5 Lies the Media Keeps Repeating About Gaza

[godofthunder9010]

I agree with some of what your saying but ...

Originally Posted by oberon_1

3) The 1948 war outcome was very different than the map drawn by the UN in 1947 and the period between 1947-1967 very stormy. In those years, Palestinians could demand to establish an independent state in the west bank and Gaza. They didn't even consider such option. Can you guess why?

The reason that the Palestinians didn't create an independent state was because the West Bank was part of the nation of Jordan. They would have needed to gain their independence from Jordan first and Jordan wasn't particularly interested in that idea.

But the gist of what you say is correct. The Palestinians could have left well enough alone. Be part of Egypt in the Gaza strip. Be part of Jordan in the West Bank. Or perhaps even try to negotiate for independence from Egypt and Jordan. Instead they remained obsessively focused on taking back everything by force. They sought for and welcomed every mass attack on Israel that followed and each subsequent war made matters worse and worse for the Palestinians.

To this very day, the majority of Palestinians want the whole thing and refuse to accept anything less. That's just a completely unrealistic expectation to have. How do you negotiate with a group of people that will never be happy with anything less than having all of modern-day Israel just handed back to them? Many of them honestly don't realize how ridiculous such a demand is.

[oberon_1]

Originally Posted by godofthunder9010

I agree with some of what your saying but ...



The reason that the Palestinians didn't create an independent state was because the West Bank was part of the nation of Jordan. They would have needed to gain their independence from Jordan first and Jordan wasn't particularly interested in that idea.

But the gist of what you say is correct. The Palestinians could have left well enough alone. Be part of Egypt in the Gaza strip. Be part of Jordan in the West Bank. Or perhaps even try to negotiate for independence from Egypt and Jordan. Instead they remained obsessively focused on taking back everything by force. They sought for and welcomed every mass attack on Israel that followed and each subsequent war made matters worse and worse for the Palestinians.

To this very day, the majority of Palestinians want the whole thing and refuse to accept anything less. That's just a completely unrealistic expectation to have. How do you negotiate with a group of people that will never be happy with anything less than having all of modern-day Israel just handed back to them? Many of them honestly don't realize how ridiculous such a demand is.

Until late 50s/early 60s there was no talk of a Palestinians state. Only 1964 saw the official use of the name in an organization. All that time, they considered themselves Arabs fighting to kick Zionists out of Arab lands.

For obvious reasons, some want to give the impression that the conflict started in 1948 or even better - 1967. Suddenly, evil Zionists emerged from underground and stole Palestinian lands in 1948 (or 67), while the peaceful Arabs were looking the other way...In all these stories, Arabs are depicted as passive and innocent. The great Palestinian warriors of yesteryear, are totally ignored and forgotten!

[claudhopper]

Originally Posted by roysoldboy

I wonder why our media doesn't show us any pictures of all this seeming opulence. They only show pictures of children and teens throwing stones at those terrible Israeli soldiers near a fence that is abutted to sand and rocks. Surely somebody is lying and it is our media, I think.

I used to use those pictures myself, when I ignorantly argued the other side. I don't know where they were taken or when, but they certainly aren't what it looks like now.



Gaza, Now | Mondoweiss

[claudhopper]

They were expelled from what is now Israel in the 1948 Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign . Israelis are now living in their homes and farming their land, and they were never paid any reparations for the crimes done to them. [pdf] “Israel’s failure to provide reparations to Palestinian refugees over the past six decades is in blatant violation of international law.” Israel does not accept Palestine’s right to exist, even though it is constantly demanding that everyone, including the displaced and occupied Palestinians, recognize Israel’s right to exist.

5. Israeli hawks and their American clones depict Gaza as a foreign, hostile state with which Israel is at war. In fact, the Gaza strip is a small territory of 1.7 million people militarily occupied by Israel (something in which the UN and other international bodies concur). Israelis do not allow it to have a port or airport, nor to export most of what it produces. Palestinians cannot work about a third of its land, which is reserved by Israel as a security buffer. As an occupied territory, it is covered by the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of occupied populations by their military occupier. Indiscriminate bombing of occupied territories by the occupier is clearly illegal in international law.
Top 10 Myths About Israel's Attack on Gaza - World Mathaba

[ovcatto]

Originally Posted by oberon_1

If there is a contest for most misinformation in a single post, that must be the winner!
I will stick to the facts:

1) According to your post one can assume that 1948-1967 was a quiet period, interrupted only by Israel when it initiated the war of 1967! Even Palestinians will disagree with that...

