Refuting Israeli talking points (moving)

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

"...Israeli spinners like Mark Regev. They are masters of PR. In fact, as the Independent's Patrick Cockburn revealed over the weekend, "the playbook they are using is a professional, well-researched and confidential study on how to influence the media and public opinion in America and Europe".

Let's be clear: I'm no fan of Hamas, a brutal and anti-Semitic group which has been accused by Amnesty International and other NGOs of human rights abuses against the people of Gaza and of war crimes against the people of Israel. Firing rockets into civilian areas isn't justified under international law, even if it is framed as part of a (legitimate) struggle against foreign military occupation.

Having said that, however, in recent days I've been debating supporters of Israel's latest assault on Gaza on radio and on Twitter and I've been astonished not just by the sheer number of fact-free claims made by those supporters, but also by their confidence, slickness and sheer message discipline. According to the pro-Israel, pro-IDF crowd, Hamas is to blame for everything.

This, of course, is utter nonsense. To quote the late US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."

So, in a Moynihanian spirit, here are fact-filled, evidence-based rebuttals to the 11 main myths, half-truths and self-serving 'talking points' that are repeatedly pushed by various Israeli spokespersons, both on the airwaves and on social media:

1) The Gaza Strip isn't occupied by Israel
Boston Globe: "Israeli-imposed buffer zones.. now absorb nearly 14 percent of Gaza's total land and at least 48 percent of total arable land. Similarly, the sea buffer zone covers 85 percent of the maritime area promised to Palestinians in the Oslo Accords, reducing 20 nautical miles to three." Human Rights Watch: "Israel also continues to control the population registry for residents of the Gaza Strip, years after it withdrew its ground forces and settlements there." B'Tselem, 2013: "Israel continues to maintain exclusive control of Gaza's airspace and the territorial waters, just as it has since it occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967."

2) Israel wants a ceasefire but Hamas doesn't
Al Jazeera: "Meshaal said Hamas wants the 'aggression to stop tomorrow, today, or even this minute. But [Israel must] lift the blockade with guarantees and not as a promise for future negotiations'. He added 'we will not shut the door in the face of any humanitarian ceasefire backed by a real aid programme'." Jerusalem Post: "One day after an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire accepted by Israel, but rejected by Hamas, fell through, the terrorist organization proposed a 10-year end to hostilities in return for its conditions being met by Israel, Channel 2 reported Wednesday.. Hamas's conditions were the release of re-arrested Palestinian prisoners who were let go in the Schalit deal, the opening of Gaza-Israel border crossings in order to allow citizens and goods to pass through, and international supervision of the Gazan seaport in place of the current Israeli blockade." BBC: "Israel's security cabinet has rejected a week-long Gaza ceasefire proposal put forward by US Secretary of State John Kerry 'as it stands'."

3) Israel, unlike Hamas, doesn't deliberately target civilians
The Guardian: "It was there that the second [Israeli] shell hit the beach, those firing apparently adjusting their fire to target the fleeing survivors. As it exploded, journalists standing by the terrace wall shouted: 'They are only children.'" UN high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay: "A number of incidents, along with the high number of civilian deaths, belies the [Israeli] claim that all necessary precautions are being taken to protect civilian lives." United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, 2009: "The tactics used by the Israeli armed forces in the Gaza offensive are consistent with previous practices, most recently during the Lebanon war in 2006. A concept known as the Dahiya doctrine emerged then, involving the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations. The Mission concludes from a review of the facts on the ground that it.. appears to have been precisely what was put into practice."

4) Only Hamas is guilty of war crimes, not Israel
Human Rights Watch: "Israeli forces may also have knowingly or recklessly attacked people who were clearly civilians, such as young boys, and civilian structures, including a hospital - laws-of-war violations that are indicative of war crimes." Amnesty International: "Deliberately attacking a civilian home is a war crime, and the overwhelming scale of destruction of civilian homes, in some cases with entire families inside them, points to a distressing pattern of repeated violations of the laws of war."

5) Hamas use the civilians of Gaza as 'human shields'
Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor: "I saw no evidence during my week in Gaza of Israel's accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields." The Guardian: "In the past week, the Guardian has seen large numbers of people fleeing different neighbourhoods.. and no evidence that Hamas had compelled them to stay." The Independent: "Some Gazans have admitted that they were afraid of criticizing Hamas, but none have said they had been forced by the organisation to stay in places of danger and become unwilling human-shields." Reuters, 2013: "A United Nations human rights body accused Israeli forces on Thursday of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields."

6) This current Gaza conflict began with Hamas rocket fire on 30 June 2014
Times of Israel: "Hamas operatives were behind a large volley of rockets which slammed into Israel Monday morning, the first time in years the Islamist group has directly challenged the Jewish state, according to Israeli defense officials.. The security sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, assessed that Hamas had probably launched the barrage in revenge for an Israeli airstrike several hours earlier which killed one person and injured three more.. Hamas hasn't fired rockets into Israel since Operation Pillar of Defense ended in November 2012." The Nation: "During ten days of Operation Brother's Keeper in the West Bank [before the start of the Gaza conflict], Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. Its military operation targeted Hamas members released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011."

7) Hamas has never stopped firing rockets into Israel
Jewish Daily Forward: "Hamas hadn't fired a single rocket since [2012 Gaza conflict], and had largely suppressed fire by smaller jihadi groups. Rocket firings, averaging 240 per month in 2007, dropped to five per month in 2013." International Crisis Group: "Fewer rockets were fired from Gaza in 2013 than in any year since 2001, and nearly all those that were fired between the November 2012 ceasefire and the current crisis were launched by groups other than Hamas; the Israeli security establishment testified to the aggressive anti-rocket efforts made by the new police force Hamas established specifically for that purpose.. As Israel (and Egypt) rolled back the 2012 understandings - some of which were implemented spottily at best - so too did Hamas roll back its anti rocket efforts."

8) Hamas provoked Israel by kidnapping and killing three Israeli teenagers
Jewish Daily Forward: "The [Israeli] government had known almost from the beginning that the boys were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas' West Bank operations.. Nor was that the only fib. It was clear from the beginning that the kidnappers weren't acting on orders from Hamas leadership in Gaza or Damascus. Hamas' Hebron branch -- more a crime family than a clandestine organization -- had a history of acting without the leaders' knowledge, sometimes against their interests." BBC correspondent Jon Donnison: "Israeli police MickeyRosenfeld tells me men who killed 3 Israeli teens def lone cell, hamas affiliated but not operating under leadership.. Seems to contradict the line from Netanyahu government."

9) Hamas rule, not Israel's blockade, is to blame for the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip

US State Department cable: "Israeli officials have confirmed to Embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.. Israeli officials have confirmed.. on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge." The Guardian: "The Israeli military made precise calculations of Gaza's daily calorie needs to avoid malnutrition during a blockade imposed on the Palestinian territory between 2007 and mid-2010, according to files the defence ministry released on Wednesday under a court order.. The Israeli advocacy group Gisha.. waged a long court battle to release the document. Its members say Israel calculated the calorie needs for Gaza's population so as to restrict the quantity of food it allowed in."

10) The Israeli government, unlike Hamas, wants a two-state solution
Times of Israel: "[Netanyahu] made explicitly clear that he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank.. Amid the current conflict, he elaborated, 'I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.'"

11) All serious analysts agree it was Hamas, and not Israel, that started this current conflict
Nathan Thrall, senior Mid East analyst at the International Crisis Group, writing in the New York Times: "The current escalation in Gaza is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the April 2014 Palestinian reconciliation agreement." Henry Siegman, former national director, American Jewish Congress, writing for Politico: "Israel's assault on Gaza.. was not triggered by Hamas' rockets directed at Israel but by Israel's determination to bring down the Palestinian unity government that was formed in early June, even though that government was committed to honoring all of the conditions imposed by the international community for recognition of its legitimacy." Source

 

[faroukfarouk]

Hamas needs to renounce violence.

