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MUST A Native-American recognize the right of the United States of America to exist?

Interesting question. The USA was established by Europeans who invaded a continent that did not belong to them, eradicated most of the indigenous population (the "Red Indians") in a prolonged campaign of genocide, and exploited the labor of millions of slaves who had been brutally torn from their lives in Africa. Not to mention what is going on today. Must a Native-American - or indeed anybody at all - recognize the right of such a state to exist?

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[ 17 February 2007: Message edited by: oreobw ]

[ 17 February 2007: Message edited by: oreobw ]

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"WE ARE ready for the next war," a reserve soldier told a TV reporter this week, on the scene of a brigade-size maneuver on the Golan Heights.

What war? Against whom? About what? This was not stated, and not even asked. The soldier saw it as self-evident that war will break out soon, and it seems that he did not particularly care against whom.

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When I was a child, a popular argument in favor of the Israeli "liberation," i.e., occupation, of the Palestinian territories was its being a blessing for the Palestinians themselves. "When we took it over," I was told at school, "there were just a couple of cars in the entire West Bank. And look how many they have now!" Indeed, in the first decades of the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian standard of living was on the rise – not because of Israeli investments (Israel never invested a cent in Palestinian welfare or infrastructure), but mainly because Israel exploited the Palestinians as a cheap labor force, and even a cheap labor force gets paid.

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PATRIOTISM," SAID Dr. Samuel Johnson over 200 years ago, "is the last refuge of a scoundrel." If we substitute racism for patriotism, then we have a perfect match with the Esterina Tartman affair.

She could have been a popular member of the Knesset. She belongs to a respected Oriental family (The Shabtai family, seven generations in the country). She is pretty and looks very much younger than her 50 years. She is the mother of four. She has recovered after a severe road accident.

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The Book of Esterina

[ 04 March 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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The young Palestinian man was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt on a cold winter morning as he walked in front of heavily armed Israeli soldiers on a door-to-door sweep of three apartments in a crowded West Bank neighborhood.

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IF GOD wills, even a broomstick will shoot. That is an old Yiddish adage. One could add now: If God wills, even Olmert can sometimes tell the truth.

The truth, according to the Prime Minister's testimony before the Inquiry Commission headed by Judge Vinograd that was leaked to the media yesterday, is that this was not a spontaneous reaction to the capture of the two soldiers, but a war planned a long time ago. We said so right from the start.

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NOT ONLY the Palestinians must be breathing a deep sigh of relief after the swearing in of the Palestinian National Unity Government. We Israelis have good reason to do the same.

This event is a great blessing, not only for them, but also for us - if indeed we are interested in a peace that will put an end to the historic conflict.

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Inshallah

[ 18 March 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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INCREDIBLE! In Palestinian schoolbooks, there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence of Israel even in the 1967 borders! They say that the "Zionist gangs" stole the country from the Arabs! That's how they poison the minds of their children!

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Originally posted by CMOT Dibbler:

Indeed, in the first decades of the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian standard of living was on the rise – not because of Israeli investments (Israel never invested a cent in Palestinian welfare or infrastructure), but mainly because Israel exploited the Palestinians as a cheap labor force, and even a cheap labor force gets paid.

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In retrospect, those look like the "good old days, no"?

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CAN A pantheress turn into a pussycat? Impossible, a zoologist would say. But last week, we saw it happen with our own eyes.

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RECENTLY, THE CHIEF of the Shin Bet declared that the "Israeli Arabs", a fifth of Israel's population, constitute a danger to the state.

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AT THIS moment, negotiations on a prisoner exchange are in full swing.

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Monday's paper gave us a small reason to be happy. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for the second time in just a few weeks. Reporting the meeting – described by Palestinian sources as "fruitless" – Ha'aretz noted:

"An IDF lieutenant-colonel also attended the meeting. The officer briefed the Palestinians on the plan to remove IDF roadblocks in the West Bank. According to the officer, the IDF has so far removed 44 roadblocks. He added that the IDF was planning to remove an additional 17 in the next stage of the plan. The sources said that the Palestinian delegation requested the removal of more roadblocks, and that Olmert expressed his willingness."

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[ 19 April 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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IN HEBREW legend, the bed of Sodom is a symbol of evil.

The Bible tells how God decided to obliterate Sodom because of the wickedness of its people (Genesis, 18). The legend gives us an example of this wickedness: the special bed for visitors. When a stranger came to Sodom, he was put in this bed. If he was too tall, his legs were shortened. If he was too short, his limbs were stretched to fit.

