Arafat calls for continued fighting

JERUSALEM (October 28) - As soldiers remained entrenched in Palestinian Authority areas due to continuing violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the failure of the PA to stop firing at Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood, PA Chairman Yasser Arafat called on his people "to continue fighting, fighting, determinedly and forcefully." His statements in Gaza were broadcast on Channel 2 last night.

Two members of Arafat's Force 17 were killed in clashes with soldiers over the weekend; one yesterday near Tulkarm, Fares Jabar, was wanted for the murders of two Tel Aviv restaurateurs in January, and one near Bethlehem on Friday morning.

Five Israelis were lightly wounded in separate incidents in the West Bank; four last night from gunfire at their vehicles travelling between Sussiya and Maon and another who was shot near Shavei Shomron on Friday night.

Reinforced security units at Rachel's Tomb last night prepared for the large number of Jewish worshipers expected at the site today to mark the anniversary of her death.

In Hebron, a group of Jewish residents, angry over the cabinet decision to pull out troops from Area A, occupied an empty building in the Palestinian-controlled Abu Sneineh neighborhood to protest the move. Calling the building Beit Rehavam after assassinated tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi, the group called on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to remember his promise to reenter Palestinian areas if firing from them were renewed.

Police and soldiers dispersed the demonstrators, and police arrested Yitzhak Pass, whose 10-month-old daughter, Shalhevet, was killed by a Palestinian sniper firing from Abu Sneineh earlier this year.

The Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip issued a statement condemning the government's decision, which it said came as senior IDF officers warned that further terrorist attacks were imminent.

On Friday afternoon Judea and Samaria police detained a resident of Eilon Moreh, 26, on suspicion of throwing stones near Hawara and lightly wounding a Palestinian man in the head.

Six mortar shells were fired harmlessly over the weekend at a Jewish community in the central Gaza Strip and inside Israel near the northern Gaza border fence. Last night a grenade was thrown at soldiers patrolling the border near Rafah.

Palestinians fired anti-tank grenades at an IDF post near Neveh Dekalim, and shots were fired at an army position near Gadid in Gush Katif and at an IDF post near Bnei Atzmon. An anti-tank grenade was also fired at an IDF post near Netzer Hazani. Shots were fired last night and Friday at soldiers patrolling the Karni-Netzarim road.

In the West Bank yesterday, Palestinians reported that the IDF had arrested six Palestinians in the Nablus area; five members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a member of Fatah. Palestinians said Firas Jaber, 24, a member of Force 17, was killed during a gun battle with soldiers after tanks entered Tulkarm. Last night four Israeli civilians were lightly wounded when Palestinians shot at their car near Sussiya in the south Hebron Hills.

In the Bethlehem area there were intense gun battles between soldiers and Palestinian gunmen. Last night Palestinians continued to shoot at the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, causing damage to a number of apartments. Shots were also fired at an IDF post at Tel Aras outside Nablus and at an IDF post on Mount Ebal. Shots were fired at an Israeli vehicle near Negohot west of Hebron and at an IDF vehicle near Kalkilya. Yesterday morning a bomb was discovered near an IDF vehicle at Ein Bidan north of Nablus and Palestinians opened fire at soldiers searching the area. Shortly afterward another bomb was discovered by soldiers near Deir al-Hatab east of Nablus. Both bombs were detonated by sappers.

On Friday night shots were fired at Psagot near Ramallah and at the Bethlehem bypass (tunnel) road. Shots were fired from Kalkilya at Kibbutz Nir Eliahu inside Israel, at the Yad Yair army post, and at an army roadblock near Har Homa. Shots were also fired at a tank deployed at the Kalanswa roadblock, at a Border Police base near Tulkarm, and at a Border Police base outside Bethlehem. On Friday morning, soldiers shot and killed Farid Abu Jallah, a member of Force 17 near the Aida refugee camp.

Yesterday afternoon the IDF prevented a group of human rights activists from entering Sussiya in the south Hebron Hills to help Palestinians harvest olives. The group returned to Jerusalem and demonstrated outside the Mevaseret home of Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.

If you do not have an army of your own, your land is being taken inch-by-inch every day, what would you do?

I wouldn't bomb a pizza joint ON PURPOSE. (No accident- the bomber knew darn well he was surrounded by women and kids- he chose that target because it was safer than approaching Israeli soldiers and trying to blow them up.) I would never tell some loser to wrap himself in explosives and blow himself up in order to take out civilians ON PURPOSE. I would never push my way into an orphanage and set up a gun emplacement there while the children hide in the basement, using the children as shields. I would rather die fighting like an honorable person- for freedom- rather than die a murdering scoundrel- for a radical, exclusivly islamic dictatorship that treats its own people like crap. I would never send my kids to fight tanks with rocks in order to make propaganda films. (Ever notice that Yassir Arafat isn't stupid enough to confront a tank with rocks? No, he sends KIDS to do it.)