I will leave you to your assumptions.

2) 1947 UN granted Palestinians a territory which was rejected by them as totally unacceptable. Pretending today that there was any agreement is factually wrong. A long war erupted after the Palestinians rejected the proposal. If asked, they probably reject it even today.

See above.

3) The 1948 war outcome was very different than the map drawn by the UN in 1947 and the period between 1947-1967 very stormy. In those years, Palestinians could demand to establish an independent state in the west bank and Gaza. They didn't even consider such option. Can you guess why?

See above.

A side note:
Palestinians are the only case where the title "refugee" is inherited even 5 generations after. No other refugee (anywhere) can claim that.

I think that says quite a bit about the situation. Like refugee status as some expiration date.

[california-jewel]

Originally Posted by ringwise

Palestine has vowed to destroy Israel. Making them no different than the Nazis. If you choose to side with the evil beings that are trying to destroy Israel, fine.

I do agree with #5 - and that solution should be to turn Gaza to glass. That's what happens when you push someone too far. They fight back. And you may not like the result.

Change things around some shall we! lets say just for the hek of it, what if Palestine, vowed to destroy the United States. Wanting to wipe us off the face of the map.

How would most of us then feel, and how differ would our actions be knowing they vowed to wanting to destroy us. And wipe us off the face of the map.

Sometimes when you continously push someone to their limits, they are going to push back with a vengeance, and push harder................. i wish i could say in my heart i feel things are going to be for the better, but cease fire or not, don't see this happening..

[Eoin (pronounced Owen)]

Originally Posted by godofthunder9010

Eoin that's a lot to respond to but here goes.

It is indeed a lot, although as I'm sure you'll agree, in a conflict of this nature it's the nuances which are important and take the time to detail.

The Palestinians got screwed and everyone who helped create the problem should be a part of fixing it. Refugees are stuck where they are. For a very long time, they stayed put because they were promised by their allies that Israel would be destroyed. It is possible that all who could leave, have left but I seriously doubt it. But let's say you are right. Then Western Europe (especially the UK), the USA, Egypt, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Jordan and Israel all need to collectively foot the bill for helping them find a better life somewhere else. Trouble is, the Muslim nations want them there. As long as there are refugees in camps, they can always point to them as proof that Israel is evil and must be destroyed. The remaining refugees are not being allowed to leave. Jordan isn't letting them in. Lebanon isn't letting them in. Egypt isn't letting them in. Saudi Arabia isn't letting them in. More distant nations are not letting them in. Israel certainly doesn't want them to stay there in the refugee camps. If Egypt feels so sorry for the plight of Gaza, why not offer up sanctuary in Egypt?

I agree that parties other than Israel have a role to play in compensating the Palestinians, but I'm not sure why you've concluded that these other parties should help to find the Palestinians a better life, "somewhere else?" In the list of countries you named who do not let Palestinians 'in', you ommitted to mention the one country that has a legal and moral obligation to do so. If I can draw your attention to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 on the Palestinian refugee problem (1):

...refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations.

On what basis do you criticise countries that already have massive numbers of Palestinian refugee's within their borders, for not allowing even more Palestinian refugees into their borders, when the one country that has an actual legal and moral responsibility to admit these refugee's through its border is Israel?

On the wider peace process, the position you seem to be taking (and please correct me if I'm not doing justice to you), is that Israel should be permitted to keep all the territory it has gained through morally dubious means, and the Palestinians must resign themselves to no return of lost territory, no right-of-return to their land, sweetened by some form of financial renumeration. If that is indeed your attitude, and what you mean by this is a whopping level of compensation, the likes of which have never been seen before; say $100k per Palestinian (or $400Bn between 4 million), then I might begin to agree with you, and more importantly - the Palestinians whose choice it is to accept or reject that might agree with you.