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ON THE MORROW of Independence Day, a newspaper reported that an Arab child had refused to stand up while the national anthem was sung. The paper was furious. I was not. In fact, it raised a childhood experience from the depths of my memory.

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Uri Avnery accuses the supporters of the One State solution of forcefully imposing the facts onto the "Bed of Sodom" (22 April, 2007). He seems to regard these people best as day dreamers that do not understand the political reality around them and are stuck in a perpetual state of wishful thinking. We are all veteran comrades in the Israeli Left and therefore it is quite possible that in our moments of despair we fall into the trap of hallucinating and even fantasizing while ignoring the unpleasant reality around us.

And therefore the metaphor of the Bed of Sodom may even be fitting for lashing out at those who are inspired by the South African model in their search for a solution in Palestine. But in this case it is a small cot of Sodom compared to the king-size bed onto which Gush Shalom and other similar members of the Zionist Left insist on squeezing their two states' solution. The South African model is young - in fact hardly a year has passed since it was seriously considered - the formula of two states is sixty years old: an abortive and dangerous illusion that enabled Israel to continue its occupation without facing any significant criticism from the international community.

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I HAVE BEEN to many demonstrations in Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square, even when it was still called "Kings of Israel Square".

I was at the legendary "Demonstration of the 400 thousand" after the Sabra and Shatila massacre (actually, there were around 200 thousand, which is still an impressive number). I was there when Yitzhak Rabin was shot. I was there when masses of young people sat on the ground, weeping silently and lighting candles for the murdered leader (It was said at the time that the young generation had finally woken up. But the young generation dried its tears and went on its way together with the cameras). I was there when 100 thousand streamed to the square quite spontaneously and erupted in an outburst of joy after Ehud Barak won the elections and delivered Israel from the nightmare of Benjamin Netanyahu (even if many of them regretted it later).

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THIS IS not a duel to the death of gladiators in a Roman arena.

Ilan Pappe and I are partners in the battle against the occupation. I respect his courage. We stand side by side in a joint struggle, but we advocate two sharply opposing goals.

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Zionism was born out of two logical and justified impulses. The first was the desire to find a safe shore for the Jews of East and Central Europe, after decades of anti-semitic persecutions - and possibly also a premonition that there was worse to come. The second impulse was to redefine the Jewish religion as a national movement, under the influence of "The Spring of the Peoples" in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

When the leaders of the movement decided, for reasons which cannot be detailed here, that the only territory where these two impulses can be fulfilled is Palestine, where nearly a million people already lived - this movement turned into a colonial project.

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[ 17 May 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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The Winograd committee of inquiry is not a part of the solution. It is a part of the problem.

Now, after the first excitement caused by the publication of the partial report has died down, it is possible to evaluate it. The conclusion is that it has done much more harm than good.

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THE BLOODY battles that have erupted around the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp near Tripoli in Lebanon remind us that the refugee problem has not disappeared. On the contrary, 60 years after the "Nakba", the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, it is again the center of attention throughout the world.

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NOTHING SUCCEEDS like success," says a typical American adage. The Israeli version, also typical, is: "Nothing succeeds like failure."

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"REST HAS come to the tired / Repose to the toiler / A pale night covers / The fields of the Jezreel valley / Dew below and moon above / From Kibbutz Bet-Alfa to Moshav Nahalal…"

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Look what I found, this is incredible:

[ 16 June 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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WHAT HAPPENS when one and a half million human beings are imprisoned in a tiny, arid territory, cut off from their compatriots and from any contact with the outside world, starved by an economic blockade and unable to feed their families?

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ON MAY 25, 1967, twelve days before the Six-day war, I published in Haolam Hazeh, the news magazine of which I was the editor, an article entitled "Nasser Has Fallen Into a Trap". That sounded crazy, because, at the time, all Israel was in the grip of mortal fear.
A few months earlier, I was...

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EHUD OLMERT is the opposite of Midas, King of Phrygia. Everything the king touched turned into gold, according to Greek legend. Everything Olmert touches turns into lead. And that is no legend.

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Israel frees funds for Abbas

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel agreed on Sunday to transfer several hundred million dollars to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's emergency government, a measure designed to undercut Hamas Islamists controlling Gaza.

