Israel and Gaza Settlements - Legal or not?

[MHz]

Being kicked out on your ass by your own God is not something that should be overlooked.
The countries you mentioned are contend to watch Israel implode.
If you want to focus on somebody who hates them try looking at who voted to send them there after polls already showed it would start a conflict. Who were the ones who voted to put the Jews in a frying pan after they had just suffered massive persecution in Europe. That would be the US, Britain, France and Canada more or less.

 

[Goober]

Being kicked out on your ass by your own God is not something that should be overlooked.
The countries you mentioned are contend to watch Israel implode.
If you want to focus on somebody who hates them try looking at who voted to send them there after polls already showed it would start a conflict. Who were the ones who voted to put the Jews in a frying pan after they had just suffered massive persecution in Europe. That would be the US, Britain, France and Canada more or less.

Are you and Jbeee related - Both of you avoid hard questions - If they are to difficult I will rephrase and submit them one at a time - would that be easier for you to answer?

 

[MHz]

No.
You already got your answer. Of course Israel would just say it was under attack even though all the 'action' was outside their borders. lol What is that called again ... pre-emptive war, another war crime.

 

[Goober]

No.
You already got your answer. Of course Israel would just say it was under attack even though all the 'action' was outside their borders. lol What is that called again ... pre-emptive war, another war crime.

No I have not received an answer - preemptive war is not a war crime - I may be in error so show me where this is listed as a War Crime

 

[darkbeaver]

Being kicked out on your ass by your own God is not something that should be overlooked.
The countries you mentioned are contend to watch Israel implode.
If you want to focus on somebody who hates them try looking at who voted to send them there after polls already showed it would start a conflict. Who were the ones who voted to put the Jews in a frying pan after they had just suffered massive persecution in Europe. That would be the US, Britain, France and Canada more or less.

I believe the main push to Israel was the Zionist international. No Zionist saw any frying pan in the Holy land, quite the opposite I think. It was free pickings once the British had been bombed out. Accordingly there was Zionist pressure on those above mentioned countries to restrict immigration further thickening the flow of Jewish refugees into Palestine.

 

[darkbeaver]

No I have not received an answer - preemptive war is not a war crime - I may be in error so show me where this is listed as a War Crime

Pearl Harbour?

 

[MHz]

No I have not received an answer - preemptive war is not a war crime - I may be in error so show me where this is listed as a War Crime

"A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the 'supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.'"

Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes? | World | AlterNet

The difference in punishment even has the same length of rope.
Israel is in violation of the UN mandate that created them. The international court could null and void that document, say good-bye to free rent.

 

[Goober]

"A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the 'supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.'"

Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes? | World | AlterNet

The difference in punishment even has the same length of rope.
Israel is in violation of the UN mandate that created them. The international court could null and void that document, say good-bye to free rent.

MHZAgain and again you make statements that you cannot answer - make allegations that Pre Emptive strikes are a War crime - and again and again no answers but gibberish - Do you have some physco aversion to answering questions? Un Charter is Not the World Court buddy O

 

[MHz]

Follow along, from Wiki,

Legality

Further information: War of aggression, Jus ad bellum, and UN Charter
There is some question as to the legality of this doctrine under international law. Article 2, Section 4 of the U.N. Charter is generally considered to be 'jus cogens', or a peremptory norm which cannot be violated. It bars the threat or use of force against any state in the absence of an acute and imminent actual threat. At the same time, however, Article 51 clearly permits self defense. The tension between these two principles is evident in the doctrine of preemptive war, which claims to be defensive, yet does not come in response to an attack."


The court they take you to before they hang you , lol

Sources of International Law are the maeteria and processes out of which the rules and principles regulating the international community developed. They have been influenced by a range of political and legal theories. During the 20th century, it was recognised by legal positivists that a sovereign state could limit its authority to act by consenting to an agreement according to the principle pacta sunt servanda. This consensual view of international law was reflected in the 1920 Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice, and preserved in Article 7 of the 1946 Statute of the International Court of Justice."
International law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Remember how bad it turned out for Saddam when he pre-empted Kuwait,? Notice how bad it has turned out for the US in Iraq and Afghanistan? Notice how bad it has turbed out for Israel (being up on war-crimes charges and such?