Arafat's PLO used to attack school buses with rockets. After it had stopped doing this, the Israelis eventually talked with them and dealt with them.

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza—Debunked

Noura Erakat
July 25, 2014

Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.

Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.

This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children’s bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza’s shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 2008–09. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact.

Below I address five of Israel’s recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers.

1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.

As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable.

The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel’s responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel’s jurisdictional control. Israel does have the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, but it must do so in accordance with occupation law and not other laws of war. Occupation law ensures greater protection for the civilian population. The other laws of war balance military advantage and civilian suffering. The statement that “no country would tolerate rocket fire from a neighboring country” is therefore both a diversion and baseless.

Israel denies Palestinians the right to govern and protect themselves, while simultaneously invoking the right to self-defense. This is a conundrum and a violation of international law, one that Israel deliberately created to evade accountability.

2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

Israel argues that its occupation of the Gaza Strip ended with the unilateral withdrawal of its settler population in 2005. It then declared the Gaza Strip to be “hostile territory” and declared war against its population. Neither the argument nor the statement is tenable. Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people.

Israel argues that the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrates that ending the occupation will not bring peace. Some have gone so far as to say that Palestinians squandered their opportunity to build heaven in order to build a terrorist haven instead. These arguments aim to obfuscate Israel’s responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank. As Prime Minister Netanyahu once explained, Israel must ensure that it does not “get another Gaza in Judea and Samaria…. I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007. The siege has created a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term.

3) This Israeli operation, among others, was caused by rocket fire from Gaza.

Israel claims that its current and past wars against the Palestinian population in Gaza have been in response to rocket fire. Empirical evidence from 2008, 2012 and 2014 refute that claim. First, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the greatest reduction of rocket fire came through diplomatic rather than military means. This chart demonstrates the correlation between Israel’s military attacks upon the Gaza Strip and Hamas militant activity. Hamas rocket fire increases in response to Israeli military attacks and decreases in direct correlation to them. Cease-fires have brought the greatest security to the region.

During the four months of the Egyptian-negotiated cease-fire in 2008, Palestinian militants reduced the number of rockets to zero or single digits from the Gaza Strip. Despite this relative security and calm, Israel broke the cease-fire to begin the notorious aerial and ground offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-two days. In November 2012, Israel’s extrajudicial assassination of Ahmad Jabari, the chief of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, while he was reviewing terms for a diplomatic solution, again broke the cease-fire that precipitated the eight-day aerial offensive that killed 132 Palestinians.

Immediately preceding Israel’s most recent operation, Hamas rocket and mortar attacks did not threaten Israel. Israel deliberately provoked this war with Hamas. Without producing a shred of evidence, it accused the political faction of kidnapping and murdering three settlers near Hebron. Four weeks and almost 700 lives later, Israel has yet to produce any evidence demonstrating Hamas’s involvement. During ten days of Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank, Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. Its military operation targeted Hamas members released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. It’s these Israeli provocations that precipitated the Hamas rocket fire to which Israel claims left it with no choice but a gruesome military operation.

4) Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians.

Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested. Israel, however, would not be any more tolerant of Hamas if it strictly targeted military objects, as we have witnessed of late. Israel considers Hamas and any form of its resistance, armed or otherwise, to be illegitimate.

In contrast, Israel has the eleventh most powerful military in the world, certainly the strongest by far in the Middle East, and is a nuclear power that has not ratified the non-proliferation agreement and has precise weapons technology. With the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to target single individuals and therefore to avoid civilian casualties. But rather than avoid them, Israel has repeatedly targeted civilians as part of its military operations.

The Dahiya Doctrine is central to these operations and refers to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon in 2006. Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said that this would be applied elsewhere:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.
​

Israel has kept true to this promise. The 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission to the Gaza Conflict, better known as the Goldstone Mission, concluded “from a review of the facts on the ground that it witnessed for itself that what was prescribed as the best strategy [Dahiya Doctrine] appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.”

According to the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israel directly targeted civilians or recklessly caused civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead. Far from avoiding the deaths of civilians, Israel effectively considers them legitimate targets.

to be continued...

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

5) Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields.

This is arguably one of Israel’s most insidious claims, because it blames Palestinians for their own death and deprives them of even their victimhood. Israel made the same argument in its war against Lebanon in 2006 and in its war against Palestinians in 2008. Notwithstanding its military cartoon sketches, Israel has yet to prove that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure to store military weapons. The two cases where Hamas indeed stored weapons in UNRWA schools, the schools were empty. UNRWA discovered the rockets and publicly condemned the violation of its sanctity.

International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true. It attributed the high death toll in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch notes:

The evidence Human Rights Watch uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes [Israel’s] argument…we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.
​

In fact, only Israeli soldiers have systematically used Palestinians as human shields. Since Israel’s incursion into the West Bank in 2002, it has used Palestinians as human shields by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their cars or forcing them to go into a home where a potential militant may be hiding.

Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, “whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.”

In the over thee weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.

Beyond the body count and reference to law, which is a product of power, the question to ask is, What is Israel’s end goal? What if Hamas and Islamic Jihad dug tunnels beneath the entirety of the Gaza Strip—they clearly did not, but let us assume they did for the sake of argument. According to Israel’s logic, all of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians are therefore human shields for being born Palestinian in Gaza. The solution is to destroy the 360-kilometer square strip of land and to expect a watching world to accept this catastrophic loss as incidental. This is possible only by framing and accepting the dehumanization of Palestinian life. Despite the absurdity of this proposal, it is precisely what Israeli society is urging its military leadership to do. Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into submission, and it certainly cannot bomb them into peace.

Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza - Debunked | The Nation

 

[Hentenza]

Here is a peer reviewed journal that might help you.

"When Israel decided, in 2005, to unilaterally disengage from the Gaza Strip, many Israelis hoped that such a step would improve Israel's security and its political situation. But those hopes have been dashed. Israeli peace activists desired that the Gaza Strip would become a paragon of moderation and prosperity, and that the disengagement would build trust between Israelis and Palestinians, laying the foundation for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.


Instead, they watched in horror as Hamas quickly took control of the territory that Israel had evacuated, used severe violence to expel rival Fatah supporters, and won a majority in the January 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections. Israelis who had supported disengagement on the assumption that it would strengthen Israel's security and free Israel to conduct pre-emptive and retaliatory military strikes against any terrorist threat emanating from the Gaza Strip without fear of harming Jewish settlers, soon discovered that their assumption had been baseless. For by using the vast and sophisticated warren of tunnels dug by Palestinians under the border between Egypt (the Sinai Peninsula) and the Gaza Strip, Hamas had turned the Gaza Strip into a fundamentalist-Islamic military base. Within the expansive confines of that “base,” Hamas had given refuge to local jihadist organizations like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Global Jihadist organizations like the Army of Islam, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), and other followers of al Qaeda.


