Gaza: the "War" is really for Real Estate

The Real Estate War in Gaza

Victoria Buch
CounterPunch
Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:32 UTC

The History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

I arrived in Israel 40 years ago. It took me many years to understand that the very existence of my country, as it is today, is based on an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The project started many years ago. Its seed can be traced to the basic fallacy of the Zionist movement, which set out to establish a Jewish-national state in a location already inhabited by another nation. Under these conditions, one has, at most, a moral right to strive for a bi-national state; establishing a national state implies, more or less by definition, ethnic cleansing of the previous inhabitants.

Albert Einstein grasped this fallacy a long time ago. A short time after WWI "Einstein complained that the Zionists were not doing enough to reach agreement with the Palestinian Arabs...He favored a binational solution in Palestine and warned Chaim Weizmann against ' 'Prussian style' nationalism"[1]

But such warnings passed un-heeded by the Zionist movement. So here we are, nearly a century later, with a Jewish national state dominated by militaristic and militant nationalists, who diligently pursue colonization and "judaization" of the land under Israeli control, on both sides of the Green Line (1967 border). The project has been pursued continuously and relentlessly under the different Israeli governments, recently under the cover of bogus "negotiations" with President Abbas. Most of the Israeli institutions participate in it. Young Israelis, generation after generation, join the army to provide the military cover. The young folks have been brain-washed to honestly believe that the army pursues Israel's "fight for existence". However it seems evident to the author of this article, as to many others, that the survival of the Jewish community in this country depends on establishing viable mechanisms of coexistence with the Palestinians. Thus, under the slogan of "fight for existence", the State of Israel is pursuing an essentially suicidal project.

This long-standing outlook of the Israeli governing classes was summarized succinctly in a recent book Palestine Inside Out by Saree Makdisi, an American academic. His book "suggests that occupation is merely a feature of an ongoing Israeli policy of slow transfer of the native Palestinian population from their lands. This policy predates the founding of the state, and all of the various practices of the occupier: illegal settlement, land confiscation, home demolition and so on, serve this ultimate purpose." [2]

If you do not believe the above assessment, consider several statements by David Ben Gurion himself, from the time before the establishment of the State of Israel (Ben Gurion was the leader of the Zionist movement before 1948 and the first Israeli Prime Minister after 1948):

"The compulsory transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second Temples...We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty, this is national consolidation in a free homeland." [3]

"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]...I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." [3]

During the 1948 war, about two-thirds of the Palestinians who would become refugees were in fact expelled from their homes by the nascent Israeli army, and one-third became refugees while escaping the dangers of war. All these people, 0.75-1 million of them, were prevented from returning to Israel after the armistice agreement, while their homes and property were demolished or appropriated by the State of Israel.

Among the common mantras provided to the Israelis to justify the above is the following: "Israel accepted the UN partition plan, and Arabs did not, so what happened afterwards is their own fault". What is conveniently overlooked is that Palestinian Arabs constituted between one third and one half of the population of that designated Jewish homeland (according to various UN reports). Why should these people, whose ancestors lived there for generations, accept living in somebody else's designated homeland? Imagine, for example, the reaction of French Belgians if their country were designated as a "Flemish homeland" by the UN.

But the main mantra drummed into the conscience of an Israeli citizen from kindergarten, is that in 1948 "it was either them or us", "Arabs would have thrown us into the sea if we did not establish a Jewish majority state with a strong army", etc. I have my doubts about that line, too, but let us suppose for the moment that in fact, it was so. And then came the year 1967, and the Six Day War. Another chapter in the Israeli "fight for existence" against recalcitrant Arabs who just keep trying to throw us into the sea. On the face of it, that is how it seemed. I together with most of my compatriots believed for years that 1967 was in fact a moment of existential danger for Israel. Until I stumbled upon some telling quotes, uttered by our very own leaders [4]:

"(a) The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin's (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: 'In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.'

(b) Two-time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974 - 77 and 1992 - 95) told French newspaper Le Monde in February, 1968: 'I do not believe Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.'

(c) General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: 'Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it.'

(d) General Haim Barlev, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief told Ma'ariv in April 1972: We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.'"

So: instead of "thwarting an existential danger", in 1967 the State of Israel carried out an effective military operation to acquire some real estate. There is nothing new about that "existential danger" propaganda. Acquisition of real estate by conquest has been already called pleasing names by various other conquerors and occupiers, throughout the old and new history: such as "manifest destiny", "white man's burden", "spreading true religion / culture / democracy", whatnot.

The reader may like to know that the 1967 real estate acquisition by the State of Israel was anticipated some twenty years earlier by Ben-Gurion, at the time of the partition plan (which was supposedly accepted by the Zionist leadership). See the following quotes of Ben-Gurion, which can be found in the book by an Israeli historian[5]:

"Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do not see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question. Those who reject partition are right in their claim that this country cannot be partitioned because it constitutes one unit, not only from a historical point of view but also from that of nature and economy".

"After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of the Palestine".

I wonder if at any point in history there was any association of people who acquired goodies by brute force, and who viewed themselves candidly as such. Times and again, conquerors considered themselves unwilling victims of circumstances, and the barbarians (their own victims!) against whom they have to regretfully protect their rights. Consider the following pronouncements of Benny Morris, a historian who documented the 1948 ethnic cleansing. In a 2004 interview with Morris which was published in Haaretz one reads[6]:

Q: The title of the book you are now publishing in Hebrew is Victims. In the end, then, your argument is that of the two victims of this conflict, we [Israelis] are the bigger one.

Morris: "Yes. Exactly. We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here. We are a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us.

The above opinion is representative of the Israeli mainstream. It has been raised to the status of axiom over the years, and no reasonable peace offers (such as the latest Saudi one) are likely to put a dent in it. Israelis are using this slogan to exempt themselves from normal human decency towards Palestinians. Most Israeli Jews have convinced themselves that they have a moral right to expropriate and expel Palestinians because Palestinians are such barbarians, who did not respond to Israel's"generous peace offers" and "only wanted to throw us to the sea". Because we are a nation of Holocaust survivors. My compatriots imagined themselves starring in a modern version of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings - starring as beautiful elves, of course, who were forced by sad fate to fight ugly goblins the Palestinians (goblins = "terrorists"). Human mercy does not apply to "terrorists". You do not make territorial compromises or peace agreements with "terrorists".

The above explains the mass participation of otherwise normal and more-or-less decent Israelis in the ongoing ethnic-cleansing projects. How else can you account for a dying elderly man and his wife being dragged out of their east Jerusalem apartment to make space for Jewish settlers. Building the Jerusalem "Museum of Tolerance" on the site of an ancient Muslim graveyard. Onslaught on West Bank orphanages supported by Islamic charities. State-subsidized Jewish settler-thugs conducting pogroms against Palestinians in Hebron and elsewhere in the Occupied Territories. Widespread sadism practiced by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian detainees. Trashing of Palestinian homes during nightly military incursions in Palestinian towns and villages. Demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under the brazen pretext of "illegal construction". Extensive land grab for settlers. And much more.[7]

The Gaza Strip is the place where the self-righteous Israeli sadism has reached new heights. The Strip is densely populated, mostly by descendants of Palestinians expelled in 1948. Well before the Second Intifada, choice Gazan real estate along the beach (about ¼ of the Strip land) was confiscated for a few thousand Jewish settlers. Still, a million and a half Gazan Palestinians had a sort of normal life (under the Israeli occupation) - growing fruits and vegetables, making construction materials and other products for Israeli markets, and working as laborers within the Green Line. Before the second Intifada, very little terror was coming from there to Israel.

However, since the beginning of the Intifada (a year and a half before the first Palestinian rocket landing across the border) the Israeli army embarked on the systematic destruction of the Strip. Incursions were carried out every few weeks and included the destruction of factories and workshops, roads, agricultural land, homes, and whatnot. Access to the Israeli economy was closed. Eventually, desperate Palestinians resorted to shooting Qassam rockets which rarely caused casualties or real damage but served as an excellent pretext for Israeli military "action".