Goober you should be cheering this process on .... when they are found innocent then I will have to be quiet, that alone should be worth the risk.

 

[ironsides]

You really are going to have to change that 'no party affiliation'. Pretty hard to misunderstand who is wrecking the peace talks ..... again.

"Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here, this place will be an inseparable part of the State of Israel for eternity," Netanyahu said in the Gush Etzion enclave.

Palestinians: Netanyahu's claim to West Bank destroys peace efforts - Haaretz - Israel News

Sure a sign that no one is going to give an inch on this issue. There will only be one conclusion some day.

 

[earth_as_one]

EAOAnd what about the Jews that were forced out of Arab Countries - Also the Arabs that left were promised the spoils of war but had to leave so the massive Armies cobbled together by the Arabs was goining to destroy Isreal - genocide was the plan - Guess you forgot that -PS more than 10 thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Arab Countries.

Most of your post is deliberate misinformation.

Many Arab Jews suffered injustice and to some degree oppression before 1947. But Arab Jews never faced the same level of injustice and oppression as their European counterparts even after 1949. No doubt conditions for many Arab Jews deteriorated significantly after Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine of 800,000 Palestinians in 1947-49. A few Arab Jews may have been forced out of their homes at gunpoint, but those cases are exception, not the rule. In general, most Arab Jews emigrated to Israel left for the same reasons why similar numbers of Jews left Canada, the US and Europe for Israel. Or are you claiming that Canada is also guilty of ethnic cleansing?

The big difference between Arab Jewish emigration and Palestinian ethnic cleansing is that most Arab Jews were not forced out of their homes out of fear for their safety, unlike most Palestinians who risked rape, torture and murder if they stayed in their homes and faced the Zionist armies. Jewish and Israeli historians have thoroughly disproven Zionist claims that Arabs left their homes in order to take Jewish homes at some point in the future or personal gain. That's yet another lie told by Israeli apologists in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Most Palestinians who fled in 1947-49 had only a few minutes to gather a few possessions before fleeing for their lives. Most Arab Jews had years to make up their minds about emigrating to Israel. In fact some evidence exists which suggests that the worst atrocities committed against Arab Jews were actually committed by Zionists in order to encourage emigration. But some Arab Jews faced discrimination and they had a choice. They could either stay and faced increased hostility from their neighbors or sell their possessions and move to Israel where they would get many benefits including cheap or free Palestinian homes. Like hundreds of thousands of Jewish Canadians, Americans and Europeans, many Jewish Arabs decided to sell and move for the same reasons. In most cases Arab Jews saw their living standard increase when they moved, unlike their Palestinian counterparts many of whom still live in the filth and squalor of poorly funded UN refugee camps.

Even now, Palestinians continue to be forced out of their homes at gunpoint and their property is turned over to Jewish immigrants. In many cases, Jewish immigrants to Israel moved into fully furnished Palestinian homes. The former residents having just fled in panic with only what they can carry. In many cases, the Jewish immigrants only have to take down the Palestinian family portraits and move in. In many cases, Palestinians have generously left behind most of their belongings. In some cases the Palestinian homes have been plundered by the Zionist armies first. In other cases the Palestinian homes were razed to the ground in order to erase any trace of their existence.

I stand by what I've posted. I do not support ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many Jews suffered these crimes during WW II in Europe, but in general they did not face these threats in Arab countries. The fact that people who suffered atrocities would treat others the same way as soon as they had a chance speaks volumes about the dark side of humanity. But no I don't feel sorry for someone who sells their belongings and voluntarily emigrates to a new country where they are awarded plunder and spoils of war, just for being Jewish.

I realize I am generalizing. In a few cases, some Jewish immigrants to Israel qualify as refugees and experienced similar conditions as Palestinian refugees until they got to Israel. In these few, exceptional cases, I fully support compensation.

