Replies to post #457952 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[sortagreen]

They pick on the helpless and rail against Hamas.

At what point do we call them out for what they are?

[fuagf]

2010 - Was Israel A Mistake?

"‘Unsafe in own home’: Israeli settlers spread terror in South Hebron Hills"

Related: It would be true. If not Israel on an island in NY state, or in Uganda...
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173563386

Most all links i saw are paywalled. This article, perhaps since i once had
a subscription, i fluked getting in it's entirety. My access is denied now.

By The Daily Dish
June 9, 2010

So far, no luck on anti-Zionist columnists. And being critical of Israel does not mean you're an anti-Zionist. But a reader did note this 2006 column .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/17/AR2006071701154_pf.html .. by Richard Cohen. Money quote:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

I was thinking recently how a Burkean [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke ] could defend the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. I'm not sure it's possible - which may say more about the limits of Burkean conservatism than Zionism. Although Jews obviously dwelled in Palestine for as long as anyone, their numbers were few in recent centuries until the grand experiment. Zionism began as an idea, another nineteenth century "ism", and was, like most radical ideas, controversial among Jews and Gentiles everywhere in its inception and since. It was radically utopian, an almost text book example of imposing an abstract concept - a settled Jewish nation after so long a diaspora - on a land already embedded with an existing geographic, demographic, religious and cultural reality.

Maybe you could see the emergence of Israel as a Burkean consequence of the Holocaust. But most Zionists are offended by this idea, and it seems to me that this makes sense as a Burkean defense of Israel for Europeans, but has little resonance for Jewish Palestinians, Arab Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Persians, Kurds, and others more directly affected. I remain deeply committed to the idea of Israel, largely because the Shoah proved beyond any doubt that there was no security for Jews as a nation without a homeland. But the Burkean in me cries out prudentially against trying to coerce history - and tradition and settled populations - in this radical and sudden way.

The lesson of this, it seems to me, is not, however, that Israel should be abandoned. The lesson is that its leaders and people need to be sensitive to history, not embittered by it, however justified the embitterment might be. A Burkean could just about defend the creation and endurance of Israel (ending it now would be an even greater rupture than its beginning) but he should also be utterly unsurprised by reaction, resistance and resentment. Conservatives of all people should foresee this. When the lives and homes of hundreds of thousands are permanently and suddenly altered without their permission and against their religious beliefs, they will react. When families are still turfed out of their homes to make way for strangers of a different religious background, rage is a perfectly defensible, and rational, response. History matters, as Cohen explained:

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.

My additional point would be that this resistance to the other encroaching on sacred ground is not a unique feature of the Arab psyche. (It is, however, horribly compounded by Islam's fetish for religious exclusivity on its own territory. This insistence on a religious monopoly on actual regions is much more repellent, it seems to me, than the Jewish people's search for a small place of their own around their historic capital. Israel, after all, does not ban Islam; Saudi Arabia bans Judaism. Between the relative land-claims of Judaism and the totalist land-claims of Islam, I'm with the Jews, both proportionally and as a matter of simple equity.)

But it is prudentially idiotic for Israel to act as if Arab resentment has no legitimacy or no justification. It is tone-deaf to create a Jewish state in the middle of the Middle East and then behave as if it had been there for ever. Israel is not France or Egypt, or even Canada. It is a young and contested idea on ancient, contested land, whose original inhabitants did not all just disappear in a biological holocaust, as in America.

It does not seem to me therefore nuts to urge a certain respect and tact from Israel toward its neighbors and the populations it displaced - even when it is not reciprocated. I'm not going to go into the long and awful history of the way in which the Arab world has treated Israel from the get-go, but I am saying that to add to the original proposition an ongoing, unstoppable colonization of a further swathe of land won in wartime is obviously against the interests of the Jewish state, and compounds and deepens the resentment from 1948 and 1967 and 1974. Not to see this context, indeed to claim that any and all grievances against Israel's existence - and, much more significantly, ongoing expansion - are entirely a function of Jew-hatred is to lose any nuance in diplomacy or human relations.

