Tear gas, babies, Palestine, video activism

'Israel invaded Palestien in 1967' .... well, yes ... but have you not omitted what preceeded that? Have you not left out a rather important fact? You write as if the Israeli state just upped and 'invaded Palestine'. To omit the fact that what preceeded this invasion was an attack aimed at the liquidation of the Israeli state seems to somewhat astonishing.

And furthermore Israel did not "invade Palestine". The West Bank was under the brutal control of Jordan, and Gaza was under the incredibly brutal control of Egypt. Both their occupations were illegal, Jordan's only being recognised by Britain and Pakistan for example. There was no "Palestine" to be invaded, only areas under brutal tyrannies by Arab dictatorships. And the PLO was set up in 1964/5 (?) by Egypt, and it stated in its founding charter that it did not exercise any territorial control over the West Bank and Gaza, and did not object to their current status (brutal and illegal control by Arab tyrannies), and set about attacking Israeli civilians.

Israel in fact liberated these territories, which had been neglected, particularly Gaza which was kept deliberately in utter poverty, and their economies and so on improved massively as Israel allowed Palestinian Arab workers into Israel, and to cross over into Jordan for the markets, to see families, work, etc (despite the problem of terrorist inflitrators). Israel decided upon a hands-off policy, and Palestinian Arabs would rarely even see an Israeli soldier. They even organised elections for town mayors and so on, despite the fact that extremists and PLO terrorist supporters often won these.

Oh and you ask what the difference was with Kuwait. Well with Kuwait Saddam Hussein invaded it for aggressive reasons, immediately announced its annexation to Iraq, committed all sorts of atrocities and so on, terrorised Kuwait's population, looted it, etc. With these territories the Arab Nazi-style tyrannies were about to launch a genocidal aggressive war against Israel with the stated aim of massacring basically all its civilians, and Israel took a pre-emptive strike to get the upper hand in battle. Immediately after the war Israel offered to return the territories (conquered in a defensive war) to the Arabs in exchange for peace, but the Arabs refused to even negotiate.

Do these so called ISM people with such a lack of understanding of the historical conflict really exist. Or is it just some Nazi in an East London bedsit?

IM is now so riddled with anti Jewish sentiment that it can no longer be considered an independent voice. The self decided rules of censorship mean posts critical of Islam and removed within a few minutes of appearing while those critical of Judaism are kept with the cry of "free speech" used to justify it.

The Far Right is using the legitimate concern over the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories to ally with the Palestinian support groups in the UK.

"Israel in fact liberated these territories, which had been neglected, particularly Gaza which was kept deliberately in utter poverty."

Unlike the current israeli policy which helps living standards by having apache helicopters use laser guided missiles to destroy water pumping and purification plants which the EU taxpayers paid for......


Morning: israel calls upon arafat to arrest hamas members.....
Afternoon: arafat says he'll arrest terrorists
Evening: some low level hamas members arrested and put in jail
Midnight: israel conducts airstrikes on these jails killing both hamas members and palestinian police officers.

And yet israel are the poor victims of terrorists...I cant think why?


Comments welcome

The pro-Israel comments above are totally irrelevant to the present situation
in this region.

The simple fact is that a country that posesses nuclear weapons, that
receives over 40% of total US aid and, mostly in the form of the most sophisicated weapons in the world today, is using its military might ot intimidate, terrorise and humiliate one of the poorest people's on this planet. Anyone who cares about justice
and basic human rights must stand up and oppose this naked use of crude military might by Israel.

The significant minority of the the Israeli public that opposes it's governmnet's policy
should be listened to, not the voices of the apologists for the crude, vicious and sickening policies of the Israeli government.

"one of the poorest people's on this planet"

Before the current intifada, most Palestinians were wealthier and healthier than the majority of Arabs, e.g in Libya, Saudi, Egypt. However, since the intifada (Arafat's war on women and children) their standard of living has decreased as a direct result of the PA's sadism and neanderthal stupidity.

When the PA spends the billions upon billions showered upon in by the West on Suha Arafat and massive amounts of weapons, if they're short of food... they should hold off the £500m explosives order and fucking buy some.

Go ask the Palestinians if they feel 'liberated' by the Israeli Occupation Army.

