Israeli - Palestinian conflict by the numbers (The numbers don't lie)

reply to post by airspoon


Thank you for all the hard work airspoon! S&F

Your article makes it difficult to spew propaganda when confronted with intelligent work and undeniable numbers.

I, like many others, was so infuriated by Israel's continuing disregard for human rights and recent aggressive actions that I've let myself stoop down to that level and shown my anger when I should have controlled it better. It is truly great to see that someone took all that time and focused their energy to producing something concrete and based on evidence, as opposed to yelling at each other and parroting their media.

I applaud you and thanks again!

Kharron

I think if Jewish scholars accredit the creation of HAMAS to Israel as
"CONTROLLED OPPOSITION" then using HAMAS to justify anything IS really making Airspoon's case to put it politely

www.globalresearch.ca...
www.globalresearch.ca...

Let us not forget that it was Israel, which in fact created Hamas. According to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)".

The Hamas then launched a carefully timed campaign of attacks against civilians, one day before the meeting between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, regarding the formal recognition of Israel by the National Palestinian Council. These events were largely instrumental in the formation of a Right wing Israeli government following the May 1996 elections.

Quite unexpectedly, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered Sheik Ahmed Yassin to be released from prison ("on humanitarian grounds") where he was serving a life sentence. Meanwhile, Netanyahu, together with President Bill Clinton, was putting pressure on Arafat to control the Hamas. In fact, Netanyahu knew that he could rely, once more, on the Islamists to sabotage the Oslo accords. Worse still: after having expelled Yassin to Jordan, Prime Minister Netanyahu allowed him to return to Gaza, where he was welcomed triumphantly as a hero in October 1997.

Arafat was helpless in the face of these events. Moreover, because he had supported Saddam Hussein during the1991 Gulf war, (while the Hamas had cautiously abstained from taking sides), the Gulf states decided to cut off their financing of the Palestinian Authority.


[edit on 10-6-2010 by Danbones]

[edit on 10-6-2010 by Danbones]

Originally posted by Donkey_Dean
reply to post by maybereal11

 

Those who fight oppression or are fighting simply to exist are not terrorists!
[edit on 10-6-2010 by Donkey_Dean]

Tell that to the mother of this child..

In 2001, 10 months old infant Shalhevet Pass was shot in the head and killed by a Palestinian sniper while seated in her stroller on the streets of Hebron, where she and her family lived

en.wikipedia.org...

Or the parents of these children

In 2008, a Palestinian gunman shot multiple students at the Mercaz HaRav a religious school in Jerusalem. Eight students, most 15 or 16 years old were killed.

en.wikipedia.org...

Again...the Palastinians have a legitimate cause...they are fighting it with illegitimate means. I support the Palastinians on most issues and vehemntly oppose the tactics they have employed.

I am not a fan of Israel's policy or actions. But let's not be idiots and blindly support one side over the other and call the targeting of innocent children "resistance".

Interesting thread, but even though a 15 or 16 year old would be considered a "child" by Western standards, a 15 or 16 year old who has been indoctrinated and brainwashed by extremist organizations and trained to shoot can hardly be called "a child".

I'm not defending the Israeli apartheid regime by any means, just questioning your numbers.

Originally posted by Maslo


I think I have the solution to the whole problem too. Get the Israeli terrorists to quit occupying and blocading territories which do not belong to them, both demographically and historically.

. . .

It does belong to them. They won it in war. They then let the Palestinians live there.

Originally posted by JohnnyElohim
Airspoon,

Extremely well done. I admire your collectedness and cool head. You paint a picture using just the facts, and as you say, the numbers do not lie.

That is wrong. You can make numbers show anything you want to, by omitting or adding what you see fit.

. It does sadden me to see some posting here suggesting the murder of non-combatant children is justified by comparing human beings to mosquitos,

Cry me a river. Both sides are losing children. Both sides are losing civilians. That is called WAR. It happens in every single war, no matter how big or small, since the beginning of time.

Do you have a retort to my comparison, or just a pity party?

or by the fact that unrelated adult criminals carried out crimes of their own. Regardless, I suspect that you captured a lot of attention here. Well done.

And then hide in the general populace, to try and win the propaganda war. Looks like they succeeded with about 90% of the ATS population.

Originally posted by Lemon.Fresh

It does belong to them. They won it in war.

