BREXIT - UK PARLIAMENT DEBATES - 26 APRIL 2018

P.M. MRS MAY, DAVID DAVIS -v-  EU'S BARNIER

from Brian Hardy FCA, Oxford;

to Leyla Moran, MP for North Oxford.

25 April 2018

Dear Leyla Moran

BREXIT

Although you will know all the arguments (pro and con) concerning Brexit, I would nonetheless like to set out what I see as being the 'big picture' issues, and to express my wish to see a second popular vote on the subject.

 - The EU-part of Europe has not been at war with itself since the beginning of the EU and its predecessors in 1957.  This is unprecedented over the last several centuries - no coincidence to my mind.

 - The UK has been diminishing as a world power for a century or so and, indeed, because of its declining economic position, became known as the 'sick man of Europe' before it joined the EU.  This suggests the need for the country to be associated with a bloc of like-minded countries, for political, economic and military purposes.

 - The EU, being the UK's closest neighbour geographically, a serious force in world political affairs, a successful economic unit, and with reasonably similarly positions on democracy and human rights, is the best bloc for the UK to be associated with.

 - The USA's economic and military position has been declining relative to other large countries for decades, and it is beginning to show isolationist tendencies. It no longer has any meaningful 'special relationship' with the UK, and we cannot rely upon it to be as close a partner and protector as it has been in the past.  It is even possible to envisage NATO's role as European 'military shield' (currently led and largely financed by the USA) starting to erode, and perhaps eventually replaced by the EU building up its own separate military capability.

- The EU is incapable of granting a partly-associated or fully independent UK better terms of trade than it currently obtains as a member.  This would cause itself an existential problem, as other members would undoubtedly press for similar improvements in the terms of their membership.  This in itself suggests huge caution in thinking of abandoning our membership.

 - It is difficult to see how he UK on its own will be capable of negotiating better trade terms with the larger countries of the world (in the big picture, the only ones that matter).  Those countries can be expected to use their bargaining strength to negotiate better terms for themselves rather for the benefit of a supplicant UK.

 - The unity of the UK could be placed in jeopardy by Brexit, as Northern Ireland (whose demographics are moving inexorably towards a Catholic majority in their population mix) as well as Scotland could well vote to leave the UK and seek to rejoin the EU.

 - Straws in the wind suggest that a non-EU-fettered UK government might have a less rigorous attachment to human rights, ecological standards, and worker and consumer rights, than the EU.

 - Finally, while many youngsters sadly failed to vote in the 23 June 2016 Referendum, a significant segment of them view Brexit as a denial of the European identity they believe they have acquired.

The 2016 Referendum was held when the real issues and consequences arising from Brexit were unknown. It is therefore essential that its outcome - to leave the EU - needs to be confirmed, amended or rejected by a second vote, in the light of knowledge as to Brexit's terms and consequences.

This decision should not be left solely to the already-agreed vote of the 650 Westminster MPs, whose party allegiances will in reality shape the way that many of them will vote.  The final say on such a constitutionally-important decision as Brexit should be with the UK population as a whole.  Indeed, it is hard to see how a Parliamentary vote could override the Referendum result, even though this was only advisory, without a popular backlash.

I hope I have laid out my position clearly, and that it might help you in supporting it.

Yours sincerely,

Brian Hardy

Oxford, UK

brian@hardyinter.net

CHLORINE & EYES - CHEMICAL WARFARE

CHLORINE GAS EFFECT

In 1950 my classmates and I attended Stockport  Swimming Pool, UK, weekly, to learn to swim. The pool was cold and heavily chlorinated to prevent the spread of Poliomyelitis. The safe level is 1 to 3 parts of chlorine to one million parts of water. Goggles were rare; most swam without eye protection. ALL the children emerged with distinctly reddened,  bloodshot eyes. The irritation lasted from one to two hours. Our clothes and towels smelled of chlorine for five or six hours. 

I suffered red-eye at most swimming pools in those days - and it also occurs in some pools today. Chlorine makes eyes bloodshot and makes clothes smell of bleach. 

The BBC and ITV newsreels from Douma, Damascus, Syria showing injured children who had suffered chlorine gas attacks this week, featured about five youngsters. The film-clips were repeated many times. The children were being hosed down to remove the chlorine and were filmed in close-up. I did not see any children with bloodshot or reddened eyes. I think those film-sequences were faked. Thank heaven that the film makers did not deliberately put chlorine into children's eyes.