Moreover, in the wake of the disengagement, Hamas had adopted a cynical policy of using civilians as human shields1, developed an impressive capability for high-trajectory shooting, and launched a savvy, well-coordinated effort to delegitimize Israel and its right to defend itself. When this reality hit home, Israelis realized that the disengagement had left Israel much more constrained than it had been, less able to make proactive pre-emptive strikes, and less able to protect its citizens or its home-front. Since the disengagement, the number of Israeli citizens under immediate and unceasing threat from the high-trajectory rockets fired by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip has increased steadily —from the several tens of thousands of residents of the small towns and villages proximate to the Gaza Strip, to the over one million citizens living between the south of Tel Aviv and the Gaza Strip border.2


The military empowerment of Hamas increased exponentially once that organization had gained control of the Gaza Strip in the wake of Israel's disengagement. Moreover, this process was abetted handily by Iran and its “subsidiary,” Hezbollah—which served as a role model for Hamas. Israeli Intelligence today estimates that Hamas's military arm comprises some 20,000 combat troops in the Gaza Strip—not including the thousands of military operatives of the other Islamist organizations3 —most of them militiamen who are called to active duty in emergency situations only. The Gaza Strip's Police Force, which numbers several thousand additional men equipped with light and anti-tank weapons, also bows to the authority of Hamas's military arm, and functions as a reserve force in an emergency. Thus, the military wing of Hamas, known as the Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, is deployed throughout the Gaza Strip much like a paramilitary organization with territorial brigades, regiments, companies, platoons and dedicated units such as a coast guard and artillery units."


Ganor, Boaz. "Israel And Hamas: Is War Imminent?." Orbis 57.1 (2013): 120-134. Humanities International Complete. Web. 20 July 2014.

 

[Hentenza]

Hamas tactics during operation cast lead in 2009 are examples of the same kinds of tactics used during this conflict.

"Hamas in Gaza deliberately attacked civilian population centers before and during Operation Cast Lead, making an Israeli military air and ground operation inevitable. Hamas employed mortar bombs, Kassam and Grad rockets, homicide/suicide bombers, and active shooters against Israeli civilians. Hamas boasted of its intention to hit Israeli civilian population centers. The terrorist group's specific goal was to inflict the maximum amount of civilian death, suffering, destruction, and devastation that it could. Hamas understood that the terror group that was most successful at killing Israelis, and that launched the grandest attacks, would become the dominant militant group in Gaza. It would be able to solicit the largest financial contributions and attract the best recruits. Hamas' public relations personnel were quick to publicize and exploit mortar and missile strikes in Southern Israel.[6] Hamas systematically and deliberately used civilian sites as cover for its military operations. Using their own civilian areas for military advantage was central to the terrorists' overall strategy.[7] Hamas based its operations in civilian areas because of the likelihood that doing so would result in substantial harm to civilians. Hamas' apparent intent was to make it impossible for the IDF to avoid harming civilians and damaging civilian structures.Hamas launched rockets from areas near schools, used hospitals as bases of operation, stored weapons in mosques, and booby trapped entire neighborhoods. Thus, Hamas was able to keep the IDF from attacking legitimate military targets by taking advantage of the IDF's aversion to causing Palestinian casualties. When the IDF did attack, civilian casualties and the damage caused to homes, public institutions, and the Gaza Strip's infrastructure made excellent propaganda. The media reported almost all casualties as civilian, including combatants engaged in firing missiles. Casualty counts became a propaganda tool artfully wielded by Hamas supporters.

Hamas operatives regularly fired rockets into Israel from within or near residential and public buildings, including schools, mosques, and hospitals. There are dozens of examples of this tactic.[8] Even the yard of the central building of a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) educational complex in the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip was used to launch a rocket attack. On January 18, 2009, an IDF UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) identified a rocket launcher placed immediately between two school buildings. The Israeli Air Force did not fire on it because it was too close to the schools, thus rewarding Hamas for the placement of the rocket launcher.[9]

Hamas staged its command and control bases and located its weapons and munitions manufacturing and storage facilities within Gaza's most densely populated residential areas and next to all manner of protected sites.[10] Hamas used civilians' homes and buildings housing public institutions for its operational bases. It conducted much of its fighting during Operation Cast Lead from within these private residences and public facilities. Hamas used the IDF's reluctance to attack these locations to its advantage. Hamas' main headquarters during Operation Cast Lead was located inside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The IDF did not attack the hospital because of the inevitable harm the attack would cause civilians and the worldwide outcry that would result. Similarly, Hamas made a regular practice of storing weapons in mosques, as exemplified by the IDF's discovery of weapons in a mosque in Jabaliya."


The tactics of Hamas

 

[Hentenza]

• Prospects for peace in the Middle East have been dealt an enormous blow by the election triumph of Hamas in January 2006. Palestinian education, television shows, websites, and even families are all being mobilized in an intensified environment of agitated hatred toward Israel and Israelis.
• Even prior to the Hamas election victory, anti-Israel rhetoric was already embedded in Palestinian school textbooks and other educational materials, and ideas such as romanticizing martyrdom and “reconquering” the land were taught in the classroom. Bitter hostility towards Israel’s very existence is currently woven into the entire Palestinian educational system.
• UNRWA educational institutions are controlled by individuals committed to Hamas ideology and they are educating terrorists. Numerous terrorist operatives and Hamas political leaders have been educated in UNRWA schools.
• The idea of martyrdom has become so ingrained in Palestinian culture that it is a major theme in religious practice, television broadcasting, posters, pre-suicide eulogies, summer camps, children’s trading cards, movies, music, and games.

• Palestinian newspapers report that the number of children who express a willingness to become martyrs exceeds 70 percent. Palestinian psychiatrist Dr. Shafiq Massalha, after finding that over half the Palestinian population aged 6 to 11 dream of becoming suicide bombers, concludes that the next generation of Palestinians will be a very murderous population full of anger and hatred.

The raison d’etre of Hamas – the Islamic Resistance Movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the complete annihilation of the State of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state in its place. Prospects for peace in the Middle East have been dealt an enormous blow by the election triumph of Hamas in January 2006. Palestinian education, television shows, websites, and even families are all being mobilized in an intensified environment of agitated hatred toward Israel and Israelis.

Read more at: Hamas' Determination to Perpetuate the Israel-Palestinian Conflict: The Critical Role of Hate Indoctrination, by Justus Reid Weiner and Noam Weissman - BDS News - SPME Scholars for Peace in the Middle East

 

[Hentenza]

Tell me LoveBeingAMuslimah,

Does Israel have a right to exist? Do you recognize Israel as a sovereign nation?

 

[danny ski]

There are no rockets, no tunnels and all the dead are children. Baghdad Bob would've been proud.

 

[benmaarof]

This is an excerpt from the blog of the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamed.

Hannan, an Israeli wrote an email to the Dr. as follows :

1. I would like to have the Malaysian Armed Forces attack the United States and Israel.”

Oh, great hero. You had the chance to do it while you were the PM in service. Why didn’t you tried out the strength of the Malaysian army and its skills? You had a good chance to become the Muslim hero committing Jihad on the apes and monkeys. To become the Salah ed Din of the modern times.

How could you miss that opportunity to demolish both, America and Israel and leaving Iran to do it solely? Oh great rhetoric, do you know how a war looks like?

You care about the babies of Iraq, Palestinians, etc… How lucky we are you don’t need to care about the Jewish children suffering daily rockets from Hamas who is a Muslim charity organization. Oh, their 8 years of rockets in a quantity of thousands were full of candies ammunition that was spreading sweets to the children of Sederot and the Negev.

Since Jews are controlling everyone by proxy, I’m not sure you, Dr. Mahathir are not controlled by them as well. You’ll say that you are not controlled, but I can assure you that I’m controlling you. Can you deny it? Even Malaysia is manipulated by Jews, that’s why they are not attacking the US and Israel. You should check very well among your government ministers and officials and find the Trojan horses there.

You hate Israel not because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but you hate only because the hatred of Muslims against Jews, the apes and swine. Your hate is not political, but religious. You are just sinking into the modern era darkness.

You said once in one of your speeches that Muslims should use their brains to get rid of 13 Million Jews dominance among 1.3 billion Muslims. Are you a role model? Do you have the wisdom to do it? Do you have the power to do it? Do you know why your plan is not accomplished?

It is because it is not true, not logical, unjustified, not because the Jew are controlling the world by proxy. History is stronger than any empire, leader or people. The Jews survived more complicated events then you are planning, so don’t be hoping too much, we survive your approach as well.