If however, you mean a much more modest sum like a few thousand dollars each, then I very much doubt that the Palestinians would accept that offer. They have international law on their side giving them a right of return. When I say that the Israeli's (and others) must take seriously their obligations to make peace terms with the Palestinians, I say it in the knowledge that if there is to be peace, it is going to have to be a serious commitment from Israel, whichever mix of financial and territorial concessions that ultimately amounts to.

The single biggest reason that the Israel/Palestine problem never gets solved is simple: People are too focused on the past. Yes, the Palestinians had lands and property taken from them. Yes the land was theirs at one point. That scrap of land is the crossroads of three continents and the hotbed of human history. One group has displaced the next, then the next, then the next, then the next for as long as anyone can remember. Israel is just the most recent example. The Palestinians did everything in their power to stop the Jews from settling in Israel/Palestine under any circumstances. They were downright malicious. The Jews were also downright mean in return. The Israelis have certainly not been angels. There's been bad behavior on their part and a lot of it. If the Palestinians weren't blowing up daycares, schoolbuses and doing their level best to massacre innocent people, I'd have a lot more sympathy for them. I do sympathize nonetheless.

Again, I do not wish to mis-represent what you're saying, but while you concede a degree of blame attributable to both sides, you consciously or unconsciously keep making the issue of Palestinian terrorism the foremost consideration in your answers. I mean I agree with the principle, there is absolutely no defence for Palestinians targeting Israeli civilians - let alone school buses. However, if you can forgive the cliche, I see you missing the forest for the tree's. The numbers of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces after Operation Cast lead ended in 2009, up to but not including the current Israeli bombing, was 314 dead. (2) Note that this was the period in which there was supposedly 'peace'. By contrast, the number of Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians during the same period was 15, and the numbers of Israeli soldiers killed by Palestinians was 5. Thus, a ratio of 314 - 20.

Try to imagine casualty ratios like that in a Western context. For example, the IRA killed 29 people in one day when they bombed a shopping centre in Omagh, Northern Ireland. Would the world have accepted it if the Royal Air Force responded by dropping high explosives onto suspected IRA safe houses in the middle of Belfast? Furthermore, if the RAF did this and it resulted in the deaths of 460 innocent people (the same 15.7-1 ratio transposed from Palestine), would this be treated as a justifiable British response, or an act of despicable mass murder by the British? (The question is obviously rhetorical.)

So that I'm not mis-understood, I'm not trying to draw an equivalence between the actual conflict in Northern Ireland and Gaza as the situations are very different. All I'm trying to point out to you is how 'cheap' Palestinian lives are being treated as in this conflict, not just by the Israeli military, but also by much of the media and Western population. So many people keep harking back to this idea of the Israeli response being 'justified' in response the rocket attacks, and that the Palestinians (as if they alone among humans are collectively responsible for each others actions) were somehow asking for it.

While the Israeli's might well be telling the truth when they say they only target rocket launching sites and Hamas military personnel, they clearly know that each time they drop high explosives on built up areas that they are going to kill and injure relatively large numbers of civilians. Before the usual suspects come in here and accuse Hamas of being cowards for hiding in built up areas, take your mind back to the RAF dropping bombs on houses in Belfast and tell me whether that argument still sounds convincing. It can only be convincing to a person who has decided that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the rocket attacks, and and as a result has decided that a Palestinian life is worth less than an Irish life.

When Hamas target Israeli civilians nobody seriously makes excuses for their outrageous behaviour. I do acknowledge a difference between Hamas deliberately targeting civilians - which is the very definition of terrorism; and the Israeli's purporting only to target military targets and therefore not being a classic case of terrorism. However it's semantics whether one labels it terrorism or not. When you say that you'd have more sympathy Hamas if they weren't trying to massacre innocent civilians, that's fair enough, so would I. However when you say that, I wish I had confidence that you were also thinking that the Israeli military actually are massacring innocent civilians by the standards we'd expect from any 1st world democracy.

But let's face reality. You can't just turn the clock back and change everything. You can't rebuild the present based on what the world used to look like. It's the same with Islam returning the 4 holy cities of Christianity to the Christians. It's the same story as Tibet being unjustly siezed by the Chinese, and has since been colonized by ethnic Chinese. China also occupies a big chunk of India that they siezed by force and have no intention of giving back. The Russians displaced the Germans and Polish enmasse to expand their own borders. Lots of unfortunate things have happened in human history. In almost every case, present day realities make undoing those bad things unrealistic. The same is true for Israel. After being kicked around and horribly mistreated by pretty much everyone for thousands of years, they finally have a nation of their own again. They're never going to give it up. Why would they?

