White House: Gaza flotilla activists may be breaking U.S. law
U.S. State Department says Gaza is run by U.S. designated foreign
terrorist organization Hamas and Americans providing support to it are
subject to fines and jail.
By Natasha Mozgovaya and The Associated Press
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/white-house-gaza-flotilla-activists-may-be-breaking-u-s-law-1.369486
The Obama administration is stepping up pressure on activists planning
to challenge Israel's sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, warning that they
will face action from Israeli authorities and that American participants
may also be violating U.S. law.
The U.S. State Department said Friday that attempts to break the
blockade are "irresponsible and provocative" and that Israel has
well-established means of delivering assistance to the Palestinian
residents of Gaza. It noted that the territory is run by the militant
Hamas group, a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization, and that
Americans providing support to it are subject to fines and jail.
"Groups that seek to break Israel's maritime blockade of Gaza are taking
irresponsible and provocative actions that risk the safety of their
passengers. Established and efficient mechanisms exist to transfer
humanitarian assistance to Gaza. For example, humanitarian assistance
can be delivered at the Israeli port of Ashdod, where cargo can be
offloaded, inspected, and transported to Gaza," a State Department press
release said.
"We urge all those seeking to provide such assistance to the people of
Gaza to use these mechanisms, and not to participate in actions like the
planned flotilla."
The warning is the third in as many days and follows the announcement by
36 Americans that they will sail aboard a U.S.-flagged vessel in a
flotilla to Gaza.
The statement also reiterated the U.S. stance on Hamas, calling the
Islamic group "to play a constructive role by renouncing violence,
recognizing Israel's right to exist, and accepting past agreements."
Despite warnings by the State Department, one traveler planning to
ignore that advice is celebrated poet and novelist Alice Walker, who
intends to join with other European and American activists when they set
sail from the ports of some 22 countries.
"Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? I ask myself this,
even though the answer is: What else would I do?," Walker wrote,
explaining her motives in an open letter to CNN and outlining her plan
to carry letters to the people of Gaza on board the Audacity of Hope
boat. "We will be carrying letters ... expressing solidarity and love,"
she writes.
Walker's letter goes on to discuss the brave "followers of Gandhi," and
the "Jewish civil rights activists" who stood side by side with blacks
in the South, and places her current "mission" within this context. She
ends with a rebuke to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policies
and those in the U.S. that back them.
Meanwhile, the Turkish humanitarian relief foundation IHH has announced
that the refurbished Mavi Maramara ship, on which nine activists were
killed during an attempt to break Israel's coastal siege on the Gaza
Strip in May 2010, will not join the flotilla planned to set sail at the
end of the month.
In 1927 a group of Jews fromYemen purchased a mountain top area between Jerusalem andHebron in the Land of Israel. Far away from any local Arab villages or areas of influence, they hoped to build a life in the Holy Land as they built a village and new homes in a desolate area.
The 1929 riots that started with the slaughter of the Jews of Hebron spread as the Arabs figured it was open season on the Jews (and their property and women were free for the taking). The Yemenite Jews ran for their lives and escaped, but their land and property were stolen and homes destroyed.
In 1932 a German Jew provided funding for a return to the area and Jewish pioneers returned, rebuilding the village and starting to plant the area. The Arab revolt (against the British) made the Jews and their village again a target (if you can’t kill a British soldier, a Jew will do in a pinch), and in 1937 the village was again abandoned as their lives were at constant risk.
In 1943 the Jewish National Fund (those little blue charity boxes found in the homes of Jews in America and England) funded another return of Jewish pioneers. This time the area flourished (and the Jews were a little better armed), and the village became an “areaâ€, Gush Etzion, as two other Jewish villages were started nearby (giving access to different farming areas).
In 1947, the combined villages were attacked by Arab irregulars and then the Jordanian legion. They held out from November until
May of 1948, when a large combined attack overwhelmed the Jewish defenders.
The Arab attackers then slaughtered the captured Jewish soldiers and the Jewish civilians of the villages, the men, women and children. 250 Jews died that day. (Some of the women and children had been evacuated some weeks before.)
The Arabs then proceeded to level the villages, even cutting down every planted tree.
All they left was one lonely oak tree. (Perhaps to hang the bodies, who knows?)
This lone tree could be seen from Jerusalem, the last remnant of Gush Etzion.
After 1967, Israel recaptured the Gush Etzion area. Some survivors and children of evacuees returned and began rebuilding the villages. Oh, and they didn’t slaughter or expel the few Arab families that had moved into the area. They let them remain on the blood soaked land and fields they’d appropriated, figuring there was plenty of room for everyone.