Shalom from Hanan, a Jew, Israel.

The reply from Dr. Mahathir:

Dear Hannan,

1. I agree entirely with you that building a great nation doesn’t only take brains, but as you said it sure does help.

2. However brains alone without a heart (feelings) can produce a monster.

3. Israel is undoubtedly a great nation, becoming great through the brains and the numerous achievements you have listed. Yes I have used Israeli originated products like Microsoft Windows and Pentium chips (made in Malaysia) by Intel, an American company.

4. In fact I owe my life ultimately to Israel because there must be something invented by Israelis in the numerous instruments used in heart surgery. However most of the products used were invented and produced by Japanese.

5. I am amazed at the number of Nobel Laureates Israel has produced. I admit we have not produced even one.

6. But when the brain is without a heart it does not care for the misery resulting from the products of the brain.

7. The atom bombs which killed 100,000 men, women, children and babies are the product of Israeli (Jewish) brain. Most of the diabolical weapons now being used to kill millions of people are also the creation of Israelis on Zionist Jews. The depleted uranium and phosphorous shells being used in Gaza are also the product of Israeli brains.

8. The current financial crisis which is destroying the economies of the U.S. Britain and in fact all the countries of the world is due to manipulations of banks, financial institutions and the monetary system by Jewish supporters of Israel.

9. The negation of the freedom of speech when it comes to the alleged killings of Jews in World War II are also inspired by Zionist Jews.

10. But worse of all is the seizure of Palestinian land to create the state of Israel. Not content with the area given to the Jews by the United Nations you have seized more Palestinian land, built settlements on many parts of Palestine, disallowed the use of roads built on Palestinian land to the Palestinians, erected your own check points at the borders of Palestine with Jordan and built your version of the Berlin Wall through Palestinian villages on land that is not part of Israel.

11. Before the creation of Israel, the Jews and Arabs in Palestine lived in peace. Historically Jews had always sought refuge in Muslim countries when the Europeans conducted pogroms against them. This only stopped after the U.S. offered asylum.

12. All the terrorism that we see today, whether state initiated or by irregulars, started after the U.S. backed Israel against Arab attempts to regain their land through conventional wars. Because they were outclassed in terms of weapons by the U.S, / Israel, alliance, then only did the Arabs resort to what is called terrorism. The Israeli response have always been with greater terrorism as is seen in Gaza.

13. I have asked an American what he would do if Texas was given to the Jews to create the state of Israel. He did not answer. But I believe he would fight to get back Texas, employing all the weapons at its disposal.

14. Yet had the United States been willing to create the nation of Israel in the lands under U.S. control or in the U.S. itself, there would be no terrorism in Palestine or in the Middle East. There would be no terrorism in America either because Israel would be wiped out by the U.S. forces. The world would remain peaceful.

15. The brutality committed by your forces in Gaza is out of all proportion to the puny rocket attacks by Hamas. That attack was the result of Israel and the U.S. failing to accept the results of a properly conducted election.

16. Hamas could only establish their Government in Gaza. But you blockaded Gaza, denying them food, medicine, power, fuel etc. If you had not done that I doubt that Hamas would fire rockets at you.

17. Malaysia is well aware that total boycott of Israel is not possible. We are in fact boycotting American products which is an even more impossible task. We would not be able to bring America or Israel down.

18. But what we aim to do is to demonstrate the disgust and the anger that we feel over the inhumanity of the brainy but primitive peoples of Israel and America.

19. You can collect Nobel prizes and other prizes but the world will look down upon you as very primitive people who robbed land through terror against perfidious British and subsequently used your control over the world’s greatest military power to oppress the people whom you had robbed.

20. You have nothing to be proud of, unless of course you take pride in being heartless, in being primitive brutes.

21. The only mitigating factor is the presence among Israelis of a small number who are ashamed of what you have done to the people of Gaza.

 

[benmaarof]

This entry is in reply to a comment Hanan submitted to the blog on 2012/02/07:

My Dear Hanan,
Mr Alireza Forghani, Khamenei’s strategy specialist must of course be speaking for the Government of Iran and Ayatollah Khamenei when he puts in his website the Ayatollah’s “legal and religious justification for killing all Jews and annihilating Israel”.

You would like to believe that this threat is true. It would give Israel the excuse for taking the pre-emptive strike that you say it needs to do to secure Israel. You have to build a case for that dastardly act.

Between Iran and Israel, I believe Israel is more likely to carry out its threat. You have a record for doing this.


The world knows that Israel did carry out a pre-emptive strike to destroy Iraq’s nuclear facilities long before the war against Iraq.
The world knows that Iran has never carried out any pre-emptive strike against any other country. The world also knows that Israel’s satellite, the United States, financed Iraq to attack Iran. Israel bombed the Egyptian air force base without any declaration of war.

Israel breaks any law with impunity e.g. build settlements on Palestinian territory, build walls which divide Palestinian villages, blockade Gaza illegally, shoot and kill aid workers on a mercy mission in international waters, destroyed hospitals, schools and homes in Gaza, prevents construction materials from being sent to Gaza to rebuild homes, ran over Rachel Corrie, an American because she stood in the way of Israel bulldozers about to destroy a Palestinian home, and more.

Yes, all these you do to secure Israel and Israelis. Don’t others have any right to secure their people and their countries? You will say it is retaliation for attacks against Israel. Actually the Palestinians were retaliating against Israeli seizure of their lands, killing their people, arresting and detaining thousands of their people etc.

Israel is known to have more than 200 nuclear warheads and delivery systems. Israel uses phosphorous bombs and cluster bombs and together with America used depleted uranium in the bombs and missiles.

Iraq had neither nuclear weapons nor any WMD. It was a lie and the world knows it. But Israel has nuclear plants in Rafael, Eelun and Nebrin. Then there is Dimona, nuclear centre in Naqeb which produces 90% of enriched uranium for Israel’s nuclear weapons.

With Israel’s history of pre-emptive strikes, invasion and occupation, Israel’s total disregard for international laws and the recent talks about taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities and Israel’s possession of nuclear bombs, shouldn’t Iran prepare itself for possible Israeli and US attack? Or are other people disallowed from preparing for their own defence.

Why is it that Israel is entitled to security but Iranians and everybody else should not be so entitled? Why is labelling all Muslims as terrorist permissible but any criticism of Israeli intransigence condemned as anti-Semitic?

Iranians may sound belligerent but they are not mad. They know that if they ever use nuclear weapons, Israel and the United States would wipe Iran off the face of the earth with the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in the arsenal of the two countries.

Islam does not teach us to kill. But Islam says we have a right to defend ourselves if attacked. That is the true teachings of Islam.

But there are Muslims, as there are Christians and Jews, who make use of religion for their own purpose. They don’t represent their peoples or their religions.

I am a Muslim fundamentalist.

I adhere to the true teachings of Islam.

This is not a religious war between Islam and Judaism. It is a territorial war. When you seize other people’s land, you must expect attempts to recover it. Or do you think people must thank you for robbing them of their property?

DR MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD

 

[Hentenza]

Funny that you did not cite the link in you post and you did not include the rebuttal to Dr. Mahathir response.

The link is: Other side of a Coin...: Chedet's Debate in Hanan Entry

And the response, which you omitted, is as follows:

You may find my detailed answers after each item number as it is posted by you initially. I hope it will reflect what the other side of the coin looks like and how we see that conflict. At least it is my wish that it will make a step, even a small one towards peace.

1. I agree entirely with you that building a great nation doesn't only take brains, but as you said it sure does help.

---I have nothing to add here since we both agree on that.

