As you said, Syria took over in the 1950s. Usually latest claim is what counts. And it's not just Syria or UN who have looked into the borders and consider Shebaa farms to be Syrian, for a long time Lebanon did as well. And furthermore, as long as Israel is occupying Golan, it can't turn over parts of it to third nations without approval from Syria or the international community. That would be illegal.
If who the Shebaa farms issue is a "quibble" to you, then so is the ownership of entire Golan Heights. Israel says it's annexed, Syria (and the international community) say it's occupied. If that distinction doesn't matter, then you might as well concede the land to Israel. It just becomes a border dispute between Israel and Syria instead of Syria and Lebanon.
UN accepts Shebaa Farms IS Lebanese:
"The UN has overturned a major Israeli claim. It says the Occupied Shebaa Farms is Lebanese.
America and Israel say the land is Syrian. Lebanon and Syria have always insisted it is Lebanese.
Why does this matter? Because it is about the future of Hizbollah.
If the Shebaa Farms is in Syria, then Israel is not occupying any of Lebanon. And that is important because Hizbollah says it will continue its armed struggle until all of Lebanon is liberated.
So is Lebanon occupied or not?
The UN position has always been ‘no’ – Shebaa is Syrian. But the UN left the door open by saying Syria could put it in writing that the Shebaa is Lebanese, and transfer the territory. At the heart of the problem is that the Lebanese-Syrian border is poorly demarcated.
Now, UN cartographers have looked at the maps and decreed that the Shebaa IS Lebanese, and so Israel DOES still occupy Lebanon."
It's a quibble because either way, Israel doesn't have a legitimate claim to it. Israel has claimed to have annexed it in violation of international law and is currently building a barrier to keep the Lebanese and Syrians away.
It's blatant, bold-faced theft.
There are no colonies in Shebaa farms. And international community doesn't consider it a theft, it considers it a military occupation.
International law doesn't allow a country to annex land it has under military occupation. International law call that theft.
Theft of land and resources and ethnically cleansing west bank is an exception, because Israel wants those things regardless of what Palestinians do about it. And the blockade of Gaza was a response to Hamas violently taking power in Gaza in 2007.
It's not an exception. It's how Israeli Zionists have operated since the 1940s. Heck, it's how European colonists have operated for centuries.
To be clear, when I said "long-standing policy" I'm talking about past decade or so. Not ancient history.
Then you should say "recent policy".
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and the war with Lebanon was in 2009. And there have been five or more flare-ups that became a shooting wars between Israel and Gaza since then. These are all similarly recent events, so in relation to them, the Israeli policies used are indeed "long-standing" and consistent.
You think the establishment of a walled off ghetto full of unwanted Semitic people is something new? You think their decision to protest, to fight, to try to escape is wrongheaded or foolish? I think it follows a well known pattern.
If the people in Gaza wanted to escape, Egypt would be a better destination than Israel.
What if they want to go home? What if they want their human rights respected and upheld? What if they don't want to start over with absolutely nothing in a place where they never lived, and resent having to due to the blatant racism and religious bigotry that demands they remain separate from Jews in Israel?
You said their goal was to "escape", not me. I was showing that as a proof that their goal was
not to escape. The few people who did manage to jump the fence, jumped quickly back to Gaza.
When I said escape I didn't mean a jailbreak so they could go shopping like they did the last time the wall was breached. I mean escape in a permanent sense. To never again be locked up in an internment camp. To be free to return to their homes and communities. To live their lives without fear of being purged, extirpated, banished, or cleansed from their own homeland.
The Palestinian people want their human rights respected and their humanity acknowledged. They want the walls that imprison them in Gaza to fall and the system that keeps them impoverished and powerless to either change or be destroyed. You don't seem to support their goal, or at least you don't support them actively trying to tear down the walls and challenge the system, but you haven't said what's wrong with it.
You are talking about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. You are openly supporting it. And that's interesting because I don't think you are in favor of ethnic cleansing or state sponsored bigotry in general.
You don't appear to support white supremacists and segregationists who want to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods and Native Americans confined to reservations, or to purge Tutsis from Hutu areas, or to banish the Armenians from Kosovo. Why are you arguing that the Palestinians should leave their homeland and cede it to the Israelis? Why do you support ethnic cleansing in Palestine?
