Palestine & Israel

[coheneran]

I know there've been lots of threads on this, but I didn't want to go grave-digging so I made a new one. I want to discuss mostly the repression of Palestinian protests and IDF violence against unarmed civilian demonstrators, both Israelis and Palestinians. Here's a video of a demo against the wall about two years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz8x2NqInsk

It's got Israeli, Palestinian and international demonstrators who are being shot at with live ammunition. Just to translate a few things in there, about four minutes through an Israeli protestor is shouting in Hebrew "Nobody is threatening you! Put down your weapons! Stop shooting! There are international cameras here! You have no reason to shoot! Nobody is being violent and you are shooting!" These protests happen every week, organised by Palestinians and a group called Anarchists Against the Wall. I've been to one, it wasn't pleasant.

I'm sure you all know about the current situation, but for those who don't (ie. those who are blind, deaf and stupid), I'll give you some information:

Since about 2001 (I think it was) the Israeli government has been building a wall, about thirty feet high and five feet thick, to surround the whole Western border of the West Bank, that's the side facing Israel, the other side is facing the River Jordan (its Western bank, hence the name), beyond which is Jordan proper. Originally Sharon promised that this is a temporary defence measure, but just recently our newly elected Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, announced that the Apartheid Wall will mark the new Israeli-Palestinian West Bank border, excepting a few minor changes to the map (the annexation of a few more miles of Palestinian land). In effect, this wall is putting Palestinians in a ghetto, surrounded by a wall and barbed wire on the West and North, the Jordanian border in the East, and the rapidly drying Dead Sea in the South. This wall is being built on Palestinian land, through Palestinian villages. In many cases it is cutting off farmers from their fields and villages from their market towns. Of course, those are just the obvious economic implications.

I think that's enough for now.

Discuss.

[PepsiMetal]

I'm not sure how this wall will actually work. Palestinians are basically living in poverty, and this wall will take them further away from a normal society, which could even worsen their conditions. Fatah are trying to convince Hamas to change their mind and accept Israel as existence.

[URL="http://www.btselem.org/english/Statistics/Casualties.asp"]But apperently[/url], more Palestinians have been killed than vice versa. I'm really undecided and split on this case. They both have valid and invalid points.

[WhoDidTheElf]

According to the video they weren't shooting the live rounds, they were shooting rubber bullets. But that there were snipers with live rounds.

[Squirrel]

I don't really know where to stand on the issue.

It's two sided and I don't believe i hold enough facts to decide.

Currently though I am an Israeli sympathizer, based on the medias portrayal of Palestinians in the Western media.

[coheneran]

The logic behind the wall is so basic it's childlike. The reasoning is that if there's a big fuckoff wall between Israel and Palestine, suicide bombers won't get in. This is, of course, bullcrap. Israeli forces let suicide bombers in. They don't hold their hand and walk them through the border, but the checkpoints are opened and the soldiers in the area are called off-duty, so the roads are unguarded, which is literally unheard of. This happened the last time there was an attack on Israel, a couple of months ago.

[-1up!-]

I'm really pro-Palestinian

[coheneran]

Originally Posted by Squirrel

Currently though I am an Israeli sympathizer, based on the medias portrayal of Palestinians in the Western media.

I know, sometimes watching the news reports on Palestine is just incredible. They are the stuff of fantasy. Due to bad media portrayal, the whole world thinks that Israel is poor little David with his sling and stone and that Palestine is mighty and cruel Goliath with a mechanized army. In fact it's the other way around, but only in the military view. The reality is that only a tiny fraction of Palestinians want to keep fighting Israel, and that tiny fraction stays alive because they corrupt young, naive and impressionable boys who are angry with Israel, they spout religious dogma at them and they strap bombs on their chests. And all that the boys back in Israel wanna do is party and go to university, but they have to give two years of the end of their childhood to military service, in which they get shown how Palestinians all wanna kill the Jews and how Arabs are comparable to Nazis, then they get sent out into the refugee camps and Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages with guns and told to patrol.

If you can, get hold of a movie called Paradise Now, it's about two Palestinian men (no more than 23 or 24 years old) who have been selected to be suicide bombers.

[nowhesingsnowhesobs]

Coheneran, you are completely and utterly full of shit

[coheneran]

How concise of you, wanna expand on that for me?