2. However brains alone without a heart (feelings) can produce a monster.

---Sure. We have a good example of that like the Nazi Germany. Like the Japanese did to the Chinese during the 2nd WW. Like Saddam Hussein did to his own people for so many years in Iraq and to the Iranians. I’m sure we can find some other examples in the history, but this is not the point towards you are targeting.
As for my understanding, you are pointing with that saying to Israel and the Jews. Do correct me if I’m interpreting it wrongly.
At least we can agree that we (all humans of any race or faith) have brains and use them in a way you may like or dislike. As for our hearts they are not different from any Muslim heart or Christian heart and we have mercy on each and every innocent Palestinian that is suffering from that conflict.
Let me ask you as a father of children. Would you allow your kids to go out and play in the streets when a war is in those streets? Would you allow any armed person to shoot from your home or your courtyard while you are sitting in that home? If they shoot from your home, wouldn’t you escape and save your family members if you cannot enforce those armed people (terrorists) to get out of your property? But Hamas enforced the innocent civilians to stay at their homes and fired from their residence taking into consideration the fact that the IDF will not fire back on civilian residence. Was that Hamas judgment based on the fact they knew we are monsters or more human than they are? Terrorists are terrorists and their aim is more saint than innocent people lives using them as a human shield. Who is in this case using his brain and without the heart? Just an hour ago I watched TV and saw a report that Abed-Allah Siham a nephew of Sayed Siham who was the Hamas minister of interior affairs and security is now treated in the Wolfson Hospital in Israel. This is our monstrous demonizing picture. Why isn’t the RTM showing it as well? If we are heartless and cruel, why should we treat the Hamas minister’s family? But we are not like you are thinking and demonizing us. We use our brains and hearts while discriminating the pure terrorist (the minister) from his family which is innocent. Does a monster have mercy on its enemy? There are a lot of such examples we had during our history in the region.
The Hamas is using their brains to design their rockets and behave like monsters launching them on innocent civilians for 8 years and the reason may be justified or not (I think it is not justified). A monstrous aim is targeting civilians and Jewish children intentionally like Hamas is doing. We are not targeting innocent Palestinians intentionally. Unfortunately those innocent Palestinians are captured by the monster terrorists as human shields.

3. Israel is undoubtedly a great nation, becoming great through the brains and the numerous achievements you have listed. Yes I have used Israeli originated products like Microsoft Windows and Pentium chips (made in Malaysia) by Intel, an American company.

---It is an honor for me to be able to be a small contributor to one of the products of the Israeli developments you are using. In counter, I have some Malaysian products in my home as well and I’m not feeling upset with it. So we are about in the same position. I’m not boycotting any Malaysian products.
Just to tell you that I was mentoring three Malaysian students of engineering during their studies despite the fact that there are not any relations between the two countries. We did it via e-mail; chatting and we even met several times. Do you know what their feedback to me was? They said simply that my explanations enlighten their understanding very much. I’m just one person among many other Israelis and Jews who want to share knowledge with other and help as much as we can. In counter we would also other people to enrich us with knowledge in a peaceful mood.


4. In fact I owe my life ultimately to Israel because there must be something invented by Israelis in the numerous instruments used in heart surgery. However most of the products used were invented and produced by Japanese.

---Whatever product you are using, I wish you all the best and long healthy life with God’s blessing. Haha… At least we can continue arguing more.


5. I am amazed at the number of Nobel Laureates Israel has produced. I admit we have not produced even one.

---In this case it must be a goal to achieve one and another one later. No one should give up and excel. We are humans and God blessed us with equal brains and hearts at day of birth (if born healthy). It is to us to excel and practice our intellectual brain cells with continuous challenges. I don’t think you (I mean all of Muslims) have not the skills to be awarded with a Nobel Prize since Islam was the inventor of the Algebra, the most fundamental sophisticated math calculus. It is just a matter of excelling and wanting to do so.


6. But when the brain is without a heart it does not care for the misery resulting from the products of the brain.

---This is a kind of repeating item number two which I already have answered (Item #1).

7. The atom bombs which killed 100,000 men, women, children and babies are the product of Israeli (Jewish) brain. Most of the diabolical weapons now being used to kill millions of people are also the creation of Israelis on Zionist Jews. The depleted uranium and phosphorous shells being used in Gaza are also the product of Israeli brains.

---In this case let’s put some facts on the table which you provided mistakenly. Who was the team in Los Alamos that invented and designed the first American nuclear bombs? None was an Israeli. Among the Manhattan program were several Jewish-American scientists. May be you forgot what the Japanese did to the Chinese and in Malaya during the WWII. How were they monstrous butchers and raping women? What stopped the brutal war against the Japanese were those Atom bombs. I’m not justifying the act of the Americans to throw those bombs on innocent people. That is another argument about a war which is unfair for both sides. But saying that the Jews were the people who killed the 100,000 men, women and children is absurd, unless it is a deep hatred to Jews in the background. Do you have the same mercy on the 6,000,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis in gas chambers and other torture and murdering activities?
Isn’t the same nuclear science invented by the Jews helping in creation of cheaper energy and electricity? Isn’t it helping in medicine using radioactive Isotopes in order to treat people for their health?
Do you have any evidences or facts that Israel used depleted uranium shells in Gaza? From where do you get that “official” information? Is it from the newspapers or media or from neutral and official inspectors? Do you have one measured proof of that?
Yes, the Israeli army was shelling with phosphorous shells according to the restrictions of the International Law. It was mainly used in open spaces. It is at the moment under investigation and when the conclusion will be published then we can comment, not prior that.


8. The current financial crisis which is destroying the economies of the U.S. Britain and in fact all the countries of the world is due to manipulations of banks, financial institutions and the monetary system by Jewish supporters of Israel.

---I don’t know from where you have collected that information. In the same banks are not working Muslims or Christians? In counter I say that the current economical crisis was created by the Islamic Petrol supplying countries when they raised the prices to such a value that caused high costs to the industry that caused less business that caused less ability to pay off loans that cause an economic crisis. It is to blame the Muslims and not the Jews.
Now who is right and who is wrong? It’s a matter who you ask?


9. The negation of the freedom of speech when it comes to the alleged killings of Jews in World War II are also inspired by Zionist Jews.

---Let me be a bit personal here. I’m a son of parents that are survivors of the holocaust. I know the information from “first hand”, not washed, as is.
Because of the holocaust I had just one grandmother, not two Grandmothers and two grandfathers to pamper me as a grandson. I had just two uncles of seven possible uncles. Just imagine how many cousins I’m missing. Those murdered Jews of my family haven’t been in a five star Nazi hotel. I feel ashamed that intelligent people like you and the Iranian President (an engineer) has doubt about the truth of the holocaust. It is not a naive speaking about it that it is claimed freedom of speech. It is not more than to insult the Jews by trying to deny the holocaust and re-write the history to comply the justification to wipe Israel of the map. They claim that the holocaust is a myth but with the same tongue they call the Israelis Nazis. This is something not understandable.
When you say “Zionist” do you know what the definition of that name is? “Zionism” is an international political movement that originally supported the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish People in the historic Land of Israel. What is wrong with that? Isn’t Zion the homeland for the Jews? Why can it be the homeland for the Palestinians (which is not for my opinion, but let’s leave it at the moment) and not for the Zionist Jews?
What I understand that you are discriminating between Zionist Jews and Jews which are not Zionist. So do me with the Palestinians. I discriminate them in two groups. One group of terrorists and the other group are the non terrorist Palestinians.

10. But worse of all is the seizure of Palestinian land to create the state of Israel. Not content with the area given to the Jews by the United Nations you have seized more Palestinian land, built settlements on many parts of Palestine, disallowed the use of roads built on Palestinian land to the Palestinians, erected your own check points at the borders of Palestine with Jordan and built your version of the Berlin Wall through Palestinian villages on land that is not part of Israel.

