War, what is it good for: President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority
02 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: Gaza Strip, Hamas, Israel
Murray Rothbard (1982) on Israeli settlements in the West Bank
10 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in International law, libertarianism, Murray Rothbard, war and peace Tags: Israel, Murray Rothbard, revanchism, West Bank
To be fair, on the State of Israel, Murray Rothbard was an anti-Zionist warmongering revanchist. In 1969, for example, he argued that there are some wars that can be blamed more on one state than another and that the Israelis were to blame for most of the Israeli-Arab wars.
Israel and the West Bank
09 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in International law, politics Tags: Israel, West Bank
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| Israeli settlements cover about 2% of the West Bank and are linked by Israeli-controlled roads. There are also large tracts of Israeli-controlled land designated as military areas or nature reserves. | Military checkpoints allow Israel to monitor and control travel in much of the West Bank. |
HT: BBC
Israel is a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multireligious democracy
07 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: Hamas, Israel
the Knesset in Israel includes religious parties that are anti-Zionist for religious reasons.
There are also communist and Arab parties in the Knesset that are very much against the State of Israel and Zionism.
The three Palestinian parties usually win between 3-4 seats each. Hadash, the joint Arab-Jewish party, currently has four seats as does the United Arab List (a unification of three parties, including the Islamic Ta’al party). There is the secular Balad party, which currently has three seats.
Then there is Balad MK Hanin Zoabi whose expulsion was later overruled by the Supreme Court. She participated in the first Gaza flotilla in 2010. Zoabi rejects the idea of Israel as a solely Jewish state, which she describes as "inherently racist."
Jus in bello: the IDF dropped this Arabic flyer warning residents of Shuja’iya to evacuate – Hamas told them to stay
21 Jul 2014 2 Comments
The double dealing, sanctimonious peace movement prefers not to discuss how Hamas fights its wars
17 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Alan Dershowitz, Hamas, Israel, laws of war, temporary doves, war crimes
Just war theory (jus bellum iustum) is split into two groups: “the right to go to war’’ (jus ad bellum) and ‘’right conduct in war’’ (jus in bello). Just war conduct should be governed by the principle of distinction:
Islamic militant terrorists — whether they are called al-Qaida, Isis, Hamas, or Hezbollah — all use similar tactics.
They target civilians while hiding among civilians in order to induce democracies to kill civilians so that the media will show gruesome pictures of dead children and blame these deaths on the democracy, rather than the terrorists who use children and other civilians as human shields.
The democracy is then put to the tragic choice of either allowing terrorist attacks against its own civilians or taking military action that risks the lives of enemy civilians.
…Israel has been very careful to try to minimize civilian casualties. They drop leaflets, make phone calls and even send noisemaking bomblets to warn civilians to leave areas to which rockets are being fired.
Mostly the civilians leave. Sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, the Israeli military does not fire at the rockets, thereby putting their own civilians at risk.
Yet some in the media describe the current situation in Gaza as a “cycle of violence.” The reality, of course, is that there is no such cycle. It is a one-way street that Hamas has driven down precisely in order to create the illusion of a cycle with equal blame on both sides.
There is no comparison — legally, morally, diplomatically or by any other criteria — between what Hamas is doing and how Israel is responding. Hamas is wilfully and deliberately committing a double war crime by targeting Israeli civilians and using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
The deliberate targeting of civilians, as Hamas admits — indeed boasts — it is doing, is a clear war crime. Hamas has specifically aimed its lethal rockets at Beersheba, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. This is a war crime.
Moreover, it is firing these rockets from hospitals, schools, and houses in densely populated areas in order to cause Israel to kill Palestinian civilians. This too is a war crime.
Alan Dershowitz (2014)
Whose side is the peace movement on when it condemns warnings to civilians to evacuate immediately?
15 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Amnesty International, Hamas, human shields, Israel, laws of war, temporary doves, war crimes
The clip shows the small missile that strikes a building as a warning to get out.
This “knock on the roof” technique has been condemned by Amnesty International’s Philip Luther:
“There is no way that firing a missile at a civilian home can constitute an effective ‘warning’. Amnesty International has documented cases of civilians killed or injured by such missiles in previous Israeli military operations on the Gaza Strip,” said Philip Luther.
PAT CONDELL: “Why I support Israel”
13 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, liberalism, politics, war and peace Tags: Israel, war crimes
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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