I don't support ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and I have no idea where you got that from.
You appear to be against allowing the refugees to go back to homes and communities in what is now called Israel. You appear to support the separation of Palestinians from Israelis even though you know it's based on racism, religious bigotry, and chauvinism. You suggested the Palestinians who don't want to be imprisoned in Gaza should go to Egypt. That outcome would suit the racists very well.
If you're not in favor of ethnic cleansing then why not support the return of Palestinians to the communities they were forced to leave when they were dumped into Gaza?
Been there, done that.
Your suggestion of Palestinians getting better conditions through peaceful demonstrations and forswearing violence would be a lot more convincing if that was actually happening in the West Bank. But since all it seems to be doing is making it easier for Zionists to take over more and more land, it looks more like wishful thinking than anything reality based.
The people in West Bank undeniably do have better living conditions than Gaza. And risk of zionists taking more land is not likely to occur in Gaza. All in all, Gaza is in a lot better position than West Bank in a lot of ways: they have access to Egypt not patrolled by Israel, they have access to mediterranean (sans blockade), the border fence with Israel is actually at the internationally recognized border, and they have no internal checkpoints or Israeli settlers.
The Palestinian people of the West Bank are being crowded into ever shrinking strips of land, surrounded by IDF forces and separation barriers, with Jews-only communities being built on land stolen from them. If this pattern doesn't change in the near future they will be in the exact same position as the people of Gaza - trapped into an economically depressed enclave surrounded by barriers and barbed wire, dependent on the Israeli government for food, water, electricity, etc.
The point is that the pattern doesn't hold in Gaza. There are no Jews-only communities being built in Gaza. There are no separation barriers or checkpoints in Gaza (except at the border, obviously). Gaza is not an enclave, because it borders also Egypt and has territorial waters (though currently blockaded). And the only land in Gaza that could be thought of as stolen is the buffer zone near the border, which is why I mentioned reclaiming that as one of the attainable goals of protests, that Hamas doesn't seem to care about.
If your suggestion of peaceful demonstrations and 'living well' was a viable plan then the West Bank Palestinians wouldn't still be subject to removal by Israelis, or having their orchards uprooted and burned, or having their wells confiscated and destroyed.
It's not a viable plan in West Bank. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be viable in Gaza.
It's not a viable plan
anywhere. If Palestinians have something Zionists want, Israel takes it.
Gaza has offshore natural gas deposits. The Gazans can't develop them because Israel doesn't allow it. That doesn't mean those deposits are just sitting there undeveloped. It means that Israel negotiated contracts with international companies extract the gas, the gas is shipped to an Israeli port, and Israel gets all the natural gas it wants at a pittance. It means that once again, Palestinians are getting screwed and they know it.
How is it possible to live well when your life and livelihood is controlled by people who are openly hostile to you, who don't want you to succeed?
Warning shots for approaching the fence.
Which you suggest they should do as they reclaim no-man's-land.
Forgot to address this one. Yes, reclaiming the land requires pushing back and closing in on the fence. But that's only part of it. If you want to reclaim the land, you also have to stay there and make a point that the other party knows that's your goal. It's also necessary to remove or mitigate the main reason why No Man's Land was set up in the first place, and stop firing rockets.
It was set up in the first place as a result of ethnic cleansing.
Zionists forced Palestinians into an ethnic enclave and imprisoned them there. To maintain the ethnic separation, barriers to return were established and eventually walls were built. To thwart any attempt to bypass the barriers or breach the walls, a no-man's-land was established.
It all starts with ethnic cleansing. If Zionists weren't so determined to have racial and religious purity in their State, allowing Palestinians who've never taken up arms to return to Israel wouldn't be such a huge problem.
Palestinians murdered by Israelis. You think the Gazans are any safer?
Yes.
Part of the recent violent protest organized by Hamas.
So, it's okay to shoot people standing in an open area during a peaceful protest if you just call it a violent protest? Or are you equating the peaceful guy with a violent guy because of his national origin?
When you participate in a violent riot, even if you yourself don't happen to do anything but stand around, there is a chance of getting hit as collateral damage. And that's assuming this guy wasn't doing anything else, a claim that should be taken with a grain of salt given that considerable majority of the victims were Hamas members.