And then Sharon carried out his brilliant propaganda move of "disengagement" from Gaza. The whole operation was marketed as a demonstration of Israeli good will. The Israeli settlements in Gaza were in fact removed, but the army was redeployed around the Strip, and the Strip was converted to a large scale prison. The economic strangulation of Gaza was tightened to a draconian extent, especially after the Hamas government suppressed the Israel-cum-USA sponsored Fatah putsch. (I am no fan of Hamas but their government was democratically elected by the Palestinians) Hamas offered several times to conduct negotiations with Israel, based on 1967 borders, but the offers were under-reported and ignored. It is likely that such negotiations would have stopped the Qassams, but Israeli leaders appeared interested in continuation of the violence. The Qassams created a great opportunity for more "poor little us" propaganda, and a great pretext to wiggle out of legitimate international requests to stop the massive colonization of the West Bank.

Finally, a truce with Hamas was negotiated. Since the beginning of the truce defense minister Barak commenced preparations for a massive attack on Gaza[8]. On November 14th the working truce with Hamas was deliberately broken on Barak's orders, by killing several Hamas fighters. A totally predictable Palestinian response ensued - cancellation of the truce and a barrage of rockets. The barrage was used by Barak as a pretext for that large-scale operation, including the slaughter of hundreds of people in Gaza with missiles deployed from airplanes. This muscle-flexing is an obvious part of Barak's and Livni's forthcoming election campaign, at the price of hundreds of Palestinian casualties, and several Israeli ones (as meanwhile Palestinians have improved their aim). In a forthcoming ground operation Israeli soldiers are also likely to pay with their lives for this form of electioneering.

Do you know what mainstream Israelis make of the above? 'We, Israelis, in an act of self-sacrifice, removed poor Jewish settlers from their "homes" in the Gaza Strip and gave Palestinians a chance for free and happy existence. But the Palestinians spurned our peace efforts and preferred instead to pursue their addiction to "throwing Jews to the sea." Gaza could have become a new Singapore, but the Gazans chose instead to shoot rockets at Israelis.'

The disengagement was thus an act of brilliance on part of that evil genius, Sharon. He provided mainstream Israelis with a sweeping moral absolution. Palestinians "disappointed" them. Now the Israeli leaders can do anything they wish to Palestinians. Do not expect a squeak of public protest from the Israeli Jewish public, except for a tiny minority of "self hating Jews" like yours truly.

Believe me, these Jewish-Israeli mainstreamers are not natural-born monsters. They just do not know any better. Alas, I used to be one of them. Then one day I stumbled, more or less by chance, into the West Bank with a group of activists. I acquired some Palestinian friends and finally understood the criminality of the treatment of the Palestinians by my country. And I learned to ignore the daily portion of preposterous propaganda which is provided to my compatriots by the media in lieu of "news". But how to convince my compatriots not to listen to this propaganda? I do not know.

Then again, it does not have to be so. In addition to four million or so stateless Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, there are about a million Palestinians living within the Green Line and carrying Israeli citizenship. Despite the very considerable internal racism, many of these Palestinian citizens are deeply involved in Israeli society. You meet Arab doctors and nurses in Israeli hospitals, Arab students in Israeli universities etc. There is quite an element of coexistence and cooperation between Jews and Arabs there. But a mainstream Jewish-Israeli colleague who might treat his or her Arab co-worker perfectly decently would still be proud of a soldier son who is "serving the country" in the Occupied Territories. He or she would still repeat racist propaganda about the "demographic danger" to the State of Israel from its Arab citizens, and believe the bloodthirsty speeches of generals and ex-generals on the TV. And vote for any of the three major Zionist parties, Likud, Kadima and Labour, whose leaders have been dedicated ethnic cleansers over the years.

For the sake of both nations living in this country, this outrage must be stopped. It must be stopped by pressure from outside, because at present within Israel there are no significant political forces to oppose it. Please do something, my friends, and do it urgently. And kindly ignore the endless "negotiations" between our government and the powerless Palestinian Authority, they are just a cover for more ethnic cleansing. If you do not believe me, come and see the massive settlement construction in East Jerusalem and West Bank. And the walls of the Palestinian ghettos.

Victoria Buch is an Israeli academic and anti-Occupation activist. Her email: vvbb54@yahoo.com

[1] From The Pity of It All, a book by Amos Elon on German Jews.
[2] From a review of Makdisi's book: Palestine Inside Out, by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, IMEU 2008.
[3] From Righteous Victims by Benny Morris
[4] Collected by Stephen Lendman, see here)
[5] From The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities,by Simha Flapan
[6] The full text of the interview can be found in the Counterpunch website
[7] *Information can be found, e.g., in the Occupation Magazine, the website of Israeli anti-Occupation activists.
[8] "Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about" By Barak Ravid, Haaretz

Ethnic Cleansing Palestine Expulsion Zionists Israeli Apartheid Wall

A Gaza Witness speaks

Video: What I Witnessed Today in Gaza

Israels60thbirthday.com
Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:53 UTC

Safa Joudeh

The following is moving eyewitness testimony from Gaza.

It was just before noon when I heard the first explosion. I rushed to my window, barely did I get there and look out when I was pushed back by the force and air pressure of another explosion. For a few moments I didn't understand, then I realized that Israeli promises of a wide-scale offensive against the Gaza Strip had materialized. Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzpi Livni's statements following a meeting with Egyptian President Hussni Mubarak the day before yesterday had not been empty threats after all.

What followed seems pretty much surreal at this point. Never had we imagined anything like this. It all happened so fast but the amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, even to me and I'm in the middle of it and a few hours have passed already passed.



6 locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza city. The images are probably not broadcasted in US media. There are piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you look at them you can see that a few of the young men are still alive, someone lifts a hand here, and another raise his head there. They probably died within moments because their bodies are burned, most have lost limbs, some have their guts hanging out and they're all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home, (which is close to the 2 largest universities in Gaza) a missile fell on a large group of young men, university students, they'd been warned not to stand in groups, it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. 7 were killed, 4 students and 3 of our neighbors kids, young men who were from the same family (Rayes) and were best friends. As I'm writing this I can hear a funeral procession go by outside, I looked out the window a moment ago and it was the 3 Rayes boys, They spent all their time together when they were alive, they died together and now their sharing the same funeral together. Nothing could stop my 14 year old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn't spoken a word since.

What did Olmert mean when he stated that WE the people of Gaza weren't the enemy, that it was Hamas and the Islamic Jihad who were being targeted? Was that statement made to infuriate us out of out state of shock, to pacify any feelings of rage and revenge? To mock us?? Were the scores of children on their way home from school and who are now among the dead and the injured Hamas militants? A little further down my street about half an hour after the first strike 3 schoolgirls happened to be passing by one of the locations when a missile struck the Preventative Security Headquarters building. The girls bodies were torn into pieces and covered the street from one side to the other.

In all the locations people are going through the dead terrified of recognizing a family member among them. The streets are strewn with their bodies, their arms, legs, feet, some with shoes and some without. The city is in a state of alarm, panic and confusion, cell phones aren't working, hospitals and morgues are backed up and some of the dead are still lying in the streets with their families gathered around them, kissing their faces, holding on to them. Outside the destroyed buildings old men are kneeling on the floor weeping. Their slim hopes of finding their sons still alive vanished after taking one look at what had become of their office buildings.

And even after the dead are identified, doctors are having a hard time gathering the right body parts in order to hand them over to their families. The hospital hallways look like a slaughterhouse. It's truly worse than any horror movie you could ever imagine. The floor is filled with blood, the injured are propped up against the walls or laid down on the floor side by side with the dead. Doctors are working frantically and people with injuries that aren't life threatening are sent home. A relative of mine was injured by a flying piece of glass from her living room window, she had deep cut right down the middle of her face. She was sent home, too many people needed medical attention more urgently. Her husband, a dentist, took her to his clinic and sewed up her face using local anesthesia

200 people dead in today's air raid. That means 200 funeral processions, a few today, most of them tomorrow probably. To think that yesterday these families were worried about food and heat and electricity. At this point I think they -actually all of us- would gladly have Hamas sign off every last basic right we've been calling for the last few months forever if it could have stopped this from ever having happened.

The bombing was very close to my home. Most of my extended family live in the area. My family is ok, but 2 of my uncles' homes were damaged,

We can rest easy, Gazans can mourn tonight. Israel is said to have promised not to wage any more air raids for now. People suspect that the next step will be targeted killings, which will inevitably means scores more of innocent bystanders whose fate has already been sealed.