I have no doubt that Assad and his troops are committing many awful, appalling acts of war in their efforts to overcome their enemies (I just heard that 15 nations are involved) in the Syrian civil war. I have no doubt that ISIS and other terrorists and rebel factions are committing equally terrible acts. The ISIS troops and attacks are not shown on UK media; we only see clips of "victims of Assad", always featuring innocent children, suffering Assad attacks - as if the government attacks are without provocation or reason, against unarmed citizens. If the opposition or enemy is unarmed and do no harm - then how have they kept this vicious war going for 7 years, since March 2011?

My interpretation of the UK news is tending more and more to doubt that the conflict is being reported in an unbiased manner. I wholly agree that the ban on chemical weapons must be globally enforced - with force if necessary. But I imagine that the majority of UK citizens don't like or need to be fed fake-news and propaganda by our media and government.

UPDATE 17 APRIL 2018:

 Robert Fisk, The Independent 16/4/18

Fisk visits Douma

This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks -- and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the ‘gas’ videotape which horrified the world – despite all the doubters – is perfectly genuine.

War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.

As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eye witness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?

By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the coming weeks.

France, meanwhile, has said it has “proof” chemical weapons were used, and US media have quoted sources saying urine and blood tests showed this too. The WHO has said its partners on the ground treated 500 patients “exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”.

At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they lacked the correct UN permits.

Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars.

So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.

I first drove into Douma as part of an escorted convoy of journalists. But once a boring general had announced outside a wrecked council house “I have no information” – that most helpful rubbish-dump of Arab officialdom -- I just walked away. Several other reporters, mostly Syrian, did the same. Even a group of Russian journalists – all in military attire – drifted off.

It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic – “Point 200,” it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.

“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night -- but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a ‘White Helmet’, shouted ‘Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”

Oddly, after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find one who showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the Western air attacks. Two actually told me they didn’t know about the connection.

But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma attack.

The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.

Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.

There were food stalls open and a patrol of Russian military policemen – a now optional extra for every Syrian ceasefire – and no-one had even bothered to storm into the forbidding Islamist prison near Martyr’s Square where victims were supposedly beheaded in the basements. The town’s complement of Syrian interior ministry civilian police – who eerily wear military clothes – are watched over by the Russians who may or may not be watched by the civilians. Again, my earnest questions about gas were met with what seemed genuine perplexity.

How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that ‘news’ in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them. Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy – as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues – and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?

They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Mrs May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?

…and this just in 17^th April 2018:

Here is Lord West, former First Sea Lord, speaking to the BBC this morning, his thoughts on why he thinks the chemical weapons attack on Douma was a false flag.

https://twitter.com/VanessaBeeley/status/986131126694612992 

Bobsblues2 days ago

Just now , I was looking at footage of the destroyed " Chemical Weapons Factory " and what do we see ?? People standing around with fire hoses putting out the fires and they are standing right in the middle of the destroyed heaps of rubble that was a supposed chemical weapons factory, and they were WEARING NO GAS MASKS, NO HAZMAT SUITS, NO PROTECTION OF ANY SORT . Dozens of people standing there with cameras and film equipment and non of them were wearing any protective gear either. HMM , WHY are they NOT FALLING OVER DEAD ??? WHY isnt everyone in the area NOT FALLING OVER DEAD ?????

1. 4.  Chlorine is an important chemical in water purification, in disinfectants, in bleach and in mustard gas.  Chlorine is also used widely in the manufacture of many products and items directly or indirectly, i.e. in paper product production, antiseptic, dyestuffs, food, insecticides, paints, petroleum products, plastics, medicines, textiles, solvents, and many other consumer products.  It is used to kill bacteria and other microbes from drinking water supplies.  Chlorine is involved in beaching wood pulp for paper making, bleach is also used industrially to remove ink from recycle paper.  Chlorine often imparts many desired properties in an organic compound when it is substituted for hydrogen (synthetic rubber), so it is widely use in organic chemistry, in the production of chlorates, chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, and in the bromine extraction. APPLICATIONS
2. 
   

