Egypt video compilations

Israel's failure to learn
Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:00:20 -0800 by ArchivesAlgeriennes

When George Bush, the US president, first entered the White House as the commander-in-chief in 2001, Palestinians were being killed in the al-Aqsa intifada.Eight years later, as Bush prepares to leave office, Israel is carrying out one of the largest massacres in its 60-year occupation of Palestine.The US, then and now, strongly backs Israel's offensive, justifying it as being, in fact, defensive.An Israeli general recently threatened to use military force to set Gaza back decades in much the same language used before the invasion of Lebanon in 2006. But despite the Israeli devastation of Lebanon, Hezbollah emerged victorious and the Shia resistance and social movement emerged a hero to the Arab world.Israel is about to make the same mistake with Hamas. Its notion of a truce with Hamas was that the Palestinians would quietly accept the siege. Israel would deny them the basic means of survival, let alone the basic means to create a functioning society. If the Palestinians attempted to resist, they would be crushed. As in Lebanon, Israel should have learned years ago that military might cannot crush Palestinian resistance movements.While the Israeli military again bombs the starving and imprisoned population of 1.5 million Gazans, the world watches their plight live as Western media scrambles to explain and, in some cases, justify the ongoing carnage.Even some Arab outlets have attempted to equate Palestinian resistance - and homemade rockets - with the might of the Israeli military machine.However, none of this is a surprise; the Israelis just concluded a global public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of some Arab states.An American periodical once asked me to contribute to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified.My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, such as the Native Americans 150 years ago, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Palestinians today, to answer.Terrorism is a normative term which is used to describe what the 'other' does, not what 'we' do.Powerful nations such as Israel, the US, Russia or China will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism.However, they fail to acknowledge as acts of terror the destruction of Chechnya, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the repression of Tibetans, and the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.Normativ e rules and what is legal and permissible are determined by the powerful. They formulate the concept of terrorism in normative terms and make it appear as if a neutral court derived such definitions instead of the oppressors.For the weak to resist becomes illegal by definition.This excessive use of legal jargon actually undermines the fundamentals of what is truly legal and diminishes the credibility of international institutions such as the UN. The law becomes the enemy of those who struggle.It becomes apparent that the powerful - those who make the rules - insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the natives, be they indigenous populations in North America or Palestinians in what are today Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.Attackin g civilians, then, becomes the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds and imminent eradication.The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that such violence will destroy or defeat Israel.When the native population understands that there is an irreversible dynamic stripping them of their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can muster.In 1948, when Israel was being established as a new state, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed.Their lands were settled by colonists who even today deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world.Israel, its allies in the West and some regional Arab countries have managed to corrupt the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and entice them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people.This eventually neutralised and transformed the PLO into a liberation movement which collaborates with the occupier.The focus then shifted to Hamas, a movement which won legislative elections nearly three years ago and thus became a target for the Israelis.

Related: gaza dead oslo norway hosiptal sweden denmark finland scandinavia israel army jihad cnn afp bbc childrens war fox cbs itn new york clash air strike missile obama us ali germany america f-16 bush terrorism israeli england idf palestine iran al jazeera sky news usa hamas islam jews muslims iraq algerie australia algeria tv france arabs sarkozy china russia allah egypt ??????? ?????? ??? ??????? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ??? ???