This doesn't even begin to tell the story on any level. Just flashes of thing that happened today that are going through my head.

Beware the Seduction of "Change"

Ok, we're all breathing a sigh of relief that Bible-Spice is no longer a heartbeat away from being able to "praaaaize jeeeezus" by starting Armageddon with a few spare nuclear weapons on any handy Middle East muslim country. And by now the hype over the seeming salvation that Obama is supposed to bring should have settled down. Time for a reality check.

You don't think the dude who collected the most corporate donations of any candidate in history made it into the White House without having more than a few chits to pay back? Expect more of the Bush years in a prettier, more intelligently presented package. If one can judge a man by he company he (may be forced to) keep, this group does not look promising. To be presented in several sections

Blue Ibis
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Beware of the Obama hype. What 'change' in America really means

The New Statesman
Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:20 UTC

John Pilger

© unknown

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger writes that the lauding of Barack Obama has a history and that 'historical moments' ought to be less about their symbolism and accompanying histrionics than what they really mean. The question is: what is Obama's true relation to unchanging American myths about the imposition of its notorious power?

My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of president John F Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south, following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the Midlothian Mirror. Except for his drawl and fine boots, everything about Penn was the antithesis of the Texas stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official version of Kennedy's murder.

This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented, before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose "professionalism" and "objectivity" carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth. Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic. Read American Dreams: Lost and Found by the masterly Studs Terkel, who died the other day, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute enlightened views to a majority who believe that "government should care for those who cannot care for themselves" and are prepared to pay higher taxes for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their troops out of other people's countries.

Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the history of the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.

That is the subtext of Barack Obama's "oratory". He says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama's election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting from America since 4 November (e.g. "liberal Americans smiled and the world smiled with them") but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the "bailout" of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.

Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush to continue his blood fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama never said the illegal invasion of Iraq was wrong, merely that it was a "mistake". Thereafter, he voted in to give Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama's election is historic, a symbol of great change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a liberal Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to "investigate" and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush's secretary of state, Powell was often described as a "liberal" and was considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice.

Obama's first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an "Israel-first" Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians - an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people's loathing of the United States and the spawning of jihadism.

No serious scrutiny of this is permitted within the histrionics of Obamamania, just as no serious scrutiny of the betrayal of the majority of black South Africans was permitted within the "Mandela moment". This is especially marked in Britain, where America's divine right to "lead" is important to elite British interests. The once respected Observer newspaper, which supported Bush's war in Iraq, echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that "America has restored the world's faith in its ideals". These "ideals", which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children.

None of this was uttered during the election campaign. Had it been allowed, there might even have been recognition that liberalism as a narrow, supremely arrogant, war-making ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Prior to Blair's criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and his media mystics. "Blair can be a beacon to the world," declared the Guardian in 1997. "[He is] turning leadership into an art form."

Today, merely insert "Obama". As for historic moments, there is another that has gone unreported but is well under way - liberal democracy's shift towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity, with the media as its clichéd façade. "True democracy," wrote Penn Jones Jr, the Texas truth-teller, "is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you're meant to think and keeping your eyes wide open at all times."

CFR Barak Obama, Studs Terkel Vietnam My Lai Rahm Emanuel Joe Biden Zionists Tony Blair

Equal Opportunity Oppression - "Tis the Season"

Why confine the fun to just the Palestinian muslims?

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Israeli occupation creates hell on earth, even for Christians
The Palestinian Information Center
Wed, 26 Dec 2007 05:36 EST

©Unknown

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah arrives at the IOF checkpoint outside Bethlehem

From Khalid Amayreh in Bethlehem

Christmas is a season of good will. However, for Israel and its notoriously mendacious propaganda machine, Christmas is also a hasbara opportunity for spreading lies and disseminating disinformation and half truths about Christians in the Holy Land.

The usual seasonal dosage of lies includes such claims that Christians in the Holy Land suffer more from Muslim persecution than from the Israeli and apartheid, and that Christian emigration is not really attributed to Israel's Nazi-like repression of the Palestinian people but rather to Palestinian "Muslim" intolerance and violence.

Well, such lies are not new. Israel itself is a state based on lies and lying has always been and continues to be Israel's policy and modus operandi. In fact, it is very hard for one to be Zionist and not to be a liar. In truth, Zionism and mendacity are two sides of the same coin.

Didn't Zionism claim that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land?

Didn't Zionism claim that Palestinian refugees fled their homes and towns willingly and that Israel was in no way responsible for their flight?

Didn't Israel tell the world that the Israeli occupation army was the most moral army in the world, and that Israeli soldiers didn't knowingly and deliberately kill Palestinian children and civilians, and that the numerous acts of murder and maiming by the Israeli army were merely regrettable accidents?

And even now, and despite Israel's nakedness before the peoples of the world, this shameless state and its professional liars and spin doctors continue to claim ad nauseam that Israel is a democratic state where the rule of law is supreme.

Well, do democratic states act and behave the way Israel is acting and behaving? Do democratic states classify citizens and subjects into Ubermensch and untermensch?

I know for sure that our Christian-Palestinian brothers and sisters shall never allow Israel to use them as hasbara pawns in the service of oppression, racism and ethnic cleansing.

The Christians of Palestine, who have received their share of suffering and oppression at the hands of Zionism know more than anybody else that the wickedness of the occupation doesn't distinguish between them and their Muslim compatriots.

In November, 1948, the Hagana terrorists overran the two Christian villages of Ikrit and Birim in the upper Galilee, expelling inhabitants at gunpoint. The pogrom-like expulsion was carried out without the Israeli government approval. However, the democratic Israeli state never allowed the Christian inhabitants to return, despite several rulings to the contrary by the Israeli High Court.

Since 1967, Israel, has been trying to play all kinds of dirty tactics to tamper with Palestinian national unity, especially by playing Muslim against Christian and vice versa.

A few years ago, the Israeli Intelligence instructed its agents to throw stones and Molotov cocktails on several churches in the northern and central parts of the West Bank, apparently in order to use the incidents as hasbara ammunition in North America where public opinion was already overcharged against anything Arab or Islamic.

Meanwhile, the Israeli media, especially right-wing newspapers such as the Jerusalem Post, was concocting and inventing stories about Christian girls being raped and murdered by Palestinians in Bethlehem.

Such fabrications would be readily inflated, spun out of proportions and then widely disseminated especially among evangelical fundamentalists. Eventually, this would be translated into political support for Israeli colonialism and ethnic cleansing against both Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land.

Of course, many innocent and often naïve Americans and Canadians have no idea what kind of treatment is being meted out to Christians in the West Bank at the hands of Israeli occupiers.

They don't know that Israel is systematically stealing, at gunpoint, Church property and real estate in Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahur and Jerusalem.

They don't know that Israel routinely bars Christians, laymen and clergy, from accessing their holy places in Jerusalem, e.g. the Church of the Sepulcher.

They don't know that Israeli Jewish youths routinely harass, even spit on clergymen in the streets of Jerusalem, often in full view of policemen who in most cases remain passive.

They don't know that Christian commuters are routinely humiliated at roadblocks manned by trigger-happy soldiers, which make their daily lives an unending nightmare?

They don't know that Israel has already morphed Bethlehem into a ghetto thanks to this Wall of Shame which Israel calls "separation wall" when in reality it is designed to grab and steal as much Palestinian land as possible.

Well, just come to Bethlehem and see for yourself. It is a nightmare, it is hell on earth, and it is done by a people who claim to be a light upon the nations.

If Christians in North America knew how Israel is acting and behaving toward their fellow Christian coreligionists and, of course, toward other Palestinians, they probably would start to change their views.

That is why it is imperative that Christians, especially in North America, make some serious efforts to know the truth about Israel and its crimes.

This can be done through third-party sources such as human rights organizations and western groups operating in the West Bank such as the Christian Peace Making Team and the International Solidarity Movement.

In short, Israeli and pro-Israeli media wouldn't tell the truth about Israeli crimes against Palestinians, Muslim and Christian alike. So try to find alternative sources of news to know the truth about what is really happening in the Holy Land.

Don't allow yourself to be duped and enslaved by Zionist lies.

Hypocrisy Thy Name is Zionism

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How dare they! Egypt, Syria press for IAEA resolution over Israel's nuclear weapons

Simon Morgan
AFP
Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:38 EDT

Egypt and Syria urged the UN nuclear watchdog on Wednesday to pass a resolution condemning Israel for possessing nuclear weapons.

