• War Versus Peace : Israel Has Decided and So Should We | Opinion | teleSUR English
    https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/War-Versus-Peace-Israel-Has-Decided-and-So-Should-We-20190418-0014.h

    Même sur #Seenthis on ne trouve que rarement la perspective sudaméricaine. teleSUR publie un commentaire du journaliste palestinien Ramzy Baroud.

    Israelis are divided on some issues that are particular to their social and economic makeup. But they are also resolutely unified around the issue that should concern us most: the continued subjugation of the Palestinian people.

    Indeed, ‘tight race’, or not, Israel has voted to cement Apartheid, support the ongoing annexation of the Occupied West Bank, and carry on with the Gaza siege.

    In the aftermath of the elections, Netanyahu emerged even more powerful; his Likud party has won the elections with 36 seats, followed by Gantz’s Kahol Lavan (Blue and White) with 35 seats.

    Gantz, the rising star in Israeli politics was branded throughout the campaign as a centrist politician, a designation that tossed a lifeline to the vanquished Israeli ‘left’ - of which not much is left anyway.

    This branding helped sustain a short-lived illusion that there is an Israeli alternative to Netanyahu’s extremist right-wing camp.

    But there was never any evidence to suggest that Gantz would have been any better as far as ending the Israeli occupation, dismantling the Apartheid regime and parting ways with the country’s predominantly racist discourse.

    In fact, the opposite is true.

    Gantz has repeatedly criticized Netanyahu for supposedly being too soft on Gaza, promising to rain yet more death and destruction on an a region that, according to the United Nations, will be unlivable by 2020.

    A series of videos, dubbed “Only the Strong Survives”, were issued by the Gantz campaign in the run up to the elections. In the footage, Gantz was portrayed as the national savior, who had killed many Palestinians while serving as the army’s chief of staff between 2011 and 2015.

    Gantz is particularly proud of being partly responsible for bombing Gaza “back to the stone age.”

    http://www.ramzybaroud.net/about

    #Israël #élections #zionisme #Palestine

  • In Words and Deeds: The Genesis of Israeli #Violence
    http://www.ramzybaroud.net/in-words-and-deeds-the-genesis-of-israeli-violence

    Russian-born Menachem Begin was the leader of the Irgun which, along with the Stern Gang and other Jewish militants, massacred hundreds of civilians in Deir Yassin.

    ‘Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue this until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest," Begin wrote at the time. He described the massacre as a “splendid act of conquest.”

    The intrinsic link between words and actions remain unchanged.

    Nearly 30 years later, a once wanted terrorist, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. He accelerated land theft of the newly-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, launched a war on Lebanon, annexed Occupied Jerusalem to Israel and carried out the massacre of Sabra and Shatilla in 1982.

    Some of the other terrorists-turned-politicians and top army brass include Begin, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan and Yitzhak Shamir. Each one of these leaders has a record dotted with violence.

    Shamir served as the Prime Minister of Israel from 1986 – 1992. In 1941, Shamir was imprisoned by the British for his role in the Stern Gang. Later, as Prime Minister, he ordered a violent crackdown against a mostly non-violent Palestinian uprising in 1987, purposely breaking the limbs of kids accused of throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers.

    So, when government ministers like Ariel and Bennett call for wanton violence against Palestinians, they are simply carrying on with a bloody legacy that has defined every single Israeli leader in the past. It is the violent mindset that continues to control the Israeli government and its relationship with Palestinians; in fact, with all of its neighbors.

    #israel

  • Depuis que le monde est monde et depuis que l’homme est homme, il n’y a pas que les Palestiniens qui ont vu leur territoire occupé. Les Indiens d’Amérique, entre autres, ont également connu cette horreur. Les Indiens qui, comme les Palestiniens, vivaient leur rapport à la terre d’une manière tout autant sacrée que politique. C’est pour cela qu’un jour Mahmoud Darwich, se reconnaissant dans ce peuple bafoué, a écrit Discours de l’Indien rouge, discours qu’un chef indien aurait prononcé devant les Sénateurs américains et où on comprend pourquoi son peuple a vécu ces événements comme un destin imparable, au point de s’excuser des arbres qu’il leur fallait couper pour satisfaire leurs besoins vitaux. En se mettant dans la peau de cet homme d’un autre continent que le sien, d’une culture différente de la sienne, l’écrivain palestinien a cherché à défendre l’innocence des choses, l’enfance de l’humanité, l’harmonie de l’univers et de la nature, harmonie que l’homme blanc a rompue par sa conduite.