---The partitioning plan that was accepted by the UN on 29th of November 1947 was rejected by the Arab/Palestinians. When the last British soldier left the land after the termination of the British mandate, the Arabs/Palestinians started a war in order to conquer the whole land and wipe the Jews into the sea. Despite we have been about 600,000 in population against 5 well armed Arab countries (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq) and the Palestinians from inside, we managed to survive the 1948 war. That war against the adopted UN resolution wasn’t ignited by the Jews since we were accepting the partitioning plan. In that war, each side tried to capture its most land it could. The West Bank was captured by Jordan and the Gaza strip was captured by Egypt. The rest of the soil was captured by the Jews. So in this case it was not the Jews who violated the UN decision. After the West Bank and Gaza strip was under Jordanian and Egyptian governing, why weren’t those parts declared as independent Palestinian state? Why didn’t a single Muslim claim then for the Palestinians independence? I tell you why. The Muslims and Arabs wanted to preserve the Palestinian problem just for the purpose to wipe the Jews off the map. If there is not a Palestinian problem, there is no reason to be against the Jews the most enemy of Muslims.
In 1967 Jamal Abdul Nasser put a naval blockade on the southern port of Eilat by closing the Tiran Straits for ships that their address was Eilat-Israel. In parallel he forwarded his well equipped army with Soviets help into the Sinai Peninsula close to the Israeli borders. He banished the UN truce observers from the Israeli-Egyptian border. He was prepared mistakenly to another war declaring in the media that this time he is intending to wipe Israel off the map. As Israel was threatened by that aggressor and any diplomatic effort didn’t improve the situation, it needed to defend itself from destruction. When the 1967 self defending war started against Egypt in order to remove the blockade and remove the threat of the Egyptian army, Syria and Jordan jumped into the war to help their Egyptian brothers. That war was not against the Palestinians it was a war of three armed countries against Israel as a Jewish state in order to wipe it off the map (a wet dream of our Arab neighbors and Muslims abroad).
Luckily we defeated all three armies and freed the West Bank and Gaza strip from the Jordanian and Egyptian governing (It was not Palestinian governing). We captured the Golan from the Syrians mainly as a reason to retreat their army away from the borders. As you probably remember, prior 1967 the Syrians shelled our villages and Kibutzes near the border on a daily basis. Farmers couldn’t work in their fields and children were sleeping and playing in shelters. Many people were killed, civilian people, by the Syrian shelling. As Syria jumped into the 1967 war it was an opportunity to teach them the lesson.
All seized lands were lost by Arabs during war and aggression they committed on the young Jewish state of Israel. If the Jewish state was wiped off the map as the Arabs desire to do so, who would even remember the partitioning plan of the UN? Who would talk about the Jews rights to live in the land of Israel? I’m sure you would celebrate that event as a heroic Muslim win to complete the job which the Nazis didn’t finish.
Throughout the whole history can you prove a single day of an independent Palestinian state on that land? Who were the president and PM of that independent state? There never was such a thing.
But, as it was agreed upon previously, we (all of us) have brains and some of us have also hearts, the Jews are ready for compromising and share that land to have two independent states, one Palestinian and One Jewish with a hope that they can live peacefully side by side. For that purpose we need a single voice of the Palestinians to negotiate and abandon violence. Once violence is abandoned, you’ll see that it could be a great achievement for both suffering peoples.
Just to remind you, the fence we built was against the suicide bombers passing freely from the West Bank into Israeli towns and terrorize, killing innocent people in busses, malls and streets. Thanks God those actions were down severely since the fence was completed. Where there was a legal argument of the fence path, the Palestinians appealed to the Supreme Court of Justice in Israel. In some cases they won the courts judgment and the fence moved to another path.
We made bypassing roads not because we want to insult the Palestinians. It was because the terror of the Palestinians. There were daily events of shooting on Israeli cars while they passed near Palestinians villages. Many people, mainly civilians were killed on the roads. The bypassing roads saved a lot of lives.
You say we did this and that but you ignore the reasons why we did it.
The fence and the roads can be reverted when peace will be settled. Lost lives cannot be recovered.

11. Before the creation of Israel, the Jews and Arabs in Palestine lived in peace. Historically Jews had always sought refuge in Muslim countries when the Europeans conducted pogroms against them. This only stopped after the U.S. offered asylum.

---Israel was created as a state in 1948.
Let me remind you the peaceful Arabs prior those days. What about the 1929 riots against the Jews during the British mandate? You may find detailed information in that link: 1929 Palestine riots - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
…and the great peaceful life between the Arabs and Jews during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936–1939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine.
Can the the Jaffa riots of Arabs against the Jews in 1921 be ignored? Jaffa riots - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Arabs couldn’t accept the return of Jews to their homeland after being expelled for about 2000 years.

12. All the terrorism that we see today, whether state initiated or by irregulars, started after the U.S. backed Israel against Arab attempts to regain their land through conventional wars. Because they were outclassed in terms of weapons by the U.S, / Israel, alliance, then only did the Arabs resort to what is called terrorism. The Israeli response have always been with greater terrorism as is seen in Gaza.

---Your terminology about terrorism is different of mine. Terrorism is defined by me upon people or entities that their intention is to kill civilians like Hamas is doing by shelling Sederot which is a civilian town. There is no one soldier that is hiding there in a civilian residence and using the innocent as human shields.
Israel is not under the definition of terror since it is fighting back with a legal army and thanks God well equipped. Our intention is not to kill civilians as an aim. We are firing back to the Hamas sources of fire that are using their population as human shields. Did you know that the Israeli army called privately by phone the innocent Palestinian civilians in order to save their lives and leave their homes because Hamas is launching rockets, shelling mortars and sniper firing before we bomb that place? What army in the entire world would do that if it is called an army of terror?
The US is backing the people they think they are right from their point of view and you are backing the people that you think they are right. That’s probably an endless argument of who is right and who is wrong.
Our sophisticated weapons are an outcome of an essential survival need and not as an intention to kill innocent people. In counter, the Iranian sophisticated weapons they claim they have are for what purpose? Isn’t it to wipe Israel of the map? Isn’t it the sophisticated armor they are smuggling to Gaza for Hamas to help them to wipe the Jews off the map?


13. I have asked an American what he would do if Texas was given to the Jews to create the state of Israel. He did not answer. But I believe he would fight to get back Texas, employing all the weapons at its disposal.

---Why didn’t you ask him about giving the same Texas to the Palestinians to have their state there? And then ask him an additional question: which of the two peoples he would prefer to have in Texas if there is no other choice. I know the answer since I asked another Texan friend that question. Try to imagine what his answer was.


14. Yet had the United States been willing to create the nation of Israel in the lands under U.S. control or in the U.S. itself, there would be no terrorism in Palestine or in the Middle East. There would be no terrorism in America either because Israel would be wiped out by the U.S. forces. The world would remain peaceful.