Living under occupation means having to wait at checkpoints for hours, perhaps never being able to go to work, it means a constant risk of having your house demolished, it means giving birth a checkpoints because ambluances aren't allowed through, it means having your farmland stolen from you by the apartheid wall, it means you can be shot by a bullet through your window while you're sitting at home, or blown up in a missile attack, or arrested and held without charge for months and years. It means being tortured in custody.

About 50 percent of ISM ARE Jewish. Stop co-opting the term Jewish to mean hard-core zionist. Most of my personal heroes are Jewish, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Albert Einstein, Marc Ellis, and these guys are or were not zionist in the way you use it, and many are the heftiest critics of zionism. I remember working out there with an AMerican Jewish grandmother, who had lived in Israel. She told me she had gone out there to follow a beautiful dream, and to build the Jewish state. 'But I saw it turn into the Nazi state', were her words, and she left the country, and now campaigns for Palestinian rights.

Zionism is anti-semitism, in my opinion. Nationalism is one of the crudest forms of human expression, and to tie it so closely to Judaism, along with all the oppression and loss of dignity that goes with it, is a tragedy, and a dis-service to the Jewish people. Zionism is vulgar, in the same way the BNP is vulgar.

Yeah we know, the state of Israel was "threatened" so it made a "pre-emptive strike" .....

Hmmmm

"The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weitzman, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was 'no threat of destruction' but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could 'exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.'...Menahem Begin had the following remarks to make: 'In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.' "Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."

The late Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhaq Rabin, assassinated by a Jewish fanatic Igal Ameer in 1995 affirms that Egypt did not want to attack Israel.

"I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it." Rabin said in an article published in Le Monde French paper on 2/28/68 as he was Israel's Chief of Staff in 1967.

Furthermore, The New York Times, May 11, 1997 said in an article that Moshe Dayan, the Minister of defense at the time admitted that Israel provoked the war on the Syrian side and occupied the Golan Heights out of greed for more land.

"Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander who, as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the Golan...[said] many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland...[Dayan stated] 'They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land...We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot, and then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was...The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.'"

 http://www.mediamonitors.net/mazin28.html

Of course, the Palestinians still threaten the almighty, US funded State of Israel.......

Funny that!

Many an ISMer being turned away as a threat to the State of Israel at the moment .......

Now, theres nowt so scarey as a protestor whose made a commiment to non-violent direct action - I bet Sharon is shitting his pants permanently.

Or maybe, just maybe, they're erm playing up this security number to justify their little genocide programme.

Heh. along with help from the faithful scaredy cats on here........

In 1967, on the eve of war, Fatah said that when the Arab armies came victoriously into Israel all Israeli citizens who were not born there, but emigrated there, would have to leave. When a journalist reminded him that that would be most Israeli civilians, the Fatah leader said that those that were born there could stay, be he expected that most of them would not survive. I.e. Fatah was planning, or expecting, a genocide. If the Arab states weren't planning to attack but were just pretending to, Fatah certainly was fooled by it.

Nasser's rhetoric was becoming increasingly angry and threatening, and for example in, I think, 1965 he said that he would not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, they would enter it with its soil covered in blood. Can't be bothered to look for all the quotes, but they're there. Oh, not relevant to this but interesting, in a 1961 interview with a German neo-Nazi magazine he said that he and his collegeaues had wanted the Nazis to win the war, and incidently Nasser was working in Egypt in the pro-Nazi faction that wanted to overthrow the government and ally with Nazi Germany.

It was clear from all the actions of the Arab states that they intended to attack Israel. Whether in fact it may all have been a big bluff seems very unlikely given all their actions or statements. And Begin is right btw, Nasser's troop concentations didn't PROVE that he was planning to attack, and Israel DID make the choice for war. Israel could have sat it out and hoped that Nasser would eventually back down, and wouldn't launch an attack, or could be pressured to do so by the UN or America or something. That was an option. Another option was to take a pre-emptive strike, giving Israel a greater advantage than if she was attacked first, and working under the assumption that Nasser probably was intending to attack and there was going to be a war, and therefore Israel should get the advantage by attacking first (and Nasser should be denied the chance to arm even more and prepare even more for war).

Israel only took the West Bank because Jordan entered the war. Israel warned Hussein not to enter, but he did nevertheless and lost territory as a result. Immediately after the war Israel offered to give back basically all territory in exchange for peace, and the Arabs refused even to negotiate (unprecedented in the history of warfare that the victor should immediately offer to return all conquests btw).