If I were Palestinian I would ask myself why no one- not even my Arab 'brethren'- wants me to immigrate to their country. I would realize that I was being used by the Arab states as a counterpoint to Israel, and know that in reality, they are worse than the Israelis ever were.

If I were a Palestinian, I would apply for Israeli citizenship, because in Israel you can worship Allah if you like. I would work my way up as far as I could by being a good citizen, and provide food for my family, rather than rocks to throw. Or I would apply for citizenship in any other country where I could practice my faith and raise my kids. That includes Europe and the US, or Turkey, or anywhere where I would be accepted. And whichever country I was able to enter, would become my ONLY country, and I would become a loyal citizen thereof, and be proud of my new land and grasteful to those who welcome me. I would wear my new nationality with pride and dignity.

The Palestinians would do well to learn about the Nez Pierce statesman, Chief Joseph. He was a far better man than anyone the Palestinian powerfreaks have put forth to date. The Arapaho survived all the crap the US shoveled at them. They would not have, had they continued fighting forever. Those who endured the awful and cruel years are now part of a great nation, and if they choose, call themselves by either or both the names Arapaho or American. Chief Joseph wasn't treated right in his life, but by determining to 'fight no more forever,' as he said, he enabled future generations to achieve what could never have been achieved through a guerilla war (or an unthinkable terror war) against a much more powerful enemy. They retained their honor.

They had fought until it was clear they couldn't win, but the Nez Pierce didn't descend into the kind of gutter the palestinian radicals seem to love to roll in. Thanks to Chief Joseph knowing when enough was enough, the people, as individuals, are equal to any American because they ARe American. they have individual liberties, truly the only kind of liberty there is. Like any citizen, they can buy and sell land as they please and move where they please, and work where they please. Some have done so for so long they are thoroughly mixed with everyone else. We don't bomb each other's pizza parlors. There are no Arapaho suicide bombers. (The Arapaho weren't gutless terrorist-loving cowards.)

The Palestinians are in no way as great a culture as the Nez Pierce, but perhaps their despotic leaders can still learn from these people, and from the Choctaw and Cherokee, and say 'enough!' But I doubt it. They want the Palestinian people to remain a poor 'group,' they want them to be denied peace, because poverty and war are how people like Arafat remain in power. Such people need a captive audience. They don't want their own state because if they had it, people would see how incompetant as leaders they are. People would realize that the 'group rights' to a Palestinian state would mean they would have to give up hope of individual rights like property rights.

On the other hand, how it is justified by anybody that some teenagers are throwing rocks to israeli armoured vehicle, and in response, israeli army throwing live bullet at them?

It's simple, O dense one. First, the teenagers CHOOSE to throw rocks. They don't have to. they could spend their time studying and working, and caring for each other. Only an idiot would throw rocks at a tank if they seriously thought the tank would fire on them. But the reason the Palestinians send children to throw rocks at tanks is because they KNOW the Israelis do NOT want to kill children, rock throwing though they may be. They want to create propaganda scenes for the western press to film, so as to pressure Israel politically.

Most of the time, chucking rocks isn't unsafe because the Israelis would rather not fire on a rock thrower. (It would be unsafe for someone to chuck rocks at a Taliban tank, or a Syrian tank, or an Iraqi tank, by comparison... which is why no one does it.) If the Israelis were killers, there would be no more rock throwing children. They would all be dead, and the Palestinian cause would long ago have been forgotten. If the Israelis wanted to kill palestinians wholesale, the Palestininas wouldn't number more than 5 million (and increasing.)

Can any sane person admits this inequality?

What inequality? The same inequality that you see when a guy with explosives chooses to blow up pizza huts whithout a military target in sight? The same inequality we see when unarmed Israeli cab drivers trying to help the regular Palestinian folk he calls friends, are murdered in his Palestinian friends' food stand by radicals, simply because they choose to kill all Israelis they can? The same inequality that makes Palestinian authorities arrest and torture Palestinian people, or their family members, for speaking out against the PA's actions? The same inequality that leads the PA to say palestinians cannot sell their property to anyone they want but must only sell to whom the PA allows to buy? the same inequality that leads the PA to destroy historic sites in order to hide the archaeological record?

