OK then let's all get rid of our computers, which use ISRAELI technology to run.
Next time the doctor offers me some medical ais, I'll be certain to ask if any Jews (er I mean Isra-ay-lees) were involved in the research and development of the medicine or technology.

Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Toshiba etc all utilize technology developed in Israel.

Soo, I plan to trash my computer and reject medical aid. I'll wait until the peace loving Arabs develop the stuff.
 http://www.science.co.il/Electronics-Companies.asp?s=medical

Why are you blaming the entire Middle East conflict on Israel? The Palestinians have hardly been pacifists have they? They carried out and still carry out a brutal terrorist campaign which has cost tens of thousands of innocent lives since 1967. How can you condemn one side without condemning the other? Also if the Palestinians had never took up arms against Israel in the first place, none of them would have been killed or injured. You don't seem to realise how the Palestinians suffering has been self inflicted.

Surely if you're gonna boycott goods it should be from all powers who control the world. That is US/UK/Israel/China/etc
all these countries are responsible for the deaths of millions of people throughout history be that by using economic imperialism or war.
As for concerned. You are absolutely right. Why should people take up weapons when their land is being seized by another country. And of course lets not forget the loving nature of the Israeli occupation army when an Israeli general was asked why they killed a 3 year old girl running to avoid the military raid he responded 'thats one less future terrorist'.

"Why are you blaming the entire Middle East conflict on Israel?"

Nobody is, simply the conflict with the Palestinians, which began with the arrival of secular Zionists from Europe, followed by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from the region now referred to as "Israel".

ORIGINS OF THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT
Published By
Jews For Justice in the Middle East
 http://www.google.ca/search?q=origins+of+the+israel-palestine+conflict+-+jews+for+justice&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

"The Palestinians have hardly been ..."

Compared to the decades-long, state-sponsored program of military aggression and Apartheid levelled at the Palestinian People, which continues to this day, these sporadic and small-scale actions are the least Resistance Zionism could hope for.

"How can you condemn one side without condemning the other?"

If Zionism had never arrived in the region to polarize Jews and Arabs, and manipulate Judaism to achieve its own political and financial goals, none of this would be happening now. If Zionism had recognized the Palestinian State which the UN created, when it created Israel, as a way to end the conflict, none of this would be happening. If Zionism, today, ended its aggression and slow annexation of Palestine, none of this would be happening.

That's why.

Likewise, I don't condemn the Iraqi Resistance, because their armed resistance is legitimized under the law, because the US/UK are the aggressors. Same deal.

"Also if the Palestinians had never took up arms against Israel in the first place, none of them would have been killed or injured."

Thousands of them were killed, and hundreds of thousands ethnically cleansed, their villages destroyed and erased from the maps, before the Palestinian took up arms.

Contrary to common perception, Jewish anti-Zionism is not restricted exclusively to the well know Jewish anti-Zionist movements such as Satmar and Neturei Karta.

There are in fact many Jewish movements, groups and organizations whose ideology regarding Zionism and the so-called "State of Israel" is that of the unadulterated Torah position that any form of Zionism is heresy and that the existence of the so-called "State of Israel" is illegitimate.

No one has had to create any antagonism between our Torah and Zionism because such antagonism exists by virtue of the essence of Judaism itself, which can never tolerate the heresy of Zionism.

Zionism is wrong from the Torah viewpoint, not because many of its adherents are lax in practice or even anti-religious, but because its fundamental principle conflicts with the Torah.

Unfortunately, due to many undesirable factors, the view of Torah-true Jewry has been concealed from the general public.

We, the staff at www.jewsnotzionists.org are delighted that with the advance in media technology a substantial benefit to researchers, students, and the general public has been made available. We are elated at the advantage which the internet provides for the presentation of and accessibility to a position so widely held yet so deliberately ignored by many a Zionist-inclined medium.

It is our hope that the information presented on this site will be of benefit to all and that we soon merit the peaceful dismantlement of the so-called "State of Israel" and that Jewish-Muslim brotherhood be restored as prior to the arrival of the Zionist scheme on the global scene.