Today Gush Etzion is home to towns that almost qualify as small cities. They are renowned for their grapes and wines, beer and cherries.
Every year right before summer they have a cherry festival. Gush is home to organic cherries which are grown (as you can see in the picture) by covering the whole orchard with huge bug nets, removing the need for pesticides. They also use drip irrigation, requiring less than 1/2 the water of a traditional orchard.
The festival draws tens of thousands from Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh, and surrounding areas. It includes the option to pick your own cherries (with a variety of types).
Besides a chance to enjoy the orchard and some pick your cherries (and blackberries and raspberries), it also included music, various booths selling various treats, clothes, art and so forth.
While wandering the booths I saw a young man wearing a Palestinian Keffiyah around his neck and back.
Now what do you think happened to this young man, in the middle of an Israeli settlement surrounded by “violent settlers†who’s grandparents had literally been slaughtered by the Arabs of the symbol he was wearing?What happened to him? Nothing. After all, Jews aren’t barbarians who go around slaughtering people â€" regardless of the news propaganda.
Everything is rebuilt, new, and created by them, including the forests. Every tree they planted, every stone they moved, every pipe they laid and every orchard they created.
Gush Etzion is “over the green line†and “beyond the 1948 bordersâ€. And President Obama expects them to “give it backâ€??? They bought it, they died for it, and they returned to it again and again.
They are more connected to their land than President Obama is to the United States of America.
The Torah says G-d gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Their grandfathers took it seriously and so do they.
A cotton candy guy seriously into his job. Look at those arms!
The Festival area, a family weekend delight.
No different than a simple town festival anywhere else…except the ground is soaked in the blood of their grandfathers.
Nakba, shmakba
Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust…
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.
What is implicit here is the nakba myth: that a flowering Palestinian civilization was invaded by European Jews who forcibly dispossessed them from their homes and made refugees of them. Ever since then, they yearn for 'justice' in the form of return.
The nakba myth is what gives legitimacy to those like the President who argue that Israel must be pressured to imperil its own security to create a Palestinian state, because 'it's the right thing to do' for the Palestinian Arabs.
It is called upon to 'explain' or even justify Arab 'resistance', from 'nonviolent' attempts to vandalize the security fence to launching rockets at random into civilian areas, to firing antitank missiles at yellow school buses, to slitting the throats of 3-month old babies.
The nakba myth is what underlies the Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state — they believe that it belongs to them. The national identity of the 'Palestinian people' is as closely connected to the nakba myth as that of Americans is to our Revolutionary War.
But the myth is false in very significant ways:
- The Zionists did not dispossess the local Arabs, forcibly or otherwise, before 1948
- Zionist development of the land of Israel actually caused an increase in the number and prosperity of local Arabs
- The exodus of Arabs from what would become Israel in 1947-48 was forcible in only in a few cases — and overall due to the decisions of their leaders and Arab neighbors
It's also true that the Arabs practiced ethnic cleansing of Jews in eastern Jerusalem and Judea/Samaria before and during the War of Independence, and that more Jews fled Arab countries during and after the war than Arabs left Israel, but we can leave this aside for now and concentrate on the nakba.
The area that is now Israel was home to less than 200,000 Arabs and somewhat fewer Jews (who lived in places like Jerusalem, Tzfat and Hebron) when Zionist immigration began in the 1880′s. Did the Zionists forcibly dispossess the Arabs? In an article entitled "
Not Stealing Palestine but Purchasing Israel," Daniel Pipes writes,
In
Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel, Eric H. Cline writes of Jerusalem: "No other city has been more bitterly fought over throughout its history" … The PA fantasizes that today's Palestinians are descended from a tribe of ancient Canaan, the
Jebusites; in fact, but they are overwhelmingly the off-spring of invaders and
immigrants seeking economic opportunities.
Against this tableau of unceasing conquest, violence, and overthrow, Zionist efforts to build a presence in the Holy Land until 1948 stand out as astonishingly mild, as mercantile rather than military. Two great empires, the Ottomans and the British, ruled
Eretz Yisrael; in contrast, Zionists lacked military power. They could not possibly achieve statehood through conquest.