Israel insisted there was no basis for the resolution, scheduled to be presented on Thursday, and called upon the other member states of the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to reject the proposal.

Egyptian ambassador Ihab Fawzy said the IAEA must pass the resolution against Israel to show it is committed to "the principles and declared stances regarding peace, stability and security in the Middle East region."

Syrian ambassador Ibrahim Othman told the IAEA general conference that "Arab countries will with greater determination... present to this conference a draft resolution for its adoption."

Israel's policy is one of "nuclear ambiguity", neither confirming nor denying it has nuclear weapons even if, in an apparent blunder, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appeared to imply late last year that his country does in fact have the bomb. [Oh they confirmed it. See Here]

The Arab states insist, however, that the Jewish state does have such weapons and is a danger to peace and stability in the Middle East.

Traditionally at the IAEA's general conference, Arab states introduce a resolution on the Israeli nuclear threat but in the face of strong Western opposition, they withdraw the text.

It is then postponed to the following year in return for Israel agreeing to a call for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East.

On Wednesday, however, the Egyptian and Syrian ambassadors signalled that their patience was wearing thin.

"The fact that many UN and IAEA resolutions with regard to Israel's nuclear capabilities are not carried out increases the frustration of the Arab peoples and threatens an arms race that could also threaten the peace and security of the region and the world," said Syrian ambassador Othman.

He complained that Israel was the only country in the Middle East "to have nuclear weapons and nuclear capabilities which are not under international control."

It was therefore a legitimate concern "to ask Israel to join the other countries in the NPT" (the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), Othman said. [Even Iran has signed this treaty]

The Jewish state's steadfast refusal to put its nuclear facilities under international control constituted a "danger" to peace in the region and internationally, he argued.

Syria supports setting up a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East and "expresses its deep anxiety regarding the obstacle that Israel places to setting up such an area," Othman said.

Israel's "intransigent attitude has brought great harm to the credibility and the internationality of the NPT", Othman said.

The chief of Israel's atomic energy commission, Gideon Frank, rejected the criticism.

He said Israel remained committed "to a vision of the Middle East developing into a zone free of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. [Except Israel of course]

"Yet, in the Middle East... such a noble goal cannot be advanced out of context," Frank argued.

A nuclear weapons-free zone could only emerge if there were "a fundamental transformation of the regional political-strategic environment through a gradual process of building mutual trust and reconciliation, followed by more modest arms control measures," Frank said.

"So far, such a transformation has eluded the Middle East."

Frank said that "many alarming proliferation developments in the Middle East have occurred in recent years. None of these involved Israel. But all of them challenge our security."

There was "no basis" for the resolution against Israel. "Its sponsors are motivated by extraneous considerations," he said.

Comment: No basis?

"Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map.
Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as France, America, Russia and Israel?" -- Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, December 13, 2006

Of course, Iran never said that.

Then and Now, Zionist Style

Not a lot to add here, except the U.S. recently committed 30 BILLION ("yes, with a B") more of your tax dollars to support this inhumanity. Not only does it deprive you in the US of decent schools, good affordable medical care, safe roads and other things that make a life livable, it makes EVERY U.S. taxpayer complicit in these crimes. Think about that.

Blue Ibis
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Gaza: The Auschwitz Of Our Time

Khalid Amayreh
Coastal Post
Wed, 29 Aug 2007 23:21 EDT

In 1940, several months after invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazis forced about 500,000 Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto, surrounding it with a high wall. Tens of thousands died from hunger and disease. Eventually, 300,000 were sent to death camps, mainly Treblinka in eastern Poland.

Similarly, Israel is now incarcerating nearly a million and a half helpless Palestinians in the Gaza Strip into a hell similar in nature to the Warsaw Ghetto. The Gaza concentration camp is not only fitted with a wall, but also with every conceivable tool of repression, such as electric fences and watch towers manned by Gestapo-like trigger-happy Jewish soldiers who shoot first and ask questions later.

Moreover, thousands of Israeli soldiers, are surrounding Gaza in a hermetic manner, shooting and killing any Palestinian trying to escape, e.g. enter Israel to search for work or even food.

Palestinian kids survive on bread and tea

Even Palestinian kids playing soccer near the hateful fences, are routinely riddled with bullets or reduced into pieces of human flesh by the "most moral army in the world."

As a result of these genocidal designs, Gazans in the thousands are dying of malnutrition and illness resulting from anemia. Moreover, Children in great numbers are surviving on a meager and totally inadequate diet consisting mainly of bread and tea.

This week, this writer contacted several Gaza families and asked to speak with the kids. The answers I received were truly horrifying. I did speak with 10 kids and was shocked to find out that seven of the kids told me their diet during the previous week consisted mainly of bread and tea in addition to some tomatoes.

The grown-ups, especially the parents, wouldn't reveal the extent of the unfolding tragedy they are facing. They would only say a terse "al hamdulillah" (thank God). But the tone of their voices tells us that they are in real distress.

The Gaza Strip made into the largest detention camp in the world

The harsh blockade of Gaza didn't start in mid June when Hamas took over the small seaside region after defeating and ousting the American-backed Fatah forces led by Muhammed Dahlan and cohorts who had been planning, with American dollars and arms, to murder the Hamas leadership in order to receive a certificate of good conduct from the Bush Administration and Israel.

In fact, Gaza has been effectively under siege since 2000 when the second Palestinian intifada or uprising broke out. Since, then Gazans have been barred from exporting their products and produces.

Moreover, Israel, which has been telling the world that it had ended its occupation of Gaza, still retains full control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, thus reducing the Gaza Strip into the largest detention camp in the world.

To make a long story short, Gazans are being pushed into a situation very similar to that which prevailed at the Ghetto Warsaw. They are not allowed to work (unemployment in Gaza stands at more than 70%), they are not allowed to travel abroad, they are not allowed to enter Israel for work, they are not allowed even to go fishing offshore since Israeli gunboats would open fire at any fishing-boat daring to go more than a mile off the shore.

The criminal and draconian measures are meant to further impoverish Gazans to the extent that they won't be able to purchase food.

The declared Israeli goal behind starving and tormenting the people of Gaza is to force them to revolt against the democratically-elected government, led by the Hamas movement, and settle for a quisling-like government that would sell-out Palestinian national rights, including the paramount right of return for Palestinian refugees uprooted from their homes and villages by Jewish gangs in 1948, when Israel was created.

It is believed that up to two thirds of the inhabitants of Gaza are refugees. Hence, the intensive repression and coercion being meted out to these people in order to force them to give up their right to return to their homes and villages in what is now Israel.

It is crystal clear that Israel is steadily but certainly effecting a Nazi-like approach toward the people of the Gaza Strip.

The PR-conscious Israeli government, however, is hoping that the world will not take proactive measures to expose the creeping genocide in Gaza . This is why Israel is allowing limited shipments of food products, such as flour and cooking oil, into Gaza, to avoid a possible international outcry.

However, the supplies are conspicuously meager and don't meet the basic nutritional needs of the vast bulk of Gaza children.

Unfortunately, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) seems to be conniving and colluding with Israel to keep the unfolding Gaza tragedy as silent as possible.

UNRWA officials do make idle statements from time to time, warning of an impending "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza. However, the UN agency often refrains from "saying it as it is," probably for fear of upsetting the Israelis and the Americans, who apparently don't like to hear words like "starvation, and concentration camps" with regard to the situation in Gaza find their way to the international media.

Israel is undoubtedly the central culprit in this man-made tragedy in Gaza, since it is up to her to allow Gazans to obtain food and export their products and especially their produces to the West Bank. Such a step, which would cost Israel nothing, would help Gazans obtain some meager income to feed their children.

However, Israel, as always, has apparently chosen to be faithful to long traditions of callousness and moral depravity, not unlike the way the Nazis treated their victims.

US administration, Abbas as guilty as Israel

But Israel is not the only guilty party in this tragedy. The US is actually as criminal as Israel, since the Bush administration is urging Israel to keep up the pressure on Gaza.