 

[earth_as_one]

No I have not received an answer - preemptive war is not a war crime - I may be in error so show me where this is listed as a War Crime

How about when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The Nazis also invented justifications, but after the war, they were were held accountable for starting a war of aggression. Maybe one day members of the Bush regime will be held to the same standard of justice as that faced by members of Hitler's regime.

 

[earth_as_one]

Back on subject, Israeli colonies in the West Bank are illegal. So are many Israeli activities:

UN mission finds evidence of war crimes by both sides in Gaza conflict

The four person United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict


15 September 2009 – The United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict at the start of this year has found evidence that both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants committed serious war crimes and breaches of humanitarian law, which may amount to crimes against humanity.

“We came to the conclusion, on the basis of the facts we found, that there was strong evidence to establish that numerous serious violations of international law, both humanitarian law and human rights law, were committed by Israel during the military operations in Gaza,” the head of the mission, Justice Richard Goldstone, told a press briefing today.


“The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes and possibly, in some respects, crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defense Force (IDF).”


“There’s no question that the firing of rockets and mortars [by armed groups from Gaza] was deliberate and calculated to cause loss of life and injury to civilians and damage to civilian structures. The mission found that these actions also amount to serious war crimes and also possibly crimes against humanity,” he said.


The 575-page report by the four-person mission was released today, ahead of its presentation to the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva on 29 September.


“The mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility,” the report’s executive summary said. “It also finds that the direct targeting and arbitrary killing of Palestinian civilians is a violation of the right to life.”


It went on to criticize the “deliberate and systematic policy on the part of the Israeli armed forces to target industrial sites and water installations,” and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.


On the objectives and strategy of Israel’s military operation, the mission concluded that military planners deliberately followed a doctrine which involved “the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations.”


On the firing of mortars from Gaza, the mission concluded that they were indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against a civilian population and “would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.” It added that their apparent intention of spreading terror among the Israeli civilian population was a violation of international law....


UN mission finds evidence of war crimes by both sides in Gaza conflict

Sooner or later one of these war criminals will make the mistake of entering a country which respects international law regarding war crimes and crimes against humanity.

 

[ironsides]

This is why there can be no peace, the Arabs turned it into a blood feud immediately. The UN is responsible for not letting this problem come to some conclusion. They keep interfering even today.

"Violence in the Holy Land broke out almost immediately after the UN announced partition on November 29, 1947. Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, had told the UN prior to the partition vote the Arabs would drench "the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood.

On May 4, 1948, the Arab Legion attacked Kfar Etzion. The defenders drove them back, but the Legion returned a week later. After two days, the ill-equipped and outnumbered settlers were overwhelmed. Many defenders were massacred after they had surrendered.6 This was prior to the invasion by the regular Arab armies that followed Israel's declaration of independence.

On May 15, 1948, the day the British Mandate over Palestine ended, the armies of five neighboring Arab states invaded the new State of Israel, which had declared its independence the previous day. The invasion, heralded by an Egyptian air attack on Tel Aviv, was vigorously resisted. From the north, east and south came the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt.
The invading forces were fully equipped with the standard weapons of a regular army of the time - artillery, tanks, armored cars and personnel carriers, in addition to machine guns, mortars and the usual small arms in great quantities, and full supplies of ammunition, oil, and gasoline. Further, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria had air forces. As sovereign states, they had no difficulty (as had the pre-state Jewish defense force) in securing whatever armaments they needed through normal channels from Britain and other friendly powers."

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Invade.html

 

[MHz]

This is why there can be no peace, the Arabs turned it into a blood feud immediately. The UN is responsible for not letting this problem come to some conclusion. They keep interfering even today.

The UN was advised by the locals that giving land to the Jews would result in violence. Just how was the loss of Palestine land any different than Poland being invaded. Poland had the guns come in, Palestine had some piece of paper signed by foreigners, both actions resulted in land being taken by force against the will of the people. That in itself is illegal. The UN has an entity that is in place to deal with disputes for that specific place. It was written up in the same document the West voted on that stole land from the ones living there. Palestine should have been independent after WWI, that was the promise from Britain if the locals helped them win the war (and territory). The League of Nations was part of the land grab, there were motions that made taking land and giving it to the Jews specifically.
It has been decided today that Toronto now belongs to Haiti because they want it as their new home. Granada seconded the motion and there were no objections that were counted. Canada protested but their concerns were ignored as being a 'minor issue' and not worth considering. Toronto residents have until sundown to abandon all properties and goods, best be gone before the (now fully armed) new owners arrive tomorrow morning. If you lived there and loved the place you would not leave, you would resist even if the rest of the world (the ones who voted 'yes' to the land grab) called you the enemy of peace. Perhaps the member Nations should review the fairness of the voting policy.