That's where the Israelis have lost me and some others. It was revealed first by how petulantly even the Kadima-led government responded to Obama's election. The Gaza war, conceptually defensible, was practically gruesome (Hamas and Israel share that blame), but the unapologetic, almost triumphalist and revengeful manner in which it was conducted and defended was and is shocking, as is the contempt for the wounded and dead on the Mavi Marmara. When your heart is hardened against the corpses of children buried in rubble, it is hardened too much. And the job of a real friend is to point this out, not to enable it.

Keep holding the mirror, Mr president.

(Photo: Israeli soldiers (top C) and Israeli settlers (top L) watch from a hilltop as Palestinians villages try to put out fires after fields were set ablaze in the village of Asira al-Qiblyia in the northern West Bank on June 2, 2010. According to Palestinian villagers, Jewish settlers from the nearby Yitzhar settlement set on fire their olive and wheat fields. By Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/06/was-israel-a-mistake/186093/

[fuagf]

‘A new Nakba’: settler violence forces Palestinians out of West Bank villages

"‘Unsafe in own home’: Israeli settlers spread terror in South Hebron Hills
"Israel's Supreme Court strikes down disputed law that limited court oversight
"Why Palestinians Aren’t Joining Israel’s Protests
"The U.S.-Israel Relationship No Longer Makes Sense
"Israel voters message to American voters, and to Netanyahu -- Israel Is Somewhere It’s Never Been Before
"Netanyahu fires defense minister, sparking mass protests in Israel""""""

Communities who have clung on for decades are leaving their homes in the face of rising attrition by Israelis

* Israel and Hamas at war – live updates

Bethan McKernan in Masafer Yatta, West Bank
Wed 1 Nov 2023 04.52 AEDT
Last modified on Fri 3 Nov 2023 07.37 AEDT


Zanuta residents load their belongings on to a pickup truck after deciding they have lost the fight to remain on their land. Photograph: Bethan McKernan/The Guardian

Life in Zanuta, a Palestinian village atop a windy ridge in the desolate south Hebron hills, deep in the occupied West Bank, has never been easy. The community are mostly herders who raise goats and sheep through the barren landscape’s scorching summers and freezing winters, and who have steadfastly refused to leave their homes despite the mounting difficulties posed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers on one hand and radical Israeli settlers on the other.

But after weeks of intense settler violence in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, Zanuta’s 150 residents have made a collective decision to leave. Armed settlers – some in reservist army uniforms, some covering their faces – have begun breaking into their homes at night, beating up adults, destroying and stealing belongings, and terrifying the children.

After decades of a desperate fight to cling on to their land, the community has decided they have lost.

On Monday, men and women cried as they dismantled their homes and haphazardly packed solar panels, animal feed and personal belongings on to pickup trucks. The noise of the demolition drowned out the bleating from the animal pens and threw up dust and debris that tore at the eyes and throat.

“It is a new Nakba,” said Issa Ahmad Baghdad, 71, referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 after the creation of Israel. “My family are going to Rafat. But we don’t know anyone there. We don’t know what to tell the children.”

[YouTube of embedded] - Palestinians forced out of West Bank villages by settler violence – video

Israel targets Hamas tunnels amid hopes more aid will reach civilians in Gaza
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/hamas-reports-clashes-with-israeli-troops-deep-inside-gaza-as-ground-offensive-expands

In the Gaza Strip, where Israel has launched a campaign to destroy Hamas, the militant group that killed 1,400 people on its rampage through southern Israel, trapped civilians cannot leave; in the West Bank, they are being forced from their homes.

Masafer Yatta, a collection of shepherding hamlets including Zanuta, is in area C, the sparsely populated 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control and under threat of annexation. Palestinian water cisterns, solar panels, roads and buildings here are frequently demolished on the grounds that they do not have building permits, which are nearly impossible to obtain, while surrounding illegal Israeli settlements flourish.

Israeli settlers herding sheep .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/20/land-beyond-road-forbidden-israeli-settler-shepherds-displacing-palestinians .. had in effect taken control of 10% of area C in about five years, according to research by Kerem Navot, an NGO monitoring settler activity, but in the last year alone, about 110,000 dunams, or 110 sq km (42 sq miles), of the West Bank has been annexed by settlers on herding outposts. By way of comparison, the entirety of the built-up Israeli settlement areas constructed since the occupation began in 1967 cover only 80 sq km.