[nowhesingsnowhesobs]

This is rubbish:

I know, sometimes watching the news reports on Palestine is just incredible. They are the stuff of fantasy. Due to bad media portrayal, the whole world thinks that Israel is poor little David with his sling and stone and that Palestine is mighty and cruel Goliath with a mechanized army. In fact it's the other way around, but only in the military view.

Seriously, you're just inventing this stuff.

[Dave de Sylvia]

Except David actually won.

[coheneran]

It's pretty much true, apart from a report now and then about some BIG thing that Israel did to the Palestinians. Trust me dude, most people in the world won't ever even hear a rumour about the stuff that Israel does. Man, Israel's (supposed-to-be) secret prisons make Guantanamo Bay look like a nice day on a Carribbean beach. There was one I remember in particular, in a place called Prison 6, about interrogators making a nude Palestinian prison sit on an upright truncheon. There's also stuff about electric torture, psychological torture etc.. Stuff people don't want to think about.

[coheneran]

Originally Posted by Spat Out Plath

Except David actually won.

Don't get cheeky boy.

[nowhesingsnowhesobs]

no, the bbc is hardly pro-israeli, nor are the other channels.

[coheneran]

Originally Posted by nowhesingsnowhesobs

Seriously, you're just inventing this stuff.

Yeah, I am spouting bollocks. Everyone knows Israel's army is tiny and weak and has no real firepower, but every Palestinian home is equipped with AK47s, a secret helicopter pad for their private Cobra attack choppers, and dirty uranium bombs in the basement where they say they keep the "olive oil."

[BassRevelation1029]

LoL at ridiculous thread

Originally Posted by Spat Out Plath

Except David actually won.

[coheneran]

Originally Posted by nowhesingsnowhesobs

no, the bbc is hardly pro-israeli, nor are the other channels.

The international media doesn't show anything. They don't tell you Palestinians die every day, that they're shot at every day, that they can't go out for milk without a permit. All they tell you about is when an international journalist gets shot by the IDF, when a bomb goes off in central Tel-Aviv, or when Israel slaughters a thousand people. Anything below a thousand isn't newsworthy, apparantly.

[coheneran]

Originally Posted by Med57

Do you have any sources for this beyond your grandmother telling you that that's what happened or whatever it was? Because I haven't seen that allegation made anywhere else at all.

I can try to find some, but I doubt I'll find any. As for my zionist racist grandmother, no, she wouldn't step foot within ten meters of an Arab if she could help it. I was with my family in Israel on that day, and my parents drove to Ramalla to see a friend of theirs, when they came back they told me they didn't see a soldier coming and going and that the checkpoints were all open.

Originally Posted by Med57

The international media doesn't tell us all sorts of things, since the Israel/Palestine conflict doesn't itself actually directly impact most people in the West. As for saying that "anything below a thousand isn't newsworthy", it's simply nonsense. Jenin in 2002 was huge news here in the UK, as have been crimes committed by Israeli soldiers. The media here in the UK is constantly attacked from both sides when the fact is that both Israeli and Palestinian crimes are reported.

Read the Israeli indymedia and compare it with what we hear from mainstream media about Israel, the number of facts we get from one against the number we get from another.

[Dave de Sylvia]

Originally Posted by coheneran

The international media doesn't show anything. They don't tell you Palestinians die every day, that they're shot at every day, that they can't go out for milk without a permit. All they tell you about is when an international journalist gets shot by the IDF, when a bomb goes off in central Tel-Aviv, or when Israel slaughters a thousand people. Anything below a thousand isn't newsworthy, apparantly.

The media doesn't tell us things that happen everyday; that would make 'news' redundant. The BBC has done numerous spotlights on the conflict that present the points of view of all sides of the debate.

[coheneran]

It's pointless for us to argue how much the international media shows, because I've grown up with direct involvement in what's happening, and saw it through Israeli media (both right and left wing), international media and independent media. I don't know what you guys watch/read for news, but I assume the mainstream media newspapers and TV stations, but correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: Can't find any sources on the roads being cleared that day, absolutely nothing apart from how many people he killed. Feel free to disregard what I said, however I don't think my parents lied.