[PAA-Discuss] FW: Uri Avnery on Obama and British parlimentarian on Gaza

[Lee Loe]

Great statements. Avnery is a 3 X member of the Israeli Knesset. See
Palestine ~ Israel Notebook. Don't have one? Send me your address and I will
send your some. Lee
 
"The very next morning, Obama phoned a number of Middle East leaders.  He
decided to make a quite unique gesture: placing the first call to Mahmoud
Abbas, and only the next to Olmert. The Israeli media could not stomach
that. Haaretz, for example, consciously falsified the record by writing -
not once but twice in the same issue - that Obama had called "Olmert, Abbas,
Mubarak and King Abdallah" (in that order).  Instead of the group of
American Jews who had been in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Obama, on his very first
day in office, appointed an Arab-American, George Mitchell, whose mother had
come to America from Lebanon at age 18, and who himself, orphaned from his
Irish father, was brought up in a Maronite Christian Lebanese family.  These
are not good tidings for the Israeli leaders. For the last 42 years, they
have pursued a policy of expansion, occupation and settlements in close
cooperation with Washington. They have relied on unlimited American support,
from the massive supply of money and arms to the use of the veto in the
Security Council. This support was essential to their policy. This support
may now be reaching its limits." -- Uri Avnery

"I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our
kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put
coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine....My
grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow.
A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.  My grandmother did not die to
provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in
Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the
continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust
as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that
Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not
count....However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot
solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the
fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5
million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis,
with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal
Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long
from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel. It is
time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their
conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on
Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest
which is the Israelis' real goal but which it is impossible for them to
achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools." -- Sir Gerald
Kaufman, Member of British Parliament

"

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