ISRAEL & PALESTINE & BEDOUIN RIGHTS

ISRAEL & PALESTINE & BEDOUIN RIGHTS - Did the incoming Jews from 1920 to 2018, force out the Arabs? 

UPDATE 1ST SEPT 2018
  WASHINGTON POST

By Karen DeYoung ,

Ruth Eglash and

Hazem Balousha

August 31 at 5:59 PM

The United States will no longer contribute to the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees, the State Department announced Friday, amid widespread Palestinian outrage charging that the decision violates international law and will aggravate an already dire humanitarian situation, particularly in Gaza.

The statement called the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, an “irredeemably flawed operation” and criticized other countries for not sharing the burden of supporting the Palestinians.

Blaming UNRWA and other international donors for failing to reform the organization’s “way of doing business,” the statement said the United States remained “very mindful of and deeply concerned regarding the impact upon innocent Palestinians, especially school children.”

Among the administration’s many complaints about the agency — to which the United States contributed about one third of a $1.1 billion 2017 budget — is the way the United Nations calculates the number of Palestinians officially recognized as refugees. It would like to change the number from the more than 5 million who are counted today to the few hundred thousand alive when the agency was created seven decades ago, according to U.S. officials.

****

TRUMPIAN LOGIC TRIUMPHS: 

 For the first and probably the last time, I tend to agree with the logic, long argued and now attributed to Demented Donald Trump. If the 250,000 Israeli-Arabs who moved to Gaza and other refuges in 1948 (most Israeli-Arabs did not move and have good lives in Israel) can claim refugee status and "the right to return" for their 5 million descendants, down 3 generations; then so can all populations who were relocated by oppression or war. Does this logic extend to the Pilgrim-Fathers who fled from religious persecution in England? There are millions of their descendants. Conversely, the same logic applies to the Native Americans who were slaughtered and displaced by Europeans. They should be given New York and California...  I could go on with hundreds of examples. It is time for the Gaza and other "refugee" Arabs to accept reality and build their own lives in the free world - instead of living on handouts. 


15th May 2018  58 dead 1,500 injured. Is it genocide or suicide. Do 40,000 Palestinians storming the fence constitute a "clear & present" danger to the households on the Israeli side? 

Breaking News: 14th May 2018.
TRUMP designates rooms in Jerusalem as USA Embassy, and Ivanka and Jared Kushner attend a celebratory banquet. Thousands protest on the Gaza border. 

Key Points - Midday News Update

• 37 people killed in protests so far, Gaza's health ministry says
• 
  
• Israel drops leaflets on Gaza warning Palestinians protesters at the border will be shot
• 
  
• Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner arrive for opening ceremony
• 
  
• Football team renames itself after Donald Trump in honour of US recognition of city as Israeli capital

With friends like Trump, who needs enemies. This Embassy redesignation will end in tears. 1,000 protesters injured, 40 killed. 

9th April 2018 "...there were 1.2 million Arabs in 1948 in what is now Israel. Today there are 1.6 million Arab-Israeli citizens."

From Noel to Lee

9^th April 2018 – Having said a few days ago that I am only interested in the peaceful future of Israel & Palestine – not the vexed arguments of the past – I have been reading back to the 1920’s. This Wikipedia history seems to give a thorough view of the modern founding of Israel in Arab (Bedouin) lands. We should also be aware that Palestine has been a mixed race region, largely Semitic races with some Christians, since the Crusades, and from a thousand years earlier. Governed by The Ottoman Empire from 1876, then by Germany until WW1 - 1918, then by Britain and France.

I was prompted to enquire further by Mel Cooper’s several copy headlines on the present conflict – and by this quote from those articles:

“Zakout was wounded on Friday when he was 10 metres from the border fence, hit by a sniper during the latest mass protests at the divide between Israel and Gaza. The “Great March of Return”, a series of protests intended to continue until 15 May, the 70th annual commemoration of “the Nakba” or catastrophe, when 700,000 Palestinian refugees were forced from their homes in the 1948 war, has captured his imagination. (my emphasis)

Insisting he was “not afraid”, Zakout said he had been taking part in the protests for the idea of a “return to our lands” – the home in what is now Israel, from which his grandparents had to flee in 1948”

…written by an angry displaced Arab grandchild. Jewish sources say that the Arabs left as a ploy, believing they would return as conquerors and wipe out the immigrant Jews, in a few weeks. 