---I would say it in a different proposal. Let the people that are claiming they are Palestinians return to their tribes in the Arabian Peninsula. They came from there to the empty land of Israel during the spreading of Islam. That land was empty of Jews because they were expelled by the force of the Roman Empire prior Islam was even born. This wasn’t a Muslim territory in Genuine but a Jewish even prior prophet Mohammad was born. There was the kingdom of Shaul, David, Salomon and other kings of the Jews. Not even a single Palestinian was living there during that dynasty of Jewish kingdom. So the Palestinians of today are the grand-grandchildren of Muslim invaders from the Arabian Peninsula.
Assume you have a home, an asset and you are enforced to leave it. The home stays empty for a long time. After that long time you are returning home and you find that someone lives in it and owns your asset. This is what the Muslims did during the spread of Islam to the land of Israel. They overtook the abandoned land by force with a hope or mistaken assumption that the Jews will never return to their homeland. And when the Jews returned to the land of Israel they become upset and angry since they lived here. The Jews claimed back their homes. The Jews purchased back parts of the land from Muslims legally and paid for it good money. One of the Jews who bought back the peoples assets was Yehoshua Hankin Yehoshua Hankin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. A large part of the lands has been purchased from the Lebanese Sursuk family which is evidence that the land wasn’t any independent Palestinian state. Most of the purchased (legally) soil was covered with swamps infected with the Malaria mosquitoes. The Sursuk family gladly used the “stupidity” of Jews to buy that non fruitful soil for such a high price they claimed from Yehoshua Hankin. Good business. No one was living at the swamps area and the place was abandoned by civilization for hundreds of years. It remained undeveloped until the Jewish pioneers brought that soil back to life.
How can it be that a sovereign Palestinian state would sell its land to the Jews? What you claim as a Palestinian territory is a distortion of the history and the audience of Muslims believes it since they want to believe it and not because it is true or false.
So, if the Palestinians will return to the Arabian Peninsula, peace can be established in the Middle East.
But, we (the Jews) understand that it is not logical to remove people who are living here for a few hundred or thousand years. We just want to get back to our homeland and live side by side with the Palestinian people. We are ready to compromise under an agreement which will be fair for both peoples. Unfortunately, the Palestinians and Arabs were dreaming to wipe the Jews off the map of the Middle East and terrorized the Jews more than 100 years since the Jews came back to claim land for their living here, in their genuine homeland. I don’t think we need to look back too much to the history of anger and frustration of both peoples. We must not continue that anger for the future and a new page must be opened. Both peoples can compromise and find the solution. The goal of Muslims is to encourage the Palestinians to do something to compromise as well as we are encouraging our leaders to keep seeking a compromise for peace. Continuing the violence forever will not gain anything to either side.


15. The brutality committed by your forces in Gaza is out of all proportion to the puny rocket attacks by Hamas. That attack was the result of Israel and the U.S. failing to accept the results of a properly conducted election.

---The brutality wasn’t the IDF’s using of force. The brutality was by Hamas who used the innocent civilians as human shields while knowing that the pictures of killed innocent children may do their war better than being brave and struggle with the IDF soldiers. They made the civilian residences as bomb traps in order to kill the Israeli soldiers. And when Israel bombed the houses from where the Hamas was firing, secondary blasts of those explosives traps increased the injuries and damages.
Brutality is the use of Mosques as explosives stowage and launching their rockets from there. Once the Mosque is a place from where rockets or mortars are launched or shelled, it is no more a Mosque (under any international law); it becomes a stronghold which is no more a protected place.
Brutality is the usage of schools and its courtyards as bases of rocket launching while families of innocent Palestinians escaped there knowing that schools are protected places. But if that school is used as a shield for the Hamas terrorists to launch rockets it is not a school any more, it is a stronghold and the responsibility of lost lives and brutality is to blame Hamas.
Brutality means when a Hamas rocket launching team captures few kids to surround them in order to avoid the Israeli air force to target that rocket team.
Brutality means no mercy of your own people and taking actions to enforce involvement of innocent civilians in terror.


16. Hamas could only establish their Government in Gaza. But you blockaded Gaza, denying them food, medicine, power, fuel etc. If you had not done that I doubt that Hamas would fire rockets at you.

---You just forgot one (or some) important fact(s). When Hamas established its government in Gaza they removed the Fatah from the offices by force and killed many of them. In addition they violated the agreement upon the border passages control and banished the international border inspectors of the passages and broke the security surveillance control equipment. More than this, they attacked the border passages of Gaza strip killing Israelis and their own innocent people that were there. We can be with tolerance to the innocent Palestinians suffering, but we are not so dumb to let our tolerance to bring us into a situation of recognizing a terror organization committing violence to Israelis.
It is not true that the Palestinians didn’t have enough humanitarian supplies during the “blockade”. Despite their launching rockets on the Ashkelon electricity power station, that station was continuing supplying electricity most of the time about 75% of their consumption. Fuel vehicles passed from Israel with the needed quantities but not more than this. Vehicles of food supply and medicine were supplied as well when it was needed. Yes it was not a free passage since Hamas used the free passages to do again and again their terror actions against those passages. They did it intentionally to cause Israel to close the passages since it may create the hoo-ha exactly what you are saying here.
The blockade on the sea was against weapon smuggling from Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah vessels. Oh, you probably would expect us to help those vessels to unload the weapons and Fajer rockets at Gaza port, directly to the humanitarian Hamas organization.


17. Malaysia is well aware that total boycott of Israel is not possible. We are in fact boycotting American products which is an even more impossible task. We would not be able to bring America or Israel down.

---I can understand that declaration of boycotting as an outcome of frustration and anger and I am able to accept it. It is a kind of a protest against what you think is wrong. I cannot advice you what to do in this case since it is more a kind of emotion and not helping or harming anyone logically.
Instead of thinking how to make Israel and America to kneel, I would do utmost helping the Palestinian brothers to stand up from the deep misery and use their rocket engineering capability to establish a firm good industry, build a modern infrastructure and build a beautiful resort for tourist on the beach of Gaza. Abandon violence and improve their life standard. When there will be no violence, all borders would be open free and they can enjoy the taste of prosperity. May be the Malaysian car industry Proton can help them by establishing a plant of spare parts fabrication. They are your Muslim brothers and this is a kind of help they are expecting. This is engineering for life, not for misery and death.
It is required thinking differently, instead of kneeling someone, it is better to make another one to stand up and build a better life.
If I make the analogy of resistance it terms of electricity, sometimes resistors are burned due to the over current flow. So resistance cannot be too massive since it may burn itself. Too violent resistance will become a self destruction.


18. But what we aim to do is to demonstrate the disgust and the anger that we feel over the inhumanity of the brainy but primitive peoples of Israel and America.

---The terminology of primitive behavior is not equal for both of us. I don’t think the behavior of Israel or America is primitive just because you have anger. Let’s say I’m angry about what you say on Jews. Does it mean you are primitive while you use your brainy thoughts and sharp tongue saying that? You may dislike things, but disliking things or people cannot make them primitive. It is two different things.
Demonizing people as Malaysia’s government is demonizing Israel is primitive!



19. You can collect Nobel prizes and other prizes but the world will look down upon you as very primitive people who robbed land through terror against perfidious British and subsequently used your control over the world's greatest military power to oppress the people whom you had robbed.

---Actually the robbers of the land are the Palestinians as I mentioned in my answer before (item #14). They did it at an ugliest way while the genuine land owners were out of their homeland. So who is primitively behaving? It is primitively done like animals are stamping their territory.
We are not against your trying to collect Nobel prizes. From the comments of some Palestinian and Muslim people I can learn that they are sharp in mind and tongue. Muslims invented the Algebra, so there is no obstacle for them to collect Nobel prizes as well. I’ll be the first to salute them for that.
I say that Muslims are controlling the world with their petrol force and not the Jews are doing it. With that force they enforce the UN to condemn Israel again and again justified or not justified. They did it so many times, so that the UN resolutions are no more relevant for anyone and become an arena of hypocrites. Is Iran complying to stop their nuclear program as it was requested? The control of the Muslim petrol created a declaration of the general assembly about Zionism is defined as racism. So how can you say that we are controlling countries? It is no more than mismatching facts to have an excuse to wipe Israel and the Jews off the map.


20. You have nothing to be proud of, unless of course you take pride in being heartless, in being primitive brutes.

---Dear Dr. Mahathir, we are proud in our humanity and contribution to all peoples. We are not arrogant because other people need our help. There is a difference between the word proud and the word arrogant. Muslims tend to think we are arrogant as a nation. There might be arrogant people everywhere and even among Muslims. Aren’t you proud of flourishing Malaysia? Same is with the Israelis, we are proud with our achievements despite the complexity of our life. How can you say we are heartless while we provide medical help to our enemies in cases when their hospitals are not with those special capabilities for the treating? I’m not looking for your sympathy, but expecting to bring all facts and the true facts onto the table of discussion.