In fact, American officials keep congratulating their Israeli colleagues on the "success" of the blockade against Gaza. I wonder what kind of politicians are those who enjoy watching children starve to death? [Hint: try here] Are they human beings or cannibalistic beasts? This question ought to be directed to Condoleezza Rice whose behavior toward the Palestinian people is probably a thousand times worse than the behavior of the worst American white slave masters toward here forefathers.

Maybe it is naive to appeal to Rice's sense of justice and morality since her manifestly criminal record with regard to the Palestinian cause leaves no doubt as to the woman's unethical and evil character.

But if the Bush administration, which has been carrying a holocaust in Iraq, and Israel, which has been effecting ethnic cleansing in Palestine in the name of Jewish nationalism, can be "excused" on the ground that only evil can be expected from evil governments, the Palestinian regime of Mahmoud Abbas has no excuse whatsoever to collude and connive with Israel against the very people it is claiming to serve. [Psychopaths recognize each other, and band together when it serves their individual interests.]

Such behavior, including the tacit and implicit encouragement of Israel to tighten the blockade of Gaza, and keep hundreds of thousands of encircled Gazans hungry and thoroughly tormented, characterizes quislings and agents of a foreign occupation.

Clearly, Abbas and his aides have much to explain to the Palestinian people. They also have much to atone for. This is if they still possess any sense of shame. [Don't bet on it. They will tell you they are good patriots.]

It's All in the Wrist Folks!

We welcome Mr. Allen Branson as the latest editorial contributor to Signs of the Times. Ever wonder how the mainstream media, politicians and psychopaths in general put one over on you? Branson shows you the ins and outs of mental trickery using very clear simple illustrations.

Vaccinate your mind! It's the best thing you will ever do for your health and the health of the world.

Blue Ibis

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The Art of Deception

Allen Branson
Psychopaths, psyops and COINTELPRO
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:44 EDT

The man sitting across the table from you is known for trickery. He is a stage magician. You know he employs trickery, so he tells you he is going to do a card trick in which he can't possibly manipulate the cards. In this trick, you will do all of the card handling. He won't touch the cards at all.

He instructs you to cut the deck into four piles. You do so. He then tells you that you are going to randomize the order of the cards by shuffling them around and moving cards from one pile to another. Pointing to a pile of cards, he instructs you to take the top three cards and place them at the bottom of that pile. Then, take the next three cards and place them, one each, on top of the three piles remaining on the table. You repeat the procedure with all four piles of cards. The cards should now be very well mixed.

The man then begins his patter in earnest. He asks you to confirm the fact that he has not touched the cards. You agree. In no way could he have manipulated how you would cut the cards or handle them. Again, you agree. With a smile, he asks you to turn over the top card from each pile. You are amazed. The four aces sit at the top of each of the four piles of cards. For a moment, your mind might actually entertain the possibility that real magic has been performed, though you "know" you've been duped.

The fact is, this trick can be taught in a couple of minutes to any child capable of understanding the instructions. It requires no fine motor skills for clever card handling since the performer does not even handle the deck. The only thing required is setting up the deck before the trick is performed and being able to do a little sales patter in which you get the audience to agree to a statement that is blatantly false.

Take a moment and see if you can identify the lie that makes the trick believable. Everything the magician says is true with one exception. The trick is based completely on a facet of human psychology that most people--stage magicians, salesmen and politicians aside--don't understand. When a person is given a number of facts that are demonstrably true, they will tend to group all statements in that group together, agreeing to everything said, including an embedded lie.

1. The magician asked you to agree that he did not touch the cards during the trick: True
2. He asks you to agree that he did not influence you in any way in how the cards were cut: True
3. He asks you to agree that in no way did he manipulate you in the handling of the cards: FALSE

In fact, the only thing he did was manipulate you while creating the illusion in your mind that you were making free choices. If you don't see the manipulation yet, read through the description of the trick again. The magician did not allow you to choose how the cards would be shuffled once they were cut into four piles. Instead, he guided you through a pre-programmed series of moves--three cards to the bottom then three cards on top of the remaining piles--designed to move the four aces to the top of the four piles from their pre-placed position at the top of the deck! If you want to understand the mechanics of the trick, grab a deck of cards and try it. Just put the four aces at the top of the deck then simply follow the trick as outlined above.

Once you understand how the trick is done, you'll realize it is a very cheap bit of manipulation. If you found your mind reeling at the description of the trick, you'll probably feel a bit of a fool at how easily you could be duped. The trick really is a child's game and a very old one, at that. Yet, people are still fooled by it.

It works with more than just cards. The phrase, "stacking the deck" means using a variation of this kind of trick to predetermine the outcome of any situation by placing what is to be chosen in a particular position then guiding the chooser through a predefined set of movements that forces that particular choice while giving the illusion of free choice. There are a number of other methods used to force a selection in stage magic. Many card tricks rely on forced selection, but the magician can't use the same force twice in his act. As he changes methods, he informs you that each new method is an assurance that he is not engaging in any sort of trickery. Maybe he fooled you on the last one, so this time he won't even touch the cards. Next time, perhaps he'll use the force called Magician's Choice. He'll give you three choices and ask you to pick one at random. You, of course, have no choice but to pick exactly what you are forced to pick.

How can that be? It's easy. Given three choices, A, B and C, suppose I want you to pick B. I ask you to pick one at random. If you happen to pick B, the force is done. If you pick A, I set A aside and ask you to pick from B and C. If you pick C, I declare that you've left your choice, B, on the table. Again, a cheap trick that most people will fall for if done with the requisite theatricality. Forced choice and sleight-of-hand are not only the prevue of stage magicians, though. Take a look at how it is done in real life.

The most enduring form of the forced choice in the U.S. and western Europe is the electoral process. This is such an obvious forced choice that it can, rather paradoxically, remain undetected even after it is pointed out. The key is the emotional involvement of the electors, which just happens to be the key to stage magic, too. Once you've convinced someone they are making a free choice, they will provide the evidence of the freedom of their choice for you. If human beings didn't possess this peculiar bit of psychology, stage magic wouldn't work. It wouldn't matter what the magician said. The forced choice would be seen for precisely what it is: forced. Instead, a little salesmanship on the part of the performer convinces the audience of what is to come before the trick is performed. The audience then dutifully sees exactly what they were told to see and the magician is free to manipulate events to his favor.

Here is another example of the techniques of stage magic at work. On the morning of September 11, 2001, you awoke to reports that the unthinkable had happened--a massive terrorist attack had occurred on U.S. soil. As the day unfolds, you learn the following facts. Four planes had been hijacked to be used as veritable flying bombs against high profile targets. Two of those planes, in front of thousands of witnesses and several video cameras, fly into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Later that morning, those towers collapse, leaving not even a bit of the structures left standing. In the Pennsylvania countryside, another of the hijacked planes crashes following an apparent heroic effort by the passengers to regain control of the aircraft from its hijackers. Also, something crashes into the Pentagon, causing massive damage, a huge fire ball and loss of life.

Eventually, it is announced that the damage at the Pentagon was caused by the fourth hijacked plane. This makes perfect sense to you. Four planes are hijacked, three are clearly accounted for, and something crashed into the Pentagon. The only logical choice is that the fourth plane crashed into the Pentagon. What doesn't occur to you is that you have been duped once again by another variation of the forced choice. Just like with the card trick, you don't think of the obvious, that the deck has been stacked and movements manipulated to force this particular choice.

Subsequent revelations about the inconsistencies in the official story of the event only further the illusion. A magician might turn your mind away from thoughts of the cheap manipulation he has performed by giving you a false choice of explanations for what you have witnessed. He only needs to give you one of the possible explanations, letting you provide the other in the privacy of your own mind. He tells you it must have been "magic." While you know it isn't true, his suggestion has clouded your thinking by introducing noise into your thought process. After all, if you were sufficiently impressed by the trick, that very thought likely went through your head. The same thing is done in the official story of the events of the day of 911. A false choice is set up by suggesting that the alternative to the official story is something preposterous, like holograms of planes flying into the twin towers, or rogue elements of the U.S. government committing this atrocity.

And here we see that a subtle variation of the trick, also used in stage magic, has been employed to divert your attention. You have been given two possible scenarios that contradict the official story. One of them is blatantly silly, one is not. Yet, as any stage magician, salesman or professional politician knows, your mind will group the statements together and dismiss the second with the first. In other words, the truth about the trick has been told openly, but in such a way that you will reject the truth, sending you down any number of dead-end blind alleys searching for the secret of how it was done.