(edit to add)
(in part)
Sources for the Israeli/Palestinian situation 1947-1948

NOTE: This is a critical fact often omitted when the history is presented and this leads to a very distorted view of what happened in 1948. The misleading story often told is that "Jews declared Israel and then they were attacked." The fact is from November 1947 to May 1948 the Zionists were already on the offensive and had already attacked Arabs. In the months before Israel was declared, the Zionists had driven 300,000 non-Jews off their land. In the months before Israel was declared, the Zionists had seized land beyond the proposed Jewish State. http://www.representativepress.org/IsraelHistory.html .

"The Zionists were by far the more powerful and better organized force, and by May 1948, when the state of Israel was formally established, about 300,000 Palestinians already had been expelled from their homes or had fled the fighting, and the Zionists controlled a region well beyond the area of the original Jewish state that had been proposed by the UN. 62 Now it's then that Israel was attacked by its neighbors - in May 1948; it's then, after the Zionists had taken control of this much larger part of the region and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been forced out, not before." pp. 131-132 Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky * See Footnote 62 below Zionist forces had been planning their conquest of the Palestine for years and had the military advantage over the native inhabitants. Even before Zionists declared their "Jewish State of Israel" in May of 1948, Zionist armies had already seized land within areas of what the UN proposed for the Palestinian state and had already carried out terrorist attacks (including killing children) in order to ethnically cleanse areas. Writing about a December 18, 1947 terrorist attack killing civilians carried out by the Palmach - the kibbutz-based strike force of the Haganah (the Defense Force of the Jewish settlemetn in Palestine, the precursor of the IDF), Chomsky quotes Israeli military historian Uri Milshtein who wrote that Moshe Dayan justified the attack on the grounds that it had a "desirable effect." Chomsky writes, "Sykes [ author of Crossroads to Israel] suggests that this opperation, three weeks before the first Arab irregulars entered the country, may have "percipitated the next phase of the war." p95 Fateful Triangle The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians The footnote for this says: "For a contemporary record of Irgun-LEHI terrorism in December 1947, see Peace in the Middle East?, pp.64-5, citing a report by the Council on Jewish-Arab Cooperation, which concludes that these actions were undertaken to create conflict in peaceful areas. See Towards a New Cold War pp. 464-5 and referances cited for additional examples of Zionist terrorism, including major masssacres. Little of this is known here; information appears in standard Israeli (Hebrew) sources.
​

http://www.representativepress.org/Sources.html

 

[earth_as_one]

This is why there can be no peace, the Arabs turned it into a blood feud immediately. The UN is responsible for not letting this problem come to some conclusion. They keep interfering even today.

"Violence in the Holy Land broke out almost immediately after the UN announced partition on November 29, 1947. Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, had told the UN prior to the partition vote the Arabs would drench "the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood.

On May 4, 1948, the Arab Legion attacked Kfar Etzion. The defenders drove them back, but the Legion returned a week later. After two days, the ill-equipped and outnumbered settlers were overwhelmed. Many defenders were massacred after they had surrendered.6 This was prior to the invasion by the regular Arab armies that followed Israel's declaration of independence.

On May 15, 1948, the day the British Mandate over Palestine ended, the armies of five neighboring Arab states invaded the new State of Israel, which had declared its independence the previous day. The invasion, heralded by an Egyptian air attack on Tel Aviv, was vigorously resisted. From the north, east and south came the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt.
The invading forces were fully equipped with the standard weapons of a regular army of the time - artillery, tanks, armored cars and personnel carriers, in addition to machine guns, mortars and the usual small arms in great quantities, and full supplies of ammunition, oil, and gasoline. Further, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria had air forces. As sovereign states, they had no difficulty (as had the pre-state Jewish defense force) in securing whatever armaments they needed through normal channels from Britain and other friendly powers."

