It impels me to pray.
As I have many times before, I pray. Do you think the Israelis hate the Palestinians? They do not. They are not beheading them. The more rockets that are fired, the greater their resolve for it to stop. Israel has been drawn into the Gaza Strip. Some people run when they hear a gun; others, run to the report of the gun. The Israelis are doing exactly what Hamas wants them to do. If the Palestinian refugees were not there, this would have been over long ago.
I just had to throw my two cents in…take it or leave it.
It has been shown that there are clearly two sets of history being presented here, both in the US and across the world.
Regardless of who you think is correct in being entitled to the land in question, the methods for “reclaiming” such land by Israel has been severely lacking in the humanity department.
Firstly…let me just say that any country who is occupying another country has a duty, to protect those people who are “occupied” by the conquering force.
Israel has a duty to protect the Palestinian people.
Israel has given the Palestinian people maps of supposed “safe-zones”, specific sites that the people are told will NOT be bombed….like the UN school destroyed just the other day.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/israeli-fire-hits-compound-housing-u-n-school-in-gaza-killing-15/
The UN began putting people on busses to get them out of their because shells began to fall…mind you, the Israelis also have this map, because they are the one’s who made it.
But they shelled the women and children anyhow.
I have nothing against Jewish people, or Muslim people….because they are just that - people.
The Zionist settlers who first settled in that area, took the land by proxy from the indigenous people living there at the time (Palestinians), just because the Jews ruled the area for a period of what? 160 years total? Those same people who were Jewish at the time, became subsequent religions, including Muslim, but this doesn’t mean that it was a different group of folks. These are the same families who were Jews at the time of Jewish rule - they are now the ones getting shelled by the Zionists.
So yes…according to international law, Israel has a right to protect itself from being attacked. But, Israel has a duty to protect and maintain a normal semblance of life in the occupied territories.
You can read about Occupation Law here -
http://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/WebART/195-200053?OpenDocument
The laws of armed conflict are found primarily in the Hague Regulations of 1907, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and their Additional Protocols I and II of 1977. This body of law is based on a crude balance between humanitarian concerns on the one hand and military advantage and necessity on the other. The post-World War II Nuremberg trials defined military exigency as permission to expend “any amount and kind of force to compel the complete submission of the enemy…” so long as the destruction of life and property is not done for revenge or a lust to kill. Thus, the permissible use of force during war, while expansive, is not unlimited.
In international law, self-defense is the legal justification for a state to initiate the use of armed force and to declare war. This is referred to as jus ad bellum–meaning “when it is just to begin to fight.” The right to fight in self-defense is distinguished from jus in bello, the principles and laws regulating the means and methods of warfare itself. Jus ad bellum aims to limit the initiation of the use of armed force in accordance with United Nations Charter Article 2(4); its sole justification, found in Article 51, is in response to an armed attack (or an imminent threat of one in accordance with customary law on the matter). The only other lawful way to begin a war, according to Article 51, is with Security Council sanction, an option reserved–in principle, at least–for the defense or restoration of international peace and security.
Once armed conflict is initiated, and irrespective of the reason or legitimacy of such conflict, the jus in bello legal framework is triggered. Therefore, where an occupation already is in place, the right to initiate militarized force in response to an armed attack, as opposed to police force to restore order, is not a remedy available to the occupying state. The beginning of a military occupation marks the triumph of one belligerent over another. In the case of Israel, its occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai in 1967 marked a military victory against Arab belligerents.
Occupation Law prohibits an occupying power from initiating armed force against its occupied territory. By mere virtue of the existence of military occupation, an armed attack, including one consistent with the UN Charter, has already occurred and been concluded. Therefore the right of self-defense in international law is, by definition since 1967, not available to Israel with respect to its dealings with real or perceived threats emanating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip population. To achieve its security goals, Israel can resort to no more than the police powers, or the exceptional use of militarized force, vested in it by IHL. This is not to say that Israel cannot defend itself–but those defensive measures can neither take the form of warfare nor be justified as self-defense in international law. As explained by Ian Scobbie:To equate the two is simply to confuse the legal with the linguistic denotation of the term ”defense.“ Just as ”negligence,“ in law, does not mean ”carelessness” but, rather, refers to an elaborate doctrinal structure, so ”self-defense” refers to a complex doctrine that has a much more restricted scope than ordinary notions of ”defense.“
To argue that Israel is employing legitimate “self-defense” when it militarily attacks Gaza affords the occupying power the right to use both police and military force in occupied territory. An occupying power cannot justify military force as self-defense in territory for which it is responsible as the occupant. The problem is that Israel has never regulated its own behavior in the West Bank and Gaza as in accordance with Occupation Law.
Israel’s Attempts To Change International Law Since the beginning of its occupation in 1967, Israel has rebuffed the applicability of international humanitarian law to the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Despite imposing military rule over the West Bank and Gaza, Israel denied the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (the cornerstone of Occupation Law). Israel argued because the territories neither constituted a sovereign state nor were sovereign territories of the displaced states at the time of conquest, that it simply administered the territories and did not occupy them within the meaning of international law. The UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, theUN General Assembly, as well as the Israeli High Court of Justice have roundly rejected the Israeli government’s position. Significantly, the HCJ recognizes the entirety of the Hague Regulations and provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions that pertain to military occupation as customary international law.
Israel’s refusal to recognize the occupied status of the territory, bolstered by the US’ resilient and intransigent opposition to international accountability within the UN Security Council, has resulted in the condition that exists today: prolonged military occupation. Whereas the remedy to occupation is its cessation, such recourse will not suffice to remedy prolonged military occupation. By virtue of its decades of military rule, Israel has characterized all Palestinians as a security threat and Jewish nationals as their potential victims, thereby justifying the differential, and violent, treatment of Palestinians. In its 2012 session, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination described current conditions following decades of occupation and attendant repression as tantamount toApartheid.
In complete disregard for international law, and its institutional findings, Israel continues to treat the Occupied Territory as colonial possessions. Since the beginning of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, Israel has advanced the notion that it is engaged in an international armed conflict short of war in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Accordingly, it argues that it can 1) invoke self-defense, pursuant to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, and 2) use force beyond that permissible during law enforcement, even where an occupation exists.
We are being fed half-truths in the US in regards to this conflict going on over there.
To sit there and justify the deaths of the Palestinian people - now over 1000 mostly women and children in this most recent attack…while Israel has something like 40 deaths (and they are soldiers) is madness to me. That isn’t a battle…who is battling whom? To blow up a hospital in response to garbage rockets (that almost never hit because of the Iron Dome) being fired over the wall by a small minority of Palestinians is insanity.
It is a slaughter of innocent people.
I am not trying to justify killing on either side…we should end this madness…but the extermination of the Palestinian people because it stands in the way of a Zionist homeland is disgusting.