Instead, they purchased land. Acquiring property
dunam by dunam, farm by farm, house by house, lay at the heart of the Zionist enterprise until 1948. The
Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901 to buy land in Palestine "to assist in the foundation of a new community of free Jews engaged in active and peaceable industry," was the key institution – and not the Haganah, the clandestine defense organization founded in 1920…
Only when the British mandatory power gave up on Palestine in 1948, followed immediately by an all-out attempt by Arab states to crush and expel the Zionists, did the latter take up the sword in self defense and go on to win land through military conquest. Even then, as the historian Efraim Karsh demonstrates in
Palestine Betrayed, most Arabs fled their lands; exceedingly few were forced off.
This history contradicts the
Palestinian account that "Zionist gangs stole Palestine and expelled its people" which led to a catastrophe "unprecedented in history" (according to a PA 12
th-grade textbook) or that Zionists "plundered the Palestinian land and national interests, and established their state upon the ruins of the Palestinian Arab people" (writes a columnist in the PA's daily). International organizations, newspaper editorials, and faculty petitions reiterate this falsehood worldwide.
The population of Native Americans declined drastically with European immigration into the New World, but what happened to the Arabs of Palestine as a result of the Zionist 'invasion'? From about 200,000 in 1890, the Arab population of what would become Israel rose to
almost 1.3 million in 1947 (see "
MidEast Web: Population of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine")! This fact alone refutes claims of violent dispossession.
In ancient times, as [Walter Lowdermilk, an American soil expert] knew, Palestine was largely self-sufficient, with a population of millions. Replete with forests, teeming with sheep and goats, full of farms and wineries, the landscape evoked a European plenitude. By 1939, however, when Lowdermilk arrived in the area, it was largely an environmental disaster. As he recounted in his 1944 book, Palestine, Land of Promise, "when Jewish colonists first began their work in 1882…the soils were eroded off the uplands to bedrock over fully one half the hills; streams across the coastal plain were choked with erosional debris from the hills to form pestilential marshes infested with dreaded malaria; the fair cities and elaborate works of ancient times were left in doleful ruins." In the late 19th century around the current Tel Aviv, Lowdermilk was told, "no more than 100 miserable families lived in huts." Jericho, once luxuriantly shaded by balsams, was treeless.
What amazed Lowdermilk, though — and changed his life — was not the 1,000 years of deterioration but the some 50 years of reclamation of both the highlands and the lowlands by relatively small groups of Jewish settlers. As one of many examples of valley reclamation, he tells the story of the settlement of Petah Tikva, established by Jews from Jerusalem in 1878, in defiance of warnings from physicians who saw the area outside what is now Tel Aviv as hopelessly infested with malarial mosquitoes. After initial failures and retreats, Petah Tikva became "the first settlement to conquer the deadly foe of malaria," by "planting Eucalyptus [locally known as 'Jew trees'] in the swamps to absorb the moisture," draining other swamps, importing large quantities of quinine, and developing rich agriculture and citriculture …
In draining swamps, leaching saline soils, redeeming dunes into orchards and poultry farms, in planting millions of trees on rocky hills, in constructing elaborate water works and terraces on the hills, in digging 548 wells and supporting canals in little more than a decade and irrigating thousands of acres of land, establishing industries, hospitals, clinics, and schools, the 500,000 Jewish settlers who arrived before the creation of Israel massively expanded the very absorptive dimensions and capacity of the country. It was these advances that made possible the fivefold 20th-century surge of the Arab population by 1940.
There's one more chapter to this story. In 1948, Israel became independent, and somewhere between 600,000 and 650,000 Arabs fled, to become the ancestors of the 4.5 million who today claim refugee status (Palestinian refugee status is the only such status recognized by the UN as hereditary) and who are slavering at the gates of Israel demanding to 'return' and take what is 'theirs'.
But in fact only residents of a few Arab villages, mostly those on the Tel-Aviv — Jerusalem Road, from which attacks were launched against convoys supplying besieged Jerusalem, were removed by force. Most left in fear that they would be caught up in fighting or massacred (although actual massacres of civilians by Jews were almost nonexistent — another story), and in many cases were encouraged to leave by their own leadership. Here is how Efraim Karsh describes it (
Karsh: Reclaiming a Historical Truth):
While most Palestinian Arabs needed little encouragement to take to the road, large numbers of them were driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or the "Arab Liberation Army" that had entered Palestine prior to the end of the Mandate, whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state. Of this there is an overwhelming and incontrovertible body of contemporary evidence – intelligence briefs, captured Arab documents, press reports, personal testimonies and memoirs, and so on and so forth.
In the largest and best-known example of Arab-instigated exodus, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa (on April 21-22 ) on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective "government" of the Palestinian Arabs. Only days earlier, Tiberias' 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes (a fortnight after the exodus, Sir Alan Cunningham, the last British high commissioner of Palestine, reported that the Tiberias Jews "would welcome [the] Arabs back" ). In Jaffa, Palestine's largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several neighborhoods, while in Beisan the women and children were ordered out as Transjordan's Arab Legion dug in.