We are not in the middle ages. You dont "won" territories full of foreign inhabitants in wars like some trophy. Territories should belong to the nation which has demographic majority in them. Anything else is injustice and leads only to oppresion and conflicts. Just like Kosovo, central Europe till WW1 (Hungary), or artificial colonial states which were established by dragging the finger of some colonial officer across a map, and noone cared of ethnic diversity trapped in them. Israel is the same.

They then let the Palestinians live there.

Say what? Who was the first to live there?

And just to make it clear, that war in which they "won" the land was only to keep the land which they have stolen before, therefore wrong and unjust too.

[edit on 10-6-2010 by Maslo]

Originally posted by Lemon.Fresh
That is wrong. You can make numbers show anything you want to, by omitting or adding what you see fit.

I am familiar with the numbers and Airspoon did indeed use conservative numbers. It is a well established fact that the casualties are quite asymmetric. You can point out that numbers can be deceptive but that doesn't mean that Airspoon's numbers are deceptive.

Cry me a river. Both sides are losing children. Both sides are losing civilians. That is called WAR. It happens in every single war, no matter how big or small, since the beginning of time.

Do you have a retort to my comparison, or just a pity party?

In my opinion your choice of words is callous beyond compare and indicates that for whatever reason you do not value Palestinian lives. Killing a non-combatent child is not swatting at a mosquito. If you think I need a sophisticated argument to make this point I don't think there's much I can say to persuade you.

To dismiss atrocity with such hand-waving is as cold as it gets.

And then hide in the general populace, to try and win the propaganda war. Looks like they succeeded with about 90% of the ATS population.

That's an empty assertion. You are retroactively justifying the slaughter of children by proposing that they were surely doing something insidious. Such retroactive justification is a tool of tyrants and killers and does not "pass go" for advocates of peace and mutual security.

reply to post by Eliad

I would only like to say one more thing- This is not genocide. This is not ethnic cleansing. Non of these civilians were killed as part of a military objective.
I hope this is clear to everyone.

If anybody is unclear about ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, this may enlighten you on what has been happening since 1948 to this very day.

Ilan Pappe is an senior lecturer at Haifa University and also a renown historian. He is also a Israeli. He has access to accurate and authenthic documented history of Israel pre and post founding of the state. He exploded the myth of the Palestinian residents leaving their land willingly. In fact, until recently, Israel's school textbooks were still giving a dishonest view of the whole sordid affair.

The Beginning - Initial Planning for Ethnic Cleansing

In his preface, Pappe writes about the "Red House" in Tel-Aviv that became headquarters for the Hagana, the dominant Zionist underground paramilitary militia during the British Mandate period in Palestine between 1920 and 1948 when the Jewish state came into being. He details how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, met with leading Zionists and young Jewish military officers on March 10, 1948 to finalize plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine that unfolded in the months that followed including "large-scale (deadly serious)intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning."

The final master plan was called Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew) following plans A, B, and C preceding it. It was to be a war without mercy complying with what Ben-Gurion said in June, 1938 to the Jewish Agency Executive and never wavering from later: "I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it." Plan D became the way to do it. It included forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of unwanted Palestinian Arabs in urban and rural areas accompanied by an unknown number of others mass slaughtered to get it done. The goal was simple and straightforward - to create an exclusive Jewish state without an Arab presence by any means including mass-murder.

Once begun, the whole ugly business took six months to complete. It expelled about 800,000 people, killed many others, and destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. The action was a clear case of ethnic cleansing that international law today calls a crime against humanity for which convicted Nazis at Nuremberg were hanged. So far Israelis have always remained immune from international law even though names of guilty leaders and those charged with implementing their orders are known as well as the crimes they committed.

They included cold-blooded mass-murder; destruction of homes, villages and crops; rapes; other atrocities; and massacres of defenseless people given no quarter including women and children. The crimes were suppressed and expunged from official accounts as Israeli historiography cooked up the myth that Palestinians left voluntarily fearing harm from invading Arab armies. It was a lie covering up Israeli crimes Palestinians call the Nakba - the catastrophe or disaster that's still a cold, harsh festering unresolved injustice.

(Source: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe by Stephen Lendman)
www.globalresearch.ca...

Originally posted by Lemon.Fresh
And to the people crying over who the land belongs to . . . to the victor goes the spoils. That is the way of war.

Fair enough. Now let's talk about just HOW Israel got that land in the first place.