If the paramilitary group ISM are truly committed to the jihad against Israeli democracy, they should be prepared to be shot on sight if caught infiltrating Israel. And the truth is, the ISM's sole purpose is the campaign for the extermination of Jews by Arab imperialists.

.... now, as it happens, if they don't know what they did, then I fail to see how anyone else can.........

But the "security" issue does sound like a scam when a US Bankrolled sate, with the worlds 4th most powerful army is terrified of a a rag tag bunch of militants (under its control for 37 years) and a bunch of non-violent protestors from the west.

I just can't get the image of Ariel shitting his pants over a 44 year peace activist from the States out of my head..............

Fucking war criminals are going soft or summat......

Lol - Arab Imperialists and peacenik palamilitaries.

What a twisted reality you have .

War is peace

Love is hate

Freedom is slavery

_ keep taking the pills.........

Pish, those quotes in freethepeeps post come from leaders of the zionist movement.

Are you calling the leaders of the zionist movement liars?

Well, I'm certainly inclined to agree with you...

Don't forget that there was the 1956 war as well, and an incident known as the Lavon Affair, which soured Egyptian/Israeli relations.

From what has been said FROM THE HORSES MOUTH, these wars were hoped for by a far stronger Israeli army as a way of expanding and taking more territory. It is well known that a major stream of thought was the idea of Greater Israel, and any pretext was used as a way of expanding.


1956

The facts concerning the Sinai war come from Israeli sources. An authoritative contribution exploding the myth of Israel's accusations are the relevations from former Prime Minister Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary (Moshe Sharett, Yoman Ishi, Ma'ariv, 1979, in Hebrew with portions trans. in Livia Rokach, Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary and Other Documents, AAUG, 1980).

The main reason often given for the origin of the 1956 war was Egypt's closing of the Suez Canal. Moshe Sharett reveals that the Israeli leadership was planning the territorial conquest of the Sinai and Gaza as early as the fall of 1953. The Israeli attack on Gaza in February 1955 was a conscious preliminary act of war. David Ben-Gurion became Prime Minister and Israel soon became very aggressive.

On 28 February 1955 Israeli troops invaded Gaza killing 37 Egyptians and wounding 31. The attack was unprovoked. Egyptian President Gamal Nasser said it "was revenge for nothing. Everything was quiet there" (Kennett Love, Suez: the Twice Fought War, McGraw-Hill, 1969, p. 83). The Chief of Staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation, Swedish General Carl von Horn, confirmed Nasser's claim, saying that there had been

"comparative tranquility along the armistice demarcation lines during the greater part of the period November 1954 to February 1955" (Report to the Security Council, UN Doc. S3373, 17 March 1955).

In the 1950s few people believed that Nasser had aggressive intentions towards Israel. Richard Grossman, a British Zionist, wrote in 1955 that:

"not only Egypt, but the whole Middle East must pray that Nasser survives the assassin's bullet. I am certain that he is a man who means what he says, and that so long as he is in power directing his middle-class revolution, Egypt will remain a factor for peace and social development" (Richard Grossman, New Statesman and Nation, 22 January 1955).

The events in Gaza changed that. Arab public opinion was outraged and demanded action. Nasser needed arms to equip his army which was hopelessly outgunned by Israel. Western Intelligence was convinced that Egypt had no intention of attacking Israel. The Americans rebuffed Nasser in any case and Egypt turned to the Russians who orchestrated the famous Czech arms deal which was used by Israel for feigned outrage. The Russians had also used the Czechs to supply arms to Israel in 1948.

Nasser did not realise that he was being set up for the Israeli invasion, although he did recognise that the situation was heating up. In October 1955, a year before the war, Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion ordered his Chief of Staff, General Moshe Dayan, to prepare invasion plans. Ben Gurion was determined, according to Dayan,

"not to miss any politically favorable opportunity to strike at Egypt" (Moshe Dayan, Diary of the Sinai Campaign, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, p. 37).

Dayan expressed the hopes of the Israeli leadership when he said in December 1955:

"One of these days a situation will be created which makes military action possible" (Kennet Love, Suez: The Twice Fought War, McGraw-Hill, 1969, p. 106).