It is a fact that more than 50 million (surviving) people lost their homes and nationalities due to WW2. Their descendants all might equally claim the right to return to their grandparents’ homes. 

This Ottoman (Turkish) map is dated 1920.  After the Ottoman Empire rule, the area was German controlled until 1918. The British & French took over and gave the Jews some land – then came the conflicts, terrorism and wars resulting in the current boundaries.  “The Palestinians” are a recent collective.

(Palestine 1918 to 1948. Palestine is the name (first referred to by the Ancient Greeks) of an area in the Middle East situated between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Palestine was absorbed into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and remained under the rule of the Turks until World War One.  In the peace talks that followed the end of the war, parts of the Ottoman Empire were handed over to the French to control and parts were handed over to the British – including Palestine. Britain governed this area under a League of Nations mandate from 1920 to 1948)

Demographic history of Palestine (region) - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)

Jump to The question of late Arab and Muslim immigration to Palestine - It is known that the Arab population of Palestine doubled during the British Mandate era, from 670,000 in 1922 to over 1.2 million in 1948,

Arab citizens of Israel - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel

According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the Arab population in 2013 was estimated at 1,658,000, representing 20.7% of the country's population. The majority of these identify themselves as Arab or Palestinian by nationality and Israeli by citizenship.

Israel today is 21,000 sq miles (54,000 sq km) the majority is the Negev Desert. { NB Scotland is 80,000 sq km.}

Negev - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negev

Demography. As of 2010, the Negev was home to some 630,000 people (or 8.2% of Israel's population), even though it comprises over 55% of the country's area. 470,000 Negev residents or 75% of the population of the Negev are Jews, while 160,000 or 25% are Bedouin.

BRITISH CONTROL 1922

So – there were 1.2 million Arabs in 1948 in what is now Israel. Today there are 1.6 million Arab-Israeli citizens. Does this evidence a driving-out of the Bedouin by the Zionists? No. And as Nick Usiskin has written, numbers of top Israeli posts are held by Arabs.

Most of the rest of the “facts” and “false-news” are political spin. The Bedouin have no greater (or lesser) rights to these territories than do the Aboriginals to Australia or the Apaches to America or The Inuit to Canada. Should America repatriate all the black people of African descent - at the same time as the Arabs expel the Jews? Should the entire Drumph family-tribe be sent back to Germany? Which other minorities should we persecute and send “home”? The Celts never held UK Blue-Passports. And Calais indubitably belongs to Britain.

QED – There it is.  - Noel – 9^th April 2018

****

To Noel

Thanks for your history lesson. Me, having a Jewish mother and dozens of Jewish relatives, some of whom lived in Israel, and a daughter once engaged to an Israeli resident, knew until your response, so little about the history of Israel.  However, what I do know is that to shoot and kill a bunch of unarmed protestors guilty of ganging up and chucking bricks at a wall is nothing other than murder, since supported without any show of concern or regret by the Israeli government.  And nothing but nothing in its history justifies such an action. - Lee

****

To Lee from Noel

“Violence is the last resort of the incompetent”. On both sides. The Arab-Jewish conflict is now, today. Forget three-thousand-years of desert tribal wars and all the assaults and insults. IF, the Palestinian Refugees march into Israel; what will they do? What do they want to achieve?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Israel

Israel has a GDP of $387 billion per annum - $44,000 per head (of the mixed Arab-Jewish-Christian population). Is that what the Palestinians want? Will they work to maintain it? Or will it be another Rhodesia – asset stripping, neglect, corruption, bankruptcy?

Or do the Palestinians simply intend to slaughter all Jews ?

I have ceased to be at all interested in the history. I am very interested in future peaceful, positive solutions. What are the options?  - Noel 

Yaser Murtaja was a filmmaker and the founder of Ain Media, a media and art agency which sought to tell the reality of life in Gaza. He was 30-years-old and was shot down by an Israeli sniper while attempting to do his job. As were another 7 Palestinians - Lee

****

to Lee from Noel

I have read the whole article by Mehdi Hassan (below). I agree that it is a terrible tale of killing unarmed protestors. The actions of the Israeli “killers” does not accord with any Jews or Israelis I have met. I know what my UK Jewish friends would say – “They were provoked and had to defend themselves”. (see Wikipedia lists below). On this week’s conflict, I ask “Why are those men massing on a border protected by armed troops – and throwing stones at them. If the troops were not there – what would the Palestinians do next?”  