* The Difference Between Zionism and Judaism
* Why Is World Jewry Opposed to the Zionist State?

 http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/

Jews against Zionism
A list of websites opposed to Israel's policies
 http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/jews_against_zionism.html

Guide to Israeli/Zionist Hasbara (Propaganda) from the WUJS.
Replace "Jewish" With "Zionist" in this group's name, since it represents another example of Zionism attempting to hide itself and manipulate Jews for its own agenda.
 http://www.wujs.org.il/activist/campaigns/hasbara.shtml

"Oppose Apartheid"

Israel is hardly an "apartheid" state. Repeating the mantra over and over again just doesn't make it so.
However, if you're truly opposed to Apartheid States, then it is in your best interest to boycott all petroleum products.
35% of OPEC's oil comes from Apartheid Saudi Arabia. The majority of the remaider of OPEC's oil comes from other Arab Apartheid states.

So, every time you top off your tank, you're financing Apartheid. Plastic products and petrochemicals too!

Arthur all I can say to you is if you are in doubt about the status of Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel then go ther and see for yourself.

Palestinians live a hell where their land is taken everyday, for no other reason than the Zionists regard it as their land . They are regarded by the settlers as people with no rights to their own land since they believe God gave Zionist nutters their 'divine right' to the state of Israel.They live under constant siege from the IDF and murder by ak47 wielding settlers.
Daily incursions house demolition and murder is the order of the day. Unemployment is 70% . Sharon has only pulled out of Gaza to strengthen his grip in the occupation of the West Bank and annex West Jerusalem while basking under the glow of respectability bought from the international community, disengaing from Gaza and freeing up the army to continue the real project , driving the Palestinians out of the West Bank, Having reduced them to misery, poverty and starvation by surrounding them by an 8 metere Iron curtain on all sides. the Palestians are the bravest strongest people resisting a terrible occupation ;for which the British government is largely responsible through its duplicitous Balfour declaration in 1917 promising Palestine first to the Arabs and then to Zionists to shore up support from the American government in WW1 .
The Zionist mission is born of racism turned in on itself. It is a state built on fear and the collusion of the powerful at the expense of the weak and the downtrodden

"Israel is hardly an "apartheid" state."

Israel is, by its very creation, the DEFINITION of an Apartheid State.

I notice you couldn't respond to anything I said previously.

Justin Keating On Israel



I have a tree in Israel, and I once had a certificate to prove it. In about 1950 a lady from a Zionist organisation planted it for my support of the Zionist Youth Movement in Ireland. But it is all so long ago that it has probably been cut down by now, and I have lost the certificate. At the time, like many young Europeans with left-wing views, as the full horrors of Nazi genocide became known, I supported the new state. But now I have totally changed my mind.

I have reached the conclusion that the Zionists have absolutely no right in what they call Israel, that they have built their state not beside but on top of the Palestinian people, and that there can be no peace as long as contemporary Israel retains its present form. I hasten to make clear that none of this gives me any pleasure, but in the great scheme of things my personal wishes do not weigh heavily in the scale pans of history. I wish I did not think what I do, I hope I am wrong. My conclusions are based on the answers to five questions.

1. Did the Jews of the Old Testament come from what is now Israel? The answer is No.

2. Are the Jews of the world today simply the descendants of the people of the Diaspora two thousand years ago? The answer is, only in part.

3. Does the right of return apply to people who occupied some land two thousand years ago for a historically brief period, to the detriment of those who have been there since? Obviously no. Imagine a world where every people claimed that right.

4. Did the Balfour Declaration give the Zionists the right to establish a state in Israel? The answer is no. At the time the British Government had no right to give.

5. Did the United Nations Resolution of November 1947 give Zionists the right to establish the present state of Israel? The answer is no, and they have continuously and relentlessly violated that resolution for more than half a century, so that any tatters that now remain are void, by their action.

I want briefly to look at each point separately. Some of what I say is taken from a book called My People by Abba Eban, who was Israeli Foreign Minister. He says the Hebrew Tribes came out of Mesopotamia. They moved from Ur in southwest Mesopotamia to Haran, in northwest Mesopotamia. It was here that Abraham was told, by the God that the Jews had invented to leave his land and kinsmen for a new country. Obedient to the divine voice, he moved into western Palestine, the land of the Canaanites. The above is loosely but accurately quoted from Eban. It follows that the Jews came from far away, that they claimed the land of Canaan because their God gave it to them, and there were Canaanites there already. Israel's Declaration of Independence in 1948 states, "The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people." This was a self serving and untruthful Zionist myth.