The opportunity to make war against Egypt came in July 1956 when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, an act within the legal right of the Egyptian state. The Suez Canal was controlled by foreigners in 1956 and was seen as an important symbol of colonialism to the Arab people. Nasser's action was popular, although France and Britain, looking to keep control of this important trade route, colluded in a secret alliance with Israel to invade the Sinai and destroy Nasser.

On 29 October 1956 Israel attacked Egypt and occupied the entire Sinai. French war equipment poured into Israel and French and British warships bombarded the Egyptian coast. French and British troops landed and helped the Israeli armed forces. Eisenhower, who had been in the dark about the invasion plans and the secret alliance, demanded that Israeli forces withdraw from Egyptian territory. Israel refused, leading Eisenhower to exclaim:

"Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of U.N. disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal? If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the purpose of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order..." (Address to the nation, 20 February 1957).



The Lavon Affair

In July 1954 Egypt was plagued by a series of bomb outrages directed mainly against American and British property in Cairo and Alexandria. It was generally assumed that they were the work of the Moslem Brothers, then the most dangerous challenge to the still uncertain authority of Colonel (later President) Nasser and his two-year-old revolution. Nasser was negotiating with Britain over the evacuation of its giant military bases in the Suez Canal Zone, and, the Moslem Brothers, as zealous nationalists, were vigorously opposed to any Egyptian compromises.

It therefore came as a shock to world, and particularly Jewish opinion, when on 5 October the Egyptian Minister of the Interior, Zakaria Muhieddin, announced the break-up of a thirteen-man Israeli sabotage network. An 'anti-Semitic' frame-up was suspected.


Indignation increased when, on 11 December, the group was brought to trial. In the Israeli parliament, Prime Minister Moshe Sharett denounced the 'wicked plot hatched in Alexandria ... the show trial which is being organized there against a group of Jews who have fallen victims to false accusations and from who mit seems attempts are being made to extract confessions of imaginary crimes, by threats and torture . . .'49 The trade union newspaper Davar observed that the Egyptian regime 'seems to take its inspiration from the Nazis' and lamented the 'deterioration in the status of Egyptian Jews in general'.50 For Haaretz the trial 'proved that the Egyptian rulers do not hesitate to invent the most fantastic accusations if it suits them'; it added that 'in the present state of affairs in Egypt the junta certainly needs some diversions'.51 And the next day the Jerusalem Post carried this headline: 'Egypt Show Trial Arouses Israel, Sharett Tells House. Sees Inquisition Practices Revived.'


The trial established that the bombings had indeed been carried out by an Israeli espionage and terrorist network. This was headed by Colonel Avraharn Dar --alias John Darling-- and a core of professionals who had set themselves up in Egypt under various guises. They had recruited a number of Egyptian Jews; one of them was a young woman, Marcelle Ninio, who worked in the offices of a British company. Naturally, the eventual exposure of such an organization was not going to improve the lot of the vast majority of Egyptian Jews who wanted no-thing to do with Zionism. There were still at least 50,000 Jews in Egypt; there had been something over 60,000 in 1947, more than half of whom were actually foreign nationals. During the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948, the populace had some times vented its frustration against them, and some were killed in mob violence or by terrorist bombs. In spite of this, and of the revolutionary upheaval which followed four years later, few Jews-including the foreign nationals-left the country, and fewer still went to Israel. A Jewish journalist insisted: 'We, Egyptian Jews, feel secure in our homeland, Egypt.'52


The welfare of Oriental Jewry in their various homelands was, as we have seen, Israel's last concern. And in July 1954 it had other worries. It was feeling isolated and insecure. Its Western friends-let alone the rest of the world-were unhappy about its aggressive behaviour. The US Assistant Secretary of State advised it to 'drop the attitude of the conqueror'.53 More alarming was the rapprochement under way between Egypt, on the one hand, and the United States and Britain on the other. President Eisenhower had urged Britain to give up her giant military base in the Suez Canal Zone; Bengurion had failed to dissuade her. It was to sabotage this rapprochement that the head of Israeli intelligence, Colonel Benyamin Givli, ordered his Egyptian intelligence ring to strike.