IMAGE

“We have had hard times in the village since the settlers started the Mitarim farm across the valley three years ago. It has been harder to take the sheep out, and the settler young men destroy things like crops, or steal sheep, or call the army to come and harass us. But now they are coming into our homes. My daughters are terrified,” said Amin Hamed al-Hudarat, 41, as he began to cry.

“I had thought we might need to leave before, but we did not expect it to happen like this. I can’t believe that by tomorrow I am going to leave my home. We are going to camp on the outskirts of Deira, but I don’t know what will happen next, what I will do for work, what we will do with the sheep. My whole life is in Zanuta.

“The community is breaking up. I don’t know when I will see my neighbours to chat and tell stories and drink coffee again.”


Members of three generations of the Baghdad family in Zanuta. Photograph: Bethan McKernan/The Guardian

After years of legal battles, Israel’s supreme court ruled last May in favour of the IDF that a 3,000-hectare (7,410-acre) area of Masafer Yatta would remain a military training zone, known as Firing Zone 918, a ruling illegal under international law and one of the single biggest expulsion decisions since the occupation began. Since then, the army and Israeli settlers have steadily increased the pressure to try to force the Palestinian community in the Firing Zone, as well as those living in dozens of nearby villages, to leave.

Demolitions of Palestinian houses, roads and infrastructure have increased since the court’s ruling, while shepherds say they are regularly told by the army to leave grazing land, which is then taken over by settlers, or settlers chase them away. Water and animal-feed deliveries, as well as visitors from charities and leftwing Israeli activists who used to help deter settler violence, have been turned back by the army. Since 7 October, settlers have begun beating and using live fire against the activists, as well as Palestinians.

New checkpoints have completely isolated villages such as Jimba, making it difficult for residents to leave. Palestinians are held up and questioned by soldiers sometimes for hours at a time, and dozens of unlicensed cars have been confiscated, forcing residents to use donkeys instead.


Amr and Fatima Mahrig, 56 and 20 from the Palestinian village Khirbet ar Ratheem tell of harrassment. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

Under this campaign of attrition, some families had already made the difficult decision to leave, most of them for the nearby town of Yatta. During the Guardian’s visit to the area a month ago, two families in Khirbet ar-Ratheem, near the Asael settlement, insisted they would not leave, despite the pressure; today, they have gone.

IMAGE - 121+ Palestinians killed in West Bank since October 7.

Now that entire villages such as Zanuta have decided to leave, it is feared there will be a domino effect in the area, said Nasser Nawadja, a field researcher from the village of Susiya for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. He has been beaten and arrested many times during his work.

“Settler violence is now worse than ever. Sometimes, they are wearing reservist uniforms, and we don’t know who is the army and who is a settler any more,” he said.

“The people in Tuba were given a 24-hour ultimatum to leave, or the settlers said they would come back and kill them. That was on Saturday. We don’t know what will happen next.”

Palestinian PM: we will not run Gaza without solution for West Bank
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/29/palestinian-pm-we-will-not-run-gaza-without-solution-for-west-bank

According to B’Tselem, in the last three weeks 858 Palestinians from 32 different communities, and 13 entire communities in total, have been forcibly displaced. The numbers increase every day.

The international community, including the US, has issued strong statements to the Israeli government that it must “take measures to protect Palestinians from attacks by Israeli extremist settlers”. “These attacks are unacceptable, those responsible need to be stopped and held accountable,” a communique from the state department in Washington said on Monday.

However, Palestinians and Israeli activists say they have little faith in the Israeli authorities. According to UN data from September, in four out of five communities where residents had filed police complaints about settler violence, only 6% knew of any follow-up.


Remains of the displaced village Khirbet Ghuwein al Fauqa in Masafer Yattah. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

For some, it is too little, too late. In Zanuta on Monday, pickup trucks trundled down the dirt track to the main road, full to the brim; they came back empty a few hours later to collect more belongings from the dying community. Three Israeli soldiers stood next to an armoured patrol vehicle at the turnoff to the main road, silently watching.

“I don’t know when I will be able to come back again,” said Hudarat. “I think I am saying goodbye to my home for ever.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/west-bank-palestinian-villages-israeli-army-settlers