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Invade.html

The war started November 29, 1947, when the UN gave awarded most of Palestine to European refugees and heavily armed, mostly foreign terrorists began to systematically use rape, torture and murder to depopulate most of what became Israel.

By "May 15, 1948, the day the British Mandate over Palestine ended, the armies of five neighboring Arab states invaded the new State of Israel", the terrorists had already committed a long series of atrocities.

Deir Yassin is one well known example:

[FONT=Verdana, Arial]Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang (terrorists) attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents.

The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the Jewish State; it had a peaceful reputation. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet and the mainstream Jewish defense force, the Haganah, authorized the irregular terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the takeover....

[/FONT]http://www.deiryassin.org/

1947 New York Times

25 Terrorists Held in Palestine; Linked to Stern Gang and Irgun; Outrages Continue Despite Maintenance of Martial Law, Which Injures Trade-- Arabs Score 'Lenient' Curbs

By CLIFTON DANIEL

March 7, 1947

JERUSALEM, March 6--Twenty five known terrorists have been captured in Palestine in recent days, it was officially announced today in the first report of progress against underground forces since limited martial law.

25 Terrorists Held in Palestine; Linked to Stern Gang and Irgun; Outra... - Free Preview - The New York Times

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:

A photograph dated 1947 shows a poster issued by British police forces seeking 18 wanted Jewish terrorists from the Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stern Gang. Pictured at top left is Irgun commander and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (AFP Photo)

... at the time of the British Mandate, it was Jews in Palestine who mainly waged terrorism against the Palestinians. As Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion recorded in his personal history of Israel: “From 1946 to 1947 there were scarcely any Arab attacks on the Yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine].”

The same could not be said for the Zionists. Jewish terrorists waged an intense and bloody campaign against the Palestinians, British, and even some Jews who opposed them leading up to the establishment of Israel.


The two major Jewish terror organizations in pre-independence Palestine were the Irgun Zvai Leumi—National Military Organization, NMO, also known by the Hebrew letters Etzel—founded in 1937, and the Lohamei Herut Israel, Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, Lehi in the Hebrew acronym, also known as the Stern Gang after its leader Avraham Stern, known as Yair, founded in 1940.

The Irgun was led by Menachem Begin, the future Israeli prime minister who was a leading proponent of Revisionist Zionism, the militant branch of Zionism pioneered by Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, which openly despised the Arabs and sought restoration of what it called Eretz Yisrael, the ancient land of Israel. By this was meant “both sides of the Jordan,”...

Hamas: A Pale Image of the Jewish Irgun And Lehi Gangs

From the viewpoint of the people attacked by Zionist terrorists and overrun by Jewish/European refugees, the 'invading" Arab armies were just another invading army, one that was supposed to help them, but arrived too late with too little. Then they occupied the West Bank and Gaza.

Your post is manipulative propaganda because it portrays a deliberately planned invasion, acts of terrorism, conquest, occupation and ethnic cleansing against a people who had no military as self defense???

But I'll bite. Please offer some evidence of an invading "Palestinian" army. Where did they come from and what did they conquer?

 

[Goober]

EAO
My posts are disinformation - Only because they do not match your viewpoint

Point - Some proof for this claim please.

No doubt conditions for many Arab Jews deteriorated significantly after Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine of 800,000 Palestinians in 1947-49. A few Arab Jews may have been forced out of their homes at gunpoint, but those cases are exception, not the rule. In general, most Arab Jews emigrated to Israel left for the same reasons why similar numbers of Jews left Canada, the US and Europe for Israel. Or are you claiming that Canada is also guilty of ethnic cleansing?

Point - Some proof for this claim please.

http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_war_atrocities_israeli.php

What about Israeli atrocities against Arabs?

