-- Download Israel: Rogue State as PDF --
Israel has the right to defend itself.
Arguably, so does every nation.
Israel, however, gets a free pass for going well beyond defending itself.
I’ll leave the West Bank alone right now.
Gaza:
- Is an open-air prison, walled off by Israel.
- Is under an economic embargo.
- Is barred from importing and exporting.
- Recently saw its Gaza Ark bombed. Twice.
- Has had its children, hospitals, university, homes, beach soccer-playing teen boys, and hundreds of civilians systemically targeted and bombed/murdered.
- Makes people feel uncomfortable when they see pictures of dead Gazan children in the Twitter. Even though this kind of reality journalism helped end the Vietnam nightmare.
- Is monstrously outgunned by Israel, which is armed by the USA and others.
- Is defined as a terrorist region despite the massive power/economic/military imbalance.
- Is invaded and occupied by settlers.
- Is a daily paradox: Israel wants them gone so they can have the land/resources, but they aren’t allowing the Gazans to leave. So is the goal to kill them all?
- Is the thorn in the side of the quaint, deflecting notion of a two-state solution. Why would Israel seek peace and a two-state solution when it out-guns the Palestinians, gets billions a year in military funding and virtually carte blanche support from many other nations, even when they indiscriminately murder children.
So, don’t expect the Israeli crimes against humanity in Gaza to stop any time soon, unless Israel decides to stop.
And considering all this, Israel is constantly shocked that Hamas fights back.
The nerve of them!
More from my site
July 15, 2010 The Queen, G20 Abuses and Canada’s Future
May 15, 2010 HST Rhetoric Insults Our Intelligence
March 28, 2014 We Won’t Let Police Brutality Quell Occupy’s Wave of Action
March 4, 2015 It Turns Out That Yes, You Are an Artist
September 19, 2012 So Did YOU Get a 3% Raise Last Year?
February 12, 2014 What is Soft Fascism, Anyway?
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Stephen Elliott-Buckley
Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun
Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.
Latest posts by Stephen Elliott-Buckley (see all)
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A bunch of bullshit, if I’ve ever read such stupidity before. You do realize that Hamas imported 800,000 tons of concrete during the last 10 years and didn’t use a single cubic yard of it to build homes or upgrade infrastructure, right? They used it to line illegal tunnels dug into Israeli territory. And in the process, they managed to kill some 160 children to cave-ins and explosions.
What a great bunch of guys, eh?
which parts of the pieces do you think are bullshit? i think #1 may be an analytical conclusion, but #2-11 are facts, unless you have something that indicates one of them is incorrect.
in a war, i expect people think it reasonable that the other side fights back? i also think that israel’s actions [random military attacks, along with a lack of effort seeking an equitable peace] are designed to [or at the very least, end up] radicalizing lots in Gaza, leading to increased support for violent responses.
i suppose all tunnels into israel would be illegal?
have you got a link on the 160 dead kids?
do you also have a link to the 800,000 tons of concrete imported? i expect with an economic embargo, importing anything would be difficult.
I am one of many who understand that criticizing and openly analyzing the annexation of the Palestinian territories by Israeli military force ….is not ‘anti-Semitic’. Just as criticizing Canadian Federal gov’t military participation in the pillage and plunder of the Middle East oil-bearing nations is not ‘anti-Canadian’.
I put together a webpage of perspectives rarely discussed in mainstream news:
Destruction of Palestine – How Israel was created http://www.blissful-wisdom.com/destruction-of-palestine—how-israel-was-created.html
This whole diatribe is nothing but bullshit propaganda.
so, by bullshit, you don’t mean factually inaccurate, then?
and if you think this piece of mostly facts and some analytical conclusions is just bullshit propaganda, what do you think of Noam Chomsky’s perspective [bear in mind that once, a highly intelligent [but horribly ignorant/biased] person, told a friend of mine that anyone who agrees with anything Chomsky says is a moron]:
Professor Noam Chomsky: “It’s not war, it is murder”
“The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel, it is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in a decades-long campaign to ethnically-cleanse Palestinians.
Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war, it is murder.
When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying someone else’s land. That’s not defense. Call it what you like, it’s not defense.”