During WW1 the British took the land known as Palestine from Ottoman Turks, then after the war the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the League of Nations passed the Mandate For Palestine, providing for temporary control of Palestine to be administered by the British.

Part of that Mandate stated:

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

So, we originally encroached upon the Palestinians to give the Jewish people a place to settle.

Then, after WW2 the United Nations voted to terminate the Mandate for Palestine and partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab States, which the Jews gladly accepted, but the Arabs rejected.

Why would the Arabs reject such a resolution? Pretty simple really: First, the League of Nations passes a resolution providing for the British to administer Palestine and for Jews to settle on their land. Then, the United Nations votes to split Palestine into 2 countries. No battle, no war, just sorry Palestine we forced the Jews on you in the first place and now your going to give up land so that the Jewish people can have their own State! As an apology for the Holocoust.

The Palestinians weren't responsible for the Holocoust, yet were made to suffer because of it?

After the Partition Resolution was passed, and no clear plan for transition of authority was established, the British announced their intention to unilaterally withdraw from Palestine and the day before they were to complete their withdrawel the Jews published a Declaration of Independence as the State of Israel. The next day the Arabs attacked, marking the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Had the League of Nations and United Nations never intervened to begin with, the Jews would never have been able to occupy Palestine, and Israel would not exist today!

Had the United States not provided the financial and military support we've given Israel for the last 60+ years, they'd never have been able to keep that land.

And how has Israel thanked us? Lets see, they immediately set out to develop nuclear weapons. Refused to sign on to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty or put its facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency. They viciously attacked the USS Liberty in International Waters and killed 34 Americans, without provacation. And, have sent Mossad Agents into the U.S. and infiltrated our government and military.

Israel believes they are above International Law and can do anything they please.

They may have won a war to become a separate State, but without the League of Nations and United Nations interventions, they would never have even been in place to wage that war.

We should have annihilated Israel for the USS Liberty attack, and have been done with them once and for all!

reply to post by IAF101


IAF101! Sir, I Salute You. You are a true friend of Israel.

Really, what part of "Promised Land" & "Chosen People" don't these dumb goy stone throwers understand?

So what if some "peace activists" get shot in the face? So what if that dumb Yankee Rachel Corrie gets run over? Is it a crime? Who cares? I say do a USS Liberty on the next "aid ship" & teach them a lesson they won't forget.

You know, it's great to see so many fine Americans like you coming out to support Israel here, if only Obama would do the same. He seems to forget that seven million Jews died in the Holocaust. George Bush would never have let this happen.

What friends of Israel need to do now is work on moving the agenda on, I sense that many are tiring of this "aid flotilla" nonsense anyway. Thank goodness the World Cup in nearly upon us!

There are plenty of us on here that are critical of both sides and yet when we approach it honestly, we are attacked. You want credibility turn the conversation to an honest discussion, minus the bigotry.

When rabid Bigots do join in the conversation, if they are on your side it's just OK with many of you. Your willing to overlook one wrong due to your own biases. When the discussion devolves into whether or not one murderer is worse than another murderer because ones body count is higher than the other, how could one not shake their head in dismay.

One glaring thing missing from those numbers is how many children were killed because Hamas used them for human shields? Is that OK?

What if Hamas had better armaments? How many Israeli civilians would be dead if that were true? 4,000 rockets!

Hamas has made no secret their goal is in fact genocide. Is that OK also? The only reason it has not occurred is that Hamas has been kept from having the weapons to do it. Otherwise, we would be here discussing the slaughter of all Jews, good or bad in Israel.

Unless you are willing to discuss the atrocities from BOTH SIDES, it speaks volumes about peoples true feelings.

I know Palestinians personally that are less bigoted toward Jews than many posting here in these threads. They tell me without hesitation they will never go back because their own people are crazy.

I wonder how many here have the courage to stand up and say both sides are wrong and both sides deserve the criticism they receive? Not many of you I suspect, which shows true intent does it not?

Originally posted by Lemon.Fresh

Originally posted by Maslo

or by the fact that unrelated adult criminals carried out crimes of their own. Regardless, I suspect that you captured a lot of attention here. Well done.

And then hide in the general populace, to try and win the propaganda war. Looks like they succeeded with about 90% of the ATS population.

You are correct. It would seem they have won the propaganda war here at ATS with a majority.

I don't buy it and can see the truth.

