placnx

On the BBC today at the Sydney demonstration the organizers are reported to have asked the participants not to shout inflamatory slogans, as this would undermine the subject, which maybe was asking for humanitarian aid and/or ceasefire. On some campuses in the US I have heard that the River to the Sea chant was uttered, and alumni are getting excited.

By now your should know my thoughts through numerous posts. I have spoken so many times of the two-state solution. While a state with equal rights was promised in Israel's Declaration of Independence, that would require the promised constitution that never happened (so now Israelis are faced with a malleable Basic Law which Bibi et al want to "fix").

The IDF is not known for truth when they are at fault, but of course other armies do the same. There are things that do not look right about the hospital narrative, but we may not be able ever to know for sure, unless something emerges from government archives many years hence.

Since when am I excluded from the back & forth when you replied to @thatbeachlovers with something which I felt was another nitpicking as @placeholder has noticed, too? Deflection? No, correction. I am fully aware of the Palestinians' organizing troubles, both historically and currently. Past Israeli governments had a part in this, as they didn't want Palestinians to have a credible government. That would have removed an excuse for not granting them more autonomy. So the Oslo arrangement has led the PA into becoming a stooge of Israel, assisting most of the time in oppressing the people and preventing alternate political actors from emerging. Then there is the lack of elections since 2006.

This war has a counterpart on the West Bank with settler terrorism, and the struggle for Palestinian freedom is becoming universal as demonstrations are happening everywhere, even in countries like Germany that try to suppress anti-Israel speech.

Actually someone else spoke of navigating 5 checkpoints to buy food (if available). I spoke of the economic damage caused by 550+ checkpoints keeping people from going about their business, thus damaging the Palestinian economy. I believe that I gave Morch a blue heart for criticizing settler activity in that post.

In response to your several posts with complaints that I did not address your comments above, I felt that the point concerning withdrawals from Sinai & settlements from Gaza was not remarkable enough respond to, much less the piling on - blaming the victims further in your second paragraph. At one earlier post I tried to explain that Palestinians had agency in political organizing and resistance, although that in the earlier pre-1930s was filtered through the predominant focus on Arab nationalism. From the 1930s it's true that they were not as organized as the Zionist side which benefited from the connivance of the British occupiers, as exemplified by Orde Wingate, whose major role you dealt with by ignoring his Palestine activities such as the Special Night Squads, and instead evoking his later career in Burma. Whataboutism? As to your complaints that I did not respond to your blockade comments, please show me which of your voluminous comments you are referring to.

My view that Palestinians cannot get freedom without the world's intervention is a pessimistic and realist assessment.

Please tell me which phrase was hyperbole. 550+ checkpoints is public knowledge.

I've responded about the blockade in other posts. There are hundreds of stories, but these may be several stories on the same incident, and there are various levels of seriousness, no doubt.

The blockade is collective punishment under international law. Egypt has its own interests which include not annoying Israel or the US.

Obviously the Palestinians cannot get their freedom without the world imposing a solution on Israel.

Having to spend hours at checkpoints to commute to one's job or healthcare is not productive for the individual or the economy. Meanwhile settlers come and go on their lovely roads with their extraterritorial (read: 19th C colonial) rights.

The 18-20000 is a recent development, about 1% of the Gazan population. Perhaps the hope was to cultivate some as spies.

Two wrongs don't make a right is another way of expressing what @placeholder said. It is disingenuous to ignore the blockade in place since at least 2007, where Gazans have been kept in a state of near starvation and their economy cannot properly function. The attack was an act of desperation provoked by the prospect of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, as Netanyahu's obvious intent was to eliminate external opposition to the settler colonization of the West Bank while continuing the blockade of Gaza. Saudi Arabia was the author of the peace proposal in place since 2002, which was not compatible with the policy of filling Area C with settlements, so getting the Saudis to effectively sign off on existing Israeli policy would have meant abandoning their peace proposal. This attack is in a sense a trap for the current ultra-Orthodox/Kahanist faction in the Israeli government as they seize the opportunity to increase their pogroms on the West Bank. There are too many witnesses with cameras. For now centrist Israelis are overcome with horror at these massacres of secular Israelis, so it will take a while for backlash to resume against the judicial "reform" agenda and the disproportional death and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank pogroms. In the meantime the world will have taken stock of massive war crimes and depopulation in Gaza, so Hamas probably anticipated that Israel would end up with Europe and most of the world against it, with only the US still supporting it, and with qualifications. Whether merely attacking military targets would have produced a sufficiently vehement reaction is debatable. That this attack may accelerate the end of the current Israeli government is probable.

