Israeli Kids Against Their Own Army & Killing of Innocent Palestinians

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.couchsurfing.org/group_read.html?gid=17133&post=11058064#gpid11058064


Israeli Kids Against Their Own Army & Killing of Innocent Palestinians


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNE7CXxcPZw&feature=share

http://december18th.org/

[RedAtheist]

Good on them for not joining in the oppression of the Palestinians. What kind of 'free' country sends people to jail for something like that? I will at least give them credit for having women in their army, though the fact that they force them to join undermines that.

My brothers have Israeli citizenship, but they got away with not serving in the army because they live in Australia. I do not know what I would do to them if they did end up joining the army.

This video also shows that opposing the Israeli occupation does not make you anti-Semite. Even their own citizens don't necessarily like what their government is doing. We need to unite with anti-Zionists who are citizens of Isreal.

Thanks for taking a stand for what you believe in.

[ckaihatsu]

Thanks for taking a stand for what you believe in.


Thanks. I consider it to be crucially important to note that the Zionist project well preceded World War II and the Holocaust. Here are some very good resources on that history:








After almost two millennia of existence of the Jewish diaspora without a national state, the Zionist movement was founded in the late 19th century by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to rising antisemitism in Europe, exemplified by the Dreyfus Affair in France and the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire.[6] The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in 1897 following the publication of his book Der Judenstaat.[7] At that time, the movement sought to encourage Jewish migration to the Ottoman Palestine.

Although initially one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to assimilation and antisemitism, Zionism grew rapidly and became the dominant force in Jewish politics with the destruction of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe where these alternative movements were rooted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism








John Rose



Israel: The Hijack State

The Origins of Zionism

Israel’s political philosophy is usually described as “Zionism”. This is a partly religious and partly historical idea that the world’s Jewish population has a claim on part of that territory of the Middle East that had been occupied by Palestinian Arabs for well over a thousand years. It was an idea of no significance whatsoever, until sustained outbreaks of anti-semitism (organised anti-Jewish feeling) in Europe in the late nineteenth century.

The religious origin of the idea is rooted in a series of Biblical myths that the Jews are God’s chosen people, that their dispersal at the time of the Roman Empire would only be temporary, and that the arrival of the Messiah (a role denied in Judaism to either Christ or Mohammed) would signal the regrouping of the Jews in Palestine, the land of their forefathers.

However powerful the myths might have been, at no time over the centuries have the Jews shown the slightest inclination to uproot themselves and return to the land of their religion’s founders. This is true notwithstanding the occasional pilgrimage to the “Holy City” of Jerusalem and the continuous restatement of the myths in the form of prayer.

In fact by the time the Zionist idea began to take shape as a modern movement of Jewish political conquest of Palestine in the 1880s and 1890s, no less than 90 per cent of the world’s entire Jewish population lived in Europe and Russia, and had been settled there as communities for centuries. In other words, they were distinctly European in both culture and physical appearance, and, of course, had made important contributions to European culture in the arts, in literature and in science.

Yet throughout this period the Jews often found themselves the victims of hatred and persecution. This was not simply a religious difference – though it often took a religious form. At bottom it was economic. The Jews were always a trading community, with their own religion and culture, which had developed in major towns of the Roman Empire and which persisted into feudal Europe. They played a role somewhat similar to the Chinese in South East Asia or the Asian communities in East Africa. And like these other ethnic groups, they were a convenient scapegoat for rulers wanting to divert popular hatred from themselves. So it was in medieval Europe that Jews were excluded from agriculture, the guild occupations and the professions and forced to act as moneylenders and “middlemen” – typically, in Poland, the richer Jews became managers of estates for absentee landlords, the poorer Jews became tinkers and petty traders – and both were regularly subject to the wrath of an oppressed peasantry. [1]

At the time of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and especially after the French Revolution, the Jews were progressively released from all these restrictions and began to play a full part at every level of society. However in Poland and in Russia, where a majority of the Jews were concentrated, all the backward features of feudal Europe clung on, despite deep convulsions for social change. Soon the deep revolutionary changes that had transformed the rest of feudal Europe would catch up with these countries. But the outdated rulers resisted this in any way they could. And one way was to make the Jews take the blame for the plight of the masses, for keeping them in fourteenth-century conditions. The Russian Czars, in particular, became expert at this. The pogrom, inciting the poor and wretched to massacre the Jews, became the standard mechanism used by the landlords and the Tsars of Russia for diverting hostility away from themselves.