Take a moment again to review what you were told and what you actually saw with your own eyes. If you want to see how the trick is done, do not accept anything the magician tells you at face value. He is a liar. His job is to give you as much truth and openness as possible, for the purpose of proving to you that he is not manipulating events in any way, so that the critical lie that makes the trick work will go undetected by the average observer. In the case of 911, you were flooded with demonstrable facts that were horrifying, engaging your emotions to a high degree. Remember, the key to all trickery is the emotional involvement of the audience in supporting the lie. Each fact presented made the ensuing lies all the more believable.

Two planes really did crash into the twin towers. A plane really did crash into the Pennsylvania countryside. Something really did crash into the Pentagon. All of this is a matter of record, so everything that comes after, your mind will tell you, is a matter of record, too.

But it isn't.

In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that a commercial aircraft could not have crashed into the Pentagon. There was, for example, no wreckage found at the scene that could have come from such a craft. For the craft to have hit the building as low as it did, its engines would have had to scrape the ground, yet the lawn in front of the Pentagon was left unmarked. The hole left in the Pentagon was barely as wide as the fuselage of such a craft. Assuming that the fuselage managed to fully penetrate the building and disintegrate, creating a hole that size, one is still left to account for the wings and engines. The official story would have the folding back and penetrating the building along with the fuselage. But there is simply no room for them to have made it through the hole.

In the case of the twin towers, the claim has been made that they collapsed--as did the building 7, later--due to a loss of structural integrity caused by massive fire and a weakening of supports from the shock caused by the impact of the planes. This was accepted as a reasonable explanation, despite the fact that the buildings were designed to withstand such a shock and no steel reinforced building has ever collapsed due to fire, before or since. Also, as any publicly available video of the collapse of the towers will show you, the tops of the towers leaned to one side as they began to fall, yet still managed to right themselves and fall into the footprint of the building. This would be impossible without a controlled demolition of the buildings.

You have also been asked to believe that each and every safeguard against such an event put in place by the U.S. military failed simultaneously on that fateful day, despite the fact that those safeguards had been called to action over 60 times in the preceding 12 months and worked perfectly each and every time. In the words of our stage magician, "it was magic!"

Of course, in the case of stage magic, the lies are told for our amusement. No harm done, maybe even a lesson learned. In the case of a deception like 911, the stakes are a bit higher. The art of deception is as old as mankind. Strike that. It is far older. It is as old as the universe itself. Deception is a key survival strategy for nearly everything that has ever been alive. How curious, then, that we - the one species we believe capable of rational thought on the planet - remain almost completely ignorant of the various means of deception. What's even more curious is the fact that many remain steadfast in their belief that such deception is rare when the evidence contradicting that belief can be seen in even the most cursory investigation of nature.

Chameleons change color to blend into their surroundings. Some species of moths and butterflies have markings that are so close to the bark of the trees on which they perch that you can look right at them and not notice they are there. Carnivorous plants will mimic the smell of rotting flesh in order to attract the flies they like to eat. The list goes on and on, from one link in the food chain to the next. Why do we insist that this behavior ends with mankind?

The key, once again, is emotional involvement in a lie we have been told. Since the time we were children, it has been drummed into our heads. Everyone is the same inside. It's a lovely democratic sentiment, but it is a sentiment that is contradicted by evidence. Just like in stage magic, we are directed away from seeing the truth through clever means of misdirection. The belief of what we are to see is planted in our heads before we ever see it. If we begin to suspect the truth, noise is injected into our thought process and true statements are mixed with false to use our psychology against us.

The simple fact is, all who look human are not human in the way we normally understand humanity. A small but very destructive minority of those who look human lack some of the most basic of human characteristics - empathy and conscience. These creatures use deception and misdirection to prey on human beings. If humans begin to suspect that all is not right with them, they will put a preprogrammed set of movements into play that are designed to steer you away from the truth. And, just like in the trick, everything they do is mechanical. Yet, as long as people remain unaware of their methods, their actions continue to befuddle and even amaze.

Another real world example of how this kind of trickery is performed. As you read this, the chances are pretty good that a soldier for the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is either using a Palestinian mother as a human shield while he terrorizes innocent people in their homes, ostensibly to search for terrorists, or is shooting a small Palestinian child in the back for the egregious crime of throwing rocks at an Israeli checkpoint in anger.

If this were any other country, you would be outraged. But this is not any country. This country was set up with immunity from criticism before it even existed. Do you see the correlation to stage magic again? The audience is told what they will see BEFORE they see it, preparing them to look for clues that validate what they were told and ignore what doesn't fit. In the case of Israel, the audience was told that they are God's chosen people who have suffered endlessly and now deserve to have this little plot of land to call home and live in peace.

What the audience misses is the fact that a large portion of the Jews who have made Israel their home are the descendents of converts to Judaism rather than descendents of the founders of that religion, and that they appear to be lead by some of the aforementioned almost-human predators, a.k.a., psychopaths. Even the slightest hint of criticism of Israel is met with cries of anti-Semitism, another bit of manipulation in which the only choice given is to wholeheartedly support everything Israel does or side with the Nazis. It's another bit of forced choice that is as cheap as any described here...and it is remarkably effective.

The fact is, most Jews are caring, compassionate people who really do want to live their lives in peace. Because nearly everyone has had at least a Jewish friend or two and has observed this for themselves, charges of anti-Semitism can carry weight in their minds. Jews are not monsters, so how could these people claim they are doing anything but defending themselves against a relentless Palestinian terrorist mob that threatens their very existence? Let's look at the statements in the same way we looked at the card trick.

1. Most Jews are caring and compassionate: True
2. Jews deserve a home in which they can live in peace like everyone else: True
3. Therefore, Israel is only defending itself when it imposes curfews, limits travel and even shoots small Palestinian children: FALSE

No one deserves a home at the expense of others. The Palestinians were living peacefully in the region for thousands of years before the U.N. created the state of Israel. Even after that event, Palestinians were gracious to their new neighbors. It was not until the leaders of Israel saw fit to demolish Palestinian homes and drive a people from a land that had been theirs for thousands of years that things turned ugly. Put yourself in their position for a moment and tell me you wouldn't be just a little pissed off.

You may think I've given three examples of trickery in the real world - voting, 911 and the assumed irreproachability of Israel. In fact, I've only given one. The best tricks have multiple levels. One deception follows another until the audience is completely lost in the trickery with no hope of unraveling the secrets. The same is true, here. There are more levels to this particular trick, far more than we could talk about now. The rabbit hole is deep with a lot of branching tunnels that lead nowhere.

It is possible to unravel this trick, however. The key, as always, is to avoid taking any of what the magician says at face value. To see how the trick is done requires a little study and a willingness to accept that you have been tricked at all. Maintain your emotional attachment to supporting the lie and you will only fall further under the spell of the magician. Learn to open your eyes and you will suddenly see what has been going on right under you nose, undetected. One day, the trick will seem cheap and obvious and you will wonder how you didn't see it all along.

If that day comes for you, the day your study has paid off and you can see the trickery of the magician, you will have a future.

The Video Israel Doesn't Want You to See

Notice the family is considered by one soldier to be "dirty" , sub-human. Isn't that the same thing Jews suffered in Germany? And this was 2002. Things have only gotten worse.

Blue Ibis.
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Israeli army embarrassed by video broadcast

CBC News, 19 March 2002

The Israeli army has expressed a note of contrition after a television station aired a videotape showing an army assault on a Palestinian home in which a mother of five children died. When CBC News spoke with Ismail Hawarjeh at Bethlehem's hospital earlier this month, there was no way to verify the story he told about how his wife had died, until Israel's Channel 2 broacast the tape last weekend.

The Palestinian school administrator said his wife Huda had been killed in their home by an Israeli tank shell during the army's March 8 assault on the Aida refugee camp. The army wouldn't comment and foreign journalists weren't allowed inside the camp.

But Israeli media were allowed to ride along with the soldiers, and they went right into the Hawarjeh home. An Israeli camera recorded the army blowing off the door, and found Huda Hawarjeh bleeding on the floor.

The pictures conformed to Ismail Hawarjeh's story about his wife being hit by shrapnel in the front hallway of the house, and about the Israeli soldiers doing little to help her for an hour while she bled to death in front of her five children.