Thanks. I'll give feedback tomorrow on the results.

With 500+ checkpoints and settlers gobbling Area C, the West Bank is heading in the direction of Gaza. Just this week, I've just heard that four Palestinian villages have been depopulated, i.e. ethnically cleansed. For the past two years settlers assisted by IDF have been attacking villages and towns. When Palestinians resist, IDF steps in to shoot them. The Gaza economy is non-functional due to the blockade, so it's no wonder that there is high unemployment. Gazans are forced to survive on aid and need 150 trucks per day in "normal" times.

It will be impossible to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank without shrinking these settlements and dismantling the most egregious, such as Hebron. Settler rampages show that a lot of thought would have to go into stop them from being a danger to Palestinians. Or offending settlers would have to be banned from the West Bank; extraterritorial status of settlers should be limited so that crimes committed in the West Bank (against Palestinians) would fall under Palestinian law. It will be a very heavy lift to achieve a viable Palestinian state.

They had a potential leader in Marwan Barghouti after the failed Oslo Accords, but he's been locked up for some time. I don't know whether he would be relevant any more, now age 64, but Mandela was locked up for 28 years and became preident at age 75. Marwan also has a very articulate cousin, Mustafa Barghouti, who is also involved in politics. Ultra-Zionists believe that to all belongs to them, including Gaza and the West Bank, maybe Sinai, too, and part of Jordan??? No need the compensate for stolen land since it already belongs to them.

So do we need to file TM 30 on the new system (after setting it up) if we filed in June on the old system? We tried but it stuck on "in progress" and now about a month later we can't find the filing on the new system.

I put the expiration date of extension of stay. Now another problem: We took a screenshot when listing me was "in progress" back in September, concerning a reentry last June. We did do a report on the old online system and took a screenshot of that file. Now we are trying to access the report on the new system, but it seems to allow asking to search for filings for previous seven days only. If we do that, there is "no data". Does the "in progress" leave the possibility that the filing failed? Since I have to do annual extension next week, what to do?

Why don't you and the ultra-Zionists recognize the Palestinians and their human rights? The narrative ca 1950 was that the oppressed new arrivals were making the desert bloom in a land devoid of people. Where was the respect for Palestinians then? Anyone who questions Israel's policies toward Palestinians gets flogged with the "right to exist" line as though that was existential. At this point it's the Palestinians right to exist which is the real question.

"No"? Nitpicking becomes you. You know very well what I meant. Your links do not really counter the essence of my post. The point of evoking the principal Arab Revolt against the Ottomans was that there were serious political aspirations of Arab nationalism, which you may know were thwarted by the British et al in betrayal of promises made in return for their service against the Ottomans. Not nitpicking, but replying to one of your arguments - that people were politically indifferent, so no need for a state of their own. Palestinians were not indifferent then and are not now. Also the Wiki on the 1936-39 Arab Revolt in Palestine shows that the Palestinians attempted to resist Jewish colonisation, but were unable to sustain their struggle in the face of brutal suppression by Wingate's forces in particular.

No, the Arab Revolt was against the Ottoman Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt The hope was to establish an Arab state "from Aleppo to Aden" in Yemen. You mean this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936–1939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine This was in opposition to Jewish immigration that had grown under the British mandate from 57,000 to 320,000 in 1935. Regarding Wingate, here's an article about him from Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/75-years-after-his-death-why-orde-wingate-remains-a-hero-in-israel/ The Arab Revolt was resistance against occupation. The link about Wingate contains the section "Palestine and the Special Night Squads" which mentions the horrible abuses, but the following link contains more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Night_Squads Without studying history, it's difficult to understand why Palestinians speak with such hysteria when interviewed by BBC, etc.

The $300bn claim is a from a footnoted 2007 article in the Jerusalem Post. It cannot be accessed by me, but maybe by a Port subscriber if any of you subscribe. The link does say that the figures are in 2007 Dollars. The group which created the link is a Zionist lobby group. Among their political activities: "JIMENA played a key role in the unanimous passage of House Resolution 185 by the U.S. Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, February 27, 2008.[4][6] This resolution urges the President to ensure that when refugees from the Middle East are discussed in international forums, any reference to Palestinian refugees be matched by a similarly explicit reference to Jewish and other refugee populations.[7]"