The money, some of the Palestinian tax revenues withheld by Israel since Hamas won election in 2006, is part of an initial package of benefits to bolster Abbas that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is likely to announce at a summit in Egypt on Monday.

Israel wants to isolate Hamas economically, diplomatically and militarily in the Gaza Strip, where the Islamist group seized control more than a week ago, while allowing funds to flow to Abbas's emergency administration in the West Bank.

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Olmert promises to release 250 prisoners SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - Israel's prime minister promised Monday to free 250 Palestinian prisoners and promised to improve life in the West Bank in an attempt to boost Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas' takeover in Gaza.

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Five years after His Highness G.W. Bush – president of the United States of America, czar of Afghanistan, emperor of Iraq, democratizer of the Middle East, etc., etc. – launched his "Road Map for Peace in the Middle East," announcing a Palestinian state by 2005, the Israeli public has a new pastime. The public discussion in Israel now revolves around "Three states for two peoples?": that is, should the Jewish state use the Hamas coup in Gaza to separate the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and deal with two Palestinian states, or should Israel keep the two districts connected? Roughly, the right wing supports the former track – based on arguments like "divide and rule," "two states are easier to manipulate than one," etc. – whereas the left wing tends to the latter option, remembering Israel's obligation in the Oslo accords to treat the two districts as one political entity and airing arguments like "one enemy is better than two," "two states would compete with each other in hatred," etc.

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THERE NEVER was a darker Middle East summit meeting. The darkest there can be.

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NOT SINCE the resurrection of Jesus Christ has there been such a miracle: a dead body buried in a cave has come to life again.

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A DETECTIVE trying to solve a crime always asks "cui bono?" (who would profit?) When we try to solve the crime called the Second Lebanon War, this question must head the list.

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A Stupid War

[ 15 July 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

He is a valuable asset in that he does perform the job well but to create a bible out of his views; to infer what he has to say is the ALL KNOWING TRUTH is pure folly. His job, simply put, is to show everything wrong and negative going on in Israeli politics, in the Israeli armed froces and in Israeli civil life.

One can therefore easily get the impression that nothing right, nothing constructive, nothing positive ever evolves or takes hold in Israeli society, with respect to Palestinian Israeli relations except for Uri Avnery's writings.

After the second intifada, I checked the internet to see if Israelis were indeed interested in peace with their Palestinian neighbours.

I found 7 Jewish Israeli sites with the purpose of promoting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

I found NONE coming from Palestinians.

Recently, the Israeli Government has done some peace promotion in releasing Palestinian prisoners; in releasing funds to the Abbas' Government.

Israel does have a record of one-sided peace promotion.

Apart from the Oslo Agreements, the Palestinan record on promoting peace is truly sparse. Where are one-sided Palestinian initiatives to fight extremist groups? There never have been, and, for now, it looks like they never will be.

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I found 7 Jewish Israeli sites with the purpose of promoting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

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I found 7 Jewish Israeli sites with the purpose of promoting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

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IN A classical American western, the difference is as glaring as the midday sun in Colorado: there are Good Guys and Bad Guys. The good ones are the settlers, who are making the prairie bloom. The bad ones are the Indians, who are blood-thirsty savages. The ultimate hero is the cowboy, tough, humane, with a big revolver or two, ready to defend himself at all times.

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LAST WEEK, James Wolfensohn gave a long interview to Haaretz. He poured out his heart and summed up, with amazing openness, his months as special envoy of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN (the "Quartet") in this country - the same job entrusted now to Tony Blair. The interview could have been entitled "A Warning to Tony".

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I can't imagine what the Palestinians are going through. They're utterly impoverished, a very large percentage are suffering from malnutrition, post-traumatic stress disorder and despair are omnipresent, they don't have air conditioners or even access to significant amounts of water, they're living in the densest population centres in the world, their communities lack a functioning infrastructure, their medical facilities are overwhelmed and under-resourced, they're subjected to all the humiliations and murderous abuses of the occupation, and now they're having to deal with temperatures like these. And the CBC is focusing on Israeli air conditioner use. As usual, in our major media the visceral horror under which Palestinians struggle to survive is trumped by stories about Israeli inconvenience.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/07/28/heat-wave.html

[ 28 July 2007: Message edited by: Michael Nenonen ]

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THE KING of Siam knew how to deal with domestic opponents: he would present them with a white elephant.

