ECHOES
Posted by: twominutewarning | December 31, 2008
Echoes
Posted in graphics, history, Palestine, repression, war | Tags: bombs, casualites, gaza, Hitler, Israel, massacre, occupation, Palestine
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shortmemory.wordpress.com 
To all the people who sleep safely in their beds at night and have the audacity to criticize the Israeli government, this is for you:
None of you spoke in the past 8 years when rockets and bombs fell in southern Israeli cities, causing death and destruction without any provocation on our part.
What you need to understand are two things-
First of all, there is no functioning government in Gaza. The Hamas took over (in a military coup!) and they are running the show. The Hamas, in case you didn’t know, is a terror organization. Just like Al-kaida and Hezbollah. Israel is dealing with terror organizations all through its borders. Not with governments. And not with civilians. We have nothing against the Palestinians. Only the terrorists.
The second thing you need to know is that the Hamas is a very cynical organization which uses innocent women and children to fight Israel. They launch their missals from civilian’s houses, not from open fields or military camps, and when the Israeli army wants to destroy those missals launchers- sometimes innocent people die.
They stash weapons; bombs etc. in hospitals, mosques, civil houses and schools exactly for this reason- they know that the Israeli army will not bomb those places. Over the years, they have dig tunnels between Egypt and Gaza to smuggle everything, including weapons which is being used against us.
The Israeli army has such advanced technologies they can surgically hit those places. And that is exactly what we are doing. The manipulations in the media, done by the Arabs are ridicules, at best.
Ask yourself- what would you do if your life was constantly under threat? Look at the map. Maybe that will help you grasp our geographic situation.
The purpose of the Israeli army is to defend. Not attack.
So next time you think about how miserable and poor the Palestinians are, and how powerful and evil the Israelis are- think again. And if you support the Palestinians right now in any way- that means you support terrorism.
(Written by a left-wing Israeli who thinks terror should not win anywhere in the world).
By: shirajordan on December 31, 2008
at 10:43 am
I appreciate you taking the time to respond, and doing so with a minimal amount of invective, as I gather you don’t care too much for the point of view expressed in the graphic. I understand that perspectives often change due to circumstance, and as you point out, I’m not in Israel in the midst of an ongoing conflict, as you evidently are.
But perspective and point of view are not the same as truth and reality – and the argument you make – portraying the air strikes in Gaza as the measured and defensive actions of a people fighting for survival – lacks any grounding in the basic facts of the situation, ignores the chain of events that has brought us to this moment, and in tone is strikingly indifferent to the overwhelming devastation that the self-proclaimed “Jewish State” has inflicted and continues to inflict upon the Palestinian people.
While it’s clear that you passionately feel Israel has been and continues to be the injured party, to accept your claim of unprovoked victimhood at the hands of those dastardly Palestinian “terrorists” – a myth that by now even many Israelis find difficult to swallow – would require a creative redefinition of the word “provoke” and a determined blindness to 60 years of history.
It would require ignoring the cataclysmic events of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were systematically expelled from their homes – a process that encompassed massacres, roundups and executions – what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe rightfully called “ethnic cleansing.”
It would require ignoring the decades of direct occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the tortures by Shin Bet, the broken bones of young people punished for facing off armed soldiers with rocks, and the continual theft of Palestinian land for use by Jewish settlers.
It would require ignoring the parting gift of a million anti-personnel cluster bombs which Israel showered upon Lebanon during it’s invasion a few summers back – or forgetting about Israel’s 1982 Lebanon invasion taken to crush the then-Fatah led PLO, and the tens of thousands killed during that campaign, including those slaughtered during the Israeli supervised massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
And in Gaza, to embrace full Israeli victimhood demands ignoring the last two years of blockade following Israel’s vaunted “withdrawal” that effectively has walled in it’s 1.5 million people into a modern equivalent of the Warsaw ghetto. Engaging in collective punishment for the “sins” of Hamas, Israel destroyed the local economy – bulldozing fruit orchards, severely restricting fishing, cutting off supplies to factories – driving young people to survive as smugglers crawling through tunnels to bring in needed items and earn a living. In a mini-version of the U.S. sanctions against Iraq, pressure is put on the imprisoned population by continually cutting off needed food and medical supplies – a war crime by any standards – and to any objective witness, a “provocation.”
You mention that Gaza lacks a government – as if anarchy justifies air strikes and carnage. You also leave out that Hamas actually won a majority of seats in the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, which earned condemnation and sanctions from Israel and the west for their success at the polls – proving that “democracy” upheld only when the results are to their liking. The “military coup” you mention was a consequence of a virtual civil war with the Fatah faction in the Palestinian Authority – where Hamas seized Gaza and Fatah seized the West Bank.
Your argument that Hamas hides behind civilians suffers from the same combination of bad facts and worse logic. This was the same charges Israel made against Hezbollah to justify killing 1,200 people during it’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, a charge that was shown to be a blatant lie by Human Rights Watch. Of course, if proximity of military forces to civilians is as you argue, justification for military strikes and “collateral” damage, then you should have no complaints about those fatal Hezbollah rocket attacks on parts of northern Israel where the Israeli government has placed military bases and munitions factories in and around Israeli Arab communities.
You ask “what would you do if your life was constantly under threat” – as if this question alone has only one self evident Israel-supporting answer. Step outside the box for a moment. How many Israelis have been driven off of their land en masse, the names of their communities eradicated, their existence even denied for decades – because of the Palestinians? How many Israelis have had been en masse denied food, medical attention or a livelihood by Palestinians? How many thousands of Israelis have been humiliated at Palestinian checkpoints or tortured in Palestinian prisons or shot for violating a Palestinian curfew?
As you seem to exhibit few qualms over what at best can be described as “collateral damage” in Gaza, should it be a shock that there are forces among the Palestinian movement who target Israelis as indiscriminately as they have been targeted? No doubt that British settlers felt “threatened” when some of their neighbors were killed by members of the Kenyan Land and Freedom Movement (called “Mau Mau” in the western press). Would you have defended the British and their brutal colonial domination, and opposed Kenyan independence as mere terrorism? What of the those white farmers killed by Native Americans resisting manifest destiny – would you have cheered on the U.S. Calvary and condemned those defending Native American rights as supporting “terrorism.” By your criteria, wouldn’t the antebellum American South have been the aggrieved party because in fighting against slavery, Nat Turner killed not only slave owners but their whole families as well? No doubt from the perspective of a British settler, 19th century American farmer or Southern slave-owner, they were merely the victims of unprovoked violence. Point of view is poor substitute for truth.
I understand your fear of rocket attacks and desire not to live under threat of violence. But if you really want that violence to end, then a first step is to cease being complicit in the much more sweeping and massive violence that Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinian people. There are those who claim the Nazi slaughter of Jews was a fiction and are rightfully condemned as Holocaust deniers. There are those who hold that the “Nakba” – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine – is a fiction or at best a self-inflicted wound. When that denial ceases, you might get closer to the peace you’re seeking.
By: twominutewarning on January 2, 2009
at 9:22 pm