I've been duped.
Do you know the frustration you feel when you believed in something strongly and then you realize that the information that made you believe was from a source with an agenda to deceive?
I just watched a powerful and courageous documentary called Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land. It certainly has its own agenda and doesn't present balanced coverage. Still, it showed me how my understanding of the struggles in the Middle East has been skewed by most of our mainstream media. I saw how coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian problem is brilliantly controlled and shaped. I pride myself in understanding how the media works... and I find I've been bamboozled.
Invest 75 minutes in watching this, because most of the time we only hear one viewpoint when it comes to the interminable struggle in the Holy Land. While this documentary would never be shown on commercial TV in the USA, it can be viewed online (Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land). In my view, many Palestinians live under inhumane conditions, and U.S. taxpayers help to make it happen. Please, watch this and then share your impressions.
Criticism of Israel's policies is not automatically anti-Semitic (see J-Street for an example of a pro-Israel, pro-peace group). In fact, the irony is that for Israel's hard-liners, their clever PR strategy could be their own worst enemy. While Israel certainly deserves security on its land, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory (in Gaza and the West Bank) degrades Israel and drives Palestinians to desperation. The question of whether Israel is conducting a brutal military occupation or a reasonable defense against terrorism gets no real airtime. If we care about the long-term security of Israel, we have a responsibility to understand what our government is funding and supporting.
I believe that watching this documentary is a painful first step to finding a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. If you are a friend of Israel, you must watch Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land.
Follow Rick Steves on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@RickSteves
It's convenient for the state of Israel to assert that the label of occupation doesn't apply to their actions in Gaza -- naturally, they don't want to be confronted for what they do. But, doublespeak aside, Israel maintains military control over the land and its people. They are suffering, and they are not free. Gaza remains occupied.
Here's why: "Israeli officials and Israeli police, speaking little or no arabic, were appointed in large numbers to purely Arab districts; Israeli agricultural colonists were encouraged to settle on land confiscated under the Land Reform in the middle of Palestinian populations; for the children of these Israeli invaders Jewish schools were built on a large scale; there is a very general belief that Jewish firms were favoured as against Palestinian firms in the allocation of State contracts and that the State provided work and relief for Jews more readily than for Palestinians. I believe these complaints to be in the main justified. Even as late as the time of my Mission, I could find no readiness on the part of the Israeli Government to remedy them on anything like an adequate scale ...."
This is actually a quote from a fact finding mission to the German Sudetenland in 1938. To get the original text just substitute the words: "Israeli/Jew" with "Czech" and "Arab/Palestinian" with "German." The dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are almost identical to those of the conflict between Czechoslovakia and Sudeten Germans. Just like in the 1930s, we're missing the big picture - which is the conflict between Israel and the league of Arab and Muslim states. Unfortunately, Israel has become the New Czechoslovakia.
Just like in the case of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Israel is far from innocent in its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. But while this movie supposedly tries to show how Western media is skewed in favor of Israel in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and covers up the occupation), it only takes 59 SECONDS (!) for the movie itself to distort the reality of the conflict and shift our attention away from the Big Picture.
The big picture is that in 1967 Arab countries were trying to destroy Israel, and lost in a war in which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai peninsula. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which called for Israel to withdraw from territories AND for "termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State..."
The movie fails to acknowledge the fact that to this day most Arab states and the Palestinians still refuse to reconcile with Israel, and still want to destroy Israel. That is the reason why there is still Israeli occupation. By omitting this basic fact the movie is nothing more than propaganda.
"To pretend that the Egyptian forces massed on our frontiers were in a position to threaten the existence of Israel constitutes an insult not only to the intelligence of anyone capable of analysing this sort of situation, but above all an insult to the Zahal [Israeli army]."
- General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.
(In fact, half the Egyptian army was bogged down in Yemen at the time)
" I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let's talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plough someplace where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was."
- Moshe Dayan on the origins of the '67 war in the North.