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Originally posted by Zaklamont:
All Hail The Israeli Resistance is the world seen through the eyes of a man whose dogma is to criticize the State of Israel and its policies

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I AM A PALESTINIAN from Nazareth, a citizen of Israel and was, until last month, a member of the Israeli parliament.

But now, in an ironic twist reminiscent of France's Dreyfus affair — in which a French Jew was accused of disloyalty to the state — the government of Israel is accusing me of aiding the enemy during Israel's failed war against Lebanon in July.

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ON THESE hot, sticky days of the Israeli summer, it is pleasant to feel the coolness of Oslo, even if the visit is only virtual.

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Not long ago, I claimed that Israel is employing genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. I hesitated before using this very charged term and yet decided to adopt it. The responses I received indicated unease in using such a term. I rethought the term for a while, but concluded with even stronger conviction: it is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip.

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[ 15 August 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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For about 25 minutes, they behaved liked lords of the land: One man, followed later by a young guy, descended from Mitzpeh Yair, one of the unauthorized outposts in the southern Mt. Hebron area, and prevented a United Nations jeep from traveling. UN directives prohibit leaving the vehicle in such cases, in order to avoid an escalation of friction. And so we, three Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) staffers and two Haaretz journalists, were forced to watch them demonstrate their lordliness from inside the car: The older one blocked the vehicle, in the middle of the unpaved road, with his body. Using hand movements, he ordered the engine shut down. When that didn't happen, he jumped on the hood and then on the roof and back on the hood, and finally lay back on the windshield and played with the wipers, taking them apart. The driver progressed slowly down the track, and the man leaned back on the windshield with force, until it broke and shards went into the driver's eyes.

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INTRODUCING Miss Calculatsia, that fashionable foreigner, the new star in Israeli discourse.

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Every few weeks some international body issues a report directly linking the policy of restricted movement imposed by Israel on the occupied territories and the state of economic deterioration there. The report is often accompanied by a warning that the situation cannot persist. Last week it was the turn of the World Bank to issue a cautionary report, entitled "Movement and Access Restrictions in the West Bank: Uncertainty and Inefficiency in the Palestinian Economy."

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The donkey kicked angrily with his back leg and refused to budge. More accurately, he refused to turn around and climb back up the sand dunes down which he had reluctantly agreed to go only half an hour earlier, hitched to a cart bearing a heavy motor for a water pump.

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GAZA CITY (AFP) - Israeli soldiers shot and killed two armed Palestinians heading for a kibbutz after infiltrating Israel on Saturday, during a surge in clashes that has left up to eight Palestinians dead.

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SOON AFTER coming to power, Ariel Sharon started to commission public opinion polls. He kept the results to himself. This week, a reporter of Israel's TV Channel 10 succeeded in obtaining some of them.

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Not only are some 1.5 million Gaza residents living like prisoners in the largest jail in the world, but they are also subjected to daily attacks by Israel that leave them with more dead to bury. Two children were killed on Tuesday, and not only those suspected of firing Qassam rockets. And if there's no shelling, there's a short-term incursion, and dozens of people are arrested and undergo a day-long campaign of humiliation.

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IN THE year 701 BC, the Assyrian king Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem. The Bible records the words which the Assyrian general, Rabshakeh, addressed to Hezekiah, king of Judah: "Now, behold, thou trusteth upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it: so is Pharaoh, king of Egypt, unto all that trust on him."

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In the most recent Israel Defense Forces raids in the Gaza Strip, during which dozens of people were detained for interrogation by the Shin Bet, the security service adopted a procedure unknown in recent years: The detainees were forced to undress in the presence of another detainee and a soldier or a member of the Shin Bet and then be interrogated while wearing a disposable, blue paper overall. This emerged in cumulative testimony from the Strip. In the West Bank, apparently, the color of the overall is white.

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[ 03 September 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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"A demonstration without tear gas and stun grenades is no demonstration," joked one of the demonstrators.

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WHEN MY friends fall prey to despair, I show them a piece of painted concrete, which I bought in Berlin.

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It's noon on Thursday and Khaled, a lawyer, noticed immediately: The older soldier checking IDs at the Za'atra checkpoint - south of Nablus - is being nice to people. The soldier looked inside the car, saw the three children, smiled and gave them candy.