Finally, the soldiers allowed an ambulance to come to a nearby street, and soldiers helped Hawarjeh carry his wife to it. Doctors tried to revive her at the hospital but couldn't.

Huda Hawarjeh was one of seven people to die in the Bethlehem area that day.

The Israeli army allows the media such close access on the understanding it can embargo anything it doesn't want broadcast.

The tapes of the assault on the Hawarjeh home fell into that category. But Channel 2 broke the embargo anyway.

The army, government and many Israeli citizens didn't like what they saw.

Channel 2 showed Hawarjeh begging soldiers to allow an ambulance through. The camera captured the terror of the woman's daughter, and her brother's attempt to stop her from showing the soldiers her fear.

After the woman was finally taken out, one of the soldiers looked into the camera and said: "I don't know what we're doing here. Purification, maybe. It's dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy should be here, so far from his home."

The soldiers tore the home apart, evidently looking for weapons.

Another daughter begged them not to demolish the home's wall. Soldiers commonly smash walls to move into adjacent houses.

Israeli spokesman Ranaan Gissin said the government was disappointed by the decision to air the tapes. "I would have expected a little bit more self-censorship on the part of the Israeli media," he said.

Ma'ariv, Israel's second-biggest newspaper, ran the story on its front page on Monday, under a banner headline that read "Gaffe!"

[That's all the Zionists think this is. A procedural faux pas instead of what it is, yet another violation of human rights. Oh wait. I forgot. Palestinians aren't human.]

The army, after trying to suppress distribution of the pictures, admitted the soldiers' actions pushed the boundaries of public acceptance.

"Our action is so difficult to be done that it is to the extremities of acceptance," said Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli Defence Force spokesman.

He called what happened in the Hawarjeh home "a mistake."

Comment:

At one point in the video an Israeli soldier says. "I don't know what we're doing here. Purification maybe. It's dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy should be here so far from his home."

These are people he is talking about!

That Israel is able to kill innocent Palestinians while saying what amounts to how hard it is to do the killing without being condemned is sickening.

Applying Lessons of Imperialism: Zionism Learns Fast

Crosses, double-crosses, triple-crosses. This is the history of Zionist behaviour towards the people who's land they stole. Crying "Peace, peace" but in action, promoting everything but. And it sure appears the psychopaths in charge of Israel are almost enjoying it.

Jonathan Cook is a resident of Nazareth. He knows where of he speaks.

Blue Ibis
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Divide and rule, Israeli style

Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:46 EDT

©Omar Rashidi/MaanImages/POOL/PPO

After deposing the Hamas government, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abas meets with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt. King Abdullah of Jordan and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak were also present at the meeting arranged to discuss Hamas' control of Gaza, 25 June 2007.

The boycott by Israel and the international community of the Palestinian Authority finally blew up in their faces with Hamas' recent bloody takeover of Gaza. Or so argues Gideon Levy, one of the saner voices still to be found in Israel. "Starving, drying up and blocking aid do not sear the consciousness and do not weaken political movements. On the contrary ... Reality has refuted the chorus of experts and commentators who preached [on] behalf of the boycott policy. This daft notion that it is possible to topple an elected government by applying pressure on a helpless population suffered a complete failure."

But has Levy got it wrong? The faces of Israeli and American politicians, including Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush, appear soot-free. On the contrary. Over the past fortnight they have been looking and sounding even more smug than usual.

The problem with Levy's analysis is that it assumes that Israel and the US wanted sanctions to bring about the fall of Hamas, either by giving Fatah the upper hand so that it could deal a knockout blow to the Palestinian government, or by inciting ordinary Palestinians to rise up and demand that their earlier electoral decision be reversed and Fatah reinstalled. In short, Levy, like most observers, assumes that the policy was designed to enforce regime change.

But what if that was not the point of the sanctions? And if so, what goals were Israel and the US pursuing?

The parallels between Iraq and Gaza may be instructive. After all, Iraq is the West's only other recent experiment in imposing sanctions to starve a nation. And we all know where it led: to an even deeper entrenchment of Saddam Hussein's rule.

True, the circumstances in Iraq and Gaza are different: most Iraqis wanted Saddam out but had no way to effect change, while most Gazans wanted Hamas in and made it happen by voting for them in last year's elections. Nevertheless, it may be that the US and Israel drew a different lesson from the sanctions experience in Iraq.

Whether intended or not, sanctions proved a very effective tool for destroying the internal bonds that held Iraqi society together. Destitution and hunger are powerful incentives to turn on one's neighbor as well as one's enemy. A society where resources -- food, medicines, water and electricity -- are in short supply is also a society where everyone looks out for himself. It is a society that, with a little prompting, can easily be made to tear itself apart.

And that is precisely what the Americans began to engineer after their "shock and awe" invasion of 2003. Contrary to previous US interventions abroad, Saddam was not toppled and replaced with another strongman -- one more to the West's liking. Instead of regime change, we were given regime overthrow. Or as Daniel Pipes, one of the neoconservative ideologues of the attack on Iraq, expressed it, the goal was "limited to destroying tyranny, not sponsoring its replacement ... Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility nor its burden."

In place of Saddam, the Americans created a safe haven known as the Green Zone from which its occupation regime could loosely police the country and oversee the theft of Iraq's oil, while also sitting back and watching a sectarian civil war between the Sunni and Shia populations spiral out of control and decimate the Iraqi population.

What did Washington hope to achieve? Pipes offers a clue: "When Sunni terrorists target Shiites and vice-versa, non-Muslims [that is, US occupation forces and their allies] are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one." In other words, enabling a civil war in Iraq was far preferable to allowing Iraqis to unite and mount an effective resistance to the US occupation. After all, Iraqi deaths -- at least 650,000 of them, according to the last realistic count -- are as good as worthless, while US soldiers' lives cost votes back home.

["Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one."!! If that isn't a psychopath in full flight, what is?]

For the neocon cabal behind the Iraq invasion, civil war was seen to have two beneficial outcomes.

First, it eroded the solidarity of ordinary Iraqis, depleting their energies and making them less likely to join or support the resistance to the occupation. The insurgency has remained a terrible irritation to US forces but not the fatal blow it might have been were the Sunni and Shia to fight side by side. As a result, the theft of Iraq's resources has been made easier.

And second, in the longer term, civil war is making inevitable a slow process of communal partition and ethnic cleansing. Four million Iraqis are reported to have been forced either to leave the country or flee their homes. Iraq is being broken up into small ethnic and religious fiefdoms that will be easier to manage and manipulate.

[Amazing! Just what the "Clean Break" paper, prepared for Israel in 1996 by US Neocons proposed as being the most advantageous to it.]

Is this the model for Gaza now and the West Bank later?

It is worth recalling that neither Israel nor the US pushed for an easing of the sanctions on the Palestinian Authority after the national unity government of Hamas and Fatah was formed earlier this year. In fact, the US and Israel could barely conceal their panic at the development. The moment the Mecca agreement was signed, reports of US efforts to train and arm Fatah forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas became a newspaper staple.

The cumulative effect of US support for Fatah, as well as Israel's continuing arrests of Hamas legislators in the West Bank, was to strain already tense relations between Hamas and Fatah to breaking point. When Hamas learned that Abbas' security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, with US encouragement, was preparing to carry out a coup against them in Gaza, they got the first shot in.

Did Fatah really believe it could pull off a coup in Gaza, given the evident weakness of its forces there, or was the rumour little more than American and Israeli spin, designed to undermine Hamas' faith in Fatah and doom the unity government? Were Abbas and Dahlan really hoping to topple Hamas, or were they the useful idiots needed by the US and Israel? These are questions that may have to be settled by the historians.

But with the fingerprints of Elliott Abrams, one of the more durable neocons in the Bush administration, to be found all over this episode, we can surmise that what Washington and Israel are intending for the Palestinians will have strong echoes of what has unfolded in Iraq.

By engineering the destruction of the unity government, Israel and the US have ensured that there is no danger of a new Palestinian consensus emerging, one that might have cornered Israel into peace talks. A unity government might have found a formula offering Israel:

- limited recognition inside the pre-1967 borders in return for recognition of a Palestinian state and the territorial integrity of the West Bank and Gaza;
- a long-term ceasefire in return for Israel ending its campaign of constant violence and violations of Palestinian sovereignty;
- and a commitment to honor past agreements in return for Israel's abiding by UN resolutions and accepting a just solution for the Palestinian refugees.