It is a feud. It goes back two or three thousand years to warring desert tribes, picked up by Christians (200 years after the alleged event) to revenge the Crucifixion – revitalised by Muslims (450 AD?) and now spread across the world. Who will make the first moves to make peace? I am now only interested in how to fix it – not in who did what to whom, where, why and when. What can we do to persuade them that jaw-jaw is better than war-war? My suggestion is to create ten times the space (Qatari Depression, Egypt - see links below) and make it hugely desirable and wealthy.

I blame the parents.

Noel

Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel

On 10 March, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, unveiled a monument to its rocket attacks on Israeli cities and towns, a life-sized model of an M-75 rocket in Gaza City. The group declared that the attacks "managed to take the battle to the heart of the Zionist entity (Israel)".

‎History · ‎Israeli defensive measures · ‎Effects · ‎Views

Lists of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel 

These are lists of rocket and mortar attacks on Israel by Palestinian militant groups. 2000s. List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2001 · List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2002–2006 · List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2007 · List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2008 ·etc

List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2018 - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel,_2018 

All of the attacks originated in the Gaza Strip, unless stated otherwise. For information pertaining to the wider conflict, see Arab–Israeli conflict and Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This list does not include reports of deaths and injuries caused by Hamas rocket and mortar attacks that fell within Gaza.

List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2017 - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel,_2017

This is a detailed list of Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israel in 2017. All of the attacksoriginated in the Gaza Strip, unless stated otherwise. For information pertaining to the wider conflict, seeArab-Israeli conflict and Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This list does not include reports of deaths and injuries caused by ...

Palestinian tunnel warfare in the Gaza Strip - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_tunnel_warfare_in_the_Gaza_Strip

Jump to Use in attacks - On 17 July 2014, Hamas militants crossed the Israeli border through a tunnel about a mile away from the farming village of Sufa but were stopped by Israeli Defense Forces. TheIsraeli military reported that thirteen armed men had exited the tunnel, and shared video footage of them being hit by ...

List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2016 - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel,_2016      

This is a detailed list of Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israel in 2016. All of the attacks originated in the Gaza Strip, unless stated otherwise. For information pertaining to the wider conflict, seeArab-Israeli conflict and Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This list does not include reports of deaths and injuries caused by ...

From: Lee to Noel - The Palestinian perspective:

(Unarmed ? Peaceful? "Wipe Israel off the map")

Israel Kills Palestinians and Western Liberals Shrug. Their Humanitarianism Is a Sham.      Mehdi Hasan   April 2 2018,   “IF THE CONCEPT of intervention is driven by universal human rights, why is it — from the people who identify themselves as liberal interventionists — why do we never hear a peep, a word, about intervening to protect the Palestinians?”  That was the question I put to the French philosopher, author, and champion of liberal (or humanitarian) interventionism, Bernard-Henri Lévy, on my Al Jazeera English interview show “Head to Head” in 2013. The usually silver-tongued Levy struggled to answer the question. The situation in Palestine is “not the same” as in Syria and “you have not all the good on one side and all the bad on the other side,” said Levy, who once remarked in reference to the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, that he had “never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions.” 

I couldn’t help but be reminded of my exchange with the man known as “BHL” this past weekend, as I watched horrific images of unarmed Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border being shot in the back by the “democratic army” of Israel. How many “moral questions” did those Israeli snipers ask themselves, I wondered, before they gunned downGazan refugees for daring to demand a return to their homes inside the Green Line? 

(Unarmed ? Peaceful? "Wipe Israel off the map"  

ALARMING CONTEXT: Washington Post - Cole said this week, 5th Oct 2011, that in the 1980s Khomeini gave a speech in which he said in Persian “Een rezhim-i eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az sahneh-i ruzgar mahv shaved.” This means, “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.” But then anonymous wire service translators rendered Khomeini as saying that Israel “must be wiped off the face of the map,” which Cole and Nourouzi say is inaccurate.     