He wasn't participating in a violent riot. He posted the video right there in the link I provided. He was just standing there out in the open, no where near to the Israeli position, just talking as he made his recording, when an Israeli sniper shot him.
Granted, looking at the video this individual didn't do anything else but stand around at a safe distance (I usually don't watch videos on news websites). But nevertheless the context for this incident was the Hamas-organized protest. Was the soldier who shot him mistaking his camera for a weapon, or was he just taking the shot out of boredom? We'll never know, but that's not relevant to this discussion.
You say Palestinians should engage in peaceful protest. I highlighted your words to that effect above. But what does it take for a Palestinian to be seen as a peaceful protester by you? In what way was that guy in the video not peacefully protesting?
Freedom isn't free. Protesting peacefully doesn't mean you won't get casualties, it's the end result that counts. If
everyone in that protest had just stood back at that distance, instead of storming the fence, there probably would be zero casualties. And if this guy had been the
only casualty, his story wouldn't be buried under the dozens of pictures of Palestinians using slingshots, or setting up IEDs, or brandishing their weapons at funerals.
Freedom isn't free. If you're not willing to walk up to a fence that wouldn't even exist in a fair and just world, then you're not likely to get your freedom from the racist, religious bigots who built it to keep you imprisoned.
The guy wasn't doing anything that threatened life, limb, or property. But he was doing something that threatened IDF control of Gaza. He was protesting it. He was calling attention to it. He was leading others to question its legitimacy.
If you support peaceful protests as a means of securing better living conditions for Palestinians, then support the people doing it. You might also consider condemning violence directed at them.
They can't build up their infrastructure unless Israel allows it. Israel doesn't allow it.
Gaza has off-shore natural gas deposits. Do you honestly think the Israelis will allow them to develop those resources on their own, to their own benefit, and charge Israelis fair market price for it?
How does storming the fence help with that?
Gaza grows flowers and produce for the European market. Do you honestly think Israel allows them to control that trade, to choose their own trading partners and negotiate their own contracts freely, to ship their goods to market and receive payment without obstacles or interference?
How does storming the fence help with that?
It doesn't happen that way. Just like Israel doesn't allow the Palestinians to control their own water supplies. Everything goes through Israeli businesses or Israeli government agencies, for the benefit Israelis, just like every attempt to improve life on the Reservations here in the US went through white owned companies and the BIA. It's going to take more than a cheerful, positive, Pollyanna attitude to change that.
And storming the fence is supposed to change it, how exactly?
By making it harder for people like you to ignore the gross violation of human rights and the undiluted bigotry at the heart of Israeli policies towards Palestinians.
People are trapped in Gaza because racists and religious bigots want their land but don't want them. The US supports it because racists and religious bigots have enough influence in Congress to make it so, and because it's profitable. That could change if enough people care about the situation in Gaza to change it. But no one will care if no one even notices.
I beg to differ. The Hamas protest was an utter failure to highlight any of the human rights violations in Gaza. It shows the Gazans as barbarians whose only goal is to attack Israel and "tear out their hearts" or whatever it was that the Hamas leader said the protests were about. This is not conducive to helping the Gazans or Palestinians at large in any shape, way or form.
If Hamas really wanted to bring attention to the bigoted policies or human rights situation, they ought to target their protests and other actions specificly against those policies and violations. Otherwise nobody will give a crap.
Interesting.
Of all the reasons given for
The Great March of Return including the specific linking of the protests to the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem on the very same day Palestinians have historically commemorated the
Nakba, all the speeches about the desire of the Gazan people to be free, you responded with a
mined quote from a guy reacting to the killing of protesters the day before.
Were his words intemperate? Yes. They're pretty hostile, even hateful. Does that exercise in quote mining refute the given reasons for the protests? Not at all.
Trump decided to trash what was left of the peace process so he could have his vanity project, a yuge byootiful embassy in Jerusalem and bragging rights about being the guy who made it happen. The fact he chose Nakba Day as the date of the Embassy's opening was an especially pungent fuck you to the Palestinians. They protested, Israeli snipers killed a few dozen of them.
You suggest that in the future they should be more humble and focus on specific policies that harm them. I disagree. I think they need to keep calling attention to the one policy that underlies all the others - the policy of segregation and dispossession of the non-Jews of Palestine. I think they should be as loud, active, and impossible to ignore as they can manage.