Finklestein has a good summary:
http://www.ussliberty.org/orenbook.htm
Another nice reminder of the kind of cruel actions the US perpetrates with the hard-earned tax dollars of unsuspecting citizens...
All in the name of "FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY"
The world is finally catching up!
Villages owned their land collectively by the village residents or by the hamoula (family). Physical features and traditional names of lands were used to describe the boundaries of a certain village land and were respected by neighboring villages. In the plowing and seeding season, lands were divided between village residents every fall based on ability to cultivate. Zalameh wa 'ammal (a man and a working animal) would get one feddan share. A man without 'ammal would get half a feddan. A man would get half a feddan for each additional working animal he owned that was available for work.
This system was used by the villages for the distribution of ardh as-sahil (the lands of the fields) for cultivation. The concept is still used today in some villages in the West Bank.
- from:
Land Ownership in Palestine/Israel
By Nasser Abufarha
By Nasser Abufarha
Control over territories, land use, and ownership are central issues to the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. What follows is a historical overview of the system of land ownership in Palestine, including an examination of the methods by which the Israeli government and Jewish agencies acquired land in Palestine.
http://www.ap-agenda.org/nasser/nasser3.htm
It has been documented in numerous sources that the Baron de Rothschild set up a fund for the purchase of land in Palestine by the Zionists in the 1880s. Early Zionist settlers purchased land – mainly arid scrub and malarial swamp, which should have been their ancestral birthright – from wealthy, absentee Arab landlords in the late 19th Century, who then often hired local thugs to drive the Jews off the land that they had just purchased.
After 1948 and through successive wars of anniliation by the Arabs against Israel, that land area increased through conquest.
"Despite British efforts to curb the illegal immigration, during the 14 years of its operation, 110,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah#Aliyah_Bet:_Illegal_immigration_.281933.E2.80.931948.29
After 25 years the Zionist land acquisition program was a miserable failure and had ground to a halt. The overwhelming majority of Arabs had pressured the Mandatory administration to prohibit land transfers to Jews in the majority of the territory.
By Nasser Abufarha
http://www.ap-agenda.org/nasser/nasser3.htm
http://www.ismi.emory.edu/JournalArticles/MESapr84.html
The balance of land, be it State land, Waqf , Miri or Mulk, was owned by the indigenous people.
Nothing in any document related to this conflict authorises the taking of land from those owners. In fact, the partition documents specifically forbid it:
Chapter 2:
"No expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State (by a Jew in the Arab State)(4) shall be allowed except for public purposes. In all cases of expropriation full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court shall be said previous to dispossession."
Were upwards of one million people illegally and immorally dispossessed?
Yes.
Has the Jewish State ever allowed them to return as is their right under all International Law?
No.
Has the Jewish State even offered compensation for their loss?
No.
No matter how you slice it.
Despite this, Ben Gurion, the Israeli leader invited the Arabs to build a country along with them.
The Palestinians missed their chance in 1947 by refusing it and have since found that war, boycotts and terrorism won't make the Jews leave but still refuse to accept offers on the table or to negotiate for peace unless they get to flood Israel with their people, negating Israel's own right to self-determination. The movie Steve watched is the result of another kind of attack, that of slanted PR.
Be fair, let each side have its own country if they can't live together. Who would object to that?
"not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements." (Simha Flapan, p. 32)
Ben-Gurion commented on the proposed Peel Commission Partition plan as follows in 1937:
"We must EXPEL ARABS and take their places .... and, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places-then we have force at our disposal." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 66)
Most Palestinians accepted the partition. It was the Arab High Committee that rejected it. Of course, were the UN to declare they were dividing Israel UN half and giving one half to a foreign settler community, you can be sure that Israel would reject it and go to war if it was imposed in them.
@Be fair, let each side have its own country if they can't live together. Who would object to that?"
Not only dud Netenyahu successfully campaigned on a platform objecting to a two state solution, Likud's charter explicitly rejects it.
Let us talk about today. Why are the Palestinians not battering the door down demanding peace and an end to the occupation? It's suspicious that they don't
"In our state there will be non-Jews as well — and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well. ...The attitude of the Jewish State to its Arab citizens will be an important factor—though not the only one—in building good neighbourly relations with the Arab States." - David ben Gurion
A report from the military intelligence SHAI of the Haganah entitled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948", dated 30 June 1948, affirms that:
At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations." To this figure, the report's compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%… of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to "fears" and "a crisis of confidence" affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases…[50][51][52]
According to Morris's estimates, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians left Israel during this stage.[9]:262 Keesing's Contemporary Archives in London place the total number of refugees before Israel's independence at 300,000.[53]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus#April_1948_.E2.80.93_June_1948
- God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster
By Donald H. Akenson. (Cornell University Press) page 168.
Najd's Palestinian villagers, approximately 620 in 1945, were expelled on 13 May 1948, before Israel was declared a state and before any Arab armies entered Palestine. According to UN Resolution 194 and also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, Section 2, the villagers of Najd have a right to return home to their personal property and to their native village.
Cheers
This is just too easy!
I respect what they are doing because they utilize the mechanisms that are present in the Israeli government to advocate for policies and procedures that are in line with the aspirations of a democratic state, that require the military to be accountable to the judiciary and legislative branches of government. They simply seek to make Israel truly consistent and a better example for human rights in the whole region...and who doesn't believe that the region needs an example of excellence in respecting human rights of all those affected by its government?
I'm convinced...until I hear of new information which may be biased and then my entire worldview may change again...
The only dupes here are me and anyone else who bothered to click on this article.
All of which is the result of the inspiring collaboration between the plucky residents of this southern Israeli town and Palestinian rocketeers who make the construction of these wonderful public structures not only possible, but a veritable necessity!
Oh wait, he didn't cover that aspect of the conflict? Well that seems to explain a few things.
But he is still a good source for knowing the best cathedrals to visit in Tuscany (Florence and Siena, btw).
Nor did he cover the aspect regarding Israel's withrawl from Gaza that was not only accompanied by 7,700 shells fired into Gaza by Israel as a parting gift, but the fact that Israel turned Gaza into an open air prison.
The one and only comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli settlements n the occupied territories, "Lords of the Land", by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, describes it as follows:
"After Israel withdrew it's forces from Gaza, in August 2005, the ruined territory was not released for even a single day from Israel's military grip, or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day. Israel left behind scotched earth, devastated services, and people with nearly a present or a future. The Jewish settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass it's inhabitants, by means of it's formidable military might."
I guess a documentary arguing that the Earth was flat would not be balanced witout presneting the case that it was right ?
However, you dishonestly present the I/P conflict as though it were equally cut-and-dried, which one could only accept as so if, like you, one is completely blind to the Palestinians' responsibility for the situation that they now find themselves in, which is the result of, among other things, Palestinians' crimes against humanity and the rejectionist policies of their leadership.
Cheers
They don't need to pay for anyone's sins but their own. What they do need to do is respect the human rights of the Jewish community.
"Defending Israel's actions and policies had amounted to defending the indefensible...."
Link? Quote? Anything? Nothing?!
"so the fallback position that Israeli apologist routinely adopt, is that the situation is complex."
As a fellow who can't acknowledge the crimes against humanity committed by Palestinians, your critique above comes across as rather dishonest and hypocritical. Clearly, you don't propose to hold anyone else to the standards you demand for Israel, so please, once again, spare me.
"The other equally absurd a d desperate position is to try and present the conflict as one between equals, whence the failed obsession with Palestinians' crimes against humanity...."
Sorry, you don't need to be "equals" for you to be obligated not to commit crimes against humanity. Which, again, you can't seem to admit the Palestinians are doing. Please excuse me for not taking your commitment to the universal values that you say you believe in any mores seriously that you do yourself.
Cheers
Perhaps Mr. Steves should watch something balanced, and without an agenda, if he wishes to get a true picture.
And say "hi" to Rick for me. Like a lot of people, I feel like I traveled through Europe with him.