“Is Israel murdering Palestinians and stealing their land because of Hamas? And does anyone seriously think that the genocidal Zionist ethnic cleansing would stop if Hamas were to disappear?”

Not at all. In fact Israel initially helped bring forth Hamas to siphon away support from the PLO in the Occupied Territories. They didn’t expect the experiment to go the way it did.

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As for your comment that Hamas is saving Palestinian lives.. What the hell are you smoking?

This is the same organization that sends Palestinians to blow themselves up (sometimes killing other Arabs in the process!). Should I even mention the latest Hamas-Fatah mini-war when the two groups threw each others members from the rooftops. Or the attacks on rival clans to consolidate their control in Gaza. Not to mention robbing children of their childhood and exploiting people’s suffering to advance their agenda. Hamas is a dark, evil force that brought us nothing but more suffering.

But let’s put Hamas aside for a moment..

I’ll share with you that I’m the son of a family that was expelled at gun-point from their village in 1948 by the Hagganah so I’m not waiting for you to unroll the scroll of sins committed against the Palestinians.

Even my octogenarian grandmother, who still lives in the refugee camp in Tyre and clings stubbornly to the key to her former house, has the lucidity to realise that our people’s continuing predicament is due to a cocktail of reasons and forces including: British/UN mismanagement of the Palestine Mandate; Zionist aspirations and settler expansionism; incompetence, inflexibility, gambling of the Arab leadership from Haj Amin onwards; backroom dealings between the Hashemites and the Zionist
enterprise; divisions within the Palestinian national movement – and that’s just the short list.

As for your statement:
“(Israel) is a state that is based on murder, theft, ethnic cleansing. Failing to see the facts in this regard shows that you have a real problem with your honesty.”

I didn’t deny the atrocities and land theft, and I’ll add that the settlement enterprise was accommodated and even flourished under the presumably leftist Peres.

That said, how do we proceed from here? I’m asking you this from Palestinian to Palestinian.

How do we deal with Israel?

If you want to liberate Palestine, then I urge you and Khalid to stop writing these frivolous texts and comments, load your klashins and descend valiantly onto the border. I’ll be trailing at a safe distance shouting out Aweeehas and ululating loudly in encouragement.

I’m sure you’ll agree with me that you won’t get very far. In fact, before you even make it to the border you’ll be captured by the Egyptian/Syrian/Jordanian/Hizb mukhabarat and given a beating so severe that you’ll be crying for your mother’s milk.
Why? Because the countries ringing Israel’s are not interested in
losing another war, not to mention forfeiting more territory, money and men.

So the military issue is out of the question (for the moment).

Do we follow the anti-Apartheid model and hope that our campaign will bring about enough international pressure to dismantle Israel?

Good luck:

1-Israelis aren’t Boers, or Americans, or Canadians. They don’t view themselves as a colonial entity that was built atop the ruins of the natives, so the key element of guilt towards the aboriginal population isn’t there to be leveraged by us. (barring the tiny uber-leftist and ineffective fringe of the fringe) We’re dealing with people who genuinely believe they are the natives and that we were the settlers! And they’ll point to the number of times that Jerusalem is mentioned in the Torah to make their point.

2-Thanks to the “life-loving” Hamas baboons to whom you’re sympathetic, the West now associates the Palestinians with radical (Al-Qaeda) Islam. Back in the days of the first Intifada, “Palestine Support” in the West (as E.Said called it) was at its highest point in history. But the café/bus/resto/club bombings in TA/Jerusalem didn’t go over well – especially after 9-11. This makes mounting a media campaign in the west
excessively difficult not to mention that our point of view will never go through the sieve of the American Israel-sympathetic media.

3- We’re on our own. We can’t count on the Arabs. PLO decisions have burnt enough bridges that no one wants anything to do with us. Iceland and Sweden are taking in refugees that the Arab states are leaving stranded at the borders. Furthermore, any Arab (petro) clout vis-à-vis the west is not for us to leverage. The sheikhs and emirs who hold trillions in the American economy don’t give 2 shits about you and me.

4-Outside our region, Israel is less of a pariah state now than ever before. After Oslo, the taboo of dealing with Israel was lifted and future powers such as India and China have much to benefit from Israeli technology in many fields, from nanotechnology to weaponry and they’re all developing their ties with “The Great Zionist Sin”. What do we have to offer the world? ya Palestinian?

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So our best hope for now is to campaign internally and reform our society and institutions. But instead we waste our time on this incessant bleating.

And I’ll end it by saying that all of the current political choices (barring The Third Way) are Zbaleh. So is the same stagnant mentality that keeps us from making any headway. We should spend the next decade working on ourselves and as for land-grabs and settler expansionism we need more of what the people demonstrating at Bi’lin are doing. Organized non-violent resistance – more Ghandi, less Arafat and certainly no more Zahar.

First, the fact that you have been hearing complaints about Israeli crimes for sixty years doesn’t mean that these crimes didn’t occur. Israel was a sinful and criminal state from day-1. It continues to be a criminal and sinful state and will always be. It is a state that is based on murder, theft, ethnic cleansing. Failing to see the facts in this regard shows that you have a real problem with your honesty.

Second, Hamas is not negotiating with Israel. Hamas has only accepted an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire with the Zio-Nazi entity in order to save Palestinian lives. Besides, there is nothing wrong with negotiations per se with one’s enemy.

Didn’t Jews seek to negotiate with Adolph Hitler to save “Jewish lives”? during WWII. Have you all forgotten about Rudolph Kastner?

Finally, since when was Israel’s criminality confined to Hamas? Is Israel murdering Palestinians and stealing their land because of Hamas? And does anyone seriously think that the genocidal Zionist ethnic cleansing would stop if Hamas were to disappear?

This unimaginative, binary article is nothing but a regurgitation of the same zbaleh propaganda that we’ve been fed for over 60 years. Even Hamssawis are too cynical to buy into this hot air (hence their indirect negotiations with Israel)

What do you expect Israel to do with Hamas? send them roses and congratulate them for a decade’s worth of bus and café bombings?

Or they can do what they did to the PLO in Lebanon in 1982, only they don’t need to because unlike the Fatah of ’82, Hamas actually (indirectly) negotiates with Israel.