Originally posted by Team Locke
I think I have the solution to the whole problem. Get the Hamas terrorist to quit launching rockets into Israel. Leave them alone. Then if Israel attacks anyone you can cry foul. Until then you statistics don't mean much unless you also provide the provoking factors which caused the end results.

Just a suggestion.

It is arguable and convincingly so, that Israeli terrorists are the instigators in this conflict. I'm bet that Hamas would quit firing rockets if Israel stopped oppressing, torturing, harassing and otherwise terrorizing the Palestinian people. Israel has attacked many and not just Palestinians.

Did they not just launch a night-time commando raid through air-assault onto a ship in international waters, killing many people? Who was the attacker? Did the IDF commandos just happen to mistakenly fall on that ship and were subsequently attacked by the crew? I don't think so.

What about the other twenty or so similar incidents that didn't get the same press as they were not watched live by thousands of people on the internet?

What about the US Liberty that Israel tried to send to the bottom, leaving no survivors in an effort to pull America into their war? The Israeli Navy was even firing at the life-boats as to leave no survivors. Even if you ignorantly argue that this particular incident was accident, you have to admit that Israel was playing awfully dirty by shooting those life-boats. Thank god for the Russians that saved many American lives that day by steaming over to investigate, ultimately resulting in the Israelis to back off.

If Israel is the attacker in these incidents (to which there are many more that I didn't mention), then how hard is it to assume that they wouldn't behave the same way with the Palestinians?

The truth of the matter is that the Western Media outlets choose to ignore Israel's atrocities, while only focusing on the responses to those atrocities by the Palestinians, leaving many people to believe that it is only the Palestinians who are acting violently.

In fact, it doesn't take that much brain-power to realize that the Palestinians would have nothing to gain by sending rockets unprovoked. It is more than clear that they send rockets in response to Israeli atrocities.

As far as providing provoking factors, that is inherently subjective. Each side believes that the other is the instigator and each side believes that they are correct, based upon subjective testimony. The purpose of this post was to give the numbers, plain and simple because the numbers, when given as a whole, are completely objective. You choose how you want to interpret them, which would be subjective. The only thing that isn't subjective or factually deniable, is the numbers from this situation.

I apologize if the facts don't fit in with your views and biases of the situation. Maybe you need to change your views based upon the facts. That is the sign of intelligence and the very definition of "denying ignorance".


--airspoon

reply to post by Lemon.Fresh

I also notice that no one seems to want to acknowledge that Israel gave them the land, after gaining it after a failed attempt to push Israel into the sea.

Well, if you actually knew your history, you would know that it was Israel who attacked first and completely "out of the blue". Israel caught the Islamic nations off-guard by sending their war-planes to destroy Egypt's air forces and ground forces. Jordan only participated due to their alliance with Egypt, who had been blind-sided by Israel.

I remember the Japanese doing the same thing, on a much smaller scale and with far more provocation and warning during the raid on Pearl Harbor. We seem to have no problem condemning the Japanese for a much lesser offense.

As far as Israel "giving" them the land, Israel had to to shore up world-wide condemnation for their actions. If Israel didn't give them back small portions of their land, Israel would not have survived until this day.

Also, just because Israel "gave" them some land, doesn't mean that Israel has the right to terrorize those people on that land.

--airspoon

reply to post by mark-in-dallas


thanks for posting that - these events are rarely brought up, being increasingly shrouded in the mists of time, as it were.

you didn't mention the Balfour Declaration, though, so i thought i'd do so.

The Mandate for Palestine was actually preceded by The Balfour Declaration. Both declarations came into being within a few days of each other, in 1917, although not formally adopted, and made retro-active, in the League of Nations until 1922.

It was named for Lord Balfour, who is the author of the following letter to one of the leaders of the early Zionist movement:

Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country".

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely
Arthur James Balfour

this letter, for all intents and purposes, declares an intention to PREVENT the situation that we now have today, in former Palestine/present Israel.

i do, however, feel that part of the initial responsibility for this fiasco does lay with the Allied forces post-WWII.

promises made to the Zionists were NOT the only promises being made in the goings-on during and following the first great war.

