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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (206395)	12/2/2001 11:04:36 AM
From: E. T.	Respond to of 769670

I have already and at great length.eom

To: Ish who wrote (206395)	12/2/2001 11:07:28 AM
From: E. T.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

But if you insist...Moshe Dayan in a speech to Israeli students in 1969.... "We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. .. There is not a single community in the country that did not have a former Arab population."

To: Ish who wrote (206395)	12/2/2001 11:11:23 AM
From: E. T.	Respond to of 769670

Here's more for you...This is an excerpt from a eulogy Moshe Dayan, Israel's defence chief of staff, gave at the funeral for Roy Rotberg, killed by Arabs on the Gaza border in May of 1956.. "Let us not heap accusation on the murderers. How can we complain about their deep hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the Gaza refugee camps, and before their very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived... We are the generation of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home... Let us not recoil from seeing the hate which fills the life of hundreds of thousands of Arabs surrounding us."

To: Ish who wrote (206395)	12/2/2001 11:13:18 AM
From: E. T.	Respond to of 769670

I hope you find this helpful...From Reflections On the History of Zionism and Israel by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a professor at Haifa University. "The Only Democracy In The Middle East" One common claim about Israel is that it is a parliamentary democracy, where all civil liberties are guaranteed and a whole range of political movement exist. The common slogan of "the only democracy in the Middle East" bring to mind a vision of something modeled after the U.S. constitution. Americans project what they know and think of a U.S.-style democracy. The reality is quite different. The political culture in Israel is much more similar to those of Europe and the Middle East. The Western democratic credo, based on the ideas of the essential dignity of the individual, the fundamental equality of all human beings and of the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity, is not a part of Israeli political culture. Because of the success of the Israeli public relations effort and the Zionist effort over the past three generations, there is a persistent image of Israeli liberalism and even socialism in many Western minds. Once we set out on a search for ideologies, we find them not only wanting but totally missing. The basic principle of individual equality is absent. The rights to free speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion do no exit in Israel. In practice and by the law, the ideal of free speech does not play a role in Israeli political discourse. Publishing any periodical requires a permit, which then may be revoked at any time. There is a censorship board for films and plays. Free speech arguments cannot be used as a defense against it. There is even a list of forbidden books. ... Discrimination against Arabs in Israel is often described as a result of the common gap between vision and reality, and as contrary to Zionist ideals. Nothing could be further from the truth. The discrimination exists exactly because of Zionist ideology. The contradiction between professed ideals and actual behaviors, which has been the engine of political change in so many places, does not exist for may Israelis because the democratic creed is absent. There is no promise of equality for all citizens in Israeli political culture and praxis. When Liberal supporters of Israel express surprise and anguish over this reality, they display either ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. There is no tradition of civil liberties because such a tradition would mean the end of Zionism. True equality means the dismantling of the state. If Isreal belongs to all its citizens, it is the end of Zionism. There is a clear opposition between the Zionist ethos and democratic ideals. Equality dooms any colonialist structure. The Zionist system is quite clearly incompatible with democracy. The lack of democracy stems from the colonialist problem and the presence of the natives, who are a population apart, an enemy within. Among Jews, there are democratic practices and traditions: majority rule, no political violence and open debate. There is democracy in the sense that the government represents the will of the voters. There is no law which guarantees freedom of speech, but Jews enjoy a great deal of such freedom. This means that Israel is hardly a democracy when this basic freedom is limited to the privileged class. There is a dual system of rights and privileges, so Israel is a "herrenvolk democracy": a democracy for a select group of citizens, defined as both citizens and nationals of Israel. (i.e. Jews)

To: Ish who wrote (206395)	12/2/2001 11:18:14 AM
From: E. T.	Respond to of 769670

From Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a professor at Haifa University. An article by Yitzhak Epstein, published in 1907, called for a new Zionist policy towards the Arabs after 30 years of settlement activity. His observations are moving and his suggestions prophetic and eloquent. Epstein refers to the Arabs as..."those who till the land, its true proprietors ... In the land of our dreams there is a whole people that has dwelled there for hundreds of years and never meant to leave." These Arab inhabitants made up more than half a million, 80 per cent of whome were peasants, tilling all the arable land. Epstien claims that no good land is vacant, so Jewish settlement meant Arab dispossession. Zionist organizations have habitually bought land from large absentee landlords, and this meant the dispossession of families that have tilled the same soil for generations. By law, the zionist buyers are right, but they are committing an injustice and an error. "While we emphasize the love we have for the land of our ancestors, we forget that the people living there now has a sensitive heart and a loving soul" Epstien was an eyewitness to one scene of exile: Still ringing in my ears is the wailing of Arab women from the village of Jaony, now Rosh-Pina (a Jewish settlement founded in 1882), on the day their families left to settle in the Golan, on the east side of the Jordan. The men were riding the donkeys, and the women followed them walking and sobbing. The valley was filled with their lamentations. From time to time they stopped and kissed the rocks and the ground. Epstein uses not only moral argurments, but also pragmatic ones: Will the dispossed keep silent and accept what has been done to them? They will eventually wake up to gain by force what has been robbed from them by gold! They will take to court the foreigners that pushed them off their land, and then they may be both prosecutors and judges... And this people... is but a small part of the great nation which holds the neighboring coutnries: Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia and Egypt... At least in Palestine there is still no Arab movement in the national and political sense, but this people does not need a movement. It is big and strong and does not need a revival, because it never died, and never stopped living for a minute... Let us not provoke the sleeping lion... Jewish settlements have brought much good the country and a material benefits to Arab workers: but all of this will not atone for our transgressions. We will not get credit for good deeds, but our name is chiseled into the evil, which will be remembered forever... We must consider every step we take, and solve the question of our relations with the Arabs before creating a new Jewish question... Whenever the spurious national good harms universal justice, this supposed good will become a gross national sin, which will never be expatiated.

To: Ish who wrote (206395)	12/2/2001 11:20:04 AM
From: E. T.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I hope this helps you....From Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi a professor at Haifa University: "Palestinians in Israel live mostly under a separate but unequal system of education and social services. Discrimination against Arabs in Israel takes many forms; it is completely spelled out in legal documents, backed by the Supreme Court. Because they are defined as foreigners and because they are the enemy, Palestinians do not enjoy all the services Israel provides for its real citizens, the shareholders in the state. They are excluded from over 90 per cent of the land and have an inferior education system. The 800,000 Palestinians who were entitled as of 1990 to Israeli identity card (ie permanent residence), were treated differently from members of the majority in every area of government activities and services. When the Interior Ministry budgets per capita allocations to local governments, there are two kinds of localities: Jewish and Arab. The prime minister of Israel claimed in 1986 that the per capita allocation for Arabs was 30 per cent of that for Jews. This was in response to critics who charged that it was only 10 to 20 per cent of the majority allocation! Similarly, per capita allocations by the Education Ministry for the separate Arab school system are about 10 per cent of the standard. One can see Arab schools without doors, windows or running water. There are "Jewish roads" and "Arab roads" in Israel. That means that roads leading to Arab villages have not been resurfaced for generations. Israelis probably hold the world record in real estate ownership. More than 90 per cent own their apartments or homes, thanks to massive public housing programs and generous government subsidies. This is true as far as Jews are concerned. Ninety-nine per cent of public husing programs exclude Arabs. When Arabs build their own homes, the constructions are considered illegal -- and they are. To receive a permit to build in any locality, a master plan is required. The Israel government, in its wisdom, saw to it that master plans have been approved in only four out of 150 Arab localities. The State of Israel took over the property of 600,000 Palestinians who left their homes during the 1948-49 War and were not allowed to return. The 150,000 Palestinians who remained under Israeli control were also subject to laws and regulations that depreived them of most of their land. The Palestinians living in Israel since 1948 have lost about one million acres of land. This land has been taken by perfectly legal means, by the authority of laws passed by the Knesset, which give the government the right of expropriation under clearly defined conditions. Palestinians who left their normal place of residence during the 1948-49 War but remained in Israeli-held territory, were declared by the Knesset to be present-absentees -- a unique concept in the world's legal literature -- losing their rights to land and citizenship. In one case, this law covered a group of villages in central Israel, which were occuppied by the Jordanians in 1948 whle the villages' agricultural lands were under Israeli contorl. The 1949 Armistice agreements gave Israel control over the villages and their inhabitants. But the inhabitants were by then present-absentees and lost all their lands.