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The five daily prayers helped Nader E'bayat calculate how many days had passed during his first weeks of detention at the interrogation division of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service in Bethlehem. Toward the end, when he was transferred to the interrogation cells at the Bituniya headquarters, he started to lose count. Altogether, E'bayat spent 47 days in detention, from June 30 to August 15. He was released on the order of the Bethlehem magistrate's court after no evidence was presented to prove accusations that he had participated in Hamas' operative force in the West Bank.

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THE DIVISION of the Palestinian territories into a "Hamastan" in the Gaza Strip and a "Fatahland" in the West Bank is a disaster.

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Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station would dismiss as feminine and sentimental the view that peoples don't win wars. Like other Arab analysts, they regard attacking Israeli civilians and engaging the IDF in fierce battles as an Arab victory. But where's the victory for the 1,000 Lebanese the Israeli army has killed? Where's the victory in a million people fleeing homes that were bombed and destroyed? Are such losses worthwhile just to demonstrate that a guerrilla group can entangle a regular army and expose such an Israeli weakness?

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"But look what Hamas is doing in Gaza." That is the standard response in the West Bank to reports about the offensive being waged by the Palestinian Authority (PA) against Hamas activists. And from Hamas men in Gaza one can still hear that the beating of detainees and the forcible repression of demonstrations and meetings are the result of errors of some individuals, not orders from above, despite the fact that the "errors" are continuing. "The error of individual, in contradiction to policy" is how a senior official in a PA security force characterized, in speaking to Haaretz, reports of the torture of Hamas detainees.

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On Monday night, the Defense Ministry telephoned the Israeli liaison office for the Gaza Strip and delivered surprising news: Despite lengthy prior coordination, civilians would not be allowed to leave the strip through the Erez and Nitzana crossings.

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TODAY IS Yom Kippur, and almost automatically my thoughts, like those of everybody else who was around at the time, go back 34 years, to that Yom Kippur.

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A group of prominent Israeli academics and writers have urged the government to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas, the militant group in control of Gaza.

In a petition, they said this would help bring an end to the suffering of Israelis and of Palestinians.

Internationally-acclaimed authors Amos Oz, David Grossman and AB Yehoshua were among the signatories.

Israel rejected the petition, saying a group dedicated to Israel's destruction could not be a partner for any talks.

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A woman chatting idly in Ramallah on Sunday said dismissively: "The High Court of Justice's decision to move the separation fence in Bil'in proves nothing about the effectiveness of the popular Palestinian-Israeli struggle. Israel needs it to portray itself as a democracy."

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A RESPECTED American paper posted a scoop this week: Vice-President Dick Cheney, the King of Hawks, has thought up a Machiavellian scheme for an attack on Iran. Its main point: Israel will start by bombing an Iranian nuclear installation, Iran will respond by launching missiles at Israel, and this will serve as a pretext for an American attack on Iran.

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A year ago, Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi was diagnosed with a malignant growth in his stomach. Born in 1919, Abdel Shafi had been one of the founders of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964, the head of the Palestinian-Jordanian delegation to the Madrid Conference in 1991 and one of Yasser Arafat's harshest critics. He was advised to seek medical treatment abroad or in Israel - his name gained him an exit visa without delay. Abdel Shafi, the surgeon who had studied medicine in Beirut and worked as a physician in Jaffa until 1948, rejected the suggestions and said he trusted the doctors in Gaza.

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THERE ARE books that change people's consciousness and change history. Some tell a story, like Harriet Beech Stowe's 1851 "Uncle Tom's Cabin", which gave a huge impetus to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Others take the form of a political treatise, like Theodor Herzl's "Der Judenstaat", which gave birth to the Zionist movement. Or they can be scientific in nature, like Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species", which changed the way humanity sees itself. And perhaps political satire, too, can shake the world, like "1984" by George Orwell.

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I think there are 3 main myths that inform mainstream Israeli Jewish society. A lot of them still believe, because that’s the way they have been educated, that Palestine had been empty when the Jewish settlers came there in the late 19th century. There is still a feeling there that basically the Palestinian inhabitants of Palestine are either a nuisance or newcomers, or irrelevant. They are an obstacle, but not people with rights or indigenous rights.

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The hearing for three Palestinian minors in a military court in the West Bank went quickly several days ago: Their lawyer pleaded guilty to the charges immediately after the indictment was read, and on the basis of the admission they were sentenced to a number of months in prison.

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Originally posted by I AM WOMAN:
It's not just the U.S and Canada that were colonized by Europeans, so were Central & South America (by the Spanish & Portuguese) and Australia as well.

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