On Friday, the IDF shot an astonishing 773 people with live ammunition, killing 17 of them. Yet a spokesperson for the IDF bragged that Israeli troops “arrived prepared” and “everything was accurate. … We know where every bullet landed.” On Sunday, Israel’s hawkish defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, roundly rejected calls from the European Union and the United Nations for an independent inquiry into the violence and insisted that “our soldiers deserve a commendation.”

To be clear, then: Israeli troops will continue to murder and maim Palestinians while the Israeli government guarantees that there will be no consequences for their actions.

So, where is the outcry from liberal interventionists across the West? Where is BHL, as Palestinians are being shot and wounded in the hundreds in 2018?

Where is the call from former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose 1999 speech in Chicago defending the concept of a “just war” and a “doctrine of the international community” became a key text for liberal interventionists, for a “no-fly” zone over Gaza? Why does a guest speaker at Ariel Sharon’s funeral have nothing to say about the increasing number of Palestinian funerals?

Where is the moral outrage from former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, the famously pro-intervention, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a “A Problem From Hell,” which lamented U.S. inaction in Rwanda, over the sheer number of unarmed Palestinians shot, killed, and injured in recent days? How does she have time to retweet a picture of an elephant and a lion cub, but not to make a statement about the violence in Gaza? 

Where is the demand from Canadian academic-turned-politician Michael Ignatieff, who was once one of the loudest voices in favor of the so-called responsibility to protect doctrine, for peacekeeping troops to be deployed to the Occupied Territories? 

Where are the righteously angry op-eds from Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, or Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, or David Aaronovitch of The Times of London, demanding concrete action against the human rights abusers of the IDF?

And where is the appeal from former U.S. Secretary of State and arch-interventionist Madeleine Albright for economic and financial sanctions against the state of Israel? For an arms embargo? For travel bans on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Lieberman, and IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot?

Their silence is deafening — and telling. Palestinians, it seems, have been so dehumanized that they don’t deserve a humanitarian intervention; their blood is cheap, their plight is unimportant, and, perhaps above all else, their killers are our friends. 

SHOULD WE REALLY be surprised, though? After all, this isn’t the first time that members of the liberal intervention brigade have shamelessly ignored the tragic deaths of innocent Palestinians.

In March 2001, towards the start of the “Second Intifada,” and with the Palestinian civilian death toll mounting, the U.N. Security Council proposed a resolution that would have “set up an appropriate mechanism to protect Palestinian civilians, including through the establishment of a United Nations observer force” on the ground in the Occupied Territories. The United States, however, in the form of the George W. Bush administration, vetoed that resolution. What was the response from U.S. liberals? They stayed mum. 

In the summer of 2014, the Israeli air force — for the the third time in six years — pounded the Gaza Strip, dropping bombs on schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings, and killing more than 1,500 Palestinian civilians — including 500 children — in the process. What was the position of then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who would later throw her support behind a “no-fly” zone over Syria)? “Hamas provoked another attack” while “Israel has a right to defend itself.” And what was the response from her fellow liberals? Most of them didn’t say a word.

Fast forward to 2018: This time round, 17 dead and 1,400 wounded. Videos going viral of Israeli soldiers — armed and funded by U.S. taxpayers — shooting fleeing Palestinians in their backs. Again, not a peep on Twitter, or elsewhere, from the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. For liberal Democrats, #resistance is supposed to be against the Trump administration and the so-called alt-right, not against the longest military occupation in the world. 

This moral blindness that so many liberals and progressives in the United States have for the Palestinians has never ceased to amaze — or disgust — me. As the Israeli writer and economist Abraham Gutman notes, “This blind spot is so pronounced that it created a whole new type of progressive, the PEP, ‘Progressive-Except-on-Palestine.’” The PEP, he continues, “is horrified by the appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, but willing to argue that there is nuance and perhaps support the government of Israel, with [Ayelet] Shaked as the Minister of Justice, who posted on Facebook an article calling Palestinian children ‘little snakes.’”

Indeed. The PEP will loudly condemn the bigotry and nativism of the Republican Party in the United States, and the ongoing segregation and racism in the Deep South, while averting their gaze from the brazen racism of the Israeli government and the ongoing apartheid in the Occupied Territories. 

