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SteveDemi
Current Version
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The notion that the situation in Gaza is \
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The notion that the situation in Gaza is \\\"not so bad\\\" is easily refuted by even a glance at UN and Red Cross statistics. We\\\'re talking about a place in which nearly half the population is unemployed and nearly all of the water (I believe the specific number is 95%) is unfit for human consumption. Similar facts can be found quite easily.
Your claim that Egypt during the Mubarak days didn\\\'t receive any criticism for upholding the blockade is irrelevant (whether or not people pay attention to Egypt has no bearing on the validity of criticism of Israel) as well as untrue (Egypt received plenty of criticism) and misleading (though Egypt kept the Rafah crossing closed, it didn\\\'t control Gaza\\\'s territorial waters, control its airspace, and control the vast majority of the border that is with Israel).
As for the West Bank, Palestinians there regularly receive brutal treatment for any sort of protest against their conditions, are denied 4/5 of the West Bank\\\'s water resources, and are denied the rights guaranteed to them under international law, which the occupation (beyond being illegal in itself, as the acquisition of land through military conquest is illegal under international law) completely violates. These illegal policies include the common demolition of Palestinian houses (destruction of property, this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention), the checkpoints (denies freedom of movement, this violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), the separation barrier (denies freedom of movement and destroys property, this violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Fourth Geneva Convention), the transportation of Palestinian prisoners to Israeli prisons (denies the right of occupied people to remain in the occupied territory for the duration of their incarceration, this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention), the expropriation of water resources from the West Bank (utilizes resources in the occupied territory for the occupying power\\\'s own use, this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention), the settlements (transfers the population of the occupying power to the occupied territory, this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention), and so on.
As for your numbers, no where near 20,000 Israelis have been killed over the course of the Israel-Palestinian conflict (which is what the troper was referring to, not the broader Arab-Israeli conflict).
You are right in saying that genocide has not been practiced in the occupied territories. So far, that has been limited to Israel\\\'s actions, which were indeed of quite a genocidal nature, in the 1982 Lebanon War, in which IDF strategy essentially consisted of annihilating refugee camps (both the people there and the schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure that had developed over time) and then wreaking destruction on to Beirut once refugees had fled there.
In contrast, ethnic cleansing in the territories and Israel itself dates all the way back to the state\\\'s very founding. One needs only to look at Plan Dalet, the Allon Plan, or even Tzipi Livni\\\'s proposals in the leaked Palestine Papers to see evidence of ethnic cleansing\\\'s popularity.
Your references to Sudan, Rwanda, and Somalia, in addition to being irrelevant to this issue, fail to take into account that none of these countries have anything comparable to the political clout in the US that the Israeli government is. Obviously, there\\\'s no Sudanese organization comparable to AIPAC, one would be very unlikely to find editorials in The New York Times defending the Interahamwe during the Rwandan Genocide, and it\\\'s inconceivable that Omar al-Bashir would even speak before the entirety Congress, let alone receive the kind of reception that Binyamin Netanyahu did recently.
Your comments consist mostly of misleading statements, failed attempts to link criticism of Israeli government policies to old anti-Semitic canards, and irrelevant references to other countries that are the intellectual equivalent of someone criticizing American civil rights activists for complaining about the treatment of black Americans when black South Africans are treated even worse.
Your claim that Egypt during the Mubarak days didn\\\'t receive any criticism for upholding the blockade is irrelevant (whether or not people pay attention to Egypt has no bearing on the validity of criticism of Israel) as well as untrue (Egypt received plenty of criticism) and misleading (though Egypt kept the Rafah crossing closed, it didn\\\'t control Gaza\\\'s territorial waters, control its airspace, and control the vast majority of the border that is with Israel).
As for the West Bank, Palestinians there regularly receive brutal treatment for any sort of protest against their conditions, are denied 4/5 of the West Bank\\\'s water resources, and are denied the rights guaranteed to them under international law, which the occupation (beyond being illegal in itself, as the acquisition of land through military conquest is illegal under international law) completely violates. These illegal policies include the common demolition of Palestinian houses (destruction of property, this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention), the checkpoints (denies freedom of movement, this violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), the separation barrier (denies freedom of movement and destroys property, this violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Fourth Geneva Convention), the transportation of Palestinian prisoners to Israeli prisons (denies the right of occupied people to remain in the occupied territory for the duration of their incarceration, this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention), the expropriation of water resources from the West Bank (utilizes resources in the occupied territory for the occupying power\\\'s own use, this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention), the settlements (transfers the population of the occupying power to the occupied territory, this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention), and so on.
As for your numbers, no where near 20,000 Israelis have been killed over the course of the Israel-Palestinian conflict (which is what the troper was referring to, not the broader Arab-Israeli conflict).
You are right in saying that genocide has not been practiced in the occupied territories. So far, that has been limited to Israel\\\'s actions, which were indeed of quite a genocidal nature, in the 1982 Lebanon War, in which IDF strategy essentially consisted of annihilating refugee camps (both the people there and the schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure that had developed over time) and then wreaking destruction on to Beirut once refugees had fled there.
In contrast, ethnic cleansing in the territories and Israel itself dates all the way back to the state\\\'s very founding. One needs only to look at Plan Dalet, the Allon Plan, or even Tzipi Livni\\\'s proposals in the leaked Palestine Papers to see evidence of ethnic cleansing\\\'s popularity.
Your references to Sudan, Rwanda, and Somalia, in addition to being irrelevant to this issue, fail to take into account that none of these countries have anything comparable to the political clout in the US that the Israeli government is. Obviously, there\\\'s no Sudanese organization comparable to AIPAC, one would be very unlikely to find editorials in The New York Times defending the Interahamwe during the Rwandan Genocide, and it\\\'s inconceivable that Omar al-Bashir would even speak before the entirety Congress, let alone receive the kind of reception that Binyamin Netanyahu did recently.
Your comments consist mostly of misleading statements, failed attempts to link criticism of Israeli government policies to old anti-Semitic canards, and irrelevant references to other countries that are the intellectual equivalent of someone criticizing American civil rights activists for complaining about the treatment of black Americans when black South Africans are treated even worse.