My second point is that the assumption that the Jews of the world (all of whom claim the right of return) are descendants of the Diaspora takes no account of the Kingdom of the Khazars, about whom Arthur Koestler wrote a book arguing that he and other Ashkanazi Jews were their descendents. Also, it assumes that no Jewish girl ever got pregnant (over 2,000 years) by a non-Jew, and brought the child home to her parents, and it also forgets that the converted wives or husbands who were born non-Jewish can, on conversion, claim the right of return.

Point three: At the time of the Balfour Declaration, the Ottoman Empire, which was the ruling power in Palestine, was falling apart, but the British Government had no rights in the area. The Declaration was made to a private person, the head of the Rothschild family, and while Balfour was promising the Jews a nation home in Palestine, T.E. Lawrence was promising the same thing to Palestinian Arabs. In law and in equity it has no validity.

Finally, when the United Nations passed its historic resolution (with Britain abstaining) it was a plan for partition. What was new and crucial was that it recognized Jewish sovereignty. The flight of the ignorant Palestinian peasants was founded on such atrocities as the massacre at Deir Yasin where Zionist terrorists filled the well with slaughtered peasants, and went to adjoining villages saying, "Look what happened over there." In addition, there were bogus broadcasts purporting to come from Palestinian leaders, advising flight. The Jewish-Arab partnership, pleaded for so eloquently by David Ben Gurion -"based on equality and mutual assistance," to quote his words - was from the beginning a lie which Zionist fundamentalists did not believe.

Those same fundamentalists, who are in the ascendant now, can only say, "We are here because our God gave it to us." That is too weak for me I'm afraid.

All of this is a huge tragedy for ordinary Zionist people, who have been led up a blind alley by fanatics. But it is more. Jews have made an immense contribution to civilization, developing as they were between the great empires of Mesopotamia and the Nile, with both of which they had intimate contact, and by which they wanted to avoid being swallowed. They developed a religion and an ethos based on independence, liberty and democracy to which we all owe a debt. That religion is based on the twin concepts of Law and Righteousness, which inspired over the millennia extraordinary contributions to culture and morality. All admirable. In Israel/Palestine, where are they now?

Zionists have betrayed all of this, and that is a tragedy not just for Jews, but for all of us.

Palestine/Israel is a strange place; here separateness is valorized by many decent people and presented as the "peace option" and the not-so-nice-ones openly preach ethnic cleansing. Yet those who preach ethnic cleansing are often viewed as persons that "we can do business with". In South Africa, apartheid was regarded by the world as the problem; here in Israel they, and much of the rest of the world, present it as the solution.

For many otherwise decent people who do not experience dispossession and discrimination on a daily basis, stability in its preferred and somehow morally elevated package as "peace" becomes the single most important objective that one must yearn for. Thus, "we support the peace process" becomes a mantra for "decent people." Yet, a refusal to connect with other people can sometimes be part of a broader struggle to ensure that connectedness is ultimately a just one, that "niceness" and "peace" do not become substitutes for justice and integrity. "Wouldn't it nice if that abused woman stopped embarrassing her husband by screaming out so loud when she is being beaten?" "Why can't she get on with the business of being a good mother?" "Will someone please pacify her?" Questions such as "who do we want to connect with?", "to what end?" and "whose peace?" are important to consider if we do not want to be taken for a ride - unless, of course, we want to be taken for a ride.