Certainly claims of massacres and atrocities should not go without investigation. The problem is that, like the case of Dir Yassin, even when the claim is shown to be unfounded, the legend persists. It is convenient for the enemies of Israel to portray her armed forces as ruthless savages, but that propagandistic position cannot be supported by any facts.

For example, Tantura. A Haifa University revisionist historian, Theodor Katz, claimed in his M.A. thesis (released January 2000) that an IDF unit had massacred over 200 Arab residents of the village of Tantura in the 1948 War of Independence. He was brought to court in 2001 by surviving officers and men of the unit who presented contrary evidence including review of Katz's tape recordings showing how he had manipulated the testimony of survivors. Katz admitted finally that he had selectively used reports from Arab sources, taking only those that supported his thesis. The lawsuit was dropped after Katz signed a renunciation of his own work and Haifa University pulled the thesis from library shelves. [It was revealed in September 2002 that tormer Palestinian Authority minister Feisal Husseini paid $8,000 for the legal defense of Teddy Katz.] The University conducted its own review of the evidence. After six months of work, the committee had managed to review only a little more than one-fourth of Katz's tapes, mostly in Arabic, which bore direct relation to the question of whether any massacre took place. Yet even in that limited selection, 14 major discrepancies - in which the tapes didn't accord with the written text - came to light.No pro-Palestinian Arab source had ever pointed to a massacre at Tantura before Katz's thesis appeared in 2000. The thesis has been completely debunked. Nonetheless, there are now hundreds of web sites that cite the "Tantura massacre" as historical fact. And while Arab sources rushed into print to trumpet the news of Katz's thesis, none has mentioned the retraction save a few who cite it as an example of a massive coverup

.http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_war_atrocities_arab.php

The largest Arab atrocity of the war was on May 13, 1948, the massacre of dozens of surrendering defenders, including some twenty women, at Kfar Etzion in the Etzion Bloc of settlements (Gush Etzion) just north of Hebron, in the territory allocated to the Arabs under the UN partition plan. The Etzion Bloc had already seen a massacre in January 1947 when a Haganah platoon of 35 soldiers sent to help them with medical supplies and ammunition was massacred by hundreds of Arab militants. Their stripped, mutilated bodies were found the next day by a British patrol.The final battle for Gush Etzion took place between May 12-14, 1948. Massive, heavily armed enemy forces overran the Jewish positions. A handful of exhausted defenders, equipped only with light arms and very little ammunition could not withstand the attacking forces. On Thursday, May 13th, Kfar Etzion fell, its defenders killed, most of them slaughtered by Arab rioters after the collapse of the defense. Gush Etzion was destroyed in the aftermath -- everything of value was removed, then the buildings were reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of trees in the orchards -- individually planted by the Jewish farmers -- were uprooted

.http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1566/article_detail.asp