The PA wants to prevent at all costs the integration of Palestinians into Israel, and wants to prevent the acceptance of Palestininas into other countries as well. they are afraid that if the people go to Jordan, or to other countries, that there will be no Palestinians to rule. The PA wants to keep them separate and offers not a promise of individual rights- but a promise of group rights- the rule of the mob. Mobs can be manipulated and used; people with individual rights won't suffer it long. They will seek education, progress, and opportunity- something the PA cannot offer.

Your Arab Islamic friends ethnically cleansed and stole the land from Jews and Christians (non-Arab):

Arabization and Ethnic Cleansing (the fairy tale of "indigenous Palestinians" exposed (my title))

"At the beginning of the conquest....the conquered populations of the Orient were still using their national languages: Aramaic (Iraq, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine), Coptic (Egypt), and Pahlavi (Persia), and the foundations of Arab power were still weak. Consequently, notwithstanding their repugnance, the caliphs and their governors had to resort to the services of local Christian or Jewish administrators, a situation which risked jeopardizing the performance of their power. It therefore became imperative to consolidate Islamic politico-military domination by a demographic increase in Arab numbers and by Muslim legislation to stabilize the situation....These two phases, which roughly corresponded to the period of Arabization under the Umayyads [661-750 A.D.] and of Islamization under the Abbasids [750-1517 A.D.] , definitely ensured the Arab-Muslim hold on the conquered lands and population.

In fact, the postconquest period was a time of intensive Arab colonization dictated by strategic requirements. For whereas pursuit of the ongoing jihad procured considerable booty and cemented Islamic solidarity, these battles in far-off lands weakened the Arab military presence in the conquered countries. To mitigate this danger, Umar, and particularly Uthman, adopted a policy of Arab colonization pursued by their successors.

The continuous migration of whole tribes with their flocks---tribes originating from different regions of Arabia and often hostile to one another---not only created problems of settlement in towns and country areas that were among the most fertile and most highly populated, it also gave rise to difficulties regarding subsidies and cohabitation with the native population, the nomads being adverse to agricultural and urban occupations.

The flow of migration, duly controlled by the Arab military administration, was directed toward specific regions. Certain tribes joined up with military population centers: Basra and Kufa in Iraq, Fustat in Egpt for example: others received the vast domains farmed by the native inhabitants reduced to slavery or bond service (Iraq, Egypt, Spain, the Maghreb). In Palestine and Syria, tribes from Yemen and nomads from Hijaz settled in the towns and countryside where they took over houses and lands...

This Arabization had disastrous effects on the native populations, as the confiscation of lands by the invaders and the appropriation of houses and villages did not take place without plundering and abuse. This emigration had four major consequences. First, the total area of the conquered lands was seized by a tribe originating from Mecca, who exercised their military authority through nomadic Arab tribes. Second, the massive Arab emigration engendered endemic anarchy in countries where hitherto, in comparison with the native population, they had only constituted tiny minorities on the desert fringes.....Moreover, during this period of Arabization in the Near East, the caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705) forbade the use of native languages in the administration, replacing them with Arabic. Thus emigration into countries of settled civilization by nomads, who were strengthened in their bellicose habits by the ideology of jihad and by their victories, increased the instability, while plundering turned cultivated areas into deserts." (Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam (1996)pp.58-60).

I think what you Israelis need to do is learn from what the US government did with hostile Indian tribes back in the 1860s and ‘70s. The non-hostile tribes were left pretty much alone, and the US government kept Eastern white settlers from stealing their land, but the hostile tribes were put on large reservations and isolated for several decades. They were given livestock, crop seed, and they were taught how to farm and raise livestock. They were given large areas of land, and much of it was their “native homeland”.

Since Israel has confiscated a lot of Palestinian “native homeland”, you are going to have to buy them some other land somewhere, put them on it, teach them how to farm it and use it. Put armed guards on your own borders, and keep the Palestinians out of Israel all together. You can’t use terrorists as low-income cab drivers, waiters, common laborers, factory workers, and then gripe because there are terrorists among you. Well, you can, but that’s not the way to handle the situation. You’ve got to ban them from your territory.

You need to start buying up land for them now, and put them on it. It is this part of the situation that Israel has neglected. Be nice about it. Tell them you are helping them resettle on their real “homeland”. Build them some nice basic houses. Buy them some new goats. Teach them how to raise chickens. They apparently aren’t just going to “go away”. They apparently can’t organize themselves into successful prosperous communities, so you guys are going to have to do that for them. If you want cheap labor, import Hispanics from Latin America.

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