murderers'... We do not recognise the principle of a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye... We do not recognise the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st Century map of the Middle East."9 The Zionist Agenda The world struggles to understand the cause of the conflict. Talk of Israeli Jews being an endangered species is the standard Zionist line: the Jews escaping persecution in Europe began returning to Palestine at the end of the 19th Century to reclaim their biblical homeland. As the Zionist pioneers acquired land, and began building up the Jewish community, they were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, allegedly stemming from their inherent anti-Semitism. The settlers, so the story goes, were forced to defend themselves then, as now. In fact from the outset, Zionism was aimed at the dispossession and eviction of the indigenous Palestinian population so that Israel could become an exclusivist Jewish state. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund, usually from absentee Arab landlords and often by deception, was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs. The situation continues to this day. As the Palestinian people awoke to these intentions they quite naturally began resisting. At the end of the First World War and the collapse of the German-aligned Turkish Ottoman Empire - which had ruled much of the Middle East from the early 16th Century - the map of the region changed drastically. Palestine and Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia) both fell under British mandate rule in 1919, with Syria being awarded to France. Lebanon was created from Syrian territory by the French in 1920, which explains Syria's interest and influence in that country. Britain established kingdoms in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Transjordan. Anti-colonial struggles soon developed everywhere. In Palestine national consciousness sharpened against both the British mandate and the Zionist settlers. A courageous national uprising of the Palestinian people broke out from 1936 to 1939, and was mercilessly put down by British troops and Zionist militia. The Zionists had no hesitation in using terrorist tactics against both the Palestinians and later the British, whose policy interests vacillated between Arabs and Zionists. Nevertheless Britain gave decisive support to the Zionist project with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, seeing a Jewish homeland as a potential strategic buffer against the Arabs. Winston Churchill, then Britain's Colonial Secretary, made this clear in a 1921 statement: "Zionism is good for the Jews and good for the British Empire." This strategy was later spurred on by the increasing importance of the region as oilfields were discovered from Iraq to Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and the Cold War unfolded. International sympathy for the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust - certainly the most horrific act of genocide in modern history - flooding into Palestine after the Second World War, proved decisive in swinging the balance of power in favour of Zionism. Consequently in 1947 the UN decided on a Partition Plan - Resolution 181 -to create separate Arab and Jewish homelands. Approximately 56% of the former British Mandate territory was granted to the Jews and 44% to the Palestinians. Yet the latter population at 1,250,000 in 1948 was double that of the Jews, who up to that stage only owned 7% of the land. The Zionists had no hesitation in accepting the UN proposal - for the time being. The Palestinians, who were not consulted by the UN, rejected the proposal. They were naturally unwilling to surrender any of the land they had lived in for centuries to intruders from Europe. The USA put considerable pressure on Latin American states to vote in favour of the recognition of Israel by the UN at the time, when there were few African and Asian states represented in that august body. The vote was 33 in favour, 13 against with 10 states abstaining. The Palestinians were being made to pay a heavy price for the persecution of Jews in Europe. Although Israel cast itself in the image of the diminutive David facing the mighty Arab Goliath, the kingdoms of the Middle East were extremely weak and disunited and, despite their rhetoric, unable to assist the Palestinians. The Zionists claim that Israel had to face incredible odds to survive against the Arab "hordes". They refer to an invasion by five Arab armies. These are cited as Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria - all weak kingdoms or states under British and French influence. In fact Lebanon had no army whatsoever; the Iraqi's were mobilised only after the ceasefire; and Syrian and Egyptian forces were poorly organised and led. The only force that had seen action during the World War was the Jordanian Arab Legion -a redoubtable outfit but only two battalions strong. The latter's monarch, King Abdullah, seeking to hold on to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was involved in secret negotiations with the Zionists and later assassinated. In fact the Arab coalition failed to create a joint command, never entered that part of Palestine set aside for the Jewish state, and was hopelessly outmatched. Far from the Arab countries constituting a threat to Israel, it was precisely the Zionists that aimed to subjugate the Palestinians in particular and control the Arabs in general. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, made this perfectly clear when he stated: "The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British Mandate. The Jewish people have got another map, from the Nile to the Euphrates." In May 1948 he stated: "The Achilles heel of the Arab coalition is Lebanon. Muslim supremacy in Lebanon is artificial and can be easily overthrown... Smash Lebanon... establish a Christian state there... eliminate Transjordan... Syria will fall to us."10 After Israel's unilateral declaration of independence in May 1948 - and in the face of an Israeli attack on the Palestinian 44% of territory - the Arab forces advanced with the aim of protecting that section of the partition settlement set aside for the Palestinians. Israeli forces, equal in number to all the Arab forces put together and far better organised and equipped, prevailed. At the end of hostilities in 1949 they had gained 78% of what had once been historic Palestine. This constituted a monstrous land grab. ... continued"