    Photo : Native American activists taking a stand in support of Palestinian rights. (Photo : via Counter Currents)

  • Palestine : Mahmoud Abbas dit savoir qui a « tué » Arafat - Monde - tdg.ch
    10 novembre 2016
    http://www.tdg.ch/monde/mahmoud-abbas-dit-savoir-tue-arafat/story/12405018

    Le président Mahmoud Abbas a déclaré jeudi qu’il savait qui avait « tué » son prédécesseur et leader historique des Palestiniens Yasser Arafat, sans préciser le nom de l’auteur du meurtre présumé.

    « Vous me demandez qui l’a tué, je sais - mais mon seul témoignage ne suffit pas », a ainsi affirmé M. Abbas en prenant la parole devant des milliers de personnes rassemblées à Ramallah, en Cisjordanie occupée, pour marquer le 12e anniversaire de la mort d’Arafat.

    « Une commission d’enquête est en train d’approfondir les choses, mais vous serez informés à la première occasion et serez surpris quand vous saurez qui l’a fait », a-t-il dit. « Je ne veux pas citer de noms parce que ces noms ne méritent pas d’être rappelés, » a-t-il ajouté.

    • Israeli forces injure 4, detain 2 Palestinians after student march erupts into clashes in Ramallah
      Nov. 10, 2016 6:28 P.M. (Updated: Nov. 10, 2016 6:30 P.M.)
      http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=773912

      RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — Israeli forces Thursday injured four Palestinian teenagers with rubber-coated steel bullets, and detained two others, during clashes that erupted in eastern Beituniya city near Israel’s Ofer detention center in the occupied West Bank district of Ramallah.

      A student march commemorating the 12th anniversary of the death of late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat erupted into clashes with Israeli forces as the march headed to the Ofer detention center to support child prisoners held in Israeli detention centers.

      Palestinian demonstrators threw rocks at Israeli soldiers, while Israeli military vehicles chased the protesters, injuring four, and detaining and assaulting two others.

    • The Infamy of the Palestinian #Elites: An Imminent Split within Fatah?
      http://www.ramzybaroud.net/infamy-palestinian-elites-imminent-split-within-fatah

      Dahlan is involved in various “charity projects” including financing mass weddings in impoverished Gaza. But it is not Dahlan’s money that Hamas is seeking; rather the hope that he mediates with Egypt to ease movement on the Rafah-Egypt border.

      With a growing clout and rising number of benefactors, Dahlan’s resurrection is assured, but imposing him on an embattled Fatah faction in the West Bank remains uncertain.

      To preclude Dahlan’s attempt at regaining his status within Fatah, Abbas’s PA forces in the occupied West Bank have been conducting arrests of Dahlan’s supporters. The latter’s armed men are retaliating and clashes have been reported in various parts of the West Bank.

      Moreover, Abbas has called for the seventh Fatah conference to be held sometime later this month, where the Abbas faction within Fatah is likely to rearrange the various committees to ensure Dahlan’s supporters are weakened, if not permanently removed.

      Considering Dahlan’s strong support base and his ability to win followers using his access to wealth and regional allies, a move against his followers is likely to backfire, splitting the party, or worse, leading to an armed conflict. Despite Israel’s intentional silence, there are also reports that Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who was tied to Dahlan repeatedly in the past, is keen on ensuring the return of Dahlan at the helm of Fatah.

      Tragically, the power struggle rarely involves ordinary Palestinian people, who remain alone facing the Israeli military machine, the growing illegal Jewish settlements, the suffocating siege, while persisting under an unprecedented leadership vacuum.

      This is one of the enduring legacies of the Oslo Accords, which divides Palestinians into classes: a powerful class that is subsidised by “donor countries” and is used to serve the interests of the US, Israel and regional powers, and the vast majority of people, barely surviving on handouts and resisting under growing odds.

      This strange contradiction has become the shameful reality of Palestine, and regardless of what the power struggle between Abbas and Dahlan brings, most Palestinians will find themselves facing the same dual enemy, military occupation, on the one hand, and their leadership’s own acquiescence and #corruption, on the other.

      #Palestine