A mass Jewish exodus began which would carry on into the twentieth century. The land of opportunity – indeed the promised land not only for the Jews but for millions of others fleeing persecution in Europe – was traditionally America. By the late 1920s more than three million Jews had quit Eastern Europe and Russia for America, over a 40-year period. Nearly half a million fled to Western Europe. By comparison, the 120,000 Jews who had arrived in Palestine by 1930 were a small minority.




In 1917, before the British had assumed control of the area, Weizmann was invited to secret discussions with the British government. These led to the famous “Balfour Declaration”, which both expressed British support for Zionist settlement in Palestine and Zionist acceptance of British control of Palestine. The Declaration promised a “national home for the Jewish people”. Winston Churchill understood the significance of a “national home for the Jewish people” only too well.

... a Jewish state under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four million Jews ... would from every point of view be beneficial and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire. [11]

The shadow of anti-semitism as a partner of Zionism rather than its polar opposite, as the Zionists would claim it to be, hung over the Balfour Declaration. Lord Balfour, the British minister in whose name the declaration was signed, had enthusiastically campaigned for the introduction of the British Aliens Act in 1905 – which aimed deliberately at stemming further Jewish immigration into Britain.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/hijack/4-origin.htm








International Socialist Review Issue 4, Spring 1998

Israel: The U. S. Watchdog

By Lance Selfa


THE ESTABLISHMENT of the state of Israel coincided with the rise of the Middle East as an oil producer and with the displacement of Britain by the U.S. as the main imperialist power in the region. Until the Second World War, imperialist strategists considered the Middle East primarily as a passageway to trade in the Far East. But in the 1930s and 1940s, according to a U.S. oil industry report prepared in that period, "The center of gravity of world oil production is shifting from the Mexican Gulf and the Caribbean area to the Middle East-Persian Gulf area and is likely to continue to shift until it is firmly established in that area." 1

The U.S. wasn't the only power to recognize the Middle East's importance in the aftermath of the Second World War. So did the other major superpower, the USSR. In 1947, the USSR voted with the U.S. to approve the partition of Palestine in the United Nations. Later, in 1948, a shipment of Soviet Bloc arms from Czechoslovakia to the Zionist Haganah militia aided Israel's conquest of Palestine. 2 In the geopolitics of the time, the U.S. and Russia competed to win allies in the Third World to their side. Both the Russians and the U.S. considered the loss of an ally an automatic gain for the other side. Although it seems absurd today, some U.S. Zionists argued for U.S. support on grounds that failure to aid Israel would drive the Jewish state to seek support from the USSR. "The United States is going to have to grant sufficient financial support to the present Israeli regime to avoid seeing the country go bust and perhaps swing into Communist hands," wrote The New York Times' Cyrus L. Sulzberger in 1948. 3

Nevertheless, Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion knew that the USSR could not provide the kind of financial and military aid to Israel that the U.S. and American Zionist organizations could. They continued to woo the U.S. to become Israel's chief patron. The U.S. took the first step to underwriting the Israeli venture in 1949, when it extended a $100 million loan to Israel from the newly created Export-Import Bank. The U.S. justified its support for Israel as necessary to counteract "the Soviet threat" to the Middle East oil fields. But its true enemy was rising nationalism in the region.

[...]

http://www.isreview.org/issues/04/Israel_watchdog.shtml