[Shlomo] Avineri mentions the strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade the Haifa Arabs to stay but not the AHC's order to leave – which was passed on to the local leadership by phone and secretly recorded by the Haganah. Nor does he note the well-documented efforts of Haifa's Arab leadership to scaremonger their hapless constituents, reluctant in the extreme to leave, into fleeing. Some Arab residents received written threats that, unless they left town, they would be branded as traitors deserving of death. Others were told they could expect no mercy from the Jews…
Nor was this phenomenon confined to Palestinian cities. The deliberate depopulation of Arab villages too, and their transformation into military strongholds was a hallmark of the Arab campaign from the onset of hostilities…
War is Hell, as much or more so for civilians as soldiers, but a great deal of the Hell that characterized the experience of the Arabs of Palestine was of their own making or that of their Arab neighbors. Very little was the responsibility of the Jews, who ought not to be asked to pay the price for it.
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Black Jews or afroizrailtyane
I wonder how many more we do not know about the people with whom we live together, in one country. In Israel, already from the end of the 60s there is community "afroizrailtyan," or as they call themselves - Black Jews. No, this is not the Ethiopian Jews. They are - a group of African-Americans, who immigrated to Israel in 1969 from the U.S. and took root primarily in the south, in Dimona. Black Jews primarily religious, although "officially" the Jews are not counted.
There are several versions of the education community. For one, they consider themselves children of slaves, plantation owners, the Jews, before the American Civil War. Or is it just a group of African-Americans accepted the Jews. In general, if you're interested in theJewish Encyclopedia is an entire article dedicated to this community.
That's it.
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Jewish bodies found in medieval well in NorwichREV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT DREW THOUSANDS FOR HIS ANTI-SEMITIC RANT
By
Ruth King on June 22nd, 2011
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-mossburg-wright-20110621,0,7912844,print.column Reverend Wright brings his anti-American crusade to Baltimore
Marta Mossburg writes that Obama's former pastor urges blacks to disavow their country
Marta H. Mossburg
Forget hope and change; victimization is in. Dropped by the president and dismissed as a racist by many Americans, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright still draws crowds with his sometimes crotch-grabbing, always riveting soliloquies about black oppression.
Mr. Wright spread the blame for black persecution around on lots of people and epochs. He hates Roman emperors for renaming months after themselves and upsetting their proper numerical order; Michelangelo for painting Jesus as white; U.S. public schools for teaching the American Revolution instead of African history. In particular, he hates the term "Middle East," as it implies Europe as the center of the world.
His solution: "We need to help African-Americans see they are just Africans born in another country."And never mind that students today suffer not from an identity crisis but a lack of basic skills. Studies show student self-esteem at an all-time high. But at Baltimore City Community College, 80 percent of incoming students need remedial education. Statewide, public two- and four-year institutions report 56 percent of students going directly from high school to college need some form of remedial education in a state honored three years in a row as having the top public education system by Education Week. This could be achieved in part by requiring African-American students to study African history after school each day, just like Jewish children who receive a separate Hebrew education, he said. (Never mind that all of that education has not prevented cross-faith marriages and a weakening of the ties of successive generations to Judaism.)
Empowering the children of the Empowerment Temple to rise above their circumstances would mean fewer converts down the road, however. And it would shatter the myth of a black liberation theology that needs Baltimore and Detroit and other crumbling cities to exist in order to be relevant.But believing in an America that will never change is a lot easier than remaking it into one in which he would like to live. Mr. Wright said, "When you say yes to politics, you say yes to compromise." What's worse is telling struggling single mothers with boyfriends, husbands and sons in prison and homes in foreclosure that the only way out is to disavow America for an African dream that has never existed and never will. Mr. Wright's fiery rhetoric likely won't prompt any defections from the Barack Obama camp, either. As Daily Show "Senior Black Correspondent" Larry Wilmore recently said, "He [Obama] could lose the black vote. … If he can't get a hold of this economy, then goodbye 96 percent, hello 94."
New gay & friends of gays yahoo group
Click link or send email to join
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GaysUnited/?yguid=464418070
Feel free to refer friends here. All topics will be considered. For those who know me from other groups, I will not be sending any posts about Israel unless they concern gays in Israel in case anyone presumes that this group will cover the same things I already send elsewhere.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. ~Herm Albright~
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