Givli's boss, Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon, and the Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett, knew nothing of the operation. For Givli was a member of a powerful Defence Ministry clique which often acted independently, or in outright defiance, of the cabinet. They were proteges of Bengurion and, although 'The Old Man' had left the Premiership for Sde Boker, his Negev desert retreat, a few months before, he was able, through them, to perpetuate the hardline 'activist' policies in which he believed. On Givli's instructions, the Egyptian network was to plant bombs in American and British cultural centres, British-owned cinemas and Egyptian public buildings. The Western powers, it was hoped, would conclude that there was fierce internal opposition to the rapprochement and that Nasser's young r6gime,faced with this challenge, was not one in which they could place much confidence.54 Mysterious violence might therefore persuade both London and Washington that British troops should remain astride the Canal; the world had not forgotten Black Saturday, 28 January 1951, in the last year of King Farouk's reign, when mobs rampaged through downtown Cairo, setting fire to foreign-owned hotels and shops, in which scores of people, including thirteen Britons, died.


The first bomb went off, on 2 July, in the Alexandria post office. On 11 July, the Anglo-Egyptian Suez negotiations, which had been blocked for nine months, got under way again. The next day the Israeli embassy in London was assured that, up on the British evacuation from Suez, stock-piled arms would not be handed over to the Egyptians. But the Defence Ministry activists were unconvinced. On 14 July their agents, in clandestine radio contact with Tel Aviv, fire-bombed US Information Service libraries in Cairo and Alexandria. That same day, a phosphorous bomb exploded prematurely in the pocket of one Philip Natanson, nearly burning him alive, as he was about to enter the British-owned Rio cinema in Alexandria. His arrest and subsequent confession led to the break-up of the whole ring-but not before the completion of another cycle of clandestine action and diplomatic failure. On 15 July President Eisenhower assured the Egyptians that 'simultaneously' with the signing of a Suez agreement the United States would enter into 'firm commitments' for economic aid to strengthen their armed forces.55 On 23 July --anniversary of the 1952 revolution-- the Israeli agents still at large had a final fling; they started fires in two Cairo cinemas, in the central post office and the railway station. On the same day, Britain announced that the War Secretary, Antony Head, was going to Cairo. And on 27 July he and the Egyptians initiated the 'Heads of Agreement' on the terms of Britain's evacuation.


The trial lasted from 11 December to 3 January. Not all the culprits were there, because Colonel Dar and an Israeli colleague managed to escape, and the third Israeli, Hungarian-born Max Bennett, committed suicide; but those who were present all pleaded guilty. Most of them, including Marcelle Ninio, were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. But Dr Musa Lieto Marzuk, a Tunisian-born citizen of France who was a surgeon at the Jewish Hospital in Cairo, and Samuel Azar, an engineering professor from Alexandria, were condemned to death. In spite of representations from France, Britain and the United States the two men were hanged. Politically, it would have been very difficult for Nasser to spare them, for only seven weeks before six Moslem Brothers had been executed for complicity in an attempt on his life. Nevertheless Israel reacted with grief and anger. So did some Western Jews. Marzuk and Azar 'died the death of martyrs', said Sharett on the same day in the Knesset, whose members stood in silent tribute. Israel went into official mourning the following day. Beersheba and Ramat Gan named streets after the executed men. Israeli delegates to the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission refused to attend its meeting, declaring that they would not sit down with representatives of the Cairo junta. In New York there were bomb threats against the Egyptian consulate and a sniper fired four shots into its fourth-floor window.56


This whole episode, which was to poison Israeli political life for a decade and more, came to be known as the 'Lavon Affair', for it had been established in the Cairo trial that Lavon, as Minister of Defence, had approved the campaign of sabotage. At least so the available evidence made it appear. But in Israel, Lavon had asked Moshe Sharett for a secret inquiry into a matter about which the cabinet knew nothing. Benyamin Givli, the intelligence chief, claimed that the so-called 'security operation' had been authorized by Lavon himself. Two other Bengurion proteges, Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, testified against Lavon. Lavon denounced Givli's papers as forgeries and demanded the resignation of all three men. Instead, Sharett ordered Lavon himself to resign and invited Bengurion to come out of retirement and take over the Defence Ministry. It was a triumphant comeback for the 'activist' philosophy whose excesses both Sharett and Lavon had tried to modify. It was consummated, a week later, by an unprovoked raid on Gaza, which left thirty-nine Egyptians dead and led to the Suez War Of 1956.57