Even fewer mentions are made of the Sykes-Picot Agreement:

The Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 was a secret agreement between the governments of the UK and France, with the assent of Imperial Russia, defining their respective spheres of influence and control in Western Asia after the expected downfall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It was largely a trade agreement with a large area set aside for indirect control through an Arab state or a confederation of Arab states. The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916. It did not contemplate the assignment of any League of Nations mandates, since the League and its mandates were developed during the post-war period. The terms were negotiated by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Sir Mark Sykes.

this agreement with the Arab states was BEFORE the agreement with the Zionists - but the first promise was swept under the rug in the sorting-out after the war. read up on these events if you are interested - i posted only the minimal as to not derail this thread which is not about WHY but about HOW MANY.

i don't feel, however, that any of us is exempt from responsibility for what is going on over there. just being a consenting adult on this planet imparts a certain degree of accountability: either you side with one or the other, or you do not side at all - yet not siding at all is still not trying to establish peace if one does not speak out and do what can be done without increasing or participating in the madness that must be stopped!

reply to post by IAF101

an army is a commissioned body appointed by the government of a legitimate state that acts according to the rules of war and can be held accountable.

Accountability like this, for example?

People are idiots especially in large groups. This conflict only shows what sheep all people are Palestinian, Jew and all other peoples alike, they will believe anything as long as you wear the right hat or decor. Religion and politics have there place but they are just tools, and those that believe them unconditionally are tools. In ww2 those that profited from the war believed the convenient religion of the day and wore what they needed to wear to be believed ie the papacy/christianity even some that thought they were jewish and bankers, now how is that for irony jews financing there own holocaust, ahh the religion of power and money likes to dress as other religions, how convenient all one has to do is say what they want to hear and they throw money at you. Now the fashion is Judaism and so all the rage is in being jewish, but at the end of the day everybody is just a bunch of confused europeans.

In the end everybody gets what they want out of it the jews get some stony land to live in as promised, the war profiters get moneys out of it after all sending aid and guns to Israel is business and it looks like business will bloom in that land eventually. The religious nuts get to see Armageddon maybe if there unlucky enough to get what they want, though I doubt jesus or god will interfere, since even if a god did exist watching a bunch of hairless monkeys all day would be boring. And the Palestinians well who knows maybe in a couple of centuries the tide will turn and they get to come back to liberate there homeland. Ah the circle of life goes on and on and on and on and so forth.



“Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule” Friedrich Nietzsche

It looks like not only did he have a cool mustache but he was right concerning the insanity that humans are prone to.

reply to post by itsallmaya


I'm planning to do so, I've already started a thread comparing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Nazi genocide, in both PR and genocide, to prove that the comparison is ridiculous..

Israel is not committing genocide, and Israeli PR is nothing like nazi propaganda.

Originally posted by galadofwarthethird
Ah the circle of life goes on and on and on and on and so forth.

ahhhh...
but that is not the circle of life that you described.

it is the circle of death

which is no circle, at all. just a straight line into oblivion.

Originally posted by Eliad
I'm planning to do so, I've already started a thread comparing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Nazi genocide, in both PR and genocide, to prove that the comparison is ridiculous..

Israel is not committing genocide, and Israeli PR is nothing like nazi propaganda.

so does that make it any less UNNECESSARY death and murder?

on both sides?
it is not right.
and it is not right that unwarranted carnage be allowed to go on as if we do not see that it is indeed going on in our very neighborhood.

the whole world is our neighborhood - maybe even a village as they say.

these numbers are a shocking atrocity, in any light.
we should quit casting blame and taking sides and just decide, ALL TOGETHER, to put a stop to it.

not an aggressive stop but an effective stop.

reply to post by evans


First I'd like to say that I'm not a religious person.
But I agree with you that life is sacred, no matter what religion you're in.

Why is it that holy books are covered with blood, really? Why is it that after the story of Jesus was taught to the Romans, it sparked the beginning of an era known as the dark ages?
Why is it that Islam, while calls for peace and love, is interpreted into jihad, death, and conquest.
I can't answer that.

As for the killing of children.. If only you had known how the hamas uses its children.
Golda Meir once said- Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.

If the people posting here had only known.. Including airspoon who boasts that he's been here.. I don't know where you were (I'd love if you could elaborate who you were working with, and from what unit were these soldiers that you've met) that you managed to miss the way the soldiers and the local population interact.
I have seen it. I have been there. I have given children candy, and helped old people walk. I have learned their language, from them, so I could communicate with them better, I have seen checkposts, I have seen evil, and I have seen good.
I know.

And your last comment is the heart of this issue.
Believe me when I say- you do not yet know the whole truth of this conflict.
There are a lot of good threads here on the subject of hamas, Israel, and the conflict.
Figure out for yourself which show a full picture and which show half thruths.