WHY AN ISRAELI OFFENSIVE AGAINST GAZA?

Why is Israel attacking Gaza with more ferocity than before, seeking to join those who throughout the ages who have persecuted and starved millions as a matter of state policy. Is it to set the precedent of Israeli impunity as we transition to a new President? Is this the way it is and always must be? Must Israel continue its endless efforts to drive the Palestinians from Palestine and to prevent their return to their homeland?

It seems to me that Israel continues to use the accusation of terrorism regarding relatively minor Palestinian attacks to justify the persecutions, starvation and even murder of the Palestinian people at large. This is not justice and if Obama supports this siege of Palestine he too is a criminal because without United States support this siege would not be happening.

If the Palestinians have any friends I don't see them in evidence. It is as if the whole world has written them off. This doesn't mean that Israel will prevail in its efforts to create an even larger Israel. Ultimately the Jews and Palestinians will sit down and the same table and wonder why peace took so long to come to. Israeli intransigence and hostility to the Palestinian people is the fundamental obstacle to peace.

Currently the parties could easily agree on a just peace. It isn't clear that the Israeli's will ever be ready for peace. They basically demand peace before their is a peace, a tall order and one they work tirelessly to make impossible. Too many of them are just unwilling to abandon the idea of taking every square inch of Palestine. Religious delusions rule despite widespread rejection of the fundamentalist notions that animate
aggressive settlers and politicians alike.

HOPEFULLY OBAMA IS NOT ANTI PALESTINIAN

One of the crucial moral issues in progressive politics is the question of Israel and Zionism and the situation in Palestine/Israel today. Currently it seems to me that there are progressive ideas about Palestine and Israel that allow for either one united secular state or two viable unconquered states at peace with one another.

The Palestinians continue to be terribly oppressed and abused in Gaza and the West Bank. The sieges of Gaza and other Palestinian areas are crimes against humanity as well as war crimes. Siege has long been condemned by international law. Nor is siege an appropriate response to the asymmetrical attacks on Israeli territory because the scale of those attacks is quite limited and ineffective although sometimes quite deadly, admittedly.

I think the Israelis and Palestinians should become one family, to put all the so called values that supposedly divide aside and to adopt one another into each others families. A religion that divides the oppressed of yesterday from the oppressed of today is an idolatry. Many already see that racial purity and this or that piece of territory is not what is crucial. A real, just peace among the two and several peoples is what is holy, not the land, not the land. Remember the golden calf when Moses came down from the mountain with the law. Call it what you may, the ten commandments or the one thousand commandments. It was the law and it is what so many who want more land say they are following.

Negotiations with Hamas have already ratcheted down the missile attacks on Israel. Isn't it possible to secure a peace agreement between Israel and all Palestinian factions and government officials.

It is time for Israel to stop trying to social engineer the future of the Palestinian people. Let's see that genius applied for the embrace of both parties, both sides, one by the other so that everyone succeeds. Of course the Israeli extremists need to be coaxed into a peaceful frame of mind. This may be a great challenge but the nonviolent struggle with, not against, these settlers by Israeli society at large could be a model for struggling with and working out a just, stable peace with Palestinians.

Consider the practicality of peace in a world of crisis. Who has not betrayed the Palestinians and now they are divided into two camps. Lets have an honest and transparent foreign policy and domestic policy towards Israel. How can Israel protect itself from the threats of the violent extremists who oppose accommodation, peace and a fraternal relationship with this close and indigenous people?

Presumably those who are for peace should not be intimidated if some are martyred in the cause of peace. Yitzak Rabin should not be the only Israeli willing to die for peace and as a peaceful Israeli leader. So some extremists may kill other Israeli leaders for peace. If so they could have other leaders ready to go, and another replacement team several replacements deep ready to go on short notice. It sucks to be in this sort of position but what is the point of dying for endless war or killing for endless war? Peace is better for everything and everyone as long as it is a just peace.

It seems that if violence trends downward that this is a good sign and that military brutality may not be the best input into the "peace process" at that time.

EDUCATE FRIENDS OF ISRAEL ABOUT THE FACTS OF ETHNIC CLEANSING SINCE 1948

I just heard a fifteen minute lecture from a fellow named Pappe? Anyway he was recounting the real history of Palestine and Israel and he very explicitly told how Ben Gurion and ten other Zionist leaders planned the ethnic cleansing of what they imagined would be, and now essentially are, Israeli territories as we know them today.

He told, very briefly, how about three quarters of a million Palestineans were cleaned out ot Palestine by a well orchestrated campaign of terror and forced evacuation in 1948. Amazingly, the world said nothing! And this sort of vicious ethnic cleansing has been going on the last sixty years. Sixty years of ethnic cleansing.