I come from a country where we called upon the conscience of the world to stay away from it; where we expected all 'decent' people to heed the call for economic, academic and cultural sanctions against South Africa. Chief Albert Luthuli, a father of our nation and a Noble Peace Prize winner, appealed to the world as early as 1960:
"We welcome most heartily the action of the overseas people in launching the boycott [...] Our hope really is this: that we can bring pressure to bear on South Africa and that through this pressure South Africa will change its way of dealing with non-Europeans... We know as African people that we, as [an] oppressed people, will never gain our freedom without suffering. But to us it is a demonstration of the solidarity of the freedom-loving peoples throughout the world [...] We must pursue our policy of non-violence up to the limit [...] We, therefore, welcome your decision to boycott [...,] as we are convinced that nothing but good can flow out of all efforts directed against defeating a policy which seeks to perpetuate Afrikaner domination and economic exploitation of the millions of African people." ('Boycott Us,' Spectator, 12 February 1960, 208.
Investors and tourists, some of them probably nice folk, still came - claiming innocence and being "apolitical" - and we despised them. They came at the invitation of 'White' South Africa. They had the money and the freedom to do with it as they pleased. The White dominated economy of South Africa needed their money as much as the pimps of some other country need the sex tourists. Many of these tourists to South Africa returned to their homes, not surprisingly, enchanted with what our country had to offer and ignorant of any reality beyond the bodies that smiled at them and satisfied them. "Oh, I have been to South Africa myself and, don't be fooled by all this propaganda; the Blacks are really very happy there."

Apartness

Apartness is not unique to Palestine/Israel as any church-goer in the USA can testify; Even in the post-apartheid South Africa, the vast majority of Whites have never been in a Coloured or Black township and most Coloureds and Indians have never been in a Black one. When apartness is elevated to dogma and ideology and when it is enforced though the law and its agencies - and this is ultimately what Apartheid is - then we are dealing with something particularly horrific, no matter how genuine the trauma that gave birth to it and regardless of the religious depth of the exclusivist beliefs underpinning it all. How we respond to our own trauma and the indifference of the world - indeed its culpability, even if only by silence - never justifies traumatizing others or an indifference to theirs. Apartness then not only becomes a sound foundation for ignorance of the other with whom one shares a common space - but also a basis for denying the suffering and humiliation that the other undergoes as a consequence of one's one rather expansive approach to 'being' in the world or to deal with one's own trauma.

For a South African the sense of deja vu is inescapable - almost immediately upon arrival in the land of Palestine/Israel. Let me re-phrase that; for a South African who has lived - or just survived - under Apartheid or who acted in solidarity with those who did - it is a fairly simple matter to be struck by this enforced separateness. In some ways, all of us are the children of our histories - the relevance of our own stories and sadly, the irrelevance of the stories of others. Yet, we also choose to be struck by the stories of others. Perhaps this ability to be struck by the stories of others is what is called morality. We cannot always act upon what we see but we always have the freedom to see. We choose to be struck and the extent that we exercise this choice is perhaps the barometer of our humanness.

Words - Who Owns Them?

Post modernist thinkers, feminists, liberation theologians and other progressive scholars have long since debunked the myth of objectivity and insisted on 'disclosure' as a precondition to dialogue; tell us about your class and gender interest? What are the lenses with which you view the world? A denial of lenses is really tantamount to the acceptance of a dominant status quo. It's a bit like the word 'mankind.' 'Oh,' the supposedly ideologyless argue, 'why do you want to politicize words and make a fuss about language? When we say 'mankind' we really include women!' Uninterrogated, language often functions as an instrument of subjugation. In this myth of language as neutral, the use of the alternative and more inclusive 'humankind' is dismissed as 'political' and political correctness, as a fad of nostalgic hippies who have not smelt the coffee heralding the end of the Sixties, rather than viewed part of a quest for greater gender justice - however flawed and inadequate.

When I walk through the districts where sex is on sale; I can choose to see it through they eyes of the 'sex tourist' or through the eyes of the sex worker sold into the trade or driven by their poverty and exploitation into it. I choose to look at Palestine/Israel though the eyes of the marginalized and the exploited and I choose to privilege this perspective over other perspectives.

So is it "sex tourism" or "sexual exploitation?" Or worse, is it a refusal to name it and a preference to speak about the seemingly neutral "just having some fun" or "relaxation?" It depends on where you are located in the power structure.

I am astonished at how ordinarily decent people whose "hearts are in the right place" equivocate when it comes to Israel and the dispossession and suffering of the Palestinians. And now I wonder about the nature of "decency." Does "objectivity," "moderation," and "both sides" not have contexts? Is "moderation" in matters of manifest injustice really a virtue? Do both parties deserve an "equal hearing" in a situation of domestic violence where a woman gets beaten up by a male who was abused by his father some time ago because "he, too, is a victim?" Why must someone else suffer because the husband was abused by some other male yesterday?