Much to the delight of Israel's post-Zionist intelligentsia, Morris claimed that a policy advocating "transfer" of Palestinians was built into Zionism, which he described in Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (2001), as "a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement...intent on politically, or even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs." In blaming Israel—and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, whom he painted in Machiavellian shades—for the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees, Morris sought to expose a darker side of the story of 1948.For this unmasking, Morris earned much praise from the Left. Edward Said, for instance, lauded him for showing "that it was a sequence of Zionist terror and Israeli expulsion that were behind the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem." Just as predictably, Morris drew fire from mainstream Israeli historians like Shabtai Teveth, who dismissed Morris and the New Historians as peddling a "farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications."After the failed Camp David summit in 2000, however, when Yasser Arafat turned down Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's offer of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and launched a second, bloodier intifada of suicide bombings, Morris abruptly revised his revisionism. He began to acknowledge a long thread of obduracy, folly, and rejection that ran through the entire history of Palestinian nationalism—"a rejection, to the point of absurdity, of the history of the Jewish link to the land of Israel; a rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish claims to Palestine; a rejection of the right of the Jewish state to exist." The Palestinian leaders, he now saw, sticking fast to their vision of a Greater Palestine, rejected every compromise offered them, from the Peel Commission partition proposal of 1937 and the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 to the peace proposals offered by Yitzhak Rabin at Oslo and Barak at Camp David.Morris himself still advocated a Palestinian state, and considered the Israeli settlement movement misguided. But if in the 1990s he believed that the Palestinians had finally accepted the need for a compromise to achieve a two-state solution, by following the thread of their tenacious rejection of negotiated accommodation he now reluctantly concluded that they had all along ultimately sought Israel's destruction. Morris became, in other words, a symbol of the Israeli Left's disillusionment.Morris's about-face did not find favor in the eyes of his erstwhile colleagues. "Morris flipped out as a result of three years of terrorism," Segev said. Pappe denounced Morris's "abominable racist views," declaring that he "was never a proper historian" but a "charlatan."***With its meticulous scholarship, Morris's latest book refutes that charge. The story he tells hinges on three points. The first is that from the Arabs' perspective the war of 1948 was not merely a territorial dispute, but a battlefront in the struggle between Islam and the West. Well before 1948, Arabs both inside and outside Palestine came to see the Jewish community there not only as an infidel presence in the heart of the Middle East, but as a beachhead of Western imperialism, embodying all the sins they imputed to the West. (The same view, two decades later, informed the Palestine Liberation Organization Covenant, which accused Israel of being "a geographic base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland.")Accordingly, Morris paints the backdrop to the war by drawing from the palette of the jihadi rhetoric that preceded it. Imams across the Arab world, he says, alluded to the hadith (oral tradition) which teaches that "the day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and until the trees and stones shout out, ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'" Undeterred by the fact that in 12 centuries of Muslim rule Palestine had never been treated as a distinct political territory by its rulers, they now pressed the Crusader analogy into service, invoking Saladin's liberation of Palestine from the Christians.As early as 1899, the mufti of Jerusalem proposed that all Jews who had come after 1891, the "new Crusaders," be expelled or harassed into emigrating. In 1920, the pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi vowed to fight "until Palestine is either placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country." In 1929, that kind of rhetoric bore fruit: rioting Arabs killed about 130 Jews—a massacre that would be repeated during the Arab revolt of 1936-39.As war loomed nearer, the belligerent rhetoric intensified. In 1946, a Baghdad newspaper called on Arabs to "annihilate all European Jews in Palestine." "We will sweep them into the sea," Arab League Secretary-General 'Abd al-Rahman Azzam announced just before the invasion. The mufti of Egypt proclaimed jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims, and King Abdullah of Jordan pledged to rescue Islamic holy sites.

 

[darkbeaver]

Canada is guilty of ethnic cleansing, that's a fact Goober.

 

[MHz]

In the article below did they just admit to war-crimes, making a local become a refugee? That would have been about 1,700 people.





"Having discovered they were publicly accused of war crimes in the pages of Israel’s largest newspaper, veterans of the 33rd battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade were outraged. They maintained that the battle for Tantura was a strategic one, an attempt to stop the maritime smuggling of arms and food and to prevent the Haifa-Tel Aviv road from being cut off; and that throughout the fight for survival in a bloody war launched by the Arabs, they had maintained the strictest ethical standards. While the battle for Tantura was difficult – 14 members of the IDF battalion and about 40 Arabs were killed in street fighting – the veterans insisted Katz had lied about a massacre.
Indeed, they noted that by 10 a.m. on the morning of the alleged massacre, 99 percent of the villagers had already been transferred out of Tantura —the women to the nearby village of Faradis, and the fighters to the Zichron Ya’akov police station. In April 2000, attorney Giora Erdinast, a Peace Now activist and son-in-law of one of the battalion members, agreed to represent the veterans and filed a libel suit in Tel Aviv court against Teddy Katz. Katz reportedly received approximately $8,000 from former Palestinian Authority minister Faisal Husseini to pay for his defense."

 

[Colpy]

Back on subject, Israeli colonies in the West Bank are illegal. So are many Israeli activities:


Sooner or later one of these war criminals will make the mistake of entering a country which respects international law regarding war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Somehow I suspect you mean the Israeli or the US "war criminals" (What a fricking joke!)

And you don't include officials of Hamas, Hezbollah, or for that matter, the leader of China.

Gee whiz! I am SOOOOO surprized.