The PEP rails against Trump and his hawkish minions while standing to applaud Netanyahu or smiling in photos with Lieberman — this despite the fact that the similarities between the Trump and Netanyahu administrations have been well–documented. 

And the PEP who happens to be a proud supporter of liberal interventionism will back interventions almost everywhere except the Occupied Territories. Their heart bleeds for Syrians, Libyans, Afghans, Iraqis, Rwandans, Kosovars … but not for Palestinians. 

This is not an exercise in whataboutism; it is about drawing attention to blatant double standards and moral hypocrisy. On Palestine, liberal interventionists who happen to be “progressive-except-on-Palestine” borrow from the Trump playbook when they cynically blame “both sides” for the violence. They claim that Palestinian deaths are the consequence of “clashes” and “confrontations.” Yet the reality is that one side is the occupier and the other is the occupied; one side has rockets and rifles and the other side has rocks and slingshots; one side is doing the killing and the other side is doing the dying.

There is no other conclusion: The ongoing and glaring refusal of liberal interventionists in the West to say even a word about the need to protect occupied Palestinians from state-sponsored violence is a reminder of just how morally bankrupt and cynically hypocritical the whole “liberal intervention” shtick is. -  Mehdi Hasan   April 2 2018

(Unarmed ? Peaceful? "Wipe Israel off the map")

 *****

ISRAELI  BORDER TROOPS - APRIL 2018

To Noel

I don't doubt a word of what you say, but none of it explains or excuses the shooting down of unarmed Palestinians.  I have no idea how to solve the situation but I do know that murdering unarmed protesters most certainly will not help, but just exacerbate matters. A start would be if the Israeli government showed some contrition.

Lee

From: Noel to Lee

Lee – If you and your family lived in the scrap of land called Israel, 50 miles wide, faced with hundreds of angry men, vowing to eradicate you and Israel, how would you defend the borders? Most of my European & USA Jewish friends are pacific and promote the two-state solution. A few come from Zionist, Russian backgrounds, including one whose grandfather was one of the founders of Israel. My own direct experience of three visits to Israel inform me that the majority of Jews and Arabs who live there, co-exist and trade and live peacefully. Between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I saw that Jewish farms are lush and productive, ancient Arab farms are patches of desert with a few goats. We could put the clock back worldwide; to say 1,500 AD, and restore native land rights (Texas for the Apaches – the Highlands for the crofters – Australia for the Aborigines – Droit de Seigneur for French aristocrats etc) – or we can move on from today’s reality and make peace. Zealots and crazed religionists on both sides need to be pacified. It seems to have worked in Northern Ireland. How would you end the feuding?  – Noel

UPDATE 13 April 2018 from Nick

To add a couple of things.

There were about 700,000 Arabs who fled when the Arabs attacked Israel.

This was a vicious war of survival for the new Israeli state.

There are some 200,000 of those refugees still alive. Some in camps (unfortunately - and only because Arab states will not accept them) some lucky ones in other Arab countries.

Yet, somehow the UN has counted over 5m refugees to be looked after by a bloated, corrupt and self serving UNWRA. 

(Created in December 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) )

The only refugees in the world to have their own UN agency, staffed by some 35,000 employees. 

To put this into perspective the UN employs about 7000 or 8000 staff to look after all the other worlds refugees, which at the last count was over 70m!!

In case anyone forgets, nearly a million Jews were driven out of Arab countries since the 1930’s and especially since 1948.

These were Jews who had lived there for literally thousands of years.

They were forced to leave behind any wealth they had, and start over again.

They wanted to get on with their lives, not to be permanent refugees. They were taken in by the US, or the UK, or France, or especially Israel.

Nobody gives those refugees a second thought.

Nick (13 April 2018)

WIKIPEDIA - UNRWA services are available to all those living in its area of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency, and who need assistance. The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children, are also eligible for registration as refugees. When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are registered as eligible for UNRWA services.

UNRWA provides facilities in 59 recognized refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and in other areas where large numbers of registered Palestine refugees live outside of recognized camps.

MORE READING: Suggested solution for displaced Arabs, Israelis and North Africans:

Monday, 7 September 2015

SHALOM - SUPER SOLAR POWERS.

Tuesday, 1 September 2015

HAVENS FOR REFUGEES