21. The only mitigating factor is the presence among Israelis of a small number who are ashamed of what you have done to the people of Gaza.

---I have mercy on the innocent people of Gaza, but not because Israel was doing wrong. It is because the Hamas was doing wrong. They brought their own brothers backward with their terror which they call resistance. I’ve already mentioned what can happen to a resistor when a massive current overflows through it – it simply burns itself.
I have no mercy on the Hamas activists and terrorists. They deserve their own brothers’ anger as the root cause of their misery.
Israel is ready to help the Palestinians when they establish their own independent state and I’m not ashamed about it at all.

 

[EnemyOfReason]

Filistinians like the vast majority of Muslims cannot distinguish a Zionist from a Jew. Their main mission is the destruction of Israel and the murder of all Jews on the basis of religion.

Talking points refuted. Didn't event take a paragraph

 

[Hentenza]

Tell me Benmaarof,

Does Israel have a right to exist? Do you recognize Israel as a sovereign nation?

 

[EnemyOfReason]

Tell me Benmaarof,

Does Israel have a right to exist? Do you recognize Israel as a sovereign nation?

It is best to rephrase the question as "Do Jews have a right to exist?".

 

[benmaarof]

It is best to rephrase the question as "Do Jews have a right to exist?".

Yes. It's not a religious/racial dispute. It a territorial one.

 

[benmaarof]

It is best to rephrase the question as "Do Jews have a right to exist?".

If they don't have a right to exist, they would have been wiped out long ago in Muslim lands.

 

[Hentenza]

It is best to rephrase the question as "Do Jews have a right to exist?".

My question relates directly to the present state of Israel not about the Jews existing anywhere else as they did for almost 2000 years.

 

[benmaarof]

Tell me Benmaarof,

Does Israel have a right to exist? Do you recognize Israel as a sovereign nation?

No. Because the people already living there in 1948 did not agree to it. It violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN charter which granted people the right to decide their own destiny.

 

[LoveBeingAMuslimah]

20. You have nothing to be proud of, unless of course you take pride in being heartless, in being primitive brutes.

Here's another one (this, unlike the others, is from someone's personal blog but the points are nonetheless important)....from the time Israel attacked Gaza in 2012:

As Israel continues to pound the Gaza Strip, and factions within the beleaguered territory retaliate as best they can, there are many myths and stereotypes dominating mainstream media coverage, and many conversations.

Here are a few of the most common misunderstandings:

Myth: Hamas started the round of fighting that led to Israel’s “Operation Pillar of Defense.”
Fact: This myth represents a common error in mainstream – and even much progressive – media coverage. The “truth” all depends on when you start the timeline. What is clear is that while both Israel and resistance groups in Gaza bear responsibility for keeping the warfare going, Israel is more often the precipitator.

In an analysis that has received very little attention by Western audiences, Nancy Kanwisher (the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) asks, “As Israel and Palestine suffer a hideous new spasm of terror, misery and mayhem, it is important to ask how this situation came about…How did the (last) ceasefire unravel?”

President Barak Obama and the mainstream media in the United States and Israel place the blame squarely on Hamas. It is true that a barrage of Palestinian rockets have been fired into Israel, and that ending this rocket fire is the stated goal of the current Israeli invasion of Gaza. However, this simplistic summary leaves out crucial facts. Consider this chain of events, which followed a “lull” of sorts over the previous couple of weeks: (The details of what took place during these days vary somewhat from one media outlet to another. However, the broad strokes are the same.)

Nov. 4: Israel killed a mentally ill Palestinian walking near the Israeli-imposed “no-go zone” inside the Gaza Strip -- an event that triggered a rocket from Gaza into southern Israel, which did not cause any deaths or injuries.
Nov. 8: Four Israeli military tanks and a bulldozer entered Gaza, fatally shooting a 13-year-old boy who had been playing soccer by his family’s house.
Nov. 10: In retaliation, two rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel, and an anti-tank missile injured four soldiers, when it hit an Israeli army jeep that had crossed over into the territory. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported the killing of five more Palestinians, four of whom were civilians – including two soccer players age 16 and 17 and two young men (18 and 19) who ran to the scene. Forty-nine others were wounded, including 10 children.
Nov. 11: Amid talks of a truce, six more Palestinians (all but one were civilians) were wounded and another was killed by both air strikes and troops on the ground.
Nov. 12: With Israeli air strikes continuing, two rockets from Gaza hit Israel
Nov. 13: After two mid-afternoon air strikes, news services announced a truce had been agreed-upon.
Nov. 14: Israel ignored the nascent truce and assassinated Hamas military chief Ahmad al-Jabari. (It is questionable whether Israeli officials ever really wanted a truce. As Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies wrote in The Nation: “Earlier this year, on the third anniversary of the Gaza assault of 2008/9, Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz told Army Radio that Israel will need to attack Gaza again soon, to restore what he called its power of ‘deterrence.’ He said the assault must be ‘swift and painful,’ concluding, ‘we will act when the conditions are right.’ Perhaps this was his chosen moment.&#8221

A fact not known by most Americans, who see Jabari as merely a leader of “terrorists,” is that Israeli activist Gershon Baskin confirmed that Jabari was engaged in peace settlement negotiations with Israel. In fact, he was due to send Hamas’ version of a draft agreement to Baskin on the Wednesday evening before he was killed. It’s worth asking: Did Israel intend to torpedo those efforts?

The rest of the story is tragic history. Jabari’s killing triggered Operation Pillar of Defense, and it continues to unfold.

“It is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict,” writes Kanwisher, who analyzed the entire timeline of killings between Palestinians and Israelis from September 2000 to October 2008, to determine if there was a historical pattern. “Seventy-nine percent of all conflict pauses (during the study period) were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern -- in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause -- becomes more pronounced for longer (ceasefires). Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than nine days.”

One of the lessons from these data, she writes, is, “If Israel wants to reduce rocket fire from Gaza, it should cherish and preserve the peace when it starts to break out, not be the first to kill.”

Myth: Israel is killing militant “targets.”
Fact: The victims are humans, not “targets.” They have names, families, stories worth telling.

At the close of Nov. 19, Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights reported that 110 Palestinians had been killed, including 25 children, 14 senior citizens and 12 women. Seventy-two percent were civilians, with no active involvement in the resistance. Another 891 Palestinians (including 277 children, 164 women and 62 seniors) had been wounded.

[In contrast, various Israeli sources report a total of 664 rockets from Gaza have hit southern Israel. Three Israeli civilians have been killed and a reported 10 civilians and four soldiers have been injured.]

In the photo above, Jihad Misharawi, a BBC Arabic journalist who lives in Gaza, carries the body of his 11-month old son, Omar, through al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. A round of Israeli missile fire hit Misharawi’s four-room home in Gaza, killing his son. Misharawi’s sister-in-law was also killed, and his brother wounded. He told his manager at BBC that when the missiles hit, there was no fighting in his residential neighborhood.

The killing of Misharawi’s son received so much attention because he works for a major Western news outlet, and his agony was captured so graphically on film. However, there are many other stories that are not being told. With one of the youngest populations in the world, over half of Gaza's 1.7 million residents are aged under 18.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald observed: “Virtually every time the U.S. [or Israel] fires a missile and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ‘militants’ – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed ‘officials’ claiming that the dead were ‘militants.’ It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.”

In the words of one Gazan Palestinian, on Facebook: We are not numbers, we are humans! We have names, we have families, we have kids, we have emotions, we have feelings .... Every life has a story ... Just like you and just like any human being! We are not *** news and death reports!! We are not *** Numbers!! We are HUMAN SOULS.

To be continued...