Flash: Arafat denies his government was in a crisis
Haaretz reports:
“In his first public comments since the upheavals in Gaza spilled over into a political confrontation with Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia last week, Arafat denied the government was in a crisis, and said he had approved changes in the Cabinet.
‘No, no, there is no crisis,’ Arafat said after meeting Arab diplomats in his headquarters.”
Can someone please get this man a newspaper, any newspaper.
Uri Avnery theorizes that
1) Palestinian society will pull back from the abyss
2) Arafat is the only person who can make peace with us
3) The strategy of Sharon and his generals is simple and brutal: to destroy the Palestinian Authority, turn life in the occupied territories into hell, disintegrate Palestinian society and drive the survivors from the country, not in one dramatic sweep (as in 1948) but in a slow, continuous, creeping process.
Given what he’s up to, newspapers won’t help him much:
“But the most troubling aspect of Mr. Arafat’s reassertion of control was a warning to Palestinian journalists to cease all coverage of the kind of street protests that rocked the Gaza Strip and some West Bank cities last weekend. Reporters have also been threatened with severe punishment if they depict clashes between rival groups in the Gaza Strip, such as the gunfight in Rafah that injured 12 people on Sunday.
The ban effectively prevents international news outlets from covering these events, since they depend on Palestinian photographers, reporters and editors to produce news footage and written copy for broadcasters, print media and wire services.”
http://tinylink.com/?FCDNRLJ4Lo
fukin sharon
If there is no crisis in the government, why not schedule some overdue elections?
Mr. Brown,
you’d have a lot more credibility if you’d stop quoting Uri Avnery who travels to the Mukata every once in a while to act as a human shield.
Arafat can’t make peace with us; he’s killed so many Jews already, won a Nobel, and kept killing Jews.
Actually, you’re number 3) is a bit off. The plan is for Sharon to ‘withdraw’ from the territories and wait for an excuse (like the ‘mega-attack’) to viciously return to the territories and massacre every last Arab.
That’s ‘creeping’, man.
Mr. Avnery has already theorised that Sharon would use the US intervention in Iraq to drive the Palestinians out of the territories.
He’s quite prone to theorise the worst about Sharon and the best about Arafat. Now isn’t that special?
Just as Israel is responsible for its falings, the PA, not some theorised “Sharon strategy”, is responsible for its own.
josh wrote:
“you’d have a lot more credibility if you’d stop quoting Uri Avnery who travels to the Mukata every once in a while to act as a human shield. “
Uri Avnery fought in the Haganah and was injured in the 1948 war, was elected to the Knesset 3 times, and he wrote 3 biographies of Ariel Sharon – two of them (1973, 1981) with Sharon’s active cooperation
He knows Sharon personally for decades. That doesn’t mean he’s always going to be right about him, but he certainly does not lack credibility in my opinion.
josh continued:
The plan is for Sharon to ‘withdraw’ from the territories and wait for an excuse (like the ‘mega-attack’) to viciously return to the territories and massacre every last Arab.”
Sharon never said anything about withdrawing from the West Bank. In fact Netanyahu only spoke about pouring millions of shekels into expanding the settlements there
“JERUSALEM – Israel will invest tens of millions of dollars in West Bank settlements as it withdraws from the Gaza Strip, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday.”
[…]
“There, we are going to invest,” he said. “I myself am going to approve hundreds of millions of shekels to invest in the settlements [b]beyond the main fence[/b].”
NY Times
Jews didn’t drive any Arabs out in 1948.
The Arabs shooed the Arabs out.
velvel:
“That Ben-Gurion’s ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve his purpose…most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants…even [if] they had not participated in the war and had stayed in Israel hoping to live in peace and equality, as promised in the Declaration of Independence.”
-Israeli author, Simha Flapan, “The Birth of Israel.”
“During May [1948] ideas about how to consolidate and give permanence to the Palestinian exile began to crystallize, and the destruction of villages was immediately perceived as a primary means of achieving this aim…[Even earlier,] On 10 April, Haganah units took Abu Shusha… The village was destroyed that night… Khulda was leveled by Jewish bulldozers on 20 April… Abu Zureiq was completely demolished… Al Mansi and An Naghnaghiya, to the southeast, were also leveled. . .By mid-1949, the majority of [the 350 depopulated Arab villages] were either completely or partly in ruins and uninhabitable.”
-Benny Morris, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.
The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict
Hey Babylonian,
Let’s remember that the stated goal of the Arabs in 1948 was the complete annihilation of the Jews. The Arabs played for all the marbles and lost. We hear ad nauseum about the Arab villages and towns that were erased from the map in the wake of Israeli military victories. But none of this happenned in a vacuum. While some Arab villages that fell into Israeli hands were wiped out, ALL Jewish settlements that fell into Arab hands were completely obliterated.
These include Beit Ha’arava, on the shore of the Dead Sea and Atarot and Neve Ya’akov, north of Jerusalem; Kfar Darom, Yad Mordechai and Nitzanim, which were on the route of the invading Egyptian army; the four Etzion settlements south of Jerusalem (the residents of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion were massacred, the survivors of the other settlements were sent to captivity); the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem that surrendered to the besieging forces of the Trans-Jordanian Arab legion; Mishmar Hayarden, which was conquered by Syrian forces. Wherever an Arab army conquered a Jewish settlement, this settlement ceased to exist. The Arab ethnic cleansing was complete – not one Jewish settlement remained in Arab-controlled areas.
The rules of this game were clear from the outset, even if the Israelis were not as thorough in their application as the Arabs were. So please, I urge you to look at both sides of the coin and don’t ask me to have any pity on people who would, given the opportunity, do far worse things to me than had been done to them.
(info borrowed/lifted liberally from Moaz Azaryahu)
the source for babylonians usual dose of israeli hatred, the “origin of the palestinian israeli conlict”, is published by jews for justice in berkely, ca.; they are amonst the most virulent anti israelis out there. but kudos to bablylonia for revealing his sources. hey b, let us know when you next quote the protocols of zion.
Mr Brown,
leaving Gaza to save ‘settlement blocs’ is an empty promise for people who don’t think.
Once you retreat under fire from one area, you can go the whole 9 yards quite easily.
Just remind you of the calculated ‘pullback’ from Lebanon that turned into the retreat with our tail between our legs that some people claimed from the beginning.
Jewish pride and nation will be damaged once again, but Sharon doesn’t seem to care about that.