When the truth about the Lavon Affair came to light, six years after the event, it confirmed that there had been a frame-up-not, however, by the Egyptians, but by Bengurion and his young proteges. Exposure was fortuitous. Giving evidence in a forgery trial in September 1960, a witness divulged on passant that he had seen the faked signature of Lavon on a document relating to a 1954 'security mishap'.58 Bengurion immediately announced that the three-year statute of limitations prohibited the opening of the case. But Lavon, now head of the powerful Histradut Trade Union Federation, seized upon this opportunity to demand an inquiry. Bengurion did everything in his power to stop it, but his cabinet overruled him. The investigation revealed that the security operation' had been planned behind Lavon's back. His signature had been forged, and the bombing had actually begun long before his approval --which he withheld-- had been sought. He was a scapegoat pure and simple. On Christmas Day 1960,the Israeli cabinet unanimously exonerated him of all guilt in the 'disastrous security adventure in Egypt'; the Attorney General had, in the meantime, found 'conclusive evidence of forgeries as well as false testimony in an earlier inquiry'.59 Bengurion was enraged. He issued an ultimatum to the ruling Labour party to remove Lavon, stormed out of a cabinet meeting and resigned. In what one trade unionist described as 'an immoral and unjust submission to dictatorship', his diehard supporters in the Histradut swung the vote in favour i)f accepting Lavon's resignation. Lavon, however, won a moral victory over the man who twice forced him from office. In the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, students demonstrated in his favour. They carried placards reading: 'Bengurion Go to Sde Boker, Take Dayan and Peres with You. We do Not Accept Leaders with Elastic Consciences.'60 The affair rocked the ruling establishment, split public opinion, forced new elections and contributed largely to Bengurion's eventual disappearance from public life.


But Lavon was not the only real victim. There were also those misguided Egyptian Jews who paid with their lives or long terms of imprisonment. It is true that when, in 1968, Marcelle Ninio and her colleagues were exchanged for Egyptian' prisoners in Israel, they received a heroes' welcome. True, too, that when Miss Ninio got married Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defence Minister Dayan and Chief of Staff General Bar Lev all attended the wedding and Dayan told the bride 'the Six-Day War was success enough that it led to your freedom'.61 However, after spending fourteen years in an Egyptian prison, the former terrorists did not share the leadership's enthusiasm. When Ninio and two of her colleagues appeared on Israel television a few years later, they all expressed the belief that the reason why they were not released earlier was because Israel made little effort to get them out. 'Maybe they didn't want us to come back,' said Robert Dassa. 'There was so much intrigue in Israel. We were instruments in the hands of the Egyptians and of others ... and what is more painful after all that we went through is that this continues to be so.' In Ninio's opinion, 'the government didn't want to spoil its relations with the United States and didn't want the embarrassment of admitting it was behind our action'.62

But the real victims were the great mass of Egyptian Jewry. Episodes like the Lavon Affair tended to identify them, in the mind of ordinary Egyptians, with the Zionist movement. When, in 1956, Israeli invaded and occupied Sinai, feeling ran high against them. The government, playing into the Zionist hands, began ordering Jews to leave the country. Belatedly, reluctantly, 21,000 left in the following year; more were expelled later, and others, their livelihood gone, had nothing to stay for. But precious few went to Israel.

Someone called "Voice" writes "IM is now so riddled with anti Jewish sentiment that it can no longer be considered an independent voice."

There's not an ounce of anti Jewish sentiment in the whole article mate. The terms "Jewish", "Jew", "Judaism" don't appear a single time. I am Jewish and I do not one bit support the Israeli occupation of Palestine and there are many Jews and Israelis who do not. To equate the two is to make a big mistake and it is done by both Zionist and anti-Jewish propagandists alike.

Of course, you are not the first person to cry "Anti Jewish!" when confronted with first hand reports of Israeli abuse of Palestinians. It is extremely common. However, the abuse of innocents carries on in the occupied territories day to day. Please read the Undercurrents report again but take the Nazi-Hunting shades off....

Sean (from oz)

"If the paramilitary group ISM are truly committed to the jihad against Israeli democracy, they should be prepared to be shot on sight if caught infiltrating Israel. And the truth is, the ISM's sole purpose is the campaign for the extermination of Jews by Arab imperialists.
. "

Para-what? You been eating that moon-cheese again?

this is the sign od day of judgment, were muslim's will suffer and when we fight they always say it is barbaric or the MUSLIMS are terrorists do they not think that they are not when they kill innocent children!