Later in his life Ben Gurion visited northern Israel and wrote in his diary how great it was but for one thing, that there were still Palestinians who had not been removed. Ben Gurion, the premier founder of the Israeli experiment was a hard core racist. He hated Arabs and Palestinians. Is this why so many enablers of Zionism don't like the term apartheid to be used vis-a-vis Israel? Is it because these racists posing as the defenders of all Jews and all Judaism really want to get rid of the Palestinians all together?

Certainly that is the endless policy of Israel for sixty years, the ethnic cleansing of the territories they call Israel proper and the colonization of the few remaining Palestinian territories. Ethnic cleansing, forced expatriation, purging Israel and the territories under its military and economic domination of all indigenous people. That is the stinking truth about Israel that must be both exposed and condemned as a matter of basic human decency.

Only when the Zionists confront their own racist ideology will peace between them and their neighbors be possible. This means they must recognize Palestinians as human beings.

Congratulations to All Parties!

Now see how easy it is to not be a pirate! Hopefully this is a sign of new flexibility and a determination to allow free access to Gaza.

There were some Palestinians on the ships, weren't there? That is to say I hope this isn't just more of that racist Zionist crap about allowing for European and non-Palestinian rights then denying them to Palestinians.

Is it hope or just a wise avoidance of a propaganda disaster?

WILL ISRAEL COMMIT ACTS OF PIRACY AGAIN?

Scores of human rights activists are putting their lives on the line as they seek to sail two ships from Cyprus to Gaza. Israel has threatened them with military attack.

That is piracy, often condemned as such when committed by other actors such as off the coast of Somalia.

However Israel's blockade of Gaza by land, sea and air is regarded as an exception to the rule at least by
a majority of American Zionists.

Of course a number of Israeli activists are involved as are some American Jews. They are putting their lives on the line for peace, justice and an end to the blockade of Gaza.

Iran, Israel and the United States Have a HIstory of Secretive Collaboration

As the United States under the leader of its idiot President and puppetmaster
Dicke Cheney appears to be bent on another act of military aggression, open war against Iran.

Remember the good ole days when Reagan and the Ayatollah Khomeini could work together to give arms to the contras in Nicaragua so they could mount a campaign of terrorism against the Sandinista regime then in power? Of course it was all hush hush. I think it tells you something about the Iranian regime that they may have provided these weapons knowing that they were going to these terrorist instruments of United States imperialism, the butcher contras, the terrorist contras.

Yes,the Iranian revolutions tend to have practical goals and yet it is motivated by religious nonsense. So I guess they didn't give a damn about the Sandinistas.
People should be grilling the Iranian revolutionaries about this. What do they say about this collaboration with empire and the betrayal of others fighting that same empire simply to achieve national independence in Nicaragua.

What did they give Iran, missiles to fight Iraq. And who started the war against Iran? Saddam Hussein under the tutelage and with the support of the United states of America. Freedom lovers to the end, eh? So the United States sought to benefit from both sides in this war it instigated! There is not simply blood upon the hands of the imperialist, their hands are nothing but blood. Someone, please say that better, and better and better.

Stop entertaining yourself, stop intoxicating yourself with ideas of slavery and submission. Look at what is happening in the real world. End the siege of your mind! Break out! Think out!

History is now, history is now! Everything from the past is now! The consequences of these imperialist invasions, interventions, occupations and conquests are now. They are real. History is liberating. Don't believe the ahistorical lies of the empire or those who imagine that the empire is necessary and inevitable. They are slaves of the system. They have not yet overthown the bourgeois ideas, the capitalist ideas, the ideas of serving the master, racism, sexism, all the crap that
weighs us down with the unnecessary tradition which is basically reactionary crap, at least a majority of it. So you have to work on overthowing that in your own mind before you can proceed with any rationality.

AS GAZANS STRUGGLE FOR LIFE PBS AIRS TALES OF JEWISH PERSECUTION

I just have to say that once again, as the Palestinians are horribly persecuted, tortured and abused by Israel, we see almost none of that in our so-called news and now a series is it on PBS about the persecution of Jews.

I actually like the program about Vilnus (sp?) and its role as a sort of de facto Yiddish capital but my critique is not of the programs per se but the focus of PBS as real people in the real world today
face dire problems while the Vilnus stuff happened more than six decades ago. Of course it does open the door to comparing the resistance of the Vilnus Jews and that of the Palestinians today.

It looked, sort of like a mini-Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is a monument to the human will for liberty and liberation. Too bad we as humans have to be so pushed to such extremities to rebel for liberty, justice and liberation.

Let us take this occasion to remember that it was European Christianity that tried to destroy the Jews, not anyone in Palestine!