After decades of Israeli bad faith, and the growing rancor between Fatah and Hamas, the chances of them finding common ground on which to make such an offer, it must be admitted, would have been slight. But now they are non-existent.

That is exactly how Israel wants it, because it has no interest in meaningful peace talks with the Palestinians or in a final agreement. It wants only to impose solutions that suit Israel's interests, which are securing the maximum amount of land for an exclusive Jewish state and leaving the Palestinians so weak and divided that they will never be able to mount a serious challenge to Israel's dictates.

Instead, Hamas' dismal authority over the prison camp called Gaza and Fatah's bastard governance of the ghettoes called the West Bank offer a model more satisfying for Israel and the US -- and one not unlike Iraq. A sort of sheriff's divide and rule in the Wild West.

Just as in Iraq, Israel and the US have made sure that no Palestinian strongman arises to replace Yasser Arafat. Just as in Iraq, they are encouraging civil war as an alternative to resistance to occupation, as Palestine's resources -- land, not oil -- are stolen. Just as in Iraq, they are causing a permanent and irreversible partition, in this case between the West Bank and Gaza, to create more easily managed territorial ghettoes. And just as in Iraq, the likely reaction is an even greater extremism from the Palestinians that will undermine their cause in the eyes of the international community.

Where will this lead the Palestinians next?

Israel is already pulling the strings of Fatah with a new adeptness since the latter's humiliation in Gaza. Abbas is currently basking in Israeli munificence for his rogue West Bank regime, including the decision to release a substantial chunk of the $700 million tax monies owed to the Palestinians (including those of Gaza, of course) and withheld for years by Israel. The price, according to the Israeli media, was a commitment from Abbas not to contemplate re-entering a unity government with Hamas.

The goal will be to increase the strains between Hamas and Fatah to breaking point in the West Bank, but ensure that Fatah wins the confrontation there. Fatah is already militarily stronger and with generous patronage from Israel and the US -- including arms and training, and possibly the return of the Badr Brigade currently holed up in Jordan -- it should be able to rout Hamas. The difference in status between Gaza and the West Bank that has been long desired by Israel will be complete.

The Palestinian people have already been carved up into a multitude of constituencies. There are the Palestinians under occupation, those living as second-class citizens of Israel, those allowed to remain "residents" of Jerusalem, and those dispersed to camps across the Middle East. Even within these groups, there are a host of sub-identities: refugees and non-refugees; refugees included as citizens in their host state and those excluded; occupied Palestinians living under the control of the Palestinian Authority and those under Israel's military government; and so on.

Now, Israel has entrenched maybe the most significant division of all: the absolute and irreversible separation of Gaza and the West Bank. What applies to one will no longer be true for the other. Each will be a separate case; their fates will no longer be tied. One will be, as Israelis like to call it, Hamastan, and other Fatahland, with separate governments and different treatment from Israel and the international community.

The reasons why Israel prefers this arrangement are manifold.

First, Gaza can now be written off by the international community as a basket case. The Israeli media is currently awash with patronizing commentary from the political and security establishments about how to help avoid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including the possibility of air drops of aid over the Gaza "security fence" -- as though Gaza were Pakistan after an earthquake. From past experience, and the current menacing sounds from Israel's new Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, those food packages will quickly turn into bombs if Gaza does not keep quiet.

As Israeli and US officials have been phrasing it, there is a new "clarity" in the situation. In a Hamastan, Gaza's militants and civilians can be targeted by Israel with little discrimination and no outcry from the international community. Israel will hope that message from Gaza will not be lost on West Bank Palestinians as they decide who to give their support to, Fatah or Hamas.

Second, at their meeting last week Olmert and Bush revived talk of Palestinian statehood. According to Olmert, Bush "wants to realize, while he is in office, the dream of creating a Palestinian state." Both are keen to make quick progress, a sure sign of mischief in the making. Certainly, they know they are now under no pressure to create the single viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once promised by President Bush. An embattled Abbas will not be calling for the inclusion of Gaza in his ghetto-fiefdom.

Third, the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may be used to inject new life into Olmert's shopworn convergence plan -- if he can dress it up in new clothes. Convergence, which required a very limited withdrawal from those areas of the West Bank heavily populated with Palestinians while Israel annexed most of its illegal colonies and kept the Jordan Valley, was officially ditched last summer after Israel's humiliation by Hizballah.

Why seek to revive convergence? Because it is the key to Israel securing the expanded Jewish fortress state that is its only sure protection from the rapid demographic growth of the Palestinians, soon to outnumber Jews in the Holy Land, and Israel's fears that it may then be compared to apartheid South Africa.

If the occupation continues unchanged, Israel's security establishment has long been warning, the Palestinians will eventually wake up to the only practical response: to dissolve the Palestinian Authority, Israel's clever ruse to make the Palestinian leadership responsible for suppressing Palestinian resistance to the occupation, thereby forcing Israel to pick up the bill for the occupation rather than Europe. The next stage would be an anti-apartheid struggle for one state in historic Palestine.

For this reason, demographic separation from the Palestinians has been the logic of every major Israeli policy initiative since -- and including -- Oslo. Convergence requires no loss of Israel's control over Palestinian lives, ensured through the all but finished grid of walls, settlements, bypass roads and checkpoints, only a repackaging of their occupation as statehood.

The biggest objection in Israel to Olmert's plan -- as well as to the related Gaza disengagement -- was the concern that, once the army had unilaterally withdrawn from the Palestinian ghettoes, the Palestinians would be free to launch terror attacks, including sending rockets out of their prisons into Israel. Most Israelis, of course, never consider the role of the occupation in prompting such attacks.

But Olmert may believe he has found a way to silence his domestic critics. For the first time he seems genuinely keen to get his Arab neighbors involved in the establishment of a Palestinian "state". As he headed off to the Sharm al-Sheikh summit with Egypt, Jordan and Abbas this week, Olmert said he wanted to "jointly work to create the platform that may lead to a new beginning between us and the Palestinians."

Did he mean partnership? A source in the Prime Minister's Office explained to The Jerusalem Post why the three nations and Abbas were meeting. "These are the four parties directly impacted by what is happening right now, and what is needed is a different level of cooperation between them." Another spokesman bewailed the failure so far to get the Saudis on board.

This appears to mark a sea change in Israeli thinking. Until now Tel Aviv has regarded the Palestinians as a domestic problem -- after all, they are sitting on land that rightfully, at least if the Bible is to be believed, belongs to the Jews. Any attempt at internationalizing the conflict has therefore been strenuously resisted.

But now the Israeli Prime Minister's Office is talking openly about getting the Arab world more directly involved, not only in its usual role as a mediator with the Palestinians, nor even in simply securing the borders against smuggling, but also in policing the territories. Israel hopes that Egypt, in particular, is as concerned as Tel Aviv by the emergence of a Hamastan on its borders, and may be enticed to use the same repressive policies against Gaza's Islamists as it does against its own.

Similarly, Olmert's chief political rival, Binyamin Netanyahu of Likud, has mentioned not only Egyptian involvement in Gaza but even a Jordanian military presence in the West Bank. The "moderate" Arab regimes, as Washington likes to call them, are being seen as the key to developing new ideas about Palestinian "autonomy" and regional "confederation." As long as Israel has a quisling in the West Bank and a beyond-the-pale government in Gaza, it may believe it can corner the Arab world into backing such a "peace plan."

What will it mean in practice? Possibly, as Zvi Barel of Haaretz speculates, we will see the emergence of half a dozen Palestinian governments in charge of the ghettoes of Gaza, Ramallah, Jenin, Jericho, and Hebron. Each may be encouraged to compete for patronage and aid from the "moderate" Arab regimes but on condition that Israel and the US are satisfied with these Palestinian governments' performance.

In other words, Israel looks as if it is dusting off yet another blueprint for how to manage the Palestinians and their irritating obsession with sovereignty. Last time, under Oslo, the Palestinians were put in charge of policing the occupation on Israel's behalf. This time, as the Palestinians are sealed into their separate prisons masquerading as a state, Israel may believe that it can find a new jailer for the Palestinians -- the Arab world.

Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2006). His website is www.jkcook.net