On the one hand you're criticising the Palestinians for longingly looking backwards to the land that many of them were born and raised on. Yet, on the other hand you're defending the position of a different group of people who decided to build a country on another peoples land by looking backwards for over 2000 years. Under Israeli law, any Jewish person from anywhere in the world has the right to go 'back' to and live in Israel, a land they may never even have seen. Palestinians in Gaza can see with their own eyes over the barriers and electric fences into the land they were born and raised on, but have no right to live in because they aren't Jewish! I agree with you entirely when you say that looking backwards has caused enormous problems in the region, but you'd be testing my credulity if you can seriously look at what has happened in Palestine and accuse the Palestinians of being the guilty party. However, I assume we both agree that in order for there to be peace that both sides must look forwards, which brings us to your final point.

Demanding and end of the nation of Israel is a completely ridiculous demand. It's a complete non-starter. You might as well ask Saudi Arabia to turn over Mecca and Medina to the Roman Catholic Church.

There will never be peace in the Middle East until the Muslim world, especially the Palestinians, accepts the fact that Israel isn't going to just go away. Any final peace agreement must begin with recognizing Israel's right to exist. Fail to do that and you might as well not bother with peace talks at all.

My final point is going to be contentious because I'm going to criticise your entire perception of this problem. As a result I have no problem with whatever terms you want to respond to me in. I put it to you that you have been grossly mis-led over the stumbling blocks towards peace, and this is leading you to parrot the Israeli Governments sponsored narrative that Hamas refuse to 'recognise Israel's right to exist'. I see this line repeated over and over again in the news media, but on inspection it actually means next to nothing.

If you asked me, "Does the UK have a right to exist?" That's a relatively straightforward question for me to answer, because of course I think the UK has a right to exist. However, if I knew that you included half of France within the UK, and then you asked me "Does the UK have a right to exist?" I would have to give another answer. Returning to the middle east, Israel has always refused to set its own borders on a map, therefore how could anybody (let alone the Palestinians!) acknowledge its right to exist? The problem is not merely one of territory, it is also one of context.

When you look at the proposed terms of historic peace plans, at the very centre of the Palestinians claim is a right of return for their residents who are prepared to live peacefully in Israel. (As stipulated in UN resolution 194.) This would mean a large influx of Muslim Arabs to Israel, which would in turn alter the whole nature of that country as a self-described Jewish State. Therefore, when you ask a Palestinian whether he respects the right of Israel to exist, then how can he possibly answer that question without knowing what the peace terms were? It depends entirely on what is being described as 'Israel', the nature of that state called 'Israel' and the Palestinians rights within that state of 'Israel'. The underlying purpose of the peace process is to establish on what terms that the Palestinians will accept the right of Israel to exist. By definition, the Palestinians cannot recognise Israel's right to exist until it is the very last point in the peace process, not the first!

To return to what I said in my previous post, Hamas's peace position is that they will accept a permanent peace with the Jewish people providing that (3):
1. Palestinian refugee's get their right of return as defined under UN resolution 194. (Above)
2. Israel withdraws to its 1967 borders.
3. Jerusalem becomes the capital of a seperate Palestinian State.
4. A referendum of the Palestinian people accepts these peace terms.

Whether the Israeli's accept these terms or not is not for me to decide, however I must ask you to re-consider where the failures in the peace process really lie. It has nothing to do with Hamas not 'recognising' Israel. That whole idea is nothing but the hot air coming out of Israeli Government spokespeople when they get their spot on the evening news, they're just trying to 'spin' the real story to make the Palestinians look bad.

There's a lot more I could respond to, but what I've said should suffice. I do thank you for bringing a voice of reason to a subject matter that most often involves childishly hurling insults around and the like.

I quite agree and I thank you in return!

Eoin

(1) United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(2)B'Tselem - Statistics - Fatalities
(3) Palestinian views on the peace process - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia