Israeli Sanskrit professor jailed

[Jagat 1]

Thought this might be of interest:

 

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 10:49:53 +0200

ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il

Neve Gordon <ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il>

Tel-Aviv University Sanskrit Scholar Yigal Bronner, Imprisoned!!!!!!!

 

Dear friends,

 

I have been jailed by the Israeli Army for refusing to take part in the occupation of Palestine. I have been sentenced for 28 days in military prison.

 

The reasons which led me to say no to the humiliation, dispossession and starvation of an entire people are perhaps obvious to some of you. Nonetheless, I have explained my motivations in the form of a letter to my military superiors, and this statement is at the bottom of the letter and can also be found at http://www.yesh-gvul.org/yigal-english.html or at http://www.yesh-gvul.org/yigal.html or at http://www.seruv.org.il/signers/24_1_Heb.htm (Hebrew-version).

 

Please do not hesitate to send my statement to your friends as well.

 

This message is sent to you by my friend Neve Gordon, who has taken it upon himself to keep you informed about my news. Please do not flood Neve with messages. He will update you every once in a while, whenever there will be something to report.

 

You can write me while I am in jail, Neve will let you know my address as soon as he gets it. Those of you who know Galila should feel free to call and support her. She, after all, clearly has the harder assignment. While I'll be vacationing in jail, she'll be alone with both Amos and Naomi.

 

You may also help by protesting my imprisonment. At the bottom of this message are fax numbers and addresses of several senior Israeli officials. Please circulate all this information as widely as possible.

 

I want you to know that I am strong, and that I thank you for all your support.

 

Shalom,

 

Yigal

<hr>

 

<center><h3>A Letter of Response to the General By Yigal Bronner</h3></center><blockquote>”GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver.” (Bertolt Brecht)</blockquote>Dear General,

 

In your letter to me, you wrote that "given the ongoing war in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and in view of the military needs," I am called upon to "participate in army operations" in the West Bank.

 

I am writing to tell you that I do not intend to heed your call.

 

During the 1980s, Ariel Sharon erected dozens of settler colonies in the heart of the occupied territories, a strategy whose ultimate goal was the subjugation of the Palestinian people and the expropriation of their land. Today, these colonies control nearly half of the occupied territories and are strangling Palestinian cities and villages as well as obstructing -- if not altogether prohibiting -- the movement of their residents. Sharon is now prime minister, and in the past year he has been advancing towards the definitive stage of the initiative he began twenty years ago. Indeed, Sharon gave his order to his lackey, the Defense Minister, and from there it trickled down the chain of command.

 

The Chief of Staff has announced that the Palestinians constitute a cancerous threat and has commanded that chemotherapy be applied against them. The brigadier has imposed curfews without time limits, and the colonel has ordered the destruction of Palestinian fields. The division commander has placed tanks on the hills between their houses, and has not allowed ambulances to evacuate their wounded. The lieutenant colonel announced that the open-fire regulations have been amended to an indiscriminate order "fire!" The tank commander, in turn, spotted a number of people and ordered his artilleryman to launch a missile.

 

I am that artilleryman. I am the small screw in the perfect war machine. I am the last and smallest link in the chain of command. I am supposed to simply follow orders -- to reduce my existence down to stimulus and reaction, to hear the sound of "fire" and pull the trigger, to bring the overall plan to completion. And I am supposed to do all this with the simplicity and naturalness of a robot, who -- at most -- feels the shaking tremor of the tank as the missile is launched towards the target.

 

But as Bertolt Brecht wrote: “General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think.”

 

And indeed, general, whoever you may be-- colonel, brigadier, chief of staff, defense minister, prime minister, or all of the above-- I can think. Perhaps I am not capable of much more than that. I confess that I am not an especially gifted or courageous soldier; I am not the best shot, and my technical skills are minimal. I am not even very athletic, and my uniform does not sit comfortably on my body. But I am capable of thinking.

 

I can see where you are leading me. I understand that we will kill, destroy, get hurt and die, and that there is no end in sight. I know that the "ongoing war" of which you speak, will go on and on. I can see that if the "military needs" lead us to lay siege to, hunt down, and starve a whole people, then something about these "needs" is terribly wrong.

 

I am therefore forced to disobey your call. I will not pull the trigger.

 

I do not delude myself, of course. You will shoo me away. You will find another artilleryman -- one who is more obedient and talented than I. There is no dearth of such soldiers. Your tank will continue to roll; a gadfly like me cannot stop a rolling tank, surely not a column of tanks, and definitely not the entire march of folly. But a gadfly can buzz, annoy, nudge, and at times even bite.

 

Eventually other artillerymen, drivers, and commanders, who will observe the senseless killings and endless cycle of violence will also begin to think and buzz. We are already hundreds strong. And at the end of the day, our buzzing will turn into a deafening roar, a roar that will echo in your ears and in those of your children. Our protest will be recorded in the history books, for all generations to see.

 

So general, before you shoo me away, perhaps you too should begin to think.

 

Sincerely, Yigal Bronner

 

Please send letters of protest on behalf of the objectors to:

 

Mr. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer,

Minister of Defence,

Ministry of Defence,

37 Kaplan St.,

Tel-Aviv 61909, Israel.

E-mail: sar@mod.gov.il or pniot@mod.gov.il

Fax: ++972-3-696-27-57 / ++972-3-691-69-40 / ++972-3-691-79-15

 

Another useful address for sending copies would be the Military Attorney General:

 

Brig. Gen. Menachem Finklestein

Chief Military Attorney Military

postal code 9605 IDF Israel Fax: ++972-3-569-43-70

[Tarun 6]

Thank u Jagatji for this superfind finesuper artikel. Knowing Deva-nAgari, Ivrit's origin, certainly has given Yigal an obvious intellectual naiSkarmik edge over all other blander, blinder, blunder Zionists.

[Jagat 1]

(Letter from Yigal Bronner, released by Laurie Patton)

 

Dear Friends,

 

I am writing to let you know that my term is over and I have been released from military prison. It is a very joyous feeling to be free again, and to be reunited with my dear ones.

 

I have a lot to catch up with, and it will take me a while to do so. I have, for instance, around a thousand e-mail messages to read. It will also take me some time to get a better perspective of all that I've been through. Quite an experience...

 

I feel overwhelmed by the responses my case stirred in so many places. I feel deeply indebted for what you all did for me. I am told that your faxes basically flooded the office of the Military's Attorney General, and that of the Defense Minister. In the difficult hours of the first part of my term, the knowledge that I am not really alone in all this, that there is that huge, world-wide support group constantly protesting, drafting adds, sending faxes, and spreading the word, is what kept my head above the water. It meant a whole lot to me.

 

I'll try and write some more later (please forgive if you get double messages, I have too many e-mail accounts now). Meanwhile I just wanted to let you know I am free again, and to tell you how much your love and support meant to me.

 

Yigal

 

 

[Streetstraw 0]

Aerial 'Tirtzach' Sharon should follow this professor's advice.

Instead, he has the atheistic audacity to put such a true jew, true brahmana in jail.

 

Jenin - Part of Historical Trend of Anti-Arab Violence

New Stürmer Volume 4

 

"Jesus and Adolph Told the Truth about them."

 

Jesus said, they are liars, hypocrites, and deceivers. They twist truth to their benefit and give us lies.

Visit my web-side at: http:/www.newsturmer.com

Contact me at: juliusstreiker@newsturmer.com

 

Dear kindred and fellow Aryans (Yigal Bronner included),

 

note: We have to distinguish between zionist murderers & law-abiding peaceful vegetarian jews.

Now Kissinger (the former) has been appointed to head 9/11 investigation, meaning Bush has reintroduced irony personified into his own administration.

======

Jenin - Part of an Historical Trend of Anti-Arab Violence

By Samar Saleh, edited by Mark Farrell

 

In more recent times, Zionist attacks in Jenin have caused international ire. At the same time, many people seem to have forgotten that Jenin is a refugee camp. These refugee camp victims arrived there when vicious Zionist terrorist gangs illegally drove most of Jenin's inhabitants out of their homes in the Israeli part of Palestine in 1948.

 

In 1967, these same gangs, posing as an army, began invading the camps. Since then -- for 35 years -- they have regularly subjected the refugees and other inhabitants to the type of treatment experienced in a concentration camp.

 

During April 2002, the same refugees were attacked again but, this time, with unprecedented viciousness and brutality. Many homes were knocked down on the families' heads, crushing men, women, and children to death. The women and elderly were used as human shields. The sick were deprived of medical treatment. Children were starved. The injured were left bleeding to death. The victims' corpses were buried somewhere in mass graves by bulldozers.

 

These were major war crimes that, once again, were never investigated by the international community, who seemingly view such atrocities as being acceptable since Zionists were doing the killing.

 

The Israeli attack on both armed men and civilians in Jenin was illegal, as it was in many other camps in Gaza and the West Bank: Nablus, Rammallah, Duhaisha, Beit Jala, Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoon, Khan Younes, to name a few.

 

To answer the question of legality or illegality of the Israeli army going into these places, a brief demonstration of that area's history must first be illustrated.

 

According to the Jews, Abraham is of great importance because he is their forefather. A central theme in Judaism is his exodus from Ur in Mesopotamia - a region in the Middle East that is defined as the land lying between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris in what is Iraq today - to Canaan. Abraham and his tribe settled in Canaan, and from this stems the Jewish idea of all of the Middle East, between the Nile and Euphrates (covering today's Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and eastern Egypt), being the Promised Land (Genesis 15: 18). (This idea is represented in the Zionists' flag's two blue stripes, which are symbolic of the Nile and Euphrates, the land between which representing their desire of the "greater Israel.")

 

Abraham was buried in the Machpelah cave in Hebron (now known as the Ibrahimi Mosque), which he himself bought from the local Hitties (old Arabic tribes) to bury his wife Sarah. They were the first Jews to arrive in the land of "milk and honey."

 

The modern history of this area is crowded with events, mostly tragic and disastrous.

 

In 1880, the total number of residents in Palestine was approximately 480,000, of which around 24,000 (approximately 5 percent of the population) were Jewish and the remainder Muslim and Christian.

 

Many revolutionary Jews from Eastern Europe fled to Palestine and elsewhere in 1881. This occurred because a plot, contrived in the Russian Jewess Hesia Helfman's home, was successful: Tsar Alexander II (who was once described as being "the most benevolent prince that ever ruled Russia" by D'Israeli) was blown up, causing the end of his reign. Most Russians were upset with the Tsar's assassination, causing a lot of Jews to flee to Palestine and abroad in order to avoid persecution. After the first wave of immigration into

 

Palestine in 1881, the number of Jewish settlers in Palestine gradually increased.

 

In 1897, after the people in Russia attacked its Jewish citizens, Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, organized the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland. This Zionist Congress concluded that the only way Jewish people will be safe from anti-Semitic persecution across Europe and Russia is if they had a land and state of their own. After much debate, Palestine was chosen as the location for this Jewish homeland.

 

During WWI, the British captured Palestine from the Ottomans. On November 2, 1917, the British Government promised to establish a national home for Jewish people in Palestine, as if the British ever had the right to do so, in what is now known as the Balfour Declaration. The Declaration also promised to safeguard the civil and religious rights of the existing "non-Jewish" communities in Palestine.

 

By 1918, the Jewish residents of Palestine owned 2 percent of the land. Initially, Palestinians welcomed Jewish settlers; but, as more arrived, problems involving land increased.

 

In 1922, the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate to administer Palestine, with the intention of making it an independent Palestinian state and a national home for Jewish people. When Britain took control of Palestine, 93 percent of the population were Muslim and Christian, and only 7 percent Jewish (that is, Palestinian Jews and settler Jews, including

 

Zionists).

 

By 1935, Jewish people owned about 5.5 percent of the land (equivalent to 12 percent of the cultivable land). They acquired most of it from absentee landlords. Palestinians had farmed this land for centuries.

 

In 1936, Palestinian resistance to the changes in population and land ownership, brought about by the continued Jewish immigration into Palestine, erupted into open battles between the Palestinian Arabs and British forces. At the time, the Britons were encouraging, protecting, and arming the newcomers.

 

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish immigration into Palestine increased due to an agreement between Germany and Jews in Germany The Haavara Agreement. (Go to my web-site, 2002 Edition and read about that agreement under The pact between Hitler and the Zioinists. JS)

 

By 1947, Jewish people owned 6 percent of the land. The British Government announced that it intended to give up the Mandate, and to hand the problem of Palestine over to the United Nations. A UN special commission recommended that the land be divided as follows:

 

A Jewish state, which would include 56 percent of the land, was to be formed. The population of this state would be 497,000 Palestinian Arabs and 498,000 Palestinian and settler Jews.

 

An Arab state, which would include 44 percent of the land, was also to be formed. The population of this state would be 98.7 percent Palestinian Arabs (725,000 Arabs and 10,000 Palestinian and settler Jews).

 

Jerusalem and the area surrounding it would become an "international zone."

 

The General Assembly approved this Partition Plan. Palestinian Jews and settlers, who made up less than a third of the population, also accepted the Plan. Understandably, all Arabs rejected it. This caused a civil war among the inhabitants, with the Jewish population then feeling entitled to land in which Palestinian Arabs had lived for countless generations.

 

In 1948, the British Mandate in Palestine ended on 14 May, and the new State of Israel was proclaimed. Within hours, the armies of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq attacked Israel. The Syrian and the Lebanese armies were not organized or qualified. (They had attained their independence only five years prior.) The Iraqi and the Jordanian armies were under the command of English officers and collaborating politicians. The Egyptian army was poorly equipped and trained, and was also under the close eye of the British in the Suez Canal.

 

The Arab armies were defeated; and, by the time of the cease-fire in January 1949, Israel occupied 77 percent of the territory of the Palestine Mandate. Jordan annexed the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. During the conflict, more than 725,000 Palestinians (a large proportion of the population) became refugees within the West Bank, Gaza and other areas that are now controlled by Israel; and many Palestinians were also exiled to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. (Between 1948 and 1949, the Zionists murdered at least 13,000 Palestinians for challenging their land-grab.)

 

The UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which declared that Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their homes and that Israel should facilitate this at the earliest practicable date. The State of Israel opposed (and still opposes) their return. On October 26, 1948, the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion established the "Transfer Committee" and adopted its recommendations, thereby preventing the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes.

 

In 1948 and after, Israel plundered and looted Palestinian property spread over hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, including homes, household effects, cash, heavy equipment, trucks and whole flocks of cattle. The total quantity of Palestinian property confiscated by Israel amounted to over 4 million acres of land, plus the looting and confiscation of tens of thousands of homes, apartments, shops, factories and other facilities.

 

Yosef Weitz, a Polish Jew, was the prime mover behind the first and second Transfer Committees (1937-48), and between 1932 and 1948 he was the powerful director of the Jewish National Fund's Land Settlement Department. On April 21, 1948 Weitz wrote in his diary:

 

"Our army is steadily conquering [Palestinian] Arab villages, and their inhabitants are afraid and fleeing like mice. You have no idea what happened in the [Palestinian] Arab villages. It is enough that, during the night, several shells will whistle over them as they flee for their lives. Villages are steadily emptying, and if we continue on this course -- and we shall certainly do so as our strength increases -- then villages will empty of their inhabitants." (Israel: A History, p. 174)

 

In December 1948, Weitz remarked: "[The village has been] completely leveled, and I now wonder if it was good that it was destroyed and would it not have been a greater revenge had we now settled Jews in the village houses. (Benny Morris, p. 169)

 

In 1949, the UN General Assembly voted to accept Israel as a member of the UN. This was done only after Israel declared that it would implement the obligation of UN Resolution 194: the Palestinians' right to return to their homes. At the time, Israel declared that it accepted the obligations of the UN charter in exchange for formal recognition. However, up till the present day, not only have Palestinians not been allowed to return to their homes, but a total of 85 United Nations Security Council Resolutions have been violated by Israel - more than five times the number that Iraq has presently violated.

 

In 1952, The Law of Citizenship was passed in Israel, giving automatic citizenship to any Jewish immigrant. Jewish settlers arrived from Europe, North and South America, and some Middle Eastern countries such as Morocco, Yemen and Iraq.

 

On October 14, 1953, an Israeli commando unit, under command of the current Prime Minister of the State of Israel, killed 69 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, and blew up 45 Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Qibiya. Massacres horrified the Palestinians and caused them to leave everything and run for their lives. The armed Jewish gangs were very happy with the consequences. Many massacres were required to keep these

 

Jewish gangs happy, and that was exactly what happened in Baldat al-Shaikh (January 30-31, 1947), Yehida (December 13, 1947), Khisas (December 18, 1947), Qazaza (December 19, 1947), Katamon (July 5, 1948), Deir Yassin (April 9-10, 1948), Naser al-Din (April 13-14, 1948), Tantura (May 15, 1948), Beit Daras (May 21, 1948), Lydda (July 11, 1948), Dawayma (October 29, 1948), Houla (October 26, 1948), Sharafat (February 7, 1951).

 

In 1956, the second Arab-Israeli war broke out when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France, whose interests were threatened, lent Israel's military support (aircrafts with pilots, battleships with officers, and tanks with soldiers) to attack Egypt. Israel captured the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula.

 

In the same year, October 29, Israel killed 49 Palestinian villagers, including 15 women and 11 children in Kafir Kassim, a Palestinian village in the little Triangle. The villagers were lined up and shot for breaking a curfew (for which they had not been informed).

 

In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was established by Arab heads of State and became the national liberation movement of the Palestinian people.

 

In 1967, tension between Israel and its neighbors erupted into the Six Day War. The armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria lost the war. Israel occupied east Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights (belonging to Syria) and the Sinai Peninsula (belonging to Egypt). A further 200,000 Palestinians fled to camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and another 335,000 people were internally displaced within the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

 

During this war, the Israeli army killed -- although official figures have never been released -- at least 15,000 Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians. It forcibly expelled 388,500 Palestinian civilians, including 188,500 for the second time.

 

Moshe Dayan, a Haganah member who held several positions in the Israel Defense Force such as chief of staff and minister of defense, was proud to report (Haaretz, April 4, 1969) these victories and promulgated:

 

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

 

In November of the same year, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242. It called on Israel to withdraw from territories occupied in the 1967 war, and it stated that there should be a just settlement of the refugee problem (which has not been reached even now).

 

In 1982, Israel launched a full-scale attack on Lebanon, also targeting and destroying many of the Palestinian refugee camps in the south, and displacing many thousands of refugees again. The PLO withdrew from Beirut and -- no longer having a base in Lebanon -- relocated to Yemen, Sudan, Syria, and mainly Tunis. Israel entered west Beirut and ordered the massacre of at least 1,300 (other sources say more than 3,000) Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. In Lebanon, the Israeli army killed over 29,500 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians, approximately 11,800 of which were children.

 

During various invasions, it forcibly evicted more than 100,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

 

In 1987, pressure continued to build. The Israelis decided to work on a tunnel beneath the Al Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites to Muslims, to search for an old Jewish temple. This was a real threat to the mosque's structure, and consequently caused the Muslim Palestinians to become irate. This already tense situation was compounded when an Israeli settler's truck

 

intentionally crushed a car, killing four Palestinians in Gaza. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza began to resist the Israeli occupation of their land through mass public demonstrations that were televised around the world. The Israeli army responded with curfews and closures and by, as usual, killing some civilians. What is now known as the Palestinian uprising, or the first Intifada, began amid all this.

 

In 1988, the PLO accepted UN Resolution 242. In a move towards diplomacy, it renounced violence and recognized the right of Israel to exist. The Palestine National Council declared an independent State of Palestine.

 

In 1991, the PLO authorized Palestinian involvement in US-sponsored peace talks in Madrid.

 

In 1993, the PLO and Israel recognized each other and signed the Declaration of Principles. Under the Oslo Peace Accords, the Palestinian Authority was established and Israel withdrew from most of the Gaza Strip and from the town of Jericho in the West Bank. However, many of the most difficult issues, including how to share the city of Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the borders of Palestine, and the building of Jewish settlements, were left to be resolved at a later date.

 

Between December 1987 and September 1993, Israel killed over 1,300 Palestinian civilians, including over a quarter under the age of 16, wounded more than 100,000, and demolished 2,089 homes.

 

In 1995, the Oslo II Interim Agreement divided the West Bank into three areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority was given partial control over Area A only, which amounts to less than 18 per cent of the land in the West Bank. Israel still retains control of most of the land and roads as well as all the water under the ground. All water management in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been placed under Israeli military rule since 1967. Furthermore, in 1984,

 

it issued a military order that made it illegal for Palestinians to plant a new or replacement fruit tree without a permit.

 

On the other hand, Israel had been responsible for establishing, financing and protecting illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. It had confiscated 40,000 acres of land to build a vast road system in the occupied Palestinian territories. Only Israel's army and Jewish settlers are permitted to use these roads. Most of this land was previously Palestinian

 

farmland.

 

Of aid spent in these occupied territories, 96.5 percent was spent on Israeli settlers, and 3.5 percent to the 90 percent Palestinian population. In 1992, Israeli settlers (discounting East Jerusalem) constituted barely 6 percent of the West Bank and Gaza populations.

 

In 1996, the first ever Palestinian elections were held in Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza. Yasser Arafat was elected as President. The right-wing Likud party under Binyamin Netanyahu won the Israeli general election. The peace process was virtually suspended as Israel stepped up building programs of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, withdrew residency rights for Palestinians in Jerusalem, and imposed entry permits for West Bankers and Gazans. Between 1987 and 1999, in East Jerusalem alone, Israel, revoked

 

residency rights of 3,327 Palestinians.

 

Widespread protests from Palestinians lead to Israel implementing many road closures in the Palestinian Territories. Israel imposed restrictions on Palestinian movement in and out of Palestinian localities, depriving them of access to their land and property, and to all other economical and educational places. This had a serious impact on Palestinian economic

 

development, and most Palestinians became poorer.

 

Since the start of Peace Talks in 1993, Palestinians in the West Bank have been denied access to the Gaza Strip and Israel. Israel has used curfews and partial and total closures. It further separated Palestinian communities inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, separating villages from cities and villages from villages, through checkpoints, bypass roads, settlements and closures.

 

Since the start of Peace Talks until the end of 1999, Israel had killed 492 Palestinian civilians and had demolished approximately 1,000 Palestinian homes, leaving more than 5,000 Palestinians homeless.

 

In July 2000, Camp David negotiations ended inconclusively as President Arafat and Prime Minister Ehud Barak failed to reach agreement on the future of Jerusalem and on the nature and shape of the state that the Oslo process would give the Palestinians.

 

Seven years of peace negotiations and interim solutions had left the Palestinians economically poorer, with less freedom of movement and with their basic, inalienable rights denied.

 

For all reasons, frustration increased and a second Intifada began in the West Bank and Gaza, following a provocative visit by Israeli hard-liner Ariel Sharon on 28 September 2000 to al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, a site sacred to Muslims. In February 2001, Ariel Sharon, former Defense Minister and "hero" of the Sabra and Shatila massacre (and many others), was elected Prime Minister of Israel.

 

Israel has always raided mosques and churches and harassed worshippers. It has allowed its soldiers to shoot tear gas inside places of worships and has disrupted the burial rites of Palestinians. Between September 2000 until May 2001, Israelis demolished 39 mosques and 12 churches (and many others were transformed into Jewish entertainment centers and clubs).

 

Israel has also raided schools, universities and even hospitals and used tear gas inside school buildings. Since September 2000, 197 schools have been damaged, 239 Palestinian students and school children have been killed, 166 students and 75 teachers arrested.

 

Palestinian historical and cultural sites have always been threatened. One example among many others is the Al-Shihabi Palace that was bulldozed in 1999. It was a masterpiece of Arab Architecture and one of the prominent historical landmarks in the Olive Mount in Jerusalem.

 

Israel has maintained a policy of continually establishing new settlements for Jews (one of the most important issues of the conflict) to isolate and cut off Palestinian communities. The Israeli group Peace Now found that since the February 2001 elections, 44 new settlement sites have been established in the West Bank. There are 450,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem -- settlers who are living on land they do not own.

 

On the other hand, Israel has imposed massive restrictions on Palestinian construction. In occupied East Jerusalem, the State of Israel prevents Palestinians access to 66 percent of the land because of Israeli zoning, planning and building restrictions.

 

Israel has imposed severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, including through closures, besiegement, curfews and the use of trenches, fences, iron gates and walls. It has denied Palestinians access to goods and services, hospitals and medicine, food and water, schools and universities, workplaces, businesses, agricultural areas, industries, family and community life. Poverty is already at 75 percent, and unemployment has reached 62 percent.

 

Israel has assaulted Palestinian women in various ways, including illegal and indiscriminate use of lethal force by Israeli military authorities, resulting in deaths or injuries; the deliberate abuse of tear gas, resulting in suffocation, health problems, and miscarriages among Palestinian women; sexual harassment; the use of obscene language; exposure; urinating on women; molestation and attempted rape; arrest; hostage-taking; interrogation and torture inside Israeli prisons.

 

Since March 2002, 15,000 Palestinians have been detained, 6,000 of whom remain in prison. Of those 6,000, 1,500 (including 255 children) prisoners are now under administrative detention, meaning they have not had a trial, and are imprisoned without any charges.

 

Between 1967 and 2002, Israel deported 1,531 Palestinians, including mayors, writers, students and university lecturers.

 

To date, Israel has prevented the return of approximately 6 million Palestinian refugees, who have either been expelled or displaced. The majority of Palestinian refugees, living inside the occupied Palestinian territories, and internally displaced Palestinians living within the

 

boundaries Israel, live within 100 miles of their places of origin but are denied their right to return to their homes and lands.

 

Since the end of September 2000, Israel and its army and settlers have killed 1,946 Palestinians, including 336 children. It has severely injured more than 41,000 Palestinians, leaving more than 2,000 Palestinians permanently disabled.

 

Palestine has but a small population. In comparison, if Palestine had a population that was equivalent to the United States and the Israeli terrorists caused the same proportion of atrocities, there would have been 194,600 Palestinians murdered between September 2000 and September 2002, including 33,600 children murdered. Applying these same proportions, more than 4,100,000 Palestinians would be injured, including more than 200,000 permanently disabled.

 

Additionally, Israel has uprooted hundreds of thousands of fruit and olive trees. It has destroyed tens of thousands of acres of Palestinian farmland. It has destroyed hundreds of homes and made hundreds of Palestinians refugees again.

 

Crimes are committed every day in the name of Israel and the Jewish people. No other society on earth has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire nation and has gotten away with it.

 

Terrorism has long been a trend among Israeli leaders. Before Menachem Begin became prime minister of Israel, he bombed Britain's King David Hotel, killing dozens of people.

 

Prior to Yitzhak Shamir becoming prime minister of Israel, he too was a "wanted" criminal by the British for having engaged in terrorism. He did everything from planting explosives and sending letter-bombs to hanging Britons and booby-trapping their corpses with explosives (not to mention ordering the assassination of both Count Bernadotte and Lord Moyne).

 

In fact, in August 1943, Yitzhak Shamir wrote an article entitled "Terror" that appeared in Hazit, which was the publication of his organization, Lehi. In this article, he openly promoted the use of terrorism that has become so common today in Israel:

 

"Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war... We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle. First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today..."

 

Even today, many feel that current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, like many other Israeli leaders before him, continues to embrace the Zionist ideology: to kill, hurt, destroy, reduce, and drive away Palestinians until "they break."

 

Seemingly proud of his war machine for abusing defenseless Palestinian civilians, he involves thousands of loyal soldiers in the humiliation and punishment of each Palestinian, without regard for age, gender, or illness. No one hears the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, and tortured prisoners.

 

A while back, some people tried to bring Sharon to Belgium to face a war crimes trial for the events that occurred at the camps of Sabra and Shatilla. He did not travel there to face the charges.

 

To the world, Sharon gives a much different story. He says he is a man of peace. In a visit to the U.S. Congress in October 2002, Sharon said:"The Israeli army is the most moral in the world and tries its best not to harm civilians."

 

On the very day that Sharon said the above, his Israeli troops murdered a 72-year-old woman, a 32-year-old woman, an 11-year-old boy, an 8-year-old boy, a 27-year-old grocer, and a 45-year-old man. A bomb had killed these people. There were others, but they could not be counted nor removed from their homes because of continued Israeli gunfire.

 

A week before Sharon's speech, a bomb dropped by Israelis caused injuries or deaths to over 110 people.

 

A month before, a 1-ton bomb killed dozens of innocent civilians and took out a large cement apartment building, which housed many, and several buildings surrounding it. It seems that this is a trend among the Israeli officers and officials: lies and murders.

 

Except for the few journalists and intellectuals who are honest and courageous enough, the Israelis, extensively governed and administered by Generals, have sunk into the daily debates of official propaganda about strategic withdrawal, whether to incorporate settlements, or whether to keep building that monstrous fence that will put millions of Palestinians in a

 

huge cage and, thereby, forget about them ever existing.

 

This is the truth about what the Palestinians suffer. If their land was not stolen or occupied, using some independent judgment and some sort of moral standard, what possibly is the word for all of this???????

 

Israeli policy will ultimately fail, for it was built -- and continues to operate -- on terrorism and hatred.

 

If zionist audacity/swindle, Chuzpe, is right, then resistance must be a national duty.

Heil og sael