When we reduce the problem to "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" - or worse, the "Israeli-Arab conflict," or "the Middle East situation;" what does it really say about us, our own power interest and our refusal to have our comfort zones disturbed? To describe violence against women as just that risks alienating the male partner. If that abusive male husband is also our business partner, or possibly one"s boss, or one"s primary funder, then things can get really sticky. So we walk away saying, "I do not want to get into the middle of all of this" or we delude ourselves with seemingly conciliatory mutterings without ever addressing the question of abuse.

We are in the middle of it because we do business with the abusive husband (or we profit from his abuse of his wife) and we sustain his delusions that he is OK, a part of the civilized crowd. We seek refuge in "both sides have a story to tell" as a way of dodging our own complicity. Rather than us merely hallowing the abuser with the mantel of respectability, our silence draws us into a web of complicity. (As indeed, can be the effect of an uncritical solidarity with the victims of oppression.) However small a minority they may have been, only those who refused to turn a blind eye to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis were civilized; only those who refused to be silent were civilized; all others had Jewish blood on their hands. Talking about the "Jewish-German conflict," or the "Black-White situation," or "marital problems" in the face of manifest injustice and domestic abuse is no great virtue; it is the path of, initially, acquiescence and, ultimately, complicity.

Farid Esack is a South African academic and journalist who was appointed South Africa’s Commissioner for Gender Equality under Nelson Mandela, and today Professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, in the United States.

"
Palestinians live a hell where their land is taken everyday, for no other reason than the Zionists regard it as their land "

Being emotive is great when you're trying to impress a babe at a peace rally. It shows your "feminine " side and points to the fact that your really care for the plight of brown people.
The unfortunate reality is, that the vast majority of "palestinians" hold Jordanian passports. That makes them Jordanians. Jordan invaded "palestinian" land in 1948, precisely to PREVENT the creation of an new independent Arab nation. Jordan annexed "palestinian" land, and built ilegal settlements fro Arabs from a variety of Arab nations. The Jews were ethnically cleansed and holy places were destroyed. They allowed the UN to take care of the Arabs that they locked into "refugee" camps. Insuring that they would be forver living on the dole, and impoverised. Unfortunately for them, Jordan abandoned them after twenty years of occupation, when they lost their aggressive war, The Six Day War. Allah (swt) took sides in those summer days of 1967, causing Israel to totally defeat the combined foreces of 14 Arab armies, in Six Days.
Jordan REFUSED to negotiate the return of the west bank.

Many of the "palestinians" arrived AFTER the creation of Israel, looking for jobs INSIDE Israel.
Many of the local Arabs stayed and became citizens of Israel, preferring not to live among their Aab brothers. They enjoy MORE rights than Arabs living in Arab nations (with the exception of the Royal families, dictators and their kin.)
Yasser lived quite well, fattening his Swiss accounts with "palestinian" money. Suha was forced to live in Paris on the paltry sum of $100000 per month, and that was just the hotel bill.

That's supposed to justify Zionist Ethnic Cleasning of Palestinian villages, Apartheid, and the continued oppression and campaign of aggression towards an entire People?

Look. How are the oppressed ever going to bring about a state of harmony with such nationalistic vitriole being spat. Fuck Palestine and Fuck Israel. Fuck all forms of Statism. Regarding the boycott, exactly how is NOT buying the Israeli chocolate bar or soft-drink really going to make a positive difference. You fail to realise that all these products are made by lowly paid factory workers, both Israeli and Arab, who have little more to do with the continuing bloodshed than the ex-Rover workers' were accountable for Britain's foray into Iraq. By your reasoning, we should abstain from buying British (lest we prop up the economy that's funding the current war), buying American, buying Australian, etc etc. The exercise becomes entirely futile given we are dominated by a global economy- i.e. one that is bigger and badder than the sum of its constituent economies.
We need solidarity among the working classes, all the more that we are being exploited and brainwashed with notions of national pride by governments that would have us, not THEM, fighting on the front lines. Its trite, but true; we're dealing here with mere dots on a map. Surely you can recognise the idiocy.

boycott all boycotts and buy everything you want, now, borrow as much money as you can then declare bankruptcy. If everyone did this the capitalist system would collapse.